You see? That was it: the very words reputation and good name. Merely to say them, speak them aloud, give their existence vocal recognition, would irrevocably soil and besmirch them, would destroy the immunity of the very things they represented, leaving them not just vulnerable but already doomed; from the inviolable and proud integrity of principles they would become, reduce to, the ephemeral and already doomed and damned fragility of human conditions; innocence and virginity become symbol and postulant of loss and grief, evermore to be mourned, existing only in the past tense was and now is not, no more no more.
That was the problem. Because the act, the deed itself, was simple enough. Luckily the affair happened late on a Saturday afternoon, which would give my face thirty-six hours anyway before it would have to make a public appearance. (It wouldn’t have needed that long except for the ring he wore — a thing not quite as large as a brass knuckle and not really noticeably unlike gold if you didn’t get too close probably, of a tiger’s head gripping between its jaws what had been — advisedly — a ruby; advisedly because the fact that the stone was missing at the moment was a loss only to my lip.)
Besides, the drugstore meetings were not even a weekly affair, let alone daily, so even a whole week could pass before (1) it would occur to someone that we had not met in over a week, who (2) would immediately assume that we had something to conceal was why we had not met in over a week, and (3) the fact that we had met again after waiting over a week only proved it.
By which time I was even able to shave past my cut lip. So it was very simple; simple indeed in fact, and I the simple one. I had planned it like this: the carefully timed accident which would bring me out the drugstore door, the (say) tin of pipe tobacco still in plain sight on its way to the pocket, at the exact moment when she would pass on her way to school: “Good morning, Linda—” already stepping on past her and then already pausing: “I have another book for you. Meet me here after school this afternoon and we’ll have a coke over it.”
Which would be all necessary. Because I was the simple one, to whom it had never once occurred that the blow of that ruby-vacant reasonably almost-gold tiger’s head might have marked her too even if it didn’t leave a visible cut; that innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent; innocent because it foreknows all and therefore doesn’t have to fear and be afraid; the tin of tobacco now in my coat pocket because by this time even it had become noticeable, the last book-burdened stragglers now trotting toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell and still she had not passed; obviously I had missed her somehow: either taken my post not soon enough or she had taken another route to school or perhaps would not leave home for school at all today, for whatever reasons no part of which were the middleaged bachelor’s pandering her to Jonson and Herrick and Thomas Campion; crossing — I — the now-unchildrened street at last, mounting the outside stairs since tomorrow was always tomorrow; indeed, I could even use the tobacco tin again, provided I didn’t break the blue stamp for verity, and opened the screen door and entered the office.
She was sitting neither in the revolving chair behind the desk nor in the leather client’s one before it but in a straight hard armless one against the book-case as though she had fled, been driven until the wall stopped her, and turned then, her back against it, not quite sitting in the chair nor quite huddled in it because although her legs, knees were close and rigid and her hands were clasped tight in her lap, her head was still up watching the door and then me with the eyes the McCarron boy had marked her with which at a distance looked as black as her hair until you saw they were that blue so dark as to be almost violet.
“I thought …” she said. “They — somebody said Matt quit his job and left — went yesterday. I thought you might.…”
“Of course,” I said. “I always want to see you,” stopping myself in time from I’ve been waiting over there on the corner until the last bell rang, for you to pass though this is what I really stopped from Get up. Get out of here quick. Why did you come here anyway? Dont you see this is the very thing I have been lying awake at night with ever since Saturday? So I merely said that I had bought the can of tobacco which I must now find someone capable or anyway willing to smoke, to give it to, to create the chance to say: “I have another book for you. I forgot to bring it this morning, but I’ll bring it at noon. I’ll wait for you at Christian’s after school and stand you a soda too. Now you’ll have to hurry; you’re already late.”
I had not even released the screen door and so had only to open it again, having also in that time in which she crossed the room, space to discard a thousand frantic indecisions: to remain concealed in the office as though I had not been there at all this morning, and let her leave alone; to follow to the top of the stairs and see her down them, avuncular and fond; to walk her to the school itself and wait to see her through the actual door: the family friend snatching the neighbor’s child from the rife midst of truancy and restoring it to duty — family friend to Flem Snopes who had no more friends than Blackbeard or Pistol, to Eula Varner who no more had friends than man or woman either would have called them that Messalina and Helen had.
So I did all three: waited in the office too long, so that I had to follow down the stairs too fast, and then along the street beside her not far enough either to be un-noticed or forgotten. Then there remained only to suborn my nephew with the dollar bill and the book: I dont remember which one, I dont believe I even noticed.
“Sir?” Chick said. “I meet her in Christian’s drugstore after school and give her the book and tell her you’ll try to get there but not to wait. And buy her a soda. Why dont I just give her the book at school and save time?”
“Certainly,” I said. “Why dont you just give me back the dollar?”
“And buy her a soda,” he said. “Do I have to pay for that out of the dollar?”
“All right,” I said. “Twenty-five cents then. If she takes a banana split you can drink water and make a nickel more.”
