The Beautiful and Damned. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

       CHAPTER 2

       PORTRAIT OF A SIREN

      Crispness folded down upon New York a month later, bringing November and the three big football games and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony’s mail. Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous undaunted ambition toward the first three dozen young men, who were of course invited to each of the ninety-six parties—as were the young lady’s group of family friends, acquaintances, college boys, and eager young outsiders. To continue, there was a third layer from the skirts of the city, from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to bitter Connecticut and the ineligible sections of Long Island—and doubtless contiguous layers down to the city’s shoes: Jewesses were coming out into a society of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx, and looking forward to a rising young broker or jeweller and a kosher wedding; Irish girls were casting their eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a society of young Tammany politicians, pious undertakers, and grown-up choirboys.

      And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entrée—the working girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted male—as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke and the subway’s foulness was freshened. And the actresses came out in new plays and the publishers came out with new books and the Castles came out with new dances. And the railroads came out with new schedules containing new mistakes instead of the old ones that the commuters had grown used to. …

      The City was coming out!

      Anthony, walking along Forty-second Street one afternoon under a steel-gray sky, ran unexpectedly into Richard Caramel emerging from the Manhattan Hotel barber shop. It was a cold day, the first definitely cold day, and Caramel had on one of those knee-length, sheep-lined coats long worn by the working men of the Middle West, that were just coming into fashionable approval. His soft hat was of a discreet dark brown, and from under it his clear eye flamed like a topaz. He stopped Anthony enthusiastically, slapping him on the arms more from a desire to keep himself warm than from playfulness, and, after his inevitable hand shake, exploded into sound.

      “Cold as the devil—Good Lord, I’ve been working like the deuce all day till my room got so cold I thought I’d get pneumonia. Darn landlady economizing on coal came up when I yelled over the stairs for her for half an hour. Began explaining why and all. God! First she drove me crazy, then I began to think she was sort of a character, and took notes while she talked—so she couldn’t see me, you know, just as though I were writing casually—”

      He had seized Anthony’s arm and walking him briskly up Madison Avenue.

      “Where to?”

      “Nowhere in particular.”

      “Well, then what’s the use?” demanded Anthony.

      They stopped and stared at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel’s, whose nose was crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were red and watery at the rims. After a moment they began walking again.

      “Done some good work on my novel.” Dick was looking and talking emphatically at the sidewalk. “But I have to get out once in a while.” He glanced at Anthony apologetically, as though craving encouragement.

      “I have to talk. I guess very few people ever really think, I mean sit down and ponder and have ideas in sequence. I do my thinking in writing or conversation. You’ve got to have a start, sort of—something to defend or contradict—don’t you think?”

      Anthony grunted and withdrew his arm gently.

      “I don’t mind carrying you, Dick, but with that coat—”

      “I mean,” continued Richard Caramel gravely, “that on paper your first paragraph contains the idea you’re going to damn or enlarge on. In conversation you’ve got your vis-à-vis’s last statement—but when you simply ponder, why, your ideas just succeed each other like magic-lantern pictures and each one forces out the last.”

      They passed Forty-fifth Street and slowed down slightly. Both of them lit cigarettes and blew tremendous clouds of smoke and frosted breath into the air.

      “Let’s walk up to the Plaza and have an egg-nog,” suggested Anthony. “Do you good. Air’ll get the rotten nicotine out of your lungs. Come on—I’ll let you talk about your book all the way.”

      “I don’t want to if it bores you. I mean you needn’t do it as a favor.” The words tumbled out in haste, and though he tried to keep his face casual it screwed up uncertainly. Anthony was compelled to protest: “Bore me? I should say not!”

      “Got a cousin—” began Dick, but Anthony interrupted by stretching out his arms and breathing forth a low cry of exultation.

      “Good weather!” he exclaimed, “isn’t it? Makes me feel about ten. I mean it makes me feel as I should have felt when I was ten. Murderous! Oh, God! one minute it’s my world, and the next I’m the world’s fool. To-day it’s my world and everything’s easy, easy. Even Nothing is easy!”

      “Got a cousin up at the Plaza. Famous girl. We can go up and meet her. She lives there in the winter—has lately anyway—with her mother and father.”

      “Didn’t know you had cousins in New York.”

      “Her