A Fable

‘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.’