The Beautiful and the Damned | Page 2

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 eventually forms on
all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the age.
From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed
against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign

which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed
himself a rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an
intolerable bore. The year in which this story opens found him
wearying; his campaign had grown desultory; 1861 was creeping up
slowly on 1895; his thoughts ran a great deal on the Civil War,
somewhat on his dead wife and son, almost infinitesimally on his
grandson Anthony.
Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty,
Alicia Withers, who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an
impeccable entré into the banking circles of New York. Immediately
and rather spunkily she had borne him a son and, as if completely
devitalized by the magnificence of this performance, she had
thenceforth effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the
nursery. The boy, Adam Ulysses Patch, became an inveterate joiner of
clubs, connoisseur of good form, and driver of tandems--at the
astonishing age of twenty-six he began his memoirs under the title
"New York Society as I Have Seen It." On the rumor of its conception
this work was eagerly bid for among publishers, but as it proved after
his death to be immoderately verbose and overpoweringly dull, it never
obtained even a private printing.
This Fifth Avenue Chesterfield married at twenty-two. His wife was
Henrietta Lebrune, the Boston "Society Contralto," and the single child
of the union was, at the request of his grandfather, christened Anthony
Comstock Patch. When he went to Harvard, the Comstock dropped out
of his name to a nether hell of oblivion and was never heard of
thereafter.
Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together--so
often had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the
impersonality of furniture, but every one who came into his bedroom
regarded it with interest. It showed a dandy of the nineties, spare and
handsome, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the
suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown
curls, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit. This was Anthony at
five, the year of his mother's death.

His memories of the Boston Society Contralto were nebulous and
musical. She was a lady who sang, sang, sang, in the music room of
their house on Washington Square--sometimes with guests scattered all
about her, the men with their arms folded, balanced breathlessly on the
edges of sofas, the women with their hands in their laps, occasionally
making little whispers to the men and always clapping very briskly and
uttering cooing cries after each song--and often she sang to Anthony
alone, in Italian or French or in a strange and terrible dialect which she
imagined to be the speech of the Southern negro.
His recollections of the gallant Ulysses, the first man in America to roll
the lapels of his coat, were much more vivid. After Henrietta Lebrune
Patch had "joined another choir," as her widower huskily remarked
from time to time, father and son lived up at grampa's in Tarrytown,
and Ulysses came daily to Anthony's nursery and expelled pleasant,
thick-smelling words for sometimes as much as an hour. He was
continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and
excursions to Atlantic City, "oh, some time soon now"; but none of
them ever materialized. One trip they did take; when Anthony was
eleven they went abroad, to England and Switzerland, and there in the
best hotel in Lucerne his father died with much sweating and grunting
and crying aloud for air. In a panic of despair and terror Anthony was
brought back to America, wedded to a vague melancholy that was to
stay beside him through the rest of his life.
PAST AND PERSON OF THE HERO
At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his
parents had died and his grandmother had faded off almost
imperceptibly, until, for the first time since her marriage, her person
held for one day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing
room. So to Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at
every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination
that he formed the habit