Fable, A - William Faulkner [44]
'Hangars,' he said. 'I was to go on the patrol.'
'Didn't anyone tell you to report to me here?'
'Report?' he said. 'Flight Sergeant Conventicle-----No,' he said.
'You're-----'
'Levine,'
'Levine. You've been here three weeks. Not long enough to have learned that this squadron is run by people especially appointed and even qualified for it. In fact, when they gave you those badges, they gave you a book of rules to go with them, to prevent you needing ever to rack your brains like this. Perhaps you haven't yet had time to glance through it.'
'Yes,' he said. 'What do you want with me?'
'To sit down somewhere and be quiet. As far as this squadron is concerned, the war stopped at noon. There'll be no more flying here until further notice. As for those guns, they began at twelve hours. The major knew that beforehand. They will stop at fifteen hours. Now you know that in advance too-'
'Stop?' he said. 'Don't you see-'
'Sit down!' the adjutant said.
'-if we stop now, we are beat, have lost-----'
'Sit down?
He stopped then. Then he said: 'Am I under arrest?'
'Do you want to be?'
'Right,' he said. He sat down. It was twenty-two minutes past twelve hours; now it was not the Nissen walls which trembled, but the air they contained. Presently, or in time that is, it was thirteen hours, then fourteen, all that distant outside fury reduced now to a moiling diastole of motes where the sun slanted into the western windows; getting on for fifteen hours now and the squadron itself reduced to a handful of tyros who barely knew in which direction the front lay, under command of a man who had never been anything but a poor bloody observer to begin with and had even given that up now for a chessboard-the other new men who had-must have-brought out from England with them the same gratitude and pride and thirst and hope-Then he was on his feet, hearing the silence still falling like a millstone into a well; then they were all moving as one, through the door and outside into that topless gape from which the walls and roof of distant gunfire had been ripped, snatched, as a cyclone rips the walls and roof from the rectangle of vacancy which a moment ago had been a hangar, leaving audibility with nothing now to lean against, outbursting into vac-uum as the eardrums crack with altitude, until at last even that shocking crash died away.
That seems to be it,' a voice said behind him.
'Seems to be what?' he said. 'It's not over! Didn't you hear what the major said? The Americans aren't quitting either! Do you think Monaghan' (Monaghan was an American, in B Flight too; although he had been out only ten weeks, he already had a score of three and a fraction) 'is quitting? And even if they do-' and stopped, finding them all watching him, soberly and quietly, as if he were a flight commander himself; one said: 'What do you think, Levine?'
'Me?' he said. 'About what?' Ask Collyer, he thought. He's running the nursery now; bitterly too now: Ask Collyer-the pipe, the balding head, the plump bland face which at this moment was England's sole regent over this whole square half-mile of French dirt, custodian of her honor and pride, who three years ago had probably brought out to France (he, Collyer, according to squadron folklore, had been ridden down by a Uhlan with a lance inside the war's first weeks and turned flying observer and came out again and within a week of that managed somehow to live through a F. E. crash