No, not whores.
Sometimes I believe that they are the only true chaste women, not to say virgins, in America, and they remain true and faithful to that man not merely until he dies or frees them, but until they die.
And where will you find whore or lady either whom you can count on to do that?" and Henry,
"But you married her. You married her": and Bon—it would be a little quicker now, sharper now, though still gentle, still patient, though still the iron, the steel the gambler not quite yet reduced to his final trump: "Ah. That ceremony.
I see.
That's it, then.
A formula, a shibholeth meaningless as a child's game, performed by someone created by the situation whose need it answered: a crone mumbling in a dungeon lighted by a handful of burning hair, something in a tongue which not even the girls themselves understand anymore, maybe not even the crone herself, rooted in nothing of economics for her or for any possible progeny since the very fact that we acquiesced, suffered the farce, was her proof and assurance of that which the ceremony itself could never enforce; vesting no new rights in no one, denying to none the old—a ritual as meaningless as that of college boys in secret rooms at night, even to the same archaic and forgotten symbols?—you call that a marriage, when the night of a honeymoon and the casual business with a hired prostitute consists of the same suzerainty over a (temporarily) private room, the same order of removing the same clothes, the same conjunction in a single bed?
Why not call that a marriage too?" and Henry:
"Oh I know.
I know.
You give me two and two and you tell me it makes five and it does make five.
But there is still the marriage.
Suppose i assume an obligation to a man who cannot speak my language, the obligation stated to him in his own and I agree to it: am I any the less obligated because I did not happen to know the tongue in which he accepted me in good faith?
No: the more, the mote." and Bon—the trump now, the voice gentle now:
"Have you forgot that this woman, this child, are niggers?
You, Henry Sutpen of Sutpen's Hundred in Mississippi?
You, talking of marriage, a wedding, here?" and Henry the despair now, the last bitter cry of irrevocable undefeat:
"Yes.
I know.
I know that.
But it's still there.
It's not right.
Not even you doing it makes it right.
Not even you."
'So that was all.
It should have been all; that afternoon four years later should have happened the next day, the four years, the interval, mere anti-climax: an attenuation and prolongation of a conclusion already ripe to happen, by the War by a stupid and bloody aberration in the high (and impossible) destiny of the United States, maybe instigated by that family fatality which possessed, along with all circumstance, that curious lack of economy between cause and effect which is always a characteristic of fate when reduced to using human beings for tools, material.
Anyway, Henry waited four years, holding the three of them in that abeyance, that durance, waiting, hoping, for Bon to renounce the woman and dissolve the marriage which he (Henry) admitted was no marriage, and which he must have known as soon as he saw the woman and the child that Bon would not renounce.
In fact, as time passed and Henry became accustomed to the idea of that ceremony which was still no marriage, that may have been the trouble with Henry—not the two ceremonies but the two women; not the fact that Bon's intention was to commit bigamy but that it was apparently to make his (Henry's) sister a sort of junior partner in a harem.
Anyway, he waited, hoped, for four years.
That spring they returned north, into Mississippi.
Bull Run had been fought and there was a company organizing at the University, among the student body.
Henry and Bon joined it.
Probably Henry wrote Judith where they were and what they intended to do.
They enlisted together, you see, Henry watching Bon and Bon permitting himself to be watched, the probation, the durance: the one who dared not let the other out of his sight, not from fear that Bon would marry Judith with Henry not there to stop it, but that Bon would marry Judith and then he (Henry) would have to live for the rest of his life with the knowledge that he was glad that he had been so betrayed, with the coward's joy of surrendering without having been vanquished; the other for that same reason too, who could not have wanted Judith without Henry since he must never have doubted but what he could marry Judith when he wished, in spite of brother and father both, because as I said before, it was not Judith who was the object of Bon's love or of Henry's solicitude.
She was just the blank shape, the empty vessel in which each of them strove to preserve, not the illusion of himself nor his illusion of the other but what each conceived the other to believe him to be the man and the youth, seducer and seduced, who had known one another, seduced and been seduced, victimized in turn each by the other, conquerer vanquished by his own strength, vanquished conquering by his own weakness, before Judith came into their joint lives even by so much as girlname.
And who knows? there was the War now; who knows but what the fatality and the fatality's victims did not both think, hope, that the War would settle the matter, leave free one of the two irreconcilables, since it would not be the first time that youth has taken catastrophe as a direct act of Providence for the sole purpose of solving a personal problem which youth itself could not solve.
'And Judith: how else to explain her but this way?
Surely Bon could not have corrupted her to fatalism in twelve days, who not only had not tried to corrupt her to unchastity but not even to defy her father.
No: anything but a fatalist, who was the Sutpen with the ruthless Sutpen code of taking what it wanted provided it were strong enough, of the two children as Henry was the Coldfield with the Coldfield cluttering of morality and rules of right and wrong; who while Henry screamed and vomited, looked down from the loft that night on the spectacle of Sutpen fighting halfnaked with one of his halfnaked niggers with the same cold and attentive interest with which Sutpen would have watched Henry fighting with a Negro boy of his own age and weight.
Because she could not have known the reason for her father's objection to the marriage.
Henry would not have told her, and she would not have asked her father.
Because, even if she had known it, it would have made no difference to her.
She would have acted as Sutpen would have acted with anyone who tried to cross him: she would have taken Bon anyway.
I can imagine her if necessary even murdering the other woman.
But she certainly would have made no investigation and then held a moral debate between what she wanted and what she thought was right.
Yet she waited.
She waited four years, with no word from him save through Henry that he (Bon) was alive.
It was the probation, the durance; they all three accepted it; I don't believe there was ever any promise between Henry and Bon demanded or offered.
But Judith, who could not have known what happened nor why. —Have you noticed how so often when we try to reconstruct the causes which lead up to the actions of men and women, how with a sort of astonishment we find ourselves now and then reduced to the belief, the only possible belief, that they stemmed from some of the old virtues? the thief who steals not for greed but for love, the murderer who kills not out of lust but pity?
Judith, giving implicit trust where she had given love, giving implicit love where she had derived breath and pride: that true pride, not that false kind which transforms what it does not at the moment understand into scorn and outrage and so vents itself in pique and lacerations, but true pride which can say to itself without abasement I love, I will accept no substitute; something has happened between him and my father; if my father was right, I will never see him, again, if wrong he will come or send for me; if happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.