The Beautiful and Damned
She was in wretched humor; that was evident. Her gray eyes were granite
now indeed. When she wasn't speaking she stared straight in front of her
as if at some distasteful abstraction in the lobby.
"Well, come on, then."
He followed her, a graceful girl even in her enveloping fur, out to a
taxicab, and, with an air of having a definite place in mind, instructed
the driver to go over to Broadway and then turn south. He made several
casual attempts at conversation but as she adopted an impenetrable armor
of silence and answered him in sentences as morose as the cold darkness
of the taxicab he gave up, and assuming a like mood fell into a
dim gloom.
A dozen blocks down Broadway Anthony's eyes were caught by a large and
unfamiliar electric sign spelling "Marathon" in glorious yellow script,
adorned with electrical leaves and flowers that alternately vanished and
beamed upon the wet and glistening street. He leaned and rapped on the
taxi-window and in a moment was receiving information from a colored
doorman: Yes, this was a cabaret. Fine cabaret. Bes' showina city!
"Shall we try it?"
With a sigh Gloria tossed her cigarette out the open door and prepared
to follow it; then they had passed under the screaming sign, under the
wide portal, and up by a stuffy elevator into this unsung palace
of pleasure.
The gay habitats of the very rich and the very poor, the very dashing
and the very criminal, not to mention the lately exploited very
Bohemian, are made known to the awed high school girls of Augusta,
Georgia, and Redwing, Minnesota, not only through the bepictured and
entrancing spreads of the Sunday theatrical supplements but through the
shocked and alarmful eyes of Mr. Rupert Hughes and other chroniclers of
the mad pace of America. But the excursions of Harlem onto Broadway, the
deviltries of the dull and the revelries of the respectable are a matter
of esoteric knowledge only to the participants themselves.
A tip circulates--and in the place knowingly mentioned, gather the lower
moral-classes on Saturday and Sunday nights--the little troubled men who
are pictured in the comics as "the Consumer" or "the Public." They have
made sure that the place has three qualifications: it is cheap; it
imitates with a sort of shoddy and mechanical wistfulness the glittering
antics of the great cafes in the theatre district; and--this, above all,
important--it is a place where they can "take a nice girl," which means,
of course, that every one has become equally harmless, timid, and
uninteresting through lack of money and imagination.
There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid,
overworked people with hyphenated occupations: book-keepers,
ticket-sellers, office-managers, salesmen, and, most of all,
clerks--clerks of the express, of the mail, of the grocery, of the
brokerage, of the bank. With them are their giggling, over-gestured,
pathetically pretentious women, who grow fat with them, bear them too
many babies, and float helpless and uncontent in a colorless sea of
drudgery and broken hopes.
They name these brummagem cabarets after Pullman cars. The "Marathon"!
Not for them the salacious similes borrowed from the cafés of Paris!
This is where their docile patrons bring their "nice women," whose
starved fancies are only too willing to believe that the scene is
comparatively gay and joyous, and even faintly immoral. This is life!
Who cares for the morrow?
Abandoned people!
Anthony and Gloria, seated, looked about them. At the next table a party
of four were in process of being joined by a party of three, two men and
a girl, who were evidently late--and the manner of the girl was a study
in national sociology. She was meeting some new men--and she was
pretending desperately. By gesture she was pretending and by words and
by the scarcely perceptible motionings of her eyelids that she belonged
to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do,
that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a
higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined--she wore a last
year's hat covered with violets no more yearningly pretentious and
palpably artificial than herself.
Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the
impression that she was only condescendingly present. For _me_, her eyes
said, this is practically a slumming expedition, to be cloaked with
belittling laughter and semi-apologetics.
--And the other women passionately poured out the impression that though
they were in the crowd they were not of it. This was not the sort of
place to which they were accustomed; they had dropped in because it was
near by and convenient--every party in the restaurant poured out that
impression ... who knew? They were forever changing class, all of
them--the women often marrying above their opportunities, the men
striking suddenly a magnificent opulence: a sufficiently preposterous
advertising scheme, a celestialized ice cream cone. Meanwhile, they met
here to eat, closing their eyes to the economy displayed in infrequent
changings of table-cloths, in the casualness of the cabaret performers,
most of all in the colloquial carelessness and familiarity of the
waiters. One was sure that these waiters were not impressed by their
patrons. One expected that presently they would sit at the tables ...
"Do you object to this?" inquired Anthony.
Gloria's face warmed and for the first time that evening she smiled.
