He had to land the aeroplane, the rest he learned later: how she had come down, with the dress, pulled or blown free of the parachute harness, up about her armpits, and had been dragged along the ground until overtaken by a yelling mob of men and youths, in the centre of which she now lay dressed from the waist down in dirt and parachute straps and stockings. When he fought through the mob to where she was she had been arrested by three village officers one of whose faces Shumann remarked even then with a violent foreboding — a youngish man with a hard handsome face sadistic rather than vicious, who was using the butt of a pistol to keep the mob back and who struck at Shumann with it with the same blind fury. They carried her to jail, the younger one threatening her with the pistol now; already Shumann realized that in the two other officers he had only bigotry and greed to contend with. It was the younger one that he had to fear — a man besotted and satiated by his triumphs over abased human flesh which his corrupt and picayune office supplied him, seeing now and without forewarning the ultimate shape of his jaded desires fall upon him out of the sky, not merely naked but clothed in the very traditional symbology — the ruined dress with which she was trying wildly to cover her loins, and the parachute harness — of female bondage.
They would neither arrest Shumann too nor allow him access to her. After he was driven back along with the mob from the jail door by the younger officer’s pistol — it was a square building of fierce new brick into which he saw her forced, struggling still — he had a single glimpse of her indomitable and terrified face beyond the younger officer’s shoulder as the now alarmed older officers hurried her inside. 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 showed; the match now, without calculation, without sight to guide it, almost followed the mark. 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 som
ething 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 eight o’clock; so that he moved only when he said to himself, “It must be after three now.” —
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 188
