But long since celibacy had begun to oppress him.
5
Handling his stick smartly he turned into Broussard’s. As he had hoped, here was Dawson Fairchild, the novelist, resembling a benevolent walrus too recently out of bed to have made a toilet, dining in company with three men. Mr. Talliaferro paused diffidently in the doorway and a rosy cheeked waiter resembling a studious Harvard undergraduate in an actor’s dinner coat, assailed him courteously. At last he caught Fairchild’s eye and the other greeted him across the small room, then said something to his three companions that caused them to turn half about in their chairs to watch his approach. Mr. Talliaferro, to whom entering a restaurant alone and securing a table was an excruciating process, joined them with relief. The cherubic waiter spun a chair from an adjoining table deftly against Mr. Talliaferro’s knees as he shook Fairchild’s hand.
“You’re just in time,” Fairchild told him, propping his fist and a clutched fork on the table. “This is Mr. Hooper. You know these other folks, I think.”
Mr. Talliaferro ducked his head to a man with iron gray hair and an orotund humorless face like that of a thwarted Sunday school superintendent, who insisted on shaking his hand, then his glance took in the other two members of the party — a tall, ghostly young man with a thin evaporation of fair hair and a pale prehensile mouth, and a bald Semitic man with a pasty loose jowled face and sad quizzical eyes.
“We were discussing—” began Fairchild when the stranger interrupted with a bland and utterly unselfconscious rudeness.
“What did you say the name was?” he asked, fixing Mr. Talliaferro with his eye. Mr. Talliaferro met the eye and knew immediately a faint unease. He answered the question, but the other brushed the reply aside. “I mean your given name. I didn’t catch it to-day,”
“Why, Ernest,” Mr. Talliaferro told him with alarm.
“Ah, yes: Ernest. You must pardon me, but traveling, meeting new faces each Tuesday, as I do—” he interrupted himself with the same bland unconsciousness. “What are your impressions of the get-together to-day?” Ere Mr. Talliaferro could have replied, he interrupted himself again. “You have a splendid organization here,” he informed them generally compelling them with his glance, “and a city that is worthy of it. Except for this southern laziness of yours. You folks need more northern blood, to bring out all your possibilities. Still, I won’t criticize: you boys have treated me pretty well.” He put some food into his mouth and chewed it down hurriedly, forestalling any one who might have hoped to speak.
“I was glad that my itinerary brought me here, to see the city and be with the boys to-day, and that one of your reporters gave me the chance to see something of your bohemian life by directing me to Mr. Fairchild here, who, I understand, is an author.” He met Mr. Talliaferro’s expression of courteous amazement again. “I am glad to see how you boys are carrying on the good work; I might say, the Master’s work, for it is only by taking the Lord into our daily lives—” He stared at Mr. Talliaferro once more. “What did you say the name was?”
“Ernest,” suggested Fairchild mildly.
“ — Ernest. People, the man in the street, the breadwinner, he on whom the heavy burden of life rests, does he know what we stand for, what we can give him in spite of himself — forgetfulness of the trials of day by day? He knows nothing of our ideals of service, of the benefits to ourselves, to each other, to you” — he met Fairchild’s burly quizzical gaze— “to himself. And, by the way,” he added coming to earth again, “there are a few points on this subject I am going to take up with your secretary to-morrow.” He transfixed Mr. Talliaferro again, “What were your impressions of my remarks to-day?”
“I beg pardon?”
“What did you think of my idea for getting a hundred percent church attendance by keeping them afraid they’d miss something good by staying away?”
Mr. Talliaferro turned his stricken face to the others, one by one. After a while his interrogator said in a tone of cold displeasure: “You don’t mean to say you do not recall me?”
Mr. Talliaferro cringed. “Really, sir — I am distressed—” The other interrupted heavily.
“You were not at lunch to-day?”
“No,” Mr. Talliaferro replied with effusive gratitude, “I take only a glass of buttermilk at noon. I breakfast late, you see.” The other man stared at him with chill displeasure, and Mr. Talliaferro added with inspiration: “You have mistaken me for some one else, I fear.”
The stranger regarded Mr. Talliaferro for a cold moment. The waiter placed a dish before Mr. Talliaferro and he fell upon it in a flurry of acute discomfort.
“Do you mean—” began the stranger. Then he put his fork down and turned his disapproval coldly upon Fairchild. “Didn’t I understand you to say that this — gentleman was a member of Rotary?”
Mr. Talliaferro suspended his fork and he too looked at Fairchild in shocked unbelief, “I a member of Rotary?” he repeated.
“Why, I kind of got the impression he was,” Fairchild admitted. “Hadn’t you heard that Talliaferro was a Rotarian?” he appealed to the others. They were noncommittal and he continued: “I seem to recall somebody telling me you were a Rotarian. But then, you know how rumors get around. Maybe it is because of your prominence in the business life of our city. Talliaferro is a member of one of our largest ladies’ clothing houses,” he explained. “He is just the man to help you figure out some way to get God into the mercantile business. Teach Him the meaning of service, hey, Talliaferro?”
“No: really, I—” Mr. Talliaferro objected with alarm. The stranger interrupted again.
“Well, there’s nothing better on God’s green earth than Rotary. Mr. Fairchild had given me to understand that you were a member,” he accused with a recurrence of cold suspicion. Mr. Talliaferro squirmed with unhappy negation. The other stared him down, then he took out his watch. “Well, well. I must run along. I run my day to schedule. You’d be astonished to learn how much time can be saved by cutting off a minute here and a minute there,” he informed them. “And—”
“I beg pardon?”
“What do you do with them?” Fairchild asked.
“When you’ve cut off enough minutes here and there to make up a sizable mess, what do you do with them?”
“ — Setting a time limit to everything you do makes a man get more punch into it; makes him take the hills on high, you might say.” A drop of nicotine on the end of the tongue will kill a dog, Fairchild thought, chuckling to himself. He said aloud:
“Our forefathers reduced the process of gaining money to proverbs. But we have beaten them; we have reduced the whole of existence to fetiches.”
“To words of one syllable that look well in large red type,” the Semitic man corrected.
The stranger ignored them. He half turned in his chair. He gestured at the waiter’s back, then he snapped his fingers until he had attracted the waiter’s attention. “Trouble with these small second-rate places,” he told them. “No pep, no efficiency, in handling trade. Check, please,” he directed briskly. The cherubic waiter bent over them.
“You found the dinner nice?” he suggested.
“Sure, sure, all right. Bring the bill, will you, George?” The waiter looked at the others, hesitating.
“Never mind, Mr. Broussard,” Fairchild said quickly. “We won’t go right now. Mr. Hooper here has got to catch a train. You are my guest,” he explained to the stranger. The other protested conventionally: he offered to match coins for it, but Fairchild repeated: “You are my guest to-night. Too bad you must hurry away.”
“I haven’t got the leisure you New Orleans fellows have,” the other explained. “Got to keep on the jump, myself.” He arose and shook hands all around. “Glad to’ve met you boys,” he said to each in turn. He clasped Mr. Talliaferro’s elbow with his left hand while their rights were engaged. The waiter fetched his hat and he gave the man a half dollar with a flourish. “If you’re ever in the little city” — he paused to
reassure Fairchild.
“Sure, sure,” Fairchild agreed heartily, and they sat down again. The late guest paused at the street door a moment, then he darted forth shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!” The cab took him to the Monteleone hotel, three blocks away, where he purchased two to-morrow’s papers and sat in the lobby for an hour, dozing over them. Then he went to his room and lay in bed staring at them until he had harried his mind into unconsciousness by the sheer idiocy of print.
