Part 9

"What can they bring but fleas? The scum of south Europe...

"... O, Nancibel, you do have the most delightful teas."

"Why, Jane, I often wonder why on earth I do it. Doesn't it seem the height of absurdity to collect a lot of indifferent people, a regular zoo, in a room and pour a little tea down their throats and tell them: Now, have a good time?"

"But one must have some sort of society ... And you know perfectly well you are just fishing, Nancibel. Why, the cleverest people in Boston come to your teas, and as for celebrities!"

"Mr. Preston, won't you let me give you a little more tea? Yours looks cold and horrid...."

"... No, I wouldn't call 'The Way of All Flesh' a great novel.'"

"But, really, I'd like to know what is great then."

"A great satire, but not a great novel. . . . It's too embittered, not Olympian and balanced enough to be truly great."

"But as a philosopher ..."

"Ah, as a philosopher ..."

Through rigid glassy layers Wenny watched the nodding of heads, lifting of teacups, setting down of plates, brushing of fingertips. Occasionally he saw himself going through wooden gestures of politeness, heard himself speak. At last they had all gone; he was alone with Nan in the room that smelt of tea and scalded lemon and cake. Outside the windows the ruddy mist was purpling to twilight.

"O, Wenny, why on earth do I do it?"

"I guess because you like it, Nan."

"Probably you're right." She laughed happily. "I'd never thought of that before.... No, I hate it, and all those people. Imagine what Fitzie told me today. She said you always turned up as a sign that tea was over and it was time to wait not on the order of her going but go at once... Isn't she a fool? Then she added that it was rumored round Jordan that my engagement to Fanshaw would be announced any day... O, Wenny, people are a scream!"

"I probably do look rather grouchy when I come here and find a lot of those young hens cackling about your technique and that wretched old cadenza hound ..."

"It's pretty ridiculous, Wenny, that two people who know each other as well as we do can't talk...." Nan interrupted suddenly, speaking slowly, choosing her words: "Can't talk about our ... can't explain ourselves. O, I wonder if we'll ever know each other."

"Perhaps the fact that we need to explain ourselves ..."

"You mean it proves that we can't?"

Wenny nodded.

"Or perhaps it's just cowardice," he went on after a long pause, feeling everything within the cold bars of his ribs throb sickeningly. "Almost everything is that."

"Why can't we be sensible?"

"It's not sensible, it's alive I'd want to be ... But this is repeating," he said harshly with trembling lips, straightening himself up. It was as if a rind had burst in him letting out warm, sweetish floods; as if he were crying beside a grave where she had lain dead for years and lifetimes, his memory full of an ivory body he had loved.

They were silent, not looking at each other.

There was a knock at the door. Nan drew her breath in sharply and went to open. Wenny heard Fanshaw's voice in the hall.

"O I'm so glad to find you. I thought it'ld be just my luck to miss you both and spend a dull evening all alone. I have had the most detestable day."

"Let's walk in town to supper," said Nan in a hurried, throaty voice.

Walking down a broad street towards town, they had the dome of the Christian Science Church ahead of them swelled with purple against a tremendous scarletflaring sky across which grimy green clouds scudded on gusts of rising wind. Sharp flaws of cold were clotting the mist and chilling all reminiscence of thaw and spring out of the air. Footsteps rang shrill and fast on the pavements and were lost in the clang of streetcars and whirr of motors grinding slowly when they came out on Massachusetts Avenue. Overhead, above the bright shine of shop windows through which faces drifted steadily, outline drifting into outline, like snowflakes past an arclight, the sky was a churning of dark green clouds fast blotting the clear, fiery afterglow. Wenny could hear himself talking to Fanshaw as they walked, but all the while he was intent on the people he passed; smooth, velvety-warm masks of young men and girls, wooden masks of men bleached by offices, crumpled masks of old women; under them all seemed to tremble something jellylike and eager, something half caught sight of in their eyes that had thrilled to the warm afternoon, that this sudden cold searching through the dusty concrete grooves of the city congealed to shuddering crystals of terror. He felt a sudden maudlin desire to climb on a hydrant and talk, to draw people in circle after circle about him and explain all the joy and agony he felt in words so simple that they would tear off their masks and tell their lives too; it would be his face, his eyes, his mouth moulding words all about him when the masks were off. The picture brightened painfully in his mind.

"Look at all that yellow broom in the window," Fanshaw was saying. As they passed a flowershop they caught a momentary sweet gust of hothouses. "That's the real plantagenet, I think, that the Black Prince wore on his helmet. Strange to think of it this cold night in a Boston flowershop."

"Say it with flowers," Nan put in laughing.

"Exactly," said Fanshaw. "Yet why should there be that horrid rasp in the advertising phrase and the unction in 'langage des fleurs'? Do things seem beautiful only when they are unaccustomed?"

"Perhaps it's that not being customary and diurnal puts them in the proper light ... so that we can really see them," said Nan.

"I think it's just that we like to kid ourselves along. This may be a moment as important in the history of Boston as the time of lilies when Pico della Mirandola first rode into Florence, as you and Mr. Pater are so fond of telling us, Fanshaw," broke in Wenny. "But we don't know anything about it. We'd probably have gone grumbling and growling into town for dinner if we'd lived in Florence then, just like we do here, and complained what a dull town it was."

"But can't you imagine people of another caliber altogether from us?"

"Perhaps I can, Nan... out what I mean is it's our fault, not the fault of the century."

"What's our fault, Wenny?" asked Fanshaw smiling indulgently.

"That we are so damn rotten."

"But we're not. What we've lost in color and picturesqueness, we've made up in ..."

"In sheepishness and cowardice, I'll grant you that."

"Now Wenny."

Wenny saw himself in bitter distortion, standing on a hydrant confessing idiocies to crowds who wore his face as a mask on their own and bleated like sheep, baa, baa, at every pause. It all dissolved into an obscene muddle of leering faces. If I could only stop thinking.

They were cutting diagonally across the Common, under a hurrying sky lit by a last mustard-green flare from the west. The electric signs along Tremont Street bit icily through the lacy pattern of the stirring twigs of trees. The wind was getting steadier and colder, occasionally shot with a fine lash of snow.

"No, but we couldn't live without the ideal that somewhere at some time people had found life a sweeter, stronger draught than we find it," Fanshaw was saying. "That the flatness of our lives hasn't been the rule ... I don't think the fault's with us at all, Wenny. I think we're great people ... It's just this fearful environment we have to live down, the narrowness of our families, our bringing up, the moral code and all that. The people of the Renaissance were great because they lived in a great period...."

"Well, we haven't had much chance yet; give us time, Wenny," said Nan.

"Time means nothing. You can't make Narcissus into the Prelude from Tristan by working on it. The germ would be here."

"But we are learning, Wenny. Taught by our ideal of the past, of the Greeks and the people of the Renaissance, we are learning to surround ourselves with beautiful things, to live less ugly, money-grabbing lives."

"Culture, you mean. God, I'd rather rot in Childs' dairy lunches. Culture's mummifying the corpse with scented preservatives. Better let it honestly putrefy, I say."

"And while we argue about how we ought to live, things muddle along," said Nan.

"And the months go by ... Look at me, I'm twenty-three years old and I've done nothing ever, never anything of any sort," cried Wenny savagely.

"But you're not even hatched yet, Wenny. Give yourself time ... When you've got your M. A."

"Won't be any different ten years from now. I know it won't. You know it won't."

