“So he invited Bon into the house, and for the two weeks of the vacation (only it didn’t take that long; Father said that probably Mrs Sutpen had Judith and Bon already engaged from the moment she saw Bon’s name in Henry’s first letter) he watched Bon and Henry and Judith, or watched Bon and Judith rather because he would have already known about Henry and Bon from Henry’s letters about him from the school; watched them for two weeks, and did nothing. Then Henry and Bon went back to school and now the nigger groom that fetched the mail back and forth each week between Oxford and Sutpen’s Hundred brought letters to Judith now that were not in Henry’s hand (and that not necessary either, Father said, because Mrs Sutpen was already covering the town and county both with news of that engagement that Father said didn’t exist yet) and still he did nothing. He didn’t do anything at all until spring was almost over and Henry wrote that he was bringing Bon home with him to stay a day or two before Bon went home. Then Sutpen went to New Orleans. Whether he chose that time to go in order to get Bon and his mother together and thrash the business out for good and all or not, nobody knows, just as nobody knows whether he ever saw the mother or not while he was there, if she received him or refused to receive him; or if she did and he tried once more to come to terms with her, buy her off maybe with money now, since Father said that a man who could believe that a scorned and outraged and angry woman could be bought off with formal logic would believe that she could be placated with money too, and it didn’t work; or if Bon was there and it was Bon himself who refused the offer, though nobody ever did know if Bon ever knew Sutpen was his father or not, whether he was trying to revenge his mother or not at first and only later fell in love, only later succumbed to the current of retribution and fatality which Miss Rosa said Sutpen had started and had doomed all his blood to, black and white both. But it didn’t work evidently, and the next Christmas came and Henry and Bon came to Sutpen’s Hundred again and now Sutpen saw that there was no help for it, that Judith was in love with Bon and whether Bon wanted revenge or was just caught and sunk and doomed too, it was all the same. So it seems that he sent for Henry that Christmas eve just before supper time (Father said that maybe by now, after his New Orleans trip, he had learned at last enough about women to know it wouldn’t do any good to go to Judith first) and told Henry. And he knew what Henry would say and Henry said it and he took the lie from his son and Henry knew by his father taking the lie that what his father had told him was true; and Father said that he (Sutpen) probably knew what Henry would do too and counted on Henry doing it because he still believed that it had been only a minor tactical mistake, and so he was like a skirmisher who is outnumbered yet cannot retreat who believes that if he is just patient enough and clever enough and calm enough and alert enough he can get the enemy scattered and pick them off one by one. And Henry did it. And he (Sutpen) probably knew what Henry would do next too, that Henry too would go to New Orleans to find out for himself. Then it was ’61 and Sutpen knew what they would do now, not only what Henry would do but what he would force Bon to do; maybe (being a demon—though it would not require a demon to foresee war now) he even foresaw that Henry and Bon would join that student company at the University; he may have had some way of watching, knowing the day their names appeared on the roster, some way of knowing where the company was even before Grandfather became colonel of the regiment the company was in until he got hurt at Pittsburg Landing (where Bon was wounded) and came home to get used to not having any right arm and Sutpen came home in ’64 with the two tombstones and talked to Grandfather in the office that day before both of them went back to the war;—knew all the time where Henry and Bon were, that they had been all the time in Grandfather’s regiment where Grandfather could look after them in a fashion even if Grandfather didn’t know that he was doing it—even if they needed watching, because Sutpen must have known about the probation too, what Henry was doing now: holding all three of them—himself and Judith and Bon—in that suspension while he wrestled with his conscience to make it come to terms with what he wanted to do just like his father had that time more than thirty years ago, maybe even turned fatalist like Bon now and giving the war a chance to settle the whole business by killing him or Bon or both of them (but with no help, no fudging, on his part because it was him that carried Bon to the rear after Pittsburg Landing) or maybe he knew that the South would be whipped and then there wouldn’t be anything left that mattered that much, worth getting that heated over, worth protesting against or suffering for or dying for or even living for. That was the day he came to the office, his——” (“the demon’s,” Shreve said) “——one day of leave at home, came home with his tombstones and Judith was there and I reckon he looked at her and she looked at him and he said, ‘You know where he is’ and Judith didn’t lie to him, and (he knew Henry) he said, ‘But you have not heard from him yet’ and Judith didn’t lie about that either and she didn’t cry either because both of them knew what would be in the letter when it came so he didn’t have to ask, ‘When he writes you that he is coming, you and Clytie will start making the wedding dress’ even if Judith would have lied to him about that, which she would not have: so he put one of the stones on Ellen’s grave and set the other one up in the hall and came in to see Grandfather, trying to explain it, seeing if Grandfather could discover that mistake which he believed was the sole cause of his problem, sitting there in his worn and shabby uniform, with his worn gauntlets and faded sash and (he would have had the plume by all means. He might have had to discard his sabre, but he would have had the plume) the plume in his hat broken and frayed and soiled, with his horse saddled and waiting in the street below and a thousand miles to ride to find his regiment, yet he sitting there on the one afternoon of his leave as though he had