Kabanata Kabanata 9 · No Matter!

Within another year Anthony and Gloria had become like players who had

lost their costumes, lacking the pride to continue on the note of

tragedy--so that when Mrs. and Miss Hulme of Kansas City cut them dead

in the Plaza one evening, it was only that Mrs. and Miss Hulme, like

most people, abominated mirrors of their atavistic selves.

Their new apartment, for which they paid eighty-five dollars a month,

was situated on Claremont Avenue, which is two blocks from the Hudson in

the dim hundreds. They had lived there a month when Muriel Kane came to

see them late one afternoon.

It was a reproachless twilight on the summer side of spring. Anthony lay

upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street toward

the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green

trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive.

Across the water were the Palisades, crowned by the ugly framework of

the amusement park--yet soon it would be dusk and those same iron

cobwebs would be a glory against the heavens, an enchanted palace set

over the smooth radiance of a tropical canal.

The streets near the apartment, Anthony had found, were streets where

children played--streets a little nicer than those he had been used to

pass on his way to Marietta, but of the same general sort, with an

occasional hand organ or hurdy-gurdy, and in the cool of the evening

many pairs of young girls walking down to the corner drug-store for ice

cream soda and dreaming unlimited dreams under the low heavens.

Dusk in the streets now, and children playing, shouting up incoherent

ecstatic words that faded out close to the open window--and Muriel, who

had come to find Gloria, chattering to him from an opaque gloom over

across the room.

"Light the lamp, why don't we?" she suggested. "It's getting _ghostly_

in here."

With a tired movement he arose and obeyed; the gray window-panes

vanished. He stretched himself. He was heavier now, his stomach was a

limp weight against his belt; his flesh had softened and expanded. He

was thirty-two and his mind was a bleak and disordered wreck.

"Have a little drink, Muriel?"

"Not me, thanks. I don't use it anymore. What're you doing these days,

Anthony?" she asked curiously.

"Well, I've been pretty busy with this lawsuit," he answered

indifferently. "It's gone to the Court of Appeals--ought to be settled

up one way or another by autumn. There's been some objection as to

whether the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over the matter."

Muriel made a clicking sound with her tongue and cocked her head on one

side.

"Well, you tell'em! I never heard of anything taking so long."

"Oh, they all do," he replied listlessly; "all will cases. They say it's

exceptional to have one settled under four or five years."

"Oh ..." Muriel daringly changed her tack, "why don't you go to work,

you la-azy!"

"At what?" he demanded abruptly.

"Why, at anything, I suppose. You're still a young man."

"If that's encouragement, I'm much obliged," he answered dryly--and then

with sudden weariness: "Does it bother you particularly that I don't

want to work?"

"It doesn't bother me--but, it does bother a lot of people who claim--"

"Oh, God!" he said brokenly, "it seems to me that for three years I've

heard nothing about myself but wild stories and virtuous admonitions.

I'm tired of it. If you don't want to see us, let us alone. I don't

bother my former friends. But I need no charity calls, and no criticism

disguised as good advice--" Then he added apologetically: "I'm

sorry--but really, Muriel, you mustn't talk like a lady slum-worker even

if you are visiting the lower middle classes." He turned his bloodshot

eyes on her reproachfully--eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue,

that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when he

was drunk.

"Why do you say such awful things?" she protested. You talk as if you

and Gloria were in the middle classes."

"Why pretend we're not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats

when they can't even keep up the appearances of it."

"Do you think a person has to have money to be aristocratic?"

Muriel ... the horrified democrat ...!

"Why, of course. Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits

which we call fine--courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of

thing--can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't

have the warpings of ignorance and necessity."

Muriel bit her lower lip and waved her head from side to side.

"Well, all _I_ say is that if a person comes from a good family they're

always nice people. That's the trouble with you and Gloria. You think

that just because things aren't going your way right now all your old

friends are trying to avoid you. You're too sensitive--"

"As a matter of fact," said Anthony, "you know nothing at all about it.

With me it's simply a matter of pride, and for once Gloria's reasonable

enough to agree that we oughtn't go where we're not wanted. And people

don't want us. We're too much the ideal bad examples."

"Nonsense! You can't park your pessimism in my little sun parlor. I

think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work."

"Here I am, thirty-two. Suppose I did start in at some idiotic business.

Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week--with luck.

That's _if_ I could get a job at all; there's an awful lot of

unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I'd be any

happier? Do you think that if I don't get this money of my grandfather's

life will be _endurable?_"

Muriel smiled complacently.

"Well," she said, "that may be clever but it isn't common sense."

A few minutes later Gloria came in seeming to bring with her into the

room some dark color, indeterminate and rare. In a taciturn way she was

happy to see Muriel. She greeted Anthony with a casual "Hi!"

"I've been talking philosophy with your husband," cried the

irrepressible Miss Kane.

"We took up some fundamental concepts," said Anthony, a faint smile

disturbing his pale cheeks, paler still under two days' growth of beard.

Oblivious to his irony Muriel rehashed her contention. When she had

done, Gloria said quietly:

"Anthony's right. It's no fun to go around when you have the sense that

people are looking at you in a certain way."

He broke in plaintively:

"Don't you think that when even Maury Noble, who was my best friend,

won't come to see us it's high time to stop calling people up?" Tears

were standing in his eyes.

"That was your fault about Maury Noble," said Gloria coolly.

"It wasn't."

"It most certainly was."

Muriel intervened quickly:

"I met a girl who knew Maury, the other day, and she says he doesn't

drink any more. He's getting pretty cagey."

"Doesn't?"

"Practically not at all. He's making _piles_ of money. He's sort of

changed since the war. He's going to marry a girl in Philadelphia who

has millions, Ceci Larrabee--anyhow, that's what Town Tattle said."

"He's thirty-three," said Anthony, thinking aloud. But it's odd to

imagine his getting married. I used to think he was so brilliant."

"He was," murmured Gloria, "in a way."

"But brilliant people don't settle down in business--or do they? Or what

do they do? Or what becomes of everybody you used to know and have so

much in common with?"

"You drift apart," suggested Muriel with the appropriate dreamy look.

"They change," said Gloria. "All the qualities that they don't use in

their daily lives get cobwebbed up."

