“Is that so,” the reporter said pleasantly, laying the watch back. “Two past ten, huh? That’s a fine hour for a man not to have nothing to do until tomorrow but go to work, aint it?”
“That ought not to be much hardship on a man that dont only work except when he aint got nothing else to do,” the elevator man said.
“Is that so too,” the reporter said pleasantly. “You better close that door; I think I felt a——” It clashed behind him. “Two minutes past ten,” he thought. “That leaves.……” But that fled before he had begun to think it; he hung in a slow long backwash of peaceful and serene waiting, thinking Now she will be.… Just above the button on the bellplate the faintly oxidised streak of last night’s match still showed; the match now, without calculation, without sight to guide it, almost followed the mark. The washroom was the last door: a single opaque sheet of glass stencilled GENTLEMEN in a frame without knob (“Maybe that’s why only gentlemen,” the reporter thought) inswinging into eternal creosote. He removed even his shirt to wash, fingering gingerly the left side of his face, leaning to the blunt wavering mirror the replica of his gingerly grimace as he moved his jaw back and forth as he contemplated the bluish autograph of violence upon his diplomacolored flesh like tattooing, thinking quietly, “Yair. Now she will be.……” Now the cityroom (he scratched this match on the door itself) the barncavern, looming: the copydesk like a cluttered island, the other single desks beneath the single greenshaded bulbs had that quality of profound and lonely isolation of buoy-marked shoals in an untravelled and forgotten sea, his own among them. He had not seen it in twenty-four hours it is true, yet as he stood beside it he looked down at its cluttered surface—the edgenotching of countless vanished cigarettes, the halffilled sheet of yellow copy in the typewriter—with slow and quiet amaze as though not only at finding anything of his own on the desk but at finding the desk itself still in its old place, thinking how he could not possibly have got that drunk and got that sober in just that time. There was someone else at Hagood’s desk when he passed and so Hagood had not seen him yet; he had been at his desk for almost an hour while yellow sheet after yellow sheet passed steadily through the typewriter when the copyboy came.
“He wants you,” the boy said.
“Thanks,” the reporter said. In his shirt sleeves and with his tie loose again though still wearing his hat, he stopped at the desk and looked down at Hagood with pleasant and courteous interrogation. “You wanted me, chief?” he said.
“I thought you went home. It’s eleven oclock. What are you doing?”
“Buggering up a Sunday feature for Smitty. He asked me to do it.”
“Asked you to?”
“Yair. I had caught up. I was all through.”
“What is it?”
“It’s all right. It’s about how the loves of Antony and Cleopatra had been prophesied all the time in Egyptian architecture only they never knew what it meant; maybe they had to wait on the Roman papers. But it’s all right. Smitty’s got some books and a couple or three cuts to run, and all you have to do is try to translate the books so that any guy with a dime can understand what it means, and when you dont know yourself you just put it down like the book says it and that makes it better still because even the censors dont know what it says they were doing.” But Hagood was not listening.
“You mean you are not going home tonight?” The reporter looked down at Hagood, gravely and quietly. “They are still down yonder at your place, are they?” The reporter looked at him. “What are you going to do tonight?”
“I’m going home with Smitty. Sleep on his sofa.”
“He’s not even here,” Hagood said.
“Yair. He’s at home. I told him I would finish this for him first.”
“All right,” Hagood said. The reporter returned to his desk.
“And now it’s eleven oclock,” he thought. “And that leaves.……Yair. She will be.……” There were three or four others at the single desks, but by midnight they had snapped off their lights and gone; now there was only the group about the copydesk and now the whole building began to tremble to the remote travail of the presses; now about the copydesk the six or seven men, coatless and collarless, in their green eyeshades like a uniform, seemed to concentrate toward a subterranean crisis, like so many puny humans conducting the lyingin of a mastodon. At half past one Hagood himself departed; he looked across the room toward the desk where the reporter sat immobile now, his hands still on the keyboard and his lowered face shaded and so hidden by his hatbrim; it was at two oclock that one of the proofreaders approached the desk and found that the reporter was not thinking but asleep, sitting bolt upright, his bony wrists and his thin hands projecting from his frayed clean tooshort cuffs and lying peaceful and inert on the typewriter before him.
“We’re going over to Joe’s,” the proofreader said. “Want to come?”
“I’m on the wagon,” the reporter said. “I aint through here, anyway.”
“So I noticed,” the other said. “Only you better finish it in bed.—What do you mean, on the wagon? That you are going to start buying your own? You can do that with us; maybe Joe wont drop dead.”
“No,” the reporter said. “On the wagon.”
“Since when, for Christ’s sake?”
“I dont know. Some time this morning.—Yair, I got to finish this. Dont you guys wait on me.” So they went out, putting on their coats, though almost at once two charwomen came in. But the reporter did not heed them. He removed the sheet from the typewriter and laid it on the stack and evened them meticulously, his face peaceful. “Yair,” he thought. “It aint the money. It aint that.——Yair. And now she will be.……” The women did not pay him any mind either as he went to Hagood’s desk and turned on the light above it. He chose the right drawer at once and took out the pad of blank note forms and tore off the top one and put the pad back into the drawer. He did not return to his own desk, neither did he pause at the nearest one because one of the women was busy there. So he snapped on the light above the next one and sat down and racked the note form into the typewriter and began to fill it in, carefully—the neat convenient flimsy scrap of paper which by a few marks became transposed into an implement sharper than steel and more enduring than stone and by means of which the final and fatal step became anesthetised out of the realm not only of dread but of intelligence too, into that of delusion and mindless hope like the superscription on a loveletter: .……February 16, 1935.……February 16, 1936 we.……The Ord-Atkinson Aircraft Corp., Blaisedell, Franciana.……——He did not pause at all, his fingers did not falter; he wrote in the sum exactly as though he were writing two words of a column head: Five Thousand Dollars ($5000.00).……——Now he did pause, his fingers poised, thinking swiftly while the charwoman did something in the wastebasket beside the desk in front of him, producing a mute deliberate scratching like a huge rat: “There’s one of them is against the law, only if I put in the other one it might look fishy.” So he wrote again, striking the keys clean and firm, spelling out the e-i-g-h-t and flipping the note out; now he went to the copy-desk itself, since he did not own a fountain pen, and turned on the light there and signed the note on the first signature line and blotted it and sat looking at it quietly for a moment, thinking, “Yair. In bed now. And now he will.……Yair,” he said aloud, quietly, “that looks o.k.” He turned, speaking to either of the two women: “You all know what time it is?” One of them leaned her mop against a desk and began to draw from the front of her dress an apparently interminable length of shoestring, though at last the watch—a heavy old-fashioned gold one made for a man to carry—came up.
“Twenty-six minutes to three,” she said.
“Thanks,” the reporter said. “Dont neither of you smoke cigarettes, do you?”
“Here’s one I found on the floor,” the second one said. “It dont look like much. It’s been walked on.” Nevertheless some of the tobacco remained in it, though it burned fast; at each draw the reporter rec
eived a sensation precarious and lightly temporary, as though at a breath tobacco fire and all would evacuate the paper tube and stop only when it struck the back of his throat or the end of his lungs; three draws consumed it.
“Thanks,” he said. “If you find any more, will you put them on that desk back there where the coat is? Thanks.—Twenty-two to three,” he thought. “That dont even leave six hours.”—Yair, he thought, then it blew out of his mind, vanished, again into the long peaceful slack nothope, notjoy: just waiting, thinking how he ought to eat, then he thought how the elevator would not be running now, so that should settle that. “Only I could get some cigarettes,” he thought. “Jesus, I ought to eat something.” There was no light now in the corridor, but there would be one in the washroom; he returned to his desk and took the folded paper from his coat and went out again; and now, leaning against the carbolised wall he opened the paper upon the same boxheadings, the identical from day to day—the bankers the farmers the strikers, the foolish the unlucky and the merely criminal—distinguishable from one day to another not by what they did but by the single brief typeline beneath the paper’s registered name. He could stand easily so, without apparent need to shift his weight in rotation among the members which bore it; now with mere inertia and not gravity to contend with he had even less of bulk and mass to support than he had carried running up the stairs at eight oclock, so that he moved only when he said to himself, “It must be after three now.” He folded the paper neatly and returned to the corridor, where one glance into the dark cityroom showed him that the women were done. “Yair. It’s making toward four,” he thought, thinking, wondering if it were actually dawn which he felt, or that anyway the dark globe on which people lived had passed the dead point at which the ill and the weary were supposed to be prone to die and now it was beginning to turn again, soon beginning to spin again out of the last laggard reluctance of darkness—the garblement which was the city: the scabby hoppoles which elevated the ragged palmcrests like the monstrous broomsage out of an old country thought, the spent stage of last night’s clatterfalque Nilebarge supine now beneath today’s white wings treadling, the hydrant-gouts gutterplaited with the trodden tinseldung of stars. “And at Alphonse’s and Renaud’s the waiters that can not only understand Mississippi Valley French but they can even fetch back from the kitchen what you were not so sure yourself you told them to,” he thought, passing among the desks by feel now and rolling the paper into his coat for pillow before stretching out on the floor. “Yair,” he thought, “in bed now, and he will come in and she will say Did you get it? and he will say What? Get what? Oh, you mean the ship. Yair, we got it. That’s what we went over there for.”
It was not the sun that waked him, nor what would have been the sun save for the usual winter morning’s overcast: he just waked, regardless of the fact that during the past forty-eight hours he had slept but little more than he had eaten, like so many people who, living always on the outside of the mechanical regimentation of hours, seem able at need to coincide with a given moment with a sort of unflagging instinctive facility. But the train would be ordered by mechanical postulation though, and there would be no watch or clock in the building yet; gaunt, worn (he had not even paused to wash his face) he ran down the stairs and along the street itself, still running, and turned in this side of the window and the immemorial grapefruit halves which apparently each morning at the same moment at which the street lamps went out would be set, age- and timeproved for intactness and imperviousness like the peasant vases exhumed from Greek and Roman ruins, between the paper poinsettias and the easel bearing the names of food printed upon interchangeable metal strips. In the cityroom they called it the dirty spoon: one of ten thousand narrow tunnels furnished with a counter, a row of buttockpolished backless stools, a coffeeurn and a Greek proprietor resembling a retired wrestler adjacent to ten thousand newspapers and dubbed by ten thousand variations about the land; the same thickbodied Greek in the same soiled drill jacket might have looked at him across the same glass coffin filled with bowls of cereal and oranges and plates of buns apparently exhumed along with the grapefruit in the window, only just this moment varnished. Then the reporter was able to see the clock on the rear wall; it was only fifteen past seven. “Well, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
“Coffee?” the Greek said.
“Yair,” the reporter said. “I ought to eat too,” he thought, looking down into the glasswalled and -topped gutter beneath his hands, not with any revulsion now, but with a kind of delicate distasteful abstemiousness like the old novel women. And not from impatience, hurry: just as last night he seemed to see his blind furious course circling implacably back to the point where he had lost control of it like a kind of spiritual groundloop, now he seemed to feel it straighten out at last, already lifting him steadily and as implacably and undeviatingly onward so that now he need make no effort to move with it; all he had to do now was to remember to carry along with him everything which he was likely to need because this time he was not coming back. “Gimme one of these,” he said, tapping the glass with one hand while with the other he touched, felt, the folded slip of paper in his watchpocket. He ate the bun along with his coffee, tasting neither, feeling only the coffee’s warmth; it was now twenty-five past seven. “I can walk,” he thought. The overcast would burn away later. But it still lay overhead when he entered the station where Shumann rose from the bench. “Had some breakfast yet?” the reporter said.
“Yes,” Shumann said. The reporter looked at the other with a kind of bright grave intensity.
“Come on,” he said. “We can get on now.” The lights still burned in the trainshed; the skylight was the same color of the sky outside. “It will be gone soon though,” the reporter said. “Maybe by the time we get there; you will probably fly the ship back in the sun. Just think of that.” But it was gone before that; it was gone when they ran clear of the city; the car (they had the entire end of it to themselves) ran almost at once in thin sunlight. “I told you you would fly back in the sunshine,” the reporter said. “I guess we had better fix this up now, too.” He took out the note; he watched with that grave bright intensity while Shumann read it and then seemed to muse upon it soberly.
“Five thousand,” Shumann said. “That’s.……”
“High?” the reporter said. “Yair. I didn’t want there to be any hitch until we got into the air with it, got back to the airport with it. To look like a price that even Marchand wouldn’t dare refuse to.……” He watched Shumann, bright, quiet, grave.
“Yair,” Shumann said. “I see.” He reached into his coat. Then perhaps it was the fountain pen, though the reporter did not move yet and the brightness and intensity and gravity had not altered yet as he watched the deliberate, unhurried, slightly awkward movement of the pen across the blank signature line beneath the one where he had signed, watching the letters emerge: Roger Shumann But he did not move even yet; it was not until the pen without stopping dropped down to the third line and was writing again that he leaned and stopped it with his hand, looking at the half finished third name: Dr Carl S
“Wait,” he said. “What’s that?”
“It’s my father’s name.”
“Would he let you sign it on this?”
“He’d have to, after it was done. Yes. He would help you out on it.”
“Help me out on it?”
“I wouldn’t be worth even five hundred unless I managed to finish that race first.” A trainman passed, swinging from seatback to seatback, pausing above them for a moment.
“Blaisedell,” he said. “Blaisedell.”
“Wait,” the reporter said. “Maybe I didn’t understand. I aint a flyer; all I know is that hour’s dual Matt gave me that time. I thought maybe what Matt meant was he didn’t want to risk having the undercarriage busted or the propeller bent or maybe a wingtip——” He looked at Shumann, bright, grave, his hand still holding Shumann’s wrist.
“I guess I can land it all right,” Shumann said.
But the reporter did not move, looking at Shumann.
“Then it will be all right? it’ll just be landing it, like what Matt said about the time he landed it?”
“I guess so,” Shumann said. The train began to slow; the oleander bushes, the mosshung liveoaks in which light threads of mistsnared gossamer glinted in the sun; the vine-shrouded station flowed up, slowing; it would not quite pass.
“Because, Jesus, it’s just the money prize; it’s just one afternoon. And Matt will help you build your ship back and you will be all set with it for the next meet——” They looked at one another.
“I guess I can get it back down,” Shumann said.
“Yair. But listen——”
“I can land it,” Shumann said.
“All right,” the reporter said. He released the other’s wrist; the pen moved again, completing the signature steadily: Dr Carl Shumann, by Roger Shumann The reporter took the note, rising.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.” They walked again; it was about a mile; presently the road ran beside the field beyond which they could see the buildings—the detached office, the shop, the hangar with a broad legend above the open doors: ORD-ATKINSON AIRCRAFT CORPORATION—all of pale brick, as neat as and apparently contemporaneous with Ord’s new house. Sitting on the ground a little back from the road they watched two mechanics wheel out the red-and-white monoplane with which Ord had set his record and start it and warm it, and then they saw Ord himself come out of the office and get into the racer and taxi to the end of the field and turn and takeoff straight over their heads, already travelling a hundred feet ahead of his own sound. “It’s forty miles over to Feinman from here,” the reporter said. “He flies it in ten minutes. Come on. You let me do the talking. Jesus,” he cried, in a kind of light amazed exultation, “I never told a lie in my life that anybody believed; maybe this is what I have been needing all the time!” When they reached the hangar the doors were now closed to a crack just large enough for a man to enter. Shumann entered, already looking about, until he found the aeroplane—a lowwing monoplane with a big nose and a tubular fuselage ending in a curiously flattened tailgroup which gave it the appearance of having been drawn lightly and steadily through a huge lightlyclosed gloved fist. “There it is,” the reporter said.