Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  We went inside. It was a long hall, a corridor, a line of folks two and two that they would a been the last one in it except it was a line that never had no last: jest a next to the last and not that long: on to a door that said REGISTRAR and inside. That wasn’t long neither; the two taxicabs was still waiting. “So this is Grinnich Village,” I says. The door give right off the street but with a little shirttail of ground behind it you could a called a yard though maybe city folks called it a garden; it even had one tree in it, with three things on it that undoubtedly back in the spring or summer was leaves. But inside it was nice: full of folks of course, with two waiters dodging in and out with trays of glasses of champagne and three or four of the company helping too, not to mention the folks that was taking over the apartment while Linda and her new husband was off at the war in Spain—a young couple about the same age as them. “Is he a sculptor too?” I says to Lawyer.

  “No,” Lawyer says. “He’s a newspaperman.”

  “Oh,” I says. “Thenkely they been married all the time.”

  It was nice: a room with plenty of window lights. It had a heap of stuff in it too but it looked like it was used—a wall full of books and a piano and I knowed they was pictures because they was hanging on the wall and I knowed that some of the other things was sculpture but the rest of them I didn’t know what they was, made outen pieces of wood or iron or strips of tin and wires. Except that I couldn’t ask then because of the rest of the poets and painters and sculptors and musicians, since he would still have to be the host until we—him and Linda and Lawyer and Hoake and me—could slip out and go down to where the ship was; evidently a heap of folks found dreams in Grinnich Village but evidently it was a occasion when somebody married in it. And one of them wasn’t even a poet or painter or sculptor or musician or even jest a ordinary moral newspaperman but evidently a haberdasher taking Saturday evening off. Because we was barely in the room before he was not only looking at it too but rubbing it between his thumb and finger. “Allanovna,” he says.

  “That’s right,” I says.

  “Oklahoma?” he says. “Oil?”

  “Sir?” I says.

  “Oh,” he says. “Texas. Cattle then. In Texas you can choose your million between oil and cattle, right?”

  “No sir,” I says, “Missippi. I sell sewing machines.”

  So it was a while before Kohl finally come to me to fill my glass again.

  “I understand you grew up with Linda’s mother,” he says.

  “That’s right,” I says. “Did you make these?”

  “These what?” he says.

  “In this room,” I says.

  “Oh,” he says. “Do you want to see more of them? Why?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I says. “Does that matter?” So we shoved on through the folks—it had begun to take shoving by now—into a hall and then up some stairs. And this was the best of all: a loft with one whole side of the roof jest window lights—a room not jest where folks used but where somebody come off by his-self and worked. And him jest standing a little behind me, outen the way, giving me time and room both to look. Until at last he says,

  “Shocked? Mad?” Until I says,

  “Do I have to be shocked and mad at something jest because I never seen it before?”

  “At your age, yes,” he says. “Only children can stand surprise for the pleasure of surprise. Grown people cant bear surprise unless they are promised in advance they will want to own it.”

  “Maybe I aint had enough time yet,” I says.

  “Take it then,” he says. So he leaned against the wall with his arms folded like a football player, with the noise of the party where he was still supposed to be host at coming up the stairs from below, while I taken my time to look: at some I did recognise and some I almost could recognise and maybe if I had time enough I would, and some I knowed I wouldn’t never quite recognise, until all of a sudden I knowed that wouldn’t matter neither, not jest to him but to me too. Because anybody can see and hear and smell and feel and taste what he expected to hear and see and feel and smell and taste, and wont nothing much notice your presence nor miss your lack. So maybe when you can see and feel and smell and hear and taste what you never expected to and hadn’t never even imagined until that moment, maybe that’s why Old Moster picked you out to be the one of the ones to be alive.

