Part 73 (1/2)

”I've gathered quite a few books,” he said suddenly.

”So I see.”

”I've made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new.

I don't mean the usual Longfellow-Whittier thing--in fact, most of it's modern.”

He stepped to one of the walls and, seeing that it was expected of him, Anthony arose and followed.

”Look!”

Under a printed tag _Americana_ he displayed six long rows of books, beautifully bound and, obviously, carefully chosen.

”And here are the contemporary novelists.”

Then Anthony saw the joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard Caramel--”The Demon Lover,” true enough ... but also seven others that were execrably awful, without sincerity or grace.

Unwillingly Anthony glanced at d.i.c.k's face and caught a slight uncertainty there.

”I've put my own books in, of course,” said Richard Caramel hastily, ”though one or two of them are uneven--I'm afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don't believe in false modesty. Of course some of the critics haven't paid so much attention to me since I've been established--but, after all, it's not the critics that count. They're just sheep.”

For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard Caramel continued:

”My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of America--because of my New York novel.”

”Yes,” Anthony managed to muster, ”I suppose there's a good deal in what you say.”

He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He, knew that he would have changed places with d.i.c.k unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then--can a man disparage his life-work so readily? ...

--And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great hittings of the wrong keys and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.gs up of his weary, unmatched eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged concentration--Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.

THE BEATING

As winter approached it seemed that a sort of madness seized upon Anthony. He awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria could feel him trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coa.r.s.en under her eyes, Gloria's soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out all night, as he did several times, she not only failed to be sorry but even felt a measure of relief. Next day he would be faintly repentant, and would remark in a gruff, hang-dog fas.h.i.+on that he guessed he was drinking a little too much.

For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair that had been in his apartment, lost in a sort of stupor--even his interest in reading his favorite books seemed to have departed, and though an incessant bickering went on between husband and wife, the one subject upon which they ever really conversed was the progress of the will case. What Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, what she expected that great gift of money to bring about, is difficult to imagine. She was being bent by her environment into a grotesque similitude of a housewife. She who until three years before had never made coffee, prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked a great deal in the afternoons, and in the evenings she read--books, magazines, anything she found at hand. If now she wished for a child, even a child of the Anthony who sought her bed blind drunk, she neither said so nor gave any show or sign of interest in children. It is doubtful if she could have made it clear to any one what it was she wanted, or indeed what there was to want--a lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind some impregnable inhibition born and coexistent with her beauty.

One afternoon when the snow was dirty again along Riverside Drive, Gloria, who had been to the grocer's, entered the apartment to find Anthony pacing the floor in a state of aggravated nervousness. The feverish eyes he turned on her were traced with tiny pink lines that reminded her of rivers on a map. For a moment she received the impression that he was suddenly and definitely old.

”Have you any money?” he inquired of her precipitately.

”What? What do you mean?”

”Just what I said. Money! Money! Can't you speak English?”

She paid no attention but brushed by him and into the pantry to put the bacon and eggs in the ice-box. When his drinking had been unusually excessive he was invariably in a whining mood. This time he followed her and, standing in the pantry door, persisted in his question.

”You heard what I said. Have you any money?”

She turned about from the ice-box and faced him.