The Beautiful and Damned
off somewhere. Then I began to realize I hadn't seen you for several
hours, so I went up-stairs--"
He broke off as a salutatory "Hello, there!" boomed suddenly out of the
darkness. Gloria sprang to her feet and he did likewise.
"It's Maury's voice," she cried excitedly. "If it's Hull with him, keep
them away, keep them away!"
"Who's there?" Anthony called.
"Just Dick and Maury," returned two voices reassuringly.
"Where's Hull?"
"He's in bed. Passed out."
Their figures appeared dimly on the platform.
"What the devil are you and Gloria doing here?" inquired Richard Caramel
with sleepy bewilderment.
"What are _you_ two doing here?"
Maury laughed.
"Damned if I know. We followed you, and had the deuce of a time doing
it. I heard you out on the porch yelling for Gloria, so I woke up the
Caramel here and got it through his head, with some difficulty, that if
there was a search-party we'd better be on it. He slowed me up by
sitting down in the road at intervals and asking me what it was all
about. We tracked you by the pleasant scent of Canadian Club."
There was a rattle of nervous laughter under the low train-shed.
"How did you track us, really?"
"Well, we followed along down the road and then we suddenly lost you.
Seems you turned off at a wagontrail. After a while somebody hailed us
and asked us if we were looking for a young girl. Well, we came up and
found it was a little shivering old man, sitting on a fallen tree like
somebody in a fairy tale. 'She turned down here,' he said, 'and most
steppud on me, goin' somewhere in an awful hustle, and then a fella in
short golfin' pants come runnin' along and went after her. He throwed me
this.' The old fellow had a dollar bill he was waving around--"
"Oh, the poor old man!" ejaculated Gloria, moved.
"I threw him another and we went on, though he asked us to stay and tell
him what it was all about."
"Poor old man," repeated Gloria dismally.
Dick sat down sleepily on a box.
"And now what?" he inquired in the tone of stoic resignation.
"Gloria's upset," explained Anthony. "She and I are going to the city by
the next train."
Maury in the darkness had pulled a time-table from his pocket.
"Strike a match."
A tiny flare leaped out of the opaque background illuminating the four
faces, grotesque and unfamiliar here in the open night.
"Let's see. Two, two-thirty--no, that's evening. By gad, you won't get a
train till five-thirty."
Anthony hesitated.
"Well," he muttered uncertainly, "we've decided to stay here and wait
for it. You two might as well go back and sleep."
"You go, too, Anthony," urged Gloria; "I want you to have some sleep,
dear. You've been as pale as a ghost all day."
"Why, you little idiot!"
Dick yawned.
"Very well. You stay, we stay."
He walked out from under the shed and surveyed the heavens.
"Rather a nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything.
Exceptionally tasty assortment of them."
"Let's see." Gloria moved after him and the other two followed her.
"Let's sit out here," she suggested. "I like it much better."
Anthony and Dick converted a long box into a backrest and found a board
dry enough for Gloria to sit on. Anthony dropped down beside her and
with some effort Dick hoisted himself onto an apple-barrel near them.
"Tana went to sleep in the porch hammock," he remarked. "We carried him
in and left him next to the kitchen stove to dry. He was drenched to
the skin."
"That awful little man!" sighed Gloria.
"How do you do!" The voice, sonorous and funereal, had come from above,
and they looked up startled to find that in some manner Maury had
climbed to the roof of the shed, where he sat dangling his feet over the
edge, outlined as a shadowy and fantastic gargoyle against the now
brilliant sky.
"It must be for such occasions as this," he began softly, his words
having the effect of floating down from an immense height and settling
softly upon his auditors, "that the righteous of the land decorate the
railroads with bill-boards asserting in red and yellow that 'Jesus
Christ is God,' placing them, appropriately enough, next to
announcements that 'Gunter's Whiskey is Good.'"
There was gentle laughter and the three below kept their heads tilted
upward.
"I think I shall tell you the story of my education," continued Maury,
"under these sardonic constellations."
"Do! Please!"
"Shall I, really?"
They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the
white smiling moon.
"Well," he began, "as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against
future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred 'Now I
lay me's.'"
"Throw down a cigarette," murmured some one.
A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian
command:
"Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks
reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of
such skies."
Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice
resumed:
"I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes
until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I
believed that because a man cried out 'My God!' when a safe fell on him,
it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went
to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to
ancient flint-locks and cried to me: 'There's the real thing. These new
rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.' They damned the books
I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the
fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them 'clever'.
"And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets,
listening--to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of
Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to
Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and
Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron
declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I
learned a little of beauty--enough to know that it had nothing to do
with truth--and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary
tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every
literary tradition....
"Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from
me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life
rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.
"The transition was subtle--the thing had lain in wait for me for some
time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one. With
me? No--I didn't try to seduce the janitor's wife--nor did I run through
the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite
passion that does the business--it is the dress that passion wears. I
became bored--that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a
frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my
acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand?--I was grown." He paused.
"End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two."
Three quietly active points of light showed the location of his
listeners. Gloria was now half sitting, half lying, in Anthony's lap.
His arm was around her so tightly that she could hear the beating of his
heart. Richard Caramel, perched on the apple-barrel, from time to time
stirred and gave off a faint grunt.
"I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a
state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral
schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But, with a mistaken faith
in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and
insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression--but
Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read
Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism--and behold! Jones was still
in my way. I did not think--I was a battle-ground for the thoughts of
many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries
over which the great powers surge back and forth.
"I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the
experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the
not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it
presented itself to me in life--and of being beaten and bewildered
just the same.
"But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I
said, Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens
pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up
against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable
scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too
late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and
predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight
against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life
for the fight against death."
He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation--after a moment he
yawned and resumed.
"I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a
ghastly dissatisfaction at being used in spite of myself for some
inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware--if, indeed,
there _was_ an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The
schoolmistress seemed to be saying, 'We're going to play football and
nothing but football. If you don't want to play football you can't
play at all--'
"What was I to do--the playtime was so short!
"You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might
have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees.
Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly
smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn
day before a fire?--I don't think I did that. I was a great deal too
warm for that, and too alive.
"For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was
beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature--nature, that by
the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly
in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and
thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher--or, let us say, her
more amusing--though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And,
actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to
circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle
with the white--in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe
to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the
one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity.
"We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper--and presently the breed
of the leper is the salt of the earth. If any one can find any lesson in
that, let him stand forth."
"There's only one lesson to be learned from life, anyway," interrupted
Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.
"What's that?" demanded Maury sharply.
"That there's no lesson to be learned from life."
After a short silence Maury said:
"Young Gloria, the beautiful and merciless lady, first looked at the
world with the fundamental sophistication I have struggled to attain,
that Anthony never will attain, that Dick will never fully understand."
There was a disgusted groan from the apple-barrel. Anthony, grown
accustomed to the dark, could see plainly the flash of Richard Caramel's
yellow eye and the look of resentment on his face as he cried:
"You're crazy! By your own statement I should have attained some
experience by trying."
"Trying what?" cried Maury fiercely. "Trying to pierce the darkness of