earth—a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men—
Beauty: (In astonishment) What?
The Voice: (Very much depressed) Yes, it is truly a melancholy spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in broad daylight saying “Do this!” and “Do that!” and all the men, even those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer sonorously either as “Mrs. So-and-so” or as “the wife.”
Beauty: But this can’t be true! I can understand, of course, their obedience to women of charm—but to fat women? to bony women? to women with scrawny cheeks?
The Voice: Even so.
Beauty: What of me? What chance shall I have?
The Voice: It will be “harder going,” if I may borrow a phrase.
Beauty: (After a dissatisfied pause) Why not the old lands, the land of grapes and soft-tongued men or the land of ships and seas?
The Voice: It’s expected that they’ll be very busy shortly.
Beauty: Oh!
The Voice: Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.
Beauty: What will I be? Tell me?
The Voice: At first it was thought that you would go this time as an actress in the motion pictures but, after all, it’s not advisable. You will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a “susciety gurl.”
Beauty: What’s that?
(There is a new sound in the wind which must for our purposes be interpreted as The Voice scratching its head.)
The Voice: (At length) It’s a sort of bogus aristocrat.
Beauty: Bogus? What is bogus?
The Voice: That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much that is bogus. Also, you will do much that is bogus.
Beauty: (Placidly) It all sounds so vulgar.
The Voice: Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you danced the old ones.
Beauty: (In a whisper) Will I be paid?
The Voice: Yes, as usual—in love.
Beauty: (With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips) And will I like being called a jazz-baby?
The Voice: (Soberly) You will love it….
(The dialogue ends here, with Beauty still sitting quietly, the stars pausing in an ecstasy of appreciation, the wind, white and gusty, blowing through her hair.
All this took place seven years before Anthony sat by the front windows of his apartment and listened to the chimes of St. Anne’s.)
— ◆ —
Chapter II.
Portrait of a Siren
Crispness folded down upon New York a month later, bringing November and the three big football games and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony’s mail. Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous undaunted ambition toward the first three dozen young men, who were of course invited to each of the ninety-six parties—as were the young lady’s group of family friends, acquaintances, college boys, and eager young outsiders. To continue, there was a third layer from the skirts of the city, from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to bitter Connecticut and the ineligible sections of Long Island—and doubtless contiguous layers down to the city’s shoes: Jewesses were coming out into a society of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx, and looking forward to a rising young broker or jeweller and a kosher wedding; Irish girls were casting their eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a society of young Tammany politicians, pious undertakers, and grown-up choirboys.
And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entré—the working girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted male—as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke and the subway’s foulness was freshened. And the actresses came out in new plays and the publishers came out with new books and the Castles came out with new dances. And the railroads came out with new schedules containing new mistakes instead of the old ones that the commuters had grown used to….
The City was coming out!
Anthony, walking along Forty-second Street one afternoon under a steel-gray sky, ran unexpectedly into Richard Caramel emerging from the Manhattan Hotel barber shop. It was a cold day, the first definitely cold day, and Caramel had on one of those knee-length, sheep-lined coats long worn by the working men of the Middle West, that were just coming into fashionable approval. His soft hat was of a discreet dark brown, and from under it his clear eye flamed like a topaz. He stopped Anthony enthusiastically, slapping him on the arms more from a desire to keep himself warm than from playfulness, and, after his inevitable hand shake, exploded into sound.
“Cold as the devil—Good Lord, I’ve been working like the deuce all day till my room got so cold I thought I’d get pneumonia. Darn landlady economizing on coal came up when I yelled over the stairs for her for half an hour. Began explaining why and all. God! First she drove me crazy, then I began to think she was sort of a character, and took notes while she talked—so she couldn’t see me, you know, just as though I were writing casually—”
He had seized Anthony’s arm and walking him briskly up Madison Avenue.
“Where to?”
“Nowhere in particular.”
“Well, then what’s the use?” demanded Anthony.
They stopped and stared at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel’s, whose nose was crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were red and watery at the rims. After a moment they began walking again.
“Done some good work on my novel.” Dick was looking and talking emphatically at the sidewalk. “But I have to get out once in a while.” He glanced at Anthony apologetically, as though craving encouragement.
“I have to talk. I guess very few people ever really think, I mean sit down and