"The last thing he said to me," recollected Anthony, "was that he was

going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for."

Muriel caught at this quickly.

"That's what _you_ ought to do," she exclaimed triumphantly. "Of course

I shouldn't think anybody would want to work for nothing. But it'd give

you something to do. What do you do with yourselves, anyway? Nobody ever

sees you at Montmartre or--or anywhere. Are you economizing?"

Gloria laughed scornfully, glancing at Anthony from the corners of her

eyes.

"Well," he demanded, "what are you laughing at?"

"You know what I'm laughing at," she answered coldly.

"At that case of whiskey?"

"Yes"--she turned to Muriel--"he paid seventy-five dollars for a case of

whiskey yesterday."

"What if I did? It's cheaper that way than if you get it by the bottle.

You needn't pretend that you won't drink any of it."

"At least I don't drink in the daytime."

"That's a fine distinction!" he cried, springing to his feet in a weak

rage. "What's more, I'll be damned if you can hurl that at me every

few minutes!"

"It's true."

"It is _not!_ And I'm getting sick of this eternal business of

criticising me before visitors!" He had worked himself up to such a

state that his arms and shoulders were visibly trembling. "You'd think

everything was my fault. You'd think you hadn't encouraged me to spend

money--and spent a lot more on yourself than I ever did by a long shot."

Now Gloria rose to her feet.

"I _won't_ let you talk to me that way!"

"All right, then; by Heaven, you don't have to!"

In a sort of rush he left the room. The two women heard his steps in the

hall and then the front door banged. Gloria sank back into her chair.

Her face was lovely in the lamplight, composed, inscrutable.

"Oh--!" cried Muriel in distress. "Oh, what _is_ the matter?"

"Nothing particularly. He's just drunk."

"Drunk? Why, he's perfectly sober. He talked----"

Gloria shook her head.

"Oh, no, he doesn't show it any more unless he can hardly stand up, and

he talks all right until he gets excited. He talks much better than he

does when he's sober. But he's been sitting here all day

drinking--except for the time it took him to walk to the corner for a

newspaper."

"Oh, how terrible!" Muriel was sincerely moved. Her eyes filled with

tears. "Has this happened much?"

"Drinking, you mean?"

"No, this--leaving you?"

"Oh, yes. Frequently. He'll come in about midnight--and weep and ask me

to forgive him."

"And do you?"

"I don't know. We just go on."

The two women sat there in the lamplight and looked at each other, each

in a different way helpless before this thing. Gloria was still pretty,

as pretty as she would ever be again--her cheeks were flushed and she

was wearing a new dress that she had bought--imprudently--for fifty

dollars. She had hoped she could persuade Anthony to take her out

to-night, to a restaurant or even to one of the great, gorgeous moving

picture palaces where there would be a few people to look at her, at

whom she could bear to look in turn. She wanted this because she knew

her cheeks were flushed and because her dress was new and becomingly

fragile. Only very occasionally, now, did they receive any invitations.

But she did not tell these things to Muriel.

"Gloria, dear, I wish we could have dinner together, but I promised a

man and it's seven-thirty already. I've got to _tear_."

"Oh, I couldn't, anyway. In the first place I've been ill all day. I

couldn't eat a thing."

After she had walked with Muriel to the door, Gloria came back into the

room, turned out the lamp, and leaning her elbows on the window sill

looked out at Palisades Park, where the brilliant revolving circle of

the Ferris wheel was like a trembling mirror catching the yellow

reflection of the moon. The street was quiet now; the children had gone

in--over the way she could see a family at dinner. Pointlessly,

ridiculously, they rose and walked about the table; seen thus, all that

they did appeared incongruous--it was as though they were being jiggled

carelessly and to no purpose by invisible overhead wires.

She looked at her watch--it was eight o'clock. She had been pleased for

a part of the day--the early afternoon--in walking along that Broadway

of Harlem, One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, with her nostrils alert

to many odors, and her mind excited by the extraordinary beauty of some

Italian children. It affected her curiously--as Fifth Avenue had

affected her once, in the days when, with the placid confidence of

beauty, she had known that it was all hers, every shop and all it held,

every adult toy glittering in a window, all hers for the asking. Here on

One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street there were Salvation Army bands and

spectrum-shawled old ladies on door-steps and sugary, sticky candy in

the grimy hands of shiny-haired children--and the late sun striking down

on the sides of the tall tenements. All very rich and racy and savory,

like a dish by a provident French chef that one could not help enjoying,

even though one knew that the ingredients were probably left-overs....

Gloria shuddered suddenly as a river siren came moaning over the dusky

roofs, and leaning back in till the ghostly curtains fell from her

shoulder, she turned on the electric lamp. It was growing late. She knew

there was some change in her purse, and she considered whether she would

go down and have some coffee and rolls where the liberated subway made a

roaring cave of Manhattan Street or eat the devilled ham and bread in

the kitchen. Her purse decided for her. It contained a nickel and

two pennies.

After an hour the silence of the room had grown unbearable, and she

found that her eyes were wandering from her magazine to the ceiling,

toward which she stared without thought. Suddenly she stood up,

hesitated for a moment, biting at her finger--then she went to the

pantry, took down a bottle of whiskey from the shelf and poured herself

a drink. She filled up the glass with ginger ale, and returning to her

chair finished an article in the magazine. It concerned the last

revolutionary widow, who, when a young girl, had married an ancient

veteran of the Continental Army and who had died in 1906. It seemed

strange and oddly romantic to Gloria that she and this woman had been

contemporaries.

She turned a page and learned that a candidate for Congress was being

accused of atheism by an opponent. Gloria's surprise vanished when she

found that the charges were false. The candidate had merely denied the

miracle of the loaves and fishes. He admitted, under pressure, that he

gave full credence to the stroll upon the water.

Finishing her first drink, Gloria got herself a second. After slipping

on a negligée and making herself comfortable on the lounge, she became

conscious that she was miserable and that the tears were rolling down

her cheeks. She wondered if they were tears of self-pity, and tried

resolutely not to cry, but this existence without hope, without

happiness, oppressed her, and she kept shaking her head from side to

side, her mouth drawn down tremulously in the corners, as though she

were denying an assertion made by some one, somewhere. She did not know

that this gesture of hers was years older than history, that, for a

hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered

that gesture, of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more

profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and

before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent. It is a

truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never

answers--this force intangible as air, more definite than death.

