Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  Then a single man stepped forward from among the princes and prelates and generals and statesmen, in full dress and medalled too; the first man in France: poet, philosopher, statesman patriot and orator, to stand bareheaded facing the caisson while the distant gun thudded another minute into eternity. Then he spoke:

  ‘Marshal.’

  But only the day answered, and the distant gun to mark another interval of its ordered dirge. Then the man spoke again, louder this time, urgent; not peremptory: a cry:

  ‘Marshal!’

  But still there was only the dirge of day, the dirge of victorious and grieving France, the dirge of Europe and from beyond the seas too where men had doffed the uniforms in which they had been led through suffering to peace by him who lay now beneath the draped flag on the caisson, and even further than that where people who had never heard his name did not even know that they were still free because of him, the orator’s voice ringing now into the grieving circumambience for men everywhere to hear it:

  ‘That’s right, great general! Lie always with your face to the east, that the enemies of France shall always see it and beware!’

  At which moment there was a sudden movement, surge, in the crowd to one side; the hats and capes and lifted batons of policemen could be seen struggling toward the disturbance. But before they could reach it, something burst suddenly out of the crowd — not a man but a mobile and upright scar, on crutches, he had one arm and one leg, one entire side of his hatless head was one hairless eyeless and earless sear, he wore a filthy dinner jacket from the left breast of which depended on their barber-pole ribbons a British Military Cross and Distinguished Conduct Medal, and a French Médaille Militaire: which (the French one) was probably why the French crowd itself had not dared prevent him emerging from it and even now did not dare grasp him and jerk him back as he swung himself with that dreadful animal-like lurch and heave with which men move on crutches, out into the empty space enclosing the Arch, and on until he too faced the caisson. Then he stopped and braced the crutches into his armpits and with his single hand grasped the French decoration on his breast, he too crying in a loud and ringing voice:

  ‘Listen to me too, Marshal! This is yours: take it!’ and snatched, ripped from his filthy jacket the medal which was the talisman of his sanctuary and swung his arm up and back to throw it. Apparently he knew himself what was going to happen to him as soon as he released the medal, and defied it; with the medal up-poised in his hand he even stopped and looked back at the crowd which seemed now to crouch almost, leashed and straining for the moment when he would absolve himself of immunity, and laughed, not triumphant: just indomitable, with that side of his ruined face capable of laughing, then turned and flung the medal at the caisson, his voice ringing again in the aghast air as the crowd rushed down upon him: ‘You too helped carry the torch of man into that twilight where he shall be no more; these are his epitaphs: They shall not pass. My country right or wrong. Here is a spot which is forever England — —’

  Then they had him. He vanished as though beneath a wave, a tide of heads and shoulders above which one of the crutches appeared suddenly in a hand which seemed to be trying to strike down at him with it until the converging police (there were dozens of them now, converging from everywhere) jerked it away, other police rapidly forming a cordon of linked arms, gradually forcing the crowd back while, rite and solemnity gone for good now, parade marshals’ whistles shrilled and the chief marshal himself grasped the bridles of the horses drawing the caisson and swung them around, shouting to the driver: ‘Go on!’ the rest of the cortege huddling without order, protocol vanished for the moment too as they hurried after the caisson almost with an air of pell mell, as though in actual flight from the wreckage of the disaster.

  The cause of it now lay in the gutter of a small cul-de-sac side street where he had been carried by the two policemen who had rescued him before the mob he had instigated succeeded in killing him, lying on his back, his unconscious face quite peaceful now, bleeding a little at one corner of his mouth, the two policemen standing over him though now that the heat was gone their simple uniforms seemed sufficient to hold back that portion of the crowd which had followed, to stand in a circle looking down at the unconscious and peaceful face.

  ‘Who is he?’ a voice said.

  ‘Ah, we know him,’ one of the policemen said. ‘An Englishman. We’ve had trouble with him ever since the war; this is not the first time he has insulted our country and disgraced his own.’

  ‘Maybe he will die this time,’ another voice said. Then the man in the gutter opened his eyes and began to laugh, or tried to, choking at first, trying to turn his head as though to clear his mouth and throat of what he choked on, when another man thrust through the crowd and approached him — an old man, a gaunt giant of a man with a vast worn sick face with hungry and passionate eyes above a white military moustache, in a dingy black overcoat in the lapel of which were three tiny faded ribbons, who came and knelt beside him and slipped one arm under his head and shoulders and raised him and turned his head a little until he could spit out the blood and shattered teeth and speak. Or laugh rather, which is what he did first, lying in the cradle of the old man’s arm, laughing up at the ring of faces enclosing him, then speaking himself in French:

  ‘That’s right,’ he said: ‘Tremble. I’m not going to die. Never.’

  ‘I am not laughing,’ the old man bending over him said. ‘What you see are tears.’

