We hardly ever saw him. He would be gone from dawn until dark, he and Jones and another man or two that he had got from somewhere and paid with something, perhaps the same coin in which he had paid that foreign architect ‐ cajolery, promise, threat and at last force. That was the winter when we began to learn what carpetbagger meant and people ‐ women ‐ locked doors and windows at night and began to frighten each other with tales of Negro uprisings, when the ruined, the four years' fallow and neglected land lay more idle yet while men with pistols in their pockets gathered daily at secret meeting places in the towns. He did not make one of these; I remember how one night a deputation called, rode out through the mud of early March and put him to the point of definite yes or no, with them or against them, friend or enemy: and he refused, declined, offered them (with no change of gaunt ruthless face nor level voice) defiance if it was defiance they wanted, telling them that if every man in the South would do as he himself was doing, would see to the restoration of his own land the general land and South would save itself: and ushered them from the room and from the house and stood plain in the doorway holding the lamp above his head while their spokesman delivered his ultimatum: 'There be war, Sutpen,' and answered, 'I am used to it." Oh yes, I watched him, watched his old man's solitary fury fighting now not with the stubborn yet slowly tractable earth as it had done before, but now against the ponderable weight of the changed new time itself as though he were trying to dam a river with his bare hands and a shingle: and this for the same spurious delusion of reward which had failed (failed? betrayed: and would this time destroy) him once; I see the analogy myself now: the accelerating circle's fatal curving course of his ruthless pride, his lust for vain magnificence, though I did not then.
And how could I? turned twenty true enough yet still a child, still living in that womb‐like corridor where the world came not even as living echo but as dead incomprehensible shadow, where with the quiet and unalarmed amazement of a child I watched the miragy antics of men and women ‐
my father, my sister, Thomas Sutpen, Judith, Henry, Charles Bon ‐ called honor, principle, marriage, love, bereavement, death; the child who watching him was not a child but one of that triumvirate mother‐woman which we three, Judith, Clytie, and I made, which fed and clothed and warmed the static shell and so gave vent and scope to the fierce vain illusion and so said, 'at last my life is worth something, even though it only shields and guards the antic fury of an insane child." And then one afternoon (I was in the garden with a hoe, where the path came up from the stable‐lot) I looked up and saw him looking at me.
He had seen me for twenty years, but now he was looking at me; he stood there in the path looking at me, in the middle of the afternoon.
That was it: that it should have been in the middle of the afternoon, when he should not have been anywhere near the house at all but miles away and invisible somewhere among his hundred square miles which they had not troubled to begin to take away from him yet, perhaps not even at this point or at that point but diffused (not attenuated to thinness but enlarged, magnified, encompassing as though in a prolonged and unbroken instant of tremendous effort embracing and holding intact that ten‐mile square while he faced from the brink of disaster, invincible and unafraid, what he must have known would be the final defeat) but instead of that standing there in the path looking at me with something curious and strange in his face as if the barnlot, the path at the instant when he came in sight of me had been a swamp out of which he' had emerged without having been forewarned that he was about to enter light, and then went on ‐ the face, the same face: it was not love; I do not say that, not gentleness or pity: just a sudden over‐burst of light, illumination, who had been told that his son had done murder and vanished and said 'Ah. ‐well, Clytie." He went on to the house. But it was not love: I do not claim that; I hold no brief for myself, I do not excuse it. I could have said that he had needed, used me; why should I rebel now, because he would use me more?
but I did not say it; I could say this time, I do not know, and I would tell the truth.
Because I do not know. He was gone; I did not even know that either since there is a metabolism of the spirit as well as of the entrails, in which the stored accumulations of long time burn, generate, create, and break some maidenhead of the ravening meat; ay in a second's time ‐yes, lost all the shibholeth erupting of cannot, will not, never will in one red instant's fierce obliteration.
This was my instant, who could have fled then and did not, who found that he had gone on and did not remember when he had walked away, who found my okra bed finished without remembering the completing of it, who sat at the supper table that night with the familiar dream‐cloudy shell which we had grown used to (he did not look at me again during the meal; I might have said then, To what deluded sewer‐gush of dreaming does the incorrigible flesh betray us: but I did not) and then before the fire in Judith's bedroom sat as we always did until he came in the door and looked at us and said, 'Judith, you and Clytie ‐' and ceased, still entering, then said, ' No, never mind. Rosa will not mind if you both hear it too, since we are short for time and busy with what we have of it' and came and stopped and put his hand on my head and (I do not know what he looked at while he spoke, save that by the sound of his voice it was not at us nor at anything in that room) said, ' You may think I made your sister Ellen no very good husband. You probably do think so.
But even if you will not discount the fact that I am older now, I believe I can promise that I shall do no worse at least for you." That was my courtship. That minute's exchanged look in a kitchen garden, that hand upon my head in his daughter's bedroom; a ukase, a decree, a serene and florid boast like a sentence (ay, and delivered in the same attitude) not to be spoken and heard but to be read carved in the bland stone which pediments a forgotten and nameless effigy. I do not excuse it. I claim no brief, no pity, who did not answer 'I will' not because I was not asked, because there was no place, no niche, no interval for reply. Because I could have made one. I could have forced that niche myself if I had willed to ‐ a niche not shaped to fit mild ' Yes' but some blind desperate)male weapon's frenzied slash whose very gaping wound had cried' No! No!" and' Help!" and' Save me!"