Absalom, Absalom!

by William Faulkner

  “Because for the time Ellen even walked out of the weeping, the tears, and so into the church. It was empty yet save for your grandfather and grandmother and perhaps a half dozen more who might have come out of loyalty to the Coldfields or perhaps to be close and so miss nothing of that which the town, as represented by the waiting carriages, seemed to have anticipated as well as Sutpen did. It was still empty even after the ceremony started and concluded. Because Ellen had something of pride too, or at least that vanity which at times can assume the office of pride and fortitude; besides, nothing had happened yet. The crowd outside was quiet yet, perhaps out of respect for the church, out of that aptitude and eagerness of the Anglo-Saxon for complete mystical acceptance of immolated sticks and stones. She seems to have walked out of the church and so into it without any warning whatever. Perhaps she was still moving beneath that pride which would not allow the people inside the church to see her weep. She just walked into it, probably hurrying toward the seclusion of the carriage where she could weep; perhaps her first intimation was the voice shouting, ‘Look out! Dont hit her now!’ and then the object—dirt, filth, whatever it was—passing her, or perhaps the changing light itself as she turned and saw one of the negroes, his torch raised and in the act of springing toward the crowd, the faces, when Sutpen spoke to him in that tongue which even now a good part of the county did not know was a civilised language. That was what she saw, what the others saw from the halted carriages across the street—the bride shrinking into the shelter of his arm as he drew her behind him and he standing there, not moving even after another object (they threw nothing which could actually injure: it was only clods of dirt and vegetable refuse) struck the hat from his head, and a third struck him full in the chest—standing there motionless, with an expression almost of smiling where his teeth showed through the beard, holding his wild negroes with that one word (there were doubtless pistols in the crowd; certainly knives: the negro would not have lived ten seconds if he had sprung) while about the wedding party the circle of faces with open mouths and torch-reflecting eyes seemed to advance and waver and shift and vanish in the smoky glare of the burning pine. He retreated to the carriage, shielding the two women with his body, ordering the negroes to follow with another word. But they threw nothing else. Apparently it was that first spontaneous outburst, though they had come armed and prepared with the ones they did throw. In fact, that seemed to have been the entire business which had come to a head when the vigilance committee followed him to Mr Coldfield’s gate that day two months before. Because the men who had composed the mob, the traders and drovers and teamsters, returned, vanished back into the region from which they had emerged for this one occasion like rats; scattered, departed about the country—faces which even Ellen was not to remember, seen for the night or the meal or just the drink at other taverns twenty and fifty and a hundred miles further on along nameless roads and then gone from there too; and those who had come in the carriages and buggies to see a Roman holiday, driving out to Sutpen’s Hundred to call and (the men) to hunt his game and eat his food again and on occasion gathering at night in his stable while he matched two of his wild negroes against one another as men match game cocks or perhaps even entered the ring himself. It blew away, though not out of memory. He did not forget that night, even though Ellen, I think, did, since she washed it out of her remembering with tears. Yes, she was weeping again now; it did, indeed, rain on that marriage.”

  3

  If he threw her over, I wouldn’t think she would want to tell anybody about it Quentin said.

