Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Deposit five cents for three minutes, please,” the bland machine voice said. In the airless cuddy the reporter coin-fumbled, sweat-clutching the telephone; again the discreet click and cling died into dead wire hum.

  “Hello! Hello!” he bawled. “You cut me off; gimme my.. But now the buzzing on the editor’s desk has sounded again; now the interval out of outraged and apoplectic waiting: the wire hum clicked full voiced before the avalanched, the undammed:

  “Fired! Fired! Fired! Fired!” the editor screamed. He leaned half-way across the desk beneath the green-shaded light, telephone and receiver clutched to him like a tackled half-back lying half across the goal line, as he had caught the instrument up; as, sitting bolt upright in the chair, his knuckles white on the arms and his teeth glinting under his lips while he glared at the telephone in fixed and waiting fury, he had sat during the five minutes since putting the receiver carefully back and waiting for the buzzer to sound again. “Do you hear me?” he screamed.

  “Yair,” the reporter said. “Listen. I wouldn’t even bother with that son of a bitch Feinman at all; you can have the right guy paged right here in the lobby. Or listen. You don’t even need to do that. All they need is just a few dollars to eat and sleep until to-morrow; just call the desk and tell them to let me draw on the paper; I will just add the eleven-eighty I had to spend to—”

  “WILL you listen to me?” the editor said. “Please! Will you?”

  — “to ride out there and — Huh? Sure. Sure, chief. Shoot.”

  The editor gathered himself again; he seemed to extend and lie a little further and flatter across the desk even as the back, with the goal safe, tries for an extra inch while already downed; now he even ceased to tremble. “No,” he said; he said it slowly and distinctly. “No. Do you understand? NO.” Now he too heard only dead wire hum, as if the other end of it extended beyond atmosphere, into cold space; as though he listened now to the profound sound of infinity, of void itself filled with the cold unceasing murmur of æon-weary and unflagging stars. Into the round target of light a hand slid the first to-morrow’s galley; the still damp neat row of boxes which in the paper’s natural order had no scare-head, containing, since there was nothing new in them since time began, likewise no alarm: — that cross-section out of time space as though of a light ray caught by a speed lens for a second’s fraction between infinity and furious and trivial dust:

  FARMERS REFUSE BANKERS DENY STRIKERS DEMAND PRESIDENT’S YACHT ACREAGE REDUCTION QUINTUPLETS GAIN EX-SENATOR RENAUD CELEBRATES TENTH ANNIVERSARY AS RESTAURATEUR

  Now the wire hum came to life.

  “You mean you won’t...” the reporter said. “You ain’t going to...”

  “No. No. I won’t even attempt to explain to you why I will not or cannot. Now listen. Listen carefully. You are fired. Do you understand? You don’t work for this paper. You don’t work for anyone this paper knows. If I should learn to-morrow that you do, so help me God I will tear their advertisement out with my own hands. Have you a telephone at home?”

  “No. But there’s one at the corner; I co—”

  “Then go home. And if you call this office or this building again to-night I will have you arrested for vagrancy. Go home.”

  “All right, chief. If that’s how you feel about it, O.K. We’ll go home; we got a race to fly to-morrow, see? — Chief! Chief!”

  “Yes?”

  “What about my eleven-eighty? I was still working for you when I sp—”

  Night in the Vieux Carré

  NOW THEY COULD cross Grandlieu Street. There was traffic in it now; to clash and clang of light and bell, trolley and automobile crashed and glared across the intersection, rushing in a light kerb-channelled spindrift of tortured and draggled serpentine and trodden confetti pending the dawn’s white wings — spent tinsel dung of Momus’ Nile barge clatter-falque. Ordered and marked by light and bell and carrying the two imitation-leather bags and the drill meal sack they could now cross, the four others watching the reporter who, the little boy still asleep on his shoulder, stood at the extreme of the kerb edge’s channel brim, in poised and swooping immobility like a scarecrow weathered gradually out of the earth which had supported it erect and intact and now poised for the first light vagrant air to blow it into utter dissolution. He translated himself into a kind of flapping gallop, gaining fifteen or twenty feet on the others before they could move, passing athwart the confronting glares of automobiles apparently without contact with earth, like one of those apocryphal night-time bat creatures whose nest or home no man ever saw, which are seen only in mid-swoop, caught for a second in a light beam between nothing and nowhere. “Somebody take Jack from him,” the woman said. “I am afr—”

  “Of him?” the parachute jumper said, carrying one of the bags, his other hand under her elbow. “A guy would no more hit him than he would a glass barber pole. Or a paper sack of empty beer bottles in the street.”

  “He might fall down, though, and cut the kid all to pieces,” Jiggs said. Then he said (it was still good, it pleased him no less even though this was the third time): “When he gets to the other side he might find out that they have opened the cemetery, too, and that would not be so good for Jack.” He handed the sack to Shumann and passed the woman and the jumper, stepping quick on his short bouncing legs, the boots twinkling in the aligned tense immobility of the head-lights and overtook the reporter and reached up for the boy. “Gimme,” he said. The reporter glared down at him without stopping, with a curious glazed expression like that of one who has not slept much lately.

  “I got him,” he said. “He ain’t heavy.”

  “Yair; sure,” Jiggs said, dragging the still sleeping boy down from the other’s shoulder like a bolt of wing fabric from a shelf as they stepped together on to the other kerb. “But you want to have your mind free to find the way home.”

  “Yair,” the reporter cried. They paused, turning, waiting for the others; the reporter glared down with that curious dazed look at Jiggs who carried the boy now with no more apparent effort than he had carried the aeroplane’s tail, half-turned also, balanced like a short pair of tailor’s shears stuck lightly upright into the table-top, leaning a little forward like a dropped bowie-knife. The other three still walked in the street — the woman who somehow even contrived to wear the skirt beneath the sexless trench-coat as any one of the three men would; the tall parachute jumper with his handsome face now wearing an expression of sullen speculation; and Shumann behind them, in the neat serge suit and the new hat which even yet had the appearance of resting, exactly as the machine had stamped and moulded it, on the hat-block in the store — the three of them with that same air which in Jiggs was merely oblivious and lightly worn insolvency but which in them was that irrevocable homelessness of three immigrants walking down the steerage gang-plank of a ship. As the woman and the parachute jumper stepped on to the kerb, light and bell clanged again and merged into the rising gear-whine as the traffic moved; Shumann sprang forward and on to the kerb with a stiff light movement of unbelievable and rigid celerity, without a hair’s abatement of expression or hat-angle. Again, behind them now, the light harried spindrift of tortured confetti and serpentine rose from the gutter in sucking gusts. The reporter glared at them all now with his dazed, strained and urgent face. “The bastards!” he cried. “The son of a bitches!”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “Which way now?” For an instant longer the reporter glared at them. Then he turned, as though put into motion not by any spoken word but by the sheer solid weight of their patient and homeless passivity, into the dark mouth of the street now so narrow of kerb that they followed in single file, walking beneath a shallow overhang of iron-grilled balconies. The street was empty, unlighted save by the reflection from Grandlieu Street behind them, smelling of mud and of something else richly anonymous somewhere between coffee grounds and bananas. Looking back Jiggs tried to spell out the name, the letters inletted into the kerb edge in tile-blurred mosaic, unable to discern at once that
it was not only a word, a name which he had neither seen nor heard in his life, but that he was looking at it upside down. “Jesus,” he thought, “it must have took a Frenchman to be polite enough to call this a street, let alone name it.” Carrying the sleeping boy on his shoulder he was followed in turn by the three others, the four of them hurrying quietly after the hurrying reporter as though Grandlieu Street and its light and movement were Lethe itself just behind them and they four shades this moment out of the living world and being hurried, grave, quiet and unalarmed, on towards complete oblivion by one not only apparently long enough in residence to have become a citizen of the shadows, but one who from all outward appearances had been born there, too. The reporter was still talking, but they did not appeal to hear him, as though they had arrived too recently to have yet unclogged their ears of human speech in order to even hear the tongue in which the guide spoke. Now he stopped again, turning upon them again his wild, urgent face. It was another intersection — two narrow roofless tunnels like exposed mine galleries marked by two pale one-way arrows which seemed to have drawn to themselves and to hold in faint suspension what light there was. Then Jiggs saw that to the left the street ran into something of light and life — a line of cars along the kerb beneath an electric sign, a name, against which the shallow dark grill-work of the eternal balconies hung in weightless and lace-like silhouette. This time Jiggs stepped from the kerb and spelled out the street’s name. “Toulouse,” he spelled. “Too loose,” he thought. “Yair. Swell. Our house last night must have got lost on the way home.” So at first he was not listening to the reporter, who now held them immobile in a tableau reminiscent (save for his hat) of the cartoon pictures of city anarchists; Jiggs looked up only to see him rushing away towards the lighted sign. They all looked, watching the thin, long, bat-like shape as it fled on.

