The Beautiful and Damned

Ch. 1: Anthony Patch

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone

since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at

least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the

ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"--yet

at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the

conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he

is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness

glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these

occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself

rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted

to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else

he knows.

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very

attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he

considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that

the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars

in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and

immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony

Patch--not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality,

opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward--a man who

was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the

sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

A WORTHY MAN AND HIS GIFTED SON

Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the

grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line

over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and

Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded

sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.

Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as "Cross Patch," left his

father's farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry

regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street,

and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he gathered to himself

some seventy-five million dollars.

This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was

then that he determined, after a severe attack of sclerosis, to

consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the

world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent

efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he

levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor,

literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind,

under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on

all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the

age. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed

against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign

which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed himself a

rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an intolerable bore. The

year in which this story opens found him wearying; his campaign had

grown desultory; 1861 was creeping up slowly on 1895; his thoughts ran a

great deal on the Civil War, somewhat on his dead wife and son, almost

infinitesimally on his grandson Anthony.

Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty,

Alicia Withers, who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an

impeccable entr into the banking circles of New York. Immediately and

rather spunkily she had borne him a son and, as if completely

devitalized by the magnificence of this performance, she had thenceforth

effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the nursery. The boy,

Adam Ulysses Patch, became an inveterate joiner of clubs, connoisseur of

good form, and driver of tandems--at the astonishing age of twenty-six

he began his memoirs under the title "New York Society as I Have Seen

It." On the rumor of its conception this work was eagerly bid for among

publishers, but as it proved after his death to be immoderately verbose

and overpoweringly dull, it never obtained even a private printing.

This Fifth Avenue Chesterfield married at twenty-two. His wife was

Henrietta Lebrune, the Boston "Society Contralto," and the single child

of the union was, at the request of his grandfather, christened Anthony

Comstock Patch. When he went to Harvard, the Comstock dropped out of his

name to a nether hell of oblivion and was never heard of thereafter.

Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together--so

often had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the

impersonality of furniture, but every one who came into his bedroom

regarded it with interest. It showed a dandy of the nineties, spare and

handsome, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the

suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown

curls, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit. This was Anthony at

five, the year of his mother's death.

His memories of the Boston Society Contralto were nebulous and musical.

She was a lady who sang, sang, sang, in the music room of their house on

Washington Square--sometimes with guests scattered all about her, the

men with their arms folded, balanced breathlessly on the edges of sofas,

the women with their hands in their laps, occasionally making little

whispers to the men and always clapping very briskly and uttering cooing

cries after each song--and often she sang to Anthony alone, in Italian

or French or in a strange and terrible dialect which she imagined to be

the speech of the Southern n***o.

His recollections of the gallant Ulysses, the first man in America to

roll the lapels of his coat, were much more vivid. After Henrietta

Lebrune Patch had "joined another choir," as her widower huskily

remarked from time to time, father and son lived up at grampa's in

Tarrytown, and Ulysses came daily to Anthony's nursery and expelled

pleasant, thick-smelling words for sometimes as much as an hour. He was

continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and

excursions to Atlantic City, "oh, some time soon now"; but none of them

ever materialized. One trip they did take; when Anthony was eleven they

went abroad, to England and Switzerland, and there in the best hotel in

Lucerne his father died with much sweating and grunting and crying aloud

for air. In a panic of despair and terror Anthony was brought back to

America, wedded to a vague melancholy that was to stay beside him

through the rest of his life.

PAST AND PERSON OF THE HERO

At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his

parents had died and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly,

until, for the first time since her marriage, her person held for one

day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing room. So to Anthony

life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was

as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the

habit of reading in bed--it soothed him. He read until he was tired and

often fell asleep with the lights still on.

His favorite diversion until he was fourteen was his stamp collection;

enormous, as nearly exhaustive as a boy's could be--his grandfather

considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography. So Anthony kept

up a correspondence with a half dozen "Stamp and Coin" companies and it

was rare that the mail failed to bring him new stamp-books or packages

of glittering approval sheets--there was a mysterious fascination in

transferring his acquisitions interminably from one book to another. His

stamps were his greatest happiness and he bestowed impatient frowns on

any one who interrupted him at play with them; they devoured his

allowance every month, and he lay awake at night musing untiringly on

their variety and many-colored splendor.

At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself, an inarticulate

boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his

contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe with a

private tutor, who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it would

"open doors," it would be a tremendous tonic, it would give him

innumerable self-sacrificing and devoted friends. So he went to

Harvard--there was no other logical thing to be done with him.

Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought

in a high room in Beck Hall--a slim dark boy of medium height with a shy

sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the

foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile

first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, and a yellowed

illegible autograph letter of Keats's, finding later that he had been

amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a rather

pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns, and

neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would parade

before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his

window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor,

breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have

a part.

Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position

in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic

figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but

secretly pleased him--he began going out, at first a little and then a

great deal. He made the Pudding. He drank--quietly and in the proper

tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so young

he might have "done extremely well." In 1909, when he graduated, he was

only twenty years old.

Then abroad again--to Rome this time, where he dallied with architecture

and painting in turn, took up the violin, and wrote some ghastly Italian

sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk on the

joys of the contemplative life. It became established among his Harvard

intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that

year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight

excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or

indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance,

remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of

Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a

civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his

grandfather's called on him, and had he so desired he might have been

_persona grata_ with the diplomatic set--indeed, he found that his

inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality, but that long

adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness still dictated to

his conduct.

He returned to America in 1912 because of one of his grandfather's

sudden illnesses, and after an excessively tiresome talk with the

perpetually convalescent old man he decided to put off until his

grandfather's death the idea of living permanently abroad. After a

prolonged search he took an apartment on Fifty-second Street and to all

appearances settled down.

In 1913 Anthony Patch's adjustment of himself to the universe was in

process of consummation. Physically, he had improved since his

undergraduate days--he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened

and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year.

He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span--his friends

declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too

sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined

to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were

charming, whether alert with intelligence or half closed in an

expression of melancholy humor.

One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the

Aryan ideal, he was yet, here and there, considered handsome--moreover,

he was very clean, in appearance and in reality, with that especial

cleanness borrowed from beauty.

THE REPROACHLESS APARTMENT

Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it seemed to Anthony, were the uprights of a

gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park.

Coming up-town on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street invariably

gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of

treacherous rungs, and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he

found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps

to the sidewalk.

After that, he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street half a block,

pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses--and then in a jiffy he was

under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely

satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted,

read, and entertained.

The house itself was of murky material, built in the late nineties; in

response to the steadily growing need of small apartments each floor had

been thoroughly remodelled and rented individually. Of the four

apartments Anthony's, on the second floor, was the most desirable.

The front room had fine high ceilings and three large windows that

loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second Street. In its appointments it

escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period; it escaped

stiffness, stuffiness, bareness, and decadence. It smelt neither of

smoke nor of incense--it was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep

lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it

like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer chiefly

concerned with geometrical fishermen and huntsmen in black and gold;

this made a corner alcove for a voluminous chair guarded by an

orange-colored standing lamp. Deep in the fireplace a quartered shield

was burned to a murky black.

Passing through the dining-room, which, as Anthony took only breakfast

at home, was merely a magnificent potentiality, and down a comparatively

long hall, one came to the heart and core of the apartment--Anthony's

bedroom and bath.

Both of them were immense. Under the ceilings of the former even the

great canopied bed seemed of only average size. On the floor an exotic

rug of crimson velvet was soft as fleece on his bare feet. His bathroom,

in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom, was gay,

bright, extremely habitable and even faintly facetious. Framed around

the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the

day: Julia Sanderson as "The Sunshine Girl," Ina Claire as "The Quaker

Girl," Billie Burke as "The Mind-the-Paint Girl," and Hazel Dawn as "The

Pink Lady." Between Billie Burke and Hazel Dawn hung a print

representing a great stretch of snow presided over by a cold and

formidable sun--this, claimed Anthony, symbolized the cold shower.

