A Fable

by William Faulkner

  ‘Look at his face,’ the lawyer said. ‘He hasn’t got any money. He doesn’t even know where any is. Neither of them do, because there never was any and what little there might have been, that cockney swipe threw away long ago on whores and whisky.’

  ‘You still aint answered,’ the turnkey said. ‘As soon as the charge is on the books, he can go.’

  ‘Yes,’ the lawyer said. ‘Lock the courtroom doors first. Then come back for the nigger.’ Then the turnkey opened the door; the five men stood there but he didn’t even falter: on through and past them; then suddenly, instead of following the corridor to the courtroom’s rear door as the lawyer had ordered him, he turned toward the stairs, moving fast now, not running: just moving fast, down the stairs and along the hall to the office of his wife’s uncle-in-law, deserted now, and into the office, around the partition and straight to the drawer and opened it and without even faltering, took from beneath the mass of old discharged warrants and incomplete subpoenas and paper clips and rubber stamps and corroded pen points, the spare office pistol and slipped it into the empty holster and returned to the hall and mounted the opposite stairway which brought him to the main courtroom doors and drew them quietly to even as a face, then three, then a dozen, turned to look at him, and turned the key in the lock and withdrew it and put it into his pocket, already hurrying again, even running now, back to the judge’s chambers where the lawyer had put the receiver back on its hook and pushed the telephone away and reached for the cigar in the ashtray and actually looked for the first time at the Negro, drawing the cigar to life in one slow inhale-exhale and through the smoke for the first time examined the calm no-aged Roman senator’s face framed in a narrow unclosed circlet of grizzled hair clasping the skull like a caesar’s laurels above the aged worn carefully brushed carefully mended frock coat, and then spoke, the two of them in succinct flat poste-riposte that was almost monotone:

  ‘You haven’t got any money, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You dont even know where any is, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because there’s not any. There never was. And even that little, your white bully boy threw away before you even saw it——’

  ‘You’re wrong. And you believe you’re wrong too. Because I know——’

  ‘All right. Maybe it was even a whole hundred dollars.’

  ‘More than that.’

  ‘More than thirty thousand dollars?’ and only the faintest hesitation here; no faulting: only an interval: the voice still strong, still invincibly unshaken and unshakable:

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much more than thirty thousand dollars?.… All right. How much more than a hundred dollars? … Did you ever have a hundred dollars? Ever see a hundred dollars? … All right. You know it’s more than a hundred dollars, but you dont know how much more. Is that it?’

  ‘Yes. But you dont need to worry——’

  ‘And you came back to get your half of the hundred dollars anyway.’

  ‘I came back to tell him goodbye before he goes back home.’

  ‘Back home?’ the lawyer said quickly. ‘You mean, England? Did he tell you that?’ and the other, insuperably calm, insuperably intractable:

  ‘How could he told me? Because he wouldn’t need to. When a man comes to the place where he aint got anything left worth spending or losing, he always goes back home. But you dont need to worry, because I know what you’re fixing to do: lock me up in the jail until he hears about it in the newspapers and comes back. And you’re right, because that’s what he’ll do, because he needs me too. And you dont need to worry about how much money it is; it’ll be enough for all the lawyers too.’

  ‘Like the loaves and the fishes?’ the lawyer said. But this time it was not an interval; there was no answer at all, serenely nothing, and the interval was the lawyer’s to put an end to: ‘So he’s the one who needs you. Yet he’s the one who has the forty thousand dollars. How can anyone with forty thousand dollars need you?’ and again the interval, intractable and serene, again the lawyer’s to break: ‘Are you an ordained minister?’

  ‘I dont know. I bears witness.’

  ‘To what? God?’

  ‘To man. God dont need me. I bears witness to Him of course, but my main witness is to man.’

  ‘The most damning thing man could suffer would be a valid witness before God.’