  Ah Mr Compson said again After Mr Coldfield died in ’64, Miss Rosa moved out to Sutpen’s Hundred to live with Judith. She was twenty then, four years younger than the niece whom, in obedience to her sister’s dying request, she set out to save from the family’s doom which Sutpen seemed bent on accomplishing, apparently by the process of marrying him. She (Miss Rosa) was born in 1845, with her sister already seven years married and the mother of two children and Miss Rosa born into her parents’ middleage (her mother must have been at least forty and she died in that childbed and Miss Rosa never forgave her father for it) and at a time when—granted that Miss Rosa merely mirrored her parents’ attitude toward the son-in-law—the family wanted only peace and quiet and probably did not expect and maybe did not even want another child. But she was born, at the price of her mother’s life and never to be permitted to forget it, and raised by the same spinster aunt who tried to force not only the elder sister’s bridegroom but the wedding too down the throat of a town which did not want it, growing up in that closed masonry of females to see in the fact of her own breathing not only the lone justification for the sacrifice of her mother’s life, not only a living and walking reproach to her father, but a breathing indictment ubiquitous and even transferable of the entire male principle (that principle which had left the aunt a virgin at thirty-five) above dust. So for the first sixteen years of her life she lived in that grim tight little house with the father whom she hated without knowing it—that queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience and the only thing he cared about his reputation for probity among his fellow men—that man who was later to nail himself in his attic and starve to death rather than look upon his native land in the throes of repelling an invading army—and the aunt who even ten years later was still taking revenge for the fiasco of Ellen’s wedding by striking at the town, the human race, through any and all of its creatures—brother nieces nephew-in-law herself and all—with the blind irrational fury of a shedding snake; who had taught Miss Rosa to look upon her sister as a woman who had vanished not only out of the family and the house but out of life too, into an edifice like Bluebeard’s and there transmogrified into a mask looking back with passive and hopeless grief upon the irrevocable world, held there not in durance but in a kind of jeering suspension by a man (his face the same which Mr Coldfield now saw and had seen since that day when, with his future son-in-law for ostensible yokemate but actually whip, Mr Coldfield’s conscience had set the brakes and, surrendering even his share of the cargo, he and the son-in-law had parted) who had entered hers and her family’s life before she was born with the abruptness of a tornado, done irrevocable and incalculable damage, and gone on—a grim mausoleum air of puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness in which Miss Rosa’s childhood (that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a Cassandra-like listening beyond closed doors, of lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation while she waited for the infancy and childhood with which nature had confounded and betrayed her to overtake the precocity of convinced disapprobation regarding any and every thing which could penetrate the walls of that house through the agency of any man, particularly her father, which the aunt seems to have invested her with at birth along with the swaddling clothes) was passed.

  Perhaps she saw in her father’s death, in the resulting necessity upon her as not only an orphan but a pauper, to turn to her next of kin for food and shelter and protection—and this kin the niece whom she had been asked to save—; perhaps she saw in this fate itself supplying her with the opportunity to observe her sister’s dying request. Perhaps she even saw herself as an instrument of retribution: if not in herself an active instrument strong enough to cope with him, at least as a kind of passive symbol of inescapable reminding to rise bloodless and without dimension from the sacrificial stone of the marriage-bed. Because until he came back from Virginia in ’66 and found her living there with Judith and Clytie——(Yes, Clytie was his daughter too: Clytemnestra. He named her himself. He named them all himself: all his own get and all the get of his wild niggers after the country began to assimilate them. Miss Rosa didn’t tell you that two of the niggers in the wagon that day were women?

  No, sir Quentin said.

  Yes. Two of them. And brought here neither by chance nor oversight. He saw to that, who had doubtless seen even further ahead than
the two years it actually took him to build his house and show his good intentions to his neighbors until they allowed him to mix his wild stock with their tame, since the difference in tongue between his niggers and theirs could have been a barrier only for a matter of weeks or perhaps even days. He brought the two women deliberately; he probably chose them with the same care and shrewdness with which he chose the other livestock—the horses and mules and cattle—which he bought later on. And he lived out there for almost five years before he had speaking acquaintance with any white woman in the county, just as he had no furniture in his house and for the same reason: he had at the time nothing to exchange for it them or her. Yes. He named Clytie as he named them all, the one before Clytie and Henry and Judith even, with that same robust and sardonic temerity, naming with his own mouth his own ironic fecundity of dragon’s teeth which with the two exceptions were girls. Only I have always liked to believe that he intended to name her Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster, and that he just got the name wrong through a mistake natural in a man who must have almost taught himself to read)——–When he returned home in ’66, she had not seen him a hundred times in her whole life. And what she saw then was just that ogre-face of her childhood seen once and then repeated at intervals and on occasions which she could neither count nor recall, like the mask in Greek tragedy interchangeable not only from scene to scene but from actor to actor and behind which the events and occasions took place without chronology or sequence and leaving her actually incapable of saying how many separate times she had seen him for the reason that, waking or sleeping, the aunt had taught her to see nothing else. On those guarded and lugubrious and even formal occasions when she and the aunt went out to Sutpen’s Hundred to spend the day and the aunt would order her to go and play with her nephew and niece exactly as the aunt might have ordered her to play a piece for company on the piano, she would not see him even at the dinner table because the aunt would have arranged the visit to coincide with his absence; and probably Miss Rosa would have tried to avoid meeting him even if he had been there. And on the four or five occasions during the year when Ellen would bring the children in to spend the day at her father’s, the aunt (that strong vindictive consistent woman who seems to have been twice the man that Mr Coldfield was and who in very truth was not only Miss Rosa’s mother but her father too) cast over these visits also that same atmosphere of grim embattled conspiracy and alliance against the two adversaries, one of whom—Mr Coldfield—whether he could have held his own or not, had long since drawn in his picquets and dismantled his artillery and retired into the impregnable citadel of his passive rectitude: and the other—Sutpen—who probably could have engaged and even routed them but who did not even know that he was an embattled foe. Because he would not even come to the house to the noon meal. His reason may have been because of some delicacy for his father-in-law, the true reason for and beginning of the relationship between whom and himself neither the aunt nor Ellen nor Miss Rosa ever knew, which Sutpen was to divulge to but one man—and that under the pledge of confidence as long as Mr Coldfield lived—out of regard for Mr Coldfield’s carefully nurtured name for immaculate morality—and which, your grandfather said, Mr Coldfield himself never divulged for the same reason. Or perhaps the reason was the one which Miss Rosa told you and which the aunt gave her: that now since he had got out of his father-in-law all which Mr Coldfield possessed that Sutpen could have used or wanted, he (Sutpen) had neither the courage to face his father-in-law nor the grace and decency to complete the ceremonial family group even four times a year. Or perhaps it was the reason which Sutpen gave himself and which the aunt refused to believe because of that very fact: that he did not get to town every day and when he did he preferred to spend it (he used the bar now) with the men who gathered each noon at the Holston House.

  That was the face which, when she saw it at all, was across his own dining table—the face of a foe who did not even know that it was embattled. She was ten now and following the aunt’s dereliction (Miss Rosa now kept her father’s house as the aunt had done until the night the aunt climbed out the window and vanished) there was not only no one to make her try to play with her nephew and niece on those days formal and funereal, she did not even have to go out there and breathe the same air which he breathed and where, even though absent, he still remained, lurked, in what she called sardonic and watchful triumph. She went out to Sutpen’s Hundred just once a year now when, in their Sunday clothes, she and her father drove the twelve miles in a stout battered buggy behind the stout scrubby team, to spend the day. It was now Mr Coldfield who insisted on the visits, who had never gone out with them while the aunt was there, perhaps from a sense of duty, which was the reason he gave and which in this case even the aunt would have believed, perhaps because it was not the true one, since doubtless even Miss Rosa would not have believed the true one: which was that Mr Coldfield wanted to see his grandchildren regarding whom he was in a steadily increasing unease of that day when their father would tell the son at least of that old business between father and grandfather which Mr Coldfield was not sure yet that his son-in-law had never told. Though the aunt was gone, she still managed to bequeath and invoke upon each of these expeditions something of the old flavor of grim sortie, more than ever now against a foe who did not know that he was at war. Because now that the aunt was gone, Ellen had reneged from that triumvirate of which Miss Rosa tried without realising it to make two. Now she was completely alone and facing across the dinner table and without support now even from Ellen (at this time Ellen went through a complete metamorphosis, emerging into her next lustrum with the complete finality of actual re-birth);—facing across the table the foe who was not even aware that he sat there not as host and brother-in-law but as the second party to an armistice. He probably did not even look at her twice as compared with, weighed against, his own family and children—the small slight child whose feet, even when she would be grown, would never quite reach the floor even from her own chairs, the ones which she would inherit nor the ones—the objects—which she would accumulate as complement to and expression of individual character, as people do, as against Ellen who, though small-boned also, was what is known as fullbodied (and who would have been, if her life had not declined into a time when even men found little enough to eat and the end of her days had been without trouble, fullbodied indeed. Not fat: just rounded and complete, the hair white, the eyes still even young, even a faint bloom yet on what would be dewlaps and not cheeks any longer, the small plump ringed unscarified hands folded in tranquil anticipation of the food, on the damask before the Haviland beneath the candelabra which he had fetched to town years and years ago in wagons, to the astonished and affronted outrage of his fellow citizens), and against Judith already taller than Ellen, and Henry though not as tall for sixteen as Judith was for fourteen, yet giving promise of someday standing eye to eye with his father;—this creature, this face which hardly ever spoke during the meal, with eyes like (as you put it) pieces of coal pressed into soft dough and prim hair of that peculiar mouselike shade of hair on which the sun does not often shine, against Judith’s and Henry’s out-of-doors faces: Judith with her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes and Henry with his hair halfway between his father’s red and Ellen’s black and eyes of a bright dark hazel;—this small body with its air of curious and paradoxical awkwardness like a costume borrowed at the last moment and of necessity for a masquerade which she did not want to attend: that aura of a creature cloistered now by deliberate choice and still in the throes of enforced apprenticeship to, rather than voluntary or even acquiescent participation in, breathing—this bound maidservant to flesh and blood waiting even now to escape it by writing a schoolgirl’s poetry about the also-dead—the face, the smallest face in company, watching him across the table with still and curious and profound intensity as though she actually had some intimation gained from that rapport with the fluid cra
dle of events (time) which she had acquired or cultivated by listening beyond closed doors not to what she heard there but by becoming supine and receptive, incapable of either discrimination or opinion or incredulity, to the prefever’s temperature of disaster which makes soothsayers and sometimes makes them right, of the future catastrophe in which the ogre-face of her childhood would apparently vanish so completely that she would agree to marry the late owner of it.

  That may have been the last time she saw him. Because they quit going out there. Mr Coldfield quit. There had never been any day set for the visit. One morning he would merely appear at breakfast in the decent and heavy black coat in which he had been married and had worn fifty-two times each year since until Ellen married and then fifty-three times a year after the aunt deserted them until he put it on for good the day he climbed to the attic and nailed the door behind him and threw the hammer out the window and so died in it. Then Miss Rosa would retire and reappear in the formidable black or brown silk which the aunt had chosen for her years ago and which she continued to wear on Sundays and occasions even after it was worn out, until the day when her father decided that the aunt would not return and permitted Miss Rosa to use the clothing which the aunt had left in the house the night of her elopement. Then they would get into the buggy and depart, Mr Coldfield first docking the two negroes for the noon meal which they would not have to prepare and (so the town believed) charging them for the crude one of left-overs which they would have to eat. Then one year they did not go. Doubtless Mr Coldfield failed to come to breakfast in the black coat, and more days passed and still he did not, and that was all. Perhaps he felt, now that the grandchildren were grown, that the draft on his conscience had been discharged what with Henry away at the State University at Oxford and Judith gone even further than that:—into that transition stage between childhood and womanhood where she was even more inaccessible to the grandfather of whom she had seen but little during her life and probably cared less anyway—that state where, though still visible, young girls appear as though seen through glass and where even the voice cannot reach them; where they exist (this the hoyden who could—and did—outrun and outclimb, and ride and fight both with and beside her brother) in a pearly lambence without shadows and themselves partaking of it; in nebulous suspension held, strange and unpredictable, even their very shapes fluid and delicate and without substance; not in themselves floating and seeking but merely waiting, parasitic and potent and serene, drawing to themselves without effort the post-genitive upon and about which to shape, flow into back, breast; bosom, flank, thigh.