The Beautiful and Damned
sat in the middle, and as he settled himself he slipped his arm about
Gloria's shoulder. It rested there lifelessly for a moment and then
tightened like a vise. He leaned over her.
"You're awfully pretty," he whispered.
"Thank you kindly, sir." She was neither pleased nor annoyed. Before
Anthony came so many arms had done likewise that it had become little
more than a gesture, sentimental but without significance.
Up in Rachael's long front room a low fire and two lamps shaded with
orange silk gave all the light, so that the corners were full of deep and
somnolent shadows. The hostess, moving about in a dark-figured gown of
loose chiffon, seemed to accentuate the already sensuous atmosphere. For
a while they were all four together, tasting the sandwiches that waited
on the tea table--then Gloria found herself alone with Captain Collins
on the fireside lounge; Rachael and Captain Wolf had withdrawn to the
other side of the room, where they were conversing in subdued voices.
"I wish you weren't married," said Collins, his face a ludicrous
travesty of "in all seriousness."
"Why?" She held out her glass to be filled with a high-ball.
"Don't drink any more," he urged her, frowning.
"Why not?"
"You'd be nicer--if you didn't."
Gloria caught suddenly the intended suggestion of the remark, the
atmosphere he was attempting to create. She wanted to laugh--yet she
realized that there was nothing to laugh at. She had been enjoying the
evening, and she had no desire to go home--at the same time it hurt her
pride to be flirted with on just that level.
"Pour me another drink," she insisted.
"Please--"
"Oh, don't be ridiculous!" she cried in exasperation.
"Very well." He yielded with ill grace.
Then his arm was about her again, and again she made no protest. But
when his pink cheek came close she leaned away.
"You're awfully sweet," he said with an aimless air.
She began to sing softly, wishing now that he would take down his arm.
Suddenly her eye fell on an intimate scene across the room--Rachael and
Captain Wolf were engrossed in a long kiss. Gloria shivered
slightly--she knew not why.... Pink face approached again.
"You shouldn't look at them," he whispered. Almost immediately his other
arm was around her ... his breath was on her cheek. Again absurdity
triumphed over disgust, and her laugh was a weapon that needed no
edge of words.
"Oh, I thought you were a sport," he was saying.
"What's a sport?"
"Why, a person that likes to--to enjoy life."
"Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?"
They were interrupted as Rachael and Captain Wolf appeared suddenly
before them.
"It's late, Gloria," said Rachael--she was flushed and her hair was
dishevelled. "You'd better stay here all night."
For an instant Gloria thought the officers were being dismissed. Then
she understood, and, understanding, got to her feet as casually as
she was able.
Uncomprehendingly Rachael continued:
"You can have the room just off this one. I can lend you everything you
need."
Collins's eyes implored her like a dog's; Captain Wolf's arm had settled
familiarly around Rachael's waist; they were waiting.
But the lure of promiscuity, colorful, various, labyrinthine, and ever a
little odorous and stale, had no call or promise for Gloria. Had she so
desired she would have remained, without hesitation, without regret; as
it was she could face coolly the six hostile and offended eyes that
followed her out into the hall with forced politeness and hollow words.
"_He_ wasn't even sport, enough to try to take me home," she thought in
the taxi, and then with a quick surge of resentment: "How
_utterly_ common!"
GALLANTRY
In February she had an experience of quite a different sort. Tudor
Baird, an ancient flame, a young man whom at one time she had fully
intended to marry, came to New York by way of the Aviation Corps, and
called upon her. They went several times to the theatre, and within a
week, to her great enjoyment, he was as much in love with her as ever.
Quite deliberately she brought it about, realizing too late that she had
done a mischief. He reached the point of sitting with her in miserable
silence whenever they went out together.
A Scroll and Keys man at Yale, he possessed the correct reticences of a
"good egg," the correct notions of chivalry and _noblesse oblige_--and,
of course but unfortunately, the correct biases and the correct lack of
ideas--all those traits which Anthony had taught her to despise, but
which, nevertheless, she rather admired. Unlike the majority of his
type, she found that he was not a bore. He was handsome, witty in a
light way, and when she was with him she felt that because of some
quality he possessed--call it stupidity, loyalty, sentimentality, or
something not quite as definite as any of the three--he would have done
anything in his power to please her.
He told her this among other things, very correctly and with a ponderous
manliness that masked a real suffering. Loving him not at all she grew
sorry for him and kissed him sentimentally one night because he was so
charming, a relic of a vanishing generation which lived a priggish and
graceful illusion and was being replaced by less gallant fools.
Afterward she was glad she had kissed him, for next day when his plane
fell fifteen hundred feet at Mineola a piece of a gasolene engine
smashed through his heart.
GLORIA ALONE
When Mr. Haight told her that the trial would not take place until
autumn she decided that without telling Anthony she would go into the
movies. When he saw her successful, both histrionically and financially,
when he saw that she could have her will of Joseph Bloeckman, yielding
nothing in return, he would lose his silly prejudices. She lay awake
half one night planning her career and enjoying her successes in
anticipation, and the next morning she called up "Films Par Excellence."
Mr. Bloeckman was in Europe.
But the idea had gripped her so strongly this time that she decided to
go the rounds of the moving picture employment agencies. As so often had
been the case, her sense of smell worked against her good intentions.
The employment agency smelt as though it had been dead a very long time.
She waited five minutes inspecting her unprepossessing competitors--then
she walked briskly out into the farthest recesses of Central Park and
remained so long that she caught a cold. She was trying to air the
employment agency out of her walking suit.
In the spring she began to gather from Anthony's letters--not from any
one in particular but from their culminative effect--that he did not
want her to come South. Curiously repeated excuses that seemed to haunt
him by their very insufficiency occurred with Freudian regularity. He
set them down in each letter as though he feared he had forgotten them
the last time, as though it were desperately necessary to impress her
with them. And the dilutions of his letters with affectionate
diminutives began to be mechanical and unspontaneous--almost as though,
having completed the letter, he had looked it over and literally stuck
them in, like epigrams in an Oscar Wilde play. She jumped to the
solution, rejected it, was angry and depressed by turns--finally she
shut her mind to it proudly, and allowed an increasing coolness to creep
into her end of the correspondence.
Of late she had found a good deal to occupy her attention. Several
aviators whom she had met through Tudor Baird came into New York to see
her and two other ancient beaux turned up, stationed at Camp Dix. As
these men were ordered overseas they, so to speak, handed her down to
their friends. But after another rather disagreeable experience with a
potential Captain Collins she made it plain that when any one was
introduced to her he should be under no misapprehensions as to her
status and personal intentions.
When summer came she learned, like Anthony, to watch the officers'
casualty list, taking a sort of melancholy pleasure in hearing of the
death of some one with whom she had once danced a german and in
identifying by name the younger brothers of former suitors--thinking, as
the drive toward Paris progressed, that here at length went the world to
inevitable and well-merited destruction.
She was twenty-seven. Her birthday fled by scarcely noticed. Years
before it had frightened her when she became twenty, to some extent when
she reached twenty-six--but now she looked in the glass with calm
self-approval seeing the British freshness of her complexion and her
figure boyish and slim as of old.
She tried not to think of Anthony. It was as though she were writing to
a stranger. She told her friends that he had been made a corporal and
was annoyed when they were politely unimpressed. One night she wept
because she was sorry for him--had he been even slightly responsive she
would have gone to him without hesitation on the first train--whatever he
was doing he needed to be taken care of spiritually, and she felt that
now she would be able to do even that. Recently, without his continual
drain upon her moral strength she found herself wonderfully revived.
Before he left she had been inclined through sheer association to brood
on her wasted opportunities--now she returned to her normal state of
mind, strong, disdainful, existing each day for each day's worth. She
bought a doll and dressed it; one week she wept over "Ethan Frome"; the
next she revelled in some novels of Galsworthy's, whom she liked for his
power of recreating, by spring in darkness, that illusion of young
romantic love to which women look forever forward and forever back.
In October Anthony's letters multiplied, became almost frantic--then
suddenly ceased. For a worried month it needed all her powers of control
to refrain from leaving immediately for Mississippi. Then a telegram
told her that he had been in the hospital and that she could expect him
in New York within ten days. Like a figure in a dream he came back into
her life across the ballroom on that November evening--and all through
long hours that held familiar gladness she took him close to her breast,
nursing an illusion of happiness and security she had not thought that
she would know again.
DISCOMFITURE OF THE GENERALS
After a week Anthony's regiment went back to the Mississippi camp to be
discharged. The officers shut themselves up in the compartments on the
Pullman cars and drank the whiskey they had bought in New York, and in
the coaches the soldiers got as drunk as possible also--and pretended
whenever the train stopped at a village that they were just returned
from France, where they had practically put an end to the German army.
As they all wore overseas caps and claimed that they had not had time to
have their gold service stripes sewed on, the yokelry of the seaboard
were much impressed and asked them how they liked the trenches--to which
they replied "Oh, _boy!_" with great smacking of tongues and shaking of
heads. Some one took a piece of chalk and scrawled on the side of the
train, "We won the war--now we're going home," and the officers laughed
and let it stay. They were all getting what swagger they could out of
this ignominious return.
As they rumbled on toward camp, Anthony was uneasy lest he should find
Dot awaiting him patiently at the station. To his relief he neither saw
nor heard anything of her and thinking that were she still in town she
would certainly attempt to communicate with him, he concluded that she
had gone--whither he neither knew nor cared. He wanted only to return to
Gloria--Gloria reborn and wonderfully alive. When eventually he was
discharged he left his company on the rear of a great truck with a crowd
who had given tolerant, almost sentimental, cheers for their officers,