Dick had to drag him off among the trees to avoid a fight. “We’ll certainly be pinched if you go on like this,” Dick was whispering earnestly in his ear. “And I want to see the returns. Wilson might be winning.”
“Let’s go to Frank Locke’s and have a drink.”
Dick wanted to stay out with the crowd and see the returns; he was excited and didn’t want to drink any more. “It means we won’t go to war.” “Razer have a war,” said Ned thickly, “be zo amuzing… but war or no war lez have a lil drink on it.”
The barkeep at Frank Locke’s wouldn’t serve them, though he’d of ten served them before, and they were disgruntedly on their way down Washington Street to another bar when a boy ran past with an extra in four inch black type HUGHES ELECTED. “Hurray,” yelled Ned. Dick put his hand over his mouth and they wrestled there in the street while a hostile group of men gathered around them. Dick could hear the flat unfriendly voices, “College boys… Harvard men.” His hat fell off. Ned let go his hold to let him pick it up. A cop was elbowing his way through toward them. They both straightened up and walked off soberly, their faces red. “It’s all blahblahblahblah,” whispered Ned under his breath. They walked along toward Scollay Square. Dick was sore.
He didn’t like the looks of the crowd around Scollay Square either and wanted to go home to Cambridge, but Ned struck up a conversation with a thuggylooking individual and a sailor whose legs were weaving. “Say, Chub, let’s take ’em along to Mother Bly’s,” said the thuggylooking individual, poking the sailor in the ribs with his elbow. “Take it easy now, feller, take it easy,” the sailor kept muttering unsteadily.
“Go anywhere they don’t have all this blahblahblahblah,” Ned was shouting, seesawing from one foot to the other. “Say, Ned, you’re drunk, come along back to Cambridge,” Dick whined desperately in his ear and tugged at his arm, “They want to get you drunk and take your money.”
“Can’t get me drunk, I am drunk… blahblahblahblah,” whinnied Ned and took the sailor’s white cap and put it on his head instead of his own hat.
“Well, do what you damn please, I’m going.” Dick let go Ned’s arm suddenly and walked away as fast as he could. He walked along across Beacon Hill, his ears ringing, his head hot and thumping. He walked all the way to Cambridge and got to his room shivering and tired, on the edge of crying. He went to bed but he couldn’t sleep and lay there all night cold and miserable even after he’d piled the rug on top of the blankets, listening for every sound in the street.
In the morning he got up with a headache and a sour burntout feeling all through him. He was having some coffee and a toasted roll at the counter under the Lampoon Building when Ned came in looking fresh and rosy with his mouth all twisted up in a smile, “Well, my young politico, Professor Wilson was elected and we’ve missed out on the sabre and epaulettes.” Dick grunted and went on eating. “I was worried about you,” went on Ned airily, “where did you disappear to?” “What do you think I did? I went home and went to bed,” snapped Dick. “That Barney turned out to be a very amusing fellow, a boxing instructor, if he didn’t have a weak heart he’d be welterweight champion of New England. We ended up in a Turkish Bath… a most curious place.” Dick felt like smashing him in the face. “I’ve got a lab period,” he said hoarsely and walked out of the lunchcounter.
It was dusk before he went back to Ridgely. There was somebody in the room. It was Ned moving about the room in the blue dusk. “Dick,” he began to mumble as soon as the door closed behind him, “never be sore.” He stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets swaying. “Never be sore, Dick, at things fellows do when they’re drunk…. Never be sore at anything fellows do. Be a good fellow and make me a cup of tea.” Dick filled the kettle and lit the alcohol flame under it. “Fellow has to do lotta damn fool things, Dick.”
“But people like that… picking up a sailor in Scollay Square… so damn risky,” he said weakly.
Ned swung around towards him laughing easily and happily, “And you always told me I was a damn Backbay snob.”
Dick didn’t answer. He had dropped into the chair beside the table. He wasn’t sore any more. He was trying to keep from crying. Ned had lain down on the couch and was lifting first one leg and then the other above his head. Dick sat staring at the blue alcohol flame of the lamp listening to the purring of the teakettle until the last dusk faded to darkness and ashy light from the street began to filter into the room.
That winter Ned was drunk every evening. Dick made the Monthly and The Advocate, had poems reprinted in The Literary Digest and The Conning Tower, attended meetings of the Boston Poetry Society, and was invited to dinner by Amy Lowell. He and Ned argued a good deal because Dick was a pacifist and Ned said what the hell he’d join the Navy, it was all a lot of Blah anyway.
In the Easter vacation, after the Armed Ship Bill had passed Dick had a long talk with Mr. Copper who wanted to get him a job in Washington, because he said a boy of his talent oughtn’t to endanger his career by joining the army and already there was talk of conscription. Dick blushed becomingly and said he felt it would be against his conscience to help in the war in any way. They talked a long time without getting anywhere about duty to the state and party leader ship and highest expediency. In the end Mr. Cooper made him promise not to take any rash step without consulting him. Back in Cambridge everybody was drilling and going to lectures on military science. Dick was finishing up the four year course in three years and had to work hard, but nothing in the courses seemed to mean anything any more. He managed to find time to polish up a group of sonnets called Morituri Te Salutant that he sent to a prize competition run by The Literary Digest. It won the prize but the editors wrote back that they would prefer a note of hope in the last sestet. Dick put in the note of hope and sent the hundred dollars to Mother to go to Atlantic City with. He discovered that if he went into war work he could get his degree that spring without taking any exams and went in to Boston one day without saying anything to anybody and signed up in the volunteer ambulance service.
The night he told Ned that he was going to France they got very drunk on orvieto wine in their room and talked a great deal about how it was the fate of Youth and Beauty and Love and Friendship to be mashed out by an early death, while the old fat pompous fools would make merry over their carcasses. In the pearly dawn they went out and sat with a last bottle on one of the old tombstones in the graveyard, on the corner of Harvard Square. They sat on the cold tombstone a long time without saying anything, only drinking, and after each drink threw their heads back and softly bleated in unison Blahblahblahblah.
Sailing for France on the Chicago in early June was like suddenly having to give up a book he’d been reading and hadn’t finished. Ned and his mother and Mr. Cooper and the literary lady considerably older than himself he’d slept with several times rather uncomfortably in her doubledecker apartment on Central Park South, and his poetry and his pacifist friends and the lights of the Esplanade shakily reflected in the Charles, faded in his mind like paragraphs in a novel laid by unfinished. He was a little seasick and a little shy of the boat and the noisy boozing crowd and the longfaced Red Cross women workers giving each other gooseflesh with stories of spitted Belgian babies and Canadian officers crucified and elderly nuns raped; inside he was coiled up tight as an overwound clock with wondering what it would be like over there.