The wash-room was the last door: a single opaque sheet of glass stencilled GENTLEMEN in a frame without knob (“Maybe that’s why only gentlemen,” the reporter thought) in-swinging into eternal creosote.
He removed even his shirt to wash, fingering gingerly the left side of his face, leaning to the blunt wavering mirror the replica of his gingerly grimace as he moved his jaw back and forth and contemplated the bluish autograph of violence like tattooing upon his diploma-coloured flesh, thinking quietly, “Yair. Now she will be..
Now the city room (he scratched this match on the door itself), the barn cavern, loomed: the copy-desk like a cluttered island, the other single desks beneath the single green-shaded bulbs, had that quality of profound and lonely isolation of buoy-marked shoals in an untravelled and forgotten sea, his own among them.
He had not seen it in twenty-four hours it is true, yet as he stood beside it he looked down at its cluttered surface — the edge-notching of countless vanished cigarettes, the half-filled sheet of yellow copy in the typewriter — with slow and quiet amaze as though not only at finding anything of his own on the desk but at finding the desk itself still in its old place, thinking how he could not possibly have got that drunk and got that sober in just that time.
There was someone else at Hagood’s desk when he passed and so Hagood had not seen him yet. He had been at his desk for almost an hour, while yellow sheet after yellow sheet passed steadily through the typewriter, when the copy-boy came.
“He wants you,” the boy said.
“Thanks,” the reporter said. In his shirt sleeves, and with his tie loose again though still wearing his hat, he stopped at the desk and looked down at Hagood with pleasant and courteous interrogation. “You wanted me, chief?” he said.
“I thought you went home. It’s eleven o’clock. What are you doing?”
“Dolling up a Sunday feature for Smitty. He asked me to do it.”
“Asked you to?”
“Yair. I had caught up. I was all through.”
“What is it?”
“It’s all right. It’s about how the loves of Antony and Cleopatra had been prophesied all the time in Egyptian architecture only they never knew what it meant; maybe they had to wait on the Roman papers. But it’s all right.
Smitty’s got some books and a couple or three cuts to run, and all you have to do is try to translate the books so that any guy with a dime can understand what it means, and when you don’t know yourself you just put it down like the book says it and that makes it better still because even the censors don’t know what it says they were doing.’” But Hagood was not listening.
“You mean you are not going home to-night?” The reporter looked down at Hagood, gravely and quietly. “They are still down yonder at your place, are they?” The reporter looked at him. “What are you going to do to-night?”
“I’m going home with Smitty. Sleep on his sofa.”
“He’s not even here,” Hagood said.
“Yair. He’s at home. I told him I would finish this for him first.”
“All right,” Hagood said. The reporter returned to his desk.
“And now it’s eleven o’clock,” he thought. “And that leaves… Yair. She will be…” There were three or four others at the single desks, but by midnight they had snapped off their lights and gone; now there was only the group about the copy-desk and the whole building began to tremble to the remote travail of the presses.
Now about the copy-desk the six or seven men, coatless and collarless, in their green eyeshades like a uniform, seemed to concentrate towards a subterranean crisis, like so many puny humans conducting the lying in of a mastodon.
At half-past one Hagood himself departed; he looked across the room towards the desk where the reporter sat immobile now, his hands still on the keyboard and his lowered face shaded and so hidden by his hat-brim.
It was at two o’clock that one of the proof readers approached the desk and found that the reporter was not thinking but asleep, sitting bolt upright, his bony wrists and his thin hands projecting from his frayed clean too short cuffs and lying peaceful and inert on the typewriter before him.
“We’re going over to Joe’s,” the proof reader said. “Want to come?”
“I’m on the wagon,” the reporter said. “I ain’t through here, anyway.”
“So I noticed,” the other said. “Only you better finish it in bed…. What do you mean, on the wagon? That you are going to start buying your own? You can do that with us; maybe Joe won’t drop dead.”
“No,” the reporter said. “On the wagon.”
“Since when, for Christ’s sake?”
“I don’t know. Some time this morning. — Yair. I got to finish this. Don’t you guys wait on me.” So they went out, putting on their coats, though almost at once two charwomen came in. But the reporter did not heed them. He removed the sheet from the typewriter and laid it on the stack and evened them meticulously, his face peaceful. “Yair,” he thought. “It ain’t the money. It ain’t that…. Yair. And now she will be…”
The women did not pay him any mind either as he went to Hagood’s desk and turned on the light above it. He chose the right drawer at once and took out the pad of blank note forms and tore off the top one and put the pad back into the drawer. He did not return to his own desk, neither did he pause at the nearest one because one of the women was busy there.
So he snapped on the light above the next one and sat down and racked the note form into the typewriter and began to fill it in, carefully — the neat convenient flimsy scrap of paper which by a few marks became transposed into an implement sharper than steel and more enduring than stone and by means of which the final and fatal step became anaesthetized out of the realm not only of dread but of intelligence too, into that of delusion and mindless hope like the superscription on a love letter:…
February 16, 1935… February 16, 1936 we… The Ord-Atkinson Aircraft Corp., Blaisedell, Franciana… He did not pause at all, his fingers did not falter; he wrote in the sum exactly as though he were writing two words of a column head: Five Thousand Dollars ($5000.00)….
Now he did not pause, his fingers poised, thinking swiftly while the charwoman did something in the waste-basket beside the desk in front of him, producing a mute deliberate scratching like a huge rat: “There’s one of them is against the law, only if I put in the other one it might look fishy.” So he wrote again, striking the keys clean and firm, spelling out the e-i-g-b-t per cent, and flipping the note out.
Now he went to the copy-desk itself, since he did not own a fountain pen, and turning on the light there signed the note on the first signature line, blotted it, and sat looking at it quietly for a moment, thinking, “Yair. In bed now. And now he will… Yair,” he said aloud, quietly, “that looks O.K.” He turned, speaking to either of the two women: “You all know what time it is?” One of them leaned her mop against a desk and began to draw from the front of her dress an apparently interminable length of shoe-string, though at last the watch — a heavy old-fashioned gold one made for a man to carry — came up.
“Twenty-six minutes to three,” she said.
“Thanks,” the reporter said. “Don’t neither of you smoke cigarettes, do you?”
“Here’s one I found on the floor,” the second one said. “It don’t look like much. It’s been walked on.” Nevertheless some of the tobacco remained in it, though it burned fast; at each draw the reporter received a sensation precarious and lightly temporary, as though at a breath tobacco fire and all would evacuate the paper tube and stop only when it struck the back of his throat or the end of his lungs; three draws consumed it.
“Thanks,” he said. “If you find any more, will you put them on that desk back there where the coat is? Thanks. — Twenty-two to three,” he thought. “That don’t even leave six hours.” — Yair, he thought, then it blew out of his mind, vanished again into the long peaceful slack not hope, not joy: just waiting, thinking how he ought to eat.
Then he thought how the elevator would not be running now, so that should settle that. “Only I could get some cigarettes,” he thought. “Jesus, I ought to eat something.” There was no light now in the corridor, but there would be one in the wash-room.
He returned to his desk, took the folded paper from his coat and went out again; and now, leaning against the carbolized wall he opened the paper upon the same box-headings, the identical from day to day — the bankers the farmers the strikers, the foolish the unlucky and the merely criminal — distinguishable from one day to another not by what they did but by the single brief typeline beneath the paper’s registered name.
He could stand easily so, without apparent need to shift his weight in rotation among the members which bore it; now with mere inertia and not gravity to contend with he had even less of bulk and mass to support than he had carried running up the stairs at
