'No,' Shreve said; 'you wait. Let me play a while now. Now, Wash. Him (the demon) standing there with the horse, the saddled charger, the sheathed saber, the gray waiting to be laid peaceful away among the moths and all lost save dishonor: then the voice of the faithful grave-digger who opened the play and would close it, coming out of the wings like Shakespeare's very self: "Well, Kernel, they mought have whupped us but they aint kilt us yit, air they?" — This was not flippancy either. It too was just that protective coloring of levity behind which the youthful shame of being moved hid itself, out of which Quentin also spoke, the reason for Quentin's sullen bemusement, the (on both their parts) flipness, the strained clowning: the two of them, whether they knew it or not, in the cold room (it was quite cold now) dedicated to that best of ratiocination which after all was a good deal like Sutpen's morality and Miss Coldfield's demonizing — this room not only dedicated to it but set aside for it and suitably so since it would be here above any other place that it (the logic and the morality) could do the least amount of harm — the two of them back to back as though at the last ditch, saying No to Quentin's Mississippi shade who in life had acted and reacted to the minimum of logic and morality, who dying had escaped it completely, who dead remained not only indifferent but impervious to it, somehow a thousand times more potent and alive. There was no harm intended by Shreve and no harm taken, since Quentin did not even stop. He did not even falter, taking Shreve up in stride without comma or colon or paragraph: ' — no reserve to risk a spotting shot with now so he started this one like you start a rabbit out of a brier patch, with a little chunk of dried mud thrown by hand. Maybe it was the first string of beads out of his and Wash's little store where he would get mad at his customers, the niggers and the trash and the haggling, and turn them out and lock the door and drink himself blind. And maybe Wash delivered the beads himself, Father said, that was down at the gate when he rode back from the war that day that after he went away with the regiment would tell folks that he (Wash) was looking after Kernel's place and niggers until after a while maybe he even believed it. Father's mother said how when the Sutpen niggers first heard about what he was saying, they would stop him in the road that came up out of the bottom where the old fishing camp was that Sutpen let him and the granddaughter (she was about eight then) live in. There would be too many of them for him to whip them all, to even try to, risk trying to: and they would ask him why he wasn't at the war and he would say, "Git outen my road, niggers!" and then it would be the outright laughing, asking one another (except it was not one another but him): "Who him, calling us niggers?" and he would rush at them with a stick and them avoiding him just enough, not mad at all, just laughing. And he was still carrying fish and animals he killed (or maybe stole) and vegetables up to the house when that was about all Mrs Sutpen and Judith (and Clytie too) had to live on, and Clytie would not let him come into the kitchen with the basket even, saying, "Stop right there, white man Stop right where you is. You aint never crossed this door while Colonel was here and you aint going to cross it now." Which was true, only Father said there was a kind of pride in it: that he had never tried to enter the house, even though he believed that if he had tried, Sutpen would not have let them repulse him; like (Father said) he might have said to himself The reason I won't try it aint that I refuse to give any black nigger the chance to tell me I cant but because I aint going to force Mister Tom to have to cuss a nigger or take a cussing from his vile on my account. But they would drink together under the scuppernong arbor on the Sunday afternoons, and on the weekdays he would see Sutpen (the fine figure of the man as he called it) on the black stallion, galloping about the plantation, and Father said how for that moment Wash's heart would be quiet and proud both and that maybe it would seem to him that this world where niggers, that the Bible said had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better found and housed and even clothed than he and his granddaughter — that this world where he walked always in mocking and jeering echoes of nigger laughter, was just a dream and an illusion and that the actual world was the one where his own lonely apotheosis (Father said) galloped on the black thoroughbred, thinking maybe, Father said, how the Book said that all men were created in the image of God and so all men were the same in God's eyes anyway, looked the same to God at least, and so he would look at Sutpen and think A fine proud man. If God Himself was to come down and rid the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like. Maybe he even delivered the first string of beads himself, and Father said maybe each of the ribbons afterward during the next three years while the girl matured fast like girls of that kind do; or anyway he would know and recognize each and every ribbon when he saw it on her even when she lied to him about where and how she got it, which she probably did not, since she would be bound to know that he had been seeing the ribbons in the showcase every day for three years and would have known them as well as he knew his own shoes.
