 Book 2, Chapter 3, Part 2 of 2, of The Beautiful and Damned. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Book 2, Chapter 3, The Broken Loot, Part 2 of 2. The Apartment. After the sureties of youth, there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jurker, this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in this scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain impractical ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties, the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Everything comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied. The values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality. It has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future. So we cease to be impulsive, convinceable men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins. We substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity. We value safety above romance. We become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships, and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside for the task. Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed. This gradual change had taken place through the past several years, accelerated by a succession of anxieties preying on his mind. There was, first of all, the sense of waste, always dormant in his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of his position. In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant. In his early twenties the conviction of the futility of effort, of the wisdom of adnogation, had been confirmed by the philosophies he had admired, as well as by his association with Maury Noble, and later with his wife. Yet there had been occasions, just before his first meeting with Gloria, for example, and when his grandfather had suggested he should go abroad, as a war correspondent, upon which his dissatisfaction had given him almost to a positive step. One day, just before they left Marietta for the last time, carelessly turning over the pages of a Harvard alumni bulletin, he had found a column which told him what his contemporaries had been about in this six years since graduation. Most of them were in business, it was true, and several were converting the heathen of China or America to a nebulous Protestantism. But a few, he found, were working constructively at jobs that were neither sinecures nor There was Calvin Boyd, for instance, who, though barely out of medical school, had discovered a new treatment for typhus, had shipped abroad and was mitigating some of the civilization that the great powers had brought to Serbia. There was Eugene Bronson, whose articles in the New Democracy were stamping him as a man with ideas transcending both vulgar timelines and popular hysteria. There was a man named Daley, who had been suspended from the faculty of a righteous university for preaching Marxian doctrines in the classroom. In art, science, politics, he saw the authentic personalities of his time emerging. There was even Severance, the quarterback, who had given up his life rather neatly and gracefully with a foreign legion on the Azena. He laid down the magazine and thought for a while about these diverse men. In the days of his integrity he would have defended his attitude to the last, an epicurus in Nirvana. He would have cried that to struggle was to believe, to believe was to limit. He would as soon have become a churchgoer because the prospect of immortality gratified him as he would have considered entering the leather business because the intensity of the competition would have kept him from unhappiness. But at present he had no such delicate scruples. This autumn, as his twenty-ninth year began, he was inclined to close his mind to many things. To avoid prying deeply into motives and first causes, I am mostly to long passionately for security from the world and from himself. He hated to be alone. As has been said he often dreaded being alone with Gloria. Because of this chasm which his grandfather's visit had opened before him and the consequent revulsion from his late mode of life, it was inevitable that he should look around in this suddenly hostile city for the friends and environments that had once seemed the warmest and most secure. His first step was a desperate attempt to get back his old apartment. In the spring of nineteen-twelve he had signed a four-year lease at seventeen-hundred a year with an option of renewal. This lease had expired the previous May. When he had first rented the rooms they had been mere potentialities scarcely to be discerned as that. But Anthony had seen into these potentialities and arranged in the lease that he and the landlord should each spend a certain amount in improvements. Renz had gone up in the past four years, and last spring, when Anthony had waved his option, the landlord, a Mr. Soenberg, had realized that he could get a much bigger price for what was now a pre-possessing apartment. Accordingly, when Anthony approached him on the subject in September he was met with Soenberg's offer of a three-year lease at twenty-five-hundred a year. Thus it seemed Anthony was outrageous. It meant that well over a third of their income would be consumed in rent. In vain he argued that his own money, his own ideas in the repartitioning, had made the rooms attractive. In vain he offered two thousand dollars, twenty-two hundred, though they could ill-afford it. Mr. Soenberg was obdurate. It seemed that two other gentlemen were considering it. Just that sort of apartment was in demand at the moment, and it would scarcely be business to give it to Mr. Patch. Besides, though he had never mentioned it before, several of the other tenants had complained of noise during the previous winter, singing and dancing late at night, that sort of thing. Internally raging, Anthony hurried back to the Ritz to report his discomforture to Gloria. I can just see you, she stormed, letting him back you down. What could I say? You could have told him what he was. I wouldn't have stood it. No other man in the world would have stood it. You just let people order you around, and cheat you, and bully you, and take advantage of you, as if you were a silly little boy. It's absurd. Oh, for heaven's sake, don't lose your temper. I know, Anthony, but you are such an ass. Well, possibly. Anyway, we can't afford that apartment, but we can't afford it better than living here at the Ritz. You were the one who insisted on coming here. Yes, because I knew you'd be miserable in a cheap hotel. Of course I would. At any rate, we've got to find a place to live. How much can we pay? She demanded. Well, we can pay even his price if we sell more bonds, but we agreed last night that until I had gotten something definite to do, we— Oh, I know all that. I asked you how much we can pay out of just our income. They say you ought not to pay more than a fourth. How much is a fourth? One hundred and fifty a month. Do you mean to say we've only got six hundred dollars coming in every month? A subdued note crept into her voice. Of course, he answered angrily, do you think we've gone on spending more than twelve thousand a year without cutting way into our capital? I knew we'd sold bonds, but have we spent that much a year? How did we? Her awe increased. Oh, I'll look in those careful account books we kept, he remarked ironically, and added, Two rents, a good part of the time, clothes, travel, what, each of those springs in California cost about four thousand dollars, that darned car was an expense from start to finish, and parties and amusements and oh, one thing and another. They were both excited now, and inordinately depressed. The situation seemed worse in the actual telling, Gloria, than it had when he had first made the discovery himself. You've got to make some money, she said suddenly. I know it. And you've got to make another attempt to see your grandfather. I will. When? When we get settled. This eventuality occurred a week later. They rented a small apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street at one hundred and fifty a month. It included bedroom, living room, kitchenette and bath in a thin white stone apartment house. And though the rooms were too small to display Anthony's best furniture, they were clean, new, and, in a blonde and sanitary way, not unattractive. Bounds had gone abroad to enlist in the British army, and in his place they tolerated, rather than enjoyed, the services of a gaunt, big-boned Irish woman whom Gloria loathed because she discussed the glories of Sinn Fein as she served breakfast. But they had vowed they would have no more Japanese and English servants were for the present hard to obtain. Like bounds the woman prepared only breakfast, their other meals they took at restaurants and hotels. What finally drove Anthony post-haste up to Tarrytown was an announcement in several New York papers that Adam Patch, the multimillionaire, the philanthropist, the venerable uplifter, was seriously ill and not expected to recover. The Kitten. Anthony could not see him. The doctor's instructions were that he was to talk to no one, said Mr. Shuddleworth, who offered kindly to take any message that Anthony might care to entrust with him and deliver it to Adam Patch when his condition permitted. But by obvious innuendo he confirmed Anthony's melancholy inference that the prodigal grandson would be particularly unwelcome at the bedside. At one point in the conversation Anthony, with Gloria's positive instructions in mind, made a move as though to brush by the secretary. But Shuddleworth, with a smile, squared his brawny shoulders, and Anthony saw how futile such an attempt would be. Miserably intimidated, he returned to New York, where husband and wife passed a restless week. A little incident that occurred one evening indicated to what tension their nerves were drawn. Walking home along a cross-street after dinner, Anthony noticed a night-bound cat prowling near a railing. I always have an instinct to kick a cat, he said idly. I like them. I yield it to it once. When? Oh, years ago, before I met you. One night between the acts of a show, cold night like this, and I was a little