A Fable

The message from Corps Headquarters was waiting for him: Chaulnesmont. Tomorrow 15 hours. You are expected. You will confine yourself to quarters until the motor car calls for you, crumpling the message and the aide’s handkerchief into his tunic pocket; and, home again (what home he had ever had since when, at eighteen, he had first donned the uniform which from then on would be his home as the turtle’s shell is its domicile), there opened before him an attenuation, an emptiness, of the next five or six or seven hours until it would be dark. He thought of drink. He was not a drinking man; he not only never thought of it until he saw it, it was as though he had forgot it existed until someone actually put it into his hand, as the aide had done the flask. But he dismissed the idea as immediately and completely and for exactly the same reason as if he had been a drinking man: although he had officially ceased to be General of Division Gragnon the moment he received the corps commander’s order for him to put himself under arrest, General of Division Gragnon would have to continue to exist for another five or six or seven hours, perhaps even for another day or two yet.

Then suddenly he knew what he would do, quitting the official quarters for his private ones, passing his own bedroom—a small, panelled closet called by the millionaire the gunroom and containing a shotgun which had never been fired and a mounted stag’s head (not a very good one) and a stuffed trout, both bought in the same shop with the gun—and went on to the room in which three of his aides slept—the lovenest itself, which seemed to retain even yet something of the Argentine, though none could have said what it was, since nothing remained of her, unless it was some inconsolable ghost perhaps of what northerners conceived, believed, to be antipodal libidinous frenzy—and found the volume in the battered chest in which it was the duty of one of the aides to transport about with them the unofficial effects of the headquarters entourage. And now the book’s dead owner was present again too: a former member of his staff, a thin, overtall, delicately- and even languidly-made man regarding whose sexual proclivities the division commander had had his doubts (very likely wrong) without really caring one way or the other, who had entered the (then) brigadier’s military family shortly before he received his division, who, the general discovered, was the nameless product of an orphanage too—which fact, not the book, the reading itself, the division commander would admit to himself with a sort of savage self-contempt in his secret moments, was what caused him to be so constantly aware of the other not quite sipping and not quite snatching and certainly not buried in the book because he was a satisfactory aide, until at last it seemed to the division commander that the battered and dogeared volume was the aide and the man himself merely that aide’s orderly: until one evening while they were waiting for a runner from the front lines with a return concerning some prisoners which a brigadier had neglected to sign (the aide was his divisional JAG), he asked and then listened in cold, inattentive amazement to the answer he got:

‘I was a couturier. In Paris——’

‘A what?’ the division commander said.

‘I made women’s clothes. I was good at it. I was going to be better some day. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be brave.’

‘Be what?’ the division commander said.

‘You know: a hero. Instead, I made women’s clothes. So I thought of becoming an actor—Henry V—Tartuffe better than nothing—even Cyrano. But that would be just acting, pretence—somebody else, not me. Then I knew what to do. Write it.’

‘Write it?’

‘Yes. The plays. Myself write the plays, rather than just act out somebody else’s idea of what is brave. Invent myself the glorious deeds and situations, create myself the people brave enough to perform and face and endure them.’

‘And that wouldn’t have been make-believe too?’ the general said.

‘It would have been me that wrote them, invented them, created them.’ Nor did the general discern humility either: a quality humble yet dogged too, even if it was sheep-like. ‘I would at least have done that.’

‘Oh,’ the general said. ‘And this is the book.’

‘No no,’ the aide said. ‘Another man wrote this one. I haven’t written mine yet.’

‘Haven’t written it yet? You have had time here’; not even knowing that he had expressed the contempt nor even that he had tried to conceal it, or that perhaps he might have tried. And now the aide was not humble, not even dogged; certainly the general would not have recognised despair, though he might indomitability:

‘I dont know enough yet. I had to wait to stop the books to find out——’

‘In books? What in books?’