The Beautiful and Damned

from younger men, satisfied as he was with so little. He humored her and he laughed, whether he understood her or not. She met him several times, despite the open disapproval of her parents, and within a month he had asked her to marry him, tendering her everything from a villa in Italy to a brilliant career on the screen. She had laughed in his face--and he had laughed too. But he had not given up. To the time of Anthony's arrival in the arena he had been making steady progress. She treated him rather well--except that she had called him always by an invidious nickname--perceiving, meanwhile, that he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall. The night before the engagement was announced she told Bloeckman. It was a heavy blow. She did not enlighten Anthony as to the details, but she implied that he had not hesitated to argue with her. Anthony gathered that the interview had terminated on a stormy note, with Gloria very cool and unmoved lying in her corner of the sofa and Joseph Bloeckman of "Films Par Excellence" pacing the carpet with eyes narrowed and head bowed. Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to show it. In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate her, there at the last. But Anthony, understanding that Gloria's indifference was her strongest appeal, judged how futile this must have been. He wondered, often but quite casually, about Bloeckman--finally he forgot him entirely. HEYDAY One afternoon they found front seats on the sunny roof of a bus and rode for hours from the fading Square up along the sullied river, and then, as the stray beams fled the westward streets, sailed down the turgid Avenue, darkening with ominous bees from the department stores. The traffic was clotted and gripped in a patternless jam; the busses were packed four deep like platforms above the crowd as they waited for the moan of the traffic whistle. "Isn't it good!" cried Gloria. "Look!" A miller's wagon, stark white with flour, driven by a powdery clown, passed in front of them behind a white horse and his black team-mate. "What a pity!" she complained; "they'd look so beautiful in the dusk, if only both horses were white. I'm mighty happy just this minute, in this city." Anthony shook his head in disagreement. "I think the city's a mountebank. Always struggling to approach the tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it. Trying to be romantically metropolitan." "I don't. I think it is impressive." "Momentarily. But it's really a transparent, artificial sort of spectacle. It's got its press-agented stars and its flimsy, unenduring stage settings and, I'll admit, the greatest army of supers ever assembled--" He paused, laughed shortly, and added: "Technically excellent, perhaps, but not convincing." "I'll bet policemen think people are fools," said Gloria thoughtfully, as she watched a large but cowardly lady being helped across the street. "He always sees them frightened and inefficient and old--they are," she added. And then: "We'd better get off. I told mother I'd have an early supper and go to bed. She says I look tired, damn it." "I wish we were married," he muttered soberly; "there'll be no good night then and we can do just as we want." "Won't it be good! I think we ought to travel a lot. I want to go to the Mediterranean and Italy. And I'd like to go on the stage some time--say for about a year." "You bet. I'll write a play for you." "Won't that be good! And I'll act in it. And then some time when we have more money"--old Adam's death was always thus tactfully alluded to--"we'll build a magnificent estate, won't we?" "Oh, yes, with private swimming pools." "Dozens of them. And private rivers. Oh, I wish it were now." Odd coincidence--he had just been wishing that very thing. They plunged like divers into the dark eddying crowd and emerging in the cool fifties sauntered indolently homeward, infinitely romantic to each other ... both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream. Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years. Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes--not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one fairy night, May became June. Sixteen days now--fifteen--fourteen---- THREE DIGRESSIONS Just before the engagement was announced Anthony had gone up to Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who, a little more wizened and grizzly as time played its ultimate chuckling tricks, greeted the news with profound cynicism. "Oh, you're going to get married, are you?" He said this with such a dubious mildness and shook his head up and down so many times that Anthony was not a little depressed. While he was unaware of his grandfather's intentions he presumed that a large part of the money would come to him. A good deal would go in charities, of course; a good deal to carry on the business of reform. "Are you going to work?" "Why--" temporized Anthony, somewhat disconcerted. "I _am_ working. You know--" "Ah, I mean work," said Adam Patch dispassionately. "I'm not quite sure yet what I'll do. I'm not exactly a beggar, grampa," he asserted with some spirit. The old man considered this with eyes half closed. Then almost apologetically he asked: "How much do you save a year?" "Nothing so far--" "And so after just managing to get along on your money you've decided that by some miracle two of you can get along on it." "Gloria has some money of her