The bathtub, equipped with an ingenious bookholder, was low and large.

Beside it a wall wardrobe bulged with sufficient linen for three men and

with a generation of neckties. There was no skimpy glorified towel of a

carpet--instead, a rich rug, like the one in his bedroom a miracle of

softness, that seemed almost to massage the wet foot emerging from

the tub....

All in all a room to conjure with--it was easy to see that Anthony

dressed there, arranged his immaculate hair there, in fact did

everything but sleep and eat there. It was his pride, this bathroom. He

felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing

the tub so that, lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water, he

might lie and look up at her and muse warmly and sensuously on

her beauty.

NOR DOES HE SPIN

The apartment was kept clean by an English servant with the singularly,

almost theatrically, appropriate name of Bounds, whose technic was

marred only by the fact that he wore a soft collar. Had he been entirely

Anthony's Bounds this defect would have been summarily remedied, but he

was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood. From

eight until eleven in the morning he was entirely Anthony's. He arrived

with the mail and cooked breakfast. At nine-thirty he pulled the edge of

Anthony's blanket and spoke a few terse words--Anthony never remembered

clearly what they were and rather suspected they were deprecative; then

he served breakfast on a card-table in the front room, made the bed and,

after asking with some hostility if there was anything else, withdrew.

In the mornings, at least once a week, Anthony went to see his broker.

His income was slightly under seven thousand a year, the interest on

money inherited from his mother. His grandfather, who had never allowed

his own son to graduate from a very liberal allowance, judged that this

sum was sufficient for young Anthony's needs. Every Christmas he sent

him a five-hundred-dollar bond, which Anthony usually sold, if possible,

as he was always a little, not very, hard up.

The visits to his broker varied from semi-social chats to discussions of

the safety of eight per cent investments, and Anthony always enjoyed

them. The big trust company building seemed to link him definitely to

the great fortunes whose solidarity he respected and to assure him that

he was adequately chaperoned by the hierarchy of finance. From these

hurried men he derived the same sense of safety that he had in

contemplating his grandfather's money--even more, for the latter

appeared, vaguely, a demand loan made by the world to Adam Patch's own

moral righteousness, while this money down-town seemed rather to have

been grasped and held by sheer indomitable strengths and tremendous

feats of will; in addition, it seemed more definitely and

explicitly--money.

Closely as Anthony trod on the heels of his income, he considered it to

be enough. Some golden day, of course, he would have many millions;

meanwhile he possessed a _raison d'etre_ in the theoretical creation of

essays on the popes of the Renaissance. This flashes back to the

conversation with his grandfather immediately upon his return from Rome.

He had hoped to find his grandfather dead, but had learned by

telephoning from the pier that Adam Patch was comparatively well

again--the next day he had concealed his disappointment and gone out to

Tarrytown. Five miles from the station his taxicab entered an

elaborately groomed drive that threaded a veritable maze of walls and

wire fences guarding the estate--this, said the public, was because it

was definitely known that if the Socialists had their way, one of the

first men they'd assassinate would be old Cross Patch.

Anthony was late and the venerable philanthropist was awaiting him in a

glass-walled sun parlor, where he was glancing through the morning

papers for the second time. His secretary, Edward Shuttleworth--who

before his regeneration had been gambler, saloon-keeper, and general

reprobate--ushered Anthony into the room, exhibiting his redeemer and

benefactor as though he were displaying a treasure of immense value.

They shook hands gravely. "I'm awfully glad to hear you're better,"

Anthony said.

The senior Patch, with an air of having seen his grandson only last

week, pulled out his watch.

"Train late?" he asked mildly.

