“Of him?” the parachute jumper said, carrying one of the bags, his other hand under her elbow. “A guy would no more hit him than he would a glass barberpole. Or a paper sack of empty beerbottles in the street.”
“He might fall down though and cut the kid all to pieces,” Jiggs said. Then he said (it was still good, it pleased him no less even though this was the third time): “When he gets to the other side he might find out that they have opened the cemetery too and that would not be so good for Jack.” He handed the sack to Shumann and passed the woman and the jumper, stepping quick on his short bouncing legs, the boots twinkling in the aligned tense immobility of the headlights, and overtook the reporter and reached up for the boy. “Gimme,” he said. The reporter glared down at him without stopping, with a curious glazed expression like that of one who has not slept much lately.
“I got him,” he said. “He aint heavy.”
“Yair; sure,” Jiggs said, dragging the still sleeping boy down from the other’s shoulder like a bolt of wingfabric from a shelf as they stepped together onto the other curb. “But you want to have your mind free to find the way home.”
“Yair,” the reporter cried. They paused, turning, waiting for the others; the reporter glared down with that curious dazed look at Jiggs who carried the boy now with no more apparent effort than he had carried the aeroplane’s tail, half-turned also, balanced like a short pair of tailor’s shears stuck lightly upright into the tabletop, leaning a little forward like a dropped bowieknife. The other three still walked in the street—the woman who somehow even contrived to wear the skirt beneath the sexless trenchcoat as any one of the three men would; the tall parachute jumper with his handsome face now wearing an expression of sullen speculation; and Shumann behind them, in the neat serge suit and the new hat which even yet had the appearance of resting exactly as the machine stamped and molded it, on the hatblock in the store—the three of them with that same air which in Jiggs was merely oblivious and lightlyworn insolvency but which in them was that irrevocable homelessness of three immigrants walking down the steerage gangplank of a ship. As the woman and the parachute jumper stepped onto the curb light and bell clanged again and merged into the rising gearwhine as the traffic moved; Shumann sprang forward and onto the curb with a stiff light movement of unbelievable and rigid celerity, without a hair’s abatement of expression or hatangle; again, behind them now, the light harried spindrift of tortured confetti and serpentine rose from the gutter in sucking gusts. The reporter glared at them all now with his dazed, strained and urgent face. “The bastards!” he cried. “The son of a bitches!”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Which way now?” For an instant longer the reporter glared at them. Then he turned, as though put into motion not by any spoken word but by the sheer solid weight of their patient and homeless passivity, into the dark mouth of the street now so narrow of curb that they followed in single file, walking beneath a shallow overhang of irongrilled balconies. The street was empty, unlighted save by the reflection from Grandlieu Street behind them, smelling of mud and of something else richly anonymous somewhere between coffeegrounds and bananas. Looking back Jiggs tried to spell out the name, the letters inletted into the curbedge in tileblurred mosaic, unable to discern at once that it was not only a word, a name which he had neither seen nor heard in his life, but that he was looking at it upside down. “Jesus,” he thought, “it must have took a Frenchman to be polite enough to call this a street, let alone name it” carrying the sleeping boy on his shoulder and followed in turn by the three others and the four of them hurrying quietly after the hurrying reporter as though Grandlieu Street and its light and movement were Lethe itself just behind them and they four shades this moment out of the living world and being hurried, grave quiet and unalarmed, on toward complete oblivion by one not only apparently long enough in residence to have become a citizen of the shadows, but who from all outward appearances had been born there too. The reporter was still talking, but they did not appear to hear him, as though they had arrived too recently to have yet unclogged their ears of human speech in order to even hear the tongue in which the guide spoke. Now he stopped again, turning upon them again his wild urgent face. It was another intersection: two narrow roofless tunnels like exposed minegalleries marked by two pale oneway arrows which seemed to have drawn to themselves and to hold in faint suspension what light there was. Then Jiggs saw that to the left the street ran into something of light and life—a line of cars along the curb beneath an electric sign, a name, against which the shallow dark grillwork of the eternal balconies hung in weightless and lacelike silhouette. This time Jiggs stepped from the curb and spelled out the street’s name. “Toulouse,” he spelled. “Too loose,” he thought. “Yair. Swell. Our house last night must have got lost on the way home.” So at first he was not listening to the reporter, who now held them immobile in a tableau reminiscent (save for his hat) of the cartoon pictures of city anarchists; Jiggs looked up only to see him rushing away toward the lighted sign; they all looked, watching the thin long batlike shape as it fled on.
“I dont want anything to drink,” Shumann said. “I want to go to bed.” The parachute jumper put his hand into the pocket of the woman’s trenchcoat and drew out a pack of cigarettes, the third of those which the reporter had bought before they left the hotel the first time. He lit one and jetted smoke viciously from his nostrils.
“I heard you tell him that,” he said.
“Booze?” Jiggs said. “Jesus, is that what he was trying to tell us?” They watched the reporter, the gangling figure in the flapping suit running loosely toward the parked cars; they saw the newsboy emerge from somewhere, the paper already extended and then surrendered, the reporter scarcely pausing to take it and pay.
“That’s the second one he has bought tonight since we met him,” Shumann said. “I thought he worked on one.” The parachute jumper inhaled and jetted the vicious smoke again.
“Maybe he cant read his own writing,” he said. The woman moved abruptly; she came to Jiggs and reached for the little boy.
“I’ll take him a while,” she said. “You and whatever his name is have carried him all evening.” But before Jiggs could even release the boy the parachute jumper came and took hold of the boy too. The woman looked at him. “Get away, Jack,” she said.
“Get away yourself,” the jumper said. He lifted the boy from both of them, not gentle and not rough. “I’ll take him. I can do this much for my board and keep.” He and the woman looked at one another across the sleeping boy.
“Laverne,” Shumann said, “give me one of the cigarettes.” The woman and the jumper looked at one another.
“What do you want?” she said. “Do you want to walk the streets tonight? Do you want Roger to sit in the railroad station tonight and then expect to win a race tomorrow? Do you want Jack to——”
“Did I say anything?” the jumper said. “I dont like his face. But all right about that. That’s my business. But did I say anything? Did I?”
“Laverne,” Shumann said, “give me that cigarette.” But it was Jiggs who moved; he went to the jumper and took the child from him.
“Jesus, gimme,” he said. “You never have learned how to carry him.” From somewhere among the dark dead narrow streets there came a sudden burst of sound, of revelry: shrill, turgid, wallmuted, as though emerging from beyond a low doorway or from a cave—some place airless and filled with smoke. Then they saw the reporter. He appeared from beneath the electric sign, emerging too from out a tilefloored and -walled cavern containing nothing like an incomplete gymnasium showerroom, and lined with two rows of discreet and curtained booths from one of which a faunfaced waiter with a few stumps of rotting teeth had emerged and recognised him.
“Listen,” the reporter had said. “I want a gallon of absinth. You know what kind. I want it for some friends but I am going to drink it too and besides they aint Mardi Gras tourists. You tell Pete that. You know what I mean?”
“Sure mike,” the
waiter said. He turned and went on to the rear and so into a kitchen, where at a zinccovered table a man in a silk shirt, with a shock of black curls, eating from a single huge dish, looked up at the waiter with a pair of eyes like two topazes while the waiter repeated the reporter’s name. “He says he wants it good,” the waiter said in Italian. “He has friends with him. I guess I will have to give him gin.”
“Absinth?” the other said, also in Italian. “Fix him up. Why not?”
“He said he wanted the good.”
“Sure. Fix him up. Call mamma.” He went back to eating. The waiter went out a second door; a moment later he returned with a gallon jug of something without color and followed by a decent withered old lady in an immaculate apron. The waiter set the jug on the sink and the old lady took from the apron’s pocket a small phial. “Look and see if it’s the paregoric she has,” the man at the table said without looking up or ceasing to chew. The waiter leaned and looked at the phial from which the old lady was pouring into the jug. She poured about an ounce; the waiter shook the jug and held it to the light.
“A trifle more, madonna,” he said. “The color is not quite right.” He carried the jug out; the reporter emerged from beneath the sign, carrying it; the four at the corner watched him approach at his loose gallop, as though on the verge not of falling down but of completely disintegrating at the next stride.
“Absinth!” he cried. “New Valois absinth! I told you I knew them. Absinth! We will go home and I will make you some real New Valois drinks and then to hell with them!” He faced them, glaring, with the actual jug now gesticulant. “The bastards!” he cried. “The son of a bitches!”
“Watch out!” Jiggs cried. “Jesus, you nearly hit that post with it!” He shoved the little boy at Shumann. “Here; take him,” he said. He sprang forward, reaching for the jug. “Let me carry it,” he said.
“Yair; home!” the reporter cried. He and Jiggs both clung to the jug while he glared at them all with his wild bright face. “Hagood didn’t know he would have to fire me to make me go there. And get this, listen! I dont work for him now and so he never will know whether I went there or not!”
As the cage door clashed behind him, the editor himself reached down and lifted the facedown watch from the stack of papers, from that cryptic staccato crosssection of an instant crystallised and now dead two hours, though only the moment, the instant: the substance itself not only not dead, not complete, but in its very insoluble enigma of human folly and blundering possessing a futile and tragic immortality:
FARMERS BANKERS STRIKERS ACREAGE
WEATHER POPULATION
Now it was the elevator man who asked the time. “Half past two,” the editor said. He put the watch back, placing it without apparent pause or calculation in the finicking exact center of the line of caps, so that now, in the shape of a cheap metal disc, the cryptic stripe was parted neatly in the exact center by the blank backside of the greatest and most inescapable enigma of all. The cage stopped, the door slid back. “Good night,” the editor said.
“Good night, Mr Hagood,” the other said. The door clashed behind him again; now in the glass street doors into which the reporter had watched himself walk five hours ago, the editor watched his reflection—a shortish sedentary man in worn cheap neartweed knickers and rubbersoled golf-shoes, a silk muffler, a shetland jacket which unmistakably represented money and from one pocket of which protruded the collar and tie which he had removed probably on a second or third tee sometime during the afternoon, topped by a bare bald head and the horn glasses—the face of an intelligent betrayed asceticism, the face of a Yale or perhaps a Cornell senior outrageously surprised and overwhelmed by a sudden and vicious double decade—which marched steadily upon him as he crossed the lobby until just at the point where either he or it must give way, when it too flicked and glared away and he descended the two shallow steps and so into the chill and laggard predawn of winter. His roadster stood at the curb, the hostler from the allnight garage beside it, the neatgleamed and vaguely obstetrical shapes of golf-clubheads projecting, raked slightly, above the lowered top and repeating the glint and gleam of other chromium about the car’s dullsilver body. The hostler opened the door but Hagood gestured him in first.
“I’ve got to go down to French Town,” he said. “You drive on to your corner.” The hostler slid, lean and fast, past the golfbag and the gears and under the wheel. Hagood entered stiffly, like an old man, letting himself down into the low seat, whereupon without sound or warning the golfbag struck him across the head and shoulder with an apparently calculated and lurking viciousness, emitting a series of dry clicks as though produced by the jaws of a beast domesticated though not tamed, half in fun and half in deadly seriousness, like a pet shark. Hagood flung the bag back and then caught it just before it clashed at him again. “Why in hell didn’t you put it into the rumble?” he said.
“I’ll do it now,” the hostler said, opening the door.
“Never mind now,” Hagood said. “Let’s get on. I have to go clear across town before I can go home.”
“Yair, I guess we will all be glad when Moddy Graw is over,” the hostler said. The car moved; it accelerated smoothly and on its fading gearwhine it drifted down the alley, poising without actually pausing; then it swung into the Avenue, gaining speed—a machine expensive, complex, delicate and intrinsically useless, created for some obscure psychic need of the species if not the race, from the virgin resources of a continent, to be the individual muscles bones and flesh of a new and legless kind—into the empty avenue between the purple-and-yellow paper bunting caught from post to post by cryptic shields symbolic of laughter and mirth now vanished and departed. It rushed along the dark lonely street, its displacement and the sum of money it represented concentrated and reduced to a single suavely illuminated dial on which numerals without significance increased steadily toward some yet unrevealed crescendo of ultimate triumph whose only witnesses were waifs. It slowed and stopped as smoothly and skilfully as it had started; the hostler slid out before it came to a halt. “O.K., Mr Hagood,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Hagood said. As he slid across to the wheel the golfbag feinted silently at him. This time he slammed it over and down into the other corner. The car moved again, though now it was a different machine. It got into motion with a savage overpowered lurch as if something of it besides the other and younger man had quitted it when it stopped; it rolled on and into Grandlieu Street unchallenged now by light or bell. Instead, only the middle eye on each post stared dimly and steadily yellow, the four corners of the intersection marked now by four milkcolored jets from the fireplugs and standing one beside each plug, motionless and identical, four men in white like burlesqued internes in comedies, while upon each gutterplaited stream now drifted the flotsam and jetsam of the dead evening’s serpentine and confetti. The car drifted on across the intersection and into that quarter of narrow canyons, the exposed minegalleries hung with iron lace, going faster now, floored now with cobbles and roofed by the low overcast sky and walled by a thick and tremendous uproar as though all reverberation hung like invisible fog in the narrow streets, to be waked into outrageous and monstrous sound even by streamlining and air-wheels. He slowed into the curb at the mouth of an alley in which even as he got out of the car he could see the shape of a lighted second storey window printing upon the flag paving the balcony’s shadow, and then in the window’s rectangle the shadow of an arm which even from here he could see holding the shadow of a drinkingglass as, closing the car door, he turned upon the curb’s chipped mosaic inlet The Drowned and walked up the alley in outrage but not surprise. When he came opposite the window he could see the living arm itself, though long before that he had begun to hear the reporter’s voice. Now he could hear nothing else, scarcely his own voice as he stood beneath the balcony, shouting, beginning to scream, until without warning a short trimlegged man bounced suddenly to the balustrade and leaned outward a blunt face and a tonsure like a priest’
s as Hagood glared up at him and thought with raging impotence, “He told me they had a horse too. Damn damn damn!”
“Looking for somebody up here, doc?” the man on the balcony said.
“Yes!” Hagood screamed, shouting the reporter’s name again.
“Who?” the man on the balcony said, cupping his ear downward. Again Hagood screamed the name. “Nobody up here by that name that I know of,” the man on the balcony said; then he said, “Wait a minute.” Perhaps it was Hagood’s amazed outraged face; the other turned his head and he too bawled the name into the room behind him. “Anybody here named that?” he said. The reporter’s voice ceased for a second, no more, then it shouted in the same tone which Hagood had been able to hear even from the end of the alley:
“Who wants to know?” But before the man on the balcony could answer, it shouted again: “Tell him he aint here. Tell him he’s moved away. He’s married. He’s dead.” then the voice, for its type timbre and volume, roared: “Tell him he’s gone to work!” The man on the balcony looked down again.