Fanshaw opened his eyes, stretched himself in bed, and was aware hazily of luminous grey sheets of rain outside the window. He reached for his watch and his glasses. Seven-forty-three; that means ten minutes more of delicious languor. He took off his glasses again and lay staring at the ceiling, happily thinking of nothing. The steam pipes were popping and cracking, and there was a dribble of water from the bathroom. Ought to have them fix that faucet. His mind was groping to remember what the nine o'clock section meeting would be about. Fra Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco, Gozzoli, names of Italian painters streamed through his head. But we're through with them; must be about the Dutch, some Fleming. Why cudgel his brains? This was April: April, May, June, then the treadmill stopped. Freedom. Imagine living always free like a Chinese sage in a hut of rice-matting beside a waterfall; to retire to an exquisite pavillion ornamented with red and black lacquer, living on rice and tea and trout from the stream. The mist steaming up out of the valleys and the constant shimmer of moisture on the green, delicate leaves of ferns. And Wenny for an attendant to carry the begging bowl, or Wenny, brown from the sun, gleaming with sweat as he worked the rice fields with a piece of scarlet cloth about his loins. Days eternal with quiet to elaborate thoughts of such subtlety that ... How delicious to lie here and let his mind ramble. And Nan. Only five thousand a year would do amply for a villa in Italy somewhere, perhaps on the shore near Sorrento. The old dream of love; roses handed over supper-tables at Capri, on a terrace with low music ... Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea ... and the moon rising out of the dark sea. No, Capri would be too crowded, full of noisy, fast people. A grey old house somewhere with a courtyard. Mr. and Mrs. J. Fanshaw Macdougan, at home. Nan the way she had looked that night at the fancy dress party at the Logans, her hair caught back from her forehead under a jewelled net, playing the violin in a long-raftered hall, a little musty with the smell of the old incense-drenched tapestries, and through the windows in great, cool gusts the smell of jessamine from the garden. Little trips to hilltowns to look at frescoes, caffe con latte in station restaurants, jokes about Karl Baedeker, a cab rattling pleasantly over the cobblestones driven by a brown youth with a flower behind his ear... Then he thought of his mother's wrinkled cheeks against the pillow and the peevish lines at the ends of her mouth. Poor lamb.
He jumped up with a jerk and looked at his watch. Lord, a quarter past eight. I shan't have time to shave. He ran, shivering a little, to shut the window. What beastly weather to be having in April.
The coffee at the cafeteria had a sour taste that morning, hastily swallowed amid a rattle of dishes on tin trays and shrill talk. Fanshaw was peevishly telling himself this was the last year he'd lead this dog's life, getting up out of bed this way every morning to hear a lot of young nincompoops make themselves ridiculous about the history of painting. If only it weren't for Mother, all the things he would be able to do! Crossing the yard, he began to feel better. His unbuckled arctics clinked cheerfully as he walked. The groups of boys in brown hats at the doors of the lecture halls, the tattoo of springy footsteps on the boardwalks, the ringing voices and the softmoulded cheeks flushed by the rain spun a net about him warm and full of freshness that gave him a sense of being within protecting walls and proceeding nonchalantly towards some aim. What else could he do that would give him such pleasant surroundings, and freedom for part of the year. And this youth always welling up about him. He sat down at the yellow-varnished desk in the semicircular lecture hall that smelt of chalk and turpentine that drifted in from the Museum, pushed off his arctics and strolled about, chatting with students and giving an occasional glance at his watch. Of course he might try being agent for some dealer, he was thinking as he talked. There was money to be made that way. Awfully low, of course. Still, for a year in Italy, to talk endlessly with good friends like Wenny and Nan at supper-tables in the moonlight in a smell of roses. The class was under way, would soon be over. That story overheard in a smoker about a rose. How disgusting, nauseating; one couldn't keep things like that out of one's head. "Rubens," he was saying. "No, I don't see why we should waste much time on Rubens, Mr. Jones; more acreage than intensity in Rubens, and all of it smeared with raspberry jam." The class laughed.
After the lecture hall had emptied, Fanshaw stood a moment behind the desk thoughtfully plucking at the elastic round a bundle of papers. Let's see, he'd have time to go over to Wenny's for a moment before starting to sort those photographs. Pulling on his arctics again, he walked down the road towards Conant. The snow had nearly vanished under the beat of the warm rain. Now there'd be some spring. It was time he and Wenny and Nan were going to Nahant again. He climbed the stairs and knocked at the room door. The door was unlatched and swung open. The bed had not been slept in. There were no papers on the desk. Fanshaw felt a sudden catch of excitement in his throat. Could he be out with some woman? Wenny, with drunken eyes and flushed cheeks, in the arms of a fat, painted blonde. Horrible. He was too fine for that sort of thing. Poor kid. On the mantelpiece was a little snapshot of Nan propped against some volumes of the Golden Bough. Fanshaw barely glanced at it and flushed as if he had caught himself intruding into some inner privacy. Poor Wenny, he probably is crazy about her.
Fanshaw scribbled a note on a piece of yellow paper and left it on the desk:
Wenny, you little debauchee, where are you hiding yourself? Come over at tea time. F.
In the hall outside he found Herb Roscoe shaking the water off an oilskin slicker.
"How do you do? Have you seen Wendell about anywhere recently?"
"No, I haven't seen him in the last couple of days.... I don't quite know what he's up to these days; looks like to me he was in love or somethin', he's been actin' so queer." Herb Roscoe laughed and gave the slicker a final shake.
Fanshaw's face stiffened.
"O, I don't think it's that," he said coldly, nodded, and went down the steps.
While he was crossing the little triangle of grass in front of the seated statue of John Harvard, Fanshaw stopped a moment to sniff the moist air that for the first time that season smelt of earth and gardens. The rain had stopped, and there were breaks of blue in the brightening sky. A grimyfaced boy ran by calling an extra. Fanshaw was turning away, so as not to see the great blocks of print, when his eye caught the headline:
BAFFLING HARVARD MURDER MYSTERY
Body of Harvard Graduate Student
Fanshaw grabbed the boy's shoulder.
"That paper."
"A nickel cause it's a extra."
I must go home. He folded the paper almost stealthily and strode across the yard, neither looking to the right or to the left. Get home before anyone speaks to me. How hideous if anyone should speak to me. Professor Walpole, grey beard and narrow, steelrimmed glasses, was coming down the boardwalk; he stopped and smiled benignantly at Fanshaw:
"You've heard the news, haven't you, Mr. Macdougan?"
"What news?" asked Fanshaw, his hands quaking, his tongue dry in his mouth from horror.
"Why we are going to have a Velasquez for two months...."
"How wonderful! ... Pardon me, won't you, I've got a pressing engagement."
Fanshaw had shoved the paper into the pocket of his raincoat. He darted across Massachusetts Avenue in front of a trolley car. At last he was on Holyoke Street. O it was raining again. The drops danced in the puddle in front of his door. Green door, yellow house, here he was. He walked slowly up the stairs, locked and bolted his door on the inside. There he unfolded the paper carefully and began to read:
Body of Harvard Graduate Student Found Floating in Charles.
David Wendell, Washington, D. C., Boy, Shot Through Head; Was He Murdered on the East Cambridge Bridge? Police Completely Baffled.
At eighty twenty this morning ...
For a moment Fanshaw could not read the bleary print. The bitter smell of the newspaper filled his nostrils. Of course it's a mistake, a beastly mistake, he said aloud.
At eight twenty this morning Patrolman John H. Higgs of the seventh precinct observed an object that he took to be an old coat floating among cakes of ice near the Esplanade below the East Cambridge Bridge. Upon investigating, however, he decided that it must be the body of a drowned man and summoned assistance. When the body was recovered it was identified through a seaman's union card and a receipted bill from the Bursar of Harvard University as that of ...
Fanshaw let the paper fall to the ground. He was sitting, breathing deeply on the edge of the bed. He took off his coat and overshoes. Seaman's union card. So Wenny really was trying to go to sea? Wenny tugging at a frozen rope, his curly hair clotted and briny, the rope tearing the skin off his hands. Fanshaw picked up the paper again feverishly.
... According to the medical examiner at the Morgue where the body was immediately placed, death was not caused by drowning. The young man, Dr. Swanson alleged, had been shot through the jaw by a pistol of small calibre held close to the neck. The bullet had penetrated to the brain and death had resulted instantaneously. The hypothesis has been advanced that the young man might have been waylaid and robbed at some time during the phenomenally violent blizzard that swept this city last night and afterwards murdered and the body thrown into the Charles River Basin, perhaps from the East Cambridge Bridge...
How horrible! Of course it's true, something had to happen to Wenny; he was too reckless, too beautifully alive.
He crumpled the paper up. I must get Nan. We must go to see him at the morgue to make sure. O these filthy newspapers. He dropped the paper in the grate and set a match to it. The flame roared a moment in the chimney, then the black ash collapsed into flakes.
There was a knock at the door. Fanshaw stood a moment with his fists clenched. I suppose I must see who it is. He drew the bolt and stepped back, very pale, with compressed lips. "Come in," he said. A short youngish man with fat cheeks that showed a trace of black beard opened the door and came towards him holding out a hand effusively.
"Mr. Macdougan, I believe."
"My name is Macdougan."
"I have information that you could give me details of the life of that unfortunate young man; you see I'm a reporter from the American. My name is Rogers. I'm on special articles mostly." He looked up at Fanshaw sideways with a smile.
"Thank you... I know er ... nothing except what I just read in your paper... I'm afraid I can't talk to you now..." Fanshaw was desperately trying to think: These beasts'll try to get up a scandal. There's nothing they'll stick at. Nan and I must keep out of it... If I were to lose my instructorship...
"You see, it is this way, Mr. Macdougan ... Won't you take a cigarette?" Rogers settled himself in a chair, lit a cigarette, pulled his trousers up at the knees, and continued in his oily, wheedling voice: "You see, Mr. Macdougan, my paper, as you know, is at present out to clean up the police department of this city, which is disgracefully inefficient. We are going to fight them with every means in our power. Publicity and publicity and more publicity for every instance of neglect and corruption we can unearth. We intend to make the streets of Boston safe for the most delicate girl at any hour of the day or night.... That is why we are so interested in procuring all the details of a case like this accident that overwhelmed your unfortunate young friend. I'm sure you want to help us in this."
"But I don't know anything. I last saw David Wendell at dinner last night in Boston. I am not in the least certain that it's he who was murdered."
"What time last night?"
"O I suppose at around ten... We'd been dining on Hanover Street... But I can't talk about this now."
"I am sure you will appreciate my position, Mr. Macdougan; it's only in the interest of justice, with that poor young man's interest at heart that I intrude this way on your grief at the loss of a dear friend... Did you dine alone with him?"
"No... But, look here, I must go."
"You wouldn't mind giving me the name of the other party. He and you were probably the last to ever see him alive. He might be able to help us."
"I'm afraid I can't give you the name."
"The third party was a lady, then?"
Fanshaw blushed red. He stared hard in the man's wheedling eyes.
"I must get in touch with the police to find out what really happened... Please excuse me."
Fanshaw pulled on his overshoes and took his coat from the bed.
"Have you thought of any motive anyone could have for wanting to kill young Wendell, Mr. Macdougan?"
"None, of course not."
"Do you think it could have been suicide?"
Fanshaw felt the beads of sweat trickling down his cheek. He motioned the reporter out the door and slammed it behind them.
"I don't know... It might have been anything."
He started down the stairs.
"If you are going to the Morgue now I should be very glad to go with you, Mr. Macdougan," said the reporter, following him with the same confident smile.
"Thank you, no!"
Fanshaw started tearing down the street towards the college office. O, this is hideous, hideous.
The reporter stared after him blandly from the doorstep.
Publicity, thought Fanshaw, pitiless publicity. And his mind seethed with people in streetcars, in restaurants and bars, their eyes bulging with delight, people in subways and under streetlamps reading of Wenny's death in paragraphs of smeary print. The headlines seemed reflected in their ghoulish eyes as they read gluttonously every detail of the bullet searing the warm flesh, the warm flesh quenched in the water of the basin, the body that people had loved, talked to, walked with, floating like an old coat among the melting ice-cakes at eight-twenty this morning. Youth had been killed. In offices and stores and front parlors and lonely hall bedrooms sallow-jowled faces sucked the blood through the nasty smelling print of the extras. The streets swarmed and seethed with faces drinking Wenny's blood.
He walked hastily into the college office, past a row of scared freshmen waiting a reprimand, and asked for the Dean of the Graduate School. He felt calmer in the quiet dinginess, among the low voices of the office. All the blood and clamor and hideousness of the streets was shut outside.
"Yes, come right in, Mr. Macdougan."
* * * *
The steam from the spout of the big blue teapot rose between Fanshaw and the sunlight of the window. He sat staring at its slow spiral, his cup forgotten in his hand. Beside the mantelpiece Nan, her brows contracted and a flush on her face, was reading a piece of the Sunday newspaper. In the blue velvet armchair Miss Fitzhugh sat hunched up, occasionally giving her red eyes a little dab with a handkerchief.
"O dear," Miss Fitzhugh was quavering faintly, "I haven't been so upset since I broke off my engagement and sent Billy back his ring."
"Please don't break down again, Fitzie, dear," said Nan savagely, letting the paper drop out of her hands. "My sense of humor is somewhat worn to a frazzle... My God, what swine people are!"
"But after all, dear, it's not as if we really believed he was dead. The word has no meaning to me now... Why I fell so happy in his presence, more than when he was alive; don't you?"
"It's these papers that infuriate me, being dragged out naked this way by these beasts, these bloodsuckers for everybody to gloat over. ... God, I never want to go out of doors again."
"But after all, dear, it's such a marvellous romance..."
"O, Fitzie, will you please shut up?"
Miss Fitzhugh got slowly to her feet and put her untasted teacup down on the table.
"I'll go away now and come back for a minute after supper to see if you want anything."
"O, you are a dear, Fitzie." Nan followed her out into the hall.
Fanshaw sat stiffly in his chair looking out of the window at the sunny, cloud-flecked sky. In his hands he was folding and unfolding the newspaper Nan had dropped. His mind seethed with its phrases. Headlines in the ornamental print of the magazine section danced and writhed and squirmed mockingly through his head: Was it love lured young David Wendell to his doom? Known to frequent low companions ... inveterate slummer ... Despair over money matters or jilting by Back Bay girl led him first to try to ship as a sailor and at last to that final orgy in a foreign restaurant on Hanover Street... Victim of infatuation for some beautiful flower of the slums ... I must get this out of my head or go mad. Fanshaw started walking back and forth in front of the window clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back.
Nan came back into the room, her face calmer, a little smile hovering at the edges of her lips.
"I'd have just lain down on the floor and shrieked if Fitzie had stayed any longer."
"She has the holy stupidity of an early Christian saint," said Fanshaw. "But let's have some hot tea, Lord knows we'll need it."
"There's fresh hot water on the gas."
"I'll get it."
In the kitchenette he stood still a moment with the teakettle in his hand. The smell of the Morgue, the old wax-faced man in uniform who led the way down a grey passage, and Nan's heart beating madly against his arm when they came to the slab where the body lay diminished and pitiful under a sheet ... Fanshaw tried to rid his mind of the memory. The steam from the kettle was scalding his hand. As he was leaning over to pour some hot water into the pot, Nan looked up into his face from the armchair and said:
"Do you feel this fearful ache, as if your head would burst with it all?"
Fanshaw nodded quietly, poured himself some fresh tea, and went to sit by the window. Wenny's face, when the sheet was pulled off, bruised and mashed, the strange smiling look of the blue full lips, and his shoulders rigid and calm like very old carved ivory.
"What have the people in the Fine Arts Department had to say about all these beastly insinuations?"
"They've been extremely decent, as far as I know; of course the University doesn't like one's getting in the papers."
"Poor little Wenny, even dead he gets us into scrapes."
"Doesn't it make you hate people?"
"I can't walk along the street without shuddering, Fanshaw... I'd always thought of all the faces drifting by along the pavement, joggling opposite you in trolley cars, as vaguely friendly and lovable; I wanted to be part of them, to dive into the crowd like into a sea..."
"That was Wenny's idea."
"But now I know what swine they are. If they had a drop of human kindness these hideous articles in the papers wouldn't be allowed."
The headlines were filing in procession again through Fanshaw's mind: Drink and infatuation for a woman lead minister's son to his death... Following the will-of-the-wisp of pleasure through the tortuous mazes of Boston's tenderloin shatters young graduate's career. ... Lovely Back Bay girl Conservatoire student figures in East Cambridge bridge suicide. Mystery of missing revolver ...
"O, if I could get it out of my head and forget it."
"How's your mother, Fanshaw?"
"I really don't know, Nan ... No better and no worse."
The bell rang. Nan raised herself slowly from the chair and went to the door. "Why, Betty Thomas!" Fanshaw heard her exclaim.
In spite of himself, Fanshaw had unrolled the newspaper. It was a heavily ornamented magazine page with a picture in the upper left-hand corner of a young man in a dress suit brandishing a revolver in the middle of a spotchy snowstorm. See next Sunday's Magazine Section for What Drove David Wendell, Goodlooking, Successful, Beloved by Parents and Friends, to blow out his brains that night of wind and blizzard on the East Cambridge Bridge.
"Put that paper away," said Betty Thomas in her fresh, ringing voice. She wore a grey skirt and a burnt-orange sweater that moulded to the ample curves of her bosom. "I'm going to make Nancibel play some Bach or something with me... You people are getting morbid sitting around with these dirty yellow sheets all day."
"You're right, Betty," said Nan. "Will you have some tea?"
Betty Thomas shook her head, smiling.
"D'you mind if I open the window, though? The air's splendid outside, cold and smells of spring."
Nan had brought out her violin.
"Let's play ... I haven't practiced for three days."
Fanshaw sat by the window shivering a little in the cold air. The sound of the violin being tuned rasped on his ears. Then they started playing a solemn, circular tune that made him think of a minuet, and today made him twitch all over with impatience. He got to his feet and tiptoed out. Something about the two girls' absorption in the music annoyed him. He walked down the stairs and strolled across the Fenway where a few nursemaids were wheeling babies about in the late afternoon sun.
He crossed a bridge over a railroad track. The sound of a train whistle in the distance sent a pang through him of helpless nostalgia for travel and railway carriages and the smoke of stations and the unfamiliar smell of hotel rooms. He got so little of all he had longed for before he died, Fanshaw was thinking; and what I long for, how little of it shall I get! He felt tears welling up within him.
At the corner where he waited for the Brookline car some workmen were repairing the track. Under baggy blue shirts the muscles of arms and shoulders moved tautly. A smell of sweat and rank pipes came from them. Wenny would have wanted to be one of them, redfaced spitting men with skillful ugly hands. The men who had dug the grave had been like that, men digging everywhere were like that; strange how through all the tense idiocy of the funeral, and Wenny's father and mother very solemn and professional, and the father's little speech to the effect that he believed as he believed in God Almighty that his son had not died a suicide but had been done to death by some low companion or other, he had felt that the only people there Wenny would have liked were the two hickory-faced men with spades who filled in the grave, their thick backs bending and straightening as they shoveled in the reddish dirt. Fanshaw suddenly pressed his lips hard together as he remembered the undertaker's man in black broadcloth unscrewing the silver handles from the coffin before it was lowered into the grave, and Wenny's father in black broadcloth eloquently reading the burial service, and the rattle of the first shovelfull of dirt and stones on the coffin.
The car stopped in front of him with a shriek of brakes.
Fanshaw sat stiffly in the rattling streetcar that smelt of cheap perfume and overcoats and breathed out air, staring unseeing out of the window.
"O, Muriel, isn't that suicide case dreadful?"
A girl's voice from the seat ahead roused him. Two blonde girls in tamoshanters were bending over a newspaper.
"That boy never killed himself, I'm certain," said the other girl.
"Do you think he was murdered?"
"Yes, deary, I do, by the husband of the woman he had wronged ..."
"But, Muriel, he didn't wrong anybody ... He killed himself for grief because a Back Bay beauty spurned his love."
"Lot o' piffle, that stuff ... I wouldn't kill myself for any man."
"O, but Muriel, you might. Think, if he was a duke or something in disguise and dreadfully handsome, with curly hair and a strong, silent face."
"Like fun I would. Have a peppermint."
"O, but Muriel, don't you think it would be just wonderful to have something like that happen ... a suicide or something? Of course it'ld be just terrible, but ..."
A smell of chewed peppermints filtered gradually back to Fanshaw. The streetcar had speeded up noisily, so that he could no longer hear what they were saying.
* * * *
"I wonder, Nan, if death doesn't make one feel how very acutely one is alive, the thought of one's own death, or the death of someone beloved," Fanshaw said, turning suddenly to Nan, seeking out her eyes. It had been on his tongue all day, but somehow he had not been able to say it till now. He was tingling hot with the excitement of saying it.
"Or do you mean that we feel in ourselves the dead person alive?" Nan's eyes flashed green in his.
"No, no, Wenny wouldn't have meant that."
They sat on Fanshaw's overcoat, their backs against a rock. Behind them were patches of sprouting emerald grass in the clefts of rocks and rows of shingled cottages, shutters still fast for the winter. At their feet the surf hissed and rattled on the pebbly beach. The sea was slate-grey with an occasional whitecap. From the deep indigo line of the horizon cumulous clouds steamed up heavy and flushed with spring, with a hint of rain in their broad, shadowy bases. In the back of his mind Fanshaw was remembering the scalloped wavelets and the blown hair and the curves like grey rose petals of Botticelli's waveborn Venus. What was the Latin that went it: Cras amet qui numquam amavit...? No, how ridiculous.
"What did you think of his father, Fanshaw?"
"O, impossible, completely impossible."
"I wonder ..."
They were silent a long time looking out to sea. Fanshaw leaned back with halfclosed eyes, conscious of Nan beside him, felt vague rosy contours, slender and leaping like the figures on a black-figure vase, dancing within him. He was very happy.
"Nan, I wish I could paint."
"Who's stopping you?"
"I suppose that sort of thing is pretty futile nowadays ... It would have been fine, though, to have been born in a time ..."
"Wouldn't Wenny have been angry hearing you say that?"
They turned towards each other and laughed.
"Wenny could have done anything ... Think that all his life should be gone, like a glass of wine poured on the ground."
"Such a Biblical metaphor." Nan laughed deep in her throat. "Maybe you and I are the ground, Fanshaw, who can tell?"
"Tares and thistles probably ... Don't you wish we were the lilies of the field?"
"That makes me think of the Reverend Jonas ... I wonder if all of poor old Wenny's troubles didn't come from that. Wasn't it a case of ... what's the quotation about the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge?"
"Don't you think it's a little vulgar to know the Bible so well?"
They both laughed. Down the coast the sun had burst through the clouds. The spreading rays brightened on the sea to great patches of heaving silver. Far out the sails of a schooner shone out suddenly like mother of pearl.
"O, isn't it superb here this afternoon, Nan? And think that I didn't want to come."
"I like it ... Suppose we stayed forever."
"After all the hideousness of this Spring?"
"Let's not talk about it... I won't remember it. What's today?"
"I think it's the twentieth."
"Well, for me it's May first. I won't be cheated of my spring. I'm just going to begin it all over again. And practice! Fanshaw, if you only knew how I was going to practice!"
"Look down the coast now ... With the dark clouds and the rays from the sun and the sailboat and everything, isn't it exactly like one of those funny old English engravings? Seascapes they used to call them. Even to the musty color."
Nan's arm was against his arm. She had taken off her tailored jacket, and her round arm, faintly brownish against his grey tweed, was bare from above the elbow. She wore a sort of tunic of dull red silk with a little black embroidery on it that left a deep V at her neck and fell suavely over her slight breasts as she leaned back against the rock. A dizzying flush went through him as his eyes followed the shadowed curve of her neck to the sharp chin and up the oval contour of her cheeks. Her lips were parted. Suddenly he found her eyes, green and grey, very solemn, looking into his. His heart was thumping like mad in his chest. He gulped and looked away over the sea that was green and grey like her eyes. A quick inexplicable chill went down his spine. It was a moment before he could speak:
"Nan..." He paused, his tongue dry, "Nan, don't you think we need our tea?"
"Yes, come along," she said hoarsely, and jumped to her feet.
"I was getting a little chilly." Fanshaw bent to pick up a pebble to hide his flushed face. He threw the pebble as far as he could out across the surf, caught up his overcoat and followed Nan. She had already started across the rocks. They walked round the edge of the harbor towards the town. Under the grey sky slightly marbled with sunlight the shingled sharp-roofed houses scattered unevenly among lanes and low picket fences looked out hostilely through the small panes of their windows at the sprouting tulips and hyacinths in their dooryards.
"Are we going to the redheaded woman's?" said Fanshaw after a while.
"Where else can we go?"
"Nowhere, I suppose, but she does give one such small cups." His voice faltered as he spoke. What a waste of breath were all these trivialities when he ought to be telling Nan ... If he could only catch the proper note, mock-serious, flippant, as one would have made love to a marquise with powdered hair in a garden by LeNotre. And Wenny had loved Nan. Fanshaw was trying to imagine some sulfurous boiling passion. He saw Wenny brown and flushed, sweaty and dusty like a runner after a race, break through all this stage scenery of New England houses and trees and sea, tearing it apart with hard knobbed fingers the way he'd pulled down the window curtains one night when he was drunk. Wenny's face dead, purple-splotched under the sheet on the marble slab at the Morgue. And Nan and I going on, springtime and autumn, breakfast and luncheon and dinner.
They had reached the teahouse. A coldframe under the window was full of violets. They settled themselves at a little table, breathing deep of the fugitive scent of the violets.
After all, Fanshaw was thinking, does it bring any more to kick against the pricks? A certain position in the world ... He could hear his mother's tremulous voice: Your beautiful, lovely career. Perhaps it's best for Wenny that he died. Wenny grown old, sodden, drunken, losing his fire and his good looks; Verlaine's last absinthe-haunted days; Lord Byron, a puffy-faced Don Juan; the verdict of history. Circumspectly, with infinite grace, they went about life in the eighteenth century, never headlong, half-cocked. Nan and I can be like that.
"Delicious, isn't it, to smell this mixture of tea and violets?" he said.
"I was thinking," said Nan, "How wonderful if he were only here. Isn't it silly?"
"I was thinking of him too," said Fanshaw.
And Wenny loved Nan. Yet, was it any more unbearable for him than just now when I looked in her eyes and a light like the light bursting out from the center in that Greco Nativity shot all through me? Never to have held a woman in your arms and kissed her. Pent up aching rivers ... Called for madder music and for stronger wine.
