Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Permit me,” he said. He took the box and struck a match. “You’re fortunate to have escaped with just that.” He indicated my sling.

  “Yes, sir. If it hadn’t been for my leg, I’d have got the knife in my ribs instead of my arm.”

  “Your leg?”

  “I keep it propped on a chair beside the bed, so I can reach it easily. He stumbled over it and waked me. Otherwise he’d have stuck me like a pig.”

  “Oh,” he said. He dropped the match and brooded again with his stubborn bewilderment. “And yet, his is not the face of an assassin in the dark. There is a forthrightness in it, a — a — what shall I say? a sense of social responsibility, integrity, that . . . And you say that you — I beg your pardon; I do not doubt your word; it is only that — Yet the girl is indubitably dead; it was he who discovered her and was with her until she died and saw her buried. He heard the man laugh once, in the dark.”

  “But you cannot slash a stranger’s arm simply because you heard a laugh in the dark, sir. The poor devil is crazy with his own misfortunes.”

  “Perhaps so,” the padre said. “He told me that he has other proof, something incontrovertible; what, he would not tell me.”

  “Then let him produce it. If I were in his place now . . .”

  He brooded, his hands clasped on the table. “There is a justice in the natural course of events. . . . My dear sir, are you accusing Providence of a horrible and meaningless practical joke? No, no; to him who has sinned, that sin will come home to him. Otherwise . . . God is at least a gentleman. Forgive me: I am not — You understand how this comes home to me, in this unfortunate time when we already have so much to reproach ourselves with. We are responsible for this.” He touched the small metal cross on his tunic, then he swept his arm in a circular gesture that shaped in the quiet room between us the still and sinister darkness in which the fine and resounding words men mouthed so glibly were the vampire’s teeth with which the vampire fed. “The voice of God waking His servants from the sloth into which they have sunk. . . .”

  “What, padre?” I said. “Is the damn thing making a dissenter of you too?”

  He mused again, his face heavy in the candle light. “That the face of a willful shedder of blood, of an assassin in the dark? No, no; you cannot tell me that.”

  I didn’t try. I didn’t tell him either my belief that only necessity, the need for expedition and silence, had reduced Jotham to employing a knife, an instrument of any kind; that what he wanted was my throat under his hands.

  He had gone home on his leave, to that neat little dovecote beside the lock, and at once he found something strained in its atmosphere and out of tune. That was last summer, about the time I was completing my course at the Observers’ School.

  Simon appeared to be oblivious of the undercurrent, but Jotham had not been home long before he discovered that every evening about dusk Corinthia quitted the house for an hour or so, and something in her manner, or maybe in the taut atmosphere of the house itself, caused him to question her. She was evasive, blazed suddenly out at him in anger which was completely unlike her at all, then became passive and docile. Then he realized that the passiveness was secretive, the docility dissimulation; one evening he surprised her slipping away. He drove her back to the house, where she took refuge in her room and locked the door, and from a window he thought he caught a glimpse of the man disappearing beyond a field. He pursued, but found no one. For an hour after dusk he lay in a nearby coppice, watching the house, then he returned. Corinthia’s door was still locked and old Simon filled the house with his peaceful snoring.

  Later something waked him. He sat up in bed, then sprang to the floor and went to the window. There was a moon and by its light he saw something white flitting along the towpath. He pursued and overtook Corinthia, who turned like a vicious small animal at the edge of the coppice where he had lain in hiding. Beyond the towpath a punt lay at the bank. It was empty. He grasped Corinthia’s arm. She raged at him; it could not have been very pretty. Then she collapsed as suddenly and from the tangled darkness of the coppice behind them a man’s laugh came, a jeering sound that echoed once across the moonlit river and ceased. Corinthia now crouched on the ground, watching him, her face like a mask in the moonlight. He rushed into the coppice and beat it thoroughly, finding nothing. When he emerged the punt was gone. He ran down to the water, looking this way and that. While he stood there the laugh came again, from the shadows beneath the other shore.

  He returned to Corinthia. She sat as he had left her, her loosened hair about her face, looking out across the river. He spoke to her, but she did not reply. He lifted her to her feet. She came docilely and they returned to the cottage. He tried to talk to her again, but she moved stonily beside him, her loosened hair about her cold face. He saw her to her room and locked the door himself and took the key back to bed with him. Simon had not awakened. The next morning she was gone, the door still locked.

  He told Simon then and all that day they sought her, assisted by the neighbors. Neither of them wished to notify the police, but at dusk that day a constable appeared with his notebook, and they dragged the lock, without finding anything. The next morning, just after dawn, Jotham found her lying in the towpath before the door. She was unconscious, but showed no physical injury. They brought her into the house and applied their spartan, homely remedies, and after a time she revived, screaming. She screamed all that day until sunset. She lay on her back screaming, her eyes wide open and perfectly empty, until her voice left her and her screaming was only a ghost of screaming, making no sound. At sunset she died.

  He had now been absent from his battalion for a hundred and twelve days. God knows how he did it; he must have lived like a beast, hidden, eating when he could, lurking in the shadow with every man’s hand against him, as he sought through the entire B.E.F. for a man whose laugh he had heard one time, knowing that the one thing he could surely count on finding would be his own death, and to be foiled on the verge of success by an artificial leg propped on a chair in the dark.

