Miss Jenny had arrived home, looking a little spent, and Narcissa had scolded her and at last prevailed on her to lie down after dinner. And here she had dozed while the drowsy afternoon wore away, and waked to lengthening shadows and a sound of piano keys touched softly from downstairs. I’ve slept all afternoon she told herself, rising. In Narcissa’s room the child slept in his crib; beside him the nurse dozed placidly; Miss Jenny tiptoed out and descended the stairs and drew her chair out from behind the piano. Narcissa ceased.
“Do you fed rested?” Narcissa asked. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Fiddlesticks,’? Miss Jenny said. “It always does me good to see all those fool pompous men lying there with their marble mottoes and things. Thank the Lord, none of them will have a chance at me. I reckon the Lord knows His business, but I declare, sometimes … Play something.” Narcissa obeyed, playing softly, and Miss Jenny sat listening for a while. But presently she began to talk of the child. Narcissa played quietly on, her white dress with itsv black ribbon at the waist vaguely luminous in the gloom. Jasmine drifted steadily in, and Miss Jenny talked on about little Johnny. Narcissa played with rapt inattention, as though she were not listening. Then, without ceasing and without turning her head, she said:
“He isn’t John. He’s Benbow Sartoris.”
“What?”
“His name is Benbow Sartoris “she repeated.
Miss Jenny sat quite still for a moment Twilight thickened slowly about them; Narcissa’s dress was pale as wax. In the next room Elnora moved about, laying the table for supper. “And do you think that’ll do any good?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Do you think you can change one of ‘em with a name?”
The music went on in the dusk; the dusk was peopled with ghosts of glamorous and old disastrous things. And if they were just glamorous enough, there would be a Sartoris in them, and then they were sure to be disastrous. Pawns. But the Player and the game He plays—who knows? He must have a name for his pawns, though, but perhaps Sartoris is the name of the game itself—a game outmoded and played with pawns shaped too late and to an old dead pattern, and of which the Player Himself is a little wearied. For there is death in the sound of it, and a glamorous fatality, like silver pennons downrushing at sunset, or a dying fall of horns along the road to Roncevaux.
“Do you think,” Miss Jenny insisted, “that because his name is Benbow, he’ll be any less a Sartoris and a scoundrel and a fool?”
Narcissa played on as though she were not listening. Then she turned her head and without ceasing her hands, she smiled at Miss Jenny quietly, a little dreamily, with serene fond detachment. Beyond Miss Jenny’s trim fading head the window curtains hung motionless without any wind; beyond the window evening was a windless lilac dream, foster-dam of quietude and peace.
Oxford, Miss
29 September 1927
end.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Faulkner, born New Albany, Mississippi, September 25, 1897—died July 6, 1962. Enlisted Royal Air Force, Canada, 1918. Attended University of Mississippi. Traveled in Europe 1925-1926. Resident of Oxford, Mississippi, where he held various jobs while trying to establish himself as a writer. First published novel, Soldier’ Pay, 1926. Writer in Residence at the University of Virginia 1957-1958. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1950.