Part 3

"How can we tell? But, anyway, I must run along. Aunt M. always expects me at twelve every Sunday and she thinks I have come to some dreadful end if I don't get there on the dot."

Nan was out in the street again. A dusty wind had come up and was making dead leaves and scraps of newspapers dance in the gutters, and tearing ragged holes in the clouds. O how poor Fitzie gets on my nerves, Nan was saying to herself, and a picture flashed through her mind of Fitzie opening her eyes wide, rapt, and saying, pausing with her mouth open a little between the words--Like a young Greek god.

She walked over to Beacon Street and down the row of houses that faces the Public Garden, looking now and then into front windows massed with ferns and autumn flowers. On small wellcleaned windowpanes a reflection of sky and clouds, shadows of sombredressed people passing, fleeting glint of limousines, then, beside a bunch of yellow curlypetalled chrysanthemums the face of Aunt M. Nan thought how ashy and wrinkled it looked beside the yellow flowers. The face smiled and bobbed showing a straight part and hair steelgrey slicked against the head on either side. Nan pulled at the shining brass knob of the bell. Immediately the door opened.

"Yer late, Miss Nancibel; the missus was agettin' anxious an' alookin' outa the winder," said the old woman in flounced cap and apron metallic with starch who let her in.

"I'm not so awfully late, am I, Mary Ann?"

Pulling off her gloves, Nan brushed through portieres of salmoncolored brocade into the parlor.

"O, my dear Nancibel, how glad I am to see you," said Aunt M. throwing stubby arms round her niece's neck. Nan's lips touched the wrinkled lifeless skin.

"I'm sorry to be late, Auntie."

"Well, one can't expect a budding virtuoso.... I suppose one should say virtuosa ... to be very punctual. And punctuality is fallen into disrepute among young people nowadays.... Now run up and take your things off like a good girl and come back quickly and talk to me so that we can have a good chat before the Turnstables come."

"Are they coming Auntie?"

"Yes, Cousin Jane Turnstable and her boy and girl are coming to dinner at half after one. It's quite thrilling to have so many young people in the house."

Running up the thickcarpeted stairs, Nan caught herself remembering running up those same stairs when she was still in short skirts, a Scotch plaid it was, accordionpleated, that day, and Mary Ann was polishing the brass rails that kept the carpet down, and her Aunt M., a tall omnipotent person then, had told her not to sing, O my darling Clementine, because it was a low vulgar song and somehow she hadn't been able to keep it in and had shouted out without meaning to:

Herring boxes without topses, Sandals were for Clementine.

And Aunt M. had come out on the landing suddenly very cold and sharptoned and had made her stay in her room all afternoon and learn The Slave's Dream. As Nan went into the little room with Dutch blue wallpaper, which Aunt M. always called Nancibel's room, to throw her hat on the bed and give a hasty pat to her hair in front of the mirror,

Beside the ungathered rice he lay His sickle in his hand,

bubbled up from somewhere deep in her mind. She smiled thinking how as the years had passed her relation to Aunt M. had changed, until now it was she who seemed the tall omnipotent person, skilled in all the world outside the house, and her aunt the timid one the housewalls protected from the shaggy world.

"Well, dear, what have you been up to all the week?" said Aunt M. when Nan had run down the stairs and back into the parlor. "I hope you haven't been gadding about a lot, like last week."

"Not a gad," said Nan laughing. They sat side by side on the curvebacked sofa in front of the window. Nan was looking down at Aunt M.'s old hands swollen at the knuckles that lay halfclenched on the full mauve satin of her dress. In her nostrils was a tang from the chrysanthemums.

"And how's your practicing?"

"Pretty good this week."

"You know how I feel about your music, Nancibel." There was a flame of blue in Aunt M.'s hazel eyes.

"You mustn't put too much faith in it," said Nan roughly. She went on hastily in a high nervous voice like her voice when she had people to tea: "Practiced every day but Thursday. Worked to a frazzle, really. How the neighbors must hate me. And there's somebody two floors down who plays the cornet all the morning, so we do a sort of distant duet with the effect quite ... modern."

"Why didn't you practice Thursday deary?"

"I went out to Nahant with Fanshaw and Wendell to see the surf. There was a wonderful noreaster blowing."

"You see a lot of those two young men."

"Of course I do.... But, Auntie, what have you been doing? When did you get the chrysanthemums? they're lovely."

"You can't get me off the track that way," said Aunt M. with a sly smile. "Which of them is it, Nancibel?"

"No, it's different from that.... O, I can't explain it." Nan saw herself and Wenny and Fanshaw running arm in arm on the turf at the cliffedge, leaning against the wind, the taste of spray on their lips. "It's so difficult to classify feelings. That's what Wenny says.... O, you wouldn't understand Auntie."

Nan felt the old woman beside her wince.

"O, I didn't mean that, Aunt M. Why am I so dreadfully inconsiderate?"

"I wonder why Cousin Jane Turnstable doesn't come. I hope they won't be late. It upsets poor Judkins so to have to keep dinner hot."

They were silent. O, I must think of something to talk about, Nan was saying over and over again in her mind. She was staring at the little Corot that hung beside the mantel. A poplar overhanging water greywhite like milkweed silk.

"Do you remember Auntie when I was a little girl what ecstasies I used to go into over that little picture? When you used to tell me about abroad I used to think of everything as pale green and silver grey, like that picture."

"A funny impatient little girl you were," said Aunt M. softly. "Poor Elizabeth used to worry so about your tantrums, but I used to reassure her by saying it was merely temperament and that you'd be a great artist some day.... If she had only been spared to us to hear you play...."

The door bell rang.

"There they are," said Nan with relief.

"And they are not late after all. Punctual to the minute.... O, my dear Cousin Jane, how glad I am to see you. And James you've grown I declare.... Helen, you'll kiss your old cousin, won't you, dear?"

Cousin Jane Turnstable was a tall woman with silvery hair caught up smoothly under a broad hat. Her eyebrows were black and her face had all over the same unwrinkled milky texture as her cheeks. The boy and girl were both blonde and very thin. They all stood in a group in the center of the buff and blue carpet of the parlor, and the voices of the Turnstables chimed softly together like well attuned bells against Nan's deep voice and the quavering voice of her aunt.

"Nancibel, you won't mind showing Cousin Jane and Cousin Helen where they can take their things off, will you dear?" said Aunt M. At the same moment Mary Ann came through the sliding doors that led to the dining room and announced solemnly: "Dinner's on the table, mum."

"This is nice," said Aunt M. when they were all seated round the table where amid a glitter of silverware the creases stood up stiffly in the heavily starched linen cloth: "Quite like old times." And as Nan let the brown croutons slide off the spoon into the tomato bisque a heartbreaking lassitude came over her--I'm twentyeight and every seventh day of my life I must have done this. Twentyeight by fiftytwo, what does that make? But some one was speaking to her. "And how did you enjoy September at Squirrel Island?" Cousin Jane Turnstable was asking in her musical voice.

After dinner with the thickness of overrich icecream still in their mouths they went into the parlor for coffee.

"I suppose I shall never go abroad again," Aunt M. was saying. "My travelling days are over. But if I did it would be to take for one last time that drive from Sorrento to Amalfi when the lemontrees are in bloom.... I'm afraid it is a little blasphemous to say it, but I can't imagine Heaven more beautiful. You surely have taken that drive, Nancibel."

"I've never been south of Florence, Auntie." With bitter poignance she sat remembering the smell of lemontrees. She was moving the spoon round her small cup of coffee with a slow movement of long fingers. She thought of Fitzie eating banana split and telling about the girl who'd run off with an Italian smelling of garlic like a young Greek god. Poor Fitzie who had none of that in her life, always making up romances for other people.

"I seem to remember," Aunt M. went on, "having heard Philips Brooks say that no one could really feel the beauty of such sights and remain an unbeliever."

"Ah, yes, so true," said Cousin Jane Turnstable.

"O dear," said James, his voice breaking.

Nan looked up at him suddenly. His face was crimson. He had spilt half a cup of coffee over his neatlypressed grey trousers. Nan took the cup out of his hand and set it on the mantel while he sheepishly fumbled for the spoon on the floor.

"No harm done," she said. "Come upstairs; it'll wash right out. I'll give you a cloth to rub it with."

"I'm afraid you think I'm dreadfully dumb, Cousin Nancibel. That was the dumbest thing to do," he said in tearful voice going up the stairs.

"Nonsense. I might have done it myself," she answered laughing. "Anything to break up the monotony of Sunday afternoon!... Right in here, James. You sit on the bathtub and hold it tight. I'll rub it with a little soap, Here's a cloth."

The boy did as he was told.

"Why, that'll come right out. You'll never notice it," said Nan briskly rubbing the cloth held against his thin thigh.

"You don't like Sunday either." His eyes looked up into hers with a sudden flash.

She wrinkled up her nose and he laughed.

From the wet woolly cloth came up a rough little smell like from Wenny's homespun. She felt herself flushing hotly. The boy looked up at her fixedly for a second and then the flush suffused his fair skin until it reddened his ears and the roots of his flaxen hair.

"That'll do," said Nan gruffly. "No one will notice it now." She walked hurriedly to the stairs and down.

"You'll play for us a bit, won't you, Nancibel?" said her Aunt when she was back in the parlor.

"All right. You'll accompany won't you?"

She brushed past James without looking at him as she went into the hall to fetch her violin. She was furious at herself for having blushed. As she leaned over to unstrap the violin case, the blood pounded in her temples and filled her eyes so that she could scarcely see. The blood in her ears was the sound of the grindorgan playing The Wearing of the Green after tea yesterday, when Wenny's cheek had been beside her cheek and they had looked at the throbbing star in the west. She tossed her head back and stood for a moment, her teeth firm together, the violin in one hand and bow in the other. And the girl who played the violin in the Fadettes had run off with an Italian who smelt of garlic like a young Greek god. O Fitzie's a romantic fool.

"How well you are looking today," said Aunt M. from the pianostool. "Shall it be Bach, Nancibel?"

* * * *

A yellow mist had come in off the harbor during the evening so that walking home after the concert the streets were dim and unfamiliar and each arclight had a ruddy halo. Nan walked beside Fanshaw whose greenish raincoat made him look taller and thinner even than usual. Ahead of them they could hear Wenny and Betty Thomas laughing together.

"What do you think of Betty?" Nan was saying in a low voice.

"She's your latest discovery isn't she?... A trifle ... er ... unconscious I should say. No harm in her.... I wish she hadn't such a burr in her voice."

"O you are chilly."

"I didn't mean to be so pompous. She seems to like music. So rare in a musician."

Nan laughed.

"You seem to be feeling very superior this evening, Fanshaw. What have you done to be so cocky?"

"Little enough, God knows.... Nan, I wish we could get Wenny settled somehow. I'm worried about him. He ought to get to work at something definite."

"But he's so enormously alive, Fanshaw. How can one worry about him. O, if I had half his vitality, sensitiveness...."

"So much of that is sheer nerves ... in a man. In you it's different. There's something rock bottom about women that men haven't at all. We are lichen. If we are too alive we burn up and shrivel.... I wonder if he isn't a little too alive."

"Nonsense."

"Do you know you do us a lot of good, Nan?"

"If you think, young man, that I'm going to be anybody's rock of ages, you are mistaken, I can tell you that."

The others were waiting for them at a corner where a drugstore sent planes of white and greenish light slanting to the gleaming mud-filmed pavement.

"This is my street, people," said Betty Thomas.

"But we'll take you to your door. Remember the holdups," said Wenny.

"It'ld be so dreadfully exciting to be held up."

"It's on my way home anyway, Betty." Nan took the girl's arm and pulled her with her across the street.

The two men followed them up a street of apartment houses where patches of lighted windows made a yellow blur in the fog above their heads. Before the word Swarthcote on a glass door they stopped.

"Good night all," said Betty Thomas. "Thank you, deary, for the lovely supper and everything."

The door closed behind her. With Nan in the middle the three of them walked on.

"How cosy it is this way in the fog?" she said.

"It makes me feel wonderfully sentimental," Wenny said slowly. "Wagner makes me feel sentimental anyway, but Wagner plus fog ... like sitting on the curbstone and letting great warm tears flow down my cheeks till the gutter simply gurgled with them."

"I say," said Fanshaw.

"Not a bit of it," broke in Nan. "I feel jolly, like roasting apples in front of an open fire. We're so secure all three of us together this way and the world drifting by, dinner at Aunt M.'s and tomato bisque and croutons and love and hate and all that outside drifting by like fog."

"Harmless you mean, Nan. I shouldn't say so.... Do you think its harmless, Wenny?"

"May be for some people, Fanshaw."

"No, I don't mean that. O, you are so lackadaisical, Fanshaw," Nan said bitterly. "I mean something more active.... The three of us conquering, shutting the fog and the misery out, all that helpless against us. But I'm talking like a book."

"You are a little, Nan," said Wenny laughing.

Nan felt what she wanted to say slipping out of her mind, ungraspable. The three of them walked on in silence, arm in arm, with Nan in the middle. Beginnings of sentences flared and sputtered out in her mind like damp fireworks. Slowly the yellow fog, the cold enormous fog that had somehow a rhythm of slow vague swells out at sea sifted in upon her, blurred the focus of herself that had been for a moment intensely sharp. She so wanted to say something that would make that moment permanent, that would pin down forever the sudden harmony of the three of them so that she could always possess it, no matter what happened after. Epigram, that was the word. There had been Greeks who had cut the flame of an instant deep on stone in broad letters for centuries to read.

"I wish we could walk like this always."

Her throat was dry. At the sound of her thin voice, all her thoughts scuttled into the dark like cockroaches in a kitchen cupboard. Her mind smoothed to vacancy.

"How do you mean?" asked Wenny.

"Well, here we are," said Fanshaw in a singsong tone.

The Swansea, in gold gothic letters shaded with black, stared at her from a wide glass door. Beyond white steps another glass door, unmarked. Nan remembered how she used to feel when she was a child and people were getting ready to go into dinner and bedtime came. She turned her back on the sourly familiar letters. Opposite a few twigs of trees leaned into the warm tent of light from a streetlamp out of dark immensity of fog. The light slanting out through the glass door gave a gleam on Fanshaw's glasses that hid his eyes. She pressed ever so slightly his long limp hand and Wenny's hard hand. Wenny's face was flushed from the rawness of the fog and there was a glint in his eyes that made her catch her breath joyously. She wanted to say something. They turned away, raised their hands vaguely and walked off. Fanshaw had leaned over and said something to Wenny that had made him laugh. The door closed behind her. She had a glimpse of the letters The Swansea inside out. She took her key out of her purse and unlocked the inner door. She hated Fanshaw, his glasses that hid his eyes, his long limp hands. They had gone off carelessly laughing. And Wenny too, with the grime round his collar and his shambling walk like an Italian laborer's. She pushed open the sliding door of the elevator that had a familiar everyday smell of dust and machine oil. The door slid to behind her. She put her finger on the button marked 4. It was the girl in the Fadettes who had gone off with a brown man, garlicky, with bright teeth like the Greeks' were who made epigrams. Nan closed her eyes as the elevator started to rise. She was very tired.

III

Fanshaw Macdougan's left shoe pinched the upper part of his foot and a damp chill from the fog-moistened pavement seeped through the thin soles as he walked with long strides beside Wenny. These things gave a vaguely peevish whine to the flow of thoughts through his head. If only I had the money, he was thinking, I would have ten pairs of shoes and a valet to wear them until they were comfortable. The form of an advertisement in a paper started into his head: Wanted a valet, must wear No. 9 shoes, best references required; and himself in a dressing gown of pale colored silk looking over the applicants from a great tapestried easychair. O, how one could live if one had the money, and the people who had it never seemed to know how to use it except Mrs. Jack Gardiner in her Italian palace.

"I was thinking what I'd do if I had a million dollars, Wenny."

Wenny turned, his eyes snapping, and laughed. The glimpse of his face laughing turned up into the full white glare of an arclight lingered in Fanshaw's eyes and faded, the way a stranger's face out of a crowd would sometimes linger and fade. Nan's face too, the profile as she turned to put her key in the lock of the glass door was still sharp in his mind, behind it a memory of the smell extraordinarily warm honied artificial of the flowers among the pictures in Mrs. Gardiner's gallery. Strange that Nan should have worn a hat like that this evening. Unbecoming, made her look like a schoolteacher. The New England in her coming out. Such a wonderful person had no right to look that way. That night at the fancy dress dance at the Logans she had looked her best, her face oval, Sienese, and the hair tight back from her forehead under a jewelled net like a girl by a Lombard painter. There had been such distinction in the modelling of her forehead and cheekbones and her slender neck among all those panting pigeonbreasted women. How rarely people were themselves. Out of the corner of an eye he glanced at Wenny walking beside him with short steps, doggedly, his face towards the ground. A trio we are, Nan and Wenny and I, a few friends my only comfort in this great snarling waste of a country. We don't fit here. We are like people floating down a stream in a barge out of a Canaletto carnival, gilt and dull vermilion, beautiful lean-faced people of the Renaissance lost in a marsh, in a stagnant canal overhung by black walls and towering steel girders. One could make a poem or an essay out of that idea, some people could; Wenny, if he weren't such a lazy little brute. Why couldn't I?

