A Fable

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, to last as long as the capacity for breathing would, the capacity for tears,—saying (the runner) this time: