Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “I dont know,” Quentin said.

  “All right,” Shreve said. “Maybe I dont either. Only, Jesus, some day you are bound to fall in love. They just wouldn’t beat you that way. It would be like if God had got Jesus born and saw that he had the carpenter tools and then never gave him anything to build with them. Dont you believe that?”

  “I dont know,” Quentin said. He did not move. Shreve looked at him. Even while they were not talking their breaths in the tomblike air vaporized gently and quietly. The chimes for midnight would have rung some time ago now.

  “You mean, it dont matter to you?” Quentin did not answer. “That’s right. Dont say it. Because I would know you are lying. — All right then. Listen. Because he never had to worry about the love because that would take care of itself. Maybe he knew there was a fate, a doom on him, like what the old Aunt Rosa told you about some things that just have to be whether they are or not, just to balance the books, write Paid on the old sheet so that whoever keeps them can take it out of the ledger and burn it, get rid of it. Maybe he knew then that whatever the old man had done, whether he meant well or ill by it, it wasn’t going to be the old man who would have to pay the check; and now that the old man was bankrupt with the incompetence of age, who should do the paying if not his sons, his get, because wasn’t it done that way in the old days? the old Abraham full of years and weak and incapable now of further harm, caught at last and the captains and the collectors saying, ‘Old man, we dont want you’ and Abraham would say, ‘Praise the Lord, I have raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions; yea, perhaps even to restore my flocks and herds from the hand of the ravisher: that I might rest mine eyes upon my goods and chattels, upon the generations of them and of my descendants increased an hundred fold as my soul goeth out from me.’ He knew all the time that the love would take care of itself. Maybe that was why he didn’t have to think about her during those three months between that September and that Christmas while Henry talked about her to him, saying every time he breathed: Hers and my lives are to exist within and upon yours; did not need to waste any time over the love after it happened, backfired on him, why he never bothered to write her any letters (except that last one) which she would want to save, why he never actually proposed to her and gave her a ring for Mrs Sutpen to show around. Because the fate was on her too: the same old Abraham who was so old and weak now nobody would want him in the flesh on any debt; maybe he didn’t even have to wait for that Christmas to see her to know this; maybe that’s what it was that came out of the three months of Henry’s talking that he heard without listening to: I am not hearing about a young girl, a virgin; I am hearing about a narrow delicate fenced virgin field already furrowed and bedded so that all I shall need to do is drop the seeds in, caress it smooth again, saw her that Christmas and knew it for certain and then forgot it, went back to school and did not even remember that he had forgotten it, because he did not have time then; maybe it was just one day in that spring you told about when he stopped and said, right quiet: All right. I want to go to bed with who might be my sister. All right and then forgot that too. Because he didn’t have time. That is, he didn’t have anything else but time, because he had to wait. But not for her. That was all fixed. It was the other. Maybe he thought it would be in the mail bag each time the nigger rode over from Sutpen’s Hundred, and Henry believing it was the letter from her that he was waiting for, when what he was thinking was Maybe he will write it then. He would just have to write ‘I am your father. Burn this’ and I would do it. Or if not that, a sheet, a scrap of paper with the one word ‘Charles’ in his hand, and I would know what he meant and he would not even have to ask me to burn it. Or a lock of his hair or a paring from his finger nail and I would know them because I believe now that I have known what his hair and his finger nails would look like all my life, could choose that lock and that paring out of a thousand. And it did not come, and his letter went to her every two weeks and hers came back to him, and maybe he thought If one of mine to her should come back to me unopened then. That would be a sign. And that didn’t happen: and then Henry began to talk about his stopping at Sutpen’s Hundred for a day or so on his way home and he said all right to it, said It will be Henry who will get the letter, the letter saying it is inconvenient for me to come at that time; so apparently he does not intend to acknowledge me as his son, but at least I shall have forced him to admit that I am. And that one did not come either and the date was set and the family at Sutpen’s Hundred notified of it and that letter did not come either and he thought It will be then; I wronged him; maybe this is what he has been waiting for and maybe his heart sprang then, maybe he said Yes. Yes. I will renounce her; I will renounce love and all; that will be cheap, cheap, even though he say to me ‘never look upon my face again; take my love and my acknowledgment in secret, and go’ I will do that; I will not even demand to know of him what it was my mother did that justified his action toward her and me. So the day came and he and Henry rode the forty miles again, into the gates and up the drive to the house. He knew what would be there — the woman whom he had seen once and seen through, the girl whom he had seen through without even having to see once, the man whom he had seen daily, watched out of his fearful intensity of need and had never penetrated — the mother who had taken Henry aside before they had been six hours in the house on that Christmas visit and informed him of the engagement almost before the fiance had had time to associate the daughter’s name with the daughter’s face: so that probably before they even reached school again, and without his being aware that he had done so, Henry had already told Bon what was in his mother’s mind, (who had already told Bon what was in his); so that maybe before they even started on Bon’s second visit — (It would be June now and what would it be in North Mississippi? what was it you said; the magnolias in bloom and the mockingbirds, and in fifty years more, after they had gone and fought it and lost it and come back home, the Decoration Day and the veterans in the neat brushed hand-ironed gray and the spurious bronze medals that never meant anything to begin with, and the chosen young girls in white dresses bound at the waist with crimson sashes and the band would play Dixie and all the old doddering men would yell that you would not have thought would have had wind enough to get there, walk down town to sit on the rostrum even) — it would be June now, with the magnolias and mockingbirds in the moonlight and the curtains blowing in the June air of Commencement, and the music, fiddles and triangles, inside among the swirling and dipping hoops: and Henry would be a little tight, that should have been saying ‘I demand to know your intentions toward my sister’ but wasn’t saying it, instead maybe blushing again even in the moonlight, but standing straight and blushing because when you are proud enough to be humble you dont have to cringe (who every time he breathed over his vocal chords he was saying We belong to you; do as you will with us), saying ‘I used to think that I would hate the man that I would have to look at every day and whose every move and action and speech would say to me, I have seen and touched parts of your sister’s body that you will never see and touch: and now I know that I shall hate him and that’s why I want that man to be you,’ knowing that Bon would know what he meant, was trying to say, tell him, thinking, telling himself (Henry): Not just because he is older than I am and has known more than I shall ever know and has remembered more of it; but because of my own free will, and whether I knew it at the time or not does not matter, I gave my life and Judith’s both to him — —”

  “That’s still not love,” Quentin said.

  “All right,” Shreve said. “Just listen. — They rode the forty miles and into the gates and up to the house. And this time Sutpen wasn’t even there. And Ellen didn’t even know where he had gone, believing blandly and volubly that he had gone to Memphis or maybe even to Saint Louis on business, and Henry and Judith not even caring that much, and only he, Bon, to know where Sutpen had gone, saying to himself Of course; he wasn’t sure; he had to go there to make sure, tell
ing himself that loud now, loud and fast too so he would not, could not, hear the thinking, the But if he suspected, why not have told me? I would have done that, gone to him first, who have the blood after it was tainted and corrupt by whatever it was in mother; loud and fast now, telling himself That’s what it is; maybe he has gone on ahead to wait for me; he left no message for me here because the others are not to suspect yet and he knows that I will know at once where he is when I find him gone, thinking of the two of them, the somber vengeful woman who was his mother and the grim rocklike man who had looked at him every day for ten days with absolutely no alteration of expression at all, facing one another in grim armistice after almost thirty years in that rich baroque drawing room in that house which he called home since apparently everybody seemed to have to have a home, the man whom he was now sure was his father not humble now either (and he, Bon, proud of that), not saying even now I was wrong but I admit that it is so — Jesus, think of his heart then, during those two days, with the old gal throwing Judith at him every minute now because she had been spreading the news of the engagement confidentially through the county ever since Christmas — didn’t your father say how she had even taken Judith to Memphis in the spring to buy the trousseau? — and Judith neither having to accede to the throwing nor to resist it but just being, just existing and breathing like Henry did who maybe one morning during that spring waked up and lay right still in the bed and took stock, added the figures and drew the balance and told himself, All right. I am trying to make myself into what I think he wants me to be; he can do anything he wants to with me; he has only to tell me what to do and I will do it; even though what he asked me to do looked to me like dishonor, I would still do it, only Judith, being a female and so wiser than that, would not even consider dishonor: she would just say, All right. I will do anything he might ask me to do and that is why he will never ask me to do anything that I consider dishonorable: so that (maybe he even kissed her that time, the first time she had ever been kissed maybe and she too innocent to be coy or modest or even to know that she had been temporized with, maybe afterward just looking at him with a kind of peaceful and blank surprise at the fact that your sweetheart apparently kissed you the first time like your brother would — provided of course that your brother ever thought of, could be brought to, kissing you on the mouth) — so that when the two days were up and he was gone again and Ellen shrieking at her, ‘What?’ No engagement, no troth, no ring?’ she would be too astonished even to lie about it because that would be the first time it would have occurred to her that there had been no proposal. — Think of his heart then, while he rode to the River, and then on the steamboat itself where he walked up and down the deck, feeling through the deck the engines driving him nearer and nearer day and night to the moment which he must have realized now he had been waiting forever since he had got big enough to comprehend. Of course every now and then he would have to say it pretty fast and loud, That’s all it is. He just wants to make sure first to drown out the old But why do it this way? Why not back there? He knows that I shall never make any claim upon any part of what he now possesses, gained at the price of what sacrifice and endurance and scorn (so they told me; not he: they) only he knows; knows that so well that it would never have occurred to him just as he knows it would never occur to me that this might be his reason, who is not only generous but ruthless, who must have surrendered everything he and mother owned to her and to me as the price of repudiating her, not because the doing it this way hurt him, flouted him and kept him in suspense that much unnecessary longer, because he didn’t matter; whether he was irked or even crucified didn’t matter: it was the fact that he had to be kept constantly reminded that he would not have done it this way himself, yet he had stemmed from the blood after whatever it was his mother had been or done had tainted and corrupted it. — Nearer and nearer, until suspense and puzzlement and haste and all seemed blended into one sublimation of passive