Fable, A - William Faulkner [156]
'Listen to me,' the runner said. 'There's not time. It will be daylight in two hours and I've got to get back. Just show me how to make the sign, the signal,'
'You cant learn it right in that time,' the old Negro said. 'And even if you could, I'm going too. Maybe this is what I been hunting for too,'
'Didn't you just say the Germans might shoot at us?' the runner said. 'Dont you see? That's it, that's the risk: if some of the Germans do come out. Then they will shoot at us, both of them, their side and ours too-put a barrage down on all of us. They'll have to. There wont be anything else for them to do,'
'So your mind done changed about it,' the old Negro said.
'Just show me the sign, the signal,' the runner said. Again the old Negro groaned, peaceful, almost inattentive, swinging his legs on out of the bed. The innocent and unblemished corporal's uniform was hanging neatly on a chair, the shoes and the socks were placed neatly beneath it. The youth had picked them up and he now knelt beside the bed, holding one of the socks open for the old Negro's foot. 'Aren't you afraid?' the runner said.
'Aint we already got enough ahead of us without bringing that up?' the old Negro said pettishly. 'And I know what you're fixing to say next: How am I going to get up there? And I can answer that: I never had no trouble getting here to France; I reckon I can make them other just sixty miles. And I know what you are fixing to say after that one too: I cant wear this French suit up there neither without no general with me. Only I dont need to answer that one because you done already answered it,'
'Kill a British soldier this time?' the runner said.
Ton said he wasn't dead.'
'I said maybe he wasn't,'
'You said you hoped he wasn't. Dont never forget that,'
The runner was the last thing which the sentry would ever see. In fact, he was the first thing the sentry saw that morning except for the relief guard who had brought his breakfast and who now sat, his rifle leaning beside him against the dugout's opposite earthen shelf.
He had been under arrest for almost thirty hours now. That was all: just under arrest, as though the furious blows of the rifle-butt two nights ago had not simply hushed a voice which he could bear no longer but had somehow separated him from mankind; as if that aghast reversal, that cessation of four years of mud and blood and its accompanying convulsion of silence had cast him up on this buried dirt ledge with no other sign of man at all save the rotation of guards who brought him food and then sat opposite him until the time came for their relief. Yesterday and this morning too in ordained rote the Orderly Officer's sergeant satellite had appeared suddenly in the orifice, crying 'Shun!' and he had stood bareheaded while the guard saluted and the Orderly Officer himself entered and said, rapid and glib out of the glib and routine book: 'Any complaints?' and was gone again before he could have made any answer he did not intend to make. But that was all. Yesterday he Thursday had tried for a little while to talk to one of the rotated guards and since then some of them had tried to talk to him, but that was all of that too, so that in effect for over thirty hours now he had sat or sprawled and lay asleep on his dirt shelf, morose, sullen, incorrigible, foul-mouthed and snarling, not even waiting but just biding, pending whatever it was they would finally decide to do with him or with the silence, both or either, if and when they did make up their minds.
Then he saw the runner. At the same moment he saw the pistol already in motion as the runner struck the guard between the ear and the rim of the helmet and caught him as he toppled and tumbled him onto the ledge and turned and the sentry saw the bur-lesque of a soldier entering behind him-the travesty of the wrapped puttees, the tunic whose lower buttons would not even meet across the paunch not of sedentariness but of age and above it, beneath the helmet, the chocolate face which four years ago he had tried to relegate and repudiate into the closed book of