That room, that apartment which the reporter called bohemian, he had hunted down in this section of New Valois’s Vieux Carré and then hunted down piece by piece the furniture which cluttered it, with the eager and deluded absorption of a child hunting coloured easter eggs.
It was a gaunt cavern roofed like a barn, with scuffed and worn and even rotted floor-boards and scrofulous walls and cut into two uneven halves, bedroom and studio, by an old theatre curtain and cluttered with slovenly mended and useless tables draped with imitation batik bearing precarious lamps made of liquor bottles, and other objects of oxidized metal made for what original purpose no man knew, and hung with more batik and machine-made Indian blankets and indecipherable has-relief plaques vaguely religio-Italian primitive.
It was filled with objects whose desiccated and fragile inutility bore a kinship to their owner’s own physical being as though he and they were all conceived in one womb and spawned in one litter — objects which possessed that quality of veteran prostitutes, of being overlaid by the ghosts of so many anonymous proprietors that even the present title-holder held merely rights but no actual possession — a room apparently exhumed from a theatrical morgue and rented intact from one month to the next.
It was about two months after the reporter had joined the paper without credentials or any past, documentary or hearsay, at all, with his appearance of some creature evolved by forced draught in a laboratory and both beyond and incapable of any need for artificial sustenance, like a tumble weed, with his eager, dog-like air and his child’s aptitude for being not so much where news happened exactly but for being wherever were the most people at any given time rushing about the Vieux Carré for his apartment and his furniture and the decorations — the blankets and batik and the objects which he would buy and fetch into the office and then listen with incorrigible shocked amazement while Hagood would prove to him patiently how he had paid two or three prices for them. — One day, Hagood looked up and watched a woman whom he had never seen before enter the city room.
“She looked like a locomotive,” he told the paper’s owner later with bitter outrage. “You know: when the board has been devilled and harried by the news reels of Diesel trains and by the reporters that ask them about the future of railroading until at last the board takes the old engine, the one that set the record back in nineteen-two or nineteen-ten or somewhere and send it to the shops and one day they unveil it (with the news reels and the reporters all there, too) with horseshoe rose wreaths and congress men and thirty-six high-school girls out of the beauty show in bathing-suits, and it is a new engine on the outside only, because everyone is glad and proud that inside it is still the old fast one of nineteen-two or -ten.
The same number is on the tender and the old fine, sound, time-proved working parts, only the cab and the boiler are painted robin’s egg blue and the rods and the bell look more like gold than gold does and even the supercharger don’t look so very noticeable except in a hard light, and the number is in neon now: the first number in the world to be in neon?”
He looked up from his desk and saw her enter on a blast of scent as arresting as mustard gas and followed by the reporter looking more than ever like a shadow whose projector had eluded it weeks and weeks ago… the fine big bosom like one of the walled, impervious towns of the Middle Ages whose origin antedates writing, which have been taken and retaken in uncountable fierce assaults which overran them in the brief fury of a moment and vanished, leaving no trace, the broad tomato-coloured mouth, the eyes pleasant, shrewd and beyond mere disillusion, the hair of that diamond-hard and imperviously recent lustre of a gilt service in a shop window, the gold-studded teeth square and white and big like those of a horse.
He saw all this beneath a plump, rich billowing of pink plumes so that he thought of himself as looking at a canvas out of the vernal equinox of pigment when they could not always write to sign their names to them — a canvas conceived in and executed out of that fine innocence of sleep and open bowels capable of crowning the rich, foul, unchaste earth with rose cloud where lurk and sport oblivious and incongruous cherubim. “I just dropped into town to see who he really works for,” she said.
“May I… Thanks.” She took the cigarette from the pack on the desk before he could move, though she did wait for him to strike and hold the match. “And to ask you to sort of look out for him. Because he is a fool, you see. I don’t know whether he is a newspaper man or not.
Maybe you don’t know yet, yourself. But he is the baby.” Then she was gone — the scent, the plumes; the room which had been full of pink vapour and golden teeth darkened again, became niggard — and Hagood thought, “Baby of what?” because the reporter had told him before and now assured him again that he had neither brothers nor sisters, that he had no ties at all save the woman who had passed through the city room — and apparently through New Valois, too, without stopping, with something of that aura of dwarfed distances and self-sufficient bulk of a light cruiser passing through a canal lock — and the incredible name.
“Only the name is right,” the reporter told him. “Folks don’t always believe it at first, but it’s correct as far as I know.”
“But I thought she said her name was—” and Hagood repeated the name the woman had given.
“Yair,” the reporter said. “It is now.”
“You mean she has—” Hagood said.
“Yair,” the reporter said. “She’s changed it twice since I can remember. They were both good guys, too.” So then Hagood believed that he saw the picture — the woman not voracious, not rapacious; just omnivorous like the locomotive’s maw of his late symbology; he told himself with savage disillusion, Yes.
Come here to see just who he really worked for. What she meant was she came here to see that he really had a job and whether or not he was going to keep it. He believed now that he knew why the reporter cashed his pay-cheque before leaving the building each Saturday night; he could almost see the reporter, running now to reach the post office station before it closed — or perhaps the telegraph office — in the one case the flimsy blue strip of money order, in the other the yellow duplicate receipt.
So that, on that first midweek night when the reporter opened the subject diffidently, Hagood set a precedent out of his own pocket which he did not break for almost a year, cursing the big woman whom he had seen but once, who had passed across the horizon of his life without stopping, yet for ever after disarranging it, like the air-blast of the oblivious locomotive crossing a remote and trash-filled suburban street.
But he said nothing until the reporter came and requested a loan twice the size of an entire week’s pay, and even then he did not open the matter. It was his face which caused the reporter to explain; it was for a wedding present. “A wedding present?” Hagood said.
“Yair,” the reporter said. “She’s been good to me. I reckon I better send her something, even if she won’t need it.”
“Won’t need it?” Hagood cried.
“No. She won’t need what I could send her. She’s always been lucky that way.”
“Wait,” Hagood said. “Let me get this straight. You want to buy a wedding present. I thought you told me you didn’t have any sisters or br—”
“No,” the reporter said. “It’s for mamma.”
“Oh,” Hagood said after a time, though perhaps it did not seem very long to the reporter; perhaps it did not seem long before Hagood spoke again: “I see. Yes. Am I to congratulate you?”
“Thanks,” the reporter said. “I don’t know the guy. But the two I did know were O.K.”
“I see,” Hagood said. “Yes. Well. Married. The two you did know. Was one of them your — But no matter. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me!” he cried. “At least it is something. Anyway, she did what she could for you!” Now it was the reporter looking at Hagood with courteous interrogation. “It will change your life some now,” Hagood said.
“Well, I hope not,” the reporter said. “I don’t reckon she has done any worse this time than she used to. You saw yourself she’s still a fine-looking old gal and a good goer still, even if she ain’t any longer one of the ones you will find in the dance marathons at 6 a m. So I guess it’s O.K. still. She always has been lucky that way.”
“You hope—” Hagood said. “You… Wait,” he said.
He took a cigarette from the pack on the desk, though at last the reporter himself leaned and struck
