บทที่ บทที่ 4 · The Radiant Hour

After a fortnight Anthony and Gloria began to indulge in "practical

discussions," as they called those sessions when under the guise of

severe realism they walked in an eternal moonlight.

"Not as much as I do you," the critic of belles-lettres would insist.

"If you really loved me you'd want every one to know it."

"I do," she protested; "I want to stand on the street corner like a

sandwich man, informing all the passers-by."

"Then tell me all the reasons why you're going to marry me in June."

"Well, because you're so clean. You're sort of blowy clean, like I am.

There's two sorts, you know. One's like Dick: he's clean like polished

pans. You and I are clean like streams and winds. I can tell whenever I

see a person whether he is clean, and if so, which kind of clean he is."

"We're twins."

Ecstatic thought!

"Mother says"--she hesitated uncertainly--"mother says that two souls

are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born."

Bilphism gained its easiest convert.... After a while he lifted up his

head and laughed soundlessly toward the ceiling. When his eyes came back

to her he saw that she was angry.

"Why did you laugh?" she cried, "you've done that twice before. There's

nothing funny about our relation to each other. I don't mind playing the

fool, and I don't mind having you do it, but I can't stand it when we're

together."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, don't say you're sorry! If you can't think of anything better than

that, just keep quiet!"

"I love you."

"I don't care."

There was a pause. Anthony was depressed.... At length Gloria murmured:

"I'm sorry I was mean."

"You weren't. I was the one."

Peace was restored--the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and

sharp and poignant. They were stars on this stage, each playing to an

audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality.

Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression--yet it was

probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than

Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she

was giving.

Telling Mrs. Gilbert had been an embarrassed matter. She sat stuffed

into a small chair and listened with an intense and very blinky sort of

concentration. She must have known it--for three weeks Gloria had seen

no one else--and she must have noticed that this time there was an

authentic difference in her daughter's attitude. She had been given

special deliveries to post; she had heeded, as all mothers seem to heed,

the hither end of telephone conversations, disguised but still

rather warm--

--Yet she had delicately professed surprise and declared herself

immensely pleased; she doubtless was; so were the geranium plants

blossoming in the window-boxes, and so were the cabbies when the lovers

sought the romantic privacy of hansom cabs--quaint device--and the staid

bill of fares on which they scribbled "you know I do," pushing it over

for the other to see.

But between kisses Anthony and this golden girl quarrelled incessantly.

"Now, Gloria," he would cry, "please let me explain!"

"Don't explain. Kiss me."

"I don't think that's right. If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss

it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget."

"But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we _can_ kiss

and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue."

At one time some gossamer difference attained such bulk that Anthony

arose and punched himself into his overcoat--for a moment it appeared

that the scene of the preceding February was to be repeated, but knowing

how deeply she was moved he retained his dignity with his pride, and in

a moment Gloria was sobbing in his arms, her lovely face miserable as a

frightened little girl's.

Meanwhile they kept unfolding to each other, unwillingly, by curious

reactions and evasions, by distastes and prejudices and unintended hints

of the past. The girl was proudly incapable of jealousy and, because he

was extremely jealous, this virtue piqued him. He told her recondite

incidents of his own life on purpose to arouse some spark of it, but to

no avail. She possessed him now--nor did she desire the dead years.

"Oh, Anthony," she would say, "always when I'm mean to you I'm sorry

afterward. I'd give my right hand to save you one little moment's pain."

And in that instant her eyes were brimming and she was not aware that

she was voicing an illusion. Yet Anthony knew that there were days when

they hurt each other purposely--taking almost a delight in the thrust.

Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving

desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent

and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or

anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous

reticences to some physical discomfort--of these she never complained

until they were over--or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or

to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which

she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a

mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of

unwavering pride.

"Why do you like Muriel?" he demanded one day.

"I don't very much."

"Then why do you go with her?"

"Just for some one to go with. They're no exertion, those girls. They

sort of believe everything I tell them--but I rather like Rachael. I

think she's cute--and so clean and slick, don't you? I used to have

other friends--in Kansas City and at school--casual, all of them, girls

who just flitted into my range and out of it for no more reason than

that boys took us places together. They didn't interest me after

environment stopped throwing us together. Now they're mostly married.

What does it matter--they were all just people."

"You like men better, don't you?"

"Oh, much better. I've got a man's mind."

"You've got a mind like mine. Not strongly gendered either way."

Later she told him about the beginnings of her friendship with

Bloeckman. One day in Delmonico's, Gloria and Rachael had come upon

Bloeckman and Mr. Gilbert having luncheon and curiosity had impelled her

to make it a party of four. She had liked him--rather. He was a relief

from younger men, satisfied as he was with so little. He humored her and

he laughed, whether he understood her or not. She met him several times,

despite the open disapproval of her parents, and within a month he had

asked her to marry him, tendering her everything from a villa in Italy

to a brilliant career on the screen. She had laughed in his face--and he

had laughed too.

But he had not given up. To the time of Anthony's arrival in the arena

he had been making steady progress. She treated him rather well--except

that she had called him always by an invidious nickname--perceiving,

meanwhile, that he was figuratively following along beside her as she

walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.

The night before the engagement was announced she told Bloeckman. It was

a heavy blow. She did not enlighten Anthony as to the details, but she

implied that he had not hesitated to argue with her. Anthony gathered

that the interview had terminated on a stormy note, with Gloria very

cool and unmoved lying in her corner of the sofa and Joseph Bloeckman of

"Films Par Excellence" pacing the carpet with eyes narrowed and head

bowed. Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to

show it. In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate

her, there at the last. But Anthony, understanding that Gloria's

indifference was her strongest appeal, judged how futile this must have

been. He wondered, often but quite casually, about Bloeckman--finally he

forgot him entirely.

HEYDAY

One afternoon they found front seats on the sunny roof of a bus and rode

for hours from the fading Square up along the sullied river, and then,

as the stray beams fled the westward streets, sailed down the turgid

Avenue, darkening with ominous bees from the department stores. The

traffic was clotted and gripped in a patternless jam; the busses were

packed four deep like platforms above the crowd as they waited for the

moan of the traffic whistle.

"Isn't it good!" cried Gloria. "Look!"

A miller's wagon, stark white with flour, driven by a powdery clown,

passed in front of them behind a white horse and his black team-mate.

"What a pity!" she complained; "they'd look so beautiful in the dusk, if

only both horses were white. I'm mighty happy just this minute, in

this city."

Anthony shook his head in disagreement.

"I think the city's a mountebank. Always struggling to approach the

tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it. Trying to be

romantically metropolitan."

"I don't. I think it is impressive."

"Momentarily. But it's really a transparent, artificial sort of

spectacle. It's got its press-agented stars and its flimsy, unenduring

stage settings and, I'll admit, the greatest army of supers ever

assembled--" He paused, laughed shortly, and added: "Technically

excellent, perhaps, but not convincing."

"I'll bet policemen think people are fools," said Gloria thoughtfully,

as she watched a large but cowardly lady being helped across the street.

"He always sees them frightened and inefficient and old--they are," she

added. And then: "We'd better get off. I told mother I'd have an early

supper and go to bed. She says I look tired, damn it."

"I wish we were married," he muttered soberly; "there'll be no good

night then and we can do just as we want."

"Won't it be good! I think we ought to travel a lot. I want to go to the

Mediterranean and Italy. And I'd like to go on the stage some time--say

for about a year."

"You bet. I'll write a play for you."

"Won't that be good! And I'll act in it. And then some time when we have

more money"--old Adam's death was always thus tactfully alluded

to--"we'll build a magnificent estate, won't we?"

"Oh, yes, with private swimming pools."

"Dozens of them. And private rivers. Oh, I wish it were now."

Odd coincidence--he had just been wishing that very thing. They plunged

like divers into the dark eddying crowd and emerging in the cool fifties

sauntered indolently homeward, infinitely romantic to each other ...

both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found

in a dream.

Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring

evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and

bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers

long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years. Always

the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them

apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and

return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they

would form words with their lips for each other's eyes--not knowing that

they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but

comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode

of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one

fairy night, May became June. Sixteen days now--fifteen--fourteen----

THREE DIGRESSIONS

Just before the engagement was announced Anthony had gone up to

Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who, a little more wizened and grizzly

as time played its ultimate chuckling tricks, greeted the news with

profound cynicism.

"Oh, you're going to get married, are you?" He said this with such a

dubious mildness and shook his head up and down so many times that

Anthony was not a little depressed. While he was unaware of his

grandfather's intentions he presumed that a large part of the money

would come to him. A good deal would go in charities, of course; a good

deal to carry on the business of reform.

"Are you going to work?"

"Why--" temporized Anthony, somewhat disconcerted. "I _am_ working. You

know--"

"Ah, I mean work," said Adam Patch dispassionately.

"I'm not quite sure yet what I'll do. I'm not exactly a beggar, grampa,"

he asserted with some spirit.

The old man considered this with eyes half closed. Then almost

apologetically he asked:

"How much do you save a year?"

"Nothing so far--"

"And so after just managing to get along on your money you've decided

that by some miracle two of you can get along on it."

"Gloria has some money of her own. Enough to buy clothes."

"How much?"

Without considering this question impertinent, Anthony answered it.

"About a hundred a month."

"That's altogether about seventy-five hundred a year." Then he added

softly: "It ought to be plenty. If you have any sense it ought to be

plenty. But the question is whether you have any or not."

"I suppose it is." It was shameful to be compelled to endure this pious

browbeating from the old man, and his next words were stiffened with

vanity. "I can manage very well. You seem convinced that I'm utterly

worthless. At any rate I came up here simply to tell you that I'm

getting married in June. Good-by, sir." With this he turned away and

headed for the door, unaware that in that instant his grandfather, for

the first time, rather liked him.

"Wait!" called Adam Patch, "I want to talk to you."

Anthony faced about.

"Well, sir?"

"Sit down. Stay all night."

Somewhat mollified, Anthony resumed his seat.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to see Gloria to-night."

"What's her name?"

"Gloria Gilbert."

"New York girl? Someone you know?"

"She's from the Middle West."

"What business her father in?"

"In a celluloid corporation or trust or something. They're from Kansas

City."

"You going to be married out there?"

"Why, no, sir. We thought we'd be married in New York--rather quietly."

"Like to have the wedding out here?"

Anthony hesitated. The suggestion made no appeal to him, but it was

certainly the part of wisdom to give the old man, if possible, a

proprietary interest in his married life. In addition Anthony was a

little touched.

"That's very kind of you, grampa, but wouldn't it be a lot of trouble?"

"Everything's a lot of trouble. Your father was married here--but in the

old house."

"Why--I thought he was married in Boston."

Adam Patch considered.

"That's true. He _was_ married in Boston."

Anthony felt a moment's embarrassment at having made the correction, and

he covered it up with words.

"Well, I'll speak to Gloria about it. Personally I'd like to, but of

course it's up to the Gilberts, you see."

His grandfather drew a long sigh, half closed his eyes, and sank back in

his chair.

"In a hurry?" he asked in a different tone.

"Not especially."

"I wonder," began Adam Patch, looking out with a mild, kindly glance at

the lilac bushes that rustled against the windows, "I wonder if you ever

think about the after-life."

"Why--sometimes."

"I think a great deal about the after-life." His eyes were dim but his

voice was confident and clear. "I was sitting here to-day thinking about

what's lying in wait for us, and somehow I began to remember an

afternoon nearly sixty-five years ago, when I was playing with my little

sister Annie, down where that summer-house is now." He pointed out into

the long flower-garden, his eyes trembling of tears, his voice shaking.

"I began thinking--and it seemed to me that _you_ ought to think a

little more about the after-life. You ought to be--steadier"--he paused

and seemed to grope about for the right word--"more industrious--why--"

Then his expression altered, his entire personality seemed to snap

together like a trap, and when he continued the softness had gone from

his voice.

"--Why, when I was just two years older than you," he rasped with a

cunning chuckle, "I sent three members of the firm of Wrenn and Hunt to

the poorhouse."

Anthony started with embarrassment.

"Well, good-by," added his grandfather suddenly, "you'll miss your

train."

Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old

man; not because his wealth could buy him "neither youth nor digestion"

but because he had asked Anthony to be married there, and because he had

forgotten something about his son's wedding that he should have

remembered.

Richard Caramel, who was one of the ushers, caused Anthony and Gloria

much distress in the last few weeks by continually stealing the rays of

their spot-light. "The Demon Lover" had been published in April, and it

interrupted the love affair as it may be said to have interrupted

everything its author came in contact with. It was a highly original,

rather overwritten piece of sustained description concerned with a Don

Juan of the New York slums. As Maury and Anthony had said before, as the

more hospitable critics were saying then, there was no writer in America

with such power to describe the atavistic and unsubtle reactions of that

section of society.

The book hesitated and then suddenly "went." Editions, small at first,

then larger, crowded each other week by week. A spokesman of the

Salvation Army denounced it as a cynical misrepresentation of all the

uplift taking place in the underworld. Clever press-agenting spread the

unfounded rumor that "Gypsy" Smith was beginning a libel suit because

one of the principal characters was a burlesque of himself. It was

barred from the public library of Burlington, Iowa, and a Mid-Western

columnist announced by innuendo that Richard Caramel was in a sanitarium

with delirium tremens.

The author, indeed, spent his days in a state of pleasant madness. The

book was in his conversation three-fourths of the time--he wanted to

know if one had heard "the latest"; he would go into a store and in a

loud voice order books to be charged to him, in order to catch a chance

morsel of recognition from clerk or customer. He knew to a town in what

sections of the country it was selling best; he knew exactly what he

cleared on each edition, and when he met any one who had not read it,

or, as it happened only too often, had not heard of it, he succumbed to

moody depression.

So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy,

that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore. To Dick's great

annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read "The Demon

Lover," and didn't intend to until every one stopped talking about it.

As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were

pouring in--first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the

bric-à-brac of forgotten family friends to the photographs of forgotten

poor relations.

Maury gave them an elaborate "drinking set," which included silver

goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers. The extortion from Dick

was more conventional--a tea set from Tiffany's. From Joseph Bloeckman

came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was

even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him

want to weep--indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in

the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to

convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent

by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with

remembrances of Gloria's Farmover days, and with rather pathetic

trophies from her former beaux, which last arrived with esoteric,

melancholy messages, written on cards tucked carefully inside, beginning

"I little thought when--" or "I'm sure I wish you all the happiness--"

or even "When you get this I shall be on my way to--"

The most munificent gift was simultaneously the most disappointing. It

was a concession of Adam Patch's--a check for five thousand dollars.

To most of the presents Anthony was cold. It seemed to him that they

would necessitate keeping a chart of the marital status of all their

acquaintances during the next half-century. But Gloria exulted in each

one, tearing at the tissue-paper and excelsior with the rapaciousness of

a dog digging for a bone, breathlessly seizing a ribbon or an edge of

metal and finally bringing to light the whole article and holding it up

critically, no emotion except rapt interest in her unsmiling face.

"Look, Anthony!"

"Darn nice, isn't it!"

No answer until an hour later when she would give him a careful account

of her precise reaction to the gift, whether it would have been improved

by being smaller or larger, whether she was surprised at getting it,

and, if so, just how much surprised.

Mrs. Gilbert arranged and rearranged a hypothetical house, distributing

the gifts among the different rooms, tabulating articles as "second-best

clock" or "silver to use _every_ day," and embarrassing Anthony and

Gloria by semi-facetious references to a room she called the nursery.

She was pleased by old Adam's gift and thereafter had it that he was a

very ancient soul, "as much as anything else." As Adam Patch never quite

decided whether she referred to the advancing senility of his mind or to

some private and psychic schema of her own, it cannot be said to have

pleased him. Indeed he always spoke of her to Anthony as "that old

woman, the mother," as though she were a character in a comedy he had

seen staged many times before. Concerning Gloria he was unable to make

up his mind. She attracted him but, as she herself told Anthony, he had

decided that she was frivolous and was afraid to approve of her.

Five days!--A dancing platform was being erected on the lawn at

Tarrytown. Four days!--A special train was chartered to convey the

guests to and from New York. Three days!----

THE DIARY

She was dressed in blue silk pajamas and standing by her bed with her

hand on the light to put the room in darkness, when she changed her mind

and opening a table drawer brought out a little black book--a

"Line-a-day" diary. This she had kept for seven years. Many of the

pencil entries were almost illegible and there were notes and references

to nights and afternoons long since forgotten, for it was not an

intimate diary, even though it began with the immemorial "I am going to

keep a diary for my children." Yet as she thumbed over the pages the

eyes of many men seemed to look out at her from their half-obliterated

names. With one she had gone to New Haven for the first time--in 1908,

when she was sixteen and padded shoulders were fashionable at Yale--she

had been flattered because "Touch down" Michaud had "rushed" her all

evening. She sighed, remembering the grown-up satin dress she had been

so proud of and the orchestra playing "Yama-yama, My Yama Man" and

"Jungle-Town." So long ago!--the names: Eltynge Reardon, Jim Parsons,

"Curly" McGregor, Kenneth Cowan, "Fish-eye" Fry (whom she had liked for

being so ugly), Carter Kirby--he had sent her a present; so had Tudor

Baird;--Marty Reffer, the first man she had been in love with for more

than a day, and Stuart Holcome, who had run away with her in his

automobile and tried to make her marry him by force. And Larry Fenwick,

whom she had always admired because he had told her one night that if

she wouldn't kiss him she could get out of his car and walk home. What

a list!

... And, after all, an obsolete list. She was in love now, set for the

eternal romance that was to be the synthesis of all romance, yet sad for

these men and these moonlights and for the "thrills" she had had--and

the kisses. The past--her past, oh, what a joy! She had been

exuberantly happy.

Turning over the pages her eyes rested idly on the scattered entries of

the past four months. She read the last few carefully.

"_April 1st_.--I know Bill Carstairs hates me because I was so

disagreeable, but I hate to be sentimentalized over sometimes. We drove

out to the Rockyear Country Club and the most wonderful moon kept

shining through the trees. My silver dress is getting tarnished. Funny

how one forgets the other nights at Rockyear--with Kenneth Cowan when I

loved him so!

"_April 3rd_.--After two hours of Schroeder who, they inform me, has

millions, I've decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one

out, particularly when the things concerned are men. There's nothing so

often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused. We talked about

'love'--how banal! With how many men have I talked about love?

"_April 11th_.--Patch actually called up to-day! and when he forswore me

about a month ago he fairly raged out the door. I'm gradually losing

faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.

"_April 20th_.--Spent the day with Anthony. Maybe I'll marry him some

time. I kind of like his ideas--he stimulates all the originality in me.

Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside

Drive. I liked him to-night: he's so considerate. He knew I didn't want

to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.

"_April 21st_.--Woke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called

and sounded sweet on the phone--so I broke a date for him. To-day I feel

I'd break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck.

He's coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and

starched----"

She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had

undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows. Yet it

seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities

burning in her heart.

The next entry occurred a few days later:

"_April 24th_.--I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often

'husbands' and I must marry a lover.

"There are four general types of husbands.

"(1) The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices

and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!

"(2) The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure.

This sort always considers every pretty woman 'shallow,' a sort of

peacock with arrested development.

"(3) Next comes the worshipper, the idolater of his wife and all that is

his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an

emotional actress for a wife. God! it must be an exertion to be thought

righteous.

"(4) And Anthony--a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to

realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get

married to Anthony.

"What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless

marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one.

Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting--it's

going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance,

and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to

posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's

unwanted children. What a fate--to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my

self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers.... Dear

dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little

creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden,

golden wings----

"Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the

wedded state.

"_June 7th_.--Moral question: Was it wrong to make Bloeckman love me?

Because I did really make him. He was almost sweetly sad to-night. How

opportune it was that my throat is swollen plunk together and tears were

easy to muster. But he's just the past--buried already in my

plentiful lavender.

"_June 8th_.--And to-day I've promised not to chew my mouth. Well, I

won't, I suppose--but if he'd only asked me not to eat!

"Blowing bubbles--that's what we're doing, Anthony and me. And we blew

such beautiful ones to-day, and they'll explode and then we'll blow more

and more, I guess--bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all

the soap and water is used up."

On this note the diary ended. Her eyes wandered up the page, over the

June 8th's of 1912, 1910, 1907. The earliest entry was scrawled in the

plump, bulbous hand of a sixteen-year-old girl--it was the name, Bob

Lamar, and a word she could not decipher. Then she knew what it

was--and, knowing, she found her eyes misty with tears. There in a

graying blur was the record of her first kiss, faded as its intimate

afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before. She seemed to remember

something one of them had said that day and yet she could not remember.

Her tears came faster, until she could scarcely see the page. She was

crying, she told herself, because she could remember only the rain and

the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass.

... After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew

three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS in

large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.

BREATH OF THE CAVE

Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his

lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting

on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night--a sheet was

enough for comfort--and through his wide-open windows came sound,

evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking

that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in

facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long

dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the

union of his soul with Gloria's, whose radiant fire and freshness was

the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that

evanescent and dissolving sound--something the city was tossing up and

calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the

Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or

on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this

sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was

playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it

up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be

beautiful as a story, promising happiness--and by that promise giving

it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.

It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft

crying of the night. It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred

feet from his rear window, the noise of a woman's laughter. It began

low, incessant and whining--some servant-maid with her fellow, he

thought--and then it grew in volume and became hysterical, until it

reminded him of a girl he had seen overcome with nervous laughter at a

vaudeville performance. Then it sank, receded, only to rise again and

include words--a coarse joke, some bit of obscure horseplay he could not

distinguish. It would break off for a moment and he would just catch the

low rumble of a man's voice, then begin again--interminably; at first

annoying, then strangely terrible. He shivered, and getting up out of

bed went to the window. It had reached a high point, tensed and stifled,

almost the quality of a scream--then it ceased and left behind it a

silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead. Anthony

stood by the window a moment longer before he returned to his bed. He

found himself upset and shaken. Try as he might to strangle his

reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter had grasped

at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his

old aversion and horror toward all the business of life. The room had

grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze,

miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the

corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly

reiterated female sound.

"Oh, my _God_!" he cried, drawing in his breath sharply.

Burying his face in the pillows he tried in vain to concentrate upon the

details of the next day.

MORNING

In the gray light he found that it was only five o'clock. He regretted

nervously that he had awakened so early--he would appear fagged at the

wedding. He envied Gloria who could hide her fatigue with careful

pigmentation.

In his bathroom he contemplated himself in the mirror and saw that he

was unusually white--half a dozen small imperfections stood out against

the morning pallor of his complexion, and overnight he had grown the

faint stubble of a beard--the general effect, he fancied, was

unprepossessing, haggard, half unwell.

On his dressing table were spread a number of articles which he told

over carefully with suddenly fumbling fingers--their tickets to

California, the book of traveller's checks, his watch, set to the half

minute, the key to his apartment, which he must not forget to give to

Maury, and, most important of all, the ring. It was of platinum set

around with small emeralds; Gloria had insisted on this; she had always

wanted an emerald wedding ring, she said.

It was the third present he had given her; first had come the engagement

ring, and then a little gold cigarette-case. He would be giving her many

things now--clothes and jewels and friends and excitement. It seemed

absurd that from now on he would pay for all her meals. It was going to

cost: he wondered if he had not underestimated for this trip, and if he

had not better cash a larger check. The question worried him.

Then the breathless impendency of the event swept his mind clear of

details. This was the day--unsought, unsuspected six months before, but

now breaking in yellow light through his east window, dancing along the

carpet as though the sun were smiling at some ancient and reiterated gag

of his own.

Anthony laughed in a nervous one-syllable snort.

"By God!" he muttered to himself, "I'm as good as married!"

THE USHERS

_Six young men in_ CROSS PATCH'S _library growing more and more cheery

under the influence of Mumm's Extra Dry, set surreptitiously in cold

pails by the bookcases._

THE FIRST YOUNG MAN: By golly! Believe me, in my next book I'm going to

do a wedding scene that'll knock 'em cold!

THE SECOND YOUNG MAN: Met a débutante th'other day said she thought your

book was powerful. As a rule young girls cry for this primitive business.

THE THIRD YOUNG MAN: Where's Anthony?

THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Walking up and down outside talking to himself.

SECOND YOUNG MAN: Lord! Did you see the minister? Most peculiar looking

teeth.

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Think they're natural. Funny thing people having gold

teeth.

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: They say they love 'em. My dentist told me once a woman

came to him and insisted on having two of her teeth covered with gold.

No reason at all. All right the way they were.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Hear you got out a book, Dicky. 'Gratulations!

DICK: (_Stiffly_) Thanks.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (_Innocently_) What is it? College stories?

DICK: (_More stiffly_) No. Not college stories.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Pity! Hasn't been a good book about Harvard for years.

DICK: (_Touchily_) Why don't you supply the lack?

THIRD YOUNG MAN: I think I saw a squad of guests turn the drive in a

Packard just now.

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Might open a couple more bottles on the strength of

that.

THIRD YOUNG MAN: It was the shock of my life when I heard the old man

was going to have a wet wedding. Rabid prohibitionist, you know.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (_Snapping his fingers excitedly_) By gad! I knew I'd

forgotten something. Kept thinking it was my vest.

DICK: What was it?

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! By gad!

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Here! Here! Why the tragedy?

SECOND YOUNG MAN: What'd you forget? The way home?

DICK: (_Maliciously_) He forgot the plot for his book of Harvard

stories.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: No, sir, I forgot the present, by George! I forgot to

buy old Anthony a present. I kept putting it off and putting it off, and

by gad I've forgotten it! What'll they think?

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: (_Facetiously_) That's probably what's been holding up

the wedding.

(THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN _looks nervously at his watch. Laughter._)

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! What an ass I am!

SECOND YOUNG MAN: What d'you make of the bridesmaid who thinks she's

Nora Bayes? Kept telling me she wished this was a ragtime wedding.

Name's Haines or Hampton.

DICK: (_Hurriedly spurring his imagination_) Kane, you mean, Muriel

Kane. She's a sort of debt of honor, I believe. Once saved Gloria from

drowning, or something of the sort.

SECOND YOUNG MAN: I didn't think she could stop that perpetual swaying

long enough to swim. Fill up my glass, will you? Old man and I had a

long talk about the weather just now.

MAURY: Who? Old Adam?

SECOND YOUNG MAN: No, the bride's father. He must be with a weather

bureau.

DICK: He's my uncle, Otis.

OTIS: Well, it's an honorable profession. (_Laughter._)

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Bride your cousin, isn't she?

DICK: Yes, Cable, she is.

CABLE: She certainly is a beauty. Not like you, Dicky. Bet she brings

old Anthony to terms.

MAURY: Why are all grooms given the title of "old"? I think marriage is

an error of youth.

DICK: Maury, the professional cynic.

MAURY: Why, you intellectual faker!

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Battle of the highbrows here, Otis. Pick up what crumbs

you can.

DICK: Faker yourself! What do _you_ know?

MAURY: What do _you_ know?

LICK: Ask me anything. Any branch of knowledge.

MAURY: All right. What's the fundamental principle of biology?

DICK: You don't know yourself.

MAURY: Don't hedge!

DICK: Well, natural selection?

MAURY: Wrong.

DICK: I give it up.

MAURY: Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony.

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Take your base!

MAURY: Ask you another. What's the influence of mice on the clover crop?

(_Laughter._)

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: What's the influence of rats on the Decalogue?

MAURY: Shut up, you saphead. There _is_ a connection.

DICK: What is it then?

MAURY: (_Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion_) Why, let's see. I

seem to have forgotten exactly. Something about the bees eating

the clover.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: And the clover eating the mice! Haw! Haw!

MAURY: (_Frowning_) Let me just think a minute.

DICK: (_Sitting up suddenly_) Listen!

(_A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room. The six young men

arise, feeling at their neckties._)

DICK: (_Weightily_) We'd better join the firing squad. They're going to

take the picture, I guess. No, that's afterward.

OTIS: Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: I wish to God I'd sent that present.

MAURY: If you'll give me another minute I'll think of that about the

mice.

OTIS: I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and----

(_They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and

the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans

from ADAM PATCH'S organ_.)

ANTHONY

There were five hundred eyes boring through the back of his cutaway and

the sun glinting on the clergyman's inappropriately bourgeois teeth.

With difficulty he restrained a laugh. Gloria was saying something in a

clear proud voice and he tried to think that the affair was irrevocable,

that every second was significant, that his life was being slashed into

two periods and that the face of the world was changing before him. He

tried to recapture that ecstatic sensation of ten weeks before. All

these emotions eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness

of that very morning--it was all one gigantic aftermath. And those gold

teeth! He wondered if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely

if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service....

But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious of a strong

reaction. The blood was moving in his veins now. A languorous and

pleasant content settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility

and possession. He was married.

GLORIA

So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from

the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly

back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding

in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a

sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately

important was happening--and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in

her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and

securely safe.

Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at

the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were

not married.

The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that

anything so beautiful as Gloria could be moral.

"CON AMORE"

That first half-year--the trip West, the long months' loiter along the

California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived

until late autumn made the country dreary--those days, those places, saw

the enraptured hours. The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way,

first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The

breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around

one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost

the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to

the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all

life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain....

The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth. Came a day when

Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony

discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with

Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world.

But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained.

Love lingered--by way of long conversations at night into those stark

hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams

become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses

they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same

absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.

It was, first of all, a time of discovery. The things they found in each

other were so diverse, so intermixed and, moreover, so sugared with love

as to seem at the time not so much discoveries as isolated phenomena--to

be allowed for, and to be forgotten. Anthony found that he was living

with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed

selfishness. Gloria knew within a month that her husband was an utter

coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination.

Her perception was intermittent, for this cowardice sprang out, became

almost obscenely evident, then faded and vanished as though it had been

only a creation of her own mind. Her reactions to it were not those

attributed to her sex--it roused her neither to disgust nor to a

premature feeling of motherhood. Herself almost completely without

physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of

what she felt to be his fear's redeeming feature, which was that though

he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain--when his

imagination was given play--he had yet a sort of dashing recklessness

that moved her on its brief occasions almost to admiration, and a pride

that usually steadied him when he thought he was observed.

The trait first showed itself in a dozen incidents of little more than

nervousness--his warning to a taxi-driver against fast driving, in

Chicago; his refusal to take her to a certain tough café she had always

wished to visit; these of course admitted the conventional

interpretation--that it was of her he had been thinking; nevertheless,

their culminative weight disturbed her. But something that occurred in a

San Francisco hotel, when they had been married a week, gave the matter

certainty.

It was after midnight and pitch dark in their room. Gloria was dozing

off and Anthony's even breathing beside her made her suppose that he was

asleep, when suddenly she saw him raise himself on his elbow and stare

at the window.

"What is it, dearest?" she murmured.

"Nothing"--he had relaxed to his pillow and turned toward her--"nothing,

my darling wife."

"Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your

'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable.... Come

into my arms," she added in a rush of tenderness; "I can sleep so well,

so well with you in my arms."

Coming into Gloria's arms had a quite definite meaning. It required that

he should slide one arm under her shoulder, lock both arms about her,

and arrange himself as nearly as possible as a sort of three-sided crib

for her luxurious ease. Anthony, who tossed, whose arms went tinglingly

to sleep after half an hour of that position, would wait until she was

asleep and roll her gently over to her side of the bed--then, left to

his own devices, he would curl himself into his usual knots.

Gloria, having attained sentimental comfort, retired into her doze. Five

minutes ticked away on Bloeckman's travelling clock; silence lay all

about the room, over the unfamiliar, impersonal furniture and the

half-oppressive ceiling that melted imperceptibly into invisible walls

on both sides. Then there was suddenly a rattling flutter at the window,

staccato and loud upon the hushed, pent air.

With a leap Anthony was out of the bed and standing tense beside it.

"Who's there?" he cried in an awful voice.

Gloria lay very still, wide awake now and engrossed not so much in the

rattling as in the rigid breathless figure whose voice had reached from

the bedside into that ominous dark.

The sound stopped; the room was quiet as before--then Anthony pouring

words in at the telephone.

"Some one just tried to get into the room! ...

"There's some one at the window!" His voice was emphatic now, faintly

terrified.

"All right! Hurry!" He hung up the receiver; stood motionless.

... There was a rush and commotion at the door, a knocking--Anthony went

to open it upon an excited night clerk with three bell-boys grouped

staring behind him. Between thumb and finger the night clerk held a wet

pen with the threat of a weapon; one of the bell-boys had seized a

telephone directory and was looking at it sheepishly. Simultaneously the

group was joined by the hastily summoned house-detective, and as one man

they surged into the room.

Lights sprang on with a click. Gathering a piece of sheet about her

Gloria dove away from sight, shutting her eyes to keep out the horror of

this unpremeditated visitation. There was no vestige of an idea in her

stricken sensibilities save that her Anthony was at grievous fault.

... The night clerk was speaking from the window, his tone half of the

servant, half of the teacher reproving a schoolboy.

"Nobody out there," he declared conclusively; "my golly, nobody _could_

be out there. This here's a sheer fall to the street of fifty feet. It

was the wind you heard, tugging at the blind."

"Oh."

Then she was sorry for him. She wanted only to comfort him and draw him

back tenderly into her arms, to tell them to go away because the thing

their presence connotated was odious. Yet she could not raise her head

for shame. She heard a broken sentence, apologies, conventions of the

employee and one unrestrained snicker from a bell-boy.

"I've been nervous as the devil all evening," Anthony was saying;

"somehow that noise just shook me--I was only about half awake."

"Sure, I understand," said the night clerk with comfortable tact; "been

that way myself."

The door closed; the lights snapped out; Anthony crossed the floor

quietly and crept into bed. Gloria, feigning to be heavy with sleep,

gave a quiet little sigh and slipped into his arms.

"What was it, dear?"

"Nothing," he answered, his voice still shaken; "I thought there was

somebody at the window, so I looked out, but I couldn't see any one and

the noise kept up, so I phoned down-stairs. Sorry if I disturbed you,

but I'm awfully darn nervous to-night."

Catching the lie, she gave an interior start--he had not gone to the

window, nor near the window. He had stood by the bed and then sent in

his call of fear.

"Oh," she said--and then: "I'm so sleepy."

For an hour they lay awake side by side, Gloria with her eyes shut so

tight that blue moons formed and revolved against backgrounds of deepest

mauve, Anthony staring blindly into the darkness overhead.

After many weeks it came gradually out into the light, to be laughed and

joked at. They made a tradition to fit over it--whenever that

overpowering terror of the night attacked Anthony, she would put her

arms about him and croon, soft as a song:

"I'll protect my Anthony. Oh, nobody's ever going to harm my Anthony!"

He would laugh as though it were a jest they played for their mutual

amusement, th her eyes shut so

tight that blue moons formed and revolved against backgrounds of deepest

mauve, Anthony staring blindly into the darkness overhead.

After many weeks it came gradually out into the light, to be laughed and

joked at. They made a tradition to fit over it--whenever that

overpowering terror of the night attacked Anthony, she would put her

arms about him and croon, soft as a song:

"I'll protect my Anthony. Oh, nobody's ever going to harm my Anthony!"

He would laugh as though it were a jest they played for their mutual

amusement, but to Gloria it was never quite a jest. It was, at first, a

keen disappointment; later, it was one of the times when she controlled

her temper.

The management of Gloria's temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of

hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost

the primary duty of Anthony's day. It must be done just so--by this much

silence, by that much pressure, by this much yielding, by that much

force. It was in her angers with their attendant cruelties that her

inordinate egotism chiefly displayed itself. Because she was brave,

because she was "spoiled," because of her outrageous and commendable

independence of judgment, and finally because of her arrogant

consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself,

Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean. This, of

course, with overtones of profound sentiment.

There was, for example, her stomach. She was used to certain dishes, and

she had a strong conviction that she could not possibly eat anything

else. There must be a lemonade and a tomato sandwich late in the

morning, then a light lunch with a stuffed tomato. Not only did she

require food from a selection of a dozen dishes, but in addition this

food must be prepared in just a certain way. One of the most annoying

half hours of the first fortnight occurred in Los Angeles, when an

unhappy waiter brought her a tomato stuffed with chicken salad instead

of celery.

"We always serve it that way, madame," he quavered to the gray eyes that

regarded him wrathfully.

Gloria made no answer, but when the waiter had turned discreetly away

she banged both fists upon the table until the china and silver rattled.

"Poor Gloria!" laughed Anthony unwittingly, "you can't get what you want

ever, can you?"

"I can't eat _stuff_!" she flared up.

"I'll call back the waiter."

"I don't want you to! He doesn't know anything, the darn _fool_!"

"Well, it isn't the hotel's fault. Either send it back, forget it, or be

a sport and eat it."

"Shut up!" she said succinctly.

"Why take it out on me?"

"Oh, I'm _not_," she wailed, "but I simply _can't_ eat it."

Anthony subsided helplessly.

"We'll go somewhere else," he suggested.

"I don't _want_ to go anywhere else. I'm tired of being trotted around

to a dozen cafés and not getting _one thing_ fit to eat."

"When did we go around to a dozen cafés?"

"You'd _have_ to in _this_ town," insisted Gloria with ready sophistry.

Anthony, bewildered, tried another tack.

"Why don't you try to eat it? It can't be as bad as you think."

"Just--because--I--don't--like--chicken!"

She picked up her fork and began poking contemptuously at the tomato,

and Anthony expected her to begin flinging the stuffings in all

directions. He was sure that she was approximately as angry as she had

ever been--for an instant he had detected a spark of hate directed as

much toward him as toward any one else--and Gloria angry was, for the

present, unapproachable.

Then, surprisingly, he saw that she had tentatively raised the fork to

her lips and tasted the chicken salad. Her frown had not abated and he

stared at her anxiously, making no comment and daring scarcely to

breathe. She tasted another forkful--in another moment she was eating.

With difficulty Anthony restrained a chuckle; when at length he spoke

his words had no possible connection with chicken salad.

This incident, with variations, ran like a lugubrious fugue through the

first year of marriage; always it left Anthony baffled, irritated, and

depressed. But another rough brushing of temperaments, a question of

laundry-bags, he found even more annoying as it ended inevitably in a

decisive defeat for him.

One afternoon in Coronado, where they made the longest stay of their

trip, more than three weeks, Gloria was arraying herself brilliantly for

tea. Anthony, who had been down-stairs listening to the latest rumor

bulletins of war in Europe, entered the room, kissed the back of her

powdered neck, and went to his dresser. After a great pulling out and

pushing in of drawers, evidently unsatisfactory, he turned around to the

Unfinished Masterpiece.

"Got any handkerchiefs, Gloria?" he asked. Gloria shook her golden head.

"Not a one. I'm using one of yours."

"The last one, I deduce." He laughed dryly.

"Is it?" She applied an emphatic though very delicate contour to her

lips.

"Isn't the laundry back?"

"I don't know."

Anthony hesitated--then, with sudden discernment, opened the closet

door. His suspicions were verified. On the hook provided hung the blue

bag furnished by the hotel. This was full of his clothes--he had put

them there himself. The floor beneath it was littered with an

astonishing mass of finery--lingerie, stockings, dresses, nightgowns,

and pajamas--most of it scarcely worn but all of it coming indubitably

under the general heading of Gloria's laundry.

He stood holding the closet door open.

"Why, Gloria!"

"What?"

The lip line was being erased and corrected according to some mysterious

perspective; not a finger trembled as she manipulated the lip-stick, not

a glance wavered in his direction. It was a triumph of concentration.

"Haven't you ever sent out the laundry?"

"Is it there?"

"It most certainly is."

"Well, I guess I haven't, then."

"Gloria," began Anthony, sitting down on the bed and trying to catch her

mirrored eyes, "you're a nice fellow, you are! I've sent it out every

time it's been sent since we left New York, and over a week ago you

promised you'd do it for a change. All you'd have to do would be to cram

your own junk into that bag and ring for the chambermaid."

"Oh, why fuss about the laundry?" exclaimed Gloria petulantly, "I'll

take care of it."

"I haven't fussed about it. I'd just as soon divide the bother with you,

but when we run out of handkerchiefs it's darn near time

something's done."

Anthony considered that he was being extraordinarily logical. But

Gloria, unimpressed, put away her cosmetics and casually offered him

her back.

"Hook me up," she suggested; "Anthony, dearest, I forgot all about it. I

meant to, honestly, and I will to-day. Don't be cross with your

sweetheart."

What could Anthony do then but draw her down upon his knee and kiss a

shade of color from her lips.

"But I don't mind," she murmured with a smile, radiant and magnanimous.

"You can kiss all the paint off my lips any time you want."

They went down to tea. They bought some handkerchiefs in a notion store

near by. All was forgotten.

But two days later Anthony looked in the closet and saw the bag still

hung limp upon its hook and that the gay and vivid pile on the floor had

increased surprisingly in height.

"Gloria!" he cried.

"Oh--" Her voice was full of real distress. Despairingly Anthony went to

the phone and called the chambermaid.

"It seems to me," he said impatiently, "that you expect me to be some

sort of French valet to you."

Gloria laughed, so infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile.

Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress

of the situation--with an air of injured righteousness she went

emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into

the bag. Anthony watched her--ashamed of himself.

"There!" she said, implying that her fingers had been worked to the bone

by a brutal taskmaster.

He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her an object-lesson and

that the matter was closed, but on the contrary it was merely beginning.

Laundry pile followed laundry pile--at long intervals; dearth of

handkerchief followed dearth of handkerchief--at short ones; not to

mention dearth of sock, of shirt, of everything. And Anthony found at

length that either he must send it out himself or go through the

increasingly unpleasant ordeal of a verbal battle with Gloria.

GLORIA AND GENERAL LEE

On their way East they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about

with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of

distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor--it seemed a

pasty-pale and self-conscious city. The second day they made an

ill-advised trip to General Lee's old home at Arlington.

The bus which bore them was crowded with hot, unprosperous people, and

Anthony, intimate to Gloria, felt a storm brewing. It broke at the Zoo,

where the party stopped for ten minutes. The Zoo, it seemed, smelt of

monkeys. Anthony laughed; Gloria called down the curse of Heaven upon

monkeys, including in her malevolence all the passengers of the bus and

their perspiring offspring who had hied themselves monkey-ward.

Eventually the bus moved on to Arlington. There it met other busses and

immediately a swarm of women and children were leaving a trail of

peanut-shells through the halls of General Lee and crowding at length

into the room where he was married. On the wall of this room a pleasing

sign announced in large red letters "Ladies' Toilet." At this final blow

Gloria broke down.

"I think it's perfectly terrible!" she said furiously, "the idea of

letting these people come here! And of encouraging them by making these

houses show-places."

"Well," objected Anthony, "if they weren't kept up they'd go to pieces."

"What if they did!" she exclaimed as they sought the wide pillared

porch. "Do you think they've left a breath of 1860 here? This has become

a thing of 1914."

"Don't you want to preserve old things?"

"But you _can't_, Anthony. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and

then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And

just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should

decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few

hearts like mine that react to them. That graveyard at Tarrytown, for

instance. The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that

too. Sleepy Hollow's gone; Washington Irving's dead and his books are

rotting in our estimation year by year--then let the graveyard rot too,

as it should, as all things should. Trying to preserve a century by

keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by

stimulants."

"So you think that just as a time goes to pieces its houses ought to go

too?"

"Of course! Would you value your Keats letter if the signature was

traced over to make it last longer? It's just because I love the past

that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth

and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of

women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it

into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. It hasn't any right to

look so prosperous. It might care enough for Lee to drop a brick now and

then. How many of these--these _animals_"--she waved her hand

around--"get anything from this, for all the histories and guide-books

and restorations in existence? How many of them who think that, at best,

appreciation is talking in undertones and walking on tiptoes would even

come here if it was any trouble? I want it to smell of magnolias instead

of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's

boots crunched on. There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no

poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books,

houses--bound for dust--mortal--"

A small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of

banana-peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the Potomac.

SENTIMENT

Simultaneously with the fall of Liège, Anthony and Gloria arrived in New

York. In retrospect the six weeks seemed miraculously happy. They had

found to a great extent, as most young couples find in some measure,

that they possessed in common many fixed ideas and curiosities and odd

quirks of mind; they were essentially companionable.

But it had been a struggle to keep many of their conversations on the

level of discussions. Arguments were fatal to Gloria's disposition. She

had all her life been associated either with her mental inferiors or

with men who, under the almost hostile intimidation of her beauty, had

not dared to contradict her; naturally, then, it irritated her when

Anthony emerged from the state in which her pronouncements were an

infallible and ultimate decision.

He failed to realize, at first, that this was the result partly of her

"female" education and partly of her beauty, and he was inclined to

include her with her entire sex as curiously and definitely limited. It

maddened him to find she had no sense of justice. But he discovered

that, when a subject did interest her, her brain tired less quickly than

his. What he chiefly missed in her mind was the pedantic teleology--the

sense of order and accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously

correlated piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while that such

a quality in her would have been incongruous.

Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost

uncanny pull at each other's hearts. The day they left the hotel in

Coronado she sat down on one of the beds while they were packing, and

began to weep bitterly.

"Dearest--" His arms were around her; he pulled her head down upon his

shoulder. "What is it, my own Gloria? Tell me."

"We're going away," she sobbed. "Oh, Anthony, it's sort of the first

place we've lived together. Our two little beds here--side by

side--they'll be always waiting for us, and we're never coming back to

'em any more."

She was tearing at his heart as she always could. Sentiment came over

him, rushed into his eyes.

"Gloria, why, we're going on to another room. And two other little beds.

We're going to be together all our lives."

Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.

"But it won't be--like our two beds--ever again. Everywhere we go and

move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't

ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--"

He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond any criticism of

her sentiment, a wise grasping of the minute, if only an indulgence of

her desire to cry--Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams,

extracting poignancy from the memorable things of life and youth.

Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station with the

tickets he found her asleep on one of the beds, her arm curled about a

black object which he could not at first identify. Coming closer he

found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new one, nor clean

one, but her face, tear-stained, was pressed against it, and he

understood her ancient and most honorable message. There was almost

ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him, shy but well aware of

her own nicety of imagination.

With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two things, it seemed

to Anthony that they lay somewhere near the heart of love.

THE GRAY HOUSE

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to

slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are

significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty

an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an

organ--and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of

humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only

youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with

light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show

the bare framework of a man-made thing--oh, that eternal hand!--a play,

most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches,

sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by

men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

And this time with Gloria and Anthony, this first year of marriage, and

the gray house caught them in that stage when the organ-grinder was

slowly undergoing his inevitable metamorphosis. She was twenty-three; he

was twenty-six.

The gray house was, at first, of sheerly pastoral intent. They lived

impatiently in Anthony's apartment for the first fortnight after the

return from California, in a stifled atmosphere of open trunks, too many

callers, and the eternal laundry-bags. They discussed with their friends

the stupendous problem of their future. Dick and Maury would sit with

them agreeing solemnly, almost thoughtfully, as Anthony ran through his

list of what they "ought" to do, and where they "ought" to live.

"I'd like to take Gloria abroad," he complained, "except for this damn

war--and next to that I'd sort of like to have a place in the country,

somewhere near New York, of course, where I could write--or whatever I

decide to do."

Gloria laughed.

"Isn't he cute?" she required of Maury. "'Whatever he decides to do!'

But what am _I_ going to do if he works? Maury, will you take me around

if Anthony works?"

"Anyway, I'm not going to work yet," said Anthony quickly.

It was vaguely understood between them that on some misty day he would

enter a sort of glorified diplomatic service and be envied by princes

and prime ministers for his beautiful wife.

"Well," said Gloria helplessly, "I'm sure I don't know. We talk and talk

and never get anywhere, and we ask all our friends and they just answer

the way we want 'em to. I wish somebody'd take care of us."

"Why don't you go out to--out to Greenwich or something?" suggested

Richard Caramel.

"I'd like that," said Gloria, brightening. "Do you think we could get a

house there?"

Dick shrugged his shoulders and Maury laughed.

"You two amuse me," he said. "Of all the unpractical people! As soon as

a place is mentioned you expect us to pull great piles of photographs

out of our pockets showing the different styles of architecture

available in bungalows."

"That's just what I don't want," wailed Gloria, "a hot stuffy bungalow,

with a lot of babies next door and their father cutting the grass in his

shirt sleeves--"

"For Heaven's sake, Gloria," interrupted Maury, "nobody wants to lock

you up in a bungalow. Who in God's name brought bungalows into the

conversation? But you'll never get a place anywhere unless you go out

and hunt for it."

"Go where? You say 'go out and hunt for it,' but where?"

With dignity Maury waved his hand paw-like about the room.

"Out anywhere. Out in the country. There're lots of places."

"Thanks."

"Look here!" Richard Caramel brought his yellow eye rakishly into play.

"The trouble with you two is that you're all disorganized. Do you know

anything about New York State? Shut up, Anthony, I'm talking to Gloria."

"Well," she admitted finally, "I've been to two or three house parties

in Portchester and around in Connecticut--but, of course, that isn't in

New York State, is it? And neither is Morristown," she finished with

drowsy irrelevance.

There was a shout of laughter.

"Oh, Lord!" cried Dick, "neither is Morristown!' No, and neither is

Santa Barbara, Gloria. Now listen. To begin with, unless you have a

fortune there's no use considering any place like Newport or

Southhampton or Tuxedo. They're out of the question."

They all agreed to this solemnly.

"And personally I hate New Jersey. Then, of course, there's upper New

York, above Tuxedo."

"Too cold," said Gloria briefly. "I was there once in an automobile."

"Well, it seems to me there're a lot of towns like Rye between New York

and Greenwich where you could buy a little gray house of some--"

Gloria leaped at the phrase triumphantly. For the first time since their

return East she knew what she wanted.

"Oh, _yes_!" she cried. "Oh, _yes_! that's it: a little gray house with

sort of white around and a whole lot of swamp maples just as brown and

gold as an October picture in a gallery. Where can we find one?"

"Unfortunately, I've mislaid my list of little gray houses with swamp

maples around them--but I'll try to find it. Meanwhile you take a piece

of paper and write down the names of seven possible towns. And every day

this week you take a trip to one of those towns."

"Oh, gosh!" protested Gloria, collapsing mentally, "why won't you do it

for us? I hate trains."

"Well, hire a car, and--"

Gloria yawned.

"I'm tired of discussing it. Seems to me all we do is talk about where

to live."

"My exquisite wife wearies of thought," remarked Anthony ironically.

"She must have a tomato sandwich to stimulate her jaded nerves. Let's go

out to tea."

As the unfortunate upshot of this conversation, they took Dick's advice

literally, and two days later went out to Rye, where they wandered

around with an irritated real estate agent, like bewildered babes in the

wood. They were shown houses at a hundred a month which closely adjoined

other houses at a hundred a month; they were shown isolated houses to

which they invariably took violent dislikes, though they submitted

weakly to the agent's desire that they "look at that stove--some stove!"

and to a great shaking of doorposts and tapping of walls, intended

evidently to show that the house would not immediately collapse, no

matter how convincingly it gave that impression. They gazed through

windows into interiors furnished either "commercially" with slab-like

chairs and unyielding settees, or "home-like" with the melancholy

bric-à-brac of other summers--crossed tennis rackets, fit-form couches,

and depressing Gibson girls. With a feeling of guilt they looked at a

few really nice houses, aloof, dignified, and cool--at three hundred a

month. They went away from Rye thanking the real estate agent very

much indeed.

On the crowded train back to New York the seat behind was occupied by a

super-respirating Latin whose last few meals had obviously been composed

entirely of garlic. They reached the apartment gratefully, almost

hysterically, and Gloria rushed for a hot bath in the reproachless

bathroom. So far as the question of a future abode was concerned both of

them were incapacitated for a week.

The matter eventually worked itself out with unhoped-for romance.

Anthony ran into the living room one afternoon fairly radiating

"the idea."

"I've got it," he was exclaiming as though he had just caught a mouse.

"We'll get a car."

"Gee whiz! Haven't we got troubles enough taking care of ourselves?"

"Give me a second to explain, can't you? just let's leave our stuff with

Dick and just pile a couple of suitcases in our car, the one we're going

to buy--we'll have to have one in the country anyway--and just start out

in the direction of New Haven. You see, as we get out of commuting

distance from New York, the rents'll get cheaper, and as soon as we find

a house we want we'll just settle down."

By his frequent and soothing interpolation of the word "just" he aroused

her lethargic enthusiasm. Strutting violently about the room, he

simulated a dynamic and irresistible efficiency. "We'll buy a car

to-morrow."

Life, limping after imagination's ten-league boots, saw them out of town

a week later in a cheap but sparkling new roadster, saw them through the

chaotic unintelligible Bronx, then over a wide murky district which

alternated cheerless blue-green wastes with suburbs of tremendous and

sordid activity. They left New York at eleven and it was well past a hot

and beatific noon when they moved rakishly through Pelham.

"These aren't towns," said Gloria scornfully, "these are just city

blocks plumped down coldly into waste acres. I imagine all the men here

have their mustaches stained from drinking their coffee too quickly in

the morning."

"And play pinochle on the commuting trains."

"What's pinochle?"

"Don't be so literal. How should I know? But it sounds as though they

ought to play it."

"I like it. It sounds as if it were something where you sort of cracked

your knuckles or something.... Let me drive."

Anthony looked at her suspiciously.

"You swear you're a good driver?"

"Since I was fourteen."

He stopped the car cautiously at the side of the road and they changed

seats. Then with a horrible grinding noise the car was put in gear,

Gloria adding an accompaniment of laughter which seemed to Anthony

disquieting and in the worst possible taste.

"Here we go!" she yelled. "Whoo-oop!"

Their heads snapped back like marionettes on a single wire as the car

leaped ahead and curved retchingly about a standing milk-wagon, whose

driver stood up on his seat and bellowed after them. In the immemorial

tradition of the road Anthony retorted with a few brief epigrams as to

the grossness of the milk-delivering profession. He cut his remarks

short, however, and turned to Gloria with the growing conviction that he

had made a grave mistake in relinquishing control and that Gloria was a

driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.

"Remember now!" he warned her nervously, "the man said we oughtn't to go

over twenty miles an hour for the first five thousand miles."

She nodded briefly, but evidently intending to accomplish the

prohibitive distance as quickly as possible, slightly increased her

speed. A moment later he made another attempt.

"See that sign? Do you want to get us pinched?"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake," cried Gloria in exasperation, "you _always_

exaggerate things so!"

"Well, I don't want to get arrested."

"Who's arresting you? You're so persistent--just like you were about my

cough medicine last night."

"It was for your own good."

"Ha! I might as well be living with mama."

"What a thing to say to me!"

A standing policeman swerved into view, was hastily passed.

"See him?" demanded Anthony.

"Oh, you drive me crazy! He didn't arrest us, did he?"

"When he does it'll be too late," countered Anthony brilliantly.

Her reply was scornful, almost injured.

"Why, this old thing won't _go_ over thirty-five."

"It isn't old."

"It is in spirit."

That afternoon the car joined the laundry-bags and Gloria's appetite as

one of the trinity of contention. He warned her of railroad tracks; he

pointed out approaching automobiles; finally he insisted on taking the

wheel and a furious, insulted Gloria sat silently beside him between the

towns of Larchmont and Rye.

But it was due to this furious silence of hers that the gray house

materialized from its abstraction, for just beyond Rye he surrendered

gloomily to it and re-relinquished the wheel. Mutely he beseeched her

and Gloria, instantly cheered, vowed to be more careful. But because a

discourteous street-car persisted callously in remaining upon its track

Gloria ducked down a side-street--and thereafter that afternoon was

never able to find her way back to the Post Road. The street they

finally mistook for it lost its Post-Road aspect when it had gone five

miles from Cos Cob. Its macadam became gravel, then dirt--moreover, it

narrowed and developed a border of maple trees, through which filtered

the weltering sun, making its endless experiments with shadow designs

upon the long grass.

"We're lost now," complained Anthony.

"Read that sign!"

"Marietta--Five Miles. What's Marietta?"

"Never heard of it, but let's go on. We can't turn here and there's

probably a detour back to the Post Road."

The way became scarred with deepening ruts and insidious shoulders of

stone. Three farmhouses faced them momentarily, slid by. A town sprang

up in a cluster of dull roofs around a white tall steeple.

Then Gloria, hesitating between two approaches, and making her choice

too late, drove over a fire-hydrant and ripped the transmission

violently from the car.

It was dark when the real-estate agent of Marietta showed them the gray

house. They came upon it just west of the village, where it rested

against a sky that was a warm blue cloak buttoned with tiny stars. The

gray house had been there when women who kept cats were probably

witches, when Paul Revere made false teeth in Boston preparatory to

arousing the great commercial people, when our ancestors were gloriously

deserting Washington in droves. Since those days the house had been

bolstered up in a feeble corner, considerably repartitioned and newly

plastered inside, amplified by a kitchen and added to by a

side-porch--but, save for where some jovial oaf had roofed the new

kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained.

"How did you happen to come to Marietta?" demanded the real-estate agent

in a tone that was first cousin to suspicion. He was showing them

through four spacious and airy bedrooms.

"We broke down," explained Gloria. "I drove over a fire-hydrant and we

had ourselves towed to the garage and then we saw your sign."

The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity. There was

something subtly immoral in doing anything without several months'

consideration.

They signed a lease that night and, in the agent's car, returned

jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too

broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a

country road-house. Half the night they lay awake planning the things

they were to do there. Anthony was going to work at an astounding pace

on his history and thus ingratiate himself with his cynical

grandfather.... When the car was repaired they would explore the country

and join the nearest "really nice" club, where Gloria would play golf

"or something" while Anthony wrote. This, of course, was Anthony's

idea--Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato

sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant still in a shadowy

hinterland. Between paragraphs Anthony would come and kiss her as she

lay indolently in the hammock.... The hammock! a host of new dreams in

tune to its imagined rhythm, while the wind stirred it and waves of sun

undulated over the shadows of blown wheat, or the dusty road freckled

and darkened with quiet summer rain....

And guests--here they had a long argument, both of them trying to be

extraordinarily mature and far-sighted. Anthony claimed that they would

need people at least every other week-end "as a sort of change." This

provoked an involved and extremely sentimental conversation as to

whether Anthony did not consider Gloria change enough. Though he assured

her that he did, she insisted upon doubting him.... Eventually the

conversation assumed its eternal monotone: "What then? Oh, what'll we

do then?"

"Well, we'll have a dog," suggested Anthony.

"I don't want one. I want a kitty." She went thoroughly and with great