Roger runs back to the house; they have an argument first because Roger wants the poet to keep the umbrella and the poet won’t do it. So Roger runs back to the house. Anne is at the door. “The fool,” Roger says. “I can’t—”
“Come in!” Anne calls. “John! Please!” But the poet has stepped out of the light and vanished. “John!” Anne calls. Then she began to laugh, staring at Roger from between her hair brushing at her hair with her hands. “He — he looked so f — funny. He I — looked so—” Then she was not laughing and Roger had to hold her up. He carried her upstairs and put her to bed and sat with her until she could stop crying. Then he went back to the office. The lamp was still at the window, and when he moved it the light went across the lawn and he saw Blair again.
He was sitting on the ground, with his back against a tree, his face raised in the rain toward Anne’s window. Roger rushed out again, but when he got there, Blair was gone. Roger stood under the umbrella and called him for a while, but he never got any answer. Maybe he was going to try again to make the poet take the umbrella. So maybe he didn’t know as much about poets as he thought he did. Or maybe he was thinking about Pope. Pope might have had an umbrella.
They never saw the poet again. This one, that is. Because this happened almost six months ago, and they still live there. But they never saw this one. Three days later, Anne gets the second letter, mailed from the village. It is a menu card from the Elite Café, or maybe they call it the Palace. It was already autographed by the flies that eat there, and the poet had written on the back of it. Anne left it on Roger’s desk and went out, and then Roger read it.
It seems that this was the shot. The one that Roger had always claimed to be waiting for. Anyway, the magazines that don’t have any pictures took the poem, stealing it from one another while the interest or whatever it was ate up the money that the poet never got for it. But that was all right, too, because by that time Blair was dead.
Amos Crain’s wife told them how the poet had left town. And a week later Anne left too. She went up to Connecticut to spend the rest of the summer with her mother and father, where the children were. The last thing she heard when she left the house was the typewriter.
But it was two weeks after Anne left before Roger finished it, wrote the last word. At first he wanted to put the poem in too, this poem on the menu card that wasn’t about freedom, either, but he didn’t. Conscience, maybe he called it, put over the old haymaker, and Roger took it standing, like a little man, and sent off the poem for the magazines to jaw over, and tied up the papers he had written and sent them off too. And what was it he had been writing?
Him, and Anne, and the poet. Word for word, between the waiting spells to find out what to write down next, with a few changes here and there, of course, because live people do not make good copy, the most interesting copy being gossip, since it mostly is not true.
So he bundled the pages up and sent them off and they sent him the money. It came just in time, because the winter was coming and he still owed a balance on Blair’s hospital and funeral. So he paid that, and with the rest of the money he bought Anne a fur coat and himself and the children some winter underwear.
Blair died in September. Anne and the children were still away when he got the wire, three or four days late, since the next batch of them had not arrived yet. So here he is, sitting at his desk, in the empty house, with the typewriting all finished, holding the wire in his hand. “Shelley,” he says. “His whole life was a not very successful imitation of itself. Even to the amount of water it took.”
He didn’t tell Anne about the poet until after the fur coat came. “Did you see that he . . .” Anne said.
“Yes. He had a nice room, in the sun. A good nurse. The doctor didn’t want him to have a special nurse at first. Damn butcher.”
Sometimes when a man thinks about them making poets and artists and such pay these taxes which they say indicates that a man is free, twenty-one, and capable of taking care of himself in this close competition, it seems like they are obtaining money under false pretenses. Anyway, here’s the rest of it, what they did next.
He reads the book, the story, to her, and her not saying anything until he had finished. “So that’s what you were doing,” she said.
He doesn’t look at her, either; he is busy evening the pages, getting them smooth again. “It’s your fur coat,” he said.
“Oh,” she says. “Yes. My fur coat.”
So the fur coat comes. And what does she do then? She gave it away. Yes. Gave it to Mrs. Crain. Gave it to her, and her in the kitchen, churning, with her hair in her face, brushing her hair back with a wrist that looked like a lean ham. “Why, Miz Howes,” she says. “I caint. I reely caint.”
“You’ll have to take it,” Anne says. “We — I got it under false pretenses. I don’t deserve it. You put bread into the ground and reap it; I don’t. So I can’t wear a coat like this.”
And they leave it there with Mrs. Crain and they go back home, walking. Only they stop in broad daylight, with Mrs. Crain watching them from the window, and go into a clinch on their own account. “I feel better,” Anne says.
“So do I,” Roger says. “Because Blair wasn’t there to see Mrs. Crain’s face when you gave her that coat. No freedom there, or equality either.”
But Anne is not listening. “Not to think,” she says, “that he . . . to dress me in the skins of little slain beasts. . . . You put him in a book, but you didn’t finish it. You didn’t know about that coat, did you? God beat you, that time, Roger.”
“Ay,” Roger says. “God beats me lots of times. But there’s one thing about it. Their children are bigger than ours, and even Mrs. Crain can’t wear my underclothes. So that’s all right.”
Sure. That was all right. Because it was Christmas soon, and then spring; and then summer, the long summer, the long days.
The End
The Brooch, William Faulkner
The Brooch
THE TELEPHONE WAKED him. He waked already hurrying, fumbling in the dark for robe and slippers, because he knew before waking that the bed beside his own was still empty, and the instrument was downstairs just opposite the door beyond which his mother had lain propped upright in bed for five years, and he knew on waking that he would be too late because she would already have heard it, just as she heard everything that happened at any hour in the house.
She was a widow, he the only child. When he went away to college she went with him; she kept a house in Charlottesville, Virginia, for four years while he graduated. She was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. Her husband had been a travelling man who came one summer to the town with letters of introduction: one to a minister, the other to her father. Three months later the travelling man and the daughter were married. His name was Boyd.
He resigned his position within the year and moved into his wife’s house and spent his days sitting in front of the hotel with the lawyers and the cotton-planters — a dark man with a gallant swaggering way of removing his hat to ladies. In the second year, the son was born.
Six months later, Boyd departed. He just went away, leaving a note to his wife in which he told her that he could no longer bear to lie in bed at night and watch her rolling onto empty spools the string saved from parcels from the stores. His wife never heard of him again, though she refused to let her father have the marriage annulled and change the son’s name.
Then the merchant died, leaving all his property to the daughter and the grandson who, though he had been out of Fauntleroy suits since he was seven or eight, at twelve wore even on weekdays clothes which made him look not like a child but like a midget; he probably could not have long associated with other children even if his mother had let him.
In due time the mother found a boys’ school where the boy could wear a round jacket and a man’s hard hat with impunity, though by the time the two of them removed to Charlottesville for these next four years, the son did not look like a midget.
He looked now like a character out of Dante — a man a little slighter than his father but with something of his father’s dark handsomeness, who hurried with averted head, even when his mother was not with him, past the young girls on the streets not only of Charlottesville but of the little lost Mississippi hamlet
