“I’ve got the money.
How much do you want?”
He was silent, thinking for a moment of the place where the angel stood.
He knew he had nothing to cover or obliterate that place — it left a barren crater in his heart.
“All right,” he said.
“You can have it for what I paid for it — $420.”
She took a thick sheaf of banknotes from her purse and counted the money out for him.
He pushed it back.
“No.
Pay me when the job’s finished and it has been set up.
You want some sort of inscription, don’t you?”
“Yes.
There’s her full name, age, place of birth, and so on,” she said, giving him a scrawled envelope.
“I want some poetry, too — something that suits a young girl taken off like this.”
He pulled his tattered little book of inscriptions from a pigeonhole, and thumbed its pages, reading her a quatrain here and there.
To each she shook her head.
Finally, he said:
“How’s this one, Elizabeth?” He read:
She went away in beauty’s flower,
Before her youth was spent;
Ere life and love had lived their hour
God called her, and she went.
Yet whispers Faith upon the wind:
No grief to her was given.
She left YOUR love and went to find
A greater one in heaven.
“Oh, that’s lovely — lovely,” she said.
“I want that one.”
“Yes,” he agreed,
“I think that’s the best one.”
In the musty cool smell of his little office they got up.
Her gallant figure reached his shoulder.
She buttoned her kid gloves over the small pink haunch of her palms and glanced about her.
His battered sofa filled one wall, the line of his long body was printed in the leather.
She looked up at him.
His face was sad and grave.
They remembered.
“It’s been a long time, Elizabeth,” he said.
They walked slowly to the front through aisled marbles.
Sentinelled just beyond the wooden doors, the angel leered vacantly down.
Jannadeau drew his great head turtlewise a little further into the protective hunch of his burly shoulders.
They went out on to the porch.
The moon stood already, like its own phantom, in the clear washed skies of evening.
A little boy with an empty paper-delivery bag swung lithely by, his freckled nostrils dilating pleasantly with hunger and the fancied smell of supper.
He passed, and for a moment, as they stood at the porch edge, all life seemed frozen in a picture: the firemen and Fagg Sluder had seen Gant, whispered, and were now looking toward him; a policeman, at the high side-porch of the Police Court, leaned on the rail and stared; at the near edge of the central grass-plot below the fountain, a farmer bent for water at a bubbling jet, rose dripping, and stared; from the Tax Collector’s office, City Hall, upstairs, Yancey, huge, meaty, shirtsleeved, stared.
And in that second the slow pulse of the fountain was suspended, life was held, like an arrested gesture, in photographic abeyance, and Gant felt himself alone move deathward in a world of seemings as, in 1910, a man might find himself again in a picture taken on the grounds of the Chicago Fair, when he was thirty and his mustache black, and, noting the bustled ladies and the derbied men fixed in the second’s pullulation, remember the dead instant, seek beyond the borders for what was there (he knew); or as a veteran who finds himself upon his elbow near Ulysses Grant, before the march, in pictures of the Civil War, and sees a dead man on a horse; or I should say, like some completed Don, who finds himself again before a tent in Scotland in his youth, and notes a cricket-bat long lost and long forgotten, the face of a poet who has died, and young men and the tutor as they looked that Long Vacation when they read nine hours a day for “Greats.”
Where now?
Where after?
Where then?
20