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And this time it was laughing. It was all right. You couldn t even hear it.
So that was why, he said. So their women wouldn t have to chop wood in the
dark with half-awake children holding lanterns.
No, his uncle said. They were not running from Lucas. They had forgotten
about him
That s exactly what I m saying, he said. They didn t even wait to send him
a can of tobacco and sayIt s all right, old man, everybody makes mistakes and
we wont hold this one against you.
Was that what you wanted? his uncle said. The can of tobacco? That would
have been enough? Of course it wouldn t. Which is one reason why Lucas will
ultimately get his can of tobacco; they will insist on it, they will have to.
He will receive installments on it for the rest of his life in this country
whether he wants them or not and not just Lucas butLucas: Sambo since what
sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow
so much as having been wrong; the mere injury (if he cannot justify it with
what he calls logic) he can efface by destroy-ing the victim and the witnesses
but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to
choke to death with butter. So Lucas will get his tobacco. Hewont want it of
course and he ll try to resist it. But he ll get it and so we shall watch
right here in Yoknapatawpha County the ancient oriental relationship between
the savior and the life he saved turned upside down: Lucas Beauchamp once the
slave of any white man within range of whose notice he hap-pened to come, now
tyrant over the whole county s white conscience. And they Beat One and Two and
Three and Five knew that too so why take time now to send him a ten-cent can
of tobacco when they have got to spend the balance of their lives doing it? So
they had dismissed him for the time. They were not running from him, they were
running from Crawford Gowrie; they simply repudiated not even in horror but in
absolute unanimity a shall-not and should-not which without any warning
whatever turned into amust -not.Thou shall not kill you see no accusative,
heatless: a simple moral precept; we have accepted it in the dis-tant
anonymity of our forefathers, had it so long, cherished it, fed it, kept the
sound of it alive and the very words them-selves unchanged, handled it so long
that all the corners are now worn smoothly off; we can sleep right in the bed
with it; we have even distilled our own antidotes for it as the fore-sighted
housewife keeps a solution of mustard or handy egg-whites on the same shelf
with the ratpoison; as familiar as grandpa s face, as unrecognisable as
grandpa s face beneath the turban of an Indian prince, as abstract as
grandpa s flatu-lence at the family supper-table; even when it breaks down and
the spilled blood stands sharp and glaring in our faces we still have the
precept, still intact, still true:we shall not kill and maybe next time we
even wont. Butthou shall not kill thy mother s child . It came right down into
the street that time to walk in broad daylight at your elbow, didn t it?
So for a lot of Gowries and Workitts to burn Lucas Beauchamp to death with
gasoline for something he didn t even do is one thing but for a Gowrie to
murder his brother is another.
Yes, his uncle said.
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Youcant say that. he said.
Yes, his uncle said. Thou shalt not killin precept and even when you do,
precept still remains unblemished and scarless:Thou shalt not kill and who
knows, perhaps next time maybe youwont . ButGowrie must not kill Gowrie s
brother: no maybe about it, no next time to maybe not Gowrie kill Gowrie
because there must be no first time. And not just for Gowrie but for all:
Stevens and Mallison and Edmonds and McCaslin too; if we are not to hold to
the belief that that point not just shall not but must not andcan not come at
which Gowrie or Ingrum or Stevens or Mal-lison may shed Gowrie or Ingrum or
Stevens or Mallison blood, how hope ever to reach that one whereThou shalt not
kill at all , where Lucas Beauchamp s life will be secure not despite the fact
that he is Lucas Beauchamp but because he is?
So they ran to keep from having to lynch Crawford Gowrie, he said.
They wouldn t have lynched Crawford Gowrie, his uncle said. There were too
many of them. Dont you remember, they packed the street in front of the jail
and the Square too all morning while they still believed Lucas had shot Vinson
Gowrie in the back without bothering him at all?
They were waiting for Beat Four to come in and do it.
Which is exactly what I am saying granted for the mo-ment that that s true.
That part of Beat Four composed of Gowries and Workitts and the four or five
others who wouldn t have given a Gowrie or Workitt either a chew of tobacco
and who would have come along just to see the blood, is small enough to
produce a mob. But not all of them together because there is a simple
numerical point at which a mob cancels and abolishes itself, maybe because it
has finally got too big for darkness, the cave it was spawned in is no longer
big enough to conceal it from light and so at last whether it will or not it
has to look at itself, or maybe because the amount of blood in one human body
is no longer enough, as one peanut might titillate one elephant but not two or
ten. Or maybe it s because man having passed into mob passes then into mass
which abolishes mob by absorp-tion, metabolism, then having got too large even
for mass becomes man again conceptible of pity and justice and con-science
even if only in the recollection of his long painful aspiration toward them,
toward that something anyway of one serene universal light.
So man is always right, he said.
No, his uncle said. He tries to be if they who use him for their own power
and aggrandisement let him alone. Pity and justice and conscience too that
belief in more than the divinity of individual man (which we in America have
de-based into a national religion of the entrails in which man owes no duty to
his soul because he has been absolved of soul to owe duty to and instead is
static heir at birth to an inevictible quit-claim on a wife a car a radio and
an old-age pension) but in the divinity of his continuity as Man; think how
easy it would have been for them to attend to Crawford Gowrie: no mob moving
fast in darkness watching con-stantly over its shoulder but one indivisible
public opinion: that peanut vanishing beneath a whole concerted trampling herd
with hardly one elephant to really know the peanut had even actually been
there since the main reason for a mob is that the individual red hand which
actually snapped the thread may vanish forever into one inviolable
confraternity of namelessness; where in this case that one would have had no [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
