Drops fell shining from the trees about him into the trodden yellow slush of the path at his feet. In the air shuddering with the foretaste of spring of the thaw were constant rainbow glints of water. Wenny's knees and shoulders ached. His feet were swollen from frostbite. The bristles on his chin rasped against the upturned collar of his coat. Well, it would be spring soon, he was saying to himself, and this spring... Fanshaw's grey raincoat and long meditative stride and his rubbers flashed past among the Saturday afternoon crowd. Without thinking Wenny ran after him.
"Hello, Fanshaw."
"O, Wenny," Fanshaw thrust out both hands; "I've been almost worried sick about you. Where have you been? My dear boy, you look a wreck."
"I don't see why?"
"Here it is, three days you've vanished from the face of the earth."
"I haven't been anywhere else that I know of."
"Nan's been fearfully uneasy."
"That's funny."
"That's quite all right. She told me all about it. I told her it was just nerves, that morning. She thought it was, too. You must take better care of yourself. But Wenny, where have you been?"
"Looking for a job."
"You poor child! Look, I've got to go to the Touraine. We can wash up and go up to Nan's. She said she'd be in at teatime."
"No, I'd rather not."
"You must come, Wenny. O, when will you grow up? Let's walk along, we're obstructing traffic."
"First, you must lend me fifty cents," said Wenny with a dry little laugh. "I'm most split with hunger."
"Can't you wait till we get out to Nan's? She'll have tea for us."
"No, I can't, Fanshaw, you old fool. I haven't eaten since yesterday morning, or maybe it was the day before that."
"Good God! There's Dupont's opposite. Let's go up there, a horrid place, but you won't mind eating something there, will you? But Wenny, why didn't you tell me you were all out of money?"
As they climbed the stair a smell of food and baking powder filled Wenny's nostrils. He inhaled it eagerly. In the restaurant it was very stuffy, a couple of waitresses in starched aprons were sitting at tables. A grimy man in his shirtsleeves carried in a tray of freshwashed glasses in through a green baize door. As Wenny pulled off his overcoat he thought he was going to faint. Letting the coat drop to the floor he grabbed the table and lowered himself into a chair. The expression of consternation on Fanshaw's face as he picked up the coat made him laugh so that his eyes filled with tears.
"Well, what will you have? Don't eat too much, it might make you sick."
"O, Fanshaw, you're such an old woman."
The waitress, a rawboned woman with dead cod's eyes, hung over the table threateningly.
"Bring me some boiled eggs and tea and toast right away, please." Something in Wenny exulted strangely under the hostile glare of the waitress as she looked at his muddy shoes and I unshaven chin.
"Three minutes?"
"Yes, and quickly please."
The waitress rustled starchily away.
"How funny Fanshaw, I'd been thinking of boiled eggs for hours and I never thought about their being three minutes."
"But, where have you been, you poor child? ... I've been to Cham Mason's wedding."
"Heaps of wonderful places.... I've been finding my place in society."
"Where?"
"On the benches."
"But, why didn't you go to the Alumni Employment Bureau? They'd have found you a job."
"I didn't want that kind of a job."
The smell of the bread the waitress set before him was overpoweringly sweet. His fingers trembled so he spilt half the egg on the side of the glass breaking it. He ate hurriedly without tasting anything.
"Bring me two more eggs, please.... Lord, but tea is wonderful stuff." The warm savor of tea filled his head. All of a sudden he felt very talkative. "I tried to ship as a seaman. You stand in a large room full of pipesmoke and a man chalks up the names of ships on a blackboard.... The finest names of ships: there's been the Arethusa and the Adolphus Q. Bangs and the Heart's Desire and the Muskokacola or something like that.... But, I always seemed to get down to the office too late or I didn't have five dollars to give the mate or something. Didn't have much luck with bussboy either. It's amazing, Fanshaw, how many people are just crazy to wash dishes."
Wenny laughed and choked over a gulp of tea.
"Don't eat so fast," said Fanshaw in a strange hoarse voice.
"Why not?"
"You'll choke, that's why."
"God, I wish I would... Have you ever ... felt so's you didn't care if you choked or not? D'you know I met a fine kid named Whitey. He could go without eating three days an' never notice it. I could never do that. I don't guess there's much of any thing I could do."
Fanshaw was looking at his watch.
"Really, we should be going.... I've got to go out to dinner, Wenny, I wish there were something I could do to help."
"You can pay for my eggs, you old put you."
Fanshaw paid the cheque; then he said rather solemnly:
"Look, you must let me lend you some money."
"All right, give me five bucks."
At the door, Wenny waited a moment for Fanshaw to come from the washroom. His head was singing dizzily. It's all up now, he was saying to himself. He thought of his room and his bed; delicious it will be to stretch out between the clean smooth sheets and sleep.
Going up on the car he felt a haze of contentment stealing over him. All about people nodded to the joggle, hatchetfaced women and flabby jowled men. Fanshaw's talk and his own answers droned beyond a great drowsy curtain in which the phrase Par delicatesse j'ai perdu la vie, wove in and out endlessly. Outside autos slushed through streets running with the thaw. Fanshaw was saying something about the deceitful warmth of the day, spring-like.
In front of them, four seats ahead in a blue hat with cherries on it, was Ellen. Wenny clenched his teeth, why would his damn pulse speed up so? She turned and stared at him with a comical little expression about her mouth. He drew his eyes away quickly, felt himself hideously flushing.—You skunk afraid to recognize her because she's a whore, are you? Don't want Fanshaw to know, do you? snarled an angry voice in his head. Her lips were pale today. He remembered the sweetish fatty smell of the rouge on her lips that night. And only four nights ago; how long. He didn't dare look at her again.
The car stopped.
"Come on, Wenny," came Fanshaw's voice briskly.
They were splashing along towards the purple lacework of twigs of the Fenway trees. Fanshaw was talking unconcernedly about a Caravaggio the museum had bought that had turned out to be spurious. And there were the worn gold letters The Swansea sliding down the glass door and the oil smell of the elevator. O I must go away from here. Then Nan's oval face, her voice strangely caressing. Brainstorm, the comfortable word. Teacups clinking and the steam of the teapot and dusk very misty over the Fenway.
Why hadn't he gone away with Ellen, spoken to her, kissed her in front of Fanshaw. If she'd fallen in love with him it would have been up to the ears, the whole hog; those women were like that.
"You just missed Fitzie," Nan was saying. She had just poured herself out a cup of tea into which she shook meditatively a few drops of cream from the empty pitcher. "O she's such a scream... I don't know what I'd do without her. Now I know all the gossip and about the Summer Street murder case and everything... And do you remember the girl in the Fadettes we thought was the violinist at the Venice? Well, that wasn't the girl at all. Fitzie told me all about her... It seems she came back to try to get her job again and Mrs. Thing who runs it said of course it would be impossible. I don't see what her morals have to do with her playing, do you? And the poor girl's going to have a baby... Fitzie was so funny about it, said she thought it was terrible things like that should happen so soon... O what would I do without Fitzie?"
"But the fellow she went off with must be a scoundrel," said Fanshaw. "A man like that ought to be shot."
"She ought to have thought twice before she did it, that's all. It's not his fault particularly."
"And dry-rotted scraping out Light Cavalry for the Fadettes...." Wenny caught himself. No, he wasn't going to talk. Nan looked him full in the face for an instant. Her eyes were dark, dilated; he thought she was going to burst into tears.
"Such droll things have been going on at the Conservatoire." Nan, her face flushing, threw herself into a stream of talk. "Poor Isolda Jones is madly in love with Salinski and had hysterics during her violin lesson and there's a dreadful scandal about the last Symphony concert. It seems that..." She stopped talking. No one spoke. Fanshaw moved his spoon uneasily about in his saucer. "Wenny, have some more to eat," she said sharply and got to her feet and went to the window.
Wenny sat without moving, staring at her back dark and slender against the dusk.
"You must be dreadfully exhausted, Wenny," said Fanshaw in a low voice.
"The evening star's red tonight," said Nan from the window. "Is it on account of the mist, or is it Mars, I wonder?"
"We could look it up in the almanac," said Fanshaw vaguely.
Wenny stood for a moment in the window beside Nan. His blood throbbed with other remembered stars, blooming green in the amethyst sky above the Fenway, gulped suddenly by the stupid cubes of the further apartment houses. The green of them somehow shone in the lamps down brick streets where he and Nan had gone arm in arm in a forgotten dream of walking with her through a port town and seeing at the end of the street masts and tackle and bellying sails and white steam puffs from the sirens of steamers, and going off together alone some sunset. She's in love with me. If I had the courage....
"Well, I must be off to the Hargroves' for dinner," said Fanshaw cheerfully. "O it is a relief to know you are all right, Wenny. We were worried sick about you."
"I'm tired. I must go home," said Wenny firmly and turned away from Nan.
He went away without looking at her again.
* * * *
My dear son:
It has pleased me more than I can say to hear of your sensible and manly course in taking a job. I am sure that earning your own living you will find inspiring and helpful, and that you will come to regret your past callousness and restlessness. Indeed, this great trial may be a disguised blessing. We all have to learn by experience. I myself went through moments in my youth inexpressibly painful for me to recall, bitter moments of profligacy and despair, and that I came through them with my soul alive was only by the merciful Help of the Allknowing and Allforgiving Creator in Whom I have never lost faith, nay not for one instant.
You, my dear boy, I trust and pray will follow the same course. I cannot but think that had I not let my poor sister Elizabeth take you from us, from your real Christian home, your battle might have been less hard.
Your mother joins me in love and in the earnest hope that you will come back to us.
Your loving father,
JONAS E. WENDELL.
Wenny folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. This was the third time he had read it. He gulped the rest of his coffee and left the lunchroom full of hurried breakfasters. Outside the east wind stung his face, made his eyes water.