Nobody answered. Wenny walked along at Nan's side, his fists clenching and unclenching nervously. They had reached the Park Street corner of the Common where the steeple of the church stood up lithe and slender out of the muddle of arclights into the tumultuous sky where the frayed edges of clouds trailed along ruddy from the reflection of streets. In the lee of the subway stations sailors loafed with the broad collars of their jackets turned up watching the wind tussle with the skirts of a couple of girls who strutted back and forth with jerky impatient steps. A trail of Salvation Army lasses hobbled by following a fat redcheeked man with a cornet. Through the narrow crowded street towards Scollay Square the wind was less searching. In the floods of light in front of the moving picture houses dapper young men in overcoats belted at the waist waited for girls they had made dates with. A fat man threw away his cigarette and advanced towards a blonde girl who had just crossed the street; with one hand he was straightening his necktie. The smile on his puffy, razorscraped face kindled in her straight lips. Up a side street a man in a red sweater was preaching about something in a voice like a sea lion's. In the middle of the Square a policeman had hold of a holloweyed little man whiskered like a bottle cleaner whom he was shaking by the shoulder and roaring at. Wenny jumped back to avoid a truck lumbering up noisily out of Cornhill. Why didn't I let it run over me? Then the shop windows of Hanover Street full of price-signs were sliding past. Wenny felt vague interest in the streets and people he was walking among, the sort of disconnected interest he had felt when a child in the tableaux in the Old Mill at Revere, gliding along through expressionless dark, occasionally peering out at incidents, random gestures and faces. A year ago, he was thinking, I would have imagined every man, woman and child I met part of some absurd romantic vortex I was just on the point of being sucked into myself. I know better now. Do I?

"Funny, the thought," he said aloud, "That I pass people on the street and say to myself what wonderful lives they must be living, and they look at me out of their own emptiness and say the same thing... We're going to the Venice, aren't we?"

"Mind, no garlic," put in Fanshaw.

"We'll even let you have the eternal broiled lamb chop without hooting."

A flurry of snow fine as sand drove down the street.

"What do you think of this for the Boston climate?" said Nan.

"Here we are!"

The restaurant was nearly empty. They shook the snow off their overcoats and settled themselves at the round table in the window.

"What's so nice about this place, in spite of the garlic and the stains on the cloth and everything," Fanshaw was saying, "Is that it gives us a breathing space from Boston, a quiet eminence where we can sit undisturbed and look about us ... O, Wenny, do pull up your necktie."

"Now, Fanshaw, you shan't heckle Wenny," said Nan laughing.

The orchestra had struck up Funiculi, Funicula with great vigor. Wenny was looking at the girl who played the violin. Something in the tilt of the chin was painfully like Nan, only all the features were heavier, the lips coarser and less intense; many men had kissed them perhaps. To kiss Nan's lips. No, I mustn't think of all that. I will drive it out of me, down into me. Tonight it's calm; cold I must be, to weigh everything. In spite of him the tune filled his mind with streets full of carnival, scampering, heavybreasted women pelting him with flowers.

"The ladies' three-piece band is doing itself proud tonight," he shouted boisterously.

Like this always, these dreams. I must put an end to them. It's on account of these dream women I've not made Nan love me; everything has slipped by. What's the good of dreams? It's hard actuality I want, will have.

Yama, yama, blare of brass bands, red flags waving against picture postcard scenery, brown oarsmen with flashing teeth and roses behind their ears, and Nan; both of us lolling on red cushions. Bay of Naples and musical comedy moonlight and a phonograph in a flat in a smell of baby carriages and cabbage grinding out love songs. O, the mockery of it.

"Gee, what a horrible tune."

"Hacknied, I should say, Wenny, but it's rather jolly, and when they play it on those boats on the Grand Canal it's almost thrilling..."

"To Cook's tourists and little schoolma'ams from Grand Rapids."

"Isn't it a little like sour grapes that we should be so scornful of them?" put in Nan gently.

"I'm not scornful of them. I am them... We are just like them. Can't you see what I mean, Nan? I can see that they are ridiculous and pitiful. How much more ridiculous and pitiful we must be."

"But from that point of view everything must be ... well, just ashes; everybody ridiculous and pitiful," said Nan slowly with a flash in her eyes. "I'm willing to admit that in a sense, I suppose, yet certain things are dreadfully important to me--my friends, my music, my career, my sense of fitness. I don't see that those things are ridiculous... Of course, one can make oneself sound clever by making fun of anything, but that doesn't change it any way."

The hot light in her eyes, flushing her cheeks, her parted lips, were a stab of pain for him.

"O I can't say what I mean?" muttered Wenny.

"Do you know what you mean?" said Fanshaw.

"Perhaps not."

"And you forget what you're so fond of talking about Wenny."

"What?"

"The gorgeousness of matter. That's your pet phrase."

Taste of veal with tomato and peppers, savor of frizzled olive oil, little seeds mashed between the front teeth into a prickly faint aroma, and wine, the cool curve of the glass against my lips, the tang of it like rainy sunsets. I could sit here imagining it and never drink, imagining Nan's lips... He picked up the glass and drank off the goldcolored wine at a gulp so that it choked him. He coughed and spluttered into his napkin.

"I follow you there, if you include the idea of material pleasures being purged of their grossness, by reason, fitness, as Nan says. So made the raw material of beauty," Fanshaw was saying. Wenny coughed and spluttered into his napkin.

"Drink a little water," Fanshaw added.

"More Orvieto, you mean," said Wenny hoarsely. "By the way, is Orvieto in Tuscany?"

"No, in Umbria, I think; that's where the great Signorelli frescos of the last judgment are, that strange dry hideously violent piece of macabre."

"Gee, I'd like to see them."

"You will some day."

"If I don't see the actual subject first ... No Burton Holmes is as far as I'll ever get towards Umbria."

"Why, lots of people work their way over."

"You haven't seen me do it yet, have you? That's what I was saying. The world is full of people doing every conceivable sort of thing. The streets are full of them. You can see the things in their eyes."

"Well, why not you?" said Nan breathlessly.

"Before I came to college I spent my time dreaming, and now I spend it gabbling about my dreams that have died and begun to stink. Why the only genuine thing I ever did in my life was get drunk, and I haven't done that often."

Wenny drank down his wine again. His hair was wet. His heart pounded with exultation in the look of wincing pain on Nan's face.

"Suppose we start home," Nan said. "I have a little headache tonight."

Out in the streets the snowflakes danced dazzlingly, ruddy and green, and shivered gold through flaws and cones and crystals of light from windows and arclights. Faces bloomed and faded through a jumbled luminous mist, white as plaster casts, red as raw steak, yellow and warted like summer squashes, smooth and expressionless like cantaloupes. Occasionally a door yawned black and real in the spinning flicker of the snow and the lights, or a wall seemed to bulge to splitting with its denseness. In the shelter of the subway entrance they stood hesitating a moment.

"Why don't you both come out to my place?" said Nan in a pleading voice. "We'll make some chocolate or something."

"No, I want to think."

"But you can think there all you want... And it's such a miserable night."

"I'm going to Brookline to Mother's, anyway; I'll go as far as your door," said Fanshaw.

"You can amuse yourselves picking my character to pieces all the way out," said Wenny boisterously.

They none of them laughed.

"Well, then, good night."

Wenny watched them go down the steps, Nan in her long buff coat, Fanshaw with his wet hat pulled over his eyes. Nan half turned and waved with a little thwarted gesture of the hand. For a second she paused, then with the slightest shrug of the shoulders followed Fanshaw's tall figure out of sight past the change booth. Wenny took two steps to follow, but the impulse died sickeningly like a spoiled skyrocket falling. He thought he was going to cry, and turned about and walked recklessly into the blinding bright dance of the snow.

* * * *

The wind had dropped. Great sloppy flakes were spinning slowly down between the houses, filling with glitter the tents of light cast by the street lamps. Wenny had been walking fast with long irregular steps muffled by the crunching carpet of the snow. His feet and legs were wet and very cold. At a corner he stopped and leaned a moment against a wall. The shadows in the windows of the house opposite seemed concrete and the walls built heavily out of reddish darkness. People were grey ghosts with faces of unnatural bright pink that flitted past him through the leisurely chaos of the snow. In their eyes, at the edges of hats, from the ledges of shop windows glittered little globules of moist brightness. From gutters came a continual drip of melted snow. Now, what bar haven't I been to? he kept asking himself, as he stood listening to the little hiss of the snow and the slushy padding of footsteps.

I'd forgotten Frank Locke's; and he walked on with lurching strides.

After the velvety blur of the snow the bar room assailed him with needles and facets of glitter on brass and crystal that shivered in the mirrors into sharp angular grottoes. He shook the snow off his coat and let himself fall heavily into a chair. The hard shape in his back pocket rapped against his hip. His spine went cold at the touch of it.

"A Martini cocktail, please," he said to the thin, large-eyed man with a scrawny neck who came for his order.

The little mirrors in the ceiling and the glinty knobs and bottle ends of the partitions all radiated endlessly in dusty looking-glasses on the walls, so that Wenny felt himself drunkenly spinning through air heavy with beersmells and whisky and old tobacco smoke in the middle of a crazy merrygoround. The men at tables round him were tiny and gesticulating. The cocktail stung his mouth, sent writhing gold haze all through him. The glass was the center of a vortex into which were sucked the cutting edges of light, flickering cones of green and red brightness, the voices and the throbbing rubber faces of the men in the bar. In his mind Fanshaw's voice and his father's voice droning like antiphonal choirs: Leanfaced people of the Renaissance carried away helpless in their vermilion barge through snarling streets shaken with the roar of engines: Stand therefore having your loins girt about with the breastplate of righteousness ... Of course that's what it reminds me of here, looking through the globes in the drugstore window where I used to go to get aspirin for Auntie.

"Waiter, another cocktail, please."

This cocktail, smooth, smooth, hot tropic beaches, and the leanfaced men in their great barge deepchanting sliding through lagoons of islands of the South Seas (first love, first South Sea island, the great things of life); brown girls girdled with red hybiscus pulling nets full of writhing silver through parrotgreen water.... God! I must pull myself together. I must think, not dream... In the beginning was the word,... And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth... Poor little me, with holes in my stockings, sitting in my bedroom that had the cracked looking glass learning Genesis for Dad: The earth also was corrupt before God, the earth was filled with violence ... And God looked upon the earth and behold it was corrupt ... corrupt... I must think, not dream putrid dreams. Dreams, the corruption of misery, soggy, thwarted. If I had a clean, sharp knife to cut away dreams. Herb's little gun will do as well.

"Hey, another Martini, please."

He had no sense of being drunk any more. Things were still, icehard, iceclear all about him. The little neatly painted world of his childhood had been like that, breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little redroofed houses back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps shepherding Noah's animals out of a cardboard ark, all cute and tiny, like through the wrong end of a telescope; and the smell of the enamel scaling off toys, the grain of wood grimed by the fingers, the dark gleam on the floor under the bay window.

"Another Martini, please."

He drank it slowly in little sips, watching himself in the looking-glass beside him. His hair was very curly with sweat, his dark eyebrows jauntily arched, his lips moist and red. He drank and the man in the looking-glass drank. He stared into the black wells of his dilated pupils. Panic terror swooped on him all of a sudden; it was not his face. The face was thinner, the upper lip tight over the teeth, the hair smooth and steel grey, the jowls pinkish, close-shaved, constricted by a collar round backwards. My face, my father's face, and Dad's voice: David, my boy, taking a job has pleased me more than I can say, sensible and manly course ... I am sure that earning your living you will find inspiring and helpful and regret callousness and restlessness ... I, myself, bitter moments in my youth inexpressibly painful for me to recall of profligacy and despair ... A thin voice shrieking, interrupting in his head: My God, I'm going mad, mad, mad. The pulpit voice boomed louder in his ears: It was like this, David, I was not content with my lot and told myself in my boyish pride that life was short and the world wide, and wanted to run away to sea. I was one of those filthy dreamers mentioned in the Gospels who defile the flesh, despise dominion and speak evil of dignities. And I fell so low that inexpressibly painful to recall I took up in a low dive with a scarlet woman and arranged with her that she should give herself to me for five dollars, and I followed her to her room and she divested herself of her clothes and I stood before her trembling with lust, and all at once a sword cleaving me, a light searing me, I felt my flesh corrupt before God, and I felt the mercy of God in a great white light about me, and I rushed out sobbing and calling upon God. And that is how, dearly beloved brethren, I was called to the ministry... Let us pray...