“Gruss Gott, messieurs,” Don said.
“You just say that in Austria,” I said.
But (again after an infinitesimal moment) a voice said, “Gruss Gott.”
“No you dont,” Don said. We slipped our rucksacks and sat at one of the tables. Then the woman said, knitting rapidly, her blondined and marcelled head bent over her knitting, not even looking up when she spoke:
“Messieurs?”
“Deux bieres, Madame,” Don said.
“Brune ou blonde, Messieurs?”
“Blonde, Madame. And we would sleep too.”
“Bon, Messieurs.”
And the beer came too, blond as gold in the glass mugs manufactured like as not in Pittsburgh or Akron or Indianapolis, almost before we were done asking for it, as if, knowing we would be there sooner or later, they had had it ready for us. The waiter even wore a dinner jacket over his apron, maybe the first dinner jacket by geography outside the Peace Palace at Lausanne. He had a few rotten teeth in the face of a handsome consumptive stable-swipe and within the next ten seconds we discovered that he not only spoke better English than we did but, when he forgot to try too hard, better American too.
“Cet mort-la,” Don said. “Cet homme du voisonage qui tomba—”
“So you’re the ones that tried to put the lug on Papa Grignon,” the waiter said.
“On who?” Don said.
“The mayor. Back there at the church.”
“I thought he was the postman,” I said.
The waiter didn’t even glance at me. “You missed the sword and the manure-cart,” he said. “You’re thinking of Hollywood. This is Switzerland.” He never glanced at the rucksacks either. He didn’t need to. He could have spoken a paragraph or a page and said no more.
“Yes,” Don said. “Walking. We like it. The man that fell.”
“All right,” the waiter said. “So what?”
“A guide,” Don said. “With a wife in a Paris hat and a forty-thousand-franc fur coat. Who was there on the mountain with them when he fell. I may have heard of guides falling, but I never heard of one taking his wife along on a professional job, on a climb with a paying client. Because the mayor said there were four of them, and one of them was another guide—”
“All right,” the waiter said. “Brix and his wife and Emil Hiller and the client. It was the day Brix and his wife had set to get married on, after the season was over last fall, after Brix had made all the jack he could while the climbing lasted and there wouldn’t be anything ahead but just the winter to be married in. Only the night before the wedding Brix gets a blue from the client that the client’s already in Zurich and to meet him tomorrow morning. So Brix puts the wedding off and him and Hiller meet the train and the client gets off with the eight or ten thousand francs’ worth of climbing junk Brix and Hiller have helped him buy during the last five years and that afternoon they climb to the Bernardines’ and the next day—”
“The bride,” Don said.
“They took her with them. They held the wedding that morning, like Brix had planned. He had put it off when he got the blue until him and Hiller could climb the client to wherever he wanted to go and then bring him back and put him back on the train again but the first thing the client heard about when he got off the train was the wedding so he took charge of the wedding and—”
“Wait,” Don said. “Wait.”
“He had the jack,” the waiter said. He hadn’t moved anymore. He wasn’t even wiping off the table that didn’t need it as we might have expected. He just stood there. “The Big Shot. Brix and Hiller had been dragging him over the easy climbs around here for the last four or five years, between the times when he would be merging something else for another two million kroner or francs or lire. Not that he couldn’t have done better. He was a little older than you but not much. He didn’t want to. He climbed for a holiday, to get his picture in his hometown paper maybe. And you dont climb for a holiday. You chisel yourself the holiday and spend it and maybe the dough that should have gone on your wife’s teeth too, climbing. And there was the jack, the extra jack, and Brix was probably close enough to marriage by then to have realised he wasn’t going to ever see much more of what he could call spare money. So the Big Shot took charge and they held the wedding and the Big Shot himself gave away the bride and signed the register—”
“Didn’t she have any people?” Don said.
