“Out to the airport,” he said.
“Airport?” the driver said. “I thought the other fellow said you wanted to go to Noyades Street.”
“No; airport,” the reporter said. The driver looked forward again; he seemed to settle himself, to shape his limbs for comfort for the long haul even while the one-way arrows of the old constricted city flicked past. But presently the old quarter gave way to out-ravelling and shabby purlieus, mostly lightless now, and the cab went faster; presently the street straightened and became the ribbon-straight road running across the terraqueous plain and the cab was going quite fast, and now the illusion began, the sense of being suspended in a small airtight glass box clinging by two puny fingers of light in the silent and rushing immensity of space. By looking back he could still see the city, the glare of it, no further away; if he were moving, regardless at what terrific speed and in what loneliness, so was it, paralleling him. He was not escaping it; symbolic and encompassing, it outlay all gasoline-spanned distances and all clock-or sun-stipulated destinations. It would be there — the eternal smell of the coffee the sugar the hemp sweating slow iron plates above the forked deliberate brown water and lost lost lost all ultimate blue of latitude and horizon; the hot rain gutterful plaiting the eaten heads of shrimp; the ten thousand inescapable mornings wherein ten thousand swinging airplants stippleprop the soft scrofulous soaring of sweating brick and ten thousand pairs of splayed brown hired Leonora feet tiger-barred by jaloused armistice with the invincible sun: the thin black coffee, the myriad fish stewed in a myriad oil — to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow; not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure.
The Scavengers
AT MIDNIGHT — one of the group of newspaper men on the beach claimed to have watched the mate of the dredge-boat and the sergeant of the police-launch holding flashlights on their watches for fifteen minutes… the dredge upped anchor and stood off shore and steamed away while the police-launch, faster, had taken its white bone almost beyond the sea-wall before the dredge had got enough offing to turn.
Then the five newspaper men — four in overcoats with upturned collars — turned too and mounted the beach towards where the ranked glaring cars were beginning to disperse while the policemen — there were not so many of them now — tried to forestall the inevitable jam. There was no wind to-night, neither was there any overcast.
The necklace of lights along the lake shore curved away faint and clear, with that illusion of tremulous wavering which distance and clarity gave them, like bright not-quite-settled roosting birds, as did the boundary lights along the seawall; and now the steady and measured rake of the beacon seemed not to travel so much as to murmur like a moving forefoot of wind across the water, among the thick faint stars.
They mounted the beach to where a policeman, hands on hips, stood as though silhouetted not against the criss-crossing of headlights but against the blatting and honking uproar as well, as though contemplating without any emotion whatever the consummation of that which he had been waiting on for twenty hours now. “Ain’t you talking to us too, sergeant?” the first newspaper man said. The policeman looked back over his shoulder, squinting down at the group from under his raked cap.
“Who are you?” he said.
“We are the press,” the other said in a smirking affected voice.
“Get on, get on,” a second said behind him. “Let’s get indoors somewhere.” The policeman had already turned back to the cars, the racing engines, the honking and blatting.
“Come, come, sergeant,” the first said. “Come come come come. Ain’t you going to send us back to town too?” The policeman did not even look back. “Well, won’t you at least call my wife and tell her you won’t make me come home, since you wear the dark blue of honour integrity and purity—” The policeman spoke without turning his head.
“Do you want to finish this wake out here or do you really want to finish it in the wagon?”
“Exactly. You have got the idea at last. Boys, he’s even com—”
“Get on, get on,” the second said. “Let him buy a paper and read it.” They went on, the reporter (he was the one without an overcoat) last, threading their way between the blatting and honking, the whining and clashing of gears, the glare of back-bouncing and crossing headlight beams, and reached the boulevard and crossed it towards the lunch-stand.
The first led the way in, his hat-brim crumpled on one side and his overcoat caught one button awry and a bottle neck protruding from one pocket. The proprietor looked up at them with no especial pleasure; he was about to close up.
“That fellow out there kept me up all last night and I am about wore out,” he said.
“You would think we were from the District Attorney’s office and trying to padlock him instead of a press delegation trying to persuade him to stay open and accept our pittances,” the first said. “You are going to miss the big show at daylight, let alone all the country trade that never heard about it until the noon train got in with the papers.”
“How about coming to the back room and letting me lock the door and turn out the lights up here, then?” the proprietor said.
“Sure,” they told him. So he locked up and turned off the lights and led them to the back, to the kitchen — a stove, a zinc table encrusted with week-end after week-end of slain meat and fish — and supplied them with glasses, bottles of coca cola, a deck of cards, beer-cases to sit on, and a barrel head for table, and prepared to retire.
“If anybody knocks, just sit quiet,” he said. “And you can beat on that wall there when they get ready to begin; I’ll wake up.”
“Sure,” they told him. He went out. The first opened the bottle and began to pour into the five glasses. The reporter stopped him.
“None for me. I’m not drinking.”
“What?” the first said. He set the bottle carefully down and took out his handkerchief and went through the pantomime of removing his glasses, polishing them, and replacing them and staring at the reporter, though before he had finished the fourth took up the bottle and finished pouring the drinks. “You what?” the first said. “Did I hear my ears, or was it just blind hope I heard?”
“Yes,” the reporter said; his face wore that faint, spent, aching expression which a man might wear towards the end of a private baby show, “I’ve quit for a while.”
“Thank God for that,” the first breathed, then he turned and began to scream at the one who now held the bottle, with that burlesque outrage and despair of the spontaneous amateur buffoon. But he ceased at once and then the four of them (again the reporter declined) sat about the barrel and began to deal blackjack. The reporter did not join them.
He drew his beer-case aside, whereupon the first, the habitual opportunist who must depend upon all unrehearsed blundering and recalcitrant circumstance to be his stooge, noticed at once that he had set his beer-case beside the now cold stove. “If you ain’t going to take the drink yourself maybe you better give the stove one,” he said.
“I’ll begin to warm up in a minute,” the reporter said. They played; the fourth had the deal; their voices came quiet and brisk and impersonal above the faint slapping of the cards.
“That’s what I call a guy putting himself away for keeps,” he said.
“What do you suppose he was thinking about while he was sitting up there waiting for that water to smack him?” the first said.
“Nothing,” the second said shortly. “If he had been a man that thought, he would not have been up there in the first place.”
“Meaning he would have had a good job on a newspaper, huh?” the first said.
“Yes,” the second said. “That’s what I mean.” The reporter rose quietly. He lit a cigarette, his back turned a little to them, and dropped the match carefully into the cold stove and sat down again. None of the others appeared to have noticed him.
“While you are supposing,” the fourth said, “what do you suppose his wife was thinking about?”
“That’s easy,” the first said. “She was thinking, ‘Thank God I carry a spare.’” They did not laugh; the reporter heard no sound of laughter, sitting quiet and immobile on his beer-case while the cigarette smoke lifted in the unwinded stale air and broke about his face, streaming on, and the voices spoke back and forth with a sort of brisk dead slap-slap-slap like that of the cards.
“Do you suppose it’s a fact that they were both laying her?” the third said.
“That’s not news,” the first said. “But how about the fact that Shumann knew it too? Some of these mechanics that have known them for some time say they don’t even know who the kid belongs to.”
“Maybe both,” the fourth said. “A dual personality: the flying Jekyll and Hyde brother, who flies the ship and makes the parachute jump all at once.”
The reporter did not move, only his hand, the arm bending at the elbow which rested upon his knee, rose with the cigarette to his mouth and became motionless again while he drew in the smoke with an outward aspect of intense bemused concentration, trembling quietly and steadily and apparently
