‘What is it? What’s the money for? He’s gone now; why dont you just help yourselves while he’s not here to put it down against you?’ and still getting only the watchful, secretive, already dispersing stares, and not waiting even for that: himself outside too now, in the cobbled street, and saw that too: one of the long black funereal French motorcars such as high government officials use, with a uniformed driver and a French staff-captain in the front seat and a British one and a thin Negro youth on the two small jump seats and behind them in the rear seat, a middle-aged woman in rich furs who could be nothing but a rich American (the runner did not recognise her though almost any Frenchman would since her money partially supported a French air squadron in which her only son was a pilot) and a Frenchman who was not the prime minister but (the runner did recognise this) was at least a high Cabinet secretary for something, and sitting between them, an old Negro in a worn brushed tophat, with the serene and noble face of an idealised Roman consul; the owner of the money-belt rigid and wooden, staring but at nothing, saluting but saluting no one, just saluting, then rigid and wooden again and ten feet away while the old Negro man leaned, speaking to him, then the old Negro himself descended from the car, the runner watching that too, and not only the runner but the entire circumambience: the six people still in the car, the orderly who had fetched the man from the bunk, the thirty-odd men who had been in the creeping line when the orderly broke through it, having followed into the street to stand before the billet door, watching too, perhaps waiting: the two of them drawn aside now, the owner of the money-belt still rigid, wooden, invincibly repudiant while the serene and noble head, the calm imperial chocolate-colored face, still talked to him, murmured: barely a minute, then the Negro turned and went back to the car and got into it, the runner not waiting to watch that either, already following the white man back toward the billet, the waiting group before the door parting to let him through, then crowding in after him until the runner stopped the last one by touching, grasping his sleeve.
‘The money,’ the runner said. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s the Association,’ the man said.
‘All right, all right,’ the runner said, almost testily. ‘How do you get it? Can anybody …’
‘Right,’ the man said. ‘You take ten bob. Then on the next payday you begin paying him sixpence a day for thirty days.’
‘If you’re still alive,’ the runner said.
‘Right,’ the other said. ‘When you have paid up you can start over again.’
‘But suppose you’re not,’ the runner said. But this time the man merely looked at him, so that he said, almost pettishly again:
‘All right, all right, I’m not really that stupid; to still be alive a year from now is worth six hundred percent. of anything.’ But still the man looked at him, with something so curious in his face, behind his eyes, that the runner said quickly, ‘Yes. What?’
‘You’re new,’ the other said.
‘Yes,’ the runner said. ‘I was in London last week. Why?’
‘The rate aint so high, if you’re a ……’ the voice stopping, ceasing, the eyes still watching him so curiously, so intently, that it seemed to the runner that his own gaze was drawn, as though by some physical force, down the man’s side to where his hand hung against his flank: at which instant the hand flicked out in a gesture, a signal, so brief, so rapid before it became again immobile against its owner’s khaki leg, that the runner could hardly believe he had seen it.
‘What?’ the runner said. ‘What?’ But now the face was closed, inscrutable; the man was already turning away.
‘Why dont you ask him what you want to know?’ he said. ‘He wont bite yer. He wont even make you take the ten bob, if you dont want.’
The runner watched the long car back and fill in the narrow street, to return wherever it came from: nor had he even seen the battalion adjutant yet, who at worst could be no more than captain and very likely not even as old as he: so the preliminaries would not take long, probably no more than this: what Hollywood in a few more years would coin a word for: double-take: then the adjutant: Oh, you’re that one. Why haven’t you got up your M.C.? Or did they take that back too, along with the pip?
Then he: I dont know. Could I wear an M.C. on this?
Then the adjutant: I dont know either. What else did you want? You’re not due here until Orderly Room Monday.
Then he would ask: who by now had divined who the rich American woman would be, since for two years now Europe—France anyway—had been full of them—the wealthy Philadelphia and Wall Street and Long Island names whose money supported ambulance units and air squadrons in the French front—the committees, organizations, of officially nonbelligerent amateurs by means of which America fended off not Germans but war itself; he could ask then, saying, But why here? Granted that they have one with at the head of it an old blackamoor who looks like a nonconformist preacher, why did the French government send him up here in a State motorcar for a two-minute visit with a private soldier in a British infantry battalion?—oh yes, he could ask, getting nothing probably except the old Negro’s name, which he already knew and hence was not what he lacked, needed, must have if there were peace: which took another three days from that Monday when, reporting at Orderly Room, he became officially a member of the battalion family and could cultivate the orderly corporal in charge of the battalion correspondence and so hold at last in his own hands the official document signed by the chief-of-staff at Poperinghe, containing not only the blackamoor’s name but the rich and organ-rolling one of the organization, committee, which he headed: Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes à la France de Tout le Monde—a title, a designation, so embracing, so richly sonorous with grandeur and faith, as to have freed itself completely from man and his agonies, majestic in empyrean, as weightless and palpless upon the anguished earth as the adumbration of a cloud. And if he had hoped to get anything at all, even that much, let alone anything more, from the owner of the money-belt, he would have been wrong indeed there: which (the failure) cost him five shillings in francs: hunting the man down and stopping him by simply getting in front of him and standing there, saying baldly and bluntly:
‘Who is Reverend Tobe Sutterfield?’ then still standing there for better than another minute beneath the harsh spent vituperation, until he could say at last: ‘Are you finished now? Then I apologise. All I really want is ten bob:’ and watched his name go down into the little dogeared book and took the francs which he would not even spend, so that the thirty six-pences would go back to their source in the original notes. But at least he had established a working, a speaking relationship; because of his orderly-room contact, he was able to use it, not needing to block the way this time to speak:
‘Best keep this a staff matter, though I think you should know. We’re going back in tonight.’ The man looked at him. ‘Something is going to happen. They have brought too many troops down here. It’s a battle. The ones who thought up Loos cant rest on their laurels forever, you know.’ Still the man only looked at him. ‘It’s your money. So you can protect yourself. Who knows? you may be one of the ones to stay alive. Instead of letting us bring you only sixpence a day, demand it all at once and bury it somewhere.’ Still the man just looked at him, not even with contempt; suddenly the runner thought, with humility, abasement almost: He has ethics, like a banker, not to his clients because they are people, but because they are clients. Not pity: he would bankrupt any—all—of them without turning a hair, once they had accepted the gambit; it’s ethics toward his vocation, his trade, his profession. It’s purity. No: it’s even more than that: it’s chastity, like Caesar’s wife,—watching it; the battalion went in that night, and he was right: when it came out again—the sixty-odd percent. which was left of it—it bore forever across its memory like the sear of a heated poker, the name of the little stream not much wider in places than a good downwind spit, and the other Somme names—Arras and Albert, Bapaume and St Quentin and Beaumont Hamel—ineradicable, t
o last as long as the capacity for breathing would, the capacity for tears,—saying (the runner) this time:
‘You mean that all that out there is just a perfectly healthy and normal panic, like a market-crash: necessary to keep the body itself strong and hale? that the ones who died and will still die in it, were allotted to do so, like the little brokers and traders without wit or intelligence or perhaps just enough money backing, whose high destiny it is to commit suicide in order to keep the edifice of finance solvent?’ And still the other only looked at him, not even contemptuous, not even with pity: just waiting until the runner had finished this time. Then he said:
‘Well? Do you want the tanner, or dont you?’
The runner took the money, the francs. He spent them, this time, seeing for the first time, thinking, how finance was like poetry, demanding, requiring a giver and a taker too in order to endure; singer and listener, banker and borrower, buyer and seller, both ethical, unimpugnable, immaculate in devotion and faith; thinking I was the one who failed; I was the debaser, the betrayer, spending the money this time, usually at one blow, in modest orgies of food and drink for whoever would share it with him, fulfilling his sixpence-by-sixpence contract, then borrowing the ten shillings again, with the single-mindedness of a Roman Catholic at his devotions or expiating a penance: through that fall, that winter; it would be spring soon and now his leave would be coming up again and he thought, quietly, without grief, without regret: Of course I could go back home, back to London. Because what else can you do to a cashiered subaltern in this year of Our Lord One Nine One Seven but give him a rifle and a bayonet and I already have those; when, suddenly and peacefully, he knew what he would do with that freedom, that liberty which he no longer had any use for because there was no more any place for it on the earth; and this time he would ask not for shillings but pounds, setting its valuation not in shillings but in pounds, not only on his pilgrimage back to when and where the lost free spirit of man once existed, but on that which made the pilgrimage possible, asking for ten of them and himself setting the rate and interest at ten shillings a day for thirty days.
‘Going to Paris to celebrate your f … ing D.C.M. are you?’ the other said.
‘Why not?’ he said: and took the ten pounds in francs and with the ghost of his lost youth dead fifteen years now, he retraced the perimeter of his dead life when he had not only hoped but believed, concentric about the once-sylvan vale where squatted the gray and simple stone of Saint Sulpice, saving for the last the narrow crooked passageway in which he had lived for three years, passing the Sorbonne but only slowing, not turning in, and the other familiar Left Bank places—quai and bridge, gallery and garden cafe—where he had spent his rich leisure and his frugal money; it was not until the second solitary and sentimental morning, after coffee (and Figaro: today was April eighth, an English liner, this time practically full of Americans, had 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 à 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 président, Madame, s’il vous plaît. Monsieur le Révérend 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 Réverénd 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 à 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:
‘Prière 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 less than a horse: it was no longer a horse at all: not at all intractable and anything but unpredictable, because it was quite predictable in fact; not only dangerous, but in effect, for all its dedicated and consecrated end and purpose—the long careful breeding and selecting which finally produced it to be sold for the price it brought to perform the one rite for which it had been shaped—worthless, letting none save the one man enter the same walls or fence with it to groom or feed it, no jockey or exercise boy to approach and mount it until the man bade it; and even then, with the rider actually up, not even running until—whatever the communication was: voice, touch, whatever—the man had set it free.