It had irritated him to wait for Anthony. He was under the delusion not

only that in his youth he had handled his practical affairs with the

utmost scrupulousness, even to keeping every engagement on the dot, but

also that this was the direct and primary cause of his success.

"It's been late a good deal this month," he remarked with a shade of

meek accusation in his voice--and then after a long sigh, "Sit down."

Anthony surveyed his grandfather with that tacit amazement which always

attended the sight. That this feeble, unintelligent old man was

possessed of such power that, yellow journals to the contrary, the men

in the republic whose souls he could not have bought directly or

indirectly would scarcely have populated White Plains, seemed as

impossible to believe as that he had once been a pink-and-white baby.

The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows--the

first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had

sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the

girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one,

suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs,

changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in

others--callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a

paintbox. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain.

It had sent him night-sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had

split his intense normality into credulity and suspicion. Out of the

coarse material of his enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant

obsessions; his energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child,

and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous puerile desire for a

land of harps and canticles on earth.

The amenities having been gingerly touched upon, Anthony felt that he

was expected to outline his intentions--and simultaneously a glimmer in

the old man's eye warned him against broaching, for the present, his

desire to live abroad. He wished that Shuttleworth would have tact

enough to leave the room--he detested Shuttleworth--but the secretary

had settled blandly in a rocker and was dividing between the two Patches

the glances of his faded eyes.

"Now that you're here you ought to _do_ something," said his grandfather

softly, "accomplish something."

Anthony waited for him to speak of "leaving something done when you pass

on." Then he made a suggestion:

"I thought--it seemed to me that perhaps I'm best qualified to write--"

Adam Patch winced, visualizing a family poet with a long hair and three

mistresses.

"--history," finished Anthony.

"History? History of what? The Civil War? The Revolution?"

"Why--no, sir. A history of the Middle Ages." Simultaneously an idea was

born for a history of the Renaissance popes, written from some novel

angle. Still, he was glad he had said "Middle Ages."

"Middle Ages? Why not your own country? Something you know about?"

"Well, you see I've lived so much abroad--"

"Why you should write about the Middle Ages, I don't know. Dark Ages, we

used to call 'em. Nobody knows what happened, and nobody cares, except

that they're over now." He continued for some minutes on the uselessness

of such information, touching, naturally, on the Spanish Inquisition and

the "corruption of the monasteries." Then:

"Do you think you'll be able to do any work in New York--or do you

really intend to work at all?" This last with soft, almost

imperceptible, cynicism.

"Why, yes, I do, sir."

"When'll you be done?"

"Well, there'll be an outline, you see--and a lot of preliminary

reading."

"I should think you'd have done enough of that already."

The conversation worked itself jerkily toward a rather abrupt

conclusion, when Anthony rose, looked at his watch, and remarked that he

had an engagement with his broker that afternoon. He had intended to

stay a few days with his grandfather, but he was tired and irritated

from a rough crossing, and quite unwilling to stand a subtle and

sanctimonious browbeating. He would come out again in a few days,

he said.

Nevertheless, it was due to this encounter that work had come into his

life as a permanent idea. During the year that had passed since then, he

had made several lists of authorities, he had even experimented with

chapter titles and the division of his work into periods, but not one

line of actual writing existed at present, or seemed likely ever to

exist. He did nothing--and contrary to the most accredited copy-book

logic, he managed to divert himself with more than average content.

AFTERNOON

It was October in 1913, midway in a week of pleasant days, with the

sunshine loitering in the cross-streets and the atmosphere so languid as

to seem weighted with ghostly falling leaves. It was pleasant to sit

lazily by the open window finishing a chapter of "Erewhon." It was

pleasant to yawn about five, toss the book on a table, and saunter

humming along the hall to his bath.

"To ... you ... beaut-if-ul lady,"

he was singing as he turned on the tap.

"I raise ... my ... eyes;

To ... you ... beaut-if-ul la-a-dy

My ... heart ... cries--"

He raised his voice to compete with the flood of water pouring into the

tub, and as he looked at the picture of Hazel Dawn upon the wall he put

an imaginary violin to his shoulder and softly caressed it with a

phantom bow. Through his closed lips he made a humming noise, which he

vaguely imagined resembled the sound of a violin. After a moment his

hands ceased their gyrations and wandered to his shirt, which he began

to unfasten. Stripped, and adopting an athletic posture like the

tiger-skin man in the advertisement, he regarded himself with some

satisfaction in the mirror, breaking off to dabble a tentative foot in

the tub. Readjusting a faucet and indulging in a few preliminary grunts,

he slid in.

Once accustomed to the temperature of the water he relaxed into a state

of drowsy content. When he finished his bath he would dress leisurely

and walk down Fifth Avenue to the Ritz, where he had an appointment for

dinner with his two most frequent companions, d**k Caramel and Maury

Noble. Afterward he and Maury were going to the theatre--Caramel would

probably trot home and work on his book, which ought to be finished

pretty soon.

Anthony was glad _he_ wasn't going to work on _his_ book. The notion of

sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe

thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was

absurdly beyond his desires.

Emerging from his bath he polished himself with the meticulous attention

of a bootblack. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and whistling the

while a weird, uncertain melody, strolled here and there buttoning,

adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the thick carpet on his feet.

He lit a cigarette, tossed the match out the open top of the window,

then paused in his tracks with the cigarette two inches from his

mouth--which fell faintly ajar. His eyes were focussed upon a spot of

brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.

It was a girl in a red neglig, silk surely, drying her hair by the

still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of

the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a

sudden impression that she was beautiful. Sitting on the stone parapet

beside her was a cushion the same color as her garment and she was

leaning both arms upon it as she looked down into the sunny areaway,

where Anthony could hear children playing.

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him,

something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the

triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was

beautiful--then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a

rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in

terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and

the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing

perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the

deepest kiss he had ever known.

He finished his dressing, found a black bow tie and adjusted it

carefully by the three-sided mirror in the bathroom. Then yielding to an

impulse he walked quickly into the bedroom and again looked out the

window. The woman was standing up now; she had tossed her hair back and

he had a full view of her. She was fat, full thirty-five, utterly

undistinguished. Making a clicking noise with his mouth he returned to

the bathroom and reparted his hair.

"To ... you ... beaut-if-ul lady,"

he sang lightly,

"I raise ... my ... eyes--"

Then with a last soothing brush that left an iridescent surface of sheer

gloss he left his bathroom and his apartment and walked down Fifth

Avenue to the Ritz-Carlton.

THREE MEN

At seven Anthony and his friend Maury Noble are sitting at a corner

table on the cool roof. Maury Noble is like nothing so much as a large

slender and imposing cat. His eyes are narrow and full of incessant,

protracted blinks. His hair is smooth and flat, as though it has been

licked by a possible--and, if so, Herculean--mother-cat. During

Anthony's time at Harvard he had been considered the most unique figure

in his class, the most brilliant, the most original--smart, quiet and

among the saved.

This is the man whom Anthony considers his best friend. This is the only

man of all his acquaintance whom he admires and, to a bigger extent than

he likes to admit to himself, envies.

They are glad to see each other now--their eyes are full of kindness as

each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are

drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity; Maury

Noble behind that fine and absurdly catlike face is all but purring. And

Anthony, nervous as a will-o'-the-wisp, restless--he is at rest now.

They are engaged in one of those easy short-speech conversations that

only men under thirty or men under great stress indulge in.

ANTHONY: Seven o'clock. Where's the Caramel? _(Impatiently.)_ I wish

he'd finish that interminable novel. I've spent more time hungry----

MAURY: He's got a new name for it. "The Demon Lover "--not bad, eh?

ANTHONY: _(interested)_ "The Demon Lover"? Oh "woman wailing"--No--not a

bit bad! Not bad at all--d'you think?

MAURY: Rather good. What time did you say?

ANTHONY: Seven.

MAURY:_(His eyes narrowing--not unpleasantly, but to express a faint

disapproval)_ Drove me crazy the other day.

ANTHONY: How?

MAURY: That habit of taking notes.

ANTHONY: Me, too. Seems I'd said something night before that he

considered material but he'd forgotten it--so he had at me. He'd say

"Can't you try to concentrate?" And I'd say "You bore me to tears. How

do I remember?"

_(MAURY laughs noiselessly, by a sort of bland and appreciative widening

of his features.)_

MAURY: d**k doesn't necessarily see more than any one else. He merely

can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.

ANTHONY: That rather impressive talent----

MAURY: Oh, yes. Impressive!

ANTHONY: And energy--ambitious, well-directed energy. He's so

entertaining--he's so tremendously stimulating and exciting. Often

there's something breathless in being with him.

MAURY: Oh, yes. _(Silence, and then:)_

ANTHONY: _(With his thin, somewhat uncertain face at its most convinced)

_But not indomitable energy. Some day, bit by bit, it'll blow away, and

his rather impressive talent with it, and leave only a wisp of a man,

fretful and egotistic and garrulous.

MAURY: _(With laughter)_ Here we sit vowing to each other that little

Dick sees less deeply into things than we do. And I'll bet he feels a

measure of superiority on his side--creative mind over merely critical

mind and all that.

ANTHONY: Oh, yes. But he's wrong. He's inclined to fall for a million

silly enthusiasms. If it wasn't that he's absorbed in realism and

therefore has to adopt the garments of the cynic he'd be--he'd be

credulous as a college religious leader. He's an idealist. Oh, yes. He

thinks he's not, because he's rejected Christianity. Remember him in

college? just swallow every writer whole, one after another, ideas,

technic, and characters, Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, each one as easily

as the last.

MAURY:_(Still considering his own last observation)_ I remember.

ANTHONY: It's true. Natural born fetich-worshipper. Take art--

MAURY: Let's order. He'll be--

ANTHONY: Sure. Let's order. I told him--

MAURY: Here he comes. Look--he's going to bump that waiter. _(He lifts

his finger as a signal--lifts it as though it were a soft and friendly

claw.)_ Here y'are, Caramel.

A NEW VOICE: _(Fiercely)_ Hello, Maury. Hello, Anthony Comstock Patch.

How is old Adam's grandson? D******** still after you, eh?

_In person_ RICHARD CARAMEL _is short and fair--he is to be bald at

thirty-five. He has yellowish eyes--one of them startlingly clear, the

other opaque as a muddy pool--and a bulging brow like a funny-paper

baby. He bulges in other places--his paunch bulges, prophetically, his

words have an air of bulging from his mouth, even his dinner coat

pockets bulge, as though from contamination, with a dog-eared collection

of time-tables, programmes, and miscellaneous scraps--on these he takes

his notes with great screwings up of his unmatched yellow eyes and

motions of silence with his disengaged left hand._

_When he reaches the table he shakes hands with ANTHONY and MAURY. He is

one of those men who invariably shake hands, even with people whom they

have seen an hour before._

ANTHONY: Hello, Caramel. Glad you're here. We needed a comic relief.

MAURY: You're late. Been racing the postman down the block? We've been

clawing over your character.

DICK: (_Fixing_ ANTHONY _eagerly with the bright eye_) What'd you say?

Tell me and I'll write it down. Cut three thousand words out of Part One

this afternoon.

MAURY: Noble aesthete. And I poured alcohol into my stomach.

DICK: I don't doubt it. I bet you two have been sitting here for an hour

talking about liquor.

ANTHONY: We never pass out, my beardless boy.

MAURY: We never go home with ladies we meet when we're lit.

ANTHONY: All in our parties are characterized by a certain haughty

distinction.

DICK: The particularly silly sort who boast about being "tanks"! Trouble

is you're both in the eighteenth century. School of the Old English

Squire. Drink quietly until you roll under the table. Never have a good

time. Oh, no, that isn't done at all.

ANTHONY: This from Chapter Six, I'll bet.

DICK: Going to the theatre?

MAURY: Yes. We intend to spend the evening doing some deep thinking over

of life's problems. The thing is tersely called "The Woman." I presume

that she will "pay."

ANTHONY: My God! Is that what it is? Let's go to the Follies again.

MAURY: I'm tired of it. I've seen it three times. (_To d**k:_) The first

time, we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When we

came back we entered the wrong theatre.

ANTHONY: Had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we thought

were in our seats.

DICK: (_As though talking to himself_) I think--that when I've done

another novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories, I'll do a

musical comedy.

MAURY: I know--with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And

all the critics will groan and grunt about "Dear old Pinafore." And I

shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a

meaningless world.

DICK: (_Pompously_) Art isn't meaningless.

MAURY: It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

ANTHONY: In other words, d**k, you're playing before a grand stand

peopled with ghosts.

MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.

ANTHONY:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I'd feel that it being a meaningless

world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.

DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a

poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that

sophistic rot?

ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so.

MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected

thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of

morals--Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don't complain of

conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who

seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral

freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.

(_Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone on to say is lost

for all time._)

NIGHT

Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and, at a price, obtained

seats for a new musical comedy called "High Jinks." In the foyer of the

theatre they waited a few moments to see the first-night crowd come in.

There were opera cloaks stitched of myriad, many-colored silks and furs;

there were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of white

and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers down the middles of

innumerable silk hats; there were shoes of gold and bronze and red and

shining black; there were the high-piled, tight-packed coiffures of many

women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept men--most of all there

was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling

wave effect of this cheerful sea of people as to-night it poured its

glittering torrent into the artificial lake of laughter....

After the play they parted--Maury was going to a dance at Sherry's,

Anthony homeward and to bed.

He found his way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square,

which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful

and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a

kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin--too fat, too lean, yet

floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate

breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he

thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully,

swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of many

cigarettes. He caught the glance of a dark young beauty sitting alone in

a closed taxicab. Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and

violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten

remoteness of the afternoon.

Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning

their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances. They were

dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness then semi-fashionable;

their turned over collars were notched at the Adam's apple; they wore

gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles.

Passed a bewildered old lady borne along like a basket of eggs between

two men who exclaimed to her of the wonders of Times Square--explained

them so quickly that the old lady, trying to be impartially interested,

waved her head here and there like a piece of wind-worried old

orange-peel. Anthony heard a snatch of their conversation:

"There's the Astor, mama!"

"Look! See the chariot race sign----"

"There's where we were to-day. No, _there!_"

"Good gracious! ..."

"You should worry and grow thin like a dime." He recognized the current

witticism of the year as it issued stridently from one of the pairs at

his elbow.

"And I says to him, I says----"

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a

crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways

underneath--and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and

recedings of light--light dividing like pearls--forming and reforming in

glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut

amazingly on the sky.

He turned thankfully down the hush that blew like a dark wind out of a

cross-street, passed a bakery-restaurant in whose windows a dozen roast

chickens turned over and over on an automatic spit. From the door came a

smell that was hot, doughy, and pink. A drug-store next, exhaling

medicines, spilt soda water and a pleasant undertone from the cosmetic

counter; then a Chinese laundry, still open, steamy and stifling,

smelling folded and vaguely yellow. All these depressed him; reaching

Sixth Avenue he stopped at a corner cigar store and emerged feeling

better--the cigar store was cheerful, humanity in a navy blue mist,

buying a luxury ....

Once in his apartment he smoked a last cigarette, sitting in the dark by

his open front window. For the first time in over a year he found

himself thoroughly enjoying New York. There was a rare pungency in it

certainly, a quality almost Southern. A lonesome town, though. He who

had grown up alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During the past

several months he had been careful, when he had no engagement for the

evening, to hurry to one of his clubs and find some one. Oh, there was a

loneliness here----

His cigarette, its smoke bordering the thin folds of curtain with rims

of faint white spray, glowed on until the clock in St. Anne's down the

street struck one with a querulous fashionable beauty. The elevated,

half a quiet block away, sounded a rumble of drums--and should he lean

from his window he would see the train, like an angry eagle, breasting

the dark curve at the corner. He was reminded of a fantastic romance he

had lately read in which cities had been bombed from aerial trains, and

for a moment he fancied that Washington Square had declared war on

Central Park and that this was a north-bound menace loaded with battle

and sudden death. But as it passed the illusion faded; it diminished to

the faintest of drums--then to a far-away droning eagle.

There were the bells and the continued low blur of auto horns from Fifth

Avenue, but his own street was silent and he was safe in here from all

the threat of life, for there was his door and the long hall and his

guardian bedroom--safe, safe! The arc-light shining into his window

seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful

than the moon.

A FLASH-BACK IN PARADISE

_Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor

waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a

breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went

by and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her hair. She was

incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one--the beauty of

her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by

philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of

winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in

the contemplation of herself._

_It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again.

Sighing, she began a long conversation with a voice that was in the

white wind, a conversation that took many hours and of which I can give

only a fragment here._

BEAUTY: (_Her lips scarcely stirring, her eyes turned, as always, inward

upon herself_) Whither shall I journey now?

THE VOICE: To a new country--a land you have never seen before.

BEAUTY: (_Petulantly_) I loathe breaking into these new civilizations.

How long a stay this time?

THE VOICE: Fifteen years.

BEAUTY: And what's the name of the place?

THE VOICE: It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth--a land

whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the

rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in

Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men----

BEAUTY: (_In astonishment_) What?

THE VOICE: (_Very much depressed_) Yes, it is truly a melancholy

spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in

broad daylight saying "Do this!" and "Do that!" and all the men, even

those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer

sonorously either as "Mrs. So-and-so" or as "the wife."

BEAUTY: But this can't be true! I can understand, of course, their

obedience to women of charm--but to fat women? to bony women? to women

with scrawny cheeks?

THE VOICE: Even so.

BEAUTY: What of me? What chance shall I have?

THE VOICE: It will be "harder going," if I may borrow a phrase.

BEAUTY: (_After a dissatisfied pause_) Why not the old lands, the land

of grapes and soft-tongued men or the land of ships and seas?

THE VOICE: It's expected that they'll be very busy shortly.

BEAUTY: Oh!

THE VOICE: Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between

two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

BEAUTY: What will I be? Tell me?

THE VOICE: At first it was thought that you would go this time as an

actress in the motion pictures but, after all, it's not advisable. You

will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a

"susciety gurl."

BEAUTY: What's that?

(_There is a new sound in the wind which must for our purposes be

interpreted as_ THE VOICE _scratching its head._)

THE VOICE: (_At length_) It's a sort of bogus aristocrat.

BEAUTY: Bogus? What is bogus?

THE VOICE: That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much

that is bogus. Also, you will do much that is bogus.

BEAUTY: (_Placidly_) It all sounds so vulgar.

THE VOICE: Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your

fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp.

You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you

danced the old ones.

BEAUTY: (_In a whisper_) Will I be paid?

THE VOICE: Yes, as usual--in love.

BEAUTY: (_With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the

immobility of her lips_) And will I like being called a jazz-baby?

THE VOICE: (_Soberly_) You will love it....

(_The dialogue ends here, with_ BEAUTY _still sitting quietly, the stars

pausing in an ecstasy of appreciation, the wind, white and gusty,

blowing through her hair._

_All this took place seven years before_ ANTHONY _sat by the front

windows of his apartment and listened to the chimes of St. Anne's_.)