"And did I tell you he said you played as if you had a soul?"
They were standing beside the coat-rack. Miss Fitzhugh was doing up her gloves with little jerky movements of a hairpin, talking all the while breathlessly. From the parlor at the end of the narrow green-papered hall came a whiff of tea and the sound of cups clinked against saucers.
"What he said was.... You won't mind if I tell you all, will you dear...? Anyway, I've always admired your way of playing Chabrier. He said your technique was rotten, but that you had a soul. And he turned down Mrs. Glendinning to come here this afternoon, honest he did. Will you turn on the light a sec, my hat's crooked ... There! ..."
Miss Fitzhugh put back the hairpin and made a few jabs at the hair under her hat.
"If you want my plain opinion ... O, I do look a sight ... I think you've made a conquest, Nancibel. O, you are a lucky girl! And that Wendell boy's dreadfully good looking. ... Well, I must go." Miss Fitzhugh drew the taller girl down on her firm plump bosom and kissed her moistly—"Just think of being loved by Salinski!" She kissed Nancibel on the mouth again and fled with a little giggle out the door.
"Poor fool!" muttered Nancibel. With her lips tightly compressed she walked back towards her guests. While still in the dark of the hall she closed her eyes for a second—O, I hope they go soon. Then with a smile she went back to her place by the teathings.
"Was Fitzie telling you all the Boston Theatre gossip?" asked a little girl with light fuzzy hair and a green dress.
"No, it was only about Mr. Salinski."
"She's jealous because he played here, I bet you."
"She doesn't want him to play with that dreadful ladies' orchestra, does she?" put in a tall girl with large teeth and a picture hat.
"You shouldn't laugh at people's misfortunes, Susan," said the fuzzy-haired girl with a shrill little titter.
"What are Miss Fitzhugh's misfortunes?" asked Fanshaw, who stood tall and blonde in a light grey suit, with his back to the fireplace.
"She's celloist on the famous ladies' orchestra."
"How delicious. The Fadettes!"
"Fitzie's an awful fool, but I like her," said Nancibel gruffly.
"Susan, we must go," said the fuzzy-haired girl.
"Must you, dear?" said Nancibel automatically.
Their dresses swished and kisses were exchanged in the hall beside the coatrack. When the door had closed behind the two women, Nancibel hurried back to the parlor.
"O, what a relief!" she cried, "I was so afraid there would be somebody left I'd overlooked."
"I'm about dead," said Wendell. "Nan, you ought to warn people when you have tea fights and celebrities. I tried to escape once I'd got in, but Fanshaw held on to my coat." He got up from where he had sat crouched in the corner by the window and walked over to the teatable. "Any food left?"
"Here, you poor child," said Nancibel, bouncing a section of sticky chocolate cake on to a plate. "I'll make some fresh tea in a minute. Do you realize that this afternoon is the first triumph in a career of fashionable music? O, it's too silly ..." She burst out laughing, letting herself drop limply into a chair.
"I thought it was going a little far when the stout, red-haired lady sailed in with those two poor little men like a liner being tugged up to the wharf," said Fanshaw, who still stood with his back to the unlit gaslogs.
"That's the famous Mrs. Hammond Tweed, who writes animal stories," burst out Nancibel, carried off on a fresh gust of hysterical laughter. "The way she said Ah when Salinski wriggled out of a cadenza, like people watching sky-rockets."
Nancibel rolled about on her chair. What fun it was to be giggling like this with Wenny and Fanshaw, like children who've done something naughty. Through the tears in her eyes she could see, beyond the big brass-topped teatable stacked with used teacups and crumb-covered plates where here and there a cigarette but blackened with its ash a few drops of tea left in a spoon, Wenny's brown face convulsed with laughter and greediness as he stuffed hunks of chocolate cake into his mouth. And Fitzie thinks I'm angling after old Salinski. The thought came to make her laugh the harder. Her foot knocked against the leg of the teatable and all the cups rattled.
"Look out, Nan, you'll have it over," said Fanshaw.
"Wouldn't care if I did. I'd like to smash something."
"You shan't smash Confucius there, young lady. I'll not let you." Fanshaw put the big blue Chinese teapot in a place of safety on the mantelpiece.
Nan got to her feet and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.
"O, dear! ... But I must give you children some fresh tea to make up for all you've suffered."
She ran out to the kitchenette to put fresh tea in the pot. From there she called: "Wenny, bring the debris, I'll leave it for the maid to clean up." The glasses in a row along a shelf whined with the vibration of her voice. She felt all at once curiously constrained. Absurd. She'd known Wenny when he was in knickerbockers. Why should it embarrass her to be alone with him in the kitchenette? The tea sizzled faintly, and the steam came up scalding in her face as she poured the boiling water into the pot. She did not turn around she was flushing so, when he heard Wenny's step and the rattle of china behind her.
