1919 (13 page)

Monday night finally came around. Already trying to tell himself not to be disappointed if Freddy Wigglesworth forgot about the date, Dick was on his way to the Union a full hour before the time. The cavernous clatter and smell of Mem, the funny stories of the boneheads at his table, and Mr. Kanrich's sweaty bald head bobbing above the brass instruments of the band in the gallery seemed particularly dreary that evening.

There were tulips in the trim Cambridge gardens, and now and then a whiff of lilacs on the wind. Dick's clothes irked him; his legs were heavy as he walked around and around the blocks of yellow frame houses and grass dooryards that he already knew too well. The blood pounding through his veins seemed too fast and too hot to stand. He must get out of Cambridge or go crazy. Of course at eight sharp when he walked slowly up the Union steps Wigglesworth hadn't come yet. Dick went upstairs to the library and picked up a book, but he was too nervous to even read the title. He went downstairs again and stood around in the hall. A fellow who worked next to him in Physics 1 lab. came up and started to talk about something, but Dick could hardly drag out an answer. The fellow gave him a puzzled look and walked off. It was twenty past eight. Of course he wasn't coming, God damn him, he'd been a fool to expect he'd come, a stuck up snob like Wigglesworth wouldn't keep a date with a fellow like him.

Freddy Wigglesworth was standing in front of him, with his hands in his pockets. “Well, shall we Copify?” he was saying.

There was another fellow with him, a dreamy looking boy with fluffy light gold hair and very pale blue eyes. Dick couldn't help staring at him he was so handsome. “This is Blake. He's my younger brother. . . . You're in the same class.” Blake Wigglesworth hardly looked at Dick when they shook hands, but his mouth twisted up into a lopsided smile. When they crossed the Yard in the early summer dusk fellows were leaning out the windows yelling “Rinehart O
Rinehart” and grackles were making a racket in the elms, and you could hear the screech of streetcar wheels from Mass. Avenue; but there was a complete hush in the lowceiling room lit with candles where a scrubbylooking little man was reading aloud a story that turned out to be Kipling's “The Man Who Would be King.” Everybody sat on the floor and was very intent. Dick decided he was going to be a writer.

Sophomore year Dick and Blake Wigglesworth began to go around together. Dick had a room in Ridgely and Blake was always there. Dick suddenly found he liked college, that the weeks were flying by. The
Advocate
and the
Monthly
each published a poem of his that winter; he and Ned, as he took to calling Blake Wigglesworth, had tea and conversation about books and poets in the afternoons and lit the room with candles. They hardly ever ate at Mem any more, though Dick was signed up there. Dick had no pocketmoney at all once he'd paid for his board and tuition and the rent at Ridgely but Ned had a pretty liberal allowance that went for both. The Wigglesworths were well off; they often invited Dick to have Sunday dinner with them at Nahant. Ned's father was a retired art critic and had a white Vandyke beard; there was an Italian marble fireplace in the drawingroom over which hung a painting of a madonna, two angels and some lilies that the Wigglesworths believed to be by Botticelli, although B.B., out of sheer malice, Mr. Wigglesworth would explain, insisted that it was by Botticini.

Saturday nights Dick and Ned took to eating supper at the Thorndike in Boston and getting a little tight on sparkling nebbiolo. Then they'd go to the theatre or the Old Howard.

The next summer Hiram Halsey Cooper was campaigning for Wilson. In spite of Ned's kidding letters, Dick found himself getting all worked up about the New Freedom, Too Proud to Fight, Neutrality in Mind and Deed, Industrial Harmony between capital and labor, and worked twelve hours a day typing releases, jollying smalltown newspaper editors into giving more space to Mr. Cooper's speeches, branding Privilege, flaying the Interests. It was a letdown to get back to the dying elms of the Yard, lectures that neither advocated anything, nor attacked anything,
The Hill of Dreams
and tea in the afternoons. He'd gotten a scholarship from the English department and he and Ned had a room together in a house on Garden Street. They had quite a bunch of friends who were interested in English and Fine
Arts and things like that, who'd gather in their room in the late afternoon, and sit late in the candlelight and the cigarettesmoke and the incense in front of a bronze Buddha Ned had bought in Chinatown when he was tight once, drinking tea and eating cake and talking. Ned never said anything unless the talk came around to drinking or sailingships; whenever politics or the war or anything like that came up he had a way of closing his eyes and throwing back his head and saying Blahblahblahblah.

Election Day Dick was so excited he cut all his classes. In the afternoon he and Ned took a walk round the North End, and out to the end of T wharf. It was a bitterly raw grey day. They were talking about a plan they had, that they never spoke about before people, of getting hold of a small yawl or ketch after they'd graduated and following the coast down to Florida and the West Indies and then through the Panama Canal and out into the Pacific. Ned had bought a book on navigation and started to study it. That afternoon Ned was sore because Dick couldn't seem to keep his mind on talk about sailing and kept wondering out loud how this state and that state was going to vote. They ate supper grumpily at the Venice, that was crowded for once, of cold scallopini and spaghetti; the service was wretched. As soon as they'd finished one bottle of white orvieto, Ned would order another; they left the restaurant walking stiffly and carefully, leaning against each other a little. Disembodied faces swirled past them against the pinkishgold dark of Hanover Street. They found themselves on the Common in the fringes of the crowd watching the bulletin board on the Boston
Herald
building. “Who's winning? Batter up. . . . Hurray for our side,” Ned kept yelling. “Don't you know enough to know it's election night?” a man behind them said out of the corner of his mouth. “Blahblahblahblah,” brayed Ned in the man's face.

Dick had to drag him off among the trees to avoid a fight. “We'll certainly be pinched if you go on like this,” Dick was whispering earnestly in his ear. “And I want to see the returns. Wilson might be winning.”

“Let's go to Frank Locke's and have a drink.”

Dick wanted to stay out with the crowd and see the returns; he was excited and didn't want to drink any more. “It means we won't go to war.” “Razer have a war,” said Ned thickly, “be zo amuzing . . . but war or no war lez have a lil drink on it.”

The barkeep at Frank Locke's wouldn't serve them, though he'd of
ten served them before, and they were disgruntedly on their way down Washington Street to another bar when a boy ran past with an extra in four inch black type H
UGHES
E
LECTED
. “Hurray,” yelled Ned. Dick put his hand over his mouth and they wrestled there in the street while a hostile group of men gathered around them. Dick could hear the flat unfriendly voices, “College boys . . . Harvard men.” His hat fell off. Ned let go his hold to let him pick it up. A cop was elbowing his way through toward them. They both straightened up and walked off soberly, their faces red. “It's all blahblahblahblah,” whispered Ned under his breath. They walked along toward Scollay Square. Dick was sore.

He didn't like the looks of the crowd around Scollay Square either and wanted to go home to Cambridge, but Ned struck up a conversation with a thuggylooking individual and a sailor whose legs were weaving. “Say, Chub, let's take 'em along to Mother Bly's,” said the thuggylooking individual, poking the sailor in the ribs with his elbow. “Take it easy now, feller, take it easy,” the sailor kept muttering unsteadily.

“Go anywhere they don't have all this blahblahblahblah,” Ned was shouting, seesawing from one foot to the other. “Say, Ned, you're drunk, come along back to Cambridge,” Dick whined desperately in his ear and tugged at his arm, “They want to get you drunk and take your money.”

“Can't get me drunk, I am drunk . . . blahblahblahblah,” whinnied Ned and took the sailor's white cap and put it on his head instead of his own hat.

“Well, do what you damn please, I'm going.” Dick let go Ned's arm suddenly and walked away as fast as he could. He walked along across Beacon Hill, his ears ringing, his head hot and thumping. He walked all the way to Cambridge and got to his room shivering and tired, on the edge of crying. He went to bed but he couldn't sleep and lay there all night cold and miserable even after he'd piled the rug on top of the blankets, listening for every sound in the street.

In the morning he got up with a headache and a sour burntout feeling all through him. He was having some coffee and a toasted roll at the counter under the
Lampoon
Building when Ned came in looking fresh and rosy with his mouth all twisted up in a smile, “Well, my young politico, Professor Wilson was elected and we've missed out on the sabre and epaulettes.” Dick grunted and went on eating. “I was
worried about you,” went on Ned airily, “where did you disappear to?” “What do you think I did? I went home and went to bed,” snapped Dick. “That Barney turned out to be a very amusing fellow, a boxing instructor, if he didn't have a weak heart he'd be welterweight champion of New England. We ended up in a Turkish Bath . . . a most curious place.” Dick felt like smashing him in the face. “I've got a lab period,” he said hoarsely and walked out of the lunchcounter.

It was dusk before he went back to Ridgely. There was somebody in the room. It was Ned moving about the room in the blue dusk. “Dick,” he began to mumble as soon as the door closed behind him, “never be sore.” He stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets swaying. “Never be sore, Dick, at things fellows do when they're drunk. . . . Never be sore at anything fellows do. Be a good fellow and make me a cup of tea.” Dick filled the kettle and lit the alcohol flame under it. “Fellow has to do lotta damn fool things, Dick.”

“But people like that . . . picking up a sailor in Scollay Square . . . so damn risky,” he said weakly.

Ned swung around towards him laughing easily and happily, “And you always told me I was a damn Backbay snob.”

Dick didn't answer. He had dropped into the chair beside the table. He wasn't sore any more. He was trying to keep from crying. Ned had lain down on the couch and was lifting first one leg and then the other above his head. Dick sat staring at the blue alcohol flame of the lamp listening to the purring of the teakettle until the last dusk faded to darkness and ashy light from the street began to filter into the room.

That winter Ned was drunk every evening. Dick made the
Monthly
and
The Advocate
, had poems reprinted in
The Literary Digest
and
The Conning Tower
, attended meetings of the Boston Poetry Society, and was invited to dinner by Amy Lowell. He and Ned argued a good deal because Dick was a pacifist and Ned said what the hell he'd join the Navy, it was all a lot of Blah anyway.

In the Easter vacation, after the Armed Ship Bill had passed Dick had a long talk with Mr. Copper who wanted to get him a job in Washington, because he said a boy of his talent oughtn't to endanger his career by joining the army and already there was talk of conscription. Dick blushed becomingly and said he felt it would be against his conscience to help in the war in any way. They talked a long time without getting anywhere about duty to the state and party leader
ship and highest expediency. In the end Mr. Cooper made him promise not to take any rash step without consulting him. Back in Cambridge everybody was drilling and going to lectures on military science. Dick was finishing up the four year course in three years and had to work hard, but nothing in the courses seemed to mean anything any more. He managed to find time to polish up a group of sonnets called Morituri Te Salutant that he sent to a prize competition run by
The Literary Digest.
It won the prize but the editors wrote back that they would prefer a note of hope in the last sestet. Dick put in the note of hope and sent the hundred dollars to Mother to go to Atlantic City with. He discovered that if he went into war work he could get his degree that spring without taking any exams and went in to Boston one day without saying anything to anybody and signed up in the volunteer ambulance service.

The night he told Ned that he was going to France they got very drunk on orvieto wine in their room and talked a great deal about how it was the fate of Youth and Beauty and Love and Friendship to be mashed out by an early death, while the old fat pompous fools would make merry over their carcasses. In the pearly dawn they went out and sat with a last bottle on one of the old tombstones in the graveyard, on the corner of Harvard Square. They sat on the cold tombstone a long time without saying anything, only drinking, and after each drink threw their heads back and softly bleated in unison Blahblahblahblah.

 

Sailing for France on the
Chicago
in early June was like suddenly having to give up a book he'd been reading and hadn't finished. Ned and his mother and Mr. Cooper and the literary lady considerably older than himself he'd slept with several times rather uncomfortably in her doubledecker apartment on Central Park South, and his poetry and his pacifist friends and the lights of the Esplanade shakily reflected in the Charles, faded in his mind like paragraphs in a novel laid by unfinished. He was a little seasick and a little shy of the boat and the noisy boozing crowd and the longfaced Red Cross women workers giving each other gooseflesh with stories of spitted Belgian babies and Canadian officers crucified and elderly nuns raped; inside he was coiled up tight as an overwound clock with wondering what it would be like over there.