Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (80 page)

In the park, before the gutted pit, above the savage and random refuse of the digging, the broad sign stood upright in all weather, lettered in red on a white ground
Blount Memorial Art Gallery. Windham & Healy, Architects
. He passed it every day, but he never stopped. He would enter the park and see the sign looming suddenly above the clipped green of tended hedges on a knoll, and drive swiftly past. “It’s not for me,” he told himself, alone in his swift and isolated glass cabinet, moving past and on, the sign falling behind; “it’s for the citizens, the city. I will derive nothing from it; not one tittle more than any dweller in a Beale or Gayoso street tenement who has carfare out here.” He would drive on. What calls he made were brief. He would sit in the straight chairs, waiting for the gouty and bed-ridden women to learn of it as he used to wait in the dark closet of his childhood for the sound of the supper bell. Then he would go home, still immune, to supper with his likewise oblivious grandmother and aunt. “It’s nice of the city,” the aunt said. “But I must say, it’s not a bit too soon.” Then she would look at him, her eyes sharp, curious, with a woman’s instinctive affinity for evil. “But what in the world you could have done, have said to them.…”

“Nothing,” he said above his plate. “They did it of their own accord.”

“You mean, you knew nothing about it until they began to break the ground?”

“I knew nothing,” he said. After supper he would go out again, to rush alone along the dim and light-glared asphalt, turning again into the shadowy park, passing the sudden and now indecipherable
loom of the sign, saying to himself, “How could I have said yes? How could I?”

Late one afternoon he stopped his car before the big house where the sick woman lived. He mounted to the same bedroom and found her in the same chair, beneath the same rug, though the cold fireplace was filled with fluted green paper. “I have wondered what has been the matter with you lately,” she said. He told her, sitting forward on the hard, straight chair, talking quietly; she watching his face in the failing light. “I didn’t think you were that rich,” she said. “And I didn’t believe that the city.…”

“Yes,” Blount said. “He is right. Every man has his price. It’s because he is right. There is something about being right that’s better than being courageous or even honorable.”

“So it seems,” the woman said.

“The others. They have parks named for them, and this and that. Because they had the money, the cash, at the right time. It doesn’t matter how they got it. Because there were not many reputable ways in those days to get money in this country; the question is, to have had it. To have had it; do you see? If Grandfather or his father had just done sixty years ago what I did, it would be all right. Do you see?”

“But they didn’t,” the woman said. “But that dont matter. It dont matter.”

“No,” Blount said. “That’s done. It’s all done now. But not too much done. I have enough, Grandmother and I, to cover the work that has been done, to pay the contractor his forfeit. Stop it where it is. Leave the sign too: a monument.”

“Then stop it,” the woman said.

“You mean, cry off?”

“Just take her name off the list. That’s all you have to do. Let him build the gallery. He owes that much to the city. It’s the city’s money he is building it with, that’s digging the hole; dont you know that?”

“No,” Blount said. She had been looking at him. Now her head lay back on the pillow; again her eyes were closed as though she slept.

“You men,” she said. “You poor, fool men.”

“Yes,” Blount said. “Us poor, fool men. But we are just men. If the city let him rob it, I am in a way responsible. But this has
nothing to do with the city. At one time I had myself fooled. I believed that the city would derive from this, not I. But even a man’s self cannot fool itself always. A man’s self, that is. Maybe women are different. But we are just men; we cant help that. So what must I do?”

“I’ve told you. Strike her name off. Or let it stay on. After all, what does it matter? Suppose there were a hundred girls like that there? What would it matter?”

“Yes. She wont like it. She will be sorry. It will be terrible for him.”

“For him?”

“Didn’t you just say, us poor fool men?”

“Go and see him,” the woman said.

“And cry off?”

“You men,” the woman said. Her head lay back on the pillow; her eyes were closed. Her hands, thick, soft, swollen, ringed, lay on the chair-arms. “You poor, fool men.”

Martin’s house was on a knoll in a new subdivision. It was in the Spanish style; a big house, with courts and balconies, looming huge in the twilight. When Blount drove up, the yellow roadster stood under the porte-cochere. He was admitted by a negro in his shirtsleeves, who opened the door and looked out at him with a kind of insolent brusqueness. “I want to see Mr Martin,” Blount said.

“He eating supper now,” the negro said, holding the door. “What you want with him?”

“Get away,” Blount said. He pushed the door back, and entered. “Tell Mr Martin Dr Blount wants to see him.”

“Doctor who?”

