Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (76 page)

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 think 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 God,” 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.”

And now I like to think about Dr Blount. Cant you hear him telling himself “it’s for the city, the citizens; I will derive nothing from it, not one jot more than any dweller in a tenement.” But the very fact that he had to argue the question with himself was an indication. Maybe it was partly because he could not tell the truth about it, yet he could not let the town believe a lie; maybe sometimes he believed it had been a dream, that he had dreamed the irrevocable words; perhaps now and then during that spring he could persuade himself so, thinking
How could I have said yes? How could I?
He had the stuff in him, you see, the old blood, the old sense of honor dead everywhere else in America except in the south and kept alive here by a few old ladies who acquiesced in ’65 but never surrendered.

So one evening—it was the day upon which the matter became incontrovertible, when upon the proposed site the metal sign unveiled its fresh lettering: … “Blount Memorial Art Gallery. Windham and Healy, Architects …” he went to call upon one of them who had for fifteen years been consulting him almost every time she raised a window. They had the stuff too, you see. Not that she advised him to do what he did; she probably laughed at him, with a little sympathy and a little contempt; perhaps that was what he
couldn’t stand— So that evening he came to see Martin. He had aged ten years, Martin said, standing in the floor—he wouldn’t sit—and stating his errand baldly too: “I must ask you to let me withdraw from our agreement.”

“You mean—?” Martin said.

“Yes. Completely. On your part and my own.”

“The contract is let and the ground ready to be broken,” Martin said.

Blount made a short gesture. “I know.” From his inside pocket he took a sheaf of papers. “I have here bonds in the amount of fifty thousand dollars; they are all my own.” He came and laid them on the table at Martin’s hand. “If that is not enough, perhaps you would take my note for whatever the difference will be.”

Martin did not look at the bonds. “No,” he said.

Blount stood beside the table, his face lowered. “I dont think I have made myself clear. I mean—”

“You mean, whether I agree or not, you will take her name offen the ball list?” Blount did not answer. He stood beside the table. “You cant do that. If you did that, I’d have to explain hit all to the contractor, maybe to the newspapers. You hadn’t thought of that, had you?”

“Yes,” Blount said. “Yes, I had thought of that.”

“Then I dont know as there’s ere a thing we can do about hit. Do you?”

“No,” Blount said. He had picked up something from the table, then he put it down and turned, moving toward the door. He looked about the room. “Nice place you have here,” he said.