The Beautiful and Damned
He liked her, realizing that she was temporizing for the effect on him.
He came closer and took her hand.
"If we get back by ten, can't you? just to the movies?"
"Well--I reckon so--"
Hand in hand they walked back toward down-town, along a hazy, dusky
street where a negro newsboy was calling an extra in the cadence of the
local venders' tradition, a cadence that was as musical as song.
Dot
Anthony's affair with Dorothy Raycroft was an inevitable result of his
increasing carelessness about himself. He did not go to her desiring to
possess the desirable, nor did he fall before a personality more vital,
more compelling than his own, as he had done with Gloria four years
before. He merely slid into the matter through his inability to make
definite judgments. He could say "No!" neither to man nor woman;
borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. Indeed
he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did they were but
half-hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and
irreparable awakening.
The particular weakness he indulged on this occasion was his need of
excitement and stimulus from without. He felt that for the first time in
four years he could express and interpret himself anew. The girl
promised rest; the hours in her company each evening alleviated the
morbid and inevitably futile poundings of his imagination. He had become
a coward in earnest--completely the slave of a hundred disordered and
prowling thoughts which were released by the collapse of the authentic
devotion to Gloria that had been the chief jailer of his insufficiency.
On that first night, as they stood by the gate, he kissed Dorothy and
made an engagement to meet her the following Saturday. Then he went out
to camp, and with the light burning lawlessly in his tent, he wrote a
long letter to Gloria, a glowing letter, full of the sentimental dark,
full of the remembered breath of flowers, full of a true and exceeding
tenderness--these things he had learned again for a moment in a kiss
given and taken under a rich warm moonlight just an hour before.
When Saturday night came he found Dot waiting at the entrance of the
Bijou Moving Picture Theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding
Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently
been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumpled.
Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that in a sketchy,
faulty way she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small,
irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark,
unenduring little flower--yet he thought he detected in her some quality
of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of
all things. In this he was mistaken.
Dorothy Raycroft was nineteen. Her father had kept a small, unprosperous
corner store, and she had graduated from high school in the lowest
fourth of her class two days before he died. At high school she had
enjoyed a rather unsavory reputation. As a matter of fact her behavior
at the class picnic, where the rumors started, had been merely
indiscreet--she had retained her technical purity until over a year
later. The boy had been a clerk in a store on Jackson Street, and on the
day after the incident he departed unexpectedly to New York. He had been
intending to leave for some time, but had tarried for the consummation
of his amorous enterprise.
After a while she confided the adventure to a girl friend, and later, as
she watched her friend disappear down the sleepy street of dusty
sunshine she knew in a flash of intuition that her story was going out
into the world. Yet after telling it she felt much better, and a little
bitter, and made as near an approach to character as she was capable of
by walking in another direction and meeting another man with the honest
intention of gratifying herself again. As a rule things happened to Dot.
She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was
being weak. She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the
things she did were brave. She neither defied nor conformed nor
compromised.
She had no sense of humor, but, to take its place, a happy disposition
that made her laugh at the proper times when she was with men. She had
no definite intentions--sometimes she regretted vaguely that her
reputation precluded what chance she had ever had for security. There
had been no open discovery: her mother was interested only in starting
her off on time each morning for the jewelry store where she earned
fourteen dollars a week. But some of the boys she had known in high
school now looked the other way when they were walking with "nice
girls," and these incidents hurt her feelings. When they occurred she
went home and cried.
Besides the Jackson Street clerk there had been two other men, of whom
the first was a naval officer, who passed through town during the early
days of the war. He had stayed over a night to make a connection, and
was leaning idly against one of the pillars of the Stonewall Hotel when
she passed by. He remained in town four days. She thought she loved
him--lavished on him that first hysteria of passion that would have gone
to the pusillanimous clerk. The naval officer's uniform--there were few
of them in those days--had made the magic. He left with vague promises
on his lips, and, once on the train, rejoiced that he had not told her
his real name.
Her resultant depression had thrown her into the arms of Cyrus Fielding,
the son of a local clothier, who had hailed her from his roadster one
day as she passed along the sidewalk. She had always known him by name.
Had she been born to a higher stratum he would have known her before.
She had descended a little lower--so he met her after all. After a month
he had gone away to training-camp, a little afraid of the intimacy, a
little relieved in perceiving that she had not cared deeply for him, and
that she was not the sort who would ever make trouble. Dot romanticized
this affair and conceded to her vanity that the war had taken these men
away from her. She told herself that she could have married the naval
officer. Nevertheless, it worried her that within eight months there had
been three men in her life. She thought with more fear than wonder in
her heart that she would soon be like those "bad girls" on Jackson
Street at whom she and her gum-chewing, giggling friends had stared with
fascinated glances three years before.
For a while she attempted to be more careful. She let men "pick her up";
she let them kiss her, and even allowed certain other liberties to be
forced upon her, but she did not add to her trio. After several months
the strength of her resolution--or rather the poignant expediency of her
fears--was worn away. She grew restless drowsing there out of life and
time while the summer months faded. The soldiers she met were either
obviously below her or, less obviously, above her--in which case they
desired only to use her; they were Yankees, harsh and ungracious; they
swarmed in large crowds.... And then she met Anthony.
On that first evening he had been little more than a pleasantly unhappy
face, a voice, the means with which to pass an hour, but when she kept
her engagement with him on Saturday she regarded him with consideration.
She liked him. Unknowingly she saw her own tragedies mirrored in
his face.
Again they went to the movies, again they wandered along the shadowy,
scented streets, hand in hand this time, speaking a little in hushed
voices. They passed through the gate--up toward the little porch--
"I can stay a while, can't I?"
"Sh!" she whispered, "we've got to be very quiet. Mother sits up reading
Snappy Stories." In confirmation he heard the faint crackling inside as
a page was turned. The open-shutter slits emitted horizontal rods of
light that fell in thin parallels across Dorothy's skirt. The street was
silent save for a group on the steps of a house across the way, who,
from time to time, raised their voices in a soft, bantering song.
"--_When you wa-ake
You shall ha-ave
All the pretty little hawsiz_--"
Then, as though it had been waiting on a near-by roof for their arrival,
the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's
face to the color of white roses.
Anthony had a start of memory, so vivid that before his closed eyes
there formed a picture, distinct as a flashback on a screen--a spring
night of thaw set out of time in a half-forgotten winter five years
before--another face, radiant, flower-like, upturned to lights as
transforming as the stars--
Ah, _la belle dame sans merci_ who lived in his heart, made known to him
in transitory fading splendor by dark eyes in the Ritz-Carlton, by a
shadowy glance from a passing carriage in the Bois de Boulogne! But
those nights were only part of a song, a remembered glory--here again
were the faint winds, the illusions, the eternal present with its
promise of romance.
"Oh," she whispered, "do you love me? Do you love me?"
The spell was broken--the drifted fragments of the stars became only
light, the singing down the street diminished to a monotone, to the
whimper of locusts in the grass. With almost a sigh he kissed her
fervent mouth, while her arms crept up about his shoulders.
THE MAN-AT-ARMS
As the weeks dried up and blew away, the range of Anthony's travels
extended until he grew to comprehend the camp and its environment. For
the first time in his life he was in constant personal contact with the
waiters to whom he had given tips, the chauffeurs who had touched their
hats to him, the carpenters, plumbers, barbers, and farmers who had
previously been remarkable only in the subservience of their
professional genuflections. During his first two months in camp he did
not hold ten minutes' consecutive conversation with a single man.
On the service record his occupation stood as "student"; on the original
questionnaire he had prematurely written "author"; but when men in his
company asked his business he commonly gave it as bank clerk--had he
told the truth, that he did no work, they would have been suspicious of
him as a member of the leisure class.
His platoon sergeant, Pop Donnelly, was a scraggly "old soldier," worn
thin with drink. In the past he had spent unnumbered weeks in the
guard-house, but recently, thanks to the drill-master famine, he had
been elevated to his present pinnacle. His complexion was full of
shell-holes--it bore an unmistakable resemblance to those aerial
photographs of "the battle-field at Blank." Once a week he got drunk
down-town on white liquor, returned quietly to camp and collapsed upon
his bunk, joining the company at reveille looking more than ever like a
white mask of death.
He nursed the astounding delusion that he was astutely "slipping it
over" on the government--he had spent eighteen years in its service at a
minute wage, and he was soon to retire (here he usually winked) on the
impressive income of fifty-five dollars a month. He looked upon it as a
gorgeous joke that he had played upon the dozens who had bullied and
scorned him since he was a Georgia country boy of nineteen.
At present there were but two lieutenants--Hopkins and the popular
Kretching. The latter was considered a good fellow and a fine leader,
until a year later, when he disappeared with a mess fund of eleven
hundred dollars and, like so many leaders, proved exceedingly difficult
to follow.
Eventually there was Captain Dunning, god of this brief but
self-sufficing microcosm. He was a reserve officer, nervous, energetic,
and enthusiastic. This latter quality, indeed, often took material form
and was visible as fine froth in the corners of his mouth. Like most