Fable, A - William Faulkner [173]
'There are still ten,' the corporal said.
'Let's try it. We will remain here; I will send the car back with orders to unlock and open that door and then for every man in that building to vanish from it, oblivious of all to which they themselves will be invisible-quietly unlock that door, unlock that gate, and vanish. How long before that ten will have denied you too-betrayed you too, if you can call that choice betrayal?'
'And you see too,' the corporal said. 'In ten minutes there would Thursday Night not be ten but a hundred. In ten hours there would not be ten hundred but ten thousand. And in ten days-'
'yes,' the old general said. 'I have seen that. Have I not said I dont so basely misread your character? Oh yes, let us say it: your threat. Why else have I offered to buy my-our-security with things which most men not only do not want but on the contrary do well to fear and flee from, like liberty and freedom? Oh yes, I can destroy you tomorrow morning and save us-for the time. For the length of my life, in fact. But only for the time. And if I must, I will. Because I believe in man within his capacities and limitations. I not only believe he is capable of enduring and will endure, but that he must endure, at least until he himself invents evolves produces a better tool than he to substitute for himself. Take my car and freedom, and I will give you Polchek. Take the highest of all the ecstasies: compassion, pity: the orgasm of forgiving him who barely escaped doing you a mortal hurt-that glue, that catalyst which your philosophers have trained you to believe holds the earth together. Take the earth,'
There are still ten,' the corporal said.
'Have I forgotten them?' the old general said. 'Have I not said twice that I have never misread you? You dont need to threaten me; I know that they, not you, are the problem; not you but they are what we are bargaining for. Because for your profit, I must destroy all eleven of you and so compound tenfold the value of your threat and sacrifice. For my profit, I must let them go too to be witnesses to all the earth that you forsook them; for, talk as much and as loudly and as long as they will, who to believe in the value-value? validity-of the faith they preach when you, its prophet and instigator, elected your liberty to its martyrdom? No no, we are not two Greek or Armenian or Jewish-or for that mat-ter, Norman-peasants swapping a horse: we are two articulations, self-elected possibly, anyway elected, anyway postulated, not so much to defend as to test two inimical conditions which, through no fault of ours but through the simple paucity and restrictions of the arena where they meet, must contend and-one of them-perish: I champion of this mundane earth which, whether I like it or not, is, and to which I did not ask to come, yet since I am here, not only must stop but intend to stop during my allotted while; you champion of an esoteric realm of man's baseless hopes and his infinite capacity-no: passion-for unfact. No, they are not inimical really, there is no contest actually; they can even exist side by side together in this one restricted arena, and could and would, had yours not interfered with mine. So once more: take the earth. Now, answer as I know you will: There are still ten,'
There are still that ten,' the corporal said.
'Then take the world,' the old general said. 'I will acknowledge you as my son; together we will close the window on this aberration and lock it forever. Then I will open another for you on a world such as caesar nor sultan nor khan ever saw, Tiberius nor Kubla nor all the emperors of the East ever dreamed of-no Rome and Baiae: mere depot for the rapine of ravagers and bagnio for one last exhaustion of the nerve-ends