The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

“Gloria has some money of her own. Enough to buy clothes.”

“How much?”

Without considering this question impertinent, Anthony answered it.

“About a hundred a month.”

“That’s altogether about seventy-five hundred a year.” Then he added softly: “It ought to be plenty. If you have any sense it ought to be plenty. But the question is whether you have any or not.”

“I suppose it is.” It was shameful to be compelled to endure this pious browbeating from the old man, and his next words were stiffened with vanity. “I can manage very well. You seem convinced that I’m utterly worthless. At any rate I came up here simply to tell you that I’m getting married in June. Goodbye, sir.” With this he turned away and headed for the door, unaware that in that instant his grandfather, for the first time, rather liked him.

“Wait!” called Adam Patch, “I want to talk to you.”

Anthony faced about.

“Well, sir?”

“Sit down. Stay all night.”

Somewhat mollified, Anthony resumed his seat.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to see Gloria tonight.”

“What’s her name?”

“Gloria Gilbert.”

“New York girl? Someone you know?”

“She’s from the Middle West.”

“What business her father in?”

“In a celluloid corporation or trust or something. They’re from Kansas City.”

“You going to be married out there?”

“Why, no, sir. We thought we’d be married in New York⁠—rather quietly.”

“Like to have the wedding out here?”

Anthony hesitated. The suggestion made no appeal to him, but it was certainly the part of wisdom to give the old man, if possible, a proprietary interest in his married life. In addition Anthony was a little touched.

“That’s very kind of you, grampa, but wouldn’t it be a lot of trouble?”

“Everything’s a lot of trouble. Your father was married here⁠—but in the old house.”

“Why⁠—I thought he was married in Boston.”

Adam Patch considered.

“That’s true. He was married in Boston.”

Anthony felt a moment’s embarrassment at having made the correction, and he covered it up with words.

“Well, I’ll speak to Gloria about it. Personally I’d like to, but of course it’s up to the Gilberts, you see.”

His grandfather drew a long sigh, half closed his eyes, and sank back in his chair.

“In a hurry?” he asked in a different tone.

“Not especially.”

“I wonder,” began Adam Patch, looking out with a mild, kindly glance at the lilac bushes that rustled against the windows, “I wonder if you ever think about the afterlife.”

“Why⁠—sometimes.”

“I think a great deal about the afterlife.” His eyes were dim but his voice was confident and clear. “I was sitting here today thinking about what’s lying in wait for us, and somehow I began to remember an afternoon nearly sixty-five years ago, when I was playing with my little sister Annie, down where that summerhouse is now.” He pointed out into the long flower-garden, his eyes trembling of tears, his voice shaking.

“I began thinking⁠—and it seemed to me that you ought to think a little more about the afterlife. You ought to be⁠—steadier”⁠—he paused and seemed to grope about for the right word⁠—“more industrious⁠—why⁠—”

Then his expression altered, his entire personality seemed to snap together like a trap, and when he continued the softness had gone from his voice.

“⁠—Why, when I was just two years older than you,” he rasped with a cunning chuckle, “I sent three members of the firm of Wrenn and Hunt to the poorhouse.”

Anthony started with embarrassment.

“Well, goodbye,” added his grandfather suddenly, “you’ll miss your train.”

Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old man; not because his wealth could buy him “neither youth nor digestion” but because he had asked Anthony to be married there, and because he had forgotten something about his son’s wedding that he should have remembered.

Richard Caramel, who was one of the ushers, caused Anthony and Gloria much distress in the last few weeks by continually stealing the rays of their spotlight. The Demon Lover had been published in April, and it interrupted the love affair as it may be said to have interrupted everything its author came in contact with. It was a highly original, rather overwritten piece of sustained description concerned with a Don Juan of the New York slums. As Maury and Anthony had said before, as the more hospitable critics were saying then, there was no writer in America with such power to describe the atavistic and unsubtle reactions of that section of society.

The book hesitated and then suddenly “went.” Editions, small at first, then larger, crowded each other week by week. A spokesman of the Salvation Army denounced it as a cynical misrepresentation of all the uplift taking place in the underworld. Clever press-agenting spread the unfounded rumor that “Gypsy” Smith was beginning a libel suit because one of the principal characters was a burlesque of himself. It was barred from the public library of Burlington, Iowa, and a Mid-Western columnist announced by innuendo that Richard Caramel was in a sanitarium with delirium tremens.

The author, indeed, spent his days in a state of pleasant madness. The book was in his conversation three-fourths of the time⁠—he wanted to know if one had heard “the latest”; he would go into a store and in a loud voice order books to be charged to him, in order to catch a chance morsel of recognition from clerk or customer. He knew to a town in what sections of the country it was selling best; he knew exactly what he cleared on each edition, and when he met anyone who had not read it, or, as it happened only too often, had not heard of it, he succumbed to moody depression.

So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy, that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore. To Dick’s great annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read The Demon Lover, and didn’t intend to until everyone stopped talking about it. As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were pouring in⁠—first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the bric-a-brac