The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (summer beach reads .txt) đ
- Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
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âOh, gosh!â sighed Anthony in rapturous slang, âsheâs wonderful, that girl! She has it!â
âWhen we have a baby,â she began one dayâthis, it had already been decided, was to be after three yearsââI want it to look like you.â
âExcept its legs,â he insinuated slyly.
âOh, yes, except his legs. Heâs got to have my legs. But the rest of him can be you.â
âMy nose?â
Gloria hesitated.
âWell, perhaps my nose. But certainly your eyesâand my mouth, and I guess my shape of the face. I wonder; I think heâd be sort of cute if he had my hair.â
âMy dear Gloria, youâve appropriated the whole baby.â
âWell, I didnât mean to,â she apologized cheerfully.
âLet him have my neck at least,â he urged, regarding himself gravely in the glass. âYouâve often said you liked my neck because the Adamâs apple doesnât show, and, besides, your neckâs too short.â
âWhy, it is not!â she cried indignantly, turning to the mirror, âitâs just right. I donât believe Iâve ever seen a better neck.â
âItâs too short,â he repeated teasingly.
âShort?â Her tone expressed exasperated wonder.
âShort? Youâre crazy!â She elongated and contracted it to convince herself of its reptilian sinuousness. âDo you call that a short neck?â
âOne of the shortest Iâve ever seen.â
For the first time in weeks tears started from Gloriaâs eyes and the look she gave him had a quality of real pain.
âOh, Anthonyââ
âMy Lord, Gloria!â He approached her in bewilderment and took her elbows in his hands. âDonât cry, please! Didnât you know I was only kidding? Gloria, look at me! Why, dearest, youâve got the longest neck Iâve ever seen. Honestly.â
Her tears dissolved in a twisted smile.
âWellâyou shouldnât have said that, then. Letâs talk about the b-baby.â
Anthony paced the floor and spoke as though rehearsing for a debate.
âTo put it briefly, there are two babies we could have, two distinct and logical babies, utterly differentiated. Thereâs the baby thatâs the combination of the best of both of us. Your body, my eyes, my mind, your intelligenceâand then there is the baby which is our worstâmy body, your disposition, and my irresolution.â
âI like that second baby,â she said.
âWhat Iâd really like,â continued Anthony, âwould be to have two sets of triplets one year apart and then experiment with the six boysââ
âPoor me,â she interjected.
ââIâd educate them each in a different country and by a different system and when they were twenty-three Iâd call them together and see what they were like.â
âLetâs have âem all with my neck,â suggested Gloria.
THE END OF A CHAPTERThe car was at length repaired and with a deliberate vengeance took up where it left off the business of causing infinite dissension. Who should drive? How fast should Gloria go? These two questions and the eternal recriminations involved ran through the days. They motored to the Post-Road towns, Rye, Portchester, and Greenwich, and called on a dozen friends, mostly Gloriaâs, who all seemed to be in different stages of having babies and in this respect as well as in others bored her to a point of nervous distraction. For an hour after each visit she would bite her fingers furiously and be inclined to take out her rancor on Anthony.
âI loathe women,â she cried in a mild temper. âWhat on earth can you say to themâexcept talk âlady-ladyâ? Iâve enthused over a dozen babies that Iâve wanted only to choke. And every one of those girls is either incipiently jealous and suspicious of her husband if heâs charming or beginning to be bored with him if he isnât.â
âDonât you ever intend to see any women?â
âI donât know. They never seem clean to meâneverânever. Except just a few. Constance Shawâyou know, the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us last Tuesdayâis almost the only one. Sheâs so tall and fresh-looking and stately.â
âI donât like them so tall.â
Though they went to several dinner dances at various country clubs, they decided that the autumn was too nearly over for them to âgo outâ on any scale, even had they been so inclined. He hated golf; Gloria liked it only mildly, and though she enjoyed a violent rush that some undergraduates gave her one night and was glad that Anthony should be proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their hostess for the evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat disquieted by the fact that Anthonyâs classmate, Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush. The Granbys never phoned again, and though Gloria laughed, it piqued her not a little.
âYou see,â she explained to Anthony, âif I wasnât married it wouldnât worry herâbut sheâs been to the movies in her day and she thinks I may be a vampire. But the point is that placating such people requires an effort that Iâm simply unwilling to makeâŠ. And those cute little freshmen making eyes at me and paying me idiotic compliments! Iâve grown up, Anthony.â
Marietta itself offered little social life. Half a dozen farm-estates formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive wives. The townspeople were a particularly uninteresting typeâunmarried females were predominant for the most partâwith school-festival horizons and souls bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches. The only native with whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped, broad-shouldered Swedish girl who came every day to do their work. She was silent and efficient, and Gloria, after finding her weeping violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen table, developed an uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food. Because of her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.
Gloriaâs penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex, properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic, and, far from gullible about the motives of people, she was inclined to credit any extraordinary happening attributed to the whimsical perambulations of the buried. The desperate squeakings about the old house on windy nights that to Anthony were burglars with revolvers ready in hand represented to Gloria the auras, evil and restive, of dead generations, expiating the inexpiable upon the ancient and romantic hearth. One night, because of two swift bangs down-stairs, which Anthony fearfully but unavailingly investigated, they lay awake nearly until dawn asking each other examination-paper questions about the history of the world.
In October Muriel came out for a two weeksâ visit. Gloria had called her on long-distance, and Miss Kane ended the conversation characteristically by saying âAll-ll-ll righty. Iâll be there with bells!â She arrived with a dozen popular songs under her arm.
âYou ought to have a phonograph out here in the country,â she said, âjust a little Vicâthey donât cost much. Then whenever youâre lonesome you can have Caruso or Al Jolson right at your door.â
She worried Anthony to distraction by telling him that âhe was the first clever man she had ever known and she got so tired of shallow people.â He wondered that people fell in love with such women. Yet he supposed that under a certain impassioned glance even she might take on a softness and promise.
But Gloria, violently showing off her love for Anthony, was diverted into a state of purring content.
Finally Richard Caramel arrived for a garrulous and to Gloria painfully literary week-end, during which he discussed himself with Anthony long after she lay in childlike sleep up-stairs.
âItâs been mighty funny, this success and all,â said Dick. âJust before the novel appeared Iâd been trying, without success, to sell some short stories. Then, after my book came out, I polished up three and had them accepted by one of the magazines that had rejected them before. Iâve done a lot of them since; publishers donât pay me for my book till this winter.â
âDonât let the victor belong to the spoils.â
âYou mean write trash?â He considered. âIf you mean deliberately injecting a slushy fade-out into each one, Iâm not. But I donât suppose Iâm being so careful. Iâm certainly writing faster and I donât seem to be thinking as much as I used to. Perhaps itâs because I donât get any conversation, now that youâre married and Mauryâs gone to Philadelphia. Havenât the old urge and ambition. Early success and all that.â
âDoesnât it worry you?â
âFrantically. I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like buck-feverâitâs a sort of intense literary self-consciousness that comes when I try to force myself. But the really awful days arenât when I think I canât write. Theyâre when I wonder whether any writing is worth while at allâI mean whether Iâm not a sort of glorified buffoon.â
âI like to hear you talk that way,â said Anthony with a touch of his old patronizing insolence. âI was afraid youâd gotten a bit idiotic over your work. Read the damnedest interview you gave outâ-â
Dick interrupted with an agonized expression.
âGood Lord! Donât mention it. Young lady wrote itâmost admiring young lady. Kept telling me my work was âstrong,â and I sort of lost my head and made a lot of strange pronouncements. Some of it was good, though, donât you think?â
âOh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterward.â
âOh, I believe a lot of it,â admitted Richard Caramel with a faint beam. âIt simply was a mistake to give it out.â
In November they moved into Anthonyâs apartment, from which they sallied triumphantly to the Yale-Harvard and Harvard-Princeton football games, to the St. Nicholas ice-skating rink, to a thorough round of the theatres and to a miscellany of entertainmentsâfrom small, staid dances to the great affairs that Gloria loved, held in those few houses where lackeys with powdered wigs scurried around in magnificent Anglomania under the direction of gigantic majordomos. Their intention was to go abroad the first of the year or, at any rate, when the war was over. Anthony had actually completed a Chestertonian essay on the twelfth century by way of introduction to his proposed book and Gloria had done some extensive research work on the question of Russian sable coatsâin fact the winter was approaching quite comfortably, when the Bilphistic demiurge decided suddenly in mid-December that Mrs. Gilbertâs soul had aged sufficiently in its present incarnation. In consequence Anthony took a miserable and hysterical Gloria out to Kansas City, where, in the fashion of mankind, they paid the terrible and mind-shaking deference to the dead.
Mr. Gilbert became, for the first and last time in his life, a truly pathetic figure. That woman he had broken to wait upon his body and play congregation to his mind had ironically deserted himâjust when he could not much longer have supported her. Never again would he be able so satisfactorily to bore and bully a human soul.
Gloria had lulled Anthonyâs mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain.
It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for
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