  ‘You’re wrong there,’ the Negro said. ‘Man is full of sin and nature, and all he does dont bear looking at, and a heap of what he says is a shame and a mawkery. But cant no witness hurt him. Someday something might beat him, but it wont be Satan,’ and turned, both of them, at the sound of the door and saw the turnkey inside the room, trying to hold the corridor door, braced against its slow remorseless movement until the yawn’s full inswing dismissed him completely into the wall and the five men from the corridor entered, the lawyer already moving before they had got inside the room, crossing to the opposite courtroom door, saying over his shoulder: ‘This way, gentlemen,’ and opened the door and stood aside holding it: no gesture or motion commanding nor even peremptory as, docile and simultaneous as five sheep, they filed across the room after him like five of the identical targets—ducks or clay pipes or stars—traversing on their endless chain the lilliputian range of a shooting-gallery, and on through the door, the lawyer following on the last one’s heels and saying over his shoulder to the turnkey or the Negro or perhaps both or perhaps neither: ‘Five minutes,’ and followed, on and then through the five men who had stopped, huddled, blocking the narrow passage as if they had walked full tilt, as into an invisible wall, into the room’s massed and waiting cynosure; and on through the swing gate into the enclosure, to stop facing the massed room in almost the same prints he had stood in ten minutes ago, solitary this time but anything but alone amid, against, as a frieze or tapestry, that titanic congeries, invincible and judgmatical, of the long heroic roster who were the milestones of the rise of man—the giants who coerced compelled directed and, on occasion, actually led his myriad moil: Caesar and Christ, Bonaparte and Peter and Mazarin, Marlborough and Alexander, Genghis and Talleyrand and Warwick, Marlborough and Bryan, Bill Sunday, General Booth and Prester John, prince and bishop, Norman, dervish, plotter and khan, not for the power and glory nor even the aggrandisement; these were merely secondarily concomitant and even accidental; but for man: by putting some of him in one motion in one direction, by him of him and for him, to disjam the earth, get him for a little while at least out of his own way;—standing there a moment, then two, then three, not accepting but compelling the entire blast of the cynosure as in the twilit room the mirror concentrates to itself all of light and all else owns visibility only at second hand; four then five then six, while breathed no sound no sigh no sound of breathing even save the watch-chain’s golden sough and the thin insistent music of the pearl, still holding as in his palm like putty, the massed anonymity and the waiting as the sculptor holds for another moment yet the malleable obedient unimpatient clay, or the conductor across his balanced untensile hands the wand containing within its weightless pencil-gleam all the loud fury and love and anguish.

  Then he moved his hand, feeling as he did so the whole vast weight of the watching and the attention concentrate in one beam upon it as the magician’s hand compels, and took out the watch and snapped it open, seeing even as he calculated the elapsed creep of the hands, within the lid’s mellow concavity as in the seer’s crystal ball, the shadowy miniatures of the turnkey and the prisoner who should be well into the square by now and even perhaps already in the alley leading to the hotel garage; even at the moment there came into the room the rising roar of an automobile engine, then the sound of the car itself rushing fast into the square and across and out of it, rushing on at that contemptuous and reckless gait at which his insolent Negro driver always drove when, under his master’s orders, the car contained passengers whom the driver considered beneath him or beneath the car’s splendor—a swaggering demi-d’Artagn
an of a mulatto murderer whom the lawyer had let remain in the penitentiary at hard labor for exactly one year and one day, as the handler wires the dead game bird to the neck of the intractable hunting dog, then getting him out on parole, not that he (the lawyer) held any brief even for the murder of this particular woman, but because of the way it had been done; apparently with the razor already naked in his hand, the man had not driven the woman out of the cabin, but had simply harried and chivvied her through a scene which, as the lawyer imagined it, must have had the quality of ballet, until the woman broke and ran out of the house screaming into the moonlit lane, running without doubt toward the sanctuary of the white kitchen where she worked, until the man without haste overtook her, not to catch, grasp at her, but simply ran past her with one single neat surgeon-like back-handed slash of the razor, running into then out of the instant’s immobility into which all motion flowed in one gesture of formulated epicene, almost finicking, even niggardly fatal violence like the bullfighter’s, the two of them running on side by side for two or three paces in the moonlight until the woman fell, the man not even spotted and the blade itself barely befouled, as if he had severed not a jugular but a scream and restored merely to the midnight, silence.

