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THE LAY ANTHONY

A Romance

By Joseph Hergesheimer

New York & London

Mitchell Kennerley 1914


"_... if in passing from this deceitful world into true life love is
not forgotten,... I know that among the most joyous souls of the third
heaven my Fiametta sees my pain. Pray her, if the sweet draught of Lethe
has not robbed me of her,... to obtain my ascent to her._"

--Giovanni Boccaccio


TO

DOROTHY

THIS

FIGMENT OF A PERPETUAL FLOWERING

THE LAY ANTHONY




I--A ROMANCE

NOT for the honor of winning the Vanderbilt Cup, nor for the glory of
pitching a major league baseball team into the world's championship,
would Tony Ball have admitted to the familiar and derisive group in the
drugstore that he was--in the exact, physical aspect of the word--pure.
Secretly, and in an entirely natural and healthy manner, he was ashamed
of his innocence. He carefully concealed it in an elaborate assumption
of wide worldly knowledge and experience, in an attitude of cynical
comprehension, and indifference toward _girls_.

But he might have spared himself the effort, the fictions, of his
pose--had he proclaimed his ignorance aloud from the brilliantly lighted
entrance to the drugstore no one who knew him in the midweek, night
throng on Ellerton's main street would have credited Anthony with
anything beyond a thin and surprising joke. He was, at twenty, the
absolute, adventurous opposite of any conscious or cloistered virtue:
the careless carriage of his big, loose frame; his frank, smiling grey
eyes and ample mouth; his very, drawling voice--all marked him for a
loiterer in the pleasant and sunny places of life, indifferent to the
rigors of a mental or moral discipline.

The accumulated facts of his existence fully bore this out: the number
of schools from which, playing superlative baseball, he had been still
obliged to leave, carrying with him the cordial good will of master
and fellow, for an unconquerable, irresponsible laxity; the number and
variety of occupations that had claimed him in the past three years,
every one of which at their inception certain, he felt confident, to
carry him beyond all dreams and necessity of avarice; and every one, in
his rapidly diminishing interest, attention, or because of persistent,
adverse conditions over which, he asseverated, he had no control,
turning into a fallow field, a disastrous venture; and, conclusively,
the group of familiars, the easy companions of idle hours, to which he
had gravitated.

He met his mates by appointment at Doctor Allhop's drugstore, or by an
elaborate system of whistled formulas from the street, at which he would
rise with a muttered excuse from the dinner table and disappear.--He
was rarely if ever sought outright at his father's house; it was quite
another sort of boy who met and discoursed easily with sisters, who
unperturbed greeted mothers face to face.

It would have been useless, had he known it, to protest his virtue
inside the drugstore or out; a curious chain of coincidents had
preserved it. Again and again he had been at the point of surrendering
his involuntary Eden, and always the accident, the interruption, had
befallen, always he had retired in a state of more or less orderly
celibacy. On the occasion of one of those nocturnal, metropolitan
escapades by which matured boys, in a warm, red veil of whiskey, assert
their manhood and independence, he had been thrust in a drunken stupor
into the baggage car of the "owl" train to Ellerton. Instances might
be multiplied: life, in its haphazard manner, its uncharted tides
and eddies sweeping arbitrarily up and down the world, had carelessly
preserved in him that concrete ideal which myriads of heroic and
agonized beings had striven terribly and in vain to ward.

And so it happened, when Doctor Allhop turned with an elaborate
impropriety from the pills he was compounding in a porcelain pestle,
that Anthony's laugh was loudest, his gusto most marked, in the group
gathered at the back of the drugstore. A wooden screen divided them,
hid the shelves of bottles, the water sink, and the other properties and
ingredients of the druggist's profession, from the glittering and public
exhibition of the finished article, the marble slab and silver mouths of
the sodawater fountain, the uninitiated throng.

He was sitting on a case of prepared food, his legs thrust out before
him, and a thread of smoke coiling bluely from the cigarette held in
his broad, scarred hand. There was a little gay