Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “That would be delightful,” she agreed readily. “I was so anxious to have my niece see a real studio, Mr. Gordon, where a real artist works. Darling—” she glanced over her shoulder fatly, still holding his hand “ — darling, let me present you to a real sculptor, one from whom we expect great things.... Darling,” she repeated in a louder tone.

  The niece, untroubled by the stairs, had drifted in after them and she now stood before the single marble. “Come and speak to Mr. Gordon, darling.” Beneath her aunt’s saccharine modulation was a faint trace of something not so sweet after all. The niece turned her head and nodded slightly without looking at him. Gordon released his hand.

  “Mr. Talliaferro tells me you have a commission.” Mrs. Maurier’s voice was again a happy astonished honey. “May we see it? I know artists don’t like to exhibit an incomplete work, but just among friends, you see.... You both know how sensitive to beauty I am, though I have been denied the creative impulse myself.”

  “Yes,” agreed Gordon, watching the niece.

  “I have long intended visiting your studio, as I promised, you remember. So I shall take this opportunity of looking about — Do you mind?”

  “Help yourself. Talliaferro can show you things. Pardon me.” He lurched characteristically between them and Mrs. Maurier chanted:

  “Yes, indeed. Mr. Talliaferro, like myself, is sensitive to the beautiful in Art. Ah, Mr. Talliaferro, why were you and I given a love for the beautiful, yet denied the ability to create it from stone and wood and clay...

  Her body in its brief simple dress was motionless when he came over to her. After a time he said:

  “Like it?”

  Her jaw in profile was heavy: there was something masculine about it. But in full face it was not heavy, only quiet. Her mouth was full and colorless, unpainted, and her eyes were opaque as smoke. She met his gaze, remarking the icy blueness of his eyes (like a surgeon’s she thought) and looked at the marble again.

  “I don’t know,” she answered slowly. Then: “It’s like me,”

  “How like you?” he asked gravely.

  She didn’t answer. Then she said: “Can I touch it?”

  “If you like,” he replied, examining the line of her jaw, her firm brief nose. She made no move and he added: “Aren’t you going to touch it?”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she told him calmly. Gordon glanced over his shoulder to where Mrs, Maurier pored volubly over something, Mr. Talliaferro yea’d her with restrained passion.

  “Why is it like you?” he repeated.

  She said irrelevantly: “Why hasn’t she anything here?” Her brown hand flashed slimly across the high unemphasis of the marble’s breast, and withdrew.

  “You haven’t much there yourself.” She met his steady gaze steadily. “Why should it have anything there?” he asked.

  “You’re right,” she agreed with the judicial complaisance of an equal. “I see now. Of course she shouldn’t. I didn’t quite — quite get it for a moment.”

  Gordon examined with growing interest her flat breast and belly, her boy’s body which the poise of it and the thinness of her arms belied. Sexless, yet somehow vaguely troubling. Perhaps just young, like a calf or a colt. “How old are you?” he asked abruptly.

  “Eighteen, if it’s any of your business,” she replied without rancor, staring at the marble, Suddenly she looked up at him again. “I wish I could have it,” she said with sudden sincerity and longing, quite like a four-year-old.

  “Thanks,” he said. “That was quite sincere, too, wasn’t it? Of course you can’t have it, though. You see that, don’t you?”

  She was silent. He knew she could see no reason why she shouldn’t have it.

  “I guess so,” she agreed at last. “I just thought I’d see, though.”

  “Not to overlook any bets?”

  “Oh, well, by to-morrow I probably won’t want it, anyway.... And if I still do, I can get something just as good.”

  “You mean,” he amended, “that if you still want it to-morrow, you can get it. Don’t you?”

  Her hand, as if it were a separate organism, reached out slowly, stroking the marble. “Why are you so black?” she asked.

  “Black?”

  “Not your hair and beard. I like your red hair and beard. But you. You are black. I mean.. her voice fell and he suggested Soul? “I don’t know what that is,” she stated quietly.

  “Neither do I. You might ask your aunt, though. She seems familiar with souls.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, showing him her other unequal profile. “Ask her yourself. Here she comes.”

