Francis Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned / Прекрасные и обреченные. Уровень 4

“Well!” cried the girl defiantly.

She was dazzling.

“I’m a solid block of ice,” murmured Gloria, glancing around. “We found a place where you could stand on an iron-bar grating, and it blew warm air up at you – but Dick wouldn’t wait there with me. I told him to go on alone and let me be happy.”

She seemed talking for her own pleasure, without effort. Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her profile: the exquisite regularity of nose and upper lip, the chin, balanced beautifully on a rather short neck.

“I think you’ve got the best name I’ve heard,” she was saying, still apparently to herself. “Anthony Patch. You look like Anthony, rather majestic and solemn.”

Anthony smiled.

“My name is too flamboyant,” she went on, “I used to know two girls named Jinks, though, and just think what they were named – Judy Jinks and Jerry Jinks. Cute, what? Don’t you think?”

“Everybody in the next generation,” suggested Dick, “will be named Peter or Barbara – because at present all the piquant literary characters are named Peter or Barbara.”

Anthony continued the prophecy:

“Of course Gladys and Eleanor.”

“Displacing Ella and Stella,” interrupted Dick.

“And Pearl and Jewel,” Gloria added cordially, “and Earl and Elmer and Minnie.”

“Where are you from?” inquired Anthony.

“Kansas City, Missouri.”

“I must confess,” said Anthony gravely, “that even I’ve heard one thing about you.”

She sat up straight.

“Tell me. I’ll believe it. I always believe anything any one tells me about myself.”

“I’m not sure that I ought to,” said Anthony. She was so obviously interested.

“He means your nickname,” said her cousin.

“What name?” inquired Anthony, politely puzzled.

Instantly she was shy – then she laughed, and turned her eyes up as she spoke:

“Coast-to-Coast Gloria.” Her voice was full of laughter. “O Lord!”

Still Anthony was puzzled.

“What do you mean?”

“Me, I mean. That’s what some silly boys called me.”

“Don’t you see, Anthony,” explained Dick, “a great traveler? Isn’t that what you’ve heard? She’s been called that for years – since she was seventeen.”

“What have you heard of me?” asked she.

“Something about your tan.”

“My tan?” She was puzzled. Her hand rose to her throat.

“Do you remember Maury Noble? Man you met about a month ago. You made a great impression.”

She thought a moment.

“I remember – but he didn’t call me up.”

“He was afraid to, I don’t doubt.”

On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together in the grill room at the Plaza. She seemed so young, scarcely eighteen; her form was amazingly supple and slender, and her hands were small as a child’s hands should be.

Gloria considered several locations, and rather to Anthony’s annoyance paraded him to a table for two at the far side of the room. Would she sit on the right or on the left? Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture.

She watched the dancers, commenting murmurously.

“There’s a pretty girl in blue, there! No. Behind you – there!”

“Yes,” he agreed helplessly.

“You didn’t see her.”

“I’d rather look at you.”

“I know, but she was pretty. Except that she had big ankles.”

“Did she?” he said indifferently.

A girl’s salutation came from a couple dancing close to them.

“Hello, Gloria! O Gloria!”

“Hello there.”

“Who’s that?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. Somebody.” She caught sight of another face. “Hello, Muriel!” Then to Anthony: “There’s Muriel Kane[18] Muriel Kane – Мюриэл Кейн . Now I think she’s attractive, but not very.”

Anthony chuckled.

“Attractive, but not very,” he repeated.

She smiled.

“Why is that funny? Do you want to dance?”

“Do you?”

“Sort of. But let’s sit,” she decided.

“And talk about you? You love to talk about you, don’t you?”

“Yes.” She laughed.

“I imagine your autobiography is a classic.”

“Dick says I haven’t got one.”

“Dick!” he exclaimed. “What does he know about you?”

“Nothing. But he says the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms.”

“He’s talking from his book.”

“He says unloved women have no biographies – they have histories.”

Anthony laughed again.

“Then why haven’t you a biography? Haven’t you ever had a kiss that counted?”

“I don’t know what you mean ‘counts,’” she objected.

“I wish you’d tell me how old you are.”

“Twenty-two,” she said. “How old did you think?”

“About eighteen.”

“Let’s be eighteen, then. I don’t like being twenty-two. I hate it more than anything in the world.”

“Being twenty-two?”

“No. Getting old and everything. Getting married.”

“Don’t you ever want to marry?”

“I don’t want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care of.”

He waited rather breathlessly for her next remark. She was smiling, without amusement but pleasantly.

“ What do you do with yourself?[19] What do you do with yourself? – Чем вы занимаетесь? ” she asked.

Anthony was in a mood to talk. He wanted, moreover, to impress this girl. He wanted to pose.

“I do nothing,” he began. “I do nothing, for there’s nothing I can do that’s worth doing.”

“Well?” He had not surprised her.

“Don’t you approve of lazy men?”

She nodded.

“I want to know just why it’s impossible for an American to be gracefully idle, it astonishes me.

I don’t understand why people think that every young man ought to go downtown and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work.”

She watched him inscrutably. He waited for her to agree or disagree, but she did neither.

“Don’t you ever form judgments on things?” he asked with some exasperation.

She shook her head and her eyes wandered back to the dancers as she answered:

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about – what you should do, or what anybody should do. I don’t mind if people don’t do anything. I don’t see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything.”

“You don’t want to do anything?”

“I want to sleep.”

“Sleep?”

“Sort of. I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe. And some of them can do nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me. But I never want to change people.”

“You’re a little determinist,” laughed Anthony. “It’s your world, isn’t it?”

“Well,” she said, “isn’t it? As long as I’m – young.”

She paused slightly before the last word and Anthony suspected that she wanted to say “beautiful.”

That winter afternoon at the Plaza was the first of a succession of “dates” Anthony made with her before Christmas. Invariably she was busy. She attended the charity dances at the big hotels; he saw her several times at dinner parties.

He made engagements with her several times for lunch and tea. She was sleepy, incapable of concentrating upon anything.

One Sunday afternoon just before Christmas he called up and found her after some important but mysterious quarrel.