Five and ten

By Fannie Hurst

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Title: Five and ten

Author: Fannie Hurst


        
Release date: April 21, 2026 [eBook #78515]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1929

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78515

Credits: Carla Foust, The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIVE AND TEN ***




FIVE & TEN




BROADWAY EDITION

FIVE AND TEN

by
_FANNIE HURST_

[Illustration]

P. F. COLLIER & SON CORPORATION

Publishers      New York




FIVE AND TEN
COPYRIGHT, 1929,
BY FANNIE HURST
PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES

EA




TO

NEW YORK
CITY OF CITIES




  ... Whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are
  within full of dead men’s bones.

    MATTHEW, XXIII, 27.

  Those who want fewest things are nearest to the gods.

    SOCRATES.




FIVE & TEN




In the long reaches of what had become chronic insomnia John G. Rarick
found himself mentally mouthing to himself phrases such as this: I am a
rich man. I am a very rich man. Me, John G., rich!

It was his way of striving to grind into his overtaxed realizations the
fact that, as he lay there, wheels of industry, turning by now of their
own momentum, were pouring more and more gold into Rarick coffers.

Even in a land where such annals of achievement as textbooks and
success magazines were crowded with the names of those who had vaulted
from petty beginnings into high places, there was something about the
rapid phantasmagoria from obscurity to rapid success that never failed
to tax Rarick’s credulities.

Now, Jenny Rarick, lying there beside him in the elaborate marquetry
bed, the first piece of signed furniture, by the way, which they had
acquired, had less imagination to startle with the fecundity of events.
She had a capacity to take for granted many of the phenomena of the
world in which she lived.

A sunset was something to admire, but not to wonder about.

She had once remarked to a poet of no small repute, that she regretted
she had never found time to become a writer.

Yet it was obviously a nervous woman lying there asleep beside Rarick.
The face, always too angular for beauty, was constantly ridden across
with expressions, as if, while the body slept, the mind kept open shop.

Above the fine coverlet, her shoulders, narrow white ones, with firm
breasts that had not sagged from child-bearing, rose and fell to
irregular breathing. Here was someone asleep with much on her mind.

With Rarick, the difference lay in his not being able to sleep at all.
As a boy, back on his stepaunt’s farm, twenty miles out of Keokuk, he
had known the torments of insomnia, coming in, time after time, from a
long back-splitting day in the fields, to lie sleepless for hours after
he had sought his bed.

His room then had been an unfurnished attic with a window set into a
slanting roof. Stars had gleamed into his insomnia through that window.

Stars gleamed into his insomnia now. They were gilt, hand-wrought ones,
against a ceiling of billow, cherub, and streamer, done after the
manner of Tiepolo’s Labia Palace painting of “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Whimsically Rarick lay on the marquetry bed, ruminating on the
divergence of causes that had contributed to the years of his insomnia.
Everything, from a sick calf; the haunting lilt of “The Ancient
Mariner”; a harsh word from his stepaunt’s farmer husband; fear of
losing his clerkship in a hardware store, to one million dishpans;
Avery’s croup; a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bank-loan; a
rare and exclusive obsidian mirror with native textile string which he
coveted for his Aztec collection, was fodder to his sleeplessness.

No subject was too casual to tempt his insomnia. He built empires and
warehouses by night. He dreamed into flooding darkness of achieving
his nine-hundred-and-sixty-first store, of possessing the Gutenberg
Bible, of tin tacks, of beholding with his own eyes, in his own
conservatories, the opening of a passion-flower. Into that darkness
he designed window displays, calculated floor space, inaugurated
Eskimo pie for his soda-fountains, and coveted a tode-stone ring from
Clusium, the ancient capital of the Etruscans.

Across his relentless insomnia there stalked contemplations of new
sites for new Five and Tens. Insolent sites within shadow of Hellenic
marble libraries and along boulevarded frontage; more and more Rarick
temples to tin tacks, paper napkins, hooks and eyes, sink-swabbers, and
paste jewelry mounted on pasteboard and sold in bins.

His way of sleeping over a matter was to lie sleepless over it. A
chain of six hundred and forty-two stores might virtually be said to
have crocheted itself out of these hours of enforced contemplations.
Problems of population of a given town, types and habits of the
people, study of main industries, bank deposits and clearings, number
of different industries, proportion of workers to clerks, of women
employees to men, prevailing local rental conditions, had been pondered
to their minutiæ from the flat of his back.

The problems of Jenny, now, or of his small son Avery, or his daughter
Jennifer, were another matter. They made him restless and unable to
concentrate. The fact that approximately eight per cent of all candy
sales in America are made to men was a reasonable hypothesis on which
to work out a system of extensive candy departments in those stores
which drew their business from the wholesale districts.

The fact, however, that Jenny’s nervous dissatisfactions with the
gratifications of today, in order that she might yearn for those
of tomorrow, seemed to increase in just such proportion as her
creature-cares decreased, was an unreasonable hypothesis upon which to
base nothing.

How dissatisfiedly she slept, two perpendicular lines flashing in and
out between her eyes. Her strong hooked nose flashed slightly, too,
at the nostrils, and in the pale light from a transom, the triangular
planes of her cheeks, far too thin, rippled now and then. There was
something of a frail, pale Dante about the sleeping face of Jenny. A
face that walked in a hell.

Prop himself on an elbow, and gaze as he would across the mound of
delicate coverings between them, the pale splotch of the face of Jenny
had a habit of seeming to recede through the darkness.

What was it she wanted? Strange angular woman whom he called wife,
lying there sharing his bed, what is there that will ease your hunger,
slake your thirst, gratify your indomitable appetites. Appetites for
what? God knows! Love? Bah! she was as empty as a meal-sack of it for
him, yet she was not the woman to seek it elsewhere. Up to now, hers
had been the easy morality of the frigid.

Lying there beside him, in a house that already contained a sister
portrait to an “El Greco” that hung in the Prado; a pear-shaped pearl
said to have been given by Jérôme Bonaparte to Queen Hortense; and the
largest private collection of Stücks in the world, what was the secret
of the anguish that rippled beneath her cheeks?

Rarick owned, in his already considerable collection of precious stones
of religious uses, a small steatite cup said to have been found in a
Japanese grave of the Iron Age. There was a pinhead hole through the
bottom of the precious thing. It seemed to Rarick that Jenny’s cup of
happiness must be something like that. The contents ran out of the
wrong end when she tilted it to her thirsty lips.

And what thirsty lips! She was thirsty now in her sleep. And, as
always, that sense of her desire for what lay just beyond her present
transmitted itself to him.

What did she want? She had her children, as much as one seemed to have
one’s children nowadays.

What did she want? She had the security that goes with a
fifteen-year-old marriage that has borne the fruit of offspring
and material success. Indeed, a material success that taxed the
credulities. As to the underlying gratifications of the passions,
romance, oneness of purpose, sympathy, companionship, love--well, well,
what proportion of human beings _can_ hope to sustain those?

Rarick had once hoped. But the young clerk who had come to St. Louis
from Keokuk and had married, rather considerably above his station,
a Miss Jenny Avery, had cast off many a dead skin since then. It
seemed to him terribly certain that Jenny had. Where was that somewhat
caustic, but intellectual-faced girl of those eager, wooing days, who
had sat opposite him in a canoe that cut through the Meramac River
with the same lean swiftness of their dreams? Where was that girl,
a high-school graduate, from whom he could learn; who had talked to
him of life in terms of the grave, simple, beautiful things that had
somehow started so consistently to elude them, once they seemed to be
in a position to make some of those early yearnings come true?

Where was that eager, narrow, intelligent-faced Jenny? Why, he had
almost lost sight of her the first year of their marriage, when there
had been so little time for the old talks of those days when the mind
of each to the other had seemed an oyster-shell crammed with pearls!

Their marriage had routinized so quickly. Perhaps because of the
circumstance that it had been Jenny’s total capital of twenty-five
hundred dollars which had embarked him on the enterprise of the Nick
Nack Store on Olive Street.

After that, her face had immediately taken on some of the pinch and
strain from which it was never to recover. Jenny’s money had started
him. Had that had something to do with the immediate reversal of what
had been their pre-nuptial relationship of idealization of life and
love? Undoubtedly. Jenny had begun to fear terribly for her investment.
Naturally. The money represented the careful total of the tiny estate
that had been held in trust for her in the five years between the death
of her parents and her coming of age. And the first few years after,
the investment had been unbelievably precarious. Rarick never held it
against her judgment that she had resisted, with all her vehemence, his
determination to try and reëstablish the almost defunct business which
her money had launched, on the new basis of the five-and-ten-cent Nick
Nack Store.

As a matter of fact, it had been a maneuver of desperation rather than
of logic. No more than Jenny had he even remotely anticipated the
enormity of that move....

And now ... perhaps he had been the one to change. The desire for
passionate love with the Jenny Avery who had dreamed with him of
walking-trips through the Pyrenees, was by now nothing more than a
sense of frustration lying back in the dim reaches of his mind.

That walking-trip through the Pyrenees! She had been so bright! A
high-school girl, educated by rote, rather than by the desultory
reading of such books as his older sister Hildegarde in Keokuk had
sometimes sent him by mail. Jenny, at his very first mention, had known
at once of the Pyrenees, and their highest peak, the Maladetta. She had
leaned so sympathetically into the yearnings of his untutored mind and
spirit ... and now.... Something of that same frustration, mutual to
them both, must be what kept her face flickering so in her sleep.

Well? Then what? How many times, leaning on his elbow, gazing at her
through the pale darkness, had that question of his dropped down into
the cistern of a silence from which there was no answer.

Presently the gilt stars, among the foliated stars, the festoons, and
the adumbrated cherubs on the ceiling, would begin to fade; and dawn, a
pale horse, would ride through the Corinthian archway that inclosed the
exclusive residential Westmoreland Place where the Raricks occupied the
most pretentious house of all the pretentious row.

It was about this time that John Rarick was due to drop off into brief
but resuscitative sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was about this same time that Jenny, an early waker against her
will, was due to open her eyes almost with a click, as it were, and
start to a sitting posture at once, as if she had been called. Called
she had been, by the pressure of the procession of her thoughts, which
were marching so closely beneath the surface of her sleep.

Ficke house! Cretonne covers for the sedan. Box for the San Carlo
Opera. Mermord and Jaccard’s about the twenty-ninth pearl for
Jennifer’s necklace. Wednesday Club. Wire Long Island Kennels to ship
Russian wolfhound to pose in the portrait Shandig was doing. Pour tea
at St. Louis Water-Colorists Exhibit. Toy electric motor-boat for
Avery. Meeting advisory board Garrison Avenue Home for Wayward Girls.
Bridge-tea St. Louis Club. Garden Swing. Sit for Shandig. Oh yes!
Mermord and Jaccard’s, too, about the gold bouillon-spoons. They could
also be used for grapefruit. Avery must be forced, if necessary, to
attend dancing-school. Avery’s riding-lesson. Rarick must telegraph bid
on the Ficke house.

All this on the instant of awakening. Jenny’s mind might have been a
memorandum-book, the leaves turning.

... Oh yes, and remind Rarick to indicate which plants in the
conservatory were to be sent to the Chrysanthemum Show, and then, the
Ficke house. FICKE HOUSE.

How he slept! Across the mound of the sheets that sprayed lace and
sometimes made him flick as if at a fly, she too had to raise herself
on an elbow, in order to find his face, which slept in the position of
staring upright through closed eyes.

A little man. In the beginning, his shortness of stature had been
merely something to regret and then adjust oneself to, with the
immemorial processes of a woman compromising between the Lothario of
her dreams and the stocky reality of her husband.

Subsequently, she had come almost to hate him for that shortness. A
stunted man. Curious, that to her he had always given the effect of a
hunchback. Not so much because his head, on a short neck, was so deeply
set into the valley of high shoulders, but because, even in the days
when he had wooed and fascinated her, the little hardware clerk from
Keokuk, who had first been brought to see Jenny by a poor relation
who boarded in the same house with him, had somehow had the face of a
hunchback. A bony, up-thrust, hurt face. Short sinews of rear neck,
rather than the slightest indication of an actual hunch, kept it thrust
upward. Rarick’s face was always cocked to a world slightly taller than
he. It was already upturned to his fourteen-year-old daughter Jennifer.
Fervently Jenny found herself hoping, as her son’s slight frame and
threat of short stature began to prove worrisome, that some day it
would be necessary for Rarick to look up to his son.

All this talk that men of brief stature had ruled the world--poppycock!
What about Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Bismarck, Lincoln? Jenny
was not sure about the heroic proportions of most of them. Lincoln,
of course, and Alexander, the vast-minded Macedonian, and Charlemagne,
must surely have matched up to the heroic proportions of their names.
On the other hand, Rarick, Jenny felt certain, had steeped himself in
the sugared legend of the magnificence of the small.

His collection of Napoleonana already included a desk from Versailles,
an inkstand flanked by onyx horses, and an enameled snuff-box worn
down by the Corsican’s own thumb. The entire north end of his library,
fourteen shelves of it behind copper grating, either pertained or
appertained to the small Emperor.

How much of his success, Jenny asked herself, leaning on her elbow
and gazing at him who slept there with his hunchback’s face washed in
dawn, was due to luck or power? Without the incalculable boon of her
patrimony of twenty-five hundred dollars which had first set him up in
the Nick Nack Store, might he not still be clerking in the Schwebbe
hardware establishment from which he had taken a day off for his
marriage to her?

How much of this man’s success was due to an initial stroke of luck,
her patrimony, and her distaste for his petty rôle of selling wire
nails over Schwebbe’s hardware counter? Little as it seemed to matter,
this speculation was one of tireless interest to Jenny.

How much foresight had Rarick ever manifested in his business moves?
Precious little. Credited already in the industrial world with vision,
acumen, and imagination, was it not rather that every move he had made
had been a lucky gesture in the dark? The result of an imminent need
to jump this way or that; and Rarick had happened to jump right. How
well she could recall the move that had precipitated the change in
the policy of the Nick Nack Store to the five-and-ten-cent idea. It
had been nothing more or less than a clutch at a straw to avoid going
under. Mingling even with her sense of pride, as she had sat beside him
one day at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon and heard him referred to by
a speaker as “that far-sighted industrial peer right in our very own
midst--John Rarick (applause),” had been her merciless appraisal of
him. Without the incalculable boon of her patrimony ... where would he
be?

The chain-store idea, originating long before his time, had never
really entered Rarick’s head as a scheme of scope, insistent as his
biographers were to credit him with a canny and pioneer eye that had
anticipated the dawn of mass-production and quantity-buying.

It had all just happened. Of this much she felt powerfully certain.
Rarick had not foreseen his magnificent business maneuvers. They were
born out of circumstance and stress. She did not want the world to know
what she knew, but she wanted Rarick to know that she knew!

Without the initial patrimony that had been scrimped for her by
deceased parents, where would Rarick be now? She was so fairly sure
that she knew. Clerking at Schwebbe’s or possibly following up an
old dream of his to acquire a Missouri farm and a sufficient formal
education to divide his time between working it and teaching in some
rural school.

It had taken courage to hand over that sum to a young clerk with such
lofty ideals as this and who was constantly chafing under penny-wise
business methods of the old German firm that employed him. And
moreover, in the very first year of their marriage, when she was
already carrying Jennifer and the fear of childbirth was upon her! He
had rowed her on the Meramac those days, on Sundays and holidays, or
taken her across the river to Cahokia to see the Indian mounds; and
they had talked, not of big business, but of a dream which was to be
only deferred by this rather unanticipated coming of the child--that
walking-trip through the Pyrenees. The trip through the Pyrenees had
come true, twice over, in fact, in a Hispano-Suiza car; and some of the
most important of the excavations at Cahokia had subsequently been made
at Rarick’s expense. But what was the use pretending? A wife, peering
into the sleeping face of her husband as he lay beside her, need play
no rôle before her own soul....

In Jenny’s mind, Rarick had not even succeeded in being educated to
greatness. He was like a man who, at fifty, still spends most of his
time reliving his college days. He had not gone on in spirit. The
handsome house that contained him inclosed him as loosely as a gigantic
pod holds an ordinary-sized pea. He rattled about inside his setting.
And talk about penny-wise! He was still dreaming dreams the stature
of that walking-trip through the Pyrenees and the farm that was to be
worked as a sideline to teaching the young that Hannibal crossed the
Alps.

The pea had not grown with its pod. Jenny had, mark you that! Breeding
will tell. Her maternal forebears had been Piexottos who had settled
in St. Louis as early as Pierre Laclede. You could not come of that
kind of colonizing stock and not know how to meet success with the
same kind of indomitability with which they had met adversity. Jenny
spoke frequently of her colonizing ancestors. One grew to the demands
of circumstance. In other words, Jenny Avery was being educated to
greatness. After all, not even the Corsican upon whom Rarick doted, had
remained the Corsican.

What was it that this man, her husband, lay there wanting, even
in his sleep? What were the citadels behind those closed lids of
his, upon which shone some secret inner sun of his private own? Was
he inscrutable or just inadequate? The smallish young man who had
fascinated her, way back there, with his inchoate desires that had
never entered the heads of the sons of the St. Louis business men who
had milled about the wealthy-in-her-own-name Miss Avery, had remained a
sophomore on the campus of that youth.

One outgrew being a sophomore about life. One ceased desiring what one
had achieved ten times over. In many ways, Rarick was like a man whose
garages are filled with high-power motor-cars, but who, by the force
of fondness for old dreams, continues to tour on his velocipede. The
comparison was Jenny’s.

He had what he wanted ten times, forty times, over, but in the forty
times, had missed the once.

But was it desire behind those closed lids, or just a gnawing
frustration? As a matter of fact, their marriage had borne the fruits
of love, four times over. Two children between Jennifer and Avery
had died in infancy. She had submitted to Rarick’s bed with the same
unequivocal acceptance of marriage that she expected and received from
him.

She had seen the glance of this allegedly great little man, her
husband, follow many a time the living, flowing line of a beautiful
woman’s body, but with much the appraisement with which he was fond
of observing, in its glass case, a fine example of a wooden statuette
of the Virgin of San Domingo in his North American collection, one of
whose breasts was studded with a turquoise-incrusted marine clam-shell.

There was no telling....

Little man, you, I think I hate you. He must telegraph bid on the
Ficke house. He must! He must! He must! Cretonne covers for sedan. Box
for the San Carlo Opera. Mermord and Jaccard’s about the twenty-ninth
pearl for Jennifer’s necklace. Wednesday Club. Sealed bid on the Ficke
house....




If anyone had told Rarick on the morning of the day he wired the sealed
bid on the Ficke house that before his sun set on another afternoon
he would be owner of two million five hundred thousand dollars’ worth
of mortar-stone lace and Italian Renaissance façade, flanked by two
famous Grecian urns which guarded a pair of doors, superb copies of the
Campanile doors in Florence, he would have listened to it with that
polite third ear of his which enabled him to appear attentive to the
discourse of another while thinking of something entirely removed. A
quality, by the way, which was to win and sustain him the reputation of
being a canny and silent listener.

A maid entered on the seven-thirty chime of a hall clock, drew back
curtains and lowered spacious windows that looked out upon the
elaborately boulevarded, landscaped, and very private precincts of
Westmoreland Place, before he lifted back his eyelids from the deep
kind of sleep that invariably capped his insomnia.

From the depths of her pillow, where for an hour her open eyes had lain
upturned to the gilt stars, it was as if Jenny had heard the flicker of
his lids.

It was characteristic of her that she should resume conversation, upon
his awaking, at precisely the point where they had left off the night
before.

“Sooner or later, Rarick, the move is inevitable! Wire your bid today!”
The phrase beat against his brain as if it had been there all night,
and yet with his conscious mind he had forgotten it. That room in which
he slept was always beating with repetitious little phrases that were
Jenny’s. Do this. Do that.

Wire what bid? Of course, that had been her last phrase before dropping
off to sleep. Ding. Dong. Here it was again. “Sooner or later the move
is inevitable. It is Providence that the Ficke house should be on the
market just at this time.”

“Not necessarily inevitable, Jenny. The roots of our lives are down
here.”

“Nonsense! The roots of life are where one chooses they should be. You
wouldn’t have a Guatemala orchid in your conservatory if that were not
partially true.”

“Well, then, I choose that our roots should be here.”

“You choose. You choose. You choose. As usual, that closes the
controversy?”

His eyes, as he lifted them into quizzical peaks, made him look Asiatic
in a way she detested. Oh yes, that closes the controversy, he was
saying to himself. Oh yes. Oh yes. Rather, it kept it running in great
sluices of talk through all-too-brief silences which he craved.

“No, Jenny, but it is scarcely necessary to argue that my greatest
interests are here.”

“At the moment, yes. But your main office is practically now in the
East. You are on trains half your time.”

That was true. But the prospect of reiterating, as if it had never been
said before, this two-year-old argument between them, made him long to
close his eyes and sink back, at least on to the rim of the slumber
which had visited him so reluctantly.

“We have outgrown St. Louis, Rarick. Anyone can remain a big frog in a
small pond.”

“My home is here.”

“You have the opportunity to live in one of the most beautiful homes
in America. Do you realize that you are rich enough to buy the home of
the man who endowed the Metropolitan Gallery with the Ficke Collection?
I have been prophesying for the six months, ever since the death of
Emanie Ficke, that the house would come on the market. Don’t be all
kinds of a fool, Rarick. Wire your bid.”

“And what then?”

And what then? She sat up in bed at that, her nightgown, plain but
impeccably sheer, falling down off one shoulder, her brick-colored,
eccentric hair, which she wore brushed up perpendicularly off her ears
as if to accentuate the narrowness of her face, falling in thin spray
along her shoulders. A sort of tremor, faint as a blue flame, seemed to
burn along the pale wick of her lips, making them flicker.

And then what! The most beautiful house in the world, Rarick, built out
of damned little ugly things.

Things. Things. Things and things. It was as if, so that he put
his hands over his eyes to squeeze back their pressure, there came
marching out of his insomnia the nightly procession of the million
dishpans, bins of hair-pins, carloads of coin-purses, glass beads,
curtain rods, rubber gloves, cotton stockings, eye-shades, flower-seed,
pink soaps, tooth-brushes, darning-cottons, water-tumblers, salted
peanuts, baby-dolls, lead-pencils, paper flowers, gimcrack vases, and
chewing-gums.

“Things.”

“Exactly, Rarick. Titians out of stewpans. Conservatories out of cotton
stockings. Pipe-organs out of gas tubing. Libraries out of tooth-paste.
Polo ponies out of Eskimo pies. Rarick, where is your imagination!”

She was not the one to cajole with any grace. Her thin face, in a
way that was no longer lovely to him, propped on its elbow, was all
covered over with an expression that, starting with her lips, had
burst like paper into flame. She desired with an intensity that was
embarrassing. It grated Rarick horribly to see her wanting anything. It
stretched her face so, drawing the tight skin back further still from
the bony outline, nakedly, like a person biting down pain.

Wherever his imagination was, it left him lying there with his tired
hand pressed against his eyes, and his lips lifted back slightly from
his teeth, as her voice grated:

“Do you realize that you’re a richer man than Cyrus Breckenridge,
Rarick?”

Trust Jenny to have heard, almost before the proposition had been
put into writing, this newest offer of the Breckenridge group of
Southwestern stores to buy in the Rarick chain. His reply to it had
been to add six new links to his own. Youngstown, Altoona, Akron, Fall
River, Lowell, and New Bedford. Her entire being was like a hateful
little antenna. Sensing. He wanted her not to be hateful to him, and
the knowledge that she was, kept him in a state of constant mental
retribution toward her. Through the lattice of his fingers he regarded
her, his lids half down to blur the eager, tight-skinned thrust of her
face.

“I suppose I am a richer man than Breckenridge.”

“Hellman figures you out about the thirteenth richest man in the world,
Rarick. Know that?”

As a matter of fact, he did. His confidential secretary, Harry Hellman,
an exceedingly stout young Jew, with excellent qualifications for his
position, had called his attention to that new fact only that week.
He had thought about it subsequently and with the sustained sort of
incredulity that had caused him to clutch toward reality by repeating
to himself such phrases as: I am a rich man. I am a very rich man.
Me, John Rarick, born Fancy Prairie, Iowa, October 7th, 1870, son of
Anna Masey Rarick and John Geoffrey Rarick. m. Jenny Avery, St. Louis,
1898. President Rarick Chain, Inc. Vice-president Dime Savings Bank.
Vice-president Ajoy Soap Company. Board directors Dime Savings Bank.
Board directors Corn Belt Traction Company. Vice-president Empire State
Trust Company. Vice-president Croton Mills. Trustee Guaranty Trust
Association. Director St. Louis Art Center; Municipal Opera Company;
Americana Association; Lapidarian Club Society; Hispano Association;
Society for Preservation of Indian Culture; Missouri Historical
Association; Member of.... Me, John G. ... all those ... me, John!

It was like Jenny to take this dazzling fact, rather indiscreetly
handed her by Hellman, for granted, and without wasting either analysis
or wonderment upon it, begin to cut her cloth accordingly. One became
the thirteenth richest man in the world and then set immediately about
adjusting one’s life to the requirements of being the thirteenth
richest man in the land. Hers not to reason why.

He was being constantly ashamed of the way she could grate on him.
Coming from Jenny, the selfsame statement that had caused him a rise of
goose-flesh when Hellman had called his attention to this new notch on
his hickory stick, filled him with a dull resentment.

What new desires and cravings and ambitions for herself, and, worst of
all, crazy plots for her children, were there left to set in motion?

What was it that being the wife of the thirteenth richest man in the
world could give her that she had not enjoyed as the wife of the
thirteenth hundredth richest man in the world?

It did not seem so long ago to Rarick when their first car, a Buick
sedan, had stood new and shiny one Sunday morning at the curbstone
of their seven-room house on Kensington Avenue, and Jenny, with
his overcoat thrown on over her kimono, had rushed out to try its
upholstery. There had been a small tag on the steering-wheel:

[Illustration: Good morning, Jenny. Your street car days are over

Rarick]

That was about as demonstrative as Rarick could bring himself to be,
even back in the days before their fairy tale had begun to happen.

“Good morning, Jenny. Your street car days are over,” he had written
during the fifth year of their marriage. During the first year he had
sent her a modest little traveling-case for a birthday present, but
the card had read: “Pack my love and some of our dear dreams in this,
for our walking-trip through the Pyrenees.”

That had been before the acquisitive, tight-skinned look had spread
itself over the face of Jenny: before the fox had leaned out of the
nervous and intelligently homely face of the girl he had been proud of
himself for choosing from a world that seemed to him populated with
girls with no faces at all, only a vacuous geometry of pleasantly
related features.

No one but God and Rarick knew that the dowry that went with Jenny had
played no part in his choice. Sometimes, as the something flowed out
of their relationship that had been precious to him, it seemed there
must be some way to tear open the secret chambers of his heart and
reveal this truth to Jenny, on to whose lips, not so many years after
marriage, had crept occasional innuendo.

What she did not or would not remember was that it actually was well
after their engagement that Rarick, a young man from the outside of her
circle, had come to know about the twenty-five hundred dollars.

What she did and would remember, as if her mind were a magnifying-glass
under which a small mental image could become Gargantuan, was the hot
August day when they had taken the street car together for the Union
Trust Company, and withdrawn from her safety-deposit box there, the
twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of government bonds which were to be
converted into capital investment in the Nick Nack Store.

That fact, in these years when Jenny was already buying an
eighty-five-hundred-dollar bauble far more casually than she had once
bought an eighty-dollar one, never lost its luminosity in the dark
places of her mind. It was a piece of phosphorescent memory. A cold,
flameless light that tinged every aisle of her mind where he was
concerned, and which she kept dancing before the eyes of her husband
like a signalman on a bridge at night swinging his lantern.

Behind her reminder to him that he was the thirteenth richest man in
the world there trailed the unspoken tagline, “thanks to the start I
gave you by intrusting you with my inheritance,” a string of words
which, spoken or unspoken, traveled through him in a groove that
innuendo had worn down, his live nerves the trolley of transmission.
Rebuttal would have meant the fatal act of admission to her implied
word. Rarick had learned various kinds of silences.

“I haven’t minded the years of your stubborn refusal to pretty nearly
everything I’ve asked for myself, Rarick. It is Jennifer now. I want
the child to see the light of her fifteenth birthday in the Ficke
house. That’s not asking much of a man many times a millionaire. The
pity is that it has to be coaxed out of you.”

“The pity of it” clung in a burr-like phrase to his brain.

The pity of it. The pity somehow of everything, including this
flavorless beginning of another day. Pretty Jennifer, who had
everything, and now, at barely fifteen, was so cruelly fretted, aided
and abetted by a doting mother, with wanting more than everything.
After all, if you had two motor-cars, there was only left for you
to want three, if the goal of your acquisitiveness was things. And
things. And things. It was an entirely different kind of wanting from
the desire to own a Buick sedan when you owned no car at all. The
difference between desiring a Buick sedan when you owned no car, or
desiring a third car when you already owned two, was all the difference
in the world. The pity of it. Jennifer at fifteen, who had a good mind,
was a good pupil, and was a phantom of delight to her father, already
too busy wanting more than everything.

That kind of thinking made him heavy and pedantic and old-as-the-hills,
as a father.

The little girl who wanted more than everything.

Damn her mother.

The phrase shot through his mind like a burst of flame, startling him
horribly.

Under cover of Jenny’s steady runnel of accusative and importuning
talk, he began to reason with himself, to calm himself, to rid his mind
of the taste of the phrase that had shot through his mind in sacrilege
to this woman who shared his bed.

As mothers went, Jenny would have stood impeccable before any jury. She
wanted passionately for her young. She was forever baring herself to
his scorn by asking in their name. She was a doting, gloating mother,
fierce for her offspring, yet, withal, sweet with them and to them.
Many a night through she had sat unnecessarily, but tirelessly, beside
the bed of Avery, whose first years had been precarious ones. The death
of two infants had gone hard with her. Jennifer was her doting, her
waking, and her sleeping thought.

Rarick, whose manner was not fortunate with his children because he was
seldom at ease with them, could not have formulated into words, except
in vague fashion to the effect that she spoiled them, the stubborn wall
of opposition which he erected between himself and Jenny’s plans and
dreams for her children.

“It is as if you were jealous of them,” she had barked at him once,
hysterically, when he was opposing an indoor roller-skating rink across
the top of the house.

No. No. No.

Without his knowing how to reach out a hand to stay them, except in
vague fumings and consistent conservatisms, the entire kingdom of
his household was drifting like a bit of land disassociating itself
from the mainland to become island, out into some high tide beyond his
reach. Jenny and Jennifer and his boy Avery were on that island. He
was back helplessly on the mainland; and Jenny, mark you, mind you,
no otherwise to it, was to blame! The bitterness of that tore at him
constantly, like a flame pulling itself off the candle.

Jennifer, for a time, while she had been a little pupil at Mary
Institute, had been something of an eager student, with a hint of her
mother’s old air of desire to know, about her. Rarick had said little,
but her school reports had been a source of deep private pleasure to
him; and once he had carried about in his pocket an essay of hers,
written on ruled paper, called “WHY WE LOVE RUSKIN.” He had filched
it off her desk and returned it there a few evenings later when he
observed the child scrambling among her possessions for what might have
been the essay.

Rarick had not, up to that time, known who Ruskin was, and it elated
him no little that the enlightenment should have come by way of his
daughter. “In mastery of prose language he has never been surpassed,”
the thirteen-year-old daughter of Rarick, undismayed by discursive
eagerness and floriated mannerism, had written in her roundly vertical
chirography. It was this phrase out of the mouth of his babe that must
have lain engraved upon Rarick’s memory when, years later, he acquired,
at what was said to be an astonishingly high price, a page of the
original manuscript of Ruskin’s _Præterita_.

Suddenly that brownish, rather studious Jennifer of those days back
in the solid square house on MacPherson Avenue had slipped from her
little-girlhood into a high-strung, mature-faced disciple of her
mother’s ambitions for her. The home in Westmoreland Place. Finishing
school in Tarrytown.

Now here was family history repeating itself. It had been the same
way when Jenny began to “feel her oats,” as Rarick was in the habit
of putting it, in the MacPherson Avenue house, and was casting an eye
toward Westmoreland Place. Jennifer’s graduation reception must be
held in the new home, and not in the twelve-room yellow-brick one on
MacPherson. The neighborhood was running down so. Stores. Flats. Even
the G. H. Francises were talking of selling.

The little brown jug of a Jennifer of the MacPherson Avenue house was
now the slip of a young miss, straight as a paper-cutter, with the
sophisticated eyes that for the life of him her father could never
catch and hold in a glance.

And now that brown child back there, whitened because her freckles
seemed to have come off, this Jennifer whom he was casting about, in
his futile way, to save, what was left of her, for himself, must have
her fifteenth birthday in a house on Fifth Avenue that almost faced the
Metropolitan Museum.

To think that he, John Rarick, who had once dreamed dreams no bigger
than that walking-trip through the Pyrenees, should be in a position
to give her such a house. Was Jenny, after all, the natural and doting
parent, and was he to Jennifer the grudging, silent father? Was he too
finished with youth to know his own children?

Could his dreams for Avery, the boy, slip between his fingers, too, as
this mother of his began to demand his rights for him? Would Avery grow
up alien to a father who seemed to have no shred of youth left that
would enable him the better to understand the youth in his children?

From what was it he was struggling to save them? His own innate sense
of rightness could be no deeper than his wisdom, and who was he to
be cocksure of his wisdom? After all, what was the meaning of this
success, which sometimes threatened to seem chimeric to him, if it was
not to enable him to do just such things as give Jennifer her fifteenth
birthday in one of the most beautiful and expensive houses in the world?

Success had done its share to teach Rarick himself new and complex
appetites. He was a philatelist of elaborate and expensive tastes.
There was in one of the pockets of his waistcoat, which was hanging
over the foot of the bed, a famous Gnostic gem, heliotrope, engraved
with the sacred name “Abrasax.” A museum in Boston had been bidder
against him for that gem. There were in that same pocket, result of
those same tastes acquired through his growing wealth, an ominous
and luminous opal, a tiny agate ring with a runic inscription of the
late-Saxon period, and a transparent aquamarine cut _en cabochon_
with the figure of a hump-bull. In his library, at this period, were
celebrated “firsts” upon the shelves; a Tintoretto, a Greuze, and a
triptych of the Cimabue period upon his walls.

What Jenny was demanding for herself and her children were the
equivalents of the runic gems, the celebrated firsts, and the misty
Greuzes.

No wonder, as she lay there beside him, silent for the moment, the
lines about her thin lips were tight with the distaste of their state
of constant asking, and the stretched look across her face was the
look that had been written there by the constant and almost automatic
opposition he had been erecting for years against the nature of her
desires for herself and her children.

His children, even the small boy Avery, approached him only through the
mother. The mother herself approached him as a diplomat goes to the
conference table, her points carefully tabulated in the portfolio of
her mind.

A man, if he loved them, could hold out only so long against his
children....

He swung himself to a sitting posture on the side of the bed, and
reached for a robe to slip on over his nightshirt. He was short,
somber, gnome-like, and a little ridiculous in his nightshirt; and he
never forgot it.

“I’ll buy you the Ficke house, Jenny.”




During the last six months of the six years the Raricks had occupied
the Ficke mansion, a man by the name of Dr. Felix Gerkes had lived on
the top floor of the house. He occupied two rooms and a green bathroom
with a frieze of mermaids over the tub. His meals for the most part
were brought to him and served on a card table beside a window that
overlooked Central Park, which separated him in a diagonal from the
Museum, where he had spent twenty-one years in the archæological
department. He was also an Indianologist of first-rank repute, a man
who had been frequently endowed with honorary degrees in the realms of
scholarship and science.

He was the author of numerous brochures and pamphlets, a text-book
on geology that was in general use throughout American colleges, had
written three books on amulets, precious stones, and meteorites, and
was regarded as a foremost living authority on religious uses of stones
among primitive peoples.

He was a lean, shabby fellow, with a walrus-like mustache and a
conspicuously prominent forehead with thin stringlets of hair brushed
sidewise across what threatened to become a bald horseshoe. His
clothing, so loosely it hung, seemed to have no points of contact with
his body.

The women of the household, even though weeks might pass without their
so much as encountering him, and then only in a hallway or on the rare
occasions when he dined with the family, thought him repulsive, and
considered it disgusting of Rarick to insist upon having him there.

A curious bond existed between these two men. They had first met when
Rarick had been directed to him for advice concerning a contemplated
purchase, for his collection, of a necklace of banded and variegated
agates, onyx, carnelians, and sards, attributed to the first century,
A.D.

In the course of a long and enlightening conversation with this wise,
strange man, who wore a hexagon-shaped Chinese skull-cap with a
crystal button on its peak, Gerkes had quoted from the _Pantagruel_ of
Rabelais, reciting almost word for word that part of the book which
describes the oracle of the Dive Bouteilly and its seven columns
of sapphire, jacinth, diamond, ruby, emerald, “_more brilliant and
glistening than those which were set in place of eyes in the marble
lion stretched before the tomb of King Hermias. The sixth column of
agate, the seventh of transparent syenite with a splendor like that
of Hymettian honey, and within appeared the moon in form and motion
such as she is in the heavens, full and new, waxing and waning._”
In the further course of that casual hour’s conversation, Gerkes
had discoursed upon the seven heavens of the Mohammedans, white
lapis-lazuli, the sack of Constantinople by the Sassanian Persian
king, Khusrau II, Navajo silversmiths, Figdor collection in Vienna,
use of black and white enamel on bezel, cramp-rings, Edward the
Confessor, native Indian mountaineers of California, Liberian silver,
Catherine von Bora and her marriage to Martin Luther, Cleveland Museum
of Art, Antiochus IV, aluminum kitchenware, alleged curative effects
of violet-blue, John Ruskin on crystals, balas-rubies, Flinders
Petrie, Field Museum of Natural History, and the snake story in _Gesta
Romanorum_.

Rarick, who had just returned from Atlanta, where he had contracted for
the annual run-of-the-mill output of two million cotton handkerchiefs
of the largest three concerns in the South, sat in the musty little
office of Gerkes, which was laid out at the moment with stone
arrow-heads of a Navajo collection, and let the wisdom of this slow man
flow against ear-drums that were still throbbing with the barter for
the delivery of the two million cotton squares that were to be sold in
eleven hundred and eight stores at five cents apiece.

There were lying undercurrent in Rarick’s mind at the time of this
talk, an impending conference of the Mountain region and Eastern
store-managers, with an eye to further standardization of window
display; a contemplated monopoly of the output of a paper-napkin
factory near Brattleboro, Vermont, and a trip to Springfield, with
one of his buyers, a German, for the purpose of demonstrating to
an American toy-manufacturer how to produce a celluloid doll, the
equivalent of the German product, which could retail for ten cents.
There was further at work under the surface of Rarick’s consciousness,
a major plan for the formation of a policy, not yet revealed to his
company, for the establishment of a Rarick store in every city of seven
thousand or over, in the entire country.

Years of nights of lying awake over that immense project were about to
fructify into action.

The thirteenth richest man in the world sat in that musty pocket of
an office with Gerkes until museum attendants began to turn off the
lights and rattle keys. Then Gerkes, who loved talk, and who, deep in
the midst of a discourse on amber deposits in the Stone Age, had found
a listener, clapped on his shapeless hat and walked home with Rarick
across the twilit park, depositing him at his door, without so much
as a glance up at the pale splendor of the façade of the Ficke house,
which John Rarick had purchased by sealed bid at sensational auction
seven years before. That meeting was the beginning of an impeccable
friendship between these two.

A week later, Rarick invited Gerkes to lunch at a downtown business
men’s club. Gerkes did not belong to the world of men to whom lunch is
a social or business ritual. He either took his off a lunch-stand in
the vicinity of the Museum or cut slivers with a pocket knife off the
small loaf of American cheese he kept in a desk drawer along with a box
of Swedish biscuit.

His imperviousness to surroundings was colossal. He had once lunched
with the King of England over a matter pertaining to the Jubilee
jewels, and was unable later to describe the occasion in anything
except the contents of the discussion.

He ate sparingly of Rarick’s carefully ordered luncheon, giving little
if any heed to it, and once more, apropos of the first-century string
of agates and sards, let his discourse flow from the crammed stock-room
of his mind.

Here was a man who, in casual discussion of a mediæval and practically
obsolete gem, could quote from the _Divina Commedia_ the lines in which
Dante uses these stones as a symbol of joy divine:

    “L’altra letizia, che m’era gia nota
    Preclara cosa, me si fece in vista
    Qual fin balascio in che lo sol percota,”

and then, with a mental handspring and a Rabelaisian twist of the old
rascal in him, which was absurdly out of keeping with his odor of chalk
dust and blackboard, would lean his walrus mustache into Rarick’s ear
with a foul bit of anecdote about a youth with a ruby studded into his
flesh, who fancied the chryselephantine statue of Athena by Phidias.

After the boiling turmoil of a morning that held a conference on the
feasibility of installing soda-water fountains in the west of the
Mississippi areas, a complicated discussion with three architects
on the standard fronts of Rarick stores, a long-distance-telephone
conversation with the Chattanooga real-estate office on a
ninety-nine-year lease for a second store, and the consummation of
an order for one hundred thousand bathing-hats, to walk with Gerkes
through the sarcophagus of his mind was like emerging from noisy
sunlight into the green twilight of the Italian cypresses Rarick was
fond of transplanting, in long aisles, from Sicilian hillsides to his
own.

Here was a man who had a decayed-looking green circle on the front of
his neck, from a brass collar-button, which he was never to discard,
even after Rarick had sent him precious ones, but to whom, on the other
hand, a blemish on the crystal flesh of an art-object was something to
cause his own flesh to crawl upward.

Some five years after these meetings between the two, Gerkes fell ill
of a flaying neuritis, and, tracing him to the lair of his dwelling,
Rarick found him in a small room in the high-up rear of a Twenty-third
Street rooming-house, books stacked from floor to ceiling, and exactly
three personal objects in evidence. A wooden-backed hair-brush, a
pocket comb, and a tooth-brush, sharing the dresser-top with an
assortment of Aztec arrow-heads, proof-sheets of an article on scarabs
for the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, a copy of Plato’s _Phædon_, William
Langland’s _Piers Plowman_, and a _World Almanac_.

If Rarick had expected protest when he suggested the move from these
quarters to the suite at the top of his home, nothing of the sort
happened. With his imperviousness to environment or even to the sense
of personal obligation, Gerkes took up residence under his friend’s
roof. One had to live somewhere. Money was something you shared if
you had it, or you accepted if you had not. Within a week the walls
which Jenny had recently had done in yellow brocatelle, were plastered
with maps, and the furniture itself littered, as the lodging-house
room had been, with the story of the dawn of the human race as told
by flint-head, ax, and spear, littering up the decorator’s idea of a
perfect example of a suite done in the manner of the Second Empire.

Jenny’s kind of opposition to the invasion of Gerkes had been tinctured
with the wisdom of a certain restraint. Here was one of the times it
was not good to oppose Rarick. When his head seemed to jam down tightly
between his shoulders, and his lower lip shot out, and his eyes, which
so seldom met hers any more, slid up under their lids, leaving a horrid
effect of just white ball, Jenny had the intuition to know that here
was not the time to put up active opposition.

She had missed this scent a few times, once in particular over an
apparently trivial matter that had to do with Avery and a week-end stag
party of eleven school companions which she planned for him on board a
motor-yacht which she was maneuvering for his father to give him on his
fifteenth birthday.

The idea of Avery on his own private yacht, lording it as host over
eleven youngsters to whom a yacht was that day’s toy, was roiling to
Rarick. There had been a similar scene, not two months before, over a
cigar-shaped roadster for Avery; but then there had been high, bitter,
even more terrible words and Rarick’s foot had come down with an
emphasis that Jenny somehow knew better than to further oppose, and
Avery had not even been allowed to come home from school at Newberry
over the occasion of his birthday.

There had been a matter that had to do with Jennifer, who had played
high stakes beside her mother at the baccarat tables of Nice and won
sums large enough for the papers to carry the story in headlines that
had been the occasion of peremptory cablegrams for their return to
America and had virtually shut off subsequent trips abroad.

There had been the affair, too, of the young Argentinian, son of a
castor-bean magnate, driving his Hispano-Suiza into the swimming-pool
at the Roslyn, Long Island, estate. Jenny had been as outraged as
Rarick, except that he went to the extreme of keeping the house closed
for two subsequent seasons.

There were certain well-defined limits to opposing Rarick, which were
none the less tricky limits, because there seemed to be no way, except
the intuitive one, to anticipate them. He would give in on many a grand
issue, such, for instance, as the Ficke house, Jennifer’s fabulous
string of matched pearls, or Jenny’s whim for five thousand acres of
French-Canadian tract north of Quebec, upon which they had built an
artificial lake, a forty-room chalet, “The Cataract,” and which had
been opened exactly twenty days in five years. On the other hand, a
trifle like Avery’s roadster, or this matter of Dr. Gerkes, would set
his head rigidly into the valley of his shoulders and square him for
fight.

The coming of Dr. Gerkes was one of those occasions. This time Jenny
knew it even before she raised the first faint dust of issue; but she
could not forego that first faint dust. The coming of Gerkes angered
her. It went against the grain. Not that, offhand, it would seem
to cause much of a ripple in a household where thirty-one servants
reported to the housekeeper every morning; but it did matter more than
was discernible at the first glance.

From the first, Jenny had found the Ficke house deceptive. A Gothic
library, two stories high, which ran across the entire Fifth Avenue
frontage, a drawing-room of enormous proportions, a Roman dining-room
into which you ascended by Pompeian-marble steps, and a glassed-in
conservatory for which a breakfast-room had been sacrificed as Rarick’s
passion for difficult and exotic transplantation began to grow, left
embarrassingly few bedroom suites.

An additional story would have marred the Hellenic grace of the
building, and the owner of the adjoining pile of magnificence felt
affronted, rather than tempted, by the Rarick offer to buy.

The yellow suite assigned to Dr. Gerkes subtracted one from the five
small suites of guest-chambers that Jenny had so elaborately planned
and redone. It is true that the comings and goings of Gerkes, who
preferred to use what was known as the service-entrance and the
small rear staircase that led quite privately up to his rooms, made
practically no dent in that household. He dined in his rooms, except on
those rare occasions when the family was home alone and Rarick wanted
him at table. He was seldom, if ever, seen in the wide, beautifully
vaulted corridors of the house; and yet to Jenny there was something
repulsive about his being there at all. The shabby black figure somehow
recalled the musty memory and figure of an old music-teacher back in
her St. Louis girlhood, whose face, close beside hers at the piano,
and his audible breathing had been repellent to her. A lady’s-maid
had gossiped to Jennifer, who gossiped to Jenny, that he used only
three towels a week, and no bed-linen, because he slept on the floor,
wrapped in one of the beautiful canary-yellow camel’s-hair blankets.
A secret survey of his rooms, one day during his absence, revealed to
Jenny’s horrified eyes the yellow-brocade hangings and bed-coverings
removed and crammed into a corner, the tops of her lovely curving
period-furniture covered with a layout of lean-looking hair-brush,
a whisk broom, and primitive stone implements, her paneled yellow
walls hung with pin-studded maps, and, on the mantelpiece, beside the
meticulously right ormolu clock, a box of Swedish biscuit, a cube of
American cheese, and a huge pocket knife, open.

That evening, before they went down to dinner, Jenny’s anger overflowed
her discretion.

“There’s a time and a place for everything, Rarick,” she said to him,
as he stood tugging at his collar in the enormous mirrored bathroom
which gave off their bedroom. “That man is no more comfortable here
than we are in having him.”

Standing in a foundation slip of coral-colored silk, over which she was
presently to slip a coral-colored evening dress of all front and no
back, her carrot-colored hair caught upward in the tight perpendicular
line which accentuated the narrowness of her head, she could see
Rarick’s neck, through the wall of mirror, drop into the slit of his
shoulders, and that peculiar look of the hunchback which she dreaded,
and of which she was wary, come cunningly into his face.

“What man?”

“Gerson, or whatever it was you said his name is.”

He turned, in his black trousers, stiff white shirt, black suspenders,
still tinkering with his tie, so that, as he faced her, she could see
his eyes ride up under his lids.

“I said his name is Felix Gerkes,” he pronounced, slowly and
meticulously, as you might mouth a lesson to a child. “Dr. Felix Gerkes
has condescended to come and make his home here.”

“Isn’t it usual, Rarick,” she said, her rising anger crowding closer on
her discretion, “for even so great a patron saint of indigent college
professors as yourself to consult the members of his family before
introducing a worthy outsider into the household?”

“There are few demands I make here. This is one of them.”

“You have a young-lady daughter to consider.”

“That is precisely what I did, when I introduced into this madhouse a
human being out of the world of ideas.”

“I see. You feel that Jennifer’s scientific education has been
neglected and that no young woman is equipped for life without a
Ph.D. knowledge of the glacial age,” she said, and glittered as she
stood there with her bronze-colored eyes and the points of light
off the tapping toe of her slipper. She could have plunged her long
jeweled fingers into the valleys of his shoulders and shaken him, as a
smothering sense of futility began to crowd her in.

“Not at all, Jenny. Our daughter’s education is all one could ask. She
knows a Hispano-Suiza from a Rolls-Royce. She knows a Cartier setting,
Theodore at the Ritz, her finishing-school ‘R’s,’ and how to stack her
artichoke leaves. I notice our son, too, already has quite a way with
his artichokes.”

The speech was not like him, but rather in mimicry of what she might
have said under similar circumstances.

“What a devil you are, Rarick!”

“A poor devil, Jenny,” he said, his face as pulled-looking as tarpaulin.

“You are a poor father.” She was going to add, “and a poor husband,”
but she let the words lodge in her eyes.

“I am that,” he said, replying to the spoken and unspoken indictment.

“What is it you want of us?” she cried. “Must you oppose your children
on every occasion, just as you have always opposed me? Is merely the
fact that we want something, sufficient itself to dispose you against
it? Why must you always be the stern parent to them, with me the
buffer between? What do you want?”

She did not know it, but she was voicing the cry within his heart.

What did he want? He wanted some of the intimacy from that boy of his
that was Jenny’s. He wanted some of that intimacy from Jennifer. He
wanted.... What did he want?...

“Do you want your children to skip their youth, so that they may follow
in the footsteps of some doddering college professor who spends his
life fiddling among arrow-heads?”

“I want Felix Gerkes in my house,” he said, climbing back from what was
sure to be a discussion of defeat by reason of what he considered her
colossal lack of logic, “because he knows things that we don’t know.
That we cannot buy for them. He has not mere learning. He has wisdom.”

“I see. Why Eskimo Indians like blubber.”

There was absolutely no way to capture a focal point of discussion
when you found yourself in argument with such a woman. She invariably
answered you in terms of something irrelevant, making you wild with
futility. Damn her! Damn her! In the years since that thought first
lightened into his brain, it had flashed there with recurring frequency.

“Yes, Jenny,” he said again, driven to the extremity of employing her
same skidding method, “and why your son, a second-year boy at Newberry,
maintains two roadsters, a motor-boat, a trotting horse, and fails in
his mid-year examinations.”

“No man ever understood a high-strung boy less than you understand
yours!”

The dart struck sure, and sent his head retreating down into his
shoulders. True. True. Too, too true.

“Nor a gay and beautiful daughter, one with brains, let me tell you
that, although you prefer to treat her as if she were a moron. She’s a
match for your professors. Jennifer’s got brains!”

“Exactly, damn it all! And for what? Waste. Waste.”

In a world of superficial interests, filled with the need to be
clever and sophisticated, you could be clever with the sharp edge
of your brain, if you had one, and sophisticated on a shoestring of
intelligence and no heart.

“Your merely clever person is only a first-rate second rather.”

“Try being one.”

“I can’t; it’s not in me.”

“Lots of things are not in you, Rarick. The ability to meet your world
is not in you.”

“I wish to God it were not so deeply in you.”

“Gerkes’s world, I suppose....”

“I don’t know his world. He knows the secret of things and of not being
smothered by them. Like you. Like me. Like your children.”

“Obviously, from the look of his hair-brush.”

You couldn’t argue with a woman like that. You couldn’t. You couldn’t.
The crazing sense of futility....

She was in her gown by now, a sort of henna-colored affair, as if
the threads had been picked from her hair--a gown that wrapped her
eccentrically thin body on a diagonal, rushing to a high ruff about her
neck in front, cut daringly, almost to her waist line, behind. Between
the bang of her hair and a stiff, enormously brilliant dog-collar of
diamonds, her eyes were red and level and full of the impudence of her
remark.

“Doctor Gerkes remains, Jenny.”

She shrugged her shoulders and walked out.

Damn her! Damn her! Damn her!




A story about Jennifer Rarick went the rounds that winter, creating
hilarity at many a cocktail and dinner party.

It seemed that the Rarick house, shiningly conditioned, was now being
shouted out by sight-seeing-omnibus megaphones as the billion-dollar
Ficke-Rarick mansion purchased with Rarick dimes.

One morning, just as Jennifer, in riding-habit, was emerging from the
house to enter a large fawn-colored roadster which she was accustomed
to drive herself across the Park to the academy where she kept her
mounts, one of these omnibuses slowed while the megaphone roared of
Rarick dimes and billion-dollar mansions.

Throughout this canned oration, the daughter of John Rarick, one hand
against her slim hip, the other thumbing her nose at the omnibus, held
posture, precipitating the picture by a dash into her roadster at its
conclusion, and leaving a gasping and bucolic sight-seeing omnibus load
not quite sure that it had happened.

Whether it did happen or not, the gesture might be said to be somewhat
typical of Jennifer. I am. You are. Take me. Leave me.

Usually you took her. Even at her worst, when she was cocksure and
tiresomely sophisticated and pseudo and pretentious, there was about
her a hearty self-loathing, concerning which she was robustly frank.

“I despise myself,” she was constantly saying to people on club
verandas and in grand stands at polo matches, where patter
predominated. “I am a swine. I’m N. G. I’m stealing a ride through
life. I’m a panhandler.”

After a fashion she meant it. After the fashion of one who attempts to
appease a dissatisfaction by throwing to it slops of words.

People were always saying of her, “She has brains,” in the key of
saying, “Too bad, the girl has brains.”

“So’s my old man,” was Jennifer’s usual retort, in the slang with which
she hung her speech. She meant this. She admired her father from the
distance that lay between them. She wanted his respect and, strangely
enough, gave him precious little of hers.

The evening following his scene with Jenny regarding the coming of
Gerkes, Rarick sent for his daughter.

In a house filled with the confusions, the comings, the goings, the
ringing of telephones, and the hurrying of servants, that the two
women, mother and daughter, managed to create about themselves, the
occasions of family conference were seldom enough.

When the summons came for Jennifer to go to her father, in the library,
she was in the act of slapping about her rooms, with her own confused
English maid and her mother’s Breton maid hurrying at her heels, in the
effort to help her toward a dinner engagement for which she was already
thirty minutes late.

The fact of the matter was, she had remained shockingly overtime
at a bridge game at the Mayfair, vainly trying to retrieve a
several-hundred-dollar loss.

Jennifer was of that species of tormentor who, abusive of her servants,
was none the less beloved by them, because, quickly contrite, she wooed
them back by anointing their wounds with tips and gifts.

It was her maid Mariana’s boast that these tantrums kept her supplied
with furs, French gowns, and even jewels.

The last time Jennifer had been summoned in this fashion by her father
was about two years before. She had bought on a dare, at the auction
of a famous Long Island estate, a cigar-shaped roadster with an
Italian engine of very special make, for eleven thousand dollars. The
estate was being sold because the owner had been killed in this very
car. Jennifer had stood on a table in the garage and led the spirited
bidding.

Rarick, after a high and ugly scene with her in the library, had paid
the eleven thousand dollars, and the day following, in her enraged and
humiliated presence, had sold it to a dealer for twenty-five hundred.

“The meanest man in the world,” Jennifer had ground through clenched
teeth into her mirror after the episode, the tears of her humiliation
splashing down a face which, although molded after her father’s, had
a lightning beauty that darted into it and played around her eyes
and her lips. A straight brown slab of a girl, with a brilliant sort
of Jeanne d’Arc directness to her eyes, which were surrounded by a
mediæval-looking curtain of straight brown bob.

There had been, too, the highly unpleasant occasion when, like
a small girl, Jennifer at twenty had been obliged to endure the
unendurable indignity of standing beside her much younger brother for
a dressing-down from Rarick that had to do with Avery’s presence--to
say nothing of her own--at a swimming-pool party at Greenwich that had
found its way into insinuating print.

As a matter of fact, both Jennifer’s and Avery’s presence had been the
result of a flat tire in front of the estate of the friends who had
detained them. But somehow, facing her father, as she stood beside her
slim brother, there on the mysterious beauty of a sixteenth-century
Kuba hunting-rug, the truth of the story seemed too flimsy to bear
the telling, or something grim and hating in these children kept them
silent. Rarick was always to believe, not from what they said, but from
what they did not say, that their presence on this notorious occasion
had been deliberate.

In any event, a summons to her father in the library was grimly
associated with the scratching memory of scenes like those.

Then there had been the excruciating occasion when Jennifer and her
mother, returning from a season at Deauville and Le Touquet, had
successfully passed customs officials without declaring three important
and perfectly matched pearls, which they had sewn on to a beaded gown.
There had been an outrageous scene in the library when these facts
became known to Rarick; in fact, rage and terror had caused Jenny
to swoon--cutting her forehead as she went down--at her husband’s
reiterated threats to reveal the whole untidy business.

There was rankling, in some terror at the moment, in Jennifer’s
mind, a dread that an extremely private dramatic evening, entitled
“Casanova, Be Careful,” which had been staged with great lavishness
in the garden-amphitheater of a Connecticut estate, was through some
mysterious leak about to find its way into notorious publicity.

Hang it all! she had been lured into the thing chiefly because it had
given her an opportunity to try her hand at what she secretly suspected
in herself to be a talent for lyrical writing.

Hang it all! the way to avoid such jams as this was to ditch the
home condition. Marry forty-million-dollar Charley Kempner and spawn
him square-faced little Kempner heirs with Kempner casts in their
Kempner eyes. Or not marry Lew Bissinger and live in embroidered sin
with an already married man. Or pursue Berry Rhodes, who was simply
unassailable with social position, and who fascinated her. Or just
ditch it. Open a tea-room. Write a scandalous book. Hang it all! No
parent can hope to get away with _moyenâge_, maiden-in-a-tower stuff.
Yes, she had written the “Casanova, Be Careful” lyrics and danced in
the last of seven veils. Damned talented job, if she did say it. “Well,
Father,” she improvised to her mirror, “it’s come to this between you
and me; has been coming to this between you and me since you popped
me into a world I didn’t ask to be popped into. I’m no nincompoop.
You’d see to it that a daughter of yours wasn’t. But I’m tired being
treated like one. I’m finished. If you want to throw me a million or
two to save me from being somebody’s expensive hussy, I’m not too proud
to accept it. If you don’t, and since I’m not made of the stuff you
seem to think your daughter should be made of, I’m through, anyway.
I’ll go off and write a dirty play and show up the whole wretched
business of life as it is lived behind the tessellated walls of the
million-dollar Rarick mansion that is built out of dimes. If the walls
aren’t tessellated, they ought to be. I’ll give them a megaphonefull
that they’ll remember. I’ll tell the story of how somebody took a
couple of hair-pins and bent them into a couple of frowns and stuck
them into sour dough and made a little man who lived in tall marble
halls that kept him looking like a dwarf, and who would have thought
he was Napoleon, if he had quite had the nerve, but who only got as
far as owning everything in the world he could lay his hands on that
had belonged to Napoleon or was about Napoleon. I’ll tell the world
about this little man who got so rich on needles and pins that he hated
himself--and his family. I’ll tell the world, damn it! I’ll tell....”
cried Jennifer to herself, as she ran down the hall toward the library;
but not without pausing to snatch up a spangled scarf to throw across
the back of her dinner gown, which was cut to one inch above the waist
line, where a topaz buckle bit softly into the flesh.




What Rarick wanted with his daughter was to have her meet Gerkes.

He was standing waiting for her, on the hearthstone of a vaulted
fireplace that had been lifted out of the palace of a Milanese Sforza,
a small man who was forever to be dwarfed by the Gothic grandeur
through which he moved, and yet to whom the Druid twilight of such
splendor was to become a fetish.

Three enormous chandeliers, designed after the crowns of Merovingian
kings, poured cunningly diffused pools of light on to this scene of
mediæval resurrection. The very modern young Jennifer, who wore her
docked head like Jeanne d’Arc, and whose metallic frock clicked,
slouched in on slim, inelegant legs.

Her smartness, even back in the St. Louis days when she had first
begun to drift from him, had always been a source of her father’s deep
admiration. Not her indubitable smartness in the worldly sense, but the
brand of it that was indicated in the intelligent bright dark eyes, set
into a head that stood so erect and right between its slim shoulders.
She could have been anything, Jennifer could have been, except the
thing she was. And the thing she was, without his being able to define
the exact why, was anathema to her father.

It was not that she carried her cocktails vulgarly, or said gross
things with what passed for the new frankness. She was no more and no
less than any girl of her upbringing. Or her mother’s upbringing. If
anything, a little more. She drank rather less, smoked not at all, and,
in her own phraseology, had remained a virgin chiefly because she had
never let her curiosity get the better of her.

When she said a thing like that, Rarick ground his fingers into his
palms to keep from boxing the ears of the consciously modern young
Jennifer. She was so cocksure of what a sophisticated, unillusioned,
amusing thing it was to be Jennifer. She was tiresome and a swine, yes,
she was willing to admit, but only in the sense that her rattling-good
brain was going to waste in cocksure and debonair fashion. You couldn’t
live in her swinish set and take the world seriously enough to
concentrate. Hang it all! why try to write plays, even if you felt a
talent for it, when, to be true to the life she knew, they would have
to be dirty plays? Or why do charity or social work, when the world
hadn’t time for the dirty-nosed little darlings even after you’d gone
to all the trouble to save them for it. Part of the amusing thing it
was to be Jennifer was to be brutal and frank and unsentimental and
greedy and a little foul-mouthed.

To Rarick, this young woman of his flesh, his board, his keep, who
stood there on the hearth-rug before him, glittering in her gown of
fake armor, was as strange as if she had just stepped full grown from
the life-size silver-and-chalcedony Zeus that stood on a _credenza_
against the wall. Everything he felt about this illuminated edition of
himself was imbedded in disapproval. Had been, since the Mary Institute
days back in St. Louis, when she had stopped bounding the state of
Missouri for him in an unaffected little voice that was appealing, and
had first started going to football games in the white-kid gloves her
mother provided for her, with boys in their first long trousers, who
came calling for her in their family automobiles. He despised what she
had become, chiefly in terms of what she might have been.

“You sent for me, Father?” she said, the glance she guarded from
ever meeting his sliding to the spot where his graying hair hung in
the Napoleonic forelock down his brow, and simulating unconcern by
feeling very concernedly along the rear edges of her shining curtain of
coiffure.

“Dr. Felix Gerkes, of the National Museum and a scholar of considerable
consequence, is going to make his home with us. I suppose you know
that, Jennifer?”

Jennifer did. In fact, she was the one who had passed along to her
mother the first information concerning the thin-bristled hair-brush
and the square of American cheese, as they had sat, in pajamas, in
Jennifer’s bedroom over coffee one morning. Pretty snide, to stick a
fossil in the yellow suite, with the blessed old Gothic mausoleum as
cramped as a Harlem flat, when it came down to actual living-quarters.

But nevertheless a sense of relief ran through Jennifer. Thank Heaven,
he had not got wind of the whole silly business of “Casanova, Be
Careful.” They were damned clever lyrics, if she did say so, but fat
chance to get anything but a dressing-down for them from her father.

“I’m like the fellow, Father, when it comes to science, who kept
‘Stones of Venice’ on the geology shelf of his library.”

“Dr. Gerkes’s scientific achievement is by no means all there is to
him, Jennifer. I want you to cultivate him.”

His ability to antagonize his children was infallible.

She drew back from his command, with the kind of rearing of the neck
that he had beheld countless times in his boy Avery. A dull sense of
his impotence, where these youngsters were concerned, was a chronic
rage within him.

“I want you to have dinner with Dr. Gerkes and me tonight.”

“That’s impossible. I’m late as it is for early dinner with the Delaney
Stuarts. Shibby sails tomorrow.”

The name “Shibby Stuart” was no more anathema to him than a dozen
others which were constantly on the lips of his wife and daughter. In
fact, there were important reasons of diplomacy why there should be
an _entente cordiale_ with Delaney Stuart, president of an Eastern
Federal Reserve Bank with which the Rarick Chain, Inc., had enormous
transactions. But the picture of Shibby Stuart as he had once seen her
lying sick-drunk on a couch in his house, during one of Jennifer’s
dinner dances, rose crazily before him.

“You will remain at home for dinner tonight. It may help you to
remember you have a home.”

“Don’t be absurd, Father,” said Jennifer, and began pulling at the
net edge of her handkerchief. Her rage, which she felt hitting in hot
points against her eyeballs, was out of all proportion to the dilemma
of being obliged to cancel her dinner with Shibby Stuart. As a matter
of fact, even as she had been sliding into the armor gown that clicked,
the thought of evasion had flashed through her brain. What with her
back stiff and sore from riding a new mount that afternoon, and a more
recent invitation to go off to a speak-easy for dinner and dancing with
Berry Rhodes, here was an opportunity to pass up the Stuart farewell
dinner and incidentally repay Shibby for a last-minute non-appearance
of hers that she had recently staged at one of Jennifer’s bridge
luncheons.

“It isn’t often I make demands, Jennifer. I let weeks go by without so
much as seeing you at the dinner table. This is one of the times I want
you here.”

It seemed to her at the moment that nothing mattered quite so much as
dinner at the Stuarts’.

“You should have given me warning.”

“You should have had sufficient judgment to know there comes a time
when a halt must be called, if you won’t call it yourself. You haven’t
sat down to dinner in this house for three weeks or more.”

“Why should I? Everything I do gets on your nerves. If I’m so much as
called to the telephone, you humiliate me before a butler by refusing
to let me answer it.”

“I have known you to spend twenty minutes of a dinner hour at the
telephone.”

“If I say the moon is made of green cheese, then I’ve said something
off-color. Hell! why should I want to stay at home, Father?”

He reached out and hit a gong with a baton of lapis-lazuli, padded in
velvet.

“Miss Jennifer will join us at dinner,” he said to an immediate butler.

She waited until the door had closed again, and then, with her face
clenched and her hands clenched and her gown making jangling little
sounds as the quivers of her wrath shot through her, she lowered her
face until it almost touched her father’s.

“I just hate you sometimes,” she said, and began to cry the invariable
tears of anger and humiliation to which these scenes could reduce her.
“I wish I had the guts to go out and scrub floors for a prostitute,
rather than put up with being treated like one here.”

A fit of trembling that went through him like a tree-shake caught him
at the words which came off her lips, which were so close to his face
that it was as if he could feel their shape.

“You will have dinner at home tonight, Jennifer, even if your temper
does turn you into a barmaid.”

“It must be a splendid feeling to have to force the members of your
family to your side.”

“It is, Jennifer,” he said, and looked at her with what, for a moment,
threatening to disarm her, seemed like a film across his eyes. She sat
down, still pulling at the net edge of her handkerchief and every so
often scraping it angrily along her wet cheeks.

“Well, now you’ve got me, what is it you want with me? I suppose it
isn’t asking too much to be allowed leave-of-absence to get a message
off to the Stuarts. God knows what I am to say.”

He beat the gong again. “Telephone Mrs. Delaney Stuart that, owing to
an unavoidable change in her plans, Miss Jennifer will be unable to
come to dinner tonight.”

She held her face, during this, averted from the butler’s view of it, a
little squeal of rage rising to her throat.

“Now what? I suppose I am to spend a jolly evening at home talking
isinglass, or blue grottos, or dinosaurs’ eggs, or whatever it is one
talks to fossil-finders.” Her rage ended on a spurt of laughter and for
the life of him, he could not see her face break into amusement, her
eyes crinkling, and keep his own face straight.

“I want you to meet a great and simple person, Jennifer. A man who has
not grown simply great in his work, but great simply.”

“He sounds as if he ought to be done in stained glass.”

“He is witty enough to think that poor wit.”

“Thank you, Father. Any more lilies today?”

“Cultivate Dr. Gerkes, Jennifer. Cultivate Gerkes. You want to learn.”

He knew he was being roiling and didactic and tiresome again but to his
surprise, she flashed a tear-stained face at him that was lit with a
sudden sweetness, a clear-eyed curiosity to it that was reminiscent of
the small brown jug of a girl who had bounded Missouri.

“I do, Father! I know I’m all of a total loss. I’m on to myself, don’t
you forget it. I want to sit at the feet of somebody and learn. God
knows I don’t know anybody with a pair of feet like that. Trot out
this wise guy, Father. I’ll chuck everything and stay home at the
indoor sport of improving my so-called mind. Do you think he’d like
to collaborate with me on a book I’ve long had in mind, called ‘Sex
O’Clock’? Really, Father, I _am_ in favor of more and better brains.”

Jenny came in then, wearing a yellow satin gown that had been
dry-cleaned to the color of an old tooth, and so shrunken that it
spanned. She had long since discarded it from her more formal wardrobe,
but, with a survival of an old instinct for economy, went through the
mean and futile performance of reserving it for just such occasions as
this, when they dined alone and _en famille_.

“You look like the devil, darling,” said Jennifer, and kissed her.

“I feel like him and his bride,” said Jenny, stooping to draw at a
thread that was raveling at her hem. “I thought you were having dinner
at Shibby’s.”

“I’m dining at home with the Department of Arts and Sciences,” said
Jennifer, and dropped a large slow wink to her mother.

Across the island of the hunting-rug, Jenny regarded her husband with
eyes that had no gleam.

“I didn’t mind canceling the Dentons at the last moment and leaving a
vacancy in her opera box, but I don’t relish the idea of also being
on Shibby Stuart’s black list, any more than you should, Rarick,
considering your banking connections with them.”

“You leave my banking connections to me.”

“Gladly.”

“Never mind, Mother. Father and I have evolved a new philosophy of
life. Less philosophy and more life.”

“The philosophy, I suppose, that the rich are all mean and frivolous
and vicious, and the poor holy and righteous.”

He regarded her with the masked look to his face that could cause her
to say over and over to herself: “Little man. Little man, you. Little
fake Napoleon, you.”

“Holy righteousness, my dear Jenny, cannot reside exclusively among the
poor while you are you.”

“Attaboy, Father!” said Jennifer, and jammed a pillow into the cave
between the small of her back and the couch. “I can forgive a dirty dig
if it’s well dug. Can’t you, Mother?”

Her mother glanced at her wrist watch, a singular and precious one, set
into the plane surface of a square diamond.

“It’s a wise house guest who is on time for his meals.”

“At that rate, Jenny, our average run of them must be morons.”

“Life among the Raricks,” sang out Jennifer and hurling out the pillow,
jumped to her feet and to some inner syncopated rhythm, began teetering
on her slim toes down the great length of room that led to an organ at
its far end.

Carved down the pipes of the towering instrument was the legend of the
St. Gregorian Mass, the meeting of Abraham and Melchisedec, and the
Last Supper. A chime, somewhere in the complicated heart of the organ,
which was rigged with all sorts of mechanical attachments, gave out
the half-hours. To Jennifer’s hilarity, it played the grand operas,
stained-window versions of the action springing into light above the
keyboards. “Father’s folly,” she called it.

“Jennifer, if you turn that on, I’ll scream!”

“Keep your well-known equilibrium, Jenny. I just wanted to see the fat
Brünnehilde, in purple cheeks and corsets, heave in stained glass.”

How small they made him, these women of his. That organ, built in at
tremendous expense and effort by tearing out one entire end of the
house, was as dear as someone beloved could have been. The storied
operas, stalking in stained glass to the pressure of a button, peopled
his solitude, plunged, in the glory of melody, through his evenings,
saturating his thirsting spirit. Chromoesque tinned music, perhaps, but
full of solaces....

“Jennifer!”

“I’m not! I’m not turning it on. Surely, if Father can stand his
‘Faust’ served up to him like Campbell’s soup, you should be able to
endure a magenta and majestic trickle of ‘Tannhäuser.’”

“Do you think Gerkes understood the dinner-hour, Rarick?”

“Why, Jenny, what _is_ the matter? The man is not even due for five
minutes. I’ve known you to hold dinner three-quarters of an hour
without a whimper when the guests happen to be yours, as they almost
invariably are.”

“She’s a cave-in from dieting, Father.”

That was doubtless true. It offended him to the point of disgust to
see this angular woman responding to a herd instinct that apparently
deprived her of logic, trying to reduce herself still closer to her
skeleton by nibbling at meal-time on a special faddistic diet of chop
and pine-apple slices.

“I’m a cave-in, all right,” said Jenny, and stretched her thin body
outright on a divan and pressed her fingers into her eyes and bared her
teeth in an on-edge fashion.

“Nerves. Underfed,” said Rarick, eyeing her from the opposite side of
the hearth.

“Nerves, all right. Reason, all wrong.”

There descended a silence characteristic of their times together.
Taking up an object here and there, as she wandered aimlessly about the
museum-like room, Jennifer began to whistle in short, breathy snatches.

“For Heaven’s sake, Jennifer, stop it!”

“Sorry, Mother.”

Silence.

“Say, Dad, what do you call this?”

“That’s a Tau-crossed pastoral staff. French, about the eleventh
century....”

“No, I mean the gold panel above it!”

“Oh, that’s a reredos of St. Peregrine. It’s part of an old
altar-table. I bought it at the Donetti auction at the same time I got
the ivory panel of the Virgin Mary with the pearl crown there, over the
doorway.”

“I think it’s a waste of those lovely seed pearls, Rarick. You might
have them done into something wearable for Jennifer or me.”

He did not answer.

“I was going to say, Father, I saw what might be a sister panel to
that reredos today, at Duveen’s. I was there with Mary Dakin. She
got caught in a tumbling market and was trying to unload two Romneys
that came with her share of her grandmother’s estate. By the way,
wouldn’t be interested, would you, Father, in buying a pair of Romneys?
Mangy-looking, but frightfully _bona-fide_. Girl with a lamb. And Boy
with a Goat. Or maybe his was a lamb, too. Well, anyway, Mary’s asking
fifteen thousand for the pair, and Duveen’s sent a man to appraise.”

“Not interested.”

“What did they stick you for the pearl-incrusted reredos, Dad?”

“Hellman bid for me ... something like twenty-five thousand, if I
remember....”

“Good God!” said Jenny from her reclining position, blowing smoke and
holding her cigarette at bare arm’s length upward from her.

“Good God, what?” barked Rarick, ready to be on edge.

“Good God, she’s hungry!” said Jennifer, and resumed her aimless tour.

Silence.

“A Baby Gar speed-boat for your son would have cost half that much.
Why is it so much easier to understand your own desire to own a
sixteen-thousand-dollar piece of ivory slab than it is for you to
understand a boy’s desire for the things that mean youth and sport to
him?”

“Because it is not his desire. I am convinced that all these notions to
add more and more dangerous and expensive toys to the jumble of things
with which you are cluttering his school life and educating both your
children to demand, come from you.”

“In which Jennifer is drawn dirtily into the picture.”

“Keep quiet, Jennifer.”

“Sorry, Mother.”

“Your boy demands precious little.”

“I realize that, Jenny. In fact, it is just my point.”

“Fortunately, Rarick, I am of sufficiently tough fiber to nag in his
behalf for some of the things he is too sensitive to nag for himself.”

“What are some of those things, Jenny?”

“The things to which, as a rich man’s son, he is entitled.”

“Meaning....”

“O Lord! Rarick, I haven’t it left in me to go over it all again.”

“I’ll go over it for you. Meaning things. Things to keep him moving
instead of thinking. Devices for speed. For motion. Things to distract
him from books, _things_ to distract him from thinking.”

“Good Lord, Dad, where do you get off? Things? You’ve spent half your
life shoveling snide things into the shopping-bags of snide people who
need snide things like safety-pins and stewpans. You’ve glorified the
American dime by making it stand for _things_. You’re the Thing King!”

How astute she was! Clever, slim Jennifer, with her sophisticated
Egyptian-looking eyes, merciless in her ability to lay him open to
himself.

“A major reason why I want to spare my own from the tyranny of things,”
he yapped back at them, trying to express, with the chronic sense of
futility, some of the malaria of his spirit which managed to keep his
family at this kind of antagonized arm’s length.

“You don’t seem particularly inclined to spare yourself the tyranny of
those fifteenth-century tapestries or that enameled Pietà up there that
cost a king’s ransom, or unpronounceable and unwearable gems with which
your pockets are crammed.”

“There is at least something of the story of mankind to be found in
historical objects.”

“There’s beauty in that motor-boat Avery isn’t going to get,” sang
Jennifer, cupping the tall heel of her slipper in her hand and
teetering. “Slim, speedy beauty, let me tell you that. And as for that
story-of-mankind stuff, if you ask me, it is pretty much the low-down
same, whether you read it off the hieroglyphics of an amulet from
Hindustan or study our gigolo civilization through a magnifying-glass
shaped like a monocle. And, Father, speaking of gigolos, I’m in
love! He’s a window-dresser for a haberdasher by day, and dances at
Florentine’s by night. Abbey Chadwick engaged him for her dinner
dance, and I’m going to have him for mine next week. He tangos like a
patent-leather-haired god, and his name is Nemo.”

“Darling, that’s the name of a rubber corset or a comic strip or
something.”

“No, Mother. He wears one and is the other; but, oh, my beating heart!”

“Bicarbonate of soda, darling!”

Why must he stand there with disgust printed on to his features,
instead of meeting her vulgarity as Jenny did, by snapping her fingers.
Was Jenny, after all, clever and even subtle with her children, giving
them their heads, to prevent them from running away? Her children
adored her. They were easy and indolent and insolent in her presence.
Sometimes he even felt himself hankering for some of that insolence.
Avery had once said to his mother in Rarick’s presence, “Shut up, old
darling,” and he had rebuked him for it. At that there had flashed
between Avery and his mother a look of amused understanding at his lack
of understanding. Letters from Avery to his mother were constantly
lying about the gold-stoppered bottles and knickknacks of her
dressing-tables. He never read them, even surreptitiously, but he knew
they were chatty letters that preyed upon the easy indulgences of his
mother; and, meticulous as he was not to read, constantly his glance
was being snagged by such salutatory exuberance as “Dearest Brick of a
Mother” or “Dearest Mother-on-the-Spot.”

That was precisely what Jennifer was saying to her now.
“Mother-on-the-Spot, you’re beautiful, but dumb.”

Dr. Gerkes entered then, after the inconsequential manner he had
of appearing on a scene without the slightest preamble. His dinner
clothes, which he called his “overalls,” because he wore them when he
lectured, hung from the rounded part of his back like a suit that had
been suspended from a nail. His shuffling footsteps skidded the small
rugs from under them like so much silent gravel.

There was a graciousness to Gerkes. A man of almost unlimited
intellectual contacts, he could be loquacious enough on subjects
where he felt informed, and an indulgent listener to those who, in
his opinion, wanted to talk more than he. Stupidity he regarded as a
cardinal vice. It made him snappy. His principal income was derived
from lecturing, but he could be thoroughly rude to the interrogators
who crowded and chirped around him at women’s clubs; and even at the
meetings of such learned organizations as scientific and historical
societies he was capable of rebuking a colleague for the inattention to
his lecture that his question had implied.

On the other hand, there was an amusing mixture of the Socratic and
Rabelaisian about Gerkes. He loved the private and impolite jokes that
had to be told behind the barrier of a hand, and the curbstone and the
platform were alike his rostrums. He had never married, due principally
to chronic lack of income and what he regarded as the popular fallacy
that two could live as cheaply as one. His eye for a pretty woman was
a quick, discerning one. It lit on Jennifer, who was standing in one
of the pools of light, glittering in her armor, her dress a blaze of
winking metallic disks, and her eyes as if they had come off the gown.

Rarick’s pride in his friend was pretentious and clumsy.

“Gerkes, I wish you’d tell my daughter that story about the Taoist
priest who once found himself, when a meteor fell, in Lahore, India.
There’s a mighty fine moral there.” Or, “Gerkes, I’d like for my wife
to hear your opinion of our own Arizona summers and how they compare
with say a country like Switzerland. I cannot get my family to realize
that they don’t have to cross the Atlantic for beauty of scene or
variety of climate.”

“Three chamber-of-commerce cheers,” said Jennifer, and held her
cocktail-glass up against the light.

“See America first,” said Jenny, and gulped hers down.

It was the kind of patter for which Gerkes had little retort.
Persiflage, the smiting word at any price, chic sophistication for the
average truism, tea-table and round-table caliber of profundities,
disarmed and bewildered him. He was at his worst. The descent to the
dining-room through aisles of tapestries was made goose-step. Gerkes,
who was never ill at ease, only silent where it seemed the better part
of wisdom, plowed solemnly through the high-napped rugs.

Not even port wine or champagne-cup, made by Jenny at table in a
frosted-silver pitcher over a _mélange_ of fresh, whole, cling-stone
peaches and black cherries, could succeed in drawing him out of
the slough of amiable silence into which the occasion had thus far
submerged him.

“I hope you are finding your quarters comfortable, Doctor Gerkes,” said
Jenny from the head of her table, where they sat sparsely grouped,
because it could have accommodated four times their number. The secret
of the icy grace with which Jenny presided at her table, Jennifer was
fond of declaring, was that her mother never permitted her head to
touch the back of her tall chair, or her hand to lie along its arms.

“Very comfortable, thank you,” said Gerkes, who was interested in his
portion of slim frizzled smelts. “It’s a pleasant room.”

“Room?” repeated Jenny, and swung her high, curved glance to her
husband.

“You’ve a couple of them, Gerkes, or is it three? Don’t guess you’ve
had time to check up.”

“Well now, Rarick, I haven’t,” said Gerkes without embarrassment.
“There’s another room leads off, I take it.”

“No, old dear, you don’t take it,” said Jennifer, popping an almond
into her mouth and grinning; “you apparently leave it.”

“I’m pretty much of an Eskimo,” he said. “They live in bare rooms and
keep stacked such furniture as they need, outside their houses, until a
piece is called in for use. Simplifies.”

“Dr. Gerkes has lived up there a lot among them, Jenny. He also spent
two years in Lapland, studying.”

“You don’t say so,” said Jenny, regarding him over a smelt poised on
the end of her fork. “Wasn’t it somebody or other said of the French
that no race which eats little _escargots_, suffocated in their shells,
can ever achieve civilization? Well, that’s the way I feel about
Eskimos and blubber. Fancy being the kind of person that can drink it!”

“One must fancy it; because they don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Drink blubber.”

“But I always thought....”

“No, my dear lady, you never thought, or you wouldn’t be of the opinion
that Eskimos drink blubber.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Why can’t you drink this wine-tumbler full of olive-oil?”

“Why--er--obviously--I can’t.”

“Well, for that same obvious anatomical reason, the Eskimo, who,
strange as it may seem, is constructed just as you are, could not drink
quantities of oil, either, and keep it down. Sorry to have to seem to
be concrete.”

“You _are_ smart, aren’t you?” said Jennifer, and propped her elbows on
the table and her chin in her palm, and regarded his lusterless figure
across the table. “Now tell me how they put ships in bottles, and who
wrote ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

“The best way to make a ship in a bottle is to begin working from the
inside of the bottle, outward. Glycon is the reputed inventor of a kind
of logaœdic verse. Bivalves have snouts. Biology, around the time of
the Council of Trent, insisted that the vein of the fourth finger of a
_fiancée’s_ hand led to the heart. Does that square me scholastically
with your daughter, Rarick?” said Gerkes, irritated or stimulated to a
point of loquacity that took his breath away.

“I think it must be wonderful,” said Jennifer, widening her eyes at
him, “to be wise enough to play dumb. I’m always trying to be not too
dumb to play wise. It can’t be got away with.”

“Nothing of the sort,” championed her mother. “You’ve a good brain.
Jennifer is a graduate of Miss Pratt’s, Doctor Gerkes.”

“Yes, and I would have gone to college, Doctor, but I would have been
sure to fall in love with all my professors under forty, and it would
have been so complicated.”

Gerkes told a none-too-chaste tale then from the _Cent Nouvelles_,
about a lady and a certain three lovers.

“He’s a nasty old _roué_,” said Jenny to herself, although she had
rocked with laughter through far more pointless tales when her table
blazed with friends of her own choosing.

“By the way, Rarick, there’s an idea behind the story I just told that
ought to interest you. Louis Sixteenth, to whom the authorship is
attributed, goes on to relate that this lady, while bathing, lost her
diamond ring. While diamonds were undoubtedly not common at this time,
it proves, however, that the stone which Henley picked up for you at
Bruges, could easily date back to at least 1460.”

“By Jove! So it could! It also proves that they faceted their stones
back in those days, too, now doesn’t it? That’s a mighty interesting
point. That’s what I mean, Jennifer, by the historical value of
inanimate things.”

It was Rarick’s way of attempting to justify to his daughter the
telling of the _risqué_ story. “Even at his worst, the talk of Gerkes
mattered, which was more than he could say of the endless sluices of it
that roared through the Rarick functions,” was what he was desperately
and in his clumsy, antagonizing way, trying to convey to Jennifer.

And strangely enough, Jennifer’s reaction to one whom she might just as
readily have regarded as a vile old bore, was as rare to herself as it
was to Rarick.

After coffee, when the candles softened down closer to their reflection
in the long fine pool of table, and Jenny, maneuvering to extricate her
daughter from the vise of a dull evening, suggested that she accompany
her to the last act of “Louise,” for which a pair of tickets were going
begging, there was hesitation from Jennifer. She knew that after the
opera they were sure to join up with the Chadwicks and the Edgertons
for dancing at Florentine’s. Except for the seductive fact that Berry
Rhodes might also be in the party, and Berry could tango like the
Argentine Republic, Jennifer for the moment, wanted to remain around
the pool of quiet talk and quiet candlelight and the slow syrupy flow
of liqueurs and the intellectual luster of this dim old fogey, Gerkes.

Except there was that seductive possibility that Berry might drop in at
Florentine’s....

“I’m glad you’re going to stick around,” she told Gerkes, when she gave
him her hand in good-night.

“Doctor Gerkes has promised to make this his home indefinitely.”

“Let me come up, will you, and get on to some books to read and some
things to think about?”

“Come up and I’ll show you a manuscript of the ninth century, which
I am translating for a library in Cologne. It will make the hottest
sex-novel in your library look like a juvenile book.”

“I think you’re immense. You keep your feet nice and pedicured, because
I am going to sit at them. Do you think you can convert a sow’s ear
into a silk purse?”

“I might find I have a silk purse to start with, and what if I should
unwittingly reduce it to a sow’s ear?”

“Father, where _did_ you find him!”

“Dr. Gerkes will tell you for himself tomorrow evening, if you will
join us.”

“Have a footstool ready for me every evening, Doctor Gerkes. I’m going
to try a new way of showing myself a good time. My present one is a
flop. Until tomorrow....”

Poor Jennifer. She meant it. But, as a matter of fact, she saw him
exactly two subsequent times, that high-exciting and excited winter of
her twenty-third year. Once when muffled from her knees to the tip of
her nose in an ermine-and-sable wrap, she had rushed downstairs between
two young men who were making noises with their teeth like ukuleles,
just in time to nod to Gerkes as he came out of her father’s library
with a stack of books in his hand.

The second time, she had seen him quite crazily, through a keyhole. She
was never to be quite clear about that, however. It was six o’clock
in the morning, and she had been “on a party” with Berry Rhodes. The
door before which she had crouched had lurched about so; and so had the
figure of Dr. Gerkes, seen crazily through the keyhole.




Jenny, standing before a full-length, three-sided mirror, did an
uncharacteristic thing. She removed from the front of her peignoir of
coffee-colored lace, a small cascade of ruffles, which left her chest
bare, daubed powder on to the V, and then stood off to survey. Her
bathroom, an enormous one guiltless of tile, cleverly disguised in
rugs, taffetas, a sunken bathtub with growing plants on its coping, and
porcelain water-birds on little stands against a background of glazed
Chinese wall-paper, reflected her figure over and over again. There
was no angle from which she could not contemplate herself. Profile.
Semi-profile. Full front. Back. She bent into them all, surveying. She
was the angular type of woman that wears high neck-ruffs well. She
owned dog-collars of jewels; principally pearls with vertical bars of
sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, or jade. She need not have feared for
her neck and shoulders. It was just that, somehow, the close collar,
the narrow cuff, the high ruff of fur at the hands and wrists and neck,
gave Jenny what air of distinction she could claim. Tall, narrow, her
high coiffure boldly revealing her ears and planes of cheek, there was
something studiedly, if remotely, Bernhardtian about Jenny. At least
she grasped at the wisp of resemblance and pandered to it for all it
was worth.

Yet, standing before the mirror, holding the cascade of coffee-colored
lace alternately against her chest and then removing it, she finally
decided to leave it off, feeling strangely not herself as she did so.

As a matter of fact, she was not herself. So strangely not herself that
once she crossed her arms over her flat chest and hugged her shoulders
in an exultant little fashion.

The no-longer-to-be-evaded truth of it was that Jenny, whose impeccable
wifehood, extending over a period of twenty-three years, had been
an easy virtue, was excited away and beyond her usual and curiously
volatile air of composure, by the fact that a young Argentine, named
Ramond Lopez, was coming in for a five-o’clock cocktail with her in the
conservatory.

It had been arranged in the hurried breaking up of a party at the
Ambassadeur the previous afternoon. Abbey Chadwick had asked twenty
to tea and dancing, including young Lopez, who was said to be a paid
dancer at Florentine’s, a gigolo of exalted type who mingled socially
by virtue of his connections, but who, nevertheless, was paid by the
management. He had sat next to Jennifer at the Ambassadeur and had
coaxed her to attempt a tango which she had never before ventured on
a public floor. He and a Spanish girl professionally known as Cleo,
had danced two Brazilian ballroom numbers at one of Jennifer’s dinner
dances a few weeks previous, and been paid handsomely for it.

The son of a partially defunct coffee king, whose fortune had been
spent in defending his daughter Bianca from the charge of having shot
and instantly killed her young _roué_ of a millionaire husband as he
was leaving his racing-stable, Ramond’s anomalous position kept him
hovering precariously between two worlds. He had been a mere lad in
school, in Switzerland, at the time of the notorious case of Bianca
Lopez Dakin, but the swift tides of family fortune, the death of his
father, a little later the death of Bianca, and the paltriness of his
inheritance, had swept him from Rio Janeiro. He was any young man with
a dancing-figure and a personable air.

It was said of him, as it was said of his kind, that women contributed
chiefly toward his support. Possibly. It is certain, however, that
Jenny, whose social world was a happy hunting-ground for the hired or
more subtly rewarded gigolo, had never bartered in the strange coin of
that realm except in the out-and-out terms of signing checks to paid
entertainers for services rendered and received. The case of Ramond
had been different from the case of Nemo, the case of Tom and Dick and
Harry, only to the extent that he had occasionally been present in
social capacity at functions where she and Jennifer dined or danced.

It had all come about so suddenly that it seemed to Jenny her confused
senses must be playing her a prank. As tidy about her emotions as she
was about the objects on her dressing-table, and more and more given
of late years to going about to all occasions and functions without
Rarick, the man beside her at dinner or in an opera box or with whom
she danced, catalogued readily according to these tidy emotions.

Whatever Rarick might hold against her, Jenny was given to reminding
herself, infidelity by word or action, as wife, or mother to his
children, could never be one of his indictments.

The former, on those not infrequent occasions when she brought this
subject to the fore, Rarick let rest uncontroversial; but the latter,
which was scarcely true to Rarick, was more than he could hear without
rebuttal. The very fact that Jenny’s children adored her, caused him to
contend bitterly that she misused her power by smothering them beneath
bracelets and shields.

Be that as it may, here was Jenny now, standing before her mirror,
hugging her shoulders and shaken to the very foundation of that
temperamental frigidity which had always stood her in such good stead.
Ramond Lopez, cross between a gigolo, and somebody or other’s tame
robin, and who taught the tango for fifteen dollars a lesson at Palm
Beach during the season, had suddenly walked devastatingly into her
consciousness. She could trace its inchoate beginnings back to the
night of Jennifer’s dinner dance, when he and the Spanish girl, the
fellow Nemo and a beautifully sinuous little Russian, had alternated in
exhibition dances. Later Ramond had asked her to sit out a tango with
him in Rarick’s conservatory, of all places! A brackish retreat, this
erstwhile breakfast-room, of hot-smelling soils and difficult pottings
in Osmunda leaves and sphagnum moss, and which was devoted almost
exclusively to orchid plants imported from Brazil and Japan. In the
various processes of their hybridization, they were seldom, as Jenny
and Jennifer were constantly complaining, sufficiently presentable to
save them florist’s expenditures.

Jenny was not the one to invite the highly special attentions of slim
young men with Latin eyes. She danced with them, dined, and cocktailed,
even flirted in that rather excited brittle manner of hers; but,
outside of that, her slate was clean. The security of that state
of her mind was unconsciously apparent in the thrust of her clean
scimitar-thin features.

A young wag of a society writer for a caustic weekly had described
Jenny’s face as two profiles pasted together. It was enormously apt.
Lopez, at Jennifer’s dance, had sat among the unflowering hybrids of
Rarick’s odontiodes, cypripediums, and other curious orchids of purely
botanical interest, and with his immediate eyes covering her face like
a mask of sweet ether, had solemnly refuted this delicious indictment,
paying her, instead, breathy compliments that somehow failed to arouse
her usual sure-fire ability to laugh a bad boy cruelly into his place.

At Ramond’s lispings, something starved in Jenny had lifted its
desolate head. Excepting for the months of courtship, when an eager,
rather timidly idealistic young clerk had wooed the intelligent-looking
Jenny Avery on the “chigger”-infested banks of the Meramac, there had
been precious few words, except in platitude, addressed warmly and
closely into Jenny’s eyes.

Almost immediately after her marriage, the alienating affair of the
twenty-five hundred had mattered terribly in their relationship.

Bitter with having given, bitter with having allowed himself to accept,
once Rarick had seen her reaction set in, the honey dried out of the
brief flower of marriage.

No, it had been many a day since close, fervent things had been said
to Jenny. Ramond had made her suddenly and hurtingly aware of it.
Something in her had thawed and was aching. Ramond, half her age, had
interpreted her with a melancholy kind of wisdom.

“Why do you try to deceive me, as you do the others, with your icy
manner?” he said to her, with the slight accent that lifted his lips in
a flare off his square white teeth.

“My dear boy,” she said, starting to be brittle and annihilating in
the cocksure way she had, “you are now in the act of telling me how
misunderstood I am.”

To her surprise, he was neither annihilated nor subdued. He caught both
her slim cool wings of hands, half-buried under wrist-ruffs, in the
grip of his own.

“You must not talk like that to me. You do not mean what you say.
You are the most interesting woman that I know. One cannot bear to
be in the company of the insipid young girls, once he has known you.
Do not pretend, Mrs. Rarick, that you need to be told that you are
fascinating. Sometimes I think you are as Dante would have been if he
had been beautiful and a woman. Sometimes I think you are most like
Bernhardt. Then I think you are like the best of both of them.”

“Why, you foolish boy!” she said, the words, from lack of conviction,
slow and stiff on her lips. American men simply did not look at one
like that. They had not the eyes....

“I want to see more of you, Mrs. Rarick. I want to know you. Am I
impertinent----”

He was.

“--or just one more admirer. After all, I cannot be what you call in
America, such a ‘total loss,’ Mrs. Rarick, or I would not have the
good sense to recognize so quickly a brilliant and worth-while woman
when I see one. It is easy to dance with your beautiful girls over
here--but they are not so nimble with their brains as with their feet
and tongues. Am I impertinent?”

He was. Yet how amusing of him! Here was no mere patent-leather-haired
gigolo, with a gift for wearing evening clothes and making middle-aged
women horrible. Impudent of him to have insinuated his fingers up under
the fur cuff of her long, tight sleeve--in flames--she did not withdraw
them----

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a letter between Jenny’s bodice and her flesh, as she
maneuvered before the mirror. It was a line from Ramond, confirming
what had been the hurried arrangement for this afternoon’s cocktail.

  Lest you forget what is unforgettably important to me. This afternoon
  at five, where the orchids dare not bloom for fear of comparison.

                                         RAMON.

The “d” off the “Ramon” had somehow excited her more than the note
itself. She was aware, as she sat up that morning in bed and put the
square white envelope back on her breakfast tray, that her legs, which
were stretched between the sheets, were trembling and would have
doubled under her had she attempted to stand. The place at her side,
with the covers folded back by Rarick, as he had risen from his night
there, was still dented with his body. Through the years, there had
been no gesture from either of them to alter these arrangements in any
of their town or country homes, with the exception of the camp in the
Adirondacks, where the women’s quarters of _de luxe_ simplicity were in
one twenty-four-room log building, and the men’s in another of equal
size.

A wave of self-pity, not unmixed with anger, drenched Jenny as she sat
and dipped strawberries-in-November, into a small brown bowl of sour
cream. What a starveling she must be, if just the ordinary homage and
admiration from a boy such as Ramon could bring about all this turmoil
within her.

Why, in the last few years she and Rarick had left off even pecking
each other good-night. She had been aware of it, and, in the spirit
of letting the old cat die, had managed to seem asleep first, if they
retired together, which was rare.

It was well over twenty years since the days when he had placed kisses
against her lips when he came home evenings, or stretched himself
out after dinner on a couch, holding her hand while she sat beside
him and read aloud. Twenty years, or was it ever? There were limits
to the memory of the flesh. The feeling of the print of caresses had
long since died from Jenny’s. Not that Jenny was a type to whom the
end of every road was the arms of the man she loves. Her temperamental
frigidity saw to that. And yet, suddenly sitting there in bed, the
sense of desiring a great deal and being not desired, stabbed through
her consciousness.

Life was passing her by. And for what? For nothing more than a
dumb-animal response to the instinct to abide by her sense of wifely
duty. For what? For Rarick, to whom even her fidelity might be a
matter of indifference? For her children? Bless them, they were no
worse and possibly not much better than the average. Life was going
to be bountiful to them. Jennifer would marry brilliantly. Avery, you
somehow felt about him, even then, in his adolescence, was sure in some
way to be as distinguished as he was rich. She would be crowded out
of their lives. And then what? A specter of an old age with Rarick,
whose eccentricities and cloistered habits were sure to grow upon him,
stalked down a corridor of her imagination--then what?----Thank God,
thank God, it was still left in her to feel that cut of thrill at the
left-off “d.”

Ramon was coming.

She handed the small cascade of ruffles to the maid in the Breton cap
and hurried out as if she dared not glance back at this symbol of the
soiled inner workings of the mind of Jenny Avery Rarick, mother of two
grown children.

Ramon was in the conservatory, poking about among goldfish which darted
about a beautiful wall-fountain of Pulhamite stone that Rarick had
brought over, with its lichen still clinging to it, from a rock-garden
he had admired in Taormina.

He kissed her hand, lifting back some lace first, and then regarded her
in long silence, a slight film of moisture across his eyes making them
deeper.

The quick picture of half a dozen men she knew, including Rarick,
flashed across her mind’s eye. How clumsily they would have paid this
same simple tribute. Mark House, an American who had been fabulously
rich all his life and lived much abroad, always employed this
continental greeting. But how clumsily, creaking where his shirt bent,
and leaving the disagreeable feeling of smear across the knuckles. A
Count Luckow, whom Jenny suspected of casting amorous eyes at Jennifer,
who had only ridicule for him, had this habit gracefully. Rarick,
somehow, would not visualize.

She could imagine that, to a young man like Ramon, whose masculinity
was not mere maleness, there must be something chapped and a little
funny about the unkissed hands of American women.

Twenty and more years of the perfunctory pats of greeting and adieu
from Rarick had been Jenny’s sole share in a world which she was
suddenly aware must be filled with the grand passions between women and
men. Not that anything she had not received from Rarick mattered, but
the slow anger of resentment flared just the same.

Women who had been less meticulous than she about their marriage-vows
were loved women. There were women of Jenny’s acquaintance, of great
wealth and social security, who had not been meticulous, whose wifehood
was far from irreproachable, but who somehow had the gift of demanding
full measure of homage from their husbands.

Precious little Jenny had demanded or received. A stab of self-pity,
the immemorial self-pity of a woman feeling denied, cut Jenny. Rarick
as a husband and lover! It was inconceivable that he could be missing
in his turn any of those things he denied her. The lover had died
back there in the beginning; and for the twenty and more subsequent
years she had been living with a husband. What would even this
Latin-eyed youngster, who was paying her pretty, slightly old-fashioned
compliments, and letting his eye linger far too long on the spot where
the insert of ruffles had been removed, think of her sterile kind
of life if he knew? Really, his eyes, black-velvet ones of deepest
nap, were naughty, roving as they did, from hers down to the tip of
the V-neck which she had calculated before her mirror. A wave of
self-disgust made her redden. With a prim reaction, over which she had
no control, she suddenly felt stripped, and withdrew her hand, to clap
it against her chest.

He regarded her with gentle reproach.

“Why are you like that?”

“Like what?”

“Shy, like a--like one of those beautiful wild pumas that used to live
on the edge of one of my father’s estates in the interior of Peru.”

Puma! She did not know whether to laugh down what she regarded as his
absurdity or incinerate him with the rebuff of which she was so capable.

“You don’t understand the strange wild beauty of these graceful
creatures. You must not think the comparison odious, Mrs. Rarick.”

What were you to do with a boy like that, whose sweetness was
indomitable?

They sat on the coping of the fountain, against a back-rest formed by a
Malaga-grape vine the thickness of an arm. Delicate Asia Minor aconite
crawled along the coping; and even though not one of Rarick’s hundreds
of species of orchids was at the moment in bloom, an overheated air of
exotic humidity prevailed.

“You’re a silly boy for making me indulge your whim for a cocktail in
this ridiculous conservatory of my husband’s, where nothing ever really
blooms, but unpronounceable, unwearable species and expensive botanical
things are always about to happen and somehow don’t. Except by the time
orchids are ridiculously cheap at every corner florist’s.”

The impersonal portion went sailing over his head.

“I know it is only a little glass house, but it cannot ever seem quite
that to me, since it is where you first let me dare know you a little
better.”

“I’m afraid, dear boy, there is nothing to know. If I am still water, I
am not only the kind that doesn’t run deep, but perhaps the kind that
doesn’t run at all.”

“You do not expect me to believe that.”

No, she did not, but she said it again.

“You are a liberal education to me.”

“How liberal?”

“I am tired of all your pretty girls here in this country who have no
faces in particular. You have a face.”

“My dear boy, are you given to profound observations like that?”

“You must not make me ridiculous. I mean you have a face that hangs
like a cameo in the memory.”

She looked at him, and, through the glazed fabric of a skin that did
not easily take the flush, blushed with the surprised sweetness of a
girl.

“You naughty Latin boy. I am old enough to be your mother.”

“I am glad, though, that you are not. Fancy the tragedy of having to be
no more than son to Dusé or Cleopatra or Bernhardt.”

“My boy doesn’t feel that way,” she said, clambering back to what
safety-ledge she could.

“Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“It hurts me.”

“What?”

“‘My boy’--in that tone. I am jealous, Mrs. Rarick--not of him--but of
all the life that has claim on you----”

She had the impulse to rise and rebuke him, and, instead, permitted his
hand to wander again toward the thick fur ruffs at her wrists. Then a
butler served cocktails, and they were silent and at nice distance
while he puttered; but the eyes of young Lopez, above the three
cocktails he tossed off, were over her face with the sweetishness of an
anæsthetic mask.

“I’m going to send you along home now,” she said, and rose. There were
no lights, and a thick hush of November snow was falling against the
glass walls, closing them in.

“I don’t want to go home, Jenny.”

Jenny. The plushy way he had of saying that. The impertinence of his
saying that. The dearness....

“I don’t want to go home, Jenny, without something to tide me over
until next time.” That plushiness in his speech was not from the effect
of the three cocktails, but from an excited lisp, adorable to her, that
seemed to crowd his speech.

“Impertinent,” she said, frightened, in an exultant way beyond anything
that had ever happened to her, and putting out a stiff arm to ward him
off.

He used the arm as a lever to draw her toward him. To the silence of
the big white flakes that were pasting themselves against their glass
inclosure, he dipped the back of her neck against his arm and sank his
lips down on to hers.




Racing home from a charity bazaar, where she had raffled off character
dolls with conspicuous success, to change her clothes for a tea dance
at the St. Regence, a surprise awaited Jenny.

Avery was home.

An envelope addressed in his large free hand was handed her by the maid
in the Breton cap.

    DEAR MOTH:

  Hullo! Surprise, eh what? I’ll wait in my bedroom until you pop in on
  me.

                                         AV.

Avery home!

The first thought that flashed through Jenny’s mind, as she stood
with the note dangling among her purse and gloves, flooded her with
such self-disgust that, on the very heels of it, she went hurrying to
Avery’s room, as if in expiation, the enormous sable coat that wrapped
her from eyes to knees still dangling back off her slight shoulders.

If only she had gone straight from the bazaar to the St. Regence,
without having bothered to come home and change into a taupe Lanvin
gown with a high neck-ruche of chinchilla that Ramon liked. It made
Ramon nervous to wait. Actually gave him indigestion, which asserted
itself in little splotches of pink across his forehead. High-strung....

A lump of mortification was in Jenny’s very soul as she sped to her
son. Was Avery ill? Crazy thought, but this was the first time she had
seen Avery in the two months since--Ramon. Would he--could he--sense
anything different? No. No. No. She need not reproach herself where
her children were concerned. She had been plugging harder than ever
for Avery’s speed-boat. Would--Avery--being home--make a difference to
Ramon? He had never seen her with her boy. With Jennifer, now, it was
different. With that not-to-be-resisted lisp of his when he attempted
to employ the idioms of American slang, he called them the “Flip
sisters.” But Avery--Avery, though only sixteen, had a grave, rather
precious quality. His blond straight youth, while boasting a maturity
of appearance that matched some of the young fellows who trailed around
Jennifer, was shot through with the most knowing perceptions. Would
Avery, with those curiously delicate perceptions, sense that in the two
months since she had seen him, strange, turbulent, and high emotions
had been sluicing through the slim being of his mother?

How annoyed Rarick would be if something only casual were bringing
Avery home in the midst of his semester. He had come down so
flat-footedly against it. Surely Avery could not be ill....

He was standing in a striped-flannel dressing-gown, tamping tobacco
into his short-stemmed pipe, when his mother entered. The contents of
a large pigskin bag, good accouterments, littered the room. A portable
phonograph was open on the table, with a disk on, and a needle in
position.

“Good for you, Mother! I was afraid it might not be you. Peacock tells
me father often gets home nowadays around four.”

“Avery, you’re not ill?”

“Nothing so pleasantly explanatory of my sudden return to the
magnificent fold of the family,” he said, giving his parent a lift off
the floor as he kissed her.

“Avery, you’re not in trouble of any sort?”

“Not the kind you think.”

“What other kinds are there?”

“Deep psychological fee-fie-fo-fum ones.”

“Avery, don’t tell me you’ve started to be foolish about a girl--or
anything like that,” she cried, flashing a glance, even in the suspense
of her sudden suspicion, to her wrist watch.

“No, I’m off women,” he said, with elaborate grandeur and innocence of
them, that made her take his long, pale cheeks between her hands and
kiss him.

“Darling, tell me what has brought you home in this sudden fashion. You
know how set your father is against it, since all those supper dances
we used to drag you in for. Tell me, son, I’ve only a moment between
appointments.”

“Mother, be a brick and cancel. How can I talk to you if you’ve only a
moment? I must see you before father comes in. Please manage.”

She stood fluttering between her indecisions. After all, the important
thing was that Avery was well. Some schoolboy predicament no doubt,
that seemed enormous enough to the schoolboy living it. Ramon hated
to wait. Waiting acted as an actual physical depressant upon him,
from which he was slow to recover. Jenny had learned that. Their most
violent quarrel had resulted from her arrival twenty minutes late at a
small tea-room in West Seventy-sixth Street which they were beginning
to frequent for its obscurity. Women who took tango lessons of Ramon
learned quickly, too, that to keep him waiting was to receive only
desultory and sullen attention, instead of the subtle thrills they came
for and paid for.

Jenny’s virtue as wife and mother had been founded on no principle
of life or religion. That she happened to possess it up to now had
apparently been a matter of no counter-forces sufficiently strong
to imperil it. Raging to see Ramon, who in five minutes would be
beginning his wait for her, Jenny regarded this slender choirboy-faced
son of hers, while turmoils battered her. He was not an easy son.
Never had been. There had been long and frequent sieges of difficult
child-illnesses and curious phases of mental reserve. His schooling had
not been an easy matter to settle, what with his father’s desires, the
boy’s, and her own. She had won her points, where Avery was concerned,
too slowly to have them appear won.

The years at Newberry, and now his freshman year at Eastern, had drawn
Avery out of his reticent, inhibited, boyhood precisely as she had
predicted they would. Avery was pretty much of a regular fellow now.
He had “made” the right fraternity. The son of a former Vice-president
of the United States had sponsored him for K. A. K.; and the Avery who
used to hide from his riding-master and feel squeamish in a rowboat now
rode his own polo mount and did not remonstrate at Jenny’s high desire
for him to own a speed-boat. As a child he had feared water.

Yes, Avery was pretty much of a fellow now. In fact, she was fond
of admitting, a little slyly and with innuendo that was without
foundation, that he was too much of a fellow.

“Boys will be boys” flowed in relief off the lips of Jenny, who had
spent her quota of time doubting if her boy would. Ah yes, boys
nowadays knew how to handle their love-affairs, various tooth-cutting
amours and indiscretions, as skilfully as they knew how to handle their
cars. That was to presuppose that Avery had always handled his, just
that casually.

Avery, always more or less at shy odds with life, with his father, and
even with Jenny herself, had not been the gay and uncomplex youngster
that Jennifer had been. Even now he was sometimes dark and turgid water
to her. Had she failed him as confidante on those occasions when he had
seemed to want to grope his way into her understanding of this or that
plight of his? Chiefly psychological ones that she had found it hard
to comprehend. She had read books on adolescence. In a vague way, they
accounted.

Once, on one of his Easter vacations from Newberry, Avery, to whom his
mother was by far the happiest aspect of his holidays, had tried to
read her excerpts from a very private journal which he had kept for
three years, and which locked with a key he kept on a chain with his
fraternity symbol.

She had felt deeply the spirit which prompted the confidence, but was
conscious of having failed miserably to understand what to her had
seemed the rather embarrassing vaporings of a young mind floundering
to climb out of some sophomoric morass. It was a phase of adolescence,
she concluded, as she dismissed the sense of failure that had followed
these private disclosures of some of the mental travail of her son. No
one could quite be expected to be able to comprehend the tortuous and
tortured workings of the adolescing mind. From the books she had read,
it would be rather abnormal to find Avery normal at this stage. All
would work itself out. As a matter of fact, of course, a boy’s father
was the proper confidant at such times.... But secretly, Jenny gloried
in her strategic position in the minds and hearts of both her children.
It was a sort of trump card up her sleeve; it was the writing on the
wall of who was who.

Was she about to fail again of her coveted place in the eyes of her
son? If Avery were impelled to once more put before her the difficult
and even embarrassing torments of his expanding and maturing mind,
would it not be better, after all, to evade the issue, than to fail in
it?

Let Avery have it out with his father! Let them become acquainted and
find a common language. It was not even fair to continue to stand as
buffer between them. Great responsibilities, that had to do with his
father, were ultimately to descend upon this young boy. Better to try
to have him cross the stormy Niagara gorge that divided the two of them.

But, in her heart, Jenny knew that the source of all this hurried
disposition of her immediate predicament was the fact that Ramon was
waiting. He must be chewing at his lip now, and sliding in and out of
the waistcoat pocket that lay against the slim torso of his dancer’s
body, a platinum-and-diamond watch, the thickness and diameter of a
silver dollar, Jenny’s first gift to him.

“Mother, I know I’m putting the cart before the horse, to try and make
you understand the result first, and then give you the reasons that led
up to the decision, but the fact is, I’m done with college.”

Then it _was_ something schoolboyish! Let him have it out with his
father. Eastern was the ideal college for a son of the rich. Important
connections. Socially right. Proper setting. Rich men with sons about
to inherit vast responsibilities, chose Eastern for their boys. Ramon
was waiting ten minutes by now. High time Avery and his father were
making each other’s acquaintance.

“You talk as if such decisions were a matter of course, Avery. I’m
surprised.”

“I knew you would be, Mother. That’s why I want like the dickens to
talk to you before the explaining to father begins. Or maybe you’ll
talk to him, Mother?”

“I cannot always be taking sides with you against your father, Avery.
After all, he is your father and my husband, and must be respected.”

That, ever since the advent of Ramon, was part of her new psychology of
atonement to her husband. She had applied it directly to Rarick the few
weeks just passed, causing him no surprise in particular, because he
was no longer sensitive to her doings. Her son, however, looked up at
her in almost startled surprise.

“Out of whose book of life have you torn a new page, Mother? Not your
own?”

Now he was going to be abstract! That was the difficulty about being
able to understand Avery. It made her proud of what she was pleased
to call his depth; but, just the same, he was at the stage where
he was forever vaporing about life. As such. It was a thoroughly
concrete affair to Jenny, life was. Witness the precise situation of
Ramon waiting for her. It was hard to treat life as a generality. You
talked about your own life, of the life of some one in whom you were
passionately interested. Just life as a subject was sermon matter, or
something you did not discuss except under precious circumstances.

“You’ve only three more years at Eastern, Avery. There is something
about the idea of a college degree! It’s an asset in after-life. Avery
T. Rarick. Century Club, Racquet Club, Eastern Club. It’s fine to hear
one man say of another, ‘We finished at Eastern together. We made the
polo teams together at Eastern!’” (Ramon was capable of going off,
after waiting a half-hour.)

“Mother, I want a couple of years to myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yes. Alone. Mother, I want terribly some time to myself. In Europe.
On my own. I imagine Paris is as good a place as any for a place to
get one’s bearings. Or, better still, some off-the-beat places like
Sicily or Greece. I’m fed up. College is all right for a certain sort
of fellow; I’m wasting my time at it.”

“That’s ungrateful, Avery. I’ve almost won your father over about your
boat.”

“Mother, I need to tell you a few things about myself. I’d have told
you long ago, you’re so sweet. But you dodged; and I do hate like the
dickens to say them....”

Then it was to be in the key of the writings in that locked journal of
his. Darling, silly adolescent! Ramon was waiting.

“Avery, I cannot stand the strain of the rôle of go-between for you and
your father any longer. Isn’t it manlier for you to face him yourself?
This is too serious for me. You yourself must ask him for what you
want----”

“Why, mother, do you know I’ve never really wanted anything before? It
is you who have always wanted for me. That’s what makes it impossible
for me to really get at father. He thinks I’m the fellow who has wanted
all the things I’ve never really wanted.”

So! It had come home to her. So much sooner than she could have
dreamed. It was for this she had practically alienated her husband,
worn down her vitality, sacrificed her peace of mind. From the very
infancy of her children, Jenny had been fighting for what she wanted
for them; and here was her son interpreting it for her in a way that
robbed her of any of the fruits of sacrifice.

“Avery Rarick,” she said, with everything reproachful in her voice that
she could muster, “I cannot believe my ears.”

“Mother dear, you mustn’t take it that way! Let me explain.”

Ramon was waiting.

“Listen, dear, I must----”

“Mother, I haven’t hopped on to this decision today or yesterday. I’m
everybody’s total-loss at college, dear.”

“That’s a pretty disheartening thing to have to hear, after the long
wrangle I had with your father, who wanted a state university. Really,
Avery----”

“I’d be no go at any college, Mother. It’s hard as the devil to try to
explain--even to you.”

“Yes, Avery,” she said, mashing out a cigarette off which she had taken
two puffs, and trying to bite down an impatience that was almost a
frenzy within her; “I should think it might be.” Ramon was waiting.

“Mother, what do you think?”

“I can’t. I don’t,” she said, and pressed her eyeballs.

“Mother, for the last six months I’ve been carrying only one course at
college. You might as well know and have it over with.”

“You’ve made excellent connections. Donnie Chattenfield told Jennifer
that Hal is inviting you to Whitecastle for the Christmas holidays.”

“Mother, doesn’t that surprise you?”

“Why should it? The Chattenfields weren’t always as socially secure as
they are now. I----”

“I mean, doesn’t it surprise you that I’ve only carried one course, and
that a dead-cat one in current events?”

“Of course it does----”

“It doesn’t really, old darling, because you’ve never thought about it
one way or another. But anyway--even my address at college has been a
fake one, Mother. I’ve faked.”

“Avery!”

“I haven’t lived on the campus for six months. The college
canning-factory began to tin my brains, so I moved out of it. I’ve
rooms up on the hill with an artist and his wife.”

“Why, Avery Rarick, how could you!”

“It’s the only thing I could do, Mother. I’m not cut out for the
college-factory. Matter of fact, if I am cut out for much of anything,
I haven’t found out yet what it is. That’s what I want to talk about.
You’ve been such a brick getting Father to put up with me, that it’s
kind of rotten to bring this home to you after the way you maneuvered
for Eastern. But it would have been the same at Penn, or whatever
state university it was Father preferred. It isn’t that I haven’t been
working. I have--after a fashion--worked, if you’d call it that!”

“Oh, Avery, don’t meander. Talk to the point.”

“Right, Mother. I mean, I’ve been scribbling. Writing a little.
Verse and stuff. Pretty rotten. Wouldn’t like to see it, would you?
Might give you a better idea of why I think a couple of years on my
own--knocking about Europe--alone--alone--would put me straight--with
things. Mother, you’re not listening!”

She lifted her tormented eyes to him, which for the moment she had
closed against the milling of her inner frenzy, and made the pretense
of having heard.

“That is all stuff and nonsense, Avery. You are to bide your time at
college, and next summer take that trip to Norway and Sweden with the
Stanley-Blake twins.”

“I don’t give a damn for those saps, Mother.”

“‘Those saps,’ as you are pleased to call them, will some day be two of
the most powerful men in America.”

“I tell you I need to be alone, Mother. To find myself.”

“Oh--Avery----”

“I know! I sound like a letter to a newspaper. Well, I’m capable of
writing one like this. ‘Editor, _Daily Bunk_. Dear Sir: What should
a young man of seventeen years of age do who simply cannot get
interested in life as he sees it about him. I cannot find myself.
Everything becomes disgustingly monotonous. Not interesting enough to
call for any real effort. I’m a perfect failure to date, and unless
I pull out, may remain so for the rest of my days on this supposedly
glorious earth. Everything about me is as interesting as a morgue,
where I am concerned. What’s wrong with this picture?’

“Letter from Editor to Morbid Young Man: ‘Your symptoms, young man,
include indifference to whatever you do and the belief that a congenial
task would reveal your hitherto unappreciated values. As you see the
world, it is sadly out of joint, and you wonder why others are so
indifferent to the pearl of great price hidden in your personality.
Young man, behind your inability to connect with life, lurks an
egregious self-centeredness and an exaggerated idea of your own
consequence.’”

“Avery, I can’t bear it. You’re too funny to be borne. Stop it, idiot!
How can one take you seriously?”

“But I am serious, Mother. I’m clowning Hamlet for you.”

How slenderly handsome he was, his father’s son around the eyes and
brow, but son of his mother in the lean, lithe figure. As he sat
there on the edge of the table, dangling one long cleverly-clad leg,
and showing, as if to excellent stage-direction, his clean blade
of profile, he was like one of those well-made youths in English
society-comedies.

“Avery, I simply must go. My advice to you is to pack yourself back to
college without even letting your father know about this--brainstorm.”

“Mother, I’m in hell!”

“Then you _are_ in some trouble, son,” she cried out, a sudden terror
dilating her eyes.

“I know, Mother, I know, it all sounds like tommyrot,” he cried, and
struck his breast with a gesture that immediately became sophomoric
to her, once he followed it up with words. “But can’t you understand?
The hell is here inside me. I must get away. Alone. To think--it
out----It’s too cluttered up here. I can’t stand the clutter. I’m sick
of being me. And doing the things a fellow has to do if he is me. Give
me a year or two on my own, Mother. Get Father to. I want to think. I
want to think my way out....”

“Of what?”

“How do I know? How can I try to tell it, when you sit there thinking
of other things. When you won’t understand.”

How dear he was! How inexpressibly dear. Hurtingly young. Silly,
sensitive, sophomoric dreamer. She had never seen him like this. At
least not exactly like this. She wanted to take him in her arms....
Ramon was waiting.

“Mother dear, be a brick. Put it up to Father before I have to face the
music. Make him see that I need a couple of years away--to myself----”

“I simply must go, son.”

“He’ll never understand, Mother. Coming from me, the suggestion will
only antagonize him. I can’t be myself with Father--any more than I
sometimes think he can be with me.”

“Hush, Avery.”

There was one principle of hers which Jenny had never even bent, much
less broken. She could not bring herself to discuss her husband’s
shortcomings with his children.

“I must go!” she cried, wildly. “If you insist upon coming home from
college with such ideas, son, it is manlier that you should face your
father yourself. Tell him just what you have told me.”

“I can’t! I can’t! You know that.”

“Then begin to learn now. I cannot always be buffer between you. Tell
him what you’ve told me.”

“Not in a thousand years. He’ll want facts. I haven’t any.”

“Here he comes. Tell him now.”

“Mother, for God’s sake! You wouldn’t do that----”

For the first time in her life, Jenny would. She was off and gone, down
the corridor, frantic with haste, just as Rarick, attracted by his
son’s voice, paused at his door to peer in.




For several years now, Rarick had been cultivating this habit of
extricating himself from his office at four o’clock in the afternoon.
It was not easy, except that he had found that the closing of his
multifarious day, whether at four or six or eight, was sure to leave an
overflow of affairs to which he could not get around.

The year that Rarick instructed his chauffeur to enter his office at
precisely the stroke of four, and, regardless of who or what might be
present, hand him his hat, the force began to refer to him as “the old
man.”

As a matter of fact, it was Rarick’s conclusion that these few precious
hours of late afternoon which included the sedative one of twilight, if
properly induced, could be made to stack upon the credit side of health
and vitality.

His golf consisted of those hours spent in the forest-like silences
of his library, where he read little, if at all, but where glyphs
and triptychs; helmet and sword of Doge’s guard; “Virgin and Child”;
Auvergne art of the fifteenth century; pillars of stone decorated in
Roman cups; red velvets inlaid with heraldic leopards, played effect
after effect into his solitude.

He could sit in the dim splendor of this hall, and out would creep the
mood to empty his pocket of its strange fires of stones of the earth
and place them in smoldering rows along a strip of black velvet which
he kept concealed behind the cushion of a divan. Out of his organ,
“Father’s Folly,” there came pouring to his pressing of a button the
storied action of “Tosca” or “La Bohème,” told in the illuminated
stained glass above the triple grin of keyboards. Musical cataracts
that leaped in glory over the din of a day that had been lived to
the tune of dishpans, hair-nets, lingerie ribbon, and forty thousand
small dolls made out of imitation peach-skin from the Vermont factory.
Countless and ever-fascinating devices lurked within the Gothic maw
of this pretentious instrument. Symphony orchestras, Japanese bells,
xylophones, bird-notes, and cymbals. Violin solos, sextettes, octettes,
“Chimes of Normandy,” Bach, Verdi, Guilmant, Handel, Saint-Saëns,
Bonne, Mendelssohn, and a reproduction of the Vatican choir, with the
lifted faces of the singing boys rising chastely above their surplices
and glowing softly into stained-glass flesh.

To Rarick, who scarcely knew his son, there was something of Avery
in these pale soprano boys, a look of spiritual contact, until he
invariably jerked himself away from a comparison that, no sooner made,
seemed ridiculous.

Avery, indeed! Speed-boats. Plus-fours. Oriental-pearl studs at
seventeen. A growing suspicion that all was not open and above board
about his college had been Rarick’s. Something not quite _bona-fide_
about what Avery had to say about his life there----

The suspicion moved up a notch at the sight of his boy, standing in
the French-flannel dressing-gown, with the contents of his open bag
scattered about the room, and the plane surface of his lean, pale face
plastered with a look of panic that was positively grotesque as his
father leaned in at the door. The flash of Jenny’s sable coat, as she
sped down the hall, had not been lost upon him, and now there came to
him rather belatedly the consciousness that he had been hearing the dim
patter of her and Avery’s voices all the way along the corridor.

The thrill that he invariably experienced over this narrow young person
he called son, shot through him before his first resentment had time to
leap out.

Good youngster! A bit too thin. Needed filling out. A bothered look to
him. What made him gape like a fish that had just been landed, hook and
all? The scent and the echo of Jenny still lay on the air. Conniving
again, filling Rarick with a roiling sense of outsider in his own home.
Heads together, the two of them had been shutting him out. Some scrape
had brought him home, no doubt.

“Well, Father, here I am.”

The little man stood in the doorway, shoulder-high to his
seventeen-year-old son, head up, hand thrust into the groove between
his coat buttons. After all, your prisoner was innocent until you
proved him guilty. Illness, or whim, or unavoidable difficulty might
have brought Avery home. Surely he would not dare to be showing himself
in the midst of a school-week, for some of the nonsense frivolities
Rarick had come down hard against, such as Jenny’s plans for the social
divertissement of the youngest set.

“This is a surprise, boy. At least to me,” he could not help
supplementing.

Hang it! Why had he added that? It threw the boy still further off his
ease.

“I guess it is sort of a surprise to me, too Father. Hadn’t
particularly planned on coming, until I found myself driving down.
One of those decisions a fellow kind of makes for a long time without
knowing he’s doing it. All of a sudden it’s made! If you see what I
mean.”

“I see,” said his father, in the polite tones of not seeing at all.

“Will you sit down, Father?”

The boy did have oyster-shells under his eyes. Ill-health?
Dissipations? Well? What?

They seated themselves, facing each other, on two straight chairs. It
occurred to Avery miserably, as he swept one of them clear of a litter
of his belongings, that he and his father were forever facing each
other on straight chairs.

With his tongue as thick as a rusk in his mouth, the determination
to unbend came flooding over him. A fellow had a right to some kind
of a decent break with his father. Old gentleman wasn’t God. Regular
enough fellow, no doubt, if you once broke through the crust. Crusty
with crust, though, no doubt of that. Low-down of mother, to leave him
flat--but here goes.

“You see, Father, here’s the situation,” began the son of Rarick.

They were going to get on! Sometimes a man and his boy just naturally
came to a place where they began to get on. Avery was old enough now to
understand....

“I’m mighty anxious to hear it, son.”

Now that was a handsome enough beginning of the old gentleman! Many a
fellow and his ‘gov’, after starting it off on the wrong foot, had hit
a pace. Not a bit improbable but what the old gentleman might be the
one to understand more quickly than anyone else, that a fellow needs to
somehow--get his balance. God, though, could anyone understand, except
the fellow himself who was living through this particular hell?

“The situation is this, Father.”

“Yes, son.” Patience. Patience. Shouldn’t expect a lad to come directly
to the point like a business man. What the dickens was the trouble with
him? Bothered looking boy, no doubt of that. Well, it was a good time
to get at him. This fine, straight fellow on the chair before him was
his son. The pleasurable years were about to begin. The time had come
to draw this boy into his life. This boy was no stranger. This boy was
his!

“Yes, son?”

“The situation is this, Father.” What in the name of Heaven was the
situation? Sitting there, facing his father, frantic for point of
contact, now-or-never blazing in his bright blue eyes, words seemed to
log-jam back in Avery’s throat.

You didn’t sit opposite one of the titan business men of the
country--of the world, for that matter--and tell him that your soul was
hurting you. You didn’t sit opposite the director of a string of banks,
a merchandise king of two continents, the biggest individual dispenser
of pins, Eskimo pies, and ink-erasers in the world, and tell him of
the strange torments, the nervous panic, the despairs, the ecstasies,
the strange stirrings of the desire to love and be loved, or the
yearnings for some power to express the wonder and the pain of those
first faint stirrings. You didn’t sit opposite a small, literal man
called your father, whose ideals were as well hung as his paintings,
and tell him that the world was a manhole into which you felt yourself
falling. It was one thing to pour forth these torments and ecstasies
and lonelinesses into your journal, which locked, or into the trunk of
verses that were your own disembodied nerves, jangling away for dear
life. It was another to sit facing this small remote man, your father.
“The situation is this, Father.” What in God’s name was the situation?
One did not dare to say to one’s father, “Life is too much for me,
Dad.” One did not quite dare bring to the point of discussion the
curiously recurrent thoughts of the lips of women that were flashing
through his torment ... the desire to create ... the desire to live
beautifully ... the need to be alone to work it all out. The confusion
... somewhere there was a father to understand ... not this father.
And yet--strange little man--he liked his organ with the horrible
stained-glass operas. The fires in the stones of the earth had witchery
for him. The salty wisdom and humor of the old fossil he kept up in
the yellow suite tickled and delighted him. What the devil was the
truth of this man, his father? What the devil was the truth of himself,
Avery, sitting there in torment, idiotically repeating over and over
again, “This is the situation, Father.”

“Go ahead, son.”

“As I had been saying to mother, just before you came in, or rather,
it’s been running through my mind....”

He and his mother had had their heads together as usual. She had been
first in his confidence. This was the method cooked-up between them, of
approach to the ogre. Damit! Jenny was a good mother, a more successful
parent than he was, no getting around that; but a man was entitled to
the first-hand confidence of his boy!

Was the old gentleman stiffening already?

Damit! damit! this boy was his. The only thing on earth he could look
to train into being closely and intimately his. There were a hundred
things he needed to begin to get said to this boy, if ever they were to
begin to prepare for the intricate problems that lay ahead for both of
them. A good way to begin was to give in. Why not on the speed-boat!
That was what he was most probably wanting. Damned dangerous playthings
of the rich. Speed-devices for going nowhere. Things. More things to
alienate him from the power to be tranquil. The way to get at these
youngsters, though--Jenny had the right idea--was to give them things.
Things. The way to get at Avery was the way of indulgence. Youth wants
indulgence.

“Well, I suppose if there is something you want, son, you’re beginning
to be of an age now where you’ve got to depend on your own good
judgments.”

“That’s mighty fine of you to say, Father.”

“I sometimes have my own ideas about these things, Avery. Some day,
when you don’t have to get back to college, we’ll take time off and----”

“But, Father----”

“--talk some of these things out. We haven’t ever had much to say to
each other about you and your relationship to this big world you are
preparing to grapple with. It’s a bigger and more complex world than
falls to the lot of most youths. I’d like to talk to you along those
lines----”

“But, Father, that’s not what I want to ta----”

“It’s all right, son; I understand this may be a bit premature. No
hurry. I think I know what’s brought you down from college today. Want
you to start back this afternoon.”

“But, Father----”

“Don’t like sloppy attendance. Don’t like sloppy anything. Wait
a minute. Hold your horses. You’re going back with what you came
down for. I don’t like speed-boats, as a general rule. Don’t like
speed-devices in general, when they’ve no other purpose than
saving time that you don’t know what to do with after it’s saved.
Nerve-racking. Extravagant. Dumb. But I figure you’re getting to an age
when your own judgments should count. I’m glad to give in. Is that all
right with you, son?” said Rarick, and took out his check-book.

They sat there, knee to knee, in their straight chairs, their faces
seeming to swim together as twilight came to blur them. Rarick, a
sudden sliding blur to his son; Avery, a sliding blur to his father.

“Is it all right, son?”

“It’s all right with me, Father--if it is with you--I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I mean--it’s all right with me, Father--if it is with you----”

The pen of Rarick began to splutter along his check-book.




The consciousness had long since begun to dawn upon Jenny, in whom
the impulse to climb was an acquired, rather than an inherent
characteristic, that she had started off, socially speaking, on the
wrong foot.

The advent of the John G. Raricks, from out of the Middle West, had
not been a planned campaign, for the reason that the need for strategy
had simply not occurred to her until the propitious moment had passed
and the house of Rarick had settled. Subsequently her mistakes had
been fast and successive. After the dust of the publicity attending
the purchase by John G. Rarick of the famous Ficke mansion had been
laid, Jenny, appalled by the lull, had snatched, with more nervousness
than diplomacy, at old relationships, mostly families of wealth and no
particular social position, whose migration from the Middle West had
preceded theirs.

Thereafter, the Raricks bobbed about in uneven waters, sometimes riding
up to quite a social crest, but in an erratic, unstable way that was
precarious, and then, just as likely as not, sliding down again into
the valleys between the waves.

No gainsaying the fact that the Raricks were invited to six houses
outside the social register for every one within. Jenny’s awareness of
social-register discriminations did not even begin to dawn upon her
until well after the move, when that dawn came up like thunder.

The time was not slow in coming when she was to encounter the
difficulty of rounding up a formal dinner composed of the people she
came gradually to realize were the right ones, and when she was to
scorch under such mortifications as sending out thirty-six invitations
to the alleged right ones and have twenty-eight regrets come home to
roost heavily upon her heart.

It was not exactly in the spirit of snubbing. The Raricks were not
sufficiently in the running for that. It was just that in settings
where even great wealth required proper exploitation, the Raricks had
somehow not arrived right.

What brought this home with sudden acuteness to Jenny was the fact
that the Isaac Slocums, whose wealth and social connections back in
the St. Louis days, when they were neighbors in Westmoreland Place,
were comparatively negligible, had moved East considerably after the
Raricks, and were now moving securely and consistently in social
circles which Jenny achieved only sporadically.

Betty Slocum’s careful social sense had accomplished that. She had
planned ahead. She had surveyed, and ended by employing, at a vast sum,
the services of a woman of impeccable social position, whose chief
financial resources flowed in bountifully in return for achieving a
wedge for the socially ambitious. One of Jenny’s sources of undying
regret was the fact that at the time such services would have been
invaluable to her, she had never even heard of the Slocum method of
crashing the social gate.

There was no going back. The best that could be hoped for was less
uneven sledding.

The mistake had rebounded most cruelly on Jennifer. Passionately
Jenny had wasted heartburn on the futility of wishing that Jennifer
and Avery had been born to her in reverse order. An eligible son,
somehow, millions in his offing, would have accelerated social matters.
As it was, Jennifer, always popular, whirled nevertheless in three
worlds. A Bohemian one which her set invaded in “slumming-parties”; an
outer-fringe one which represented wealth and perhaps a bit too much
gayety; and, far too occasionally, the one within the walls which the
Slocums had scaled by careful maneuver and which Jenny had mistakenly
planned to hurdle by a running high-jump.

It was not, Jenny felt sure, that Rarick money could not have
accomplished anything that Rarick money set out to do; it was that
Rarick money had not taken its psychological moment.

These realizations began to marshal themselves into Jennifer’s younger
and more nimble mind the first year that she was out of Miss Pratt’s
School for Girls. To begin with, Miss Pratt’s School had been a
mistake. The daughters of millionaires attended all right, but not the
daughters of the socially-right millionaires. Jennifer kept a stiff and
even an impudent upper lip about it all, but in the seclusion of talks
with her mother those lips of hers could drag at the corners.

“Where do they get off, leaving us out! I wouldn’t give a plugged
nickel to go to the Monkton-Beck’s cotillion. I thought cotillions
went out with bustles, anyhow. But what do you bet they don’t forget
father’s name on their Joint-Disease Hospital subscription list?”

“Let them get it!”

“Don’t be silly, darling. You know perfectly well Leila Monkton has as
good as got you down for five thousand.”

Jenny did. “Well, just the same,” went on Jenny, whose eyes were heavy
from a sleepless night over this same case of omission, “what can you
expect? Your father never accepts an invitation of any sort. People
don’t know quite how to approach us, the women of the family always
either asking permission to bring another man, or attending alone.”

“Nonsense, Mother! Look at the Slocums. Does their old man ever show
himself? Look at the Turpitzes. The face of the husband and father of
that family has almost become extinct. Fewer and funnier husbands is
the social cry of the hour. Bring your own gigolo. Don’t kid yourself
along, darling, that’s not the reason we’re zero.”

In the inelegant parlance of her daughter, that was precisely what
Jenny was doing, casting about within her troubled spirit for some sort
of satisfactory explanation of a position that was hourly becoming more
enigmatical to her.

“There’s nothing mysterious about it, Mother, we’ve treated the exact
science of social climbing inexactly, that’s all.”

“But just the same, Jennifer, assuming that we are horrible people,
with intellectual harelips and no ‘g’s,’ this is a country where money
is supposed to buy everything.”

“And so it does, if you know how to go about spending it. Money will
buy anything from a plush horse to an Aubusson tapestry. You’re out of
luck if you go after the plush horse when Aubusson tapestries are the
swanky buy. We should have employed a social, interior-decorator to
keep us from making mistakes such as cultivating plush horses, like the
Ben Wimans or the Maxfield Doons. Not that I would give one blondined
Wiman hair in order to crash into the Monkton cotillion. But just the
same, you’ve got to know your onions.”

“Do you know, I sometimes think,” said Jenny, contemplatively, and with
the crinkled look of continuing to break her head for more satisfactory
explanation, “that there’s such a thing as being too nice? There
is nothing more ghastly than the hung-on smile of trying to be too
amiable.”

“Perhaps, socially speaking, darling, we haven’t got ‘It.’”

“Nonsense!” said her mother, regarding her with tilted lids of
admiration. “You have every kind of ‘It.’”

“Oh, I get by in a crowd. That is, if I can manage to care enough. I’m
so damned half-baked! Even the desire in me to be something besides the
thing I am is half-baked, or I’d go be it. I’ve got a brain, Mother.”

“Use it, Jennifer,” said her mother, regarding her through lids that
were untilted now. “On Berry Rhodes.”

“You’re being disgusting, darling,” said Jennifer, and rose to her
height, stretching as a cat stretches, one arm climbing over the other.

“Don’t be an idiot, Jennifer, you’re too intelligent.”

“In other words, the beautiful and reluctant daughter of wealth must
jerk her family into social security by marrying the scion of a great
family. What is a scion, anyway?”

“Jennifer, you’re being coy. It’s horrible.”

“Honestly, Mother, you’re the one who’s being idiotic,” cried Jennifer,
and began to flush in waves.

“Berry is a person on his own, you’ve said so yourself. Why not come
out and own you like him?”

“Why Mother, you pain and surprise me!”

“You’re not clever in the rôle of _ingénue_, darling. A little awful,
in fact.”

“Well, all right, if you insist. He’s a bad boy, but I like him. God
knows why, but I do.”

“You like him because you have the good sense to believe in my adage
that it is as easy to fall in love with the right one as with the
wrong.”

“That adage gives me shivers down my spine. But then, so does Berry.”

“Leslie Edgerton hasn’t asked you to her dance tonight because she
loves you.”

“Mother, you continue to pain and surprise me.”

“Berry got you asked there. She must have thought it the better part of
wisdom not to refuse.”

“It’s all off there!”

“Are you sure, Jennifer?”

“That’s the devilish part. I’m not.”

“Jennifer, there’s one thing I must say for your father. He never
played for small stakes in his life.”

“There was all that talk that Leslie’s trip to Europe was a trip to
Brooklyn to have a baby--Berry’s.”

“You know that if that were true, it would have been marry-the-girl at
the point of the merciless Edgerton tongue!”

“Berry’s a queer, evasive devil of a darling-on-wheels. I don’t know
where I get off with him.”

“Find out.”

“Of course he got me asked out to the Edgertons’ tonight, but I don’t
give a damn. I’m going! With him. I like him, Mother. Hang it! I like
him,” said Jennifer; and, and to add to the horror of the sound of her
own voice giggling in a key beyond her control, the laugh petered out
suddenly and became a thin cry. “He’s a bad boy, but, hang it! I like
him.”

“You know perfectly well that he is better than the average would be in
his position. He has everything, and besides, a clever girl can settle
him down. Jennifer, if you would!”

“You mean if I could.”

“You can.”

“I will.”




The great-grandfather of Leslie Edgerton had once been governor of a
Confederate state. It had cost the grandfather of Leslie Edgerton one
million and a half dollars to run on a foredoomed ticket for President
of the United States.

The father of Leslie Edgerton had married a Miss Henrietta Crosby,
of Crosby, Connecticut, and had retrieved the million and many
more by subsequently inheriting, by proxy of this wife, the Crosby
watch-factories.

The paths of the Crosbys and the Raricks crossed occasionally, chiefly
at Bailey’s Beach, public charity functions, bridges, bazaars, teas,
and occasionally in a purely social way.

Jenny had ventured to include the Crosbys in what had been the largest
dinner dance of the season, with which she had magnificently set the
winter ball rolling the night after the opening of the opera.

The Crosbys had “regretted.”

Jennifer had cried, with her usual irrelevant questionnaire, which she
hurled, while smarting, at such situations, “Where do they get off? The
Edgertons don’t set my hair on fire.”

Be that as it may, when the Edgertons regretted, one of the
high-water-mark hopes for their dinner had fainted within Jennifer and
her mother.

Leslie had sat opposite Jennifer at a Hunt Club subscription-luncheon
two days later, and made no reference either to the occasion of
the dinner dance itself, which had caused talk because of its
elaborateness, or to her regrets.

That had somehow rankled in Jennifer more than the original refusal. It
was as if, with a preciosity that was chiseled thinly into her face and
lay along the delicate arch of her brows, Leslie had set about wounding
a wound.

A Rarick had never set foot on Parmley, where the Edgertons kept open
house all winter on their enormous estates skirting Tarrytown.

Jennifer was about to set foot there now. A small, bizarre-looking
foot, in a white-fur sandal that was mounted on a four-inch ivory heel.

       *       *       *       *       *

Parmley ran back into the Pocantico Hills. The house itself rose off
a cleared eminence in the heart of four hundred heavily wooded acres.
A terrace, tiled in bright blue, shone around it like a lake. Marble
stairs, flanked with balustrades and lions, led to the blue-tiled
terrace from lower ones of green turf. The building itself was a long
low one, of enormous width, no particular depth, and a whiteness to
it as if a Mediterranean sun were perpetually beating down. Some wag
had tagged it “Carnegie Library” because of this low width and the
pairs of Carrara lions that crouched beside the four flights of marble
staircases.

The Edgertons had decided to have a sense of humor about this
sixty-eight-room white elephant, which five years previous had been
rushed to completion in time for Leslie’s birthday. Henrietta Edgerton
promptly christened it her “white _bête noire_” and had the coping of
the superb swimming-pool, which was out of natural rock, elaborately
inlaid in black and white symbolic beasts of two heads and four tails.

The white crash of this house into the finest stretch of forest land
within its radius from New York was a sore point with Tom Edgerton.
It had cost easily over a million and a half, and there it stood, an
affront to his taste, his intelligence, and his dignity. It was the
sort of home a war millionaire might have erected out of an overnight
fortune.

Truth of the matter was, and bitterly he knew it, Henrietta had been
deep in an affair with the architect who designed it.

Tom’s sop to his sense of the ironic was to be unfaithful to his wife,
on every possible occasion, in this house which had turned into a
monstrosity because she had insisted upon giving _carte blanche_ to her
lover, the nincompoop young architect on dancing legs, who had created
it.

“We’re a pretty lot,” Leslie Edgerton had once said to her father, who,
when in his cups, could laugh uproariously at a remark he would slap
her clear, heart-shaped face for when sober. “We’re a pretty lot, Dad.
The only thing virgin around here is the soil. If!”

Jennifer and Berry tilted into the three-mile driveway of that virgin
soil on two wheels at a sixty-mile clip. They had driven out in Berry’s
underslung, boat-shaped roadster. Jennifer at first had remonstrated,
holding out against cramming herself, in her slim sheaf of baby-ermine
gown, into a crouched position in the natty sports-car.

“You’re a dog, Berry, to even ask it. I’m not dressed for a football
game.”

“Come along. Be as boyish as your bob. I’ll wrap you in a raccoon coat,
and that little white mitten you’re wearing for a dress won’t turn a
hair,” he said, and brushed aside a butler who had been holding some
more white ermine for her to slide arms into, during the twelve minutes
of this controversy.

She liked his riding her down this way. Old cave-man stuff, she told
herself. Putrid-old. But she liked it. Wasn’t often a fellow with
millions, only grandson of a personage like old Rodney Rhodes, and
more millions to come on top of it, came in a package like Berry.
Personality. Brains. Brawn. At least if Leslie had to have a nervous
breakdown, it had been a little worth-while to have it over Berry.
Jennifer had heard she had a nervous twitch to her face nowadays, that
was part of that nervous breakdown.

“Nervous?” he said, letting out a rip of speed, as they cleared the
city line.

“Not to the point of breakdown,” she said, and tilted a look at him
from the low crouch into which the car forced her.

“You girls give me a pain in the neck,” he said. “Innuendo. All lies.”

“I’m sorry, Berry,” she said, and laid a hand against his driving arm.
“And I’m glad it’s all lies.”

“That’s right,” he said, “be yourself,” and smiled at her with white
teeth set in a face that had been polished tan by the sun.

“What self is that?”

“The self I like. You’re a darling, Jennifer. I strongly suspect you
of having brains, too, and you’re brainy enough to keep them carefully
concealed under that Joan of Arc bob.”

“Give me a light, Berry.”

He flecked on his lighter and held it to her while the car sped swift
and sure under his lone-hand grip.

“Oh!”

“There, you had it!”

“No, you burnt my lip. Let’s stop anyway, Berry. I can’t smoke in this
open boat. Draw in here.”

“You little designing designer,” he laughed, and drew up. “It’s
darling of you, though, to want our ride to last.”

“It’s darling of you, Berry, to have got me asked out to the Edgertons’
tonight. I’m on.”

“Nonsense!”

“I don’t give a damn for them or their parties, except for you----”

“By God! I think you lisp! Let me thee your tongue.”

“There!” She darted it at him. Quick. Pink.

The sultry haze of late October twilight, sharp with the smell of
burning leaves, twined about them.

“Let’s see it again.”

His quick close kiss went against the second dart of pink.

“You sweet Sweet,” he said, out of its long endurance.

She pushed him back, her face suddenly smeared with the pallor of
excitement.

“Berry, let’s you and me be low-down honest.”

“I choose the first. You be honest.”

“If you had half an idea of how honest I’m going to be, you’d climb out
and hitch-hike your way back to town.”

“Fortify me for that exigency--this way,” he said, and kissed her
again, his strong lips flaring so that involuntarily she drew the back
of her hand across the feeling of the wetness of his teeth against her
face.

“Berry, you and I weren’t born yesterday.”

He made to kiss her again.

“Don’t do that.”

“You egged me on.”

“I know, but----”

“You are so blamed honest, Jennifer, it makes a fellow want----”

“But now I’m going to be awful serious.”

“Awful is right, as applied to seriousness in all its forms.”

“Awful serious, Berry.”

“It can’t be done, Jen. I’m immune.”

“Berry, marry me.”

He tightened as if a lock had sprung.

“Certainly. But I haven’t my music with me.”

“Berry, get this. I’m serious. Marry me. Don’t answer. Just listen.
You’re no angel, Berry. God knows I’m not. I like you. A lot. I want
you to respect that. I’m pretty crazy about you. You’re a bad boy,
Berry, but neither of us is sprouting wings. I think it’s a swell plan
and I’m sober. I’ll marry you, not to reform you, but to reform with
you.”

“The only way to get me to marry the girl, Jennifer, is at the point of
the well-known gun.”

“Bing!” she said, and cocked a finger.

He grasped it and locked it between his teeth.

“I don’t know whether you’re spoofing me or not, but let’s not be
serious tonight, Jennifer. Isn’t it enough--this night--us--this
way----”

She let her head swing back against the crook of his arm.

“Damn you, darling,” she said, “you’re standing up the girl.”

“Jennifer, let me know you tonight--afterwards--my rooms?”

“You go plumb to hell, Berry,” she said, pushing him from her with
high laughter. “Step on her, we’ll be late! And if you don’t behave,
the girl will leap from the car and her mangled remains will be found
on the roadside by an early-morning farmer carting his carrots to
market. Daughter of Dime Millionaire leaps from speeding car of son of
rubber-heel magnate!”

“Jen! Nee! Fer!”

“Step on her, I said.”

It was to her high, fast, and incessant laughter that they tilted into
Parmley on two wheels at the sixty-mile clip.




At the last moment, and to the rushing of innumerable servants, the
Edgertons had turned their dinner dance out-of-doors. The suddenly
limpid October, the imminence of moon, the belated perfume of late
white honeysuckle, had pressed their way into the ballroom, which was
spread with fifty small tables and elaborately laid out across one end
with a complete bar, brass rail, polished counter, battalion of bottles
and glasses, and the faithful verisimilitude of a sprinkling of sawdust.

The milky light of one of those pale nights that never becomes quite
dark poured down on to the blue-tile terrace. Tables had been dragged
out there. A hurried platform for musicians was being set up between
one pair of the lions, submerging one flight of terrace-stairs.
Lanterns were run up in the groves and along the edges of the
swimming-pool.

A formal party had suddenly gone violently informal. Tom Edgerton,
already convivial, had conceived the idea, along with the change of
party-policy, of dragging out a vast iron pot on a crane, to boil
corn-on-the-cob in the open. The bar was being set up in a pergola.
When the first guests arrived, Leslie Edgerton, in a bouffant white
gown with wired panniers and a tumbler in one hand, was still in the
act of trying to convey to a gardener her idea of how a small red bulb
should dangle from the pointed left ear of a marble faun.

It was true that every few moments her rather pretty heart-shaped face
twitched as if her nervousness were a prankish jack-in-the-box. The
small red electric bulb refused to dangle from the left ear of the
marble faun. She grasped it from the servant, and, leaping to a stone
bench, began to adjust it herself.

She was in that position when Jennifer and Berry and a smattering
of early guests appeared on the wide marble staircase. At sight of
them, she swung herself by the neck of the faun, legs out in a rigid
horizontal, and began kissing him against his chilly lips.

It started out as that kind of party.

The way, Jennifer had long since decided, to feel at ease at what she
called these closed-corporation functions, was to pretend to be as
intimately a part of them as everyone else was, or pretended to be.

A sense of not belonging; of not knowing these people on the easy
informal basis they knew one another, assailed her, and seemed to
lock her tonsils and stiffen her heart on those occasions when she
penetrated into the social fastness of the gayer, if less conservative,
elements of these safely intrenched families. Their intimate talk that
took so much for granted. High bandying of Christian names where she
was addressed as Miss Rarick. References to past functions to which
she had not been bidden, and to future ones to which she would not be
bidden.

Not that she was not very much part of these scenes. The Edgertons
moved in swift, newspaper-headline sets. But even here, she was
consciously Miss Rarick. The way to keep a stiff upper lip when you
were ill at ease and inwardly frightened was to see to it that you were
conspicuously Miss Rarick. You listened, when the two on either side of
you at dinner leaned across you to indulge in familiar discussion of an
important social function to which you had mysteriously and damnably
not been bidden, with a smile as bright as platinum drawn across your
face. You let them make up a party around you to go off cruising in
warm waters on the yacht of the father of a boy who had just kissed
the back of your neck, and laughed at some sally about the Delaware Gap
and the Delaware Yawn, as if you were not stinging at the omission.

The lively Miss Rarick was loud in her laughter. That was part of the
stiff upper lip. She was daring in her dress, but impeccably so, never
erring beyond the bonds of chic. A good fellow up to a point, and that
point, as she was fond of putting it, an exclamation point.

When Jennifer walked down the wide staircase of the Edgertons’ famed
blue terrace, with Berry at her right and a one-armed chap named Roger
Madison, descendant of a President, at her left, her heart was in her
mouth; insolence in her smile; and a burning humiliation before Berry,
beating about in her.

Perhaps he had never realized she was not spoofing. He had, though!
He had. _He had._ He had jumped like a sprung trap when she had come
out with it. Perhaps he had thought her a little spifflicated. God,
make him think I was tight! No, no, no, he wouldn’t. They had not even
stopped for cocktails before they drove off. There came that hateful
Irene Annescy! How did one address her? Hello, Irene? Or just Miss
Annescy?

Miss Annescy solved it. “Hello, Berry! Haven’t seen you since three
A.M. Good party at the Ruhls’, wasn’t it? Hello, Roger! Say, you’re
driving with us over to Edgecombe from here for a sunrise cocktail.
Howdo, Miss Rarick!”

Damn them! Damn life! “Berry darling, that’s my ankle you’re climbing.”

With the exception of a center-table which seated twelve, the flocks of
surrounding smaller ones were for six. Berry and Jennifer were at one
which adjoined the larger one, presided over by Leslie.

Berry’s absence from that center-table was one of those elaborately
casual maneuvers which usually fail of their purpose and become merely
elaborate maneuvers.

“Berry’s been banished,” said a Miss Steen der Venter, who was narrow
and caustic and something of a town legend because she continued to
refuse to sell or build on fifty fabulously valuable feet of vacant lot
on Fifth Avenue, but maintained it as a playground for her three black
poodles. “I scent a diplomatic move!”

“I’m making him eat at second table, Van Steen; his manners are too
atrocious for first,” cried Leslie, whom Berry had once accused of
overhearing, no matter how large the crowd, any reference to him.

Almost immediately the occasion began to progress. The amusing feature
of the bar kept a steady stream of young men skating across blue tiles,
imperiling waiters, and returning with assorted tumblers of assorted
drinks, which they balanced precariously, to the squeals of women
in _décolletée_ who feared for their shoulders. A Miss Flavverdale,
impoverished, but one of the right Flavverdales, the one, by the way,
who had managed things for the St. Louis Slocums, began by insisting
upon carting Berry off before the fowl course, with a napkin filled
with dinner rolls to be crumpled into the goldfish-pond.

“I want to stay with my field-mouse,” bawled Berry, and began to stroke
Jennifer’s ermine and pull at the fringe of soft black tails which
bordered it.

“Don’t be an idiot, Berry,” said the efficient Miss Flavverdale; “I’ll
buy you a five-and-ten-cent one.”

“Was that a dirty dig?” said Jennifer to a beautiful boy beside her,
whom she did not know, but who was in the first throes of getting drunk
on champagne, which he kept sipping, while he refused all food.

“A dirty dig,” he repeated, rolling his extraordinarily blue
and luminous eyes. “A dirty dig.” Apparently the octave of his
conversation, at least at this stage, consisted in repeating the last
three words of what was said to him.

“The Beautiful next to you, Miss Rarick,” sang out Leslie Edgerton, on
a sudden surge of geniality, when she saw Berry hauled protesting along
the Mediterranean of blue tiles, “is Jules Wilke-Barre. He’s going to
cut a tooth for us later in the evening!”

A Wilke-Barre! A thrill shot through Jennifer. Despise herself for the
snobbery of it as she would, it was impossible not to bristle with
awareness among names that were whole planetary systems in the social
firmament. This naughty-eyed, beautiful-eyed boy, whose knee had to be
shoved away again and again as it approached hers, a Wilke-Barre! Here,
gathered at these fifty tables, were the youngsters of the mighty ones
of the land. Madison. Rhodes. Flavverdale. Wilke-Barre.

She leaned toward Wilke-Barre.

“I thought you were Bobby Shaftoe, who went to sea with silver buckles
on his knee.”

The youth she thought was Bobby Shaftoe, who went to sea with silver
buckles on his knee, was asleep, his chin resting squarely and
precariously in the shallow crystal basin of his empty champagne-glass.

Before the crash came that was to gash the Rossetti-looking Wilke-Barre
chin with splintered glass, Berry was back, in great and rising spirits.

“Glory! what a night!”

Its glamor was out over Jennifer. Its pollen fell over the scene and in
a sheen across her flesh.

“It was on such a night as this----”

“--that I made the damnedest mistake of my life,” said Berry, and
jerked the great athletic hulk of his body back to his place at the
table.

“Leslie’s been looking for you, Berry,” said Irene Annescy.

“Finders keepers,” said Berry under his breath to Jennifer.

She flashed her face, with the indescribable pallor of moon over it,
upon him.

“Mean that?”

“If I ever meant anything, I mean it. Find me, Jennifer.”

“You won’t let me.”

“Try me.”

“Don’t be darling to me, Berry, unless----”

Beneath the table his heavy palm clamped down on her knee.

“How can I help it, when you are darling to me.”

“How do you mean that?”

“I’ll tell you later----”

“I’ll not drive back with you alone unless----”

“Unless what?”

“Unless I damn please,” she said, and swung her smooth bare shoulder
from him and turned to talk to Wilke-Barre, who was having his chin
nursed by a princess of Greece.

Tom Edgerton began to beat a tom-tom in an effort to drum up trade
for his boiling pot of corn on cob. He was voted ridiculous, because,
while the party had gone informal, so to speak, the food had remained
strictly _de rigueur_. It was difficult, after mushrooms under glass
and duck soaked in sherry, to warm up to the impulse to nibble the
mealy pearls off the cobs which Edgerton forked up out of the fine
hullabaloo of boiling pot.

Most of those who ventured never quite reached the boiling pot. The
gardens lay embalmed in a night through which the moonlight poured
like spring showers. Marble curve of benches gleamed in among hedges.
Islands of shadow crawled back into the groves. The waterfall that fed
the natural swimming-pool made silver-tipped commotion. The dinner
broke into dancing almost before the tables could be cleared from the
tiles. It was as dreamy as absinthe to tango out there under the stars.

Six Hawaiian boys in shellacked hair sang to Argentine music. A
jazz-band alternated. A Spanish slip of a girl, with hips which she
managed like a spaniel shaking off water, danced solo with Ramon
Lopez. Her bold, sinuous body-beauty went through you in points of
excitement. The give of the slim jacket of her ribs as she doubled
with a boneless ductility back over his elbow. Slitted eyes of Ramon,
braced for her whirling body to spin into the close insinuating haven
of his arms. Slow shuffling feet, too sensuous to leave the ground.
Faces, as through a curtain of moonlight, dimly; the Spanish girl’s
fore-shortened upper lip hiked back to reveal small wet teeth; Ramon’s
face, sliding down like a warm brown breathing lid--over hers....

“God, Berry, they’re wonderful,” said Jennifer.

His body, through it all, as they stood in the thick fringe of
onlookers, had been crushing against hers. It had been her dance with
Berry, vicariously.

The pair broke into a tarantella then, as if to gloss over the
thickening moist-lipped faces that had begun to lean out of the human
wall around them.

“Come on, Jennifer, let’s get out of here. I need a drink. I need
eleven drinks.” They backed off without much disturbance, moving
slidingly and unnoticed along the tiles; moving hand in hand down the
broad reflecting steps; moving slidingly toward the grove above the
grotto of the swimming-pool.

Patches of moonlight covered the floor of the grove like lily-pads.
Water, skedaddling down rocks to feed the pool, was the only sound....

       *       *       *       *       *

“Life ought to be sweeter to us than it is, Berry. What’s rotten with
us?”

He stared, with his head in her lap, at a patch of pale sky that
reminded him of his star-sapphire studs.

“What say?”

“You’re not listening.”

“I can feel your voice. It makes darling little vibrations.”

“I begged you not to get tight, Berry.”

His eyes fluttered heavily and closed as he began fumbling out on to
the moss for the frosted quart bottle and two glasses with which he had
fortified himself from the buffet table that was now being spread down
beside the swimming-pool.

“You can’t get tight on champagne, my field mouse. You get divine.”

Her fingers were in his hair. Her lips gave off a tiny fume.

“You’ve stood me up frightfully, Berry. What if I were to go home
and blow out that portion of my anatomy called brain, with a
mother-of-pearl pistol?”

“I’d embalm you in a block of ice and keep you in a casket of rose
quartz.”

“You are as slippery as a glass eel.”

“You don’t know the half of it, my darling, or the half of the half of
it,” he cried, and rolled over and dug his face into the soft fur moss
of her gown. “God! I’m ten kinds of a fool!”

“Sweet ten kinds.”

“Rotten ten kinds.”

“Tell me one of the kinds.”

“Fee, fie, fo, fum. The kind that daren’t like little white field mice.”

“That daren’t?” she said, and lifted her head as if to listen. “Why?”

“Let me alone,” he cried into her lap, “with your whys and your whys
and your whys. Why are all you girls such why-hounds?”

“Sh-h-h! Berry’s tight,” she said, smoothing his hair.

“Just go on doing that,” he said, still into the thick whiteness of her
lap. “Just go on doing that--and talk----”

“Why should I do all the talking and you all the evading?”

“Is this evading?” he said, and reached up to stroke her cheek.

“Berry, Berry, what is it we want...?”

“I know what I want----”

“I feel like I belonged in one of those psychological novels they’re
writing nowadays.”

“The darling has read a book and everything.”

“Where nothing happens except in the tortured brains of some tortured
author’s brain-children. The cross-eyed school of literature that looks
inward, and does nothing about it but look and look. Life isn’t that
way. Life moves. Life is motion. Time doesn’t pass. We pass. I may be
in a mess, but I don’t intend to sit in it and stew.”

“Stew in my arms, darling.”

“I hate you when you’re tight. Am I tight, Berry?”

“Not tight. Divine.”

“Let’s be good, Berry, and sober, and live so that, after it’s all
over, it will have mattered a damn whether we have lived or not.”

“You’re good, Jennifer. You’re a good gal. That’s what ails you.”

“You’re no good, Berry. That’s what ails you.”

“You’re what ails me.”

“Then, for God’s sake, Berry, play fair with me! Oh! Get up, Berry!
Look! They’re throwing light on the pool. It may slip up here. How long
have we been away? What will Leslie say?”

A cone of light swung through the grove. He dragged her swiftly back.

“Don’t go, Pussy.”

“Berry, we must.”

“Don’t go.”

“Look, the crowd is coming down to bathe. There’s Elsie Risdon in a
bathing-suit. She never travels without it. And Ramon. He looks as
if he were painted in gold leaf. It’s beautiful. It’s terrible. It’s
like one of those Stuck pictures--horrible loveliness. Look at the
Wilke-Barre infant there in that patch of moonlight. He’s going to
dive. It may sober him. Where on earth did Tom Edgerton get those
striped trunks? Bacchus gone wrong. Vine leaves in his hair, or is
it confetti? This is one of those swimming parties of the idle and
debauched rich that they read about out in Dubuque and turn Bolsheviki
or try to imitate. I’ve never seen one happen so true to form. Look,
there comes----This is awful!”

They crept to the edge of their ledge, which looked down from
an eminence on to the half-natural, half-contrived grotto. Slim
silhouettes, all fays in the moonlight, sat on the coping, along which
crawled Henrietta Edgerton’s little _bêtes noires_, and dangled bare
legs into the moon-reflecting pool. A slope of hillside marched down
to the pool, inclosing it like a crater. Figures were strewn over the
hillside, helping one another down declivities, in monkey-chains of
twos and threes. The Spanish dancer, clad in a mere dash of suit, the
exact henna of her flesh, leaped down from crag to crag like a bit of
lightning, zigzagging off the edges of rock. The Falstaffian figure
of the over-stout young Philip Londo swaggered down in an improvised
bathing-suit, a sweater tied by the sleeves about his great middle. The
Spanish dancer leap-frogged over him, took the tip of the diving-board,
and sliced downward like a quick thin blade. Voices in the moonlight
had the musical flow to them of water. Over the ledge they peered,
secure, arm in arm, their bodies flat to the soft moss, seeing, unseen.
It was a scene of a Paul Veronese canvas, set to music by Stravinsky,
and directed by the buxom figure of Tom Edgerton, who went stamping
among his guests in his striped trunks, dragging shrinking and
reluctant maidens, with dry, beautifully powdered legs, to the water’s
edge, immersing them, leaping back up the hillsides for more of his
strange and spectacular prey.

“Berry, there’s Leslie! In the black suit.”

She felt his head move; but even as she spoke she pressed it down again
into her lap.

“She must be looking for us! Why the dickens did we do this, Berry?
It’s this loony moonlight. We’ve been gone over an hour. Leslie
shouldn’t let herself get this tipsy. Thank goodness, she’s going to
dive. It will sober her. Berry, hadn’t we better slide around to the
house and get into bathing-suits and ooze quietly into the crowd? Oh,
Berry, I hate to!”

He raised his tousled and troubled-looking head.

“Guess we’d better,” he said, with a sudden kind of soberness.

It made her wild that what she had just said should have this power
over him.

“Berry,” she cried, and caught his face in the cup of her hands and
drew it to hers closely; “Berry darling--tell me the low-down--let
me hear you deny, yourself, the horrid rumor that you and
Leslie--oh--oh--no----”

Due to a loud series of shouts through cupped hands which Tom Edgerton
was directing at an electrician, the entire scene below suddenly
slipped into the incredible beauty of a moon-silvered darkness, the
cone of search-light shooting upward like a great tusk of ivory,
drenching the hilltop forest in glare, drenching the figures of
Jennifer and Berry, lying there so closely face to face on their bed of
moss.

To the bathers beneath, it was as if the heavens had opened in
the fashion that was supposed to reveal God seated on a throne of
mother-of-pearl. Only, there sat Berry and Jennifer instead, bathed in
incalculable amperes of luminosity.

The figure on the tip edge of the diving-board was a figure
transfigured.

“Leslie,” cried Henrietta Edgerton to her daughter--the only voice to
find itself in that blinding shift of scene “Leslie, don’t!”

The spring-board began to jiggle. It made a creaking noise. Then came
the voice of Leslie, poised on the tip of the spring-board, her arms
shooting out as her silhouette became a cross.

“There you are!” screamed Leslie, and danced up and down on the
spring-board. “There you are!”

“Leslie!” shouted Henrietta Edgerton.

“There you are!” called Leslie up to the glare on the hilltop. “Pretty
ones! I’ll tell the world! I’ll tell the world!”

“Leslie!”

“World, that’s my husband up there! We were married yesterday.
Never mind why. Keep this marriage a secret for him a few weeks,
so he can settle his affairs? The devil I will! What affairs? His
five-and-ten-cent affairs. The devil I will!” screamed Leslie, and
dived.

       *       *       *       *       *

At four o’clock of that translucent October morning, with a moon still
retreating in a high sky, the only daughter of the thirteenth richest
man in the world sat crouched in a huddle no larger than a spaniel,
outside the door of Doctor Gerkes.

She did not quite clearly know why she was there, except that
inchoately, fragmentarily, her fuddled brain had telegraphed to her
fuddled feet the road to Gerkes. She did not know why. Truth of the
matter was, she was generally not quite clear, except for her sense of
the lump of shame. She was the lump of shame. The world was a wave,
tossing a lump of shame.

There was a slit of light beneath Gerkes’s door. Behind that door,
Jennifer’s fuddled sense told her, Gerkes would be sitting in a
monotonous gray herring-bone suit, or, worse, the stiff gray-flannel
dressing-gown she had seen hanging on the door of his bathroom the day
of her exploratory trip. A small gray man, about as exciting as chalk
dust. Behind that closed door he was sitting in a limitless world of
ideas. The stones of Venice and the stones of Alexandria and the stones
of Carthage were not mere stones to him. Like the flint and arrow-heads
on his tables, they looked up at him with the wide revealing eyes of
immemorial man. Heaps and heaps of these strange lusterless stones
covered the fine table-tops of that room. Wisdoms were behind that
closed door--and quiet----

It was then that Jennifer scratched faintly at the panel, like a little
dog, not so much because she particularly wanted admission into the
room, but because she wanted some of the kind solitude she seemed to
sense there.

After a while, on limbs that were too wavy to carry her, the young
Miss Rarick, in the white-ermine frock and her coat dragging, began
a tortuous and shocking journey down the hallway, on all-fours, knee
after knee, the palms of her hands padding softly along the carpet.

Her maid, dozing as she waited, heard the soft noises, ran down the
hallway, and horrified, lifted and carried her bodily to bed.

It was about then that consciousness that there had been scratching
noises came belatedly to Doctor Gerkes, who had been bending to
scrutinize a dated altar-stone, 575, of Maya civilization, said to have
been unearthed from the city of Matzap Ceel.

Opening his door to peer out into the now empty hallway, a faint smell
that reminded him of the dried-rose-leaf scent in a third-century
mummy-chamber he had once helped to excavate near Luxor, came and
caused him pleasantly to sniff.




It pleased Rarick to be a patron of the arts. He liked to think
that opera committees came to him to make good their deficits.
Little-theater groups were appealing to him more and more frequently.
Child musical prodigies of piano and violin virtuosity were constantly
being brought before him.

It pleased him to sit, a Mæcenas, in his library and make chapels of
his fingers and pass judgments in which he was solely assisted by
Hellman, who had graduated from a South St. Louis music-school, and
Alfredo Ludovici, the violin member of a chamber-music quartette which
Rarick had supported for years.

Children, for the most part, were brought by mothers whose agony of
nervousness was almost invariably cruelly transmitted to their prodigy
offspring. Again, they were sent by music-school teachers, personal
friends and some without even benefit of introduction, feverishly
seeking the wedge of an audition.

Hellman arranged these auditions. He was high-handed about it, thinking
nothing of keeping a mother and an alleged violinistic prodigy waiting
for weeks at their hotel for the Rarick summons. It was Hellman who
arranged the interviews with little-theater committees, art-foundation
groups, endowment-seeking organizations, and scholarship-fund seekers,
weeding out at his discretion, but lenient in his judgments, since it
seemed perpetually pleasing to Rarick to sit in tribunal.

With the exception of the Firenzi Quartette, which, thanks to Rarick’s
generous maintenance, had become world-renowned for the perfection of
its _ensemble_, the success of most of Rarick’s musical _protégés_
was still to be achieved. To be sure, there was a thirteen-year-old
Milwaukee lad, named Isa Friedberg, studying at Fontainebleau, and
for whom great things were predicted; and little Leontine Bachrach of
Brooklyn, thirteen and a half, who had played a piano-recital at Town
Hall with outstanding success, was making spectacular headway with his
teachers in Munich.

But not infrequently, Rarick’s fervor to serve the arts outclassed
his critical judgments. The little Norwegian lad from Flagler, North
Dakota, whom, against the better judgment of both Hellman and Ludovici,
he had chosen to endow with his patronage in preference to the small
Russian boy from the Boston ghetto, was now playing viola in a theater
orchestra, while the small Russian boy from the Boston ghetto was
winning honors as a soloist of the first rank. There was also the case
of a pretty and enormously promising young soprano whom he had lifted
from a stenographer’s desk in a broker’s office to the conservatory
of Milan, and who had returned to America, homesick, after the second
Italian month, to marry a runner in the brokerage office where she had
formerly been employed.

As Hellman and Ludovici used to remark with a wink between them, the
old gentleman took these debit results gamely, apparently more than
compensated for failures by the majesty of his rôle of patron of the
fine arts and by the first-water success of the Firenzi Quartette.

Of this last there was no question. Taking over, after one hearing, the
four friendless Italian youths who had finally succeeded in winning
audience, Rarick had supported them, exploited them, and launched them
securely into success. It was his bounty that continued to supply
them generous budget for travel, study, and leisure, long after their
financial need of him had passed.

When not abroad or on American tour, they occupied a pleasant old house
in West Ninth Street, fitted with a vast music-chamber across the top,
and which, except for their tenancy, Rarick would long since have
profitably converted into a skyscraper apartment-building.

Evening after evening, during these town periods, they played chamber
music to Rarick alone, occasionally Gerkes present, semi-occasionally
one or both of the Jennys appearing on the scene.

Frequently, the Quartette, which had long outgrown private-home
engagements, played at one of Jenny’s functions when she decided to
have a “bit of music.” But after the Firenzi Quartette became closely
associated with the name of Rarick, she abandoned that habit, because
it smacked of home-made economy, buying instead the professional
services of some stellar vocal or violinistic attraction whose fees
were notoriously high.

Besides, there came to be something about the very faces of the members
of the Quartette--as they sat on the small platform which was rolled
in for them to the organ end of the library--which was repellent
to her, because, by association, they suggested one of Rarick’s
quasi-Napoleonic attitudes. He liked to crouch into an enormous
tapestry chair, done after the unicorn at Cluny, at the far end of
the room from their platform, head thrust forward and downward on his
chest, a little forelock, which Jenny sometimes described to herself as
his Della Fox Napoleon, down over his brow, and his curiously intent
gaze seeming to hook into the music as it flowed past.

His imagination, more than his senses, appeared to come awake to the
warm reality of chamber music. The tumbling figures of a Tiepolo
ceiling, garland-wound, music-wound, became a grove in which lazy
fancy could wander. There was a tragic and a comic mask, divided by a
flaming torch, woven palely into one of the tapestries that faced him.
To Bach or Strauss or Massenet, these faces could tilt into laughter
or screw to tears. They became his own face in layers of moods that
were heart-breaking to him for their pathos or their absurdity. Again,
to him, some of these faces were sublime. They were the faces of the
Rarick he might have been. Some of those Rarick faces were as beautiful
as Avery. Some of those Rarick faces had it in them to create the
very music to which he was listening; some, to create the drama of
the tragic mask. No Five-and-Ten-Cent Rarick of the Five-and-Ten-Cent
thing. No industrial magnate in a tin crown. Here, under the weaving
spell of music, he became the Rarick he was, deeply, secretly, and
terribly, within himself. No patron of the arts, but a creator! No
piler-up of wealth. Dispenser! Four-and-twenty Raricks all in a row....

Projects came to Rarick under the weaving motion of music. New loans.
New stores. New policies. It was in this room, for instance, to evening
after evening of the peregrinations of the small music of Schubert and
Haydn, that the mammoth idea of the Rarick Building was born.

Layer by layer, to its dramatic seventy-three-story splendor, it rose
on a scaffolding wrought out of these strange spirals of inspiration
that seemed to wind up through him when his imagination responded to a
stimulus it comprehended not at all. Story by story, to its eminence
as the tallest building in the world, this Taj Mahal of industry took
form. It was to take eleven years to realize, thirty million dollars to
construct, and it rose out of Schubert and Haydn and Chopin and Brahms.
It rose out of the winding of the imagined faces of his children as
they appeared warm and sympathetic to him among the garlands of fancy
that came to life on the Tiepolo ceiling. It rose out of Rarick’s
visions of himself, creating the kind of beauty that money could buy.

Mozart, Schubert, Smetana, Schumann, Beethoven. His knowledge of music
was negligible, and his choice of selection often secretly amusing
and chromoesque to his Quartette, but somehow it was impossible to
patronize Rarick musically. In one breath, he might call out, across
the long reaches of the room, for “Träumerei,” “Narcissus,” and the
“Scarf Dance,” but the Beethoven C-major, op. 59, with its gymnastic
and tuneless ’cello-passages in the first movement, was just as apt to
be his next choice. He might not remember the name of a composition or
a composer; but he could hum a thread of _motif_ for them, or demand
this or that movement by describing its tempo.

“Play those wild gypsies dancing in the bonfire-light,” was his way
of requesting the last movement of the Schubert G-major, op. 161.
Or, “Play that flowing, running one,” for the Andante Cantabile from
Tchaikowsky’s Quartette, D-major.

He was an interesting, an interested, a solitarily grand audience of
one. On those rare occasions when Jenny or Jennifer found time, or
found it the better part of wisdom to pause for a snatch of one of
these evenings, they did so, usually perched on the arms of chairs
like brilliant birds of passage, their evening cloaks trailing, their
ears cocked for the summons to depart. When Gerkes dropped in, after
a lecture he had either delivered or attended, it was to slide into
a straight chair which he kept for himself in the loft of the organ,
where he could tilt back and nap to music whose chief function, where
he was concerned, was to soothe him. Usually these evenings wound up
with beer and talk of the habits of immortals among musicians, chiefly
between Gerkes and the members of the Quartette.

“Now, take that countryman Verdi of yours; from what they tell me,
he must have been pretty much of an ordinary fellow, apart from his
ability to compose,” was Gerkes’ way, for instance, of starting Gigli
Fortuno, the ’cellist member of the Quartette, who was well informed on
the subject of musical personalities, and whose father had personally
known Verdi.

Sometimes, throughout these discourses, Gerkes remained up on his
balcony, tilted back on his straight chair, while the four members of
the little group worked themselves up into musical controversy that
rose to the climax of shouts and heated disagreement. Occasionally,
Gerkes, who dozed or relaxed, would be reminded of a pun or reference,
as some name came floating dimly up to him among the floriated arches,
and he would call down his comment:

“Speaking of the Fifth Symphony, Sir Henry Larrimore, the inventor of
the Larrimore tuning-fork and the foremost living acoustician, told me
a good one about observing an audience in Queens Hall during the first
movement of the Fifth Symphony....”

Then Rarick: “Tell the gentlemen, Gerkes, the Eurasian theory of the
Music of the Spheres.”

Then Gerkes: “You Quartette boys, how much do you really know about the
principles of harmony?...”

Evenings far removed from the banging reality of days that were crowded
with four hundred thousand sets of doll-dishes for children, or a
pending order for hair-nets that had an annoying rider in the contract.

A patron of the arts sat among his art-objects and listened to a
discussion of the arts. And yet it was this very listening that could
rankle. His Quartette, when their musical arguments rose and excluded
him, was not the Quartette that made him obsequious and played to his
wishes. Their manner, between themselves, was that of artist to artist.
Their manner to Rarick was that of men beholden for favors that lay
outside their stamina to earn. There was, in their behavior between
themselves, the unconscious difference between artist to artist, and
artist to financial benefactor.

They respected his riches. But Rarick, Rarick himself, well, Rarick was
a rich man....

Equally aggravating to this sense of exclusion were the writers,
theater groups, young aspirants in this or that form of art, who came
to him for patronage and at the same time gave him that sense of
isolation from their cause, except in so far as his hands held the
strings to the money-bags.

They spoke to him of their projects in terms of numbers. Rentals of
theaters. Price of publishing a slender book of verse. Scholarship
money. Endowment money. It was among themselves that the ambitious
young poets who smote their dissonant lyres of modern verse, and the
young playwrights who gave birth, in travail, to their Hedda Gablers of
the experimental theater, had their real beings.

They talked projects to Rarick. Lisped in numbers of box-office
receipts, yearly deficit, and the ledger-book which they despised.

He was Crœsus, related only to Thyrsus, Sappho, Terpsichore, and Apollo
by the strings of the money-bags.

It was in his rôle of patron that the Committee of Internationalists,
Inc., which was one day to be one of the most potent forces in the
young theater movement in America, came before Rarick.

They were three. A young fellow named Trigoloff, with a crooked
and strangely powerful profile, who had written a two-act play in
thirty-one episodes which had been produced in a cellar called the
Rhomboid Theater. A Miss Virginia Adelbert, with blond hair, cropped,
polished, and parted on the side, like a boy’s, in tailored clothes,
soft shirt, and who carried her crush felt hat under her arm, and her
package of cigarettes protruding from a tailored pocket. The third
member of this group, Gratton Davies, was a young professor of dramatic
composition at a city university. His comedy, “Herod’s Mask,” had been
a success the season before. Here was a fellow of such abounding and
amusing enthusiasm that it was inevitable he should have been elected
spokesman for this occasion. He had a thatch of thick tan hair, which
jumped and fell from the roots, as he sat on the edge of his chair, his
opening sentence accomplishing what it set out to do as concisely as a
good headline flare of advertising.

“Mr. Rarick, we have chosen you to sponsor what is without any
doubt to be the most significant and far-reaching experiment in
the history of the American theater. I used the word ‘chosen’
advisedly, because the man who is granted the privilege of bringing
to life our plan is going to get a ride for his money to the peak of
artistic-success-with-a-box-office-value.”

“Yes, young man?” said Rarick, with a bitter kind of mockery playing
around his lips. This was not the fellow himself speaking. This was the
young scholar, suiting his phrase, his manner, and his matter to his
man. In other words, “selling his idea” to big business.

The fervor of his presentation was all right, but the manner was the
rehearsed one of a traveling salesman.

Young Davies was talking down to Rarick in terms of the one aspect of
the enterprise that interested him least of all, and yet which was so
essential to the very life and breath of their beautiful baby of an
idea. Money. Without it, that beautiful baby must perish aborning. Its
soul was in the keeping of such as these three young committeemen.
Its shoes, the farina to feed it, the fires to warm it, were merchant
concerns. Rarick’s.

“Money, Mr. Rarick, is what we need of you.”

His resentments, he told himself were absurd. What else had he to
offer? Presently these three, and the _confrères_ who spoke their
language, would recede into the laboratories of their imaginations.
They could talk to one another from these laboratories. Where did
he, Rarick, come in? Why sit stiffly before this young barker up the
Himalayas and bark back a bitter “Yes, young man,” into his enthusiasms.

These three before him were in the heyday of their walking-trip through
the Pyrenees. Their walking-trip was coming off, too. After all, it was
something to sit there, holding their creative destinies in the same
hand that held the money-bags.

“Don’t think, Mr. Rarick, that our ideas are all visionary. We don’t
propose to drive the commercial theater out of business. Nothing of the
sort.”

“Now, don’t you?”

“No, sir. We propose to supplant, in time--with thought, with
discrimination, with genius, with money--the garbage of the present
commercial theater, by giving the people pre-digested, intellectual,
artistic, and entertaining fodder. But it is not so much a matter of
throwing out the commercial theater, Mr. Rarick, as cleaning out the
Augean dramatic stables. That is why we dare to approach you with a
proposition which will ultimately grant you full return on your money.
Not that you are interested in exacting any such guaranty as that from
us, but----”

Young rascal! Young walker in the Pyrenees. Young three there, who
presently, once outside his doors, would revert to the swift, ruthless
well-informed talk of their own world, and who might even ape and
deride the holder of the strings of the money-bags....

“... Of course, I am not here to bore you with our standards of
production, the literary ideals we have set for ourselves....”

“Why not?” barked Rarick. “You can’t put your cart before your horse.”

“What Mr. Davies means,” hastened Miss Adelbert, “is that we have long
ago threshed out our literary policies. That has been taken care of.
It’s money we----”

“Can’t see why the money-concerns of such an organization as you
describe are a thing separate and apart from its policies. They
overlap. My selling-policies regarding an article can only be
determined after I am thoroughly familiar with the article itself.”

“In the theater, Mr. Rarick, that scarcely applies. Our
production-policies have nothing to do with our financial ones. We need
an initial endowment of one hundred thousand dollars to put them into
what we firmly believe will be a successful practice. We want you to be
the man to have sufficient faith in those production-policies to endow
our baby.”

Impudent youth! Well, what rebuttal had he? Plays were foreign affairs
to him. Occasionally, he sat through one with Jenny. He had not seen
“Herod’s Mask.” Doubtless it would have gone monotonously over his
head. Music flowed into him, whereas the drama seemed merely to use
his brain as a surface of impact. Jennifer liked the Follies and the
rapid revues. Once or twice he had accompanied her and sat in first-row
seats or in a box. The box was more to his liking. Jennifer said it was
because he could hang a crepe over the railing. But the fact was, the
box was more to his liking because, as at the Greek plays he sometimes
sponsored, it was possible to remain out of it an entire act without
leaving the hole of an empty seat in a row.

What had he, after all, to offer these youngsters, except money? It
would be dignified patronage. Miss Adelbert had already won herself
a somewhat esoteric position as one of those clever and respected
actresses of the intellectual school. Trigoloff, of the crooked
profile, was an author and director of rising fame in both fields. The
fellow Davies stood to the fore of a certain group of young rebels.
What a pity--what a pity Jennifer or Avery was missing such interests
as this.

A thought smote Rarick.

“Young people, take my boy into this enterprise with you!”

If he had said, “Young people, take my howling red monkey into this
enterprise with you,” he could not have struck a more compelling
silence across the faces of these three.

“I’ve a boy. Youngster. Bright as a new nickel. I’d like him to sharpen
his teeth, come vacation, on a few young people like you. I’d like to
see him get interested in groups that will get him acquainted with some
of the things I think he may be missing.”

A glance, imbedded in smile, wound itself from one face to the other of
the three.

“Your son is interested in the theater, Mr. Rarick?”

“I wouldn’t say that, Miss Adelbert,” snapped Rarick. “It is I who am
interested in interesting him.”

“I see.”

Of course she did not see, nor did any of them, sitting there so
politely mindful of the hand that held the money-bags. Nor did Rarick
himself, for that matter. The need of his boy eventually coming
into his affairs was more and more a pressing one, the inevitable
contingency of primogeniture hovered closer; yet here he was, trying
to foist him off on to a vague art-project. As it was, Avery had barely
time to spare for these college years. Rarick was not minded to start
him in overalls from the bottom up. Why teach a walking child to crawl?
But little as Rarick could visualize his son cast into his future, the
time was at hand when he must be tossed, as you would toss a youngster
who must learn to swim, out into the monstrous sea of five-and-ten-cent
things. High, tormenting tides of big business awaited Avery. A mantle
of tin armor was hovering over his young shoulders. He was about to
matriculate in that relentless university of highly limited enrollment
which was to prepare him to be one of the richest men in the world.
What Rarick had just suggested was as fantastic to himself as to the
three who sat with masks of respectful attention drawn across their
faces.

“How’s Avery’s second act?” was to explode in hilarity from Miss
Adelbert’s lips as the committee of three emerged from the house of
Rarick after this interview, and mounted a Fifth Avenue omnibus for an
Eleventh Street restaurant, where more of their group anxiously awaited
them.

And yet, after the palpable absurdity of what he had suggested came
flooding over Rarick, the idea persisted. Even a few months of contact
with these inquisitive pioneering young minds, might help Avery to feel
healthy alienation from the world of Jenny’s making, which was already
threatening to whirl around him. A few months of gambol in these
adventurous fields of ideas before the lamb be shorn to the wind of
being son to one of the richest men in the world.

“Let my boy in on the ground-floor of this new-theater idea--agree to
take him into your fold when he comes out of college----”

“Why, of course, Mr. Rarick, if he is interested. We would want to
meet him. See what’s on his mind. It could--er--of course be done.
Always a place in a workshop like ours....”

“On that basis, then, and subject to specifications which Mr. Hellman
will arrange at my dictation, you may consider that I will seriously
take under advisement the matter of endowing your group.”

The three young people who finally, walking on air, turned their faces
toward the Eleventh Street café, left Rarick sitting there crouched
deeply in the enormous chair which faced the organ.

An idea had, for the moment, completely captured his fancy. What if the
boy had somewhere imbedded in him a talent for this sort of creative
thing. Not as a vocation. Naturally. But as an avocation. Something
to keep him tinged at least with the adventurous quality of mind that
flooded that young fellow Davies. Avery must not be cheated of his
walking-trip through the Pyrenees. There was plenty of time later for
the two-feet-on-the-ground business of training him to be the son of
one of the richest men in the world.

Presently, Rarick began a letter to his son. Somehow, with the concrete
pen on the concrete paper, the words began to clog in his brain. There
were things that could not be broached out of a clear sky. Nothing had
ever been said between father and son to prepare Avery for the popping
of this notion into the head of his parent. The dread of seeming
ridiculous in his son’s clear eyes began to matter above everything in
Rarick’s tired brain, as he sat there, his pen drying above the paper.

It was difficult, practically impossible, to convey to his boy that the
idea prompted by the three avid young faces, and most of all by the
fellow named Davies, had not to do with their little enterprise itself,
but somewhere behind it all was a symbol ... a symbol of some kind of
release which he wanted for his boy.

One could not get that easily said, at least not without danger of
appearing ridiculous to a college boy in his teens, who could want for
a speed-boat as desperately as Avery had wanted for his.

The letter was to remain in the limbo of unwritten ones.




The first time Jenny received Ramon behind the closed door of her
boudoir, a thousand misgivings assailed her. The creak of a chair was
sufficient to stiffen her in his arms; a footstep on a stair startling
her eyes into a listening expression, the pupils widening and full of
dreads.

“Jenny, that is not nice! Of what are you afraid? Cannot two people
have tea in privacy? Why do you not lock the door, if in your great big
house you have no privacy?”

“No. No. There must be nothing like that.”

“But you make it like that with your nervousness.”

“I want your coming here to be the most natural thing in the world. I
am going to begin to make it a habit to have afternoon cocktails always
served in here. That will make it seem less strange. It is a nice room,
isn’t it, Ramon--all these soft yellows----”

“Any room that contains you is a beautiful room.”

She took his face between her hands.

“Sweet.”

“You do feel that way, don’t you, Jenny?”

“You know that I do.”

“Then what are we going to do about it?”

A question like that could send the fears rushing back over her.

“I don’t know, Ramon.”

“We cannot go on like this, Jenny.”

“Why? Of course not, Ramon----”

“It is not fair to me.”

“I know that, Ramon. There must be a way.”

“There must be a way--for me to live--if I am to go on neglecting my
work this way----”

Once, when he pressed her thus, she had unwittingly asked him, “what
work?” and filled his eyes with reproach that looked near to tears. His
stalkings in this fashion around the subject of money, somehow sullied
perfection.

“I have given up everything, Jenny. My teaching, my----”

“I know you have, Ramon.”

“I love giving up everything; but it has its practical side, dearest,
since we live in a practical world.”

“I know that. There is a thousand-dollar-bill in registered mail for
you now, dearest.”

It was like her to see that these transactions took place easily, in
currency. He kissed her.

“That is for the thought,” he said; “the money itself is horrible,
practical necessity.”

“That is for the kiss,” she said, kissing him back.

He would have slid easily off this sand-bar of a subject, but the
procession of her thoughts matched the fact that she lay in his arms
and his smooth olive pallor was hers to lift up a hand and stroke.

“How cruel and wrong and spiteful life can be, Ramon.”

“Not if we do something about it, to see that it is not so.”

It occurred to her, as she lay there, that everything there was to
do about it she would never dare to do. And yet it was sweet to
contemplate doing it.

In just such proportion as her sense of disloyalty toward Rarick grew,
her efforts to reawaken some sort of a relationship between them began
asserting itself. With the immemorial psychology of the guilty wife,
she developed an entirely new attitude of solicitude where her husband
was concerned.

She began the unprecedented business of leaving notes explaining her
whereabouts on those evenings when she was not going to be at home when
he arrived. Elaborate, unclever, and superfluous notes of evasion. She
no longer pretended to be asleep mornings, while he moved about the
bedroom. It was with difficulty that she held herself in leash, in
order not to overdo these efforts to placate herself.

As it was, Rarick, always obtuse, only dimly noticed, and was not
seriously impressed one way or another. Jenny would think ahead for
five or ten minutes how best to casually introduce the name of Ramon
into her conversation, so that if rumor by mischance should come
wagging, he would cast it off as a distorted version of something
she had herself told him. When she finally did trump up a manner to
remark casually that Ramon was a dear boy, absolutely invaluable as a
last-minute escort, so good-natured and harmless, it was to fall on
what amounted to unheeding ears. Jenny’s prattle, particularly of late,
was so constant. It gave you a headache if you did not let it run over
the surface of your mind like so much patter. She was unusually nervous
these days--talking more than usual.

The anomaly of her position, as she lay there in Ramon’s arms, smote
and smote her. A woman could want to remain secure in her marriage
and yet be passionately in love with some one not her husband. It was
possible to want two things desperately at the same time. Not that
Jenny was in love with her husband, but she was in love with wanting to
remain secure as his wife.

“I want to arrange my life, Ramon--ours, I should say--so that while we
are waiting for our ultimate happiness, everything connected with us
shall seem casual.”

She did not quite know what she meant by ultimate happiness.

“You are the one to be considered, Jenny. It is heaven to be with
you--to drop everything--my work--but a man must live.”

She did not again say, “What work, what work?” His boyishness was
irresistible to her.

“There must be no gossip about us, Ramon. Even if my children are
grown, Ramon, I am an ideal to them.”

“So are you to me.”

“It would kill me to hurt them.”

“You are good.”

“Thank God, though, I have reared them with sophisticated heads on
their sensible shoulders.”

“It is you who are not sophisticated, my love.”

“I never want to grow sufficiently sophisticated, my Ramon, not to love
our love as the dearest thing in life. Jennifer would be the first to
want me to grasp at that part of life which has so nearly passed me by.”

“I would like, Jenny, to look up the fellow who has that paragraph
about her in this week’s _Town Tattle_--about the affair at the
Edgertons--and punch his----”

“Nothing like that, Ramon! Coming from you, it would look obvious. If
only her father doesn’t see it! It will all be forgotten in a week; but
meanwhile it is awful. Town talk. They say Berry had to marry Leslie
to save her from a scandal and that Leslie had to announce it to save
herself from Jennifer.... Ramon, what was that noise?”

“How nervous you are, my Jenny! Only something creaking.”

“I must get my household accustomed to taking my tea-hour for granted.
It will make it so much easier for us, Ramon. Everything in my life
hereafter will revolve around that, Ramon.”

“Jenny, how soon will we have a nook somewhere--ours--alone....”

She hid her face in her hands.

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Soon.”

“You remember, Jenny, what you promised?”

“What?”

“I am to fix up our nook--and bring you to it after it is all complete.”

“Yes.”

“It is hard to say what I must say now, Jenny, except that, between us,
everything must be said.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I want to do that nook terribly. I would be doing something for--us.”

“You darling.”

“And yet, you see, my hands are tied. I do not do it.”

She knew what was coming and bated her breath for it because she did
not want it to come.

“It takes money to fix up that kind of a place, Jenny.”

She lay in silence against his coat.

“Does it offend you to have me say that, Jenny?”

“No--only I hate the talk of money between us----”

“I know, dearest, but it must be said. I have given up my----”

“There is the thousand in the mail----”

“But I must live, Jenny. Besides, what is a thousand? You would not
want me to build you a nook that was not worthy of our love.”

“It isn’t that he ever questions what I draw. But a conspicuously large
amount is noticeable when I have nothing to show for it, and he is sure
to think I am indulging the children against his wishes.”

“Surely you have money of your own.”

“Just a drawing-account. I’ve never bothered. He is generous.”

“But you say, yourself, you cannot even indulge your children.”

“That is his one difficult spot, Ramon.”

“It is not right. No woman should be dependent!”

“I’ve never thought about it in that light before. There has never been
occasion.”

“You mean to say no properties are in your name!”

“Of course, silly! I’m always signing papers. I’m one of the
stockholders in the new Rarick Building. I’m a big stockholder in the
Rarick Chain. Don’t forget that, dearest.”

Jenny had not forgotten it. Neither had she forgotten certain easily
accessible holdings which it did not please her to relate just now.
She had no intention of permitting Ramon to furnish a place such as he
described. Not for the present, at least, she told herself, when desire
ate through the better part of caution. Having one’s cake and eating
it, too, was almost as insanely paradoxical as it sounded. Besides, a
mental picture that was repulsive to her, had a habit of leaning into
her bliss with this boy.

Was she one of the horrible, wattled, painted women, as in the
notorious case of the dowager, Mrs. Emanie Bursilap, who at seventy
years, after her own youth had fled from her as if in disgust, still
kept young boys in luxury for the sake of maintaining the delusion of
that departed youth? Was this thing between her and Ramon no better
than that? Sometimes it seemed to her she must find a way to peer into
the heart of this youth, whose time of life, whose flexible, godlike
body entitled him to the first bloom of a woman. He and Jennifer were
of an age to frolic in the same gardens--and yet he seemed not to see
Jennifer, for Jenny----

“Dear Ramon, everything will come out all right.”

“I love to hear you say that, Jenny,” he said, and crushed kisses
against her eyes.

This time, of the volition of a force that was stronger than her fears,
she reached out and turned the key in the door.




In the phraseology of Jennifer and Avery, between whom existed a gay
nonsense-code, any period of time fraught with comings and goings,
telephone bells, messenger boys, arrivals, departures, in, out, bang,
hasten, bag, baggage, up, down, motor-cars, golf-bags, theater tickets,
opera wraps, bridge tables, packages, flowers, caterers, bustle and
rush, constituted a “day among the Raricks.”

Hurried scrawls of notes or telegrams, interchanged between them, read
like this:

  DEAREST AVERY: It’s been a hell of a day among the Raricks down home
  here. How cum with brother Rarick up among the Campus Cut Clothes
  Boys?

  DEAR JENNIF: This day among this Rarick has been no go. This Rarick
  has a new speed-boat. This day among this Rarick has been spent
  feeling seasick in and about said speed-boat. It’s a wamble. To be a
  wamble means to be built for land and live on water. That’s me, too.
  I am built for where I ain’t....

That was about as far as these two ever ventured across the chasm of
the six years’ difference in their ages.

Jennif was a peach, but you couldn’t let off steam to her, because when
you tried to talk she was always listening to some one beyond your
shoulder who wasn’t there.

You couldn’t talk to Avery, whose mind was always on his own young
stuff. Hard to make out what his own stuff was. But there was something
to Avery, all right. The boy ran deep ... he already knew the strange
heart-aches of seeing illusions tarnish and had learned his game of
compromise. Life among the Raricks wasn’t the joke he pretended it
was....

       *       *       *       *       *

The “day among the Raricks” that precipitated a galling scene between
Jennifer and her father began as any run-of-the-mill day for Rarick,
for Jenny, and for Jennifer might have begun.


JENNY’S DAY

This particular one started with a pain in her side. An annoying
neuralgic one, against which she usually carried tablets in a beautiful
gold-and-enamel snuff-box (Napoleona) which she had begged from
Rarick’s collection.

Rarick, who had slept no better and no worse than usual, and whose
night had been a procession of projects for the Rarick Building,
dropped into one of his brief deep slumbers just as Jenny beside him
flew awake, her lids popping back suddenly.

The flooding memory of the night before, when she had dared, because
the chauffeur was new, to drive home from the opera with Ramon by
way of three circumferences of the Park, came sparkling over her in
goose-flesh.

It made her shudder. It made her lift eyes that were still brilliant
from the night before, up to the sound-eating radiations of shirred
brocade that hung in a canopy over the bed and then dropped in more
sound-eating drapes between her and the vista of six full-length
windows that looked out on Fifth Avenue.

There was a small blue-enamel French telephone, a blue-enamel thermos
carafe, a blue-enamel engagement-pad, and the blue-enamel box of
tablets on the night table beside her. One of these tablets she
presently swallowed.

This habit of her early awaking was still abominable to her. Precious
hours of needed rest, even when they were filled with contemplations
that were sweet to her, were wasted lying in bed thus, waiting for her
day to begin.

How he slept! Deep in the cave of his pillow, with his face upward.
“Little man, you! What do you know of me--here--lying by your
side--sharing your bed? Nothing!”

A fear smote her. What if he knew more than she realized! That was
absurd. He was not astute.

How strange, after all these years of the disillusionment of a
love-life that had spluttered out like a feeble match, that a Ramon
should find her desirable. It made her lie slim and straight in bed,
with arms folded across her breast in the beatific attitude of feeling
herself desirable.

The aspirin made one pleasantly at ease.

What if that were not Rarick beside her, but----

She shuddered with a rousing distaste of self. Horrible, horrible, to
lie there imagining.... There were certain scavengers of thoughts that
must be kept locked in the inner boxes of the mind. It made one feel
shameful to have a thought like that pop out. Just the same, the whole
meaning of life would be changed and exalted if that were not Rarick
lying there, but, yes, but Ramon! How horrible of her. How poisonous.

