‘It’s Caddy!’ the librarian whispered. ‘We must save her!’
‘It’s Cad, all right,’ Jason said. Then he began to laugh. He stood there laughing above the picture, above the cold beautiful face now creased and dogeared from its week’s sojourn in the desk drawer and the handbag. And the librarian knew why he was laughing, who had not called him anything but Mr Compson for thirty-two years now, ever since the day in 1911 when Candace, cast off by her husband, had brought her infant daughter home and left the child and departed by the next train, to return no more, and not only the Negro cook, Dilsey, but the librarian too divined by simple instinct that Jason was somehow using the child’s life and its illegitimacy both to blackmail the mother not only into staying away from Jefferson for the rest of her life but into appointing him sole unchallengeable trustee of the money she would send for the child’s maintenance, and had refused to speak to him at all since that day in 1928 when the daughter climbed down the rainpipe and ran away with the pitchman.
‘Jason!’ she cried. ‘We must save her! Jason! Jason!’ and still crying it even when he took up the picture between thumb and finger and threw it back across the counter toward her.
‘That Candace?’ he said. ‘Don’t make me laugh. This bitch aint thirty yet. The other one’s fifty now.’
And the library was still locked all the next day too when at three oclock in the afternoon, footsore and spent yet still unflagging and still clasping the handbag tightly under her arm, she turned into a neat small yard in the Negro residence section of Memphis and mounted the steps of the neat small house and rang the bell and the door opened and a black woman of
about her own age looked quietly out at her. ‘It’s Frony, isn’t it?’ the librarian said. ‘Dont you remember me Melissa Meek, from Jefferson’ ‘Yes,’ the Negress said. ‘Come in. You want to see Mama.’
And she entered the room, the neat yet cluttered bedroom of an old Negro, rank with the smell of old people, old women, old Negroes, where the old woman herself sat in a rocker beside the hearth where even though it was June a fire smoldered a big woman once, in faded clean calico and an immaculate turban wound round her head above the bleared and now apparently almost sightless eyes and put the dogeared clipping into the black hands which, like the women of her race, were still as supple and delicately shaped as they had been when she was thirty or twenty or even seventeen.
‘It’s Caddy!’ the librarian said. ‘It is! Dilsey! Dilsey!’ ‘What did he say?’ the old Negress said. And the librarian knew whom she meant by ‘he’, nor did the librarian marvel, not only that the old Negress would know that she (the librarian) would know whom she meant by the ‘he’, but that the old Negress would know at once that she had already shown the picture to Jason.
‘Dont you know what he said?’ she cried. ‘When he realised she was in danger, he said it was her, even if I hadn’t even had a picture to show him. But as soon as he realised that somebody, anybody, even just me, wanted to save her, would try to save her, he said it wasn’t. But it is! Look at it!»Look at my eyes,’ the old Negress said. ‘How can I see that picture?»Call Frony!’ the librarian cried. ‘She will know her!’ But already the old Negress was folding the clipping carefully back into its old creases, handing it back.
‘My eyes aint any good anymore,’ she said. ‘I cant see it.’ And that was all. At six oclock she fought her way through the crowded bus terminal, the bag clutched under one arm and the return half of her roundtrip ticket in the other hand, and was swept out onto the roaring platform on the diurnal tide of a few middleaged civilians but mostly soldiers and sailors enroute either to leave or to death and the homeless young women, their companions, who for two years now had lived from day to day in pullmans and hotels when they were lucky and in daycoaches
and busses and stations and lobbies and public restrooms when not, pausing only long enough to drop their foals in charity wards or policestations and then move on again, and fought her way into the bus, smaller than any other there so that her feet touched the floor only occasionally until a shape (a man in khaki; she couldn’t see him at all because she was already crying) rose and picked her up bodily and set her into a seat next the window, where still crying quietly she could look out upon the fleeing city as it streaked past and then was behind and presently now she would be home again, safe in Jefferson where life lived too with all its incomprehensible passion and turmoil and grief and fury and despair, but here at six oclock you could close the covers on it and even the weightless hand of a child could put it back among its unfeatured kindred on the quiet eternal shelves and turn the key upon it for the whole and dreamless night.
Yes she thought, crying quietly that was it she didn’t want to see it know whether it was Caddy or not because she knows Caddy doesn’t want to be saved hasn’t anything anymore worth being
saved for nothing worth being lost that she can lose JASON IV. The first sane Compson since before Culloden and (a childless bachelor) hence the last. Logical rational contained and even a philosopher in the old stoic tradition: thinking nothing whatever of God one way or the other and simply considering the police and so fearing and respecting only the Negro woman, his sworn enemy since his birth and his mortal one since that day in 1911 when she too divined by simple clairvoyance that he was somehow using his infant niece’s illegitimacy to blackmail its mother, who cooked the food he ate. Who not only fended off end held his own with Compsons but competed and held his own with the Snopeses who took over the little town following the turn of the century as the Compsons and Sartorises and their ilk faded from it (no Snopes, but Jason Compson himself who as soon as his mother died the niece had already climbed down the rainpipe and vanished so Dilsey no longer had either of these clubs to hold over him committed his idiot younger brother to the state and vacated the old house, first chopping up the vast oncesplendid rooms into what he called apartments and selling the whole thing to a countryman who opened a boardinghouse in it), though this was not difficult since to him all the rest of the town and the world and the human race too except himself were Compsons, inexplicable yet quite predictable in that they were in no sense whatever to be trusted.
Who, all the money from the sale of the pasture having gone for his sister’s wedding and his brother’s course at Harvard, used his own niggard savings out of his meagre wages as a storeclerk to send himself to a Memphis school where he learned to class and grade cotton, and so established his own business with which, following his dipsomaniac father’s death, he assumed the entire burden of the rotting family in the rotting house, supporting his idiot brother because of their mother, sacrificing what pleasures might have been the right and just due and even the necessity of a thirty year old bachelor, so that his mother’s life might continue as nearly as possible to what it had been this not because he loved her but (a sane man always) simply because he was afraid of the Negro cook whom he could not even force to leave even when he tried to stop paying her weekly wages, and who despite all this, still managed to save almost three thousand dollars ($2840. 50) as he reported it on the night his niece stole it, in niggard and agonised dimes and quarters and halfdollars, which hoard he kept in no
bank because to him a banker too was just one more Compson, but hid in a locked bureau drawer in his bedroom whose bed he made and changed himself since he kept the bedroom door locked all the time save when he was passing through it.
Who, following a fumbling abortive attempt by his idiot brother on a passing female child, had himself appointed the idiot’s guardian without letting their mother know and so was able to have the creature castrated before the mother even knew it was out of the house, and who following the mother’s death in 1933 was able to free himself forever not only from the idiot brother and the house but from the Negro woman too, moving into a pair of offices up a flight of stairs above the supplystore containing his cotton ledgers and samples, which he had
converted into a bedroom kitchen bath, in and out of which on weekends there would be seen a big plain friendly brazenhaired pleasantfaced woman no longer very young, in round picture hats and (in its season) an imitation fur coat, the two of them, the middleaged cottonbuyer and the woman whom the town called, simply, his friend from Memphis, seen at the local picture show on Saturday night and