a thousand of them, as if there were no haste nor urgency anywhere under the sun and that when he departed he had no further to go than the twelve miles out to Sutpen’s Hundred and a thousand days or maybe even years of monotony and rich peace, and he, even after he would become dead, still there, still watching the fine grandsons and great-grandsons springing as far as eye could reach; he still, even though dead in the earth, that same fine figure of a man that Wash Jones called him, but not now. Now fogbound by his own private embattlement of personal morality: that picayune splitting of abstract hairs while (Grandfather said) Rome vanished and Jericho crumbled, that this would be right if or that would be wrong but of slowing blood and stiffening bones and arteries that Father says men resort to in senility who while young and supple and strong reacted to a single simple Yes and a single simple No as instantaneous and complete and unthinking as the snapping on and off of electricity, sitting there and talking and now Grandfather not knowing what he was talking about because now Grandfather said he did not believe that Sutpen himself knew because even yet Sutpen had not quite told him all of it. And this that morality again, Grandfather said: that morality which would not permit him to malign or traduce the memory of his first wife, or at least the memory of the marriage even though he felt that he had been tricked by it, not even to an acquaintance in whose confidence and discretion he trusted enough to wish to justify himself, not even to his son by another marriage in order to preserve the status of his life’s attainment and desire, except as a last resort. Not that he would hesitate then, Grandfather said: but not until then. He had been tricked by it himself, but he had extricated himself without asking or receiving help from any man; let anyone else who might be so imposed upon do the same.—Sitting there and moralising on the fact that, no matter which course he chose, the result would be that that design and plan to which he had given fifty years of his life had just as well never have existed at all by almost exactly fifty years, and Grandfather not knowing what choice he was talking about even, what second choice he was faced with until the very last word he spoke before he got up and put on his hat and shook Grandfather’s left hand and rode away; this second choice, need to choose, as obscure to Grandfather as the reason for the first, the repudiation, h
ad been: so that Grandfather did not even say ‘I dont know which you should choose’ not because that was all he could have said and so to say that would be less than no answer at all, but that anything he might have said would have been less than no answer at all since Sutpen was not listening, did not expect an answer, who had not come for pity and there was no advice that he could have taken, and justification he had already coerced from his conscience thirty years ago. And he still knew that he had courage, and though he may have come to doubt lately that he had acquired that shrewdness which at one time he believed he had, he still believed that it existed somewhere in the world to be learned and that if it could be learned he would yet learn it—and maybe even this, Grandfather said: if shrewdness could not extricate him this second time as it had before, he could at least depend on the courage to find him will and strength to make a third start toward that design as it had found him to make the second with—who came into the office not for pity and not for help because Grandfather said he had never learned how to ask anybody for help or anything else and so he would not have known what to do with the help if Grandfather could have given it to him, but came just with that sober and quiet bemusement, hoping maybe (if he hoped at all, if he were doing anything but just thinking out loud at all) that the legal mind might perceive and clarify that initial mistake which he still insisted on, which he himself had not been able to find: ‘I was faced with condoning a fact which had been foisted upon me without my knowledge during the process of building toward my design, which meant the absolute and irrevocable negation of the design; or in holding to my original plan for the design in pursuit of which I had incurred this negation. I chose, and I made to the fullest what atonement lay in my power for whatever injury I might have done in choosing, paying even more for the privilege of choosing as I chose than I might have been expected to, or even (by law) required. Yet I am now faced with a second necessity to choose, the curious factor of which is not, as you pointed out and as first appeared to me, that the necessity for a new choice should have arisen, but that either choice which I might make, either course which I might choose, leads to the same result: either I destroy my design with my own hand, which will happen if I am forced to play my last trump card, or do nothing, let matters take the course which I know they will take and see my design complete itself quite normally and naturally and successfully to the public eye, yet to my own in such fashion as to be a mockery and a betrayal of that little boy who approached that door fifty years ago and was turned away, for whose vindication the whole plan was conceived and carried forward to the moment of this choice, this second choice devolving out of that first one which in its turn was forced on me as the result of an agreement, an arrangement which I had entered in good faith, concealing nothing, while the other party or parties to it concealed from me the one very factor which would destroy the entire plan and design which I had been working toward, concealed it so well that it was not until after the child was born that I discovered that this factor existed’——”
“Your old man,” Shreve said. “When your grandfather was telling this to him, he didn’t know any more what your grandfather was talking about than your grandfather knew what the demon was talking about when the demon told it to him, did he? And when your old man told it to you, you wouldn’t have known what anybody was talking about if you hadn’t been out there and seen Clytie. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Quentin said. “Grandfather was the only friend he had.”
