Fable, A - William Faulkner [100]
Then He would have thought of that too,'
Then why hasn't He sent you up there, instead of here to live on hot food in clean bugless clothes in a palace?'
'Maybe because He knows I aint brave enough,' the old Negro said.
'Would you go if He sent you?'
'I would try,' the old Negro said. 'If I could do the work, it wouldn't matter to Him or me neither whether I was brave,'
'To believe and to hope,' the runner said. 'Oh yes, I walked through that room downstairs; I saw them; I was walking along the street and happened by simple chance to see that placard over the gate. I was going somewhere else, yet here I am too. But not to believe and hope. Because man can bear anything, provided he has something left, a little something left: his integrity as a creature tough and enduring enough not only not to hope but not even to believe in it and not even to miss its lack; to be tough and to endure until the flash, crash, whatever it will be, when he will no longer be anything and none of it will matter any more, even the fact that he was tough and, until then, did endure,'
'That's right,' the old Negro said, peaceful and serene, 'maybe it is tomorrow you got to go back. So go on now and have your Paris while you got a little time,'
'Aha,' the runner said. 'Ave Bacchus and Venus, morituri te salutant, eh? Wouldn't you have to call that sin?'
'Evil is a part of man, evil and sin and cowardice, the same as repentance and being brave. You got to believe in all of them, or believe in none of them. Believe that man is capable of all of them, or he aint capable of none. You can go out this way if you want to, without having to meet nobody,'
'Thanks,' the runner said. 'Maybe what I need is to have to meet somebody. To believe. Not in anything: just to believe. To enter that room down there, not to escape from anything but to escape into something, to flee mankind for a little while. Not even to look at that banner because some of them probably cant even read it, but just to sit in the same room for a while with that affirmation, that promise, that hope. If I only could. You only could. Anybody only could. Do you know what the loneliest experience of all is? But of course you do: you just said so. It's breathing,'
'Send for me,' the old Negro said.
'Oh yes-if I only could.'
'I know,' the old Negro said. Tou aint ready yet neither. But when you are, send for me,'
'Are what?' the runner said.
'When you needs me,'
What can I need you for, when it will be over next year? All I've got to do is just stay alive,'
'Send for me,' the old Negro said.
'Good-bye,' the runner said.
Descending, retracing his steps, they were still there in the vast cathedral-like room, not only the original ones but the steady trickle of new arrivals, entering, not even to look at the lettered banner but just to sit for a while inside the same walls with that innocent and invincible affirmation. And he had been right: it was August now and there were American uniforms in France, not as combat units yet but singly, still learning: they had a captain and two subalterns posted to the battalion, to blood themselves on the old Somme names, preparatory to, qualifying themselves to, lead their own kind into the ancient familiar abbatoir; he thought: Oh yes, three more years and we will have exhausted Europe. Then we-hun and allies together-will transfer the whole business intact to the fresh trans-Atlantic pastures, the virgin American stage, like a travelling minstrel troupe.
Then it was winter; later, remembering it, it would seem to him that it might actually have been the anniversary of the Son of Man, a gray day and cold, the gray cobbles of that village Place de Ville gleaming and wimpled like the pebbles beneath the surface of a brook when he saw the small augmenting crowd and joined it too, from curiosity then, seeing across the damp khaki shoulders the small clump of battle-stained horizon blue whose obvious or at Wednesday least apparent leader bore a French corporal's insigne, the faces alien and strange and bearing an identical lostness,