Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (25 page)

“Of course! Would you value your Keats letter if the signature was traced over to make it last longer? It’s just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the foot-steps of women with hoop-skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they’ve made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. It hasn’t any right to look so prosperous. It might care enough for Lee to drop a brick now and then. How many of these—these
animals”—
she waved her hand around—“get anything from this, for all the histories and guide-books and restorations in existence? How many of them who think that, at best, appreciation is talking in undertones and walking on tiptoes would even come here if it was any trouble? I want it to smell of magnolias instead of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee’s boots crunched on. There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses—bound for dust—mortal—”

A small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana-peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the Potomac.

Simultaneously with the fall of Liege, Anthony and Gloria arrived in New York. In retrospect the six weeks seemed miraculously happy. They had found to a great extent, as most young couples find in some measure, that they possessed in common many fixed ideas and curiosities and odd quirks of mind; they were essentially companionable.

But it had been a struggle to keep many of their conversations on the level of discussions. Arguments were fatal to Gloria’s disposition. She had all her life been associated either with her mental inferiors or with men who, under the almost hostile intimidation of her beauty, had not dared to contradict her; naturally, then, it irritated her when Anthony emerged from the state in which her pronouncements were an infallible and ultimate decision.

He failed to realize, at first, that this was the result partly of her “female” education and partly of her beauty, and he was inclined to include her with her entire sex as curiously and definitely limited. It maddened him to find she had no sense of justice. But he discovered that, when a subject did interest her, her brain tired less quickly than his. What he chiefly missed in her mind was the pedantic teleology—the sense of order and accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously correlated piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while that such a quality in her would have been incongruous.

Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each other’s hearts. The day they left the hotel in Coronado she sat down on one of the beds while they were packing, and began to weep bitterly.

“Dearest—” His arms were around her; he pulled her head down upon his shoulder. “What is it, my own Gloria? Tell me.”

“We’re going away,” she sobbed. “Oh, Anthony, it’s sort of the first place we’ve lived together. Our two little beds here—side by side—they’ll be always waiting for us, and we’re never coming back to ’em any more.”

She was tearing at his heart as she always could. Sentiment came over him, rushed into his eyes.

“Gloria, why, we’re going on to another room. And two other little beds. We’re going to be together all our lives.”

Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.

“But it won’t be—like our two beds—ever again. Everywhere we go and move on and change, something’s lost—something’s left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat anything, and I’ve been so yours, here ”

He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond any criticism of her sentiment, a wise grasping of the minute, if only an indulgence of her desire to cry—Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams, extracting poignancy from the memorable things of life and youth.

Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station with the tickets he found her asleep on one of the beds, her arm curled about a black object which he could not at first identify. Coming closer he found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new one, nor clean one, but her face, tear-stained, was pressed against it, and he understood her ancient and most honorable message. There was almost ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him, shy but well aware of her own nicety of imagination.

With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two things, it seemed to Anthony that they lay somewhere near the heart of love.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ—and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing—oh, that eternal hand!—a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

And this time with Gloria and Anthony, this first year of marriage, and the gray house caught them in that stage when the organ-grinder was slowly undergoing his inevitable metamorphosis. She was twenty-three; he was twenty-six.

The gray house was, at first, of sheerly pastoral intent. They lived impatiently in Anthony’s apartment for the first fortnight after the return from California, in a stifled atmosphere of open trunks, too many callers, and the eternal laundry-bags. They discussed with their friends the stupendous problem of their future. Dick and Maury would sit with them agreeing solemnly, almost thoughtfully, as Anthony ran through his list of what they “ought” to do, and where they “ought” to live.

“I’d like to take Gloria abroad,” he complained, “except for this damn war—and next to that I’d sort of like to have a place in the country, somewhere near New York, of course, where I could write—or whatever I decide to do.”

Gloria laughed.

“Isn’t he cute?” she required of Maury. “‘Whatever he decides to do!’ But what am
I
going to do if he works? Maury, will you take me around if Anthony works?”

“Anyway, I’m not going to work yet,” said Anthony quickly.

It was vaguely understood between them that on some misty day he would enter a sort of glorified diplomatic service and be envied by princes and prime ministers for his beautiful wife.

“Well,” said Gloria helplessly, “I’m sure I don’t know. We talk and talk and never get anywhere, and we ask all our friends and they just answer the way we want ’em to. I wish somebody’d take care of us.”

“Why don’t you go out to—out to Greenwich or something?” suggested Richard Caramel.

“I’d like that,” said Gloria, brightening. “Do you think we could get a house there?”

Dick shrugged his shoulders and Maury laughed.

“You two amuse me,” he said. “Of all the unpractical people! As soon as a place is mentioned you expect us to pull great piles of photographs out of our pockets showing the different styles of architecture available in bungalows.”

“That’s just what I don’t want,” wailed Gloria, “a hot stuffy bungalow, with a lot of babies next door and their father cutting the grass in his shirt-sleeves—”

“For Heaven’s sake, Gloria,” interrupted Maury, “nobody wants to lock you up in a bungalow. Who in God’s name brought bungalows into the conversation? But you’ll never get a place anywhere unless you go out and hunt for it.”

“Go where? You say ‘go out and hunt for it,’ but where?”

With dignity Maury waved his hand paw-like about the room.

“Out anywhere. Out in the country. There’re lots of places.”

“Thanks.”

“Look here!” Richard Caramel brought his yellow eye rakishly into play. “The trouble with you two is that you’re all disorganized. Do you know anything about New York State? Shut up, Anthony, I’m talking to Gloria.”

“Well,” she admitted finally, “I’ve been to two or three house-parties in Portchester and around in Connecticut—but, of course, that isn’t in New York State, is it? And neither is Morristown,” she finished with drowsy irrelevance.

There was a shout of laughter.

“Oh, Lord!” cried Dick, “‘neither is Morristown!’ No, and neither is Santa Barbara, Gloria. Now listen. To begin with, unless you have a fortune there’s no use considering any place like Newport or Southampton or Tuxedo. They’re out of the question.”

They all agreed to this solemnly.

“And personally I hate New Jersey. Then, of course, there’s upper New York, above Tuxedo.”

“Too cold,” said Gloria briefly. “I was there once in an automobile.”

“Well, it seems to me there’re a lot of towns like Rye between New York and Greenwich where you could buy a little gray house of some—”

Gloria leaped at the phrase triumphantly. For the first time since their return East she knew what she wanted.

“Oh,
yes!”
she cried. ”Oh,
yes!
that’s it: a little gray house with sort of white around and a whole lot of swamp-maples just as brown and gold as an October picture in a gallery. Where can we find one?”

“Unfortunately, I’ve mislaid my list of little gray houses with swamp-maples around them—but I’ll try to find it. Meanwhile you take a piece of paper and write down the names of seven possible towns. And every day this week you take a trip to one of those towns.”

“Oh, gosh!” protested Gloria, collapsing mentally, “why won’t you do it for us? I hate trains.”

“Well, hire a car, and—”

Gloria yawned.

“I’m tired of discussing it. Seems to me all we do is talk about where to live.”

“My exquisite wife wearies of thought,” remarked Anthony ironically. “She must have a tomato sandwich to stimulate her jaded nerves. Let’s go out to tea.”

As the unfortunate upshot of this conversation, they took Dick’s advice literally, and two days later went out to Rye, where they wandered around with an irritated real-estate agent, like bewildered babes in the wood. They were shown houses at a hundred a month which closely adjoined other houses at a hundred a month; they were shown isolated houses to which they invariably took violent dislikes, though they submitted weakly to the agent’s desire that they “look at that stove—some stove!” and to a great shaking of door-posts and tapping of walls, intended evidently to show that the house would not immediately collapse, no matter how convincingly it gave that impression. They gazed through windows into interiors furnished either “commercially” with slab-like chairs and unyielding settees, or “home-like” with the melancholy bric-à-brac of other summers—crossed tennis-rackets, fit-form couches, and depressing Gibson girls.
ⁿ
With a feeling of guilt they looked at a few really nice houses, aloof, dignified, and cool—at three hundred a month. They went away from Rye thanking the real-estate agent very much indeed.

On the crowded train back to New York the seat behind was occupiedby a super-respirating Latin whose last few meals had obviously been composed entirely of garlic. They reached the apartment gratefully, almost hysterically, and Gloria rushed for a hot bath in the reproachless bathroom. So far as the question of a future abode was concerned both of them were incapacitated for a week.

The matter eventually worked itself out with unhoped-for romance. Anthony ran into the living-room one afternoon fairly radiating “the idea.”

“I’ve got it,” he was exclaiming as though he had just caught a mouse. “We’ll get a car.”

“Gee whiz! Haven’t we got troubles enough taking care of ourselves?”

“Give me a second to explain, can’t you? Just let’s leave our stuff with Dick and just pile a couple of suitcases in our car, the one we’re going to buy—we’ll have to have one in the country anyway—and just start out in the direction of New Haven. You see, as we get out of commuting distance from New York, the rents’ll get cheaper, and as soon as we find a house we want we’ll just settle down.”

By his frequent and soothing interpolation of the word “just” he aroused her lethargic enthusiasm. Strutting violently about the room, he simulated a dynamic and irresistible efficiency. “We’ll buy a car to-morrow”

Life, limping after imagination’s ten-league boots, saw them out of town a week later in a cheap but sparkling new roadster, saw them through the chaotic unintelligible Bronx, then over a wide murky district which alternated cheerless blue-green wastes with suburbs of tremendous and sordid activity. They left New York at eleven and it was well past a hot and beatific noon when they moved rakishly through Pelham.

“These aren’t towns,” said Gloria scornfully, “these are just city blocks plumped down coldly into waste acres. I imagine all the men here have their mustaches stained from drinking their coffee too quickly in the morning.”

“And play pinochle on the commuting trains.”

“What’s pinochle?”

“Don’t be so literal. How should I know? But it sounds as though they ought to play it.”

“I like it. It sounds as if it were something where you sort of cracked your knuckles or something.... Let me drive.”

Anthony looked at her suspiciously.

“You swear you’re a good driver?”

“Since I was fourteen.”

He stopped the car cautiously at the side of the road and they changed seats. Then with a horrible grinding noise the car was put in gear, Gloria adding an accompaniment of laughter which seemed to Anthony disquieting and in the worst possible taste.

“Here we go!” she yelled. “Whoo-oop!”

Their heads snapped back like marionettes on a single wire as the car leaped ahead and curved retchingly about a standing milk-wagon, whose driver stood up on his seat and bellowed after them. In the immemorial tradition of the road Anthony retorted with a few brief epigrams as to the grossness of the milk-delivering profession. He cut his remarks short, however, and turned to Gloria with the growing conviction that he had made a grave mistake in relinquishing control and that Gloria was a driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.