The Beautiful and the Damned Part 33

She hesitated--and then, too quickly, she thought, picked up the receiver.

"h.e.l.lo."

Her voice was hollow and unreal. The words rang in the empty set like the ineffectualities of a ghost. The absurdities of their requirements appalled her--Did they expect that on an instant's notice she could put herself in the place of this preposterous and unexplained character?

"... No ... no.... Not yet! Now listen: 'John Sumner has just been knocked over by an automobile and instantly killed!'"

Gloria let her baby mouth drop slowly open. Then: "Now hang up! With a bang!"

She obeyed, clung to the table with her eyes wide and staring. At length she was feeling slightly encouraged and her confidence increased.

"My G.o.d!" she cried. Her voice was good, she thought. "Oh, my G.o.d!"

"Now faint."

She collapsed forward to her knees and throwing her body outward on the ground lay without breathing.

"All right!" called Mr. Debris. "That's enough, thank you. That's plenty. Get up--that's enough."

Gloria arose, mustering her dignity and brus.h.i.+ng off her skirt.

"Awful!" she remarked with a cool laugh, though her heart was b.u.mping tumultuously. "Terrible, wasn't it?"

"Did you mind it?" said Mr. Debris, smiling blandly. "Did it seem hard? I can't tell anything about it until I have it run off."

"Of course not," she agreed, trying to attach some sort of meaning to his remark--and failing. It was just the sort of thing he would have said had he been trying not to encourage her.

A few moments later she left the studio. Bloeckman had promised that she should hear the result of the test within the next few days. Too proud to force any definite comment she felt a baffling uncertainty and only now when the step had at last been taken did she realize how the possibility of a successful screen career had played in the back of her mind for the past three years. That night she tried to tell over to herself the elements that might decide for or against her. Whether or not she had used enough make-up worried her, and as the part was that of a girl of twenty, she wondered if she had not been just a little too grave. About her acting she was least of all satisfied. Her entrance had been abominable--in fact not until she reached the phone had she displayed a shred of poise--and then the test had been over. If they had only realized! She wished that she could try it again. A mad plan to call up in the morning and ask for a new trial took possession of her, and as suddenly faded. It seemed neither politic nor polite to ask another favor of Bloeckman.

The third day of waiting found her in a highly nervous condition. She had bitten the insides of her mouth until they were raw and smarting, and burnt unbearably when she washed them with listerine. She had quarrelled so persistently with Anthony that he had left the apartment in a cold fury. But because he was intimidated by her exceptional frigidity, he called up an hour afterward, apologized and said he was having dinner at the Amsterdam Club, the only one in which he still retained members.h.i.+p.

It was after one o'clock and she had breakfasted at eleven, so, deciding to forego luncheon, she started for a walk in the Park. At three there would be a mail. She would be back by three.

It was an afternoon of premature spring. Water was drying on the walks and in the Park little girls were gravely wheeling white doll-buggies up and down under the thin trees while behind them followed bored nursery-maids in two's, discussing with each other those tremendous secrets that are peculiar to nursery-maids.

Two o'clock by her little gold watch. She should have a new watch, one made in a platinum oblong and incrusted with diamonds--but those cost even more than squirrel coats and of course they were out of her reach now, like everything else--unless perhaps the right letter was awaiting her ... in about an hour ... fifty-eight minutes exactly. Ten to get there left forty-eight ... forty-seven now ...

Little girls soberly wheeling their buggies along the damp sunny walks. The nursery-maids chattering in pairs about their inscrutable secrets. Here and there a raggedy man seated upon newspapers spread on a drying bench, related not to the radiant and delightful afternoon but to the dirty snow that slept exhausted in obscure corners, waiting for extermination....

Ages later, coming into the dim hall she saw the Martinique elevator boy standing incongruously in the light of the stained-gla.s.s window.

"Is there any mail for us?" she asked.

"Up-stays, madame."

The switchboard squawked abominably and Gloria waited while he ministered to the telephone. She sickened as the elevator groaned its way up--the floors pa.s.sed like the slow lapse of centuries, each one ominous, accusing, significant. The letter, a white leprous spot, lay upon the dirty tiles of the hall....

My dear Gloria: We had the test run off yesterday afternoon, and Mr. Debris seemed to think that for the part he had in mind he needed a younger woman. He said that the acting was not bad, and that there was a small character part supposed to be a very haughty rich widow that he thought you might---- * * * * *

Desolately Gloria raised her glance until it fell out across the areaway. But she found she could not see the opposite wall, for her gray eyes were full of tears. She walked into the bedroom, the letter crinkled tightly in her hand, and sank down upon her knees before the long mirror on the wardrobe floor. This was her twenty-ninth birthday, and the world was melting away before her eyes. She tried to think that it had been the make-up, but her emotions were too profound, too overwhelming for any consolation that the thought conveyed.

She strained to see until she could feel the flesh on her temples pull forward. Yes--the cheeks were ever so faintly thin, the corners of the eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. The eyes were different. Why, they were different! ... And then suddenly she knew how tired her eyes were.

"Oh, my pretty face," she whispered, pa.s.sionately grieving. "Oh, my pretty face! Oh, I don't want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what's happened?"

Then she slid toward the mirror and, as in the test, sprawled face downward upon the floor--and lay there sobbing. It was the first awkward movement she had ever made.

CHAPTER III.

NO MATTER!

Within another year Anthony and Gloria had become like players who had lost their costumes, lacking the pride to continue on the note of tragedy--so that when Mrs. and Miss Hulme of Kansas City cut them dead in the Plaza one evening, it was only that Mrs. and Miss Hulme, like most people, abominated mirrors of their atavistic selves.

Their new apartment, for which they paid eighty-five dollars a month, was situated on Claremont Avenue, which is two blocks from the Hudson in the dim hundreds. They had lived there a month when Muriel Kane came to see them late one afternoon.

It was a reproachless twilight on the summer side of spring. Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. Across the water were the Palisades, crowned by the ugly framework of the amus.e.m.e.nt park--yet soon it would be dusk and those same iron cobwebs would be a glory against the heavens, an enchanted palace set over the smooth radiance of a tropical ca.n.a.l.

The streets near the apartment, Anthony had found, were streets where children played--streets a little nicer than those he had been used to pa.s.s on his way to Marietta, but of the same general sort, with an occasional hand organ or hurdy-gurdy, and in the cool of the evening many pairs of young girls walking down to the corner drug-store for ice cream soda and dreaming unlimited dreams under the low heavens.

Dusk in the streets now, and children playing, shouting up incoherent ecstatic words that faded out close to the open window--and Muriel, who had come to find Gloria, chattering to him from an opaque gloom over across the room.

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

With a tired movement he arose and obeyed; the gray window-panes vanished. He stretched himself. He was heavier now, his stomach was a limp weight against his belt; his flesh had softened and expanded. He was thirty-two and his mind was a bleak and disordered wreck.

"Have a little drink, Muriel?"

"Not me, thanks. I don't use it anymore. What're you doing these days, Anthony?" she asked curiously.

"Well, I've been pretty busy with this lawsuit," he answered indifferently. "It's gone to the Court of Appeals--ought to be settled up one way or another by autumn. There's been some objection as to whether the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over the matter."

Muriel made a clicking sound with her tongue and c.o.c.ked her head on one side.

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

"Oh, they all do," he replied listlessly; "all will cases. They say it's exceptional to have one settled under four or five years."

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

"At what?" he demanded abruptly.

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

"If that's encouragement, I'm much obliged," he answered dryly--and then with sudden weariness: "Does it bother you particularly that I don't want to work?"

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

"Oh, G.o.d!" he said brokenly, "it seems to me that for three years I've heard nothing about myself but wild stories and virtuous admonitions. I'm tired of it. If you don't want to see us, let us alone. I don't bother my former friends.' But I need no charity calls, and no criticism disguised as good advice--" Then he added apologetically: "I'm sorry--but really, Muriel, you mustn't talk like a lady slum-worker even if you are visiting the lower middle cla.s.ses." He turned his bloodshot eyes on her reproachfully--eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue, that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when he was drunk.

"Why do you say such awful things?" she protested. You talk as if you and Gloria were in the middle cla.s.ses."

"Why pretend we're not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats when they can't even keep up the appearances of it."

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

Muriel ... the horrified democrat ...!

"Why, of course. Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine--courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing--can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity."

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

"Well, all I say is that if a person comes from a good family they're always nice people. That's the trouble with you and Gloria. You think that just because things aren't going your way right now all your old friends are trying to avoid you. You're too sensitive--"

"As a matter of fact," said Anthony, "you know nothing at all about it. With me it's simply a matter of pride, and for once Gloria's reasonable enough to agree that we oughtn't go where we're not wanted. And people don't want us. We're too much the ideal bad examples."

"Nonsense! You can't park your pessimism in my little sun parlor. I think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work."

"Here I am, thirty-two. Suppose I did start in at some idiotic business. Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week--with luck. That's if I could get a job at all; there's an awful lot of unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I'd be any happier? Do you think that if I don't get this money of my grandfather's life will be endurable?"

Muriel smiled complacently.

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

A few minutes later Gloria came in seeming to bring with her into the room some dark color, indeterminate and rare. In a taciturn way she was happy to see Muriel. She greeted Anthony with a casual "Hi!"

"I've been talking philosophy with your husband," cried the irrepressible Miss Kane.

"We took up some fundamental concepts," said Anthony, a faint smile disturbing his pale cheeks, paler still under two days' growth of beard.

Oblivious to his irony Muriel rehashed her contention. When she had done, Gloria said quietly: "Anthony's right. It's no fun to go around when you have the sense that people are looking at you in a certain way."

He broke in plaintively: "Don't you think that when even Maury n.o.ble, who was my best friend, won't come to see us it's high time to stop calling people up?" Tears were standing in his eyes.

"That was your fault about Maury n.o.ble," said Gloria coolly.

"It wasn't."

"It most certainly was."

Muriel intervened quickly: "I met a girl who knew Maury, the other day, and she says he doesn't drink any more. He's getting pretty cagey."

"Doesn't?"

"Practically not at all. He's making piles of money. He's sort of changed since the war. He's going to marry a girl in Philadelphia who has millions, Ceci Larrabee--anyhow, that's what Town Tattle said."

"He's thirty-three," said Anthony, thinking aloud. But it's odd to imagine his getting married. I used to think he was so brilliant."

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

"But brilliant people don't settle down in business--or do they? Or what do they do? Or what becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?"

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

"They change," said Gloria. "All the qualities that they don't use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up."

"The last thing he said to me," recollected Anthony, "was that he was going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for."

Muriel caught at this quickly.

"That's what you ought to do," she exclaimed triumphantly. "Of course I shouldn't think anybody would want to work for nothing. But it'd give you something to do. What do you do with yourselves, anyway? n.o.body ever sees you at Montmartre or--or anywhere. Are you economizing?"

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

"Well," he demanded, "what are you laughing at?" "You know what I'm laughing at," she answered coldly.

"At that case of whiskey?"

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

"What if I did? It's cheaper that way than if you get it by the bottle. You needn't pretend that you won't drink any of it."

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

"That's a fine distinction!" he cried, springing to his feet in a weak rage. "What's more, I'll be d.a.m.ned if you can hurl that at me every few minutes!"

"It's true."

"It is not! And I'm getting sick of this eternal business of criticising me before visitors!" He had worked himself up to such a state that his arms and shoulders were visibly trembling. "You'd think everything was my fault. You'd think you hadn't encouraged me to spend money--and spent a lot more on yourself than I ever did by a long shot."

Now Gloria rose to her feet.

"I won't let you talk to me that way!"

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

In a sort of rush he left the room. The two women heard his steps in the hall and then the front door banged. Gloria sank back into her chair. Her face was lovely in the lamplight, composed, inscrutable.

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