About this book

The Beautiful and Damned

F. Scott Fitzgerald

sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness--and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft crying of the night. It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred feet from his rear window, the noise of a woman's laughter. It began low, incessant and whining--some servant-maid with her fellow, he thought--and then it grew in volume and became hysterical, until it reminded him of a girl he had seen overcome with nervous laughter at a vaudeville performance. Then it sank, receded, only to rise again and include words--a coarse joke, some bit of obscure horseplay he could not distinguish. It would break off for a moment and he would just catch the low rumble of a man's voice, then begin again--interminably; at first annoying, then strangely terrible. He shivered, and getting up out of bed went to the window. It had reached a high point, tensed and stifled, almost the quality of a scream--then it ceased and left behind it a silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead. Anthony stood by the window a moment longer before he returned to his bed. He found himself upset and shaken. Try as he might to strangle his reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter had grasped at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his old aversion and horror toward all the business of life. The room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound. "Oh, my _God_!" he cried, drawing in his breath sharply. Burying his face in the pillows he tried in vain to concentrate upon the details of the next day. MORNING In the gray light he found that it was only five o'clock. He regretted nervously that he had awakened so early--he would appear fagged at the wedding. He envied Gloria who could hide her fatigue with careful pigmentation. In his bathroom he contemplated himself in the mirror and saw that he was unusually white--half a dozen small imperfections stood out against the morning pallor of his complexion, and overnight he had grown the faint stubble of a beard--the general effect, he fancied, was unprepossessing, haggard, half unwell. On his dressing table were spread a number of articles which he told over carefully with suddenly fumbling fingers--their tickets to California, the book of traveller's checks, his watch, set to the half minute, the key to his apartment, which he must not forget to give to Maury, and, most important of all, the ring. It was of platinum set around with small emeralds; Gloria had insisted on this; she had always wanted an emerald wedding ring, she said. It was the third present he had given her; first had come the engagement ring, and then a little gold cigarette-case. He would be giving her many things now--clothes and jewels and friends and excitement. It seemed absurd that from now on he would pay for all her meals. It was going to cost: he wondered if he had not underestimated for this trip, and if he had not better cash a larger check. The question worried him. Then the breathless impendency of the event swept his mind clear of details. This was the day--unsought, unsuspected six months before, but now breaking in yellow light through his east window, dancing along the carpet as though the sun were smiling at some ancient and reiterated gag of his own. Anthony laughed in a nervous one-syllable snort. "By God!" he muttered to himself, "I'm as good as married!" THE USHERS _Six young men in_ CROSS PATCH'S _library growing more and more cheery under the influence of Mumm's Extra Dry, set surreptitiously in cold pails by the bookcases._ THE FIRST YOUNG MAN: By golly! Believe me, in my next book I'm going to do a wedding scene that'll knock 'em cold! THE SECOND YOUNG MAN: Met a débutante th'other day said she thought your book was powerful. As a rule young girls cry for this primitive business. THE THIRD YOUNG MAN: Where's Anthony? THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Walking up and down outside talking to himself. SECOND YOUNG MAN: Lord! Did you see the minister? Most peculiar looking teeth. FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Think they're natural. Funny thing people having gold teeth. SIXTH YOUNG MAN: They say they love 'em. My dentist told me once a woman came to him and insisted on having two of her teeth covered with gold. No reason at all. All right the way they were. FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Hear you got out a book, Dicky. 