Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  So now (if Mother was right) he had a double burden. One was anguish over what base depths of imagination and selfish hope he knew himself to be, not so much capable of as doomed to be ashamed of; the other, the fact that if that twinship double indemnity did work in his favor and John was shot down first, he—Bayard—would, no matter how much longer he survived, have to face his twin some day in the omniscience of the mutual immortality, with the foul stain of his weakness now beyond concealment. The foul stain being not the idea, because the same idea must have occurred to his twin at the same instant with himself although they were in different squadrons now, but that of the two of them, John would not have been ashamed of it. The idea being simply this: John had managed to shoot down three huns before he himself was killed (he was probably a better shot than Bayard or maybe his flight commander liked him and set up targets) and Bayard himself had racked up enough ninths and sixteenths, after the British method of scoring (unless somebody was incredible enough to say “Not me; I was too damn scared to remember to pull up the cocking handles”) to add up to two and maybe an inch over; now that John was gone and no longer needed his, suppose, just suppose he could wangle, bribe, forge, corrupt the records and whoever kept them, into transferring all the Sartoris bumf under one name, so that one of them anyway could come back home an ace—an idea not base in itself, because John had not only thought of it too but if he had lived and Bayard had died, would have managed somehow to accomplish it, but base only after he, Bayard, had debased and befouled it by being ashamed of it. And he could not quit it of his own volition, since when he faced John’s ghost some day in the course of simple fatality, John would be just amused and contemptuous; where if he did it by putting the pistol barrel in his mouth himself, that ghost would be not just risible and contemptuous but forever unreconciled, irreconcilable.

  But Linda Snopes—excuse me: Snopes Kohl—would be our first female one. So you would think the whole town would turn out, or at least be represented by delegates: from the civic clubs and churches, not to mention the American Legion and the V.F.W., which would have happened if she had been elected Miss America instead of merely blown up by a Franco shell or land mine or whatever it was that went off in or under the ambulance she was driving and left her stone deaf. So I said, “What does she want to come back home for? There’s nothing for her to join. What would she want in a Ladies’ Auxiliary, raffling off homemade jam and lamp shades. Even if she could make jam, since obviously cooking is the last thing a sculptor would demand of his girl. Who was just passing time anyway between Communist meetings until somebody started a Fascist war he could get into. Not to mention the un-kosher stuff she would have had to learn in Jefferson, Mississippi. Especially if where she learned to cook was in that Dirty Spoon her papa beat Ratliff out of back there when they first came to town.” But I was wrong. It wouldn’t be municipal: only private: just three people only incidentally from Jefferson because they were mainly out of her mother’s past: my uncle, her father, and Ratliff. Then I saw there would be only two. Ratliff wouldn’t even get in the car.

  “Come on,” Uncle Gavin said. “Go with us.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Ratliff said. “I’ll be the local committee. Until next time,” he said at me.

  “What?” Uncle Gavin said.

  “Nothing,” Ratliff said. “Jest a joke Chick told me that I’m reminding him of.”

  Then I saw it wasn’t going to be even two out of her mother’s past. We were not even going by the bank, let alone stop at it. I said, “What the hell would Mr Snopes want, throwing away at least six hours of good usury to make a trip all the way to Memphis to meet his daughter, after all the expense he had to go to get her out of Jefferson—not only butchering up De Spain’s house, but all that imported Italian marble over her mother’s grave to give her something worth going away from or not coming back to if you like that better.”

  I said: “So it’s my fault I wasn’t born soon enough either to defend Das Democracy in your war or Das Kapital in hers. Meaning there’s still plenty of time for me yet. Or maybe what you mean is that Hitler and Mussolini and Franco all three working together cannot get an authentic unimpeachable paid-up member of the Harvard R.O.T.C, into really serious military trouble. Because I probably wont make Porcellian either; F.D.R. didn’t.”

  I said: “That’s it. That’s why you insisted on me coming along this morning: although she hasn’t got any eardrums now and cant hear you say No or Please No or even For God’s sake No, at least she cant marry you before we get back to Jefferson with me right here in the car too. But there’s the rest of the afternoon when you can chase me out, not to mention the eight hours of the night when Mother likes to believe I am upstairs asleep. Not to mention I’ve got to go back to Cambridge next month—unless you believe your … is it virginity or just celibacy? is worth even that sacrifice? But then why not, since it was your idea to send me all the way to Cambridge, Mass, for what we laughingly call an education. Being as Mother says she’s been in love with you all her life, only she was too young to know it and you were too much of a gentleman to tell her. Or does Mother really always know best?”

  By this time we had reached the airport; I mean Memphis. Uncle Gavin said, “Park the car and let’s have some coffee. We’ve probably got at least a half-hour yet.” We had the coffee in the restaurant; I dont know why they dont call it the Skyroom here too. Maybe Memphis is still off quota. Ratliff said she would have to marry somebody sooner or later, and every day that passed made it that much sooner. No, that wasn’t the way he put it: that he—Uncle Gavin—couldn’t escape forever, that almost any day now some woman would decide he was mature and dependable enough at last for steady work in place of merely an occasional chore; and that the sooner this happened the better, since only then would he be safe. I said, “How safe? He seems to me to be doing all right; I never knew anybody that scatheless.”

  “I dont mean him,” Ratliff said. “I mean us, Yoknapatawpha County; that he would maybe be safe to live with then because he wouldn’t have so much time for meddling.”

  In which case, saving us would take some doing. Because he—Gavin—had one defect in his own character which always saved him, no matter what jeopardy it left the rest of us in. I mean, the fact that people get older, especially young girls of fifteen or sixteen, who seem to get older all of a sudden in six months or one year than they or anybody else ever does in about ten years. I mean, he always picked out children, or maybe he was just vulnerable to female children and they chose him, whichever way you want it. That the selecting or victim-falling was done at an age when the oath of eternal fidelity would have ceased to exist almost before the breath was dry on it. I’m thinking now of Melisandre Backus naturally, before my time and Linda Snopes’s too. That is, Melisandre was twelve and thirteen and fourteen several years before she vacated for Linda to take her turn in the vacuum, Gavin selecting and ordering the books of poetry to read to Melisandre or anyway supervise and check on, which was maybe how by actual test, trial and error, he knew which ones to improve Linda’s mind and character with when her turn came, or anyway alter them.

  Though pretty soon Melisandre committed the irrevocable error of getting a year older and so quitting forever that fey unworld of Spenser and the youth Milton, for the human race where even the sort of girl that he picked out or that picked out him, when a man talked about fidelity and devotion to her, she was in a position to tell him either to put up or shut up. Anyway, he was saved that time. Though I wasn’t present to remember exactly what the sequence was: whether Gavin went off to Harvard first or maybe it was between Harvard and Heidelberg, or whether she got married first. Anyway, when he got back from his war, she was married. To a New Orleans underworld big shot named Harriss with two esses. And how in the world or where on earth she ever managed to meet him—a shy girl, motherless and an only child, who lived on what used to be one of our biggest plantations two or three miles from town but that for years had been gradually going t
o decay, with her widowered father who spent all his time on the front gallery in summer and in the library in winter with a bottle of whiskey and a volume of Horace. Who (Melisandre) had as far as we knew never been away from it in her life except to be driven daily in to town by a Negro coachman in a victoria while she graduated from the grammar school then the high school then the Female Academy. And a man about whom all we knew was what he said: that his name was Harriss with two esses, which maybe it was, and that he was a New Orleans importer. Which we knew he was, since (this was early 1919, before Uncle Gavin got back home) even Jefferson recognised when it saw one a bullet-proof Cadillac that needed two chauffeurs, both in double-breasted suits that bulged a little at the left armpit.

  Not to mention the money. Mr Backus died about then and of course there were some to say it was with a broken heart over his only child marrying a bootleg czar. Though apparently he waited long enough to make sure his son-in-law was actually a czar or anyway the empire a going and solvent one, since the money had already begun to show a little before he died—the roofs and galleries patched and shored up even if Mr Backus evidently balked at paint on the house yet, and gravel in the drive so that when she came home to spend that first Christmas, she and the nurse and the czarevitch could go back and forth to town in an automobile instead of the old victoria drawn by a plow team. Then Mr Backus died and the house and outbuildings too got painted. And now Harriss with both his esses began to appear in Jefferson, making friends even in time though most of Yoknapatawpha County was unsold still, just neutral, going out there in the Model T’s and on horses and mules, to stand along the road and watch what had been just a simple familiar red-ink north Mississippi cotton plantation being changed into a Virginia or Long Island horse farm, with miles of white panel fence where the rest of us were not a bit too proud for what we called bobwire and any handy sapling post, and white stables with electric light and steam heat and running water and butlers and footmen for the horses where a lot of the rest of us still depended on coal-oil lamps for light and our wives to tote firewood and water from the nearest woodlot and spring or well.

  Then there were two children, an heir and a princess too, when Harriss died with his two esses in a New Orleans barber’s chair of his ordinary thirty-eight-caliber occupational disease. Whereupon the horses and their grooms and valets became sold and the house closed except for a caretaker, vacant now of Mrs Harriss with her two esses and the two children and the five maids and couriers and nannies and secretaries, and now Mother and the other ones who had been girls with her in the old Academy days would get the letters and post cards from the fashionable European cities telling how just the climate at first but presently, in time, the climate and the schools both were better for the children and (on Mother’s naturally) she hoped Gavin was well and maybe even married. “So at least he’s safe from that one,” I told Ratliff, who said,

  “Safe?”

  “Why the hell not? She not only got too big for the fairy tale, she’s got two children and all that money: what the hell does she want to marry anybody for? Or not Gavin anyway; he dont want money: all he wants is just to meddle and change. Why the hell isn’t he safe now?”

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “It looks like he would almost have to be, dont it? At least until next time.” Joke. And still worth repeating two hours ago when he declined to come with us. And Gavin sitting there drinking a cup of what whoever ran the airport restaurant called coffee, looking smug and inscrutable and arrogant and immune as a louse on a queen’s arse. Because maybe Linda Kohl (pardon me, Snopes Kohl) had plenty of money too, not only what her mother must have left her but what Uncle Gavin, as her guardian, had managed to chisel out of old Will Varner. Not chiselled out of her father too because maybe old Snopes was glad to stump up something just to have what Gavin or Ratliff would call that reproachless virgin rectitude stop looking at him. But she didn’t have two children so all Ratliff and I had to trust, depend on this time was that old primary condition founded on simple evanescence, that every time a moment occurred they would be one moment older: that they had to be alive for him to notice them, and they had to be in motion to be alive, and the only moment of motion which caught his attention, his eye, was that one at which they entered puberty like the swirl of skirt or flow or turn of limb when entering, passing through a door, slowed down by the camera trick but still motion, still a moment, irrevocable.

  That was really what saved him each time: that the moment had to be motion. They couldn’t stop in the door, and once through it they didn’t stop either; sometimes they didn’t even pause long enough to close it behind them before going on to the next one and through it, which was into matrimony—from maturation to parturition in one easy lesson you might say. Which was all right. Uncle Gavin wouldn’t be at that next door. He would still be watching the first one. And since life is not so much motion as an inventless repetition of motion, he would never be at that first door long before there would be another swirl, another unshaped vanishing adolescent leg. So I should have thought to tell Ratliff that, while I was in Memphis helping Uncle Gavin say good-bye to this one, he might be looking around the Square to see who the next one was going to be, as Linda had already displaced Melisandre Backus probably before Melisandre even knew she had been dispossessed. Then in the next moment I knew that would not be necessary; obviously Uncle Gavin had already picked her out himself, which was why he could sit there placid and composed, drinking coffee while we waited for the plane to be announced.

  Which it was at last. We went out to the ramp. I stopped at the rail. “I’ll wait here,” I said. “You’ll want a little privacy while you can still get it even if it’s only anonymity and not solitude. Have you got your slate ready? or maybe she’ll already have one built in on her cuff, or maybe strapped to her leg like aviators carry maps.” But he had gone on. Then the plane taxied up, one of the new DC 3’s, and in time there she was. I couldn’t see her eyes from this distance but then it wasn’t them, it was just her ears the bomb or shell or mine or whatever it was blew up—the same tall girl too tall to have a shape but then I dont know: women like that and once you get their clothes off they surprise you even if she was twenty-nine years old now. Then I could see her eyes, so dark blue that at first you thought they were black. And I for one never did know how or where she got them or the black hair either since old Snopes’s eyes were the color of stagnant pond water and his hair didn’t have any color at all, and her mother had had blue eyes too but her hair was blond. So that when I tried to remember her, she always looked like she had just been raided out of a brothel in the Scandinavian Valhalla and the cops had just managed to fling a few garments on her before they hustled her into the wagon. Fine eyes too, that probably if you were the one to finally get the clothes off you would have called them beautiful too. And she even had the little pad and pencil in her hand while she was kissing Gavin. I mean, kissing him. Though evidently he would need a little time to get used to using it or depending on it because he said aloud, just like she was anybody else:

  “Here’s Chick too,” and she remembered me; she was as tall as Gavin and damn near as tall as me, as well as a nail-biter though maybe that had come after the shell or perhaps after the bereavement. And when she shook hands she really had driven that ambulance and apparently changed the tires on it too, speaking not loud but in that dry harsh quacking voice that deaf people learn to use, even asking about Mother and Father as if she really cared, like any ordinary Jefferson woman that never dreamed of going to wars and getting blown up. Though Uncle Gavin remembered now, or at least was learning fast, taking the pad and pencil and scrawling something on it, baggage I reckon, since she said, “Oh yes,” just like she could hear too, and got the checks out of her handbag.

  I brought the car up while they untangled the bags. So she had lived with the guy for years before they married but it didn’t show on her. And she had gone to Spain to the war and got blown up at the front, and that didn’t show on
her either. I said, “Why dont you let her drive? Then maybe she wont be so nervous because she cant talk to you.”

  “Maybe you’d better drive then,” he said. So we did, and brought the hero home, the two of them in the back. And somebody may have said, “Why dont we all ride in front? the seat’s wide enough.” Though I dont remember it. Or at least nobody did. Or anyway at least they got into the back seat. So I dont remember that either: only Uncle Gavin: “You can relax now. You’re quite safe. I’m holding her hand.”

  Which they were, she holding his hand in both hers on her lap and every mile or so the duck voice would say, “Gavin,” and then after a mile or so, “Gavin.” And evidently she hadn’t had the pad and pencil long enough to get used to them either or maybe when you lose hearing and enter real silence you forget that everything does not take place in that privacy and solitude. Or maybe after he took the pencil from her to answer on the pad, she couldn’t wait to get the pencil back so both should have had slates: “Yes it does. I can feel it, somewhere in my skull or the back of my mouth. It’s an ugly sound. Isn’t it?” But evidently Gavin was learning because it was still the duck voice: “Yes it is. I can feel it, I tell you.” And still the duck voice: “How? If I try to practise, how can I know when it’s right?” Which I agree with myself: if you’re going to take time out from your law practice and being county attorney to restore to your deaf girl friend the lost bridehead of her mellifluity, how would you go about it. Though what a chance for a husband: to teach your stone-deaf wife that all she needed to make her tone and pitch beautiful was merely to hold her breath while she spoke. Or maybe what Uncle Gavin wrote next was simply Jonson (or some of that old Donne or Herrick maybe or even just Suckling maybe—any or all of them annotated to that one ear—eye now—by that old Stevens) Vale not these cherry lips with vacant speech But let me drink instead thy tender Yes. Or maybe what he wrote was simpler still: Hold it till we get home. This is no place to restore your voice. Besides, this infant will have to go back to Cambridge next month and then we’ll have plenty of time, plenty of privacy.