surrender in which he thought only All right. All right. Even this way. Even if he wants to do it this way. I will promise never to see her again. Never to see him again. Then he reached home. And he never learned if Sutpen had been there or not. He never knew. He believed it, but he never knew — his mother the same somber unchanged fierce paranoiac whom he had left in September, from whom he could learn nothing by indirection and whom he dared not ask outright — the very fact that he saw through the skillful questions of the lawyer (as to how he had liked the school and the people of that country and how perhaps — or had he not perhaps? — he had made friends up there among the country families) only that much more proof to him at that time that Sutpen had not been there, or at least the lawyer was not aware that he had, since now that he believed he had fathomed the lawyer’s design in sending him to that particular school to begin with, he saw nothing in the questions to indicate that the lawyer had learned anything new since. (Or what he could have learned in that interview with the lawyer, because it would be a short one; it would be next to the shortest one ever to transpire between them, the shortest one of all next to the last one of course, the one which would occur in the next summer, when Henry would be with him.) Because the lawyer would not dare risk asking him outright, just as he (Bon) did not dare to ask his mother outright. Because, though the lawyer believed him to be rather a fool than dull or dense, yet even he (the lawyer) never for one moment believed that even Bon was going to be the kind of a fool he was going to be. So he told the lawyer nothing and the lawyer told him nothing, and the summer passed and September came and still the lawyer (his mother too) had not once asked him if he wanted to return to the school. So that at last he had to say it himself, that he intended to return; and maybe he knew that he had lost that move since there was nothing whatever in the lawyer’s face save an agent’s acquiescence. So he returned to school, where Henry was waiting (oh yes; waiting) for him, who did not even say ‘You didn’t answer my letters. You didn’t even write to Judith’ who had already said What my sister and I have and are belongs to you but maybe he did write to Judith now, by the first nigger post which rode to Sutpen’s Hundred, about how it had been an uneventful summer and hence nothing to write about, with maybe Charles Bon plain and inelidable on the outside of the envelope and he thinking He will have to see that. Maybe he will send it back thinking Maybe if it comes back nothing will stop me then and so maybe at last I will know what I am going to do. But it didn’t come back. And the others didn’t come back. And the fall passed and Christmas came and they rode again to Sutpen’s Hundred and this time Sutpen was not there again, he was in the field, he had gone to town, he was hunting — something; Sutpen not there when they rode up and Bon knew he had not expected him to be there, saying Now. Now. Now. It will come now. It will come this time, and I am young, young, because I still dont know what I am going to do. So maybe what he was doing that twilight (because he knew that Sutpen had returned, was now in the house; it would be like a wind, something, dark and chill, breathing upon him and he stopping, grave, quiet, alert, thinking What? What is it? Then he would know; he could feel the other entering the house, and he would let his held breath go quiet and easy, a profound exhalation, his heart quiet too) in the garden while he walked with Judith and talked to her, gallant and elegant and automatic (and Judith thinking about that like she thought about that first kiss back in the summer: So that’s it. That’s what love is, bludgeoned once more by disappointment but still unbowed) — maybe what he was doing there now was waiting, telling himself Maybe even yet he will send for me. At least say it to me even though he knew better: He is in the library now, he has sent the nigger for Henry, now Henry is entering the room: so that maybe he stopped and faced her, with something in his face that was smiling now, and took her by the elbows and turned her, easy and gentle, until she faced the house, and said ‘Go. I wish to be alone to think about love’ and she went just as she took the kiss that day, with maybe the feel of the flat of his hand light and momentary upon her behind. And he stood there facing the house un
til Henry came out, and they looked at one another for a while with no word said and then turned and walked together through the garden, across the lot and into the stable, where maybe there was a nigger there and maybe they saddled the two horses themselves and waited until the house nigger came with the two repacked saddlebags. And maybe he didn’t even say then, ‘But he sent no word to me?’ ”