For the time he became one of the mob, though even then, mad with rage and terror, he knew that it was merely because his and the mob’s immediate object happened to be the same, to see, touch her, again. He knew too that the two older craven officers were at least neutral, pulled to his side by their own physical fear of the mob, and that actually the one had for support only his dispensation for impunitive violence with which the dingy cadaver of the law invested him. But it seemed to be enough.
It was for the next hour anyway, during which, followed by his ragamuffin train of boys and youths and drunken men, Shumann accomplished his nightmare’s orbit about the town, from mayor to lawyer to lawyer to lawyer and back again.
They were at supper, or about to sit down to it or just finishing; he would have to tell his story with the round eyes of children and the grim implacable faces of wives and aunts watching him while the empowered men from whom he sought what he sincerely believed to be justice and no more forced him step by step to name what he feared, whereupon one of them threatened to have him arrested for criminal insinuations against the town’s civil structure.
It was a minister (and two hours after dark) who finally telephoned to the mayor. Shumann learned only from the over-heard conversation that the authorities were apparently seeking him now. Five minutes later a car called for him, with one of the two older officers in it and two others whom he had not seen before. “Am I under arrest too?” he said.
“You can try to get out and run if you want to,” the officer said. That was all. The car stopped at the jail and the officer and one of the others got out. “Hold him,” the officer said.
“I’ll hold him all right,” the second deputy said. So Shumann sat in the car with the deputy’s shoulder jammed into his and watched the two others hurry up the bricked walk.
The door of the jail opened for them and closed; then it opened again and he saw her. She wore a rain-coat now; he saw her for an instant as the two men hurried her out and the door closed again.
It was not until the next day that she showed him the dress now in shreds and the scratches and bruises on the insides of her legs and on her jaw and face and the cut in her lip.
They thrust her into the car, beside him. The officer was about to follow when the second deputy shoved him roughly away. “Ride in front,” the deputy said. “I’ll ride back here.” There were now four in the back seat; Shumann sat rigid with the first deputy’s shoulder jammed into his and Laverne’s rigid flank and side jammed against him so that it seemed to him that he could feel through her rigidity the second deputy crowding and dragging his flank against Laverne’s other side.
“All right,” the officer said. “Let’s get away from here while we can.”
“Where are we going?” Shumann asked. The officer did not answer. He leaned out, looking back at the jail as the car gathered speed, going fast now.
“Go on,” he said. “Them boys may not be able to hold him and there’s been too much whore’s hell here already.” The car rushed on, out of the village; Shumann realized that they were going in the direction of the field, the airport. The car swung in from the road; its headlights fell upon the aeroplane standing as he had jumped out of it, already running, in the afternoon.
As the car stopped the lights of a second one came into sight, coming fast down the road. The officer began to curse. “Durn him.
Durn them boys. I knew they couldn’t—” He turned to Shumann. “There’s your airship. You and her get out of here.”
“What do you want us to do?” Shumann said.
“You’re going to crank up that flying machine and get out of this town. And you do it quick; I was afraid them boys couldn’t hold him.”
“To-night?” Shumann said. “I haven’t got any lights.”
“Ain’t nothing going to run into you up there, I guess,” the officer said. “You get her into it and get away from here and don’t you never come back.” Now the second car slewed from the road, the lights swung full upon them; it rushed up, slewing again, with men already jumping out of it before it had stopped. “Hurry!” the officer cried. “We’ll try to hold him.”
“Get into the ship,” Shumann told her. At first he thought that the man was drunk. He watched Laverne, holding the raincoat about her, run down the long tunnel of the cars’ lights and climb into the aeroplane and vanish, then he turned and saw the man struggling while the others held him.
But he was not drunk, he was mad, he was insane for the time; he struggled towards Shumann who saw in his face not rage, not even lust, but almost a counterpart of that terror and wild protest against bereavement and division which he had seen in Laverne’s face while she clung to the strut and looked back at him.
“I’ll pay you!” the man screamed. “I’ll pay her! I’ll pay either of you! Name it! Let me… her once and you can cut me if you want!”
“Go on, I tell you!” the older officer panted at him. Shumann ran too; for an instant the man ceased to struggle; perhaps for the instant he believed that Shumann had gone to fetch her back.
Then he began to struggle” and scream again, cursing now, screaming at Laverne, calling her whore and bitch and pervert in a tone wild with despair until the engine blotted it. But Shumann could still see him struggling with the men who held him, the group silhouetted by the lights of the two cars, while he sat and warmed the engine as long as he dared.
But he had to take it off cold after all; he could hear the shouts now and against the headlights he saw the man running towards him, towards the aeroplane; he took it off from where it stood, with nothing to see ahead but the blue flames at the exhaust ports, into a night without moon.
Thirty minutes later, using a dimly seen windmill to check his altitude and making a fast blind landing in an alfalfa field, he struck an object which the next morning, fifty feet from the overturned aeroplane, he found to be a cow.
It was now about nine-thirty. The reporter thought for a moment of walking on over to Grandlieu Street and its celluloid-and confetti-rained uproar and down it to Saint Jules and so back to the paper that way, but he did not. When he moved it was to turn back into the dark cross street out of which the cab had emerged a half-hour before.
When the reporter entered the twin glass doors and the elevator cage clashed behind him this time, stooping to lift the face-down watch alone and look at it, he would contemplate the inexplicable and fading fury of the past twenty-four hours circled back to itself and become whole and intact and objective and already vanishing slowly like the damp print of a lifted glass on a bar.
Because he was not thinking about time, about any angle of clock-hands on a dial since the one moment out of all the future which he could see where his body would need to coincide with time or dial would not occur for almost twelve hours yet.
He was not even to recognize at once the cycle’s neat completion towards which he walked steadily, not fast, from block to block of the narrow cross street notched out of the blunt and now slumbering back ends of commerce while at each intersection where he waited during the traffic-dammed moment there reached him, as in the cab previously, the faint rumour, the sound felt rather than heard, of Grandlieu Street: the to-night’s Nile barge clatterfalque — the butterfly spawn against the choral drop of the dawn’s biding white wings — and at last Saint Jules’ Avenue itself running broad and suave between the austere palms springing, immobile and monstrous like burlesqued bunches of country broom sedge set on scabby posts, and then the twin doors and the elevator cage where the elevator man, glancing up at him from beneath shaggy pepper-and-salt brows that looked as if his moustache had had twins suddenly, said with grim and vindictive unction, “Well, I see how this afternoon another of them tried to make the front page, only he never quite—”
“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 to-morrow but go to work, ain’t it?”
“That ought not to be much hardship on a man that don’t only work except when he ain’t 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 oxidized streak of last night’s match still
