"How's that?" Fanshaw gulped some coffee.
"Didn't you know that the young couple were going on their honeymoon in the big red Stutz Harrenden gave them? An elegantly matched pair."
"Cham and I roomed together, Freshman year in college," Fanshaw found himself saying.
"Ah, College! That's the place to make connections."
They stood looking at each other nodding their heads knowingly, Fanshaw with his coffeecup, the pudgy man with his highball glass, when the sound of a racing motor attracted their attention. It was followed by a shout from the front of the house. Fanshaw went to the window and pulled back the curtain. The guests cheering and laughing filled the colonial porch and surged round a shaking roadster in the drive. Fanshaw caught a glimpse of Alice Harrenden's pale face under a little brown hat and veil as she climbed into the car. Her eyes were swollen and her lips tight as if she were going to cry. Cham waved a buff cap and opened the cutout. Rice hailed on the car. An old sneaker hit Cham in the head. He honked the horn, bent over the wheel and the car shot around the bend of the driveway. People looked at each other constrainedly and began going back into the house.
Somewhere quiet till this passes off, Fanshaw was thinking. He made his way back through the house and out into the garden. Why, I'm staggering down the path. Mucky underfoot from the thaw. Bench to sit on. Dry bench. He leaned back and stared up at the streaming greypurple clouds that brightened to yellow in spots where a little sun broke through. Oughtn't to have drunk so much champagne. After all, if no one noticed... Jolly thing an oldfashioned jolly wedding. My wedding. The Macdougan wedding. If it could be Nan. But Wenny... No, no. Someone I've not met yet. Perhaps she'd have red hair, auburn hair, a Titian blonde. Aretino had to flee Venice when he was accused of sodomy. He had eight beautiful mistresses in a great palace on the Grand Canal. And I've never had a woman. Wedding parties, fellows phoning easy girls, through all that lonely as a cloud. Horrible coward, I guess. That night walking with Wenny along the road to Blue Hill couples of girls wanting to be picked up, their eyes under the arclight clicking into ours. Hullo, kiddo. Hello, cutie. But Wenny, that sort of thing just isn't done. Danger of exposure too, scandal, disease. And the street through Somerville dark under the May-rustling trees, pink blobs of arclights and the shuddering green fringes of foliage about them and the hips, the wabbly hips of stumpy girls. When walking, when welldressed people walked, thinking of the Renaissance, of distant splendid things, all this surged about them out of the long streets of night. Festering web of desire, grimy probing hands, groping eyes, toughs and hard girls circling like dogs before a fight. Wrestling sweaty bodies, hands palping, feeling, feeling up.... O, I don't want to think of all that. Oldfashioned jolly wedding. Pull yourself together.
Fanshaw sat with his head buried in his hands, his elbows on his knees, staring at the gravel between his feet. After a while he got up, cold and stiff. The dazzle of the champagne had passed off. The orchestra in the house was playing a foxtrot. Probably caught a cold sitting out here like an idiot. He walked meditatively towards the conservatory, scraped his feet off on the mat and stepped in. The warm sugary air was soothing after the rawness of outdoors. He stood a long while looking at the little sprouts that had formed at the tips of the fronds of a big Australian fern. The door at the end of the conservatory opened letting in a burst of ragtime from the drawing room, voices, sliding of feet on a hardwood floor. All of a sudden he wanted to go away to be walking by himself down the road to the station. He went out into the garden again for fear someone should see him and speak to him. He'd slip away without saying goodby. Such a crowd no one could possibly notice. Groping in his pocket for his coatcheck he went round the house towards the front door. In an embrasure beside a fieldstone chimney was a trellised bench, on the bench a hat of orange tulle, beside the hat a fluffy peachcolored dress, a flushed face thrown back, a long lock of undone hair curling spikily over a shoulder, and stooped about her, half holding her up, a young man in a black suit. Her eyes were closed, his face crushed into hers. One hand gripped the young man hard like a claw by the elbow. Fanshaw stood a moment breathless staring at them. Then he walked off fast with the blood throbbing in his ears.
On the way to the station he kept thinking: And the years slip by like telegraph poles past you in the train and people marry and spoon on benches and I'm always, alone, moral, refined, restrained. If I were only made like Wenny, I'd enjoy life. Disgusting, though, out in the open like that where anybody could see, worse than factory hands at Norumbega.
One must try to be beautiful about life.