Maybe the mother found out about the octoroon and the child and the ceremony and discovered more than the lawyer had (or would believe, who considered Bon only dull, not a fool) and sent for him and he came and lounged against the mantel again and maybe knowing what was up, what had happened before she told him, lounging there with an expression on his face you might call smiling except it was not that but just something you couldn’t see through or past, and she watching him with maybe the lank iron-colored strand of hair down again and not even bothering to brush it back now because she was not looking at any letter now but her eyes blazing at him, her voice trying to blaze at him out of the urgency of alarm and fear, but she managing to keep it down since she could not talk about betrayal because she had not told him yet, and now, at this moment, she would not dare risk it—he looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn’t smiling but was just something you were not supposed to see beyond, saying, admitting it: “Why not?
All young men do it. The ceremony too. I didn’t set out to get the child, but now that I have…. It’s not a bad child, either” and she watching him, glaring at him and not being able to say what she would because she had put off too long now saying what she could: “But you.
This is different” and he (she would not need to say it. He would know because he already knew why she had sent for him, even if he did not know and did not care what she had been up to since before he could remember, since before he could take a woman whether in love or not): “Why not? Men seem to have to marry some day, sooner or later. And this is one whom I know, who makes me no trouble. And with the ceremony, that bother, already done. And as for a little matter like a spot of Negro blood—’ not needing to talk much, say much either, not needing to say I seem to have been born into this world with so few fathers that I have too many brothers to outrage and shame while alive and hence too many descendants to bequeath my little portion of hurt and harm to, dead; not that, just ‘a little spot of Negro blood—’ and then to watch the face, the desperate urgency and fear, then to depart, kissing her maybe, her hand maybe which would lie in his and even touch his lips like a dead hand because of the desperate casting for this straw or that; maybe as he went out he said she will go to him (the lawyer); if I were to wait five minutes I could see her in the shawl.
So probably by tonight I will be able to know—if I cared to know. Maybe by night he did, maybe before that if they managed to find him, get word to him, because she went to the lawyer. And it was right in the lawyer’s alley. Maybe before she even got started telling it good that gentle white glow began like when you turn up a wick; maybe he could even almost see his hand writing on into the space where the daughter? daughter? daughter? never had quite showed. Because maybe that had been the lawyer’s trouble and worry and concern all the time; that ever since she had made him promise he would never tell Bon who his father was, he had been waiting and wondering how to do it, since maybe he knew that if he were to tell Bon, Bon might believe it or he might not, but certainly he would go and tell his mother that the lawyer had told him and then he (the lawyer) would be sunk, not for any harm done because there would be no harm, since this could not alter the situation, but for having crossed his paranoiac client.
Maybe while he would sit in his office adding and subtracting the money and adding what they would get out of Sutpen (he was never worried about what Bon would do when he found out; he had probably a long time ago paid Bon that compliment of thinking that even if he was too dull or too indolent to suspect or find out about his father himself, he wasn’t fool enough not to be able to take advantage of it once somebody showed him the proper move; maybe if the thought had ever occurred to him that because of love or honor or anything else under Heaven or jurisprudence either, Bon would not, would refuse to, he (the lawyer) would even have furnished proof that he no longer breathed) maybe all the time it was this that racked him: how to get Bon where he would either have to find it out himself, or where somebody—the father or the mother—would have to tell him.
So maybe she wasn’t out of the office good or at least as soon as he had had time to open the safe and look in the secret drawer and make sure that it was the University of Mississippi that Henry attended—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