6
“Now,” said Fairchild, “let that be a lesson to yon young men. That’s what you’ll come to by joining things, by getting the habit of it. As soon as a man begins to join clubs and lodges, his spiritual fiber begins to disintegrate. When you are young, you join things because they profess high ideals. You believe in ideals at that age, you know. Which is all right, as long as you just believe in them as ideals and not as criterions of conduct. But after a while you join more things, you are getting older and more sedate and sensible; and believing in ideals is too much trouble so you begin to live up to them with your outward life, in your contacts with other people. And when you’ve made a form of behavior out of an ideal, it’s not an ideal any longer, and you become a public nuisance.”
“It’s a man’s own fault if the fetich men annoy him,” the Semitic man said. “Nowadays there are enough things for every one to belong to something.”
“That’s a rather stiff price to pay for immunity, though,” Fairchild objected.
“That need not bother you,” the other told him. “You have already paid it.”
Mr. Talliaferro laid aside his fork. “I do hope he’s not offended,” he murmured. Fairchild chuckled.
“At what?” the Semitic man asked. He and Fairchild regarded Mr. Talliaferro kindly.
“At Fairchild’s little joke,” Mr. Talliaferro explained.
Fairchild laughed. “I’m afraid we disappointed him. He probably not only does not believe that we are bohemians, but doubts that we are even artistic. Probably the least he expected was to be taken to dinner at the studio of two people who are not married to each other, and to be offered hashish instead of food.”
“And to be seduced by a girl in an orange smock and no stockings,” the ghostly young man added in a sepulchral tone.
“Yes,” Fairchild said. “But he wouldn’t have succumbed, though.”
“No,” the Semitic man agreed. “But, like any Christian, he would have liked the opportunity to refuse.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Fairchild admitted. He said: “I guess he thinks that if you don’t stay up all night and get drunk and ravish somebody, there’s no use in being an artist.”
“Which is worse?” murmured the Semitic man.
“God knows,” Fairchild answered. “I’ve never been ravished.. He sucked at his coffee. “But he’s not the first man that ever hoped to be ravished and was disappointed. I’ve spent a lot of time in different places laying myself open, and always come off undefiled. Hey, Talliaferro?”
Mr. Talliaferro squirmed again, diffidently. Fairchild lit a cigarette. “Well, both of them are vices, and we’ve all seen to-night what an uncontrolled vice will lead a man into — defining a vice as any natural impulse which rides you, like the gregarious instinct in Hooper,” He ceased a while. Then he chuckled again. “God must look about our American scene with a good deal of consternation, watching the antics of these volunteers who are trying to help Him.”
“Or entertainment,” the Semitic man amended. “But why American scene?”
“Because our doings are so much more comical. Other nations seem to be able to entertain the possibility that God may not be a Rotarian or an Elk or a Boy Scout after all. We don’t. And convictions are always alarming, unless you are looking at them from behind.”
The waiter approached with a box of cigars. The Semitic man took one. Mr. Talliaferro finished his dinner with decorous expedition. The Semitic man said:
“My people produced Jesus, your people Christianized him. And ever since you have been trying to get him out of your church. And now that you have practically succeeded, look at what is filling the vacuum of his departure. Do you think that your new ideal of willynilly Service without request or recourse is better than your old ideal of humility? No, no” — as the other would have spoken— “I don’t mean as far as results go. The only ones who ever gain by the spiritual machinations of mankind are the small minority who gain emotional or mental or physical exercise from the activity itself, never the passive majority for whom the crusade is set afoot.”
“Katharsis by peristalsis,” murmured the blond young man, who was nurturing a reputation for cleverness. Fairchild said:
“Are you opposed to religion, then — in its general sense, I mean?”
“Certainly not,” the Semitic man answered. “The only sense in which religion is general is when it benefits the greatest number in the same way. And the universal benefit of religion is that it gets the children out of the house on Sunday morning.”
“But education gets them out of the house five days a week,” Fairchild pointed out.
“That’s true, too. But I am not at home myself on those days: education has already got me out of the house six days a week.” The waiter brought Mr. Talliaferro’s coffee. Fairchild lit another cigarette.
“So you believe the sole accomplishment of education is that it keeps us away from home?”
“What other general result can you name? It doesn’t make us all brave or healthy or happy or wise, it doesn’t even keep us married. In fact, to take an education by the modern process is like marrying in haste and spending the rest of your life making the best of it. But, understand me:
I have no quarrel with education, I don’t think it hurts you much, except to make you unhappy and unfit for work, for which man was cursed by the gods before they had learned about education. And if it were not education, it would be something else just as bad, and perhaps worse. Man must fill his time some way, you know.”
“But to go back to religion”— “the spirit protestant eternal,” murmured the blond young man hoarsely— “do you mean any particular religion, or just the general teaching of Christ?”
“What has Christ to do with it?”
“Well, it’s generally accepted that he instigated a certain branch of it, whatever his motives really were.”
“It’s generally accepted that first you must have an effect to discern a cause. And it is a human trait to foist the blunders of the age and the race upon some one or something too remote or heedless or weak to resist. But when you say religion, you have a particular sect in mind, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Fairchild admitted. “I always think of the Protestant religion.”
“The worst of all,” the Semitic man said. “To raise children into, I mean. For some reason one can be a Catholic or a Jew and be religious at home. But a Protestant at home is only a Protestant. It seems to me that the Protestant faith was invented for the sole purpose of filling our jails and morgues and houses of detention. I speak now of its more rabid manifestations, particularly of its activities in smaller settlements. How do young Protestant boys in small towns spend Sunday afternoons, with baseball and all such natural muscular vents denied them? They kill, they slay and steal and burn. Have you ever noticed how many juvenile firearm accidents occur on Sunday, how many fires in barns and outhouses happen on Sunday afternoon?” He ceased and shook the ash from his cigar carefully into his coffee cup. Mr. Talliaferro seeing an opening, coughed and spoke.
“By the way, I saw Gordon to-day. Tried to persuade him for our yachting party to-morrow. He doesn’t enthuse, so to speak. Though I assured him how much we’d all like to have him.”
“Oh, he’ll come, I guess,” Fairchild said. “He’d be a fool not to let her feed him for a few days.”
“He’d pay a fairly high price for his food,” the Semitic man remarked drily. Fairchild looked at him and he added: “Gordon hasn’t served his apprenticeship yet, you know. You’v
e got through yours.”
“Oh,” Fairchild grinned. “Well, yes, I did kind of play out on her, I reckon.” He turned to Mr. Talliaferro. “Has she been to him in person to sell him the trip, yet?”
Mr. Talliaferro hid his mild retrospective discomfort behind a lighted match. “Yes. She stopped in this afternoon. I was with him at the time.”
“Good for her,” the Semitic man applauded, and Fairchild said with interest:
“She did? What did Gordon say?”
“He left,” Mr. Talliaferro admitted mildly.
“Walked out on her, did he?” Fairchild glanced briefly at the Semitic man. He laughed. “You are right,” he agreed. He laughed again, and Mr. Talliaferro said:
“He really should come, you know. I thought perhaps” — diffidently— “that you’d help me persuade him. The fact that you will be with us, and your — er — assured position in the creative world..”
“No, I guess not,” Fairchild decided. “I’m not much of a hand for changing folks’ opinions. I guess I won’t meddle with it.”
“But, really,” Mr. Talliaferro persisted, “the trip would benefit the man’s work. Besides,” he added with inspiration, “he will round out our party. A novelist, a painter—”
“I am invited, too,” the blond young man put in sepulchrally. Mr. Talliaferro accepted him with apologetic effusion.
“By all means, a poet. I was about to mention you, my dear fellow. Two poets, in fact, with Eva W — .”
“I am the best poet in New Orleans,” the other interrupted with sepulchral belligerence.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed quickly, “ — and a sculptor. You see?” he appealed to the Semitic man. The Semitic man met Mr. Talliaferro’s importunate gaze kindly, without reply. Fairchild turned to him.
“We — ll,” he began. Then: “What do you think?”
The Semitic man glanced briefly at him. “I think well need Gordon by all means.” Fairchild grinned again and agreed.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 32