“The married daughter of her mother’s half-sister,” the waiter said. “She lived with them but maybe everybody’s half-first cousin dont marry somebody that has for his boss a man that not only has the jack but is easy with it too as long as he runs the way it is being spent. And so the Big Shot signed the register first and the priest blessed the climb too, up to the Bernardines’ where the Big Shot will give the wedding supper and back home tomorrow for the Big Shot to catch his train to Milan and merge something else, because a little child could make that climb alone almost if the weather just held off. So they climbed to the Bernardines’ that afternoon and the Big Shot gave the wedding supper and the next morning they are on the glacis where Brix hadn’t intended to be except that something had gone wrong, the weather probably, they usually say it’s the weather, and maybe they should have stayed holed-up at the Bernardines’ but there was the Big Shot’s train and everybody dont want to dedicate his life to hauling lugs up and down mountains and dont ever intend to want to, and maybe Brix should have left his wife at the Bernardines’ but everybody dont want to get married either and dont ever intend to want to. Anyway the Big Shot is where Brix shouldn’t have taken him, doing whatever it was that Brix and Hiller should have known he would do, and he goes off the ledge and takes Mrs Brix with him and the two of them take Brix and so there they are: Hiller anchored on the ledge with his end of the rope, and Mrs Brix and then the Big Shot and then Brix at the other end of it, dangling down the ice-face. But at least the Big Shot drops his axe in time to miss Brix with it which is lucky because it’s an overhang that Brix cant reach with his axe and nobody ever pulled up three people swinging clear, at least not around here, and naturally Brix aint going to ask the guy who is paying for the trip to cut the rope just so Hiller can pull up a guide’s wife that was a deadhead and never had any business there anyway. So Brix cuts between himself and the Big Shot and then Hiller pulls up two all right and the next afternoon Mrs Brix and the Big Shot left on the train and after a while the snow—”
“Wait,” Don said. “The bride? the widow?”
“They waited twenty-four hours. The Big Shot laid over a full day. Hiller took them back to the Bernardines’ that afternoon to come down by the road in the morning, and Hiller and one of the brothers went down the glacis that night to make a try for Brix. But there was too much snow so Hiller came on down to the village and got some help (the Big Shot was guaranteeing that too. He was offering a good piece of jack for finding Brix now) and when daylight came Hiller and the other boys tried to go in from the bottom. But there was too much snow and would be until it went in the spring so finally even Hiller admitted they would have to wait and so the Big Shot and Mrs Brix took the train. And after a while the snow—”
“But her people,” Don said. “You said she had some people. That—”
“—daughter of her mother’s half-sister and her husband. Or maybe the priest knew. He was at the station that afternoon when she and the Big Shot left. Maybe the half-first cousin and her husband were leaving it to the priest. Or maybe it was the jack again. Or maybe she just couldn’t hear the priest. She didn’t look much like she could hear or see either that afternoon when she got on the train.”
“Nothing?” Don said. “Not anything?”
“Well, she could walk,” the waiter said. “What do you want to eat? the ragout, or do you want some ham and eggs?”
“But she came back,” Don said. “At least she came back.”
“Sure. On the train last night. The snow began to go last month and last week Hiller wired the Big Shot he th
ought it was O.K. now so she got off the midnight train last night and checked her bag and sat in the station until Hiller showed up at daylight and they went out and found Brix and brought him in and if she gets cold down there at the church tonight she can always go back to the station and sit there until the train goes back tomorrow. What do you want to eat?”
“But her people,” Don said. “That.…”
“What do you want to eat?” the waiter said.
“Maybe they’re married now,” Don said.
“What do you want to eat?” the waiter said.
“Maybe she loves him now,” Don said.
“All right. What do you want to eat?”
“You speak United States well,” Don said.
“I lived there. Chicago. Sixteen years. What do you want to eat?”
“Maybe he was good to her,” Don said. “Even if he was an Italian, a foreigner—”
“He was a German,” the waiter said. “We dont like Germans in this country. What do you want to eat?”
“The ragout,” Don said.
So we ate the food that was good anywhere in Europe or anywhere else that French was spoken; we mounted the clean stairs to the little clean room beneath the steep pitch of the eaves and lay between the clean chill sheets which even of themselves smelled of snow. Then the sun came from beyond the opposite mountains now, slanting long in the valley and then shortening, not driving the shadow of the mountains before it but obliterating the shadow as the rising tide consumes a beach, until when we left the inn the valley was full of sun. And I thought again how even when this country was level it was level by separate steps because when we looked back from the station, the village was once more beneath us; we looked down into the true valley from what we had merely taken for the valley, standing again in snow, between the crumpled ramparts of snow which the plows had hurled up into a gutter funnelling not only the shining rails but the living light and sun too into the black orifice of the tunnel until soon the tunnel too would overflow and the mountain it pierced dissolve in fierce light.
We entered the buvette. “Gruss Gott, messieurs,” Don said. Again a voice answered “Gruss Gott” and we drank the beer blond as the morning itself in the glass mugs, which back home in America to drink before noon and that only on a hot day was as unheard of as bringing a dishpan of peas with you to shell during church, yet which all through the Tyrol we had drunk for breakfast too. Then the train came and Don said, “Gruss Gott, messieurs,” and again somebody answered and we went out into the bright unbearable snow-glare and walked along the train to our third-class carriage and turned and looked back and except for the snow and the sun it might have been last night again: the quiet mountain peasant faces though not so many as last night and all men now and they might have been there anyway as people in American little towns meet through trains, and the guide named Hiller who had come out of the church last night standing before the steps of a first-class carriage beside the woman with the Paris hat and the fur coat and the face which was a peasant’s face too for a while yet because it would take more than just six months to efface the mountains and the valley and the village and the spring festivals on the green if there was a green and if people in Switzerland held spring festivals, and the cows driven back and forth to the high pastures and milked for the cheese and the milk chocolate or whatever it was Swiss girls did.
Then we heard the little wan frantic horns too and she took something from her purse and gave it to the man and got into the train and we got in too, the train moving, already picking up speed as it passed the man and he turned and flipped the twinkling coin, into the plow-seethed snow-bank moving faster still as it crashed into the blackness of the tunnel which after the snow was like a blow across the eyes and then crashed from blackness into fierce light like another blow, going faster and faster, lurching and swinging on the curves and crashing again from dazzle to blackness and blackness to dazzle while steadily on either hand the peaks in their pastel gradations from that unbearable radiance swung with the tremendous deliberation of ruminant celestial mastodons under the mounting morning and into the blaze of noon and through and past it and on into one last fading swoop that even we could tell was now downgrade, and it was there: the whole long slope of the Côte d’Or, the shelving roof-pitch of a continent slanting away into the drowsing haze where Paris was, and the last white peak slid slowly past the window and was gone.
“I’m glad of it,” I said.
“Yes,” Don said. “I dont want anymore snow forever. I dont want to see any snow for a long time.”
“It was just the same,” the man said. “The people in Europe have hated and feared Germans for so long that nobody remembers how it was.”
NOTES
and
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS:
DCPA Dorothy Commins Private Archive.
ESPL Essays, Speeches & Public Letters by William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether, New York, Random House, 1965.
NOS William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches, ed. Carvel Collins, New York, Random House, 1968.
FCVA William Faulkner Collections, University of Virginia Library.
JFSA Jill Faulkner Summers Private Archive.
NYPL New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
ROUM Rowan Oak papers, University of Mississippi Library.
Ambuscade
This story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, CCVII (29 Sept. 1934), 12–13, 80, 81, as the first in a promised series. Printed in brackets on page 9 is one passage from the typescript which did not appear in the Post and which Faulkner did not restore when he rewrote the story to become the first chapter of his novel The Unvanquished (1938). There were thirteen other passages from the typescript which did not appear in the Post, but all were very brief and not important to the story’s form or content. In the novel, Faulkner enlarged the first half of the story substantially, deepening it, enriching the prose style, and elaborating the Sartoris and Strother family relationships as he laid the groundwork for the material to follow. He filled in the portrait of John Sartoris and heightened the reader’s awareness of the war, both the fighting in the field and the preparations at home to protect the livestock and the silver from the imminent arrival of Yankee troops. Faulkner also reinforced the sense of the chapter’s structure by using numerals to divide it into five parts.
Repository: ROUM, ms. fragments and 23-pp. ts.
Retreat
This story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, CCVII (13 Oct. 1934), 16–17, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89. There were nearly two dozen minor changes made between the typescript and the magazine version. Thirteen of them were indentions for new paragraphs, and a space was inserted in the text just before the departure for Memphis. The Yankees became just “they” rather than “They,” and “one another” was changed to “each other.” Ringo’s “Great God, Bayard,” and a Yankee’s “goddamn” were both deleted, but two new phrases were introduced into the story about the rose cuttings from Mrs. Compson which Granny took on the trip. The last two lines of the story were deleted. When Faulkner revised the story to become the second chapter of The Unvanquished, he amplified the comic material about Granny’s stratagems to protect the chest of silver and wrote half a dozen important pages on Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy McCaslin which prefigured his treatment of them in Go Down, Moses. He also described in some detail their part in the raising of John Sartoris’s regiment. He added to Bayard and Ringo’s search for the stolen mules, to their meeting with Sartoris, and to the subsequent attack on the Yankees. Faulkner emphasized the division in the story, just before the departure for Memphis, by numbering the first and second parts. Where the Post version had used the expletive “son,” Faulkner changed it to “son of a bitch.” He also restored the two last lines of the story, which are printed here in brackets.
Repository: ROUM, 10-pp. ms. and 32-pp. ts.
Raid
This story was published in T
he Saturday Evening Post, CCVII (3 Nov. 1934), 18–19, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78. The deletions from the typescript were minimal. The expletive “Great God” was cut at both occurrences. When Drusilla spoke of the life a Southern woman could expect before the war, she said “you settled down forever more while your husband got children on your body for you.…” Both the husband and “on your body” disappeared in the printed version, as did “on your body” once more in the same context fourteen lines later—presumably too physical a phrase for a family magazine. The initial letters of pronouns referring to the hated Yankees were reduced from upper to lower case in eleven places, and twenty-six indentions produced new paragraphs. There were five minor changes in phrasing. When Faulkner revised the story to become the third chapter of The Unvanquished, he extended Granny’s foray by two days and expanded the material about the war’s destruction of the railroad, supplying a seven-page passage in which a joust between Federal and Confederate locomotives would stand as contrast to the grim realities of warfare which Bayard and Ringo would experience later. He also introduced numbers to divide the chapter into three parts.
Repository: ROUM, 11-pp. ms. and 35-pp. ts.
Skirmish at Sartoris
On 4 October 1934 Faulkner sent a story called “Drusilla” to The Saturday Evening Post. On 26 November he wrote his agent, Morton Goldman, that he would get around to rewriting it as soon as he finished typing his new novel, Pylon.1 But the Post did not buy the story, and Goldman sold it to Scribner’s Magazine, where it appeared without alteration in Volume XCVII (April 1935), 193–200, under the new title “Skirmish at Sartoris.” When Faulkner revised it as Chapter VI of The Unvanquished, he deleted material which had provided background for Scribner’s readers. He cut one sentence establishing Granny’s death and deleted a sixteen-line recapitulation of major events in “Raid” together with Drusilla’s appeal to be allowed to ride with John Sartoris’s troop. He also shortened the time elapsed since “Raid” from two years to eighteen months and altered the divisions of the story. After the flashback he made a new section with the number 2 and then changed what had been part II, beginning with the arrival of Mrs. Habersham, to part 3.
Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Page 79