The Beautiful and Damned
or, as it happened only too often, had not heard of it, he succumbed to
moody depression.
So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy,
that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore. To Dick's great
annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read "The Demon
Lover," and didn't intend to until every one stopped talking about it.
As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were
pouring in--first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the
bric-à-brac of forgotten family friends to the photographs of forgotten
poor relations.
Maury gave them an elaborate "drinking set," which included silver
goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers. The extortion from Dick
was more conventional--a tea set from Tiffany's. From Joseph Bloeckman
came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was
even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him
want to weep--indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in
the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to
convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent
by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with
remembrances of Gloria's Farmover days, and with rather pathetic
trophies from her former beaux, which last arrived with esoteric,
melancholy messages, written on cards tucked carefully inside, beginning
"I little thought when--" or "I'm sure I wish you all the happiness--"
or even "When you get this I shall be on my way to--"
The most munificent gift was simultaneously the most disappointing. It
was a concession of Adam Patch's--a check for five thousand dollars.
To most of the presents Anthony was cold. It seemed to him that they
would necessitate keeping a chart of the marital status of all their
acquaintances during the next half-century. But Gloria exulted in each
one, tearing at the tissue-paper and excelsior with the rapaciousness of
a dog digging for a bone, breathlessly seizing a ribbon or an edge of
metal and finally bringing to light the whole article and holding it up
critically, no emotion except rapt interest in her unsmiling face.
"Look, Anthony!"
"Darn nice, isn't it!"
No answer until an hour later when she would give him a careful account
of her precise reaction to the gift, whether it would have been improved
by being smaller or larger, whether she was surprised at getting it,
and, if so, just how much surprised.
Mrs. Gilbert arranged and rearranged a hypothetical house, distributing
the gifts among the different rooms, tabulating articles as "second-best
clock" or "silver to use _every_ day," and embarrassing Anthony and
Gloria by semi-facetious references to a room she called the nursery.
She was pleased by old Adam's gift and thereafter had it that he was a
very ancient soul, "as much as anything else." As Adam Patch never quite
decided whether she referred to the advancing senility of his mind or to
some private and psychic schema of her own, it cannot be said to have
pleased him. Indeed he always spoke of her to Anthony as "that old
woman, the mother," as though she were a character in a comedy he had
seen staged many times before. Concerning Gloria he was unable to make
up his mind. She attracted him but, as she herself told Anthony, he had
decided that she was frivolous and was afraid to approve of her.
Five days!--A dancing platform was being erected on the lawn at
Tarrytown. Four days!--A special train was chartered to convey the
guests to and from New York. Three days!----
THE DIARY
She was dressed in blue silk pajamas and standing by her bed with her
hand on the light to put the room in darkness, when she changed her mind
and opening a table drawer brought out a little black book--a
"Line-a-day" diary. This she had kept for seven years. Many of the
pencil entries were almost illegible and there were notes and references
to nights and afternoons long since forgotten, for it was not an
intimate diary, even though it began with the immemorial "I am going to
keep a diary for my children." Yet as she thumbed over the pages the
eyes of many men seemed to look out at her from their half-obliterated
names. With one she had gone to New Haven for the first time--in 1908,
when she was sixteen and padded shoulders were fashionable at Yale--she
had been flattered because "Touch down" Michaud had "rushed" her all
evening. She sighed, remembering the grown-up satin dress she had been
so proud of and the orchestra playing "Yama-yama, My Yama Man" and
"Jungle-Town." So long ago!--the names: Eltynge Reardon, Jim Parsons,
"Curly" McGregor, Kenneth Cowan, "Fish-eye" Fry (whom she had liked for
being so ugly), Carter Kirby--he had sent her a present; so had Tudor
Baird;--Marty Reffer, the first man she had been in love with for more
than a day, and Stuart Holcome, who had run away with her in his
automobile and tried to make her marry him by force. And Larry Fenwick,
whom she had always admired because he had told her one night that if
she wouldn't kiss him she could get out of his car and walk home. What
a list!
... And, after all, an obsolete list. She was in love now, set for the
eternal romance that was to be the synthesis of all romance, yet sad for
these men and these moonlights and for the "thrills" she had had--and
the kisses. The past--her past, oh, what a joy! She had been
exuberantly happy.
Turning over the pages her eyes rested idly on the scattered entries of
the past four months. She read the last few carefully.
"_April 1st_.--I know Bill Carstairs hates me because I was so
disagreeable, but I hate to be sentimentalized over sometimes. We drove
out to the Rockyear Country Club and the most wonderful moon kept
shining through the trees. My silver dress is getting tarnished. Funny
how one forgets the other nights at Rockyear--with Kenneth Cowan when I
loved him so!
"_April 3rd_.--After two hours of Schroeder who, they inform me, has
millions, I've decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one
out, particularly when the things concerned are men. There's nothing so
often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused. We talked about
'love'--how banal! With how many men have I talked about love?
"_April 11th_.--Patch actually called up to-day! and when he forswore me
about a month ago he fairly raged out the door. I'm gradually losing
faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.
"_April 20th_.--Spent the day with Anthony. Maybe I'll marry him some
time. I kind of like his ideas--he stimulates all the originality in me.
Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside
Drive. I liked him to-night: he's so considerate. He knew I didn't want
to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.
"_April 21st_.--Woke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called
and sounded sweet on the phone--so I broke a date for him. To-day I feel
I'd break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck.
He's coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and
starched----"
She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had
undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows. Yet it
seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities
burning in her heart.
The next entry occurred a few days later:
"_April 24th_.--I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often
'husbands' and I must marry a lover.
"There are four general types of husbands.
"(1) The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices
and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!
"(2) The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure.
This sort always considers every pretty woman 'shallow,' a sort of
peacock with arrested development.
"(3) Next comes the worshipper, the idolater of his wife and all that is
his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an
emotional actress for a wife. God! it must be an exertion to be thought
righteous.
"(4) And Anthony--a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to
realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get
married to Anthony.
"What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless
marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one.
Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting--it's
going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance,
and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to
posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's
unwanted children. What a fate--to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my
self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers.... Dear
dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little
creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden,
golden wings----
"Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the
wedded state.
"_June 7th_.--Moral question: Was it wrong to make Bloeckman love me?
Because I did really make him. He was almost sweetly sad to-night. How
opportune it was that my throat is swollen plunk together and tears were
easy to muster. But he's just the past--buried already in my
plentiful lavender.
"_June 8th_.--And to-day I've promised not to chew my mouth. Well, I
won't, I suppose--but if he'd only asked me not to eat!
"Blowing bubbles--that's what we're doing, Anthony and me. And we blew
such beautiful ones to-day, and they'll explode and then we'll blow more
and more, I guess--bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all
the soap and water is used up."
On this note the diary ended. Her eyes wandered up the page, over the
June 8th's of 1912, 1910, 1907. The earliest entry was scrawled in the
plump, bulbous hand of a sixteen-year-old girl--it was the name, Bob
Lamar, and a word she could not decipher. Then she knew what it
was--and, knowing, she found her eyes misty with tears. There in a
graying blur was the record of her first kiss, faded as its intimate
afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before. She seemed to remember
something one of them had said that day and yet she could not remember.
Her tears came faster, until she could scarcely see the page. She was
crying, she told herself, because she could remember only the rain and
the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass.
... After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew
three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS in
large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.
BREATH OF THE CAVE
Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his
lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting
on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night--a sheet was
enough for comfort--and through his wide-open windows came sound,
evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking
that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in
facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long
dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the
union of his soul with Gloria's, whose radiant fire and freshness was
the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.
From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that
evanescent and dissolving sound--something the city was tossing up and
calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the
Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or
on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this