“Oh, that,” she said. “You mean that. That doesn’t matter. That’s never been any trouble. He … cant. He’s — what’s the word? impotent. He’s always been. Maybe that’s why, one of the reasons. You see? You’ve got to be careful or you’ll have to pity him. You’ll have to. He couldn’t bear that, and it’s no use to hurt people if you dont get anything for it. Because he couldn’t bear being pitied. It’s like V.K.’s Vladimir. Ratliff can live with Ratliff’s Vladimir, and you can live with Ratliff’s Vladimir. But you mustn’t ever have the chance to, the right to, the choice to. Like he can live with his impotence, but you mustn’t have the chance to help him with pity. You promised about the Vladimir, but I want you to promise again about this.”
“I promise,” I said. Then I said: “Yes. You’re going tonight. That’s why the beauty parlor this afternoon: not for me but for Manfred. No: not even for Manfred after eighteen years: just to elope with, get on the train with. To show your best back to Jefferson. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re leaving tonight.”
“Marry her, Gavin,” she said. I had known her by sight for eighteen years, with time out of course for the war; I had dreamed about her at night for eighteen years including the war. We had talked to one another twice: here in the office one night fourteen years ago, and in her living room one morning two years back. But not once had she ever called me even Mister Stevens. Now she said Gavin. “Marry her, Gavin.”
“Change her name by marriage, then she wont miss the one she will lose when you abandon her.”
“Marry her, Gavin,” she said.
“Put it that I’m not too old so much as simply discrepant; that having been her husband once, I would never relinquish even her widowhood to another. Put it that way then.”
“Marry her, Gavin,” she said. And now I stopped, she sitting beyond the desk, the cigarette burning on the tray, balancing its muted narrow windless feather where she had not touched it once since she lit it and put it down, the hands still quiet on the bag and the face now turned to look at me out of the half-shadow above the rim of light from the lamp — the big broad simple still unpainted beautiful mouth, the eyes not the hard and dusty blue of fall but the blue of spring blooms all one inextricable mixture of wistaria cornflowers larkspur bluebells weeds and all, all the lost girls’ weather and boys’ luck and too late the grief, too late.
“Then this way. After you’re gone, if or when I become convinced that conditions are going to become such that something will have to be done, and nothing else but marrying me can help her, and she will have me. But have me, take me. Not just give up, surrender.”
“Swear it then,” she said.
“I promise. I have promised. I promise again.”
“No,” she said. “Swear.”
“I swear,” I said.
“And even if she wont have you. Even after that. Even if she w — you cant marry her.”
“How can she need me then?” I said. “Flem — unless your father really does get shut of the whole damned boiling of you, runs Flem out of Jefferson too — will have his bank and wont need to swap, sell, trade her anymore; maybe he will even prefer to have her in a New England school or even further than that if he can manage it.”
“Swear,” she said.
“All right,” I said. “At any time. Anywhere. No matter what happens.”
“Swear,” she said.
“I swear,” I said.
“I’m going now,” she said and rose and picked up the burning cigarette and crushed it carefully out into the tray and I rose too.
“Of course,” I said. “You have some packing to do even for an elopement, dont you. I’ll drive you home.”
“You dont need to,” she said.
“A lady, walking home alone at — it’s after midnight. What will Otis Harker say? You see, I’ve got to be a man too; I cant face Otis Harker otherwise since you wont stop being a lady to him until after tomorrow’s south-bound train; I believe you did say Texas, didn’t you?” Though Otis was not in sight this time though with pencil paper and a watch I could have calculated about where he would be now. Though the figures could have been wrong and only Otis was not in sight, not we, crossing the shadow-bitten Square behind the flat rapid sabre-sweep of the headlights across the plate glass storefronts, then into the true spring darkness where the sparse street lights were less than stars. And we could have talked if there had been more to talk about or maybe there had been more to talk about if we had talked. Then the small gate before the short walk to the small dark house not rented now of course and of course not vacant yet with a little space yet for decent decorum, and I wondered, thought Will Manfred sell him his house along with his bank or just abandon both to him — provided of course old Will Varner leaves him time to collect either one and stopped.
“Dont get out,” she said and got out and shut the door and said, stooping a little to look at me beneath the top: “Swear again.”
“I swear,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Good night,” and turned and I watched her, through the gate and up the walk, losing dimension now, onto or rather into the shadow of the little gallery and losing even substance now. And then I heard the door and it was as if she had not been. No, not that; not not been, but rather no more is, since was remains always and forever, inexplicable and immune, which is its grief. That’s what I mean: a dimension less, then a substance less, then the sound of a door and then, not never been but simply no more is since always and forever that was remains, as if what is going to happen to one tomorrow already gleams faintly visible now if the watcher were only wise enough to discern it or maybe just brave enough.
The spring night, cooler now, as if for a little while, until tomorrow’s dusk and the new beginning, somewhere had suspired into sleep at last the amazed hushed burning of hope and dream two-and-two engendered. It would even be quite cold by dawn, daybreak. But even then not cold enough to chill, make hush for sleep the damned mocking bird for three nights now keeping his constant racket in Maggie’s pink dogwood just under my bedroom window. So the trick of course would be to divide, not him but his racket, the having to listen to him: one Gavin Stevens to cross his dark gallery too and into the house and up the stairs to cover his head in the bedclothes, losing in his turn a dimension of Gavin Stevens, an ectoplasm of Gavin Stevens impervious to cold and hearing too to bear its half of both, bear its half or all of any other burdens anyone wanted to shed and shuck, having only this moment assumed that one of a young abandoned girl’s responsibility.
Because who would miss a dimension? who indeed but would be better off for having lost it, who had nothing in the first place to offer but just devotion, eighteen years of devotion, the ectoplasm of devotion too thin to be crowned by scorn, warned by hatred, annealed by grief. That’s it: unpin, shed, cast off the last clumsy and anguished dimension, and so be free. Unpin: that’s the trick, remembering Vladimir Kyrilytch’s “He aint unpinned it yet” — the twenty-dollar gold piece pinned to the undershirt of the country boy on his first trip to Memphis, who even if he has never been there before, has as much right as any to hope he can be, may be, will be tricked or trapped into a whorehouse before he has to go back home again. He has unpinned it now I thought.
TWENTY ONE
Charles Mallison
YOU KNOW HOW it is, you wake in the morning and you know at once that it has already happened and you are already too late. You didn’t know what it was going to be, which was why you had to watch so hard for it, trying to watch in all directions at once. Then you let go for a second, closed your eyes for just one second, and bang! it happened and it was too late, not even time to wake up and still hold off a minute, just to stretch and think What is it that makes today such a good one? then to let it come in, flow in: Oh yes, there’s not any school today. More: Thursday and in April and still there’s not any school today.
But not this morning. And halfway down the stairs I heard the swish of the pantry door shutting and I cou
ld almost hear Mother telling Guster: “Here he comes. Quick. Get out,” and I went into the dining room and Father had already had breakfast, I mean even when Guster has moved the plate and cup and saucer you can always tell where Father has eaten something; and by the look of his place Uncle Gavin hadn’t been to the table at all and Mother was sitting at her place just drinking coffee, with her hat already on and her coat over Uncle Gavin’s chair and her bag and gloves by her plate and the dark glasses she wore in the car whenever she went beyond the city limits as if light didn’t have any glare in it except one mile from town. And I reckon she wished for a minute that I was about three or four because then she could have put one arm around me against her knee and held the back of my head with the other hand. But now she just held my hand and this time she had to look up at me. “Mrs Snopes killed herself last night,” she said. “I’m going over to Oxford with Uncle Gavin to bring Linda home.”
“Killed herself?” I said. “How?”
“What?” Mother said. Because I was only twelve then, not yet thirteen.
“What did she do it with?” I said. But then Mother remembered that too by that time. She was already getting up.
“With a pistol,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think to ask whose.” She almost had the coat on too. Then she came and got the gloves and bag and the glasses. “We may be back by dinner, but I dont know. Will you try to stay at home, at least stay away from the Square, find something to do with Aleck Sander in the back yard? Guster’s not going to let him leave the place today, so why dont you stay with him?”
“Yessum,” I said. Because I was just twelve; to me that great big crepe knot dangling from the front door of Mr de Spain’s bank signified only waste: another holiday when school was suspended for an indefinite time; another holiday piled on top of one we already had, when the best, the hardest holiday user in the world couldn’t possibly use two of them at once, when it could have been saved and added on to the end of the one we already had when the little Riddell boy either died or got well or anyway they started school again. Or better still: just to save it for one of those hopeless days when Christmas is so long past you have forgotten it ever was, and it looks like summer itself has died somewhere and will never come again.
Because I was just twelve; I would have to be reminded that the longest school holiday in the world could mean nothing to the people which that wreath on the bank door freed for one day from work. And I would have to be a lot older than twelve before I realised that that wreath was not the myrtle of grief, it was the laurel of victory; that in that dangling chunk of black tulle and artificial flowers and purple ribbons was the eternal and deathless public triumph of virtue itself proved once more supreme and invincible.
I couldn’t even know now what I was looking at. Oh yes, I went to town, not quite as soon as Mother and Uncle Gavin were out of sight, but close enough. So did Aleck Sander. We could hear Guster calling us both a good while after we had turned the corner, both of us going to look at the wreath on the closed bank door and seeing a lot of other people too, grown people, come to look at it for what I know now was no braver reason than the one Aleck Sander and I had. And when Mr de Spain came to town as he always did just before nine oclock and got his mail from the postoffice like he always did and let himself into the back door of the bank with his key like he always did because the back door always stayed locked, we — I couldn’t know that the reason he looked exactly like nothing had happened was because that was exactly the way he had to come to town that morning to have to look. That he had to get up this morning and shave and dress and maybe practise in front of the mirror a while in order to come to the Square at the time he always did so everybody in Jefferson could see him doing exactly as he always did, like if there was grief and trouble anywhere in Jefferson that morning, it was not his grief and trouble, being an orphan and unmarried; even to going on into the closed bank by the back door as if he still had the right to.
