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

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eaching for it, he knocked it flat; whereupon once more the face mused tenderly behind the rigid travesty of the painted mouth, contemplating something beyond his shoulder. He lay in bed, dressed, with the light burning, until he heard the court-house clock strike three. Then he left the house, putting his watch and his tobacco pouch into his pocket. The railroad station was three quarters of a mile away. The waiting room was lit by a single weak bulb. It was empty save for a man in overalls asleep on a bench, his head on his folded coat, snoring, and a woman in a calico dress, in a dingy shawl and a new hat trimmed with rigid and moribund flowers set square and awkward on her head. Her head was bent; she may have been asleep; her hands crossed on a paper-wrapped parcel upon her lap, a straw suit case at her feet. It was then that Horace found he had forgot his pipe. The train came, finding him tramping back and forth along the cinder-packed right-of-way. The man and woman got on, the man carrying his rumpled coat, the woman the parcel and the suit case. He followed them into the day coach filled with snoring, with bodies sprawled half into the aisle as though in the aftermath of a sudden and violent destruction, with dropped heads, open-mouthed, their throats turned profoundly as though waiting the stroke of knives. He dozed. The train clicked on, stopped, jolted. He waked and dozed again. Someone shook him out of sleep into a primrose dawn, among unshaven puffy faces washed lightly over as though with the paling ultimate stain of a holocaust, blinking at one another with dead eyes into which personality returned in secret opaque waves. He got off, had breakfast, and took another accommodation, entering a car where a child wailed hopelessly, crunching peanut-shells under his feet as he moved up the car in a stale ammoniae odor until he found a seat beside a man. A moment later the man leaned forward and spat tobacco juice between his knees. Horace rose quickly and went forward into the smoking car. It was full too, the door between it and the jim crow swinging open. Standing in the aisle he could look forward into a diminishing corridor of green plush seat-backs topped by hatted cannnonballs swaying in unison, while gusts of talk and laughter blew back and kept in steady motion the acrid air in which white men sat, spitting into the aisle. He changed again. The waiting crowd was composed half of young men in collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests, and two girls with painted small faces and scant bright dresses like identical artificial flowers surrounded each by bright and restless bees. When the train came they pushed gaily forward, talking and laughing, shouldering aside older people with gay rudeness, clashing and slamming seats back and settling themselves, turning their faces up out of laughter, their cold faces still toothed with it, as three middle-aged women moved down the car, looking tentatively left and right at the filled seats. The two girls sat together, removing a fawn and a blue hat, lifting slender hands and preening not-quite-formless fingers about their close heads seen between the sprawled elbows and the leaning heads of two youths hanging over the back of the seat and Surrounded by colored hat bands at various heights where the owners sat on the seat arms or stood in the aisle; and presently the conductor's cap as he thrust among them with plaintive, fretful cries, like a bird. "Tickets. Tickets, please," he chanted. For an instant they held him there, invisible save for his cap. Then two young men slipped swiftly back and into the seat behind
Horace. He could hear them breathing. Forward the conductor's punch clicked twice. He came on back. "Tickets," he chanted, "Tickets." He took Horace's and stopped where the youths sat. "You already got mine," one said. "Up there." "Where's your check?" the conductor said. "You never gave us any. You got your tickets, though. Mine was number-" he repeated a number glibly, in a frank, pleasant tone. "Did you notice the number of yours, Shack?" The second one repeated a number in a frank, pleasant tone. "Sure you got ours. Look and see." He began to whistle between his teeth, a broken dance rhythm, unmusical. "Do you eat at Gordon Hall?" the other said. "No. I have natural halitosis." The conductor went on. The whistle reached crescendo, clapped off by his hands on his knees, ejaculating duh-duh-duh. Then he just squalled, meaningless, vertiginous; to Horace it was like sitting before a series of printed pages turned in furious snatches leaving a series of cryptic, headless and tailless evocations on the mind. "She's travelled a thousand miles without a ticket." "Marge too." "Beth too." "Duh-duh-duh." "Marge too." "I'm going to punch mine Friday night." "Eeeeyow." "Do you like liver?" "I cant reach that far." "Eceeeyow." They whistled, clapping their heels on the floor to furious crescendo, saying duhduh-duh. The first jolted the seat back against Horace's head. He rose. "Come on," he said. "He's done gone." Again the seat jarred into Horace and he watched them return and join the group that blocked the aisle, saw one of them lay his bold, rough hand flat upon one of the bright, soft faces uptilted to them. Beyond the group a countrywoman with an infant in her arms stood braced against a seat. From time to time she looked back at the blocked aisle and the empty seats beyond. At Oxford he descended into a throng of them at the station, hatless, in bright dresses, now and then with books in their hands and surrounded still by swarms of colored shirts. Impassable, swinging hands with their escorts, objects of casual and puppyish pawings, they dawdled up the hill toward the college, swinging their little hips, looking at Horace with cold, blank eyes as he stepped off the walk in order to pass them. At the top of the hill three paths diverged through a broad grove beyond which, in green vistas, buildings in red brick or gray stone gleamed, and where a clear soprano bell began to ring. The procession became three streams, thinning rapidly upon the dawdling couples, swinging hands, strolling in erratic surges, lurching into one another with puppyish squeals, with the random intense purposelessness of children. The broader path led to the post-office. He entered and waited until the window was clear.
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William Faulkner SANCTUARY First pu
Page 3 and 4:
"Through all them trees?" Popeye sa
Page 5 and 6:
and stooped above an open packing c
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somebody else's wife, you start off
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Tommy guffawed, in undertone. The r
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"Some women want a man to marry a c
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slanted against the glare. The brok
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small clouds rosy with sunlight dro
Page 17 and 18:
"Putty hard walkin', aint it?" he s
Page 19 and 20: stand fer nobody drinkin' hyer cep
Page 21 and 22: They went on in the path. Popeye wa
Page 23 and 24: we stopped at Dumfries and he went
Page 25 and 26: worth, and all the rest of it you t
Page 27 and 28: "Here," Gowan said across the table
Page 29 and 30: there, he said, stopping, then he s
Page 31 and 32: They swung Gowan onto the bed. His
Page 33 and 34: at her with a quality furious and q
Page 35 and 36: "A rat?" she wailed, "a rat? Open t
Page 37 and 38: The blind man's stick clattered aga
Page 39 and 40: Temple sprang back into the kitchen
Page 41 and 42: house. Instead he went on across th
Page 43 and 44: she was about halfway back to the h
Page 45 and 46: "Goodwin and I were both talking. H
Page 47 and 48: him who was already dead singing ab
Page 49 and 50: "And go on back to Kinston until th
Page 51 and 52: "You dont think I am lawyer enough,
Page 53 and 54: kept on talking, sitting there in h
Page 55 and 56: "No," he said, "I didn't. I didn't
Page 57 and 58: together, listening to the hot minu
Page 59 and 60: They reached Memphis in mid-afterno
Page 61 and 62: glared with choleric ferocity, thei
Page 63 and 64: and hurled the covers over her head
Page 65 and 66: owl and pitcher and a row of towels
Page 67 and 68: "But that girl," Horace said. "she
Page 69: "Yes; Gowan. And, by the Lord, he'd
Page 73 and 74: delicate paradox, as though the Cre
Page 75 and 76: shoulders and his gestures. The tra
Page 77 and 78: She took shape vaguely, approaching
Page 79 and 80: As the train neared Memphis Virgil
Page 81 and 82: "Caint be her husband," Fonzo said.
Page 83 and 84: When they reached home Fonzo stoppe
Page 85 and 86: "This is Snopes," he said. "How're
Page 87 and 88: "And what's your price?" Horace sai
Page 89 and 90: special bed made and sent down here
Page 91 and 92: to herself sitting on the bed, list
Page 93 and 94: teacher in school and it was a litt
Page 95 and 96: Temple turned from the door and sto
Page 97 and 98: she smoked swiftly, moving about th
Page 99 and 100: toward his armpit. He caught her wr
Page 101 and 102: still alive; she felt long shudderi
Page 103 and 104: and black and navy blue, and glitte
Page 105 and 106: "Beer? Beer? Is somebody--" "Put th
Page 107 and 108: They began to talk politely, in dec
Page 109 and 110: "I knew it all the time," Miss Reba
Page 111 and 112: "Going down to Jackson for a couple
Page 113 and 114: Two days before it opened Snopes em
Page 115 and 116: "Then I guess it's time to think ab
Page 117 and 118: "Yes," she said. She held the bon-b
Page 119 and 120: man is going to let me walk out of
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"Sustained," the Court said. "Strik
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"He had the pistol in his hand. Wha
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loomed. In the yard, beneath the ba
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he said, when Horace descended from
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"The strikers. I dont care a damn w
Page 131 and 132:
"What's your name? Calvin Coolidge?
Page 133 and 134:
"Sure. Tell it to them. I dont know
Page 135:
he quit jerking his neck and stood
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