Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “All right,” I said. “And then?”

  “That’s all,” she said. “Your coffee’s cold. I’ll get another cup—” and began to rise until I stopped her.

  “When was this?” I said.

  “Four years ago,” she said. “When he bought this house.”

  “Bought the house?” I said. “Four years ago? That’s when he became vice president of the bank!”

  “Yes,” she said. “The day before it was announced. I’ll get another cup.”

  “I dont want coffee,” I said, sitting there saying Flem Snopes Flem Snopes until I said, cried: “I dont want anything! I’m afraid!” until I finally said “What?” and she repeated:

  “Will you have a cigarette?” and I saw that too: a synthetic metal box also and there should have been a synthetic matching lighter but what she had taken from the same box with the cigarette was a kitchen match. “Linda says you smoke a corncob pipe. Smoke it if you want to.”

  “No,” I said again. “Not anything. — But Flem Snopes,” I said. “Flem Snopes.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s not me that wont let her go away from Jefferson to school.”

  “But why?” I said. “Why? When she’s not even his — he’s not even her — I’m sorry. But you can see how urgent, how we dont even have time for.…”

  “Politeness?” she said. Nor did I make that move either: just sitting there watching while she leaned and scratched the match on the sole of her side-turned slipper and lit the cigarette.

  “For anything,” I said. “For anything except her. Ratliff tried to tell me this this morning, but I wouldn’t listen. So maybe that’s what you were telling me a moment ago when I wouldn’t or didn’t listen? The furniture. That day in the store. Didn’t know what he wanted because what he wanted didn’t matter, wasn’t important: only that he did want it, did need it, must have it, intended to have it no matter what cost or who lost or who anguished or grieved. To be exactly what he needed to exactly fit exactly what he was going to be tomorrow after it was announced: a vice president’s wife and child along with the rest of the vice president’s furniture in the vice president’s house? Is that what you tried to tell me?”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “Just something like that,” I said. “Because that’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. We wont mention the money because everybody who ever saw that bow tie would know he wouldn’t pay out his own money to send his own child a sleeper-ticket distance to school, let alone another man’s ba—” and stopped. But not she, smoking, watching the burning tip of the cigarette.

  “Say it,” she said. “Bastard.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why?” she said.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “Maybe I could, if only you were. Looked like you were. Or even like you were trying to be.”

  “Go on,” she said. “Not the money.”

  “Because he — you — could get that from Uncle Will probably, not to mention taking it from me as a scholarship. Or is that it? he cant even bear to see the money of even a mortal enemy like old man Will Varner probably is to him, wasted on sending a child out of the state to school when he pays taxes every year to support the Mississippi ones?”

  “Go on,” she said again. “Not the money.”

  “So it is that furniture catalogue picture after all, scaled in cheap color from the Charleston or Richmond or Long Island or Boston photograph, down to that one which Flem Snopes holds imperative that the people of Yoknapatawpha County must have of him. While he was just owner of a back-alley café it was all right for all Frenchman’s Bend (and all Jefferson and the rest of the county too after Ratliff and a few others like him got through with it) to know that the child who bore his name was really a — —”

  “Bastard,” she said again.

  “All right,” I said. But even then I didn’t say it: “ — and even when he sold the café for a nice profit and was superintendent of the power-plant, it still wouldn’t have mattered. And even after that when he held no public position but was simply a private usurer and property-grabber quietly minding his own business; not to mention the fact that ten or twelve years had now passed, by which time he could even begin to trust Jefferson to have enough tenderness for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old female child not to upset her life with that useless and gratuitous information. But now he is vice president of a bank and now a meddling outsider is persuading the child to go away to school, to spend at least the three months until the Christmas holidays among people none of whose fathers owe him money and so must keep their mouths shut, any one of whom might reveal the fact which at all costs he must now keep secret. So that’s it,” I said, and still she wasn’t looking at me: just smoking quietly and steadily while she watched the slow curl and rise of the smoke. “So it’s you, after all,” I said. “He forbade her to leave Jefferson, and blackmailed you into supporting him by threatening you with what he himself is afraid of: that he himself will tell her of her mother’s shame and her own illegitimacy. Well, that’s a blade with three edges. Ask your father for the money, or take it from me, and get her away from Jefferson or I’ll tell her myself who she is — or is not.”

  “Do you think she will believe you?” she said.

