The Unvanquished (26 page)

“Be damned if I would.—You want to come home with me? We’ll have time to eat and then ride out there in time for the—” But I couldn’t do that either.

“No,” I said. “I’m not hungry after all. I think I’ll go home.”

“Dont you want to wait and ride out with me?”

“No. I’ll go on.”

“You dont want to stay here, anyway.” He looked around the room again, where the smell of powder smoke still lingered a little, still lay somewhere on the hot dead air though invisible now, blinking a little with his fierce pale unintroverted eyes. “Well by God,” he said again. “Maybe you’re right, maybe there has been enough killing in your family without— Come on.” We left the office. I waited at the foot of the stairs and soon Ringo came up with the horses. We crossed the square again. There were no feet on the Holston House railing now (it was twelve oclock) but a group of men stood before the door who raised their hats and I raised mine and Ringo and I rode on.

We did not go fast. Soon it was one, maybe after; the carriages and buggies would begin to leave the square soon, so I turned from the road at the end of the pasture and I sat the mare, trying to open the gate without dismounting, until Ringo dismounted and opened it. We crossed the pasture in the hard fierce sun; I could have seen the house now but I didn’t look. Then we
were in the shade, the close thick airless shade of the creek bottom; the old rails still lay in the undergrowth where we had built the pen to hide the Yankee mules. Presently I heard the water, then I could see the sunny glints. We dismounted. I lay on my back, I thought
Now it can begin again if it wants to
. But it did not. I went to sleep. I went to sleep almost before I had stopped thinking. I slept for almost five hours and I didn’t dream anything at all yet I waked myself up crying, crying too hard to stop it. Ringo was squatting beside me and the sun was gone though there was a bird of some sort still singing somewhere and the whistle of the north-bound evening train sounded and the short broken puffs of starting where it had evidently stopped at our flag station. After a while I began to stop and Ringo brought his hat full of water from the creek but instead I went down to the water myself and bathed my face.

There was still a good deal of light in the pasture, though the whip-poor-wills had begun, and when we reached the house there was a mockingbird singing in the magnolia, the night song now, the drowsy moony one, and again the moon like the rim print of a heel in wet sand. There was just one light in the hall now and so it was all over though I could still smell the flowers even above the verbena in my coat. I had not looked at him again. I had started to before I left the house but I did not, I did not see him again and all the pictures we had of him were bad ones because a picture could no more have held him dead than the house could have kept his body. But I didn’t need to see him again because
he was there, he would always be there; maybe what Drusilla meant by his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes. I went into the house. There was no light in the drawing room except the last of the afterglow which came through the western window where Aunt Jenny’s colored glass was; I was about to go on up stairs when I saw her sitting there beside the window. She didn’t call me and I didn’t speak Drusilla’s name, I just went to the door and stood there. “She’s gone,” Aunt Jenny said. “She took the evening train. She has gone to Montgomery, to Dennison.” Denny had been married about a year now; he was living in Montgomery, reading law.

“I see,” I said. “Then she didn’t—” But there wasn’t any use in that either; Jed White must have got there before one oclock and told them. And besides, Aunt Jenny didn’t answer. She could have lied to me but she didn’t, she said,

“Come here.” I went to her chair. “Kneel down. I cant see you.”

“Dont you want the lamp?”

“No. Kneel down.” So I knelt beside the chair. “So you had a perfectly splendid Saturday afternoon, didn’t you? Tell me about it.” Then she put her hands on my shoulders. I watched them come up as though she were trying to stop them; I felt them on my shoulders as if they had a separate life of their own and were trying to
do something which for my sake she was trying to restrain, prevent. Then she gave up or she was not strong enough because they came up and took my face between them, hard, and suddenly the tears sprang and streamed down her face like Drusilla’s laughing had. “Oh, damn you Sartorises!” she said. “Damn you! Damn you!”

As I passed down the hall the light came up in the diningroom and I could hear Louvinia laying the table for supper. So the stairs were lighted quite well. But the upper hall was dark. I saw her open door (that unmistakable way in which an open door stands open when nobody lives in the room any more) and I realised I had not believed that she was really gone. So I didn’t look into the room. I went on to mine and entered. And then for a long moment I thought it was the verbena in my lapel which I still smelled. I thought that until I had crossed the room and looked down at the pillow on which it lay—the single sprig of it (without looking she would pinch off a half dozen of them and they would be all of a size, almost all of a shape, as if a machine had stamped them out) filling the room, the dusk, the evening with that odor which she said you could smell alone above the smell of horses.

