The Beautiful and Damned

Ch. 2: 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 i***t!" 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 m****. 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

na** 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 premi** 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 na**** 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, n* 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, d**k 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 d**k 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 r** 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 r***?"

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.

He remembered a time when in going on a "party" with his two best

friends, he and Maury had invariably paid more than their share of the

expenses. They would buy the tickets for the theatre or squabble between

themselves for the dinner check. It had seemed fitting; d**k, with his

na*** and his astonishing fund of information about himself, had been

a diverting, almost juvenile, figure--court jester to their royalty. But

this was no longer true. It was d**k who always had money; it was

Anthony who entertained within limitations--always excepting occasional

wild, wine-inspired, check-cashing parties--and it was Anthony who was

solemn about it next morning and told the scornful and disgusted Gloria

that they'd have to be "more careful next time."

In the two years since the publication of "The Demon Lover," d**k had

made over twenty-five thousand dollars, most of it lately, when the

reward of the author of fiction had begun to swell unprecedentedly as a

result of the voracious hunger of the motion pictures for plots. He

received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large

emolument for such a young man--he was not quite thirty--and for every

one that contained enough "action" (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing)

for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand. His stories varied;

there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive in all of

them, but none attained the personality of "The Demon Lover," and there

were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick

explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn't it true that men

who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had

appealed to the many as well as to the elect?

Though Anthony and Maury disagreed, Gloria told him to go ahead and make

as much money as he could--that was the only thing that counted

anyhow....

Maury, a little stouter, faintly mellower, and more complaisant, had

gone to work in Philadelphia. He came to New York once or twice a month

and on such occasions the four of them travelled the popular routes from

dinner to the theatre, thence to the Frolic or, perhaps, at the urging

of the ever-curious Gloria, to one of the cellars of Greenwich Village,

notorious through the furious but short-lived vogue of the "new poetry

movement."

In January, after many monologues directed at his reticent wife, Anthony

determined to "get something to do," for the winter at any rate. He

wanted to please his grandfather and even, in a measure, to see how he

liked it himself. He discovered during several tentative semi-social

calls that employers were not interested in a young man who was only

going to "try it for a few months or so." As the grandson of Adam Patch

he was received everywhere with marked courtesy, but the old man was a

back number now--the heyday of his fame as first an "oppressor" and then

an uplifter of the people had been during the twenty years preceding his

retirement. Anthony even found several of the younger men who were under

the impression that Adam Patch had been dead for some years.

Eventually Anthony went to his grandfather and asked his advice, which

turned out to be that he should enter the bond business as a salesman, a

tedious suggestion to Anthony, but one that in the end he determined to

follow. Sheer money in deft manipulation had fascinations under all

circumstances, while almost any side of manufacturing would be

insufferably dull. He considered newspaper work but decided that the

hours were not ordered for a married man. And he lingered over pleasant

fancies of himself either as editor of a brilliant weekly of opinion, an

American Mercure de France, or as scintillant producer of satiric comedy

and Parisian musical revue. However, the approaches to these latter

guilds seemed to be guarded by professional secrets. Men drifted into

them by the devious highways of writing and acting. It was palpably

impossible to get on a magazine unless you had been on one before.

So in the end he entered, by way of his grandfather's letter, that

Sanctum Americanum where sat the president of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy

at his "cleared desk," and issued therefrom employed. He was to begin

work on the twenty-third of February.

In tribute to the momentous occasion this two-day revel had been

planned, since, he said, after he began working he'd have to get to bed

early during the week. Maury Noble had arrived from Philadelphia on a

trip that had to do with seeing some man in Wall Street (whom,

incidentally, he failed to see), and Richard Caramel had been half

persuaded, half tricked into joining them. They had condescended to a

wet and fashionable wedding on Monday afternoon, and in the evening had

occurred the d********: Gloria, going beyond her accustomed limit of

four precisely timed cocktails, led them on as gay and joyous a

bacchanal as they had ever known, disclosing an astonishing knowledge of

ballet steps, and singing songs which she confessed had been taught her

by her cook when she was innocent and seventeen. She repeated these by

request at intervals throughout the evening with such frank conviviality

that Anthony, far from being annoyed, was gratified at this fresh source

of entertainment. The occasion was memorable in other ways--a long

conversation between Maury and a defunct crab, which he was dragging

around on the end of a string, as to whether the crab was fully

conversant with the applications of the binomial theorem, and the

aforementioned race in two hansom cabs with the sedate and impressive

shadows of Fifth Avenue for audience, ending in a labyrinthine escape

into the darkness of Central Park. Finally Anthony and Gloria had paid a

call on some wild young married people--the Lacys--and collapsed in the

empty milk bottles.

Morning now--theirs to add up the checks cashed here and there in clubs,

stores, restaurants. Theirs to air the dank staleness of wine and

cigarettes out of the tall blue front room, to pick up the broken glass

and brush at the stained fabric of chairs and sofas; to give Bounds

suits and dresses for the cleaners; finally, to take their smothery

half-feverish bodies and faded depressed spirits out into the chill air

of February, that life might go on and Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy obtain

the services of a vigorous man at nine next morning.

"Do you remember," called Anthony from the bathroom, "when Maury got out

at the corner of One Hundred and Tenth Street and acted as a traffic

cop, beckoning cars forward and motioning them back? They must have

thought he was a private detective."

After each reminiscence they both laughed inordinately, their

overwrought nerves responding as acutely and janglingly to mirth as to

depression.

Gloria at the mirror was wondering at the splendid color and freshness

of her face--it seemed that she had never looked so well, though her

stomach hurt her and her head was aching furiously.

The day passed slowly. Anthony, riding in a taxi to his broker's to

borrow money on a bond, found that he had only two dollars in his

pocket. The fare would cost all of that, but he felt that on this

particular afternoon he could not have endured the subway. When the

taximetre reached his limit he must get out and walk.

With this his mind drifted off into one of its characteristic

day-dreams.... In this dream he discovered that the metre was going too

fast--the driver had dishonestly adjusted it. Calmly he reached his

destination and then nonchalantly handed the man what he justly owed

him. The man showed fight, but almost before his hands were up Anthony

had knocked him down with one terrific blow. And when he rose Anthony

quickly sidestepped and floored him definitely with a crack in

the temple.

