Streets of Night

by John Dos Passos

"It looked clean this morning," said Wenny flushing.

"Well, it's filthy now."

"That seems to me a darn good reason for not going."

The jade beads clinked as she followed them down the hall towards the door. For some reason she held out her hand to them formally. After the limpness of Fanshaw's hand, Wenny's seemed hard and hot. Again the phrase came to her mind: ditchdigger's hands.

"I don't want to go a bit, Nan...."

"Well, good evening," interrupted Fanshaw pushing Wenny towards the door with a gesture of proprietorship. As they turned towards the elevator, her eyes followed the fuzziness of Wenny's hair down the nape of his neck under the soft collar. The collar had a line of grime round it. Dirty little animal, said the voice in her. She closed the door, her nostrils full of the greasy smell of the elevator. The smile went out of her face.

The beads clinked as she walked back to the parlor. What was the matter with her today anyhow?—An old maid that's what you are like Aunt M. Nonsense, I'm too alive for all that rubbish. She stood with compressed lips looking about the room. How beastly small it was. There was a design in reddish orange on the bright blue curtains, that was echoed by the orange shade on the tall lamp that stood on the floor beside the piano. She'd thought herself clever to think up the colorscheme, with the warm buff walls as a background. It seemed hideous to her at that moment, like the decoration of a room in the window of a department store. There were still soiled teacups on the tables and along the mantel, and little plates with bits of sandwich and cake on them. She picked up the fat blue teapot Fanshaw had named Confucius. The smooth bulge of it in her hands was reassuring for a moment. Then solitude poured in upon her again. The Jacobean table with knobby legs opposite the fireplace and the books crammed into the bookcase and the battered Buhl cabinet in the corner all seemed squared and tiptoe with hostility. There was a faint bitter smell of tealeaves and burnt out cigarettebutts about everything.

She put down the teapot and flung herself on the pianostool. She would play madly. She would compose. A momentary thrill of huge chords, rising cadences to carry her with immense wingbeats out of the pit of sick yearning. She struck the keys with all ten fingers. The sound jangled loud through the room. She winced. Idiot, she said aloud, and went to the window. She raised the shade part way and let it fall behind her. The green star trembled in the west just above the dark mass of a building the other side of the Fenway. She watched it breathless while it sank out of sight.

* * * *

Nan climbed painfully out of slumber as one climbs a ladder. Sparrows were twittering outside. Her white bedroom was full of sunlight that poured through the wide window opposite her bed, smouldered hotly on the red and blue of the carpet, glinted on the tall mahogany bedpost and finally struck a warm tingling coverlet over her feet and legs. She snuggled into the bedclothes and lay staring at the ceiling wrapped in a delicious blank haze of sleepiness. A motortruck rasping by outside grated on her drowsy quiet and then rattled off into silence. Through the window she could see a lacework of treetops and the expressionless cubes of the further apartment houses and, beyond, a blue vaguely clouded sky. Two little sparrows, fat, fuzzy, with bright eyes, fluttered down past the window. She closed her eyes. In her ears something formed the words: So wonderfully secure.