508
PARTISAN REVIEW
credible dreamy distance, like far summer thunder; until the spring of
'64, the once-vast fixed impalpable increaseless and threatless earth
now one omnivorous roar of rock (a roar so vast and so spewing,
flinging ahead of itself, like the spray above the maelstrom, the pre–
liminary anesthetic of shock so that the agony of bone and flesh will
not even be felt, as to contain and sweep along with it the begin–
ning, the first ephemeral phase, of this story, permitting it to boil
for an instant to the surface like a chip or a twig-a match-stick or
a bubble, say, too weightless to give resistance for destruction to func–
tion against: in this case, a bubble, a minute globule which was its
own impunity, since what it-the bubble-contained, having no
part in rationality and being contemptuous of fact, was immune even
to the rationality of rock) -a sudden battle centering around Colonel
Sartoris's plantation house four miles to the north, the line of a
creek held long enough for the main Confederate body to pass
through Jefferson to a stronger line on the river heights south of
the town, a rear-guard action of cavalry in the streets of the
town itself (and this was the story, the beginning of it; all of it
too, the town might have been justified in thinking, presuming they
had had time to see, notice, remark and then remember, even that
little) -the rattle and burst of pistols, the hooves, the dust, the rush
and scurry of a handful of horsemen led by a lieutenant, up the street
past the jail,and the two of them-the frail and useless girl musing
in the blonde mist of her hair beside the window-pane where three
or four (or whatever it was) years ago she had inscribed with her
grandmother's diamond ring her paradoxical and significantless
name (and where, so it seemed to the town, she had been standing
ever since), and the soldier, gaunt and tattered, battle-grimed and
fleeing and undefeated, looking at one another for that moment
across the fury and pell mell of battle;
Then gone; that night the town was occupied by Federal troops;
two nights later, it was on fire (the Square, the stores and shops
and the professional offices), gutted (the courthouse too), the black–
ened jagged topless jumbles of brick wall enclosing like a ruined
jaw the blackened shell of the courthouse between its two rows
of topless columns, which (the columns) were only blackened and
stained, being tougher than fire: but not the jail, it escaped, un-