RICHARD CARAMEL

Early in the summer Anthony resigned from his last club, the Amsterdam.

He had come to visit it hardly twice a year, and the dues were a

recurrent burden. He had joined it on his return from Italy because it

had been his grandfather's club and his father's, and because it was a

club that, given the opportunity, one indisputably joined--but as a

matter of fact he had preferred the Harvard Club, largely because of

Dick and Maury. However, with the decline of his fortunes, it had seemed

an increasingly desirable bauble to cling to.... It was relinquished at

the last, with some regret....

His companions numbered now a curious dozen. Several of them he had met

in a place called "Sammy's," on Forty-third Street, where, if one

knocked on the door and were favorably passed on from behind a grating,

one could sit around a great round table drinking fairly good whiskey.

It was here that he encountered a man named Parker Allison, who had been

exactly the wrong sort of rounder at Harvard, and who was running

through a large "yeast" fortune as rapidly as possible. Parker Allison's

notion of distinction consisted in driving a noisy red-and-yellow

racing-car up Broadway with two glittering, hard-eyed girls beside him.

He was the sort who dined with two girls rather than with one--his

imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialogue.

Besides Allison there was Pete Lytell, who wore a gray derby on the side

of his head. He always had money and he was customarily cheerful, so

Anthony held aimless, long-winded conversation with him through many

afternoons of the summer and fall. Lytell, he found, not only talked but

reasoned in phrases. His philosophy was a series of them, assimilated

here and there through an active, thoughtless life. He had phrases about

Socialism--the immemorial ones; he had phrases pertaining to the

existence of a personal deity--something about one time when he had been

in a railroad accident; and he had phrases about the Irish problem, the

sort of woman he respected, and the futility of prohibition. The only

time his conversation ever rose superior to these muddled clauses, with

which he interpreted the most rococo happenings in a life that had been

more than usually eventful, was when he got down to the detailed

discussion of his most animal existence: he knew, to a subtlety, the

foods, the liquor, and the women that he preferred.

He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of

civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city

street--and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero

of a thousand romances of life and art--and he was a virtual moron,

performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely

astounding epics over a span of threescore years.

With such men as these two Anthony Patch drank and discussed and drank

and argued. He liked them because they knew nothing about him, because

they lived in the obvious and had not the faintest conception of the

inevitable continuity of life. They sat not before a motion picture with

consecutive reels, but at a musty old-fashioned travelogue with all

values stark and hence all implications confused. Yet they themselves

were not confused, because there was nothing in them to be

confused--they changed phrases from month to month as they

changed neckties.

Anthony, the courteous, the subtle, the perspicacious, was drunk each

day--in Sammy's with these men, in the apartment over a book, some book

he knew, and, very rarely, with Gloria, who, in his eyes, had begun to

develop the unmistakable outlines of a quarrelsome and unreasonable

woman. She was not the Gloria of old, certainly--the Gloria who, had she

been sick, would have preferred to inflict misery upon every one around

her, rather than confess that she needed sympathy or assistance. She was

not above whining now; she was not above being sorry for herself. Each

night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new

unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and

freshness to her vanishing beauty. When Anthony was drunk he taunted her

about this. When he was sober he was polite to her, on occasions even

tender; he seemed to show for short hours a trace of that old quality of

understanding too well to blame--that quality which was the best of him

and had worked swiftly and ceaselessly toward his ruin.

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around

him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid

than despair, of incessant passage up or down, which in every metropolis

is most in evidence through the unstable middle class. Unable to live

with the rich he thought that his next choice would have been to live

with the very poor. Anything was better than this cup of perspiration

and tears.

The sense of the enormous panorama of life, never strong in Anthony, had

become dim almost to extinction. At long intervals now some incident,

some gesture of Gloria's, would take his fancy--but the gray veils had

come down in earnest upon him. As he grew older those things

faded--after that there was wine.

There was a kindliness about intoxication--there was that indescribable

gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded

evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing

Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building--its summit a peak of sheer

grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall

Street, the crass, the banal--again it was the triumph of gold, a

gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the money

for their wars....

... The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the

brief passage from darkness to darkness--the old illusion that truth and

beauty were in some way entwined.

As he stood in front of Delmonico's lighting a cigarette one night he

saw two hansoms drawn up close to the curb, waiting for a chance drunken

fare. The outmoded cabs were worn and dirty--the cracked patent leather

wrinkled like an old man's face, the cushions faded to a brownish

lavender; the very horses were ancient and weary, and so were the

white-haired men who sat aloft, cracking their whips with a grotesque

affectation of gallantry. A relic of vanished gaiety!

Anthony Patch walked away in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the

bitterness of such survivals. There was nothing, it seemed, that grew

stale so soon as pleasure.

On Forty-second Street one afternoon he met Richard Caramel for the

first time in many months, a prosperous, fattening Richard Caramel,

whose face was filling out to match the Bostonian brow.

"Just got in this week from the coast. Was going to call you up, but I

didn't know your new address."

"We've moved."

Richard Caramel noticed that Anthony was wearing a soiled shirt, that

his cuffs were slightly but perceptibly frayed, that his eyes were set

in half-moons the color of cigar smoke.

"So I gathered," he said, fixing his friend with his bright-yellow eye.

"But where and how is Gloria? My God, Anthony, I've been hearing the

dog-gonedest stories about you two even out in California--and when I

get back to New York I find you've sunk absolutely out of sight. Why

don't you pull yourself together?"

"Now, listen," chattered Anthony unsteadily, "I can't stand a long

lecture. We've lost money in a dozen ways, and naturally people have

talked--on account of the lawsuit, but the thing's coming to a final

decision this winter, surely--"

"You're talking so fast that I can't understand you," interrupted Dick

calmly.

"Well, I've said all I'm going to say," snapped Anthony. "Come and see

us if you like--or don't!"

With this he turned and started to walk off in the crowd, but Dick

overtook him immediately and grasped his arm.

