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Crisis Chronicles Cyber Litmag (2008-2015)

~ Contemporary Poetry and Literary Classics from Cleveland to Infinity

Crisis Chronicles Cyber Litmag (2008-2015)

Category Archives: Novels

Fragments (by Carol Smallwood)

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 2000s, American, Novels, Smallwood (Carol)

≈ 1 Comment

Fragments
by Carol Smallwood

     Fragments. The brilliant colors in the stained glass window of St. John’s I stared at while others went to communion; the scalloped edge of Aunt Heidi’s gloves; the restroom in the church basement with its stark light bulb and frayed string, the chipped porcelain sink; being startled when I saw someone with hair more gray than blonde before recognizing myself in the mirror; the angle of the bishop’s hat (what was it called?) in the church’s lobby picture; the deep satisfaction I’d felt seeing a run in Rachel’s nylons and gray roots of her Raggedy Ann red hair—hair so red that it’d looked like she’d been drinking too much Cherry Kool-Aid; Aunt Hester looking at me with narrowed eyes across a buffet table; the wedge-shaped, crew cut coach all in black except for his white socks–I remember Mark as a student snickering at his white socks.


* * * *

Excerpt from Lily’s Odyssey (print novel 2010) published with permission of All Things That Matter Press. Its first chapter was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in Best New Writing. 

Carol Smallwood’s books include
Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching, foreword by Molly Peacock (McFarland, 2012) on Poets & Writers magazine’s list of Best Books for Writers; Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing (Key Publishing House, 2012); and Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity, and Other Realms (Anaphora Literary Press, 2011). Carol has founded, supports humane societies.

Kate Zambreno reads from O Fallen Angel in Cleveland, part 2

24 Sunday Oct 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 2000s, American, Novels, Video, Zambreno (Kate)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73oqMpQT4pE

2nd half of a reading by Kate Zambreno from her novel, O Fallen Angel (2009, Chiasmus Press)
recorded May 8th 2010 at Visible Voice Books, 1023 Kenilworth Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio
[camera and video editing by John Burroughs]

Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel won Chiasmus Press’ “Undoing the Novel” contest. She is the prose editor at Nightboat Books and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative. A book of essays with the same name as her blog, Frances Farmer Is My Sister, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Spring 2012.  Legacy Pictures recently published a chapbook, I AM SHARON TATE, that is excerpted from her novel-in-progress Under the Shadow of My Roof. Her novel Green Girl will be published by Emergency Press in Fall 2011. She is also the author of the anti-memoir Book of Mutter.

Out Now from Chiasmus Press

Kate Zambreno reads from O Fallen Angel in Cleveland, part 1

22 Friday Oct 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 2000s, American, Novels, Video, Zambreno (Kate)

≈ Leave a comment


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX3Ap5554so

1st half of a reading by Kate Zambreno from her novel, O Fallen Angel (2009, Chiasmus Press)
recorded May 8th 2010 at Visible Voice Books, 1023 Kenilworth Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio
[camera and video editing by John Burroughs]

Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel won Chiasmus Press’ “Undoing the Novel” contest. She is the prose editor at Nightboat Books and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative. A book of essays with the same name as her blog, Frances Farmer Is My Sister, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Spring 2012.  Legacy Pictures recently published a chapbook, I AM SHARON TATE, that is excerpted from her novel-in-progress Under the Shadow of My Roof. Her novel Green Girl will be published by Emergency Press in Fall 2011. She is also the author of the anti-memoir Book of Mutter.

Out Now from Chiasmus Press
Click cover to read more and/or to order.

Anthem – a novella by Ayn Rand (second half: chapters 7 through 12)

21 Thursday Jan 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1900s, American, Novels, Rand (Ayn)

≈ Leave a comment

photo of An Rand by Phyllis Cerf

Anthem
[second half: chapters 7-12]
by Ayn Rand
[first published by 1938 by Cassell]

Chapter 7

It is dark here in the forest. The leaves rustle over our head,
black against the last gold of the sky. The moss is soft and warm. We
shall sleep on this moss for many nights, till the beasts of the forest
come to tear our body. We have no bed now, save the moss, and no
future, save the beasts.

We are old now, yet we were young this morning, when we carried our
glass box through the streets of the City to the Home of the Scholars.
No men stopped us, for there were none about from the Palace of
Corrective Detention, and the others knew nothing. No men stopped us at
the gate. We walked through empty passages and into the great hall
where the World Council of Scholars sat in solemn meeting.

We saw nothing as we entered, save the sky in the great windows,
blue and glowing. Then we saw the Scholars who sat around a long table;
they were as shapeless clouds huddled at the rise of the great sky.
There were men whose famous names we knew, and others from distant
lands whose names we had not heard. We saw a great painting on the wall
over their heads, of the twenty illustrious men who had invented the
candle.

All the heads of the Council turned to us as we entered. These great
and wise of the earth did not know what to think of us, and they looked
upon us with wonder and curiosity, as if we were a miracle. It is true
that our tunic was torn and stained with brown stains which had been
blood. We raised our right arm and we said:

“Our greeting to you, our honored brothers of the World Council of Scholars!”

Then Collective 0-0009, the oldest and wisest of the Council, spoke and asked:

“Who are you, our brother? For you do not look like a Scholar.”

“Our name is Equality 7-2521,” we answered, “and we are a Street Sweeper of this City.”

Then it was as if a great wind had stricken the hall, for all the Scholars spoke at once, and they were angry and frightened.

“A Street Sweeper! A Street Sweeper walking in upon the World
Council of Scholars! It is not to be believed! It is against all the
rules and all the laws!”

But we knew how to stop them.

“Our brothers!” we said. “We matter not, nor our transgression. It
is only our brother men who matter. Give no thought to us, for we are
nothing, but listen to our words, for we bring you a gift such as had
never been brought to men. Listen to us, for we hold the future of
mankind in our hands.”

Then they listened.

We placed our glass box upon the table before them. We spoke of it,
and of our long quest, and of our tunnel, and of our escape from the
Palace of Corrective Detention. Not a hand moved in that hall, as we
spoke, nor an eye. Then we put the wires to the box, and they all bent
forward and sat still, watching. And we stood still, our eyes upon the
wire. And slowly, slowly as a flush of blood, a red flame trembled in
the wire. Then the wire glowed.

But terror struck the men of the Council. They leapt to their feet,
they ran from the table, and they stood pressed against the wall,
huddled together, seeking the warmth of one another’s bodies to give
them courage.

We looked upon them and we laughed and said:

“Fear nothing, our brothers. There is a great power in these wires, but this power is tamed. It is yours. We give it to you.”

Still they would not move.

“We give you the power of the sky!” we cried. “We give you the key
to the earth! Take it, and let us be one of you, the humblest among
you. Let us all work together, and harness this power, and make it ease
the toil of men. Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us
flood our cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men!”

But they looked upon us, and suddenly we were afraid. For their eyes were still, and small, and evil.

“Our brothers!” we cried. “Have you nothing to say to us?”

Then Collective 0-0009 moved forward. They moved to the table and the others followed.

“Yes,” spoke Collective 0-0009, “we have much to say to you.”

The sound of their voices brought silence to the hall and to beat of our heart.

“Yes,” said Collective 0-0009, “we have much to say to a wretch who have broken all the laws and who boast of their infamy!

How dared you think that your mind held greater wisdom than the
minds of your brothers? And if the Councils had decreed that you should
be a Street Sweeper, how dared you think that you could be of greater
use to men than in sweeping the streets?”

“How dared you, gutter cleaner,” spoke Fraternity 9-3452, “to hold
yourself as one alone and with the thoughts of the one and not of the
many?”

“You shall be burned at the stake,” said Democracy 4-6998.

“No, they shall be lashed,” said Unanimity 7-3304, “till there is nothing left under the lashes.”

“No,” said Collective 0-0009, “we cannot decide upon this, our
brothers. No such crime has ever been committed, and it is not for us
to judge. Nor for any small Council. We shall deliver this creature to
the World Council itself and let their will be done.”

We looked upon them and we pleaded:

“Our brothers! You are right. Let the will of the Council be done
upon our body. We do not care. But the light? What will you do with the
light?”

Collective 0-0009 looked upon us, and they smiled.

“So you think that you have found a new power,” said Collective 0-0009. “Do all your brothers think that?”

“No,” we answered.

“What is not thought by all men cannot be true,” said Collective 0-0009.

“You have worked on this alone?” asked International 1-5537.

“Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in
the past,” said Solidarity 8-1164, “but when the majority of their
brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all
men must.”

“This box is useless,” said Alliance 6-7349.

“Should it be what they claim of it,” said Harmony 9-2642, “then it
would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. The Candle is a great
boon to mankind, as approved by all men. Therefore it cannot be
destroyed by the whim of one.”

“This would wreck the Plans of the World Council,” said Unanimity
2-9913, “and without the Plans of the World Council the sun cannot
rise. It took fifty years to secure the approval of all the Councils
for the Candle, and to decide upon the number needed, and to re-fit the
Plans so as to make candles instead of torches. This touched upon
thousands and thousands of men working in scores of States. We cannot
alter the Plans again so soon.”

“And if this should lighten the toil of men,” said Similarity
5-0306, “then it is a great evil, for men have no cause to exist save
in toiling for other men.”

Then Collective 0-0009 rose and pointed at our box.

“This thing,” they said, “must be destroyed.”

And all the others cried as one:

“It must be destroyed!”

Then we leapt to the table.

We seized our box, we shoved them aside, and we ran to the window.
We turned and we looked at them for the last time, and a rage, such as
it is not fit for humans to know, choked our voice in our throat.

“You fools!” we cried. “You fools! You thrice-damned fools!”

We swung our fist through the windowpane, and we leapt out in a ringing rain of glass.

We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran.
We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent
without shape. And the road seemed not to be flat before us, but as if
it were leaping up to meet us, and we waited for the earth to rise and
strike us in the face. But we ran. We knew not where we were going. We
knew only that we must run, run to the end of the world, to the end of
our days.

Then we knew suddenly that we were lying on a soft earth and that we
had stopped. Trees taller than we had ever seen before stood over us in
great silence. Then we knew. We were in the Uncharted Forest. We had
not thought of coming here, but our legs had carried our wisdom, and
our legs had brought us to the Uncharted Forest against our will.

Our glass box lay beside us. We crawled to it, we fell upon it, our face in our arms, and we lay still.

We lay thus for a long time. Then we rose, we took our box and walked on into the forest.

It mattered not where we went. We knew that men would not follow us,
for they never enter the Uncharted Forest. We had nothing to fear from
them. The forest disposes of its own victims. This gave us no fear
either. Only we wished to be away, away from the City and from the air
that touches upon the air of the City. So we walked on, our box in our
arms, our heart empty.

We are doomed. Whatever days are left to us, we shall spend them
alone. And we have heard of the corruption to be found in solitude. We
have torn ourselves from the truth which is our brother men, and there
is no road back for us, and no redemption.

We know these things, but we do not care. We care for nothing on earth. We are tired.

Only the glass box in our arms is like a living heart that gives us
strength. We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the
good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our
brothers to us, and its truth above their truth. Why wonder about this?
We have not many days to live. We are walking to the fangs awaiting us
somewhere among the great, silent trees. There is not a thing behind us
to regret.

Then a blow of pain struck us, our first and our only. We thought of
the Golden One. We thought of the Golden One whom we shall never see
again. Then the pain passed. It is best. We are one of the Damned. It
is best if the Golden One forget our name and the body which bore that
name.

Chapter 8

It has been a day of wonder, this, our first day in the forest.

We awoke when a ray of sunlight fell across our face. We wanted to
leap to our feet, as we have had to leap every morning of our life, but
we remembered suddenly that no bell had rung and that there was no bell
to ring anywhere. We lay on our back, we threw our arms out, and we
looked up at the sky. The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and
rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us.

We did not wish to move. We thought suddenly that we could lie thus
as long as we wished, and we laughed aloud at the thought. We could
also rise, or run, or leap, or fall down again. We were thinking that
these were thoughts without sense, but before we knew it our body had
risen in one leap. Our arms stretched out of their own will, and our
body whirled and whirled, till it raised a wind to rustle through the
leaves of the bushes. Then our hands seized a branch and swung us high
into a tree, with no aim save the wonder of learning the strength of
our body. The branch snapped under us and we fell upon the moss that
was soft as a cushion. Then our body, losing all sense, rolled over and
over on the moss, dry leaves in our tunic, in our hair, in our face.
And we heard suddenly that we were laughing, laughing aloud, laughing
as if there were no power left in us save laughter.

Then we took our glass box, and we went on into the forest. We went
on, cutting through the branches, and it was as if we were swimming
through a sea of leaves, with the bushes as waves rising and falling
and rising around us, and flinging their green sprays high to the
treetops. The trees parted before us, calling us forward. The forest
seemed to welcome us. We went on, without thought, without care, with
nothing to feel save the song of our body.

We stopped when we felt hunger. We saw birds in the tree branches,
and flying from under our footsteps. We picked a stone and we sent it
as an arrow at a bird. It fell before us. We made a fire, we cooked the
bird, and we ate it, and no meal had ever tasted better to us. And we
thought suddenly that there was a great satisfaction to be found in the
food which we need and obtain by our own hand. And we wished to be
hungry again and soon, that we might know again this strange new pride
in eating.

Then we walked on. And we came to a stream which lay as a streak of
glass among the trees. It lay so still that we saw no water but only a
cut in the earth, in which the trees grew down, upturned, and the sky
lay at the bottom. We knelt by the stream and we bent down to drink.
And then we stopped. For, upon the blue of the sky below us, we saw our
own face for the first time.

We sat still and we held our breath. For our face and our body were
beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt
not pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our
brothers, for our limbs were straight and thin and hard and strong. And
we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the
stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.

We walked on till the sun had set. When the shadows gathered among
the trees, we stopped in a hollow between the roots, where we shall
sleep tonight. And suddenly, for the first time this day, we remembered
that we are the Damned. We remembered it, and we laughed.

We are writing this on the paper we had hidden in our tunic together
with the written pages we had brought for the World Council of
Scholars, but never given to them. We have much to speak of to
ourselves, and we hope we shall find the words for it in the days to
come. Now, we cannot speak, for we cannot understand.

Chapter 9

We have not written for many days. We did not wish to speak. For we needed no words to remember that which has happened to us.

It was on our second day in the forest that we heard steps behind
us. We hid in the bushes, and we waited. The steps came closer. And
then we saw the fold of a white tunic among the trees, and a gleam of
gold.

We leapt forward, we ran to them, and we stood looking upon the Golden One.

They saw us, and their hands closed into fists, and the fists pulled
their arms down, as if they wished their arms to hold them, while their
body swayed. And they could not speak.

We dared not come too close to them. We asked, and our voice trembled:

“How did you come to be here, Golden One?”

But they whispered only:

“We have found you. . . .”

“How did you come to be in the forest?” we asked.

They raised their head, and there was a great pride in their voice; they answered:

“We have followed you.”

Then we could not speak, and they said:

“We heard that you had gone to the Uncharted Forest, for the whole
City is speaking of it. So on the night of the day when we heard it, we
ran away from the Home of the Peasants. We found the marks of your feet
across the plain where no men walk. So we followed them, and we went
into the forest, and we followed the path where the branches were
broken by your body.”

Their white tunic was torn, and the branches had cut the skin of
their arms, but they spoke as if they had never taken notice of it, nor
of weariness, nor of fear.

“We have followed you,” they said, “and we shall follow you wherever
you go. If danger threatens you, we shall face it also. If it be death,
we shall die with you. You are damned, and we wish to share your
damnation.”

They looked upon us, and their voice was low, but there was bitterness and triumph in their voice.

“Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor
fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and
humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our
brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with
all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send us away
from you.”

Then they knelt, and bowed their golden head before us.

We had never thought of that which we did. We bent to raise the
Golden One to their feet, but when we touched them, it was as if
madness had stricken us. We seized their body and we pressed our lips
to theirs. The Golden One breathed once, and their breath was a moan,
and then their arms closed around us.

We stood together for a long time. And we were frightened that we
had lived for twenty-one years and had never known what joy is possible
to men.

Then we said:

“Our dearest one. Fear nothing of the forest. There is no danger in
solitude. We have no need of our brothers. Let us forget their good and
our evil, let us forget all things save that we are together and that
there is joy as a bond between us. Give us your hand. Look ahead. It is
our own world, Golden One, a strange, unknown world, but our own.”

Then we walked on into the forest, their hand in ours.

And that night we knew that to hold the body of women in our arms is
neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to the race of
men.

We have walked for many days. The forest has no end, and we seek no
end. But each day added to the chain of days between us and the City is
like an added blessing.

We have made a bow and many arrows. We can kill more birds than we
need for our food; we find water and fruit in the forest. At night, we
choose a clearing, and we build a ring of fires around it. We sleep in
the midst of that ring, and the beasts dare not attack us. We can see
their eyes, green and yellow as coals, watching us from the tree
branches beyond. The fires smoulder as a crown of jewels around us, and
smoke stands still in the air, in columns made blue by the moonlight.
We sleep together in the midst of the ring, the arms of the Golden One
around us, their head upon our breast.

Some day, we shall stop and build a house, when we shall have gone
far enough. But we do not have to hasten. The days before us are
without end, like the forest.

We cannot understand this new life which we have found, yet it seems
so clear and so simple. When questions come to puzzle us, we walk
faster, then turn and forget all things as we watch the Golden One
following. The shadows of leaves fall upon their arms, as they spread
the branches apart, but their shoulders are in the sun. The skin of
their arms is like a blue mist, but their shoulders are white and
glowing, as if the light fell not from above, but rose from under their
skin. We watch the leaf which has fallen upon their shoulder, and it
lies at the curve of their neck, and a drop of dew glistens upon it
like a jewel. They approach us, and they stop, laughing, knowing what
we think, and they wait obediently, without questions, till it pleases
us to turn and go on.

We go on and we bless the earth under our feet. But questions come
to us again, as we walk in silence. If that which we have found is the
corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If
this is the great evil of being alone, then what is good and what is
evil?

Everything which comes from the many is good. Everything which comes
from one is evil. This have we been taught with our first breath. We
have broken the law, but we have never doubted it. Yet now, as we walk
through the forest, we are learning to doubt.

There is no life for men, save in useful toil for the good of all
their brothers. But we lived not, when we toiled for our brothers, we
were only weary. There is no joy for men, save the joy shared with all
their brothers. But the only things which taught us joy were the power
we created in our wires, and the Golden One. And both these joys belong
to us alone, they come from us alone, they bear no relation to all our
brothers, and they do not concern our brothers in any way. Thus do we
wonder.

There is some error, one frightful error, in the thinking of men.
What is that error? We do not know, but the knowledge struggles within
us, struggles to be born. Today, the Golden One stopped suddenly and
said:

“We love you.”

But they frowned and shook their head and looked at us helplessly.

“No,” they whispered, “that is not what we wished to say.”

They were silent, then they spoke slowly, and their words were
halting, like the words of a child learning to speak for the first time:

“We are one . . . alone . . . and only . . . and we love you who are one . . . alone . . . and only.”

We looked into each other’s eyes and we knew that the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly.

And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.

Chapter 10

We are sitting at a table and we are writing this upon paper made
thousands of years ago. The light is dim, and we cannot see the Golden
One, only one lock of gold on the pillow of an ancient bed. This is our
home.

We came upon it today, at sunrise. For many days we had been
crossing a chain of mountains. The forest rose among cliffs, and
whenever we walked out upon a barren stretch of rock we saw great peaks
before us in the west, and to the north of us, and to the south, as far
as our eyes could see. The peaks were red and brown, with the green
streaks of forests as veins upon them, with blue mists as veils over
their heads. We had never heard of these mountains, nor seen them
marked on any map. The Uncharted Forest has protected them from the
Cities and from the men of the Cities.

We climbed paths where the wild goat dared not follow. Stones rolled
from under our feet, and we heard them striking the rocks below,
farther and farther down, and the mountains rang with each stroke, and
long after the strokes had died. But we went on, for we knew that no
men would ever follow our track nor reach us here.

Then today, at sunrise, we saw a white flame among the trees, high
on a sheer peak before us. We thought that it was a fire and stopped.
But the flame was unmoving, yet blinding as liquid metal. So we climbed
toward it through the rocks. And there, before us, on a broad summit,
with the mountains rising behind it, stood a house such as we had never
seen, and the white fire came from the sun on the glass of its windows.

The house had two stories and a strange roof flat as a floor. There
was more window than wall upon its walls, and the windows went on
straight around the corners, though how this kept the house standing we
could not guess. The walls were hard and smooth, of that stone unlike
stone which we had seen in our tunnel.

We both knew it without words: this house was left from the
Unmentionable Times. The trees had protected it from time and weather,
and from men who have less pity than time and weather. We turned to the
Golden One and we asked:

“Are you afraid?”

But they shook their head. So we walked to the door, and we threw it
open, and we stepped together into the house of the Unmentionable Times.

We shall need the days and the years ahead, to look, to learn, and
to understand the things of this house. Today, we could only look and
try to believe the sight of our eyes. We pulled the heavy curtains from
the windows and we saw that the rooms were small, and we thought that
not more than twelve men could have lived here. We thought it strange
that men had been permitted to build a house for only twelve.

Never had we seen rooms so full of light. The sunrays danced upon
colors, colors, more colors than we thought possible, we who had seen
no houses save the white ones, the brown ones and the grey. There were
great pieces of glass on the walls, but it was not glass, for when we
looked upon it we saw our own bodies and all the things behind us, as
on the face of a lake. There were strange things which we had never
seen and the use of which we do not know. And there were globes of
glass everywhere, in each room, the globes with the metal cobwebs
inside, such as we had seen in our tunnel.

We found the sleeping hall and we stood in awe upon its threshold.
For it was a small room and there were only two beds in it. We found no
other beds in the house, and then we knew that only two had lived here,
and this passes understanding. What kind of world did they have, the
men of the Unmentionable Times?

We found garments, and the Golden One gasped at the sight of them.
For they were not white tunics, nor white togas; they were of all
colors, no two of them alike. Some crumbled to dust as we touched them.
But others were of heavier cloth, and they felt soft and new in our
fingers.

We found a room with walls made of shelves, which held rows of
manuscripts, from the floor to the ceiling. Never had we seen such a
number of them, nor of such strange shape. They were not soft and
rolled, they had hard shells of cloth and leather; and the letters on
their pages were so small and so even that we wondered at the men who
had such handwriting. We glanced through the pages, and we saw that
they were written in our language, but we found many words which we
could not understand. Tomorrow, we shall begin to read these scripts.

When we had seen all the rooms of the house, we looked at the Golden One and we both knew the thought in our minds.

“We shall never leave this house,” we said, “nor let it be taken
from us. This is our home and the end of our journey. This is your
house, Golden One, and ours, and it belongs to no other men whatever as
far as the earth may stretch. We shall not share it with others, as we
share not our joy with them, nor our love, nor our hunger. So be it to
the end of our days.”

“Your will be done,” they said.

Then we went out to gather wood for the great hearth of our home. We
brought water from the stream which runs among the trees under our
windows. We killed a mountain goat, and we brought its flesh to be
cooked in a strange copper pot we found in a place of wonders, which
must have been the cooking room of the house.

We did this work alone, for no words of ours could take the Golden
One away from the big glass which is not glass. They stood before it
and they looked and looked upon their own body.

When the sun sank beyond the mountains, the Golden One fell asleep
on the floor, amidst jewels, and bottles of crystal, and flowers of
silk. We lifted the Golden One in our arms and we carried them to a
bed, their head falling softly upon our shoulder. Then we lit a candle,
and we brought paper from the room of the manuscripts, and we sat by
the window, for we knew that we could not sleep tonight.

And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock
and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that
waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first
commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great
deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say
it has great gifts to lay before us, but it wishes a greater gift for
us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to
all this glowing space of rock and sky.

We look ahead, we beg our heart for guidance in answering this call
no voice has spoken, yet we have heard. We look upon our hands. We see
the dust of centuries, the dust which hid the great secrets and perhaps
great evils. And yet it stirs no fear within our heart, but only silent
reverence and pity.

May knowledge come to us! What is the secret our heart has
understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as
if it were endeavoring to tell it?

Chapter 11

I am. I think. I will.

My hands…My spirit… My sky… My forest…This earth of mine….
What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I
spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest.
I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to
find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of
sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to
the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives
its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgement of
my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will
which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must
respect.

Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: “I will it!”

Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding
star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one
direction. They point to me.

I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the
universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not
and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth.
And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is
not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its
own purpose.

Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I
am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am
not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!

I do not surrender my treasures, nor do I share them. The fortune of
my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds
as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought,
my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.

I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask
none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man’s
soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them
shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than
to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any
chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love.
But honor is a thing to be earned.

I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters.
And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and
respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when
we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. For in the temple of his
spirit, each man is alone. Let each man keep his temple untouched and
undefiled. Then let him join hands with others if he wishes, but only
beyond his holy threshold.

For the word “We” must never be spoken, save by one’s choice and as
a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man’s
soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth,
the root of man’s torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.

The word “We” is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to
stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that
which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by
which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak
steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of
the sages.

What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it?
What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my
freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my
masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?

But I am done with this creed of corruption.

I am done with the monster of “We,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth,
this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who
will grant them joy and peace and pride.

This god, this one word:

“I.”

Chapter 12

It was when I read the first of the books I found in my house that I
saw the word “I.” And when I understood this word, the book fell from
my hands, and I wept, I who had never known tears. I wept in
deliverance and in pity for all mankind.

I understood the blessed thing which I had called my curse. I
understood why the best in me had been my sins and my transgressions;
and why I had never felt guilt in my sins. I understood that centuries
of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of
truth within him.

I read many books for many days. Then I called the Golden One, and I
told her what I had read and what I had learned. She looked at me and
the first words she spoke were:

“I love you.”

Then I said:

“My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names. There
was a time when each man had a name of his own to distinguish him from
all other men. So let us choose our names. I have read of a man who
lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books,
his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and he
brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for
his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name was Prometheus.”

“It shall be your name,” said the Golden One.

“And I have read of a goddess,” I said, “who was the mother of the
earth and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be your name, my
Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods.”

“It shall be my name,” said the Golden One.

Now I look ahead. My future is clear before me. The Saint of the
pyre had seen the future when he chose me as his heir, as the heir of
all the saints and all the martyrs who came before him and who died for
the same cause, for the same word, no matter what name they gave to
their cause and their truth.

I shall live here, in my own house. I shall take my food from the
earth by the toil of my own hands. I shall learn many secrets from my
books. Through the years ahead, I shall rebuild the achievements of the
past, and open the way to carry them further, the achievements which
are open to me, but closed forever to my brothers, for their minds are
shackled to the weakest and dullest ones among them.

I have learned that my power of the sky was known to men long ago;
they called it Electricity. It was the power that moved their greatest
inventions. It lit this house with light which came from those globes
of glass on the walls. I have found the engine which produced this
light. I shall learn how to repair it and how to make it work again. I
shall learn how to use the wires which carry this power. Then I shall
build a barrier of wires around my home, and across the paths which
lead to my home; a barrier light as a cobweb, more impassable than a
wall of granite; a barrier my brothers will never be able to cross. For
they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their
numbers. I have my mind.

Then here, on this mountaintop, with the world below me and nothing
above me but the sun, I shall live my own truth. Gaea is pregnant with
my child. Our son will be raised as a man. He will be taught to say “I”
and to bear the pride of it. He will be taught to walk straight and on
his own feet. He will be taught reverence for his own spirit.

When I shall have read all the books and learned my new way, when my
home will be ready and my earth tilled, I shall steal one day, for the
last time, into the cursed City of my birth. I shall call to me my
friend who has no name save International 4-8818, and all those like
him, Fraternity 2-5503, who cries without reason, and Solidarity 9-6347
who calls for help in the night, and a few others. I shall call to me
all the men and the women whose spirit has not been killed within them
and who suffer under the yoke of their brothers. They will follow me
and I shall lead them to my fortress. And here, in this uncharted
wilderness, I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall
write the first chapter in the new history of man.

These are the things before me. And as I stand here at the door of
glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon the history of
men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long
story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man’s freedom.
But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a
man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be
free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains.
Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was
enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their
chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which
neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter
what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right
on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of the freedom
for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.

But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from
men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The
worship of the word “We.”

When men accepted that worship, the structure of centuries collaped
about them, the structure whose every beam had come from the thought of
some one man, each in his day down the ages, from the depth of some one
spirit, such spirit as existed but for its own sake. Those men who
survived those eager to obey, eager to live for one another, since they
had nothing else to vindicate them—those men could neither carry on,
nor preserve what they had received. Thus did all thought, all science,
all wisdom perish on earth. Thus did men— men with nothing to offer
save their great number— lost the steel towers, the flying ships, the
power wires, all the things they had not created and could never keep.
Perhaps, later, some men had been born with the mind and the courage to
recover these things which were lost; perhaps these men came before the
Councils of Scholars. They were answered as I have been answered— and
for the same reasons.

But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of
transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and
went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is
hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word “I” could give it up
and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have
lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted
to be brought upon them.

Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear
sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word. What agony
must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not
stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest and in warning. But men paid no
heed to their warning. And they, these few, fought a hopeless battle,
and they perished with their banners smeared by their own blood. And
they chose to perish, for they knew. To them, I send my salute across
the centuries, and my pity.

Theirs is the banner in my hand. And I wish I had the power to tell
them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their
night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost.
For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the
darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of
man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken.
It may wear chains, but it will break through. And man will go on. Man,
not men.

Here on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall
build our new land and our fort. And it will become as the heart of the
earth, lost and hidden at first, but beating, beating louder each day.
And word of it will reach every corner of the earth. And the roads of
the world will become as veins which will carry the best of the world’s
blood to my threshold. And all my brothers, and the Councils of my
brothers, will hear of it, but they will be impotent against me. And
the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and
raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of
a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my
chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life.
For his honor.

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the
word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not
die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on
this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

The sacred word:

EGO

[Click here to read chapters 1 through 6, the first half of Ayn Rand’s Anthem]

Anthem – a novella by Ayn Rand (first half: chapters 1 through 6)

21 Thursday Jan 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1900s, American, Novels, Rand (Ayn)

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photo of An Rand by Phyllis Cerf

Anthem
[first half: chapters 1-6]
by Ayn Rand
[first published by 1938 by Cassell]

Chapter 1

It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others
think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is
base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our
own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do
or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not
write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!

But this is not the only sin upon us. We have committed a greater
crime, and for this crime there is no name. What punishment awaits us
if it be discovered we know not, for no such crime has come in the
memory of men and there are no laws to provide for it.

It is dark here. The flame of the candle stands still in the air.
Nothing moves in this tunnel save our hand on the paper. We are alone
here under the earth. It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that
none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the
great transgression and the root of all evil. But we have broken many
laws. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is
strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall
before us the shadow of our one head.

The walls are cracked and water runs upon them in thin threads
without sound, black and glistening as blood. We stole the candle from
the larder of the Home of the Street Sweepers. We shall be sentenced to
ten years in the Palace of Corrective Detention if it be discovered.
But this matters not. It matters only that the light is precious and we
should not waste it to write when we need it for that work which is our
crime. Nothing matters save the work, our secret, our evil, our
precious work. Still, we must also write, for—may the Council have
mercy on us!—we wish to speak for once to no ears but our own.

Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet
which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We
are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a burden,
for there are not many men who are six feet tall. Ever have the
Teachers and the Leaders pointed to us and frowned and said: “There is
evil in your bones, Equality 7-2521, for your body has grown beyond the
bodies of your brothers.” But we cannot change our bones nor our body.

We were born with a curse. It has always driven us to thoughts which
are forbidden. It has always given us wishes which men may not wish. We
know that we are evil, but there is no will in us and no power to
resist it. This is our wonder and our secret fear, that we know and do
not resist.

We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike.
Over the portals of the Palace of the World Council, there are words
cut in the marble, which we repeat to ourselves whenever we are tempted:

“We are one in all and all in one.
There are no men but only the great WE,
One, indivisible and forever.“

We repeat this to ourselves, but it helps us not.

These words were cut long ago. There is green mold in the grooves of
the letters and yellow streaks on the marble, which come from more
years than men could count. And these words are the truth for they are
written on the Palace of the World Council, and the World Council is
the body of all truth. Thus has it been ever since the Great Rebirth,
and farther back than that no memory can reach.

But we must never speak of the times before the Great Rebirth, else
we are sentenced to three years in the Palace of Corrective Detention.
It is only the Old Ones who whisper about it in the evenings, in the
Home of the Useless. They whisper many strange things, of the towers
which rose to the sky, in those Unmentionable Times, and of the wagons
which moved without horses, and of the lights which burned without
flame. But those times were evil. And those times passed away, when men
saw the Great Truth which is this: that all men are one and that there
is no will save the will of all men together.

All men are good and wise. It is only we, Equality 7-2521, we alone
who were born with a curse. For we are not like our brothers. And as we
look back upon our life, we see that it has ever been thus and that it
has brought us step by step to our last, supreme transgression, our
crime of crimes hidden here under the ground.

We remember the Home of Infants where we lived till we were five
years old, together with all the children of the City who had been born
in the same year. The sleeping halls there were white and clean and
bare of all things save one hundred beds. We were just like all our
brothers then, save for the one transgression: we fought with our
brothers. There are few offenses blacker than to fight with our
brothers, at any age and for any cause whatsoever. The Council of the
Home told us so, and of all the children of that year, we were locked
in the cellar most often.

When we were five years old, we were sent to the Home of the
Students, where there are ten wards, for our ten years of learning. Men
must learn till they reach their fifteenth year. Then they go to work.
In the Home of the Students we arose when the big bell rang in the
tower and we went to our beds when it rang again. Before we removed our
garments, we stood in the great sleeping hall, and we raised our right
arms, and we said all together with the three Teachers at the head:

“We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we
allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers who are
the State. Amen.”

Then we slept. The sleeping halls were white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds.

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those years in the Home of
the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was
that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a
head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our
brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us
so, and they frowned when they looked upon us.

So we fought against this curse. We tried to forget our lessons, but
we always remembered. We tried not to understand what the Teachers
taught, but we always understood it before the Teachers had spoken. We
looked upon Union 5-3992, who were a pale boy with only half a brain,
and we tried to say and do as they did, that we might be like them,
like Union 5-3992, but somehow the Teachers knew that we were not. And
we were lashed more often than all the other children.

The Teachers were just, for they had been appointed by the Councils,
and the Councils are the voice of all justice, for they are the voice
of all men. And if sometimes, in the secret darkness of our heart, we
regret that which befell us on our fifteenth birthday, we know that it
was through our own guilt. We had broken a law, for we had not paid
heed to the words of our Teachers. The Teachers had said to us all:

“Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when
you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do that which the Council
of Vocations shall prescribe for you. For the Council of Vocations
knows in its great wisdom where you are needed by your brother men,
better than you can know it in your unworthy little minds. And if you
are not needed by your brother men, there is no reason for you to
burden the earth with your bodies.”

We knew this well, in the years of our childhood, but our curse
broke our will. We were guilty and we confess it here: we were guilty
of the great Transgression of Preference. We preferred some work and
some lessons to the others. We did not listen well to the history of
all the Councils elected since the Great Rebirth. But we loved the
Science of Things. We wished to know. We wished to know about all the
things which make the earth around us. We asked so many questions that
the Teachers forbade it.

We think that there are mysteries in the sky and under the water and
in the plants which grow. But the Council of Scholars has said that
there are no mysteries, and the Council of Scholars knows all things.
And we learned much from our Teachers. We learned that the earth is
flat and that the sun revolves around it, which causes the day and the
night. We learned the names of all the winds which blow over the seas
and push the sails of our great ships. We learned how to bleed men to
cure them of all ailments.

We loved the Science of Things. And in the darkness, in the secret
hour, when we awoke in the night and there were no brothers around us,
but only their shapes in the beds and their snores, we closed our eyes,
and we held our lips shut, and we stopped our breath, that no shudder
might let our brothers see or hear or guess, and we thought that we
wished to be sent to the Home of the Scholars when our time would come.

All the great modern inventions come from the Home of the Scholars,
such as the newest one, which we found only a hundred years ago, of how
to make candles from wax and string; also, how to make glass, which is
put in our windows to protect us from the rain. To find these things,
the Scholars must study the earth and learn from the rivers, from the
sands, from the winds and the rocks. And if we went to the Home of
Scholars, we could learn from these also. We could ask questions of
these, for they do not forbid questions.

And questions give us no rest. We know not why our curse makes us
seek we know not what, ever and ever. But we cannot resist it. It
whispers to us that there are great things on this earth of ours, and
that we can know them if we try, and that we must know them. We ask,
why must we know, but it has no answer to give us. We must know that we
may know.

So we wished to be sent to the Home of the Scholars. We wished it so
much that our hands trembled under the blankets in the night, and we
bit our arm to stop that other pain which we could not endure. It was
evil and we dared not face our brothers in the morning. For men may
wish nothing for themselves. And we were punished when the Council of
Vocations came to give us our Life Mandates which tell those who reach
their fifteenth year what their work is to be for the rest of their
days.

The Council of Vocations came on the first day of spring, and they
sat in the great hall. And we who were fifteen and all the Teachers
came into the great hall. And the Council of Vocations sat on a high
dais, and they had but two words to speak to each of the Students. They
called the Students’ names, and when the Students stepped before them,
one after another, the Council said: “Carpenter” or “Doctor” or “Cook”
or “Leader.” Then each Student raised their right arm and said: “The
will of our brothers be done.”

Now if the Council has said “Carpenter” or “Cook,” the Students so
assigned go to work and they do not study any further. But if the
Council has said “Leader,” then those Students go into the Home of the
Leaders, which is the greatest house in the City, for it has three
stories. And there they study for many years, so that they may become
candidates and be elected to the City Council and the State Council and
World Council—by a free and general vote of all men. But we wished not
to be a Leader, even though it is a great honor. We wished to be a
Scholar.

So we waited our turn in the great hall and then we heard the
Council of Vocations call our name: “Equality 7-2521.” We walked to the
dais, and our legs did not tremble, and we looked up at the Council.
There were five members of the Council, three of the male gender and
two of the female. Their hair was white and their faces were cracked as
the clay of a dry river bed. They were old. They seemed older than the
marble of the Temple of the World Council. They sat before us and they
did not move. And we saw no breath to stir the folds of their white
togas. But we knew that they were alive, for a finger of the hand of
the oldest rose, pointed to us, and fell down again. This was the only
thing which moved, for the lips of the oldest did not move as they
said: “Street Sweeper.”

We felt the cords of our neck grow tight as our head rose higher to
look upon the faces of Council, and we were happy. We knew we had been
guilty, but now we had a way to atone for it. We would accept our Life
Mandate, and we would work for our brothers, gladly and willingly, and
we would erase our sin against them, which they did not know, but we
knew. So we were happy, and proud of ourselves and of our victory over
ourselves. We raised our right arm and we spoke, and our voice was the
clearest, the steadiest voice in the hall that day, and we said:

“The will of our brothers be done.”

And we looked straight into the eyes of the Council, but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.

So we went into the Home of the Street Sweepers. It is a grey house
on a narrow street. There is a sundial in its courtyard, by which the
Council of the Home can tell the hours of the day and when to ring the
bell. When the bell rings, we all arise from our beds. The sky is green
and cold in our windows to the east. The shadow on the sundial marks
off a half-hour while we dress and eat our breakfast in the dining
hall, where there are five long tables with twenty clay plates and
twenty clay cups on each table. Then we go to work in the streets of
the City, with our brooms and our rakes. In five hours, when the sun is
high we return to the Home and we eat our midday meal, for which
one-half hour is allowed. Then we go to work again. In five hours, the
shadows are blue on the pavements, and the sky is blue with a deep
brightness which is not bright. We come back to have our dinner, which
lasts one hour. Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to
one of the City Halls, for the Social Meeting. Other columns of men
arrive from the Homes of the different Trades. The candles are lit, and
the Councils of the different Homes stand in a pulpit, and they speak
to us of our duties and of our brother men. Then visiting Leaders mount
the pulpit and they read to us the speeches which were made in the City
Council that day, for the City Council represents all men and all men
must know. Then we sing hymns, the Hymn of Brotherhood, and the Hymn of
Equality, and the Hymn of the Collective Spirit. The sky is a soggy
purple when we return to the Home. Then the bell rings and we walk in a
straight column to the City Theatre for three hours of Social
Recreation. There a play is shown upon the stage, with two great
choruses from the Home of the Actors, which speak and answer all
together, in two great voices. The plays are about toil and how good it
is. Then we walk back to the Home in a straight column. The sky is like
a black sieve pierced by silver drops beat against the street lanterns.
We go to our beds and we sleep, till the bell rings again. The sleeping
halls are white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds.

Thus we lived each day of four years, until two springs ago when our
crime happened. Thus must all men live until they are forty. At forty,
they are worn out. At forty, they are sent to the Home of the Useless,
where the Old Ones live. The Old Ones do not work, for the State takes
care of them. They sit in the sun in summer and they sit by the fire in
winter. They do not speak often, for they are weary. The Old Ones know
that they are soon to die. When a miracle happens and some live to be
forty-five, they are the Ancient Ones, and children stare at them when
passing by the Home of the Useless. Such is to be our life, as that of
all our brothers and of the brothers who came before us.

Such would have been our life, had we not committed our crime which
changed all things for us. And it was our curse which drove us to our
crime. We had been a good Street Sweeper and like all our brother
Street Sweepers, save for our cursed wish to know. We looked too long
at the stars at night, and at the trees and the earth. And when we
cleaned the yard of the Home of the Scholars, we gathered the glass
vials, the pieces of metal, the dried bones which they had discarded.
We wished to keep these things to study them, but we had no place to
hide them. So we carried them to the City Cesspool. And then we made
the discovery.

It was on a day of the spring before last. We Street Sweepers work
in brigades of three, and we were with Union 5-3992, they of the
half-brain, and with International 4-8818. Now Union 5-3992 are a
sickly lad and sometimes they are stricken with convulsions, when their
mouth froths and their eyes turn white. But International 4-8818 are
different. They are a tall, strong youth and their eyes are like
fireflies, for there is laughter in their eyes. We cannot look upon
International 4-8818 and not smile in answer. For this they were not
liked in the Home of the Students, as it is not proper to smile without
reason. And also they were not liked because they took pieces of coal
and the drew pictures upon the walls, and they were pictures which made
men laugh. But it is only our brothers in the Home of the Artists who
are permitted to draw pictures, so International 4-8818 were sent to
the Home of the Street Sweepers, like ourselves.

International 4-8818 and we are friends. This is an evil thing to
say, for it is a transgression, the great Transgression of Preference,
to love any among men better than the others, since we must love all
men and all men are our friends. So International 4-8818 and we have
never spoken of it. But we know. We know, when we look into each
other’s eyes. And when we look thus without words, we both know other
things also, strange things for which there are no words, and these
things frighten us.

So on that day of the spring before last, Union 5-3992 were stricken
with convulsions on the edge of the City, near the City Theatre. We
left them to lie in the shade of the Theatre tent and we went with
International 4-8818 to finish our work. We came together to the great
ravine behind the Theatre. It is empty save for trees and weeds. Beyond
the ravine there is a plain, and beyond the plain there lies the
Uncharted Forest, about which men must not think.

We were gathering the papers and the rags which the wind had blown
from the Theatre, when we saw an iron bar among the weeds. It was old
and rusted by many rains. We pulled with all our strength, but we could
not move it. So we called International 4-8818, and together we scraped
the earth around the bar. Of a sudden the earth fell in before us, and
we saw an old iron grill over a black hole.

International 4-8818 stepped back. But we pulled at the grill and it
gave way. And then we saw iron rings as steps leading down a shaft into
a darkness without bottom.

“We shall go down,” we said to International 4-8818.

“It is forbidden,” they answered.

We said: “The Council does not know of this hole, so it cannot be forbidden.”

And they answered: “Since the Council does not know of this hole,
there can be no law permitting to enter. And everything which is not
permitted by law is forbidden.”

But we said: “We shall go, none the less.”

They were frightened, but they stood by and watched us go.

We hung on the iron rings with our hands and our feet. We could see
nothing below us. And above us the hole open upon the sky grew smaller
and smaller, till it came to be the size of a button. But still we went
down. Then our foot touched the ground. We rubbed our eyes, for we
could not see. Then our eyes became used to the darkness, but we could
not believe what we saw.

No men known to us could have built this place, nor the men known to
our brothers who lived before us, and yet it was built by men. It was a
great tunnel. Its walls were hard and smooth to the touch; it felt like
stone, but it was not stone. On the ground there were long thin tracks
of iron, but it was not iron; it felt smooth and cold as glass. We
knelt, and we crawled forward, our hand groping along the iron line to
see where it would lead. But there was an unbroken night ahead. Only
the iron tracks glowed through it, straight and white, calling us to
follow. But we could not follow, for we were losing the puddle of light
behind us. So we turned and we crawled back, our hand on the iron line.
And our heart beat in our fingertips, without reason. And then we knew.

We knew suddenly that this place was left from the Unmentionable
Times. So it was true, and those Times had been, and all the wonders of
those Times. Hundreds upon hundreds of years ago men knew secrets which
we have lost. And we thought: “This is a foul place. They are damned
who touch the things of the Unmentionable Times.” But our hand which
followed the track, as we crawled, clung to the iron as if it would not
leave it, as if the skin of our hand were thirsty and begging of the
metal some secret fluid beating it its coldness.

We returned to the earth. International 4-8818 looked upon us and stepped back.

“Equality 7-2521,” they said, “your face is white.”

But we could not speak and we stood looking upon them.

They backed away, as if they dared not touch us. Then they smiled,
but it was not a gay smile; it was lost and pleading. But still we
could not speak. Then they said:

“We shall report our find to the City Council and both of us will be rewarded.”

And then we spoke. Our voice was hard and there was no mercy in our voice. We said:

“We shall not report our find to the City Council. We shall not report it to any men.”

They raised their hands to their ears, for never had they heard such words as these.

“International 4-8818,” we asked, “will you report us to the Council and see us lashed to death before your eyes?”

They stood straight of a sudden and they answered:

“Rather would we die.”

“Then,” we said, “keep silent. This place is ours. This place
belongs to us, Equality 7-2521, and to no other men on earth. And if
ever we surrender it, we shall surrender our life with it also.”

Then we saw that the eyes of International 4-8818 were full to the
lids with tears they dared not drop. They whispered, and their voice
trembled, so that their words lost all shape:

“The will of the Council is above all things, for it is the will of
our brothers, which is holy. But if you wish it so, we shall obey you.
Rather shall we be evil with you than good with all our brothers. May
the Council have mercy upon both our hearts!”

Then we walked away together and back to the Home of the Street Sweepers. And we walked in silence.

Thus did it come to pass that each night, when the stars are high
and the Street Sweepers sit in the City Theatre, we, Equality 7-2521,
steal out and run through the darkness to our place. It is easy to
leave the Theatre; when the candles are blown and the Actors come onto
the stage, no eyes can see us as we crawl under our seat and under the
cloth of the tent. Later, it is easy to steal through the shadows and
fall in line next to International 4-8818, as the column leaves the
Theatre. It is dark in the streets and there are no men about, for no
men may walk through the City when they have no mission to walk there.
Each night, we run to the ravine, and we remove the stones which we
have piled upon the iron grill to hide it from men. Each night, for
three hours, we are under the earth, alone.

We have stolen candles from the Home of the Street Sweepers, we have
stolen flints and knives and paper, and we have brought them to this
place. We have stolen glass vials and powders and acids from the Home
of the Scholars. Now we sit in the tunnel for three hours each night
and we study. We melt strange metals, and we mix acids, and we cut open
the bodies of the animals which we find in the City Cesspool. We have
built an oven of bricks we gathered in the streets. We burn the wood we
find in the ravine. The fire flickers in the oven and blue shadows
dance upon the walls, and there is no sound of men to disturb us.

We have stolen manuscripts. This is a great offense. Manuscripts are
precious, for our brothers in the Home of the Clerks spend one year to
copy one single script in their clear handwriting. Manuscripts are rare
and they are kept in the Home of the Scholars. So we sit under the
earth and we read the stolen scripts. Two years have passed since we
found this place. And in these two years we have learned more than we
had learned in the ten years of the Home of the Students.

We have learned things which are not in the scripts. We have solved
secrets of which the Scholars have no knowledge. We have come to see
how great is the unexplored, and many lifetimes will not bring us to
the end of our quest. But we wish no end to our quest. We wish nothing,
save to be alone and to learn, and to feel as if with each day our
sight were growing sharper than the hawk’s and clearer than rock
crystal.

Strange are the ways of evil. We are false in the faces of our
brothers. We are defying the will of our Councils. We alone, of the
thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work
which has no purpose save that we wish to do it. The evil of our crime
is not for the human mind to probe. The nature of our punishment, if it
be discovered, is not for the human heart to ponder. Never, not in the
memory of the Ancient Ones’ Ancients, never have men done that which we
are doing.

And yet there is no shame in us and no regret. We say to ourselves
that we are a wretch and a traitor. But we feel no burden upon our
spirit and no fear in our heart. And it seems to us that our spirit is
clear as a lake troubled by no eyes save those of the sun. And in our
heart—strange are the ways of evil!—in our heart there is the first
peace we have known in twenty years.

Chapter 2

Liberty 5-3000 . . . Liberty five-three thousand . . . Liberty 5-3000 . . . .

We wish to write this name. We wish to speak it, but we dare not
speak it above a whisper. For men are forbidden to take notice of
women, and women are forbidden to take notice of men. But we think of
one among women, they whose name is Liberty 5-3000, and we think of no
others. The women who have been assigned to work the soil live in the
Homes of the Peasants beyond the City. Where the City ends there is a
great road winding off to the north, and we Street Sweepers must keep
this road clean to the first milepost. There is a hedge along the road,
and beyond the hedge lie the fields. The fields are black and ploughed,
and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in
some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide
apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin,
green spangles. Women work in the fields, and their white tunics in the
wind are like the wings of sea-gulls beating over the black soil.

And there it was that we saw Liberty 5-3000 walking along the
furrows. Their body was straight and thin as a blade of iron. Their
eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness
and no guilt. Their hair was golden as the sun; their hair flew in the
wind, shining and wild, as if it defied men to restrain it. They threw
seeds from their hand as if they deigned to fling a scornful gift, and
the earth was a beggar under their feet.

We stood still; for the first time did we know fear, and then pain.
And we stood still that we might not spill this pain more precious than
pleasure.

Then we heard a voice from the others call their name: “Liberty
5-3000,” and they turned and walked back. Thus we learned their name,
and we stood watching them go, till their white tunic was lost in the
blue mist.

And the following day, as we came to the northern road, we kept our
eyes upon Liberty 5-3000 in the field. And each day thereafter we knew
the illness of waiting for our hour on the northern road. And there we
looked at Liberty 5-3000 each day. We know not whether they looked at
us also, but we think they did. Then one day they came close to the
hedge, and suddenly they turned to us. They turned in a whirl and the
movement of their body stopped, as if slashed off, as suddenly as it
had started. They stood still as a stone, and they looked straight upon
us, straight into our eyes. There was no smile on their face, and no
welcome. But their face was taut, and their eyes were dark. Then they
turned as swiftly, and they walked away from us.

But the following day, when we came to the road, they smiled. They
smiled to us and for us. And we smiled in answer. Their head fell back,
and their arms fell, as if their arms and their thin white neck were
stricken suddenly with a great lassitude. They were not looking upon
us, but upon the sky. Then they glanced at us over their shoulder, as
we felt as if a hand had touched our body, slipping softly from our
lips to our feet.

Every morning thereafter, we greeted each other with our eyes. We
dared not speak. It is a transgression to speak to men of other Trades,
save in groups at the Social Meetings. But once, standing at the hedge,
we raised our hand to our forehead and then moved it slowly, palm down,
toward Liberty 5-3000. Had the others seen it, they could have guessed
nothing, for it looked only as if we were shading our eyes from the
sun. But Liberty 5-3000 saw it and understood. They raised their hand
to their forehead and moved it as we had. Thus, each day, we greet
Liberty 5-3000, and they answer, and no men can suspect.

We do not wonder at this new sin of ours. It is our second
Transgression of Preference, for we do not think of all our brothers,
as we must, but only of one, and their name is Liberty 5-3000. We do
not know why we think of them. We do not know why, when we think of
them, we feel all of a sudden that the earth is good and that it is not
a burden to live. We do not think of them as Liberty 5-3000 any longer.
We have given them a name in our thoughts. We call them the Golden One.
But it is a sin to give men names which distinguish them from other
men. Yet we call them the Golden One, for they are not like the others.
The Golden One are not like the others.

And we take no heed of the law which says that men may not think of
women, save at the Time of Mating. This is the time each spring when
all the men older than twenty and all the women older than eighteen are
sent for one night to the City Palace of Mating. And each of the men
have one of the women assigned to them by the Council of Eugenics.
Children are born each winter, but women never see their children and
children never know their parents. Twice have we been sent to the
Palace of Mating, but it is an ugly and shameful matter, of which we do
not like to think.

We had broken so many laws, and today we have broken one more. Today, we spoke to the Golden One.

The other women were far off in the field, when we stopped at the
hedge by the side of the road. The Golden One were kneeling alone at
the moat which runs through the field. And the drops of water falling
from their hands, as they raised the water to their lips, were like
sparks of fire in the sun. Then the Golden One saw us, and they did not
move, kneeling there, looking at us, and circles of light played upon
their white tunic, from the sun on the water of the moat, and one
sparkling drop fell from a finger of their hand held as frozen in the
air.

Then the Golden One rose and walked to the hedge, as if they had
heard a command in our eyes. The two other Street Sweepers of our
brigade were a hundred paces away down the road. And we thought that
International 4-8818 would not betray us, and Union 5-3992 would not
understand. So we looked straight upon the Golden One, and we saw the
shadows of their lashes on their white cheeks and the sparks of sun on
their lips. And we said:

“You are beautiful, Liberty 5-3000.”

Their face did not move and they did not avert their eyes. Only
their eyes grew wider, and there was triumph in their eyes, and it was
not triumph over us, but over things we could not guess.

Then they asked:

“What is your name?”

“Equality 7-2521,” we answered.

“You are not one of our brothers, Equality 7-2521, for we do not wish you to be.”

We cannot say what they meant, for there are no words for their meaning, but we know it without words and we knew it then.

“No,” we answered, “nor are you one of our sisters.”

“If you see us among scores of women, will you look upon us?”

“We shall look upon you, Liberty 5-3000, if we see you among all the women of the earth.”

Then they asked:

“Are Street Sweepers sent to different parts of the City or do they always work in the same places?”

“They always work in the same places,” we answered, “and no one will take this road away from us.”

“Your eyes,” they said, “are not like the eyes of any among men.”

And suddenly, without cause for the thought which came to us, we felt cold, cold to our stomach.

“How old are you?” we asked.

They understood our thought, for they lowered their eyes for the first time.

“Seventeen,” they whispered.

And we sighed, as if a burden had been taken from us, for we had
been thinking without reason of the Palace of Mating. And we thought
that we would not let the Golden One be sent to the Palace. How to
prevent it, how to bar the will of the Councils, we knew not, but we
knew suddenly that we would. Only we do not know why such thought came
to us, for these ugly matters bear no relation to us and the Golden
One. What relation can they bear?

Still, without reason, as we stood there by the hedge, we felt our
lips drawn tight with hatred, a sudden hatred for all our brother men.
And the Golden One saw it and smiled slowly, and there was in their
smile the first sadness we had seen in them. We think that in the
wisdom of women the Golden One had understood more than we can
understand.

Then three of the sisters in the field appeared, coming toward the
road, so the Golden One walked away from us. They took the bag of
seeds, and they threw the seeds into the furrows of earth as they
walked away. But the seeds flew wildly, for the hand of the Golden One
was trembling.

Yet as we walked back to the Home of the Street Sweepers, we felt
that we wanted to sing, without reason. So we were reprimanded tonight,
in the dining hall, for without knowing it we had begun to sing aloud
some tune we had never heard. But it is not proper to sing without
reason, save at the Social Meetings.

“We are singing because we are happy,” we answered the one of the Home Council who reprimanded us.

“Indeed you are happy,” they answered. “How else can men be when they live for their brothers?”

And now, sitting here in our tunnel, we wonder about these words. It
is forbidden, not to be happy. For, as it has been explained to us, men
are free and the earth belongs to them; and all things on earth belong
to all men; and the will of all men together is good for all; and so
all men must be happy.

Yet as we stand at night in the great hall, removing our garments
for sleep, we look upon our brothers and we wonder. The heads of our
brothers are bowed. The eyes of our brothers are dull, and never do
they look one another in the eyes. The shoulders of our brothers are
hunched, and their muscles are drawn, as if their bodies were shrinking
and wished to shrink out of sight. And a word steals into our mind, as
we look upon our brothers, and that word is fear.

There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and in the
air of the streets. Fear walks through the City, fear without name,
without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.

We feel it also, when we are in the Home of the Street Sweepers. But
here, in our tunnel, we feel it no longer. The air is pure under the
ground. There is no odor of men. And these three hours give us strength
for our hours above the ground.

Our body is betraying us, for the Council of the Home looks with
suspicion upon us. It is not good to feel too much joy nor to be glad
that our body lives. For we matter not and it must not matter to us
whether we live or die, which is to be as our brothers will it. But we,
Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish
no virtue.

Yet our brothers are not like us. All is not well with our brothers.
There are Fraternity 2-5503, a quiet boy with wise, kind eyes, who cry
suddenly, without reason, in the midst of day or night, and their body
shakes with sobs they cannot explain. There are Solidarity 9-6347, who
are a bright youth, without fear in the day; but they scream in their
sleep, and they scream: “Help us! Help us! Help us!” into the night, in
a voice which chills our bones, but the Doctors cannot cure Solidarity
9-6347.

And as we all undress at night, in the dim light of the candles, our
brothers are silent, for they dare not speak the thoughts of their
minds. For all must agree with all, and they cannot know if their
thoughts are the thoughts of all, and so they fear to speak. And they
are glad when the candles are blown for the night. But we, Equality
7-2521, look through the window upon the sky, and there is peace in the
sky, and cleanliness, and dignity. And beyond the City there lies the
plain, and beyond the plain, black upon the black sky, there lies the
Uncharted Forest.

We do not wish to look upon the Uncharted Forest. We do not wish to
think of it. But ever do our eyes return to that black patch upon the
sky. Men never enter the Uncharted Forest, for there is no power to
explore it and no path to lead among its ancient trees which stand as
guards of fearful secrets. It is whispered that once or twice in a
hundred years, one among the men of the City escape alone and run to
the Uncharted Forest, without call or reason. These men do not return.
They perish from hunger and from the claws of the wild beasts which
roam the Forest. But our Councils say that this is only a legend. We
have heard that there are many Uncharted Forests over the land, among
the Cities. And it is whispered that they have grown over the ruins of
many cities of the Unmentionable Times. The trees have swallowed the
ruins, and the bones under the ruins, and all the things which
perished. And as we look upon the Uncharted Forest far in the night, we
think of the secrets of the Unmentionable Times. And we wonder how it
came to pass that these secrets were lost to the world. We have heard
the legends of the great fighting, in which many men fought on one side
and only a few on the other. These few were the Evil Ones and they were
conquered. Then great fires raged over the land. And in these fires the
Evil Ones and all the things made by the Evil Ones were burned. And the
fire which is called the Dawn of the Great Rebirth, was the Script Fire
where all the scripts of the Evil Ones were burned, and with them all
the words of the Evil Ones. Great mountains of flame stood in the
squares of the Cities for three months. Then came the Great Rebirth.

The words of the Evil Ones . . . The words of the Unmentionable Times . . . What are the words which we have lost?

May the Council have mercy upon us! We had no wish to write such a
question, and we knew not what we were doing till we had written it. We
shall not ask this question and we shall not think it. We shall not
call death upon our head.

And yet . . . And yet . . . There is some word, one single word
which is not in the language of men, but which had been. And this is
the Unspeakable Word, which no men may speak nor hear. But sometimes,
and it is rare, sometimes, somewhere, one among men find that word.
They find it upon scraps of old manuscripts or cut into the fragments
of ancient stones. But when they speak it they are put to death. There
is no crime punished by death in this world, save this one crime of
speaking the Unspeakable Word.

We have seen one of such men burned alive in the square of the City.
And it was a sight which has stayed with us through the years, and it
haunts us, and follows us, and it gives us no rest. We were a child
then, ten years old. And we stood in the great square with all the
children and all the men of the City, sent to behold the burning. They
brought the Transgressor out into the square and they led them to the
pyre. They had torn out the tongue of the Transgressor, so that they
could speak no longer. The Transgressor were young and tall. They had
hair of gold and eyes blue as morning. They walked to the pyre, and
their step did not falter. And of all the faces on that square, of all
the faces which shrieked and screamed and spat curses upon them, theirs
was the calmest and the happiest face.

As the chains were wound over their body at the stake, and a flame
set to the pyre, the Transgressor looked upon the City. There was a
thin thread of blood running from the corner of their mouth, but their
lips were smiling. And a monstrous thought came to us then, which has
never left us. We had heard of Saints. There are the Saints of Labor,
and the Saints of the Councils, and the Saints of the Great Rebirth.
But we had never seen a Saint nor what the likeness of a Saint should
be. And we thought then, standing in the square, that the likeness of a
Saint was the face we saw before us in the flames, the face of the
Transgressor of the Unspeakable Word.

As the flames rose, a thing happened which no eyes saw but ours,
else we would not be living today. Perhaps it had only seemed to us.
But it seemed to us that the eyes of the Transgressor had chosen us
from the crowd and were looking straight upon us. There was no pain in
their eyes and no knowledge of the agony of their body. There was only
joy in them, and pride, a pride holier than is fit for human pride to
be. And it seemed as if these eyes were trying to tell us something
through the flames, to send into our eyes some word without sound. And
it seemed as if these eyes were begging us to gather that word and not
to let it go from us and from the earth. But the flames rose and we
could not guess the word. . . .

What—even if we have to burn for it like the Saint of the Pyre—what is the Unspeakable Word?

Chapter 3

We, Equality 7-2521, have discovered a new power of nature. And we have discovered it alone, and we alone are to know it.

It is said. Now let us be lashed for it, if we must. The Council of
Scholars has said that we all know the things which exist and therefore
the things which are not known by all do not exist. But we think that
the Council of Scholars is blind. The secrets of this earth are not for
all men to see, but only for those who will seek them. We know, for we
have found a secret unknown to all our brothers.

We know not what this power is nor whence it comes. But we know its
nature, we have watched it and worked with it. We saw it first two
years ago. One night, we were cutting open the body of a dead frog when
we saw its leg jerking. It was dead, yet it moved. Some power unknown
to men was making it move. We could not understand it. Then, after many
tests, we found the answer. The frog had been hanging on a wire of
copper; and it had been the metal of our knife which had sent the
strange power to the copper through the brine of the frog’s body. We
put a piece of copper and a piece of zinc into a jar of brine, we
touched a wire to them, and there, under our fingers, was a miracle
which had never occurred before, a new miracle and a new power.

This discovery haunted us. We followed it in preference to all our
studies. We worked with it, we tested it in more ways than we can
describe, and each step was as another miracle unveiling before us. We
came to know that we had found the greatest power on earth. For it
defies all the laws known to men. It makes the needle move and turn on
the compass which we stole from the Home of the Scholars; but we had
been taught, when still a child, that the loadstone points to the north
and that this is a law which nothing can change; yet our new power
defies all laws. We found that it causes lightning, and never have men
known what causes lightning. In thunderstorms, we raised a tall rod of
iron by the side of our hole, and we watched it from below. We have
seen the lightning strike it again and again. And now we know that
metal draws the power of the sky, and that metal can be made to give it
forth.

We have built strange things with this discovery of ours. We used
for it the copper wires which we found here under the ground. We have
walked the length of our tunnel, with a candle lighting the way. We
could go no farther than half a mile, for earth and rock had fallen at
both ends. But we gathered all the things we found and we brought them
to our work place. We found strange boxes with bars of metal inside,
with many cords and strands and coils of metal. We found wires that led
to strange little globes of glass on the walls; they contained threads
of metal thinner than a spider’s web.

These things help us in our work. We do not understand them, but we
think that the men of the Unmentionable Times had known our power of
the sky, and these things had some relation to it. We do not know, but
we shall learn. We cannot stop now, even though it frightens us that we
are alone in our knowledge.

No single one can possess greater wisdom than the many Scholars who
are elected by all men for their wisdom. Yet we can. We do. We have
fought against saying it, but now it is said. We do not care. We forget
all men, all laws and all things save our metals and our wires. So much
is still to be learned! So long a road lies before us, and what care we
if we must travel it alone!

Chapter 4

Many days passed before we could speak to the Golden One again. But
then came the day when the sky turned white, as if the sun had burst
and spread its flame in the air, and the fields lay still without
breath, and the dust of the road was white in the glow. So the women of
the field were weary, and they tarried over their work, and they were
far from the road when we came. But the Golden One stood alone at the
hedge, waiting. We stopped and we saw that their eyes, so hard and
scornful to the world, were looking at us as if they would obey any
word we might speak.

And we said:

“We have given you a name in our thoughts, Liberty 5-3000.”

“What is our name?” they asked.

“The Golden One.”

“Nor do we call you Equality 7-2521 when we think of you.”

“What name have you given us?” They looked straight into our eyes and they held their head high and they answered:

“The Unconquered.”

For a long time we could not speak. Then we said:

“Such thoughts as these are forbidden, Golden One.”

“But you think such thoughts as these and you wish us to think them.”

We looked into their eyes and we could not lie.

“Yes,” we whispered, and they smiled, and then we said: “Our dearest one, do not obey us.”

They stepped back, and their eyes were wide and still.

“Speak these words again,” they whispered.

“Which words?” we asked. But they did not answer, and we knew it.

“Our dearest one,” we whispered.

Never have men said this to women.

The head of the Golden One bowed slowly, and they stood still before
us, their arms at their sides, the palms of their hands turned to us,
as if their body were delivered in submission to our eyes. And we could
not speak.

Then they raised their head, and they spoke simply and gently, as if they wished us to forget some anxiety of their own.

“The day is hot,” they said, “and you have worked for many hours and you must be weary.”

“No,” we answered.

“It is cooler in the fields,” they said, “and there is water to drink. Are you thirsty?”

“Yes,” we answered, “but we cannot cross the hedge.”

“We shall bring the water to you,” they said.

Then they knelt by the moat, they gathered water in their two hands, they rose and they held the water out to our lips.

We do not know if we drank that water. We only knew suddenly that
their hands were empty, but we were still holding our lips to their
hands, and that they knew it, but did not move.

We raised our head and stepped back. For we did not understand what had made us do this, and we were afraid to understand it.

And the Golden One stepped back, and stood looking upon their hands
in wonder. Then the Golden One moved away, even though no others were
coming, and they moved, stepping back, as if they could not turn from
us, their arms bent before them, as if they could not lower their hands.

Chapter 5

We made it. We created it. We brought it forth from the night of the ages. We alone. Our hands. Our mind. Ours alone and only.

We know not what we are saying. Our head is reeling. We look upon
the light which we have made. We shall be forgiven for anything we say
tonight. . . .

Tonight, after more days and trials than we can count, we finished
building a strange thing, from the remains of the Unmentionable Times,
a box of glass, devised to give forth the power of the sky of greater
strength than we had ever achieved before. And when we put our wires to
this box, when we closed the current—the wire glowed! It came to life,
it turned red, and a circle of light lay on the stone before us.

We stood, and we held our head in our hands. We could not conceive
of that which we had created. We had touched no flint, made no fire.
Yet here was light, light that came from nowhere, light from the heart
of metal.

We blew out the candle. Darkness swallowed us. There was nothing
left around us, nothing save night and a thin thread of flame in it, as
a crack in the wall of a prison. We stretched our hands to the wire,
and we saw our fingers in the red glow. We could not see our body nor
feel it, and in that moment nothing existed save our two hands over a
wire glowing in a black abyss.

Then we thought of the meaning of that which lay before us. We can
light our tunnel, and the City, and all the Cities of the world with
nothing save metal and wires. We can give our brothers a new light,
cleaner and brighter than any they have ever known. The power of the
sky can be made to do men’s bidding. There are no limits to its secrets
and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose
to ask.

Then we knew what we must do. Our discovery is too great for us to
waste our time in sweeping the streets. We must not keep our secret to
ourselves, nor buried under the ground. We must bring it into the sight
of all men. We need all our time, we need the work rooms of the Home of
the Scholars, we want the help of our brother Scholars and their wisdom
joined to ours. There is so much work ahead for all of us, for all the
Scholars of the world.

In a month, the World Council of Scholars is to meet in our City. It
is a great Council, to which the wisest of all lands are elected, and
it meets once a year in the different Cities of the earth. We shall go
to this Council and we shall lay before them, as our gift, this glass
box with the power of the sky. We shall confess everything to them.
They will see, understand and forgive. For our gift is greater than our
transgression. They will explain it to the Council of Vocations, and we
shall be assigned to the Home of the Scholars. This has never been done
before, but neither has a gift such as ours ever been offered to men.

We must wait. We must guard our tunnel as we had never guarded it
before. For should any men save the Scholars learn of our secret, they
would not understand it, nor would they believe us. They would see
nothing, save our crime of working alone, and they would destroy us and
our light. We care not about our body, but our light is . . .

Yes, we do care. For the first time do we care about our body. For
this wire is as a part of our body, as a vein torn from us, glowing
with our blood. Are we proud of this thread of metal, or of our hands
which made it, or is there a line to divide these two?

We stretch out our arms. For the first time do we know how strong
our arms are. And a strange thought comes to us: we wonder, for the
first time in our life, what we look like. Men never see their own
faces and never ask their brothers about it, for it is evil to have
concern for their own faces or bodies. But tonight, for a reason we
cannot fathom, we wish it were possible to us to know the likeness of
our own person.

Chapter 6

We have not written for thirty days. For thirty days we have not
been here, in our tunnel. We had been caught. It happened on that night
when we wrote last. We forgot, that night, to watch the sand in the
glass which tells us when three hours have passed and it is time to
return to the City Theatre. When we remembered it, the sand had run out.

We hastened to the Theatre. But the big tent stood grey and silent
against the sky. The streets of the City lay before us, dark and empty.
If we went back to hide in our tunnel, we would be found and our light
found with us. So we walked to the Home of the Street Sweepers.

When the Council of the Home questioned us, we looked upon the faces
of the Council, but there was no curiosity in those faces, and no
anger, and no mercy. So when the oldest of them asked us: “Where have
you been?” we thought of our glass box and of our light, and we forgot
all else. And we answered:

“We will not tell you.”

The oldest did not question us further. They turned to the two youngest, and said, and their voice was bored:

“Take our brother Equality 7-2521 to the Palace of Corrective Detention. Lash them until they tell.”

So we were taken to the Stone Room under the Palace of Corrective
Detention. This room has no windows and it is empty save for an iron
post. Two men stood by the post, naked but for leather aprons and
leather hoods over their faces. Those who had brought us departed,
leaving us to the two Judges who stood in a corner of the room. The
Judges were small, thin men, grey and bent. They gave the signal to the
two strong hooded ones.

They tore the clothes from our body, they threw us down upon our
knees and they tied our hands to the iron post. The first blow of the
lash felt as if our spine had been cut in two. The second blow stopped
the first, and for a second we felt nothing, then the pain struck us in
our throat and fire ran in our lungs without air. But we did not cry
out.

The lash whistled like a singing wind. We tried to count the blows,
but we lost count. We knew that the blows were falling upon our back.
Only we felt nothing upon our back any longer. A flaming grill kept
dancing before our eyes, and we thought of nothing save that grill, a
grill, a grill of red squares, and then we knew that we were looking at
the squares of the iron grill in the door, and there were also the
squares of stone on the walls, and the squares which the lash was
cutting upon our back, crossing and re-crossing itself in our flesh.

Then we saw a fist before us. It knocked our chin up, and we saw the
red froth of our mouth on the withered fingers, and the Judge asked:

“Where have you been?”

But we jerked our head away, hid our face upon our tied hands, and bit our lips.

The lash whistled again. We wondered who was sprinkling burning coal
dust upon the floor, for we saw drops of red twinkling on the stones
around us.

Then we knew nothing, save two voices snarling steadily, one after
the other, even though we knew they were speaking many minutes apart:

“Where have you been where have you been where have you been where have you been? . . .”

And our lips moved, but the sound trickled back into our throat, and the sound was only:

“The light . . . The light . . . The light. . . .”

Then we knew nothing.

We opened our eyes, lying on our stomach on the brick floor of a
cell. We looked upon two hands lying far before us on the bricks, and
we moved them, and we knew that they were our hands. But we could not
move our body. Then we smiled, for we thought of the light and that we
had not betrayed it.

We lay in our cell for many days. The door opened twice each day,
once for the men who brought us bread and water, and once for the
Judges. Many Judges came to our cell, first the humblest and then the
most honored Judges of the City. They stood before us in their white
togas, and they asked:

“Are you ready to speak?”

But we shook our head, lying before them on the floor. And they departed.

We counted each day and each night as it passed. Then, tonight, we
knew that we must escape. For tomorrow the World Council of Scholars is
to meet in our City.

It was easy to escape from the Palace of Corrective Detention. The
locks are old on the doors and there are no guards about. There is no
reason to have guards, for men have never defied the Councils so far as
to escape from whatever place they were ordered to be. Our body is
healthy and strength returns to it speedily. We lunged against the door
and it gave way. We stole through the dark passages, and through the
dark streets, and down into our tunnel.

We lit the candle and we saw that our place had not been found and
nothing had been touched. And our glass box stood before us on the cold
oven, as we had left it. What matter they now, the scars upon our back!

Tomorrow, in the full light of day, we shall take our box, and leave
our tunnel open, and walk through the streets to the Home of the
Scholars. We shall put before them the greatest gift ever offered to
men. We shall tell them the truth. We shall hand to them, as our
confession, these pages we have written. We shall join our hands to
theirs, and we shall work together, with the power of the sky, for the
glory of mankind. Our blessing upon you, our brothers! Tomorrow, you
will take us back into your fold and we shall be an outcast no longer.
Tomorrow we shall be one of you again.

Tomorrow…

[Click here to read chapters 7 through 12, the conclusion of Ayn Rand’s Anthem]

The Beautiful and Damned (Book Three, Chapter III) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

05 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1900s, American, Fitzgerald (F. Scott), Novels

≈ Leave a comment

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
originally published by Scribner’s in 1922


Book Three, Chapter III: No Matter!


Within another year Anthony and Gloria had become like players who had lost their costumes, lacking the pride to continue on the note of tragedy–so that when Mrs. and Miss Hulme of Kansas City cut them dead in the Plaza one evening, it was only that Mrs. and Miss Hulme, like most people, abominated mirrors of their atavistic selves.


Their new apartment, for which they paid eighty-five dollars a month, was situated on Claremont Avenue, which is two blocks from the Hudson in the dim hundreds. They had lived there a month when Muriel Kane came to see them late one afternoon.


It was a reproachless twilight on the summer side of spring. Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. Across the water were the Palisades, crowned by the ugly framework of the amusement park–yet soon it would be dusk and those same iron cobwebs would be a glory against the heavens, an enchanted palace set over the smooth radiance of a tropical canal.


The streets near the apartment, Anthony had found, were streets where children played–streets a little nicer than those he had been used to pass on his way to Marietta, but of the same general sort, with an occasional hand organ or hurdy-gurdy, and in the cool of the evening many pairs of young girls walking down to the corner drug-store for ice cream soda and dreaming unlimited dreams under the low heavens.


Dusk in the streets now, and children playing, shouting up incoherent ecstatic words that faded out close to the open window–and Muriel, who had come to find Gloria, chattering to him from an opaque gloom over across the room.


“Light the lamp, why don’t we?” she suggested. “It’s getting ghostly in here.”


With a tired movement he arose and obeyed; the gray window-panes vanished. He stretched himself. He was heavier now, his stomach was a limp weight against his belt; his flesh had softened and expanded. He was thirty-two and his mind was a bleak and disordered wreck.


“Have a little drink, Muriel?”


“Not me, thanks. I don’t use it anymore. What’re you doing these days, Anthony?” she asked curiously.


“Well, I’ve been pretty busy with this lawsuit,” he answered indifferently. “It’s gone to the Court of Appeals–ought to be settled up one way or another by autumn. There’s been some objection as to whether the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over the matter.”


Muriel made a clicking sound with her tongue and cocked her head on one side.


“Well, you tell’em! I never heard of anything taking so long.”


“Oh, they all do,” he replied listlessly; “all will cases. They say it’s exceptional to have one settled under four or five years.”


“Oh …” Muriel daringly changed her tack, “why don’t you go to work, you la-azy!”


“At what?” he demanded abruptly.


“Why, at anything, I suppose. You’re still a young man.”


“If that’s encouragement, I’m much obliged,” he answered dryly–and then with sudden weariness: “Does it bother you particularly that I don’t want to work?”


“It doesn’t bother me–but, it does bother a lot of people who claim–“


“Oh, God!” he said brokenly, “it seems to me that for three years I’ve heard nothing about myself but wild stories and virtuous admonitions. I’m tired of it. If you don’t want to see us, let us alone. I don’t bother my former friends.’ But I need no charity calls, and no criticism disguised as good advice–” Then he added apologetically: “I’m sorry–but really, Muriel, you mustn’t talk like a lady slum-worker even if you are visiting the lower middle classes.” He turned his bloodshot eyes on her reproachfully–eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue, that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when he was drunk.


“Why do you say such awful things?” she protested. You talk as if you and Gloria were in the middle classes.”


“Why pretend we’re not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats when they can’t even keep up the appearances of it.”


“Do you think a person has to have money to be aristocratic?”


Muriel … the horrified democrat …!


“Why, of course. Aristocracy’s only an admission that certain traits which we call fine–courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing–can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don’t have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.”


Muriel bit her lower lip and waved her head from side to side.


“Well, all I say is that if a person comes from a good family they’re always nice people. That’s the trouble with you and Gloria. You think that just because things aren’t going your way right now all your old friends are trying to avoid you. You’re too sensitive–“


“As a matter of fact,” said Anthony, “you know nothing at all about it. With me it’s simply a matter of pride, and for once Gloria’s reasonable enough to agree that we oughtn’t go where we’re not wanted. And people don’t want us. We’re too much the ideal bad examples.”


“Nonsense! You can’t park your pessimism in my little sun parlor. I think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work.”


“Here I am, thirty-two. Suppose I did start in at some idiotic business. Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week–with luck. That’s if I could get a job at all; there’s an awful lot of unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I’d be any happier? Do you think that if I don’t get this money of my grandfather’s life will be endurable?“


Muriel smiled complacently.


“Well,” she said, “that may be clever but it isn’t common sense.”


A few minutes later Gloria came in seeming to bring with her into the room some dark color, indeterminate and rare. In a taciturn way she was happy to see Muriel. She greeted Anthony with a casual “Hi!”


“I’ve been talking philosophy with your husband,” cried the irrepressible Miss Kane.


“We took up some fundamental concepts,” said Anthony, a faint smile disturbing his pale cheeks, paler still under two days’ growth of beard.


Oblivious to his irony Muriel rehashed her contention. When she had done, Gloria said quietly:


“Anthony’s right. It’s no fun to go around when you have the sense that people are looking at you in a certain way.”


He broke in plaintively:


“Don’t you think that when even Maury Noble, who was my best friend, won’t come to see us it’s high time to stop calling people up?” Tears were standing in his eyes.


“That was your fault about Maury Noble,” said Gloria coolly.


“It wasn’t.”


“It most certainly was.”


Muriel intervened quickly:


“I met a girl who knew Maury, the other day, and she says he doesn’t drink any more. He’s getting pretty cagey.”


“Doesn’t?”


“Practically not at all. He’s making piles of money. He’s sort of changed since the war. He’s going to marry a girl in Philadelphia who has millions, Ceci Larrabee–anyhow, that’s what Town Tattle said.”


“He’s thirty-three,” said Anthony, thinking aloud. But it’s odd to imagine his getting married. I used to think he was so brilliant.”


“He was,” murmured Gloria, “in a way.”


“But brilliant people don’t settle down in business–or do they? Or what do they do? Or what becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?”


“You drift apart,” suggested Muriel with the appropriate dreamy look.


“They change,” said Gloria. “All the qualities that they don’t use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up.”


“The last thing he said to me,” recollected Anthony, “was that he was going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for.”


Muriel caught at this quickly.


“That’s what you ought to do,” she exclaimed triumphantly. “Of course I shouldn’t think anybody would want to work for nothing. But it’d give you something to do. What do you do with yourselves, anyway? Nobody ever sees you at Montmartre or–or anywhere. Are you economizing?”


Gloria laughed scornfully, glancing at Anthony from the corners of her eyes.


“Well,” he demanded, “what are you laughing at?” “You know what I’m laughing at,” she answered coldly.


“At that case of whiskey?”


“Yes”–she turned to Muriel–“he paid seventy-five dollars for a case of whiskey yesterday.”


“What if I did? It’s cheaper that way than if you get it by the bottle. You needn’t pretend that you won’t drink any of it.”


“At least I don’t drink in the daytime.”


“That’s a fine distinction!” he cried, springing to his feet in a weak rage. “What’s more, I’ll be damned if you can hurl that at me every few minutes!”


“It’s true.”


“It is not! And I’m getting sick of this eternal business of criticising me before visitors!” He had worked himself up to such a state that his arms and shoulders were visibly trembling. “You’d think everything was my fault. You’d think you hadn’t encouraged me to spend money–and spent a lot more on yourself than I ever did by a long shot.”


Now Gloria rose to her feet.


“I won’t let you talk to me that way!”


“All right, then; by Heaven, you don’t have to!”


In a sort of rush he left the room. The two women heard his steps in the hall and then the front door banged. Gloria sank back into her chair. Her face was lovely in the lamplight, composed, inscrutable.


“Oh–!” cried Muriel in distress. “Oh, what is the matter?”


“Nothing particularly. He’s just drunk.”


“Drunk? Why, he’s perfectly sober. He talked—-“


Gloria shook her head.


“Oh, no, he doesn’t show it any more unless he can hardly stand up, and he talks all right until he gets excited. He talks much better than he does when he’s sober. But he’s been sitting here all day drinking–except for the time it took him to walk to the corner for a newspaper.”


“Oh, how terrible!” Muriel was sincerely moved. Her eyes filled with tears. “Has this happened much?”


“Drinking, you mean?”


“No, this–leaving you?”


“Oh, yes. Frequently. He’ll come in about midnight–and weep and ask me to forgive him.”


“And do you?”


“I don’t know. We just go on.”


The two women sat there in the lamplight and looked at each other, each in a different way helpless before this thing. Gloria was still pretty, as pretty as she would ever be again–her cheeks were flushed and she was wearing a new dress that she had bought–imprudently–for fifty dollars. She had hoped she could persuade Anthony to take her out to-night, to a restaurant or even to one of the great, gorgeous moving picture palaces where there would be a few people to look at her, at whom she could bear to look in turn. She wanted this because she knew her cheeks were flushed and because her dress was new and becomingly fragile. Only very occasionally, now, did they receive any invitations. But she did not tell these things to Muriel.


“Gloria, dear, I wish we could have dinner together, but I promised a man and it’s seven-thirty already. I’ve got to tear.”


“Oh, I couldn’t, anyway. In the first place I’ve been ill all day. I couldn’t eat a thing.”


After she had walked with Muriel to the door, Gloria came back into the room, turned out the lamp, and leaning her elbows on the window sill looked out at Palisades Park, where the brilliant revolving circle of the Ferris wheel was like a trembling mirror catching the yellow reflection of the moon. The street was quiet now; the children had gone in–over the way she could see a family at dinner. Pointlessly, ridiculously, they rose and walked about the table; seen thus, all that they did appeared incongruous–it was as though they were being jiggled carelessly and to no purpose by invisible overhead wires.


She looked at her watch–it was eight o’clock. She had been pleased for a part of the day–the early afternoon–in walking along that Broadway of Harlem, One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, with her nostrils alert to many odors, and her mind excited by the extraordinary beauty of some Italian children. It affected her curiously–as Fifth Avenue had affected her once, in the days when, with the placid confidence of beauty, she had known that it was all hers, every shop and all it held, every adult toy glittering in a window, all hers for the asking. Here on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street there were Salvation Army bands and spectrum-shawled old ladies on door-steps and sugary, sticky candy in the grimy hands of shiny-haired children–and the late sun striking down on the sides of the tall tenements. All very rich and racy and savory, like a dish by a provident French chef that one could not help enjoying, even though one knew that the ingredients were probably left-overs….


Gloria shuddered suddenly as a river siren came moaning over the dusky roofs, and leaning back in till the ghostly curtains fell from her shoulder, she turned on the electric lamp. It was growing late. She knew there was some change in her purse, and she considered whether she would go down and have some coffee and rolls where the liberated subway made a roaring cave of Manhattan Street or eat the devilled ham and bread in the kitchen. Her purse decided for her. It contained a nickel and two pennies.


After an hour the silence of the room had grown unbearable, and she found that her eyes were wandering from her magazine to the ceiling, toward which she stared without thought. Suddenly she stood up, hesitated for a moment, biting at her finger–then she went to the pantry, took down a bottle of whiskey from the shelf and poured herself a drink. She filled up the glass with ginger ale, and returning to her chair finished an article in the magazine. It concerned the last revolutionary widow, who, when a young girl, had married an ancient veteran of the Continental Army and who had died in 1906. It seemed strange and oddly romantic to Gloria that she and this woman had been contemporaries.


She turned a page and learned that a candidate for Congress was being accused of atheism by an opponent. Gloria’s surprise vanished when she found that the charges were false. The candidate had merely denied the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He admitted, under pressure, that he gave full credence to the stroll upon the water.


Finishing her first drink, Gloria got herself a second. After slipping on a negligee and making herself comfortable on the lounge, she became conscious that she was miserable and that the tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wondered if they were tears of self-pity, and tried resolutely not to cry, but this existence without hope, without happiness, oppressed her, and she kept shaking her head from side to side, her mouth drawn down tremulously in the corners, as though she were denying an assertion made by some one, somewhere. She did not know that this gesture of hers was years older than history, that, for a hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered that gesture, of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent. It is a truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never answers–this force intangible as air, more definite than death.


Richard Caramel


Early in the summer Anthony resigned from his last club, the Amsterdam. He had come to visit it hardly twice a year, and the dues were a recurrent burden. He had joined it on his return from Italy because it had been his grandfather’s club and his father’s, and because it was a club that, given the opportunity, one indisputably joined–but as a matter of fact he had preferred the Harvard Club, largely because of Dick and Maury. However, with the decline of his fortunes, it had seemed an increasingly desirable bauble to cling to…. It was relinquished at the last, with some regret….


His companions numbered now a curious dozen. Several of them he had met in a place called “Sammy’s,” on Forty-third Street, where, if one knocked on the door and were favorably passed on from behind a grating, one could sit around a great round table drinking fairly good whiskey. It was here that he encountered a man named Parker Allison, who had been exactly the wrong sort of rounder at Harvard, and who was running through a large “yeast” fortune as rapidly as possible. Parker Allison’s notion of distinction consisted in driving a noisy red-and-yellow racing-car up Broadway with two glittering, hard-eyed girls beside him. He was the sort who dined with two girls rather than with one–his imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialogue.


Besides Allison there was Pete Lytell, who wore a gray derby on the side of his head. He always had money and he was customarily cheerful, so Anthony held aimless, long-winded conversation with him through many afternoons of the summer and fall. Lytell, he found, not only talked but reasoned in phrases. His philosophy was a series of them, assimilated here and there through an active, thoughtless life. He had phrases about Socialism–the immemorial ones; he had phrases pertaining to the existence of a personal deity–something about one time when he had been in a railroad accident; and he had phrases about the Irish problem, the sort of woman he respected, and the futility of prohibition. The only time his conversation ever rose superior to these muddled clauses, with which he interpreted the most rococo happenings in a life that had been more than usually eventful, was when he got down to the detailed discussion of his most animal existence: he knew, to a subtlety, the foods, the liquor, and the women that he preferred.


He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street–and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art–and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.


With such men as these two Anthony Patch drank and discussed and drank and argued. He liked them because they knew nothing about him, because they lived in the obvious and had not the faintest conception of the inevitable continuity of life. They sat not before a motion picture with consecutive reels, but at a musty old-fashioned travelogue with all values stark and hence all implications confused. Yet they themselves were not confused, because there was nothing in them to be confused–they changed phrases from month to month as they changed neckties.


Anthony, the courteous, the subtle, the perspicacious, was drunk each day–in Sammy’s with these men, in the apartment over a book, some book he knew, and, very rarely, with Gloria, who, in his eyes, had begun to develop the unmistakable outlines of a quarrelsome and unreasonable woman. She was not the Gloria of old, certainly–the Gloria who, had she been sick, would have preferred to inflict misery upon every one around her, rather than confess that she needed sympathy or assistance. She was not above whining now; she was not above being sorry for herself. Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty. When Anthony was drunk he taunted her about this. When he was sober he was polite to her, on occasions even tender; he seemed to show for short hours a trace of that old quality of understanding too well to blame–that quality which was the best of him and had worked swiftly and ceaselessly toward his ruin.


But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down, which in every metropolis is most in evidence through the unstable middle class. Unable to live with the rich he thought that his next choice would have been to live with the very poor. Anything was better than this cup of perspiration and tears.


The sense of the enormous panorama of life, never strong in Anthony, had become dim almost to extinction. At long intervals now some incident, some gesture of Gloria’s, would take his fancy–but the gray veils had come down in earnest upon him. As he grew older those things faded–after that there was wine.


There was a kindliness about intoxication–there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building–its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal–again it was the triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the money for their wars….


… The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness–the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.


As he stood in front of Delmonico’s lighting a cigarette one night he saw two hansoms drawn up close to the curb, waiting for a chance drunken fare. The outmoded cabs were worn and dirty–the cracked patent leather wrinkled like an old man’s face, the cushions faded to a brownish lavender; the very horses were ancient and weary, and so were the white-haired men who sat aloft, cracking their whips with a grotesque affectation of gallantry. A relic of vanished gaiety!


Anthony Patch walked away in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the bitterness of such survivals. There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.


On Forty-second Street one afternoon he met Richard Caramel for the first time in many months, a prosperous, fattening Richard Caramel, whose face was filling out to match the Bostonian brow.


“Just got in this week from the coast. Was going to call you up, but I didn’t know your new address.”


“We’ve moved.”


Richard Caramel noticed that Anthony was wearing a soiled shirt, that his cuffs were slightly but perceptibly frayed, that his eyes were set in half-moons the color of cigar smoke.


“So I gathered,” he said, fixing his friend with his bright-yellow eye. “But where and how is Gloria? My God, Anthony, I’ve been hearing the dog-gonedest stories about you two even out in California–and when I get back to New York I find you’ve sunk absolutely out of sight. Why don’t you pull yourself together?”


“Now, listen,” chattered Anthony unsteadily, “I can’t stand a long lecture. We’ve lost money in a dozen ways, and naturally people have talked–on account of the lawsuit, but the thing’s coming to a final decision this winter, surely–“


“You’re talking so fast that I can’t understand you,” interrupted Dick calmly.


“Well, I’ve said all I’m going to say,” snapped Anthony. “Come and see us if you like–or don’t!”


With this he turned and started to walk off in the crowd, but Dick overtook him immediately and grasped his arm.


“Say, Anthony, don’t fly off the handle so easily! You know Gloria’s my cousin, and you’re one of my oldest friends, so it’s natural for me to be interested when I hear that you’re going to the dogs–and taking her with you.”


“I don’t want to be preached to.”


“Well, then, all right–How about coming up to my apartment and having a drink? I’ve just got settled. I’ve bought three cases of Gordon gin from a revenue officer.”


As they walked along he continued in a burst of exasperation:


“And how about your grandfather’s money–you going to get it?”


“Well,” answered Anthony resentfully, “that old fool Haight seems hopeful, especially because people are tired of reformers right now–you know it might make a slight difference, for instance, if some judge thought that Adam Patch made it harder for him to get liquor.”


“You can’t do without money,” said Dick sententiously. “Have you tried to write any–lately?”


Anthony shook his head silently.


“That’s funny,” said Dick. “I always thought that you and Maury would write some day, and now he’s grown to be a sort of tight-fisted aristocrat, and you’re–“


“I’m the bad example.”


“I wonder why?”


“You probably think you know,” suggested Anthony, with an effort at concentration. “The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he’s succeeded, and the failure because he’s failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father’s good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father’s mistakes.”


“I don’t agree with you,” said the author of “A Shave-tail in France.” “I used to listen to you and Maury when we were young, and I used to be impressed because you were so consistently cynical, but now–well, after all, by God, which of us three has taken to the–to the intellectual life? I don’t want to sound vainglorious, but–it’s me, and I’ve always believed that moral values existed, and I always will.”


“Well,” objected Anthony, who was rather enjoying himself, “even granting that, you know that in practice life never presents problems as clear cut, does it?”


“It does to me. There’s nothing I’d violate certain principles for.”


“But how do you know when you’re violating them? You have to guess at things just like most people do. You have to apportion the values when you look back. You finish up the portrait then–paint in the details and shadows.”


Dick shook his head with a lofty stubbornness. “Same old futile cynic,” he said. “It’s just a mode of being sorry for yourself. You don’t do anything–so nothing matters.”


“Oh, I’m quite capable of self-pity,” admitted Anthony, “nor am I claiming that I’m getting as much fun out of life as you are.”


“You say–at least you used to–that happiness is the only thing worth while in life. Do you think you’re any happier for being a pessimist?”


Anthony grunted savagely. His pleasure in the conversation began to wane. He was nervous and craving for a drink.


“My golly!” he cried, “where do you live? I can’t keep walking forever.”


“Your endurance is all mental, eh?” returned Dick sharply. “Well, I live right here.”


He turned in at the apartment house on Forty-ninth Street, and a few minutes later they were in a large new room with an open fireplace and four walls lined with books. A colored butler served them gin rickeys, and an hour vanished politely with the mellow shortening of their drinks and the glow of a light mid-autumn fire.


“The arts are very old,” said Anthony after a while. With a few glasses the tension of his nerves relaxed and he found that he could think again.


“Which art?”


“All of them. Poetry is dying first. It’ll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that’s never been beautiful before. Beauty, as the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can’t go any further–except in the novel, perhaps.”


Dick interrupted him impatiently:


“You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature.”


Anthony tried to remember what he had read lately of Richard Caramel’s. There was “A Shave-tail in France,” a novel called “The Land of Strong Men,” and several dozen short stories, which were even worse. It had become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard Caramel with a smile of scorn. “Mr.” Richard Caramel, they called him. His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies. As the fashion in books shifted he was becoming almost a byword of contempt.


While Anthony was thinking this, Dick had got to his feet and seemed to be hesitating at an avowal.


“I’ve gathered quite a few books,” he said suddenly.


“So I see.”


“I’ve made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new. I don’t mean the usual Longfellow-Whittier thing–in fact, most of it’s modern.”


He stepped to one of the walls and, seeing that it was expected of him, Anthony arose and followed.


