Streets of Night

by John Dos Passos

[III]

Fanshaw Macdougan's left shoe pinched the upper part of his foot and a damp chill from the fog-moistened pavement seeped through the thin soles as he walked with long strides beside Wenny. These things gave a vaguely peevish whine to the flow of thoughts through his head. If only I had the money, he was thinking, I would have ten pairs of shoes and a valet to wear them until they were comfortable. The form of an advertisement in a paper started into his head: Wanted a valet, must wear No. 9 shoes, best references required; and himself in a dressing gown of pale colored silk looking over the applicants from a great tapestried easychair. O, how one could live if one had the money, and the people who had it never seemed to know how to use it except Mrs. Jack Gardiner in her Italian palace.

"I was thinking what I'd do if I had a million dollars, Wenny."

Wenny turned, his eyes snapping, and laughed. The glimpse of his face laughing turned up into the full white glare of an arclight lingered in Fanshaw's eyes and faded, the way a stranger's face out of a crowd would sometimes linger and fade. Nan's face too, the profile as she turned to put her key in the lock of the glass door was still sharp in his mind, behind it a memory of the smell extraordinarily warm honied artificial of the flowers among the pictures in Mrs. Gardiner's gallery. Strange that Nan should have worn a hat like that this evening. Unbecoming, made her look like a schoolteacher. The New England in her coming out. Such a wonderful person had no right to look that way. That night at the fancy dress dance at the Logans she had looked her best, her face oval, Sienese, and the hair tight back from her forehead under a jewelled net like a girl by a Lombard painter. There had been such distinction in the modelling of her forehead and cheekbones and her slender neck among all those panting pigeonbreasted women. How rarely people were themselves. Out of the corner of an eye he glanced at Wenny walking beside him with short steps, doggedly, his face towards the ground. A trio we are, Nan and Wenny and I, a few friends my only comfort in this great snarling waste of a country. We don't fit here. We are like people floating down a stream in a barge out of a Canaletto carnival, gilt and dull vermilion, beautiful lean-faced people of the Renaissance lost in a marsh, in a stagnant canal overhung by black walls and towering steel girders. One could make a poem or an essay out of that idea, some people could; Wenny, if he weren't such a lazy little brute. Why couldn't I?

"Didn't you think Nan looked tired tonight?" asked Wenny suddenly.

Fanshaw was loath to break into the rhythm of his thoughts.

"I did," said Wenny again.

"Why should she be tired? She hasn't worked very hard this week."

Wenny said nothing. The street was muffled by the fog all about them. In Fanshaw's mind were phrases from Lamb, vague thought of fogs over London. They came out on the springy boards of the bridge that seemed to sway ever so little under their feet. The fog above the river was denser and colder. Their steps were loud on the slats of the sidewalk. Half way over they passed a man and a girl, bodies cleaving together so that they made a single silhouette. Fanshaw caught Wenny's backward glance after them. Rather unhealthy, the interest in those things, he thought. Further along they heard a regular heavy tread coming towards them, a policeman.

"He'll break their clinch," said Wenny giggling. Fanshaw was annoyed,—vulgar, he thought, why notice such things? Other ages perhaps had put beauty, romance in them; Paolo and Francesca floating cloudy through limbo.