Fable, A - William Faulkner [106]
'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.
'Angelique,' the old man said.
Tick 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. Tins 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 h^r 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. Conic, 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