  END

  December, 1944

  Oxford — New York — Princeton

  November, 1953

  The Town

  First published in 1957, this novel forms the second part of the Snopes Trilogy, following the history of the fictional family from Mississippi. Each chapter is narrated from the point of view of one of three characters: Chick Mallison, Gavin Stevens, or V.K. Ratliff. The Snopes family serves as the author’s symbol for the grasping and destructive element of the post-bellum South. Like its predecessor The Hamlet and its successor The Mansion, The Town is a self-contained narrative. It details Flem Snopes’ ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humour and of profundity, the novel fashions a realistic social milieu compared to some of the author’s other works.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY ONE

  TWENTY TWO

  TWENTY THREE

  TWENTY FOUR

  The first edition’s title page

  To Phil Stone

  He did half the laughing for thirty years

  ONE

  Charles Mallison

  I WASN’T BORN yet so it was Cousin Gowan who was there and big enough to see and remember and tell me afterward when I was big enough for it to make sense. That is, it was Cousin Gowan plus Uncle Gavin or maybe Uncle Gavin rather plus Cousin Gowan. He — Cousin Gowan — was thirteen. His grandfather was Grandfather’s brother so by the time it got down to us, he and I didn’t know what cousin to each other we were. So he just called all of us except Grandfather ‘cousin’ and all of us except Grandfather called him ‘cousin’ and let it go at that.

  They lived in Washington, where his father worked for the State Department, and all of a sudden the State Department sent his father to China or India or some far place, to be gone two years; and his mother was going too so they sent Gowan down to stay with us and go to school in Jefferson until they got back. ‘Us’ was Grandfather and Mother and Father and Uncle Gavin then. So this is what Gowan knew abou
t it until I got born and big enough to know about it too. So when I say ‘we’ and ‘we thought’ what I mean is Jefferson and what Jefferson thought.

  At first we thought that the water tank was only Flem Snopes’s monument. We didn’t know any better then. It wasn’t until afterward that we realised that that object low on the sky above Jefferson, Mississippi, wasn’t a monument at all. It was a footprint.

  One day one summer he drove up the southeast road into town in a two-mule wagon containing his wife and baby and a small assortment of house-furnishings. The next day he was behind the counter of a small back-alley restaurant which belonged to V. K. Ratliff. That is, Ratliff owned it with a partner, since he — Ratliff — had to spend most of his time in his buckboard (this was before he owned the Model T Ford) about the county with his demonstrator sewing machine for which he was the agent. That is, we thought Ratliff was still the other partner until we saw the stranger in the other greasy apron behind the counter — a squat uncommunicative man with a neat minute bow tie and opaque eyes and a sudden little hooked nose like the beak of a small hawk; a week after that, Snopes had set up a canvas tent behind the restaurant and he and his wife and baby were living in it. And that was when Ratliff told Uncle Gavin:

  “Just give him time. Give him six months and he’ll have Grover Cleveland” (Grover Cleveland Winbush was the partner) “out of that café too.”

  That was the first summer, the first Summer of the Snopes, Uncle Gavin called it. He was in Harvard now, working for his M.A. After that he was going to the University of Mississippi law school to get ready to be Grandfather’s partner. But already he was spending the vacations helping Grandfather be City Attorney; he had barely seen Mrs Snopes yet so he not only didn’t know he would ever go to Germany to enter Heidelberg University, he didn’t even know yet that he would ever want to: only to talk about going there someday as a nice idea to keep in mind or to talk about.

  He and Ratliff talked together a lot. Because although Ratliff had never been to school anywhere much and spent his time travelling about our county selling sewing machines (or selling or swapping or trading anything else for that matter), he and Uncle Gavin were both interested in people — or so Uncle Gavin said. Because what I always thought they were mainly interested in was curiosity. Until this time, that is. Because this time it had already gone a good deal further than just curiosity. This time it was alarm.

  Ratliff was how we first began to learn about Snopes. Or rather, Snopeses. No, that’s wrong: there had been a Snopes in Colonel Sartoris’s cavalry command in 1864 — in that part of it whose occupation had been raiding Yankee picket-lines for horses. Only this time it was a Confederate picket which caught him — that Snopes — raiding a Confederate horse-line and, it was believed, hung him. Which was evidently wrong too, since (Ratliff told Uncle Gavin) about ten years ago Flem and an old man who seemed to be his father appeared suddenly from nowhere one day and rented a little farm from Mr Will Varner who just about owned the whole settlement and district called Frenchman’s Bend about twenty miles from Jefferson. It was a farm so poor and small and already wornout that only the most trifling farmer would undertake it, and even they stayed only one year. Yet Ab and Flem rented it and evidently (this is Ratliff) he or Flem or both of them together found it ——

  “Found what?” Uncle Gavin said.

  “I dont know,” Ratliff said. “Whatever it was Uncle Billy and Jody had buried out there and thought was safe.” — because that winter Flem was the clerk in Uncle Billy’s store. And what they found on that farm must have been a good one, or maybe they didn’t even need it anymore; maybe Flem found something else the Varners thought was hidden and safe under the counter of the store itself. Because in another year old Ab had moved into Frenchman’s Bend to live with his son and another Snopes had appeared from somewhere to take over the rented farm; and in two years more still another Snopes was the official smith in Mr Varner’s blacksmith shop. So there were as many Snopeses in Frenchman’s Bend as there were Varners; and five years after that, which was the year Flem moved to Jefferson, there were even more Snopeses than Varners because one Varner was married to a Snopes and was nursing another small Snopes at her breast.

  Because what Flem found that last time was inside Uncle Billy’s house. She was his only daughter and youngest child, not just a local belle but a belle throughout that whole section. Nor was it just because of old Will’s land and money. Because I saw her too and I knew what it was too, even if she was grown and married and with a child older than I was and I only eleven and twelve and thirteen. (“Oh ay,” Uncle Gavin said. “Even at twelve dont think you are the first man ever chewed his bitter thumbs for that like reason such as her.”) She wasn’t too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any just one human female package to contain and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I dont know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instant with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew that there never would be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do.

  That was what he found this time. One day, according to Ratliff, Frenchman’s Bend learned that Flem Snopes and Eula Varner had driven across the line into the next county the night before and bought a license and got married; the same day, still according to Ratliff, Frenchman’s Bend learned that three young men, three of Eula’s old suitors, had left the country suddenly by night too, for Texas it was said, or anyway west, far enough west to be longer than Uncle Billy or Jody Varner could have reached if they had needed to try. Then a month later Flem and Eula also departed for Texas (that bourne, Uncle Gavin said, in our time for the implicated the insolvent or the merely hopeful), to return the next summer with a girl baby a little larger than you would have expected at only three months ——

  “And the horses,” Uncle Gavin said. Because we did know about that, mainly because Flem Snopes had not been the first to import them. Every year or so someone brought into the county a string of wild unbroken plains ponies from somewhere in the west and auctioned them off. This time the ponies arrived, in the charge of a man who was obviously from Texas, at the same time that Mr and Mrs Snopes returned home from that state. This string however seemed to be uncommonly wild, since the resultant scattering of the untamed and untameable calico-splotched animals covered not just Frenchman’s Bend but the whole east half of the county too. Though even to the last, no one ever definitely connected Snopes with their ownership. “No no,” Uncle Gavin said. “You were not one of the three that ran from the smell of Will Varner’s shotgun. And dont tell me Flem Snopes traded you one of those horses for your half of that restaurant because I wont believe it. What was it?”

  Ratliff sat there with his bland brown smoothly-shaven face and his neat tieless blue shirt and his shrewd intelligent gentle eyes not quite looking at Uncle Gavin. “It was that old house,” he said. Uncle Gavin waited. “The Old Frenchman place.” Uncle Gavin waited. “That buried money.” Then Uncle Gavin understood: not an old pre-Civil War plantation house in all Mississippi or the South either but had its legend of the money and plate buried in the flower garden from Yankee raiders; — in this particular case, the ruined mansion which in the old time had dominated and bequeathed its name to the whole section known as Frenchman’s Bend, which the Varners now owned. “It was Henry Armstid’s fault, trying to get even with Flem for that horse that Texas man sold him that broke his leg. No,” Ratliff said, “it was me too as much as anybody else, as any of us. To figger out what Flem was doing owning that old place that anybody could see wasn’t worth nothing. I dont mean why Flem bought it. I mean, why he even taken it when Uncle Billy give it to him and Eula for a wedding gift. So when Henry taken to following and watching Flem and finally caught him that night diggi
ng in that old flower garden, I dont reckon Henry had to persuade me very hard to go back the next night and watch Flem digging myself.”

  “So when Flem finally quit digging and went away, you and Henry crawled out of the bushes and dug too,” Uncle Gavin said. “And found it. Some of it. Enough of it. Just exactly barely enough of it for you to hardly wait for daylight to swap Flem Snopes your half of that restaurant for your half of the Old Frenchman place. How much longer did you and Henry dig before you quit?”

  “I quit after the second night,” Ratliff said. “That was when I finally thought to look at the money.”

  “All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “The money.”

  “They was silver dollars me and Henry dug up. Some of them was pretty old. One of Henry’s was minted almost twenty years ago.”

  “A salted goldmine,” Uncle Gavin said. “One of the oldest tricks in the world, yet you fell for it. Not Henry Armstid: you.”

  “Yes,” Ratliff said. “Almost as old as that handkerchief Eula Varner dropped. Almost as old as Uncle Billy Varner’s shotgun.” That was what he said then. Because another year had passed when he stopped Uncle Gavin on the street and said, “With the court’s permission, Lawyer, I would like to take a exception. I want to change that-ere to ‘still’.”