  So now it was time for that-ere date. I mean the one that Lawyer and Hoake had fixed up, with Hoake saying, “But what can I tell her—her husband—her friends?” and Lawyer says,

  “Why do you need to tell anybody anything? I’ve attended to all that. As soon as enough of them have drunk her health, just take her by the arm and clear out. Just dont forget to be aboard the ship by eleven-thirty.” Except Hoake still tried, the two of them standing in the door ready to leave, Hoake in that-ere dark expensive city suit and his derby hat in his hand, and Linda in a kind of a party dress inside her coat. And it wasn’t that they looked alike, because they didn’t. She was tall for a woman, so tall she didn’t have much shape (I mean, the kind that folks whistle at), and he wasn’t tall for a man and in fact kind of stocky. But their eyes was exactly alike. Anyhow, it seemed to me that anybody that seen them couldn’t help but know they was kin. So he still had to try it: “A old friend of her mother’s family. Her grandfather and my father may have been distantly related—” and Lawyer saying,

  “All right, all right, beat it. Don’t forget the time,” and Hoake saying,

  “Yes yes, we’ll be at Twenty-One for dinner and afterward at the Stork Club if you need to telephone.” Then they was gone and the rest of the company went too except three other men that I found out was newspapermen too, foreign correspondents; and Kohl his-self helped his new tenant’s wife cook the spaghetti and we et it and drunk some more wine, red this time, and they talked about the war, about Spain and Ethiopia and how this was the beginning: the lights was going off all over Europe soon and maybe in this country too; until it was time to go to the ship. And more champagne in the bed room there, except that Lawyer hadn’t hardly got the first bottle open when Linda and Hoake come in.

  “Already?” Lawyer says. “We didn’t expect you for at least a hour yet.”

  “She—we decided to skip the Stork Club,” Hoake says. “We took a fiacre through the Park instead. And now,” he says, that hadn’t even put the derby hat down.

  “Stay and have some champagne,” Lawyer says, and Kohl said something too. But Linda had done already held out her hand.

  “Good-bye, Mr McCarron,” she says. “Thank you for the ning and for coming to my wedding.”

  “Cant you say ‘Hoake’ yet?” he says.

  “Good-bye, Hoake,” she says.

  “Wait in the cab then,” Lawyer says. “We’ll join you in a minute.”

  “No,” Hoake says. “I’ll take another cab and leave that one for you.” Then he was gone. She shut the door behind him and came toward Lawyer, taking something outen her pocket.

  “Here,” she says. It was a gold cigarette lighter. “I know you wont ever use it, since you say you think you can taste the fluid when you light your pipe.”

  “No,” Lawyer says. “What I said was, I know I can taste it.”

  “All right,” she says. “Take it anyway.” So Lawyer taken it. “It’s engraved with your initials: see?”

  “G L S,” Lawyer says. “They are not my initials. I just have two: GS.”

  “I know. But the man said a monogram should have three so I loaned you one of mine.” Then she stood there facing him, as tall as him almost, looking at him. “That was my father,” she says.

  “No,” Lawyer says.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “You dont mean to tell me he told you that,” Lawyer says.

  “You know he didn’t. You made him swear not to.”

  “No,” Lawyer says.

  “You swear then.”

  “All right,” Lawyer says. “I swear.”

  “I love you,” she says. “D
o you know why?”

  “Tell me,” Lawyer says.

  “It’s because every time you lie to me I can always know you will stick to it.”

  Then the second sentimental pilgrimage. No, something else come first. It was the next afternoon. “Now we’ll go pick up the necktie,” Lawyer says.

  “No,” I says.

  “You mean you want to go alone?”

  “That’s right,” I says. So I was alone, the same little office again and her still in the same dress that wouldn’t fitted nobody already looking at my empty collar even before I put the necktie and the hundred and fifty dollars on the desk by the new one that I hadn’t even teched yet because I was afraid to. It was red jest a little under what you see in a black-gum leaf in the fall, with not no singe sunflower nor even a bunch of them but little yellow sunflowers all over it in a kind of diamond pattern, each one with a little blue center almost the exact blue my shirts gets to after a while. I didn’t dare touch it. “I’m sorry,” I says. “But you see I jest cant. I sells sewing machines in Missippi. I cant have it knowed back there that I paid seventy-five dollars apiece for neckties. But if I’m in the Missippi sewing-machine business and cant wear seventy-five dollar neckties, so are you in the New York necktie business and cant afford to have folks wear or order neckties and not pay for them. So here,” I says. “And I ask your kindness to excuse me.”

  But she never even looked at the money. “Why did he call you Vladimir Kyrilytch?” she says. I told her.

  “Except we live in Missippi now, and we got to live it down. Here,” I says. “And I ask you again to ex—”

  “Take that off my desk,” she says. “I have given the ties to you. You cannot pay for them.”

