Then he saw him, higher than the others and well outside, though the voice now was not from the amplifier but from a mechanic:
“Jesus, look at Shumann! It must be fast: he’s flying twice as far as the rest of them — or maybe Ord ain’t trying.
— Why in hell don’t he bring it on in?” Then the voice was drowned in the roar, the snarl, as the aeroplanes turned the field pylon and, followed by the turning heads along the apron as if the faces were geared to the sound, diminished singly out and over the lake again, Shumann still quite wide, making a turn that was almost a skid yet holding his position.
They converged towards the second pylon, the lake one, in slightly irregular order and tiny now with distance and with Shumann still cautiously high and outside, they wafted lightly upwards and around the pylon.
Now the reporter could hear the mechanic again: “He’s coming in now, watch him. Jesus, he’s second — he’s diving in — Jesus, he’s going to be right behind Ord on this pylon; maybe he was just feeling it out—” The noise was faint now and dis seminated; the drowsy afternoon was domed with it and the four machines seemed to hover like dragon-flies silently in vacuum, in various distance-softened shades of pastel against the ineffable blue, with now a quality trivial, random, almost like notes of music — a harp, say — as the sun glinted and lost them.
The reporter leaned down to the woman who was not yet aware of his presence, crying:
“Watch him! Oh, can he fly! Can he fly!
And Ord ain’t going to beat the Ninety-Two to — Second money Thursday, and if Ord ain’t going to — Oh, watch him! Watch him!” She turned: the jaw, pale eyes, the voice which he did not even listen to:
“Yes. The money will be fine.” Then he even stopped looking at her, staring down the runway as the four aeroplanes, now in two distinct pairs, came in towards the field, increasing fast. The mechanic was talking again:
“He’s in! Jesus, he’s going to try Ord here! And look at Ord giving him room—” The two in front began to bank at the same time, side by side, the droning roar drawing down and in as though sucked down out of the sky by them in place of being produced by them.
The reporter’s mouth was still open; he knew that by the needling of nerves in his sore jaw. Later he was to remember seeing the ice-cream cone crush in his fist and begin to ooze between his fingers as he let the little boy slide to the ground and took his hand.
Not now though; now the two aeroplanes, side by side, and Shumann outside and above, banked into the pylon as though bolted together, when the reporter suddenly saw something like a light scattering of burnt paper or feathers floating in the air above the pylon-tip He was watching this, his mouth still open, when a voice somewhere said, “Ahhhhhhh!” and he saw Shumann now shooting almost straight upward and then a whole waste-basketful of the light trash blew out of the aeroplane.
They said later about the apron that he used the last of his control before the fuselage broke to zoom out of the path of the two aeroplanes behind while he looked down at the close-peopled land and the empty lake, and made a choice before the tail-group came completely free.
But most of them were busy saying how his wife took it, how she did not scream or faint (she was standing quite near the microphone, near enough for it to have caught the scream) but instead just stood there and watched the fuselage break in two and said, “Oh, damn you, Roger!
Oh, damn you! damn you!” and turning, snatched the little boy’s hand and ran towards the sea-wall, the little boy dangling vainly on his short legs between her and the reporter who, holding the little boy’s other hand, ran at his loose lightly-clattering gallop like a scarecrow in a gale, after the bright plain shape of love.
Perhaps it was the added weight because she turned, still running, and gave him a single pale, cold, terrible look, crying:
“God damn you to hell! Get away from me!”
Love-song of J. A. Prufrock
ON THE SHELL beach between the boulevard and the seaplane slip one of the electric company’s trucks stood while its crew set up a searchlight at the-water’s edge. When the photographer called Jug saw the reporter; he was standing beside the empty truck, in the backwash which it created between the faces beyond the police line, and the men — police and newspaper men and airport officials and the others, the ones without authority or object who manage to pass police lines at all scenes of public violence — gathered along the beach. The photographer approached at a flagging trot, the camera banging against his flank. “Christ Almighty,” he said. “I got that, all right. Only Jesus, I near vomited into the box while I was changing plates.” Beyond the crowd at the water-edge and just beyond the outer markers of the seaplane basin a police-launch was scattering the fleet of small boats which, like most of the people on the beach itself, had appeared as though by magic from nowhere like crows, to make room for the dredge-boat to anchor over the spot where the aeroplane was supposed to have sunk. The seaplane slip, dredged out, was protected from the sluggish encroachment of the lake’s muddy bottom by a sunken mole composed of refuse from the city itself — shards of condemned paving and masses of fallen walls and even discarded automobile bodies — any and all the refuse of man’s twentieth century clotting into communities large enough to pay a mayor’s salary — dumped into the lake. Either directly above or just outside of this mass the aeroplane was believed, from the accounts of three oystermen in a dory who were about two hundred yards away, to have struck the water. The three versions varied as to the exact spot, despite the fact that both wings had reappeared on the surface almost immediately and been towed ashore, but then one of the oystermen (from the field, the apron, Shumann had been seen struggling to open the cockpit hatch as though to jump, as though with the intention of trying to open his parachute despite his lack of height) — one of the oystermen claimed that the body had fallen off the machine, having either extricated itself or been flung out. But the three agreed that the body and the machine were both either upon or beside the mole from whose vicinity the police-launch was now harrying the small boats.
It was after sunset. Upon the mirror-smooth water even the little foul skiffs — the weathered and stinking dories and dinghies of oyster-and shrimp-men — had a depthless and fairy-light quality as they scattered like butterflies or moths before a mechanical reaper, just ahead of the trim, low, martial-coloured police-launch, on to at which the moment the photographer saw being transferred from one of the skiffs two people whom he recognized as being the dead pilot’s wife and child. Among them the dredge looked like something antediluvian crawled for the first time into light, roused but not alarmed by the object or creature out of the world of light and air which had plunged without warning into the watery fastness where it had been asleep. “Jesus,” the photographer said. “Why wasn’t I standing right here: Hagood would have had to raise me then. Jesus God,” he said in a hoarse tone of hushed and unbelieving amazement, “how’s it now for being a poor bastard that never even learned to roller-skate?” The reporter looked at him, for the first time. The reporter’s face was perfectly calm; he looked down at the photographer, turning carefully as though he were made of glass and knew it, blinking a little, and spoke in a peaceful dreamy voice such as might be heard where a child is sick — not sick for a day or even two days, but for so long that even wasting anxiety has become mere surface habit:
“She told me to go away. I mean, to go clean away, like to another town.”
“She did?” the photographer said. “To what town?”
“You don’t understand,” the reporter said, in that peaceful baffled voice. “Let me explain to you.”
“Yair; sure,” the photographer said. “I still feel like vomiting too. But I got to get on in with these plates. And I bet you ain’t even phoned in. Have you?”
“What?” the reporter said. “Yes. I phoned in. But listen. She didn’t understand. She told me—”
“Come on, now,” the other said. “You will have to call in with the build-up on it. Jesus, I tell you I feel bad too. Here, smoke a cigarette. Yair. I could vomit too. But what the hell? He ain’t our brother. Come on, now.” He took the cigarettes from the reporter’s coat and-took two from the pack and struck a match. The reporter roused somewhat; he took the burning match himself and