own. Enough to buy clothes." "How much?" Without considering this question impertinent, Anthony answered it. "About a hundred a month." "That's altogether about seventy-five hundred a year." Then he added softly: "It ought to be plenty. If you have any sense it ought to be plenty. But the question is whether you have any or not." "I suppose it is." It was shameful to be compelled to endure this pious browbeating from the old man, and his next words were stiffened with vanity. "I can manage very well. You seem convinced that I'm utterly worthless. At any rate I came up here simply to tell you that I'm getting married in June. Good-by, sir." With this he turned away and headed for the door, unaware that in that instant his grandfather, for the first time, rather liked him. "Wait!" called Adam Patch, "I want to talk to you." Anthony faced about. "Well, sir?" "Sit down. Stay all night." Somewhat mollified, Anthony resumed his seat. "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to see Gloria to-night." "What's her name?" "Gloria Gilbert." "New York girl? Someone you know?" "She's from the Middle West." "What business her father in?" "In a celluloid corporation or trust or something. They're from Kansas City." "You going to be married out there?" "Why, no, sir. We thought we'd be married in New York--rather quietly." "Like to have the wedding out here?" Anthony hesitated. The suggestion made no appeal to him, but it was certainly the part of wisdom to give the old man, if possible, a proprietary interest in his married life. In addition Anthony was a little touched. "That's very kind of you, grampa, but wouldn't it be a lot of trouble?" "Everything's a lot of trouble. Your father was married here--but in the old house." "Why--I thought he was married in Boston." Adam Patch considered. "That's true. He _was_ married in Boston." Anthony felt a moment's embarrassment at having made the correction, and he covered it up with words. "Well, I'll speak to Gloria about it. Personally I'd like to, but of course it's up to the Gilberts, you see." His grandfather drew a long sigh, half closed his eyes, and sank back in his chair. "In a hurry?" he asked in a different tone. "Not especially." "I wonder," began Adam Patch, looking out with a mild, kindly glance at the lilac bushes that rustled against the windows, "I wonder if you ever think about the after-life." "Why--sometimes." "I think a great deal about the after-life." His eyes were dim but his voice was confident and clear. "I was sitting here to-day thinking about what's lying in wait for us, and somehow I began to remember an afternoon nearly sixty-five years ago, when I was playing with my little sister Annie, down where that summer-house is now." He pointed out into the long flower-garden, his eyes trembling of tears, his voice shaking. "I began thinking--and it seemed to me that _you_ ought to think a little more about the after-life. You ought to be--steadier"--he paused and seemed to grope about for the right word--"more industrious--why--" Then his expression altered, his entire personality seemed to snap together like a trap, and when he continued the softness had gone from his voice. "--Why, when I was just two years older than you," he rasped with a cunning chuckle, "I sent three members of the firm of Wrenn and Hunt to the poorhouse." Anthony started with embarrassment. "Well, good-by," added his grandfather suddenly, "you'll miss your train." Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old man; not because his wealth could buy him "neither youth nor digestion" but because he had asked Anthony to be married there, and because he had forgotten something about his son's wedding that he should have remembered. Richard Caramel, who was one of the ushers, caused Anthony and Gloria much distress in the last few weeks by continually stealing the rays of their spot-light. "The Demon Lover" had been published in April, and it interrupted the love affair as it may be said to have interrupted everything its author came in contact with. It was a highly original, rather overwritten piece of sustained description concerned with a Don Juan of the New York slums. As Maury and Anthony had said before, as the more hospitable critics were saying then, there was no writer in America with such power to describe the atavistic and unsubtle reactions of that section of society. The book hesitated and then suddenly "went." Editions, small at first, then larger, crowded each other week by week. A spokesman of the Salvation Army denounced it as a cynical misrepresentation of all the uplift taking place in the underworld. Clever press-agenting spread the unfounded rumor that "Gypsy" Smith was beginning a libel suit because one of the principal characters was a burlesque of himself. It was barred from the public library of Burlington, Iowa, and a Mid-Western columnist announced by innuendo that Richard Caramel was in a sanitarium with delirium tremens. The author, indeed, spent his days in a state of pleasant madness. The book was in his conversation three-fourths of the time--he wanted to know if one had heard "the latest"; he would go into a store and in a loud voice order books to be charged to him, in order to catch a chance morsel of recognition from clerk or customer. He knew to a town in what sections of the country it was selling best; he knew exactly what he cleared on each edition, and when he met any one who had not read it,