“Blount.” The hall was opulent, oppressive, chilly. To the right was a lighted room. “Can I go in there?” Blount said.

“What you want with Mr Martin?” the negro said.

Blount stopped and turned back. “You tell him it’s Dr Blount,” he said. The negro was young, saddle-colored, with a pocked face. “Go on,” Blount said. The negro quit looking at Blount. He went down the hall, toward another lighted passage. Blount entered a huge, raftered drawing room that looked like a window-set in a
furniture store. There were rugs that looked as though they had never been trodden on; furniture and lamps that looked like they had been sent out that morning on approval; dead, still, costly. When Martin entered, he wore the same cheap serge suit. He was in his stocking feet. They did not shake hands. They did not even seat themselves. Blount stood beside a table set with objects which also looked like they had been borrowed or stolen from a shop-window. “I must ask you to let me withdraw from our agreement,” he said.

“You want to back out,” Martin said.

“Yes,” Blount said.

“The contract is let, and the ground broken,” Martin said. “You must have seen that.”

“Yes,” Blount said. He put his hand into his breast. From beyond the door came a swift tap-tap-tapping of hard and brittle heels. The girl entered, already talking.

“I’m guh—” She saw Blount and stopped: a thin girl with tow-colored hair tortured about a small, savagely painted mask, the eyes at once challenging and uncertain; belligerent. Her dress was too red and too long, her mouth too red, her heels too high. She wore ear-rings and carried a cloak of white fur over her arm, though it was only August.

“This here is Dr Blount,” Martin said.

She made no response, no sign at all; her glance lay for a moment upon him, quick, belligerent, veiled, and went on. “I’m gone,” she said. She went on, her heels brittle and hard and swift on the hard floor. Blount heard the voice of the pock-marked negro at the front door: “Where you going tonight?” Then the front door closed. A moment later he heard the car, the yellow roadster. It whined past the windows in second gear, at high speed. From his breast pocket Blount took a sheaf of embossed papers.

“I have here bonds for fifty thousand,” he said. He laid them on the table. Martin had not moved, motionless in his socks on the expensive rug. “Maybe you will take my note for the balance.”

“Why dont you just scratch her name off the list?” Martin said. “Couldn’t nobody prove it on you.”

“I could give you a mortgage on my house,” Blount said. “My grandmother holds the title to it, but I am sure—”

“No,” Martin said. “You’re wasting your money. Take her
name off the list. You can do that. Wont nobody be the wiser. Cant prove nothing on you. Not with your word against mine.”

Blount took up from the table a carved paper-weight of jade. He examined it and put it down and stood for a time, looking down at his hand. He moved, toward the door, with a vague air, as though he had suddenly found himself moving. His face was strained, vague, though quiet. “Nice place you have here,” he said.

“Hit suits us,” Martin said, motionless, shabby, in his gray socks, watching him. Blount’s hat still lay on the chair where he had put it. “You done forgot something,” Martin said. “Your bonds.” Blount returned to the table and took up the bonds. He put them carefully into his breast, his face lowered. Then he moved again.

“Well,” he said, “if I could have done any good by coming, you would not be you. Or I would not be I, and it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

He was half way to his car when the pock-marked negro overtook him. “Here’s your hat,” the negro said. “You forgot it.”

At the corner of Main Street and Madison Avenue the next day the people, the Mississippi and Arkansas farmers, the clerks and stenographers, read the four-inch headlines
CLUBMAN SUICIDE Prominent Memphian Shoots Self in Garage. Scion of old Memphis family takes own life; leaves grandmother and unmarried aunt … Dr Gavin Blount … member of old family … prominent in city’s social life; president of Nonconnah Guards, premier social organization … family well-to-do … can give no reason for
.…

It was a three-day sensation, talked of among one another by the sporting- and gambling-house touts, the stenographers and clerks, the bankers and lawyers and their wives who lived in the fine houses on Sandeman and Blount Avenue; then it was gone, displaced by a state election or something. That was in August. In November the envelope came to Martin’s house number: the embossed card, the crest: the bolled cotton-stalk crossed by sabres, the lettering:
The Nonconnah Guards. December 2, 1930. 10:00 P.M.;
and in a neat clerkly hand:
Miss Laverne Martin and escort
.

As Dr Blount had said, she didn’t have a good time. She returned home before midnight, in a black dress a little too smart, sophisticated, in cut, and found her father, his sock feet propped against the mantel, reading a late edition which carried the names and a blurred flash-light picture of the girls, the debutantes. She entered crying, running, her heels brittle and hard. He took her onto his lap, she still crying with a passionate abjectness; he patted her back. “There now,” he said, patting her back and it jerking and shuddering under the new dress, the sophisticated and costly black lace which had been for those two hours isolated out of and by the white and pastel dresses of the girls from the old houses on Sandeman and Belvedere as though it had clothed a spectre and which would be seen perhaps twice more, glittering, savage and belligerent, at the balls at the Grottoes and the Pete’s Places about the equivocal purlieus and environs of the town. “There now. The fool. The durn fool. We could have done something with this town, me and him.”

On the day the carriage would be due, from daylight on the negro boy would squat beside the hitched droop-eared mule, shivering over the smoldering fire in the December rain beside the road which came up from Mississippi, with wrapped in an oil cloth cape a bouquet the size of a yard broom, and perhaps a hundred yards further up the road Charles Gordon himself sitting his horse in the rain too beneath a bare tree, watching the boy and the road. Then the muddy carriage would come in sight and Gordon would see the bouquet delivered and then he would ride out, bareheaded in the rain, and bow from his saddle before the carriage window, above the fleet soft hand, the soft eyes above the mass of red roses.

This was in 1861, the third time Lewis Randolph had come up from Mississippi in the muddy carriage paved with hot bricks which a footman would remove every few miles and build a fire with the pine knots fetched along for that purpose and reheat, accompanied on the first two occasions by her mother and father both, to receive Gordon’s bouquet on the streaming road and to enter that evening the Nonconnah Guards Armory in Memphis on Gordon’s arm and there to dance schottische and reel and even the new waltz while the starred and striped flag hung unwinded from the balcony where the negro musicians with fiddles and triangles sat. But this time, this December of 1861, only her mother accompanied her because her father was down in Mississippi organising a company of infantry, and the flag now hanging from the musicians’
balcony was the new one, the starred Saint Andrew’s cross, as strange and new as the unsullied gray which the young men now wore in place of the old blue.

The battalion had been organised to go to Mexico—all young men and all bachelors; a man lost his membership automatically by marriage. It was a National Guard unit, but there was also a hierarchate of hereditary and elective social officers, and the Chairman of the Committee, in west Tennessee and north Mississippi at least, ranked any major or captain, Washington, the United States and all, to the contrary notwithstanding. It was formed too late to go to Mexico however so its first deployment at strength took place, not in field equipment on a dusty Texas plain but in the blue-and-gold of full dress in the ball room of a Memphis hotel just before Christmas, with the United States flag hanging from the musicians’ balcony, and repeated itself each year after that, presently in its own armory, until soon the young girls of north Mississippi and west Tennessee were being presented formally to society at those balls and an invitation (or summons) to one of them was a social cachet no less irrevocable than one from Saint James’s or the Vatican.

But at the one in ’61 the men wore gray instead of blue and the new flag hung where the old one had used to hang and a troop train waited in the station to depart at midnight for the East. Lewis Randolph would tell about that ball, to her single listener who in a sense had missed being present himself by only twenty-four hours. She told him about it more than once, though the first time the listener could remember was when he was about six years old—the young men (there were a hundred and four of them) in their new pristine gray beneath the new flag, the gray coats and the hooped gowns turning and swirling while the rain which had turned to snow at dusk whispered and murmured at the high windows—how at half past eleven the music stopped at a signal from Gavin Blount, who was both Chairman of the Committee and major of the battalion, and the floor was cleared—the broad floor beneath the harsh military chandeliers, the battalion drawn up in parade front beneath the flag above which the faces of the negro musicians peered, the girls in their hoops and flowers at the opposite end of the room, the guests—the chaperones, the mothers and aunts and fathers and uncles, and the young men who did not
belong to the Guards—in gilded chairs along the walls. She even made the speech to the six-year-old listener, word for word as Gavin Blount had made it as he leaned easily on his propped sabre in front of the gray battalion, she (Lewis Randolph) standing in the center of the kitchen in the Mississippi house which was already beginning to fall down about their heads, in a calico dress and sunbonnet, leaning on the Yankee musket barrel which they used to poke fires with as Gavin Blount had leaned on his sabre. And as she spoke it seemed to the six-year-old listener that he could see the scene itself, that it was not his mother’s voice but the voice of that young man who was already dead when the listener was born—the words full of bombast and courage and ignorance of that man who had very likely seen powder flash toward his own body and heard the bullet but who had not yet seen war: