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

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?

“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 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’re you going?” he inquired politely.

“Just goin’.” The answer was an apology, a question, an explanation.

“Can I stroll along with you?”

“Reckon 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 in 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 around 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 street-lamp. 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 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 venders’ 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. Indeed 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 night 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 unrumpled. 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 behavior at the class picnic,