Elly, William Faulkner

Elly

BORDERING THE SHEER drop of the precipice, the wooden railing looked like a child’s toy. It followed the curving road in thread-like embrace, passing the car in a flimsy blur. Then it flicked behind and away like a taut ribbon cut with scissors.

Then they passed the sign, the first sign, Mills City. 6 mi and Elly thought, with musing and irrevocable astonishment, ‘Now we are almost there. It is too late now’; looking at Paul beside her, his hands on the wheel, his face in profile as he watched the fleeing road.

She said, “Well. What can I do to make you marry me, Paul?” thinking ‘There was a man plowing in that field, watching us when we came out of those woods with Paul carrying the motor-robe, and got back into the car,’ thinking this quietly, with a certain detachment and inattention, because there was something else about to obliterate it.

‘Something dreadful that I have forgotten about,’ she thought, watching the swift and increasing signs which brought Mills City nearer and nearer. ‘Something terrible that I shall remember in a minute,’ saying aloud, quietly: “There’s nothing else I can do now, is there?”

Still Paul did not look at her. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing else you can do.”
Then she remembered what it was she had forgotten. She remembered her grandmother, thinking of the old woman with her dead hearing and her inescapable cold eyes waiting at Mills City, with amazed and quiet despair: ‘How could I have ever forgot about her? How could I have? How could I?’

She was eighteen. She lived in Jefferson, two hundred miles away, with her father and mother and grandmother, in a biggish house. It had a deep veranda with screening vines and no lights.

In this shadow she half lay almost nightly with a different man — youths and young men of the town at first, but later with almost anyone, any transient in the small town whom she met by either convention or by chance, provided his appearance was decent. She would never ride in their cars with them at night, and presently they all believed that they knew why, though they did not always give up hope at once — until the courthouse clock struck eleven. Then for perhaps five minutes longer they (who had been practically speechless for an hour or more) would talk in urgent whispers:
“You must go now.”
“No. Not now.”
“Yes. Now.”
“Why?”

“Because. I’m tired. I want to go to bed.”
“I see. So far, and no mother. Is that it?”

“Maybe.” In the shadow now she would be alert, cool, already fled, without moving, beyond some secret reserve of laughter. And he would leave, and she would enter the dark house and look up at the single square of light which fell upon the upper hallway, and change completely. Wearily now, with the tread almost of an old woman, she would mount the stairs and pass the open door of the lighted room where her grandmother sat, erect, an open book in her hands, facing the hall.

Usually she did not look into the room when she passed. But now and then she did. Then for an instant they would look full at one another: the old woman cold, piercing; the girl weary, spent, her face, her dark dilated eyes, filled with impotent hatred.

Then she would go on and enter her own room and lean for a time against the door, hearing the grandmother’s light click off presently, sometimes crying silently and hopelessly, whispering, “The old bitch. The old bitch.” Then this would pass.

She would undress and look at her face in the mirror, examining her mouth now pale of paint and heavy, flattened (so she would believe) and weary and dulled with kissing, thinking ‘My God.

Why do I do it? What is the matter with me?’ thinking of how tomorrow she must face the old woman again with the mark of last night upon her mouth like bruises, with a feeling of the pointlessness and emptiness of life more profound than the rage or the sense of persecution.

Then one afternoon at the home of a girl friend she met Paul de Montigny. After he departed the two girls were alone. Now they looked at one another quietly, like two swordsmen, with veiled eyes.

“So you like him, do you?” the friend said. “You’ve got queer taste, haven’t you?”
“Like who?” Elly said. “I don’t know who you are talking about.”

“Oh yeah?” the friend said. “You didn’t notice his hair then. Like a knitted cap. And his lips. Blubber, almost.” Elly looked at her.
“What are you talking about?” Elly said.

“Nothing,” the other said. She glanced toward the hall, then she took a cigarette from the front of her dress and lit it. “I don’t know anything about it. I just heard it, too. How his uncle killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood.”

“You’re lying,” Elly said.
The other expelled smoke. “All right. Ask your grandmother about his family. Didn’t she used to live in Louisiana too?”
“What about you?” Elly said. “You invited him into your house.”

“I wasn’t hid in the cloak closet, kissing him, though.”
“Oh, yeah?” Elly said. “Maybe you couldn’t.”

“Not till you got your face out of the way, anyhow,” the other said.
That night she and Paul sat on the screened and shadowed veranda. But at eleven o’clock it was she who was urgent and tense: “No! No! Please. Please.”

“Oh, come on. What are you afraid of?”
“Yes. I’m afraid. Go, please. Please.”

“Tomorrow, then?”
“No. Not tomorrow or any time.”
“Yes. Tomorrow.”

This time she did not look in when she passed her grandmother’s door. Neither did she lean against her own door to cry. But she was panting, saying aloud against the door in thin exultation: “A nigger. A nigger. I wonder what she would say if she knew about that.”

The next afternoon Paul walked up onto the veranda. Elly was sitting in the swing, her grandmother in a chair nearby. She rose and met Paul at the steps. “Why did you come here?” she said. “Why did you?” Then she turned and seemed to watch herself walking before him toward the thin old woman sitting bolt upright, sitting bolt and implacably chaste in that secret place, peopled with ghosts, very likely to Elly at any given moment uncountable and unnamable, who might well have owned one single mouth. She leaned down, screaming: “This is Mr. de Montigny, Grandmother!”
“What?”

“Mr. de Montigny! From Louisiana!” she screamed, and saw the grandmother, without moving below the hips, start violently backward as a snake does to strike. That was in the afternoon. That night Elly quitted the veranda for the first time. She and Paul were in a close clump of shrubbery on the lawn; in the wild close dark for that instant Elly was lost, her blood aloud with desperation and exultation and vindication too, talking inside her at the very brink of surrender loud as a voice: “I wish she were here to see! I wish she were here to see!” when something — there had been no sound — shouted at her and she made a mad awkward movement of recovery. The grandmother stood just behind and above them. When she had arrived, how long she had been there, they did not know.

But there she stood, saying nothing, in the long anti-climax while Paul departed without haste and Elly stood, thinking stupidly, ‘I am caught in sin without even having time to sin.’ Then she was in her room, leaning against the door, trying to still her breathing, listening for the grandmother to mount the stairs and go to her father’s room. But the old woman’s footsteps ceased at her own door.

Elly went to her bed and lay upon it without undressing, still panting, the blood still aloud. ‘So,’ she thought, ‘it will be tomorrow. She will tell him in the morning.’ Then she began to writhe, to toss lightly from side to side. ‘I didn’t even have a chance to sin,’ she thought, with panting and amazed regret. ‘She thinks I did and she will tell that I did, yet I am still virgin. She drove me to it, then prevented me at the last moment.’ Then she was lying with the sun in her eyes still fully dressed. ‘So it will be this morning, today,’ she thought dully. ‘My God. How could I. How could I. I don’t want any man, anything.’

She was waiting in the dining-room when her father came down to breakfast. He said nothing, apparently knew nothing. ‘Maybe it’s mother she told,’ Elly thought. But after a while her mother, too, appeared and departed for town also, saying nothing. ‘So it has not been yet,’ she thought, mounting the stairs. Her grandmother’s door was closed.

When she opened it, the old woman was sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper; she looked up, cold, still, implacable, while Elly screamed at her in the empty house: “What else can I do, in this little dead, hopeless town?

I’ll work. I don’t want to be idle. Just find me a job — anything, anywhere, so that it’s so far away that I’ll never have to hear the word Jefferson again.” She was named for the grandmother — Ailanthia, though the old woman had not heard her own name or her granddaughter’s or anyone else’s in almost fifteen years save when it was screamed at her as Elly now screamed: “It hadn’t even happened last night! Won’t you believe me?

That’s it. It hadn’t even happened! At least, I would have had something, something . . .”