Because I know now that we — Jefferson — all knew that he had lost the bank. I mean, whether old Mr Will Varner ran Mr Flem Snopes out of Jefferson too after this, Mr de Spain himself wouldn’t stay. In a way, he owed that not just to the memory of his dead love, his dead mistress; he owed that to Jefferson too. Because he had outraged us. He had not only flouted the morality of marriage which decreed that a man and a woman cant sleep together without a certificate from the police, he had outraged the economy of marriage which is the production of children, by making public display of the fact that you can be barren by choice with impunity; he had outraged the institution of marriage twice: not just his own but the Flem Snopes’s too. So they already hated him twice: once for doing it, once for not getting caught at it for eighteen years. But that would be nothing to the hatred he would get if, after his guilty partner had paid with her life for her share of the crime, he didn’t even lose that key to the back door of the bank to pay for his.
We all knew that. So did he. And he knew we knew. And we in our turn knew he knew we did. So that was all right. He was finished, I mean, he was fixed. His part was set. No: I was right the first time; and now I know that too. He was done, ended. That shot had finished him too and now what he did or didn’t do either didn’t matter any more. It was just Linda now; and when I was old enough I knew why none of us expected that day that old Mr Varner would come charging out of Mr Snopes’s house with the same pistol maybe seeking more blood, if for no other reason than that there would have been no use in it. Nor were we surprised when (after a discreet interval of course, for decorum, the decorum of bereavement and mourning) we learned that ‘for business reasons and health’ Mr de Spain had resigned from the bank and was moving out West (he actually left the afternoon of the funeral, appeared at the grave — alone and nobody to speak to him except to nod — with a crape armband which was of course all right since the deceased was the wife of his vice president, and then turned from the grave when we all did except that he was the first one and an hour later that afternoon his Buick went fast across the Square and into the Memphis highway with him in it and the back full of baggage) and that his bank stock — not his house; Ratliff said that even Flem Snopes didn’t have that much nerve: to buy the house too the same day he bought the bank stock — was offered for sale, and even less surprised that (even more discreetly) Mr Snopes had bought it.
It was Linda now. And now I know that the other people, the grown people, who had come to look at that wreath on the bank door for exactly the same reason that Aleck Sander and I had come to look at it, had come only incidentally to look at the wreath since they had really come for exactly the same reason Aleck Sander and I had really come: to see Linda Snopes when Mother and Uncle Gavin brought her home even if mine and Aleck Sander’s reason was to see how much Mrs Snopes’s killing herself would change the way Linda looked so that we would know how we would look if Mother and Guster ever shot themselves. It was Linda because I know now what Uncle Gavin believed then (not knew: believed: because he couldn’t have known because the only one that could have told him would have been Mrs Snopes herself and if she had told him in that note she gave me that afternoon before she was going to commit suicide, he would have stopped her or tried to because Mother anyway would have known it if he had tried to stop her and failed), and not just Uncle Gavin but other people in Jefferson too. So now they even forgave Mrs Snopes for the eighteen years of carnal sin, and now they could even forgive themselves for condoning adultery by forgiving it, by reminding themselves (one another too I reckon) that if she had not been an abomination before God for eighteen years, she wouldn’t have reached the point where she would have to choose death in order to leave her child a mere suicide for a mother instead of a whore.
Oh yes, it was Linda. She had the whole town on her side now, the town and the county and everybody who ever heard of her and Mr de Spain or knew or even suspected or just guessed anything about the eighteen years, to keep any part of the guessing or suspecting or actual knowing (if there was any
, ever was any) from ever reaching her. Because I know now that people really are kind, they really are; there are lots of times when they stop hurting one another not just when they want to keep on hurting but even when they have to; even the most Methodist and Baptist of the Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians — all right, Episcopals too: — the car coming at last with Linda in the front seat between Mother and Uncle Gavin; across the Square and on to Linda’s house so that Aleck Sander and I had plenty of time to be waiting at the corner to flag Uncle Gavin when he came back.
“I thought Guster and your mother told both of you to stay home this morning,” he said.
“Yes sir,” we said. We went home. And he didn’t eat any dinner either: just trying to make me eat, I dont know why. I mean, I dont know why all grown people in sight believe they have to try to persuade you to eat whether you want to or not or even whether they really want to try to persuade you or not, until at last even Father noticed what was going on.
“Come on,” he told me. “Either eat it or leave the table. I dont want to lie to your mother when she comes home and asks me why you didn’t eat it and I can always say you left suddenly for Texas.” Then he said, “What’s the matter, you too?” because Uncle Gavin had got up, right quick, and said,
“Excuse me,” and went out; yes, Uncle Gavin too; Mr de Spain was finished now as far as Jefferson was concerned and now we — Jefferson — could put all our mind on who was next in sight, what else the flash of that pistol had showed up like when you set off a flashlight powder in a cave; and one of them was Uncle Gavin. Because I know now there were people in Jefferson then who believed that Uncle Gavin had been her lover too, or if he hadn’t he should have been or else not just the whole Jefferson masculine race but the whole masculine race anywhere that called itself a man, ought to be ashamed.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 493
