Fable, A - William Faulkner [29]
'Cant face it,' he said.
'Wont face it,' the company commander said.
'All right,' he said. 'So I must get back into the muck with him. Then maybe I'll be free.'
'Free of what?' the company commander said.
'All right,' he said. 'I dont know either. Maybe of having to perform forever at inescapable intervals that sort of masturbation about the human race people call hoping. That would be enough. I had thought of going straight to Brigade. That would save time. But then, the colonel might get his back up for being overslaughed. I'm looking for what K. R. and O. would call channels, I suppose. Only I dont seem to know anybody who ever read that book.'
It was not that easy. The battalion commander refused to endorse him; he found himself in the presence of a brigadier twenty-seven years old, less than four years out of Sandhurst today, in a Mons Star, M. C. and bar, D. S. O. and a French Croix de Guerre and a thing from the Belgian monarch and three wound stripes, who could not-not would not, could not-even believe what he was hearing, let alone understand what his importuner was talking about, who said, 'I daresay you've already thought of shooting yourself in the foot. Raise the pistol about sixty inches first. You might as well get out front of the parapet too, what? Better still, get past the wire while you're about it.'
But it was quite simple, when he finally thought of the method, lie waited until his leave came up. He would have to do that; desertion was exactly what he did not want. In London he found a girl, a young woman, not a professional, not really a good-standing amateur yet, two or three months pregnant from any one of three men, two of whom had been killed inside the same fortnight and Tuesday Night mile by Nieppe Forest, and the other now in Mesopotamia, who didn't understand either and therefore (so he thought at the time) was willing to help him for a price-a price twice what she suggested and which represented his whole balance at Cox's-in a plot whose meretricity and shabbiness only American moving pictures were to match: the two of them taken in delicto so outrageously flagrante and public, so completely unequivocal and incapable of other than one interpretation, that anyone, even the field-rank moralists in charge of the conduct of Anglo-Saxon-derived junior officers, should have refused point blank to accept or even believe it.
It worked though. The next morning, in a Knightsbridge barracks anteroom, a staff officer spokesman offered, as an alternative to preserve the regiment's honor, the privilege which he had requested of his company commander and then the battalion commander, and finally of the brigadier himself in France three months ago, and three nights later, passing through Victoria station to file into a coach full of private soldiers in the same returning train which had brought him by officers' first class up from Dover ten days ago, he found he had been wrong about the girl, whom at first he didn't even remember after she spoke to him. 'It didn't work,' she said.
'Yes,' he said. 'It worked.'
'But you're going back. I thought you wanted to lose the commission so you wouldn't have to go back.' Then she was clinging to him, cursing him and crying too. 'You were lying all the time, then. You wanted to go back. You just wanted to be a poor bloody private again.' She was pulling at his arm. 'Come on. The gates are still open.'
'No,' he said, holding back. 'It's all right,'
'Come on,' she said, jerking at him. 'I know these things. There's a train you can take in the morning; you wont be reported absent until tomorrow night in Boulogne,' The line began to move. He tried to move with it. But she clung only the harder. 'Cant you see?' she cried. 'I cant get the money to give back to you until tomorrow morning,'
'Let go,' he said. 'I must get aboard and find a corner to sleep in,'
'The train wont go for two hours yet. How many of them do you think I've seen leave? Come on. My room isn't ten minutes from here,'
'Let go now,' he said, moving on. 'Good-bye,'
'Just two hours,' A sergeant