Part 14

"Hello, Fitzie. Why, how splendid... I always wanted to meet you, Miss Taylor.... You see, I admired you from afar up at Jordan." Her hand was firm and cool. She had brown eyes, a skin flushed with olive, hair like ebony, and at the waist of a simply cut tuniclike black dress two small red chrysanthemums. "Do sit down. O it is good of you to have come."

As she sat down she spread out one arm along the top of the brocaded sofa. Above a long brown neck, Preraphaelite neck, poised a little pointed chin. Nan felt herself sitting stiffly with pursed lips. She let herself sink back in her chair.

"O Fitzie, I've heard about the tour. Isn't it great? I almost wish I were going along. Think of the squalling and squabbling there'll be; won't it be grand? It was funny enough going out to Worcester that time, but the grand continental tour of the embattled Fadettes'll be an unholy shriek."

There was a knock at the door. A waiter came in half hidden under a teatray balanced over one shoulder.

"Would either of you prefer a cocktail or a glass of port or something?"

"O no, tea will be just delicious," said Fitzie, shaking hastily the red feather of her hat.

"Nothing could be better than tea, Mrs. Van Troppfer," said Nan quietly.

"Did you know, Fitzie, I've given up the violin? After all this time, isn't it ridiculous?" The brown eyes were looking in Nan's, wide amused. "Yes, I'm afraid I'm a rolling stone, and certainly I shan't gather moss. Think how they'd be horrified up at the conservatory.... I'm going to try to sing again. You see, I always had wanted to sing and only took up the violin because I could get quicker money by it. Then I had mother to support."

"Really, I never knew that," said Fitzie, suspending a spoonful of pastry half way to her mouth.

"O families are a perpetual problem, aren't they?" said the Worthington girl, laughing.

Nan ate a cream cornucopia delicately, between sips of tea. The crisp pastry and the faint cheese flavor in the white cream made her think of Paris, station restaurants, and fogs and concerts.

"We are going abroad again in a week or two and I'm going to work like a Trojan ... try to strike while the iron's hot. You see, my husband and Hammerstein claim that I have a good stage presence and ought to take a whack at the Opera Comique. That's what the Fadettes did for me! I keep telling them that I'm too long-necked to be a singer ... but I guess I'll take a try at it. Maybe I'll have luck."

"Your husband must have great connections," said Fitzie in a humble tone.

"That won't do any good unless I manage to learn to sing, will it?" She turned laughing to Nan, "Do have a little more tea, I'm afraid I'm boring you with all my chatter.... I hear you are studying with Salinski, Miss Taylor. How do you find him? He knows the instrument all right, but it's difficult to hold him down, he's getting so social these days."

"Still if he's really interested in your work," Nan heard herself say.

"O, that's another thing ... He never was interested in me, I know that."

There was a knock at the door. "Come!" called the Worthington girl. The bellboy came in with a telegram on a plate.

"All right, bring it here; thanks."

It was a creamfaced boy with a snub nose. Nan watched a tense, adoring look come into his eyes as he put the plate within the Worthington girl's reach. That's how she does it. The boy left the room hurriedly, flushing as if her smile stung. With languid fingers she crumpled the telegram.

"You must excuse me," she said. "Isn't it wretched being in a hotel this way? They never give you any peace ... Did you ever study music in Paris, Miss Taylor?"

"No, only in Boston."

"I was wondering if they were as stupid over there about it as they are here. Isn't it hopeless?" She laughed happily, cuddling into the corner of the sofa and taking little bites out of a cream cornucopia. "Still, we'll see what turns up."

"Who are you studying with?"

"O, that's the great question ... It's really more difficult than getting married. I have to look them over and they have to look me over."

Nan began to put on her gloves.

"Must you go?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Then so must I," said Fitzie hastily. "It's been just lovely to see you, Mabel dear."

"I was hoping Van Troppfer would get in before you left.... He'll be disappointed not seeing you."

The Worthington girl went with them to the door. As they turned the corner of the red-carpeted hall Nan had a glimpse of her smiling at them from the half open door, tall and dark against a streak of light.

They walked down the stairs and out on the street in silence. Then Fitzie turned suddenly to Nan and said:

"Isn't she just wonderful?... Now you must tell me what you think of her. O, she's the girl who'll have a career."

"I suppose her vulgarity was to be expected. She wears her clothes beautifully, doesn't she?"

"Well, she always did do that. Everybody admitted her to be the best dressed girl in the orchestra."

"I wonder where she learned it?"

"I believe she came of a good family in reduced circumstances; that's all there is about it."

"Well, Fitzie, I'm going home. If I don't see you again before you go, here's wishing you all the luck in the world." Nan leant and kissed Fitzie on the cheek.

"You will write, won't you, dearie? I'll let you know the addresses."

"Of course, I will."

Nan walked fast down a cross street. What a relief to be alone. Shouldn't have left Fitzie so abruptly, but couldn't stand her chatter a moment longer. Silly to be so upset; what am I so upset about anyway? My nerves are jumpy as the dickens this winter. In a cold fury of dismay she walked home through the yellow twilight, her chin pressed into her fur neckpiece as she leaned against the wind that blew razorkeen down the long street that led to the Fenway and made her ears sting and her forehead ache. Muffled by closed windows, shattered by the gusty wind, there came to her from the houses on either hand wail and tinkle of music students doing their scales on piano and violin, growls of cellos, trilling of dramatic sopranos. Street of scales; they expect to climb into life up their scales like up ladders. She remembered savagely she hadn't practiced that day. And that Worthington girl, did she ever practice, did she work and contrive to get on, or was everything as easy to her as the bellboy's frightened blush under her smile? And this husband she had picked up, what could he be like? A short loud man in a checked suit probably, with a bulging red vest and a brown derby. I'm glad I didn't see him, men like that are too disgusting.

She dug her chin into her fur and battled furiously with the wind. If it'ld only snow it wouldn't be so cold. At length the letters spelling out The Swansea were dark against the light ahead of her, she was in the elevator, the key was clicking softly in the lock of her door. The homelike smell was soothing to her nostrils. Thank heavens, I left the heat on. Before taking off her hat and gloves she stood a moment in the window, her hands over the steampipes. The sky, beyond the hardetched tangle of branches of the Fenway and the purple cubes of the further apartment houses, was a wide empty yellow, chilling to green overhead. Nan felt its bitter emptiness like a rasp on a half-healed wound. With wincing lips she pulled down the shade and turned her back on the window.

That night she dreamed that she sat in the great yellowshot beehive of the Boston theatre and that Fanshaw sat on one side of her and Wenny on the other, both in evening dress, and she was a little girl in spotted calico with her hair in pigtails and on the stage was the orchestra of the Fadettes playing like mad and in front of them Mabel Worthington with her mouth open and her head thrown back and a sheet of music agitated in front of her and Nan kept turning to Wenny and to Fanshaw and saying: I can't hear a word, not a single word. Suddenly Wenny had slipped from her side and was in a taxi with his arms round the Worthington girl, kissing her, kissing her, and Nan was in another taxi driven by a young man with a red face and a diamond horseshoe in his tie and they were hurtling through red-flaring streets under a black sky, streets lined with faces staring and hands pointing and to all Nan's crying to them to tell her where he had gone there was no answer but hissing and stamping and catcalls.

Nan sat up in bed rubbing her forehead trying to remember what she had been dreaming. The glow of the street-light in her window was full of furtive padded movement. Snow.

* * * *

Nan closed the front door gently behind them.

"My, I'm glad to get in again," said Gertrude Fagan.

"Why, dear?"

"It's so horrible a night like this. I hate it all."

"What do you mean? But we'd better go up to my room. We'll wake Aunt M. if we sit down here, and it's so hard to get her to sleep again."

"I don't suppose she's much better, is she?" whispered Gertrude Fagan as they tiptoed up the heavily carpeted stairs. Nan winced when a board creaked on the second flight.

"No," she was whispering over her shoulder, "though there doesn't seem to be any danger of another stroke just at present. There doesn't seem to be any cure for the aphasia, though Doctor Smythe talks wisely enough about it ... Whew, it's hot in here."

Nan went to the window without turning on the light and pushed it up hard. A heavy scent of lilacs came in off the Public Garden where the occasional lights were misted with the green of young leaves. Beyond, the electric signs of Boylston and Tremont Streets sent a great glare up into the milky spring sky. An automobile whirred past. There were steps on the pavements. She turned back into the room.

Gertrude Fagan sat on the bed with her hat on her knee. The reading lamp she had just switched on threw her eyes into shadow.

"Look, Nancibel, at my shadow on the wall," she said harshly. "Wouldn't think I had a hooked beak like that, would you?"

"How absurd, Gertrude! Look, this is the room I used to have when I was a little girl ... I'll put you up next door."

"But, really, I ought to go home."

"No, you'll be perfectly comfortable here. You know you don't like going home alone at night."

"Not a night like this," said Gertrude Fagan shuddering.

"But it's the finest night we've had this spring."

"I hate it; it makes me feel unclean, as if I hadn't washed all day. And there's a sense of unclean things prowling about one ... It shatters my nerves a night like this."

"I wonder if I don't feel that way too, really," Nan said in a low dead voice. "Look, Gertrude, are you too tired to work the board again tonight?"

"You mean you want to try again?"

Nan nodded.

"Of course I could keep it up for a little while," said Gertrude Fagan, getting eagerly to her feet. "You're sure your aunt won't mind if I spend the night? Seeing me appear mysteriously at the breakfast table might surprise her."

"Poor Aunt M., she's gone beyond surprise, Gertrude; she probably won't recognize you. It's almost as if she were dead."

"Horrible! She was such a brilliant person ... I always felt there was a strange magnetism about her, something I couldn't explain, like about you. Probably all your family had it ... What a nice room this is, the antithesis of those horrible paths across the Common ... O, didn't you feel it, Nancibel, in the theatre and shoving our way through the crowd home, a horrible lack of spirituality in all the faces?"

"Rather that they have strange secrets I can never know." Nan was leaning over the chiffonier, fumbling in a drawer. "Here's the ouija board." She turned into the swath of light, holding out before her a yellow varnished board with a semicircle of letters on it.

"He taught you to think that. His was an earthspirit. Now he is purified."

"Please, Gertrude,... You never knew him," Nan snapped out. Her fingers were taut about the edge of the ouija board.

"Why, I met him several times."

"I mean really knew him."

"Why are you angry at me, Nancibel?"

Without answering, Nan began taking the books off the small table where the reading light stood. She drew up two chairs and put a small three-legged wooden pointer on the board. Then she went to the window again and looked down into the welter of broken lights and green-spun shadows of the Public Garden. That night of premature spring the three of them had walked into town under a sky of coppery flame and all the streets had seemed to fall into a procession behind them and they had seemed gay and strong enough to trample the whole world, was this all it led to these choking lilacs that smelt of death? Or was it all mirage, false? Behind her she could feel Gertrude Fagan moving restlessly about the room. Nan half closed her eyes and breathed deep of the fetor of blossoms and gasoline and lurking bodies; then came back to the table, her face still and pale. Gertrude Fagan already sat at the table with the tips of her fingers on the wooden pointer, her eyes black, fixed on the black of the window.

"Think of him, Nancibel," she said in a shaky voice.

Nan put her fingers on the other end of the pointer and closed her eyes. Above the pounding of her heart she could hear the slow rasp of the other girl's breathing. So they waited.

IX

"Well, it was a great war while it lasted." Major Baldwin sat swinging his brightly polished puttees from the edge of Fanshaw's desk. "What are you going to do when you go home?" He turned towards Fanshaw a steaklike face from which emanated a distinct steam of cocktails.

Fanshaw looked up from the photographs of Red Cross activities he was sorting, let his eye roam across the golden and rusty roofs that stretched away under the window past domes and more domes towards St. Peter's and Janiculum, glanced at the blue reflected light on Major Baldwin's puttees, at his elegant whipcord breeches and Sam Browne belt, red and shiny as his puttees, until at last he found himself looking into his blue watery eyes.

"I suppose ... I guess there's nothing to it but to go back to teaching the young idea how to appreciate art."

"Why don't ye stay in relief work?... There'll be jobs for years." Major Baldwin kicked his heels against the desk and threw back his head and laughed and laughed.

"Colonel Hopkins is in there," said Fanshaw, jerking his head back towards the mahogany doors behind his desk.

"I don't give a hoot in hell about Hopkins ... Listen here, I've got some dope, see?..." He leaned over and whispered noisily in Fanshaw's ear. "Old Hopkins is going to get his ... They're starting an investigation of the organization from the ground up. A congressional investigation ... Goin' to be hell to pay. Let's get out and have a lil' drink."

Fanshaw looked at his watch.

"I can't go for half an hour yet ... I'm not supposed to leave my desk till five."

"Hell, up in my office we don't keep any hours at all."

"You aren't so near to centers of operation."

"You mean to that old fool?" Major Baldwin pointed with a stout forefinger at the mahogany doors. "The investigation'll fix him.... How soon are you packing up for home?"

"Probably in a couple of weeks ... I'm afraid I'll have to finish up this album of Child Relief, 1918-1919, first ... I'm bored to death with this work, aren't you?"

Major Baldwin got to his feet and went to the window. He stood a long while looking out, twirling his cane in one hand. Fanshaw continued sorting photographs of ragged Italian children.

"Gosh, I don't see it," said Major Baldwin suddenly.

"See what?" Fanshaw was poring over a group of a Red Cross captain and a nurse with soup ladles in their hands surrounded by ragged Neapolitan guttersnipes.

"Going home after this."

Fanshaw pushed his chair back silently and got up from the desk. They both leaned out of the window and hung over the city that seemed to sway in the great waves of honeycolored sunlight like jetsam in a harbor swell. They could smell gardens and scorched olive oil, and a drowsy afternoon murmur came up to them, punctuated occasionally by the screech of a tram round a corner or a shout or a distant church bell.

"That's true ... There have been many enjoyable ..."

"I tell you, Macdougan, it was a great war.... Gosh, look at that girl in the garden there.... No, just coming out from under the arbor. Look at that throat ... Isn't she a pippin?"

Fanshaw laughed.

"You're incorrigible, Baldwin."

"That's why I don't want to go home.... I'm afraid that if I go home they'll correct me."

"I don't know ... They say things are very gay in the States ... Flappers and all that."

"What's this about flappers?" came a cracked voice behind them. The voice broke into a wheezy laugh. "So this is how the publicity department does its work, is it?"

"Just about," said Fanshaw, turning round to face a small greyfaced man with shaggy eyebrows. "Are you shutting up shop, Petrie?"

"Yes, it's four minutes after five ... Look, does either of you men want to sail home from Palermo on the _Canada_ next week?"

"Heavens, no, I'm staying on till they drive me away," shouted the Major.

"I'd like to go," Fanshaw said quietly. "I've been away two years. It's time I went to see what the university has to say about my job."

"Beginning to think of the girl I left behind me, are you?" asked the greyfaced man creakily.

"Ha, ha! that's it." Fanshaw laughed loud and lifted his hand as if to slap his thigh. He found himself looking with constraint at his lifted hand and put it stiffly into his pocket.

* * * *

Le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière had a red scar on his left cheek that stretched from the lower rim of his monocle to the tip of his distended nostril. As he sat beside Fanshaw in the joggling cab the medals clinked together on the breast of his tight-waisted khaki uniform.

