The Beautiful and Damned
its depths he didn't say he hated you. I simply know he does."
"It doesn't wor----"
"Oh, let's drop it!" she cried spiritedly. "It's a most uninteresting
matter to me."
With a tremendous effort Anthony made his acquiescence a twist of
subject, and they drifted into an ancient question-and-answer game
concerned with each other's pasts, gradually warming as they discovered
the age-old, immemorial resemblances in tastes and ideas. They said
things that were more revealing than they intended--but each pretended
to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.
The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best
picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood
and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second
portrait, and a third--before long the best lines cancel out--and the
secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled
and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a
picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of
ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates
are accepted as true.
"It seems to me," Anthony was saying earnestly, "that the position of a
man with neither necessity nor ambition is unfortunate. Heaven knows
it'd be pathetic of me to be sorry for myself--yet, sometimes I
envy Dick."
Her silence was encouragement. It was as near as she ever came to an
intentional lure.
"--And there used to be dignified occupations for a gentleman who had
leisure, things a little more constructive than filling up the landscape
with smoke or juggling some one else's money. There's science, of
course: sometimes I wish I'd taken a good foundation, say at Boston
Tech. But now, by golly, I'd have to sit down for two years and struggle
through the fundamentals of physics and chemistry."
She yawned.
"I've told you I don't know what anybody ought to do," she said
ungraciously, and at her indifference his rancor was born again.
"Aren't you interested in anything except yourself?"
"Not much."
He glared; his growing enjoyment in the conversation was ripped to
shreds. She had been irritable and vindictive all day, and it seemed to
him that for this moment he hated her hard selfishness. He stared
morosely at the fire.
Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he
saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him--as
though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though
emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an
omnipotent controlling thread.
He moved closer and taking her hand pulled her ever so gently toward him
until she half lay against his shoulder. She smiled up at him as he
kissed her.
"Gloria," he whispered very softly. Again she had made a magic, subtle
and pervading as a spilt perfume, irresistible and sweet.
Afterward, neither the next day nor after many years, could he remember
the important things of that afternoon. Had she been moved? In his arms
had she spoken a little--or at all? What measure of enjoyment had she
taken in his kisses? And had she at any time lost herself ever
so little?
Oh, for him there was no doubt. He had risen and paced the floor in
sheer ecstasy. That such a girl should be; should poise curled in a
corner of the couch like a swallow newly landed from a clean swift
flight, watching him with inscrutable eyes. He would stop his pacing
and, half shy each time at first, drop his arm around her and find
her kiss.
She was fascinating, he told her. He had never met any one like her
before. He besought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he
didn't want to fall in love. He wasn't coming to see her any
more--already she had haunted too many of his ways.
What delicious romance! His true reaction was neither fear nor
sorrow--only this deep delight in being with her that colored the
banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing
seem wise. He _would_ come back--eternally. He should have known!
"This is all. It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and
wonderful. But this wouldn't do--and wouldn't last." As he spoke there
was in his heart that tremulousness that we take for sincerity in
ourselves.
Afterward he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her.
He remembered it in this form--perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and
polished it:
"A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically
without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress."
As always when he was with her she seemed to grow gradually older until
at the end ruminations too deep for words would be wintering in
her eyes.
An hour passed, and the fire leaped up in little ecstasies as though its
fading life was sweet. It was five now, and the clock over the mantel
became articulate in sound. Then as if a brutish sensibility in him was
reminded by those thin, tinny beats that the petals were falling from
the flowered afternoon, Anthony pulled her quickly to her feet and held
her helpless, without breath, in a kiss that was neither a game nor
a tribute.
Her arms fell to her side. In an instant she was free.
"Don't!" she said quietly. "I don't want that."
She sat down on the far side of the lounge and gazed straight before
her. A frown had gathered between her eyes. Anthony sank down beside her
and closed his hand over hers. It was lifeless and unresponsive.
"Why, Gloria!" He made a motion as if to put his arm about her but she
drew away.
"I don't want that," she repeated.
"I'm very sorry," he said, a little impatiently. "I--I didn't know you
made such fine distinctions."
She did not answer.
"Won't you kiss me, Gloria?"
"I don't want to." It seemed to him she had not moved for hours.
