The Beautiful and Damned
"Well?" Anthony sat up in bed and looked down at her. The corners of his
lips were drooping with depression, his voice was strained and hollow.
Her reply was to raise her hand to her mouth and begin a slow, precise
nibbling at her finger.
"We've done it," he said after a pause; then, as she was still silent,
he became exasperated. "Why don't you say something?"
"What on earth do you want me to say?"
"What are you thinking?"
"Nothing."
"Then stop biting your finger!"
Ensued a short confused discussion of whether or not she had been
thinking. It seemed essential to Anthony that she should muse aloud upon
last night's disaster. Her silence was a method of settling the
responsibility on him. For her part she saw no necessity for speech--the
moment required that she should gnaw at her finger like a nervous child.
"I've got to fix up this damn mess with my grandfather," he said with
uneasy conviction. A faint newborn respect was indicated by his use of
"my grandfather" instead of "grampa."
"You can't," she affirmed abruptly. "You can't--_ever_. He'll never
forgive you as long as he lives."
"Perhaps not," agreed Anthony miserably. "Still--I might possibly square
myself by some sort of reformation and all that sort of thing--"
"He looked sick," she interrupted, "pale as flour."
"He _is_ sick. I told you that three months ago."
"I wish he'd died last week!" she said petulantly. "Inconsiderate old
fool!"
Neither of them laughed.
"But just let me say," she added quietly, "the next time I see you
acting with any woman like you did with Rachael Barnes last night, I'll
leave you--_just--like--that!_ I'm simply _not_ going to stand it!"
Anthony quailed.
"Oh, don't be absurd," he protested. "You know there's no woman in the
world for me except you--none, dearest."
His attempt at a tender note failed miserably--the more imminent danger
stalked back into the foreground.
"If I went to him," suggested Anthony, "and said with appropriate
biblical quotations that I'd walked too long in the way of
unrighteousness and at last seen the light--" He broke off and glanced
with a whimsical expression at his wife. "I wonder what he'd do?"
"I don't know."
She was speculating as to whether or not their guests would have the
acumen to leave directly after breakfast.
Not for a week did Anthony muster the courage to go to Tarrytown. The
prospect was revolting and left alone he would have been incapable of
making the trip--but if his will had deteriorated in these past three
years, so had his power to resist urging. Gloria compelled him to go. It
was all very well to wait a week, she said, for that would give his
grandfather's violent animosity time to cool--but to wait longer would
be an error--it would give it a chance to harden.
He went, in trepidation ... and vainly. Adam Patch was not well, said
Shuttleworth indignantly. Positive instructions had been given that no
one was to see him. Before the ex-"gin-physician's" vindictive eye
Anthony's front wilted. He walked out to his taxicab with what was
almost a slink--recovering only a little of his self-respect as he
boarded the train; glad to escape, boylike, to the wonder palaces of
consolation that still rose and glittered in his own mind.
Gloria was scornful when he returned to Marietta. Why had he not forced
his way in? That was what she would have done!
Between them they drafted a letter to the old man, and after
considerable revision sent it off. It was half an apology, half a
manufactured explanation. The letter was not answered.
Came a day in September, a day slashed with alternate sun and rain, sun
without warmth, rain without freshness. On that day they left the gray
house, which had seen the flower of their love. Four trunks and three
monstrous crates were piled in the dismantled room where, two years
before, they had sprawled lazily, thinking in terms of dreams, remote,
languorous, content. The room echoed with emptiness. Gloria, in a new
brown dress edged with fur, sat upon a trunk in silence, and Anthony
walked nervously to and fro smoking, as they waited for the truck that
would take their things to the city.
"What are those?" she demanded, pointing to some books piled upon one of
the crates.
"That's my old stamp collection," he confessed sheepishly. "I forgot to
pack it."
"Anthony, it's so silly to carry it around."
"Well, I was looking through it the day we left the apartment last
spring, and I decided not to store it."
"Can't you sell it? Haven't we enough junk?"
"I'm sorry," he said humbly.
With a thunderous rattling the truck rolled up to the door. Gloria shook
her fist defiantly at the four walls.
"I'm so glad to go!" she cried, "so glad. Oh, my God, how I hate this
house!"
So the brilliant and beautiful lady went up with her husband to New
York. On the very train that bore them away they quarrelled--her bitter
words had the frequency, the regularity, the inevitability of the
stations they passed.
"Don't be cross," begged Anthony piteously. "We've got nothing but each
other, after all."
"We haven't even that, most of the time," cried Gloria.
"When haven't we?"
"A lot of times--beginning with one occasion on the station platform at
Redgate."
"You don't mean to say that--"
"No," she interrupted coolly, "I don't brood over it. It came and
went--and when it went it took something with it."
She finished abruptly. Anthony sat in silence, confused, depressed. The
drab visions of train-side Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor,
succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing
ineffectually as country. He found himself remembering how on one summer
morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They
had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had
been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed,
must be a setting up of props around one--otherwise it was disaster.
There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and
dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his
dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.
Pelham! They had quarrelled in Pelham because Gloria must drive. And
when she set her little foot on the accelerator the car had jumped off
spunkily, and their two heads had jerked back like marionettes worked by
a single string.
The Bronx--the houses gathering and gleaming in the sun, which was
falling now through wide refulgent skies and tumbling caravans of light
down into the streets. New York, he supposed, was home--the city of
luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. Here on the
outskirts absurd stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset,
poised for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded
by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River. The train moved in through
the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating
streets of the upper East Side, each one passing the car window like the
space between the spokes of a gigantic wheel, each one with its vigorous
colorful revelation of poor children swarming in feverish activity like
vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned
rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven;
women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like
great bags of abominably dirty laundry.
"I like these streets," observed Anthony aloud. "I always feel as though
it's a performance being staged for me; as though the second I've passed
they'll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead, grow very sad,
remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their
houses. You often get that effect abroad, but seldom in this country."
Down in a tall busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of
stores; in the door of each stood a dark little man watching the passers
from intent eyes--eyes gleaming with suspicion, with pride, with
clarity, with cupidity, with comprehension. New York--he could not
dissociate it now from the slow, upward creep of this people--the little
stores, growing, expanding, consolidating, moving, watched over with
hawk's eyes and a bee's attention to detail--they slathered out on all
sides. It was impressive--in perspective it was tremendous.
Gloria's voice broke in with strange appropriateness upon his thoughts.
"I wonder where Bloeckman's been this summer."
THE APARTMENT
After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and
intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as
to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the
attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain
"impractical" ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business
has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and
confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like
twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The
complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly
with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn
nothing from the past with which to face the future--so we cease to be
impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine
margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value
safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is
left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of
relationships--and even this few only in certain hours especially set
aside for the task.
Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of
curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a
longing to be emotionally undisturbed. This gradual change had taken
place through the past several years, accelerated by a succession of
anxieties preying on his mind. There was, first of all, the sense of
waste, always dormant in his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of
his position. In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the
suggestion that life might be, after all, significant. In his early
twenties the conviction of the futility of effort, of the wisdom of
abnegation, had been confirmed by the philosophies he had admired as
well as by his association with Maury Noble, and later with his wife.
Yet there had been occasions--just before his first meeting with Gloria,
for example, and when his grandfather had suggested that he should go
abroad as a war correspondent--upon which his dissatisfaction had driven
him almost to a positive step.
One day just before they left Marietta for the last time, in carelessly
turning over the pages of a Harvard Alumni Bulletin, he had found a
column which told him what his contemporaries had been about in this six
years since graduation. Most of them were in business, it was true, and
several were converting the heathen of China or America to a nebulous
protestantism; but a few, he found, were working constructively at jobs
that were neither sinecures nor routines. There was Calvin Boyd, for
instance, who, though barely out of medical school, had discovered a new
treatment for typhus, had shipped abroad and was mitigating some of the
civilization that the Great Powers had brought to Servia; there was
Eugene Bronson, whose articles in The New Democracy were stamping him as
a man with ideas transcending both vulgar timeliness and popular
hysteria; there was a man named Daly who had been suspended from the
faculty of a righteous university for preaching Marxian doctrines in the
classroom: in art, science, politics, he saw the authentic personalities
of his time emerging--there was even Severance, the quarter-back, who