Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  TEN

  Gavin Stevens

  I COULD HAVE suggested that, told her to do that, and she would have done it — torn the card up at once, quickly, immediately, with passion and exultation. She was like her mother in one thing at least: needing, fated to need, to find something competent enough, strong enough (in her case, this case, not tough enough because Kohl was tough enough: he happened to be mere flesh and bones and so wasn’t durable enough) to take what she had to give; and at the same time doomed to fail, in this, her case, not because Barton failed her but because he also had doom in his horoscope. So if the Communist party, having already proved itself immune to bullets and therefore immortal, had replaced him, not again to bereave her, of course she would have torn her card up, with passion and exultation and joy too. Since what sacrifice can love demand more complete than abasement, abnegation, particularly at the price of what the unknowing materialist world would in its crass insensitive ignorance dub cowardice and shame? I have always had a sneaking notion that that old Christian martyr actually liked, perhaps even loved, his aurochs or his lion.

  But I did suggest something else. It was 1940 now. The Nibelung maniac had destroyed Poland and turned back west where Paris, the civilised world’s eternal and splendid courtesan, had been sold to him like any whore and only the English national character turned him east again; another year and Lenin’s Frankenstein would be our ally but too late for her; too late for us too, too late for all the western world’s peace for the next hundred years, as a tubby little giant of a man in England was already saying in private, but needs must when the devil etcetera.

  It began in my office. He was a quiet, neat, almost negative man of no particular age between twenty-five and fifty, as they all appear, who showed me briefly the federal badge (his name was Gihon) and accepted the chair and said Thank you and opened his business quietly and impersonally, as they do, as if they are simply delivering a not-too-important message. Oh yes, I was doubtless the last, the very last on his list since he would have checked thoroughly on or into me without my knowing it as he had days and maybe months ago penetrated and resolved and sifted all there was to be learned about her.

  “We know that all she has done, tried to do, has been done quite openly, where everybody would have a chance to hear about it, know about it—”

  “I think you can safely say that,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “ — quite openly. Quite harmless. With the best of intentions, only not very . . . practical. Nothing in fact that a lady wouldn’t do, only a little . . .”

  “Screwy,” I suggested.

  “Thank you. But there you are. I can tell you in confidence that she holds a Communist party card. Naturally you are not aware of that.”

  Now I said, “Thank you.”

  “And, once a communist — I grant you, that’s like the old saying (no imputation of course, I’m sure you understand that), Once a prostitute. Which anyone after calm reflection knows to be false. But there you are. This is not a time of calmness and reflection; to ask or expect, let alone hope for, that from the government and the people too, faced with what we are going to have to meet sooner probably than we realise—”

  “Yes,” I said. “What do you want me to do? What do you assume I can do?”

  “She . . . I understand, have been informed, that you are her earliest and still are her closest friend—”

  “No imputation of course,” I said. But he didn’t say Thank you in his turn. He didn’t say anything, anything at all. He just sat there watching me through his glasses, grey, negative as a chameleon, terrifying as the footprint on Crusoe’s beach, too negative and neuter in that one frail articulation to bear the terrible mantle he represented. “What you want then is for me to use my influence—”

  “ — as a patriotic citizen who is intelligent enough to know that he too will be in this war within five years — I set five years as an outside maximum since it took the Germans only three years before to go completely mad and defy us into that one — with exactly who for our enemy we may not know until it is already too late—”

  “ — to persuade her to surrender that card quietly to you and swear whatever binding oath you are authorised to give her,” I said. “Didn’t you just say yourself that Once a whore (with no imputations) always a whore?”

  “I quite agree with you,” he said. “In this case, not the one with the imputations.”

  “Then what do you want of me — her?”

  He produced a small notebook and opened it; he even had the days of the week and the hours: “She and her husband were in Spain, members of the Loyalist communist army six months and twenty-nine days until he was killed in action; she herself remained, serving as an orderly in the hospital after her own wound, until the Loyalists evacuated her across the border into France—”

  “Which is on record even right here in Jefferson.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Before that she lived for seven years in New York City as the common-law wife—”

  “ — which of course damns her not only in Jefferson, Mississippi, but in Washington too.” But he had not even paused.

  “ — of a known registered member of the Communist party, and the close associate of other known members of the Communist party, which may not be in your Jefferson records.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And then?”

  He closed the notebook and put it back inside his coat and sat looking at me again, quite cold, quite impersonal, as if the space between us were the lens of a microscope. “So she knew people, not only in Spain but in the United States too, people who so far are not even in our records — Communists members and agents, important people, who are not as noticeable as Jewish sculptors and Columbia professors and other such intelligent amateurs—” Because that was when I finally understood.

  “I see,” I said. “You offer a swap. You will trade her immunity for names. Your bureau will whitewash her from an enemy into a simple stool pigeon. Have you a warrant of any sort?”

  “No,” he said. I got up.

  “Then good-day, sir.” But he didn’t move yet.

  “You won’t suggest it to her?”

  “I will not,” I said.

  “Your country is in danger, perhaps in jeopardy.”

  “Not from her,” I said. Then he rose too and took his hat from the desk.