tight, one of the first times I was ever tight, he added. The poor little beggar was looking for a place to sleep, I guess, and I was in a mean mood. So it took my fancy to kick it. Oh, the poor kitty, cried Gloria, sincerely moved. Inspired with the narrative instinct, Anthony enlarged on the theme. It was pretty bad, he admitted. The poor little beast turned around and looked at me rather plaintively as though hoping I'd pick him up and be kind to him. He was really just a kitten. And before he knew it, a big foot launched out at him and caught his little back. Oh! Gloria's cry was full of anguish. It was such a cold night, he continued perversely, keeping his voice upon a melancholy tone. I guess it expected kindness from somebody, and it got only pain. He broke off suddenly. Gloria was sobbing. They had reached home, and when they entered the apartment she threw herself upon the lounge, crying as though he had struck at her very soul. Oh, the poor little kitty! She repeated piteously. The poor little kitty, so cold. Gloria, don't come near me. Please, don't come near me. You killed the soft little kitty. Touched, Anthony knelt beside her. Dear, he said, oh, Gloria, darling, it isn't true. I invented it, every word of it. But she would not believe him. There had been something in the details he had chosen to describe that made her cry herself to sleep that night for the kitten, for Anthony, for herself, for the pain and bitterness and cruelty of all the world. The passing of an American moralist. Old Adam died on a midnight of late November, with a pious compliment to his god on his thin lips. He, who had been flattered so much, faded out flattering the omnipotent abstraction, which he fancied he might have angered in the more lascivious moments of his youth. It was announced that he had arranged some sort of an armistice with the deity, the terms of which were not made public, though they were thought to have included a large cash payment. All the newspapers printed his biography, and two of them ran short editorials on his sterling worth, in his part in the drama of industrialism, with which he had grown up. They referred guardedly to the reforms he had sponsored and financed. The memories of Comstock and Cato the Sensor were resuscitated and paraded like gaunt ghosts through the columns. Every newspaper remarked that he was survived by a single grandson, Anthony Comstock Patch, of New York. The burial took place in the family plot at Tarrytown. Anthony and Gloria rode in the first carriage, too worried to feel grotesque, both trying desperately to glean presage of fortune from the faces of retainers who had been with him at the end. They awaited a frantic week for decency, and then, having received no notification of any kind, Anthony called up his grandfather's lawyer. Mr. Brett was not in. He was expected back in an hour. Anthony left his telephone number. It was the last day of November, cool and crackling outside, with a lusterless sun peering bleakly in at the windows. While they waited for the call, ostensibly engaged in reading, the atmosphere, within and without, seemed pervaded with a deliberate rendition of the pathetic fallacy. After an interminable while, the bell jingled, and Anthony, starting violently, took up the receiver. Hello? His voice was strained and hollow. Yes, I did leave word. Who is this, please? Yes. Why, it was about the estate. Naturally I'm interested, and I've received no word about the reading of the will. I thought you might not have my address. What? Yes. Gloria fell on her knees. The intervals between Anthony's speeches were like tourniquets winding on her heart. She found herself helplessly twisting the large buttons from a velvet cushion. Then, that's very, very odd. That's very odd. That's very odd. Not even any mention, or any reason? His voice sounded faint and far away. She uttered a little sound, half gasp, half cry. Yes, I'll see. All right, thanks, thanks. The phone clicked. Her eyes, looking along the floor, saw his feet cut the pattern of a patch of sunlight on the carpet. She rose and faced him with a gray level glance just as his arms folded about her. My dearest, he whispered huskily, he did it, god damn him. Next day. Who are the heirs? asked Mr. Haidt. You see, when you can tell me so little about it. Mr. Haidt was tall and bent and beetle-browed. He had been recommended to Anthony as an astute and tenacious lawyer. I only know vaguely, answered Anthony. A man named Shuttleworth, who was a sort of pet of his, has the whole thing in charge as administrator or trustee or something, all except the direct bequest to charity and the provisions for servants and for those two cousins in Idaho. How distant are the cousins? Oh, third or fourth, anyway. I never even heard of them. Mr. Haidt nodded comprehensively. And you want to contest a provision of the will? I guess so, admitted Anthony, helplessly. I want to do what sounds most hopeful. That's what I want you to tell me. You want them to refuse probate to the will? Anthony shook his head. You've got me. I haven't any idea what probate is. I want a share of the estate. Suppose you tell me some more details. For instance, do you know why the testator disinherited you? Why, yes, began Anthony. You see, he was always a sucker for moral reform and all that. I know, interjected Mr. Haidt humorlessly. And I don't suppose he ever thought I was much good. I didn't go into business, you see, but I feel certain that, up to last summer, I was one of the beneficiaries. We had a house out in Marietta, and one night grandfather got the notion that he'd come over and see us. It just happened that there was a rather gay party going on, and he arrived without any warning. Well, he took one look, he in this fellow shuttle worth, and then turned around and tore right back to Tarrytown. After that, he never answered my letters or even let me see him. He was a prohibitionist, wasn't he? He was everything, regular religious maniac. How long before his death was the will made that disinherited you? Recently, I mean, since August. And you think that the direct reason for his not leaving you the majority of his estate was his displeasure with your recent actions? Yes. Mr. Haidt considered. Upon what grounds was Anthony thinking of contesting the will? Why, isn't there something about evil influence? Undue influence is one ground, but it's the most difficult. You would have to show that such pressure was brought to bear so that the deceased was in a condition where he disposed of his property contrary to his intentions. Well, suppose this fellow shuttle worth dragged him over to Marietta, just when he thought some sort of a celebration was probably going on. That wouldn't have any bearing on the case. There's a strong division between advice and influence. You'd have to prove that the secretary had a sinister intention. I'd suggest some other grounds. A will is automatically refused probate in case of insanity, drunkenness. Here, Anthony smiled, or feeble-mindedness through premature old age. But, objected Anthony, his private physician, being one of the beneficiaries, would testify that he wasn't feeble-minded, and he wasn't. As a matter of fact, he probably did just what he intended to with his money. It was perfectly consistent with everything he'd ever done in his life. Well, you see, feeble-mindedness is a great deal-like undue influence. It implies that the property wasn't disposed of as originally intended. The most common ground is duress, physical pressure. Anthony shook his head. Not much chance on that, I'm afraid. Undue influence sounds best to me. After more discussion, so technical as to be largely unintelligible to Anthony, he retained Mr. Haight as counsel. The lawyer proposed an interview with Shuttleworth, who, jointly with Wilson, Heimer, and Hardy, was executor of the will. Anthony was to come back later in the week. It transpired that the estate consisted of approximately $40 million. The largest bequest to an individual was of one million to Edward Shuttleworth, who received, in addition, 30,000 a year salary as administrator of the $30 million trust fund left to be doled out to various charities and reform societies practically at his own discretion. The remaining nine millions were proportioned among the two cousins in Idaho and about 25 other beneficiaries, friends, secretaries, servants, and employees who had, at one time or another, earned the seal of Adam Patch's approval. At the end of another fortnight, Mr. Haight, on a retainer's fee of $15,000, had begun preparations for contesting the will. The Winter of Discontent. Before there had been two months in the little apartment on 57th Street, it had assumed for both of them the same, indefinable, but almost material taint that had impregnated the gray house in Marietta. There was the odor of tobacco always. Both of them smoked incessantly. It was in their clothes, their blankets, the curtains, and the ash-littered carpets. Added to this was the wretched aura of stale wine with its inevitable suggestion of beauty gone foul and revelry remembered in disgust. About a particular set of glass goblets on the sideboard, the odor was particularly noticeable, and in the main room, the mahogany table was ringed with white circles where glasses had been set down upon it. There had been many parties, people broke things, people became sick in Gloria's bathroom, people spilled wine, people made unbelievable messes of the kitchenette. These things were a regular part of their existence. Despite the resolutions of many Mondays, it was tacitly understood, as the weekend approached, that it should be observed with some sort of unholy excitement. When Saturday came, they would not discuss the matter, but would call up this person or that from among their circle of sufficiently irresponsible friends and suggest a rendezvous. Only after the friends had gathered and Anthony had set out to canters would he murmur casually, I guess I'll have just one high ball myself. Then they were off for two days, realizing on a wintry dawn that they had been the noisiest and most conspicuous members of the noisiest and most conspicuous party at the Boumitch or the Club Ramay, or at other resorts much less particular about the hilarity of their clientele. They would find that they had somehow squandered eighty or ninety dollars, how they never knew. They customarily attributed it to the general penury of the friends who had accompanied them. It began to be not unusual for the more sincere of their friends to remonstrate with them in the very course of a party and to predict a somber end for them in the loss of Gloria's looks and the Anthony's constitution. The story of the summarily interrupted revel in Marietta had, of course, leaked out in detail. Miriel doesn't mean to tell everyone she knows, said Gloria to Anthony, but she thinks everyone she tells is the only one she's going to tell. And, diaphoniously veiled, the tale had been given a conspicuous place in the town tattle. When the terms of Adam Patch's will were made public and the newspapers printed items concerning Anthony's suit, the story was beautifully rounded out to Anthony's infinite disparagement. They began to hear rumors about themselves from all quarters, rumors founded usually on a soup sawn of truth, but overlaid with preposterous and sinister detail. Outwardly they showed no signs of deterioration. Gloria, at 26, was still the Gloria of 20, her complexion of fresh damp setting for her candid eyes, her hair still a childish glory, darkening slowly from corn color to a deep russet gold, her slender body suggesting ever a nymph running and dancing through orphic groves. Masculine eyes, dozens of them, followed her with a fascinated stare when she walked through a hotel lobby or down the aisle of a theater. Men asked to be introduced to her, fell into prolonged states of sincere admiration, made definite love to her, for she was still a thing of exquisite and unbelievable beauty. And for his part, Anthony had gained rather than lost in appearance. His face had taken on a certain intangible air of tragedy, romantically contrasted with his trim and immaculate person. Early in the winter, when all conversation turned on the probability of America's going into the war, when Anthony was making a desperate and sincere attempt to write, Muriel Kane arrived in New York and came immediately to see them. Like Gloria, she seemed never to change. She knew the latest slang, danced the latest dances and talked of the latest songs in plays with all the fervor of her first season as a New York drifter. Her coyness was eternally new, eternally ineffectual. Her clothes were extreme. Her black hair was bobbed now, like Gloria's. I've come up for the midwinter prom at New Haven, she announced, imparting her delightful secret. Though she must have been older then than any of the boys in college, she managed always to secure some sort of invitation, imagining vaguely that at the next party would occur the flirtation which was to end at the romantic altar. Where have you been? Inquired Anthony, unfailingly amused. I've been at hot springs. It's been slick and peppy this fall, more men. Are you in love, Muriel? What do you mean love? This was the rhetorical question of the year. I'm going to tell you something, she said, switching the subject abruptly. I suppose it's none of my business, but I think it's time for you two to settle down. What, we are settled down. Yes you are, she scoffed archly. Everywhere I go I hear stories of your escapades. Let me tell you, I have an awful time sticking up for you. You needn't bother, said Gloria coldly. Now Gloria, she protested, you know I'm one of your best friends. Gloria was silent, Muriel continued. It's not so much the idea of a woman drinking, but Gloria is so pretty and so many people know her by sight all around that it's naturally conspicuous. What have you heard recently? Demanded Gloria, her dignity going down before her curiosity. Well, for instance, that that party in Marietta killed Anthony's grandfather. Instantly husband and wife were tense with annoyance. Why, I think that's outrageous. That's what they say, persisted Muriel stubbornly. Anthony paced the room. It's preposterous, he declared. The very people we take on at parties shout the story around as a great joke and eventually it gets back to us in some such form as this. Gloria began running her finger through a stray reddish curl. Muriel licked her veil as she considered her next remark. You ought to have a baby. Gloria looked up wearily. We can't afford it. All the people in the slums have them, said Muriel triumphantly. Anthony and Gloria exchanged a smile. They had reached the stage of violent quarrels that were never made up, quarrels that smoldered and broke out again at intervals or died away from sheer indifference. But this visit of Muriel's drew them temporarily together. When the discomfort under which they were living was remarked upon by a third party, it gave them the impetus to face this hostile world together. It was very seldom now that the impulse toward reunion sprang from within. Anthony found himself associating his own existence with that of the apartment's night elevator man, a pale, scraggly-bearded person of about sixty, with an error of being somewhat above his station. It was probably because of this quality that he had secured the position. He made him a pathetic and memorable figure of failure. Anthony recollected, without humor, a hoary jest about the elevator man's career being a matter of ups and downs. It was at any rate an enclosed life of infinite dreariness. Each time Anthony stepped into the car, he waited breathlessly for the old man's, well, I guess we're going to have some sunshine today. Anthony thought how little rain or sunshine he would enjoy shut into that close little cage in the smoke-colored, windowless hall. A darkling figure, he attained tragedy in leaving the life that had used him so shabbily. Three young gunmen came in one night, tied him up, and left him on a pile of coal in the cellar while they went through the trunk room. When the janitor found him the next morning, he had collapsed from chill. He died of pneumonia four days later. He was replaced by a glib Martinique Negro with an incongruous British accent and a tendency to be surly whom Anthony detested. The passing of the old man had approximately the same effect on him that the kitten story had had on Gloria. He was reminded of the cruelty of all life and inconsequence of the increasing bitterness of his own. He was writing, and in earnest at last, he had gone to Dick and listened for a tense hour to an elucidation of those minutiae of procedure which hitherto he had rather scornfully looked down upon. He needed money immediately. He was selling bonds every month to pay their bills. Dick was frank and explicit. So as far as articles on literary subjects and these obscure magazines go, you couldn't make enough money to pay a rent. Of course, if a man has the gift of humor or a chance at a big biography or some specialized knowledge, he may strike it rich. But for you, fiction's the only thing. You say you need money right away? I certainly do. Well, it'd be a year and a half before you'd make any money out of a novel. Try some popular short stories. And by the way, unless they're exceptionally brilliant, they have to be cheerful and on the side of the heaviest artillery to make you any money. Anthony thought of Dick's recent output which had been appearing in a well-known monthly. It was concerned chiefly with the preposterous actions of a class of sawdust effigies who, one was assured, were New York society people. And it turned as a rule upon questions of the Heverwind's technical purity with mock sociological overtones about the mad antics of the 400. But your stories, exclaimed Anthony aloud, almost involuntarily. Oh, that's different, Dick asserted astoundingly. I have a reputation, you see. So I'm expected to deal with strong themes. Anthony gave an interior start, realizing with this remark how much Richard Caramel had fallen off. Did he actually think these amazing latter productions were as good as his first novel? Anthony went back to the apartment and set to work. He found that the business of optimism was no mean task. After half a dozen feudal starts, he went to the public library and for a week investigated the files of a popular magazine. Then, better equipped, he accomplished his first story, the dictophone of fate. It was founded upon one of his few remaining impressions of that six weeks in Wall Street the year before. It purported to be the sunny tale of an office boy who, quite by accident, hummed a wonderful melody into the dictophone. The cylinder was discovered by the boss's brother, a well-known producer of musical comedy and then immediately lost. The body of the story was concerned with the pursuit of the missing cylinder and the eventual marriage of the noble office boy, now a successful composer, to Miss Rooney, the virtuous stenographer who was half Joan of Arc and half Florence Nightingale. He had gathered that this was what the magazines wanted. He offered, in his protagonists, the customary denizens of the pink and blue literary world, immersing them in a saccharine plot that would offend not a single stomach in Marietta. He had it typed in double space, this last, as advised by a booklet, success as a writer made easy by R. Megs Wittelstein, which assured the ambitious plumber of the futility of perspiration since, after a six-lesson course, he could make at least $1,000 a month. After reading it to a bored Gloria and coaxing from her the immemorial remark that it was better than a lot of stuff that gets published, he satirically affixed the nom de plume of Jules de Sade and enclosed the proper return envelope and sent it off. Following the gigantic labor of conception, he decided to wait until he heard from the first story before beginning another. Dick had told him that he might get as much as $200. If by any chance it did happen to be unsuited, the editor's letter would, no doubt, give him an idea of what changes should be made. It is, without question, the most abominable piece of writing and existence, said Anthony. The editor, quite conceivably, agreed with him. He returned the manuscript with a rejection slip. Anthony sent it off elsewhere and began another story. The second one was called The Little Open Doors. It was written in three days. It concerned the occult, an estranged couple were brought together by a medium in a vaudeville show. There were six altogether, six wretched and pitiable efforts to write down by a man who had never before made a consistent effort to write it all. Not one of them contained a spark of vitality and their total yield of grace and felicity was less than that of an average newspaper column. During their circulation, they collected, all told, 31 rejection slips, headstones for the packages that he would find lying like dead bodies at his door. In mid-January, Gloria's father died and they went again to Kansas City, a miserable trip, for Gloria brooded interminably not upon her father's death but on her mother's. Russell Gilbert's affairs, having been cleared up, they came into possession of about $3,000 at a great amount of furniture. This was in storage, for he had spent his last days in a small hotel. It was due to his death that Anthony made a new discovery concerning Gloria. On the journey east, she disclosed herself, astonishingly, as a bilfist. Why, Gloria, he cried, you don't mean to tell me you believe that stuff. Well, she said defiantly, why not? Because it's fantastic. You know that in every sense of the word, you're an agnostic. You'd laugh at any orthodox form of Christianity and then you come out with the statement that you believe in some silly rule of reincarnation. What if I do? I've heard you and Maury and everyone else for whose intellect I have the slightest respect agree that life as it appears is utterly meaningless but it's always seemed to me that if I were unconsciously learning something here it might not be so meaningless. You're not learning anything. You're just getting tired and if you must have a faith to soften things tick up one that appeals to the reason of someone besides a lot of hysterical women. A person like you oughtn't to accept anything unless it's decently demonstrable. I don't care about truth. I want some happiness. Well, if you've got a decent mind the second has got to be qualified by the first. Any simple soul can delude himself with mental garbage. I don't care, she held out stoutly and what's more I'm not propounding any doctrine. The argument faded off but reoccurred to Anthony several times thereafter. It was disturbing to find this old belief evidently assimilated from her mother inserting itself again under its immemorial disguise as an innate idea. They reached New York in March after an expensive and ill-advised week spent in Hot Springs and Anthony resumed his abortive attempts at fiction. As it became planner to both of them that escape did not lie in the way of popular literature there was a further slipping of their mutual confidence and courage. A complicated struggle went on incessantly between them. All efforts to keep down expenses died away from sheer inertia and by March they were again using any pretext as an excuse for a party. With an assumption of recklessness Gloria tossed out the suggestion that they should take all their money and go on a real spree while it lasted. Anything seemed better than to see it go when unsatisfactory driblets. Gloria, you want parties as much as I do. It doesn't matter about me. Everything I do is in accordance with my ideas to use every minute of these years when I'm young and having the best time I possibly can. How about after that? After that I won't care. Yes, you will. Well, I may, but I won't be able to do anything about it and I'll have had my good time. You'll be the same then. After a fashion we have had our good time, raise the devil and we're in the state of paying for it. Nevertheless the money kept going. There would be two days of gaiety, two days of morose-ness, an endless, almost invariable round. The sharp pull-ups, when they occurred, resulted usually in a spurt of work for Anthony while Gloria, nervous and bored, remained in bed or else chewed abstractedly at her fingers. After a day or so of this they would make an engagement and then, oh, what did it matter? This night, this glow, the cessation of anxiety and the sense that if living was not purposeful it was, at any rate, essentially romantic. Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure. Meanwhile the suit progressed slowly with interminable examinations of witnesses and marshallings of evidence. The preliminary proceedings of settling the estate were finished. Mr. Haight saw no reason why the case should not come up for trial before summer. Blockbin appeared in New York late in March. He had been in England for nearly a year on matters connected with film's par excellence. The process of general refinement was still in progress. Always he dressed a little better, his intonation was mellower, and in his manner there was perceptibly more assurance that the fine things of the world were his by a natural and inalienable right. He called the apartment, remained only an hour during which he talked chiefly of the war and left telling them he was coming again. On his second visit, Anthony was not at home, but an absorbed and excited Gloria greeted her husband later in the afternoon. Anthony, she began, would you still object if I went in the movies? His whole heart hardened against the idea as she seemed to recede from him if only in threat, her presence became again not so much precious as desperately necessary. Oh, Gloria, Blockhead said he'd put me in only if I'm ever going to do anything I'll have to start now, they only want young women. Think of the money, Anthony. For you, yes, but how about me? Don't you know that anything I have is yours too? It's such a hell of a career. He burst out, the moral, the infinitely circumspect, Anthony, and such a hell of a bunch, and I'm so utterly tired of that fellow block man coming here and interfering. I hate theatrical things. It isn't theatrical, it's utterly different. What am I supposed to do? Chase you all over the country? Live on your money? Then make some yourself. The conversation developed into one of the most violent quarrels they had ever had. After the ensuing reconciliation and the inevitable period of moral inertia, she realized that he had taken the life out of the project. Neither of them ever mentioned the probability that Blockman was by no means disinterested, but they both knew that it lay back of Anthony's objection. In April, war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet, a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the 12 apostles, let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German government which aroused them to hysteria. The rest were worked up to a condition of wretching indecency. Any song which contained the word mother and the word Kaiser was assured of a tremendous excess. At last everyone had something to talk about and almost everyone fully enjoyed it as though they had been cast for parts in a somber and romantic play. Anthony, Moray and Dick sent in their applications for officers' training camps and the two latter went about feeling strangely exalted and reproachless. They chattered to each other like college boys of wars being the one excuse for and justification of the aristocrat, and conjured up an impossible cast of officers. To be composed it appeared chiefly of the more attractive alumni of three or four Eastern colleges. It seemed to Gloria that in this huge red light streaming across the nation, even Anthony took on a new glamour. The 10th Infantry arriving in New York from Panama were escorted from saloon to saloon by patriotic citizens to their great bewilderment. West pointers began to be noticed for the first time in years and the general impression was that everything was glorious but not half so glorious as it was going to be pretty soon and that everybody was a fine fellow and every race a great race always accepting Germans and in every strata of society outcasts and scapegoats had but to appear in uniform to be forgiven cheered and wept over by relatives, ex-friends and other strangers. Unfortunately a small and precise doctor decided that there was something to matter with Anthony's blood pressure. He could not conscientiously pass him for an officer's training camp. The Broken Loot. Their third anniversary passed, uncelebrated, unnoticed. The season warmed in thaw, melted into hotter summer, simmered and boiled away. In July the will was offered for probate and upon the contestation was assigned by the surrogate to trial term for trial. The matter was prolonged due to September. There was difficulty in impaneling an unbiased jury because of the moral sentiments involved. To Anthony's disappointment a verdict was finally returned in favor of the testator whereupon Mr. Haight caused a notice of appeal to be served upon Edward Shuddleworth. As the summer waned Anthony and Gloria talked of the things they were to do when the money was theirs and of the places they were to go after the war when they would agree on things again. For both of them look forward to a time when love springing like the phoenix from its own ashes should be born again in its mysterious and unfathomable haunts. He was drafted early in the fall and the examining doctor made no mention of low blood pressure. It was all very purposeless and sad when Anthony told Gloria one night that he wanted, above all things, to be killed. But as always they were sorry for each other for the wrong things at the wrong times. They decided that for the present she was not to go with him to the Southern camp where his contingent was ordered. She would remain in New York to use the apartment to save money and to watch the progress of the case which was pending now in the appellate division of which the calendar Mr. Haight told them was far behind. Almost their last conversation was a senseless quarrel about the proper division of the income. At a word either would have given it all to the other. It was typical of the muddle and confusion of their lives that on the October night when Anthony reported at Grand Central Station for the journey to camp she arrived only in time to catch his eye over the anxious heads of a gathered crowd. Through the dark light of the enclosed train sheds their glances stretched across a hysterical area foul with yellow sobbing and the smells of poor women. They must have pondered upon what they had done to one another and each must have accused himself of drawing the somber pattern through which they were tracing tragically and obscurely. At the last they were too far away for either to see the other's tears. End of book two chapter three part two of two. Book three chapter one part one of two of the beautiful and damned. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Book three chapter one a matter of civilization. Part one of two. At a frantic command from some invisible source Anthony groped his way inside. He was thinking that for the first time in more than three years he was to remain longer than a night away from Gloria. The finality of it appealed to him drearily. It was his clean and lovely girl that he was leaving. They had arrived, he thought, at the most practical financial settlement. She was to have three hundred and seventy five dollars a month. Not too much considering over half of that would go in rent and he was taking fifty to supplement his pay. He saw no need for more. Food, clothes, and quarters would be provided. There were no social obligations for a private. The car was crowded and already thick with breath. It was one of the type known as tourist cars, a sort of brumagem pullman with a bare floor and straw seats that needed cleaning. Nevertheless Anthony greeted it with relief. He had vaguely expected that the trip south would be made in a freight car in one end of which would stand eight horses and in the other end forty men. He had heard the alms carrand chevre huite story so often that it had become confused and ominous. As he rocked down the aisle with his barrack bag slung at his shoulder like a monstrous blue sausage he saw no vacant seats. But after a moment his eye fell on a single space at present occupied by the feet of a short swarthy Sicilian who, with his hat drawn over his eyes, hunched defiantly in the corner. As Anthony stopped beside him he stared up with a scowl, evidently intended to be intimidating. He must have adopted it as a defense against this entire gigantic equation. At Anthony's sharp, that seat taken? He very slowly lifted the feet as though they were a breakable package and placed them with some care upon the floor. His eyes remained on Anthony who, meanwhile, sat down and unbuttoned the uniform coat issued to him at Camp Upton the day before. It chafed him under the arms. Before Anthony could scrutinize the other occupants of the section a young second lieutenant blew in at the upper end of the car and wafted eerily down the aisle announcing in a voice of appalling acerbity, there will be no smoking in this car, no smoking, don't smoke men in this car. As he sailed out at the other end a dozen little clouds of ex-postulation arose on all sides. Oh, cripe, tease, no smoking? Hey, come back here, fella, what's the idea? Two or three cigarettes were shot out through the open windows. Others were retained inside though kept sketchily away from view. From here and there in accents of bravado, of mockery, of submissive humor, a few remarks were dropped that soon melted into the listless and pervasive silence. The fourth occupant of Anthony's section spoke up suddenly. Goodbye, liberty, he said sullenly. Goodbye, everything except being an officer's dog. Anthony looked at him. He was a tall Irishman with an expression molded of indifference and utter disdain. His eyes fell on Anthony as though he expected an answer and then upon the others. Receiving only a defiant stare from the Italian, he groaned and spat noisily on the floor by way of a dignified transition back into tessiturity. A few minutes later, the door opened again and the second lieutenant was born in upon his customary official Zephyr, this time singing out a different tidying. All right, men, smoke if you want to. My mistake, men, it's all right, men. Go on and smoke, my mistake. This time Anthony had a good look at him. He was young, thin, already faded. He was like his own mustache. He was like a great piece of shiny straw. His chin receded faintly. This was offset by a magnificent and unconvincing scowl, a scowl that Anthony was to connect with the faces of many young officers during the ensuing year. Immediately everyone smoked, whether they had previously desired to or not. Anthony's cigarette contributed to the hazy oxidation which seemed to roll back and forth in opalescent clouds with every motion of the train. The conversation which had lapsed between the two impressive visits of the young officer now revived tepidly. The men across the aisle began making clumsy experiments with their straw seats capacity for comparative comfort. Two card games, half-heartedly begun, soon drew several spectators to sitting positions on the arms of seats. In a few minutes Anthony became aware of a persistently obnoxious sound the small defiant Sicilian had fallen audibly asleep. It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm reasonable by courtesy only shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization taken somewhere to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence. Anthony's side opened a newspaper which he had no recollection of buying and began to read by the dim yellow light. 10 o'clock bumped stuffily into 11, the hours clogged and caught and slowed down. Amazingly the train halted along the dark countryside from time to time indulging in short deceitful movements backward or forward and whistling harsh pains into the high October night. Having read his newspaper through editorials, cartoons and war poems, his eye fell on a half column headed Shakespeareville, Kansas. It seemed that the Shakespeareville Chamber of Commerce had recently held an enthusiastic debate as to whether the American soldiers should be known as Sammies or battling Christians. The thought gagged him. He dropped the newspaper, yawned, and let his mind drift off at a tangent. He wondered why Gloria had been late. It seemed so long ago already. He had a pang of elusive loneliness. He tried to imagine from what angle she would regard her new position, what place in her considerations he would continue to hold. The thought acted as a further depressant. He opened his paper and began to read again. The members of the Chamber of Commerce in Shakespeareville had decided upon Liberty Lads. For two days and two nights they rattled southward, making mysterious inexplicable stops in what were apparently arid wastes and then rushing through large cities with a pompous air of hurry. The whimsicalities of this train foreshadowed for Anthony the whimsicalities of all army administration. In the arid wastes they were served from the baggage car with beans and bacon that at first he was unable to eat. He dined scantily on some milk chocolate distributed by a village canteen. But on the second day the baggage car's output began to appear surprisingly palatable. On the third morning the rumor was passed along that within the hour they would arrive at their destination, Camp Hooker. It had become intolerably hot in the car and the men were all in shirt sleeves. The sun came in through the windows, a tired and ancient sun, yellow as parchment and stretched out of shape in transit. It tried to enter in triumphant squares and produced only warped splotches, but it was appallingly steady, so much so, that it disturbed Anthony not to be the pivot of all the inconsequential sawmills and trees and telegraph poles that were turning around him so fast. Outside it played its heavy tremolo over olive roads and fallow cotton fields back of which ran a ragged line of woods broken with eminences of gray rock. The foreground was dotted sparsely with wretched, ill-patched shanties, among which there would flash by, now and then, a specimen of the languid yokelery of South Carolina, or else a strolling darkie with sullen and bewildered eyes. Then the woods moved off and they rolled into a broad space like the baked top of a gigantic cake, sugared with an infinity of tents arranged in geometric figures over its surface. The train came to an uncertain stop and the sun and the poles and the trees faded and his universe rocked itself slowly back to its old usualness with Anthony Patch in the center. As the men, weary and perspiring, crowded out of the car, he smelt that unforgettable aroma that impregnates all permanent camps, the odor of garbage. Camp Hooker was an astonishing and spectacular growth, suggesting a mining town in 1870, the second week. It was a thing of wooden shacks and whitish gray tents, connected by a pattern of roads with hard tan drill grounds fringed with trees. Here and there stood green YMCA houses, unpromising oases, with their muggy odor of wet flannels and closed telephone booths and across from each of them there was usually a canteen swarming with life, presided over indolently by an officer who, with the aid of a sidecar, usually managed to make his detail a pleasant and chatty sinecure. Up and down the dusty roads sped the soldiers of the quartermaster corps, also inside cars. Up and down drove the generals and their government automobiles, stopping now and then to bring unalert details to attention, to frown heavily upon captains marching at the heads of companies, to set the pompous pace in that gorgeous game of showing off, which was taking place triumphantly over the entire area. The first week after the arrival of Anthony's draft was filled with a series of interminable inoculations and physical examinations and with the preliminary drilling. The days left him desperately tired. He had been issued the wrong size shoes by a popular easygoing supply sergeant and in consequence his feet were so swollen that the last hours of the afternoon were an acute torture. For the first time in his life, he could throw himself down on his cot between dinner and afternoon drill call and seeming to sink with each moment deeper into a bottomless bed, drop off immediately to sleep while the noise and laughter around him faded to a pleasant drone of drowsy summer sound. In the morning he awoke, stiff and aching, hollow as a ghost and hurried forth to meet the other ghostly figures who swarmed in the wan company streets while a harsh bugle shrieked and spluttered at the gray heavens. He was in a skeleton infantry company of about a hundred men. After the invariable breakfast of fatty bacon, cold toast and cereal, the entire hundred would rush for the latrines which however well-policed seemed always intolerable like the lavatories in cheap hotels. Out on the field then in ragged order the lame man on his left grotesquely marring Anthony's listless efforts to keep in step, the platoon sergeants either showing off violently to impress the officers in recruits or else quietly lurking in close to the line of march, avoiding both labor and unnecessary visibility. When they reached the field, work began immediately. They peeled off their shirts for calisthenics. This was the only part of the day that Anthony enjoyed. Lieutenant Kretching, who presided at the antics, was sinewy and muscular, and Anthony followed his movements faithfully with the feeling that he was doing something of positive value to himself. The other officers and sergeants walked about among the men with the malice of schoolboys grouping here and there around some unfortunate who lacked muscular control, giving him confused instructions and commands. When they discovered a particularly forlorn ill-nourished specimen, they would linger the full half hour making cutting remarks and snickering among themselves. One little officer named Hopkins, who had been a sergeant in the regular army, was particularly annoying. He took the war as a gift of revenge from the high gods to himself, and the constant burden of his harangues was that these rookies did not appreciate the full gravity and responsibility of the service. He considered that by a combination of foresight and dauntless efficiency, he had raised himself to his current magnificence. He aped the particular tyrannies of every officer under whom he had served in times gone by. His frown was frozen on his brow. Before giving a private a pass to go to town, he would ponderously weigh the effect of such an absence upon the company, the army, and the welfare of the military profession the world over. Lieutenant Crutching, blonde, dull and phlegmatic, introduced Anthony ponderously to the problems of attention, right face, about face, and at ease. His principal defect was his forgetfulness. He often kept to the company straining and aching at attention for five minutes while he stood out in front and explained a new movement. As a result, only those men in the center knew what it was all about. Those on both flanks had been too emphatically impressed with the necessity of staring straight ahead. The drill continued until noon. It consisted of stressing a succession of infinitely remote details. And though Anthony perceived that this was consistent with the logic of war, it nonetheless irritated him, that the same faulty blood pressure which would have been indecent in an officer did not interfere with the duties of a private was a preposterous incongruity. Sometimes, after listening to a sustained invective concerned with a dull and, on the face of it, absurd subject known as military courtesy, he suspected that the dim purpose of the war was to let the regular army officers, men with a mentality and aspirations of schoolboys, have their fling with some real slaughter. He was being grotesquely sacrificed to the 20-year patience of a Hopkins. Of his three tentmates, a flat face, conscientious objector from Tennessee, a big scared pole, and the disdainful Kelt whom he had sat beside on the train. The two former spent the evenings in writing eternal letters home while the Irishman sat in the tent door whistling over and over to himself half a dozen shrill and monotonous bird calls. It was rather to avoid an hour of their company than with any hope of diversion that when the quarantine was lifted at the end of the week he went into town. He caught one of the swarm of jitneys that overran the camp each evening and in half an hour was set down in front of the Stonewall Hotel on the hot and drowsy Main Street. Under the gathering twilight the town was unexpectedly attractive. The sidewalks were peopled by vividly overdressed, over-painted girls who chattered volubly in low, lazy voices by dozens of taxi drivers who assailed passing officers with take you anywhere, lieutenant. And by an intermittent procession of ragged, shuffling, subservient, negroes. Anthony, loitering along through the warm dusk, felt for the first time in years the slow, erotic breath of the south imminent in the hot softness of the air in the pervasive lull of thought and time. He had gone about a block when he was arrested suddenly by a harsh command at his elbow. Haven't you been taught to salute officers? He looked dumbly at the man who addressed him, a stout, black-haired captain who fixed him menacingly with brown pop eyes. Come to attention! The words were literally thundered. A few pedestrians nearby stopped and stared. A soft-eyed girl in her lilac dress tittered to her companion. Anthony came to attention. What's your regiment and company? Anthony told him. After this, when you pass an officer in the street, you straighten up and salute. All right, say yes, sir. Yes, sir. The stout officer grunted, turned sharply and marched down the street. After a moment Anthony moved on. The town was no longer indolent and exotic. The magic was suddenly gone out of the desk. His eyes were turned precipitately inward upon the indignity of his position. He hated that officer, every officer. Life was unendurable. After he had gone half a block, he realized that the girl in the lilac dress, who had giggled at his discomforture, was walking with her friend about ten paces ahead of him. Several times she had turned and stared at Anthony with cheerful laughter and the large eyes that seemed the same color as her gown. At the corner, she and her companion visibly slackened their pace. He must make his choice between joining them and passing obliviously by. He passed, hesitated, then slowed down. In a moment the pair were abreast of him again, dissolved in laughter now, not such strident mirth as he would have expected in the North from actresses in this familiar comedy, but a soft, low rippling, like the overflow from some subtle joke into which he had inadvertently blundered. "'How do you do?' he said. Her eyes were soft as shadows. Were they violet or was it their blue darkness mingling with the gray hues of dusk? "'It's a pleasant evening,' ventured Anthony, uncertainly. "'Sure is,' said the second girl. "'Hasn't been a very pleasant evening for you,' sighed the girl in lilac. Her voice seemed as much a part of the night as the drowsy breeze stirring the wide brim of her hat. He had to have a chance to show off, said Anthony, with a scornful laugh. "'Reckon so,' she agreed. They turned to the corner and moved, lackadaisically up a side street, as if following a drifting cable to which they were attached. In this town, it seemed entirely natural to turn corners like that. It seemed natural to be bound nowhere in particular, to be thinking nothing. The side street was dark, a sudden offshoot into a district of wild rose hedges and little quiet houses set far back from the street. "'Where are you going?' he inquired politely. "'Just going.' The answer was an apology, a question, an explanation. "'Can I stroll along with you?' reckoned so. It was an advantage that her accent was different. He could not have determined the social status of a Southerner from her talk. In New York, a girl of a lower class would have been raucous, unendurable, except through the rosy spectacles of intoxication. Dark was creeping down, talking little, Anthony and careless, casual questions, the other two with provincial economy of phrase and burden. They sauntered past another corner and another. In the middle of a block, they stopped beneath a lamppost. "'I live near here,' explained the other girl. "'I live round the block,' said the girl in lilac. "'Can I see you home?' "'To the corner, if you want to.' The other girl took a few steps backward. Anthony removed his hat. "'You're supposed to salute,' said the girl in lilac, with a laugh. All the soldiers salute. "'I'll learn,' he responded soberly.' The other girl said, "'Well,' hesitated, then added, "'Call me up tomorrow, Dot,' and retreated from the yellow circle of the streetlamp. Then, in silence, Anthony and the girl in lilac walked the three blocks to the small, rickety house which was her home. Outside the wooden gate, she hesitated. "'Well, thanks. Must you go in so soon?' "'I ought to.' "'Can't you stroll around a little longer?' She regarded him dispassionately. "'I don't even know you,' Anthony laughed. "'It's not too late.' "'I reckon I better go in. I thought we might walk down and see a movie. I'd like to. Then I could bring you home. I'd have just enough time. I've got to be in camp by eleven.' It was so dark that he could scarcely see her now. She was a dress swayed infinitesimally by the wind, two limpid, reckless eyes. "'Why don't you come, Dot? Don't you like movies? Better come.' She shook her head. "'I oughtn't to.' He liked her, realizing that she was temporizing for the effect on him. He came closer and took her hand. "'If we can get back by ten, can't you? Just to the movies?' "'Well, I reckon so.' Hand in hand they walked back toward downtown, along a hazy, dusky street, where a Negro newsboy was calling an extra in the cadence of the local vendor's tradition, a cadence that was as musical as song.' Dot.' Anthony's affair with Dorothy Raycroft was an inevitable result of his increasing carelessness about himself. He did not go to her desiring to possess the desirable, nor did he fall before a personality more vital, more compelling than his own, as he had done with Gloria four years before. He merely slid into the matter through his inability to make definite judgments. He could say, no, neither to man nor woman, borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. But he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did, they were but half hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and irreparable awakening. The particular weakness he indulged on this occasion was his need of excitement and stimulus from without. He felt that for the first time in four years he could express and interpret himself anew. The girl promised rest. The hours in her company each evening alleviated the morbid and inevitably futile poundings of his imagination. He had become a coward in earnest, completely the slave of a hundred disordered and prowling thoughts which were released by the collapse of the authentic devotion to Gloria that had been the chief jailer of his insufficiency. On that first night, as they stood by the gate, he kissed Dorothy and made an engagement to meet her the following Saturday. Then he went out to camp and with the light burning lawlessly in his tent. He wrote a long letter to Gloria, a glowing letter, full of the sentimental dark, full of the remembered breath of flowers, full of a true and exceeding tenderness. These things he had learned again, for a moment, in a kiss given and taken under a rich warm moonlight just an hour before. When Saturday came, he found Dot waiting at the entrance of the Bijou moving picture theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumbled. Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that, in a sketchy, faulty way, she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small, irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark, unenduring little flower, yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken. Dorothy Raycroft was nineteen. Her father had kept a small, unprosperous corner store, and she had graduated from high school in the lowest fourth of her class two days before he died. At high school she had enjoyed a rather unsavory reputation. As a matter of fact her behaviour at the class picnic, where the rumours started, had been merely indiscreet. She had retained her technical purity until over a year later. The boy had been a clerk in a store on Jackson Street, and on the day after the incident he departed unexpectedly to New York. He had been intending to leave for some time, but had tarried for the consummation of his amorous enterprise. After a while she confided the adventure to a girlfriend, and later, as she watched her friend disappear down the sleepy street of dusty sunshine, she knew in a flash of intuition that her story was going out into the world. Yet after telling it she felt much better, and a little bitter, and made as near an approach to character as she was capable of by walking in another direction and meeting another man with the honest intention of gratifying herself again. As a rule things happened to Dot. She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak. She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave. She neither defied, nor conformed, nor compromised. She had no sense of humor, but to take its place a happy disposition that made her laugh at the proper times when she was with men. She had no definite intentions. Sometimes she regretted vaguely that her reputation precluded what chance she had ever had for security. There had been no open discovery. Her mother was interested only in starting her off on time, each morning for the jewelry store, where she earned $14 a week. But some of the boys she had known in high school now looked the other way when they were walking with nice girls, and these incidents hurt her feelings. When they occurred she went home and cried. Besides the Jackson Street clerk there had been two other men, of whom the first was a naval officer, who passed through town during the early days of the war. He had stayed over a night to make a connection, and was leaning idly against one of the pillars of the Stonewall Hotel when she passed by. He remained in town four days. She thought she loved him, lavished on him that first hysteria of passion that would have gone to the pusillanimous clerk. The naval officer's uniform, there were few of them in those days, had made the magic. He left with vague promises on his lips, and, once on the train, rejoiced that he had not told her his real name. Her resultant depression had thrown her into the arms of Cyrus Fielding, the son of a local clothier, who had hailed her from his roadster one day as she passed along the sidewalk. She had always known him by name. Had she been born into a higher stratum he would have known her before. She had descended a little lower, so he met her after all. After a month he had gone away to training camp, a little afraid of the intimacy, a little relieved in perceiving that she had not cared deeply for him, and that she was not the sort who would ever make trouble. Dot romanticised this affair, and conceded to her vanity that the war had taken these men away from her. She told herself that she could have married the naval officer. Nevertheless it worried her that, within eight months there had been three men in her life. She thought, with more fear than wonder in her heart, that she would soon be like those bad girls on Jackson Street, at whom she and her gum-chewing, giggling friends had stared with fascination three years before. For a while she attempted to be more careful. She let men pick her up, she let them kiss her, and even allowed certain other liberties to be forced upon her, but she did not add to her trio. After several months the strength of her resolution, or rather the poignant expediency of her fears, was worn away. She grew restless drowsing there out of life and time while the summer months faded. The soldiers she met were either obviously below her, or less obviously above her, in which case they desired only to use her. They were Yankees, harsh and ungracious. They swarmed in large crowds. And then she met Anthony. On that first evening he had been little more than a pleasantly unhappy face, a voice, the means with which to pass an hour, but when she kept her engagement with him on Saturday she regarded him with consideration. She liked him. Unknowingly she saw her own tragedies mirrored in his face. Again they went to the movies, again they wandered along the shadowy scented streets, hand in hand this time, speaking a little in hushed voices. They passed through the gate, up toward the little porch. I can stay a while, can't I? Sh! she whispered. I've got to be very quiet. Mother sits up reading snappy stories. In confirmation he heard the faint crackling inside as a page was turned. The open shutter slits emitted horizontal rods of light that fell in thin parallels across Dorothy's skirt. The street was silent, save for a group on the steps of a house across the way, who, from time to time, raised their voices in a soft, bantering song. When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little houses. Then as though it had been waiting on a nearby roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face to the color of white roses. Anthony had a start of memory, so vivid that, before his closed eyes there formed a picture, distinct as a flashback on a screen, a spring night of thaw set out of time in a half-forgotten winter five years before, another face, radiant, flower-like, upturned to lights as transforming as the stars. Ah, la belle dame salme si, who lived in his heart, made known to him in transitory fading splendor by dark eyes in their rits Carlton, by a shadowy glance from a passing carriage in the Bois de Belon. But those nights were only part of a song, a remembered glory. Here again were the faint winds, the illusions, the eternal present with its promise of romance. Oh, she whispered, do you love me? Do you love me? The spell was broken. The drifted fragments of the stars became only light, the singing down the street diminished to a monotone, to the whimper of locusts in the grass. With almost a sigh he kissed her fervent mouth while her arms crept up about his shoulders. The man at arms. As the weeks dried up and blew away, the range of Anthony's travels extended until he grew to comprehend the camp and its environment. For the first time in life he was in constant personal contact with the waiters to whom he had given tips, the chauffeurs who had touched their hats to him, the carpenters, plumbers, barbers and farmers, who had previously been remarkable only in the subservience of their professional genuflections. During his first two months in camp he did not hold ten minutes consecutive conversation with a single man. On his service record his occupation stood as student. On the original questionnaire he had prematurely written author, but when men in his company asked his business he commonly gave it as bank clerk. Had he told the truth that he did no work they would have been suspicious of him as a member of the leisure class. His platoon sergeant, Pop Donnelly, was a scraggly old soldier, worn thin with drink. In the past he had spent unnumbered weeks in the guard house, but recently, thanks to the drillmaster Famon, he had been elevated to his present pinnacle. His complexion was full of shell holes, it bore an unmistakable resemblance to those aerial photographs of the battlefield at Blank. Once a week he got drunk downtown on white liquor, returned quietly to camp and collapsed upon his bunk, joining the company at Reveley, looking more than ever like a white mask of death. He nursed the astounding delusion that he was astutely slipping it over on the government. He had spent eighteen years in its service at a minute wage, and he was soon to retire, here he usually winked, on the impressive income of fifty-five dollars a month. He looked upon it as a gorgeous joke that he had played upon the dozens who had bullied and scorned him since he was a Georgia country boy of nineteen. At present there were but two lieutenants, Hopkins and the popular Kutching. The latter was considered a good fellow, and a fine leader, until a year later when he disappeared with a mess fund of eleven hundred dollars and, like so many leaders, proved exceedingly difficult to follow. Eventually there was Captain Dunning, god of this brief but self-sufficing microcosm. He was a reserve officer, nervous, energetic, and enthusiastic. This latter quality indeed often took material form, and was visible as fine froth in the corners of his mouth. Like most executives he saw his charges strictly from the front, and to his hopeful eyes his command seemed just such an excellent unit as such an excellent war deserved. For all his anxiety and absorption he was having the time of his life. Baptiste, the little Sicilian of the train, fell foul of him the second week of drill. The Captain had, several times, ordered the men to be clean shaven when they fell in each morning. One day there was disclosed an alarming breach of this rule, surely a case of Teutonic connivance. During the night four men had grown hair upon their faces. The fact that three of the four understood a minimum of English made a practical object lesson only the more necessary, so Captain Dunning resolutely sent a volunteer barber back to the company street for a razor. Whereupon for the safety of democracy a half ounce of hair was scraped dry from the cheeks of three Italians in one pole. Outside the world of the company there appeared, from time to time, the Colonel, a heavy man with snarling teeth, who circumnavigated the battalion drill field upon a handsome black horse. He was a West-pointer and, mimetically, a gentleman. He had a dowdy wife and a dowdy mind, and spent much of his time in town taking advantage of the army's lately exalted social position. First of all was the general, who traversed the roads of the camp preceded by his flag, a figure so austere, so removed, so magnificent, as to be scarcely comprehensible. December, cool winds at night now, and damp, chilly mornings on the drill-grounds. As the heat faded, Anthony found himself increasingly glad to be alive. Renewed strangely through his body, he worried little and existed in the present with a sort of animal content. It was not that Gloria, or the life that Gloria represented, was less often in his thoughts. It was simply that she became, day by day, less real, less vivid. For a week they had corresponded passionately, almost hysterically. Then by an unwritten agreement they had ceased to write more than twice, and then once, a week. She was bored, she said, if his brigade was to be there a long time she was coming down to join him. Their hate was going to be able to submit a stronger brief than he had expected, but doubted that the appealed case would come up until late spring. Muriel was in the city, doing Red Cross work, and they went out together rather often. What would Anthony think if she went into the Red Cross? Trouble was, she had heard that she might have to bathe Negroes in alcohol, and after that she hadn't felt so patriotic. The city was full of soldiers, and she'd seen a lot of boys she hadn't laid eyes on for years. Anthony did not want her to come south. He told himself that this was for many reasons. He needed a rest from her, and she from him. She would be bored beyond measure in town, and she would be able to see Anthony for only a few hours each day. But in his heart he feared that it was because he was attracted to Dorothy. As a matter of fact he lived in terror that Gloria should learn by some chance or intention of the relation he had formed. By the end of a fortnight the entanglement began to give him moments of misery at his own faithlessness. Nevertheless as each day ended he was unable to withstand the lure that would draw him irresistibly out of his tent and over to the telephone at the YMCA. Dot. Yes? I may be able to get in to-night. I'm so glad. Do you want to listen to my splendid eloquence for a few starry hours? Oh, you funny! For an instant he had a memory of five years before—of Geraldine. Then I'll arrive for about eight. At seven he would be in a jitney bound for the city, where hundreds of little southern girls were waiting on moonlit porches for their lovers. He would be excited already for her warm retarded kisses, for the amazed quietude of the glances she gave him, glances nearer to worship than any he had ever inspired. To this girl his very caresses were an inestimable boon. Crying quietly she had confessed to him that he was not the first man in her life, that there had been one other. He gathered that the affair had no sooner commenced than it had been over. Indeed so far as she was concerned she spoke the truth. She had forgotten the clerk, the naval officer, the clothier's son, forgotten her vividness of emotion, which is true for getting. She knew that in some opaque and shadowy existence someone had taken her. It was as though it had occurred in sleep. Almost every night Anthony came to town. It was too cool now for the porch, so her mother surrendered to them the tiny sitting-room, with its dozens of cheaply-framed cromos, its yard upon yard of decorative fringe, and its thick atmosphere of several decades in the proximity of the kitchen. They would build a fire, then happily, inexhaustibly, she would go about the business of love. Each evening at ten she would walk with him to the door, her black hair in disarray, her pale face without cosmetics, paler still under the whiteness of the moon. As a rule it would be bright and silver outside. Now and then there was a slow warm rain, too indolent, almost, to reach the ground. Say you love me, she would whisper. Why, of course, you sweet baby. Am I baby? This almost wistfully. Just a little baby. She knew vaguely of Gloria. It gave her pain to think of it, so she imagined her to be haughty and proud and cold. She had decided that Gloria must be older than Anthony, and that there was no love between husband and wife. Sometimes she let herself dream that after the war, Anthony would get a divorce, and they would be married. But she never mentioned this to Anthony. She scarcely knew why. She shared his company's idea that he was a sort of bank clerk. She thought that he was respectable and poor. She would say, If I had some money, darling, I'd give every bit of it to you. I'd like to have about fifty thousand dollars. I suppose that'd be plenty, agreed, Anthony. In her letter that day, Gloria had written, I suppose if we could settle for a million, it would be better to tell Mr. Hake to go ahead and settle, but it'd seem a pity. We could have an automobile, exclaimed Dot, in a final burst of triumph. An impressive occasion. Captain Dunning prided himself on being a great reader of character. Half an hour after meeting a man, he was accustomed to place him in one of a number of astonishing categories. One man, good man, smart fellow, theorizer, poet, and worthless. One day early in February he caused Anthony to be summoned to his presence in the orderly tent. Pat, he said sententiously, I've had my eye on you for several weeks. Anthony stood erect and motionless. And I think you've got the makings of a good soldier. He waited for the warm glow which this would naturally arouse, to cool, and then continued, this is no child's play, he said, narrowing his brows. Anthony agreed with a melancholy, no sir. It's a man's game, and we need leaders. Then the climax, swift, sure, and electric. Pat, I'm going to make you a corporal. At this point Anthony should have staggered slightly backward, overwhelmed. He was to be one of the quarter-million selected for that consummate trust. He was going to be able to shout the technical phrase, follow me, to seven other frightened men. You seem to be a man of some education, said Captain Dunning. Yes, sir. That's good, that's good. Education's a great thing, but don't let it go to your head. Keep on the way you're going and you'll be a good soldier. With these parting words lingering in his ears, corporal Pat saluted, executed a right about face, and left the tent. Though the conversation amused Anthony, it did generate the idea that life would be more exciting as a sergeant, or should he find a less exacting medical examiner as an officer. He was little interested in the work, which seemed to belie the army's boasted gallantry. At the inspections one did not dress up to look well, one dressed up to keep from looking badly. But as winter wore away, the short, snowless winter marked by damp nights and cool rainy days, he marveled at how quickly the system had grasped him. He was a soldier. All who were not soldiers were civilians. The world was divided primarily into those two classifications. It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the military, divided men into two kinds, their own kind and those without. To the clergymen there were clergy in laity, to the Catholic there were Catholics and non-Catholics, to the negro there were blacks and whites, to the prisoner there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the sick men there were the sick and the well. So without thinking of it, once in his lifetime he had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a gentile, white, free and well. As the American troops were poured into the French and British trenches, he began to find the names of many Harvard men among the casualties recorded in the Army and Navy Journal. But for all the sweat and blood the situation appeared unchanged and he saw no prospect of the war's ending and the perceptible future. In the old chronicles the right wing of one army always defeated the left wing of the other, the left wing being, meanwhile, vanquished by the enemy's right. After that the mercenaries fled. It had been so simple in those days, almost as if prearranged. Anna wrote that she was reading a great deal. What a mess they had made of their affairs, she said. She had so little to do now, that she spent her time imagining how differently things might have turned out. Her whole environment appeared insecure and a few years back she had seemed to hold all the strings in her own little hand. In June her letters grew hurried and less frequent. She suddenly ceased to write about coming south. Book 3, Chapter 1, Part 1 of 2