Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (24 page)

With a leap Anthony was out of the bed and standing tense beside it.

“Who’s there?” he cried in an awful voice.

Gloria lay very still, wide awake now and engrossed not so much in the rattling as in the rigid breathless figure whose voice had reached from the bedside into that ominous dark.

The sound stopped; the room was quiet as before—then Anthony pouring words in at the telephone.

“Some one just tried to get into the room! ...

“There’s some one at the window!” His voice was emphatic now, faintly terrified.

“All right! Hurry!” He hung up the receiver; stood motionless.

... There was a rush and commotion at the door, a knocking—Anthony went to open it upon an excited night-clerk with three bell-boys grouped staring behind him. Between thumb and finger the night-clerk held a wet pen with the threat of a weapon; one of the bell-boys had seized a telephone directory and was looking at it sheepishly. Simultaneously the group was joined by the hastily summoned house-detective, and as one man they surged into the room.

Lights sprang on with a click. Gathering a piece of sheet about her Gloria dove away from sight, shutting her eyes to keep out the horror of this unpremeditated visitation. There was no vestige of an idea in her stricken sensibilities save that her Anthony was at grievous fault.

... The night-clerk was speaking from the window, his tone half of the servant, half of the teacher reproving a schoolboy.

“Nobody out there,” he declared conclusively; “my golly, nobody could be out there. This here’s a sheer fall to the street of fifty feet. It was the wind you heard, tugging at the blind.”

“Oh.”

Then she was sorry for him. She wanted only to comfort him and draw him back tenderly into her arms, to tell them to go away because the thing their presence connotated was odious. Yet she could not raise her head for shame. She heard a broken sentence, apologies, conventions of the employee and one unrestrained snicker from a bell-boy.

“I’ve been nervous as the devil all evening,” Anthony was saying; “somehow that noise just shook me—I was only about half awake.”

“Sure, I understand,” said the night-clerk with comfortable tact; “been that way myself.”

The door closed; the lights snapped out; Anthony crossed the floor quietly and crept into bed. Gloria, feigning to be heavy with sleep, gave a quiet little sigh and slipped into his arms.

“What was it, dear?”

“Nothing,” he answered, his voice still shaken; “I thought there was somebody at the window, so I looked out, but I couldn’t see any one and the noise kept up, so I phoned down-stairs. Sorry if I disturbed you, but I’m awfully darn nervous to-night.”

Catching the lie, she gave an interior start—he had not gone to the window, nor near the window. He had stood by the bed and then sent in his call of fear.

“Oh,” she said—and then: “I’m so sleepy.”

For an hour they lay awake side by side, Gloria with her eyes shut so tight that blue moons formed and revolved against backgrounds of deepest mauve, Anthony staring blindly into the darkness overhead.

After many weeks it came gradually out into the light, to be laughed and joked at. They made a tradition to fit over it—when—ever that overpowering terror of the night attacked Anthony, she would put her arms about him and croon, soft as a song:

“I’ll protect my Anthony. Oh, nobody’s ever going to harm my Anthony!”

He would laugh as though it were a jest they played for their mutual amusement, but to Gloria it was never quite a jest. It was, at first, a keen disappointment; later, it was one of the times when she controlled her temper.

The management of Gloria’s temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost the primary duty of Anthony’s day. It must be done just so—by this much silence, by that much pressure, by this much yielding, by that much force. It was in her angers with their attendant cruelties that her inordinate egotism chiefly displayed itself. Because she was brave, because she was “spoiled,” because of her outrageous and commendable independence of judgment, and finally because of her arrogant consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself, Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean. This, of course, with overtones of profound sentiment.

There was, for example, her stomach. She was used to certain dishes, and she had a strong conviction that she could not possibly eat anything else. There must be a lemonade and a tomato sandwich late in the morning, then a light lunch with a stuffed tomato. Not only did she require food from a selection of a dozen dishes, but in addition this food must be prepared in just a certain way. One of the most annoying half hours of the first fortnight occurred in Los Angeles, when an unhappy waiter brought her a tomato stuffed with chicken salad instead of celery.

“We always serve it that way, madame,” he quavered to the gray eyes that regarded him wrathfully.

Gloria made no answer, but when the waiter had turned discreetly away she banged both fists upon the table until the china and silver rattled.

“Poor Gloria!” laughed Anthony unwittingly, “you can’t get what you want ever, can you?”

“I can’t eat
stuff
!
”
she flared up.

“I’ll call back the waiter.”

“I don’t want you to! He doesn’t know anything, the darn
fool
!
”

“Well, it isn’t the hotel’s fault. Either send it back, forget it, or be a sport and eat it.”

“Shut up!” she said succinctly.

“Why take it out on me?”

“Oh, I’m
not,”
she wailed, “but I simply
can’t
eat it.”

Anthony subsided helplessly.

“We’ll go somewhere else,” he suggested.

“I don’t
want
to go anywhere else. I’m tired of being trotted around to a dozen cafés and not getting
one thing
fit to eat.”

“When did we go around to a dozen cafés?”

“You’d
have
to in
this
town,” insisted Gloria with ready sophistry.

Anthony, bewildered, tried another tack.

“Why don’t you try to eat it? It can’t be as bad as you think.”

“Just—because—I—don’t—like—chicken!”

She picked up her fork and began poking contemptuously at the tomato, and Anthony expected her to begin flinging the stuffings in all directions. He was sure that she was approximately as angry as she had ever been—for an instant he had detected a spark of hate directed as much toward him as toward any one else—and Gloria angry was, for the present, unapproachable.

