Fanshaw Macdougan's left shoe pinched the upper part of his foot and a damp chill from the fog-moistened pavement seeped through the thin soles as he walked with long strides beside Wenny. These things gave a vaguely peevish whine to the flow of thoughts through his head. If only I had the money, he was thinking, I would have ten pairs of shoes and a valet to wear them until they were comfortable. The form of an advertisement in a paper started into his head: Wanted a valet, must wear No. 9 shoes, best references required; and himself in a dressing gown of pale colored silk looking over the applicants from a great tapestried easychair. O, how one could live if one had the money, and the people who had it never seemed to know how to use it except Mrs. Jack Gardiner in her Italian palace.
"I was thinking what I'd do if I had a million dollars, Wenny."
Wenny turned, his eyes snapping, and laughed. The glimpse of his face laughing turned up into the full white glare of an arclight lingered in Fanshaw's eyes and faded, the way a stranger's face out of a crowd would sometimes linger and fade. Nan's face too, the profile as she turned to put her key in the lock of the glass door was still sharp in his mind, behind it a memory of the smell extraordinarily warm honied artificial of the flowers among the pictures in Mrs. Gardiner's gallery. Strange that Nan should have worn a hat like that this evening. Unbecoming, made her look like a schoolteacher. The New England in her coming out. Such a wonderful person had no right to look that way. That night at the fancy dress dance at the Logans she had looked her best, her face oval, Sienese, and the hair tight back from her forehead under a jewelled net like a girl by a Lombard painter. There had been such distinction in the modelling of her forehead and cheekbones and her slender neck among all those panting pigeonbreasted women. How rarely people were themselves. Out of the corner of an eye he glanced at Wenny walking beside him with short steps, doggedly, his face towards the ground. A trio we are, Nan and Wenny and I, a few friends my only comfort in this great snarling waste of a country. We don't fit here. We are like people floating down a stream in a barge out of a Canaletto carnival, gilt and dull vermilion, beautiful lean-faced people of the Renaissance lost in a marsh, in a stagnant canal overhung by black walls and towering steel girders. One could make a poem or an essay out of that idea, some people could; Wenny, if he weren't such a lazy little brute. Why couldn't I?
"Didn't you think Nan looked tired tonight?" asked Wenny suddenly.
Fanshaw was loath to break into the rhythm of his thoughts.
"I did," said Wenny again.
"Why should she be tired? She hasn't worked very hard this week."
Wenny said nothing. The street was muffled by the fog all about them. In Fanshaw's mind were phrases from Lamb, vague thought of fogs over London. They came out on the springy boards of the bridge that seemed to sway ever so little under their feet. The fog above the river was denser and colder. Their steps were loud on the slats of the sidewalk. Half way over they passed a man and a girl, bodies cleaving together so that they made a single silhouette. Fanshaw caught Wenny's backward glance after them. Rather unhealthy, the interest in those things, he thought. Further along they heard a regular heavy tread coming towards them, a policeman.
"He'll break their clinch," said Wenny giggling. Fanshaw was annoyed,—vulgar, he thought, why notice such things? Other ages perhaps had put beauty, romance in them; Paolo and Francesca floating cloudy through limbo.
"These last few days I have been often thinking of that passage, Pico della Mirandola riding into Florence in the time of lilies. Then it would have been less futile to be alive."
"How do you know Fanshaw?"
"You have no nostalgia of the past, have you, Wenny? It's that things were so much cleaner, fresher. Everything was not so muddled and sordid then."
"Can't things always have been muddled and sordid? I think they were."
"Those people on the bridge and you giggling at them. I can't understand it, it's so low."
"Then, by God, you can't understand anything." Wenny's voice broke; he was angry and walked faster. Fanshaw thought of a phrase out of The Book of Tea; a man without tea was a man without poise, refinement. Wenny had no tea. How amusing his rages were. They went along without speaking. In the bright circle of each arclight he glanced at Wenny's sullen face, the prominent lips, the strangely soft-textured cheeks, the slightness of the waist under the shirt that bagged at the belt revealed by the flapping unbuttoned coat, the clenched swinging hands. There were puddles in the road. It was dark between arclights, a few glows from windows loomed distant among weighty shadows. Shadows seemed to move slouchingly just out of sight. Fanshaw felt he was walking unawares through all manner of lives, complications of events. Thought of holdups brought a vague fear into his mind. There ought to be more lights. If it weren't for these wretched Irish politicians who ran things.... When they crossed the railway tracks there were little red and green lights in the fog, the wail of an engine far away. A bell began to ring and the old man dozing in a little shack with a red and a green flag propped against his knees—like Rembrandt the shadows thought Fanshaw—jumped up. The bar came down behind them. Lights flashed down the track and they could hear down towards Cambridge-port the chug of a locomotive and the slow bumping of the wheels of freightcars over a crossing.
"Let's stop and watch it go past," said Wenny.
"No, my feet are wet. I'm afraid of catching cold."
They walked on.
"I think I'll try an' get a job on a section gang on the railway this summer, Fanshaw."
"A fine Italian laborer you'd make, Wenny; why you would never get up early enough, and think of the food and the bunkhouses, fearful!"
"I think I'd like it for a while."
Through chinks in the great bulk of the Armory light and a racket of voices trickled out into the fog like sand out of a cart.
"I guess it's a dance," said Wenny.
The day that Ficino finished his great work—Plato was it?—Pico della Mirandola rode into Florence and the lilies were in bloom, Fanshaw was thinking, and wondering whether he would have enough money to go abroad comfortably next summer. If I could only leave Mother.
"For crissake lemme walk between yez a sec," came a breathless voice from behind them.
Fanshaw hastened his stride. His muscles were tense. A holdup.
"Walk slow like. Lemme walk between yez for crissake."
Fanshaw looked desperately up the long straight street towards the glare of Central Square. Not a policeman of course. The man walked panting between them with red sweating face stuck forward. Fanshaw dropped back a step and came up on the outside of Wenny.
"What's the trouble?" Wenny was saying.
"Hell to pay.... Fight in the Armory, see? I doan know what it was about.... I was lookin' at two fellows fightin' an' a guy, a big tall guy, comes up to me, an' says, Well, what about it? Then he called me a sonofabitch.... I guess he was a Catholic, one of them South Boston guys. I hit 'im in the jaw, see? An' then I saw the bulls comin' an' I beat it. You don't care if I walk between yez, just to the corner?"
"Of course not," said Wenny.
At the first corner the man left them.
"I'll run along to home and mother now," he said.
"Wasn't that rich," cried Wenny laughing. "Say suppose we go back to see what's happening."
"The policemen would probably arrest us as accessories. You don't believe that man's story, do you? Probably a burglar making off."
"You are an old sourbelly this evening. What's the matter?" Wenny hopped and skipped along beside him roaring with laughter.
"I am rather depressed. Music depresses me."
They had reached the long brightly lighted oblong of Central Square where the fog was thinned by the shine of the plateglass windows of cheap furniture stores and the twisted glint of tinware in the window of Wool worth's. Young men loafed on the edge of the sidewalk and stumpy girls chattered in the doorways of candy shops.
"Where were you born, Fanshaw? I can't seem to remember?"
"Why?"
"I was thinking up where people I knew were born. Nan was born in Boston, Beacon Hill. ... Central Square would be a comical place to be born."
"You knew perfectly well I was born in Omaha. You just want the satisfaction of hearing me say it."
Scraps of talk kept impinging upon them as they threaded through the groups on the sidewalk.
"I only lived there until I was twelve," Fanshaw was saying. In his ears rang the phrase: An' I gave her one swell time. "Then my father died and Mother moved East. She'd always wanted to live in Boston. The day we were settled in our little house in Brookline she brought me in on the car to see the Abbey paintings. She was bound I'd take to the arts."
"By the way, how is your mother now?"
"About the same, Wenny. Poor lamb, I'm afraid she never will get much better. She's so patient about it."
They were out of the square walking past dwelling houses set back from the road. A smell of leaves and autumnal earth came to them. In Fanshaw's mind was the picture of a grey head against a pillow, heavy despairing wrinkles from the nose to the ends of the mouth where was a wry peevish twitch of pain; his mother shapeless in a lilac dressing gown propped up in the easy chair in the library amid a faint stale smell of cologne and medicines.
"I wonder if it will always be like this, this meaningless round of things. It would have been if I hadn't met you, Wenny."
"D'you mean I'm a horrible example to keep you on the straight paths of virtue?" said Wenny harshly. He shook off Fanshaw's hand that was on his arm and thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
"When I'm with you I feel as if there were something I could do about life. Remember the passage about 'to burn with a hard gemlike flame'?"
Wenny grunted.
"We must get something graceful and intense we die in the attempt. I haven't the energy.... I'm going to talk about myself, you can't stop me, Wenny.... Mother has a curio cabinet. You know it, in the corner of the drawing room with a shepherd à la Watteau painted on the panel. Out in Nebraska when I was little I used to spend hours looking at the things: a filigree gondola from Venice, the Sistine Madonna in mosaic, carved wooden goats from Switzerland, the Nuremberg goose boy ... you know all those desperate little Mid-Victorian knick-knacks put in the cabinet so that they won't have to be dusted. I think my mind is like that. It opens. You can put things in and they stay there, but nothing moves. That's why I am so appropriate to the groves of Academe.... You're dynamic."
"A damn bundle of frustrations, that's all I am Fanshaw if you only knew. Funny how we each think the other has the inside dope on things.... My father had it about God or thought he did. He was sure of himself anyway."
"But you are sure of yourself."
"The hell I am.... Let's have a drink. I am fearfully thirsty."
"What you wanting a soda?"
Wenny laughed. They went into the candy store that was thick with the smell of fresh cooked chocolate. A boy with tow hair and a pimply face was washing glasses. Fanshaw found himself staring with a faint internal shudder at the red knuckles as his fingers moved round swiftly in glass under glass under the faucet. They drank glasses of orangeade in silence, Wenny paid the girl behind the cash-register who showed two gold teeth in a smile as they went out. Fanshaw was already thinking with eager anticipation of his room with its orange shaded lamp; the cosy bookish smell of it, the backs of his books in their case of well dusted mahogany and the discreet sheen of the gold letters of their titles in the lamplight, the sepia of the Primavera over the mantel, the neatness of his bedroom, the linen sheets on his bed, the clean aloofness of fresh pyjamas.
"I often wonder why I go out in the evenings at all."
"Why not?"
"Things seem to me so ugly now, all this rasping and grinding. It used not to be so when I was in college but now it makes me feel so unpleasantly futile. When I'm in my room with everything about me as I have grouped it I feel futile too, but pleasantly futile, artistically futile."
"Fanshaw, that's all utter rot."
"That's no argument, Wenny, to call a thing rot."
"But it's rot just the same."
They walked along silent again. How hopeless to make oneself understood. Through the sting of bitterness Fanshaw remembered the first time he had seen Wenny. He had sat beside him in a classroom in front of the yellow varnished desk of the instructor. There was the dry smell of chalk and outside lilacs swayed against a blue sky full of little rosy clouds; the hideous lassitude of words in an even voice that smelt of chalk and blackboards, and besides him a thin brownfaced boy with moist brown eyes intent on everything, the chalky words of the instructor, the lilacs outside, the swallows that flashed against the sky. And now they walked back side by side towards Cambridge as they had walked hundreds of other nights at about this hour, and his arm touched Wenny's arm occasionally as it swung. Was it four years, five years, they had known each other? Hopeless all these futile walks, this constant juggling of words. Wenny's stride was even with his stride now, occasionally the backs of their hands touched as they swung. For all they could tell each other they might be on different continents. Fanshaw felt frozen and rigid in ferocious loneliness. And now there was Nan. The thought that he might love her, that he might be losing himself to her disturbed him so that he tried to brush it aside.
"Strange how we are all settling down," he said. All the while he was thinking of love, his boyish idea of love elegant over teacups, suppertables on terraces at Capri, a handing of old fashioned bouquets with a rose in the center, red rose of passion, romaunt of the rose.
"I haven't settled down," said Wenny, savagely. "I wish I had."
In a smoker once Fanshaw had overheard a story about a rose. The recollection brought a curious little feeling of sickness, stale cigar smoke and smutty eyes in a leer, flabby jowls laughing.
"I mean all our group at college," he heard himself saying.
"What else can they do, they've none of them the guts to do anything or be anything.... Nan hasn't settled down."
"I was going to say. She has just started on the rampage."
"That's because she is a woman. They go on developing. Men don't."
They were walking up Mt. Auburn Street. A group of boys passed them, striding jauntily, chattering in high voices. Fanshaw caught the eager tilt of heads, the smoothness of the contours of faces in the greenish lamplight. There was a catch in his voice.
"How like a ghost it makes you feel," he said.
"Do you mean you wish you were back there again."
"After all youth is the only thing."
"If there is anything in my life I bitterly resent it is that. The time I wasted in college. ... Sentimentality about youth is the cheapest of all sentimentalities."
"Won't you come in a minute, here we are."
Wenny shook his head.
They stood irresolute a moment on the doorstep.
"Do come up and tell me what you mean by your hatred of youth. You so rarely commit yourself to an arguable statement like that.... I'm open to conviction of almost anything."
"I must go along home," said Wenny. He turned, raising an arm, and walked fast down the street.
The stairs creaked under the carpet as Fanshaw climbed slowly, two steps at a time, to his room. He turned the key and went in. Objects were illuminated by a greenwhite swath of light from the arclight at the corner that cut through the curtains and made a bright oblong on the ceiling. On the broad desk beside the window papers gleamed white and an inkbottle gave a glint of jet. Fanshaw pulled down the shades of the two windows and clicked on the reading lamp on the desk. Examination books in blue covers made a neat pile on one corner. On another were bundles of folded papers held tight by elastics. In the center were many pencils and pens of different colors in a shallow copper tray. Fanshaw felt the peevish despair slipping off him. He went into the alcove where the bed was, took off his shoes and coat slowly thinking of nothing, his eyes following the twisting figures on the chintz window curtains. Then he walked across the floor to the bookcase, his feet at ease in slippers, and pulled aside the blue silk curtain that kept the dust off his books. For a long time he contemplated the colored oblongs of their backs, reading the gilt and black and red type of titles, deciding what he should read.
* * * *
The air was raw. Clouds ruddy from the glare of arclights sagged like awnings over the streets. They were walking briskly down an oozy black alley near the market.
"Where are you taking us, Wenny?" said Nan. She rested a greygloved hand on Fanshaw's arm for a moment as she stepped over a pile of fruit-skins on the curb.
"You said you wanted a walk before dinner"; Wenny sauntered ahead talking over his shoulder.
"We are getting it. I didn't know there were so many streets in Boston, did you, Nan?" Fanshaw spoke with a little sniggering laugh. The ooze of grimy unfamiliar lives out of these dark houses oppressed him. Unhealthy it must be down here, typhoid, consumption, typhus, diphtheria. He felt himself putting his feet down gently as he walked as if he feared that at a loud step the pulpy darkness would burst suddenly into oaths and shouts, dirty hands clutching at his coat and whisky-steaming faces thrust into his.
"Now you know where you are," said Wenny.
They had burst suddenly out into the shine and scuttle of Hanover Street, where men and women, dark bulky shadows in overcoats and mufflers and bits of fur, flitted constantly past the broad show-windows bright with intricate glints on shoes and hardware and sourish colors in clothing stores and gleaming cascades of cheap jewelry over black velvet under the three ominous gold balls of pawnbrokers.
"Gee, I'm glad it's Saturday night!"
"Why Wenny?" Fanshaw stood on the curb beside Nan, blinking a little, dazzled by the noise and hustle.
"Because it's Saturday night you old owl.... This way."
"You aren't going to take us into more dark alleys and get us black-jacked for your entertainment, are you Wenny?"
"I'm going to give you the best bottle of white wine you ever had in your life. Here we are."
Venice read Fanshaw on the window. Stood in Venice by the Bridge of Sighs, a prison and a palace on each hand. Byron; rather a rotter he must have been, or perhaps passionate impulsive hot, like Wenny. The verdict of history.
They were sitting at a round table in the window. The waiter, a grey eggshaped man with sagging pockets under his eyes and a sagging vest too large for him was bending over the table. The others were ordering. How ravishing Nan was tonight in a black dress with great spots of burnt orange embroidery; her eyes under the small black hat trimmed with the same color, were full of little green sparks.
"I swear, Nan," Wenny was saying, "you are the only woman in this blooming town who knows how to dress."
"Where did you get that dress anyway? I have never seen it before," chimed in Fanshaw. He had a vague feeling of pique at not having said it first. Nan and Wenny seemed to get along so well this evening. He felt out of place down here in the slums. The food would probably be horrid.
"This is delightful, Wenny," Nan was saying. "What I want to know is why have you never brought us here before?"
The lint from the napkin came off on Fanshaw's blue serge suit. What a mess. Mechanically he started wiping off the knife and fork when the waiter set them down before him.
"Like in Europe," he said aloud. "You must forgive me Wenny, but I am suspicious of this famous restaurant of yours."
"And just looked there a fiasco just like in Italy," cried Nan, "Why this is wonderful. Genuine Orvieto, Miss," said the waiter solemnly.
"And look at the gondola ... Fanshaw, do get over being cross and look at the gondola at the foot of the stairs, with a lantern in it too."
"That's for the orchestra. They'll be here in a minute, a ladies' three-piece band as I heard a man call them one night. One of them's awfully good looking."
Fanshaw looked about the room. At another table a man and a woman were eating intently. They had sallow, puffy faces and looked into each other's eyes as they stuffed their mouths with spaghetti; depraved-looking thought Fanshaw. Probably Byron had been like that, a puffyfaced man, signs of dissipation. If it hadn't been for drink and women ... Why couldn't people be beautiful about life?
"Here they come," cried Nan and Wenny at the same moment.
Three women in white were behind the gondola prow tuning up their instruments. All at once with a nervous rush they started strumming away at O Sole Mio, with piano, 'cello and violin.
In the back of Fanshaw's mind were pictures of how he would have lived if he had had as much money as Lord Byron; a palazzo in Venice exquisitely hung with faded silk brocades, bedrooms with old rose and dull gold upholstery, and everything according to period, no jarring note, a villa on Fiesole hill, smothered in flowers with in the distance the russet roofs of Florence and the great dome.
"Nan, do you see the girl who's playing the violin?" whispered Wenny. "That's the girl I meant. She's lovely, isn't she?"
"Wenny, you are seeing things through the Orvieto, but she is beautiful."
"It's her lips and chin that are rather like yours."
"Musician's lips," said Fanshaw a little pompously. "Do you like those little snippets of veal, Nan? I don't. Too much garlic. We'll taste it for a week."
"Why it's fine," cried Wenny uproariously. "It'll put hair on your chest."
"I wonder," Nan was speaking slowly, "I wonder if that could be the girl Fitzie was telling me about. I rather think Fitzie said she looked like that."
"Who?"
"The violinist ... Must be a month ago I met Fitzie one day all excited about something. Poor Fitzie does take life so hard. She told me a long cock and bull story that ended by impressing me a great deal about a girl in the Fadettes ..."
At the mention of the Fadettes, Wenny laughed himself red in the face.
"Children should be seen and not heard, Wenny," went on Nan in an even amused voice. "About a girl in the Fadettes who eloped with an Italian boy and how his wife went round to the theatre dragging a lot of squalling brats and made a fearful scene. Fitzie couldn't understand how anyone could wreck their chances of a career like that. It would be wonderful if this were the girl."
"What would you have done?" asked Wenny eagerly leaning over the table.
"If I had been the girl? How can I know? I wonder sometimes if just the wanting so hard to succeed wouldn't make you throw the whole thing away in one mad moment. It's hard to explain."
"Sure, I know what you mean. No, but about the Italian?"
"What a silly question Wenny," said Fanshaw.
"Perhaps not so silly. Who can tell?"
They were silent a moment. The orchestra was playing The Soldiers Chorus. The waiter brought coffee.
"And another bottle," said Wenny jauntily.
Fanshaw frowned. They had had enough to drink. What a child Wenny was anyway. With unexpected tenderness he pictured himself putting him to bed drunk, unlacing his shoes, pulling off his trousers. A sudden desire came to him to draw a hand over Wenny's crisp short hair.
"There is something strangely fantastically dismal about that gondola with its red light as an end to romance. I wonder where those stairs go."
Nan nodded her head.
"That's what I meant. I wonder if she is the girl.... No, Wenny, I'm glad you brought us here, even if we shall taste garlic for a week."
"At least there is the satisfaction of having busted loose," said Wenny eagerly.
"I never can understand the amazing way people put themselves out to be miserable." Fanshaw found himself suddenly welling with bitter irritation.
"But, by God!" cried Wenny, "You have to put yourself out to live at all; every damn moment of your life you have to put yourself out not to fossilize. Most people are mere wax figures in a show window. Have you seen a dredger ever, a lot of buckets in a row on a chain going up an inclined plane. That's what people are, tied in a row on the great dredger of society.... I want to be a bucket standing on my own bottom, alone.... Why are you laughing Nan?"
"You are so eager about it, Wenny, dear."
"What in hell would you be eager about if not that?"
"Why be too eager about anything?" put in Fanshaw in his most languid voice.
"O you make me tired, Fanshaw."
Fanshaw flushed. The little rat, he thought, I'd like to smack him for being so silly. If he could get all that energy into something worth while. That's the difference between us and people like Pico della Mirandola or Petrarch. They could get all that energy into thought, art for the liberation of the world. We fritter it in silly complications. What a clever idea; if he could only make Wenny understand that.
