The Beautiful and Damned
offices of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy and listened to many vague
instructions delivered by an energetic young man of about his own age,
named Kahler, who wore a defiant yellow pompadour, and in announcing
himself as an assistant secretary gave the impression that it was a
tribute to exceptional ability.
"There's two kinds of men here, you'll find," he said. "There's the man
who gets to be an assistant secretary or treasurer, gets his name on our
folder here, before he's thirty, and there's the man who gets his name
there at forty-five. The man who gets his name there at forty-five stays
there the rest of his life."
"How about the man who gets it there at thirty?" inquired Anthony
politely.
"Why, he gets up here, you see." He pointed to a list of assistant
vice-presidents upon the folder. "Or maybe he gets to be president or
secretary or treasurer."
"And what about these over here?"
"Those? Oh, those are the trustees--the men with capital."
"I see."
"Now some people," continued Kahler, "think that whether a man gets
started early or late depends on whether he's got a college education.
But they're wrong."
"I see."
"I had one; I was Buckleigh, class of nineteen-eleven, but when I came
down to the Street I soon found that the things that would help me here
weren't the fancy things I learned in college. In fact, I had to get a
lot of fancy stuff out of my head."
Anthony could not help wondering what possible "fancy stuff" he had
learned at Buckleigh in nineteen-eleven. An irrepressible idea that it
was some sort of needlework recurred to him throughout the rest of the
conversation.
"See that fellow over there?" Kahler pointed to a youngish-looking man
with handsome gray hair, sitting at a desk inside a mahogany railing.
"That's Mr. Ellinger, the first vice-president. Been everywhere, seen
everything; got a fine education."
In vain did Anthony try to open his mind to the romance of finance; he
could think of Mr. Ellinger only as one of the buyers of the handsome
leather sets of Thackeray, Balzac, Hugo, and Gibbon that lined the walls
of the big bookstores.
Through the damp and uninspiring month of March he was prepared for
salesmanship. Lacking enthusiasm he was capable of viewing the turmoil
and bustle that surrounded him only as a fruitless circumambient
striving toward an incomprehensible goal, tangibly evidenced only by the
rival mansions of Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie on Fifth Avenue. That these
portentous vice-presidents and trustees should be actually the fathers
of the "best men" he had known at Harvard seemed to him incongruous.
He ate in an employees' lunch-room up-stairs with an uneasy suspicion
that he was being uplifted, wondering through that first week if the
dozens of young clerks, some of them alert and immaculate, and just out
of college, lived in flamboyant hope of crowding onto that narrow slip
of cardboard before the catastrophic thirties. The conversation that
interwove with the pattern of the day's work was all much of a piece.
One discussed how Mr. Wilson had made his money, what method Mr. Hiemer
had employed, and the means resorted to by Mr. Hardy. One related
age-old but eternally breathless anecdotes of the fortunes stumbled on
precipitously in the Street by a "butcher" or a "bartender," or "a darn
_mess_enger boy, by golly!" and then one talked of the current gambles,
and whether it was best to go out for a hundred thousand a year or be
content with twenty. During the preceding year one of the assistant
secretaries had invested all his savings in Bethlehem Steel. The story
of his spectacular magnificence, of his haughty resignation in January,
and of the triumphal palace he was now building in California, was the
favorite office subject. The man's very name had acquired a magic
significance, symbolizing as he did the aspirations of all good
Americans. Anecdotes were told about him--how one of the vice-presidents
had advised him to sell, by golly, but he had hung on, even bought on
margin, "and _now_ look where he is!"
Such, obviously, was the stuff of life--a dizzy triumph dazzling the
eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meagre wage and
with the arithmetical improbability of their eventual success.
To Anthony the notion became appalling. He felt that to succeed here the
idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. It seemed to him that the
essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their
affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal,
self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was
obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom--so, with
appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.
His determination to stay in at night during the week did not survive,
and a good half of the time he came to work with a splitting, sickish
headache and the crowded horror of the morning subway ringing in his
ears like an echo of hell.
Then, abruptly, he quit. He had remained in bed all one Monday, and late
in the evening, overcome by one of those attacks of moody despair to
which he periodically succumbed, he wrote and mailed a letter to Mr.
Wilson, confessing that he considered himself ill adapted to the work.
Gloria, coming in from the theatre with Richard Caramel, found him on
the lounge, silently staring at the high ceiling, more depressed and
discouraged than he had been at any time since their marriage.
She wanted him to whine. If he had she would have reproached him
bitterly, for she was not a little annoyed, but he only lay there so
utterly miserable that she felt sorry for him, and kneeling down she
stroked his head, saying how little it mattered, how little anything
mattered so long as they loved each other. It was like their first year,
and Anthony, reacting to her cool hand, to her voice that was soft as
breath itself upon his ear, became almost cheerful, and talked with her
of his future plans. He even regretted, silently, before he went to bed
that he had so hastily mailed his resignation.
"Even when everything seems rotten you can't trust that judgment,"
Gloria had said. "It's the sum of all your judgments that counts."
In mid-April came a letter from the real-estate agent in Marietta,
encouraging them to take the gray house for another year at a slightly
increased rental, and enclosing a lease made out for their signatures.
For a week lease and letter lay carelessly neglected on Anthony's desk.
They had no intention of returning to Marietta. They were weary of the
place, and had been bored most of the preceding summer. Besides, their
car had deteriorated to a rattling mass of hypochondriacal metal, and a
new one was financially inadvisable.
But because of another wild revel, enduring through four days and
participated in, at one time or another, by more than a dozen people,
they did sign the lease; to their utter horror they signed it and sent
it, and immediately it seemed as though they heard the gray house,
drably malevolent at last, licking its white chops and waiting to
devour them.
"Anthony, where's that lease?" she called in high alarm one Sunday
morning, sick and sober to reality. "Where did you leave it? It
was here!"
Then she knew where it was. She remembered the house party they had
planned on the crest of their exuberance; she remembered a room full of
men to whose less exhilarated moments she and Anthony were of no
importance, and Anthony's boast of the transcendent merit and seclusion
of the gray house, that it was so isolated that it didn't matter how
much noise went on there. Then Dick, who had visited them, cried
enthusiastically that it was the best little house imaginable, and that
they were idiotic not to take it for another summer. It had been easy to
work themselves up to a sense of how hot and deserted the city was
getting, of how cool and ambrosial were the charms of Marietta. Anthony
had picked up the lease and waved it wildly, found Gloria happily
acquiescent, and with one last burst of garrulous decision during which
all the men agreed with solemn handshakes that they would come out for
a visit ...
"Anthony," she cried, "we've signed and sent it!"
"What?"
"The lease!"
"What the devil!"
"Oh, _An_thony!" There was utter misery in her voice. For the summer,
for eternity, they had built themselves a prison. It seemed to strike at
the last roots of their stability. Anthony thought they might arrange it
with the real-estate agent. They could no longer afford the double rent,
and going to Marietta meant giving up his apartment, his reproachless
apartment with the exquisite bath and the rooms for which he had bought
his furniture and hangings--it was the closest to a home that he had
ever had--familiar with memories of four colorful years.
But it was not arranged with the real-estate agent, nor was it arranged
at all. Dispiritedly, without even any talk of making the best of it,
without even Gloria's all-sufficing "I don't care," they went back to
the house that they now knew heeded neither youth nor love--only those
austere and incommunicable memories that they could never share.
THE SINISTER SUMMER
There was a horror in the house that summer. It came with them and
settled itself over the place like a sombre pall, pervasive through the
lower rooms, gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs until
it oppressed their very sleep. Anthony and Gloria grew to hate being
there alone. Her bedroom, which had seemed so pink and young and
delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and
there on chair and bed, seemed now to whisper with its rustling curtains:
"Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is not the first daintiness and
delicacy that has faded here under the summer suns ... generations of
unloved women have adorned themselves by that glass for rustic lovers
who paid no heed.... Youth has come into this room in palest blue and
left it in the gray cerements of despair, and through long nights many
girls have lain awake where that bed stands pouring out waves of misery
into the darkness."
Gloria finally tumbled all her clothes and unguents ingloriously out of
it, declaring that she had come to live with Anthony, and making the
excuse that one of her screens was rotten and admitted bugs. So her room
was abandoned to insensitive guests, and they dressed and slept in her
husband's chamber, which Gloria considered somehow "good," as though
Anthony's presence there had acted as exterminator of any uneasy shadows
of the past that might have hovered about its walls.
The distinction between "good" and "bad," ordered early and summarily
out of both their lives, had been reinstated in another form. Gloria
insisted that any one invited to the gray house must be "good," which,
in the case of a girl, meant that she must be either simple and
reproachless or, if otherwise, must possess a certain solidity and
strength. Always intensely sceptical of her sex, her judgments were now
concerned with the question of whether women were or were not clean. By
uncleanliness she meant a variety of things, a lack of pride, a
slackness in fibre and, most of all, the unmistakable aura of
promiscuity.
"Women soil easily," she said, "far more easily than men. Unless a
girl's very young and brave it's almost impossible for her to go
down-hill without a certain hysterical animality, the cunning, dirty
sort of animality. A man's different--and I suppose that's why one of
the commonest characters of romance is a man going gallantly to
the devil."
She was disposed to like many men, preferably those who gave her frank
homage and unfailing entertainment--but often with a flash of insight
she told Anthony that some one of his friends was merely using him, and