The Beautiful and Damned
knocked over by an automobile and instantly killed!'"
Gloria let her baby mouth drop slowly open. Then:
"Now hang up! With a bang!"
She obeyed, clung to the table with her eyes wide and staring. At length
she was feeling slightly encouraged and her confidence increased.
"My God!" she cried. Her voice was good, she thought. "Oh, my God!"
"Now faint."
She collapsed forward to her knees and throwing her body outward on the
ground lay without breathing.
"All right!" called Mr. Debris. "That's enough, thank you. That's
plenty. Get up--that's enough."
Gloria arose, mustering her dignity and brushing off her skirt.
"Awful!" she remarked with a cool laugh, though her heart was bumping
tumultuously. "Terrible, wasn't it?"
"Did you mind it?" said Mr. Debris, smiling blandly. "Did it seem hard?
I can't tell anything about it until I have it run off."
"Of course not," she agreed, trying to attach some sort of meaning to
his remark--and failing. It was just the sort of thing he would have
said had he been trying not to encourage her.
A few moments later she left the studio. Bloeckman had promised that she
should hear the result of the test within the next few days. Too proud
to force any definite comment she felt a baffling uncertainty and only
now when the step had at last been taken did she realize how the
possibility of a successful screen career had played in the back of her
mind for the past three years. That night she tried to tell over to
herself the elements that might decide for or against her. Whether or
not she had used enough make-up worried her, and as the part was that of
a girl of twenty, she wondered if she had not been just a little too
grave. About her acting she was least of all satisfied. Her entrance had
been abominable--in fact not until she reached the phone had she
displayed a shred of poise--and then the test had been over. If they had
only realized! She wished that she could try it again. A mad plan to
call up in the morning and ask for a new trial took possession of her,
and as suddenly faded. It seemed neither politic nor polite to ask
another favor of Bloeckman.
The third day of waiting found her in a highly nervous condition. She
had bitten the insides of her mouth until they were raw and smarting,
and burnt unbearably when she washed them with listerine. She had
quarrelled so persistently with Anthony that he had left the apartment
in a cold fury. But because he was intimidated by her exceptional
frigidity, he called up an hour afterward, apologized and said he was
having dinner at the Amsterdam Club, the only one in which he still
retained membership.
It was after one o'clock and she had breakfasted at eleven, so, deciding
to forego luncheon, she started for a walk in the Park. At three there
would be a mail. She would be back by three.
It was an afternoon of premature spring. Water was drying on the walks
and in the Park little girls were gravely wheeling white doll-buggies up
and down under the thin trees while behind them followed bored
nursery-maids in two's, discussing with each other those tremendous
secrets that are peculiar to nursery-maids.
Two o'clock by her little gold watch. She should have a new watch, one
made in a platinum oblong and incrusted with diamonds--but those cost
even more than squirrel coats and of course they were out of her reach
now, like everything else--unless perhaps the right letter was awaiting
her ... in about an hour ... fifty-eight minutes exactly. Ten to get
there left forty-eight ... forty-seven now ...
Little girls soberly wheeling their buggies along the damp sunny walks.
The nursery-maids chattering in pairs about their inscrutable secrets.
Here and there a raggedy man seated upon newspapers spread on a drying
bench, related not to the radiant and delightful afternoon but to the
dirty snow that slept exhausted in obscure corners, waiting for
extermination....
Ages later, coming into the dim hall she saw the Martinique elevator boy
standing incongruously in the light of the stained-glass window.
"Is there any mail for us?" she asked.
"Up-stays, madame."
The switchboard squawked abominably and Gloria waited while he
ministered to the telephone. She sickened as the elevator groaned its
way up--the floors passed like the slow lapse of centuries, each one
ominous, accusing, significant. The letter, a white leprous spot, lay
upon the dirty tiles of the hall....
* * * * *
_My dear Gloria:_
_We had the test run off yesterday afternoon, and Mr. Debris seemed to
think that for the part he had in mind he needed a younger woman. He
said that the acting was not bad, and that there was a small character
part supposed to be a very haughty rich widow that he thought
you might----_
* * * * *
Desolately Gloria raised her glance until it fell out across the
areaway. But she found she could not see the opposite wall, for her gray
eyes were full of tears. She walked into the bedroom, the letter
crinkled tightly in her hand, and sank down upon her knees before the
long mirror on the wardrobe floor. This was her twenty-ninth birthday,
and the world was melting away before her eyes. She tried to think that
it had been the make-up, but her emotions were too profound, too
overwhelming for any consolation that the thought conveyed.
She strained to see until she could feel the flesh on her temples pull
forward. Yes--the cheeks were ever so faintly thin, the corners of the
eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. The eyes were different. Why, they
were different! ... And then suddenly she knew how tired her eyes were.
"Oh, my pretty face," she whispered, passionately grieving. "Oh, my
pretty face! Oh, I don't want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what's
_happened?_"
Then she slid toward the mirror and, as in the test, sprawled face
downward upon the floor--and lay there sobbing. It was the first awkward
movement she had ever made.
CHAPTER III
NO MATTER!
Within another year Anthony and Gloria had become like players who had
lost their costumes, lacking the pride to continue on the note of
tragedy--so that when Mrs. and Miss Hulme of Kansas City cut them dead
in the Plaza one evening, it was only that Mrs. and Miss Hulme, like
most people, abominated mirrors of their atavistic selves.
Their new apartment, for which they paid eighty-five dollars a month,
was situated on Claremont Avenue, which is two blocks from the Hudson in
the dim hundreds. They had lived there a month when Muriel Kane came to
see them late one afternoon.
It was a reproachless twilight on the summer side of spring. Anthony lay
upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street toward
the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green
trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive.
Across the water were the Palisades, crowned by the ugly framework of
the amusement park--yet soon it would be dusk and those same iron
cobwebs would be a glory against the heavens, an enchanted palace set
over the smooth radiance of a tropical canal.
The streets near the apartment, Anthony had found, were streets where
children played--streets a little nicer than those he had been used to
pass on his way to Marietta, but of the same general sort, with an
occasional hand organ or hurdy-gurdy, and in the cool of the evening
many pairs of young girls walking down to the corner drug-store for ice
cream soda and dreaming unlimited dreams under the low heavens.
Dusk in the streets now, and children playing, shouting up incoherent
ecstatic words that faded out close to the open window--and Muriel, who
had come to find Gloria, chattering to him from an opaque gloom over
across the room.
"Light the lamp, why don't we?" she suggested. "It's getting _ghostly_
in here."
With a tired movement he arose and obeyed; the gray window-panes
vanished. He stretched himself. He was heavier now, his stomach was a
limp weight against his belt; his flesh had softened and expanded. He
was thirty-two and his mind was a bleak and disordered wreck.
"Have a little drink, Muriel?"
"Not me, thanks. I don't use it anymore. What're you doing these days,
Anthony?" she asked curiously.
"Well, I've been pretty busy with this lawsuit," he answered
indifferently. "It's gone to the Court of Appeals--ought to be settled
up one way or another by autumn. There's been some objection as to
whether the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over the matter."
Muriel made a clicking sound with her tongue and cocked her head on one
side.
"Well, you tell'em! I never heard of anything taking so long."
"Oh, they all do," he replied listlessly; "all will cases. They say it's
exceptional to have one settled under four or five years."
"Oh ..." Muriel daringly changed her tack, "why don't you go to work,
you la-azy!"
"At what?" he demanded abruptly.
"Why, at anything, I suppose. You're still a young man."
"If that's encouragement, I'm much obliged," he answered dryly--and then
with sudden weariness: "Does it bother you particularly that I don't
want to work?"
"It doesn't bother me--but, it does bother a lot of people who claim--"
"Oh, God!" he said brokenly, "it seems to me that for three years I've
heard nothing about myself but wild stories and virtuous admonitions.
I'm tired of it. If you don't want to see us, let us alone. I don't
bother my former friends. But I need no charity calls, and no criticism
disguised as good advice--" Then he added apologetically: "I'm
sorry--but really, Muriel, you mustn't talk like a lady slum-worker even
if you are visiting the lower middle classes." He turned his bloodshot
eyes on her reproachfully--eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue,
that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when he
was drunk.
"Why do you say such awful things?" she protested. You talk as if you
and Gloria were in the middle classes."
"Why pretend we're not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats
when they can't even keep up the appearances of it."
"Do you think a person has to have money to be aristocratic?"
Muriel ... the horrified democrat ...!
"Why, of course. Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits
which we call fine--courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of
thing--can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't
have the warpings of ignorance and necessity."
Muriel bit her lower lip and waved her head from side to side.
"Well, all _I_ say is that if a person comes from a good family they're
always nice people. That's the trouble with you and Gloria. You think
that just because things aren't going your way right now all your old
friends are trying to avoid you. You're too sensitive--"
"As a matter of fact," said Anthony, "you know nothing at all about it.
With me it's simply a matter of pride, and for once Gloria's reasonable
enough to agree that we oughtn't go where we're not wanted. And people
don't want us. We're too much the ideal bad examples."
"Nonsense! You can't park your pessimism in my little sun parlor. I
think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work."
"Here I am, thirty-two. Suppose I did start in at some idiotic business.
Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week--with luck.
That's _if_ I could get a job at all; there's an awful lot of
unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I'd be any
happier? Do you think that if I don't get this money of my grandfather's
life will be _endurable?_"
Muriel smiled complacently.
"Well," she said, "that may be clever but it isn't common sense."
A few minutes later Gloria came in seeming to bring with her into the