“I thought so. By Henry, you young fellows that count on the luck all the time.…”
The other lays his cards down. His hands are gnarled, plow-warped; he handles the cards with a certain deliberation which at first glance appears stiff and clumsy, so that a man would not glance at them again: certainly not a man whose eyes are dim in the first place and a little fuddled with drink in the second. But I doubt if the liquor was for that purpose, if he depended on it alone. I suspect he was as confident of himself, had taken his slow and patient precautions just as he would have got out and practised with an axe before undertaking to clear up a cypress bottom for profit by the stick. “I reckon I still got it,” he says.
The boss has reached for the nails. Now he leans forward. He does it slowly, his trembling hand arrested above the nails. He leans across the table, peering, his movement slowing all the while. It is as though he knows what he will see. It is as though the whole movement were without conviction, as you reach for money in a dream, knowing you are not awake. “Move them closer,” he says. “Damn it, do you expect me to read them from here?” The other does so—the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The boss looks at them. He is breathing hard. Then he sits back and takes in his trembling hand a cold chewed cigar from the table-edge and sucks at it, making shaking contact between cigar and mouth, while the other watches him, motionless, his face lowered a little, not yet reaching for the nails. The boss curses, sucking at the cigar. “Pour me a toddy,” he says.
That’s how he got his start. He sold the store and with his wife and infant daughter he came to town, to the city. And he arrived here at just exactly the right time—the year three A. V. Otherwise the best he could have hoped for would have been another store, where at sixty perhaps he could have retired. But now, at only forty-eight (there is a certain irony that oversees the doings of the great. It’s as though behind their chairs at whatever table they sit there loom leaning and partisan shadows making each the homely and immemorial gesture for fortune and good luck and whose triumphant shout at each coup roars beneath his own exultation, tossing it high—until one day he turns suddenly himself aghast at the sardonic roar), now at forty-eight he was a millionaire, living with the daughter—she was eighteen; his wife had lain ten years now beneath a marble cenotaph that cost twenty thousand dollars among the significant names in the oldest section of the oldest cemetery: he bought the lot at a bankrupt sale—in four or five acres of Spanish bungalow in our newest subdivision, being fetched each morning by his daughter in a lemon-colored roadster doing forty and fifty miles an hour along the avenue to the touched caps of the traffic policemen, in to the barren office where he would sit in his sock feet and read in the Sentinel with cold and biding delusion the yearly list of debutantes at the Chickasaw Guards ball each December.
The Spanish bungalow was recent. The first year they had lived in rented rooms, the second year they moved into—the compulsion of his country rearing—the biggest house he could find nearest the downtown, the street cars and traffic, the electric signs. His wife still insisted on doing her own housework. She still wanted to go back to the country, or, lacking that, to buy one of those tiny, neat, tight bungalows surrounded by infinitesimal lawns and garden plots and aseptic chicken-runs on the highways just beyond the city limits.
But he was already beginning to affirm himself in that picture of a brick house with columns on a broad, faintly dingy lawn of magnolias; he could already tell at a glance the right names—Sandeman, Blount, Heustace—in the newspapers and the city directory. He got the house, paid three prices for it, and it killed his wife. Not the overpurchase of the house, but the watching of that man who heretofore had been superior to all occasions, putting himself with that patient casualness with which he used to hide in the brush near the gate to the big house, in the way of his neighbors, establishing a certain hedge-top armistice with the men while their wives remained cold, turning in and out of the drives in their heavy, slightly outmoded limousines without a glance across the dividing box and privet.
So she died, and he got a couple—Italians—to come in and keep house for him and the girl. Not negroes yet, mind you. He was not ready for them. He had the house, the outward shape and form, but he was not yet certain of himself, not yet ready to affirm in actual practise that conviction of superiority; he would not yet jeopardise that which had once saved him. He had not yet learned that man is circumstance.
The bungalow came five years ago, when he practically gave the house away—he had begun to learn then—and built the new one, the stucco splendor of terraces and patios and wrought iron like the ultimate sublimation of a gasoline station. Perhaps he felt that in this both himself and them—the peasant without past and the black man without future—would have at least a scratch start from very paradox.
