Part 5

"I'm going," said Nan suddenly in a cold, hard voice. "You can stay if you like, Wenny."

The door swung behind them. They brushed past some boys clattering up the stairs with shouts of laughter. Once on the pavement, Fanshaw breathed deep of the snowy air.

"We'll take the car at Scollay Square," he said in a reassuring businesslike tone. In him a voice kept saying: That dirty little kid, that dirty little kid, and exultantly, Nan can't like him after this.

Nan said nothing, but walked beside him with cold, precise steps. At the entrance to the subway, Wenny came up to them and said: "All right. Good night," in a sudden, curt tone, and went off walking fast down Hanover Street again.

The Huntington Avenue car filled up gradually with people. As it growled through the tunnel past Park and Boylston the row of faces opposite joggled as meaningless as turnips jounced over cobbles in a pushcart. And again Fanshaw throught of Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait with yellow curls and the dandified black and white flounced shirt and the calm, self-possessed mouth. If I could be like that, he was thinking, and not like these. And there's that suit I meant to have pressed today. I'll take it round after my nine o'clock class; and the weekly tests and Mrs. Gerald's dinner invitation to answer. He half closed his eyes. That wine makes me drowsy.

* * * *

"I've so wanted, so prayed, dear, that you might have a beautiful, lovely career," Fanshaw's mother was saying in a weak voice, her head swaying from side to side ever so little against the pillow.

Fanshaw nodded and drew up his chair beside her's. Outside the window some barberries were very red against the snow in the thin twilight of the winter afternoon. Snow scene by Brueghel.

"And really, dear, it must be admitted," went on Mrs. Macdougan with a little smile, "that you have done very well in the five years since you left college. You have made yourself beloved and respected, dear, in the walk of life you have chosen... Don't shake your head, you know it is true. Why Mrs. Appleby was telling me only yesterday how highly Mr. Appleby thought of your work under him. O, I was proud of you! And I shall be prouder yet, I know it, if I live long enough... Yes, I shall. O, dear boy, when I was raising you, and I had such trouble raising you, you were sickly, you know dear, like I am now... I used to think how you'd be big and strong and a comfort to me when I was old, just like you are. If God hadn't seen fit to try me with this affliction, how happy we would be together."

"But, mother, you are going to get well, you know. This summer maybe we'll be able to go abroad."

"Nice of you to say it, dearest.... Do you think you could make me a cup of tea? I'd so like a cup of tea. These afternoons are so long."

"But, mother, you know you're not supposed to have tea."

All the little wrinkles about her eyes and the corners of her mouth deepened. She patted her grey pompadour, that had slipped a little to one side of her head, with a querulous hand.

"I didn't have any yesterday," she whined. "I'm so thirsty, Fanshaw."

"All right, I'll get Susan to make some."

When he came back from the kitchen, she said, her grey eyes wide, staring with excitement:

"I was thinking, Fanshaw, supposing you married and some dreadful woman won you away from your poor mother; what should I do? You're so sweet to me; you take such care of me."

Fanshaw turned red to the roots of his sandy hair.

"Not much danger of that," he said stiffly. "We'll have a nice cup of tea in a minute, very weak, so that we shan't get too nervous, shan't we dear?"

"I know it's so, Fanshaw. Some girl has got a hold on you. Don't trust her dear, don't trust her. Women are so wicked. She's after your social position or thinks you make a good salary... O, I'd die, I'd die if someone got you away from me." Mrs. Macdougan was sitting bolt upright in the chair, beating on her knees with little puffy hands. A wisp of grey hair had fallen down over her forehead, revealing a bit of the black rat under the pompadour. "They are such scheming creatures, so deceitful and wicked, and I so want you to have a beautiful career and be a comfort to me."

"O, now please dear! O, now please dear!" Fanshaw was saying, clenching and unclenching his hands, staring into the crowded twilight of the library behind his mother's head.

Susan, tall, with genial horse teeth, came in with a tray of tea things.

"O, your hair's acomin' down, mum. Can't I fix it for you, mum?"

"Do, Susan, please," said Mrs. Macdougan in a faint voice, drooping against the pillow.

