William Faulkner, SANCTUARY – WordPress.com - literature save 2

shaking the rosary at them. They snarled at her in vicious falsetto, baring their teeth, and
she leaned against the wall in a thin aroma of beer, her hand to her breast, her mouth
open, her eyes fixed in a glare of sad terror of all breathing as she sought breath, the
tankard a squat soft gleam like dull silver lifted in the gloom.
The narrow stair-well turned back upon itself in a succession of niggard reaches.
The light, falling through a thickly curtained door at the front and through a shuttered
window at the rear of each stage, had a weary quality. A spent quality: defunctive,
exhausted--a protracted weariness like a vitiated backwater beyond sunlight and the vivid
noises of sunlight and day. There was a defunctive odor of irregular food, vaguely
alcoholic, and Temple even in her ignorance seemed to be surrounded by a ghostly
promiscuity of intimate garments, of discreet whispers of flesh stale and oft-assailed and
impregnable beyond each silent door which they passed. Behind her, about hers and Miss
Reba's feet the two dogs scrabbled in nappy gleams, their claws clicking on the metal
strips which bound the carpet to the stairs.
Later, lying in bed, a towel wrapped about her naked loins, she could hear them
sniffing and whining outside the door. Her coat and hat hung on nails on the door, her
dress and stockings lay upon a chair, and it seemed to her that she could hear the
rhythmic splush-splush of the washing-board somewhere and she flung herself again in
an agony for concealment as she had when they took her knickers off.
"Now, now," Miss Reba said. "I bled for four days, myself. It aint nothing. Doctor
Quinn'll stop it in two minutes, and Minnie'll have them all washed and pressed and you
won't never know it. That blood'll be worth a thousand dollars to you honey." She lifted
the tankard, the flowers on her hat rigidly moribund, nodding in macabre wassail. "Us
poor girls," she said. The drawn shades, cracked into a myriad pattern like old skin, blew
faintly on the bright air, breathing into the room on waning surges the sound of Sabbath
traffic, festive, steady, evanescent. Temple lay motionless in the bed, her legs straight and
close, in covers to her chin and her face small and wan, framed in the rich sprawl of her
hair. Miss Reba lowered the tankard, gasping for breath. In her hoarse, fainting voice she
began to tell Temple how lucky she was.
"Every girt in the district has been trying to get him, honey. There's one, a little
married woman slips down here sometimes, she offered Minnie twenty-five dollars just
to get him into the room, that's all. But do you think he'd so much as look at one of them'?
Girls that have took a hundred dollars a night. No, sir. Spend his money like water, but do
you think he'd look at one of them except to dance with her? I always knowed it wasn't
going to be none of these here common whores he'd take. I'd tell them, I'd say, the one of
yez that gets him'll wear diamonds, I says, but it aint going to be none of you common
whores, and now Minnie'll have them washed and pressed until you wont know it."
"I cant wear it again," Temple whispered. "I cant."
"No more you'll have to, if you dont want, You can give them to Minnie, though I
dont know what she'll do with them except maybe--" At the door the dogs began to
whimper louder. Feet approached. The door opened. A negro maid entered, carrying a
tray bearing a quart bottle of beer and a glass of gin, the dogs surging in around her feet.
"And tomorrow the stores'll be open and me and you'll go shopping, like he said for us to.
Like I said, the girl that gets him'll wear diamonds: you just see if I wasn't--" she turned,
mountainous, the tankard lifted, as the two dogs scrambled onto the bed and then onto her
lap, snapping viciously at one another. From their curled shapeless faces bead-like eyes