"After the battle mother," sang Wenny as he put the tea things down beside the sink.
"Here, you cut this lemon and bring it in, Wenny, if you don't mind," she said and fled with the pot and a couple of clean cups into the other room. Fanshaw's voice was always so soothing when one was excited.
"There's still a bit of the afterglow," said Fanshaw from near the window. "It's wonderful how long it lingers these fall evenings."
Wenny had come back with the lemon and dropped a piece into each of the three cups. Then he sniffed at his hands.
"That's a splendid lemon. It's wonderful how good it makes your fingers smell."
She watched his lips form the words. Semetic lips, like in the Assyrians in the museum, she thought.
"Gertrude said"; Fanshaw was taking little sips of tea as he spoke, "You'ld be taken up with the spirits."
"Not gin I hope." She tossed her head up suddenly, lips pressed together. Fine gesture that, whispered some mocking demon in her.
Fanshaw smiled indulgently with thin lips.
"No, I mean spooks," he said. "Gertrude said you did extraordinary things with a ouija board. She's very silly, you know."
"Made me out a regular witch of Endor, did she?" Her voice was tense in spite of herself.
"O, I hate the longfaced way people talk about that guff ... as if people dead could be more important than people alive," Wenny blurted out angrily.
Nan found herself looking in his eyes; the black pupils widened as she looked in them. There was a warmth about her body as if his vehemence had communicated itself to her. Then the eyes flashed away.
"What nonsense, Wendell," she said. "Don't be so silly. I just played with a ouija board to see what people would say. We talked to Robinson Crusoe."
Fanshaw waved a long thin hand in the air.
"For Heaven's sake, don't squabble. After all those young women, I feel weak. There must have been a thousand of them ... I say, Nan, did you invite the whole conservatory?"
"No, but as they were all dying to say they'd been in the same room with Salinski, I went the limit."
"You certainly did."
"Gosh! The size of that star," came Wenny's voice from the window. In his black silhouette Nan was imagining the moulding of the muscles of the arms, the hollow between the shoulders, the hard bulge of calves. She got to her feet. The grey jade beads hung down from her neck as she lifted the teatable out of the way. The little demon in her head was hissing Careful Nancibel, careful Nancibel as she walked over to the window. Her arm hanging limply at her side touched his arm; writhing hump-backed flares danced an insane ballet through her body. Down the street a grindorgan was playing The Wearing of the Green. What wonderful lashes he has, she caught herself thinking, so much nicer than mine. Warm shudders came from his cheek to her cheek, from his moving lips.
"It looks as big as a chrysanthemum," he was saying. She had forgotten the star. She saw it then bristling with green horns of light.
Wenny wore a woolly suit that had been wet, as it had been raining; the smell of it mixed with a tang of tobacco filled her nostrils. She was looking at the star that seemed to palpitate with slow sucking rhythm, afloat in the evening v like a jellyfish in shallow bay water. For an instant all her life palpitated hideously with the star. She turned. Her lips almost brushed Wenny's cheek.
"L'étoile du berger," said Fanshaw. His voice rasped through Nan's head.
Her hands were icecold. The little demon in her head with a voice like Aunt M's was whispering: You must meet my niece Nancibel Taylor, she's such a clever violinist. She pulled the shade down sharply in Wenny's face.
"You'ld be there all night mooning at that star," she said and tried to laugh.
They sat down in their chairs again.
"Well, Wenny, how have you been wasting your time?" Her voice rang false in her ears.
Wenny's brown eyes looked at her timidly for a moment. He spread his square hands on his knees and glanced down at their large knuckles. In Nan a cold voice exulted: he has the hands of a ditchdigger.
"I wish I knew," he said.
She looked at Fanshaw. His bluish green crepe necktie was the color his eyes were behind the round tortoiseshell spectacles. His arched nose and high forehead were what had made one of the girls say: There's a clever looking man. She was glad he was here. She always felt sane where Fanshaw was.
"Wenny," Fanshaw was saying as he got to to his feet.
"What's the matter?"
"Don't go," said Nan in a sudden panic at the idea of being left alone.
"But, Nan, I promised the Perkinses I'd bring Wenny to dinner and we are late already."
"O hell," muttered Wenny.
"I promised you'ld come, and I'm going to drag you along even if your shirt is dirty."
"It looked clean this morning," said Wenny flushing.
"Well, it's filthy now."
