Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (99 page)

“Wait,” I said. “He fell. So what? Come on. I’m hungry. Let’s go eat.”

“Maybe he didn’t fall,” Don said. “Maybe a friend pushed him. Maybe he jumped off on a bet. We came to Europe to observe customs. You never saw a funeral just like this, even in Alabama.”

“All right,” I said. “Suppose he—” But we were too close now; you could never tell, at least in the parts of Europe we had seen, just what language anyone spoke or just how many different ones he didn’t quite speak. So we went on toward what still looked like an empty church because all the people that we could see were on the outside of it, the heads turning and watching us quietly as we came up.

“Messieurs,” Don said. “Mesdames.”

“Messieurs,” one of them said after an instant—a little man, fiftyish and snuffy: a mail carrier if I ever saw one, just as there had been a mail carrier with his leather pouch outside the Alabama jail that day. The other faces still turned and still watched us and then watched us no more when we stopped among them where we could see into the church too—a stone cubicle not much bigger than a sentry-box in which the soft cold candle-light, washing upward and already fading about the plaster agony of the shadowy lifesize crucifix, seemed to compound again the icy chill which our leaving the snow had seemed to establish, and the candles and the coffin and the woman kneeling beside it in a hat and a fur coat that were not bought in any Swiss city either, and the priest busy at something at the back with an air exactly like that of a busy and abstracted housewife, and the other man, a peasant with the mark of the mountains on him even if he hadn’t got it driving cattle back and forth to pasture at dawn and dusk, standing in a pew near the aisle halfway back. Then even as we looked into the church the priest crossed behind the coffin and paused beneath the crucifix, his robes hushed and sibilant as if the cold faint washing of the candlelight had become audible, and genuflected, curtsied almost as little girls are taught to do, and was gone, somewhere out the back or the side, and the other man came out of the pew and came up the aisle toward us. And I saw no movement, I merely felt it, but when the man reached the door and came out there were only three of us there—myself and Don and the little postman—as the man stooped and picked up an ice axe with five or six pitons strung on it and passed us without looking at us at all and was gone too. And the reason the postman was still there was because Don was holding him by the arm and I remembered how someone had told us before we left Paris that you could say anything you wanted to any European but dont put your hand on him and without doubt this one would be a servant of the State too and it would be the same as violating a gendarme or a station agent. I could not see the others at all, I could just feel them watching from the darkness while Don held the postman like a little boy caught stealing apples in front of the open door beyond which the woman in the fur coat and the Paris hat still knelt with her forehead against the coffin as if she had gone to sleep. Don’s French was all right. It never always
said what he thought it was, but nobody ever failed to understand him.

“That dead,” he said. “He fell? He stroked himself to the foot of the mountain?”

“Yes, monsieur,” the postman said.

“And the woman who grieves. The milady from Paris. His wife?”

“Yes, monsieur.” The postman jerked at the arm Don held.

“I see,” Don said. “A stranger. A client for the climbing. A rich French. Or perhaps an English milord who buys his wife’s clothes in Paris.”

Now the postman was struggling. “No! No French! No English! Of this village! Assez, monsieur! Assez donc, alors—”

But Don held him. “Not the guide who came out of the church and picked up the ice axe and the little bijoux. The other one. Who remains. The husband who is dead in the box.”

But now it was too fast for me. The postman was free now and for a while even Don stood there like a silo with a hose of water or maybe of light gravel being played on it, until the postman ceased and flung up one arm and was gone too and only Don stood there blinking down at me, the half-Zeiss looking like a child’s toy on his chest.

“Of this village,” he said. “Her husband. And a Paris hat and I’ll bet you that coat cost thirty or forty thousand francs.”

“I heard that too,” I said. “What was he saying when he really pulled the plug?”

“That they were both guides, the one that came out and got the ice axe, and the one in the coffin. And all three of them are of this village, the Paris hat and that fur coat too. And she and the one in the coffin are married and one day last fall all four of them climbed—”

“All four of who?” I said.