  Mrs. Maurier surged her scented upholstered bulk between them. “Wonderful, wonderful,” she was exclaiming in sincere astonishment. “And this...” her voice died away and she gazed at the marble, dazed. Mr. Talliaferro echoed her immaculately, taking to himself the showman’s credit.

  “Do you see what he has caught?” he bugled melodiously, “Do you see? The spirit of youth, of something fine and hard and clean in the world; something we ail desire until our mouths are stopped with dust.” Desire with Mr. Talliaferro had long since become an unfulfilled habit requiring no longer any particular object at all.

  “Yes,” agreed Mrs. Maurier. “How beautiful. What — what does it signify, Mr. Gordon?”

  “Nothing, Aunt Pat,” the niece snapped. “It doesn’t have to.”

  “But, really—”

  “What do you want it to signify? Suppose it signified a — a dog, or an ice cream soda, what difference would it make? Isn’t it all right like it is?”

  “Yes, indeed, Mrs. Maurier,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed with soothing haste, “it is not necessary that it have objective significance. We must accept it for what it is: pure form untrammeled by any relation to a familiar or utilitarian object.”

  “Oh, yes: untrammeled.” Here was a word Mrs. Maurier knew. “The untrammeled spirit, freedom like the eagle’s.”

  “Shut up, Aunty,” the niece told her. “Don’t be a fool.”

  “But it has what Talliaferro calls objective significance,” Gordon interrupted brutally. “This is my feminine ideal: a virgin with no legs to leave me, no arms to hold me, no head to talk to me.”

  “Mister Gordon!” Mrs. Maurier stared at him over her compressed breast. Then she thought of something that did possess objective significance. “I had almost forgotten our reason for calling so late. Not,” she added quickly, “that we needed any other reason to — to — Mr. Talliaferro, how was it those old people used to put it, about pausing on Life’s busy highroad to kneel for a moment at the Master’s feet?

  . Mrs. Maurier’s voice faded and her face assumed an expression of mild concern. “Or is it the Bible of which I am thinking? Well, no matter: we dropped in to invite you for a yachting party, a few days on the lake—”

  “Yes. Talliaferro told me about it. Sorry, but I shall be unable to come.”

  Mrs. Maurier’s eyes became quite round. She turned to Mr. Talliaferro. “Mister Talliaferro! You told me you hadn’t mentioned it to him!”

  Mr. Talliaferro writhed acutely. “Do forgive me, if I left you under that impression. It was quite unintentional. I only desired that you speak to him yourself and make him reconsider. The party will not be complete without him, will it?”

  “Not at all. Really, Mr. Gordon, won’t you reconsider? Surely you won’t disappoint us.” She stooped creaking, and slapped at her ankle. “Pardon me.”

  “No. Sorry. I have work to do.”

  Mrs. Maurier transferred her expression of astonishment and dejection to Mr. Talliaferro. “It can’t be that he doesn’t want to come. There must be some other reason. Do say something to him, Mr. Talliaferro. We simply must have him. Mr. Fairchild is going, and Eva and Dorothy: we simply must have a sculptor. Do convince him, Mr. Talliaferro.”

  “I’m sure his decision is not final: I am sure he will not deprive us of his company. A few days on the water will do him no end of good; freshen him up like
a tonic. Eh, Gordon?”

  Gordon’s hawk’s face brooded above them, remote and insufferable with arrogance. The niece had turned away, drifting slowly about the room, grave and quiet and curious, straight as a poplar. Mrs. Maurier implored him with her eyes doglike, temporarily silent. Suddenly she had an inspiration.

  “Come, people, let’s all go to my house for dinner. Then we can discuss it at our ease.”

  Mr. Talliaferro demurred. “I am engaged this evening, you know,” he reminded her.

  “Oh, Mr. Talliaferro.” She put her hand on his sleeve. “Don’t you fail me, too. I always depend on you when people fail me. Can’t you defer your engagement?”

  “Really, I am afraid not. Not in this case,” Mr. Talliaferro replied smugly. “Though I am distressed..

  Mrs. Maurier sighed. “These women! Mr. Talliaferro is perfectly terrible with women,” she informed Gordon. “But you will come, won’t you?”

  The niece had drifted up to them and stood rubbing the calf of one leg against the other shin. Gordon turned to her. “Will you be there?”

  Damn their little souls, she whispered on a sucked breath. She yawned. “Oh, yes. I eat. But I’m going to bed darn soon.” She yawned again, patting the broad pale oval of her mouth with brown fingers “Patricia!” her aunt exclaimed in shocked amazement. “Of course you will do nothing of the kind. The very idea! Come, Mr. Gordon.”

  “No, thanks. I am engaged myself,” he answered stiffly. “Some other time, perhaps.”

  “I simply won’t take No for an answer. Do help me, Mr. Talliaferro. He simply must come.”

  “Do you want him to come as he is?” the niece asked.

  Her aunt glanced briefly at the undershirt, and shuddered. But she said bravely: “Of course, if he wishes. What are clothes, compared with this?” she described an arc with her hand; diamonds glittered on its orbit. “So you cannot evade it, Mr. Gordon. You must come.”

  Her hand poised above his arm, pouncing. He eluded it brusquely. “Excuse me.” Mr. Talliaferro avoided his sudden movement just in time, and the niece said wickedly:

  “There’s a shirt behind the door, if that’s what you are looking for. You won’t need a tie, with that beard.”

  He picked her up by the elbows, as you would a high narrow table, and set her aside. Then his tail controlled body filled and emptied the door and disappeared in the darkness of the hallway. The niece gazed after him. Mrs. Maurier stared at the door, then to Mr. Talliaferro in quiet amazement. “What in the world—” Her hands clashed vainly among her various festooned belongings. “Where is he going?” she said at last.

  The niece said suddenly: “I like him.” She too gazed at the door through which, passing, he seemed to have emptied the room. “I bet he doesn’t come back,” she remarked.

  Her aunt shrieked. “Doesn’t come back?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t, if I were him.” She returned to the marble, stroking it with slow desire. Mrs. Maurier gazed helplessly at Mr. Talliaferro.

  “Where—” she began.

  “I’ll go see,” he offered, breaking his own trance. The two women regarded his vanishing neat back.

  “Never in my life — Patricia, what did you mean by being so rude to him? Of course he is offended. Don’t you know how sensitive artists are? After I have worked so hard to cultivate him, too!”

  “Nonsense. It’ll do him good. He thinks just a little too well of himself as it is.”

  “But to insult the man in his own house. I can’t understand you young people at all. Why, if I’d said a thing like that to a gentleman, and a stranger... I can’t imagine what your father can mean, letting you grow up like this. He certainly knows better than this—”

  “I’m not to blame for the way he acted. You are the one, yourself. Suppose you’d been sitting in your room in your shimmy, and a couple of men you hardly knew had walked in on you and tried to persuade you to go somewhere you didn’t want to go, what would you have done?”

  “These people are different,” her aunt told her coldly. “You don’t understand them. Artists don’t require privacy as we do: it means nothing whatever to them. But any one, artist or no, would object—”

  “Oh, haul in your sheet,” the niece interrupted coarsely. “You’re jibbing.”

  Mr. Talliaferro reappeared panting with delicate repression, “Gordon was called hurriedly away. He asked me to make his excuses and to express his disappointment over having to leave so unceremoniously.”

  “Then he’s not coming to dinner.” Mrs. Maurier sighed, feeling her age, the imminence of dark and death. She seemed not only unable to get new men any more, but to hold to the old ones, even... Mr. Talliaferro, too,.. age, age.... She sighed again. “Come, darling,” she said in a strangely chastened tone, quieter, pitiable in a way. The niece put both her firm tanned hands on the marble, hand, hard, O beautiful, she whispered in salutation and farewell, turning quickly away.

  “Let’s go,” she said, “I’m starving.”

