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

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 in 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, in 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, raised 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 moroseness⁠—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.

Bloeckman appeared in New York late in March; he had been in England for nearly a year on matters concerned with “Films 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 at 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 Bloeckman 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 Bloeckman 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 twelve 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 retching indecency. Any song which contained the word “mother” and the word “kaiser” was assured of a tremendous success. At last everyone had something to talk about⁠—and almost everyone fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play.

Anthony, Maury, 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 war’s being the one excuse for, and justification of, the aristocrat, and conjured up an impossible caste 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 Tenth 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 excepting the 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 utter strangers.

Unfortunately, a small and precise doctor decided that there was something the matter with Anthony’s blood-pressure. He could not conscientiously pass him for an officers’ training-camp.

The Broken Lute

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 into September⁠—there was difficulty in empanelling an unbiased jury because of the moral sentiments involved. To