VII

Fanshaw opened his eyes, stretched himself in bed, and was aware hazily

of luminous grey sheets of rain outside the window. He reached for his

watch and his glasses. Seven-forty-three; that means ten minutes more of

delicious languor. He took off his glasses again and lay staring at the

ceiling, happily thinking of nothing. The steam pipes were popping and

cracking, and there was a dribble of water from the bathroom. Ought to

have them fix that faucet. His mind was groping to remember what the

nine o'clock section meeting would be about. Fra Angelico, Lorenzo

Monaco, Gozzoli, names of Italian painters streamed through his head.

But we're through with them; must be about the Dutch, some Fleming. Why

cudgel his brains? This was April: April, May, June, then the treadmill

stopped. Freedom. Imagine living always free like a Chinese sage in a

hut of rice-matting beside a waterfall; to retire to an exquisite

pavillion ornamented with red and black lacquer, living on rice and tea

and trout from the stream. The mist steaming up out of the valleys and

the constant shimmer of moisture on the green, delicate leaves of ferns.

And Wenny for an attendant to carry the begging bowl, or Wenny, brown

from the sun, gleaming with sweat as he worked the rice fields with a

piece of scarlet cloth about his loins. Days eternal with quiet to

elaborate thoughts of such subtlety that ... How delicious to lie here

and let his mind ramble. And Nan. Only five thousand a year would do

amply for a villa in Italy somewhere, perhaps on the shore near

Sorrento. The old dream of love; roses handed over supper-tables at

Capri, on a terrace with low music ... Sweet and low, sweet and low,

wind of the western sea ... and the moon rising out of the dark sea. No,

Capri would be too crowded, full of noisy, fast people. A grey old house

somewhere with a courtyard. Mr. and Mrs. J. Fanshaw Macdougan, at home.

Nan the way she had looked that night at the fancy dress party at the

Logans, her hair caught back from her forehead under a jewelled net,

playing the violin in a long-raftered hall, a little musty with the

smell of the old incense-drenched tapestries, and through the windows in

great, cool gusts the smell of jessamine from the garden. Little trips

to hilltowns to look at frescoes, caffe con latte in station

restaurants, jokes about Karl Baedeker, a cab rattling pleasantly over

the cobblestones driven by a brown youth with a flower behind his ear...

Then he thought of his mother's wrinkled cheeks against the pillow and

the peevish lines at the ends of her mouth. Poor lamb.

He jumped up with a jerk and looked at his watch. Lord, a quarter past

eight. I shan't have time to shave. He ran, shivering a little, to shut

the window. What beastly weather to be having in April.

The coffee at the cafeteria had a sour taste that morning, hastily

swallowed amid a rattle of dishes on tin trays and shrill talk. Fanshaw

was peevishly telling himself this was the last year he'd lead this

dog's life, getting up out of bed this way every morning to hear a lot

of young nincompoops make themselves ridiculous about the history of

painting. If only it weren't for Mother, all the things he would be able

to do! Crossing the yard, he began to feel better. His unbuckled arctics

clinked cheerfully as he walked. The groups of boys in brown hats at the

doors of the lecture halls, the tattoo of springy footsteps on the

boardwalks, the ringing voices and the softmoulded cheeks flushed by the

rain spun a net about him warm and full of freshness that gave him a

sense of being within protecting walls and proceeding nonchalantly

towards some aim. What else could he do that would give him such

pleasant surroundings, and freedom for part of the year. And this youth

always welling up about him. He sat down at the yellow-varnished desk in

the semicircular lecture hall that smelt of chalk and turpentine that

drifted in from the Museum, pushed off his arctics and strolled about,

chatting with students and giving an occasional glance at his watch. Of

course he might try being agent for some dealer, he was thinking as he

talked. There was money to be made that way. Awfully low, of course.

Still, for a year in Italy, to talk endlessly with good friends like

Wenny and Nan at supper-tables in the moonlight in a smell of roses. The

class was under way, would soon be over. That story overheard in a

smoker about a rose. How disgusting, nauseating; one couldn't keep

things like that out of one's head. "Rubens," he was saying. "No, I

don't see why we should waste much time on Rubens, Mr. Jones; more

acreage than intensity in Rubens, and all of it smeared with raspberry

jam." The class laughed.

After the lecture hall had emptied, Fanshaw stood a moment behind the

desk thoughtfully plucking at the elastic round a bundle of papers.

Let's see, he'd have time to go over to Wenny's for a moment before

starting to sort those photographs. Pulling on his arctics again, he

walked down the road towards Conant. The snow had nearly vanished under

the beat of the warm rain. Now there'd be some spring. It was time he

and Wenny and Nan were going to Nahant again. He climbed the stairs and

knocked at the room door. The door was unlatched and swung open. The bed

had not been slept in. There were no papers on the desk. Fanshaw felt a

sudden catch of excitement in his throat. Could he be out with some

woman? Wenny, with drunken eyes and flushed cheeks, in the arms of a

fat, painted blonde. Horrible. He was too fine for that sort of thing.

Poor kid. On the mantelpiece was a little snapshot of Nan propped

against some volumes of the Golden Bough. Fanshaw barely glanced at it

and flushed as if he had caught himself intruding into some inner

privacy. Poor Wenny, he probably is crazy about her.

Fanshaw scribbled a note on a piece of yellow paper and left it on

the desk:

Wenny, you little debauchee, where are you hiding yourself? Come

over at tea time. F.

In the hall outside he found Herb Roscoe shaking the water off an

oilskin slicker.

"How do you do? Have you seen Wendell about anywhere recently?"

"No, I haven't seen him in the last couple of days.... I don't quite

know what he's up to these days; looks like to me he was in love or

somethin', he's been actin' so queer." Herb Roscoe laughed and gave the

slicker a final shake.

Fanshaw's face stiffened.

"O, I don't think it's that," he said coldly, nodded, and went down

the steps.

While he was crossing the little triangle of grass in front of the

seated statue of John Harvard, Fanshaw stopped a moment to sniff the

moist air that for the first time that season smelt of earth and

gardens. The rain had stopped, and there were breaks of blue in the

brightening sky. A grimyfaced boy ran by calling an extra. Fanshaw was

turning away, so as not to see the great blocks of print, when his eye

caught the headline:

BAFFLING HARVARD MURDER MYSTERY

Body of Harvard Graduate Student

Fanshaw grabbed the boy's shoulder.

"That paper."

"A nickel cause it's a extra."

I must go home. He folded the paper almost stealthily and strode across

the yard, neither looking to the right or to the left. Get home before

anyone speaks to me. How hideous if anyone should speak to me. Professor

Walpole, grey beard and narrow, steelrimmed glasses, was coming down the

boardwalk; he stopped and smiled benignantly at Fanshaw:

"You've heard the news, haven't you, Mr. Macdougan?"

"What news?" asked Fanshaw, his hands quaking, his tongue dry in his

mouth from horror.

"Why we are going to have a Velasquez for two months...."

"How wonderful!... Pardon me, won't you, I've got a pressing

engagement."

Fanshaw had shoved the paper into the pocket of his raincoat. He darted

across Massachusetts Avenue in front of a trolley car. At last he was on

Holyoke Street. O it was raining again. The drops danced in the puddle

in front of his door. Green door, yellow house, here he was. He walked

slowly up the stairs, locked and bolted his door on the inside. There he

unfolded the paper carefully and began to read:

Body of Harvard Graduate Student Found Floating in Charles.

David Wendell, Washington, D. C., Boy, Shot Through

Head; Was He Murdered on the East Cambridge

Bridge? Police Completely Baffled.

At eighty twenty this morning ...

For a moment Fanshaw could not read the bleary print. The bitter smell

of the newspaper filled his nostrils. Of course it's a mistake, a

beastly mistake, he said aloud.

At eight twenty this morning Patrolman John H. Higgs of the seventh

precinct observed an object that he took to be an old coat floating

among cakes of ice near the Esplanade below the East Cambridge Bridge.

Upon investigating, however, he decided that it must be the body of a

drowned man and summoned assistance. When the body was recovered it was

identified through a seaman's union card and a receipted bill from the

Bursar of Harvard University as that of ...

Fanshaw let the paper fall to the ground. He was sitting, breathing

deeply on the edge of the bed. He took off his coat and overshoes.

Seaman's union card. So Wenny really was trying to go to sea? Wenny

tugging at a frozen rope, his curly hair clotted and briny, the rope

tearing the skin off his hands. Fanshaw picked up the paper again

feverishly.

... According to the medical examiner at the Morgue where the body was

immediately placed, death was not caused by drowning. The young man, Dr.

Swanson alleged, had been shot through the jaw by a pistol of small

calibre held close to the neck. The bullet had penetrated to the brain

and death had resulted instantaneously. The hypothesis has been advanced

that the young man might have been waylaid and robbed at some time

during the phenomenally violent blizzard that swept this city last night

and afterwards murdered and the body thrown into the Charles River

Basin, perhaps from the East Cambridge Bridge...

How horrible! Of course it's true, something had to happen to Wenny; he

was too reckless, too beautifully alive.

