A Fable

been torpedoed yesterday off Ireland; he thought peacefully, tearless: They’ll have to come in now; we can destroy both hemispheres now) at the Deux Magots, taking the long way, through the Luxembourg Gardens again among the nursemaids and maimed soldiers (another spring, perhaps by this autumn even, there would be American uniforms too) and the stained effigies of gods and queens, into the rue Vaugirard, already looking ahead to discern the narrow crevice which would be the rue Servandoni and the garret which he had called home (perhaps Monsieur and Madame Gargne, patron and patronne, would still be there to greet him), when he saw it—the banner, the lettered cloth strip fastened above the archway where the ducal and princely carriages had used to pass, affirming its grandiose and humble declaration out of the old faubourg of aristocrats: Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes a la France de Tout le Monde, and, already one in a thin steady trickle of people—soldiers and civilians, men and women, old and young—entered something which seemed to him afterward like a dream: a vestibule, an anteroom, where a strong hale plain woman of no age, in a white coif like a nun, sat knitting, who said:

‘Monsieur?’

‘Monsieur le president, Madame, s’il vous plait. Monsieur le Reverend Sutterfield:’ and who (the woman) said again, with no pause in the click and flick of the needles:

‘Monsieur?’

‘Le chef de bureau, Madame. Le directeur. Monsieur Le Reverend Sutterfield.’

‘Ah,’ the woman said. ‘Monsieur Tooleyman:’ and, still knitting, rose to precede, guide, conduct him: a vast marble-floored hall with gilded cornices and hung with chandeliers and furnished, crowded, heterogeneous and without order, with wooden benches and the sort of battered chairs you rent for a few sous at band concerts in parks, murmurous not with the voices but as though with the simple breathing, the inspiration and suspiration of the people—the soldiers maimed and unmaimed, the old men and women in black veils and armbands and the young women here and there carrying a child against or even beneath the complete weeds of bereavement and grieving—singly or in small groups like family groups about the vast room murmurous also still of dukes and princes and millionaires, facing the end of the room across which was suspended another of the cloth banners, the lettered strip like that one above the gateway and lettered like it: Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes a la France de Tout le Monde: not looking at the banner, not watching it; not like people in church: it was not subdued enough for that, but perhaps like people in a railway station where a train has been indefinitely delayed; then the rich curve of a stairway, the woman stopping and standing aside, still knitting and not even looking up to speak:

‘Priere de monter, monsieur:’ and he did so: who had traversed a cloud, now mounting to the uttermost airy nepenthelene pinnacle: a small chamber like a duchess’s boudoir in heaven converted temporarily to represent a business office in a charade: a new innocent and barren desk and three hard and innocent chairs and behind the desk the serene and noble face in its narrow clasp of white wool rising now from the horizon-blue of an infantry corporal’s uniform which by its look had lain only yesterday still on a supply sergeant’s shelves, and slightly behind him the pole-thin Negro youth in the uniform and badges of a French sub-lieutenant which looked almost as new, himself facing them across it, the voices also serenely congruous and inconsequential, like dream:

‘Yes, it used to be Sutterfield. But I changed it. To make it easier for the folks. From the Association.’

‘Oh. Tout le Monde.’

‘Yes. Tooleyman.’

‘So you came up that day to see.… I was about to say friend——’

‘Yes, he aint quite ready yet. It was to see if he needed money.’

‘Money? He?’

‘The horse,’ the old Negro said. ‘That they claimed we stole. Except that we couldn’t have stole it, even if we had wanted to. Because it never belonged to no man to be stole from. It was the world’s horse. The champion. No, that’s wrong too. Things belonged to it, not it to things. Things and people both. He did. I did. All three of us did before it was over.’

‘He?’ the runner said.

‘Mistairy.’

‘Mist what?’ the runner said.

‘Harry,’ the youth said. ‘That’s how he pronounced it.’

‘Oh,’ the runner said, with a sort of shame. ‘Of course. Mistairy——’

‘That’s right,’ the old Negro said. ‘He kept on trying to get me to say just Airy, but I reckon I was too old.’ So he told it: what he had seen, watched at first hand, and what he had divined from what he had seen, watched: which was not all; the runner knew that, thinking, A protagonist. If I’m to run with the hare and be the hounds too, I must have a protagonist, even while the youth, speaking for the first time, answered that:

‘It was the deputy marshal that sent the New Orleans lawyer.’

‘The who?’ the runner said.

‘The Federal deputy marshal,’ the youth said. ‘The head man of the folks chasing us.’

‘All right,’ the runner said. ‘Tell me.’

It was 1912, two years before the war; the horse was a three-year-old running horse, but such a horse that even the price which the Argentine hide-and-wheat prince paid for it at the Newmarket sale, although an exceptional one, was not an outrageous one. Its groom was the sentry, the man with the ledger and the money-belt. He went out to America with it, whereupon within the next twenty-four months three things happened to him which changed completely not only his life but his character too, so that when late in 1914 he returned to England to enlist, it was as though somewhere behind the Mississippi Valley hinterland where within the first three months he had vanished, a new man had been born, without past, without griefs, without recollections.

He was not merely included in the sale of the horse, he was compelled into it. And not by the buyer nor even the seller, but by the sold: the chattel: the horse itself, with an imperiousness not even to be temporised with, let alone denied. It was not because he was the exceptional groom, which he might have been, nor even the first rate one which he actually was. It was because there had developed apparently on sight between the man and the animal something which was no mere rapport but an affinity, not from understanding to understanding but from heart to heart and glands to glands, so that unless the man was present or at least nearby, the horse was not even