Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Absinth?” the other said, also in Italian. “Fix him up. Why not?”

  “He said he wanted the good.”

  “Sure. Fix him up. Call mamma.” He went back to eating. The waiter went out a second door; a moment later he returned with a gallon jug of something without colour and followed by a decent withered old lady in an immaculate apron. The waiter set the jug on the sink and the old lady took from the apron’s pocket a small phial. “Look and see if it’s the paregoric she has,” the man at the table said without looking up or ceasing to chew. The waiter leaned and looked at the phial from which the old lady was pouring into the jug. She poured about an ounce; the waiter shook the jug and held it to the light.

  “A trifle more, madonna,” he said. “The colour is not quite right.” He carried the jug out; the reporter emerged from beneath the sign, carrying it; the four at the corner watched him approach at his loose gallop, as though on the verge not of falling down but of completely disintegrating at the next stride.

  “Absinth!” he cried. “New Valois absinth! I told you I knew them. Absinth! We will go home and I will name you some real New Valois drinks and then to hell with them!” He faced them, glaring, with the actual jug now gesticulant. “The bastards!” he cried. “The son of a bitches!”

  “Watch out!” Jiggs cried. “Jesus, you nearly hit that post with it!” He shoved the little boy at Shumann. “Here; take him,” he said. He sprang forward, reaching for the jug. “Let me carry it,” he said.

  “Yair; home!” the reporter cried. He and Jiggs both clung to the jug while he glared at them all with his wild bright face. “Hagood didn’t know he would have to fire me to make me go there. And get this, listen! I don’t work for him now and so he will never know whether I went there or not!”

  As the cage door clashed behind him, the editor himself reached down and lifted the face-down watch from the stack of papers, from that cryptic staccato cross-section of an instant crystallized and now dead two hours, though only the moment, the instant: the substance itself not only not dead, not complete, but in its very insoluble enigma of human folly and blundering possessing a futile and tragic immortality:

  FARMERS BANKERS STRIKERS ACREAGE

  WEATHER POPULATION

  Now it was the elevator man who asked the time. “Halfpast two,” the editor said. He put the watch back, placing it without apparent pause or calculation in the finicking exact centre of the line of caps, so that now, in the shape of a cheap metal disc, the cryptic stripe was parted neatly in the exact centre by the blank backside of the greatest and most inescapable enigma of all. The cage stopped, the door slid back. “Good night,” the editor said.

  “Good night, Mr. Hagood,” the other said. The door closed behind him again. Now in the glass street doors into which the reporter had watched himself walk five hours ago, the editor watched his reflection — a shortish, sedentary man in worn, cheap, near-tweed knickers and rubber-soled golf-shoes, a silk muffler, a shetland jacket which unmistakably represented money and from one pocket of which protruded the collar and tie which he had removed probably on a second or third tee some time during the afternoon, topped by a bare, bald head and the horn glasses — the face of an intelligent betrayed asceticism, the face of a Yale or perhaps a Cornell senior outrageously surprised and overwhelmed by a sudden and vicious double decade — which marched steadily upon him as he crossed the lobby until just at the point where either he or it must give way, when it too flicked and glared away and he descended the two shallow steps and so into the chill and laggard pre-dawn of winter. His roadster stood at the kerb, the ostler from the all-night garage beside it, the neat-gleamed and vaguely obstetrical shapes of golf-heads projecting, raked slightly, above the lowered top and repeating the glint and gleam of other chromium about the car’s dull-silver body. The ostler opened the door, but Hagood gestured him in first.

  “I’ve got to go down to French Town,” he said. “You drive on to your corner.” The ostler slid, lean and fast, past the golf bag and the gears and under the wheel. Hagood entered stiffly, like an old man, letting himself down into the low seat, whereupon without sound or warning the golf-bag struck him across the head and shoulder with an apparently calculated and lurking viciousness, emitting a series of dry clicks as though produced by the jaws of a beast domesticated though not tamed, half in fun and half in deadly seriousness, like a pet shark. Hagood flung the bag back and then caught it just before it clashed at him again. “Why in hell didn’t you put it into the rumble?” he said.

