A Fable

by William Faulkner

  ‘Angélique,’ the old man said in a thin quavering disused voice. The blind woman paid no attention to him. She faced the two women. Or the three women, the third one too: the older sister who had not spoken yet, whom anyone looking at her would never know whether she was going to speak or not, and even when she did speak it would be in no language of the used and familiar passions: suspicion or scorn or fear or rage; who had not even greeted the girl who had called the sister by a christian name, who had stopped simply because the sister had stopped and apparently was simply waiting with peaceful and infinite patience for the sister to move again, watching each speaker in turn with serene inattention.

  ‘So the anarchist who is murdering Frenchmen is your brother,’ the blind woman said. Still facing the woman carrying the child, she jerked her head sideways toward the girl. ‘What does she claim him as? a brother too, or maybe an uncle?’

  ‘She is his wife,’ the woman carrying the child said.

  ‘His whore, maybe you mean,’ the blind woman said. ‘Maybe I’m looking at two more of them, even if both of you are old enough to be his grandmothers. Give me the child.’ Again she moved as unerring as light toward the faint sound of the child’s breathing and before the other could move snatched the child down from her shoulder and swung it onto her own. ‘Murderers,’ she said.

  ‘Angélique,’ the old man said.

  ‘Pick it up,’ the blind woman snapped at him. It was the cloth-knotted bundle; only the blind woman, who was still facing the three other women, not even the old man himself, knew that he had dropped it. He stooped for it, letting himself carefully and with excruciating slowness hand under hand down the crutch and picked it up and climbed the crutch hand over hand again. As soon as he was up her hand went out with that sightless unerring aim and grasped his arm, jerking him after her as she moved, the child riding high on her other shoulder and staring silently back at the woman who had been carrying it; she was not only holding the old man up, she was actually leading the way. They went on to the old arch and passed beneath it. The last of sunset was gone even from the plain now.

  ‘Marthe,’ the girl said to the woman who had carried the child. Now the other sister spoke, for the first time. She was carrying a bundle too—a small basket neatly covered with an immaculate cloth tucked neatly down.

  ‘That’s because he’s different,’ she said with peaceful triumph. ‘Even people in the towns can see it.’

  ‘Marthe!’ the girl said again. This time she grasped the other’s arm and began to jerk at it. ‘That’s what they’re all saying! They’re going to kill him!’

  ‘That’s why,’ the second sister said with that serene and happy triumph.

  ‘Come on,’ Marthe said, moving. But the girl still clung to her arm.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘We cant do anything just standing here and being afraid,’ Marthe said. ‘We’re all one now. It is the same death, no matter who calls the tune or plays it or pays the fiddler. Come, now. We’re still in time, if we just go on.’ They went on toward the old dusk-filling archway, and entered it. The sound of the crowd had ceased now. It would begin again presently though, when, having eaten, the city would hurry once more back to the Place de Ville. But now what sound it was making was earthy, homely, inturned and appeased, no longer the sound of thinking and hope and dread, but of the peaceful diurnal sublimation of viscera; the very air was colored not so much by twilight as by the smoke of cooking drifting from windows and doorways and chimneys and from braziers and naked fires burning on the cobbles themselves where even the warrens had overflowed, gleaming rosily on the spitted hunks of horses and the pots and on the faces of the men and children squatting about them and the women bending over them with spoons or forks.

  That is, until a moment ago. Because when the two women and the girl entered the gate, the street as far as they could see it lay arrested and immobilised under a deathlike silence, rumor having moved almost as fast as anguish did, though they never saw the blind woman and the old man again. They saw only the back-turned squatting faces about the nearest fire and the face of the woman turned too in the act of stooping or rising, one hand holding the fork or spoon suspended over the pot, and beyond them faces at the next fire turning to look, and beyond them people around the third fire beginning to stand up to see, so that even Marthe had already stopped for a second when the girl grasped her arm again.

  ‘No, Marthe!’ she said. ‘No!’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Marthe said. ‘Haven’t I told you we are all one now?’ She freed her arm, not roughly, and went on. She walked steadily into the firelight, into the thin hot reek of the meat, the squatting expressionless faces turning like the heads of owls to follow her, and stopped facing across the closed circle the woman with the spoon. ‘God be with all here this night and tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘So here you are,’ the woman said. ‘The murderer’s whores.’

  ‘His sisters,’ Marthe said. ‘This girl is his wife.’

  ‘We heard that too,’ the woman said. The group at the next fire had left it now, and the one beyond it. But of the three strangers only the girl seemed aware that the whole street was crowding quietly up, growing denser and denser, not staring at them yet, the faces even lowered or turned a little aside and only the gaunt children staring, not at the three strangers but at the covered basket which the sister carried. Marthe had not once even glanced at any of them.

  ‘We have food,’ she said. ‘We’ll share with you for a share in your fire.’ Without turning her head she said something in the mountain tongue, reaching her hand back as the sister put the handle of the basket into it. She extended the basket toward the woman with the spoon. ‘Here,’ she said.

  ‘Hand me the basket,’ the woman said. A man in the squatting circle took the basket from Marthe and passed it to her. Without haste the woman put the spoon back into the pot, pausing to give the contents a single circular stir, turning her head to sniff at the rising steam, then in one motion she released the spoon and turned and took the basket from the man and swung her arm back and flung the basket at Marthe’s head. It spun once, the cloth still neatly tucked. It struck Marthe high on the shoulder and caromed on, revolving again and emptying itself (it was food) just before it struck the other sister in the chest. She caught it. That is, although none had seen her move, she now held the empty basket easily against her breast with one hand while she watched the woman who threw it, interested and serene.

  ‘You’re not hungry,’ she said.

  ‘Did that look like we want your food?’ the woman said.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ the sister said. ‘Now you dont have to grieve.’ Then the woman snatched the spoon from the pot and threw it at the sister. But it missed. That is, as the woman stooped and scrabbled for the next missile (it was a wine bottle half full of vinegar) she realised that the spoon had struck nothing, that none of the three strangers had even ducked, as though the spoon had vanished into thin air as it left her hand. And when she threw the bottle she couldn’t see the three women at all. It struck a man in the back and caromed vanishing as the whole crowd surged, baying the three strangers in a little ring of space like hounds holding fixed but still immune some animal not feared but which had completely confounded them by violating all the rules of chase and flight, so that, as hounds fall still and for a moment even cease to whimper, the crowd even stopped yelling and merely held the three women in a ring of gaped suspended uproar until the woman who threw the spoon broke through, carrying a tin mug and two briquettes and flung them without aim, the crowd baying and surging again as Marthe turned, half carrying the girl in one arm and pushing the sister on ahead with the other hand, walking steadily, the crowd falling away in front and closing behind so that the flexing intact ring itself seemed to advance as they did like a miniature whirlpool in a current, then the woman, screaming now, darted and stooped to a scatter of horse droppings among the cobbles and began to hurl the dried globul
es which might have been briquettes too but for hue and durability. Marthe stopped and turned, the girl half hanging from the crook of her arm, the sister’s ageless interested face watching from behind her shoulder, while refuse of all sorts—scraps of food, rubbish, sticks, cobbles from the street itself—rained about them. A thread of blood appeared suddenly at the corner of her mouth but she didn’t move, until after a time her immobility seemed to stay the missiles too and the gaped crowding faces merely bayed at them again, the sound filling the alley and roaring from wall to wall until the reverberations had a quality not only frantic but cachinnant, recoiling and compounding as it gathered strength, rolling on alley by alley and street to street until it must have been beating along the boulevards’ respectable fringes too.

  Because the patrol—it was a mounted provost marshal’s party—met them at the first corner. The crowd broke, burst, because this was a charge. The yelling rose a whole octave without transition like flipping over a playing card, as motionless again the three women watched the crowd stream back upon them; they stood in a rushing vacuum while the mass divided and swept past on either hand, in front of and beneath and behind the running horses, the cobble-clashing fire-ringing hooves and the screams dying away into the single vast murmur of the whole city’s tumult, leaving the alley empty save for the three women when the N.C.O. leader of the patrol reined his horse and held it, short-bitted, ammoniac and reek-spreading and bouncing a little against the snaffle, while he glared down at them. ‘Where do you live?’ he said. They didn’t answer, staring up at him—the wan girl, the tall calm woman, the quicking and serene approval of the sister. The N.C.O. listened for an instant to the distant tumult. Then he looked at them again. ‘All right,’ he said harshly. ‘Get out of town while you can. Come on now. Get started.’

  ‘We belong here too,’ Marthe said. For a second he glared down at them, he and the horse in high sharp fading silhouette against the sky itself filled with anguish and fury.

  ‘Is the whole damned world crowding here to crucify a bastard the army’s going to fix anyway?’ he said in thin furious exasperation.

  ‘Yes,’ Marthe said. Then he was gone. He slacked the horse; its iron feet clashed and sparked on the cobbles; the hot reek sucked after it, pungent for a fading instant, then even the galloping had faded into the sound of the city. ‘Come,’ Marthe said. They went on. At first she seemed to be leading them away from the sound. But presently she seemed to be leading them straight back to it. She turned into an alley, then into another not smaller but emptier, deserted, with an air about it of back premises. But she seemed to know where she was going or at least what she was looking for. She was almost carrying the girl now until the sister moved up unbidden and exchanged the empty basket to the other arm and took half the girl’s weight and then they went quite rapidly, on to the end of the alley and turned the wall and there was what Marthe had gone as directly to as if she had not only known it was there but had been to it before—an empty stone stall, a byre or stable niched into the city’s night-fading flank. There was even a thin litter of dry straw on the stone floor and once inside although the sound was still audible it was as though they had established armistice with the tumult and the fury, not that it should evacuate the city in their favor but at least it should approach no nearer. Marthe didn’t speak, she just stood supporting the girl while the sister set down the empty basket and knelt and with quick deft darting motions like a little girl readying a doll’s house she spread the straw evenly and then removed her shawl and spread it over the straw and still kneeling helped Marthe lower the girl onto the shawl and took the other shawl which Marthe removed from her shoulders and spread it over the girl. Then they lowered themselves onto the straw on either side of the girl and as Marthe drew the girl to her for warmth the sister reached and got the basket and not even triumphant, with another of those clumsy darting childlike motions which at the same time were deft or least efficient or anyway successful, she took from the basket which everyone had seen empty itself when the woman at the fire threw it at her, a piece of broken bread a little larger than two fists. Again Marthe said nothing. She just took the bread from the sister and started to break it.

  ‘In three,’ the sister said and took the third fragment when Marthe broke it and put it back into the basket and they reclined again, the girl between them, eating. It was almost dark now. What little light remained seemed to have gathered about the door’s worn lintel with a tender nebulous quality like a worn lost halo, the world outside but little lighter than the stone interior—the chill sweating stone which seemed not to conduct nor even contain but to exude like its own moisture the murmur of the unwearying city—a sound no longer auricularly but merely intellectually disturbing, like the breathing of a sick puppy or a sick child. But when the other sound began they stopped chewing. They stopped at the same instant; when they sat up it was together as though a spreader bar connected them, sitting each with a fragment of bread in one poised hand, listening. It was beneath the first sound, beyond it, human too but not the same sound at all because the old one had women in it—the mass voice of the ancient limitless mammalian capacity not for suffering but for grieving, wailing, to endure incredible anguish because it could become vocal without shame or self-consciousness, passing from gland to tongue without transition through thought—while the new one was made by men and though they didn’t know where the prisoners’ compound was nor even (nobody had taken time to tell them yet) that the regiment was in a compound anywhere, they knew at once what it was. ‘Hear them?’ the sister said, serene, in astonished and happy approval, so rapt that Marthe’s movement caused her to look up only after the other had risen and was already stooping to rouse the girl; whereupon the sister reached again with that deft unthinking immediate clumsiness and took the fragment of bread from Marthe and put it and her own fragment back into the basket with the third one and rose to her knees and began to help raise the girl, speaking in a tone of happy anticipation. ‘Where are we going now?’ she said.

  ‘To the Mayor,’ Marthe said. ‘Get the basket.’ She did so; she had to gather up both the shawls too which delayed her a little, so that when she was on her feet Marthe, supporting the girl, had already reached the door. But even for a moment yet the sister didn’t follow, standing clutching the shawls and the basket, her face lifted slightly in rapt and pleased astonishment in the murmurous last of light which seemed to have brought into the damp stone cubicle not merely the city’s simple anguish and fury but the city itself in all its invincible and impervious splendor. Even inside the stone single-stalled stable it seemed to rise in glittering miniature, tower and spire tall enough and high enough to soar in sunlight still though dark had fallen, high enough and tall enough above earth’s old miasmic mists for the glittering and splendid pinnacles never to be in darkness at all perhaps, invincible, everlasting, and vast.

  ‘He will wear a fine sword here,’ she said.

  Shortly before sunset the last strand of wire enclosing the new compound had been run and joined and the electric current turned into it. Then the whole regiment, with the exception of the thirteen special prisoners who were in a separate cell to themselves, were turned out of the barracks. They were not released, they were evicted, not by simultaneous squads of guards nor even by one single roving detachment moving rapidly, alert compact and heavily armed, from barracks to barracks, but by individual Senegalese. Armed sometimes with a bayoneted rifle and sometimes merely with the naked bayonet carried like a brush knife or a swagger stick and sometimes with nothing at all, they appeared abruptly and without warning in each room and drove its occupants out, hustling them with scornful and contemptuous expedition toward the door, not even waiting to follow but going along with them, each one already well up into the middle of the group before it even reached the door and still pressing on toward the head of it, prodding each his own moving path with the reversed rifle or the bayonet’s handle and, even within the ruck, moving faster than it moved, riding hea
d and shoulders not merely above the moving mass but as though on it, gaudy ethiope and contemptuous, resembling harlequined trees uprooted say from the wild lands, the tameless antipodal fields, moving rigid and upright above the dull sluggish current of a city-soiled commercial canal. So the Senegalese would actually be leading each group when it emerged into its company street. Nor would they even stop then, not even waiting to pair off in couples, let alone in squads, but seeming to stride once or twice, still carrying the bayoneted rifles or the bayonets like the spears and knives of a lion or antelope hunt, and vanish as individual and abrupt as they had appeared.

  So when the regiment, unarmed unshaven hatless and half-dressed, began to coalesce without command into the old sheeplike molds of platoons and companies, it found that nobody was paying any attention to it at all, that it had been deserted even by the bayonets which had evicted it out of doors. But for a while yet it continued to shuffle and grope for the old familiar alignments, blinking a little after the dark barracks, in the glare of sunset. Then it began to move. There were no commands from anywhere; the squads and sections simply fell in between the old file-markers and -closers and began to flow, drift as though by some gentle and even unheeded gravitation, into companies in the barracks streets, into battalions onto the parade ground, and stopped. It was not a regiment yet but rather a shapeless mass in which only the squads and platoons had any unity, as the coherence of an evicted city obtains only in the household groups which stick together not because the members are kin in blood but because they have eaten together and slept together and grieved and hoped and fought among themselves so long, huddling immobile and blinking beneath the high unclimbable wire and the searchlights and machine-gun platforms and the lounging scornful guards, all in silhouette on the sunset as if the lethal shock which charged the wire ten minutes ago had at the same instant electrocuted them all into inflexible arrestment against the end of time.