William Faulkner - A Fable

‘He was a man,’ the other said. ‘Even dead, angels—justice itself—still fought for him. You were away at the time, so you have not heard this either. It was at the signing of the citation for that rosette. While bearing the parchment across to the desk for the Grand Commander’s signature, the clerk (in private life an amateur Alpinist) stumbled and overturned a litre bottle of ink onto it, blotting out not merely the recipient’s name but the entire record of the achievement. So they produced a new parchment. It reached the desk, but even as the Grand Commander reached his hand for the pen, a draft of air came from nowhere (if you know General Martel, you know that any room he stops in long enough to remove his hat, must be hermetically sealed)—came from nowhere and wafted the parchment twenty metres across the room and into the fire, where it vanished pouf! like celluloid. But to what avail, between them armed only with the flaming swords of clumsy mythology, and the Comité de Ferrovie snoring with revolving pistols and the rattling belch of Maxim guns? So now he has gone to a Tibetan lamasery. To repent.’

‘To wait!’ he cried. ‘To prepare!’

‘Yes,’ the other said. ‘That’s what they call it too: Der Tag . So maybe I’d better hurry on back to Verdun and get on with our preparing and waiting too, since we are warned now that we shall need them both. Oh, I know. I was not there that day to see his face in that gate as you saw it. But at least I inherited it. We all did: not just that class, but all the others which came after yours and his. And at least we know now what we inherited: only fear, not anguish. A prophet discharged us of that by giving us a warning of it. So only the respect for the other need remain.’

‘A murderer,’ he said.

‘But a man,’ the other said, and was gone, leaving him not quite erect from death perhaps but at least with his back once more toward it; erect enough to be aware of the steadily diminishing numbers of his seniority: that diminishing reservoir on which the bark of his career floated, to be aground soon at this rate. In fact, that day would come when he would know that it was aground, revokable never more by any tide or wave or flood: who had believed all his life, if not in his durability, at least in the vast frame which the indurability clothed; whereupon in the next moment he would know that, aground or not, it—he—would never be abandoned; that that edifice which had accepted the gaunt frame’s dedication would see always that there was at least one number between him and zero, even if it were only his own; so that the day came, Der Tag , the enemy poured, not through Verdun because his caller of that morning twenty-five years back had been right and they would not pass there, but through Flanders so fast and so far that a desperate rag-tag met them in Paris taxi-cabs and held them for the necessary desperate moment, and still behind his glassed veranda he heard how that Number One to his Two in the old St Cyr class was now Number One among all the desperate and allied peoples in Western Europe, and he said, Even from here I will have seen the beginning of it , then two months later he stood across a desk from the face which he had not seen in thirty years, which he had seen the first time in the St Cyr gate forty years ago and had been marked forever with it, looking not much older, still calm, composed, the body, the shoulders beneath it still frail and delicate yet doomed—no: not doomed: potent—to bear the fearful burden of man’s anguish and terror and at last his hope, looking at him for a moment, then saying: ‘The appointment of Quartermaster General is within my gift. Will you accept the office?’ and he said to himself, with a sort of peaceful vindication not even of great and desperate hope now but of simple reason, logic: I will even see the end, accomplishment of it too. I will even be present there .

But that was a quarter of a century away yet, as the caller of ten minutes ago had prophesied; now he lay beneath his own peaceful tears while the nurse bent over him with a folded cloth, saying, weak but indomitable still, invincibly obdurate, incurable and doomed with hope, using the two ‘he’s’ indiscriminately, as though the nurse too knew:

‘Yes, he was a man. But he was young then, not much more than a child. These tears are not anguish: only grief.’

The room was now lighted candelabrum, sconce and girandole. The windows were closed now, curtain and casement; the room seemed now to hang insulate as a diving bell above the city’s murmur where the people had already begun to gather again in the Place below. The jug and bowl were gone and the old general sat once more flanked by his two confreres behind the bare table, though among them now was a fourth figure as incongruous and paradoxical as a magpie in a bowl of goldfish—a bearded civilian sitting between the old generalissimo and the American in that black-and-white costume which to the Anglo-Saxon is the formal regalia for eating or seduction or other diversions of the dark, and to the Continental European and South American the rigid uniform for partitioning other governments or overthrowing his own. The young aide stood facing them. He said rapid and glib in French: ‘The prisoners are here. The motorcar from Villeneuve Blanche will arrive at twenty-two hours. The woman about the spoon.’

‘Spoon?’ the old general said. ‘Did we take her spoon? Return it.’

‘No sir,’ the aide said. ‘Not this time. The three strange women. The foreigners. His Honor the Mayor’s business.’ For a moment the old general sat perfectly still. But there was nothing in his voice.

‘They stole the spoon?’

Nor was there anything in the aide’s either: rigid, inflectionless: ‘She threw the spoon at them. It disappeared. She has witnesses.’

‘Who saw one of them pick up the spoon and hide it,’ the old general said.

The aide stood rigid, looking at nothing. ‘She threw a basket too. It was full of food. The same one caught it in the air without spilling it.’

‘I see,’ the old general said. ‘Does she come here to protest a miracle, or merely affirm one?’

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said. ‘Do you want the witnesses too?’

‘Let the strangers wait,’ the old general said. ‘Just the plaintiff.’

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said. He went out again by the smaller door at the end of the room. Though when in the next second almost he reappeared, he had not had time to get out of anyone’s way. He returned not swept but tumbled, not in but rather on because he rose, loomed not half a head nor even a whole head but half a human being above a tight clump of shawled or kerchiefed women led by one of a short broad strong fifty-ish who stopped just at the edge of the white rug as if it were water and gave the room one rapid comprehensive look, then another rapid one at the three old men behind the table, then moved again unerringly toward the old generalissimo, leading her group, save the aide who had at last extricated himself beside the door, firmly out onto the blanched surface of the rug, saying in a strong immediate voice:

‘That’s right. Dont hope to conceal yourself—not behind a mayor anyway; there are too many of you for that. Once I would have said that the curse of this country is its forest of mayoral sashes and swords; I know better now. And after four years of this harassment, even the children can tell a general on sight—provided you can ever see one when you need him.’

‘A third miracle then,’ the old general said. ‘Since your first postulate is proved by the confounding of your second.’

‘Miracle?’ the woman said. ‘Bah. The miracle is that we have anything left after four years of being over-run by foreigners. And now, even Americans. Has France come to that sorry pass where you must not only rob us of our kitchen utensils but even import Americans in order to fight your battles? War, war, war. Dont you ever get tired of it?’