The Beautiful and Damned
modesty. Of course some of the critics haven't paid so much attention to
me since I've been established--but, after all, it's not the critics
that count. They're just sheep."
For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony
felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard
Caramel continued:
"My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of
America--because of my New York novel."
"Yes," Anthony managed to muster, "I suppose there's a good deal in what
you say."
He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He, knew that he would have
changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best
to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then--can a man
disparage his life-work so readily? ...
--And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great
hittings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary, unmatched
eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the
fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged
concentration--Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back
seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.
THE BEATING
As winter approached it seemed that a sort of madness seized upon
Anthony. He awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria could feel him
trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble
into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the
influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her
eyes, Gloria's soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out
all night, as he did several times, she not only failed to be sorry but
even felt a measure of relief. Next day he would be faintly repentant,
and would remark in a gruff, hang-dog fashion that he guessed he was
drinking a little too much.
For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair that had been in
his apartment, lost in a sort of stupor--even his interest in reading
his favorite books seemed to have departed, and though an incessant
bickering went on between husband and wife, the one subject upon which
they ever really conversed was the progress of the will case. What
Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, what she expected that
great gift of money to bring about, is difficult to imagine. She was
being bent by her environment into a grotesque similitude of a
housewife. She who until three years before had never made coffee,
prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked a great deal in the
afternoons, and in the evenings she read--books, magazines, anything she
found at hand. If now she wished for a child, even a child of the
Anthony who sought her bed blind drunk, she neither said so nor gave any
show or sign of interest in children. It is doubtful if she could have
made it clear to any one what it was she wanted, or indeed what there
was to want--a lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind some
impregnable inhibition born and coexistent with her beauty.
One afternoon when the snow was dirty again along Riverside Drive,
Gloria, who had been to the grocer's, entered the apartment to find
Anthony pacing the floor in a state of aggravated nervousness. The
feverish eyes he turned on her were traced with tiny pink lines that
reminded her of rivers on a map. For a moment she received the
impression that he was suddenly and definitely old.
"Have you any money?" he inquired of her precipitately.
"What? What do you mean?"
"Just what I said. Money! Money! Can't you speak English?"
She paid no attention but brushed by him and into the pantry to put the
bacon and eggs in the ice-box. When his drinking had been unusually
excessive he was invariably in a whining mood. This time he followed her
and, standing in the pantry door, persisted in his question.
"You heard what I said. Have you any money?"
She turned about from the ice-box and faced him.
"Why, Anthony, you must be crazy! You know I haven't any money--except a
dollar in change."
He executed an abrupt about-face and returned to the living room, where
he renewed his pacing. It was evident that he had something portentous
on his mind--he quite obviously wanted to be asked what was the matter.
Joining him a moment later she sat upon the long lounge and began taking
down her hair. It was no longer bobbed, and it had changed in the last
year from a rich gold dusted with red to an unresplendent light brown.
She had bought some shampoo soap and meant to wash it now; she had
considered putting a bottle of peroxide into the rinsing water.
"--Well?" she implied silently.
"That darn bank!" he quavered. "They've had my account for over ten
years--ten _years_. Well, it seems they've got some autocratic rule that
you have to keep over five hundred dollars there or they won't carry
you. They wrote me a letter a few months ago and told me I'd been
running too low. Once I gave out two bum checks--remember? that night in
Reisenweber's?--but I made them good the very next day. Well, I promised
old Halloran--he's the manager, the greedy Mick--that I'd watch out. And
I thought I was going all right; I kept up the stubs in my check-book
pretty regular. Well, I went in there to-day to cash a check, and
Halloran came up and told me they'd have to close my account. Too many
bad checks, he said, and I never had more than five hundred to my
credit--and that only for a day or so at a time. And by God! What do you
think he said then?"
"What?"
"He said this was a good time to do it because I didn't have a damn
penny in there!"
"You didn't?"
"That's what he told me. Seems I'd given these Bedros people a check for
sixty for that last case of liquor--and I only had forty-five dollars in
the bank. Well, the Bedros people deposited fifteen dollars to my
account and drew the whole thing out."
In her ignorance Gloria conjured up a spectre of imprisonment and
disgrace.
"Oh, they won't do anything," he assured her. "Bootlegging's too risky a
business. They'll send me a bill for fifteen dollars and I'll pay it."
"Oh." She considered a moment. "--Well, we can sell another bond."
He laughed sarcastically.
"Oh, yes, that's always easy. When the few bonds we have that are paying
any interest at all are only worth between fifty and eighty cents on the
dollar. We lose about half the bond every time we sell."
"What else can we do?"
"Oh, we'll sell something--as usual. We've got paper worth eighty
thousand dollars at par." Again he laughed unpleasantly. "Bring about
thirty thousand on the open market."
"I distrusted those ten per cent investments."
"The deuce you did!" he said. "You pretended you did, so you could claw
at me if they went to pieces, but you wanted to take a chance as much
as I did."
She was silent for a moment as if considering, then:
"Anthony," she cried suddenly, "two hundred a month is worse than
nothing. Let's sell all the bonds and put the thirty thousand dollars in
the bank--and if we lose the case we can live in Italy for three years,
and then just die." In her excitement as she talked she was aware of a
faint flush of sentiment, the first she had felt in many days.
"Three years," he said nervously, "three years! You're crazy. Mr.
Haight'll take more than that if we lose. Do you think he's working
for charity?"
"I forgot that."
"--And here it is Saturday," he continued, "and I've only got a dollar
and some change, and we've got to live till Monday, when I can get to my
broker's.... And not a drink in the house," he added as a significant
afterthought.
"Can't you call up Dick?"
"I did. His man says he's gone down to Princeton to address a literary
club or some such thing. Won't be back till Monday."
"Well, let's see--Don't you know some friend you might go to?"
"I tried a couple of fellows. Couldn't find anybody in. I wish I'd sold
that Keats letter like I started to last week."
"How about those men you play cards with in that Sammy place?"
"Do you think I'd ask _them?_" His voice rang with righteous horror.
Gloria winced. He would rather contemplate her active discomfort than
feel his own skin crawl at asking an inappropriate favor. "I thought of
Muriel," he suggested.
"She's in California."
"Well, how about some of those men who gave you such a good time while I
was in the army? You'd think they might be glad to do a little favor
for you."
She looked at him contemptuously, but he took no notice.
"Or how about your old friend Rachael--or Constance Merriam?"
"Constance Merriam's been dead a year, and I wouldn't ask Rachael."
"Well, how about that gentleman who was so anxious to help you once that
he could hardly restrain himself, Bloeckman?"
"Oh--!" He had hurt her at last, and he was not too obtuse or too
careless to perceive it.
"Why not him?" he insisted callously.
"Because--he doesn't like me any more," she said with difficulty, and
then as he did not answer but only regarded her cynically: "If you want
to know why, I'll tell you. A year ago I went to Bloeckman--he's changed
his name to Black--and asked him to put me into pictures."
"You went to Bloeckman?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me?" he demanded incredulously, the smile fading
from his face.
"Because you were probably off drinking somewhere. He had them give me a
test, and they decided that I wasn't young enough for anything except a
character part."
"A character part?"
"The 'woman of thirty' sort of thing. I wasn't thirty, and I didn't
think I--looked thirty."
"Why, damn him!" cried Anthony, championing her violently with a curious
perverseness of emotion, "why--"
"Well, that's why I can't go to him."
"Why, the insolence!" insisted Anthony nervously, "the insolence!"
"Anthony, that doesn't matter now; the thing is we've got to live over
Sunday and there's nothing in the house but a loaf of bread and a
half-pound of bacon and two eggs for breakfast." She handed him the
contents of her purse. "There's seventy, eighty, a dollar fifteen. With
what you have that makes about two and a half altogether, doesn't it?
Anthony, we can get along on that. We can buy lots of food with
that--more than we can possibly eat."
Jingling the change in his hand he shook his head. "No. I've got to have
a drink. I'm so darn nervous that I'm shivering." A thought struck him.
"Perhaps Sammy'd cash a check. And then Monday I could rush down to the
bank with the money." "But they've closed your account."
"That's right, that's right--I'd forgotten. I'll tell you what: I'll go
down to Sammy's and I'll find somebody there who'll lend me something. I
hate like the devil to ask them, though...." He snapped his fingers
suddenly. "I know what I'll do. I'll hock my watch. I can get twenty
dollars on it, and get it back Monday for sixty cents extra. It's been
hocked before--when I was at Cambridge."
He had put on his overcoat, and with a brief good-by he started down the
hall toward the outer door.
Gloria got to her feet. It had suddenly occurred to her where he would
probably go first.
"Anthony!" she called after him, "hadn't you better leave two dollars
with me? You'll only need car-fare."
The outer door slammed--he had pretended not to hear her. She stood for
a moment looking after him; then she went into the bathroom among her
tragic unguents and began preparations for washing her hair.
Down at Sammy's he found Parker Allison and Pete Lytell sitting alone at
a table, drinking whiskey sours. It was just after six o'clock, and
Sammy, or Samuele Bendiri, as he had been christened, was sweeping an
accumulation of cigarette butts and broken glass into a corner.
"Hi, Tony!" called Parker Allison to Anthony. Sometimes he addressed him