“Maybe she’ll take a coke,” he said. “Then I can have one too and still make fifteen cents.”
“All right,” I said.
“Or suppose she dont want anything.”
“Didn’t I say all right?” I said. “Just dont let your mother hear you say ‘she dont’.”
“Why?” he said. “Father and Ratliff say ‘she dont’ all the time, and so do you when you are talking to them. And Ratliff says ‘taken’ for ‘took’ and ‘drug’ for ‘dragged’ and so do you when you are talking to country people like Ratliff.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“I’ve heard you. So has Ratliff.”
“Why? Did you tell him to?”
“No sir,” he said. “Ratliff told me.”
My rejoinder may have been Wait until you get as old as Ratliff and your father and me and you can too, though I dont remember. But then, inside the next few months I was to discover myself doing lots of things he wasn’t old enough yet for the privilege. Which was beside the point anyway now; now only the afternoon remained: the interminable time until a few moments after half-past-three filled with a thousand indecisions which each fierce succeeding harassment would revise. You see? She had not only abetted me in making that date with which I would break, wreck, shatter, destroy, slay something, she had even forestalled me in it by the simplicity of directness.
So I had only to pass that time. That is, get it passed, live it down; the office window as good as any for that and better than most since it looked down on the drugstore entrance so I had only to lurk there. Not to hear the dismissal bell of course this far away but rather to see them first: the little ones, the infantile inflow and scatter of primer- and first-graders, then the middle-graders boisterous and horsing as to the boys, then the mature ones, juniors and seniors grave with weight and alien with puberty; and ther
e she was, tall (no: not for a girl that tall but all right then: tall, like a heron out of a moil of frogs and tadpoles), pausing for just one quick second at the drugstore entrance for one quick glance, perhaps at the empty stairway. Then she entered, carrying three books any one of which might have been that book and I thought He gave it to her at school; the damned little devil has foxed me for that odd quarter.
But then I saw Chick; he entered too, carrying the book and then I thought how if I had only thought to fill a glass with water, to count off slowly sixty seconds say to cover the time Skeets McGowan, the soda squirt, would need to tear his fascinations from whatever other female junior or senior and fill the order, then drink the water slowly to simulate the coke; thinking But maybe she did take the banana split; maybe there is still time, already across the office, the screen door already in my hand before I caught myself: at least the county attorney must not be actually seen running down his office stairs and across the street into a drugstore where a sixteen-year-old high school junior waited.
And I was in time but just in time. They had not even sat down, or if they had she had already risen, the two of them only standing beside the table, she carrying four books now and looking at me for only that one last instant and then no more with the eyes you thought were just dark gray or blue until you knew better.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “I hope Chick told you.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I have to go on home anyway.”
“Without a coke even?” I said.
“I have to go home,” she said.
“Another time then,” I said. “What they call a rain check.”
“Yes,” she said. “I have to go home now.” So I moved so she could move, making the move first to let her go ahead, toward the door.
“Remember what you said about that quarter,” Chick said.
And made the next move first too, opening the screen for her then stopping in it and so establishing severance and separation by that little space before she even knew it, not even needing to pause and half-glance back to prove herself intact and safe, intact and secure and unthreatened still, not needing to say Mister Stevens nor even Mister Gavin nor Goodbye nor even anything to need to say Thank you for, nor even to look back then although she did. “Thank you for the book,” she said; and gone.
“Remember what you said about that quarter,” Chick said.
“Certainly,” I said. “Why the bejesus dont you go somewhere and spend it?”
Oh yes, doing a lot of things Chick wasn’t old enough yet himself to do. Because dodging situations which might force me to use even that base shabby lash again was fun, excitement. Because she didn’t know (Must not know, at least not now, not yet: else why the need for that base and shabby lash?), could not be certainly sure about that afternoon, that one or two or three (whatever it was) minutes in the drugstore; never sure whether what Chick told her was the truth: that I actually was going to be late and had simply sent my nephew as the handiest messenger to keep her company until or when or if I did show up, I so aged and fatuous as not even to realise the insult either standing her up would be, or sending a ten-year-old boy to keep her company and believing that she, a sixteen-year-old high school junior, would accept him; or if I had done it deliberately: made the date then sent the ten-year-old boy to fill it as a delicate way of saying Stop bothering me.
So I must not even give her a chance to demand of me with the temerity of desperation which of these was right. And that was the fun, the excitement. I mean, dodging her. It was adolescence in reverse, turned upside down: the youth, himself virgin and — who knew? — maybe even more so, at once drawn and terrified of what draws him, contriving by clumsy and timorous artifice the accidental encounters in which he still would not and never quite touch, would not even hope to touch, really want to touch, too terrified in fact to touch; but only to breathe the same air, be laved by the same circumambience which laved the mistress’s moving limbs; to whom the glove or the handkerchief she didn’t even know she had lost, the flower she didn’t even know she had crushed, the very ninth- or tenth-grade arithmetic or grammar or geography bearing her name in her own magical hand on the flyleaf, are more terrible and moving than ever will be afterward the gleam of the actual naked shoulder or spread of unbound hair on the pillow’s other twin.
That was me: not to encounter; continuously just to miss her yet never be caught at it. You know: in a little town of three thousand people like ours, the only thing that could cause more talk and notice than a middleaged bachelor meeting a sixteen-year-old maiden two or three times a week, would be a sixteen-year-old maiden and a middleaged bachelor just missing each other two or three times a week by darting into stores or up alleys. You know: a middleaged lawyer, certainly the one who was county attorney too, could always find enough to do even in a town of just three thousand to miss being on the one street between her home and the school house at eight-thirty and twelve and one and three-thirty oclock when the town’s whole infant roster must come and go, sometimes, a few times even, but not forever.
Yet that’s what I had to do. I had no help, you see; I couldn’t stop her suddenly on the street one day and say, “Answer quickly now. Exactly how much were you fooled or not fooled that afternoon in the drugstore? Say in one word exactly what you believe about that episode.” All I could do was leave well-enough alone, even when the only well-enough I had wasn’t anywhere that well.
So I had to dodge her. I had to plan not just mine but Yoknapatawpha County’s business too ahead in order to dodge a sixteen-year-old girl. That was during the spring. So until school was out in May it would be comparatively simple, at least for five days of the week. But in time vacation would arrive, with no claims of regimen or discipline on her; and observation even if not personal experience had long since taught me that anyone sixteen years old not nursing a child or supporting a family or in jail, could be almost anywhere at any time during the twenty-four hours.
So when the time came, which was that last summer before her final year in high school when she would graduate, I didn’t even have the catalogues and brochures from the alien and outland schools sent first to me in person, to be handed by me to her, but sent direct to her, to Miss Linda Snopes, Jefferson, Mississippi, the Mississippi to be carefully spelt out in full else the envelope would go: first, to Jefferson, Missouri; second, to every other state in the forty-eight which had a Jefferson in it, before: third, it would finally occur to somebody somewhere that there might be someone in Mississippi capable of thinking vaguely of attending an eastern or northern school or capable of having heard of such or anyway capable of enjoying the pictures in the catalogues or even deciphering the one-syllable words, provided they were accompanied by photographs.
So I had them sent direct to her — the shrewd suave snob-enticements from the Virginia schools at which Southern mothers seemed to aim their daughters by simple instinct, I dont know why, unless because the mothers themselves did not attend them, and thus accomplishing by proxy what had been denied them in person since they had not had mothers driven to accomplish vicariously what they in their turn had been denied.
And not just the Virginia ones first but the ones from the smart ‘finishing’ schools north of Mason’s and Dixon’s too. I was being fair. No: we were being fair, she and I both, the two of us who never met anymore now for the sake of her good name, in federation and cahoots for the sake of her soul; the two of us together saying in absentia to her mother: There they all are: the smart ones, the snob ones. We have been fair, we gave you your chance. Now, here is where we want to go, where you can help us go, if not by approval, at least by not saying No; arranging for the other catalogues to reach her only then: the schools which would not even notice what she wore and how she walked and used her fork and all the rest of how she looked and acted in public because by this time all that would be too old and fixed to change, but mainly because it had not mattered anyway since what did matter was what she did an
d how she acted in the spirit’s inviolable solitude.
So now — these last began to reach her about Christmas time of that last year in high school — she would have to see me, need to see me, not to help her decide which one of them but simply to discuss, canvass the decision before it became final. I waited, in fact quite patiently while it finally dawned on me that she was not going to make the first gesture to see me again. I had avoided her for over six months now and she not only knew I had been dodging her since in a town the size of ours a male can no more avoid a female consistently for that long by mere accident than they can meet for that long by what they believed or thought was discretion and surreptition, even she realised by this time that that business in Christian’s drugstore that afternoon last April had been no clumsy accident. (Oh yes, it had already occurred to me also that she had no reason whatever to assume I knew she had received the catalogues, let alone had instigated them. But I dismissed that as immediately as you will too if we are to get on with this.)
So I must make that first gesture. It would not be quite as simple now as it had used to be. A little after half-past-three on any weekday afternoon I could see her from the office window (if I happened to be there) pass along the Square in the school’s scattering exodus. Last year, in fact during all the time before, she would be alone, or seemed to be. But now, during this past one, particularly since the Levitt troglodyte’s departure, she would be with another girl who lived on the same street. Then suddenly (it began in the late winter, about St Valentine’s day) instead of two there would be four of them: two boys, Chick said the Rouncewell boy and the youngest Bishop one, the year’s high school athletic stars. And now, after spring began, the four of them would be on almost any afternoon in Christian’s drugstore (at least there harbored apparently there no ghosts to make her blush and squirm and I was glad of that), with coca colas and the other fearsome (I was acquainted there) messes which young people, young women in particular, consume with terrifying equanimity not only in the afternoon but at nine and ten in the morning too: which — the four of them — I had taken to be two pairs, two couples in the steadfast almost uxorious fashion of high school juniors and seniors, until one evening I saw (by chance) her going toward the picture show squired by both of them.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 480