Fable, A - William Faulkner [134]
'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 extended 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 Comite 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!'
Tes,' 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 to-ward 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, revocable 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 Wednesday Night 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 appoin'I'ment of Quartermaster General is within my gift. Will you accept the office?' and