Light in August - William Faulkner [49]
She turned, at once. “Well. You don’t have to tell me. I know, anyway. I’ve known it all the time that he’s part nigger.” She returned to the house. She did not walk fast now and she yawned, terrifically. ‘All I have to do is to think of some way to make the madam believe it. He won’t tell her, back me up.’ She yawned again, tremendously, her face emptied now of everything save yawning and then emptied even of yawning. She had just thought of something else. She had not thought of it before, but she believed that she had, had known it all the while, because it seemed so right: he would not only be removed; he would be punished for having given her terror and worry. ‘They’ll send him to the nigger orphanage,’ she thought ‘Of course. They will have to.’
She did not even go to the matron at once. She had started there, but instead of turning toward the office door she saw herself passing it, going on toward the stairs and mounting. It was as though she followed herself to see where she was going. In the corridor, quiet and empty now, she yawned again, with utter relaxation. She entered her room and locked the door and took off her clothes and got into bed. The shades were drawn and she lay still, in the more than halfdark, on her back. Her eyes were closed and her face was empty and smooth. After a while she began to open her legs and close them slowly, feeling the sheets flow cool and smooth over them and then flow warm and smooth again. Thinking seemed to hang suspended between the sleep which she had not had now in three nights and the sleep which she was about to receive, her body open to accept sleep as though sleep were a man. ‘All I need do is to make the madam believe,’ she thought. And then she thought, He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans.
That was in the afternoon. At nine that evening she was undressing again when she heard the janitor come up the corridor, toward her door. She did not, could not, know who it was, then somehow she did know, hearing the steady feet and then a knock at the door which already began to open before she could spring to it. She didn’t call; she sprang to the door, putting her weight against it, holding it to. “I’m undressing!” she said in a thin, agonised voice, knowing who it was. He didn’t answer, his weight firm and steady against the crawling door, beyond the crawling gap. “You can’t come in here!” she cried, hardly louder than a whisper. “Don’t you know they ...” Her voice was panting, fainting, and desperate. He did not answer. She tried to halt and hold the slow inward crawling of the door. “Let me get some clothes on, and I’ll come out there. Will you do that?” She spoke in that fainting whisper, her tone light, inconsequential, like that of one speaking to an unpredictable child or a maniac: soothing, cajoling: “You wait, now. Do you hear? Will you wait, now?” He did not answer. The slow and irresistible crawling of the door did not cease. Leaning against it, wearing nothing save her undergarment, she was like a puppet in some burlesque of rapine and despair. Leaning, downlooking, immobile, she appeared to be in deepest thought, as if the puppet in the midst of the scene had gone astray within itself. Then she turned, releasing the door, and sprang back to the bed, whipping up without looking at it a garment and whirling to face the door, clutching the garment at her breast, huddling. He had already entered; apparently he had been watching her and waiting during the