Fanshaw brought up a small table and poured out a cup of tea. His lips were compressed and trembling. When Susan had gone he said in a quiet, expressionless voice:

"Now, mother, you are getting yourself worked up over nothing. I assure you there is nothing whatever between me and any girl."

"You always were a truthful boy, but no matter, no matter... There's not enough sugar in this tea, dear. O, why don't people ever give me things the way I like them?"

Fanshaw dropped another lump in her cup. She began to drink the tea in little sips. The wrinkles in her face relaxed. Fanshaw was looking out of the window at the snow, rosy with sunset, and the intense purple shadows behind the barberry bushes. His mind was all drawn hotly into the image of Nan that day at the Logans' with a net of pearls over her hair like a girl by a Lombard painter. Against the snow, the fervid rose and purple, how fine she would be.

"Well, I must leave you, mother," he said. "I must go over to Cambridge."

"Don't be late this evening."

"No, dear."

* * * *

The wind was nipping and frosty with a smell of mudflats on it and salt-eaten piles. Fanshaw, walking up T Wharf between Wenny and Nan, sniffed with relish the harbor air, looking at the agewarped houses and the masts and tackle of the fishing schooners against the grey sky. He had pulled his buff woolen muffler up until it covered the lobes of his ears and had sunk his hands deep in his overcoat pockets. In the forehead between the eyes the wind pressed now and then like biting cold iron.

"If I had been a man," Nan was saying, "I should have gone to sea."

"But think of it in this weather... It's delightful to take a stroll and look at the harbor and the shipping and go back to a warm room. But think of being out in it always. Such beastly cold, grimy, monotonous work." Fanshaw felt his teeth almost on edge as he spoke. How differently made people must be who could stand that sort of thing.

The wharf was empty. From the stubby stovepipes of the galleys of the close-packed schooners came an occasional rift of blue smoke, a whiff of bacon and pipes and stuffy bunks snatched away in a gust of wind.

"I may go yet someday," said Wenny.

"But think," Fanshaw shuddered. "Think of handling frozen ropes in a wind like this." He thought of gritty ropes cutting through gloves and flesh, ripping the calloused flesh of men's palms. That story of Jack London's he had read years ago. It must have been that that put it in his head, the sight of blood on ice-jagged, tarry ropes.

The harbor was wide bright silver, tarnished where the wind made catspaws. One tug steamed seaward, cutting into the wind with a white rustle of foam about a bluff, grimy bow, dragging long coils of brown smoke. They were standing beside some piles at the end of the wharf.

"I have my chance now," said Wenny. "The bust-up was complete this time."

"How do you mean?" Fanshaw and Nan said in unison.

"My chance to go to sea ... I've broken off relations ... with my relations ... Bad pun, isn't it?"

"You mean you had a row with them?" said Fanshaw. "I can understand that. Poor mother and I nearly came to blows.... It's the holiday spirit. Christmas is a dreadful time. Don't you think so, Nan?"

"I like Christmas," said Wenny.

"But Wenny, you said complete." Nan put a hand on his arm.

"I mean it. I shall never have anything to do with them again... I never have rows."

"But what on earth happened?" Nan's voice was very gentle.

"Absolutely nothing. My father and I had a little chat about life and eternity. How silly, I'm getting all worked up talking about it. O, I suppose I'd better tell you to get it off my system. It's not a bit important. I laid on for life and he laid on for eternity ... Naturally, being a clergyman eternity is his line of goods. We got sore. I'm never going to take anything more from him, either his money or his insolence."

"But how are you going to live?" cried Fanshaw.

"What the hell? I've got as much muscle as the next man."

"But you're so impractical, Wenny."

"It must have been more than that. How did it start?" said Nan, tapping with her patent leather toe at a loose board.

"It started ..." There was a catch in Wenny's voice. Then gruffly: "He said something unpleasant about a snapshot I had on my desk. It's too ridiculous."

"But you'll have to give up your M. A.," went on Fanshaw.

"Damn good thing, too. I was just hanging round the Anthropology department in the hope of getting in on an expedition to South America."

And Wenny owes me a hundred dollars, the thought crept unexpectedly into Fanshaw's mind. Never get it now.

"But Wenny," Nan was pleading, "I think you are probably exaggerating the importance of the whole thing. I don't see that it's necessary to get on your high horse like that."

