PARADISE BE DAMNED!
ByF. Scott Fitzjazzer
ByF. Scott Fitzjazzer
By
F. Scott Fitzjazzer
This story was written between 10P. M.and 3A. M.of one night while I was playing bridge.The Swift Setpaid me enough for it to recoup what I lost at bridge and leave me the price of a diamond tiara and two theatre tickets. The movie rights brought me $60,000. It is probably the worst story I ever wrote—though, for that distinction, it has many rivals.
Anthony Blaine’s grandfather had all the money in the known world and lived in Tarrytown—a remarkable coincidence. Entirely surrounded by cold cash, he had acquired an austere frigidity of manner and was commonly called “Old Chill Blaine.” This relationship made Anthony constantly conscious of social security, since an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular—whatever that means.
His father, an ineffectual æsthete of that prehistoric period known as the Nineties, had died before he was born, apparently thus reversing the customarily usual process of nature—a phenomenon explicable only on the hypothesis that language sometimes obscures the thought it is supposed to elucidate. The fact is that Anthony was a posthumorous child—a kind of practical joke on his surprised mother.
Anthony inherited from his father nothing but his last name, his taper fingers and a million dollars—a miserable heritage.
But his mother, Beatrice Blaine! She was a woman!—by curious chance. Born in Boston of the old Puritan family of O’Hara, she was educated in Rome—also in Watertown and Ogdensburg, having been fired from three schools successively. She went abroad and was polished in Poland and finished in Finland.
She learned to smoke Camels in the Desert of Sahara and, at the Hague, to drink the national beverage, double strength. All in all, she absorbed a sort of education and an amount of liquor that it will be impossible ever again to find in this country.
In an absent-minded moment, she married Stephen Blaine, because she was a little bitweary, a little bit sad and more than a little bit pie-eyed. He tried to keep step with her, but in less than a year cheerfully died. So Anthony was born fatherless.
His childhood and youth were spent in the midst of privations—private cars, private yachts and private tutors.
At the age of seven he bit bell-boys, at eight smoked cigarettes, at nine played poker, at ten read Rabelais, at eleven imbibed intoxicants, at twelve kissed chorus-girls, and at thirteen his mother died of delirium tremens. He was sent to school at St. Ritz’s.
St. Ritz’s isn’t Eton but it is pretty strong on drinkin’. Anthony’s private stock was recruited from all parts of the world.
“What’s ’is pink stuff, Anthony?” asked a fellow dipsomaniac of the fourth form, in the intimacy of intoxication.
“’At’s ole genevieve from Geneva. ‘At green’s grenadine from Grenada, an’ ‘at yellow’s yataghan from Yap. Make a fairish cocktail, if you lace it with l’il ole wood-alcohol. Keeps a fella fit, ’is stuff does.”
He drank liquors of incomparable strengthand iridescent beauty, in whose mysterious depths all the lost lures of Mont Marter and of 42nd and Broadway shivered and shimmied languorously in resplendent redundancy. Also he took a shot of hop now and then.
He read enormously. In his first term he accomplished Rousseau’s Confessions, “The Newgate Calendar,” Boswell’s Life of Johnston, “Frank in the Mountains,” Kant’s Critique, The Arabian Nights in fourteen volumes, “Ten Nights in a Bar-room,” “The Dutch Twins,” the Memoirs of Cazanova, Petronius, Suetonius, Vitruvius, Vesuvius, Plato, Cato, Keats, Yeats and all the Elsie books.
Clad in an opalescent dressing-gown, the color of peacock’s eyes and emu’s fins, Anthony was lying on a luxurious lounge of mauve satin stuffed with eiderdown and aigrettes, reading Ghunga Dhin and drinking Ghordon Ghin. A timid knock on the door preceded the entrance of the headmaster. He stood in the doorway sheepishly, hat in hand, pulling an obsequious forelock.
“Blaine—er—er—Mister Blaine,” he said.
“Well, Margotson? What is it?”
“I called—er—to ask you, sir, if—er—er—you wouldn’t kindly attend a recitation—er—nowand then—er—just as a matter of form, you know?”
“Go to hell!” said Anthony coldly, turning again to his liquor.
“Yes, sir. Very good, sir.”
The headmaster faded through the doorway and, doubtless, went as he had been directed.
“Damn his impudence!” muttered Anthony.
He was leading man in all the school plays, editor of theSt. Ritz Bartenders’ Guide, quarterback on the eleven, first base on the nine, second bass on the glee club, forward on the hockey team and backward in his studies. He carried off first honors in the hundred-yards, the mile, the hurdles, the hammer-throw, the standing long drink, the debating society and the bacchanalian orgies.
Thus Anthony at eighteen, six feet tall and narrow in proportion, green eyes that shone through a tangled mass of tawny eyelashes, scornful of the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat, entered Princeton.
From the first he loved Princeton, the pleasantest country club in America. He loved thetall, towering tapestries of trees, infinitely transient, transiently infinite, yearning infinitely with infinite melancholy—the dreamy double chocolate jiggers pleasing the palate, drenching the innards with a joy akin to pleasure—the early moon, mistily mysterious, more mysterious than mystery itself—the deep insidious devotion of the dreaming peaks, in their lofty aspiration toward the empyrean—through it all the melancholy voices, singing “Old Nassau,” blent in a pæan of pain. While over all the two great dreaming towers towered toward the sky, like a gigantic pair of white flannel trousers, reversed.
The time is in the evening of any day in any month in any year. The place is the front room of an apartment in 52nd Street, New York, the library of a house in 68th Street, the ball-room of the Ritz-Royce, a limousine outside the Country Club in Louisville, the Princeton campus, anywhere else you choose.
Enter Rosalind—kissable mouth, other details unnecessary. Enter to her Anthony Blaine.
He: Will you kiss me?
She: Sure!
(They kiss—definitely and thoroughly—in a most workmanlike manner.)
He: Did you ever kiss anyone before?
She: (Dreamily) Dozens, hundreds, thousands of boys.
He: Kiss me again.
(They kiss.)
She: How old are you?
He: Nineteen-past.
She: I’m sixteen-just.
He: Kiss me again.
(They kiss.)
She: You’re some kisser yourself.
He: Of course—Princeton, you know.
She: I knew it. Now, Yale men——
He: Don’t mention the brutes!
She: But Harvard men——
He: Sissies! Kiss me again.
(They kiss.)
She: When I was in——
He: You’re so loquacious.
(They kiss.)
She: By the way, who are you?
He: Anthony Blaine.
She: I’ve heard——
He: Don’t talk.
(They kiss.)
She: I’m——
He: What difference does it make who you are? Let’s get married.
She: Can’t. I’m engaged.
He: Whom to?
She: What?
He: To who—who to?
She: Oh. Why, to Dawson Ryder and Skeets McCormick and Amory Patch and—to a boy named Wilson—don’t remember his first name and—to a Yale boy I met in the dark and don’t know any of his names or what he looks like and to—oh, lots of others.
He: You love me, don’t you?
(They kiss.)
She: I love you! I love you! I’m mad about you. I can’t do without you.
(They kiss.)
He: My God! You’re spoiling both our lives.
She: My God! Am I?
He: Here! we’re losing time.
(They kiss—kiss—kiss.)
She: You’ve broken my heart.
He: My God!
She: My God!
He: Time’s up. I have a date with Cecelia Connage.
She: She’s my sister. She’s not very good at it.
He: Good-by! You’ve broken my heart and mussed me all up.
(They kiss. He stumbles toward the exit—a broken man—then—throws back his head with that proud Princeton gesture—and goes out.)
She: Oh, God! I want to die!
(She looks about her—misty-eyed—with a deep aching sadness—that will pass—that will pass in time—say, three minutes.—She looks for her vanity-bag—powders her nose—renews the carmine on those tired lips——)
She: Well? Are they going to keep me waiting all night? Next boy, please!
The last light fades and drifts across the land,The low, long land, the land of towers and spires,That wanders lonely lest the lurid lyresPress thy pale petals with a passionate hand—Enchanted essences and pagan pyres—Oh, dream that sleeps and sleep that knows no dreaming!So wert thou wrought in fragrant fadeless fires.So wert thou wrapt in garments goldly gleamingAnd dying knew not what should end this seeming.The ghosts of evenings haunt these afternoons.The mid-day twilight shifts with my desire.Nor yet before my eyes do they conspireThere to distil the fragrance of the moonsThat burn and are consumed with splendid fire,And hurl them to abide in their abodeWhere young Fitjazzer tuned his youthful lyreAnd sang to Princeton his melodious odeWhich, what it means, there’s no one never knowed.
The last light fades and drifts across the land,The low, long land, the land of towers and spires,That wanders lonely lest the lurid lyresPress thy pale petals with a passionate hand—Enchanted essences and pagan pyres—Oh, dream that sleeps and sleep that knows no dreaming!So wert thou wrought in fragrant fadeless fires.So wert thou wrapt in garments goldly gleamingAnd dying knew not what should end this seeming.The ghosts of evenings haunt these afternoons.The mid-day twilight shifts with my desire.Nor yet before my eyes do they conspireThere to distil the fragrance of the moonsThat burn and are consumed with splendid fire,And hurl them to abide in their abodeWhere young Fitjazzer tuned his youthful lyreAnd sang to Princeton his melodious odeWhich, what it means, there’s no one never knowed.
The last light fades and drifts across the land,The low, long land, the land of towers and spires,That wanders lonely lest the lurid lyresPress thy pale petals with a passionate hand—Enchanted essences and pagan pyres—Oh, dream that sleeps and sleep that knows no dreaming!So wert thou wrought in fragrant fadeless fires.So wert thou wrapt in garments goldly gleamingAnd dying knew not what should end this seeming.
The last light fades and drifts across the land,
The low, long land, the land of towers and spires,
That wanders lonely lest the lurid lyres
Press thy pale petals with a passionate hand—
Enchanted essences and pagan pyres—
Oh, dream that sleeps and sleep that knows no dreaming!
So wert thou wrought in fragrant fadeless fires.
So wert thou wrapt in garments goldly gleaming
And dying knew not what should end this seeming.
The ghosts of evenings haunt these afternoons.The mid-day twilight shifts with my desire.Nor yet before my eyes do they conspireThere to distil the fragrance of the moonsThat burn and are consumed with splendid fire,And hurl them to abide in their abodeWhere young Fitjazzer tuned his youthful lyreAnd sang to Princeton his melodious odeWhich, what it means, there’s no one never knowed.
The ghosts of evenings haunt these afternoons.
The mid-day twilight shifts with my desire.
Nor yet before my eyes do they conspire
There to distil the fragrance of the moons
That burn and are consumed with splendid fire,
And hurl them to abide in their abode
Where young Fitjazzer tuned his youthful lyre
And sang to Princeton his melodious ode
Which, what it means, there’s no one never knowed.
Anthony Blaine paused in the process of adjusting the universe to himself and looked about him—an apartment in a house of murky material, windows that loomed gloomily down upon Fifty-second Street, voluminous chairs, a fireplace of murky black, a flamboyant exotic rug of crimson velvet, an orange-colored lamp—everything suggested the solidarity of wealth, an entré into the best society.
He yawned and sauntered to his bathroom, an enormous room, where he spent most of his time. He usually took five baths a day; on Sundays, seven.
Emerging from his bath, he polished himself with fine sandpaper, finishing with chamois-skin, until his smooth skin shone like satin. From the closets bursting with clothes—underwear for an army, silk shirts for a city, collars and ties for a multitude—he selected his attire.
He taxied to Brooks’s, to buy him some ties and collars, then to the grill-room of the Jazza.
Life in Large Cities
The grill-room of the Jazza. Anthony seated. Enter Richard Caramel. In person short, in pocket shorter. His figure is round—he is always round where Anthony is buying drinks.
Anthony: Hello, Caramel, old sweet!
Dick: Thanks, I will.
Anthony: Waiter! Two double Dacharis in tea cups and four more to follow.
Dick: Sounds to me!
Anthony: Pour it down, beardless boy! How many can you hold?
Dick: Don’t know—never had enough.
Anthony: Waiter! two dozen quadruple Dacharis in bath-tubs. Who’s the luscious débutante across the room?
Dick: My cousin, Gloria Goodle, the Speed Girl from Kansas City.
Anthony: No!
Dick: Yes! These short lines are lifesavers, aren’t they?
Anthony: Indeed. Also this dialogue stuff—so snappy. What were we talking about?
Dick: Gloria Goodle.
Anthony: Oh, yes——
Dick: The Speed Girl from Kansas City.
Anthony: Aren’t we nearly at the bottom of the page?
Dick: Yes, turn over.
Anthony: Your cousin?
Dick: Want to meet her?
Anthony: Gloria who?
Dick: Goodle.
Anthony: Funny name.
Dick: Funny girl.
Anthony: What’s her line?
Dick: Legs.
Anthony: Whose?
Dick: Her own.
Anthony: My God! lead me to her!
Dick: Come on.
Anthony: Wait a minute. I’ve got something on my mind.
Dick: Get it off before you meet Gloria.
Anthony: Suppose I were an Athenian—too proud to be enigmatic, too supple to eventuate, too incongruous to ratify, too courageous to adorn—
Dick: Cut it! Suppose you were an author too young to be wise, too self-sufficient to learn, too impatient to wait, too successful to stop—that’s the kind of bunk you’d write.
She was dazzling—alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance—hair full of heavenly glamour—mouth full of gum drops.
“Where are you from?” inquired Anthony.
“K. C., Mo. Got any gum drops?”
“Gum drops! My God!”
The clock on the mantel struck five with a querulous fashionable beauty. Then, as if a brutish sensibility in him was reminded by those thin, tinny beats that the petals were falling from the flowered afternoon, Anthony pulled her to him and held her helpless without breath, with scarcely room to masticate the gum drops, in a kiss like a chloroformed sponge.
The clock struck six.
Anthony: Will you marry me, Gloria?
Gloria: Are you rich?
Anthony: Haven’t a cent.
Gloria: Thought you were a millionaire.
Anthony: Absolutely stony. Spent it all on neckties and collars.
Gloria: I must have gum drops.
Anthony: Impossible.
Gloria: My God! how I love you!—but I must have gum drops.
Anthony: My God! You’ve broken my heart!
Gloria: My God! have I? Try a gum drop.
Anthony: My God! woman, you’re heartless.
Gloria: I’m Gloria Goodle—the Speed Girl, Coast to Coast Gloria.
Anthony: Coast to coast!—ashes to ashes! dust to dust! My love is dead.
(Then a thick impenetrable darkness descended on his mind—though you’d hardly notice the difference.)
At seven-thirty of the same evening, Anthony was sitting on the floor of the front room of his apartment, with three books before him—a child again playing with his stamp-albums—when Gloria and Dick came in.
“Anthony!” she cried, “your grandfather has died and left you a hundred million bucks.”
“Go ’way,” he answered with petulant gentleness, “I’ve got a five-pistache stamp of Jugo-Rumania and there isn’t any place for it in the damned old book.”
“Jugo-Rumania!” gasped Dick. “Ain’t that the truth? The poor gink’s got ’em. He always was a wet one.”
“Never mind,” said glorious Gloria gently. “I’ll marry him and take him to Arabia where the gum comes from and you can get a decent drink. His trouble ain’t so much the humidity as the hooch.”