Wenny walked alone down a long street of arclights, memories throbbing to the rhythm of his swift, nervous steps. Every instant he seemed to walk from end to end the whole street of his life. Back in his childhood it had been unaccountable and dark, overhung; where was it he had walked down a narrow alley between towering blind brick walls that trembled with a roar of hidden engines? The terror of it had been like that. Then breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little redroofed houses set back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps, tiny, like through the wrong end of the telescope, shepherding Noah's animals out of the cardboard ark; and the smell of the varnish scaling off toys, grain of wood grimed by the fingers, black gleam of the floor under the bay window. Then streets to go out in alone, runnings to the corner drugstore, vast, glittering, reeking with dangerous smells, to buy aspirin for Auntie. Terror of faces looking out through grated area windows. And now all that's over. I am going to live. The uneven frozen slush on the pavement crunched underfoot.
And the little funny store where they had candy canes striped like barberpoles and toy trumpets; tin shiny through green and red bright paint; and the feel of rough brown paper twisted funnel-shape, cornucopias, horns of plenty, Auntie said they were. And the smell of schoolrooms and ink on his fingers, and himself walking home fast to get away from Pug Williams, who said he'd smash his dirty mug in. Fire engines and bare, proud arms of firemen loafing in the enginehouse. Muckers, bad-smelling in brown black clothes, who threw snowballs at you and wrote dirty words on the pavement, reckless, who had no aunts to scold them. And tonight I walk fast to get away from all these memories, because tomorrow I am going to live.
And there had been the time he had first discovered memories, when he had held his life out at arms' length and looked at it. And the streets had been full of girls then, the tilt of heels, ankles, calves swelling under wind-yanked skirts; the hot blush and the sudden trembling heartbeat when his eyes met a girl's eyes; the girls giggling over sodas in corner drugstores. The smell of hot asphalt and oil from a steam-roller puffing and clanking in front of the house, the wonderfulness of engines and boats, whistles and the churned harbor-water as the liner left the wharf. Ballantyne read with smarting eyes after bedtime, black faces against blue sea and chattering paraquats greener than an emerald and himself brownly naked in the surf of lonely beaches. Now for all that. No more dreams, I'm going live tomorrow.
The funny excited anticipation when he first saw the sign in the subway: Out to Mass. Avenue and the College Yard; then the intonations of arguing voices, hands knocking the ashes out of pipes, card catalogues in the library, the dazzle of unimagined horizons with phrases of all the philosophers going by like the transparencies in a political parade. His aunt in a coffin, her grey face brittle under glass like the imitation flowers in showcases in Peabody. His father and mother bustling about. During the service he had run away and locked himself in the bathroom and cried like when he had been in a temper when he was very little. And now here I am, and what am I going to do to live without dreams? Tomorrow and tomorrow ... how silly that's Shakespeare.
He was walking down a straight deserted street through Cambridgeport. A few trees cut the cold glint of light against windows and scrawled shadows over the uneven snowpiles along the gutters. He walked fast, staring at the arclights that were violet in the center and gave off green and orange rays through the thin mist. At a corner in front of a red A. P. store a group of boys followed him with their eyes. Muckers.
"O, Algy! ... It's late, Algernon," they taunted him in falsetto voices as he passed. A snowball whizzed past his ear.
"How in hell do they know I'm in college? Must be the smell," he muttered amusedly. A sudden tingle of curiosity went through him to know about those boys on the corner. How he'd lain awake at night thinking of muckers when he was a kid, making himself stories of fights, things with girls, adventures he'd do if he were a mucker, if he were to run away from Aunt Susan and be a mucker. He thought of himself scuttling over roofs from the cops, shots twanging hard in the zero-green night, dancing belly to belly with a painted girl in a cellar. But enough of dreams. Tomorrow I'm going to live.
Busy his mind had been all the evening, urging his tired legs on to its throb, clanking out memories raspingly, the way a press turns out papers; all at once he knew why. He had to keep from thinking of Nan.
