A Fable

‘Afternoon. As you were a moment, will you?’ The runner did so and watched enter a captain whom he was to know as commander of one of the companies in the battalion to which he would be assigned, followed by a thin wiry surly-looking private who, even to the runner’s first glance, seemed to have between his bowed legs and his hands the shape of a horse, the brigadier saying pettishly, ‘Stand at ease; stand at ease,’ then opened the folded letter and glanced at it, then looked at the private and said: ‘This came by special courier this morning. From Paris. Someone from America is trying to find you. Someone important enough for the French government to have located you through channels and then send a special courier up from Paris. Someone named—’ and glanced at the letter again: ‘—Reverend Tobe Sutterfield.’

And now the runner was watching the private too, already looking at him in time not only to hear but to see him say, quick and harsh and immediately final: ‘No.’

‘Sir,’ the captain prompted.

‘No what?’ the brigadier said. ‘An American. A blackamoor minister. You dont know who it is?’

‘No,’ the private said.

‘He seemed to think you might say that. He said to remind you of Missouri.’

‘No,’ the private said, rigid and harsh and final. ‘I was never in Missouri. I dont know anything about him.’

‘Say sir,’ the captain said.

‘That’s your last word?’ the brigadier said.

‘Yes sir,’ the private said.

‘All right,’ the brigadier said. ‘Carry on.’ Then they were gone and, rigid at attention, he (the runner) felt rather than saw the brigadier open the brigade order and begin to read it and then look up at him—no movement of the head at all: merely an upward flick of the eyes, steady for a moment, then down to the order again: thinking (the runner) quietly: Not this time. There’s too much rank: thinking: It wont even be the colonel, but the adjutant. Which by ordinary could have been as much as two weeks later since, a runner formally assigned to a combat battalion, his status was the same as any other member of it and he too would be officially ‘resting’ until they went back up the lines; and, except for coincidence, probably would have been: reporting (the runner) not to the battalion sergeant-major but to Coincidence, entering his assigned billet two hours later, and in the act of stowing his kit into a vacant corner, saw again the man he had seen two hours ago in the brigadier’s office—the surly, almost insubordinate stable-aura-ed private who by his appearance would have pined and died one day after he was removed further from Whitechapel than a Newmarket paddock perhaps, yet who was not only important enough to be approached through official channels by some American individual or agent or agency himself or itself important enough to use the French government for messenger, but important enough to repudiate the approach—seated this time on a bunk with a thick leather money-belt open on one knee and a small dirty dogeared notebook on the other, and three or four other privates facing him in turn, to each of which he counted out a few French notes from the money-belt and then made a notation with the stub of a pencil in the notebook.

And the next day, the same scene; and the day after that, and the one after that, directly after the morning parade for roll-call and inspection; the faces different faces and varying in number: two, or three, sometimes only one: but always one, the worn money-belt getting a little thinner but apparently inexhaustible, anyway bottomless, the pencil stub making the tedious entries in the grimed notebook; then the fifth day, after noon mess; it was payday and, approaching the billet, for a moment the runner thought wildly that part of the pay parade was taking place there: a line, a queue of men extending out into the street, waiting to creep one by one inside, so that the runner had trouble entering his own domicile, to stand now and watch the whole affair in reverse: the customers, clients, patients—whatever they were—now paying the grimed frayed wads of French notes back into the money-belt, the tedious pencil stub still making the tedious entries; and still standing there watching when the orderly whom he had seen that first morning in the brigade anteroom, entered and broke through the line, saying to the man on the bunk: ‘Come on. You’re for it this time. It’s a bleeding f … ing motorcar from Paris with a bleeding f … ing prime minister in it,’—watching (the runner) the man on the bunk without haste stow the notebook and the pencil-stub into the money-belt and strap it up and turn and roll the belt into the blanket behind him and rise and follow the orderly, the runner speaking to the nearest of the now broken and dispersing line: