скачать книгу бесплатно
The Beautiful and Damned
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
From Collins Classics and the author of ‘The Great Gatsby’ comes this razor-sharp satire on the excesses of the Jazz AgeFrom the author of The Great Gatsby, a tale of marriage and disappointment in the Roaring Twenties.Fitzgerald’s rich and detailed novel of the decadent Jazz Era follows the beautiful and vibrant Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria as they navigate the heady lifestyle of the young and wealthy in 1920s New York. Patch is the presumptive heir to his grandfather’s fortune, and keeps his equally spoiled wife in comfort while biding time until his grandfather’s death. Patch is unable to hold down any kind of job and spends his days in luxury, indulging in whatever pleasures are available. But as the money begins to fail, so does their marriage. Patch’s gradual descent into alcoholism, depression and alienation from his marriage ultimately lead to his ruin. Fitzgerald’s novel is a remorseless exploration of the horrors of an age of excess and lost innocence.F. Scott Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Despite his present popularity, Fitzgerald was often in financial trouble, due to the fact that only one of his novels sold well enough to support the extravagant lifestyle that he and his wife Zelda adopted, and later Zelda’s medical bills. His novel The Great Gatsby has sold millions of copies and remains a continual best-seller.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
F. Scott Fitzgerald
CONTENTS
Title Page (#u54a73d48-bc89-5876-a10e-af7f3bfa48cc)
History of Collins (#u875d0292-a5d8-52f0-8f6b-c8178d20087e)
Life & Times (#uec50af48-e263-5c25-85cf-12a63f7a31ed)
Epigraph (#u4ebdc677-8b9f-5255-aeb3-b01ada7c0221)
Dedication (#u29ab7dfe-24c9-5994-ac66-c3be7e1a10ee)
Book One (#u0c15b657-bc42-5648-aa2e-e90b27eba9dc)
Chapter 1 Anthony Patch (#ucb0d437b-19cd-55ce-b7c1-679ae280efef)
Chapter 2 Portrait of a Siren (#u2f9cef80-4615-509a-99db-a468120b1ecd)
Chapter 3 The Connoisseur of Kisses (#u79b9c415-a705-5706-b216-1ed4e8e3e466)
Book Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 The Radiant Hour (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 Symposium (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 The Broken Lute (#litres_trial_promo)
Book Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 A Matter of Civilization (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 A Matter of Aesthetics (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 No Matter! (#litres_trial_promo)
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
History of Collins (#ulink_8d42a263-0464-5f73-a7e3-cded46bbffb3)
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and ThePilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times (#ulink_d96b89dd-eba8-5148-a8de-1bdf3244e5c9)
Fitzgerald’s books provide a curious window into a world that has been and gone. A world where elements of US society had drowned themselves in a moral and ethical sump. His novels are a warning about what can happen when people become decadent and dishonourable, and appeal because the reader enjoys voyeuristically peering in to view the lives of those who are ridiculed as being exotic, foolish and beguiled, and is grateful not to be a part of it.
There is a moral judgement involved in the process of reading such stories and Fitzgerald’s work can be compared to that of the British author Thomas Hardy, who takes the same view that people tend to get what they deserve in life and that the real victims are those who get caught up, either by accident or by attraction. There is a definite register of contempt penned by both of these authors, as if to suggest that they have chosen to point the spotlight at those for whom they have little time in real life.
As its title suggests, The Beautiful and Damned (1922) is about the superficiality of café society in New York during the Jazz Age. This was the period when jazz music became hugely popular, when the smart set enjoyed living to excess in the heady days before the Great Depression. Fitzgerald observed that these people were often attractive and glamorous in appearance, but flawed and shallow in personality. He isn’t simply writing a condemnation of fey types, however, as the novel is essentially autobiographical, about himself and his wife Zelda.
In fact, Fitzgerald is clever enough to illustrate that this apparent superficiality is underscored by profound character complexity. The overt superficiality veils a covert diversity of hang-ups, anxieties, desires, needs, neuroses, passions, emotions, ambitions and failings. In short, the novel is a dissection of human nature, which is fundamentally the same in any social group, no matter what the outward impression.
Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s view is a rather unsympathetic one. He regards this social set as destined for personal disaster, because they are too subjectively obsessed to be objective about life. As a result, they lack the ability to save themselves from their indulgences, both internal and external. Ultimately Fitzgerald is saying that they lack the ingredients to keep themselves grounded, leaving their priorities in disarray. Their failure to reflect and maintain perspective on life means they inevitably lack the wisdom to make the right decisions and consequently they head for a fall.
It is this insight and analysis that makes Fitzgerald a great writer – he is just as interested in the human condition as he is in telling an entertaining story. The Beautiful and Damned is really a self-morality play, as the consequences it presents are self-impacting. The sub-society he describes is self-contained, like fermenting yeast in a demijohn, destined to destroy itself with the products of its own metabolism.
Later Works
There can be few novels as divisive as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in terms of people’s opinion of its literary worth. It registered disappointing sales upon its publication in 1925 which led to Fitzgerald slipping into obscurity despite his having established a reasonable reputation with his earlier books. Following his death, in 1940, the book was included on a list of titles to be provided free to US service men and women fighting in World War Two. This meant that 150,000 copies began circulating through the armed forces until the book became familiar to overseas Americans. As a result it had inadvertently worked its way into the American psyche and won favour where otherwise it would have been forgotten.
The story itself is essentially about the moral decay that ensued in America during the 1920s. Although other countries had class divisions, the US had the equivalent of an upper class in the form of patricians or members of long-established wealthy families. These New World aristocrats lorded themselves above other people and spent much of their lives partying their way through the Jazz Age. In addition, 1920 had seen the prohibition of alcohol, with the result that organized criminals had seen a way to make good money by bootlegging, or illegally selling liquor. When both of these groups came together they formed a social order of dilettantism – people who assumed and cultivated pretensions of sophistication. The story of The Great Gatsby spirals into tragedy as the book progresses with a succession of events – manslaughter, murder and then suicide – tragedy that seems all the more horrific after the spirited and frothy excesses that have come before.
In stark contrast to The Great Gatsby came Fitzgerald’s final novel Tender is the Night (1934), which is autobiographical at its heart. At the time of writing the book Fitzgerald’s wife was being treated for schizophrenia and the author holed-up in a house near the hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. There he wrestled with the book and indulged his alcoholism, from which he had suffered for most of his adult life. The story is about a couple who become involved because he is a psychoanalyst and she his patient. She is wealthy and fragile of mind, while he is poor and strong of mind. However, the tables are eventually turned as he becomes dependent on the demon drink and his behaviour sends him on a downward spiral, while she finds someone else and divorces him for a better life.
There are evidently themes in the book that run a close parallel with the real lives of the Fitzgeralds, so it seems that the author used the work as a way of unloading his darkest thoughts. It wasn’t so much a catharsis as a confessional, for Fitzgerald was laying his human flaws and desires bare for all to see, admitting that he had a drink problem and that his wife was his crutch. He was also known to have financial problems due to his frivolities and extravagancies and had turned to other women to satisfy his emotional and carnal desires. Much of his relationship with his wife had been spent as an amateur psychoanalyst, helping her to deal with her diminishing sanity.
Just six years after Tender is the Night was published, Fitzgerald was dead. His self-abuse had caught up with him at the age of only 44 years old, with a massive cardiac arrest. It seems that his last book was also a prophecy of his impending demise from alcohol. It was only a matter of time before his mortal being abandoned his immortal ambition. Fitzgerald the legendary writer has now outlived Fitzgerald the man several times over.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway
Fitzgerald was friends with arguably the greatest American writer, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway encouraged Fitzgerald to pursue his prose with artistic integrity, but grew frustrated with Fitzgerald’s tendency towards making his literature commercial. However, most of Fitzgerald’s novels did not perform that well, so a large part of his income came from magazine work, writing short stories which, by their very nature, had to conform to editorial requirements. Nine years after The Great Gatsby, he had struggled to complete his final novel, Tender is the Night. Unfortunately for Fitzgerald the book was received with disappointment and the decline of his writing career continued unabated. In the latter half of the 1930s he found work developing movie scripts and carried out further commercial writing. By the time of his death his literary career had died, too.
In hindsight Fitzgerald’s work is regarded variously, but The Great Gatsby has become the quintessential American classic. Some feel that Fitzgerald’s talent would have been better focused on his novel writing, but fiscal matters always dictated that he continue with his commercial work. However, Hemingway may have been a heavyweight writer but he was certainly not a contented man. For him the praise he garnered for each new book was a fix. When he ran out of ideas he suffered severe depression and ultimately took his own life with a shotgun. Fitzgerald battled on in a workmanlike manner even when plaudits were a distant memory.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
—ANTHONY PATCH
TO SHANE LESLIE, GEORGE JEAN NATHAN AND MAXWELL PERKINS
IN APPRECIATION OF MUCH LITERARY HELP AND ENCOURAGEMENT
BOOK ONE (#ulink_04eda658-2540-5d01-bc5f-3221c8b43bc9)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_6b999d23-4620-5009-ba86-1c3d8316fc4a)
ANTHONY PATCH
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch—not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward—a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.
A WORTHY MAN AND HIS GIFTED SON
Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.
Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as “Cross Patch,” left his father’s farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars.
This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was then that he determined, after a 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 entrée 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 of reading in bed—it soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on.
His favorite diversion until he was fourteen was his stamp collection; enormous, as nearly exhaustive as a boy’s could be—his grandfather considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography. So Anthony kept up a correspondence with a half dozen “Stamp and Coin” companies and it was rare that the mail failed to bring him new stamp-books or packages of glittering approval sheets—there was a mysterious fascination in transferring his acquisitions interminably from one book to another. His stamps were his greatest happiness and he bestowed impatient frowns on any one who interrupted him at play with them; they devoured his allowance every month, and he lay awake at night musing untiringly on their variety and many-colored splendor.
At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself, an inarticulate boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe with a private tutor, who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it would “open doors,” it would be a tremendous tonic, it would give him innumerable self-sacrificing and devoted friends. So he went to Harvard—there was no other logical thing to be done with him.
Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought in a high room in Beck Hall—a slim dark boy of medium height with a shy sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, and a yellowed illegible autograph letter of Keats’s, finding later that he had been amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a rather pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns, and neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would parade before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor, breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have a part.
Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but secretly pleased him—he began going out, at first a little and then a great deal. He made the Pudding. He drank—quietly and in the proper tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so young he might have “done extremely well.” In 1909, when he graduated, he was only twenty years old.
Then abroad again—to Rome this time, where he dallied with architecture and painting in turn, took up the violin, and wrote some ghastly Italian sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk on the joys of the contemplative life. It became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his grandfather’s called on him, and had he so desired he might have been persona grata with the diplomatic set—indeed, he found that his inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality, but that long adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness still dictated to his conduct.
He returned to America in 1912 because of one of his grandfather’s sudden illnesses, and after an excessively tiresome talk with the perpetually convalescent old man he decided to put off until his grandfather’s death the idea of living permanently abroad. After a prolonged search he took an apartment on Fifty-second Street and to all appearances settled down.
In 1913 Anthony Patch’s adjustment of himself to the universe was in process of consummation. Physically, he had improved since his undergraduate days—he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year. He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span—his friends declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were charming, whether alert with intelligence or half closed in an expression of melancholy humor.
One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the Aryan ideal, he was yet, here and there, considered handsome—moreover, he was very clean, in appearance and in reality, with that especial cleanness borrowed from beauty.
THE REPROACHLESS APARTMENT
Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it seemed to Anthony, were the uprights of a gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park. Coming up-town on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street invariably gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of treacherous rungs, and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps to the sidewalk.
After that, he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street half a block, pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses—and then in a jiffy he was under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, read, and entertained.
The house itself was of murky material, built in the late nineties; in response to the steadily growing need of small apartments each floor had been thoroughly remodelled and rented individually. Of the four apartments Anthony’s, on the second floor, was the most desirable.
The front room had fine high ceilings and three large windows that loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second Street. In its appointments it escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period; it escaped stiffness, stuffiness, bareness, and decadence. It smelt neither of smoke nor of incense—it was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer chiefly concerned with geometrical fishermen and huntsmen in black and gold; this made a corner alcove for a voluminous chair guarded by an orange-colored standing lamp. Deep in the fireplace a quartered shield was burned to a murky black.
Passing through the dining-room, which, as Anthony took only breakfast at home, was merely a magnificent potentiality, and down a comparatively long hall, one came to the heart and core of the apartment—Anthony’s bedroom and bath.
Both of them were immense. Under the ceilings of the former even the great canopied bed seemed of only average size. On the floor an exotic rug of crimson velvet was soft as fleece on his bare feet. His bathroom, in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom, was gay, bright, extremely habitable and even faintly facetious. Framed around the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the day: Julia Sanderson as “The Sunshine Girl,” Ina Claire as “The Quaker Girl,” Billie Burke as “The Mind-the-Paint Girl,” and Hazel Dawn as “The Pink Lady.” Between Billie Burke and Hazel Dawn hung a print representing a great stretch of snow presided over by a cold and formidable sun—this, claimed Anthony, symbolized the cold shower.
The bathtub, equipped with an ingenious bookholder, was low and large. Beside it a wall wardrobe bulged with sufficient linen for three men and with a generation of neckties. There was no skimpy glorified towel of a carpet—instead, a rich rug, like the one in his bedroom a miracle of softness, that seemed almost to massage the wet foot emerging from the tub. …
All in all a room to conjure with—it was easy to see that Anthony dressed there, arranged his immaculate hair there, in fact did everything but sleep and eat there. It was his pride, this bathroom. He felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing the tub so that, lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water, he might lie and look up at her and muse warmly and sensuously on her beauty.
NOR DOES HE SPIN
The apartment was kept clean by an English servant with the singularly, almost theatrically, appropriate name of Bounds, whose technic was marred only by the fact that he wore a soft collar. Had he been entirely Anthony’s Bounds this defect would have been summarily remedied, but he was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood. From eight until eleven in the morning he was entirely Anthony’s. He arrived with the mail and cooked breakfast. At nine-thirty he pulled the edge of Anthony’s blanket and spoke a few terse words—Anthony never remembered clearly what they were and rather suspected they were deprecative; then he served breakfast on a card-table in the front room, made the bed and, after asking with some hostility if there was anything else, withdrew.
In the mornings, at least once a week, Anthony went to see his broker. His income was slightly under seven thousand a year, the interest on money inherited from his mother. His grandfather, who had never allowed his own son to graduate from a very liberal allowance, judged that this sum was sufficient for young Anthony’s needs. Every Christmas he sent him a five-hundred-dollar bond, which Anthony usually sold, if possible, as he was always a little, not very, hard up.
The visits to his broker varied from semi-social chats to discussions of the safety of eight per cent investments, and Anthony always enjoyed them. The big trust company building seemed to link him definitely to the great fortunes whose solidarity he respected and to assure him that he was adequately chaperoned by the hierarchy of finance. From these hurried men he derived the same sense of safety that he had in contemplating his grandfather’s money—even more, for the latter appeared, vaguely, a demand loan made by the world to Adam Patch’s own moral righteousness, while this money down-town seemed rather to have been grasped and held by sheer indomitable strengths and tremendous feats of will; in addition, it seemed more definitely and explicitly—money.
Closely as Anthony trod on the heels of his income, he considered it to be enough. Some golden day, of course, he would have many millions; meanwhile he possessed a raison d’etre in the theoretical creation of essays on the popes of the Renaissance. This flashes back to the conversation with his grandfather immediately upon his return from Rome.
He had hoped to find his grandfather dead, but had learned by telephoning from the pier that Adam Patch was comparatively well again—the next day he had concealed his disappointment and gone out to Tarrytown. Five miles from the station his taxicab entered an elaborately groomed drive that threaded a veritable maze of walls and wire fences guarding the estate—this, said the public, was because it was definitely known that if the Socialists had their way, one of the first men they’d assassinate would be old Cross Patch.
Anthony was late and the venerable philanthropist was awaiting him in a glass-walled sun parlor, where he was glancing through the morning papers for the second time. His secretary, Edward Shuttleworth—who before his regeneration had been gambler, saloon-keeper, and general reprobate—ushered Anthony into the room, exhibiting his redeemer and benefactor as though he were displaying a treasure of immense value.
They shook hands gravely. “I’m awfully glad to hear you’re better,” Anthony said.
The senior Patch, with an air of having seen his grandson only last week, pulled out his watch.
“Train late?” he asked mildly.
It had irritated him to wait for Anthony. He was under the delusion not only that in his youth he had handled his practical affairs with the utmost scrupulousness, even to keeping every engagement on the dot, but also that this was the direct and primary cause of his success.
“It’s been late a good deal this month,” he remarked with a shade of meek accusation in his voice—and then after a long sigh, “Sit down.”
Anthony surveyed his grandfather with that tacit amazement which always attended the sight. That this feeble, unintelligent old man was possessed of such power that, yellow journals to the contrary, the men in the republic whose souls he could not have bought directly or indirectly would scarcely have populated White Plains, seemed as impossible to believe as that he had once been a pink-and-white baby.
The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows—the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others—callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paintbox. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain. It had sent him night-sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had split his intense normality into credulity and suspicion. Out of the coarse material of his enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant obsessions; his energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child, and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous puerile desire for a land of harps and canticles on earth.
The amenities having been gingerly touched upon, Anthony felt that he was expected to outline his intentions—and simultaneously a glimmer in the old man’s eye warned him against broaching, for the present, his desire to live abroad. He wished that Shuttleworth would have tact enough to leave the room—he detested Shuttleworth—but the secretary had settled blandly in a rocker and was dividing between the two Patches the glances of his faded eyes.
“Now that you’re here you ought to do something,” said his grandfather softly, “accomplish something.”
