‐ before his hand was writing steady and even into the space where the daughter? daughter?
daughter? never had showed ‐ and when the date here too: 1859. Two children. Say 1860, 20 years.
Increase 200% times intrinsic val. yearly plus liquid assets plus credit earned. Approx'te val.
1860, 100,000. Query: bigamy threat, Yes or No. Possible. No.
Incest threat: Credible Yes and the hand going back before it put down the period, lining out the Credible, writing in Certain, underlining it.
'And he didn't care about that too; he just said, "All right."
Because maybe he knew now that his mother didn't know and never would know what she wanted, and so he couldn't beat her (maybe he had learned from the octoroon that you cant beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to), and he knew that all the lawyer wanted was just the money; and so if he just didn't make the mistake of believing that he could beat all of it, if he just remembered to be quiet and be alert he could beat some of it. ‐ So he said, "All right" and let his mother pack the fine clothes and the fine linen into the bags and trunks, and maybe he lounged into the lawyer's office and watched from behind that something which could have been called smiling while the lawyer made the elbow motion about getting his horses onto the steamboat and maybe buying him an extra special body servant and arranging about the money and all; watching from behind the smiling while the lawyer did the heavy father even, talking about the scholarship, the culture, the Latin and the Greek that would equip and polish him for the position which he would hold in life and how a man to be sure could get that anywhere, in his own library even, who had the will; but how there was something, some quality to culture which only the monastic, the cloistral monotony of a ‐ say obscure and small (though high class, high class) college ‐ and he ‐' (neither of them said ' Bon'. Never at any time did there seem to be any confusions between them as to whom Shreve meant by 'he') 'listening courteous and quiet behind that expression which you were not supposed to see past, asking at last, interrupting maybe, courteous and affable nothing of irony, nothing of sarcasm ‐ "What did you say this college was?": and now a good deal of elbow motion here while the lawyer would shuffle through the papers to find the one from which he could read that name which he had been memorizing ever since he first talked to the mother: "The University of Mississippi, at" ‐ Where did you say?" 'Oxford,' Quentin said.
'It's about forty miles from ‐'
'‐ "Oxford."
And then the papers could be still again because he would be talking: about a small college only ten years old, about how there wouldn't be anything to distract him from his studies there (where, in a sense, wisdom herself would be a virgin or at least not very secondhand) and how he would have a chance to observe another and a provincial section of the country in which his high destiny was rooted; (granted the outcome of this war which was without doubt imminent, the successful conclusion of which we all hoped for, had no doubt of) as the man he would be and the economic power he would represent when his mother passed on, and he listening behind that expression, saying, "Then you don't recommend the law as a vocation?" and now for just a moment the lawyer would stop, but not long; maybe not long enough or perceptible enough for you to call it pause: and he would be looking at Bon too: "It hadn't occurred to me that the law might appeal to you" said Bon: "Neither did practising with a rapier appeal to me while I was doing it. But I can recall at least one occasion in my life when I was glad I had" and then the lawyer, smooth and easy: "Then by all means let it be the law. Your mother will ag ‐ be pleased."
"All right," he said, not "good‐bye"; he didn't care. Maybe he didn't even say good‐bye to the octoroon, to those tears and lamentations and maybe even the clinging, the soft despairing magnolia‐colored arms about his knees, and (say) three and a half feet above those boneless steel gyves that expression of his which was not smiling but just something not to be seen through.
Because you cant beat them: you just flee (and thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five‐foot‐thick maggot‐cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked and racked like ninepins; thanks to whatever Gods for that masculine hipless tapering peg which fits light and glib to move where the cartridge‐chambered hips of women hold them fast) ‐ not good‐bye: all right: and one night he walked up the gangplank between the torches and probably only the lawyer there to see him off and this not for godspeed but to make sure that he actually took the boat.
And the new extra nigger opening the bags in the stateroom, spreading the fine clothes, and the ladies already gathered in the saloon for supper and the men in the bar, preparing for it, but not he; he alone, at the rail, with a cigar maybe, watching the city drift and wink and glitter and sink away and then all motion cease, the boat suspended immobile and without progress from the stars themselves by the two ropes of spark‐filled smoke streaming upward from the stacks. And who knows what thinking, what sober weighing and discarding, who had known for years that his mother was up to something; that the lawyer was up to something and though he knew that was just money, yet he knew that within his (the lawyer's) known masculine limitations he (the lawyer) could be almost as dangerous as the unknown quantity which was his mother; and now this ‐ school, college ‐
and he twenty‐eight years old. And not only that, but this particular college, which he had never heard of, which ten years ago did not even exist; and knowing too that it was the lawyer who had chosen it for him ‐ what sober, what intent, what almost frowning Why? Why? Why this college, this particular one above all others?
* maybe leaning there in that solitude between panting smoke and engines and almost touching the answer, aware of the jigsaw puzzle picture integers of it waiting, almost lurking, just beyond his reach, inextricable, jumbled, and unrecognizable yet on the point of falling into pattern which would reveal to him at once, like a flash of light, the meaning of his whole life, past ‐ the Haiti, the childhood, the lawyer, the woman who was his mother. And maybe the letter itself right there under his feet, somewhere in the darkness beneath the deck on which he stood ‐ the letter addressed not to Thomas Sutpen at Sutpen's Hundred but to Henry Sutpen, Esquire, in Residence at the University of Mississippi, near Oxford, Mississippi. One day Henry showed it to him and there was no gentle spreading glow but a flash, a glare (showed it to him who not only had no visible father but had found himself to be, even in infancy, enclosed by an unsleeping cabal bent apparently on teaching him that he had never had a father, that his mother had emerged from a sojourn in limbo, from that state of blessed amnesia in which the weak senses can take refuge from the godless dark forces and powers which weak human flesh cannot stand, to wake pregnant, shrieking and screaming and thrashing, not against the ruthless agony of labor but in protest against the outrage of her swelling loins; that he had been fathered on her not through that natural process but had been blotted onto and out of her body by the old infernal immortal male principle of all unbridled terror and darkness) a glare in which he stood looking at the innocent face of the youth almost ten years his junior, while one part of him said. He has my brow my skull my jaw my hands and the other said Wait.