He crumpled the paper up. I must get Nan. We must go to see him at the

morgue to make sure. O these filthy newspapers. He dropped the paper in

the grate and set a match to it. The flame roared a moment in the

chimney, then the black ash collapsed into flakes.

There was a knock at the door. Fanshaw stood a moment with his fists

clenched. I suppose I must see who it is. He drew the bolt and stepped

back, very pale, with compressed lips. "Come in," he said. A short

youngish man with fat cheeks that showed a trace of black beard opened

the door and came towards him holding out a hand effusively.

"Mr. Macdougan, I believe."

"My name is Macdougan."

"I have information that you could give me details of the life of that

unfortunate young man; you see I'm a reporter from the _American._ My

name is Rogers. I'm on special articles mostly." He looked up at Fanshaw

sideways with a smile.

"Thank you... I know er ... nothing except what I just read in your

paper... I'm afraid I can't talk to you now..." Fanshaw was desperately

trying to think: These beasts'll try to get up a scandal. There's

nothing they'll stick at. Nan and I must keep out of it... If I were to

lose my instructorship...

"You see, it is this way, Mr. Macdougan ... Won't you take a cigarette?"

Rogers settled himself in a chair, lit a cigarette, pulled his trousers

up at the knees, and continued in his oily, wheedling voice: "You see,

Mr. Macdougan, my paper, as you know, is at present out to clean up the

police department of this city, which is disgracefully inefficient. We

are going to fight them with every means in our power. Publicity and

publicity and more publicity for every instance of neglect and

corruption we can unearth. We intend to make the streets of Boston safe

for the most delicate girl at any hour of the day or night.... That is

why we are so interested in procuring all the details of a case like

this accident that overwhelmed your unfortunate young friend. I'm sure

you want to help us in this."

"But I don't know anything. I last saw David Wendell at dinner last

night in Boston. I am not in the least certain that it's he who was

murdered."

"What time last night?"

"O I suppose at around ten... We'd been dining on Hanover Street... But

I can't talk about this now."

"I am sure you will appreciate my position, Mr. Macdougan; it's only in

the interest of justice, with that poor young man's interest at heart

that I intrude this way on your grief at the loss of a dear friend...

Did you dine alone with him?"

"No... But, look here, I must go."

"You wouldn't mind giving me the name of the other party. He and you

were probably the last to ever see him alive. He might be able to help

us."

"I'm afraid I can't give you the name."

"The third party was a lady, then?"

Fanshaw blushed red. He stared hard in the man's wheedling eyes.

"I must get in touch with the police to find out what really

happened... Please excuse me."

Fanshaw pulled on his overshoes and took his coat from the bed.

"Have you thought of any motive anyone could have for wanting to

kill young Wendell, Mr. Macdougan?"

"None, of course not."

"Do you think it could have been suicide?"

Fanshaw felt the beads of sweat trickling down his cheek. He motioned

the reporter out the door and slammed it behind them.

"I don't know... It might have been anything."

He started down the stairs.

"If you are going to the Morgue now I should be very glad to go with

you, Mr. Macdougan," said the reporter, following him with the same

confident smile.

"Thank you, no!"

Fanshaw started tearing down the street towards the college office. O,

this is hideous, hideous.

The reporter stared after him blandly from the doorstep.

Publicity, thought Fanshaw, pitiless publicity. And his mind seethed

with people in streetcars, in restaurants and bars, their eyes bulging

with delight, people in subways and under streetlamps reading of Wenny's

death in paragraphs of smeary print. The headlines seemed reflected in

their ghoulish eyes as they read gluttonously every detail of the bullet

searing the warm flesh, the warm flesh quenched in the water of the

basin, the body that people had loved, talked to, walked with, floating

like an old coat among the melting ice-cakes at eight-twenty this

morning. Youth had been killed. In offices and stores and front parlors

and lonely hall bedrooms sallow-jowled faces sucked the blood through

the nasty smelling print of the extras. The streets swarmed and seethed

with faces drinking Wenny's blood.

He walked hastily into the college office, past a row of scared freshmen

waiting a reprimand, and asked for the Dean of the Graduate School. He

felt calmer in the quiet dinginess, among the low voices of the office.

All the blood and clamor and hideousness of the streets was shut

outside.

"Yes, come right in, Mr. Macdougan."

* * * *

The steam from the spout of the big blue teapot rose between Fanshaw and

the sunlight of the window. He sat staring at its slow spiral, his cup

forgotten in his hand. Beside the mantelpiece Nan, her brows contracted

and a flush on her face, was reading a piece of the Sunday newspaper. In

the blue velvet armchair Miss Fitzhugh sat hunched up, occasionally

giving her red eyes a little dab with a handkerchief.

"O dear," Miss Fitzhugh was quavering faintly, "I haven't been so upset

since I broke off my engagement and sent Billy back his ring."

"Please don't break down again, Fitzie, dear," said Nan savagely,

letting the paper drop out of her hands. "My sense of humor is somewhat

worn to a frazzle... My God, what swine people are!"

"But after all, dear, it's not as if we really believed he was dead. The

word has no meaning to me now... Why I fell so happy in his presence,

more than when he was alive; don't you?"

"It's these papers that infuriate me, being dragged out naked this way

by these beasts, these bloodsuckers for everybody to gloat over....

God, I never want to go out of doors again."

"But after all, dear, it's such a marvellous romance..."

"O, Fitzie, will you please shut up?"

Miss Fitzhugh got slowly to her feet and put her untasted teacup down

on the table.

"I'll go away now and come back for a minute after supper to see if

you want anything."

"O, you are a dear, Fitzie." Nan followed her out into the hall.

Fanshaw sat stiffly in his chair looking out of the window at the sunny,

cloud-flecked sky. In his hands he was folding and unfolding the

newspaper Nan had dropped. His mind seethed with its phrases. Headlines

in the ornamental print of the magazine section danced and writhed and

squirmed mockingly through his head: Was it love lured young David

Wendell to his doom? Known to frequent low companions ... inveterate

slummer ... Despair over money matters or jilting by Back Bay girl led

him first to try to ship as a sailor and at last to that final orgy in a

foreign restaurant on Hanover Street... Victim of infatuation for some

beautiful flower of the slums ... I must get this out of my head or go

mad. Fanshaw started walking back and forth in front of the window

clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back.

Nan came back into the room, her face calmer, a little smile hovering

at the edges of her lips.

"I'd have just lain down on the floor and shrieked if Fitzie had

stayed any longer."

"She has the holy stupidity of an early Christian saint," said

Fanshaw. "But let's have some hot tea, Lord knows we'll need it."

"There's fresh hot water on the gas."

"I'll get it."

In the kitchenette he stood still a moment with the teakettle in his

hand. The smell of the Morgue, the old wax-faced man in uniform who led

the way down a grey passage, and Nan's heart beating madly against his

arm when they came to the slab where the body lay diminished and pitiful

under a sheet ... Fanshaw tried to rid his mind of the memory. The steam

from the kettle was scalding his hand. As he was leaning over to pour

some hot water into the pot, Nan looked up into his face from the

armchair and said:

"Do you feel this fearful ache, as if your head would burst with it

all?"

Fanshaw nodded quietly, poured himself some fresh tea, and went to sit

by the window. Wenny's face, when the sheet was pulled off, bruised and

mashed, the strange smiling look of the blue full lips, and his

shoulders rigid and calm like very old carved ivory.

"What have the people in the Fine Arts Department had to say about

all these beastly insinuations?"

"They've been extremely decent, as far as I know; of course the

University doesn't like one's getting in the papers."

"Poor little Wenny, even dead he gets us into scrapes."

"Doesn't it make you hate people?"

"I can't walk along the street without shuddering, Fanshaw... I'd always

thought of all the faces drifting by along the pavement, joggling

opposite you in trolley cars, as vaguely friendly and lovable; I wanted

to be part of them, to dive into the crowd like into a sea..."

"That was Wenny's idea."

"But now I know what swine they are. If they had a drop of human

kindness these hideous articles in the papers wouldn't be allowed."

The headlines were filing in procession again through Fanshaw's mind:

Drink and infatuation for a woman lead minister's son to his death...

Following the will-of-the-wisp of pleasure through the tortuous mazes of

Boston's tenderloin shatters young graduate's career.... Lovely Back

Bay girl Conservatoire student figures in East Cambridge bridge suicide.

Mystery of missing revolver ...

"O, if I could get it out of my head and forget it."

"How's your mother, Fanshaw?"

"I really don't know, Nan ... No better and no worse."

The bell rang. Nan raised herself slowly from the chair and went to the

door. "Why, Betty Thomas!" Fanshaw heard her exclaim.

In spite of himself, Fanshaw had unrolled the newspaper. It was a

heavily ornamented magazine page with a picture in the upper left-hand

corner of a young man in a dress suit brandishing a revolver in the

middle of a spotchy snowstorm. See next Sunday's Magazine Section for

What Drove David Wendell, Goodlooking, Successful, Beloved by Parents

and Friends, to blow out his brains that night of wind and blizzard on

the East Cambridge Bridge.

"Put that paper away," said Betty Thomas in her fresh, ringing voice.

She wore a grey skirt and a burnt-orange sweater that moulded to the

ample curves of her bosom. "I'm going to make Nancibel play some Bach or

something with me... You people are getting morbid sitting around with

these dirty yellow sheets all day."

"You're right, Betty," said Nan. "Will you have some tea?"

Betty Thomas shook her head, smiling.

"D'you mind if I open the window, though? The air's splendid outside,

cold and smells of spring."

Nan had brought out her violin.

"Let's play ... I haven't practiced for three days."

Fanshaw sat by the window shivering a little in the cold air. The sound

of the violin being tuned rasped on his ears. Then they started playing

a solemn, circular tune that made him think of a minuet, and today made

him twitch all over with impatience. He got to his feet and tiptoed out.

Something about the two girls' absorption in the music annoyed him. He

walked down the stairs and strolled across the Fenway where a few

nursemaids were wheeling babies about in the late afternoon sun.

He crossed a bridge over a railroad track. The sound of a train whistle

in the distance sent a pang through him of helpless nostalgia for travel

and railway carriages and the smoke of stations and the unfamiliar smell

of hotel rooms. He got so little of all he had longed for before he

died, Fanshaw was thinking; and what I long for, how little of it shall

I get! He felt tears welling up within him.

At the corner where he waited for the Brookline car some workmen were

repairing the track. Under baggy blue shirts the muscles of arms and

shoulders moved tautly. A smell of sweat and rank pipes came from them.

Wenny would have wanted to be one of them, redfaced spitting men with

skillful ugly hands. The men who had dug the grave had been like that,

men digging everywhere were like that; strange how through all the tense

idiocy of the funeral, and Wenny's father and mother very solemn and

professional, and the father's little speech to the effect that he

believed as he believed in God Almighty that his son had not died a

suicide but had been done to death by some low companion or other, he

had felt that the only people there Wenny would have liked were the two

hickory-faced men with spades who filled in the grave, their thick backs

bending and straightening as they shoveled in the reddish dirt. Fanshaw

suddenly pressed his lips hard together as he remembered the

undertaker's man in black broadcloth unscrewing the silver handles from

the coffin before it was lowered into the grave, and Wenny's father in

black broadcloth eloquently reading the burial service, and the rattle

of the first shovelfull of dirt and stones on the coffin.

The car stopped in front of him with a shriek of brakes.

Fanshaw sat stiffly in the rattling streetcar that smelt of cheap

perfume and overcoats and breathed out air, staring unseeing out of the

window.

"O, Muriel, isn't that suicide case dreadful?"

A girl's voice from the seat ahead roused him. Two blonde girls in

tamoshanters were bending over a newspaper.

"That boy never killed himself, I'm certain," said the other girl.

"Do you think he was murdered?"

"Yes, deary, I do, by the husband of the woman he had wronged ..."

"But, Muriel, he didn't wrong anybody ... He killed himself for

grief because a Back Bay beauty spurned his love."

"Lot o' piffle, that stuff ... I wouldn't kill myself for any man."

"O, but Muriel, you might. Think, if he was a duke or something in

disguise and dreadfully handsome, with curly hair and a strong, silent

face."

"Like fun I would. Have a peppermint."

"O, but Muriel, don't you think it would be just wonderful to have

something like that happen ... a suicide or something? Of course it'ld

be just terrible, but ..."

A smell of chewed peppermints filtered gradually back to Fanshaw. The

streetcar had speeded up noisily, so that he could no longer hear what

they were saying.

* * * *

"I wonder, Nan, if death doesn't make one feel how very acutely one is

alive, the thought of one's own death, or the death of someone beloved,"

Fanshaw said, turning suddenly to Nan, seeking out her eyes. It had been

on his tongue all day, but somehow he had not been able to say it till

now. He was tingling hot with the excitement of saying it.

"Or do you mean that we feel in ourselves the dead person alive?"

Nan's eyes flashed green in his.

"No, no, Wenny wouldn't have meant that."

They sat on Fanshaw's overcoat, their backs against a rock. Behind them

were patches of sprouting emerald grass in the clefts of rocks and rows

of shingled cottages, shutters still fast for the winter. At their feet

the surf hissed and rattled on the pebbly beach. The sea was slate-grey

with an occasional whitecap. From the deep indigo line of the horizon

cumulous clouds steamed up heavy and flushed with spring, with a hint of

rain in their broad, shadowy bases. In the back of his mind Fanshaw was

remembering the scalloped wavelets and the blown hair and the curves

like grey rose petals of Botticelli's waveborn Venus. What was the Latin

that went it: Cras amet qui numquam amavit...? No, how ridiculous.

"What did you think of his father, Fanshaw?"

"O, impossible, completely impossible."

"I wonder ..."

They were silent a long time looking out to sea. Fanshaw leaned back

with halfclosed eyes, conscious of Nan beside him, felt vague rosy

contours, slender and leaping like the figures on a black-figure vase,

dancing within him. He was very happy.

"Nan, I wish I could paint."

"Who's stopping you?"

"I suppose that sort of thing is pretty futile nowadays ... It would

have been fine, though, to have been born in a time ..."

"Wouldn't Wenny have been angry hearing you say that?"

They turned towards each other and laughed.

"Wenny could have done anything ... Think that all his life should be

gone, like a glass of wine poured on the ground."

"Such a Biblical metaphor." Nan laughed deep in her throat. "Maybe

you and I are the ground, Fanshaw, who can tell?"

"Tares and thistles probably ... Don't you wish we were the lilies

of the field?"

"That makes me think of the Reverend Jonas ... I wonder if all of poor

old Wenny's troubles didn't come from that. Wasn't it a case of ...

what's the quotation about the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the

children's teeth are set on edge?"

"Don't you think it's a little vulgar to know the Bible so well?"

They both laughed. Down the coast the sun had burst through the clouds.

The spreading rays brightened on the sea to great patches of heaving

silver. Far out the sails of a schooner shone out suddenly like mother

of pearl.

"O, isn't it superb here this afternoon, Nan? And think that I didn't

want to come."

"I like it ... Suppose we stayed forever."

"After all the hideousness of this Spring?"

"Let's not talk about it... I won't remember it. What's today?"

"I think it's the twentieth."

"Well, for me it's May first. I won't be cheated of my spring. I'm just

going to begin it all over again. And practice! Fanshaw, if you only

knew how I was going to practice!"

"Look down the coast now ... With the dark clouds and the rays from the

sun and the sailboat and everything, isn't it exactly like one of those

funny old English engravings? Seascapes they used to call them. Even to

the musty color."

Nan's arm was against his arm. She had taken off her tailored jacket,

and her round arm, faintly brownish against his grey tweed, was bare

from above the elbow. She wore a sort of tunic of dull red silk with a

little black embroidery on it that left a deep V at her neck and fell

suavely over her slight breasts as she leaned back against the rock. A

dizzying flush went through him as his eyes followed the shadowed curve

of her neck to the sharp chin and up the oval contour of her cheeks. Her

lips were parted. Suddenly he found her eyes, green and grey, very

solemn, looking into his. His heart was thumping like mad in his chest.

He gulped and looked away over the sea that was green and grey like her

eyes. A quick inexplicable chill went down his spine. It was a moment

before he could speak:

"Nan..." He paused, his tongue dry, "Nan, don't you think we need

our tea?"

"Yes, come along," she said hoarsely, and jumped to her feet.

"I was getting a little chilly." Fanshaw bent to pick up a pebble to

hide his flushed face. He threw the pebble as far as he could out across

the surf, caught up his overcoat and followed Nan. She had already

started across the rocks. They walked round the edge of the harbor

towards the town. Under the grey sky slightly marbled with sunlight the

shingled sharp-roofed houses scattered unevenly among lanes and low

picket fences looked out hostilely through the small panes of their

windows at the sprouting tulips and hyacinths in their dooryards.

"Are we going to the redheaded woman's?" said Fanshaw after a while.

"Where else can we go?"

"Nowhere, I suppose, but she does give one such small cups." His voice

faltered as he spoke. What a waste of breath were all these trivialities

when he ought to be telling Nan ... If he could only catch the proper

note, mock-serious, flippant, as one would have made love to a marquise

with powdered hair in a garden by LeNotre. And Wenny had loved Nan.

Fanshaw was trying to imagine some sulfurous boiling passion. He saw

Wenny brown and flushed, sweaty and dusty like a runner after a race,

break through all this stage scenery of New England houses and trees and

sea, tearing it apart with hard knobbed fingers the way he'd pulled down

the window curtains one night when he was drunk. Wenny's face dead,

purple-splotched under the sheet on the marble slab at the Morgue. And

Nan and I going on, springtime and autumn, breakfast and luncheon and

dinner.

They had reached the teahouse. A coldframe under the window was full of

violets. They settled themselves at a little table, breathing deep of

the fugitive scent of the violets.

After all, Fanshaw was thinking, does it bring any more to kick against

the pricks? A certain position in the world ... He could hear his

mother's tremulous voice: Your beautiful, lovely career. Perhaps it's

best for Wenny that he died. Wenny grown old, sodden, drunken, losing

his fire and his good looks; Verlaine's last absinthe-haunted days; Lord

Byron, a puffy-faced Don Juan; the verdict of history. Circumspectly,

with infinite grace, they went about life in the eighteenth century,

never headlong, half-cocked. Nan and I can be like that.

"Delicious, isn't it, to smell this mixture of tea and violets?" he

said.

"I was thinking," said Nan, "How wonderful if he were only here. Isn't

it silly?"

"I was thinking of him too," said Fanshaw.

And Wenny loved Nan. Yet, was it any more unbearable for him than just

now when I looked in her eyes and a light like the light bursting out

from the center in that Greco Nativity shot all through me? Never to

have held a woman in your arms and kissed her. Pent up aching rivers ...

Called for madder music and for stronger wine.

The redhaired woman leaned over to put a plate of toasted muffins on the

table. Her round breasts hung heavy against the thin muslin of her

blouse There was a faint rancid smell from her armpits.

She doesn't wear corsets; sloppy that modern style. Here comes the

bride, here comes the bride... Make a formal declaration. A marriage

license engraved with cupids and hearts. Wobbling from side to side ...

Sukie Smith and I walking round the block singing that one Fourth, smell

of lindens, and people laughing at us and asking if we meant it, until

Mother stopped us. Here come the groom, straight as a broom!

"What a comfort tea is, Nan. I feel my tongue getting loose again. I

wish we could talk about ourselves a little."

"I hate it above anything, but let's ... Do you know, Fanshaw, I think

sometimes that the more people see of each other the less they get to

know. You can tell a stranger anything, but a friend ..."

"It's awfully hard to say anything about what I really feel ... If we

only had the Eighteenth Century code of badinage."

"On ne badine pas avec l'amour."

Fanshaw felt something like terror chilling his spine. He was tapping

with a teaspoon on the table. Nan looked straight at him with narrowed

eyes.

"That's what I meant, Nan, I ..."

"But why not after all?... Why not play with love to keep it from

playing with us?" cried Nan wildly. The radiance of her eyes hurt like a

too bright light.

"O, Nan, what are we going to do about ourselves, you and I?"

"Fanshaw, whatever happens, remember that my music is terribly

important to me."

"But life is more important to us than anything."

Nan put her hand out to him suddenly across the table. He pressed it

gently with long, white fingers. He felt his carefully balanced

restraint tottering. When he was very small once he had tried to balance

himself on the fence of the back yard above a rosebush in flower, and

somehow the drone of the bees and the fragrance of the dull carmine

flowers had made him dizzy, and he had lost his balance and tottered and

swung his arms wildly. Then he had fallen and lain crying on the path

among the fallen petals, his face all scratched and bloody from the

thorns. He patted her hand gently. Neither of them spoke.

"Dear Nan," he began when the silence had got to swirling fearfully

about his head.

"There are the Turnstables," said Nan sharply. "They are coming in

here."

They got to their feet. Mrs. Turnstable, in a long motor coat, came up

to them, followed by her blonde son and daughter.

"Why, Nancibel, how delightful to run upon you here. And how do you do,

Mr. Macdougan? Why, this is luck ... Isn't it delicious here today. Our

first real spring day."

"Hello, Cousin Nancibel."

Chairs scraped. Another table was pushed up. Under cover of the clinking

of more teacups being brought and Mrs. Turnstable's musical voice

talking about what a dreadful spring it had been, Fanshaw sat silent,

feeling his frenzy of excitement ebb deliciously. This was saner.

Control. Control.

"O, Mr. Macdougan, have you seen Prunella? Such a beautiful play; I'm

sure you'd like it. I've been twice, and I am taking the children

tomorrow. So romantic and dainty ..."

"It's a Pierrot play, isn't it?"

"Yes, I was wondering if the veritable commedia del arte can't have been

something like that."

"Why very probably."

While he talked Fanshaw was furtively watching James Turnstable's thin

pink and white face. The boy was eating toast and staring at Nan with

worshipping blue eyes. At length when she turned to him and said: "More

tea, Jamesy," he grew red to the ears and stammered, "Please, Cousin

Nancibel." An attractive kid, Fanshaw was thinking. O, the cycle of it.

"There'll be lots of room ... We'll all go back to Boston together in my

car," Mrs. Turnstable was saying. "Don't you love Marblehead, Mr.

Macdougan?"

* * * *

Fanshaw's mother sat by the library window looking out into the garden

that was full of the fiery chalices of Darwin tulips.

"Once I'm well, Fanshaw, we must rebuild the garden. There aren't any

paeonies. I've always wanted some of those beautiful yellow paeonies in

the garden. You must get me some next time you see them in a flower

shop."

"I will, indeed, Mother," said Fanshaw from the easy chair where he

was reading.

"What are you reading, dear?"

"Just a thing about Umbrian painters."

"Come here and tell me about it... You never tell me anything about your

work any more."