"Didn't you think Nan looked tired tonight?" asked Wenny suddenly.

Fanshaw was loath to break into the rhythm of his thoughts.

"I did," said Wenny again.

"Why should she be tired? She hasn't worked very hard this week."

Wenny said nothing. The street was muffled by the fog all about them. In Fanshaw's mind were phrases from Lamb, vague thought of fogs over London. They came out on the springy boards of the bridge that seemed to sway ever so little under their feet. The fog above the river was denser and colder. Their steps were loud on the slats of the sidewalk. Half way over they passed a man and a girl, bodies cleaving together so that they made a single silhouette. Fanshaw caught Wenny's backward glance after them. Rather unhealthy, the interest in those things, he thought. Further along they heard a regular heavy tread coming towards them, a policeman.

"He'll break their clinch," said Wenny giggling. Fanshaw was annoyed,--vulgar, he thought, why notice such things? Other ages perhaps had put beauty, romance in them; Paolo and Francesca floating cloudy through limbo.

"These last few days I have been often thinking of that passage, Pico della Mirandola riding into Florence in the time of lilies. Then it would have been less futile to be alive."

"How do you know Fanshaw?"

"You have no nostalgia of the past, have you, Wenny? It's that things were so much cleaner, fresher. Everything was not so muddled and sordid then."

"Can't things always have been muddled and sordid? I think they were."

"Those people on the bridge and you giggling at them. I can't understand it, it's so low."

"Then, by God, you can't understand anything." Wenny's voice broke; he was angry and walked faster. Fanshaw thought of a phrase out of The Book of Tea; a man without tea was a man without poise, refinement. Wenny had no tea. How amusing his rages were. They went along without speaking. In the bright circle of each arclight he glanced at Wenny's sullen face, the prominent lips, the strangely soft-textured cheeks, the slightness of the waist under the shirt that bagged at the belt revealed by the flapping unbuttoned coat, the clenched swinging hands. There were puddles in the road. It was dark between arclights, a few glows from windows loomed distant among weighty shadows. Shadows seemed to move slouchingly just out of sight. Fanshaw felt he was walking unawares through all manner of lives, complications of events. Thought of holdups brought a vague fear into his mind. There ought to be more lights. If it weren't for these wretched Irish politicians who ran things.... When they crossed the railway tracks there were little red and green lights in the fog, the wail of an engine far away. A bell began to ring and the old man dozing in a little shack with a red and a green flag propped against his knees--like Rembrandt the shadows thought Fanshaw--jumped up. The bar came down behind them. Lights flashed down the track and they could hear down towards Cambridgeport the chug of a locomotive and the slow bumping of the wheels of freightcars over a crossing.

"Let's stop and watch it go past," said Wenny.

"No, my feet are wet. I'm afraid of catching cold."

They walked on.

"I think I'll try an' get a job on a section gang on the railway this summer, Fanshaw."

"A fine Italian laborer you'd make, Wenny; why you would never get up early enough, and think of the food and the bunkhouses, fearful!"

"I think I'd like it for a while."

Through chinks in the great bulk of the Armory light and a racket of voices trickled out into the fog like sand out of a cart.

"I guess it's a dance," said Wenny.

The day that Ficino finished his great work--Plato was it?--Pico della Mirandola rode into Florence and the lilies were in bloom, Fanshaw was thinking, and wondering whether he would have enough money to go abroad comfortably next summer. If I could only leave Mother.

"For crissake lemme walk between yez a sec," came a breathless voice from behind them.

Fanshaw hastened his stride. His muscles were tense. A holdup.

"Walk slow like. Lemme walk between yez for crissake."