Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (95 page)

   And now the hour, the moment, has come. Within the Garden, beyond the dusk and the slow gateward throng, the hidden bugle begins. Out of the secret dusk the grave brazen notes come, overtaking the people, passing the caped policemen at the gates, and about the city dying where beneath the waxing and bloodless moon evening has found itself. Yet still within the formal twilight of the trees the bugle sounds, measured, arrogant, and sad.

The general, flanked by his A.D.C. and the aerodrome colonel and adjutant and a few wives and several who were not wives, stood in the windy sun and read aloud the paper whose contents they had already known since yesterday:

Then he folded the paper away and looked at them—the three flight-commanders at attention, behind them the Squadron—the young men gathered from the flung corners of the Empire (and including Sartoris, the Mississippian, who had not been a Briton since a hundred and forty-two years)—and behind them in turn, the line of waiting aeroplanes dull and ungleaming in the intermittent sun across which the general’s voice still came, telling again the old stale tale: Waterloo and the playing fields of Eton and here a spot which is forever England. Then the voice was in actual retrograde in a long limbo filled with horses—Fontenoy and Agincourt and Crécy and the Black Prince—and Sartoris whispering to his neighbor from the side of his rigid mouth: “What nigger is that? He’s talking about Jack Johnson.”

But at last the general was done with that too. He faced them—an old man, a kindly man doubtless, certainly in no way as
martial and splendid as the Horse Guards Captain A.D.C. all blood and steel in his red hatband and tabs and brassard and the wisps and loops of lapidary-like burnished chain at his shoulders and armpits where that old chain mail of Crécy and Agincourt had been blown off him in the long intervening years by a hard and constant wind, leaving only that wispy residuum. “Goodbye and goodluck, and give them hell,” the general said. He took the flight-commanders’ salute. The three flight-commanders turned. Britt, the senior, with his M.C. and his Mons Star and his D.F.C. and his Gallipoli ribbon (so that he was gaudier above the left pocket than even the Guards captain), roved his hard eyes from face to face along the Squadron and spoke as he could speak: in that voice cold and precise as a surgeon’s knife, which never failed to reach any ear it was intended for and no further, certainly not back to the general:

“For gad’s sake try to keep formation until we reach the Channel. At least try to look like something to the taxpayers while we are over England. If you should straggle and land behind their lines, what do you do?”

“Burn the crate,” someone said.

“If you have time; it doesn’t really matter. But if you crash anywhere behind our lines, in France or England either, what had you better do, by gad?” This time a dozen voices answered.

“Get the clock.”

“Right,” Britt said. “Let’s get along.”

The band was playing now, though it was soon drowned by engines. They took off in turn and climbed to a thousand feet and formed echelon of flights, Britt leading with B flight, of which Sartoris was number three. Britt paraded them back across the aerodrome in a shallow dive. They passed, quite low, to the fluttering of feminine handkerchiefs; Sartoris could see the steady rising and falling of the drummer’s arm and the shifting glints of brass among the horns as if the sound they made were about to become visible and then audible. But it did not; the engines drummed again and they climbed on away toward the east and south.

It was a drowsy, hazy day of early spring. At five thousand feet greening England slid slowly beneath them, neat and quilted, the aeroplanes shifting slightly and constantly, rising and falling within their own close integration, within their own loud drone. In no
time at all, it seemed to Sartoris, the flat unglinting gleam of the Channel lay before them and the cloudbank beyond it which was France; there was an aerodrome just beneath them. Then Britt was signalling. He was going to loop in formation: salute and farewell to home; naturally it would have occurred to someone to play horse for a while since there was nothing urgent in France—only a Hun break-through over the collapsed Fifth Army and General Haig with our backs to the wall and believing in the justice and sanctity of our cause. They were looping; they were over the top of the loop, upside down. There was a Camel right side up and heading directly toward Sartoris and about ten feet away; it would be one out of A flight whose position was just behind him. He had lost altitude; he had fallen out of the loop without knowing it. But he hadn’t; Britt’s Camel was just off his right wing, where it should have been.

