“The cinema?” the fourth says. “Him?”
“Yes,” the other says. “She would take him to the cinema the comedies, so he could hear them laughing.”
The blind man talks. “ — told me how the pictures hurt her eyes, and that she would leave me at the cinema and when it was over she would come and fetch me. So I said it was all right. And the next night it was again. And I said it was all right. And the next night I told her I wouldn’t go either. I said we would stop at home, at the hospital. And then she didn’t say anything for a long while. I could hear her breathing. Then she said it was all right. So after that we didn’t go to the cinema. We would just sit, holding hands, and me feeling the scar now and then. We couldn’t talk loud in the hospital, so we would whisper. But mostly we didn’t talk. We just held hands. And that was for eight nights. I counted. Then it was the eighth night. We were sitting there, with the other hand in my hand, and me touching the scar now and then. Then on a sudden the hand jerked away. I could hear her standing up. ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘This cant go on any longer. You will have to know sometime,’ she says. And I says, ‘I dont want to know but one thing. What is your name?’ I says. She told me her name; one of the nurses. And she says—”
“What?” the fourth says. “What is this?”
“He told you,” the first said. “It was one of the nurses in the hospital. The girl had been buggering off with another fellow and left the nurse for him to hold her hand, thinking he was fooled.”
“But how did he know?” the fourth says.
“Listen,” the first says.
“— ‘and you knew all the time,’ she says, ‘since the first time?’ ‘It was the scar,’ I says. ‘You’ve got it on the wrong wrist. You’ve got it on your right wrist,’ I says. ‘And two nights ago, I lifted up the edge of it a bit. What is it,’ I says. ‘Courtplaster?’” The blind man sits against the wall, his face lifted a little, his hands motionless beside him. “That’s how I knew, by the scar. Thinking they could fool me, when it was me put the scar on her, you might say—”
The prone figure farthest from the fire lifts its head. “Hup,” he says; “ere e comes.”
The others turn as one and look toward the entrance.
“Here who comes?” the blind man says. “Is it the bobbies?”
They do not answer. They watch the man who enters: a tall man with a stick. They cease to talk, save the blind man, watching the tall man come among them. “Here who comes, mates?” the blind man says. “Mates!”
The newcomer passes them, and the fire; he does not look at them. He goes on. “Watch, now,” the second says. The blind man is now leaning a little forward; his hands fumble at the ground beside him as though he were preparing to rise.
“Watch who?” he says. “What do you see?”
They do not answer. They are watching the newcomer covertly, attentively, as he disrobes and then, a white shadow, a ghostly gleam in the darkness, goes down to the water and washes himself, slapping his body hard with icy and filthy handfuls of river water. He returns to the fire; they turn their faces quickly aside, save the blind man (he still sits forward, his arms propped beside him as though on the point of rising, his wan face turned toward the sound, the movement) and one other. “Yer stones is ot, sir,” this one says. “I’ve ad them right in the blaze.”
“Thanks,” the newcomer says. He still appears to be utterly oblivious of them, so they watch him again, quietly, as he spreads his sorry garments on one stone and takes a second stone from the fire and irons them. While he is dressing, the man who spoke to him goes down to the water and returns with the cake of soap which he had used. Still watching, they see the newcomer rub his fingers on the cake of soap and twist his moustaches into points.
“A bit more on the left one, sir,” the man holding the soap says. The newcomer soaps his fingers and twists his left moustache again, the other man watching him, his head bent and tilted a little back, in shape and attitude and dress like a caricatured scarecrow.
“Right, now?” the newcomer says.
“Right, sir,” the scarecrow says. He retreats into the darkness and returns without the cake of soap, and carrying instead the hat and the stick. The newcomer takes them. From his pocket he takes a coin and puts it into the scarecrow’s hand. The scarecrow touches his cap; the newcomer is gone. They watch him, the tall shape, the erect back, the stick, until he disappears.
“What do you see, mates?” the blind man says. “Tell a man what you see.”
