At once he realized that he was still in his pajamas, so he buttoned his overcoat. It was of broadcloth, black, brushed, of an outmoded elegance, with a sable collar. “At least they didn’t have time to hide this from me,” he thought in fretted rage. “Now, if I just had my. . . .” He looked down at his feet. “Ah. I seem to have. . . .” He looked at his shoes. “That’s fortunate, too.” Then the momentary surprise faded too, now that outrage had space in which to disseminate itself. He touched his hat, then he put his hand to his lapel. The jasmine was there. Say what he would, curse Jake as he often had to do, the Negro never forgot whatever flower in its season. Always it would be there, fresh and recent and unblemished, on the morning coffee tray. The flower and the. . . . He clasped his ebony stick beneath his arm and opened the briefcase. The two fresh handkerchiefs were there, beside the book. He thrust one of them into his breast pocket and went on. After a while the noise of Chlory’s wailing died away.
Then for a little while it was definitely unpleasant. He detested crowds: the milling and aimless and patient stupidity; the concussion of life-quick flesh with his own. But presently, if not soon, he was free, and standing so, still a little ruffled, a little annoyed, he looked back with fading outrage and distaste at the throng as it clotted quietly through the entrance. With fading distaste until the distaste was gone, leaving his face quiet and quite intelligent, with a faint and long constant overtone of quizzical bemusement not yet tinctured with surprised speculation, not yet puzzled, not yet wary. That was to come later. Hence it did not show in his voice, which was now merely light, quizzical, contained, “There seems to be quite a crowd of them.”
“Yes,” the other said. The Judge looked at him and saw a young man in conventional morning dress with some subtle effluvium of weddings, watching the entrance with a strained, patient air.
“You are expecting someone?” the Judge said.
Now the other looked at him. “Yes. You didn’t see — But you don’t know her.”
“Know whom?”
“My wife. That is, she is not my wife yet. But the wedding was to be at noon.”
“Something happened, did it?”
“I had to do it.” The young man looked at him, strained, anxious. “I was late. That’s why I was driving fast. A child ran into the road. I was going too fast to stop. So I had to turn.”
“But you missed the child?”
“Yes.” The other looked at him. “You don’t know her?”
“And are you waiting here to. . . .” The judge stared at the other. His eyes were narrowed, his gaze was piercing, hard. He said suddenly, sharply, “Nonsense.”
“What? What did you say?” the other asked with his vague, strained, almost beseeching air. The Judge looked away. His frowning concentration, his reflex of angry astonishment, was gone. He seemed to have wiped it from his face by a sudden deliberate action. He was like a man who, not a swordsman, has practiced with a blade a little against a certain improbable crisis, and who suddenly finds himself, blade in hand, face to face with the event. He looked at the entrance, his face alert, musing swiftly: he seemed to muse upon the entering faces with a still and furious concentration, and quietly; quietly he looked about, then at the other again. The young man still watched him.
“You’re looking for your wife too, I suppose,” he said. “I hope you find her. I hope you do.” He spoke with a sort of quiet despair. “I suppose she is old, as you are. It must be hell on the one who has to watch and wait for the other one he or she has grown old in marriage with, because it is so terrible to wait and watch like me, for a girl who is a maiden to you. Of course I think mine is the most unbearable. You see if it had only been the next day — anything. But then if it had, I guess I could not have turned out for that kid. I guess I just think mine is so terrible. It can’t be as bad as I think it is. It just can’t be. I hope you find her.”
The Judge’s lip lifted. “I came here to escape someone; not to find anyone.” He looked at the other. His face was still broken with that grimace which might have been smiling. But his eyes were not smiling. “If I were looking for anybody, it would probably be my son.”
“Oh. A son. I see.”
“Yes. He would be about your age. He was ten when he died.”
“Look for him here.”
Now the Judge laughed outright, save for his eyes. The other watched him with that grave anxiety leavened now with quiet interested curiosity. “You mean you don’t believe?” The Judge laughed aloud. Still laughing, he produced a cloth sack of tobacco and rolled a slender cigarette. When he looked up, the other was watching the entrance again. The Judge ceased to laugh.
“Have you a match?” he said. The other looked at him. The Judge raised the cigarette. “A match.”
The other sought in his pockets. “No.” He looked at the Judge. “Look for him here,” he said.
“Thank you,” the Judge answered. “I may avail myself of your advice later.” He turned away. Then he paused and looked back. The young man was watching the entrance. The Judge watched him, bemused, his lip lifted. He turned on, then he stopped still. His face was now completely shocked, into complete immobility like a mask; the sensitive, worn mouth, the delicate nostrils, the eyes all pupil or pupilless. He could not seem to move at all. Then Mothershed turned and saw him. For an instant Mothershed’s pale eyes flickered, his truncated jaw, collapsing steadily with a savage, toothless motion, ceased.
“Well?” Mothershed said.
“Yes,” the Judge said; “it’s me.” Now it was that, as the mesmerism left him, the shadow bewildered and wary and complete, touched his face. Even to himself his words sounded idiotic. “I thought that you were dea. . . .” Then he made a supreme and gallant effort, his voice light, quizzical, contained again, “Well?”
Mothershed looked at him — a squat man in a soiled and mismatched suit stained with grease and dirt, his soiled collar innocent of tie — with a pale, lightly slumbering glare filled with savage outrage. “So they got you here, too, did they?”
“That depends on who you mean by ‘they’ and what you mean by ‘here.’”
Mothershed made a savage, sweeping gesture with one arm. “Here, by God! The preachers. The Jesus shouters.”
“Ah,” the Judge said. “Well, if I am where I am beginning to think I am, I don’t know whether I am here or not. But you are not here at all, are you?” Mothershed cursed violently. “Yes,” the Judge said, “we never thought, sitting in my office on those afternoons, discussing Voltaire and Ingersoll, that we should ever be brought to this, did we? You, the atheist whom the mere sight of a church spire on the sky could enrage; and I who have never been able to divorce myself from reason enough to accept even your pleasant and labor-saving theory of nihilism.”
“Labor-saving!” Mothershed cried. “By God, I. . . .” He cursed with impotent fury. The Judge might have been smiling save for his eyes. He sealed the cigarette again.
“Have you a match?”
“What?” Mothershed said. He glared at the Judge, his mouth open. He sought through his clothes. From out the savage movement, strapped beneath his armpit, there peeped fleetly the butt of a heavy pistol. “No,” he said. “I ain’t.”
“Yes,” the Judge said. He twisted the cigarette, his gaze light, quizzical. “But you still haven’t told me what you are doing here. I heard that you had. . . .”
Again Mothershed cursed, prompt, outraged. “I ain’t. I just committed suicide.” He glared at the Judge. “God damn it, I remember raising the pistol; I remember the little cold ring it made against my ear; I remember when I told my finger on the trigger. . . .” He glared at the Judge. “I thought that that would be one way I could escape the preachers, since by the church’s own token. . . .”. He glared at the Judge, his pale gaze apoplectic and outraged. “Well, I know why you are here. You come here looking for that boy.”
The Judge looked down, his lip lifted, the movement pouched upward about his eyes. He said quietly, “No.”<
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Mothershed watched him, glared at him. “Looking for that boy. Agnosticism.” He snarled it. “Won’t say ‘Yes’ and won’t say ‘No’ until you see which way the cat will jump. Ready to sell out to the highest bidder. By God, I’d rather have give up and died in sanctity, with every heaven-yelping fool in ten miles around. . . .”
“No,” the Judge said quietly behind the still, dead gleam of his teeth. Then his teeth vanished quietly, though he did not look up. He sealed the cigarette carefully again. “There seem to be a lot of people here.” Mothershed now began to watch him with speculation, tasting his savage gums, his pale furious glare arrested. “You have seen other familiar faces besides my own here, I suppose. Even those of men whom you know only by name, perhaps?”
