The Beautiful and the Damned Part 36

"Wait an' I'll getcha waiter."

After a short interval a head waiter appeared, bearing a card on which were charted the table reservations. He darted a cynical look at Anthony--which, however, failed of its target. Together they bent over the cardboard and found the table without difficulty--a party of eight, Mr. Black's own.

"Tell him Mr. Patch. Very, very important."

Again he waited, leaning against the banister and listening to the confused harmonies of "Jazz-mad" which came floating down the stairs. A check-girl near him was singing: "Out in--the shimmee sanitarium The jazz-mad nuts reside. Out in--the shimmee sanitarium I left my blushing bride. She went and shook herself insane, So let her shiver back again--"

Then he saw Bloeckman descending the staircase, and took a step forward to meet him and shake hands.

"You wanted to see me?" said the older man coolly.

"Yes," answered Anthony, nodding, "personal matter. Can you jus' step over here?"

Regarding him narrowly Bloeckman followed Anthony to a half bend made by the staircase where they were beyond observation or earshot of any one entering or leaving the restaurant.

"Well?" he inquired.

"Wanted talk to you."

"What about?"

Anthony only laughed--a silly laugh; he intended it to sound casual.

"What do you want to talk to me about?" repeated Bloeckman.

"Wha's hurry, old man?" He tried to lay his hand in a friendly gesture upon Bloeckman's shoulder, but the latter drew away slightly. "How've been?"

"Very well, thanks.... See here, Mr. Patch, I've got a party up-stairs. They'll think it's rude if I stay away too long. What was it you wanted to see me about?"

For the second time that evening Anthony's mind made an abrupt jump, and what he said was not at all what he had intended to say.

"Un'erstand you kep' my wife out of the movies." "What?" Bloeckman's ruddy face darkened in parallel planes of shadows.

"You heard me."

"Look here, Mr. Patch," said Bloeckman, evenly and without changing his expression, "you're drunk. You're disgustingly and insultingly drunk."

"Not too drunk talk to you," insisted Anthony with a leer. "Firs' place, my wife wants nothin' whatever do with you. Never did. Un'erstand me?"

"Be quiet!" said the older man angrily. "I should think you'd respect your wife enough not to bring her into the conversation under these circ.u.mstances."

"Never you min' how I expect my wife. One thing--you leave her alone. You go to h.e.l.l!"

"See here--I think you're a little crazy!" exclaimed Bloeckman. He took two paces forward as though to pa.s.s by, but Anthony stepped in his way.

"Not so fas', you G.o.ddam Jew."

For a moment they stood regarding each other, Anthony swaying gently from side to side, Bloeckman almost trembling with fury.

"Be careful!" he cried in a strained voice.

Anthony might have remembered then a certain look Bloeckman had given him in the Biltmore Hotel years before. But he remembered nothing, nothing---- "I'll say it again, you G.o.d----"

Then Bloeckman struck out, with all the strength in the arm of a well-conditioned man of forty-five, struck out and caught Anthony squarely in the mouth. Anthony cracked up against the staircase, recovered himself and made a wild drunken swing at his opponent, but Bloeckman, who took exercise every day and knew something of sparring, blocked it with ease and struck him twice in the face with two swift smashing jabs. Anthony gave a little grunt and toppled over onto the green plush carpet, finding, as he fell, that his mouth was full of blood and seemed oddly loose in front. He struggled to his feet, panting and spitting, and then as he started toward Bloeckman, who stood a few feet away, his fists clenched but not up, two waiters who had appeared from nowhere seized his arms and held him, helpless. In back of them a dozen people had miraculously gathered.

"I'll kill him," cried Anthony, pitching and straining from side to side. "Let me kill----"

"Throw him out!" ordered Bloeckman excitedly, just as a small man with a pockmarked face pushed his way hurriedly through the spectators.

"Any trouble, Mr. Black?"

"This b.u.m tried to blackmail me!" said Bloeckman, and then, his voice rising to a faintly shrill note of pride: "He got what was coming to him!"

The little man turned to a waiter.

"Call a policeman!" he commanded.

"Oh, no," said Bloeckman quickly. "I can't be bothered. Just throw him out in the street.... Ugh! What an outrage!" He turned and with conscious dignity walked toward the wash-room just as six brawny hands seized upon Anthony and dragged him toward the door. The "b.u.m" was propelled violently to the sidewalk, where he landed on his hands and knees with a grotesque slapping sound and rolled over slowly onto his side.

The shock stunned him. He lay there for a moment in acute distributed pain. Then his discomfort became centralized in his stomach, and he regained consciousness to discover that a large foot was prodding him.

"You've got to move on, y' b.u.m! Move on!"

It was the bulky doorman speaking. A town car had stopped at the curb and its occupants had disembarked--that is, two of the women were standing on the dashboard, waiting in offended delicacy until this obscene obstacle should be removed from their path.

"Move on! Or else I'll throw y'on!"

"Here--I'll get him."

This was a new voice; Anthony imagined that it was somehow more tolerant, better disposed than the first. Again arms were about him, half lifting, half dragging him into a welcome shadow four doors up the street and propping him against the stone front of a millinery shop.

"Much obliged," muttered Anthony feebly. Some one pushed his soft hat down upon his head and he winced.

"Just sit still, buddy, and you'll feel better. Those guys sure give you a b.u.mp."

"I'm going back and kill that dirty--" He tried to get to his feet but collapsed backward against the wall.

"You can't do nothin' now," came the voice. "Get 'em some other time. I'm tellin' you straight, ain't I? I'm helpin' you."

Anthony nodded.

"An' you better go home. You dropped a tooth to-night, buddy. You know that?"

Anthony explored his mouth with his tongue, verifying the statement. Then with an effort he raised his hand and located the gap.

"I'm agoin' to get you home, friend. Whereabouts do you live--"

"Oh, by G.o.d! By G.o.d!" interrupted Anthony, clenching his fists pa.s.sionately. "I'll show the dirty bunch. You help me show 'em and I'll fix it with you. My grandfather's Adam Patch, of Tarrytown"-- "Who?"

"Adam Patch, by G.o.d!"

"You wanna go all the way to Tarrytown?"

"No."

"Well, you tell me where to go, friend, and I'll get a cab."

Anthony made out that his Samaritan was a short, broad-shouldered individual, somewhat the worse for wear.

"Where d'you live, hey?"

Sodden and shaken as he was, Anthony felt that his address would be poor collateral for his wild boast about his grandfather.

"Get me a cab," he commanded, feeling in his pockets.

A taxi drove up. Again Anthony essayed to rise, but his ankle swung loose, as though it were in two sections. The Samaritan must needs help him in--and climb in after him.

"See here, fella," said he, "you're soused and you're bunged up, and you won't be able to get in your house 'less somebody carries you in, so I'm going with you, and I know you'll make it all right with me. Where d'you live?"

With some reluctance Anthony gave his address. Then, as the cab moved off, he leaned his head against the man's shoulder and went into a shadowy, painful torpor. When he awoke, the man had lifted him from the cab in front of the apartment on Claremont Avenue and was trying to set him on his feet.

"Can y' walk?"

"Yes--sort of. You better not come in with me." Again he felt helplessly in his pockets. "Say," he continued, apologetically, swaying dangerously on his feet, "I'm afraid I haven't got a cent."

"Huh?"

"I'm cleaned out."

"Sa-a-ay! Didn't I hear you promise you'd fix it with me? Who's goin' to pay the taxi bill?" He turned to the driver for confirmation. "Didn't you hear him say he'd fix it? All that about his grandfather?"

"Matter of fact," muttered Anthony imprudently, "it was you did all the talking; however, if you come round, to-morrow--"

At this point the taxi-driver leaned from his cab and said ferociously: "Ah, poke him one, the dirty cheap skate. If he wasn't a b.u.m they wouldn'ta throwed him out."

In answer to this suggestion the fist of the Samaritan shot out like a battering-ram and sent Anthony crashing down against the stone steps of the apartment-house, where he lay without movement, while the tall buildings rocked to and fro above him....

After a long while he awoke and was conscious that it had grown much colder. He tried to move himself but his muscles refused to function. He was curiously anxious to know the time, but he reached for his watch, only to find the pocket empty. Involuntarily his lips formed an immemorial phrase: "What a night!"