"O Nan," he said between clenched teeth. For an instant he felt her acutely walking beside him, leaning on his arm, her cheek against his cheek. He trembled as he walked. His body was a funnel of blackness in which his life was sucked away, whirling like water out of a washbasin. He jerked himself to a stop. He was at a corner in front of a drugstore. At the top of the greenly lit window his eyes followed the letters of a Coca-Cola sign. That will be the first act, he was thinking, I shall tell Nan. I can't go now. I'm too tired now... And all at once a great wave of jollity bubbled up through him. Of course I'll go and tell Nan. To love Nan, to walk arm in arm with her, the ache of desiring all eased, to talk endlessly to her, touching her... Now I'll go home and go to bed. In the morning early I'll go to see her before she's up, arrive carrying the milk and the paper. His heart pounding with anticipation, he started walking fast again down a cross street. He had a feeling of suddenly scrambling on to a mountain top from which he could see endless valleys radiating into sunlight, full of gleam of roads and streams and beckoning woods, and swift shine of rails taut about the bulging hills. From now on he would burst through the stagnant film of dreams, his life would be a headlong adventure. Tomorrow Nan and real living. They'd go away from Boston, where they were caged by dead customs, where there were ghosts at every corner, constricting ghosts.
At Massachusetts Avenue the wind was like a razor in his face. The blundering yellow oblong of a car came towards him along the black straight track through the rutted snow. He ran, slipped and with a laugh landed on the step.
"Wait till the car stops," said the conductor mechanically. "Safety first."
Wenny dropped into the seat beside a lean redfaced man with floppy ears.
"Hullo, Wendell," the man said, "How's your museum work going?"
"It's gone. I'm chucking the whole shooting match."
"Why on earth?"
"I'm going abroad. I don't know what I'm going to do. I am going to do something. This isn't anything."
"But why drop out now? Why not wait for your M. A.? You haven't been fired, have you?"
Wenny laughed and laughed.
"No. Things have come to a jumping off place, that's all. I want some more satisfactory ..." Wenny smothered an impulse to boast.
"I see," said the man with a queer look.
"No, you don't ... Because I don't either. ... But that's how things are, and to hell with the M. A."
It was good to pull off his heavy coat in his own room once the door had slammed behind him. The warmth made him very drowsy.
"Tomorrow," he said aloud as he tugged at his necktie. "Gee, it's lucky I had that row with Father. I'd never have waked up for years." When he had his clothes off he stretched himself and yawned. Old fool, Fanshaw, I wonder why I like him, he was thinking. We'll outlive his old dusty Picos and Mirandolas, anyway. O, and Nan, Nan. The thought of her body in his arms, of her slender body in the bed beside him, made his head swim in a haze of throbbing lights sharp like chirruping of crickets, sleepy like dryflies. He clicked off the electricity and let himself crumple on to the bed. After a minute he shivered and pulled the covers high about his face. And think that we're going abroad. Out among islands in a pearly blue sea dolphins danced, from the islands great gusts of fragrance came like music on the wind, the plunk of an anchor in blue bay-water, pink and yellow houses jostling each other on the sandy shore... He lay laughing happily, so that the bedsprings shook.
When he woke up the hands of his piefaced alarm clock were at seven. The sun was barely up. The poplars behind the dormitory cast streaky shadows on the pitted snow where here and there a bit of upturned crust glowed ruby and topaz color. Wenny reached out of the window for an icicle that glittered from the gutter above his head. It was cold against his tongue, tasted the way soot smells. He threw it at a sparrow perched fluffily on a bush. "Top of the mornin', Mr. Sparrow!" and closed the window. The sparrow was tiny and violet black as he flew into the dazzle of the sun. Wenny dressed hastily, wondering whether he should shave. I can't take the time; what the hell does it matter anyway? An old woman was scrubbing the stone steps. Cold, her hands must be, he thought as he rammed his hands into his overcoat pockets.
The lunchroom was almost empty.
"Scrambled eggs and bacon on toast and a cup of coffee," he said to the towhaired, pink-cheeked youth who was slipping into a white jacket behind the counter. "Fine morning, isn't it?"
"Aint no fine mornings at this job. I call a fine mornin' a mornin' I can lay in bed."
Wenny laughed. It'ld be fun to be a bussboy for a while, the grotesque people telling you yarns over coffee. Not here with these damn college snobs though, in a lunchwagon down in the North End. How many existences. Walt Whitman had it in The Song of Occupations. The toast and bacon crackled under his teeth. He noticed the clock. Hell's bells, only half past seven. I can't help it, I'll wake her up. She won't care. Nan asleep in her white bedroom, her hair plaited, sitting up in a dressing gown, he leaning over her talking to her, the smell of her hair in his nostrils. He would come up from behind and put his hands on her breasts and kiss her.
