Gloria shuddered suddenly as a river siren came moaning
over the dusky roofs, and leaning back in till the
ghostly curtains fell from her shoulder, she turned
on the electric lamp. It was growing late.
She knew there was some change in her purse, and she
considered whether she would go down and have some
coffee and rolls where the liberated subway made a
roaring cave of Manhattan Street or eat the devilled
ham and bread in the kitchen. Her purse decided
for her. It contained a nickel and two pennies.
After an hour the silence of the room had grown unbearable,
and she found that her eyes were wandering from her
magazine to the ceiling, toward which she stared without
thought. Suddenly she stood up, hesitated for
a moment, biting at her finger—then she
went to the pantry, took down a bottle of whiskey
from the shelf and poured herself a drink. She
filled up the glass with ginger ale, and returning
to her chair finished an article in the magazine.
It concerned the last revolutionary widow, who, when
a young girl, had married an ancient veteran of the
Continental Army and who had died in 1906. It
seemed strange and oddly romantic to Gloria that she
and this woman had been contemporaries.
She turned a page and learned that a candidate for
Congress was being accused of atheism by an opponent.
Gloria’s surprise vanished when she found that
the charges were false. The candidate had merely
denied the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
He admitted, under pressure, that he gave full credence
to the stroll upon the water.
Finishing her first drink, Gloria got herself a second.
After slipping on a negligee and making herself comfortable
on the lounge, she became conscious that she was miserable
and that the tears were rolling down her cheeks.
She wondered if they were tears of self-pity, and tried
resolutely not to cry, but this existence without hope,
without happiness, oppressed her, and she kept shaking
her head from side to side, her mouth drawn down tremulously
in the corners, as though she were denying an assertion
made by some one, somewhere. She did not know
that this gesture of hers was years older than history,
that, for a hundred generations of men, intolerable
and persistent grief has offered that gesture, of
denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more
profound, more powerful than the God made in the image
of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would
be equally impotent. It is a truth set at the
heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never
answers—this force intangible as air, more
definite than death.
RICHARD CARAMEL
Early in the summer Anthony resigned from his last
club, the Amsterdam. He had come to visit it
hardly twice a year, and the dues were a recurrent
burden. He had joined it on his return from Italy
because it had been his grandfather’s club and
his father’s, and because it was a club that,
given the opportunity, one indisputably joined—but
as a matter of fact he had preferred the Harvard Club,
largely because of Dick and Maury. However, with
the decline of his fortunes, it had seemed an increasingly
desirable bauble to cling to.... It was relinquished
at the last, with some regret....
