Fable, A - William Faulkner [104]
'I can't help that,' the corporal said.'You don't pass here.' Nor did he really want to. He knew enough now. Ten hours later in the Villeneuve Blanche gendarme's uniform, he was in Paris, tra-Wednesday Night versing again the dark and silent streets of the aghast and suspended city dense not only with French civil police but the military ones of the three nations patrolling the streets in armed motorcars, until he passed again beneath the lettered banner above the arched gateway.
WEDNESDAY NIGHT
To the young woman waiting just inside the old eastern city gate that dispersal in the Place de Ville None made a long faint hollow faraway rushing sound as remote and impersonal as a pouring of water or the wings of a tremendous migratory flock. With her head turned and arrested and one thin hand clutching the crossing of the shabby shawl on her breast, she seemed to listen to it almost inattentively while it filled the saffron sunset between the violet city and the cobalt-green firmament, and died away.
Then she turned back to where the road entered the city beneath the old arch. It was almost empty now, only a trickle approached and entered, the last of them, the dregs; when she turned back to it her face, though still wan and strained, was almost peaceful now, as if even the morning's anguish had been exhausted and even at last obliterated by the day of watching and waiting.
Then she was not even watching the road as her hand, releasing the shawl, brushed past the front of her dress and stopped, her whole body motionless while her hand fumbled at something through the cloth, fumbling at whatever it was as if even the hand didn't know yet what it was about to find. Then she thrust her hand inside the dress and brought the object out-the crust of the bread which the man had given her in the boulevard almost twelve hours ago, warm from her body and which by her expression she had completely forgotten, even the putting it there. Then she even forgot the bread again, clutching it to her mouth in one thin voracious fist, tearing at it with quick darting birdlike snatches as she once more watched the gate which those entering now approached with creeping and painful slowness. Because these were the dregs, the residue-the very old and the very young, belated not because they had had farther to come but because some of them had been so long in life as long ago to have outlived the kin and friends who would have owned carts to lend or share with them, and the others had been too brief in it yet to have friends capable of owning carts and who had already been orphaned of km by the regiment at Bethune and Souchez and the Chemin des Dames three years ago-all creeping cityward now at the pace of the smallest and weakest.
When she began suddenly to run, she was still chewing the bread, still chewing when she darted under the old twilit arch, running around an old woman and a child who were entering it without breaking stride but merely changing feet like a running horse at a jump, flinging the crust behind her, spurning it with her palm against the hollow purchaseless air as she ran toward a group of people coming up the now almost empty road-an old man and three women, one of them carrying a child. The woman carrying the child saw her and stopped. The second woman stopped too, though the others-an old man on a single crutch and carrying a small cloth-knotted bundle and leaning on the arm of an old woman who appeared to be blind-were still walking on when the young woman ran past them and up to the woman carrying the child and stopped facing her, her wan face urgent and frantic again.
'Marthe!' she said. 'Marthe!'
The woman answered, something rapid and immediate, not in French but in a staccato tongue full of harsh rapid consonants, which went with her face-a dark high calm ugly direct competent peasant's face out of the ancient mountainous Central-Euro-pean cradle, which, though a moment later she spoke in French