The Essential Faulkner (56 page)

On the German’s other side Monaghan was filling his glass. “I brought him down this morning,” he said. “I’m going to take him home with me.”

“Why?” Bland said. “What do you want with him?”

“Because he belongs to me,” Monaghan said. He set the full glass before the German. “Here; drink.”

“I once thought about taking one home to my wife,” Bland said. “So I could prove to her that I have only been to a war. But I never could find a good one. A whole one, I mean.”

“Come on,” Monaghan said. “Drink.”

“I haf plenty,” the German said. “All day I haf plenty.”

“Do you want to go to America with him?” Bland said.

“Yes. I would ligk it. Thanks.”

“Sure you’ll like it,” Monaghan said. “I’ll make a man of you. Drink.”

The German raised the glass, but he merely held it in his hand. His face was strained, deprecatory, yet with a kind of sereneness, like that of a man who has conquered himself. I imagine some of the old martyrs must have looked at the lions with that expression. He was sick, too. Not from the liquor: from his head. “I haf in Bayreuth a wife and a little wohn. Mine son. I haf not him yet seen.”

“Ah,” the subadar said. “Bayreuth. I was there one spring.”

“Ah,” the German said. He looked quickly at the subadar. “So? The music?”

“Yes,” the subadar said. “In your music a few of you have felt, tasted, lived, the true brotherhood. The rest of us can only look beyond the heart. But we can follow them for a little while in the music.”

“And then we must return,” the German said. “That iss not good. Why must we yet return always?”

“It is not the time for that yet,” the subadar said. “But soon … It is not as far as it once was. Not now.”

“Yes,” the German said. “Defeat will be good for us. Defeat iss good for art; victory, it iss not good.”

“So you admit you were whipped,” Comyn said. He was sweating again, and Sartoris’ nostrils were quite white. I thought of what the subadar had said about men in water. Only our water was drunkenness: that isolation of alcoholism which drives men to shout and laugh and fight, not with one another but with their unbearable selves which, drunk, they are even more fain and still less fell to escape. Loud and overloud, unwitting the black thunder-head of outraged France (steadily the other tables were being emptied; the other customers were now clotted about the high desk where the
patronne
, an old woman in steel spectacles, sat, a wad of knitting on the ledge before her), we shouted at one another, speaking in foreign tongues out of our inescapable isolations, reiterant, unlistened to by one another; while submerged by us and more foreign still, the German and the subadar talked quietly of music, art, the victory born of defeat. And outside in the chill November darkness was the suspension, the not-quite-believing, not-quite-awakened nightmare, the breathing spell of the old verbiaged lusts and the buntinged and panoplied greeds.

“By God, I’m shanty Irish,” Monaghan said. “That’s what I am.”

“What about it?” Sartoris said, his nostrils like chalk against his high-colored face. His twin brother had been killed in July. He was in a Camel squadron below us, and Sartoris was down there when it happened. For a week after that, as soon as he came in from patrol he would fill his tanks and drums and go out again alone. One day somebody saw him, roosting about five thousand feet above an old Ak.W. I suppose the other guy who was with his brother that morning had seen the markings on the Hun patrol leader’s crate; anyway, that’s what Sartoris
was doing, using the Ak.W. for bait. Where he got it and who he got to fly it, we didn’t know. But he got three Huns that week, catching them dead when they dived on the Ak.W., and on the eighth day he didn’t go out again. “He must have got him,” Hume said. But we didn’t know. He never told us. But after that, he was all right again. He never did talk much; just did his patrols and maybe once a week he’d sit and drink his nostrils white in a quiet sort of way.

Bland was filling his glass, a drop at a time almost, with a catlike indolence. I could see why men didn’t like him and why women did. Comyn, his arms crossed on the table, his cuff in a pool of spilt liquor, was staring at the German. His eyes were bloodshot, a little protuberant. Beneath his downcrushed monkey cap the American M.P. smoked his meager cigarettes, his face quite blank. The steel chain of his whistle looped into his breast pocket, his pistol was hunched forward onto his lap. Beyond, the French people, the soldiers, the waiter, the
patronne
, clotted at the desk. I could hear their voices like from a distance, like crickets in September grass, the shadows of their hands jerking up the wall and flicking away.