"That seems to me a dam good reason for not going."
The jade beads clinked as she followed them down the hall towards the door. For some reason she held out her hand to them formally. After the limpness of Fanshaw's hand, Wenny's seemed hard and hot. Again the phrase came to her mind: ditchdigger's hands.
"I don't want to go a bit, Nan...."
"Well, good evening," interrupted Fanshaw pushing Wenny towards the door with a gesture of proprietorship. As they turned towards the elevator, her eyes followed the fuzziness of Wenny's hair down the nape of his neck under the soft collar. The collar had a line of grime round it. Dirty little animal, said the voice in her. She closed the door, her nostrils full of the greasy smell of the elevator. The smile went out of her face.
The beads clinked as she walked back to the parlor. What was the matter with her today anyhow?—An old maid that's what you are like Aunt M. Nonsense, I'm too alive for all that rubbish. She stood with compressed lips looking about the room. How beastly small it was. There was a design in reddish orange on the bright blue curtains, that was echoed by the orange shade on the tall lamp that stood on the floor beside the piano. She'd thought herself clever to think up the colorscheme, with the warm buff walls as a background. It seemed hideous to her at that moment, like the decoration of a room in the window of a department store. There were still soiled teacups on the tables and along the mantel, and little plates with bits of sandwich and cake on them. She picked up the fat blue teapot Fanshaw had named Confucius. The smooth bulge of it in her hands was reassuring for a moment. Then solitude poured in upon her again. The Jacobean table with knobby legs opposite the fireplace and the books crammed into the bookcase and the battered Buhl cabinet in the corner all seemed squared and tiptoe with hostility. There was a faint bitter smell of tealeaves and burnt out cigarettebutts about everything.
She put down the teapot and flung herself on the pianostool. She would play madly. She would compose. A momentary thrill of huge chords, rising cadences to carry her with immense wingbeats out of the pit of sick yearning. She struck the keys with all ten fingers. The sound jangled loud through the room. She winced. Idiot, she said aloud, and went to the window. She raised the shade part way and let it fall behind her. The green star trembled in the west just above the dark mass of a building the other side of the Fenway. She watched it breathless while it sank out of sight.
* * * *
Nan climbed painfully out of slumber as one climbs a ladder. Sparrows were twittering outside. Her white bedroom was full of sunlight that poured through the wide window opposite her bed, smouldered hotly on the red and blue of the carpet, glinted on the tall mahogany bedpost and finally struck a warm tingling coverlet over her feet and legs. She snuggled into the bedclothes and lay staring at the ceiling wrapped in a delicious blank haze of sleepiness. A motortruck rasping by outside grated on her drowsy quiet and then rattled off into silence. Through the window she could see a lacework of treetops and the expressionless cubes of the further apartment houses and, beyond, a blue vaguely clouded sky. Two little sparrows, fat, fuzzy, with bright eyes, fluttered down past the window. She closed her eyes. In her ears something formed the words: So wonderfully secure.
She woke with a start from her doze. What was she trying to remember? She was suddenly wide awake, her heart pounding. The warm bulge of his arm against her arm, hard, male, and the bright jelly of his eyes between black lashes, last evening looking at the star. She tried to brush the memory off; it clung about her the way the sticky spiderwebs used to cling to her face and hair walking through the woods last summer. She didn't want to think of Wenny that way, she told herself. It would spoil everything, she must have more self-control. No, no, she said aloud as she put her toes into her slippers. Then she went about her dressing with compressed lips.
She threw herself into a flurry of things to be done. Sunday and late and the maid not coming. There was the percolator to put on, the water to run for her bath, the milk to take in, and the paper, and the caps to take off the milk bottle and the creambottle, and the flame under the percolator mustn't be too high and the bath mustn't be too hot. The familiar morning smells, gasflame, soap, bathwater, coffee-steam, were vaguely distasteful to her this morning, gave her a feeling of days succeeding days and years years, as alike and meaningless as milkbottles. As she was cleaning her teeth she stopped with her mouth full of lather and the tooth brush in her hand. It was two years and eight months she'd been living in this apartment. O something must happen soon. When she had rinsed her mouth she looked at herself a long while in the tilted mirror over the washbasin. On one side the nickel fixture of the shower over the bathtub, on the other a glimpse through the open door into the hall and a patch of blue and green curtain; in the middle her face, chestnut hair caught loosely away from the narrow forehead, straight eyebrows darker than her hair, fine lashes. She stared for a moment intensely in her own grey eyes, then closed them with a shudder. I have the thin New England lips, she said to herself. She pulled the nightgown off impatiently and stood with her hands on her scarcely formed breasts looking down into the pale green of the bathtub. Somewhere at the end of a long corridor of her mind she ran through the dappled shadow of woods, naked, swift, chased by someone brown, flushed, goatfooted. She could feel in her nostrils the roughness of the smell of Wenny's damp homespun suit. Après midi d'un Faune, the words formed in her mind, Music by Claude Debussy, Choreography by M. Nijinski; the big program in her hands with its smell of glazed printer's ink and the rustling of dresses about her at the Opera. What are you dawdling about? she muttered, and stepped into the water and began briskly soaping the facecloth.