"You would, Nan, if you knew them. You can't imagine how fearful it is down there. A congregational minister's house in Washington. The snobbery and the mealymouthedness ... God, it's stinking... You see I never really lived with them. My mother's sister brought me up mostly here in Boston. You see I had three brothers and a sister, and I was the ugly duckling; and my aunt, who was an old maid, took me off their hands. She was a fine woman. She died the year I went to college. She lived on an annuity, and left me just enough money to skimp through on till Junior year, when my father said he'd help... I have nothing in common with those people down there, and now, because they were giving me money, they decided I must do what they wanted, and they hate me and I hate them. I was a filthy coward to ever take a cent from him, anyway.... And so here I am at twenty-three, penniless, ignorant, and full of the genteel paralysis of culture... Silly, isn't it, Nan?"

The rising wind whined through the rigging of the fishing schooners and the waves slapped noisily against their pitchy bows. Fanshaw's feet were numb and his forehead ached.

"Let's walk along," he said. "I'm frozen. I'd like some hot chocolate, would you, Nan?"

"But Wenny," Nan was saying, "You ought to stay on a little while to get your breath as it were... You took your room in Conant for the whole season."

"But, how am I going to pay the term bill, I'd like to know?" There was a little tremor in Wenny's voice that made him cut off his words sharp.

They turned and walked down the wharf again, the wind shoving and nudging at them from behind. In the lea of the buildings were a few old men with red faces sitting on boxes smoking pipes.

"Still," said Wenny with a sudden laugh. "I'm glad it happened. It tears off this fearful cotton wadding I've been swaddled in all my life. We'll see what the world is like now, won't we Fanshaw, old duck?" He slapped Fanshaw hard between the shoulders.

"The trouble is; can one live without it?" said Nan.

Fearfully good looking the boy is, all excited and flushed like this, Fanshaw thought.

"By God, I intend to!"

"I thought you looked different, Wenny, when you got off the train," Nan said.

"It was fearfully decent of you two to meet me... Makes me feel as if I had somebody, no matter what happened."

"I've often thought," Fanshaw said, "That there was something that cut us three off together, like people in a carnival in Venice who might drift in their wonderfully carved state gondola down a dark canal ..."

"And find themselves in the Charles ... Exactly!" cried Wenny laughing.

They had left the wharves and were walking through the grey many-angled buildings of the business section. It was the lunch hour, and the streets were full of clerks and stenographers hustling from their offices to their lunch; from out of the tiled caves of lunchrooms came a smell of bacon and old coffee grounds.

"What sort of work are you going to do? I suppose you'll try a newspaper; everybody does."

"Let's not talk about that now, Fanshaw. Where on earth are you taking us?"

"To Thompson's Spa."

"Why not the Parker House, where we can have something to drink?"

"I'd rather have hot chocolate. I am frozen," said Nan.

They rounded the old State House.

Thompson's Spa was like an aviary, full of shrill women's chatter, bobbing hats, rows of powdered faces eating at narrow counters, smell of chocolate and sandwiches and sarsaparilla.

"Look, there's Betty Thomas!... What are you doing here, Betty? Sit here before somebody nabs the place," said Nan.

"O, just shopping. Dear, you should see the hats, straws at Filenes. Why, how do you do, Mr. Macdougan, and ... you! Why, this is a reunion!"

"Are they reasonable?"

"What, the hats?... Marvellous values, really."

Betty Thomas's nose was a little red from the cold. She held, balanced between finger and thumb, a salad sandwich that dripped mayonnaise into her plate; the three unoccupied fingers were arched airily in space. There was something about her amiable chatter to Nan, about the amiable fussy chattiness of the women all about them that rasped on Fanshaw's nerves; the sum of it was shrill and ominous.

"But Wenny, what are you going to do?... I'm fearfully worried," he said in a low voice, leaning towards Wenny's ear. Like a haze about them was Nan's and Betty Thomas's chirruping talk:

"My dear, have you heard the latest? Up at the conservatoire ..."

"Honestly, I don't give a damn, Fanshaw. I'm so sick of this hanging on the outskirts of college ..."

"I think your department would get you a scholarship. You must go put it up to them. It's ridiculous to let a thing like this wreck your career."

"... And Mrs. Ambrose absolutely refused to sing a note ..."

"My dear Fanshaw, if you knew how utterly sick and fed up I was with all that ... No, I'm going to live this time."

"... And Salinski said ..."

"But don't be a fool. Look, I'll try to scrape up some cash for the term bill. I think I can do it."

"You mustn't. I don't want it paid... I'm not going to keep on with this farce any longer."

"... A middle register, like an angel.... And she told Fitzie that he said ..."

"You make me tired, Wenny. You must be sensible."

"Don't you see that I'm trying to be, for the first time in my life?"

"... met a man who said Romoulet wasn't teaching the belcanto at all.... O, I'm so afraid, dear, of ruining my voice.... So many people ..."

"Well, so long. I'm going to fetch my suitcase," said Wenny shortly. "I'll see you people later." He threaded his way out through groups of women and sallow men waiting for seats.

"I'm afraid your friend doesn't like me," said Betty Thomas pouting.

"He does, I assure you. He's a little diswrought today. He's often like that, isn't he Nan?"

Nan laughed, as she began fitting her gloves on again.

"Poor child.... All too often."

"It's no use taking it too seriously," said Fanshaw.

"No, I don't suppose one ought to take Wenny seriously," Nan whispered slowly, "And yet ..."

"Are we taking the car?" asked Betty Thomas.

"I'll come up as far as your place and then go on over to see Mother... I haven't been there all day," said Fanshaw. Career, he was thinking. Will Nan or this girl make careers? Career in music, diva, prima donna, like Ethel Barrymore in Tante, Adelina Patti; Doris Keene in Romance. Suites in hotels full of expensive flowers. For me a career wouldn't be like that. Too absurd, poor dear mother wanting me to have a lovely career. Epicurus would not have approved of a career.

At Symphony Hall they got out of the car.

"Nan, you'll invite me to your first concert in there, won't you?" said Betty Thomas.

"If you'll invite me first." They laughed to hide their eagerness.

They walked up a street of brick and brownstone houses with narrow windows stuffed with fussy curtains on the parlor floors. Occasionally a girl passed them with a folder of music under her arm. From the houses came a perpetual sound of scales taken with tenors, sopranos, contraltos, tinkled on pianos, scraped on 'cellos and violins, toodled on flutes. From somewhere came occasionally the muffled bray of an English horn.

"Fearful street, isn't it?" said Fanshaw.

"So Betty and I aren't the only ones ..."

"You mean who want to scale Symphony Hall? O, it's a common disease, Nan.... Well, I must go back and get the car over to Brookline. If Wenny goes to see you, do try and get him to be sensible."

* * * *

Fanshaw had marked the last paper in the test on Florentine sculpture. He got up from his desk yawning. O Lord! he was thinking, I'll never be able to look Donatello or the Ghiberti doors in the face again. He leaned over, arranged the pencils in their tray, put the papers away in the drawer, and slowly took off his tortoise-shell spectacles. My eyes are smarting; I mustn't work any more tonight. The case closed on his spectacles with a faint clack. Poor Wenny, what a rotten shame; but if he would not learn tact, discretion, what on earth was there to do? So idiotically childish. Fanshaw walked with long, leisurely stride into his bathroom, where he hung his dressing gown on the back of the door. He came back with yellowstriped pajamas under his arm and sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes. Fearful how this business upsets me, he muttered aloud. Much too fond of Wenny, his dark skin, his extraordinary bright eyes. One ought to have more control over one's emotions, senses. At grade school in Omaha, there had been that curlyhaired boy, Bunny Jones. Walking home from school one day, they took the roundabout way beyond the railroad yards. Must have been May, for the locusts were out. Mother never could abide the smell of locusts, insisted they gave her a headache. Bunny had suddenly put an arm round his neck and kissed him and run off crying in a funny little voice, "Gee, I'm skeered." Curious the way streaks like that turn up in one. Pico della Mirandola wouldn't have been afraid of such an impulse if it had come to him. There were so many scandalmongers about this place. How fearful anything like that would be. He wasn't free like Wenny. He had his mother to take care of, lovely career to make. How bitterly silly the idea was. He folded his trousers over the back of the chair. And it was really Nan he cared for. Love, he thought; the word somehow rasped in him. When he had put on his pajamas he stood in front of the dim mirror a second rubbing his fingers through his short sandy hair. Wonderful it would be to have yellow curls like Dürer in his portrait. He turned out the light and got into bed. O, the window! He got up, pushed the window up half way and retreated hastily before the blast of cold air that stung his flesh under the loose pajamas. Comfortable, this bed; better than the one I have at mother's place. He closed his eyes and drew the covers up about his chin. Streets, he thought of, long streets of blind windows, dark, cold under arclights, and himself and Wenny and Nan walking arm in arm, hurrying from corner to corner. Can't seem to find that street, and on to the next corner between endless rows of blind windows converging in a perspective utterly black beyond the cold lividness of arclights. Must have lost our way in these streets.

He opened his eyes with a jerk. The room was familiar and quiet about him, the accustomed bulk of the desk opposite the bed. Out on Mt. Auburn Street voices, occasional steps. He closed his eyes again and fell asleep.

IV

Wenny walked alone down a long street of arclights, memories throbbing to the rhythm of his swift, nervous steps. Every instant he seemed to walk from end to end the whole street of his life. Back in his childhood it had been unaccountable and dark, overhung; where was it he had walked down a narrow alley between towering blind brick walls that trembled with a roar of hidden engines? The terror of it had been like that. Then breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little redroofed houses set back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps, tiny, like through the wrong end of the telescope, shepherding Noah's animals out of the cardboard ark; and the smell of the varnish scaling off toys, grain of wood grimed by the fingers, black gleam of the floor under the bay window. Then streets to go out in alone, runnings to the corner drugstore, vast, glittering, reeking with dangerous smells, to buy aspirin for Auntie. Terror of faces looking out through grated area windows. And now all that's over. I am going to live. The uneven frozen slush on the pavement crunched underfoot.

And the little funny store where they had candy canes striped like barberpoles and toy trumpets; tin shiny through green and red bright paint; and the feel of rough brown paper twisted funnel-shape, cornucopias, horns of plenty, Auntie said they were. And the smell of schoolrooms and ink on his fingers, and himself walking home fast to get away from Pug Williams, who said he'd smash his dirty mug in. Fire engines and bare, proud arms of firemen loafing in the enginehouse. Muckers, bad-smelling in brown black clothes, who threw snowballs at you and wrote dirty words on the pavement, reckless, who had no aunts to scold them. And tonight I walk fast to get away from all these memories, because tomorrow I am going to live.

And there had been the time he had first discovered memories, when he had held his life out at arms' length and looked at it. And the streets had been full of girls then, the tilt of heels, ankles, calves swelling under wind-yanked skirts; the hot blush and the sudden trembling heartbeat when his eyes met a girl's eyes; the girls giggling over sodas in corner drugstores. The smell of hot asphalt and oil from a steam-roller puffing and clanking in front of the house, the wonderfulness of engines and boats, whistles and the churned harbor-water as the liner left the wharf. Ballantyne read with smarting eyes after bedtime, black faces against blue sea and chattering paraquets greener than an emerald and himself brownly naked in the surf of lonely beaches. Now for all that. No more dreams, I'm going live tomorrow.

The funny excited anticipation when he first saw the sign in the subway: Out to Mass. Avenue and the College Yard; then the intonations of arguing voices, hands knocking the ashes out of pipes, card catalogues in the library, the dazzle of unimagined horizons with phrases of all the philosophers going by like the transparencies in a political parade. His aunt in a coffin, her grey face brittle under glass like the imitation flowers in showcases in Peabody. His father and mother bustling about. During the service he had run away and locked himself in the bathroom and cried like when he had been in a temper when he was very little. And now here I am, and what am I going to do to live without dreams? Tomorrow and tomorrow ... how silly that's Shakespeare.

He was walking down a straight deserted street through Cambridgeport. A few trees cut the cold glint of light against windows and scrawled shadows over the uneven snowpiles along the gutters. He walked fast, staring at the arclights that were violet in the center and gave off green and orange rays through the thin mist. At a corner in front of a red A. P. store a group of boys followed him with their eyes. Muckers.

"O, Algy!... It's late, Algernon," they taunted him in falsetto voices as he passed. A snowball whizzed past his ear.