him out.” He returned to the roadster; the reporter had already turned on too, back towards the entrance before he was aware of it, stopping again; he could not do it — the lights and the faces, not even for the warmth of lights and human suspirations — thinking, “Jesus, if I was to go in there I would drown.” He could go around the opposite hangar and reach the apron and be on his way back to the seaplane slip. But when he moved it was towards the first hangar, the one in which it seemed to him that he had spent enough of incomprehensible and unpredictable frenzy and travail to have been born and raised there, walking away from the lights and sound and faces, walking in solitude where despair and regret could sweep down over the building and across the plaza and on into the harsh thin hissing of the palms and so at least he could breathe it in, at least endure. It was as though some sixth sense, some economy out of profound inattention guided him, on through the blank door and the tool-room and into the hangar itself where in the hard light of the overhead clusters the motionless aeroplanes squatted in fierce and depthless relief among one another’s monstrous shadows, and on to where Jiggs sat on the tongue of a dolly, the shined boots rigid and fiercely high lighted on his out-thrust feet, gnawing painfully at a sandwich with one side of his face, his head turned parallel to the earth like a dog eats while the one good eye rolled, painful and bloodshot, up at the reporter.
“What is it you want me to do?” Jiggs said. The reporter blinked down at him with quiet and myopic intensity.
“You see, she didn’t understand,” he said. “She told me to go away. To let her alone. And so I can’t…”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He drew the boots under him and prepared to get up, but he stopped and sat so for a moment, his head bent and the sandwich in one hand, looking at what the reporter did not know, because at once the single eye was looking at him again. “Will you look behind that junk over in the corner there and get my bag?” Jiggs said. The reporter found the canvas bag hidden carefully beneath a rubbish-heap of empty oil cans and boxes and such; when he returned with it Jigs was already holding one foot out. “Would you mind giving it a pull?” The reporter took hold of the boot. “Pull it easy.”
“Have they made your feet sore?” the reporter said.
“No. Pull it easy.” The boots came off easier than they did two nights ago; the reporter watched Jiggs take from the sack a shirt not soiled but filthy, and wipe the boots carefully, upper sole and all, with an air thoughtful, intent, bemused, and wrap them in the shirt, put them into the sack and, again in the tennis shoes and the makeshift leggings, hide the sack once more in the corner, the reporter following him to the corner and then back as if it were now the reporter who was the dog.
“You see,” he said (even as he spoke it seemed to him to be not himself speaking but something inside him which insisted on pre-empting his tongue)— “you see, I keep on trying to explain to somebody that she didn’t understand. Only she understands exactly, don’t she? He’s out there in the lake and I can’t think of anything plainer than that. Can you?” The main doors were locked now; they had to return through the tool-room as the reporter had entered. As they emerged the beacon’s beam swept overhead again with its illusion of powerful and slow acceleration. “So they gave you all a bed this time,” he said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “The kid went to sleep on the police boat. Jack brought him in and they let them have a bed this time. She didn’t come in. She ain’t going to leave now, anyway. I’ll try if you want to, though.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I guess you are right. I didn’t mean to try to make… I just wanted to…” He began to think now, now, NOW, and it came: the long nebulous sword-stroke sweeping steadily up from beyond the other hangar until almost overhead and then accelerating with that illusion of terrific strength and speed which should have left a sound, a swish, behind it but did not. “You see, I don’t know about these things. I keep on thinking about fixing it up so that a woman, another woman—”
“All right,” Jiggs said. “I’ll try.”
“Just so she can see you and call you if she needs — wants… if… She won’t even need to know I am… but if she should—”
“Yair. I’ll fix it if I can.” They went on around the other hangar. Now they could see half of the beacon’s entire arc; the reporter could watch it as it swung across the lake, watching the skeleton-lattice of the empty bleachers come into relief against it, and the parapet of staffs from which the purple-and-gold pennons, black now, streamed rigid in the rising wind from the lake as the beam picked them up one by one and discarded them in swift and accelerating succession as it swept in and overhead and on. They could see the looped bunting too tossing and labouring and even here and there blown out of the careful loops of three days ago and whipping in forlorn and ceaseless shreds as though, sentient itself, it had anticipated the midnight bells from town which would signal the beginning of Lent.
And now, beyond the black rampart of the sea-wall, the searchlight beside whose truck the photographer had found the reporter was burning — a fierce white downward-glaring beam brighter though smaller than the beacon — and they saw presently another one on the tower of the dredge-boat itself. In fact, it was as though when they reached the sea-wall they would look down into a pit filled not by one steady source of light but by a luminous diffusion as though from the air-particles, beyond which the shore-line curved twinkling faintly away into darkness. But it was not until they reached the wall that they saw that the light came not from the searchlight on the shore nor the one on the dredge-boat nor the one on the slowly cruising police-launch engaged still in harrying away the little skiffs from some of which puny flashlights winked but in most of which burned the weak turgid flame of kerosene — but from a line of automobiles drawn up along the boulevard. Extending for almost a mile along the shore and facing the water, their concerted refulgence, broken at short intervals by the buttons and shields of policemen and now by the sidearms and putties of a national guard company, glared down upon the disturbed and ceaseless dark water which seemed to surge and fall and surge and fall as though in travail of amazement and outrage.
There was a skiff just landing from the dredge-boat. While the reporter waited for Jiggs to return the dark steady chill wind pushed hard against him, through his thin clothes; it seemed to have passed through the lights, the faint human sounds and movement, without gaining anything of warmth or light. After a while he believed that he could discern the faint hissing plaint of the ground and powdered oyster shells on which he stood even above the deep steady humming of the searchlight not far away. The men from the skiff came up and passed him, Jiggs following. “It’s like they said,” Jiggs said. “It’s right up against the rocks. I asked the guy if they had hooked anything yet and he said hooked, hell; they had hooked something the first throw with one hook and ain’t even got the hook loose yet. But the other hook came up with a piece of that damn monococque plywood, and he said there was oil on it.” He looked at the reporter. “So that will be from the belly.”
“Yes,” the reporter said.
“So it’s bottom upwards. The guy says they think out there that it is fouled on some of them old automobiles and junk they throwed in to build it with. — Yair,” he said, though the reporter had not spoken, but had only looked at him: “I asked that too. She’s up yonder at that lunch-wagon getting — —” The reporter turned; like the photographer Jiggs now had to trot to keep up, scrabbling up the shelving beach towards the ranked automobiles until he bumped into the reporter who had paused in the headlights’ glare with his head lowered and one arm raised before his face. “Over this way,” Jiggs said, “I can see.” He took the reporter’s arm and guided him on to the gap in the cars where the steps led up from the beach and through the gap to where, across the boulevard, they could see the heads and shoulders against the broad low dingy window. Jiggs could hear the reporter breathing, panting, though the climb up from the beach had not been that hard. When the reporter’s fumbling hand touched his own it felt like ice.
“She hasn’t got any money,” the reporter said. “Hurry. Hurry.” Jiggs went on. Then the reporter could still see them — the faces pressed to the glass (for the instant he made one as he pushed through them and went around the end of the lunch-wagon to the smaller window) —