2024年5月4日发(作者：)

GB6017.1-20起重机械安全规程-第1部分

A Rose for Emily

by William Faulkner

I

WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort

of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside

of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen

in at least ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and

spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once

been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even

the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and

coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores.

And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in

the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and

Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon

the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the

edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes,

the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily

would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss

Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred

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GB6017.1-20起重机械安全规程-第1部分

this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented

it, and only a woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this

arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax

notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at

the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or

to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing

calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also

enclosed, without comment.

They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her,

knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting

lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which

a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The

Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the

Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when

they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the

single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss

Emily's father.

They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending

to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her

skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in

another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water,

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