happened to be in a good humor, so I satisfied his curiosity by a simple and precise ‘yes.’ Being rather a sensible man, after his fashion, he dropped the subject.”
“Except to say that he hated me.”
“Oh, it worries you? Well, if you must probe this stupendous matter to its depths he didn’t say he hated you. I simply know he does.”
“It doesn’t wor—-“
“Oh, let’s drop it!” she cried spiritedly. “It’s a most uninteresting matter to me.”
With a tremendous effort Anthony made his acquiescence a twist of subject, and they drifted into an ancient question-and-answer game concerned with each other’s pasts, gradually warming as they discovered the age-old, immemorial resemblances in tastes and ideas. They said things that were more revealing than they intended–but each pretended to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.
The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third–before long the best lines cancel out–and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.
“It seems to me,” Anthony was saying earnestly, “that the position of a man with neither necessity nor ambition is unfortunate. Heaven knows it’d be pathetic of me to be sorry for myself–yet, sometimes I envy Dick.”
Her silence was encouragement. It was as near as she ever came to an intentional lure.
“–And there used to be dignified occupations for a gentleman who had leisure, things a little more constructive than filling up the landscape with smoke or juggling some one else’s money. There’s science, of course: sometimes I wish I’d taken a good foundation, say at Boston Tech. But now, by golly, I’d have to sit down for two years and struggle through the fundamentals of physics and chemistry.”
She yawned.
“I’ve told you I don’t know what anybody ought to do,” she said ungraciously, and at her indifference his rancor was born again.
“Aren’t you interested in anything except yourself?”
“Not much.”
He glared; his growing enjoyment in the conversation was ripped to shreds. She had been irritable and vindictive all day, and it seemed to him that for this moment he hated her hard selfishness. He stared morosely at the fire.
Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him–as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.
He moved closer and taking her hand pulled her ever so gently toward him until she half lay against his shoulder. She smiled up at him as he kissed her.
“Gloria,” he whispered very softly. Again she had made a magic, subtle and pervading as a spilt perfume, irresistible and sweet.
Afterward, neither the next day nor after many years, could he remember the important things of that afternoon. Had she been moved? In his arms had she spoken a little–or at all? What measure of enjoyment had she taken in his kisses? And had she at any time lost herself ever so little?
Oh, for him there was no doubt. He had risen and paced the floor in sheer ecstasy. That such a girl should be; should poise curled in a corner of the couch like a swallow newly landed from a clean swift flight, watching him with inscrutable eyes. He would stop his pacing and, half shy each time at first, drop his arm around her and find her kiss.
She was fascinating, he told her. He had never met any one like her before. He besought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he didn’t want to fall in love. He wasn’t coming to see her any more–already she had haunted too many of his ways.
What delicious romance! His true reaction was neither fear nor sorrow–only this deep delight in being with her that colored the banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing seem wise. He _would_ come back–eternally. He should have known!
“This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do–and wouldn’t last.” As he spoke there was in his heart that tremulousness that we take for sincerity in ourselves.
Afterward he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her. He remembered it in this form–perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and polished it:
“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”
As always when he was with her she seemed to grow gradually older until at the end ruminations too deep for words would be wintering in her eyes.
An hour passed, and the fire leaped up in little ecstasies as though its fading life was sweet. It was five now, and the clock over the mantel became articulate in sound. Then as if a brutish sensibility in him was reminded by those thin, tinny beats that the petals were falling from the flowered afternoon, Anthony pulled her quickly to her feet and held her helpless, without breath, in a kiss that was neither a game nor a tribute.
Her arms fell to her side. In an instant she was free.
“Don’t!” she said quietly. “I don’t want that.”
She sat down on the far side of the lounge and gazed straight before her. A frown had gathered between her eyes. Anthony sank down beside her and closed his hand over hers. It was lifeless and unresponsive.
“Why, Gloria!” He made a motion as if to put his arm about her but she drew away.
“I don’t want that,” she repeated.
“I’m very sorry,” he said, a little impatiently. “I–I didn’t know you made such fine distinctions.”
She did not answer.
“Won’t you kiss me, Gloria?”
“I don’t want to.” It seemed to him she had not moved for hours.
“A sudden change, isn’t it?” Annoyance was growing in his voice.
“Is it?” She appeared uninterested. It was almost as though she were looking at some one else.
“Perhaps I’d better go.”
No reply. He rose and regarded her angrily, uncertainly. Again he sat down.
“Gloria, Gloria, won’t you kiss me?”
“No.” Her lips, parting for the word, had just faintly stirred.
Again he got to his feet, this time with less decision, less confidence.
“Then I’ll go.”
Silence.
“All right–I’ll go.”
He was aware of a certain irremediable lack of originality in his remarks. Indeed he felt that the whole atmosphere had grown oppressive. He wished she would speak, rail at him, cry out upon him, anything but this pervasive and chilling silence. He cursed himself for a weak fool; his clearest desire was to move her, to hurt her, to see her wince. Helplessly, involuntarily, he erred again.
“If you’re tired of kissing me I’d better go.”
He saw her lips curl slightly and his last dignity left him. She spoke, at length:
“I believe you’ve made that remark several times before.”
He looked about him immediately, saw his hat and coat on a chair–blundered into them, during an intolerable moment. Looking again at the couch he perceived that she had not turned, not even moved. With a shaken, immediately regretted “good-by” he went quickly but without dignity from the room.
For over a moment Gloria made no sound. Her lips were still curled; her glance was straight, proud, remote. Then her eyes blurred a little, and she murmured three words half aloud to the death-bound fire:
“Good-by, you ass!” she said.
PANIC
The man had had the hardest blow of his life. He knew at last what he wanted, but in finding it out it seemed that he had put it forever beyond his grasp. He reached home in misery, dropped into an armchair without even removing his overcoat, and sat there for over an hour, his mind racing the paths of fruitless and wretched self-absorption. She had sent him away! That was the reiterated burden of his despair. Instead of seizing the girl and holding her by sheer strength until she became passive to his desire, instead of beating down her will by the force of his own, he had walked, defeated and powerless, from her door, with the corners of his mouth drooping and what force there might have been in his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of a whipped schoolboy. At one minute she had liked him tremendously–ah, she had nearly loved him. In the next he had become a thing of indifference to her, an insolent and efficiently humiliated man.
He had no great self-reproach–some, of course, but there were other things dominant in him now, far more urgent. He was not so much in love with Gloria as mad for her. Unless he could have her near him again, kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from life. By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to be instead his complete preoccupation. However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through those three minutes. She was beautiful–but especially she was without mercy. He must own that strength that could send him away.
At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony. His clarity of mind, all those endless resources which he thought his irony had brought him were swept aside. Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape–that world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.
About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry. He went down into Fifty-second Street, where it was so cold that he could scarcely see; the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips. Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north, settling upon the thin and cheerless street, where black bundled figures blacker still against the night, moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the shrieking wind, sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though they were on skis. Anthony turned over toward Sixth Avenue, so absorbed in his thoughts as not to notice that several passers-by had stared at him. His overcoat was wide open, and the wind was biting in, hard and full of merciless death.
… After a while a waitress spoke to him, a fat waitress with black-rimmed eye-glasses from which dangled a long black cord.
“Order, please!”
Her voice, he considered, was unnecessarily loud. He looked up resentfully.
“You wanna order or doncha?”
“Of course,” he protested.
“Well, I ast you three times. This ain’t no rest-room.”
He glanced at the big clock and discovered with a start that it was after two. He was down around Thirtieth Street somewhere, and after a moment he found and translated the
[Illustration: S’DLIHC]
[Transcribers note: The illustration shows the word “CHILD’s” in mirror image.]
in a white semicircle of letters upon the glass front. The place was inhabited sparsely by three or four bleak and half-frozen night-hawks.
“Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please.”
The waitress bent upon him a last disgusted glance and, looking ludicrously intellectual in her corded glasses, hurried away.
God! Gloria’s kisses had been such flowers. He remembered as though it had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the lamps of the street–under the lamps.
Misery struck at him again, piling a sort of terror upon the ache and yearning. He had lost her. It was true–no denying it, no softening it. But a new idea had seared his sky–what of Bloeckman! What would happen now? There was a wealthy man, middle-aged enough to be tolerant with a beautiful wife, to baby her whims and indulge her unreason, to wear her as she perhaps wished to be worn–a bright flower in his button-hole, safe and secure from the things she feared. He felt that she had been playing with the idea of marrying Bloeckman, and it was well possible that this disappointment in Anthony might throw her on sudden impulse into Bloeckman’s arms.
The idea drove him childishly frantic. He wanted to kill Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous presumption. He was saying this over and over to himself with his teeth tight shut, and a perfect orgy of hate and fright in his eyes.
But, behind this obscene jealousy, Anthony was in love at last, profoundly and truly in love, as the word goes between man and woman.
His coffee appeared at his elbow and gave off for a certain time a gradually diminishing wisp of steam. The night manager, seated at his desk, glanced at the motionless figure alone at the last table, and then with a sigh moved down upon him just as the hour hand crossed the figure three on the big clock.
WISDOM
After another day the turmoil subsided and Anthony began to exercise a measure of reason. He was in love–he cried it passionately to himself. The things that a week before would have seemed insuperable obstacles, his limited income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his infatuation. If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence. To be able to face people and to endure the constant reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew to his self-respect.
Out of this developed a spark of wisdom, a true perception of his own from out the effortless past.
“Memory is short,” he thought.
So very short. At the crucial point the Trust President is on the stand, a potential criminal needing but one push to be a jailbird, scorned by the upright for leagues around. Let him be acquitted–and in a year all is forgotten. “Yes, he did have some trouble once, just a technicality, I believe.” Oh, memory is very short!
Anthony had seen Gloria altogether about a dozen times, say two dozen hours. Supposing he left her alone for a month, made no attempt to see her or speak to her, and avoided every place where she might possibly be. Wasn’t it possible, the more possible because she had never loved him, that at the end of that time the rush of events would efface his personality from her conscious mind, and with his personality his offense and humiliation? She would forget, for there would be other men. He winced. The implication struck out at him–other men. Two months–God! Better three weeks, two weeks—-
He thought this the second evening after the catastrophe when he was undressing, and at this point he threw himself down on the bed and lay there, trembling very slightly and looking at the top of the canopy.
Two weeks–that was worse than no time at all. In two weeks he would approach her much as he would have to now, without personality or confidence–remaining still the man who had gone too far and then for a period that in time was but a moment but in fact an eternity, whined. No, two weeks was too short a time. Whatever poignancy there had been for her in that afternoon must have time to dull. He must give her a period when the incident should fade, and then a new period when she should gradually begin to think of him, no matter how dimly, with a true perspective that would remember his pleasantness as well as his humiliation.
He fixed, finally, on six weeks as approximately the interval best suited to his purpose, and on a desk calendar he marked the days off, finding that it would fall on the ninth of April. Very well, on that day he would phone and ask her if he might call. Until then–silence.
After his decision a gradual improvement was manifest. He had taken at least a step in the direction to which hope pointed, and he realized that the less he brooded upon her the better he would be able to give the desired impression when they met.
In another hour he fell into a deep sleep.
THE INTERVAL
Nevertheless, though, as the days passed, the glory of her hair dimmed perceptibly for him and in a year of separation might have departed completely, the six weeks held many abominable days. He dreaded the sight of Dick and Maury, imagining wildly that they knew all–but when the three met it was Richard Caramel and not Anthony who was the centre of attention; “The Demon Lover” had been accepted for immediate publication. Anthony felt that from now on he moved apart. He no longer craved the warmth and security of Maury’s society which had cheered him no further back than November. Only Gloria could give that now and no one else ever again. So Dick’s success rejoiced him only casually and worried him not a little. It meant that the world was going ahead–writing and reading and publishing–and living. And he wanted the world to wait motionless and breathless for six weeks–while Gloria forgot.
TWO ENCOUNTERS
His greatest satisfaction was in Geraldine’s company. He took her once to dinner and the theatre and entertained her several times in his apartment. When he was with her she absorbed him, not as Gloria had, but quieting those erotic sensibilities in him that worried over Gloria. It didn’t matter how he kissed Geraldine. A kiss was a kiss–to be enjoyed to the utmost for its short moment. To Geraldine things belonged in definite pigeonholes: a kiss was one thing, anything further was quite another; a kiss was all right; the other things were “bad.”
When half the interval was up two incidents occurred on successive days that upset his increasing calm and caused a temporary relapse.
The first was–he saw Gloria. It was a short meeting. Both bowed. Both spoke, yet neither heard the other. But when it was over Anthony read down a column of The Sun three times in succession without understanding a single sentence.
One would have thought Sixth Avenue a safe street! Having forsworn his barber at the Plaza he went around the corner one morning to be shaved, and while waiting his turn he took off coat and vest, and with his soft collar open at the neck stood near the front of the shop. The day was an oasis in the cold desert of March and the sidewalk was cheerful with a population of strolling sun-worshippers. A stout woman upholstered in velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle straining at its leash–the effect being given of a tug bringing in an ocean liner. Just behind them a man in a striped blue suit, walking slue-footed in white-spatted feet, grinned at the sight and catching Anthony’s eye, winked through the glass. Anthony laughed, thrown immediately into that humor in which men and women were graceless and absurd phantasms, grotesquely curved and rounded in a rectangular world of their own building. They inspired the same sensations in him as did those strange and monstrous fish who inhabit the esoteric world of green in the aquarium.
Two more strollers caught his eye casually, a man and a girl–then in a horrified instant the girl resolved herself into Gloria. He stood here powerless; they came nearer and Gloria, glancing in, saw him. Her eyes widened and she smiled politely. Her lips moved. She was less than five feet away.
“How do you do?” he muttered inanely.
Gloria, happy, beautiful, and young–with a man he had never seen before!
It was then that the barber’s chair was vacated and he read down the newspaper column three times in succession.
The second incident took place the next day. Going into the Manhattan bar about seven he was confronted with Bloeckman. As it happened, the room was nearly deserted, and before the mutual recognition he had stationed himself within a foot of the older man and ordered his drink, so it was inevitable that they should converse.
“Hello, Mr. Patch,” said Bloeckman amiably enough.
Anthony took the proffered hand and exchanged a few aphorisms on the fluctuations of the mercury.
“Do you come in here much?” inquired Bloeckman.
“No, very seldom.” He omitted to add that the Plaza bar had, until lately, been his favorite.
“Nice bar. One of the best bars in town.”
Anthony nodded. Bloeckman emptied his glass and picked up his cane. He was in evening dress.
“Well, I’ll be hurrying on. I’m going to dinner with Miss Gilbert.”
Death looked suddenly out at him from two blue eyes. Had he announced himself as his vis-à-vis’s prospective murderer he could not have struck a more vital blow at Anthony. The younger man must have reddened visibly, for his every nerve was in instant clamor. With tremendous effort he mustered a rigid–oh, so rigid–smile, and said a conventional good-by. But that night he lay awake until after four, half wild with grief and fear and abominable imaginings.
WEAKNESS
And one day in the fifth week he called her up. He had been sitting in his apartment trying to read “L’Education Sentimental,” and something in the book had sent his thoughts racing in the direction that, set free, they always took, like horses racing for a home stable. With suddenly quickened breath he walked to the telephone. When he gave the number it seemed to him that his voice faltered and broke like a schoolboy’s. The Central must have heard the pounding of his heart. The sound of the receiver being taken up at the other end was a crack of doom, and Mrs. Gilbert’s voice, soft as maple syrup running into a glass container, had for him a quality of horror in its single “Hello-o-ah?”
“Miss Gloria’s not feeling well. She’s lying down, asleep. Who shall I say called?”
“Nobody!” he shouted.
In a wild panic he slammed down the receiver; collapsed into his armchair in the cold sweat of breathless relief.
SERENADE
The first thing he said to her was: “Why, you’ve bobbed your hair!” and she answered: “Yes, isn’t it gorgeous?”
It was not fashionable then. It was to be fashionable in five or six years. At that time it was considered extremely daring.
“It’s all sunshine outdoors,” he said gravely. “Don’t you want to take a walk?”
She put on a light coat and a quaintly piquant Napoleon hat of Alice Blue, and they walked along the Avenue and into the Zoo, where they properly admired the grandeur of the elephant and the collar-height of the giraffe, but did not visit the monkey house because Gloria said that monkeys smelt so bad.
Then they returned toward the Plaza, talking about nothing, but glad for the spring singing in the air and for the warm balm that lay upon the suddenly golden city. To their right was the Park, while at the left a great bulk of granite and marble muttered dully a millionaire’s chaotic message to whosoever would listen: something about “I worked and I saved and I was sharper than all Adam and here I sit, by golly, by golly!”
All the newest and most beautiful designs in automobiles were out on Fifth Avenue, and ahead of them the Plaza loomed up rather unusually white and attractive. The supple, indolent Gloria walked a short shadow’s length ahead of him, pouring out lazy casual comments that floated a moment on the dazzling air before they reached his ear.
“Oh!” she cried, “I want to go south to Hot Springs! I want to get out in the air and just roll around on the new grass and forget there’s ever been any winter.”
“Don’t you, though!”
“I want to hear a million robins making a frightful racket. I sort of like birds.”
“All women _are_ birds,” he ventured.
“What kind am I?”–quick and eager.
“A swallow, I think, and sometimes a bird of paradise. Most girls are sparrows, of course–see that row of nurse-maids over there? They’re sparrows–or are they magpies? And of course you’ve met canary girls–and robin girls.”
“And swan girls and parrot girls. All grown women are hawks, I think, or owls.”
“What am I–a buzzard?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Oh, no, you’re not a bird at all, do you think? You’re a Russian wolfhound.”
Anthony remembered that they were white and always looked unnaturally hungry. But then they were usually photographed with dukes and princesses, so he was properly flattered.
“Dick’s a fox terrier, a trick fox terrier,” she continued.
“And Maury’s a cat.” Simultaneously it occurred to him how like Bloeckman was to a robust and offensive hog. But he preserved a discreet silence.
Later, as they parted, Anthony asked when he might see her again.
“Don’t you ever make long engagements?” he pleaded, “even if it’s a week ahead, I think it’d be fun to spend a whole day together, morning and afternoon both.”
“It would be, wouldn’t it?” She thought for a moment. “Let’s do it next Sunday.”
“All right. I’ll map out a programme that’ll take up every minute.”
He did. He even figured to a nicety what would happen in the two hours when she would come to his apartment for tea: how the good Bounds would have the windows wide to let in the fresh breeze–but a fire going also lest there be chill in the air–and how there would be clusters of flowers about in big cool bowls that he would buy for the occasion. They would sit on the lounge.
And when the day came they did sit upon the lounge. After a while Anthony kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been away. The fire was bright and the breeze sighing in through the curtains brought a mellow damp, promising May and world of summer. His soul thrilled to remote harmonies; he heard the strum of far guitars and waters lapping on a warm Mediterranean shore–for he was young now as he would never be again, and more triumphant than death.
Six o’clock stole down too soon and rang the querulous melody of St. Anne’s chimes on the corner. Through the gathering dusk they strolled to the Avenue, where the crowds, like prisoners released, were walking with elastic step at last after the long winter, and the tops of the busses were thronged with congenial kings and the shops full of fine soft things for the summer, the rare summer, the gay promising summer that seemed for love what the winter was for money. Life was singing for his supper on the corner! Life was handing round cocktails in the street! Old women there were in that crowd who felt that they could have run and won a hundred-yard dash!
In bed that night with the lights out and the cool room swimming with moonlight, Anthony lay awake and played with every minute of the day like a child playing in turn with each one of a pile of long-wanted Christmas toys. He had told her gently, almost in the middle of a kiss, that he loved her, and she had smiled and held him closer and murmured, “I’m glad,” looking into his eyes. There had been a new quality in her attitude, a new growth of sheer physical attraction toward him and a strange emotional tenseness, that was enough to make him clinch his hands and draw in his breath at the recollection. He had felt nearer to her than ever before. In a rare delight he cried aloud to the room that he loved her.
He phoned next morning–no hesitation now, no uncertainty–instead a delirious excitement that doubled and trebled when he heard her voice:
“Good morning–Gloria.”
“Good morning.”
“That’s all I called you up to say-dear.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“I wish I could see you.”
“You will, to-morrow night.”
“That’s a long time, isn’t it?”
“Yes–” Her voice was reluctant. His hand tightened on the receiver.
“Couldn’t I come to-night?” He dared anything in the glory and revelation of that almost whispered “yes.”
“I have a date.”
“Oh–“
“But I might–I might be able to break it.”
“Oh!”–a sheer cry, a rhapsody. “Gloria?”
“What?”
“I love you.”
Another pause and then:
“I–I’m glad.”
Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery. But oh, Anthony’s face as he walked down the tenth-floor corridor of the Plaza that night! His dark eyes were gleaming–around his mouth were lines it was a kindness to see. He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.
He knocked and, at a word, entered. Gloria, dressed in simple pink, starched and fresh as a flower, was across the room, standing very still, and looking at him wide-eyed.
As he closed the door behind him she gave a little cry and moved swiftly over the intervening space, her arms rising in a premature caress as she came near. Together they crushed out the stiff folds of her dress in one triumphant and enduring embrace.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER I
THE RADIANT HOUR
After a fortnight Anthony and Gloria began to indulge in “practical discussions,” as they called those sessions when under the guise of severe realism they walked in an eternal moonlight.
“Not as much as I do you,” the critic of belles-lettres would insist. “If you really loved me you’d want every one to know it.”
“I do,” she protested; “I want to stand on the street corner like a sandwich man, informing all the passers-by.”
“Then tell me all the reasons why you’re going to marry me in June.”
“Well, because you’re so clean. You’re sort of blowy clean, like I am. There’s two sorts, you know. One’s like Dick: he’s clean like polished pans. You and I are clean like streams and winds. I can tell whenever I see a person whether he is clean, and if so, which kind of clean he is.”
“We’re twins.”
Ecstatic thought!
“Mother says”–she hesitated uncertainly–“mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and–and in love before they’re born.”
Bilphism gained its easiest convert…. After a while he lifted up his head and laughed soundlessly toward the ceiling. When his eyes came back to her he saw that she was angry.
“Why did you laugh?” she cried, “you’ve done that twice before. There’s nothing funny about our relation to each other. I don’t mind playing the fool, and I don’t mind having you do it, but I can’t stand it when we’re together.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t say you’re sorry! If you can’t think of anything better than that, just keep quiet!”
“I love you.”
“I don’t care.”
There was a pause. Anthony was depressed…. At length Gloria murmured:
“I’m sorry I was mean.”
“You weren’t. I was the one.”
Peace was restored–the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and sharp and poignant. They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression–yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.
Telling Mrs. Gilbert had been an embarrassed matter. She sat stuffed into a small chair and listened with an intense and very blinky sort of concentration. She must have known it–for three weeks Gloria had seen no one else–and she must have noticed that this time there was an authentic difference in her daughter’s attitude. She had been given special deliveries to post; she had heeded, as all mothers seem to heed, the hither end of telephone conversations, disguised but still rather warm–
–Yet she had delicately professed surprise and declared herself immensely pleased; she doubtless was; so were the geranium plants blossoming in the window-boxes, and so were the cabbies when the lovers sought the romantic privacy of hansom cabs–quaint device–and the staid bill of fares on which they scribbled “you know I do,” pushing it over for the other to see.
But between kisses Anthony and this golden girl quarrelled incessantly.
“Now, Gloria,” he would cry, “please let me explain!”
“Don’t explain. Kiss me.”
“I don’t think that’s right. If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don’t like this kiss-and-forget.”
“But I don’t want to argue. I think it’s wonderful that we _can_ kiss and forget, and when we can’t it’ll be time to argue.”
At one time some gossamer difference attained such bulk that Anthony arose and punched himself into his overcoat–for a moment it appeared that the scene of the preceding February was to be repeated, but knowing how deeply she was moved he retained his dignity with his pride, and in a moment Gloria was sobbing in his arms, her lovely face miserable as a frightened little girl’s.
Meanwhile they kept unfolding to each other, unwillingly, by curious reactions and evasions, by distastes and prejudices and unintended hints of the past. The girl was proudly incapable of jealousy and, because he was extremely jealous, this virtue piqued him. He told her recondite incidents of his own life on purpose to arouse some spark of it, but to no avail. She possessed him now–nor did she desire the dead years.
“Oh, Anthony,” she would say, “always when I’m mean to you I’m sorry afterward. I’d give my right hand to save you one little moment’s pain.”
And in that instant her eyes were brimming and she was not aware that she was voicing an illusion. Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely–taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort–of these she never complained until they were over–or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride.
“Why do you like Muriel?” he demanded one day.
“I don’t very much.”
“Then why do you go with her?”
“Just for some one to go with. They’re no exertion, those girls. They sort of believe everything I tell them–but I rather like Rachael. I think she’s cute–and so clean and slick, don’t you? I used to have other friends–in Kansas City and at school–casual, all of them, girls who just flitted into my range and out of it for no more reason than that boys took us places together. They didn’t interest me after environment stopped throwing us together. Now they’re mostly married. What does it matter–they were all just people.”
“You like men better, don’t you?”
“Oh, much better. I’ve got a man’s mind.”
“You’ve got a mind like mine. Not strongly gendered either way.”
Later she told him about the beginnings of her friendship with Bloeckman. One day in Delmonico’s, Gloria and Rachael had come upon Bloeckman and Mr. Gilbert having luncheon and curiosity had impelled her to make it a party of four. She had liked him–rather. He was a relief from younger men, satisfied as he was with so little. He humored her and he laughed, whether he understood her or not. She met him several times, despite the open disapproval of her parents, and within a month he had asked her to marry him, tendering her everything from a villa in Italy to a brilliant career on the screen. She had laughed in his face–and he had laughed too.
But he had not given up. To the time of Anthony’s arrival in the arena he had been making steady progress. She treated him rather well–except that she had called him always by an invidious nickname–perceiving, meanwhile, that he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.
The night before the engagement was announced she told Bloeckman. It was a heavy blow. She did not enlighten Anthony as to the details, but she implied that he had not hesitated to argue with her. Anthony gathered that the interview had terminated on a stormy note, with Gloria very cool and unmoved lying in her corner of the sofa and Joseph Bloeckman of “Films Par Excellence” pacing the carpet with eyes narrowed and head bowed. Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to show it. In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate her, there at the last. But Anthony, understanding that Gloria’s indifference was her strongest appeal, judged how futile this must have been. He wondered, often but quite casually, about Bloeckman–finally he forgot him entirely.
HEYDAY
One afternoon they found front seats on the sunny roof of a bus and rode for hours from the fading Square up along the sullied river, and then, as the stray beams fled the westward streets, sailed down the turgid Avenue, darkening with ominous bees from the department stores. The traffic was clotted and gripped in a patternless jam; the busses were packed four deep like platforms above the crowd as they waited for the moan of the traffic whistle.
“Isn’t it good!” cried Gloria. “Look!”
A miller’s wagon, stark white with flour, driven by a powdery clown, passed in front of them behind a white horse and his black team-mate.
“What a pity!” she complained; “they’d look so beautiful in the dusk, if only both horses were white. I’m mighty happy just this minute, in this city.”
Anthony shook his head in disagreement.
“I think the city’s a mountebank. Always struggling to approach the tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it. Trying to be romantically metropolitan.”
“I don’t. I think it is impressive.”
“Momentarily. But it’s really a transparent, artificial sort of spectacle. It’s got its press-agented stars and its flimsy, unenduring stage settings and, I’ll admit, the greatest army of supers ever assembled–” He paused, laughed shortly, and added: “Technically excellent, perhaps, but not convincing.”
“I’ll bet policemen think people are fools,” said Gloria thoughtfully, as she watched a large but cowardly lady being helped across the street. “He always sees them frightened and inefficient and old–they are,” she added. And then: “We’d better get off. I told mother I’d have an early supper and go to bed. She says I look tired, damn it.”
“I wish we were married,” he muttered soberly; “there’ll be no good night then and we can do just as we want.”
“Won’t it be good! I think we ought to travel a lot. I want to go to the Mediterranean and Italy. And I’d like to go on the stage some time–say for about a year.”
“You bet. I’ll write a play for you.”
“Won’t that be good! And I’ll act in it. And then some time when we have more money”–old Adam’s death was always thus tactfully alluded to–“we’ll build a magnificent estate, won’t we?”
“Oh, yes, with private swimming pools.”
“Dozens of them. And private rivers. Oh, I wish it were now.”
Odd coincidence–he had just been wishing that very thing. They plunged like divers into the dark eddying crowd and emerging in the cool fifties sauntered indolently homeward, infinitely romantic to each other … both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream.
Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years. Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other’s eyes–not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one fairy night, May became June. Sixteen days now–fifteen–fourteen—-
THREE DIGRESSIONS
Just before the engagement was announced Anthony had gone up to Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who, a little more wizened and grizzly as time played its ultimate chuckling tricks, greeted the news with profound cynicism.
“Oh, you’re going to get married, are you?” He said this with such a dubious mildness and shook his head up and down so many times that Anthony was not a little depressed. While he was unaware of his grandfather’s intentions he presumed that a large part of the money would come to him. A good deal would go in charities, of course; a good deal to carry on the business of reform.
“Are you going to work?”
“Why–” temporized Anthony, somewhat disconcerted. “I _am_ working. You know–“
“Ah, I mean work,” said Adam Patch dispassionately.
“I’m not quite sure yet what I’ll do. I’m not exactly a beggar, grampa,” he asserted with some spirit.
The old man considered this with eyes half closed. Then almost apologetically he asked:
“How much do you save a year?”
“Nothing so far–“
“And so after just managing to get along on your money you’ve decided that by some miracle two of you can get along on it.”
“Gloria has some money of her own. Enough to buy clothes.”
“How much?”
Without considering this question impertinent, Anthony answered it.
“About a hundred a month.”
“That’s altogether about seventy-five hundred a year.” Then he added softly: “It ought to be plenty. If you have any sense it ought to be plenty. But the question is whether you have any or not.”
“I suppose it is.” It was shameful to be compelled to endure this pious browbeating from the old man, and his next words were stiffened with vanity. “I can manage very well. You seem convinced that I’m utterly worthless. At any rate I came up here simply to tell you that I’m getting married in June. Good-by, sir.” With this he turned away and headed for the door, unaware that in that instant his grandfather, for the first time, rather liked him.
“Wait!” called Adam Patch, “I want to talk to you.”
Anthony faced about.
“Well, sir?”
“Sit down. Stay all night.”
Somewhat mollified, Anthony resumed his seat.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to see Gloria to-night.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gloria Gilbert.”
“New York girl? Someone you know?”
“She’s from the Middle West.”
“What business her father in?”
“In a celluloid corporation or trust or something. They’re from Kansas City.”
“You going to be married out there?”
“Why, no, sir. We thought we’d be married in New York–rather quietly.”
“Like to have the wedding out here?”
Anthony hesitated. The suggestion made no appeal to him, but it was certainly the part of wisdom to give the old man, if possible, a proprietary interest in his married life. In addition Anthony was a little touched.
“That’s very kind of you, grampa, but wouldn’t it be a lot of trouble?”
“Everything’s a lot of trouble. Your father was married here–but in the old house.”
“Why–I thought he was married in Boston.”
Adam Patch considered.
“That’s true. He _was_ married in Boston.”
Anthony felt a moment’s embarrassment at having made the correction, and he covered it up with words.
“Well, I’ll speak to Gloria about it. Personally I’d like to, but of course it’s up to the Gilberts, you see.”
His grandfather drew a long sigh, half closed his eyes, and sank back in his chair.
“In a hurry?” he asked in a different tone.
“Not especially.”
“I wonder,” began Adam Patch, looking out with a mild, kindly glance at the lilac bushes that rustled against the windows, “I wonder if you ever think about the after-life.”
“Why–sometimes.”
“I think a great deal about the after-life.” His eyes were dim but his voice was confident and clear. “I was sitting here to-day thinking about what’s lying in wait for us, and somehow I began to remember an afternoon nearly sixty-five years ago, when I was playing with my little sister Annie, down where that summer-house is now.” He pointed out into the long flower-garden, his eyes trembling of tears, his voice shaking.
“I began thinking–and it seemed to me that _you_ ought to think a little more about the after-life. You ought to be–steadier”–he paused and seemed to grope about for the right word–“more industrious–why–“
Then his expression altered, his entire personality seemed to snap together like a trap, and when he continued the softness had gone from his voice.
“–Why, when I was just two years older than you,” he rasped with a cunning chuckle, “I sent three members of the firm of Wrenn and Hunt to the poorhouse.”
Anthony started with embarrassment.
“Well, good-by,” added his grandfather suddenly, “you’ll miss your train.”
Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old man; not because his wealth could buy him “neither youth nor digestion” but because he had asked Anthony to be married there, and because he had forgotten something about his son’s wedding that he should have remembered.
Richard Caramel, who was one of the ushers, caused Anthony and Gloria much distress in the last few weeks by continually stealing the rays of their spot-light. “The Demon Lover” had been published in April, and it interrupted the love affair as it may be said to have interrupted everything its author came in contact with. It was a highly original, rather overwritten piece of sustained description concerned with a Don Juan of the New York slums. As Maury and Anthony had said before, as the more hospitable critics were saying then, there was no writer in America with such power to describe the atavistic and unsubtle reactions of that section of society.
The book hesitated and then suddenly “went.” Editions, small at first, then larger, crowded each other week by week. A spokesman of the Salvation Army denounced it as a cynical misrepresentation of all the uplift taking place in the underworld. Clever press-agenting spread the unfounded rumor that “Gypsy” Smith was beginning a libel suit because one of the principal characters was a burlesque of himself. It was barred from the public library of Burlington, Iowa, and a Mid-Western columnist announced by innuendo that Richard Caramel was in a sanitarium with delirium tremens.
The author, indeed, spent his days in a state of pleasant madness. The book was in his conversation three-fourths of the time–he wanted to know if one had heard “the latest”; he would go into a store and in a loud voice order books to be charged to him, in order to catch a chance morsel of recognition from clerk or customer. He knew to a town in what sections of the country it was selling best; he knew exactly what he cleared on each edition, and when he met any one who had not read it, or, as it happened only too often, had not heard of it, he succumbed to moody depression.
So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy, that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore. To Dick’s great annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read “The Demon Lover,” and didn’t intend to until every one stopped talking about it. As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were pouring in–first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the bric-à-brac of forgotten family friends to the photographs of forgotten poor relations.
Maury gave them an elaborate “drinking set,” which included silver goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers. The extortion from Dick was more conventional–a tea set from Tiffany’s. From Joseph Bloeckman came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him want to weep–indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with remembrances of Gloria’s Farmover days, and with rather pathetic trophies from her former beaux, which last arrived with esoteric, melancholy messages, written on cards tucked carefully inside, beginning “I little thought when–” or “I’m sure I wish you all the happiness–” or even “When you get this I shall be on my way to–“
The most munificent gift was simultaneously the most disappointing. It was a concession of Adam Patch’s–a check for five thousand dollars.
To most of the presents Anthony was cold. It seemed to him that they would necessitate keeping a chart of the marital status of all their acquaintances during the next half-century. But Gloria exulted in each one, tearing at the tissue-paper and excelsior with the rapaciousness of a dog digging for a bone, breathlessly seizing a ribbon or an edge of metal and finally bringing to light the whole article and holding it up critically, no emotion except rapt interest in her unsmiling face.
“Look, Anthony!”
“Darn nice, isn’t it!”
No answer until an hour later when she would give him a careful account of her precise reaction to the gift, whether it would have been improved by being smaller or larger, whether she was surprised at getting it, and, if so, just how much surprised.
Mrs. Gilbert arranged and rearranged a hypothetical house, distributing the gifts among the different rooms, tabulating articles as “second-best clock” or “silver to use _every_ day,” and embarrassing Anthony and Gloria by semi-facetious references to a room she called the nursery. She was pleased by old Adam’s gift and thereafter had it that he was a very ancient soul, “as much as anything else.” As Adam Patch never quite decided whether she referred to the advancing senility of his mind or to some private and psychic schema of her own, it cannot be said to have pleased him. Indeed he always spoke of her to Anthony as “that old woman, the mother,” as though she were a character in a comedy he had seen staged many times before. Concerning Gloria he was unable to make up his mind. She attracted him but, as she herself told Anthony, he had decided that she was frivolous and was afraid to approve of her.
Five days!–A dancing platform was being erected on the lawn at Tarrytown. Four days!–A special train was chartered to convey the guests to and from New York. Three days!—-
THE DIARY
She was dressed in blue silk pajamas and standing by her bed with her hand on the light to put the room in darkness, when she changed her mind and opening a table drawer brought out a little black book–a “Line-a-day” diary. This she had kept for seven years. Many of the pencil entries were almost illegible and there were notes and references to nights and afternoons long since forgotten, for it was not an intimate diary, even though it began with the immemorial “I am going to keep a diary for my children.” Yet as she thumbed over the pages the eyes of many men seemed to look out at her from their half-obliterated names. With one she had gone to New Haven for the first time–in 1908, when she was sixteen and padded shoulders were fashionable at Yale–she had been flattered because “Touch down” Michaud had “rushed” her all evening. She sighed, remembering the grown-up satin dress she had been so proud of and the orchestra playing “Yama-yama, My Yama Man” and “Jungle-Town.” So long ago!–the names: Eltynge Reardon, Jim Parsons, “Curly” McGregor, Kenneth Cowan, “Fish-eye” Fry (whom she had liked for being so ugly), Carter Kirby–he had sent her a present; so had Tudor Baird;–Marty Reffer, the first man she had been in love with for more than a day, and Stuart Holcome, who had run away with her in his automobile and tried to make her marry him by force. And Larry Fenwick, whom she had always admired because he had told her one night that if she wouldn’t kiss him she could get out of his car and walk home. What a list!
… And, after all, an obsolete list. She was in love now, set for the eternal romance that was to be the synthesis of all romance, yet sad for these men and these moonlights and for the “thrills” she had had–and the kisses. The past–her past, oh, what a joy! She had been exuberantly happy.
Turning over the pages her eyes rested idly on the scattered entries of the past four months. She read the last few carefully.
“_April 1st_.–I know Bill Carstairs hates me because I was so disagreeable, but I hate to be sentimentalized over sometimes. We drove out to the Rockyear Country Club and the most wonderful moon kept shining through the trees. My silver dress is getting tarnished. Funny how one forgets the other nights at Rockyear–with Kenneth Cowan when I loved him so!
“_April 3rd_.–After two hours of Schroeder who, they inform me, has millions, I’ve decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one out, particularly when the things concerned are men. There’s nothing so often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused. We talked about ‘love’–how banal! With how many men have I talked about love?
“_April 11th_.–Patch actually called up to-day! and when he forswore me about a month ago he fairly raged out the door. I’m gradually losing faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.
“_April 20th_.–Spent the day with Anthony. Maybe I’ll marry him some time. I kind of like his ideas–he stimulates all the originality in me. Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside Drive. I liked him to-night: he’s so considerate. He knew I didn’t want to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.
“_April 21st_.–Woke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called and sounded sweet on the phone–so I broke a date for him. To-day I feel I’d break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck. He’s coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and starched—-“
She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows. Yet it seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities burning in her heart.
The next entry occurred a few days later:
“_April 24th_.–I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often ‘husbands’ and I must marry a lover.
“There are four general types of husbands.
“(1) The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!
“(2) The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman ‘shallow,’ a sort of peacock with arrested development.
“(3) Next comes the worshipper, the idolater of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! it must be an exertion to be thought righteous.
“(4) And Anthony–a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony.
“What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting–it’s going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s unwanted children. What a fate–to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers…. Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings—-
“Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the wedded state.
“_June 7th_.–Moral question: Was it wrong to make Bloeckman love me? Because I did really make him. He was almost sweetly sad to-night. How opportune it was that my throat is swollen plunk together and tears were easy to muster. But he’s just the past–buried already in my plentiful lavender.
“_June 8th_.–And to-day I’ve promised not to chew my mouth. Well, I won’t, I suppose–but if he’d only asked me not to eat!
“Blowing bubbles–that’s what we’re doing, Anthony and me. And we blew such beautiful ones to-day, and they’ll explode and then we’ll blow more and more, I guess–bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all the soap and water is used up.”
On this note the diary ended. Her eyes wandered up the page, over the June 8th’s of 1912, 1910, 1907. The earliest entry was scrawled in the plump, bulbous hand of a sixteen-year-old girl–it was the name, Bob Lamar, and a word she could not decipher. Then she knew what it was–and, knowing, she found her eyes misty with tears. There in a graying blur was the record of her first kiss, faded as its intimate afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before. She seemed to remember something one of them had said that day and yet she could not remember. Her tears came faster, until she could scarcely see the page. She was crying, she told herself, because she could remember only the rain and the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass.
… After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS in large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.
BREATH OF THE CAVE
Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night–a sheet was enough for comfort–and through his wide-open windows came sound, evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the union of his soul with Gloria’s, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.
From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound–something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness–and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.
It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft crying of the night. It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred feet from his rear window, the noise of a woman’s laughter. It began low, incessant and whining–some servant-maid with her fellow, he thought–and then it grew in volume and became hysterical, until it reminded him of a girl he had seen overcome with nervous laughter at a vaudeville performance. Then it sank, receded, only to rise again and include words–a coarse joke, some bit of obscure horseplay he could not distinguish. It would break off for a moment and he would just catch the low rumble of a man’s voice, then begin again–interminably; at first annoying, then strangely terrible. He shivered, and getting up out of bed went to the window. It had reached a high point, tensed and stifled, almost the quality of a scream–then it ceased and left behind it a silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead. Anthony stood by the window a moment longer before he returned to his bed. He found himself upset and shaken. Try as he might to strangle his reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter had grasped at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his old aversion and horror toward all the business of life. The room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound.
“Oh, my _God_!” he cried, drawing in his breath sharply.
Burying his face in the pillows he tried in vain to concentrate upon the details of the next day.
MORNING
In the gray light he found that it was only five o’clock. He regretted nervously that he had awakened so early–he would appear fagged at the wedding. He envied Gloria who could hide her fatigue with careful pigmentation.
In his bathroom he contemplated himself in the mirror and saw that he was unusually white–half a dozen small imperfections stood out against the morning pallor of his complexion, and overnight he had grown the faint stubble of a beard–the general effect, he fancied, was unprepossessing, haggard, half unwell.
On his dressing table were spread a number of articles which he told over carefully with suddenly fumbling fingers–their tickets to California, the book of traveller’s checks, his watch, set to the half minute, the key to his apartment, which he must not forget to give to Maury, and, most important of all, the ring. It was of platinum set around with small emeralds; Gloria had insisted on this; she had always wanted an emerald wedding ring, she said.
It was the third present he had given her; first had come the engagement ring, and then a little gold cigarette-case. He would be giving her many things now–clothes and jewels and friends and excitement. It seemed absurd that from now on he would pay for all her meals. It was going to cost: he wondered if he had not underestimated for this trip, and if he had not better cash a larger check. The question worried him.
Then the breathless impendency of the event swept his mind clear of details. This was the day–unsought, unsuspected six months before, but now breaking in yellow light through his east window, dancing along the carpet as though the sun were smiling at some ancient and reiterated gag of his own.
Anthony laughed in a nervous one-syllable snort.
“By God!” he muttered to himself, “I’m as good as married!”
THE USHERS
_Six young men in_ CROSS PATCH’S _library growing more and more cheery under the influence of Mumm’s Extra Dry, set surreptitiously in cold pails by the bookcases._
THE FIRST YOUNG MAN: By golly! Believe me, in my next book I’m going to do a wedding scene that’ll knock ’em cold!
THE SECOND YOUNG MAN: Met a débutante th’other day said she thought your book was powerful. As a rule young girls cry for this primitive business.
THE THIRD YOUNG MAN: Where’s Anthony?
THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Walking up and down outside talking to himself.
SECOND YOUNG MAN: Lord! Did you see the minister? Most peculiar looking teeth.
FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Think they’re natural. Funny thing people having gold teeth.
SIXTH YOUNG MAN: They say they love ’em. My dentist told me once a woman came to him and insisted on having two of her teeth covered with gold. No reason at all. All right the way they were.
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Hear you got out a book, Dicky. ‘Gratulations!
DICK: (_Stiffly_) Thanks.
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (_Innocently_) What is it? College stories?
DICK: (_More stiffly_) No. Not college stories.
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Pity! Hasn’t been a good book about Harvard for years.
DICK: (_Touchily_) Why don’t you supply the lack?
THIRD YOUNG MAN: I think I saw a squad of guests turn the drive in a Packard just now.
SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Might open a couple more bottles on the strength of that.
THIRD YOUNG MAN: It was the shock of my life when I heard the old man was going to have a wet wedding. Rabid prohibitionist, you know.
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (_Snapping his fingers excitedly_) By gad! I knew I’d forgotten something. Kept thinking it was my vest.
DICK: What was it?
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! By gad!
SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Here! Here! Why the tragedy?
SECOND YOUNG MAN: What’d you forget? The way home?
DICK: (_Maliciously_) He forgot the plot for his book of Harvard stories.
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: No, sir, I forgot the present, by George! I forgot to buy old Anthony a present. I kept putting it off and putting it off, and by gad I’ve forgotten it! What’ll they think?
SIXTH YOUNG MAN: (_Facetiously_) That’s probably what’s been holding up the wedding.
(THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN _looks nervously at his watch. Laughter._)
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! What an ass I am!
SECOND YOUNG MAN: What d’you make of the bridesmaid who thinks she’s Nora Bayes? Kept telling me she wished this was a ragtime wedding. Name’s Haines or Hampton.
DICK: (_Hurriedly spurring his imagination_) Kane, you mean, Muriel Kane. She’s a sort of debt of honor, I believe. Once saved Gloria from drowning, or something of the sort.
SECOND YOUNG MAN: I didn’t think she could stop that perpetual swaying long enough to swim. Fill up my glass, will you? Old man and I had a long talk about the weather just now.
MAURY: Who? Old Adam?
SECOND YOUNG MAN: No, the bride’s father. He must be with a weather bureau.
DICK: He’s my uncle, Otis.
OTIS: Well, it’s an honorable profession. (_Laughter._)
SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Bride your cousin, isn’t she?
DICK: Yes, Cable, she is.
CABLE: She certainly is a beauty. Not like you, Dicky. Bet she brings old Anthony to terms.
MAURY: Why are all grooms given the title of “old”? I think marriage is an error of youth.
DICK: Maury, the professional cynic.
MAURY: Why, you intellectual faker!
FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Battle of the highbrows here, Otis. Pick up what crumbs you can.
DICK: Faker yourself! What do _you_ know?
MAURY: What do _you_ know?
LICK: Ask me anything. Any branch of knowledge.
MAURY: All right. What’s the fundamental principle of biology?
DICK: You don’t know yourself.
MAURY: Don’t hedge!
DICK: Well, natural selection?
MAURY: Wrong.
DICK: I give it up.
MAURY: Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony.
FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Take your base!
MAURY: Ask you another. What’s the influence of mice on the clover crop? (_Laughter._)
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: What’s the influence of rats on the Decalogue?
MAURY: Shut up, you saphead. There _is_ a connection.
DICK: What is it then?
MAURY: (_Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion_) Why, let’s see. I seem to have forgotten exactly. Something about the bees eating the clover.
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: And the clover eating the mice! Haw! Haw!
MAURY: (_Frowning_) Let me just think a minute.
DICK: (_Sitting up suddenly_) Listen!
(_A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room. The six young men arise, feeling at their neckties._)
DICK: (_Weightily_) We’d better join the firing squad. They’re going to take the picture, I guess. No, that’s afterward.
OTIS: Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid.
FOURTH YOUNG MAN: I wish to God I’d sent that present.
MAURY: If you’ll give me another minute I’ll think of that about the mice.
OTIS: I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and—-
(_They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans from ADAM PATCH’S organ_.)
ANTHONY
There were five hundred eyes boring through the back of his cutaway and the sun glinting on the clergyman’s inappropriately bourgeois teeth. With difficulty he restrained a laugh. Gloria was saying something in a clear proud voice and he tried to think that the affair was irrevocable, that every second was significant, that his life was being slashed into two periods and that the face of the world was changing before him. He tried to recapture that ecstatic sensation of ten weeks before. All these emotions eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness of that very morning–it was all one gigantic aftermath. And those gold teeth! He wondered if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service….
But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious of a strong reaction. The blood was moving in his veins now. A languorous and pleasant content settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility and possession. He was married.
GLORIA
So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately important was happening–and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and securely safe.
Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were not married.
The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that anything so beautiful as Gloria could be moral.
“CON AMORE”
That first half-year–the trip West, the long months’ loiter along the California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived until late autumn made the country dreary–those days, those places, saw the enraptured hours. The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain….
The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth. Came a day when Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world. But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered–by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.
It was, first of all, a time of discovery. The things they found in each other were so diverse, so intermixed and, moreover, so sugared with love as to seem at the time not so much discoveries as isolated phenomena–to be allowed for, and to be forgotten. Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness. Gloria knew within a month that her husband was an utter coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination. Her perception was intermittent, for this cowardice sprang out, became almost obscenely evident, then faded and vanished as though it had been only a creation of her own mind. Her reactions to it were not those attributed to her sex–it roused her neither to disgust nor to a premature feeling of motherhood. Herself almost completely without physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of what she felt to be his fear’s redeeming feature, which was that though he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain–when his imagination was given play–he had yet a sort of dashing recklessness that moved her on its brief occasions almost to admiration, and a pride that usually steadied him when he thought he was observed.
The trait first showed itself in a dozen incidents of little more than nervousness–his warning to a taxi-driver against fast driving, in Chicago; his refusal to take her to a certain tough café she had always wished to visit; these of course admitted the conventional interpretation–that it was of her he had been thinking; nevertheless, their culminative weight disturbed her. But something that occurred in a San Francisco hotel, when they had been married a week, gave the matter certainty.
It was after midnight and pitch dark in their room. Gloria was dozing off and Anthony’s even breathing beside her made her suppose that he was asleep, when suddenly she saw him raise himself on his elbow and stare at the window.
“What is it, dearest?” she murmured.
“Nothing”–he had relaxed to his pillow and turned toward her–“nothing, my darling wife.”
“Don’t say ‘wife.’ I’m your mistress. Wife’s such an ugly word. Your ‘permanent mistress’ is so much more tangible and desirable…. Come into my arms,” she added in a rush of tenderness; “I can sleep so well, so well with you in my arms.”
Coming into Gloria’s arms had a quite definite meaning. It required that he should slide one arm under her shoulder, lock both arms about her, and arrange himself as nearly as possible as a sort of three-sided crib for her luxurious ease. Anthony, who tossed, whose arms went tinglingly to sleep after half an hour of that position, would wait until she was asleep and roll her gently over to her side of the bed–then, left to his own devices, he would curl himself into his usual knots.
Gloria, having attained sentimental comfort, retired into her doze. Five minutes ticked away on Bloeckman’s travelling clock; silence lay all about the room, over the unfamiliar, impersonal furniture and the half-oppressive ceiling that melted imperceptibly into invisible walls on both sides. Then there was suddenly a rattling flutter at the window, staccato and loud upon the hushed, pent air.
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–whenever 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.
GLORIA AND GENERAL LEE
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