It was a week before she could stay in the apartment with the
probability of remaining dry-eyed. There seemed little in the city that
was amusing. Muriel had been shifted to a hospital in New Jersey, from
which she took a metropolitan holiday only every other week, and with
this defection Gloria grew to realize how few were the friends she had
made in all these years of New York. The men she knew were in the army.
"Men she knew"?--she had conceded vaguely to herself that all the men
who had ever been in love with her were her friends. Each one of them
had at a certain considerable time professed to value her favor above
anything in life. But now--where were they? At least two were dead, half
a dozen or more were married, the rest scattered from France to the
Philippines. She wondered whether any of them thought of her, and how
often, and in what respect. Most of them must still picture the little
girl of seventeen or so, the adolescent siren of nine years before.
The girls, too, were gone far afield. She had never been popular in
school. She had been too beautiful, too lazy, not sufficiently conscious
of being a Farmover girl and a "Future Wife and Mother" in perpetual
capital letters. And girls who had never been kissed hinted, with
shocked expressions on their plain but not particularly wholesome faces,
that Gloria had. Then these girls had gone east or west or south,
married and become "people," prophesying, if they prophesied about
Gloria, that she would come to a bad end--not knowing that no endings
were bad, and that they, like her, were by no means the mistresses of
their destinies.
Gloria told over to herself the people who had visited them in the gray
house at Marietta. It had seemed at the time that they were always
having company--she had indulged in an unspoken conviction that each
guest was ever afterward slightly indebted to her. They owed her a sort
of moral ten dollars apiece, and should she ever be in need she might,
so to speak, borrow from them this visionary currency. But they were
gone, scattered like chaff, mysteriously and subtly vanished in essence
or in fact.
By Christmas, Gloria's conviction that she should join Anthony had
returned, no longer as a sudden emotion, but as a recurrent need. She
decided to write him word of her coming, but postponed the announcement
upon the advice of Mr. Haight, who expected almost weekly that the case
was coming up for trial.
One day, early in January, as she was walking on Fifth Avenue, bright
now with uniforms and hung with the flags of the virtuous nations, she
met Rachael Barnes, whom she had not seen for nearly a year. Even
Rachael, whom she had grown to dislike, was a relief from ennui, and
together they went to the Ritz for tea.
After a second cocktail they became enthusiastic. They liked each other.
They talked about their husbands, Rachael in that tone of public
vainglory, with private reservations, in which wives are wont to speak.
"Rodman's abroad in the Quartermaster Corps. He's a captain. He was
bound he would go, and he didn't think he could get into anything else."
"Anthony's in the Infantry." The words in their relation to the cocktail
gave Gloria a sort of glow. With each sip she approached a warm and
comforting patriotism.
"By the way," said Rachael half an hour later, as they were leaving,
"can't you come up to dinner to-morrow night? I'm having two awfully
sweet officers who are just going overseas. I think we ought to do all
we can to make it attractive for them."
Gloria accepted gladly. She took down the address--recognizing by its
number a fashionable apartment building on Park Avenue.
"It's been awfully good to have seen you, Rachael."
"It's been wonderful. I've wanted to."
With these three sentences a certain night in Marietta two summers
before, when Anthony and Rachael had been unnecessarily attentive to
each other, was forgiven--Gloria forgave Rachael, Rachael forgave
Gloria. Also it was forgiven that Rachael had been witness to the
greatest disaster in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Patch--
Compromising with events time moves along.
THE WILES OF CAPTAIN COLLINS
The two officers were captains of the popular craft, machine gunnery. At
dinner they referred to themselves with conscious boredom as members of
the "Suicide Club"--in those days every recondite branch of the service
referred to itself as the Suicide Club. One of the captains--Rachael's
captain, Gloria observed--was a tall horsy man of thirty with a pleasant
mustache and ugly teeth. The other, Captain Collins, was chubby,
pink-faced, and inclined to laugh with abandon every time he caught
Gloria's eye. He took an immediate fancy to her, and throughout dinner
showered her with inane compliments. With her second glass of champagne
Gloria decided that for the first time in months she was thoroughly
enjoying herself.
After dinner it was suggested that they all go somewhere and dance. The
two officers supplied themselves with bottles of liquor from Rachael's
sideboard--a law forbade service to the military--and so equipped they
went through innumerable fox trots in several glittering caravanseries
along Broadway, faithfully alternating partners--while Gloria became
more and more uproarious and more and more amusing to the pink-faced
captain, who seldom bothered to remove his genial smile at all.
At eleven o'clock to her great surprise she was in the minority for
staying out. The others wanted to return to Rachael's apartment--to get
some more liquor, they said. Gloria argued persistently that Captain
Collins's flask was half full--she had just seen it--then catching
Rachael's eye she received an unmistakable wink. She deduced,
confusedly, that her hostess wanted to get rid of the officers and
assented to being bundled into a taxicab outside.
Captain Wolf sat on the left with Rachael on his knees. Captain Collins
sat in the middle, and as he settled himself he slipped his arm about
Gloria's shoulder. It rested there lifelessly for a moment and then
tightened like a vise. He leaned over her.
"You're awfully pretty," he whispered.
"Thank you kindly, sir." She was neither pleased nor annoyed. Before
Anthony came so many arms had done likewise that it had become little
more than a gesture, sentimental but without significance.
Up in Rachael's long front room a low fire and two lamps shaded with
orange silk gave all the light, so that the corners were full of deep and
somnolent shadows. The hostess, moving about in a dark-figured gown of
loose chiffon, seemed to accentuate the already sensuous atmosphere. For
a while they were all four together, tasting the sandwiches that waited
on the tea table--then Gloria found herself alone with Captain Collins
on the fireside lounge; Rachael and Captain Wolf had withdrawn to the
other side of the room, where they were conversing in subdued voices.
"I wish you weren't married," said Collins, his face a ludicrous
travesty of "in all seriousness."
"Why?" She held out her glass to be filled with a high-ball.
"Don't drink any more," he urged her, frowning.
"Why not?"
"You'd be nicer--if you didn't."
Gloria caught suddenly the intended suggestion of the remark, the
atmosphere he was attempting to create. She wanted to laugh--yet she
realized that there was nothing to laugh at. She had been enjoying the
evening, and she had no desire to go home--at the same time it hurt her
pride to be flirted with on just that level.
"Pour me another drink," she insisted.
"Please--"
"Oh, don't be ridiculous!" she cried in exasperation.
"Very well." He yielded with ill grace.
Then his arm was about her again, and again she made no protest. But
when his pink cheek came close she leaned away.
"You're awfully sweet," he said with an aimless air.
She began to sing softly, wishing now that he would take down his arm.
Suddenly her eye fell on an intimate scene across the room--Rachael and
Captain Wolf were engrossed in a long kiss. Gloria shivered
slightly--she knew not why.... Pink face approached again.
"You shouldn't look at them," he whispered. Almost immediately his other
arm was around her... his breath was on her cheek. Again absurdity
triumphed over disgust, and her laugh was a weapon that needed no
edge of words.
"Oh, I thought you were a sport," he was saying.
"What's a sport?"
"Why, a person that likes to--to enjoy life."
"Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?"
They were interrupted as Rachael and Captain Wolf appeared suddenly
before them.
"It's late, Gloria," said Rachael--she was flushed and her hair was
dishevelled. "You'd better stay here all night."
For an instant Gloria thought the officers were being dismissed. Then
she understood, and, understanding, got to her feet as casually as
she was able.
Uncomprehendingly Rachael continued:
"You can have the room just off this one. I can lend you everything you
need."
Collins's eyes implored her like a dog's; Captain Wolf's arm had settled
familiarly around Rachael's waist; they were waiting.
But the lure of promiscuity, colorful, various, labyrinthine, and ever a
little odorous and stale, had no call or promise for Gloria. Had she so
desired she would have remained, without hesitation, without regret; as
it was she could face coolly the six hostile and offended eyes that
followed her out into the hall with forced politeness and hollow words.
"_He_ wasn't even sport, enough to try to take me home," she thought in
the taxi, and then with a quick surge of resentment: "How
_utterly_ common!"
GALLANTRY
In February she had an experience of quite a different sort. Tudor
Baird, an ancient flame, a young man whom at one time she had fully
intended to marry, came to New York by way of the Aviation Corps, and
called upon her. They went several times to the theatre, and within a
week, to her great enjoyment, he was as much in love with her as ever.
Quite deliberately she brought it about, realizing too late that she had
done a mischief. He reached the point of sitting with her in miserable
silence whenever they went out together.
A Scroll and Keys man at Yale, he possessed the correct reticences of a
"good egg," the correct notions of chivalry and _noblesse oblige_--and,
of course but unfortunately, the correct biases and the correct lack of
ideas--all those traits which Anthony had taught her to despise, but
which, nevertheless, she rather admired. Unlike the majority of his
type, she found that he was not a bore. He was handsome, witty in a
light way, and when she was with him she felt that because of some
quality he possessed--call it stupidity, loyalty, sentimentality, or
something not quite as definite as any of the three--he would have done
anything in his power to please her.
He told her this among other things, very correctly and with a ponderous
manliness that masked a real suffering. Loving him not at all she grew
sorry for him and kissed him sentimentally one night because he was so
charming, a relic of a vanishing generation which lived a priggish and
graceful illusion and was being replaced by less gallant fools.
Afterward she was glad she had kissed him, for next day when his plane
fell fifteen hundred feet at Mineola a piece of a gasolene engine
smashed through his heart.
GLORIA ALONE
When Mr. Haight told her that the trial would not take place until
autumn she decided that without telling Anthony she would go into the
movies. When he saw her successful, both histrionically and financially,
when he saw that she could have her will of Joseph Bloeckman, yielding
nothing in return, he would lose his silly prejudices. She lay awake
half one night planning her career and enjoying her successes in
anticipation, and the next morning she called up "Films Par Excellence."
Mr. Bloeckman was in Europe.
But the idea had gripped her so strongly this time that she decided to
go the rounds of the moving picture employment agencies. As so often had
been the case, her sense of smell worked against her good intentions.
The employment agency smelt as though it had been dead a very long time.
She waited five minutes inspecting her unprepossessing competitors--then
she walked briskly out into the farthest recesses of Central Park and
remained so long that she caught a cold. She was trying to air the
employment agency out of her walking suit.
In the spring she began to gather from Anthony's letters--not from any
one in particular but from their culminative effect--that he did not
want her to come South. Curiously repeated excuses that seemed to haunt
him by their very insufficiency occurred with Freudian regularity. He
set them down in each letter as though he feared he had forgotten them
the last time, as though it were desperately necessary to impress her
with them. And the dilutions of his letters with affectionate
diminutives began to be mechanical and unspontaneous--almost as though,
having completed the letter, he had looked it over and literally stuck
them in, like epigrams in an Oscar Wilde play. She jumped to the
solution, rejected it, was angry and depressed by turns--finally she
shut her mind to it proudly, and allowed an increasing coolness to creep
into her end of the correspondence.
Of late she had found a good deal to occupy her attention. Several
aviators whom she had met through Tudor Baird came into New York to see
her and two other ancient beaux turned up, stationed at Camp Dix. As
these men were ordered overseas they, so to speak, handed her down to
their friends. But after another rather disagreeable experience with a
potential Captain Collins she made it plain that when any one was
introduced to her he should be under no misapprehensions as to her
status and personal intentions.
When summer came she learned, like Anthony, to watch the officers'
casualty list, taking a sort of melancholy pleasure in hearing of the
death of some one with whom she had once danced a german and in
identifying by name the younger brothers of former suitors--thinking, as
the drive toward Paris progressed, that here at length went the world to
inevitable and well-merited destruction.
She was twenty-seven. Her birthday fled by scarcely noticed. Years
before it had frightened her when she became twenty, to some extent when
she reached twenty-six--but now she looked in the glass with calm
self-approval seeing the British freshness of her complexion and her
figure boyish and slim as of old.
She tried not to think of Anthony. It was as though she were writing to
a stranger. She told her friends that he had been made a corporal and
was annoyed when they were politely unimpressed. One night she wept
because she was sorry for him--had he been even slightly responsive she
would have gone to him without hesitation on the first train-whatever he
was doing he needed to be taken care of spiritually, and she felt that
now she would be able to do even that. Recently, without his continual
drain upon her moral strength she found herself wonderfully revived.
Before he left she had been inclined through sheer association to brood
on her wasted opportunities--now she returned to her normal state of
mind, strong, disdainful, existing each day for each day's worth. She
bought a doll and dressed it; one week she wept over "Ethan Frome"; the
next she revelled in some novels of Galsworthy's, whom she liked for his
power of recreating, by spring in darkness, that illusion of young
romantic love to which women look forever forward and forever back.
In October Anthony's letters multiplied, became almost frantic--then
suddenly ceased. For a worried month it needed all her powers of control
to refrain from leaving immediately for Mississippi. Then a telegram
told her that he had been in the hospital and that she could expect him
in New York within ten days. Like a figure in a dream he came back into
her life across the ballroom on that November evening--and all through
long hours that held familiar gladness she took him close to her breast,
nursing an illusion of happiness and security she had not thought that
she would know again.
DISCOMFITURE OF THE GENERALS
After a week Anthony's regiment went back to the Mississippi camp to be
discharged. The officers shut themselves up in the compartments on the
Pullman cars and drank the whiskey they had bought in New York, and in
the coaches the soldiers got as drunk as possible also--and pretended
whenever the train stopped at a village that they were just returned
from France, where they had practically put an end to the German army.
As they all wore overseas caps and claimed that they had not had time to
have their gold service stripes sewed on, the yokelry of the seaboard
were much impressed and asked them how they liked the trenches--to which
they replied "Oh, _boy!_" with great smacking of tongues and shaking of
heads. Some one took a piece of chalk and scrawled on the side of the
train, "We won the war--now we're going home," and the officers laughed
and let it stay. They were all getting what swagger they could out of
this ignominious return.
As they rumbled on toward camp, Anthony was uneasy lest he should find
Dot awaiting him patiently at the station. To his relief he neither saw
nor heard anything of her and thinking that were she still in town she
would certainly attempt to communicate with him, he concluded that she
had gone--whither he neither knew nor cared. He wanted only to return to
Gloria--Gloria reborn and wonderfully alive. When eventually he was
discharged he left his company on the rear of a great truck with a crowd
who had given tolerant, almost sentimental, cheers for their officers,
especially for Captain Dunning. The captain, on his part, had addressed
them with tears in his eyes as to the pleasure, etc., and the work,
etc., and time not wasted, etc., and duty, etc. It was very dull and
human; having given ear to it Anthony, whose mind was freshened by his
week in New York, renewed his deep loathing for the military profession
and all it connoted. In their childish hearts two out of every three
professional officers considered that wars were made for armies and not
armies for wars. He rejoiced to see general and field-officers riding
desolately about the barren camp deprived of their commands. He rejoiced
to hear the men in his company laugh scornfully at the inducements
tendered them to remain in the army. They were to attend "schools." He
knew what these "schools" were.
Two days later he was with Gloria in New York.
ANOTHER WINTER
Late one February afternoon Anthony came into the apartment and groping
through the little hall, pitch-dark in the winter dusk, found Gloria
sitting by the window. She turned as he came in.
"What did Mr. Haight have to say?" she asked listlessly.
"Nothing," he answered, "usual thing. Next month, perhaps."
She looked at him closely; her ear attuned to his voice caught the
slightest thickness in the dissyllable.
"You've been drinking," she remarked dispassionately.
"Couple glasses."
"Oh."
He yawned in the armchair and there was a moment's silence between them.
Then she demanded suddenly:
"Did you go to Mr. Haight? Tell me the truth."
"No." He smiled weakly. "As a matter of fact I didn't have time."
"I thought you didn't go.... He sent for you."
"I don't give a damn. I'm sick of waiting around his office. You'd think
he was doing _me_ a favor." He glanced at Gloria as though expecting
moral support, but she had turned back to her contemplation of the
dubious and unprepossessing out-of-doors.
"I feel rather weary of life to-day," he offered tentatively. Still she
was silent. "I met a fellow and we talked in the Biltmore bar."
The dusk had suddenly deepened but neither of them made any move to turn
on the lights. Lost in heaven knew what contemplation, they sat there
until a flurry of snow drew a languid sigh from Gloria.
"What've you been doing?" he asked, finding the silence oppressive.
"Reading a magazine--all full of idiotic articles by prosperous authors
about how terrible it is for poor people to buy silk shirts. And while I
was reading it I could think of nothing except how I wanted a gray
squirrel coat--and how we can't afford one."
"Yes, we can."
"Oh, no."
"Oh, yes! If you want a fur coat you can have one."
Her voice coming through the dark held an implication of scorn.
"You mean we can sell another bond?"
"If necessary. I don't want to go without things. We have spent a lot,
though, since I've been back."
"Oh, shut up!" she said in irritation.
"Why?"
"Because I'm sick and tired of hearing you talk about what we've spent
or what we've done. You came back two months ago and we've been on some
sort of a party practically every night since. We've both wanted to go
out, and we've gone. Well, you haven't heard me complain, have you? But
all you do is whine, whine, whine. I don't care any more what we do or
what becomes of us and at least I'm consistent. But I will _not_
tolerate your complaining and calamity-howling----"
"You're not very pleasant yourself sometimes, you know."
"I'm under no obligations to be. You're not making any attempt to make
things different."
"But I am--"
"Huh! Seems to me I've heard that before. This morning you weren't going
to touch another thing to drink until you'd gotten a position. And you
didn't even have the spunk to go to Mr. Haight when he sent for you
about the suit."
Anthony got to his feet and switched on the lights.
"See here!" he cried, blinking, "I'm getting sick of that sharp tongue
of yours."
"Well, what are you going to do about it?"
"Do you think _I'm_ particularly happy?" he continued, ignoring her
question. "Do you think I don't know we're not living as we ought to?"
In an instant Gloria stood trembling beside him.
"I won't _stand_ it!" she burst out. "I won't be lectured to. You and
your suffering! You're just a pitiful weakling and you always
have been!"
They faced one another idiotically, each of them unable to impress the
other, each of them tremendously, achingly, bored. Then she went into
the bedroom and shut the door behind her.
His return had brought into the foreground all their pre-bellum
exasperations. Prices had risen alarmingly and in perverse ratio their
income had shrunk to a little over half of its original size. There had
been the large retainer's fee to Mr. Haight; there were stocks bought at
one hundred, now down to thirty and forty and other investments that
were not paying at all. During the previous spring Gloria had been given
the alternative of leaving the apartment or of signing a year's lease at
two hundred and twenty-five a month. She had signed it. Inevitably as
the necessity for economy had increased they found themselves as a pair
quite unable to save. The old policy of prevarication was resorted to.
Weary of their incapabilities they chattered of what they would
do--oh--to-morrow, of how they would "stop going on parties" and of how
Anthony would go to work. But when dark came down Gloria, accustomed to
an engagement every night, would feel the ancient restlessness creeping
over her. She would stand in the doorway of the bedroom, chewing
furiously at her fingers and sometimes meeting Anthony's eyes as he
glanced up from his book. Then the telephone, and her nerves would
relax, she would answer it with ill-concealed eagerness. Some one was
coming up "for just a few minutes"--and oh, the weariness of pretense,
the appearance of the wine table, the revival of their jaded
spirits--and the awakening, like the mid-point of a sleepless night in
which they moved.
As the winter passed with the march of the returning troops along Fifth
Avenue they became more and more aware that since Anthony's return their
relations had entirely changed. After that reflowering of tenderness and
passion each of them had returned into some solitary dream unshared by
the other and what endearments passed between them passed, it seemed,
from empty heart to empty heart, echoing hollowly the departure of what
they knew at last was gone.
Anthony had again made the rounds of the metropolitan newspapers and had
again been refused encouragement by a motley of office boys, telephone
girls, and city editors. The word was: "We're keeping any vacancies open
for our own men who are still in France." Then, late in March, his eye
fell on an advertisement in the morning paper and in consequence he
found at last the semblance of an occupation.
* * * * *
YOU CAN SELL!!!
_Why not earn while you learn?_
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