Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (54 page)

“It does to me. There’s nothing I’d violate certain principles for.”

“But how do you know when you’re violating them? You have to guess at things just like most people do. You have to apportion the values when you look back. You finish up the portrait then—paint in the details and shadows.”

Dick shook his head with a lofty stubbornness.

“Same old futile cynic,” he said, “It’s just a mode of being sorry for yourself. You don’t do anything—so nothing matters.”

“Oh, I’m quite capable of self-pity,” admitted Anthony, “nor am I claiming that I’m getting as much fun out of life as you are.”

“You say—at least you used to—that happiness is the only thing worth while in life. Do you think you’re any happier for being a pessimist?”

Anthony grunted savagely. His pleasure in the conversation began to wane. He was nervous and craving for a drink.

“My golly!” he cried, “where do you live? I can’t keep walking forever.”

“Your endurance is all mental, eh?” returned Dick sharply. “Well, I live right here.”

He turned in at the apartment-house on Forty-ninth Street, and a few minutes later they were in a large new room with an open fireplace and four walls lined with books. A colored butler served them gin rickeys, and an hour vanished politely with the mellow shortening of their drinks and the glow of a light mid-autumn fire.

“The arts are very old,” said Anthony after a while. With a few glasses the tension of his nerves relaxed and he found that he could think again.

“Which art?”

“All of them. Poetry is dying first. It’ll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that’s never been beautiful before. Beauty, as the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can’t go any further—except in the novel, perhaps.”

Dick interrupted him impatiently:

“You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’
^y
Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature.”

Anthony tried to remember what he had read lately of Richard Caramel’s. There was “A Shave-tail in France,” a novel called “The Land of Strong Men,” and several dozen short stories, which were even worse. It had become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard Caramel with a smile of scorn. “Mr.” Richard Caramel, they called him. His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies. As the fashion in books shifted he was becoming almost a byword of contempt.

While Anthony was thinking this, Dick had got to his feet and seemed to be hesitating at an avowal.

“I’ve gathered quite a few books,” he said suddenly.

“So I see.”

“I’ve made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new. I don’t mean the usual Longfellow-Whittier thing—in fact, most of it’s modern.”

He stepped to one of the walls and, seeing that it was expected of him, Anthony arose and followed.

“Look!”

Under a printed tag
Americana
he displayed six long rows of books, beautifully bound and, obviously, carefully chosen.

“And here are the contemporary novelists.”

Then Anthony saw the joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard Caramel—“The Demon Lover,” true enough ... but also seven others that were execrably awful, without sincerity or grace.

Unwillingly Anthony glanced at Dick’s face and caught a slight uncertainty there.

“I’ve put my own books in, of course,” said Richard Caramel hastily, “though one or two of them are uneven—I’m afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don’t believe in false modesty. Of course some of the critics haven’t paid so much attention to me since I’ve been established—but, after all, it’s not the critics that count. They’re just sheep.”

For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard Caramel continued:

“My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of America—because of my New York novel.”

“Yes,” Anthony managed to muster, “I suppose there’s a good deal in what you say.”

He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He knew that he would have changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then—can a man disparage his life-work so readily? ...

—And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great hittings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary, unmatched eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged concentration—Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.

As winter approached it seemed that a sort of madness seized upon Anthony. He awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria could feel him trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria’s soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out all night, as he did several times, she not only failed to be sorry but even felt a measure of dismal relief Next day he would be faintly repentant, and would remark in a gruff, hang-dog fashion that he guessed he was drinking a little too much.

For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair that had been in his apartment, lost in a sort of stupor—even his interest in reading his favorite books seemed to have departed, and though an incessant bickering went on between husband and wife, the one subject upon which they ever really conversed was the progress of the will case. What Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, what she expected that great gift of money to bring about, is difficult to imagine. She was being bent by her environment into a grotesque similitude of a housewife. She who until three years before had never made coffee, prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked a great deal in the afternoons, and in the evenings she read—books, magazines, anything she found at hand. If now she wished for a child, even a child of the Anthony who sought her bed blind drunk, she neither said so nor gave any show or sign of interest in children. It is doubtful if she could have made it clear to any one what it was she wanted, or indeed what there was to want—a lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind some impregnable inhibition born and coexistent with her beauty.

One afternoon when the snow was dirty again along Riverside Drive, Gloria, who had been to the grocer’s, entered the apartment to find Anthony pacing the floor in a state of aggravated nervousness. The feverish eyes he turned on her were traced with tiny pink lines that reminded her of rivers on a map. For a moment she received the impression that he was suddenly and definitely old.

“Have you any money?” he inquired of her precipitately.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Money! Money! Can’t you speak English?”

She paid no attention but brushed by him and into the pantry to put the bacon and eggs in the ice-box. When his drinking had been unusually excessive he was invariably in a whining mood. This time he followed her and, standing in the pantry door, persisted in his question.

“You heard what I said. Have you any money?”

She turned about from the ice-box and faced him.

“Why, Anthony, you must be crazy! You know I haven’t any money—except a dollar in change.”

He executed an abrupt about-face and returned to the living-room, where he renewed his pacing. It was evident that he had something portentous on his mind—he quite obviously wanted to be asked what was the matter. Joining him a moment later she sat upon the long lounge and began taking down her hair. It was no longer bobbed, and it had changed in the last year from a rich gold dusted with red to an unresplendent light brown. She had brought some shampoo soap and meant to wash it now; she had considered putting a bottle of peroxide into the rinsing water.

“—Well?” she implied silently.

“That darn bank!” he quavered. “They’ve had my account for over ten years—ten
years.
Well, it seems they’ve got some autocratic rule that you have to keep over five hundred dollars there or they won’t carry you. They wrote me a letter a few months ago and told me I’d been running too low. Once I gave out two bum checks—remember? that night in Reisenweber’s?—but I made them good the very next day. Well, I promised old Halloran—he’s the manager, the greedy Mick—that I’d watch out. And I thought I was going all right; I kept up the stubs in my check-book pretty regular. Well, I went in there to-day to cash a check, and Halloran came up and told me they’d have to close my account. Too many bad checks, he said, and I never had more than five hundred to my credit—and that only for a day or so at a time. And by God! What do you think he said then?”

“What?”

“He said this was a good time to do it because I didn’t have a damn penny in there!”

“You didn’t?”

“That’s what he told me. Seems I’d given these Bedros people a check for sixty for that last case of liquor—and I only had forty-five dollars in the bank. Well, the Bedros people deposited fifteen dollars to my account and drew the whole thing out.”

In her ignorance Gloria conjured up a spectre of imprisonment and disgrace.

“Oh, they won’t do anything,” he assured her. “Boot-legging’s too risky a business. They’ll send me a bill for fifteen dollars and I’ll pay it.”

“Oh.” She considered a moment. “—Well, we can sell another bond.”

He laughed sarcastically.

“Oh, yes, that’s always easy. When the few bonds we have that are paying any interest at all are only worth between fifty and eighty cents on the dollar. We lose about half the bond every time we sell.”

“What else can we do?”

“Oh, we’ll sell something—as usual. We’ve got paper worth eighty thousand dollars at par.” Again he laughed unpleasantly. “Bring about thirty thousand on the open market.”

“I distrusted those ten per cent investments.”

“The deuce you did!” he said. “You pretended you did, so you could claw at me if they went to pieces, but you wanted to take a chance as much as I did.”

She was silent for a moment as if considering, then:

“Anthony,” she cried suddenly, “two hundred a month is worse than nothing. Let’s sell all the bonds and put the thirty thousand dollars in the bank—and if we lose the case we can live in Italy for three years, and then just die.” In her excitement as she talked she was aware of a faint flush of sentiment, the first she had felt in many days.

“Three years,” he said nervously, “three years! You’re crazy. Mr. Haight’ll take more than that if we lose. Do you think he’s working for charity?”

“I forgot that.”

“—And here it is Saturday,” he continued, “and I’ve only got a dollar and some change, and we’ve got to live till Monday, when I can get to my broker’s.... And not a drink in the house,” he added as a significant after-thought.

“Can’t you call up Dick?”

“I did. His man says he’s gone down to Princeton to address a literary club or some such thing. Won’t be back till Monday.”

“Well, let’s see—Don’t you know some friend you might go to?”

“I tried a couple of fellows. Couldn’t find anybody in. I wish I’d sold that Keats
^z
letter like I started to last week.”

“How about those men you play cards with in that Sammy place?”

“Do you think I’d ask
them?”
His voice rang with righteous horror. Gloria winced. He would rather contemplate her active discomfort than feel his own skin crawl at asking an inappropriate favor. “I thought of Muriel,” he suggested.

“She’s in California.”

“Well, how about some of those men who gave you such a good time while I was in the army? You’d think they might be glad to do a little favor for you.”

She looked at him contemptuously, but he took no notice.

“Or how about your old friend Rachael—or Constance Merriam?”

“Constance Merriam’s been dead a year, and I wouldn’t ask Rachael.”

“Well, how about that gentleman who was so anxious to help you once that he could hardly restrain himself, Bloeckman?”

“Oh—!” He had hurt her at last, and he was not too obtuse or too careless to perceive it.

“Why not him?” he insisted callously.

“Because—he doesn’t like me any more,” she said with difficulty, and then as he did not answer but only regarded her cynically: “If you want to know why, I’ll tell you. A year ago I went to Bloeckman—he’s changed his name to Black—and asked him to put me into pictures.”

“You went to Bloeckman?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded incredulously, the smile fading from his face.

“Because you were probably off drinking somewhere. He had them give me a test, and they decided that I wasn’t young enough for anything except a character part.”

“A character part?”

“The ‘woman of thirty’ sort of thing. I wasn’t thirty, and I didn’t think I—looked thirty.”

“Why, damn him!” cried Anthony, championing her violently with a curious perverseness of emotion, “why—”

“Well, that’s why I can’t go to him.”

“Why, the insolence!” insisted Anthony nervously, “the insolence!”