“Dearest—” His arms were around
her; he pulled her head down upon his shoulder.
“What is it, my own Gloria? Tell me.”
“We’re going away,” she sobbed.
“Oh, Anthony, it’s sort of the first place
we’ve lived together. Our two little beds
here—side by side—they’ll
be always waiting for us, and we’re never coming
back to ’em any more.”
She was tearing at his heart as she always could.
Sentiment came over him, rushed into his eyes.
“Gloria, why, we’re going on to another
room. And two other little beds. We’re
going to be together all our lives.”
Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.
“But it won’t be—like our two
beds—ever again. Everywhere we go and
move on and change, something’s lost—something’s
left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat
anything, and I’ve been so yours, here—”
He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond
any criticism of her sentiment, a wise grasping of
the minute, if only an indulgence of her desire to
cry—Gloria the idler, caresser of her own
dreams, extracting poignancy from the memorable things
of life and youth.
Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station
with the tickets he found her asleep on one of the
beds, her arm curled about a black object which he
could not at first identify. Coming closer he
found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new
one, nor clean one, but her face, tear-stained, was
pressed against it, and he understood her ancient
and most honorable message. There was almost
ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him,
shy but well aware of her own nicety of imagination.
With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two
things, it seemed to Anthony that they lay somewhere
near the heart of love.
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of
life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed
to whom as many things are significant and meaningful
at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an
organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who
grinds an organ—and once he was an organ-grinder!
The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those
impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever
grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant
ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through
its own silks and satins to show the bare framework
of a man-made thing—oh, that eternal hand!—a
play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely
a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal
plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject
to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
And this time with Gloria and Anthony, this first
year of marriage, and the gray house caught them in
that stage when the organ-grinder was slowly undergoing
his inevitable metamorphosis. She was twenty-three;
he was twenty-six.
