The Beautiful and Damned
There was an undertone of sadness in her character, a conscious evasion
of all except the pleasurable minutiae of life. Her violet eyes would
remain for hours apparently insensate as, thoughtless and reckless, she
basked like a cat in the sun. He wondered what the tired, spiritless
mother thought of them, and whether in her moments of uttermost cynicism
she ever guessed at their relationship.
On Sunday afternoons they walked along the countryside, resting at
intervals on the dry moss in the outskirts of a wood. Here the birds had
gathered and the clusters of violets and white dogwood; here the hoar
trees shone crystalline and cool, oblivious to the intoxicating heat
that waited outside; here he would talk, intermittently, in a sleepy
monologue, in a conversation of no significance, of no replies.
July came scorching down. Captain Dunning was ordered to detail one of
his men to learn blacksmithing. The regiment was filling up to war
strength, and he needed most of his veterans for drill-masters, so he
selected the little Italian, Baptiste, whom he could most easily spare.
Little Baptiste had never had anything to do with horses. His fear made
matters worse. He reappeared in the orderly room one day and told
Captain Dunning that he wanted to die if he couldn't be relieved. The
horses kicked at him, he said; he was no good at the work. Finally he
fell on his knees and besought Captain Dunning, in a mixture of broken
English and scriptural Italian, to get him out of it. He had not slept
for three days; monstrous stallions reared and cavorted through
his dreams.
Captain Dunning reproved the company clerk (who had burst out laughing),
and told Baptiste he would do what he could. But when he thought it over
he decided that he couldn't spare a better man. Little Baptiste went
from bad to worse. The horses seemed to divine his fear and take every
advantage of it. Two weeks later a great black mare crushed his skull in
with her hoofs while he was trying to lead her from her stall.
In mid-July came rumors, and then orders, that concerned a change of
camp. The brigade was to move to an empty cantonment, a hundred miles
farther south, there to be expanded into a division. At first the men
thought they were departing for the trenches, and all evening little
groups jabbered in the company street, shouting to each other in
swaggering exclamations: "Su-u-ure we are!" When the truth leaked out,
it was rejected indignantly as a blind to conceal their real
destination. They revelled in their own importance. That night they told
their girls in town that they were "going to get the Germans." Anthony
circulated for a while among the groups--then, stopping a jitney, rode
down to tell Dot that he was going away.
She was waiting on the dark veranda in a cheap white dress that
accentuated the youth and softness of her face.
"Oh," she whispered, "I've wanted you so, honey. All this day."
"I have something to tell you."
She drew him down beside her on the swinging seat, not noticing his
ominous tone.
"Tell me."
"We're leaving next week."
Her arms seeking his shoulders remained poised upon the dark air, her
chin tipped up. When she spoke the softness was gone from her voice.
"Leaving for France?"
"No. Less luck than that. Leaving for some darn camp in Mississippi."
She shut her eyes and he could see that the lids were trembling.
"Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard."
She was crying upon his shoulder.
"So damned hard, so damned hard," he repeated aimlessly; "it just hurts
people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't
be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does."
Frantic, wild with anguish, she strained him to her breast.
"Oh, God!" she whispered brokenly, "you can't go way from me. I'd die."
He was finding it impossible to pass off his departure as a common,
impersonal blow. He was too near to her to do more than repeat "Poor
little Dot. Poor little Dot."
"And then what?" she demanded wearily.
"What do you mean?"
"You're my whole life, that's all. I'd die for you right now if you said
so. I'd get a knife and kill myself. You can't leave me here."
Her tone frightened him.
"These things happen," he said evenly.
"Then I'm going with you." Tears were streaming down her checks. Her
mouth was trembling in an ecstasy of grief and fear.
"Sweet," he muttered sentimentally, "sweet little girl. Don't you see
we'd just be putting off what's bound to happen? I'll be going to France
in a few months--"
She leaned away from him and clinching her fists lifted her face toward
the sky.
"I want to die," she said, as if moulding each word carefully in her
heart.
"Dot," he whispered uncomfortably, "you'll forget. Things are sweeter
when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it.
It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it
turned to dust in my hands."
"All right."
Absorbed in himself, he continued:
"I've often thought that if I hadn't got what I wanted things might have
been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and
enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the
work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success. I suppose that
at one time I could have had anything I wanted, within reason, but that
was the only thing I ever wanted with any fervor. God! And that taught
me you can't have _any_thing, you can't have anything at _all_. Because
desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there
about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we
poor fools try to grasp it--but when we do the sunbeam moves on to
something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter
that made you want it is gone--" He broke off uneasily. She had risen
and was standing, dry-eyed, picking little leaves from a dark vine.
"Dot--"
"Go way," she said coldly. "What? Why?"
"I don't want just words. If that's all you have for me you'd better
go."
"Why, Dot--"
"What's death to me is just a lot of words to you. You put 'em together
so pretty."
"I'm sorry. I was talking about you, Dot."
"Go way from here."
He approached her with arms outstretched, but she held him away.
"You don't want me to go with you," she said evenly; "maybe you're going
to meet that--that girl--" She could not bring herself to say wife. "How
do I know? Well, then, I reckon you're not my fellow any more. So
go way."
For a moment, while conflicting warnings and desires prompted Anthony,
it seemed one of those rare times when he would take a step prompted
from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him.
It was too late--everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed
the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached
beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark
and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame. With some
profound and uncharted pride she had made herself remote and so achieved
her purpose.
"I didn't--mean to seem so callous, Dot."
"It don't matter."
The fire rolled over Anthony. Something wrenched at his bowels, and he
stood there helpless and beaten.
"Come with me, Dot--little loving Dot. Oh, come with me. I couldn't
leave you now--"
With a sob she wound her arms around him and let him support her weight
while the moon, at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of
the world, showered its illicit honey over the drowsy street.
THE CATASTROPHE
Early September in Camp Boone, Mississippi. The darkness, alive with
insects, beat in upon the mosquito-netting, beneath the shelter of which
Anthony was trying to write a letter. An intermittent chatter over a
poker game was going on in the next tent, and outside a man was
strolling up the company street singing a current bit of doggerel about
"K-K-K-Katy."
With an effort Anthony hoisted himself to his elbow and, pencil in hand,
looked down at his blank sheet of paper. Then, omitting any heading,
he began:
_I can't imagine what the matter is, Gloria. I haven't had a line from
you for two weeks and it's only natural to be worried--_
He threw this away with a disturbed grunt and began again:
_I don't know what to think, Gloria. Your last letter, short, cold,
without a word of affection or even a decent account of what you've been
doing, came two weeks ago. It's only natural that I should wonder. If
your love for me isn't absolutely dead it seems that you'd at least keep
me from worry--_
Again he crumpled the page and tossed it angrily through a tear in the
tent wall, realizing simultaneously that he would have to pick it up in
the morning. He felt disinclined to try again. He could get no warmth
into the lines--only a persistent jealousy and suspicion. Since
midsummer these discrepancies in Gloria's correspondence had grown more
and more noticeable. At first he had scarcely perceived them. He was so
inured to the perfunctory "dearest" and "darlings" scattered through her
letters that he was oblivious to their presence or absence. But in this
last fortnight he had become increasingly aware that there was
something amiss.
He had sent her a night-letter saying that he had passed his
examinations for an officers' training-camp, and expected to leave for
Georgia shortly. She had not answered. He had wired again--when he
received no word he imagined that she might be out of town. But it
occurred and recurred to him that she was not out of town, and a series
of distraught imaginings began to plague him. Supposing Gloria, bored
and restless, had found some one, even as he had. The thought terrified
him with its possibility--it was chiefly because he had been so sure of
her personal integrity that he had considered her so sparingly during
the year. And now, as a doubt was born, the old angers, the rages of
possession, swarmed back a thousandfold. What more natural than that she
should be in love again?
He remembered the Gloria who promised that should she ever want
anything, she would take it, insisting that since she would act entirely
for her own satisfaction she could go through such an affair
unsmirched--it was only the effect on a person's mind that counted,
anyhow, she said, and her reaction would be the masculine one, of
satiation and faint dislike.
But that had been when they were first married. Later, with the
discovery that she could be jealous of Anthony, she had, outwardly at
least, changed her mind. There were no other men in the world for her.
This he had known only too surely. Perceiving that a certain
fastidiousness would restrain her, he had grown lax in preserving the
completeness of her love--which, after all, was the keystone of the
entire structure.
Meanwhile all through the summer he had been maintaining Dot in a
boarding-house down-town. To do this it had been necessary to write to
his broker for money. Dot had covered her journey south by leaving her
house a day before the brigade broke camp, informing her mother in a
note that she had gone to New York. On the evening following Anthony had
called as though to see her. Mrs. Raycroft was in a state of collapse
and there was a policeman in the parlor. A questionnaire had ensued,
from which Anthony had extricated himself with some difficulty.
In September, with his suspicions of Gloria, the company of Dot had
become tedious, then almost intolerable. He was nervous and irritable
from lack of sleep; his heart was sick and afraid. Three days ago he had
gone to Captain Dunning and asked for a furlough, only to be met with
benignant procrastination. The division was starting overseas, while