The Beautiful and Damned
bag furnished by the hotel. This was full of his clothes--he had put
them there himself. The floor beneath it was littered with an
astonishing mass of finery--lingerie, stockings, dresses, nightgowns,
and pajamas--most of it scarcely worn but all of it coming indubitably
under the general heading of Gloria's laundry.
He stood holding the closet door open.
"Why, Gloria!"
"What?"
The lip line was being erased and corrected according to some mysterious
perspective; not a finger trembled as she manipulated the lip-stick, not
a glance wavered in his direction. It was a triumph of concentration.
"Haven't you ever sent out the laundry?"
"Is it there?"
"It most certainly is."
"Well, I guess I haven't, then."
"Gloria," began Anthony, sitting down on the bed and trying to catch her
mirrored eyes, "you're a nice fellow, you are! I've sent it out every
time it's been sent since we left New York, and over a week ago you
promised you'd do it for a change. All you'd have to do would be to cram
your own junk into that bag and ring for the chambermaid."
"Oh, why fuss about the laundry?" exclaimed Gloria petulantly, "I'll
take care of it."
"I haven't fussed about it. I'd just as soon divide the bother with you,
but when we run out of handkerchiefs it's darn near time
something's done."
Anthony considered that he was being extraordinarily logical. But
Gloria, unimpressed, put away her cosmetics and casually offered him
her back.
"Hook me up," she suggested; "Anthony, dearest, I forgot all about it. I
meant to, honestly, and I will to-day. Don't be cross with your
sweetheart."
What could Anthony do then but draw her down upon his knee and kiss a
shade of color from her lips.
"But I don't mind," she murmured with a smile, radiant and magnanimous.
"You can kiss all the paint off my lips any time you want."
They went down to tea. They bought some handkerchiefs in a notion store
near by. All was forgotten.
But two days later Anthony looked in the closet and saw the bag still
hung limp upon its hook and that the gay and vivid pile on the floor had
increased surprisingly in height.
"Gloria!" he cried.
"Oh--" Her voice was full of real distress. Despairingly Anthony went to
the phone and called the chambermaid.
"It seems to me," he said impatiently, "that you expect me to be some
sort of French valet to you."
Gloria laughed, so infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile.
Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress
of the situation--with an air of injured righteousness she went
emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into
the bag. Anthony watched her--ashamed of himself.
"There!" she said, implying that her fingers had been worked to the bone
by a brutal taskmaster.
He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her an object-lesson and
that the matter was closed, but on the contrary it was merely beginning.
Laundry pile followed laundry pile--at long intervals; dearth of
handkerchief followed dearth of handkerchief--at short ones; not to
mention dearth of sock, of shirt, of everything. And Anthony found at
length that either he must send it out himself or go through the
increasingly unpleasant ordeal of a verbal battle with Gloria.
GLORIA AND GENERAL LEE
On their way East they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about
with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of
distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor--it seemed a
pasty-pale and self-conscious city. The second day they made an
ill-advised trip to General Lee's old home at Arlington.
The bus which bore them was crowded with hot, unprosperous people, and
Anthony, intimate to Gloria, felt a storm brewing. It broke at the Zoo,
where the party stopped for ten minutes. The Zoo, it seemed, smelt of
monkeys. Anthony laughed; Gloria called down the curse of Heaven upon
monkeys, including in her malevolence all the passengers of the bus and
their perspiring offspring who had hied themselves monkey-ward.
Eventually the bus moved on to Arlington. There it met other busses and
immediately a swarm of women and children were leaving a trail of
peanut-shells through the halls of General Lee and crowding at length
into the room where he was married. On the wall of this room a pleasing
sign announced in large red letters "Ladies' Toilet." At this final blow
Gloria broke down.
"I think it's perfectly terrible!" she said furiously, "the idea of
letting these people come here! And of encouraging them by making these
houses show-places."
"Well," objected Anthony, "if they weren't kept up they'd go to pieces."
"What if they did!" she exclaimed as they sought the wide pillared
porch. "Do you think they've left a breath of 1860 here? This has become
a thing of 1914."
"Don't you want to preserve old things?"
"But you _can't_, Anthony. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and
then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And
just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should
decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few
hearts like mine that react to them. That graveyard at Tarrytown, for
instance. The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that
too. Sleepy Hollow's gone; Washington Irving's dead and his books are
rotting in our estimation year by year--then let the graveyard rot too,
as it should, as all things should. Trying to preserve a century by
keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by
stimulants."
"So you think that just as a time goes to pieces its houses ought to go
too?"
"Of course! Would you value your Keats letter if the signature was
traced over to make it last longer? It's just because I love the past
that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth
and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of
women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it
into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. It hasn't any right to
look so prosperous. It might care enough for Lee to drop a brick now and
then. How many of these--these _animals_"--she waved her hand
around--"get anything from this, for all the histories and guide-books
and restorations in existence? How many of them who think that, at best,
appreciation is talking in undertones and walking on tiptoes would even
come here if it was any trouble? I want it to smell of magnolias instead
of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's
boots crunched on. There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no
poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books,
houses--bound for dust--mortal--"
A small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of
banana-peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the Potomac.
SENTIMENT
Simultaneously with the fall of Liège, Anthony and Gloria arrived in New
York. In retrospect the six weeks seemed miraculously happy. They had
found to a great extent, as most young couples find in some measure,
that they possessed in common many fixed ideas and curiosities and odd
quirks of mind; they were essentially companionable.
But it had been a struggle to keep many of their conversations on the
level of discussions. Arguments were fatal to Gloria's disposition. She
had all her life been associated either with her mental inferiors or
with men who, under the almost hostile intimidation of her beauty, had
not dared to contradict her; naturally, then, it irritated her when
Anthony emerged from the state in which her pronouncements were an
infallible and ultimate decision.
He failed to realize, at first, that this was the result partly of her
"female" education and partly of her beauty, and he was inclined to
include her with her entire sex as curiously and definitely limited. It
maddened him to find she had no sense of justice. But he discovered
that, when a subject did interest her, her brain tired less quickly than
his. What he chiefly missed in her mind was the pedantic teleology--the
sense of order and accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously
correlated piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while that such
a quality in her would have been incongruous.
Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost
uncanny pull at each other's hearts. The day they left the hotel in
Coronado she sat down on one of the beds while they were packing, and
began to weep bitterly.
"Dearest--" His arms were around her; he pulled her head down upon his
shoulder. "What is it, my own Gloria? Tell me."
"We're going away," she sobbed. "Oh, Anthony, it's sort of the first
place we've lived together. Our two little beds here--side by
side--they'll be always waiting for us, and we're never coming back to
'em any more."
She was tearing at his heart as she always could. Sentiment came over
him, rushed into his eyes.
"Gloria, why, we're going on to another room. And two other little beds.
We're going to be together all our lives."
Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.
"But it won't be--like our two beds--ever again. Everywhere we go and
move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't
ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--"
He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond any criticism of
her sentiment, a wise grasping of the minute, if only an indulgence of
her desire to cry--Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams,
extracting poignancy from the memorable things of life and youth.
Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station with the
tickets he found her asleep on one of the beds, her arm curled about a
black object which he could not at first identify. Coming closer he
found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new one, nor clean
one, but her face, tear-stained, was pressed against it, and he
understood her ancient and most honorable message. There was almost
ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him, shy but well aware of
her own nicety of imagination.
With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two things, it seemed
to Anthony that they lay somewhere near the heart of love.
THE GRAY HOUSE
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to
slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are
significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty
an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an
organ--and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of
humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only
youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with
light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show
the bare framework of a man-made thing--oh, that eternal hand!--a play,
most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches,
sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by
men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
And this time with Gloria and Anthony, this first year of marriage, and
the gray house caught them in that stage when the organ-grinder was
slowly undergoing his inevitable metamorphosis. She was twenty-three; he
was twenty-six.
The gray house was, at first, of sheerly pastoral intent. They lived
impatiently in Anthony's apartment for the first fortnight after the
return from California, in a stifled atmosphere of open trunks, too many
callers, and the eternal laundry-bags. They discussed with their friends
the stupendous problem of their future. Dick and Maury would sit with
them agreeing solemnly, almost thoughtfully, as Anthony ran through his