"The people on the street are looking at us as we drive by," he was saying. "They are telling each other: There go two of the bravest of our allies ... The Italians like that sort of thing: medals and people riding by in cabs ... Captain Macdougan, never forget that there is a brotherhood among the Latin peoples." Thereupon he sat up stiffly in the cab, blonde moustaches bristling, and clicked his hand up to a salute. An Italian officer in a long blue cloak saluted ferociously from the curb. Fanshaw found himself also stiffening to salute ... Funny feeling, the victorious allies riding about in cabs, saluting one another to a clink of medals. America had done all that, won the war, and he had done his bit himself; after all, relief work ...

"Excuse me if I stop at this chemist's a moment," said the French captain. "There is something I must get before they close." And he poked the driver in the back with his cane, crying out: "Arretez ici, cré nom d'un chien!"

While le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière was in the shop, Fanshaw lolled in the cab and stared down the grey Palermo street where the dust gave a shimmering outline to the patches of sun and shadow. Now and then he straightened up and answered the salute of some Italian soldier. His puttees were too tight and cut into his legs above the ankle. Never mind, this was the last day. Tomorrow, sailing for home a civilian, no more uniform, no more inspecting colonels to talk to. Strange and different it will be coming back from the war. The thought was elating. And Nan Taylor, what will have become of her? A year since he'd heard of her. Poor Nan must be getting quite an old maid by this time, and, as for me, if it hadn't been for the war, this curious life in Italy, relief work ...

Le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière was coming out of the shop, red and spluttering.

"Did you get what you wanted?" asked Fanshaw.

"These dirty Sicilians don't seem to understand. We'll try another place. Alley oop! Continuez!... We'll dine in the grand manner, won't we?... Imagine, this is my first day of Europe after a year of Africa. If I had not chanced to meet you, Captain Macdougan, I should have bored myself to death."

"Then you weren't on the front for the victory?"

"I was in the battle that made the victory. The war was won in the first battle of the Marne ... That's where I almost lost my leg and picked up a medaille militaire ... Ah, there's another chemist ... Arretez donc. Bon ... Perhaps you could help me explain."

They got out of the cab and went into the shop.

"What I want is tincture of yohimbine ... a very useful product ... a slight aid, that's what it is."

The clerk was a small yellow man with a bald head who wore a stained pongee jacket. He looked up through slanting eyeglasses at the French captain who stood over him twirling the end of his moustache.

"Avez-vous de la teinture de yohimbine, monsieur?"

"Non comprendo, signore."

"Won't you explain to him what I want?... It's a little help, a slight aid." Le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière waved a tightly gloved hand under the druggist's nose.

Is this man crazy? Fanshaw was thinking. Why am I riding round in a cab with this man?

"Cré nom d'un chien, por l'amore!" shouted the French captain. "Teinture de yohimbine."

Fanshaw felt himself turn red.

"I don't imagine they have it," he said hastily and walked out of the shop. He had barely got into the cab when the French captain followed.

"Ce sale pays," he was muttering. As he climbed into the cab his usual bland smile crept back over his face. "Now we can dine," he said. "It takes more than a slight contrariety to ruffle old campaigners, eh, Captain Macdougan?"

"All right, let's have dinner," Fanshaw assented weakly.

How on earth did I get in with this ridiculous Frenchman, he was bitterly asking himself. Last day in Italy, too, that I had intended to be so pleasant. Intended to go up to Monreale to see the mosaics and the view.

"I cannot tell you, Captain Macdougan," his companion was saying, "how pleasant it is to spend an evening, after all those weary years of the war, frontier posts and that sort of thing, with a man of your culture and refinement, may I even say sophistication ... I said to myself when I met you this morning in the Red Cross office: There is a man of parts, an unusual person.... With me there are no half measures, I am a man of action.... So I immediately invited you to dinner. I am sure neither of us will regret it."

"Indeed, not for my part ..." stammered Fanshaw. They had driven up in front of a small empty restaurant. The hollow-eyed waiter at the door agitated his napkin in welcome.