Strangely enough, he was almost sober. Without moving his head he looked up to where the moon was anch.o.r.ed in mid-sky, shedding light down into Claremont Avenue as into the bottom of a deep and uncharted abyss. There was no sign or sound of life save for the continuous buzzing in his own ears, but after a moment Anthony himself broke the silence with a distinct and peculiar murmur. It was the sound that he had consistently attempted to make back there in the Boul' Mich', when he had been face to face with Bloeckman--the unmistakable sound of ironic laughter. And on his torn and bleeding lips it was like a pitiful retching of the soul.

Three weeks later the trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool of legal red tape having unrolled over a period of four and a half years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria and, on the other side, Edward Shuttleworth and a platoon of beneficiaries testified and lied and ill-behaved generally in varying degrees of greed and desperation. Anthony awoke one morning in March realizing that the verdict was to be given at four that afternoon, and at the thought he got up out of his bed and began to dress. With his extreme nervousness there was mingled an unjustified optimism as to the outcome. He believed that the decision of the lower court would be reversed, if only because of the reaction, due to excessive prohibition, that had recently set in against reforms and reformers. He counted more on the personal attacks that they had levelled at Shuttleworth than on the more sheerly legal aspects of the proceedings.

Dressed, he poured himself a drink of whiskey and then went into Gloria's room, where he found her already wide awake. She had been in bed for a week, humoring herself, Anthony fancied, though the doctor had said that she had best not be disturbed.

"Good morning," she murmured, without smiling. Her eyes seemed unusually large and dark.

"How do you feel?" he asked grudgingly. "Better?"

"Yes."

"Much?"

"Yes."

"Do you feel well enough to go down to court with me this afternoon?"

She nodded.

"Yes. I want to. d.i.c.k said yesterday that if the weather was nice he was coming up in his car and take me for a ride in Central Park--and look, the room's all full of sunshine."

Anthony glanced mechanically out the window and then sat down upon the bed.

"G.o.d, I'm nervous!" he exclaimed.

"Please don't sit there," she said quickly.

"Why not?"

"You smell of whiskey. I can't stand it."

He got up absent-mindedly and left the room. A little later she called to him and he went out and brought her some potato salad and cold chicken from the delicatessen.

At two o'clock Richard Caramel's car arrived at the door and, when he phoned up, Anthony took Gloria down in the elevator and walked with her to the curb.

She told her cousin that it was sweet of him to take her riding. "Don't be simple," d.i.c.k replied disparagingly. "It's nothing."

But he did not mean that it was nothing and this was a curious thing. Richard Caramel had forgiven many people for many offenses. But he had never forgiven his cousin, Gloria Gilbert, for a statement she had made just prior to her wedding, seven years before. She had said that she did not intend to read his book.

Richard Caramel remembered this--he had remembered it well for seven years.

"What time will I expect you back?" asked Anthony.

"We won't come back," she answered, "we'll meet you down there at four."

"All right," he muttered, "I'll meet you."

Up-stairs he found a letter waiting for him. It was a mimeographed notice urging "the boys" in condescendingly colloquial language to pay the dues of the American Legion. He threw it impatiently into the waste-basket and sat down with his elbows on the window sill, looking down blindly into the sunny street.

Italy--if the verdict was in their favor it meant Italy. The word had become a sort of talisman to him, a land where the intolerable anxieties of life would fall away like an old garment. They would go to the watering-places first and among the bright and colorful crowds forget the gray appendages of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk again in the Piazza di Spanga at twilight, moving in that drifting flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars. The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly--when his purse hung heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it--the romance of blue ca.n.a.ls in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after rain, and of women, women who changed, dissolved, melted into other women and receded from his life, but who were always beautiful and always young.

But it seemed to him that there should be a difference in his att.i.tude. All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had been because of women. It was something that in different ways they did to him, unconsciously, almost casually--perhaps finding him tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced their absolute sway.

Turning about from the window he faced his reflection in the mirror, contemplating dejectedly the wan, pasty face, the eyes with their crisscross of lines like shreds of dried blood, the stooped and flabby figure whose very sag was a doc.u.ment in lethargy. He was thirty three--he looked forty. Well, things would be different.

The door-bell rang abruptly and he started as though he had been dealt a blow. Recovering himself, he went into the hall and opened the outer dour. It was Dot.