  “I’ll do it now,” the ostler said, opening the door.

  “Never mind now,” Hagood said. “Let’s get on. I have to go clear across town before I can go home.”

  “Yair, I guess we will all be glad when Moddy Graw is over,” the ostler said. The car moved; it accelerated smoothly and on its fading gear-whine it drifted down the alley, poising without actually pausing; then it swung into the Avenue, gaining speed — a machine expensive, complex, delicate and intrinsically useless, created for some obscure psychic need of the species if not the race, from the virgin resources of a continent, to be the individual muscles, bones and flesh of a new and legless kind — into the empty avenue between the purple-and-yellow paper bunting caught from post to post by cryptic shield symbolic of laughter and mirth now vanished and departed. It rushed along the dark lonely street, its displacement and the sum of money it represented concentrated and reduced to a single suavely illuminated dial on which numerals without significance increased steadily towards some yet unrevealed crescendo of ultimate triumph whose only witnesses were waifs. It slowed and stopped as smoothly and skilfully as it had started; the ostler slid out before it came to a halt. “O.K., Mr. Hagood,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” Hagood said. As he slid across to the wheel the golf-bag feinted silently at him. This time he slammed it over and down into the other corner. The car moved again, though now it was a different machine. It got into motion with a savage overpowered lurch as if something of it besides the other and younger man had quitted it when it stopped; it rolled on and into Grandlieu Street, unchallenged now by light or bell. Instead, only the middle eye on each post stared dimly and steadily yellow, the four corners of the intersection marked now by four milk-coloured jets from the fireplugs and standing one beside each plug, motionless and identical, four men in white like burlesqued internes in comedies, while upon each gutter-plaited stream now drifted the flotsam and jetsam of the dead evening’s serpentine and confetti. The car drifted on across the intersection and into that quarter of narrow canyons, the exposed mine-galleries hung with iron lace, going faster now, floored now with cobbles and roofed by the low overcast sky and walled by a thick and tremendous uproar as though all reverberation hung like invisible fog in the narrow streets, to be waked into outrageous and monstrous sound even by streamlining and air-wheels. He slowed into the kerb at the mouth of an alley in which even as he got out of the car he could see the shape of a lighted second-storey window printing the balcony’s shadow upon the flag paving, and then in the window’s rectangle the shadow of an arm which even from here he could see holding the shadow of a drinking-glass as, closing the car door, he trod upon the chipped mosaic words, The Drowned, set into the kerb and walked up the alley in outrage but not surprise. When he came opposite the window he could see the living arm itself, though long before that he had begun to hear the reporter’s voice. Now he could hear nothing else, scarcely his own voice, as he stood beneath the balcony, shouting, beginning to scream, until without warning a short trim-legged man bounced suddenly to the balustrade and leaned outward, blunt of face and with a tonsure like a priest’s, as Hagood glared up at him and thought with raging impotence, “He told me they had a horse, too. Damn, damn, damn!”

  “Looking for somebody up here, doc?” the man on the balcony said.

  “Yes!” Hagood screamed, shouting the reporter’s name again.

  “Who?” the man on the balcony said, cupping his ear
downward. Again Hagood screamed the name. “Nobody up here by that name that I know of,” the man on the balcony said; then he said, “Wait a minute.” Perhaps it was Hagood’s amazed, outraged face; the other turned his head and he too bawled the name into the room behind him. “Anybody here named that?” he said. The reporter’s voice ceased for a second, no more, then it shouted in the same tone which Hagood had been able to hear even from the end of the alley:

  “Who wants to know?” But before the man on the balcony could answer, it shouted again: “Tell him he ain’t here. Tell him he’s moved away. He’s married. He’s dead.” Then the voice roared: “Tell him he’s gone to work!” The man on the balcony looked down again.

  “Well, mister,” he said, “I guess you heard him about as plain as I did.” —

  “No matter,” Hagood said. “You come down.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes!” Hagood shouted. “You!” So he stood in the alley and watched the other go back into the room which he himself had never seen. He had never before been closer to what the reporter who had worked directly under him for twenty months now called home than the file form which the reporter had filled out on the day he joined the paper. That room, that apartment which the reporter called bohemian, he had hunted down in this section of New Valois’s Vieux Carré and then hunted down piece by piece the furniture which cluttered it, with the eager and deluded absorption of a child hunting coloured easter eggs. It was a gaunt cavern roofed like a barn, with scuffed and worn and even rotted floor-boards and scrofulous walls and cut into two uneven halves, bedroom and studio, by an old theatre curtain and cluttered with slovenly mended and useless tables draped with imitation batik bearing precarious lamps made of liquor bottles, and other objects of oxidized metal made for what original purpose no man knew, and hung with more batik and machine-made Indian blankets and indecipherable has-relief plaques vaguely religio-Italian primitive. It was filled with objects whose desiccated and fragile inutility bore a kinship to their owner’s own physical being as though he and they were all conceived in one womb and spawned in one litter — objects which possessed that quality of veteran prostitutes, of being overlaid by the ghosts of so many anonymous proprietors that even the present title-holder held merely rights but no actual possession — a room apparently exhumed from a theatrical morgue and rented intact from one month to the next.

  It was about two months after the reporter had joined the paper without credentials or any past, documentary or hearsay, at all, with his appearance of some creature evolved by forced draught in a laboratory and both beyond and incapable of any need for artificial sustenance, like a tumble weed, with his eager, dog-like air and his child’s aptitude for being not so much where news happened exactly but for being wherever were the most people at any given time rushing about the Vieux Carré for his apartment and his furniture and the decorations — the blankets and batik and the objects which he would buy and fetch into the office and then listen with incorrigible shocked amazement while Hagood would prove to him patiently how he had paid two or three prices for them. — One day, Hagood looked up and watched a woman whom he had never seen before enter the city room. “She looked like a locomotive,” he told the paper’s owner later with bitter outrage. “You know: when the board has been devilled and harried by the news reels of Diesel trains and by the reporters that ask them about the future of railroading until at last the board takes the old engine, the one that set the record back in nineteen-two or nineteen-ten or somewhere and send it to the shops and one day they unveil it (with the news reels and the reporters all there, too) with horseshoe rose wreaths and congress men and thirty-six high-school girls out of the beauty show in bathing-suits, and it is a new engine on the outside only, because everyone is glad and proud that inside it is still the old fast one of nineteen-two or -ten. The same number is on the tender and the old fine, sound, time-proved working parts, only the cab and the boiler are painted robin’s egg blue and the rods and the bell look more like gold than gold does and even the supercharger don’t look so very noticeable except in a hard light, and the number is in neon now: the first number in the world to be in neon?”

  He looked up from his desk and saw her enter on a blast of scent as arresting as mustard gas and followed by the reporter looking more than ever like a shadow whose projector had eluded it weeks and weeks ago... the fine big bosom like one of the walled, impervious towns of the Middle Ages whose origin antedates writing, which have been taken and retaken in uncountable fierce assaults which overran them in the brief fury of a moment and vanished, leaving no trace, the broad tomato-coloured mouth, the eyes pleasant, shrewd and beyond mere disillusion, the hair of that diamond-hard and imperviously recent lustre of a gilt service in a shop window, the gold-studded teeth square and white and big like those of a horse. He saw all this beneath a plump, rich billowing of pink plumes so that he thought of himself as looking at a canvas out of the vernal equinox of pigment when they could not always write to sign their names to them — a canvas conceived in and executed out of that fine innocence of sleep and open bowels capable of crowning the rich, foul, unchaste earth with rose cloud where lurk and sport oblivious and incongruous cherubim. “I just dropped into town to see who he really works for,” she said.

  “May I... Thanks.” She took the cigarette from the pack on the desk before he could move, though she did wait for him to strike and hold the match. “And to ask you to sort of look out for him. Because he is a fool, you see. I don’t know whether he is a newspaper man or not. Maybe you don’t know yet, yourself. But he is the baby.” Then she was gone — the scent, the plumes; the room which had been full of pink vapour and golden teeth darkened again, became niggard — and Hagood thought, “Baby of what?” because the reporter had told him before and now assured him again that he had neither brothers nor sisters, that he had no ties at all save the woman who had passed through the city room — and apparently through New Valois, too, without stopping, with something of that aura of dwarfed distances and self-sufficient bulk of a light cruiser passing through a canal lock — and the incredible name.

  “Only the name is right,” the reporter told him. “Folks don’t always believe it at first, but it’s correct as far as I know.”

  “But I thought she said her name was—” and Hagood repeated the name the woman had given.

  “Yair,” the reporter said. “It is now.”

  “You mean she has—” Hagood said.

  “Yair,” the reporter said. “She’s changed it twice since I can remember. They were both good guys, too.” So then Hagood believed that he saw the picture — the woman not voracious, not rapacious; just omnivorous like the locomotive’s maw of his late symbology; he told himself with savage disillusion, Yes. Come here to see just who he really worked for. What she meant was she came here to see that he really had a job and whether or not he was going to keep it. He believed now that he knew why the reporter cashed his pay-cheque before leaving the building each Saturday night; he could almost see the reporter, running now to reach the post office station before it closed — or perhaps the telegraph office — in the one case the flimsy blue strip of money order, in the other the yellow duplicate receipt. So that, on that first midweek night when the reporter opened the subject diffidently, Hagood set a precedent out of his own pocket which he did not break for almost a year, cursing the big woman whom he had seen but once, who had passed across the horizon of his life without stopping, yet for ever after disarranging it, like the air-blast of the oblivious locomotive crossing a remote and trash-filled suburban street. But he said nothing until the reporter came and requested a loan twice the size of an entire week’s pay, and even then he did not open the matter. It was his face which caused the reporter to explain; it was for a wedding present. “A wedding present?” Hagood said.

  “Yair,” the reporter said. “She’s been good to me. I reckon I better send her something, even if she won’t need it.”

  “Won’t need it?” Hagood
cried.

  “No. She won’t need what I could send her. She’s always been lucky that way.”

  “Wait,” Hagood said. “Let me get this straight. You want to buy a wedding present. I thought you told me you didn’t have any sisters or br—”

  “No,” the reporter said. “It’s for mamma.”

  “Oh,” Hagood said after a time, though perhaps it did not seem very long to the reporter; perhaps it did not seem long before Hagood spoke again: “I see. Yes. Am I to congratulate you?”

  “Thanks,” the reporter said. “I don’t know the guy. But the two I did know were O.K.”

  “I see,” Hagood said. “Yes. Well. Married. The two you did know. Was one of them your — But no matter. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me!” he cried. “At least it is something. Anyway, she did what she could for you!” Now it was the reporter looking at Hagood with courteous interrogation. “It will change your life some now,” Hagood said.

  “Well, I hope not,” the reporter said. “I don’t reckon she has done any worse this time than she used to. You saw yourself she’s still a fine-looking old gal and a good goer still, even if she ain’t any longer one of the ones you will find in the dance marathons at 6 a m. So I guess it’s O.K. still. She always has been lucky that way.”

  “You hope—” Hagood said. “You... Wait,” he said.

  He took a cigarette from the pack on the desk, though at last the reporter himself leaned and struck the match for him and held it. “Let me get this straight. You mean you haven’t been — that that money you borrowed from me, that you send—”

  “Send what where?” the reporter said after a moment. “Oh, I see. No. I ain’t sent her money. She sends me money. And I don’t reckon that just getting married again will...” Hagood did not even sit back in the chair.