There was a Hellenic purity about the sunlight along the river that afternoon, Fanshaw was telling himself, something that made one think of Praxiteles and running grounds at Olympia. The stadium in the distance across the meadows and the white bodies of the rowers in the shells stretching and contracting to the bark of the coxswains stood out like the reliefs on a temple against the azure and silver sheen of the sky and the river. From some birches by the river the notes of a song sparrow tumbled glittering. On the wind came an indefinable mushroom-scent of spring. Fanshaw's mind was full of suave visions of the future that evolved rosily like slow highpiled clouds. He would get a scholarship from the department on which they might live in Italy for a year. Extra money might be made appraising and attributing things for some art dealer. There would be Spain and Greece and North Africa. Magazine articles might appear about pictures and places. They could get a villa somewhere with lemon trees near the sea, breakfast in the morning leaning over the balustrade watching the bronzelimbed fishermen draw their boats up on the beach below; long strolls in the moonlight through overgrown gardens of myrtle and cypress, and Nan, dressed as she had been that night at the Logans (she would always dress that way—like a Renaissance princess), in his arms, silken and shuddering.
Fanshaw felt himself flush as he walked with slow strides along the turf by the river.
And Wenny had loved Nan. Perhaps it was through his death they had been brought together. The ways of destiny, Fuerza del Destino, by Verdi. Perhaps they could afford an apartment in one of these places by the river. The Strathcona. Fun it would be decorating it. And Wenny had loved her. That's how I felt towards him, I suppose. No harm, now that he's dead. This afternoon the Attic gleam of rowers in the sun, swallows circling in a blue sky glittering as with mica; if I could paint I would do him against such a background, hair curling crisp about his eager narrow forehead, eyes laughing, lips winesmudged and full, brownly naked like the Bacchus in that picture by Velasquez, defying the world.
Fanshaw was twirling some pink clover blossoms between his fingers, occasionally sniffing at them. The sense of Wenny's presence became suddenly intense to him, as if he could feel the hard muscle of Wenny's shoulder against his arm, as when they had walked together. He closed his eyes for dizziness.
He opened his eyes and looked about him. Round a bend in the river at the end of a silvery blue reach was a bridge and beyond the fantastic pile of the Abattoir with its tall bottle-shaped chimney. A rough smell of singed hides came down the wind. Fanshaw turned into a path up the hill towards a shrubbery behind which showed the crowded obelisks and crosses of the cemetery, crossed a wooden bar and found himself wandering among neatly laid off grass plots and gravestones with the dust of the stone cutting still on them. He passed a mock orange in bloom and remembered how he used to breathe deep the fragrance from the bush at the corner of his mother's lawn in Omaha until he almost swooned from it. That fancy that Wenny had once had that all the tombstones ought to be effaced and cemeteries turned into amusement parks with dancehalls and rollercoasters and toodling calliopes. There was a smell of lilacs ... When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. Perhaps that was what had made Wenny say that the smell of lilacs made him think of death. Then he was staring at the newest stone:
DAVID WENDELL: AET. 23
The Rev. Wendell, as Nan called him, had thought the Latin was appropriate to a scholar. On the reddish mound new grass fine as hair was sprouting. How little any of it had to do with Wenny. On the next grave a stalk of frail paper-white Madonna lilies trembled in the wind. It was in the time of lilies Pico della Mirandola had come to Florence and in the time of lilies he died, having failed in his great work of reconciling Christ and Apollo. Wenny would have been like that. O, if more people had only known him, if he had lived where there was an atmosphere of accomplishment instead of futility, his name might have rung like Pico's to the last syllable of recorded time.
"How do you do, sir?" came a wheezy voice from behind Fanshaw's back; he turned and found an old man with a pert, wizened face in blue cap and uniform standing beside him.
"A friend o' the party buried there, ain't you?" went on the old man.
"Why, yes, I am."