  So the lawyer could have stopped now, with one word leaving them once more fixed, as with one twitch of his cape the espada does the bull, and walk again through the door to the judge’s chambers and on to the hotel and pack and strap his bag. But he did not: who owed this little more, as the old pagan, before he quaffed it empty, tilted always from the goblet’s brimming rim one splash at least upon the hearth, not to placate but simply in recognition of them who had matched him with his hour upon the earth; in one of the houses on one of the best streets in one of the most unassailable sections of New Orleans, he owned a picture, a painting, no copy but proved genuine and coveted, for which he had paid more than he liked to remember even though it had been validated by experts before he bought it and revalidated twice since and for which he had been twice offered half again what he had paid for it, and which he had not liked then and still didn’t and was not even certain he knew what it meant, but which was his own now and so he didn’t even have to pretend that he liked it, which—so he believed then, with more truth than any save himself knew—he affirmed to have bought for the sole purpose of not having to pretend that he liked it; one evening, alone in his study (wifeless and childless, in the house too save for the white-jacketed soft-footed not tamed but merely tractable mulatto murderer) suddenly he found himself looking at no static rectangle of disturbing Mediterranean blues and saffrons and ochres, nor even at the signboard affirming like a trumpet-blast the inevictable establishment in coeval space of the sum of his past—the house in its unimpeachable street, the membership in clubs some of whose doors were older than the state and behind which his father’s name would, could, never have disturbed the air, and the cryptic numbers which opened his lock boxes and monotonous incrementation of his securities-lists—but instead was looking at the cognizance of his destiny like the wind-hard banner of the old Norman earl beneath whose vast shadow not just bankers and politicians clicked and sprang nor governors and lieutenants blenched and trembled but at the groaning tables in whose kitchens and sculleries or even open courtyards and kennels daily sixty thousand who wore no swords and spurs and owned no surnames made the one last supreme sacrifice: the free gift of their pauperism, and (the lawyer) thought: I didn’t really earn this. I didn’t have time. I didn’t even need to earn to earn it; man out of his boundless and incalculable folly foisted it on me before I even had time to resist him; and closed the watch and put it back into the waistcoat pocket and then the voice, not even raised, murmurous, ventriloquial, sourceless, as though it were not even he but circumambience, the room, the high unsubstanced air itself somewhere about or among the soaring and shadowy cornices, not speaking to the faces but rather descending, not as sound but as benison, as light itself upon the docile, the enduring, the triumphing heads:

  ‘Ladies, gentlemen—’ then not louder: merely sharp peremptory and succinct, like the report of a small whip or a toy pistol: ‘Democrats: On the fourth of November two years ago there rose from the ballot boxes of America the sun of a thousand years of peace and prosperity such as the world has never seen; on the fourth day of November two years from now, we will see it set again, if the octopus of Wall Street and the millionaire owners of New England factories have their way, waiting and watching their chance to erect once more the barricade of a Yankee tariff between the Southern farmer and the hungry factories and cheap labor of the old world in Europe already entered into its own millennium of peace and reason, freed at last after two thousand years of war and the fear of war, panting only to exchange at a price you can afford to accept, your wheat and corn and cotton for the manufactured goods necessary to your life and happiness and that of your children at a price you can afford to pay, affirming again that inalienable right decreed by our forefathers a hundred and twenty-six years ago of liberty and free trade: the right of man to sell the produce of his own sweat and labor wherever and whenever he wants to, without fear or favor of New York capitalists or New England factory owners already spending like water the money ground out of the child labor of their sweatshops, to divert to the farthest corners of the earth the just profits of your sweat and labor, so that not your wives and children, but those of African savages and heathen Chinese will have the good roads and the schools and the cream separators and the automobiles——’ then already in motion before he stopped speaking, crossing rapidly to the gate in the railing as with one concerted unhaste the entire room stood up, not flowing so much as swaying toward the main doors at the back, since almost at once a voice said from the doors:

  ‘Hit’s locked,’ the sway not even pausing, only reversing and becoming a flow: one murmurous hollow roaring of feet, not running: merely shuffling yet as the crowd flowed back toward and into the narrow passage leading to the judge’s chambers, where the lawyer, passing rapidly through the swing gate, now stood between them and the door; and even as he thought, My first mistake was moving he made another.

