Light in August - William Faulkner [171]
It is too huge and fast for distance and time; hence no path to be retraced, leading the mule for a good way before he remembers to get on it and ride. It is as though he has already and long since outstripped himself, already waiting at the cabin until he can catch up and enter. And then I will stand there and I will ... He tries it again: Then I will stand there and I will ... But he can get no further than that. He is in the road again now, approaching a wagon homeward bound from town. It is about six o’clock. He does not give up, however. Even if I can’t seem to get any further than that: when I will open the door and come in and stand there. And then I will. Look at her. Look as her. Look at her— The voice speaks again:
“—excitement, I reckon.”
“What?” Byron says. The wagon has halted. He is right beside it, the mule stopped too. On the wagon seat the man speaks again, in his flat, complaining voice:
“Durn the luck. Just when I had to get started for home. I’m already late.”
“Excitement?” Byron says. “What excitement?”
The man is looking at him. “From your face, a man would say you had been in some excitement yourself.”
“I fell down,” Byron says. “What excitement in town this evening?”
“I thought maybe you hadn’t heard. About an hour ago. That nigger, Christmas. They killed him.”
Chapter 19
ABOUT the suppertables on that Monday night, what the town wondered was not so much how Christmas had escaped but why when free, he had taken refuge in the place which he did, where he must have known he would be certainly run to earth, and why when that occurred he neither surrendered nor resisted. It was as though he had set out and made his plans to passively commit suicide.
There were many reasons, opinions, as to why he had fled to Hightower’s house at the last. “Like to like,” the easy, the immediate, ones said, remembering the old tales about the minister. Some believed it to have been sheer chance; others said that the man had shown wisdom, since he would not have been suspected of being in the minister’s house at all if someone had not seen him run across the back yard and run into the kitchen.
Gavin Stevens though had a different theory. He is the District Attorney, a Harvard graduate, a Phi Beta Kappa: a tall, loosejointed man with a constant cob pipe, with an untidy mop of irongray hair, wearing always loose and un pressed dark gray clothes. His family is old in Jefferson; his ancestors owned slaves there and his grandfather knew (and also hated, and publicly congratulated Colonel Sartoris when they died) Miss Burden’s grandfather and brother. He has an easy quiet way with country people, with the voters and the juries; he can be seen now and then squatting among the overalls on the porches of country stores for a whole summer afternoon, talking to them in their own idiom about nothing at all.
On this Monday night there descended from the nine o’clock southbound train a college professor from the neighboring State University, a schoolmate of Stevens’ at Harvard, come to spend a few days of the vacation with his friend. When he descended from the train he saw his friend at once. He believed that Stevens had come down to meet him until he saw that Stevens was engaged with a queerlooking old couple whom he was putting on the train. Looking at them, the professor saw a little, dirty old man with a short