The Beautiful and Damned
naïveté and his astonishing fund of information about himself, had been
a diverting, almost juvenile, figure--court jester to their royalty. But
this was no longer true. It was Dick who always had money; it was
Anthony who entertained within limitations--always excepting occasional
wild, wine-inspired, check-cashing parties--and it was Anthony who was
solemn about it next morning and told the scornful and disgusted Gloria
that they'd have to be "more careful next time."
In the two years since the publication of "The Demon Lover," Dick had
made over twenty-five thousand dollars, most of it lately, when the
reward of the author of fiction had begun to swell unprecedentedly as a
result of the voracious hunger of the motion pictures for plots. He
received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large
emolument for such a young man--he was not quite thirty--and for every
one that contained enough "action" (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing)
for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand. His stories varied;
there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive in all of
them, but none attained the personality of "The Demon Lover," and there
were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick
explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn't it true that men
who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had
appealed to the many as well as to the elect?
Though Anthony and Maury disagreed, Gloria told him to go ahead and make
as much money as he could--that was the only thing that counted
anyhow....
Maury, a little stouter, faintly mellower, and more complaisant, had
gone to work in Philadelphia. He came to New York once or twice a month
and on such occasions the four of them travelled the popular routes from
dinner to the theatre, thence to the Frolic or, perhaps, at the urging
of the ever-curious Gloria, to one of the cellars of Greenwich Village,
notorious through the furious but short-lived vogue of the "new poetry
movement."
In January, after many monologues directed at his reticent wife, Anthony
determined to "get something to do," for the winter at any rate. He
wanted to please his grandfather and even, in a measure, to see how he
liked it himself. He discovered during several tentative semi-social
calls that employers were not interested in a young man who was only
going to "try it for a few months or so." As the grandson of Adam Patch
he was received everywhere with marked courtesy, but the old man was a
back number now--the heyday of his fame as first an "oppressor" and then
an uplifter of the people had been during the twenty years preceding his
retirement. Anthony even found several of the younger men who were under
the impression that Adam Patch had been dead for some years.
Eventually Anthony went to his grandfather and asked his advice, which
turned out to be that he should enter the bond business as a salesman, a
tedious suggestion to Anthony, but one that in the end he determined to
follow. Sheer money in deft manipulation had fascinations under all
circumstances, while almost any side of manufacturing would be
insufferably dull. He considered newspaper work but decided that the
hours were not ordered for a married man. And he lingered over pleasant
fancies of himself either as editor of a brilliant weekly of opinion, an
American Mercure de France, or as scintillant producer of satiric comedy
and Parisian musical revue. However, the approaches to these latter
guilds seemed to be guarded by professional secrets. Men drifted into
them by the devious highways of writing and acting. It was palpably
impossible to get on a magazine unless you had been on one before.
So in the end he entered, by way of his grandfather's letter, that
Sanctum Americanum where sat the president of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy
at his "cleared desk," and issued therefrom employed. He was to begin
work on the twenty-third of February.
In tribute to the momentous occasion this two-day revel had been
planned, since, he said, after he began working he'd have to get to bed
early during the week. Maury Noble had arrived from Philadelphia on a
trip that had to do with seeing some man in Wall Street (whom,
incidentally, he failed to see), and Richard Caramel had been half
persuaded, half tricked into joining them. They had condescended to a
wet and fashionable wedding on Monday afternoon, and in the evening had
occurred the dénouement: Gloria, going beyond her accustomed limit of
four precisely timed cocktails, led them on as gay and joyous a
bacchanal as they had ever known, disclosing an astonishing knowledge of
ballet steps, and singing songs which she confessed had been taught her
by her cook when she was innocent and seventeen. She repeated these by
request at intervals throughout the evening with such frank conviviality
that Anthony, far from being annoyed, was gratified at this fresh source
of entertainment. The occasion was memorable in other ways--a long
conversation between Maury and a defunct crab, which he was dragging
around on the end of a string, as to whether the crab was fully
conversant with the applications of the binomial theorem, and the
aforementioned race in two hansom cabs with the sedate and impressive
shadows of Fifth Avenue for audience, ending in a labyrinthine escape
into the darkness of Central Park. Finally Anthony and Gloria had paid a
call on some wild young married people--the Lacys--and collapsed in the
empty milk bottles.
Morning now--theirs to add up the checks cashed here and there in clubs,
stores, restaurants. Theirs to air the dank staleness of wine and
cigarettes out of the tall blue front room, to pick up the broken glass
and brush at the stained fabric of chairs and sofas; to give Bounds
suits and dresses for the cleaners; finally, to take their smothery
half-feverish bodies and faded depressed spirits out into the chill air
of February, that life might go on and Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy obtain
the services of a vigorous man at nine next morning.
"Do you remember," called Anthony from the bathroom, "when Maury got out
at the corner of One Hundred and Tenth Street and acted as a traffic
cop, beckoning cars forward and motioning them back? They must have
thought he was a private detective."
After each reminiscence they both laughed inordinately, their
overwrought nerves responding as acutely and janglingly to mirth as to
depression.
Gloria at the mirror was wondering at the splendid color and freshness
of her face--it seemed that she had never looked so well, though her
stomach hurt her and her head was aching furiously.
The day passed slowly. Anthony, riding in a taxi to his broker's to
borrow money on a bond, found that he had only two dollars in his
pocket. The fare would cost all of that, but he felt that on this
particular afternoon he could not have endured the subway. When the
taximetre reached his limit he must get out and walk.
With this his mind drifted off into one of its characteristic
day-dreams.... In this dream he discovered that the metre was going too
fast--the driver had dishonestly adjusted it. Calmly he reached his
destination and then nonchalantly handed the man what he justly owed
him. The man showed fight, but almost before his hands were up Anthony
had knocked him down with one terrific blow. And when he rose Anthony
quickly sidestepped and floored him definitely with a crack in
the temple.
... He was in court now. The judge had fined him five dollars and he had
no money. Would the court take his check? Ah, but the court did not know
him. Well, he could identify himself by having them call his apartment.
... They did so. Yes, it was Mrs. Anthony Patch speaking--but how did
she know that this man was her husband? How could she know? Let the
police sergeant ask her if she remembered the milk bottles ...
He leaned forward hurriedly and tapped at the glass. The taxi was only
at Brooklyn Bridge, but the metre showed a dollar and eighty cents, and
Anthony would never have omitted the ten per cent tip.
Later in the afternoon he returned to the apartment. Gloria had also
been out--shopping--and was asleep, curled in a corner of the sofa with
her purchase locked securely in her arms. Her face was as untroubled as
a little girl's, and the bundle that she pressed tightly to her bosom
was a child's doll, a profound and infinitely healing balm to her
disturbed and childish heart.
DESTINY
It was with this party, more especially with Gloria's part in it, that a
decided change began to come over their way of living. The magnificent
attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet
of Gloria's it became the entire solace and justification for what they
chose to do and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry, not to
loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor
toward each other, and to seek the moment's happiness as fervently and
persistently as possible.
"No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony," she said one day. "It'd
be ridiculous for me to go about pretending I felt any obligations
toward the world, and as for worrying what people think about me, I
simply _don't_, that's all. Since I was a little girl in dancing-school
I've been criticised by the mothers of all the little girls who weren't
as popular as I was, and I've always looked on criticism as a sort of
envious tribute."
This was because of a party in the "Boul' Mich'" one night, where
Constance Merriam had seen her as one of a highly stimulated party of
four. Constance Merriam, "as an old school friend," had gone to the
trouble of inviting her to lunch next day in order to inform her how
terrible it was.
"I told her I couldn't see it," Gloria told Anthony. "Eric Merriam is a
sort of sublimated Percy Wolcott--you remember that man in Hot Springs I
told you about--his idea of respecting Constance is to leave her at home
with her sewing and her baby and her book, and such innocuous
amusements, whenever he's going on a party that promises to be anything
but deathly dull."
"Did you tell her that?"
"I certainly did. And I told her that what she really objected to was
that I was having a better time than she was."
Anthony applauded her. He was tremendously proud of Gloria, proud that
she never failed to eclipse whatever other women might be in the party,
proud that men were always glad to revel with her in great rowdy groups,
without any attempt to do more than enjoy her beauty and the warmth of
her vitality.
These "parties" gradually became their chief source of entertainment.
Still in love, still enormously interested in each other, they yet found
as spring drew near that staying at home in the evening palled on them;
books were unreal; the old magic of being alone had long since
vanished--instead they preferred to be bored by a stupid musical comedy,
or to go to dinner with the most uninteresting of their acquaintances,
so long as there would be enough cocktails to keep the conversation from
becoming utterly intolerable. A scattering of younger married people who
had been their friends in school or college, as well as a varied
assortment of single men, began to think instinctively of them whenever
color and excitement were needed, so there was scarcely a day without
its phone call, its "Wondered what you were doing this evening." Wives,
as a rule, were afraid of Gloria--her facile attainment of the centre of
the stage, her innocent but nevertheless disturbing way of becoming a
favorite with husbands--these things drove them instinctively into an
attitude of profound distrust, heightened by the fact that Gloria was
largely unresponsive to any intimacy shown her by a woman.
On the appointed Wednesday in February Anthony had gone to the imposing