U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [201]
Sophomore year Dick and Blake Wigglesworth began to go around together. Dick had a room in Ridgely and Blake
-90-was always there. Dick suddenly found he liked col ege, that the weeks were flying by. The Advocate and the Monthly each published a poem of his that winter; he and Ned, as he took to cal ing Blake Wigglesworth, had tea and conversation about books and poets in the afternoons and lit the room with candles. They hardly ever ate at Mem any more, though Dick was signed up there. Dick had no pocketmoney at al once he'd paid for his board and tuition and the rent at Ridgely but Ned had a pretty liberal al owance that went for both. The Wigglesworths were wel off; they often invited Dick to have Sunday din-ner with them at Nahant. Ned's father was a retired art critic and had a white Vandyke beard; there was an Ital-ian marble fireplace in the drawingroom over which hung a painting of a madonna, two angels and some lilies that the Wigglesworths believed to be by Botticel i, although B.B., out of sheer malice, Mr. Wigglesworth would ex-plain, insisted that it was by Botticini. Saturday nights Dick and Ned took to eating supper at the Thorndike in Boston and getting a little tight on spar-kling nebbiolo. Then they'd go to the theatre or the Old Howard.
The next summer Hiram Halsey Cooper was campaign-ing for Wilson. In spite of Ned's kidding letters, Dick found himself getting al worked up about the New Free-dom, Too Proud to Fight, Neutrality in Mind and Deed, Industrial Harmony between capital and labor, and
worked twelve hours a day typing releases, jol ying smal -town newspaper editors into giving more space to Mr. Cooper's speeches, branding Privilege, flaying the Inter-ests. It was a letdown to get back to the dying elms of the Yard, lectures that neither advocated anything, nor at-tacked anything, The Hill of Dreams and tea in the after-noons. He'd gotten a scholarship from the English depart-ment and he and Ned had a room together in a house on Garden Street. They had quite a bunch of friends who
-91-were interested in English and Fine Arts and things like that, who'd gather in their room in the late afternoon, and sit late in the candlelight and the cigarettesmoke and the incense in front of a bronze Buddha Ned had bought in Chinatown when he was tight once, drinking tea and eat-ing cake and talking. Ned never said anything unless the talk came around to drinking or sailingships; whenever politics or the war or anything like that came up he had a way of closing his eyes and throwing back his head and saying Blahblahblahblah.
Election Day Dick was so excited he cut al his classes. In the afternoon he and Ned took a walk round the North End, and out to the end of T wharf. It was a bitterly raw grey day. They were talking about a plan they had, that they never spoke about before people, of getting hold of a smal yawl or ketch after they'd graduated and fol ow-ing the coast down to Florida and the West Indies and then through the Panama Canal and out into the Pacific. Ned had bought a book on navigation and started to study it. That afternoon Ned was sore because Dick couldn't seem to keep his mind on talk about sailing and kept wondering out loud how this state and that state was going to vote. They ate supper grumpily at the Venice, that was crowded for once, of cold scal opini and spaghetti; the service was wretched. As soon as they'd finished one bottle of white orvieto, Ned would order another; they left the restau-rant walking stiffly and careful y, leaning against each other a little. Disembodied faces swirled past them against the pinkishgold dark of Hanover Street. They found them-selves on the Common in the fringes of the crowd watch-ing the bul etin board on the Boston Herald building.
"Who's winning? Batter up. . . . Hurray for our side," Ned kept yel ing. "Don't you know enough to know its election night?" a man behind them said out of the corner of his mouth. "Blahblahblahblah," brayed Ned in the man's face.
-92-Dick had to drag him off among the trees to avoid a fight. "We'l 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."