Part 13

She had reached Massachusetts Avenue where the pavements were full of people coming out of the moving-picture theatres, standing in knots on the corner waiting for streetcars. For a moment she was caught up, elated, in the stream of windfreshened faces, bodies uncramping deliciously after the stiff seats of theatres. Her eyes ran thrillingly over faces that streamed past her, like her fingers over pianokeys. She walked fast, with exhilaration, until at a corner where she turned up past a drugstore, the curve of a cheek under a boy's mashed-down felt hat, full lips laughing, made her stop still suddenly. Dizzy blackness welled up through her. She stood panting on the corner. Whites of eyes, heads jerked towards her, puzzled looks as people passed. She walked back and forth in front of the drugstore. A hallucination, of course. But could she have seen him? Before she knew it she had called out: "Wenny!" People were looking at her. She walked hurriedly up the dark street, breathless, running away from them. She spun in the grip of a horrible nausea.

* * * *

"Why, Confucius looks sleeker than ever, Nan," said Fanshaw, and ran the tips of his fingers round the big blue teapot. They sat in the open window looking out at the misty russet trees of the Fenway, with the teatable between them.

"He never goes hungry, or rather thirsty."

"Imagine this weather for the end of October ... St. Martin's summer."

"That's a nice name for it."

"Nicer than ours. Indian summer always makes me think of Hiawatha."

A sound of pounding and spades cutting gravel came up from the street below. Nan watched the blue backs of three laborers bend and straighten, bend and straighten as they worked in a hole in the street. A man in a black felt hat with a corncob pipe stuck in his beet face stood over them.

"Curious for them to be tearing up the street at this time of the year," said Fanshaw, languidly.

"Our watermain burst. There wasn't a drop of water in the house this morning."

"How awkward."

Nan did not hear him. One of the laborers had looked up. For a moment his eyes were black, shining into hers. O, but he can't really see me from down there. The face was lean brown between curly black hair and an unshaven chin. With an eager child's smile he raised a hand. As the hand fell she had a glimpse of a dark chest scooped in taut muscles towards the belly under his open blue shirt. He was again a blue back bending and straightening with the three other backs. Crazy fires danced through her.

"Yes, I had to go round to Gertrude Fagan's to wash." There was a dead veil between her and Fanshaw.

"And how is the fiery Gertrude?"

"Very well."

"The last time I met that lady on the street she cut me dead ... I suppose she's too taken up with the world beyond to notice us terrestrial beings."

"Nonsense, Fanshaw, Gertrude's an awfully nice person ... You must have done something she didn't like. She's very easily offended."

"Do the spooks continue to flourish?"

"You mean her automatic writing. Well, what of it? You shouldn't scoff at things you don't understand."

"That's better than being awed by them, Nan."

"Anything more I can do for you, Miss?"

It was the Irish girl who came to clean. She stood in the shadow by the door with her hand at her sides. Pretty smiling lips.

"No, nothing tonight, Marion. I'm sorry I kept you so late today."

"That's all right. Good night, Miss."

Nan smiled warmly at her through the dusk of the room. At the end of the hall the door shut sharply.

"More tea, Fanshaw?"

"No, thanks."

While she poured a few drops of tea into her cup she glanced out the window again. Italians they were, probably, smelling of pipes and sweaty shirts and garlic. There's Marion. If I were Marion Reily instead of Nancibel Taylor ... to stroll along twilit streets with backward looks through the lashes; that boy'd rub the clay off his hands and follow me; kidding talk on park benches, fumbling work-rough hands, ditchdiggers' hands, hardmuscled arms crushing, moist hot lips bearing down, panting. The cold voice of Aunt M. when she was a little girl too excited at the circus: Careful, Nancibel, careful, Nancibel.

"But, Fanshaw," she was saying, straining to keep the tumult out of her voice, "suppose there were a life after death."

Fanshaw did not answer for a moment. She saw his eyes dusky grey, troubled. The straight line of his lips tightened. All this is me, smalltalk over teacups and polished hardwood floors and Fanshaw's drawling Harvardese. Marion's neat dark figure had gone off down the street with quick jerky steps. Nan looked back into the darkening room.

