The Beautiful and Damned Part 71

"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? n.o.body 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 d.a.m.ned 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 s.h.i.+ny-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 gla.s.s 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.

Finis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sertion 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 G.o.d made in the image of man, and before which that G.o.d, 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 d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sed 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, a.s.similated 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 pa.s.ses 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.