  Mr. Talliaferro had lost his box of matches: he was desolated. So they were forced to feel their way down the stairs, disturbing years and years of dust upon the rail. The stone corridor was cool and dank and filled with a suppressed minor humming. They hurried on.

  Night was fully come and the car squatted at the curb in patient silhouette; the negro driver sat within with all the windows closed. Within its friendly familiarity Mrs. Maurier’s spirits rose again. She gave Mr. Talliaferro her hand, sugaring her voice again with a decayed coquetry.

  “You will call me, then? But don’t promise: I know how completely your time is taken up—” she leaned forward, tapping him on the cheek— “Don Juan!”

  He laughed deprecatingly, with pleasure. The niece from her corner said:

  “Good evening, Mr. Tarver.”

  Mr. Talliaferro stood slightly inclined from the hips, frozen. He closed his eyes like a dog awaiting the fall of the stick, while time passed and passed... he opened his eyes again, after how long he knew not. But Mrs. Maurier’s fingers were but leaving his cheek and the niece was invisible in her corner: a bodiless evil. Then he straightened up, feeling his cold entrails resume their proper place.

  The car drew away and he watched it, thinking of the girl’s youngness, her hard clean youngness, with fear and a troubling unhappy desire like an old sorrow. Were children really like dogs? Could they penetrate one’s concealment, know one instinctively?

  Mrs. Maurier settled back comfortably. “Mr. Talliaferro is perfectly terrible with women,” she informed her niece.

  “I bet he is,” the niece agreed, “perfectly terrible.”

  4

  Mr. Talliaferro had been married while quite young by a rather plainfaced girl whom he was trying to seduce. But now, at thirty-eight, he was a widower these eight years. He had been the final result of some rather casual biological research conducted by two people who, like the great majority, had no business producing children at all. The family originated in northern Alabama and drifted slowly westward ever after, thus proving that a certain racial impulse in the race, which one Horace Greeley summed up in a slogan so excruciatingly apt that he didn’t have to observe it himself, has not yet died away. His brothers were various and they attained their several milieus principally by chance; milieus ranging from an untimely heaven via some one else’s horse and a rope and a Texas cottonwood, through a classical chair in a small Kansas college, to a state legislature via some one else’s votes. This one got as far as California. They never did know what became of Mr. Talliaferro’s sister, Mr. Talliaferro had got what is known as a careful raising: he had been forced while quite young and pliable to do all the things to which his natural impulses objected, and to forgo all the things he could possibly have had any fun doing. After a while nature gave up and this became a habit with him. Nature surrendered him without a qualm: even disease germs seemed to ignore him.

  His marriage had driven him into work as drouth drives the fish down stream into the larger waters
, and things had gone hard with them during the years during which he had shifted from position to position, correspondence course to correspondence course, until he had an incorrect and impractical smattering of information regarding every possible genteel method of gaining money, before finally and inevitably gravitating into the women’s clothing section of a large department store.

  Here he felt that he had at last come into his own (he always got along much better with women than with men) and his restored faith in himself enabled him to rise with comfortable ease to the coveted position of wholesale buyer. He knew women’s clothes and, interested in women, it was his belief that knowledge of the frail intimate things they preferred gave him an insight which no other man had into the psychology of women. But he merely speculated on this, for he remained faithful to his wife, although she was bedridden; an invalid.

  And then, when success was in his grasp and life had become smooth at last for them, his wife died. He had become habituated to marriage, sincerely attached to her, and readjustment came slowly. Yet in time he became accustomed to the novelty of mature liberty. He had been married so young that freedom was an unexplored field to him. He took pleasure in his snug bachelor quarters in the proper neighborhood, in his solitary routine of days: of walking home in the dusk for the sake of his figure, examining the soft bodies of girls on the street, knowing that if he cared to take one of them, that there was none save the girls themselves to say him nay; to his dinners alone or in company with an available literary friend.

  Mr. Talliaferro did Europe in forty-one days, gained thereby a worldly air and a smattering of esthetics and a precious accent, and returned to New Orleans feeling that he was Complete. His only alarm was his thinning hair, his only worry was the fact that some one would discover that he had been born Tarver, not Talliaferro.