Then, surprisingly, he saw that she had tentatively raised the fork to her lips and tasted the chicken salad. Her frown had not abated and he stared at her anxiously, making no comment and daring scarcely to breathe. She tasted another forkful—in another moment she was eating. With difficulty Anthony restrained a chuckle; when at length he spoke his words had no possible connection with chicken salad.

This incident, with variations, ran like a lugubrious fugue through the first year of marriage; always it left Anthony baffled, irritated, and depressed. But another rough brushing of temperaments, a question of laundry-bags, he found even more annoying as it ended inevitably in a decisive defeat for him.

One afternoon in Coronado, where they made the longest stay of their trip, more than three weeks, Gloria was arraying herself brilliantly for tea. Anthony, who had been down-stairs listening to the latest rumor-bulletins of war in Europe, entered the room, kissed the back of her powdered neck, and went to his dresser. After a great pulling out and pushing in of drawers, evidently unsatisfactory, he turned around to the Unfinished Masterpiece.

“Got any handkerchiefs, Gloria?” he asked.

Gloria shook her golden head.

“Not a one. I’m using one of yours.”

“The last one, I deduce.” He laughed dryly.

“Is it?” She applied an emphatic though very delicate contour to her lips.

“Isn’t the laundry back?”

“I don’t know.”

Anthony hesitated—then, with sudden discernment, opened the closet door. His suspicions were verified. On the hook provided hung the blue bag furnished by the hotel. This was full of his clothes—he had put them there himself. The floor beneath it was littered with an astonishing mass of finery—lingerie, stockings, dresses, nightgowns, and pajamas—most of it scarcely worn but all of it coming indubitably under the general heading of Gloria’s laundry.

He stood holding the closet door open.

“Why, Gloria!”

“What?”

The lip line was being erased and corrected according to some mysterious perspective; not a finger trembled as she manipulated the lip-stick, not a glance wavered in his direction. It was a triumph of concentration.

“Haven’t you ever sent out the laundry?”

“Is it there?”

“It most certainly is.”

“Well, I guess I haven’t, then.”

“Gloria,” began Anthony, sitting down on the bed and trying to catch her mirrored eyes, “you’re a nice fellow, you are! I’ve sent it out every time it’s been sent since we left New York, and over a week ago you promised you’d do it for a change. All you’d have to do would be to cram your own junk into that bag and ring for the chambermaid.”

“Oh, why fuss about the laundry?” exclaimed Gloria petulantly, “I’ll take care of it.”

“I haven’t fussed about it. I’d just as soon divide the bother with you, but when we run out of handkerchiefs it’s darn near time something’s done.”

Anthony considered that he was being extraordinarily logical. But Gloria, unimpressed, put away her cosmetics and casually offered him her back.

“Hook me up,” she suggested; “Anthony, dearest, I forgot all about it. I meant to, honestly, and I will to-day Don’t be cross with your sweetheart.”

What could Anthony do then but draw her down upon his knee and kiss a shade of color from her lips.

“But I don’t mind,” she murmured with a smile, radiant and magnanimous. “You can kiss all the paint off my lips any time you want.”

They went down to tea. They bought some handkerchiefs in a notion store near by. All was forgotten.

But two days later Anthony looked in the closet and saw the bag still hung limp upon its hook and that the gay and vivid pile on the floor had increased surprisingly in height.

“Gloria!” he cried.

“Oh—” Her voice was full of real distress. Despairingly Anthony went to the phone and called the chambermaid.

“It seems to me,” he said impatiently, “that you expect me to be some sort of French valet to you.”

Gloria laughed, so infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile. Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress of the situation—with an air of injured righteousness she went emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into the bag. Anthony watched her—ashamed of himself.

“There!” she said, implying that her fingers had been worked to the bone by a brutal taskmaster.

He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her an object-lesson and that the matter was closed, but on the contrary it was merely beginning. Laundry pile followed laundry pile—at long intervals ; dearth of handkerchief followed dearth of handkerchief—at short ones; not to mention dearth of sock, of shirt, of everything. And Anthony found at length that either he must send it out himself or go through the increasingly unpleasant ordeal of a verbal battle with Gloria.

On their way East they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor—it seemed a pasty-pale and self-conscious city. The second day they made an ill-advised trip to General Lee’s old home at Arlington.

The bus which bore them was crowded with hot, unprosperous people, and Anthony, intimate to Gloria, felt a storm brewing. It broke at the Zoo, where the party stopped for ten minutes. The Zoo, it seemed, smelt of monkeys. Anthony laughed; Gloria called down the curse of Heaven upon monkeys, including in her malevolence all the passengers of the bus and their perspiring offspring who had hied themselves monkey-ward.

Eventually the bus moved on to Arlington. There it met other busses and immediately a swarm of women and children were leaving a trail of peanut-shells through the halls of General Lee and crowding at length into the room where he was married. On the wall of this room a pleasing sign announced in large red letters “Ladies’ Toilet.” At this final blow Gloria broke down.

“I think it’s perfectly terrible!” she said furiously, “the idea of letting these people come here! And of encouraging them by making these houses show-places.”

“Well,” objected Anthony, “if they weren’t kept up they’d go to pieces.”

“What if they did!” she exclaimed as they sought the wide pillared porch. “Do you think they’ve left a breath of 1860 here? This has become a thing of 1914.”

“Don’t you want to preserve old things?”

“But you
can’t,
Anthony. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they’re preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. That graveyard at Tarrytown, for instance. The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that too. Sleepy Hollow’s gone; Washington Irving’s dead and his books are rotting in our estimation year by year—then let the graveyard rot too, as it should, as all things should. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.”

“So you think that just as a time goes to pieces its houses ought to go too?”