Half an hour later Nancibel Taylor sat at the table beside the window in the livingroom sipping coffee and putting dabs of butter on the broken pieces of a sugared bun left over from tea. The sky had clouded over. Through the black tangle of twigs of the low trees in the Fenway here and there a slaty gleam of water flashed out. From a long way off came the unresonant tolling of a churchbell broken into occasionally by the shrill grind of a street car round a corner. Still chewing the last mouthful Nan picked up the cup and plate, absentmindedly brushing a few crumbs off the blue tablecover with one hand, and carried them into the kitchenette. Putting them in the sink she let the hot water run on them, and with her hand still on the tap, paused to think what she must do next. O, the garbage. She picked up the zinc pail a little gingerly, holding her face away from it, and put it on the dumbwaiter, then pulled on the grimy cord that made the dumbwaiter descend, past the kitchenettes of the apartments below into the lowest region of all where the janitor was and a smell of coalgas from the furnace. After that with a feeling of relief Nan washed her hands and put her hat on in front of the pierglass in her bedroom, a hat of fine black straw without trimming that seemed to her to go very well with her light grey tailored suit. Pulling on her gloves, with a faint glow in her of anticipation of streets and movement and faces, she walked down the stairs.
Outside the air was raw with a faint underlying rottenness of autumn. Nan walked briskly, rejoicing in the tap of her little heels on the even pavement, down a long street of brick apartments that merged into older brownstone houses with dusty steps and several bells beside the front door. The pianos were quieter than usual because it was Sunday, but occasionally the high voice of a girl doing her scales jerked out through a pair of muslin windowcurtains or there came the shriek of a violin being tuned. Down Commonwealth Avenue the elms were losing their leaves. In the windows bloated chrysanthemum flowers stood up stiffly out of jardinieres. In the Public Garden, where there was still a bit of flame in the leaves of the trees, in front of an asthmatic old man sitting on a bench with his chin on a silverhandled cane beside a little old grey woman in a porkpie hat, Nan found herself all of a sudden looking into the eager black eyes of Miss Fitzhugh.
"O, Nan, I'm so glad to see you."
Nan felt her neatly gloved fingers squeezed with sudden violence.
"Why, what's wrong?"
"Just let me tell you.... O, I'm so upset. I haven't been able to practice a minute all day. I haven't been so upset since I broke off my engagement and sent Billy back his ring.... It's about Mabel Worthington."
"But Fitzie, who's Mabel Worthington?"
"I must have told you about her. She was such a lovely girl, one of our second violins.... Nancibel, you never pay any attention when I tell you things; I think it's mean of you.... O, it's too dreadful and I'm just miserable about it.... Look, dear, won't you walk a little up Huntington Avenue? I was just going to get a soda ... so soothing, you know, dear, and I know the nicest candy store just a block up."
As they followed the path towards the Unitarian Church between grass patches dappled with russet of leaves, Nan could feel the eyes of the men on the benches, eyes indolent after a bloating Sunday breakfast, dazzled by following the smudgy sharpscented columns of Sunday newspapers, eyes blurred by Saturday night parties; their glances seemed to weave a warm shameful net to catch her wellpoised ankles and the erect slenderness of her figure in its closely tailored tweed. Fitzie was still talking.
"But, you must have seen her, dear, the last time you went to hear us play.... You did go, didn't you, that time I sent you the ticket? You said you'd been.... She was to the left beside the stage, just beside the first violin, a lovely girl with black curly hair."
At the corner they threaded their way among groups of heavyjowled people coming out of the church, men bristling with decorous stiffness, white points of starched collars, prickly scarfpins in satin of neckties, black curves of hats and gleaming shoetips, women fuzzy with boas and bits of fur and spotted veils.
"I had always thought," went on Fitzie's voice in a whine of dismay, "that she had a great future, and she seemed so much the best educated and ... you know ... most refined person there."
"But, what's happened to her?"
"I must begin at the beginning.... You see, dear, it was this way.... O, this is it. What will you have, dear?"
A smell of sodawater and chocolate and polished nickel encompassed them about. They sat at a little white table on which was a lace doily covered by a round piece of plate glass.
A waitress in black with tight starched bands at the wrists and waist hung over them.
"What are you having, dear?" said Fitzie again. "I'm goin' to have a banana split. I just love banana splits. Isn't it greedy of me? And before lunch, too."
"D'you know if you don't mind, Fitzie, I won't take anything. I'm going to dine with Aunt M. and she always feeds one a dreadful lot of stuffing on Sundays. She has such old-fashioned ideas about food."
"Well, as I was telling you, Nancibel, the first time I guessed anything was wrong was about a month ago, when I noticed a young Italian waiting outside the stage door. I was in a hurry and didn't notice him until I'd brushed against him. He was very poorly dressed and smelt dreadfully of garlic but I had to admit to myself that he was goodlooking, like a young Greek god!"
"Young Greek gods probably smelt of garlic too," said Nan laughing.
The banana split had arrived in a boatshaped plate. Miss Fitzhugh took up a dab of whipped cream on her spoon.
"Won't you have just a taste, Nancibel? ... No? O, you are a Puritan, dear.... Well, to make a long story short, one day last week I met them on Washington Street, Mabel Worthington and that dreadful Italian. I was brushing by pretending not to see them.... I thought it would be less embarrassing for them, you understand, dear.... But not a bit of it, she stopped me and chatted for a minute, calm as a cucumber, and then she introduced me to him.... This is Giovanni, she said, and that's all she said, though they both flushed crimson. He bobbed his head awkwardly at me and smiled showing the most beautiful teeth. And that was all."
Fitzie was quiet for a minute and took three or four spoonfulls of yellow icecream in succession. She was talking in a rapid whisper, leaning far over the table towards Nan's unsmiling face.
"And yesterday morning she didn't turn up at rehearsal. And now it appears that she has gone off with him. Isn't it frightful. Because she was a lovely girl, really, a lovely girl. She reminded me of you."
"Well," said Nan, "she was probably in love with him."
"But I'm coming to the most dreadful part. ... The wretched man had a wife and two squalling filthy little babies. They came round to the theatre and made a dreadful scene, a horrid coarse woman just like an immigrant. ... And he is nothing but a common laborer, just think of it. O, how can people do such things? It just makes me sick to think of that lovely girl in the power of that horrible garlic-smelling ruffian.... It just makes me sick to think of it."
Miss Fitzhugh caught up the last yellow liquid on her plate with several swift scraping little strokes of her spoon. She started delving with two fingers in the back compartment of her alligatorskin purse.
"Just think of it, Nancibel, a common laborer. If he'd been a musician or a composer or something it would have been different even if he was an Italian, but ... O, Nancibel, won't you please let me have your hanky a sec I declare I've lost mine."
Nan handed over her handkerchief.
"I suppose she's in love with him," she said. "It's a good thing she makes her own living."
"But, don't you think it's dreadful?"
"How can we tell? But, anyway, I must run along. Aunt M. always expects me at twelve every Sunday and she thinks I have come to some dreadful end if I don't get there on the dot."
Nan was out in the street again. A dusty wind had come up and was making dead leaves and scraps of newspapers dance in the gutters, and tearing ragged holes in the clouds. O how poor Fitzie gets on my nerves, Nan was saying to herself, and a picture flashed through her mind of Fitzie opening her eyes wide, rapt, and saying, pausing with her mouth open a little between the words—Like a young Greek god.
She walked over to Beacon Street and down the row of houses that faces the Public Garden, looking now and then into front windows massed with ferns and autumn flowers. On small wellcleaned windowpanes a reflection of sky and clouds, shadows of sombredressed people passing, fleeting glint of limousines, then, beside a bunch of yellow curlypetalled chrysanthemums the face of Aunt M. Nan thought how ashy and wrinkled it looked beside the yellow flowers. The face smiled and bobbed showing a straight part and hair steelgrey slicked against the head on either side. Nan pulled at the shining brass knob of the bell. Immediately the door opened.
"Yer late, Miss Nancibel; the missus was agettin' anxious an' alookin' outa the winder," said the old woman in flounced cap and apron metallic with starch who let her in.
"I'm not so awfully late, am I, Mary Ann?"
Pulling off her gloves, Nan brushed through portieres of salmoncolored brocade into the parlor.
"O, my dear Nancibel, how glad I am to see you," said Aunt M. throwing stubby arms round her niece's neck. Nan's lips touched the wrinkled lifeless skin.
"I'm sorry to be late, Auntie."