“The demon had?” Quentin didn’t answer, didn’t move. It was cold in the room now. The heat was almost gone out of the radiators: the cold iron fluting stern signal and admonition for sleeping, the little death, the renewal. It had been some time now since the chimes had rung eleven. “All right,” Shreve said. He was hugging himself into the bathrobe now as he had formerly hugged himself inside his pink naked almost hairless skin. “He chose. He chose lechery. So do I. But go on.” His remark was not intended for flippancy nor even derogation. It was born (if from any source) of that incorrigible unsentimental sentimentality of the young which takes the form of hard and often crass levity—to which, by the way, Quentin paid no attention whatever, resuming as if he had never been interrupted, his face still lowered, still brooding apparently on the open letter upon the open book between his hands.
“He left for Virginia that night. Grandfather said how he went to the window and watched him ride across the square on the gaunt black stallion, erect in his faded gray, the hat with its broken plume cocked a little yet not quite so much as the beaver of the old days, as if (Grandfather said) even with his martial rank and prerogatives he did not quite swagger like he used to do, not because he was chastened by misfortune or spent or even war-wearied but as though even while riding he was still bemused in that state in which he struggled to hold clear and free above a maelstrom of unpredictable and unreasoning human beings, not his head for breath and not so much his fifty years of effort and striving to establish a posterity, but his code of logic and morality, his formula and recipe of fact and deduction whose balanced sum and product declined, refused to swim or even float;—saw him approach the Holston House and saw old Mr McCaslin and two other old men hobble out and stop him, he sitting the stallion and talking to them and his voice not raised, Grandfather said, yet the very sober quality of his gestures and the set of his shoulders forensic, oratorical. Then he went on. He could still reach Sutpen’s Hundred before dark, so it was probably after supper that he headed the stallion toward the Atlantic Ocean, he and Judith facing one another again for maybe a full minute, he not needing to say ‘I will stop it if I can’, she not needing to say ‘Stop it then—if you can’ but just goodbye, the kiss on the brow and no tears; a word to Clytie and to Wash: master to slave, baron to retainer: ‘Well, Clytie, take care of Miss Judith.—Wash, I’ll send you a piece of Abe Lincoln’s coat tail from Washington’ and I reckon Wash answering like it used to be under the scuppernongs with the demijohn and the well bucket: ‘Sho, Kernel; kill ever one of the varmints!’ So he ate the hoecake and drank the parched acorn coffee and rode away. Then it was ’65 and the army (Grandfather had gone back to it too; he was a brigadier now though I reckon this was for more reason than because he just had one arm) had retreated across Georgia and into Carolina and they all knew it wouldn’t be very much longer now. Then one day Lee sent Johnston some reinforcements from one of his corps and Grandfather found out that the Twenty-third Mississippi was one of the regiments. And he (Grandfather) didn’t know what had happened: whether Sutpen had found out in some way that Henry had at last coerced his conscience into agreeing with him as his (Henry’s) father had done thirty years ago, whether Judith perhaps had written her father that she had heard from Bon at last and what she and Bon intended to do, or if the four of them had just reached as one person that point where something had to be done, had to happen, he (Grandfather) didn’t know. He just learned one morning that Sutpen had ridden up to Grandfather’s old regiment’s headquarters and asked and received permission to speak to Henry and did speak to him and then rode away again before midnight.”
“So he got his choice made, after all,” Shreve said. “He played that trump after all. And so he came home and found——”
“Wait,” Quentin said.
