Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (100 page)

“But her people,” Don said. “That.…”

“What do you want to eat?” the waiter said.

“Maybe they’re married now,” Don said.

“What do you want to eat?” the waiter said.

“Maybe she loves him now,” Don said.

“All right. What do you want to eat?”

“You speak United States well,” Don said.

“I lived there. Chicago. Sixteen years. What do you want to eat?”

“Maybe he was good to her,” Don said. “Even if he was an Italian, a foreigner—”

“He was a German,” the waiter said. “We dont like Germans in this country. What do you want to eat?”

“The ragout,” Don said.

So we ate the food that was good anywhere in Europe or anywhere else that French was spoken; we mounted the clean stairs to the little clean room beneath the steep pitch of the eaves and lay between the clean chill sheets which even of themselves smelled of snow. Then the sun came from beyond the opposite mountains now, slanting long in the valley and then shortening, not driving the shadow of the mountains before it but obliterating the shadow as the rising tide consumes a beach, until when we left the inn the valley was full of sun. And I thought again how even when this country was level it was level by separate steps because when we looked back from the station, the village was once more beneath us; we looked down into the true valley from what we had merely taken for the valley, standing again in snow, between the crumpled ramparts of snow which the plows had hurled up into a gutter funnelling not only the shining rails but the living light and sun too into the black orifice of the tunnel until soon the tunnel too would overflow and the mountain it pierced dissolve in fierce light.

We entered the buvette. “Gruss Gott, messieurs,” Don said. Again a voice answered “Gruss Gott” and we drank the beer blond as the morning itself in the glass mugs, which back home in America to drink before noon and that only on a hot day was as unheard of as bringing a dishpan of peas with you to shell during church, yet which all through the Tyrol we had drunk for breakfast too. Then the train came and Don said, “Gruss Gott, messieurs,” and again somebody answered and we went out into the bright unbearable snow-glare and walked along the train to our third-class carriage and turned and looked back and except for the snow and the sun it might have been last night again: the quiet mountain peasant faces though not so many as last night and all men now and they might have been there anyway as people in American little towns meet through trains, and the guide named Hiller who had come out of the church last night standing before the steps of a first-class carriage beside the woman with the Paris hat and the fur coat and the face which was a peasant’s face too for a while yet because it would take more than just six months to efface the mountains and the valley and the village and the spring festivals on the green if there was a green and if people in Switzerland held spring festivals, and the cows driven back and forth to the high pastures and milked for the cheese and the milk chocolate or whatever it was Swiss girls did.

Then we heard the little wan frantic horns too and she took something from her purse and gave it to the man and got into the train and we got in too, the train moving, already picking up speed as it passed the man and he turned and flipped the twinkling coin, into the plow-seethed snow-bank moving faster still as it crashed into the blackness of the tunnel which after the snow was like a blow across the eyes and then crashed from blackness into fierce light like another blow, going faster and faster, lurching and swinging on the curves and crashing again from dazzle to blackness and blackness to dazzle while steadily on either hand the peaks in their pastel gradations from that unbearable radiance swung with the tremendous deliberation of ruminant celestial mastodons under the mounting morning and into the blaze of noon and through and past it and on into one last fading swoop that even we could tell was now downgrade, and it was there: the whole long slope of the
Côte d’Or
, the shelving roof-pitch of a continent slanting away into the
drowsing haze where Paris was, and the last white peak slid slowly past the window and was gone.

“I’m glad of it,” I said.

“Yes,” Don said. “I dont want anymore snow forever. I dont want to see any snow for a long time.”

   “It was just the same,” the man said. “The people in Europe have hated and feared Germans for so long that nobody remembers how it was.”