VII
Among the demobilized officers who emigrated from England after the Armistice was a subaltern named Walkley. He went out to Canada, where he raised wheat and prospered, both in pocket and in health. So much so that, had he been walking out of the Gare de Lyon in Paris instead of in Piccadilly Circus on this first evening (it is Christmas eve) of his first visit home, they would have said, “Here is not only a rich milord; it is a well one.”
He had been in London just long enough to outfit himself with the beginning of a wardrobe, and in his new clothes (bought of a tailor which in the old days he could not have afforded) he was enjoying himself too much to even go anywhere. So he just walked the streets, among the cheerful throngs, until suddenly he stopped dead still, staring at a face. The man had almost white hair, moustaches waxed to needle points. He wore a frayed scarf in which could be barely distinguished the colors and pattern of a regiment. His threadbare clothes were freshly ironed and he carried a stick. He was standing at the curb, and he appeared to be saying something to the people who passed, and Walkley moved suddenly forward, his hand extended. But the other man only stared at him with eyes that were perfectly dead.
“Gray,” Walkley said, “don’t you remember me?” The other stared at him with that dead intensity. “We were in hospital together. I went out to Canada. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes,” the other said. “I remember you. You are Walkley.” Then he quit looking at Walkley. He moved a little aside, turning to the crowd again, his hand extended; it was only then that Walkley saw that the hand contained three or four boxes of the matches which may be bought from any tobacconist for a penny a box. “Matches? Matches, sir?” he said. “Matches? Matches?”
Walkley moved also, getting again in front of the other. “Gray—” he said.
The other looked at Walkley again, this time with a kind of restrained yet raging impatience. “Let me alone, you son of a bitch!” he said, turning immediately toward the crowd again, his hand extended. “Matches! Matches, sir!” he chanted.
Walkley moved on. He paused again, half turning, looking back at the gaunt face above the waxed moustaches. Again the other looked him full in the face, but the glance passed on, as though without recognition. Walkley went on. He walked swiftly. “My God,” he said. “I think I am going to vomit.”
Crevasse
THE PARTY GOES on, skirting the edge of the barrage weaving down into shell craters old and new, crawling out again. Two men half drag, half carry between them a third, while two others carry the three rifles. The third man’s head is bound in a bloody rag; he stumbles his aimless legs along, his head lolling, sweat channeling slowly down his mud-crusted face.
The barrage stretches on and on across the plain, distant, impenetrable. Occasionally a small wind comes up from nowhere and thins the dun smoke momentarily upon clumps of bitten poplars. The party enters and crosses a field which a month ago was sown to wheat and where yet wheatspears thrust and cling stubbornly in the churned soil, among scraps of metal and seething hunks of cloth.
It crosses the field and comes to a canal bordered with tree stumps sheared roughly at a symmetrical five-foot level. The men flop and drink of the contaminated water and fill their water bottles. The two bearers let the wounded man slip to earth; he hangs lax on the canal bank with both arms in the water and his head too, had not the others held him up. One of them raises water in his helmet, but the wounded man cannot swallow. So they set him upright and the other holds the
helmet brim to his lips and refills the helmet and pours the water on the wounded man’s head, sopping the bandage. Then he takes a filthy rag from his pocket and dries the wounded man’s face with clumsy gentleness.
The captain, the subaltern and the sergeant, still standing, are poring over a soiled map. Beyond the canal the ground rises gradually; the canal cutting reveals the chalk formation of the land in pallid strata. The captain puts the map away and the sergeant speaks the men to their feet, not loud. The two bearers raise the wounded man and they follow the canal bank, coming after a while to a bridge formed by a water-logged barge hull lashed bow and stern to either bank, and so pass over. Here they halt again while once more the captain and the subaltern consult the map.
Gunfire comes across the pale spring noon like a prolonged clashing of hail on an endless metal roof. As they go on the chalky soil rises gradually underfoot. The ground is dryly rough, shaling, and the going is harder still for the two who carry the wounded man. But when they would stop the wounded man struggles and wrenches free and staggers on alone, his hands at his head, and stumbles, falling. The bearers catch and raise him and hold him muttering between them and wrenching his arms. He is muttering “. . . bonnet . . .” and he frees his hands and tugs again at his bandage. The commotion passes forward. The captain looks back and stops; the party halts also, unbidden, and lowers rifles.
