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

told me they’d have to close my account. Too many bad checks, he said, and I never had more than five hundred to my credit—and that only for a day or so at a time. And by God! What do you think he said then?”

“What?”

“He said this was a good time to do it because I didn’t have a damn penny in there!”

“You didn’t?”

“That’s what he told me. Seems I’d given these Bedros people a check for sixty for that last case of liquor—and I only had forty-five dollars in the bank. Well, the Bedros people deposited fifteen dollars to my account and drew the whole thing out.”

In her ignorance Gloria conjured up a spectre of imprisonment and disgrace.

“Oh, they won’t do anything,” he assured her. “Bootlegging’s too risky a business. They’ll send me a bill for fifteen dollars and I’ll pay it.”

“Oh.” She considered a moment. “—Well, we can sell another bond.”

He laughed sarcastically.

“Oh, yes, that’s always easy. When the few bonds we have that are paying any interest at all are only worth between fifty and eighty cents on the dollar. We lose about half the bond every time we sell.”

“What else can we do?”

“Oh, we’ll sell something—as usual. We’ve got paper worth eighty thousand dollars at par.” Again he laughed unpleasantly. “Bring about thirty thousand on the open market.”

“I distrusted those ten per cent investments.”

“The deuce you did!” he said. “You pretended you did, so you could claw at me if they went to pieces, but you wanted to take a chance as much as I did.”

She was silent for a moment as if considering, then:

“Anthony,” she cried suddenly, “two hundred a month is worse than nothing. Let’s sell all the bonds and put the thirty thousand dollars in the bank—and if we lose the case we can live in Italy for three years, and then just die.” In her excitement as she talked she was aware of a faint flush of sentiment, the first she had felt in many days.

“Three years,” he said nervously, “three years! You’re crazy. Mr. Haight’ll take more than that if we lose. Do you think he’s working for charity?”

“I forgot that.”

“—And here it is Saturday,” he continued, “and I’ve only got a dollar and some change, and we’ve got to live till Monday, when I can get to my broker’s…. And not a drink in the house,” he added as a significant afterthought.

“Can’t you call up Dick?”

“I did. His man says he’s gone down to Princeton to address a literary club or some such thing. Won’t be back till Monday.”

“Well, let’s see—Don’t you know some friend you might go to?”

“I tried a couple of fellows. Couldn’t find anybody in. I wish I’d sold that Keats letter like I started to last week.”

“How about those men you play cards with in that Sammy place?”

“Do you think I’d ask them?” His voice rang with righteous horror. Gloria winced. He would rather contemplate her active discomfort than feel his own skin crawl at asking an inappropriate favor. “I thought of Muriel,” he suggested.

“She’s in California.”

“Well, how about some of those men who gave you such a good time while I was in the army? You’d think they might be glad to do a little favor for you.”

She looked at him contemptuously, but he took no notice.

“Or how about your old friend Rachael—or Constance Merriam?”

“Constance Merriam’s been dead a year, and I wouldn’t ask Rachael.”

“Well, how about that gentleman who was so anxious to help you once that he could hardly restrain himself, Bloeckman?”

“Oh—!” He had hurt her at last, and he was not too obtuse or too careless to perceive it.

“Why not him?” he insisted callously.

“Because—he doesn’t like me any more,” she said with difficulty, and then as he did not answer but only regarded her cynically: “If you want to know why, I’ll tell you. A year ago I went to Bloeckman—he’s changed his name to Black—and asked him to put me into pictures.”

“You went to Bloeckman?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded incredulously, the smile fading from his face.

“Because you were probably off drinking somewhere. He had them give me a test, and they decided that I wasn’t young enough for anything except a character part.”

“A character part?”

“The ‘woman of thirty’ sort of thing. I wasn’t thirty, and I didn’t think I—looked thirty.”

“Why, damn him!” cried Anthony, championing her violently with a curious perverseness of emotion, “why—”

“Well, that’s why I can’t go to him.”

“Why, the insolence!” insisted Anthony nervously, “the insolence!”

“Anthony, that doesn’t matter now; the thing is we’ve got to live over Sunday and there’s nothing in the house but a loaf of bread and a half-pound of bacon and two eggs for breakfast.” She handed him the contents of her purse. “There’s seventy, eighty, a dollar fifteen. With what you have that makes about two and a half altogether, doesn’t it? Anthony, we can get along on that. We can buy lots of food with that—more than we can possibly eat.”

Jingling the change in his hand he shook his head. “No. I’ve got to have a drink. I’m so darn nervous that I’m shivering.” A thought struck him. “Perhaps Sammy’d cash a check. And then Monday I could rush down to the bank with the money.” “But they’ve closed your account.”

“That’s right, that’s right—I’d forgotten. I’ll tell you what: I’ll go down to Sammy’s and I’ll find somebody there who’ll lend me something. I hate like the devil to ask them, though….” He snapped his fingers suddenly. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll hock my watch. I can get twenty dollars on it, and get it back Monday for sixty cents extra. It’s been hocked before—when I was at Cambridge.”

He had put on his overcoat, and with a brief good-by he started down the hall toward the outer door.

Gloria got to her feet. It had suddenly occurred to her where he would probably go first.

“Anthony!” she called after him, “hadn’t you better leave two dollars with me? You’ll only need car-fare.”

The outer door slammed—he had pretended not to hear her. She stood for a moment looking after him; then she went into the bathroom among her tragic unguents and began preparations for washing her hair.

Down at Sammy’s he found Parker Allison and Pete Lytell sitting alone at a table, drinking whiskey sours. It was just after six o’clock, and Sammy, or Samuele Bendiri, as he had been christened, was sweeping an accumulation of cigarette butts and broken glass into a corner.

“Hi, Tony!” called Parker Allison to Anthony. Sometimes he addressed him as Tony, at other times it was Dan. To him all Anthonys must sail under one of these diminutives.

“Sit down. What’ll you have?”

On the subway Anthony had counted his money and found that he had almost four dollars. He could pay for two rounds at fifty cents a drink—which meant that he would have six drinks. Then he would go over to Sixth Avenue and get twenty dollars and a pawn ticket in exchange for his watch.

“Well, roughnecks,” he said jovially, “how’s the life of crime?”

“Pretty good,” said Allison. He winked at Pete Lytell. “Too bad you’re a married man. We’ve got some pretty good stuff lined up for about eleven o’clock, when the shows let out. Oh, boy! Yes, sir—too bad he’s married—isn’t it, Pete?”

“‘Sa shame.”

At half past seven, when they had completed the six rounds, Anthony found that his intentions were giving audience to his desires. He was happy and cheerful now—thoroughly enjoying himself. It seemed to him that the story which Pete had just finished telling was unusually and profoundly humorous—and he decided, as he did every day at about this point, that they were “damn good fellows, by golly!” who would do a lot more for him than any one else he knew. The pawnshops would remain open until late Saturday nights, and he felt that if he took just one more drink he would attain a gorgeous rose-colored exhilaration.

Artfully, he fished in his vest pockets, brought up his two quarters, and stared at them as though in surprise.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” he protested in an aggrieved tone, “here I’ve come out without my pocketbook.”

“Need some cash?” asked Lytell easily.

“I left my money on the dresser at home. And I wanted to buy you another drink.”

“Oh—knock it.” Lytell waved the suggestion away disparagingly. “I guess we can blow a good fella to all the drinks he wants. What’ll you have—same?”

“I tell you,” suggested Parker Allison, “suppose we send Sammy across the street for some sandwiches and eat dinner here.”

The other two agreed.

“Good idea.”

“Hey, Sammy, wantcha do somep’m for us….”

Just after nine o’clock Anthony staggered to his feet and, bidding them a thick good night, walked unsteadily to the door, handing Sammy one of his two quarters as he passed out. Once in the street he hesitated uncertainly and then started in the direction of Sixth Avenue, where he remembered to have frequently passed several loan offices. He went by a news-stand and two drug-stores—and then he realized that he was standing in front of the place which he sought, and that it was shut and barred. Unperturbed he continued; another one, half a block down, was also closed—so were two more across the street, and a fifth in the square below. Seeing a faint light in the last one, he began to knock on the glass door; he desisted only when a watchman appeared in the back of the shop and motioned him angrily to move on. With growing discouragement, with growing befuddlement, he crossed the street and walked back toward Forty-third. On the corner near Sammy’s he paused undecided—if he went back to the apartment, as he felt his body required, he would lay himself open to bitter reproach; yet, now that the pawnshops were closed, he had no notion where to get the money. He decided finally that he might ask Parker Allison, after all—but he approached Sammy’s only to find the door locked and the lights out. He looked at his watch; nine-thirty. He began walking.

Ten minutes later he stopped aimlessly at the corner of Forty-third Street and Madison Avenue, diagonally across from the bright but nearly deserted entrance to the Biltmore Hotel. Here he stood for a moment, and then sat down heavily on a damp board amid some debris of construction work. He rested there for almost half an hour, his mind a shifting pattern of surface thoughts, chiefest among which were that he must obtain some money and get home before he became too sodden to find his way.

Then, glancing over toward the Biltmore, he saw a man standing directly under the overhead glow of the porte-coch�re lamps beside a woman in an ermine coat. As Anthony watched, the couple moved forward and signalled to a taxi. Anthony perceived by the infallible identification that lurks in the walk of a friend that it was Maury Noble.

He rose to his feet.

“Maury!” he shouted.

Maury looked in his direction, then turned back to the girl just as the taxi came up into place. With the chaotic idea of borrowing ten dollars, Anthony began to run as fast as he could across Madison Avenue and along Forty-third Street.

As he came up Maury was standing beside the yawning door of the taxicab. His companion turned and looked curiously at Anthony.

“Hello, Maury!” he said, holding out his hand. “How are you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Their hands dropped and Anthony hesitated. Maury made no move to introduce him, but only stood there regarding him with an inscrutable feline silence.

“I wanted