The Beautiful and Damned
should drive? How fast should Gloria go? These two questions and the
eternal recriminations involved ran through the days. They motored to
the Post-Road towns, Rye, Portchester, and Greenwich, and called on a
dozen friends, mostly Gloria's, who all seemed to be in different stages
of having babies and in this respect as well as in others bored her to a
point of nervous distraction. For an hour after each visit she would
bite her fingers furiously and be inclined to take out her rancor
on Anthony.
"I loathe women," she cried in a mild temper. "What on earth can you say
to them--except talk 'lady-lady'? I've enthused over a dozen babies that
I've wanted only to choke. And every one of those girls is either
incipiently jealous and suspicious of her husband if he's charming or
beginning to be bored with him if he isn't."
"Don't you ever intend to see any women?"
"I don't know. They never seem clean to me--never--never. Except just a
few. Constance Shaw--you know, the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us
last Tuesday--is almost the only one. She's so tall and fresh-looking
and stately."
"I don't like them so tall."
Though they went to several dinner dances at various country clubs, they
decided that the autumn was too nearly over for them to "go out" on any
scale, even had they been so inclined. He hated golf; Gloria liked it
only mildly, and though she enjoyed a violent rush that some
undergraduates gave her one night and was glad that Anthony should be
proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their hostess for the
evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat disquieted by the fact that
Anthony's classmate, Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush.
The Granbys never phoned again, and though Gloria laughed, it piqued her
not a little.
"You see," she explained to Anthony, "if I wasn't married it wouldn't
worry her--but she's been to the movies in her day and she thinks I may
be a vampire. But the point is that placating such people requires an
effort that I'm simply unwilling to make.... And those cute little
freshmen making eyes at me and paying me idiotic compliments! I've grown
up, Anthony."
Marietta itself offered little social life. Half a dozen farm-estates
formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who
displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of
limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes
accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive wives. The townspeople
were a particularly uninteresting type--unmarried females were
predominant for the most part--with school-festival horizons and souls
bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches. The
only native with whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped,
broad-shouldered Swedish girl who came every day to do their work. She
was silent and efficient, and Gloria, after finding her weeping
violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen table, developed an
uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food. Because of
her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.
Gloria's penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague
supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex,
properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her
Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her
susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic, and, far from gullible
about the motives of people, she was inclined to credit any
extraordinary happening attributed to the whimsical perambulations of
the buried. The desperate squeakings about the old house on windy nights
that to Anthony were burglars with revolvers ready in hand represented
to Gloria the auras, evil and restive, of dead generations, expiating
the inexpiable upon the ancient and romantic hearth. One night, because
of two swift bangs down-stairs, which Anthony fearfully but unavailingly
investigated, they lay awake nearly until dawn asking each other
examination-paper questions about the history of the world.
In October Muriel came out for a two weeks' visit. Gloria had
called her on long-distance, and Miss Kane ended the conversation
characteristically by saying "All-ll-ll righty. I'll be there with
bells!" She arrived with a dozen popular songs under her arm.
"You ought to have a phonograph out here in the country," she said,
"just a little Vic--they don't cost much. Then whenever you're lonesome
you can have Caruso or Al Jolson right at your door."
She worried Anthony to distraction by telling him that "he was the first
clever man she had ever known and she got so tired of shallow people."
He wondered that people fell in love with such women. Yet he supposed
that under a certain impassioned glance even she might take on a
softness and promise.
But Gloria, violently showing off her love for Anthony, was diverted
into a state of purring content.
Finally Richard Caramel arrived for a garrulous and to Gloria painfully
literary week-end, during which he discussed himself with Anthony long
after she lay in childlike sleep up-stairs.
"It's been mighty funny, this success and all," said Dick. "Just before
the novel appeared I'd been trying, without success, to sell some short
stories. Then, after my book came out, I polished up three and had them
accepted by one of the magazines that had rejected them before. I've
done a lot of them since; publishers don't pay me for my book till
this winter."
"Don't let the victor belong to the spoils."
"You mean write trash?" He considered. "If you mean deliberately
injecting a slushy fade-out into each one, I'm not. But I don't suppose
I'm being so careful. I'm certainly writing faster and I don't seem to
be thinking as much as I used to. Perhaps it's because I don't get any
conversation, now that you're married and Maury's gone to Philadelphia.
Haven't the old urge and ambition. Early success and all that."
"Doesn't it worry you?"
"Frantically. I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like
buck-fever--it's a sort of intense literary self-consciousness that
comes when I try to force myself. But the really awful days aren't when
I think I can't write. They're when I wonder whether any writing is
worth while at all--I mean whether I'm not a sort of glorified buffoon."
"I like to hear you talk that way," said Anthony with a touch of his old
patronizing insolence. "I was afraid you'd gotten a bit idiotic over
your work. Read the damnedest interview you gave out----"
Dick interrupted with an agonized expression.
"Good Lord! Don't mention it. Young lady wrote it--most admiring young
lady. Kept telling me my work was 'strong,' and I sort of lost my head
and made a lot of strange pronouncements. Some of it was good, though,
don't you think?"
"Oh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his
generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever
afterward."
"Oh, I believe a lot of it," admitted Richard Caramel with a faint beam.
"It simply was a mistake to give it out."
In November they moved into Anthony's apartment, from which they sallied
triumphantly to the Yale-Harvard and Harvard-Princeton football games,
to the St. Nicholas ice-skating rink, to a thorough round of the
theatres and to a miscellany of entertainments--from small, staid dances
to the great affairs that Gloria loved, held in those few houses where
lackeys with powdered wigs scurried around in magnificent Anglomania
under the direction of gigantic majordomos. Their intention was to go
abroad the first of the year or, at any rate, when the war was over.
Anthony had actually completed a Chestertonian essay on the twelfth
century by way of introduction to his proposed book and Gloria had done
some extensive research work on the question of Russian sable coats--in
fact the winter was approaching quite comfortably, when the Bilphistic
demiurge decided suddenly in mid-December that Mrs. Gilbert's soul had
aged sufficiently in its present incarnation. In consequence Anthony
took a miserable and hysterical Gloria out to Kansas City, where, in the
fashion of mankind, they paid the terrible and mind-shaking deference
to the dead.
Mr. Gilbert became, for the first and last time in his life, a truly
pathetic figure. That woman he had broken to wait upon his body and play
congregation to his mind had ironically deserted him--just when he could
not much longer have supported her. Never again would he be able so
satisfactorily to bore and bully a human soul.
CHAPTER II
SYMPOSIUM
Gloria had lulled Anthony's mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women
the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his
doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first years what
he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always
through the pattern of the curtain.
It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for
another summer. Through a golden enervating spring they had loitered,
restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining
other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado,
from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than
Gloria's desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal
variant among the changing colors of the sea. Out of the Pacific there
rose to greet them savage rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries
built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar
glorified by the polo costumes of Southhampton and Lake Forest and
Newport and Palm Beach. And, as the waves met and splashed and glittered
in the most placid of the bays, so they joined this group and that, and
with them shifted stations, murmuring ever of those strange
unsubstantial gaieties in wait just over the next green and
fruitful valley.
A simple healthy leisure class it was--the best of the men not
unpleasantly undergraduate--they seemed to be on a perpetual candidates
list for some etherealized "Porcellian" or "Skull and Bones" extended
out indefinitely into the world; the women, of more than average beauty,
fragilely athletic, somewhat idiotic as hostesses but charming and
infinitely decorative as guests. Sedately and gracefully they danced the
steps of their selection in the balmy tea hours, accomplishing with a
certain dignity the movements so horribly burlesqued by clerk and chorus
girl the country over. It seemed ironic that in this lone and
discredited offspring of the arts Americans should excel,
unquestionably.
Having danced and splashed through a lavish spring, Anthony and Gloria
found that they had spent too much money and for this must go into
retirement for a certain period. There was Anthony's "work," they said.
Almost before they knew it they were back in the gray house, more aware
now that other lovers had slept there, other names had been called over
the banisters, other couples had sat upon the porch steps watching the
gray-green fields and the black bulk of woods beyond.
It was the same Anthony, more restless, inclined to quicken only under
the stimulus of several high-balls, faintly, almost imperceptibly,
apathetic toward Gloria. But Gloria--she would be twenty-four in August
and was in an attractive but sincere panic about it. Six years to
thirty! Had she been less in love with Anthony her sense of the flight
of time would have expressed itself in a reawakened interest in other
men, in a deliberate intention of extracting a transient gleam of
romance from every potential lover who glanced at her with lowered brows
over a shining dinner table. She said to Anthony one day:
"How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've
always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I