He leads the way along the ditch until they reach the outskirts of the village. Here they are out of the sun, and here they sit quietly beneath a wall, surrounding the wounded man, while the captain and the sergeant again crawl away. They return in five minutes. “Fix bayonets,” the sergeant says in a low voice. “Quiet, now.”
“Wull A stay wi thae hur-rt lad, Sair-rgent?” one whispers.
“Nay,” the sergeant says. “A’ll tak’s chance wi us. Forrard.”
They steal quietly along the wall, behind the captain. The wall approaches at right angles to the street, the road which crosses the bridge. The captain raises his hand. They halt and watch him as he peers around the corner. They are opposite the bridgehead. It and the road are deserted; the village dreams quietly in the setting sun. Against the sky beyond the village the dust of the retreating column hangs, turning to rose and gold.
Then they hear a sound, a short, guttural word. Not ten yards away and behind a ruined wall leveled breast-high and facing the bridge, four men squat about a machine gun. The captain raises his hand again. They grasp their rifles: a rush of hobnails on cobblestones, a cry of astonishment cut sharply off; blows, short, hard breaths, curses; not a shot.
The man with the bandaged head begins to laugh, shrilly, until someone hushes him with a hand that tastes like brass. Under the captain’s direction they bash in the door of the house and drag the gun and the four bodies into it. They hoist the gun upstairs and set it up in a window looking down upon the bridgehead. The sun sinks further, the shadows fall long and quiet across village and river. The man with the bandaged head babbles to himself.
Another column swings up the road, dogged and orderly beneath coalhod helmets. It crosses the bridge and passes on through the village. A party detaches itself from the rear of the column and splits into three squads. Two of them have machine guns, which they set up on opposite sides of the street, the near one utilizing the barricade behind which the other gun had been captured. The third squad returns to the bridge, carrying sappers’ tools and explosive. The sergeant tells off six of the nineteen men, who descend the stairs silently. The captain remains with the gun in the window.
Again there is a brief rush, a scuffle, blows. From the window the captain sees the heads of the machine-gun crew across the street turn, then the muzzle of the gun swings, firing. The captain rakes them once with his gun, then he sweeps with it the party on the bridge, watching it break like a covey of quail for the nearest wall. The captain holds the gun on them. They wilt running and dot the white road and become motionless. Then he swings the gun back to the gun across the street. It ceases.
He gives another order. The remaining men, except the man with the bandage, run down the stairs. Half of them stop at the gun beneath the window and drag it around. The others dash on across the street, toward the second gun. They are halfway across when the other gun rattles. The running men plunge as one in midstep. Their kilts whip forward and bare their pale thighs. The gun rakes across the doorway where the others are freeing the first gun of bodies. As the captain sweeps his gun down again, dust puffs from the left side of the window, his gun rings metallically, something sears along his arm and across his ribs, dust puffs from the right side of the window. He rakes the other gun again. It ceases. He continues to fire into the huddled clump about it long after the gun has ceased.
The dark earth bites into the sun’s rim. The street is now all in shadow; a final level ray comes into the room, and fades. Behind him in the twilight the wounded man laughs, then his laughter sinks into a quiet contented gibberish.
Just before dark another column crosses the bridge. There is still enough light for it to be seen that these troops wear khaki and that their helmets are flat. But likely there is no one to see, because when a party mounted to the second story and found the captain propped in the window beside the cold gun, they thought that he was dead.
This time Matthew Gray saw the citation. Someone clipped it from the Gazette and sent it to him, and he sent it in turn to his son in the hospital, with a letter:
. . . Since you must go to a war we are glad that you are doing well in it. Your mother thinks that you have done your part and that you should come home. But women do not understand such things. But I myself think that it is time they stopped fighting. What is the good in the high wages when food is so high that there is profit for none save the profiteers. When a war gets to where the battles do not even prosper the people who win them, it is time to stop.
