514
PARTISAN REVIEW
usurping the earth before the blasts of blank shotgun shells and the
weightless collapsing of bunting had unveiled the final ones
to
the old;
Not only a new century and a new way of thinking, but of acting
and behaving too: now you could go to bed in a train in Jefferson
and wake up tomorrow morning in New Orleans or Chicago; there
were electric lights and running water in almost every house in town
except the cabins of Negroes; and now the town bought and brought
from a great distance a kind of gray crushed ballast-stone called
macadam, and paved the entire street between the depot and the
hotel, so that no more would the train-meeting hacks filled with
drununers and lawyers and court-witnesses need to lurch and heave
and strain through the winter mud-holes; every morning a wagon
came to your very door with artificial ice and put it in your icebox
on the back gallery for you, the children in rotational neighborhood
gangs following it (the wagon), eating the fragments of ice which
the Negro driver chipped off for them; and that summer a specially–
built sprinkling-cart began to make the round of the streets each
day; a new time, a new age: there were screens in windows now;
people (white people) could actually sleep in summer night air,
finding it harmless, uninimical: as though there had waked suddenly
in man (or anyway in his womenfolks) a belief in his inalienable
civil right to be free of dust and bugs;
Moving faster and faster: from the speed of two horses on either
side of a polished tongue, to that of thirty then fifty then a hundred
under a tin bonnet no bigger than a wash-tub: which from almost
the first explosion, would have to be controlled by police; already
in a back yard on the edge of town, an ex-blacksmith's-apprentice,
a grease-covered man with the eyes of a visionary monk, was build–
ing a gasoline buggy, casting and boring his own cylinders and rods
and cams, inventing his own coils and plugs and valves as he found
he needed them, which would run, and did: crept popping and
stinking out of the alley at the exact moment when the banker
Bayard Sartoris, the Colonel's son, passed in his carriage: as a result
of which, there is on the books of Jefferson today a law prohibiting
the operation of any mechanically-propelled vehicle on the streets of
the corporate town: who (the same banker Sartoris) died in one
