LENINE REPORTED ALIVE 2 страница

Dick had hardly gotten back to school as a senior the
next fall when he got a telegram from his mother: Come
home at once darling your poor father is dead. He didn't
feel sorry but kind of ashamed, afraid of meeting any of
the masters or fellows who might ask him questions. At
the railway station it seemed as if the train would never
come. It was Saturday and there were a couple of fellows
in his class at the station. Until the train came he thought
of nothing else but dodging them. He sat stiff on his seat
in the empty daycoach looking out at the russet October
hills, all keyed up for fear somebody would speak to him.
It was a relief to hurry out of the Grand Central Station
into the crowded New York streets where nobody knew
him, where he knew nobody. Crossing on the ferry he felt
happy and adventurous. He began to dread getting home
and deliberately missed the first train to Trenton. He went
into the old dining room of the Pennsylvania Station and
ate fried oysters and sweet corn for lunch and ordered a
glass of sherry, half afraid the colored waiter wouldn't
serve him. He sat there a long time reading The Smart
Set and drinking the sherry feeling like a man of the

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world, a traveller on his own, but underneath it all was
the memory of that man's trembling white hurt face, the
way held walked up the area steps that day. The restaurant
gradually emptied. The waiter must be thinking it was
funny his sitting there that long. He paid his check, and
before he wanted to found himself on the train for
Trenton.

At Aunt Beatrice's house everything looked and smelt
the same. His mother was lying on the bed with the shades
down and a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne on her
forehead. She showed him a photograph that he'd sent
from Havana, a withered man who looked too small for.
his palm beach suit and panama hat. He'd been working
in the consulate as a clerk and had left a ten thousand
dollar life insurance in her favor. While they were talking
Henry came in looking worried and sore. The two of them
went out in the back yard and smoked cigarettes together.
Henry said he was going to take Mother to live with
him in Philadelphia, get her away from Aunt Beatrice's
nagging and this damn boardinghouse. He wanted Dick
to come too and go to the U. of P. Dick said no, he was
going to Harvard. Henry asked him how he was going
to get the money. Dick said he'd make out all right, he
didn't want any of the damned insurance. Henry said he
wasn't going to touch it, that was Mother's, and they went
back upstairs feeling about ready to sock each other in the
jaw. Dick felt better though, he could tell the fellows at
school that his father had been consul at Havana and had
died of a tropical fever.

That summer Dick worked for Mr. Cooper at $25 a
week getting up a prospectus for an art museum he wanted
to found in Jersey City and delighted him so by dedicating
to him a verse translation of Horace's poem about Mae-
cenas that he worked up with the help of the trot, that
Mr. Cooper made him a present of a thousand dollars to
take him through college; for the sake of form and so that

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Dick should feel his responsibilities he put it in the form
of a note maturing in five years at four percent interest.

He spent his two weeks' vacation with the Thurlows
at Bay Head. He'd hardly been able to wait going down
on the train to see how Hilda would be, but everything was
different. Edwin didn't have the paperwhite look he used
to have; he'd had a call as assistant in a rich church on
Long Island where the only thing that worried him was
that part of the congregation was low and wouldn't allow
chanting or incense. He was comforting himself with the
thought that they did allow candles on the altar. Hilda
was changed too. Dick was worried to see that she and
Edwin held hands during supper. When they got alone
she told him that she and Edwin were very happy now
and that she was going to have a baby and that bygones
must be bygones. Dick stalked up and down and ran his
hands through his hair and talked darkly about death and
hellonearth and going to the devil as fast as he could but
Hilda just laughed and told him not to be silly, that he
was a goodlooking attractive boy and would find many nice
girls crazy to fall in love with him. Before he left they
had a long talk about religion and Dick told them with a
bitter stare at Hilda, that he'd lost his faith and only be-
lieved in Pan and Bacchus, the old gods of lust and drink.
Edwin was quite startled, but Hilda said it was all non-
sense and only growing pains. After he'd left he wrote a
very obscure poem full of classical references that he la-
belled, To a Common Prostitute and sent to Hilda, add-
ing a postscript that he was dedicating his life to Beauty
and Sin.

Dick had an exam to repeat in Geometry which he'd
flunked in the spring and one in Advanced Latin that he
was taking for extra credits, so he went up to Cambridge a
week before college opened. He sent his trunk and suitcase
out by the transfer company from the South Station and
went out on the subway. He had on a new grey suit and a

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new grey felt hat and was afraid of losing the certified
cheque he had in his pocket for deposit in the Cambridge
bank. The glimpse of redbrick Boston and the state house
with its gold dome beyond the slatecolored Charles as the
train came out into the air to cross the bridge looked like
the places in foreign countries he and Hilda had talked
about going to. Kendall Square . . . Central Square . . .
Harvard Square. The train didn't go any further; he had
to get out. Something about the sign on the turnstile Out
To The College Yard sent a chill down his spine. He
hadn't been in Cambridge two hours before he discovered
that his felt hat ought to have been brown and old instead
of new and that getting a room in the Yard had been a
grave mistake for a freshman.

Perhaps it was the result of living in the Yard that he
got to know all the wrong people, a couple of socialist
Jews in first year law, a graduate student from the middle-
west who was taking his Ph.D. in Gothic, a Y.M.C.A. ad-
dict out from Dorchester who went to chapel every morn-
ing. He went out for Freshman rowing but didn't make
any of the crews and took to rowing by himself in a wherry
three afternoons a week. The fellows he met down at the
boathouse were pleasant enough to him, but most of them
lived on the Gold Coast or in Beck and he never got much
further than hello and solong with them. He went to all
the football rallies and smokers and beer nights but he
never could get there without one of his Jewish friends or
a graduate student so he never met anybody there who was
anybody.

One Sunday morning in the spring he ran into Freddy
Wigglesworth in the Union just as they were both going
in to breakfast; they sat down at the same table. Freddy,
an old Kent man, was a junior now. He asked Dick what

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he was doing and who he knew, and appeared horrified by
what he heard. "My dear boy," he said, "there's nothing
to do now but go out for the Monthly or the Advocate.
. . . I don't imagine the Crime would be much in your
line, would it?"

"I was thinking of taking some of my stuff around, but
I hardly had the nerve."

"I wish you'd come around to see me last fall. . . .
Goodness, we owe it to the old school to get you started
right. Didn't anybody tell you that nobody lived in the
Yard except seniors?" Freddy shook his head sadly as he
drank his coffee.

Afterwards they went around to Dick's room and he
read some poems out loud. "Why, I don't think they're so
bad," said Freddy Wigglesworth, between puffs at a ciga-
rette. "Pretty purple I'd say, though. . . . You get a few
of them typed and I'll take them around to R. G. . . .
Meet me at the Union at eight o'clock a week from Mon-
day night and we'll go around to Copey's. . . . Well, so
long, I must be going." After he'd gone Dick walked up
and down his room, his heart thumping hard. He wanted
to talk to somebody, but he was sick of all the people he
knew around Cambridge, so he sat down and wrote Hilda
and Edwin a long letter with rhyming inserts about how
well he was getting on at college.

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

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around the blocks of yellow frame houses and grass door-
yards 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 I 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 yell-
ing "Rinehart O Rinehart" and grackles were making a
racket in the elms, and you could hear the screech of street-
car 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

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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 din-
ner with them at Nahant. Ned's father was a retired art
critic and had a white Vandyke beard; there was an Ital-
ian 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 ex-
plain, 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 spar-
kling nebbiolo. Then they'd go to the theatre or the Old
Howard.

The next summer Hiram Halsey Cooper was campaign-
ing for Wilson. In spite of Ned's kidding letters, Dick
found himself getting all worked up about the New Free-
dom, Too Proud to Fight, Neutrality in Mind and Deed,
Industrial Harmony between capital and labor, and
worked twelve hours a day typing releases, jollying small-
town newspaper editors into giving more space to Mr.
Cooper's speeches, branding Privilege, flaying the Inter-
ests. It was a letdown to get back to the dying elms of the
Yard, lectures that neither advocated anything, nor at-
tacked anything, The Hill of Dreams and tea in the after-
noons. He'd gotten a scholarship from the English depart-
ment and he and Ned had a room together in a house on
Garden Street. They had quite a bunch of friends who

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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 eat-
ing 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 follow-
ing 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 restau-
rant walking stiffly and carefully, leaning against each other
a little. Disembodied faces swirled past them against the
pinkishgold dark of Hanover Street. They found them-
selves on the Common in the fringes of the crowd watch-
ing the bulletin board on the BostonHerald building.
"Who's winning? Batter up. . . . Hurray for our side,"
Ned kept yelling. "Don't you know enough to know its
election night?" a man behind them said out of the corner
of his mouth. "Blahblahblahblah," brayed Ned in the man's
face.

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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 re-
turns; 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 often served them before, and they were dis-
gruntedly on their way down Washington Street to an-
other bar when a boy ran past with an extra in four inch
black type HUGHES ELECTED. "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 blahblahblah-
blah," 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 indi-
vidual and a sailor whose legs were weaving. "Say, Chub,
let's take 'em along to Mother Bly's," said the thuggylook-
ing 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 blahblahblah-
blah," Ned was shouting, seesawing from one foot to the
other. "Say, Ned, you're drunk, come along back to Cam-
bridge," Dick whined desperately in his ear and tugged

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at his arm, "They want to get you drunk and take your
money."

"Can't get me drunk, I am drunk . . . blahblahblah-
blah," 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 ring-
ing, 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 po-
litico, 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 welter-
weight 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 sway-
ing. "Never be sore, Dick, at things fellows do when

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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 Scol-
lay 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 be-
side 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 lis-
tening 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. Cooper 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 con-
science to help in the war in any way. They talked a long
time without getting anywhere about duty to the state and
party leadership and highest expediency. In the end Mr.
Cooper made him promise not to take any rash step with-
out consulting him. Back in Cambridge everybody was
drilling and going to lectures on military science. Dick

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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 held slept
with several times rather uncomfortably in her double-
decker 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

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seasick and a little shy of the boat and the noisy boozing
crowd and the longfaced Red Cross women workers giv-
ing 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.

Bordeaux, the red Garonne, the pastelcolored streets of
old tall mansardroofed houses, the sunlight and shadow so
delicately blue and yellow, the names of the stations all out
of Shakespeare, the yellowbacked novels on the bookstands,
the bottles of wine in the buvettes, were like nothing he'd
imagined. All the way to Paris the faintly bluegreen fields
were spattered scarlet with poppies like the first lines of a
poem; the little train jogged along in dactyls; everything
seemed to fall into rhyme.

They got to Paris too late to report at the Norton-
Harjes office. Dick left his bag in the room assigned him
with two other fellows at the Hotel Mont Thabor and
walked around the streets. It wasn't dark yet. There was
almost no traffic but the boulevards were full of strollers
in the blue June dusk. As it got darker women leaned out
towards them from behind all the trees, girls' hands
clutched their arms, here and there a dirty word in Eng-
lish burst like a thrown egg above the nasal singsong of
French. The three of them walked arm in arm, a little
scared and very aloof, their ears still ringing from the talk
on the dangers of infection with syphilis and gonorrhea a
medical officer had given the last night on the boat. They
went back to the hotel early.

Ed Schuyler, who knew French on account of having
been to boarding school in Switzerland, shook his head as
he was cleaning his teeth at the washstand and spluttered
out through his toothbrush, "C'est la guerre.""Well, the
first five years 'll be the hardest," said Dick, laughing.
Fred Summers was an automobile mechanic from Kansas.
He was sitting up in bed in his woolly underwear. "Fel-

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lers," he said, solemnly looking from one to the other,

"This ain't a war. . . . It's a goddam whorehouse."

In the morning they were up early and hurried through
their coffee and rolls and rushed out hot and cold with
excitement to the rue François Premier to report. They
were told where to get their uniforms and cautioned to
keep away from wine and women and told to come back
in the afternoon. In the afternoon they were told to come
back next morning for their identity cards. The identity
cards took another day's waiting around. In between they
drove around the Bois in horsecabs, went to see Nôtre
Dame and the Conciérgerie and the Sainte Chapelle and
out on the street car to Malmaison. Dick was furbishing
up his prepschool French and would sit in the mild sun-
light among theshabby white statues in the Tuileries Gar-
dens reading Les Dieux Ont Soif and L'Ile des Pinguins.
He and Ed Schuyler and Fred stuck together and after
dining exceeding well every night for fear it might be their
last chance at a Paris meal, took a turn around the boule-
vards in the crowded horizonblue dusk; they'd gotten to
the point of talking to the girls now and kidding them
along a little. Fred Summers had bought himself a prophy-
lactic kit and a set of smutty postalcards. He said the last
night before they left he was going to tear loose. When
they got to the front he might get killed and then what?
Dick said he liked talking to the girls but that the whole
business was too commercial and turned his stomach. Ed
Schuyler, who'd been nicknamed* Frenchie and was getting
very continental in his ways, said that the street girls were
too naïve.