Part 4

Fanshaw looked desperately up the long straight street towards the glare of Central Square. Not a policeman of course. The man walked panting between them with red sweating face stuck forward. Fanshaw dropped back a step and came up on the outside of Wenny.

"What's the trouble?" Wenny was saying.

"Hell to pay.... Fight in the Armory, see? I doan know what it was about.... I was lookin' at two fellows fightin' an' a guy, a big tall guy, comes up to me, an' says, Well, what about it? Then he called me a sonofabitch.... I guess he was a Catholic, one of them South Boston guys. I hit 'im in the jaw, see? An' then I saw the bulls comin' an' I beat it. You don't care if I walk between yez, just to the corner?"

"Of course not," said Wenny.

At the first corner the man left them.

"I'll run along to home and mother now," he said.

"Wasn't that rich," cried Wenny laughing. "Say suppose we go back to see what's happening."

"The policemen would probably arrest us as accessories. You don't believe that man's story, do you? Probably a burglar making off."

"You are an old sourbelly this evening. What's the matter?" Wenny hopped and skipped along beside him roaring with laughter.

"I am rather depressed. Music depresses me."

They had reached the long brightly lighted oblong of Central Square where the fog was thinned by the shine of the plateglass windows of cheap furniture stores and the twisted glint of tinware in the window of Woolworth's. Young men loafed on the edge of the sidewalk and stumpy girls chattered in the doorways of candy shops.

"Where were you born, Fanshaw? I can't seem to remember?"

"Why?"

"I was thinking up where people I knew were born. Nan was born in Boston, Beacon Hill.... Central Square would be a comical place to be born."

"You knew perfectly well I was born in Omaha. You just want the satisfaction of hearing me say it."

Scraps of talk kept impinging upon them as they threaded through the groups on the sidewalk.

"I only lived there until I was twelve," Fanshaw was saying. In his ears rang the phrase: An' I gave her one swell time. "Then my father died and Mother moved East. She'd always wanted to live in Boston. The day we were settled in our little house in Brookline she brought me in on the car to see the Abbey paintings. She was bound I'd take to the arts."

"By the way, how is your mother now?"

"About the same, Wenny. Poor lamb, I'm afraid she never will get much better. She's so patient about it."

They were out of the square walking past dwelling houses set back from the road. A smell of leaves and autumnal earth came to them. In Fanshaw's mind was the picture of a grey head against a pillow, heavy despairing wrinkles from the nose to the ends of the mouth where was a wry peevish twitch of pain; his mother shapeless in a lilac dressing gown propped up in the easy chair in the library amid a faint stale smell of cologne and medicines.

"I wonder if it will always be like this, this meaningless round of things. It would have been if I hadn't met you, Wenny."

"D'you mean I'm a horrible example to keep you on the straight paths of virtue?" said Wenny harshly. He shook off Fanshaw's hand that was on his arm and thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

"When I'm with you I feel as if there were something I could do about life. Remember the passage about 'to burn with a hard gemlike flame'?"

Wenny grunted.

"We must get something graceful and intense into it if we die in the attempt. I haven't the energy.... I'm going to talk about myself, you can't stop me, Wenny.... Mother has a curio cabinet. You know it, in the corner ofthe drawing room with a shepherd à la Watteau painted on the panel. Out in Nebraska when I was little I used to spend hours looking at the things: a filigree gondola from Venice, the Sistine Madonna in mosaic, carved wooden goats from Switzerland, the Nuremberg goose boy ... you know all those desperate little Mid-Victorian knick-knacks put in the cabinet so that they won't have to be dusted. I think my mind is like that. It opens. You can put things in and they stay there, but nothing moves. That's why I am so appropriate to the groves of Academe.... You're dynamic."

"A damn bundle of frustrations, that's all I am Fanshaw if you only knew. Funny how we each think the other has the inside dope on things.... My father had it about God or thought he did. He was sure of himself anyway."

"But you are sure of yourself."

"The hell I am.... Let's have a drink. I am fearfully thirsty."

"What you wanting a soda?"