"Is there any reason to believe," Fanshaw was saying in a tone that arrested all her attention suddenly, "that people in the next life would be any less futile than people in this life? It's horrible to want to do way with death."

"How can you feel that way? It's all such fun," she said boisterously. So Fanshaw too ... She felt he was changing the subject.

"Coming back on the Baltic, Nan ... you should have seen Edgar. He blossomed into a regular society butterfly and actually forced me to play bridge with some dreadful girls named Van Ryn he dug up somewhere."

"New Yorkers?"

"Yes."

"Was the famous Mrs. Harry Van Ryn along?"

"Was she? You should have seen how she dressed! Might have thought it was the Lusitania. Her daughters were quieter than she was, and rather more intelligent, I must allow them that."

They were silent a while. Rosy afterglow flowed like water through the window.

"Where did you go besides Siena?"

"O, to Arezzo, Urbino, and then to Assissi and San Gimingiano."

"You wretch, stole a march on me ... And there I was up at Squirrel Island with Aunt M., bored to the ears. Never mind, I'll have my revenge some day."

Fitzie's Italian who smelt of garlic and looked like a young Greek god, dark face and a boy's full wistful smile. The gods were ever young and Mabel Worthington eloped with youth and married an elderly Dutchman for his money and lived at the Vendome.

Fanshaw was on his feet.

"Must you run away so soon?"

He nodded. Her cheerful social voice rang bitterly in her ears as she stood in the middle of the empty room. She was full of dull surprised pain like a disappointed child. So that's dead, she heard herself say. Am I growing old? Is everything going to die like that? Twenty-nine isn't old.

She switched on the light and took her violin. I can get in an hour's practice before getting ready to go to the Smithers ... O, I can't play. I'm too wretchedly nervous this afternoon. Perhaps Gertrude'll be in. She went to the phone in the hall to call the number. As she waited with the receiver against her ear, something made her remember Fitzie saying in her thrill excited whisper: And Salinski says you played as if you had a soul. Let's see, when was that? Think I've been in this apartment nearly four years, four years scraping on the fiddle. Gertrude doesn't answer. Tomorrow morning I must get hold of Fitzie. She promised to take me to see that girl. Quite exciting her career has been: the Fadettes and then that disreputable episode with the Italian. How much she must know about life! Probably decided she couldn't play or she wouldn't have gone into the agency business. Wonderful to cut loose the way she has. Fitzie says she comes from quite a good family out in Waltham.

Nan had put the teacups on the tray with the pot and was carrying them out into the kitchenette. O that wretched girl forgot the garbage. She took up the little zinc pail and put it on the dumbwaiter. I'll ask John to empty it as a special favor. While she stood pulling on the rope, gingerly so as not to dirty her hands, she heard loud laughter from one of the kitchens below. Wish I'd noticed more about the people living in this house; there must be some queer fish. She felt herself smiling. How shocked Aunt M. was when I told her where I'd taken an apartment. She washed the teacups and the pot and left them to dry in the rack beside the sink. When she opened the tin box to put the cake in, there came to her a familiar smell of stale bread and crackers. She dropped the lid sharply. Why do I go on doing these little things day after day? The indigestion of the little. A woman's life may always be that. O, I must know about other people's lives. Mabel Worthington, is her life just pots and pans and combs and nailfiles and doilies? She went into her bedroom. Only half-past six by the little porcelain clock on the mantel, a whole hour before I need be at the Smithers. She lifted the shade and peered down into the blue darkness of the street. The workmen had gone. Under the lamppost she could see the patched place they had left. She let herself sink into a chair and remained a long while looking out the window with the shade between her and her room. Occasionally a man or woman walked past from the direction of Huntington Avenue. On their way home to dinner. Endless family tables, and other tables, kept women pouring out champagne for fashionably dressed men, the fast set. Women throwing back their heads and laughing through the smoke of their cigarettes. Perhaps that's how Mabel Worthington would be, with high-piled hair bleached with peroxide and a whisky voice. If I were like that dining tonight with Wenny among cocktails and offcolor stories. The Back Bay siren. She shuddered and threw open the window. Fog was coming in, blurring the streetlights. He always loved the fog. Perhaps once more out of the streaming faces and the clicking feet, his funny shambling walk, his hands, ditchdiggers' hands, the hair curling crisply about his forehead the way it curled on foggy nights.... As the fog thickened the people passing under the window became shadowy and the sound of their steps dull and muffled.

