Fable, A - William Faulkner [215]
'She has picked it up for you once. Dont do it again,'
Here. Take it. Why wont you take it? I worked for it-sweated for it-the only money in my life I ever earned by honest sweat. I did it just for this-earned it and then went to all the trouble to find you and give it to you, and now you wont take it. Here,' But they only looked at him, alien and composed, cold and composed the one, the other with that bright and pitiless serenity until at last he said with a kind of amazement: 'So you wont take it. You really wont,' and looked at them for a moment longer, then came to the table and took up the coins and put them into his pocket and turned and went to the door.
That's right,' Marya said in her serene and unpitying voice. 'Go now. It is not much further. You dont have much longer to despair': at which he turned, framed for a moment in the door, his face livid and intolerable, with nothing left now but the insolence, the tall feather in the hat which he had never removed breaking into the line of the lintel as if he actually were hanging Tomorrow on a cord from it against the vacant shape of the spring darkness.
Then he was gone too.
'Have you shut up the fowls yet?' the tall sister said.
'Of course, Sister,' Marya said.
It was a gray day though not a gray year. In fact, time itself had not been gray since that day six years ago when the dead hero whom the quiet uncovered throngs which lined both sides of the Champs Elise's from the Place de la Concorde to the Arch and the dignitaries walking humbly on foot who composed the cortege itself had come to honor, had driven all adumbration from the face of Western Europe and indeed from the whole Western world. Only the day was gray, as though in dirge for him to whom it owed (and would forever) for the right and privilege to mourn in peace without terror or concern.
He lay in his splendid casket in full uniform and his medals (the originals, the ones pinned to his breast by the actual hands of the President of his own motherland and the Kings and Presidents of the allied nations whose armies he had led to victory were in the Invalides; these which would return with him to the earth were replicas), the baton of his marshalate lying on his breast beneath his folded hands, on the gun caisson drawn b) black-draped and pom-pommed horses, beneath the flag to which he in his turn and in its most desperate moment had added glory and eagles; behind him in the slow and measured procession color guards bore the flags of the other nations over whose armies and fates he had been supreme.
But the flags were not first because first behind the caisson walked (doddered rather, in step with nothing as though self-immersed and oblivious of all) the aged batman who had outlived him, in the uniform and the steel helmet still pristine and innocent of war, the rifle through which no shot had ever been fired slung from the bowed shoulder in reverse and as gleaming with tender and meticulous care as a polished serving spoon or drawing-room poker or candelabrum, carrying before him on a black velvet cushion the sheathed sabre, his head bowed a little over it like an aged acolyte with a fragment of the Cross or the ashes of a saint. Then came the two sergeant-grooms leading the charger, black-caparisoned too, the spurred boots reversed in the irons; and only then the flags and the muffled drums and the unrankable black-banded uniforms of the generals and the robes and mitres and monstrances of the Church and the sombre broadcloth and humble silk hats of the ambassadors, all moving beneath the gray and grieving day to the muffled drums and the minute-spaced thudding of a big gun somewhere in the direction of the Fort of Vincennes, up the broad and grieving avenue, between the half-staffed grieving flags of half the world, in pagan and martial retinue and rite: dead chief and slave and steed and the medal-symbols of his glory and the arms