"A sudden change, isn't it?" Annoyance was growing in his voice.
"Is it?" She appeared uninterested. It was almost as though she were
looking at some one else.
"Perhaps I'd better go."
No reply. He rose and regarded her angrily, uncertainly. Again he sat
down.
"Gloria, Gloria, won't you kiss me?"
"No." Her lips, parting for the word, had just faintly stirred.
Again he got to his feet, this time with less decision, less confidence.
"Then I'll go."
Silence.
"All right--I'll go."
He was aware of a certain irremediable lack of originality in his
remarks. Indeed he felt that the whole atmosphere had grown oppressive.
He wished she would speak, rail at him, cry out upon him, anything but
this pervasive and chilling silence. He cursed himself for a weak fool;
his clearest desire was to move her, to hurt her, to see her wince.
Helplessly, involuntarily, he erred again.
"If you're tired of kissing me I'd better go."
He saw her lips curl slightly and his last dignity left him. She spoke,
at length:
"I believe you've made that remark several times before."
He looked about him immediately, saw his hat and coat on a
chair--blundered into them, during an intolerable moment. Looking again
at the couch he perceived that she had not turned, not even moved. With
a shaken, immediately regretted "good-by" he went quickly but without
dignity from the room.
For over a moment Gloria made no sound. Her lips were still curled; her
glance was straight, proud, remote. Then her eyes blurred a little, and
she murmured three words half aloud to the death-bound fire:
"Good-by, you ass!" she said.
PANIC
The man had had the hardest blow of his life. He knew at last what he
wanted, but in finding it out it seemed that he had put it forever
beyond his grasp. He reached home in misery, dropped into an armchair
without even removing his overcoat, and sat there for over an hour, his
mind racing the paths of fruitless and wretched self-absorption. She had
sent him away! That was the reiterated burden of his despair. Instead of
seizing the girl and holding her by sheer strength until she became
passive to his desire, instead of beating down her will by the force of
his own, he had walked, defeated and powerless, from her door, with the
corners of his mouth drooping and what force there might have been in
his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of a whipped schoolboy. At
one minute she had liked him tremendously--ah, she had nearly loved him.
In the next he had become a thing of indifference to her, an insolent
and efficiently humiliated man.
He had no great self-reproach--some, of course, but there were other
things dominant in him now, far more urgent. He was not so much in love
with Gloria as mad for her. Unless he could have her near him again,
kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from
life. By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had
lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to
be instead his complete preoccupation. However much his wild thoughts
varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally
passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved
in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through
those three minutes. She was beautiful--but especially she was without
mercy. He must own that strength that could send him away.
At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony. His clarity of
mind, all those endless resources which he thought his irony had brought
him were swept aside. Not only for that night but for the days and weeks
that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only
people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was
trying to escape--that world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a
little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.
About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry. He went down into
Fifty-second Street, where it was so cold that he could scarcely see;
the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips.
Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north, settling upon the
thin and cheerless street, where black bundled figures blacker still
against the night, moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the
shrieking wind, sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though they were
on skis. Anthony turned over toward Sixth Avenue, so absorbed in his
thoughts as not to notice that several passers-by had stared at him. His
overcoat was wide open, and the wind was biting in, hard and full of
merciless death.
... After a while a waitress spoke to him, a fat waitress with
black-rimmed eye-glasses from which dangled a long black cord.
"Order, please!"
Her voice, he considered, was unnecessarily loud. He looked up
resentfully.
"You wanna order or doncha?"
"Of course," he protested.
"Well, I ast you three times. This ain't no rest-room."
He glanced at the big clock and discovered with a start that it was
after two. He was down around Thirtieth Street somewhere, and after a
moment he found and translated the
[Transcribers note: The illustration shows the word "CHILD's" in mirror
image.]
in a white semicircle of letters upon the glass front. The place was
inhabited sparsely by three or four bleak and half-frozen night-hawks.
"Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please."
The waitress bent upon him a last disgusted glance and, looking
ludicrously intellectual in her corded glasses, hurried away.
God! Gloria's kisses had been such flowers. He remembered as though it
had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines
of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the
lamps of the street--under the lamps.
Misery struck at him again, piling a sort of terror upon the ache and