He ruddered outward and pushed forward on the stick. He would stall now for sure, and he did; he was spinning, he had missed the other Camel somehow and he felt its slipstream as he passed through it. He closed the throttle and stopped the spin and slapped the throttle open again, climbing, frightened and raging. The squadron was below him now, the gap still carefully intact where he should have been between Britt and Atkinson at number five. Then Britt was pulling away, climbing too. “All right,” Sartoris said. “If that’s what you want.” Only if Britt could have been the one which almost rammed him. He did not know who it had been; he had not had time to read the letter or number.
I was too close
, he thought,
to see anything as big as a letter or a number. I would have to look at it head-on from five inches, find the one with a twisted pin in one of the boss bolt-heads or something
. He dived at Britt, who turned sharply away. He turned too, to get onto Britt’s tail. But he never got Britt into his Aldis because Britt was gone, he was too good for him; Sartoris did not even need to look back to know that Britt was now on his tail. They looped twice in one anothers’ slipstream as if they were bolted together.
He was probably right on the back of my goggle-strap for a whole belt
, Sartoris thought.

The altimeter had never quite caught up with him but it said about seven thousand feet when he stalled deliberately at the top of the third loop and just before he spun he saw Britt pass him, already rolling into an Immelman turn. He spun for what he
thought was about a thousand feet and dived out; with the engine full out he dived on and then zoomed terrifically, still climbing on after the Camel began to shudder and labor. Two thousand feet below him, the squadron was completing another sedate circle; either Sibleigh or Tate, the other flight commanders, had moved up into Britt’s place. Five hundred feet below him Britt was circling too, looking up and jabbing violently downward with his arm. “Certainly,” Sartoris said. He put his nose straight down. When he passed Britt, he was doing a hundred and sixty; when he dived across Tate’s or Sibleigh’s nose or whoever it was leading now, he was at terminal velocity; the engine was making a terrific racket; if the Camel just held together, he would have enough speed to zoom back two thousand feet and maybe even loop the squadron a time or two. Then his pressure gauge blew out. He came out of the dive, already working the hand-pump, but nothing happened; he switched the valve to the gravity tank but still nothing happened, the propeller merely continued to flop over in the wind of its own creation. He was less than two thousand feet now and he remembered the aerodrome which had been somewhere beneath them when Britt decided to loop and he found it, less than two miles away. But it was upwind, so in a silence containing now only the whistling of wires, he turned his back upon it. Then he heard Britt coming up behind him; he made the dud engine signal as Britt passed. Now he had found a field—an oblong of sprouting grain bounded on both sides by hedgerows, at one end a copse, at the other a low stone wall, lying right for the wind. Britt passed him again, shaking his fist. “I didn’t do it,” Sartoris said. “Come look at the gauge and the valve if you dont believe me.” He made the last turn, upwind; he would come in over the wall. The field was all right; anyone who had had as much as forty hours on Camels could land one in it, but not even Sibleigh, who was the best Camel pilot he had ever seen, could have flown it out again. He was coming in just right, overshooting just exactly enough. He fishtailed a little, still overshooting just exactly enough to have the extra height and speed if he should need it; he cut the switch and used another feather’s weight of rudder, raising the nose a hair’s breadth, already beginning to get his tail down as the wall passed under him, getting the tail down a little more toward the mazy green. He was making a beautiful landing. He was making the best
landing he had ever made; he was making the best dead-stick Camel landing he had ever seen. He had made it, the stick back to his stomach; he was on the ground. He was already reaching for the catch of his safety-belt when the Camel rolled into the moist depression which he had not even seen and stood slowly up on its nose. While he stood beside it, stanching the blood from his nose where one of the gun-butts had struck him, Britt roared past again, shaking his fist, and went streaking off hopping hedges toward where the aerodrome lay.

It was not as far as he had thought; he had not finished his cigarette when a motorcycle and sidecar burst through the hedgerow and came up. It contained a private and a corporal. “Shouldn’t be smoking, sir,” the corporal said. “Against regulations to smoke near a crash.”

“This is not a crash,” Sartoris said. “All I did was bust the prop.”