He paid the fat cashier, whose eyes drooped sleepily on either side of a spongy, pendulous nose. Wondered how long his money would last; one day, two days, four days? The icy pavement flew under his feet. Beside the Charles he stooped a moment to watch a rift widening, very black in the ice. Behind him was the throb of the power plant and the soaring brick chimneys. It would be fine to build chimneys like that. I mustn't dawdle. I'll go crazy if I don't see Nan. Kiss me Nan.
He was flushed and his ears and fingers tingled from the wind and his eyes were jumpy from the dazzle of the snow through the Fenway. The Swansea, the gilt letters, a little worn, slanted ornately down the glass door. His throat felt tight, all the blood seemed to have ebbed out of him. He wondered if he were going to faint. Miss Taylor, said the visiting card above the bell. The little black button bit into his finger he pushed it so hard. Again. Again. At last the thing in the lock clicked. He pushed the door open and ran up the stairs. On every landing papers, milk bottles. Cautiously Nan's door opened under his knock.
"Why, Wenny, you startled me half out of my wits," she said in a yawning voice. "I thought you were a telegram."
"I am."
She opened the door so that he could see half her face between the tumbled pile of her hair and the green dressing gown clutched about her chin.
"Wait a sec. Go into the library. I'll get something on. What on earth is the matter?"
In the library Wenny fell into the Morris chair and buried his face in his hands. He was trembling like a whipped dog. He was falling through zone after zone of misery like in a nightmare.
"Had any breakfast? I'm putting on coffee," came Nan's voice from the kitchenette.
"Fine!" Something unbearably false in his tone made him wince like a lash.
He stared about the room terribly afraid of the moment when Nan would come. Opposite him was the piano's great white complacent grin.
She was in the room, between him and the piano. He was looking up at her, at her oval face that capped the aloof slenderness of her body in green clinging crepe with long sleeves. O God, to put my hands on her breasts, to touch my lips to the richness of her neck.
"Well, you are an early bird this morning, Wenny."
She stopped beside the window. Behind her head clouds skidded across a green patch of sky.
"It's cold this morning," he heard his voice say.
"I'm afraid we'll have a thaw before the day is out.... O, Wenny, I hate this wretched climate. Why aren't we all millionaires so that we could escape the Boston climate?"
"Why not escape?" The words stuck in his throat. You damn fool, pull yourself together, a little furious voice was saying in his head.
"Ah, the coffee's boiling over.... Wenny, run and fetch the milk and the paper, will you, please?"
He ran eagerly to the front door. The paper had a bitter diurnal smell that smacked of his father. Black and white, stuffy-looking like his father in black with his collar round backwards. He dropped the paper again and slammed the door.
"Here's the milk."
The kitchenette was full of velvety warm coffeesteam.
"Do you mean to say those awful people downstairs have stolen my Herald again?"
"I left it there. I want to talk ... I've got to talk to you, can't you see?"
"What's the matter?"
Her eyes were in his. He couldn't see her, only her eyes, grey like the sea.
"Well, Wenny, we must have breakfast first. Have you patched it up with your family?" The words were elaborately emotionless, clinking, rounded like the cups and saucers she was putting on the tray. He was out of the trembling husk of his body looking at himself, hating, out of her grey eyes. When she leaned to take the tray he could see a faint coppery down on her neck under the dressing gown. To kiss her there.
He let himself fall heavily into a chair. She set the tray on the little table by the window.
"One or two? Of course you want two, don't you, Wenny? What fun to breakfast like this, you and me."
Wenny took a gulp of coffee.
"For God's sake don't be so casual.... It's hideous." The coffee choked him. He coughed. "Nan, I'm crazy about you."
"Now, Wenny, you haven't come here so bright and early to make love to me," she said with a hurried, nervous laugh.
"Don't, Nan." He yanked at her hand.
"Wenny, you hurt me, you're spilling my coffee.... Look, are you drunk?"
"I swear to God I've never been so serious in my life."
"Hold your horses, Wenny boy, we are too old friends to carry on this way. It's too silly. Do talk sensibly."
"I've been holding myself in so long.... I can't do it any more. I'm going to live like a human being, do you understand, Nan? From this moment on you and I are going to live."
As he jumped to his feet his knee hit the table, bowling over the cream pitcher.
"O, the carpet, Wenny," said Nan in a whining little voice. "Have you no respect for my carpet?"
"Damn the carpet, Nan. I'm crazy about you. I want to kiss you."
He fell back into the chair and covered his face with his hands, his fingers writhed in his hair that was curly with sweat. Nan ran out into the kitchenette and was back with a cloth sopping up the white puddle of milk. She rubbed the carpet tensely as if everything depended on its being unspotted.
"Nan, I'm so sorry to give you all that trouble."
"You are such a little silly."
"O what can I do? Nan, for God's sake understand that I love you. I must have you love me."
He went towards her blind with his arms out. She put her hands roughly on his shoulders and shook him the way an angry school teacher shakes a child. Her voice was full of shrill hatred.
"Be quiet, I tell you. You shall be quiet."
"You mean you don't love me."
"Of course not, you little fool.... Please go away, it's my time to practice. I don't love anyone that way."
Her eyes were dilated and burning. The kimono had fallen from one shoulder and showed the beginning of the curve of a breast. Her long fingers dug into the flesh of his shoulder. His back was against the door.
"O this is fearful, Nan."
The hat in his hand, red gleam of varnish on the door closing behind him. Then stairs again, numbered doors, milk bottles, newspapers. He brushed against the elevator man, whose eyes rolled white in a black face, and through the glass door where climbed the letters of Swansea in reverse, and out into the grey street. As he crossed a truck nearly hit him. A man with a grease smudge on an unshaven cheek under a shiny visored cap leaned out snarling: "Wanter git kilt ye sonofabitch?"
Sure I want to git kilt, sure I want to git kilt.
... Wenny picked his way very carefully across a snowpile and sat hunched on a bench under a skinny tree. Anything to forget Nan, her ringing voice saying: Of course not, you little fool, the warm curve of her breast, the down in the hollow of her back under the green crepe. He beat against his forehead with his fists. O he'd go mad if he didn't stop thinking of her. Anything to stop thinking of her. Death to stop thinking of her, death a motortruck hurtling down the frozen street and a voice shrieking: Wanter git kilt ye sonofabitch, and hard blackness, eternal. To crawl into bed and draw the covers up to your chin and sleep. That's what it would be like to git kilt. No more agony of hands to touch, lips to kiss, so downy and warm it would be asleep in a bed of blackness.
The back of the bench was hard against the nape of his neck. He was shivering. He got to his feet. The sky had become overcast with dovecolored mackerel clouds that cast a violet gloom over the apartment houses and the etched trees and the rutted yellow slush of the street. Wenny tugged at his watchfob. The familiar round face, slender Roman numbers. God, only half past nine? How many hours ahead. He walked on numbly.
* * * *
"Some cold, aint it?" came a voice beside him. "Aint no time for keepin' the benches warm." Wenny turned his head. Beside him on the bench was a fellow without an overcoat of about his own age, a compact, snubnosed face with lips blue and a little trembling from the cold. It was afternoon; he was sitting on the Common.
"Of course it's cold," said Wenny testily. He was staring straight before him through the trees at the dark shapes of people and automobiles passing in front of the shopwindows, gay and glinting along Tremont Street. Like that his thoughts passed and repassed, miserable silhouettes against the shine and color of his memories. It hurt him to leave the mood of processional sadness he had slipped into at the end of dumb hours of walking. After a long silence the man at the other end of the bench continued in the same confidential tone.
"Aint no time for keeping the benches warm I can tell you.... Out of a job, are you?" Wenny nodded.
"Up against it?"
Wenny got to his feet.
"I guess I'll walk along," he said.
"Mind if I walk with you?" said the young man jumping up and thrashing his arm about. "Bad onct you let yesself git cold this weather. You don't never git warm agin. Got a flop for the night?"
Wenny nodded. They started walking down the path.
"I aint yet. I'll git one though. It's too tumble cold out."
"Are you flat?"
"Like a buckwheat cake."
"I mean, haven't you any money?"
"Money!" Wenny's companion stopped in his tracks shaking with laughter. "Jumpin' jeeze, that's funny. That sure strikes me funny. Why I aint had a piece of change the size of your little finger for so damn long ..."
"How do you make out?"
"O, I make out fine, 'xceptin' when my luck goes back on me like today."
"Been in Boston long?"
"Nope. Tumbled in here 'bout three days ago from Albany. Too cold up there. I aint got the hang of it yet. Bum town, I'd say. Though you can't tell about a town till you learn it."
A rolled up newspaper lay on the path before them. The young man without an overcoat made a grab for it, shooting a skinny chapped forearm out of the frayed sleeve of his coat.
"Useful things, newspapers," he said as they walked on. Then he turned and looked at Wenny fixedly a minute. "Lost your job? ... You aint bummed much, have you? Lost your job?"
"I've hardly been out of Boston."
They were rounding the dry basin of one of the ponds that was piled with muddy snow from the paths.
"Et today?"
"Of course.... Look, I've still got a couple of dollars. Suppose you come and have a drink with me. Say, what's your name?"
"The guys called me Whitey down where I come from. And say, if you want to set me up to something for Gawd's sake make it a hamburger steak. Honest, I aint et a thing since I been in Boston city."
"Gosh, come along. I'll take you to Jake's."
"Hell, it don't hurt you not to eat onct you git used to it. I kin go days without eatin' an' never notice it."
"Gee, I'm hungry too. I forgot to eat any lunch."
In the German restaurant there was a thick smell of beer and fat wurst and sawdust. Whitey took off his cap exposing a closely cropped tow head and sat stiffly on the shiny reddish wooden bench. Wenny ordered beer and hamburger and potatoes of a fat-faced waiter who looked from one to the other out of suspicious pig eyes.
"Gee, you're treatin' me white. I guess you're millionaire on the loose."
"I wish I was," said Wenny laughing. "No, I just had a fight with my father."
"Like me when I left home."
"How long have you been bumming round like this?"
"'Bout a year an a half."
"Where do you come from?"
"Perkinville, a little jerkwater town back in South Dakota."
"Good beer, isn't it?"
"I'll tell the world it is.... So you had a failin' out with the old man, did ye too?"
"I sure did."
"Did he trun a flatiron after you?"
"No," said Wenny laughing, his mouth full of potato.
"Mine did. A red hot one too."
"How did it happen?"
"O, I dunno. Things was pretty rough round our shack anyway. I used to run away for a week at a time an' stay with some guys I knew an' the old man kep' sayin' how's I ought to be workin' to support the family an' all that. He wasn't workin' but he always wanted us kids to work.... An' I come home one night feelin' top notch with a couple of drinks in me. We'd all been down the line, an' I was tellin' myself how I was goin' to lay off that stuff an' hold down a job. An' just as I gits to the house I hears em hollerin' blue murder.... Ma took in washin' an' used to do the ironin' in the evenin's.... Well, I looked through the kitchen winder and, jeeze, there was Ma and the old man chasin' her around the kitchen with the ironin' board an' beatin' at her with it, an' there was a tub full o' clothes to soak by the stove, and Ma just picked up that tub an' dumped it on the old man's head sayin': Take that, ye dirty beast, an' ran out of the house. And, jeeze, I was mad at him... An' I runs in and tells him to quit beatin' up Ma, and he had the clothes all hangin' round his neck and the water pourin' off his neck. But he was roarin' drunk though; jeeze it'd a been funny if I hadn't been so scared. I always was scared of the old man. An' he stood up with his eyes all red lookin' at me scoldin' an' cursin' at him. Curse at yer father, you yellow-bellied bastard, he said. An' then he picked up two flatirons, red hot on the stove, an' came after me... Honest to Gawd, I couldn't move, I was so scared, like when you're scared in your sleep. All I could do—jeeze, I remember it clear as anything—was yell: They're red hot, they're red hot. One of 'em went through the winder with an awful noise an' I ran out of the house and used my legs till I fell down cry in' on the side of the road a mile out o' town.... I jumped a freight an' went to Milwaukee, an' I aint been back since. I'm goin' though in about a year an' plant myself among the weeds. This aint no life for a white man."
"What about girls?"
"O, they don't bother me. I get it now and then. But I don't miss it."
"It bothers me."
"What I like is goin' round to new towns, hoppin' freights an' all that. Jeeze, I been some places in the last year. I've worked in Akron an' Cleveland, an' Chicago, an' Atlanta, Georgia. If I'd had the sense to stay down south I wouldn't be freezin' to death at this minute.... An' Tallahassee an' Key West. I passed up a chance to go to Havana. 'Count the lingo. An' Galveston an' South Bend an' Topeka an' Pittsburgh. That's where they pick you up an' put you on the stone crushers. An' Duluth an' Cairo an' Albany an' New Orleans. Ought to see them high yallers down there if you're stuck on girls. I didn't get to the coast but I was in New York and Philly...."
"Have some more beer?"
"No... Jeeze, I'm talkin' too much, I guess."
"Hell no, I like to hear you."
"Well, I'll beat it this time. Got to meet a friend o' mine on the Common.... See you some time."
He pulled his cap over his eyes, put up his collar and slouched out the door. Wenny sat sipping his beer. He wished Whitey had not gone. His mind was fearfully empty and dark. Why couldn't I do that, bum from town to town? That's the worst that can happen to me anyway, and that sounds fun. That way I can forget her and all this life. Start afresh as if I had just been born. He got to his feet firmly, put his two dollars down beside the cheque and walked out into the street. A sudden wild elation had seized him. He hadn't a cent in the world. What should he do now, reborn without a cent?
It was already dark. The wind made his cheeks tingle. Of course he knew what to do. He'd pawn his watch. Down the street a little way three gold balls glinted above a show window in the full glare of an arclight.
* * * *
His forehead and eyes in the carmine ring of a Ward 8 becoming oval as he tipped it to his mouth, half a slice of orange bobbing in the midst of it, the lemony claret taste in his mouth and excitement shooting in hot and cold shivers through his blood. Opposite a girl's face, cheeks firm under powder giving way suddenly in loose purplish skin under the eyes, hair fuzzy and yellow. Beyond, through blue arabesques of tobacco smoke, tops of instruments from the orchestra playing Goodby, Girls I'm Through, a chromo of George Washington in a gold frame hung with a festoon of red frilled paper. In his mind muddled the towns Whitey had told him about, Akron and Cleveland and Chicago and Atlanta, Georgia, and Tallahassee and Key West, and Fanshaw's delicately intoned voice saying: Like beautiful leanfaced people of the Renaissance lost in their vermillion barge.... Ellen wasn't leanfaced; plump cheeks, plump breasts. He was living now. Now he'd forget how his father looked with his collar round backwards, he'd forget Nan with Ellen, realer than old fool Fanshaw's vermillion barge.
"You're one of these college boys, aren't you, dear?"
Her tired fingers, overwhite, played nervously with a cigarette box on the table.
"Why?"
"Cause you keep askin' me my life history. I'm not a fiction magazine. Tellin' stories isn't in my line, see?"
"I'm sort of interested in people's life histories today, Ellen. I'm just beginning mine."
"I knew I was robbin' the cradle," she said, and laughed, showing to the gums a set of teeth like the teeth in a dentist's showcase. "But I didn't know it was that bad."
Wenny felt himself blushing. He took another long drink of the Ward 8. Leanfaced people of the Renaissance with falcons on their wrists, quoting Greek in bed with their great-limbed rosy lemans, riding days over parched hills to find the yellow, half-obliterated parchment that once spelled out would resolve the festering chaos of the world into radiant Elysian order. Whitey loafing on street corners in New Orleans watching the high yallers drive by in barouches. By God, I must live all that.
"Ever been abroad, Ellen?"
"The Fall River boat's about the biggest liner I ever took."
"Waiter, two more Ward 8's."
"Make mine a ginger ale highball, kiddo."
Silly, this blather of the Renaissance, ham actors mouthing To be or not to be... Like Whitey, that was better. But first I'll have to be so girls don't bother me. Shall I go home with her? I wish she was better looking. He wouldn't care how she looked.... I get it now and then, but I don't miss it. And Nan is Nan just girls bothering me?
"You're blue this evenin', kiddo, ain't they treatin' you right? Tell it to mommer."
Wenny jerked his chair round and put an arm round her waist. Her head sank on his shoulder. Smell of her hair, what was the perfume she used? Rouge too, sweetish fatty smell of rouge from her lips. She beads her eyes. His hand touched her breast limp under her bodice. Firm Nan's breasts would have been. This morning how he had wanted to put his hands on Nan's firm breasts and kiss her. Don't think of it. When I am sated I will forget Nan, everything. He kissed her lips. Her eyes were bored unfired between their beaded lashes.
"Look out, kiddo, don't get too close. This is a respectable joint. I doan wanter get in wrong here."
Wenny seemed to stand apart from this body of his touching the girl's body, to look at it critically through the tobacco smoke as if from the bleary eyes of the chromo of Washington. And when he is sated, his voice seemed to say, when his flesh has grown very cold he'll be like Whitey, going round to new towns, walking down roads, hopping freights: Tallahassee and South Bend and Havana and Paris and Helsingfors and Khiva and Budapest and Khorasan ... riding over more parched hills than the leanfaced people of the Renaissance rode over, in search of words, of old gods' names more powerful than any they ever dreamed of. Under the table his hand was on her thigh. His heart was pounding.
"What do you think about when you're blue, Ellen?"
"Me? I don't think when I'm blue. I drink."
At the next table a man with three chins whose bald head swayed from side to side was trying to stroke with a puffy ringed hand the arm of the redhaired girl opposite him. A waiter hovered over them threateningly. The room was swinging round in smooth spirals to the sound of The Blue Danube from the orchestra.
Wenny's heart was pounding. His hands were cold. Afraid, are you? a voice sneered in his head. To live you can be afraid of nothing. The Greeks were not afraid. The lean-faced men were not afraid. By god they were. Men flagellated themselves round the altar of Apollo on Delos. They recanted on their deathbeds and stuck their tongues out eagerly for the wafer. And can David Wendell, silly little Wenny, son of a minister with his collar on backwards, can I conquer fear. I must. Her flesh was hot under his hand.
"Let's go, Ellen. Where do you live?"
"Aint so far from here. I'll show you. I got a swell room."
The wind blew cold down streets of blank windows. At the corner she slipped on a frozen puddle.
"Oopsidaisy!" He caught her with a laugh.
"Jeeze, I wrenched my ankle..." She drew the breath in sharply through her teeth. "Hell of a note... Say, kiddo, got plenty of jack?"
"I've got enough."
"I'll treat you nice, honest I will. I like you, real pash. Make it twenty, will you? A buck don't go far nowadays. Make it twenty, kiddo."
"I don't think I can give you as much as that. I'm broke."
Nan this morning in her green kimono shaking him, her long fingers digging into his shoulders. O, I must forget her.
"Not often you can get a girl like me, deary. I'm mighty careful...
"Don't worry, I'll give you all I've got."
They passed a Chinaman in a fur coat standing under an arclight.
Nan, I hate you. Nan, I'll kill you out of my mind. Tomorrow when I've killed you utterly, I'll begin to live.
They stopped at a red brick house with a sign Furnished Rooms in the window. The key was in the door, clicked; the door opened. Dim gaslight in the hall.
Whitey had said: O, they don't bother me.
I get it now and then, but I don't miss it. I'll be like that tomorrow.
The carpet on the stairs had big roses on green; it was frayed and tom. The stairs creaked. The house smelt mustily of rotting wallpaper, of ratnests.
"Here we are, deary... Aint bad, is it. Wait a sec, I'll light up."
Nan, you are beaten, dead. Must not is dead too. Wenny's legs were trembling. His tongue moved about in his mouth like a thirsty dog's. He dropped into a chair by the door. Nan, God, how I love you, Nan.
"Tired are you, deary? D'you know you look powerful like a guy I had a crush on wonct. Near croaked of it, honest... You see, for all I could do he wouldn't give it to me... Kerist, I'm glad that's over. Worse than a spell of sickness..."
To be free of this sickness of desire. I must break down my fear. Of what, of what? The social evil, prostitutions of the Caananites, venereal disease, what every young man should know, convention, duty, God. What rot.
"You get into bed, deary... I must fix my hair. Sheets are nice and clean, see. I always have clean sheets on my bed... Maybe you'll come to see me often now. Safer, I'm tellin' ye to go to one girl steady. You know what you're gettin' then... Pretty, ain't it, this chimmy? Got it at Filene's in the bargain basement..."
He was standing against the door crumpling his felt hat in his hands. He tried to speak; no words came.
She was naked sitting on the edge of the bed under the gas jet, eyes wide and mocking; her breasts hung free as she leaned towards him. In his head was a ghastly sniggering. He was out the door.
She grabbed him by the wrist.
"No, you don't. I've had them kind before ... just want to peek an' run. Gimme somethin' or I'll raise the roof, you low-down sonofabitch of a cheap skate you."
"Here, take that, it's all I've got."
He piled crumpled greenbacks in her hands. A half-dollar fell to the floor. She stooped, naked, groping for it.
He rushed down the stairs, slammed the door, out into the icy glare of the arclight in the street. Coward, the word was like a pack of hounds screaming about his ears, yelping, tearing. This is what you've done to me, Nan. Tomorrow was colonnades of stage scenery tumbling about his ears. Through it he was fainting with desire for the woman's body naked on the bed under the gas jet. Nan's eyes, sea-grey, drowning him, the smell of her hair. He leaned against a lamp post and stared with stinging eyes down the empty darkness of the street.