The Beautiful and Damned
An hour later, shaven and dressed, he was sitting at his desk looking at
a small piece of paper he had taken out of his wallet. It was scrawled
with semi-legible memoranda: "See Mr. Howland at five. Get hair-cut. See
about Rivers' bill. Go book-store."
--And under the last: "Cash in bank, $690 (crossed out), $612 (crossed
out), $607."
Finally, down at the bottom and in a hurried scrawl: "Dick and Gloria
Gilbert for tea."
This last item brought him obvious satisfaction. His day, usually a
jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic
structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax,
as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the
backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl
at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door,
returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering
staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.
There was a growing lack of color in Anthony's days. He felt it
constantly and sometimes traced it to a talk he had had with Maury Noble
a month before. That anything so ingenuous, so priggish, as a sense of
waste should oppress him was absurd, but there was no denying the fact
that some unwelcome survival of a fetish had drawn him three weeks
before down to the public library, where, by the token of Richard
Caramel's card, he had drawn out half a dozen books on the Italian
Renaissance. That these books were still piled on his desk in the
original order of carriage, that they were daily increasing his
liabilities by twelve cents, was no mitigation of their testimony. They
were cloth and morocco witnesses to the fact of his defection. Anthony
had had several hours of acute and startling panic.
In justification of his manner of living there was first, of course, The
Meaninglessness of Life. As aides and ministers, pages and squires,
butlers and lackeys to this great Khan there were a thousand books
glowing on his shelves, there was his apartment and all the money that
was to be his when the old man up the river should choke on his last
morality. From a world fraught with the menace of débutantes and the
stupidity of many Geraldines he was thankfully delivered--rather should
he emulate the feline immobility of Maury and wear proudly the
culminative wisdom of the numbered generations.
Over and against these things was something which his brain persistently
analyzed and dealt with as a tiresome complex but which, though
logically disposed of and bravely trampled under foot, had sent him out
through the soft slush of late November to a library which had none of
the books he most wanted. It is fair to analyze Anthony as far as he
could analyze himself; further than that it is, of course, presumption.
He found in himself a growing horror and loneliness. The idea of eating
alone frightened him; in preference he dined often with men he detested.
Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed at length, unendurable, a
business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own
dream's shadow.
--If I am essentially weak, he thought, I need work to do, work to do.
It worried him to think that he was, after all, a facile mediocrity,
with neither the poise of Maury nor the enthusiasm of Dick. It seemed a
tragedy to want nothing--and yet he wanted something, something. He knew
in flashes what it was--some path of hope to lead him toward what he
thought was an imminent and ominous old age.
After cocktails and luncheon at the University Club Anthony felt better.
He had run into two men from his class at Harvard, and in contrast to
the gray heaviness of their conversation his life assumed color. Both of
them were married: one spent his coffee time in sketching an
extra-nuptial adventure to the bland and appreciative smiles of the
other. Both of them, he thought, were Mr. Gilberts in embryo; the number
of their "yes's" would have to be quadrupled, their natures crabbed by
twenty years--then they would be no more than obsolete and broken
machines, pseudo-wise and valueless, nursed to an utter senility by the
women they had broken.
Ah, he was more than that, as he paced the long carpet in the lounge
after dinner, pausing at the window to look into the harried street. He
was Anthony Patch, brilliant, magnetic, the heir of many years and many
men. This was his world now--and that last strong irony he craved lay in
the offing.
With a stray boyishness he saw himself a power upon the earth; with his
grandfather's money he might build his own pedestal and be a Talleyrand,
a Lord Verulam. The clarity of his mind, its sophistication, its
versatile intelligence, all at their maturity and dominated by some
purpose yet to be born would find him work to do. On this minor his
dream faded--work to do: he tried to imagine himself in Congress rooting
around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and
porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of
the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to
the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book
ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into
the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people--and
the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were
content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a
discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between
wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and
continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains!
Lord Verulam! Talleyrand!
Back in his apartment the grayness returned. His cocktails had died,
making him sleepy, somewhat befogged and inclined to be surly. Lord
Verulam--he? The very thought was bitter. Anthony Patch with no record
of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with
truth when it was given him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making
careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly,
the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished
his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He
was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle--
The buzzer rang at the door. Anthony sprang up and lifted the tube to
his ear. It was Richard Caramel's voice, stilted and facetious:
"Announcing Miss Gloria Gilbert."
"How do you do?" he said, smiling and holding the door ajar.
Dick bowed.
"Gloria, this is Anthony."
"Well!" she cried, holding out a little gloved hand. Under her fur coat
her dress was Alice-blue, with white lace crinkled stiffly about
her throat.
"Let me take your things."
Anthony stretched out his arms and the brown mass of fur tumbled into
them.
"Thanks."
"What do you think of her, Anthony?" Richard Caramel demanded
barbarously. "Isn't she beautiful?"
"Well!" cried the girl defiantly--withal unmoved.
She was dazzling--alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a
glance. Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter
color of the room.
Anthony moved about, magician-like, turning the mushroom lamp into an
orange glory. The stirred fire burnished the copper andirons on
the hearth--
"I'm a solid block of ice," murmured Gloria casually, glancing around
with eyes whose irises were of the most delicate and transparent bluish
white. "What a slick fire! We found a place where you could stand on an
iron-bar grating, sort of, and it blew warm air up at you--but Dick
wouldn't wait there with me. I told him to go on alone and let me
be happy."
Conventional enough this. She seemed talking for her own pleasure,
without effort. Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her
profile against the foreground of the lamp: the exquisite regularity of
nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a
rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely
classical, almost cold--but the glow of her hair and cheeks, at once
flushed and fragile, made her the most living person he had ever seen.
"... Think you've got the best name I've heard," she was saying, still
apparently to herself; her glance rested on him a moment and then
flitted past him--to the Italian bracket-lamps clinging like luminous
yellow turtles at intervals along the walls, to the books row upon row,
then to her cousin on the other side. "Anthony Patch. Only you ought to
look sort of like a horse, with a long narrow face--and you ought to be
in tatters."
"That's all the Patch part, though. How should Anthony look?"
"You look like Anthony," she assured him seriously--he thought she had
scarcely seen him--"rather majestic," she continued, "and solemn."
Anthony indulged in a disconcerted smile.
"Only I like alliterative names," she went on, "all except mine. Mine's
too flamboyant. I used to know two girls named Jinks, though, and just
think if they'd been named anything except what they were named--Judy
Jinks and Jerry Jinks. Cute, what? Don't you think?" Her childish mouth
was parted, awaiting a rejoinder.
"Everybody in the next generation," suggested Dick, "will be named Peter
or Barbara--because at present all the piquant literary characters are
named Peter or Barbara."
Anthony continued the prophecy:
"Of course Gladys and Eleanor, having graced the last generation of
heroines and being at present in their social prime, will be passed on
to the next generation of shop-girls--"
"Displacing Ella and Stella," interrupted Dick.
"And Pearl and Jewel," Gloria added cordially, "and Earl and Elmer and
Minnie."
"And then I'll come along," remarked Dick, "and picking up the obsolete
name, Jewel, I'll attach it to some quaint and attractive character and
it'll start its career all over again."
Her voice took up the thread of subject and wove along with faintly
upturning, half-humorous intonations for sentence ends--as though
defying interruption--and intervals of shadowy laughter. Dick had told
her that Anthony's man was named Bounds--she thought that was wonderful!
Dick had made some sad pun about Bounds doing patchwork, but if there
was one thing worse than a pun, she said, it was a person who, as the
inevitable come-back to a pun, gave the perpetrator a mock-reproachful
look.
"Where are you from?" inquired Anthony. He knew, but beauty had rendered
him thoughtless.
"Kansas City, Missouri."
"They put her out the same time they barred cigarettes."
"Did they bar cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather."
"He's a reformer or something, isn't he?"
"I blush for him."
"So do I," she confessed. "I detest reformers, especially the sort who
try to reform me."
"Are there many of those?"
"Dozens. It's 'Oh, Gloria, if you smoke so many cigarettes you'll lose
your pretty complexion!' and 'Oh, Gloria, why don't you marry and
settle down?'"
Anthony agreed emphatically while he wondered who had had the temerity
to speak thus to such a personage.
"And then," she continued, "there are all the subtle reformers who tell
you the wild stories they've heard about you and how they've been
sticking up for you."
He saw, at length, that her eyes were gray, very level and cool, and
when they rested on him he understood what Maury had meant by saying she
was very young and very old. She talked always about herself as a very
charming child might talk, and her comments on her tastes and distastes
were unaffected and spontaneous.
"I must confess," said Anthony gravely, "that even _I_'ve heard one
thing about you."
Alert at once, she sat up straight. Those eyes, with the grayness and
eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his.
"Tell me. I'll believe it. I always believe anything any one tells me