“I’m not a soldier,” Monaghan said. “I’m not a gentleman. I’m not anything.” At the base of each flapping shoulder strap there was a small rip; there were two longer ones parallel above his left pocket where his wings and ribbon had been. “I don’t know what I am. I have been in this damn war for three years and all I know is, I’m not dead. I—”

“How do you know you’re not dead?” Bland said.

Monaghan looked at Bland, his mouth open upon his uncompleted word.

“I’ll kill you for a shilling,” Comyn said. “I don’t like your bloody face, Lootenant. Bloody lootenant.”

“I’m shanty Irish,” Monaghan said. “That’s what I am. My father was shanty Irish, by God. And I don’t know what my grandfather was. I don’t know if I had one. My
father don’t remember one. Likely it could have been one of several. So he didn’t even have to be a gentleman. He never had to be. That’s why he could make a million dollars digging sewers in the ground. So he could look up at the tall glittering windows and say—I’ve heard him, and him smoking the pipe would gas the puking guts out of you damn, niggling, puny—”

“Are you bragging about your father’s money or about his sewers?” Bland said.

“—would look up at them and he’d say to me, he’d say, ‘When you’re with your fine friends, the fathers and mothers and sisters of them you met at Yale, ye might just remind them that every man is the slave of his own refuse and so your old dad they would be sending around to the forty-storey back doors of their kitchens is the king of them all—’ What did you say?” He looked at Bland.

“Look here, buddy,” the M.P. said. “This is about enough of this. I’ve got to report this prisoner.”

“Wait,” Monaghan said. He did not cease to look at Bland. “What did you say?”

“Are you bragging about your father’s money or about his sewers?” Bland said.

“No,” Monaghan said. “Why should I? Any more than I would brag about the thirteen Huns I got, or the two ribbons, one of which his damned king—” he jerked his head at Comyn—“gave me.”

“Don’t call him my damned king,” Comyn said, his cuff soaking slowly in the spilt liquor.

“Look,” Monaghan said. He jerked his hand at the rips on his flapping shoulder straps, at the two parallel rips on his breast. “That’s what I think of it. Of all your goddamn twaddle about glory and gentlemen. I was young; I thought you had to be. Then I was in it and there wasn’t time to stop even when I found it didn’t count. But now it’s over; finished now. Now I can be what I am. Shanty Irish; son of an immigrant that knew naught but shovel and pick until youth and the time for pleasuring was wore
out of him before his time. Out of a peat bog he came, and his son went to their gentlemen’s school and returned across the water to swank it with any of them that owned the peat bogs and the bitter sweat of them that mired it, and the king said him well.”

“I will give yez the shilling and I will beat the head off yez,” Comyn said.

“But why do you want to take him back with you?” Bland said. Monaghan just looked at Bland. There was something of the crucified about Monaghan, too: furious, inarticulate not with stupidity but at it, like into him more than any of us had distilled the ceased drums of the old lust and greed waking at last aghast at its own impotence and accrued despair. Bland sat on his spine, legs extended, his hands in his slacks, his handsome face calmly insufferable. “What stringed pick would he bow? maybe a shovel strung with the gut of an alley-cat? he will create perhaps in music the flushed toilets of Manhattan to play for your father after supper of an evening?” Monaghan just looked at Bland with that wild, rapt expression. Bland turned his lazy face a little to the German.

“Look here,” the M.P. said.

“You have a wife, Herr Leutnant?” Bland said.

The German looked up. He glanced swiftly from face to face. “Yes, thank you,” he said. He still had not touched his full glass save to hold it in his hand. But he was no nearer sober than before, the liquor become the hurting of his head, his head the pulse and beat of alcohol in him. “My people are of Prussia little barons. There are four brothers: the second for the Army, the third who did nothing in Berlin, the little one a cadet of dragoons; I, the eldest, in the University. There I learned. There wass a time then. It wass as though we, young from the quiet land, were brought together, chosen and worthy to witness a period quick like a woman with a high destiny of the earth and of man. It iss as though the old trash, the old litter of man’s blundering iss to be swept away for a new race that
will in the heroic simplicity of olden time to walk the new earth. You knew that time, not? when the eye sparkled, the blut ran quick?” He looked about at our faces. “No? Well, in America perhaps not. America iss new; in a new house it iss not the litter so much as in old.” He looked at his glass for a moment, his face tranquil. “I return home; I say to my father, in the University I haf learned it iss not good; baron I will not be. He cannot believe. He talks of Germany, the fatherland; I say to him, It iss there; so. You say fatherland; I, brotherland. I say, the word
father
iss that barbarism which will be first swept away; it iss the symbol of that hierarchy which hass stained the history of man with injustice of arbitrary instead of moral; force instead of love.

“From Berlin they send for that one; from the Army that one comes. I still say baron I will not be, for it iss not good. We are in the little hall where my ancestors on the walls hang; I stand before them like courtmartial; I say that Franz must be baron, for I will not be. My father says you can; you will; it iss for Germany. Then I say, For Germany then will my wife be baroness? And like a court-martial I tell them I haf married the daughter of a musician who wass peasant.

“So it iss that. That one of Berlin iss to be baron. He and Franz are twin, but Franz iss captain already, and the most humble of the Army may eat meat with our kaiser; he does not need to be baron. So I am in Bayreuth with my wife and my music. It iss as though I am dead. I do not get letter until to say my father iss dead and I haf killed him, and that one iss now home from Berlin to be baron. But he does not stay at home. In 1912 he iss in Berlin newspaper dead of a lady’s husband and so Franz iss baron after all.

“Then it iss war. But I am in Bayreuth with my wife and my music, because we think that it will not be long, since it was not long before. The fatherland in its pride needed us of the schools, but when it needed us it did not
know it. And when it did realize that it needed us it wass too late and any peasant who would be hard to die would do. And so—”

“Why did you go, then?” Bland said. “Did the women make you? throw eggs at you, maybe?”

The German looked at Bland. “I am German; that iss beyond the I, the I am. Not for baron and kaiser.” Then he quit looking at Bland without moving his eyes. “There wass a Germany before there wass barons,” he said. “And after, there will be.”

“Even after this?”

“More so. Then it was pride, a word in the mouth. Now it is a—how you call it? …”

“A nation vanquishes its banners,” the subadar said. “A man conquers himself.”

“Or a woman a child bears,” the German said.

“Out of the lust, the travail,” the subadar said; “out of the travail, the affirmation, the godhead; truth.”

The M.P. was rolling another cigarette. He watched the subadar, upon his face an expression savage, restrained, and cold. He licked the cigarette and looked at me.

“When I came to this goddamn country,” he said, “I thought niggers were niggers. But now I’ll be damned if I know what they are. What’s he? snake-charmer?”

“Yes,” I said. “Snake-charmer.”

“Then he better get his snake out and beat it. I’ve got to report this prisoner. Look at those frogs yonder.” As I turned and looked three of the Frenchmen were leaving the room, insult and outrage in the shapes of their backs. The German was talking again.

“I hear by the newspapers how Franz is colonel and then general, and how the cadet, who wass still the round-headed boy part of a gun always when I last saw him, iss now ace with iron cross by the Kaiser’s own hand. Then it iss 1916. I see by the paper how the cadet iss killed by your Bishop—” he bowed slightly to Comyn—“that good
man. So now I am cadet myself. It iss as though I know. It iss as though I see what iss to be. So I transfer to be aviator, and yet though I know now that Franz iss general of staff and though to myself each night I say, ‘You have again returned,’ I know that it iss no good.

“That, until our Kaiser fled. Then I learn that Franz iss now in Berlin; I believe that there iss a truth, that we haf not forfeited all in pride, because we know it will not be much longer now, and Franz in Berlin safe, the fighting away from.

“Then it iss this morning. Then comes the letter in my mother’s hand that I haf not seen in seven years, addressed to me as baron. Franz iss shot from his horse by German soldier in Berlin street. It iss as though all had been forgotten, because women can forget all that quick, since to them nothing iss real—truth, justice, all—nothing that cannot be held in the hands or cannot die. So I burn all my papers, the picture of my wife and my son that I haf not yet seen, destroy my identity disk and remove all insignia from my tunic—” he gestured toward his collar.

“You mean,” Bland said, “that you had no intention of coming back? Why didn’t you take a pistol to yourself and save your government an aeroplane?”

“Suicide iss just for the body,” the German said. “The body settles nothing. It iss of no importance. It iss just to be kept clean when possible.”