"Well, one can't expect a budding virtuoso. ... I suppose one should say virtuosa ... to be very punctual. And punctuality is fallen into disrepute among young people nowadays. ... Now run up and take your things off like a good girl and come back quickly and talk to me so that we can have a good chat before the Turnstables come."
"Are they coming Auntie?"
"Yes, Cousin Jane Turnstable and her boy and girl are coming to dinner at half after one. It's quite thrilling to have so many young people in the house."
Running up the thickcarpeted stairs, Nan caught herself remembering running up those same stairs when she was still in short skirts, a Scotch plaid it was, accordionpleated, that day, and Mary Ann was polishing the brass rails that kept the carpet down, and her Aunt M., a tall omnipotent person then, had told her not to sing, O my darling Clementine, because it was a low vulgar song and somehow she hadn't been able to keep it in and had shouted out without meaning to:
Herring boxes without topses,
Sandals were for Clementine.
And Aunt M. had come out on the landing suddenly very cold and sharptoned and had made her stay in her room all afternoon and learn The Slave's Dream. As Nan went into the little room with Dutch blue wallpaper, which Aunt M. always called Nancibel's room, to throw her hat on the bed and give a hasty pat to her hair in front of the mirror,
Beside the ungathered rice he lay
His sickle in his hand,
bubbled up from somewhere deep in her mind. She smiled thinking how as the years had passed her relation to Aunt M. had changed, until now it was she who seemed the tall omnipotent person, skilled in all the world outside the house, and her aunt the timid one the housewalls protected from the shaggy world.
"Well, dear, what have you been up to all the week?" said Aunt M. when Nan had run down the stairs and back into the parlor. "I hope you haven't been gadding about a lot, like last week."
"Not a gad," said Nan laughing. They sat side by side on the curvebacked sofa in front of the window. Nan was looking down at Aunt M.'s old hands swollen at the knuckles that lay halfclenched on the full mauve satin of her dress. In her nostrils was a tang from the chrysanthemums.
"And how's your practicing?"
"Pretty good this week."
"You know how I feel about your music, Nancibel." There was a flame of blue in Aunt M.'s hazel eyes.
"You mustn't put too much faith in it," said Nan roughly. She went on hastily in a high nervous voice like her voice when she had people to tea: "Practiced every day but Thursday. Worked to a frazzle, really. How the neighbors must hate me. And there's somebody two floors down who plays the cornet all the morning, so we do a sort of distant duet with the effect quite ... modern."
"Why didn't you practice Thursday deary?"
"I went out to Nahant with Fanshaw and Wendell to see the surf. There was a wonderful noreaster blowing."
"You see a lot of those two young men."
"Of course I do.... But, Auntie, what have you been doing? When did you get the chrysanthemums? they're lovely."
"You can't get me off the track that way," said Aunt M. with a sly smile. "Which of them is it, Nancibel?"
"No, it's different from that.... O, I can't explain it." Nan saw herself and Wenny and Fanshaw running arm in arm on the turf at the cliffedge, leaning against the wind, the taste of spray on their lips. "It's so difficult to classify feelings. That's what Wenny says.... O, you wouldn't understand Auntie."
Nan felt the old woman beside her wince.
"O, I didn't mean that, Aunt M. Why am I so dreadfully inconsiderate?"
"I wonder why Cousin Jane Turnstable doesn't come. I hope they won't be late. It upsets poor Judkins so to have to keep dinner hot."
They were silent. O, I must think of something to talk about, Nan was saying over and over again in her mind. She was staring at the little Corot that hung beside the mantel. A poplar overhanging water greywhite like milkweed silk.
"Do you remember Auntie when I was a little girl what ecstasies I used to go into over that little picture? When you used to tell me about abroad I used to think of everything as pale green and silver grey, like that picture."
"A funny impatient little girl you were," said Aunt M. softly. "Poor Elizabeth used to worry so about your tantrums, but I used to reassure her by saying it was merely temperament and that you'd be a great artist some day.... If she had only been spared to us to hear you play...."
The door bell rang.
"There they are," said Nan with relief.
"And they are not late after all. Punctual to the minute.... O, my dear Cousin Jane, how glad I am to see you. And James you've grown I declare.... Helen, you'll kiss your old cousin, won't you, dear?"
Cousin Jane Turnstable was a tall woman with silvery hair caught up smoothly under a broad hat. Her eyebrows were black and her face had all over the same unwrinkled milky texture as her cheeks. The boy and girl were both blonde and very thin. They all stood in a group in the center of the buff and blue carpet of the parlor, and the voices of the Turnstables chimed softly together like well attuned bells against Nan's deep voice and the quavering voice of her aunt.
"Nancibel, you won't mind showing Cousin Jane and Cousin Helen where they can take their things off, will you dear?" said Aunt M. At the same moment Mary Ann came through the sliding doors that led to the dining room and announced solemnly: "Dinner's on the table, mum."
"This is nice," said Aunt M. when they were all seated round the table where amid a glitter of silverware the creases stood up stiffly in the heavily starched linen cloth: "Quite like old times." And as Nan let the brown croutons slide off the spoon into the tomato bisque a heartbreaking lassitude came over her—I'm twentyeight and every seventh day of my life I must have done this. Twentyeight by fifty-two, what does that make? But some one was speaking to her. "And how did you enjoy September at Squirrel Island?" Cousin Jane Turnstable was asking in her musical voice.
After dinner with the thickness of overrich icecream still in their mouths they went into the parlor for coffee.
"I suppose I shall never go abroad again," Aunt M. was saying. "My travelling days are over. But if I did it would be to take for one last time that drive from Sorrento to Amalfi when the lemontrees are in bloom.... I'm afraid it is a little blasphemous to say it, but I can't imagine Heaven more beautiful. You surely have taken that drive, Nancibel."
"I've never been south of Florence, Auntie." With bitter poignance she sat remembering the smell of lemontrees. She was moving the spoon round her small cup of coffee with a slow movement of long fingers. She thought of Fitzie eating banana split and telling about the girl who'd run off with an Italian smelling of garlic like a young Greek god. Poor Fitzie who had none of that in her life, always making up romances for other people.
"I seem to remember," Aunt M. went on, "having heard Philips Brooks say that no one could really feel the beauty of such sights and remain an unbeliever."
"Ah, yes, so true," said Cousin Jane Turnstable.
"O dear," said James, his voice breaking.
Nan looked up at him suddenly. His face was crimson. He had spilt half a cup of coffee over his neatlypressed grey trousers. Nan took the cup out of his hand and set it on the mantel while he sheepishly fumbled for the spoon on the floor.
"No harm done," she said. "Come upstairs; it'll wash right out. I'll give you a cloth to rub it with."
"I'm afraid you think I'm dreadfully dumb, Cousin Nancibel. That was the dumbest thing to do," he said in tearful voice going up the stairs.
"Nonsense. I might have done it myself," she answered laughing. "Anything to break up the monotony of Sunday afternoon! ... Right in here, James. You sit on the bathtub and hold it tight. I'll rub it with a little soap, Here's a cloth."
The boy did as he was told.
"Why, that'll come right out. You'll never notice it," said Nan briskly rubbing the cloth held against his thin thigh.
"You don't like Sunday either." His eyes looked up into hers with a sudden flash.
She wrinkled up her nose and he laughed.
From the wet woolly cloth came up a rough little smell like from Wenny's homespun. She felt herself flushing hotly. The boy looked up at her fixedly for a second and then the flush suffused his fair skin until it reddened his ears and the roots of his flaxen hair.
"That'll do," said Nan gruffly. "No one will notice it now." She walked hurriedly to the stairs and down.
"You'll play for us a bit, won't you, Nancibel?" said her Aunt when she was back in the parlor.
"All right. You'll accompany won't you?"
She brushed past James without looking at him as she went into the hall to fetch her violin. She was furious at herself for having blushed. As she leaned over to unstrap the violin case, the blood pounded in her temples and filled her eyes so that she could scarcely see. The blood in her ears was the sound of the grindorgan playing The Wearing of the Green after tea yesterday, when Wenny's cheek had been beside her cheek and they had looked at the throbbing star in the west. She tossed her head back and stood for a moment, her teeth firm together, the violin in one hand and bow in the other. And the girl who played the violin in the Fadettes had run off with an Italian who smelt of garlic like a young Greek god. O Fitzie's a romantic fool.
"How well you are looking today," said Aunt M. from the pianostool. "Shall it be Bach, Nancibel?"
* * * *
A yellow mist had come in off the harbor during the evening so that walking home after the concert the streets were dim and unfamiliar and each arclight had a ruddy halo. Nan walked beside Fanshaw whose greenish raincoat made him look taller and thinner even than usual. Ahead of them they could hear Wenny and Betty Thomas laughing together.
"What do you think of Betty?" Nan was saying in a low voice.
"She's your latest discovery isn't she? ... A trifle ... er ... unconscious I should say. No harm in her.... I wish she hadn't such a burr in her voice."
"O you are chilly."
"I didn't mean to be so pompous. She seems to like music. So rare in a musician."
Nan laughed.
"You seem to be feeling very superior this evening, Fanshaw. What have you done to be so cocky?"
"Little enough, God knows.... Nan, I wish we could get Wenny settled somehow. I'm worried about him. He ought to get to work at something definite."
"But he's so enormously alive, Fanshaw. How can one worry about him. O, if I had half his vitality, sensitiveness...."
"So much of that is sheer nerves ... in a man. In you it's different. There's something rock bottom about women that men haven't at all. We are lichen. If we are too alive we burn up and shrivel.... I wonder if he isn't a little too alive."
"Nonsense."
"Do you know you do us a lot of good, Nan?"
"If you think, young man, that I'm going to be anybody's rock of ages, you are mistaken, I can tell you that."
The others were waiting for them at a corner where a drugstore sent planes of white and greenish light slanting to the gleaming mud-filmed pavement.
"This is my street, people," said Betty Thomas.
"But we'll take you to your door. Remember the holdups," said Wenny.
"It'ld be so dreadfully exciting to be held up."
"It's on my way home anyway, Betty." Nan took the girl's arm and pulled her with her across the street.
The two men followed them up a street of apartment houses where patches of lighted windows made a yellow blur in the fog above their heads. Before the word Swarthcote on a glass door they stopped.
"Good night all," said Betty Thomas. "Thank you, deary, for the lovely supper and everything."
The door closed behind her. With Nan in the middle the three of them walked on.
"How cosy it is this way in the fog?" she said.
"It makes me feel wonderfully sentimental," Wenny said slowly. "Wagner makes me feel sentimental anyway, but Wagner plus fog ... like sitting on the curbstone and letting great warm tears flow down my cheeks till the gutter simply gurgled with them."
"I say," said Fanshaw.
"Not a bit of it," broke in Nan. "I feel jolly, like roasting apples in front of an open fire. We're so secure all three of us together this way and the world drifting by, dinner at Aunt M.'s and tomato bisque and croutons and love and hate and all that outside drifting by like fog."
"Harmless you mean, Nan. I shouldn't say so.... Do you think its harmless, Wenny?"
"May be for some people, Fanshaw."
"No, I don't mean that. O, you are so lackadaisical, Fanshaw," Nan said bitterly. "I mean something more active.... The three of us conquering, shutting the fog and the misery out, all that helpless against us. But I'm talking like a book."
"You are a little, Nan," said Wenny laughing.
Nan felt what she wanted to say slipping out of her mind, ungraspable. The three of them walked on in silence, arm in arm, with Nan in the middle. Beginnings of sentences flared and sputtered out in her mind like damp fireworks. Slowly the yellow fog, the cold enormous fog that had somehow a rhythm of slow vague swells out at sea sifted in upon her, blurred the focus of herself that had been for a moment intensely sharp. She so wanted to say something that would make that moment permanent, that would pin down forever the sudden harmony of the three of them so that she could always possess it, no matter what happened after. Epigram, that was the word. There had been Greeks who had cut the flame of an instant deep on stone in broad letters for centuries to read.
"I wish we could walk like this always."
Her throat was dry. At the sound of her thin voice, all her thoughts scuttled into the dark like cockroaches in a kitchen cupboard. Her mind smoothed to vacancy.
"How do you mean?" asked Wenny.
"Well, here we are," said Fanshaw in a singsong tone.
The Swansea, in gold gothic letters shaded with black, stared at her from a wide glass door. Beyond white steps another glass door, unmarked. Nan remembered how she used to feel when she was a child and people were getting ready to go into dinner and bedtime came. She turned her back on the sourly familiar letters. Opposite a few twigs of trees leaned into the warm tent of light from a streetlamp out of dark immensity of fog. The light slanting out through the glass door gave a gleam on Fanshaw's glasses that hid his eyes. She pressed ever so slightly his long limp hand and Wenny's hard hand. Wenny's face was flushed from the rawness of the fog and there was a glint in his eyes that made her catch her breath joyously. She wanted to say something. They turned away, raised their hands vaguely and walked off. Fanshaw had leaned over and said something to Wenny that had made him laugh. The door closed behind her. She had a glimpse of the letters The Swansea inside out. She took her key out of her purse and unlocked the inner door. She hated Fanshaw, his glasses that hid his eyes, his long limp hands. They had gone off carelessly laughing. And Wenny too, with the grime round his collar and his shambling walk like an Italian laborer's. She pushed open the sliding door of the elevator that had a familiar everyday smell of dust and machine oil. The door slid to behind her. She put her finger on the button marked 4. It was the girl in the Fadettes who had gone off with a brown man, garlicky, with bright teeth like the Greeks' were who made epigrams. Nan closed her eyes as the elevator started to rise. She was very tired.