Sanctuary

round and soft as those prehensile tips on a child's toy arrows. Then he

lay back again. After that each morning the turnkey thrust a rolled

newspaper through the door. They fell to the floor and lay there,

accumulating, unrolling and flattening slowly of their own weight in

diurnal progression.

When he had three days left a Memphis lawyer arrived. Unbidden, he rushed

up to the cell. All that morning the turnkey heard his voice in pleading

and anger and expostulation; by noon he was hoarse, his voice not much

louder than a whisper. "Are you just going to lie here and let-"

"I'm all right," Popeye said. "I didn't send for you. Keep Your nose

out."

"Do you want to hang? Is that it? Are you trying to commit suicide? Are

you so tired of dragging down jack that . . . You, the smartest-"

"I told you once. I've got enough on you."

"You, to have it hung on you by a small-time j.p.! When I go back to

Memphis and tell them, they wont believe it."

"Dont tell them, then." He lay for a time while the lawyer looked at him

in baffled and raging unbelief. "Them durn hicks," Popeye said. "Jesus

Christ ... Beat it, now," he said. "I told you. I'm all right."

On the night before, a minister came in. "Will you let me pray with you?"

he said. "Sure," Popeye said: "go ahead. Don't mind me."

The minister knelt beside the cot where Popeye lay smoking. After a while

the minister heard him rise and cross the floor, then return to the cot.

When he rose Popeye was lying on the cot, smoking. The minister looked

behind him, where he had hear Popeye moving and saw twelve marks at

spaced intervals along the base of the wall, as though marked there with

burned matches. Two of the spaces were filled with cigarette stubs laid

in neat rows. In the third space were two stubs. Before he departed he

watched Popeye rise and go there and crush out two more stubs and lay

them carefully beside the others.

Just after five o'clock the minister returned. All the spaces were filled

save the twelfth one. It was three quarters complete. Popeye was lying

on the cot. "Ready to go?" he said.

"Not yet," the minister said. "Try to pray," he said. "Try.

"Sure," Popeye said; "go ahead." The minister knelt again. He heard

Popeye rise once and cross the floor and then return.

At five-thirty the turnkey came. "I brought-" he said. He held his closed

fist dumbly through the grating. "Here's your change from that hundred

you never- I brought . . . It's forty-eight dollars. Wait; I'll count it

again; I dont know exactly, but I can give you a list-them tickets . .

."

"Keep it," Popeye said. "Buy yourself a hoop."

178 WILLIAM FAULKNER

They came for him at six. The minister went with him, his hand under

Poveye's elbow, and he stood beneath the scaffold pravinQ, while they

adiusted the rope, draggine it over Popeye's sleek oiled head, breaking

his hair loose. His hands were tied, so he began to jerk his head,

flipping his hair back each time it fell forward again, while the

minister prayed, the others motionless at their posts with bowed heads.

Popeye began to jerk his neck forward in little jerks. "Psssst!" he said,

the sound cutting sharp into the drone of the minister's voice;

"nssssst!" The sheriff looked at him; he quit jerking his neck and stood

ri-id as thouah he had an egg balqnced on his head. "Fix my hair, Jack,"

he said. "Sure," the sheriff said. "I'll fix it for you"; springing the

trap.

It had been a gray (Jay, a grav summer, a gray year. On the street men

wore overcoats and in the Luxembourg Gardens as Temole and her father

passed the women sat knitting in shawls and even the men playinQ croauet

played in coats and capes, and in the sad gloom of the chestnut trees the

dry click of balls, the random shouts of children, had that quality of

autumn, gallant and evanescent and forlorn. From beyond the circle with

its spurious Greek balustrade, clotted with movement, filled with a gray

light of the same color and texture as the water which the fountain

played into the pool, came a steady crash of music. They went on, passed

the pool where the children and an old man in a shabby brown overcoat

sailed toy boats, and entered the trees again and found seats. Im-

mediately an old woman came with decrepit promptitude and collected four

sous.

In the pavilion a band in the horizon blue of the army played Massenet

and Scriabine, and Berlioz like a thin coating of tortured Tschaikovsky

on a slice of stale bread, while the twilight dissolved in wet gleams

from the branches, onto the pavilion and the sombre toadstools of

umbrellas. Rich and resonant the brasses crashed and died in the thick

green twilight, rolling over them in rich sad waves. Temple yawned behind

her hand, then she took out a compact and opened it upon a face in

miniature sullen and discontented and sad. Beside her her father sat, his

hands crossed on the head of his stick, the rigid bar of his moustache

beaded with moisture like frosted silver. She closed the compact and from

beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves