But the lobby to-night was crowded with more than these; already he saw them fallen definitely into two distinct categories: the one in Madison Avenue jackets, who perhaps once held transport ratings and perhaps still holds them, like the manufacturer who once wrote himself mechanic or clerk retains in the new chromium Geddes sanctuary the ancient primary die or mimeograph machine with which he started out, and perhaps have now only the modest Q.B. wings which clip to the odorous lapel the temperate silk ribbon stencilled Judge or Official, without the transport rating and perhaps the ribbon and the tweed but not even the wings; and the other with faces both sober and silent because they cannot drink to-night and fly to-morrow and have never learned to talk at any time, in blue serge cut apparently not only from the same bolt but folded at the same crease on the same shelf, who hold the severe transport rating and are here to-night by virtue of painfully drummed charter trips from a hundred little nameless bases known only to the Federal Department of Commerce, and whose equipment consists of themselves and a mechanic and one aeroplane which is not new.
The reporter thrust on among them, with that semblance of filtering rather than passing. “Yair,” he thought, “you don’t need to look. It’s the smell, you can tell the bastards because they smell like pressing clubs instead of Harris tweed.” Then he saw her, standing beside a Spanish jar filled with sand pocked by chewing gum and cigarettes and burnt matches, in a brown worn hat and a stained trench-coat from whose pocket protruded a folded newspaper.
“Yah,” he thought, “because a trench-coat will fit anybody and so they can have two of them and then somebody can always stay at home with the kid.” When he approached her she looked full at him for a moment, with pale blank complete unrecognition, so that while he crossed the crowded lobby towards her and during the subsequent three hours while at first he and she and Shumann and Jiggs, and later the little boy and the parachute jumper too, sat crowded in the taxicab while he watched the implacable meter figures compound, he seemed to walk solitary and chill and without progress down a steel corridor like a fly in a gun barrel, thinking, “Yah, Hagood told me to go home and I never did know whether I intended to go or not.
But Jiggs told me she would be at the hotel, but I didn’t believe that at all”; thinking (while the irrevocable figures clocked and clicked beneath the dim insistent bulb and the child slept on his bony lap and the other four smoked the cigarette which he had bought for them and the cab spun along the dark swamp-smelling shell road out to the airport and then back to town again) — thinking how he had not expected to see her again because to-morrow and to-morrow do not count because that will be at the field, with air and earth full of snarling and they not even alive out there because they are not human.
But not like this, in clad decorous attitudes that the police will not even look once at, in the human night world of half-past ten o’clock and then eleven and then twelve: and then behind a million separate secret closed doors we will slack ourselves profoundly defenceless on our backs, opened for the profound unsleeping, the inescapable and compelling flesh.
Standing there beside the Basque chamber pot at twenty-two minutes past ten because one of her husbands flew this afternoon in a crate that three years ago was all right, that three years ago was so all right that ever since all the others have had to conjoin as one in order to keep it so that the word ‘race’ would still apply, so that now they cannot quit because if they once slow down they will be overreached and destroyed by their own spawning, like the Bornean what’s-its-name that has to spawn running to keep from being devoured by its own litter.
“Yah,” he thought, “standing there waiting so he can circulate in his blue serge suit and the other trench-coat among the whisky and the tweed when he ought to be at what they call home in bed except they ain’t human and don’t have to sleep”; thinking how it seems that he can bear either of them, either one of them alone. “Yair,” he thought, “tiered Q pickles of one thousand… nights. They will have to hurry before anybody can go to bed with her,” walking straight into the pale cold blank gaze which waked only when he reached his hand and drew the folded paper from the trench-coat’s pocket.
“Dempsey asleep, huh?” he said, opening the paper, the page which he could have recited off-hand before he even looked at it:
BURNHAM BURNS
VALOISIAN CLAIMS LOVENEST FRAMEUP
Myers Easy Winner in Opener at Feinman Airport
Laughing Boy in Fifth at Washington Park
“No news is good newspaper news,” he said, folding the paper again. “Dempsey in bed, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. “Keep it. I’ve seen it.” Perhaps it was his face. “Oh, I remember. You work on a paper yourself. Is it this one? or did you tell me?”
“Yair,” he said. “I told you. No, it ain’t this one.” Then he turned too, though she had already spoken.
“This is the one that bought Jack the ice-cream to-day,” she said. Shumann wore the blue serge, but there was no trench-coat. He wore a new grey homburg hat, not raked like in the department store cuts but set square on the back of his head so that (not tall, with blue eyes in a square thin profoundly sober face) he looked out not from beneath it but from within it with open and fatal humourlessness, like an early Briton who has been assured that the Roman governor will not receive him unless he wear the borrowed centurion’s helmet. He looked at the reporter for a single unwinking moment even blanker than the woman’s had been.
“Nice race you flew in there to-day,” the reporter said.
“Yair?” Shumann said. Then he looked at the woman. The reporter looked at her too. She had not moved, yet she now stood in a more complete and somehow terrific immobility, in the stained trench-coat, a cigarette burning in the grained and black-rimmed fingers of one hand, looking at Shumann with naked and urgent concentration. “Come on,” Shumann said. “Let’s go.” But she did not move.
“You didn’t get it,” she said. “You couldn’t—”
“No. They don’t pay off until Saturday night,” Shumann said. (“Yah,” the reporter thought, clashing the tight hermetic door behind him as the automatic dome light came on; “ranked coffin cubicles of dead tail; the Great American in one billion printings slave post-chained and scribble-scrawled: annotations of eternal electro deitch and bottom hope.”)
“Deposit five cents for three minutes, please,” the bland machine voice chanted. The metal stalk sweat-clutched, the gutta-percha bloom cupping his breathing back at him, he listened, fumbled, counting as the discreet click and cling died into wire hum.
“That’s five,” he bawled. “Hear them? Five nickels. Now don’t cut me off in three hundred and eighty-one seconds and tell me to… Hello,” he bawled, crouching, clutching the metal stalk as if he hung by it from the edge of a swimming pool; “listen. Get this…. Yair.
At the Terrebonne…. Yair, after midnight; I know. Listen. Chance for the goddamn paper to do something at last beside run our ass ragged between what Grandlieu Street kikes tell us to print in their half of the paper and tell you what you can’t print in our half and still find something to fill the blank spaces under Connotator of theWorld’s Doings and Moulder of the Peoples’ Thought, ha ha ha ha…
“What?” the editor cried. “Terrebonne Hotel? I told you when you left here three hours ago to—”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Almost three hours, that’s all. Just a taxi ride to get to the other side of Grandlieu Street first, and then out to the airport and back because they don’t have but a hundred beds for visiting pilots out there and General Behind-man needs all of them for his reception. And so we come on back to the hotel because this is where they all are to tell him to come back Saturday night provided the bastard don’t kill him to-morrow or Saturday.
And you can thank whatever tutelary ass scratcher you consider presides over the fate destiny and blunders of that office that me or somebody happened to come in here despite the fact that this is the logical place to find what we laughingly call news at ten o’clock at night, what with half the air-meet proprietors getting drunk here and all of Mardi Gras already drunk here.
And him that ought to been in bed three hours