The redhaired woman leaned over to put a plate of toasted muffins on the table. Her round breasts hung heavy against the thin muslin of her blouse There was a faint rancid smell from her armpits.
She doesn't wear corsets; sloppy that modern style. Here comes the bride, here comes the bride... Make a formal declaration. A marriage license engraved with cupids and hearts. Wobbling from side to side ... Sukie Smith and I walking round the block singing that one Fourth, smell of lindens, and people laughing at us and asking if we meant it, until Mother stopped us. Here come the groom, straight as a broom!
"What a comfort tea is, Nan. I feel my tongue getting loose again. I wish we could talk about ourselves a little."
"I hate it above anything, but let's ... Do you know, Fanshaw, I think sometimes that the more people see of each other the less they get to know. You can tell a stranger anything, but a friend ..."
"It's awfully hard to say anything about what I really feel ... If we only had the Eighteenth Century code of badinage."
"On ne badine pas avec l'amour."
Fanshaw felt something like terror chilling his spine. He was tapping with a teaspoon on the table. Nan looked straight at him with narrowed eyes.
"That's what I meant, Nan, I ..."
"But why not after all? ... Why not play with love to keep it from playing with us?" cried Nan wildly. The radiance of her eyes hurt like a too bright light.
"O, Nan, what are we going to do about ourselves, you and I?"
"Fanshaw, whatever happens, remember that my music is terribly important to me."
"But life is more important to us than anything."
Nan put her hand out to him suddenly across the table. He pressed it gently with long, white fingers. He felt his carefully balanced restraint tottering. When he was very small once he had tried to balance himself on the fence of the back yard above a rosebush in flower, and somehow the drone of the bees and the fragrance of the dull carmine flowers had made him dizzy, and he had lost his balance and tottered and swung his arms wildly. Then he had fallen and lain crying on the path among the fallen petals, his face all scratched and bloody from the thorns. He patted her hand gently. Neither of them spoke.
"Dear Nan," he began when the silence had got to swirling fearfully about his head.
"There are the Turnstables," said Nan sharply. "They are coming in here."
They got to their feet. Mrs. Turnstable, in a long motor coat, came up to them, followed by her blonde son and daughter.
"Why, Nancibel, how delightful to run upon you here. And how do you do, Mr. Macdougan? Why, this is luck ... Isn't it delicious here today. Our first real spring day."
"Hello, Cousin Nancibel."
Chairs scraped. Another table was pushed up. Under cover of the clinking of more teacups being brought and Mrs. Turnstable's musical voice talking about what a dreadful spring it had been, Fanshaw sat silent, feeling his frenzy of excitement ebb deliciously. This was saner. Control. Control.
"O, Mr. Macdougan, have you seen Prunella? Such a beautiful play; I'm sure you'd like it. I've been twice, and I am taking the children tomorrow. So romantic and dainty ..."
"It's a Pierrot play, isn't it?"
"Yes, I was wondering if the veritable commedia del arte can't have been something like that."
"Why very probably."
While he talked Fanshaw was furtively watching James Turnstable's thin pink and white face. The boy was eating toast and staring at Nan with worshipping blue eyes. At length when she turned to him and said: "More tea, Jamesy," he grew red to the ears and stammered, "Please, Cousin Nancibel." An attractive kid, Fanshaw was thinking. O, the cycle of it.
"There'll be lots of room ... We'll all go back to Boston together in my car," Mrs. Turnstable was saying. "Don't you love Marblehead, Mr. Macdougan?"
* * * *
Fanshaw's mother sat by the library window looking out into the garden that was full of the fiery chalices of Darwin tulips.
"Once I'm well, Fanshaw, we must rebuild the garden. There aren't any paeonies. I've always wanted some of those beautiful yellow paeonies in the garden. You must get me some next time you see them in a flower shop."
"I will, indeed, Mother," said Fanshaw from the easy chair where he was reading.
"What are you reading, dear?"
"Just a thing about Umbrian painters."
"Come here and tell me about it... You never tell me anything about your work any more."
Fanshaw moved to the window ledge beside her chair and stared out into the garden.
"Mother," he said, without looking in her face, "what would you say if I were to marry some day?"
"But then we couldn't go abroad this summer, could we, dear?"
"I'm afraid we aren't going to be able to do that anyway."
"Why?"
"Because I'm afraid you won't be quite strong enough, dear."
"How ridiculous, Fanshaw. Of course I'll be well in a couple of months. How long is it now since Dr. Nickerson said I'd be well in a couple of months?"
"It's nearly a year, Mother dear. Of course he did not say that definitely ..."
"You wait and see how quickly I'll get well ... But, Fanshaw, I don't believe in a boy marrying too young."
"I'm nearly thirty, Mother, that's old enough surely."
"Your dear father was thirty-five when he married me. And, Fanshaw, there are so many things we'll want to do together when I get well. And if that girl loves you as she ought she'll wait for you years if need be ... And the expense of the wedding and all that ... O, I think it's an extravagant idea."
"I'll think about it, Mother."
"O, darling, I've got such a headache."
"Here comes Susan with your medicine, dear. That'll make you feel better."
Susan stood over her, showing her long teeth in a smile.
"Here's your tablet, mum, and I'm bringin' ye a cup of malted milk right away.
"Thank you, Susan," said Mrs. Macdougan with a wan frown. "And be sure to make it sweet enough. It was just horrid yesterday." Susan's eyes met Fanshaw's. She smiled tolerantly as she smoothed the grey hair back from the old woman's forehead.
* * * *
There was a Hellenic purity about the sunlight along the river that afternoon, Fanshaw was telling himself, something that made one think of Praxiteles and running grounds at Olympia. The stadium in the distance across the meadows and the white bodies of the rowers in the shells stretching and contracting to the bark of the coxswains stood out like the reliefs on a temple against the azure and silver sheen of the sky and the river. From some birches by the river the notes of a song sparrow tumbled glittering. On the wind came an indefinable mushroom-scent of spring. Fanshaw's mind was full of suave visions of the future that evolved rosily like slow highpiled clouds. He would get a scholarship from the department on which they might live in Italy for a year. Extra money might be made appraising and attributing things for some art dealer. There would be Spain and Greece and North Africa. Magazine articles might appear about pictures and places. They could get a villa somewhere with lemon trees near the sea, breakfast in the morning leaning over the balustrade watching the bronzelimbed fishermen draw their boats up on the beach below; long strolls in the moonlight through overgrown gardens of myrtle and cypress, and Nan, dressed as she had been that night at the Logans (she would always dress that way—like a Renaissance princess), in his arms, silken and shuddering.
Fanshaw felt himself flush as he walked with slow strides along the turf by the river.
And Wenny had loved Nan. Perhaps it was through his death they had been brought together. The ways of destiny, Fuerza del Destino, by Verdi. Perhaps they could afford an apartment in one of these places by the river. The Strathcona. Fun it would be decorating it. And Wenny had loved her. That's how I felt towards him, I suppose. No harm, now that he's dead. This afternoon the Attic gleam of rowers in the sun, swallows circling in a blue sky glittering as with mica; if I could paint I would do him against such a background, hair curling crisp about his eager narrow forehead, eyes laughing, lips winesmudged and full, brownly naked like the Bacchus in that picture by Velasquez, defying the world.
Fanshaw was twirling some pink clover blossoms between his fingers, occasionally sniffing at them. The sense of Wenny's presence became suddenly intense to him, as if he could feel the hard muscle of Wenny's shoulder against his arm, as when they had walked together. He closed his eyes for dizziness.
He opened his eyes and looked about him. Round a bend in the river at the end of a silvery blue reach was a bridge and beyond the fantastic pile of the Abattoir with its tall bottle-shaped chimney. A rough smell of singed hides came down the wind. Fanshaw turned into a path up the hill towards a shrubbery behind which showed the crowded obelisks and crosses of the cemetery, crossed a wooden bar and found himself wandering among neatly laid off grass plots and gravestones with the dust of the stone cutting still on them. He passed a mock orange in bloom and remembered how he used to breathe deep the fragrance from the bush at the corner of his mother's lawn in Omaha until he almost swooned from it. That fancy that Wenny had once had that all the tombstones ought to be effaced and cemeteries turned into amusement parks with dancehalls and rollercoasters and toddling calliopes. There was a smell of lilacs ... When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. Perhaps that was what had made Wenny say that the smell of lilacs made him think of death. Then he was staring at the newest stone:
DAVID WENDELL: AET. 23
The Rev. Wendell, as Nan called him, had thought the Latin was appropriate to a scholar. On the reddish mound new grass fine as hair was sprouting. How little any of it had to do with Wenny. On the next grave a stalk of frail paper-white Madonna lilies trembled in the wind. It was in the time of lilies Pico della Mirandola had come to Florence and in the time of lilies he died, having failed in his great work of reconciling Christ and Apollo. Wenny would have been like that. O, if more people had only known him, if he had lived where there was an atmosphere of accomplishment instead of futility, his name might have rung like Pico's to the last syllable of recorded time.
"How do you do, sir?" came a wheezy voice from behind Fanshaw's back; he turned and found an old man with a pert, wizened face in blue cap and uniform standing beside him.
"A friend o' the party buried there, ain't you?" went on the old man.
"Why, yes, I am."
"I thought I'd recognized ye from the funeral," said the old man brightening up. "I guess you'll be a-noticin' that they's been tramplin' an' settin' on it."
"How frightful! No, I hadn't noticed it. But who would do such a thing?"
"O, they don't mean no harm by it. You see there ain't lights here."
"You don't mean they are body snatchers?"
"Lord no ... It's just young folks. You see, the watchman just can't make his rounds fast enough to keep 'em from grassin' ... 'Ticularly in the spring. It'ld fair surprise ye to see the mashin' and the spoonin' that goes on in the most high-class cemeteries. Yessiree, it'ld fair surprise ye."
"But how do they get in?"
"How did you get in? Ain't no fence at this end."
"You mean they come and make love in the cemetery?"
The old man looked up sideways at Fanshaw and gave a wrinkled wink.
"There's nothin' they don't do, I'm tellin' ye. Worse than the canoes in Norumbega Park for barefaced grassin'. Listen to what happened last night. You know that there tower atop o' the hill? Well, we always lock it up tight, but last night the watchman forgot to, and when the patrolman made his round at 'bout midnight he heard 'em agigglin' and carryin' on up in the tower and found the door was open, an' he went up with his lantern... And they wasn't a bit ashamed or mortified... They just laughed, the fellers and the girls, when he ran 'em out of there ... I don't know what young folks are comin' to in this day an' age ... And they wasn't furriners neither."