  ‘Stand back, men,’ he said and even raised his hand, palm out, seeing, marking for the first time, faces, individual faces and eyes which least of all were those of individuals now, but rather one single face bearing steadily down on him and overwhelming him until suddenly he was moving backward: no shock, no concussion, but simply enclosed, accepted into one moving envelopement; he stumbled once but immediately what felt like a dozen quick firm impersonal hands steadied and even turned him and then checked him while others reached past him and opened the door to the judge’s chambers, not flinging nor even sweeping him aside, but evacuating, voiding him back into the wall as the crowd flowed on across the little room to the opposite corridor door, already emptying the room before they had had time to fill it, so that he knew that the first ones out had gone around to the main courtroom doors and unlocked them, so that not only the corridor but the whole building was murmuring again with the hollow unhurried thunder of feet while he stood for a moment more against the wall with in the center of the once immaculate waistcoat the print, not smeared: just blurred, not hurried, just firm and plain and light, of a hand.

  And suddenly, in outrage and prescience, he started, actually sprang almost, already knowing what he would see before he reached the window, looking through it down into the square where they had already halted, the turnkey already facing back toward the courthouse as he fumbled inside his coat; except there were three of them now and the lawyer thought, rapid, inattentive and with no surprise: Oh yes, the child who rode the horse and looked no more at the turnkey scrabbling clumsily beneath his coat-tail but watched instead the deliberate pour of the crowd from the courthouse portal, already spreading as it converged toward the three waiting figures like the remorseless unhurried flow of spilled ink across a table cloth, thinking (the lawyer) how only when he is mounted on something—anything, from a footstool throug
h a horse or rostrum to a flagpole or a flying machine—is man vulnerable and familiar; that on his own feet and in motion, he is terrible; thinking with amazement and humility and pride too, how no mere immobile mass of him, no matter how large nor apparently doing or about to do no matter what, nor even the mass of him in motion mounted on something which, not he but it, was locomotive, but the mass of him moving of itself in one direction, toward one objective by means of his own frail clumsily-jointed legs and feet;—not Ghengis’ bone horns nor Murat’s bugles, let alone the golden voice of Demosthenes or Cicero, or the trumpet-blast of Paul or John Brown or Pitt or Calhoun or Daniel Webster, but the children dying of thirst amid Mesopotamian mirages and the wild men out of the northern woods who walked into Rome carrying even their houses on their backs and Moses’ forty-year scavengers and the tall men carrying a rifle or an axe and a bag of beads who changed the color of the American race (and in the lawyer’s own memory the last individual: cowboy who marked the whole of western America with the ranging dung of his horse and the oxidising hulls of his sardine and tomato cans, exterminated from the earth by a tide of men with wire-stretchers and pockets full of staples); thinking with pride and awe too, how threatful only in locomotion and dangerous only in silence; neither in lust nor appetite nor greed lay wombed the potency of his threat, but in silence and meditation: his ability to move en masse at his own impulse, and silence in which to fall into thought and then action as into an open manhole; with exultation too, since none knew this better than the lords proprietors of his massed breathing, the hero-giant precentors of his seething moil, who used his spendthrift potency in the very act of curbing and directing it, and ever had and ever would: in Detroit today an old-time bicycle-racer destined to be one of the world’s giants, his very surname an adjectival noun in the world’s mouth, who had already put half a continent on wheels by families, and in twenty-five more would have half a hemisphere on wheels individually, and in a thousand would have already effaced the legs from a species just as that long-ago and doubtless at the time not-even-noticed twitch of Cosmos drained the seas into continents and effaced the gills from their fish. But that was not yet; that would be peace, and to attain that, the silence must be conquered too: the silence in which man had space to think and in consequence act on what he believed he thought or thought he believed: the silence in which the crowd walked, flowed steadily across the square toward the three waiting figures and out of which the turnkey cried in his thin high manless voice, dragging the new pistol in its turn from beneath his coat skirts: