one time some gossamer difference attained such bulk that Anthony arose and punched himself into his overcoat—for a moment it appeared that the scene of the preceding February was to be repeated, but knowing how deeply she was moved he retained his dignity with his pride, and in a moment Gloria was sobbing in his arms, her lovely face miserable as a frightened little girl’s.
Meanwhile they kept unfolding to each other, unwillingly, by curious reactions and evasions, by distastes and prejudices and unintended hints of the past. The girl was proudly incapable of jealousy and, because he was extremely jealous, this virtue piqued him. He told her recondite incidents of his own life on purpose to arouse some spark of it, but to no avail. She possessed him now—nor did she desire the dead years.
“Oh, Anthony,” she would say, “always when I’m mean to you I’m sorry afterward. I’d give my right hand to save you one little moment’s pain.”
And in that instant her eyes were brimming and she was not aware that she was voicing an illusion. Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort—of these she never complained until they were over—or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride.
“Why do you like Muriel?” he demanded one day.
“I don’t very much.”
“Then why do you go with her?”
“Just for some one to go with. They’re no exertion, those girls. They sort of believe everything I tell them—but I rather like Rachael. I think she’s cute—and so clean and slick, don’t you? I used to have other friends—in Kansas City and at school—casual, all of them, girls who just flitted into my range and out of it for no more reason than that boys took us places together. They didn’t interest me after environment stopped throwing us together. Now they’re mostly married. What does it matter—they were all just people.”
“You like men better, don’t you?”
“Oh, much better. I’ve got a man’s mind.”
“You’ve got a mind like mine. Not strongly gendered either way.”
Later she told him about the beginnings of her friendship with Bloeckman. One day in Delmonico’s, Gloria and Rachael had come upon Bloeckman and Mr. Gilbert having luncheon and curiosity had impelled her to make it a party of four. She had liked him—rather. He was a relief from younger men, satisfied as he was with so little. He humored her and he laughed, whether he understood her or not. She met him several times, despite the open disapproval of her parents, and within a month he had asked her to marry him, tendering her everything from a villa in Italy to a brilliant career on the screen. She had laughed in his face—and he had laughed too.
But he had not given up. To the time of Anthony’s arrival in the arena he had been making steady progress. She treated him rather well—except that she had called him always by an invidious nickname—perceiving, meanwhile, that he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.
The night before the engagement was announced she told Bloeckman. It was a heavy blow. She did not enlighten Anthony as to the details, but she implied that he had not hesitated to argue with her. Anthony gathered that the interview had terminated on a stormy note, with Gloria very cool and unmoved lying in her corner of the sofa and Joseph Bloeckman of “Films Par Excellence” pacing the carpet with eyes narrowed and head bowed. Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to show it. In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate her, there at the last. But Anthony, understanding that Gloria’s indifference was her strongest appeal, judged how futile this must have been. He wondered, often but quite casually, about Bloeckman—finally he forgot him entirely.
Heyday.
One afternoon they found front seats on the sunny roof of a bus and rode for hours from the fading Square up along the sullied river, and then, as the stray beams fled the westward streets, sailed down the turgid Avenue, darkening with ominous bees from the department stores. The traffic was clotted and gripped in a patternless jam; the busses were packed four deep like platforms above the crowd as they waited for the moan of the traffic whistle.
“Isn’t it good!” cried Gloria. “Look!”
A miller’s wagon, stark white with flour, driven by a powdery clown, passed in front of them behind a white horse and his black team-mate.
“What a pity!” she complained; “they’d look so beautiful in the dusk, if only both horses were white. I’m mighty happy just this minute, in this city.”
Anthony shook his head in disagreement.
“I think the city’s a mountebank. Always struggling to approach the tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it. Trying to be romantically metropolitan.”
“I don’t. I think it is impressive.”
“Momentarily. But it’s really a transparent, artificial sort of spectacle. It’s got its press-agented stars and its flimsy, unenduring stage settings and, I’ll admit, the greatest army of supers ever assembled—” He paused, laughed shortly, and added: “Technically excellent, perhaps, but not convincing.”
“I’ll bet policemen think people are fools,” said Gloria thoughtfully, as she watched a large but cowardly lady being helped across the street. “He always sees them frightened and inefficient and old—they are,” she added. And then: “We’d better get off. I told mother I’d have an early supper and go to bed. She says I look tired, damn it.”
“I wish we were married,” he muttered soberly; “there’ll be no good night then and we can do just as we want.”
“Won’t it be good! I think we ought to travel a lot. I want to go to the Mediterranean and Italy. And I’d like to go on the stage some time—say for about a year.”
“You bet. I’ll write a play for you.”
“Won’t that be good! And I’ll act in it. And then some time when we have more money”—old Adam’s death was always thus tactfully alluded to—“we’ll build a magnificent estate, won’t we?”
“Oh, yes, with private swimming pools.”
“Dozens of them. And private rivers. Oh, I wish it were now.”
Odd coincidence—he had just been wishing that very thing. They plunged like divers into the dark eddying crowd and emerging in the cool fifties sauntered indolently homeward, infinitely romantic to each other … both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream.
Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years. Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other’s eyes—not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one fairy night, May became June. Sixteen days now—fifteen—fourteen—
Three Digressions.
Just before the engagement was announced Anthony had gone up to Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who, a little more wizened and grizzly as time played its ultimate chuckling