Behind her in the room the clock struck seven silvery discreet little strokes. Nan jumped guiltily to her feet. She must dress. As she arranged her hair she wondered if she should take her violin. They'd be sure to ask her to play, but perhaps it would impress them more if she said she had forgotten it.

* * * *

"Perhaps it's suede you wanted, Miss," said the thin blonde saleslady, narrowing her eyes as she leaned towards Nan across the counter.

"The material doesn't matter a bit. It's a certain color I'm looking for, can't you understand?" said Nan peevishly. She held herself in and said again firmly in her natural voice: "A warm pearl grey."

Nan was very tired. The late afternoon bustle of the department store and the atmosphere of perfumes and women's furs and breathedout air and the close smell of fabrics were almost unbearable. She had been shopping all afternoon so that her legs ached and she had a faint pain between her eyes. While the woman went off for a new box of gloves, Nan stared dully at the holly-wreathed sign above the counter: Do Your Christmas Shopping Early. Her eyes followed the wearisome curlicues of the gothic capitals.

"Here you are, Miss," said the saleslady, with a desperate attempt at sprightliness in her voice.

"That's it," said Nan. She found herself looking in the white face of the saleslady, itself a little like wrinkled kid. "Busy time this must be for you."

"Busy! No time to breathe."

"I don't see how you do it."

"Don't think about it. Only way. Never think about things," said the saleslady, breathlessly writing out the slip.

Nan found herself drifting down the aisle of the store, a package added to those under her arm and stuffed into her bag, among fat jostling women and angular women with disapproving lips and small tired women with saggy eyes; she glanced in the waxen face under slimy hair of a floorwalker, tried ineffectually to approach the notions counter and at last found herself looking at the clock beside the elevator. Half-past four, time to meet Fitzie at the tearoom. The elevator smelt of oil, heavy like castor oil. Was it her mother's voice, or some governess's out of her childhood: Now, Nancibel, if you can't be more ladylike you'll have to take some castor oil? How tired she was this afternoon. Silly to come shopping in the afternoon so near the Christmas season.

Christmas comes but once a year. Let us laugh and have good cheer, La la dee dee, la la dee dee.

Beyond nodding cherries in a grey woman's hat, the face of the elevator man, black face with an ivory grin, and his suave negro voice announcing: Mezzanine Floor: Ladies' and Misses' garments and imported lingerie, Ladies' and Misses' hats and footwear. Way back, please ... Second Floor: Men's and Boys' clothes, ready and custom made, sporting goods; Men's and Boys' haberdashery and footwear. Let the lady out, please ... Third Floor: House furnishings, rugs, verandah furniture and imported goods ... At the top floor Nan stumbled out of the elevator and had to sit down on the bench in front of it, she was so tired. She counted over the little packages on her lap. That's right, I haven't lost anything.

"Nan, it's all fixed."

Fitzie, in a red hat with a feather, popped out of the soggy mass of women in the elevator crisp and bristling with excitement. She sat down beside Nan on the bench.

"My dear, you look a sight; you must be dreadfully tired. Never mind, some tea'll freshen you up famously.... But it's all fixed about our tour."

"You mean the orchestra?"

"Of course, Nancibel. We open next Monday in Montreal."

"It'll be dreadfully cold up there, I should think."

"But think, dearest, how wonderful! I've never traveled in my life before. We'll go all the way out to the Coast, San Francisco and all that."

"Fitzie, before you go we mustn't forget to call on Mabel Worthington. I'm very curious to meet her."

"O, we will, but let's get a table before they are all snapped up. I'm perishing."

The waitress had pretty brown eyes. She can't be more than eighteen, thought Nan as they sat down. Eleven years younger than I am. What happens in eleven years! Nothing. Everything. A mere kid Wenny would have been eleven years ago, inky-fingered curlypated schoolboy.

"And how's your aunt?" Fitzie was asking.

"I'm rather worried about her ... Poor Aunt M. hasn't been a bit well this last month. I've been trying to get her to go south."

"I should think Florida 'ld be just the thing."

"She's afraid she'd be lonely."

"Why don't you go with her?"

"But my music, Fitzie! I can't afford to lose a whole winter at this stage of the game, and Salinski's promised me some extra hours."

"O, I see."

Nan frowned.

"You don't mean you think I ought to give up everything and go, do you?"

"Of course not, but the conflict between one's love for one's family and one's wanting a career is sometimes dreadful, positively dreadful ... Of course, it's none of my business and I shan't say anything one way or the other."

"But what tommyrot ... You know perfectly well how I feel about my career."

"Of course, dear, of course," said Fitzie nibbling at a piece of toast. "You'll be interested in what Mabel has to say about that. She's made more of a career than any of the girls in our time at the Conservatory."

"I don't mean quite that by career," said Nan laughing.

"Of course not, you are much too wellbred, dearest ... But could you go tomorrow?"

"Not tomorrow ... But, how about Saturday?"

Nan gulped down a cup of weak milky tea with relief. The chatter at the tables round about and the smothered selection from the Arcadians out of the victrola in the corner of the tearoom sucked all the remaining energy out of her so that she sat limp, staring at her friend's new red hat. Utterly ridiculous, like a redbird, she was thinking.

"Why not tomorrow?" insisted Fitzie. "I shall be dreadfully busy Saturday. It'll be my last useful day. We leave Sunday night. Isn't it too wonderful! Think of the places I'll see and the people I'll meet and everything ... Of course it'll be exhausting too."

"I almost wish I were going with you."

"But you can't have engagements all day tomorrow, Nancibel."

"I'm going to stay in the house tomorrow."

"O, you poor dear!" Fitzie leaned over and patted Nan's hand. "That's quite all right. Of course, I understand. Of course, we'll go Saturday."

Nan winced. She felt a sudden rage against all this womanish chatter and chirping talk. The smell of women, perfume, furs, dry goods was choking her. I must get out of here.

"Walk with me to the Touraine, Fitzie. I'm going home in a taxi."

"You extravagant thing. But I simply can't. I've got so much to do ... preparations for departure."

"And that Worthington girl?" asked Nan in a carefully offhand voice as they were going down in the packed elevator.

"O, I'll call her up and make a date. She's always in at teatime. Shall I phone you, dear?"

"Yes, do." Fitzie's short pigeon-breasted figure was caught into the stream of women down the main aisle of the store, over which the arcs hovered like big lilac-white balloons. A last glimpse of the red hat. O, I should have spoken of it; she'll be offended. But such a sight ... The revolving doors swung Nan out on to the pavement, where the air was cold and hard. The signs down Washington Street brandished metallic facets of light. The crowd streamed endlessly dark against the motionlessness of the wide windows of stores. From automobiles moving in compact opposed streams came the rasp of racing motors and a smell of scorched gasoline. Nan made her way slowly through a barbed painful tunnel of light and noise and cold. With a little sigh she sank back into the springy seat of the taxi and let the packages slip out of her hands. There was a musty smell about it that brought up childish dreams of elegance. That picture eternally repeated in the movies of the elegantly gloved heroine stepping into her limousine. To arrive that way stately at the side doors of concert halls, to be handed out by sleekhaired men in frock coats, to stand a moment waiting in a long tightfitting dress of royal blue, her violin in one hand, a smell of roses about her, and from everywhere the terrible dizzy murmur of the waiting audience. Had Mabel Worthington attained all that already? Why, she can't even play, all she's done has been to flaunt her sex. She must be a veritable harlot. I must see her to find out.

They were turning the corner out of Massachusetts Avenue. Nan tapped suddenly on the window.

"I want to stop at that fruit store ... That's right."

"All right, Miss," said the driver smiling. He was a pertlooking young man with a red face and a horseshoe scarf pin.

Why am I so timid? I have personality as much as the next girl, she was thinking as warmed by the young man's smile she wandered about the fruit store trying to decide what to buy. At last she lit on some pears. While the Greek, a sallow man with a long nose and close-cropped hair, was putting them in a bag, she spied some Japanese persimmons in a box. "O, I must have some of those for the color."

"They are mighty good ... sweet as honey," said the Greek.

"At last!" she muttered, closing her eyes with a little sigh when, having paid off the taxi, she stood in the elevator of the Swansea. As she let the packages slide from her arms into the armchair in the living room, she felt a crushing sense of loneliness. She poured the orangered persimmons into a blue bowl on the teatable. How beautiful they are. If I only had someone to show them to. She threw herself into a bustle of preparations for supper. She lit two burners in the kitchenette. Toast and boiled eggs and then I'll go to bed with a book. The usualness of the smell of the gas-burners and boiling water and toast oppressed her. Was she going to spend all her life puttering about that miserable kitchenette? If I were at Aunt M.'s in the little room I had when I was a child it would be cosy to be made a fuss over and have breakfast brought up to me in bed by Mary Ann in the morning.

After supper she remembered she hadn't looked at the letters she had brought up from the mailbox. One from Salinski, what on earth?

Dear Miss Taylor:

It is with infinite regret that I must announce to you that on account of great and pressing business I shall be forced to omit your next three lessons, making our following engagement for January 26....

I know what that means. He's losing interest in me. He can't treat me like that. I'll phone him. He has no right not to explain what he means.

She went to the phone and jerked off the receiver. Then she put it back weakly and burst into tears. O, I'm all distraught this evening. How horribly silly. I'll go to bed and read.

Once in bed, in her white bedroom, with the reading light over her shoulder and the rest of the room in cosy shadow and the persimmons in their blue bowl on a chair within reach, she began to feel calmer. She lay a long while staring at the ceiling with Locke's Beloved Vagabond unopened in her hand. Is it just that I'm feeling low this evening, or is everything crumbling, breaking down to let in the floods of platitude the way the noise of pianolas seeps in through apartment-house walls?

The persimmons glowed like lacquer. Sweet as honey, the Greek had said they were. Vermilion, the color, was more than red or orange. Was it Wenny or Fanshaw used to talk about how the three of them were like people out of another age lost in a grey swamp of dullness in their vermilion barge? Another age. If she'd lived in another age. The grandeur that was Rome. Decline and fall. What careers women had then. Dread career of adultery and crime. Messalina. Was it on the Pincian her gardens had been? Somewhere in Baedeker. Carried in a litter through howling streets, swinging above the torches and the black dripping backs of slaves with an arm about the neck of a young curlyhaired lover, long ringed fingers clasped about the hard muscle of his shoulder, into the walled gardens winy with the smell of overripe fruits sweet as honey. Great gates closing on streets full of crowds that shrieked challenging, mocking, Messalina. In the hush of the garden on the Pincian she and Wenny in each other's arms, with their lips touching, sweet as honey. Nan felt hot shudders go through her, her cheeks were fire. She pressed her dry eyes against the white cool linen of the pillow and lay on her face rocking to and fro. Then she jumped out of bed and began to walk about her narrow bedroom. She must go out.

From the apartment below came the sound of a piano and a man's nasal voice singing:

I know a spot where the sun is like gold And the cherry blooms burst with snow.

Nan threw open the window and looked out into the empty street. Two cats, arched scuttling shadows, were circling about the lampost. The night was suddenly ripped with their caterwauling. Shivering with cold and disgust, Nan sat a long time in the chair by the window, her palms pressed against her hot tearless eyes. Down the street she heard from time to time the lovewail of a cat.

* * * *

A bellboy's brown back shiny with buttons preceded them down the dark red-carpeted hall. In spite of Nan's casual stroll beside Fitzie who walked with her face pushed forward eagerly and a smile ready on her lips, she felt strangely uneasy. I merely want to see what she's like, she said to herself, constricting her flutter of excitement as she constricted her wrists buttoning her tight kid gloves. Merely to observe. The boy knocked on a brown door at the end of the hall. Nan could feel her heart pumping.

"Come!" The voice was deep, throaty under velvet. The room was bright, wide, looped salmon colored curtains, brisk air with a smell of flowers, freesias. The woman walked towards them, holding out a hand.