hanging over the back of the seat and surrounded by colored hat bands at various heights where the owners sat on the seat arms or stood in the aisle; and presently the conductor’s cap as he thrust among them with plaintive, fretful cries, like a bird.
“Tickets. Tickets, please,” he chanted. For an instant they held him there, invisible save for his cap. Then two young men slipped swiftly back and into the seat behind Horace. He could hear them breathing. Forward the conductor’s punch clicked twice. He came on back. “Tickets,” he chanted. “Tickets.” He took Horace’s and stopped where the youths sat.
“You already got mine,” one said. “Up there.”
“Where’s your check?” the conductor said.
“You never gave us any. You got our tickets, though. Mine was number—” he repeated a number glibly, in a frank, pleasant tone. “Did you notice the number of yours, Shack?”
The second one repeated a number in a frank, pleasant tone. “Sure you got ours. Look and see.” He began to whistle between his teeth, a broken dance rhythm, unmusical.
“Do you eat at Gordon hall?” the other said.
“No. I have natural halitosis.” The conductor went on. The whistle reached crescendo, clapped off by his hands on his knees, ejaculating duh-duh-duh. Then he just squalled, meaningless, vertiginous; to Horace it was like sitting before a series of printed pages turned in furious snatches, leaving a series of cryptic, headless and tailless evocations on the mind.
“She’s travelled a thousand miles without a ticket.”
“Marge too.”
“Beth too.”
“Duh-duh-duh.”
“Marge too.”
“I’m going to punch mine Friday night.”
“Eeeeyow.”
“Do you like liver?”
“I cant reach that far.”
“Eeeeeyow.”
They whistled, clapping their heels on the floor to furious crescendo, saying duh-duh-duh. The first jolted the seat back against Horace’s head. He rose. “Come on,” he said. “He’s done gone.” Again the seat jarred into Horace and he watched them return and join the group that blocked the aisle, saw one of them lay his bold, rough hand flat upon one of the bright, soft faces uptilted to them. Beyond the group a countrywoman with an infant in her arms stood braced against a seat. From time to time she looked back at the blocked aisle and the empty seats beyond.
At Oxford he descended into a throng of them at the station, hatless, in bright dresses, now and then with books in their hands and surrounded still by swarms of colored shirts. Impassable, swinging hands with their escorts, objects of casual and puppyish pawings, they dawdled up the hill toward the college, swinging their little hips, looking at Horace with cold, blank eyes as he stepped off the walk in order to pass them.
At the top of the hill three paths diverged through a broad grove beyond which, in green vistas, buildings in red brick or gray stone gleamed, and where a clear soprano bell began to ring. The procession became three streams, thinning rapidly upon the dawdling couples swinging hands, strolling in erratic surges, lurching into one another with puppyish squeals, with the random intense purposelessness of children.
The broader path led to the postoffice. He entered and waited until the window was clear.
“I’m trying to find a young lady, Miss Temple Drake. I probably just missed her, didn’t I?”
“She’s not here any longer,” the clerk said. “She quit school about two weeks ago.” He was young: a dull, smooth face behind horn glasses, the hair meticulous. After a time Horace heard himself asking quietly:
“You dont know where she went?”
The clerk looked at him. He leaned, lowering his voice: “Are you another detective?”
“Yes,” Horace said, “yes. No matter. It doesn’t matter.” Then he was walking quietly down the steps, into the sunlight again. He stood there while on both sides of him they passed in a steady stream of little colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes, above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving, like honey poured in sunlight, pagan and evanescent and serene, thinly evocative of all lost days and outpaced delights, in the sun. Bright, trembling with heat, it lay in open glades of miragelike glimpses of stone or brick: columns without tops, towers apparently floating above a green cloud in slow ruin against the southwest wind, sinister, imponderable, bland; and he standing there listening to the sweet cloistral bell, thinking Now what? What now? and answering himself: Why, nothing. Nothing. It’s finished.
He returned to the station an hour before the train was due, a filled but unlighted cob pipe in his hand. In the lavatory he saw, scrawled on the foul, stained wall, her pencilled name. Temple Drake. He read it quietly, his head bent, slowly fingering the unlighted pipe.
A half hour before the train came they began to gather, strolling down the hill and gathering along the platform with thin, bright, raucous laughter, their blonde legs monotonous, their bodies moving continually inside their scant garments with that awkward and voluptuous purposelessness of the young.
The return train carried a pullman. He went on through the day coach and entered it. There was only one other occupant: a man in the center of the car, next the window, bareheaded, leaning back, his elbow on the window sill and an unlighted cigar in his ringed hand. When the train drew away, passing the sleek crowns in increasing reverse, the other passenger rose and went forward toward the day coach. He carried an overcoat on his arm, and a soiled, light-colored felt hat. With the corner of his eye Horace saw his hand fumbling at his breast pocket, and he remarked the severe trim of hair across the man’s vast, soft, white neck. Like with a guillotine, Horace thought, watching the man sidle past the porter in the aisle and vanish, passing out of his sight and his mind in the act of