  “What?” I said. “Believe me? Believe me? Even without a mirror to look into, nothing to compare with and need to repudiate from, since all she needed was just to live with him for the seventeen years which she has. What more could she want than to believe me, believe anyone, a chance to believe anyone compassionate enough to assure her she’s not his child? What are you talking about? What more could she ask than the right to love the mother who by means of love saved her from being a Snopes? And if that were not enough, what more could anybody want than this, that most never have the chance to be, not one in ten million have the right to be, deserve to be: not just a love child but one of the elect to share cousinhood with the world’s immortal love-children — fruit of that brave virgin passion not just capable but doomed to count the earth itself well lost for love, which down all the long record of man the weak and impotent and terrified and sleepless that the rest of the human race calls its poets, have dreamed and anguished and exulted and amazed over—” and she watching me now, not smoking: just holding the poised cigarette while the last blue vapor faded, watching me through it.

  “You dont know very much about women, do you?” she said. “Women aren’t interested in poets’ dreams. They are interested in facts. It doesn’t even matter whether the facts are true or not, as long as they match the other facts without leaving a rough seam. She wouldn’t even believe you. She wouldn’t even believe him if he were to tell her. She would just hate you both — you most of all because you started it.”

  “You mean she will take … this — him — in preference to nothing? will throw away the chance for school and everything else? I dont believe you.”

  “To her, this isn’t nothing. She will take it before a lot of things. Before most things.”

  “I dont believe you!” I said, cried, or thought I did. But only thought it, until I said: “So there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Yes,” she said. And now she was watching me, the cigarette motionless, not even seeming to burn. “Marry her.”

  “What?” I said, cried. “A gray-headed man more than twice her age? Dont you see, that’s what I’m after: to set her free of Jefferson, not tie her down to it still more, still further, still worse, but to set her free? And you talk about the reality of facts.”

  “The marriage is the only fact. The rest of it is still the poet’s romantic dream. Marry her. She’ll have you. Right now, in the middle of all this, she wont know how to say No. Marry her.”

  “Goodbye,” I said. “Goodbye.”

  And Ratliff again, still in the client’s chair where I had left him an hour ago.

  “I tried to tell you,” he said. “Of course it’s Flem. What reason would Eula and that gal have not to jump at a
chance to be shut of each other for nine or ten months for a change?”

  “I can tell you that now myself,” I said. “Flem Snopes is vice president of a bank now with a vice president’s house with vice president’s furniture in it and some of that vice president’s furniture has got to be a vice president’s wife and child.”

  “No,” he said.

  “All right,” I said. “The vice president of a bank dont dare have it remembered that his wife was already carrying somebody else’s bastard when he married her, so if she goes off to school some stranger that dont owe him money will tell her who she is and the whole playhouse will blow up.”

  “No,” Ratliff said.

  “All right,” I said. “Then you tell a while.”

  “He’s afraid she’ll get married,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “When Jody was born, Uncle Billy Varner made a will leaving half of his property to Miz Varner and half to Jody. When Eula was born, he made a new will leaving that same first half to Miz Varner and the other half split in two equal parts, one for Jody and one for Eula. That’s the will he showed Flem that day him and Eula was married and he aint changed it since. That is, Flem Snopes believed him when he said he wasn’t going to change it, whether anybody else believed him or not — especially after Flem beat him on that Old Frenchman place trade.”

  “What?” I said. “He gave that place to them as Eula’s dowry.”

  “Sho,” Ratliff said. “It was told around so because Uncle Billy was the last man of all that would have corrected it. He offered Flem the place but Flem said he would rather have the price of it in cash money. Which was why Flem and Eula was a day late leaving for Texas: him and Uncle Billy was trading, with Uncle Billy beating Flem down to where he never even thought about it when Flem finally said all right, he would take that figger provided Uncle Billy would give him a option to buy the place at the same amount when he come back from Texas. So they agreed, and Flem come back from Texas with them paint ponies and when the dust finally settled, me and Henry Armstid had done bought that Old Frenchman place from Flem for my half of that restaurant and enough of Henry’s cash money to pay off Uncle Billy’s option, which he had done forgot about. And that’s why Flem Snopes at least knows that Uncle Billy aint going to change that will. So he dont dare risk letting that girl leave Jefferson and get married, because he knows that Eula will leave him too then. It was Flem started it by saying No, but you got all three of them against you, Eula and that girl too until that girl finds the one she wants to marry. Because women aint interested — —”

  “Wait,” I said, “wait. It’s my time now. Because I dont know anything about women because things like love and morality and jumping at any chance you can find that will keep you from being a Snopes are just a poet’s romantic dream and women aren’t interested in the romance of dreams; they are interested in the reality of facts, they dont care what facts, let alone whether they are true or not if they just dovetail with all the other facts without leaving a sawtooth edge. Right?”

  “Well,” he said, “I might not a put it jest exactly that way.”

  “Because I dont know anything about women,” I said. “So would you mind telling me how the hell you learned?”

  “Maybe by listening,” he said. Which we all knew, since what Yoknapatawphian had not seen at some time during the past ten or fifteen years the tin box shaped and painted to resemble a house and containing the demonstrator machine, in the old days attached to the back of a horse-drawn buckboard and since then to the rear of a converted automobile, hitched or parked beside the gate to a thousand yards on a hundred back-country roads, while, surrounded by a group of four or five or six ladies come in sunbonnets or straw hats from anywhere up to a mile along the road, Ratliff himself with his smooth brown bland inscrutable face and his neat faded tieless blue shirt, sitting in a kitchen chair in the shady yard or on the gallery, listening. Oh yes, we all knew that.

  “So I didn’t listen to the right ones,” I said.

  “Or the wrong ones neither,” he said. “You never listened to nobody because by that time you were already talking again.”

  Oh yes, easy. All I had to do was stand there on the street at the right time, until she saw me and turned, ducked with that semblance of flight, into the side street which would bypass the ambush. Nor even then to back-track that one block but merely to go straight through the drugstore itself, out the back door, so that no matter how fast she went I was in the alley first, ambushed again behind the wall’s angle in ample time to hear her rapid feet and then step out and grasp her arm just above the wrist almost before it began to rise in that reflex of flight and repudiation, holding the wrist, not hard, while she wrenched, jerked faintly at it, saying, “Please. Please.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right. Just tell me this. When you went home first and changed before you met me in the drugstore that afternoon. It was your idea to go home first and change to the other dress. But it was your mother who insisted on the lipstick and the perfume and the silk stockings and the high heels. Isn’t that right?” And she still wrenching and jerking faintly at the arm I held, whispering:

  “Please. Please.”

  SIXTEEN

  Charles Mallison

  THIS IS WHAT Ratliff said happened up to where Uncle his is what Ratliff said happened up to where Uncle Gavin could see it.

  It was January, a gray day though not cold because of the fog. Old Het ran in Mrs Hait’s front door and down the hall into the kitchen, already hollering in her strong bright happy voice, with strong and childlike pleasure:

  “Miss Mannie! Mule in the yard!”

  Nobody knew just exactly how old old Het really was. Nobody in Jefferson even remembered just how long she had been in the poorhouse. The old people said she was about seventy, though by her own counting, calculated from the ages of various Jefferson ladies from brides to grandmothers that she claimed to have nursed from infancy, she would be around a hundred and, as Ratliff said, at least triplets.

  That is, she used the poorhouse to sleep in or anyway pass most or at least part of the night in. Because the rest of the time she was either on the Square or the streets of Jefferson or somewhere on the mile-and-a-half dirt road between town and the poorhouse; for twenty-five years at least ladies, seeing her through the front window or maybe even just hearing her strong loud cheerful voice from the house next door, had been locking themselves in the bathroom. But even this did no good unless they had remembered first to lock the front and back doors of the house itself. Because sooner or later they would have to come out and there she would be, tall, lean, of a dark chocolate color, voluble, cheerful, in tennis shoes and the long rat-colored coat trimmed with what forty or fifty years ago had been fur, and the purple toque that old Mrs Compson had given her fifty years ago while General Compson himself was still alive, set on the exact top of her headrag (at first she had carried a carpetbag of the same color and apparently as bottomless as a coal mine, though since the ten cent store came to Jefferson the carpetbag had given place to a succession of the paper shopping bags which it gave away), already settled in a chair in the kitchen, having established already upon the begging visitation a tone blandly and incorrigibly social.

  She passed that way from house to house, travelling in a kind of moving island of alarm and consternation as she levyed her weekly toll of food scraps and castoff garments and an occasional coin for snuff, moving in an urbane uproar and as inescapable as a tax-gatherer. Though for the last year or two since Mrs Hait’s widowing, Jefferson had gained a sort of temporary respite from her because of Mrs Hait. But even this was not complete. Rather, old Het had merely established a kind of local headquarters or advanced foraging post in Mrs Hait’s kitchen soon after Mr Hait and five mules belonging to Mr I.O. Snopes died on a sharp curve below town under the fast north-bound through freight one night and even the folks at the poorhouse heard that Mrs Hait had got eight thousand dol
lars for him. She would come straight to Mrs Hait’s as soon as she reached town, sometimes spending the entire forenoon there, so that only after noon would she begin her implacable rounds. Now and then when the weather was bad she spent the whole day with Mrs Hait. On these days her regular clients or victims, freed temporarily, would wonder if in the house of the man-charactered and man-tongued woman who as Ratliff put it had sold her husband to the railroad company for eight thousand percent. profit, who chopped her own firewood and milked her cow and plowed and worked her own vegetable garden; — they wondered if maybe old Het helped with the work in return for her entertainment or if even now she still kept the relationship at its social level of a guest come to divert and be diverted.