“Look!”


Under a printed tag Americana he displayed six long rows of books, beautifully bound and, obviously, carefully chosen.


“And here are the contemporary novelists.”


Then Anthony saw the joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard Caramel–“The Demon Lover,” true enough … but also seven others that were execrably awful, without sincerity or grace.


Unwillingly Anthony glanced at Dick’s face and caught a slight uncertainty there.


“I’ve put my own books in, of course,” said Richard Caramel hastily, “though one or two of them are uneven–I’m afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don’t believe in false 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 as Tony, at other times it was Dan. To him all Anthonys must sail under one of these diminutives.


“Sit down. What’ll you have?”


On the subway Anthony had counted his money and found that he had almost four dollars. He could pay for two rounds at fifty cents a drink–which meant that he would have six drinks. Then he would go over to Sixth Avenue and get twenty dollars and a pawn ticket in exchange for his watch.


“Well, roughnecks,” he said jovially, “how’s the life of crime?”


“Pretty good,” said Allison. He winked at Pete Lytell. “Too bad you’re a married man. We’ve got some pretty good stuff lined up for about eleven o’clock, when the shows let out. Oh, boy! Yes, sir–too bad he’s married–isn’t it, Pete?”


“‘Sa shame.”


At half past seven, when they had completed the six rounds, Anthony found that his intentions were giving audience to his desires. He was happy and cheerful now–thoroughly enjoying himself. It seemed to him that the story which Pete had just finished telling was unusually and profoundly humorous–and he decided, as he did every day at about this point, that they were “damn good fellows, by golly!” who would do a lot more for him than any one else he knew. The pawnshops would remain open until late Saturday nights, and he felt that if he took just one more drink he would attain a gorgeous rose-colored exhilaration.


Artfully, he fished in his vest pockets, brought up his two quarters, and stared at them as though in surprise.


“Well, I’ll be darned,” he protested in an aggrieved tone, “here I’ve come out without my pocketbook.”


“Need some cash?” asked Lytell easily.


“I left my money on the dresser at home. And I wanted to buy you another drink.”


“Oh–knock it.” Lytell waved the suggestion away disparagingly. “I guess we can blow a good fella to all the drinks he wants. What’ll you have–same?”


“I tell you,” suggested Parker Allison, “suppose we send Sammy across the street for some sandwiches and eat dinner here.”


The other two agreed.


“Good idea.”


“Hey, Sammy, wantcha do somep’m for us….”


Just after nine o’clock Anthony staggered to his feet and, bidding them a thick good night, walked unsteadily to the door, handing Sammy one of his two quarters as he passed out. Once in the street he hesitated uncertainly and then started in the direction of Sixth Avenue, where he remembered to have frequently passed several loan offices. He went by a news-stand and two drug-stores–and then he realized that he was standing in front of the place which he sought, and that it was shut and barred. Unperturbed he continued; another one, half a block down, was also closed–so were two more across the street, and a fifth in the square below. Seeing a faint light in the last one, he began to knock on the glass door; he desisted only when a watchman appeared in the back of the shop and motioned him angrily to move on. With growing discouragement, with growing befuddlement, he crossed the street and walked back toward Forty-third. On the corner near Sammy’s he paused undecided–if he went back to the apartment, as he felt his body required, he would lay himself open to bitter reproach; yet, now that the pawnshops were closed, he had no notion where to get the money. He decided finally that he might ask Parker Allison, after all–but he approached Sammy’s only to find the door locked and the lights out. He looked at his watch; nine-thirty. He began walking.


Ten minutes later he stopped aimlessly at the corner of Forty-third Street and Madison Avenue, diagonally across from the bright but nearly deserted entrance to the Biltmore Hotel. Here he stood for a moment, and then sat down heavily on a damp board amid some debris of construction work. He rested there for almost half an hour, his mind a shifting pattern of surface thoughts, chiefest among which were that he must obtain some money and get home before he became too sodden to find his way.


Then, glancing over toward the Biltmore, he saw a man standing directly under the overhead glow of the porte-cochere lamps beside a woman in an ermine coat. As Anthony watched, the couple moved forward and signalled to a taxi. Anthony perceived by the infallible identification that lurks in the walk of a friend that it was Maury Noble.


He rose to his feet.


“Maury!” he shouted.


Maury looked in his direction, then turned back to the girl just as the taxi came up into place. With the chaotic idea of borrowing ten dollars, Anthony began to run as fast as he could across Madison Avenue and along Forty-third Street.


As he came up Maury was standing beside the yawning door of the taxicab. His companion turned and looked curiously at Anthony.


“Hello, Maury!” he said, holding out his hand. “How are you?”


“Fine, thank you.”


Their hands dropped and Anthony hesitated. Maury made no move to introduce him, but only stood there regarding him with an inscrutable feline silence.


“I wanted to see you–” began Anthony uncertainly. He did not feel that he could ask for a loan with the girl not four feet away, so he broke off and made a perceptible motion of his head as if to beckon Maury to one side.


“I’m in rather a big hurry, Anthony.”


“I know–but can you, can you–” Again he hesitated.


“I’ll see you some other time,” said Maury. “It’s important.”


“I’m sorry, Anthony.”


Before Anthony could make up his mind to blurt out his request, Maury had turned coolly to the girl, helped her into the car and, with a polite “good evening,” stepped in after her. As he nodded from the window it seemed to Anthony that his expression had not changed by a shade or a hair. Then with a fretful clatter the taxi moved off, and Anthony was left standing there alone under the lights.


Anthony went on into the Biltmore, for no reason in particular except that the entrance was at hand, and ascending the wide stair found a seat in an alcove. He was furiously aware that he had been snubbed; he was as hurt and angry as it was possible for him to be when in that condition. Nevertheless, he was stubbornly preoccupied with the necessity of obtaining some money before he went home, and once again he told over on his fingers the acquaintances he might conceivably call on in this emergency. He thought, eventually, that he might approach Mr. Howland, his broker, at his home.


After a long wait he found that Mr. Howland was out. He returned to the operator, leaning over her desk and fingering his quarter as though loath to leave unsatisfied.


“Call Mr. Bloeckman,” he said suddenly. His own words surprised him. The name had come from some crossing of two suggestions in his mind.


“What’s the number, please?”


Scarcely conscious of what he did, Anthony looked up Joseph Bloeckman in the telephone directory. He could find no such person, and was about to close the book when it flashed into his mind that Gloria had mentioned a change of name. It was the matter of a minute to find Joseph Black–then he waited in the booth while central called the number.


“Hello-o. Mr. Bloeckman–I mean Mr. Black in?”


“No, he’s out this evening. Is there any message?” The intonation was cockney; it reminded him of the rich vocal deferences of Bounds.


“Where is he?”


“Why, ah, who is this, please, sir?”


“This Mr. Patch. Matter of vi’al importance.” “Why, he’s with a party at the Boul’ Mich’, sir.” “Thanks.”


Anthony got his five cents change and started for the Boul’ Mich’, a popular dancing resort on Forty-fifth Street. It was nearly ten but the streets were dark and sparsely peopled until the theatres should eject their spawn an hour later. Anthony knew the Boul’ Mich’, for he had been there with Gloria during the year before, and he remembered the existence of a rule that patrons must be in evening dress. Well, he would not go up-stairs–he would send a boy up for Bloeckman and wait for him in the lower hall. For a moment he did not doubt that the whole project was entirely natural and graceful. To his distorted imagination Bloeckman had become simply one of his old friends.


The entrance hall of the Boul’ Mich’ was warm. There were high yellow lights over a thick green carpet, from the centre of which a white stairway rose to the dancing floor.


Anthony spoke to the hallboy:


“I want to see Mr. Bloeckman–Mr. Black,” he said. “He’s up-stairs–have him paged.”


The boy shook his head.


“‘Sagainsa rules to have him paged. You know what table he’s at?”


“No. But I’ve got see him.”


“Wait an’ I’ll getcha waiter.”


After a short interval a head waiter appeared, bearing a card on which were charted the table reservations. He darted a cynical look at Anthony–which, however, failed of its target. Together they bent over the cardboard and found the table without difficulty–a party of eight, Mr. Black’s own.


“Tell him Mr. Patch. Very, very important.”


Again he waited, leaning against the banister and listening to the confused harmonies of “Jazz-mad” which came floating down the stairs. A check-girl near him was singing:


“Out in–the shimmee sanitarium The jazz-mad nuts reside. Out in–the shimmee sanitarium I left my blushing bride. She went and shook herself insane, So let her shiver back again–“


Then he saw Bloeckman descending the staircase, and took a step forward to meet him and shake hands.


“You wanted to see me?” said the older man coolly.


“Yes,” answered Anthony, nodding, “personal matter. Can you jus’ step over here?”


Regarding him narrowly Bloeckman followed Anthony to a half bend made by the staircase where they were beyond observation or earshot of any one entering or leaving the restaurant.


“Well?” he inquired.


“Wanted talk to you.”


“What about?”


Anthony only laughed–a silly laugh; he intended it to sound casual.


“What do you want to talk to me about?” repeated Bloeckman.


“Wha’s hurry, old man?” He tried to lay his hand in a friendly gesture upon Bloeckman’s shoulder, but the latter drew away slightly. “How’ve been?”


“Very well, thanks…. See here, Mr. Patch, I’ve got a party up-stairs. They’ll think it’s rude if I stay away too long. What was it you wanted to see me about?”


For the second time that evening Anthony’s mind made an abrupt jump, and what he said was not at all what he had intended to say.


“Un’erstand you kep’ my wife out of the movies.” “What?” Bloeckman’s ruddy face darkened in parallel planes of shadows.


“You heard me.”


“Look here, Mr. Patch,” said Bloeckman, evenly and without changing his expression, “you’re drunk. You’re disgustingly and insultingly drunk.”


“Not too drunk talk to you,” insisted Anthony with a leer. “Firs’ place, my wife wants nothin’ whatever do with you. Never did. Un’erstand me?”


“Be quiet!” said the older man angrily. “I should think you’d respect your wife enough not to bring her into the conversation under these circumstances.”


“Never you min’ how I expect my wife. One thing–you leave her alone. You go to hell!”


“See here–I think you’re a little crazy!” exclaimed Bloeckman. He took two paces forward as though to pass by, but Anthony stepped in his way.


“Not so fas’, you Goddam Jew.”


For a moment they stood regarding each other, Anthony swaying gently from side to side, Bloeckman almost trembling with fury.


“Be careful!” he cried in a strained voice.


Anthony might have remembered then a certain look Bloeckman had given him in the Biltmore Hotel years before. But he remembered nothing, nothing—-


“I’ll say it again, you God—-“


Then Bloeckman struck out, with all the strength in the arm of a well-conditioned man of forty-five, struck out and caught Anthony squarely in the mouth. Anthony cracked up against the staircase, recovered himself and made a wild drunken swing at his opponent, but 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 dour. 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 clerk of the Appellate Division. She had called up the apartment and had been told that Anthony was out by a woman to whom she had refused to give her name.


In a living room he stood by the door regarding her with a sort of stupefied horror as she rattled on…. His predominant sensation was that all the civilization and convention around him was curiously unreal…. She was in a milliner’s shop on Sixth Avenue, she said. It was a lonesome life. She had been sick for a long while after he left for Camp Mills; her mother had come down and taken her home again to Carolina…. She had come to New York with the idea of finding Anthony.


She was appallingly in earnest. Her violet eyes were red with tears; her soft intonation was ragged with little gasping sobs.


That was all. She had never changed. She wanted him now, and if she couldn’t have him she must die….


“You’ll have to get out,” he said at length, speaking with tortuous intensity. “Haven’t I enough to worry me now without you coming here? My God! You’ll have to get out!”


Sobbing, she sat down in a chair.


“I love you,” she cried; “I don’t care what you say to me! I love you.”


“I don’t care!” he almost shrieked; “get out–oh, get out! Haven’t you done me harm enough? Haven’t–you–done–enough?”


“Hit me!” she implored him–wildly, stupidly. “Oh, hit me, and I’ll kiss the hand you hit me with!”


His voice rose until it was pitched almost at a scream. “I’ll kill you!” he cried. “If you don’t get out I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!”


There was madness in his eyes now, but, unintimidated, Dot rose and took a step toward him.


“Anthony! Anthony!–“


He made a little clicking sound with his teeth and drew back as though to spring at her–then, changing his purpose, he looked wildly about him on the floor and wall.


“I’ll kill you!” he was muttering in short, broken gasps. “I’ll kill you!” He seemed to bite at the word as though to force it into materialization. Alarmed at last she made no further movement forward, but meeting his frantic eyes took a step back toward the door. Anthony began to race here and there on his side of the room, still giving out his single cursing cry. Then he found what he had been seeking–a stiff oaken chair that stood beside the table. Uttering a harsh, broken shout, he seized it, swung it above his head and let it go with all his raging strength straight at the white, frightened face across the room … then a thick, impenetrable darkness came down upon him and blotted out thought, rage, and madness together–with almost a tangible snapping sound the face of the world changed before his eyes….


Gloria and Dick came in at five and called his name. There was no answer–they went into the living room and found a chair with its back smashed lying in the doorway, and they noticed that all about the room there was a sort of disorder–the rugs had slid, the pictures and bric-a-brac were upset upon the centre table. The air was sickly sweet with cheap perfume.


They found Anthony sitting in a patch of sunshine on the floor of his bedroom. Before him, open, were spread his three big stamp-books, and when they entered he was running his hands through a great pile of stamps that he had dumped from the back of one of them. Looking up and seeing Dick and Gloria he put his head critically on one side and motioned them back.


“Anthony!” cried Gloria tensely, “we’ve won! They reversed the decision!”


“Don’t come in,” he murmured wanly, “you’ll muss them. I’m sorting, and I know you’ll step in them. Everything always gets mussed.”


“What are you doing?” demanded Dick in astonishment. “Going back to childhood? Don’t you realize you’ve won the suit? They’ve reversed the decision of the lower courts. You’re worth thirty millions!”


Anthony only looked at him reproachfully.


“Shut the door when you go out.” He spoke like a pert child.


With a faint horror dawning in her eyes, Gloria gazed at him–


“Anthony!” she cried, “what is it? What’s the matter? Why didn’t you come–why, what is it?”


“See here,” said Anthony softly, “you two get out–now, both of you. Or else I’ll tell my grandfather.”


He held up a handful of stamps and let them come drifting down about him like leaves, varicolored and bright, turning and fluttering gaudily upon the sunny air: stamps of England and Ecuador, Venezuela and Spain–Italy….


Together with the Sparrows


That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many generations of sparrows doubtless records the subtlest verbal inflections of the passengers of such ships as The Berengaria. And doubtless it was listening when the young man in the plaid cap crossed the deck quickly and spoke to the pretty girl in yellow.


“That’s him,” he said, pointing to a bundled figure seated in a wheel chair near the rail. “That’s Anthony Patch. First time he’s been on deck.”


“Oh–that’s him?”


“Yes. He’s been a little crazy, they say, ever since he got his money, four or five months ago. You see, the other fellow, Shuttleworth, the religious fellow, the one that didn’t get the money, he locked himself up in a room in a hotel and shot himself–


“Oh, he did–“


“But I guess Anthony Patch don’t care much. He got his thirty million. And he’s got his private physician along in case he doesn’t feel just right about it. Has she been on deck?” he asked.


The pretty girl in yellow looked around cautiously.


“She was here a minute ago. She had on a Russian-sable coat that must have cost a small fortune.” She frowned and then added decisively: “I can’t stand her, you know. She seems sort of–sort of dyed and unclean, if you know what I mean. Some people just have that look about them whether they are or not.”


“Sure, I know,” agreed the man with the plaid cap. “She’s not bad-looking, though.” He paused. “Wonder what he’s thinking about–his money, I guess, or maybe he’s got remorse about that fellow Shuttleworth.”


“Probably….”


But the man in the plaid cap was quite wrong. Anthony Patch, sitting near the rail and looking out at the sea, was not thinking of his money, for he had seldom in his life been really preoccupied with material vainglory, nor of Edward Shuttleworth, for it is best to look on the sunny side of these things. No–he was concerned with a series of reminiscences, much as a general might look back upon a successful campaign and analyze his victories. He was thinking of the hardships, the insufferable tribulations he had gone through. They had tried to penalize him for the mistakes of his youth. He had been exposed to ruthless misery, his very craving for romance had been punished, his friends had deserted him–even Gloria had turned against him. He had been alone, alone–facing it all.


Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was justified in his way of life–and he had stuck it out stanchly. Why, the very friends who had been most unkind had come to respect him, to know he had been right all along. Had not the Lacys and the Merediths and the Cartwright-Smiths called on Gloria and him at the Ritz-Carlton just a week before they sailed?


Great tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was tremulous as he whispered to himself.


“I showed them,” he was saying. “It was a hard fight, but I didn’t give up and I came through!”




F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned
appears in the C.C. Online Library in nine sections.


“Book Three, Chapter 3: No Matter!” is the ninth of nine.

Click here to read more.



* * * * *


   

The Beautiful and Damned (Book Three, Chapter II) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

05 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1900s, American, Fitzgerald (F. Scott), Novels

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
originally published by Scribner’s in 1922


Book Three, Chapter II: A Matter of Aesthetics


On the night when Anthony had left for Camp Hooker one year before, all that was left of the beautiful Gloria Gilbert–her shell, her young and lovely body–moved up the broad marble steps of the Grand Central Station with the rhythm of the engine beating in her ears like a dream, and out onto Vanderbilt Avenue, where the huge bulk of the Biltmore overhung, the street and, down at its low, gleaming entrance, sucked in the many-colored opera-cloaks of gorgeously dressed girls. For a moment she paused by the taxi-stand and watched them–wondering that but a few years before she had been of their number, ever setting out for a radiant Somewhere, always just about to have that ultimate passionate adventure for which the girls’ cloaks were delicate and beautifully furred, for which their cheeks were painted and their hearts higher than the transitory dome of pleasure that would engulf them, coiffure, cloak, and all.


It was growing colder and the men passing had flipped up the collars of their overcoats. This change was kind to her. It would have been kinder still had everything changed, weather, streets, and people, and had she been whisked away, to wake in some high, fresh-scented room, alone, and statuesque within and without, as in her virginal and colorful past.


Inside the taxicab she wept impotent tears. That she had not been happy with Anthony for over a year mattered little. Recently his presence had been no more than what it would awake in her of that memorable June. The Anthony of late, irritable, weak, and poor, could do no less than make her irritable in turn–and bored with everything except the fact that in a highly imaginative and eloquent youth they had come together in an ecstatic revel of emotion. Because of this mutually vivid memory she would have done more for Anthony than for any other human–so when she got into the taxicab she wept passionately, and wanted to call his name aloud.


Miserable, lonesome as a forgotten child, she sat in the quiet apartment and wrote him a letter full of confused sentiment:


*       *       *       *       *

… I can almost look down the tracks and see you going but without you, dearest, dearest, I can’t see or hear or feel or think. Being apart–whatever has happened or will happen to us–is like begging for mercy from a storm, Anthony; it’s like growing old. I want to kiss you so–in the back of your neck where your old black hair starts. Because I love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have said, you’ve got to feel how much I do, how inanimate I am when you’re gone. I can’t even hate the damnable presence of PEOPLE, those people in the station who haven’t any right to live–I can’t resent them even though they’re dirtying up our world, because I’m engrossed in wanting you so.


If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me–how absurd this sounds–I’d still want you, I’d still love you. I KNOW, my darling.


It’s late–I have all the windows open and the air outside, is just as soft as spring, yet, somehow, much more young and frail than spring. Why do they make spring a young girl, why does that illusion dance and yodel its way for three months through the world’s preposterous barrenness. Spring is a lean old plough horse with its ribs showing–it’s a pile of refuse in a field, parched by the sun and the rain to an ominous cleanliness.


In a few hours you’ll wake up, my darling–and you’ll be miserable, and disgusted with life. You’ll be in Delaware or Carolina or somewhere and so unimportant. I don’t believe there’s any one alive who can contemplate themselves as an impermanent institution, as a luxury or an unnecessary evil. Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin–but they don’t, even you and I….


… Still I can see you. There’s blue haze about the trees where you’ll be passing, too beautiful to be predominant. No, the fallow squares of earth will be most frequent–they’ll be along beside the track like dirty coarse brown sheets drying in the sun, alive, mechanical, abominable. Nature, slovenly old hag, has been sleeping in them with every old farmer or negro or immigrant who happened to covet her….


So you see that now you’re gone I’ve written a letter all full of contempt and despair. And that just means that I love you, Anthony, with all there is to love with in your


GLORIA.


*       *       *       *       *

When she had addressed the letter she went to her twin bed and lay down upon it, clasping Anthony’s pillow in her arms as though by sheer force of emotion she could metamorphize it into his warm and living body. Two o’clock saw her dry-eyed, staring with steady persistent grief into the darkness, remembering, remembering unmercifully, blaming herself for a hundred fancied unkindnesses, making a likeness of Anthony akin to some martyred and transfigured Christ. For a time she thought of him as he, in his more sentimental moments, probably thought of himself.


At five she was still awake. A mysterious grinding noise that went on every morning across the areaway told her the hour. She heard an alarm clock ring, and saw a light make a yellow square on an illusory blank wall opposite. With the half-formed resolution of following him South immediately, her sorrow grew remote and unreal, and moved off from her as the dark moved westward. She fell asleep.


When she awoke the sight of the empty bed beside her brought a renewal of misery, dispelled shortly, however, by the inevitable callousness of the bright morning. Though she was not conscious of it, there was relief in eating breakfast without Anthony’s tired and worried face opposite her. Now that she was alone she lost all desire to complain about the food. She would change her breakfasts, she thought–have a lemonade and a tomato sandwich instead of the sempiternal bacon and eggs and toast.


Nevertheless, at noon when she had called up several of her acquaintances, including the martial Muriel, and found each one engaged for lunch, she gave way to a quiet pity for herself and her loneliness. Curled on the bed with pencil and paper she wrote Anthony another letter.


Late in the afternoon arrived a special delivery, mailed from some small New Jersey town, and the familiarity of the phrasing, the almost audible undertone of worry and discontent, were so familiar that they comforted her. Who knew? Perhaps army discipline would harden Anthony and accustom him to the idea of work. She had immutable faith that the war would be over before he was called upon to fight, and meanwhile the suit would be won, and they could begin again, this time on a different basis. The first thing different would be that she would have a child. It was unbearable that she should be so utterly alone.


It was a week before she could stay in the apartment with the probability of remaining dry-eyed. There seemed little in the city that was amusing. Muriel had been shifted to a hospital in New Jersey, from which she took a metropolitan holiday only every other week, and with this defection Gloria grew to realize how few were the friends she had made in all these years of New York. The men she knew were in the army. “Men she knew”?–she had conceded vaguely to herself that all the men who had ever been in love with her were her friends. Each one of them had at a certain considerable time professed to value her favor above anything in life. But now–where were they? At least two were dead, half a dozen or more were married, the rest scattered from France to the Philippines. She wondered whether any of them thought of her, and how often, and in what respect. Most of them must still picture the little girl of seventeen or so, the adolescent siren of nine years before.


The girls, too, were gone far afield. She had never been popular in school. She had been too beautiful, too lazy, not sufficiently conscious of being a Farmover girl and a “Future Wife and Mother” in perpetual capital letters. And girls who had never been kissed hinted, with shocked expressions on their plain but not particularly wholesome faces, that Gloria had. Then these girls had gone east or west or south, married and become “people,” prophesying, if they prophesied about Gloria, that she would come to a bad end–not knowing that no endings were bad, and that they, like her, were by no means the mistresses of their destinies.


Gloria told over to herself the people who had visited them in the gray house at Marietta. It had seemed at the time that they were always having company–she had indulged in an unspoken conviction that each guest was ever afterward slightly indebted to her. They owed her a sort of moral ten dollars apiece, and should she ever be in need she might, so to speak, borrow from them this visionary currency. But they were gone, scattered like chaff, mysteriously and subtly vanished in essence or in fact.


By Christmas, Gloria’s conviction that she should join Anthony had returned, no longer as a sudden emotion, but as a recurrent need. She decided to write him word of her coming, but postponed the announcement upon the advice of Mr. Haight, who expected almost weekly that the case was coming up for trial.


One day, early in January, as she was walking on Fifth Avenue, bright now with uniforms and hung with the flags of the virtuous nations, she met Rachael Barnes, whom she had not seen for nearly a year. Even Rachael, whom she had grown to dislike, was a relief from ennui, and together they went to the Ritz for tea.


After a second cocktail they became enthusiastic. They liked each other. They talked about their husbands, Rachael in that tone of public vainglory, with private reservations, in which wives are wont to speak.


“Rodman’s abroad in the Quartermaster Corps. He’s a captain. He was bound he would go, and he didn’t think he could get into anything else.”


“Anthony’s in the Infantry.” The words in their relation to the cocktail gave Gloria a sort of glow. With each sip she approached a warm and comforting patriotism.


“By the way,” said Rachael half an hour later, as they were leaving, “can’t you come up to dinner to-morrow night? I’m having two awfully sweet officers who are just going overseas. I think we ought to do all we can to make it attractive for them.”


Gloria accepted gladly. She took down the address–recognizing by its number a fashionable apartment building on Park Avenue.


“It’s been awfully good to have seen you, Rachael.”


“It’s been wonderful. I’ve wanted to.”


With these three sentences a certain night in Marietta two summers before, when Anthony and Rachael had been unnecessarily attentive to each other, was forgiven–Gloria forgave Rachael, Rachael forgave Gloria. Also it was forgiven that Rachael had been witness to the greatest disaster in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Patch–


Compromising with events time moves along.


The Wiles of Captain Collins


The two officers were captains of the popular craft, machine gunnery. At dinner they referred to themselves with conscious boredom as members of the “Suicide Club”–in those days every recondite branch of the service referred to itself as the Suicide Club. One of the captains–Rachael’s captain, Gloria observed–was a tall horsy man of thirty with a pleasant mustache and ugly teeth. The other, Captain Collins, was chubby, pink-faced, and inclined to laugh with abandon every time he caught Gloria’s eye. He took an immediate fancy to her, and throughout dinner showered her with inane compliments. With her second glass of champagne Gloria decided that for the first time in months she was thoroughly enjoying herself.


After dinner it was suggested that they all go somewhere and dance. The two officers supplied themselves with bottles of liquor from Rachael’s sideboard–a law forbade service to the military–and so equipped they went through innumerable fox trots in several glittering caravanseries along Broadway, faithfully alternating partners–while Gloria became more and more uproarious and more and more amusing to the pink-faced captain, who seldom bothered to remove his genial smile at all.


At eleven o’clock to her great surprise she was in the minority for staying out. The others wanted to return to Rachael’s apartment–to get some more liquor, they said. Gloria argued persistently that Captain Collins’s flask was half full–she had just seen it–then catching Rachael’s eye she received an unmistakable wink. She deduced, confusedly, that her hostess wanted to get rid of the officers and assented to being bundled into a taxicab outside.


Captain Wolf sat on the left with Rachael on his knees. Captain Collins sat in the middle, and as he settled himself he slipped his arm about Gloria’s shoulder. It rested there lifelessly for a moment and then tightened like a vise. He leaned over her.


“You’re awfully pretty,” he whispered.


“Thank you kindly, sir.” She was neither pleased nor annoyed. Before Anthony came so many arms had done likewise that it had become little more than a gesture, sentimental but without significance.


Up in Rachael’s long front room a low fire and two lamps shaded with orange silk gave all the light, so that the corners were full of deep and somnolent shadows. The hostess, moving about in a dark-figured gown of loose chiffon, seemed to accentuate the already sensuous atmosphere. For a while they were all four together, tasting the sandwiches that waited on the tea table–then Gloria found herself alone with Captain Collins on the fireside lounge; Rachael and Captain Wolf had withdrawn to the other side of the room, where they were conversing in subdued voices.


“I wish you weren’t married,” said Collins, his face a ludicrous travesty of “in all seriousness.”


“Why?” She held out her glass to be filled with a high-ball.


“Don’t drink any more,” he urged her, frowning.


“Why not?”


“You’d be nicer–if you didn’t.”


Gloria caught suddenly the intended suggestion of the remark, the atmosphere he was attempting to create. She wanted to laugh–yet she realized that there was nothing to laugh at. She had been enjoying the evening, and she had no desire to go home–at the same time it hurt her pride to be flirted with on just that level.


“Pour me another drink,” she insisted.


“Please–“


“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” she cried in exasperation.


“Very well.” He yielded with ill grace.


Then his arm was about her again, and again she made no protest. But when his pink cheek came close she leaned away.


“You’re awfully sweet,” he said with an aimless air.


She began to sing softly, wishing now that he would take down his arm. Suddenly her eye fell on an intimate scene across the room–Rachael and Captain Wolf were engrossed in a long kiss. Gloria shivered slightly–she knew not why…. Pink face approached again.


“You shouldn’t look at them,” he whispered. Almost immediately his other arm was around her … his breath was on her cheek. Again absurdity triumphed over disgust, and her laugh was a weapon that needed no edge of words.


“Oh, I thought you were a sport,” he was saying.


“What’s a sport?”


“Why, a person that likes to–to enjoy life.”


“Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?”


They were interrupted as Rachael and Captain Wolf appeared suddenly before them.


“It’s late, Gloria,” said Rachael–she was flushed and her hair was dishevelled. “You’d better stay here all night.”


For an instant Gloria thought the officers were being dismissed. Then she understood, and, understanding, got to her feet as casually as she was able.


Uncomprehendingly Rachael continued:


“You can have the room just off this one. I can lend you everything you need.”


Collins’s eyes implored her like a dog’s; Captain Wolf’s arm had settled familiarly around Rachael’s waist; they were waiting.


But the lure of promiscuity, colorful, various, labyrinthine, and ever a little odorous and stale, had no call or promise for Gloria. Had she so desired she would have remained, without hesitation, without regret; as it was she could face coolly the six hostile and offended eyes that followed her out into the hall with forced politeness and hollow words.


“He wasn’t even sport, enough to try to take me home,” she thought in the taxi, and then with a quick surge of resentment: “How utterly common!”


Gallantry


In February she had an experience of quite a different sort. Tudor Baird, an ancient flame, a young man whom at one time she had fully intended to marry, came to New York by way of the Aviation Corps, and called upon her. They went several times to the theatre, and within a week, to her great enjoyment, he was as much in love with her as ever. Quite deliberately she brought it about, realizing too late that she had done a mischief. He reached the point of sitting with her in miserable silence whenever they went out together.


A Scroll and Keys man at Yale, he possessed the correct reticences of a “good egg,” the correct notions of chivalry and noblesse oblige–and, of course but unfortunately, the correct biases and the correct lack of ideas–all those traits which Anthony had taught her to despise, but which, nevertheless, she rather admired. Unlike the majority of his type, she found that he was not a bore. He was handsome, witty in a light way, and when she was with him she felt that because of some quality he possessed–call it stupidity, loyalty, sentimentality, or something not quite as definite as any of the three–he would have done anything in his power to please her.


He told her this among other things, very correctly and with a ponderous manliness that masked a real suffering. Loving him not at all she grew sorry for him and kissed him sentimentally one night because he was so charming, a relic of a vanishing generation which lived a priggish and graceful illusion and was being replaced by less gallant fools. Afterward she was glad she had kissed him, for next day when his plane fell fifteen hundred feet at Mineola a piece of a gasolene engine smashed through his heart.


Gloria Alone


When Mr. Haight told her that the trial would not take place until autumn she decided that without telling Anthony she would go into the movies. When he saw her successful, both histrionically and financially, when he saw that she could have her will of Joseph Bloeckman, yielding nothing in return, he would lose his silly prejudices. She lay awake half one night planning her career and enjoying her successes in anticipation, and the next morning she called up “Films Par Excellence.” Mr. Bloeckman was in Europe.


But the idea had gripped her so strongly this time that she decided to go the rounds of the moving picture employment agencies. As so often had been the case, her sense of smell worked against her good intentions. The employment agency smelt as though it had been dead a very long time. She waited five minutes inspecting her unprepossessing competitors–then she walked briskly out into the farthest recesses of Central Park and remained so long that she caught a cold. She was trying to air the employment agency out of her walking suit.


In the spring she began to gather from Anthony’s letters–not from any one in particular but from their culminative effect–that he did not want her to come South. Curiously repeated excuses that seemed to haunt him by their very insufficiency occurred with Freudian regularity. He set them down in each letter as though he feared he had forgotten them the last time, as though it were desperately necessary to impress her with them. And the dilutions of his letters with affectionate diminutives began to be mechanical and unspontaneous–almost as though, having completed the letter, he had looked it over and literally stuck them in, like epigrams in an Oscar Wilde play. She jumped to the solution, rejected it, was angry and depressed by turns–finally she shut her mind to it proudly, and allowed an increasing coolness to creep into her end of the correspondence.


Of late she had found a good deal to occupy her attention. Several aviators whom she had met through Tudor Baird came into New York to see her and two other ancient beaux turned up, stationed at Camp Dix. As these men were ordered overseas they, so to speak, handed her down to their friends. But after another rather disagreeable experience with a potential Captain Collins she made it plain that when any one was introduced to her he should be under no misapprehensions as to her status and personal intentions.


When summer came she learned, like Anthony, to watch the officers’ casualty list, taking a sort of melancholy pleasure in hearing of the death of some one with whom she had once danced a german and in identifying by name the younger brothers of former suitors–thinking, as the drive toward Paris progressed, that here at length went the world to inevitable and well-merited destruction.


She was twenty-seven. Her birthday fled by scarcely noticed. Years before it had frightened her when she became twenty, to some extent when she reached twenty-six–but now she looked in the glass with calm self-approval seeing the British freshness of her complexion and her figure boyish and slim as of old.


She tried not to think of Anthony. It was as though she were writing to a stranger. She told her friends that he had been made a corporal and was annoyed when they were politely unimpressed. One night she wept because she was sorry for him–had he been even slightly responsive she would have gone to him without hesitation on the first train-whatever he was doing he needed to be taken care of spiritually, and she felt that now she would be able to do even that. Recently, without his continual drain upon her moral strength she found herself wonderfully revived. Before he left she had been inclined through sheer association to brood on her wasted opportunities–now she returned to her normal state of mind, strong, disdainful, existing each day for each day’s worth. She bought a doll and dressed it; one week she wept over “Ethan Frome”; the next she revelled in some novels of Galsworthy’s, whom she liked for his power of recreating, by spring in darkness, that illusion of young romantic love to which women look forever forward and forever back.


In October Anthony’s letters multiplied, became almost frantic–then suddenly ceased. For a worried month it needed all her powers of control to refrain from leaving immediately for Mississippi. Then a telegram told her that he had been in the hospital and that she could expect him in New York within ten days. Like a figure in a dream he came back into her life across the ballroom on that November evening–and all through long hours that held familiar gladness she took him close to her breast, nursing an illusion of happiness and security she had not thought that she would know again.


Discomfiture of the Generals


After a week Anthony’s regiment went back to the Mississippi camp to be discharged. The officers shut themselves up in the compartments on the Pullman cars and drank the whiskey they had bought in New York, and in the coaches the soldiers got as drunk as possible also–and pretended whenever the train stopped at a village that they were just returned from France, where they had practically put an end to the German army. As they all wore overseas caps and claimed that they had not had time to have their gold service stripes sewed on, the yokelry of the seaboard were much impressed and asked them how they liked the trenches–to which they replied “Oh, boy!” with great smacking of tongues and shaking of heads. Some one took a piece of chalk and scrawled on the side of the train, “We won the war–now we’re going home,” and the officers laughed and let it stay. They were all getting what swagger they could out of this ignominious return.


As they rumbled on toward camp, Anthony was uneasy lest he should find Dot awaiting him patiently at the station. To his relief he neither saw nor heard anything of her and thinking that were she still in town she would certainly attempt to communicate with him, he concluded that she had gone–whither he neither knew nor cared. He wanted only to return to Gloria–Gloria reborn and wonderfully alive. When eventually he was discharged he left his company on the rear of a great truck with a crowd who had given tolerant, almost sentimental, cheers for their officers, especially for Captain Dunning. The captain, on his part, had addressed them with tears in his eyes as to the pleasure, etc., and the work, etc., and time not wasted, etc., and duty, etc. It was very dull and human; having given ear to it Anthony, whose mind was freshened by his week in New York, renewed his deep loathing for the military profession and all it connoted. In their childish hearts two out of every three professional officers considered that wars were made for armies and not armies for wars. He rejoiced to see general and field-officers riding desolately about the barren camp deprived of their commands. He rejoiced to hear the men in his company laugh scornfully at the inducements tendered them to remain in the army. They were to attend “schools.” He knew what these “schools” were.


Two days later he was with Gloria in New York.


Another Winter


Late one February afternoon Anthony came into the apartment and groping through the little hall, pitch-dark in the winter dusk, found Gloria sitting by the window. She turned as he came in.


“What did Mr. Haight have to say?” she asked listlessly.


“Nothing,” he answered, “usual thing. Next month, perhaps.”


She looked at him closely; her ear attuned to his voice caught the slightest thickness in the dissyllable.


“You’ve been drinking,” she remarked dispassionately.


“Couple glasses.”


“Oh.”


He yawned in the armchair and there was a moment’s silence between them. Then she demanded suddenly:


“Did you go to Mr. Haight? Tell me the truth.”


“No.” He smiled weakly. “As a matter of fact I didn’t have time.”


“I thought you didn’t go…. He sent for you.”


“I don’t give a damn. I’m sick of waiting around his office. You’d think he was doing me a favor.” He glanced at Gloria as though expecting moral support, but she had turned back to her contemplation of the dubious and unprepossessing out-of-doors.


“I feel rather weary of life to-day,” he offered tentatively. Still she was silent. “I met a fellow and we talked in the Biltmore bar.”


The dusk had suddenly deepened but neither of them made any move to turn on the lights. Lost in heaven knew what contemplation, they sat there until a flurry of snow drew a languid sigh from Gloria.


“What’ve you been doing?” he asked, finding the silence oppressive.


“Reading a magazine–all full of idiotic articles by prosperous authors about how terrible it is for poor people to buy silk shirts. And while I was reading it I could think of nothing except how I wanted a gray squirrel coat–and how we can’t afford one.”


“Yes, we can.”


“Oh, no.”


“Oh, yes! If you want a fur coat you can have one.”


Her voice coming through the dark held an implication of scorn.


“You mean we can sell another bond?”


“If necessary. I don’t want to go without things. We have spent a lot, though, since I’ve been back.”


“Oh, shut up!” she said in irritation.


“Why?”


“Because I’m sick and tired of hearing you talk about what we’ve spent or what we’ve done. You came back two months ago and we’ve been on some sort of a party practically every night since. We’ve both wanted to go out, and we’ve gone. Well, you haven’t heard me complain, have you? But all you do is whine, whine, whine. I don’t care any more what we do or what becomes of us and at least I’m consistent. But I will not tolerate your complaining and calamity-howling—-“


“You’re not very pleasant yourself sometimes, you know.”


“I’m under no obligations to be. You’re not making any attempt to make things different.”


“But I am–“


“Huh! Seems to me I’ve heard that before. This morning you weren’t going to touch another thing to drink until you’d gotten a position. And you didn’t even have the spunk to go to Mr. Haight when he sent for you about the suit.”


Anthony got to his feet and switched on the lights.


“See here!” he cried, blinking, “I’m getting sick of that sharp tongue of yours.”


“Well, what are you going to do about it?”


“Do you think I’m particularly happy?” he continued, ignoring her question. “Do you think I don’t know we’re not living as we ought to?”


In an instant Gloria stood trembling beside him.


“I won’t stand it!” she burst out. “I won’t be lectured to. You and your suffering! You’re just a pitiful weakling and you always have been!”


They faced one another idiotically, each of them unable to impress the other, each of them tremendously, achingly, bored. Then she went into the bedroom and shut the door behind her.


His return had brought into the foreground all their pre-bellum exasperations. Prices had risen alarmingly and in perverse ratio their income had shrunk to a little over half of its original size. There had been the large retainer’s fee to Mr. Haight; there were stocks bought at one hundred, now down to thirty and forty and other investments that were not paying at all. During the previous spring Gloria had been given the alternative of leaving the apartment or of signing a year’s lease at two hundred and twenty-five a month. She had signed it. Inevitably as the necessity for economy had increased they found themselves as a pair quite unable to save. The old policy of prevarication was resorted to. Weary of their incapabilities they chattered of what they would do–oh–to-morrow, of how they would “stop going on parties” and of how Anthony would go to work. But when dark came down Gloria, accustomed to an engagement every night, would feel the ancient restlessness creeping over her. She would stand in the doorway of the bedroom, chewing furiously at her fingers and sometimes meeting Anthony’s eyes as he glanced up from his book. Then the telephone, and her nerves would relax, she would answer it with ill-concealed eagerness. Some one was coming up “for just a few minutes”–and oh, the weariness of pretense, the appearance of the wine table, the revival of their jaded spirits–and the awakening, like the mid-point of a sleepless night in which they moved.


As the winter passed with the march of the returning troops along Fifth Avenue they became more and more aware that since Anthony’s return their relations had entirely changed. After that reflowering of tenderness and passion each of them had returned into some solitary dream unshared by the other and what endearments passed between them passed, it seemed, from empty heart to empty heart, echoing hollowly the departure of what they knew at last was gone.


Anthony had again made the rounds of the metropolitan newspapers and had again been refused encouragement by a motley of office boys, telephone girls, and city editors. The word was: “We’re keeping any vacancies open for our own men who are still in France.” Then, late in March, his eye fell on an advertisement in the morning paper and in consequence he found at last the semblance of an occupation.


*       *       *       *       *

YOU CAN SELL!!!


Why not earn while you learn?


Our salesmen make $50-$200 weekly.


*       *       *       *       *

There followed an address on Madison Avenue, and instructions to appear at one o’clock that afternoon. Gloria, glancing over his shoulder after one of their usual late breakfasts, saw him regarding it idly.


“Why don’t you try it?” she suggested.


“Oh–it’s one of these crazy schemes.”


“It might not be. At least it’d be experience.”


At her urging he went at one o’clock to the appointed address, where he found himself one of a dense miscellany of men waiting in front of the door. They ranged from a messenger-boy evidently misusing his company’s time to an immemorial individual with a gnarled body and a gnarled cane. Some of the men were seedy, with sunken cheeks and puffy pink eyes–others were young; possibly still in high school. After a jostled fifteen minutes during which they all eyed one another with apathetic suspicion there appeared a smart young shepherd clad in a “waist-line” suit and wearing the manner of an assistant rector who herded them up-stairs into a large room, which resembled a school-room and contained innumerable desks. Here the prospective salesmen sat down–and again waited. After an interval a platform at the end of the hall was clouded with half a dozen sober but sprightly men who, with one exception, took seats in a semicircle facing the audience.


The exception was the man who seemed the soberest, the most sprightly and the youngest of the lot, and who advanced to the front of the platform. The audience scrutinized him hopefully. He was rather small and rather pretty, with the commercial rather than the thespian sort of prettiness. He had straight blond bushy brows and eyes that were almost preposterously honest, and as he reached the edge of his rostrum he seemed to throw these eyes out into the audience, simultaneously extending his arm with two fingers outstretched. Then while he rocked himself to a state of balance an expectant silence settled over the hall. With perfect assurance the young man had taken his listeners in hand and his words when they came were steady and confident and of the school of “straight from the shoulder.”


“Men!”–he began, and paused. The word died with a prolonged echo at the end of the hall, the faces regarding him, hopefully, cynically, wearily, were alike arrested, engrossed. Six hundred eyes were turned slightly upward. With an even graceless flow that reminded Anthony of the rolling of bowling balls he launched himself into the sea of exposition.


“This bright and sunny morning you picked up your favorite newspaper and you found an advertisement which made the plain, unadorned statement that you could sell. That was all it said–it didn’t say ‘what,’ it didn’t say ‘how,’ it didn’t say ‘why.’ It just made one single solitary assertion that you and you and you“–business of pointing–“could sell. Now my job isn’t to make a success of you, because every man is born a success, he makes himself a failure; it’s not to teach you how to talk, because each man is a natural orator and only makes himself a clam; my business is to tell you one thing in a way that will make you know it–it’s to tell you that you and you and you have the heritage of money and prosperity waiting for you to come and claim it.”


At this point an Irishman of saturnine appearance rose from his desk near the rear of the hall and went out.


“That man thinks he’ll go look for it in the beer parlor around the corner. (Laughter.) He won’t find it there. Once upon a time I looked for it there myself (laughter), but that was before I did what every one of you men no matter how young or how old, how poor or how rich (a faint ripple of satirical laughter), can do. It was before I found–myself!


“Now I wonder if any of you men know what a ‘Heart Talk’ is. A ‘Heart Talk’ is a little book in which I started, about five years ago, to write down what I had discovered were the principal reasons for a man’s failure and the principal reasons for a man’s success–from John D. Rockerfeller back to John D. Napoleon (laughter), and before that, back in the days when Abel sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. There are now one hundred of these ‘Heart Talks.’ Those of you who are sincere, who are interested in our proposition, above all who are dissatisfied with the way things are breaking for you at present will be handed one to take home with you as you go out yonder door this afternoon.


“Now in my own pocket I have four letters just received concerning ‘Heart Talks.’ These letters have names signed to them that are familiar in every house-hold in the U.S.A. Listen to this one from Detroit:


*       *       *       *       *

DEAR MR. CARLETON:


I want to order three thousand more copies of ‘Heart Talks’ for distribution among my salesmen. They have done more for getting work out of the men than any bonus proposition ever considered. I read them myself constantly, and I desire to heartily congratulate you on getting at the roots of the biggest problem that faces our generation to-day–the problem of salesmanship. The rock bottom on which the country is founded is the problem of salesmanship. With many felicitations I am


Yours very cordially,
        HENRY W. TERRAL.


*       *       *       *       *

He brought the name out in three long booming triumphancies–pausing for it to produce its magical effect. Then he read two more letters, one from a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners and one from the president of the Great Northern Doily Company.


“And now,” he continued, “I’m going to tell you in a few words what the proposition is that’s going to make those of you who go into it in the right spirit. Simply put, it’s this: ‘Heart Talks’ have been incorporated as a company. We’re going to put these little pamphlets into the hands of every big business organization, every salesman, and every man who knows–I don’t say ‘thinks,’ I say knows–that he can sell! We are offering some of the stock of the ‘Heart Talks’ concern upon the market, and in order that the distribution may be as wide as possible, and in order also that we can furnish a living, concrete, flesh-and-blood example of what salesmanship is, or rather what it may be, we’re going to give those of you who are the real thing a chance to sell that stock. Now, I don’t care what you’ve tried to sell before or how you’ve tried to sell it. It don’t matter how old you are or how young you are. I only want to know two things–first, do you want success, and, second, will you work for it?


“My name is Sammy Carleton. Not ‘Mr.’ Carleton, but just plain Sammy. I’m a regular no-nonsense man with no fancy frills about me. I want you to call me Sammy.


“Now this is all I’m going to say to you to-day. To-morrow I want those of you who have thought it over and have read the copy of ‘Heart Talks’ which will be given to you at the door, to come back to this same room at this same time, then we’ll, go into the proposition further and I’ll explain to you what I’ve found the principles of success to be. I’m going to make you feel that you and you and you can sell!”


Mr. Carleton’s voice echoed for a moment through the hall and then died away. To the stamping of many feet Anthony was pushed and jostled with the crowd out of the room.


Further Adventures with Heart Talks


With an accompaniment of ironic laughter Anthony told Gloria the story of his commercial adventure. But she listened without amusement.


“You’re going to give up again?” she demanded coldly.


“Why–you don’t expect me to–“


“I never expected anything of you.”


He hesitated.


“Well–I can’t see the slightest benefit in laughing myself sick over this sort of affair. If there’s anything older than the old story, it’s the new twist.”


It required an astonishing amount of moral energy on Gloria’s part to intimidate him into returning, and when he reported next day, somewhat depressed from his perusal of the senile bromides skittishly set forth in “Heart Talks on Ambition,” he found only fifty of the original three hundred awaiting the appearance of the vital and compelling Sammy Carleton. Mr. Carleton’s powers of vitality and compulsion were this time exercised in elucidating that magnificent piece of speculation–how to sell. It seemed that the approved method was to state one’s proposition and then to say not “And now, will you buy?”–this was not the way–oh, no!–the way was to state one’s proposition and then, having reduced one’s adversary to a state of exhaustion, to deliver oneself of the categorical imperative: “Now see here! You’ve taken up my time explaining this matter to you. You’ve admitted my points–all I want to ask is how many do you want?”


As Mr. Carleton piled assertion upon assertion Anthony began to feel a sort of disgusted confidence in him. The man appeared to know what he was talking about. Obviously prosperous, he had risen to the position of instructing others. It did not occur to Anthony that the type of man who attains commercial success seldom knows how or why, and, as in his grandfather’s case, when he ascribes reasons, the reasons are generally inaccurate and absurd.


Anthony noted that of the numerous old men who had answered the original advertisement, only two had returned, and that among the thirty odd who assembled on the third day to get actual selling instructions from Mr. Carleton, only one gray head was in evidence. These thirty were eager converts; with their mouths they followed the working of Mr. Carleton’s mouth; they swayed in their seats with enthusiasm, and in the intervals of his talk they spoke to each other in tense approving whispers. Yet of the chosen few who, in the words of Mr. Carleton, “were determined to get those deserts that rightly and truly belonged to them,” less than half a dozen combined even a modicum of personal appearance with that great gift of being a “pusher.” But they were told that they were all natural pushers–it was merely necessary that they should believe with a sort of savage passion in what they were selling. He even urged each one to buy some stock himself, if possible, in order to increase his own sincerity.


On the fifth day then, Anthony sallied into the street with all the sensations of a man wanted by the police. Acting according to instructions he selected a tall office building in order that he might ride to the top story and work downward, stopping in every office that had a name on the door. But at the last minute he hesitated. Perhaps it would be more practicable to acclimate himself to the chilly atmosphere which he felt was awaiting him by trying a few offices on, say, Madison Avenue. He went into an arcade that seemed only semi-prosperous, and seeing a sign which read Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, he opened the door heroically and entered. A starchy young woman looked up questioningly.


“Can I see Mr. Weatherbee?” He wondered if his voice sounded tremulous.


She laid her hand tentatively on the telephone-receiver.


“What’s the name, please?”


“He wouldn’t–ah–know me. He wouldn’t know my name.”


“What’s your business with him? You an insurance agent?”


“Oh, no, nothing like that!” denied Anthony hurriedly. “Oh, no. It’s a–it’s a personal matter.” He wondered if he should have said this. It had all sounded so simple when Mr. Carleton had enjoined his flock:


“Don’t allow yourself to be kept out! Show them you’ve made up your mind to talk to them, and they’ll listen.”


The girl succumbed to Anthony’s pleasant, melancholy face, and in a moment the door to the inner room opened and admitted a tall, splay-footed man with slicked hair. He approached Anthony with ill-concealed impatience.


“You wanted to see me on a personal matter?”


Anthony quailed.


“I wanted to talk to you,” he said defiantly.


“About what?”


“It’ll take some time to explain.”


“Well, what’s it about?” Mr. Weatherbee’s voice indicated rising irritation.


Then Anthony, straining at each word, each syllable, began:


“I don’t know whether or not you’ve ever heard of a series of pamphlets called ‘Heart Talks’–“


“Good grief!” cried Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, “are you trying to touch my heart?”


“No, it’s business. ‘Heart Talks’ have been incorporated and we’re putting some shares on the market–“


His voice faded slowly off, harassed by a fixed and contemptuous stare from his unwilling prey. For another minute he struggled on, increasingly sensitive, entangled in his own words. His confidence oozed from him in great retching emanations that seemed to be sections of his own body. Almost mercifully Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, terminated the interview:


“Good grief!” he exploded in disgust, “and you call that a personal matter!” He whipped about and strode into his private office, banging the door behind him. Not daring to look at the stenographer, Anthony in some shameful and mysterious way got himself from the room. Perspiring profusely he stood in the hall wondering why they didn’t come and arrest him; in every hurried look he discerned infallibly a glance of scorn.


After an hour and with the help of two strong whiskies he brought himself up to another attempt. He walked into a plumber’s shop, but when he mentioned his business the plumber began pulling on his coat in a great hurry, gruffly announcing that he had to go to lunch. Anthony remarked politely that it was futile to try to sell a man anything when he was hungry, and the plumber heartily agreed.


This episode encouraged Anthony; he tried to think that had the plumber not been bound for lunch he would at least have listened.


Passing by a few glittering and formidable bazaars he entered a grocery store. A talkative proprietor told him that before buying any stocks he was going to see how the armistice affected the market. To Anthony this seemed almost unfair. In Mr. Carleton’s salesman’s Utopia the only reason prospective buyers ever gave for not purchasing stock was that they doubted it to be a promising investment. Obviously a man in that state was almost ludicrously easy game, to be brought down merely by the judicious application of the correct selling points. But these men–why, actually they weren’t considering buying anything at all.


Anthony took several more drinks before he approached his fourth man, a real-estate agent; nevertheless, he was floored with a coup as decisive as a syllogism. The real-estate agent said that he had three brothers in the investment business. Viewing himself as a breaker-up of homes Anthony apologized and went out.


After another drink he conceived the brilliant plan of selling the stock to the bartenders along Lexington Avenue. This occupied several hours, for it was necessary to take a few drinks in each place in order to get the proprietor in the proper frame of mind to talk business. But the bartenders one and all contended that if they had any money to buy bonds they would not be bartenders. It was as though they had all convened and decided upon that rejoinder. As he approached a dark and soggy five o’clock he found that they were developing a still more annoying tendency to turn him off with a jest.


At five, then, with a tremendous effort at concentration he decided that he must put more variety into his canvassing. He selected a medium-sized delicatessen store, and went in. He felt, illuminatingly, that the thing to do was to cast a spell not only over the storekeeper but over all the customers as well–and perhaps through the psychology of the herd instinct they would buy as an astounded and immediately convinced whole.


“Af’ernoon,” he began in a loud thick voice. “Ga l’il prop’sition.”


If he had wanted silence he obtained it. A sort of awe descended upon the half-dozen women marketing and upon the gray-haired ancient who in cap and apron was slicing chicken.


Anthony pulled a batch of papers from his flapping briefcase and waved them cheerfully.


“Buy a bon’,” he suggested, “good as liberty bon’!” The phrase pleased him and he elaborated upon it. “Better’n liberty bon’. Every one these bon’s worth two liberty bon’s.” His mind made a hiatus and skipped to his peroration, which he delivered with appropriate gestures, these being somewhat marred by the necessity of clinging to the counter with one or both hands.


“Now see here. You taken up my time. I don’t want know why you won’t buy. I just want you say why. Want you say how many!“


At this point they should have approached him with check-books and fountain pens in hand. Realizing that they must have missed a cue Anthony, with the instincts of an actor, went back and repeated his finale.


“Now see here! You taken up my time. You followed prop’sition. You agreed ‘th reasonin’? Now, all I want from you is, how many lib’ty bon’s?”


“See here!” broke in a new voice. A portly man whose face was adorned with symmetrical scrolls of yellow hair had come out of a glass cage in the rear of the store and was bearing down upon Anthony. “See here, you!”


“How many?” repeated the salesman sternly. “You taken up my time–“


“Hey, you!” cried the proprietor, “I’ll have you taken up by the police.”


“You mos’ cert’nly won’t!” returned Anthony with fine defiance. “All I want know is how many.”


From here and there in the store went up little clouds of comment and expostulation.


“How terrible!”


“He’s a raving maniac.”


“He’s disgracefully drunk.”


The proprietor grasped Anthony’s arm sharply.


“Get out, or I’ll call a policeman.”


Some relics of rationality moved Anthony to nod and replace his bonds clumsily in the case.


“How many?” he reiterated doubtfully.


“The whole force if necessary!” thundered his adversary, his yellow mustache trembling fiercely.


“Sell ’em all a bon’.”


With this Anthony turned, bowed gravely to his late auditors, and wabbled from the store. He found a taxicab at the corner and rode home to the apartment. There he fell sound asleep on the sofa, and so Gloria found him, his breath filling the air with an unpleasant pungency, his hand still clutching his open brief case.


Except when Anthony was drinking, his range of sensation had become less than that of a healthy old man and when prohibition came in July he found that, among those who could afford it, there was more drinking than ever before. One’s host now brought out a bottle upon the slightest pretext. The tendency to display liquor was a manifestation of the same instinct that led a man to deck his wife with jewels. To have liquor was a boast, almost a badge of respectability.


In the mornings Anthony awoke tired, nervous, and worried. Halcyon summer twilights and the purple chill of morning alike left him unresponsive. Only for a brief moment every day in the warmth and renewed life of a first high-ball did his mind turn to those opalescent dreams of future pleasure–the mutual heritage of the happy and the damned. But this was only for a little while. As he grew drunker the dreams faded and he became a confused spectre, moving in odd crannies of his own mind, full of unexpected devices, harshly contemptuous at best and reaching sodden and dispirited depths. One night in June he had quarrelled violently with Maury over a matter of the utmost triviality. He remembered dimly next morning that it had been about a broken pint bottle of champagne. Maury had told him to sober up and Anthony’s feelings had been hurt, so with an attempted gesture of dignity he had risen from the table and seizing Gloria’s arm half led, half shamed her into a taxicab outside, leaving Maury with three dinners ordered and tickets for the opera.


This sort of semi-tragic fiasco had become so usual that when they occurred he was no longer stirred into making amends. If Gloria protested–and of late she was more likely to sink into contemptuous silence–he would either engage in a bitter defense of himself or else stalk dismally from the apartment. Never since the incident on the station platform at Redgate had he laid his hands on her in anger–though he was withheld often only by some instinct that itself made him tremble with rage. Just as he still cared more for her than for any other creature, so did he more intensely and frequently hate her.


So far, the judges of the Appellate Division had failed to hand down a decision, but after another postponement they finally affirmed the decree of the lower court–two justices dissenting. A notice of appeal was served upon Edward Shuttleworth. The case was going to the court of last resort, and they were in for another interminable wait. Six months, perhaps a year. It had grown enormously unreal to them, remote and uncertain as heaven.


Throughout the previous winter one small matter had been a subtle and omnipresent irritant–the question of Gloria’s gray fur coat. At that time women enveloped in long squirrel wraps could be seen every few yards along Fifth Avenue. The women were converted to the shape of tops. They seemed porcine and obscene; they resembled kept women in the concealing richness, the feminine animality of the garment. Yet–Gloria wanted a gray squirrel coat.


Discussing the matter–or, rather, arguing it, for even more than in the first year of their marriage did every discussion take the form of bitter debate full of such phrases as “most certainly,” “utterly outrageous,” “it’s so, nevertheless,” and the ultra-emphatic “regardless”–they concluded that they could not afford it. And so gradually it began to stand as a symbol of their growing financial anxiety.


To Gloria the shrinkage of their income was a remarkable phenomenon, without explanation or precedent–that it could happen at all within the space of five years seemed almost an intended cruelty, conceived and executed by a sardonic God. When they were married seventy-five hundred a year had seemed ample for a young couple, especially when augmented by the expectation of many millions. Gloria had failed to realize that it was decreasing not only in amount but in purchasing power until the payment of Mr. Haight’s retaining fee of fifteen thousand dollars made the fact suddenly and startlingly obvious. When Anthony was drafted they had calculated their income at over four hundred a month, with the dollar even then decreasing in value, but on his return to New York they discovered an even more alarming condition of affairs. They were receiving only forty-five hundred a year from their investments. And though the suit over the will moved ahead of them like a persistent mirage and the financial danger-mark loomed up in the near distance they found, nevertheless, that living within their income was impossible.


So Gloria went without the squirrel coat and every day upon Fifth Avenue she was a little conscious of her well-worn, half-length leopard skin, now hopelessly old-fashioned. Every other month they sold a bond, yet when the bills were paid it left only enough to be gulped down hungrily by their current expenses. Anthony’s calculations showed that their capital would last about seven years longer. So Gloria’s heart was very bitter, for in one week, on a prolonged hysterical party during which Anthony whimsically divested himself of coat, vest, and shirt in a theatre and was assisted out by a posse of ushers, they spent twice what the gray squirrel coat would have cost.


It was November, Indian summer rather, and a warm, warm night–which was unnecessary, for the work of the summer was done. Babe Ruth had smashed the home-run record for the first time and Jack Dempsey had broken Jess Willard’s cheek-bone out in Ohio. Over in Europe the usual number of children had swollen stomachs from starvation, and the diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars. In New York City the proletariat were being “disciplined,” and the odds on Harvard were generally quoted at five to three. Peace had come down in earnest, the beginning of new days.


Up in the bedroom of the apartment on Fifty-seventh Street Gloria lay upon her bed and tossed from side to side, sitting up at intervals to throw off a superfluous cover and once asking Anthony, who was lying awake beside her, to bring her a glass of ice-water. “Be sure and put ice in it,” she said with insistence; “it isn’t cold enough the way it comes from the faucet.”


Looking through the frail curtains she could see the rounded moon over the roofs and beyond it on the sky the yellow glow from Times Square–and watching the two incongruous lights, her mind worked over an emotion, or rather an interwoven complex of emotions, that had occupied it through the day, and the day before that and back to the last time when she could remember having thought clearly and consecutively about anything–which must have been while Anthony was in the army.


She would be twenty-nine in February. The month assumed an ominous and inescapable significance–making her wonder, through these nebulous half-fevered hours whether after all she had not wasted her faintly tired beauty, whether there was such a thing as use for any quality bounded by a harsh and inevitable mortality.


Years before, when she was twenty-one, she had written in her diary: “Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved-to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty should be used like that….”


And now, all this November day, all this desolate day, under a sky dirty and white, Gloria had been thinking that perhaps she had been wrong. To preserve the integrity of her first gift she had looked no more for love. When the first flame and ecstasy had grown dim, sunk down, departed, she had begun preserving–what? It puzzled her that she no longer knew just what she was preserving–a sentimental memory or some profound and fundamental concept of honor. She was doubting now whether there had been any moral issue involved in her way of life–to walk unworried and unregretful along the gayest of all possible lanes and to keep her pride by being always herself and doing what it seemed beautiful that she should do. From the first little boy in an Eton collar whose “girl” she had been, down to the latest casual man whose eyes had grown alert and appreciative as they rested upon her, there was needed only that matchless candor she could throw into a look or clothe with an inconsequent clause–for she had talked always in broken clauses–to weave about her immeasurable illusions, immeasurable distances, immeasurable light. To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud–proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.


She knew that in her breast she had never wanted children. The reality, the earthiness, the intolerable sentiment of child-bearing, the menace to her beauty–had appalled her. She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving itself. Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her own illusions, but her ironic soul whispered that motherhood was also the privilege of the female baboon. So her dreams were of ghostly children only–the early, the perfect symbols of her early and perfect love for Anthony.


In the end then, her beauty was all that never failed her. She had never seen beauty like her own. What it meant ethically or aesthetically faded before the gorgeous concreteness of her pink-and-white feet, the clean perfectness of her body, and the baby mouth that was like the material symbol of a kiss.


She would be twenty-nine in February. As the long night waned she grew supremely conscious that she and beauty were going to make use of these next three months. At first she was not sure for what, but the problem resolved itself gradually into the old lure of the screen. She was in earnest now. No material want could have moved her as this fear moved her. No matter for Anthony, Anthony the poor in spirit, the weak and broken man with bloodshot eyes, for whom she still had moments of tenderness. No matter. She would be twenty-nine in February–a hundred days, so many days; she would go to Bloeckman to-morrow.


With the decision came relief. It cheered her that in some manner the illusion of beauty could be sustained, or preserved perhaps in celluloid after the reality had vanished. Well–to-morrow.


The next day she felt weak and ill. She tried to go out, and saved herself from collapse only by clinging to a mail box near the front door. The Martinique elevator boy helped her up-stairs, and she waited on the bed for Anthony’s return without energy to unhook her brassiere.


For five days she was down with influenza, which, just as the month turned the corner into winter, ripened into double pneumonia. In the feverish perambulations of her mind she prowled through a house of bleak unlighted rooms hunting for her mother. All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.


“Odi Profanum Vulgus”


One day in the midst of Gloria’s illness there occurred a curious incident that puzzled Miss McGovern, the trained nurse, for some time afterward. It was noon, but the room in which the patient lay was dark and quiet. Miss McGovern was standing near the bed mixing some medicine, when Mrs. Patch, who had apparently been sound asleep, sat up and began to speak vehemently:


“Millions of people,” she said, “swarming like rats, chattering like apes, smelling like all hell … monkeys! Or lice, I suppose. For one really exquisite palace … on Long Island, say–or even in Greenwich … for one palace full of pictures from the Old World and exquisite things–with avenues of trees and green lawns and a view of the blue sea, and lovely people about in slick dresses … I’d sacrifice a hundred thousand of them, a million of them.” She raised her hand feebly and snapped her fingers. “I care nothing for them–understand me?”


The look she bent upon Miss McGovern at the conclusion of this speech was curiously elfin, curiously intent. Then she gave a short little laugh polished with scorn, and tumbling backward fell off again to sleep.


Miss McGovern was bewildered. She wondered what were the hundred thousand things that Mrs. Patch would sacrifice for her palace. Dollars, she supposed–yet it had not sounded exactly like dollars.


The Movies


It was February, seven days before her birthday, and the great snow that had filled up the cross-streets as dirt fills the cracks in a floor had turned to slush and was being escorted to the gutters by the hoses of the street-cleaning department. The wind, none the less bitter for being casual, whipped in through the open windows of the living room bearing with it the dismal secrets of the areaway and clearing the Patch apartment of stale smoke in its cheerless circulation.


Gloria, wrapped in a warm kimona, came into the chilly room and taking up the telephone receiver called Joseph Bloeckman.


“Do you mean Mr. Joseph Black?” demanded the telephone girl at “Films Par Excellence.”


“Bloeckman, Joseph Bloeckman. B-l-o–“


“Mr. Joseph Bloeckman has changed his name to Black. Do you want him?”


“Why–yes.” She remembered nervously that she had once called him “Blockhead” to his face.


His office was reached by courtesy of two additional female voices; the last was a secretary who took her name. Only with the flow through the transmitter of his own familiar but faintly impersonal tone did she realize that it had been three years since they had met. And he had changed his name to Black.


“Can you see me?” she suggested lightly. “It’s on a business matter, really. I’m going into the movies at last–if I can.”


“I’m awfully glad. I’ve always thought you’d like it.”


“Do you think you can get me a trial?” she demanded with the arrogance peculiar to all beautiful women, to all women who have ever at any time considered themselves beautiful.


He assured her that it was merely a question of when she wanted the trial. Any time? Well, he’d phone later in the day and let her know a convenient hour. The conversation closed with conventional padding on both sides. Then from three o’clock to five she sat close to the telephone–with no result.


But next morning came a note that contented and excited her:


*       *       *       *       *

My dear Gloria:


Just by luck a matter came to my attention that I think will be just suited to you. I would like to see you start with something that would bring you notice. At the same time if a very beautiful girl of your sort is put directly into a picture next to one of the rather shop-worn stars with which every company is afflicted, tongues would very likely wag. But there is a “flapper” part in a Percy B. Debris production that I think would be just suited to you and would bring you notice. Willa Sable plays opposite Gaston Mears in a sort of character part and your part I believe would be her younger sister.


Anyway Percy B. Debris who is directing the picture says if you’ll come to the studios day after to-morrow (Thursday) he will run off a test. If ten o’clock is suited to you I will meet you there at that time.


With all good wishes


Ever Faithfully


JOSEPH BLACK.


*       *       *       *       *

Gloria had decided that Anthony was to know nothing of this until she had obtained a definite position, and accordingly she was dressed and out of the apartment next morning before he awoke. Her mirror had given her, she thought, much the same account as ever. She wondered if there were any lingering traces of her sickness. She was still slightly under weight, and she had fancied, a few days before, that her cheeks were a trifle thinner–but she felt that those were merely transitory conditions and that on this particular day she looked as fresh as ever. She had bought and charged a new hat, and as the day was warm she had left the leopard skin coat at home.


At the “Films Par Excellence” studios she was announced over the telephone and told that Mr. Black would be down directly. She looked around her. Two girls were being shown about by a little fat man in a slash-pocket coat, and one of them had indicated a stack of thin parcels, piled breast-high against the wall, and extending along for twenty feet.


“That’s studio mail,” explained the fat man. “Pictures of the stars who are with ‘Films Par Excellence.'”


“Oh.”


“Each one’s autographed by Florence Kelley or Gaston Mears or Mack Dodge–” He winked confidentially. “At least when Minnie McGlook out in Sauk Center gets the picture she wrote for, she thinks it’s autographed.”


“Just a stamp?”


“Sure. It’d take ’em a good eight-hour day to autograph half of ’em. They say Mary Pickford’s studio mail costs her fifty thousand a year.”


“Say!”


“Sure. Fifty thousand. But it’s the best kinda advertising there is–“


They drifted out of earshot and almost immediately Bloeckman appeared–Bloeckman, a dark suave gentleman, gracefully engaged in the middle forties, who greeted her with courteous warmth and told her she had not changed a bit in three years. He led the way into a great hall, as large as an armory and broken intermittently with busy sets and blinding rows of unfamiliar light. Each piece of scenery was marked in large white letters “Gaston Mears Company,” “Mack Dodge Company,” or simply “Films Par Excellence.”


“Ever been in a studio before?”


“Never have.”


She liked it. There was no heavy closeness of greasepaint, no scent of soiled and tawdry costumes which years before had revolted her behind the scenes of a musical comedy. This work was done in the clean mornings; the appurtenances seemed rich and gorgeous and new. On a set that was joyous with Manchu hangings a perfect Chinaman was going through a scene according to megaphone directions as the great glittering machine ground out its ancient moral tale for the edification of the national mind.


A red-headed man approached them and spoke with familiar deference to Bloeckman, who answered:


“Hello, Debris. Want you to meet Mrs. Patch…. Mrs. Patch wants to go into pictures, as I explained to you…. All right, now, where do we go?”


Mr. Debris–the great Percy B. Debris, thought Gloria–showed them to a set which represented the interior of an office. Some chairs were drawn up around the camera, which stood in front of it, and the three of them sat down.


“Ever been in a studio before?” asked Mr. Debris, giving her a glance that was surely the quintessence of keenness. “No? Well, I’ll explain exactly what’s going to happen. We’re going to take what we call a test in order to see how your features photograph and whether you’ve got natural stage presence and how you respond to coaching. There’s no need to be nervous over it. I’ll just have the camera-man take a few hundred feet in an episode I’ve got marked here in the scenario. We can tell pretty much what we want to from that.”


He produced a typewritten continuity and explained to her the episode she was to enact. It developed that one Barbara Wainwright had been secretly married to the junior partner of the firm whose office was there represented. Entering the deserted office one day by accident she was naturally interested in seeing where her husband worked. The telephone rang and after some hesitation she answered it. She learned that her husband had been struck by an automobile and instantly killed. She was overcome. At first she was unable to realize the truth, but finally she succeeded in comprehending it, and went into a dead faint on the floor.


“Now that’s all we want,” concluded Mr. Debris. “I’m going to stand here and tell you approximately what to do, and you’re to act as though I wasn’t here, and just go on do it your own way. You needn’t be afraid we’re going to judge this too severely. We simply want to get a general idea of your screen personality.”


“I see.”


“You’ll find make-up in the room in back of the set. Go light on it. Very little red.”


“I see,” repeated Gloria, nodding. She touched her lips nervously with the tip of her tongue.


The Test


As she came into the set through the real wooden door and closed it carefully behind her, she found herself inconveniently dissatisfied with her clothes. She should have bought a “misses'” dress for the occasion–she could still wear them, and it might have been a good investment if it had accentuated her airy youth.


Her mind snapped sharply into the momentous present as Mr. Debris’s voice came from the glare of the white lights in front.


“You look around for your husband…. Now–you don’t see him … you’re curious about the office….”


She became conscious of the regular sound of the camera. It worried her. She glanced toward it involuntarily and wondered if she had made up her face correctly. Then, with a definite effort she forced herself to act–and she had never felt that the gestures of her body were so banal, so awkward, so bereft of grace or distinction. She strolled around the office, picking up articles here and there and looking at them inanely. Then she scrutinized the ceiling, the floor, and thoroughly inspected an inconsequential lead pencil on the desk. Finally, because she could think of nothing else to do, and less than nothing to express, she forced a smile.


“All right. Now the phone rings. Ting-a-ling-a-ling! Hesitate, and then answer it.”


She hesitated–and then, too quickly, she thought, picked up the receiver.


“Hello.”


Her voice was hollow and unreal. The words rang in the empty set like the ineffectualities of a ghost. The absurdities of their requirements appalled her–Did they expect that on an instant’s notice she could put herself in the place of this preposterous and unexplained character?


“… No … no…. Not yet! Now listen: ‘John Sumner has just been knocked over by an automobile and instantly killed!'”


Gloria let her baby mouth drop slowly open. Then:


“Now hang up! With a bang!”


She obeyed, clung to the table with her eyes wide and staring. At length she was feeling slightly encouraged and her confidence increased.


“My God!” she cried. Her voice was good, she thought. “Oh, my God!”


“Now faint.”


She collapsed forward to her knees and throwing her body outward on the ground lay without breathing.


“All right!” called Mr. Debris. “That’s enough, thank you. That’s plenty. Get up–that’s enough.”


Gloria arose, mustering her dignity and brushing off her skirt.


“Awful!” she remarked with a cool laugh, though her heart was bumping tumultuously. “Terrible, wasn’t it?”


“Did you mind it?” said Mr. Debris, smiling blandly. “Did it seem hard? I can’t tell anything about it until I have it run off.”


“Of course not,” she agreed, trying to attach some sort of meaning to his remark–and failing. It was just the sort of thing he would have said had he been trying not to encourage her.


A few moments later she left the studio. Bloeckman had promised that she should hear the result of the test within the next few days. Too proud to force any definite comment she felt a baffling uncertainty and only now when the step had at last been taken did she realize how the possibility of a successful screen career had played in the back of her mind for the past three years. That night she tried to tell over to herself the elements that might decide for or against her. Whether or not she had used enough make-up worried her, and as the part was that of a girl of twenty, she wondered if she had not been just a little too grave. About her acting she was least of all satisfied. Her entrance had been abominable–in fact not until she reached the phone had she displayed a shred of poise–and then the test had been over. If they had only realized! She wished that she could try it again. A mad plan to call up in the morning and ask for a new trial took possession of her, and as suddenly faded. It seemed neither politic nor polite to ask another favor of Bloeckman.


The third day of waiting found her in a highly nervous condition. She had bitten the insides of her mouth until they were raw and smarting, and burnt unbearably when she washed them with listerine. She had quarrelled so persistently with Anthony that he had left the apartment in a cold fury. But because he was intimidated by her exceptional frigidity, he called up an hour afterward, apologized and said he was having dinner at the Amsterdam Club, the only one in which he still retained membership.


It was after one o’clock and she had breakfasted at eleven, so, deciding to forego luncheon, she started for a walk in the Park. At three there would be a mail. She would be back by three.


It was an afternoon of premature spring. Water was drying on the walks and in the Park little girls were gravely wheeling white doll-buggies up and down under the thin trees while behind them followed bored nursery-maids in two’s, discussing with each other those tremendous secrets that are peculiar to nursery-maids.


Two o’clock by her little gold watch. She should have a new watch, one made in a platinum oblong and incrusted with diamonds–but those cost even more than squirrel coats and of course they were out of her reach now, like everything else–unless perhaps the right letter was awaiting her … in about an hour … fifty-eight minutes exactly. Ten to get there left forty-eight … forty-seven now …


Little girls soberly wheeling their buggies along the damp sunny walks. The nursery-maids chattering in pairs about their inscrutable secrets. Here and there a raggedy man seated upon newspapers spread on a drying bench, related not to the radiant and delightful afternoon but to the dirty snow that slept exhausted in obscure corners, waiting for extermination….


Ages later, coming into the dim hall she saw the Martinique elevator boy standing incongruously in the light of the stained-glass window.


“Is there any mail for us?” she asked.


“Up-stays, madame.”


The switchboard squawked abominably and Gloria waited while he ministered to the telephone. She sickened as the elevator groaned its way up–the floors passed like the slow lapse of centuries, each one ominous, accusing, significant. The letter, a white leprous spot, lay upon the dirty tiles of the hall….


*       *       *       *       *

My dear Gloria:


We had the test run off yesterday afternoon, and Mr. Debris seemed to think that for the part he had in mind he needed a younger woman. He said that the acting was not bad, and that there was a small character part supposed to be a very haughty rich widow that he thought you might—-


*       *       *       *       *

Desolately Gloria raised her glance until it fell out across the areaway. But she found she could not see the opposite wall, for her gray eyes were full of tears. She walked into the bedroom, the letter crinkled tightly in her hand, and sank down upon her knees before the long mirror on the wardrobe floor. This was her twenty-ninth birthday, and the world was melting away before her eyes. She tried to think that it had been the make-up, but her emotions were too profound, too overwhelming for any consolation that the thought conveyed.


She strained to see until she could feel the flesh on her temples pull forward. Yes–the cheeks were ever so faintly thin, the corners of the eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. The eyes were different. Why, they were different! … And then suddenly she knew how tired her eyes were.


“Oh, my pretty face,” she whispered, passionately grieving. “Oh, my pretty face! Oh, I don’t want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what’s happened?“


Then she slid toward the mirror and, as in the test, sprawled face downward upon the floor–and lay there sobbing. It was the first awkward movement she had ever made.



F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned
appears in the C.C. Online Library in nine sections.


“Book Three, Chapter 2: A Matter of Aesthetics” is the eighth of nine.

Click here to read more.



* * * * *


   

The Beautiful and Damned (Book Three, Chapter I) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

05 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1900s, American, Fitzgerald (F. Scott), Novels

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
originally published by Scribner’s in 1922


Book Three, Chapter I: A Matter of Civilization


At a frantic command from some invisible source, Anthony groped his way inside. He was thinking that for the first time in more than three years he was to remain longer than a night away from Gloria. The finality of it appealed to him drearily. It was his clean and lovely girl that he was leaving.


They had arrived, he thought, at the most practical financial settlement: she was to have three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month–not too much considering that over half of that would go in rent–and he was taking fifty to supplement his pay. He saw no need for more: food, clothes, and quarters would be provided–there were no social obligations for a private.


The car was crowded and already thick with breath. It was one of the type known as “tourist” cars, a sort of brummagem Pullman, with a bare floor, and straw seats that needed cleaning. Nevertheless, Anthony greeted it with relief. He had vaguely expected that the trip South would be made in a freight-car, in one end of which would stand eight horses and in the other forty men. He had heard the “hommes 40, chevaux 8” story so often that it had become confused and ominous.


As he rocked down the aisle with his barrack-bag slung at his shoulder like a monstrous blue sausage, he saw no vacant seats, but after a moment his eye fell on a single space at present occupied by the feet of a short swarthy Sicilian, who, with his hat drawn over his eyes, hunched defiantly in the corner. As Anthony stopped beside him he stared up with a scowl, evidently intended to be intimidating; he must have adopted it as a defense against this entire gigantic equation. At Anthony’s sharp “That seat taken?” he very slowly lifted the feet as though they were a breakable package, and placed them with some care upon the floor. His eyes remained on Anthony, who meanwhile sat down and unbuttoned the uniform coat issued him at Camp Upton the day before. It chafed him under the arms.


Before Anthony could scrutinize the other occupants of the section a young second lieutenant blew in at the upper end of the car and wafted airily down the aisle, announcing in a voice of appalling acerbity:


“There will be no smoking in this car! No smoking! Don’t smoke, men, in this car!”


As he sailed out at the other end a dozen little clouds of expostulation arose on all sides.


“Oh, cripe!”


“Jeese!”


“No smokin’?”


“Hey, come back here, fella!”


“What’s ‘ee idea?”


Two or three cigarettes were shot out through the open windows. Others were retained inside, though kept sketchily away from view. From here and there in accents of bravado, of mockery, of submissive humor, a few remarks were dropped that soon melted into the listless and pervasive silence.


The fourth occupant of Anthony’s section spoke up suddenly.


“G’by, liberty,” he said sullenly. “G’by, everything except bein’ an officer’s dog.”


Anthony looked at him. He was a tall Irishman with an expression moulded of indifference and utter disdain. His eyes fell on Anthony, as though he expected an answer, and then upon the others. Receiving only a defiant stare from the Italian he groaned and spat noisily on the floor by way of a dignified transition back into taciturnity.


A few minutes later the door opened again and the second lieutenant was borne in upon his customary official zephyr, this time singing out a different tiding:


“All right, men, smoke if you want to! My mistake, men! It’s all right, men! Go on and smoke–my mistake!”


This time Anthony had a good look at him. He was young, thin, already faded; he was like his own mustache; he was like a great piece of shiny straw. His chin receded, faintly; this was offset by a magnificent and unconvincing scowl, a scowl that Anthony was to connect with the faces of many young officers during the ensuing year.


Immediately every one smoked–whether they had previously desired to or not. Anthony’s cigarette contributed to the hazy oxidation which seemed to roll back and forth in opalescent clouds with every motion of the train. The conversation, which had lapsed between the two impressive visits of the young officer, now revived tepidly; the men across the aisle began making clumsy experiments with their straw seats’ capacity for comparative comfort; two card games, half-heartedly begun, soon drew several spectators to sitting positions on the arms of seats. In a few minutes Anthony became aware of a persistently obnoxious sound–the small, defiant Sicilian had fallen audibly asleep. It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence. Anthony sighed, opened a newspaper which he had no recollection of buying, and began to read by the dim yellow light.


Ten o’clock bumped stuffily into eleven; the hours clogged and caught and slowed down. Amazingly the train halted along the dark countryside, from time to time indulging in short, deceitful movements backward or forward, and whistling harsh paeans into the high October night. Having read his newspaper through, editorials, cartoons, and war-poems, his eye fell on a half-column headed Shakespeareville, Kansas. It seemed that the Shakespeareville Chamber of Commerce had recently held an enthusiastic debate as to whether the American soldiers should be known as “Sammies” or “Battling Christians.” The thought gagged him. He dropped the newspaper, yawned, and let his mind drift off at a tangent. He wondered why Gloria had been late. It seemed so long ago already–he had a pang of illusive loneliness. He tried to imagine from what angle she would regard her new position, what place in her considerations he would continue to hold. The thought acted as a further depressant–he opened his paper and began to read again.


The members of the Chamber of Commerce in Shakespeareville had decided upon “Liberty Lads.”


For two nights and two days they rattled southward, making mysterious inexplicable stops in what were apparently arid wastes, and then rushing through large cities with a pompous air of hurry. The whimsicalities of this train foreshadowed for Anthony the whimsicalities of all army administration.


In the arid wastes they were served from the baggage-car with beans and bacon that at first he was unable to eat–he dined scantily on some milk chocolate distributed by a village canteen. But on the second day the baggage-car’s output began to appear surprisingly palatable. On the third morning the rumor was passed along that within the hour they would arrive at their destination, Camp Hooker.


It had become intolerably hot in the car, and the men were all in shirt sleeves. The sun came in through the windows, a tired and ancient sun, yellow as parchment and stretched out of shape in transit. It tried to enter in triumphant squares and produced only warped splotches–but it was appallingly steady; so much so that it disturbed Anthony not to be the pivot of all the inconsequential sawmills and trees and telegraph poles that were turning around him so fast. Outside it played its heavy tremolo over olive roads and fallow cotton-fields, back of which ran a ragged line of woods broken with eminences of gray rock. The foreground was dotted sparsely with wretched, ill-patched shanties, among which there would flash by, now and then, a specimen of the languid yokelry of South Carolina, or else a strolling darky with sullen and bewildered eyes.


Then the woods moved off and they rolled into a broad space like the baked top of a gigantic cake, sugared with an infinity of tents arranged in geometric figures over its surface. The train came to an uncertain stop, and the sun and the poles and the trees faded, and his universe rocked itself slowly back to its old usualness, with Anthony Patch in the centre. As the men, weary and perspiring, crowded out of the car, he smelt that unforgetable aroma that impregnates all permanent camps–the odor of garbage.


Camp Hooker was an astonishing and spectacular growth, suggesting “A Mining Town in 1870–The Second Week.” It was a thing of wooden shacks and whitish-gray tents, connected by a pattern of roads, with hard tan drill-grounds fringed with trees. Here and there stood green Y.M.C.A. houses, unpromising oases, with their muggy odor of wet flannels and closed telephone-booths–and across from each of them there was usually a canteen, swarming with life, presided over indolently by an officer who, with the aid of a side-car, usually managed to make his detail a pleasant and chatty sinecure.


Up and down the dusty roads sped the soldiers of the quartermaster corps, also in side-cars. Up and down drove the generals in their government automobiles, stopping now and then to bring unalert details to attention, to frown heavily upon captains marching at the heads of companies, to set the pompous pace in that gorgeous game of showing off which was taking place triumphantly over the entire area.


The first week after the arrival of Anthony’s draft was filled with a series of interminable inoculations and physical examinations, and with the preliminary drilling. The days left him desperately tired. He had been issued the wrong size shoes by a popular, easy-going supply-sergeant, and in consequence his feet were so swollen that the last hours of the afternoon were an acute torture. For the first time in his life he could throw himself down on his cot between dinner and afternoon drill-call, and seeming to sink with each moment deeper into a bottomless bed, drop off immediately to sleep, while the noise and laughter around him faded to a pleasant drone of drowsy summer sound. In the morning he awoke stiff and aching, hollow as a ghost, and hurried forth to meet the other ghostly figures who swarmed in the wan company streets, while a harsh bugle shrieked and spluttered at the gray heavens.


He was in a skeleton infantry company of about a hundred men. After the invariable breakfast of fatty bacon, cold toast, and cereal, the entire hundred would rush for the latrines, which, however well-policed, seemed always intolerable, like the lavatories in cheap hotels. Out on the field, then, in ragged order–the lame man on his left grotesquely marring Anthony’s listless efforts to keep in step, the platoon sergeants either showing off violently to impress the officers and recruits, or else quietly lurking in close to the line of march, avoiding both labor and unnecessary visibility.


When they reached the field, work began immediately–they peeled off their shirts for calisthenics. This was the only part of the day that Anthony enjoyed. Lieutenant Kretching, who presided at the antics, was sinewy and muscular, and Anthony, followed his movements faithfully, with a feeling that he was doing something of positive value to himself. The other officers and sergeants walked about among the men with the malice of schoolboys, grouping here and there around some unfortunate who lacked muscular control, giving him confused instructions and commands. When they discovered a particularly forlorn, ill-nourished specimen, they would linger the full half-hour making cutting remarks and snickering among themselves.


One little officer named Hopkins, who had been a sergeant in the regular army, was particularly annoying. He took the war as a gift of revenge from the high gods to himself, and the constant burden of his harangues was that these rookies did not appreciate the full gravity and responsibility of “the service.” He considered that by a combination of foresight and dauntless efficiency he had raised himself to his current magnificence. He aped the particular tyrannies of every officer under whom he had served in times gone by. His frown was frozen on his brow–before giving a private a pass to go to town he would ponderously weigh the effect of such an absence upon the company, the army, and the welfare of the military profession the world over.


Lieutenant Kretching, blond, dull and phlegmatic, introduced Anthony ponderously to the problems of attention, right face, about face, and at ease. His principal defect was his forgetfulness. He often kept the company straining and aching at attention for five minutes while he stood out in front and explained a new movement–as a result only the men in the centre knew what it was all about–those on both flanks had been too emphatically impressed with the necessity of staring straight ahead.


The drill continued until noon. It consisted of stressing a succession of infinitely remote details, and though Anthony perceived that this was consistent with the logic of war, it none the less irritated him. That the same faulty blood-pressure which would have been indecent in an officer did not interfere with the duties of a private was a preposterous incongruity. Sometimes, after listening to a sustained invective concerned with a dull and, on the face of it, absurd subject known as military “courtesy,” he suspected that the dim purpose of the war was to let the regular army officers–men with the mentality and aspirations of schoolboys–have their fling with some real slaughter. He was being grotesquely sacrificed to the twenty-year patience of a Hopkins!


Of his three tent-mates–a flat-faced, conscientious objector from Tennessee, a big, scared Pole, and the disdainful Celt whom he had sat beside on the train–the two former spent the evenings in writing eternal letters home, while the Irishman sat in the tent door whistling over and over to himself half a dozen shrill and monotonous bird-calls. It was rather to avoid an hour of their company than with any hope of diversion that, when the quarantine was lifted at the end of the week, he went into town. He caught one of the swarm of jitneys that overran the camp each evening, and in half an hour was set down in front of the Stonewall Hotel on the hot and drowsy main street.


Under the gathering twilight the town was unexpectedly attractive. The sidewalks were peopled by vividly dressed, overpainted girls, who chattered volubly in low, lazy voices, by dozens of taxi-drivers who assailed passing officers with “Take y’ anywheh, Lieutenant,” and by an intermittent procession of ragged, shuffling, subservient negroes. Anthony, loitering along through the warm dusk, felt for the first time in years the slow, erotic breath of the South, imminent in the hot softness of the air, in the pervasive lull, of thought and time.


He had gone about a block when he was arrested suddenly by a harsh command at his elbow.


“Haven’t you been taught to salute officers?”


He looked dumbly at the man who addressed him, a stout, black-haired captain, who fixed him menacingly with brown pop-eyes.


“Come to attention!” The words were literally thundered. A few pedestrians near by stopped and stared. A soft-eyed girl in a lilac dress tittered to her companion.


Anthony came to attention.


“What’s your regiment and company?”


Anthony told him.


“After this when you pass an officer on the street you straighten up and salute!”


“All right!”


“Say ‘Yes, sir!'”


“Yes, sir.”


The stout officer grunted, turned sharply, and marched down the street. After a moment Anthony moved on; the town was no longer indolent and exotic; the magic was suddenly gone out of the dusk. His eyes were turned precipitately inward upon the indignity of his position. He hated that officer, every officer–life was unendurable.


After he had gone half a block he realized that the girl in the lilac dress who had giggled at his discomfiture was walking with her friend about ten paces ahead of him. Several times she had turned and stared at Anthony, with cheerful laughter in the large eyes that seemed the same color as her gown.


At the corner she and her companion visibly slackened their pace–he must make his choice between joining them and passing obliviously by. He passed, hesitated, then slowed down. In a moment the pair were abreast of him again, dissolved in laughter now–not such strident mirth as he would have expected in the North from actresses in this familiar comedy, but a soft, low rippling, like the overflow from some subtle joke, into which he had inadvertently blundered.


“How do you do?” he said.


Her eyes were soft as shadows. Were they violet, or was it their blue darkness mingling with the gray hues of dusk?


“Pleasant evening,” ventured Anthony uncertainly.


“Sure is,” said the second girl.


“Hasn’t been a very pleasant evening for you,” sighed the girl in lilac. Her voice seemed as much a part of the night as the drowsy breeze stirring the wide brim of her hat.


“He had to have a chance to show off,” said Anthony with a scornful laugh.


“Reckon so,” she agreed.


They turned the corner and moved lackadaisically up a side street, as if following a drifting cable to which they were attached. In this town it seemed entirely natural to turn corners like that, it seemed natural to be bound nowhere in particular, to be thinking nothing…. The side street was dark, a sudden offshoot into a district of wild rose hedges and little quiet houses set far back from the street.


“Where’re you going?” he inquired politely.


“Just goin’.” The answer was an apology, a question, an explanation.


“Can I stroll along with you?”


“Reckon so.”


It was an advantage that her accent was different. He could not have determined the social status of a Southerner from her talk–in New York a girl of a lower class would have been raucous, unendurable–except through the rosy spectacles of intoxication.


Dark was creeping down. Talking little–Anthony in careless, casual questions, the other two with provincial economy of phrase and burden–they sauntered past another corner, and another. In the middle of a block they stopped beneath a lamp-post.


“I live near here,” explained the other girl.


“I live around the block,” said the girl in lilac.


“Can I see you home?”


“To the corner, if you want to.”


The other girl took a few steps backward. Anthony removed his hat.


“You’re supposed to salute,” said the girl in lilac with a laugh. “All the soldiers salute.”


“I’ll learn,” he responded soberly.


The other girl said, “Well–” hesitated, then added, “call me up to-morrow, Dot,” and retreated from the yellow circle of the street-lamp. Then, in silence, Anthony and the girl in lilac walked the three blocks to the small rickety house which was her home. Outside the wooden gate she hesitated.


“Well–thanks.”


“Must you go in so soon?”


“I ought to.”


“Can’t you stroll around a little longer?” She regarded him dispassionately.


“I don’t even know you.”


Anthony laughed.


“It’s not too late.”


“I reckon I better go in.”


“I thought we might walk down and see a movie.”


“I’d like to.”


“Then I could bring you home. I’d have just enough time. I’ve got to be in camp by eleven.”


It was so dark that he could scarcely see her now. She was a dress swayed infinitesimally by the wind, two limpid, reckless eyes …


“Why don’t you come–Dot? Don’t you like movies? Better come.”


She shook her head.


“I oughtn’t to.”


He liked her, realizing that she was temporizing for the effect on him. He came closer and took her hand.


“If we get back by ten, can’t you? just to the movies?”


“Well–I reckon so–“


Hand in hand they walked back toward down-town, along a hazy, dusky street where a negro newsboy was calling an extra in the cadence of the local venders’ tradition, a cadence that was as musical as song.


Dot


Anthony’s affair with Dorothy Raycroft was an inevitable result of his increasing carelessness about himself. He did not go to her desiring to possess the desirable, nor did he fall before a personality more vital, more compelling than his own, as he had done with Gloria four years before. He merely slid into the matter through his inability to make definite judgments. He could say “No!” neither to man nor woman; borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. Indeed he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did they were but half-hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and irreparable awakening.


The particular weakness he indulged on this occasion was his need of excitement and stimulus from without. He felt that for the first time in four years he could express and interpret himself anew. The girl promised rest; the hours in her company each evening alleviated the morbid and inevitably futile poundings of his imagination. He had become a coward in earnest–completely the slave of a hundred disordered and prowling thoughts which were released by the collapse of the authentic devotion to Gloria that had been the chief jailer of his insufficiency.


On that first night, as they stood by the gate, he kissed Dorothy and made an engagement to meet her the following Saturday. Then he went out to camp, and with the light burning lawlessly in his tent, he wrote a long letter to Gloria, a glowing letter, full of the sentimental dark, full of the remembered breath of flowers, full of a true and exceeding tenderness–these things he had learned again for a moment in a kiss given and taken under a rich warm moonlight just an hour before.


When Saturday night came he found Dot waiting at the entrance of the Bijou Moving Picture Theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumpled. Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that in a sketchy, faulty way she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small, irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark, unenduring little flower–yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.


Dorothy Raycroft was nineteen. Her father had kept a small, unprosperous corner store, and she had graduated from high school in the lowest fourth of her class two days before he died. At high school she had enjoyed a rather unsavory reputation. As a matter of fact her behavior at the class picnic, where the rumors started, had been merely indiscreet–she had retained her technical purity until over a year later. The boy had been a clerk in a store on Jackson Street, and on the day after the incident he departed unexpectedly to New York. He had been intending to leave for some time, but had tarried for the consummation of his amorous enterprise.


After a while she confided the adventure to a girl friend, and later, as she watched her friend disappear down the sleepy street of dusty sunshine she knew in a flash of intuition that her story was going out into the world. Yet after telling it she felt much better, and a little bitter, and made as near an approach to character as she was capable of by walking in another direction and meeting another man with the honest intention of gratifying herself again. As a rule things happened to Dot. She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak. She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave. She neither defied nor conformed nor compromised.


She had no sense of humor, but, to take its place, a happy disposition that made her laugh at the proper times when she was with men. She had no definite intentions–sometimes she regretted vaguely that her reputation precluded what chance she had ever had for security. There had been no open discovery: her mother was interested only in starting her off on time each morning for the jewelry store where she earned fourteen dollars a week. But some of the boys she had known in high school now looked the other way when they were walking with “nice girls,” and these incidents hurt her feelings. When they occurred she went home and cried.


Besides the Jackson Street clerk there had been two other men, of whom the first was a naval officer, who passed through town during the early days of the war. He had stayed over a night to make a connection, and was leaning idly against one of the pillars of the Stonewall Hotel when she passed by. He remained in town four days. She thought she loved him–lavished on him that first hysteria of passion that would have gone to the pusillanimous clerk. The naval officer’s uniform–there were few of them in those days–had made the magic. He left with vague promises on his lips, and, once on the train, rejoiced that he had not told her his real name.


Her resultant depression had thrown her into the arms of Cyrus Fielding, the son of a local clothier, who had hailed her from his roadster one day as she passed along the sidewalk. She had always known him by name. Had she been born to a higher stratum he would have known her before. She had descended a little lower–so he met her after all. After a month he had gone away to training-camp, a little afraid of the intimacy, a little relieved in perceiving that she had not cared deeply for him, and that she was not the sort who would ever make trouble. Dot romanticized this affair and conceded to her vanity that the war had taken these men away from her. She told herself that she could have married the naval officer. Nevertheless, it worried her that within eight months there had been three men in her life. She thought with more fear than wonder in her heart that she would soon be like those “bad girls” on Jackson Street at whom she and her gum-chewing, giggling friends had stared with fascinated glances three years before.


For a while she attempted to be more careful. She let men “pick her up”; she let them kiss her, and even allowed certain other liberties to be forced upon her, but she did not add to her trio. After several months the strength of her resolution–or rather the poignant expediency of her fears–was worn away. She grew restless drowsing there out of life and time while the summer months faded. The soldiers she met were either obviously below her or, less obviously, above her–in which case they desired only to use her; they were Yankees, harsh and ungracious; they swarmed in large crowds…. And then she met Anthony.


On that first evening he had been little more than a pleasantly unhappy face, a voice, the means with which to pass an hour, but when she kept her engagement with him on Saturday she regarded him with consideration. She liked him. Unknowingly she saw her own tragedies mirrored in his face.


Again they went to the movies, again they wandered along the shadowy, scented streets, hand in hand this time, speaking a little in hushed voices. They passed through the gate–up toward the little porch–


“I can stay a while, can’t I?”


“Sh!” she whispered, “we’ve got to be very quiet. Mother sits up reading Snappy Stories.” In confirmation he heard the faint crackling inside as a page was turned. The open-shutter slits emitted horizontal rods of light that fell in thin parallels across Dorothy’s skirt. The street was silent save for a group on the steps of a house across the way, who, from time to time, raised their voices in a soft, bantering song.


“–When you wa-ake You shall ha-ave All the pretty little hawsiz–“


Then, as though it had been waiting on a near-by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl’s face to the color of white roses.


Anthony had a start of memory, so vivid that before his closed eyes there formed a picture, distinct as a flashback on a screen–a spring night of thaw set out of time in a half-forgotten winter five years before–another face, radiant, flower-like, upturned to lights as transforming as the stars–


Ah, la belle dame sans merci who lived in his heart, made known to him in transitory fading splendor by dark eyes in the Ritz-Carlton, by a shadowy glance from a passing carriage in the Bois de Boulogne! But those nights were only part of a song, a remembered glory–here again were the faint winds, the illusions, the eternal present with its promise of romance.


“Oh,” she whispered, “do you love me? Do you love me?”


The spell was broken–the drifted fragments of the stars became only light, the singing down the street diminished to a monotone, to the whimper of locusts in the grass. With almost a sigh he kissed her fervent mouth, while her arms crept up about his shoulders.


The Man-at-Arms


As the weeks dried up and blew away, the range of Anthony’s travels extended until he grew to comprehend the camp and its environment. For the first time in his life he was in constant personal contact with the waiters to whom he had given tips, the chauffeurs who had touched their hats to him, the carpenters, plumbers, barbers, and farmers who had previously been remarkable only in the subservience of their professional genuflections. During his first two months in camp he did not hold ten minutes’ consecutive conversation with a single man.


On the service record his occupation stood as “student”; on the original questionnaire he had prematurely written “author”; but when men in his company asked his business he commonly gave it as bank clerk–had he told the truth, that he did no work, they would have been suspicious of him as a member of the leisure class.


His platoon sergeant, Pop Donnelly, was a scraggly “old soldier,” worn thin with drink. In the past he had spent unnumbered weeks in the guard-house, but recently, thanks to the drill-master famine, he had been elevated to his present pinnacle. His complexion was full of shell-holes–it bore an unmistakable resemblance to those aerial photographs of “the battle-field at Blank.” Once a week he got drunk down-town on white liquor, returned quietly to camp and collapsed upon his bunk, joining the company at reveille looking more than ever like a white mask of death.


He nursed the astounding delusion that he was astutely “slipping it over” on the government–he had spent eighteen years in its service at a minute wage, and he was soon to retire (here he usually winked) on the impressive income of fifty-five dollars a month. He looked upon it as a gorgeous joke that he had played upon the dozens who had bullied and scorned him since he was a Georgia country boy of nineteen.


At present there were but two lieutenants–Hopkins and the popular Kretching. The latter was considered a good fellow and a fine leader, until a year later, when he disappeared with a mess fund of eleven hundred dollars and, like so many leaders, proved exceedingly difficult to follow.


Eventually there was Captain Dunning, god of this brief but self-sufficing microcosm. He was a reserve officer, nervous, energetic, and enthusiastic. This latter quality, indeed, often took material form and was visible as fine froth in the corners of his mouth. Like most executives he saw his charges strictly from the front, and to his hopeful eyes his command seemed just such an excellent unit as such an excellent war deserved. For all his anxiety and absorption he was having the time of his life.


Baptiste, the little Sicilian of the train, fell foul of him the second week of drill. The captain had several times ordered the men to be clean-shaven when they fell in each morning. One day there was disclosed an alarming breech of this rule, surely a case of Teutonic connivance–during the night four men had grown hair upon their faces. The fact that three of the four understood a minimum of English made a practical object-lesson only the more necessary, so Captain Dunning resolutely sent a volunteer barber back to the company street for a razor. Whereupon for the safety of democracy a half-ounce of hair was scraped dry from the cheeks of three Italians and one Pole.


Outside the world of the company there appeared, from time to time, the colonel, a heavy man with snarling teeth, who circumnavigated the battalion drill-field upon a handsome black horse. He was a West Pointer, and, mimetically, a gentleman. He had a dowdy wife and a dowdy mind, and spent much of his time in town taking advantage of the army’s lately exalted social position. Last of all was the general, who traversed the roads of the camp preceded by his flag–a figure so austere, so removed, so magnificent, as to be scarcely comprehensible.


December. Cool winds at night now, and damp, chilly mornings on the drill-grounds. As the heat faded, Anthony found himself increasingly glad to be alive. Renewed strangely through his body, he worried little and existed in the present with a sort of animal content. It was not that Gloria or the life that Gloria represented was less often in his thoughts–it was simply that she became, day by day, less real, less vivid. For a week they had corresponded passionately, almost hysterically–then by an unwritten agreement they had ceased to write more than twice, and then once, a week. She was bored, she said; if his brigade was to be there a long time she was coming down to join him. Mr. Haight was going to be able to submit a stronger brief than he had expected, but doubted that the appealed case would come up until late spring. Muriel was in the city doing Red Cross work, and they went out together rather often. What would Anthony think if she went into the Red Cross? Trouble was she had heard that she might have to bathe negroes in alcohol, and after that she hadn’t felt so patriotic. The city was full of soldiers and she’d seen a lot of boys she hadn’t laid eyes on for years….


Anthony did not want her to come South. He told himself that this was for many reasons–he needed a rest from her and she from him. She would be bored beyond measure in town, and she would be able to see Anthony for only a few hours each day. But in his heart he feared that it was because he was attracted to Dorothy. As a matter of fact he lived in terror that Gloria should learn by some chance or intention of the relation he had formed. By the end of a fortnight the entanglement began to give him moments of misery at his own faithlessness. Nevertheless, as each day ended he was unable to withstand the lure that would draw him irresistibly out of his tent and over to the telephone at the Y.M.C.A.


“Dot.”


“Yes?”


“I may be able to get in to-night.”


“I’m so glad.”


“Do you want to listen to my splendid eloquence for a few starry hours?”


“Oh, you funny–” For an instant he had a memory of five years before–of Geraldine. Then–


“I’ll arrive about eight.”


At seven he would be in a jitney bound for the city, where hundreds of little Southern girls were waiting on moonlit porches for their lovers. He would be excited already for her warm retarded kisses, for the amazed quietude of the glances she gave him–glances nearer to worship than any he had ever inspired. Gloria and he had been equals, giving without thought of thanks or obligation. To this girl his very caresses were an inestimable boon. Crying quietly she had confessed to him that he was not the first man in her life; there had been one other–he gathered that the affair had no sooner commenced than it had been over.


Indeed, so far as she was concerned, she spoke the truth. She had forgotten the clerk, the naval officer, the clothier’s son, forgotten her vividness of emotion, which is true forgetting. She knew that in some opaque and shadowy existence some one had taken her–it was as though it had occurred in sleep.


Almost every night Anthony came to town. It was too cool now for the porch, so her mother surrendered to them the tiny sitting room, with its dozens of cheaply framed chromos, its yard upon yard of decorative fringe, and its thick atmosphere of several decades in the proximity of the kitchen. They would build a fire–then, happily, inexhaustibly, she would go about the business of love. Each evening at ten she would walk with him to the door, her black hair in disarray, her face pale without cosmetics, paler still under the whiteness of the moon. As a rule it would be bright and silver outside; now and then there was a slow warm rain, too indolent, almost, to reach the ground.


“Say you love me,” she would whisper.


“Why, of course, you sweet baby.”


“Am I a baby?” This almost wistfully.


“Just a little baby.”


She knew vaguely of Gloria. It gave her pain to think of it, so she imagined her to be haughty and proud and cold. She had decided that Gloria must be older than Anthony, and that there was no love between husband and wife. Sometimes she let herself dream that after the war Anthony would get a divorce and they would be married–but she never mentioned this to Anthony, she scarcely knew why. She shared his company’s idea that he was a sort of bank clerk–she thought that he was respectable and poor. She would say:


“If I had some money, darlin’, I’d give ev’y bit of it to you…. I’d like to have about fifty thousand dollars.”


“I suppose that’d be plenty,” agreed Anthony.


–In her letter that day Gloria had written: “I suppose if we could settle for a million it would be better to tell Mr. Haight to go ahead and settle. But it’d seem a pity….”


… “We could have an automobile,” exclaimed Dot, in a final burst of triumph.


An Impressive Occasion


Captain Dunning prided himself on being a great reader of character. Half an hour after meeting a man he was accustomed to place him in one of a number of astonishing categories–fine man, good man, smart fellow, theorizer, poet, and “worthless.” One day early in February he caused Anthony to be summoned to his presence in the orderly tent.


“Patch,” he said sententiously, “I’ve had my eye on you for several weeks.”


Anthony stood erect and motionless.


“And I think you’ve got the makings of a good soldier.”


He waited for the warm glow, which this would naturally arouse, to cool–and then continued:


“This is no child’s play,” he said, narrowing his brows.


Anthony agreed with a melancholy “No, sir.”


“It’s a man’s game–and we need leaders.” Then the climax, swift, sure, and electric: “Patch, I’m going to make you a corporal.”


At this point Anthony should have staggered slightly backward, overwhelmed. He was to be one of the quarter million selected for that consummate trust. He was going to be able to shout the technical phrase, “Follow me!” to seven other frightened men.


“You seem to be a man of some education,” said Captain Dunning.


“Yes, Sir.”


“That’s good, that’s good. Education’s a great thing, but don’t let it go to your head. Keep on the way you’re doing and you’ll be a good soldier.”


With these parting words lingering in his ears, Corporal Patch saluted, executed a right about face, and left the tent.


Though the conversation amused Anthony, it did generate the idea that life would be more amusing as a sergeant or, should he find a less exacting medical examiner, as an officer. He was little interested in the work, which seemed to belie the army’s boasted gallantry. At the inspections one did not dress up to look well, one dressed up to keep from looking badly.


But as winter wore away–the short, snowless winter marked by damp nights and cool, rainy days–he marvelled at how quickly the system had grasped him. He was a soldier–all who were not soldiers were civilians. The world was divided primarily into those two classifications.


It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the military, divided men into two kinds: their own kind–and those without. To the clergyman there were clergy and laity, to the Catholic there were Catholics and non-Catholics, to the negro there were blacks and whites, to the prisoner there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the sick man there were the sick and the well…. So, without thinking of it once in his lifetime, he had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a Gentile, white, free, and well….


As the American troops were poured into the French and British trenches he began to find the names of many Harvard men among the casualties recorded in the Army and Navy Journal. But for all the sweat and blood the situation appeared unchanged, and he saw no prospect of the war’s ending in the perceptible future. In the old chronicles the right wing of one army always defeated the left wing of the other, the left wing being, meanwhile, vanquished by the enemy’s right. After that the mercenaries fled. It had been so simple, in those days, almost as if prearranged….


Gloria wrote that she was reading a great deal. What a mess they had made of their affairs, she said. She had so little to do now that she spent her time imagining how differently things might have turned out. Her whole environment appeared insecure–and a few years back she had seemed to hold all the strings in her own little hand….


In June her letters grew hurried and less frequent. She suddenly ceased to write about coming South.


Defeat


March in the country around was rare with jasmine and jonquils and patches of violets in the warming grass. Afterward he remembered especially one afternoon of such a fresh and magic glamour that as he stood in the rifle-pit marking targets he recited “Atalanta in Calydon” to an uncomprehending Pole, his voice mingling with the rip, sing, and splatter of the bullets overhead.


“When the hounds of spring …”


Spang!


“Are on winter’s traces …”


Whirr-r-r-r! …


“The mother of months …”


“Hey! Come to! Mark three-e-e! …”


In town the streets were in a sleepy dream again, and together Anthony and Dot idled in their own tracks of the previous autumn until he began to feel a drowsy attachment for this South–a South, it seemed, more of Algiers than of Italy, with faded aspirations pointing back over innumerable generations to some warm, primitive Nirvana, without hope or care. Here there was an inflection of cordiality, of comprehension, in every voice. “Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us,” they seemed to say in their plaintive pleasant cadence, in the rising inflection terminating on an unresolved minor.


He liked his barber shop where he was “Hi, corporal!” to a pale, emaciated young man, who shaved him and pushed a cool vibrating machine endlessly over his insatiable head. He liked “Johnston’s Gardens” where they danced, where a tragic negro made yearning, aching music on a saxophone until the garish hall became an enchanted jungle of barbaric rhythms and smoky laughter, where to forget the uneventful passage of time upon Dorothy’s soft sighs and tender whisperings was the consummation of all aspiration, of all content.


There was an undertone of sadness in her character, a conscious evasion of all except the pleasurable minutiae of life. Her violet eyes would remain for hours apparently insensate as, thoughtless and reckless, she basked like a cat in the sun. He wondered what the tired, spiritless mother thought of them, and whether in her moments of uttermost cynicism she ever guessed at their relationship.


On Sunday afternoons they walked along the countryside, resting at intervals on the dry moss in the outskirts of a wood. Here the birds had gathered and the clusters of violets and white dogwood; here the hoar trees shone crystalline and cool, oblivious to the intoxicating heat that waited outside; here he would talk, intermittently, in a sleepy monologue, in a conversation of no significance, of no replies.


July came scorching down. Captain Dunning was ordered to detail one of his men to learn blacksmithing. The regiment was filling up to war strength, and he needed most of his veterans for drill-masters, so he selected the little Italian, Baptiste, whom he could most easily spare. Little Baptiste had never had anything to do with horses. His fear made matters worse. He reappeared in the orderly room one day and told Captain Dunning that he wanted to die if he couldn’t be relieved. The horses kicked at him, he said; he was no good at the work. Finally he fell on his knees and besought Captain Dunning, in a mixture of broken English and scriptural Italian, to get him out of it. He had not slept for three days; monstrous stallions reared and cavorted through his dreams.


Captain Dunning reproved the company clerk (who had burst out laughing), and told Baptiste he would do what he could. But when he thought it over he decided that he couldn’t spare a better man. Little Baptiste went from bad to worse. The horses seemed to divine his fear and take every advantage of it. Two weeks later a great black mare crushed his skull in with her hoofs while he was trying to lead her from her stall.


In mid-July came rumors, and then orders, that concerned a change of camp. The brigade was to move to an empty cantonment, a hundred miles farther south, there to be expanded into a division. At first the men thought they were departing for the trenches, and all evening little groups jabbered in the company street, shouting to each other in swaggering exclamations: “Su-u-ure we are!” When the truth leaked out, it was rejected indignantly as a blind to conceal their real destination. They revelled in their own importance. That night they told their girls in town that they were “going to get the Germans.” Anthony circulated for a while among the groups–then, stopping a jitney, rode down to tell Dot that he was going away.


She was waiting on the dark veranda in a cheap white dress that accentuated the youth and softness of her face.


“Oh,” she whispered, “I’ve wanted you so, honey. All this day.”


“I have something to tell you.”


She drew him down beside her on the swinging seat, not noticing his ominous tone.


“Tell me.”


“We’re leaving next week.”


Her arms seeking his shoulders remained poised upon the dark air, her chin tipped up. When she spoke the softness was gone from her voice.


“Leaving for France?”


“No. Less luck than that. Leaving for some darn camp in Mississippi.”


She shut her eyes and he could see that the lids were trembling.


“Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard.”


She was crying upon his shoulder.


“So damned hard, so damned hard,” he repeated aimlessly; “it just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.”


Frantic, wild with anguish, she strained him to her breast.


“Oh, God!” she whispered brokenly, “you can’t go way from me. I’d die.”


He was finding it impossible to pass off his departure as a common, impersonal blow. He was too near to her to do more than repeat “Poor little Dot. Poor little Dot.”


“And then what?” she demanded wearily.


“What do you mean?”


“You’re my whole life, that’s all. I’d die for you right now if you said so. I’d get a knife and kill myself. You can’t leave me here.”


Her tone frightened him.


“These things happen,” he said evenly.


“Then I’m going with you.” Tears were streaming down her checks. Her mouth was trembling in an ecstasy of grief and fear.


“Sweet,” he muttered sentimentally, “sweet little girl. Don’t you see we’d just be putting off what’s bound to happen? I’ll be going to France in a few months–“


She leaned away from him and clinching her fists lifted her face toward the sky.


“I want to die,” she said, as if moulding each word carefully in her heart.


“Dot,” he whispered uncomfortably, “you’ll forget. Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.”


“All right.”


Absorbed in himself, he continued:


“I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success. I suppose that at one time I could have had anything I wanted, within reason, but that was the only thing I ever wanted with any fervor. God! And that taught me you can’t have anything, you can’t have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it–but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone–” He broke off uneasily. She had risen and was standing, dry-eyed, picking little leaves from a dark vine.


“Dot–“


“Go way,” she said coldly. “What? Why?”


“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me you’d better go.”


“Why, Dot–“


“What’s death to me is just a lot of words to you. You put ’em together so pretty.”


“I’m sorry. I was talking about you, Dot.”


“Go way from here.”


He approached her with arms outstretched, but she held him away.


“You don’t want me to go with you,” she said evenly; “maybe you’re going to meet that–that girl–” She could not bring herself to say wife. “How do I know? Well, then, I reckon you’re not my fellow any more. So go way.”


For a moment, while conflicting warnings and desires prompted Anthony, it seemed one of those rare times when he would take a step prompted from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him. It was too late–everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water. The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame. With some profound and uncharted pride she had made herself remote and so achieved her purpose.


“I didn’t–mean to seem so callous, Dot.”


“It don’t matter.”


The fire rolled over Anthony. Something wrenched at his bowels, and he stood there helpless and beaten.


“Come with me, Dot–little loving Dot. Oh, come with me. I couldn’t leave you now–“


With a sob she wound her arms around him and let him support her weight while the moon, at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of the world, showered its illicit honey over the drowsy street.


The Catastrophe


Early September in Camp Boone, Mississippi. The darkness, alive with insects, beat in upon the mosquito-netting, beneath the shelter of which Anthony was trying to write a letter. An intermittent chatter over a poker game was going on in the next tent, and outside a man was strolling up the company street singing a current bit of doggerel about “K-K-K-Katy.”


With an effort Anthony hoisted himself to his elbow and, pencil in hand, looked down at his blank sheet of paper. Then, omitting any heading, he began:


I can’t imagine what the matter is, Gloria. I haven’t had a line from you for two weeks and it’s only natural to be worried–


He threw this away with a disturbed grunt and began again:


I don’t know what to think, Gloria. Your last letter, short, cold, without a word of affection or even a decent account of what you’ve been doing, came two weeks ago. It’s only natural that I should wonder. If your love for me isn’t absolutely dead it seems that you’d at least keep me from worry–


Again he crumpled the page and tossed it angrily through a tear in the tent wall, realizing simultaneously that he would have to pick it up in the morning. He felt disinclined to try again. He could get no warmth into the lines–only a persistent jealousy and suspicion. Since midsummer these discrepancies in Gloria’s correspondence had grown more and more noticeable. At first he had scarcely perceived them. He was so inured to the perfunctory “dearest” and “darlings” scattered through her letters that he was oblivious to their presence or absence. But in this last fortnight he had become increasingly aware that there was something amiss.


He had sent her a night-letter saying that he had passed his examinations for an officers’ training-camp, and expected to leave for Georgia shortly. She had not answered. He had wired again–when he received no word he imagined that she might be out of town. But it occurred and recurred to him that she was not out of town, and a series of distraught imaginings began to plague him. Supposing Gloria, bored and restless, had found some one, even as he had. The thought terrified him with its possibility–it was chiefly because he had been so sure of her personal integrity that he had considered her so sparingly during the year. And now, as a doubt was born, the old angers, the rages of possession, swarmed back a thousandfold. What more natural than that she should be in love again?


He remembered the Gloria who promised that should she ever want anything, she would take it, insisting that since she would act entirely for her own satisfaction she could go through such an affair unsmirched–it was only the effect on a person’s mind that counted, anyhow, she said, and her reaction would be the masculine one, of satiation and faint dislike.


But that had been when they were first married. Later, with the discovery that she could be jealous of Anthony, she had, outwardly at least, changed her mind. There were no other men in the world for her. This he had known only too surely. Perceiving that a certain fastidiousness would restrain her, he had grown lax in preserving the completeness of her love–which, after all, was the keystone of the entire structure.


Meanwhile all through the summer he had been maintaining Dot in a boarding-house down-town. To do this it had been necessary to write to his broker for money. Dot had covered her journey south by leaving her house a day before the brigade broke camp, informing her mother in a note that she had gone to New York. On the evening following Anthony had called as though to see her. Mrs. Raycroft was in a state of collapse and there was a policeman in the parlor. A questionnaire had ensued, from which Anthony had extricated himself with some difficulty.


In September, with his suspicions of Gloria, the company of Dot had become tedious, then almost intolerable. He was nervous and irritable from lack of sleep; his heart was sick and afraid. Three days ago he had gone to Captain Dunning and asked for a furlough, only to be met with benignant procrastination. The division was starting overseas, while Anthony was going to an officers’ training-camp; what furloughs could be given must go to the men who were leaving the country.


Upon this refusal Anthony had started to the telegraph office intending to wire Gloria to come South–he reached the door and receded despairingly, seeing the utter impracticability of such a move. Then he had spent the evening quarrelling irritably with Dot, and returned to camp morose and angry with the world. There had been a disagreeable scene, in the midst of which he had precipitately departed. What was to be done with her did not seem to concern him vitally at present–he was completely absorbed in the disheartening silence of his wife….


The flap of the tent made a sudden triangle back upon itself, and a dark head appeared against the night.


“Sergeant Patch?” The accent was Italian, and Anthony saw by the belt that the man was a headquarters orderly.


“Want me?”


“Lady call up headquarters ten minutes ago. Say she have speak with you. Ver’ important.”


Anthony swept aside the mosquito-netting and stood up. It might be a wire from Gloria telephoned over.


“She say to get you. She call again ten o’clock.”


“All right, thanks.” He picked up his hat and in a moment was striding beside the orderly through the hot, almost suffocating, darkness. Over in the headquarters shack he saluted a dozing night-service officer.


“Sit down and wait,” suggested the lieutenant nonchalantly. “Girl seemed awful anxious to speak to you.”


Anthony’s hopes fell away.


“Thank you very much, sir.” And as the phone squeaked on the side-wall he knew who was calling.


“This is Dot,” came an unsteady voice, “I’ve got to see you.”


“Dot, I told you I couldn’t get down for several days.”


“I’ve got to see you to-night. It’s important.”


“It’s too late,” he said coldly; “it’s ten o’clock, and I have to be in camp at eleven.”


“All right.” There was so much wretchedness compressed into the two words that Anthony felt a measure of compunction.


“What’s the matter?”


“I want to tell you good-by.


“Oh, don’t be a little idiot!” he exclaimed. But his spirits rose. What luck if she should leave town this very night! What a burden from his soul. But he said: “You can’t possibly leave before to-morrow.”


Out of the corner of his eye he saw the night-service officer regarding him quizzically. Then, startlingly, came Dot’s next words:


“I don’t mean ‘leave’ that way.”


Anthony’s hand clutched the receiver fiercely. He felt his nerves turning cold as if the heat was leaving his body.


“What?”


Then quickly in a wild broken voice he heard:


“Good-by–oh, good-by!”


Cul-lup! She had hung up the receiver. With a sound that was half a gasp, half a cry, Anthony hurried from the headquarters building. Outside, under the stars that dripped like silver tassels through the trees of the little grove, he stood motionless, hesitating. Had she meant to kill herself?–oh, the little fool! He was filled with bitter hate toward her. In this denouement he found it impossible to realize that he had ever begun such an entanglement, such a mess, a sordid melange of worry and pain.


He found himself walking slowly away, repeating over and over that it was futile to worry. He had best go back to his tent and sleep. He needed sleep. God! Would he ever sleep again? His mind was in a vast clamor and confusion; as he reached the road he turned around in a panic and began running, not toward his company but away from it. Men were returning now–he could find a taxicab. After a minute two yellow eyes appeared around a bend. Desperately he ran toward them.


“Jitney! Jitney!” … It was an empty Ford…. “I want to go to town.”


“Cost you a dollar.”


“All right. If you’ll just hurry–“


After an interminable time he ran up the steps of a dark ramshackle little house, and through the door, almost knocking over an immense negress who was walking, candle in hand, along the hall.


“Where’s my wife?” he cried wildly.


“She gone to bed.”


Up the stairs three at a time, down the creaking passage. The room was dark and silent, and with trembling fingers he struck a match. Two wide eyes looked up at him from a wretched ball of clothes on the bed.


“Ah, I knew you’d come,” she murmured brokenly.


Anthony grew cold with anger.


“So it was just a plan to get me down here, get me in trouble!” he said. “God damn it, you’ve shouted ‘wolf’ once too often!”


She regarded him pitifully.


“I had to see you. I couldn’t have lived. Oh, I had to see you–“


He sat down on the side of the bed and slowly shook his head.


“You’re no good,” he said decisively, talking unconsciously as Gloria might have talked to him. “This sort of thing isn’t fair to me, you know.”


“Come closer.” Whatever he might say Dot was happy now. He cared for her. She had brought him to her side.


“Oh, God,” said Anthony hopelessly. As weariness rolled along its inevitable wave his anger subsided, receded, vanished. He collapsed suddenly, fell sobbing beside her on the bed.


“Oh, my darling,” she begged him, “don’t cry! Oh, don’t cry!”


She took his head upon her breast and soothed him, mingled her happy tears with the bitterness of his. Her hand played gently with his dark hair.


“I’m such a little fool,” she murmured brokenly, “but I love you, and when you’re cold to me it seems as if it isn’t worth while to go on livin’.”


After all, this was peace–the quiet room with the mingled scent of women’s powder and perfume, Dot’s hand soft as a warm wind upon his hair, the rise and fall of her bosom as she took breath–for a moment it was as though it were Gloria there, as though he were at rest in some sweeter and safer home than he had ever known.


An hour passed. A clock began to chime in the hall. He jumped to his feet and looked at the phosphorescent hands of his wrist watch. It was twelve o’clock.


He had trouble in finding a taxi that would take him out at that hour. As he urged the driver faster along the road he speculated on the best method of entering camp. He had been late several times recently, and he knew that were he caught again his name would probably be stricken from the list of officer candidates. He wondered if he had not better dismiss the taxi and take a chance on passing the sentry in the dark. Still, officers often rode past the sentries after midnight….


“Halt!” The monosyllable came from the yellow glare that the headlights dropped upon the changing road. The taxi-driver threw out his clutch and a sentry walked up, carrying his rifle at the port. With him, by an ill chance, was the officer of the guard.


“Out late, sergeant.”


“Yes, sir. Got delayed.”


“Too bad. Have to take your name.”


As the officer waited, note-book and pencil in hand, something not fully intended crowded to Anthony’s lips, something born of panic, of muddle, of despair.


“Sergeant R.A. Foley,” he answered breathlessly.


“And the outfit?”


“Company Q, Eighty-third Infantry.”


“All right. You’ll have to walk from here, sergeant.”


Anthony saluted, quickly paid his taxi-driver, and set off for a run toward the regiment he had named. When he was out of sight he changed his course, and with his heart beating wildly, hurried to his company, feeling that he had made a fatal error of judgment.


Two days later the officer who had been in command of the guard recognized him in a barber shop down-town. In charge of a military policeman he was taken back to the camp, where he was reduced to the ranks without trial, and confined for a month to the limits of his company street.


With this blow a spell of utter depression overtook him, and within a week he was again caught down-town, wandering around in a drunken daze, with a pint of bootleg whiskey in his hip pocket. It was because of a sort of craziness in his behavior at the trial that his sentence to the guard-house was for only three weeks.


Nightmare


Early in his confinement the conviction took root in him that he was going mad. It was as though there were a quantity of dark yet vivid personalities in his mind, some of them familiar, some of them strange and terrible, held in check by a little monitor, who sat aloft somewhere and looked on. The thing that worried him was that the monitor was sick, and holding out with difficulty. Should he give up, should he falter for a moment, out would rush these intolerable things–only Anthony could know what a state of blackness there would be if the worst of him could roam his consciousness unchecked.


The heat of the day had changed, somehow, until it was a burnished darkness crushing down upon a devastated land. Over his head the blue circles of ominous uncharted suns, of unnumbered centres of fire, revolved interminably before his eyes as though he were lying constantly exposed to the hot light and in a state of feverish coma. At seven in the morning something phantasmal, something almost absurdly unreal that he knew was his mortal body, went out with seven other prisoners and two guards to work on the camp roads. One day they loaded and unloaded quantities of gravel, spread it, raked it–the next day they worked with huge barrels of red-hot tar, flooding the gravel with black, shining pools of molten heat. At night, locked up in the guard-house, he would lie without thought, without courage to compass thought, staring at the irregular beams of the ceiling overhead until about three o’clock, when he would slip into a broken, troubled sleep.


During the work hours he labored with uneasy haste, attempting, as the day bore toward the sultry Mississippi sunset, to tire himself physically so that in the evening he might sleep deeply from utter exhaustion…. Then one afternoon in the second week he had a feeling that two eyes were watching him from a place a few feet beyond one of the guards. This aroused him to a sort of terror. He turned his back on the eyes and shovelled feverishly, until it became necessary for him to face about and go for more gravel. Then they entered his vision again, and his already taut nerves tightened up to the breaking-point. The eyes were leering at him. Out of a hot silence he heard his name called in a tragic voice, and the earth tipped absurdly back and forth to a babel of shouting and confusion.


When next he became conscious he was back in the guard-house, and the other prisoners were throwing him curious glances. The eyes returned no more. It was many days before he realized that the voice must have been Dot’s, that she had called out to him and made some sort of disturbance. He decided this just previous to the expiration of his sentence, when the cloud that oppressed him had lifted, leaving him in a deep, dispirited lethargy. As the conscious mediator, the monitor who kept that fearsome menage of horror, grew stronger, Anthony became physically weaker. He was scarcely able to get through the two days of toil, and when he was released, one rainy afternoon, and returned to his company, he reached his tent only to fall into a heavy doze, from which he awoke before dawn, aching and unrefreshed. Beside his cot were two letters that had been awaiting him in the orderly tent for some time. The first was from Gloria; it was short and cool:


*       *       *       *       *

The case is coming to trial late in November. Can you possibly get leave?


I’ve tried to write you again and again but it just seems to make things worse. I want to see you about several matters, but you know that you have once prevented me from coming and I am disinclined to try again. In view of a number of things it seems necessary that we have a conference. I’m very glad about your appointment.

GLORIA.


*       *       *       *       *

He was too tired to try to understand–or to care. Her phrases, her intentions, were all very far away in an incomprehensible past. At the second letter he scarcely glanced; it was from Dot–an incoherent, tear-swollen scrawl, a flood of protest, endearment, and grief. After a page he let it slip from his inert hand and drowsed back into a nebulous hinterland of his own. At drill-call he awoke with a high fever and fainted when he tried to leave his tent–at noon he was sent to the base hospital with influenza.


He was aware that this sickness was providential. It saved him from a hysterical relapse–and he recovered in time to entrain on a damp November day for New York, and for the interminable massacre beyond.


When the regiment reached Camp Mills, Long Island, Anthony’s single idea was to get into the city and see Gloria as soon as possible. It was now evident that an armistice would be signed within the week, but rumor had it that in any case troops would continue to be shipped to France until the last moment. Anthony was appalled at the notion of the long voyage, of a tedious debarkation at a French port, and of being kept abroad for a year, possibly, to replace the troops who had seen actual fighting.


His intention had been to obtain a two-day furlough, but Camp Mills proved to be under a strict influenza quarantine–it was impossible for even an officer to leave except on official business. For a private it was out of the question.


The camp itself was a dreary muddle, cold, wind-swept, and filthy, with the accumulated dirt incident to the passage through of many divisions. Their train came in at seven one night, and they waited in line until one while a military tangle was straightened out somewhere ahead. Officers ran up and down ceaselessly, calling orders and making a great uproar. It turned out that the trouble was due to the colonel, who was in a righteous temper because he was a West Pointer, and the war was going to stop before he could get overseas. Had the militant governments realized the number of broken hearts among the older West Pointers during that week, they would indubitably have prolonged the slaughter another month. The thing was pitiable!


Gazing out at the bleak expanse of tents extending for miles over a trodden welter of slush and snow, Anthony saw the impracticability of trudging to a telephone that night. He would call her at the first opportunity in the morning.


Aroused in the chill and bitter dawn he stood at reveille and listened to a passionate harangue from Captain Dunning:


“You men may think the war is over. Well, let me tell you, it isn’t! Those fellows aren’t going to sign the armistice. It’s another trick, and we’d be crazy to let anything slacken up here in the company, because, let me tell you, we’re going to sail from here within a week, and when we do we’re going to see some real fighting.” He paused that they might get the full effect of his pronouncement. And then: “If you think the war’s over, just talk to any one who’s been in it and see if they think the Germans are all in. They don’t. Nobody does. I’ve talked to the people that know, and they say there’ll be, anyways, a year longer of war. They don’t think it’s over. So you men better not get any foolish ideas that it is.”


Doubly stressing this final admonition, he ordered the company dismissed.


At noon Anthony set off at a run for the nearest canteen telephone. As he approached what corresponded to the down-town of the camp, he noticed that many other soldiers were running also, that a man near him had suddenly leaped into the air and clicked his heels together. The tendency to run became general, and from little excited groups here and there came the sounds of cheering. He stopped and listened–over the cold country whistles were blowing and the chimes of the Garden City churches broke suddenly into reverberatory sound.


Anthony began to run again. The cries were clear and distinct now as they rose with clouds of frosted breath into the chilly air:


“Germany’s surrendered! Germany’s surrendered!”


The False Armistice


That evening in the opaque gloom of six o’clock Anthony slipped between two freight-cars, and once over the railroad, followed the track along to Garden City, where he caught an electric train for New York. He stood some chance of apprehension–he knew that the military police were often sent through the cars to ask for passes, but he imagined that to-night the vigilance would be relaxed. But, in any event, he would have tried to slip through, for he had been unable to locate Gloria by telephone, and another day of suspense would have been intolerable.


After inexplicable stops and waits that reminded him of the night he had left New York, over a year before, they drew into the Pennsylvania Station, and he followed the familiar way to the taxi-stand, finding it grotesque and oddly stimulating to give his own address.


Broadway was a riot of light, thronged as he had never seen it with a carnival crowd which swept its glittering way through scraps of paper, piled ankle-deep on the sidewalks. Here and there, elevated upon benches and boxes, soldiers addressed the heedless mass, each face in which was clear cut and distinct under the white glare overhead. Anthony picked out half a dozen figures–a drunken sailor, tipped backward and supported by two other gobs, was waving his hat and emitting a wild series of roars; a wounded soldier, crutch in hand, was borne along in an eddy on the shoulders of some shrieking civilians; a dark-haired girl sat cross-legged and meditative on top of a parked taxicab. Here surely the victory had come in time, the climax had been scheduled with the uttermost celestial foresight. The great rich nation had made triumphant war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness–hence the carnival, the feasting, the triumph. Under these bright lights glittered the faces of peoples whose glory had long since passed away, whose very civilizations were dead-men whose ancestors had heard the news of victory in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Bagdad, in Tyre, a hundred generations before; men whose ancestors had seen a flower-decked, slave-adorned cortege drift with its wake of captives down the avenues of Imperial Rome….


Past the Rialto, the glittering front of the Astor, the jewelled magnificence of Times Square … a gorgeous alley of incandescence ahead…. Then–was it years later?–he was paying the taxi-driver in front of a white building on Fifty-seventh Street. He was in the hall–ah, there was the negro boy from Martinique, lazy, indolent, unchanged.


“Is Mrs. Patch in?”


“I have just came on, sah,” the man announced with his incongruous British accent.


“Take me up–“


Then the slow drone of the elevator, the three steps to the door, which swung open at the impetus of his knock.


“Gloria!” His voice was trembling. No answer. A faint string of smoke was rising from a cigarette-tray–a number of Vanity Fair sat astraddle on the table.


“Gloria!”


He ran into the bedroom, the bath. She was not there. A negligée of robin’s-egg blue laid out upon the bed diffused a faint perfume, illusive and familiar. On a chair were a pair of stockings and a street dress; an open powder box yawned upon the bureau. She must just have gone out.


The telephone rang abruptly and he started–answered it with all the sensations of an impostor.


“Hello. Is Mrs. Patch there?”


“No, I’m looking for her myself. Who is this?”


“This is Mr. Crawford.”


“This is Mr. Patch speaking. I’ve just arrived unexpectedly, and I don’t know where to find her.”


“Oh.” Mr. Crawford sounded a bit taken aback. “Why, I imagine she’s at the Armistice Ball. I know she intended going, but I didn’t think she’d leave so early.”


“Where’s the Armistice Ball?”


“At the Astor.”


“Thanks.”


Anthony hung up sharply and rose. Who was Mr. Crawford? And who was it that was taking her to the ball? How long had this been going on? All these questions asked and answered themselves a dozen times, a dozen ways. His very proximity to her drove him half frantic.


In a frenzy of suspicion he rushed here and there about the apartment, hunting for some sign of masculine occupation, opening the bathroom cupboard, searching feverishly through the bureau drawers. Then he found something that made him stop suddenly and sit down on one of the twin beds, the corners of his mouth drooping as though he were about to weep. There in a corner of her drawer, tied with a frail blue ribbon, were all the letters and telegrams he had written her during the year past. He was suffused with happy and sentimental shame.


“I’m not fit to touch her,” he cried aloud to the four walls. “I’m not fit to touch her little hand.”


Nevertheless, he went out to look for her.


In the Astor lobby he was engulfed immediately in a crowd so thick as to make progress almost impossible. He asked the direction of the ballroom from half a dozen people before he could get a sober and intelligible answer. Eventually, after a last long wait, he checked his military overcoat in the hall.


It was only nine but the dance was in full blast. The panorama was incredible. Women, women everywhere–girls gay with wine singing shrilly above the clamor of the dazzling confetti-covered throng; girls set off by the uniforms of a dozen nations; fat females collapsing without dignity upon the floor and retaining self-respect by shouting “Hurraw for the Allies!”; three women with white hair dancing hand in hand around a sailor, who revolved in a dizzying spin upon the floor, clasping to his heart an empty bottle of champagne.


Breathlessly Anthony scanned the dancers, scanned the muddled lines trailing in single file in and out among the tables, scanned the horn-blowing, kissing, coughing, laughing, drinking parties under the great full-bosomed flags which leaned in glowing color over the pageantry and the sound.


Then he saw Gloria. She was sitting at a table for two directly across the room. Her dress was black, and above it her animated face, tinted with the most glamourous rose, made, he thought, a spot of poignant beauty on the room. His heart leaped as though to a new music. He jostled his way toward her and called her name just as the gray eyes looked up and found him. For that instant as their bodies met and melted, the world, the revel, the tumbling whimper of the music faded to an ecstatic monotone hushed as a song of bees.


“Oh, my Gloria!” he cried.


Her kiss was a cool rill flowing from her heart.



F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned
appears in the C.C. Online Library in nine sections.


“Book Three, Chapter 1: A Matter of Civilization” is the seventh of nine.

Click here to read more.



* * * * *


   

The Beautiful and Damned (Book Two, Chapter III) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

05 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1900s, American, Fitzgerald (F. Scott), Novels

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
originally published by Scribner’s in 1922


Book Two, Chapter III: The Broken Lute


It is seven-thirty of an August evening. The windows in the living room of the gray house are wide open, patiently exchanging the tainted inner atmosphere of liquor and smoke for the fresh drowsiness of the late hot dusk. There are dying flower scents upon the air, so thin, so fragile, as to hint already of a summer laid away in time. But August is still proclaimed relentlessly by a thousand crickets around the side-porch, and by one who has broken into the house and concealed himself confidently behind a bookcase, from time to time shrieking of his cleverness and his indomitable will.


The room itself is in messy disorder. On the table is a dish of fruit, which is real but appears artificial. Around it are grouped an ominous assortment of decanters, glasses, and heaped ash-trays, the latter still raising wavy smoke-ladders into the stale air, the effect on the whole needing but a skull to resemble that venerable chromo, once a fixture in every “den,” which presents the appendages to the life of pleasure with delightful and awe-inspiring sentiment.


After a while the sprightly solo of the supercricket is interrupted rather than joined by a new sound–the melancholy wail of an erratically fingered flute. It is obvious that the musician is practising rather than performing, for from time to time the gnarled strain breaks off and, after an interval of indistinct mutterings, recommences.


Just prior to the seventh false start a third sound contributes to the subdued discord. It is a taxi outside. A minute’s silence, then the taxi again, its boisterous retreat almost obliterating the scrape of footsteps on the cinder walk. The door-bell shrieks alarmingly through the house.


From the kitchen enters a small, fatigued Japanese, hastily buttoning a servant’s coat of white duck. He opens the front screen-door and admits a handsome young man of thirty, clad in the sort of well-intentioned clothes peculiar to those who serve mankind. To his whole personality clings a well-intentioned air: his glance about the room is compounded of curiosity and a determined optimism; when he looks at Tana the entire burden of uplifting the godless Oriental is in his eyes. His name is FREDERICK E. PARAMORE. He was at Harvard with ANTHONY, where because of the initials of their surnames they were constantly placed next to each other in classes. A fragmentary acquaintance developed–but since that time they have never met.


Nevertheless, PARAMORE enters the room with a certain air of arriving for the evening.


Tana is answering a question.


TANA: (Grinning with ingratiation) Gone to Inn for dinnah. Be back half-hour. Gone since ha’ past six.


PARAMORE: (Regarding the glasses on the table) Have they company?


TANA: Yes. Company. Mistah Caramel, Mistah and Missays Barnes, Miss Kane, all stay here.


PARAMORE: I see. (Kindly) They’ve been having a spree, I see.


TANA: I no un’stan’.


PARAMORE: They’ve been having a fling.


TANA: Yes, they have drink. Oh, many, many, many drink.


PARAMORE: (Receding delicately from the subject) “Didn’t I hear the sounds of music as I approached the house”?


TANAWith a spasmodic giggle)Yes, I play.


PARAMORE: One of the Japanese instruments.


(He is quite obviously a subscriber to the “National Geographic Magazine.”)


TANA: I play flu-u-ute, Japanese flu-u-ute.


PARAMORE: What song were you playing? One of your Japanese melodies?


TANAHis brow undergoing preposterous contraction) I play train song. How you call?–railroad song. So call in my countree. Like train. It go so-o-o; that mean whistle; train start. Then go so-o-o; that mean train go. Go like that. Vera nice song in my countree. Children song.


PARAMORE: It sounded very nice. (It is apparent at this point that only a gigantic effort at control restrains Tana from rushing up-stairs for his post cards, including the six made in America.)


TANA: I fix high-ball for gentleman?


PARAMORE: “No, thanks. I don’t use it”. (He smiles.)


(TANA withdraws into the kitchen, leaving the intervening door slightly ajar. From the crevice there suddenly issues again the melody of the Japanese train song–this time not a practice, surely, but a performance, a lusty, spirited performance.


The phone rings. TANA, absorbed in his harmonics, gives no heed, so PARAMORE takes up the receiver.)


PARAMORE: Hello…. Yes…. No, he’s not here now, but he’ll be back any moment…. Butterworth? Hello, I didn’t quite catch the name…. Hello, hello, hello. Hello! … Huh!


(The phone obstinately refuses to yield up any more sound. Paramore replaces the receiver.


At this point the taxi motif re-enters, wafting with it a second young man; he carries a suitcase and opens the front door without ringing the bell.)


MAURY: (In the hall) “Oh, Anthony! Yoho”! (He comes into the large room and sees PARAMORE) How do?


PARAMORE: (Gazing at him with gathering intensity) Is this–is this Maury Noble?


MAURY: “That’s it”. (He advances, smiling, and holding out his hand) How are you, old boy? Haven’t seen you for years.


(He has vaguely associated the face with Harvard, but is not even positive about that. The name, if he ever knew it, he has long since forgotten. However, with a fine sensitiveness and an equally commendable charity PARAMORE recognizes the fact and tactfully relieves the situation.)


PARAMORE: You’ve forgotten Fred Paramore? We were both in old Unc Robert’s history class.


MAURY: No, I haven’t, Unc–I mean Fred. Fred was–I mean Unc was a great old fellow, wasn’t he?


PARAMORE: (Nodding his head humorously several times) Great old character. Great old character.


MAURY: (After a short pause) Yes–he was. Where’s Anthony?


PARAMORE: The Japanese servant told me he was at some inn. Having dinner, I suppose.


MAURY: (Looking at his watch) Gone long?


PARAMORE: I guess so. The Japanese told me they’d be back shortly.


MAURY: Suppose we have a drink.


PARAMORE: No, thanks. I don’t use it. (He smiles.)


MAURY: Mind if I do? (Yawning as he helps himself from a bottle) What have you been doing since you left college?


PARAMORE: Oh, many things. I’ve led a very active life. Knocked about here and there. (His tone implies anything front lion-stalking to organized crime.)


MAURY: Oh, been over to Europe?


PARAMORE: No, I haven’t–unfortunately.


MAURY: I guess we’ll all go over before long.


PARAMORE: Do you really think so?


MAURY: Sure! Country’s been fed on sensationalism for more than two years. Everybody getting restless. Want to have some fun.


PARAMORE: Then you don’t believe any ideals are at stake?


MAURY: Nothing of much importance. People want excitement every so often.


PARAMORE: (Intently) It’s very interesting to hear you say that. Now I was talking to a man who’d been over there—-


(During the ensuing testament, left to be filled in by the reader with such phrases as “Saw with his own eyes,” “Splendid spirit of France,” and “Salvation of civilization,” MAURY sits with lowered eyelids, dispassionately bored.)


MAURY: (At the first available opportunity) By the way, do you happen to know that there’s a German agent in this very house?


PARAMORE: (Smiling cautiously) Are you serious?


MAURY: Absolutely. Feel it my duty to warn you.


PARAMORE: (Convinced) A governess?


MAURY: (In a whisper, indicating the kitchen with his thumb) Tana! That’s not his real name. I understand he constantly gets mail addressed to Lieutenant Emile Tannenbaum.


PARAMORE: (Laughing with hearty tolerance) You were kidding me.


MAURY: I may be accusing him falsely. But, you haven’t told me what you’ve been doing.


PARAMORE: For one thing–writing.


MAURY: Fiction?


PARAMORE: No. Non-fiction.


MAURY: What’s that? A sort of literature that’s half fiction and half fact?


PARAMORE: Oh, I’ve confined myself to fact. I’ve been doing a good deal of social-service work.


MAURY: Oh!


(An immediate glow of suspicion leaps into his eyes. It is as though PARAMORE had announced himself as an amateur pickpocket.)


PARAMORE: At present I’m doing service work in Stamford. Only last week some one told me that Anthony Patch lived so near.


(They are interrupted by a clamor outside, unmistakable as that of two sexes in conversation and laughter. Then there enter the room in a body ANTHONY, GLORIA, RICHARD CARAMEL, MURIEL KANE, RACHAEL BARNES and RODMAN BARNES, her husband. They surge about MAURY, illogically replying “Fine!” to his general “Hello.” … ANTHONY, meanwhile, approaches his other guest.)


ANTHONY: Well, I’ll be darned. How are you? Mighty glad to see you.


PARAMORE: It’s good to see you, Anthony. I’m stationed in Stamford, so I thought I’d run over. (Roguishly) We have to work to beat the devil most of the time, so we’re entitled to a few hours’ vacation.


(In an agony of concentration ANTHONY tries to recall the name. After a struggle of parturition his memory gives up the fragment “Fred,” around which he hastily builds the sentence “Glad you did, Fred!” Meanwhile the slight hush prefatory to an introduction has fallen upon the company. MAURY, who could help, prefers to look on in malicious enjoyment.)


ANTHONY: (In desperation) Ladies and gentlemen, this is–this is Fred.


MURIEL: (With obliging levity) Hello, Fred!


(RICHARD CARAMEL and PARAMORE greet each other intimately by their first names, the latter recollecting that DICK was one of the men in his class who had never before troubled to speak to him. DICK fatuously imagines that PARAMORE is some one he has previously met in ANTHONY’S house.


The three young women go up-stairs.)


MAURY: (In an undertone to DICK) Haven’t seen Muriel since Anthony’s wedding.


DICK: She’s now in her prime. Her latest is “I’ll say so!”


(ANTHONY struggles for a while with PARAMORE and at length attempts to make the conversation general by asking every one to have a drink.)


MAURY: I’ve done pretty well on this bottle. I’ve gone from “Proof” down to “Distillery.” (He indicates the words on the label.)


ANTHONY: (To PARAMORE) Never can tell when these two will turn up. Said good-by to them one afternoon at five and darned if they didn’t appear about two in the morning. A big hired touring-car from New York drove up to the door and out they stepped, drunk as lords, of course.


(In an ecstasy of consideration PARAMORE regards the cover of a book which he holds in his hand. MAURY and DICK exchange a glance.)


DICK: (Innocently, to PARAMORE) You work here in town?


PARAMORE: No, I’m in the Laird Street Settlement in Stamford. (To ANTHONY) You have no idea of the amount of poverty in these small Connecticut towns. Italians and other immigrants. Catholics mostly, you know, so it’s very hard to reach them.


ANTHONY: (Politely) Lot of crime?


PARAMORE: Not so much crime as ignorance and dirt.


MAURY: That’s my theory: immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people. I’m all for the criminals–give color to life. Trouble is if you started to punish ignorance you’d have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy.


PARAMORE: (Smiling uneasily) I was speaking of the more fundamental ignorance–of even our language.


MAURY: (Thoughtfully) I suppose it is rather hard. Can’t even keep up with the new poetry.


PARAMORE: It’s only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your finger-nails never seem dirty until you wash your hands. Of course we’re already attracting much attention.


MAURY: (Rudely) As your secretary might say, if you stuff paper into a grate it’ll burn brightly for a moment.


(At this point GLORIA, freshly tinted and lustful of admiration and entertainment, rejoins the party, followed by her two friends. For several moments the conversation becomes entirely fragmentary. GLORIA calls ANTHONY aside.)


GLORIA: Please don’t drink much, Anthony.


ANTHONY: Why?


GLORIA: Because you’re so simple when you’re drunk.


ANTHONY: Good Lord! What’s the matter now?


GLORIA: (After a pause during which her eyes gaze coolly into his) Several things. In the first place, why do you insist on paying for everything? Both those men have more money than you!


ANTHONY: Why, Gloria! They’re my guests!


GLORIA: That’s no reason why you should pay for a bottle of champagne Rachael Barnes smashed. Dick tried to fix that second taxi bill, and you wouldn’t let him.


ANTHONY: Why, Gloria–


GLORIA: When we have to keep selling bonds to even pay our bills, it’s time to cut down on excess generosities. Moreover, I wouldn’t be quite so attentive to Rachael Barnes. Her husband doesn’t like it any more than I do!


ANTHONY: Why, Gloria–


GLORIA: (Mimicking him sharply) “Why, Gloria!” But that’s happened a little too often this summer–with every pretty woman you meet. It’s grown to be a sort of habit, and I’m not going to stand it! If you can play around, I can, too. (Then, as an afterthought) By the way, this Fred person isn’t a second Joe Hull, is he?


ANTHONY: Heavens, no! He probably came up to get me to wheedle some money out of grandfather for his flock.


(GLORIA turns away from a very depressed ANTHONY and returns to her guests.


By nine o’clock these can be divided into two classes–those who have been drinking consistently and those who have taken little or nothing. In the second group are the BARNESES, MURIEL, and FREDERICK E. PARAMORE.)


MURIEL: I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.


DICK: As Goliath said, he understood how David felt, but he couldn’t express himself. The remark was immediately adopted for a motto by the Philistines.


MURIEL: I don’t get you. I must be getting stupid in my old age.


GLORIA: (Weaving unsteadily among the company like an exhilarated angel) If any one’s hungry there’s some French pastry on the dining room table.


MAURY: Can’t tolerate those Victorian designs it comes in.


MURIEL: (Violently amused) I’ll say you’re tight, Maury.


(Her bosom is still a pavement that she offers to the hoofs of many passing stallions, hoping that their iron shoes may strike even a spark of romance in the darkness …


Messrs. BARNES and PARAMORE have been engaged in conversation upon some wholesome subject, a subject so wholesome that MR. BARNES has been trying for several moments to creep into the more tainted air around the central lounge. Whether PARAMORE is lingering in the gray house out of politeness or curiosity, or in order at some future time to make a sociological report on the decadence of American life, is problematical.)


MAURY: Fred, I imagined you were very broad-minded.


PARAMORE: I am.


MURIEL: Me, too. I believe one religion’s as good as another and everything.


PARAMORE: There’s some good in all religions.


MURIEL: I’m a Catholic but, as I always say, I’m not working at it.


PARAMORE: (With a tremendous burst of tolerance) The Catholic religion is a very–a very powerful religion.


MAURY: Well, such a broad-minded man should consider the raised plane of sensation and the stimulated optimism contained in this cocktail.


PARAMORE: (Taking the drink, rather defiantly) Thanks, I’ll try–one.


MAURY: One? Outrageous! Here we have a class of ‘nineteen ten reunion, and you refuse to be even a little pickled. Come on!


“Here’s a health to King Charles, Here’s a health to King Charles, Bring the bowl that you boast—-“


(PARAMORE joins in with a hearty voice.)


MAURY: Fill the cup, Frederick. You know everything’s subordinated to nature’s purposes with us, and her purpose with you is to make you a rip-roaring tippler.


PARAMORE: If a fellow can drink like a gentleman–


MAURY: What is a gentleman, anyway?


ANTHONY: A man who never has pins under his coat lapel.


MAURY: Nonsense! A man’s social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.


DICK: He’s a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper.


RACHAEL: A man who never gives an impersonation of a dope-fiend.


MAURY: An American who can fool an English butler into thinking he’s one.


MURIEL: A man who comes from a good family and went to Yale or Harvard or Princeton, and has money and dances well, and all that.


MAURY: At last–the perfect definition! Cardinal Newman’s is now a back number.


PARAMORE: I think we ought to look on the question more broad-mindedly. Was it Abraham Lincoln who said that a gentleman is one who never inflicts pain?


MAURY: It’s attributed, I believe, to General Ludendorff.


PARAMORE: Surely you’re joking.


MAURY: Have another drink.


PARAMORE: I oughtn’t to. (Lowering his voice for MAURY’S ear alone) What if I were to tell you this is the third drink I’ve ever taken in my life?


(DICK starts the phonograph, which provokes MURIEL to rise and sway from side to side, her elbows against her ribs, her forearms perpendicular to her body and out like fins.)


MURIEL: Oh, let’s take up the rugs and dance!


(This suggestion is received by ANTHONY and GLORIA with interior groans and sickly smiles of acquiescence.)


MURIEL: Come on, you lazy-bones. Get up and move the furniture back.


DICK: Wait till I finish my drink.


MAURY: (Intent on his purpose toward PARAMORE) I’ll tell you what. Let’s each fill one glass, drink it off and then we’ll dance.


(A wave of protest which breaks against the rock of MAURY’S insistence.)


MURIEL: My head is simply going round now.


RACHAEL: (In an undertone to ANTHONY) Did Gloria tell you to stay away from me?


ANTHONY: (Confused) Why, certainly not. Of course not.


(RACHAEL smiles at him inscrutably. Two years have given her a sort of hard, well-groomed beauty.)


MAURY: (Holding up his glass) Here’s to the defeat of democracy and the fall of Christianity.


MURIEL: Now really!


(She flashes a mock-reproachful glance at MAURY and then drinks.


They all drink, with varying degrees of difficulty.)


MURIEL: Clear the floor!


(It seems inevitable that this process is to be gone through, so ANTHONY and GLORIA join in the great moving of tables, piling of chairs, rolling of carpets, and breaking of lamps. When the furniture has been stacked in ugly masses at the sides, there appears a space about eight feet square.)


MURIEL: Oh, let’s have music!


MAURY: Tana will render the love song of an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist.


(Amid some confusion due to the fact that TANA has retired for the night, preparations are made for the performance. The pajamaed Japanese, flute in hand, is wrapped in a comforter and placed in a chair atop one of the tables, where he makes a ludicrous and grotesque spectacle. PARAMORE is perceptibly drunk and so enraptured with the notion that he increases the effect by simulating funny-paper staggers and even venturing on an occasional hiccough.)


PARAMORE: (To GLORIA) Want to dance with me?


GLORIA: No, sir! Want to do the swan dance. Can you do it?


PARAMORE: Sure. Do them all.


GLORIA: All right. You start from that side of the room and I’ll start from this.


MURIEL: Let’s go!


(Then Bedlam creeps screaming out of the bottles: TANA plunges into the recondite mazes of the train song, the plaintive “tootle toot-toot” blending its melancholy cadences with the “Poor Butter-fly (tink-atink), by the blossoms wait-ing” of the phonograph. MURIEL is too weak with laughter to do more than cling desperately to BARNES, who, dancing with the ominous rigidity of an army officer, tramps without humor around the small space. ANTHONY is trying to hear RACHAEL’S whisper–without attracting GLORIA’s attention….


But the grotesque, the unbelievable, the histrionic incident is about to occur, one of those incidents in which life seems set upon the passionate imitation of the lowest forms of literature. PARAMORE has been trying to emulate GLORIA, and as the commotion reaches its height he begins to spin round and round, more and more dizzily–he staggers, recovers, staggers again and then falls in the direction of the hall … almost into the arms of old ADAM PATCH, whose approach has been rendered inaudible by the pandemonium in the room.


ADAM PATCH is very white. He leans upon a stick. The man with him is EDWARD SHUTTLEWORTH, and it is he who seizes PARAMORE by the shoulder and deflects the course of his fall away from the venerable philanthropist.


The time required for quiet to descend upon the room like a monstrous pall may be estimated at two minutes, though for a short period after that the phonograph gags and the notes of the Japanese train song dribble from the end of TANA’S flute. Of the nine people only BARNES, PARAMORE, and TANA are unaware of the late-comer’s identity. Of the nine not one is aware that ADAM PATCH has that morning made a contribution of fifty thousand dollars to the cause of national prohibition.


It is given to PARAMORE to break the gathering silence; the high tide of his life’s depravity is reached in his incredible remark.)


PARAMORE: (Crawling rapidly toward the kitchen on his hands and knees) I’m not a guest here–I work here.


(Again silence falls–so deep now, so weighted with intolerably contagious apprehension, that RACHAEL gives a nervous little giggle, and DICK finds himself telling over and over a line from Swinburne, grotesquely appropriate to the scene:


“One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.”


… Out of the hush the voice of ANTHONY, sober and strained, saying something to ADAM PATCH; then this, too, dies away.)


SHUTTLEWORTH: (Passionately) Your grandfather thought he would motor over to see your house. I phoned from Rye and left a message.


(A series of little gasps, emanating, apparently, from nowhere, from no one, fall into the next pause. ANTHONY is the color of chalk. GLORIA’S lips are parted and her level gaze at the old man is tense and frightened. There is not one smile in the room. Not one? Or does CROSS PATCH’S drawn mouth tremble slightly open, to expose the even rows of his thin teeth? He speaks–five mild and simple words.)


ADAM PATCH: We’ll go back now, Shuttleworth–(And that is all. He turns, and assisted by his cane goes out through the hall, through the front door, and with hellish portentousness his uncertain footsteps crunch on the gravel path under the August moon.)


Retrospect


In this extremity they were like two goldfish in a bowl from which all the water had been drawn; they could not even swim across to each other.


Gloria would be twenty-six in May. There was nothing, she had said, that she wanted, except to be young and beautiful for a long time, to be gay and happy, and to have money and love. She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately. She had been married over two years. At first there had been days of serene understanding, rising to ecstasies of proprietorship and pride. Alternating with these periods had occurred sporadic hates, enduring a short hour, and forgetfulnesses lasting no longer than an afternoon. That had been for half a year.


Then the serenity, the content, had become less jubilant, had become, gray–very rarely, with the spur of jealousy or forced separation, the ancient ecstasies returned, the apparent communion of soul and soul, the emotional excitement. It was possible for her to hate Anthony for as much as a full day, to be carelessly incensed at him for as long as a week. Recrimination had displaced affection as an indulgence, almost as an entertainment, and there were nights when they would go to sleep trying to remember who was angry and who should be reserved next morning. And as the second year waned there had entered two new elements. Gloria realized that Anthony had become capable of utter indifference toward her, a temporary indifference, more than half lethargic, but one from which she could no longer stir him by a whispered word, or a certain intimate smile. There were days when her caresses affected him as a sort of suffocation. She was conscious of these things; she never entirely admitted them to herself.


It was only recently that she perceived that in spite of her adoration of him, her jealousy, her servitude, her pride, she fundamentally despised him–and her contempt blended indistinguishably with her other emotions…. All this was her love–the vital and feminine illusion that had directed itself toward him one April night, many months before.


On Anthony’s part she was, in spite of these qualifications, his sole preoccupation. Had he lost her he would have been a broken man, wretchedly and sentimentally absorbed in her memory for the remainder of life. He seldom took pleasure in an entire day spent alone with her–except on occasions he preferred to have a third person with them. There were times when he felt that if he were not left absolutely alone he would go mad–there were a few times when he definitely hated her. In his cups he was capable of short attractions toward other women, the hitherto-suppressed outcroppings of an experimental temperament.


That spring, that summer, they had speculated upon future happiness–how they were to travel from summer land to summer land, returning eventually to a gorgeous estate and possible idyllic children, then entering diplomacy or politics, to accomplish, for a while, beautiful and important things, until finally as a white-haired (beautifully, silkily, white-haired) couple they were to loll about in serene glory, worshipped by the bourgeoisie of the land…. These times were to begin “when we get our money”; it was on such dreams rather than on any satisfaction with their increasingly irregular, increasingly dissipated life that their hope rested. On gray mornings when the jests of the night before had shrunk to ribaldries without wit or dignity, they could, after a fashion, bring out this batch of common hopes and count them over, then smile at each other and repeat, by way of clinching the matter, the terse yet sincere Nietzscheanism of Gloria’s defiant “I don’t care!”


Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous; there was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement–not an uncommon phenomenon in the British aristocracy of a hundred years ago, but a somewhat alarming one in a civilization steadily becoming more temperate and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fibre, not so much in what they did as in their subtle reactions to the civilization about them. In Gloria had been born something that she had hitherto never needed–the skeleton, incomplete but nevertheless unmistakable, of her ancient abhorrence, a conscience. This admission to herself was coincidental with the slow decline of her physical courage.


Then, on the August morning after Adam Patch’s unexpected call, they awoke, nauseated and tired, dispirited with life, capable only of one pervasive emotion–fear.


Panic


“Well?” Anthony sat up in bed and looked down at her. The corners of his lips were drooping with depression, his voice was strained and hollow.


Her reply was to raise her hand to her mouth and begin a slow, precise nibbling at her finger.


“We’ve done it,” he said after a pause; then, as she was still silent, he became exasperated. “Why don’t you say something?”


“What on earth do you want me to say?”


“What are you thinking?”


“Nothing.”


“Then stop biting your finger!”


Ensued a short confused discussion of whether or not she had been thinking. It seemed essential to Anthony that she should muse aloud upon last night’s disaster. Her silence was a method of settling the responsibility on him. For her part she saw no necessity for speech–the moment required that she should gnaw at her finger like a nervous child.


“I’ve got to fix up this damn mess with my grandfather,” he said with uneasy conviction. A faint newborn respect was indicated by his use of “my grandfather” instead of “grampa.”


“You can’t,” she affirmed abruptly. “You can’t–ever. He’ll never forgive you as long as he lives.”


“Perhaps not,” agreed Anthony miserably. “Still–I might possibly square myself by some sort of reformation and all that sort of thing–“


“He looked sick,” she interrupted, “pale as flour.”


“He is sick. I told you that three months ago.”


“I wish he’d died last week!” she said petulantly. “Inconsiderate old fool!”


Neither of them laughed.


“But just let me say,” she added quietly, “the next time I see you acting with any woman like you did with Rachael Barnes last night, I’ll leave you–just–like–that! I’m simply not going to stand it!”


Anthony quailed.


“Oh, don’t be absurd,” he protested. “You know there’s no woman in the world for me except you–none, dearest.”


His attempt at a tender note failed miserably–the more imminent danger stalked back into the foreground.


“If I went to him,” suggested Anthony, “and said with appropriate biblical quotations that I’d walked too long in the way of unrighteousness and at last seen the light–” He broke off and glanced with a whimsical expression at his wife. “I wonder what he’d do?”


“I don’t know.”


She was speculating as to whether or not their guests would have the acumen to leave directly after breakfast.


Not for a week did Anthony muster the courage to go to Tarrytown. The prospect was revolting and left alone he would have been incapable of making the trip–but if his will had deteriorated in these past three years, so had his power to resist urging. Gloria compelled him to go. It was all very well to wait a week, she said, for that would give his grandfather’s violent animosity time to cool–but to wait longer would be an error–it would give it a chance to harden.


He went, in trepidation … and vainly. Adam Patch was not well, said Shuttleworth indignantly. Positive instructions had been given that no one was to see him. Before the ex-“gin-physician’s” vindictive eye Anthony’s front wilted. He walked out to his taxicab with what was almost a slink–recovering only a little of his self-respect as he boarded the train; glad to escape, boylike, to the wonder palaces of consolation that still rose and glittered in his own mind.


Gloria was scornful when he returned to Marietta. Why had he not forced his way in? That was what she would have done!


Between them they drafted a letter to the old man, and after considerable revision sent it off. It was half an apology, half a manufactured explanation. The letter was not answered.


Came a day in September, a day slashed with alternate sun and rain, sun without warmth, rain without freshness. On that day they left the gray house, which had seen the flower of their love. Four trunks and three monstrous crates were piled in the dismantled room where, two years before, they had sprawled lazily, thinking in terms of dreams, remote, languorous, content. The room echoed with emptiness. Gloria, in a new brown dress edged with fur, sat upon a trunk in silence, and Anthony walked nervously to and fro smoking, as they waited for the truck that would take their things to the city.


“What are those?” she demanded, pointing to some books piled upon one of the crates.


“That’s my old stamp collection,” he confessed sheepishly. “I forgot to pack it.”


“Anthony, it’s so silly to carry it around.”


“Well, I was looking through it the day we left the apartment last spring, and I decided not to store it.”


“Can’t you sell it? Haven’t we enough junk?”


“I’m sorry,” he said humbly.


With a thunderous rattling the truck rolled up to the door. Gloria shook her fist defiantly at the four walls.


“I’m so glad to go!” she cried, “so glad. Oh, my God, how I hate this house!”


So the brilliant and beautiful lady went up with her husband to New York. On the very train that bore them away they quarrelled–her bitter words had the frequency, the regularity, the inevitability of the stations they passed.


“Don’t be cross,” begged Anthony piteously. “We’ve got nothing but each other, after all.”


“We haven’t even that, most of the time,” cried Gloria.


“When haven’t we?”


“A lot of times–beginning with one occasion on the station platform at Redgate.”


“You don’t mean to say that–“


“No,” she interrupted coolly, “I don’t brood over it. It came and went–and when it went it took something with it.”


She finished abruptly. Anthony sat in silence, confused, depressed. The drab visions of train-side Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor, succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually as country. He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one–otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.


Pelham! They had quarrelled in Pelham because Gloria must drive. And when she set her little foot on the accelerator the car had jumped off spunkily, and their two heads had jerked back like marionettes worked by a single string.


The Bronx–the houses gathering and gleaming in the sun, which was falling now through wide refulgent skies and tumbling caravans of light down into the streets. New York, he supposed, was home–the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. Here on the outskirts absurd stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset, poised for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River. The train moved in through the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating streets of the upper East Side, each one passing the car window like the space between the spokes of a gigantic wheel, each one with its vigorous colorful revelation of poor children swarming in feverish activity like vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven; women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like great bags of abominably dirty laundry.


“I like these streets,” observed Anthony aloud. “I always feel as though it’s a performance being staged for me; as though the second I’ve passed they’ll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead, grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad, but seldom in this country.”


Down in a tall busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores; in the door of each stood a dark little man watching the passers from intent eyes–eyes gleaming with suspicion, with pride, with clarity, with cupidity, with comprehension. New York–he could not dissociate it now from the slow, upward creep of this people–the little stores, growing, expanding, consolidating, moving, watched over with hawk’s eyes and a bee’s attention to detail–they slathered out on all sides. It was impressive–in perspective it was tremendous.


Gloria’s voice broke in with strange appropriateness upon his thoughts.


“I wonder where Bloeckman’s been this summer.”


The Apartment


After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain “impractical” ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future–so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships–and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside for the task.


Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed. This gradual change had taken place through the past several years, accelerated by a succession of anxieties preying on his mind. There was, first of all, the sense of waste, always dormant in his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of his position. In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant. In his early twenties the conviction of the futility of effort, of the wisdom of abnegation, had been confirmed by the philosophies he had admired as well as by his association with Maury Noble, and later with his wife. Yet there had been occasions–just before his first meeting with Gloria, for example, and when his grandfather had suggested that he should go abroad as a war correspondent–upon which his dissatisfaction had driven him almost to a positive step.


One day just before they left Marietta for the last time, in carelessly turning over the pages of a Harvard Alumni Bulletin, he had found a column which told him what his contemporaries had been about in this six years since graduation. Most of them were in business, it was true, and several were converting the heathen of China or America to a nebulous protestantism; but a few, he found, were working constructively at jobs that were neither sinecures nor routines. There was Calvin Boyd, for instance, who, though barely out of medical school, had discovered a new treatment for typhus, had shipped abroad and was mitigating some of the civilization that the Great Powers had brought to Servia; there was Eugene Bronson, whose articles in The New Democracy were stamping him as a man with ideas transcending both vulgar timeliness and popular hysteria; there was a man named Daly who had been suspended from the faculty of a righteous university for preaching Marxian doctrines in the classroom: in art, science, politics, he saw the authentic personalities of his time emerging–there was even Severance, the quarter-back, who had given up his life rather neatly and gracefully with the Foreign Legion on the Aisne.


He laid down the magazine and thought for a while about these diverse men. In the days of his integrity he would have defended his attitude to the last–an Epicurus in Nirvana, he would have cried that to struggle was to believe, to believe was to limit. He would as soon have become a churchgoer because the prospect of immortality gratified him as he would have considered entering the leather business because the intensity of the competition would have kept him from unhappiness. But at present he had no such delicate scruples. This autumn, as his twenty-ninth year began, he was inclined to close his mind to many things, to avoid prying deeply into motive and first causes, and mostly to long passionately for security from the world and from himself. He hated to be alone, as has been said he often dreaded being alone with Gloria.


Because of the chasm which his grandfather’s visit had opened before him, and the consequent revulsion from his late mode of life, it was inevitable that he should look around in this suddenly hostile city for the friends and environments that had once seemed the warmest and most secure. His first step was a desperate attempt to get back his old apartment.


In the spring of 1912 he had signed a four-year lease at seventeen hundred a year, with an option of renewal. This lease had expired the previous May. When he had first rented the rooms they had been mere potentialities, scarcely to be discerned as that, but Anthony had seen into these potentialities and arranged in the lease that he and the landlord should each spend a certain amount in improvements. Rents had gone up in the past four years, and last spring when Anthony had waived his option the landlord, a Mr. Sohenberg, had realized that he could get a much bigger price for what was now a prepossessing apartment. Accordingly, when Anthony approached him on the subject in September he was met with Sohenberg’s offer of a three-year lease at twenty-five hundred a year. This, it seemed to Anthony, was outrageous. It meant that well over a third of their income would be consumed in rent. In vain he argued that his own money, his own ideas on the repartitioning, had made the rooms attractive.


In vain he offered two thousand dollars–twenty-two hundred, though they could ill afford it: Mr. Sohenberg was obdurate. It seemed that two other gentlemen were considering it; just that sort of an apartment was in demand for the moment, and it would scarcely be business to give it to Mr. Patch. Besides, though he had never mentioned it before, several of the other tenants had complained of noise during the previous winter–singing and dancing late at night, that sort of thing.


Internally raging Anthony hurried back to the Ritz to report his discomfiture to Gloria.


“I can just see you,” she stormed, “letting him back you down!”


“What could I say?”


“You could have told him what he was. I wouldn’t have stood it. No other man in the world would have stood it! You just let people order you around and cheat you and bully you and take advantage of you as if you were a silly little boy. It’s absurd!”


“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, don’t lose your temper.”


“I know, Anthony, but you are such an ass!”


“Well, possibly. Anyway, we can’t afford that apartment. But we can afford it better than living here at the Ritz.”


“You were the one who insisted on coming here.”


“Yes, because I knew you’d be miserable in a cheap hotel.”


“Of course I would!”


“At any rate we’ve got to find a place to live.”


“How much can we pay?” she demanded.


“Well, we can pay even his price if we sell more bonds, but we agreed last night that until I had gotten something definite to do we-“


“Oh, I know all that. I asked you how much we can pay out of just our income.”


“They say you ought not to pay more than a fourth.”


“How much is a fourth?”


“One hundred and fifty a month.”


“Do you mean to say we’ve got only six hundred dollars coming in every month?” A subdued note crept into her voice.


“Of course!” he answered angrily. “Do you think we’ve gone on spending more than twelve thousand a year without cutting way into our capital?”


“I knew we’d sold bonds, but–have we spent that much a year? How did we?” Her awe increased.


“Oh, I’ll look in those careful account-books we kept,” he remarked ironically, and then added: “Two rents a good part of the time, clothes, travel–why, each of those springs in California cost about four thousand dollars. That darn car was an expense from start to finish. And parties and amusements and–oh, one thing or another.”


They were both excited now and inordinately depressed. The situation seemed worse in the actual telling Gloria than it had when he had first made the discovery himself.


“You’ve got to make some money,” she said suddenly.


“I know it.”


“And you’ve got to make another attempt to see your grandfather.”


“I will.”


“When?”


“When we get settled.”


This eventuality occurred a week later. They rented a small apartment on Fifty-seventh Street at one hundred and fifty a month. It included bedroom, living-room, kitchenette, and bath, in a thin, white-stone apartment house, and though the rooms were too small to display Anthony’s best furniture, they were clean, new, and, in a blonde and sanitary way, not unattractive. Bounds had gone abroad to enlist in the British army, and in his place they tolerated rather than enjoyed the services of a gaunt, big-boned Irishwoman, whom Gloria loathed because she discussed the glories of Sinn Fein as she served breakfast. But they vowed they would have no more Japanese, and English servants were for the present hard to obtain. Like Bounds, the woman prepared only breakfast. Their other meals they took at restaurants and hotels.


What finally drove Anthony post-haste up to Tarrytown was an announcement in several New York papers that Adam Patch, the multimillionaire, the philanthropist, the venerable uplifter, was seriously ill and not expected to recover.


The Kitten


Anthony could not see him. The doctors’ instructions were that he was to talk to no one, said Mr. Shuttleworth–who offered kindly to take any message that Anthony might care to intrust with him, and deliver it to Adam Patch when his condition permitted. But by obvious innuendo he confirmed Anthony’s melancholy inference that the prodigal grandson would be particularly unwelcome at the bedside. At one point in the conversation Anthony, with Gloria’s positive instructions in mind, made a move as though to brush by the secretary, but Shuttleworth with a smile squared his brawny shoulders, and Anthony saw how futile such an attempt would be.


Miserably intimidated, he returned to New York, where husband and wife passed a restless week. A little incident that occurred one evening indicated to what tension their nerves were drawn.


Walking home along a cross-street after dinner, Anthony noticed a night-bound cat prowling near a railing.


“I always have an instinct to kick a cat,” he said idly.


“I like them.”


“I yielded to it once.”


“When?”


“Oh, years ago; before I met you. One night between the acts of a show. Cold night, like this, and I was a little tight–one of the first times I was ever tight,” he added. “The poor little beggar was looking for a place to sleep, I guess, and I was in a mean mood, so it took my fancy to kick it–“


“Oh, the poor kitty!” cried Gloria, sincerely moved. Inspired with the narrative instinct, Anthony enlarged on the theme.


“It was pretty bad,” he admitted. “The poor little beast turned around and looked at me rather plaintively as though hoping I’d pick him up and be kind to him–he was really just a kitten–and before he knew it a big foot launched out at him and caught his little back”


“Oh!” Gloria’s cry was full of anguish.


“It was such a cold night,” he continued, perversely, keeping his voice upon a melancholy note. “I guess it expected kindness from somebody, and it got only pain–“


He broke off suddenly–Gloria was sobbing. They had reached home, and when they entered the apartment she threw herself upon the lounge, crying as though he had struck at her very soul.


“Oh, the poor little kitty!” she repeated piteously, “the poor little kitty. So cold–“


“Gloria”


“Don’t come near me! Please, don’t come near me. You killed the soft little kitty.”


Touched, Anthony knelt beside her.


“Dear,” he said. “Oh, Gloria, darling. It isn’t true. I invented it–every word of it.”


But she would not believe him. There had been something in the details he had chosen to describe that made her cry herself asleep that night, for the kitten, for Anthony for herself, for the pain and bitterness and cruelty of all the world.


The Passing of an American Moralist


Old Adam died on a midnight of late November with a pious compliment to his God on his thin lips. He, who had been flattered so much, faded out flattering the Omnipotent Abstraction which he fancied he might have angered in the more lascivious moments of his youth. It was announced that he had arranged some sort of an armistice with the deity, the terms of which were not made public, though they were thought to have included a large cash payment. All the newspapers printed his biography, and two of them ran short editorials on his sterling worth, and his part in the drama of industrialism, with which he had grown up. They referred guardedly to the reforms he had sponsored and financed. The memories of Comstock and Cato the Censor were resuscitated and paraded like gaunt ghosts through the columns.


Every newspaper remarked that he was survived by a single grandson, Anthony Comstock Patch, of New York.


The burial took place in the family plot at Tarrytown. Anthony and Gloria rode in the first carriage, too worried to feel grotesque, both trying desperately to glean presage of fortune from the faces of retainers who had been with him at the end.


They waited a frantic week for decency, and then, having received no notification of any kind, Anthony called up his grandfather’s lawyer. Mr. Brett was not he was expected back in an hour. Anthony left his telephone number.


It was the last day of November, cool and crackling outside, with a lustreless sun peering bleakly in at the windows. While they waited for the call, ostensibly engaged in reading, the atmosphere, within and without, seemed pervaded with a deliberate rendition of the pathetic fallacy. After an interminable while, the bell jingled, and Anthony, starting violently, took up the receiver.


“Hello …” His voice was strained and hollow. “Yes–I did leave word. Who is this, please? … Yes…. Why, it was about the estate. Naturally I’m interested, and I’ve received no word about the reading of the will–I thought you might not have my address…. What? … Yes …”


Gloria fell on her knees. The intervals between Anthony’s speeches were like tourniquets winding on her heart. She found herself helplessly twisting the large buttons from a velvet cushion. Then:


“That’s–that’s very, very odd–that’s very odd–that’s very odd. Not even any–ah–mention or any–ah–reason?”


His voice sounded faint and far away. She uttered a little sound, half gasp, half cry.


“Yes, I’ll see…. All right, thanks … thanks….”


The phone clicked. Her eyes looking along the floor saw his feet cut the pattern of a patch of sunlight on the carpet. She arose and faced him with a gray, level glance just as his arms folded about her.


“My dearest,” he whispered huskily. “He did it, God damn him!”


NEXT DAY


“Who are the heirs?” asked Mr. Haight. “You see when you can tell me so little about it–“


Mr. Haight was tall and bent and beetle-browed. He had been recommended to Anthony as an astute and tenacious lawyer.


“I only know vaguely,” answered Anthony. “A man named Shuttleworth, who was a sort of pet of his, has the whole thing in charge as administrator or trustee or something–all except the direct bequests to charity and the provisions for servants and for those two cousins in Idaho.”


“How distant are the cousins?”


“Oh, third or fourth, anyway. I never even heard of them.”


Mr. Haight nodded comprehensively.


“And you want to contest a provision of the will?”


“I guess so,” admitted Anthony helplessly. “I want to do what sounds most hopeful–that’s what I want you to tell me.”


“You want them to refuse probate to the will?”


Anthony shook his head.


“You’ve got me. I haven’t any idea what ‘probate’ is. I want a share of the estate.”


“Suppose you tell me some more details. For instance, do you know why the testator disinherited you?”


“Why–yes,” began Anthony. “You see he was always a sucker for moral reform, and all that–“


“I know,” interjected Mr. Haight humorlessly.


“–and I don’t suppose he ever thought I was much good. I didn’t go into business, you see. But I feel certain that up to last summer I was one of the beneficiaries. We had a house out in Marietta, and one night grandfather got the notion he’d come over and see us. It just happened that there was a rather gay party going on and he arrived without any warning. Well, he took one look, he and this fellow Shuttleworth, and then turned around and tore right back to Tarrytown. After that he never answered my letters or even let me see him.”


“He was a prohibitionist, wasn’t he?”


“He was everything–regular religious maniac.”


“How long before his death was the will made that disinherited you?”


“Recently–I mean since August.”


“And you think that the direct reason for his not leaving you the majority of the estate was his displeasure with your recent actions?”


“Yes.”


Mr. Haight considered. Upon what grounds was Anthony thinking of contesting the will?


“Why, isn’t there something about evil influence?”


“Undue influence is one ground–but it’s the most difficult. You would have to show that such pressure was brought to bear so that the deceased was in a condition where he disposed of his property contrary to his intentions–“


“Well, suppose this fellow Shuttleworth dragged him over to Marietta just when he thought some sort of a celebration was probably going on?”


“That wouldn’t have any bearing on the case. There’s a strong division between advice and influence. You’d have to prove that the secretary had a sinister intention. I’d suggest some other grounds. A will is automatically refused probate in case of insanity, drunkenness”–here Anthony smiled–“or feeble-mindedness through premature old age.”


“But,” objected Anthony, “his private physician, being one of the beneficiaries, would testify that he wasn’t feeble-minded. And he wasn’t. As a matter of fact he probably did just what he intended to with his money–it was perfectly consistent with everything he’d ever done in his life–“


“Well, you see, feeble-mindedness is a great deal like undue influence–it implies that the property wasn’t disposed of as originally intended. The most common ground is duress–physical pressure.”


Anthony shook his head.


“Not much chance on that, I’m afraid. Undue influence sounds best to me.”


After more discussion, so technical as to be largely unintelligible to Anthony, he retained Mr. Haight as counsel. The lawyer proposed an interview with Shuttleworth, who, jointly with Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy, was executor of the will. Anthony was to come back later in the week.


It transpired that the estate consisted of approximately forty million dollars. The largest bequest to an individual was of one million, to Edward Shuttleworth, who received in addition thirty thousand a year salary as administrator of the thirty-million-dollar trust fund, left to be doled out to various charities and reform societies practically at his own discretion. The remaining nine millions were proportioned among the two cousins in Idaho and about twenty-five other beneficiaries: friends, secretaries, servants, and employees, who had, at one time or another, earned the seal of Adam Patch’s approval.


At the end of another fortnight Mr. Haight, on a retainer’s fee of fifteen thousand dollars, had begun preparations for contesting the will.


The Winter of Discontent


Before they had been two months in the little apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, it had assumed for both of them the same indefinable but almost material taint that had impregnated the gray house in Marietta. There was the odor of tobacco always–both of them smoked incessantly; it was in their clothes, their blankets, the curtains, and the ash-littered carpets. Added to this was the wretched aura of stale wine, with its inevitable suggestion of beauty gone foul and revelry remembered in disgust. About a particular set of glass goblets on the sideboard the odor was particularly noticeable, and in the main room the mahogany table was ringed with white circles where glasses had been set down upon it. There had been many parties–people broke things; people became sick in Gloria’s bathroom; people spilled wine; people made unbelievable messes of the kitchenette.


These things were a regular part of their existence. Despite the resolutions of many Mondays it was tacitly understood as the week end approached that it should be observed with some sort of unholy excitement. When Saturday came they would not discuss the matter, but would call up this person or that from among their circle of sufficiently irresponsible friends, and suggest a rendezvous. Only after the friends had gathered and Anthony had set out decanters, would he murmur casually “I guess I’ll have just one high-ball myself–“


Then they were off for two days–realizing on a wintry dawn that they had been the noisiest and most conspicuous members of the noisiest and most conspicuous party at the Boul’ Mich’, or the Club Ramee, or at other resorts much less particular about the hilarity of their clientele. They would find that they had, somehow, squandered eighty or ninety dollars, how, they never knew; they customarily attributed it to the general penury of the “friends” who had accompanied them.


It began to be not unusual for the more sincere of their friends to remonstrate with them, in the very course of a party, and to predict a sombre end for them in the loss of Gloria’s “looks” and Anthony’s “constitution.”


The story of the summarily interrupted revel in Marietta had, of course, leaked out in detail–“Muriel doesn’t mean to tell every one she knows,” said Gloria to Anthony, “but she thinks every one she tells is the only one she’s going to tell”–and, diaphanously veiled, the tale had been given a conspicuous place in Town Tattle. When the terms of Adam Patch’s will were made public and the newspapers printed items concerning Anthony’s suit, the story was beautifully rounded out–to Anthony’s infinite disparagement. They began to hear rumors about themselves from all quarters, rumors founded usually on a soupcon of truth, but overlaid with preposterous and sinister detail.


Outwardly they showed no signs of deterioration. Gloria at twenty-six was still the Gloria of twenty; her complexion a fresh damp setting for her candid eyes; her hair still a childish glory, darkening slowly from corn color to a deep russet gold; her slender body suggesting ever a nymph running and dancing through Orphic groves. Masculine eyes, dozens of them, followed her with a fascinated stare when she walked through a hotel lobby or down the aisle of a theatre. Men asked to be introduced to her, fell into prolonged states of sincere admiration, made definite love to her–for she was still a thing of exquisite and unbelievable beauty. And for his part Anthony had rather gained than lost in appearance; his face had taken on a certain intangible air of tragedy, romantically contrasted with his trim and immaculate person.


Early in the winter, when all conversation turned on the probability of America’s going into the war, when Anthony was making a desperate and sincere attempt to write, Muriel Kane arrived in New York and came immediately to see them. Like Gloria, she seemed never to change. She knew the latest slang, danced the latest dances, and talked of the latest songs and plays with all the fervor of her first season as a New York drifter. Her coyness was eternally new, eternally ineffectual; her clothes were extreme; her black hair was bobbed, now, like Gloria’s.


“I’ve come up for the midwinter prom at New Haven,” she announced, imparting her delightful secret. Though she must have been older then than any of the boys in college, she managed always to secure some sort of invitation, imagining vaguely that at the next party would occur the flirtation which was to end at the romantic altar.


“Where’ve you been?” inquired Anthony, unfailingly amused.


“I’ve been at Hot Springs. It’s been slick and peppy this fall–more men!“


“Are you in love, Muriel?”


“What do you mean ‘love’?” This was the rhetorical question of the year. “I’m going to tell you something,” she said, switching the subject abruptly. “I suppose it’s none of my business, but I think it’s time for you two to settle down.”


“Why, we are settled down.”


“Yes, you are!” she scoffed archly. “Everywhere I go I hear stories of your escapades. Let me tell you, I have an awful time sticking up for you.”


“You needn’t bother,” said Gloria coldly.


“Now, Gloria,” she protested, “you know I’m one of your best friends.”


Gloria was silent. Muriel continued:


“It’s not so much the idea of a woman drinking, but Gloria’s so pretty, and so many people know her by sight all around, that it’s naturally conspicuous–“


“What have you heard recently?” demanded Gloria, her dignity going down before her curiosity.


“Well, for instance, that that party in Marietta killed Anthony’s grandfather.”


Instantly husband and wife were tense with annoyance.


“Why, I think that’s outrageous.”


“That’s what they say,” persisted Muriel stubbornly.


Anthony paced the room. “It’s preposterous!” he declared. “The very people we take on parties shout the story around as a great joke–and eventually it gets back to us in some such form as this.”


Gloria began running her finger through a stray red-dish curl. Muriel licked her veil as she considered her next remark.


“You ought to have a baby.”


Gloria looked up wearily.


“We can’t afford it.”


“All the people in the slums have them,” said Muriel triumphantly.


Anthony and Gloria exchanged a smile. They had reached the stage of violent quarrels that were never made up, quarrels that smouldered and broke out again at intervals or died away from sheer indifference–but this visit of Muriel’s drew them temporarily together. When the discomfort under which they were living was remarked upon by a third party, it gave them the impetus to face this hostile world together. It was very seldom, now, that the impulse toward reunion sprang from within.


Anthony found himself associating his own existence with that of the apartment’s night elevator man, a pale, scraggly bearded person of about sixty, with an air of being somewhat above his station. It was probably because of this quality that he had secured the position; it made him a pathetic and memorable figure of failure. Anthony recollected, without humor, a hoary jest about the elevator man’s career being a matter of ups and downs–it was, at any rate, an enclosed life of infinite dreariness. Each time Anthony stepped into the car he waited breathlessly for the old man’s “Well, I guess we’re going to have some sunshine to-day.” Anthony thought how little rain or sunshine he would enjoy shut into that close little cage in the smoke-colored, windowless hall.


A darkling figure, he attained tragedy in leaving the life that had used him so shabbily. Three young gunmen came in one night, tied him up and left him on a pile of coal in the cellar while they went through the trunk room. When the janitor found him next morning he had collapsed from chill. He died of pneumonia four days later.


He was replaced by a glib Martinique negro, with an incongruous British accent and a tendency to be surly, whom Anthony detested. The passing of the old man had approximately the same effect on him that the kitten story had had on Gloria. He was reminded of the cruelty of all life and, in consequence, of the increasing bitterness of his own.


He was writing–and in earnest at last. He had gone to Dick and listened for a tense hour to an elucidation of those minutiae of procedure which hitherto he had rather scornfully looked down upon. He needed money immediately–he was selling bonds every month to pay their bills. Dick was frank and explicit:


“So far as articles on literary subjects in these obscure magazines go, you couldn’t make enough to pay your rent. Of course if a man has the gift of humor, or a chance at a big biography, or some specialized knowledge, he may strike it rich. But for you, fiction’s the only thing. You say you need money right away?”


“I certainly do.”


“Well, it’d be a year and a half before you’d make any money out of a novel. Try some popular short stories. And, by the way, unless they’re exceptionally brilliant they have to be cheerful and on the side of the heaviest artillery to make you any money.”


Anthony thought of Dick’s recent output, which had been appearing in a well-known monthly. It was concerned chiefly with the preposterous actions of a class of sawdust effigies who, one was assured, were New York society people, and it turned, as a rule, upon questions of the heroine’s technical purity, with mock-sociological overtones about the “mad antics of the four hundred.”


“But your stories–” exclaimed Anthony aloud, almost involuntarily.


“Oh, that’s different,” Dick asserted astoundingly. “I have a reputation, you see, so I’m expected to deal with strong themes.”


Anthony gave an interior start, realizing with this remark how much Richard Caramel had fallen off. Did he actually think that these amazing latter productions were as good as his first novel?


Anthony went back to the apartment and set to work. He found that the business of optimism was no mean task. After half a dozen futile starts he went to the public library and for a week investigated the files of a popular magazine. Then, better equipped, he accomplished his first story, “The Dictaphone of Fate.” It was founded upon one of his few remaining impressions of that six weeks in Wall Street the year before. It purported to be the sunny tale of an office boy who, quite by accident, hummed a wonderful melody into the dictaphone. The cylinder was discovered by the boss’s brother, a well-known producer of musical comedy–and then immediately lost. The body of the story was concerned with the pursuit of the missing cylinder and the eventual marriage of the noble office boy (now a successful composer) to Miss Rooney, the virtuous stenographer, who was half Joan of Arc and half Florence Nightingale.


He had gathered that this was what the magazines wanted. He offered, in his protagonists, the customary denizens of the pink-and-blue literary world, immersing them in a saccharine plot that would offend not a single stomach in Marietta. He had it typed in double space–this last as advised by a booklet, “Success as a Writer Made Easy,” by R. Meggs Widdlestien, which assured the ambitious plumber of the futility of perspiration, since after a six-lesson course he could make at least a thousand dollars a month.


After reading it to a bored Gloria and coaxing from her the immemorial remark that it was “better than a lot of stuff that gets published,” he satirically affixed the nom de plume of “Gilles de Sade,” enclosed the proper return envelope, and sent it off.


Following the gigantic labor of conception he decided to wait until he heard from the first story before beginning another. Dick had told him that he might get as much as two hundred dollars. If by any chance it did happen to be unsuited, the editor’s letter would, no doubt, give him an idea of what changes should be made.


“It is, without question, the most abominable piece of writing in existence,” said Anthony.


The editor quite conceivably agreed with him. He returned the manuscript with a rejection slip. Anthony sent it off elsewhere and began another story. The second one was called “The Little Open Doors”; it was written in three days. It concerned the occult: an estranged couple were brought together by a medium in a vaudeville show.


There were six altogether, six wretched and pitiable efforts to “write down” by a man who had never before made a consistent effort to write at all. Not one of them contained a spark of vitality, and their total yield of grace and felicity was less than that of an average newspaper column. During their circulation they collected, all told, thirty-one rejection slips, headstones for the packages that he would find lying like dead bodies at his door.


In mid-January Gloria’s father died, and they went again to Kansas City–a miserable trip, for Gloria brooded interminably, not upon her father’s death, but on her mother’s. Russel Gilbert’s affairs having been cleared up they came into possession of about three thousand dollars, and a great amount of furniture. This was in storage, for he had spent his last days in a small hotel. It was due to his death that Anthony made a new discovery concerning Gloria. On the journey East she disclosed herself, astonishingly, as a Bilphist.


“Why, Gloria,” he cried, “you don’t mean to tell me you believe that stuff.”


“Well,” she said defiantly, “why not?”


“Because it’s–it’s fantastic. You know that in every sense of the word you’re an agnostic. You’d laugh at any orthodox form of Christianity–and then you come out with the statement that you believe in some silly rule of reincarnation.”


“What if I do? I’ve heard you and Maury, and every one else for whose intellect I have the slightest respect, agree that life as it appears is utterly meaningless. But it’s always seemed to me that if I were unconsciously learning something here it might not be so meaningless.”


“You’re not learning anything–you’re just getting tired. And if you must have a faith to soften things, take up one that appeals to the reason of some one beside a lot of hysterical women. A person like you oughtn’t to accept anything unless it’s decently demonstrable.”


“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”


“Well, if you’ve got a decent mind the second has got to be qualified by the first. Any simple soul can delude himself with mental garbage.”


“I don’t care,” she held out stoutly, “and, what’s more, I’m not propounding any doctrine.”


The argument faded off, but reoccurred to Anthony several times thereafter. It was disturbing to find this old belief, evidently assimilated from her mother, inserting itself again under its immemorial disguise as an innate idea.


They reached New York in March after an expensive and ill-advised week spent in Hot Springs, and Anthony resumed his abortive attempts at fiction. As it became plainer to both of them that escape did not lie in the way of popular literature, there was a further slipping of their mutual confidence and courage. A complicated struggle went on incessantly between them. All efforts to keep down expenses died away from sheer inertia, and by March they were again using any pretext as an excuse for a “party.” With an assumption of recklessness Gloria tossed out the suggestion that they should take all their money and go on a real spree while it lasted–anything seemed better than to see it go in unsatisfactory driblets.


“Gloria, you want parties as much as I do.”


“It doesn’t matter about me. Everything I do is in accordance with my ideas: to use every minute of these years, when I’m young, in having the best time I possibly can.”


“How about after that?”


“After that I won’t care.”


“Yes, you will.”


“Well, I may–but I won’t be able to do anything about it. And I’ll have had my good time.”


“You’ll be the same then. After a fashion, we have had our good time, raised the devil, and we’re in the state of paying for it.”


Nevertheless, the money kept going. There would be two days of gaiety, two days of moroseness–an endless, almost invariable round. The sharp pull-ups, when they occurred, resulted usually in a spurt of work for Anthony, while Gloria, nervous and bored, remained in bed or else chewed abstractedly at her fingers. After a day or so of this, they would make an engagement, and then–Oh, what did it matter? This night, this glow, the cessation of anxiety and the sense that if living was not purposeful it was, at any rate, essentially romantic! Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.


Meanwhile the suit progressed slowly, with interminable examinations of witnesses and marshallings of evidence. The preliminary proceedings of settling the estate were finished. Mr. Haight saw no reason why the case should not come up for trial before summer.


Bloeckman appeared in New York late in March; he had been in England for nearly a year on matters concerned with “Films Par Excellence.” The process of general refinement was still in progress–always he dressed a little better, his intonation was mellower, and in his manner there was perceptibly more assurance that the fine things of the world were his by a natural and inalienable right. He called at the apartment, remained only an hour, during which he talked chiefly of the war, and left telling them he was coming again. On his second visit Anthony was not at home, but an absorbed and excited Gloria greeted her husband later in the afternoon.


“Anthony,” she began, “would you still object if I went in the movies?”


His whole heart hardened against the idea. As she seemed to recede from him, if only in threat, her presence became again not so much precious as desperately necessary.


“Oh, Gloria–!”


“Blockhead said he’d put me in–only if I’m ever going to do anything I’ll have to start now. They only want young women. Think of the money, Anthony!”


“For you–yes. But how about me?”


“Don’t you know that anything I have is yours too?”


“It’s such a hell of a career!” he burst out, the moral, the infinitely circumspect Anthony, “and such a hell of a bunch. And I’m so utterly tired of that fellow Bloeckman coming here and interfering. I hate theatrical things.”


“It isn’t theatrical! It’s utterly different.”


“What am I supposed to do? Chase you all over the country? Live on your money?”


“Then make some yourself.”


The conversation developed into one of the most violent quarrels they had ever had. After the ensuing reconciliation and the inevitable period of moral inertia, she realized that he had taken the life out of the project. Neither of them ever mentioned the probability that Bloeckman was by no means disinterested, but they both knew that it lay back of Anthony’s objection.


In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet–a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles–let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word “mother” and the word “kaiser” was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about–and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play.


Anthony, Maury, and Dick sent in their applications for officers’ training-camps and the two latter went about feeling strangely exalted and reproachless; they chattered to each other, like college boys, of war’s being the one excuse for, and justification of, the aristocrat, and conjured up an impossible caste of officers, to be composed, it appeared, chiefly of the more attractive alumni of three or four Eastern colleges. It seemed to Gloria that in this huge red light streaming across the nation even Anthony took on a new glamour.


The Tenth Infantry, arriving in New York from Panama, were escorted from saloon to saloon by patriotic citizens, to their great bewilderment. West Pointers began to be noticed for the first time in years, and the general impression was that everything was glorious, but not half so glorious as it was going to be pretty soon, and that everybody was a fine fellow, and every race a great race–always excepting the Germans–and in every strata of society outcasts and scapegoats had but to appear in uniform to be forgiven, cheered, and wept over by relatives, ex-friends, and utter strangers.


Unfortunately, a small and precise doctor decided that there was something the matter with Anthony’s blood-pressure. He could not conscientiously pass him for an officers’ training-camp.


The Broken Lute


Their third anniversary passed, uncelebrated, unnoticed. The season warmed in thaw, melted into hotter summer, simmered and boiled away. In July the will was offered for probate, and upon the contestation was assigned by the surrogate to trial term for trial. The matter was prolonged into September–there was difficulty in empanelling an unbiassed jury because of the moral sentiments involved. To Anthony’s disappointment a verdict was finally returned in favor of the testator, whereupon Mr. Haight caused a notice of appeal to be served upon Edward Shuttleworth.


As the summer waned Anthony and Gloria talked of the things they were to do when the money was theirs, and of the places they were to go to after the war, when they would “agree on things again,” for both of them looked forward to a time when love, springing like the phoenix from its own ashes, should be born again in its mysterious and unfathomable haunts.


He was drafted early in the fall, and the examining doctor made no mention of low blood-pressure. It was all very purposeless and sad when Anthony told Gloria one night that he wanted, above all things, to be killed. But, as always, they were sorry for each other for the wrong things at the wrong times….


They decided that for the present she was not to go with him to the Southern camp where his contingent was ordered. She would remain in New York to “use the apartment,” to save money, and to watch the progress of the case–which was pending now in the Appellate Division, of which the calendar, Mr. Haight told them, was far behind.


Almost their last conversation was a senseless quarrel about the proper division of the income–at a word either would have given it all to the other. It was typical of the muddle and confusion of their lives that on the October night when Anthony reported at the Grand Central Station for the journey to camp, she arrived only in time to catch his eye over the anxious heads of a gathered crowd. Through the dark light of the enclosed train-sheds their glances stretched across a hysterical area, foul with yellow sobbing and the smells of poor women. They must have pondered upon what they had done to one another, and each must have accused himself of drawing this sombre pattern through which they were tracing tragically and obscurely. At the last they were too far away for either to see the other’s tears.



F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned
appears in the C.C. Online Library in nine sections.


“Book Two, Chapter 3: The Broken Lute” is the sixth of nine.

Click here to read more.



* * * * *


   

The Beautiful and Damned (Book Two, Chapter II) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

05 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1900s, American, Fitzgerald (F. Scott), Novels

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
originally published by Scribner’s in 1922


Book Two, Chapter II: Symposium


Gloria had lulled Anthony’s mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain.


It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for another summer. Through a golden enervating spring they had loitered, restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria’s desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal variant among the changing colors of the sea. Out of the Pacific there rose to greet them savage rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar glorified by the polo costumes of Southhampton and Lake Forest and Newport and Palm Beach. And, as the waves met and splashed and glittered in the most placid of the bays, so they joined this group and that, and with them shifted stations, murmuring ever of those strange unsubstantial gaieties in wait just over the next green and fruitful valley.


A simple healthy leisure class it was—the best of the men not unpleasantly undergraduate—they seemed to be on a perpetual candidates list for some etherealized “Porcellian” or “Skull and Bones” extended out indefinitely into the world; the women, of more than average beauty, fragilely athletic, somewhat idiotic as hostesses but charming and infinitely decorative as guests. Sedately and gracefully they danced the steps of their selection in the balmy tea hours, accomplishing with a certain dignity the movements so horribly burlesqued by clerk and chorus girl the country over. It seemed ironic that in this lone and discredited offspring of the arts Americans should excel, unquestionably.


Having danced and splashed through a lavish spring, Anthony and Gloria found that they had spent too much money and for this must go into retirement for a certain period. There was Anthony’s “work,” they said. Almost before they knew it they were back in the gray house, more aware now that other lovers had slept there, other names had been called over the banisters, other couples had sat upon the porch steps watching the gray-green fields and the black bulk of woods beyond.


It was the same Anthony, more restless, inclined to quicken only under the stimulus of several high-balls, faintly, almost imperceptibly, apathetic toward Gloria. But Gloria—she would be twenty-four in August and was in an attractive but sincere panic about it. Six years to thirty! Had she been less in love with Anthony her sense of the flight of time would have expressed itself in a reawakened interest in other men, in a deliberate intention of extracting a transient gleam of romance from every potential lover who glanced at her with lowered brows over a shining dinner table. She said to Anthony one day:


“How I feel is that if I wanted anything I’d take it. That’s what I’ve always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”


They were bound eastward through a parched and lifeless Indiana, and she had looked up from one of her beloved moving picture magazines to find a casual conversation suddenly turned grave.


Anthony frowned out the car window. As the track crossed a country road a farmer appeared momentarily in his wagon; he was chewing on a straw and was apparently the same farmer they had passed a dozen times before, sitting in silent and malignant symbolism. As Anthony turned to Gloria his frown intensified.


“You worry me,” he objected; “I can imagine wanting another woman under certain transitory circumstances, but I can’t imagine taking her.”


“But I don’t feel that way, Anthony. I can’t be bothered resisting things I want. My way is not to want them—to want nobody but you.”


“Yet when I think that if you just happened to take a fancy to some one—”


“Oh, don’t be an idiot!” she exclaimed. “There’d be nothing casual about it. And I can’t even imagine the possibility.”


This emphatically closed the conversation. Anthony’s unfailing appreciation made her happier in his company than in any one’s else. She definitely enjoyed him—she loved him. So the summer began very much as had the one before.


There was, however, one radical change in menage. The icy-hearted Scandinavian, whose austere cooking and sardonic manner of waiting on table had so depressed Gloria, gave way to an exceedingly efficient Japanese whose name was Tanalahaka, but who confessed that he heeded any summons which included the dissyllable “Tana.”


Tana was unusually small even for a Japanese, and displayed a somewhat naive conception of himself as a man of the world. On the day of his arrival from “R. Gugimoniki, Japanese Reliable Employment Agency,” he called Anthony into his room to see the treasures of his trunk. These included a large collection of Japanese post cards, which he was all for explaining to his employer at once, individually and at great length. Among them were half a dozen of pornographic intent and plainly of American origin, though the makers had modestly omitted both their names and the form for mailing. He next brought out some of his own handiwork—a pair of American pants, which he had made himself, and two suits of solid silk underwear. He informed Anthony confidentially as to the purpose for which these latter were reserved. The next exhibit was a rather good copy of an etching of Abraham Lincoln, to whose face he had given an unmistakable Japanese cast. Last came a flute; he had made it himself but it was broken: he was going to fix it soon.


After these polite formalities, which Anthony conjectured must be native to Japan, Tana delivered a long harangue in splintered English on the relation of master and servant from which Anthony gathered that he had worked on large estates but had always quarrelled with the other servants because they were not honest. They had a great time over the word “honest,” and in fact became rather irritated with each other, because Anthony persisted stubbornly that Tana was trying to say “hornets,” and even went to the extent of buzzing in the manner of a bee and flapping his arms to imitate wings.


After three-quarters of an hour Anthony was released with the warm assurance that they would have other nice chats in which Tana would tell “how we do in my countree.”


Such was Tana’s garrulous premiere in the gray house—and he fulfilled its promise. Though he was conscientious and honorable, he was unquestionably a terrific bore. He seemed unable to control his tongue, sometimes continuing from paragraph to paragraph with a look akin to pain in his small brown eyes.


Sunday and Monday afternoons he read the comic sections of the newspapers. One cartoon which contained a facetious Japanese butler diverted him enormously, though he claimed that the protagonist, who to Anthony appeared clearly Oriental, had really an American face. The difficulty with the funny paper was that when, aided by Anthony, he had spelled out the last three pictures and assimilated their context with a concentration surely adequate for Kant’s “Critique,” he had entirely forgotten what the first pictures were about.


In the middle of June Anthony and Gloria celebrated their first anniversary by having a “date.” Anthony knocked at the door and she ran to let him in. Then they sat together on the couch calling over those names they had made for each other, new combinations of endearments ages old. Yet to this “date” was appended no attenuated good-night with its ecstasy of regret.


Later in June horror leered out at Gloria, struck at her and frightened her bright soul back half a generation. Then slowly it faded out, faded back into that impenetrable darkness whence it had come—taking relentlessly its modicum of youth.


With an infallible sense of the dramatic it chose a little railroad station in a wretched village near Portchester. The station platform lay all day bare as a prairie, exposed to the dusty yellow sun and to the glance of that most obnoxious type of countryman who lives near a metropolis and has attained its cheap smartness without its urbanity. A dozen of these yokels, red-eyed, cheerless as scarecrows, saw the incident. Dimly it passed across their confused and uncomprehending minds, taken at its broadest for a coarse joke, at its subtlest for a “shame.” Meanwhile there upon the platform a measure of brightness faded from the world.


With Eric Merriam, Anthony had been sitting over a decanter of Scotch all the hot summer afternoon, while Gloria and Constance Merriam swam and sunned themselves at the Beach Club, the latter under a striped parasol-awning, Gloria stretched sensuously upon the soft hot sand, tanning her inevitable legs. Later they had all four played with inconsequential sandwiches; then Gloria had risen, tapping Anthony’s knee with her parasol to get his attention.


“We’ve got to go, dear.”


“Now?” He looked at her unwillingly. At that moment nothing seemed of more importance than to idle on that shady porch drinking mellowed Scotch, while his host reminisced interminably on the byplay of some forgotten political campaign.


“We’ve really got to go,” repeated Gloria. “We can get a taxi to the station…. Come on, Anthony!” she commanded a bit more imperiously.


“Now see here—” Merriam, his yarn cut off, made conventional objections, meanwhile provocatively filling his guest’s glass with a high-ball that should have been sipped through ten minutes. But at Gloria’s annoyed “We really must!” Anthony drank it off, got to his feet and made an elaborate bow to his hostess.


“It seems we ‘must,'” he said, with little grace.


In a minute he was following Gloria down a garden-walk between tall rose-bushes, her parasol brushing gently the June-blooming leaves. Most inconsiderate, he thought, as they reached the road. He felt with injured naivete that Gloria should not have interrupted such innocent and harmless enjoyment. The whiskey had both soothed and clarified the restless things in his mind. It occurred to him that she had taken this same attitude several times before. Was he always to retreat from pleasant episodes at a touch of her parasol or a flicker of her eye? His unwillingness blurred to ill will, which rose within him like a resistless bubble. He kept silent, perversely inhibiting a desire to reproach her. They found a taxi in front of the Inn; rode silently to the little station….


Then Anthony knew what he wanted—to assert his will against this cool and impervious girl, to obtain with one magnificent effort a mastery that seemed infinitely desirable.


“Let’s go over to see the Barneses,” he said without looking at her. “I don’t feel like going home.”


—Mrs. Barnes, nee Rachael Jerryl, had a summer place several miles from Redgate.


“We went there day before yesterday,” she answered shortly.


“I’m sure they’d be glad to see us.” He felt that that was not a strong enough note, braced himself stubbornly, and added: “I want to see the Barneses. I haven’t any desire to go home.”


“Well, I haven’t any desire to go to the Barneses.”


Suddenly they stared at each other.


“Why, Anthony,” she said with annoyance, “this is Sunday night and they probably have guests for supper. Why we should go in at this hour—”


“Then why couldn’t we have stayed at the Merriams’?” he burst out. “Why go home when we were having a perfectly decent time? They asked us to supper.”


“They had to. Give me the money and I’ll get the railroad tickets.”


“I certainly will not! I’m in no humour for a ride in that damn hot train.”


Gloria stamped her foot on the platform.


“Anthony, you act as if you’re tight!”


“On the contrary, I’m perfectly sober.”


But his voice had slipped into a husky key and she knew with certainty that this was untrue.


“If you’re sober you’ll give me the money for the tickets.”


But it was too late to talk to him that way. In his mind was but one idea—that Gloria was being selfish, that she was always being selfish and would continue to be unless here and now he asserted himself as her master. This was the occasion of all occasions, since for a whim she had deprived him of a pleasure. His determination solidified, approached momentarily a dull and sullen hate.


“I won’t go in the train,” he said, his voice trembling a little with anger. “We’re going to the Barneses.”


“I’m not!” she cried. “If you go I’m going home alone.”


“Go on, then.”


Without a word she turned toward the ticket office; simultaneously he remembered that she had some money with her and that this was not the sort of victory he wanted, the sort he must have. He took a step after her and seized her arm.


“See here!” he muttered, “you’re not going alone!”


“I certainly am—why, Anthony!” This exclamation as she tried to pull away from him and he only tightened his grasp.


He looked at her with narrowed and malicious eyes.


“Let go!” Her cry had a quality of fierceness. “If you have any decency you’ll let go.”


“Why?” He knew why. But he took a confused and not quite confident pride in holding her there.


“I’m going home, do you understand? And you’re going to let me go!”


“No, I’m not.”


Her eyes were burning now.


“Are you going to make a scene here?”


“I say you’re not going! I’m tired of your eternal selfishness!”


“I only want to go home.” Two wrathful tears started from her eyes.


“This time you’re going to do what I say.”


Slowly her body straightened: her head went back in a gesture of infinite scorn.


“I hate you!” Her low words were expelled like venom through her clenched teeth. “Oh, let me go! Oh, I hate you!” She tried to jerk herself away but he only grasped the other arm. “I hate you! I hate you!”


At Gloria’s fury his uncertainty returned, but he felt that now he had gone too far to give in. It seemed that he had always given in and that in her heart she had despised him for it. Ah, she might hate him now, but afterward she would admire him for his dominance.


The approaching train gave out a premonitory siren that tumbled melodramatically toward them down the glistening blue tracks. Gloria tugged and strained to free herself, and words older than the Book of Genesis came to her lips.


“Oh, you brute!” she sobbed. “Oh, you brute! Oh, I hate you! Oh, you brute! Oh—”


On the station platform other prospective passengers were beginning to turn and stare; the drone of the train was audible, it increased to a clamor. Gloria’s efforts redoubled, then ceased altogether, and she stood there trembling and hot-eyed at this helpless humiliation, as the engine roared and thundered into the station.


Low, below the flood of steam and the grinding of the brakes came her voice:


“Oh, if there was one man here you couldn’t do this! You couldn’t do this! You coward! You coward, oh, you coward!”


Anthony, silent, trembling himself, gripped her rigidly, aware that faces, dozens of them, curiously unmoved, shadows of a dream, were regarding him. Then the bells distilled metallic crashes that were like physical pain, the smoke-stacks volleyed in slow acceleration at the sky, and in a moment of noise and gray gaseous turbulence the line of faces ran by, moved off, became indistinct—until suddenly there was only the sun slanting east across the tracks and a volume of sound decreasing far off like a train made out of tin thunder. He dropped her arms. He had won.


Now, if he wished, he might laugh. The test was done and he had sustained his will with violence. Let leniency walk in the wake of victory.


“We’ll hire a car here and drive back to Marietta,” he said with fine reserve.


For answer Gloria seized his hand with both of hers and raising it to her mouth bit deeply into his thumb. He scarcely noticed the pain; seeing the blood spurt he absent-mindedly drew out his handkerchief and wrapped the wound. That too was part of the triumph he supposed—it was inevitable that defeat should thus be resented—and as such was beneath notice.


She was sobbing, almost without tears, profoundly and bitterly.


“I won’t go! I won’t go! You—can’t—make—me—go! You’ve—you’ve killed any love I ever had for you, and any respect. But all that’s left in me would die before I’d move from this place. Oh, if I’d thought you’d lay your hands on me—”


“You’re going with me,” he said brutally, “if I have to carry you.”


He turned, beckoned to a taxicab, told the driver to go to Marietta. The man dismounted and swung the door open. Anthony faced his wife and said between his clenched teeth:


“Will you get in?—or will I put you in?”


With a subdued cry of infinite pain and despair she yielded herself up and got into the car.


All the long ride, through the increasing dark of twilight, she sat huddled in her side of the car, her silence broken by an occasional dry and solitary sob. Anthony stared out the window, his mind working dully on the slowly changing significance of what had occurred. Something was wrong—that last cry of Gloria’s had struck a chord which echoed posthumously and with incongruous disquiet in his heart. He must be right—yet, she seemed such a pathetic little thing now, broken and dispirited, humiliated beyond the measure of her lot to bear. The sleeves of her dress were torn; her parasol was gone, forgotten on the platform. It was a new costume, he remembered, and she had been so proud of it that very morning when they had left the house…. He began wondering if any one they knew had seen the incident. And persistently there recurred to him her cry:


“All that’s left in me would die—”


This gave him a confused and increasing worry. It fitted so well with the Gloria who lay in the corner—no longer a proud Gloria, nor any Gloria he had known. He asked himself if it were possible. While he did not believe she would cease to love him—this, of course, was unthinkable—it was yet problematical whether Gloria without her arrogance, her independence, her virginal confidence and courage, would be the girl of his glory, the radiant woman who was precious and charming because she was ineffably, triumphantly herself.


He was very drunk even then, so drunk as not to realize his own drunkenness. When they reached the gray house he went to his own room and, his mind still wrestling helplessly and sombrely with what he had done, fell into a deep stupor on his bed.


It was after one o’clock and the hall seemed extraordinarily quiet when Gloria, wide-eyed and sleepless, traversed it and pushed open the door of his room. He had been too befuddled to open the windows and the air was stale and thick with whiskey. She stood for a moment by his bed, a slender, exquisitely graceful figure in her boyish silk pajamas—then with abandon she flung herself upon him, half waking him in the frantic emotion of her embrace, dropping her warm tears upon his throat.


“Oh, Anthony!” she cried passionately, “oh, my darling, you don’t know what you did!”


Yet in the morning, coming early into her room, he knelt down by her bed and cried like a little boy, as though it was his heart that had been broken.


“It seemed, last night,” she said gravely, her fingers playing in his hair, “that all the part of me you loved, the part that was worth knowing, all the pride and fire, was gone. I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.”


Nevertheless, she was aware even then that she would forget in time and that it is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away. After that morning the incident was never mentioned and its deep wound healed with Anthony’s hand—and if there was triumph some darker force than theirs possessed it, possessed the knowledge and the victory.


Nietzschean Incident


Gloria’s independence, like all sincere and profound qualities, had begun unconsciously, but, once brought to her attention by Anthony’s fascinated discovery of it, it assumed more nearly the proportions of a formal code. From her conversation it might be assumed that all her energy and vitality went into a violent affirmation of the negative principle “Never give a damn.”


“Not for anything or anybody,” she said, “except myself and, by implication, for Anthony. That’s the rule of all life and if it weren’t I’d be that way anyhow. Nobody’d do anything for me if it didn’t gratify them to, and I’d do as little for them.”


She was on the front porch of the nicest lady in Marietta when she said this, and as she finished she gave a curious little cry and sank in a dead faint to the porch floor.


The lady brought her to and drove her home in her car. It had occurred to the estimable Gloria that she was probably with child.


She lay upon the long lounge down-stairs. Day was slipping warmly out the window, touching the late roses on the porch pillars.


“All I think of ever is that I love you,” she wailed. “I value my body because you think it’s beautiful. And this body of mine—of yours—to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It’s simply intolerable. Oh, Anthony, I’m not afraid of the pain.”


He consoled her desperately—but in vain. She continued:


“And then afterward I might have wide hips and be pale, with all my freshness gone and no radiance in my hair.”


He paced the floor with his hands in his pockets, asking:


“Is it certain?”


“I don’t know anything. I’ve always hated obstrics, or whatever you call them. I thought I’d have a child some time. But not now.”


“Well, for God’s sake don’t lie there and go to pieces.”


Her sobs lapsed. She drew down a merciful silence from the twilight which filled the room. “Turn on the lights,” she pleaded. “These days seem so short—June seemed—to—have—longer days when I was a little girl.”


The lights snapped on and it was as though blue drapes of softest silk had been dropped behind the windows and the door. Her pallor, her immobility, without grief now, or joy, awoke his sympathy.


“Do you want me to have it?” she asked listlessly.


“I’m indifferent. That is, I’m neutral. If you have it I’ll probably be glad. If you don’t—well, that’s all right too.”


“I wish you’d make up your mind one way or the other!”


“Suppose you make up your mind.”


She looked at him contemptuously, scorning to answer.


“You’d think you’d been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity.”


“What if I do!” she cried angrily. “It isn’t an indignity for them. It’s their one excuse for living. It’s the one thing they’re good for. It is an indignity for me.


“See here, Gloria, I’m with you whatever you do, but for God’s sake be a sport about it.”


“Oh, don’t fuss at me!” she wailed.


They exchanged a mute look of no particular significance but of much stress. Then Anthony took a book from the shelf and dropped into a chair.


Half an hour later her voice came out of the intense stillness that pervaded the room and hung like incense on the air.


“I’ll drive over and see Constance Merriam to-morrow.”


“All right. And I’ll go to Tarrytown and see Grampa.”


“—You see,” she added, “it isn’t that I’m afraid—of this or anything else. I’m being true to me, you know.”


“I know,” he agreed.


The Practical Men


Adam Patch, in a pious rage against the Germans, subsisted on the war news. Pin maps plastered his walls; atlases were piled deep on tables convenient to his hand together with “Photographic Histories of the World War,” official Explain-alls, and the “Personal Impressions” of war correspondents and of Privates X, Y, and Z. Several times during Anthony’s visit his grandfather’s secretary, Edward Shuttleworth, the one-time “Accomplished Gin-physician” of “Pat’s Place” in Hoboken, now shod with righteous indignation, would appear with an extra. The old man attacked each paper with untiring fury, tearing out those columns which appeared to him of sufficient pregnancy for preservation and thrusting them into one of his already bulging files.


“Well, what have you been doing?” he asked Anthony blandly. “Nothing? Well, I thought so. I’ve been intending to drive over and see you, all summer.”


“I’ve been writing. Don’t you remember the essay I sent you—the one I sold to The Florentine last winter?”


“Essay? You never sent me any essay.”


“Oh, yes, I did. We talked about it.”


Adam Patch shook his head mildly.


“Oh, no. You never sent me any essay. You may have thought you sent it but it never reached me.”


“Why, you read it, Grampa,” insisted Anthony, somewhat exasperated, “you read it and disagreed with it.”


The old man suddenly remembered, but this was made apparent only by a partial falling open of his mouth, displaying rows of gray gums. Eying Anthony with a green and ancient stare he hesitated between confessing his error and covering it up.


“So you’re writing,” he said quickly. “Well, why don’t you go over and write about these Germans? Write something real, something about what’s going on, something people can read.”


“Anybody can’t be a war correspondent,” objected Anthony. “You have to have some newspaper willing to buy your stuff. And I can’t spare the money to go over as a free-lance.”


“I’ll send you over,” suggested his grandfather surprisingly. “I’ll get you over as an authorized correspondent of any newspaper you pick out.”


Anthony recoiled from the idea—almost simultaneously he bounded toward it.


“I—don’t—know—”


He would have to leave Gloria, whose whole life yearned toward him and enfolded him. Gloria was in trouble. Oh, the thing wasn’t feasible—yet—he saw himself in khaki, leaning, as all war correspondents lean, upon a heavy stick, portfolio at shoulder—trying to look like an Englishman. “I’d like to think it over,” he, confessed. “It’s certainly very kind of you. I’ll think it over and I’ll let you know.”


Thinking it over absorbed him on the journey to New York. He had had one of those sudden flashes of illumination vouchsafed to all men who are dominated by a strong and beloved woman, which show them a world of harder men, more fiercely trained and grappling with the abstractions of thought and war. In that world the arms of Gloria would exist only as the hot embrace of a chance mistress, coolly sought and quickly forgotten….


These unfamiliar phantoms were crowding closely about him when he boarded his train for Marietta, in the Grand Central Station. The car was crowded; he secured the last vacant seat and it was only after several minutes that he gave even a casual glance to the man beside him. When he did he saw a heavy lay of jaw and nose, a curved chin and small, puffed-under eyes. In a moment he recognized Joseph Bloeckman.


Simultaneously they both half rose, were half embarrassed, and exchanged what amounted to a half handshake. Then, as though to complete the matter, they both half laughed.


“Well,” remarked Anthony without inspiration, “I haven’t seen you for a long time.” Immediately he regretted his words and started to add: “I didn’t know you lived out this way.” But Bloeckman anticipated him by asking pleasantly:


“How’s your wife? …”


“She’s very well. How’ve you been?”


“Excellent.” His tone amplified the grandeur of the word.


It seemed to Anthony that during the last year Bloeckman had grown tremendously in dignity. The boiled look was gone, he seemed “done” at last. In addition he was no longer overdressed. The inappropriate facetiousness he had affected in ties had given way to a sturdy dark pattern, and his right hand, which had formerly displayed two heavy rings, was now innocent of ornament and even without the raw glow of a manicure.


This dignity appeared also in his personality. The last aura of the successful travelling-man had faded from him, that deliberate ingratiation of which the lowest form is the bawdy joke in the Pullman smoker. One imagined that, having been fawned upon financially, he had attained aloofness; having been snubbed socially, he had acquired reticence. But whatever had given him weight instead of bulk, Anthony no longer felt a correct superiority in his presence.


“D’you remember Caramel, Richard Caramel? I believe you met him one night.”


“I remember. He was writing a book.”


“Well, he sold it to the movies. Then they had some scenario man named Jordan work on it. Well, Dick subscribes to a clipping bureau and he’s furious because about half the movie reviewers speak of the ‘power and strength of William Jordan’s “Demon Lover.”‘ Didn’t mention old Dick at all. You’d think this fellow Jordan had actually conceived and developed the thing.”


Bloeckman nodded comprehensively.


“Most of the contracts state that the original writer’s name goes into all the paid publicity. Is Caramel still writing?”


“Oh, yes. Writing hard. Short stories.”


“Well, that’s fine, that’s fine…. You on this train often?”


“About once a week. We live in Marietta.”


“Is that so? Well, well! I live near Cos Cob myself. Bought a place there only recently. We’re only five miles apart.”


“You’ll have to come and see us.” Anthony was surprised at his own courtesy. “I’m sure Gloria’d be delighted to see an old friend. Anybody’ll tell you where the house is—it’s our second season there.”


“Thank you.” Then, as though returning a complementary politeness: “How is your grandfather?”


“He’s been well. I had lunch with him to-day.”


“A great character,” said Bloeckman severely. “A fine example of an American.”


The Triumph of Lethargy


Anthony found his wife deep in the porch hammock voluptuously engaged with a lemonade and a tomato sandwich and carrying on an apparently cheery conversation with Tana upon one of Tana’s complicated themes.


“In my countree,” Anthony recognized his invariable preface, “all time—peoples—eat rice—because haven’t got. Cannot eat what no have got.” Had his nationality not been desperately apparent one would have thought he had acquired his knowledge of his native land from American primary-school geographies.


When the Oriental had been squelched and dismissed to the kitchen, Anthony turned questioningly to Gloria:


“It’s all right,” she announced, smiling broadly. “And it surprised me more than it does you.”


“There’s no doubt?”


“None! Couldn’t be!”


They rejoiced happily, gay again with reborn irresponsibility. Then he told her of his opportunity to go abroad, and that he was almost ashamed to reject it.


“What do you think? Just tell me frankly.”


“Why, Anthony!” Her eyes were startled. “Do you want to go? Without me?”


His face fell—yet he knew, with his wife’s question, that it was too late. Her arms, sweet and strangling, were around him, for he had made all such choices back in that room in the Plaza the year before. This was an anachronism from an age of such dreams.


“Gloria,” he lied, in a great burst of comprehension, “of course I don’t. I was thinking you might go as a nurse or something.” He wondered dully if his grandfather would consider this.


As she smiled he realized again how beautiful she was, a gorgeous girl of miraculous freshness and sheerly honorable eyes. She embraced his suggestion with luxurious intensity, holding it aloft like a sun of her own making and basking in its beams. She strung together an amazing synopsis for an extravaganza of martial adventure.


After supper, surfeited with the subject, she yawned. She wanted not to talk but only to read “Penrod,” stretched upon the lounge until at midnight she fell asleep. But Anthony, after he had carried her romantically up the stairs, stayed awake to brood upon the day, vaguely angry with her, vaguely dissatisfied.


“What am I going to do?” he began at breakfast. “Here we’ve been married a year and we’ve just worried around without even being efficient people of leisure.”


“Yes, you ought to do something,” she admitted, being in an agreeable and loquacious humor. This was not the first of these discussions, but as they usually developed Anthony in the role of protagonist, she had come to avoid them.


“It’s not that I have any moral compunctions about work,” he continued, “but grampa may die to-morrow and he may live for ten years. Meanwhile we’re living above our income and all we’ve got to show for it is a farmer’s car and a few clothes. We keep an apartment that we’ve only lived in three months and a little old house way off in nowhere. We’re frequently bored and yet we won’t make any effort to know any one except the same crowd who drift around California all summer wearing sport clothes and waiting for their families to die.”


“How you’ve changed!” remarked Gloria. “Once you told me you didn’t see why an American couldn’t loaf gracefully.”


“Well, damn it, I wasn’t married. And the old mind was working at top speed and now it’s going round and round like a cog-wheel with nothing to catch it. As a matter of fact I think that if I hadn’t met you I would have done something. But you make leisure so subtly attractive—”


“Oh, it’s all my fault—”


“I didn’t mean that, and you know I didn’t. But here I’m almost twenty-seven and—”


“Oh,” she interrupted in vexation, “you make me tired! Talking as though I were objecting or hindering you!”


“I was just discussing it, Gloria. Can’t I discuss—”


“I should think you’d be strong enough to settle—”


“—something with you without—”


“—your own problems without coming to me. You talk a lot about going to work. I could use more money very easily, but I’m not complaining. Whether you work or not I love you.” Her last words were gentle as fine snow upon hard ground. But for the moment neither was attending to the other—they were each engaged in polishing and perfecting his own attitude.


“I have worked—some.” This by Anthony was an imprudent bringing up of raw reserves. Gloria laughed, torn between delight and derision; she resented his sophistry as at the same time she admired his nonchalance. She would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing much was worth doing.


“Work!” she scoffed. “Oh, you sad bird! You bluffer! Work—that means a great arranging of the desk and the lights, a great sharpening of pencils, and ‘Gloria, don’t sing!’ and ‘Please keep that damn Tana away from me,’ and ‘Let me read you my opening sentence,’ and ‘I won’t be through for a long time, Gloria, so don’t stay up for me,’ and a tremendous consumption of tea or coffee. And that’s all. In just about an hour I hear the old pencil stop scratching and look over. You’ve got out a book and you’re ‘looking up’ something. Then you’re reading. Then yawns—then bed and a great tossing about because you’re all full of caffeine and can’t sleep. Two weeks later the whole performance over again.”


With much difficulty Anthony retained a scanty breech-clout of dignity.


“Now that’s a slight exaggeration. You know darn well I sold an essay to The Florentine—and it attracted a lot of attention considering the circulation of The Florentine. And what’s more, Gloria, you know I sat up till five o’clock in the morning finishing it.”


She lapsed into silence, giving him rope. And if he had not hanged himself he had certainly come to the end of it.


“At least,” he concluded feebly, “I’m perfectly willing to be a war correspondent.”


But so was Gloria. They were both willing—anxious; they assured each other of it. The evening ended on a note of tremendous sentiment, the majesty of leisure, the ill health of Adam Patch, love at any cost.


“Anthony!” she called over the banister one afternoon a week later, “there’s some one at the door.” Anthony, who had been lolling in the hammock on the sun-speckled south porch, strolled around to the front of the house. A foreign car, large and impressive, crouched like an immense and saturnine bug at the foot of the path. A man in a soft pongee suit, with cap to match, hailed him.


“Hello there, Patch. Ran over to call on you.”


It was Bloeckman; as always, infinitesimally improved, of subtler intonation, of more convincing ease.


“I’m awfully glad you did.” Anthony raised his voice to a vine-covered window: “Glor-i-a! We’ve got a visitor!”


“I’m in the tub,” wailed Gloria politely.


With a smile the two men acknowledged the triumph of her alibi.


“She’ll be down. Come round here on the side-porch. Like a drink? Gloria’s always in the tub—good third of every day.”


“Pity she doesn’t live on the Sound.”


“Can’t afford it.”


As coming from Adam Patch’s grandson, Bloeckman took this as a form of pleasantry. After fifteen minutes filled with estimable brilliancies, Gloria appeared, fresh in starched yellow, bringing atmosphere and an increase of vitality.


“I want to be a successful sensation in the movies,” she announced. “I hear that Mary Pickford makes a million dollars annually.”


“You could, you know,” said Bloeckman. “I think you’d film very well.”


“Would you let me, Anthony? If I only play unsophisticated roles?”


As the conversation continued in stilted commas, Anthony wondered that to him and Bloeckman both this girl had once been the most stimulating, the most tonic personality they had ever known—and now the three sat like overoiled machines, without conflict, without fear, without elation, heavily enamelled little figures secure beyond enjoyment in a world where death and war, dull emotion and noble savagery were covering a continent with the smoke of terror.


In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose…. Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria’s dress; the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda…. Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria’s beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death….


“… Any day next week,” Bloeckman was saying to Gloria. “Here—take this card. What they do is to give you a test of about three hundred feet of film, and they can tell pretty accurately from that.”


“How about Wednesday?”


“Wednesday’s fine. Just phone me and I’ll go around with you—”


He was on his feet, shaking hands briskly—then his car was a wraith of dust down the road. Anthony turned to his wife in bewilderment.


“Why, Gloria!”


“You don’t mind if I have a trial, Anthony. Just a trial? I’ve got to go to town Wednesday, anyhow.”


“But it’s so silly! You don’t want to go into the movies—moon around a studio all day with a lot of cheap chorus people.”


“Lot of mooning around Mary Pickford does!”


“Everybody isn’t a Mary Pickford.”


“Well, I can’t see how you’d object to my trying.”


“I do, though. I hate actors.”


“Oh, you make me tired. Do you imagine I have a very thrilling time dozing on this damn porch?”


“You wouldn’t mind if you loved me.”


“Of course I love you,” she said impatiently, making out a quick case for herself. “It’s just because I do that I hate to see you go to pieces by just lying around and saying you ought to work. Perhaps if I did go into this for a while it’d stir you up so you’d do something.”


“It’s just your craving for excitement, that’s all it is.”


“Maybe it is! It’s a perfectly natural craving, isn’t it?”


“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. If you go to the movies I’m going to Europe.”


“Well, go on then! I’m not stopping you!”


To show she was not stopping him she melted into melancholy tears. Together they marshalled the armies of sentiment—words, kisses, endearments, self-reproaches. They attained nothing. Inevitably they attained nothing. Finally, in a burst of gargantuan emotion each of them sat down and wrote a letter. Anthony’s was to his grandfather; Gloria’s was to Joseph Bloeckman. It was a triumph of lethargy.


One day early in July Anthony, returned from an afternoon in New York, called up-stairs to Gloria. Receiving no answer he guessed she was asleep and so went into the pantry for one of the little sandwiches that were always prepared for them. He found Tana seated at the kitchen table before a miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends—cigar-boxes, knives, pencils, the tops of cans, and some scraps of paper covered with elaborate figures and diagrams.


“What the devil you doing?” demanded Anthony curiously.


Tana politely grinned.


“I show you,” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “I tell—”


“You making a dog-house?”


“No, sa.” Tana grinned again. “Make typewutta.”


“Typewriter?”


“Yes, sa. I think, oh all time I think, lie in bed think ’bout typewutta.”


“So you thought you’d make one, eh?”


“Wait. I tell.”


Anthony, munching a sandwich, leaned leisurely against the sink. Tana opened and closed his mouth several times as though testing its capacity for action. Then with a rush he began:


“I been think—typewutta—has, oh, many many many many thing. Oh many many many many.” “Many keys. I see.”


“No-o? Yes-key! Many many many many lettah. Like so a-b-c.”


“Yes, you’re right.”


“Wait. I tell.” He screwed his face up in a tremendous effort to express himself: “I been think—many words—end same. Like i-n-g.”


“You bet. A whole raft of them.”


“So—I make—typewutta—quick. Not so many lettah—”


“That’s a great idea, Tana. Save time. You’ll make a fortune. Press one key and there’s ‘ing.’ Hope you work it out.”


Tana laughed disparagingly. “Wait. I tell—” “Where’s Mrs. Patch?”


“She out. Wait, I tell—” Again he screwed up his face for action. “My typewutta——”


“Where is she?”


“Here—I make.” He pointed to the miscellany of junk on the table.


“I mean Mrs. Patch.”


“She out.” Tana reassured him. “She be back five o’clock, she say.”


“Down in the village?”


“No. Went off before lunch. She go Mr. Bloeckman.”


Anthony started.


“Went out with Mr. Bloeckman?”


“She be back five.”


Without a word Anthony left the kitchen with Tana’s disconsolate “I tell” trailing after him. So this was Gloria’s idea of excitement, by God! His fists were clenched; within a moment he had worked himself up to a tremendous pitch of indignation. He went to the door and looked out; there was no car in sight and his watch stood at four minutes of five. With furious energy he dashed down to the end of the path—as far as the bend of the road a mile off he could see no car—except—but it was a farmer’s flivver. Then, in an undignified pursuit of dignity, he rushed back to the shelter of the house as quickly as he had rushed out.


Pacing up and down the living room he began an angry rehearsal of the speech he would make to her when she came in—


“So this is love!” he would begin—or no, it sounded too much like the popular phrase “So this is Paris!” He must be dignified, hurt, grieved. Anyhow—”So this is what you do when I have to go up and trot all day around the hot city on business. No wonder I can’t write! No wonder I don’t dare let you out of my sight!” He was expanding now, warming to his subject. “I’ll tell you,” he continued, “I’ll tell you—” He paused, catching a familiar ring in the words—then he realized—it was Tana’s “I tell.”


Yet Anthony neither laughed nor seemed absurd to himself. To his frantic imagination it was already six—seven—eight, and she was never coming! Bloeckman finding her bored and unhappy had persuaded her to go to California with him….


—There was a great to-do out in front, a joyous “Yoho, Anthony!” and he rose trembling, weakly happy to see her fluttering up the path. Bloeckman was following, cap in hand.


“Dearest!” she cried.


“We’ve been for the best jaunt—all over New York State.”


“I’ll have to be starting home,” said Bloeckman, almost immediately. “Wish you’d both been here when I came.”


“I’m sorry I wasn’t,” answered Anthony dryly. When he had departed Anthony hesitated. The fear was gone from his heart, yet he felt that some protest was ethically apropos. Gloria resolved his uncertainty.


“I knew you wouldn’t mind. He came just before lunch and said he had to go to Garrison on business and wouldn’t I go with him. He looked so lonesome, Anthony. And I drove his car all the way.”


Listlessly Anthony dropped into a chair, his mind tired—tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear. He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless here as he had always been. One of those personalities who, in spite of all their words, are inarticulate, he seemed to have inherited only the vast tradition of human failure—that, and the sense of death.


“I suppose I don’t care,” he answered.


One must be broad about these things, and Gloria being young, being beautiful, must have reasonable privileges. Yet it wearied him that he failed to understand.


Winter


She rolled over on her back and lay still for a moment in the great bed watching the February sun suffer one last attenuated refinement in its passage through the leaded panes into the room. For a time she had no accurate sense of her whereabouts or of the events of the day before, or the day before that; then, like a suspended pendulum, memory began to beat out its story, releasing with each swing a burdened quota of time until her life was given back to her.


She could hear, now, Anthony’s troubled breathing beside her; she could smell whiskey and cigarette smoke. She noticed that she lacked complete muscular control; when she moved it was not a sinuous motion with the resultant strain distributed easily over her body—it was a tremendous effort of her nervous system as though each time she were hypnotizing herself into performing an impossible action….


She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth to get rid of that intolerable taste; then back by the bedside listening to the rattle of Bounds’s key in the outer door.


“Wake up, Anthony!” she said sharply.


She climbed into bed beside him and closed her eyes. Almost the last thing she remembered was a conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Lacy. Mrs. Lacy had said, “Sure you don’t want us to get you a taxi?” and Anthony had replied that he guessed they could walk over to Fifth all right. Then they had both attempted, imprudently, to bow—and collapsed absurdly into a battalion of empty milk bottles just outside the door. There must have been two dozen milk bottles standing open-mouthed in the dark. She could conceive of no plausible explanation of those milk bottles. Perhaps they had been attracted by the singing in the Lacy house and had hurried over agape with wonder to see the fun. Well, they’d had the worst of it—though it seemed that she and Anthony never would get up, the perverse things rolled so….


Still, they had found a taxi. “My meter’s broken and it’ll cost you a dollar and a half to get home,” said the taxi driver. “Well,” said Anthony, “I’m young Packy McFarland and if you’ll come down here I’ll beat you till you can’t stand up.” …At that point the man had driven off without them. They must have found another taxi, for they were in the apartment….


“What time is it?” Anthony was sitting up in bed, staring at her with owlish precision.


This was obviously a rhetorical question. Gloria could think of no reason why she should be expected to know the time.


“Golly, I feel like the devil!” muttered Anthony dispassionately. Relaxing, he tumbled back upon his pillow. “Bring on your grim reaper!”


“Anthony, how’d we finally get home last night?”


“Taxi.”


“Oh!” Then, after a pause: “Did you put me to bed?”


“I don’t know. Seems to me you put me to bed. What day is it?”


“Tuesday.”


“Tuesday? I hope so. If it’s Wednesday, I’ve got to start work at that idiotic place. Supposed to be down at nine or some such ungodly hour.”


“Ask Bounds,” suggested Gloria feebly.


“Bounds!” he called.


Sprightly, sober—a voice from a world that it seemed in the past two days they had left forever, Bounds sprang in short steps down the hall and appeared in the half darkness of the door.


“What day, Bounds?”


“February the twenty-second, I think, sir.”


“I mean day of the week.”


“Tuesday, sir.” “Thanks.” After a pause: “Are you ready for breakfast, sir?”


“Yes, and Bounds, before you get it, will you make a pitcher of water, and set it here beside the bed? I’m a little thirsty.”


“Yes, sir.”


Bounds retreated in sober dignity down the hallway.


“Lincoln’s birthday,” affirmed Anthony without enthusiasm, “or St. Valentine’s or somebody’s. When did we start on this insane party?”


“Sunday night.”


“After prayers?” he suggested sardonically.


“We raced all over town in those hansoms and Maury sat up with his driver, don’t you remember? Then we came home and he tried to cook some bacon—came out of the pantry with a few blackened remains, insisting it was ‘fried to the proverbial crisp.'”


Both of them laughed, spontaneously but with some difficulty, and lying there side by side reviewed the chain of events that had ended in this rusty and chaotic dawn.


They had been in New York for almost four months, since the country had grown too cool in late October. They had given up California this year, partly because of lack of funds, partly with the idea of going abroad should this interminable war, persisting now into its second year, end during the winter. Of late their income had lost elasticity; no longer did it stretch to cover gay whims and pleasant extravagances, and Anthony had spent many puzzled and unsatisfactory hours over a densely figured pad, making remarkable budgets that left huge margins for “amusements, trips, etc.,” and trying to apportion, even approximately, their past expenditures.


He remembered a time when in going on a “party” with his two best friends, he and Maury had invariably paid more than their share of the expenses. They would buy the tickets for the theatre or squabble between themselves for the dinner check. It had seemed fitting; Dick, with his naivete and his astonishing fund of information about himself, had been a diverting, almost juvenile, figure—court jester to their royalty. But this was no longer true. It was Dick who always had money; it was Anthony who entertained within limitations—always excepting occasional wild, wine-inspired, check-cashing parties—and it was Anthony who was solemn about it next morning and told the scornful and disgusted Gloria that they’d have to be “more careful next time.”


In the two years since the publication of “The Demon Lover,” Dick had made over twenty-five thousand dollars, most of it lately, when the reward of the author of fiction had begun to swell unprecedentedly as a result of the voracious hunger of the motion pictures for plots. He received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large emolument for such a young man—he was not quite thirty—and for every one that contained enough “action” (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing) for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand. His stories varied; there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive in all of them, but none attained the personality of “The Demon Lover,” and there were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn’t it true that men who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had appealed to the many as well as to the elect?


Though Anthony and Maury disagreed, Gloria told him to go ahead and make as much money as he could—that was the only thing that counted anyhow….


Maury, a little stouter, faintly mellower, and more complaisant, had gone to work in Philadelphia. He came to New York once or twice a month and on such occasions the four of them travelled the popular routes from dinner to the theatre, thence to the Frolic or, perhaps, at the urging of the ever-curious Gloria, to one of the cellars of Greenwich Village, notorious through the furious but short-lived vogue of the “new poetry movement.”


In January, after many monologues directed at his reticent wife, Anthony determined to “get something to do,” for the winter at any rate. He wanted to please his grandfather and even, in a measure, to see how he liked it himself. He discovered during several tentative semi-social calls that employers were not interested in a young man who was only going to “try it for a few months or so.” As the grandson of Adam Patch he was received everywhere with marked courtesy, but the old man was a back number now—the heyday of his fame as first an “oppressor” and then an uplifter of the people had been during the twenty years preceding his retirement. Anthony even found several of the younger men who were under the impression that Adam Patch had been dead for some years.


Eventually Anthony went to his grandfather and asked his advice, which turned out to be that he should enter the bond business as a salesman, a tedious suggestion to Anthony, but one that in the end he determined to follow. Sheer money in deft manipulation had fascinations under all circumstances, while almost any side of manufacturing would be insufferably dull. He considered newspaper work but decided that the hours were not ordered for a married man. And he lingered over pleasant fancies of himself either as editor of a brilliant weekly of opinion, an American Mercure de France, or as scintillant producer of satiric comedy and Parisian musical revue. However, the approaches to these latter guilds seemed to be guarded by professional secrets. Men drifted into them by the devious highways of writing and acting. It was palpably impossible to get on a magazine unless you had been on one before.


So in the end he entered, by way of his grandfather’s letter, that Sanctum Americanum where sat the president of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy at his “cleared desk,” and issued therefrom employed. He was to begin work on the twenty-third of February.


In tribute to the momentous occasion this two-day revel had been planned, since, he said, after he began working he’d have to get to bed early during the week. Maury Noble had arrived from Philadelphia on a trip that had to do with seeing some man in Wall Street (whom, incidentally, he failed to see), and Richard Caramel had been half persuaded, half tricked into joining them. They had condescended to a wet and fashionable wedding on Monday afternoon, and in the evening had occurred the denouement: Gloria, going beyond her accustomed limit of four precisely timed cocktails, led them on as gay and joyous a bacchanal as they had ever known, disclosing an astonishing knowledge of ballet steps, and singing songs which she confessed had been taught her by her cook when she was innocent and seventeen. She repeated these by request at intervals throughout the evening with such frank conviviality that Anthony, far from being annoyed, was gratified at this fresh source of entertainment. The occasion was memorable in other ways—a long conversation between Maury and a defunct crab, which he was dragging around on the end of a string, as to whether the crab was fully conversant with the applications of the binomial theorem, and the aforementioned race in two hansom cabs with the sedate and impressive shadows of Fifth Avenue for audience, ending in a labyrinthine escape into the darkness of Central Park. Finally Anthony and Gloria had paid a call on some wild young married people—the Lacys—and collapsed in the empty milk bottles.


Morning now—theirs to add up the checks cashed here and there in clubs, stores, restaurants. Theirs to air the dank staleness of wine and cigarettes out of the tall blue front room, to pick up the broken glass and brush at the stained fabric of chairs and sofas; to give Bounds suits and dresses for the cleaners; finally, to take their smothery half-feverish bodies and faded depressed spirits out into the chill air of February, that life might go on and Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy obtain the services of a vigorous man at nine next morning.


“Do you remember,” called Anthony from the bathroom, “when Maury got out at the corner of One Hundred and Tenth Street and acted as a traffic cop, beckoning cars forward and motioning them back? They must have thought he was a private detective.”


After each reminiscence they both laughed inordinately, their overwrought nerves responding as acutely and janglingly to mirth as to depression.


Gloria at the mirror was wondering at the splendid color and freshness of her face—it seemed that she had never looked so well, though her stomach hurt her and her head was aching furiously.


The day passed slowly. Anthony, riding in a taxi to his broker’s to borrow money on a bond, found that he had only two dollars in his pocket. The fare would cost all of that, but he felt that on this particular afternoon he could not have endured the subway. When the taximetre reached his limit he must get out and walk.


With this his mind drifted off into one of its characteristic day-dreams…. In this dream he discovered that the metre was going too fast—the driver had dishonestly adjusted it. Calmly he reached his destination and then nonchalantly handed the man what he justly owed him. The man showed fight, but almost before his hands were up Anthony had knocked him down with one terrific blow. And when he rose Anthony quickly sidestepped and floored him definitely with a crack in the temple.


… He was in court now. The judge had fined him five dollars and he had no money. Would the court take his check? Ah, but the court did not know him. Well, he could identify himself by having them call his apartment.


… They did so. Yes, it was Mrs. Anthony Patch speaking—but how did she know that this man was her husband? How could she know? Let the police sergeant ask her if she remembered the milk bottles …


He leaned forward hurriedly and tapped at the glass. The taxi was only at Brooklyn Bridge, but the metre showed a dollar and eighty cents, and Anthony would never have omitted the ten per cent tip.


Later in the afternoon he returned to the apartment. Gloria had also been out—shopping—and was asleep, curled in a corner of the sofa with her purchase locked securely in her arms. Her face was as untroubled as a little girl’s, and the bundle that she pressed tightly to her bosom was a child’s doll, a profound and infinitely healing balm to her disturbed and childish heart.


Destiny


It was with this party, more especially with Gloria’s part in it, that a decided change began to come over their way of living. The magnificent attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet of Gloria’s it became the entire solace and justification for what they chose to do and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment’s happiness as fervently and persistently as possible.


“No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony,” she said one day. “It’d be ridiculous for me to go about pretending I felt any obligations toward the world, and as for worrying what people think about me, I simply don’t, that’s all. Since I was a little girl in dancing-school I’ve been criticised by the mothers of all the little girls who weren’t as popular as I was, and I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.”


This was because of a party in the “Boul’ Mich'” one night, where Constance Merriam had seen her as one of a highly stimulated party of four. Constance Merriam, “as an old school friend,” had gone to the trouble of inviting her to lunch next day in order to inform her how terrible it was.


“I told her I couldn’t see it,” Gloria told Anthony. “Eric Merriam is a sort of sublimated Percy Wolcott—you remember that man in Hot Springs I told you about—his idea of respecting Constance is to leave her at home with her sewing and her baby and her book, and such innocuous amusements, whenever he’s going on a party that promises to be anything but deathly dull.”


“Did you tell her that?”


“I certainly did. And I told her that what she really objected to was that I was having a better time than she was.”


Anthony applauded her. He was tremendously proud of Gloria, proud that she never failed to eclipse whatever other women might be in the party, proud that men were always glad to revel with her in great rowdy groups, without any attempt to do more than enjoy her beauty and the warmth of her vitality.


These “parties” gradually became their chief source of entertainment. Still in love, still enormously interested in each other, they yet found as spring drew near that staying at home in the evening palled on them; books were unreal; the old magic of being alone had long since vanished—instead they preferred to be bored by a stupid musical comedy, or to go to dinner with the most uninteresting of their acquaintances, so long as there would be enough cocktails to keep the conversation from becoming utterly intolerable. A scattering of younger married people who had been their friends in school or college, as well as a varied assortment of single men, began to think instinctively of them whenever color and excitement were needed, so there was scarcely a day without its phone call, its “Wondered what you were doing this evening.” Wives, as a rule, were afraid of Gloria—her facile attainment of the centre of the stage, her innocent but nevertheless disturbing way of becoming a favorite with husbands—these things drove them instinctively into an attitude of profound distrust, heightened by the fact that Gloria was largely unresponsive to any intimacy shown her by a woman.


On the appointed Wednesday in February Anthony had gone to the imposing offices of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy and listened to many vague instructions delivered by an energetic young man of about his own age, named Kahler, who wore a defiant yellow pompadour, and in announcing himself as an assistant secretary gave the impression that it was a tribute to exceptional ability.


“There’s two kinds of men here, you’ll find,” he said. “There’s the man who gets to be an assistant secretary or treasurer, gets his name on our folder here, before he’s thirty, and there’s the man who gets his name there at forty-five. The man who gets his name there at forty-five stays there the rest of his life.”


“How about the man who gets it there at thirty?” inquired Anthony politely.


“Why, he gets up here, you see.” He pointed to a list of assistant vice-presidents upon the folder. “Or maybe he gets to be president or secretary or treasurer.”


“And what about these over here?”


“Those? Oh, those are the trustees—the men with capital.”


“I see.”


“Now some people,” continued Kahler, “think that whether a man gets started early or late depends on whether he’s got a college education. But they’re wrong.”


“I see.”


“I had one; I was Buckleigh, class of nineteen-eleven, but when I came down to the Street I soon found that the things that would help me here weren’t the fancy things I learned in college. In fact, I had to get a lot of fancy stuff out of my head.”


Anthony could not help wondering what possible “fancy stuff” he had learned at Buckleigh in nineteen-eleven. An irrepressible idea that it was some sort of needlework recurred to him throughout the rest of the conversation.


“See that fellow over there?” Kahler pointed to a youngish-looking man with handsome gray hair, sitting at a desk inside a mahogany railing. “That’s Mr. Ellinger, the first vice-president. Been everywhere, seen everything; got a fine education.”


In vain did Anthony try to open his mind to the romance of finance; he could think of Mr. Ellinger only as one of the buyers of the handsome leather sets of Thackeray, Balzac, Hugo, and Gibbon that lined the walls of the big bookstores.


Through the damp and uninspiring month of March he was prepared for salesmanship. Lacking enthusiasm he was capable of viewing the turmoil and bustle that surrounded him only as a fruitless circumambient striving toward an incomprehensible goal, tangibly evidenced only by the rival mansions of Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie on Fifth Avenue. That these portentous vice-presidents and trustees should be actually the fathers of the “best men” he had known at Harvard seemed to him incongruous.


He ate in an employees’ lunch-room up-stairs with an uneasy suspicion that he was being uplifted, wondering through that first week if the dozens of young clerks, some of them alert and immaculate, and just out of college, lived in flamboyant hope of crowding onto that narrow slip of cardboard before the catastrophic thirties. The conversation that interwove with the pattern of the day’s work was all much of a piece. One discussed how Mr. Wilson had made his money, what method Mr. Hiemer had employed, and the means resorted to by Mr. Hardy. One related age-old but eternally breathless anecdotes of the fortunes stumbled on precipitously in the Street by a “butcher” or a “bartender,” or “a darn messenger boy, by golly!” and then one talked of the current gambles, and whether it was best to go out for a hundred thousand a year or be content with twenty. During the preceding year one of the assistant secretaries had invested all his savings in Bethlehem Steel. The story of his spectacular magnificence, of his haughty resignation in January, and of the triumphal palace he was now building in California, was the favorite office subject. The man’s very name had acquired a magic significance, symbolizing as he did the aspirations of all good Americans. Anecdotes were told about him—how one of the vice-presidents had advised him to sell, by golly, but he had hung on, even bought on margin, “and now look where he is!”


Such, obviously, was the stuff of life—a dizzy triumph dazzling the eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meagre wage and with the arithmetical improbability of their eventual success.


To Anthony the notion became appalling. He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom—so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.


His determination to stay in at night during the week did not survive, and a good half of the time he came to work with a splitting, sickish headache and the crowded horror of the morning subway ringing in his ears like an echo of hell.


Then, abruptly, he quit. He had remained in bed all one Monday, and late in the evening, overcome by one of those attacks of moody despair to which he periodically succumbed, he wrote and mailed a letter to Mr. Wilson, confessing that he considered himself ill adapted to the work. Gloria, coming in from the theatre with Richard Caramel, found him on the lounge, silently staring at the high ceiling, more depressed and discouraged than he had been at any time since their marriage.


She wanted him to whine. If he had she would have reproached him bitterly, for she was not a little annoyed, but he only lay there so utterly miserable that she felt sorry for him, and kneeling down she stroked his head, saying how little it mattered, how little anything mattered so long as they loved each other. It was like their first year, and Anthony, reacting to her cool hand, to her voice that was soft as breath itself upon his ear, became almost cheerful, and talked with her of his future plans. He even regretted, silently, before he went to bed that he had so hastily mailed his resignation.


“Even when everything seems rotten you can’t trust that judgment,” Gloria had said. “It’s the sum of all your judgments that counts.”


In mid-April came a letter from the real-estate agent in Marietta, encouraging them to take the gray house for another year at a slightly increased rental, and enclosing a lease made out for their signatures. For a week lease and letter lay carelessly neglected on Anthony’s desk. They had no intention of returning to Marietta. They were weary of the place, and had been bored most of the preceding summer. Besides, their car had deteriorated to a rattling mass of hypochondriacal metal, and a new one was financially inadvisable.


But because of another wild revel, enduring through four days and participated in, at one time or another, by more than a dozen people, they did sign the lease; to their utter horror they signed it and sent it, and immediately it seemed as though they heard the gray house, drably malevolent at last, licking its white chops and waiting to devour them.


“Anthony, where’s that lease?” she called in high alarm one Sunday morning, sick and sober to reality. “Where did you leave it? It was here!”


Then she knew where it was. She remembered the house party they had planned on the crest of their exuberance; she remembered a room full of men to whose less exhilarated moments she and Anthony were of no importance, and Anthony’s boast of the transcendent merit and seclusion of the gray house, that it was so isolated that it didn’t matter how much noise went on there. Then Dick, who had visited them, cried enthusiastically that it was the best little house imaginable, and that they were idiotic not to take it for another summer. It had been easy to work themselves up to a sense of how hot and deserted the city was getting, of how cool and ambrosial were the charms of Marietta. Anthony had picked up the lease and waved it wildly, found Gloria happily acquiescent, and with one last burst of garrulous decision during which all the men agreed with solemn handshakes that they would come out for a visit …


“Anthony,” she cried, “we’ve signed and sent it!”


“What?”


“The lease!”


“What the devil!”


“Oh, Anthony!” There was utter misery in her voice. For the summer, for eternity, they had built themselves a prison. It seemed to strike at the last roots of their stability. Anthony thought they might arrange it with the real-estate agent. They could no longer afford the double rent, and going to Marietta meant giving up his apartment, his reproachless apartment with the exquisite bath and the rooms for which he had bought his furniture and hangings—it was the closest to a home that he had ever had—familiar with memories of four colorful years.


But it was not arranged with the real-estate agent, nor was it arranged at all. Dispiritedly, without even any talk of making the best of it, without even Gloria’s all-sufficing “I don’t care,” they went back to the house that they now knew heeded neither youth nor love—only those austere and incommunicable memories that they could never share.


The Sinister Summer


There was a horror in the house that summer. It came with them and settled itself over the place like a sombre pall, pervasive through the lower rooms, gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs until it oppressed their very sleep. Anthony and Gloria grew to hate being there alone. Her bedroom, which had seemed so pink and young and delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and there on chair and bed, seemed now to whisper with its rustling curtains:


“Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is not the first daintiness and delicacy that has faded here under the summer suns … generations of unloved women have adorned themselves by that glass for rustic lovers who paid no heed…. Youth has come into this room in palest blue and left it in the gray cerements of despair, and through long nights many girls have lain awake where that bed stands pouring out waves of misery into the darkness.”


Gloria finally tumbled all her clothes and unguents ingloriously out of it, declaring that she had come to live with Anthony, and making the excuse that one of her screens was rotten and admitted bugs. So her room was abandoned to insensitive guests, and they dressed and slept in her husband’s chamber, which Gloria considered somehow “good,” as though Anthony’s presence there had acted as exterminator of any uneasy shadows of the past that might have hovered about its walls.


The distinction between “good” and “bad,” ordered early and summarily out of both their lives, had been reinstated in another form. Gloria insisted that any one invited to the gray house must be “good,” which, in the case of a girl, meant that she must be either simple and reproachless or, if otherwise, must possess a certain solidity and strength. Always intensely sceptical of her sex, her judgments were now concerned with the question of whether women were or were not clean. By uncleanliness she meant a variety of things, a lack of pride, a slackness in fibre and, most of all, the unmistakable aura of promiscuity.


“Women soil easily,” she said, “far more easily than men. Unless a girl’s very young and brave it’s almost impossible for her to go down-hill without a certain hysterical animality, the cunning, dirty sort of animality. A man’s different—and I suppose that’s why one of the commonest characters of romance is a man going gallantly to the devil.”


She was disposed to like many men, preferably those who gave her frank homage and unfailing entertainment—but often with a flash of insight she told Anthony that some one of his friends was merely using him, and consequently had best be left alone. Anthony customarily demurred, insisting that the accused was a “good one,” but he found that his judgment was more fallible than hers, memorably when, as it happened on several occasions, he was left with a succession of restaurant checks for which to render a solitary account.


More from their fear of solitude than from any desire to go through the fuss and bother of entertaining, they filled the house with guests every week-end, and often on through the week. The week-end parties were much the same. When the three or four men invited had arrived, drinking was more or less in order, followed by a hilarious dinner and a ride to the Cradle Beach Country Club, which they had joined because it was inexpensive, lively if not fashionable, and almost a necessity for just such occasions as these. Moreover, it was of no great moment what one did there, and so long as the Patch party were reasonably inaudible, it mattered little whether or not the social dictators of Cradle Beach saw the gay Gloria imbibing cocktails in the supper room at frequent intervals during the evening.


Saturday ended, generally, in a glamourous confusion—it proving often necessary to assist a muddled guest to bed. Sunday brought the New York papers and a quiet morning of recuperating on the porch—and Sunday afternoon meant good-by to the one or two guests who must return to the city, and a great revival of drinking among the one or two who remained until next day, concluding in a convivial if not hilarious evening.


The faithful Tana, pedagogue by nature and man of all work by profession, had returned with them. Among their more frequent guests a tradition had sprung up about him. Maury Noble remarked one afternoon that his real name was Tannenbaum, and that he was a German agent kept in this country to disseminate Teutonic propaganda through Westchester County, and, after that, mysterious letters began to arrive from Philadelphia addressed to the bewildered Oriental as “Lt. Emile Tannenbaum,” containing a few cryptic messages signed “General Staff,” and adorned with an atmospheric double column of facetious Japanese. Anthony always handed them to Tana without a smile; hours afterward the recipient could be found puzzling over them in the kitchen and declaring earnestly that the perpendicular symbols were not Japanese, nor anything resembling Japanese.


Gloria had taken a strong dislike to the man ever since the day when, returning unexpectedly from the village, she had discovered him reclining on Anthony’s bed, puzzling out a newspaper. It was the instinct of all servants to be fond of Anthony and to detest Gloria, and Tana was no exception to the rule. But he was thoroughly afraid of her and made plain his aversion only in his moodier moments by subtly addressing Anthony with remarks intended for her ear:


“What Miz Pats want dinner?” he would say, looking at his master. Or else he would comment about the bitter selfishness of “‘Merican peoples” in such manner that there was no doubt who were the “peoples” referred to.


But they dared not dismiss him. Such a step would have been abhorrent to their inertia. They endured Tana as they endured ill weather and sickness of the body and the estimable Will of God—as they endured all things, even themselves.


In Darkness


One sultry afternoon late in July Richard Caramel telephoned from New York that he and Maury were coming out, bringing a friend with them. They arrived about five, a little drunk, accompanied by a small, stocky man of thirty-five, whom they introduced as Mr. Joe Hull, one of the best fellows that Anthony and Gloria had ever met.


Joe Hull had a yellow beard continually fighting through his skin and a low voice which varied between basso profundo and a husky whisper. Anthony, carrying Maury’s suitcase up-stairs, followed into the room and carefully closed the door.


“Who is this fellow?” he demanded.


Maury chuckled enthusiastically.


“Who, Hull? Oh, he’s all right. He’s a good one.”


“Yes, but who is he?”


“Hull? He’s just a good fellow. He’s a prince.” His laughter redoubled, culminating in a succession of pleasant catlike grins. Anthony hesitated between a smile and a frown.


“He looks sort of funny to me. Weird-looking clothes”—he paused—”I’ve got a sneaking suspicion you two picked him up somewhere last night.”


“Ridiculous,” declared Maury. “Why, I’ve known him all my life.” However, as he capped this statement with another series of chuckles, Anthony was impelled to remark: “The devil you have!”


Later, just before dinner, while Maury and Dick were conversing uproariously, with Joe Hull listening in silence as he sipped his drink, Gloria drew Anthony into the dining room:


“I don’t like this man Hull,” she said. “I wish he’d use Tana’s bathtub.”


“I can’t very well ask him to.”


“Well, I don’t want him in ours.”


“He seems to be a simple soul.”


“He’s got on white shoes that look like gloves. I can see his toes right through them. Uh! Who is he, anyway?”


“You’ve got me.”


“Well, I think they’ve got their nerve to bring him out here. This isn’t a Sailor’s Rescue Home!”


“They were tight when they phoned. Maury said they’ve been on a party since yesterday afternoon.”


Gloria shook her head angrily, and saying no more returned to the porch. Anthony saw that she was trying to forget her uncertainty and devote herself to enjoying the evening.


It had been a tropical day, and even into late twilight the heat-waves emanating from the dry road were quivering faintly like undulating panes of isinglass. The sky was cloudless, but far beyond the woods in the direction of the Sound a faint and persistent rolling had commenced. When Tana announced dinner the men, at a word from Gloria, remained coatless and went inside.


Maury began a song, which they accomplished in harmony during the first course. It had two lines and was sung to a popular air called Daisy Dear. The lines were:


“The—pan-ic—has—come—over us, So ha-a-as—the moral decline!”


Each rendition was greeted with bursts of enthusiasm and prolonged applause.


“Cheer up, Gloria!” suggested Maury. “You seem the least bit depressed.”


“I’m not,” she lied.


“Here, Tannenbaum!” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve filled you a drink. Come on!”


Gloria tried to stay his arm.


“Please don’t, Maury!”


“Why not? Maybe he’ll play the flute for us after dinner. Here, Tana.”


Tana, grinning, bore the glass away to the kitchen. In a few moments Maury gave him another.


“Cheer up, Gloria!” he cried. “For Heaven’s sakes everybody, cheer up Gloria.”


“Dearest, have another drink,” counselled Anthony.


“Do, please!”


“Cheer up, Gloria,” said Joe Hull easily.


Gloria winced at this uncalled-for use of her first name, and glanced around to see if any one else had noticed it. The word coming so glibly from the lips of a man to whom she had taken an inordinate dislike repelled her. A moment later she noticed that Joe Hull had given Tana another drink, and her anger increased, heightened somewhat from the effects of the alcohol.


“—and once,” Maury was saying, “Peter Granby and I went into a Turkish bath in Boston, about two o’clock at night. There was no one there but the proprietor, and we jammed him into a closet and locked the door. Then a fella came in and wanted a Turkish bath. Thought we were the rubbers, by golly! Well, we just picked him up and tossed him into the pool with all his clothes on. Then we dragged him out and laid him on a slab and slapped him until he was black and blue. ‘Not so rough, fellows!’ he’d say in a little squeaky voice, ‘please! …'”


—Was this Maury? thought Gloria. From any one else the story would have amused her, but from Maury, the infinitely appreciative, the apotheosis of tact and consideration….


“The—pan-ic—has—come—over us, So ha-a-as—”


A drum of thunder from outside drowned out the rest of the song; Gloria shivered and tried to empty her glass, but the first taste nauseated her, and she set it down. Dinner was over and they all marched into the big room, bearing several bottles and decanters. Some one had closed the porch door to keep out the wind, and in consequence circular tentacles of cigar smoke were twisting already upon the heavy air.


“Paging Lieutenant Tannenbaum!” Again it was the changeling Maury. “Bring us the flute!”


Anthony and Maury rushed into the kitchen; Richard Caramel started the phonograph and approached Gloria.


“Dance with your well-known cousin.”


“I don’t want to dance.”


“Then I’m going to carry you around.”


As though he were doing something of overpowering importance, he picked her up in his fat little arms and started trotting gravely about the room.


“Set me down, Dick! I’m dizzy!” she insisted.


He dumped her in a bouncing bundle on the couch, and rushed off to the kitchen, shouting “Tana! Tana!”


Then, without warning, she felt other arms around her, felt herself lifted from the lounge. Joe Hull had picked her up and was trying, drunkenly, to imitate Dick.


“Put me down!” she said sharply.


His maudlin laugh, and the sight of that prickly yellow jaw close to her face stirred her to intolerable disgust.


“At once!”


“The—pan-ic—” he began, but got no further, for Gloria’s hand swung around swiftly and caught him in the cheek. At this he all at once let go of her, and she fell to the floor, her shoulder hitting the table a glancing blow in transit….


Then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tana in his white coat reeling about supported by Maury. Into his flute he was blowing a weird blend of sound that was known, cried Anthony, as the Japanese train-song. Joe Hull had found a box of candles and was juggling them, yelling “One down!” every time he missed, and Dick was dancing by himself in a fascinated whirl around and about the room. It appeared to her that everything in the room was staggering in grotesque fourth-dimensional gyrations through intersecting planes of hazy blue.


Outside, the storm had come up amazingly—the lulls within were filled with the scrape of the tall bushes against the house and the roaring of the rain on the tin roof of the kitchen. The lightning was interminable, letting down thick drips of thunder like pig iron from the heart of a white-hot furnace. Gloria could see that the rain was spitting in at three of the windows—but she could not move to shut them….


… She was in the hall. She had said good night but no one had heard or heeded her. It seemed for an instant as though something had looked down over the head of the banister, but she could not have gone back into the living room—better madness than the madness of that clamor…. Up-stairs she fumbled for the electric switch and missed it in the darkness; a roomful of lightning showed her the button plainly on the wall. But when the impenetrable black shut down, it again eluded her fumbling fingers, so she slipped off her dress and petticoat and threw herself weakly on the dry side of the half-drenched bed.


She shut her eyes. From down-stairs arose the babel of the drinkers, punctured suddenly by a tinkling shiver of broken glass, and then another, and by a soaring fragment of unsteady, irregular song….


She lay there for something over two hours—so she calculated afterward, sheerly by piecing together the bits of time. She was conscious, even aware, after a long while that the noise down-stairs had lessened, and that the storm was moving off westward, throwing back lingering showers of sound that fell, heavy and lifeless as her soul, into the soggy fields. This was succeeded by a slow, reluctant scattering of the rain and wind, until there was nothing outside her windows but a gentle dripping and the swishing play of a cluster of wet vine against the sill. She was in a state half-way between sleeping and waking, with neither condition predominant … and she was harassed by a desire to rid herself of a weight pressing down upon her breast. She felt that if she could cry the weight would be lifted, and forcing the lids of her eyes together she tried to raise a lump in her throat … to no avail….


Drip! Drip! Drip! The sound was not unpleasant—like spring, like a cool rain of her childhood, that made cheerful mud in her back yard and watered the tiny garden she had dug with miniature rake and spade and hoe. Drip—dri-ip! It was like days when the rain came out of yellow skies that melted just before twilight and shot one radiant shaft of sunlight diagonally down the heavens into the damp green trees. So cool, so clear and clean—and her mother there at the centre of the world, at the centre of the rain, safe and dry and strong. She wanted her mother now, and her mother was dead, beyond sight and touch forever. And this weight was pressing on her, pressing on her—oh, it pressed on her so!


She became rigid. Some one had come to the door and was standing regarding her, very quiet except for a slight swaying motion. She could see the outline of his figure distinct against some indistinguishable light. There was no sound anywhere, only a great persuasive silence—even the dripping had ceased … only this figure, swaying, swaying in the doorway, an indiscernible and subtly menacing terror, a personality filthy under its varnish, like smallpox spots under a layer of powder. Yet her tired heart, beating until it shook her breasts, made her sure that there was still life in her, desperately shaken, threatened….


The minute or succession of minutes prolonged itself interminably, and a swimming blur began to form before her eyes, which tried with childish persistence to pierce the gloom in the direction of the door. In another instant it seemed that some unimaginable force would shatter her out of existence … and then the figure in the doorway—it was Hull, she saw, Hull—turned deliberately and, still slightly swaying, moved back and off, as if absorbed into that incomprehensible light that had given him dimension.


Blood rushed back into her limbs, blood and life together. With a start of energy she sat upright, shifting her body until her feet touched the floor over the side of the bed. She knew what she must do—now, now, before it was too late. She must go out into this cool damp, out, away, to feel the wet swish of the grass around her feet and the fresh moisture on her forehead. Mechanically she struggled into her clothes, groping in the dark of the closet for a hat. She must go from this house where the thing hovered that pressed upon her bosom, or else made itself into stray, swaying figures in the gloom.


In a panic she fumbled clumsily at her coat, found the sleeve just as she heard Anthony’s footsteps on the lower stair. She dared not wait; he might not let her go, and even Anthony was part of this weight, part of this evil house and the sombre darkness that was growing up about it….


Through the hall then … and down the back stairs, hearing Anthony’s voice in the bedroom she had just left—


“Gloria! Gloria!”


But she had reached the kitchen now, passed out through the doorway into the night. A hundred drops, startled by a flare of wind from a dripping tree, scattered on her and she pressed them gladly to her face with hot hands.


“Gloria! Gloria!”


The voice was infinitely remote, muffed and made plaintive by the walls she had just left. She rounded the house and started down the front path toward the road, almost exultant as she turned into it, and followed the carpet of short grass alongside, moving with caution in the intense darkness.


“Gloria!”


She broke into a run, stumbled over the segment of a branch twisted off by the wind. The voice was outside the house now. Anthony, finding the bedroom deserted, had come onto the porch. But this thing was driving her forward; it was back there with Anthony, and she must go on in her flight under this dim and oppressive heaven, forcing herself through the silence ahead as though it were a tangible barrier before her.


She had gone some distance along the barely discernible road, probably half a mile, passed a single deserted barn that loomed up, black and foreboding, the only building of any sort between the gray house and Marietta; then she turned the fork, where the road entered the wood and ran between two high walls of leaves and branches that nearly touched overhead. She noticed suddenly a thin, longitudinal gleam of silver upon the road before her, like a bright sword half embedded in the mud. As she came closer she gave a little cry of satisfaction—it was a wagon-rut full of water, and glancing heavenward she saw a light rift of sky and knew that the moon was out.


“Gloria!”


She started violently. Anthony was not two hundred feet behind her.


“Gloria, wait for me!”


She shut her lips tightly to keep from screaming, and increased her gait. Before she had gone another hundred yards the woods disappeared, rolling back like a dark stocking from the leg of the road. Three minutes’ walk ahead of her, suspended in the now high and limitless air, she saw a thin interlacing of attenuated gleams and glitters, centred in a regular undulation on some one invisible point. Abruptly she knew where she would go. That was the great cascade of wires that rose high over the river, like the legs of a gigantic spider whose eye was the little green light in the switch-house, and ran with the railroad bridge in the direction of the station. The station! There would be the train to take her away.


“Gloria, it’s me! It’s Anthony! Gloria, I won’t try to stop you! For God’s sake, where are you?”


She made no answer but began to run, keeping on the high side of the road and leaping the gleaming puddles—dimensionless pools of thin, unsubstantial gold. Turning sharply to the left, she followed a narrow wagon road, serving to avoid a dark body on the ground. She looked up as an owl hooted mournfully from a solitary tree. Just ahead of her she could see the trestle that led to the railroad bridge and the steps mounting up to it. The station lay across the river.


Another sounds startled her, the melancholy siren of an approaching train, and almost simultaneously, a repeated call, thin now and far away.


“Gloria! Gloria!”


Anthony must have followed the main road. She laughed with a sort of malicious cunning at having eluded him; she could spare the time to wait until the train went by.


The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory roar and clamor, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the bridge—it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them, which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid, the temperature of warm blood…. The clicking blended suddenly with itself in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside. Then it contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.


Silence crept down again over the wet country; the faint dripping resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria stirring her out of the trance-like torpor which the passage of the train had wrought. She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it was something she had always wanted to do, and that she would have the added excitement of traversing the yard-wide plank that ran beside the tracks over the river.


There! This was better. She was at the top now and could see the lands about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was lifted now—the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom. This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.


“Gloria!”


Like a startled child she scurried along the plank, hopping, skipping, jumping, with an ecstatic sense of her own physical lightness. Let him come now—she no longer feared that, only she must first reach the station, because that was part of the game. She was happy. Her hat, snatched off, was clutched tightly in her hand, and her short curled hair bobbed up and down about her ears. She had thought she would never feel so young again, but this was her night, her world. Triumphantly she laughed as she left the plank, and reaching the wooden platform flung herself down happily beside an iron roof-post.


“Here I am!” she called, gay as the dawn in her elation. “Here I am, Anthony, dear—old, worried Anthony.”


“Gloria!” He reached the platform, ran toward her. “Are you all right?” Coming up he knelt and took her in his arms.


“Yes.”


“What was the matter? Why did you leave?” he queried anxiously.


“I had to—there was something”—she paused and a flicker of uneasiness lashed at her mind—”there was something sitting on me—here.” She put her hand on her breast. “I had to go out and get away from it.”


“What do you mean by ‘something’?”


“I don’t know—that man Hull—”


“Did he bother you?”


“He came to my door, drunk. I think I’d gotten sort of crazy by that time.”


“Gloria, dearest—”


Wearily she laid her head upon his shoulder.


“Let’s go back,” he suggested.


She shivered.


“Uh! No, I couldn’t. It’d come and sit on me again.” Her voice rose to a cry that hung plaintive on the darkness. “That thing—”


“There—there,” he soothed her, pulling her close to him. “We won’t do anything you don’t want to do. What do you want to do? Just sit here?”


“I want—I want to go away.”


“Where?”


“Oh—anywhere.”


“By golly, Gloria,” he cried, “you’re still tight!”


“No, I’m not. I haven’t been, all evening. I went up-stairs about, oh, I don’t know, about half an hour after dinner …Ouch!”


He had inadvertently touched her right shoulder.


“It hurts me. I hurt it some way. I don’t know—somebody picked me up and dropped me.”


“Gloria, come home. It’s late and damp.”


“I can’t,” she wailed. “Oh, Anthony, don’t ask me to! I will to-morrow. You go home and I’ll wait here for a train. I’ll go to a hotel—”


“I’ll go with you.”


“No, I don’t want you with me. I want to be alone. I want to sleep—oh, I want to sleep. And then to-morrow, when you’ve got all the smell of whiskey and cigarettes out of the house, and everything straight, and Hull is gone, then I’ll come home. If I went now, that thing—oh—!” She covered her eyes with her hand; Anthony saw the futility of trying to persuade her.


“I was all sober when you left,” he said. “Dick was asleep on the lounge and Maury and I were having a discussion. That fellow Hull had wandered off somewhere. Then I began to realize I hadn’t seen you for several hours, so I went up-stairs—”


He broke off as a salutatory “Hello, there!” boomed suddenly out of the darkness. Gloria sprang to her feet and he did likewise.


“It’s Maury’s voice,” she cried excitedly. “If it’s Hull with him, keep them away, keep them away!”


“Who’s there?” Anthony called.


“Just Dick and Maury,” returned two voices reassuringly.


“Where’s Hull?”


“He’s in bed. Passed out.”


Their figures appeared dimly on the platform.


“What the devil are you and Gloria doing here?” inquired Richard Caramel with sleepy bewilderment.


“What are you two doing here?”


Maury laughed.


“Damned if I know. We followed you, and had the deuce of a time doing it. I heard you out on the porch yelling for Gloria, so I woke up the Caramel here and got it through his head, with some difficulty, that if there was a search-party we’d better be on it. He slowed me up by sitting down in the road at intervals and asking me what it was all about. We tracked you by the pleasant scent of Canadian Club.”


There was a rattle of nervous laughter under the low train-shed.


“How did you track us, really?”


“Well, we followed along down the road and then we suddenly lost you. Seems you turned off at a wagontrail. After a while somebody hailed us and asked us if we were looking for a young girl. Well, we came up and found it was a little shivering old man, sitting on a fallen tree like somebody in a fairy tale. ‘She turned down here,’ he said, ‘and most steppud on me, goin’ somewhere in an awful hustle, and then a fella in short golfin’ pants come runnin’ along and went after her. He throwed me this.’ The old fellow had a dollar bill he was waving around—”


“Oh, the poor old man!” ejaculated Gloria, moved.


“I threw him another and we went on, though he asked us to stay and tell him what it was all about.”


“Poor old man,” repeated Gloria dismally.


Dick sat down sleepily on a box.


“And now what?” he inquired in the tone of stoic resignation.


“Gloria’s upset,” explained Anthony. “She and I are going to the city by the next train.”


Maury in the darkness had pulled a time-table from his pocket.


“Strike a match.”


A tiny flare leaped out of the opaque background illuminating the four faces, grotesque and unfamiliar here in the open night.


“Let’s see. Two, two-thirty—no, that’s evening. By gad, you won’t get a train till five-thirty.”


Anthony hesitated.


“Well,” he muttered uncertainly, “we’ve decided to stay here and wait for it. You two might as well go back and sleep.”


“You go, too, Anthony,” urged Gloria; “I want you to have some sleep, dear. You’ve been as pale as a ghost all day.”


“Why, you little idiot!”


Dick yawned.


“Very well. You stay, we stay.”


He walked out from under the shed and surveyed the heavens.


“Rather a nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.”


“Let’s see.” Gloria moved after him and the other two followed her. “Let’s sit out here,” she suggested. “I like it much better.”


Anthony and Dick converted a long box into a backrest and found a board dry enough for Gloria to sit on. Anthony dropped down beside her and with some effort Dick hoisted himself onto an apple-barrel near them.


“Tana went to sleep in the porch hammock,” he remarked. “We carried him in and left him next to the kitchen stove to dry. He was drenched to the skin.”


“That awful little man!” sighed Gloria.


“How do you do!” The voice, sonorous and funereal, had come from above, and they looked up startled to find that in some manner Maury had climbed to the roof of the shed, where he sat dangling his feet over the edge, outlined as a shadowy and fantastic gargoyle against the now brilliant sky.


“It must be for such occasions as this,” he began softly, his words having the effect of floating down from an immense height and settling softly upon his auditors, “that the righteous of the land decorate the railroads with bill-boards asserting in red and yellow that ‘Jesus Christ is God,’ placing them, appropriately enough, next to announcements that ‘Gunter’s Whiskey is Good.'”


There was gentle laughter and the three below kept their heads tilted upward.


“I think I shall tell you the story of my education,” continued Maury, “under these sardonic constellations.”


“Do! Please!”


“Shall I, really?”


They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the white smiling moon.


“Well,” he began, “as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred ‘Now I lay me’s.'”


“Throw down a cigarette,” murmured some one.


A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian command:


“Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies.”


Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice resumed:


“I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I believed that because a man cried out ‘My God!’ when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flint-locks and cried to me: ‘There’s the real thing. These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.’ They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them ‘clever’.


“And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets, listening—to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I learned a little of beauty—enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth—and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition….


“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.


“The transition was subtle—the thing had lain in wait for me for some time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one. With me? No—I didn’t try to seduce the janitor’s wife—nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite passion that does the business—it is the dress that passion wears. I became bored—that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand?—I was grown.” He paused. “End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two.”


Three quietly active points of light showed the location of his listeners. Gloria was now half sitting, half lying, in Anthony’s lap. His arm was around her so tightly that she could hear the beating of his heart. Richard Caramel, perched on the apple-barrel, from time to time stirred and gave off a faint grunt.


“I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression—but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism—and behold! Jones was still in my way. I did not think—I was a battle-ground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.


“I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life—and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.


“But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you—it’s a wall that an active you runs up against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”


He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation—after a moment he yawned and resumed.


“I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a ghastly dissatisfaction at being used in spite of myself for some inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware—if, indeed, there was an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The schoolmistress seemed to be saying, ‘We’re going to play football and nothing but football. If you don’t want to play football you can’t play at all—’


“What was I to do—the playtime was so short!


“You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire?—I don’t think I did that. I was a great deal too warm for that, and too alive.


“For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature—nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher—or, let us say, her more amusing—though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And, actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white—in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity.


“We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper—and presently the breed of the leper is the salt of the earth. If any one can find any lesson in that, let him stand forth.”


“There’s only one lesson to be learned from life, anyway,” interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.


“What’s that?” demanded Maury sharply.


“That there’s no lesson to be learned from life.”


After a short silence Maury said:


“Young Gloria, the beautiful and merciless lady, first looked at the world with the fundamental sophistication I have struggled to attain, that Anthony never will attain, that Dick will never fully understand.”


There was a disgusted groan from the apple-barrel. Anthony, grown accustomed to the dark, could see plainly the flash of Richard Caramel’s yellow eye and the look of resentment on his face as he cried:


“You’re crazy! By your own statement I should have attained some experience by trying.”


“Trying what?” cried Maury fiercely. “Trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary years for one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube—”


“Have you?”


Maury paused, and in his answer, when it came, there was a measure of weariness, a bitter overnote that lingered for a moment in those three minds before it floated up and off like a bubble bound for the moon.


“Not I,” he said softly. “I was born tired—but with the quality of mother wit, the gift of women like Gloria—to that, for all my talking and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I have added not one jot.”


In the distance a deep sound that had been audible for some moments identified itself by a plaintive mooing like that of a gigantic cow and by the pearly spot of a headlight apparent half a mile away. It was a steam-driven train this time, rumbling and groaning, and as it tumbled by with a monstrous complaint it sent a shower of sparks and cinders over the platform.


“Not one jot!” Again Maury’s voice dropped down to them as from a great height. “What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe—why, intelligence never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.


“I could quote you the philosophy of the hour—but, for all we know, fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation that’s absorbing the intellectuals to-day, the triumph of Christ over Anatole France—” He hesitated, and then added: “But all I know—the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself—these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else.


“Well, I started to tell you of my education, didn’t I? But I learned nothing, you see, very little even about myself. And if I had I should die with my lips shut and the guard on my fountain pen—as the wisest men have done since—oh, since the failure of a certain matter—a strange matter, by the way. It concerned some sceptics who thought they were far-sighted, just as you and I. Let me tell you about them by way of an evening prayer before you all drop off to sleep.


“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:


“‘Let’s join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let’s persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We’ll include all the most preposterous old wives’ tales now current. We’ll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he’ll become a byword for laughter the world over—and we’ll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he’ll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there’ll be no more nonsense in the world.


“‘Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.’


“So the men did, and they died.


“But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”


When he concluded there was no comment. Some damp languor sleeping on the air of night seemed to have bewitched them all.


“As I said, I started on the story of my education. But my high-balls are dead and the night’s almost over, and soon there’ll be an awful jabbering going on everywhere, in the trees and the houses, and the two little stores over there behind the station, and there’ll be a great running up and down upon the earth for a few hours—Well,” he concluded with a laugh, “thank God we four can all pass to our eternal rest knowing we’ve left the world a little better for having lived in it.”


A breeze sprang up, blowing with it faint wisps of life which flattened against the sky.


“Your remarks grow rambling and inconclusive,” said Anthony sleepily. “You expected one of those miracles of illumination by which you say your most brilliant and pregnant things in exactly the setting that should provoke the ideal symposium. Meanwhile Gloria has shown her far-sighted detachment by falling asleep—I can tell that by the fact that she has managed to concentrate her entire weight upon my broken body.”


“Have I bored you?” inquired Maury, looking down with some concern.


“No, you have disappointed us. You’ve shot a lot of arrows but did you shoot any birds?”


“I leave the birds to Dick,” said Maury hurriedly. “I speak erratically, in disassociated fragments.”


“You can get no rise from me,” muttered Dick. “My mind is full of any number of material things. I want a warm bath too much to worry about the importance of my work or what proportion of us are pathetic figures.”


Dawn made itself felt in a gathering whiteness eastward over the river and an intermittent cheeping in the near-by trees.


“Quarter to five,” sighed Dick; “almost another hour to wait. Look! Two gone.” He was pointing to Anthony, whose lids had sagged over his eyes. “Sleep of the Patch family—”


But in another five minutes, despite the amplifying cheeps and chirrups, his own head had fallen forward, nodded down twice, thrice….


Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house. He was sorry for no one now—on Monday morning there would be his business, and later there would be a girl of another class whose whole life he was; these were the things nearest his heart. In the strangeness of the brightening day it seemed presumptuous that with this feeble, broken instrument of his mind he had ever tried to think.


There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm—the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp “all aboard!” and a bell ringing. Confusedly Maury saw eyes in the milk train staring curiously up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether he should go to the city with her, then another clamor and she was gone and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor truck, carolling hoarsely at the summer morning.



F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned
appears in the C.C. Online Library in nine sections.


“Book Two, Chapter 2: Symposium” is the fifth of nine.

Click here to read more.



* * * * *


   

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