Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online Page A

ceased she rose and laid the paper aside and followed him to the front door.
    The moon had gotten up beyond the dark eastern wall of the hills and it lay without emphasis upon the valley, mounting like a child’s balloon behind the oaks and locusts along the drive. Bayard sat with his feet on the veranda rail, in the moonlight. His cigar glowed at spaced intervals, and a shrill monotone of crickets rose from the immediate grass, and further away, from among the trees, a fairy-like piping of young frogs like endless silver small bubbles rising, and a thin sourceless odor of locust drifted up intangible as fading tobacco-wraiths, and from the rear of the house, up the dark hall, Elnora’s voice floated in meaningless minor suspense.
    Miss Jenny groped in the darkness beside the door and from beside the yawning lesser obscurity of the mirror she took Bayard’s hat from the hook, and carried it out to him and put it in his hand. “Dont sit out here too long, now. It aint summer yet.”
    He grunted indistinguishably, but he put the hat on andshe turned and went back to the office and finished the paper and folded it and laid it on the table. She snapped the light off and mounted the dark stairs to her room. The moon shone above the trees at this height and it fell in broad silver bars through the eastern windows.
    Before turning up the light she crossed to the southern wall and raised a window there, upon the crickets and frogs and somewhere a mockingbird. Outside the window was a magnolia tree, but it was not to bloom yet, nor had the honeysuckle massed along the garden fence flowered. But this would be soon, and from here she could overlook the garden, could look down upon cape jasmine and syringa and callacanthus where the moon lay upon their bronze and yet unflowered sleep, and upon those other shoots and graftings from the faraway Carolina gardens she had known as a girl.
    Just beyond the corner from the invisible kitchen, Elnora’s voice welled in mellow falling suspense.
All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven aint gwine dar
Elnora sang, and presently she and Simon emerged into the moonlight and took the path to Simon’s cabin below the barn. Simon had fired his cigar at last, and the evil smoke of it trailed behind him, fading; but when they had gone the rank pungency of it seemed still to linger within the sound of the crickets and of the frogs upon the silver air, mingled and blended inextricably with the dying fall of Elnora’s voice.
    All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven aint gwine dar
    His cigar was cold, and he moved and dug a match from his waistcoat and relit it and braced his feet again upon the railing, and again the drifting sharpness of tobacco lay along the windless currents of the silver air, straying and fading slowly amid locust-breaths and the ceaseless fairy reiteration of crickets and frogs. There was a mockingbird somewhere down thevalley, and after a while another sang from the magnolia at the corner of the garden fence. An automobile passed along the smooth valley road, slowed for the railway crossing, then sped on. Before the sound of it had died away, the whistle of the nine-thirty train drifted down from the hills.
    Two long blasts with dissolving echoes, two short following ones; but before it came in sight his cigar was cold again, and he sat holding it in his fingers and watched the locomotive drag its string of yellow windows up the valley and into the hills once more, where after a time it whistled again, arrogant and resonant and sad. John Sartoris had sat so on this veranda and watched his two daily trains emerge from the hills and cross the valley into the hills, with lights and smoke and a noisy simulation of speed. But now his railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it that ran from Chicago to the Gulf, completing his dream, while John Sartoris slept among martial cherubim and the useless vain-glory of whatever God he did not scorn to recognise.
    Then old