No, he thought, not quite everyone. Some are no place.
“What does the paper say, anything new?” he asked indifferently, but without bothering to take it up from where it lay.
“Splashed with blood,” she said disheartenedly. “I hate to look at it any more. Those same old names, that once were so strange, staring you in the face day after day, until they ring in your mind. Douaumont, Vaux, Hill 304, le Mort Homme and...”
Splattered with blood, he repeated to himself. Then what difference does one added little drop make?
“I wish they’d move on a little, then we’d get a few new names at least,” he grunted disgustedly. “Looks like they never will. Can I have a little more marmalade, please.” After that they didn’t talk about it any further.
She only made one passing reference to the events of the night before — the ultimate event, that is to say.
“Poor Wise,” she said at one point. “I’ll bet he got his, all right.”
“He got his, sure enough,” he concurred, albeit absently, without any great interest in what her remark had been in the first place or his agreement with it had been in the second.
“I’ve got to hurry, now.” He threw down his napkin, kissed her hastily, and made for the door. This was the typical way in which businessmen, particularly suburban, were popularly supposed to leave for their work each morning. On the stage and in the comic strips they were always shown that way: taking their departure in a last-minute rush. As a matter of fact, he himself never did, other days.
“Don’t hurry too much, it’s not good for you,” she counseled him from the doorway. “A few minutes more or less won’t matter. I’ll bet some of the others, like Wise, for instance, won’t get in at all today.”
He stopped dead in his tracks for a moment, flung her the oddest look across his shoulder, almost as though he’d heard wrongly, thought she’d said something other than she had; that sort of look. An absent, yet a quizzical one. Then, as if correctly translating it by afterthought, he simply nodded and rapidly resumed his way, rushing out into the biscuit-colored sunlight of the morning street, while powdered cornmeal seemed to sift over his head and shoulders from some canister held aloft.
Great as his haste was, he stopped once more out on the sidewalk as he encountered the building superintendent, who was coming the opposite way, and who would have passed with simply a good morning, and halted him by calling out his name, and turning back a stride to face him.
“Sorenson. You’re just the man I’m looking for.”
The man in turn came back a step. “You wanted to talk to me, Mr. Marshall?”
“You’re going to have my flat on your hands. Don’t start showing it yet, I don’t want Mrs. Marshall disturbed, but you can consider this my notice.”
“You leaving town?”
“Yes, we’re going away.”
“Where you going?”
“Can’t say for sure yet. I won’t know until tonight.” He looked at his watch. “I’m late, I’ll have to chase along.”
He took his usual bus for the office, but he got off two stops short of his customary alighting-place and went into the bank. He consulted his bankbook, copied its bottommost entry onto a slip, down to the last cent, and presented that.
The teller gave him that professionally hurt look they do at such a time. “Wouldn’t you care to leave a dollar in? That would be just enough to keep the account open, in case you want to go ahead with it later.”
“I won’t have any further use for the account,” said Marshall tersely.
He pocketed the money, threw the canceled bankbook into a waste receptacle on his way out, and went to his job.
He did his work, just as on any other day. He made no attempt to see Ponds, to tell him he was leaving. He made no attempt to write out a formal resignation. He was as a matter of fact more diligent and more continuously applied than most of the others, as if he were seeking to complete the greatest number of neglected details within an allotted length of time. A self-allotted length of time.
In general, there was an air of torpor about the office, no doubt an aftermath of the previous night’s festivity. Yawns were prolific, and everyone was languid and supine. Wise had absented himself, but outside of an understanding grin or two toward his unoccupied desk, no comment was made on that fact.
Then, after two hours of this doldrumlike stagnation, at approximately mid-morning there was a little minor flurry of activity at the reception girls desk, nearest the door, and two men were taken directly inside to Ponds’ private office, without the usual wait, nominal as it was even at other times.
Marshall saw them go by. They looked at no one, they looked neither right nor left; simply followed her, and then went in and closeted themselves. And that was another thing; she had risen and personally ushered them to their destination, a thing she never did at other times, simply pointing out the direction from where she sat.
As when a stone has been dropped into still water, little outward-spreading ripples of bated rumor began to lave their way across the room and into its farthest corners, although their point of origin, the reception desk, was once more lifeless and still.
“Helen says they told her they’re from the Police Department,” Marshall overheard someone relaying from a neighboring desk.
He stopped what he was doing and put it away. He sat for a moment, without turning to look at the private office door, which remained inscrutably closed and silent, though more than one of the others turned and glanced around at it in a sort of ingenuous curiosity. The police, in 1916, were still to the average layman a fairly mystic, rather esoteric junta, more often heard of than personally encountered. At least, in their upper, non-uniformed categories.
“Did anybody do anything last night they shouldn’t?” he heard somebody ask in a jeering stage whisper.
He got up suddenly, pale and quite intent, and walked out of the room and sought the washroom, across the public hall. There was, about the gingerly yet determined way he walked, his almost exaggerated preoccupation, and above all, his air of not brooking hindrance, a suggestion that he felt he was about to become ill.
He wasn’t. He smoked a cigarette, and then another, and paced about a good deal. Looking thoughtfully down at the floor the whole while.
Just as he went back, they were coming out. He met them right outside the door, the door to the public hall, and had to cock his weight back upon his heel to give them passage. They brushed by him without a look or word, while the coat lapels of first the one and then the other rustled past his own, and then in turn he went in. He carried a palettelike impression of veinous high-blooded faces, seen too close to the eye for the features to be analyzed, stringy neckties, and teal-blue and cocoa-brown material, which, however, soon faded, for it had been seen at too close a perspective, almost a blur, to be long retained.
The excitement was very evident in the air by now, but no one could tell whence it was coming or what was continuing to generate it, now that the callers had gone. It was like an electrifying undercurrent, a tingling, that each one seemed to get from his neighbor and pass on in turn to the next. It was like a leashed waiting for something momentous that was to happen, though up to this point, nothing momentous whatever had happened. Two men, minding their business almost to the point of self-effacement, had passed through the room once, then passed through it a second time in the opposite direction. Someone had said that someone else had said that they were from the police. That was all.
There was on the surface no untoward sight or sound. Everything was as it had been before, half an hour ago. But everyone looked up too quickly at the slightest sound. A sound that at another time would have not even caught their attention; the scrape of a chair, the clearing of a throat, even the thump emitted by a closing ledger. And when there were not even such sounds, everyone looked around too frequently, as if in search of them. Marshall, for his part, sat more quietly than almost anyone else, head tilted downward. As if lost in thought. Or as if listening intently for something, that he alone would hear when it did come. Or understand when he heard.