The Sound and the Fury: List 2: June Second, 1910

The train swung around the curve, the engine puffing with short, heavy blasts, and they passed smoothly from sight that way, with that quality about them of shabby and timeless patience, of static serenity: that blending of childlike and ready incompetence and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of all reason and robs them steadily and evades responsibility and obligations by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge...

...that frank and spontaneous admiration for the victor which a gentleman feels for anyone who beats him in a fair contest, and withal a fond and unflagging tolerance for whitefolks’ vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children, which I had forgotten.

Spoade was the world’s champion sitter-around, no holds barred and gouging discretionary.

Because they couldn't cajole him into the diningroom Mother believed he had some sort of spell he was going to cast on her when he got her alone.

A face reproachful tearful an odor of camphor and of tears a voice weeping steadily and softly beyond the twilit door the twilight-colored smell of honeysuckle.

When I can see my shadow again if not careful that I tricked into the water shall tread again upon my impervious shadow.

From then on until he had you completely subjugated he was always in or out of your room, ubiquitous and garrulous, though his manner gradually moved northward as his raiment improved...

From then on until he had you completely subjugated he was always in or out of your room, ubiquitous and garrulous, though his manner gradually moved northward as his raiment improved...

But he had been guide mentor and friend to unnumbered crops of innocent and lonely freshmen, and I suppose that with all his petty chicanery and hypocrisy he stank no higher in heaven’s nostrils than any other.

His eyes were soft and irisless and brown, and suddenly I saw Roskus watching me from behind all his whitefolks’ claptrap of uniforms and politics and Harvard manner, diffident, secret, inarticulate and sad.

Once more he was that self he had long since taught himself to wear in the world’s eye, pompous, spurious, not quite gross.

He looked down at me, benignant, profound.

Jason ran on, his hands in his pockets fell down and lay there like a trussed fowl until Versh set him up.

Shreve was coming up the walk, shambling, fatly earnest, his glasses glinting beneath the running leaves like little pools.

...I’ll go down on my knees and pray for the absolution of my sins that he may escape this curse...

Remote cousins and family friends whom mere acquaintanceship invested with a sort of blood obligation noblesse oblige.

Telling us about Gerald’s women in a Quentin has shot Herbert he shot his voice through the floor of Caddy's room tone of smug approbation.

“I’m talking about cruel fate in eight yards of apricot silk and more metal pound for pound than a galley slave and the sole owner and proprietor of the unchallenged peripatetic john of the late Confederacy.”

That’s where the water would be, healing out to the sea and the peaceful grottoes.

Only our country was not like this country. There was something about just walking through it. A kind of still and violent fecundity that satisfied even bread-hunger like.

Flowing around you, not brooding and nursing every niggard stone.

The bridge was of gray stone, lichened, dappled with slow moisture where the fungus crept.

The fading vortex drifted away down stream and then I saw the arrow again, nose into the current, wavering delicately to the motion of the water above which the May flies slanted and poised.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

He leaned on the rail, looking down at the trout which he had already spent, and suddenly the acrimony, the conflict, was gone from their voices, as if to them too it was as though he had captured the fish and bought his horse and wagon, they too partaking of that adult trait of being convinced of anything by an assumption of silent superiority.

He would be sort of grand too, pulling in lonely state across the noon, rowing himself right out of noon, up the long bright air like an apotheosis, mounting into a drowsing infinity where only he and the gull, the one terrifically motionless, the other in a steady and measured pull and recover that partook of inertia itself, the world punily beneath their shadows on the sun.

She looked like a librarian. Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done.

Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed.

“Them foreigners,” she said, staring up into the obscurity where the bell tinkled.

“This one?” I said, pointing. She just chewed, but it seemed to me that I discerned something affirmative, acquiescent even if it wasn’t eager, in her air.

Julio broke from the men and sprang at me again, but the marshal met him and they struggled until the other two pinioned his arms again.

I could hear them telling them what it was, and Spoade asking questions, and then Julio said something violently in Italian and I looked back and saw the little girl standing at the curb, looking at me with her friendly, inscrutable regard.

“All the time we thought he was the model youth that anybody could trust a daughter with, until the police showed him up at his nefarious work.”

He was as crotchety about his julep as an old maid, measuring everything by a recipe in his head.

...we can take my school money we can cancel my matriculation...

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

And then Spoade said they were going somewhere, would not be back until late, and Mrs Bland would need another cavalier.

The first note sounded, measured and tranquil, serenely peremptory, emptying the unhurried silence for the next one...

...every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows before hand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery...

...every man is the arbiter of his own virtues...