The Beautiful and Damned Part 2

ANTHONY: Seven.

MAURY:_(His eyes narrowing--not unpleasantly, but to express a faint disapproval)_ Drove me crazy the other day.

ANTHONY: How?

MAURY: That habit of taking notes.

ANTHONY: Me, too. Seems I'd said something night before that he considered material but he'd forgotten it--so he had at me. He'd say "Can't you try to concentrate?" And I'd say "You bore me to tears. How do I remember?"

_(MAURY laughs noiselessly, by a sort of bland and appreciative widening of his features.)_

MAURY: d.i.c.k doesn't necessarily see more than any one else. He merely can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.

ANTHONY: That rather impressive talent----

MAURY: Oh, yes. Impressive!

ANTHONY: And energy--ambitious, well-directed energy. He's so entertaining--he's so tremendously stimulating and exciting. Often there's something breathless in being with him.

MAURY: Oh, yes. _(Silence, and then:)_

ANTHONY: _(With his thin, somewhat uncertain face at its most convinced) _But not indomitable energy. Some day, bit by bit, it'll blow away, and his rather impressive talent with it, and leave only a wisp of a man, fretful and egotistic and garrulous.

MAURY: _(With laughter)_ Here we sit vowing to each other that little d.i.c.k sees less deeply into things than we do. And I'll bet he feels a measure of superiority on his side--creative mind over merely critical mind and all that.

ANTHONY: Oh, yes. But he's wrong. He's inclined to fall for a million silly enthusiasms. If it wasn't that he's absorbed in realism and therefore has to adopt the garments of the cynic he'd be--he'd be credulous as a college religious leader. He's an idealist. Oh, yes. He thinks he's not, because he's rejected Christianity. Remember him in college? just swallow every writer whole, one after another, ideas, technic, and characters, Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, each one as easily as the last.

MAURY:_(Still considering his own last observation)_ I remember.

ANTHONY: It's true. Natural born fetich-wors.h.i.+pper. Take art--

MAURY: Let's order. He'll be--

ANTHONY: Sure. Let's order. I told him--

MAURY: Here he comes. Look--he's going to b.u.mp that waiter. _(He lifts his finger as a signal--lifts it as though it were a soft and friendly claw.)_ Here y'are, Caramel.

A NEW VOICE: _(Fiercely)_ h.e.l.lo, Maury. h.e.l.lo, Anthony Comstock Patch.

How is old Adam's grandson? Debutantes still after you, eh?

_In person_ RICHARD CARAMEL _is short and fair--he is to be bald at thirty-five. He has yellowish eyes--one of them startlingly clear, the other opaque as a muddy pool--and a bulging brow like a funny-paper baby. He bulges in other places--his paunch bulges, prophetically, his words have an air of bulging from his mouth, even his dinner coat pockets bulge, as though from contamination, with a dog-eared collection of time-tables, programmes, and miscellaneous sc.r.a.ps--on these he takes his notes with great s.c.r.e.w.i.n.gs up of his unmatched yellow eyes and motions of silence with his disengaged left hand._

_When he reaches the table he shakes hands with ANTHONY and MAURY. He is one of those men who invariably shake hands, even with people whom they have seen an hour before._

ANTHONY: h.e.l.lo, Caramel. Glad you're here. We needed a comic relief.

MAURY: You're late. Been racing the postman down the block? We've been clawing over your character.

d.i.c.k: (_Fixing_ ANTHONY _eagerly with the bright eye_) What'd you say?

Tell me and I'll write it down. Cut three thousand words out of Part One this afternoon.

MAURY: n.o.ble aesthete. And I poured alcohol into my stomach.

d.i.c.k: I don't doubt it. I bet you two have been sitting here for an hour talking about liquor.

ANTHONY: We never pa.s.s out, my beardless boy.

MAURY: We never go home with ladies we meet when we're lit.

ANTHONY: All in our parties are characterized by a certain haughty distinction.

d.i.c.k: The particularly silly sort who boast about being "tanks"! Trouble is you're both in the eighteenth century. School of the Old English Squire. Drink quietly until you roll under the table. Never have a good time. Oh, no, that isn't done at all.

ANTHONY: This from Chapter Six, I'll bet.

d.i.c.k: Going to the theatre?

MAURY: Yes. We intend to spend the evening doing some deep thinking over of life's problems. The thing is tersely called "The Woman." I presume that she will "pay."

ANTHONY: My G.o.d! Is that what it is? Let's go to the Follies again.

MAURY: I'm tired of it. I've seen it three times. (_To d.i.c.k:_) The first time, we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When we came back we entered the wrong theatre.

ANTHONY: Had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we thought were in our seats.

d.i.c.k: (_As though talking to himself_) I think--that when I've done another novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories, I'll do a musical comedy.

MAURY: I know--with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And all the critics will groan and grunt about "Dear old Pinafore." And I shall go on s.h.i.+ning as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

d.i.c.k: (_Pompously_) Art isn't meaningless.

MAURY: It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

ANTHONY: In other words, d.i.c.k, you're playing before a grand stand peopled with ghosts.

MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.

ANTHONY:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I'd feel that it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.

d.i.c.k: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that sophistic rot?

ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so.

MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals--Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don't complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means ent.i.tled by their intelligences.

(_Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone on to say is lost for all time._)

NIGHT