The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald [sites to read books for free .txt] 📗

in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud⁠—proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.

She knew that in her breast she had never wanted children. The reality, the earthiness, the intolerable sentiment of childbearing, the menace to her beauty⁠—had appalled her. She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving itself. Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her own illusions, but her ironic soul whispered that motherhood was also the privilege of the female baboon. So her dreams were of ghostly children only⁠—the early, the perfect symbols of her early and perfect love for Anthony.

In the end then, her beauty was all that never failed her. She had never seen beauty like her own. What it meant ethically or aesthetically faded before the gorgeous concreteness of her pink-and-white feet, the clean perfectness of her body, and the baby mouth that was like the material symbol of a kiss.

She would be twenty-nine in February. As the long night waned she grew supremely conscious that she and beauty were going to make use of these next three months. At first she was not sure for what, but the problem resolved itself gradually into the old lure of the screen. She was in earnest now. No material want could have moved her as this fear moved her. No matter for Anthony, Anthony the poor in spirit, the weak and broken man with bloodshot eyes, for whom she still had moments of tenderness. No matter. She would be twenty-nine in February⁠—a hundred days, so many days; she would go to Bloeckman tomorrow.

With the decision came relief. It cheered her that in some manner the illusion of beauty could be sustained, or preserved perhaps in celluloid after the reality had vanished. Well⁠—tomorrow.

The next day she felt weak and ill. She tried to go out, and saved herself from collapse only by clinging to a mail box near the front door. The Martinique elevator boy helped her upstairs, and she waited on the bed for Anthony’s return without energy to unhook her brassiere.

For five days she was down with influenza, which, just as the month turned the corner into winter, ripened into double pneumonia. In the feverish perambulations of her mind she prowled through a house of bleak unlighted rooms hunting for her mother. All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

“Odi Profanum Vulgus”

One day in the midst of Gloria’s illness there occurred a curious incident that puzzled Miss McGovern, the trained nurse, for some time afterward. It was noon, but the room in which the patient lay was dark and quiet. Miss McGovern was standing near the bed mixing some medicine, when Mrs. Patch, who had apparently been sound asleep, sat up and began to speak vehemently:

“Millions of people,” she said, “swarming like rats, chattering like apes, smelling like all hell⁠ ⁠… monkeys! Or lice, I suppose. For one really exquisite palace⁠ ⁠… on Long Island, say⁠—or even in Greenwich⁠ ⁠… for one palace full of pictures from the Old World and exquisite things⁠—with avenues of trees and green lawns and a view of the blue sea, and lovely people about in slick dresses⁠ ⁠… I’d sacrifice a hundred thousand of them, a million of them.” She raised her hand feebly and snapped her fingers. “I care nothing for them⁠—understand me?”

The look she bent upon Miss McGovern at the conclusion of this speech was curiously elfin, curiously intent. Then she gave a short little laugh polished with scorn, and tumbling backward fell off again to sleep.

Miss McGovern was bewildered. She wondered what were the hundred thousand things that Mrs. Patch would sacrifice for her palace. Dollars, she supposed⁠—yet it had not sounded exactly like dollars.

The Movies

It was February, seven days before her birthday, and the great snow that had filled up the cross-streets as dirt fills the cracks in a floor had turned to slush and was being escorted to the gutters by the hoses of the street-cleaning department. The wind, none the less bitter for being casual, whipped in through the open windows of the living room bearing with it the dismal secrets of the areaway and clearing the Patch apartment of stale smoke in its cheerless circulation.

Gloria, wrapped in a warm kimona, came into the chilly room and taking up the telephone receiver called Joseph Bloeckman.

“Do you mean Mr. Joseph Black?” demanded the telephone girl at “Films Par Excellence.”

“Bloeckman, Joseph Bloeckman. B-l-o⁠—”

“Mr. Joseph Bloeckman has changed his name to Black. Do you want him?”

“Why⁠—yes.” She remembered nervously that she had once called him “Blockhead” to his face.

His office was reached by courtesy of two additional female voices; the last was a secretary who took her name. Only with the flow through the transmitter of his own familiar but faintly impersonal tone did she realize that it had been three years since they had met. And he had changed his name to Black.

“Can you see me?” she suggested lightly. “It’s on a business matter, really. I’m going into the movies at last⁠—if I can.”

“I’m awfully glad. I’ve always thought you’d like it.”

“Do you think you can get me a trial?” she demanded with the arrogance peculiar to all beautiful women, to all women who have ever at any time considered themselves beautiful.

He assured her that it was merely a question of when she wanted the trial. Any time? Well, he’d phone later in the day and let her know a convenient hour. The conversation closed with conventional padding on both sides. Then from three o’clock to five she sat close to the telephone⁠—with no result.

But next morning came a note that contented and excited her:

My dear Gloria:

Just by luck a matter came to my attention that I think will be just suited