The Beautiful and the Damned Part 17

"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 d.a.m.n 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 a.s.serted 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sionately, "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 a.s.sumed more nearly the proportions of a formal code. From her conversation it might be a.s.sumed that all her energy and vitality went into a violent affirmation of the negative principle "Never give a d.a.m.n."

"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. n.o.body'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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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."