The Beautiful and Damned
executives he saw his charges strictly from the front, and to his
hopeful eyes his command seemed just such an excellent unit as such an
excellent war deserved. For all his anxiety and absorption he was having
the time of his life.
Baptiste, the little Sicilian of the train, fell foul of him the second
week of drill. The captain had several times ordered the men to be
clean-shaven when they fell in each morning. One day there was disclosed
an alarming breech of this rule, surely a case of Teutonic
connivance--during the night four men had grown hair upon their faces.
The fact that three of the four understood a minimum of English made a
practical object-lesson only the more necessary, so Captain Dunning
resolutely sent a volunteer barber back to the company street for a
razor. Whereupon for the safety of democracy a half-ounce of hair was
scraped dry from the cheeks of three Italians and one Pole.
Outside the world of the company there appeared, from time to time, the
colonel, a heavy man with snarling teeth, who circumnavigated the
battalion drill-field upon a handsome black horse. He was a West
Pointer, and, mimetically, a gentleman. He had a dowdy wife and a dowdy
mind, and spent much of his time in town taking advantage of the army's
lately exalted social position. Last of all was the general, who
traversed the roads of the camp preceded by his flag--a figure so
austere, so removed, so magnificent, as to be scarcely comprehensible.
December. Cool winds at night now, and damp, chilly mornings on the
drill-grounds. As the heat faded, Anthony found himself increasingly
glad to be alive. Renewed strangely through his body, he worried little
and existed in the present with a sort of animal content. It was not
that Gloria or the life that Gloria represented was less often in his
thoughts--it was simply that she became, day by day, less real, less
vivid. For a week they had corresponded passionately, almost
hysterically--then by an unwritten agreement they had ceased to write
more than twice, and then once, a week. She was bored, she said; if his
brigade was to be there a long time she was coming down to join him. Mr.
Haight was going to be able to submit a stronger brief than he had
expected, but doubted that the appealed case would come up until late
spring. Muriel was in the city doing Red Cross work, and they went out
together rather often. What would Anthony think if _she_ went into the
Red Cross? Trouble was she had heard that she might have to bathe
negroes in alcohol, and after that she hadn't felt so patriotic. The
city was full of soldiers and she'd seen a lot of boys she hadn't laid
eyes on for years....
Anthony did not want her to come South. He told himself that this was
for many reasons--he needed a rest from her and she from him. She would
be bored beyond measure in town, and she would be able to see Anthony
for only a few hours each day. But in his heart he feared that it was
because he was attracted to Dorothy. As a matter of fact he lived in
terror that Gloria should learn by some chance or intention of the
relation he had formed. By the end of a fortnight the entanglement began
to give him moments of misery at his own faithlessness. Nevertheless, as
each day ended he was unable to withstand the lure that would draw him
irresistibly out of his tent and over to the telephone at the Y.M.C.A.
"Dot."
"Yes?"
"I may be able to get in to-night."
"I'm so glad."
"Do you want to listen to my splendid eloquence for a few starry hours?"
"Oh, you funny--" For an instant he had a memory of five years
before--of Geraldine. Then--
"I'll arrive about eight."
At seven he would be in a jitney bound for the city, where hundreds of
little Southern girls were waiting on moonlit porches for their lovers.
He would be excited already for her warm retarded kisses, for the amazed
quietude of the glances she gave him--glances nearer to worship than any
he had ever inspired. Gloria and he had been equals, giving without
thought of thanks or obligation. To this girl his very caresses were an
inestimable boon. Crying quietly she had confessed to him that he was
not the first man in her life; there had been one other--he gathered
that the affair had no sooner commenced than it had been over.
Indeed, so far as she was concerned, she spoke the truth. She had
forgotten the clerk, the naval officer, the clothier's son, forgotten
her vividness of emotion, which is true forgetting. She knew that in
some opaque and shadowy existence some one had taken her--it was as
though it had occurred in sleep.
Almost every night Anthony came to town. It was too cool now for the
porch, so her mother surrendered to them the tiny sitting room, with its
dozens of cheaply framed chromos, its yard upon yard of decorative
fringe, and its thick atmosphere of several decades in the proximity of
the kitchen. They would build a fire--then, happily, inexhaustibly, she
would go about the business of love. Each evening at ten she would walk
with him to the door, her black hair in disarray, her face pale without
cosmetics, paler still under the whiteness of the moon. As a rule it
would be bright and silver outside; now and then there was a slow warm
rain, too indolent, almost, to reach the ground.
"Say you love me," she would whisper.
"Why, of course, you sweet baby."
"Am I a baby?" This almost wistfully.
"Just a little baby."
She knew vaguely of Gloria. It gave her pain to think of it, so she
imagined her to be haughty and proud and cold. She had decided that
Gloria must be older than Anthony, and that there was no love between
husband and wife. Sometimes she let herself dream that after the war
Anthony would get a divorce and they would be married--but she never
mentioned this to Anthony, she scarcely knew why. She shared his
company's idea that he was a sort of bank clerk--she thought that he was
respectable and poor. She would say:
"If I had some money, darlin', I'd give ev'y bit of it to you.... I'd
like to have about fifty thousand dollars."
"I suppose that'd be plenty," agreed Anthony.
--In her letter that day Gloria had written: "I suppose if we _could_
settle for a million it would be better to tell Mr. Haight to go ahead
and settle. But it'd seem a pity...."
... "We could have an automobile," exclaimed Dot, in a final burst of
triumph.
AN IMPRESSIVE OCCASION
Captain Dunning prided himself on being a great reader of character.
Half an hour after meeting a man he was accustomed to place him in one
of a number of astonishing categories--fine man, good man, smart fellow,
theorizer, poet, and "worthless." One day early in February he caused
Anthony to be summoned to his presence in the orderly tent.
"Patch," he said sententiously, "I've had my eye on you for several
weeks."
Anthony stood erect and motionless.
"And I think you've got the makings of a good soldier."
He waited for the warm glow, which this would naturally arouse, to
cool--and then continued:
"This is no child's play," he said, narrowing his brows.
Anthony agreed with a melancholy "No, sir."
"It's a man's game--and we need leaders." Then the climax, swift, sure,
and electric: "Patch, I'm going to make you a corporal."
At this point Anthony should have staggered slightly backward,
overwhelmed. He was to be one of the quarter million selected for that
consummate trust. He was going to be able to shout the technical phrase,
"Follow me!" to seven other frightened men.
"You seem to be a man of some education," said Captain Dunning.
"Yes, Sir."
"That's good, that's good. Education's a great thing, but don't let it
go to your head. Keep on the way you're doing and you'll be a
good soldier."
With these parting words lingering in his ears, Corporal Patch saluted,
executed a right about face, and left the tent.
Though the conversation amused Anthony, it did generate the idea that
life would be more amusing as a sergeant or, should he find a less
exacting medical examiner, as an officer. He was little interested in
the work, which seemed to belie the army's boasted gallantry. At the
inspections one did not dress up to look well, one dressed up to keep
from looking badly.
But as winter wore away--the short, snowless winter marked by damp
nights and cool, rainy days--he marvelled at how quickly the system had
grasped him. He was a soldier--all who were not soldiers were civilians.
The world was divided primarily into those two classifications.
It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the
military, divided men into two kinds: their own kind--and those without.
To the clergyman there were clergy and laity, to the Catholic there were
Catholics and non-Catholics, to the negro there were blacks and whites,
to the prisoner there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the sick
man there were the sick and the well.... So, without thinking of it once
in his lifetime, he had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a
Gentile, white, free, and well....
As the American troops were poured into the French and British trenches
he began to find the names of many Harvard men among the casualties
recorded in the Army and Navy Journal. But for all the sweat and blood
the situation appeared unchanged, and he saw no prospect of the war's
ending in the perceptible future. In the old chronicles the right wing
of one army always defeated the left wing of the other, the left wing
being, meanwhile, vanquished by the enemy's right. After that the
mercenaries fled. It had been so simple, in those days, almost as if
prearranged....
Gloria wrote that she was reading a great deal. What a mess they had
made of their affairs, she said. She had so little to do now that she
spent her time imagining how differently things might have turned out.
Her whole environment appeared insecure--and a few years back she had
seemed to hold all the strings in her own little hand....
In June her letters grew hurried and less frequent. She suddenly ceased
to write about coming South.
DEFEAT
March in the country around was rare with jasmine and jonquils and
patches of violets in the warming grass. Afterward he remembered
especially one afternoon of such a fresh and magic glamour that as he
stood in the rifle-pit marking targets he recited "Atalanta in Calydon"
to an uncomprehending Pole, his voice mingling with the rip, sing, and
splatter of the bullets overhead.
"When the hounds of spring ..."
_Spang!_
"Are on winter's traces ..."
_Whirr-r-r-r!_ ...
"The mother of months ..."
_"Hey!_ Come to! Mark three-e-e! ..."
In town the streets were in a sleepy dream again, and together Anthony
and Dot idled in their own tracks of the previous autumn until he began
to feel a drowsy attachment for this South--a South, it seemed, more of
Algiers than of Italy, with faded aspirations pointing back over
innumerable generations to some warm, primitive Nirvana, without hope or
care. Here there was an inflection of cordiality, of comprehension, in
every voice. "Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of
us," they seemed to say in their plaintive pleasant cadence, in the
rising inflection terminating on an unresolved minor.
He liked his barber shop where he was "Hi, corporal!" to a pale,
emaciated young man, who shaved him and pushed a cool vibrating machine
endlessly over his insatiable head. He liked "Johnston's Gardens" where
they danced, where a tragic negro made yearning, aching music on a
saxophone until the garish hall became an enchanted jungle of barbaric
rhythms and smoky laughter, where to forget the uneventful passage of
time upon Dorothy's soft sighs and tender whisperings was the
consummation of all aspiration, of all content.