The Beautiful and Damned
dripping and the swishing play of a cluster of wet vine against the
sill. She was in a state half-way between sleeping and waking, with
neither condition predominant ... and she was harassed by a desire to
rid herself of a weight pressing down upon her breast. She felt that if
she could cry the weight would be lifted, and forcing the lids of her
eyes together she tried to raise a lump in her throat ... to
no avail....
Drip! Drip! Drip! The sound was not unpleasant--like spring, like a cool
rain of her childhood, that made cheerful mud in her back yard and
watered the tiny garden she had dug with miniature rake and spade and
hoe. Drip--dri-ip! It was like days when the rain came out of yellow
skies that melted just before twilight and shot one radiant shaft of
sunlight diagonally down the heavens into the damp green trees. So cool,
so clear and clean--and her mother there at the centre of the world, at
the centre of the rain, safe and dry and strong. She wanted her mother
now, and her mother was dead, beyond sight and touch forever. And this
weight was pressing on her, pressing on her--oh, it pressed on her so!
She became rigid. Some one had come to the door and was standing
regarding her, very quiet except for a slight swaying motion. She could
see the outline of his figure distinct against some indistinguishable
light. There was no sound anywhere, only a great persuasive
silence--even the dripping had ceased ... only this figure, swaying,
swaying in the doorway, an indiscernible and subtly menacing terror, a
personality filthy under its varnish, like smallpox spots under a layer
of powder. Yet her tired heart, beating until it shook her breasts, made
her sure that there was still life in her, desperately shaken,
threatened....
The minute or succession of minutes prolonged itself interminably, and a
swimming blur began to form before her eyes, which tried with childish
persistence to pierce the gloom in the direction of the door. In another
instant it seemed that some unimaginable force would shatter her out of
existence ... and then the figure in the doorway--it was Hull, she saw,
Hull--turned deliberately and, still slightly swaying, moved back and
off, as if absorbed into that incomprehensible light that had given him
dimension.
Blood rushed back into her limbs, blood and life together. With a start
of energy she sat upright, shifting her body until her feet touched the
floor over the side of the bed. She knew what she must do--now, now,
before it was too late. She must go out into this cool damp, out, away,
to feel the wet swish of the grass around her feet and the fresh
moisture on her forehead. Mechanically she struggled into her clothes,
groping in the dark of the closet for a hat. She must go from this house
where the thing hovered that pressed upon her bosom, or else made itself
into stray, swaying figures in the gloom.
In a panic she fumbled clumsily at her coat, found the sleeve just as
she heard Anthony's footsteps on the lower stair. She dared not wait; he
might not let her go, and even Anthony was part of this weight, part of
this evil house and the sombre darkness that was growing up about it....
Through the hall then ... and down the back stairs, hearing Anthony's
voice in the bedroom she had just left--
"Gloria! Gloria!"
But she had reached the kitchen now, passed out through the doorway into
the night. A hundred drops, startled by a flare of wind from a dripping
tree, scattered on her and she pressed them gladly to her face with
hot hands.
"Gloria! Gloria!"
The voice was infinitely remote, muffed and made plaintive by the walls
she had just left. She rounded the house and started down the front path
toward the road, almost exultant as she turned into it, and followed the
carpet of short grass alongside, moving with caution in the
intense darkness.
"Gloria!"
She broke into a run, stumbled over the segment of a branch twisted off
by the wind. The voice was outside the house now. Anthony, finding the
bedroom deserted, had come onto the porch. But this thing was driving
her forward; it was back there with Anthony, and she must go on in her
flight under this dim and oppressive heaven, forcing herself through the
silence ahead as though it were a tangible barrier before her.
She had gone some distance along the barely discernible road, probably
half a mile, passed a single deserted barn that loomed up, black and
foreboding, the only building of any sort between the gray house and
Marietta; then she turned the fork, where the road entered the wood and
ran between two high walls of leaves and branches that nearly touched
overhead. She noticed suddenly a thin, longitudinal gleam of silver upon
the road before her, like a bright sword half embedded in the mud. As
she came closer she gave a little cry of satisfaction--it was a
wagon-rut full of water, and glancing heavenward she saw a light rift of
sky and knew that the moon was out.
"Gloria!"
She started violently. Anthony was not two hundred feet behind her.
"Gloria, wait for me!"
She shut her lips tightly to keep from screaming, and increased her
gait. Before she had gone another hundred yards the woods disappeared,
rolling back like a dark stocking from the leg of the road. Three
minutes' walk ahead of her, suspended in the now high and limitless air,
she saw a thin interlacing of attenuated gleams and glitters, centred in
a regular undulation on some one invisible point. Abruptly she knew
where she would go. That was the great cascade of wires that rose high
over the river, like the legs of a gigantic spider whose eye was the
little green light in the switch-house, and ran with the railroad bridge
in the direction of the station. The station! There would be the train
to take her away.
"Gloria, it's me! It's Anthony! Gloria, I won't try to stop you! For
God's sake, where are you?"
She made no answer but began to run, keeping on the high side of the
road and leaping the gleaming puddles--dimensionless pools of thin,
unsubstantial gold. Turning sharply to the left, she followed a narrow
wagon road, serving to avoid a dark body on the ground. She looked up as
an owl hooted mournfully from a solitary tree. Just ahead of her she
could see the trestle that led to the railroad bridge and the steps
mounting up to it. The station lay across the river.
Another sounds startled her, the melancholy siren of an approaching
train, and almost simultaneously, a repeated call, thin now and
far away.
"Gloria! Gloria!"
Anthony must have followed the main road. She laughed with a sort of
malicious cunning at having eluded him; she could spare the time to wait
until the train went by.
The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory
roar and clamor, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the
shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush
of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the
bridge--it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of
blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them,
which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an
instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back
instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid, the
temperature of warm blood.... The clicking blended suddenly with itself
in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the
thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the
lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside. Then it
contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a
reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.
Silence crept down again over the wet country; the faint dripping
resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria
stirring her out of the trance-like torpor which the passage of the
train had wrought. She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank
and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it
was something she had always wanted to do, and that she would have the
added excitement of traversing the yard-wide plank that ran beside the
tracks over the river.
There! This was better. She was at the top now and could see the lands
about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon,
coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To
her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the
light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights
of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge
squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was
lifted now--the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to
a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom.
This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.
"Gloria!"
Like a startled child she scurried along the plank, hopping, skipping,
jumping, with an ecstatic sense of her own physical lightness. Let him
come now--she no longer feared that, only she must first reach the
station, because that was part of the game. She was happy. Her hat,
snatched off, was clutched tightly in her hand, and her short curled
hair bobbed up and down about her ears. She had thought she would never
feel so young again, but this was her night, her world. Triumphantly she
laughed as she left the plank, and reaching the wooden platform flung
herself down happily beside an iron roof-post.
"Here I am!" she called, gay as the dawn in her elation. "Here I am,
Anthony, dear--old, worried Anthony."
"Gloria!" He reached the platform, ran toward her. "Are you all right?"
Coming up he knelt and took her in his arms.
"Yes."
"What was the matter? Why did you leave?" he queried anxiously.
"I had to--there was something"--she paused and a flicker of uneasiness
lashed at her mind--"there was something sitting on me--here." She put
her hand on her breast. "I had to go out and get away from it."
"What do you mean by 'something'?"
"I don't know--that man Hull--"
"Did he bother you?"
"He came to my door, drunk. I think I'd gotten sort of crazy by that
time."
"Gloria, dearest--"
Wearily she laid her head upon his shoulder.
"Let's go back," he suggested.
She shivered.
"Uh! No, I couldn't. It'd come and sit on me again." Her voice rose to a
cry that hung plaintive on the darkness. "That thing--"
"There--there," he soothed her, pulling her close to him. "We won't do
anything you don't want to do. What do you want to do? Just sit here?"
"I want--I want to go away."
"Where?"
"Oh--anywhere."
"By golly, Gloria," he cried, "you're still tight!"
"No, I'm not. I haven't been, all evening. I went up-stairs about, oh, I
don't know, about half an hour after dinner ...Ouch!"
He had inadvertently touched her right shoulder.
"It hurts me. I hurt it some way. I don't know--somebody picked me up
and dropped me."
"Gloria, come home. It's late and damp."
"I can't," she wailed. "Oh, Anthony, don't ask me to! I will to-morrow.
You go home and I'll wait here for a train. I'll go to a hotel--"
"I'll go with you."
"No, I don't want you with me. I want to be alone. I want to sleep--oh,
I want to sleep. And then to-morrow, when you've got all the smell of
whiskey and cigarettes out of the house, and everything straight, and
Hull is gone, then I'll come home. If I went now, that thing--oh--!" She
covered her eyes with her hand; Anthony saw the futility of trying to
persuade her.
"I was all sober when you left," he said. "Dick was asleep on the lounge
and Maury and I were having a discussion. That fellow Hull had wandered