Then it was March. Now it's April. Last time I told myself I'd kill myself if I stuck it another month. In September that was and in February and now it's April. The music of the spheres makes the months revolve... Think you fool, think. Bitter moments of profligacy and despair. That's me all right, except he got the profligacy and I get the despair. Go whoring and repent and yours is the kingdom of God. A fine system all right but he repented so damn hard he spoiled my chances. Like being a eunuch, funny that, a generation of eunuchs. Your sensible and manly course in taking a job wasting breath coaching Mr. Lelan's dubs, accounted quite a genius at it too. Inspiring and helpful. God! Poor Auntie's education. That's what it's done to me; and next winter teaching, helping to inoculate other poor devils with the same dry rot.
He was walking out along Massachusetts Avenue broad and dusty through the little jigsawed houses of Somerville. In was a bitter slategrey day of razorcold wind. In the irritation of his mood he took joy in the dust smarting in his eyes and the ache of the cold in his forehead. Gradually his thoughts faded under the regular beat of his steps. It was Sunday and church bells had begun to ring. Gee, I must go home or I'll be getting blue again, he said to himself; the biddy 'll have done the room. He walked back towards Cambridge without thinking of anything, shivering, his hands deep in his pockets. When he had slammed the door behind him he threw himself on the bed, his cheeks throbbing from the wind, and lay a long while staring blankly at the ceiling.
He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. Now he's waiting while they sing the first hymn, fiddling with his prayerbook, wondering if he's forgotten any of the main headings of the sermon. And I'm just like him. Less energy that's all. A chip of the old block. Listen to them settling back flabbily into their pews in the mustard yellow, mudpurple, niggerpink light from the imitation stained glass windows. Now they're on their feet again, better than trained seals. His voice so suave so booming—my voice will be like that—Let us pray.
Wenny sat up on the edge of the bed. God damn my father; I will live him down if it kills me.
He started turning over the pages of the books on his table, seeking escape in their familiar chattering type, in the accustomedness of their smell from the eating acid of his thoughts.
* * * *
Outside of Herb Roscoe's door, Wenny was struck by the usual faint smell of oiled leather and pipesmoke. A tall man in a grey flannel shirt with face and neck and forearms lean and very tanned, opened the door slowly to his knock.
"How's the armory?" said Wenny.
"Pretty good. How's yourself?" said Roscoe in a deep drawling voice. "Sit down." As he spoke he swept a pile of books off the arms of the morrischair. Then he stood in the fireplace, where a pair of high leather moccasins were to soak in a pan of oil, polishing a rifle while he talked. "Gee, you should have seen the scores we made at rifle practice yesterday. Not a soul could hit a barn door. I think we'll have the rottenest damn team... God, I hate this place."
"So do I," said Wenny, lying back in the chair with his eyes half closed.
"Why don't you get out of it. I'm goin' the very minute I get my degree like a flash o' lightnin'."
"Haven't got the energy."
"Hell, man, it don't take much energy to buy a railroad ticket."
"Doesn't it?"
"How's your soft job?"
"I'm going to chuck it soon. I think I'll go to Mexico with you Herb."
"All right, come along. Better learn to shoot though."
"I've had another letter from my father."
"How's he now?"
"Tickled to death."
"Well, that's damn good. I'm damn glad to hear it. You know you oughtn't to be so highbrow about your father. I imagine he's a damn good scout." Roscoe put the rifle up on the rack over the mantel and began to fill a pipe slowly and methodically. "D'you know, I think all this father and son agitation is foolishness, Wendell. You are like your father, we all are, so why fuss about it? Nobody's forcin' you to live with him. But I wouldn't stay on round here. It isn't healthy for you, seeing how you feel about it. I wouldn't stay myself, except for the library."
Roscoe walked back and forth in front of the fireplace as he talked with the soft, lithe steps of a man trying to walk noiselessly through woods.
"Say, Herb, will you lend me that little .22 revolver of yours for a day or two?"
"What do you want with it? You aren't going to shoot up the dean of the Graduate School with it, are you?"
"No, no," said Wenny laughing a little shrilly. "It's curious ... I'd like to carry a gun for a day or two ... In the first place I've never done it, and the thought of death in my back pocket makes me a little nervous, and I'd like to try my nerve out, and then I just might need it ... I'll tell you why ... I'm going in for low life a little. Heavy slumming ... I'll tell you about it in a day or two, honestly I will, when things get under way a little. There's a woman in the case and everything, and a bum and a Chinaman."
"Gee, I wish you'll let me in on it. I'm just pining away for excitement in this dull hole."
"Honestly I'll tell you all about it in a day or two, but I'm such a damn coward I want to test my nerve out alone first. Don't be uneasy if I don't turn up for a day or two. I'll be all right."
Roscoe handed him a little blue steel revolver and a handful of cartridges.
"Don't get pinched for concealed weapons."
"Never fear," said Wenny jumping tensely to his feet.
"Do be careful, Wendell; it's always the man scared of a gun who shoots himself or the innocent bystanders instead of bagging his game. Get me?"
"O, I'll be careful. Anyway, there won't be any shooting. Just a precaution like rubbers. But I must be off. I have an engagement. Thanks a lot."
Wenny, going out the door, caught a contracted look of anxiety on Roscoe's tanned face as, puffing at his pipe, he strode back and forth in front of the fireplace. Wenny went down the dark brick corridor towards his own room, the gun in his back pocket pressing hard and cold on his thigh.
* * * *
Wenny walked among the muddy paths of the Fenway. Patches of snow among the shrubberies were crumbling fast in the tingle of spring that flushed the misty afternoon. The twigs of forsythias showed intensest yellow against the sopping grey of turf. In the gravel paths there was a tiny lisping sound of water as the frost came out of the ground. The rustle of it in the ruddy light was maddening like the rustle of silk. This womanish hysteria, he was saying to himself; to escape it tense and collected the way the earth slithers out from between the tight fists of winter. A man and a woman frowsy and middle-aged, a hat with mauve pansies beside a dust-grained derby; as Wenny passed the woman was tapping restlessly on the gravel with a narrow pointed toe. The thought came to him: Perhaps Nan and I will be like that, afraid to look in each other's eyes because we didn't dare when we were young and talk about if we'd done this and if we'd done that... What a rotten thing to think about the first day of spring.
In his back pocket a hard shape pressed against the fleshy part of his thigh; from its focus his whole being was stiffening to hardness.
He turned and with a sudden spring in his step crossed the street from the park, passed the livid tomblike oblong of the Dental Clinic, and pulled open the glass door of the Swansea. A grindorgan was playing at the curb. The glass door slammed behind him, cutting off the Marseillaise on an upward note. He ran up the stairs and stood still a moment in front of the reddish-stained door.
Through a bitter film of constraint he saw Nan in a pearlgrey dress pulling open the door for him.
"I never saw that one before."
"This dress? Do you like it?"
Down the hall came the aviary sound of people at tea.
"They'll be gone in a minute; don't look so worried." Nan looked in his face with a little mocking smile that faded out tremulously as she spoke. "Do wait, Wenny, I want to talk to you."
He followed the swish of her dress down the corridor. Richly the curve of her neck caught a glow of creamy rose from the pearlcolored silk.
"Have a cup of tea," she said in her hostess voice after introducing him to a large woman with beaded tragedy eyes and a lean whiny-voiced man who stood beside the teatable. Balancing a cup, Wenny settled himself against the wall beside the mantel, tried to think of nothing.
"... Dreadful, isn't it, how Boston is being transformed?"
"No, really, you wouldn't know it any more."
"We'd got used to the Irish, but now walking across the Common you don't see a soul who's not a Jew or an Italian."
"But don't you think they bring us anything?" Nan's voice, indifferent, from the teatable.
"What can they bring but fleas? The scum of south Europe...
"... O, Nancibel, you do have the most delightful teas."
"Why, Jane, I often wonder why on earth I do it. Doesn't it seem the height of absurdity to collect a lot of indifferent people, a regular zoo, in a room and pour a little tea down their throats and tell them: Now, have a good time?"
"But one must have some sort of society ... And you know perfectly well you are just fishing, Nancibel. Why, the cleverest people in Boston come to your teas, and as for celebrities!"
"Mr. Preston, won't you let me give you a little more tea? Yours looks cold and horrid...."
"... No, I wouldn't call 'The Way of All Flesh' a great novel.'"
"But, really, I'd like to know what is great then."
"A great satire, but not a great novel. . . . It's too embittered, not Olympian and balanced enough to be truly great."
"But as a philosopher ..."
"Ah, as a philosopher ..."
Through rigid glassy layers Wenny watched the nodding of heads, lifting of teacups, setting down of plates, brushing of fingertips. Occasionally he saw himself going through wooden gestures of politeness, heard himself speak. At last they had all gone; he was alone with Nan in the room that smelt of tea and scalded lemon and cake. Outside the windows the ruddy mist was purpling to twilight.
"O, Wenny, why on earth do I do it?"
"I guess because you like it, Nan."
"Probably you're right." She laughed happily. "I'd never thought of that before.... No, I hate it, and all those people. Imagine what Fitzie told me today. She said you always turned up as a sign that tea was over and it was time to wait not on the order of her going but go at once... Isn't she a fool? Then she added that it was rumored round Jordan that my engagement to Fanshaw would be announced any day... O, Wenny, people are a scream!"
"I probably do look rather grouchy when I come here and find a lot of those young hens cackling about your technique and that wretched old cadenza hound ..."
"It's pretty ridiculous, Wenny, that two people who know each other as well as we do can't talk...." Nan interrupted suddenly, speaking slowly, choosing her words: "Can't talk about our ... can't explain ourselves. O, I wonder if we'll ever know each other."
"Perhaps the fact that we need to explain ourselves ..."
"You mean it proves that we can't?"
Wenny nodded.
"Or perhaps it's just cowardice," he went on after a long pause, feeling everything within the cold bars of his ribs throb sickeningly. "Almost everything is that."
"Why can't we be sensible?"
"It's not sensible, it's alive I'd want to be ... But this is repeating," he said harshly with trembling lips, straightening himself up. It was as if a rind had burst in him letting out warm, sweetish floods; as if he were crying beside a grave where she had lain dead for years and lifetimes, his memory full of an ivory body he had loved.
They were silent, not looking at each other.
There was a knock at the door. Nan drew her breath in sharply and went to open. Wenny heard Fanshaw's voice in the hall.
"O I'm so glad to find you. I thought it'ld be just my luck to miss you both and spend a dull evening all alone. I have had the most detestable day."
"Let's walk in town to supper," said Nan in a hurried, throaty voice.
Walking down a broad street towards town, they had the dome of the Christian Science Church ahead of them swelled with purple against a tremendous scarletflaring sky across which grimy green clouds scudded on gusts of rising wind. Sharp flaws of cold were clotting the mist and chilling all reminiscence of thaw and spring out of the air. Footsteps rang shrill and fast on the pavements and were lost in the clang of streetcars and whirr of motors grinding slowly when they came out on Massachusetts Avenue. Overhead, above the bright shine of shop windows through which faces drifted steadily, outline drifting into outline, like snowflakes past an arclight, the sky was a churning of dark green clouds fast blotting the clear, fiery afterglow. Wenny could hear himself talking to Fanshaw as they walked, but all the while he was intent on the people he passed; smooth, velvety-warm masks of young men and girls, wooden masks of men bleached by offices, crumpled masks of old women; under them all seemed to tremble something jellylike and eager, something half caught sight of in their eyes that had thrilled to the warm afternoon, that this sudden cold searching through the dusty concrete grooves of the city congealed to shuddering crystals of terror. He felt a sudden maudlin desire to climb on a hydrant and talk, to draw people in circle after circle about him and explain all the joy and agony he felt in words so simple that they would tear off their masks and tell their lives too; it would be his face, his eyes, his mouth moulding words all about him when the masks were off. The picture brightened painfully in his mind.
"Look at all that yellow broom in the window," Fanshaw was saying. As they passed a flowershop they caught a momentary sweet gust of hothouses. "That's the real plantagenet, I think, that the Black Prince wore on his helmet. Strange to think of it this cold night in a Boston flowershop."
"Say it with flowers," Nan put in laughing.
"Exactly," said Fanshaw. "Yet why should there be that horrid rasp in the advertising phrase and the unction in 'langage des fleurs'? Do things seem beautiful only when they are unaccustomed?"
"Perhaps it's that not being customary and diurnal puts them in the proper light ... so that we can really see them," said Nan.
"I think it's just that we like to kid ourselves along. This may be a moment as important in the history of Boston as the time of lilies when Pico della Mirandola first rode into Florence, as you and Mr. Pater are so fond of telling us, Fanshaw," broke in Wenny. "But we don't know anything about it. We'd probably have gone grumbling and growling into town for dinner if we'd lived in Florence then, just like we do here, and complained what a dull town it was."
"Perhaps I can, Nan ... out what I mean is it's our fault, not the fault of the century."
"What's our fault, Wenny?" asked Fanshaw smiling indulgently.
"That we are so damn rotten."
"But we're not. What we've lost in color and picturesqueness, we've made up in ..."
"In sheepishness and cowardice, I'll grant you that."
"Now Wenny."
Wenny saw himself in bitter distortion, standing on a hydrant confessing idiocies to crowds who wore his face as a mask on their own and bleated like sheep, baa, baa, at every pause. It all dissolved into an obscene muddle of leering faces. If I could only stop thinking.
They were cutting diagonally across the Common, under a hurrying sky lit by a last mustard-green flare from the west. The electric signs along Tremont Street bit icily through the lacy pattern of the stirring twigs of trees. The wind was getting steadier and colder, occasionally shot with a fine lash of snow.
"No, but we couldn't live without the ideal that somewhere at some time people had found life a sweeter, stronger draught than we find it," Fanshaw was saying. "That the flatness of our lives hasn't been the rule ... I don't think the fault's with us at all, Wenny. I think we're great people ... It's just this fearful environment we have to live down, the narrowness of our families, our bringing up, the moral code and all that. The people of the Renaissance were great because they lived in a great period...."
"Well, we haven't had much chance yet; give us time, Wenny," said Nan.
"Time means nothing. You can't make Narcissus into the Prelude from Tristan by working on it. The germ would be here."
"But we are learning, Wenny. Taught by our ideal of the past, of the Greeks and the people of the Renaissance, we are learning to surround ourselves with beautiful things, to live less ugly, money-grabbing lives."
"Culture, you mean. God, I'd rather rot in Childs' dairy lunches. Culture's mummifying the corpse with scented preservatives. Better let it honestly putrefy. I say."
"And while we argue about how we ought to live, things muddle along," said Nan.
"And the months go by ... Look at me, I'm twenty-three years old and I've done nothing ever, never anything of any sort," cried Wenny savagely.
"But you're not even hatched yet, Wenny. Give yourself time ... When you've got your M. A."
"Won't be any different ten years from now. I know it won't. You know it won't."
Nobody answered. Wenny walked along at Nan's side, his fists clenching and unclenching nervously. They had reached the Park Street corner of the Common where the steeple of the church stood up lithe and slender out of the muddle of arclights into the tumultuous sky where the frayed edges of clouds trailed along ruddy from the reflection of streets. In the lee of the subway stations sailors loafed with the broad collars of their jackets turned up watching the wind tussle with the skirts of a couple of girls who strutted back and forth with jerky impatient steps. A trail of Salvation Army lasses hobbled by following a fat redcheeked man with a cornet. Through the narrow crowded street towards Scollay Square the wind was less searching. In the floods of light in front of the moving picture houses dapper young men in overcoats belted at the waist waited for girls they had made dates with. A fat man threw away his cigarette and advanced towards a blonde girl who had just crossed the street; with one hand he was straightening his necktie. The smile on his puffy, razorscraped face kindled in her straight lips. Up a side street a man in a red sweater was preaching about something in a voice like a sea lion's. In the middle of the Square a policeman had hold of a holloweyed little man whiskered like a bottle cleaner whom he was shaking by the shoulder and roaring at. Wenny jumped back to avoid a truck lumbering up noisily out of Cornhill. Why didn't I let it run over me? Then the shop windows of Handover Street full of price-signs were sliding past. Wenny felt vague interest in the streets and people he was walking among, the sort of disconnected interest he had felt when a child in the tableaux in the Old Mill at Revere, gliding along through expressionless dark, occasionally peering out at incidents, random gestures and faces. A year ago, he was thinking, I would have imagined every man, woman and child I met part of some absurd romantic vortex I was just on the point of being sucked into myself. I know better now. Do I?
"Funny, the thought," he said aloud, "That I pass people on the street and say to myself what wonderful lives they must be living, and they look at me out of their own emptiness and say the same thing... We're going to the Venice, aren't we?"
"Mind, no garlic," put in Fanshaw.
"We'll even let you have the eternal broiled lamb chop without hooting."
A flurry of snow fine as sand drove down the street.
"What do you think of this for the Boston climate?" said Nan.
"Here we are!"
The restaurant was nearly empty. They shook the snow off their overcoats and settled themselves at the round table in the window.
"What's so nice about this place, in spite of the garlic and the stains on the cloth and everything," Fanshaw was saying, "Is that it gives us a breathing space from Boston, a quiet eminence where we can sit undisturbed and look about us ... O, Wenny, do pull up your necktie."
"Now, Fanshaw, you shan't heckle Wenny," said Nan laughing.
The orchestra had struck up Funiculi, Funicula with great vigor. Wenny was looking at the girl who played the violin. Something in the tilt of the chin was painfully like Nan, only all the features were heavier, the lips coarser and less intense; many men had kissed them perhaps. To kiss Nan's lips. No, I mustn't think of all that. I will drive it out of me, down into me. Tonight it's calm; cold I must be, to weigh everything. In spite of him the tune filled his mind with streets full of carnival, scampering, heavybreasted women pelting him with flowers.
"The ladies' three-piece band is doing itself proud tonight," he shouted boisterously.
Like this always, these dreams. I must put an end to them. It's on account of these dream women I've not made Nan love me; everything has slipped by. What's the good of dreams? It's hard actuality I want, will have.
Yama, yama, blare of brass bands, red flags waving against picture postcard scenery, brown oarsmen with flashing teeth and roses behind their ears, and Nan; both of us lolling on red cushions. Bay of Naples and musical comedy moonlight and a phonograph in a flat in a smell of baby carriages and cabbage grinding out love songs. O, the mockery of it.
"Gee, what a horrible tune."
"Hacknied, I should say, Wenny, but it's rather jolly, and when they play it on those boats on the Grand Canal it's almost thrilling..."
"To Cook's tourists and little schoolma'ams from Grand Rapids."
"Isn't it a little like sour grapes that we should be so scornful of them?" put in Nan gently.
"I'm not scornful of them. I am them... We are just like them. Can't you see what I mean, Nan? I can see that they are ridiculous and pitiful. How much more ridiculous and pitiful we must be."
"But from that point of view everything must be ... well, just ashes; everybody ridiculous and pitiful," said Nan slowly with a flash in her eyes. "I'm willing to admit that in a sense, I suppose, yet certain things are dreadfully important to me—my friends, my music, my career, my sense of fitness. I don't see that those things are ridiculous... Of course, one can make oneself sound clever by making fun of anything, but that doesn't change it any way."
The hot light in her eyes, flushing her cheeks, her parted lips, were a stab of pain for him.
"O I can't say what I mean?" muttered Wenny.
"Do you know what you mean?" said Fanshaw.
"Perhaps not."
"And you forget what you're so fond of talking about Wenny."
"What?"
"The gorgeousness of matter. That's your pet phrase."
Taste of veal with tomato and peppers, savor of frizzled olive oil, little seeds mashed between the front teeth into a prickly faint aroma, and wine, the cool curve of the glass against my lips, the tang of it like rainy sunsets. I could sit here imagining it and never drink, imagining Nan's lips... He picked up the glass and drank off the goldcolored wine at a gulp so that it choked him. He coughed and spluttered into his napkin.
"I follow you there, if you include the idea of material pleasures being purged of their grossness, by reason, fitness, as Nan says. So made the raw material of beauty," Fanshaw was saying. Wenny coughed and spluttered into his napkin.
"Drink a little water," Fanshaw added.
"More Orvieto, you mean," said Wenny hoarsely. "By the way, is Orvieto in Tuscany?"
"No, in Umbria, I think; that's where the great Signorelli frescos of the last judgment are, that strange dry hideously violent piece of macabre."
"Gee, I'd like to see them."
"You will some day."
"If I don't see the actual subject first ... No Burton Holmes, is as far as I'll ever get towards Umbria."
"Why, lots of people work their way over."
"You haven't seen me do it yet, have you? That's what I was saying. The world is full of people doing every conceivable sort of thing. The streets are full of them. You can see the things in their eyes."
"Well, why not you?" said Nan breathlessly.
"Before I came to college I spent my time dreaming, and now I spend it gabbling about my dreams that have died and begun to stink. Why the only genuine thing I ever did in my life was get drunk, and I haven't done that often."
Wenny drank down his wine again. His hair was wet. His heart pounded with exultation in the look of wincing pain on Nan's face.
"Suppose we start home," Nan said. "I have a little headache tonight."
Out in the streets the snowflakes danced dazzlingly, ruddy and green, and shivered gold through flaws and cones and crystals of light from windows and arclights. Faces bloomed and faded through a jumbled luminous mist, white as plaster casts, red as raw steak, yellow and warted like summer squashes, smooth and expressionless like cantaloupes. Occasionally a door yawned black and real in the spinning flicker of the snow and the lights, or a wall seemed to bulge to splitting with its denseness. In the shelter of the subway entrance they stood hesitating a moment.
"Why don't you both come out to my place?" said Nan in a pleading voice. "We'll make some chocolate or something."
"No, I want to think."
"But you can think there all you want... And it's such a miserable night."
"I'm going to Brookline to Mother's, anyway; I'll go as far as your door," said Fanshaw.
"You can amuse yourselves picking my character to pieces all the way out," said Wenny boisterously.
They none of them laughed.
"Well, then, good night."
Wenny watched them go down the steps, Nan in her long buff coat, Fanshaw with his wet hat pulled over his eyes. Nan half turned and waved with a little thwarted gesture of the hand. For a second she paused, then with the slightest shrug of the shoulders followed Fanshaw's tall figure out of sight past the change booth. Wenny took two steps to follow, but, the impulse died sickeningly like a spoiled skyrocket falling. He thought he was going to cry, and turned about and walked recklessly into the blinding bright dance of the snow.
* * * *
The wind had dropped. Great sloppy flakes were spinning slowly down between the houses, filling with glitter the tents of light cast by the street lamps. Wenny had been walking fast with long irregular steps muffled by the crunching carpet of the snow. His feet and legs were wet and very cold. At a corner he stopped and leaned a moment against a wall. The shadows in the windows of the house opposite seemed concrete and the walls built heavily out of reddish darkness. People were grey ghosts with faces of unnatural bright pink that flitted past him through the leisurely chaos of the snow. In their eyes, at the edges of hats, from the ledges of shop windows glittered little globules of moist brightness. From gutters came a continual drip of melted snow. Now, what bar haven't I been to? he kept asking himself, as he stood listening to the little hiss of the snow and the slushy padding of footsteps.
I'd forgotten Frank Locke's; and he walked on with lurching strides.
After the velvety blur of the snow the bar room assailed him with needles and facets of glitter on brass and crystal that shivered in the mirrors into sharp angular grottoes. He shook the snow off his coat and let himself fall heavily into a chair. The hard shape in his back pocket rapped against his hip. His spine went cold at the touch of it.
"A Martini cocktail, please," he said to the thin, large-eyed man with a scrawny neck who came for his order.
The little mirrors in the ceiling and the glinty knobs and bottle ends of the partitions all radiated endlessly in dusty looking-glasses on the walls, so that Wenny felt himself drunkenly spinning through air heavy with beersmells and whisky and old tobacco smoke in the middle of a crazy merrygoround. The men at tables round him were tiny and gesticulating. The cocktail stung his mouth, sent writhing gold haze all through him. The glass was the center of a vortex into which were sucked the cutting edges of light, flickering cones of green and red brightness, the voices and the throbbing rubber faces of the men in the bar. In his mind Fanshaw's voice and his father's voice droning like antiphonal choirs: Leanfaced people of the Renaissance carried away helpless in their vermilion barge through snarling streets shaken with the roar of engines: Stand therefore having your loins girt about with the breastplate of righteousness ... Of course that's what it reminds me of here, looking through the globes in the drugstore window where I used to go to get aspirin for Auntie.
"Waiter, another cocktail, please."
This cocktail, smooth, smooth, hot tropic beaches, and the leanfaced men in their great barge deepchanting sliding through lagoons of islands of the South Seas (first love, first South Sea island, the great things of life); brown girls girdled with red hybiscus pulling nets full of writhing silver through parrotgreen water. ... God! I must pull myself together. I must think, not dream... In the beginning was the word,... And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth... Poor little me, with holes in my stockings, sitting in my bedroom that had the cracked looking glass learning Genesis for Dad: The earth also was corrupt before God, the earth was filled with violence ... And God looked upon the earth and behold it was corrupt ... corrupt... I must think, not dream putrid dreams. Dreams, the corruption of misery, soggy, thwarted. If I had a clean, sharp knife to cut away dreams. Herb's little gun will do as well.
"Hey, another Martini, please."
He had no sense of being drunk any more. Things were still, icehard, iceclear all about him. The little neatly painted world of his childhood had been like that, breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little redroofed houses back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps shepherding Noah's animals out of a cardboard ark, all cute and tiny, like through the wrong end of a telescope; and the smell of the enamel scaling off toys, the grain of wood grimed by the fingers, the dark gleam on the floor under the bay window.
"Another Martini, please."
He drank it slowly in little sips, watching himself in the looking-glass beside him. His hair was very curly with sweat, his dark eyebrows jauntily arched, his lips moist and red. He drank and the man in the looking-glass drank. He stared into the black wells of his dilated pupils. Panic terror swooped on him all of a sudden; it was not his face. The face was thinner, the upper lip tight over the teeth, the hair smooth and steel grey, the jowls pinkish, close-shaved, constricted by a collar round backwards. My face, my father's face, and Dad's voice: David, my boy, taking a job has pleased me more than I can say, sensible and manly course ... I am sure that earning your living you will find inspiring and helpful and regret callousness and restlessness ... I, myself, bitter moments in my youth inexpressibly painful for me to recall of profligacy and despair ... A thin voice shrieking, interrupting in his head: My God, I'm going mad, mad, mad. The pulpit voice boomed louder in his ears: It was like this, David, I was not content with my lot and told myself in my boyish pride that life was short and the world wide, and wanted to run away to sea. I was one of those filthy dreamers mentioned in the Gospels who defile the flesh, despise dominion and speak evil of dignities. And I fell so low that inexpressibly painful to recall I took up in a low dive with a scarlet woman and arranged with her that she should give herself to me for five dollars, and I followed her to her room and she divested herself of her clothes and I stood before her trembling with lust, and all at once a sword cleaving me, a light searing me, I felt my flesh corrupt before God, and I felt the mercy of God in a great white light about me, and I rushed out sobbing and calling upon God. And that is how, dearly beloved brethren, I was called to the ministry... Let us pray...
Rustle of Sunday dresses, a couple of coughs from the back, Wenny in short pants kneeling trembling in the full booming blast of his father's prayer, watching the patches of pink and purple and mustard yellow light cast on the pew ahead by the sun shining through the colored glass of the windows, then caught away in a dream of red Indians running through a birch wood, and roused by the long droning infections: To do good and communicate forget not for with such sacrifice God is well pleased. Women's voices shrilling high:
How firm a foundation ye say-aints of the Lord ...
Everything was spinning again and he was saying over and over: must pull myself together, pull myself together, for that face is my face and my father's voice is my voice. I am my father.
"All right, mister, closing time." There was a heavy hand on his shoulder.
He reeled out into the street, his hand over his face to wipe away the memory of the dilated pupils of his eyes in the looking-glass. The air was cold and harsh in his nostrils, against his temples. He walked slowly through streets neatly carpeted with snow that made tiny whirlwinds at corners in the clear gusts of wind. His thoughts clicked with mechanical precision. I'm sober now, I've got to decide. Up towards Beacon Hill. Something always goes mad in me when I go to Frank Locke's. Mustn't go again. Again! How silly, as if there were going to be any agains. Now in me my father'll be dead. Mustn't hurry. Pleasant to stroll about a town the last night before going away; bought your ticket and everything. Where? Want ad: Respectable house offers agreeably furnished room suitable for suicide... How fine; to be cool like this. This is the secret at last. Never been happier in my life. Or am I just hideously drunk?
Slippery down this hill. The bridge the subway goes over, that's it. He felt for his watch. Gone, of course; pawned a thousand years ago to sleep with Ellen of Troy.
It was very quiet over the river. The snow lay straight on the ledges of the bridge. The lights of the esplanade flickered like stars through the clear, bleak night and cast little tremulous sparks over the lacquered surface of the water.
The wind had blown all tracks out of the snow. Wenny cleared off the rail behind one of the turrets and sat looking at the water.
Perhaps lovers have met here. No, the cops'ld be after them. No place for love in the city of Boston; place for death though.
He pulled the little revolver out of his back pocket and held it at arms' length.
I have nerve for this, why not for the rest; for shipping on a windjammer, for walking with Nan down streets unaccountable and dark between blind brick walls that tremble with the roar of engines, for her seagrey eyes in my eyes, her lips, the sweetish fatty smell of Ellen's lips. Maybe death's all that, sinking into the body of a dark woman, with proud cold thighs, hair black, black. I wonder if it shoots.
The trigger was well-oiled. The shot rang out over the water. The rebound jerked his hand up.
Shoot? sure it does. Quick, now, there'll be somebody coming. Spread out your bed for me, Nan Ellen death.
He climbed to his feet on the parapet and pressed the muzzle of the gun under his chin. Warm it was. Black terror shrieked through him. He was breathing hard. With cold, firm hands he made sure the barrel pointed straight through his throat to his brain. He pulled the trigger.
His body pitched from the parapet of the bridge, struck the snowcovered slant of the pier, and slid into the river.