This house was staffed by negroes, too many of them; more than he had any use for. He could not bring himself to like them, to be at ease with them: the continuous sad soft murmur of their voices from the kitchen always on the verge of laughter harked him back despite himself, who was saying “Hit aint” for “it is not” and dipping his cheap snuff in the presence of urban politicians and judges and contractors with no subjective qualms whatever, to that day when, feeling the nigger’s teeth and eyeballs in the dusky hall, he tramped with stiff back down the drive from the big house and so out of his childhood forever, paced by the two voices, the one saying “You cannot run” and the other “You cannot cry.”
“So I kept Tony and his wife to look after the niggers,” he told me, “to give them something to do.” Perhaps he believed that. Perhaps he had not even ventured to himself the monstrous shape of his ambition, his delusion. Certainly he had not to the daughter as they drove down town each morning—that was until she was sixteen; within another year one of the negroes was driving him down, since the girl was not up before ten and eleven oclock, what with dancing and riding in cars the better part of the night.
“Who were you with last night?” he would ask her, and she would tell him, with that blank, secret look, who had learned in her seventeen years more about the world, that world divorced from all reality and necessity which women rule and which had killed her mother, than he had in his forty-eight, naming off the names he wanted to hear—Sandeman and Heustace and Blount. And sometimes it was the truth, even that she had met him at a dance. She just neglected to say what dance, what place—the out-of-doors pavilion at West End Gardens, where the scions of Blount and Sandeman and Heustace would go on Saturday nights with bottles of Govelli’s liquor, to pick up stenographers and shop girls. I have seen her there—a thin creature, a little overdressed despite the two months at the Washington convent. Martin took her there himself, with his list of careful addresses culled from the Sentinel—‘Miss So-and-so, daughter of So-and-so, Sandeman Place, home for the holidays’. I like to think of the two of them on that thirty-six hour journey (it was probably, for all his power and all her little urban sophistication derived from the sycophance of clerks in shops, their first Pullman experience) while the world unrolled beyond the drawing-room window with that unforgettable thrill of first journeys, that attenuation of self, that isolation and division when we first assimilate the incontrovertible actuality of the earth’s roundness while gradually but surely our spirit goes down onto four legs again to cling the closer, outfaced by its broken armistice with the horror of space.
They probably never talked to one another about what they were seeing: the new sights, mountains standing remote and profound as the ultimate unknowable into the dwarfed affirmation of the peasant with his lip full of snuff and his list of pencilled addresses and the other peasant with hair of that unmistakable shade of worn sea-grass rope: the badge and pedigree of the red-neck. And wary too, her face, her little painted face. She got quieter and quieter. Here, at home, she had a certain immediacy; she too was equal to any occasion, but in Washington it was as though the sheer accomplishing of distance, of rural ground again, had robbed her of the careful years. I like to t
hink of them making the implacable round of the addresses in a hired car, she silent, watchful, with the beginning in her little vivid shallow face of something dark and inarticulate and profound like you see in the faces of dogs, appearing to less advantage, more hopelessly country than he who had a certain assurance through sheer limitation because he was unaware of it, since women react quicker.
He did all the talking, waiting in the quiet, vaguely cloistral reception rooms while sisters and mothers superior (he decided on a Catholic convent: he had the delusions of a Napoleon, you see; he too could on occasion rise superior to the ancient voices that make up a man, without knowing it) entered with tranquil sibilance, with their serene wimpled unearthly faces. So he left her there: a thin awkward little figure, with her streaked cheeks and her haunted dumb eyes. “Dont you want to be where you can get to know the girls?” he said. “You can make friends with them here, and then you will all come home together for the Ball in the same car.” The Chickasaw Guards ball, he meant. But I’ll tell about that.
