They would be free, who had bought immunity from envy by simply outlasting it; when he reappeared, say two years from now as a colonel of twenty-three, he would be far beyond the range of any envy and jealousy, let alone theirs.
Or perhaps it wouldn’t even take two years, one might be enough, so great was their faith in, not just the uncle’s and the godfather’s power and will, but in rapacity itself: the compassionate, the omnipotent, the all-seeing and all-pervading; one day the Quai d’Orsay would gently out-breathe, and against that fierce African foreshore would officially beat a national unanimity loud and long enough not only to obfuscate the mere circumstances of fact, but to distract the mind from all curiosity regarding them; there would remain only the accomplishment and its protagonist juxtaposed without past on a stage without yesterday, like two masques for a pantomime furbished out of the bloodless lumber-room of literature, because by that time he would have escaped not merely from fear and hatred but from the long rigid mosaic of seniority itself, as irrevocably as does a girl from maidenhood; they would — could — even watch him now, heatless peaceful and immune to any remembered anguish — even see him again passing among the windy bunting and the paraded troops in the cheering Oran street in the Governor General’s car, sitting on the right hand of the Governor General himself: the hero of twenty-two or -three who had not at all merely saved some whatever scrap or fragment of an empire, but had set again against the zenith the fierce similitude of a bird, be though as it was but one more lost feather of the eagles which seventy years ago had stooped at all Europe and Africa and Asia too, they watching without jealousy now nor even rancor, but rather with amazed admiration not merely for France but for invincible Man; — the hero still girlish-looking even after two years of African sun and solitude, still frail and fragile in the same way that adolescent girls appear incredibly delicate yet at the same time invincibly durable, like wisps of mist or vapor drifting checkless and insensate among the thunderous concrete-bedded mastodons inside a foundry; appearing now only the more durable because of the proven — no: reproven — fragility, at once frail yet at the same time intact and inviolable because of what in another had been not merely ruin but destruction too: like the saint in the old tale, the maiden who without hesitation or argument fee-ed in advance with her maidenhood the ferryman who set her across the stream and into heaven (an Anglo-Saxon fable too, since only an Anglo-Saxon could seriously believe that anything buyable at no more cost than that could really be worth a sainthood); — the hero, the sheeplike acclaiming mass with not one among them all to ask or even wonder what he had done or when or where, nor even against what or whom the victory, as he passed immune even to the uproar, across the cheering city to the quai and the destroyer (a cruiser maybe, a destroyer certainly) which would carry him to his Paris triumph and then return him, chief of a corps and commander of a department, or perhaps even Governor General himself.
But that didn’t happen either. He crossed the Mediterranean and disappeared; when they followed in the order of their postings, they learned that he had gone on from the port base too, after even less than one night, to assigned duty somewhere in the interior, exactly where and on exactly what service, nobody at the port base knew either. But they had expected that.
They believed they even knew where he would be: no place remote merely because it was far away and impossible to reach, like Brazzaville say, where the three pale faces — Commandant-governor, new subaltern, and halfbreed interpreter — would slumber hierarchate and superposed, benignant and inscrutable, irascible and hieroglyph like an American Indian totem pole in ebon Eden innocence; but a place really remote, not even passively isolate but actively and even aggressively private, like an oasis in the desert’s heart itself, more blind than cave and circumferenced than safari — a silken tent odorous with burning pastille and murmurous with the dreamy chock of the woodcutter’s axe and the pad of watercarriers’ feet, where on a lion-robed divan he would await untimed destiny’s hasteless accouchement. But they were wrong.
He had left the port base the same day he arrived, for a station as famous in its circles as the Black Hole of Calcutta — a small outpost not only five hundred kilometres from anything resembling a civilised stronghold or even handhold, but sixty and more from its nearest support — a tiny lost compound manned by a sergeant’s platoon out of a foreign legion battalion recruited from the gutter-sweepings of all Europe and South America and the Levant: — a well, a flagstaff, a single building of loop-holed clay set in a seared irreconciliable waste of sun and sand which few living men had ever seen, to which troops were sent as punishment or, incorrigibles, for segregation until heat and monotony on top of their natural and acquired vices divorced them permanently from mankind.
He had gone straight there from the port base three years ago and (the only officer present and, for all practical purposes, the only white man too) had not only served out his own one-year tour of command, but that of his successor too, and was now ten months forward in that of what would have been his successor’s successor; in the shock of that first second of knowledge it seemed to them — except that one — that earth itself had faltered, rapacity itself had failed, when regardless of whatever had been the nephew’s old defalcation from his family’s hope or dream seven or eight or ten years ago, even that uncle and that godfather had been incapable of saving him; this, until that single classmate picked up the whole picture and reversed it.
He was a Norman, son of a Caen doctor whose grandfather, while an art student in Paris, had become the friend and then the fanatic disciple of Camille Desmoulins until Robespierre executed them both, the great-grandson come to Paris to be a painter too but relinquished his dream to the Military Academy for the sake of France as the great-grandfather had done his to the guillotine for the sake of Man: who for all his vast peasant bones had looked at twenty-two even more indurable and brittly-keyed than ever had his obsession at seventeen, — a man with a vast sick flaccid moon of a face and hungry and passionate eyes, who had looked once at that one which to all the world else had been that of any seventeen-year-old youth and relinquished completely to it like a sixty-year-old longtime widower to that of a pubic unconscious girl, who picked up the three figures — uncle nephew and godfather — like so many paper dolls and turned them around and set them down again in the same positions and attitudes but obversed.
Though this would be several years yet, almost ten in fact after that day when they had watched that sunstricken offing behind Oran accept that fragile stride and then close markless behind it like a painted backdrop, not only markless but impenetrable too; and not just a backdrop but Alice’s looking-glass rather, through which he had stepped not into unreality but instead carrying unreality with him to establish it where before there had been none: four years from that day and he was still there at his little lost barren sunglared unfutured outpost: who, whether or not he had ever been an actual threat once, was now an enigma burying its ostrich-head from the staff commission which would drag him back to Paris and at least into vulnerable range of his old sybaritic renunciation; five years from that day and beginning the sixth voluntary tour of that duty which should have fallen to every officer in the Army List (every man everywhere) before it came to him, and (so grave the defalcation from which his family had had to bury him that not only was mere seniority confounded, but the immutable rotation of military leave too) not even the cafes of Casa Blanca or Oran or Algiers, let alone Paris, had ever seen him.
Then six years from that day and he had vanished from Africa too, none knew where except the Norman classmate’s passionate and hungry hope, vanished not only from the knowledge of man but from the golden warp and woof of the legend too, leaving behind him only a name in the Army List, still with the old unchanged rank of sublieutenant but with nothing after it: not even dead, not even whereabouts unknown; and even this was another two years, by which time all of them who had feared him once, not only the old St Cyr class but its successors too, were scattered and diffused about the perimeter where the thrice-barred flag flew, until the afternoon when five of them, including the Norman classmate and a staff captain, met by chance in a Quai d’Orsay anteroom, were now sitting about
