Streets of Night

by John Dos Passos

She woke with a start from her doze. What was she trying to remember? She was suddenly wide awake, her heart pounding. The warm bulge of his arm against her arm, hard, male, and the bright jelly of his eyes between black lashes, last evening looking at the star. She tried to brush the memory off; it clung about her the way the sticky spiderwebs used to cling to her face and hair walking through the woods last summer. She didn't want to think of Wenny that way, she told herself. It would spoil everything, she must have more self-control. No, no, she said aloud as she put her toes into her slippers. Then she went about her dressing with compressed lips.

She threw herself into a flurry of things to be done. Sunday and late and the maid not coming. There was the percolator to put on, the water to run for her bath, the milk to take in, and the paper, and the caps to take off the milk bottle and the creambottle, and the flame under the percolator mustn't be too high and the bath mustn't be too hot. The familiar morning smells, gasflame, soap, bathwater, coffee-steam, were vaguely distasteful to her this morning, gave her a feeling of days succeeding days and years years, as alike and meaningless as milkbottles. As she was cleaning her teeth she stopped with her mouth full of lather and the tooth brush in her hand. It was two years and eight months she'd been living in this apartment. O something must happen soon. When she had rinsed her mouth she looked at herself a long while in the tilted mirror over the washbasin. On one side the nickel fixture of the shower over the bathtub, on the other a glimpse through the open door into the hall and a patch of blue and green curtain; in the middle her face, chestnut hair caught loosely away from the narrow forehead, straight eyebrows darker than her hair, fine lashes. She stared for a moment intensely in her own grey eyes, then closed them with a shudder. I have the thin New England lips, she said to herself. She pulled the nightgown off impatiently and stood with her hands on her scarcely formed breasts looking down into the pale green of the bathtub. Somewhere at the end of a long corridor of her mind she ran through the dappled shadow of woods, naked, swift, chased by someone brown, flushed, goatfooted. She could feel in her nostrils the roughness of the smell of Wenny's damp homespun suit. Aprèsmidi d'un Faune, the words formed in her mind, Music by Claude Debussy, Choreography by M. Nijinski; the big program in her hands with its smell of glazed printer's ink and the rustling of dresses about her at the Opera. What are you dawdling about? she muttered, and stepped into the water and began briskly soaping the facecloth.

Half an hour later Nancibel Taylor sat at the table beside the window in the livingroom sipping coffee and putting dabs of butter on the broken pieces of a sugared bun left over from tea. The sky had clouded over. Through the black tangle of twigs of the low trees in the Fenway here and there a slaty gleam of water flashed out. From a long way off came the unresonant tolling of a churchbell broken into occasionally by the shrill grind of a street car round a corner. Still chewing the last mouthful Nan picked up the cup and plate, absentmindedly brushing a few crumbs off the blue tablecover with one hand, and carried them into the kitchenette. Putting them in the sink she let the hot water run on them, and with her hand still on the tap, paused to think what she must do next. O, the garbage. She picked up the zinc pail a little gingerly, holding her face away from it, and put it on the dumbwaiter, then pulled on the grimy cord that made the dumbwaiter descend, past the kitchenettes of the apartments below into the lowest region of all where the janitor was and a smell of coalgas from the furnace. After that with a feeling of relief Nan washed her hands and put her hat on in front of the pierglass in her bedroom, a hat of fine black straw without trimming that seemed to her to go very well with her light grey tailored suit. Pulling on her gloves, with a faint glow in her of anticipation of streets and movement and faces, she walked down the stairs.

Outside the air was raw with a faint underlying rottenness of autumn. Nan walked briskly, rejoicing in the tap of her little heels on the even pavement, down a long street of brick apartments that merged into older brownstone houses with dusty steps and several bells beside the front door. The pianos were quieter than usual because it was Sunday, but occasionally the high voice of a girl doing her scales jerked out through a pair of muslin windowcurtains or there came the shriek of a violin being tuned. Down Commonwealth Avenue the elms were losing their leaves. In the windows bloated chrysanthemum flowers stood up stiffly out of jardinieres. In the Public Garden, where there was still a bit of flame in the leaves of the trees, in front of an asthmatic old man sitting on a bench with his chin on a silverhandled cane beside a little old grey woman in a porkpie hat, Nan found herself all of a sudden looking into the eager black eyes of Miss Fitzhugh.

"O, Nan, I'm so glad to see you."

Nan felt her neatly gloved fingers squeezed with sudden violence.

"Why, what's wrong?"

"Just let me tell you.... O, I'm so upset. I haven't been able to practice a minute all day. I haven't been so upset since I broke off my engagement and sent Billy back his ring.... It's about Mabel Worthington."

"But Fitzie, who's Mabel Worthington?"

"I must have told you about her. She was such a lovely girl, one of our second violins.... Nancibel, you never pay any attention when I tell you things; I think it's mean of you.... O, it's too dreadful and I'm just miserable about it.... Look, dear, won't you walk a little up Huntington Avenue? I was just going to get a soda ... so soothing, you know, dear, and I know the nicest candy store just a block up."