A Fable

‘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. Someday 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 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 lilliputian 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 cynosure; and on through the swing gate into the enclosure, to stop facing the massed 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, invincible and judgmatical, 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, Marlborough and Alexander, Genghis and Talleyrand 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; these were merely secondarily concomitant and even accidental; but for man: by putting some of him in one motion in one direction, by him of him and for him, to disjam the earth, get him for a little while at least out of his own way;—standing there a moment, then two, then three, not accepting but compelling the entire blast of the cynosure as in the twilit room the mirror concentrates to itself all of light and all else owns visibility only at second hand; four then five then six, while breathed no sound no sigh no sound of breathing even save the watch-chain’s golden sough and the thin insistent music of the pearl, still holding as in his palm like putty, the massed anonymity and the waiting as the sculptor holds for another moment yet the malleable obedient unimpatient clay, or the conductor across his balanced untensile hands the wand containing within its weightless pencil-gleam all the loud fury and love and anguish.