Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  He didn’t see or hear of the poet for two days. But the poet was still in town. Amos Crain saw him and came and told Roger. It seems that Amos happened to come to the house for something, because that was the only way anybody could have got to Roger to tell him anything for two days and nights. “I heard that typewriter before I crossed the creek,” Amos says. “I see that blue dressing-sacque at the hotel yesterday,” he says.

  That night, while Roger was at work, Anne came down the stairs. She looked in the office door. “I’m going to meet him,” she said.

  “Will you tell him to come back?” Roger said. “Will you tell him I sent the message?”

  “No,” Anne said.

  And the last thing she heard when she went out and when she came back an hour later and went upstairs and locked her door (Roger was sleeping on the sleeping-porch now, on an army cot) was the typewriter.

  And so life went on in its old, pleasant, happy way. They saw one another often, sometimes twice a day after Anne quit coming down to breakfast. Only, a day or so after that, she missed the sound of the typewriter; maybe she missed being kept awake by it. “Have you finished it?” she said. “The story?”

  “Oh. No. No, it’s not finished yet. Just resting for a day or so.” Bull market in typewriting, you might say.

  It stayed bullish for several days. He had got into the habit of going to bed early, of being in his cot on the sleeping-porch when Anne came back into the house. One night she came out onto the sleeping-porch, where he was reading in bed. “I’m not going back again,” she said. “I’m afraid to.”

  “Afraid of what? Aren’t two children enough for you? Three, counting me.”

  “I don’t know.” It was a reading lamp and her face was in the shadow. “I don’t know.” He turned the light, to shine it on her face, but before it got to her face she turned, running. He got there just in time to have the door banged in his face. “Blind! Blind!” she said beyond the door. “Go away! Go away!”

  He went away, but he couldn’t get to sleep. So after a while he took the metal shade off the reading lamp and jimmied the window into the room where the children slept. The door from here into Anne’s room wasn’t locked. Anne was asleep. The moon was getting down then, and he could see her face. He hadn’t made any noise, but she waked anyway, looking up at him, not moving. “He’s had nothing, nothing. The only thing he remembers of his mother is the taste of sherbet on Sunday afternoon. He says my mouth tastes like that. He says my mouth is his mother.” She began to cry. She didn’t move, face-up on the pillow, her arms under the sheet, crying. Roger sat on the edge of the bed and touched her and she flopped over then, with her face down against his knee, crying.

  They talked until about daylight. “I don’t know what to do. Adultery wouldn’t get me — anybody — into that place where he lives. Lives? He’s never lived. He’s—” She was breathing quiet, her face turned down, but still against his knee — him stroking her shoulder. “Would you take me back?”

  “I don’t know.” He stroked her shoulder. “Yes. Yes. I’d take you back.”

  And so the typewriting market picked up again. It took a spurt that night, as soon as Anne got herself cried off to sleep, and the market held steady for three or four days, without closing at night, even after Pinkie told him how the telephone was out of fix and he found where the wires were cut and knows where he can find the scissors that did it when he wants to. He doesn’t go to the village at all, even when he had a free ride. He would spend half a morning sitting by the road, waiting for somebody to pass that would bring him back a package of tobacco or sugar or something. “If I went to the village, he might have left town,” he said.

  On the fifth day, Amos Crain brought him his mail. That was the day the rain came up. There was a letter for Anne. “He evidently doesn’t want my advice on this,” he said to himself. “Maybe he has already sold it.” He gave the letter to Anne. She read it, once.

  “Will you read it?” she said.

  “I wouldn’t care to,” he said.

  But the typing market is still steady, so that when the rain came up this afternoon, he had to turn on the light. The rain was so hard on the house that he could watch his fingers (he used two or three of them) hitting the keys without hearing a sound. Pinkie didn’t come, so after a while he quit and fixed a tray and took it up and left it on a chair outside Anne’s door. He didn’t stop to eat, himself.

  It was after dark when she came down the first time. It was still raining. He saw her cross the door, going fast, in a raincoat and a rubber hat. He caught her as she opened the front door, with the rain blowing in. “Where are you going?” he said.

  She tried to jerk her arm loose. “Let me alone.”

  “You can’t go out in this. What is it?”

  “Let me alone. Please.” She jerked her arm, pulling at the door which he was holding.

  “You can’t. What is it? I’ll do it. What is it?”

  But she just looked at him, jerking at her arm and at the door knob. “I must go to the village. Please, Roger.”

  “You can’t do that. At night, and in all this rain.”

  “Please. Please.” He held her. “Please. Please.” But he held her, and she let the door go and went back up stairs. And he went back to the typewriter, to this market still going great guns.

  He is still at it at midnight. This time Anne has on a bathrobe. She stands in the door, holding to the door. Her hair is down. “Roger,” she says. “Roger.”

  He goes to her, fast for a fat man; maybe he thinks she is sick. “What? What is it?”

  She goes to the front door and opens it; the rain comes in again. “There,” she says. “Out there.”

  “What?”

  “He is. Blair.”

  He draws her back. He makes her go to the office, then he puts on his raincoat and takes the umbrella and goes out. “Blair!” he calls. “John!” Then the shade on the office window goes up, where Anne has raised it and carried the desk lamp to the window and turned the light out-doors, and then he sees Blair, standing in the rain, without any hat, with his blue coat like it was put on him by a paper-hanger, with his face lifted toward Anne’s window.

  And here we are again: the bald husband, the rural plute, and this dashing blade, this home-wrecking poet. Both gentlemen, being artists: the one that doesn’t want the other to get wet; the other whose conscience won’t let him wreck the house from inside. Here we are, with Roger trying to hold one of these green silk, female umbrellas over himself and the poet too, jerking at the poet’s arm.

  “You damned fool! Come in the house!”

  “No.” His arm gives a little as Roger jerks at it, but the poet himself doesn’t move.

  “Do you want to drown? Come on, man!”

  “No.”

  Roger jerks at the poet’s arm, like jerking at the arm of a wet saw-dust doll. Then he begins to yell at the house: “Anne! Anne!”

  “Did she say for me to come in?” the poet says.

  “I — Yes. Yes. Come in the house. Are you mad?”

  “You’re lying,” the poet says. “Let me alone.”

  “What are you trying to do?” Roger says. “You can’t stand here like this.”

  “Yes, I can. You go on in. You’ll take cold.”

  Roger runs back to the house; they have an argument first because Roger wants the poet to keep the umbrella and the poet won’t do it. So Roger runs back to the house. Anne is at the door. “The fool,” Roger says. “I can’t—”

  “Come in!” Anne calls. “John! Please!” But the poet has stepped out of the light and vanished. “John!” Anne calls. Then she began to laugh, staring at Roger from between her hair brushing at her hair with her hands. “He — he looked so f — funny. He I — looked so—” Then she was not laughing and Roger had to hold her up. He carried her upstairs and put her to bed and sat with her until she could stop crying. Then he went back to the office. The lamp was still at the window, and when he moved it the light
went across the lawn and he saw Blair again. He was sitting on the ground, with his back against a tree, his face raised in the rain toward Anne’s window. Roger rushed out again, but when he got there, Blair was gone. Roger stood under the umbrella and called him for a while, but he never got any answer. Maybe he was going to try again to make the poet take the umbrella. So maybe he didn’t know as much about poets as he thought he did. Or maybe he was thinking about Pope. Pope might have had an umbrella.

  They never saw the poet again. This one, that is. Because this happened almost six months ago, and they still live there. But they never saw this one. Three days later, Anne gets the second letter, mailed from the village. It is a menu card from the Elite Café, or maybe they call it the Palace. It was already autographed by the flies that eat there, and the poet had written on the back of it. Anne left it on Roger’s desk and went out, and then Roger read it.

  It seems that this was the shot. The one that Roger had always claimed to be waiting for. Anyway, the magazines that don’t have any pictures took the poem, stealing it from one another while the interest or whatever it was ate up the money that the poet never got for it. But that was all right, too, because by that time Blair was dead.

  Amos Crain’s wife told them how the poet had left town. And a week later Anne left too. She went up to Connecticut to spend the rest of the summer with her mother and father, where the children were. The last thing she heard when she left the house was the typewriter.

  But it was two weeks after Anne left before Roger finished it, wrote the last word. At first he wanted to put the poem in too, this poem on the menu card that wasn’t about freedom, either, but he didn’t. Conscience, maybe he called it, put over the old haymaker, and Roger took it standing, like a little man, and sent off the poem for the magazines to jaw over, and tied up the papers he had written and sent them off too. And what was it he had been writing? Him, and Anne, and the poet. Word for word, between the waiting spells to find out what to write down next, with a few changes here and there, of course, because live people do not make good copy, the most interesting copy being gossip, since it mostly is not true.

  So he bundled the pages up and sent them off and they sent him the money. It came just in time, because the winter was coming and he still owed a balance on Blair’s hospital and funeral. So he paid that, and with the rest of the money he bought Anne a fur coat and himself and the children some winter underwear.

  Blair died in September. Anne and the children were still away when he got the wire, three or four days late, since the next batch of them had not arrived yet. So here he is, sitting at his desk, in the empty house, with the typewriting all finished, holding the wire in his hand. “Shelley,” he says. “His whole life was a not very successful imitation of itself. Even to the amount of water it took.”

  He didn’t tell Anne about the poet until after the fur coat came. “Did you see that he . . .” Anne said.

  “Yes. He had a nice room, in the sun. A good nurse. The doctor didn’t want him to have a special nurse at first. Damn butcher.”

  Sometimes when a man thinks about them making poets and artists and such pay these taxes which they say indicates that a man is free, twenty-one, and capable of taking care of himself in this close competition, it seems like they are obtaining money under false pretenses. Anyway, here’s the rest of it, what they did next.

  He reads the book, the story, to her, and her not saying anything until he had finished. “So that’s what you were doing,” she said.

  He doesn’t look at her, either; he is busy evening the pages, getting them smooth again. “It’s your fur coat,” he said.

  “Oh,” she says. “Yes. My fur coat.”

  So the fur coat comes. And what does she do then? She gave it away. Yes. Gave it to Mrs. Crain. Gave it to her, and her in the kitchen, churning, with her hair in her face, brushing her hair back with a wrist that looked like a lean ham. “Why, Miz Howes,” she says. “I caint. I reely caint.”

  “You’ll have to take it,” Anne says. “We — I got it under false pretenses. I don’t deserve it. You put bread into the ground and reap it; I don’t. So I can’t wear a coat like this.”

  And they leave it there with Mrs. Crain and they go back home, walking. Only they stop in broad daylight, with Mrs. Crain watching them from the window, and go into a clinch on their own account. “I feel better,” Anne says.

  “So do I,” Roger says. “Because Blair wasn’t there to see Mrs. Crain’s face when you gave her that coat. No freedom there, or equality either.”

  But Anne is not listening. “Not to think,” she says, “that he . . . to dress me in the skins of little slain beasts. . . . You put him in a book, but you didn’t finish it. You didn’t know about that coat, did you? God beat you, that time, Roger.”

  “Ay,” Roger says. “God beats me lots of times. But there’s one thing about it. Their children are bigger than ours, and even Mrs. Crain can’t wear my underclothes. So that’s all right.”

  Sure. That was all right. Because it was Christmas soon, and then spring; and then summer, the long summer, the long days.

  The Brooch

  THE TELEPHONE WAKED him. He waked already hurrying, fumbling in the dark for robe and slippers, because he knew before waking that the bed beside his own was still empty, and the instrument was downstairs just opposite the door beyond which his mother had lain propped upright in bed for five years, and he knew on waking that he would be too late because she would already have heard it, just as she heard everything that happened at any hour in the house.

  She was a widow, he the only child. When he went away to college she went with him; she kept a house in Charlottesville, Virginia, for four years while he graduated. She was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. Her husband had been a travelling man who came one summer to the town with letters of introduction: one to a minister, the other to her father. Three months later the travelling man and the daughter were married. His name was Boyd. He resigned his position within the year and moved into his wife’s house and spent his days sitting in front of the hotel with the lawyers and the cotton-planters — a dark man with a gallant swaggering way of removing his hat to ladies. In the second year, the son was born. Six months later, Boyd departed. He just went away, leaving a note to his wife in which he told her that he could no longer bear to lie in bed at night and watch her rolling onto empty spools the string saved from parcels from the stores. His wife never heard of him again, though she refused to let her father have the marriage annulled and change the son’s name.

  Then the merchant died, leaving all his property to the daughter and the grandson who, though he had been out of Fauntleroy suits since he was seven or eight, at twelve wore even on weekdays clothes which made him look not like a child but like a midget; he probably could not have long associated with other children even if his mother had let him. In due time the mother found a boys’ school where the boy could wear a round jacket and a man’s hard hat with impunity, though by the time the two of them removed to Charlottesville for these next four years, the son did not look like a midget. He looked now like a character out of Dante — a man a little slighter than his father but with something of his father’s dark handsomeness, who hurried with averted head, even when his mother was not with him, past the young girls on the streets not only of Charlottesville but of the little lost Mississippi hamlet to which they presently returned, with an expression of face like the young monks or angels in fifteenth-century allegories. Then his mother had her stroke, and presently the mother’s friends brought to her bed reports of almost exactly the sort of girl which perhaps even the mother might have expected the son to become not only involved with but to marry.

  Her name was Amy, daughter of a railroad conductor who had been killed in a wreck. She lived now with an aunt who kept a boarding-house — a vivid, daring girl whose later reputation was due more to folly and the caste handicap of the little Southern town than to badness and which at the last was doubtless
more smoke than fire; whose name, though she always had invitations to the more public dances, was a light word, especially among the older women, daughters of decaying old houses like this in which her future husband had been born.

  So presently the son had acquired some skill in entering the house and passing the door beyond which his mother lay propped in bed, and mounting the stairs in the dark to his own room. But one night he failed to do so. When he entered the house the transom above his mother’s door was dark, as usual, and even if it had not been he could not have known that this was the afternoon on which the mother’s friends had called and told her about Amy, and that his mother had lain for five hours, propped bolt upright, in the darkness, watching the invisible door. He entered quietly as usual, his shoes in his hand, yet he had not even closed the front door when she called his name. Her voice was not raised. She called his name once:

  “Howard.”

  He opened the door. As he did so the lamp beside her bed came on. It sat on a table beside the bed; beside it sat a clock with a dead face; to stop it had been the first act of his mother when she could move her hands two years ago. He approached the bed from which she watched him — a thick woman with a face the color of tallow and dark eyes apparently both pupil-less and iris-less beneath perfectly white hair. “What?” he said. “Are you sick?”

  “Come closer,” she said. He came nearer. They looked at one another. Then he seemed to know; perhaps he had been expecting it.

  “I know who’s been talking to you,” he said. “Those damned old buzzards.”

  “I’m glad to hear it’s carrion,” she said. “Now I can rest easy that you won’t bring it into our house.”

  “Go on. Say, your house.”

  “Not necessary. Any house where a lady lives.” They looked at one another in the steady lamp which possessed that stale glow of sickroom lights. “You are a man. I don’t reproach you. I am not even surprised. I just want to warn you before you make yourself ridiculous. Don’t confuse the house with the stable.”