The Beautiful and Damned
He was too tired to try to understand--or to care. Her phrases, her
intentions, were all very far away in an incomprehensible past. At the
second letter he scarcely glanced; it was from Dot--an incoherent,
tear-swollen scrawl, a flood of protest, endearment, and grief. After a
page he let it slip from his inert hand and drowsed back into a nebulous
hinterland of his own. At drill-call he awoke with a high fever and
fainted when he tried to leave his tent--at noon he was sent to the base
hospital with influenza.
He was aware that this sickness was providential. It saved him from a
hysterical relapse--and he recovered in time to entrain on a damp
November day for New York, and for the interminable massacre beyond.
When the regiment reached Camp Mills, Long Island, Anthony's single idea
was to get into the city and see Gloria as soon as possible. It was now
evident that an armistice would be signed within the week, but rumor had
it that in any case troops would continue to be shipped to France until
the last moment. Anthony was appalled at the notion of the long voyage,
of a tedious debarkation at a French port, and of being kept abroad for
a year, possibly, to replace the troops who had seen actual fighting.
His intention had been to obtain a two-day furlough, but Camp Mills
proved to be under a strict influenza quarantine--it was impossible for
even an officer to leave except on official business. For a private it
was out of the question.
The camp itself was a dreary muddle, cold, wind-swept, and filthy, with
the accumulated dirt incident to the passage through of many divisions.
Their train came in at seven one night, and they waited in line until
one while a military tangle was straightened out somewhere ahead.
Officers ran up and down ceaselessly, calling orders and making a great
uproar. It turned out that the trouble was due to the colonel, who was
in a righteous temper because he was a West Pointer, and the war was
going to stop before he could get overseas. Had the militant governments
realized the number of broken hearts among the older West Pointers
during that week, they would indubitably have prolonged the slaughter
another month. The thing was pitiable!
Gazing out at the bleak expanse of tents extending for miles over a
trodden welter of slush and snow, Anthony saw the impracticability of
trudging to a telephone that night. He would call her at the first
opportunity in the morning.
Aroused in the chill and bitter dawn he stood at reveille and listened
to a passionate harangue from Captain Dunning:
"You men may think the war is over. Well, let me tell you, it isn't!
Those fellows aren't going to sign the armistice. It's another trick,
and we'd be crazy to let anything slacken up here in the company,
because, let me tell you, we're going to sail from here within a week,
and when we do we're going to see some real fighting." He paused that
they might get the full effect of his pronouncement. And then: "If you
think the war's over, just talk to any one who's been in it and see if
_they_ think the Germans are all in. They don't. Nobody does. I've
talked to the people that _know_, and they say there'll be, anyways, a
year longer of war. _They_ don't think it's over. So you men better not
get any foolish ideas that it is."
Doubly stressing this final admonition, he ordered the company
dismissed.
At noon Anthony set off at a run for the nearest canteen telephone. As
he approached what corresponded to the down-town of the camp, he noticed
that many other soldiers were running also, that a man near him had
suddenly leaped into the air and clicked his heels together. The
tendency to run became general, and from little excited groups here and
there came the sounds of cheering. He stopped and listened--over the
cold country whistles were blowing and the chimes of the Garden City
churches broke suddenly into reverberatory sound.
Anthony began to run again. The cries were clear and distinct now as
they rose with clouds of frosted breath into the chilly air:
_"Germany's surrendered! Germany's surrendered!"_
THE FALSE ARMISTICE
That evening in the opaque gloom of six o'clock Anthony slipped between
two freight-cars, and once over the railroad, followed the track along
to Garden City, where he caught an electric train for New York. He stood
some chance of apprehension--he knew that the military police were often
sent through the cars to ask for passes, but he imagined that to-night
the vigilance would be relaxed. But, in any event, he would have tried
to slip through, for he had been unable to locate Gloria by telephone,
and another day of suspense would have been intolerable.
After inexplicable stops and waits that reminded him of the night he had
left New York, over a year before, they drew into the Pennsylvania
Station, and he followed the familiar way to the taxi-stand, finding it
grotesque and oddly stimulating to give his own address.
Broadway was a riot of light, thronged as he had never seen it with a
carnival crowd which swept its glittering way through scraps of paper,
piled ankle-deep on the sidewalks. Here and there, elevated upon benches
and boxes, soldiers addressed the heedless mass, each face in which was
clear cut and distinct under the white glare overhead. Anthony picked
out half a dozen figures--a drunken sailor, tipped backward and
supported by two other gobs, was waving his hat and emitting a wild
series of roars; a wounded soldier, crutch in hand, was borne along in
an eddy on the shoulders of some shrieking civilians; a dark-haired girl
sat cross-legged and meditative on top of a parked taxicab. Here surely
the victory had come in time, the climax had been scheduled with the
uttermost celestial foresight. The great rich nation had made triumphant
war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness--hence
the carnival, the feasting, the triumph. Under these bright lights
glittered the faces of peoples whose glory had long since passed away,
whose very civilizations were dead-men whose ancestors had heard the
news of victory in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Bagdad, in Tyre, a hundred
generations before; men whose ancestors had seen a flower-decked,
slave-adorned cortege drift with its wake of captives down the avenues
of Imperial Rome....
Past the Rialto, the glittering front of the Astor, the jewelled
magnificence of Times Square ... a gorgeous alley of incandescence
ahead.... Then--was it years later?--he was paying the taxi-driver in
front of a white building on Fifty-seventh Street. He was in the
hall--ah, there was the negro boy from Martinique, lazy, indolent,
unchanged.
"Is Mrs. Patch in?"
"I have just came on, sah," the man announced with his incongruous
British accent.
"Take me up--"
Then the slow drone of the elevator, the three steps to the door, which
swung open at the impetus of his knock.
"Gloria!" His voice was trembling. No answer. A faint string of smoke
was rising from a cigarette-tray--a number of Vanity Fair sat astraddle
on the table.
"Gloria!"
He ran into the bedroom, the bath. She was not there. A negligée of
robin's-egg blue laid out upon the bed diffused a faint perfume,
illusive and familiar. On a chair were a pair of stockings and a street
dress; an open powder box yawned upon the bureau. She must just
have gone out.
The telephone rang abruptly and he started--answered it with all the
sensations of an impostor.
"Hello. Is Mrs. Patch there?"
"No, I'm looking for her myself. Who is this?"
"This is Mr. Crawford."
"This is Mr. Patch speaking. I've just arrived unexpectedly, and I don't
know where to find her."
"Oh." Mr. Crawford sounded a bit taken aback. "Why, I imagine she's at
the Armistice Ball. I know she intended going, but I didn't think she'd
leave so early."
"Where's the Armistice Ball?"
"At the Astor."
"Thanks."
Anthony hung up sharply and rose. Who was Mr. Crawford? And who was it
that was taking her to the ball? How long had this been going on? All
these questions asked and answered themselves a dozen times, a dozen
ways. His very proximity to her drove him half frantic.
In a frenzy of suspicion he rushed here and there about the apartment,
hunting for some sign of masculine occupation, opening the bathroom
cupboard, searching feverishly through the bureau drawers. Then he found
something that made him stop suddenly and sit down on one of the twin
beds, the corners of his mouth drooping as though he were about to weep.
There in a corner of her drawer, tied with a frail blue ribbon, were all
the letters and telegrams he had written her during the year past. He
was suffused with happy and sentimental shame.
"I'm not fit to touch her," he cried aloud to the four walls. "I'm not
fit to touch her little hand."
Nevertheless, he went out to look for her.
In the Astor lobby he was engulfed immediately in a crowd so thick as to
make progress almost impossible. He asked the direction of the ballroom
from half a dozen people before he could get a sober and intelligible
answer. Eventually, after a last long wait, he checked his military
overcoat in the hall.
It was only nine but the dance was in full blast. The panorama was
incredible. Women, women everywhere--girls gay with wine singing shrilly
above the clamor of the dazzling confetti-covered throng; girls set off
by the uniforms of a dozen nations; fat females collapsing without
dignity upon the floor and retaining self-respect by shouting "Hurraw
for the Allies!"; three women with white hair dancing hand in hand
around a sailor, who revolved in a dizzying spin upon the floor,
clasping to his heart an empty bottle of champagne.
Breathlessly Anthony scanned the dancers, scanned the muddled lines
trailing in single file in and out among the tables, scanned the
horn-blowing, kissing, coughing, laughing, drinking parties under the
great full-bosomed flags which leaned in glowing color over the
pageantry and the sound.
Then he saw Gloria. She was sitting at a table for two directly across
the room. Her dress was black, and above it her animated face, tinted
with the most glamourous rose, made, he thought, a spot of poignant
beauty on the room. His heart leaped as though to a new music. He
jostled his way toward her and called her name just as the gray eyes
looked up and found him. For that instant as their bodies met and
melted, the world, the revel, the tumbling whimper of the music faded to
an ecstatic monotone hushed as a song of bees.
"Oh, my Gloria!" he cried.
Her kiss was a cool rill flowing from her heart.
CHAPTER II
A MATTER OF AESTHETICS
On the night when Anthony had left for Camp Hooker one year before, all
that was left of the beautiful Gloria Gilbert--her shell, her young and
lovely body--moved up the broad marble steps of the Grand Central
Station with the rhythm of the engine beating in her ears like a dream,
and out onto Vanderbilt Avenue, where the huge bulk of the Biltmore
overhung, the street and, down at its low, gleaming entrance, sucked in
the many-colored opera-cloaks of gorgeously dressed girls. For a moment
she paused by the taxi-stand and watched them--wondering that but a few
years before she had been of their number, ever setting out for a
radiant Somewhere, always just about to have that ultimate passionate
adventure for which the girls' cloaks were delicate and beautifully
furred, for which their cheeks were painted and their hearts higher than
the transitory dome of pleasure that would engulf them, coiffure,
cloak, and all.
It was growing colder and the men passing had flipped up the collars of
their overcoats. This change was kind to her. It would have been kinder
still had everything changed, weather, streets, and people, and had she