The Beautiful and Damned
taxi through the Park. She had a vague family--a shadowy aunt and uncle
who shared with her an apartment in the labyrinthine hundreds. She was
company, familiar and faintly intimate and restful. Further than that he
did not care to experiment--not from any moral compunction, but from a
dread of allowing any entanglement to disturb what he felt was the
growing serenity of his life.
"She has two stunts," he informed Maury; "one of them is to get her hair
over her eyes some way and then blow it out, and the other is to say
'You cra-a-azy!' when some one makes a remark that's over her head. It
fascinates me. I sit there hour after hour, completely intrigued by the
maniacal symptoms she finds in my imagination."
Maury stirred in his chair and spoke.
"Remarkable that a person can comprehend so little and yet live in such
a complex civilization. A woman like that actually takes the whole
universe in the most matter-of-fact way. From the influence of Rousseau
to the bearing of the tariff rates on her dinner, the whole phenomenon
is utterly strange to her. She's just been carried along from an age of
spearheads and plunked down here with the equipment of an archer for
going into a pistol duel. You could sweep away the entire crust of
history and she'd never know the difference."
"I wish our Richard would write about her."
"Anthony, surely you don't think she's worth writing about."
"As much as anybody," he answered, yawning. "You know I was thinking
to-day that I have a great confidence in Dick. So long as he sticks to
people and not to ideas, and as long as his inspirations come from life
and not from art, and always granting a normal growth, I believe he'll
be a big man."
"I should think the appearance of the black note-book would prove that
he's going to life."
Anthony raised himself on his elbow and answered eagerly:
"He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but
after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or
character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in
terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea
captain and thinks he's an original character. The truth is that he sees
the resemblance between the sea captain and the last sea captain Dana
created, or who-ever creates sea captains, and therefore he knows how
to set this sea captain on paper. Dick, of course, can set down any
consciously picturesque, character-like character, but could he
accurately transcribe his own sister?"
Then they were off for half an hour on literature.
"A classic," suggested Anthony, "is a successful book that has survived
the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a
style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity
to take the place of its fashion...."
After a time the subject temporarily lost its tang. The interest of the
two young men was not particularly technical. They were in love with
generalities. Anthony had recently discovered Samuel Butler and the
brisk aphorisms in the note-book seemed to him the quintessence of
criticism. Maury, his whole mind so thoroughly mellowed by the very
hardness of his scheme of life, seemed inevitably the wiser of the two,
yet in the actual stuff of their intelligences they were not, it seemed,
fundamentally different.
They drifted from letters to the curiosities of each other's day.
"Whose tea was it?"
"People named Abercrombie."
"Why'd you stay late? Meet a luscious débutante?"
"Yes."
"Did you really?" Anthony's voice lifted in surprise.
"Not a débutante exactly. Said she came out two winters ago in Kansas
City."
"Sort of left-over?"
"No," answered Maury with some amusement, "I think that's the last thing
I'd say about her. She seemed--well, somehow the youngest person there."
"Not too young to make you miss a train."
"Young enough. Beautiful child."
Anthony chuckled in his one-syllable snort.
"Oh, Maury, you're in your second childhood. What do you mean by
beautiful?"
Maury gazed helplessly into space.
"Well, I can't describe her exactly--except to say that she was
beautiful. She was--tremendously alive. She was eating gum-drops."
"What!"
"It was a sort of attenuated vice. She's a nervous kind--said she always
ate gum-drops at teas because she had to stand around so long in
one place."
"What'd you talk about--Bergson? Bilphism? Whether the one-step is
immoral?"
Maury was unruffled; his fur seemed to run all ways.
"As a matter of fact we did talk on Bilphism. Seems her mother's a
Bilphist. Mostly, though, we talked about legs."
Anthony rocked in glee.
"My God! Whose legs?"
"Hers. She talked a lot about hers. As though they were a sort of choice
bric-à-brac. She aroused a great desire to see them."
"What is she--a dancer?"
"No, I found she was a cousin of Dick's."
Anthony sat upright so suddenly that the pillow he released stood on end
like a live thing and dove to the floor.
"Name's Gloria Gilbert?" he cried.
"Yes. Isn't she remarkable?"
"I'm sure I don't know--but for sheer dulness her father--"
"Well," interrupted Maury with implacable conviction, "her family may be
as sad as professional mourners but I'm inclined to think that she's a
quite authentic and original character. The outer signs of the
cut-and-dried Yale prom girl and all that--but different, very
emphatically different."
"Go on, go on!" urged Anthony. "Soon as Dick told me she didn't have a
brain in her head I knew she must be pretty good."
"Did he say that?"
"Swore to it," said Anthony with another snorting laugh.
"Well, what he means by brains in a woman is--"
"I know," interrupted Anthony eagerly, "he means a smattering of
literary misinformation."
"That's it. The kind who believes that the annual moral let-down of the
country is a very good thing or the kind who believes it's a very
ominous thing. Either pince-nez or postures. Well, this girl talked
about legs. She talked about skin too--her own skin. Always her own. She
told me the sort of tan she'd like to get in the summer and how closely
she usually approximated it."
"You sat enraptured by her low alto?"
"By her low alto! No, by tan! I began thinking about tan. I began to
think what color I turned when I made my last exposure about two years
ago. I did use to get a pretty good tan. I used to get a sort of bronze,
if I remember rightly."
Anthony retired into the cushions, shaken with laughter.
"She's got you going--oh, Maury! Maury the Connecticut life-saver. The
human nutmeg. Extra! Heiress elopes with coast-guard because of his
luscious pigmentation! Afterward found to be Tasmanian strain in
his family!"
Maury sighed; rising he walked to the window and raised the shade.
"Snowing hard."
Anthony, still laughing quietly to himself, made no answer.
"Another winter." Maury's voice from the window was almost a whisper.
"We're growing old, Anthony. I'm twenty-seven, by God! Three years to
thirty, and then I'm what an undergraduate calls a middle-aged man."
Anthony was silent for a moment.
"You _are_ old, Maury," he agreed at length. "The first signs of a very
dissolute and wabbly senescence--you have spent the afternoon talking
about tan and a lady's legs."
Maury pulled down the shade with a sudden harsh snap.
"Idiot!" he cried, "that from you! Here I sit, young Anthony, as I'll
sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick
and Gloria Gilbert go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating
one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only
by my lack of emotion. I shall sit and the snow will come--oh, for a
Caramel to take notes--and another winter and I shall be thirty and you
and Dick and Gloria will go on being eternally moved and dancing by me
and singing. But after you've all gone I'll be saying things for new
Dicks to write down, and listening to the disillusions and cynicisms and
emotions of new Anthonys--yes, and talking to new Glorias about the tans
of summers yet to come."
The firelight flurried up on the hearth. Maury left the window, stirred
the blaze with a poker, and dropped a log upon the andirons. Then he sat
back in his chair and the remnants of his voice faded in the new fire
that spit red and yellow along the bark.
"After all, Anthony, it's you who are very romantic and young. It's you
who are infinitely more susceptible and afraid of your calm being
broken. It's me who tries again and again to be moved--let myself go a
thousand times and I'm always me. Nothing--quite--stirs me.
"Yet," he murmured after another long pause, "there was something about
that little girl with her absurd tan that was eternally old--like me."
TURBULENCE
Anthony turned over sleepily in his bed, greeting a patch of cold sun on
his counterpane, crisscrossed with the shadows of the leaded window. The
room was full of morning. The carved chest in the corner, the ancient
and inscrutable wardrobe, stood about the room like dark symbols of the
obliviousness of matter; only the rug was beckoning and perishable to
his perishable feet, and Bounds, horribly inappropriate in his soft
collar, was of stuff as fading as the gauze of frozen breath he uttered.
He was close to the bed, his hand still lowered where he had been
jerking at the upper blanket, his dark-brown eyes fixed imperturbably
upon his master.
"Bows!" muttered the drowsy god. "Thachew, Bows?"
"It's I, sir."
Anthony moved his head, forced his eyes wide, and blinked triumphantly.
"Bounds."
"Yes, sir?"
"Can you get off--yeow-ow-oh-oh-oh God!--" Anthony yawned insufferably
and the contents of his brain seemed to fall together in a dense hash.
He made a fresh start.
"Can you come around about four and serve some tea and sandwiches or
something?"
"Yes, sir."
Anthony considered with chilling lack of inspiration. "Some sandwiches,"
he repeated helplessly, "oh, some cheese sandwiches and jelly ones and
chicken and olive, I guess. Never mind breakfast."
The strain of invention was too much. He shut his eyes wearily, let his
head roll to rest inertly, and quickly relaxed what he had regained of
muscular control. Out of a crevice of his mind crept the vague but
inevitable spectre of the night before--but it proved in this case to be
nothing but a seemingly interminable conversation with Richard Caramel,
who had called on him at midnight; they had drunk four bottles of beer
and munched dry crusts of bread while Anthony listened to a reading of
the first part of "The Demon Lover."
--Came a voice now after many hours. Anthony disregarded it, as sleep
closed over him, folded down upon him, crept up into the byways of
his mind.
Suddenly he was awake, saying: "What?"
"For how many, sir?" It was still Bounds, standing patient and
motionless at the foot of the bed--Bounds who divided his manner among
three gentlemen.
"How many what?"
"I think, sir, I'd better know how many are coming. I'll have to plan
for the sandwiches, sir."
"Two," muttered Anthony huskily; "lady and a gentleman."
Bounds said, "Thank you, sir," and moved away, bearing with him his
humiliating reproachful soft collar, reproachful to each of the three
gentlemen, who only demanded of him a third.
After a long time Anthony arose and drew an opalescent dressing grown of
brown and blue over his slim pleasant figure. With a last yawn he went
into the bathroom, and turning on the dresser light (the bathroom had no
outside exposure) he contemplated himself in the mirror with some
interest. A wretched apparition, he thought; he usually thought so in
the morning--sleep made his face unnaturally pale. He lit a cigarette
and glanced through several letters and the morning Tribune.