  How much later it was I don’t know. The candle was lighted again, but the man who had awakened me was bending over the cot, between me and the light. But despite the light, it was a little too much like that night before last; I came out of sleep upstanding this time, with my automatic. “As you were,” I said. “You’ll not—” Then he moved back and I recognized the padre. He stood beside the table, the light falling on one side of his face and chest. I sat up and put the pistol down. “What is it, padre? Do they want me again?”

  “He wants nothing,” the padre said. “Man cannot injure him further now.” He stood there, a portly figure that should have been pacing benignantly in a shovel hat in green lanes between summer fields. Then he thrust his hand into his tunic and produced a flat object and laid it on the table. “I found this among Jotham Rust’s effects which he gave me to destroy, an hour ago,” he said. He looked at me, then he turned and went to the door, and turned again and looked at me.

  “Is he — I thought it was to be at dawn.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I must hurry back.” He was either looking at me or not. The flame stood steady above the candle. Then he opened the door. “May God have mercy on your soul,” he said, and went out.

  I sat in the covers and heard him blunder on in the darkness, then I heard the motorcycle splutter into life and die away. I swung my foot to the floor and rose, holding on to the chair on which the artificial leg rested. It was chilly; it was as though I could feel the toes even of the absent leg curling away from the floor, so I braced my hip on the chair and reached the flat object from the table and returned to bed and drew the blanket about my shoulders. My wrist watch said three o’clock.

  It was a photograph, a cheap thing such as itinerant pho tographers turn out at fairs. It was dated at Abingdon in June of the summer just past. At that time I was lying in the hospital talking to George, and I sat quite still in the blankets, looking at the photograph, because it was my own
face that looked back at me. It had a quality that was not mine: a quality vicious and outrageous and unappalled, and beneath it was written in a bold sprawling hand like that of a child: “To Everbe Corinthia” followed by an unprintable phrase, yet it was my own face, and I sat holding the picture quietly in my hand while the candle flame stood high and steady above the wick and on the wall my huddled shadow held the motionless photograph. In slow and gradual diminishment of cold tears the candle appeared to sink, as though burying itself in its own grief. But even before this came about, it began to pale and fade until only the tranquil husk of the small flame stood unwinded as a feather above the wax, leaving upon the wall the motionless husk of my shadow. Then I saw that the window was gray, and that was all. It would be dawn at Pop too, but it must have been some time, and the padre must have got back in time.

  I told him to find it and kill it. The dawn was cold; on these mornings the butt of the leg felt as though it were made of ice. I told him to. I told him.

  Mistral

  I

  IT WAS THE last of the Milanese brandy. I drank, and passed the bottle to Don, who lifted the flask until the liquor slanted yellowly in the narrow slot in the leather jacket, and while he held it so the soldier came up the path, his tunic open at the throat, pushing the bicycle. He was a young man, with a bold lean face. He gave us a surly good day and looked at the flask a moment as he passed. We watched him disappear beyond the crest, mounting the bicycle as he went out of sight.

  Don took a mouthful, then he poured the rest out. It splattered on the parched earth, pocking it for a fading moment. He shook the flask to the ultimate drop. “Salut,” he said, returning the flask. “Thanks, O gods. My Lord, if I thought I’d have to go to bed with any more of that in my stomach.”

  “It’s too bad, the way you have to drink it,” I said. “Just have to drink it.” I stowed the flask away and we went on, crossing the crest. The path began to descend, still in shadow. The air was vivid, filled with sun which held a quality beyond that of mere light and heat, and a sourceless goat bell somewhere beyond the next turn of the path, distant and unimpeded.

  “I hate to see you lugging the stuff along day after day,” Don said. “That’s the reason I do. You couldn’t drink it, and you wouldn’t throw it away.”

  “Throw it away? It cost ten lire. What did I buy it for?”

  “God knows,” Don said. Against the sun-filled valley the trees were like the bars of a grate, the path a gap in the bars, the valley blue and sunny. The goat bell was somewhere ahead. A fainter path turned off at right angles, steeper than the broad one which we were following. “He went that way,” Don said.

  “Who did?” I said. Don was pointing to the faint mark of bicycle tires where they had turned into the fainter path.

  “See.”

  “This one must not have been steep enough for him,” I said.

  “He must have been in a hurry.”

  “He sure was, after he made that turn.”

  “Maybe there’s a haystack at the bottom.”

  “Or he could run on across the valley and up the other mountain and then run back down that one and up this one again until his momentum gave out.”

  “Or until he starved to death,” Don said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Did you ever hear of a man starving to death on a bicycle?”

  “No,” Don said. “Did you?”

  “No,” I said. We descended. The path turned, and then we came upon the goat bell. It was on a laden mule cropping with delicate tinkling jerks at the pathside near a stone shrine. Beside the shrine sat a man in corduroy and a woman in a bright shawl, a covered basket beside her. They watched us as we approached.

  “Good day, signor,” Don said. “Is it far?”

