Fable, A - William Faulkner [92]
in which to fall into thought and then action as into an open manhole; with exultation too, since none knew this better than the lords proprietors of his massed breathing, the hero-giant precentors of his seething moil, who used his spendthrift potency in the very act of curbing and directing it, and ever had and ever would: in Detroit today an old-time bicycle-racer destined to be one of the world's giants, his very surname an adjectival noun in the world's mouth, who had already put half a continent on wheels by families, and in twenty-five more would have half a hemisphere on wheels individually, and in a thousand would have already effaced the legs from a species just as that long-ago and doubtless at the time not-even-noticcd twitch of Cosmos drained the seas into continents and effaced the gills from their fish. But that was not yet; that would be peace, and to attain that, the silence must be conquered too: the silence in which man had space to think and in consequence act on what he believed he thought or thought he believed the silence in which the crowd walked, flowed steadily across the square toward the three waiting figures and out of which the turnkey cried in his thin high manlcss voice, dragging the new pistol in its turn from beneath his coat skirts: 'Stop, men! I'm going to count three!' and began to count: 'One-Two-' staring, even glaring at the faces which were not rushing at him nor did they even seem to walk at him, but rather towered down and over him, feeling again the pistol neither wrenched nor snatched but just wrung firmly from him and then other hands had him too. Ton durn fools' he cried, struggling. But how say it? How tell them? You had to be honorable about money, no matter who had it; if you were not honorable about money, pitying the weak did them no good because about all they got from you then was just pity. Besides, it was already too late to try to tell them, even if there had been no other reason, the firm, quite kind, almost gentle hands not only holding him up but even lifting, raising him, and then they were even carrying him as two kinless bachelors might carry a child between them, his feet remembering earth but no longer touching it; then raising him still further until he could see, between and past the heads and shoulders, the ringed circumference of faces not grim and never angry: just unanimous and attentive, and in the center of it the old Negro in the worn frock coat and the thin chocolate-colored adolescent boy with eyeballs of that pure incredible white which Flemish painters knew how to grind; then the owner of the calm irascible voice spoke again and now for the first time the turnkey could see and recognise him: no lawyer or merchant or banker or any other civic leader, but himself a gambler who bucked from choice the toughest game of all: ownership of a small peripatetic sawmill where he had gone to work at the age of fifteen as the sole support of a widowed mother and three unmarried sisters, and now at forty owned the mill and a wife and two daughters and one granddaughter of his own, speaking at last into a silence in which there was not even the sound of breathing: 'How much did you and that fellow really win on that horse? A hundred dollars?'
'More,' the old Negro said.
'A thousand?'
'More than that': and now indeed there was no stir, no breath: only one vast suspension as if the whole bright April morning leaned: 'Was it forty thousand?... All right. Was it half of forty thousand? How much did you see? How much did you count? Can you count to a thousand dollars?'
'It was a heap,' the old Negro said: and now they breathed: one Tuesday stir, one exhalation, one movement; the day, the morning once more relinquished, the voice its valedictory: 'There'll be a train at the depot in twenty-five minutes. You be on it when it leaves and dont come back. We dont like rich niggers here,'
'So we got on the train,'the old Negro said, 'and rode to the next station. Then we got out and walked. It was a far piece, but we knowed where he would be now, if they would just