The Beautiful and Damned
But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained.
Love lingered--by way of long conversations at night into those stark
hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams
become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses
they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same
absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.
It was, first of all, a time of discovery. The things they found in each
other were so diverse, so intermixed and, moreover, so sugared with love
as to seem at the time not so much discoveries as isolated phenomena--to
be allowed for, and to be forgotten. Anthony found that he was living
with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed
selfishness. Gloria knew within a month that her husband was an utter
coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination.
Her perception was intermittent, for this cowardice sprang out, became
almost obscenely evident, then faded and vanished as though it had been
only a creation of her own mind. Her reactions to it were not those
attributed to her sex--it roused her neither to disgust nor to a
premature feeling of motherhood. Herself almost completely without
physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of
what she felt to be his fear's redeeming feature, which was that though
he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain--when his
imagination was given play--he had yet a sort of dashing recklessness
that moved her on its brief occasions almost to admiration, and a pride
that usually steadied him when he thought he was observed.
The trait first showed itself in a dozen incidents of little more than
nervousness--his warning to a taxi-driver against fast driving, in
Chicago; his refusal to take her to a certain tough café she had always
wished to visit; these of course admitted the conventional
interpretation--that it was of her he had been thinking; nevertheless,
their culminative weight disturbed her. But something that occurred in a
San Francisco hotel, when they had been married a week, gave the matter
certainty.
It was after midnight and pitch dark in their room. Gloria was dozing
off and Anthony's even breathing beside her made her suppose that he was
asleep, when suddenly she saw him raise himself on his elbow and stare
at the window.
"What is it, dearest?" she murmured.
"Nothing"--he had relaxed to his pillow and turned toward her--"nothing,
my darling wife."
"Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your
'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable.... Come
into my arms," she added in a rush of tenderness; "I can sleep so well,
so well with you in my arms."
Coming into Gloria's arms had a quite definite meaning. It required that
he should slide one arm under her shoulder, lock both arms about her,
and arrange himself as nearly as possible as a sort of three-sided crib
for her luxurious ease. Anthony, who tossed, whose arms went tinglingly
to sleep after half an hour of that position, would wait until she was
asleep and roll her gently over to her side of the bed--then, left to
his own devices, he would curl himself into his usual knots.
Gloria, having attained sentimental comfort, retired into her doze. Five
minutes ticked away on Bloeckman's travelling clock; silence lay all
about the room, over the unfamiliar, impersonal furniture and the
half-oppressive ceiling that melted imperceptibly into invisible walls
on both sides. Then there was suddenly a rattling flutter at the window,
staccato and loud upon the hushed, pent air.
With a leap Anthony was out of the bed and standing tense beside it.
"Who's there?" he cried in an awful voice.
Gloria lay very still, wide awake now and engrossed not so much in the
rattling as in the rigid breathless figure whose voice had reached from
the bedside into that ominous dark.
The sound stopped; the room was quiet as before--then Anthony pouring
words in at the telephone.
"Some one just tried to get into the room! ...
"There's some one at the window!" His voice was emphatic now, faintly
terrified.
"All right! Hurry!" He hung up the receiver; stood motionless.
... There was a rush and commotion at the door, a knocking--Anthony went
to open it upon an excited night clerk with three bell-boys grouped
staring behind him. Between thumb and finger the night clerk held a wet
pen with the threat of a weapon; one of the bell-boys had seized a
telephone directory and was looking at it sheepishly. Simultaneously the
group was joined by the hastily summoned house-detective, and as one man
they surged into the room.
Lights sprang on with a click. Gathering a piece of sheet about her
Gloria dove away from sight, shutting her eyes to keep out the horror of
this unpremeditated visitation. There was no vestige of an idea in her
stricken sensibilities save that her Anthony was at grievous fault.
... The night clerk was speaking from the window, his tone half of the
servant, half of the teacher reproving a schoolboy.
"Nobody out there," he declared conclusively; "my golly, nobody _could_
be out there. This here's a sheer fall to the street of fifty feet. It
was the wind you heard, tugging at the blind."
"Oh."
Then she was sorry for him. She wanted only to comfort him and draw him
back tenderly into her arms, to tell them to go away because the thing
their presence connotated was odious. Yet she could not raise her head
for shame. She heard a broken sentence, apologies, conventions of the
employee and one unrestrained snicker from a bell-boy.
"I've been nervous as the devil all evening," Anthony was saying;
"somehow that noise just shook me--I was only about half awake."
"Sure, I understand," said the night clerk with comfortable tact; "been
that way myself."
The door closed; the lights snapped out; Anthony crossed the floor
quietly and crept into bed. Gloria, feigning to be heavy with sleep,
gave a quiet little sigh and slipped into his arms.
"What was it, dear?"
"Nothing," he answered, his voice still shaken; "I thought there was
somebody at the window, so I looked out, but I couldn't see any one and
the noise kept up, so I phoned down-stairs. Sorry if I disturbed you,
but I'm awfully darn nervous to-night."
Catching the lie, she gave an interior start--he had not gone to the
window, nor near the window. He had stood by the bed and then sent in
his call of fear.
"Oh," she said--and then: "I'm so sleepy."
For an hour they lay awake side by side, Gloria with her eyes shut so
tight that blue moons formed and revolved against backgrounds of deepest
mauve, Anthony staring blindly into the darkness overhead.
After many weeks it came gradually out into the light, to be laughed and
joked at. They made a tradition to fit over it--whenever that
overpowering terror of the night attacked Anthony, she would put her
arms about him and croon, soft as a song:
"I'll protect my Anthony. Oh, nobody's ever going to harm my Anthony!"
He would laugh as though it were a jest they played for their mutual
amusement, but to Gloria it was never quite a jest. It was, at first, a
keen disappointment; later, it was one of the times when she controlled
her temper.
The management of Gloria's temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of
hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost
the primary duty of Anthony's day. It must be done just so--by this much
silence, by that much pressure, by this much yielding, by that much
force. It was in her angers with their attendant cruelties that her
inordinate egotism chiefly displayed itself. Because she was brave,
because she was "spoiled," because of her outrageous and commendable
independence of judgment, and finally because of her arrogant
consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself,
Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean. This, of
course, with overtones of profound sentiment.
There was, for example, her stomach. She was used to certain dishes, and
she had a strong conviction that she could not possibly eat anything
else. There must be a lemonade and a tomato sandwich late in the
morning, then a light lunch with a stuffed tomato. Not only did she
require food from a selection of a dozen dishes, but in addition this
food must be prepared in just a certain way. One of the most annoying
half hours of the first fortnight occurred in Los Angeles, when an
unhappy waiter brought her a tomato stuffed with chicken salad instead
of celery.
"We always serve it that way, madame," he quavered to the gray eyes that
regarded him wrathfully.
Gloria made no answer, but when the waiter had turned discreetly away
she banged both fists upon the table until the china and silver rattled.
"Poor Gloria!" laughed Anthony unwittingly, "you can't get what you want
ever, can you?"
"I can't eat _stuff_!" she flared up.
"I'll call back the waiter."
"I don't want you to! He doesn't know anything, the darn _fool_!"
"Well, it isn't the hotel's fault. Either send it back, forget it, or be
a sport and eat it."
"Shut up!" she said succinctly.
"Why take it out on me?"
"Oh, I'm _not_," she wailed, "but I simply _can't_ eat it."
Anthony subsided helplessly.
"We'll go somewhere else," he suggested.
"I don't _want_ to go anywhere else. I'm tired of being trotted around
to a dozen cafés and not getting _one thing_ fit to eat."
"When did we go around to a dozen cafés?"
"You'd _have_ to in _this_ town," insisted Gloria with ready sophistry.
Anthony, bewildered, tried another tack.
"Why don't you try to eat it? It can't be as bad as you think."
"Just--because--I--don't--like--chicken!"
She picked up her fork and began poking contemptuously at the tomato,
and Anthony expected her to begin flinging the stuffings in all
directions. He was sure that she was approximately as angry as she had
ever been--for an instant he had detected a spark of hate directed as
much toward him as toward any one else--and Gloria angry was, for the
present, unapproachable.
Then, surprisingly, he saw that she had tentatively raised the fork to
her lips and tasted the chicken salad. Her frown had not abated and he
stared at her anxiously, making no comment and daring scarcely to
breathe. She tasted another forkful--in another moment she was eating.
With difficulty Anthony restrained a chuckle; when at length he spoke
his words had no possible connection with chicken salad.
This incident, with variations, ran like a lugubrious fugue through the
first year of marriage; always it left Anthony baffled, irritated, and
depressed. But another rough brushing of temperaments, a question of
laundry-bags, he found even more annoying as it ended inevitably in a
decisive defeat for him.
One afternoon in Coronado, where they made the longest stay of their
trip, more than three weeks, Gloria was arraying herself brilliantly for
tea. Anthony, who had been down-stairs listening to the latest rumor
bulletins of war in Europe, entered the room, kissed the back of her
powdered neck, and went to his dresser. After a great pulling out and
pushing in of drawers, evidently unsatisfactory, he turned around to the
Unfinished Masterpiece.
"Got any handkerchiefs, Gloria?" he asked. Gloria shook her golden head.
"Not a one. I'm using one of yours."
"The last one, I deduce." He laughed dryly.
"Is it?" She applied an emphatic though very delicate contour to her
lips.
"Isn't the laundry back?"
"I don't know."
Anthony hesitated--then, with sudden discernment, opened the closet
door. His suspicions were verified. On the hook provided hung the blue