"Well, it was a great war while it lasted." Major Baldwin sat swinging
his brightly polished puttees from the edge of Fanshaw's desk. "What are
you going to do when you go home?" He turned towards Fanshaw a steaklike
face from which emanated a distinct steam of cocktails.
Fanshaw looked up from the photographs of Red Cross activities he was
sorting, let his eye roam across the golden and rusty roofs that
stretched away under the window past domes and more domes towards St.
Peter's and Janiculum, glanced at the blue reflected light on Major
Baldwin's puttees, at his elegant whipcord breeches and Sam Browne belt,
red and shiny as his puttees, until at last he found himself looking
into his blue watery eyes.
"I suppose ... I guess there's nothing to it but to go back to teaching
the young idea how to appreciate art."
"Why don't ye stay in relief work?... There'll be jobs for years."
Major Baldwin kicked his heels against the desk and threw back his head
and laughed and laughed.
"Colonel Hopkins is in there," said Fanshaw, jerking his head back
towards the mahogany doors behind his desk.
"I don't give a hoot in hell about Hopkins ... Listen here, I've got
some dope, see?..." He leaned over and whispered noisily in Fanshaw's
ear. "Old Hopkins is going to get his ... They're starting an
investigation of the organization from the ground up. A congressional
investigation ... Goin' to be hell to pay. Let's get out and have a lil'
drink."
Fanshaw looked at his watch.
"I can't go for half an hour yet ... I'm not supposed to leave my desk
till five."
"Hell, up in my office we don't keep any hours at all."
"You aren't so near to centers of operation."
"You mean to that old fool?" Major Baldwin pointed with a stout
forefinger at the mahogany doors. "The investigation'll fix him.... How
soon are you packing up for home?"
"Probably in a couple of weeks ... I'm afraid I'll have to finish up
this album of Child Relief, 1918-1919, first ... I'm bored to death with
this work, aren't you?"
Major Baldwin got to his feet and went to the window. He stood a long
while looking out, twirling his cane in one hand. Fanshaw continued
sorting photographs of ragged Italian children.
"Gosh, I don't see it," said Major Baldwin suddenly.
"See what?" Fanshaw was poring over a group of a Red Cross captain and
a nurse with soup ladles in their hands surrounded by ragged Neapolitan
guttersnipes.
"Going home after this."
Fanshaw pushed his chair back silently and got up from the desk. They
both leaned out of the window and hung over the city that seemed to sway
in the great waves of honeycolored sunlight like jetsam in a harbor
swell. They could smell gardens and scorched olive oil, and a drowsy
afternoon murmur came up to them, punctuated occasionally by the screech
of a tram round a corner or a shout or a distant church bell.
"That's true ... There have been many enjoyable ..."
"I tell you, Macdougan, it was a great war.... Gosh, look at that girl
in the garden there.... No, just coming out from under the arbor. Look
at that throat ... Isn't she a pippin?"
Fanshaw laughed.
"You're incorrigible, Baldwin."
"That's why I don't want to go home.... I'm afraid that if I go home
they'll correct me."
"I don't know ... They say things are very gay in the States ...
Flappers and all that."
"What's this about flappers?" came a cracked voice behind them. The
voice broke into a wheezy laugh. "So this is how the publicity
department does its work, is it?"
"Just about," said Fanshaw, turning round to face a small greyfaced man
with shaggy eyebrows. "Are you shutting up shop, Petrie?"
"Yes, it's four minutes after five ... Look, does either of you men want
to sail home from Palermo on the _Canada_ next week?"
"Heavens, no, I'm staying on till they drive me away," shouted the
Major.
"I'd like to go," Fanshaw said quietly. "I've been away two years. It's
time I went to see what the university has to say about my job."
"Beginning to think of the girl I left behind me, are you?" asked the
greyfaced man creakily.
"Ha, ha! that's it." Fanshaw laughed loud and lifted his hand as if to
slap his thigh. He found himself looking with constraint at his lifted
hand and put it stiffly into his pocket.
* * * *
Le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière had a red scar on his left cheek
that stretched from the lower rim of his monocle to the tip of his
distended nostril. As he sat beside Fanshaw in the joggling cab the
medals clinked together on the breast of his tight-waisted khaki
uniform.
"The people on the street are looking at us as we drive by," he was
saying. "They are telling each other: There go two of the bravest of our
allies ... The Italians like that sort of thing: medals and people
riding by in cabs ... Captain Macdougan, never forget that there is a
brotherhood among the Latin peoples." Thereupon he sat up stiffly in the
cab, blonde moustaches bristling, and clicked his hand up to a salute.
An Italian officer in a long blue cloak saluted ferociously from the
curb. Fanshaw found himself also stiffening to salute ... Funny feeling,
the victorious allies riding about in cabs, saluting one another to a
clink of medals. America had done all that, won the war, and he had done
his bit himself; after all, relief work ...
"Excuse me if I stop at this chemist's a moment," said the French
captain. "There is something I must get before they close." And he poked
the driver in the back with his cane, crying out: "Arretez ici, cré nom
d'un chien!"
While le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière was in the shop, Fanshaw
lolled in the cab and stared down the grey Palermo street where the dust
gave a shimmering outline to the patches of sun and shadow. Now and then
he straightened up and answered the salute of some Italian soldier. His
puttees were too tight and cut into his legs above the ankle. Never
mind, this was the last day. Tomorrow, sailing for home a civilian, no
more uniform, no more inspecting colonels to talk to. Strange and
different it will be coming back from the war. The thought was elating.
And Nan Taylor, what will have become of her? A year since he'd heard of
her. Poor Nan must be getting quite an old maid by this time, and, as
for me, if it hadn't been for the war, this curious life in Italy,
relief work ...
Le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière was coming out of the shop, red
and spluttering.
"Did you get what you wanted?" asked Fanshaw.
"These dirty Sicilians don't seem to understand. We'll try another
place. Alley oop! Continuez!... We'll dine in the grand manner, won't
we?... Imagine, this is my first day of Europe after a year of Africa.
If I had not chanced to meet you, Captain Macdougan, I should have bored
myself to death."
"Then you weren't on the front for the victory?"
"I was in the battle that made the victory. The war was won in the first
battle of the Marne ... That's where I almost lost my leg and picked up
a medaille militaire ... Ah, there's another chemist ... Arretez donc.
Bon ... Perhaps you could help me explain."
They got out of the cab and went into the shop.
"What I want is tincture of yohimbine ... a very useful product ... a
slight aid, that's what it is."
The clerk was a small yellow man with a bald head who wore a stained
pongee jacket. He looked up through slanting eyeglasses at the French
captain who stood over him twirling the end of his moustache.
"Avez-vous de la teinture de yohimbine, monsieur?"
"Non comprendo, signore."
"Won't you explain to him what I want?... It's a little help, a slight
aid." Le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière waved a tightly gloved hand
under the druggist's nose.
Is this man crazy? Fanshaw was thinking. Why am I riding round in a
cab with this man?
"Cré nom d'un chien, por l'amore!" shouted the French captain.
"Teinture de yohimbine."
Fanshaw felt himself turn red.
"I don't imagine they have it," he said hastily and walked out of the
shop. He had barely got into the cab when the French captain followed.
"Ce sale pays," he was muttering. As he climbed into the cab his usual
bland smile crept back over his face. "Now we can dine," he said. "It
takes more than a slight contrariety to ruffle old campaigners, eh,
Captain Macdougan?"
"All right, let's have dinner," Fanshaw assented weakly.
How on earth did I get in with this ridiculous Frenchman, he was
bitterly asking himself. Last day in Italy, too, that I had intended to
be so pleasant. Intended to go up to Monreale to see the mosaics and the
view.
"I cannot tell you, Captain Macdougan," his companion was saying, "how
pleasant it is to spend an evening, after all those weary years of the
war, frontier posts and that sort of thing, with a man of your culture
and refinement, may I even say sophistication ... I said to myself when
I met you this morning in the Red Cross office: There is a man of parts,
an unusual person.... With me there are no half measures, I am a man of
action.... So I immediately invited you to dinner. I am sure neither of
us will regret it."
"Indeed, not for my part ..." stammered Fanshaw. They had driven up in
front of a small empty restaurant. The hollow-eyed waiter at the door
agitated his napkin in welcome.