V
In the bed next his, and later in the chair next his on the long glassed veranda, there was a subaltern. They used to talk. Or rather, the subaltern talked while Gray listened. He talked of peace, of what he would do when it was over, talking as if it were about finished, as if it would not last past Christmas.
“We’ll be back out there by Christmas,” Gray said.
“Gas cases? They don’t send gas cases out again. They have to be cured.”
“We will be cured.”
“But not in time. It will be over by Christmas. It can’t last another year. You don’t believe me, do you? Sometimes I believe you want to go back. But it will be. It will be finished by Christmas, and then I’m off. Canada. Nothing at home for us now.” He looked at the other, at the gaunt, wasted figure with almost white hair, lying with closed eyes in the fall sunlight. “You’d better come with me.”
“I’ll meet you in Givenchy on Christmas Day,” Gray said.
But he didn’t. He was in the hospital on the eleventh of November, hearing the bells, and he was still there on Christmas Day, where he received a letter from home:
You can come on home now. It will not be too soon now. They will need ships worse than ever now, now that the pride and the vainglory have worn themselves out.
The medical officer greeted him cheerfully. “Dammit, stuck here, when I know a place in Devon where I could hear a nightingale, by jove.” He thumped Gray’s chest. “Not much: just a bit of a murmur. Give you no trouble, if you’ll stop away from wars from now on. Might keep you from getting in again, though.” He waited for Gray to laugh, but Gray didn’t laugh. “Well, it’s all finished now, damn them. Sign here, will you.” Gray signed. “Forget it as quickly as it began, I hope. Well—” He extended his hand, smiling his antiseptic smile. “Cheer-O, Captain. And good luck.”
Matthew Gray, descending the hill at seven oclock in the morning, saw the man, the tall, hospital-colored man in city clothing and carrying a stick, and stopped.
“Alec?” he said. “Alec.” They shook hands. “I could not — I did not . . .” He looked at his son, at the white hair, the waxed moustaches. “You have two ribbons now for the box, you have written.” Then Matthew turned back up the hill at seven oclock in the morning. “We’ll go to your mother.”
Then Alec Gray reverted for an instant. Perhaps he had not progressed as far as he thought, or perhaps he had been climbing a hill, and the return was not a reversion so much as something like an avalanche waiting the pebble, momentary though it was to be. “The shipyard, Father.”
His father strode firmly on, carrying his lunchpail. “‘Twill wait,” he said. “We’ll go to your mother.”
His mother met him at the door. Behind her he saw young Matthew, a man now, and John Wesley, and Elizabeth whom he had never seen. “You did not wear your uniform home,” young Matthew said.
“No,” he said. “No, I—”
“Your mother had wanted to see you in your regimentals and all,” his father said.
“No,” his mother said. “No! Never! Never!”
“Hush, Annie,” his father said. “Being a captain now, with two ribbons now for the box. This is false modesty. Ye hae shown courage; ye should have — But ’tis of no moment: the proper uniform for a Gray is an overall and a hammer.”
“Ay, sir,” Alec said, who had long since found out that no man has courage but that any man may blunder blindly into valor as one stumbles into an open manhole in the street.
He did not tell his father until that night, after his mother and the children had gone to bed. “I am going back to England. I have work promised there.”
“Ah,” his father said. “At Bristol, perhaps? They build ships there.”
The lamp glowed, touching with faint gleams the black and polished surface of the box on the mantel-shelf. There was a wind getting up, hollowing out the sky like a dark bowl, carving house and hill and headland out of dark space. “‘Twill be blowing out yon the night,” his father said.
“There are other things,” Alec said. “I have made friends, you see.”
His father removed the iron-rimmed spectacles. “You have made friends. Officers and such, I doubt not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And friends are good to have, to sit about the hearth of nights and talk with. But beyond that, only them that love you will bear your faults. You must love a man well to put up with all his trying ways, Alec.”
“But they are not that sort of friends, sir. They are . . .” He ceased. He did not look at his father. Matthew sat, slowly polishing the spectacles with his thumb. They could hear the wind. “If this fails, I’ll come back to the shipyard.”
His father watched him gravely, polishing the spectacles slowly. “Shipwrights are not made like that, Alec. To fear God, to do your work like it was your own hull you were putting the ribs in . . .” He moved. “We’ll see what the Book will say.” He replaced the glasses. On the table was a heavy, brass-bound Bible. He opened it; the words seemed to him to rise to meet him from the page. Yet he read them, aloud: “. . . and the captains of thousands and the captains of ten thousands . . . A paragraph of pride. He faced his son, bowing his neck to see across the glasses. “You will go to London, then?”
“Yes, sir,” Alec said.
VI
His position was waiting. It was in an office. He had already had cards made: Captain A. Gray, M.C., D.S.M., and on his return to London he joined the Officers’ Association, donating to the support of the widows and orphans.
He had rooms in the proper quarter, and he would walk to and from the office, with his cards and his waxed moustaches, his sober correct clothes and his stick carried in a manner inimitable, at once jaunty and unobtrusive, giving his coppers to blind and maimed in Piccadilly, asking of them the names of their regiments. Once a month he wrote home:
I am well. Love to Jessie and Matthew and John Wesley and Elizabeth.
During that first year Jessie was married. He sent her a gift of plate, stinting himself a little to do so, drawings from his savings. He was saving, not against old age; he believed too firmly in the Empire to do that, who had surrendered completely to the Empire like a woman, a bride. He was saving against the time when he would recross the Channel among the dead scenes of his lost and found life.
That was three years later. He was already planning to ask for leave, when one day the manager broached the subject himself. With one correct bag he went to France. But he did not bear eastward at once. He went to the Riviera; for a week he lived like a gentleman, spending his money like a gentleman, lonely, alone in that bright aviary of the svelte kept women of all Europe.
That was why those who saw him descend from the Mediterranean Express that morning in Paris said, “Here is a rich milord,” and why they continued to say it in the hard-benched third-class trains, as he sat leaning forward on his stick, lip-moving the names on sheet-iron stations about the battered and waking land lying now three years quiet beneath the senseless and unbroken battalions of days.
He reached London and found what he should have known before he left. His position was gone. Conditions, the manager told him, addressing him punctiliously by his rank.
What savings he had left melted slowly; he spent the last of them on a black silk dress for his mother, with the letter:
I am well. Love to Matthew and John Wesley and Elizabeth.
He called upon his friends, upon the officers whom he had known. One, the man he knew best, gave him whisky in a comfortable room with a fire: “You aren’t working now? Rotten luck. By the way, you remember Whiteby? He had a company in the — th. Nice chap: no people, though. He killed himself last week. Conditions.”
“Oh. Did he? Yes. I remember him. Rotten luck.”
“Yes. Rotten luck. Nice chap.”
He no longer gave his pennies to the blind and the maimed in Piccadilly. He needed them for papers:
Artisans needed
Become stonemason
Men to drive motorcars. War record not necessary
Shop-assistants (must be under twenty-one)
Shipwrights needed
and at last:
Gentleman with social address and connections to meet out-of-town clients. Temporary
He got the place, and with his waxed moustaches and his correct clothes he revealed the fleshpots of the West End to Birmingham and Leeds. It was temporary.
Artisans
Carpenters
Housepainters
Winter was temporary, too. In the spring he took his waxed moustaches and his ironed clothes into Surrey, with a set of books, an encyclopedia, on commission. He sold all his things save what he stood in, and gave up his rooms in town.
He still had his stick, his waxed moustaches, his cards. Surrey, gentle, green, mild. A tight little house in a tight little garden. An oldish man in a smoking jacket puttering in a flower bed: “Good day, sir. Might I—”
The man in the smoking jacket looks up. “Go to the side, can’t you? Don’t come this way.”
He goes to the side entrance. A slatted gate, freshly white, bearing an enameled plate:
NO
HAWKERS
BEGGARS
He passes through and knocks at a tidy door smug beneath a vine. “Good day, miss. May I see the—”
“Go away. Didn’t you see the sign on the gate?”
“But I—”
“Go away, or I’ll call the master.”
In the fall he returned to London. Perhaps he could not have said why himself. Perhaps it was beyond any saying, instinct perhaps bringing him back to be present at the instant out of all time of the manifestation, apotheosis, of his life which had died again. Anyway, he was there, still with his waxed moustaches, erect, his stick clasped beneath his left armpit, among the Household troops in brass cuirasses, on dappled geldings, and Guards in scarlet tunics, and the Church militant in stole and surplice and Prince defenders of God in humble mufti, all at attention for two minutes, listening to despair. He still had thirty shillings, and he replenished his cards: Captain A. Gray, M.C., D.S.M.
It is one of those spurious, pale days like a sickly and premature child of spring while spring itself is still weeks away. In the thin sunlight buildings fade upward into misty pinks and golds. Women wear violets pinned to their furs, appearing to bloom themselves like flowers in the languorous, treacherous air.
It is the women who look twice at the man standing against the wall at a corner: a gaunt man with white hair, and moustaches twisted into frayed points, with a bleached and frayed regimental scarf in a celluloid collar, a once-good suit now threadbare yet apparently pressed within twenty-four hours, standing against the wall with closed eyes, a dilapidated hat held bottom-up before him.
He stood there for a long time, until someone touched his arm. It was a constable. “Move along, sir. Against orders.” In his hat were seven pennies and three halfpence. He bought a cake of soap and a little food.
Another anniversary came and passed; he stood again, his stick at his armpit, among the bright, silent uniforms, the quiet throng in either frank or stubborn cast-offs, with patient, bewildered faces. In his eyes now is not that hopeful resignation of a beggar, but rather that bitterness, that echo as of bitter and unheard laugher of a hunchback.
A meager fire burns on the sloping cobbles. In the fitful light the damp, fungus-grown wall of the embankment and the stone arch of the bridge loom. At the foot of the cobbled slope the invisible river
clucks and gurgles with the tide.
Five figures lie about the fire, some with heads covered as though in slumber, others smoking and talking. One man sits upright, his back to the wall, his hands lying beside him; he is blind: he sleeps that way. He says that he is afraid to lie down.
“Cant you tell you are lying down, without seeing you are?” another says.
“Something might happen,” the blind man says.
“What? Do you think they would give you a shell, even if it would bring back your sight?”
“They’d give him the shell, all right,” a third said.
“Ow. Why dont they line us all up and put down a bloody barrage on us?”
“Was that how he lost his sight?” a fourth says. “A shell?”
“Ow. He was at Mons. A dispatch rider, on a motorbike. Tell them about it, mate.”
The blind man lifts his face a little. Otherwise he does not move. He speaks in a flat voice. “She had the bit of scar on her wrist. That was how I could tell. It was me put the scar on her wrist, you might say. We was working in the shop one day. I had picked up an old engine and we was fitting it onto a bike so we could—”
“What?” the fourth says. “What’s he talking about?”
“Shhhh,” the first says. “Not so loud. He’s talking about his girl. He had a bit of a bike shop on the Brighton Road and they were going to marry.” He speaks in a low tone, his voice just under the weary, monotonous voice of the blind man. “Had their picture taken and all the day he enlisted and got his uniform. He had it with him for a while, until one day he lost it. He was fair wild. So at last we got a bit of a card about the same size of the picture. ‘Here’s your picture, mate,’ we says. ‘Hold onto it this time.’ So he’s still got the card. Likely he’ll show it to you before he’s done. So dont you let on.”
“No,” the other says. “I shant let on.”
The blind man talks. “ — got them at the hospital to write her a letter, and sure enough, here she come. I could tell her by the bit of scar on her wrist. Her voice sounded different, but then everything sounded different since. But I could tell by the scar. We would sit and hold hands, and I could touch the bit of scar inside her left wrist. In the cinema too. I would touch the scar and it would be like I—”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 634