  “I hope you won’t regret this, Mr Stevens.”

  “Good-day, sir,” I said.

  Or that is, I wrote it. Because it was three years now and she had tried, really tried to learn lip reading. But I don’t know. Maybe to live outside human sound is to live outside human time too, and she didn’t have time to learn, to bother to learn. But again I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t take even three years of freedom, immunity from it to learn that perhaps the entire dilemma of man’s condition is because of the ceaseless gabble with which he has surrounded himself, enclosed himself, insulated himself from the penalties of his own folly, which otherwise — the penalties, the simple red-ink — might have enabled him by now to have made his condition solvent, workable, successful. So I wrote it.

  Leave here Go away

  “You mean, move?” she said. “Find a place of my own? an apartment or a house?”

  I mean leave Jefferson I wrote. Go completely away for good Give me that damn card & leave Jefferson

  “You said that to me before.”

  “No I didn’t,” I said. I even spoke it, already writing, already planning out the whole paragraph it would take: We’ve never even mentioned that card or the Communist party either. Even back there three years ago when you first tried to tell me you had one and show it to me and I wouldn’t let you, stopped you, refused to listen: don’t you remember? But she was already talking again:

  “I mean back there when I was fifteen or sixteen and you said I must get away from Jefferson.”

  So I didn’t even write the other; I wrote But you couldn’t then Now you can Give me the card & go She stood quietly for a mo
ment, a time. We didn’t even try to use the ivory tablet on occasions of moment and crisis like this. It was a bijou, a gewgaw, a bangle, feminine; really almost useless: thin ivory sheets bound with gold and ringed together with more of it, each sheet about the size of a playing card so that it wouldn’t really contain more than about three words at a time, like an anagram, an acrostic at the level of children — a puzzle say or maybe a continued story ravished from a primer. Instead, we were in her upstairs sitting-room she had fitted up, standing at the mantel which she had designed at the exact right height and width to support a foolscap pad when he had something to discuss that there must be no mistake about or something which wasn’t worth not being explicit about, like money, so that she could read the words as my hand formed them, like speech, almost like hearing.

  “Go where?” she said. “Where could I go?”

  Anywhere New York Back to Europe of course but in New York some of the people still you & Barton knew the friends your own age She looked at me. With the pupils expanded like this, her eyes looked almost black; blind too.

  “I’m afraid,” she said.

  I spoke; she could read single words if they were slow: “You? Afraid?” She said:

  “Yes. I don’t want to be helpless. I won’t be helpless. I won’t have to depend.”

  I thought fast, like that second you have to raise or draw or throw in your hand, while each fraction of the second effaces another pip from your hole card. I wrote quite steadily while she watched Then why am I here and drew my hand back so she could read it. Then she said, in that dry, lifeless, what Chick calls duck’s quack:

  “Gavin.” I didn’t move. She said it again: “Gavin.” I didn’t move. She said: “All right. I lied. Not the depend part. I won’t depend. I just must be where you are.” She didn’t even add Because you’re all I have now. She just stood, our eyes almost level, looking at me out of, across, something — abyss, darkness; not abject, not questioning, not even hoping; in a moment I would know it; saying again in the quacking voice: “Gavin.”

  I wrote rapidly, in three- or four-word bursts, gaggles, clumps, whatever you want to call them, so she could read as I wrote Its all right don’t Be afraid I Refuse to marry you 20 years too much Difference for it To work besides I Don’t want to

  “Gavin,” she said.

  I wrote again, ripping the yellow sheets off the pad and shoving them aside on the mantel I don’t want to

  “I love you,” she said. “Even when I have to tell a lie, you have already invented it for me.”

  I wrote No lie nobody Mentioned Barton Kohl

  “Yes,” she said.

  I wrote No

  “But you can me,” she said. That’s right. She used the explicit word, speaking the hard brutal guttural in the quacking duck’s voice. That had been our problem as soon as we undertook the voice lessons: the tone, to soften the voice which she herself couldn’t hear. “It’s exactly backward,” she told me. “When you say I’m whispering, it feels like thunder inside my head. But when I say it this way, I can’t even feel it.” And this time it would be almost a shout. Which is the way it was now, since she probably believed she had lowered her voice, I standing there while what seemed to me like reverberations of thunder died away.

  “You’re blushing,” she said.

  I wrote that word

  “What word?”

  that you just said

  “Tell me another one to use. Write it down so I can see it and remember it.”

  I wrote There is no other thats the right one only one I am old fashioned it still shocks me a little No what shocks is when a woman uses it & is not shocked at all until she realises I am Then I wrote that’s wrong too what shocks is that all that magic passion excitement be summed up & dismissed in that one bald unlovely sound

  “All right,” she said. “Don’t use any word then.”

  I wrote Do you mean you want to

  “Of course you can,” she said. “Always. You know that.”

  I wrote That’s not what I asked you She read it. Then she didn’t move. I wrote Look at me She did so, looking at me from out or across what it was that I would recognise in a moment now.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I wrote Didn’t I just tell you you don’t ever have to be afraid and this time I had to move the pad slightly to draw her attention to it, until she said, not looking up:

  “I don’t have to go away either?”

