A Fable

‘Gwan, Irey. Get out of the sun’: so that, turning again, the turnkey faced merely another gambit, he must choose all over again: either to acquiesce forever more to man or sever himself forever more from the human race by the act—getting either himself or the prisoner free from one end or the other of the steel chain joining them—which would enable him to flee. Or not flee, not flight; who to dispute the moment’s heroic image even in that last second: no puny fumbling with a blind mechanical insentient key, but instead one single lightning-stroke of sword or scimitar across the betraying wrist, and then running, the scarlet-spurting stump inevictably aloft like an unbowed pennon’s staff or the undefeated lance’s headless shank, not even in adjuration but in abdication of all man and his corruption.

But there was not even time for that; his only choice was against being trampled as, shoulder to shoulder now with his captive and, if anything, slightly behind him, they moved on in the center of the crowd, across the square and into the courthouse, a firm hand now grasping him above the elbow and thrusting him firmly on exactly as he had nightlily dreamed ever since he assumed his office of himself in the act of doing, as soon as he found a felon either small enough or mild enough to permit him, through the corridor and up the stairs to the judge’s chambers, where the New Orleans lawyer gave one start of outrage then of astonishment and then the infinitesimal flicker which never reached his face at all nor even his eyes, until the same calm merely irascible voice said, ‘This aint big enough. We’ll use the courtroom’ and he (the lawyer) was moving too, the three of them now—himself, the turnkey and the prisoner like three hencoops on a flood—filling the little room with a sibilant sound as though all the ghosts of Coke upon Littleton upon Blackstone upon Napoleon upon Julius Caesar had started up and back in one inextricable rustle, one aghast and dusty cry, and through the opposite door into the courtroom itself, where suddenly the lawyer was not only himself free of the crowd, he had managed (quite skilfully for all his bulk: a man not only tall but big, in rich dark broadcloth and an immaculate pique waistcoat and a black cravat bearing a single pearl like the egg of a celestial humming bird) to extricate the turnkey and the prisoner too, in the same motion kneeing the swing gate in the low railing enclosing Bench and witness stand and jury box and counsels’ tables, and thrust the other two through it and followed and let the gate swing back while the crowd itself poured on into the auditorium.

People were entering now not only through the judge’s chambers but through the main doors at the back too, not just men and boys now but women also—young girls who already at eight and nine in the morning had been drinking coca cola in the drugstores, and housewives testing meat and cabbages in the groceries and markets, or matching scraps of lace and buttons over drygoods counters—until not just the town but the county itself, all of which had probably seen the three-legged horse run, and most of which had contributed at least one or two each of the dollars (by now the total had reached the thirty thousands) which the two men had won and which the old Negro preacher had escaped with and indubitably concealed—seemed to be converging steadily into the courthouse, ringing with unhurried thunder the corridor and stairs and the cavernous courtroom itself, filling row by row the hard pew-like wooden benches until the last reverberation faded behind the cool frantic pulsing of pigeons in the clock tower on the roof and the brittle chitter and rattle of sparrows in the sycamores and locusts in the yard, and the calm merely irascible voice said—and not from behind any face but as though no one man spoke but rather the room itself: ‘All right, Mister. Commence.’