"How extraordinary," said Fanshaw as he walked away. He looked at his watch. Three o'clock; Nan would have finished practicing. He walked fast for fear the old man would catch up and talk to him again. Nasty old face, he had. And yet Nan and I, and Wenny, whom we loved, dead. Everywhere love springing like hair-fine grass to obliterate the new graves. O, the pitiful cycle of it. But life would be so unsatisfactory without her. Mother's voice, her wrinkled face yellow and limp against the pillow under the pompadour that was always a little crooked and showed the black coarse hair of the rat: And later, Fanshaw, dearest, when you've made yourself a lovely, beautiful career, you'll probably marry some sweet, homey girl and settle down and be a comfort to me. Probably Mother was right. There comes a time when you can't go on living alone any longer. Of course a quiet retreat with books one would always have to have. And with Nan's passionate interest in her music there would not be any difficulty in that. And then to let oneself go. At last someone with whom I can let myself go.
He was waiting outside the pompous wrought iron gates of the cemetery for a streetcar. He climbed on a half empty car and watched the people straggle in as it drew near to the subway entrance. There were old women with spiteful lips and peevish, shifty eyes, flashy young men in checked caps, lanternjawed girls, sallow, seedy fathers of families. Once, after a long argument, he had asked Wenny: But what do you want? and Wenny had looked round the car with eager eyes and said: Not to be myself, I guess, to be anybody, any one of those people but myself. In the subway Fanshaw looked, furtively so that they should not notice him, from face to face, noting the tired skin round their eyes. Comes from drudgery in offices and factories, he was telling himself, always regimented, under orders, and then, in the evening the sudden little spurt of human brilliance, shopgirls and little clerks and ditchdiggers walking merrily through twilight streets. Tremont before theatre time, or at six o'clock with the dome of the State House glowing through dusky trees. Then the night; mystery of doorways, gangs of boys loafing sullenly under, arclights at corners, grassing in the cemetery, furtive loves over newlydug graves, always afraid of the policeman striding slowly down his beat; electric signs and burlesque shows, Pretty Girls Upstairs, lumpy women, stuffed in pink tights, twitching lewdly at the end of a smoke-rancid hall ... We can do better than that. Nan and I, escape all this grinding ugliness, make ourselves a garden walled against it all, shutting out all this garish lockstep travesty of civilization. Land where it is always afternoon. Afternoons reading on the balcony of a palace in Venice, vague splendors, relics from the Doges, Aretino, Titian, and Nan with her hair brushed back from her forehead, in a brocaded dress like a Florentine princess on a casone.
Park Street. Fanshaw got to his feet and shuffled in a jostling stream of people out the car!
* * * *
Nan had been playing Pelleas. Fanshaw sat looking out of the window into the glassy twilight in which a few stars already shimmered like bubbles ready to burst. The music and the incredible fresh green of the leaves in the darkening Fenway had brought on a mood of queer sensibility, so that he felt very happy and almost on the verge of tears. He got to his feet and walked over to the piano, where he stood awkwardly watching Nan's long fingers flash across the keys. Then he took her gently by the shoulders and said:
"Come and look at the twilight ... It's unbearably poignant, this violence of spring."
They stood side by side in the window looking out at the darkening trees.
"Nan, it'll be rather fun, won't it, setting up a ménage? And think how delightfully absurd the wedding will be and all that."
"Yes, I think it'll be fun. Will your mother hate me dreadfully?"
"Poor mother, she's like a child. She'll get used to you and be fearfully attached to you in no time."
"We must keep our liberty and our work, Fanshaw, whatever we do."
Fanshaw was startled by the tenseness in her voice. There was a hollow look about her cheeks he had never noticed before.
"Do you know," Nan was saying, "I'm rather frightened about my music tonight. I mean the divine fire, the power to let oneself go, to rule imperiously an instrument and an audience ... But I'm dreadfully determined. You won't go back on me, will you?"
"What a funny question."
"But why are we talking in this stilted way, already under the shadow of the holy institution ... We've known each other long enough to get married without a quiver, I should say."
"Perhaps it is that we've put on so many brakes in our time, that it's a little difficult to take them off now we want to," drawled Fanshaw with a wan smile.
Nan laughed excitedly. Fanshaw had put an arm around her shoulder. He felt her body stiffening against his.
"Fanshaw," she said in a changed voice, "do you see that star?"
"L'étoile du berger."
Above the dark roof of the apartment house across the park a star hovered green and trembling like jelly. They watched it in silence. Nan turned her face up quickly towards Fanshaw's in sudden passionate hunger. He folded her in his arms and kissed her lips lightly. With her head against his chest and her body rigid in his arms he stared out across her tumbled hair as the star sank flickering out of sight. He was trembling. He was full of swift shudders of foreboding. He bent his head to kiss her hair.
She tore herself away from him and threw herself sobbing into the armchair.
"Fanshaw, I can't ... I can't do it. It's all false," she was crying in a thin choked voice.
Fanshaw was standing stiffly in front of her. He felt desperately cold and tired.
"Nan, this is horrible ... Pull yourself together."
She turned to him a twisted face wet with tears.
"No, go away for the present ... Leave me alone."
She slipped to the floor and lay with her head on the blue velvet seat of the chair, her sandy hair undone, her body shaken with sobs.
In a curious maze of pain Fanshaw walked down the apartment house steps. Through spring-reeking streets, full of laughs and flower-scents and flushed cheeks and kidding voices of boys and girls arm in arm, he walked with long, sedate steps home.