“A’s pickin at’s bandage, sir-r,” one of the bearers tells the captain. They let the man sit down between them; the captain kneels beside him.
“. . . bonnet . . . bonnet,” the man mutters. The captain loosens the bandage. The sergeant extends a water bottle and the captain wets the bandage and lays his hand on the man’s brow. The others stand about, looking on with a kind of sober, detached interest. The captain rises. The bearers raise the wounded man again. The sergeant speaks them into motion.
They gain the crest of the ridge. The ridge slopes westward into a plateau slightly rolling. Southward, beneath its dun pall, the barrage still rages; westward and northward about the shining empty plain smoke rises lazily here and there above clumps of trees. But this is the smoke of burning things, burning wood and not powder, and the two officers gaze from beneath their hands, the men halting again without order and lowering arms.
“Gad, sir,” the subaltern says suddenly in a high, thin voice; “it’s houses burning! They’re retreating! Beasts! Beasts!”
“’Tis possible,” the captain says, gazing beneath his hand. “We can get around that barrage now. Should be a road just yonder.” He strides on again.
“For-rard,” the sergeant says, in that tone not loud. The men slope arms once more with unquestioning docility.
The ridge is covered with a tough, gorselike grass. Insects buzz in it, zip from beneath their feet and fall to slatting again beneath the shimmering noon. The wounded man is babbling again. At intervals they pause and give him water and wet the bandage again, then two others exchange with the bearers and they hurry the man on and close up again.
The head of the line stops; the men jolt prodding into one another like a train of freight cars stopping. At the captain’s feet lies a broad shallow depression in which grows a sparse, dead-looking grass like clumps of bayonets thrust up out of the earth. It is too big to have been made by a small shell, and too shallow to have been made by a big one. It bears no traces of having been made by anything at all, and they look quietly down into it. “Queer,” the subaltern says. “What do you fancy could have made it?”
The captain does not answer. He turns. They circle the depression, looking down into it quietly as they pass it. But they have no more than passed it when they come upon another one, perhaps not quite so large. “I didn’t know they had anything that could make that,” the subaltern says. Again the captain does not answer. They circle this one also and keep on along the crest of the ridge. On the other hand the ridge sheers sharply downward stratum by stratum of pallid eroded chalk.
A shallow ravine gashes its crumbling yawn abruptly across their path. The captain changes direction again, paralleling the ravine, until shortly afterward the ravine turns at right angles and goes on in the direction of their march. The floor of the ravine is in shadow; the captain leads the way down the shelving wall, into the shade. They lower the wounded man carefully and go on.
After a time the ravine opens. They find that they have debouched into another of those shallow depressions. This one is not so clearly defined, though, and the opposite wall of it is nicked by what is apparently another depression, like two overlapping disks. They cross the first depression, while more of the dead-looking grass bayonets saber their legs dryly, and pass through the gap into the next depression.
This one is like a miniature valley between miniature cliffs. Overhead they can see only the drowsy and empty bowl of the sky, with a few faint smoke smudges to the northwest. The sound of the barrage is now remote and far away: a vibration in earth felt rather than heard. There are no recent shell craters or marks here at all. It is as though they had strayed suddenly into a region, a world where the war had not reached, where nothing had reached, where no life is, and silence itself is dead. They give the wounded man water and go on.
