A Fable

But they would not wait for that. Already the long lines of infantry would be creeping in the darkness up out of the savage bitter fatal stinking ditches and scars and caves where they had lived for four years now, blinking with amazement and unbelief, looking about them with dawning incredulous surmise, and he tried listening, quite hard, because surely he should be able to hear it since it would be much louder, noisier than any mere dawning surmise and unbelief: the single voice of all the women in the western world, from what used to be the Russian front to the Atlantic ocean and beyond it too, Germans and French and English and Italians and Canadians and Americans and Australians—not just the ones who had already lost sons and husbands and brothers and sweethearts, because that sound had been in the air from the moment the first one fell, troops had been living with that sound for four years now; but the one which had begun only yesterday or this morning or whenever the actual instant had been, from the women who would have lost a son or brother or husband or sweetheart today or tomorrow if it hadn’t stopped and now wouldn’t have to since it had (not his women, his mother of course because she had lost nothing and had really risked nothing; there hadn’t been that much time)—a sound much noisier than mere surmise, so much noisier that men couldn’t believe it quite yet even, where women could and did believe anything they wanted to, making (didn’t want to nor even need to make) no distinction between the sound of relief and the sound of anguish.

Not his mother in the house on the River beyond Lambeth where he had been born and lived ever since and from which, until he died ten years ago, his father would go in to the City each day to manage the London office of a vast American cotton establishment; they—his father and mother—had begun too late if he were the man on whom she was to bestow her woman’s capacity for fond anguish, she the woman for whom (as history insisted—and from the talk he had had to listen to in messes he was inclined to admit that at least history believed it knew what it was talking about—men always had) he was to seek garlands or anyway sprigs of laurel at the cannon’s mouth. He remembered, it was the only time, he and two others were celebrating their commissions, pooled their resources and went to the Savoy and McCudden came in, either just finished getting some more ribbons or some more huns, very likely both, in fact indubitably both, and it was an ovation, not of men but of women, the three of them watching while women who seemed to them more beautiful and almost as myriad as angels, flung themselves upward like living bouquets about that hero’s feet; and how, watching, they thought it whether they said it aloud or not: ‘Wait.’