“I don’t follow you at all,” complained Dick in a crestfallen tone. Infinitely dismayed, he seemed to bulge in protest. He was staring intently at Anthony and caroming off a succession of passers-by, who reproached him with fierce, resentful glances.
“I simply mean that a talent like Wells’s could carry the intelligence of a Spencer. But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it’s carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.”
Dick considered, unable to decide the exact degree of criticism intended by Anthony’s remarks. But Anthony, with that facility which seemed so frequently to flow from him, continued, his dark eyes gleaming in his thin face, his chin raised, his voice raised, his whole physical being raised:
“Say I am proud and sane and wise—an Athenian among Greeks. Well, I might fail where a lesser man would succeed. He could imitate, he could adorn, he could be enthusiastic, he could be hopefully constructive. But this hypothetical me would be too proud to imitate, too sane to be enthusiastic, too sophisticated to be Utopian, too Grecian to adorn.”
“Then you don’t think the artist works from his intelligence?”
“No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it’s his mode of living. Don’t tell me you like this ‘Divine Function of the Artist’ business?”
“I’m not accustomed even to refer to myself as an artist.”
“Dick,” said Anthony, changing his tone, “I want to beg your pardon.”
“Why?”
“For that outburst. I’m honestly sorry. I was talking for effect.”
Somewhat mollified, Dick rejoined:
“I’ve often said you were a Philistine at heart.”
It was a crackling dusk when they turned in under the white façade of the Plaza and tasted slowly the foam and yellow thickness of an egg-nog. Anthony looked at his companion. Richard Caramel’s nose and brow were slowly approaching a like pigmentation; the red was leaving the one, the blue deserting the other. Glancing in a mirror, Anthony was glad to find that his own skin had not discolored. On the contrary, a faint glow had kindled in his cheeks—he fancied that he had never looked so well.
“Enough for me,” said Dick, his tone that of an athlete in training. “I want to go up and see the Gilberts. Won’t you come?”
“Why—yes. If you don’t dedicate me to the parents and dash off in the corner with Dora.”
“Not Dora—Gloria.”
A clerk announced them over the phone, and ascending to the tenth floor they followed a winding corridor and knocked at 1088. The door was answered by a middle-aged lady—Mrs. Gilbert herself.
“How do you do?” She spoke in the conventional American lady-lady language. “Well, I’m aw_fully glad to see you—”
Hasty interjections by Dick, and then:
“Mr. Pats? Well, do come in, and leave your coat there.” She pointed to a chair and changed her inflection to a deprecatory laugh full of minute gasps. “This is really lovely—lovely. Why, Richard, you haven’t been here for so long—no!—no!” The latter monosyllables served half as responses, half as periods, to some vague starts from Dick. “Well, do sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing.”
One crossed and recrossed; one stood and bowed ever so gently; one smiled again and again with helpless stupidity; one wondered if she would ever sit down at length one slid thankfully into a chair and settled for a pleasant call.
“I suppose it’s because you’ve been busy—as much as anything else,” smiled Mrs. Gilbert somewhat ambiguously. The “as much as anything else” she used to balance all her more rickety sentences. She had two other ones: “at least that’s the way I look at it” and “pure and simple”—these three, alternated, gave each of her remarks an air of being a general reflection on life, as though she had calculated all causes and, at length, put her finger on the ultimate one.
Richard Caramel’s face, Anthony saw, was now quite normal. The brow and cheeks were of a flesh color, the nose politely inconspicuous. He had fixed his aunt with the bright-yellow eye, giving her that acute and exaggerated attention that young males are accustomed to render to all females who are of no further value.
“Are you a writer too, Mr. Pats? … Well, perhaps we can all bask in Richard’s fame.”—Gentle laughter led by Mrs. Gilbert.
“Gloria’s out,” she said, with an air of laying down an axiom from which she would proceed to derive results. “She’s dancing somewhere. Gloria goes, goes, goes. I tell her I don’t see how she stands it. She dances all afternoon and all night, until I think she’s going to wear herself to a shadow. Her father is very worried about her.”
She smiled from one to the other. They both smiled.
She was composed, Anthony perceived, of a succession of semicircles and parabolas, like those figures that gifted folk make on the typewriter: head, arms, bust, hips, thighs, and ankles were in a bewildering tier of roundnesses. Well ordered and clean she was, with hair of an artificially rich gray; her large face sheltered weather-beaten blue eyes and was adorned with just the faintest white mustache.
“I always say,” she remarked to Anthony, “that Richard is an ancient soul.”
In the tense pause that followed, Anthony considered a pun—something about Dick having been much walked upon.
“We all have souls of different ages,” continued Mrs. Gilbert radiantly; “at least that’s what I say.”
“Perhaps so,” agreed Anthony with an air of quickening to a hopeful idea. The voice bubbled on:
“Gloria has a very young soul—irresponsible, as much as anything else. She has no sense of responsibility.”
“She’s sparkling, Aunt Catherine,” said Richard pleasantly. “A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.”
“Well,” confessed Mrs. Gilbert, “all I know is that she goes and goes and goes—”
The number of goings to Gloria’s discredit was lost in the rattle of the door-knob as it turned to admit Mr. Gilbert.
He was a short man with a mustache resting like a small white cloud beneath his undistinguished nose. He had reached the stage where his value as a social creature was a black and imponderable negative. His ideas were the popular delusions of twenty years before; his mind steered a wabbly and anaemic course in the wake of the daily newspaper editorials. After graduating from a small but terrifying Western university, he had entered the celluloid business, and as this required only the minute measure of intelligence he brought to it, he did well for several years—in fact until about 1911, when he began exchanging contracts for vague agreements with the moving picture industry. The moving picture industry had decided about 1912 to gobble him up, and at this time he was, so to speak, delicately balanced on its tongue. Meanwhile he was supervising manager of the Associated Mid-western Film Materials Company, spending six months of each year in New York and the remainder in Kansas City and St. Louis. He felt credulously that there was a good thing coming to him—and his wife thought so, and his daughter thought so too.
He disapproved of Gloria: she stayed out late, she never ate her meals, she was always in a mix-up—he had irritated her once and she had used toward him words that he had not thought were part of her vocabulary. His wife was easier.