‘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 and the railway’s and the insurance company’s and the oil baron’s private detectives—pursued the four of them—the crippled horse and the English groom and the old Negro and the twelve-year-old child who rode it—up and down and back and forth through the section of the Mississippi watershed between Illinois and the Gulf of Mexico and Kansas and Alabama, where on three legs the horse had been running in remote back-country quarter-races and winning most of them, the old Negro telling it, grave and tranquil, serenely and peacefully inconsequential, like listening to a dream, until presently the runner five years afterward was seeing what the Federal deputy marshal had five years ago while in the middle of it: not a theft, but a passion, an immolation, an apotheosis—no gang of opportunists fleeing with a crippled horse whose value, even whole, had ceased weeks back to equal the sum spent on its pursuit, but the immortal pageant-piece of the tender legend which was the crowning glory of man’s own legend beginning when his first paired children lost well the world and from which paired prototypes they still challenged paradise, still paired and still immortal against the chronicle’s grimed and bloodstained pages: Adam and Lilith and Paris and Helen and Pyramus and Thisbe and all the other recordless Romeos and their Juliets, the world’s oldest and most shining tale limning in his brief turn the warp-legged foul-mouthed English horse-groom as ever Paris or Lochinvar or any else of earth’s splendid rapers: the doomed glorious frenzy of a love-story, pursued not by an unclosed office file nor even the raging frustration of the millionaire owner, but by its own inherent doom since, being immortal, the story, the legend, was not to be owned by any one of the pairs who added to its shining and tragic increment, but only to be used, passed through, by each in their doomed and homeless turn.
He didn’t tell how they did it: only that they did it: as if, once it was done, how no longer mattered; that if something must be done, it is done, and then hardship or anguish or even impossibility no longer signify:—got the frantic and injured horse out of the demolished car and into the bayou where it could swim while they held its head above water—(‘He found a boat,’ the old Negro said. ‘If you could call it a boat. Whittled out of a log and done already turned over before you even put your foot in it. They called them pirogues. They talked gobble talk there, like they do here.’)—then out of the bayou too, into such complete invisibility that when the railroad detectives reached the scene the next morning, it was as if the flood itself had washed the three of them away. It was a hummock, a small island in the swamp not a mile from the collapsed trestle, where a work-train and crew had arrived the next morning to rebuild the bridge and the track, and from which (They got the horse as far up out of the water as they could the first night, and the old Negro was left to attend it. ‘I just give it water, and kept a mud pack on the hip and tried to keep the gnats and flies and mosquitoes away,’ the old Negro said.) the groom returned at dawn on the third day, with a block-and-tackle bearing the railroad company’s stencil in the pirogue, and food for themselves and the horse and canvas for the sling and cradle and plaster of Paris for the case—(‘I know what you’re going to ask now,’ the old Negro said. ‘Where we got the money for all that. He got it like he done the boat,’ telling that too: the cockney horse-groom who had never been further from London than Epsom or Doncaster yet who in two years of America had become a Mason and a Baptist, who in only two weeks in the forecastle of the American freighter up from Buenos Aires had discovered or anyway revealed to himself that rapport with and affinity for dice, who on the first return to the scene of the wreck had picked up the block-and-tackle simply because he happened to pass it, since his true destination had been the bunk-car where the Negro work-gang slept, waking them, the white man in his swamp-fouled alien jodhpurs and the black ones in undershirts or dungaree pants or in nothing at all, squatting around a spread blanket beneath the smoking lantern and the bank notes and the coins and the clicking and scuttering dice.)—and in the pitch dark—he had brought back no lantern, no light; it would not only have been dangerous to show one, he didn’t even need one: scornfully, even contemptuously, who from his tenth year had known the bodies of horses as the blind man knows the room he durst not leave: any more than he would have brought back a veterinary, not only not needing one but he would not have let any hand save his or the old Negro’s touch the horse, even if the horse had permitted it—they suspended the horse and set the hip and built the immobilising cast.
Then the weeks while the ruined hip knitted and the search-parties, with every exit to the swamp watched and guarded, continued to drag the bayou beneath the trestle, and to splash and curse among the moccasins and rattlesnakes and alligators of the swamp itself, long after they (the pursuers) had come to believe that the horse was dead for the simple reason that it must be dead, since that particular horse could not be anything else but dead and still be invisible, and that the owner would in the end gain only the privilege of venting his vengeance on the thieves. And once each week, as soon as it was dark enough and the search-parties had withdrawn for the night, the groom would depart in the pirogue, to return before dawn two or three days later with another supply of food and forage; two and three days now because the trestle was repaired now; once more trains roared hollowly across it in the night and the work-gang and that source of revenue or income was gone, back to New Orleans where it had come from and now the white man was going to New Orleans himself, bucking the professional games on baize-covered tables beneath electric lights and now not even the old Negro—(a horseman, a groom, merely by accident, but by avocation and dedication a minister of God, sworn dedicated enemy of sin yet who apparently without qualm or hesitation had long since drawn and then forgot it the line of his rectitude to include the magnificent ruined horse and all who were willing to serve it)—would know how far he sometimes had to go before he found another spread blanket beneath a smoked lantern or, as a last resort, the electric-lit baize table, where, although in their leathern cup the dice were as beyond impugnment as Caesar’s wife, the counters—chips, money—still accrued, whether or not to the benison of his gift or to the simple compulsion of his need.
Then months, not only within daily earshot of the trains once more thundering across the repaired trestle but of the search parties themselves (to whom at times either of them could have spoken without even raising his voice), the search continuing long after the ones who did the cursing and splashing and the frantic recoiling from the sluggish thrash or vicious buzz of startled moccasins and rattlesnakes all believed that the horse was long since dead and vanished forever into the sleepless insatiable appetites of eels and gars and turtles and the thief himself fled, out of the country and out of the nation and perhaps even out of the continent and the hemisphere, but continuing nevertheless because the railroad company had for stake an expensive set of triple blocks and over two hundred feet of two-inch cable, and the insurance company owned banks and barge lines and chain stores from Portland, Maine to Oregon and so could afford not to lose even a one-dollar horse, let alone a fifty thousand dollar one, and the horse’s owner that bottomless purse which would not miss the value of the sixty race horses he still owned, in order to revenge himself on the thief of the sixty-first, and the Federal police had more at stake than even the state ones who could only share in the glory and the reward: they had a file to be closed out—until one day a United Press flash came, relayed last night from Washington to the Federal deputy, of how a horse, a valuable Thoroughbred and running on three legs, in charge of or at least accompanied by a small bandy-legged foreigner who could barely speak English, and a middle-aged Negro preacher, and ridden by a twelve-year-old Negro boy, had run away from the whole field in a three-furlong race at Weatherford, Texas—(‘We walked it,’ the old Negro said, before the runner could ask him. ‘At night. It needed that much to get used to itself again. To stop remembering that trustle and get limbered up again and start being a horse. When daylight come, we would hide in the woods again.’ And afterwards too, telling that too: how they didn’t dare else: run one race and then leave directly afterward without even stopping almost, because as soon as that three-legged horse won a race the whole world would hear about it and they had to stay at least one day ahead of them.)—and got there one day too late, to learn that the Negro preacher and the snarling contemptuous foreigner had appeared suddenly from nowhere exactly in time to enter the three-legged Thoroughbred in a race on which the foreigner had betted sums ranging (by this time) all the way from ten to a thousand dollars, at odds ranging all the way from one to ten to one to a hundred, the three-legged horse breaking so fast from the post that the barrier seemed actually to have sprung behind it, and running so fast that the trailing field appeared, if anything, to be running in another and later race, and so far ahead at the finish that the jockey seemed to have no control over it at all—if anyone, let alone a child of twelve or at most thirteen who rode the race without saddle at all but simply a bellyband and a surcingle to hold on to (this informant had seen the race), could have held it after the barrier dropped, the horse crossing the finish line at full speed and apparently bent on making another circuit of the track had not the white foreigner, leaning on the rail beyond the finish line, spoken a single word to it in a voice you could not have heard fifteen feet away.