  “Dont you see I cant do that neither?” I says. “No more than I could let anybody back in Missippi order a sewing machine from me and then say he had done changed his mind when I delivered it to him?”

  “So,” she says. “You cannot accept the ties, and I cannot accept the money. Good. We do this—” There was a thing on the desk that looked like a cream pitcher until she snapped it open and it was a cigarette lighter. “We burn it then, half for you, half for me—” until I says,

  “Wait! Wait!” and she stopped. “No,” I says, “no. Not burn money,” and she says,

  “Why not?” and us looking at each other, her hand holding the lit lighter and both our hands on the money.

  “Because it’s money,” I says. “Somebody somewhere at some time went to—went through—I mean, money stands for too much hurt and grief somewhere to somebody that jest the money wasn’t never worth—I mean, that aint what I mean …” and she says,

  “I know exactly what you mean. Only the gauche, the illiterate, the frightened and the pastless destroy money. You will keep it then. You will take it back to—how you say?”

  “Missippi,” I says.

  “Missippi. Where is one who, not needs: who cares about so base as needs? Who wants something that costs one hundred fifty dollar—a hat, a picture, a book, a jewel for the ear; something never never never anyhow just to eat—but believes he—she—will never have it, has even long ago given up, not the dream but the hope—This time do you know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean because you jest said it,” I says.

  “Then kiss me,” she says. And that night me and Lawyer went up to Saratoga.

  “Did you tell Hoake better than to try to give her a lot of money, or did he jest have that better sense his-self?” I says.

  “Yes,” Lawyer says.

  “Yes which?” I says.

  “Maybe both,” Lawyer says. And in the afternoon we watched the horses, and the next morning we went out to Bemis’s Heights and Freeman’s Farm. Except that naturally there wasn’t no monument to one mercenary Hessian soldier that maybe couldn’t even speak German, let alone American, and naturally there wasn’t no hill or ditch or stump or rock that spoke up and said aloud: On this spot your first ancestral V.K. progenitor forswore Europe forever and entered the United States. And two days later we was back home, covering in two days the distance it taken that first V.K. four gener ations to do; and now we watched the lights go out in Spain and Ethiopia, the darkness that was going to creep eastward across all Europe and Asia too, until the shadow of it would fall across the Pacific islands until it reached even America. But that was a little while away yet when Lawyer says,

  “Come up to the office,” and then he says, “Barton Kohl is dead. The airplane—it was a worn-out civilian passenger carrier, armed with 1918 infantry machine guns, with homemade bomb bays through which the amateur crew dumped by hand the homemade bombs; that’s what they fought Hitler’s Luftwaffe with—was shot down in flames so she probably couldn’t have identified him even if she could have reached the crash. She doesn’t say what she intends to do now.”

  “She’ll come back here,” I says.

  “Here?” he says. “Back here?” then he says, “Why the hell shouldn’t she? It’s home.”

  “That’s right,” I says. “It’s doom.”

  “What?” he says. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” I says. “I jest said I think so too.”

  EIGHT

  CHARLES MALLISON

  Linda Kohl (Snopes that was, as Thackeray would say. Kohl that was too, since he was dead) wasn’t the first wounded war hero to finally straggle back to Jefferson. She was just the first one my uncle bothered to meet at the station. I dont mean the railroad station; by 1937 it had been a year or so since a train had passed through Jefferson that a paid passenger could have got off of. And not even the bus depot because I dont even mean Jefferson. It was the Memphis airport we went to meet her, my uncle apparently discovering at the last minute that morning that he was not able to make an eighty-mile trip and back alone in his car.

  She was not even the first female hero. For two weeks back in 1919 we had had a nurse, an authentic female lieutenant—not a denizen, citizen of Jefferson to be sure but at least kin to (or maybe just interested in a member of) a Jefferson family, who had been on the staff of a base hospital in France and—so she said—had actually spent two days at a casualty clearing station within sound of the guns behind Montdidier.