  I wrote No under her eyes this time, then she looked up, at me, and I knew what it was she looked out of or across: the immeasurable loss, the appeaseless grief, the fidelity and the enduring, the dry quacking voice saying, “Gavin. Gavin. Gavin.” while I wrote

  because we are the 2 in all the world who can love each other without having to the end of it tailing off in a sort of violent rubric as she clasped me, clinging to me, quite hard, the dry clapping voice saying,

  “Gavin. Gavin. I love you. I love you,” so that I had to break free to reach the pad and write

  Give me the card

  She stared down at it, her hands arrested in the act of leaving my shoulders. “Card?” she said. Then she said, “I’ve lost it.”

  Then I knew: a flash, like lightning. I wrote your father even while I was saying out loud: “Oh the son of a bitch, the son of a bitch,” saying to myself Wait. Wait! He had to. Put yourself in his place. What else could he do, what other weapon did he have to defend his very existence before she destroyed it — the position he had sacrificed everything for — wife home friends peace — to gain the only prize he knew since it was the only one he could understand since the world itself as he understood it assured him that was what he wanted because that was the only thing worth having. Of course: his only possible weapon: gain possession of the card, hold the threat of turning it in to the F.B.I. over her and stop her before she destroyed him. Yet all this time I was telling myself You know better. He will use it to destroy her. It was he himself probably who scrawled Jew Communist Kohl on his own sidewalk at midnight to bank a reserve of Jefferson sympathy against the day when he would be compelled to commit his only child to the insane asylum. I wrote

  Ransacked your room drawers desk

  “Somebody did,” she said. “It was last year. I thought—” I wrote

  It was your father

  “Was it?” Yes, it was exactly that tone. I wrote

  Don’t you know it was

  “Does it matter? They will send me another one I suppose. But that doesn’t matter either. I haven’t changed. I don’t have to have a little printed card to show it.”

  This time I wrote slowly and carefully You don’t have to go I won’t ask any more but when I do ask you again to go will you just believe me & go at once I will make all plans will you do that

  “Yes,” she said.

  I wrote Swear

  “Yes,” she said. “Then you can marry.” I couldn’t have written anyway; she had caught up both my hands, holding them between hers against her chest. “You must. I want you to. You mustn’t miss that. Nobody must never have had that once. Nobody. Nobody.” She was looking at me. “That word you didn’t like. My mother said that to you once too, didn’t she.” It wasn’t even a question. “Did you?”

  I freed my hands and wrote You know we didn’t

  “Why didn’t you?”

  I wrote Because she felt sorry for me when you do things for people just because you feel sorry for them what you do is probably not very important to you

  “I don’t feel sorry for you. You know that. Don’t you know it will be important to me?”

  I wrote Then maybe it was because I wasn’t worthy of her & we both knew it but I thought if we didn’t maybe she might always think maybe I might have been and ripped the sheet off and crumpled it into my pocket and wrote I must go now

  “Don’t go,” she said. Then she said, “Yes, go. You see, I’m all right now, I’m not even afraid any more.”

  I wrote why should you ever have been then on the
same sheet My hat and she went and got it while I gathered up the rest of the used sheets into my pocket and took the hat and went toward the door, the quacking voice saying “Gavin” until I turned. “How did we say it? the only two people in the world that love each other and don’t have to? I love you, Gavin,” in that voice, tone which to her was whispering, murmuring perhaps but to anyone tragic enough to still have ears was as penetrating and shocking almost as an old-time klaxon automobile horn.

  And out, fast and quick out of his house, his mansion, his palace, on to his bank fast and quick too, right on back into that little room and bump, nudge, startle the propped feet off the fireplace, my hand already out: “I will now take that card, if you please.” Except that would be wantonly throwing away an opportunity, a gift actually; why let him pick his moment to surrender, produce the evidence on his side, to the F.B.I.? Why not strike first, sic the F.B.I. on him before he could, as Ratliff would say, snatch back: that mild neutral grey man flashing that badge on him, saying, “We have it on authority, Mr Snopes, that you have a Communist party card in your possession. Do you care to make a statement?”

  But I didn’t know where Gihon would be now and, his declared enemy, he wouldn’t believe me. So the F.B.I. as represented by him was out; I would have to go straight to that vast Omnipotence called Govment; the stool-pigeoning itself must be unimpeachable; it must stem from the milieu and hold rigidly to the vernacular. A post card of course, a penny post card. I thought first of addressing it to the President of the United States but with the similar nut mail Mr Roosevelt was probably already getting, mine would be drowned in that flood. Which left the simple military. But although the military never loses any piece of paper once it has been written on and signed (anything else yes, it will abandon or give away or destroy, but a piece of signed paper never, though it have to subsidise and uniform a thousand people to do nothing else but guard it); it would inevitably reappear someday even if it took a hundred years, but that would be too long also. Whereupon I suddenly overheard myself asking, What’s wrong with your first idea of the F.B.I.? to which the only answer was, Nothing. So I could even see the completed card. The vernacular was an informed one, it knew there were two Hoovers: one a carpet sweeper and the other had been President, and that the head of the F.B.I. was said to be named Hoover. So I could see it: