John Dos Passos

“ He had a feeling of suddenly scrambling on to a mountain top from which he could see endless valleys radiating into sunlight, full of gleam of roads and streams and beckoning woods, and swift shine of rails taut about the bulging hills. From now on he would burst through the stagnant film of dreams, his life would be a headlong adventure. Tomorrow Nan and real living. They'd go away from Boston, where they were caged by dead customs, where there were ghosts at every corner, constricting ghosts.
At Massachusetts Avenue the wind was like a razor in his face. ”

“ We don't fit here. We are like people floating down a stream in a barge out of a Canaletto carnival, gilt and dull vermilion, beautiful lean-faced people of the Renaissance lost in a marsh, in a stagnant canal overhung by black walls and towering steel girders. One could make a poem or an essay out of that idea, some people could; Wenny, if he weren't such a lazy little brute. Why couldn't I?
"Didn't you think Nan looked tired tonight?" asked Wenny suddenly.
Fanshaw was loath to break into the rhythm of his thoughts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fanshaw was annoyed,—vulgar, he thought, why notice such things? Other ages perhaps had put beauty, romance in them; Paolo and Francesca floating cloudy through limbo.
"These last few days I have been often thinking of that passage, Pico della Mirandola riding into Florence in the time of lilies. Then it would have been less futile to be alive."
"How do you know Fanshaw?"
"You have no nostalgia of the past, have you, Wenny? It's that things were so much cleaner, fresher. Everything was not so muddled and sordid then."
"Can't things always have been muddled and sordid? I think they were." ”

“ How hopeless to make oneself understood. Through the sting of bitterness Fanshaw remembered the first time he had seen Wenny. He had sat beside him in a classroom in front of the yellow varnished desk of the instructor. There was the dry smell of chalk and outside lilacs swayed against a blue sky full of little rosy clouds; the hideous lassitude of words in an even voice that smelt of chalk and blackboards, and besides him a thin brownfaced boy with moist brown eyes intent on everything, the chalky words of the instructor, the lilacs outside, the swallows that flashed against the sky. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Overhead the afternoon sun beat heavily on the broad maple leaves; patches of sunlight littered the ground like bright torn paper. Through the trees came the mud smell and the restless sheen of the river. Fanshaw was trying to think of something to say to the girl beside him; he daren't turn towards her until he had thought of something to say.
"Doggone it I've got an ant down my back," cried Cham, sitting up suddenly, his face pink.
"Momma catch it," spluttered Phoebe in the middle of a gust of laughter. ”

“ Such a wonderful person had no right to look that way. That night at the fancy dress dance at the Logans she had looked her best, her face oval, Sienese, and the hair tight back from her forehead under a jewelled net like a girl by a Lombard painter. There had been such distinction in the modelling of her forehead and cheekbones and her slender neck among all those panting pigeonbreasted women. How rarely people were themselves. Out of the corner of an eye he glanced at Wenny walking beside him with short steps, doggedly, his face towards the ground. ”

“ They drank glasses of orangeade in silence, Wenny paid the girl behind the cash-register who showed two gold teeth in a smile as they went out. Fanshaw was already thinking with eager anticipation of his room with its orange shaded lamp; the cosy bookish smell of it, the backs of his books in their case of well dusted mahogany and the discreet sheen of the gold letters of their titles in the lamplight, the sepia of the Primavera over the mantel, the neatness of his bedroom, the linen sheets on his bed, the clean aloofness of fresh pyjamas.
"I often wonder why I go out in the evenings at all." ”

“ Fanshaw thought of a phrase out of The Book of Tea; a man without tea was a man without poise, refinement. Wenny had no tea. How amusing his rages were. They went along without speaking. In the bright circle of each arclight he glanced at Wenny's sullen face, the prominent lips, the strangely soft-textured cheeks, the slightness of the waist under the shirt that bagged at the belt revealed by the flapping unbuttoned coat, the clenched swinging hands. There were puddles in the road. It was dark between arclights, a few glows from windows loomed distant among weighty shadows. ”

“ The room was swinging round in smooth spirals to the sound of The Blue Danube from the orchestra.
Wenny's heart was pounding. His hands were cold. Afraid, are you? a voice sneered in his head. To live you can be afraid of nothing. The Greeks were not afraid. The lean-faced men were not afraid. By god they were. Men flagellated themselves round the altar of Apollo on Delos. They recanted on their deathbeds and stuck their tongues out eagerly for the wafer. And can David Wendell, silly little Wenny, son of a minister with his collar on backwards, can I conquer fear. ”

“ Nan walked fast down a cross street. What a relief to be alone. Shouldn't have left Fitzie so abruptly, but couldn't stand her chatter a moment longer. Silly to be so upset; what am I so upset about anyway? My nerves are jumpy as the dickens this winter. In a cold fury of dismay she walked home through the yellow twilight, her chin pressed into her fur neckpiece as she leaned against the wind that blew razorkeen down the long street that led to the Fenway and made her ears sting and her forehead ache. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rustle of Sunday dresses, a couple of coughs from the back, Wenny in short pants kneeling trembling in the full booming blast of his father's prayer, watching the patches of pink and purple and mustard yellow light cast on the pew ahead by the sun shining through the colored glass of the windows, then caught away in a dream of red Indians running through a birch wood, and roused by the long droning infections: To do good and communicate forget not for with such sacrifice God is well pleased. ”

“ One must try to be beautiful about life.
VI
Drops fell shining from the trees about him into the trodden yellow slush of the path at his feet. In the air shuddering with the foretaste of spring of the thaw were constant rainbow glints of water. Wenny's knees and shoulders ached. His feet were swollen from frostbite. The bristles on his chin rasped against the upturned collar of his coat. Well, it would be spring soon, he was saying to himself, and this spring... Fanshaw's grey raincoat and long meditative stride and his rubbers flashed past among the Saturday afternoon crowd. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What was this tremor that went through the procession of faces at sunset time, browned them, put blood in their lips, sparkle in their eyes, so that suddenly, as if dolls should come to life she would feel that she was going to meet Wenny. Dreading the pain of it, she tried to forget herself in Fitzie's shrill gossip of how the harpist had sauced the conductress and would have been fired except that she was such a good player and she'd only had to apologize and everybody had been in a dreadful temper and they'd played the Götterdämmerung piece much too slowly. ”

“ 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 ”

“ She had to affirm her separateness from poor dear Aunt M. and her friends. The orchestra was playing selections from The Tales of Hoffman which set Nan remembering being in Paris with Gertrude Fagan, the smell of tea and pastry through the foggy tang of the air on the rue Cambon, shopping, jumping in and out of cabs with silky things in tissue paper packages, hotel François Choiseuil and the two of them giggling together in the evening beside a pink shade over sole with wine sauce. If it had been Wenny in Gertrude's place; the thought set her blood seething. ”

“ Nan was saying, her voice grown suddenly tense as Wenny's. "By living it, by making myself great in it, I can bust loose of this fearful round of existence. What a wonderful phrase that is, the wheel of Karma! I understand why women throw themselves head over heels at the most puny man. They have got to escape, if only for a moment, from the humdrum, all the little silly objects, pots and pans and spools of thread that make up our lives. I've got to get that in my music. Nothing else matters."
Fanshaw was thinking for some reason of Dürer's portrait of himself at the age of twenty-eight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ There was a little tremor in Wenny's voice that made him cut off his words sharp.
They turned and walked down the wharf again, the wind shoving and nudging at them from behind. In the lea of the buildings were a few old men with red faces sitting on boxes smoking pipes.
"Still," said Wenny with a sudden laugh. "I'm glad it happened. It tears off this fearful cotton wadding I've been swaddled in all my life. We'll see what the world is like now, won't we Fanshaw, old duck?" He slapped Fanshaw hard between the shoulders.
"The trouble is; can one live without it?" said Nan. ”

“ His forehead and eyes in the carmine ring of a Ward 8 becoming oval as he tipped it to his mouth, half a slice of orange bobbing in the midst of it, the lemony claret taste in his mouth and excitement shooting in hot and cold shivers through his blood. Opposite a girl's face, cheeks firm under powder giving way suddenly in loose purplish skin under the eyes, hair fuzzy and yellow. Beyond, through blue arabesques of tobacco smoke, tops of instruments from the orchestra playing Goodby, Girls I'm Through, a chromo of George Washington in a gold frame hung with a festoon of red frilled paper. ”

“ That night she dreamed that she sat in the great yellowshot beehive of the Boston theatre and that Fanshaw sat on one side of her and Wenny on the other, both in evening dress, and she was a little girl in spotted calico with her hair in pigtails and on the stage was the orchestra of the Fadettes playing like mad and in front of them Mabel Worthington with her mouth open and her head thrown back and a sheet of music agitated in front of her and Nan kept turning to Wenny and to Fanshaw and saying: I can't hear a word, not a single word. ”

“ Wenny said slowly. "Wagner makes me feel sentimental anyway, but Wagner plus fog ... like sitting on the curbstone and letting great warm tears flow down my cheeks till the gutter simply gurgled with them."
"I say," said Fanshaw.
"Not a bit of it," broke in Nan. "I feel jolly, like roasting apples in front of an open fire. We're so secure all three of us together this way and the world drifting by, dinner at Aunt M.'s and tomato bisque and croutons and love and hate and all that outside drifting by like fog." ”

“ Suddenly Wenny had slipped from her side and was in a taxi with his arms round the Worthington girl, kissing her, kissing her, and Nan was in another taxi driven by a young man with a red face and a diamond horseshoe in his tie and they were hurtling through red-flaring streets under a black sky, streets lined with faces staring and hands pointing and to all Nan's crying to them to tell her where he had gone there was no answer but hissing and stamping and catcalls. ”

“ Nan nodded her head.
"That's what I meant. I wonder if she is the girl.... No, Wenny, I'm glad you brought us here, even if we shall taste garlic for a week."
"At least there is the satisfaction of having busted loose," said Wenny eagerly.
"I never can understand the amazing way people put themselves out to be miserable." Fanshaw found himself suddenly welling with bitter irritation.
"But, by God!" cried Wenny, "You have to put yourself out to live at all; every damn moment of your life you have to put yourself out not to fossilize. Most people are mere wax figures in a show window. ”