"Say, Anthony, don't fly off the handle so easily! You know Gloria's my

cousin, and you're one of my oldest friends, so it's natural for me to

be interested when I hear that you're going to the dogs--and taking her

with you."

"I don't want to be preached to."

"Well, then, all right--How about coming up to my apartment and having a

drink? I've just got settled. I've bought three cases of Gordon gin from

a revenue officer."

As they walked along he continued in a burst of exasperation:

"And how about your grandfather's money--you going to get it?"

"Well," answered Anthony resentfully, "that old fool Haight seems

hopeful, especially because people are tired of reformers right now--you

know it might make a slight difference, for instance, if some judge

thought that Adam Patch made it harder for him to get liquor."

"You can't do without money," said Dick sententiously. "Have you tried

to write any--lately?"

Anthony shook his head silently.

"That's funny," said Dick. "I always thought that you and Maury would

write some day, and now he's grown to be a sort of tight-fisted

aristocrat, and you're--"

"I'm the bad example."

"I wonder why?"

"You probably think you know," suggested Anthony, with an effort at

concentration. "The failure and the success both believe in their hearts

that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because

he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man

tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure

tells _his_ son to profit by his father's mistakes."

"I don't agree with you," said the author of "A Shave-tail in France."

"I used to listen to you and Maury when we were young, and I used to be

impressed because you were so consistently cynical, but now--well, after

all, by God, which of us three has taken to the--to the intellectual

life? I don't want to sound vainglorious, but--it's me, and I've always

believed that moral values existed, and I always will."

"Well," objected Anthony, who was rather enjoying himself, "even

granting that, you know that in practice life never presents problems as

clear cut, does it?"

"It does to me. There's nothing I'd violate certain principles for."

"But how do you know when you're violating them? You have to guess at

things just like most people do. You have to apportion the values when

you look back. You finish up the portrait then--paint in the details

and shadows."

Dick shook his head with a lofty stubbornness. "Same old futile cynic,"

he said. "It's just a mode of being sorry for yourself. You don't do

anything--so nothing matters."

"Oh, I'm quite capable of self-pity," admitted Anthony, "nor am I

claiming that I'm getting as much fun out of life as you are."

"You say--at least you used to--that happiness is the only thing worth

while in life. Do you think you're any happier for being a pessimist?"

Anthony grunted savagely. His pleasure in the conversation began to

wane. He was nervous and craving for a drink.

"My golly!" he cried, "where do you live? I can't keep walking forever."

"Your endurance is all mental, eh?" returned Dick sharply. "Well, I live

right here."

He turned in at the apartment house on Forty-ninth Street, and a few

minutes later they were in a large new room with an open fireplace and

four walls lined with books. A colored butler served them gin rickeys,

and an hour vanished politely with the mellow shortening of their drinks

and the glow of a light mid-autumn fire.

"The arts are very old," said Anthony after a while. With a few glasses

the tension of his nerves relaxed and he found that he could

think again.

"Which art?"

"All of them. Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner

or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering

word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention

poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word

that's never been beautiful before. Beauty, as the sum of several

beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can't go any

further--except in the novel, perhaps."

Dick interrupted him impatiently:

"You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some

silly girl asks me if I've read 'This Side of Paradise.' Are our girls

really like that? If it's true to life, which I don't believe, the next

generation is going to the dogs. I'm sick of all this shoddy realism. I

think there's a place for the romanticist in literature."

Anthony tried to remember what he had read lately of Richard Caramel's.

There was "A Shave-tail in France," a novel called "The Land of Strong

Men," and several dozen short stories, which were even worse. It had

become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard

Caramel with a smile of scorn. "Mr." Richard Caramel, they called him.

His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He

was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies.

As the fashion in books shifted he was becoming almost a byword

of contempt.

While Anthony was thinking this, Dick had got to his feet and seemed to

be hesitating at an avowal.

"I've gathered quite a few books," he said suddenly.

"So I see."

"I've made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new.

I don't mean the usual Longfellow-Whittier thing--in fact, most of

it's modern."

He stepped to one of the walls and, seeing that it was expected of him,

Anthony arose and followed.

"Look!"

Under a printed tag _Americana_ he displayed six long rows of books,

beautifully bound and, obviously, carefully chosen.

"And here are the contemporary novelists."

Then Anthony saw the joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser

were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard

Caramel--"The Demon Lover," true enough ... but also seven others that

were execrably awful, without sincerity or grace.

Unwillingly Anthony glanced at Dick's face and caught a slight

uncertainty there.

"I've put my own books in, of course," said Richard Caramel hastily,

"though one or two of them are uneven--I'm afraid I wrote a little too

fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don't believe in false

modesty. Of course some of the critics haven't paid so much attention to

me since I've been established--but, after all, it's not the critics

that count. They're just sheep."

For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony

felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard

Caramel continued:

"My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of

America--because of my New York novel."

"Yes," Anthony managed to muster, "I suppose there's a good deal in what

you say."

He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He, knew that he would have

changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best

to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then--can a man

disparage his life-work so readily? ...

--And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great

hittings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary, unmatched

eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the

fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged

concentration--Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back

seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.

THE BEATING

As winter approached it seemed that a sort of madness seized upon

Anthony. He awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria could feel him

trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble

into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the

influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her

eyes, Gloria's soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out

all night, as he did several times, she not only failed to be sorry but

even felt a measure of relief. Next day he would be faintly repentant,

and would remark in a gruff, hang-dog fashion that he guessed he was

drinking a little too much.

For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair that had been in

his apartment, lost in a sort of stupor--even his interest in reading

his favorite books seemed to have departed, and though an incessant

bickering went on between husband and wife, the one subject upon which

they ever really conversed was the progress of the will case. What

Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, what she expected that

great gift of money to bring about, is difficult to imagine. She was

being bent by her environment into a grotesque similitude of a

housewife. She who until three years before had never made coffee,

prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked a great deal in the

afternoons, and in the evenings she read--books, magazines, anything she

found at hand. If now she wished for a child, even a child of the

Anthony who sought her bed blind drunk, she neither said so nor gave any

show or sign of interest in children. It is doubtful if she could have

made it clear to any one what it was she wanted, or indeed what there

was to want--a lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind some

impregnable inhibition born and coexistent with her beauty.

One afternoon when the snow was dirty again along Riverside Drive,

Gloria, who had been to the grocer's, entered the apartment to find

Anthony pacing the floor in a state of aggravated nervousness. The

feverish eyes he turned on her were traced with tiny pink lines that

reminded her of rivers on a map. For a moment she received the

impression that he was suddenly and definitely old.

"Have you any money?" he inquired of her precipitately.

"What? What do you mean?"

"Just what I said. Money! Money! Can't you speak English?"

She paid no attention but brushed by him and into the pantry to put the

bacon and eggs in the ice-box. When his drinking had been unusually

excessive he was invariably in a whining mood. This time he followed her

and, standing in the pantry door, persisted in his question.

"You heard what I said. Have you any money?"

She turned about from the ice-box and faced him.

"Why, Anthony, you must be crazy! You know I haven't any money--except a

dollar in change."

He executed an abrupt about-face and returned to the living room, where

he renewed his pacing. It was evident that he had something portentous

on his mind--he quite obviously wanted to be asked what was the matter.

Joining him a moment later she sat upon the long lounge and began taking

down her hair. It was no longer bobbed, and it had changed in the last

year from a rich gold dusted with red to an unresplendent light brown.

She had bought some shampoo soap and meant to wash it now; she had

considered putting a bottle of peroxide into the rinsing water.

"--Well?" she implied silently.

"That darn bank!" he quavered. "They've had my account for over ten

years--ten _years_. Well, it seems they've got some autocratic rule that

you have to keep over five hundred dollars there or they won't carry

you. They wrote me a letter a few months ago and told me I'd been

running too low. Once I gave out two bum checks--remember? that night in

Reisenweber's?--but I made them good the very next day. Well, I promised

old Halloran--he's the manager, the greedy Mick--that I'd watch out. And

I thought I was going all right; I kept up the stubs in my check-book

pretty regular. Well, I went in there to-day to cash a check, and

Halloran came up and 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-cochère 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 to see you--" began Anthony uncertainly. He did not feel that

he could ask for a loan with the girl not four feet away, so he broke

off and made a perceptible motion of his head as if to beckon Maury

to one side.

"I'm in rather a big hurry, Anthony."

"I know--but can you, can you--" Again he hesitated.

"I'll see you some other time," said Maury. "It's important."

"I'm sorry, Anthony."

Before Anthony could make up his mind to blurt out his request, Maury

had turned coolly to the girl, helped her into the car and, with a

polite "good evening," stepped in after her. As he nodded from the

window it seemed to Anthony that his expression had not changed by a

shade or a hair. Then with a fretful clatter the taxi moved off, and

Anthony was left standing there alone under the lights.

Anthony went on into the Biltmore, for no reason in particular except

that the entrance was at hand, and ascending the wide stair found a seat

in an alcove. He was furiously aware that he had been snubbed; he was as

hurt and angry as it was possible for him to be when in that condition.

Nevertheless, he was stubbornly preoccupied with the necessity of

obtaining some money before he went home, and once again he told over on

his fingers the acquaintances he might conceivably call on in this

emergency. He thought, eventually, that he might approach Mr. Howland,

his broker, at his home.

After a long wait he found that Mr. Howland was out. He returned to the

operator, leaning over her desk and fingering his quarter as though

loath to leave unsatisfied.

"Call Mr. Bloeckman," he said suddenly. His own words surprised him. The

name had come from some crossing of two suggestions in his mind.

"What's the number, please?"

Scarcely conscious of what he did, Anthony looked up Joseph Bloeckman in

the telephone directory. He could find no such person, and was about to

close the book when it flashed into his mind that Gloria had mentioned a

change of name. It was the matter of a minute to find Joseph Black--then

he waited in the booth while central called the number.

"Hello-o. Mr. Bloeckman--I mean Mr. Black in?"

"No, he's out this evening. Is there any message?" The intonation was

cockney; it reminded him of the rich vocal deferences of Bounds.

"Where is he?"

"Why, ah, who is this, please, sir?"

"This Mr. Patch. Matter of vi'al importance." "Why, he's with a party at

the Boul' Mich', sir."

"Thanks."

Anthony got his five cents change and started for the Boul' Mich', a

popular dancing resort on Forty-fifth Street. It was nearly ten but the

streets were dark and sparsely peopled until the theatres should eject

their spawn an hour later. Anthony knew the Boul' Mich', for he had been

there with Gloria during the year before, and he remembered the

existence of a rule that patrons must be in evening dress. Well, he

would not go up-stairs--he would send a boy up for Bloeckman and wait for

him in the lower hall. For a moment he did not doubt that the whole

project was entirely natural and graceful. To his distorted imagination

Bloeckman had become simply one of his old friends.

The entrance hall of the Boul' Mich' was warm. There were high yellow

lights over a thick green carpet, from the centre of which a white

stairway rose to the dancing floor.

Anthony spoke to the hallboy:

"I want to see Mr. Bloeckman--Mr. Black," he said. "He's up-stairs--have

him paged."

The boy shook his head.

"'Sagainsa rules to have him paged. You know what table he's at?"

"No. But I've got see him."

"Wait an' I'll getcha waiter."

After a short interval a head waiter appeared, bearing a card on which

were charted the table reservations. He darted a cynical look at

Anthony--which, however, failed of its target. Together they bent over

the cardboard and found the table without difficulty--a party of eight,

Mr. Black's own.

"Tell him Mr. Patch. Very, very important."

Again he waited, leaning against the banister and listening to the

confused harmonies of "Jazz-mad" which came floating down the stairs. A

check-girl near him was singing:

_"Out in--the shimmee sanitarium

The jazz-mad nuts reside.

Out in--the shimmee sanitarium

I left my blushing bride.

She went and shook herself insane,

So let her shiver back again--"_

Then he saw Bloeckman descending the staircase, and took a step forward

to meet him and shake hands.

"You wanted to see me?" said the older man coolly.

"Yes," answered Anthony, nodding, "personal matter. Can you jus' step

over here?"

Regarding him narrowly Bloeckman followed Anthony to a half bend made by

the staircase where they were beyond observation or earshot of any one

entering or leaving the restaurant.

"Well?" he inquired.

"Wanted talk to you."

"What about?"

Anthony only laughed--a silly laugh; he intended it to sound casual.

"What do you want to talk to me about?" repeated Bloeckman.

"Wha's hurry, old man?" He tried to lay his hand in a friendly gesture

upon Bloeckman's shoulder, but the latter drew away slightly.

"How've been?"

"Very well, thanks.... See here, Mr. Patch, I've got a party up-stairs.

They'll think it's rude if I stay away too long. What was it you wanted

to see me about?"

For the second time that evening Anthony's mind made an abrupt jump, and

what he said was not at all what he had intended to say.

"Un'erstand you kep' my wife out of the movies."

"What?" Bloeckman's ruddy face darkened in parallel planes of shadows.

"You heard me."

"Look here, Mr. Patch," said Bloeckman, evenly and without changing his

expression, "you're drunk. You're disgustingly and insultingly drunk."

"Not too drunk talk to you," insisted Anthony with a leer. "Firs' place,

my wife wants nothin' whatever do with you. Never did. Un'erstand me?"

"Be quiet!" said the older man angrily. "I should think you'd respect

your wife enough not to bring her into the conversation under these

circumstances."

"Never you min' how I expect my wife. One thing--you leave her alone.

You go to hell!"

"See here--I think you're a little crazy!" exclaimed Bloeckman. He took

two paces forward as though to pass by, but Anthony stepped in his way.

"Not so fas', you Goddam Jew."

For a moment they stood regarding each other, Anthony swaying gently

from side to side, Bloeckman almost trembling with fury.

"Be careful!" he cried in a strained voice.

Anthony might have remembered then a certain look Bloeckman had given

him in the Biltmore Hotel years before. But he remembered nothing,

nothing----

"I'll say it again, you God----"

Then Bloeckman struck out, with all the strength in the arm of a

well-conditioned man of forty-five, struck out and caught Anthony

squarely in the mouth. Anthony cracked up against the staircase,

recovered himself and made a wild drunken swing at his opponent, but

Bloeckman, who took exercise every day and knew something of sparring,

blocked it with ease and struck him twice in the face with two swift

smashing jabs. Anthony gave a little grunt and toppled over onto the

green plush carpet, finding, as he fell, that his mouth was full of

blood and seemed oddly loose in front. He struggled to his feet, panting

and spitting, and then as he started toward Bloeckman, who stood a few

feet away, his fists clenched but not up, two waiters who had appeared

from nowhere seized his arms and held him, helpless. In back of them a

dozen people had miraculously gathered.

"I'll kill him," cried Anthony, pitching and straining from side to

side. "Let me kill----"

"Throw him out!" ordered Bloeckman excitedly, just as a small man with a

pockmarked face pushed his way hurriedly through the spectators.

"Any trouble, Mr. Black?"

"This bum tried to blackmail me!" said Bloeckman, and then, his voice

rising to a faintly shrill note of pride: "He got what was coming

to him!"

The little man turned to a waiter.

"Call a policeman!" he commanded.

"Oh, no," said Bloeckman quickly. "I can't be bothered. Just throw him

out in the street.... Ugh! What an outrage!" He turned and with

conscious dignity walked toward the wash-room just as six brawny hands

seized upon Anthony and dragged him toward the door. The "bum" was

propelled violently to the sidewalk, where he landed on his hands and

knees with a grotesque slapping sound and rolled over slowly onto

his side.

The shock stunned him. He lay there for a moment in acute distributed

pain. Then his discomfort became centralized in his stomach, and he

regained consciousness to discover that a large foot was prodding him.

"You've got to move on, y' bum! Move on!"

It was the bulky doorman speaking. A town car had stopped at the curb

and its occupants had disembarked--that is, two of the women were

standing on the dashboard, waiting in offended delicacy until this

obscene obstacle should be removed from their path.

"Move on! Or else I'll _throw_ y'on!"

"Here--I'll get him."

This was a new voice; Anthony imagined that it was somehow more

tolerant, better disposed than the first. Again arms were about him,

half lifting, half dragging him into a welcome shadow four doors up the

street and propping him against the stone front of a millinery shop.

"Much obliged," muttered Anthony feebly. Some one pushed his soft hat

down upon his head and he winced.

"Just sit still, buddy, and you'll feel better. Those guys sure give you

a bump."

"I'm going back and kill that dirty--" He tried to get to his feet but

collapsed backward against the wall.

"You can't do nothin' now," came the voice. "Get 'em some other time.

I'm tellin' you straight, ain't I? I'm helpin' you."

Anthony nodded.

"An' you better go home. You dropped a tooth to-night, buddy. You know

that?"

Anthony explored his mouth with his tongue, verifying the statement.

Then with an effort he raised his hand and located the gap.

"I'm agoin' to get you home, friend. Whereabouts do you live--"

"Oh, by God! By God!" interrupted Anthony, clenching his fists

passionately. "I'll show the dirty bunch. You help me show 'em and I'll

fix it with you. My grandfather's Adam Patch, of Tarrytown"--

"Who?"

"Adam Patch, by God!"

"You wanna go all the way to Tarrytown?"

"No."

"Well, you tell me where to go, friend, and I'll get a cab."

Anthony made out that his Samaritan was a short, broad-shouldered

individual, somewhat the worse for wear.

"Where d'you live, hey?"

Sodden and shaken as he was, Anthony felt that his address would be poor

collateral for his wild boast about his grandfather.

"Get me a cab," he commanded, feeling in his pockets.

A taxi drove up. Again Anthony essayed to rise, but his ankle swung

loose, as though it were in two sections. The Samaritan must needs help

him in--and climb in after him.

"See here, fella," said he, "you're soused and you're bunged up, and you

won't be able to get in your house 'less somebody carries you in, so I'm

going with you, and I know you'll make it all right with me. Where

d'you live?"

With some reluctance Anthony gave his address. Then, as the cab moved

off, he leaned his head against the man's shoulder and went into a

shadowy, painful torpor. When he awoke, the man had lifted him from the

cab in front of the apartment on Claremont Avenue and was trying to set

him on his feet.

"Can y' walk?"

"Yes--sort of. You better not come in with me." Again he felt helplessly

in his pockets. "Say," he continued, apologetically, swaying dangerously

on his feet, "I'm afraid I haven't got a cent."

"Huh?"

"I'm cleaned out."

"Sa-a-ay! Didn't I hear you promise you'd fix it with me? Who's goin' to

pay the taxi bill?" He turned to the driver for confirmation. "Didn't

you hear him say he'd fix it? All that about his grandfather?"

"Matter of fact," muttered Anthony imprudently, "it was you did all the

talking; however, if you come round, to-morrow--"

At this point the taxi-driver leaned from his cab and said ferociously:

"Ah, poke him one, the dirty cheap skate. If he wasn't a bum they

wouldn'ta throwed him out."

In answer to this suggestion the fist of the Samaritan shot out like a

battering-ram and sent Anthony crashing down against the stone steps of

the apartment-house, where he lay without movement, while the tall

buildings rocked to and fro above him....

After a long while he awoke and was conscious that it had grown much

colder. He tried to move himself but his muscles refused to function. He

was curiously anxious to know the time, but he reached for his watch,

only to find the pocket empty. Involuntarily his lips formed an

immemorial phrase:

"What a night!"

Strangely enough, he was almost sober. Without moving his head he looked

up to where the moon was anchored in mid-sky, shedding light down into

Claremont Avenue as into the bottom of a deep and uncharted abyss. There

was no sign or sound of life save for the continuous buzzing in his own

ears, but after a moment Anthony himself broke the silence with a

distinct and peculiar murmur. It was the sound that he had consistently

attempted to make back there in the Boul' Mich', when he had been face

to face with Bloeckman--the unmistakable sound of ironic laughter. And

on his torn and bleeding lips it was like a pitiful retching of

the soul.

Three weeks later the trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool

of legal red tape having unrolled over a period of four and a half

years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria and, on the other side,

Edward Shuttleworth and a platoon of beneficiaries testified and lied

and ill-behaved generally in varying degrees of greed and desperation.

Anthony awoke one morning in March realizing that the verdict was to be

given at four that afternoon, and at the thought he got up out of his

bed and began to dress. With his extreme nervousness there was mingled

an unjustified optimism as to the outcome. He believed that the decision

of the lower court would be reversed, if only because of the reaction,

due to excessive prohibition, that had recently set in against reforms

and reformers. He counted more on the personal attacks that they had

levelled at Shuttleworth than on the more sheerly legal aspects of the

proceedings.

Dressed, he poured himself a drink of whiskey and then went into

Gloria's room, where he found her already wide awake. She had been in

bed for a week, humoring herself, Anthony fancied, though the doctor had

said that she had best not be disturbed.

"Good morning," she murmured, without smiling. Her eyes seemed unusually

large and dark.

"How do you feel?" he asked grudgingly. "Better?"

"Yes."

"Much?"

"Yes."

"Do you feel well enough to go down to court with me this afternoon?"

She nodded.

"Yes. I want to. Dick said yesterday that if the weather was nice he was

coming up in his car and take me for a ride in Central Park--and look,

the room's all full of sunshine."

Anthony glanced mechanically out the window and then sat down upon the

bed.

"God, I'm nervous!" he exclaimed.

"Please don't sit there," she said quickly.

"Why not?"

"You smell of whiskey. I can't stand it."

He got up absent-mindedly and left the room. A little later she called

to him and he went out and brought her some potato salad and cold

chicken from the delicatessen.

At two o'clock Richard Caramel's car arrived at the door and, when he

phoned up, Anthony took Gloria down in the elevator and walked with her

to the curb.

She told her cousin that it was sweet of him to take her riding. "Don't

be simple," Dick replied disparagingly. "It's nothing."

But he did not mean that it was nothing and this was a curious thing.

Richard Caramel had forgiven many people for many offenses. But he had

never forgiven his cousin, Gloria Gilbert, for a statement she had made

just prior to her wedding, seven years before. She had said that she did

not intend to read his book.

Richard Caramel remembered this--he had remembered it well for seven

years.

"What time will I expect you back?" asked Anthony.

"We won't come back," she answered, "we'll meet you down there at four."

"All right," he muttered, "I'll meet you."

Up-stairs he found a letter waiting for him. It was a mimeographed

notice urging "the boys" in condescendingly colloquial language to pay

the dues of the American Legion. He threw it impatiently into the

waste-basket and sat down with his elbows on the window sill, looking

down blindly into the sunny street.

Italy--if the verdict was in their favor it meant Italy. The word had

become a sort of talisman to him, a land where the intolerable anxieties

of life would fall away like an old garment. They would go to the

watering-places first and among the bright and colorful crowds forget

the gray appendages of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk

again in the Piazza di Spanga at twilight, moving in that drifting

flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars.

The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly--when his purse hung

heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it--the romance of

blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after rain,

and of women, women who changed, dissolved, melted into other women and

receded from his life, but who were always beautiful and always young.

But it seemed to him that there should be a difference in his attitude.

All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had

been because of women. It was something that in different ways they did

to him, unconsciously, almost casually--perhaps finding him

tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced

their absolute sway.

Turning about from the window he faced his reflection in the mirror,

contemplating dejectedly the wan, pasty face, the eyes with their

crisscross of lines like shreds of dried blood, the stooped and flabby

figure whose very sag was a document in lethargy. He was thirty

three--he looked forty. Well, things would be different.

The door-bell rang abruptly and he started as though he had been dealt a

blow. Recovering himself, he went into the hall and opened the outer

door. It was Dot.

THE ENCOUNTER

He retreated before her into the living room, comprehending only a word

here and there in the slow flood of sentences that poured from her

steadily, one after the other, in a persistent monotone. She was

decently and shabbily dressed--a somehow pitiable little hat adorned

with pink and blue flowers covered and hid her dark hair. He gathered

from her words that several days before she had seen an item in the

paper concerning the lawsuit, and had obtained his address from the

clerk of the Appellate Division. She had called up the apartment and had

been told that Anthony was out by a woman to whom she had refused to

give her name.

In a living room he stood by the door regarding her with a sort of

stupefied horror as she rattled on.... His predominant sensation was

that all the civilization and convention around him was curiously

unreal.... She was in a milliner's shop on Sixth Avenue, she said. It

was a lonesome life. She had been sick for a long while after he left

for Camp Mills; her mother had come down and taken her home again to

Carolina.... She had come to New York with the idea of finding Anthony.

She was appallingly in earnest. Her violet eyes were red with tears; her

soft intonation was ragged with little gasping sobs.

That was all. She had never changed. She wanted him now, and if she

couldn't have him she must die....

"You'll have to get out," he said at length, speaking with tortuous

intensity. "Haven't I enough to worry me now without you coming here? My

_God_! You'll have to get _out!"_

Sobbing, she sat down in a chair.

"I love you," she cried; "I don't care what you say to me! I love you."

"I don't care!" he almost shrieked; "get out--oh, get out! Haven't you

done me harm enough? Haven't--you--done--_enough_?"

"Hit me!" she implored him--wildly, stupidly. "Oh, hit me, and I'll kiss

the hand you hit me with!"

His voice rose until it was pitched almost at a scream. "I'll kill you!"

he cried. "If you don't get out I'll kill you, I'll kill you!"

There was madness in his eyes now, but, unintimidated, Dot rose and took

a step toward him.

"Anthony! Anthony!--"

He made a little clicking sound with his teeth and drew back as though

to spring at her--then, changing his purpose, he looked wildly about him

on the floor and wall.

"I'll kill you!" he was muttering in short, broken gasps. "I'll _kill_

you!" He seemed to bite at the word as though to force it into

materialization. Alarmed at last she made no further movement forward,

but meeting his frantic eyes took a step back toward the door. Anthony

began to race here and there on his side of the room, still giving out

his single cursing cry. Then he found what he had been seeking--a stiff

oaken chair that stood beside the table. Uttering a harsh, broken shout,

he seized it, swung it above his head and let it go with all his raging

strength straight at the white, frightened face across the room ... then

a thick, impenetrable darkness came down upon him and blotted out

thought, rage, and madness together--with almost a tangible snapping

sound the face of the world changed before his eyes....

Gloria and Dick came in at five and called his name. There was no

answer--they went into the living room and found a chair with its back

smashed lying in the doorway, and they noticed that all about the room

there was a sort of disorder--the rugs had slid, the pictures and

bric-à-brac were upset upon the centre table. The air was sickly sweet

with cheap perfume.

They found Anthony sitting in a patch of sunshine on the floor of his

bedroom. Before him, open, were spread his three big stamp-books, and

when they entered he was running his hands through a great pile of

stamps that he had dumped from the back of one of them. Looking up and

seeing Dick and Gloria he put his head critically on one side and

motioned them back.

"Anthony!" cried Gloria tensely, "we've won! They reversed the

decision!"

"Don't come in," he murmured wanly, "you'll muss them. I'm sorting, and

I know you'll step in them. Everything always gets mussed."

"What are you doing?" demanded Dick in astonishment. "Going back to

childhood? Don't you realize you've won the suit? They've reversed the

decision of the lower courts. You're worth thirty millions!"

Anthony only looked at him reproachfully.

"Shut the door when you go out." He spoke like a pert child.

With a faint horror dawning in her eyes, Gloria gazed at him--

"Anthony!" she cried, "what is it? What's the matter? Why didn't you

come--why, what _is_ it?"

"See here," said Anthony softly, "you two get out--now, both of you. Or

else I'll tell my grandfather."

He held up a handful of stamps and let them come drifting down about him

like leaves, varicolored and bright, turning and fluttering gaudily upon

the sunny air: stamps of England and Ecuador, Venezuela and

Spain--Italy....

TOGETHER WITH THE SPARROWS

That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many

generations of sparrows doubtless records the subtlest verbal

inflections of the passengers of such ships as _The Berengaria_. And

doubtless it was listening when the young man in the plaid cap crossed

the deck quickly and spoke to the pretty girl in yellow.

"That's him," he said, pointing to a bundled figure seated in a wheel

chair near the rail. "That's Anthony Patch. First time he's been

on deck."

"Oh--that's him?"

"Yes. He's been a little crazy, they say, ever since he got his money,

four or five months ago. You see, the other fellow, Shuttleworth, the

religious fellow, the one that didn't get the money, he locked himself

up in a room in a hotel and shot himself--

"Oh, he did--"

"But I guess Anthony Patch don't care much. He got his thirty million.

And he's got his private physician along in case he doesn't feel just

right about it. Has _she_ been on deck?" he asked.

The pretty girl in yellow looked around cautiously.

"She was here a minute ago. She had on a Russian-sable coat that must

have cost a small fortune." She frowned and then added decisively: "I

can't stand her, you know. She seems sort of--sort of dyed and

_unclean_, if you know what I mean. Some people just have that look

about them whether they are or not."

"Sure, I know," agreed the man with the plaid cap. "She's not

bad-looking, though." He paused. "Wonder what he's thinking about--his

money, I guess, or maybe he's got remorse about that fellow

Shuttleworth."

"Probably...."

But the man in the plaid cap was quite wrong. Anthony Patch, sitting

near the rail and looking out at the sea, was not thinking of his money,

for he had seldom in his life been really preoccupied with material

vainglory, nor of Edward Shuttleworth, for it is best to look on the

sunny side of these things. No--he was concerned with a series of

reminiscences, much as a general might look back upon a successful

campaign and analyze his victories. He was thinking of the hardships,

the insufferable tribulations he had gone through. They had tried to

penalize him for the mistakes of his youth. He had been exposed to

ruthless misery, his very craving for romance had been punished, his

friends had deserted him--even Gloria had turned against him. He had

been alone, alone--facing it all.

Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to

submit to mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was

justified in his way of life--and he had stuck it out stanchly. Why, the

very friends who had been most unkind had come to respect him, to know

he had been right all along. Had not the Lacys and the Merediths and the

Cartwright-Smiths called on Gloria and him at the Ritz-Carlton just a

week before they sailed?

Great tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was tremulous as he

whispered to himself.

"I showed them," he was saying. "It was a hard fight, but I didn't give

up and I came through!"