Wenny laughed. They went into the candy store that was thick with the smell of fresh cooked chocolate. A boy with tow hair and a pimply face was washing glasses. Fanshaw found himself staring with a faint internal shudder at the red knuckles as his fingers moved round swiftly in glass under glass under the faucet. They drank glasses of orangeade in silence, Wenny paid the girl behind the cash-register who showed two gold teeth in a smile as they went out. Fanshaw was already thinking with eager anticipation of his room with its orange shaded lamp; the cosy bookish smell of it, the backs of his books in their case of well dusted mahogany and the discreet sheen of the gold letters of their titles in the lamplight, the sepia of the Primavera over the mantel, the neatness of his bedroom, the linen sheets on his bed, the clean aloofness of fresh pyjamas.

"I often wonder why I go out in the evenings at all."

"Why not?"

"Things seem to me so ugly now, all this rasping and grinding. It used not to be so when I was in college but now it makes me feel so unpleasantly futile. When I'm in my room with everything about me as I have grouped it I feel futile too, but pleasantly futile, artistically futile."

"Fanshaw, that's all utter rot."

"That's no argument, Wenny, to call a thing rot."

"But it's rot just the same."

They walked along silent again. How hopeless to make oneself understood. Through the sting of bitterness Fanshaw remembered the first time he had seen Wenny. He had sat beside him in a classroom in front of the yellow varnished desk of the instructor. There was the dry smell of chalk and outside lilacs swayed against a blue sky full of little rosy clouds; the hideous lassitude of words in an even voice that smelt of chalk and blackboards, and besides him a thin brownfaced boy with moist brown eyes intent on everything, the chalky words of the instructor, the lilacs outside, the swallows that flashed against the sky. And now they walked back side by side towards Cambridge as they had walked hundreds of other nights at about this hour, and his arm touched Wenny's arm occasionally as it swung. Was it four years, five years, they had known each other? Hopeless all these futile walks, this constant juggling of words. Wenny's stride was even with his stride now, occasionally the backs of their hands touched as they swung. For all they could tell each other they might be on different continents. Fanshaw felt frozen and rigid in ferocious loneliness. And now there was Nan. The thought that he might love her, that he might be losing himself to her disturbed him so that he tried to brush it aside.

"Strange how we are all settling down," he said. All the while he was thinking of love, his boyish idea of love elegant over teacups, suppertables on terraces at Capri, a handing of old fashioned bouquets with a rose in the center, red rose of passion, romaunt of the rose.

"I haven't settled down," said Wenny, savagely. "I wish I had."

In a smoker once Fanshaw had overheard a story about a rose. The recollection brought a curious little feeling of sickness, stale cigar smoke and smutty eyes in a leer, flabby jowls laughing.

"I mean all our group at college," he heard himself saying.

"What else can they do, they've none of them the guts to do anything or be anything.... Nan hasn't settled down."

"I was going to say. She has just started on the rampage."

"That's because she is a woman. They go on developing. Men don't."

They were walking up Mt. Auburn Street. A group of boys passed them, striding jauntily, chattering in high voices. Fanshaw caught the eager tilt of heads, the smoothness of the contours of faces in the greenish lamplight. There was a catch in his voice.

"How like a ghost it makes you feel," he said.

"Do you mean you wish you were back there again."

"After all youth is the only thing."

"If there is anything in my life I bitterly resent it is that. The time I wasted in college.... Sentimentality about youth is the cheapest of all sentimentalities."

"Won't you come in a minute, here we are."

Wenny shook his head.

They stood irresolute a moment on the doorstep.

"Do come up and tell me what you mean by your hatred of youth. You so rarely commit yourself to an arguable statement like that.... I'm open to conviction of almost anything."

"I must go along home," said Wenny. He turned, raising an arm, and walked fast down the street.

The stairs creaked under the carpet as Fanshaw climbed slowly, two steps at a time, to his room. He turned the key and went in. Objects were illuminated by a greenwhite swath of light from the arclight at the corner that cut through the curtains and made a bright oblong on the ceiling. On the broad desk beside the window papers gleamed white and an inkbottle gave a glint of jet. Fanshaw pulled down the shades of the two windows and clicked on the reading lamp on the desk. Examination books in blue covers made a neat pile on one corner. On another were bundles of folded papers held tight by elastics. In the center were many pencils and pens of different colors in a shallow copper tray. Fanshaw felt the peevish despair slipping off him. He went into the alcove where the bed was, took off his shoes and coat slowly thinking of nothing, his eyes following the twisting figures on the chintz window curtains. Then he walked across the floor to the bookcase, his feet at ease in slippers, and pulled aside the blue silk curtain that kept the dust off his books. For a long time he contemplated the colored oblongs of their backs, reading the gilt and black and red type of titles, deciding what he should read.