Fanshaw moved to the window ledge beside her chair and stared out

into the garden.

"Mother," he said, without looking in her face, "what would you say if I

were to marry some day?"

"But then we couldn't go abroad this summer, could we, dear?"

"I'm afraid we aren't going to be able to do that anyway."

"Why?"

"Because I'm afraid you won't be quite strong enough, dear."

"How ridiculous, Fanshaw. Of course I'll be well in a couple of months.

How long is it now since Dr. Nickerson said I'd be well in a couple of

months?"

"It's nearly a year, Mother dear. Of course he did not say that

definitely ..."

"You wait and see how quickly I'll get well ... But, Fanshaw, I don't

believe in a boy marrying too young."

"I'm nearly thirty, Mother, that's old enough surely."

"Your dear father was thirty-five when he married me. And, Fanshaw,

there are so many things we'll want to do together when I get well. And

if that girl loves you as she ought she'll wait for you years if need be

... And the expense of the wedding and all that ... O, I think it's an

extravagant idea."

"I'll think about it, Mother."

"O, darling, I've got such a headache."

"Here comes Susan with your medicine, dear. That'll make you feel

better."

Susan stood over her, showing her long teeth in a smile.

"Here's your tablet, mum, and I'm bringin' ye a cup of malted milk

right away.

"Thank you, Susan," said Mrs. Macdougan with a wan frown. "And be sure

to make it sweet enough. It was just horrid yesterday." Susan's eyes met

Fanshaw's. She smiled tolerantly as she smoothed the grey hair back from

the old woman's forehead.

* * * *

There was a Hellenic purity about the sunlight along the river that

afternoon, Fanshaw was telling himself, something that made one think of

Praxiteles and running grounds at Olympia. The stadium in the distance

across the meadows and the white bodies of the rowers in the shells

stretching and contracting to the bark of the coxswains stood out like

the reliefs on a temple against the azure and silver sheen of the sky

and the river. From some birches by the river the notes of a song

sparrow tumbled glittering. On the wind came an indefinable

mushroom-scent of spring. Fanshaw's mind was full of suave visions of

the future that evolved rosily like slow highpiled clouds. He would get

a scholarship from the department on which they might live in Italy for

a year. Extra money might be made appraising and attributing things for

some art dealer. There would be Spain and Greece and North Africa.

Magazine articles might appear about pictures and places. They could get

a villa somewhere with lemon trees near the sea, breakfast in the

morning leaning over the balustrade watching the bronzelimbed fishermen

draw their boats up on the beach below; long strolls in the moonlight

through overgrown gardens of myrtle and cypress, and Nan, dressed as she

had been that night at the Logans (she would always dress that way--like

a Renaissance princess), in his arms, silken and shuddering.

Fanshaw felt himself flush as he walked with slow strides along the

turf by the river.

And Wenny had loved Nan. Perhaps it was through his death they had been

brought together. The ways of destiny, Fuerza del Destino, by Verdi.

Perhaps they could afford an apartment in one of these places by the

river. The Strathcona. Fun it would be decorating it. And Wenny had

loved her. That's how I felt towards him, I suppose. No harm, now that

he's dead. This afternoon the Attic gleam of rowers in the sun, swallows

circling in a blue sky glittering as with mica; if I could paint I would

do him against such a background, hair curling crisp about his eager

narrow forehead, eyes laughing, lips winesmudged and full, brownly naked

like the Bacchus in that picture by Velasquez, defying the world.

Fanshaw was twirling some pink clover blossoms between his fingers,

occasionally sniffing at them. The sense of Wenny's presence became

suddenly intense to him, as if he could feel the hard muscle of Wenny's

shoulder against his arm, as when they had walked together. He closed

his eyes for dizziness.

He opened his eyes and looked about him. Round a bend in the river at

the end of a silvery blue reach was a bridge and beyond the fantastic

pile of the Abattoir with its tall bottle-shaped chimney. A rough smell

of singed hides came down the wind. Fanshaw turned into a path up the

hill towards a shrubbery behind which showed the crowded obelisks and

crosses of the cemetery, crossed a wooden bar and found himself

wandering among neatly laid off grass plots and gravestones with the

dust of the stone cutting still on them. He passed a mock orange in

bloom and remembered how he used to breathe deep the fragrance from the

bush at the corner of his mother's lawn in Omaha until he almost swooned

from it. That fancy that Wenny had once had that all the tombstones

ought to be effaced and cemeteries turned into amusement parks with

dancehalls and rollercoasters and toodling calliopes. There was a smell

of lilacs ... When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. Perhaps that was

what had made Wenny say that the smell of lilacs made him think of

death. Then he was staring at the newest stone: