instance. The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that too. Sleepy Hollow’s gone; Washington Irving’s dead and his books are rotting in our estimation year by year–then let the graveyard rot too, as it should, as all things should. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.”
“So you think that just as a time goes to pieces its houses ought to go too?”
“Of course! Would you value your Keats letter if the signature was traced over to make it last longer? It’s just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they’ve made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. It hasn’t any right to look so prosperous. It might care enough for Lee to drop a brick now and then. How many of these–these _animals_”–she waved her hand around–“get anything from this, for all the histories and guide-books and restorations in existence? How many of them who think that, at best, appreciation is talking in undertones and walking on tiptoes would even come here if it was any trouble? I want it to smell of magnolias instead of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee’s boots crunched on. There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses–bound for dust–mortal–“
A small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana-peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the Potomac.
SENTIMENT
Simultaneously with the fall of Liège, Anthony and Gloria arrived in New York. In retrospect the six weeks seemed miraculously happy. They had found to a great extent, as most young couples find in some measure, that they possessed in common many fixed ideas and curiosities and odd quirks of mind; they were essentially companionable.
But it had been a struggle to keep many of their conversations on the level of discussions. Arguments were fatal to Gloria’s disposition. She had all her life been associated either with her mental inferiors or with men who, under the almost hostile intimidation of her beauty, had not dared to contradict her; naturally, then, it irritated her when Anthony emerged from the state in which her pronouncements were an infallible and ultimate decision.
He failed to realize, at first, that this was the result partly of her “female” education and partly of her beauty, and he was inclined to include her with her entire sex as curiously and definitely limited. It maddened him to find she had no sense of justice. But he discovered that, when a subject did interest her, her brain tired less quickly than his. What he chiefly missed in her mind was the pedantic teleology–the sense of order and accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously correlated piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while that such a quality in her would have been incongruous.
Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each other’s hearts. The day they left the hotel in Coronado she sat down on one of the beds while they were packing, and began to weep bitterly.
“Dearest–” His arms were around her; he pulled her head down upon his shoulder. “What is it, my own Gloria? Tell me.”
“We’re going away,” she sobbed. “Oh, Anthony, it’s sort of the first place we’ve lived together. Our two little beds here–side by side–they’ll be always waiting for us, and we’re never coming back to ’em any more.”
She was tearing at his heart as she always could. Sentiment came over him, rushed into his eyes.
“Gloria, why, we’re going on to another room. And two other little beds. We’re going to be together all our lives.”
Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.
“But it won’t be–like our two beds–ever again. Everywhere we go and move on and change, something’s lost–something’s left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat anything, and I’ve been so yours, here–“
He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond any criticism of her sentiment, a wise grasping of the minute, if only an indulgence of her desire to cry–Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams, extracting poignancy from the memorable things of life and youth.
Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station with the tickets he found her asleep on one of the beds, her arm curled about a black object which he could not at first identify. Coming closer he found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new one, nor clean one, but her face, tear-stained, was pressed against it, and he understood her ancient and most honorable message. There was almost ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him, shy but well aware of her own nicety of imagination.
With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two things, it seemed to Anthony that they lay somewhere near the heart of love.
THE GRAY HOUSE
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ–and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing–oh, that eternal hand!–a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
And this time with Gloria and Anthony, this first year of marriage, and the gray house caught them in that stage when the organ-grinder was slowly undergoing his inevitable metamorphosis. She was twenty-three; he was twenty-six.
The gray house was, at first, of sheerly pastoral intent. They lived impatiently in Anthony’s apartment for the first fortnight after the return from California, in a stifled atmosphere of open trunks, too many callers, and the eternal laundry-bags. They discussed with their friends the stupendous problem of their future. Dick and Maury would sit with them agreeing solemnly, almost thoughtfully, as Anthony ran through his list of what they “ought” to do, and where they “ought” to live.
“I’d like to take Gloria abroad,” he complained, “except for this damn war–and next to that I’d sort of like to have a place in the country, somewhere near New York, of course, where I could write–or whatever I decide to do.”
Gloria laughed.
“Isn’t he cute?” she required of Maury. “‘Whatever he decides to do!’ But what am _I_ going to do if he works? Maury, will you take me around if Anthony works?”
“Anyway, I’m not going to work yet,” said Anthony quickly.
It was vaguely understood between them that on some misty day he would enter a sort of glorified diplomatic service and be envied by princes and prime ministers for his beautiful wife.
“Well,” said Gloria helplessly, “I’m sure I don’t know. We talk and talk and never get anywhere, and we ask all our friends and they just answer the way we want ’em to. I wish somebody’d take care of us.”
“Why don’t you go out to–out to Greenwich or something?” suggested Richard Caramel.
“I’d like that,” said Gloria, brightening. “Do you think we could get a house there?”
Dick shrugged his shoulders and Maury laughed.
“You two amuse me,” he said. “Of all the unpractical people! As soon as a place is mentioned you expect us to pull great piles of photographs out of our pockets showing the different styles of architecture available in bungalows.”
“That’s just what I don’t want,” wailed Gloria, “a hot stuffy bungalow, with a lot of babies next door and their father cutting the grass in his shirt sleeves–“
“For Heaven’s sake, Gloria,” interrupted Maury, “nobody wants to lock you up in a bungalow. Who in God’s name brought bungalows into the conversation? But you’ll never get a place anywhere unless you go out and hunt for it.”
“Go where? You say ‘go out and hunt for it,’ but where?”
With dignity Maury waved his hand paw-like about the room.
“Out anywhere. Out in the country. There’re lots of places.”
“Thanks.”
“Look here!” Richard Caramel brought his yellow eye rakishly into play. “The trouble with you two is that you’re all disorganized. Do you know anything about New York State? Shut up, Anthony, I’m talking to Gloria.”
“Well,” she admitted finally, “I’ve been to two or three house parties in Portchester and around in Connecticut–but, of course, that isn’t in New York State, is it? And neither is Morristown,” she finished with drowsy irrelevance.
There was a shout of laughter.
“Oh, Lord!” cried Dick, “neither is Morristown!’ No, and neither is Santa Barbara, Gloria. Now listen. To begin with, unless you have a fortune there’s no use considering any place like Newport or Southhampton or Tuxedo. They’re out of the question.”
They all agreed to this solemnly.
“And personally I hate New Jersey. Then, of course, there’s upper New York, above Tuxedo.”
“Too cold,” said Gloria briefly. “I was there once in an automobile.”
“Well, it seems to me there’re a lot of towns like Rye between New York and Greenwich where you could buy a little gray house of some–“
Gloria leaped at the phrase triumphantly. For the first time since their return East she knew what she wanted.
“Oh, _yes_!” she cried. “Oh, _yes_! that’s it: a little gray house with sort of white around and a whole lot of swamp maples just as brown and gold as an October picture in a gallery. Where can we find one?”
“Unfortunately, I’ve mislaid my list of little gray houses with swamp maples around them–but I’ll try to find it. Meanwhile you take a piece of paper and write down the names of seven possible towns. And every day this week you take a trip to one of those towns.”
“Oh, gosh!” protested Gloria, collapsing mentally, “why won’t you do it for us? I hate trains.”
“Well, hire a car, and–“
Gloria yawned.
“I’m tired of discussing it. Seems to me all we do is talk about where to live.”
“My exquisite wife wearies of thought,” remarked Anthony ironically. “She must have a tomato sandwich to stimulate her jaded nerves. Let’s go out to tea.”
As the unfortunate upshot of this conversation, they took Dick’s advice literally, and two days later went out to Rye, where they wandered around with an irritated real estate agent, like bewildered babes in the wood. They were shown houses at a hundred a month which closely adjoined other houses at a hundred a month; they were shown isolated houses to which they invariably took violent dislikes, though they submitted weakly to the agent’s desire that they “look at that stove–some stove!” and to a great shaking of doorposts and tapping of walls, intended evidently to show that the house would not immediately collapse, no matter how convincingly it gave that impression. They gazed through windows into interiors furnished either “commercially” with slab-like chairs and unyielding settees, or “home-like” with the melancholy bric-à-brac of other summers–crossed tennis rackets, fit-form couches, and depressing Gibson girls. With a feeling of guilt they looked at a few really nice houses, aloof, dignified, and cool–at three hundred a month. They went away from Rye thanking the real estate agent very much indeed.
On the crowded train back to New York the seat behind was occupied by a super-respirating Latin whose last few meals had obviously been composed entirely of garlic. They reached the apartment gratefully, almost hysterically, and Gloria rushed for a hot bath in the reproachless bathroom. So far as the question of a future abode was concerned both of them were incapacitated for a week.
The matter eventually worked itself out with unhoped-for romance. Anthony ran into the living room one afternoon fairly radiating “the idea.”
“I’ve got it,” he was exclaiming as though he had just caught a mouse. “We’ll get a car.”
“Gee whiz! Haven’t we got troubles enough taking care of ourselves?”
“Give me a second to explain, can’t you? just let’s leave our stuff with Dick and just pile a couple of suitcases in our car, the one we’re going to buy–we’ll have to have one in the country anyway–and just start out in the direction of New Haven. You see, as we get out of commuting distance from New York, the rents’ll get cheaper, and as soon as we find a house we want we’ll just settle down.”
By his frequent and soothing interpolation of the word “just” he aroused her lethargic enthusiasm. Strutting violently about the room, he simulated a dynamic and irresistible efficiency. “We’ll buy a car to-morrow.”
Life, limping after imagination’s ten-league boots, saw them out of town a week later in a cheap but sparkling new roadster, saw them through the chaotic unintelligible Bronx, then over a wide murky district which alternated cheerless blue-green wastes with suburbs of tremendous and sordid activity. They left New York at eleven and it was well past a hot and beatific noon when they moved rakishly through Pelham.
“These aren’t towns,” said Gloria scornfully, “these are just city blocks plumped down coldly into waste acres. I imagine all the men here have their mustaches stained from drinking their coffee too quickly in the morning.”
“And play pinochle on the commuting trains.”
“What’s pinochle?”
“Don’t be so literal. How should I know? But it sounds as though they ought to play it.”
“I like it. It sounds as if it were something where you sort of cracked your knuckles or something…. Let me drive.”
Anthony looked at her suspiciously.
“You swear you’re a good driver?”
“Since I was fourteen.”
He stopped the car cautiously at the side of the road and they changed seats. Then with a horrible grinding noise the car was put in gear, Gloria adding an accompaniment of laughter which seemed to Anthony disquieting and in the worst possible taste.
“Here we go!” she yelled. “Whoo-oop!”
Their heads snapped back like marionettes on a single wire as the car leaped ahead and curved retchingly about a standing milk-wagon, whose driver stood up on his seat and bellowed after them. In the immemorial tradition of the road Anthony retorted with a few brief epigrams as to the grossness of the milk-delivering profession. He cut his remarks short, however, and turned to Gloria with the growing conviction that he had made a grave mistake in relinquishing control and that Gloria was a driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.
“Remember now!” he warned her nervously, “the man said we oughtn’t to go over twenty miles an hour for the first five thousand miles.”
She nodded briefly, but evidently intending to accomplish the prohibitive distance as quickly as possible, slightly increased her speed. A moment later he made another attempt.
“See that sign? Do you want to get us pinched?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” cried Gloria in exasperation, “you _always_ exaggerate things so!”
“Well, I don’t want to get arrested.”
“Who’s arresting you? You’re so persistent–just like you were about my cough medicine last night.”
“It was for your own good.”
“Ha! I might as well be living with mama.”
“What a thing to say to me!”
A standing policeman swerved into view, was hastily passed.
“See him?” demanded Anthony.
“Oh, you drive me crazy! He didn’t arrest us, did he?”
“When he does it’ll be too late,” countered Anthony brilliantly.
Her reply was scornful, almost injured.
“Why, this old thing won’t _go_ over thirty-five.”
“It isn’t old.”
“It is in spirit.”
That afternoon the car joined the laundry-bags and Gloria’s appetite as one of the trinity of contention. He warned her of railroad tracks; he pointed out approaching automobiles; finally he insisted on taking the wheel and a furious, insulted Gloria sat silently beside him between the towns of Larchmont and Rye.
But it was due to this furious silence of hers that the gray house materialized from its abstraction, for just beyond Rye he surrendered gloomily to it and re-relinquished the wheel. Mutely he beseeched her and Gloria, instantly cheered, vowed to be more careful. But because a discourteous street-car persisted callously in remaining upon its track Gloria ducked down a side-street–and thereafter that afternoon was never able to find her way back to the Post Road. The street they finally mistook for it lost its Post-Road aspect when it had gone five miles from Cos Cob. Its macadam became gravel, then dirt–moreover, it narrowed and developed a border of maple trees, through which filtered the weltering sun, making its endless experiments with shadow designs upon the long grass.
“We’re lost now,” complained Anthony.
“Read that sign!”
“Marietta–Five Miles. What’s Marietta?”
“Never heard of it, but let’s go on. We can’t turn here and there’s probably a detour back to the Post Road.”
The way became scarred with deepening ruts and insidious shoulders of stone. Three farmhouses faced them momentarily, slid by. A town sprang up in a cluster of dull roofs around a white tall steeple.
Then Gloria, hesitating between two approaches, and making her choice too late, drove over a fire-hydrant and ripped the transmission violently from the car.
It was dark when the real-estate agent of Marietta showed them the gray house. They came upon it just west of the village, where it rested against a sky that was a warm blue cloak buttoned with tiny stars. The gray house had been there when women who kept cats were probably witches, when Paul Revere made false teeth in Boston preparatory to arousing the great commercial people, when our ancestors were gloriously deserting Washington in droves. Since those days the house had been bolstered up in a feeble corner, considerably repartitioned and newly plastered inside, amplified by a kitchen and added to by a side-porch–but, save for where some jovial oaf had roofed the new kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained.
“How did you happen to come to Marietta?” demanded the real-estate agent in a tone that was first cousin to suspicion. He was showing them through four spacious and airy bedrooms.
“We broke down,” explained Gloria. “I drove over a fire-hydrant and we had ourselves towed to the garage and then we saw your sign.”
The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity. There was something subtly immoral in doing anything without several months’ consideration.
They signed a lease that night and, in the agent’s car, returned jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a country road-house. Half the night they lay awake planning the things they were to do there. Anthony was going to work at an astounding pace on his history and thus ingratiate himself with his cynical grandfather…. When the car was repaired they would explore the country and join the nearest “really nice” club, where Gloria would play golf “or something” while Anthony wrote. This, of course, was Anthony’s idea–Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant still in a shadowy hinterland. Between paragraphs Anthony would come and kiss her as she lay indolently in the hammock…. The hammock! a host of new dreams in tune to its imagined rhythm, while the wind stirred it and waves of sun undulated over the shadows of blown wheat, or the dusty road freckled and darkened with quiet summer rain….
And guests–here they had a long argument, both of them trying to be extraordinarily mature and far-sighted. Anthony claimed that they would need people at least every other week-end “as a sort of change.” This provoked an involved and extremely sentimental conversation as to whether Anthony did not consider Gloria change enough. Though he assured her that he did, she insisted upon doubting him…. Eventually the conversation assumed its eternal monotone: “What then? Oh, what’ll we do then?”
“Well, we’ll have a dog,” suggested Anthony.
“I don’t want one. I want a kitty.” She went thoroughly and with great enthusiasm into the history, habits, and tastes of a cat she had once possessed. Anthony considered that it must have been a horrible character with neither personal magnetism nor a loyal heart.
Later they slept, to wake an hour before dawn with the gray house dancing in phantom glory before their dazzled eyes.
THE SOUL OF GLORIA
For that autumn the gray house welcomed them with a rush of sentiment that falsified its cynical old age. True, there were the laundry-bags, there was Gloria’s appetite, there was Anthony’s tendency to brood and his imaginative “nervousness,” but there were intervals also of an unhoped-for serenity. Close together on the porch they would wait for the moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland, jump a thick wood and tumble waves of radiance at their feet. In such a moonlight Gloria’s face was of a pervading, reminiscent white, and with a modicum of effort they would slip off the blinders of custom and each would find in the other almost the quintessential romance of the vanished June.
One night while her head lay upon his heart and their cigarettes glowed in swerving buttons of light through the dome of darkness over the bed, she spoke for the first time and fragmentarily of the men who had hung for brief moments on her beauty.
“Do you ever think of them?” he asked her.
“Only occasionally–when something happens that recalls a particular man.”
“What do you remember–their kisses?”
“All sorts of things…. Men are different with women.”
“Different in what way?”
“Oh, entirely–and quite inexpressibly. Men who had the most firmly rooted reputation for being this way or that would sometimes be surprisingly inconsistent with me. Brutal men were tender, negligible men were astonishingly loyal and lovable, and, often, honorable men took attitudes that were anything but honorable.”
“For instance?”
“Well, there was a boy named Percy Wolcott from Cornell who was quite a hero in college, a great athlete, and saved a lot of people from a fire or something like that. But I soon found he was stupid in a rather dangerous way.”
“What way?”
“It seems he had some naïve conception of a woman ‘fit to be his wife,’ a particular conception that I used to run into a lot and that always drove me wild. He demanded a girl who’d never been kissed and who liked to sew and sit home and pay tribute to his self-esteem. And I’ll bet a hat if he’s gotten an idiot to sit and be stupid with him he’s tearing out on the side with some much speedier lady.”
“I’d be sorry for his wife.”
“I wouldn’t. Think what an ass she’d be not to realize it before she married him. He’s the sort whose idea of honoring and respecting a woman would be never to give her any excitement. With the best intentions, he was deep in the dark ages.”
“What was his attitude toward you?”
“I’m coming to that. As I told you–or did I tell you?–he was mighty good-looking: big brown honest eyes and one of those smiles that guarantee the heart behind it is twenty-karat gold. Being young and credulous, I thought he had some discretion, so I kissed him fervently one night when we were riding around after a dance at the Homestead at Hot Springs. It had been a wonderful week, I remember–with the most luscious trees spread like green lather, sort of, all over the valley and a mist rising out of them on October mornings like bonfires lit to turn them brown–“
“How about your friend with the ideals?” interrupted Anthony.
“It seems that when he kissed me he began to think that perhaps he could get away with a little more, that I needn’t be ‘respected’ like this Beatrice Fairfax glad-girl of his imagination.”
“What’d he do?”
“Not much. I pushed him off a sixteen-foot embankment before he was well started.”
“Hurt him?” inquired Anthony with a laugh.
“Broke his arm and sprained his ankle. He told the story all over Hot Springs, and when his arm healed a man named Barley who liked me fought him and broke it over again. Oh, it was all an awful mess. He threatened to sue Barley, and Barley–he was from Georgia–was seen buying a gun in town. But before that mama had dragged me North again, much against my will, so I never did find out all that happened–though I saw Barley once in the Vanderbilt lobby.”
Anthony laughed long and loud.
“What a career! I suppose I ought to be furious because you’ve kissed so many men. I’m not, though.”
At this she sat up in bed.
“It’s funny, but I’m so sure that those kisses left no mark on me–no taint of promiscuity, I mean–even though a man once told me in all seriousness that he hated to think I’d been a public drinking glass.”
“He had his nerve.”
“I just laughed and told him to think of me rather as a loving-cup that goes from hand to hand but should be valued none the less.”
“Somehow it doesn’t bother me–on the other hand it would, of course, if you’d done any more than kiss them. But I believe _you’re_ absolutely incapable of jealousy except as hurt vanity. Why don’t you care what I’ve done? Wouldn’t you prefer it if I’d been absolutely innocent?”
“It’s all in the impression it might have made on you. _My_ kisses were because the man was good-looking, or because there was a slick moon, or even because I’ve felt vaguely sentimental and a little stirred. But that’s all–it’s had utterly no effect on me. But you’d remember and let memories haunt you and worry you.”
“Haven’t you ever kissed any one like you’ve kissed me?”
“No,” she answered simply. “As I’ve told you, men have tried–oh, lots of things. Any pretty girl has that experience…. You see,” she resumed, “it doesn’t matter to me how many women you’ve stayed with in the past, so long as it was merely a physical satisfaction, but I don’t believe I could endure the idea of your ever having lived with another woman for a protracted period or even having wanted to marry some possible girl. It’s different somehow. There’d be all the little intimacies remembered–and they’d dull that freshness that after all is the most precious part of love.”
Rapturously he pulled her down beside him on the pillow.
“Oh, my darling,” he whispered, “as if I remembered anything but your dear kisses.”
Then Gloria, in a very mild voice:
“Anthony, did I hear anybody say they were thirsty?”
Anthony laughed abruptly and with a sheepish and amused grin got out of bed.
“With just a _little_ piece of ice in the water,” she added. “Do you suppose I could have that?”
Gloria used the adjective “little” whenever she asked a favor–it made the favor sound less arduous. But Anthony laughed again–whether she wanted a cake of ice or a marble of it, he must go down-stairs to the kitchen…. Her voice followed him through the hall: “And just a _little_ cracker with just a _little_ marmalade on it….”
“Oh, gosh!” sighed Anthony in rapturous slang, “she’s wonderful, that girl! She _has_ it!”
“When we have a baby,” she began one day–this, it had already been decided, was to be after three years–“I want it to look like you.”
“Except its legs,” he insinuated slyly.
“Oh, yes, except his legs. He’s got to have my legs. But the rest of him can be you.”
“My nose?”
Gloria hesitated.
“Well, perhaps my nose. But certainly your eyes–and my mouth, and I guess my shape of the face. I wonder; I think he’d be sort of cute if he had my hair.”
“My dear Gloria, you’ve appropriated the whole baby.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to,” she apologized cheerfully.
“Let him have my neck at least,” he urged, regarding himself gravely in the glass. “You’ve often said you liked my neck because the Adam’s apple doesn’t show, and, besides, your neck’s too short.”
“Why, it is _not_!” she cried indignantly, turning to the mirror, “it’s just right. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a better neck.”
“It’s too short,” he repeated teasingly.
“Short?” Her tone expressed exasperated wonder.
“Short? You’re crazy!” She elongated and contracted it to convince herself of its reptilian sinuousness. “Do you call _that_ a short neck?”
“One of the shortest I’ve ever seen.”
For the first time in weeks tears started from Gloria’s eyes and the look she gave him had a quality of real pain.
“Oh, Anthony–“
“My Lord, Gloria!” He approached her in bewilderment and took her elbows in his hands. “Don’t cry, _please_! Didn’t you know I was only kidding? Gloria, look at me! Why, dearest, you’ve got the longest neck I’ve ever seen. Honestly.”
Her tears dissolved in a twisted smile.
“Well–you shouldn’t have said that, then. Let’s talk about the b-baby.”
Anthony paced the floor and spoke as though rehearsing for a debate.
“To put it briefly, there are two babies we could have, two distinct and logical babies, utterly differentiated. There’s the baby that’s the combination of the best of both of us. Your body, my eyes, my mind, your intelligence–and then there is the baby which is our worst–my body, your disposition, and my irresolution.”
“I like that second baby,” she said.
“What I’d really like,” continued Anthony, “would be to have two sets of triplets one year apart and then experiment with the six boys–“
“Poor me,” she interjected.
“–I’d educate them each in a different country and by a different system and when they were twenty-three I’d call them together and see what they were like.”
“Let’s have ’em all with my neck,” suggested Gloria.
THE END OF A CHAPTER
The car was at length repaired and with a deliberate vengeance took up where it left off the business of causing infinite dissension. Who should drive? How fast should Gloria go? These two questions and the eternal recriminations involved ran through the days. They motored to the Post-Road towns, Rye, Portchester, and Greenwich, and called on a dozen friends, mostly Gloria’s, who all seemed to be in different stages of having babies and in this respect as well as in others bored her to a point of nervous distraction. For an hour after each visit she would bite her fingers furiously and be inclined to take out her rancor on Anthony.
“I loathe women,” she cried in a mild temper. “What on earth can you say to them–except talk ‘lady-lady’? I’ve enthused over a dozen babies that I’ve wanted only to choke. And every one of those girls is either incipiently jealous and suspicious of her husband if he’s charming or beginning to be bored with him if he isn’t.”
“Don’t you ever intend to see any women?”
“I don’t know. They never seem clean to me–never–never. Except just a few. Constance Shaw–you know, the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us last Tuesday–is almost the only one. She’s so tall and fresh-looking and stately.”
“I don’t like them so tall.”
Though they went to several dinner dances at various country clubs, they decided that the autumn was too nearly over for them to “go out” on any scale, even had they been so inclined. He hated golf; Gloria liked it only mildly, and though she enjoyed a violent rush that some undergraduates gave her one night and was glad that Anthony should be proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their hostess for the evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat disquieted by the fact that Anthony’s classmate, Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush. The Granbys never phoned again, and though Gloria laughed, it piqued her not a little.
“You see,” she explained to Anthony, “if I wasn’t married it wouldn’t worry her–but she’s been to the movies in her day and she thinks I may be a vampire. But the point is that placating such people requires an effort that I’m simply unwilling to make…. And those cute little freshmen making eyes at me and paying me idiotic compliments! I’ve grown up, Anthony.”
Marietta itself offered little social life. Half a dozen farm-estates formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive wives. The townspeople were a particularly uninteresting type–unmarried females were predominant for the most part–with school-festival horizons and souls bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches. The only native with whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped, broad-shouldered Swedish girl who came every day to do their work. She was silent and efficient, and Gloria, after finding her weeping violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen table, developed an uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food. Because of her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.
Gloria’s penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex, properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic, and, far from gullible about the motives of people, she was inclined to credit any extraordinary happening attributed to the whimsical perambulations of the buried. The desperate squeakings about the old house on windy nights that to Anthony were burglars with revolvers ready in hand represented to Gloria the auras, evil and restive, of dead generations, expiating the inexpiable upon the ancient and romantic hearth. One night, because of two swift bangs down-stairs, which Anthony fearfully but unavailingly investigated, they lay awake nearly until dawn asking each other examination-paper questions about the history of the world.
In October Muriel came out for a two weeks’ visit. Gloria had called her on long-distance, and Miss Kane ended the conversation characteristically by saying “All-ll-ll righty. I’ll be there with bells!” She arrived with a dozen popular songs under her arm.
“You ought to have a phonograph out here in the country,” she said, “just a little Vic–they don’t cost much. Then whenever you’re lonesome you can have Caruso or Al Jolson right at your door.”
She worried Anthony to distraction by telling him that “he was the first clever man she had ever known and she got so tired of shallow people.” He wondered that people fell in love with such women. Yet he supposed that under a certain impassioned glance even she might take on a softness and promise.
But Gloria, violently showing off her love for Anthony, was diverted into a state of purring content.
Finally Richard Caramel arrived for a garrulous and to Gloria painfully literary week-end, during which he discussed himself with Anthony long after she lay in childlike sleep up-stairs.
“It’s been mighty funny, this success and all,” said Dick. “Just before the novel appeared I’d been trying, without success, to sell some short stories. Then, after my book came out, I polished up three and had them accepted by one of the magazines that had rejected them before. I’ve done a lot of them since; publishers don’t pay me for my book till this winter.”
“Don’t let the victor belong to the spoils.”
“You mean write trash?” He considered. “If you mean deliberately injecting a slushy fade-out into each one, I’m not. But I don’t suppose I’m being so careful. I’m certainly writing faster and I don’t seem to be thinking as much as I used to. Perhaps it’s because I don’t get any conversation, now that you’re married and Maury’s gone to Philadelphia. Haven’t the old urge and ambition. Early success and all that.”
“Doesn’t it worry you?”
“Frantically. I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like buck-fever–it’s a sort of intense literary self-consciousness that comes when I try to force myself. But the really awful days aren’t when I think I can’t write. They’re when I wonder whether any writing is worth while at all–I mean whether I’m not a sort of glorified buffoon.”
“I like to hear you talk that way,” said Anthony with a touch of his old patronizing insolence. “I was afraid you’d gotten a bit idiotic over your work. Read the damnedest interview you gave out—-“
Dick interrupted with an agonized expression.
“Good Lord! Don’t mention it. Young lady wrote it–most admiring young lady. Kept telling me my work was ‘strong,’ and I sort of lost my head and made a lot of strange pronouncements. Some of it was good, though, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterward.”
“Oh, I believe a lot of it,” admitted Richard Caramel with a faint beam. “It simply was a mistake to give it out.”
In November they moved into Anthony’s apartment, from which they sallied triumphantly to the Yale-Harvard and Harvard-Princeton football games, to the St. Nicholas ice-skating rink, to a thorough round of the theatres and to a miscellany of entertainments–from small, staid dances to the great affairs that Gloria loved, held in those few houses where lackeys with powdered wigs scurried around in magnificent Anglomania under the direction of gigantic majordomos. Their intention was to go abroad the first of the year or, at any rate, when the war was over. Anthony had actually completed a Chestertonian essay on the twelfth century by way of introduction to his proposed book and Gloria had done some extensive research work on the question of Russian sable coats–in fact the winter was approaching quite comfortably, when the Bilphistic demiurge decided suddenly in mid-December that Mrs. Gilbert’s soul had aged sufficiently in its present incarnation. In consequence Anthony took a miserable and hysterical Gloria out to Kansas City, where, in the fashion of mankind, they paid the terrible and mind-shaking deference to the dead.
Mr. Gilbert became, for the first and last time in his life, a truly pathetic figure. That woman he had broken to wait upon his body and play congregation to his mind had ironically deserted him–just when he could not much longer have supported her. Never again would he be able so satisfactorily to bore and bully a human soul.
CHAPTER II
SYMPOSIUM
Gloria had lulled Anthony’s mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain.
It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for another summer. Through a golden enervating spring they had loitered, restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria’s desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal variant among the changing colors of the sea. Out of the Pacific there rose to greet them savage rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar glorified by the polo costumes of Southhampton and Lake Forest and Newport and Palm Beach. And, as the waves met and splashed and glittered in the most placid of the bays, so they joined this group and that, and with them shifted stations, murmuring ever of those strange unsubstantial gaieties in wait just over the next green and fruitful valley.
A simple healthy leisure class it was–the best of the men not unpleasantly undergraduate–they seemed to be on a perpetual candidates list for some etherealized “Porcellian” or “Skull and Bones” extended out indefinitely into the world; the women, of more than average beauty, fragilely athletic, somewhat idiotic as hostesses but charming and infinitely decorative as guests. Sedately and gracefully they danced the steps of their selection in the balmy tea hours, accomplishing with a certain dignity the movements so horribly burlesqued by clerk and chorus girl the country over. It seemed ironic that in this lone and discredited offspring of the arts Americans should excel, unquestionably.
Having danced and splashed through a lavish spring, Anthony and Gloria found that they had spent too much money and for this must go into retirement for a certain period. There was Anthony’s “work,” they said. Almost before they knew it they were back in the gray house, more aware now that other lovers had slept there, other names had been called over the banisters, other couples had sat upon the porch steps watching the gray-green fields and the black bulk of woods beyond.
It was the same Anthony, more restless, inclined to quicken only under the stimulus of several high-balls, faintly, almost imperceptibly, apathetic toward Gloria. But Gloria–she would be twenty-four in August and was in an attractive but sincere panic about it. Six years to thirty! Had she been less in love with Anthony her sense of the flight of time would have expressed itself in a reawakened interest in other men, in a deliberate intention of extracting a transient gleam of romance from every potential lover who glanced at her with lowered brows over a shining dinner table. She said to Anthony one day:
“How I feel is that if I wanted anything I’d take it. That’s what I’ve always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”
They were bound eastward through a parched and lifeless Indiana, and she had looked up from one of her beloved moving picture magazines to find a casual conversation suddenly turned grave.
Anthony frowned out the car window. As the track crossed a country road a farmer appeared momentarily in his wagon; he was chewing on a straw and was apparently the same farmer they had passed a dozen times before, sitting in silent and malignant symbolism. As Anthony turned to Gloria his frown intensified.
“You worry me,” he objected; “I can imagine _wanting_ another woman under certain transitory circumstances, but I can’t imagine taking her.”
“But I don’t feel that way, Anthony. I can’t be bothered resisting things I want. My way is not to want them–to want nobody but you.”
“Yet when I think that if you just happened to take a fancy to some one–“
“Oh, don’t be an idiot!” she exclaimed. “There’d be nothing casual about it. And I can’t even imagine the possibility.”
This emphatically closed the conversation. Anthony’s unfailing appreciation made her happier in his company than in any one’s else. She definitely enjoyed him–she loved him. So the summer began very much as had the one before.
There was, however, one radical change in ménage. The icy-hearted Scandinavian, whose austere cooking and sardonic manner of waiting on table had so depressed Gloria, gave way to an exceedingly efficient Japanese whose name was Tanalahaka, but who confessed that he heeded any summons which included the dissyllable “Tana.”
Tana was unusually small even for a Japanese, and displayed a somewhat naïve conception of himself as a man of the world. On the day of his arrival from “R. Gugimoniki, Japanese Reliable Employment Agency,” he called Anthony into his room to see the treasures of his trunk. These included a large collection of Japanese post cards, which he was all for explaining to his employer at once, individually and at great length. Among them were half a dozen of pornographic intent and plainly of American origin, though the makers had modestly omitted both their names and the form for mailing. He next brought out some of his own handiwork–a pair of American pants, which he had made himself, and two suits of solid silk underwear. He informed Anthony confidentially as to the purpose for which these latter were reserved. The next exhibit was a rather good copy of an etching of Abraham Lincoln, to whose face he had given an unmistakable Japanese cast. Last came a flute; he had made it himself but it was broken: he was going to fix it soon.
After these polite formalities, which Anthony conjectured must be native to Japan, Tana delivered a long harangue in splintered English on the relation of master and servant from which Anthony gathered that he had worked on large estates but had always quarrelled with the other servants because they were not honest. They had a great time over the word “honest,” and in fact became rather irritated with each other, because Anthony persisted stubbornly that Tana was trying to say “hornets,” and even went to the extent of buzzing in the manner of a bee and flapping his arms to imitate wings.
After three-quarters of an hour Anthony was released with the warm assurance that they would have other nice chats in which Tana would tell “how we do in my countree.”
Such was Tana’s garrulous première in the gray house–and he fulfilled its promise. Though he was conscientious and honorable, he was unquestionably a terrific bore. He seemed unable to control his tongue, sometimes continuing from paragraph to paragraph with a look akin to pain in his small brown eyes.
Sunday and Monday afternoons he read the comic sections of the newspapers. One cartoon which contained a facetious Japanese butler diverted him enormously, though he claimed that the protagonist, who to Anthony appeared clearly Oriental, had really an American face. The difficulty with the funny paper was that when, aided by Anthony, he had spelled out the last three pictures and assimilated their context with a concentration surely adequate for Kant’s “Critique,” he had entirely forgotten what the first pictures were about.
In the middle of June Anthony and Gloria celebrated their first anniversary by having a “date.” Anthony knocked at the door and she ran to let him in. Then they sat together on the couch calling over those names they had made for each other, new combinations of endearments ages old. Yet to this “date” was appended no attenuated good-night with its ecstasy of regret.
Later in June horror leered out at Gloria, struck at her and frightened her bright soul back half a generation. Then slowly it faded out, faded back into that impenetrable darkness whence it had come–taking relentlessly its modicum of youth.
