Betty Thomas shook her head, smiling.
"D'you mind if I open the window, though? The air's splendid outside, cold and smells of spring."
Nan had brought out her violin.
"Let's play ... I haven't practiced for three days."
Fanshaw sat by the window shivering a little in the cold air. The sound of the violin being tuned rasped on his ears. Then they started playing a solemn, circular tune that made him think of a minuet, and today made him twitch all over with impatience. He got to his feet and tiptoed out. Something about the two girls' absorption in the music annoyed him. He walked down the stairs and strolled across the Fenway where a few nursemaids were wheeling babies about in the late afternoon sun.
He crossed a bridge over a railroad track. The sound of a train whistle in the distance sent a pang through him of helpless nostalgia for travel and railway carriages and the smoke of stations and the unfamiliar smell of hotel rooms. He got so little of all he had longed for before he died, Fanshaw was thinking; and what I long for, how little of it shall I get! He felt tears welling up within him.
At the corner where he waited for the Brookline car some workmen were repairing the track. Under baggy blue shirts the muscles of arms and shoulders moved tautly. A smell of sweat and rank pipes came from them. Wenny would have wanted to be one of them, redfaced spitting men with skillful ugly hands. The men who had dug the grave had been like that, men digging everywhere were like that; strange how through all the tense idiocy of the funeral, and Wenny's father and mother very solemn and professional, and the father's little speech to the effect that he believed as he believed in God Almighty that his son had not died a suicide but had been done to death by some low companion or other, he had felt that the only people there Wenny would have liked were the two hickory-faced men with spades who filled in the grave, their thick backs bending and straightening as they shoveled in the reddish dirt. Fanshaw suddenly pressed his lips hard together as he remembered the undertaker's man in black broadcloth unscrewing the silver handles from the coffin before it was lowered into the grave, and Wenny's father in black broadcloth eloquently reading the burial service, and the rattle of the first shovelfull of dirt and stones on the coffin.
The car stopped in front of him with a shriek of brakes.
Fanshaw sat stiffly in the rattling streetcar that smelt of cheap perfume and overcoats and breathed out air, staring unseeing out of the window.
"O, Muriel, isn't that suicide case dreadful?"