"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 cartBy 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.
THE END