What if Rarick should die? No. No. No! And yet she could never really
see the wickedness of trying to visualize the effect upon herself of
the death of another. Death was one of the few certainties of life.
Rarick would die some day. Either before or after her. If before? She
was not wishing it. She was thinking it.

It was difficult to visualize life free of the strain of simultaneously
wanting to remain impeccably married to Rarick and yet continue to be
desired by Ramon. A life free of the strain of daring to ride three
times around Central Park with Ramon because the chauffeur was new, and
yet all the while dreading, with undercurrent of fear, the indiscretion
of it. The strain of obeying that trick in her make-up which demanded
that she be thrice as solicitous of Rarick for every disloyal act with
Ramon. The strain of keeping herself free from the shadow of a doubt in
the minds of her children.

What if Rarick should die and his restraining hand were left off that
household? What if she were herself, but free! A woman of terrific
wealth, suddenly released from over twenty years of the indefinable
depressant of a man who had grown rich with his lips tight. Would Ramon
be lying beside her then?...

She swung out of bed, shuddering, and, ringing for her maid, hurried
toward her boudoir.

Her day began earnestly now, with a nine-o’clock appointment with the
executive of a large firm of decorators, who was coming to inspect the
ballroom, with an eye to erecting at one end of it a gondola-shaped
stage, on which Jenny proposed to give a charity fête called “A Doge
for a Day.”

At ten o’clock she had a henna-rinse and shampoo, a long-drawn but
imperative performance that accelerated the pain in her side and made
her nervous. During this subsequent hour and a half in the hands of
her hairdressers, maid, masseuse, her head in towels, her face under
cream, her fingers and toes in the simultaneous process of mani- and
pedi-cure, Jenny went through the performance of an interview with her
head housekeeper, Mrs. Dill. She was exacting in her enormous household
management, known to be fair enough, but demanding careful and detailed
accounting of weekly expenditures, which, even after years of the
experience of living at the very peak of American high standards,
remained titanic to her.

“Thirty dollars a week for milk, Mrs. Dill? We don’t bathe in it!”

“That fruit bill is fantastic, Mrs. Dill. What is that item? Five
pounds of grapes, fifteen dollars? Well! Of course, I know you do your
part, but isn’t that buying grapes by the carat?”

“Surely, Mrs. Dill, there is some mistake. Seven hundred dollars for
the florist’s this month, and only three large dinners. Well!”

The days of her conservative girlhood in the modest house where she
had spent the first twenty years of her life were deeply rooted.
The servants’ wages of twenty-five hundred dollars a month, and the
greengrocer, the caterer, the butcher, and the laundry bills in
proportion were to remain unabatedly startling to her.

There was one item on these statements which always smote Jenny with a
kind of anger. Generous though she was, after a fashion, the fact that
the bill for the servants’ meat could mount to hundreds for the month
was constantly roiling. Mrs. Dill saw to it that their supplies came
from the same shops where the family viands were marketed. Of course,
the servants should be well provisioned, and one must close one’s own
eyes to the fact that Mrs. Dill shopped with an eye to her commissions,
but it did seem that the ordinary cuts of meat from the ordinary shops
should have sufficed for them. She had never found voice to convey this
to any of her housekeepers, but the earlier training of the wife of one
of the richest men in the world would persist. It would have angered
Rarick to have her question these food expenditures for the servants,
and it was not, she told herself, that she really did question them. It
was the principle of the thing. It did seem that a good stew of fowl
would suffice for the servants’ table instead of the boned squabs which
were sent from Baltimore in cotton waddings.

Certain traits that had been developed back there in the pressed-brick
eight-room house in St. Louis had persisted in the wife of the
thirteenth richest man in the world.

At eleven o’clock Jenny emerged from the barrage of cold cream to
accompany Jennifer to a loft over an armory, there to enter vigorously
into a fencing-lesson with a master from Turin. When Jenny fenced,
a curious flame leaped into her eyes. Jenny’s “glitt,” her daughter
called it. With her lower lip caught between her teeth, and her face
in the tight vise of a grimace, she danced to the steel on the balls
of feet that were surprisingly nimble. Her mother’s fencing inspired
Jennifer--who was lovely at the thrust herself--to peal after peal of
hilarity.

“You’re the spirit of war let loose, Moth, only don’t bite your tongue.
Down with humanity! Long live sin!”

Nevertheless, these hours exhilarated Jenny, not only seeming to
help the pain at her side, but endowing her with a new sense of body
buoyancy. She took an extra lesson a week now. “Good measure for you,”
she told Ramon. “I must at least be one-hundredth as lithe as you are.”

At twelve o’clock in this day of a Rarick, the executive committee of
the Manhattan Hospital for Crippled Children met at the home of Mrs.
Bursilap Dobson. This home, a somber brown one that still occupied
wide footage in a once highly conservative section of Madison Avenue
that was rapidly giving way to business, was one that Jenny had never
entered on a social basis. Curious, too, because Mrs. Bursilap Dobson
apparently went out of her way to be gracious to Jenny. On these
occasions of the weekly committee meetings, they exchanged doctor,
steamship, opera-box and motor-car preferences, as well as lore
concerning their sons who had attended the same preparatory school.
Most of the time, at Mrs. Dobson’s request, Jenny remained after the
meeting for a bit of chat.

It stopped there.

To the exclusive Dobson functions the John Raricks were not bidden.
“Where do they get off?” gritted Jennifer between her teeth. “It’s town
talk that her mother, old lady Emanie Bursilap, aged two hundred and
forty-six, keeps flocks of patent-leather-haired tame robins and feeds
them meal tickets. None over twenty-one need apply.”

The time had come when this horrid indictment could send a special kind
of chill down Jenny’s spine.

At one o’clock Jenny entertained the members of the executive and
visiting board of the International House for Defective Children at the
Cosmo Club. Again it was not a social group, but the list pleased her,
and she had a typed copy of it sent to the _Times_: Madame Marcella
Tarafa, Buenos Aires. Mrs. Gregory Cripps. Lady Annabel Metcalf. Mrs.
Hugo Thorner. Marquise de Brassac. Signora Testa Pontavice. Mrs. Beaver
Kellog, Philadelphia. The Countess of Pendleton, St. John’s House. Mrs.
Turner Moses. Mrs. Willie Bingham Payne. Miss Henriette Shonnard.

Jenny was not a member of the Cosmo Club, but entertained there by
proxy of Miss Shonnard. It was Jenny’s way of signifying to the
daughter of Senator Shonnard her desire for membership in this most
socially representative women’s club in town. So far nothing had come
of it.

At three, Jenny took a taxicab from the club-house, and met Ramon at
the tea-room in the West Seventies. She had decided on this much of a
definite policy! From now on, never to appear with him at a public
function. For instance, that evening he was accompanying, at Jenny’s
stipulation, young Miss Clabby Wall to a large charity dinner-dance at
the Plaza, for which Jenny had taken a table in Jennifer’s name. There
were to be twenty guests at her table, Ramon not among them. Jenny had
sent an extra two tickets to him by mail.

Unquestionably the need of the small retreat of Ramon’s fitting-up was
becoming imperative. There was such a thing as being conspicuous even
at the inconspicuous little tea-rooms of the West Seventies.

Ramon, waiting in the tea-room, had a headache. Something repulsive had
happened. His dancing partner, the Spanish girl, a volatile, gifted
creature, desperately in love with a shiftless husband who was brutal
to her, had fallen ill of a skin irritation that manifested itself on
her face and disqualified her for the dance. The sight of the blemished
girl had been abhorrent to Ramon, who had also been obliged to advance
the improvident pair fifty dollars to cover immediate doctor bills.

Jenny loved the complete way in which he surrendered himself into
her hands. “Life is confusing, Jennifer’s Jenny. I have sympathy,
of course, but I cannot help being repulsed by sickness. Of course,
perhaps some day I may fall ill myself.”

“No, darling!” cried Jenny, eager to be omniscient in his behalf.

“You won’t hate me if ever I do fall ill--and splotchy, Jennifer’s
Jenny?”

“I’ll nurse you like an angel.”

“I am a dog and you are an angel.”

“You will be an angel to me, though, Ramon, always?”

“It gave me the shivers just now to see her. I was glad to give her
money. It strapped me to let her have fifty, though, Jennifer’s Jenny.”

“I know that,” she said, slipping a yellow bill, that was already
folded into the hole of her glove, from her hand into his.

He placed a kiss along a lean, suède-covered finger.

“It is hard not to feel upset, Jennifer’s Jenny, when life is just one
frusteration after frusteration.”

He mispronounced “frustration,” with a lisp that was adorable to her.

“Everything will come out all right, Ramon.”

“How can everything come out all right, when I am not even to be with
you tonight, but must sit with that tiresome little Clabby person at a
table that is far from yours?”

“You are going to drive home with me afterward. Around the Park three
times.”

“Darling--how----”

“Never mind how. There is another new chauffeur. I could not bear to
live through the day, dear, if it didn’t mean that much time alone with
you.”

“I am looking at you, Jennifer’s Jenny, across this ugly table-top, but
in reality I am kissing you one thousand times.”

“And me you, Ramon.” Across the table their glances poured.

“I must be at Fifty-seventh Street at four o’clock.”

“Damn four!”

“Perhaps I shall drop in later at Perroquet’s; but keep away, as usual,
dear.”

At four o’clock the unmounted body of a specially designed French car
was submitted to Jenny in the Fifty-seventh Street show-rooms of a firm
of automobile-importers.

At five o’clock Jenny picked up Madame Tarafa at her apartment-hotel
and took her to Perroquet’s for tea, where Ramon danced. He did not
come over; but again, from across the room, their glances poured.

At six o’clock, by appointment, a chinchilla coat, which had arrived by
way of Moscow, was delivered to Jenny. In the beauty of twilit snow,
it hung from her narrow shoulders as she stood before triple mirrors
in her boudoir. She proposed to wear it that night. Ramon had admired
one worn by Mrs. Stanley Grimes. Jenny happened to know that the Grimes
garment had cost forty-five thousand dollars in Paris, plus sixty per
cent duty. Her own, with the duty, came to seventy-four thousand.
Rarick, who was completely easy-going about her expenditures for
finery, paid such bills as these with puzzlement. Seventy-four thousand
dollars to cover a woman’s back. Thoughts came jamming to the fore of
his mind, but he choked them back. Well--those were the gratifications
for which men beat out their lives in the market-places.

At seven o’clock the maid in the Breton cap helped Jenny into a
black-satin gown that rose to a high neck in front and to a bare and
daring V at the back. As she was looping herself in graduated ropes of
graduated pearls, the door of her dressing-room burst open without the
preamble of a knock.

It was Rarick. His face, locked in the horrible immobility of a
gargoyle, was the color of granite.

“I want Jennifer.” A paper was crushed in his hand, and his lips were
hauled back from his teeth, making them protrude as they do in a skull.


RARICK’S DAY

That same day began for Rarick with his usual habit of twisting
reluctantly out of the belated sleep that came to him just before dawn.
It was so good, this early morning drifting-down beneath the snows of
consciousness. It was more like a little death, he sometimes thought,
than the sleep which must come to most people. It was so absolutely
dreamless. So disembodied. It was as if Rarick shot off into space for
these sleeps. They bathed, they refreshed. They pumped him full of the
energy you would expect from an eight-hour instead of a three-hour
sleep. They were his air-tight retreats. Jenny was already up when
he awoke. Sun beat against the drawn curtains. The muffled sound of
the city came roaring softly, and he could hear Jenny moving about
in her boudoir, giving the nervous kind of staccato orders to her
maid that made her attitude toward her servants seem imperious. His
opening thought had to do with an idea that had boomed into his brain
during the night. Why not erect a concert-auditorium, vast, aërial,
dramatically sky-high, on the roof of the seventy-nine-story Rarick
Building? There must still be time to adapt construction plans to that
daring scheme. A Gothic auditorium of superb twilights. Three thousand
seats, each one a _fauteuil_. A cathedral organ, diapason pipes. If
only the roof space would permit. Increase cost by millions--better to
call in Yardsley the architect at once....

Rarick Auditorium!

There was a note on Jenny’s writing-pad for him:

  Am using your Hispano this morning, as mine is up for repair. Have
  given orders to send around Renault sedan for you. Body of French
  car is here. Man will call to see Hellman. My O.K. will be on bill
  for chinchilla coat. Do you care to present Avery with one of those
  three-room portable camp sets? Nice for week-end camping-trips, in
  which he should be encouraged.

  Plans for Adirondack house annex are in your desk drawer, right.

  Jennifer wishes to charter private car, Penn., for forty guests for
  Navy football game, Nov. 18. Your office can arrange.

  Saranac Hospital Committee will ask Hellman for an interview with
  you. Please give generous check in my name. These people important to
  me. Mrs. Carleton Murray, president. Do not snub. Not home to dinner.
  Charity dance at Plaza tonight. Going alone.

He preferred Jenny up and out of the room first, and her memorandum,
even though so unusually verbose these days, by pad. He had no
intention of seeing Mrs. Murray, whose philanthropies were conspicuous
and obnoxious to him, or of presenting his son with some _deluxe_
camping paraphernalia, which he thought effete.

But how typical, this procedure! He had feigned sleep when Jenny
had come trailing in between two and three. Then she had taken the
opportunity of his morning sleep to tiptoe off to her dressing-room,
from where he could catch her quick spatter of words to her maid. Do.
Don’t. Don’t. Do. It was at least three days since they had met for
more than the briefest of periods. There was one of her letters from
Avery twisted and thrown on the night table beside the blue carafe. On
his way to his dressing-room, the temptation to smooth it out and read
it smote Rarick. The salutation, “Dearest of Mothers,” smote his eyes
from a corner that had not been caught in the twist.

He did not pause to pry into it.

At eight-thirty, an attorney came to sit beside him while he had his
breakfast in a small sun-room of superb walnut walls, inlaid with
Rarick’s collection of bronze medallions. The discussion was in regard
to a pending suit against Rarick Chain for infringement of copyright
law on a toy edition of a pocket dictionary they were about to
distribute in hundreds of thousands at five cents the copy.

At nine o’clock they rode downtown together in the Renault sedan as far
as Times Square, where Rarick dived into the subway.

He had been much headlined for that custom of his.

MAGNATE MINGLES WITH STRAP-HANGING CROWD

It saved him eleven minutes. Sometimes he wondered about those eleven
minutes. He fought for them through human underground shambles, drew
into his lungs the breath off the lips of strap-hangers who lurched
their chins into his eyes. In prospect, those eleven minutes seemed
incalculably important to him. In retrospect, somehow, they could never
be accounted for.

At nine-thirty Hellman met him at the private door of his private
office, took his hat and coat, and handed him a drink of Vichy water.

That was part of being a man of affairs. You paid somebody to see to
it that you were properly stoked with the amount of drinking-water
prescribed by your doctor. Hellman’s concern over that drink of water
was perfectly simulated. He watched each gulp of Rarick, who was never
thirsty, with an interest that was impeccable.

Everything about Rarick’s office was contrived to keep out sound. An
artificial quiet resulted. Noises began to grind in your ears from that
quiet, as if some of the crash of the subway had accumulated against
the drums. Rugs ate in footfalls. The battery of push-buttons made
only soft, purring sounds. Two enormous electric fans were noiseless.
The vast top of Rarick’s mahogany double desk, sheeted in plate glass,
carried out the noiseless effect. It was empty of even an inkstand. The
windows overlooking New York Harbor were high enough to give the scene
below--of moving tugs, weaving elevated trains, specks of people--the
effect of silence.

Outside of these carefully insulated four walls, two hundred
stenographers crashed out furious and alarmed hurry calls for more
hair-pins, more peach-skin-faced dolls, more five-cent dictionaries,
more toothpicks, and more lollypops to match the shapes of the tongues
of the world. At nine-thirty, an order, just dictated, was being typed
out there in those frenzied aisles of the polyphonic typewriters,
for the largest single order of boys’ caps in the history of the
industry, while two men sat in conference with Rarick and concluded
this perpetration upon the youthful heads of the world of hundreds of
thousands of cotton caps with cotton linings and cotton buttons and
cotton eagles stitched against navy-blue cotton backgrounds.

At eleven o’clock there arrived, direct from the railroad station,
a president of a Cleveland bank and an executive of a real-estate
concern, on an impending deal that had to do with a Rarick Chain
property-trade on a Cleveland business block that had not yet been
inundated with the shop of petty trade, and against which public
opinion ran high. This particular situation was an old story; and
Rarick took a certain glory in signing papers that were to make way for
a Rarick store on a Cleveland avenue that boasted a museum, a library,
and a park.

At noon, while the anteroom filled up with an assortment of
charity-committee representatives, department managers, factory
executives, automobile agents, and bank messengers, two harried-looking
architects with portfolios and long rolls of blue-prints were admitted
into Rarick’s office by a secret door.

It developed that the roof auditorium, being an afterthought, would
involve structural changes of appalling magnitude and expense, to say
nothing of possible building violations, steel-beam problems, water
installations, and engineering difficulties too technical to bear
immediate discussion. Everything was possible, of course, but at cost
of millions of dollars----

But the idea of the auditorium had formed, hardened, and fastened into
the mind of Rarick. Hellman hovered, during this exhaustive interview,
offering such conservative objections as he dared, and urging deferred
decisions. Two executives of the company were called in, also a
little Russian named Osonsky, an office manager in whom Rarick had
great confidence. While the anteroom jammed itself to capacity, the
conference dragged on, two difficulties arising for every one solution.
But when the architects finally buckled up their portfolios, and the
long interview came to its end, everyone present knew that, in pointed
stalagmites toward the heavens, would presently arise the Gothic
reality of Rarick’s popular-price auditorium, built of the people’s
dimes and nickels, for them, at admission of dimes and nickels. The
greatest musicians available were to pour forth the music of the
masters to the knick-knack-ridden public that swarmed the aisles of the
Rarick Chain stores. It was to cost three million dollars, house two of
the most famous Rembrandts in existence, and the organ-builder was to
die in its loft, of heart-stroke induced by unbearable excitement, the
day the instrument pealed forth the opening-strain of “Ave Maria” to
its first audience.

So much for one of Rarick’s sleepless dreams.

At considerably past the lunch hour an office boy brought five Graham
wafers in oiled tissue-paper and a glass of “half milk, half Vichy,”
and placed them silently on the desk beside Rarick, who was now talking
long-distance to Denver, a receiver pressed against each ear.

At three o’clock, a woman evangelist whose name was constantly skidding
across a coast-to-coast press, and who had traveled eleven hundred
miles for this appointment, came to confirm a matter relating to her
dream of a world-tabernacle on a mountain-top overlooking the Pacific.

At three-fifteen, a German manufacturer of Christmas-tree ornaments
arrived with two Eastern managers, and five hundred and fifty thousand
dollars was transacted across the empty desk-top.

At three-thirty, Rarick, five members of the International Theater
Foundation Committee, Hellman, and two witnessing clerks, bent over
that desk for the signing of the Rarick endowment of one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars.

At three-forty, the flower-woman on the corner of Broadway and Pine
Street, who sold wire-stemmed carnations there for the lapels of
hurrying business men, came up to Rarick’s office, by Hellman’s
arrangement, on the anniversary of her fiftieth year on that corner.
Also by Hellman’s arrangement, and to Rarick’s surprised and angry
protest, three cameras clicked the picture of him presenting her with a
check commemorating the occasion.

At ten minutes to four, Hellman walked as far as the subway with him,
handing him a packet of letters to read upon his arrival home.

At shortly past four, after a cup of tea and two more Graham wafers,
Rarick let himself relax into the unicorn-chair in his library. For
an hour he lay back there, riding the quiet, as a swimmer floats
on his back, finally pressing a button to flood that quiet with an
organ overture called “Field of the Cloth of Gold.” No matter how
chromoesque musically, there was something about it that set Rarick’s
blood marching. He could see himself mounting--always mounting steps,
a cloak streaming off his shoulder--mounting--mounting--peaks off
in the distance, snow-capped. A viola slipped into a cadenza that
seemed to pour from a bird-throat--somewhere--high--was morning air
like ice-water. He could see himself mounting--clouds formed and
were faces--the chorister face of Avery--a woman’s face, with lips
desirable--up--up--Pyrenees of mountain-tops....

Presently Dr. Gerkes came in and drank a glass of hot Burgundy,
which a butler brought without his request. He had just returned from
Toronto, where he had lectured before a royal archæological society.
There was desultory talk of university endowments, railroads, the
Abyssinian researches of a Viennese that promised to shake the theories
of the alleged beginnings of Tertiary man, and then Rarick, spilling
out a waistcoat pocket of pearls, emeralds, jacinths, girasols,
asterias, and diamonds, saw to it that his friend screwed a glass into
his eye and appraised until it was time for him to climb into what
he called his overalls for an address he was to deliver that evening
before a scientific society at the Engineers’ Club.

Left alone, Rarick began to rip open letters off the packet that
Hellman had handed him at the subway. It was after he had read the
third of them that he burst into Jenny’s boudoir with it crushed in his
hand, and his lips flaring back in the fashion that made a skull of his
face.

       *       *       *       *       *

Standing in the multiplying embrasure of her mirrors, Jenny’s hand,
emerald-incrusted, flew to her throat. What had happened? Rarick
knew something! He always did when he looked like that. Dry teeth
bare. Terror flew at her. Terror and a sudden loathing for the whole
tottering structure of her affair with Ramon. As a keeper of a gigolo
she had risked everything. Why mince matters? Keeper of a gigolo! And
at risk of security, prestige, eminence. The neuralgic pain that was
lurking in her side seemed to leap into her throat--into her spirit.
What had she pulled down about her? What terrible crash was this
impending? Out of her recklessness, out of her failure to rest content
with the security of her eminence, was she about to reap still more
failure?

“Rarick,” she cried out to him, ready, as it were, to fight for her
life, “don’t be a fool!”

How terrifyingly like a skull he was.

“Where is Jennifer?” he said along his dry jowls. “I want her.”

Jennifer? Thank God, then it wasn’t--Jenny! Jennifer, of course. Some
nonsense of Jennifer’s. This wretched nervousness of hers! How could
Rarick possibly have known what her foresight and skill had arranged
that he should not know. The prospect of the drive homeward with Ramon
through the Park came flowing back. Her precaution to change chauffeurs
every so often was an indication of the skill with which she handled
this situation. Who could be clever enough, for instance, to tie up
chauffeur trouble with the fact that she and Ramon ... Jennifer, poor
child! What now? One saw the child so comparatively seldom, now that
the season was on--surely nothing----

“Where is Jennifer?”

“She must be dressing.”

“Call her.”

“What has happened, Rarick?”

“Call her.”

“The child is probably in her bath. Is it as imperative as all that?”

“Call her.”

“Tell Miss Jennifer,” she said in French to the maid in the Breton cap,
“to come here at once. Her father wishes her.”

What row was this now? Jennifer, poor child--could you blame her?--had
been distrait and erratic in her movements ever since that wretched
business at the Edgertons’. Hard hit, poor child. But as if there
weren’t just as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Jennifer
needed change. The camp, perhaps! Could her father have got wind of
that messy occasion at the Edgertons’? God! what a bore Rarick could
be! No wonder his children shied from him.

“I wouldn’t start rowing with Jennifer this time of the evening,
Rarick. What’s wrong? Won’t it keep until----”

The maid returned.

“Miss Jennifer is dressing and is already late for an appointment. She
will come to Mr. Rarick in the library tomorrow morning.”

Rarick strode past the words, across the hall, and, without preamble of
knocking, into his daughter’s suite.

“Rarick,” cried Jenny, and strode after, “don’t be a fool!”

Jennifer, evidently just risen from bed, was sitting on the edge of it,
in a web of a nightgown that fell off her shoulder to the elbow, and
pulling on a bit of infinitesimal stocking.

“Why, Father,” she cried, and jerked a bit of the web across her, “you
mustn’t come in here!”

He hated a display of undress even in the formal attire of the women
of his family. This Aphrodite rising from the foam of lace and chiffon
offended him less than the bare backs they wore tapering into the waist
line of evening-gowns.

“Put on some clothes,” he said. From the layer of tousled bed-clothing
of more pink and more lace, his daughter regarded him throw a scowl at
a jungle of hair that had fallen forward over her eyes.

“I think this is pretty thick, Father,” she cried.

Her mother picked up a white, tufted, swan’s-down robe, and tossed it
to her.

“Put this on, Jennifer,” she said, in the cold, measured tones of her
disapproval of Rarick.

What a bore--what a bore the man was! Joyless. Still a hardware clerk
at heart. Little man, you. No wonder the flame that burned in Ramon was
warming to her rigid heart. Thank God for Ramon! What was that paper....

Thrusting the crumpled sheet under his daughter’s eyes and slapping it
with the back of his hand, Rarick lost no time.

“Explain that.”

The letter was from Tom Edgerton:

  ... unless, Mr. Rarick, this situation is to result in tragedy for
  all concerned, I beg you to call instant halt to matters between
  your daughter and my son-in-law. To add to an already outrageous
  situation, Leslie is with child. I regret the imperative need to
  bring before you what I am sure must be your first knowledge of
  this dangerous dilemma for all concerned. Unless you force it to an
  immediate solution....

A low cry escaped Jennifer. Pain. Rage. Surprise.

“Damn him! Damn!” she cried and began to sob instantly and wildly into
her bare palm, which she clapped against her mouth. “Damn! Damn!”

“It seems to me,” cried Jenny, frightened, “that Tom Edgerton had
better mind his own eggs in his own basket.”

What was this? What was this? As Jennifer had recited it that muddled
morning after, both the Jennys had sat in merciless indictment upon the
behavior of Berry, and of Leslie, too, for that matter. Jennifer had
hurled at him merciless invective, wallop, and relentless appraisal.
Surely, in these weeks subsequent, Jennifer had not been seeing Berry?
The idea that Jennifer was cruelly hard hit was preposterous. What
was this? Had Jennifer, for the first time, violated her mother’s
confidence? That little fool there, that little fool man, there, what
did he know about handling her?

“I want to know,” shouted Rarick, seeming to gnaw on his words with
his long dry-looking teeth, and standing directly up before his
daughter as she struggled into the sleeve of her robe, “what there is
between you and Berry Rhodes?”

“And what if I don’t choose to tell you?” she cried, already
breathless, as if the interview were of long duration instead of only
just having begun.

“Don’t rag her, Rarick.”

“Shut up!” he said. How his jaw slid around in that circular, grinding
movement! Thank God it was Jennifer and not herself on the rack before
him. She could defend Jennifer----

“Either you tell me the exact situation,” went on her father, brushing
the crest off of a wave of small, incredibly sheer pillows, as he began
to waggle a finger at her, “or I’ll have the Rhodes dog here himself,
or go where I can find him.”

“If you do,” cried Jennifer, wrapping herself in her arms, as if to
withdraw from possibility of contact with the threat, “I’ll kill
myself.”

“Jennifer, for God’s sake, you must learn to talk quietly to your
father.”

“How can I talk quietly to him? How can I talk at all to him? How can
I talk to anybody? Get out! For God’s sake, get out! Give me that
letter!” She snatched it from her mother’s hands and began to twist it
the shape of her own twisted lips. “Leave me alone! Get out!”

Her father caught her by the wrist, jerking her toward him until her
teeth gave a click.

“What is this man to you?”

She began to sob, her face naked and dark as she struggled for her
hands.

“As if you would understand if I told you.”

“What is he to you?”

Suddenly, as if the realization of her trap came flooding over her, she
let her wrists relax in her father’s grip and dropped her head forward
until her brow was almost against his hands, before her incredible
words came.

“I love him, Papa,” she said. “Help me, Papa, I don’t want to love him.
I want to hate him and I can’t. Help me, Papa. Please, please, Papa.”

His heart was in his mouth. His knees trembled. The “papa” had almost
unnerved him. The silly revealing child’s word. Papa. A primitive
phonetic word that must have had its etymology along the toothless gums
of babes. He was too racked to make a sound. Papa, help Jennifer....

“Oh, my darling!” cried Jenny, stung to quick, pouring tears. “And
Mother never knew. Mother never knew. My baby, what has come over you?
This isn’t like you!”

“I know it isn’t, Mother. It’s not me. That’s just it. I’m not myself.
I want to hate him. I want to keep hating him. And I love him, Mother.
Isn’t that terrible?”

“My dear! My sweet! It is just an infatuation. He isn’t worth your
little finger. My dear--my sweet!”

This bare-backed woman, with the little notches up her spine that were
repulsive to him, and the narrow head with the pink hair brushed up
straight to accentuate it, was wresting the situation from him. She was
superb as she drew the head of Jennifer to her narrow breast. Superb
with being her mother, while he stood dumb before the emergency of
his daughter, even though, at her words, “Help me, Papa,” his anger
had dissolved into the flood-stream of his heart. Still he remained
there, dumb, while Jenny, whose pain flowed in the relief of tears,
was wresting from him what had been perilously near being a moment of
contact with his girl.

“_You_ help me, Mother!”

“Why, darling, Mother never realized----”

“I’ll break every bone in his body,” Rarick began to repeat, suddenly.
“I’ll break every bone in his body.”

“That _would_ be helpful, Rarick,” said Jenny, regarding him above the
head of her daughter with cool, slitted eyes. “One of your typically
diplomatic moves.”

“I’ll break every bone in his body.”

“Mother, Mother, make him understand! There’s really been nothing
between Berry and me. If he goes to Berry, I swear I’ll kill
myself----I tell you I’ve been the--the aggressor. I am the one----”

“Shh--h-h, my darling! I understand.”

“You see, Mother, it hasn’t been Berry.”

He was out of it now. It was Jennifer and her mother. Jennifer in the
cradle of her mother’s arms, like a child.

“Yes, yes, Mother knows----”

“Down inside him somewhere, Berry’s got a sense of honor. I’m the
rotter. I haven’t let him be. After that night--even. I’ve kept
wangling him. To meet me. To be with me. Every once in a while I think
I’m cured and try not to see him. I’ve tried to be cured, Mother. I’ve
been in hell. I’m sick, Mother. You try and make Father see that. I’m
like a drug fiend. I love him and I don’t want to love him. He’s snide,
he’s swine, I keep telling myself. And now that Leslie’s going to have
a kid, that makes me twice swine. O God, I--I think I am going crazy,
Mother.”

She was like something wild, crouching beneath the wing of a protecting
arm--the bare, gleaming arm of Jenny--her muddled eyes staring through
the jungle of hair at Rarick, who, having released her wrists, stood
back, flabbergasted.

“Shh-h-h, darling! I see----”

“Make him see----”

“Yes, yes, I’ll make Father see. Mother knows. Mother understands.
Jennifer’s nervous. Jennifer has had a bad dream and Mother is going
to take her away--far--up to the Canadian camp, and get her rested and
cured.”

Jenny had wrested his moment from him, all right. A cry raged in the
silence of his heart. There they crouched from him. The Jennys. “Papa,”
she had mouthed, like a child. So far as he could remember, she had
never, even in her little-girlhood, called him that before. What a
curious thing to have happened! This little girl, this sick little
girl, this pure, good, smart, terribly alien little girl, calling him
“Papa.” And Jenny had wrested his chance. God damn her! No. No. No.
God bless her! This bare-backed woman, with the ridges up her spine
that were repulsive to him, was divine, at the moment, as she babbled
sentimental mush to this girl!

“Sh-h-h, Jennifer! You’re going to get well.”

Her sobs began to subside as she looked out fearfully under the wing of
her mother’s arm.

“I’ll get well if he will leave me alone.”

“Sh-h-h! Father will leave you alone. Won’t you, Rarick, if I promise
to help little Jennifer, who wants to get well, to be rid of the
idiotic notion that she is in love. Won’t you, Rarick? Won’t you?” sang
Jenny, in the monotony of singsong, rocking her body in soothing motion
over the crouched figure of Jennifer.

“I won’t ever see him again. I don’t want ever--to see him again----”

“Sh! That’s right. She won’t ever see him again, Rarick. Don’t cry,
sweet! Mother will help you. Nothing has happened between them; and for
you to see Berry would not only be absurd, but dangerous. Your answer
to Tom will only be the fact that Jennifer won’t ever see Berry again.
Isn’t that right, Baby?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“We’re going away for a little while. Up to the Canadian camp--to
fish--and get well. I’ll wire we’re arriving.” (Ramon could come up for
a week.) “Aren’t we, Jennifer?”

“Yes, darling.”

“You hear, Rarick?” said Jenny, always rocking, always crooning. “We’re
going up to camp--to rest--to get well.”

He sat dumb in the pool of his defeat, glorying, in a curious, crooked
way, in the power of this angular, eccentric woman he called wife, to
mother his children, yet filled with a crushing, impotent anger that
baffled and tortured him because he could not define it.

“You go now, Rarick, while Jenny puts Jennifer to bed and gives her a
bromide to make her sleep. Sh-h, my sweet----”

“Put me to sleep, Mother. Don’t let me finish dressing to go out and
meet him----”

“Shh-h! Now go, Rarick, while Jenny puts Jennifer to sleep.”

With the sensation of having no sensation at all, Rarick pressed at the
hand on his daughter and went stumbling from the room.




Dr. Gerkes was coming down the hall toward the small rear staircase he
used for his exits. He had just had his dinner. A butler was hurrying
with the remains of it hoisted on a tray. Gerkes was in his nondescript
top-coat, his collar already turned up against a fine sifting November
mist that was falling into the twilight.

Where might he be going? Wherever it was, the desire smote Rarick to
join him.

Gerkes was going for one of his walks around the reservoir in the Park.
He did a great deal of his work that way, pounding the neat geometry
of footpath that inclosed the boxed-in waters for hours on end,
formulating in his mind and hurrying back to write.

He was a known figure around that reservoir. Pedestrians, mostly with
dogs, nodded to him. Men around the waterworks knew him. Many the
blustery trip when he had things all to himself, and the grit of ice
hung to his lashes, and the wind, into which he bent the top of his
head, caused even his skimpy coat-tails to balloon.

“I’ll join you,” said Rarick, who was not much of a walker.

“Come along,” said Gerkes, practicing a rule never to be surprised.
They descended by a grand staircase instead of Gerkes’s choice of a
rear one, and two butlers swung them solemnly out of the doors that
were copied from the Florentine Campanile, into the prickled gray wash
of drizzling November.

Rain hung in the air like a curtain. It made of the evening a bead
portière. Through it, lights climbed mistily up the new architecture
of skyscraping buildings with receding terraces.

Rarick stood on his top step, no higher than a match to his house.
Traffic rolled by, filled with the silhouette of lives that he supplied
with their five-and-ten-cent needs.

It struck Rarick, in that moment while he paused for Gerkes to light
his pipe, that his own house was little more than an omnibus filled
with the hurrying figures of those who were also alien to him, except
in so far as he supplied their five-and-ten-thousand-dollar needs.

Jennifer, as she had sped past him, in that instant before Jenny had
snatched, had called, “Save me, Papa!” What atavism was that? Tucked
away in what recesses of her haughty little heart was he papa to her?
In the confusion, she had doubtless lost track. And yet the Jennys
were not all to blame for the confusion. It was the confusion that had
confused them.

_Crash_, was how his brain felt. The confusion of what seemed to Rarick
the falling of huge copper disks through jazz-splintered space that
was bottomless. And the space was divided into days. The days of the
Raricks.

A battalion of red lights flashed down the Avenue; and in the sudden
and, by contrast, deafening quiet halt of the traffic, the two men
rushed softly, bodies bent, into the Park.

There were times when the sensation of the falling of the copper disks
through the space that was divided into days, seemed to Rarick to go
on plunging through the nights. It was as if his body were some kind
of infinitude filled with a consciousness of tumult that was almost
unbearable.

Even here, in the stretches of a park that held out arms of bare
branches of trees to receive them into quiet, the tumult continued to
shoot through him in disks.

Ballet Mécanique. The world of the Raricks, still rent with Jennifer’s
cry of “Help me, Papa!” operated on a huge central piston, like a
ceiling-high steel wheel in a power-house. Ballet Mécanique. Where
had he first heard that phrase? Wherever, it stuck. Ballet Mécanique.
His life, his being, his brain were a power-house for mechanical
production. Production. Over-production. Bing! Bang! Razzle! Dazzle!
Ten-cent hats for ten-cent heads. Five-thousand-dollar speed-boats
for juniors. Production. Bing! Bang! Razzle! Dazzle! His brain was a
switchboard, as high as his house was high, as square as this Reservoir
around which they were tramping was square. Pip! Pop! Lights dancing
in and out across the switchboard. Power. Man-power. Horse-power.
Candle-power. Water-power. Brain-power. Ballet Mécanique. Out of the
switchboard of the brain ran a thousand little snaky tubings, to be
plunged into plugs. More red lights. Salted peanuts from Tennessee.
Paper snakes from Nürnberg. Under-arm shields from Trenton. Scalloped
doilies from Brooklyn. Leatherized bags from Oshkosh. Pearl buttons
from Seattle. Candied prunes from Santa Clara. Pasteboard turtles from
Tokio.

Production. The world had a hundred billion eyes that were lights on
his switchboard brain. Give me wire nails out of Pittsburgh. Raw silk
out of Shanghai. Size A-1 cans of peaches out of Sacramento. Washable
baby-ribbon out of Lyons.

Ballet Mécanique. A hot copper disk ripped off the left plate of
Rarick’s temple, as he bent into the light curtain of rain. And
another. Disk after disk after disk, a flying world of them. They
clattered, they clamored, they splintered the rain which spat against
their heat. Ballet Mécanique. The jumping pistons. The coughing
steam. The high cries of steel wheels under trains taking the steel
curves of rails. The racing of leather belts over heads bent to the
tricky business of inserting the bit of object into the machine at
the instantaneously right instant. Pistons galumphing, steel elbows
jerking. Wise old steel jaws yawning for pulp and spewing out products!
Red light. White light. Up. Down. Galumph. Give me twenty sheets of
tin at a gulp if you would have wire dish-cloths at the Five Cent
tables. Galumph! Galumph! Two hundred yards of wire for the ten-cent
boxes of assorted nails. Humdinger! Machine-stitched dish-cloths, three
for ten. Ga-dash! Ga-dash! Oilcloth books for children. Clunk! Clank!
Clink! Kodak-picture albums. Dip! Sizz! Squ! Incandescent bulbs. Spang!
Pie-pans. Yeow! The Devil limping over Hell! Chicken-wire at ten cents
a yard.

And off the wheel-sized disks that were exploding off the temple of
Rarick, began to spin images of the snow-white, copper-banded yachts of
the rich. Rows of casinos along white Rivieras, filled with overheated
men and women in elbow-deep bracelets, breathing over baccarat. Boys,
all with the chorister-faces of Avery, racing close to macadam roads
in cigar-shaped speed-monsters that were doomed for collision with
the disks. Hordes of Jennys in tight gowns with no backs, climbing up
the sides of gold amphitheaters that had been greased, and falling
back upon one another in riots of finery. Niagaras of ticker tape and
men with kidney circles under their eyes, disappearing beneath the
paper snow as it slid between their fingers. Motor-boats; chinchilla
coats, a thousand trapped little beasts to the precious garment;
four-hundred-thousand-dollar ballrooms; carved doors of a Campanile;
seven town cars; sapphire anklets from Cartier’s; thirty-five room
Adirondack camps; thirty-four servants; Jenny’s crystal bathtub; six
thousand dollars’ worth of cotillion gewgaws; private cars to football
games; eight-thousand-dollar steamship-suites; three-million-dollar
life-insurance policies; bracelets, cymbals, shields; and, smothering
under the bracelets and shields, the voice of a man’s daughter,
remote--“Papa--help me----”

“Do you know,” said Gerkes, speaking for the first time as they turned
homeward, “that certain anthropological researches seem to be proving
conclusively that man owes the dawn of his brain-power to the ice age?
When roots and berries, hitherto their principal foods, disappeared,
they were obliged to hunt reindeer, and flesh was as easy to chew as
raw oysters. That threw the jaw into disuse and gave the brain a chance
to become the larger part of the head....”




In the twenty-three years since her brother’s marriage, Hildegarde
Rarick, teacher in the primary grades in the public schools of Keokuk,
had visited him three times. Two of these highly ceremonious occasions
had taken place before the migration east.

Miss Rarick was as full of principles regarding her relationship to her
brother’s rise to fortune, as a porcupine is full of quills. And, just
so, she bristled with them.

From the very start, when rumors of Rarick’s engagement to quite
a wealthy St. Louis girl had come floating toward her on wings of
exaggerated gossip, Miss Rarick had taken her stand.

Nine years his senior, she had never, to use her own phraseology, been
beholden to him, and did not intend to begin to be so now. Trained,
by the same aunt who had reared Rarick, to become self-sustaining at
an early age, she had become that while her young brother was still
husking corn for pennies, shaking the uncongenial dust of the farm off
her feet, and attending high and normal school in Keokuk by day, while
she earned the upkeep nursing small children by night. She had seldom
clapped eyes on her brother since. At well past fifty she was teaching
the same grade, in the same school, on practically the same basis she
had taught at twenty. The check for fifty dollars which had ultimately
enabled Rarick to leave the farm for Keokuk, where he had boarded in
the same house with his sister for two years, had come from Hildegarde.

He remembered this, and off and on for years had tried to ram down
the resistance she put up against largesse from him; but she not only
continued to refuse the slightest boon of any sort, but also vigorously
resented any attempt on his part to merge her narrow path with what she
was fond of terming “the primrose one” of his family.

It is not improbable that even Miss Rarick’s state-wide fame as the
sister of John G. Rarick was equaled by the peculiar notoriety she
enjoyed as the eccentric, socialistically inclined Miss Rarick, who
would not accept a penny from her multimillionaire brother, but
continued to live in the third-floor front room of the Bustanoby family
on K Street and pay for that room (with light-housekeeping privileges)
out of the underpaid earnings of a primary teacher.

It was good copy. Miss Rarick was not. She turned a narrow back on
the vicarious distinction that was as sincerely terrifying to her
as publicity can be to the obscure, and went her way, not, however,
rejoicing.

Before the gyrations of fate, Jenny Avery, and fortune had wrenched
the situation crazily away, Miss Rarick had entertained the neat plan
of one day joining her brother in St. Louis, and, on a fifty-fifty
basis, sharing an apartment with him. They were thus to become really
acquainted, after the rather precarious years of their orphaned
childhood, and work out one of those pleasant living arrangements that
can sometimes be achieved even by relatives.

Rarick’s marriage had been a blow from which she had never completely
risen back to normal. Everything that had happened subsequently she
regarded as part of the huge prohibitive force that had come between
her and the ideal of the joint living arrangement on the fifty-fifty
basis with her brother.

Besides, from the first instant of her first visit to him, the year
after his marriage, she had detested Jenny.

One of those pointed, Chesapeake-retriever women, all peak, had been
her immediate and lasting appraisement.

“Do you mean beak?” asked her landlady, Mrs. Bustanoby, when Miss
Rarick returned and related her impressions.

“No, peak!”

“Funny,” thought Mrs. Bustanoby. “Never thought of it before, but Miss
Rarick is sort of all peak herself.”

She was, but in the most remote sense from which Jenny was that.
She was off her brother’s pattern only to the extent of the rather
thrust-up manner she had of carrying her head. Otherwise, in a sallow
kind of coloring--said by relatives to be after her father, who had
died on his sparce Iowa farm the year after John G.’s birth--and in the
lean sloping shoulders--said by relatives to be off the pattern of her
mother, who had died, lean and racked, bearing John G.--Miss Rarick was
any narrow woman, whose thin lips had obviously never been coveted and
whose eyes told that story with a thoroughly unconscious bitterness.

It synchronized with Miss Rarick’s idea of what she might expect from
her sister-in-law, that she should arrive for a long-contemplated
visit to her brother, her first trip to New York, by the way, the very
evening after the Jennys had departed suddenly for the Canadian camp.

Rarick was on hand to meet her, and that fat Mr. Hellman, who handed
her a telegram from Jenny, explaining Jennifer’s influenza and
imperative need of change, and which Miss Rarick strongly suspected
the fat Mr. Hellman of having maneuvered to send himself, by some such
device as wiring a friend in Buffalo to wire back in Jenny’s name.

As a matter of fact, the telegram had actually come from Jenny, due
to sharp admonitions from Rarick, but nothing could have suited Miss
Rarick better than this sudden and allegedly imperative absence of
Jenny. As for Jennifer and Avery, Miss Rarick had what amounted to a
pathetic desire to know these offspring whom she knew as little as she
knew their father. But even their absence was, in a sense, relief. It
eased the strain of trying not to appear so completely what she knew
she must appear, in their eyes.

It was the first year that Miss Rarick, after thirty-two years of
teaching, was enjoying her leisure and her pension at the hands of the
public-school department of her small city. For eight years she had
planned to use the first two weeks of it becoming better acquainted
with her brother.

Well, here she was. At sixty, Miss Rarick looked a nervous, an
exacting, and a narrow sixty. She had strong black hair, a face
almost the precise shape of an acorn, and penetrating black eyes that
partially redeemed her from what might have been sallow ugliness.

She was a strange and rather dread person to Rarick. A cold, remote
older sister, whose attitude had always been unspoken grievance, and
yet who never would permit him, by deed, the only gesture of which he
seemed capable, where she was concerned, to remove some of the cause
for that grievance.

The fact that Jenny and Hildegarde were congenitally uncongenial,
Rarick’s common sense had long since, after those first two harrowing
weeks she had visited them when they were bride and groom in St. Louis,
led him to accept without hope of retrieval.

But subsequently, Rarick considered that he had done everything
possible, so far as his responsibility to this narrow,
sloping-shouldered lady was concerned. Even in the first years of his
rise to prosperity he had urged her to give up her teaching and live
on the income he was beginning to be so well able to afford her.

Later, he had even gone so far as to send the junior partner of his
firm of lawyers out to Keokuk, to discuss any arrangement that might
be agreeable to Hildegarde, thus sparing her any direct endowment that
might prove embarrassing to her.

Her consistency in her refusal to accept a favor from her brother
remained flawless.

As Hellman expressed it inelegantly to his wife, “She’s a virgin even
in her financial relations with her brother.”

To Rarick, the entire situation was detestable. Hildegarde’s
punctiliousness about money matters bespoke an innate reverence for it
that her behavior attempted to belie.

Only a woman with a deeply buried respect for the importance of money
could have permitted herself so wide and conspicuous a gesture as
refusing to accept it from one so well able to give. It was the sort
of thing you were expected to respect enormously in a woman like
Hildegarde. It was supposed to make her admirable; and did, to the
citizenry of Keokuk, who would, for instance, have regarded her money
unawareness of Gerkes as meretricious.

Rarick dreaded her. She got on his nerves. She was the antithesis
of everything that set him on edge in the behaviorisms of his own
family; and yet, he asked himself regarding this admirable woman, was
Hildegarde, in the stark rigor of her life, any the better person?

Was he by way of falling into the easy indictment that the rich are all
meretricious and the poor admirable?

Hildegarde was close to impeccability. Law, church, and
society-abiding. Decent, moderate, principled. Her life was an open
moor. It was a moor, all right. Not the moor, either, of heliotropes
and mauves, where he had once spent a Christmas. Jenny, in the
fashionable name of grouse-hunting, had hankered for a Scottish castle.
Rarick had bought one, in Forfarshire, but after two seasons of social
struggle that she decided were not worth the candle, Jenny had left
it to gather moss and taxes. Rarick had since sold it, at a profit of
two hundred thousand dollars, to a Californian with a wife who also
hankered for mixed bag of deer, grouse, and social drag.

Hildegarde’s figurative moor was the moor of tradition and dictionary
definition. A tract of waste land.

The night she arrived, and sat with Rarick in her high-neck black silk,
a turquoise four-leaf clover her sole jewel, Rarick, visualizing his
glittering Jennys in their places at his dinner table of point-lace and
gold plate, felt a surge of bewilderment.

How righteous Hildegarde, in those smug precepts of life which so
decorously divided right for her from wrong!

If only, looking at her, listening to her, talking with her, he could
have felt that here, in this worthy life, were summed up some of the
realizations, mental, moral, and spiritual, that he craved so for
himself and his own.

Hildegarde was as hedged in by her grim principles as Jenny was by her
lack of them.

She held to the rigid and somewhat obsolete socialism that all men
are equal except for the accidental advantages which a capital-ridden
country gives the rich one over the day laborer. No rich man could
sincerely harbor the hope of a better poor man’s world and not choke
over the cake that came to his table. Your true economic philosopher
reduced himself, by giving away his fortune, to the impotency of
poverty, and by virtue of the asinine inconsistency of shearing himself
of his power to make his wealth work for his principles, thereby
became cleansed.

“I think,” she told her brother at the conclusion of a long meal
devoted to a discussion of the Kansas coal strikes, closed-shop
conditions in Keokuk, the Protestant vote, and a pointed dissertation
on lax youth, “that I shall take a ’bus first thing tomorrow and ride
down into the congested districts.”

“I’ll send some one down with you into some of my model tenements.”

“I don’t suppose Jenny or the girl has much time to devote to study of
that sort of thing?”

How smug she was! The mere fact of the omnibus irritated him. Her world
operated on a pivot of ready-made principles. She cerebrated about
practically nothing, but was quick to practice principle even when
meaningless, as exemplified by the ’bus ride when there were idle cars
in the garage at her disposal.

She had what Gerkes called a machine-stitched philosophy of the
interval called life. All men are equal. Marx or somebody--maybe it
was God--said so. No--Plato? Oh no, not Plato! That the scheme of the
alleged equality of man did not work out that way, never had, was
another matter. Well, anyway, all men were equal. Of course, nobody
denied that somebody had to mine coal and somebody had to teach
school, and it was important that electric lighting first be invented
and then manufactured by somebody, and, of course, there must always
be your Goethes and Edisons, your Beethovens, your paupers and your
peasants, and, for some reason, the communities of men who must have
been wood-choppers contemporaneously with Abraham Lincoln had remained
unspecial, while he----Well, just the same, all men are equal. All men
are equal in the eyes of God, anyway, even if He created some of them
with low brain-power, low vitality, and a low competency to cope with
His great ones of His earth.

How joyless she was! Men digging in subway ditches, women on hospital
cots in wards, were jocular in a way she had never been capable of
in her life. Life to Hildegarde was a roadbed bordered with spiked
principles that shot up like telegraph-poles. She lived as narrowly
within her precepts as Jenny and Jennifer lived within theirs.
Regarding her across the crystal, this smote Rarick: “It was not what
you thought about life. It was not even what you did about it. It was
what, underneath all the superimposed structure, you inherently were!”

Take Gerkes, now. Doubting old rogue, the word-magic of phrases such as
“the equality of man,” left him cool as a cucumber. He accepted their
inequality coldly, but was inflamed with the impulse to do something
about it on that basis. A better world for brick-layers, biologists,
and bankers. He was a hog for truths, Gerkes was; and turning them up
now and then with his perennially seeking spade was what kept life the
exciting predicament it so apparently was for this lusterless-looking
man in herring-bone gray and chalk dust.

God! God! God! Trying to reason out the rightness, the wrongness,
the goodness, the badness of life; of the lives around him, of his
own, of his narrow sister sitting there in the unconscious attitude
of holier-than-thou, munching an almond as if she had not sufficient
saliva for its enjoyment, the old panic arising out of his sense of
impotency, smote Rarick.

Certain people, he knew, were afflicted with a fear of high places.
Their sensations must be akin to this feeling of his. Insane fear of
loss of equilibrium. Need to feel his feet grip more closely the earth
that spun away from them.

“That is how I shall spend tomorrow, Rarick. No need for you to bother
about me. I shall take an omnibus down to the congested districts.”

He looked at her and felt that his laughter came like a bray.

“Why not the Second Avenue surface car?” he suggested. And then to
himself, “You’ll find it much more righteously uncomfortable.”




A thought that he confessed to himself was more amusing than really
valid, began to turn in Rarick’s head during the following two weeks
of his sister’s visit. He had urged her, out of what Miss Rarick
sniffingly referred to as the politeness of his heart, to prolong her
stay indefinitely, or at least specifically until the return of the
Jennys.

That was impossible. Miss Rarick was due back in Keokuk for the annual
meeting of the executive board of the Keokuk Home for Wayward Girls, of
which she was secretary and treasurer.

For seventeen years she had not missed one of these board meetings. It
was her boast, Trojan that she was at raising funds _via_ the charity
bazaar, the church social, and the Christmas drive, that she had never
approached her brother for so much as one penny contribution to her
favorite philanthropy. Roiled at her principles, which he found so
tiresome and conspicuous, Rarick had never volunteered to contribute.

It lurked in Hildegarde, rankled there. She meant, some day, in the
course of an unburdening of herself to Rarick which she had rehearsed
for years, to confront him with this omission, along with countless
other stored-away grievances she harbored. She had even rehearsed the
phraseology in which she would throw up to him the fact that the sister
of one of the richest men in the world was obliged to see her pet
philanthropy actually want for built-in bathtubs! Without ever coming
to the point, she was elaborate in her explanations of what was taking
her back to Keokuk before the return of the Jennys.

Over and over again she recounted, to his adamant smile, the shortness
of budget, the hovering mortgage, the crying need for lavatories
with built-in bathtubs, laundries where the girls could do their own
washings-out (a good bright laundry would keep many a girl off the
street of an evening).

With the same elaborate politeness Rarick listened, as determined that
she would ask for what she wanted as Hildegarde was determined not to
ask.

“Speak, Fido,” said Rarick, with his look of amused silence.

“Why, I’ve had girls come to me since we’ve put up the cretonne
curtains in the recreation-room at the Home and say to me, ‘Miss
Rarick, funny thing, but I just don’t feel like running around nights
any more!’ That girl did not realize it, but the simple fact of bright
and cozy surroundings was filling a need in her.”

It was at that stage that the impulse to throttle, until the prim words
fairly bounced off her lips, would overtake Rarick, causing him to
smile through his outrageous sense of aggravation. It was at times like
this that he could visualize his daughter, her knees crossed, probably
revealing their bareness, her mocking eyes pouring their naughty
contempt: “Keep the laundry brightly lighted,” or “Cretonnes cure the
canker in many a lassie’s heart.”

Nevertheless, it was out of the evenings that he spent with his sister,
Dr. Gerkes looking in on many of them, that the thought which was more
amusing than really valid began to bestir itself.

Hildegarde and Gerkes got on well. He let her talk. Once or twice they
had attended the opera together, two straight, narrow, and dun-colored
figures, in the Rarick box from which the Jennys usually contributed
their share of blaze to the tier.

Hildegarde admired Gerkes. Sometimes Rarick suspected her of being
more interested in Gerkes himself than in his collections, over which
she craned a long, conscientious neck; but the fact remained that
she assisted him in various catalogue work, classified some Eskimo
needle-cases and Upper Magdalenian harpoons for him, and attended those
of his lectures before the Anthropological Institute which were open to
the general public.

“It’s been a liberal education,” Hildegarde told her brother one
evening after she had returned from one of these lectures. “A person
could live a lifetime and never learn some of the things I have tonight
about prehistoric man. And as for Miocene apes--well! And that skull
recently discovered at Taunga--in Bechuanaland--yes, that’s right.
I jotted it down in my notes. Just fancy there being a place called
Bechuanaland! Mighty interesting! Live and learn. Have you seen those
stereopticon views of human skulls that Dr. Gerkes took in Alaska?
Mighty instructive.”

Gerkes came in then, tamping down his pipe. “I wish,” he said, his mood
facetiously biotic, “that the element of the human race which sees fit
to attend these so-called popular lectures of mine was as interested
in the story of its life as the ladies in my tonight’s audience,
judging from the flashing of pocket mirrors, were in the angle of
light-refraction on their noses. Do you know what Piltdown women are
supposed to have used for vanity-cases, Miss Rarick----”

“Dr. Gerkes, I was just remarking to my brother, your lecture tonight
has been a liberal education. And to think I never knew there was such
a thing as the Mousterian industry....”

“Did you ever hear the story, Miss Rarick, of the _Pithecanthropus
erectus_ who got into an argument with a small saurian creature of
snake-like stature?...”

“Now, Dr. Gerkes, you’re going to tease!”

“Perhaps I am,” sighed the doctor, “and you’ve reminded me that I’m too
tired for it. Rarick, would you raise your gloating eye from the bloody
fire of those balas-rubies, touch the sapphire button with which you
summon slaves, and ask the fourteenth eunuch to bring me a large bowl
with one inch of _fin_ champagne? To swing one inch of _fin_ champagne
around a rock-crystal basin, Miss Rarick, makes the swinging of the
filigree-and-tourmaline censers seem commonplace.”

“Explain to my sister, Dr. Gerkes, that reference to the tourmaline
censers. That is one of them, hanging up over the Cimabue Madonna
there, Hildegarde.”

“Don’t mind if I turn off the ‘Tales of Hoffman,’ do you, Rarick? Those
doll-babies get me fuddled.”

It was out of evenings often as oblique as this one that the idea in
Rarick’s mind ceased to be quaint and became remotely feasible. Why
not? Here were two lone souls playing a solitary game. Hildegarde might
react to matrimony as a stiff sponge softens in water. Here might be a
new and receptive Hildegarde, who would accept, in the name of their
wedding, the financial endowments Rarick could so legitimately bestow.

Gerkes had countless times given voice to the wear and tear upon him
of these lectures. Gerkes needed leisure, repose of mind, money,
isolation. Hildegarde was past the time when the secluded walks of life
would be irksome. Gerkes had constantly spoken about his intention of
one day seeking out again, what to him had been the beauty and the fine
seclusion of Alaska. Why not? Hildegarde had no youth to shed. Both
she and Gerkes, for that matter, were adults about life. If Gerkes was
playful about it all, it was partly because his lust for the truth of
it revealed to him the unexpected grins, like crevices occurring in
terrific masses of granite.

Why not? Given these two people; a dower of a million; facilities;
leisure for research. A million for every new truth. Two million! Why
not?

Rarick was saved from what might have been an embarrassing hole to
have stepped into, in this friendship that was so very special to him,
by the soft-footed diplomacy with which he approached the subject the
last evening of Hidegarde’s visit, after she had bidden good night to
the two men still seated over their Cointreau, and ascended to the
mauve-and-gold suite of rooms that suited her sparseness so mockingly.

First there had been some talk of a nature that, to his surprise, was
so inwardly exciting to Rarick, that it was all he could do to control
his voice.

Gerkes had gone off, on the slight impetus of an irrelevant remark
about the Rockefeller Foundation, upon the subject of constructive
philanthropies, and from that to the more general discussion of vast
personal fortunes and their dispensation. It was like him to be able
to think aloud on a subject so intimately relevant to Rarick, as
impersonally as if he were discussing the map of Great Britain after
the Würm glaciation. What he had to say along lines that were fairly
hackneyed, for one reason or another, set Rarick to thinking along
lines that were new. A slight talk; scarcely more than the thread of a
discourse, considering how far-reaching were to be its results.

“I am convinced that the basis of progress, Rarick, is prevention.”

“Prevention?”

“Yes. Prevent cancer. It will save the more expensive process of
eliminating it. Prevent slums. Prevent wars. Prevent disease. Prevent
social abuses. That not only takes terrific moneys, it takes an excess
of imagination. A man will give his money to eliminate cancer. It is
another matter to make a man living in a cancerless world visualize the
incalculable importance of cancer-prevention. Rockefeller Foundation
is a rare and fine example of subtle, far-reaching, and humanitarian
expenditure of acquired wealth. A man doing that kind of philanthropy
in his lifetime, instead of leaving fortunes to organizations and
causes that may outlive their usefulness a few years after his death,
displays the power to distribute as well as accumulate. That’s what
makes this little story of mankind that I putter around with, a
full-size job. Finding out the bad places ahead, and then steering
around them, preventing.”

“That’s a pretty big order of a thought, Gerkes.”

“Nothing particularly new about it. Preventive philanthropy is here.”

“It’s new if a fellow hasn’t given it any particular thought.”

“It’s a more thankless job to prevent hookworm than to cure it.”

“Doubtless. But the basis of progress, I’ve always held, in my
business, is elimination, Gerkes. Get rid of excess baggage----”

“I maintain, avoid excess baggage.”

“There’s a world of practical wisdom behind that idea.”

“I’m going to bury myself behind that idea some day--north--where the
nights are long and cold and quiet--fit for a man to work in.”

Out of a ten-minute silence that continued to be as inwardly exciting
as anything that had ever happened to him, filled as it was with the
words of Gerkes surging in birth against the brain of Rarick, there
came from Rarick something, this laconic:

“Wonder you don’t marry, Gerkes, before you dig yourself into those
long Arctic nights you’re always talking about.”

“Extraordinary you should mention that.”

What then! The sly fellow had lifted the thought off his mind.

“Fact is, Rarick, I’m about to.”

(Sly fellow.)

“Yes?”

(Could it be that Hildegarde had been equally sly? Good!)

“Yes.”

“Yes? Have I met the lady?”

“No.”

“Oh!”

Silence.

“Who is she?”

“An Eskimo.”

“A what?”

“Eskimo. I met Illun twelve years ago on my first expedition to
Mackenzie River. Her father is a fur-trader.”

“Eskimo!”

“Yes. Then, six years ago, I met her in Nome, where she was stopping
with her father’s brother, also a trader, and attending high school.”

“So....”

“She’s back in Alaska now, teaching. The Eskimos are close about family
ties and the old mother is pretty well along. We’ve drifted for years.
Waiting. But I have about made up my mind that too much is enough. Life
is passing us by. I’m going back, Rarick.”

“For her?”

“No, to her. Curious thing, from your point of view, anyhow, but
Eskimos, accustomed as they are to rigors of climate, do not thrive in
our so-called temperate parts. I do in theirs. I’m going to them.”

“I see.” Gerkes, Rarick figured, as he sat dumbfounded, would have
received news as surprising to him as this was to Rarick, with the
non-committal attitude of one who is the complete cosmopolite. Besides,
one did not betray anything so personal as surprise to Gerkes.

“The old folks still live out on the edge of the town. But Illun, who
is teaching in the next village, lives with an American family of
missionaries named Anderson. For solid comfort, Rarick,” said Gerkes,
taking the crystal bowl of _fin_ champagne from a butler, “I recommend
a well-built Eskimo house.”

“I see.”

“I’ve work to do, Rarick. This scheme of life down here lures me away
from singleness of purpose. At my best, Rarick, when I’m surrounded by
the world itself, instead of its clatter, I’ve a single-track mind. One
thing matters pretty terribly to me. Facts. Then from there, truth.”

“Fine. Fine.”

“I need leisure. These lectures--pah! I need simplicity. I need the
long white nights for work and my leisure for the contacts with the
strange wisdoms of simple people. I need to think. Life with Illun on
the Colville River can give me all these. Can you understand this?
Down here, everything is going out, precious little coming in. I
need leisure, Rarick, damnably, and my finger-nails out of my palms.
I’ve books to write. Collections to assemble. There is knowledge and
truth for me to unearth before I bow out in demise. I am one of those
scientific-minded hounds with a nose to the truth-scent. Facts are more
panoramic, more majestic, more extraordinary than fantasy. I need
leisure to run them down.”

“And money?”

“God, yes!”

“Would you still go North?”

“More than ever. I tell you, I’m digging in, Rarick, for my long white
night. A woman who is attractive to me. Books. Leisure. Simplicity. My
big work now lies in assembling knowledge. I need money for men who are
still young enough to get out into the fields and feed my mind with
their findings. I want to send an expedition to Abyssinia to do some
digging there. I want to study certain of the flying-bases between
Nome and Shanghai. There are weather observations I want made, over a
sustained period, from a Greenland observatory. I want men to follow
up the fine excavations that Scotelly started last year before his
death in Brindisi. My active years are done. Now I want to assemble and
deduce.”

“I’m going to give you the money for that, Gerkes.”

“That’s mighty fine of you, Rarick. I’ve wondered a bit about you
and your plans for making your wealth reap. The root of all evil
lies in the root. As I was saying, there is curative and preventive
philanthropy. Forestall the root. The great trend of modern
humanitarianism, Rarick, lies in preventive measures. The way to
prevent fallacy is to know truth. Buy truth with your money, Rarick; it
is cheap at any price. Bear that in mind when you decide to put your
terrific house in order.”

“I’d like to give you a million, Gerkes.”

“The world, Rarick, is your debtor for that. Not I.”

“I’ll assign it as an endowment to you.”

“No, don’t do that. Organize a fund-committee to finance my expeditions
as I need and form them. One that will keep me in bounds, but at
the same time give me free enough rein in my choice of actual and
intellectual excavation.”

“And you?”

“Leave me out, Rarick. I’m headed for my white nights of long leisure.”

“Even there, you must live.”

“I’ve saved a bit.”

“How much?”

“I think I stack up to somewhere around fifteen hundred in the bank.”

“You’ll need more.”

“Well, you might allow me about fifty a month, Rarick, if you’ve a mind
to. It will cost me around that much to afford the leisure for work.”

It occurred to Rarick, sitting there, sharing with his friend their
unspoken pangs at the prospect of parting, that it cost his own family
about eighteen thousand dollars a week, to afford leisure for play.




Three weeks later, the Jennys made the trip down from upper Quebec by
motor, a second car, containing two personal maids and the lighter
luggage, following.

A premature burst of spring was already on the heels of a languid
winter, so that much of the trip was taken on dry roads and to the
first freckling of foliage.

Lovely. Lovely. Lovely. Particularly lovely to a pallid Jennifer, who
had a habit nowadays of seeing through a glass not so much darkly, as
dimly. Low vitality, her doctors easily termed it. There was no form
yet to the leaves, or even color. Just the soft pointed promise of
them. Lovely. Lovely. Lovely.

Jenny, whose effort all the way down from Canada had been not to
seem too constantly excited, was grateful, too, for the loveliness.
It helped to account for the exultant something that kept rising and
overflowing in her. Ramon was along!

He had spent two of the three weeks with them in camp. Jennifer had
been glad for her mother’s sake. Her incredible mother, who could while
away time, for want of something better, with this boy, pleasant enough
timber for an evening’s flirtation, provided there was plenty of the
slow windings of tango music to sustain illusion, but who had actually
sufficed to keep her mother amused during all of what might have been
the interminable stretches of their stay at camp.

Could it be that he was smitten with her mother? The slim thought
trailed through her tired mind and petered out as she sat looking out
at the flashing of spring....

How good her mother had been! How heavenly good! From that strange and
terrifying moment when her father had sat looking at her as if his eyes
were conflagrations that would leap out in flame over her body, the
dearness of Jenny had poured like sweet oil over the terrible burnings
from those eyes.

The indulgent compassion of this woman where her children were
concerned! What if she petted them even more than she pitied or
understood them? What if to try to explain to Jenny the minute phases
of her torture was to bring down upon herself an avalanche of automatic
maternalism that sometimes made her wild with frenzy!

“Mother, please, please don’t keep on talking. You’ve said that over
and over again. I know you think there are as good fish in the sea as
ever came out of it. You’ve told me. What good does that do me if I
don’t care what is in the sea? For God’s sake, Mother, please----”

Not even such an outburst could puncture the quality of Jenny’s
compassion.

“He’s not worth the nail of your little finger, much less the mental
anguish you are wasting on him.”

“I know. I know. I know it all by heart. Only don’t keep on saying it,
mother, or I’ll go screaming mad.”

“I know, dear, I know. I know.”

“You know!” laughed Jennifer, scornfully, one midnight when clad in
pajamas, she had been walking the floor of the long living-room of
the main camp, and her mother, hearing her, had tiptoed down with a
fur coat thrown over the flimsiness of her nightdress. “You know!”
Jennifer had risen from a sleepless bed, and her hair was tousled
and angry-looking, and one of her cheeks, too hot, was smeared with
crinkles from where it had dug and dug into the pillow. “You know! What
do you know of anything that I am going through!”

What did Jenny know? Thank God, Jennifer did not know what she knew;
but just the same, sitting wrapped in fur, she hugged herself with
knowing. What did Jenny know? She knew the torment and the ecstasy of
Jennifer, because they were boiling within her, too--every one of these
precious spring-kissed days and nights.

Upstairs, since they had not troubled to open the men’s dormitory-camp,
in a beautiful old spool-bed, Ramon, who had arrived a few days before,
was asleep under sheets that she had personally laid out for him;
under thick silk puffs that she had personally chosen. There would be
the first two crocuses of spring on his breakfast tray that she would
journey down to the edge of the wild blue lake to pick. What did the
older Jenny know of the excruciating pangs of love? Impudent Jennifer,
to assume she knew little.

“My darling, you are all unnerved----”

“I know I’m your darling, mother, and that I am unnerved, but, for
God’s sake, don’t keep telling me about it!”

“My darling, do you know what a serious nervous breakdown you are sure
to have if----”

“Pretty question. Oh, no! I don’t know. I think, instead, that I am
lying in the arms of my lover--his lips are soft----”

“Jennifer!”

“O God! mother, I’m flighty! I didn’t mean that. I loathe his lips.”

“Of course you do, darling. He’s a dog. My poor darling!”

“I’m a fine darling.”

“I’ll get you well, my sweet. You’re in a trance of infatuation now.
You can’t help it. Mother understands.”

Strange words for one Jenny to be using to another.

Scene after scene Jenny had lived through with Jennifer those weeks,
walking her through woods of wild, frozen beauty; through stiff March
winds, until their limbs sagged. Tiring Jennifer. Exhausting her.
Imbuing her with a sense of nausea for the potion she was craving,
until, the last week of their stay, Jennifer was sleeping through
entire nights.

Ecstatic nights for Jenny, wakeful even in her tiredness, as she lay
there under the same roof with Ramon....

Riding homeward through the woods that were preening themselves for
outburst, the something that Jennifer had promised Jenny was dead
within her, began to lift its head. Through woods of running sap she
was riding back to the city that contained Berry! He would be under a
roof that was no farther from hers on Fifth Avenue than the lake had
been from the camp. Berry was at the end of this beautiful trail. Would
be within easy telephone call. Within messenger call. Berry! Poor boy!
How bewildered he must have been these weeks, since that night she had
stood him up as he waited for her in his car at a spot which she had
appointed at a west-side gate to the Park. The letters she had written
him since and never sent! There was one now, tucked on the flesh
side of the single little orchid-colored undergarment she wore. The
gravitation of the universe was toward Berry----

Mother had been a brick, all right, content to have burrowed-in up
there at camp, while there was some of the season left in town, to say
nothing of Florida. Making the best of the unseasonable isolation,
content to sit in the back of the car all the hours of riding with
Ramon, while she crouched silently beside the chauffeur, where there
was relief from the din of talk. Mother had been a brick, all right,
but, oh, how damned, damned, damned futile! As if you could stop
Niagara with a handkerchief. As if you could douse a house-afire, with
a squirt of eau-de-Cologne.

Jennifer had learned to sleep in camp. That meant Jennifer was
getting well. That meant Jennifer was coming out of the trance of
the infatuation for Berry, who wasn’t worth her little finger-nail.
Jennifer had promised. Darling dumb-bell Jenny; when the truth of it
was that Jennifer was flying back on purring motors to the land of
Berry. He was in New York. Madness of her, to have let them put miles
between them. He was in New York--enchanted destination.

It was difficult; it was impossible, sitting up there beside the
chauffeur, spinning through spring, to discipline one’s thoughts, when
the craving set in to see Berry. Just to be with him, to watch the
squint come out along his eyelids when he talked; to get the faint cool
scent of him; to tremble to his nearness; to withhold the hands from
making little curved cups of themselves to inclose his cheeks. His
strong hair that was full of a strange electric life. Berry’s life. It
was hard to keep down an insanity of desire through the craving, and
to sit silently beside the chauffeur and say to oneself, as a child
repeats a catechism: “No-good Berry. Cad. Snide. Here is a man about
to be a father. Jennifer, have you no pride? No decencies? No. No. No.
And, damn it, I’m glad!” The days were fiery furnaces of desire for
Berry. The nights. The weeks. The ride all the way to New York, hills,
dales, mountains, rim-roads, and the thick slush of thawing mud, was
one such fiery furnace.

Thank God, Jenny was content to sit with that beautiful nobody-home of
a Ramon there on the back-seat and let her be.

At Albany she could already begin to feel, in anticipation, that
moment of the rounding of her fingers about the pink-enamel French
telephone in her boudoir, that would bring Berry’s voice to her. It
was wonderful to be able to crave until you suffered like that. Why
not? Who was to say where sacred love began and profane love left off?
What had Nature’s scheme to do with puny, man-made ones? They had
sent her scuttling away like any finishing-school girl, to get over a
love-affair, as if miles were a panacea. If you could speak of this
leaping terrific glory of a thing that was her passion for Berry in the
innocuous terms of “love-affair,” then the Himalayas were pretty, the
Grand Canyon cute, and God a right nice God.

Two hours below Albany, Jenny placed her hand in its white crinkled
gauntlet, along her daughter’s arm.

“Jennifer dear, we’ll go down along the West Side, by way of the river
drive, so we can drop Ramon at his apartment before we go home.”

Damn! Damn! Damn! That would delay them ten minutes. Her fingers ached
for the pink-enamel telephone....

On the other hand, to Jenny, the river drive meant a detour, and ten
minutes longer with Ramon.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was not quite dusk when the car slid up before the doors that had
been copied from the Florentine Campanile. A messenger boy was running
down the steps. In fact, the doors that had swung open to emit him
remained open to admit the mistress of her house and her daughter,
chauffeurs, maids, and butlers already scurrying in the service
entrance with furs, bags, and what not.

It was strange, in a household where the telegraph-boy was a figure
woven carelessly into the pattern of every-day, that the sight of this
one running down the steps should have bitten into Jenny’s heart with a
pang of scare.

“Was that telegram for me?” she asked.

“No, madam, for Mr. Rarick.”

“Where is he?”

“In the library. Shall I let him know that you have returned?”

“No.”

“If you don’t mind, mother, I’ll rush on up to my rooms to
rest--alone----”

“Yes, Jennifer.”

For some reason which she was later never able to analyze, Jenny,
instead of following Jennifer to the left, and thereby avoiding the
chance of an immediate encounter with Rarick, went up by the right of
the broad staircase, and, trailing her heavy motor coat back off her
shoulders, hurried to the library.

Its beautiful quality of dusk, as she entered, was being rattled into
by the mechanical organ, which was repeating the famous “_Ah! fors e
lui_” of Violetta, as if some one had forgotten to turn it off, the
stained-glass story of “La Traviata” marching before Rarick, who was
seated at the far end of the room in his unicorn chair, a telegram
crushed in the hand from which he had just read it.

On one of those flashes out of the blue about which one hears but which
one so seldom sees, Jenny looked at her husband calmly and said, “Avery
is dead.”

He began to nod his head, regarding her all the while with eyes made
out of two white chinies.

She started to laugh. She could not stop. She could not stop, because
Rarick, sitting there, could not seem to stop nodding. And, nodding,
didn’t he look for all the world like the bisque bull that used to
stand on the mantelpiece in the pressed-brick house of her parents in
St. Louis? It had been a black-and-white china bull, with a head that
nodded. Every time there were to be guests, her mother used to tiptoe
in just before arrivals and start it nodding.

Rarick, replying to her that Avery was dead, kept on nodding like that
bisque bull....




To think that out of the innocent dawn of a new day could be minted the
phrase, “Avery is dead.” That phrase had not existed yesterday.

Twenty-four hours before, Avery had been alive, and, mark you, need not
have died. This was not death inevitable and God’s will be done. This
was not death demanding.

Avery had killed himself.

There had been a small note, written in blue pencil, and stuck into a
mirror in his bedroom:

  Dears, it was too much.... A.

They had followed the scent of gas and wrenched the tube from between
his teeth.

“They” (a landlady and a negro houseman in a white-duck coat) had been
the first to stumble across the strange and almost unendurably precious
fact of the death of this life.

“They” had turned in police alarms about it.

And it should have been handled so privately; as privately as the
slender spar of a body that had been Avery had suffered. And instead,
over this wounded-to-death boy in his casket, the newspapers of the
country had become a giant composite ass, braying:

  SON OF FIVE-AND-TEN MULTIMILLIONAIRE KILLS SELF NEAR COLLEGE CAMPUS

  FAMILY UNABLE TO ATTRIBUTE MOTIVE FOR THE SUICIDE

  NOTE FROM HIS FATHER, JOHN G. RARICK, FORBIDDING HIM THE PURCHASE OF
  A SEVERAL-THOUSAND-DOLLAR CAMP-EQUIPMENT FOUND AMONG HIS EFFECTS


  ANOTHER COLLEGE SUICIDE

  ONLY SON OF JOHN G. RARICK, AMERICAN CHAIN-STORE MILLIONAIRE,
  DISCOVERED BY LANDLADY DEAD FROM ASPHYXIATION

  DEATH ATTRIBUTED TO DEMAND FOR LUXURIES WHICH WERE DENIED HIM BY
  SELF-MADE FATHER


  SOCIETY SHOCKED BY SUICIDE DEATH OF ONLY SON OF JOHN G. RARICK. COMES
  AS SHOCK TO FAMILY. MRS. RARICK PROSTRATED. FAMILY IN SECLUSION.

Let them bray. Let them bray. It was better so. It covered up the
private, timid truth. The truth lay scattered in documents, some of
them torn across the page; in composition-books filled with boyish
scrawls; in half-written letters; in hand-written and hand-bound
volumes of verse that lay in a heap on the table on which John Rarick
leaned his face into his hands.

It was as if the contents of the heart of Avery, the soul and the mind
of Avery, unlocked from the vault of his nineteen years, had been
spilled there in broken utterances of torment.

This was his boy out there, in strange autopsy before him, the history
of his defeat, his pain, his lightnings of ecstasy that had apparently
been as unbearable as the pain, like chipped bits of cornice of the now
cold marble of his being.

There, spread over the table, in writings, were the truths that for
nineteen years had lain hidden from his father by the mere wall of
boy-flesh.

God! God! God! That wall had been flesh of Rarick’s and yet it had
shut him out. The door through that wall, not forty-eight hours
before, had been a living, breathing heart with a key to it--nobody
to blame--nobody to blame--least of all Avery--except--unbearable
loneliness of the thought--not even his mother had ever found the key
to it. Certainly Rarick had not.

He beat with his fists upon the table; he scorched his eyes upon the
revealing lines of the documents that had been brought him from his
dead son’s effects. He read and reread:

This boy, then, written there on the scraps of paper, whose torment
had been the strange inchoate torment of poet, adolescent, dreamer and
diviner, potential lover, and adventurer in Hellenic islands around
which flowed the blue Mediterranean of imagination, had been the Avery
of the flesh. The fledgling who had smoked the strange little hooked
pipes, that looked insolent and smelled badly. The Avery who had
piled up card debts. The Avery whose wants, at least as interpreted
by his mother, God forgive her, had been the speed motor-boats,
the special-body roadsters, the dressing-cases, gold-fitted, the
five-thousand-dollar camping outfits, the monstrous checking accounts,
polo ponies....

Some lispings of what Avery had really wanted rose in faint perfume off
the pages of the book of sophomoric verse which he had written in a
fine, painstaking, private kind of chirography that bore no resemblance
to the modish scrawl he had shown the world.

Even his very handwriting had seemed to curl inward--away----

He had tried, in those notebooks, for the perfection of the
sonnet. In fourteen lines, had begged the right to “walk the
untessellated grandeur of simplicity.” The boy who at seventeen had
appeared in Sunday rotogravure sections for the perfection of his
riding-accouterments, wrote in plaintive, if obviously Shelleyan mood
of that “brighter freedom,” and of “peace, cerulean-blue.” Sang in
whispered numbers among the ruled pages of the composition-books of
“the pain that lies under the heart and is canker there.” Rarick
followed these lines with the stub of his finger, and went back again
and again. “The pain that lies under the heart and is canker there....”

“Avery, was that your only heritage from me ... that hurting canker
there...?”

  Dears, it was too much.... A.

What was too much? Jenny, you, up there, can you answer that? What had
been too much for him? What had?

His bewilderment had been too much. His frailty, his hunger, glimpsed
through darting, wing-swift beauties. His desire for some one to share
those moments when “pain broke like surf into starry ecstasy.” Page
after page of Avery, in treble, sophomoric mood, crying for a hand in
his, through the aisles that were tormentingly black....

Avery, boy, why not my hand? I would have given....

Life had been too much for him.

Pages and pages of saying it in treble iambic and slenderly lyric
sonneteering.

There was free verse too, waddling thinly down the white sheets. “My
heart is a grail of many-colored glass. It contains me--and yet--want
out--translucent whiteness----”

Not bathos to Rarick, nor mewling of a spirit in the throes of trying
to cast off its swaddlings. But Avery, whose heart had died wanting the
Pyrenees.

And this was the boy whom his father had not dared to approach on even
the matter of an experimental theater....

This was the boy....

There were pages of the journal that broke the heart, when it was
endurable to read them through.... “My dear mother, who is everything
to me and absolutely nothing....”

“When I look at my own mother and father, I realize that I have never
seen anything so beautiful as their marriage is dreadful ... there
are worse lonelinesses than mine ... whom I admire so much more
than I like.... Would like to go up to him and say.... Look here,
Father----Why--why--cannot even write it----”

Say it to me now, son. It may seem too late, but not for everything.
Say it to me now----

“... Mother, now, has nothing to fall back upon but the excitements
that take the place of imagination. What I cannot understand is
Jennifer, who is so much more than clever, and yet to whom cleverness
matters above everything--nice Jennifer who cares so terribly--about
the things that are not worth caring about ... if only father would ...
if only father would----”

That, too, was unfinished. If only father would what? Call it back to
me, Avery--if only father would what?----

There was a fragment of a letter that had apparently been crushed and
torn in three pieces. A third of it was left. It had been written to
his father on the subject of a year he wished to spend in Paris.

“... months of hesitation lie behind this request--feel the need of
getting my bearings--think we could understand each other if only--my
great admiration for you--hesitate to say--too much for me--time
to think--alone--hesitate--unable to say to you face to face--what
I--alone to think and work and dream--please don’t think--beauty of
ideals--please don’t think--young man must believe first and--hesitate
to say--Father please----”

Upstairs, Jenny lay on her bed, chill after chill of crushed heart,
crushed pride, crushed hope, racking her thin body. Rarick had tried
his part in comforting, but everyone who appeared in the room seemed
to stalk at her out of this catastrophe, so finally the doctor forbade
even Rarick, or Jennifer, who sat for the most part in her bedroom,
close to its pale walls, and huddled there.

Down in the library, which seemed to wrap itself grandly about this
occasion, was stretched the boy out of whose incredible act had sprung
the new-coined phrase, “Avery is dead,” lying straight and beautiful as
ivory in his casket.

“God! God! God!” cried Rarick from his clenched lips, through his
clenched eyelids, down into his clenched heart. “Teach me through my
failure! Avery, call back to me!...”

No way to turn....

Yet, out of all the deluge of mail and telegrams and cablegrams that
came pouring through the defeated silence of that house, was one for
Rarick, a Western Union message that he kept folded in his pocket and
took out to reread occasionally.

At first he had not recognized the signature:

  I think I understand the thing you did not get said to Avery.

                                         GRATTON DAVIES.

Gratton Davies? Ah, ah, yes! That likable young fellow on the
committee, who had written _Herod’s Mask_.

Somehow it was the only message out of hundreds that was to open the
way for tears to work their thin, tortuous way from his clenched heart
to his clenched eyelids.


JENNY

What, what, in God’s name, had prompted this death act of Avery’s? How
could this darling of her indulgence, her adoration, have snipped the
cord that bound his heart to hers, as casually as you would snip the
cord on a candy-box?

How could an offshoot of her own body-fiber have committed an act so
outside the dimensions of her own comprehensions?

One did things like this for concrete reasons. There had been no
love-affair. Avery’s adolescence had been almost too timid. There had
been no debts. Notwithstanding the ugly and humiliating innuendos of
the headlines, Jenny had always seen to it that Avery’s pockets were
well stocked, even when his bank account was exhausted and his father
questioning and stern.

Slow, smoldering conviction became Jenny’s that Rarick had been the
stone wall before which Avery had found life meaningless.

Rarick had crossed him so constantly. Passively, rather more than by
deed or stricture. That was what made it maddening to her and subtle.
You could not quite put your finger on--anything. And yet, it was
impossible not to know how dumbly and how gropingly he had failed to
understand his boy. Rarick was not vicious. He was just part of the
failure.... Her heart even bled for him, as he sat alone, looking at
the glow in his stones for hours on end now, or with Gerkes, in those
weeks preceding his departure, while the organ plowed up the more
melodious of the operas. Sometimes, particularly after the departure of
Gerkes for absurd points north, Rarick was just sitting. Pity of a sort
lay in her heart for him. Pity of sorts lay in her heart for herself.

She had been a good mother, neither Avery nor Jennifer nor even Rarick
himself had denied her that. Wherein had she failed? Or had Avery
failed? Her dear. Her beautiful. She had seen to it that his hands were
crammed unto bursting with all her love and indulgence could give
him. Nor had she stopped there, which would have made indictment of
her easy. She had crept into his spiritual life as far as she dared.
She had once discharged one of his tutors whom she suspected of being
agnostic. When Avery was twelve, she had attended a series of morning
lectures, at the Plaza, on “You and Your Child,” and had taken him for
a drive one morning before he left for Newberry, and told him “plain
little facts,” to which he had politely listened, without surprise or
embarrassment, or even, she suspected, enlightenment. The one, “Babies,
dear, do not just grow under the heart; it is not quite so simple as
that,” had not quite come off as the lecturer had anticipated. Avery
had sniggered.

But he had sent her roses that afternoon. When he was only fourteen,
there had been grace to Avery! Tears were at the edges of her lids
these months after the death, ever quick ones, ready to flow.

To go back and back and back, could there, after all, have been a
hopeless passion for a girl? Or a woman? Or was there something secret
and terrible that a mother could not understand? Ah no! Avery was
innocent. There was the case of young Tremoil, the college-senior
son of Augustin Tremoil, president of the Civic Bank, who had been a
college suicide over his hopeless infatuation for the happily married
wife, eleven years his senior, of a French viscount. No, no, there
had been no such attachment in the life of this boy of hers. Nothing
in his papers indicated it. Or, for that matter, indicated anything.
Just bits of verse--so sweet--and the journals of any growing lad. She
had not read them through. Rarick had sort of hogged them greedily for
himself, as if for what comfort he could squeeze out of them. Jenny had
for herself the sweet, personal mementoes. Things. Avery’s beautiful
platinum watch, the flatness of a dollar, that had ticked near to the
dear tick of his heart. Avery’s beautiful books. This superb edition of
Shelley. His collection of portraits of Shelley. His beautiful pearl
studs that had lain to the beat of his dear heart. She had thought of
the pearly quality of his pallor as she had purchased the set. Avery’s
signed photograph of Tagore. Out of it all, Jennifer had only asked for
his mauled copy of Marie Bashkirtseff.

Yes, Jenny had the dear things. Over them she cried and she cried.
His own portrait, in a soft shirt open at the neck, and his fair hair
seeming to fly backward to some breeze.

  Dears, it was too much.... A.

What was too much, my darling? Avery, my darling, what, oh, what?
Avery, am I in a dream? Are you dead?

It was to Ramon she turned.

“Oh, my darling,” she told him over the small table of a
smaller-than-ever tea-room in West Ninety-seventh Street, where they
were venturing to meet, “you must be everything to me now.”

“You will not let me be.”

She knew what he meant. Ramon was more and more restive. This furtive
meeting here and there was degrading. To both. Sure as fate, it would
begin to attract notice. Cannot get away with this kind of thing
indefinitely.

“Yes, yes, darling, but----”

“But why procrastination? This eternal procrastination. Two years of it
now....”

“Darling, you are killing me. If ever I needed to mark time, it is now.
Lightning has struck my life....”

His beautiful black eyes could fill with tears for her. The death of
Avery, whom he had never seen, had affected him in a manner strange
to him. He, to whom sickness was an ugly misdemeanor, felt a strange
beauty in Avery’s kind of death. He thought of this boy nights, as he
lay trying to sleep. He had died with the flower of his body in full
bloom. No decay. No organs withering of disease. Avery had reminded him
of some one who had looked through the door of life, found what he saw
not pretty, and bowed out. The superb insolence of that gesture cast a
strange luster over the mother of such a boy.

She had given life, and the power of death, to that slim blond fellow
whose photograph, in a soft shirt with the neck open, was smeared now
with her tears. The glow of vicarious mystery was out over Jenny these
days. How damnable life was! Ramon, who wanted desperately to live,
yet found it so hard to be allowed to live. Struggle. Struggle. That
most precarious of struggles for existence off the whimsical bounty of
women. That strange boy in the photograph, with the open collar and
the hair flying backward like a woman’s in the wind, had willed not to
live, because the bursting cornucopia of life’s good things for him had
overflowed and suffocated him.

What a strange, a terrible, a revealing, a shameful note, “It was too
much.”

Too much, when Ramon, who loved life, was starving. Well, anyway,
starving for the good things of life. Perhaps this tragedy was
writing on the wall. Good times ahead. Out of the machine-stitched
infatuation which he allowed himself for this enormously rich woman,
must come security. Yes, “allowed oneself the infatuation” was what it
amounted to. One must live. It made it pleasantly decent that in his
relationship with this woman, who could do much for him, he had been
able to steam up a certain modicum of fascination. It gave him ethical
standing with himself.

Curious, slim, greenish woman, sitting opposite him in the glamorless
little tea-shop. Mother of a beautiful boy who had done a strange, wild
thing. Her grief made her sweet.

“Sweetheart, when you cry, your eyes are like deep pools filled with
sea water that cannot break into surf.”

“What would I do without you, Ramon? I need things like that said to
me. I’m frightened, Ramon. Life has showed a fang at me. Ramon, I was a
good mother to him. You know that!”

“You were too good, Jenny.”

“You mean I spoiled----”

“God has no use for protection. It leaves Him idle----”

“You are perfection, Ramon.”

“I am kissing you,” he said, letting his eyes, that were velvet to her,
lie along her narrow fretted face.

“Ramon,” she said, giving words to a thought that had smitten and
smitten her, “do you think it--possible--that some way--somehow--my
boy--could have known--about us----”

That thought, too, had flashed through his brain.

“That, Jenny, you know is impossible.”

In a way she did, only the thought would wedge in.

“He idealized me. He was sensitive. That could kill....”

“He was too much of a poet. He would have idealized our love.”

“You dear! You would see it that way.”

He laid hands over her small cold ones.

“Strange you,” he said, confusing her with the strange aura of the
strange death that hung over her.

“Am I strange to you, Ramon?”

“Only in the sense that the strange is beautiful and full of mystery,
like a little sea-flower captured in a bottle.”

“In that sense, Ramon, I think I was strange to my boy.”

“Strange....”

“He must have found life too--too----”

“Too exquisite.”

“Too exquisite.”

Too exquisite. They bandied words, prettily minted ones, across the
table, their glances jeweled with points of excitement.

“Too exquisite on one hand, Jenny--too putrid on the other.”

He meant Rarick. The strange, locked sense of her second-rate loyalty
kept her silent. With his capacity for reticence at the right moment,
he let the conversation end abruptly, as at a precipice, folding her
once more into the cloak of his dark-velvet glance.

“It is easy to imagine a death for love of you, Jenny.”

“You are all the strength I have, Ramon.”

He put out his hand again, stroking hers, insinuating his palm beneath
her palm.

“Ramon, dear, please! Those people at that table are glancing at us.”

He drew back stiff, taut, flushing down into his collar; and suddenly
she too flushed riotously.

“Dearest--of course. I have not forgotten what you asked in your note.
Here--forgive----”

She felt out timidly for his offended hand, pressing it, leaving a
small, folded five-hundred-dollar bill in it.


JENNIFER

“The death of Jennifer Rarick’s brother has played the dickens with
her,” people were saying in one way or another.

It had played this kind of a dickens with her, sobering her in a way
that made her dull, most of all to herself.

“I’ve gone dry rot,” she said one night to her mirror, propping her
cheeks in her palms and gazing at herself through a sudden attack of
inertia that had swooped down upon her in the midst of dressing for
an early-dinner appointment that had kept her knees feeling like sand
under her all day.

The dinner appointment was a clandestine one with Berry. They were
to meet and dine at a business men’s chop-house near Wall Street.
Afterward, Berry was to join his mother-in-law for another dinner and
a benefit performance of “The Port of Salute.” Jennifer was also to
dine with Hartley Slocum at the Ambassadeur Club and go on to that same
occasion. It was not the first time that their respective appetites,
blunted by the six-o’clock clandestine meal near Wall Street, were
later to be commented upon in the course of a second and more formal
meal.

It made it easier to eat as they met. Berry had discovered that it kept
down Jennifer’s late tendency to hysteria. Jennifer no longer made
terms, but complied.

There had been only four such occasions. The death of Avery had been
a crash into the apple-cart. Why couldn’t life jell neatly the way it
did in the copy-books? According to rhyme and reason, if there were
such, this hit between the eyes, this barge into the solar plexus, this
death of a boy, should have jerked her to the sanity for which she had
prayed those weeks at the camp. This should have made an end of that
monstrosity of her state of mind and soul and heart toward Berry. She
should have come through the fire of that ordeal of the death of a
life that had been sweet to her, cleansed. And here she was, with the
feeling of running sand through her knees, dressing to meet Berry.
Waiting to meet Berry, as she had been waiting since last they met.

“I can’t go,” she said, and began to cry weakly to herself in the
mirror. “I’m too tired to go. I’m too sick to go and I can’t not go.”

“Damn it!” as her eyes dried. “Berry was so much tripe.” Many happy
returns to him on the birth of a son, and may the next be twins! Well,
it would be worth the trip down to the Wall Street restaurant to see
him in this new rôle of father. Comedy lay ahead.... You didn’t go
sober over life just because of death--you certainly didn’t go sober
over death.

Avery had been in on the know, that was all, and had seen fit to pop
off. Thank God, one Rarick had dared to be honest about the waste of
time so solemnly called life. An Indian philosopher had said it! Time
passes. We don’t. Avery had turned into Time.

Fool nonsense called grief. One hurt, yes, like the devil. He had been
such a regular kid to be on to life that way, secretly down inside of
him.

He had written her a letter only a few weeks before. It was soggy now
with her secret tears:

  DEAR JENNIF: Come on up to college over next week-end and let’s talk.
  I’m for cultivating more of that indoor sport among the Raricks.

She had sent him, by telegraph, what she called one of their nuttyisms.

  Darling, can’t. I’m doppling with a darling doppus to a chic shindig
  on Saturday.

The darling doppus had been Berry and the chic shindig a furtive
rendezvous with him at a road-house where the tables offered the
doubtful seclusion of little three sided booths.

“Oh, darling,” she cried into her palms, sitting there half dressed
before her mirror, her maid dismissed, and lacking herself the impulse
to lift brush to her hair, “how in on the know you looked in your
beautiful coffin. Were you just afraid, Avery, or was it something too
terrible and adolescent to understand--or, I wonder, Avery, were you
just low-down frightened and a quitter?...”

“I’m frightened,” said Jennifer to herself, and lifted her face out of
her hands to regard it in the mirror. “You’ve knocked what few props I
had left right out from under me, Avery. I don’t want it all, any more
than you wanted it, only I don’t know what to do about it. I haven’t
got the guts, or I’ve got too many, to do it your way. Which is it,
darling? I don’t want to get dressed. I don’t want to go on. There’s
no place to go. All dressed up and no place to go, Avery. That’s me.
Why the devil did you, darling? It’s a mess. Was it on account of the
Rarick? God! but you did for him, Av! He looks as if somebody had put
him wise, five minutes after they had been sold to the McCreey chain,
to five million toy balloons that went cheap at enforced sale. He isn’t
a bad party. He deserved a better break. So did you, darling. Damned
little I did to see that you got it. That’s wisdom after the event,
like the Raricks. Why did you do it, Av? You’ve been on to the Jenny
ever since you were born. We both know that her square is crooked, but
it looks square to her. I’m for her, Av. So were you. Why did you do
it? I know--I know--only I can’t say it, any more than I can describe
the taste of tripe. Damn it, Avery, life’s got a core to it somewhere!
Look how many have nibbled through to it. The Rarick suspects the core,
only he hasn’t nibbled through. Gerkes has nibbled through, but on a
cotton apple. The world you thumbed your nose at, and quit cold, is
the Rarick-world. There are better ones. That’s why the copy-books say
riches can’t buy happiness. That’s why Indians, who sit and look all
day at their navels, are happy. Damn it, darling! I don’t want to sit
all day and look at mine. But I want to be happy, sweet Avery, and be
something decent to atone for the way life didn’t come off for you.
Damn it, I do!” sobbed Jennifer into her sobs.

A clock struck then, and Jennifer began climbing into what she would
have called her “dud.” A lace frock, the beautiful color of coffee,
well creamed. It weighed less than half a pound, cost three hundred
and sixty-five dollars, and its trade name in the fashion-show of the
French _couturière_ who had created it, had been “Irresistible.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Berry kept her waiting twenty minutes, so that she sat alone in the
business men’s restaurant, trying, behind her flaming discomfort,
to look interested in the large menu proclaiming its specialties of
grilled dishes. Fool to have come! Berry at last was probably going
to stand her up. He had begged her to leave off writing, not meaning
it, of course. Perhaps his new dignity as father of his son! Strange,
how curious that made her to see him, although to visualize him, even
vicariously, in the rôle that was almost unbearable to her, was pain.
Berry was the father of Leslie’s child, and here was Jennifer waiting
for him, the week after the birth, in a downtown restaurant, as she
sat trying to hide her face behind the huge menu of grilled chops and
planked steaks. Sickness of spirit smote her. She was on the point
of pushing back her chair and leaving the waiter an apologetic tip,
when the revolving-door spun Berry into the room, and with his usual
capacity to make any place he entered look busy, a hat girl, two
waiters, and a _maître d’hôtel_ bowed him to his place.

He ordered abruptly, without consulting her. She liked that. There was
a great straight seam horizontally across Berry’s brow. She tried to
remember if it had ever been there in unbroken line before.

“Well,” he said, and rubbed it, “this hasn’t been what you would call a
nice getaway. Too many lies.”

How matter-of-fact he was, and hot-looking, as if he had perspired.
Business men looked that way after a hard day. It made him appear like
a big rumpled boy. That softened her.

“You might have spared me this waiting around beneath a grilled mutton
chop, Berry.”

“Good lord, Jennifer!” he said, and looked at her with incredulity in
his big chiseled face. “Do you realize that I had a kid born a few days
ago? Nine pounds, all to the good.”

There was nothing to say to that, and so she stared with her palm up
against where she felt her throat beating.

“It’s a hell of a job, getting born, Jennifer.”

“Well, what do you expect me to do about it?”

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

They stared and stared across the catsup-bottle and the A-1 sauce
and the jar of chutney. Stared as if they could never have done with
staring.

“Look here, Jennif, make allowances.”

“For what?”

“Good God! for the birth of a man’s son.”

“Berry dear----”

“Jennifer dear----”

“I’m dense.”

“I--I’m--I guess I’m confused, Jennif.”

She wanted to feel, and she was not feeling; so she spoke words that
she felt she would have spoken had she been feeling.

“Dearest Berry, we’ve passed that milestone.”

“Whew, yes!”

“We’ve never exactly discussed what then--but doesn’t it seem to you
like release, Berry? Like a release for us, now that it’s over?”

“Where do you get that, Jennif?”

“She’ll be back in normal health now--Leslie----”

“I see.”

“There’s no question of money. You’ve both so much....”

“What the devil....”

“What the devil?”

“Yes? What? I say, Jennifer, it _is_ a hell of a job getting born.”

“Well, as I seem to have remarked before, what do you expect me to do
about it?”