"That's where my music comes in," Nan was saying, her voice grown suddenly tense as Wenny's. "By living it, by making myself great in it, I can bust loose of this fearful round of existence. What a wonderful phrase that is, the wheel of Karma! I understand why women throw themselves head over heels at the most puny man. They have got to escape, if only for a moment, from the humdrum, all the little silly objects, pots and pans and spools of thread that make up our lives. I've got target that in my music. Nothing else matters."
Fanshaw was thinking for some reason of Dürer's portrait of himself at the age of twenty-eight. There was a man who had never needed to bust loose. They must have been less tied to the wheel in those days.
"But you always have to pay the piper, Nan," Wenny was saying. "It's no use trying to escape that. It's fearfully dangerous to live. I should say music was less safe than love."
"Not if you use your reason, Wenny," said Fanshaw.
"Who ever had any reason to use? It's an illusion, the result of thinking things over after they've happened."
Nan left the table. Fanshaw found himself glaring indignantly at Wenny.
"Gee, isn't Nan beautiful to look at tonight?"
"O, she is!" said Fanshaw smiling with forced frankness. He felt a tumult like frightened pigeons in a box inside him. Heavens, suppose he was in love with Nan!
Nan came down the redcarpeted stairs beside the gondola, pulling on her gloves. She stood a moment talking to the girls in the orchestra.
Fanshaw leaned across the table.
"Wenny, don't you think you had better not drink any more?"
"What the hell business is it of yours? Haven't had half enough to drink."
Nan came back to the table, a little sociable smile still playing about the corners of her mouth.
"Well, shall we go?" she said briskly.
"Look! Look outside!" cried Wenny, "it's beginning to snow."
In the black space above the muslin curtain that screened the window they could see big flakes gently, breathlessly tumbling.
"Thank you, sir; come again, sir," said the waiter as he let the tip slide into one of the pockets of his sagging vest.
They were out in the snowhushed streets, the snow brushing their cheeks with occasional feathery gentleness like tips of wings of very cold birds.
"Did you ask her?" said Wenny.
"No. I shall next time. She's awfully nice." Nan was buttoning the fur round her neck.
"Do you want to taxi?" asked Fanshaw, who had thin shoes on.
"Ridiculous, let's walk. I love this anyway. Don't you, Wenny?"
The black pavement shivered in squirms and lozenges of yellow and red and green light under the feet of people scuttling home out of the wet. All the sharpness of lights and colors and sounds was padded and blotched by the slow flutter of snowflakes swirling down out of the ruddy darkness overhead to vanish in the uneven glitter of the wet streets. Fanshaw took Nan's arm and made her walk fast, up towards the electric star that revolved slowly in front of a movie on Scollay Square, leaving Wenny to saunter behind them. They had passed the outdoor market where a few women with taut lantern jaws still hovered over the nearly empty pushcarts of the vegetable sellers and where brownfaced Italians still barked their apples and peppers and artichokes, when Wenny caught up to them with: "Say, wait a minute."
They stopped outside of a nickel Odeon that belched cigarette smoke and calcium light. Overhead painted in blue letters pricked with red was the sign: Pretty Girls Upstairs.
"Ever been up there, Nan?"
Nan shook her head.
"Let's go for a minute; the most grotesque thing you ever saw."
"Absurd. We'll do no such thing," snorted Fanshaw.
Loafers and office boys on their Saturday night bat and drunken sailors and little overpainted hardfaced girls of the street who had come into the broad entrance to get out of the snow looked at them curiously as they disputed.
"I think it would be fun, Fanshaw. Come on, be a sport," said Nan.
"It'll smell fearfully," said Fanshaw under his breath.
"All right, just for a minute."
Wenny paid the admission, and they tramped up a creaking stair littered with cigarette butts and marked with dark blotches where people had spat and through a swinging door into a tobacco-reeking place with seats. At the end of a smoky tunnel in front of a curtain the color of arsenic and gangrene five women badly stuffed into pink tights like worn dolls, twitched their legs in time to the accentless jangle of a piano. The light streamed out from them among eager red faces, moist lips, derbies, felt hats, caps shoved back on heads. At every pause in the music men whistled and shouted at the girls. Now and then a girl dropped out of the wiggling, tired dance and jerked herself off the stage or a new one joined in the invariable twitching step. Fanshaw felt the fetor of hostile bodies all about him. Standing in the back behind some sailors, holding Nan's arm firmly in his, he kept whispering in her ear: "Nan, let's get out of this." The man in front of them turned, and Fanshaw caught the bulge of his eyes as he stared at Nan.
"Come on, I'm going," he said aloud.
"Don't you go with that stiff, girlie. You stay along with me," said the man leaning drunkenly towards her. He had a yellow lean face with a hooked scar on one cheek.
"I'm going," said Nan suddenly in a cold, hard voice. "You can stay if you like, Wenny."
The door swung behind them. They brushed past some boys clattering up the stairs with shouts of laughter. Once on the pavement, Fanshaw breathed deep of the snowy air.
"We'll take the car at Scollay Square," he said in a reassuring businesslike tone. In him a voice kept saying: That dirty little kid, that dirty little kid, and exultantly, Nan can't like him after this.
Nan said nothing, but walked beside him with cold, precise steps. At the entrance to the subway, Wenny came up to them and said: "All right. Good night," in a sudden, curt tone, and went off walking fast down Hanover Street again.
The Huntington Avenue car filled up gradually with people. As it growled through the tunnel past Park and Boylston the row of faces opposite joggled as meaningless as turnips jounced over cobbles in a pushcart. And again Fanshaw through of Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait with yellow curls and the dandified black and white flounced shirt and the calm, self-possessed mouth. If I could be like that, he was thinking, and not like these. And there's that suit I meant to have pressed today. I'll take it round after my nine o'clock class; and the weekly tests and Mrs. Gerald's dinner invitation to answer. He half closed his eyes. That wine makes me drowsy.
* * * *
"I've so wanted, so prayed, dear, that you might have a beautiful, lovely career," Fanshaw's mother was saying in a weak voice, her head swaying from side to side ever so little against the pillow.
Fanshaw nodded and drew up his chair beside her's. Outside the window some barberries were very red against the snow in the thin twilight of the winter afternoon. Snow scene by Brueghel.
"And really, dear, it must be admitted," went on Mrs. Macdougan with a little smile, "that you have done very well in the five years since you left college. You have made yourself beloved and respected, dear, in the walk of life you have chosen... Don't shake your head, you know it is true. Why Mrs. Appleby was telling me only yesterday how highly Mr. Appleby thought of your work under him. O, I was proud of you! And I shall be prouder yet, I know it, if I live long enough... Yes, I shall. O, dear boy, when I was raising you, and I had such trouble raising you, you were sickly, you know dear, like I am now... I used to think how you'd be big and strong and a comfort to me when I was old, just like you are. If God hadn't seen fit to try me with this affliction, how happy we would be together."
"But, mother, you are going to get well, you know. This summer maybe we'll be able to go abroad."
"Nice of you to say it, dearest.... Do you think you could make me a cup of tea? I'd so like a cup of tea. These afternoons are so long."
"But, mother, you know you're not supposed to have tea."
All the little wrinkles about her eyes and the corners of her mouth deepened. She patted her grey pompadour, that had slipped a little to one side of her head, with a querulous hand.
"I didn't have any yesterday," she whined. "I'm so thirsty, Fanshaw."
"All right, I'll get Susan to make some."
When he came back from the kitchen, she said, her grey eyes wide, staring with excitement:
"I was thinking, Fanshaw, supposing you married and some dreadful woman won you away from your poor mother; what should I do? You're so sweet to me; you take such care of me."
Fanshaw turned red to the roots of his sandy hair.
"Not much danger of that," he said stiffly. "We'll have a nice cup of tea in a minute, very weak, so that we shan't get too nervous, shan't we dear?"
"I know it's so, Fanshaw. Some girl has got a hold on you. Don't trust her dear, don't trust her. Women are so wicked. She's after your social position or thinks you make a good salary... O, I'd die, I'd die if someone got you away from me." Mrs. Macdougan was sitting bolt upright in the chair, beating on her knees with little puffy hands. A wisp of grey hair had fallen down over her forehead, revealing a bit of the black rat under the pompadour. "They are such scheming creatures, so deceitful and wicked, and I so want you to have a beautiful career and be a comfort to me."
"O, now please dear! O, now please dear!" Fanshaw was saying, clenching and unclenching his hands, staring into the crowded twilight of the library behind his mother's head.
Susan, tall, with genial horse teeth, came in with a tray of tea things.
"O, your hair's acomin' down, mum. Can't I fix it for you, mum?"
"Do, Susan, please," said Mrs. Macdougan in a faint voice, drooping against the pillow.
Fanshaw brought up a small table and poured out a cup of tea. His lips were compressed and trembling. When Susan had gone he said in a quiet, expressionless voice:
"Now, mother, you are getting yourself worked up over nothing. I assure you there is nothing whatever between me and any girl."
"You always were a truthful boy, but no matter, no matter... There's not enough sugar in this tea, dear. O, why don't people ever give me things the way I like them?"
Fanshaw dropped another lump in her cup. She began to drink the tea in little sips. The wrinkles in her face relaxed. Fanshaw was looking out of the window at the snow, rosy with sunset, and the intense purple shadows behind the barberry bushes. His mind was all drawn hotly into the image of Nan that day at the Logans' with a net of pearls over her hair like a girl by a Lombard painter. Against the snow, the fervid rose and purple, how fine she would be.
"Well, I must leave you, mother," he said. "I must go over to Cambridge."
"Don't be late this evening."
"No, dear."
* * * *
The wind was nipping and frosty with a smell of mudflats on it and salt-eaten piles. Fanshaw, walking up T Wharf between Wenny and Nan, sniffed with relish the harbor air, looking at the agewarped houses and the masts and tackle of the fishing schooners against the grey sky. He had pulled his buff woolen muffler up until it covered the lobes of his ears and had sunk his hands deep in his overcoat pockets. In the forehead between the eyes the wind pressed now and then like biting cold iron.
"I had been a man," Nan was saying, "I should have gone to sea."
"But think of it in this weather... It's delightful to take a stroll and look at the harbor and the shipping and go back to a warm room. But think of being out in it always. Such beastly cold, grimy, monotonous work." Fanshaw felt his teeth almost on edge as he spoke. How differently made people must be who could stand that sort of thing.
The wharf was empty. From the stubby stovepipes of the galleys of the close-packed schooners came an occasional rift of blue smoke, a whiff of bacon and pipes and stuffy bunks snatched away in a gust of wind.
"I may go yet someday," said Wenny.
"But think," Fanshaw shuddered. "Think of handling frozen ropes in a wind like this." He thought of gritty ropes cutting through gloves and flesh, ripping the calloused flesh of men's palms. That story of Jack London's he had read years ago. It must have been that that put it in his head, the sight of blood on ice-jagged, tarry ropes.
The harbor was wide bright silver, tarnished where the wind made catspaws. One tug steamed seaward, cutting into the wind with a white rustle of foam about a bluff, grimy bow, dragging long coils of brown smoke. They were standing beside some piles at the end of the wharf.
