A Fable

‘Yes,’ Marya said. ‘He can move fast enough. He will be there in plenty of time,’ turning then, the two of them, though it was the sister who stopped as though it was only she who had remembered at last the other man, the one with the feather, because Marya said: ‘Oh yes, there will be plenty of time for him too.’ Because he was not in the house: only the stained table, the bowl and the overturned tumbler where he had fouled and wasted their substance, the stain of the wine and the soup making a little puddle in which sat the neat small stack of coins where Marya had arranged them; all that afternoon while the tall sister went back to the field, the sowing, and Marya cleaned the kitchen and the soiled dishes, wiping the coins neatly off and stacking them again in that mute still pyramidal gleam while the light faded, until dark when they came back into the kitchen and lighted the lamp and he loomed suddenly, cadaverous and tall beneath the raking feather, from the shadows, saying in his harsh intolerable voice:

‘What have you got against the money? Go on. Take it——’ lifting his hand again to sweep, fling it to the floor, until the tall sister spoke.

‘She has picked it up for you once. Dont do it again.’

‘Here. Take it. Why wont you take it? I worked for it—sweated for it—the only money in my life I ever earned by honest sweat. I did it just for this—earned it and then went to all the trouble to find you and give it to you, and now you wont take it. Here.’ But they only looked at him, alien and composed, cold and composed the one, the other with that bright and pitiless serenity until at last he said with a kind of amazement: ‘So you wont take it. You really wont,’ and looked at them for a moment longer, then came to the table and took up the coins and put them into his pocket and turned and went to the door.

‘That’s right,’ Marya said in her serene and unpitying voice. ‘Go now. It is not much further. You dont have much longer to despair’: at which he turned, framed for a moment in the door, his face livid and intolerable, with nothing left now but the insolence, the tall feather in the hat which he had never removed breaking into the line of the lintel as if he actually were hanging on a cord from it against the vacant shape of the spring darkness. Then he was gone too.

‘Have you shut up the fowls yet?’ the tall sister said.

‘Of course, Sister,’ Marya said.

It was a gray day though not a gray year. In fact, time itself had not been gray since that day six years ago when the dead hero whom the quiet uncovered throngs which lined both sides of the Champs Élysées from the Place de la Concorde to the Arch and the dignitaries walking humbly on foot who composed the cortege itself had come to honor, had driven all adumbration from the face of Western Europe and indeed from the whole western world. Only the day was gray, as though in dirge for him to whom it owed (and would forever) for the right and privilege to mourn in peace without terror or concern.

He lay in his splendid casket in full uniform and his medals (the originals, the ones pinned to his breast by the actual hands of the President of his own motherland and the Kings and Presidents of the allied nations whose armies he had led to victory were in the Invalides; these which would return with him to the earth he came from were replicas), the baton of his marshalate lying on his breast beneath his folded hands, on the gun caisson drawn by black-draped and -pompommed horses, beneath the flag to which he in his turn and in its most desperate moment had added glory and eagles; behind him in the slow and measured procession color guards bore the flags of the other nations over whose armies and fates he had been supreme.