Fable, A - William Faulkner [30]
'Good-bye,' he said, closing the door, leaving her on the step, clinging on somehow even after the train was moving, her gaped urgent face moving parallel beyond the voiceless glass until an M. P. on the platform snatched her off, her face, not the train, seeming to flee suddenly with motion, in another instant gone.
He had gone out in with the Londoners. His commission was in them. This time, he was going out to a battalion of Northumberland Borderers. His record had preceded him; a corporal was waiting on the Boulogne quai to take him to the R. T. O. anteroom. The lieutenant had been with him at officers' school.
'So you put up a job on them,' the lieutenant said. 'Dont tell me: I dont want to know why. You're going out to the-th. I know James (the lieutenant colonel commanding it). Cut my teeth with him in the Salient last year. You dont want to go in a platoon. What about a telephonist-a sergeant-major's man?'
'Let me be a runner,' he said. So a runner he was. The word from the R. T. O. lieutenant had been too good; not just his record but his past had preceded him to the battalion also, up to the lieutenant colonel himself before he had been a week in the battalion, possibly because he, the runner, was entitled to wear (he did not Tuesday Night wear it since it was the officer's branch of the decoration and, among the men he would now mess and sleep with, that ribbon up on his private's tunic would have required too much breath) one of the same candy-stripes which the colonel (he was not a professional soldier either) did; that, and one other matter, though he would never believe that the two were more than incidentally connected.
'Look here,' the colonel said. 'you haven't come here to stir up anything. You ought to know that the only possible thing is to get on with it, finish it and bloody well have clone. We already have one man who could be a trouble-maker---unless he oversteps in time for us to learn what he is up to.' He named the man. 'He's in your company,'
'I couldn't,' the runner said. They wont talk to me yet. I probably couldn't persuade them to anything even if they would talk to me and I wanted to.'
'Not even (the colonel named the private again)? You dont know what he's up to either?'
'I dont think I'm an agitator,' the runner said. "I know I'm not a spy. This is gone now, remember,' he said, touching his shoulder lightly with the opposite hand.
Though I doubt if you can stop remembering that you once had it,' the colonel said. 'It's your own leg you're pulling, you know. If you really hate man, all you need do is take your piatoJ back to the latrines and rid yourself of him.'
'Yes, sir,' the runner said, completely wooden.
'Hate Germans, if you must hate someone,'
'Yes, sir,' the runner said.
'Well? Cant you answer?'
'All the Germans with all their kith and kin are not enough to make up man,'
They are for me-now,' the colonel said. 'And they had better be for you too now. Dont force me to compel you to remember that pip. Oh, I know it too: the men who, in hopes of being recorded as victorious prime-or cabinet-ministers, furnish men for this. The men who, in order to become millionaires, supply the guns and shells. The men who, hoping to be addressed some day as Field Marshal or Viscount Plugstreet or Earl of Loos, invent the gambles they call plans. The men who, to win a war, will go out and dig up if possible, invent if necessary, an enemy to fight against. Is that a promise?'
Tes,' the runner said.
'Right,' the colonel said. 'Carry on. Just remember,' Which he did, sometimes when on duty but mostly during the periods when