William Faulkner: A Fable

BOOKS BY WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Marble Faun (1924)

Soldier’s Pay (1926)

Mosquitoes (1927)

Sartoris (1929)

[ Flags in the Dust (1973)]

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Sanctuary (1931)

These 13 (1931)

Light in August (1932)

A Green Bough (1933)

Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934)

Pylon (1935)

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

The Unvanquished (1938)

The Wild Palms [ If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem ] (1939)

The Hamlet (1940)

Go Down, Moses (1942)

Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Knight’s Gambit (1949)

Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950)

Notes on a Horsethief (1951)

Requiem for a Nun (1954)

A Fable (1954)

Big Woods (1955)

The Town (1957)

The Mansion (1959)

The Reivers (1962)

Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (1979, Posthumous)

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 2011

Copyright © 1950, 1954 by William Faulkner

Copyright renewed 1978, 1982 by Jill Faulkner Summers

Notes copyright © 1994 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc .

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 1954. This revised text and the notes are reprinted from Novels 1942–1954 by William Faulkner, published by The Library of America, in 1994, by permission.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faulkner, William, 1897–1962.

A fable.

1. European War, 1914–1918—Fiction. I. Title.

PZ.F272Fab7 PS3511.A86

813′.5′2

77-3039

eISBN: 978-0-307-79213-6

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To my daughter, Jill

To William Bacher and Henry Hathaway of Beverly Hills, California, who had the basic idea from which this book grew into its present form; to James Street in whose volume, Look Away , I read the story of the hanged man and the bird; and to Hodding Carter and Ben Wasson of the Levee Press, who published in a limited edition the original version of the story of the stolen racehorse, I wish to make grateful acknowledgment.

W.F.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This edition of A Fable follows the text as corrected in 1994 by Noel Polk. The copy-text for this edition is the ribbon typescript setting copy at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia. An editors’ note on the corrections by Noel Polk follows the text; the line and page notes were prepared by Joseph Blotner.

Contents

Cover

William Faulkner’s Works

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Publisher’s Note

Wednesday

Monday: Monday Night

Tuesday Night

Monday: Tuesday: Wednesday

Tuesday: Wednesday

Tuesday: Wednesday: Wednesday Night

Wednesday Night

Thursday: Thursday Night

Friday: Saturday: Sunday

Tomorrow

Editors’ Note

William Faulkner: (1897–1962)

Also by William Faulkner

Academic Resources for Educators

Vintage International

Wednesday

Long before the first bugles sounded from the barracks within the city and the cantonments surrounding it, most of the city was already awake. These did not need to rise from the straw mattresses and thin pallet beds of their hive-dense tenements, because few of them save the children had ever lain down. Instead, they had huddled all night in one vast tongueless brotherhood of dread and anxiety, about the thin fires of braziers and meagre hearths, until the night wore at last away and a new day of anxiety and dread had begun.

Because the original regiment had been raised in this district, raised in person, in fact, by one of the glorious blackguards who later became Napoleon’s marshals, who delivered the regiment into the Emperor’s own hand, and along with it became one of the fiercest stars in that constellation which filled half the sky with its portent and blasted half the earth with its lightning. And most of its subsequent replacements had been drawn from this same district, so that most of these old men were not only veterans of it in their time, and these male children already dedicated to it when their time should come, but all these people were parents and kin, not only the actual old parents and kin of the doomed men, but fathers and mothers and sisters and wives and sweethearts whose sons and brothers and husbands and fathers and lovers might have been among the doomed men except for sheer blind chance and luck.

Even before the bugles’ echoes died away, the warrened purlieus were already disgorging them. A French or British or American aviator (or a German either for that matter, if he had had the temerity and the luck) could have watched it best: hovel and tenement voiding into lane and alley and nameless cul-de-sac , and lane and alley and cul-de-sac compounding into streets as the trickles became streams and the streams became rivers, until the whole city seemed to be pouring down the broad boulevards converging like wheelspokes into the Place de Ville , filling the Place and then, pressed on by the weight of its own converging mass, flowing like an unrecoiling wave up to the blank gates of the Hôtel where the three sentries of the three co-embattled nations flanked the three empty flagstaffs awaiting the three concordant flags.

They met the first troops here. It was a body of garrison cavalry, drawn up across the mouth of the wide main boulevard leading from the Place to the old gate in what had once been the city’s ancient eastern wall, already in position and waiting as though the murmur of the flood’s beginning had preceded it, right into the bedroom of the town-major himself. But the crowd paid no attention to the cavalry. It just continued to press on into the Place , slowing and stopping now because of its own massy congested weight, merely stirring and shifting constantly and faintly within its own mass while it stared, mazed and patient in the rising light, at the Hôtel door.

Then the sunrise gun crashed from the old citadel above the city; the three flags broke simultaneously from nowhere and climbed the three staffs. What they broke and climbed and peaked in was still dawn, hanging motionless for a moment. But when they streamed on the first morning breeze, they streamed into sunlight, flinging into sunlight the three mutual colors—the red for courage and pride, the white for purity and constancy, the blue for honor and truth. Then the empty boulevard behind the cavalry filled suddenly with sunlight which flung suddenly the tall shadows of the men and the horses outward upon the crowd as though the cavalry were charging it.