A Fable

‘In this book?’ the general said.

‘Yes,’ the aide said, and he died, or that is, the general found him missing one morning, or rather failed to find him at all one morning. It was two hours before he found where the aide was, and another three or four hours before he learned exactly what the aide had done, and he never did learn why and how the aide had come to be there, inside the lines, where a general of division’s Assistant Judge Advocate General had no right nor business whatever, sitting—this was how the runner told it—beside a regimental runner behind a wall near a corner much used by staff cars, on which, so the runner claimed he had told the aide, the enemy had registered a gun only that morning. And everybody had been warned of it, yet the car came on anyway, still coming on even after the aide sprang to his feet and began to wave his arms to stop the car. But it refused to stop, still coming on even after the aide ran out into the open road, still trying to wave the car off even after the runner said that he could hear the shell coming, and that the aide himself must have heard it also; and how the aide could not possibly have known that the car contained not only a wealthy American expatriate, a widow whose only son was in a French air squadron a few kilometres away and who was supporting near Paris an asylum for war-orphaned children, but a well-connected Paris staff-major too. And there had been nothing to pin the medal on when it came through, and nothing to identify to bury it with either, so that the medal also was still in the battered chest which the aide’s successors in their succession superintended from post to post; and the division commander took the book out and read the title and then read it again in mounting exasperation, reading it aloud, saying aloud almost, All right. Blas wrote it. But what’s the name of the book? until he realised that the word he was looking at was the name of the book and therefore the book would have to be about a man, thinking Yes, remembering scraps, fragments, echoes from that night two years ago, saying the name aloud this time: ‘Gil Blas,’ listening, concentrated, if perhaps there might come out of the closed pages, through the cover itself and into the simple name, something, some echo of the thunder, the clanging crash, the ringing bugles and the horns, the——What was it? he thought. The glory, the honor and the courage and the pride——

He returned to his bedroom, carrying the book. Save for his field cot and chest and desk, the furniture still belonged to the owner of the house and of the Argentine. It had the look of having been bought all in one shop too, probably over the telephone. He drew the single chair into the light from the window beside the stuffed fish and sat down and began to read, slowly, rigidly, not moving his lips even, inflexible in fortitude and suffering as if he were sitting fifty years ago for his portrait. After a while it was dusk. The door opened, hesitated, opened more and quietly and a batman entered and came to the table and prepared to light the lamp on it, the division commander not even looking up to say ‘Yes’, even when the soft gout of light plopped and burst soundless and brilliant on the open page in his hands, still reading when the batman went out, still reading until the tray was on the table beside the lamp and the batman had gone again. Then he put the book carefully down and turned to the tray, immobile again for a second, facing, somewhat as he had faced the book before opening it, the tray bearing the covered dish and the loaf and plate and cutlery and glass, and the bottle of wine and one of rum and one of cassis which he had been looking at on this tray for three years now—the same bottles which he had never touched, the same corks started each day and then driven home again and even dusted freshly over, the same liquid level in each as when vintner and distiller had bottled them. Nor did he use the knife and fork when he ate alone from the tray like this, eating not with voracity, nothing at all really gross about the feeding: simply putting the food rapidly and efficiently into himself with his fingers and sops of the bread. Then with only the slightest pause, not of indecision but simply to remember which pocket, he drew out the aide’s handkerchief and carefully wiped his moustache and fingers and tossed the handkerchief onto the tray and thrust the chair away from the table and took up the book and paused again, immobile, the book half raised, though none could have said whether he was looking at the open page or out the open window which he now faced, looking at or listening to the spring-filled darkness, the myriad peaceful silence, which it framed. Then he raised the book further and entered, strode into it as a patient enters a dentist’s office for the last petty adjustment before paying the bill, and read again, rigid and inflexible above the pages’ slow increment in which he missed, skipped, elided, no single word, with a cold, incredulous, respectful amazement, not at the shadows of men and women, because they were inventions and naturally he didn’t believe them—besides being in another country and long ago and therefore even if they had been real, they could never impinge, affect, the course of his life and its destruction—but at the capacity and industry and (he admitted it) the competence of the man who could remember all this and write it down.

He waked immediately, completely prescient. He even picked up the fallen book before looking at his watch; no start of concern nor dismay, as though he knew beforehand that he would be able to reach the chateau in plenty of time before dawn. Not that it would make any difference; he had simply planned to see the group commander tonight, and slept without intending to sleep and waked without needing to be waked, in plenty of time to see the group commander while technically at least it was still tonight.

So it was not dawn yet when the sentry at the lodge passed him (he was alone in the car, driving himself) through the gates and into the drive running straight and over-arched now through the spring darkness loud with predawn nightingales, up to the chateau. A successful highwayman had established its site and the park it sat in, a distant connection of a French queen had restored it in the Italian style of his native land; his marquis descendants had owned it: then the Republic: then a marshal of Napoleon: then a Levantine millionaire; for the last four years now, for all practical purposes, it had been the property of the general commanding the circumambient group of French armies. And the division commander had not noticed the nightingales until he was inside the park and it may have been at this moment that he realised that he himself would never own either: army command or chateau, or nightingales for doomed division commanders, coming to resign their pasts and their futures both, to listen to. And still not dawn when he slammed the car to a stop before the dark pile less of Louis than Florentine and more of baroque than either, jerking it up exactly as he would the over-ridden horse and getting out and flinging the door backward behind him against the night’s silence as he would have flung the reins to a groom without even pausing to see if the animal’s head were secure or not, then mounting the broad shallow steps to the stone terrace with its carved balustrade and urns garlanded in carven stone. Nor was even all the old gothic quite absent either: a pile of horse-droppings two or three days old on the terrace beside the door, as if the old princely highwayman himself had returned, or perhaps had only left day before yesterday, which the division commander glanced at in passing, thinking how forage grown from this northern chalkloam soil merely gave a horse windy size, distending the animal simply by its worthless passing bulk: nothing of speed and bottom like the hard, lean, light desert-bred ones bone- and flesh-bred to endure on almost nothing, contemptuous even of that. And not just horses: man too, thinking Able was I ere I saw France again, thinking how always a man’s simple longevity outlives his life and we are all our own paupers, derelict; thinking, as men had thought and said before him, that no soldier should be permitted to survive his first engagement under fire and then not thinking at all, chop-striding to the door and rapping on it, deliberate, peremptory, and loud.

He saw the candle, heard the feet. The door opened: no dishevelled Faubourg Saint Germain aide, this, but a private soldier: a middle-aged man in unlaced infantry boots and dangling braces, holding his trousers up with the other candleless hand over a soiled lavender civilian shirt whose collarless neckband was clasped by a tarnished brass button the size and shape of a wolf’s fang. Even the man appeared no different; certainly the shirt was not: he (the division commander) might have been looking at both that day fifteen years ago when Bidet got his captaincy at last and an instructorship at the Ecole Militaire, and he and the wife, who had followed him a subaltern to Africa even though she herself got no further than a loft in the Oran native town, could sleep every night under the same roof again at last, the same soldier but with a baize apron over the soiled violet shirt, scrubbing the stoop or the staircase while the wife stood over him like a sergeant herself, with a vast bunch of keys at her waist to jangle at each of his convulsive starts when she would murmur at him, and in the same baize apron waiting on table at meals; and apparently the same soldier (or at least one as large) but certainly the same shirt eight years later when Bidet was a colonel with enough pay to keep a horse too, waiting on table with a white apron now over the collarless shirt and the vast bunch of keys jangling against authentic satin now or even the true funereal silk at each of his convulsive starts, the same heavy boots under the apron bringing amid the