THE JAIL
513
No more into the United States, but into the
rest
of the United
States, because the long pull was over now; only the aging unvan–
quished women were unreconciled (irreconcilable, reversed and irre–
vocably reverted against the whole moving unanimity of panorama
until, old unordered vacant pilings above a tide's flood, they them–
selves had an illusion of motion, facing irreconcilably backward to–
ward the old lost
b~ttles,
the old aborted cause, the old four ruined
years whose very physical scars ten and twenty and twenty-five
changes of season had annealed back into the earth; twenty-five and
then thirty-five years; not only a century and an age, but a way of
thinking died; the town itself wrote the epilogue and epitaph:
1900, on Confederate Decoration Day, Mrs. Virginia Depre, Colo–
nel Sartoris's sister, twitched a lanyard and the spring-restive bunting
collapsed and flowed, leaving the marble effigy- the stone infantry–
man on his stone pedestal on the exact spot where forty years ago
the Richmond officer and the local Baptist minister had mustered in
the Colonel's regiment, and the old men in the gray and braided
coats
(all
officers now, none leSs in rank than captain ) tottered into
the sunlight and fired shotguns at the bland sky and raised their
cracked quavering voices in the shrill hackle-lifting yelling which Lee
and Jackson and Longstreet and the two
J
ohnstons (and Grant and
Sherman and Hooker and Pope and McClellan and Burnside too
for the matter of that) had listened to amid the smoke and the din;
epilogue and epitaph, because apparently neither the U.D.C. ladies
who instigated and bought the monument, nor the architect who
designed it nor the masons who erected it, had noticed that the
marble eyes under the shading marble palm stared not toward the
north and the enemy, but toward the south, toward (if anything)
his
own rear-looking perhaps, the wits said (could say now, with
the old war thirty-five years past and you could even joke about it–
except the women, the ladies, the unsurrendered, the irreconcilable,
who even after another thirty-five years would still get up and stalk
out of picture houses showing
Gone With the Wind),
for reinforce–
ments; or perhaps not a combat soldier at
all,
but a provost marshal's
man looking for deserters, or perhaps himself for a safe place to
run to: because that old war was dead; the sons of those tottering
old men in gray had already died in blue coats
in
Cuba, the maca–
bre mementos and testimonials and shrines of the new war already
