The Beautiful and Damned
ones: "at least that's the way I look at it" and "pure and
simple"--these three, alternated, gave each of her remarks an air of
being a general reflection on life, as though she had calculated all
causes and, at length, put her finger on the ultimate one.
Richard Caramel's face, Anthony saw, was now quite normal. The brow and
cheeks were of a flesh color, the nose politely inconspicuous. He had
fixed his aunt with the bright-yellow eye, giving her that acute and
exaggerated attention that young males are accustomed to render to all
females who are of no further value.
"Are you a writer too, Mr. Pats? ... Well, perhaps we can all bask in
Richard's fame."--Gentle laughter led by Mrs. Gilbert.
"Gloria's out," she said, with an air of laying down an axiom from which
she would proceed to derive results. "She's dancing somewhere. Gloria
goes, goes, goes. I tell her I don't see how she stands it. She dances
all afternoon and all night, until I think she's going to wear herself
to a shadow. Her father is very worried about her."
She smiled from one to the other. They both smiled.
She was composed, Anthony perceived, of a succession of semicircles and
parabolas, like those figures that gifted folk make on the typewriter:
head, arms, bust, hips, thighs, and ankles were in a bewildering tier of
roundnesses. Well ordered and clean she was, with hair of an
artificially rich gray; her large face sheltered weather-beaten blue
eyes and was adorned with just the faintest white mustache.
"I always say," she remarked to Anthony, "that Richard is an ancient
soul."
In the tense pause that followed, Anthony considered a pun--something
about Dick having been much walked upon.
"We all have souls of different ages," continued Mrs. Gilbert radiantly;
"at least that's what I say."
"Perhaps so," agreed Anthony with an air of quickening to a hopeful
idea. The voice bubbled on:
"Gloria has a very young soul--irresponsible, as much as anything else.
She has no sense of responsibility."
"She's sparkling, Aunt Catherine," said Richard pleasantly. "A sense of
responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty."
"Well," confessed Mrs. Gilbert, "all I know is that she goes and goes
and goes--"
The number of goings to Gloria's discredit was lost in the rattle of the
door-knob as it turned to admit Mr. Gilbert.
He was a short man with a mustache resting like a small white cloud
beneath his undistinguished nose. He had reached the stage where his
value as a social creature was a black and imponderable negative. His
ideas were the popular delusions of twenty years before; his mind
steered a wabbly and anaemic course in the wake of the daily newspaper
editorials. After graduating from a small but terrifying Western
university, he had entered the celluloid business, and as this required
only the minute measure of intelligence he brought to it, he did well
for several years--in fact until about 1911, when he began exchanging
contracts for vague agreements with the moving picture industry. The
moving picture industry had decided about 1912 to gobble him up, and at
this time he was, so to speak, delicately balanced on its tongue.
Meanwhile he was supervising manager of the Associated Mid-western Film
Materials Company, spending six months of each year in New York and the
remainder in Kansas City and St. Louis. He felt credulously that there
was a good thing coming to him--and his wife thought so, and his
daughter thought so too.
He disapproved of Gloria: she stayed out late, she never ate her meals,
she was always in a mix-up--he had irritated her once and she had used
toward him words that he had not thought were part of her vocabulary.
His wife was easier. After fifteen years of incessant guerilla warfare
he had conquered her--it was a war of muddled optimism against organized
dulness, and something in the number of "yes's" with which he could
poison a conversation had won him the victory.
"Yes-yes-yes-yes," he would say, "yes-yes-yes-yes. Let me see. That was
the summer of--let me see--ninety-one or ninety-two--Yes-yes-yes-yes----"
Fifteen years of yes's had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of
that incessant unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual
flicking of ash-mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken
her. To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married
life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first--she
listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her
tolerance--actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed
of moral courage.
She introduced him to Anthony.
"This is Mr. Pats," she said.
The young man and the old touched flesh; Mr. Gilbert's hand was soft,
worn away to the pulpy semblance of a squeezed grapefruit. Then husband
and wife exchanged greetings--he told her it had grown colder out; he
said he had walked down to a news-stand on Forty-fourth Street for a
Kansas City paper. He had intended to ride back in the bus but he had
found it too cold, yes, yes, yes, yes, too cold.
Mrs. Gilbert added flavor to his adventure by being impressed with his
courage in braving the harsh air.
"Well, you _are_ spunky!" she exclaimed admiringly. "You _are_ spunky. I
wouldn't have gone out for anything."
Mr. Gilbert with true masculine impassivity disregarded the awe he had
excited in his wife. He turned to the two young men and triumphantly
routed them on the subject of the weather. Richard Caramel was called on
to remember the month of November in Kansas. No sooner had the theme
been pushed toward him, however, than it was violently fished back to be
lingered over, pawed over, elongated, and generally devitalized by
its sponsor.
The immemorial thesis that the days somewhere were warm but the nights
very pleasant was successfully propounded and they decided the exact
distance on an obscure railroad between two points that Dick had
inadvertently mentioned. Anthony fixed Mr. Gilbert with a steady stare
and went into a trance through which, after a moment, Mrs. Gilbert's
smiling voice penetrated:
"It seems as though the cold were damper here--it seems to eat into my
bones."
As this remark, adequately yessed, had been on the tip of Mr. Gilbert's
tongue, he could not be blamed for rather abruptly changing the subject.
"Where's Gloria?"
"She ought to be here any minute."
"Have you met my daughter, Mr.----?"
"Haven't had the pleasure. I've heard Dick speak of her often."
"She and Richard are cousins."
"Yes?" Anthony smiled with some effort. He was not used to the society
of his seniors, and his mouth was stiff from superfluous cheerfulness.
It was such a pleasant thought about Gloria and Dick being cousins. He
managed within the next minute to throw an agonized glance at
his friend.
Richard Caramel was afraid they'd have to toddle off.
Mrs. Gilbert was tremendously sorry.
Mr. Gilbert thought it was too bad.
Mrs. Gilbert had a further idea--something about being glad they'd come,
anyhow, even if they'd only seen an old lady 'way too old to flirt with
them. Anthony and Dick evidently considered this a sly sally, for they
laughed one bar in three-four time.
Would they come again soon?
"Oh, yes."
Gloria would be _aw_fully sorry!
"Good-by----"
"Good-by----"
Smiles!
Smiles!
Bang!
Two disconsolate young men walking down the tenth-floor corridor of the
Plaza in the direction of the elevator.
A LADY'S LEGS
Behind Maury Noble's attractive indolence, his irrelevance and his easy
mockery, lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. His
intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in
travel, three years in utter leisure--and then to become immensely rich
as quickly as possible.
His three years of travel were over. He had accomplished the globe with
an intensity and curiosity that in any one else would have seemed
pedantic, without redeeming spontaneity, almost the self-editing of a
human Baedeker; but, in this case, it assumed an air of mysterious
purpose and significant design--as though Maury Noble were some
predestined anti-Christ, urged by a preordination to go everywhere there
was to go along the earth and to see all the billions of humans who bred
and wept and slew each other here and there upon it.
Back in America, he was sallying into the search for amusement with the
same consistent absorption. He who had never taken more than a few
cocktails or a pint of wine at a sitting, taught himself to drink as he
would have taught himself Greek--like Greek it would be the gateway to a
wealth of new sensations, new psychic states, new reactions in joy
or misery.
His habits were a matter for esoteric speculation. He had three rooms in
a bachelor apartment on Forty-forth street, but he was seldom to be
found there. The telephone girl had received the most positive
instructions that no one should even have his ear without first giving a
name to be passed upon. She had a list of half a dozen people to whom he
was never at home, and of the same number to whom he was always at home.
Foremost on the latter list were Anthony Patch and Richard Caramel.
Maury's mother lived with her married son in Philadelphia, and there
Maury went usually for the week-ends, so one Saturday night when
Anthony, prowling the chilly streets in a fit of utter boredom, dropped
in at the Molton Arms he was overjoyed to find that Mr. Noble was
at home.
His spirits soared faster than the flying elevator. This was so good, so
extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury--who would be equally happy
at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just
behind their eyes which both would conceal beneath some attenuated
raillery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and
indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars
and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But
it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings
and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under
the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of
Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against
the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and
catlike, in his favorite chair.
There he was! The room closed about Anthony, warmed him. The glow of
that strong persuasive mind, that temperament almost Oriental in its
outward impassivity, warmed Anthony's restless soul and brought him a
peace that could be likened only to the peace a stupid woman gives. One
must understand all--else one must take all for granted. Maury filled
the room, tigerlike, godlike. The winds outside were stilled; the brass
candlesticks on the mantel glowed like tapers before an altar.
"What keeps you here to-day?" Anthony spread himself over a yielding
sofa and made an elbow-rest among the pillows.
"Just been here an hour. Tea dance--and I stayed so late I missed my
train to Philadelphia."
"Strange to stay so long," commented Anthony curiously.
"Rather. What'd you do?"
"Geraldine. Little usher at Keith's. I told you about her."
"Oh!"
"Paid me a call about three and stayed till five. Peculiar little
soul--she gets me. She's so utterly stupid."
Maury was silent.
"Strange as it may seem," continued Anthony, "so far as I'm concerned,
and even so far as I know, Geraldine is a paragon of virtue."
He had known her a month, a girl of nondescript and nomadic habits.
Someone had casually passed her on to Anthony, who considered her
amusing and rather liked the chaste and fairylike kisses she had given
him on the third night of their acquaintance, when they had driven in a