... He was in court now. The judge had fined him five dollars and he had

no money. Would the court take his check? Ah, but the court did not know

him. Well, he could identify himself by having them call his apartment.

... They did so. Yes, it was Mrs. Anthony Patch speaking--but how did

she know that this man was her husband? How could she know? Let the

police sergeant ask her if she remembered the milk bottles ...

He leaned forward hurriedly and tapped at the glass. The taxi was only

at Brooklyn Bridge, but the metre showed a dollar and eighty cents, and

Anthony would never have omitted the ten per cent tip.

Later in the afternoon he returned to the apartment. Gloria had also

been out--shopping--and was asleep, curled in a corner of the sofa with

her purchase locked securely in her arms. Her face was as untroubled as

a little girl's, and the bundle that she pressed tightly to her bosom

was a child's doll, a profound and infinitely healing balm to her

disturbed and childish heart.

DESTINY

It was with this party, more especially with Gloria's part in it, that a

decided change began to come over their way of living. The magnificent

attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet

of Gloria's it became the entire solace and justification for what they

chose to do and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry, not to

loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor

toward each other, and to seek the moment's happiness as fervently and

persistently as possible.

"No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony," she said one day. "It'd

be ridiculous for me to go about pretending I felt any obligations

toward the world, and as for worrying what people think about me, I

simply _don't_, that's all. Since I was a little girl in dancing-school

I've been criticised by the mothers of all the little girls who weren't

as popular as I was, and I've always looked on criticism as a sort of

envious tribute."

This was because of a party in the "Boul' Mich'" one night, where

Constance Merriam had seen her as one of a highly stimulated party of

four. Constance Merriam, "as an old school friend," had gone to the

trouble of inviting her to lunch next day in order to inform her how

terrible it was.

"I told her I couldn't see it," Gloria told Anthony. "Eric Merriam is a

sort of sublimated Percy Wolcott--you remember that man in Hot Springs I

told you about--his idea of respecting Constance is to leave her at home

with her sewing and her baby and her book, and such innocuous

amusements, whenever he's going on a party that promises to be anything

but deathly dull."

"Did you tell her that?"

"I certainly did. And I told her that what she really objected to was

that I was having a better time than she was."

Anthony applauded her. He was tremendously proud of Gloria, proud that

she never failed to eclipse whatever other women might be in the party,

proud that men were always glad to revel with her in great rowdy groups,

without any attempt to do more than enjoy her beauty and the warmth of

her vitality.

These "parties" gradually became their chief source of entertainment.

Still in love, still enormously interested in each other, they yet found

as spring drew near that staying at home in the evening palled on them;

books were unreal; the old magic of being alone had long since

vanished--instead they preferred to be bored by a stupid musical comedy,

or to go to dinner with the most uninteresting of their acquaintances,

so long as there would be enough cocktails to keep the conversation from

becoming utterly intolerable. A scattering of younger married people who

had been their friends in school or college, as well as a varied

assortment of single men, began to think instinctively of them whenever

color and excitement were needed, so there was scarcely a day without

its phone call, its "Wondered what you were doing this evening." Wives,

as a rule, were afraid of Gloria--her facile attainment of the centre of

the stage, her innocent but nevertheless disturbing way of becoming a

favorite with husbands--these things drove them instinctively into an

attitude of profound distrust, heightened by the fact that Gloria was

largely unresponsive to any intimacy shown her by a woman.

On the appointed Wednesday in February Anthony had gone to the imposing

offices of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy and listened to many vague

instructions delivered by an energetic young man of about his own age,

named Kahler, who wore a defiant yellow pompadour, and in announcing

himself as an assistant secretary gave the impression that it was a

tribute to exceptional ability.

"There's two kinds of men here, you'll find," he said. "There's the man

who gets to be an assistant secretary or treasurer, gets his name on our

folder here, before he's thirty, and there's the man who gets his name

there at forty-five. The man who gets his name there at forty-five stays

there the rest of his life."

"How about the man who gets it there at thirty?" inquired Anthony

politely.

"Why, he gets up here, you see." He pointed to a list of assistant

vice-presidents upon the folder. "Or maybe he gets to be president or

secretary or treasurer."

"And what about these over here?"

"Those? Oh, those are the trustees--the men with capital."

"I see."

"Now some people," continued Kahler, "think that whether a man gets

started early or late depends on whether he's got a college education.

But they're wrong."

"I see."

"I had one; I was Buckleigh, class of nineteen-eleven, but when I came

down to the Street I soon found that the things that would help me here

weren't the fancy things I learned in college. In fact, I had to get a

lot of fancy stuff out of my head."

Anthony could not help wondering what possible "fancy stuff" he had

learned at Buckleigh in nineteen-eleven. An irrepressible idea that it

was some sort of needlework recurred to him throughout the rest of the

conversation.

"See that fellow over there?" Kahler pointed to a youngish-looking man

with handsome gray hair, sitting at a desk inside a mahogany railing.

"That's Mr. Ellinger, the first vice-president. Been everywhere, seen

everything; got a fine education."

In vain did Anthony try to open his mind to the romance of finance; he

could think of Mr. Ellinger only as one of the buyers of the handsome

leather sets of Thackeray, Balzac, Hugo, and Gibbon that lined the walls

of the big bookstores.

Through the damp and uninspiring month of March he was prepared for

salesmanship. Lacking enthusiasm he was capable of viewing the turmoil

and bustle that surrounded him only as a fruitless circumambient

striving toward an incomprehensible goal, tangibly evidenced only by the

rival mansions of Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie on Fifth Avenue. That these

portentous vice-presidents and trustees should be actually the fathers

of the "best men" he had known at Harvard seemed to him incongruous.

He ate in an employees' lunch-room up-stairs with an uneasy suspicion

that he was being uplifted, wondering through that first week if the

dozens of young clerks, some of them alert and immaculate, and just out

of college, lived in flamboyant hope of crowding onto that narrow slip

of cardboard before the catastrophic thirties. The conversation that

interwove with the pattern of the day's work was all much of a piece.

One discussed how Mr. Wilson had made his money, what method Mr. Hiemer

had employed, and the means resorted to by Mr. Hardy. One related

age-old but eternally breathless anecdotes of the fortunes stumbled on

precipitously in the Street by a "butcher" or a "bartender," or "a darn

_mess_enger boy, by golly!" and then one talked of the current gambles,

and whether it was best to go out for a hundred thousand a year or be

content with twenty. During the preceding year one of the assistant

secretaries had invested all his savings in Bethlehem Steel. The story

of his spectacular magnificence, of his haughty resignation in January,

and of the triumphal palace he was now building in California, was the

favorite office subject. The man's very name had acquired a magic

significance, symbolizing as he did the aspirations of all good

Americans. Anecdotes were told about him--how one of the vice-presidents

had advised him to sell, by golly, but he had hung on, even bought on

margin, "and _now_ look where he is!"

Such, obviously, was the stuff of life--a dizzy triumph dazzling the

eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meagre wage and

with the arithmetical improbability of their eventual success.

To Anthony the notion became appalling. He felt that to succeed here the

idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. It seemed to him that the

essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their

affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal,

self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was

obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom--so, with

appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.

His determination to stay in at night during the week did not survive,

and a good half of the time he came to work with a splitting, sickish

headache and the crowded horror of the morning subway ringing in his

ears like an echo of hell.

Then, abruptly, he quit. He had remained in bed all one Monday, and late

in the evening, overcome by one of those attacks of moody despair to

which he periodically succumbed, he wrote and mailed a letter to Mr.

Wilson, confessing that he considered himself ill adapted to the work.

Gloria, coming in from the theatre with Richard Caramel, found him on

the lounge, silently staring at the high ceiling, more depressed and

discouraged than he had been at any time since their marriage.

She wanted him to whine. If he had she would have reproached him

bitterly, for she was not a little annoyed, but he only lay there so

utterly miserable that she felt sorry for him, and kneeling down she

stroked his head, saying how little it mattered, how little anything

mattered so long as they loved each other. It was like their first year,

and Anthony, reacting to her cool hand, to her voice that was soft as

breath itself upon his ear, became almost cheerful, and talked with her

of his future plans. He even regretted, silently, before he went to bed

that he had so hastily mailed his resignation.

"Even when everything seems rotten you can't trust that judgment,"

Gloria had said. "It's the sum of all your judgments that counts."

In mid-April came a letter from the real-estate agent in Marietta,

encouraging them to take the gray house for another year at a slightly

increased rental, and enclosing a lease made out for their signatures.

For a week lease and letter lay carelessly neglected on Anthony's desk.

They had no intention of returning to Marietta. They were weary of the

place, and had been bored most of the preceding summer. Besides, their

car had deteriorated to a rattling mass of hypochondriacal metal, and a

new one was financially inadvisable.

But because of another wild revel, enduring through four days and

participated in, at one time or another, by more than a dozen people,

they did sign the lease; to their utter horror they signed it and sent

it, and immediately it seemed as though they heard the gray house,

drably malevolent at last, licking its white chops and waiting to

devour them.

"Anthony, where's that lease?" she called in high alarm one Sunday

morning, sick and sober to reality. "Where did you leave it? It

was here!"

Then she knew where it was. She remembered the house party they had

planned on the crest of their exuberance; she remembered a room full of

men to whose less exhilarated moments she and Anthony were of no

importance, and Anthony's boast of the transcendent merit and seclusion

of the gray house, that it was so isolated that it didn't matter how

much noise went on there. Then d**k, who had visited them, cried

enthusiastically that it was the best little house imaginable, and that

they were idiotic not to take it for another summer. It had been easy to

work themselves up to a sense of how hot and deserted the city was

getting, of how cool and ambrosial were the charms of Marietta. Anthony

had picked up the lease and waved it wildly, found Gloria happily

acquiescent, and with one last burst of garrulous decision during which

all the men agreed with solemn handshakes that they would come out for

a visit ...

"Anthony," she cried, "we've signed and sent it!"

"What?"

"The lease!"

"What the devil!"

"Oh, _An_thony!" There was utter misery in her voice. For the summer,

for eternity, they had built themselves a prison. It seemed to strike at

the last roots of their stability. Anthony thought they might arrange it

with the real-estate agent. They could no longer afford the double rent,

and going to Marietta meant giving up his apartment, his reproachless

apartment with the exquisite bath and the rooms for which he had bought

his furniture and hangings--it was the closest to a home that he had

ever had--familiar with memories of four colorful years.

But it was not arranged with the real-estate agent, nor was it arranged

at all. Dispiritedly, without even any talk of making the best of it,

without even Gloria's all-sufficing "I don't care," they went back to

the house that they now knew heeded neither youth nor love--only those

austere and incommunicable memories that they could never share.

THE SINISTER SUMMER

There was a horror in the house that summer. It came with them and

settled itself over the place like a sombre pall, pervasive through the

lower rooms, gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs until

it oppressed their very sleep. Anthony and Gloria grew to hate being

there alone. Her bedroom, which had seemed so pink and young and

delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and

there on chair and bed, seemed now to whisper with its rustling curtains:

"Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is not the first daintiness and

delicacy that has faded here under the summer suns ... generations of

unloved women have adorned themselves by that glass for rustic lovers

who paid no heed.... Youth has come into this room in palest blue and

left it in the gray cerements of despair, and through long nights many

girls have lain awake where that bed stands pouring out waves of misery

into the darkness."

Gloria finally tumbled all her clothes and unguents ingloriously out of

it, declaring that she had come to live with Anthony, and making the

excuse that one of her screens was rotten and admitted bugs. So her room

was abandoned to insensitive guests, and they dressed and slept in her

husband's chamber, which Gloria considered somehow "good," as though

Anthony's presence there had acted as exterminator of any uneasy shadows

of the past that might have hovered about its walls.

The distinction between "good" and "bad," ordered early and summarily

out of both their lives, had been reinstated in another form. Gloria

insisted that any one invited to the gray house must be "good," which,

in the case of a girl, meant that she must be either simple and

reproachless or, if otherwise, must possess a certain solidity and

strength. Always intensely sceptical of her s*x, her judgments were now

concerned with the question of whether women were or were not clean. By

uncleanliness she meant a variety of things, a lack of pride, a

slackness in fibre and, most of all, the unmistakable aura of

promiscuity.

"Women soil easily," she said, "far more easily than men. Unless a

girl's very young and brave it's almost impossible for her to go

down-hill without a certain hysterical animality, the cunning, dirty

sort of animality. A man's different--and I suppose that's why one of

the commonest characters of romance is a man going gallantly to

the devil."

She was disposed to like many men, preferably those who gave her frank

homage and unfailing entertainment--but often with a flash of insight

she told Anthony that some one of his friends was merely using him, and

consequently had best be left alone. Anthony customarily demurred,

insisting that the accused was a "good one," but he found that his

judgment was more fallible than hers, memorably when, as it happened on

several occasions, he was left with a succession of restaurant checks

for which to render a solitary account.

More from their fear of solitude than from any desire to go through the

fuss and bother of entertaining, they filled the house with guests every

week-end, and often on through the week. The week-end parties were much

the same. When the three or four men invited had arrived, drinking was

more or less in order, followed by a hilarious dinner and a ride to the

Cradle Beach Country Club, which they had joined because it was

inexpensive, lively if not fashionable, and almost a necessity for just

such occasions as these. Moreover, it was of no great moment what one

did there, and so long as the Patch party were reasonably inaudible, it

mattered little whether or not the social dictators of Cradle Beach saw

the gay Gloria imbibing cocktails in the supper room at frequent

intervals during the evening.

Saturday ended, generally, in a glamourous confusion--it proving often

necessary to assist a muddled guest to bed. Sunday brought the New York

papers and a quiet morning of recuperating on the porch--and Sunday

afternoon meant good-by to the one or two guests who must return to the

city, and a great revival of drinking among the one or two who remained

until next day, concluding in a convivial if not hilarious evening.

The faithful Tana, pedagogue by nature and man of all work by

profession, had returned with them. Among their more frequent guests a

tradition had sprung up about him. Maury Noble remarked one afternoon

that his real name was Tannenbaum, and that he was a German agent kept

in this country to disseminate Teutonic propaganda through Westchester

County, and, after that, mysterious letters began to arrive from

Philadelphia addressed to the bewildered Oriental as "Lt. Emile

Tannenbaum," containing a few cryptic messages signed "General Staff,"

and adorned with an atmospheric double column of facetious Japanese.

Anthony always handed them to Tana without a smile; hours afterward the

recipient could be found puzzling over them in the kitchen and declaring

earnestly that the perpendicular symbols were not Japanese, nor anything

resembling Japanese.

Gloria had taken a strong dislike to the man ever since the day when,

returning unexpectedly from the village, she had discovered him

reclining on Anthony's bed, puzzling out a newspaper. It was the

instinct of all servants to be fond of Anthony and to detest Gloria, and

Tana was no exception to the rule. But he was thoroughly afraid of her

and made plain his aversion only in his moodier moments by subtly

addressing Anthony with remarks intended for her ear:

"What Miz Pats want dinner?" he would say, looking at his master. Or

else he would comment about the bitter selfishness of "'Merican peoples"

in such manner that there was no doubt who were the "peoples"

referred to.

But they dared not dismiss him. Such a step would have been abhorrent to

their inertia. They endured Tana as they endured ill weather and

sickness of the body and the estimable Will of God--as they endured all

things, even themselves.

IN DARKNESS

One sultry afternoon late in July Richard Caramel telephoned from New

York that he and Maury were coming out, bringing a friend with them.

They arrived about five, a little drunk, accompanied by a small, stocky

man of thirty-five, whom they introduced as Mr. Joe Hull, one of the

best fellows that Anthony and Gloria had ever met.

Joe Hull had a yellow beard continually fighting through his skin and a

low voice which varied between basso profundo and a husky whisper.

Anthony, carrying Maury's suitcase up-stairs, followed into the room and

carefully closed the door.

"Who is this fellow?" he demanded.

Maury chuckled enthusiastically.

"Who, Hull? Oh, _he's_ all right. He's a good one."

"Yes, but who is he?"

"Hull? He's just a good fellow. He's a prince." His laughter redoubled,

culminating in a succession of pleasant catlike grins. Anthony hesitated

between a smile and a frown.

"He looks sort of funny to me. Weird-looking clothes"--he paused--"I've

got a sneaking suspicion you two picked him up somewhere last night."

"Ridiculous," declared Maury. "Why, I've known him all my life."

However, as he capped this statement with another series of chuckles,

Anthony was impelled to remark: "The devil you have!"

Later, just before dinner, while Maury and d**k were conversing

uproariously, with Joe Hull listening in silence as he sipped his drink,

Gloria drew Anthony into the dining room:

"I don't like this man Hull," she said. "I wish he'd use Tana's

bathtub."

"I can't very well ask him to."

"Well, I don't want him in ours."

"He seems to be a simple soul."

"He's got on white shoes that look like gloves. I can see his toes right

through them. Uh! Who is he, anyway?"

"You've got me."

"Well, I think they've got their nerve to bring him out here. This isn't

a Sailor's Rescue Home!"

"They were tight when they phoned. Maury said they've been on a party

since yesterday afternoon."

Gloria shook her head angrily, and saying no more returned to the porch.

Anthony saw that she was trying to forget her uncertainty and devote

herself to enjoying the evening.

It had been a tropical day, and even into late twilight the heat-waves

emanating from the dry road were quivering faintly like undulating panes

of isinglass. The sky was cloudless, but far beyond the woods in the

direction of the Sound a faint and persistent rolling had commenced.

When Tana announced dinner the men, at a word from Gloria, remained

coatless and went inside.

Maury began a song, which they accomplished in harmony during the first

course. It had two lines and was sung to a popular air called Daisy

Dear. The lines were:

"The--pan-ic--has--come--over us, So _ha-a-as_--the moral de_cline_!"

Each rendition was greeted with bursts of enthusiasm and prolonged

applause.

"Cheer up, Gloria!" suggested Maury. "You seem the least bit depressed."

"I'm not," she lied.

"Here, Tannenbaum!" he called over his shoulder. "I've filled you a

drink. Come on!"

Gloria tried to stay his arm.

"Please don't, Maury!"

"Why not? Maybe he'll play the flute for us after dinner. Here, Tana."

Tana, grinning, bore the glass away to the kitchen. In a few moments

Maury gave him another.

"Cheer up, Gloria!" he cried. "For Heaven's sakes everybody, cheer up

Gloria."

"Dearest, have another drink," counselled Anthony.

"Do, please!"

"Cheer up, Gloria," said Joe Hull easily.

Gloria winced at this uncalled-for use of her first name, and glanced

around to see if any one else had noticed it. The word coming so glibly

from the lips of a man to whom she had taken an inordinate dislike

repelled her. A moment later she noticed that Joe Hull had given Tana

another drink, and her anger increased, heightened somewhat from the

effects of the alcohol.

"--and once," Maury was saying, "Peter Granby and I went into a Turkish

bath in Boston, about two o'clock at night. There was no one there but

the proprietor, and we jammed him into a closet and locked the door.

Then a fella came in and wanted a Turkish bath. Thought we were the

rubbers, by golly! Well, we just picked him up and tossed him into the

pool with all his clothes on. Then we dragged him out and laid him on a

slab and slapped him until he was black and blue. 'Not so rough,

fellows!' he'd say in a little squeaky voice, 'please! ...'"

--Was this Maury? thought Gloria. From any one else the story would have

amused her, but from Maury, the infinitely appreciative, the apotheosis

of tact and consideration....

"The--pan-ic--has--come--over us, So _ha-a-as_--"

A drum of thunder from outside drowned out the rest of the song; Gloria

shivered and tried to empty her glass, but the first taste nauseated

her, and she set it down. Dinner was over and they all marched into the

big room, bearing several bottles and decanters. Some one had closed the

porch door to keep out the wind, and in consequence circular tentacles

of cigar smoke were twisting already upon the heavy air.

"Paging Lieutenant Tannenbaum!" Again it was the changeling Maury.

"Bring us the flute!"

Anthony and Maury rushed into the kitchen; Richard Caramel started the

phonograph and approached Gloria.

"Dance with your well-known cousin."

"I don't want to dance."

"Then I'm going to carry you around."

As though he were doing something of overpowering importance, he picked

her up in his fat little arms and started trotting gravely about

the room.

"Set me down, d**k! I'm dizzy!" she insisted.

He dumped her in a bouncing bundle on the couch, and rushed off to the

kitchen, shouting "Tana! Tana!"

Then, without warning, she felt other arms around her, felt herself

lifted from the lounge. Joe Hull had picked her up and was trying,

drunkenly, to imitate d**k.

"Put me down!" she said sharply.

His maudlin laugh, and the sight of that prickly yellow jaw close to her

face stirred her to intolerable disgust.

"At once!"

"The--pan-ic--" he began, but got no further, for Gloria's hand swung

around swiftly and caught him in the cheek. At this he all at once let

go of her, and she fell to the floor, her shoulder hitting the table a

glancing blow in transit....

Then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tana in his white

coat reeling about supported by Maury. Into his flute he was blowing a

weird blend of sound that was known, cried Anthony, as the Japanese

train-song. Joe Hull had found a box of candles and was juggling them,

yelling "One down!" every time he missed, and d**k was dancing by

himself in a fascinated whirl around and about the room. It appeared to

her that everything in the room was staggering in grotesque

fourth-dimensional gyrations through intersecting planes of hazy blue.

Outside, the storm had come up amazingly--the lulls within were filled

with the scrape of the tall bushes against the house and the roaring of

the rain on the tin roof of the kitchen. The lightning was interminable,

letting down thick drips of thunder like pig iron from the heart of a

white-hot furnace. Gloria could see that the rain was spitting in at

three of the windows--but she could not move to shut them....

... She was in the hall. She had said good night but no one had heard or

heeded her. It seemed for an instant as though something had looked down

over the head of the banister, but she could not have gone back into the

living room--better madness than the madness of that clamor....

Up-stairs she fumbled for the electric switch and missed it in the

darkness; a roomful of lightning showed her the button plainly on the

wall. But when the impenetrable black shut down, it again eluded her

fumbling fingers, so she slipped off her dress and petticoat and threw

herself weakly on the dry side of the half-drenched bed.

She shut her eyes. From down-stairs arose the babel of the drinkers,

punctured suddenly by a tinkling shiver of broken glass, and then

another, and by a soaring fragment of unsteady, irregular song....

She lay there for something over two hours--so she calculated afterward,

sheerly by piecing together the bits of time. She was conscious, even

aware, after a long while that the noise down-stairs had lessened, and

that the storm was moving off westward, throwing back lingering showers

of sound that fell, heavy and lifeless as her soul, into the soggy

fields. This was succeeded by a slow, reluctant scattering of the rain

and wind, until there was nothing outside her windows but a gentle

dripping and the swishing play of a cluster of wet vine against the

sill. She was in a state half-way between sleeping and waking, with

neither condition predominant ... and she was harassed by a desire to

rid herself of a weight pressing down upon her breast. She felt that if

she could cry the weight would be lifted, and forcing the lids of her

eyes together she tried to raise a lump in her throat ... to

no avail....

Drip! Drip! Drip! The sound was not unpleasant--like spring, like a cool

rain of her childhood, that made cheerful mud in her back yard and

watered the tiny garden she had dug with miniature rake and spade and

hoe. Drip--dri-ip! It was like days when the rain came out of yellow

skies that melted just before twilight and shot one radiant shaft of

sunlight diagonally down the heavens into the damp green trees. So cool,

so clear and clean--and her mother there at the centre of the world, at

the centre of the rain, safe and dry and strong. She wanted her mother

now, and her mother was dead, beyond sight and touch forever. And this

weight was pressing on her, pressing on her--oh, it pressed on her so!

She became rigid. Some one had come to the door and was standing

regarding her, very quiet except for a slight swaying motion. She could

see the outline of his figure distinct against some indistinguishable

light. There was no sound anywhere, only a great persuasive

silence--even the dripping had ceased ... only this figure, swaying,

swaying in the doorway, an indiscernible and subtly menacing terror, a

personality filthy under its varnish, like smallpox spots under a layer

of powder. Yet her tired heart, beating until it shook her breasts, made

her sure that there was still life in her, desperately shaken,

threatened....

The minute or succession of minutes prolonged itself interminably, and a

swimming blur began to form before her eyes, which tried with childish

persistence to pierce the gloom in the direction of the door. In another

instant it seemed that some unimaginable force would shatter her out of

existence ... and then the figure in the doorway--it was Hull, she saw,

Hull--turned deliberately and, still slightly swaying, moved back and

off, as if absorbed into that incomprehensible light that had given him

dimension.

Blood rushed back into her limbs, blood and life together. With a start

of energy she sat upright, shifting her body until her feet touched the

floor over the side of the bed. She knew what she must do--now, now,

before it was too late. She must go out into this cool damp, out, away,

to feel the wet swish of the grass around her feet and the fresh

moisture on her forehead. Mechanically she struggled into her clothes,

groping in the dark of the closet for a hat. She must go from this house

where the thing hovered that pressed upon her bosom, or else made itself

into stray, swaying figures in the gloom.

In a panic she fumbled clumsily at her coat, found the sleeve just as

she heard Anthony's footsteps on the lower stair. She dared not wait; he

might not let her go, and even Anthony was part of this weight, part of

this evil house and the sombre darkness that was growing up about it....

Through the hall then ... and down the back stairs, hearing Anthony's

voice in the bedroom she had just left--

"Gloria! Gloria!"

But she had reached the kitchen now, passed out through the doorway into

the night. A hundred drops, startled by a flare of wind from a dripping

tree, scattered on her and she pressed them gladly to her face with

hot hands.

"Gloria! Gloria!"

The voice was infinitely remote, muffed and made plaintive by the walls

she had just left. She rounded the house and started down the front path

toward the road, almost exultant as she turned into it, and followed the

carpet of short grass alongside, moving with caution in the

intense darkness.

"Gloria!"

She broke into a run, stumbled over the segment of a branch twisted off

by the wind. The voice was outside the house now. Anthony, finding the

bedroom deserted, had come onto the porch. But this thing was driving

her forward; it was back there with Anthony, and she must go on in her

flight under this dim and oppressive heaven, forcing herself through the

silence ahead as though it were a tangible barrier before her.

She had gone some distance along the barely discernible road, probably

half a mile, passed a single deserted barn that loomed up, black and

foreboding, the only building of any sort between the gray house and

Marietta; then she turned the fork, where the road entered the wood and

ran between two high walls of leaves and branches that nearly touched

overhead. She noticed suddenly a thin, longitudinal gleam of silver upon

the road before her, like a bright sword half embedded in the mud. As

she came closer she gave a little cry of satisfaction--it was a

wagon-rut full of water, and glancing heavenward she saw a light rift of

sky and knew that the moon was out.

"Gloria!"

She started violently. Anthony was not two hundred feet behind her.

"Gloria, wait for me!"

She shut her lips tightly to keep from screaming, and increased her

gait. Before she had gone another hundred yards the woods disappeared,

rolling back like a dark stocking from the leg of the road. Three

minutes' walk ahead of her, suspended in the now high and limitless air,

she saw a thin interlacing of attenuated gleams and glitters, centred in

a regular undulation on some one invisible point. Abruptly she knew

where she would go. That was the great cascade of wires that rose high

over the river, like the legs of a gigantic spider whose eye was the

little green light in the switch-house, and ran with the railroad bridge

in the direction of the station. The station! There would be the train

to take her away.

"Gloria, it's me! It's Anthony! Gloria, I won't try to stop you! For

God's sake, where are you?"

She made no answer but began to run, keeping on the high side of the

road and leaping the gleaming puddles--dimensionless pools of thin,

unsubstantial gold. Turning sharply to the left, she followed a narrow

wagon road, serving to avoid a dark body on the ground. She looked up as

an owl hooted mournfully from a solitary tree. Just ahead of her she

could see the trestle that led to the railroad bridge and the steps

mounting up to it. The station lay across the river.

Another sounds startled her, the melancholy siren of an approaching

train, and almost simultaneously, a repeated call, thin now and

far away.

"Gloria! Gloria!"

Anthony must have followed the main road. She laughed with a sort of

malicious cunning at having eluded him; she could spare the time to wait

until the train went by.

The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory

roar and clamor, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the

shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush

of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the

bridge--it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of

blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them,

which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an

instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back

instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid, the

temperature of warm blood.... The clicking blended suddenly with itself

in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the

thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the

lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside. Then it

contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a

reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.

Silence crept down again over the wet country; the faint dripping

resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria

stirring her out of the trance-like torpor which the passage of the

train had wrought. She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank

and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it

was something she had always wanted to do, and that she would have the

added excitement of traversing the yard-wide plank that ran beside the

tracks over the river.

There! This was better. She was at the top now and could see the lands

about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon,

coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To

her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the

light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights

of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge

squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was

lifted now--the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to

a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom.

This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.

"Gloria!"

Like a startled child she scurried along the plank, hopping, skipping,

jumping, with an ecstatic sense of her own physical lightness. Let him

come now--she no longer feared that, only she must first reach the

station, because that was part of the game. She was happy. Her hat,

snatched off, was clutched tightly in her hand, and her short curled

hair bobbed up and down about her ears. She had thought she would never

feel so young again, but this was her night, her world. Triumphantly she

laughed as she left the plank, and reaching the wooden platform flung

herself down happily beside an iron roof-post.

"Here I am!" she called, gay as the dawn in her elation. "Here I am,

Anthony, dear--old, worried Anthony."

"Gloria!" He reached the platform, ran toward her. "Are you all right?"

Coming up he knelt and took her in his arms.

"Yes."

"What was the matter? Why did you leave?" he queried anxiously.

"I had to--there was something"--she paused and a flicker of uneasiness

lashed at her mind--"there was something sitting on me--here." She put

her hand on her breast. "I had to go out and get away from it."

"What do you mean by 'something'?"

"I don't know--that man Hull--"

"Did he bother you?"

"He came to my door, drunk. I think I'd gotten sort of crazy by that

time."

"Gloria, dearest--"

Wearily she laid her head upon his shoulder.

"Let's go back," he suggested.

She shivered.

"Uh! No, I couldn't. It'd come and sit on me again." Her voice rose to a

cry that hung plaintive on the darkness. "That thing--"

"There--there," he soothed her, pulling her close to him. "We won't do

anything you don't want to do. What do you want to do? Just sit here?"

"I want--I want to go away."

"Where?"

"Oh--anywhere."

"By golly, Gloria," he cried, "you're still tight!"

"No, I'm not. I haven't been, all evening. I went up-stairs about, oh, I

don't know, about half an hour after dinner ...Ouch!"

He had inadvertently touched her right shoulder.

"It hurts me. I hurt it some way. I don't know--somebody picked me up

and dropped me."

"Gloria, come home. It's late and damp."

"I can't," she wailed. "Oh, Anthony, don't ask me to! I will to-morrow.

You go home and I'll wait here for a train. I'll go to a hotel--"

"I'll go with you."

"No, I don't want you with me. I want to be alone. I want to sleep--oh,

I want to sleep. And then to-morrow, when you've got all the smell of

whiskey and cigarettes out of the house, and everything straight, and

Hull is gone, then I'll come home. If I went now, that thing--oh--!" She

covered her eyes with her hand; Anthony saw the futility of trying to

persuade her.

"I was all sober when you left," he said. "d**k was asleep on the lounge

and Maury and I were having a discussion. That fellow Hull had wandered

off somewhere. Then I began to realize I hadn't seen you for several

hours, so I went up-stairs--"

He broke off as a salutatory "Hello, there!" boomed suddenly out of the

darkness. Gloria sprang to her feet and he did likewise.

"It's Maury's voice," she cried excitedly. "If it's Hull with him, keep

them away, keep them away!"

"Who's there?" Anthony called.

"Just d**k and Maury," returned two voices reassuringly.

"Where's Hull?"

"He's in bed. Passed out."

Their figures appeared dimly on the platform.

"What the devil are you and Gloria doing here?" inquired Richard Caramel

with sleepy bewilderment.

"What are _you_ two doing here?"

Maury laughed.

"Damned if I know. We followed you, and had the deuce of a time doing

it. I heard you out on the porch yelling for Gloria, so I woke up the

Caramel here and got it through his head, with some difficulty, that if

there was a search-party we'd better be on it. He slowed me up by

sitting down in the road at intervals and asking me what it was all

about. We tracked you by the pleasant scent of Canadian Club."

There was a rattle of nervous laughter under the low train-shed.

"How did you track us, really?"

"Well, we followed along down the road and then we suddenly lost you.

Seems you turned off at a wagontrail. After a while somebody hailed us

and asked us if we were looking for a young girl. Well, we came up and

found it was a little shivering old man, sitting on a fallen tree like

somebody in a fairy tale. 'She turned down here,' he said, 'and most

steppud on me, goin' somewhere in an awful hustle, and then a fella in

short golfin' pants come runnin' along and went after her. He throwed me

this.' The old fellow had a dollar bill he was waving around--"

"Oh, the poor old man!" ejaculated Gloria, moved.

"I threw him another and we went on, though he asked us to stay and tell

him what it was all about."

"Poor old man," repeated Gloria dismally.

Dick sat down sleepily on a box.

"And now what?" he inquired in the tone of stoic resignation.

"Gloria's upset," explained Anthony. "She and I are going to the city by

the next train."

Maury in the darkness had pulled a time-table from his pocket.

"Strike a match."

A tiny flare leaped out of the opaque background illuminating the four

faces, grotesque and unfamiliar here in the open night.

"Let's see. Two, two-thirty--no, that's evening. By gad, you won't get a

train till five-thirty."

Anthony hesitated.

"Well," he muttered uncertainly, "we've decided to stay here and wait

for it. You two might as well go back and sleep."

"You go, too, Anthony," urged Gloria; "I want you to have some sleep,

dear. You've been as pale as a ghost all day."

"Why, you little i***t!"

Dick yawned.

"Very well. You stay, we stay."

He walked out from under the shed and surveyed the heavens.

"Rather a nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything.

Exceptionally tasty assortment of them."

"Let's see." Gloria moved after him and the other two followed her.

"Let's sit out here," she suggested. "I like it much better."

Anthony and d**k converted a long box into a backrest and found a board

dry enough for Gloria to sit on. Anthony dropped down beside her and

with some effort d**k hoisted himself onto an apple-barrel near them.

"Tana went to sleep in the porch hammock," he remarked. "We carried him

in and left him next to the kitchen stove to dry. He was drenched to

the skin."

"That awful little man!" sighed Gloria.

"How do you do!" The voice, sonorous and funereal, had come from above,

and they looked up startled to find that in some manner Maury had

climbed to the roof of the shed, where he sat dangling his feet over the

edge, outlined as a shadowy and fantastic gargoyle against the now

brilliant sky.

"It must be for such occasions as this," he began softly, his words

having the effect of floating down from an immense height and settling

softly upon his auditors, "that the righteous of the land decorate the

railroads with bill-boards asserting in red and yellow that 'Jesus

Christ is God,' placing them, appropriately enough, next to

announcements that 'Gunter's Whiskey is Good.'"

There was gentle laughter and the three below kept their heads tilted

upward.

"I think I shall tell you the story of my education," continued Maury,

"under these sardonic constellations."

"Do! Please!"

"Shall I, really?"

They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the

white smiling moon.

"Well," he began, "as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against

future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred 'Now I

lay me's.'"

"Throw down a cigarette," murmured some one.

A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian

command:

"Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks

reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of

such skies."

Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice

resumed:

"I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes

until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I

believed that because a man cried out 'My God!' when a safe fell on him,

it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went

to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to

ancient flint-locks and cried to me: 'There's the real thing. These new

rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.' They damned the books

I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the

fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them 'clever'.

"And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets,

listening--to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of

Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to

Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and

Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron

declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I

learned a little of beauty--enough to know that it had nothing to do

with truth--and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary

tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every

literary tradition....

"Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from

me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life

rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

"The transition was subtle--the thing had lain in wait for me for some

time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one. With

me? No--I didn't try to seduce the janitor's wife--nor did I run through

the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite

passion that does the business--it is the dress that passion wears. I

became bored--that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a

frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my

acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand?--I was grown." He paused.

"End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two."

Three quietly active points of light showed the location of his

listeners. Gloria was now half sitting, half lying, in Anthony's lap.

His arm was around her so tightly that she could hear the beating of his

heart. Richard Caramel, perched on the apple-barrel, from time to time

stirred and gave off a faint grunt.

"I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a

state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral

schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But, with a mistaken faith

in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and

insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression--but

Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read

Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism--and behold! Jones was still

in my way. I did not think--I was a battle-ground for the thoughts of

many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries

over which the great powers surge back and forth.

"I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the

experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the

not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it

presented itself to me in life--and of being beaten and bewildered

just the same.

"But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I

said, Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens

pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up

against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable

scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too

late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and

predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight

against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life

for the fight against death."

He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation--after a moment he

yawned and resumed.

"I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a

ghastly dissatisfaction at being used in spite of myself for some

inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware--if, indeed,

there _was_ an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The

schoolmistress seemed to be saying, 'We're going to play football and

nothing but football. If you don't want to play football you can't

play at all--'

"What was I to do--the playtime was so short!

"You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might

have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees.

Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly

smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn

day before a fire?--I don't think I did that. I was a great deal too

warm for that, and too alive.

"For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was

beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature--nature, that by

the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly

in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and

thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher--or, let us say, her

more amusing--though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And,

actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to

circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle

with the white--in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe

to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the

one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity.

"We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper--and presently the breed

of the leper is the salt of the earth. If any one can find any lesson in

that, let him stand forth."

"There's only one lesson to be learned from life, anyway," interrupted

Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.

"What's that?" demanded Maury sharply.

"That there's no lesson to be learned from life."

After a short silence Maury said:

"Young Gloria, the beautiful and merciless lady, first looked at the

world with the fundamental sophistication I have struggled to attain,

that Anthony never will attain, that d**k will never fully understand."

There was a disgusted groan from the apple-barrel. Anthony, grown

accustomed to the dark, could see plainly the flash of Richard Caramel's

yellow eye and the look of resentment on his face as he cried:

"You're crazy! By your own statement I should have attained some

experience by trying."

"Trying what?" cried Maury fiercely. "Trying to pierce the darkness of

political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting

day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life

staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate,

definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to

take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make

for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit

to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary years for

one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube--"

"Have you?"

Maury paused, and in his answer, when it came, there was a measure of

weariness, a bitter overnote that lingered for a moment in those three

minds before it floated up and off like a bubble bound for the moon.

"Not I," he said softly. "I was born tired--but with the quality of

mother wit, the gift of women like Gloria--to that, for all my talking

and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems

to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I have

added not one jot."

In the distance a deep sound that had been audible for some moments

identified itself by a plaintive mooing like that of a gigantic cow and

by the pearly spot of a headlight apparent half a mile away. It was a

steam-driven train this time, rumbling and groaning, and as it tumbled

by with a monstrous complaint it sent a shower of sparks and cinders

over the platform.

"Not one jot!" Again Maury's voice dropped down to them as from a great

height. "What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its

waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats!

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who

say that intelligence must have built the universe--why, intelligence

never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine.

Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure

the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

"I could quote you the philosophy of the hour--but, for all we know,

fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation that's

absorbing the intellectuals to-day, the triumph of Christ over Anatole

France--" He hesitated, and then added: "But all I know--the tremendous

importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that

importance to myself--these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born

knowing these things and the painful futility of trying to know

anything else.

"Well, I started to tell you of my education, didn't I? But I learned

nothing, you see, very little even about myself. And if I had I should

die with my lips shut and the guard on my fountain pen--as the wisest

men have done since--oh, since the failure of a certain matter--a

strange matter, by the way. It concerned some sceptics who thought they

were far-sighted, just as you and I. Let me tell you about them by way

of an evening prayer before you all drop off to sleep.

"Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of

one belief--that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think

that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and

prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never

meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:

"'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to

mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write

about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust

journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all

the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the

keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities

worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of

them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter

the world over--and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities

and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion,

so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no

more nonsense in the world.

"'Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of

style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound

scepticism and our universal irony.'

"So the men did, and they died.

"But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so

astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and

genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after

they were dead it became known as the Bible."

When he concluded there was no comment. Some damp languor sleeping on

the air of night seemed to have bewitched them all.

"As I said, I started on the story of my education. But my high-balls

are dead and the night's almost over, and soon there'll be an awful

jabbering going on everywhere, in the trees and the houses, and the two

little stores over there behind the station, and there'll be a great

running up and down upon the earth for a few hours--Well," he concluded

with a laugh, "thank God we four can all pass to our eternal rest

knowing we've left the world a little better for having lived in it."

A breeze sprang up, blowing with it faint wisps of life which flattened

against the sky.

"Your remarks grow rambling and inconclusive," said Anthony sleepily.

"You expected one of those miracles of illumination by which you say

your most brilliant and pregnant things in exactly the setting that

should provoke the ideal symposium. Meanwhile Gloria has shown her

far-sighted detachment by falling asleep--I can tell that by the fact

that she has managed to concentrate her entire weight upon my

broken body."

"Have I bored you?" inquired Maury, looking down with some concern.

"No, you have disappointed us. You've shot a lot of arrows but did you

shoot any birds?"

"I leave the birds to d**k," said Maury hurriedly. "I speak erratically,

in disassociated fragments."

"You can get no rise from me," muttered d**k. "My mind is full of any

number of material things. I want a warm bath too much to worry about

the importance of my work or what proportion of us are pathetic figures."

Dawn made itself felt in a gathering whiteness eastward over the river

and an intermittent cheeping in the near-by trees.

"Quarter to five," sighed d**k; "almost another hour to wait. Look! Two

gone." He was pointing to Anthony, whose lids had sagged over his eyes.

"Sleep of the Patch family--"

But in another five minutes, despite the amplifying cheeps and chirrups,

his own head had fallen forward, nodded down twice, thrice....

Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes

wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of

morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading

radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping

avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house. He was sorry for no

one now--on Monday morning there would be his business, and later there

would be a girl of another class whose whole life he was; these were the

things nearest his heart. In the strangeness of the brightening day it

seemed presumptuous that with this feeble, broken instrument of his mind

he had ever tried to think.

There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was

life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm--the dark

pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp "all aboard!" and a bell

ringing. Confusedly Maury saw eyes in the milk train staring curiously

up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether

he should go to the city with her, then another clamor and she was gone

and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform

while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor truck,

carolling hoarsely at the summer morning.