The Beautiful and the Damned | Page 9

on to say is
lost for all time.)
NIGHT
Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and, at a price, obtained seats
for a new musical comedy called "High Jinks." In the foyer of the
theatre they waited a few moments to see the first-night crowd come in.
There were opera cloaks stitched of myriad, many-colored silks and
furs; there were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of
white and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers down the
middles of innumerable silk hats; there were shoes of gold and bronze
and red and shining black; there were the high-piled, tight-packed
coiffures of many women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept
men--most of all there was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling,
foaming, slow-rolling wave effect of this cheerful sea of people as
to-night it poured its glittering torrent into the artificial lake of
laughter....
After the play they parted--Maury was going to a dance at Sherry's,
Anthony homeward and to bed.
He found his way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times

Square, which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely
beautiful and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about
him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin--too fat, too lean, yet
floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate
breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he
thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully,
swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of
many cigarettes. He caught the glance of a dark young beauty sitting
alone in a closed taxicab. Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and
violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten
remoteness of the afternoon.
Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning
their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances. They were
dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness then semi-fashionable;
their turned over collars were notched at the Adam's apple; they wore
gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles.
Passed a bewildered old lady borne along like a basket of eggs between
two men who exclaimed to her of the wonders of Times
Square--explained them so quickly that the old lady, trying to be
impartially interested, waved her head here and there like a piece of
wind-worried old orange-peel. Anthony heard a snatch of their
conversation:
"There's the Astor, mama!"
"Look! See the chariot race sign----"
"There's where we were to-day. No, there!"
"Good gracious! ..."
"You should worry and grow thin like a dime." He recognized the
current witticism of the year as it issued stridently from one of the pairs
at his elbow.
"And I says to him, I says----"

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a crow's,
incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath--and
over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of
light--light dividing like pearls--forming and reforming in glittering
bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the
sky.
He turned thankfully down the hush that blew like a dark wind out of a
cross-street, passed a bakery-restaurant in whose windows a dozen
roast chickens turned over and over on an automatic spit. From the
door came a smell that was hot, doughy, and pink. A drug-store next,
exhaling medicines, spilt soda water and a pleasant undertone from the
cosmetic counter; then a Chinese laundry, still open, steamy and
stifling, smelling folded and vaguely yellow. All these depressed him;
reaching Sixth Avenue he stopped at a corner cigar store and emerged
feeling better--the cigar store was cheerful, humanity in a navy blue
mist, buying a luxury ....
Once in his apartment he smoked a last cigarette, sitting in the dark by
his open front window. For the first time in over a year he found
himself thoroughly enjoying New York. There was a rare pungency in
it certainly, a quality almost Southern. A lonesome town, though. He
who had grown up alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During
the past several months he had been careful, when he had no
engagement for the evening, to hurry to one of his clubs and find some
one. Oh, there was a loneliness here----
His cigarette, its smoke bordering the thin folds of curtain with rims of
faint white spray, glowed on until the clock in St. Anne's down the
street struck one with a querulous fashionable beauty. The elevated,
half a quiet block away, sounded a rumble of drums--and should he
lean from his window he would see the train, like an angry eagle,
breasting the dark curve at the corner. He was reminded of a fantastic
romance he had lately read in which cities had been