The Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald [great novels TXT] 📗

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�les?”

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, anyhow.”

“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 trying.”

“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