Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner Page A

couldn’t help but hear them. It sounded like a ladies’ club meeting with Mrs. Habersham running it, because every now and then Mrs. Habersham would forget to whisper: “—Mother should come, be sent for at once. But lacking her presence … we, the ladies of the community, mothers ourselves … child probably taken advantage of by gallant romantic … before realizing the price she must—” and Mrs. Compson said, “Hush! Hush!” and then somebody else said, “Do you really suppose—” and then Mrs. Habersham forgot to whisper good: “What else? What other reason can you namewhy she should choose to conceal herself down there in the woods all day long, lifting heavy weights like logs and—”
    Then I went away. I filled the bucket at the spring and went back to the log-yard where Drusilla and Ringo and Joby were feeding the bandsaw and the blindfolded mule going round and round in the sawdust. And then Joby kind of made a sound and we all stopped and looked and there was Mrs. Habersham, with three of the others kind of peeping out from behind her with their eyes round and bright, looking at Drusilla standing there in the sawdust and shavings, in her dirty sweated overalls and shirt and brogans, with her face sweat-streaked with sawdust and her short hair yellow with it. “I am Martha Habersham,” Mrs. Habersham said. “I am a neighbor and I hope to be a friend.” And then she said, “You poor child.”
    We just looked at her; when Drusilla finally spoke, she sounded like Ringo and I would when Father would say something to us in Latin for a joke. “Ma’am?” Drusilla said. Because I was just fifteen; I still didn’t know what it was all about; I just stood there and listened without even thinking much, like when they had been talking in the cabin. “My condition?” Drusilla said. “My—”
    “Yes,” Mrs. Habersham said. “No mother, no woman to … forced to these straits—” kind of waving her hand at the mules that hadn’t stopped and at Joby and Ringo goggling at her and the three others still peeping around her at Drusilla. “—to offer you not only our help, but our sympathy.”
    “My condition,” Drusilla said. “My con … Help and sym—” Then she began to say, “Oh. Oh. Oh.” standing there, and then she was running. She began to run like a deer, that starts to run and then decides where it wants to go; she turned right in the air and came toward me, running light over the logs and planks, with her mouth open, saying “John, John” not loud; for a minute it was like she thought I was Father until she waked up and found I was not; she stopped without even ceasing to run, like a bird stops in the air, motionless yet still furious with movement. “Is that what you think too?” she said. Then she was gone. Every now and then I could see her footprints, spaced and fast, just inside the woods, but when I came out of the bottom, I couldn’t see her. But the surreys and buggies were still in front of the cabin and I could see Mrs. Compson and the other ladies on the porch, looking out across thepasture toward the bottom, so I did not go there. But before I came to the other cabin, where Louvinia and Joby and Ringo lived, I saw Louvinia come up the hill from the spring, carrying her cedar water bucket and singing. Then she went into the cabin and the singing stopped short off and so I knew where Drusilla was. But I didn’t hide. I went to the window and looked in and saw Drusilla just turning from where she had been leaning her head in her arms on the mantel when Louvinia came in with the water bucket and a gum twig in her mouth and Father’s old hat on top of her headrag. Drusilla was crying. “That’s what it is, then,” she said. “Coming down there to the mill and telling me that in my condition—sympathy and help—Strangers; I never saw any of them before and I don’t care a damn what they—But you and Bayard. Is that what you believe? that John and