The Beautiful and Damned
"You want plots first," said Richard brilliantly.
"Of course. Plots first--" He paused, shifted his gaze. His pause
spread, included the others with all the authority of a warning finger.
Gloria followed by Rachael was coming out of the dressing room.
Among other things it developed during dinner that Joseph Bloeckman
never danced, but spent the music time watching the others with the
bored tolerance of an elder among children. He was a dignified man and a
proud one. Born in Munich he had begun his American career as a peanut
vender with a travelling circus. At eighteen he was a side show
ballyhoo; later, the manager of the side show, and, soon after, the
proprietor of a second-class vaudeville house. Just when the moving
picture had passed out of the stage of a curiosity and become a
promising industry he was an ambitious young man of twenty-six with some
money to invest, nagging financial ambitions and a good working
knowledge of the popular show business. That had been nine years before.
The moving picture industry had borne him up with it where it threw off
dozens of men with more financial ability, more imagination, and more
practical ideas...and now he sat here and contemplated the immortal
Gloria for whom young Stuart Holcome had gone from New York to
Pasadena--watched her, and knew that presently she would cease dancing
and come back to sit on his left hand.
He hoped she would hurry. The oysters had been standing some minutes.
Meanwhile Anthony, who had been placed on Gloria's left hand, was
dancing with her, always in a certain fourth of the floor. This, had
there been stags, would have been a delicate tribute to the girl,
meaning "Damn you, don't cut in!" It was very consciously intimate.
"Well," he began, looking down at her, "you look mighty sweet to-night."
She met his eyes over the horizontal half foot that separated them.
"Thank you--Anthony."
"In fact you're uncomfortably beautiful," he added. There was no smile
this time.
"And you're very charming."
"Isn't this nice?" he laughed. "We actually approve of each other."
"Don't you, usually?" She had caught quickly at his remark, as she
always did at any unexplained allusion to herself, however faint.
He lowered his voice, and when he spoke there was in it no more than a
wisp of badinage.
"Does a priest approve the Pope?"
"I don't know--but that's probably the vaguest compliment I ever
received."
"Perhaps I can muster a few bromides."
"Well, I wouldn't have you strain yourself. Look at Muriel! Right here
next to us."
He glanced over his shoulder. Muriel was resting her brilliant cheek
against the lapel of Maury Noble's dinner coat and her powdered left arm
was apparently twisted around his head. One was impelled to wonder why
she failed to seize the nape of his neck with her hand. Her eyes, turned
ceiling-ward, rolled largely back and forth; her hips swayed, and as she
danced she kept up a constant low singing. This at first seemed to be a
translation of the song into some foreign tongue but became eventually
apparent as an attempt to fill out the metre of the song with the only
words she knew--the words of the title--
"He's a rag-picker,
A rag-picker;
A rag-time picking man,
Rag-picking, picking, pick, pick,
Rag-pick, pick, pick."
--and so on, into phrases still more strange and barbaric. When she
caught the amused glances of Anthony and Gloria she acknowledged them
only with a faint smile and a half-closing of her eyes, to indicate that
the music entering into her soul had put her into an ecstatic and
exceedingly seductive trance.
The music ended and they returned to their table, whose solitary but
dignified occupant arose and tendered each of them a smile so
ingratiating that it was as if he were shaking their hands and
congratulating them on a brilliant performance.
"Blockhead never will dance! I think he has a wooden leg," remarked
Gloria to the table at large. The three young men started and the
gentleman referred to winced perceptibly.
This was the one rough spot in the course of Bloeckman's acquaintance
with Gloria. She relentlessly punned on his name. First it had been
"Block-house." lately, the more invidious "Blockhead." He had requested
with a strong undertone of irony that she use his first name, and this
she had done obediently several times--then slipping, helpless,
repentant but dissolved in laughter, back into "Blockhead."
It was a very sad and thoughtless thing.
"I'm afraid Mr. Bloeckman thinks we're a frivolous crowd," sighed
Muriel, waving a balanced oyster in his direction.
"He has that air," murmured Rachael. Anthony tried to remember whether
she had said anything before. He thought not. It was her initial remark.
Mr. Bloeckman suddenly cleared his throat and said in a loud, distinct
voice:
"On the contrary. When a man speaks he's merely tradition. He has at
best a few thousand years back of him. But woman, why, she is the
miraculous mouthpiece of posterity."
In the stunned pause that followed this astounding remark, Anthony
choked suddenly on an oyster and hurried his napkin to his face. Rachael
and Muriel raised a mild if somewhat surprised laugh, in which Dick and
Maury joined, both of them red in the face and restraining
uproariousness with the most apparent difficulty.
"--My God!" thought Anthony. "It's a subtitle from one of his movies.
The man's memorized it!"
Gloria alone made no sound. She fixed Mr. Bloeckman with a glance of
silent reproach.
"Well, for the love of Heaven! Where on earth did you dig that up?"
Bloeckman looked at her uncertainly, not sure of her intention. But in a
moment he recovered his poise and assumed the bland and consciously
tolerant smile of an intellectual among spoiled and callow youth.
The soup came up from the kitchen--but simultaneously the orchestra
leader came up from the bar, where he had absorbed the tone color
inherent in a seidel of beer. So the soup was left to cool during the
delivery of a ballad entitled "Everything's at Home Except Your Wife."
Then the champagne--and the party assumed more amusing proportions. The
men, except Richard Caramel, drank freely; Gloria and Muriel sipped a
glass apiece; Rachael Jerryl took none. They sat out the waltzes but
danced to everything else--all except Gloria, who seemed to tire after a
while and preferred to sit smoking at the table, her eyes now lazy, now
eager, according to whether she listened to Bloeckman or watched a
pretty woman among the dancers. Several times Anthony wondered what
Bloeckman was telling her. He was chewing a cigar back and forth in his
mouth, and had expanded after dinner to the extent of violent gestures.
Ten o'clock found Gloria and Anthony beginning a dance. Just as they
were out of ear-shot of the table she said in a low voice:
"Dance over by the door. I want to go down to the drug-store."
Obediently Anthony guided her through the crowd in the designated
direction; in the hall she left him for a moment, to reappear with a
cloak over her arm.
"I want some gum-drops," she said, humorously apologetic; "you can't
guess what for this time. It's just that I want to bite my finger-nails,
and I will if I don't get some gum-drops." She sighed, and resumed as
they stepped into the empty elevator: "I've been biting 'em all day. A
bit nervous, you see. Excuse the pun. It was unintentional--the words
just arranged themselves. Gloria Gilbert, the female wag."
Reaching the ground floor they naïvely avoided the hotel candy counter,
descended the wide front staircase, and walking through several
corridors found a drug-store in the Grand Central Station. After an
intense examination of the perfume counter she made her purchase. Then
on some mutual unmentioned impulse they strolled, arm in arm, not in the
direction from which they had come, but out into Forty-third Street.
The night was alive with thaw; it was so nearly warm that a breeze
drifting low along the sidewalk brought to Anthony a vision of an
unhoped-for hyacinthine spring. Above in the blue oblong of sky, around
them in the caress of the drifting air, the illusion of a new season
carried relief from the stiff and breathed-over atmosphere they had
left, and for a hushed moment the traffic sounds and the murmur of water
flowing in the gutters seemed an illusive and rarefied prolongation of
that music to which they had lately danced. When Anthony spoke it was
with surety that his words came from something breathless and desirous
that the night had conceived in their two hearts.
"Let's take a taxi and ride around a bit!" he suggested, without looking
at her.
Oh, Gloria, Gloria!
A cab yawned at the curb. As it moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine
ocean and lost itself among the inchoate night masses of the great
buildings, among the now stilled, now strident, cries and clangings,
Anthony put his arm around the girl, drew her over to him and kissed her
damp, childish mouth.
She was silent. She turned her face up to him, pale under the wisps and
patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through a foliage. Her
eyes were gleaming ripples in the white lake of her face; the shadows of
her hair bordered the brow with a persuasive unintimate dusk. No love
was there, surely; nor the imprint of any love. Her beauty was cool as
this damp breeze, as the moist softness of her own lips.
"You're such a swan in this light," he whispered after a moment. There
were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about
to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the
tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting
there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark. Anthony
laughed, noiselessly and exultantly, turning his face up and away from
her, half in an overpowering rush of triumph, half lest her sight of him
should spoil the splendid immobility of her expression. Such a kiss--it
was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to
be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself
which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart.
... The buildings fell away in melted shadows; this was the Park now,
and after a long while the great white ghost of the Metropolitan Museum
moved majestically past, echoing sonorously to the rush of the cab.
"Why, Gloria! Why, Gloria!"
Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion
she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed
inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the
eloquence of her beauty--and of her body, close to him, slender
and cool.
"Tell him to turn around," she murmured, "and drive pretty fast going
back...."
Up in the supper room the air was hot. The table, littered with napkins
and ash-trays, was old and stale. It was between dances as they entered,
and Muriel Kane looked up with roguishness extraordinary.
"Well, where have _you_ been?"
"To call up mother," answered Gloria coolly. "I promised her I would.
Did we miss a dance?"
Then followed an incident that though slight in itself Anthony had cause
to reflect on many years afterward. Joseph Bloeckman, leaning well back
in his chair, fixed him with a peculiar glance, in which several
emotions were curiously and inextricably mingled. He did not greet
Gloria except by rising, and he immediately resumed a conversation with
Richard Caramel about the influence of literature on the
moving pictures.
MAGIC
The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering
death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys.
The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has
gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.