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

the Ritz-Carlton, by a shadowy glance from a passing carriage in the Bois de Boulogne! 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 his 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 the 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 guardhouse, but recently, thanks to the drill-master famine, 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 reveille 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 Kretching. 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 breech 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 and 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. Last 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. Mr. Haight 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