Boston

Boston is where Richard Ellsworth Savage’s political hopes collide with Ned’s deliberate indifference and, on Election Night, with the risks of the city after dark. The restaurants, waterfront, Common, and streets form more than a backdrop: as the two friends move through them, an evening of shared plans becomes a test of whether their companionship can survive their opposing ideas of what matters.

A city in the orbit of student life

Richard Ellsworth Savage’s Boston belongs to a wider student world that also includes Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and Ned share a room in a Garden Street house, where friends interested in English and the Fine Arts gather late into the afternoon. In candlelight, cigarette smoke, and incense, they drink tea and eat cake before a bronze Buddha Ned bought in Chinatown. The room offers an intimate counterpoint to the public streets of Boston: conversation and fellowship are available there, but political debate rarely holds Ned’s attention. When talk turns to politics or war, he closes his eyes, throws back his head, and dismisses it as empty chatter.

Boston also figures in their recurring social routine. On Saturday nights, Richard and Ned eat supper at the Thorndike, drink sparkling nebbiolo, and then go to the theatre or the Old Howard. These outings establish the city as a place for shared pleasure and familiar ritual before Election Night makes it a setting for estrangement. Their companionship is real, but their habits already expose its asymmetry: Richard is increasingly absorbed by public questions, while Ned prefers drinking and sailing ships.

Campaign politics and Election Day

The preceding summer, Richard worked for Hiram Halsey Cooper’s campaign for Woodrow Wilson. Although Ned teased him in letters, Richard became intensely invested in the campaign’s promises, including the New Freedom, neutrality, and harmony between capital and labor. He spent twelve hours a day typing releases, persuading small-town newspaper editors to give Cooper’s speeches more space, and attacking privilege and business interests. His return to student life felt flat by comparison: lectures seemed to advocate or oppose nothing, and afternoons of tea could not match the urgency of campaign work.

On Election Day, that political investment draws Richard’s attention away from the private plan he and Ned share. Walking through Boston’s North End to the end of T Wharf, they talk about buying a small yawl or ketch after graduation and sailing down the coast to Florida and the West Indies, through the Panama Canal, and into the Pacific. Ned has bought a navigation book and begun studying it. Yet Richard keeps wondering aloud how different states will vote. The same walk therefore carries two possible futures: a sailing adventure the friends have imagined together and the political outcome that Richard cannot stop following.

The election-night streets

After a strained supper at the Venice, where the service is poor and Ned orders another bottle of white orvieto, the two leave unsteadily and reach the Common. There they join the crowd watching election returns on the Boston Herald building. Ned treats the gathering as an occasion for drunken heckling, while Richard wants to know who is winning because he believes Wilson’s success means the country will avoid war. Their difference becomes public: Ned shouts and mocks a man who asks whether he understands that it is election night, and Richard has to pull him away among the trees to prevent a fight.

At Frank Locke’s, the barkeep refuses to serve them, although he has served them before. As they walk down Washington Street toward another bar, a boy runs past carrying an extra that announces Hughes has been elected. Ned cheers; Richard covers his mouth, and the two wrestle in the street as hostile men gather around them. Their fallen hat and the approaching police officer give the political argument immediate physical stakes. The men’s voices identify them as college boys and Harvard men; Richard and Ned straighten up and leave soberly. The early bulletin intensifies the confusion of the evening, since Ned later tells Richard that Wilson was elected.

The route continues toward Scollay Square, where Richard dislikes the crowd and wants to return to Cambridge. Ned instead strikes up a conversation with a rough-looking man and an unsteady sailor, who invite them to Mother Bly’s. Richard warns Ned that the men may get him drunk and take his money, but Ned insists that he is already drunk. He takes the sailor’s white cap and puts it on in place of his own hat. Boston’s streets have shifted from the familiar setting of dinners and entertainment into a place where intoxication, strangers, and the possibility of violence make Richard feel responsible for a friend who will not heed him.

Separation and the morning after

Richard finally lets go of Ned’s arm and walks away. He crosses Beacon Hill and walks all the way back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, cold, tired, and close to tears. Unable to sleep, he lies awake listening for every sound in the street. The city evening ends not with the political celebration Richard sought, but with an isolated walk and a night of anxiety.

The next morning, Ned appears fresh and rosy at a lunch counter beneath the Lampoon Building. He jokes that Woodrow Wilson has been elected and that they have missed out on the sabre and epaulettes, then asks where Richard went. Ned recounts that the man they met was a boxing instructor and that the night ended in a Turkish bath. Richard, still suffering a headache and a sour, burned-out feeling, is furious enough to want to hit him; instead, he leaves for his laboratory period. At dusk Ned returns to their room and asks Richard not to be sore about what men do when drunk, then asks him to make tea. Richard does so, but quietly names the danger of picking up a sailor in Scollay Square. Boston has revealed the divide between them: Ned treats the night as an amusing escapade, while Richard remembers the danger, the abandonment, and the cost of having tried to look after him.