Part 2

"What he said was.... You won't mind if I tell you all, will you dear...? Anyway, I've always admired your way of playing Chabrier. He said your technique was rotten, but that you had a soul. And he turned down Mrs. Glendinning to come here this afternoon, honest he did. Will you turn on the light a sec, my hat's crooked ... There!..."

Miss Fitzhugh put back the hairpin and made a few jabs at the hair under her hat.

"If you want my plain opinion ... O, I do look a sight ... I think you've made a conquest, Nancibel. O, you are a lucky girl! And that Wendell boy's dreadfully good looking.... Well, I must go." Miss Fitzhugh drew the taller girl down on her firm plump bosom and kissed her moistly--"Just think of being loved by Salinski!" She kissed Nancibel on the mouth again and fled with a little giggle out the door.

"Poor fool!" muttered Nancibel. With her lips tightly compressed she walked back towards her guests. While still in the dark of the hall she closed her eyes for a second--O, I hope they go soon. Then with a smile she went back to her place by the teathings.

"Was Fitzie telling you all the Boston Theatre gossip?" asked a little girl with light fuzzy hair and a green dress.

"No, it was only about Mr. Salinski."

"She's jealous because he played here, I bet you."

"She doesn't want him to play with that dreadful ladies' orchestra, does she?" put in a tall girl with large teeth and a picture hat.

"You shouldn't laugh at people's misfortunes, Susan," said the fuzzy-haired girl with a shrill little titter.

"What are Miss Fitzhugh's misfortunes?" asked Fanshaw, who stood tall and blonde in a light grey suit, with his back to the fireplace.

"She's celloist on the famous ladies' orchestra."

"How delicious. The Fadettes!"

"Fitzie's an awful fool, but I like her," said Nancibel gruffly.

"Susan, we must go," said the fuzzy-haired girl.

"Must you, dear?" said Nancibel automatically.

Their dresses swished and kisses were exchanged in the hall beside the coatrack. When the door had closed behind the two women, Nancibel hurried back to the parlor.

"O, what a relief!" she cried, "I was so afraid there would be somebody left I'd overlooked."

"I'm about dead," said Wendell. "Nan, you ought to warn people when you have tea fights and celebrities. I tried to escape once I'd got in, but Fanshaw held on to my coat." He got up from where he had sat crouched in the corner by the window and walked over to the teatable. "Any food left?"

"Here, you poor child," said Nancibel, bouncing a section of sticky chocolate cake on to a plate. "I'll make some fresh tea in a minute. Do you realize that this afternoon is the first triumph in a career of fashionable music? O, it's too silly ..." She burst out laughing, letting herself drop limply into a chair.

"I thought it was going a little far when the stout, red-haired lady sailed in with those two poor little men like a liner being tugged up to the wharf," said Fanshaw, who still stood with his back to the unlit gaslogs.

"That's the famous Mrs. Hammond Tweed, who writes animal stories," burst out Nancibel, carried off on a fresh gust of hysterical laughter. "The way she said Ah when Salinski wriggled out of a cadenza, like people watching sky-rockets."

Nancibel rolled about on her chair. What fun it was to be giggling like this with Wenny and Fanshaw, like children who've done something naughty. Through the tears in her eyes she could see, beyond the big brass-topped teatable stacked with used teacups and crumb-covered plates where here and there a cigarette but blackened with its ash a few drops of tea left in a spoon, Wenny's brown face convulsed with laughter and greediness as he stuffed hunks of chocolate cake into his mouth. And Fitzie thinks I'm angling after old Salinski. The thought came to make her laugh the harder. Her foot knocked against the leg of the teatable and all the cups rattled.

"Look out, Nan, you'll have it over," said Fanshaw.

"Wouldn't care if I did. I'd like to smash something."

"You shan't smash Confucius there, young lady. I'll not let you." Fanshaw put the big blue Chinese teapot in a place of safety on the mantelpiece.

Nan got to her feet and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.

"O, dear!... But I must give you children some fresh tea to make up for all you've suffered."

She ran out to the kitchenette to put fresh tea in the pot. From there she called: "Wenny, bring the debris, I'll leave it for the maid to clean up." The glasses in a row along a shelf whined with the vibration of her voice. She felt all at once curiously constrained. Absurd. She'd known Wenny when he was in knickerbockers. Why should it embarrass her to be alone with him in the kitchenette? The tea sizzled faintly, and the steam came up scalding in her face as she poured the boiling water into the pot. She did not turn around she was flushing so, when he heard Wenny's step and the rattle of china behind her.

"After the battle mother," sang Wenny as he put the tea things down beside the sink.

"Here, you cut this lemon and bring it in, Wenny, if you don't mind," she said and fled with the pot and a couple of clean cups into the other room. Fanshaw's voice was always so soothing when one was excited.

"There's still a bit of the afterglow," said Fanshaw from near the window. "It's wonderful how long it lingers these fall evenings."

Wenny had come back with the lemon and dropped a piece into each of the three cups. Then he sniffed at his hands.

"That's a splendid lemon. It's wonderful how good it makes your fingers smell."

She watched his lips form the words. Semetic lips, like in the Assyrians in the museum, she thought.

"Gertrude said"; Fanshaw was taking little sips of tea as he spoke, "You'ld be taken up with the spirits."

"Not gin I hope." She tossed her head up suddenly, lips pressed together. Fine gesture that, whispered some mocking demon in her.

Fanshaw smiled indulgently with thin lips.

"No, I mean spooks," he said. "Gertrude said you did extraordinary things with a ouija board. She's very silly, you know."

"Made me out a regular witch of Endor, did she?" Her voice was tense in spite of herself.

"O, I hate the longfaced way people talk about that guff ... as if people dead could be more important than people alive," Wenny blurted out angrily.

Nan found herself looking in his eyes; the black pupils widened as she looked in them. There was a warmth about her body as if his vehemence had communicated itself to her. Then the eyes flashed away.

"What nonsense, Wendell," she said. "Don't be so silly. I just played with a ouija board to see what people would say. We talked to Robinson Crusoe."

Fanshaw waved a long thin hand in the air.

"For Heaven's sake, don't squabble. After all those young women, I feel weak. There must have been a thousand of them ... I say, Nan, did you invite the whole conservatory?"

"No, but as they were all dying to say they'd been in the same room with Salinski, I went the limit."

"You certainly did."

"Gosh! The size of that star," came Wenny's voice from the window. In his black silhouette Nan was imagining the moulding of the muscles of the arms, the hollow between the shoulders, the hard bulge of calves. She got to her feet. The grey jade beads hung down from her neck as she lifted the teatable out of the way. The little demon in her head was hissing Careful Nancibel, careful Nancibel as she walked over to the window. Her arm hanging limply at her side touched his arm; writhing hump-backed flares danced an insane ballet through her body. Down the street a grindorgan was playing The Wearing of the Green. What wonderful lashes he has, she caught herself thinking, so much nicer than mine. Warm shudders came from his cheek to her cheek, from his moving lips.

"It looks as big as a chrysanthemum," he was saying. She had forgotten the star. She saw it then bristling with green horns of light.

Wenny wore a woolly suit that had been wet, as it had been raining; the smell of it mixed with a tang of tobacco filled her nostrils. She was looking at the star that seemed to palpitate with slow sucking rhythm, afloat in the evening like a jellyfish in shallow bay water. For an instant all her life palpitated hideously with the star. She turned. Her lips almost brushed Wenny's cheek.

"L'étoile du berger," said Fanshaw. His voice rasped through Nan's head.

Her hands were icecold. The little demon in her head with a voice like Aunt M's was whispering: You must meet my niece Nancibel Taylor, she's such a clever violinist. She pulled the shade down sharply in Wenny's face.

"You'ld be there all night mooning at that star," she said and tried to laugh.

They sat down in their chairs again.

"Well, Wenny, how have you been wasting your time?" Her voice rang false in her ears.

Wenny's brown eyes looked at her timidly for a moment. He spread his square hands on his knees and glanced down at their large knuckles. In Nan a cold voice exulted: he has the hands of a ditchdigger.

"I wish I knew," he said.

She looked at Fanshaw. His bluish green crepe necktie was the color his eyes were behind the round tortoiseshell spectacles. His arched nose and high forehead were what had made one of the girls say: There's a clever looking man. She was glad he was here. She always felt sane where Fanshaw was.

"Wenny," Fanshaw was saying as he got to to his feet.

"What's the matter?"

"Don't go," said Nan in a sudden panic at the idea of being left alone.

"But, Nan, I promised the Perkinses I'd bring Wenny to dinner and we are late already."

"O hell," muttered Wenny.

"I promised you'ld come, and I'm going to drag you along even if your shirt is dirty."

"It looked clean this morning," said Wenny flushing.

"Well, it's filthy now."

"That seems to me a darn good reason for not going."

The jade beads clinked as she followed them down the hall towards the door. For some reason she held out her hand to them formally. After the limpness of Fanshaw's hand, Wenny's seemed hard and hot. Again the phrase came to her mind: ditchdigger's hands.

"I don't want to go a bit, Nan...."

"Well, good evening," interrupted Fanshaw pushing Wenny towards the door with a gesture of proprietorship. As they turned towards the elevator, her eyes followed the fuzziness of Wenny's hair down the nape of his neck under the soft collar. The collar had a line of grime round it. Dirty little animal, said the voice in her. She closed the door, her nostrils full of the greasy smell of the elevator. The smile went out of her face.

The beads clinked as she walked back to the parlor. What was the matter with her today anyhow?--An old maid that's what you are like Aunt M. Nonsense, I'm too alive for all that rubbish. She stood with compressed lips looking about the room. How beastly small it was. There was a design in reddish orange on the bright blue curtains, that was echoed by the orange shade on the tall lamp that stood on the floor beside the piano. She'd thought herself clever to think up the colorscheme, with the warm buff walls as a background. It seemed hideous to her at that moment, like the decoration of a room in the window of a department store. There were still soiled teacups on the tables and along the mantel, and little plates with bits of sandwich and cake on them. She picked up the fat blue teapot Fanshaw had named Confucius. The smooth bulge of it in her hands was reassuring for a moment. Then solitude poured in upon her again. The Jacobean table with knobby legs opposite the fireplace and the books crammed into the bookcase and the battered Buhl cabinet in the corner all seemed squared and tiptoe with hostility. There was a faint bitter smell of tealeaves and burnt out cigarettebutts about everything.

She put down the teapot and flung herself on the pianostool. She would play madly. She would compose. A momentary thrill of huge chords, rising cadences to carry her with immense wingbeats out of the pit of sick yearning. She struck the keys with all ten fingers. The sound jangled loud through the room. She winced. Idiot, she said aloud, and went to the window. She raised the shade part way and let it fall behind her. The green star trembled in the west just above the dark mass of a building the other side of the Fenway. She watched it breathless while it sank out of sight.

* * * *

Nan climbed painfully out of slumber as one climbs a ladder. Sparrows were twittering outside. Her white bedroom was full of sunlight that poured through the wide window opposite her bed, smouldered hotly on the red and blue of the carpet, glinted on the tall mahogany bedpost and finally struck a warm tingling coverlet over her feet and legs. She snuggled into the bedclothes and lay staring at the ceiling wrapped in a delicious blank haze of sleepiness. A motortruck rasping by outside grated on her drowsy quiet and then rattled off into silence. Through the window she could see a lacework of treetops and the expressionless cubes of the further apartment houses and, beyond, a blue vaguely clouded sky. Two little sparrows, fat, fuzzy, with bright eyes, fluttered down past the window. She closed her eyes. In her ears something formed the words: So wonderfully secure.

She woke with a start from her doze. What was she trying to remember? She was suddenly wide awake, her heart pounding. The warm bulge of his arm against her arm, hard, male, and the bright jelly of his eyes between black lashes, last evening looking at the star. She tried to brush the memory off; it clung about her the way the sticky spiderwebs used to cling to her face and hair walking through the woods last summer. She didn't want to think of Wenny that way, she told herself. It would spoil everything, she must have more self-control. No, no, she said aloud as she put her toes into her slippers. Then she went about her dressing with compressed lips.

She threw herself into a flurry of things to be done. Sunday and late and the maid not coming. There was the percolator to put on, the water to run for her bath, the milk to take in, and the paper, and the caps to take off the milk bottle and the creambottle, and the flame under the percolator mustn't be too high and the bath mustn't be too hot. The familiar morning smells, gasflame, soap, bathwater, coffee-steam, were vaguely distasteful to her this morning, gave her a feeling of days succeeding days and years years, as alike and meaningless as milkbottles. As she was cleaning her teeth she stopped with her mouth full of lather and the tooth brush in her hand. It was two years and eight months she'd been living in this apartment. O something must happen soon. When she had rinsed her mouth she looked at herself a long while in the tilted mirror over the washbasin. On one side the nickel fixture of the shower over the bathtub, on the other a glimpse through the open door into the hall and a patch of blue and green curtain; in the middle her face, chestnut hair caught loosely away from the narrow forehead, straight eyebrows darker than her hair, fine lashes. She stared for a moment intensely in her own grey eyes, then closed them with a shudder. I have the thin New England lips, she said to herself. She pulled the nightgown off impatiently and stood with her hands on her scarcely formed breasts looking down into the pale green of the bathtub. Somewhere at the end of a long corridor of her mind she ran through the dappled shadow of woods, naked, swift, chased by someone brown, flushed, goatfooted. She could feel in her nostrils the roughness of the smell of Wenny's damp homespun suit. Aprèsmidi d'un Faune, the words formed in her mind, Music by Claude Debussy, Choreography by M. Nijinski; the big program in her hands with its smell of glazed printer's ink and the rustling of dresses about her at the Opera. What are you dawdling about? she muttered, and stepped into the water and began briskly soaping the facecloth.

Half an hour later Nancibel Taylor sat at the table beside the window in the livingroom sipping coffee and putting dabs of butter on the broken pieces of a sugared bun left over from tea. The sky had clouded over. Through the black tangle of twigs of the low trees in the Fenway here and there a slaty gleam of water flashed out. From a long way off came the unresonant tolling of a churchbell broken into occasionally by the shrill grind of a street car round a corner. Still chewing the last mouthful Nan picked up the cup and plate, absentmindedly brushing a few crumbs off the blue tablecover with one hand, and carried them into the kitchenette. Putting them in the sink she let the hot water run on them, and with her hand still on the tap, paused to think what she must do next. O, the garbage. She picked up the zinc pail a little gingerly, holding her face away from it, and put it on the dumbwaiter, then pulled on the grimy cord that made the dumbwaiter descend, past the kitchenettes of the apartments below into the lowest region of all where the janitor was and a smell of coalgas from the furnace. After that with a feeling of relief Nan washed her hands and put her hat on in front of the pierglass in her bedroom, a hat of fine black straw without trimming that seemed to her to go very well with her light grey tailored suit. Pulling on her gloves, with a faint glow in her of anticipation of streets and movement and faces, she walked down the stairs.

Outside the air was raw with a faint underlying rottenness of autumn. Nan walked briskly, rejoicing in the tap of her little heels on the even pavement, down a long street of brick apartments that merged into older brownstone houses with dusty steps and several bells beside the front door. The pianos were quieter than usual because it was Sunday, but occasionally the high voice of a girl doing her scales jerked out through a pair of muslin windowcurtains or there came the shriek of a violin being tuned. Down Commonwealth Avenue the elms were losing their leaves. In the windows bloated chrysanthemum flowers stood up stiffly out of jardinieres. In the Public Garden, where there was still a bit of flame in the leaves of the trees, in front of an asthmatic old man sitting on a bench with his chin on a silverhandled cane beside a little old grey woman in a porkpie hat, Nan found herself all of a sudden looking into the eager black eyes of Miss Fitzhugh.

"O, Nan, I'm so glad to see you."

Nan felt her neatly gloved fingers squeezed with sudden violence.

"Why, what's wrong?"

"Just let me tell you.... O, I'm so upset. I haven't been able to practice a minute all day. I haven't been so upset since I broke off my engagement and sent Billy back his ring.... It's about Mabel Worthington."

"But Fitzie, who's Mabel Worthington?"

"I must have told you about her. She was such a lovely girl, one of our second violins.... Nancibel, you never pay any attention when I tell you things; I think it's mean of you.... O, it's too dreadful and I'm just miserable about it.... Look, dear, won't you walk a little up Huntington Avenue? I was just going to get a soda ... so soothing, you know, dear, and I know the nicest candy store just a block up."

As they followed the path towards the Unitarian Church between grass patches dappled with russet of leaves, Nan could feel the eyes of the men on the benches, eyes indolent after a bloating Sunday breakfast, dazzled by following the smudgy sharpscented columns of Sunday newspapers, eyes blurred by Saturday night parties; their glances seemed to weave a warm shameful net to catch her wellpoised ankles and the erect slenderness of her figure in its closely tailored tweed. Fitzie was still talking.

"But, you must have seen her, dear, the last time you went to hear us play.... You did go, didn't you, that time I sent you the ticket? You said you'd been.... She was to the left beside the stage, just beside the first violin, a lovely girl with black curly hair."

At the corner they threaded their way among groups of heavyjowled people coming out of the church, men bristling with decorous stiffness, white points of starched collars, prickly scarfpins in satin of neckties, black curves of hats and gleaming shoetips, women fuzzy with boas and bits of fur and spotted veils.

"I had always thought," went on Fitzie's voice in a whine of dismay, "that she had a great future, and she seemed so much the best educated and ... you know ... most refined person there."

"But, what's happened to her?"

"I must begin at the beginning.... You see, dear, it was this way.... O, this is it. What will you have, dear?"

A smell of sodawater and chocolate and polished nickel encompassed them about. They sat at a little white table on which was a lace doily covered by a round piece of plate glass.

A waitress in black with tight starched bands at the wrists and waist hung over them.

"What are you having, dear?" said Fitzie again. "I'm goin' to have a banana split. I just love banana splits. Isn't it greedy of me? And before lunch, too."

"D'you know if you don't mind, Fitzie, I won't take anything. I'm going to dine with Aunt M. and she always feeds one a dreadful lot of stuffing on Sundays. She has such old-fashioned ideas about food."

"Well, as I was telling you, Nancibel, the first time I guessed anything was wrong was about a month ago, when I noticed a young Italian waiting outside the stage door. I was in a hurry and didn't notice him until I'd brushed against him. He was very poorly dressed and smelt dreadfully of garlic but I had to admit to myself that he was goodlooking, like a young Greek god!"

"Young Greek gods probably smelt of garlic too," said Nan laughing.

The banana split had arrived in a boatshaped plate. Miss Fitzhugh took up a dab of whipped cream on her spoon.

"Won't you have just a taste, Nancibel?... No? O, you are a Puritan, dear.... Well, to make a long story short, one day last week I met them on Washington Street, Mabel Worthington and that dreadful Italian. I was brushing by pretending not to see them.... I thought it would be less embarrassing for them, you understand, dear.... But not a bit of it, she stopped me and chatted for a minute, calm as a cucumber, and then she introduced me to him.... This is Giovanni, she said, and that's all she said, though they both flushed crimson. He bobbed his head awkwardly at me and smiled showing the most beautiful teeth. And that was all."

Fitzie was quiet for a minute and took three or four spoonfulls of yellow icecream in succession. She was talking in a rapid whisper, leaning far over the table towards Nan's unsmiling face.

"And yesterday morning she didn't turn up at rehearsal. And now it appears that she has gone off with him. Isn't it frightful. Because she was a lovely girl, really, a lovely girl. She reminded me of you."

"Well," said Nan, "she was probably in love with him."

"But I'm coming to the most dreadful part.... The wretched man had a wife and two squalling filthy little babies. They came round to the theatre and made a dreadful scene, a horrid coarse woman just like an immigrant.... And he is nothing but a common laborer, just think of it. O, how can people do such things? It just makes me sick to think of that lovely girl in the power of that horrible garlic-smelling ruffian.... It just makes me sick to think of it."

Miss Fitzhugh caught up the last yellow liquid on her plate with several swift scraping little strokes of her spoon. She started delving with two fingers in the back compartment of her alligatorskin purse.

"Just think of it, Nancibel, a common laborer. If he'd been a musician or a composer or something it would have been different even if he was an Italian, but ... O, Nancibel, won't you please let me have your hanky a sec I declare I've lost mine."

Nan handed over her handkerchief.

"I suppose she's in love with him," she said. "It's a good thing she makes her own living."

"But, don't you think it's dreadful?"