Fable, A - William Faulkner [36]
Indeed, you have been a man of this world since noon yesterday, even if they didn't bother to tell you so until fifteen o'clock. In fact, we are all men of this world now, all of us who died on the fourth day of August four years ago-'
The sentry moved again with that convulsive start; he said in a harsh thick furious murmer: 'For the last time. I warned you,'
'-all the fear and the doubt, the agony and the grief and the lice-Because it's over. Isn't it over?'
Yes!' the sentry said.
'Of course it's over. You came out in... fifteen, wasn't it? You've seen a lot of war too. Of course you know when one is over,'
'It is over!' the sentry said. 'Didn't you hear the---ing guns stop right out there in front of you?'
'Then why dont we go home?'
'Can they draw the whole---ing line out at once? Leave the whole---ing front empty at one time?'
'Why not?' the runner said. 'Isn't it over?' It was as if he had fixed the sentry as the matador does the bull, leaving the animal capable only of watching him. 'Over. Finished. Done. No more parades. Tomorrow we shall go home; by this time tomorrow night we shall have hoicked from the beds of our wives and sweethearts the manufacturers of walking-out shoe-pegs and Enfield primers-' He thought rapidly He's going to kick me. He said, 'All right. Sorry. I didn't know you had a wife,'
'No more I have,' the sentry said in his shaking whisper. 'So will you stow it now? Will you for bleeding Christ?'
'Of course you haven't. How wise you are. A girl in a High Street pub, of course. Or perhaps a city girl-a Greater City girl, Hounds-ditch or Bermondsey, towarding forty but not looking within five years of it, and's had her troubles too-who hasn't?--but suppose she does, who wouldn't choose her and lucky, who can appreciate a man, to one of these young tarts swapping cove for cove with each leave train-'
The sentry began to curse, in the same harsh spent furious mono-Tuesday Night tone, cursing the runner with obscene and dull unimagination out of the stalls and tack-rooms and all the other hinder purlieus of what must have been his old vocation, until at the same moment the runner sat quickly and lightly up and the sentry began to turn back to the aperture in a series of jerks like a mechanical toy running down, murmuring again in his shaking furious voice: 'Remember. I told you' as two men came around the traverse and up the trench in single line, indistinguishable in their privates' uniforms save for the officer's stick and the sergeant's chevrons.
Tost?' the officer said.
Two-nine,' the sentry said. The officer had lifted his foot to the firestep when he saw, seemed to see, the runner.
'Who's that?' he said. The runner began to stand up, promptly enough but without haste. The sergeant pronounced his name.
'He was in that special draft of runners Corps drew out yesterday morning. They were dismissed to dugouts as soon as they reported back tonight, and told to stop there. This man was, anyway.'
'Oh,' the officer said. That was when the sergeant pronounced the name. 'Why aren't you there?'
'Yes, sir,' the runner said, picking up the rifle and turning quite smartly, moving back down the trench until he had vanished beyond the traverse. The officer completed his stride onto the firestep; now both the helmets slanted motionless and twinlike between the sandbags while the two of them peered through the aperture. Then the sentry said, murmured, so quietly that