“It’s a crash, sir,” the corporal said.

“Well, I’m going to get away from it,” Sartoris said. “I take you both to witness: the clock was still on it when you took over.”

“It’s all right, sir,” the corporal said. Sartoris got into the sidecar. On the road they passed the lorry and crew going to dismantle the Camel and fetch it in. The private took him to the orderly office. There was a captain with a black eye-patch and a casual’s blue armband, and a major wearing an observer’s single wing.

“Hurt?” the major said.

“Just my nose bled a little,” Sartoris said.

“What happened?”

“Pressure blew, sir.”

“Did you switch to gravity?”

“Yes, sir,” Sartoris said. “Your corporal’s probably found the valve still over.”

“Doubtless,” the major said.
You could have come up there and looked at it too
, Sartoris thought.
I’d have liked to see you making that landing
. “Your people have gone on. I dont know anything for you to do but report to Pool. Do you?”

“No, sir,” Sartoris said.

“Ring up Pool, Harry,” the major said. The adjutant talked into the phone for a while. Then the major talked into it. Sartoris waited. He was beginning to itch a little inside his sidcot in the
warm room. “They want to talk to you,” the major said. Sartoris took the phone. It was a colonel’s voice, maybe even a general’s, though he decided at once that it knew too much what it was talking about to be a general’s:

“Well? What happened?”

“Pressure blew, sir.”

“I suppose you dived it right off the aeroplane,” the voice said.

“Yes, sir,” Sartoris said, looking out the window and scratching himself where the knitted vest beneath his shirt was really beginning to itch.

“What?” the voice said.

“Sir?”

“I asked you if you dived deliberately until you lost your pres—”

“Oh. No, sir. I thought you asked if I had switched to gravity.”

“Of course you switched to gravity!” the voice said. “I never yet knew a pilot with a dud engine who ever failed to do everything, including standing on the wing and cranking his own propeller. Report to your aerodrome tonight. Then in the morning you will go to Brooklands. They will have another Camel for you. Take it and proceed—”
with caution and dispatch
, Sartoris thought. But the voice did not say that. It said, “—without blowing any more pressure gauges until you overtake your squadron. Do you think you can find it?”

“I can ask along,” Sartoris said.

“You can what?” But that was all right; the connection was broken by then, and if Sartoris knew military telephone systems, that particular number could not possibly come up again for at least thirty minutes, by which time he should be well on his way back to London.

This was by way of the daily leave-train up from Dover—a casual among the other casuals though not yet maimed. But when he reached London, he decided not to report at the aerodrome. A casual, officially in France and corporeally in England, he therefore did not exist at all; he decided to preserve that anonymity. Even if nothing unpleasant occurred to him at the aerodrome, he knew and respected the infinite capacity and fertility, not so much of the complex military hierarchate itself, as of some idle staff-wallah waking suddenly from a doze. Certainly he would have been forced
to present himself to the Transport Officer for the zone of South England and the Channel. And he could imagine that—himself who since noon yesterday had not existed in England at all, despite the fact that he still occupied space, projected suddenly among the orderly hum of clerks and N.C.O.’s and subalterns and at last captains who not only had never heard of him, they would not want to; would merely be exasperated at this interruption of the busy peaceful forms to be countersigned; would merely be enraged by his patient and passive need.

So he left his flying gear at the Royal Automobile Club and, alien and unattached and almost obfuscate, he stood at the curb-edge of that London, that England in that spring of 1918—the women, the soldiers, the women, the Waacs, the V.A.D.’s, the women in the uniforms of bus- and tram-conductors and in the no-uniform of the old trade, the old dishonored one which always flourishes in wartime since the quick-wived know that death will probably cuckold them anyhow—the posters: ENGLAND EXPECTS; the placards: BEAT THE BOCHE WITH BOVRIL; the bulletins: LINES HOLDING BEFORE AMIENS, OLD SOMME BATTLEFIELDS—and moved among them, the foreigner come out of curiosity to chance his life in the old-men’s wars, not even aware that he was watching the laboring heart of a nation in one of its blackest hours.