The Beautiful and Damned
ANTHONY: My God! Is that what it is? Let's go to the Follies again.
MAURY: I'm tired of it. I've seen it three times. (_To DICK:_) The first
time, we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When we
came back we entered the wrong theatre.
ANTHONY: Had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we thought
were in our seats.
DICK: (_As though talking to himself_) I think--that when I've done
another novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories, I'll do a
musical comedy.
MAURY: I know--with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And
all the critics will groan and grunt about "Dear old Pinafore." And I
shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a
meaningless world.
DICK: (_Pompously_) Art isn't meaningless.
MAURY: It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
ANTHONY: In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grand stand
peopled with ghosts.
MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.
ANTHONY:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I'd feel that it being a meaningless
world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.
DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a
poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that
sophistic rot?
ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so.
MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected
thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of
morals--Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don't complain of
conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who
seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral
freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.
(_Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone on to say is lost
for all time._)
NIGHT
Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and, at a price, obtained
seats for a new musical comedy called "High Jinks." In the foyer of the
theatre they waited a few moments to see the first-night crowd come in.
There were opera cloaks stitched of myriad, many-colored silks and furs;
there were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of white
and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers down the middles of
innumerable silk hats; there were shoes of gold and bronze and red and
shining black; there were the high-piled, tight-packed coiffures of many
women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept men--most of all there
was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling
wave effect of this cheerful sea of people as to-night it poured its
glittering torrent into the artificial lake of laughter....
After the play they parted--Maury was going to a dance at Sherry's,
Anthony homeward and to bed.
He found his way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square,
which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful
and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a
kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin--too fat, too lean, yet
floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate
breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he
thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully,
swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of many
cigarettes. He caught the glance of a dark young beauty sitting alone in
a closed taxicab. Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and
violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten
remoteness of the afternoon.
Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning
their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances. They were
dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness then semi-fashionable;
their turned over collars were notched at the Adam's apple; they wore
gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles.
Passed a bewildered old lady borne along like a basket of eggs between
two men who exclaimed to her of the wonders of Times Square--explained
them so quickly that the old lady, trying to be impartially interested,
waved her head here and there like a piece of wind-worried old
orange-peel. Anthony heard a snatch of their conversation:
"There's the Astor, mama!"
"Look! See the chariot race sign----"
"There's where we were to-day. No, _there!_"
"Good gracious! ..."
"You should worry and grow thin like a dime." He recognized the current
witticism of the year as it issued stridently from one of the pairs at
his elbow.
"And I says to him, I says----"
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a
crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways
underneath--and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and
recedings of light--light dividing like pearls--forming and reforming in
glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut
amazingly on the sky.
He turned thankfully down the hush that blew like a dark wind out of a
cross-street, passed a bakery-restaurant in whose windows a dozen roast
chickens turned over and over on an automatic spit. From the door came a
smell that was hot, doughy, and pink. A drug-store next, exhaling
medicines, spilt soda water and a pleasant undertone from the cosmetic
counter; then a Chinese laundry, still open, steamy and stifling,
smelling folded and vaguely yellow. All these depressed him; reaching
Sixth Avenue he stopped at a corner cigar store and emerged feeling
better--the cigar store was cheerful, humanity in a navy blue mist,
buying a luxury ....
Once in his apartment he smoked a last cigarette, sitting in the dark by
his open front window. For the first time in over a year he found
himself thoroughly enjoying New York. There was a rare pungency in it
certainly, a quality almost Southern. A lonesome town, though. He who
had grown up alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During the past
several months he had been careful, when he had no engagement for the
evening, to hurry to one of his clubs and find some one. Oh, there was a
loneliness here----
His cigarette, its smoke bordering the thin folds of curtain with rims
of faint white spray, glowed on until the clock in St. Anne's down the
street struck one with a querulous fashionable beauty. The elevated,
half a quiet block away, sounded a rumble of drums--and should he lean
from his window he would see the train, like an angry eagle, breasting
the dark curve at the corner. He was reminded of a fantastic romance he
had lately read in which cities had been bombed from aerial trains, and
for a moment he fancied that Washington Square had declared war on
Central Park and that this was a north-bound menace loaded with battle
and sudden death. But as it passed the illusion faded; it diminished to
the faintest of drums--then to a far-away droning eagle.
There were the bells and the continued low blur of auto horns from Fifth
Avenue, but his own street was silent and he was safe in here from all
the threat of life, for there was his door and the long hall and his
guardian bedroom--safe, safe! The arc-light shining into his window
seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful
than the moon.
A FLASH-BACK IN PARADISE
_Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor
waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a
breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went
by and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her hair. She was
incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one--the beauty of
her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by
philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of
winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in
the contemplation of herself._
_It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again.
Sighing, she began a long conversation with a voice that was in the
white wind, a conversation that took many hours and of which I can give
only a fragment here._
BEAUTY: (_Her lips scarcely stirring, her eyes turned, as always, inward
upon herself_) Whither shall I journey now?
THE VOICE: To a new country--a land you have never seen before.
BEAUTY: (_Petulantly_) I loathe breaking into these new civilizations.
How long a stay this time?
THE VOICE: Fifteen years.
BEAUTY: And what's the name of the place?
THE VOICE: It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth--a land
whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the
rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in
Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men----
BEAUTY: (_In astonishment_) What?
THE VOICE: (_Very much depressed_) Yes, it is truly a melancholy
spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in
broad daylight saying "Do this!" and "Do that!" and all the men, even
those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer
sonorously either as "Mrs. So-and-so" or as "the wife."
BEAUTY: But this can't be true! I can understand, of course, their
obedience to women of charm--but to fat women? to bony women? to women
with scrawny cheeks?
THE VOICE: Even so.
BEAUTY: What of me? What chance shall I have?
THE VOICE: It will be "harder going," if I may borrow a phrase.
BEAUTY: (_After a dissatisfied pause_) Why not the old lands, the land
of grapes and soft-tongued men or the land of ships and seas?
THE VOICE: It's expected that they'll be very busy shortly.
BEAUTY: Oh!
THE VOICE: Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between
two significant glances in a mundane mirror.
BEAUTY: What will I be? Tell me?
THE VOICE: At first it was thought that you would go this time as an
actress in the motion pictures but, after all, it's not advisable. You
will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a
"susciety gurl."
BEAUTY: What's that?
(_There is a new sound in the wind which must for our purposes be
interpreted as_ THE VOICE _scratching its head._)
THE VOICE: (_At length_) It's a sort of bogus aristocrat.
BEAUTY: Bogus? What is bogus?
THE VOICE: That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much
that is bogus. Also, you will do much that is bogus.
BEAUTY: (_Placidly_) It all sounds so vulgar.
THE VOICE: Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your
fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp.
You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you
danced the old ones.
BEAUTY: (_In a whisper_) Will I be paid?
THE VOICE: Yes, as usual--in love.
BEAUTY: (_With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the
immobility of her lips_) And will I like being called a jazz-baby?
THE VOICE: (_Soberly_) You will love it....
(_The dialogue ends here, with_ BEAUTY _still sitting quietly, the stars
pausing in an ecstasy of appreciation, the wind, white and gusty,
blowing through her hair._
_All this took place seven years before_ ANTHONY _sat by the front
windows of his apartment and listened to the chimes of St. Anne's_.)
CHAPTER II
PORTRAIT OF A SIREN
Crispness folded down upon New York a month later, bringing November and
the three big football games and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth
Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed
excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony's mail.
Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their
fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three
dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were
proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous