The Beautiful and Damned
had given up his life rather neatly and gracefully with the Foreign
Legion on the Aisne.
He laid down the magazine and thought for a while about these diverse
men. In the days of his integrity he would have defended his attitude to
the last--an Epicurus in Nirvana, he would have cried that to struggle
was to believe, to believe was to limit. He would as soon have become a
churchgoer because the prospect of immortality gratified him as he would
have considered entering the leather business because the intensity of
the competition would have kept him from unhappiness. But at present he
had no such delicate scruples. This autumn, as his twenty-ninth year
began, he was inclined to close his mind to many things, to avoid prying
deeply into motive and first causes, and mostly to long passionately for
security from the world and from himself. He hated to be alone, as has
been said he often dreaded being alone with Gloria.
Because of the chasm which his grandfather's visit had opened before
him, and the consequent revulsion from his late mode of life, it was
inevitable that he should look around in this suddenly hostile city for
the friends and environments that had once seemed the warmest and most
secure. His first step was a desperate attempt to get back his old
apartment.
In the spring of 1912 he had signed a four-year lease at seventeen
hundred a year, with an option of renewal. This lease had expired the
previous May. When he had first rented the rooms they had been mere
potentialities, scarcely to be discerned as that, but Anthony had seen
into these potentialities and arranged in the lease that he and the
landlord should each spend a certain amount in improvements. Rents had
gone up in the past four years, and last spring when Anthony had waived
his option the landlord, a Mr. Sohenberg, had realized that he could get
a much bigger price for what was now a prepossessing apartment.
Accordingly, when Anthony approached him on the subject in September he
was met with Sohenberg's offer of a three-year lease at twenty-five
hundred a year. This, it seemed to Anthony, was outrageous. It meant
that well over a third of their income would be consumed in rent. In
vain he argued that his own money, his own ideas on the repartitioning,
had made the rooms attractive.
In vain he offered two thousand dollars--twenty-two hundred, though they
could ill afford it: Mr. Sohenberg was obdurate. It seemed that two
other gentlemen were considering it; just that sort of an apartment was
in demand for the moment, and it would scarcely be business to _give_ it
to Mr. Patch. Besides, though he had never mentioned it before, several
of the other tenants had complained of noise during the previous
winter--singing and dancing late at night, that sort of thing.
Internally raging Anthony hurried back to the Ritz to report his
discomfiture to Gloria.
"I can just see you," she stormed, "letting him back you down!"
"What could I say?"
"You could have told him what he _was_. I wouldn't have _stood_ it. No
other man in the world would have stood it! You just let people order
you around and cheat you and bully you and take advantage of you as if
you were a silly little boy. It's absurd!"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't lose your temper."
"I know, Anthony, but you _are_ such an ass!"
"Well, possibly. Anyway, we can't afford that apartment. But we can
afford it better than living here at the Ritz."
"You were the one who insisted on coming here."
"Yes, because I knew you'd be miserable in a cheap hotel."
"Of course I would!"
"At any rate we've got to find a place to live."
"How much can we pay?" she demanded.
"Well, we can pay even his price if we sell more bonds, but we agreed
last night that until I had gotten something definite to do we-"
"Oh, I know all that. I asked you how much we can pay out of just our
income."
"They say you ought not to pay more than a fourth."
"How much is a fourth?"
"One hundred and fifty a month."
"Do you mean to say we've got only six hundred dollars coming in every
month?" A subdued note crept into her voice.
"Of course!" he answered angrily. "Do you think we've gone on spending
more than twelve thousand a year without cutting way into our capital?"
"I knew we'd sold bonds, but--have we spent that much a year? How did
we?" Her awe increased.
"Oh, I'll look in those careful account-books we kept," he remarked
ironically, and then added: "Two rents a good part of the time, clothes,
travel--why, each of those springs in California cost about four
thousand dollars. That darn car was an expense from start to finish. And
parties and amusements and--oh, one thing or another."
They were both excited now and inordinately depressed. The situation
seemed worse in the actual telling Gloria than it had when he had first
made the discovery himself.
"You've got to make some money," she said suddenly.
"I know it."
"And you've got to make another attempt to see your grandfather."
"I will."
"When?"
"When we get settled."
This eventuality occurred a week later. They rented a small apartment on
Fifty-seventh Street at one hundred and fifty a month. It included
bedroom, living-room, kitchenette, and bath, in a thin, white-stone
apartment house, and though the rooms were too small to display
Anthony's best furniture, they were clean, new, and, in a blonde and
sanitary way, not unattractive. Bounds had gone abroad to enlist in the
British army, and in his place they tolerated rather than enjoyed the
services of a gaunt, big-boned Irishwoman, whom Gloria loathed because
she discussed the glories of Sinn Fein as she served breakfast. But they
vowed they would have no more Japanese, and English servants were for
the present hard to obtain. Like Bounds, the woman prepared only
breakfast. Their other meals they took at restaurants and hotels.
What finally drove Anthony post-haste up to Tarrytown was an
announcement in several New York papers that Adam Patch, the
multimillionaire, the philanthropist, the venerable uplifter, was
seriously ill and not expected to recover.
THE KITTEN
Anthony could not see him. The doctors' instructions were that he was to
talk to no one, said Mr. Shuttleworth--who offered kindly to take any
message that Anthony might care to intrust with him, and deliver it to
Adam Patch when his condition permitted. But by obvious innuendo he
confirmed Anthony's melancholy inference that the prodigal grandson
would be particularly unwelcome at the bedside. At one point in the
conversation Anthony, with Gloria's positive instructions in mind, made
a move as though to brush by the secretary, but Shuttleworth with a
smile squared his brawny shoulders, and Anthony saw how futile such an
attempt would be.
Miserably intimidated, he returned to New York, where husband and wife
passed a restless week. A little incident that occurred one evening
indicated to what tension their nerves were drawn.
Walking home along a cross-street after dinner, Anthony noticed a
night-bound cat prowling near a railing.
"I always have an instinct to kick a cat," he said idly.
"I like them."
"I yielded to it once."
"When?"
"Oh, years ago; before I met you. One night between the acts of a show.
Cold night, like this, and I was a little tight--one of the first times
I was ever tight," he added. "The poor little beggar was looking for a
place to sleep, I guess, and I was in a mean mood, so it took my fancy
to kick it--"
"Oh, the poor kitty!" cried Gloria, sincerely moved. Inspired with the
narrative instinct, Anthony enlarged on the theme.
"It was pretty bad," he admitted. "The poor little beast turned around
and looked at me rather plaintively as though hoping I'd pick him up and
be kind to him--he was really just a kitten--and before he knew it a big
foot launched out at him and caught his little back"
"Oh!" Gloria's cry was full of anguish.
"It was such a cold night," he continued, perversely, keeping his voice
upon a melancholy note. "I guess it expected kindness from somebody, and
it got only pain--"
He broke off suddenly--Gloria was sobbing. They had reached home, and
when they entered the apartment she threw herself upon the lounge,
crying as though he had struck at her very soul.
"Oh, the poor little kitty!" she repeated piteously, "the poor little
kitty. So cold--"
"Gloria"
"Don't come near me! Please, don't come near me. You killed the soft
little kitty."
Touched, Anthony knelt beside her.
"Dear," he said. "Oh, Gloria, darling. It isn't true. I invented
it--every word of it."
But she would not believe him. There had been something in the details
he had chosen to describe that made her cry herself asleep that night,
for the kitten, for Anthony for herself, for the pain and bitterness and
cruelty of all the world.
THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MORALIST
Old Adam died on a midnight of late November with a pious compliment to
his God on his thin lips. He, who had been flattered so much, faded out
flattering the Omnipotent Abstraction which he fancied he might have
angered in the more lascivious moments of his youth. It was announced
that he had arranged some sort of an armistice with the deity, the terms
of which were not made public, though they were thought to have included
a large cash payment. All the newspapers printed his biography, and two
of them ran short editorials on his sterling worth, and his part in the
drama of industrialism, with which he had grown up. They referred
guardedly to the reforms he had sponsored and financed. The memories of
Comstock and Cato the Censor were resuscitated and paraded like gaunt
ghosts through the columns.
Every newspaper remarked that he was survived by a single grandson,
Anthony Comstock Patch, of New York.
The burial took place in the family plot at Tarrytown. Anthony and
Gloria rode in the first carriage, too worried to feel grotesque, both
trying desperately to glean presage of fortune from the faces of
retainers who had been with him at the end.
They waited a frantic week for decency, and then, having received no
notification of any kind, Anthony called up his grandfather's lawyer.
Mr. Brett was not he was expected back in an hour. Anthony left his
telephone number.
It was the last day of November, cool and crackling outside, with a
lustreless sun peering bleakly in at the windows. While they waited for
the call, ostensibly engaged in reading, the atmosphere, within and
without, seemed pervaded with a deliberate rendition of the pathetic
fallacy. After an interminable while, the bell jingled, and Anthony,
starting violently, took up the receiver.
"Hello ..." His voice was strained and hollow. "Yes--I did leave word.
Who is this, please? ... Yes.... Why, it was about the estate. Naturally
I'm interested, and I've received no word about the reading of the
will--I thought you might not have my address.... What? ... Yes ..."
Gloria fell on her knees. The intervals between Anthony's speeches were
like tourniquets winding on her heart. She found herself helplessly
twisting the large buttons from a velvet cushion. Then:
"That's--that's very, very odd--that's very odd--that's very odd. Not
even any--ah--mention or any--ah--reason?"
His voice sounded faint and far away. She uttered a little sound, half
gasp, half cry.
"Yes, I'll see.... All right, thanks ... thanks...."
The phone clicked. Her eyes looking along the floor saw his feet cut the
pattern of a patch of sunlight on the carpet. She arose and faced him
with a gray, level glance just as his arms folded about her.
"My dearest," he whispered huskily. "He did it, God damn him!"
NEXT DAY
"Who are the heirs?" asked Mr. Haight. "You see when you can tell me so
little about it--"