A Fable

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.