  In fact, by 1919 even the five-year-old Jeffersonians like I was then were even a little blasé about war heroes, not only unscratched ones but wounded too getting off trains from Memphis Junction or New Orleans. Not that I mean that even the unscratched ones actually called themselves heroes or thought they were or in fact thought one way or the other about it until they got home and found the epithet being dinned at them from all directions until finally some of them, a few of them, began to believe that perhaps they were. I mean, dinned at them by the ones who organised and correlated the dinning—the ones who hadn’t gone to that war and so were already on hand in advance to organise the big debarkation-port parades and the smaller county-seat local ones, with inbuilt barbecue and beer; the ones that hadn’t gone to that one and didn’t intend to go to the next one nor the one after that either, as long as all they had to do to stay out was buy the tax-free bonds and organise the hero-dinning parades so that the next crop of eight- and nine- and ten-year-old males could see the divisional shoulder patches and the wound- and service-stripes and the medal ribbons.

  Until some of them anyway would begin to believe that that many voices dinning it at them must be right, and they were heroes. Because, according to Uncle Gavin, who had been a soldier too in his fashion (in the American Field Service with the French army in ’16 and ’17 until we got into it, then still in France as a Y.M.C.A. secretary or whatever they were called), they had nothing else left: young men or even boys most of whom had only the vaguest or completely erroneous idea of where and what Europe was, and none at all about armies, let alone about war, snatched up by lot overnight and regimented into an expeditionary force, to survive (if they could) before they were twenty-five years old what they would not even recognise at the time to be the bi
ggest experience of their lives. Then to be spewed, again willy-nilly and again overnight, back into what they believed would be the familiar world they had been told they were enduring disruption and risking injury and death so that it would still be there when they came back, only to find that it wasn’t there any more. So that the bands and the parades and the barbecues and all the rest of the hero-dinning not only would happen only that once and was already fading even before they could get adjusted to it, it was already on the way out before the belated last of them even got back home, already saying to them above the cold congealing meat and the flat beer while the last impatient brazen chord died away: “All right, little boys; eat your beef and potato salad and drink your beer and get out of our way, who are already up to our necks in this new world whose single and principal industry is not just solvent but dizzily remunerative peace.”

  So, according to Gavin, they had to believe they were heroes even though they couldn’t remember now exactly at what point or by what action they had reached, entered for a moment or a second, that heroic state. Because otherwise they had nothing left: with only a third of life over, to know now that they had already experienced their greatest experience, and now to find that the world for which they had so endured and risked was in their absence so altered out of recognition by the ones who had stayed safe at home as to have no place for them in it any more. So they had to believe that at least some little of it had been true. Which (according to Gavin) was the why of the veterans’ clubs and legions: the one sanctuary where at least once a week they could find refuge among the other betrayed and dispossessed reaffirming to each other that at least that one infinitesimal scrap had been so.

  In fact (in Jefferson anyway) even the ones that came back with an arm or a leg gone, came back just like what they were when they left: merely underlined, italicised. There was Tug Nightingale. His father was the cobbler, with a little cubbyhole of a shop around a corner off the Square—a little scrawny man who wouldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds with his last and bench and all his tools in his lap, with a fierce moustache which hid most of his chin too, and fierce undefeated intolerant eyes—a Hard-Shell Baptist who didn’t merely have to believe it, because he knew it was so: that the earth was flat and that Lee had betrayed the whole South when he surrendered at Appomattox. He was a widower. Tug was his only surviving child. Tug had got almost as far as the fourth grade when the principal himself told Mr Nightingale it would be better for Tug to quit. Which Tug did, and now he could spend all his time hanging around the auction lot behind Dilazuck’s livery stable, where he had been spending all his spare time anyhow, and where he now came into his own: falling in first with Lonzo Hait, our local horse and mule trader, then with Pat Stamper himself, who in the horse and mule circles not just in Yoknapatawpha County or north Mississippi but over most of Alabama and Tennessee and Arkansas too, was to Lonzo Hait what Fritz Kreisler would be to the fiddle player at a country picnic, and so recognised genius when he saw it. Because Tug didn’t have any piddling mere affinity for and rapport with mules: he was an homme fatal to them, any mule, horse or mare either, being putty in his hands; he could do anything with them except buy and sell them for a profit. Which is why he never rose higher than a simple hostler and handy man and so finally had to become a house painter also to make a living: not a first-rate one, but at least he could stir the paint and put it on a wall or fence after somebody had shown him where to stop.