“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 colour 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 name 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 don’t work for him now and so he will never know whether I went there or not!”
As the cage door clashed behind him, the editor himself reached down and lifted the face-down watch from the stack of papers, from that cryptic staccato cross-section of an instant crystallized 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. “Halfpast two,” the editor said. He put the watch back, placing it without apparent pause or calculation in the finicking exact centre 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 centre 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 closed 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, near-tweed knickers and rubber-soled 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 some time 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 pre-dawn of winter.
His roadster stood at the kerb, the ostler from the all-night garage beside it, the neat-gleamed and vaguely obstetrical shapes of golf-heads projecting, raked slightly, above the lowered top and repeating the glint and gleam of other chromium about the car’s dull-silver body. The ostler 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 ostler slid, lean and fast, past the golf bag 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 golf-bag 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 ostler 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 ostler said. The car moved; it accelerated smoothly and on its fading gear-whine 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 shield 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 towards 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 ostler 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 golf-bag 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 milk-coloured 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 gutter-plaited 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 mine-galleries 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 kerb 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 the balcony’s shadow upon the flag paving, and then in the window’s rectangle the shadow of an arm which even from here he could see holding the shadow of a drinking-glass as, closing the car door, he trod upon the chipped mosaic words, The Drowned, set into the kerb 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 trim-legged man bounced suddenly to the balustrade and leaned outward, blunt of face and with 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 ain’t here. Tell him he’s moved away. He’s married. He’s dead.” Then the voice roared: “Tell him he’s gone to work!” The man on the balcony looked down again.
“Well, mister,” he said, “I guess you heard him about as plain as I did.” —
“No matter,” Hagood said. “You come down.”
“Me?”
“Yes!” Hagood shouted. “You!” So he stood in
