up in front with his megaphone and began to tell his clients how it had looked to him when his division went up to the line five years before.
“It was nine o’clock at night,” he said, “and we came out of a wood and there was the Western Front. I’d read about it for three years back in America, and here it was at last—it looked like the line of a forest fire at night except that fireworks were blazing up instead of grass. We relieved a French regiment in new trenches that weren’t three feet deep. At that, most of us were too excited to be scared until the top sergeant was blown to pieces with shrapnel about two o’clock in the morning. That made us think. Two days later we went over and the only reason I didn’t get hit was that I was shaking so much they couldn’t aim at me.”
The listeners laughed and Milly felt a faint thrill of pride. Jim hadn’t been scared—she’d heard him say so, many times. All he’d thought about was doing a little more than his duty. When others were in the comparative safety of the trenches he had gone into no-man’s land alone.
After lunch in the village the party walked over the battlefield, changed now into a peaceful undulating valley of graves. Milly was glad she had come—the sense of rest after a struggle soothed her. Perhaps after the bleak future, her life might be quiet as this peaceful land. Perhaps Jim would change someday. If he had risen once to such a height of courage there must be something deep inside him that was worth while, that would make him try once more.
Just before it was time to start home Driscoll, who had hardly spoken to her all day, suddenly beckoned her aside.
“I want to talk to you for the last time,” he said.
The last time— Milly felt a flutter of unexpected pain. Was tomorrow so near?
“I’m going to say what’s in my mind,” he said, “and please don’t be angry. I love you, and you know it; but what I’m going to say isn’t because of that—it’s because I want you to be happy.”
Milly nodded. She was afraid she was going to cry.
“I don’t think your husband’s any good,” he said.
She looked up.
“You don’t know him,” she exclaimed quickly. “You can’t judge.”
“I can judge from what he did to you. I think this shell-shock business is all a plain lie. And what does it matter what he did five years ago?”
“It matters to me,” cried Milly. She felt herself growing a little angry. “You can’t take that away from him. He acted brave.” Driscoll nodded.
“That’s true. But other men were brave.”
“You weren’t,” she said scornfully. “You just said you were scared to death—and when you said it all the people laughed. Well, nobody laughed at Jim—they gave him a medal because he wasn’t afraid.”
When Milly had said this she was sorry, but it was too late now. At his next words she leaned forward in surprise.
“That was a lie too,” said Bill Driscoll slowly. “I told it because I wanted them to laugh. I wasn’t even in the attack.”
He stared silently down the hill.
“Well then,” said Milly contemptuously, “how can you sit here and say things about my husband when—when you didn’t even—”
“It was only a professional lie,” he said impatiently. “I happened to be wounded the night before.”
He stood up suddenly.
“There’s no use,” he said. “I seem to have made you hate me, and that’s the end. There’s no use saying any more.”
He stared down the hill with haunted eyes.
“I shouldn’t have talked to you here,” he cried. “There’s no luck here for me. Once before I lost something I wanted, not a hundred yards from this hill. And now I’ve lost you.”
“What was it you lost,” demanded Milly bitterly. “Another girl?”
“There’s never been any other girl but you.”
“What was it then?”
He hesitated.
“I told you I was wounded,” he said. “I was. For two months I didn’t know I was alive. But the worst of it was that some dirty sneak thief had been through my pockets, and I guess he got the credit for a copy of German orders that I’d just brought in. He took a gold watch too. I’d pinched them both off the body of a German officer out between the lines.”
Mr. and Mrs. William Driscoll were married the following spring and started off on their honeymoon in a car that was much larger than the King of England’s. There were two dozen vacant places in it, so they gave many rides to tired pedestrians along the white poplar-lined roads of France. The wayfarers, however, always sat in the back seat as the conversation in front was not for profane ears. The tour progressed through Lyons, Avignon, Bordeaux, and smaller places not in the guidebook.
The Beautiful and Damned.
New York: Scribners, 1922.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
—Anthony Patch
To Shane Leslie, George Jean Nathan and Maxwell Perkins
in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement
Book One.
Chapter I.
Anthony Patch
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch—not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward—a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.
A Worthy Man and His Gifted Son.
Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.
Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as “Cross Patch,” left his father’s farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars.
This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was then that he determined, after a severe attack of sclerosis, to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which