The Beautiful and Damned
undaunted ambition toward the first three dozen young men, who were of
course invited to each of the ninety-six parties--as were the young
lady's group of family friends, acquaintances, college boys, and eager
young outsiders. To continue, there was a third layer from the skirts of
the city, from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to bitter Connecticut
and the ineligible sections of Long Island--and doubtless contiguous
layers down to the city's shoes: Jewesses were coming out into a society
of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx, and looking
forward to a rising young broker or jeweller and a kosher wedding; Irish
girls were casting their eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a
society of young Tammany politicians, pious undertakers, and grown-up
choirboys.
And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entré--the working
girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing
finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular
excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted
male--as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may
consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke and
the subway's foulness was freshened. And the actresses came out in new
plays and the publishers came out with new books and the Castles came
out with new dances. And the railroads came out with new schedules
containing new mistakes instead of the old ones that the commuters had
grown used to....
The City was coming out!
Anthony, walking along Forty-second Street one afternoon under a
steel-gray sky, ran unexpectedly into Richard Caramel emerging from the
Manhattan Hotel barber shop. It was a cold day, the first definitely
cold day, and Caramel had on one of those knee-length, sheep-lined coats
long worn by the working men of the Middle West, that were just coming
into fashionable approval. His soft hat was of a discreet dark brown,
and from under it his clear eye flamed like a topaz. He stopped Anthony
enthusiastically, slapping him on the arms more from a desire to keep
himself warm than from playfulness, and, after his inevitable hand
shake, exploded into sound.
"Cold as the devil--Good Lord, I've been working like the deuce all day
till my room got so cold I thought I'd get pneumonia. Darn landlady
economizing on coal came up when I yelled over the stairs for her for
half an hour. Began explaining why and all. God! First she drove me
crazy, then I began to think she was sort of a character, and took notes
while she talked--so she couldn't see me, you know, just as though I
were writing casually--"
He had seized Anthony's arm and walking him briskly up Madison Avenue.
"Where to?"
"Nowhere in particular."
"Well, then what's the use?" demanded Anthony.
They stopped and stared at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold
made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel's, whose nose was
crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were
red and watery at the rims. After a moment they began walking again.
"Done some good work on my novel." Dick was looking and talking
emphatically at the sidewalk. "But I have to get out once in a while."
He glanced at Anthony apologetically, as though craving encouragement.
"I have to talk. I guess very few people ever really _think_, I mean sit
down and ponder and have ideas in sequence. I do my thinking in writing
or conversation. You've got to have a start, sort of--something to
defend or contradict--don't you think?"
Anthony grunted and withdrew his arm gently.
"I don't mind carrying you, Dick, but with that coat--"
"I mean," continued Richard Caramel gravely, "that on paper your first
paragraph contains the idea you're going to damn or enlarge on. In
conversation you've got your vis-à-vis's last statement--but when you
simply _ponder_, why, your ideas just succeed each other like
magic-lantern pictures and each one forces out the last."
They passed Forty-fifth Street and slowed down slightly. Both of them
lit cigarettes and blew tremendous clouds of smoke and frosted breath
into the air.
"Let's walk up to the Plaza and have an egg-nog," suggested Anthony. "Do
you good. Air'll get the rotten nicotine out of your lungs. Come
on--I'll let you talk about your book all the way."
"I don't want to if it bores you. I mean you needn't do it as a favor."
The words tumbled out in haste, and though he tried to keep his face
casual it screwed up uncertainly. Anthony was compelled to protest:
"Bore me? I should say not!"
"Got a cousin--" began Dick, but Anthony interrupted by stretching out
his arms and breathing forth a low cry of exultation.
"Good weather!" he exclaimed, "isn't it? Makes me feel about ten. I mean
it makes me feel as I should have felt when I was ten. Murderous! Oh,
God! one minute it's my world, and the next I'm the world's fool. To-day
it's my world and everything's easy, easy. Even Nothing is easy!"
"Got a cousin up at the Plaza. Famous girl. We can go up and meet her.
She lives there in the winter--has lately anyway--with her mother
and father."
"Didn't know you had cousins in New York."
"Her name's Gloria. She's from home--Kansas City. Her mother's a
practising Bilphist, and her father's quite dull but a perfect
gentleman."
"What are they? Literary material?"
"They try to be. All the old man does is tell me he just met the most
wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic
friend of his and then he says: '_There_'s a character for you! Why
don't you write him up? Everybody'd be interested in _him_.' Or else he
tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and
says: 'Why don't you write a story about that place? That'd be a
wonderful setting for a story!'"
"How about the girl?" inquired Anthony casually, "Gloria--Gloria what?"
"Gilbert. Oh, you've heard of her--Gloria Gilbert. Goes to dances at
colleges--all that sort of thing."
"I've heard her name."
"Good-looking--in fact damned attractive."
They reached Fiftieth Street and turned over toward the Avenue.
"I don't care for young girls as a rule," said Anthony, frowning.
This was not strictly true. While it seemed to him that the average
debutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what
the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any
girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him
enormously.
"Gloria's darn nice--not a brain in her head."
Anthony laughed in a one-syllabled snort.
"By that you mean that she hasn't a line of literary patter."
"No, I don't."
"Dick, you know what passes as brains in a girl for you. Earnest young
women who sit with you in a corner and talk earnestly about life. The
kind who when they were sixteen argued with grave faces as to whether
kissing was right or wrong--and whether it was immoral for freshmen to
drink beer."
Richard Caramel was offended. His scowl crinkled like crushed paper.
"No--" he began, but Anthony interrupted ruthlessly.
"Oh, yes; kind who just at present sit in corners and confer on the
latest Scandinavian Dante available in English translation."
Dick turned to him, a curious falling in his whole countenance. His
question was almost an appeal.
"What's the matter with you and Maury? You talk sometimes as though I
were a sort of inferior."
Anthony was confused, but he was also cold and a little uncomfortable,
so he took refuge in attack.
"I don't think your brains matter, Dick."
"Of course they matter!" exclaimed Dick angrily. "What do you mean? Why
don't they matter?"
"You might know too much for your pen."
"I couldn't possibly."
"I can imagine," insisted Anthony, "a man knowing too much for his
talent to express. Like me. Suppose, for instance, I have more wisdom
than you, and less talent. It would tend to make me inarticulate. You,
on the contrary, have enough water to fill the pail and a big enough
pail to hold the water."
"I don't follow you at all," complained Dick in a crestfallen tone.
Infinitely dismayed, he seemed to bulge in protest. He was staring
intently at Anthony and caroming off a succession of passers-by, who
reproached him with fierce, resentful glances.
"I simply mean that a talent like Wells's could carry the intelligence
of a Spencer. But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's
carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing
the more entertaining you can be about it."
Dick considered, unable to decide the exact degree of criticism intended
by Anthony's remarks. But Anthony, with that facility which seemed so
frequently to flow from him, continued, his dark eyes gleaming in his
thin face, his chin raised, his voice raised, his whole physical
being raised:
"Say I am proud and sane and wise--an Athenian among Greeks. Well, I
might fail where a lesser man would succeed. He could imitate, he could
adorn, he could be enthusiastic, he could be hopefully constructive. But
this hypothetical me would be too proud to imitate, too sane to be
enthusiastic, too sophisticated to be Utopian, too Grecian to adorn."
"Then you don't think the artist works from his intelligence?"
"No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of
style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him
what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because
it's his mode of living. Don't tell me you like this 'Divine Function of
the Artist' business?"
"I'm not accustomed even to refer to myself as an artist."
"Dick," said Anthony, changing his tone, "I want to beg your pardon."
"Why?"
"For that outburst. I'm honestly sorry. I was talking for effect."
Somewhat mollified, Dick rejoined:
"I've often said you were a Philistine at heart."
It was a crackling dusk when they turned in under the white façade of
the Plaza and tasted slowly the foam and yellow thickness of an egg-nog.
Anthony looked at his companion. Richard Caramel's nose and brow were
slowly approaching a like pigmentation; the red was leaving the one, the
blue deserting the other. Glancing in a mirror, Anthony was glad to find
that his own skin had not discolored. On the contrary, a faint glow had
kindled in his cheeks--he fancied that he had never looked so well.
"Enough for me," said Dick, his tone that of an athlete in training. "I
want to go up and see the Gilberts. Won't you come?"
"Why--yes. If you don't dedicate me to the parents and dash off in the
corner with Dora."
"Not Dora--Gloria."
A clerk announced them over the phone, and ascending to the tenth floor
they followed a winding corridor and knocked at 1088. The door was
answered by a middle-aged lady--Mrs. Gilbert herself.
"How do you do?" She spoke in the conventional American lady-lady
language. "Well, I'm _aw_fully glad to see you--"
Hasty interjections by Dick, and then:
"Mr. Pats? Well, do come in, and leave your coat there." She pointed to
a chair and changed her inflection to a deprecatory laugh full of minute
gasps. "This is really lovely--lovely. Why, Richard, you haven't been
here for _so_ long--no!--no!" The latter monosyllables served half as
responses, half as periods, to some vague starts from Dick. "Well, do
sit down and tell me what you've been doing."
One crossed and recrossed; one stood and bowed ever so gently; one
smiled again and again with helpless stupidity; one wondered if she
would ever sit down at length one slid thankfully into a chair and
settled for a pleasant call.
"I suppose it's because you've been busy--as much as anything else,"
smiled Mrs. Gilbert somewhat ambiguously. The "as much as anything else"
she used to balance all her more rickety sentences. She had two other