A Fable

man’s meat. You cant kill his voice. And if there is enough of the meat, without even room to lay quiet and rest, you can hear it too.’

‘Even if it’s not saying anything but Why?’ the runner said.

‘What can trouble you more than having a human man saying to you, Tell me why. Tell me how. Show me the way?’

‘And you can show him the way?’

‘I can believe,’ the old Negro said.

‘So because you believed, the French government sent you to France.’

‘It was the lady,’ the youth said. ‘She paid for it.’

‘She believed too,’ the old Negro said. ‘All of them did. The money didn’t count no more now because they all knowed by now that just money had done already failed.’

‘All right,’ the runner said. ‘Anyway, you came to France—’ hearing it: a ship; there was a committee of at least one or two at Brest, even if they were just military, staff officers to expedite, not a special train maybe but at least one with precedence over everything not military; the house, palace, sonorous and empty, was already waiting for them in Paris. Even if the banner to go above the ducal gates was not ready yet, thought of yet into the words. But that was not long and the house, the palace, was not empty long either: first the women in black, the old ones and the young ones carrying babies, then the maimed men in trench-stained horizon blue, coming in to sit for a while on the hard temporary benches, not always even to see him since he was still occupied in trying to trace down his companion, his Mistairy, telling that too: from the Paris war office to the Department of State, to Downing Street to Whitehall and then out to Poperinghe, until the man’s whereabouts were ascertained at last: who (that Newmarket horse and its legend were known and remembered in Whitehall too) could have gone out as groom to the commander-in-chief himself’s horse if he had chosen, but enlisted instead into the Londoners until, having barely learned how to wrap his spiral putties, he found himself in a posting which would have left him marooned for the duration as groom-farrier-hostler in a troop of Guards cavalry had he not taught the sergeant in charge of the draft to shoot dice in the American fashion and so won his escape from him, and for two years now had been a private in a combat battalion of Northumberland Borderers.

‘Only when you finally found him, he barely spoke to you,’ the runner said.

‘He aint ready yet,’ the old Negro said. ‘We can wait. There’s plenty of time yet.’

‘We?’ the runner said. ‘You and God too?’

‘Yes. Even if it will be over next year.’

‘The war? This war? Did God tell you that?’

‘It’s all right. Laugh at Him. He can stand that too.’

‘What else can I do but laugh?’ the runner said. ‘Hadn’t He rather have that than the tears?’

‘He’s got room for both of them. They’re all the same to Him; He can grieve for both of them.’

‘Yes,’ the runner said. ‘Too much of it. Too many of them. Too often. There was another one last year, called the Somme; they give ribbons now not for being brave because all men are brave if you just frighten them enough. You must have heard of that one; you must have heard them too.’

‘I heard them too,’ the old Negro said.

‘Les Amis a la France de Tout le Monde,’ the runner said. ‘Just to believe, to hope. That little. So little. Just to sit together in the anguished room and believe and hope. And that’s enough? like the doctor when you’re ill: you know he cant cure you just by laying his hands on you and you dont expect him to: all you need is someone to say “Believe and hope. Be of good cheer”. But suppose it’s already too late for a doctor now; all that will serve now is a surgeon, someone already used to blood, up there where the blood already is.’

‘Then He would have thought of that too.’

‘Then why hasn’t He sent you up there, instead of here to live on hot food in clean bugless clothes in a palace?’

‘Maybe because He knows I aint brave enough,’ the old Negro said.

‘Would you go if He sent you?’

‘I would try,’ the old Negro said. ‘If I could do the work, it wouldn’t matter to Him or me neither whether I was brave.’

‘To believe and to hope,’ the runner said. ‘Oh yes, I walked through that room downstairs; I saw them; I was walking along the street and happened by simple chance to see that placard over the gate. I was going somewhere else, yet here I am too. But not to believe and hope. Because man can bear anything, provided he has something left, a little something left: his integrity as a creature tough and enduring enough not only not to hope but not even to believe in it and not even to miss its lack; to be tough and to endure until the flash, crash, whatever it will be, when he will no longer be anything and none of it will matter anymore, even the fact that he was tough and, until then, did endure.’

‘That’s right,’ the old Negro said, peaceful and serene, ‘maybe it is tomorrow you got to go back. So go on now and have your Paris while you got a little time.’

‘Aha,’ the runner said. ‘Ave Bacchus and Venus, morituri te salutant, eh? Wouldn’t you have to call that sin?’

‘Evil is a part of man, evil and sin and cowardice, the same as repentance and being brave. You got to believe in all of them, or believe in none of them. Believe that man is capable of all of them, or he aint capable of none. You can go out this way if you want to, without having to meet nobody.’

‘Thanks,’ the runner said. ‘Maybe what I need is to have to meet somebody. To believe. Not in anything: just to believe. To enter that room down there, not to escape from anything but to escape into something, to flee mankind for a little while. Not even to look at that banner because some of them probably cant even read it, but just to sit in the same room for a while with that affirmation, that promise, that hope. If I only could. You only could. Anybody only could. Do you know what the loneliest experience of all is? But of course you do: you just said so. It’s