'Gratulations! DICK: (_Stiffly_) Thanks. FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (_Innocently_) What is it? College stories? DICK: (_More stiffly_) No. Not college stories. FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Pity! Hasn't been a good book about Harvard for years. DICK: (_Touchily_) Why don't you supply the lack? THIRD YOUNG MAN: I think I saw a squad of guests turn the drive in a Packard just now. SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Might open a couple more bottles on the strength of that. THIRD YOUNG MAN: It was the shock of my life when I heard the old man was going to have a wet wedding. Rabid prohibitionist, you know. FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (_Snapping his fingers excitedly_) By gad! I knew I'd forgotten something. Kept thinking it was my vest. DICK: What was it? FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! By gad! SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Here! Here! Why the tragedy? SECOND YOUNG MAN: What'd you forget? The way home? DICK: (_Maliciously_) He forgot the plot for his book of Harvard stories. FOURTH YOUNG MAN: No, sir, I forgot the present, by George! I forgot to buy old Anthony a present. I kept putting it off and putting it off, and by gad I've forgotten it! What'll they think? SIXTH YOUNG MAN: (_Facetiously_) That's probably what's been holding up the wedding. (THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN _looks nervously at his watch. Laughter._) FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! What an ass I am! SECOND YOUNG MAN: What d'you make of the bridesmaid who thinks she's Nora Bayes? Kept telling me she wished this was a ragtime wedding. Name's Haines or Hampton. DICK: (_Hurriedly spurring his imagination_) Kane, you mean, Muriel Kane. She's a sort of debt of honor, I believe. Once saved Gloria from drowning, or something of the sort. SECOND YOUNG MAN: I didn't think she could stop that perpetual swaying long enough to swim. Fill up my glass, will you? Old man and I had a long talk about the weather just now. MAURY: Who? Old Adam? SECOND YOUNG MAN: No, the bride's father. He must be with a weather bureau. DICK: He's my uncle, Otis. OTIS: Well, it's an honorable profession. (_Laughter._) SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Bride your cousin, isn't she? DICK: Yes, Cable, she is. CABLE: She certainly is a beauty. Not like you, Dicky. Bet she brings old Anthony to terms. MAURY: Why are all grooms given the title of "old"? I think marriage is an error of youth. DICK: Maury, the professional cynic. MAURY: Why, you intellectual faker! FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Battle of the highbrows here, Otis. Pick up what crumbs you can. DICK: Faker yourself! What do _you_ know? MAURY: What do _you_ know? LICK: Ask me anything. Any branch of knowledge. MAURY: All right. What's the fundamental principle of biology? DICK: You don't know yourself. MAURY: Don't hedge! DICK: Well, natural selection? MAURY: Wrong. DICK: I give it up. MAURY: Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony. FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Take your base! MAURY: Ask you another. What's the influence of mice on the clover crop? (_Laughter._) FOURTH YOUNG MAN: What's the influence of rats on the Decalogue? MAURY: Shut up, you saphead. There _is_ a connection. DICK: What is it then? MAURY: (_Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion_) Why, let's see. I seem to have forgotten exactly. Something about the bees eating the clover. FOURTH YOUNG MAN: And the clover eating the mice! Haw! Haw! MAURY: (_Frowning_) Let me just think a minute. DICK: (_Sitting up suddenly_) Listen! (_A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room. The six young men arise, feeling at their neckties._) DICK: (_Weightily_) We'd better join the firing squad. They're going to take the picture, I guess. No, that's afterward. OTIS: Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid. FOURTH YOUNG MAN: I wish to God I'd sent that present. MAURY: If you'll give me another minute I'll think of that about the mice. OTIS: I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and---- (_They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans from ADAM PATCH'S organ_.) ANTHONY There were five hundred eyes boring through the back of his cutaway and the sun glinting on the clergyman's inappropriately bourgeois teeth. With difficulty he restrained a laugh. Gloria was saying something in a clear proud voice and he tried to think that the affair was irrevocable, that every second was significant, that his life was being slashed into two periods and that the face of the world was changing before him. He tried to recapture that ecstatic sensation of ten weeks before. All these emotions eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness of that very morning--it was all one gigantic aftermath. And those gold teeth! He wondered if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service.... But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious of a strong reaction. The blood was moving in his veins now. A languorous and pleasant content settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility and possession. He was married. GLORIA So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately important was happening--and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and securely safe. Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were not married. The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that anything so beautiful as Gloria could be moral. "CON AMORE" That first half-year--the trip West, the long months' loiter along the California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived until late autumn made the country dreary--those days, those places, saw the enraptured hours. The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain.... The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth. Came a day when Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world.