  “Good day, signori,” the woman said. The man looked at us. He had blue eyes with dissolving irises, as if they had been soaked in water for a long time. The woman touched his arm, then she made swift play with her fingers before his face. He said, in a dry metallic voice like a cicada’s:

  “Good day, signori.”

  “He doesn’t hear any more,” the woman said. “No, it is not far. From yonder you will see the roofs.”

  “Good,” Don said. “We are fatigued. Might one rest here, signora?”

  “Rest, signori,” the woman said. We slipped our packs and sat down. The sun slanted upon the shrine, upon the serene, weathered figure in the niche and upon two bunches of dried mountain asters lying there. The woman was making play with her fingers before the man’s face. Her other hand in repose upon the basket beside her was gnarled and rough. Motionless, it had that rigid quality of unaccustomed idleness, not restful so much as quite spent, dead. It looked like an artificial hand attached to the edge of the shawl, as if she had donned it with the shawl for conventional complement. The other hand, the one with which she talked to the man, was swift and supple as a prestidigitator’s.

  The man looked at us. “You walk, signori,” he said in his light, cadenceless voice.

  “Sì,” we said. Don took out the cigarettes. The man lifted his hand in a slight, deprecatory gesture. Don insisted. The man bowed formally, sitting, and fumbled at the pack. The woman took the cigarette from the pack and put it into his hand. He bowed again as he accepted a light. “From Milano,” Don said. “It is far.”

  “It is far,” the woman said. Her fingers rippled briefly. “He has been there,” she said.

  “I was there, signori,” the man said. He held the cigarette carefully between thumb and forefinger. “One takes care to escape the carriages.”

  “Yes.” Don said. “Those without horses.”

  “Without horses,” the woman said. “There are many. Even here in the mountains we hear of it.”

  “Many,” Don said. “Always whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.”

  “Sì,” the woman said. “Even here I have seen it.” Her hand rippled in the sunlight. The man looked at us quietly, smoking. “It was not like that when he was there, you see,” she said.

  “I am there long time ago, signori,” he said. “It is far.” He spoke in the same tone she had used, the same tone of grave and courteous explanation.

  “It is far,” Don said. We smoked. The mule cropped with delicate, jerking tinkles of the bell. “But we can rest yonder,” Don said, extending his hand toward the valley swimming blue and sunny beyond the precipice where the path turned. “A bowl of soup, wine, a bed?”

  The woman watched us across that serene and topless rampart of the deaf, the cigarette smoking close between thumb and finger. The woman’s hand flickered before his face. “Sì,” he said; “sì. With the priest: why not? The priest will take them in.” He said something else, too swift for me. The woman removed the checked cloth which covered the basket, and took out a wineskin. Don and I bowed and drank in turn, the man returning the bows.

  “Is it far to the priest’s?” Don said.

  The woman’s hand flickered with unbelievable rapidity. Her other hand, lying upon the basket, might have belonged to another body. “Let them wait for him there, then,” the man said. He looked at us. “There is a funeral today. You will find him at the church. Drink, signori.”

  We drank in decorous turn, the three of us. The wine was harsh and sharp and potent. The mule cropped, its small bell tinkling, its shadow long in the slanting sun, across the path. “Who is it that’s dead, signora?” Don said.

  “He was to have married the priest’s ward after this harvest,” the woman said; “the banns were read and all. A rich man, and not old. But two days ago, he died.”

  The man watched her lips. “Tchk. He owned land, a house: so do I. It is nothing.”

  “He was rich,” the woman said. “Because he was both young and fortunate, my man is jealous of him.”

  “But not now,” the man said. “Eh, signori?”

  “To live is good,” Don said. He said, e bello.

  “It is good,” the man said; he also said, bello.

  “He was to have
married the priest’s niece, you say,” Don said.

  “She is no kin to him,” the woman said. “The priest just raised her. She was six when he took her, without people, kin, of any sort. The mother was workhouse-bred. She lived in a hut on the mountain yonder. It was not known who the father was, although the priest tried for a long while to persuade one of them to marry her for the child’s—”

  “One of which?” Don said.

  “One of those who might have been the father, signor. But it was never known which one it was, until in 1916. He was a young man, a laborer; the next day we learned that the mother had gone too, to the war also, for she was never seen again by those who knew her until one of our boys came home after Caporetto, where the father had been killed, and told how the mother had been seen in a house in Milano that was not a good house. So the priest went and got the child. She was six then, brown and lean as a lizard. She was hidden on the mountain when the priest got there; the house was empty. The priest pursued her among the rocks and captured her like a beast: she was half naked and without shoes and it winter time.”

  “So the priest kept her,” Don said. “Stout fellow.”

  “She had no people, no roof, no crust to call hers save what the priest gave her. But you would not know it. Always with a red or a green dress for Sundays and feast days, even at fourteen and fifteen, when a girl should be learning modesty and industry, to be a crown to her husband. The priest had told that she would be for the church, and we wondered when he would make her put such away for the greater glory of God. But at fourteen and fifteen she was already the brightest and loudest and most tireless in the dances, and the young men already beginning to look after her, even after it had been arranged between her and him who is dead yonder.”