The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner [131]
‘Yes,’ the Negress said. ‘Come in. You want to see Mama.’ As she entered the room, the neat yet cluttered bedroom of an old Negro, rank with the smell of old people, old women, old Negroes, where the old woman herself sat in a rocker beside the hearth where even though it was June a fire smoldered—a big woman once, in faded clean calico and an immaculate turban wound round her head above the bleared and now apparently almost sightless eyes—and put the dogeared clipping into the black hands which, like the women of her race, were still as supple and delicately shaped as they had been when she was thirty or twenty or even seventeen.
‘It’s Caddy!’ the librarian said. ‘It is! Dilsey! Dilsey!’
‘What did he say?’ the old Negress said. And the librarian knew whom she meant by ‘he,’ nor did the librarian marvel, not only that the old Negress would know whom she meant by the ‘he,’ but that the old Negress would know at once that she had already shown the picture to Jason.
‘Dont you know what he said?’ she cried. ‘When he realised she was in danger, he said it was her, even if I hadn’t even had a picture to show him. But as soon as he realised that somebody, anybody, even just me, wanted to save her, would try to save her, he said it wasn’t. But it is! Look at it!’
‘Look at my eyes,’ the old Negress said. ‘How can I see that picture?’
‘Call Frony!’ the librarian cried. ‘She will know her!’ But already the old Negress was folding the clipping carefully back into its old creases, handing it back.
‘My eyes aint good anymore,’ she said. ‘I cant see it.’
And that was all. At six oclock she fought her way through the crowded bus terminal, the bag clutched under one arm and the return half of her roundtrip ticket in the other hand, and was swept out onto the roaring platform on the diurnal tide of a few middleaged civilians but mostly soldiers and sailors enroute either to leave or to death and the homeless young women, their companions, who for two years now had lived from day to day in pullmans and hotels when they were lucky and in daycoaches and buses and stations and lobbies and public restrooms when not, pausing only long enough to drop their foals in charity wards or policestations and then move on again, and fought her way into the bus, smaller than any other there so that her feet touched the floor only occasionally until a shape (a man in khaki; she couldn’t see him at all because she was already crying) rose and picked her up bodily and set her into a seat next to the window, where still crying quietly she could look out upon the fleeing city as it streaked past and then was behind and presently now she would be home again, safe in Jefferson where life lived too with all its incomprehensible passion and turmoil and grief and fury and despair, but here at six oclock you could close the covers on it and even the weightless hand of a child could put it back among its unfeatured kindred on the quiet eternal shelves and turn the key upon it for the whole and dreamless night. Yes she thought, crying quietly that was it she didn’t want to see it know whether it was Caddy or not because she knows Caddy doesn’t want to be saved hasn’t anything anymore worth being saved for nothing worth being lost that she can lose
JASON IV. The first sane Compson since before Culloden and (a childless bachelor) hence the last. Logical rational contained and even a philosopher in the old stoic tradition: thinking nothing whatever of God one way or the other and simply considering the police and so fearing and respecting only the Negro woman, his sworn enemy since his birth and his mortal one since that day in 1911 when she too divined by simple clairvoyance that he was somehow using his infant niece’s illegitimacy to blackmail its mother, who cooked the food he ate. Who not only fended off and held his own with Compsons but competed and held his own with the Snopeses