"I love it," she said frankly. It was impossible to doubt her. Her gray
eyes roved here and there, drowsing, idle or alert, on each group,
passing to the next with unconcealed enjoyment, and to Anthony were made
plain the different values of her profile, the wonderfully alive
expressions of her mouth, and the authentic distinction of face and form
and manner that made her like a single flower amidst a collection of
cheap bric-à-brac. At her happiness, a gorgeous sentiment welled into
his eyes, choked him up, set his nerves a-tingle, and filled his throat
with husky and vibrant emotion. There was a hush upon the room. The
careless violins and saxophones, the shrill rasping complaint of a child
near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all
moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the
shining floor--and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely
remote, quiet. Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer
projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand
gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly
virginal sea....
Then the illusion snapped like a nest of threads; the room grouped
itself around him, voices, faces, movement; the garish shimmer of the
lights overhead became real, became portentous; breath began, the slow
respiration that she and he took in time with this docile hundred, the
rise and fall of bosoms, the eternal meaningless play and interplay and
tossing and reiterating of word and phrase--all these wrenched his
senses open to the suffocating pressure of life--and then her voice came
at him, cool as the suspended dream he had left behind.
"I belong here," she murmured, "I'm like these people."
For an instant this seemed a sardonic and unnecessary paradox hurled at
him across the impassable distances she created about herself. Her
entrancement had increased--her eyes rested upon a Semitic violinist who
swayed his shoulders to the rhythm of the year's mellowest fox-trot:
"Something--goes
Ring-a-ting-a-ling-a-ling
Right in-your ear--"
Again she spoke, from the centre of this pervasive illusion of her own.
It amazed him. It was like blasphemy from the mouth of a child.
"I'm like they are--like Japanese lanterns and crape paper, and the
music of that orchestra."
"You're a young idiot!" he insisted wildly. She shook her blond head.
"No, I'm not. I _am_ like them.... You ought to see.... You don't know
me." She hesitated and her eyes came back to him, rested abruptly on
his, as though surprised at the last to see him there. "I've got a
streak of what you'd call cheapness. I don't know where I get it but
it's--oh, things like this and bright colors and gaudy vulgarity. I seem
to belong here. These people could appreciate me and take me for
granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas
the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I'm this because
of this or that because of that."
--Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely to paint her, to set her down
_now_, as she was, as, as with each relentless second she could never
be again.
"What were you thinking?" she asked.
"Just that I'm not a realist," he said, and then: "No, only the
romanticist preserves the things worth preserving."
Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed,
nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all, an
understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of
minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head,
she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held
her soul had assumed significance--that was all. She was a sun, radiant,
growing, gathering light and storing it--then after an eternity pouring
it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him
that cherished all beauty and all illusion.
CHAPTER III
THE CONNOISSEUR OF KISSES
From his undergraduate days as editor of The Harvard Crimson Richard
Caramel had desired to write. But as a senior he had picked up the
glorified illusion that certain men were set aside for "service" and,
going into the world, were to accomplish a vague yearnful something
which would react either in eternal reward or, at the least, in the
personal satisfaction of having striven for the greatest good of the
greatest number.
This spirit has long rocked the colleges in America. It begins, as a
rule, during the immaturities and facile impressions of freshman
year--sometimes back in preparatory school. Prosperous apostles known
for their emotional acting go the rounds of the universities and, by
frightening the amiable sheep and dulling the quickening of interest and
intellectual curiosity which is the purpose of all education, distil a
mysterious conviction of sin, harking back to childhood crimes and to
the ever-present menace of "women." To these lectures go the wicked
youths to cheer and joke and the timid to swallow the tasty pills, which
would be harmless if administered to farmers' wives and pious
drug-clerks but are rather dangerous medicine for these "future
leaders of men."
This octopus was strong enough to wind a sinuous tentacle about Richard
Caramel. The year after his graduation it called him into the slums of
New York to muck about with bewildered Italians as secretary to an
"Alien Young Men's Rescue Association." He labored at it over a year
before the monotony began to weary him. The aliens kept coming
inexhaustibly--Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Czechs, Armenians--with
the same wrongs, the same exceptionally ugly faces and very much the
same smells, though he fancied that these grew more profuse and diverse
as the months passed. His eventual conclusions about the expediency of
service were vague, but concerning his own relation to it they were
abrupt and decisive. Any amiable young man, his head ringing with the
latest crusade, could accomplish as much as he could with the débris of
Europe--and it was time for him to write.
He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of
making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to
work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year,
doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one