And now Boon himself didn’t know how to begin. He had prayed for luck, and immediately, by return post you might say, had been vouchsafed more than he knew what to do with. They have told you before this probably that Fortune is a fickle jade, who never withholds but gives, either good or bad: more of the former than you ever believe (perhaps with justice) that you deserve; more of the latter than you can handle. So with Boon. So all he said was, “Well.”
Nor did I help him; I took that revenge. All right, revenge on whom? Not on Boon of course: on me, my shame; perhaps on Father and Mother, who had abandoned me to the shame; perhaps on Grandfather, whose automobile had made the shame available; who knows? perhaps on Mr Buffaloe himself — that rapt and divinely stricken somnambulist who had started the whole thing two innocent years ago. But I did feel sorry for Boon because he had so little time.
It was after eleven now; Aunt Callie would be expecting me back in a matter of minutes, not because she knew it couldn’t take more than ten minutes to get back home after she heard Twenty-three whistle for the lower crossing, but because she would already be in a driving impatience to get us all fed and on the way to McCaslin; she had been born in the country and still preferred it. Boon wasn’t looking at me. He very carefully wasn’t looking at me.
“Three hundred miles,” he said. “Good thing somebody invented trains. If they’d a had to go by mule wagon like folks used to, they couldn’t even get there in ten days, let alone back in ten days too.”
“Father said four days,” I said.
“That’s right,” Boon said. “So he did. Maybe we got four days to get back to the house in, but that still dont give us forever.” We went back to the car and got in it. But he didn’t start it. “Maybe when Boss gets back in te — four days he’ll let me learn you to run this thing. You’re big enough. Besides, you already know how. Have you ever thought about that?”
“No,” I said. “Because he aint going to let me.”
“Well, you dont need to rush at it. You got four days for him to change his mind in. Though my guess is nearer ten.” Still he didn’t move to start the car. “Ten days,” he said. “How far do you reckon this automobile could travel in ten days?”
“Father said four,” I said.
“All right,” he said. “How far in four days?”
“I aint going to know that either,” I said. “Because aint anybody around here going to find out to tell me.”
“All right,” he said. He started the car suddenly and backed and turned it, already going fast, neither toward the Square nor toward Mr Rouncewell’s gasoline pump.
“I thought we had to get gasoline,” I said.
We were going fast. “I changed my mind,” Boon said. “I’ll tend to that just before we leave for McCaslin after dinner. Then so much of it wont evaporate away just standing around.” We were in a lane now, going fast between Negro cabins and vegetable patches and chicken yards, with chickens and mongrel dogs leaping frantically from the dust just in time, out of the lane and into a vacant field, a waste place marked faintly with tire tracks but no hooves; and now I recognised it: Mr Buffaloe’s homemade motordrome where Colonel Sartoris’s law had driven him two years ago and where he had taught Boon to operate an automobile. And still I didn’t understand until Boon wrenched the car to a stop and said, “Move over here.”
So I was late for dinner after all; Aunt Callie was already standing on the front gallery, carrying Alexander and already yelling at Boon and me even before he stopped the car to let me out. Because Boon licked me in fair battle after all; evidently he hadn’t quite forgot all he remembered from his own youth about boys. I know better now of course, and I even knew better then: that Boon’s fall and mine were not only instantaneous but simultaneous too: back at the identical instant when Mother got the message that Grandfather Lessep was dead. But that’s what I would have liked to believe: that Boon simply licked me.
Anyway, that’s what I told myself at the time: that, secure behind that inviolable and inescapable rectitude concomitant with the name I bore, patterned on the knightly shapes of my male ancestors as bequeathed — nay, compelled — to me by my father’s word-of-mouth, further bolstered and made vulnerable to shame by my mother’s doting conviction, I had been merely testing Boon; not trying my own virtue but simply testing Boon’s capacity to undermine it; and, in my innocence, trusting too much in the armor and shield of innocence; expected, demanded, assumed more than that frail Milanese was capable of withstanding.
I say “frail Milanese” not advisedly but explicitly: having noticed in my time how quite often the advocates and even the practitioners of virtue evidently have grave doubts of their own regarding the impregnability of virtue as a shield, putting their faith and trust not in virtue but rather in the god or goddess whose charge virtue is; by-passing virtue as it were in allegiance to the Over-goddess herself, in return for which the goddess will either divert temptation away or anyhow intercede between them. Which explains a lot, having likewise noticed in my time that the goddess in charge of virtue seems to be the same one in charge of luck, if not of folly also.
So Boon beat me in fair battle, using, as a gentleman should and would, gloves. When he stopped the car and said, “Move over,” I thought I knew what he intended. We had done this before at four or five convenient and discreet times in Grandfather’s lot, me sitting on Boon’s lap holding the wheel and steering while he let the automobile move slowly in low gear across the lot. So I was ready for him. I was already en garde and had even begun the counterthrust, opening my mouth to say It’s too hot to sit on anybody today. Besides we better get on back on home when I saw that he was already out of the car on his side while he was still speaking, standing there with one hand on the wheel and the engine still running. For another second or two I still couldn’t believe it. “Hurry up,” he said. “Any minute now Callie will come running out of that lane toting that baby under one arm and already yelling.”
So I moved under the wheel, and with Boon beside me, over me, across me, one hand on mine to shift the gears, one hand on mine to regulate the throttle, we moved back and forth across that vacant sun-glared waste, forward a while, backward a while, intent, timeless, Boon as much as I, immersed, rapt, steadying me (he was playing for such stakes, you see), out of time, beyond it, invulnerable to time until the courthouse clock striking noon a half-mile away restored us, hurled us back into the impending hard world of finagle and deception.
“All right,” Boon said, “quick,” not even waiting but lifting me bodily across him as he slid under the wheel, the car already rushing back across the field toward home, we talking man-to-man now, mutual in crime, confederate of course but not coeval yet because of my innocence; I already beginning to say What do I do now? You’ll have to tell me when once again Boon spoke first and made us equal too: “Have you figgered how to do it? We aint got much time.”
“All right,” I said. “Go on. Get on back to the house before Aunt Callie starts hollering.” So you see what I mean about Virtue? You have heard — or anyway you will — people talk about evil times or an evil generation. There are no such things. No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the un-virtue of any given moment, any more than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it.
Because what pity that Virtue does not — possibly cannot — take care of its own as Non-virtue does. Probably it cannot: who to the dedicated to Virtue, offer in reward only cold and odorless and tasteless virtue: as compared not only to the bright rewards of sin and pleasure but to the ever watchful unflagging omniprescient skill — that incredible matchless capacity for invention and imagination — with which even the tottering footsteps of infancy are steadily and firmly guided into the primrose path.
Because oh yes, I had matured terrifyingly since that clock struck two minutes ago. It has been my observation that, except in a few
