The Beautiful and Damned
Bloeckman, who took exercise every day and knew something of sparring,
blocked it with ease and struck him twice in the face with two swift
smashing jabs. Anthony gave a little grunt and toppled over onto the
green plush carpet, finding, as he fell, that his mouth was full of
blood and seemed oddly loose in front. He struggled to his feet, panting
and spitting, and then as he started toward Bloeckman, who stood a few
feet away, his fists clenched but not up, two waiters who had appeared
from nowhere seized his arms and held him, helpless. In back of them a
dozen people had miraculously gathered.
"I'll kill him," cried Anthony, pitching and straining from side to
side. "Let me kill----"
"Throw him out!" ordered Bloeckman excitedly, just as a small man with a
pockmarked face pushed his way hurriedly through the spectators.
"Any trouble, Mr. Black?"
"This bum tried to blackmail me!" said Bloeckman, and then, his voice
rising to a faintly shrill note of pride: "He got what was coming
to him!"
The little man turned to a waiter.
"Call a policeman!" he commanded.
"Oh, no," said Bloeckman quickly. "I can't be bothered. Just throw him
out in the street.... Ugh! What an outrage!" He turned and with
conscious dignity walked toward the wash-room just as six brawny hands
seized upon Anthony and dragged him toward the door. The "bum" was
propelled violently to the sidewalk, where he landed on his hands and
knees with a grotesque slapping sound and rolled over slowly onto
his side.
The shock stunned him. He lay there for a moment in acute distributed
pain. Then his discomfort became centralized in his stomach, and he
regained consciousness to discover that a large foot was prodding him.
"You've got to move on, y' bum! Move on!"
It was the bulky doorman speaking. A town car had stopped at the curb
and its occupants had disembarked--that is, two of the women were
standing on the dashboard, waiting in offended delicacy until this
obscene obstacle should be removed from their path.
"Move on! Or else I'll _throw_ y'on!"
"Here--I'll get him."
This was a new voice; Anthony imagined that it was somehow more
tolerant, better disposed than the first. Again arms were about him,
half lifting, half dragging him into a welcome shadow four doors up the
street and propping him against the stone front of a millinery shop.
"Much obliged," muttered Anthony feebly. Some one pushed his soft hat
down upon his head and he winced.
"Just sit still, buddy, and you'll feel better. Those guys sure give you
a bump."
"I'm going back and kill that dirty--" He tried to get to his feet but
collapsed backward against the wall.
"You can't do nothin' now," came the voice. "Get 'em some other time.
I'm tellin' you straight, ain't I? I'm helpin' you."
Anthony nodded.
"An' you better go home. You dropped a tooth to-night, buddy. You know
that?"
Anthony explored his mouth with his tongue, verifying the statement.
Then with an effort he raised his hand and located the gap.
"I'm agoin' to get you home, friend. Whereabouts do you live--"
"Oh, by God! By God!" interrupted Anthony, clenching his fists
passionately. "I'll show the dirty bunch. You help me show 'em and I'll
fix it with you. My grandfather's Adam Patch, of Tarrytown"--
"Who?"
"Adam Patch, by God!"
"You wanna go all the way to Tarrytown?"
"No."
"Well, you tell me where to go, friend, and I'll get a cab."
Anthony made out that his Samaritan was a short, broad-shouldered
individual, somewhat the worse for wear.
"Where d'you live, hey?"
Sodden and shaken as he was, Anthony felt that his address would be poor
collateral for his wild boast about his grandfather.
"Get me a cab," he commanded, feeling in his pockets.
A taxi drove up. Again Anthony essayed to rise, but his ankle swung
loose, as though it were in two sections. The Samaritan must needs help
him in--and climb in after him.
"See here, fella," said he, "you're soused and you're bunged up, and you
won't be able to get in your house 'less somebody carries you in, so I'm
going with you, and I know you'll make it all right with me. Where
d'you live?"
With some reluctance Anthony gave his address. Then, as the cab moved
off, he leaned his head against the man's shoulder and went into a
shadowy, painful torpor. When he awoke, the man had lifted him from the
cab in front of the apartment on Claremont Avenue and was trying to set
him on his feet.
"Can y' walk?"
"Yes--sort of. You better not come in with me." Again he felt helplessly
in his pockets. "Say," he continued, apologetically, swaying dangerously
on his feet, "I'm afraid I haven't got a cent."
"Huh?"
"I'm cleaned out."
"Sa-a-ay! Didn't I hear you promise you'd fix it with me? Who's goin' to
pay the taxi bill?" He turned to the driver for confirmation. "Didn't
you hear him say he'd fix it? All that about his grandfather?"
"Matter of fact," muttered Anthony imprudently, "it was you did all the
talking; however, if you come round, to-morrow--"
At this point the taxi-driver leaned from his cab and said ferociously:
"Ah, poke him one, the dirty cheap skate. If he wasn't a bum they
wouldn'ta throwed him out."
In answer to this suggestion the fist of the Samaritan shot out like a
battering-ram and sent Anthony crashing down against the stone steps of
the apartment-house, where he lay without movement, while the tall
buildings rocked to and fro above him....
After a long while he awoke and was conscious that it had grown much
colder. He tried to move himself but his muscles refused to function. He
was curiously anxious to know the time, but he reached for his watch,
only to find the pocket empty. Involuntarily his lips formed an
immemorial phrase:
"What a night!"
Strangely enough, he was almost sober. Without moving his head he looked
up to where the moon was anchored in mid-sky, shedding light down into
Claremont Avenue as into the bottom of a deep and uncharted abyss. There
was no sign or sound of life save for the continuous buzzing in his own
ears, but after a moment Anthony himself broke the silence with a
distinct and peculiar murmur. It was the sound that he had consistently
attempted to make back there in the Boul' Mich', when he had been face
to face with Bloeckman--the unmistakable sound of ironic laughter. And
on his torn and bleeding lips it was like a pitiful retching of
the soul.
Three weeks later the trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool
of legal red tape having unrolled over a period of four and a half
years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria and, on the other side,
Edward Shuttleworth and a platoon of beneficiaries testified and lied
and ill-behaved generally in varying degrees of greed and desperation.
Anthony awoke one morning in March realizing that the verdict was to be
given at four that afternoon, and at the thought he got up out of his
bed and began to dress. With his extreme nervousness there was mingled
an unjustified optimism as to the outcome. He believed that the decision
of the lower court would be reversed, if only because of the reaction,
due to excessive prohibition, that had recently set in against reforms
and reformers. He counted more on the personal attacks that they had
levelled at Shuttleworth than on the more sheerly legal aspects of the
proceedings.
Dressed, he poured himself a drink of whiskey and then went into
Gloria's room, where he found her already wide awake. She had been in
bed for a week, humoring herself, Anthony fancied, though the doctor had
said that she had best not be disturbed.
"Good morning," she murmured, without smiling. Her eyes seemed unusually
large and dark.
"How do you feel?" he asked grudgingly. "Better?"
"Yes."
"Much?"
"Yes."
"Do you feel well enough to go down to court with me this afternoon?"
She nodded.
"Yes. I want to. Dick said yesterday that if the weather was nice he was
coming up in his car and take me for a ride in Central Park--and look,
the room's all full of sunshine."
Anthony glanced mechanically out the window and then sat down upon the
bed.
"God, I'm nervous!" he exclaimed.
"Please don't sit there," she said quickly.
"Why not?"
"You smell of whiskey. I can't stand it."
He got up absent-mindedly and left the room. A little later she called
to him and he went out and brought her some potato salad and cold
chicken from the delicatessen.
At two o'clock Richard Caramel's car arrived at the door and, when he
phoned up, Anthony took Gloria down in the elevator and walked with her
to the curb.
She told her cousin that it was sweet of him to take her riding. "Don't
be simple," Dick replied disparagingly. "It's nothing."
But he did not mean that it was nothing and this was a curious thing.
Richard Caramel had forgiven many people for many offenses. But he had
never forgiven his cousin, Gloria Gilbert, for a statement she had made
just prior to her wedding, seven years before. She had said that she did
not intend to read his book.
Richard Caramel remembered this--he had remembered it well for seven
years.
"What time will I expect you back?" asked Anthony.
"We won't come back," she answered, "we'll meet you down there at four."
"All right," he muttered, "I'll meet you."
Up-stairs he found a letter waiting for him. It was a mimeographed
notice urging "the boys" in condescendingly colloquial language to pay
the dues of the American Legion. He threw it impatiently into the
waste-basket and sat down with his elbows on the window sill, looking
down blindly into the sunny street.
Italy--if the verdict was in their favor it meant Italy. The word had
become a sort of talisman to him, a land where the intolerable anxieties
of life would fall away like an old garment. They would go to the
watering-places first and among the bright and colorful crowds forget
the gray appendages of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk
again in the Piazza di Spanga at twilight, moving in that drifting
flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars.
The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly--when his purse hung
heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it--the romance of
blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after rain,
and of women, women who changed, dissolved, melted into other women and
receded from his life, but who were always beautiful and always young.
But it seemed to him that there should be a difference in his attitude.
All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had
been because of women. It was something that in different ways they did
to him, unconsciously, almost casually--perhaps finding him
tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced
their absolute sway.
Turning about from the window he faced his reflection in the mirror,
contemplating dejectedly the wan, pasty face, the eyes with their
crisscross of lines like shreds of dried blood, the stooped and flabby
figure whose very sag was a document in lethargy. He was thirty
three--he looked forty. Well, things would be different.
The door-bell rang abruptly and he started as though he had been dealt a
blow. Recovering himself, he went into the hall and opened the outer
door. It was Dot.
THE ENCOUNTER
He retreated before her into the living room, comprehending only a word
here and there in the slow flood of sentences that poured from her
steadily, one after the other, in a persistent monotone. She was
decently and shabbily dressed--a somehow pitiable little hat adorned
with pink and blue flowers covered and hid her dark hair. He gathered
from her words that several days before she had seen an item in the
paper concerning the lawsuit, and had obtained his address from the