Fable, A - William Faulkner [128]
'You? An Engineer?' the man facing him said.
'So was he'-the voice eager, serene, not importunate so much as simply not to be denied: 'That's why, you see. Remember, I was Number Two to him in our class. When he leaves it, it belongs to me,'
'Then you remember this,' the other said, tapping the medical survey on the desk before him. This is why you are not going back to Saigon after your leave, why you are going on Home Establishment from now on. As for that, you wouldn't live a year out there in that-'
'You were about to say "hole",' he said. 'Isn't that its purpose: for the honorable disposal of that which is self-proven to have no place in the Establishment of Man?'
'Man?'
Trance, then,' he said; and thirteen days later looked from the back of the camel across the glaring markless intervening miles, as a thousand years later the first pilgrim must have looked at the barely distinguishable midden which the native guide assured him had been, not Golgotha of course but Gethsemane, at the flagstaff and the sun-blanched walls in a nest of ragged and meagre palms; at sunset he stood inside them, rigid and abnegant while the horn chanted and there descended on him in his turn that fringy ravelling of empire's carapace; at first dark, the two camels rumbling and gurgling just beyond earshot above the waiting orderly, he stood at the gate beside the man who had been One to his Two in the old class six years ago, the two of them barely visible to each other, leaving only the voice serene and tender, passionate for suffering, sick with hope: 'I know. They thought you were hiding. They were afraid of you at first. Then they decided you were just a fool who insisted on becoming a marshal of France at fifty instead of forty-five, using the power and influence at twenty-one and -two and -three and -four and -five to evade at forty-five the baton you would have nothing left to fend off at fifty; the power and the influence to escape the power and influence, the world to escape the world; to free yourself Wednesday Night of flesh without having to die, without having to lose the awareness that you were free of flesh: not to escape from it and you could not be immune to it nor did you want to be: only to be free of it, to be conscious always that you were merely at armistice with it at the price of constant and unflagging vigilance, because without that consciousness, flesh would not exist for you to be free of it and so there would be nothing anywhere for you to be free of. Oh yes, I knew: the English poet Byron's dream or wish or cry that all living women had but one single mouth for his kiss: the supreme golden youth who encompassed all flesh by putting, still virgin to it, all flesh away. But I knew better: who sought a desert not as Simeon did but as Anthony, using Mithridates and Heliogabalus not merely to acquire a roosting-place for contempt and scorn, but for fee to the cave where the lion itself lay down: who-the ones who feared you once-believed that they had seen ambition and greed themselves default before one seventeen-year-old child-had seen the whole vast hitherto invulnerable hegemony of ruthless-ness and rapacity reveal itself unfearsome and hollow when even that uncle and that godfather could not cope with your crime or defalcation, as though so poor and thin was the ambition and greed to which even that uncle and that godfather were dedicant, that voracity itself had repudiated