“——what he must have wanted to find or anyway what he was going to find——”
“Wait, I tell you!” Quentin said, though still he did not move nor even raise his voice—that voice with its tense suffused restrained quality: “I am telling” Am I going to have to hear it all again he thought I am going to have to hear it all over again I am already hearing it all over again I am listening to it all over again I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do:—(that at least regarding which he should have needed no word nor warning even if Judith would have sent him one, sent him acknowledgement that she was beaten, who according to Mr
Compson would no more have sent him acknowledgement that he had beat her than she waited (who Miss Coldfield said was not bereaved) and met him on his return, not with the fury and despair perhaps which he might have expected even though knowing as little, having learned as little, about women as Mr Compson said he had, yet certainly with something other than the icy calm with which, according to Miss Coldfield, she met him—the kiss again after almost two years, on the brow; the voices, the speeches, quiet, contained, almost impersonal: “And—?” “Yes. Henry killed him” followed by the brief tears which ceased on the instant when they began, as if the moisture consisted of a single sheet or layer thin as a cigarette paper and in the shape of a human face; the “Ah, Clytie. Ah, Rosa.—Well, Wash. I was unable to penetrate far enough behind the Yankee lines to cut a piece from that coat tail as I promised you”; the (from Jones) guffaw, the chortle, the old imbecile stability of the articulated mud which, Mr Compson said, outlasts the victories and the defeats both: “Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?”: and that was all. He had returned. He was home again where his problem now was haste, passing time, the need to hurry. He was not concerned, Mr Compson said, about the courage and the will, nor even about the shrewdness now. He was not for one moment concerned about his ability to start the third time. All that he was concerned about was the possibility that he might not have time sufficient to do it in, regain his lost ground in. He did not waste any of what time he had either. The will and the shrewdness too he did not waste, though he doubtless did not consider it to have been either his will or his shrewdness which supplied waiting to his hand the opportunity, and it was probably less of shrewdness and more of courage than even will which got him engaged to Miss Rosa within a period of three months and almost before she was aware of the fact—Miss Rosa, the chief disciple and advocate of that cult of demon-harrying of which he was the chief object (even though not victim), engaged to him before she had got accustomed to having him in the house;—yes, more of courage than even will, yet something of shrewdness too: the shrewdness acquired in excruciating driblets through the fifty years suddenly capitulant and retroactive or suddenly sprouting and flowering like a seed lain fallow in a vacuum or in a single iron clod. Because he seemed to perceive without stopping, in that passage through the house which was an unbroken continuation of the long journey from Virginia, the pause not to greet his family but merely to pick up Jones and drag him on out to the brier-choked fields and fallen fences and clap axe or mattock into his hands, the one weak spot, the one spot vulnerable to assault in Miss Rosa’s embattled spinsterhood, and to assault and carry this in one stride, with something of the ruthless tactical skill of his old master (the Twenty-third Mississippi was in Jackson’s corps at one time). And then the shrewdness failed him again. It broke down, it vanished into that old impotent logic and morality which had betrayed him before: and what day might it have been, what furrow might he have stopped dead in, one foot advanced, the unsentient plow handles in his instantaneous unsentient hands, what fence panel held in midair as though it had no weight by muscles which could not feel it, when he realised that there was more in his problem than just lack of time, that the problem contained some super-distillation of this lack: that he was now past sixty and that possibly he could get but one more son, had at best but one more son in his loins, as the old cannon might know when it has just one more shot in its corporeality. So he suggested what he suggested to her, and she did what he should have known she would do and would have known probably if he had not bogged himself again in his morality which had all the parts but which refused to run, to move. Hence the proposal, the outrage and unbelief; the tide, the blast of indignation and anger upon which Miss Rosa vanished from Sutpen’s Hundred, her air-ballooned skirts spread upon the flood, chip-light, her bonnet (possibly one of Ellen’s which she had prowled out of the attic) clapped fast onto her head rigid and precarious with rage. And he standing there with the reins over his arm, with perhaps something like smiling inside his beard and about the eyes which was not smiling but the crinkled concentration of furious thinking:—the haste, the need for it; the urgency but not fear, not concern: just the fact that he had missed that time, though luckily it was just a spotting shot with a light charge, and the old gun, the old barrel and carriage none the worse; only next time there might not be enough powder for both a spotting shot and then a full-sized load;—the fact that the thread of shrewdness and courage and will ran onto the same spool which the thread of his remaining days ran onto and that spool almost near enough for him to reach out his hand and touch it. But this was no grave concern yet, since it (the old logic, the old morality which had never yet failed to fail him) was already falling into pattern, already showing him conclusively that he had been right, just as he knew he had been, and therefore what had happened was just a delusion and did not actually exist)
Absalom, Absalom! Page 27