The Essential Faulkner

  It didn’t take long. There was no time in it. Or rather, we were outside of time; within, not on, that surface, that demarcation between the old where we knew we had not died and the new where the subadar said that we were dead. Beyond the brandished bottles, the blue sleeves and the grimed hands, the faces like masks grimaced into rigid and soundless shouts to frighten children, I saw Comyn again. He came plowing up like a laden ship in a chop sea; beneath his arm was the ancient waiter, to his lips he held the M.P.’s whistle. Then Sartoris swung a chair at the single light.

  It was cold in the street, a cold that penetrated the clothing, the alcohol-distended pores, and murmured to the skeleton itself. The plaza was empty, the lights infrequent and remote. So quiet it was that I could hear the faint water in the fountain. From some distance away came sound, remote too under the thick low sky—shouting, far-heard, on a thin female note like all shouting, even a mob of men, broken now and then by the sound of a band. In the shadow of the wall Monaghan and Comyn held the German on his feet. He was unconscious; the three of them invisible save for the faint blur of the bandage, inaudible save for the steady monotone of Monaghan’s cursing.

  “There should never have been an alliance between Frenchmen and Englishmen,” the subadar said. He spoke without effort; invisible, his effortless voice had an organ quality, out of all proportion to his size. “Different nations should never join forces to fight for the same object. Let each fight for something different; ends that do not conflict, each in his own way.” Sartoris passed us, returning from the fountain, carrying his bulging cap carefully before him, bottom-up. We could hear the water dripping from it between his footsteps. He became one of the blob of thicker shadow where the bandage gleamed and where Monaghan cursed steadily and quietly. “And each after his own tradition,” the subadar said. “My people. The English gave them rifles. They looked at them and came to me: ‘This spear is too short and too heavy: how can a man slay a swift enemy with a spear of this size and weight?’ They gave them tunics with buttons to be kept buttoned; I have passed a whole trench of them squatting, motionless, buried to the ears in blankets, straw, empty sand bags, their faces gray with cold; I have lifted the blankets away from patient torsos clad only in a shirt.

  “The English officers would say to them, ‘Go there and do thus’; they would not stir. Then one day at fall noon the whole battalion, catching movement beyond a crater, sprang from the trench, carrying me and an officer with it. We carried the trench without firing a shot; what was left of us—the officer, I, and seventeen others—lived three days in a traverse of the enemy’s front line; it required a whole brigade to extricate us. ‘Why didn’t you shoot?’ the officer said. ‘You let them pick you off like driven pheasant.’ They did not look at him. Like children they stood, murmurous, alert, without shame. I said to the headman, ‘Were the rifles loaded, O Das?’ Like children they stood, diffident, without shame. ‘O Son of many kings,’ Das said. ‘Speak the truth of thy knowing to the sahib,’ I said. ‘They were not loaded, sahib,’ Das said.”

  Again the band came, remote, thudding in the thick air. They were giving the German drink from a bottle. Monaghan said: “Now. Feel better now?”

  “It iss mine head,” the German said. They spoke quietly, like they were discussing wallpaper.

  Monaghan cursed again. “I’m going back. By God, I—”

  “No, no,” the German said. “I will not permit. You haf already obligated—”

  We stood in the shadow beneath the wall and drank. We had one bottle left. Comyn crashed it, empty, against the wall.

  “Now what?” Bland said.

  “Girls,” Comyn said. “Would ye watch Comyn of the Irish nation among the yellow hair of them like a dog among the wheat?”

  We stood there, hearing the far band, the far shouting. “You sure you feel all right?” Monaghan said.

  “Thanks,” the German said. “I feel goot.”

  “Come on, then,” Comyn said.

  “You going to take him with you?” Bland said.

  “Yes,” Monaghan said. “What of it?”

  “Why not take him on to the A.P.M.? He’s sick.”

  “Do you want me to bash your bloody face in?” Monaghan said.

  “All right,” Bland said.

  “Come on,” Comyn said. “What fool would rather fight than fush? All men are brothers, and all their wives are sisters. So come along, yez midnight fusileers.”

  “Look here,” Bland said to the German, “do you want to go with them?” With his bandaged head, he and the subadar alone were visible, like two injured men among five spirits.

  “Hold him up a minute,” Monaghan told Comyn. Monaghan approached Bland. He cursed Bland. “I like fighting,” he said, in that same monotone. “I even like being whipped.”

  “Wait,” the German said. “Again I will not permit.” Monaghan halted, he and Bland not a foot apart. “I haf wife and son in Bayreuth,” the German said. He was speaking to me. He gave me the address, twice, carefully.

  “I’ll write to her,” I said. “What shall I tell her?”

  “Tell her it iss nothing. You will know.”

  “Yes. I’ll tell her you are all right.”

  “Tell her this life iss nothing.”

  Comyn and Monaghan took his arms again, one on either side. They turned and went on, almost carrying him. Comyn looked back once. “Peace be with you,” he said.

  “And with you, peace,” the subadar said. They went on. We watched them come into silhouette in the mouth of an alley where a light was. There was an arch there, and the faint cold pale light on the arch and on the walls so that it was like a gate and they entering the gate, holding the German up between them.

  “What will they do with him?” Bland said. “Prop him in the corner and turn the light off? Or do French brothels have he-beds too?”

  “Who the hell’s business is that?” I said.

  The sound of the band came, thudding; it was cold. Each time my flesh jerked with alcohol and cold I believed that I could hear it rasp on the bones.

  “Since seven years now I have been in this climate,” the subadar said. “But still I do not like the cold.” His voice was deep, quiet, like he might be six feet tall. It was like when they made him they said among themselves, “Well give him something to carry his message around with.” “Why? Who’ll listen to his message?” “He will. So well give him something to hear it with.”

  “Why don’t you go back to India, then?” Bland said.

  “Ah,” the subadar said. “I am like him; I too will not be baron.”

  “So you clear out and let foreigners who will treat the people like oxen or rabbits come in and take it.”

  “By removing myself I undid in one day what it took two thousand years to do. Is not that something?”

  We shook with the cold. Now the cold was the band, the shouting, murmuring with cold hands to the skeleton, not the ears.

  “Well,” Bland said, “I suppose the English government is doing more to free your people than you could.”

  The subadar touched Bland on the chest, lightly. “You are wise, my friend. Let England be glad that all Englishmen are not so wise.”

  “So you will be an exile for the rest of your days, eh?”

  The subadar jerked his short, thick arm toward the empty arch where Comyn and the German and Monaghan had disappeared. “Did you not hear what he said? This life is nothing.”

  “You can think so,” Bland said. “But, by God, I’d hate to think that what I saved out of the last three years is nothing.”

  “You saved a dead man,” the subadar said serenely. “You will see.”

  “I saved my destiny,” Bland said. “You nor nobody else knows what that will be.”

  “What is your destiny except to be dead? It is unfortunate that your generation had to be the one. It is unfortunate that for the better part of your days you will walk the earth a spirit. But that was your destiny.” From far away came the shouting, o
n that sustained note, feminine and childlike all at once, and then the band again, brassy, thudding, like the voices, forlornly gay, hysteric, but most of all forlorn. The arch in the cold glow of the light yawned empty, profound, silent, like the gate to another city, another world. Suddenly Sartoris left us. He walked steadily to the wall and leaned against it on his propped arms, vomiting.

  “Hell,” Bland said. “I want a drink.” He turned to me. “Where’s your bottle?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone where? You had two.”

  “I haven’t got one now, though. Drink water.”

  “Water?” he said. “Who the hell drinks water?”

  Then the hot hard ball came into my stomach again, pleasant, unbearable, real; again that instant when you say Now. Now I can dump everything. “You will, you goddamn son,” I said.

  Bland was not looking at me. “Twice,” he said in a quiet, detached tone. “Twice in an hour. How’s that for high?” He turned and went toward the fountain. Sartoris came back, walking steadily erect. The band blent with the cold along the bones.

  “What time is it?” I said.

  Sartoris peered at his wrist. “Twelfth.”

  “It’s later than midnight,” I said. “It must be.”

  “I said it was the twelfth,” Sartoris said.

  Bland was stooping at the fountain. There was a little light there. As we reached him he stood up, mopping at his face. The light was on his face and I thought for some time that he must have had his whole head under to be mopping that high up his face before I saw that he was crying. He stood there, mopping at his face, crying hard but quiet.

  “My poor little wife,” he said. “My poor little wife.”

  1924

  A Rose for Emily

  I

  When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.

  It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

  Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor— he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

  When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff’s office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

  They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sunray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father.

  They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

  She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.

  Her voice was dry and cold. “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.”

  “But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn’t you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?”

  “I received a paper, yes,” Miss Emily said. “Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff … I have no taxes in Jefferson.”

  “But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see. We must go by the—”

  “See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.”

  “But, Miss Emily—”

  “See Colonel Sartoris.” (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!” The Negro appeared. “Show these gentlemen out.”

  II

  So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart—the one we believed would marry her—had deserted her. After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man—a young man then—going in and out with a market basket.

  “Just as if a man—any man—could keep a kitchen properly,” the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.

  A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.

  “But what will you have me do about it, madam?” he said.

  “Why, send her word to stop it,” the woman said. “Isn’t there a law?”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Judge Stevens said. “It’s probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I’ll speak to him about it.”

  The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. “We really must do something about it, Judge. I’d be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we’ve got to do something.” That night the Board of Aldermen met—three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.

  “It’s simple enough,” he said. “Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don’t …”

  “Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?”

  So the next night, after midnight, four men crosse
d Miss Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.

  That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough to Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau; Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.