“Yes,” Don said. “So would I.—climbed the mountain and you dont often hear of professional guides falling but this one managed it somehow and it was too late to get him then until the snow went away again in the spring and so the snow went away again and yesterday his wife came back and this afternoon they fetched him in so his wife can depart again but as there is no train until tomorrow morning suppose we avail ourselves of her to satisfy our curiosity
or better still mind our own business and so goodnight messieurs.”

“Came back from where?” I said. “Going back to where?”

“Yes,” Don said. “So do I. Let’s go find the inn.”

It could be in but one direction since there was but one street and we were already in it. And presently we saw it, our hobnails clashing in the chill air of full night now, the chill mountain air which was like ice water. But spring was in it: that vivid newness of spring which caused the lamps in the scattered windows rising tier by invisible tier against the slopes to flicker and tremble still even as distance had made them do. The door was two steps down from the street. Don opened it and we entered the low bright warm clean room with its stove and wooden tables and benches and the woman who knitted as always in the little cage at the end of the bar and the mountain men at the bar whose faces turned as one face when we entered.

“Gruss Gott, messieurs,” Don said.

“You just say that in Austria,” I said.

But (again after an infinitesimal moment) a voice said, “Gruss Gott.”

“No you dont,” Don said. We slipped our rucksacks and sat at one of the tables. Then the woman said, knitting rapidly, her blondined and marcelled head bent over her knitting, not even looking up when she spoke:

“Messieurs?”

“Deux bieres, Madame,” Don said.

“Brune ou blonde, Messieurs?”

“Blonde, Madame. And we would sleep too.”

“Bon, Messieurs.”

And the beer came too, blond as gold in the glass mugs manufactured like as not in Pittsburgh or Akron or Indianapolis, almost before we were done asking for it, as if, knowing we would be there sooner or later, they had had it ready for us. The waiter even wore a dinner jacket over his apron, maybe the first dinner jacket by geography outside the Peace Palace at Lausanne. He had a few rotten teeth in the face of a handsome consumptive stable-swipe and within the next ten seconds we discovered that he not only spoke better English than we did but, when he forgot to try too hard, better American too.

“Cet mort-la,” Don said. “Cet homme du voisonage qui tomba—”

“So you’re the ones that tried to put the lug on Papa Grignon,” the waiter said.

“On who?” Don said.

“The mayor. Back there at the church.”

“I thought he was the postman,” I said.

The waiter didn’t even glance at me. “You missed the sword and the manure-cart,” he said. “You’re thinking of Hollywood. This is Switzerland.” He never glanced at the rucksacks either. He didn’t need to. He could have spoken a paragraph or a page and said no more.

“Yes,” Don said. “Walking. We like it. The man that fell.”

“All right,” the waiter said. “So what?”

“A guide,” Don said. “With a wife in a Paris hat and a forty-thousand-franc fur coat. Who was there on the mountain with them when he fell. I may have heard of guides falling, but I never heard of one taking his wife along on a professional job, on a climb with a paying client. Because the mayor said there were four of them, and one of them was another guide—”

“All right,” the waiter said. “Brix and his wife and Emil Hiller and the client. It was the day Brix and his wife had set to get married on, after the season was over last fall, after Brix had made all the jack he could while the climbing lasted and there wouldn’t be anything ahead but just the winter to be married in. Only the night before the wedding Brix gets a blue from the client that the client’s already in Zurich and to meet him tomorrow morning. So Brix puts the wedding off and him and Hiller meet the train and the client gets off with the eight or ten thousand francs’ worth of climbing junk Brix and Hiller have helped him buy during the last five years and that afternoon they climb to the Bernardines’ and the next day—”

“The bride,” Don said.

“They took her with them. They held the wedding that morning, like Brix had planned. He had put it off when he got the blue until him and Hiller could climb the client to wherever he wanted to go and then bring him back and put him back on the train again but the first thing the client heard about when he got off the train was the wedding so he took charge of the wedding and—”

“Wait,” Don said. “Wait.”