* * * *

The air was raw. Clouds ruddy from the glare of arclights sagged like awnings over the streets. They were walking briskly down an oozy black alley near the market.

"Where are you taking us, Wenny?" said Nan. She rested a greygloved hand on Fanshaw's arm for a moment as she stepped over a pile of fruit-skins on the curb.

"You said you wanted a walk before dinner"; Wenny sauntered ahead talking over his shoulder.

"We are getting it. I didn't know there were so many streets in Boston, did you, Nan?" Fanshaw spoke with a little sniggering laugh. The ooze of grimy unfamiliar lives out of these dark houses oppressed him. Unhealthy it must be down here, typhoid, consumption, typhus, diphtheria. He felt himself putting his feet down gently as he walked as if he feared that at a loud step the pulpy darkness would burst suddenly into oaths and shouts, dirty hands clutching at his coat and whisky-steaming faces thrust into his.

"Now you know where you are," said Wenny.

They had burst suddenly out into the shine and scuttle of Hanover Street, where men and women, dark bulky shadows in overcoats and mufflers and bits of fur, flitted constantly past the broad show-windows bright with intricate glints on shoes and hardware and sourish colors in clothing stores and gleaming cascades of cheap jewelry over black velvet under the three ominous gold balls of pawnbrokers.

"Gee, I'm glad it's Saturday night!"

"Why Wenny?" Fanshaw stood on the curb beside Nan, blinking a little, dazzled by the noise and hustle.

"Because it's Saturday night you old owl.... This way."

"You aren't going to take us into more dark alleys and get us black-jacked for your entertainment, are you Wenny?"

"I'm going to give you the best bottle of white wine you ever had in your life. Here we are."

VENICE read Fanshaw on the window. Stood in Venice by the Bridge of Sighs, a prison and a palace on each hand. Byron; rather a rotter he must have been, or perhaps passionate impulsive hot, like Wenny. The verdict of history.

They were sitting at a round table in the window. The waiter, a grey eggshaped man with sagging pockets under his eyes and a sagging vest too large for him was bending over the table. The others were ordering. How ravishing Nan was tonight in a black dress with great spots of burnt orange embroidery; her eyes under the small black hat trimmed with the same color, were full of little green sparks.

"I swear, Nan," Wenny was saying, "you are the only woman in this blooming town who knows how to dress."

"Where did you get that dress anyway? I have never seen it before," chimed in Fanshaw. He had a vague feeling of pique at not having said it first. Nan and Wenny seemed to get along so well this evening. He felt out of place down here in the slums. The food would probably be horrid.

"This is delightful, Wenny," Nan was saying. "What I want to know is why have you never brought us here before?"

The lint from the napkin came off on Fanshaw's blue serge suit. What a mess. Mechanically he started wiping off the knife and fork when the waiter set them down before him.

"Like in Europe," he said aloud. "You must forgive me Wenny, but I am suspicious of this famous restaurant of yours."

"And just looked there a fiasco just like in Italy," cried Nan, "Why this is wonderful."

"Genuine Orvieto, Miss," said the waiter solemnly.

"And look at the gondola ... Fanshaw, do get over being cross and look at the gondola at the foot of the stairs, with a lantern in it too."

"That's for the orchestra. They'll be here in a minute, a ladies' three-piece band as I heard a man call them one night. One of them's awfully good looking."

Fanshaw looked about the room. At another table a man and a woman were eating intently. They had sallow, puffy faces and looked into each other's eyes as they stuffed their mouths with spaghetti; depraved-looking thought Fanshaw. Probably Byron had been like that, a puffyfaced man, signs of dissipation. If it hadn't been for drink and women ... Why couldn't people be beautiful about life?

"Here they come," cried Nan and Wenny at the same moment.

Three women in white were behind the gondola prow tuning up their instruments. All at once with a nervous rush they started strumming away at O Sole Mio, with piano, 'cello and violin.

In the back of Fanshaw's mind were pictures of how he would have lived if he had had as much money as Lord Byron; a palazzo in Venice exquisitely hung with faded silk brocades, bedrooms with old rose and dull gold upholstery, and everything according to period, no jarring note, a villa on Fiesole hill, smothered in flowers with in the distance the russet roofs of Florence and the great dome.

"Nan, do you see the girl who's playing the violin?" whispered Wenny. "That's the girl I meant. She's lovely, isn't she?"

"Wenny, you are seeing things through the Orvieto, but she is beautiful."

"It's her lips and chin that are rather like yours."

"Musician's lips," said Fanshaw a little pompously. "Do you like those little snippets of veal, Nan? I don't. Too much garlic. We'll taste it for a week."

"Why it's fine," cried Wenny uproariously. "It'll put hair on your chest."

"I wonder," Nan was speaking slowly, "I wonder if that could be the girl Fitzie was telling me about. I rather think Fitzie said she looked like that."

"Who?"

"The violinist ... Must be a month ago I met Fitzie one day all excited about something. Poor Fitzie does take life so hard. She told me a long cock and bull story that ended by impressing me a great deal about a girl in the Fadettes ..."

At the mention of the Fadettes, Wenny laughed himself red in the face.

"Children should be seen and not heard, Wenny," went on Nan in an even amused voice. "About a girl in the Fadettes who eloped with an Italian boy and how his wife went round to the theatre dragging a lot of squalling brats and made a fearful scene. Fitzie couldn't understand how anyone could wreck their chances of a career like that. It would be wonderful if this were the girl."

"What would you have done?" asked Wenny eagerly leaning over the table.

"If I had been the girl? How can I know? I wonder sometimes if just the wanting so hard to succeed wouldn't make you throw the whole thing away in one mad moment. It's hard to explain."

"Sure, I know what you mean. No, but about the Italian?"

"What a silly question Wenny," said Fanshaw.

"Perhaps not so silly. Who can tell?"

They were silent a moment. The orchestra was playing The Soldiers Chorus. The waiter brought coffee.

"And another bottle," said Wenny jauntily.

Fanshaw frowned. They had had enough to drink. What a child Wenny was anyway. With unexpected tenderness he pictured himself putting him to bed drunk, unlacing his shoes, pulling off his trousers. A sudden desire came to him to draw a hand over Wenny's crisp short hair.

"There is something strangely fantastically dismal about that gondola with its red light as an end to romance. I wonder where those stairs go."

Nan nodded her head.

"That's what I meant. I wonder if she is the girl.... No, Wenny, I'm glad you brought us here, even if we shall taste garlic for a week."

"At least there is the satisfaction of having busted loose," said Wenny eagerly.

"I never can understand the amazing way people put themselves out to be miserable." Fanshaw found himself suddenly welling with bitter irritation.

"But, by God!" cried Wenny, "You have to put yourself out to live at all; every damn moment of your life you have to put yourself out not to fossilize. Most people are mere wax figures in a show window. Have you seen a dredger ever, a lot of buckets in a row on a chain going up an inclined plane. That's what people are, tied in a row on the great dredger of society.... I want to be a bucket standing on my own bottom, alone.... Why are you laughing Nan?"

"You are so eager about it, Wenny, dear."

"What in hell would you be eager about if not that?"

"Why be too eager about anything?" put in Fanshaw in his most languid voice.

"O you make me tired, Fanshaw."

Fanshaw flushed. The little rat, he thought, I'd like to smack him for being so silly. If he could get all that energy into something worth while. That's the difference between us and people like Pico della Mirandola or Petrarch. They could get all that energy into thought, art for the liberation of the world. We fritter it in silly complications. What a clever idea; if he could only make Wenny understand that.

"That's where my music comes in," Nan was saying, her voice grown suddenly tense as Wenny's. "By living it, by making myself great in it, I can bust loose of this fearful round of existence. What a wonderful phrase that is, the wheel of Karma! I understand why women throw themselves head over heels at the most puny man. They have got to escape, if only for a moment, from the humdrum, all the little silly objects, pots and pans and spools of thread that make up our lives. I've got to get that in my music. Nothing else matters."

Fanshaw was thinking for some reason of Dürer's portrait of himself at the age of twenty-eight. There was a man who had never needed to bust loose. They must have been less tied to the wheel in those days.

"But you always have to pay the piper, Nan," Wenny was saying. "It's no use trying to escape that. It's fearfully dangerous to live. I should say music was less safe than love."

"Not if you use your reason, Wenny," said Fanshaw.

"Who ever had any reason to use? It's an illusion, the result of thinking things over after they've happened."

Nan left the table. Fanshaw found himself glaring indignantly at Wenny.

"Gee, isn't Nan beautiful to look at tonight?"

"O, she is!" said Fanshaw smiling with forced frankness. He felt a tumult like frightened pigeons in a box inside him. Heavens, suppose he was in love with Nan!

Nan came down the redcarpeted stairs beside the gondola, pulling on her gloves. She stood a moment talking to the girls in the orchestra.

Fanshaw leaned across the table.

"Wenny, don't you think you had better not drink any more?"

"What the hell business is it of yours? Haven't had half enough to drink."

Nan came back to the table, a little sociable smile still playing about the corners of her mouth.

"Well, shall we go?" she said briskly.

"Look! Look outside!" cried Wenny, "it's beginning to snow."

In the black space above the muslin curtain that screened the window they could see big flakes gently, breathlessly tumbling.

"Thank you, sir; come again, sir," said the waiter as he let the tip slide into one of the pockets of his sagging vest.

They were out in the snowhushed streets, the snow brushing their cheeks with occasional feathery gentleness like tips of wings of very cold birds.

"Did you ask her?" said Wenny.

"No. I shall next time. She's awfully nice." Nan was buttoning the fur round her neck.

"Do you want to taxi?" asked Fanshaw, who had thin shoes on.

"Ridiculous, let's walk. I love this anyway. Don't you, Wenny?"

The black pavement shivered in squirms and lozenges of yellow and red and green light under the feet of people scuttling home out of the wet. All the sharpness of lights and colors and sounds was padded and blotched by the slow flutter of snowflakes swirling down out of the ruddy darkness overhead to vanish in the uneven glitter of the wet streets. Fanshaw took Nan's arm and made her walk fast, up towards the electric star that revolved slowly in front of a movie on Scollay Square, leaving Wenny to saunter behind them. They had passed the outdoor market where a few women with taut lantern jaws still hovered over the nearly empty pushcarts of the vegetable sellers and where brownfaced Italians still barked their apples and peppers and artichokes, when Wenny caught up to them with: "Say, wait a minute."

They stopped outside of a nickel Odeon that belched cigarette smoke and calcium light. Overhead painted in blue letters pricked with red was the sign: Pretty Girls Upstairs.

"Ever been up there, Nan?"

Nan shook her head.

"Let's go for a minute; the most grotesque thing you ever saw."

"Absurd. We'll do no such thing," snorted Fanshaw.

Loafers and office boys on their Saturday night bat and drunken sailors and little overpainted hardfaced girls of the street who had come into the broad entrance to get out of the snow looked at them curiously as they disputed.

"I think it would be fun, Fanshaw. Come on, be a sport," said Nan.

"It'll smell fearfully," said Fanshaw under his breath.

"All right, just for a minute."

Wenny paid the admission, and they tramped up a creaking stair littered with cigarette butts and marked with dark blotches where people had spat and through a swinging door into a tobacco-reeking place with seats. At the end of a smoky tunnel in front of a curtain the color of arsenic and gangrene five women badly stuffed into pink tights like worn dolls, twitched their legs in time to the accentless jangle of a piano. The light streamed out from them among eager red faces, moist lips, derbies, felt hats, caps shoved back on heads. At every pause in the music men whistled and shouted at the girls. Now and then a girl dropped out of the wiggling, tired dance and jerked herself off the stage or a new one joined in the invariable twitching step. Fanshaw felt the fetor of hostile bodies all about him. Standing in the back behind some sailors, holding Nan's arm firmly in his, he kept whispering in her ear: "Nan, let's get out of this." The man in front of them turned, and Fanshaw caught the bulge of his eyes as he stared at Nan.

"Come on, I'm going," he said aloud.

"Don't you go with that stiff, girlie. You stay along with me," said the man leaning drunkenly towards her. He had a yellow lean face with a hooked scar on one cheek.