  “I don’t want anything to drink,” Shumann said. “I want to go to bed.” The parachute jumper put his hand into the pocket of the woman’s trench-coat and drew out a pack of cigarettes, the third of those which the reporter had bought before they left the hotel the first time. He lit one and jetted smoke viciously from his nostrils.

  “I heard you tell him that,” he said.

  “Booze?” Jiggs said. “Jesus, is that what he was trying to tell us?” They watched the reporter, the gangling figure in the flapping suit running loosely towards the parked cars. They saw the newsboy emerge from somewhere, the paper already extended and then surrendered, the reporter scarcely pausing to take it and pay.

  “That’s the second one he has bought to-night since we met him,” Shumann said. “I thought he worked on one.” The parachute jumper inhaled and jetted the vicious smoke again.

  “Maybe he can’t read his own writing,” he said. The woman moved abruptly; she came to Jiggs and reached for the little boy.

  “I’ll take him awhile,” she said. “You and whatever his name is have carried him all evening.” But before Jiggs could even release the boy the parachute jumper came and took hold of the boy, too. The woman looked at him. “Get away, Jack,” she said.

  “Get away yourself,” the jumper said. He lifted the boy from both of them, not gentle and not rough. “I’ll take him. I can do this much for my board and keep.” He and the woman looked at one another across the sleeping boy.

  “Laverne,” Shumann said, “give me one of the cigarettes.” The woman and the jumper looked at one another.

  “What do you want?” she said. “Do you want to walk the streets to-night? Do you want Roger to sit in the railroad station to night and then expect to win a race to-morrow? Do you want Jack to..

  “Did I say anything?” the jumper said. “I don’t like his face. But all right about that. That’s my business. But did I say anything? Did I?”

  “Laverne,” Shumann said, “give me that cigarette.” But it was Jiggs who moved; he went to the jumper and took the child from him.

  “Jesus, gimme,” he said. “You never have learned how to carry him.” From somewhere among the dark, dead, narrow streets there came a sudden burst of sound, of revelry: shrill, turgid, wall-muted, as though emerging from beyond a low doorway or from a cave — some place airless and filled with smoke. Then they saw the reporter. He appeared from beneath the electric sign, emerging from a tile-floored and walled cavern containing nothing, like an incomplete gymnasium shower-room, and lined with two rows of discreet and curtained booths, from one of which a faun-faced waiter with a few stumps of rotting teeth had emerged and recognized him.

  “Listen,” the reporter had said. “I want a gallon of absinth. You know what kind. I want it for some friends, but I am going to drink it, too, and besides they ain’t Mardi Gras tourists. You tell Pete that. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure, mike,” the waiter said. He turned and went on to the rear and so into a kitchen, where at a zinc-covered table a man in a silk shirt, with a shock of black curls, eating from a single huge dish, looked up at the waiter with a pair of eyes like two topazes while the waiter repeated the reporter’s name. “He says he wants it good,” the waiter said in Italian. “He has friends with him. I guess I will have to give him gin.”