The Beautiful and the Damned Part 21

Through the hall then ... and down the back stairs, hearing Anthony's voice in the bedroom she had just left-- "Gloria! Gloria!"

But she had reached the kitchen now, pa.s.sed out through the doorway into the night. A hundred drops, startled by a flare of wind from a dripping tree, scattered on her and she pressed them gladly to her face with hot hands.

"Gloria! Gloria!"

The voice was infinitely remote, m.u.f.fed and made plaintive by the walls she had just left. She rounded the house and started down the front path toward the road, almost exultant as she turned into it, and followed the carpet of short gra.s.s alongside, moving with caution in the intense darkness.

"Gloria!"

She broke into a run, stumbled over the segment of a branch twisted off by the wind. The voice was outside the house now. Anthony, finding the bedroom deserted, had come onto the porch. But this thing was driving her forward; it was back there with Anthony, and she must go on in her flight under this dim and oppressive heaven, forcing herself through the silence ahead as though it were a tangible barrier before her.

She had gone some distance along the barely discernible road, probably half a mile, pa.s.sed a single deserted barn that loomed up, black and foreboding, the only building of any sort between the gray house and Marietta; then she turned the fork, where the road entered the wood and ran between two high walls of leaves and branches that nearly touched overhead. She noticed suddenly a thin, longitudinal gleam of silver upon the road before her, like a bright sword half embedded in the mud. As she came closer she gave a little cry of satisfaction--it was a wagon-rut full of water, and glancing heavenward she saw a light rift of sky and knew that the moon was out.

"Gloria!"

She started violently. Anthony was not two hundred feet behind her.

"Gloria, wait for me!"

She shut her lips tightly to keep from screaming, and increased her gait. Before she had gone another hundred yards the woods disappeared, rolling back like a dark stocking from the leg of the road. Three minutes' walk ahead of her, suspended in the now high and limitless air, she saw a thin interlacing of attenuated gleams and glitters, centred in a regular undulation on some one invisible point. Abruptly she knew where she would go. That was the great cascade of wires that rose high over the river, like the legs of a gigantic spider whose eye was the little green light in the switch-house, and ran with the railroad bridge in the direction of the station. The station! There would be the train to take her away.

"Gloria, it's me! It's Anthony! Gloria, I won't try to stop you! For G.o.d's sake, where are you?"

She made no answer but began to run, keeping on the high side of the road and leaping the gleaming puddles--dimensionless pools of thin, unsubstantial gold. Turning sharply to the left, she followed a narrow wagon road, serving to avoid a dark body on the ground. She looked up as an owl hooted mournfully from a solitary tree. Just ahead of her she could see the trestle that led to the railroad bridge and the steps mounting up to it. The station lay across the river.

Another sounds startled her, the melancholy siren of an approaching train, and almost simultaneously, a repeated call, thin now and far away.

"Gloria! Gloria!"

Anthony must have followed the main road. She laughed with a sort of malicious cunning at having eluded him; she could spare the time to wait until the train went by.

The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no antic.i.p.atory roar and clamor, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the bridge--it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them, which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid, the temperature of warm blood.... The clicking blended suddenly with itself in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside. Then it contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.

Silence crept down again over the wet country; the faint dripping resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria stirring her out of the trance-like torpor which the pa.s.sage of the train had wrought. She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it was something she had always wanted to do, and that she would have the added excitement of traversing the yard-wide plank that ran beside the tracks over the river.

There! This was better. She was at the top now and could see the lands about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coa.r.s.ely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the light like the s.h.i.+ny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was lifted now--the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom. This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.

"Gloria!"

Like a startled child she scurried along the plank, hopping, skipping, jumping, with an ecstatic sense of her own physical lightness. Let him come now--she no longer feared that, only she must first reach the station, because that was part of the game. She was happy. Her hat, s.n.a.t.c.hed off, was clutched tightly in her hand, and her short curled hair bobbed up and down about her ears. She had thought she would never feel so young again, but this was her night, her world. Triumphantly she laughed as she left the plank, and reaching the wooden platform flung herself down happily beside an iron roof-post.

"Here I am!" she called, gay as the dawn in her elation. "Here I am, Anthony, dear--old, worried Anthony."

"Gloria!" He reached the platform, ran toward her. "Are you all right?" Coming up he knelt and took her in his arms.

"Yes."

"What was the matter? Why did you leave?" he queried anxiously.

"I had to--there was something"--she paused and a flicker of uneasiness lashed at her mind--"there was something sitting on me--here." She put her hand on her breast. "I had to go out and get away from it."

"What do you mean by 'something'?"

"I don't know--that man Hull--"

"Did he bother you?"

"He came to my door, drunk. I think I'd gotten sort of crazy by that time."

"Gloria, dearest--"

Wearily she laid her head upon his shoulder.

"Let's go back," he suggested.

She s.h.i.+vered.

"Uh! No, I couldn't. It'd come and sit on me again." Her voice rose to a cry that hung plaintive on the darkness. "That thing--"

"There--there," he soothed her, pulling her close to him. "We won't do anything you don't want to do. What do you want to do? Just sit here?"

"I want--I want to go away."

"Where?"

"Oh--anywhere."

"By golly, Gloria," he cried, "you're still tight!"

"No, I'm not. I haven't been, all evening. I went up-stairs about, oh, I don't know, about half an hour after dinner ...Ouch!"

He had inadvertently touched her right shoulder.

"It hurts me. I hurt it some way. I don't know--somebody picked me up and dropped me."

"Gloria, come home. It's late and damp."

"I can't," she wailed. "Oh, Anthony, don't ask me to! I will to-morrow. You go home and I'll wait here for a train. I'll go to a hotel--"

"I'll go with you."

"No, I don't want you with me. I want to be alone. I want to sleep--oh, I want to sleep. And then to-morrow, when you've got all the smell of whiskey and cigarettes out of the house, and everything straight, and Hull is gone, then I'll come home. If I went now, that thing--oh--!" She covered her eyes with her hand; Anthony saw the futility of trying to persuade her.

"I was all sober when you left," he said. "d.i.c.k was asleep on the lounge and Maury and I were having a discussion. That fellow Hull had wandered off somewhere. Then I began to realize I hadn't seen you for several hours, so I went up-stairs--"

He broke off as a salutatory "h.e.l.lo, there!" boomed suddenly out of the darkness. Gloria sprang to her feet and he did likewise.

"It's Maury's voice," she cried excitedly. "If it's Hull with him, keep them away, keep them away!"

"Who's there?" Anthony called.

"Just d.i.c.k and Maury," returned two voices rea.s.suringly.

"Where's Hull?"

"He's in bed. Pa.s.sed out."

Their figures appeared dimly on the platform.

"What the devil are you and Gloria doing here?" inquired Richard Caramel with sleepy bewilderment.

"What are you two doing here?"

Maury laughed.

"d.a.m.ned if I know. We followed you, and had the deuce of a time doing it. I heard you out on the porch yelling for Gloria, so I woke up the Caramel here and got it through his head, with some difficulty, that if there was a search-party we'd better be on it. He slowed me up by sitting down in the road at intervals and asking me what it was all about. We tracked you by the pleasant scent of Canadian Club."

There was a rattle of nervous laughter under the low train-shed.

"How did you track us, really?"

"Well, we followed along down the road and then we suddenly lost you. Seems you turned off at a wagontrail. After a while somebody hailed us and asked us if we were looking for a young girl. Well, we came up and found it was a little s.h.i.+vering old man, sitting on a fallen tree like somebody in a fairy tale. 'She turned down here,' he said, 'and most steppud on me, goin' somewhere in an awful hustle, and then a fella in short golfin' pants come runnin' along and went after her. He throwed me this.' The old fellow had a dollar bill he was waving around--"

"Oh, the poor old man!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Gloria, moved.

"I threw him another and we went on, though he asked us to stay and tell him what it was all about."

"Poor old man," repeated Gloria dismally.

d.i.c.k sat down sleepily on a box.

"And now what?" he inquired in the tone of stoic resignation.

"Gloria's upset," explained Anthony. "She and I are going to the city by the next train."

Maury in the darkness had pulled a time-table from his pocket.

"Strike a match."

A tiny flare leaped out of the opaque background illuminating the four faces, grotesque and unfamiliar here in the open night.

"Let's see. Two, two-thirty--no, that's evening. By gad, you won't get a train till five-thirty."

Anthony hesitated.

"Well," he muttered uncertainly, "we've decided to stay here and wait for it. You two might as well go back and sleep."

"You go, too, Anthony," urged Gloria; "I want you to have some sleep, dear. You've been as pale as a ghost all day."

"Why, you little idiot!"

d.i.c.k yawned.

"Very well. You stay, we stay."

He walked out from under the shed and surveyed the heavens.

"Rather a nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty a.s.sortment of them."

"Let's see." Gloria moved after him and the other two followed her. "Let's sit out here," she suggested. "I like it much better."

Anthony and d.i.c.k converted a long box into a backrest and found a board dry enough for Gloria to sit on. Anthony dropped down beside her and with some effort d.i.c.k hoisted himself onto an apple-barrel near them.

"Tana went to sleep in the porch hammock," he remarked. "We carried him in and left him next to the kitchen stove to dry. He was drenched to the skin."

"That awful little man!" sighed Gloria.

"How do you do!" The voice, sonorous and funereal, had come from above, and they looked up startled to find that in some manner Maury had climbed to the roof of the shed, where he sat dangling his feet over the edge, outlined as a shadowy and fantastic gargoyle against the now brilliant sky.

"It must be for such occasions as this," he began softly, his words having the effect of floating down from an immense height and settling softly upon his auditors, "that the righteous of the land decorate the railroads with bill-boards a.s.serting in red and yellow that 'Jesus Christ is G.o.d,' placing them, appropriately enough, next to announcements that 'Gunter's Whiskey is Good.'"

There was gentle laughter and the three below kept their heads tilted upward.

"I think I shall tell you the story of my education," continued Maury, "under these sardonic constellations."

"Do! Please!"

"Shall I, really?"

They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the white smiling moon.

"Well," he began, "as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred 'Now I lay me's.'"

"Throw down a cigarette," murmured some one.

A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian command: "Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies."

Below, a lighted match was pa.s.sed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice resumed: "I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I believed that because a man cried out 'My G.o.d!' when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flint-locks and cried to me: 'There's the real thing. These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.' They d.a.m.ned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fas.h.i.+on changed, and they d.a.m.ned things by calling them 'clever'.

"And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets, listening--to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Sh.e.l.ley, to Shakespeare with his first ba.s.s and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second ba.s.s and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, ba.s.sos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I learned a little of beauty--enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth--and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition....

"Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coa.r.s.ened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

"The transition was subtle--the thing had lain in wait for me for some time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one. With me? No--I didn't try to seduce the janitor's wife--nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite pa.s.sion that does the business--it is the dress that pa.s.sion wears. I became bored--that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand?--I was grown." He paused. "End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two."

Three quietly active points of light showed the location of his listeners. Gloria was now half sitting, half lying, in Anthony's lap. His arm was around her so tightly that she could hear the beating of his heart. Richard Caramel, perched on the apple-barrel, from time to time stirred and gave off a faint grunt.

"I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression--but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism--and behold! Jones was still in my way. I did not think--I was a battle-ground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.