“Oh,” Mothershed said. “I see. I get you now.” The Judge seemed to be engrossed in the cigarette. “You want to take a whirl at them too, do you? Go ahead. I hope you will get a little more out of them that will stick to your guts than I did. Maybe you will, since you don’t seem to want to know as much as you want something new to be uncertain about. Well, you can get plenty of that from any of them.”
“You mean you have. . . .”
Again Mothershed cursed, harsh, savage. “Sure. Ingersoll. Paine. Every bastard one of them that I used to waste my time reading when I had better been sitting on the sunny side of a log.”
“Ah,” the Judge said. “Ingersoll. Is he. . . .”
“Sure. On a bench just inside the park yonder. And maybe on the same bench you’ll find the one that wrote the little women books. If he ain’t there, he ought to be.”
So the Judge sat forward, elbows on knees, the unlighted cigarette in his fingers. “So you too are reconciled,” he said. The man who Mothershed said was Ingersoll looked at his profile quietly. “To this place.”
“Ah,” the other said. He made a brief, short gesture. “Reconciled.”
The Judge did not look up. “You accept it? You acquiesce?” He seemed to be absorbed in the cigarette. “If I could just see Him, talk to Him.” The cigarette turned slowly in his fingers. “Perhaps I was seeking Him. Perhaps I was seeking Him all the time I was reading your books, and Voltaire and Montesquieu. Perhaps I was.” The cigarette turned slowly. “I have believed in you. In your sincerity. I said, if Truth is to be found by man, this man will be among those who find it. At one time — I was in the throes of that suffering from a still green hurt which causes even an intelligent man to cast about for anything, any straw — I had a foolish conceit: you will be the first to laugh at it as I myself did later. I thought, perhaps there is a hereafter, a way station into nothingness perhaps, where for an instant lesser men might speak face to face with men like you whom they could believe; could hear from such a man’s own lips the words: ‘There is hope,’ or: ‘There is nothing.’ I said to myself, in such case it will not be Him whom I shall seek; it will be Ingersoll or Paine or Voltaire.” He watched the cigarette. “Give me your word now. Say either of these to me. I will believe.”
The other looked at the Judge for a time. Then he said, “Why? Believe why?”
The paper about the cigarette had come loose. The Judge twisted it carefully back, handling the cigarette carefully. “You see, I had a son. He was the last of my name and race. After my wife died we lived alone, two men in the house. It had been a good name, you see. I wanted him to be manly, worthy of it. He had a pony which he rode all the time. I have a photograph of them which I use as a bookmark. Often, looking at the picture or watching them unbeknownst as they passed the library window, I would think What hopes ride yonder; of the pony I would think What burden do you blindly bear, dumb brute. One day they telephoned me at my office. He had been found dragging from the stirrup. Whether the pony had kicked him or he had struck his head in falling, I never knew.”
He laid the cigarette carefully on the bench beside him and opened the briefcase. He took out a book. “Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary,” he said. “I always carry a book with me. I am a great reader. It happens that my life is a solitary one, owing to the fact that I am the last of my family, and perhaps to the fact that I am a Republican office-holder in a Democratic stronghold. I am a Federal judge, from a Mississippi district. My wife’s father was a Republican.” He added quickly, “I believe the tenets of the Republican Party to be best for the country. You will not believe it, but for the last fifteen years my one intellectual companion has been a rabid atheist, almost an illiterate, who not only scorns all logic and science, but who has a distinct body odor as well. Sometimes I have thought, sitting with him in my office on a summer afternoon — a damp one — that if a restoration of faith could remove his prejudice against bathing, I should be justified in going to that length myself even.” He took a photograph from the book and extended it. “This was my son.”
The other looked at the picture without moving, without offering to take it. From the brown and fading cardboard a boy of ten, erect upon the pony, looked back at them with a grave and tranquil hauteur. “He rode practically all the time. Even to church (I attended church regularly then. I still do, at times, even now). We had to take an extra groom along in the carriage to. . . .” He looked at the picture, musing. “After his mother died I never married again. My own mother was sickly, an invalid. I could cajole her. In the absence of my aunts I could browbeat her into letting me go barefoot in the garden, with two house servants on watch to signal the approach of my aunts. I would return to the house, my manhood triumphant, vindicated, until I entered the room where she waited for me. Then I would know that for every grain of dust which pleasured my feet, she would pay with a second of her life. And we would sit in the dusk like two children, she holding my hand and crying quietly, until my aunts entered with the lamp. ‘Now, Sophia. Crying again. What have you let him bulldoze you into doing this time?’ She died when I was fourteen; I was twenty-eight before I asserted myself and took the wife of my choice; I was thirty-seven when my son was born.” He looked at the photograph, his eyes pouched, netted by two delicate hammocks of myriad lines as fine as etching. “He rode all the time. Hence the picture of the two of them, since they were inseparable. I have used this picture as a bookmark in the printed volumes where his and my ancestry can be followed for ten generations in our American annals, so that as the pages progressed it would be as though with my own eyes I watched him ride in the flesh down the long road which his blood and bone had traveled before it became his.” He held the picture. With his other hand he took up the cigarette. The paper had come loose: he held it raised a little and then arrested so, as if he did not dare raise it farther. “And you can give me your word. I will believe.”
“Go seek your son,” the other said. “Go seek him.”
Now the Judge did not move at all. Holding the picture and the dissolving cigarette, he sat in a complete immobility. He seemed to sit in a kind of terrible and unbreathing suspension. “And find him? And find him?” The other did not answer. Then the Judge turned and looked at him, and then the cigarette dropped quietly into dissolution as the tobacco rained down upon his neat, gleaming shoe. “Is that your word? I will believe, I tell you.” The other sat, shapeless, gray, sedentary, almost nondescript, looking down. “Come. You cannot stop with that. You cannot.”
Along the path before them people passed constantly. A woman passed, carrying a child and a basket, a young woman in a plain, worn, brushed cape. She turned upon the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll a plain, bright, pleasant face and spoke to him in a pleasant, tranquil voice. Then she looked at the Judge, pleasantly, a full look without boldness or diffidence, and went on. “Come. You cannot. You cannot.” Then his face went completely blank. In the midst of speaking his face emptied; he repeated “cannot. Cannot” in a tone of musing consternation. “Cannot,” he said. “You mean, you cannot give me any word? That you do not know? That you, yourself, do not know? You, Robert Ingersoll? Robert Ingersoll?” The other did not move. “Is Robert Ingersoll telling me that for twenty ye
ars I have leaned upon a reed no stronger than myself?”
Still the other did not look up. “You saw that young woman who just passed, carrying a child. Follow her. Look into her face.”
“A young woman. With a. . . .” The Judge looked at the other. “Ah. I see. Yes. I will look at the child and I shall see scars. Then I am to look into the woman’s face. Is that it?” The other didn’t answer. “That is your answer? your final word?” The other did not move. The Judge’s lip lifted. The movement pouched upward about his eyes as though despair, grief, had flared up for a final instant like a dying flame, leaving upon his face its ultimate and fading gleam in a faint grimace of dead teeth. He rose and put the photograph back into the briefcase. “And this is the man who says that he was once Robert Ingersoll.” Above his teeth his face mused in that expression which could have been smiling save for the eyes. “It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly. It was not proof that I sought.” With the stick and the briefcase clasped beneath his arm he rolled another slender cigarette. “I don’t know who you are, but I don’t believe you are Robert Ingersoll. Perhaps I could not know it even if you were. Anyway, there is a certain integral consistency which, whether it be right or wrong, a man must cherish because it alone will ever permit him to die. So what I have been, I am; what I am, I shall be until that instant comes when I am not. And then I shall have never been. How does it go? Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 664