So he left her and returned home in the same clothes he had left home in, but with a new tin of snuff. He told me about that: how he had run out and had to make an overnight trip down into Virginia to get another tin. He showed me the tin, chucking it in his hand. “Cost five cents more,” he said, “and cant noways compare with ourn. Not no ways. Why, if I’d a sold a fellow a can of this when I was keeping store, they’d a run me outen the country.” Sitting then he was, in his sock feet, with the Sentinel open at the society page where the first rumors of the Chickasaw ball were beginning to wake.
The yearly ball, the Chickasaw Guards, were institutions. It had been organised and the first ball given in 1861; they—Blounts and Sandemans and Heustaces—wore their new uniforms among the plucked strings, their knapsacks piled in the anteroom; at midnight the troop train left for Virginia. Four years later eighteen of them returned, with the faded roses of that night still buttoned in their worn tunics. For the next fifteen years it was mainly political; it became practically a secret organization, its members scattered about the south and interdict by the Federal government, until the Carpet-Bagger regime slew the golden goose. Then it became social, yet still retaining its military framework as a unit of the National Guard. Thus it was two separate organizations, with a skeleton staff of army officers—a colonel, a major, a captain and a subaltern—who were permitted on sufferance at its principal annual manifestation: the December ball at which the debutantes were presented. The actual hierarchy was social, practically hereditary, arrogating to its officers designations of a gallant, inverted military cast with a serene disregard of military usage. In other words, anybody that wanted to could be colonel of it, while the title of Flag-Corporal inferred in its incumbent a sense of honor like Launcelot’s, a purity of motive like Galahad’s, a pedigree like Man o’ War’s. It served again in the European War, the Sandemans and Blounts and Heustaces in the ranks, including the Flag-Corporal.
He was Doctor Blount. He was a bachelor, about forty. The office had been in his family for thirty-five years; he had held it for twelve on the day when Martin went to see him two weeks after he left his daughter in the Washington school. He didn’t tell me about this himself. Not that he would have minded admitting temporary defeat, but because he knew before hand that he was going to be defeated this first time, perhaps because for the first time in his life he was having to go out and buy something instead of sitting in his office and selling it.
There was nobody he could ask, you see. He knew that his judges and commissioners and such were of no weight here, for all their linen collars. Not that he would have hesitated to use them for this purpose if he could, since, also like Napoleon, he would not have hesitated to make his illusions serve his practical ends, or vice versa if you will. And that’s how a man gains practical knowlege: serving his illusions with his practical ends. By serving his practical ends with material fact he acquires only habit.
So he went to Doctor Blount, the hereditary chairman. There was also invested in him a sort of hereditary practise among old ladies like an inherited legal practise—a matter of consultations regarding diet and various polite ailments at bedsides, with perhaps coffee or a glass of wine served by a negro butler who addressed him as Mister Harrison and asked him how his mother was.
He had an office, though, and he and Martin were facing one another across the desk—the doctor with his thin face and his interrogative gaze behind pince nez on his thin nose, and his thinning hair, and the caller in a cheap unpressed suit, with something of that awkwardness, that alert and dumb foreknowledge of defeat which the daughter had carried about Washington that day.
After a moment Blount said, “Yes? You wanted to see me?”
“I reckon you dont know who I am,” Martin said. It was not interrogatory, not deprecatory, promptive: it was just a statement, a fact of no interest to either of them.
“I cant say I do. Did you wish—”
“My name is Martin.” Blount looked at him. “Dal Martin.” Blount looked at him, his eyebrows raised a little. Then his eyes became blank while Martin watched his face.
“Ah,” Blount said. “I recall the name now. You are a—contractor, isn’t it? I recall seeing your name in the paper associated with the paving of Beauregard avenue. But I am not on the city commission; I am afraid.…” His face cleared. “Ah, I see. You have come to me with regard to the proposed new armory for the Chickasaw Guards. I see. But I—”
“It aint that,” Martin said.
Blount ceased, his eyebrows arched faintly. “Then what—” Then Martin told him. I suspect he told him flat out, in a single bald sentence. And I suspect that for a minute Martin’s heart surged and the leaning shadows behind him leaned nearer yet on an indrawn breath of exultation, because the doctor sat so quiet beyond the desk. “Who were your people, Mr Martin?” Blount said. Martin told him, and about the daughter, Blount listening with that cold interest, with that knowledge of that female world which Martin had not and would never have and which pierced at a single glance his illusion about the girl.