ABBREVIATIONS
:

This story appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
, CCVII (29 Sept. 1934), 12–13, 80, 81, as the first in a promised series. Printed in brackets on page 9 is one passage from the typescript which did not appear in the
Post
and which Faulkner did not restore when he rewrote the story to become the first chapter of his novel
The Unvanquished
(1938). There were thirteen other passages from the typescript which did not appear in the
Post
, but all were very brief and not important to the story’s form or content. In the novel, Faulkner enlarged the first half of the story substantially, deepening it, enriching the prose style, and elaborating the Sartoris and Strother family relationships as he laid the groundwork for the material to follow. He filled in the portrait of John Sartoris and heightened the reader’s awareness of the war, both the fighting in the field and the preparations at home to protect the livestock and the silver from the imminent
arrival of Yankee troops. Faulkner also reinforced the sense of the chapter’s structure by using numerals to divide it into five parts.

Repository: ROUM, ms. fragments and 23-pp. ts.

This story appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
, CCVII (13 Oct. 1934), 16–17, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89. There were nearly two dozen minor changes made between the typescript and the magazine version. Thirteen of them were indentions for new paragraphs, and a space was inserted in the text just before the departure for Memphis. The Yankees became just “they” rather than “They,” and “one another” was changed to “each other.” Ringo’s “Great God, Bayard,” and a Yankee’s “goddamn” were both deleted, but two new phrases were introduced into the story about the rose cuttings from Mrs. Compson which Granny took on the trip. The last two lines of the story were deleted. When Faulkner revised the story to become the second chapter of
The Unvanquished
, he amplified the comic material about Granny’s stratagems to protect the chest of silver and wrote half a dozen important pages on Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy McCaslin which prefigured his treatment of them in
Go Down, Moses
. He also described in some detail their part in the raising of John Sartoris’s regiment. He added to Bayard and Ringo’s search for the stolen mules, to their meeting with Sartoris, and to the subsequent attack on the Yankees. Faulkner emphasized the division in the story, just before the departure for Memphis, by numbering the first and second parts. Where the
Post
version had used the expletive “son,” Faulkner changed it to “son of a bitch.” He also restored the two last lines of the story, which are printed here in brackets.

Repository: ROUM, 10-pp. ms. and 32-pp. ts.

This story was published in
The Saturday Evening Post
, CCVII (3 Nov. 1934), 18–19, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78. The deletions from the typescript were minimal. The expletive “Great God” was cut at both occurrences. When Drusilla spoke of the life a Southern woman could expect before the war, she said “you settled down forever more while your husband got children on your body for you.…” Both the husband and “on your body” disappeared in the printed version, as did “on your body” once more in the same context fourteen lines later—presumably too physical a phrase for a family magazine. The initial letters of pronouns referring to the hated Yankees were reduced from upper to lower case in eleven places, and twenty-six indentions produced new paragraphs. There were five minor changes in phrasing. When Faulkner revised the story to become the third
chapter of
The Unvanquished
, he extended Granny’s foray by two days and expanded the material about the war’s destruction of the railroad, supplying a seven-page passage in which a joust between Federal and Confederate locomotives would stand as contrast to the grim realities of warfare which Bayard and Ringo would experience later. He also introduced numbers to divide the chapter into three parts.

Repository: ROUM, 11-pp. ms. and 35-pp. ts.

On 4 October 1934 Faulkner sent a story called “Drusilla” to
The Saturday Evening Post
. On 26 November he wrote his agent, Morton Goldman, that he would get around to rewriting it as soon as he finished typing his new novel,
Pylon
.
¹
But the
Post
did not buy the story, and Goldman sold it to
Scribner’s Magazine
, where it appeared without alteration in Volume XCVII (April 1935), 193–200, under the new title “Skirmish at Sartoris.” When Faulkner revised it as Chapter VI of
The Unvanquished
, he deleted material which had provided background for
Scribner’s
readers. He cut one sentence establishing Granny’s death and deleted a sixteen-line recapitulation of major events in “Raid” together with Drusilla’s appeal to be allowed to ride with John Sartoris’s troop. He also shortened the time elapsed since “Raid” from two years to eighteen months and altered the divisions of the story. After the flashback he made a new section with the number 2 and then changed what had been part II, beginning with the arrival of Mrs. Habersham, to part 3.