With an infallible sense of the dramatic it chose a little railroad station in a wretched village near Portchester. The station platform lay all day bare as a prairie, exposed to the dusty yellow sun and to the glance of that most obnoxious type of countryman who lives near a metropolis and has attained its cheap smartness without its urbanity. A dozen of these yokels, red-eyed, cheerless as scarecrows, saw the incident. Dimly it passed across their confused and uncomprehending minds, taken at its broadest for a coarse joke, at its subtlest for a “shame.” Meanwhile there upon the platform a measure of brightness faded from the world.
With Eric Merriam, Anthony had been sitting over a decanter of Scotch all the hot summer afternoon, while Gloria and Constance Merriam swam and sunned themselves at the Beach Club, the latter under a striped parasol-awning, Gloria stretched sensuously upon the soft hot sand, tanning her inevitable legs. Later they had all four played with inconsequential sandwiches; then Gloria had risen, tapping Anthony’s knee with her parasol to get his attention.
“We’ve got to go, dear.”
“Now?” He looked at her unwillingly. At that moment nothing seemed of more importance than to idle on that shady porch drinking mellowed Scotch, while his host reminisced interminably on the byplay of some forgotten political campaign.
“We’ve really got to go,” repeated Gloria. “We can get a taxi to the station…. Come on, Anthony!” she commanded a bit more imperiously.
“Now see here–” Merriam, his yarn cut off, made conventional objections, meanwhile provocatively filling his guest’s glass with a high-ball that should have been sipped through ten minutes. But at Gloria’s annoyed “We really _must!_” Anthony drank it off, got to his feet and made an elaborate bow to his hostess.
“It seems we ‘must,'” he said, with little grace.
In a minute he was following Gloria down a garden-walk between tall rose-bushes, her parasol brushing gently the June-blooming leaves. Most inconsiderate, he thought, as they reached the road. He felt with injured naïvete that Gloria should not have interrupted such innocent and harmless enjoyment. The whiskey had both soothed and clarified the restless things in his mind. It occurred to him that she had taken this same attitude several times before. Was he always to retreat from pleasant episodes at a touch of her parasol or a flicker of her eye? His unwillingness blurred to ill will, which rose within him like a resistless bubble. He kept silent, perversely inhibiting a desire to reproach her. They found a taxi in front of the Inn; rode silently to the little station….
Then Anthony knew what he wanted–to assert his will against this cool and impervious girl, to obtain with one magnificent effort a mastery that seemed infinitely desirable.
“Let’s go over to see the Barneses,” he said without looking at her. “I don’t feel like going home.”
–Mrs. Barnes, née Rachael Jerryl, had a summer place several miles from Redgate.
“We went there day before yesterday,” she answered shortly.
“I’m sure they’d be glad to see us.” He felt that that was not a strong enough note, braced himself stubbornly, and added: “I want to see the Barneses. I haven’t any desire to go home.”
“Well, I haven’t any desire to go to the Barneses.”
Suddenly they stared at each other.
“Why, Anthony,” she said with annoyance, “this is Sunday night and they probably have guests for supper. Why we should go in at this hour–“
“Then why couldn’t we have stayed at the Merriams’?” he burst out. “Why go home when we were having a perfectly decent time? They asked us to supper.”
“They had to. Give me the money and I’ll get the railroad tickets.”
“I certainly will not! I’m in no humour for a ride in that damn hot train.”
Gloria stamped her foot on the platform.
“Anthony, you act as if you’re tight!”
“On the contrary, I’m perfectly sober.”
But his voice had slipped into a husky key and she knew with certainty that this was untrue.
“If you’re sober you’ll give me the money for the tickets.”
But it was too late to talk to him that way. In his mind was but one idea–that Gloria was being selfish, that she was always being selfish and would continue to be unless here and now he asserted himself as her master. This was the occasion of all occasions, since for a whim she had deprived him of a pleasure. His determination solidified, approached momentarily a dull and sullen hate.
“I won’t go in the train,” he said, his voice trembling a little with anger. “We’re going to the Barneses.”
“I’m not!” she cried. “If you go I’m going home alone.”
“Go on, then.”
Without a word she turned toward the ticket office; simultaneously he remembered that she had some money with her and that this was not the sort of victory he wanted, the sort he must have. He took a step after her and seized her arm.
“See here!” he muttered, “you’re _not_ going alone!”
“I certainly am–why, Anthony!” This exclamation as she tried to pull away from him and he only tightened his grasp.
He looked at her with narrowed and malicious eyes.
“Let go!” Her cry had a quality of fierceness. “If you have _any_ decency you’ll let go.”
“Why?” He knew why. But he took a confused and not quite confident pride in holding her there.
“I’m going home, do you understand? And you’re going to let me go!”
“No, I’m not.”
Her eyes were burning now.
“Are you going to make a scene here?”
“I say you’re not going! I’m tired of your eternal selfishness!”
“I only want to go home.” Two wrathful tears started from her eyes.
“This time you’re going to do what _I_ say.”
Slowly her body straightened: her head went back in a gesture of infinite scorn.
“I hate you!” Her low words were expelled like venom through her clenched teeth. “Oh, _let_ me go! Oh, I _hate_ you!” She tried to jerk herself away but he only grasped the other arm. “I hate you! I hate you!”
At Gloria’s fury his uncertainty returned, but he felt that now he had gone too far to give in. It seemed that he had always given in and that in her heart she had despised him for it. Ah, she might hate him now, but afterward she would admire him for his dominance.
The approaching train gave out a premonitory siren that tumbled melodramatically toward them down the glistening blue tracks. Gloria tugged and strained to free herself, and words older than the Book of Genesis came to her lips.
“Oh, you brute!” she sobbed. “Oh, you brute! Oh, I hate you! Oh, you brute! Oh–“
On the station platform other prospective passengers were beginning to turn and stare; the drone of the train was audible, it increased to a clamor. Gloria’s efforts redoubled, then ceased altogether, and she stood there trembling and hot-eyed at this helpless humiliation, as the engine roared and thundered into the station.
Low, below the flood of steam and the grinding of the brakes came her voice:
“Oh, if there was one _man_ here you couldn’t do this! You couldn’t do this! You coward! You coward, oh, you coward!”
Anthony, silent, trembling himself, gripped her rigidly, aware that faces, dozens of them, curiously unmoved, shadows of a dream, were regarding him. Then the bells distilled metallic crashes that were like physical pain, the smoke-stacks volleyed in slow acceleration at the sky, and in a moment of noise and gray gaseous turbulence the line of faces ran by, moved off, became indistinct–until suddenly there was only the sun slanting east across the tracks and a volume of sound decreasing far off like a train made out of tin thunder. He dropped her arms. He had won.
Now, if he wished, he might laugh. The test was done and he had sustained his will with violence. Let leniency walk in the wake of victory.
“We’ll hire a car here and drive back to Marietta,” he said with fine reserve.
For answer Gloria seized his hand with both of hers and raising it to her mouth bit deeply into his thumb. He scarcely noticed the pain; seeing the blood spurt he absent-mindedly drew out his handkerchief and wrapped the wound. That too was part of the triumph he supposed–it was inevitable that defeat should thus be resented–and as such was beneath notice.
She was sobbing, almost without tears, profoundly and bitterly.
“I won’t go! I won’t go! You–can’t–make–me–go! You’ve–you’ve killed any love I ever had for you, and any respect. But all that’s left in me would die before I’d move from this place. Oh, if I’d thought _you’d_ lay your hands on me–“
“You’re going with me,” he said brutally, “if I have to carry you.”
He turned, beckoned to a taxicab, told the driver to go to Marietta. The man dismounted and swung the door open. Anthony faced his wife and said between his clenched teeth:
“Will you get in?–or will I _put_ you in?”
With a subdued cry of infinite pain and despair she yielded herself up and got into the car.
All the long ride, through the increasing dark of twilight, she sat huddled in her side of the car, her silence broken by an occasional dry and solitary sob. Anthony stared out the window, his mind working dully on the slowly changing significance of what had occurred. Something was wrong–that last cry of Gloria’s had struck a chord which echoed posthumously and with incongruous disquiet in his heart. He must be right–yet, she seemed such a pathetic little thing now, broken and dispirited, humiliated beyond the measure of her lot to bear. The sleeves of her dress were torn; her parasol was gone, forgotten on the platform. It was a new costume, he remembered, and she had been so proud of it that very morning when they had left the house…. He began wondering if any one they knew had seen the incident. And persistently there recurred to him her cry:
“All that’s left in me would die–“
This gave him a confused and increasing worry. It fitted so well with the Gloria who lay in the corner–no longer a proud Gloria, nor any Gloria he had known. He asked himself if it were possible. While he did not believe she would cease to love him–this, of course, was unthinkable–it was yet problematical whether Gloria without her arrogance, her independence, her virginal confidence and courage, would be the girl of his glory, the radiant woman who was precious and charming because she was ineffably, triumphantly herself.
He was very drunk even then, so drunk as not to realize his own drunkenness. When they reached the gray house he went to his own room and, his mind still wrestling helplessly and sombrely with what he had done, fell into a deep stupor on his bed.
It was after one o’clock and the hall seemed extraordinarily quiet when Gloria, wide-eyed and sleepless, traversed it and pushed open the door of his room. He had been too befuddled to open the windows and the air was stale and thick with whiskey. She stood for a moment by his bed, a slender, exquisitely graceful figure in her boyish silk pajamas–then with abandon she flung herself upon him, half waking him in the frantic emotion of her embrace, dropping her warm tears upon his throat.
“Oh, Anthony!” she cried passionately, “oh, my darling, you don’t know what you did!”
Yet in the morning, coming early into her room, he knelt down by her bed and cried like a little boy, as though it was his heart that had been broken.
“It seemed, last night,” she said gravely, her fingers playing in his hair, “that all the part of me you loved, the part that was worth knowing, all the pride and fire, was gone. I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.”
Nevertheless, she was aware even then that she would forget in time and that it is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away. After that morning the incident was never mentioned and its deep wound healed with Anthony’s hand–and if there was triumph some darker force than theirs possessed it, possessed the knowledge and the victory.
NIETZSCHEAN INCIDENT
Gloria’s independence, like all sincere and profound qualities, had begun unconsciously, but, once brought to her attention by Anthony’s fascinated discovery of it, it assumed more nearly the proportions of a formal code. From her conversation it might be assumed that all her energy and vitality went into a violent affirmation of the negative principle “Never give a damn.”
“Not for anything or anybody,” she said, “except myself and, by implication, for Anthony. That’s the rule of all life and if it weren’t I’d be that way anyhow. Nobody’d do anything for me if it didn’t gratify them to, and I’d do as little for them.”
She was on the front porch of the nicest lady in Marietta when she said this, and as she finished she gave a curious little cry and sank in a dead faint to the porch floor.
The lady brought her to and drove her home in her car. It had occurred to the estimable Gloria that she was probably with child.
She lay upon the long lounge down-stairs. Day was slipping warmly out the window, touching the late roses on the porch pillars.
“All I think of ever is that I love you,” she wailed. “I value my body because you think it’s beautiful. And this body of mine–of yours–to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It’s simply intolerable. Oh, Anthony, I’m not afraid of the pain.”
He consoled her desperately–but in vain. She continued:
“And then afterward I might have wide hips and be pale, with all my freshness gone and no radiance in my hair.”
He paced the floor with his hands in his pockets, asking:
“Is it certain?”
“I don’t know anything. I’ve always hated obstrics, or whatever you call them. I thought I’d have a child some time. But not now.”
“Well, for God’s sake don’t lie there and go to pieces.”
Her sobs lapsed. She drew down a merciful silence from the twilight which filled the room. “Turn on the lights,” she pleaded. “These days seem so short–June seemed–to–have–longer days when I was a little girl.”
The lights snapped on and it was as though blue drapes of softest silk had been dropped behind the windows and the door. Her pallor, her immobility, without grief now, or joy, awoke his sympathy.
“Do you want me to have it?” she asked listlessly.
“I’m indifferent. That is, I’m neutral. If you have it I’ll probably be glad. If you don’t–well, that’s all right too.”
“I wish you’d make up your mind one way or the other!”
“Suppose you make up _your_ mind.”
She looked at him contemptuously, scorning to answer.
“You’d think you’d been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity.”
“What if I do!” she cried angrily. “It isn’t an indignity for them. It’s their one excuse for living. It’s the one thing they’re good for. It _is_ an indignity for _me._
“See here, Gloria, I’m with you whatever you do, but for God’s sake be a sport about it.”
“Oh, don’t _fuss_ at me!” she wailed.
They exchanged a mute look of no particular significance but of much stress. Then Anthony took a book from the shelf and dropped into a chair.
Half an hour later her voice came out of the intense stillness that pervaded the room and hung like incense on the air.
“I’ll drive over and see Constance Merriam to-morrow.”
“All right. And I’ll go to Tarrytown and see Grampa.”
“–You see,” she added, “it isn’t that I’m afraid–of this or anything else. I’m being true to me, you know.”
“I know,” he agreed.
THE PRACTICAL MEN
Adam Patch, in a pious rage against the Germans, subsisted on the war news. Pin maps plastered his walls; atlases were piled deep on tables convenient to his hand together with “Photographic Histories of the World War,” official Explain-alls, and the “Personal Impressions” of war correspondents and of Privates X, Y, and Z. Several times during Anthony’s visit his grandfather’s secretary, Edward Shuttleworth, the one-time “Accomplished Gin-physician” of “Pat’s Place” in Hoboken, now shod with righteous indignation, would appear with an extra. The old man attacked each paper with untiring fury, tearing out those columns which appeared to him of sufficient pregnancy for preservation and thrusting them into one of his already bulging files.
“Well, what have you been doing?” he asked Anthony blandly. “Nothing? Well, I thought so. I’ve been intending to drive over and see you, all summer.”
“I’ve been writing. Don’t you remember the essay I sent you–the one I sold to The Florentine last winter?”
“Essay? You never sent _me_ any essay.”
“Oh, yes, I did. We talked about it.”
Adam Patch shook his head mildly.
“Oh, no. You never sent _me_ any essay. You may have thought you sent it but it never reached me.”
“Why, you read it, Grampa,” insisted Anthony, somewhat exasperated, “you read it and disagreed with it.”
The old man suddenly remembered, but this was made apparent only by a partial falling open of his mouth, displaying rows of gray gums. Eying Anthony with a green and ancient stare he hesitated between confessing his error and covering it up.
“So you’re writing,” he said quickly. “Well, why don’t you go over and write about these Germans? Write something real, something about what’s going on, something people can read.”
“Anybody can’t be a war correspondent,” objected Anthony. “You have to have some newspaper willing to buy your stuff. And I can’t spare the money to go over as a free-lance.”
“I’ll send you over,” suggested his grandfather surprisingly. “I’ll get you over as an authorized correspondent of any newspaper you pick out.”
Anthony recoiled from the idea–almost simultaneously he bounded toward it.
“I–don’t–know–“
He would have to leave Gloria, whose whole life yearned toward him and enfolded him. Gloria was in trouble. Oh, the thing wasn’t feasible–yet–he saw himself in khaki, leaning, as all war correspondents lean, upon a heavy stick, portfolio at shoulder–trying to look like an Englishman. “I’d like to think it over,” he, confessed. “It’s certainly very kind of you. I’ll think it over and I’ll let you know.”
Thinking it over absorbed him on the journey to New York. He had had one of those sudden flashes of illumination vouchsafed to all men who are dominated by a strong and beloved woman, which show them a world of harder men, more fiercely trained and grappling with the abstractions of thought and war. In that world the arms of Gloria would exist only as the hot embrace of a chance mistress, coolly sought and quickly forgotten….
These unfamiliar phantoms were crowding closely about him when he boarded his train for Marietta, in the Grand Central Station. The car was crowded; he secured the last vacant seat and it was only after several minutes that he gave even a casual glance to the man beside him. When he did he saw a heavy lay of jaw and nose, a curved chin and small, puffed-under eyes. In a moment he recognized Joseph Bloeckman.
Simultaneously they both half rose, were half embarrassed, and exchanged what amounted to a half handshake. Then, as though to complete the matter, they both half laughed.
“Well,” remarked Anthony without inspiration, “I haven’t seen you for a long time.” Immediately he regretted his words and started to add: “I didn’t know you lived out this way.” But Bloeckman anticipated him by asking pleasantly:
“How’s your wife? …”
“She’s very well. How’ve you been?”
“Excellent.” His tone amplified the grandeur of the word.
It seemed to Anthony that during the last year Bloeckman had grown tremendously in dignity. The boiled look was gone, he seemed “done” at last. In addition he was no longer overdressed. The inappropriate facetiousness he had affected in ties had given way to a sturdy dark pattern, and his right hand, which had formerly displayed two heavy rings, was now innocent of ornament and even without the raw glow of a manicure.
This dignity appeared also in his personality. The last aura of the successful travelling-man had faded from him, that deliberate ingratiation of which the lowest form is the bawdy joke in the Pullman smoker. One imagined that, having been fawned upon financially, he had attained aloofness; having been snubbed socially, he had acquired reticence. But whatever had given him weight instead of bulk, Anthony no longer felt a correct superiority in his presence.
“D’you remember Caramel, Richard Caramel? I believe you met him one night.”
“I remember. He was writing a book.”
“Well, he sold it to the movies. Then they had some scenario man named Jordan work on it. Well, Dick subscribes to a clipping bureau and he’s furious because about half the movie reviewers speak of the ‘power and strength of William Jordan’s “Demon Lover.”‘ Didn’t mention old Dick at all. You’d think this fellow Jordan had actually conceived and developed the thing.”
Bloeckman nodded comprehensively.
“Most of the contracts state that the original writer’s name goes into all the paid publicity. Is Caramel still writing?”
“Oh, yes. Writing hard. Short stories.”
“Well, that’s fine, that’s fine…. You on this train often?”
“About once a week. We live in Marietta.”
“Is that so? Well, well! I live near Cos Cob myself. Bought a place there only recently. We’re only five miles apart.”
“You’ll have to come and see us.” Anthony was surprised at his own courtesy. “I’m sure Gloria’d be delighted to see an old friend. Anybody’ll tell you where the house is–it’s our second season there.”
“Thank you.” Then, as though returning a complementary politeness: “How is your grandfather?”
“He’s been well. I had lunch with him to-day.”
“A great character,” said Bloeckman severely. “A fine example of an American.”
THE TRIUMPH OF LETHARGY
Anthony found his wife deep in the porch hammock voluptuously engaged with a lemonade and a tomato sandwich and carrying on an apparently cheery conversation with Tana upon one of Tana’s complicated themes.
“In my countree,” Anthony recognized his invariable preface, “all time–peoples–eat rice–because haven’t got. Cannot eat what no have got.” Had his nationality not been desperately apparent one would have thought he had acquired his knowledge of his native land from American primary-school geographies.
When the Oriental had been squelched and dismissed to the kitchen, Anthony turned questioningly to Gloria:
“It’s all right,” she announced, smiling broadly. “And it surprised me more than it does you.”
“There’s no doubt?”
“None! Couldn’t be!”
They rejoiced happily, gay again with reborn irresponsibility. Then he told her of his opportunity to go abroad, and that he was almost ashamed to reject it.
“What do _you_ think? Just tell me frankly.”
“Why, Anthony!” Her eyes were startled. “Do you want to go? Without me?”
His face fell–yet he knew, with his wife’s question, that it was too late. Her arms, sweet and strangling, were around him, for he had made all such choices back in that room in the Plaza the year before. This was an anachronism from an age of such dreams.
“Gloria,” he lied, in a great burst of comprehension, “of course I don’t. I was thinking you might go as a nurse or something.” He wondered dully if his grandfather would consider this.
As she smiled he realized again how beautiful she was, a gorgeous girl of miraculous freshness and sheerly honorable eyes. She embraced his suggestion with luxurious intensity, holding it aloft like a sun of her own making and basking in its beams. She strung together an amazing synopsis for an extravaganza of martial adventure.
After supper, surfeited with the subject, she yawned. She wanted not to talk but only to read “Penrod,” stretched upon the lounge until at midnight she fell asleep. But Anthony, after he had carried her romantically up the stairs, stayed awake to brood upon the day, vaguely angry with her, vaguely dissatisfied.
“What am I going to do?” he began at breakfast. “Here we’ve been married a year and we’ve just worried around without even being efficient people of leisure.”
“Yes, you ought to do something,” she admitted, being in an agreeable and loquacious humor. This was not the first of these discussions, but as they usually developed Anthony in the rôle of protagonist, she had come to avoid them.
“It’s not that I have any moral compunctions about work,” he continued, “but grampa may die to-morrow and he may live for ten years. Meanwhile we’re living above our income and all we’ve got to show for it is a farmer’s car and a few clothes. We keep an apartment that we’ve only lived in three months and a little old house way off in nowhere. We’re frequently bored and yet we won’t make any effort to know any one except the same crowd who drift around California all summer wearing sport clothes and waiting for their families to die.”
“How you’ve changed!” remarked Gloria. “Once you told me you didn’t see why an American couldn’t loaf gracefully.”
“Well, damn it, I wasn’t married. And the old mind was working at top speed and now it’s going round and round like a cog-wheel with nothing to catch it. As a matter of fact I think that if I hadn’t met you I _would_ have done something. But you make leisure so subtly attractive–“
“Oh, it’s all my fault–“
“I didn’t mean that, and you know I didn’t. But here I’m almost twenty-seven and–“
“Oh,” she interrupted in vexation, “you make me tired! Talking as though I were objecting or hindering you!”
“I was just discussing it, Gloria. Can’t I discuss–“
“I should think you’d be strong enough to settle–“
“–something with you without–“
“–your own problems without coming to me. You _talk_ a lot about going to work. I could use more money very easily, but _I’m_ not complaining. Whether you work or not I love you.” Her last words were gentle as fine snow upon hard ground. But for the moment neither was attending to the other–they were each engaged in polishing and perfecting his own attitude.
“I have worked–some.” This by Anthony was an imprudent bringing up of raw reserves. Gloria laughed, torn between delight and derision; she resented his sophistry as at the same time she admired his nonchalance. She would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing much was worth doing.
“Work!” she scoffed. “Oh, you sad bird! You bluffer! Work–that means a great arranging of the desk and the lights, a great sharpening of pencils, and ‘Gloria, don’t sing!’ and ‘Please keep that damn Tana away from me,’ and ‘Let me read you my opening sentence,’ and ‘I won’t be through for a long time, Gloria, so don’t stay up for me,’ and a tremendous consumption of tea or coffee. And that’s all. In just about an hour I hear the old pencil stop scratching and look over. You’ve got out a book and you’re ‘looking up’ something. Then you’re reading. Then yawns–then bed and a great tossing about because you’re all full of caffeine and can’t sleep. Two weeks later the whole performance over again.”
With much difficulty Anthony retained a scanty breech-clout of dignity.
“Now that’s a _slight_ exaggeration. You know _darn well_ I sold an essay to The Florentine–and it attracted a lot of attention considering the circulation of The Florentine. And what’s more, Gloria, you know I sat up till five o’clock in the morning finishing it.”
She lapsed into silence, giving him rope. And if he had not hanged himself he had certainly come to the end of it.
“At least,” he concluded feebly, “I’m perfectly willing to be a war correspondent.”
But so was Gloria. They were both willing–anxious; they assured each other of it. The evening ended on a note of tremendous sentiment, the majesty of leisure, the ill health of Adam Patch, love at any cost.
“Anthony!” she called over the banister one afternoon a week later, “there’s some one at the door.” Anthony, who had been lolling in the hammock on the sun-speckled south porch, strolled around to the front of the house. A foreign car, large and impressive, crouched like an immense and saturnine bug at the foot of the path. A man in a soft pongee suit, with cap to match, hailed him.
“Hello there, Patch. Ran over to call on you.”
It was Bloeckman; as always, infinitesimally improved, of subtler intonation, of more convincing ease.
“I’m awfully glad you did.” Anthony raised his voice to a vine-covered window: “Glor-i-_a_! We’ve got a visitor!”
“I’m in the tub,” wailed Gloria politely.
With a smile the two men acknowledged the triumph of her alibi.
“She’ll be down. Come round here on the side-porch. Like a drink? Gloria’s always in the tub–good third of every day.”
“Pity she doesn’t live on the Sound.”
“Can’t afford it.”
As coming from Adam Patch’s grandson, Bloeckman took this as a form of pleasantry. After fifteen minutes filled with estimable brilliancies, Gloria appeared, fresh in starched yellow, bringing atmosphere and an increase of vitality.
“I want to be a successful sensation in the movies,” she announced. “I hear that Mary Pickford makes a million dollars annually.”
“You could, you know,” said Bloeckman. “I think you’d film very well.”
“Would you let me, Anthony? If I only play unsophisticated rôles?”
As the conversation continued in stilted commas, Anthony wondered that to him and Bloeckman both this girl had once been the most stimulating, the most tonic personality they had ever known–and now the three sat like overoiled machines, without conflict, without fear, without elation, heavily enamelled little figures secure beyond enjoyment in a world where death and war, dull emotion and noble savagery were covering a continent with the smoke of terror.
In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose…. Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria’s dress; the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda…. Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria’s beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death….
“… Any day next week,” Bloeckman was saying to Gloria. “Here–take this card. What they do is to give you a test of about three hundred feet of film, and they can tell pretty accurately from that.”
“How about Wednesday?”
“Wednesday’s fine. Just phone me and I’ll go around with you–“
He was on his feet, shaking hands briskly–then his car was a wraith of dust down the road. Anthony turned to his wife in bewilderment.
“Why, Gloria!”
“You don’t mind if I have a trial, Anthony. Just a trial? I’ve got to go to town Wednesday, _any_how.”
“But it’s so silly! You don’t want to go into the movies–moon around a studio all day with a lot of cheap chorus people.”
“Lot of mooning around Mary Pickford does!”
“Everybody isn’t a Mary Pickford.”
“Well, I can’t see how you’d object to my _try_ing.”
“I do, though. I hate actors.”
“Oh, you make me tired. Do you imagine I have a very thrilling time dozing on this damn porch?”
“You wouldn’t mind if you loved me.”
“Of course I love you,” she said impatiently, making out a quick case for herself. “It’s just because I do that I hate to see you go to pieces by just lying around and saying you ought to work. Perhaps if I _did_ go into this for a while it’d stir you up so you’d do something.”
“It’s just your craving for excitement, that’s all it is.”
“Maybe it is! It’s a perfectly natural craving, isn’t it?”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. If you go to the movies I’m going to Europe.”
“Well, go on then! _I’m_ not stopping you!”
To show she was not stopping him she melted into melancholy tears. Together they marshalled the armies of sentiment–words, kisses, endearments, self-reproaches. They attained nothing. Inevitably they attained nothing. Finally, in a burst of gargantuan emotion each of them sat down and wrote a letter. Anthony’s was to his grandfather; Gloria’s was to Joseph Bloeckman. It was a triumph of lethargy.
One day early in July Anthony, returned from an afternoon in New York, called up-stairs to Gloria. Receiving no answer he guessed she was asleep and so went into the pantry for one of the little sandwiches that were always prepared for them. He found Tana seated at the kitchen table before a miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends–cigar-boxes, knives, pencils, the tops of cans, and some scraps of paper covered with elaborate figures and diagrams.
“What the devil you doing?” demanded Anthony curiously.
Tana politely grinned.
“I show you,” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “I tell–“
“You making a dog-house?”
“No, sa.” Tana grinned again. “Make typewutta.”
“Typewriter?”
“Yes, sa. I think, oh all time I think, lie in bed think ’bout typewutta.”
“So you thought you’d make one, eh?”
“Wait. I tell.”
Anthony, munching a sandwich, leaned leisurely against the sink. Tana opened and closed his mouth several times as though testing its capacity for action. Then with a rush he began:
“I been think–typewutta–has, oh, many many many many _thing_. Oh many many many many.” “Many keys. I see.”
“No-o? _Yes_-key! Many many many many lettah. Like so a-b-c.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“Wait. I tell.” He screwed his face up in a tremendous effort to express himself: “I been think–many words–end same. Like i-n-g.”
“You bet. A whole raft of them.”
“So–I make–typewutta–quick. Not so many lettah–“
“That’s a great idea, Tana. Save time. You’ll make a fortune. Press one key and there’s ‘ing.’ Hope you work it out.”
Tana laughed disparagingly. “Wait. I tell–” “Where’s Mrs. Patch?”
“She out. Wait, I tell–” Again he screwed up his face for action. “_My_ typewutta—-“
“Where is she?”
“Here–I make.” He pointed to the miscellany of junk on the table.
“I mean Mrs. Patch.”
“She out.” Tana reassured him. “She be back five o’clock, she say.”
“Down in the village?”
“No. Went off before lunch. She go Mr. Bloeckman.”
Anthony started.
“Went out with Mr. Bloeckman?”
“She be back five.”
Without a word Anthony left the kitchen with Tana’s disconsolate “I tell” trailing after him. So this was Gloria’s idea of excitement, by God! His fists were clenched; within a moment he had worked himself up to a tremendous pitch of indignation. He went to the door and looked out; there was no car in sight and his watch stood at four minutes of five. With furious energy he dashed down to the end of the path–as far as the bend of the road a mile off he could see no car–except–but it was a farmer’s flivver. Then, in an undignified pursuit of dignity, he rushed back to the shelter of the house as quickly as he had rushed out.
Pacing up and down the living room he began an angry rehearsal of the speech he would make to her when she came in–
“So this is love!” he would begin–or no, it sounded too much like the popular phrase “So this is Paris!” He must be dignified, hurt, grieved. Anyhow–“So this is what _you_ do when I have to go up and trot all day around the hot city on business. No wonder I can’t write! No wonder I don’t dare let you out of my sight!” He was expanding now, warming to his subject. “I’ll tell you,” he continued, “I’ll tell you–” He paused, catching a familiar ring in the words–then he realized–it was Tana’s “I tell.”
Yet Anthony neither laughed nor seemed absurd to himself. To his frantic imagination it was already six–seven–eight, and she was never coming! Bloeckman finding her bored and unhappy had persuaded her to go to California with him….
–There was a great to-do out in front, a joyous “Yoho, Anthony!” and he rose trembling, weakly happy to see her fluttering up the path. Bloeckman was following, cap in hand.
“Dearest!” she cried.
“We’ve been for the best jaunt–all over New York State.”
“I’ll have to be starting home,” said Bloeckman, almost immediately. “Wish you’d both been here when I came.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t,” answered Anthony dryly. When he had departed Anthony hesitated. The fear was gone from his heart, yet he felt that some protest was ethically apropos. Gloria resolved his uncertainty.
“I knew you wouldn’t mind. He came just before lunch and said he had to go to Garrison on business and wouldn’t I go with him. He looked so lonesome, Anthony. And I drove his car all the way.”
Listlessly Anthony dropped into a chair, his mind tired–tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear. He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless here as he had always been. One of those personalities who, in spite of all their words, are inarticulate, he seemed to have inherited only the vast tradition of human failure–that, and the sense of death.
“I suppose I don’t care,” he answered.
One must be broad about these things, and Gloria being young, being beautiful, must have reasonable privileges. Yet it wearied him that he failed to understand.
WINTER
She rolled over on her back and lay still for a moment in the great bed watching the February sun suffer one last attenuated refinement in its passage through the leaded panes into the room. For a time she had no accurate sense of her whereabouts or of the events of the day before, or the day before that; then, like a suspended pendulum, memory began to beat out its story, releasing with each swing a burdened quota of time until her life was given back to her.
She could hear, now, Anthony’s troubled breathing beside her; she could smell whiskey and cigarette smoke. She noticed that she lacked complete muscular control; when she moved it was not a sinuous motion with the resultant strain distributed easily over her body–it was a tremendous effort of her nervous system as though each time she were hypnotizing herself into performing an impossible action….
She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth to get rid of that intolerable taste; then back by the bedside listening to the rattle of Bounds’s key in the outer door.
“Wake up, Anthony!” she said sharply.
She climbed into bed beside him and closed her eyes. Almost the last thing she remembered was a conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Lacy. Mrs. Lacy had said, “Sure you don’t want us to get you a taxi?” and Anthony had replied that he guessed they could walk over to Fifth all right. Then they had both attempted, imprudently, to bow–and collapsed absurdly into a battalion of empty milk bottles just outside the door. There must have been two dozen milk bottles standing open-mouthed in the dark. She could conceive of no plausible explanation of those milk bottles. Perhaps they had been attracted by the singing in the Lacy house and had hurried over agape with wonder to see the fun. Well, they’d had the worst of it–though it seemed that she and Anthony never would get up, the perverse things rolled so….
Still, they had found a taxi. “My meter’s broken and it’ll cost you a dollar and a half to get home,” said the taxi driver. “Well,” said Anthony, “I’m young Packy McFarland and if you’ll come down here I’ll beat you till you can’t stand up.” …At that point the man had driven off without them. They must have found another taxi, for they were in the apartment….
“What time is it?” Anthony was sitting up in bed, staring at her with owlish precision.
This was obviously a rhetorical question. Gloria could think of no reason why she should be expected to know the time.
“Golly, I feel like the devil!” muttered Anthony dispassionately. Relaxing, he tumbled back upon his pillow. “Bring on your grim reaper!”
“Anthony, how’d we finally get home last night?”
“Taxi.”
“Oh!” Then, after a pause: “Did you put me to bed?”
“I don’t know. Seems to me you put _me_ to bed. What day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
“Tuesday? I hope so. If it’s Wednesday, I’ve got to start work at that idiotic place. Supposed to be down at nine or some such ungodly hour.”
“Ask Bounds,” suggested Gloria feebly.
“Bounds!” he called.
Sprightly, sober–a voice from a world that it seemed in the past two days they had left forever, Bounds sprang in short steps down the hall and appeared in the half darkness of the door.
“What day, Bounds?”
“February the twenty-second, I think, sir.”
“I mean day of the week.”
“Tuesday, sir.” “Thanks.” After a pause: “Are you ready for breakfast, sir?”
“Yes, and Bounds, before you get it, will you make a pitcher of water, and set it here beside the bed? I’m a little thirsty.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bounds retreated in sober dignity down the hallway.
“Lincoln’s birthday,” affirmed Anthony without enthusiasm, “or St. Valentine’s or somebody’s. When did we start on this insane party?”
“Sunday night.”
“After prayers?” he suggested sardonically.
“We raced all over town in those hansoms and Maury sat up with his driver, don’t you remember? Then we came home and he tried to cook some bacon–came out of the pantry with a few blackened remains, insisting it was ‘fried to the proverbial crisp.'”
Both of them laughed, spontaneously but with some difficulty, and lying there side by side reviewed the chain of events that had ended in this rusty and chaotic dawn.
They had been in New York for almost four months, since the country had grown too cool in late October. They had given up California this year, partly because of lack of funds, partly with the idea of going abroad should this interminable war, persisting now into its second year, end during the winter. Of late their income had lost elasticity; no longer did it stretch to cover gay whims and pleasant extravagances, and Anthony had spent many puzzled and unsatisfactory hours over a densely figured pad, making remarkable budgets that left huge margins for “amusements, trips, etc.,” and trying to apportion, even approximately, their past expenditures.