And he repeated that too, with his mouth still open probably.
‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘What would you call it then?’ — striking the match and in the same sweep of the arm bringing the flame to the cold ash in the pipe, and still talking around the stem into the vain shape of the invisible puffing so that it would be a second or two yet before he would realise that all he had to smoke now was the match.
Then his uncle dropped the match into the ashtray and with the other hand made the move which without doubt he had already planned out long before the knock came on the door which he had been too late or at least too slow to answer or even say ‘Come in.’
He made the move without even looking, moving the pawn which exposed his, Charles’s, castle to the rook which his uncle had probably been convinced even longer back than the plan that he, Charles, had forgotten to watch, and then sat there with his thin quick face and his shock of premature white hair and his Phi Beta Kappa key and the dime corncob pipe and the suit which looked as if he had slept in it every night since the day he bought it, and said, ‘Move.’
But he, Charles, wasn’t that stupid even if his mouth was open a little. In fact, he wasn’t really surprised, after the first shock of that entrance, that abrupt and that informal, at this hour, this late at night and this cold: the boy without doubt dragging the girl by the arm right on through the front door without bothering to ring or knock there at all, on down the strange hall which, if he had never seen before, would have been seventeen or eighteen years ago as an infant at nurse, to a strange door and knocking this time true enough but not waiting for any response, and so into a room where for all he knew (or cared) his, Charles’s, mother might have been undressing for bed.
What surprised him was his uncle: that glib and talkative man who talked so much and so glibly, particularly about things which had absolutely no concern with him, that his was indeed a split personality: the one, the lawyer, the county attorney who walked and breathed and displaced air; the other, the garrulous facile voice so garrulous and facile that it seemed to have no connection with reality at all and presently hearing it was like listening not even to fiction but to literature.
Yet two strangers had burst not only into his home but into his private sitting room, and delivered first a peremptory command and then a threat and then burst out again, and his uncle had sat calmly back to an interrupted chess game and an interrupted pipe and completed a planned move as though he had not only not noticed any interruption but hadn’t actually been interrupted.
This, in the face of what should have supplied his uncle with food and scope for garrulity for the rest of the night, since of all possible things which might have entered this room from the whole county’s remotest environs, this one concerned him least: the domestic entanglements or impasses or embroilments of a family a household six miles from town whose four members or at least inhabitants not a dozen people in the county knew more than merely to speak to on the street — the wealthy widow (millionairess, the county stipulated it), the softly fading still softly pretty woman in the late thirties, and the two spoiled children a year apart somewhere under twenty-one, and the Argentine army captain house-guest, the four of them like the stock characters in the slick magazine serial, even to the foreign fortune-hunter.
For which reason (and maybe that was why, though it would take a good deal more than even his uncle’s incredible taciturnity to convince him, Charles, of this) his uncle didn’t really need to talk about it. Because for twenty years now, long before there were any children even, let alone anything to draw the foreign fortune-hunter, the county had been watching it unfold as the subscribers read and wait and watch for the serial’s next installment.
Which — the twenty years — was before his, Charles’s, time too. But it was his nevertheless; he had inherited it, heired it in his turn as he would heir in his turn from his mother and father who had heired them in their turn, the library shelf in the room just across the hall from this one where he and his uncle sat, containing not the books which his grandfather had chosen or heired in his turn from his father, but the ones which his grandmother had chosen and bought on the semi-yearly trips to Memphis — the sombre tomes before the day of gaudy dust-jackets, the fly leaves bearing his grandmother’s name and address and even that of the store or shop where she purchased them and the date in the nineties and the early nineteen hundreds in her fading young women’s seminary script, the volumes to be exchanged and lent and returned to be the subject of the leading papers at the next meeting of the literary clubs, the yellowed pages bearing even forty and fifty years later the imprint of pressed and vanished flowers and through which moved with the formal gestures of shades the men and women who were to christian-name a whole generation: the Clarissas and Judiths and Marguerites the St Elmos and Rolands and Lothairs: women who were always ladies and men who were always brave, moving in a sort of immortal moonlight without anguish and with no pain from birth without foulment to death without carrion, so that you too could weep with them without having to suffer or grieve, exult with them without having to conquer or triumph.
So the legend was his too. He had even got some of it direct from his grandmother by means of childhood’s simple inevitable listening, by-passing his own mother, who in a sense had had a part in it.
And until tonight it had even remained as harmless and unreal as the old yellowed volumes: the old plantation six miles from town which had been an old place even in his grandmother’s time, not so big in acreage hut of good land properly cared for and worked, with the house on it which was not large either but was just a house, a domicile, more spartan even than comfortable, even in those days when people wanted needed comfort in their homes for the reason that they spent some of their time there; and the widower-owner who stayed at home and farmed his heritage and, with a constant tumbler of thin whiskey-and-water at his elbow and an aged setter bitch dozing at his feet, sat through the long summer afternoons in a home-made chair on the front gallery, reading in Latin the Roman poets; and the child, the daughter, the motherless girl who grew up in that almost conventual seclusion without companions or playmates with nobody in fact except a few Negro servants and the middle-aged father who paid (again by the town’s and the county’s postulation) little or no attention to her and who therefore, without ever once saying so to anyone of course, certainly not to the child, perhaps never even to himself, still charged against the life of the daughter, the death of the wife who apparently had been his own life’s one monogamous love; and who (the child) at seventeen and without warning to anyone, not to the county anyway, married a man whom nobody in that part of Mississippi had ever heard of before.
And there was something else: an appendix or anyway appendage; a legend to or within or behind the actual or original or initial legend; apocryphal’s apocrypha. He not only couldn’t remember whether it was from his mother or his grandmother that he had heard it, he couldn’t even remember whether his mother or grandmother had actually seen it, known it at first hand, or had themselves heard it from someone else.
It was something about a previous involvement, prior to the marriage: an engagement, a betrothal in form in fact, with (so the legend said) the father’s formal consent, then broken, ruptured, voided — something — before the man she did marry ever appeared on the scene; — a betrothal in form according to the legend, yet so nebulous that even twenty years after, with twenty years of front gallery gossip for what his uncle called the Yoknapatawpha County spinster aunts of both sexes to have cast that romantic mantle over the shoulders of every male under sixty who had ever taken a drink or bought a bale of cotton from her father, the other party to it had not only no name but no face too — which at least the other man had, the stranger, for all that he appeared without warning out of nowhere and (as it were) married her all in one burst, one breath, without any space between for anything called by so leisurely a name as betrothal, let alone courtship.
So it — the first, the other one, the true betrothal, worthy of the word for the simple reason that nothing came of it but apocrypha’s ephemeral footnote, already fading: a scent, a shadow, a
