Fable, A - William Faulkner [88]
'All right. Maybe it was even a whole hundred dollars,'
'More than that,'
'More than thirty thousand dollars?' and only the faintest hesitation here; no faulting: only an interval: the voice still strong, still invincibly unshaken and unshakable: 'Yes,'
'How much more than thirty thousand dollars?... All right. How much more than a hundred dollars?... Did you ever have a hundred dollars? Ever see a hundred dollars?... All right. You know it's more than a hundred dollars, but you dont know how much more. Is that it?'
'Yes. But you dont need to worry-'
'And you came back to get your half of the hundred dollars anyway,'
'I came back to tell him good-bye before he goes back home,'
'Back home?' the lawyer said quickly. 'You mean, England? Did he tell you that?' and the other, insuperably calm, insuperably intractable: 'How could he told me? Because he wouldn't need to. When a man comes to the place where he aint got anything left worth spending or losing, he always goes back home. But you dont need to worry, because I know what you're fixing to do: lock me up in the jail until he hears about it in the newspapers and comes back. And you're right, because that's what he'll do, because he needs me too. And you dont need to worry about how much money it is; it'll be enough for all the lawyers too,'
'Like the loaves and the fishes?' the lawyer said. But this time it was not an interval; there was no answer at all, serenely nothing, and the interval was the lawyer's to put an end to: 'So he's the one who needs you. Yet he's the one who has the forty thousand dollars. How can anyone with forty thousand dollars need you?' And again the interval, intractable and serene, again the lawyer's to break: 'Are you an ordained minister?'
'I dont know. I bears witness,'
To what? God?'
To man. God dont need me. I bears witness to Him of course, but my main witness is to man,'
The most damning thing man could suffer would be a valid witness before God,'
'You're wrong there,' the Negro said. 'Man is full of sin and nature, and all he does dont bear looking at, and a heap of what he says is a shame and a mawkery. But cant no witness hurt him. Some day something might beat him, but it wont be Satan,' and turned, both of them, at the sound of the door and saw the turnkey inside the room, trying to hold the corridor door, braced against its slow remorseless movement until the yawn's full inswing dismissed Tuesday him completely into the wall and the five men from the corridor entered, the lawyer already moving before they had got inside the room, crossing to the opposite courtroom door, saying over his shoulder: This way, gentlemen,' and opened the door and stood aside holding it: no gesture or motion commanding nor even peremptory as, docile and simultaneous as five sheep, they filed across the room after him like five of the identical targets-ducks or clay pipes or stars-traversing on their endless chain the lillipu-tian range of a shooting-gallery, and on through the door, the lawyer following on the last one's heels and saying over his shoulder to the turnkey or the Negro or perhaps both or perhaps neither: 'Five minutes,' and followed, on and then through the five men who had stopped, huddled, blocking the narrow passage as if they had walked full tilt, as into an invisible wall, into the room's massed and waiting expectation; and on through the swing gate into the enclosure, to stop facing the room in almost the same prints he had stood in ten minutes ago, solitary this time but anything but alone amid, against, as a frieze or tapestry, that titanic congeries of the long heroic roster who were the milestones of the rise of man-the giants who coerced compelled directed and, on occasion, actually led his myriad moil: Caesar and Christ, Bonaparte and Peter and Mazarin and Alexander, Genghis and Talley-rand and Warwick, Marlborough and Bryan, Bill Sunday, General Booth and Prester John, prince and bishop, Norman, dervish, plotter and khan, not for the power and glory nor even the aggrandisement;