Part 10

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.

VII

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.