 Book 2, Chapter 2, Part 3 of 3, of The Beautiful and Damned. One sultry afternoon, late in July, Richard Caramel telephoned from New York that he and Maury were coming out, bringing a friend with them. They arrived about five, a little drunk, accompanied by a small, stocky man of thirty-five, whom they introduced as Mr. Joe Hull, one of the best fellows that Anthony and Gloria had ever met. Joe Hull had a yellow beard continually fighting through his skin, and a low voice which varied between Basso Profondo and a husky whisper. Anthony, carrying Maury's suitcase upstairs, followed into the room and carefully closed the door. "'Who is this fellow?' he demanded. Maury chuckled enthusiastically. "'Who, Hull? Oh, he's all right. He's a good one.' "'Yes, but who is he?' "'Hull? He's just a good fellow. He's a prince.' His laughter redoubled, culminating in the succession of pleasant, cat-like grins. Anthony hesitated between a smile and a frown. "'He looks sort of funny to me, weird-looking clothes.' He paused. "'I've got a sneaking suspicion you two picked him up some more last night.' "'Ridiculous!' declared Maury. "'Why, I've known him all my life.' However, as he capped his statement with another series of chuckles, Anthony was impelled to remark, "'The devil you have.'" Later, just before dinner, while Maury and Dick were conversing uproariously with Joe Hull listening in silence as he sipped his drink, Gloria drew Anthony into the dining-room. "'I don't like this man Hull,' she said. I wish he'd used Tanna's bathtub. I can't very well ask him to. Well, I don't want him in hours. He seems to be a simple soul. He's got on white shoes that look like gloves. I can see his toes right through them. Ugh! Who is he, anyway?' "'You've got me. Well, I think they've got their nerve to bring him out here. This isn't a sailor's rescue home.' They were tight when they phoned. Maury has said they've been on a party since yesterday afternoon.' Gloria shook her head angrily and, saying no more, returned to the porch. Anthony saw that she was trying to forget her uncertainty and devote herself to enjoying the evening. It had been a tropical day, and even into the late twilight the heat waves emanating from the dry road were quivering faintly like undulating panes of easing-glass. The sky was cloudless, but far beyond the woods in the direction of the sound a faint and persistent rolling had commenced. When Tanna announced dinner, the men, at a word from Gloria, remained coatless and went inside. One began a song, which they accompanied in harmony during the first course. It had two lines and was sung to a popular error called Daisy Deer. The lines were, The panic has come over us, so has the moral decline. Each rendition was greeted with bouts of enthusiasm and prolonged applause. "'Cheer up, Gloria,' suggested Maury, "'you seem the least bit depressed.' "'I'm not,' she lied. "'Here, Tannenbaum,' he called over his shoulder, "'I've filled you a drink, come on.'" Gloria tried to stay his arm. "'Please don't, Maury.' "'Why not? Maybe he'll play the flute for us after dinner. Here, Tanna.'" Tanna, grinning, bore the glass away to the kitchen. In a few moments Maury gave him another. "'Cheer up, Gloria,' he cried, "'for heaven's sakes, everybody, cheer up, Gloria.' "'Dearest, have another drink,' counseled Anthony. "'Do, please.'" "'Cheer up, Gloria,' said Joe Hull, easily." Gloria winced at this uncalled-for using of her first name and glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed it. The word coming so glibly from the lips of a man to whom she had taken an inordinate dislike repelled her. A moment later she noticed that Joe Hull had given Tanna another drink and her anger increased, heightened somewhat from the effects of the alcohol. Then once, Maury was saying, Peter Granby and I went into a Turkish bath in Boston about two o'clock at night. There was no one there but the proprietor, and we jammed him into a closet and locked the door. Then a fellow came in and wanted a Turkish bath. Thought we were the rubbers by Golly? Well, we just picked him up and tossed him into the pool with all his clothes on. Then we dragged him out and laid him on a slab and slapped him until he was black and blue. Not so rough, fellows, he'd say in a little squeaky voice, please. Was this Maury? thought Gloria. From anyone else the story would have amused her, but from Maury, the infinitely appreciative, the apotheosis of tact and consideration. The panic has come over us, so has— A drum of thunder from outside drowned out the rest of the song. Gloria shivered and tried to empty her glass, but the first taste nauseated her, and she set it down. Dinner was over, and they all marched into the big room, bearing several bottles and decanters. Someone had closed the porch door to keep out the wind, and in consequence, circular tentacles of cigar smoke were twisting already upon the heavy air. Paging Lieutenant Tannenbaum! Again it was the changeling Maury. Bring us the flute! Me and Maury rushed into the kitchen. Richard Caramel started the phonograph and approached Gloria. Dance with your well-known cousin. I don't want to dance. Then I'm going to carry you around. As though he were doing something of overpowering importance, he picked her up in his fat little arms and started trotting gravely about the room. Set me down, Dick, I'm dizzy! She insisted. He dumped her in a bouncing bundle on the couch and rushed off to the kitchen, shouting, Tannen, Tannen! Then without warning, she felt other arms around her, felt herself lifted from the lounge. Joe Hull had picked her up and was trying drunkenly to imitate Dick. Put me down, she said sharply. His modlin laugh and the sight of that prickly yellow jaw close to her face stirred her to intolerable disgust. At once! The panic! He began. But got no further, for Gloria's hand swung around swiftly and caught him in the cheek. At this he all at once let go of her, and she fell to the floor, her shoulder hitting the table a glancing blow in transit. Then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tannen in his white coat, reeling about, supported by Maury. To his flute he was blowing a weird blend of sound that was known, cried Anthony, as the Japanese train song. Joe Hull had found a box of candles and was juggling them, yelling, one down, every time he missed, and Dick was dancing by himself in a fascinated whirl around and about the room. It appeared to her that everything in the room was staggering in grotesque fourth-dimensional gyrations through intersecting planes of hazy blue. Inside the storm had come up amazingly, the lulls within were filled with a scrape of tall bushes against the house, and the roaring of rain on the tin roof in the kitchen. The lightning was interminable, letting down thick drips of thunder like pig-iron from the heart of a white-hot furnace. Gloria could see that the rain was spitting in at three of the windows, but she could not move to Chatham. She was in the hall. She had said good night, but no one had heard or heeded her. It seemed for an instant, as though something had looked down over the head of the banister, but she could not have gone back into the living-room. Better madness than the madness of that clamour. Upstairs she fumbled for the electric switch and missed it in the darkness. A roomful of lightning showed her the button plainly on the wall. But when the impenetrable black shut down, it again eluded her fumbling fingers, so she slipped off her dress and petticoat and threw herself weakly on the dry side of the half-drenched bed. She shut her eyes. From downstairs arose the babble of the drinkers, punctured suddenly by a tinkling shiver of broken glass, and then another, and by a soaring fragment of unsteady irregular song. She lay there for something over two hours, so she calculated afterward, surely by piecing together the bits of time. She was conscious, even aware, after a while, that the noise downstairs had lessened, and that the storm was moving off westward, throwing back lingering showers of sound that fell, heavy and lifeless as her soul, into the soggy fields. This was succeeded by a slow, reluctant scattering of rain and wind, until there was nothing outside her windows but a gentle dripping, and the swishing play of a cluster of wet vine against the sill. She was in a state half-way between sleeping and waking, with neither condition predominant. And she was harassed by a desire to rid herself of a weight pressing down upon her breast. She felt that if she could cry the weight would be lifted, and forcing the lids of her eyes together she tried to raise a lump in her throat, to no avail. Drip, drip, drip. The sound was not unpleasant, like spring, like a cool rain of her childhood that made cheerful mud in her backyard, and watered the tiny garden she had dug with miniature rake and spade and hoe. Drip, drip. It was like days when the rain came out of yellow skies that melted just before twilight, and shot one radiant shaft of sunlight diagonally down the heavens into the damp green trees. So cool, so clear and clean, and her mother there, at the center of the world, at the center of the rain, safe and dry and strong. She wanted her mother now, and her mother was dead, beyond sight and touch forever. Oh, it pressed on her so. She became rigid. Someone had come to the door, and was standing regarding her. Very quiet except for a slight swaying motion. She could see the outline of his figure distinct against some indistinguishable light. There was no sound anywhere, only a great persuasive silence. Even the dripping had ceased. Only this figure, swaying, swaying in the doorway, an indiscernible and subtly menacing terror, a personality filthy under its varnish, like smallpox spots under a layer of powder. Yet her tired heart, beating until it shook her breasts, made her sure that there was still life in her, desperately shaken, threatened. The minute, or succession of minutes, prolonged itself interminably, and a swimming blur began to form before her eyes, which tried with childish persistence to pierce the gloom in the direction of the door. In another instant it seemed that some unimaginable force would shatter her out of existence. And then the figure in the doorway, it was whole, she saw, whole, turned deliberately, and, still slightly swaying, moved back and off, as if absorbed into that uncomprehensible light that had given him dimension. God rushed back into her limbs, blood and life together. With the start of energy she sat upright, shifting her body into her feet touched the floor over the side of the bed. She knew what she must do, now, now, before it was too late. She must go out into this cool damp, out, away, to feel the wet swish of the grass around her feet and the fresh moisture on her forehead. Mechanically she struggled into her clothes, groping in the dark of the closet for a hat. She must go from this house with a thing hovered that pressed upon her bosom, or else made itself into stray, swaying figures in the gloom. In a panic she fumbled clumsily at her coat, found the sleeve just as she heard Anthony's footsteps on the lower stair. She dared not wait, he might not let her go, and even Anthony was a part of this wait, part of this evil house and the somber darkness that was growing up about it. 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, passed 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, muffled and made plaintive by the wall 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 grass 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 on to 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, and passed a single deserted barn that loomed up black and foreboding, the only building of any sort between the Grey 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 over her head. 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 stalking from the leg of the road. Three minutes' walk ahead of her, suspended now in the high and limitless air, she saw a thin interlacing of attenuated gleams and glitters centered in a regular undulation on some one invisible point. A 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 giant 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 a train to take her away. Gloria, it's me, it's Anthony. Gloria, I won't try to stop you, for God'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 hooded 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 sound startled her, the melancholy siren of an approaching train, and, almost simultaneously, a repeated call, thin now and far away. Gloria, Gloria! The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory roar and clamour, a dark insinuous 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 clock-like 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 sputtering 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 somber elasticity, the thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the lurid shaft to 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 passage 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, coarsely 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 shiny, 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 true tops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted dose. 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, snatched 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 elevation. 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 shivered. Ah! No! I couldn't. It'd come and sit on me again. Her voice rose to a cry that hung plaintive in 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 upstairs 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. Rick was asleep on the couch, 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 upstairs. He broke off, as a salutary, hello 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 him away, keep them away. Who's there? Anthony called. Just Dick and Maury returned two voices reassuringly. Where's Hull? He's in bed, passed 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. Damned 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 on 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 wagon-trail. 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 shivering old man, sitting on a fallen tree like somebody in a fairy tale. She turned down here, he said, and most stepped on me, going somewhere in an awful hustle, and then a fella in short golf and pants come running along and went after her. He throwed me this. The old fellow had a dollar a bill he was waving around. Oh, the poor old man, ejaculated Gloria, moved. I threw him another and we went on, though he asked us to say and tell him what it was all about. Poor old man, repeated Gloria dismally. Dick 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. Moray, in the darkness, had pulled a timetable 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 Gadd 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 pale as a ghost all day. Why, you little idiot! Dick yawned. Very well. You stay, we stay. He walked out from under the shed and surveyed the heavens. Rather a nice night, after all. There's her out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment 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 Dick 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 Dick hoisted himself onto an apple-barrel near them. When I 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 funeral, had come from above, and they looked up, startled, to find that in some manner Moray 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 voice 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 billboards asserting in red and yellow that Jesus Christ is God, and placing them, appropriately enough, next to announcements that Günter'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 Moray, 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 1,900 now-I-Lameys. Third down a cigarette, murmured someone. A small package reached the platform simultaneously with a 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 passed 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 God, 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 flintlocks and cried to me, there's the real thing. These new rifles are only shallow superficial imitations. They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral. Later the fashion changed, and they damned 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 Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first base and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second base and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlowe, Bassos 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 eventual death of every literary tradition. Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fiber of my mind coarsened, and my ears 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 chap for everyone. 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 passion that does the business. It is the dress that passion 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. 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 immortal schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But with a mistaken faith and intelligence, I plotted 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 obscure 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 battleground 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. I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life, and of being beaten and bewildered just the same. But after a few tastes of the slaughter-dish I had had enough. Here I said, the experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you. It's a wall that an active you runs up against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable skepticism, and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might, by making no new ties with a tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love, for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life, for the fight against death. He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation. After a moment he yawned and resumed. I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a ghastly dissatisfaction at being used, in spite of myself, for some inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware, if indeed there was an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The schoolmistress seemed to be saying, we're going to play football and nothing but football. If you don't want to play football, you can't play at all. What was I to do? The playtime was so short. You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug, superior thing, no more depressing, really, than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire? I don't think I did that. I was a great deal too warm for that, and too alive. For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature, nature that, by the divine and magnificent accident, had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to ridden the race of the inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her hire, or let us say, her more amusing, though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And, actuated by the highest gifts of the Enlightenment, we were seeking to circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white. In Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity. We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper, and presently the breed of the leper is the salt of the earth. If anyone can find any lesson in that, let him stand forth. There's only one lesson to be learned from life anyway, interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction, but in a sort of melancholy agreement. What's that? demanded Maury sharply, that there's no lesson to be learned from life. After a short silence, Maury said, young Gloria, the beautiful and merciless lady, first looked at the world with the fundamental sophistication I have struggled to attain, that Anthony never will attain, that Dick will never fully understand. There was a disgusted groan from the apple barrel. Anthony, groan accustomed to the dark, could see plainly the flash of Richard Caramel's yellow eye, and the look of resentment on his face as he cried, You're crazy! By your own statement I should have attained some experience by trying. Trying what? cried Maury fiercely, trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism, with some wild, despairing urge towards truth. Sitting day after day, supine in a rigid chair, and infinitely removed from life, staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely, and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable, trying to take a piece of actuality, and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life, and lost in transit to paper or canvas. Struggling in a laboratory through weary years for one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube, have you? Maury paused, and in his answer, when it came, there was a measure of weariness, a bitter overnote that lingered for a moment in those three minds, before it floated up and off, like a bubble bound for the moon. Not I, he said softly. I was born tired, but with the quality of mother wit, a gift of women like Gloria, to that, for all my talking and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I had added not one jot. In the distance, a deep sound that had been audible for some moments, identified itself by a plaintive mooing like that of a gigantic cow, and by the pearly spot of a headlight apparent half a mile away. It was a steam-driven train this time, rumbling and groaning, and as it tumbled by with a monstrous complaint it sent a shower of sparks and cinders over the platform. Not one jot. Then Maury's voice dropped down to them as from a great height. What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacing back and forth, its disastrous retreats. Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe, why intelligence never built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than the short foot rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of circumstances. I could quote you the philosophy of the hour, but for all we know, fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation that's absorbing the intellectuals today, the triumph of Christ over Anatole, France. He hesitated, and then added, but all I know, the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself, these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing, these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else. Well, I started to tell you of my education, didn't I? But I learned nothing, you see, very little even about myself, and if I had I should die with my lips shut and the guard on my fountain pen, as the wisest men have done since—oh, since the failure of a certain matter—a strange matter, by the way—it concerns them skeptics who thought they were farsighted just as you and I. Let me tell you about them by way of an evening prayer before you all drop off to sleep. Once upon a time all the men of mind ingenious in the world became of one belief, that is to say, of no belief. But it worried them to think that, within a few years of their death, many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them, which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another, Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the cogility of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amorous. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives tales, now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over, and will ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it and there'll be no more nonsense in the world. Finally let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound skepticism and our universal irony. So the men did, and they died. But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mine and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible. When he concluded there was no comment, some damp languor sleeping on the air of night seemed to have bewitched them all. As I said, I started on the story of my education. But my high balls are dead and the night's almost over, and soon there'll be an awful jabbering going on everywhere, in the trees and the houses, in the two little stores over there behind the station, and there'll be a great running up and down upon the earth for a few hours. Well, he concluded with a laugh, thank God we four can all pass to our eternal rest, knowing we've left the world a little better for having lived in it. A breeze sprang up, blowing with it faint wisps of life which flattened against the sky. Your remarks grow rambling and inconclusive, said Anthony sleepily. You expected one of those miracles of illumination by which you say your most brilliant and pregnant things in exactly the setting that should provoke the ideal symposium. Meanwhile, Gloria has shown her farsighted attachment by falling asleep. I can tell that by the fact that she has managed to concentrate her entire weight upon my broken body. Have I bored you? inquired Moray, looking down with some concern. No, you have disappointed us. You've shot a lot of arrows, but did you shoot any birds? I leave the birds to Dick. Then Moray hurriedly, I speak erratically, in dissociated fragments. You can get no rise from me, muttered Dick. My mind is full of any number of material things. I want a warm bath too much to worry about the importance of my work, or what proportion of us are pathetic figures. Dawn made itself felt in a gathering whiteness eastward over the river and an intermittent chipping in the nearby trees. Quarter to five, sighed Dick. Almost another hour to wait. Look, too gone. He was pointing to Anthony, whose lids had sagged over his eyes. Sleep of the patch family. But in another five minutes, despite the amplifying chips and churrups, his own head had fallen forward, knotted down twice, thrice. Only Moray Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof. His eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of mourning. He was wondering of the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life like rats into a ruined house. He was sorry for no one now. On Monday morning there would be his business, and later there would be a girl of another class whose whole life he was. These were the things nearest his heart. In the strangeness of the brightening day it seemed presumptuous that with this feeble, broken instrument of his mind he had ever tried to think. There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat. There was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm, the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp, all aboard, and a bell ringing. Fusedly, Maury saw eyes in the milk-train, staring curiously up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether he should go to the city with her. Then another clamor and she was gone, and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform, while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor-truck, caroling horsely at the summer morning. CHAPTER III. THE BROKEN LOOT. PART I OF TWO. It is seven-thirty of an August evening. The windows in the living room of the grey house are wide open, patiently exchanging the tainted inner atmosphere of liquor and smoke for the fresh drowsiness of the late hot dusk. There are dying flower-sents upon the air, so thin, so fragile, as to hint already of a summer laid away in time. But August is still proclaimed relentlessly by a thousand crickets around the side porch, and by one who has broken into the house and concealed himself confidently behind a bookcase, from time to time shrieking of his cleverness and his indomitable will. The room itself is in messy disorder. On the table is a dish of fruit, which is real but appears artificial. Around it are grouped an ominous assortment of decanters, glasses, and heaped ash-trays, the latter still raising wavy smoke-ladders into the stale air. The effect on the whole needing but a skull to resemble that venerable chromo once a fixture in every den, which presents the appendages to the life of pleasure with delightful and awe-inspiring sentiment. After a while the springly solo of the super-cricket is interrupted rather than joined by a new sound, the melancholy wail of an erratically fingered flute. It is obvious that the musician is practicing rather than performing, for from time to time the gnarled strain breaks off, and after an interval of indistinct mutterings we commences. Just prior to the seventh false start a third sound contributes to the subdued discord. It is a taxi outside. A minute's silence, then the taxi again, its boisterous retreat almost obliterating the scrape of footsteps on the cinder-walk. The doorbell shrieks alarmingly through the house. From the kitchen enters a small, fatigued Japanese, hastily buttoning a servants coat of white duck. He opens the front screen door and admits a handsome young man of thirty, clad in the sort of well-intentioned clothes peculiar to those who serve mankind. To his whole personality clings a well-intentioned era. His glance about the room is compounded by curiosity and a determined optimism. When he looks at Tana, the entire burden of uplifting the godless oriental is in his eyes. His name is Frederick E. Paramore. He was at Harvard with Anthony, where, because of the initials of their surnames, they were constantly placed next to each other in classes. A fragmentary acquaintance developed, but since that time they have never met. Nevertheless, Paramore enters the room with a certain air of arriving for the evening. Tana is answering a question. Tana, grinning with ingratiation, gone to in for dinner, be back half-hour, gone since half past six. Paramore, regarding the glasses on the table, have they company? Tana, yes, company, Mr. Caramel, Mr. and Mrs. Baines, Ms. Cain, all stay here. Paramore, I see. Kindly, they've been having a spree, I see. Tana, I know on Stan. Paramore, they've been having a fling. Tana, yes, they have drink. Oh, many, many, many drink. Paramore, receding delicately from the subject. Didn't I hear the sounds of music as I approached the house? Tana, with a spasmodic giggle. Yes, I play. Paramore, one of the Japanese instruments. He is quite obviously a subscriber to National Geographic magazine. Tana, I play flute, Japanese flute. Paramore, what song were you playing? One of your Japanese melodies? Tana, his brow undergoing preposterous contraction. I play train song, how you call railroad song. So call in my country. Like train, it goes so, that mean whistle, train start. Then go so, that mean train go, go like that. Very nice song in my country, children's song. Paramore, it sounded very nice. It is apparent at this point that only a gigantic effort that control restrains Tana from rushing upstairs for his postcards, including the six made in America. Tana, I fix high ball for a gentleman? Paramore, no thanks, I don't use it. He smiles. Tana withdraws into the kitchen, leaving the intervening door slightly ajar. From the crevice, there suddenly issues again the melody of the Japanese train song. This time, not a practice, surely, but a performance, a lusty, spirited performance. The phone rings. Tana, absorbed in his harmonics, gives no heed, so Paramore takes up the receiver. Paramore, hello, yes? No, he's not here now, but he'll be back any moment. Butterworth, hello? I didn't quite catch the name. Hello, hello, hello, hello? Huh. The phone obstinately refuses to yield up any more sound. Paramore replaces the receiver. At this point, the taxi motif re-enters, wafting with it a second young man. He carries a suitcase and opens the front door without ringing the bell. Mori, in the hall. Oh, Anthony, yahoo. He comes into the large room and sees Paramore. How do? Paramore gazing at him with gathering intensity. Is this, is this Mori noble? Mori, that's it. He advances, smiling and holding out his hand. How are you, old boy? Haven't seen you for years. He has vaguely associated the face with Harvard, but is not even positive about that. The name, if he ever knew it, he has long since forgotten. However, with a fine sensitiveness and an equally commendable charity, Paramore recognizes the fact and tactfully relieves the situation. Paramore, you've forgotten Fred Paramore? We were both in old Ankh Robert's history class. Mori, no, I haven't, Ankh. I mean Fred. Fred was, I mean Ankh was a great old fellow, wasn't he? Paramore nodding his head humorously several times. Great old character, great old character. Mori, after a short pause. Yes, he was. Where's Anthony? Paramore, the Japanese servant told me he was at some inn. Having dinner, I suppose. Mori, looking at his watch. Gone long? Paramore, I guess so. The Japanese told me they'd be back shortly. Mori, suppose we have a drink. Paramore, no thanks, I don't use it. He smiles. Mori, mind if I do? Yawning as he helps himself from a bottle. What have you been doing since you left college? Paramore, oh, many things. I've led a very active life, knocked about here and there. His tone implies anything from lion stocking to organized crime. Mori, oh, been over to Europe? Paramore, no, I haven't, unfortunately. Mori, I guess we'll all go over before long. Paramore, do you really think so? Mori, sure. Country's been fed on sensationalism for more than two years. Everybody getting restless, want to have some fun. Paramore, then you don't believe any ideals are at stake? Mori, nothing of much importance. People want excitement every so often. Paramore, intently. It's very interesting to hear you say that. Now I was talking to a man who'd been over there. During the ensuing testament, left to be filled in by the reader with such phrases as, saw with his own eyes, splendid spirit of France, and salvation of civilization, Mori sits with lowered eyelids, dispassionately bored. Mori, at the first available opportunity. By the way, do you happen to know there's a German agent in this very house? Paramore, smiling cautiously. Are you serious? Mori, absolutely, feel at my duty to warn you. Paramore, convinced. A governess? Mori, in a whisper, indicating the kitchen with his thumb. Tana, that's not his real name. I understand he constantly gets mail addressed to Lieutenant Emile Tenenbaum. Paramore, laughing with hearty tolerance. You are kidding me. Mori, I may be accusing him falsely, but you haven't told me what you've been doing. Paramore, for one thing, writing. Mori, fiction? Paramore, no, nonfiction. Mori, what's that? A sort of a literature that's half fiction and half fact? Paramore, I can find myself to fact. I've been doing a good deal of social service work. Mori, oh. An immediate glow of suspicion leaps into his eyes. It is as though Paramore had announced himself as an amateur pick-pocket. Paramore, at present I'm doing service work in Stamford. Only last week someone told me that Anthony Patch lived so near. They are interrupted by a clamor outside, unmistakable as that of two sexes in conversation and laughter. Then they enter the room in a body, Anthony, Gloria, Richard Caramel, Miriel Kane, Rachel Barnes, and Rodman Barnes, her husband. They surge about Mori, illogically replying, fine, to his general, hello? Anthony, meanwhile, approaches his other guest. Anthony, well, I'll be darned. How are you? Mighty glad to see you. Paramore, it's good to see you, Anthony. I'm stationed in Stamford, so I thought I'd run over. Rogueshly, we have to work to beat the devil most of the time, so we're entitled to a few hours' vacation. In an agony of concentration, Anthony tries to recall the name. After a struggle of parturition, his memory gives up the fragment, Fred, around which he hastily builds the sentence, glad you did, Fred. Meanwhile, the slight hush prefertory to an introduction has fallen upon the company. Mori, who could help, prefers to look on in malicious enjoyment. Anthony, in desperation, ladies and gentlemen, this is—this is Fred. Muriel, with obliging levity, hello, Fred. Richard Caramel and Paramore greet each other intimately by their first names, the latter recollecting that Dick was one of the men in his class who had never before troubled to speak to him. Dick fatuously imagines that Paramore is someone he has previously met in Anthony's house. The three young women go upstairs. Mori, in an undertone to Dick, haven't seen Muriel since Anthony's wedding. Dick, she's now in her prime, her latest is, I'll say so. Anthony struggles for a while with Paramore, and at length attempts to make the conversation general by asking everyone to have a drink. Mori, I've done pretty well on this bottle, I've gone from proof down to distillery. He indicates the words on the label. Anthony to Paramore. Never can tell when these two will turn up. Said goodbye to them one afternoon at five, and darned if they didn't appear about two in the morning. A big hired touring car from New York drove up to the door, and out they stepped, drunk as lords, of course. In an ecstasy of consideration, Paramore regards the cover of a book which he holds in his hand. Mori and Dick exchange a glance. Dick, innocently, to Paramore. You work here in town? Paramore, no, I'm in the Laird Street settlement in Stamford, to Anthony. You have no idea the amount of poverty in these small Connecticut towns, Italians and other immigrants, Catholics mostly, you know, so it's very hard to reach them. Anthony, politely, lot of crime? Paramore, not so much crime as ignorance and dirt. Mori, that's my theory, immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people. I'm all for the criminals, give color to life, but trouble is, if you started to punish ignorance, you'd have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy. Paramore, smiling uneasily, I was speaking of the more fundamental ignorance of even our language. Mori, thoughtfully, I suppose it is rather hard, can't even keep up with the new poetry. Paramore, it's only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your fingernails never seem dirty until you wash your hands. Of course we're already attracting much attention. Mori, rudely, as your secretary might say, if you stuff paper into a grate it'll burn brightly for a moment. At this point, Gloria, freshly tinted and lustful of admiration and entertainment, rejoins the party, followed by her two friends. For several moments the conversation becomes entirely fragmentary. Gloria calls Anthony aside. Gloria, please don't drink so much, Anthony. Anthony, why? Gloria, because you're so simple when you're drunk. Anthony, good Lord, what's the matter now? Gloria, after a pause during which her eyes gave coolly into his. Several things. In the first place, why do you insist on paying for everything? Both those men have more money than you. Anthony, why, Gloria? They're my guests. Gloria, that's no reason why you should pay for a bottle of champagne Rachel Barnes smashed. Dick tried to fix that second taxi bill and you wouldn't let him. Anthony, why, Gloria? Gloria, when we have to keep selling bonds to even pay our bills, it's time to cut down on excess generosity. Moreover, I wouldn't be quite so attentive to Rachel Barnes. Her husband doesn't like it any more than I do. Anthony, why, Gloria? Gloria, mimicking him sharply. Why, Gloria, but that's happened a little too often this summer. With every pretty woman you meet, it's grown to be a sort of habit. And I'm not going to stand it. If you can play around, I can, too. Then, as an afterthought. By the way, this Fred person isn't a second Joe Hall, is he? Anthony, heavens know. He probably came up to get me to weadle some money out of grandfather for his flock. Gloria turns away from a very depressed Anthony and returns to her guests. By nine o'clock, these can be divided into two classes. Those who have been drinking consistently and those who have taken little or nothing. In the second group are the Barneses, Muriel and Frederick E. Paramore. Muriel, I wish I could write. I get these ideas, but I never seem to be able to put them into words. Dick, as Goliath said, he understood how David felt, but he couldn't express himself. The remark was immediately adopted for a motto by the Philistines. Muriel, I don't get you. I must be getting stupid in my old age. Gloria, weaving unsteadily among the company like an exhilarated angel. If anyone's hungry, there's some French pastry on the dining room table. Moray can't tolerate those Victorian designs it comes in. Muriel, violently amused. I'll say you're tight, Moray. Her bosom is still a pavement that she offers to the hoofs of many passing stallions, hoping that their iron shoes may strike even a spark of romance in the darkness. This year's Barnes and Paramore have been engaged in conversation upon some wholesome subject, a subject so wholesome that Mr. Barnes has been trying for several moments to creep into the more tainted air around the central lounge, whether Paramore is lingering in the Grey House out of politeness or curiosity, or in order at some future time to make a sociological report on the decadence of American life. It is problematical. Moray, Fred, I imagined you were very broad-minded. Paramore, I am. Muriel, me too. I believe one religion's as good as another and everything. Paramore, there's some good in all religions. Muriel, I'm a Catholic, but as I always say, I'm not working at it. Paramore, with a tremendous burst of tolerance, the Catholic religion is a very, a very powerful religion. Moray, well, such a broad-minded man should consider the raised plane of sensation and the stimulated optimism contained in this cocktail. Paramore, taking the drink, rather defiantly. Thanks, I'll try one. Moray, one, outrageous, here we have a class of 1910 reunion and you refuse to be even a little pickled. Come on, here's a health to King Charles, here's a health to King Charles, bring the bowl that you boast. Paramore joins in with a hearty voice. Moray, fill the cup, Frederick. You know everything's subordinated to nature's purposes with us, and her purpose with you is to make you a rip-roaring tipler. Paramore, if a fellow can drink like a gentleman, Moray, what is a gentleman anyway? Anthony, a man who never has pins under his coat lapel. Moray, nonsense. A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich. Dick, he's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper. Rachel, a man who never gives an impersonation of a dope fiend. Moray, an American who can fool an English butler into thinking he's one. Muriel, a man who comes from a good family and went to Yale or Harvard or Princeton and has money and dance as well and all that. Moray, at last the perfect definition. Cardinal Newman's is now a back number. Paramore, I think we ought to look on the question more broad mindedly. Was it Abraham Lincoln who said that a gentleman is one who never inflicts pain? Moray, it's attributed, I believe, to General Lindendorf. Paramore, surely you're joking. Moray, have another drink. Paramore, I oughtn't to. Lowering his voice for Moray's ear alone. What if I were to tell you this is the third drink I've ever taken in my life? Dick starts the phonograph, which provokes Muriel to rise and sway from side to side, her elbows against her ribs, her forearms perpendicular to her body and out like fins. Muriel, oh, let's take up the rugs and dance. This suggestion is received by Anthony and Gloria with interior groans and sickly smiles of acquiescence. Muriel, come on, you lazy bones. Get up and move the furniture back. Dick, wait till I finish my drink. Moray, intent on his purpose towards Paramore. I'll tell you what, let's each fill one glass, drink it off, and then we'll dance. A wave of protest which breaks against the rock of Moray's insistence. Muriel, my head is simply going round now. Rachel, in an undertone to Anthony. Do Gloria tell you to stay away from me? Anthony, confused, why, certainly not, of course not. Rachel smiles at him inscrutably. Two years have given her a sort of hard, well-groomed beauty. Moray, holding up his glass. Here's to the defeat of democracy and the fall of Christianity, Muriel, now really. She flashes a mock reproachful glance at Moray, and then drinks. They all drink, with varying degrees of difficulty. Muriel, clear the floor. It seems inevitable that this process is to be gone through, so Anthony and Gloria join in the great moving of tables, piling of chairs, rolling of carpets, and breaking of lamps. When the furniture has been stacked in ugly masses at the sides, there appears a space about eight feet square. Muriel, oh, let's have music. Moray, Tenna will render the love song of an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist. Amid some confusion due to the fact that Tenna has retired for the night, preparations are made for the performance. The pajama Japanese, flute in hand, is wrapped in a comforter and placed in a chair atop one of the tables, where he makes a ludicrous and grotesque spectacle. Paramore is perceptibly drunk and so unwraptured with the notion that he increases the effect by simulating funny paper staggers and even venturing on an occasional hiccough. Paramore to Gloria, wanna dance with me? Gloria, no sir, wanna do the swan dance, can you do it? Paramore, sure, do them all. Gloria, all right, you start from that side of the room and I'll start from this. Muriel, let's go. Then Bedlam creeps screaming out of the bottles. Tenna plunges into the recondite mazes of the train song, the plaintive toodle toot, blending its melancholy cadences with the poor butterfly tink-a-tink by the bossam's waiting of the phonograph. Muriel is too weak with laughter to do more than cling desperate to barns, who, dancing with the ominous rigidity of an army officer, tramps without humor around the small space. Anthony is trying to hear Rachel's whisper without attracting Gloria's attention. But the grotesque, the unbelievable, the histrionic incident is about to occur, one of those incidents in which life seems set upon the passionate imitation of the lowest forms of literature. Paramore has been trying to emulate Gloria and as the commotion reaches its height, he begins to spin around and round, more and more dizzily. He staggers, recovers, staggers again, then falls in the direction of the hall, almost into the arms of old Adam Patch, whose approach has been rendered inaudible by the pandemonium in the room. Adam Patch is very white. He leans upon a stick. The man with him is Edward Shuddleworth, and it is he who seizes Paramore by the shoulder and deflects the course of his fall away from the venerable philanthropist. The time required for quiet to descend upon the room, like a monstrous pall, may be estimated at two minutes, though for a short period after that, the phonograph gags and the notes of the Japanese train song dribble from the end of Tana's flute. Of the nine people, only Barnes, Paramore, and Tana are unaware of the latecomer's identity. Of the nine, not one is aware that Adam Patch has that mourning made a contribution of $50,000 to the cause of national prohibition. It is given to Paramore to break the gathering silence, the high tide of his life's depravity is reached in this incredible remark. Paramore, calling rapidly toward the kitchen on his hands and knees, I'm not a guest here, I work here. Again silence falls, so deep now, so weighted with intolerably contagious apprehension that Rachel gives a nervous little giggle, and Dick finds himself telling over and over a line from Swinburne, grotesquely appropriate to the scene. One gaunt bleak blossom of sentless breath. Out of the hush, the voice of Anthony, sober and strained, saying something to Adam Patch, then this too dies away. Shuttleworth, passionately. Your grandfather thought he would motor over to see your house, I phoned from Rye and left a message. A series of little gasps emanating, apparently, from nowhere, from no one, fall into the next pause. Anthony is the color of chalk. Gloria's lips are parted, and her level gaze at the old man is tense and frightened. There is not one smile in the room. Not one? Or does cross patches drawn mouth tremble slightly open to expose the even rose of his thin teeth? He speaks, five mild and simple words. Adam Patch, we'll go back now, Shuttleworth. And that is all. He turns and assisted by his cane, goes out through the hall, through the front door, and with hellish portentiousness, his uncertain footsteps crunch on the gravel path under the August moon. Retrospect. In this extremity there were like two goldfish in a bowl from which all water had been drawn. They could not even swim across to each other. Gloria would be 26 in May. There was nothing she had said that she wanted, except to be young and beautiful for a long time, to be gay and happy, and to have money and love. She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately. She had been married over two years. At first there had been days of serene understanding arising to ecstasies of proprietorship and pride. Alternating these periods had occurred sporadic hates enduring a short hour and forgetfulness lasting no longer than an afternoon. That had been for half a year. Then the serenity, the content, had become less jubilant, had become gray. Very rarely, with the spur of jealousy or forced separation, the ancient ecstasies returned. The apparent communion of soul and soul, the emotional excitement, it was possible for her to hate Anthony for as much as a full day to be carelessly incensed at him for as long as a week. Recrimination had displaced affection as an indulgence, almost as an entertainment, and there were nights when they would go to sleep trying to remember who was angry and who should be reserved the next morning. And as the second year waned, there had entered two new elements. Gloria realized that Anthony had become capable of utter indifference toward her, a temporary indifference, more than half lethargic, but one from which she could no longer stir him by a whispered word or a certain intimate smile. There were days when her caresses affected him as a sort of suffocation. She was conscious of these things. She never entirely admitted them to herself. It was only recently that she perceived that in spite of her adoration of him, her jealousy, her servitude, her pride, she fundamentally despised him, and her contempt blended indistinguishably with her other emotions. All this was her love, the vital and feminine illusion that had directed itself toward him one April night, many months before. On Anthony's part, she was, in spite of these qualifications, his sole preoccupation. Had he lost her, he would have been a broken man, wretchedly and sentimentally absorbed in her memory for the remainder of life. He seldom took pleasure in an entire day spent alone with her, except on occasions he preferred to have a third person with them. There were times when he felt if he were not left absolutely alone, he would go mad. There were a few times when he definitely hated her. In his cups he was capable of short attractions toward other women, the hitherto suppressed outcroppings of an experimental temperament. That spring, that summer, they had speculated upon future happiness, how they were to travel from summer land to summer land, returning eventually to a gorgeous estate and possibly idyllic children, then entering diplomacy or politics to accomplish, for a while, beautiful and important things, until finally as a white-haired, beautifully silkily white-haired couple they were to lull about in serene glory worshiped by the bourgeoisie of their land. These times were to begin when we get our money. It was on such dreams rather than on any satisfaction with their increasingly irregular, increasingly dissipated life that their hope rested. On gray mornings, when the jests of the night before had shrunk to ribaldries without wit or dignity, they could, after a fashion, bring out this batch of common hopes and count them over, then smile at each other and repeat, by way of clinching the matter, the terse yet sincere Nietzscheanism of Gloria's defiant, I don't care. Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous. There was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement, not an uncommon phenomenon in the British aristocracy of a hundred years ago, but a somewhat alarming one in a civilization steadily becoming more temperate and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fiber, not so much in what they did as in their subtle reactions to the civilization about them. In Gloria had been born something that she had hitherto never needed, the skeleton, incomplete but nevertheless unmistakable, of her ancient abhorrence, a conscience. This admission to herself was coincidental with the slow decline of her physical courage. Then on the August morning after Adam Patch's unexpected call, they awoke, nauseated and tired, dispirited with life, capable of only one pervasive emotion, fear, panic. Well, Anthony sat up in bed and looked down at her. The corners of his lips were drooping with depression. His voice was strained and hollow. Her reply was to raise her hand to her mouth and begin a slow, precise nibbling at her finger. We've done it, he said after a pause. Then, as she was still silent, he became exasperated. Why don't you say something? What on earth do you want me to say? What are you thinking? Nothing. Then stop biting your finger. Insued a short, confused discussion of whether or not she had been thinking, it seemed essential to Anthony that she should muse aloud upon last night's disaster. Her silence was a method of settling the responsibility on him. For her part, she saw no necessity for speech. The moment required that she should gnaw at her finger like a nervous child. I've got to fix up this damn mess with my grandfather, he said with uneasy conviction. A faint newborn respect was indicated by his use of my grandfather instead of grandpa. You can't, she affirmed abruptly. You can't ever, he'll never forgive you as long as he lives. Perhaps not, agreed Anthony miserably. Still, I might possibly square myself by some sort of reformation and all that sort of thing. He looked sick, she interrupted, pale as flower. He is sick, I told you that three months ago. I wish he died last week, she said petulantly, inconsiderate old fool. Neither of them laughed. But let me just say, she added quietly, the next time I see you acting with any woman like you did with Rachel Barnes last night, I'll leave you, just like that. I'm simply not going to stand it. Anthony coiled, oh, don't be absurd, he protested. You know there's no woman in the world for me except you, non-dearest. His attempt at a tender note failed miserably. The more imminent danger stalked back into the foreground. If I went to him, suggested Anthony, and said with appropriate biblical quotations that I walked too long in the way of unrighteousness and at last seen the light, he broke off and glanced with a whimsical expression at his wife. I wonder what he'd do, I don't know. She was speculating as to whether or not their guests would have the acumen to leave directly after breakfast. Not for a week did Anthony muster the courage to go to Tarrytown. The prospect was revolting, and left alone he would have been incapable of making the trip. But if his will had deteriorated in these past three years, so had his power to resist urging. Gloria compelled him to go. It was all very well to wait a week, she said, for that would give his grandfather's violent and immocity time to cool, but to wait longer would be an error. He would give it a chance to harden. He went, intrepidation, and vainly. Adam Patch was not well, said Shettleworth indignantly. Positive instructions had been given that no one was to see him. Before the ex-jin physicians, vindictive eye, Anthony's front wilted. He walked out to his taxi cab with what was almost a slink, recovering only a little of his self-respect as he boarded the train. Glad to escape, boylike, to the wonder palaces of consolation that still rose and glittered in his own mind. Gloria was scornful when he returned to Marietta. Why had he not forced his way in? That was what she would have done. Between them they drafted a letter to the old man, and after considerable revision sent it off. It was half an apology, half a manufactured explanation. The letter was not answered. Came a day in September, a day slashed with alternate sun and rain, sun without warmth, rain without freshness. On that day they left the Grey House, which had seen the flower of their love. Four chunks and three monstrous crates were piled in the dismantled room where, two years before, they had sprawled lazily, thinking in terms of dreams, remote, languorous content. The room echoed with emptiness. Gloria, in a new brown dress, edged with fur, sat upon a trunk in silence, and Anthony walked nervously to and fro, smoking, as they waited for the truck that would take their things to the city. "'What are those?' she demanded, pointing to some books piled on one of the crates. That's my old stamp collection.' He confessed cheaply. I forgot to pack it. Anthony, it's so silly to carry it around. Well, I was looking through it the day we left the apartment last spring, and I decided not to store it. "'Can't you sell it? Haven't we enough junk?' I'm sorry,' he said humbly. With a thunderous rattling, the truck rolled up to the door. Gloria shook her fist defiantly at the four walls. I'm so glad to go. She cried, so glad. Oh, my God, how I hate this house!' So the brilliant and beautiful lady went up with her husband to New York. On the very train that bore them away, they quarreled. Her bitter words had the frequency, the regularity, the inevitability of the stations they passed. Don't be cross, begged Anthony piteously. We've got nothing but each other, after all. We haven't even that most of the time, cried Gloria. When haven't we? A lot of times, beginning with one occasion on the station platform at Redgate, you don't mean to say that, no, she interrupted coolly. I don't brood over it. It came and went, and when it went, it took something with it. She finished abruptly. Anthony sat in silence, confused, depressed. The drab visions of train side, Mamera neck, large mont, fry, pellum manor, succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually his country. He found himself remembering how, on one summer morning, they too had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected if forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one, otherwise it was a disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile and longing to drift and dream. No one drifted except to maelstroms. No one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastical nightmares of indecision and regret. Pellum. They had quarreled in Pellum because Gloria must drive. And when she set her little foot on the accelerator, the car had jumped off spunkily and their two heads had jerked back like marionettes worked by a single string. The Bronx, the houses gathering and gleaming in the sun, which was falling now through the wide refulgent skies and tumbling caravans of light down the streets. New York, he supposed, was home. The city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. Here on the outskirts, absurd stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset, posed for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River. The train moved in through the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating streets of the Upper East Side, each one passing the car window like the space between the spokes of a gigantic wheel, each one with its vigorous, colorful revelation of poor children, swarming in feverish activity like vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned rotund, moon-shaped mothers as constellations of this sordid heaven, women like dark, imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like great bags of abominably dirty laundry. I like these streets, observed Anthony aloud. I always feel as though it's a performance being staged for me, as though the second I've passed they'll all stop leaping and laughing and instead grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad, but seldom in this country. Down in a tall, busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores. In the door of each stood a dark little man watching the passers from intent eyes, eyes gleaming with suspicion, with pride, with clarity, with cupidity, with comprehension. New York, he could not dissociate it now from the slow, upward creep of this people. The little stores growing, expanding, consolidating, moving, watched over with hawk's eyes and a bee's attention to detail. They slathered out on all sides. It was impressive. In perspective it was tremendous. Gloria's voice broke in with strange appropriateness upon his thoughts. I wonder where Blockman spent this summer. End of book two, chapter three, The Broken Loot, part one of two.