“He had the jack,” the waiter said. He hadn’t moved anymore. He wasn’t even wiping off the table that didn’t need it as we might have expected. He just stood there. “The Big Shot. Brix and Hiller had been dragging him over the easy climbs around here for the last four or five years, between the times when he would be merging something else for another two million kroner or francs or lire. Not that he couldn’t have done better. He was a little older than you but not much. He didn’t want to. He climbed for a holiday, to get his picture in his hometown paper maybe. And you dont climb for a holiday. You chisel yourself the holiday and spend it and maybe the dough that should have gone on your wife’s teeth too, climbing. And there was the jack, the extra jack, and Brix was probably close enough to marriage by then to have realised he wasn’t going to ever see much more of what he could call spare money. So the Big Shot took charge and they held the wedding and the Big Shot himself gave away the bride and signed the register—”

“Didn’t she have any people?” Don said.

“The married daughter of her mother’s half-sister,” the waiter said. “She lived with them but maybe everybody’s half-first cousin dont marry somebody that has for his boss a man that not only has the jack but is easy with it too as long as he runs the way it is being spent. And so the Big Shot signed the register first and the priest blessed the climb too, up to the Bernardines’ where the Big Shot will give the wedding supper and back home tomorrow for the Big Shot to catch his train to Milan and merge something else, because a little child could make that climb alone almost if the weather just held off. So they climbed to the Bernardines’ that afternoon and the Big Shot gave the wedding supper and the next morning they are on the
glacis
where Brix hadn’t intended to be except that something had gone wrong, the weather probably, they usually say it’s the weather, and maybe they should have stayed holed-up at the Bernardines’ but there was the Big Shot’s train and everybody dont want to dedicate his life to hauling lugs up and down mountains and dont ever intend to want to, and maybe Brix should have left his wife at the Bernardines’ but everybody dont want to get married either and dont ever intend to want to. Anyway the Big Shot is where Brix shouldn’t have taken him, doing whatever it was that Brix and Hiller should have known he would do, and he goes off
the ledge and takes Mrs Brix with him and the two of them take Brix and so there they are: Hiller anchored on the ledge with his end of the rope, and Mrs Brix and then the Big Shot and then Brix at the other end of it, dangling down the ice-face. But at least the Big Shot drops his axe in time to miss Brix with it which is lucky because it’s an overhang that Brix cant reach with his axe and nobody ever pulled up three people swinging clear, at least not around here, and naturally Brix aint going to ask the guy who is paying for the trip to cut the rope just so Hiller can pull up a guide’s wife that was a deadhead and never had any business there anyway. So Brix cuts between himself and the Big Shot and then Hiller pulls up two all right and the next afternoon Mrs Brix and the Big Shot left on the train and after a while the snow—”

“Wait,” Don said. “The bride? the widow?”

“They waited twenty-four hours. The Big Shot laid over a full day. Hiller took them back to the Bernardines’ that afternoon to come down by the road in the morning, and Hiller and one of the brothers went down the
glacis
that night to make a try for Brix. But there was too much snow so Hiller came on down to the village and got some help (the Big Shot was guaranteeing that too. He was offering a good piece of jack for finding Brix now) and when daylight came Hiller and the other boys tried to go in from the bottom. But there was too much snow and would be until it went in the spring so finally even Hiller admitted they would have to wait and so the Big Shot and Mrs Brix took the train. And after a while the snow—”

“But her people,” Don said. “You said she had some people. That—”

“—daughter of her mother’s half-sister and her husband. Or maybe the priest knew. He was at the station that afternoon when she and the Big Shot left. Maybe the half-first cousin and her husband were leaving it to the priest. Or maybe it was the jack again. Or maybe she just couldn’t hear the priest. She didn’t look much like she could hear or see either that afternoon when she got on the train.”

“Nothing?” Don said. “Not anything?”

“Well, she could walk,” the waiter said. “What do you want to eat? the ragout, or do you want some ham and eggs?”

“But she came back,” Don said. “At least she came back.”

“Sure. On the train last night. The snow began to go last month and last week Hiller wired the Big Shot he thought it was O.K. now so she got off the midnight train last night and checked her bag and sat in the station until Hiller showed up at daylight and they went out and found Brix and brought him in and if she gets cold down there at the church tonight she can always go back to the station and sit there until the train goes back tomorrow. What do you want to eat?”