The valley, the depression, strays vaguely before them. They can see that it is a series of overlapping, vaguely circular basins formed by no apparent or deducible agency. Pallid grass bayonets saber at their legs, and after a time they are again among old healed scars of trees to which there cling sparse leaves neither green nor dead, as if they too had been overtaken and caught by a hiatus in time, gossiping dryly among themselves though there is no wind. The floor of the valley is not level. It in itself descends into vague depressions, rises again as vaguely between its shelving walls. In the center of these smaller depressions whitish knobs of chalk thrust up through the thin topsoil. The ground has a resilient quality, like walking on cork; feet make no sound. “Jolly walking,” the subaltern says. Though his voice is not raised, it fills the small valley with the abruptness of a thunderclap, filling the silence, the words seeming to hang about them as though silence here had been so long undisturbed that it had forgot its purpose; as one they look quietly and soberly about, at the shelving walls, the stubborn ghosts of trees, the bland, hushed sky. “Topping hole-up for embusqué birds and such,” the subaltern says.
“Ay,” the captain says. His word in turn hangs sluggishly and fades. The men at the rear close up, the movement passing forward, the men looking quietly and soberly about.
“But no birds here,” the subaltern says. “No insects even.”
“Ay,” the captain says. The word fades, the silence comes down again, sunny, profoundly still. The subaltern pauses and stirs something with his foot. The men halt also, and the subaltern and the captain, without touching it, examine the half-buried and moldering rifle. The wounded man is babbling again.
“What is it, sir?” the subaltern says. “Looks like one of those things the Canadians had. A Ross. Right?”
“French,” the captain says; “1914.”
“Oh,” the subaltern says. He turns the rifle aside with his toe. The bayonet is still attached to the barrel, but the stock has long since rotted away. They go on, across the uneven ground, among the chalky knobs thrusting up through the soil. Light, the wan and drowsy sunlight, is laked in the valley, stagnant, bodiless, without heat. The saberlike grass thrusts sparsely and rigidly upward. They look about again at the shaling walls, then the ones at the head of the party watch the subaltern pause and prod with his stick at one of the chalky knobs and turn presently upward its earth-stained eyesockets and its unbottomed grin.
“Forward,” the captain says sharply. The party moves; the men look quietly and curiously at the skull as they pass. They go on, among the other whitish knobs like marbles studded at random in the shallow soil.
“All in the same position, do you notice, sir?” the subaltern says, his voice chattily cheerful; “all upright. Queer way to bury chaps: sitting down. Shallow, too.”
“Ay,” the captain says. The wounded man babbles steadily. The two bearers stop with him, but the others crowd on after the officers, passing the two bearers and the wounded man. “Dinna stop to gi’s sup water,” one of the bearers says. “A’ll drink walkin.” They take up the wounded man again and hurry him on while one of them tries to hold the neck of a water bottle to the wounded man’s mouth, clattering it against his teeth and spilling the water down the front of his tunic. The captain looks back.
“What’s this?” he says sharply. The men crowd up. Their eyes are wide, sober; he looks about at the quiet, intent faces. “What’s the matter back there, Sergeant?”
“Wind-up,” the subaltern says. He looks about at the eroded walls, the whitish knobs thrusting quietly out of the earth. “Feel it myself,” he says. He laughs, his laughter a little thin, ceasing. “Let’s get out of here, sir,” he says. “Let’s get into the sun again.”
“You are in the sun here,” the captain says. “Ease off there, men. Stop crowding. We’ll be out soon. We’ll find the road and get past the barrage and make contact again.” He turns and goes on. The party gets into motion again.
Then they all stop as one, in the attitudes of walking, in an utter suspension, and stare at one another. Again the earth moves under their feet. A man screams, high, like a woman or a horse; as the firm earth shifts for a third time beneath them the officers whirl and see beyond the downplunging man a gaping hole with dry dust still crumbling about the edges before the orifice crumbles again beneath a second man. Then a crack springs like a sword slash beneath them all; the earth breaks under their feet and tilts like jagged squares of pale fudge, framing a black yawn out of which, like a silent explosion, bursts the unmistakable smell of rotted flesh. While they scramble and leap (in silence now; there has been no sound since the first man screamed) from one cake to another, the cakes tilt and slide until the whole floor of the valley rushes slowly under them and plunges them downward into darkness. A grave rumbling rises into the sunlight on a blast of decay and of faint dust which hangs and drifts in the faint air about the black orifice.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 635
