Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (48 page)

“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 hail 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!”

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
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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.

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 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.

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.

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 you 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 prebellum 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.