‘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.
So the Argentine bought the groom too, for a sum left in escrow in a London bank, to become the groom’s on his return to England after being formally discharged. By the horse of course, since nothing else could, which (the horse) in the end discharged and absolved them all, the old Negro telling this part of it since this was where he — they — himself and his grandson — came into it: — the horse which before the groom came into its life, merely won races, but which after his advent, began to break records; three weeks after it first felt his hand and heard his voice, it set a mark (‘The race was named the Sillinger,’ the old Negro said. ‘It was like our Derby at home.’) which seven years later was still standing; and in its first South American race, although only two weeks out of the ship after a month and a half at sea, it set one not likely to be touched at any time.
(‘Not nowhere. At no time. By no horse,’ the old Negro said.) And the next day it was bought by a United States oil baron for a price which even the Argentine millionaire could not refuse, and two weeks later landed in New Orleans, where the old Negro, a preacher on Sunday and the rest of the week a groom and hostler in the new owner’s Kentucky breeding and training stables, met it; and two nights later the train drawing the van containing the horse and the two grooms, the white one and the black one, plunged through a flood-weakened trestle: out of which confusion and mischance were born the twenty-two months from which the English groom emerged at last a practicing Baptist: a Mason: and one of his time’s most skillful manipulators of or players at dice.
Sixteen of the twenty-two were the months during which the five separately organised though now grimly unified groups — the Federal government, the successive state police forces