"I have my chance now," said Wenny. "The bust-up was complete this time."
"How do you mean?" Fanshaw and Nan said in unison.
"My chance to go to sea ... I've broken off relations ... with my relations ... Bad pun, isn't it?"
"You mean you had a row with them?" said Fanshaw. "I can understand that. Poor mother and I nearly came to blows.... It's the holiday spirit. Christmas is a dreadful time. Don't you think so, Nan?"
"I like Christmas," said Wenny.
"But Wenny, you said complete." Nan put a hand on his arm.
"I mean it. I shall never have anything to do with them again... I never have rows."
"But what on earth happened?" Nan's voice was very gentle.
"Absolutely nothing. My father and I had a little chat about life and eternity. How silly, I'm getting all worked up talking about it. O, I suppose I'd better tell you to get it off my system. It's not a bit important. I laid on for life and he laid on for eternity ... Naturally, being a clergyman eternity is his line of goods. We got sore. I'm never going to take anything more from him, either his money or his insolence."
"But how are you going to live?" cried Fanshaw.
"What the hell? I've got as much muscle as the next man."
"But you're so impractical, Wenny."
"It must have been more than that. How did it start?" said Nan, tapping with her patent leather toe at a loose board.
"It started ..." There was a catch in Wenny's voice. Then gruffly: "He said something unpleasant about a snapshot I had on my desk. It's too ridiculous."
"But you'll have to give up your M. A.," went on Fanshaw.
"Damn good thing, too. I was just hanging round the Anthropology department in the hope of getting in on an expedition to South America."
And Wenny owes me a hundred dollars, the thought crept unexpectedly into Fanshaw's mind. Never get it now.
"But Wenny," Nan was pleading, "I think you are probably exaggerating the importance of the whole thing. I don't see that it's necessary to get on your high horse like that."
"You would, Nan, if you knew them. You can't imagine how fearful it is down there. A congregational minister's house in Washington. The snobbery and the mealymouthedness ... God, it's stinking... You see I never really lived with them. My mother's sister brought me up mostly here in Boston. You see I had three brothers and a sister, and I was the ugly duckling; and my aunt, who was an old maid, took me off their hands. She was a fine woman. She died the year I went to college. She lived on an annuity, and left me just enough money to skimp through on till Junior year, when my father said he'd help... I have nothing in common with those people down there, and now, because they were giving me money, they decided I must do what they wanted, and they hate me and I hate them. I was a filthy coward to ever take a cent from him, anyway.... And so here I am at twenty-three, penniless, ignorant, and full of the genteel paralysis of culture... Silly, isn't it, Nan?"
The rising wind whined through the rigging of the fishing schooners and the waves slapped noisily against their pitchy bows. Fanshaw's feet were numb and his forehead ached.
"Let's walk along," he said. "I'm frozen. I'd like some hot chocolate, would you, Nan?"
"But Wenny," Nan was saying, "You ought to stay on a little while to get your breath as it were... You took your room in Conant for the whole season."
"But, how am I going to pay the term bill, I'd like to know?" There was a little tremor in Wenny's voice that made him cut off his words sharp.
They turned and walked down the wharf again, the wind shoving and nudging at them from behind. In the lea of the buildings were a few old men with red faces sitting on boxes smoking pipes.
"Still," said Wenny with a sudden laugh. "I'm glad it happened. It tears off this fearful cotton wadding I've been swaddled in all my life. We'll see what the world is like now, won't we Fanshaw, old duck?" He slapped Fanshaw hard between the shoulders.
"The trouble is; can one live without it?" said Nan.
Fearfully good looking the boy is, all excited and flushed like this, Fanshaw thought.
"By God, I intend to!"
"I thought you looked different, Wenny, when you got off the train," Nan said.
"It was fearfully decent of you two to meet me... Makes me feel as if I had somebody, no matter what happened."
"I've often thought," Fanshaw said, "That there was something that cut us three off together, like people in a carnival in Venice who might drift in their wonderfully carved state gondola down a dark canal ..."
"And find themselves in the Charles ... Exactly!" cried Wenny laughing.
They had left the wharves and were walking through the grey many-angled buildings of the business section. It was the lunch hour, and the streets were full of clerks and stenographers hustling from their offices to their lunch; from out of the tiled caves of lunchrooms came a smell of bacon and old coffee grounds.
"What sort of work are you going to do? I suppose you'll try a newspaper; everybody does."
"Let's not talk about that now, Fanshaw. Where on earth are you taking us?"
"To Thompson's Spa."
"Why not the Parker House, where we can have something to drink?"
"I'd rather have hot chocolate. I am frozen," said Nan.
They rounded the old State House.
Thompson's Spa was like an aviary, full of shrill women's chatter, bobbing hats, rows of powdered faces eating at narrow counters, smell of chocolate and sandwiches and sarsaparilla.
"Look, there's Betty Thomas! ... What are you doing here, Betty? Sit here before somebody nabs the place," said Nan.
"O, just shopping. Dear, you should see the hats, straws at Filenes. Why, how do you do, Mr. Macdougan, and ... you! Why, this is a reunion!"
"Are they reasonable?"
"What, the hats? ... Marvellous values, really."
Betty Thomas's nose was a little red from the cold. She held, balanced between finger and thumb, a salad sandwich that dripped mayonnaise into her plate; the three unoccupied fingers were arched airily in space. There was something about her amiable chatter to Nan, about the amiable fussy chattiness of the women all about them that rasped on Fanshaw's nerves; the sum of it was shrill and ominous.
"But Wenny, what are you going to do? ... I'm fearfully worried," he said in a low voice, leaning towards Wenny's ear. Like a haze about them was Nan's and Betty Thomas's chirruping talk:
"My dear, have you heard the latest? Up at the conservatoire ..."
"Honestly, I don't give a damn, Fanshaw. I'm so sick of this hanging on the outskirts of college ..."
"I think your department would get you a scholarship. You must go put it up to them. It's ridiculous to let a thing like this wreck your career."
"... And Mrs. Ambrose absolutely refused to sing a note ..."
"My dear Fanshaw, if you knew how utterly sick and fed up I was with all that ... No, I'm going to live this time."
"... And Salinski said ..."
"But don't be a fool. Look, I'll try to scrape up some cash for the term bill. I think I can do it."
"You mustn't. I don't want it paid... I'm not going to keep on with this farce any longer."
"... A middle register, like an angel.... And she told Fitzie that he said ..."
"You make me tired, Wenny. You must be sensible."
"Don't you see that I'm trying to be, for the first time in my life?"
"... met a man who said Romoulet wasn't teaching the belcanto at all. ... O, I'm so afraid, dear, of ruining my voice.... So many people ..."
"Well, so long. I'm going to fetch my suitcase," said Wenny shortly. "I'll see you people later." He threaded his way out through groups of women and sallow men waiting for seats.
"I'm afraid your friend doesn't like me," said Betty Thomas pouting.
"He does, I assure you. He's a little diswrought today. He's often like that, isn't he Nan?"
Nan laughed, as she began fitting her gloves on again.
"Poor child.... All too often."
"It's no use taking it too seriously," said Fanshaw.
"No, I don't suppose one ought to take Wenny seriously," Nan whispered slowly, "And yet ..."
"Are we taking the car?" asked Betty Thomas.
"I'll come up as far as your place and then go on over to see Mother... I haven't been there all day," said Fanshaw. Career, he was thinking. Will Nan or this girl make careers? Career in music, diva, prima donna, like Ethel Barrymore in Tante, Adelina Patti; Doris Keene in Romance. Suites in hotels full of expensive flowers. For me a career wouldn't be like that. Too absurd, poor dear mother wanting me to have a lovely career. Epicurus would not have approved of a career.
At Symphony Hall they got out of the car.
"Nan, you'll invite me to your first concert in there, won't you?" said Betty Thomas.
"If you'll invite me first." They laughed to hide their eagerness.
They walked up a street of brick and brownstone houses with narrow windows stuffed with fussy curtains on the parlor floors. Occasionally a girl passed them with a folder of music under her arm. From the houses came a perpetual sound of scales taken with tenors, sopranos, contraltos, tinkled on pianos, scraped on 'cellos and violins, toddled on flutes. From somewhere came occasionally the muffled bray of an English horn.
"Fearful street, isn't it?" said Fanshaw.
"So Betty and I aren't the only ones ..."
"You mean who want to scale Symphony Hall? O, it's a common disease, Nan.... Well, I must go back and get the car over to Brookline. If Wenny goes to see you, do try and get him to be sensible."
* * * *
Fanshaw had marked the last paper in the test on Florentine sculpture. He got up from his desk yawning. O Lord! he was thinking, I'll never be able to look Donatello or the Ghiberti doors in the face again. He leaned over, arranged the pencils in their tray, put the papers away in the drawer, and slowly took off his tortoise-shell spectacles. My eyes are smarting; I mustn't work any more tonight. The case closed on his spectacles with a faint clack. Poor Wenny, what a rotten shame; but if he would not learn tact, discretion, what on earth was there to do? So idiotically childish. Fanshaw walked with long, leisurely stride into his bathroom, where he hung his dressing gown on the back of the door. He came back with yellowstriped pajamas under his arm and sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes. Fearful how this business upsets me, he muttered aloud. Much too fond of Wenny, his dark skin, his extraordinary bright eyes. One ought to have more control over one's emotions, senses. At grade school in Omaha, there had been that curlyhaired boy, Bunny Jones. Walking home from school one day, they took the roundabout way beyond the railroad yards. Must have been May, for the locusts were out. Mother never could abide the smell of locusts, insisted they gave her a headache. Bunny had suddenly put an arm round his neck and kissed him and run off crying in a funny little voice, "Gee, I'm sheered." Curious the way streaks like that turn up in one. Pico della Mirandola wouldn't have been afraid of such an impulse if it had come to him. There were so many scandalmongers about this place. How fearful anything like that would be. He wasn't free like Wenny. He had his mother to take care of, lovely career to make. How bitterly silly the idea was. He folded his trousers over the back of the chair! And it was really Nan he cared for. Love, he thought; the word somehow rasped in him. When he had put on his pajamas he stood in front of the dim mirror a second rubbing his fingers through his short sandy hair. Wonderful it would be to have yellow curls like Dürer in his portrait. He turned out the light and got into bed. O, the window! He got up, pushed the window up half way and retreated hastily before the blast of cold air that stung his flesh under the loose pajamas. Comfortable, this bed; better than the one I have at mother's place. He closed his eyes and drew the covers up about his chin. Streets, he thought of, long streets of blind windows, dark, cold under arclights, and himself and Wenny and Nan walking arm in arm, hurrying from corner to corner. Can't seem to find that street, and on to the next corner between endless rows of blind windows converging in a perspective utterly black beyond the cold lividness of arclights. Must have lost our way in these streets.
He opened his eyes with a jerk. The room was familiar and quiet about him, the accustomed bulk of the desk opposite the bed. Out on Mt. Auburn Street voices, occasional steps. He closed his eyes again and fell asleep.