Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  With the unlighted cigarette in his fingers he thought at first that he would pass on. But instead he paused and looked down at the child. It sat in the path at the woman’s feet, surrounded by tiny leaden effigies of men, some erect and some prone. The overturned and now empty basket lay at one side. Then the Judge saw that the effigies were Roman soldiers in various stages of dismemberment — some headless, some armless and legless — scattered about, lying profoundly on their faces or staring up with martial and battered inscrutability from the mild and inscrutable dust. On the exact center of each of the child’s insteps was a small scar. There was a third scar in the palm of its exposed hand, and as the Judge looked down with quiet and quizzical bemusement, the child swept flat the few remaining figures and he saw the fourth scar. The child began to cry.

  “Shhhhhhhhh,” the woman said. She glanced up at the Judge, then she knelt and set the soldiers up. The child cried steadily, with a streaked and dirty face, strong, unhurried, passionless, without tears. “Look!” the woman said, “See? Here! Here’s Pilate too! Look!” The child ceased. Tearless, it sat in the dust, looking at the soldiers with an expression as inscrutable as theirs, suspended, aldermanic, and reserved. She swept the soldiers flat. “There!” she cried in a fond, bright voice, “see?” For a moment longer the child sat. Then it began to cry. She took it up and sat on the bench, rocking it back and forth, glancing up at the Judge. “Now, now,” she said. “Now, now.”

  “Is he sick?” the Judge said.

  “Oh, no. He’s just tired of his toys, as children will get.” She rocked the child with an air fond and unconcerned. “Now, now. The gentleman is watching you.”

  The child cried steadily. “Hasn’t he other toys?” the Judge said.

  “Oh, yes. So many that I don’t dare walk about the house in the dark. But he likes his soldiers the best. An old gentleman who has lived here a long time, they say, and is quite wealthy, gave them to him. An old gentleman with a white mustache and that kind of popping eyes that old people have who eat too much; I tell him so. He has a footman to carry his umbrella and overcoat and steamer rug, and he sits here with us for more than an hour, sometimes, talking and breathing hard. He always has candy or something.” She looked down at the child, her face brooding and serene. It cried steadily. Quizzical, bemused, the Judge stood, looking quietly down at the child’s scarred, dirty feet. The woman glanced up and followed his look. “You are looking at his scars and wondering how he got them, aren’t you? The other children did it one day when they were playing. Of course they didn’t know they were going to hurt him. I imagine they were as surprised as he was. You know how children are when they get too quiet.”

  “Yes,” the Judge said. “I had a son too.”

  “You have? Why don’t you bring him here? I’m sure we would be glad to have him play with our soldiers too.”

  The Judge’s teeth glinted quietly. “I’m afraid he’s a little too big for toys.” He took the photograph from the briefcase. “This was my son.”

  The woman took the picture. The child cried steady and strong. “Why, it’s Howard. Why, we see him every day. He rides past here every day. Sometimes he stops and lets us ride too. I walk beside to hold him on,” she added, glancing up. She showed the picture to the child. “Look! See Howard on his pony? See?” Without ceasing to cry, the child contemplated the picture, its face streaked with tears and dirt, its expression detached, suspended, as though it were living two distinct and separate lives at one time. She returned the picture. “I suppose you are looking for him.”

  “Ah,” the Judge said behind his momentary teeth. He replaced the picture carefully in the briefcase, the unlighted cigarette in his fingers.

  The woman moved on the bench, gathering her skirts in with invitation. “Won’t you sit down? You will be sure to see him pass here.”

  “Ah,” the Judge said again. He looked at her, quizzical, with the blurred eyes of the old. “It’s like this, you see. He always rides the same pony, you say?”

  “Why, yes.” She looked at him with grave and tranquil surprise.

  “And how old would you say the pony is?”

  “Why, I. . . . It looks just the right size for him.”

  “A young pony, you would say then?”

  “Why . . . yes. Yes.” She watched him, her eyes wide.

  “Ah,” the Judge said again behind his faint still teeth. He closed the briefcase carefully. From his pocket he took a half dollar. “Perhaps he is tired of the soldiers too. Perhaps with this. . . .”

  “Thank you,” she said. She did not look again at the coin. “Your face is so sad. There: when you think you are smiling it is sadder than ever. Aren’t you well?” She glanced down at his extended hand. She did not offer to take the coin. “He’d just lose it, you see. And it’s so pretty and bright. When he is older, and can take care of small playthings. . . . He’s so little now, you see.”

  “I see,” the Judge said. He put the coin back into his pocket. “Well, I think I shall—”

  “You wait here with us. He always passes here. You’ll find him quicker that way.”

  “Ah,” the Judge said. “On the pony, the same pony. You see, by that token, the pony would have to be thirty years old. That pony died at eighteen, six years unridden, in my lot. That was twelve years ago. So I had better get on.”

  And again it was quite unpleasant. It should have been doubly so, what with the narrow entrance and the fact that, while the other time he was moving with the crowd, this time he must fight his way inch by inch against it. “But at least I know where I am going,” he thought, beneath his crushed hat, his stick and briefcase dragging at his arms; “which I did not seem to know before.” But he was free at last, and looking up at the clock on the courthouse, as he never failed to do on descending his office stairs, he saw that he had a full hour before supper would be ready, before the neighbors would be ready to mark his clocklike passing.

  “I shall have time to go the cemetery,” he thought, and looking down at the raw and recent excavation, he swore with fretful annoyance, for some of the savage clods had fallen or been thrown upon the marble slab beside it. “Damn that Pettigrew,” he said. “He should have seen to this. I told him I wanted the two of them as close as possible, but at least I thought that he. . . .” Kneeling, he tried to remove the earth which had fallen upon the slab. But it was beyond his strength to do more than clear away that which partially obscured the lettering: Howard Allison II. April 3, 1903. August 22, 1913, and the quietly cryptic Gothic lettering at the foot: Auf Wiedersehen, Little Boy. He continued to smooth, to stroke the letters after the earth was gone, his face bemused, quiet, as he spoke to the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll, “You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it. I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all the immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him.” His face broke, myriad, quizzical, while his hand moved lightly upon the quiet lettering. “No. I do not require that. To lie beside him will be sufficient for me. There will be a wall of dust between us: that is true, and he is already dust these twenty years. But some day I shall be dust too. And—” he spoke now firmly, quietly, with a kind of triumph: “who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?”

  Now it was late. “Probably they are setting their clocks back at this very moment,” he thought, pacing along the street toward his home. Already he should have been hearing the lawn mower, and then in the instant of exasperation at Jake, he remarked the line of motor cars before his gate and a sudden haste came upon him. But not so much but what, looking at the vehicle at the head of the line, he cursed again. “Damn that Pettigrew! I told him, in the presence of wi
tnesses when I signed my will, that I would not be hauled feet first through Jefferson at forty miles an hour. That if he couldn’t find me a decent pair of horses. . . . I am a good mind to come back and haunt him, as Jake would have me do.”

  But the haste, the urgency, was upon him. He hurried round to the back door (he remarked that the lawn was freshly and neatly trimmed, as though done that day) and entered. Then he could smell the flowers faintly and hear the voice; he had just time to slip out of his overcoat and pajamas and leave them hanging neatly in the closet, and cross the hall into the odor of cut flowers and the drone of the voice, and slip into his clothes. They had been recently pressed, and his face had been shaved too. Nevertheless they were his own, and he fitted himself to the olden and familiar embrace which no iron could change, with the same lascivious eagerness with which he shaped his limbs to the bedclothes on a winter night.

  “Ah,” he said to the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll, “this is best, after all. An old man is never at home save in his own garments: his own old thinking and beliefs; old hands and feet, elbow, knee, shoulder which he knows will fit.”

  Now the light vanished with a mute, faint, decorous hollow sound which drove for a fading instant down upon him the dreadful, macabre smell of slain flowers; at the same time he became aware that the droning voice had ceased. “In my own house too,” he thought, waiting for the smell of the flowers to fade; “yet I did not once think to notice who was speaking, nor when he ceased.” Then he heard or felt the decorous scuffing of feet about him, and he lay in the close dark, his hands folded upon his breast as he slept, as the old sleep, waiting for the moment. It came. He said quietly aloud, quizzical, humorous, peaceful, as he did each night in his bed in his lonely and peaceful room when a last full exhalation had emptied his body of waking and he seemed for less than an instant to look about him from the portal of sleep, “Gentlemen of the Jury, you may proceed.”

  Black Music

  THIS IS ABOUT Wilfred Midgleston, fortune’s favorite, chosen of the gods. For fifty-six years, a clotting of the old gutful compulsions and circumscriptions of clocks and bells, he met walking the walking image of a small, snuffy, nondescript man whom neither man nor woman had ever turned to look at twice, in the monotonous shopwindows of monotonous hard streets. Then his apotheosis soared glaring, and to him at least not brief, across the unfathomed sky above his lost earth like that of Elijah of old.

  I found him in Rincon, which is not large; less large even than one swaybacked tanker looming above the steel docks of the Universal Oil Company and longer than the palm- and abode-lined street paved with dust marked by splayed naked feet where the violent shade lies by day and the violent big stars by night.

  “He came from the States,” they told me. “Been here twenty-five years. He hasn’t changed at all since the day he arrived, except that the clothes he came in have wore out and he hasn’t learned more than ten words of Spanish.” That was the only way you could tell that he was an old man, that he was getting along: he hadn’t learned to speak hardly a word of the language of the people with whom he had lived twenty-five years and among whom it appeared that he intended to die and be buried. Appeared: he had no job: a mild, hopelessly mild man who looked like a book-keeper in a George Ade fable dressed as a tramp for a Presbyterian social charade in 1890, and quite happy.

  Quite happy and quite poor. “He’s either poor, or he’s putting up an awful front. But they can’t touch him now. We told him that a long time ago, when he first come here. We said, ‘Why don’t you go on and spend it, enjoy it? They’ve probably forgot all about it by now.’ Because if I went to the trouble and risk of stealing and then the hardship of having to live the rest of my life in a hole like this, I’d sure enjoy what I went to the trouble to get.”

  “Enjoy what?” I said.

  “The money. The money he stole and had to come down here. What else do you reckon he would come down here and stay twenty-five years for? just to look at the country?”

  “He doesn’t act and look very rich,” I said.

  “That’s a fact. But a fellow like that. His face. I don’t guess he’d have judgment enough to steal good. And not judgment enough to keep it, after he got it stole. I guess you are right. I guess all he got out of it was the running away and the blame. While somebody back there where he run from is spending the money and singing loud in the choir twice a week.”

  “Is that what happens?” I said.

  “You’re damned right it is. Some damn fellow that’s too rich to afford to be caught stealing sets back and leaves a durn fool that never saw twenty-five hundred dollars before in his life at one time, pull his chestnuts for him. Twenty-five hundred seems a hell of a lot when somebody else owns it. But when you have got to pick up overnight and run a thousand miles, paying all your expenses, how long do you think twenty-five hundred will last?”

  “How long did it last?” I said.

  “Just about two years, by God. And then there I—” He stopped. He glared at me, who had paid for the coffee and the bread which rested upon the table between us. He glared at me. “Who do you think you are, anyway? Wm. J. Burns?”

  “I don’t think so. I meant no offense. I just was curious to know how long his twenty-five hundred dollars lasted him.”

  “Who said he had twenty-five hundred dollars? I was just citing an example. He never had nothing, not even twenty-five hundred cents. Or if he did, he hid it and it’s stayed hid ever since. He come here sponging on us white men, and when we got tired of it he took to sponging on these Spigs. And a white man has got pretty low when he’s got so stingy with his stealings that he will live with Spiggotties before he’ll dig up his own money and live like a white man.”

  “Maybe he never stole any money,” I said.

  “What’s he doing down here, then?”

  “I’m down here.”

  “I don’t know you ain’t run, either.”

  “That’s so,” I said. “You don’t know.”

  “Sure I don’t. Because that’s your business. Every man has got his own private affairs, and no man respects them quicker than I do. But I know that a man, a white man, has got to have durn good reason. . . . Maybe he ain’t got it now. But you can’t tell me a white man would come down here to live and die without no reason.”

  “And you consider that stealing money is the only reason?”

  He looked at me, with disgust and a little contempt. “Did you bring a nurse with you? Because you ought to have, until you learn enough about human nature to travel alone. Because human nature, I don’t care who he is nor how loud he sings in church, will steal whenever he thinks he can get away with it. If you ain’t learned that yet, you better go back home and stay there where your folks can take care of you.”

  But I was watching Midgleston across the street. He was standing beside a clump of naked children playing in the shady dust: a small, snuffy man in a pair of dirty drill trousers which had not been made for him. “Whatever it is,” I said, “it doesn’t seem to worry him.”

  “Oh. Him. He ain’t got sense enough to know he needs to worry about nothing.”

  Quite poor and quite happy. His turn to have coffee and bread with me came at last. No: that’s wrong. I at last succeeded in evading his other down-at-heel compatriots like my first informant; men a little soiled and usually unshaven, who were unavoidable in the cantinas and coffee shops, loud, violent, maintaining the superiority of the white race and their own sense of injustice and of outrage among the grave white teeth, the dark, courteous, fatal, speculative alien faces, and had Midgleston to breakfast with me. I had to invite him and then insist. He was on hand at the appointed hour, in the same dirty trousers, but his shirt was now white and whole and ironed, and he had shaved. He accepted the meal without servility, without diffidence, without eagerness. Yet when he raised the handleless bowl I watched his hands tremble so that for a time he could not make junction with his lips. He saw me watching his hands and he looked at my f
ace for the first time and I saw that his eyes were the eyes of an old man. He said, with just a trace of apology for his clumsiness: “I ain’t et nothing to speak of in a day or so.”

  “Haven’t eaten in two days?” I said.

  “This hot climate. A fellow don’t need so much. Feels better for not eating so much. That was the hardest trouble I had when I first come here. I was always a right hearty eater back home.”

  “Oh,” I said. I had meat brought then, he protesting. But he ate the meat, ate all of it. “Just look at me,” he said. “I ain’t et this much breakfast in twenty-five years. But when a fellow gets along, old habits are hard to break. No, sir. Not since I left home have I et this much for breakfast.”

  “Do you plan to go back home?” I said.

  “I guess not; no. This suits me here. I can live simple here. Not all cluttered up with things. My own boss (I used to be an architect’s draughtsman) all day long. No. I don’t guess I’ll go back.” He looked at me. His face was intent, watchful, like that of a child about to tell something, divulge itself. “You wouldn’t guess where I sleep in a hundred years.”

  “No. I don’t expect I could. Where do you sleep?”

  “I sleep in that attic over that cantina yonder. The house belongs to the Company, and Mrs. Widrington, Mr. Widrington’s wife, the manager’s wife, she lets me sleep in the attic. It’s high and quiet, except for a few rats. But when in Rome, you got to act like a Roman, I say. Only I wouldn’t name this country Rome; I’d name it Ratville. But that ain’t it.” He watched me. “You’d never guess it in the world.”

  “No,” I said. “I’d never guess it.”

  He watched me. “It’s my bed.”

  “Your bed?”

  “I told you you’d never guess it.”