“Ah,” Blount said. “I dont doubt that your daughter is in every way worthy of that high place to which she is obviously destined.” He rose. “That was all you wanted with me?”
Martin did not rise. He watched Blount. “I mean, cash,” he said. “I aint offering you a check.”
“You have it with you?”
“Yes,” Martin said.
“Good day, sir,” Blount said.
Martin did not move. “I’ll double it,” he said.
“I said, good day, sir,” Blount said.
They looked at one another. Martin did not move. Blount pressed the buzzer on the desk, Martin watching his hand. “I reckon you know I can make hit unpleasant for you,” he said. Blount crossed the room and opened the door as the secretary appeared there.
“This gentleman wishes to leave,” he said.
But Martin didn’t give up. I imagine him sitting in his office, his sock feet in the open drawer, his lower lip bulging slowly, for he believed that all men can be led by their lusts. “Hit was the money,” he said. “What use has a durn fellow like that got for money? Now, what can hit be?”
But he didn’t discover that until the next year. The girl was home then, two months after he left her in Washington and a week before the ball. He met her at the station. She got off the train crying and they stood in the train shed, she crying into his overcoat and he patting her back clumsily. “Now, now,” he said; “now, now. Hit dont matter. Hit dont make no difference. You can stay to home effn you’d ruther.”
She looked better; grief, homesickness, pining, had refined her; pining, that innate fear of cities which the peasant loses only when he has cinctured out of a particular city an existence more bucolic, because of readier opportunities, than the one he formerly knew, his bone and flesh knew before it was his bone and flesh. At first Martin believed it was the other girls at the convent who had made her unhappy. “By G
od,” he said, “by God, we’ll show them yet. Be durn if I dont.” The Mother Superior said in her letter that the girl had been quite ill, and she showed it. She looked much better. It was as though for the first time in her life she had faced something from which she could not hide behind that little mask of expensive paint and powder bearing spurious French names and applied after the manner of a Hollywood-smitten waitress in a station restaurant; behind the little urban mannerisms and all that intense and unflagging feminine preoccupation with sheltered trivialities to which, with old female cunning far longer lived and more practical than any of man’s invented tenets, they cling.
But that didn’t last long. Soon she was being seen again with her vivid discontented face at the brief successive night clubs with their spurious New York air—the Chinese Gardens, the Gold Slippers, the Night Boats—but withal and most dominant in her face its expression of unbelief, doubt: the peasant blood that even yet could not quite accept the reality of unlimited charge accounts at lingerie- and fur- and motor car dealers, telling her father that her escorts were Blounts and Sandemans.
He never saw them. He was too busy; he had found what it was that could move that durn fellow that had no use for money. He wouldn’t have cared, anyway, just so they were not bums, the Popeyes and Monks and Reds that he used “just as I would use a mule or a plow. But no bums. I’ll have you seen with no bums,” he told her.
That was his only stricture. He was too busy then; it was in the next year, the late winter, he sitting in the office, his feet in the drawer, thinking about Dr Blount, when all of a sudden he had it. Of course the man could not be moved by personal gain, and then he had it: he would go to him and offer to donate the new armory if his daughter’s name be put on the annual list for the ball.
He had no qualms then, of defeat. He went at once, on foot, not hurrying. It was as though it were all finished, like two compared letters, question and answer, dropped at the same instant into the mail box. He did not think of the other until he turned into the building. I like to think of him, a man you’d hardly notice twice, striding along the street and turning into the building and pausing in midstride for a second while into his face came a flashing illumination, a conviction while the leaning and invisible shades lifted high their triumphant hands. Then he went on again—you would not have known it—and mounted to the tenth floor and entered that office from which he had once been ordered out, and faced the man who had ejected him and made his bald offer in a single phrase: “Put my daughter’s name on the list, and I will build an art gallery and name it for your grandfather that was killed in Forrest’s cavalry command in ’64.”
Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Page 60
