Their mode of life had not changed. The rector was neither happy nor unhappy, neither resigned nor protesting. Occasionally he entered some dream within himself. He conducted services in the dim oaken tunnel of the church while his flock hissed softly among themselves or slept between the responses, while pigeons held their own crooning rituals of audible slumber in the spire that, arcing across motionless young clouds, seemed slow and imminent with ruin. He married two people and buried one: Gilligan found this ominous and said so aloud: Mrs Mahon found this silly and said so aloud.
Mrs Worthington sent her car for them at times and they drove into the country regretting the dogwood, the three of them (two of them did, that is, Mahon had forgotten what dogwood was); the three of them sat beneath the tree while one of them wallowed manfully among polysyllables and another of them sat motionless, neither asleep nor awake. They could never tell whether or not he heard. Nor could they ever tell whether or not he knew whom he had married. Perhaps he didn’t care. Emmy, efficient and gentle, mothering him, was a trifle subdued. Gilligan still slept on his cot at the foot of Mahon’s bed, lest he be needed.
‘You two are the ones who should have married him,’ his wife remarked with quiet wit.
3
Mrs Mahon and Gilligan had resumed their old status of companionship and quiet pleasure in each other’s company. Now that he no longer hoped to marry her she could be freer with him.
‘Perhaps this is what we needed, Joe. Anyway, I never knew anyone I liked half this much.’
They walked slowly in the garden along the avenue of roses which passed beneath the two oaks, beyond which, against a wall, poplars in a restless formal row were like columns of a temple.
‘You’re easy pleased then,’ Gilligan answered with sour assumed moroseness. He didn’t have to tell her how much he liked her.
‘Poor Joe,’ she said. ‘Cigarette, please.’
‘Poor you,’ he retorted, giving her one. ‘I’m all right. I ain’t married.’
‘You can’t escape forever, though. You are too nice: safe for the family; will stand hitched.’
‘Is that a bargain?’ he asked.
‘Sufficient unto the day, Joe. . . .’
After a while he stayed her with his hand ‘Listen.’ They halted and she stared at him intently.
‘What?’
‘There’s that damn mocking-bird again. Hear him? What’s he got to sing about, you reckon?’
‘He’s got plenty to sing about. April’s got to be May, and still spring isn’t half over. Listen. . . .’
4
Emmy had become an obsession with Januarius Jones, such an obsession that it had got completely out of the realm of sex into that of mathematics, like a paranoia. He manufactured chances to see her, only to be repulsed; he lay in wait for her like a highwayman, he begged, he threatened, he tried physical strength, and he was repulsed. It had got to where, had she acceded suddenly, he would have been completely reft of one of his motivating impulses, of his elemental impulse to live: he might have died. Yet he knew that if he didn’t get her soon he would become crazy, an imbecile.
After a time it assumed the magic of numbers. He had failed twice: this time success must be his or the whole cosmic scheme would crumble, hurling him, screaming, into blackness, where no blackness was, death where death was not. Januarius Jones, by nature and inclination a Turk, was also becoming an oriental. He felt that his number must come: the fact that it would not was making an idiot of him.
He dreamed of her at night, he mistook other women for her, other voices for hers; he hung skulking about the rectory at all hours, too wrought up to come in where he might have to converse sanely with sane people. Sometimes the rector, tramping huge and oblivious in his dream, flushed him in out-of-the-way corners of concealment, flushed him without surprise.
‘Ah, Mr Jones,’ he would say, starting like a goaded elephant, ‘good morning.’
‘Good morning, sir,’ Jones would reply, his eyes glued on the house.
‘You are out for a walk?’
‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir.’ And Jones would walk hurriedly away in an opposite direction as the rector, entering his dream again, resumed his own.
Emmy told Mrs Mahon of this with scornful contempt.
‘Why don’t you tell Joe, or let me tell him?’ Mrs Mahon asked.
Emmy sniffed with capable independence. ‘About that worm? I can take care of him, all right. I do my own fighting.’
‘And I bet you are good at it, too.’
And Emmy said: ‘I guess I am.’
5
April had become May.
Fair days, and wet days in which rain ran with silver lances over the lawn, in which rain dripped leaf to leaf while birds still sang in the hushed damp greenness under the trees, and made love and married and built houses and still sang; in which rain grew soft as the grief of a young girl grieving for the sake of grief.
Mahon hardly ever rose now. They had got him a movable bed and upon this he lay, sometimes in the house, sometimes on the veranda where the wistaria inverted its cool lilac flame, while Gilligan read to him. They had done with Rome and they now swam through the tedious charm of Rousseau’s Confessions to Gilligan’s hushed childish delight.
Kind neighbours came to inquire; the specialist from Atlanta came once by request and once on his own initiative, making a friendly call and addressing Gilligan meticulously as ‘Doctor’, spent the afternoon chatting with them, and went away. Mrs Mahon and he liked each other immensely. Dr Gary called once or twice and insulted them all and went away nattily smoking his slender rolled cigarettes. Mrs Mahon and he did not like each other at all. The rector grew greyer and quieter, neither happy nor unhappy, neither protesting nor resigned.
‘Wait until next month. He will be stronger then. This is a trying month for invalids. Don’t you think so?’ he asked his daughter-in-law.
‘Yes,’ she would tell him, looking out at the green world, the sweet, sweet spring, ‘yes, yes.’
6
It was a postcard. You buy them for a penny, stamp and all. The post office furnishes writing material free.
Got your letter. Will write later. Remember me to Gilligan and Lieut. Mahon.
Julian L.
7
Mahon was asleep on the veranda and the other three sat beneath the tree on the lawn, watching the sun go down. At last the reddened edge of the disc was sliced like a cheese by the wistaria-covered lattice wall and the neutral buds were a pale agitation against the dead afternoon. Soon the evening star would be there above the poplar tip, perplexing it, immaculate and ineffable, and the poplar was vain as a girl darkly in an arrested passionate ecstasy. Half of the moon was a coin broken palely near the zenith and at the end of the lawn the first fireflies were like lazily blown sparks from cool fires. A Negro woman passing crooned a religious song, mellow and passionless and sad.
They sat talking quietly. The grass was becoming grey with dew and she felt dew on her thin shoes. Suddenly Emmy came around the corner of the house running and darted up the steps and through the entrance, swift in the dusk.
‘What in the world—’ began Mrs Mahon, then they saw Jones, like a fat satyr, leaping after her, hopelessly distanced. When he saw them he slowed immediately and lounged up to them slovenly as ever. His yellow eyes were calmly opaque but she could see the heave of his breathing. Convulsed with laughter she at last found her voice.
‘Good evening, Mr Jones.’
‘Say,’ said Gilligan with interest, ‘what was you—’
‘Hush, Joe,’ Mrs Mahon told him. Jones’s eyes, clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat’s, roved between them.
‘Good evening, Mr Jones.’ The rector became abruptly aware of his presence. ‘Walking again, eh?’
‘Running,’ Gilligan corrected and the rector repeated Eh? looking from Jones to Gilligan.
Mrs Mahon indicated a chair. ‘Sit down, Mr Jones. You must be rather fatigued, I imagine.’
Jones stared towards the house, tore his eyes away, and sat down. The canvas sagged under him and he rose and spun his chair so as to face the dreaming façade of the rectory. He sat again.
‘Say,’ Gilligan asked him, ‘what was you doing, anyway?’
Jones eyes him briefly, heavily. ‘Running,’ he snapped, turning his eyes again to the dark house.
‘Running?’ the divine repeated.
‘I know; I seen that much from here. What was you running for, I asked.’
‘Reducing, perhaps,’ Mrs Mahon remarked, with quiet malice.
Jones turned his yellow stare upon her. Twilight was gathering swiftly. He was a fat and shapeless mass palely tweeded. ‘Reducing, yes. But not to marriage.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you,’ she told him. ‘A courtship like that will soon reduce you to anything, almost.’
‘Yeh,’ Gilligan amended, ‘if that’s the only way you got to get a wife you’d better pick out another one besides Emmy. You’ll be a shadow time you catch her. That is,’ he added, ‘if you aim to do your courting on foot.’
‘What’s this?’ the rector asked.
‘Perhaps Mr Jones was merely preparing to write a poem. Living it first, you know,’ Mrs Mahon offered. Jones looked at her sharply. ‘Atalanta,’ she suggested in the dusk.
‘Atlanta?’ repeated Gilligan,’ what—’
‘Try an apple next time, Mr Jones,’ she advised.
‘Or a handful of salt, Mr Jones,’ added Gilligan in a thin falsetto. Then in his natural voice. ‘But what’s Atlanta got to—’
‘Or a cherry, Mr Gilligan,’ said Jones viciously. ‘But then, I am not God, you know.’
‘Shut your mouth, fellow,’ Gilligan told him roughly.
‘What’s this?’ the rector repeated. Jones turned to him heavily explanatory:
‘It means, sir, that Mr Gilligan is under the impression that his wit is of as much importance to me as my actions are to him.’
‘Not me,’ denied Gilligan with warmth. ‘You and me don’t have the same thoughts about anything, fellow.’
‘Why shouldn’t they be?’ the rector asked ‘It is but natural to believe that one’s actions and thoughts are as important to others as they are to oneself, is it not?’
Gilligan gave this his entire attention. It was getting above his head, beyond his depth. But Jones was something tangible, and he had already chosen Jones for his own.
‘Naturally,’ agreed Jones with patronage. ‘There was kinship between the human instruments of all action and thought and emotion. Napoleon thought that his actions were important, Swift thought his emotions were important, Savonarola thought his beliefs were important. And they were. But we are discussing Mr Gilligan.’
‘Say—’ began Gilligan.
‘Very apt, Mr Jones,’ murmured Mrs Mahon above the suggested triangle of her cuffs and collar. ‘A soldier, a priest, and a dyspeptic.’
‘Say,’ Gilligan repeated, ‘who’s swift, anyway? I kind of got bogged up back there.’
‘Mr Jones is, according to his own statement. You are Napoleon, Joe.’
‘Him? Not quite swift enough to get himself a girl, though. The way he was gaining on Emmy — You ought to have a bicycle,’ he suggested.
‘There’s your answer, Mr Jones,’ the rector told him. Jones looked towards Gilligan’s fading figure in disgust, like that of a swordsman who has been disarmed by a peasant with a pitchfork.
‘That’s what association with the clergy does for you,’ he said crassly.
‘What is it?’ Gilligan asked. ‘What did I say wrong?’
Mrs Mahon leaned over and squeezed his arm. ‘You didn’t say anything wrong, Joe. You were grand.’
Jones glowered sullenly in the dusk. ‘By the way,’ he said, suddenly, ‘how is your husband today?’
‘Just the same, thank you.’
‘Stands wedded life as well as can be expected, does he?’ She ignored this. Gilligan watched him in leashed anticipation. He continued: ‘That’s too bad. You had expected great things from marriage, hadn’t you? Sort of a miraculous rejuvenation?’
‘Shut up, fellow,’ Gilligan told him. ‘Whatcher mean, anyway?’
‘Nothing, Mr Galahad, nothing at all. I merely made a civil inquiry. . . . Shows that when a man marries, his troubles continue, doesn’t it?’
‘Then you oughtn’t to have no worries about your troubles,’ Gilligan told him savagely.
‘What?’
‘I mean, if you don’t have no better luck than you have twice that I know of—’
‘He has a good excuse for one failure, Joe,’ Mrs Mahon said.
They both looked towards her voice. The sky was bowled with a still disseminated light that cast no shadow and branches of trees were rigid as coral in a mellow tideless sea. ‘Mr Jones says that to make love to Miss Saunders would be epicene.’
‘Epicene? What’s that?’
‘Shall I tell him, Mr Jones? or will you?’
‘Certainly. You intend to, anyway, don’t you?’
‘Epicene is something you want and can’t get, Joe.’
Jones rose viciously. ‘If you will allow me, I’ll retire, I think,’ he said savagely. ‘Good evening.’
‘Sure,’ agreed Gilligan with alacrity, rising also. ‘I’ll see Mr Jones to the gate. He might get mixed up and head for the kitchen by mistake. Emmy might be one of them epicenes, too.’
Without seeming to hurry Jones faded briskly away. Gilligan sprang after him. Jones, sensing him, whirled in the dusk and Gilligan leaned upon him.
‘For the good of your soul,’ Gilligan told him joyously. ‘You might say that’s what running with preachers does for you, mightn’t you?’ he panted as they went down.
They rolled in dew and an elbow struck him smartly under the chin. Jones was up immediately and Gilligan, tasting his bitten tongue, sprang in pursuit. But Jones retained his lead. ‘He has sure learned to run from somebody,’ Gilligan grunted. ‘Practising on Emmy so much, I guess. Wisht I was Emmy, now — until I catch him.’
Jones doubled the house and plunged into the dreaming garden. Gilligan, turning the corner of the house, saw the hushed expanse where his enemy was, but his enemy, himself, was out of sight. Roses bloomed quietly under the imminence of night, hyacinths swung pale bells, waiting for another day. Dusk was a dream of arrested time, the mocking-bird rippled it tentatively, and everywhere blooms slept passionately, waiting for tomorrow. But Jones was gone.
He stopped to listen upon the paling gravel, between the slow unpickable passion of roses, seeing the pale broken coin of the moon attain a richer lustre against the unemphatic sky. Gilligan stilled his heaving lungs to listen, but he heard nothing. Then he began systematically to beat the firefly-starred scented dusk of the garden, beating all available cover, leaving not a blade of grass unturned. But Jones had got clean away; the slow hands of dusk had removed him as cleanly as the prestidigitator reaves a rabbit from an immaculate hat.
He stood in the centre of the garden and cursed Jones thoroughly on the off-chance that he might be within hearing, then Gilligan slowly retraced his steps, retracing the course of the race through the palpable violet dusk. He passed the unlighted house where Emmy went somewhere about her duties, where at the corner of the veranda near the silver tree’s twilight-musicked ecstasy Mahon slept on his movable bed, and on across the lawn while evening like a ship with twilight-coloured sails dreamed on down the world.
The chairs were formless blurs beneath the tree and Mrs Mahon’s presence was indicated principally by her white collar and cuffs. As he approached he could see dimly the rector reclined in slumber, and the woman’s dark dress shaped her against the dull white of her canvas chair. Her face was pallid, winged either side by her hair. She raised her hand as he drew near.
‘He’s asleep,’ she whispered, as he sat beside her.
‘He got away, damn him,’ he told her, in exasperation.
‘Too bad. Better
luck next time.’
‘You bet. And there’ll be a next time soon as I see him again.’
Night was almost come. Light, all light, passed from the world, from the earth, and leaves were still. Night was almost come, but not quite; day was almost gone, but not quite. Her shoes were quite soaked in dew.
‘How long he has slept.’ She broke the silence diffidently. ‘We’ll have to wake him soon for supper.’
Gilligan stirred in his chair and almost as she spoke the rector sat hugely and suddenly up.
‘Wait, Donald,’ he said, lumbering to his feet. With elephantine swiftness he hurried across the lawn towards the darkly dreaming house.
‘Did he call?’ they spoke together, in a dark foreboding. They half rose and stared towards the house, then at each other’s indistinct, white face. ‘Did you — ?’ the question hung poised in the dusk between them and here was the evening star bloomed miraculously at the poplar’s tip and the slender tree was a leafed and passionate Atalanta, poising her golden apple.
‘No, did you?’ he replied.
But they heard nothing.
‘He dreamed,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Gilligan agreed. ‘He dreamed.’
8
Donald Mahon lay quietly conscious of unseen forgotten spring, of greenness neither recalled nor forgot. After a time the nothingness in which he lived took him wholly again, but restlessly. It was like a sea into which he could neither completely pass nor completely go away from. Day became afternoon, became dusk and imminent evening: evening like a ship, with twilight-coloured sails, dreamed down the world darkly towards darkness. And suddenly he found that he was passing from the dark world in which he had lived for a time he could not remember, again into a day that had long passed, that had already been spent by those who lived and wept and died, and so remembering it, this day was his alone: the one trophy he had reft from Time and Space. Per ardua ad astra.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 26