Fanshaw and le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière sat in a cavernous
stage box at the opera, Fanshaw with his chin on his hand leaning across
the plush rail and the Frenchman sitting straight upright in his chair
with his bemedalled chest expanded, nodding his head solemnly in time to
the music. On one side was a mottled horeshoe of faces, on the other the
dustily lighted stage across which moved processions of monks, tenors in
knee-breeches, baritones with false beards; below them out of the glint
of brasses and the shiny curves of violins and the gleaming bald heads
of musicians the orchestra boomed and crashed. Verdi's long, emphatic
tunes throatily sung brought up to Fanshaw's mind his boyish dreams out
of Walter Scott and Bulwer of hazardous enterprises and maidens' love
hardily won. He felt as if he wanted to cry. How silly and dusty this
all is, he kept saying to himself. And here I am after the war a Red
Cross captain, and everything has happened that can happen, and Wenny's
dead years ago, dead as this old opera, and Nan's an old maid, and here
I am sitting next to this crazy Frenchman with his medals and his
stories of native women ... Right after the opera I'll leave him and go
back to the hotel, get a good night's rest, and run up to Monreale
before the boat goes; twelve that is; plenty of time. A long lyric duet
had reached its inevitable finale. The horseshoe was full of clapping
hands, nodding heads. The French captain got to his feet and clapped,
leaning out from the box. Wants to have them see his medals, said a
voice savagely in Fanshaw's head.
In the intermission they sat drinking Marsala in the bar.
"I didn't tell you," le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière was saying,
"how I happened to be present at the battle of the Marne. It is a very
funny story."
I'll say I have a headache and go home; I can't stand any more of this
wretched man, Fanshaw was thinking.
"How did that happen?" he asked.
"It's very funny ... You know the little Moroccan ladies are charming. I
had one at that time as a ... governess, to keep me out of mischief. I
was sent from Casablanca to Marseilles on a little mission, so I got the
idea of taking my little lady along and got a week's leave to go up to
show her Paris. My wife was safely in Aix-les-Bains with her parents,
and there we were, my Moorish governess and I, enjoying la ville
lumière, when suddenly, boom, the war breaks out!" He took a sip of his
glass and swept the faces of the people round the bar for a moment with
his superior stare.
Too repulsive, the mentality of a man like that. It's not the
immorality, it's the ugliness of that sort of thing that disgusts. When
he finishes this story I'll go home. Fanshaw cleared his throat
nervously.
"Of course I knew war was coming, but, as usual, I hadn't counted on its
being so soon ... The first thing that happened was my wife wired to
Paris that she'd meet me in Marseilles. All officers on leave were
ordered back to their posts immediately. I was fond of my wife and I
wanted to see her, but I knew I could never smuggle the little Moorish
lady through Marseilles without her smelling a rat. What was I to do? I
hung on in Paris a day trying to decide, and the next day packed off my
little governess all alone. Poor little thing, she didn't know a word of
French. Then I went to the Minister of War and got myself transferred to
the French front and had my wife come up to Paris to see me off, and
before I knew it I was right in the middle of the battle of the Marne.
Comical, isn't it?"
Fanshaw laughed stiffly. The bell was ringing for the last act.
The two tenors and the two baritones had gone into a monastery. The
soprano had become a hermit and lived in a cave. The contralto was
disguised in a domino. The chorus promenaded with imitation torches
through an arcade in the back of the bluelighted stage. Everything was
monkish and ominous in the music. The two tenors threw their hoods off
their heads and drew swords from under their cloaks and brandished them
over the footlights and sang a duet. The baritones stepped stealthily
out from behind the wings, and the duet was a quartet. The soprano threw
herself shrieking between the swords of the tenors. The contralto,
dressed as an abbess in purple robes, came out through a door in the
back. It was a sextette. The tune, shrieked on tight vocal chords,
filled to the roof the horseshoe-shaped theatre. Fanshaw half turned his
head. The French captain was whispering with a stocky, sallowfaced young
man who held his hat in his hand and leaned forward respectfully out of
the back of the box. But things had happened on the stage. The tenors
lay dying, the soprano had thrown herself to the ground, the contralto
elevated a large cross with her portly arms, and the back of the stage
was filling with the chorus of monks and their torches.
"Très bien, très bien!" cried le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière
as the curtain came down, and clapped with gloved hands. "No, after
you!" Then, as he followed Fanshaw down the steps into the lobby of the
theatre, he said: "It would be a good thing if more French and American
officers were seen together at these affairs. It would improve our
relations with Italy ... They are impressionable people. In Italy one
must be seen."
The sallowfaced young man was waiting for them outside the theatre.
"Vous suivez moi," he said in nasal French.
"But where are you going? I'm afraid I must go back to my hotel."
"But surely you'll cast just a glance at them ... It won't take long.
They are said to be very handsome."
"Why, who?" Fanshaw was suddenly very agitated. Think, if after all
these years ... Of course, an interesting thing to see for once;
sociological study. "What do you mean? I don't understand," he said.
His companion burst out laughing.
"The little ladies of Palermo, of course ... Come along, everything's
arranged."
"All right." Of course, just a glimpse, to see what a place like that
was like. Nobody could know, he'd never see this Frenchman again.
They followed the sallowfaced man up a steep dark street. Fanshaw looked
up at the sky that was bubbling with stars. The bright streak overhead
narrowed as the cornices of the houses drew together. The street was
empty. Once a cat brushed past his legs. At last they stood panting on
the broad stepping-stone in front of a door. The guide's three knocks
resounded hollowly.
"Such calm," whispered le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière in
Fanshaw's ear, slipping a hand under his arm. "At such moments I admit
that I am rather agitated always. I congratulate you on your calm."
The guide knocked again. Somewhere up the street a rooster crowed.
"It must be midnight," said the French captain.
The door opened softly. A fatfaced woman stood in the hallway holding a
taper above her head, and stared at them searchingly through narrowed
eyes. She and the guide talked in low hurried Sicilian.
"Vous suivez moi," said the sallowfaced man.
They walked after him up a winding stone stair, the woman following with
the taper. They came out on a landing, went through a passageway and
found themselves in a brightly lighted room with pink wallpaper and
gold-framed mirrors.
"Ah!" said the French captain, pulling off his gloves. They sat down at
a marble-topped table with carved ebony legs. The fatfaced woman who had
opened the door hung over them, grinning. "Let's drink a little
something ... Une bouteille de Marsala," he said and rubbed his hands.
"I like the quiet, gentlemanly way you Americans do these things. Very
distinguished."
The woman opened a cupboard and produced a bottle and glasses on a
silver tray. She poured out four glasses.
"A desso," she said, and her grin reached nearly to her ears.
Two girls in evening dress swished in operatically through the door. One
wore pink and the other blue. The girl who sat down beside Fanshaw had a
small mouth and large tired brown eyes.
"Lei," she said with enthusiasm, "parla Italiano?"
"Si, un poco," stammered Fanshaw blushing.
"Ah, if you speak Italian, mon capitaine," said the French captain,
"would you mind explaining to this little lady of mine what I told you
about the Yohimbé tree?... It's very important."
"I don't remember," said Fanshaw in a crisp, angry voice, and turned
again to the girl in pink beside him.
A bar of light burned his eyes. Through musty darkness from beyond the
foot of the bed a bar of light came whitely at him. Gradually other
streaks arranged themselves at right angles to the light. It was the sun
through a shutter beyond the foot of the bed. He had no pajamas on. His
chest suddenly contracted with sickening agitation. There was a sound of
breathing beside him. Very cautiously he slipped from between the sheets
and groped about the room. His clothes were on a chair. He pulled them
on anyhow and put his hand on the knob of the door. The gentle breathing
from the bed was regular like a child's. Softly he turned the knob and
opened the door. The shriek of the hinges was a knife in his ribs. He
hurried through the parlor with its pink wallpaper and gold-framed
mirrors that smelt of stale cigarette smoke and lipsticks. The door on
to the stairs was open. He slunk down the winding staircase,
straightening his necktie as he went. Then he found himself in an
enclosed court. In the upper wall that glowed with dazzling sunlight
were windows with balconies full of potted geraniums, red and pink,
stirring like flame in the sun. The pavings of the court had just been
washed and a cool wet stone smell came from them. Which way now? Two
geese waddled past him, letting a little querulous quacking noise
dribble from their bloodorange bills. Under an archway an old woman sat
shelling peas into a saucepan. She looked up at him and said something
he did not catch as he darted past her and out the street door. He
walked slowly down the sloping street. In the doorways were brightly
dressed children with dirty mouths and stringy, uncombed hair. The
street was full of dust and flies; shouts and shrieked talk, and sounds
of braying donkeys and rattling carts swarmed about his ears. In front
of the theatre he hailed a cab that carried him with a quick jingle of
harness through sunny, humming streets to his hotel. There he went to
his room and ordered a bath.
It was ten o'clock. He dressed again carefully in clean clothes,
breakfasted off coffee and rolls and honey, paid his bill, and had
himself driven to the boat.
Once on board in his ample white stateroom with his baggage about him, a
terrible lassitude came over him. He sat in his bunk staring up at the
blue round of the porthole through which came a sound of derricks and a
smell of pitch and a sunseared wind off the harbor.
The day he and Nan had sat together on the beach at Marblehead and
listened to the waves hiss and rattle among the pebbles and thought how
all the strength of Wenny, now that he was dead, might perhaps ... Poor
Nan, if I'd had the nerve ...
He looked at his watch. Half past. At the same moment the ship's whistle
started booming loud and throbbing. The noise tailed off into a harsh
wail.
Tarred and feathered and drawn in a cart
By the women of Marblehead.
Wenny used to sing that. Poor kid, he'd had nerve enough. The time he
and Wenny had walked at night down a street in Somerville where the rare
arclights were pinkish blobs among the shuddering green fringes of elms
and Wenny had wanted to pick up a girl. Stumpy girls with heavy jowls
strolling in couples, swaying from the hips. It was mostly the ugliness
... Yohimbine.
Tina had been pretty in her pink dress.
And now I'm going back. Venetian Art and Culture in the Eighteenth
Century. The afterglow of the Renaissance. In a vermilion barge, lost
... in the Charles, Wenny had said.
And Nan had understood; she had never been surprised at Wenny's killing
himself. Perhaps they'd had secrets, things in common, the two of them,
that he had never known.
Exit to Massachusetts Avenue and the College Yard, and the museum and
tea with professors' wives. Think of going back to that after this life
overseas. If he could love Nan, if he could take her, it would be
different. That was hopeless, dead as Wenny, dead as grand opera.
"Gosh, I don't see it ... Going home after this," Baldwin had said, and
they had leaned out together over the gold and rusty roofs and the domes
and obelisks swaying in the great waves of honeycolored sunlight, and
smelt gardens and scorched olive oil, and seen a girl with a brown
throat come out of an arbor beneath them.
Suppose he didn't go ... There was time to get off the boat. One crazy
thing in a lifetime.
He got to his feet, his heart dancing. I won't go.
A bell started ringing far away on another deck. That means there's five
minutes. There's time. I can get another Red Cross job.
He picked up a suitcase and opened the varnished door. The companionway
was full of people, officers, Red Cross men, buzz and chatter of
farewells. Fanshaw slammed the door of his stateroom and pushed his
suitcase back under his bunk.
Don't be a fool.
He threw himself on his back on his bunk and put his hand over his eyes.
Once they got out of sight of land he'd get a good nap. Now he must go
up on deck and take a last look at Palermo. A fine sight: the town
piling up to Monreale, and the gardens, and behind them the cloudy dark
hills of Sicily.
I've been thinking too much. I won't think of anything any more.
And I'll go back and go to and fro to lectures with a notebook under my
arm, and now and then in the evening, when I haven't any engagement,
walk into Boston through terrible throbbing streets and think for a
moment I have Nan and Wenny with me, and that we are young, leansouled
people out of the Renaissance, ready to divide life like a cake with our
strong hands.
The whistle soared from a loose rattle of steam into a drumming
reverberation. The engines began to move slowly, thump after thump, and
Fanshaw felt his bunk shake as the steamer drew away from the wharf.