The Rev. Wendell, as Nan called him, had thought the Latin was
appropriate to a scholar. On the reddish mound new grass fine as hair
was sprouting. How little any of it had to do with Wenny. On the next
grave a stalk of frail paper-white Madonna lilies trembled in the wind.
It was in the time of lilies Pico della Mirandola had come to Florence
and in the time of lilies he died, having failed in his great work of
reconciling Christ and Apollo. Wenny would have been like that. O, if
more people had only known him, if he had lived where there was an
atmosphere of accomplishment instead of futility, his name might have
rung like Pico's to the last syllable of recorded time.
"How do you do, sir?" came a wheezy voice from behind Fanshaw's back; he
turned and found an old man with a pert, wizened face in blue cap and
uniform standing beside him.
"A friend o' the party buried there, ain't you?" went on the old man.
"Why, yes, I am."
"I thought I'd recognized ye from the funeral," said the old man
brightening up. "I guess you'll be a-noticin' that they's been tramplin'
an' settin' on it."
"How frightful! No, I hadn't noticed it. But who would do such a
thing?"
"O, they don't mean no harm by it. You see there ain't lights here."
"You don't mean they are body snatchers?"
"Lord no ... It's just young folks. You see, the watchman just can't
make his rounds fast enough to keep 'em from grassin' ... 'Ticularly in
the spring. It'ld fair surprise ye to see the mashin' and the spoonin'
that goes on in the most high-class cemeteries. Yessiree, it'ld fair
surprise ye."
"But how do they get in?"
"How did you get in? Ain't no fence at this end."
"You mean they come and make love in the cemetery?"
The old man looked up sideways at Fanshaw and gave a wrinkled wink.
"There's nothin' they don't do, I'm tellin' ye. Worse than the canoes in
Norumbega Park for barefaced grassin'. Listen to what happened last
night. You know that there tower atop o' the hill? Well, we always lock
it up tight, but last night the watchman forgot to, and when the
patrolman made his round at 'bout midnight he heard 'em agigglin' and
carryin' on up in the tower and found the door was open, an' he went up
with his lantern... And they wasn't a bit ashamed or mortified... They
just laughed, the fellers and the girls, when he ran 'em out of there
... I don't know what young folks are comin' to in this day an' age ...
And they wasn't furriners neither."
"How extraordinary," said Fanshaw as he walked away. He looked at his
watch. Three o'clock; Nan would have finished practicing. He walked fast
for fear the old man would catch up and talk to him again. Nasty old
face, he had. And yet Nan and I, and Wenny, whom we loved, dead.
Everywhere love springing like hair-fine grass to obliterate the new
graves. O, the pitiful cycle of it. But life would be so unsatisfactory
without her. Mother's voice, her wrinkled face yellow and limp against
the pillow under the pompadour that was always a little crooked and
showed the black coarse hair of the rat: And later, Fanshaw, dearest,
when you've made yourself a lovely, beautiful career, you'll probably
marry some sweet, homey girl and settle down and be a comfort to me.
Probably Mother was right. There comes a time when you can't go on
living alone any longer. Of course a quiet retreat with books one would
always have to have. And with Nan's passionate interest in her music
there would not be any difficulty in that. And then to let oneself go.
At last someone with whom I can let myself go.
He was waiting outside the pompous wrought iron gates of the cemetery
for a streetcar. He climbed on a half empty car and watched the people
straggle in as it drew near to the subway entrance. There were old women
with spiteful lips and peevish, shifty eyes, flashy young men in checked
caps, lanternjawed girls, sallow, seedy fathers of families. Once, after
a long argument, he had asked Wenny: But what do you want? and Wenny had
looked round the car with eager eyes and said: Not to be myself, I
guess, to be anybody, any one of those people but myself. In the subway
Fanshaw looked, furtively so that they should not notice him, from face
to face, noting the tired skin round their eyes. Comes from drudgery in
offices and factories, he was telling himself, always regimented, under
orders, and then, in the evening the sudden little spurt of human
brilliance, shopgirls and little clerks and ditchdiggers walking merrily
through twilight streets. Tremont before theatre time, or at six o'clock
with the dome of the State House glowing through dusky trees. Then the
night; mystery of doorways, gangs of boys loafing sullenly under
arclights at corners, grassing in the cemetery, furtive loves over
newlydug graves, always afraid of the policeman striding slowly down his
beat; electric signs and burlesque shows, Pretty Girls Upstairs, lumpy
women, stuffed in pink tights, twitching lewdly at the end of a
smoke-rancid hall ... We can do better than that, Nan and I, escape all
this grinding ugliness, make ourselves a garden walled against it all,
shutting out all this garish lockstep travesty of civilization. Land
where it is always afternoon. Afternoons reading on the balcony of a
palace in Venice, vague splendors, relics from the Doges, Aretino,
Titian, and Nan with her hair brushed back from her forehead, in a
brocaded dress like a Florentine princess on a casone.
Park Street. Fanshaw got to his feet and shuffled in a jostling
stream of people out the car.
* * * *
Nan had been playing Pelleas. Fanshaw sat looking out of the window into
the glassy twilight in which a few stars already shimmered like bubbles
ready to burst. The music and the incredible fresh green of the leaves
in the darkening Fenway had brought on a mood of queer sensibility, so
that he felt very happy and almost on the verge of tears. He got to his
feet and walked over to the piano, where he stood awkwardly watching
Nan's long fingers flash across the keys. Then he took her gently by the
shoulders and said:
"Come and look at the twilight ... It's unbearably poignant, this
violence of spring."
They stood side by side in the window looking out at the darkening
trees.
"Nan, it'll be rather fun, won't it, setting up a ménage? And think
how delightfully absurd the wedding will be and all that."
"Yes, I think it'll be fun. Will your mother hate me dreadfully?"
"Poor mother, she's like a child. She'll get used to you and be
fearfully attached to you in no time."
"We must keep our liberty and our work, Fanshaw, whatever we do."
Fanshaw was startled by the tenseness in her voice. There was a hollow
look about her cheeks he had never noticed before.
"Do you know," Nan was saying, "I'm rather frightened about my music
tonight. I mean the divine fire, the power to let oneself go, to rule
imperiously an instrument and an audience ... But I'm dreadfully
determined. You won't go back on me, will you?"
"What a funny question."
"But why are we talking in this stilted way, already under the shadow of
the holy institution ... We've known each other long enough to get
married without a quiver, I should say."
"Perhaps it is that we've put on so many brakes in our time, that it's a
little difficult to take them off now we want to," drawled Fanshaw with
a wan smile.
Nan laughed excitedly. Fanshaw had put an arm around her shoulder. He
felt her body stiffening against his.
"Fanshaw," she said in a changed voice, "do you see that star?"
"L'étoile du berger."
Above the dark roof of the apartment house across the park a star
hovered green and trembling like jelly. They watched it in silence. Nan
turned her face up quickly towards Fanshaw's in sudden passionate
hunger. He folded her in his arms and kissed her lips lightly. With her
head against his chest and her body rigid in his arms he stared out
across her tumbled hair as the star sank flickering out of sight. He was
trembling. He was full of swift shudders of foreboding. He bent his head
to kiss her hair.
She tore herself away from him and threw herself sobbing into the
armchair.
"Fanshaw, I can't ... I can't do it. It's all false," she was crying
in a thin choked voice.
Fanshaw was standing stiffly in front of her. He felt desperately cold
and tired.
"Nan, this is horrible ... Pull yourself together."
She turned to him a twisted face wet with tears.
"No, go away for the present ... Leave me alone."
She slipped to the floor and lay with her head on the blue velvet seat
of the chair, her sandy hair undone, her body shaken with sobs.
In a curious maze of pain Fanshaw walked down the apartment house steps.
Through spring-reeking streets, full of laughs and flower-scents and
flushed cheeks and kidding voices of boys and girls arm in arm, he
walked with long, sedate steps home.