The Unvanquished
had its beginning as a short story about a white boy, Bayard Sartoris, and his Negro slave and friend, Ringo, during the Civil War. It was written in the spring of 1934, while Faulkner was taking a break from his work on
Absalom, Absalom!
He needed to “boil the pot,” he claimed, and make some money from magazine sales. “Ambuscade,” published in
The Saturday Evening Post
on September 29, 1934, then, became the first of a series of seven stories about these boys, covering a period of about a decade and a half in their lives. Other stories in the series followed quickly: “Retreat,” (
Saturday Evening Post
, October 13, 1934); “Raid” (
Saturday Evening Post
, November 3, 1934); and “Drusilla” (
Scribner’s
, April 1935; retitled “Skirmish at Sartoris” in the book). At this point Faulkner broke off the series in
order to complete
Absalom, Absalom!
, but took up the series again almost immediately after that novel was published in October 1936. “The Unvanquished” (retitled “Riposte in Tertio” in the book) was published in
The Saturday Evening Post
on November 14, 1936, and “Vendée” in
The Saturday Evening Post
on December 5 of the same year. In late December of 1936, Faulkner wrote to Random House proposing a book of these Civil War stories, but it was not until the end of the following July that he wrote the final story, “An Odor of Verbena,” to complete the series. He was not able to sell this story to a magazine.

His preparation of the stories for book publication, in the fall of 1937, reflects the same sort of commercial haste that had gone into their writing. Although he revised and rewrote a good bit of the text, expanding and elaborating and doing much to weld the separate stories into a single narrative, for the most part he gave to the printer magazine tearsheets only slightly revised in ink. The setting copy is thus a combination of the magazine tearsheets and many revised and newly typed pages; it is a setting copy that complicates editorial work on the current edition. The
Post
and
Scribner’s
editors had, of course, heavily edited Faulkner’s text in fairly predictable ways for family magazines; they not only normalized his punctuation—supplying apostrophes in “wont”, “dont”, and “cant”, and periods for “Mr” and “Mrs”, for example—but also bowdlerized many of the mild epithets and prettied up some of the more colorful dialect language. Since Faulkner did not emend the magazine
texts back toward his normal usage in such matters, the changes made by the magazine editors were retained in the portions of the book version set from the magazine tearsheets. To complicate matters further, though it is clear that Faulkner typed most of the new pages himself, some of the pages were definitely typed by someone else, and others may have been.

Thus copy-text for the Polk edition of
The Unvanquished
consists of the new ribbon typescript Faulkner prepared as he revised, the carbon typescripts underlying those portions of the text represented by tearsheets (since the ribbon typescripts of the magazine versions are not known to exist), and certain smaller passages that appeared for the first time in the magazine text. (All of the extant materials relevant to the editing of
The Unvanquished
—Faulkner’s typescript/tearsheet setting copy, the carbon typescripts of the magazine versions of the individual stories, and the holograph manuscripts—are in the Rowan Oak Papers at the University of Mississippi; one typescript of “The Unvanquished” is in the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia.) The copy-text has been emended to account for changes, either on the magazine or book galleys (none of the galleys is known to exist) or on the original ribbon typescript pages from which the magazine texts were set, that might reasonably be attributed to Faulkner. Significant inconsistencies, such as those in chronology, have not been altered.

American English continues to fluctuate; for example, a word may be spelled in more than one way, even
in the same work. Commas are sometimes used expressively to suggest the movements of voice, and capitals are sometimes meant to give significance to a word beyond those it might have in its uncapitalized form. Since standardization would remove such effects, this volume preserves the spelling, punctuation, and wording of the texts established by Noel Polk, which strive to be as faithful to Faulkner’s usage as surviving evidence permits. In this volume the reader has the results of the most detailed scholarly efforts thus far made to establish the text of
The Unvanquished
. In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of the present volume (the line count includes chapter headings).

W
illiam Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the ‘u’ to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his great-grandfather ‘The Old Colonel,’ a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called
The White Rose of Memphis
, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the ‘ink stain’ from him.