The Lay Anthony: A Romance — Context and Discussion

informed her; “that will about shut up the shop.”

“Then perhaps you will bring back the screwdrivers.”

“What are you going to do, Tony?”

“A big strong fellow... there mast be something.”

“Mother won't let me play ball in the leagues.”

“Perhaps she will; we'll talk to her; it's better than nothing.”

“I broke a box of rotten perfume at the drugstore, and owe the Doctor four seventy.”

“It's too bad--father is never free from little worries; you are always getting into difficulties. You are different from other boys, Anthony--there don't seem to be any place in life for you; or you don't make a place, I can't tell which. You have no constructive sense, and no feeling of responsibility. What do you want to do with yourself?”

“I don't know, Ellie, honestly,” he confessed. “I try like the devil, make a thousand resolutions, and then--I go off fishing. Or if I don't things go to the rats just the same.”

“Well,” she rose, “I'm going up. Don't bother father about that money, I'll let you have it. It's perfectly useless to tell you to return it.”

“I swear you will get it next week,” he proclaimed gratefully. “The baseball association owes me for two games.”

“Haven't you promised it?”

“That's so!” he exclaimed ruefully. She laughed and disappeared into the house.

A BLACK depression settled over him; life appeared a huge conspiracy against his success, his happiness. The future, propounded by Ellie, was suddenly stripped of all glamor, denuded of all optimistic dreams; he passed through one of those dismaying periods when the world, himself, his pretentions, were revealed in the clear and pitiless light of reality. His friends, his circumstances, his hopes, held out no promise, no thought of pleasure. Behind him his life lay revealed as a series of failures, before him it was plotted without security. The plan, the order, that others saw, or said that they saw, presented to him only a cloudy confusion. The rewards for which others struggled, aspired, which they found indispensable, had been ever meaningless to him--to money he never gave a thought; a society organized into calls, dancing, incomprehensible and petty values, never rose above his horizon.

He was happiest in the freedom of the open, the woods; in the easy company of casual friends, black or white, kindly comment. He would spend a day with his dogs and gun, sitting on a stump in a snowy field, listening to the eager yelping in the distant, blue wood, shooting a rare rabbit. Or tramping tirelessly the leafy paths of autumn. Or, better still, swinging through the miry October swales, coonhunting after midnight with lantern and climbers.

But now those pleasures, in anticipated retrospect, appeared bald, unprofitable. Prolonged indefinitely, he divined, they would pall; they did not offer adequate material, aim, for the years. For a moment he saw, grinning hatefully at him, the spectre of what he might become; he passed such men, collarless and unshaven, on the street comers, flinging them a scornful salutation. He had paid for their drinks, hearkening negligently to their stereotyped stories, secretly gibing at their obvious goodfellowship, their eager, tremulous smiles. They had been, in their day, great rabbit hunters... detestable.

The mood vanished, the present closed mercifully about him, leaving him merely defiant. The townclock announced the hour in slow, jarring notes. A light shone above from Ellie's room, and he heard his father's deliberate footsteps in the hall, returning from the Ellerton Club, where, as was his invariable nightly habit, he had played cooncan. The moon, freed from the towering beams, was without color.

Anthony rose, and flung away a cold, stale cigarette; the world was just like that--stale and cold. He proceeded toward the house, when he heard footfalls on the pavement; in the obscurity he barely made out a man and woman, walking so closely as to be hardly distinguishably separate. They stopped by the fence, only a few feet from where he stood concealed in the shadows, and the man took the woman's hands in his own, bending over her. Then, suddenly, clasping her in his arms, he covered her upturned face with passionate kisses. With a little, frightened gasp she clung to his shoulders. The kisses ceased. Their strained, desperate embrace remained unbroken.--It seemed that each was the only reality for the other in a world of unsubstantial gloom, veiled in the shifting, silvery mist of a cold and removed planet. The woman breathed with a deep, sobbing inspiration; and, when she spoke, Anthony realized that he was eavesdropping, and walked swiftly and cautiously into the house.