They were staring again, across the chutney, staring and staring in
incredulity at each other. Simultaneously, the impulse to laugh smote
them. A side-twisting, strangulating gust of it shook Jennifer, not
hysterical, but what Berry later designated as an eleven-dollar,
orchestra-seat, below-the-belt laugh. He swept in on it. Waiters turned
away to hide their smiles behind palms, as, gasping, they regarded each
other across the table through the thick lenses of laughter-induced
tears; and no sooner were their faces untwisted of their simply
inexorable mirth, off they were again. It buckled them around the
waists. It strained at the chest. It jammed in their windpipes and made
them purple and full of exhausted little “oh’s” and “ah’s.”

“Oh! oh! oh!” gasped Jennifer, and clasped herself at the right side of
her waist line.

“Good lord!” panted Berry, and kept wiping at his tears, and poking his
handkerchief back into his breast pocket, and wiping his tears again
and poking it back. “I’ve paid eleven dollars an orchestra seat for a
laugh that didn’t come through like that. Whew! Now how do you think we
got that way, Jennifer?”

“I don’t know, Berry,” she said, still laughing in a soft exhausted way.

“Give you my word, Jennif. I think we were laughing at us.”

“I hope so, Berry. It will help me to seem funny to me.”

“What about me?”

“I--I’m afraid all of a sudden you are funny to me, Berry--and that’s
fatal.”

“To what?”

“Us.”

“Us is a nice word, Jennifer, when applied to us.”

“You don’t mean that. You wish to God I’d let you be.”

“Then what?”

“So you could settle down to being what you are at heart. A husband. A
fast, rich, gay stockbroker on the side, who thinks girls were made to
pinch and wives were made to have nine-pound sons. A father whose son
is a miracle, chiefly because he resembles his daddy.”

“Pretty picture.”

“I hate it more than you do.”

“Hang it, Jennif! I’ll say it, even at the risk of bringing down that
well-known scorn of yours--that kid, getting himself born as mine, gave
me the kick of a lifetime.”

“So it should, Berry.”

“Hang it, Jennif! I’ll say it again, even if I afford you the laugh of
your life, that kid getting himself born as mine gave me the kick of a
lifetime.”

“I hope it’s the only one he’ll ever give you.”

“Not nice.”

“Sorry, Berry.”

“Dear girl....”

“Don’t say that, Berry.”

“Now what?”

“Because it’s as if--as if I lifted the words off this table and put
them on your lips.”

“You should have been a writer of fantasies.”

“I’m a liver of them.”

“Nothing fantastic about this mutton chop,” he said, and slid a
black-handled steel knife into the “specialty of the house.”

“And I am expected to nibble boned breast of chicken with Hartley
Slocum at seven,” she said, slicing down, too, into mutton that flowed
red.

“And me, breast-of-something-or-other with my mother-in-law, who will
have many a bone to pick with me besides, if I’m late. Jennifer, ever
see a new kid?”

“Yes. They cause strong men to falter and bad girls to trek across the
snow----”

“Damn it, I like my kid! Now what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m afraid, Berry, I’m going to be noble.”

“God forbid!”

“I’m going to give you back to your wife and your chee-ild.”

“But I don’t want to be guv.”

“You do. Only, this surreptitious thing on the side with me satisfies
the bounder instinct in you. I satisfy your instinct for show-girls.
I’m one to you now, being pinched.”

“God, you can say the low-down to a man, Jennifer!”

“Funny, Berry, that I can say it to you so quietly. I’m all helped.
Look, I can throw away my crutches. Note the way in which she carves
her mutton chop until the bloody juices run, scoops up some baked
potato and says, ‘Pass the A-1 sauce.’ I’m awfully afraid something has
happened over this mutton chop, Berry. I’m out of love. I see you now
in your true light. Perforce, villain, you’re a family-man at heart.
You’re a Babbit in sheik’s clothing. I’m for you, but not after you.”

“If a man did the square thing by you and himself, he’d turn you over
his knee and spank you for making a continual fool of him, going and
coming.”

“That’s all that is needed to give this occasion the truly heroic
ending it deserves. I’m renouncing you, Berry, not--denouncing.”

“Why the devil....”

“Is your kid all beety and underdone? Do his fingers twine around
yours?...”

“Gad! a woman has got to be sure of herself to get away with that....”

“Does the sight of his crib warm the cockles of your heart? Why is it
cockles are always warmed?...”

“Damn it, yes!”

“Berry, there are little spangles all across your forehead. You’re
perspiring. Not nice. Hanky.”

“God! I wouldn’t treat a dog the way you’re treating me.”

“Neither would I. The husband-and-father technique applies to this case
better than canine technique would.”

“I’ll go!”

“Berry, I’m _for_ your kid----”

“I know you are. You’re so damned for him that I strongly suspect you
of being noble----”

“Maybe I am. But if that’s true--it’s such easy, incidental
nobility--it’s easy for me to want to play square by your youngster and
your wife, Berry--chiefly because I’ve come to the conclusion that one
good husband and father is worth more than a bounder.”

“But, Jennifer----”

“But, Berry----”

“Damn it, Jennif! now that this has happened--maybe it is for the best.”

“Maybe, nothing. Surely, you mean. Here, Berry, my hanky. Wipe
your forehead--it’s damp--and pay our check. You’ll be late for
Mother-in-law.”

“That’s my business.”

“No, Berry. Thank God, now it’s my business to see that you’re not late
for Mother-in-law.”

They drove uptown in his car, their fingers interlaced after an old
fashion between them, his knee ingratiated against hers, but in a
silence that began to embarrass.

“I say, Jennifer,” he said, as they approached the Plaza. “I say----”

“Don’t say, Berry,” she said. “It would spoil the perfect thing that
has happened between us. Wait until I’ve gone, and then say ‘Amen.
Fini. Curtain.’”

She alighted, leaving him standing bareheaded and perspiring, as she
ran up the hotel steps.

That was the night, after dinner and the benefit performance with
Hartley Slocum, that Jennifer met, for the first time, the author of
_Port of Salute_--a young man named Gratton Davies.




An idea began slowly, surely, and roundly to form itself in Rarick’s
brain. With the characteristically slow metabolism of a mind that
thinks its way cautiously to destination, even the consummation
took place so gradually that up to a certain point it was scarcely
perceptible to Rarick himself.

It was his way, nerve-racking, sometimes, to those dependent upon his
decision, to wake up one morning with clear-cut plan of action seeming
to spring full-grown out of long periods of what appeared to be a
languid series of procrastinations.

For instance, over a period of four and one-half years, Rarick had held
up certain final building decisions that had delayed the breaking of
ground for the Rarick Building almost beyond the endurance of those
intimately connected with the gigantic project.

At the conclusion of the fifty-fourth month of procrastination, certain
franchise developments and new subway constructions gave the delays
a most providential significance, although it had been impossible
to get out of Rarick whether he had foreseen, maneuvered, or been
just characteristically slow, careful, and lucky. There were those
who maintained that both the franchise developments and the subway
constructions had been the outgrowth of only the last six months of
the four and one-half years, and that it must have been foresight, not
insight. Hellman, who possibly was closest of all to this particular
situation, maintained a face carved out of cherry-stone, insinuating
with his manner, that circumstances similar to this happened too
frequently to leave doubt, in any except the most obtuse, of the
enormous quality of generalship behind such slow-moving maneuver.

On the other hand, there was Jenny, wife, to whom all things were still
flowing from the accident of her initial twenty-five hundred dollars.
This success of his, engendered by her, was merely going on succeeding
and succeeding....

The ideas, which, it seemed to Rarick now, must have been slowly
congealing in his subconscious mind for years and years before a chance
dissertation from Gerkes had jelled them, so to speak, had reached,
these months since the death of Avery, a sudden consistency.

Half-thoughts, semi-intentions, parts of ideas, seemed to come awake.
It was to be expected that Rarick, in his upper fifties, should already
have expended much thought upon the growing problem of the ultimate
dispositions of his ever-accruing fortunes. A man pondered over his
riches. Pondered and vexed himself over apportionments, contemplated,
wondered, and faltered. Rarick had done his share of all of these, and,
from time to time, always with ultimate revision in mind, had made
temporary wills to cover the exigency of sudden death, adding codicil
by codicil, as occasions arose.

It was when Avery had been dead a six-month that the slowly congealing
major idea became determination.

Day after day, in the maelstrom of his affairs, in conference, in trips
of coast-to-coast inspection, on tours through the raw scaffolding of
the partially erected Rarick Building; night after night, sitting in
his library in discussion with Gerkes, poring over his amulets or his
orchids, the idea, gathering specks from all corners of his mind, was
slowly swimming into pattern.

“The wealth which man draws from his fellow creatures as clouds draw
moisture from poisonous and sweet waters alike, must be made to
descend again in productive rains, or what availeth it?”

Or what availeth it? Avery had answered that. His death had
simultaneously seemed to promulgate and answer that question. Without
progeny of son, Rarick sat in his Gothic aisle, pondering his
responsibilities of disposing of a wealth that up to now had chiefly
accrued interest and objects.

According to the charts of the companies that carried his enormous
insurances, his span of life was two-thirds spent. Even with long-life
expectancy, and somehow in Rarick that expectancy had never run high,
the time had come when a man whose share in the wealth of the world, if
you figured it per capita, was several millions of human heads, must
prepare to put his house in order.

“The wealth which man draws from his fellow creatures as clouds draw
rain from poisonous and sweet waters alike, must be made to descend
again in productive rains, or what availeth it?”

There were books on Rarick’s night-table, Adam Smith’s _Wealth of
Nations_, Shaw’s _Socialism for Millionaires_, Karl Marx’s _Capital_,
Stuart Chase’s _The Tragedy of Waste_, Veblen’s _Theory of the Leisure
Class_, Weston’s _Economics for the Business Man_, William Morris’s
_Letters on Socialism_, John Stuart Mill’s _Principles of Political
Economy_, many of which he found out-of-date, confusing, un- or
mis-informing, and coldly technical.

Disposition of wealth, life being what it was, human ties being
what they were, was not a matter that springs so completely, as
the theorists seemed to reckon, out of the tenets of mathematics,
sociology, and geometric, economic patterns. Human equations of greed,
ego, blood-ties, preferences, hates, loves, sentiment, emotions,
irrationalities, devotion and lack of it, leaned into the situation.

The disposition of over one hundred million dollars according to
a man’s temperament, family, dependents, hobbies, preferences,
philanthropies, altruisms, wisdoms, principles, and conscientious
convictions, was a highly personal and complex matter, to say nothing
of the responsibilities, ethical and sentimental, for which there
was no proviso in the erudite volumes of economics, sociology,
philanthropy, or wealth in relation to peoples, land, cities, industry,
and countries.

The time had come, it seemed to Rarick, to formulate into words of
legal document, the groping convictions of years, which, aided and
abetted by what he regarded as certain brilliant thinking of Gerkes,
the death of his son had solidified in his mind.

Disposition of wealth. This much beyond a doubt: The members of his
family who survived him must be made safe from his millions. These
millions must be made to accumulate something besides interest and
objects. Bracelets and shields, as he had read it storied of the
Greeks, had also bewildered his son out of life. Smothered him to
death. This much beyond a doubt: The members of his family who survived
him must be made safe from those millions.

Wealth need not be in itself the arbitrary symbol of man’s ability to
exploit man, as it was painted in stiff chromo against the minds of
people like Hildegarde. Capital, yes, might be interpreted as that
which you in your strength continued to draw from the weak. Wealth,
if you were worthy of it, was what you turned back to them, wisely
minted....

The time had come when Rarick contemplated with obsession the turning
of his capital into wealth, wisely minted, into the largest crusade of
preventive scientific and sociological research ever launched as either
group or individual enterprise.

The wealth which man draws from his fellow creatures was not to descend
in a crushing, golden mantle upon such shoulders as Jenny’s, to whom
those fellow creatures by now had become so many millions of maggots
eating away the impedimenta of life for her, that she might walk in
glory.

It was thus out of the freighted solitudes of the long evenings of the
long months following the death of Avery, that Rarick began writing the
document that was to be his last will and testament.




The day the last steel beam was laid across the seventy-ninth story of
the skeleton of the Rarick Building, Hellman arranged a ceremonial;
a luncheon to take place under gay awnings on an improvised platform
erected among the mortar and bricks of the parapet that surrounded the
Gothic auditorium that topped the tallest building in the world.

It was a motion designed chiefly to catch the eye and headline of the
press. Tables were set up exclusively for reporters and feature-writers
at the most spectacular end of the platform, overlooking more span of
bridge, rush of skyscraper, and bird’s-eye panorama than had yet been
achieved from roof-top.

There were about seventy guests. Mayor. Aldermen. Health Commissioner.
Lieutenant-Governor. Borough Presidents. Superintendent of Schools.
Chief of Police. An ex-mayor of St. Louis and old personal friend of
Rarick’s. A half-dozen leading St. Louis citizens. The eight most
important executives of Rarick Chain, Inc. President of the Gray
Department Store Chain, in which Rarick was reputed to hold large
interests. Vice-president of Chicago Transit Company. Owner of the
San Francisco _Commercial Journal_. Attorney-General of the State of
Pennsylvania. Max Lindsey, internationally-renowned corporation lawyer.
Doctors, lawyers, merchants, yes, and even a fire-chief. Myron Stahl,
District Attorney. Ramon Lopez.

Wives had been invited. The publicity value of women present was
incalculable. Editors would give photographs of a mixed assembly twice
the space. Jenny had realized the indiscretion of asking Ramon; and
yet the explanation of his presence had seemed so obvious, almost too
trivial to require comment. She had motored down for the ceremony from
Roslyn, where she had been superintending the doing-over of the brace
of six beautiful bedrooms that overlooked a rose-garden, and had picked
up Ramon, who had been week-ending at the Breckenridge Scotes’, at
Scotes Manor, where she had stopped for luncheon. She had given him
and Eulalie Lett a lift to town, dropping Eulalie at Charvet’s for
a facial, and bringing Ramon along to the ceremonies. Nice boy--so
obliging----

Indeed, so trivial was the circumstance, that when she explained it to
Rarick, he scarcely heard; his nervous attention focused instead, on
the arrival of guests, as they stepped out of the narrow, improvised
elevator that they were obliged to take in three shifts, changing
from one at the twentieth floor to another, and then out again at the
sixtieth into a third, which completed the ascent.

Public ceremonial occasions were such painful and excoriating
anathema to Rarick that his consistent failure to accept civic and
honorary rôles could be traced to what amounted to an insurmountable
disability to occupy a president’s or chairman’s position. Even board
and directors’ meetings at which he must preside filled him with
apprehension. Usually he evaded parliamentary procedure by calling
conference in his office and seating the group about his desk, this
colossal shyness also accounting for the almost total lack of social
life in his scheme of things.

Hellman, who was always averring, averred that this inability to glean
the best from his fellow men, coupled with a certain humorlessness, was
what kept Rarick from his place among the truly great. Gerkes, in his
totally different way, practically said the same thing, when, one day,
apropos of Woodrow Wilson, whom he had known personally, he deplored
Rarick’s policy of going it alone.

On those rare occasions when his appearance at formal functions--such
as the Rarick Chain Twentieth Anniversary Banquet, the annual
Rarick Chain conventions, the laying of the cornerstone of the
Rarick Building, the dedication of the Rarick Stadium at a Missouri
university--was imperative, it took more hours of steeling his will to
make these appearances than even Hellman would ever realize.

It was rumored that Rarick paid Hellman, who was supposed to write his
speeches, stage such necessary formalities as these, and appear as
his proxy wherever opportunity presented, the sum of twenty thousand
dollars a year.

As a matter of fact, he paid him thirty.

This was one of the occasions when not even the machinations of Hellman
could prevent the affair from falling mercilessly on the shoulders of
Rarick, whose place of honor at the head of the T-shaped table, even
before the guests were assembled, had become dreadful to him at the
sight of the small ivory gavel there.

The page of typewritten address, of decorous phrases, mock humility,
and suave platitude, lay folded in the pocket of his stiff-feeling
cutaway; steep sills of language to be crossed by his faltering lips.
Presently, at whispered word from Hellman, he would push back the
fluted-paper cup of untasted pistachio ice-cream, rest his cigar on
the edge of the saucer of his demitasse, place the neat circle of his
watch in very precise position, clear his throat, strike his gavel, and
curtsy to the Mayor.

Your Honor the Mayor, ladies and gentlemen, friends--guests----

It was going to be blowy up on the roof. Gusts of wind snapped the
bunting. The sheet of paper containing Rarick’s speech would be sure
to wave and rattle. Sometimes, in spite of having memorized, it became
necessary for Rarick, because of the numb nervousness, to read his
address.

Greeting his guests as they stepped out of the makeshift elevator,
the tongue of Rarick lay like chamois in his mouth. The great little
magnate swallowed his tongue. The great little magnate was heavy with
dread.

The panorama from the highest roof in the world unrolled before his
glazed eyes. Dime by dime, brick by brick, he had built his pinnacle.
It was of steel and it seemed to him it swayed a little in the high
wind that was going to be sure to flutter his sheet of speech in his
nerve-tortured fingers.

The Rarick Auditorium tilted its Gothic-shaped eyebrows out over the
vastest expanse upon which windows had ever gazed. It seemed to Rarick
that too many forces were meeting here for his endurance to bear up
under. The agony of the nervousness. Altitude. That insistent, that
terrible sense of the swaying of steel. The harbor moving out to sea.
The crawling, remote island below, the streets as negligible-looking as
slots. The dipping heavens....

Congratulatory phrases and the shrill extravagances of the women
cluttered the high, clean altitude.

Marvelous. Breath-taking. Oh! Oh! Oh! Dramatic! Stupendous!
Incredible. Finest--biggest--highest--tallest--most terrific--most
expensive--gigantic--Oh!--Oh!--Look!--See!--What?--Where?
Finest--tallest--highest--so--American!

One shook hands. One accompanied this one and that one to
this ledge and that. That down there? Oh, of course, the
Equitable Building. Over there? I say, Hellman, is that
Metropolitan Tower? No-o--think that’s the Municipal
Building down there. Telephone Building. Oh no, forty stories
higher--wonderful--panorama--finest--biggest--tallest--highest--so
American----

As Hellman confided to his wife, a large overweight woman, who was
in turn suspected of writing Hellman’s speeches for Rarick, the old
gentleman was a ton of coal on top of the occasion. In all of the
scene of animation on the half-completed roof, Rarick’s was the one
hesitant figure, requiring, on the part of Hellman, constant watching
and steering, or inevitably he gravitated to a corner, there to stand
unanimated, his twitching hands under his coat tails, making inaudible
replies to the high falsettos of the women, meeting, but never making
overtures of conversation to the men.

As a host, Hellman again confided to his wife, as he rushed past her
to pilot Rarick to the Commissioner of Police, the old gentleman would
make a first-rate funeral-director.

Motion-picture machines ground. Cameras clicked. Groups leaned against
parapets and were photographed. The wife of the Mayor, in a feather
boa that was well known to rotogravures, was snapped with the wife of
Rarick, who posed tall and lean, with sables high about her neck and
wrists. The entire group of sixty was photographed. Then twenty. Then
ten. Finally Rarick and the Mayor.

Luncheon itself, served by a bankers’ club in Wall Street, was a cold
and tasteless affair by the time it was relayed up the seventy-nine
stories. The wind was a nagging one that became bothersome to the women
and forced Senator Grimes to dine with his high hat clamped tightly
down against neuralgia.

There were souvenirs. Snow-storm paper-weights of the Rarick Building
enclosed in crystal.

At the escarole-salad course, Miss Jennifer Rarick, slender in black
tailored things and high white fox, apologetically late and becomingly
breathless, arrived with a young man named Davies, for whom an extra
chair had to be crammed beside Jennifer’s.

The occasion marched to the address by Rarick, who, by the time the
pistachio ice-cream arrived, knew that this was to be one of the
excessively nervous times he would be obliged to read his few remarks.

He did so after coffee, the decorous phrases, the mock humilities that
had been written for him either by his secretary or by the wife of his
secretary, dropping heavily on to the assemblage.

On occasions when Rarick made address, Jenny invariably rolled bread
balls and kept her eyes down. Zigzags of disagreeable sensation ran
up and down her spine. From his place beside her, the knee of Ramon
pressed up sympathetically against hers. “Awful!” she whispered, and
pressed back; “he simply should not attempt it.”

The voice of Rarick went over its rutted road:

“... share with you--proudest moment of my life--generous
public--lifetime ambition--service of the people--humble
servant--owe everything to generosity of those who have encouraged
[applause]--temple of music dedicated to people [applause]--from
the people back to the people--your generous coöperation--my
humble efforts--fine spirit of coöperation in my organization
[applause]--thanks due to officials--employees [applause]--I wish I had
ability to express--dedicated to people--dedicated to people----”

“Awful! Awful! He said coöperation eleven times.”

Ramon’s knee so gently pressing hers! It made it easier, after the
polite applause had died down, to look up from her plate.

Thank God, chairs were scraping back. Another horror of an occasion
over. Curious, that the figure of Rarick could be so consistently a
depressant. Never knew it to fail.

“You mustn’t mind it, Jenny.”

“I do mind, terribly. Why does he attempt it? Oh, Jennifer, there you
are! Wasn’t it ghastly?”

“Not at all, Mother. Father is my idea of a bat in the pulpit, or
is it belfry? I love the bat, if only I didn’t have such a horror
of getting him caught in my hair. Gratton, you’re supposed to be a
word-prestidigitator. Pull me a phrase out of the blue that can do
justice to that view down there.”

They leaned over the parapet, young and exultant, stricken with the
wonder of what they were, even more than with the wonder of what they
beheld.

“It’s the book of life written on a postage-stamp,” he said.

“Putrid! I can do better than that. It’s the story of the circulation
of the blood being told by those crawling caterpillars down there.”

“Zero. It’s Lucifer being hurled, and splitting, as he strikes bottom,
into land and water, skyscrapers and taxicabs.”

Elegant, but dumb.

The wind in their faces could not budge her in the tight black helmet
that covered her head like close hair. It lifted the light tan thatch
of Gratton’s, though, as if it were a wig. It was difficult to indulge
in any but a breathless sort of discourse, and yet, they did discourse,
these two, smartly at first, young, exultant, and high-keyed each to
the other’s presence.

“The roof of the world isn’t so cozy as the low little old thatched
ones of Devonshire and English poetry.”

“After spending a summer in a picturesque, damp, uncomfortable and
gloomy thatched cottage in Sussex, I am convinced that love in a
cottage may lead to lumbago.”

“Love! Must all conversational roads lead to love?”

“Pretty many, I suppose, between the delightfully unattached like
ourselves. Daring to assume that you are as unattached as I yearn to
believe.”

“Your way, I suppose, of asking how, or if, I have recovered from my
last devastating love-affair?”

“Many a true word....”

“Many and many a true word ...” she said, fastening her hard, hurt eyes
upon him. “Well, to whom it may concern, the dead past has buried its
Berry. I’m so unattached it hurts! I think I’m in love now, with the
idea of being in love with you, Gratton.”

“I wish you could manage to get all the way through to being in love
with me, Jennifer. I need to be rich. I’ve a low kind of Indiana
background that I don’t seem able to live down. I can’t feel the swank
in evading my creditors. An unpaid dry-cleaner’s bill will insist upon
keeping me too worried to tackle a second act.”

“An admirable but low instinct, my lad, not acknowledged in circles of
the highest creative impulse.”

“I know it! But hang it all, my highest creative impulses, whatever
that means, get all obscured by fear that the dry-cleaner’s thirteenth
child may be dying of rickets, for need of pure, fresh milk. Of course,
dry-cleaner can probably buy and sell me ten times over, but that
doesn’t seem to lessen my obligation.”

“Go on.”

“Where?”

“Not being all the wise-crack things we seem to pretend to be, whenever
we are together.”

“It’s you who sets that pace, Jennifer.”

“I need the wise-crack, to divert the eye of the beholder from seeing
through how I do my poor little mental tricks. You don’t.”

“Jennifer, are you being humble?”

“I want to be.”

“That’s terrible! It somehow ... hurts. I prefer you naughty.”

“I think you do.”

“I think I don’t--really----”

“Gratton, guess why my face aches.”

“Too loaded with the seductiveness of youth and beauty.”

“Don’t rag. I am being profound and introspective. Altitude does that
to me. My face aches, Gratton, from pretending to look like what it
isn’t.”

“Perhaps it is your heart that aches, Jennifer.”

Their bright young eyes poured against each other and she did something
that was adorable to him. She placed her hand up against the region of
the heart in question, and her lips came lightly apart like a small,
thirsty bird’s.

“That’s it! The ache is down there and my face hurts from pretending
that it isn’t.”

“It’s too dear a face to ache.”

“Meaning expensive?”

“Not kind, Jennifer.”

“If I were to start in allowing myself to be kind to you, Gratton, I
might not know where to stop.”

“Wonderful of you to say that.”

“Wonderful to be able to say that.”

“It’s nice, our being this way,” he said, on a blurt of words.

“Yes. It rests the face.”

“What on earth do you mean, Jennifer?”

“Being this way. Just simple. To hell with persiflage.”

“I hope it isn’t all due to altitude that you’re so nice today. Perhaps
attitude has a bit to do with it?”

She grasped his arm. “Look down there, Gratton! See that steamer. Looks
like a fruit-boat, nosing into slip.”

“Where?”

“No, darling, we’re not docking boats this season on top of the
Woolworth Building. Look to the left. See, there’s the Aquitania,
beyond her are two ferries passing one another, and just beyond them
there’s a steamer sliding alongside her pier.”

“Yes! Two red funnels.”

“Right. I want a port, Gratton. I want to slip alongside a pier. That’s
what Father always says about you. You’ve destination.”

“What kind of port do you want, Jennifer?”

“A snug harbor into which I can bring useful wares--such as they are.”

“Yours would be first-rate.”

“Are you thinking, or saying, that?”

“Both?”

She hooked into his arm.

“Aren’t I grotesque to you, Gratton, up here on this peak of dimes.
Don’t I appall you?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Look at Father over there. Bewildered, frustrated, with dimes.
Sometimes he seems to me like a little man whose eyes have turned to
dimes and whose spirit cannot shine through them. Dimes have flowed
over his life, making of it a metal prairie. My mother stands in the
middle of such a prairie. I do. My brother lies buried in it. This
building is a monument of dimes to the futility of dimes ... and in a
way, a monument to the curious, groping genius of my father. I am part
of his great frustration--Gratton--never for a moment doubt but what I
know that.”

He laid his gloved hand against her mouth as if to crush back the
words and the wind tugged at them, and beyond, where both their gazes
focused, the harbor looked like a tarpaulin being dragged.

“There are times when I come perilously near liking you perilously,
Jennifer.”

“Like me enough to understand me, Gratton.”

“Then you understand him,” he said, and nodded to the form of Rarick,
who seemed perpetually to be hovering on the edge of groups to which he
did not quite belong.

“I try,” she said, on a small click of teeth. “I try. I try. I try.
Believe that.”

“Curious how simple he seems to me. A man who is too stern an idealist
to compromise. A man who asked for bread and got a gold nugget.”

“A gold brick, if you mean me.”

“I don’t.”

“I’m crazy to help him. I’m crazy to--love him.”

“I should think his pathos would help you to that; the pathos of his
terrible, heart-breaking grandeur.”

“It does.”

“Jennifer, you are sweeter today than I have ever known you. Please
don’t ever again let your face ache from looking like what it isn’t.”

“Yes, but what about my heart?”

“It’s a dear heart. In the right place.”

“Gratton, if you prove that to Father, some day, when I do things for
him that he won’t believe I had it in me to do, will I be proving it to
you at the same time?”

“If you haven’t already.”

“I need more money than anybody in the world, Gratton. The chances are
that I’m apt to always have money. I wouldn’t want ever not to have
money, and yet, I suppose that the only real chance I’d ever have to
show what I think I’m made of, is to wake up some morning broke--God
forbid!”

“I’m beginning to strangely suspect you of being made of what you think
you are.”

“Don’t make this strong man weep, Gratt. She might proceed to tell you
how ghastly lonesome and misunderstood she is. Than which....”

“Don’t take advantage of my youthful susceptibility. I am on the verge
of thinking you more of a person than is good for my peace of mind.”

“... and so, snapping out of the mood of better-self which had crossed
her fair and petulant face, the fêted and ill-fated heiress to the
Rarick millions hurled her champagne tumbler from her hand and--ate the
glass....”

“Idjut!”

He stooped to pick up her glove which had fallen crumpled to her feet.

“Give me your hand,” he said. “I’ll draw this on for you.”

“Are you suing for my hand?”

“No.”

“Well, then, keep my gauntlet until you are ready to come suing.”

“Idjut,” he said again.

This was the conversation between those two, as they stood at the
parapet, overlooking the world, high wind in their faces, and their
words jerked off their lips and swallowed up by gusts. Once or twice
Rarick hovered. The very atmosphere about them was built up of the
kind of particles that kept him gingerly on edge. Their sureness
and brightness and youngness oppressed him with a sense of his own
unsureness. He felt ill at ease, just as much so, in a very different
way, as he did when he bobbed about helplessly among the dancing young
men with no faces in particular, that Jenny dangled around with her as
you would bangles on a bracelet. That was pretty generally his feeling
about the narrow young dancing-men, who looked as if they might be slid
back into their shoe-boxes at night, and put in place along the shelf.

This Davies, now, was another matter. This fellow had a sure,
uncompromising look to him. He knew what races were worth entering--for
him. He knew his track--he knew his goal....

Even as he stood there, keyed by the slim Jennifer beside him, to his
facetious worst, Rarick, abominating what was sure to be the flying
foam of their conversation, was ready to like him. He had written that
message, “I think I understand what you failed to get said to Avery....”

“Well, young man,” said Rarick, greeting him a little later, “how is
the enterprise coming along?”

“Not for the moment, so surely as this one of yours, sir. This building
has been headed for its roof ever since you laid the cornerstone. We
are not certain yet where we are heading.”

“We’ve just come from a reading rehearsal of one of Gratton’s plays,
Father. Talk about not seeing the woods for the trees! We couldn’t hear
the lines for the adenoids.”

“That remark, I shall explain to your daughter when I have her alone,
Mr. Rarick, was both unæsthetic and untrue. The fact is, the cast at
the moment doesn’t measure up.”

“Gratton’s polite way of saying, Father, that the first thing the
committee did after feeling money in its pocket was to go out and
buy the most expensive Broadway casting-director they could find,
thus launching the experimental idea safely and smugly toward the
commercial theater from which it was so passionately revolting when you
came across. You should have endowed Gratton, Father. Not a half-baked
idea.”

“Jennifer!”

“Modesty ill becomes you, my young man. You may leave something to
be desired as a playwright, but you are as bona-fide an idealist as
ever let himself in for a bumping. But anyway, I’m for Gratton’s play,
Father. Louder and funnier--more situations and less psychology--is
all anyone could have asked of the first rehearsal. Also a new and not
quite so comic hat for the leading lady.”

“I’d like to come around sometime, Mr. Rarick, and talk to you about
this baby of yours ... that is what it is, in a way ... your money made
it possible.”

“Are you speaking of me, sir? Father, I think the young man is about to
sue for my hand.”

“Jennifer, idiot, if your comedy cannot be funnier, let it at least
be deferred. I’ve a notion you’ll be interested in seeing first hand,
sir, what we are doing with your money. Jennifer isn’t entirely correct
in what she says; but it does seem that with money in our cash-box
the committee is about to commit the understandable error of becoming
pretentious. I’m for adhering to our pre-affluent _répertoire_. I would
like to talk over our production end with you, sir.”

A broad, slow smile moved across the sallow features of Rarick, seeming
to widen them, his lips lifted, revealing seldom-revealed white oblongs
of teeth, then drew back as slowly as portières.

“My hours, young man, for conferring advice for the furtherance of our
native and esoteric drama are for the present overcrowded, but if you
will consult with my Mr. Hellman, he will arrange an appointment.”

“Darling,” said Jennifer as they turned away, “I wish to commemorate
this occasion by sliding down seventy-nine stories and rushing to the
first corner orangeadery for an ade--or a ginfizz. You may not realize
it, but you succeeded in eliciting a smile and a witticism from my
father.”

“I’m for him.”

“I’m of him.”

“That makes me vicariously for you.”

“Viciously, did you say?”

And so on and so on and so on, as, stepping into the elevator they
began descent through the stories of steel that were rising to the
tunes of the jingling of the dimes.

       *       *       *       *       *

By unexplainable oversight that offhand would seem almost impossible,
Rarick, what with Hellman rushing off with the newspaper men and the
guests paying their departing platitudes, was left on the roof alone
after the elevator man had made his last descent and apparently gone
from the building. There were no bells. It meant a walk down thousands
of stairs that were little more than ladders. For an hour now, the
sun had been in behind banking clouds, the wind stiffening. Meanwhile
Rarick waited, hoping for a return of some of the waiters to clear away
the few remaining camp-chairs, or for a watchman on his rounds.

It was not unpleasant up there on the rim of his skyscraper, except
that with the rising wind he could have wished for a warmer coat.
Clouds scurried low, and the heavens seemed to scamper. Vessels with
slanting funnels were riding out on their first lap eastward. There
were a few coming in. You could tell by the direction of the slant of
the funnels and the way the waves fawned at the cutting prows.

With the instinct of man to ponder from high places, Rarick, looking
out, looking down, stood with his elbows on a parapet and his cheeks
crushed between his palms.

The leaping bridges rushing to jerk land to land. Ships that not
improbably were majestically putting to sea or making harbor on some
such petty mission as dolls with peach-skin faces or pressed-tin
ash-trays. Belching funnels of fruit-steamers that were packed
with enormous cargoes of green-skinned bananas to sell by the puny
penny-piece off East Side pushcarts. Vertically below, the winding
of the crisscross streets, slots into which to drop your dime; the
winding play of elevated railroad; the animated dartings of the specks
of little humans rushing about with hearts buttoned up underneath
their coats. The moving clouds, the moving streets, the moving
waters, the ever-moving specks of heartbeat. The little Rarick,
elevated on his parapet of the nickels and the dimes. The little
Rarick--contemplating....

What Rarick was actually contemplating at the moment, as he stood there
in the midst of space, in the midst of a Saturday afternoon--his last
guest gone, Jenny with her narrow youth, Jennifer with her heckled and
heckling companion--was, that here he stood with miles of steps to walk
down and no place in particular to go after he had walked them.

One of those hiatuses which, because they occur so seldom in the map of
a busy man’s affairs, flabbergast.

Well, here goes!

It was almost dusk when he reached the street, after the fifty and more
flights of stairs, mortar streaks along his coat, the dizzying descent
and the Saturday-afternoon bedlam of shoppers, ferry-boat commuters,
trucksters, newsboys, clerks, stenographers, brokers, causing the scene
to seem to sway by the time he reached sidewalk-level.

Women with oilcloth bags, that had been stocked at a Rarick
Five-and-Ten across the way, jostled him.

There was a small triangle of park opposite, set out sparsely with
the geometry of two dusty maple-trees, two scrofulaed benches, a
refuse-can, and an inset of gray grass. There was a vacant place on
one of the benches, between a bulging woman with one of the oilcloth
shopping-bags and a sandwich man who had unhooked his boards and had
sat down to rest from them. There Rarick slid in.

The red front of the Five-and-Ten was ground into the pallid scene.
Its windows glittered. There was a handkerchief display this week, of
pink and blue and striped cotton squares. Rarick had sat in conference
on this buy of the two million run-of-the-mill output of a New England
concern. The vista that faced him was plastered with the small cotton
squares edged in a horrible kind of cotton lace that presently, after a
washing or two, would fray into so much string. Cotton handkerchiefs,
destined to dry against mirrors and window-panes; cotton handkerchiefs
for the customers with the cotton-looking faces who poured in and out.
They brought their ten-cent pieces to this fount of abominable things
with an acquiescence that had pathos in it. Kitchenware, celluloid
fine-combs, under-arm shields, glass jewelry, were the mission of these
men and women who, from the heights only a few moments before, seen as
specks, had seemed sublime. Ten-cent trailers after ten-cent things!

He watched them come. He watched them go. The woman on the bench beside
him began to open a package and count hair-pins. Rarick pins. Children
emerged from the red front opposite, jamming Rarick lollypops along
tongues. Women lugged Rarick mops and Rarick clothes-hangers. Men came
out with Rarick celluloid collars and Rarick ten-cent socks tucked
into their coat pockets, and more Rarick lollypops, for more babies,
turning gummy in their Rarick paper bags.

The feet that turned in at the fount of Rarick were for the most part
tired, crooked feet. The splayed feet of women who have borne too many
children under too many handicaps. The side-tilting feet of men who are
on them too many hours a day. The pitiful feet of girls in short vamps
and tall heels. Tawdry feet, filled with a mysterious eagerness.

Contemplating them for at least two hours, Rarick finally dove down
into the subway, and home, to write throughout the evening at the
document that was slowly becoming his will.




The third day that Jenny’s meals, every nine of them, had consistently
disagreed, she rather angrily decided to see a specialist.

Deep down within herself she sensed the trouble. As a child she had
been subject to fits of nervous indigestion following punishment or
spells of rage. She had subsequently outgrown all this, and, for the
years since, had enjoyed the singular hardihood that is so often the
lot of the wiry and apparently nervous temperament.

Jenny could and did truthfully boast that she had never spent a day in
bed. Small ailments, such as the sciatic twinge that had come of late,
yes. But in the main she was entitled to regard herself as a creature
well thewed.

The old nervous unease, asserting itself in this physical fashion, was,
as Jenny frenziedly diagnosed it to herself, due to a sense of panic
that went to the very roots of her being. It smote her with terror,
with a sense of aloneness, with a growing despair of years, such as
nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet.

Ramon was growing tired. The symptoms were out in him. The guarded
manner. The wary voice. The evaded appointment. The placating manner.
The roving eye. Slowly, surely, unrelentingly, the realization was
closing in on Jenny.

His telephone no longer responded to her call when too well she
knew he was lying within reach of it. The old punctiliousness about
appointments was a thing of the past. Almost invariably now it was a
matter of waiting for him; and on one or two occasions he had failed
to appear at all, sending a telephone message, explaining unavoidable
delay, by way of the cashier of the tea-room where already Jenny
awaited him.

His tendency to be irritable was growing. He disliked the pink, Chinese
polish to her finger nails; hated the manner in which she shrouded her
throat in furs and tulles, and told her so.

“It makes you look so blamed manufacturedly exotic.”

“But, Ramon, you once told me that Dusé and Bernhardt----”

“Never mind what I once told you. This is now.”

“Why, Ramon!” she gasped, tears spurting. “Why--Ramon!”

He had leaned over the table of the tea-room to pat her hand, as
you would the hand of some one who innocently irritates you beyond
endurance.

“Never mind, dear.”

Never mind! Jenny was minding to such a degree that when she laid
herself in bed at night, after a day filled with a tormenting attempt
to drown out with activities the rising fears about Ramon, the blood
kept whirring in her veins and flooding her with flushes.

The boy was tiring, no doubt of that. More-frequent exchange of
handclasps that left notes of larger and larger denomination in his
palm did not seem to matter, except for the moment.

The pallor of terror was high in the face of Jenny these days; so high
that Jennifer, marveling at such a lapse in her mother, reproved her
for rouging badly.

“A bit thick, darling.”

What was Ramon wanting? The apartment? The retreat to which he used to
refer? Her discretion continued to shrink from that. The present suited
her so well. Careful. Satisfying. Cautious. Having your cake and, as
Ramon repeatedly added these days, eating it, too. But, curiously, even
that mooted subject was laid now. Ramon no longer talked in terms of
their jewel-box of a rendezvous which was to be of his designing.

Was Ramon’s eye straying? The younger girls, including Jennifer,
interested him strangely little. Significantly little, the men would
have put it. He had appeared at the opera in Mrs. Emanie Bursilap’s
box of late. But that was unthinkable. Emanie Bursilap was a
great-grandmother, and sixty-eight if a day. Rich beyond the count,
it is true, but a rather horrible great-grandmother, with a wattled,
wrinkled face that had been lifted into a mask, and a neck with grooves
for the pearls to nest in. A naughty old gray bat of a woman, jealous
of her own daughters and haunted by terrors of becoming what she
already was.

Had the time come when Jenny must face her issues? What issues? It was
unthinkable that this outward scheme of things, this scheme of having
her cake and eating it, too, could ever be any different until--until
what? Until something happened! Well, things did happen. Death changed
the maps of families. Women had been left widows before--free--O God,
forgive me for that thought----

Ramon must be placated. There had never as yet been a time when Jenny,
in Ramon’s behalf, had drawn against her account for sums that would
be noticeably unusual. But, in a pinch, that could be managed. There
were ways of arranging with jewelers and furriers for bills to be
presented for goods never delivered. That was a common device employed
by women who, unbeknown to husbands, lost large sums at gambling. You
arranged with your furrier, for instance, to send in a statement for
a five-thousand-dollar mink coat. You returned the wrap, but paid the
check, which in good time was returned to you in currency by your
tradesman....

When one was desperate ... and yet, somehow, terribly, relentlessly,
Ramon did not seem to want to be placated. What--what in God’s name did
one, who felt the universe slipping, do to reclaim it?...

It was then that digestion seemed to go nervously back on her and that
Jenny decided to visit the specialist. Actually, Ramon’s antipathy for
illness was something reprehensible, of course, but at the same time,
adorable and fascinating and fastidious in him. His sympathies poured
out, you felt sure of that; but the little sense of aversion would
creep in, wounding his æsthetic sense. Illness to the young blade Ramon
was decay, antithetical to his sleek beauty. No wonder that he shrank.

Illness was something from which you protected Ramon.

As a matter of fact, be it said for Jenny, illness, hers, was something
from which she, in general, protected those about her.

It was an acutely wretched week of physical distress that preceded this
visit to the specialist, about which neither Jennifer nor Rarick had
inkling. Not even the maid in the Breton cap, a stanch south-of-France
woman, who had served Jenny well and long, knew to what extent she had
been in torment.

The physician, a social-register one in East, slightly East,
Sixty-third Street, to whom she finally presented herself, directed
her, after discovering that the seat of her difficulties lay in an
anatomical area two and three-quarter inches removed from the region
on which his skill focused, to an eminent man in East Seventy-second
Street, who, after a more or less cursory examination, awaited
Jenny in his office, while she climbed back into her clothes in the
examination-room.

A trying moment, this interval between physical examination and
doctor’s verdict, and one that added to Jenny’s state of general
nervousness and made her sharp with the attendant nurse.

It was not that she feared. It was more the idea that in the handsome
adjoining office was sitting a professional figure endowed with the
power of certain vital verdicts.

If there were anything serious the matter with her--well, that was
life--and death.

If there was something only superficially wrong--dear Ramon....

The verdict was neither so good as she had hoped nor so bad as she had
feared.

Some digestive complication. His manner was casual and reassuring.
Thank God for that. Life was good. But the best method of diagnosis and
determination would mean a short period of observation at a hospital.
Few days. A little troublesome but nothing to worry about. X-rays.
Fluoroscope. Test meals. A chill rattled itself against Jenny. Hospital!

“Nothing to be alarmed about. Most efficient method. Merely a
checking-up process.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

Then and there the matter was arranged by telephone.

“A large suite, doctor?”

He placed his hand across the mouthpiece.

“The hospital is too crowded to allow for suites, Mrs. Rarick. You are
fortunate to be able to obtain a single and bath. Is Friday all right?”

“Yes.”

The suite did not matter, except for Ramon. Flowers to the ceiling of
a sitting-room. Chaise-longue. None of the onus of illness. One simply
could not be ill in a hard white hospital fashion, for Ramon’s sake....

“... besides, Mrs. Rarick, I have no intention of confining you to the
hospital those few days. You may leave every afternoon after we have
tinkered at you for a few hours, but you must have all your meals at
the hospital and return six o’clock evenings for your dinner and early
bed.”

Perhaps, then, Ramon need never know! There could be nothing seriously
amiss with one who was allowed such leniency. Come to think about it,
Bettina Slocum had been obliged to undergo such observation last month,
only to discover that her trouble all the while had been due to nothing
more than tooth infection.

Ramon need not know. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday would pass quickly.
She could disappear under pretext of week-end. Nuisance, having to tell
Jennifer and Rarick. And, oh dear, Friday was the Gluxom dinner (not
that the Gluxoms really counted) and Saturday the automobile contest at
the Garden, a society competitive gala contest for the most beautiful
car. Jenny’s new special-body Twin Hercules had just arrived from
Italy--oh dear....

       *       *       *       *       *

What a disgusting nuisance! They rode you down formaldehyde-smelling
corridors on something that resembled the hand-trucks on which porters
rumble trunks at railroad-stations. They stood you up against walls
and unwound you of your last decent shred of sheet, and forced you to
drink lead-heavy liquids that made you transparent, so that they could
watch the tiresome processes of your alimentary canal or whatever it
was. They stretched you on a table and covered you with metal plates
and took pictures of your liver or whatever it was on the side where
the sciatic pain made you feel like a persimmon. They punctured your
perfectly good arm and drew thimblefuls of blood that felt like
bucketfuls. They counted your pulse and they counted your blood and
they took your metabolism, whatever that was. Internes, such unhandsome
ones, laid dingy ears to your heart....

So Jenny took the overhauling, for the most part in good nature,
rushing back to the hospital apologetically late, and creating in
her wake a confusion, a specialness, and a lavishness that were as
outwardly annoying as they were secretly impressive to the nurses.

The rich Mrs. Rarick was a patient not soon to be forgotten even in
a hospital designed to meet the needs of the rich. Jenny lay in her
narrow bed that was fluffed up as if it were a shell to hold the pearl
of her magnificence. The young internes related among themselves,
in hilarity, the amount of clawing it took to part the sheets and
the laces and the billows that confined the patient. Placing an ear
to the breast of Jenny was not just that. Laces crept up around the
stethoscope like saucy surf. The slim ridge of Mrs. Rarick was the
least of all in that bed. Silks, laces, scents, puffs, made it riotous.
Jenny, packed in splendor.

Rarick sat stiffly in the room the evenings he came to visit her.
Strangely, his comings created almost as much stir as the arrival of a
motion-picture star, two weeks before, for a major operation. Nurses
and internes remained on duty, past hours, to catch glimpses of him as
he arrived and departed. The head chef lurked behind a doorway. But for
the most part, except for Jennifer, who darted in and out, and the maid
in the Breton cap--who occupied a room adjoining--secrecy prevailed.

At the end of the three days, Jenny, her maid, her pillows, her special
bedding, her framed photograph of Avery, her bottles of scents, her
thermos flasks, her silver flower-vases, her special breakfast china,
her frilled bed-jackets, her character dolls and stuffed dogs, departed
from the hospital for home.

Three days after that, the reports on her tests were completed.




Something that had not happened to Rarick in years occurred one
morning. At least it had not happened to him since his clerkship days
in Schwebbe’s hardware store.

A peremptory command, in the form of a hand-delivered message, lay on
his desk. Hellman had laid it face-up on the top of his sorted mail.

  It is imperative that you come to my office alone at four o’clock
  this afternoon. Regard this as confidential.

                                         JOHN NOON.

Noon was the man under whose care Jenny had been during this recent
little disturbance. An illustrious figure in medicine, who had recently
operated on an ex-President of the United States, and who was almost
certain to be called in first or named as consultant in the illnesses
of the great.

Could this little upset of Jenny’s have a graver significance than he,
Rarick, had realized? She had made so light of it. He had scarcely
regarded it as more than a faddistic bit of rest-cure. His trips to
the hospital had impressed him chiefly for the air of festivity in the
sick-room. Jenny lying in her frills and going through what she called
rigmarole. Even Dr. Noon himself, whom Rarick had encountered there on
one of those occasions, had held her pulse lightly and joked at her
joking.

Women got out of gear like that. Not Jenny, it is true, but the
expensive hospitals fairly yawned for the run of them.

There was something about this wiry woman, Jenny, that had seemed to
him, immediately after his marriage to her, to be highly cutaneous,
as if she were incased in an armor of brittle, but resistant skin.
Pain did not get at her. She never perspired. Her hands had the cool,
polished feel to them of having been dipped in tallow. It struck Rarick
that he had never seen her blood. If she had ever pricked her finger,
it had not yielded a drop.

That was why, without his being able to analyze it concretely, the
idea of Jenny in any kind of physical predicament was difficult to
conjure. She was part of a surface, just as she had lain lightly on the
ridiculous ruffled bed in the hospital, making no physical dent. It
again smote Rarick, funnily, that in her place beside him, Jenny never
left dent. Or warmth. Her side of the bed, when she rose from it, was
as cool and untouched-looking as if human form had not rested there.
And now this from the doctor under whose observation she had been,
suggesting that, after all, Jenny might be more than just a corporeal
surface....

  It is imperative that you come to my office alone at four o’clock
  this afternoon....

He did what was rather unusual for him. He thought up a pretext for
telephoning Jenny. She was not at home. Her secretary, the pale Miss
Dang, offered to locate her at one of three places. André Trianon’s
for a facial and wave. The Children’s Charity Show, in the Leslie van
Blarcoms’ ballroom, or in the Oval Room at the Ritz.

“No, never mind.”

There was something reassuringly normal about Jenny immersed in her
usual kind of morning, which was crammed to capacity with the piffle of
such minutiæ as facials, marionettes, Oval Room.

Probably it was on the score of just this frenzied futility that her
doctor wanted to see him. A woman as high-strung and curiously nervous
as Jenny might go on indefinitely and then snap. At least that was what
you heard was constantly happening to women in society, and perhaps
more especially to those so frantically on the rim of it. Well, you
could not expect even so astute a man as this Noon appeared to be, to
understand. No need to acquaint him with unnecessary facts, of course;
but precious little Rarick could do about it. Jenny wanted--well, Jenny
wanted what she wanted.

Nevertheless, at four o’clock, Rarick stepped out of his car and into
the tall, narrow building that contained the four stories of offices,
laboratories, consultation-and-observation rooms of Dr. John Noon.

The trip from the first step into the lower hall up to a fourth-floor
waiting-room was past five women in the starched uniforms of nurses.
One verified his appointment, and as he gave his name, mysteriously the
news was transmitted, and portières began to stir and eye-gleams to
appear between slits of door and curtain.

“The Five-and-Ten Rarick! Sh-h-h-h!”

Another nurse for his hat. Another to admit him into the two-passenger
elevator. Another to operate it. Another to meet him as he stepped out.
And still another to turn him over to still another, who rose from a
desk in the waiting-room and advised him that his wait would be brief.

It was. His summons into an inner office came almost immediately. It
struck Rarick with surprise that he was trembling. Here was a firm that
dealt in human destinies. He was doing business with it. What if Jenny
had a deep-seated illness of the blood and bone? All this was nonsense
about her corporeal specialness. She was frailty. Women somehow, soft,
complicated creatures that they were, were subject to mysterious
maladjustments. There were special hospitals for the diseases of
women. What if Jenny....

An old man sat at an old desk in an old room. At least, the Dr. Noon of
this room looked older than the Dr. Noon of the hospital. His desk was
as uncluttered as Rarick’s own. Again it was the uncluttered desk of a
busy man. There were two sheets of white paper spread on it.

Jenny’s destiny, thought Rarick, as he seated himself on the leather
edge of the chair proffered him.

“I have sent for you, Mr. Rarick, before communicating with your wife.
In cases like this it seems best.”

So then, Jenny did not know.... “In cases like this.” The great man
was meeting just another case. Jenny’s, perhaps a little special by
virtue of the impact of the name of Rarick, but to a man like Noon,
who ministered to the powerful ones of the earth, not sufficiently
differentiated to remove it from the category of “cases like this.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Rarick’s tests are in. I am going to explain our findings to you.”

“Yes.”

“You are not, I take it, the man to want beating around the bush.”

“No.”

“There is a possibility that Mrs. Rarick’s trouble may be a major one.
I say possibility advisedly, because an operation may reveal it to be
an unmalignant complaint that will respond to surgery. Miss Bart, bring
in Mrs. Rarick’s X-ray plates.”

What a devilish formula for saying everything there was to be said,
without saying anything. Surgery. Malignant. Operation. Major. So! This
was the whither of all the frenzied, struggling, ambitious years of the
Jenny Avery whose eyes, way back there in the St. Louis beginnings,
had turned with his toward the dream of the Pyrenees. This was the
whither? That he might sit in a doctor’s office, twenty-five years
later, without ever having walked those Pyrenees with her in the flesh
or the spirit, and listen to what sounded cryptically like her doom.

Jenny, who had seemed so frenziedly to be going some place through all
the years, must at last pause and heed....

“Here are our findings, Mr. Rarick. See this negative.” There was a
wall-frame ready to receive it, with an electric bulb behind, that made
transparent the story of the flesh of Jenny, told in bits of waving
lines and clumps of shadow. So there was the bit that was Jenny--on
glass--in light--in shadow----

“Those heavy spots in there, Mr. Rarick, are what concern us.
The X-ray cannot reveal their depth. But these shadows indicate
er--a--an obstruction--alimentary canal--may merely be ulcerous--if
inoperable--close up wound--but better to explore--in other
words--imperative that the attempt at surgery be made....”

God knows that was plain enough. All this elaborate preamble boiled
itself down to the fact that Jenny must go under the knife. Either
her complaint was operable or not. The exploratory knife would tell,
and, if operable--well, then, science, skill, turn of the knife,
destiny--what--Jenny was sitting squarely in the lap of the gods....

“The exploratory knife will tell?”

“You have about summed it up, Mr. Rarick. It is not improbable that
Mrs. Rarick’s complaint may prove itself to be of a nature that will
respond to surgery.”

“Of course.”

“I am sorry to have been obliged to call you here on such a mission,
Mr. Rarick. There is, of course, reason to feel concern. On the other
hand, there is reason to feel optimism. Strong constitution, excellent
health-history ... hope....”

“Of course. Of course....”

“... In case you feel the need of more opinions--stand ready to call in
consultants--but nothing puzzling in the situation--no emergency, but
advise haste--immediate operation--every day may count....”

“Of course. Of course. Of course.”

“I--shall discreetly advise your wife--do not acquaint any other
members of your family--keep atmosphere free of anxiety--spare her
any undue nervous shock--I will be the one to advise her--make
all arrangements--within week--exceedingly regret--better to look
situation squarely in face--keep sanguine--extremely glad to have
met you, Mr. Rarick--long been an admirer. Rarick Building fitting
monument--uncertain weather for this time of year--Miss Scow will show
you to the elevator--Have Mrs. McCormack come in--Good afternoon, Mr.
Rarick----”

Late sunlight lay on the stoop of the house as he left it.

“Where, sir?” said his chauffeur, after he had stood at attention for
several minutes after Rarick had seated himself in the car.

“Where? Just drive.”




“Sacred Cow,” a three-act comedy by Gratton Davies, produced by the
Internationalists, Inc., failed.

It was one of those failures _d’estime_ that closed its doors to a
large audience of repeaters and deadheads and received obituaries and
epitaphs from a minority not mighty enough to sustain it.

It was a galling failure to Gratton. “Sacred Cow” had been purposely
written in the out-and-out key of high comedy. A burlesque in sheep’s
clothing, the bray to sound behind the straight-faced baa. Nothing of
the sort happened. Gradually, but surely, during rehearsals, it seemed
to Gratton that his play became broadly the thing he had wanted it to
be only inferentially.

“Sacred Cow” as a social satire wore its burlesque on its sleeve, and,
failing, carried down with it three years of the work and high hope of
its author.

As Gratton, in the scant words he had to say about the _débâcle_,
remarked, it was not the failure that hurt. A good legitimate failure
that was a fellow’s own, was one matter. But, hang it! “Sacred Cow”
had not been his failure. It had been a failure of interpretation,
direction, and production. His own version of “Sacred Cow” still
remained to be seen.

Gratton’s tongue had been so neatly in his cheek when he wrote that
play; and yet, all the loud braying had gone over the footlights in his
name. In his young, passionately ambitious, rebellious name.

In the eyes of certain of the groups about whose opinions he youthfully
still cared most, he had written a rather obvious and old-fashioned
slap-stick satire.

To Gratton, at that stage, the most damning of all possible indictments
was “old-fashioned.”

In the eyes of certain critics who, even while they admitted his
intent, scored him for precisely the indiscretions of which he had been
guiltless, he had sprained a wrist trying to be clever, but a wrist
that very conceivably might some day write the significant comedy of
manners that this one seemed to forecast.

In the eyes of the box-office, he had committed the fatal sin of
failing to entertain.

And so Gratton wore his failure ruefully, if silently. It hurt.

Strangely enough, and bothersome to her because she thought it
despicable, a sense of relief welled in Jennifer when Gratton’s failure
came.

But she had not until then realized with what submerged sense of
dread she had read the brilliant manuscript, lingered through many
of the rehearsals, attended tryouts, and for long hours sat opposite
Gratton across a restaurant table after a siege in the theater had been
particularly trying or discouraging to him.

Dispassionately, Jennifer desired success for Gratton. But
passionately, greedily, almost enviously, she was jealous of it. He
was somehow more closely hers while he only skirted achievement. Not
that he ever permitted her to cross certain ice-barriers of aloofness
in him that baffled and wounded her terribly; but while he was hungry
and hankered, she was sort of a self-constituted wailing-wall. He
needed her to come to when he was tired and discouraged almost beyond
endurance, as they began in rehearsal to bray his play. He sought
her out over their favorite restaurant table in the bow-window of a
small restaurant opposite the theater, or they journeyed down for a
kitchenette-brewed luncheon in the quiet of his three small rooms over
a bookstore in West Fourth Street, or just walked around the milling
block of the theater, or sometimes had tea out of beautiful little
white jade Ch’ieni-Lung cups in Jennifer’s small sitting-room, which
had been redone in Chinese lacquer.

There was no outside world to lean into the quiet of these little
retreats. Neither Gratton’s world, which was one you wedged into and
which would not come to you, nor Jennifer’s, which seldom, if ever,
played up that kind of street. Gratton came mighty near needing
Jennifer, those days of rehearsals, and Jennifer was jealous of her
rôle.

His success might snatch it from her; and about Gratton, to Jennifer
at least, was something of the foreordained kind of success of a
single-track mind. There was about him, even before he achieved,
the aroma of a man who cannot be deterred. He had given up a place
in the throne-room of a magazine that was rapidly becoming the most
significant publication of the sort ever accomplished in America,
without a backward glance, because the time had come, due to a scanty
inheritance, when he could afford to fasten his level eye upon the goal
of his choice.

Gratton wanted to say it in dramatic form. You knew inevitably that
sooner or later he would. Without compromise. He had started to do that
with his magazine.

Jennifer, in inchoate fashion, sensed this. Elusive, self-sufficient
by nature to a degree that she found terrifying, his success, when it
came, would hedge him in more securely into a world which he loved
a little more than he despised, and which he was one day to rebuke
brilliantly in two plays, “Marsdon and Son” and “The Tragedy of
Laughter.”

Gratton wanted one thing, really. To get said this brilliant foment.
Jennifer knew that and found it frightening.

She told him so one evening, about a month after “Sacred Cow” had gone
down to its by no means ignominious failure. They were at dinner in his
rooms, a Japanese student, who came in by the hour, serving them at a
table drawn up before the fire.

It was Jennifer who had first suggested these excursions to Gratton’s
rooms. Their booky, firelit shabbiness rested her. Fascinated her a
little. They were intimate, lived-in, purposeful sort of rooms. They
pretended no period. They catered to the needs of their owner. The
need of a good couch, with a head-lamp for reading. The need of an
extra-built table with a spacious top for spreading papers. The need of
book-shelves, that had overflowed into stacks of volumes standing in
rows on the floor.

The smell of these rooms was tobacco and wood fire, leather and
wire-haired spaniel.

When Jennifer had first suggested their going there, Gratton had
acquiesced at once. As a matter of fact, she had only said it out of
an indefinite desire to arouse in him some spark of the personal or
protective. Gratton should have demurred at subjecting her to what
might so easily be interpreted as a compromising act. Instead, he
casually agreed, in the impersonal manner so characteristic of him.

In all her subsequent visits to his rooms--for meals, for afternoon
cocktails, for brief interludes in between the exigencies of
rehearsal--Gratton never so much as lingered at the business of helping
her remove her wraps.

Her coming was too impersonal to matter much one way or another. He
fell in with her suggestion to dine at a restaurant just as casually.
It was as it should be. It was as Jennifer, bruised, would have told
you she desired it to be; and yet....

“Are you as self-centered as you seem, Gratton?” she asked him one
evening, after the Japanese student had washed his last dish and
departed, leaving them seated over coffee.

“I reckon I are, Jennifer. I think an awful lot of me.”

“You do nothing of the sort. You are interested in everything from
better Chinese babies to the decadence of our decade; from the decline
of philosophy to ‘Kilts, why plaid’? Things and movements and causes
and literatures and new schools and, to use a grand old smear of a
phrase of my father’s famous fossil, Dr. Gerkes, who eloped with a Lapp
or something off-color, things ideational are your major interests. I
want you to be interested in me, Gratt. I may not be ideational, but
I’m mighty nice, if I do say it as shouldn’t.”

“Hang it, Jennifer! I’m not even sure you’re nice!”

She raised her eyes at him across the small litter of after-dinner
dishes between them, bit off a third of a lump of sugar, and drank her
coffee through it slowly.

“You mean that, Gratt?”

“I think I do, Jennifer.”

“I’m not so sure, either, that I’m nice,” she said, slowly.

“Wonder if we both mean the same thing by nice.”

“Don’t qualify.”

“Haven’t the slightest intention of it. I don’t know whether money has
harmed you, Jennifer, but it hasn’t made you a nicer person.”

“Money-conscious!”

“One has to be, where you are concerned. Every bit of assurance you
have is, consciously or unconsciously, founded on your recognition of
the authority that goes with great wealth. Any stock dramatist could
write you, Jennifer. You are fundamentally, I think, sound and fine,
but....”

“Don’t qualify.”

“Damn it, Jennifer, I’m not! That’s just it. You cannot imagine that
I would dare not to qualify. That’s part of your assurance. But let
me go on. Fundamentally sound and fine, but cocksure with a sense of
power. Spoiled, chiefly because you are spoilable material. Grown
simply big and not big, simply. Chaser after false gods. Wise-cracker.
More self-ful than selfish, but a little of both. Clever. Good mind
and nothing to do with it. A giver, but considerably more of a taker.
Vain, but not without reason. Good intentions. Feeble execution. A
non-producer. A personality. A faker. A darling Jennifer, that’s you.”

“Yes, Mr. God, but why, since you say that I am fundamentally f. and
s., don’t you make me over?”

“I haven’t the right.”

“What if I give it to you?”

“What if I can’t?”

“I see. You mean you haven’t the right that goes with caring enough to
do a big job like that?”

“If you will be personal, I wouldn’t be it that cruelly, if I were you.”

“I’m lonely as hell, Gratton.”

“Are you, really, Jennifer, or is it just a dramatic state of mind that
for the moment, seems desirable to you?”

“Lord, you’re cold!”

“What are you lonely for, Jennifer?”

“For the kind of thing you are not saying to me now.”

“Well put, my lamb! May you never know more of the reaches of profound
loneliness! I know a lonely man, Jennifer. Your father.”

“Well,” she cried, high and angrily; “well, well, what if he is?
So is everybody connected with him. Shut-outs from one another.
And Father, don’t you forget it, has done his share of shutting
out. All of us have, in our family, I’m afraid. My brother--between
us--we--we--somehow managed to shut Avery out of life. Mother is a
shut-out if ever there was one. God knows Father is. I am. The rich
Raricks, if anybody should ask you, are a bunch of bankrupts. You talk
about Father being lonely, damn it, as if I didn’t know! Well, just the
same, you can’t do anything about somebody who lives on Mars, can you?
Neither can I do anything about Father. He is simply where I can’t get
at him, wherever that is. Damn it, always has been! I’ve tried. Father
is a man who ordered a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee from life, and
got stung when the waiter brought him caviar and diamond-back terrapin
instead. I’m part of the banquet he found himself served up with, along
with the terrapin and caviar. He can’t digest me. Lonely--as if I don’t
know how lonely he is...!”

“You don’t really, Jennifer. You perceive it with that clever brain of
yours. You don’t know it, though, as one who is really lonely can know
it in another.”

“I suppose you mean as you can know it.”

“Yes, Jennifer.”

She blew him a ring of smoke; and across the table, in the mellow light
of an old-fashioned oil-burning student-lamp, with a parchment map of
Eastern Europe for a shade, they regarded each other slowly.

“Have we the newfangled complaint called sex-antagonism, Gratton?”

“I don’t think the discussion important here.”

“You never do, when it concerns us. Are you open to a discussion about
dialectic writing, or how about the use of pleonasm in Irish drama,
Gratton?”

“Jennifer, that isn’t kind.”

“You’re not.”

“You’re so blamed brittle, Jennifer. You break to pieces under a
fellow’s touch.”

“How do you know? You’ve never touched me.”

“That isn’t worthy of you.”

Tears sprang across her eyes.

“Just like me to blurt that out to you, of all people, whom I most want
to impress. Don’t think I’m in love with you because I said that.”

“I don’t.”

“I want--oh, I don’t know how to say what I want out of life,
Gratton--but I want--passionately----”

“That’s it, Jennifer. You’re a wanter. You want and you won’t pay.”

“Do you know the nicest thing about me, Gratton?”

“I think you are the nicest thing about you, Jennifer.”

“No, the nicest thing about me is the fact that I like you, Gratt.”

“Don’t say that. It hurts. First, because it is not true, and secondly
because I hate your arrogance; but your meekness would just about kill
me. Humble, you would break my heart, Jennifer.”

“I am humble, Gratt, before the things you stand for.”

“Good Lord! don’t say that, Jennifer!” he said, and kicked back his
chair and began to plow into a rubber pouch for pipe tobacco. “I’m
jolly well what you said I am. A self-centered, would-be egomaniac,
trying to get on, by crawling away from that center known as self....”

“Your saying that I am fundamentally f. and s. means a lot to me,
Gratt.”

“You are, Jennifer, and some day somebody is going to sink the proper
kind of shaft and mine the f. and s. out of you.”

“Who and how?”

“A husband with the sense to understand you.”

“I think I prefer to remain fundamentally unsafe and unsound.”

“The devil you do!”

“Your way of rubbing in the fact that there is a serious possibility
that I may be in love with you.”

“Scarlet-fever symptoms may only mean measles.”

“You mean because of what I was idiot enough to tell you about Berry?”

“No; but now that you remind me....”

“Be careful, Gratt ... because if there is any sure test for me to
determine whether or not I am in love with you, it is to compare what I
am feeling now to what I did not feel then. The most counterfeit part
of that entire situation was me. Not Berry.”

“Out of the frying-pan and into the divine fire,” he said, and tilted
her face with the tip of three fingers.

It was the first time he had ever touched her.

Reliving the scene to herself later, at home, in bed, under covers, it
seemed to her that she had felt illuminated, like a switchboard. Lights
had popped out all over her, in goose-flesh, each prickle a bulb. He
had done it with the light touch of three fingers, tilting her chin
slightly backward.

She remembered with a flaying flush that she had sat down on the
couch and crammed a pillow into the small of her back, and, trying to
command a level voice, had said, “Sit down, Gratt, here, beside me, and
let’s talk things over.” Knocking out his pipe, he had said, with a
casualness that made her ridiculous:

“No. Come along. There’s a mystery-play over at the National, and I
feel in the mood for who-killed-cock-robin.”

He had felt in the mood for who-killed-cock-robin when, at the touch of
the three finger tips that had tilted back her chin, Jennifer had been
brought to realize how phony had been everything that preceded this....




It was after midnight when Jennifer arrived home after the
mystery-play. The lift, if you used it in the dead of night, made a
soughing noise that could be disturbingly heard throughout the house;
and, after her habit, she wound up the great curlicue of staircase
instead. A rose-window, bits of its floral design said to date from
a twelfth-century cloister at Tours, shone down into the majestic
forest of stone pillars of the hallway. Under it, Jennifer paused for a
moment. She loved its bath of color. Like an enormous flower it bloomed
over the tiredness of her spirit that transmitted itself in fatigue
to her body and made the walk upstairs a drag. There were rings under
the eyes of Jennifer, and her cheeks were narrow planes of pallor. The
tiredness that had clamped down upon her after she left Gratton, made
her shoulders droop and her feet creep. She wound on slowly....

There were routine signals along the way, to tell her certain trifles
that registered languidly along her brain. Her father was in bed. She
could tell by the closed bedroom door and the color of the rim of night
light. Her mother was not yet in. The figure of the maid in the Breton
cap nodding in a chair with her mouth open, as she passed Jenny’s
boudoir, testified to that.

Ever since she had been old enough to take cognizance of it, there
had been something horrible to Jennifer in the idea of the bed and
bedroom which her parents had so submissively shared throughout the
years. It was one of the few subjects Jennifer had never dared broach
to her mother. But it was horrid to her. There was something of a tomb
about that chamber. In it lay dead love. About it were strewn wilted
passions. Two husks lay side by side in it, desire long since dead.
Florentine chamber-of-horror....

Jennifer’s maid was waiting for her, and there was a glass of chilled
orange-juice on a table beside her bed; and on the bed itself, her
night things of rosy satin and pale lace. She fell out of her clothes,
and into them, gratefully eager to have her lights out before the
arrival of her mother. So long as a lamp burned in one or the other
of their boudoirs, they never went to bed without exchange of tiptoe
visits. Youngish visits, curled up on the chaise-longue in Jennifer’s
dressing-room, or Jenny’s. A curious quality of girlishness had
persisted in Jenny. There had never been a time when to Jennifer,
who adored her, there had not been something of sister in their
relationship.

Just the same, it was with a sense of relief that Jennifer found
herself deeply in bed, lights clicked out, and still no Jenny.

The sense of hurt that was out all over her had not necessarily direct
bearing on the evening she had just spent with Gratton. It was rather
the sense that had risen to its culmination with this evening, that
nothing she could hope to be or do was to have bearing upon the life of
Gratton. He was constantly flipping her off, as he would ash off his
cigarette. She merely had flavor for him. He sometimes said of her that
she gave him appetite for work.

“By sense of contrast?”

“Probably.”

And probably it was. Not because she exhilarated him. Not because she
was some one who was restless for his achievement. His plane of life
was one that excluded her. And suddenly, lying there in a little knot
of pain in bed, Jennifer, as she had never desired in her life, wanted
access to that plane. Everything that heretofore had been of prime
importance to Jennifer was secondary, if not second-rate, to Gratton.
Always had been. Unconsciously, in what he revealed to her about his
past life, was he constantly showing himself up to her. The things that
mattered most to her were the things that Gratton had never even had
time to despise.

For instance, the two years that Gratton had lived in Oxford, England,
doing graduate work there on money he had earned waiting on table
at a summer hotel, Jennifer had been making notoriety for herself
at the baccarat tables of Cannes. The summer he had spent living on
seventy-five cents a day in a room in Assisi that overlooked the upper
and lower chapel of St. Francis, and writing one of the plays that
helped make his trunk excess baggage, Jennifer had been lying most of
her days on Lido sands in a bathing-suit that looked painted on, her
head lounging against the lap of a well-oiled young Italian count to
whom she was reported engaged....

How far the Raricks had missed fire! Two of them, Jennifer and her
father, lying there now, with elaborate walls between them, in a pile
of grandeur that rose above them in the elegance of this Renaissance
tomb, one of them lying out there in a slim boy’s grave, into which the
worms must be finding way by now.

What sense of defeat was there perching now in the heart of her father,
lying, himself, not forty of the appallingly expensive feet from her
own bed. What bankruptcy there? What had Gratton meant by the really
lonely person of her father? What indictment against her had lurked in
his eyes? No. No. Rarick’s loneliness was of his own making. He had
built it up massively about himself. Jennifer had not been cast out,
because she had never been let in. Presently her mother would come
home, carrying on her narrow shoulders enough in chinchilla and square
diamonds to support a family of ten through a lifetime. She would go
to that room--to that tomb--to that bed--to that sleepless little
heart-twisting bankrupt there--Father----

After a while there was the sound of Jenny in the hallway. Jennifer,
lying there, could hear the tinkling noise her sequined gown made as
she came along. Like the welt that her body left on a bed, the footfall
of Jenny was light. It fell past Jennifer’s door softly. It turned
into snow, falling into a dream of Jennifer’s, that she was walking
ankle-deep in it toward a student-lamp that burned in the window of
a small mellow house, and that smelled of leather and a wire-haired
terrier and a pipe that hung from an amused-looking lip....

       *       *       *       *       *

Jenny had been to the closing function of what had been a series of
elaborate entertainments in connection with a Street Fair which had
been held down the center of Park Avenue, where junior members of
social-register families pinned fifty-dollar carnations on the senior
lapels of telephone-directory families.

Socially and financially, it had been a success. The Street Fair
charity-week had concluded with a supper dance held at the residence of
the chairman of the executive committee, Mrs. Grant Fillimore Speigel,
Sr., who had contributed her enormous ballroom for the purpose.

Entrance was by one-thousand-dollar check, and then only if you were
bidden. It was one of those occasions when the Raricks were sure not
to be overlooked. It was the first time Jenny had ever set foot in
the old-fashioned Murray Hill home of the Grant Speigels. The evening
had been sufficiently dull to keep its social inviolability to the
fore in Jenny’s mind. She had apparently made a personal dent upon
the consciousness of Mrs. Grant Speigel, and there was an engagement
between them for luncheon three weeks hence. The evening had been more
than justified. But her shoulders ached from fatigue; and once or
twice during the supper, which you ate off of knees, the old sense of
sickness had overtaken Jenny.

Ramon had not been there. She had taken Tom Lamentier, widowed
brother-in-law of a Wilke-Barre, on the thousand-dollar check that
should have admitted Rarick himself. Ramon, on one of the absences
that was becoming more and more intolerably mysterious to her, was
off on a week-end at the shooting-lodge of one of the sons-in-law of
Mrs. Emanie Bursilap, an inclusion that was fantastic, so far as the
burly Harrington Powers, who had married Edith Bursilap was concerned,
and which must have been manipulated at no small discretion by his
mother-in-law.

But at any rate, Ramon was returning tomorrow, and Jenny was lunching
with him, quite openly, as they did upon rare occasion, at the Ritz.
They must talk things out. Oh, how imperative it was that they talk
things out! Something corrosive and frightening was at the heart of
Jenny.

There was a list of memoranda under the lamp of her dressing-table that
had been left there by her secretary, Miss Dang, and holding it down,
as paper-weight, a small jeweler’s package, with a red seal splashed
over it. It contained four dreaming, perfect little pearls, which she
had ordered clipped off the end of one of her necklaces and mounted as
studs. Ramon’s. The time had come when Jenny, no one the wiser, was
resorting thus to the device of clipping such gifts off the edge of
her magnificence. She had already presented Ramon with star-sapphire
cuff-links off the rear end of another necklace; and the large
canary-diamond center to another cigarette-case had been pried out by
a jeweler and replaced with a blue diamond from a ring which Jenny no
longer fancied. The canary had been worth thousands, and it was like
Ramon, lover of beauty, to defer selling it, even in the face of needs
that clamored.

One memorandum reminded her of an exceptionally early morning-fitting
at Valli Sœurs before her eleven-o’clock contract-bridge lesson.
Propped up conspicuously against a Lalique perfume-urn was an isolated
item: “Dr. Noon telephoned that he will expect you without fail at his
office at one o’clock tomorrow (Thursday).”

A stab of concern smote Jenny. For the first time since her period
at the hospital, a sense of the old discomfort had been over her
at dinner. Tiresome old body. Well, Dr. Noon would have to wait.
Apparently his findings were not bothersome. There was something casual
about the message. As it was, the bridge lesson would have to go
overboard. Ramon was meeting her early.

The maid slid her out of the sequined gown and laid the string of
square diamonds in a satin-lined box with a groove for each stone, and
placed it and the chinchilla wrap in a steel vault at one end of the
bathroom.

In her underthings, Jenny looked like a paper doll. Most fastidious in
her personal habits, there was about her one specific carelessness that
her maid swapped below-stairs with servants who are hawklike in such
appraisals. Invariably Jenny went to bed with her make-up on. It was as
if her frail flesh, tested by function after function to the limit of
endurance, could not hold up under the smearing process of having it
removed. Jenny slept in her painted lips, her mask of white enamel, and
her high and narrow coiffure.

It was this Jenny, in a black-chiffon nightdress through which her body
shone like a narrow candle, who finally made her way to the room where
already lay her husband.

Lightly, in the painted mask off which her lips stared so redly, she
placed herself beside him, drawing over her half of the sheets and
coverlets. Lightly, silently, she lay wakeful beside him.

Lightly, silently, he lay wakeful beside her.




Due no doubt to subtleties of presentation, the news that she was to be
let in for a surgical operation did not at first come as shock to Jenny.

Lying face downward on her chaise-longue, with her arms flung to a peak
over her head in an attitude of relaxation taught her by a masseuse she
had brought home from Stockholm one summer, Jenny’s predicament, phase
after phase of it, began procession across her awareness.

Good Lord! What was the matter with her? Sitting there in his
office, himself seeming so invulnerable to body ill, perhaps Noon
had told her everything except the truth. What if I have cancer?
Millions of women have had before me. Was Noon holding off facts that
might terrify----Nonsense! A man like Noon had no time for subtle
psychological evasions. Besides, no man could simulate his kind of
casualness....

Good Lord! acting like an old-wife poring over a medical book and
reading her own symptoms into every page. Not every woman with a pain
in her side had cancer.... Good Lord!... Fool--fool--fool----

Take the case of Mrs. de Witte Yonge, wife of the Austrian ambassador,
with whom she had recently had the honor to dine. Mary Yonge had
just successfully undergone a major operation. You belonged to a
negligible minority if you still boasted an appendix. Dr. Noon seemed
of the opinion that much of her own difficulty might hover around that
superfluous organ. So interesting to hear Dr. Noon explain the history
of the atrophy of that organ.... Dr. Noon so graphic....

Come to think of it, Jenny’s florist-bills alone--to say nothing of
inroads into Rarick’s conservatories--to friends who were constantly
convalescing from operations in hospitals, were enormous. Naturally
you got things the matter with you in the course of a lifetime. Didn’t
expect your motor-car to run without overhauling, did you? Well, same
principle applied to the human body....

Of course, the serious side to the story might be in the cards, too.
Didn’t cross that bridge, however, until you came to it. Particularly
if that bridge happened to be across the Styx. Nifty of herself to
indulge in grim humor at a time like this, Jenny decided. Don’t cross
the bridge across the Styx until you come to it. If Fifi Putnam, with
her tubercular history, had survived three major operations, why not
Jenny? Dr. Noon had been by no means certain hers would be major. Lydia
Mason, to be sure, had died on the table, but Lydia had been awfully
wrong on the inside ever since the birth of her third child. Besides,
the--the sort of thing that did for Lydia, ran in her family. Look how
Georgie Prescott had gone to his operating-table weighing one hundred
and twelve pounds, and now tipped into the heavy-weight amateur class
at all the private boxing-bouts at the Beaverbrook Club. An operation
was something to be casual about these days. In the main, Jenny truly
was. There were little scare-spots in her. As a matter of fact, the day
she saw Noon, she had returned home from his office instead of going on
to meet Roxy Gravure at the Dog Show, where Roxy was showing a pair of
the finest Kerry Blues ever registered.

The very smell of Dr. Noon’s offices, she told herself, had been
unnerving. They invented everything else, why must doctors’ offices and
hospitals continue to reek to heaven of the suggestion of antiseptic....

Then, too, this season of seasons, just when Jenny had made what she
considered her most important social wedge! Mrs. Grant Speigel had
undoubtedly taken a fancy to Jenny. Herself one of the founders of the
Cosmo Club, she had all but volunteered to put Jenny up for membership.
They had lunched together. Jenny was already harboring the plan of
arranging an elaborate function around the dowager figure of Mrs.
Grant Speigel. The surgical operation would put a serious kink in that
important plan. In countless plans.

Then, of course, there was that wave of recurring fear about Ramon. In
the scare-specked hours which followed her knowledge that in a week she
must go on the operating-table, her thoughts and fears, trepidations
and concerns, had floated about without anchorage.

It was difficult to imagine Ramon coming to her through the etheric
smell of hospital corridors. Prying nurses! She had successfully kept
the period of her observation in the hospital from him. But this time
he must know. How curious to be confronted with the need of telling
Ramon that she must go to a hospital for an operation.

There were situations in which you simply could not imagine certain
people. Perhaps, though, thought Jenny, on the anxious drive home
from Dr. Noon’s, it is just the providential circumstance to tide
us over this bad place. Jenny, in laces, on her bed of pain, wan to
him, esoteric, might conceivably, by way of temporary and delicious
lassitude, fascinate more than in health.

He had been distrait at lunch at the Ritz the day before. Terribly so,
the lurking pain in her side seemed to collide with the fear that kept
knocking about in the region of her heart.

There was a card crushed into the hand that was flung high over her
head as she lay on the chaise-longue. It was part of the damnable
wrongness. It had added to her impending state of high nervousness to
receive this invitation from Mrs. Grant-Speigel to week-end at her
place in Lenox beginning the very day that she had arranged with Dr.
Noon to enter the hospital. The night she would probably be plowing
her way out of ether, a wound in her side, was to be a gala one at the
opera, when a visiting queen was to sit in the Gerinald box, which
adjoined the Raricks’, to say nothing of the minutiæ of plans that
clotted the lines of her engagement-book and which suddenly had become
part of a daily routine that was precious.

Then there was this business of telling Rarick and Jennifer--to Jenny,
a shamefaced procedure of trying to get said to your intimates the
intimate things that had to do with the plights of the flesh. Jennifer
must not be frightened. Rarick would be kind....

Lying there, crushed into a silence that moved in a procession of her
incipient terrors, there crept slowly into Jenny a desire that had to
do with Rarick. Even if her illness turned out to be as responsive to
the knife as it promised (Noon had been so casual!), there persisted
in Jenny a sense of need of Rarick. To be sure, he would in all
probability do little more than sit humbly beside her or at best say
lusterless things, but just the same he would be there!

An impulse to cancel her four-o’clock engagement with Ramon at the
tea-room the next afternoon flooded over Jenny. But even as she
considered, she knew that, punctiliously, dragging herself up from the
chaise-longue, she would be at the appointed place at the appointed
time.

It was in the intervals between seeing Ramon that revulsions like
this could sometimes overtake her. Revulsion of self. A commiserate
desire to creep back somehow into the old unevil life with Rarick that
dated back to the days when she had first set up housekeeping and had
presented a first child to the serious young man who, with his feet on
the clay banks of the Meramac and his eyes on the Pyrenees, had wooed
her.

Time and time again, these periods of revulsion had ridden her, and
time and time again receded, leaving her marooned on the strange shores
of her infatuation for this boy with the eyes that nowadays were more
insolent than amorous, and whose half-baked æsthetics, even as she
succumbed to them, she realized were spurious.

For the moment, in her fright, Jenny turned to Rarick. Ramon, who
hated illness, might find her ugly to him. Rarick, on the other hand,
was not the man to waste impatience or rebellion upon the inevitable.
His sympathies, always susceptible, were not hard to muster. He was
a kindly light on a landscape that to Jenny had suddenly become
threatening and sinister.

Jenny, who had no God in particular, except one she resurrected for
herself in times of great stress, felt suddenly and terribly the
need of God and Rarick. Her emergency God had last been on her lips
in her paroxysms of grief and pity over Avery. She was about to have
need of Him again. His name bubbled along her lips in tears. God, get
me out of this. God, pull me through. God, make a better person of
me. God, I need you. God, spare Jennifer any shock. God, forgive me
all--everything. And, strangely, paradoxically, even as she lay there,
chastened of mood and supplicating: God, keep me well and desirable to
Ramon.




And, of course, she did see him that following afternoon at four. As
a matter of fact, she sent a chauffeur to her milliner’s so that she
should have to wear a new tall and narrow Russian turban of black
krimmer that glittered down the front with a long dagger of diamonds.
Ramon might find it effective and amusing. Her white face, long and
narrow as the hat itself, not a rim of hair showing, was almost like a
transparent face, on to which had been hung a deep-crimson butterfly
made of two painted lips. Strange, glittering Jenny, at whom people
stared without admiring.

As usual, on the edge of one more experience of seeing Ramon, her
revulsion fell away from her and became anticipation that tingled.

There were picked words with which to tell Ramon this thing; words that
would not offend or frighten or hurt him. Ramon was a sensualist by
extraordinary virtue of the fact that he shrank so from wounding the
senses. His senses. She would wound them ever so much less than she
would charm them....

Riding along in a snide taxicab toward the place of their appointment,
the ordeal ahead of her began to set itself like a stage.

She saw herself, tilted on her hospital bed, surrounded by tall Lalique
jars of lilies and a jade bowl of green orchids with flecks on them, at
her side. She would bind her hair in a tight fillet, so that her face
shone out like a sly, sophisticated nun’s. Ramon had once jerked the
hair back from her face, held the bandeau of his handkerchief tight
above her brow, and called her that. Sly, sophisticated nun. She liked
being called that. Sly, sophisticated nun. He had not meant it really,
had said it to her in the key of endearment and had kissed her throat
through the barrier of high, scented ruche that closed it in like a
wimple. Well, well, no matter how hard had been the sledding; the
wretchedness of the deception; the dreadful sense that somehow Avery,
Jennifer, and Rarick had been smirched, and decencies that sprang from
the very magnesia of the soil of the years in St. Louis, defiled ... it
had been worth it.

To have never had this, toward which she was riding in the abominable
yellow taxicab with cigar-butts on its floor, lean into her life and
redeem some of its vanished luster was unthinkable. It had been worth
it ... was worth struggling to hold....

Contrary to his habit of late, Ramon was in the tea-room first, seated
at the small table toward the rear, under a wall-bracket of one
incandescent bulb with a pink-paper tissue shade. They could count
on this place to be fairly empty at this hour. She could smell his
cigarette smoke and see the black shellacked armor of his hair as she
entered. Their public habit was to shake hands formally. It struck
her with chill that the hand which had used to cling to prolong that
instant was something inanimate that had to be propped around her own,
like a dead one.

What subsequently happened, although she was not to realize it,
amounted, considering the facts of Ramon, to a display of courage on
his part. With what secret misgivings, fear of scene, and perhaps
terror of slaying with pain, Ramon must have prepared what he was about
to launch without giving her opportunity to preamble, Jenny was never
to know. He came at her in short hammer-blows that left her stunned and
unable to resuscitate in time to stave them off.

“I want good hot tea quick,” she said, and drew off the long, beautiful
gloves which she always wore in heavy, loose crinkles along her forearm.

“I cannot stay to tea,” he said, shortly.

The pain in her heart and the pain in her side began to thump
simultaneously.

“Why not, dear?” she said, evenly.

“I am going away.”

“Where?” she said, evenly again, as if her words were to be quiet oil
on so much troubled water.

“You have seen it coming. You have made it hard.”

“What, Ramon?” she said, trying to quiet herself, and the jumping of
the pains, with the thought that always there had been women who had
been forced to face just such stark misery as this one of losing love.
There might be women, at this very moment, in this very city, who were
being crucified as she was being crucified....

“I am sailing straight for Seville tomorrow with Mrs. Bursilap. We will
be gone--indefinitely.”

“You mean Mrs. Emanie----”

“You know whom I mean, Jenny. It is your way of always making it so
hard for me.”

“But, Ramon--Emanie Bursilap--seventy, if a day--grandchildren....”

“Beggars cannot be choosers. You know what I am by temperament. I
cannot struggle. One must live.”

“Is that why----”

“No, Jenny. You wanted, as you say it so well in your language, to have
your cake and eat it, too. You were too afraid for yourself. You were
not generous. I mean in the spirit. You would not risk. I go with Mrs.
Bursilap, and her granddaughter Ellen, to Seville, as secretary and
interpreter. Ellen does not know it, but there her grandmother and I
are to be married.”

“I see,” she said, her lips feeling so dry and gritty against her teeth
that they felt to her as if they must make a scraping sound as she
lifted them to smile. “I see.”

“I am glad you do. I have never pretended to you that I am what I am
not. One must live.”

“I see.”

If only she could stop mouthing “I see!” She wanted to cry out into
the cheap, tawdry stuffiness of that tea-room. She wanted to see his
face darken because her fingers were at his throat. She wanted to hurl
arms about his knees and anchor there to this lean, narrow pillar of
her happiness. And there she kept sitting, smoothing her long, sinuous
gloves which were the color and scent of gardenia, and mouthing, “I
see.”

And suddenly it smote her that in her hour of need, there she sat in a
specked, third-rate tea-room, being dismissed across a dingy tablecloth
by a narrow young man who was trying to keep his furtive eyes
pretentious. Jenny, who had borne Avery, who had been too precious for
life, and Jennifer, in whom leaped flame; Jenny Avery who, twenty-six
years before, had been wooed by a serious young man whose mind was
tipped with beauty, sitting there being dismissed by a gigolo who had
found her fare too meager.

“I see.”

“The--Mrs. Bursilap does not know about--this. She is not so broad
about some things. You must never----”

“I see.”

She looked at him from under the high, narrow turban; and his eyes, as
if hooked on to the dagger of diamonds, would not travel down to meet
hers.

“I wish you happiness, Ramon,” she said, politely.

“I will have to be going,” he said. “Packing.” And placed a
dollar-bill under the glass of orangeade he had pretended to be
drinking before she arrived.

“I see.”

It dawned upon her, as they neared the door, that the aluminum-colored
limousine which she had noticed at the curb as she stepped out of the
taxicab, must be waiting for him.

“I will take you home, Jenny,” he said, flushing.

“No, please, a taxicab,” she said, and shuddered along her teeth.

He hailed one, and, assisting her into it, stood bareheaded at the
curb, replacing his hat, as she drove away, with a swinging gesture
that had given her many a thrill.

Even as her misery blurred her last glimpse of him, the fantastic and
devastating thought smote her that his young, slim body-beauty had gone
back into the sea, as a fish floundering off its hook dives back, only
to be baited again.




Now that the bolt had come straight and sure at her feet, there was
only a deathly kind of fatigue of the spirit, hard to endure, but far
from being the active torment against which she had been steeling
herself.

Ramon going over into the fold of Mrs. Bursilap suggested the wattled
and ugly thought to her of a bright bird of flight being folded into,
along with little insects of prey, the webbed wings of a bat, and fast
becoming part and color of that horrible under-arm débris.

There were folds of old flesh down the face of Mrs. Bursilap that must
be down her body too, and pleats of loose skin along her upper arms,
and a cave of shadow on either side of her lean old nose that made her
bat-like. And as if to bear out the unconscious cousinship, she wore
gray mostly, fine chiffons that floated and formed web between her body
and arms.

Ramon folded into that, was something to shudder over, rather than
to shed the salt tears one locked in the keg of one’s heart. She had
shuddered her share, hurt pride, shocked vanity, loneliness, and a
modicum of grief for a fantasy that had perished, going down before
horror of Ramon and horror of self.

It was as if suddenly she had walked out of some foul lethal garden
into gray but open day. Rarick was in the day, precisely as if she
had been off in some long, embroidered faint, from which she had just
emerged to find him precisely where she had left him. A little grayer,
a little graver, without eagerness, certainly without gayety, and,
consistently as ever, remote from her. And yet so substantially there;
for which, and without shame, she showed her gratefulness.

She woke him up one night, as she thought, out of a sound sleep, when
her growing panic of the operation was heavy upon her.

“Rarick,” she said, softly, filled, there in the dead hours of the
night, with a lonely fear that if she did not speak she would cry out.

He stirred lightly as he lay motionless in his insomnia, not quite sure
that she had spoken.

“Rarick, could you wake up for a moment?”

“Yes. What is it, Jenny?”

“I am all right. I want to talk, though.”

She thought, a little bitterly, that she need not trouble to reassure
him, who had no anxiety for her.

He was relieved that it had come. He had been lying there, pitying her
in her sleep. A week had passed; and since she had not spoken, he had
resolved to see Noon again the following day. But now it had come....

“I’ve been meaning to tell you something of a nuisance, Rarick. You
never asked about what they found at the hospital--so there seemed no
hurry.”

“I knew if there had been anything serious....”

“There isn’t. But I’m in for an operation.”

He tried to lift his words carefully into the casual.

“That _is_ a nuisance,” he said after a pause. “I thought perhaps there
might be a little ulcerous condition there.”

“That is exactly what it is.”

“It is wise to operate, then, and clear up the difficulty once and for
all.”

She could not help but reach out her hand and touch his lightly at the
surge of relief that flowed over her at his calm, inferential way of
regarding her recovery.

“I think so, too. Rarick.”

“We had better have it over at once, then, Jenny.”

We! Nothing he could have said would so have snatched away her
terrifying sense of aloneness. She found herself wanting to reach out
and touch his hand lightly again, and refrained.

“Any time you say, Rarick.”

“Suppose you let me take the matter in hand. I will arrange with Noon.”

“Yes, Rarick.” She felt so small, lying there beside him, so in need,
so oppressed by sudden awareness of how solitary to be born--how
solitary to die!

“I guess I’m a little frightened, Rarick. There is something about the
knife--like cutting the rope to a moored boat----”

This time his hand felt for hers.

The very texture of her flesh, it occurred to her, scorchingly, had
been softened, since last he had touched it, by a lover’s touch. If
flesh, except by way of act of lips, could speak....

“The inevitable is frightening, Jenny, but chiefly because we usually
have to sit on the rear seat and watch some one else at the wheel.”

She thought he was going to moralize, and stiffened.

“Let’s be honest, Rarick. Ulcers may be another name for--for anything.
O God! Rarick, I don’t want to have anything terrible happen to me.
I’ve so much to do, Rarick. So much that must be straightened....”

The mother of Avery was lying beside him, frightened. The feeling of
chronic open wound somewhere around his heart began to move.

“We are going to come through this, Jenny.”

“We are, aren’t we, Rarick? It isn’t that I am afraid to die----”

It was!

“... it is just that I’m not ready, Rarick. So much to be straightened.”

Was the matter of this tawdry affair with the Spanish dancer with whom
she was fiddling away time lying heavily upon her, he wondered, some of
his dull and passive anger against her riding him for the moment.

“I don’t want to die, Rarick. I need you to bolster me over that silly
fear. I mustn’t leave Jennifer. I mustn’t leave life. Funny; all of
a sudden, it’s so sweet. We haven’t made much of a go of our lives
together, have we, Rarick? Why?”

“Yes, yes, why?” How was it that the business of living had so cruelly
deterred them from life itself? Jenny, here in her blazing tent that
was hung in bracelets and shields and all the barbaric splendor of old,
of which he had read in the histories, trembling empty-handed before a
God she had never before found time to contemplate. She had paid God.
Pew-rent. An occasional Sunday-morning obsequy. Ready-made reverences.
He had approached with a new closeness when He had taken Avery. But
now--now----

“Rarick, strange that we who have had so few joys together must always
share the sorrows--first Avery--now this----”

Avery. Avery. Avery. His lips, from hurting, could not bear to say the
word.

“I give myself the pollywoggles, Rarick, talking about death.”

“Then don’t, Jenny.”

“You must help me through, Rarick.”

“I will, Jenny.”

“I mean the courage part. ‘Spiritually,’ is the way the pious
pulpiteers would say it. I do dread death, Rarick. Tomorrow I’ll laugh
at tonight’s pollywoggles. It’s the nights--they get bad--you can
help----”

“Yes, Jenny.” How? He wanted to. The mother of Avery must have it in
her to rise on spiritual wings out of that fear.

“If I die----”

“You are talking morbid fancies....”

“If I should die, Rarick.”

“But why----”

“I want a beautiful casket. You can give it me. I want the most
beautiful. One that will hold them for many a long while.”

“Why dwell on such non----”

“You can do that for me.”

That was what he could do for her.

“Somewhere back, Rarick, when I was a girl in Central High School in
St. Louis, I remember we used to read in class, wasn’t it Héloïse or
Annabel Lee or somebody slim and white in a poem, who dreamed of a
casket lined in ailanthus leaves out of beaten silver....”

He supposed so, but why plan for death when there was life to be
thought of?...

“Life, of course. Perhaps a better life than we have been pulling off
together, Rarick. Death does terrify....”

What an Imperial Highness even the shadow of death could be, forcing
to their knees those who approached.... “I shall never live to be an
old man,” Rarick had once said to Gerkes, “therefore I want to make
a friend of the idea of death early.” Jenny had neglected to make a
friend of the idea. Poor Jenny. He would have given much not to have
been too shy to reach over and fold the startled whiteness of her body
against what comfort he had to offer. Fear was pecking at her....

“You know that beautiful ivory panel that you use for a chest door to
your collection of jades? The one with the Virgin Mary seated, with a
crown of pearls on her head?”

“Byzantium of the ninth century,” he said, mechanically.

“Isn’t it catalogued as the lower side of a casket?”

“Perhaps.”

“Rarick, I want that panel for the lower side of my casket.”

“Yes, yes; but that, we hope, will be many a long day away.”

“And those beautiful Episcopal croziers in gold and ivory, from the
Walton Collection, that stand beside the organ, I want them for
head-pieces. You can afford to build me the most beautiful casket
in the world, Rarick, starting with those priceless antiques of old
ivory and old gold. Don’t line it in satin, Rarick. I shall hate to
lie in shiny white satin like a Catholic cook who has saved up for her
funeral. I want to lie in leaves--ailanthus leaves of beaten silver ...
you can do that for me....”

Of all the things he ached to do for her, now that the open wound of
his heart was bleeding in pity for her fear, this was what she wanted
of him. There was a pair of lines from Chaucer, engraved on an ivory
oliphant of his collection:

    A pair of tables all of ivory,
    And a Poyntal polish’d fetishly.

That was all he could do for Jenny. Send her “polished fetishly” out of
the tent that was hung in the splendor of bracelets and shields.

“Of course, Rarick, I’m pretty apt to turn around on you and not die,”
she said, pertly and mockingly out of the darkness, on a rattle of the
brittle, malicious kind of humor she practiced. “You may not be rid of
me, after all.”

“I don’t want to be, Jenny.”

“Do you believe, Rarick, in a beyond?”

He did passionately, now that it held his son. He dared not, however,
because of the shyness, tell her that his belief in that ultimate
reunion was chiefly what made the strings of days, laden with their
job-lots of rubberized table mats and gilded curtain rods, bearable.
You could not exactly tell a woman like Jenny, who, even while she
quailed, might suddenly rattle off into one of her brittle moods, that
somewhere across the chasm of death, a story that had never been spoken
was waiting to be told by you to your boy.

“I believe in something, Jenny, beyond myself.”

“Do you ever pray?”

“Yes; but, like you, chiefly when I despair. I don’t suppose you would
call that worship, so much as fear....”

“When Avery died, I didn’t fear. I blasphemed.”

He could not talk about him--to her----

“I fear now, but I don’t pray, Rarick.”

He wanted her to pray. Deep in his heart he knew that her need of
prayer had come.

“Do you think it unbearably silly of me to keep wanting a casket made
of ivory and old gold?” (Perhaps Ramon, passing around it, would see
her lying there, the lovely color of the old ivory itself. Croziers at
her head and feet. Priceless ones, the beautiful shape of a shepherd’s
staff, one showing the Virgin and Infant, the other the Crucifixion....)

“I think it silly of you to be dwelling on death, although it sometimes
seems to me, Jenny, that life is a means to death.”

He had not meant to say that.

“What?”

“Try to sleep.”

“Rarick, I--want to say to you--it sounds so silly--it will seem
sillier in the morning--but now--tonight--I feel as if I want to say to
you----”

“Get your sleep, tonight.”

“Perhaps----”

He wanted to hear and yet could not bear it. She wanted to get said
what she could not bear to say. She had no real faith, herself, that
once more in health, she might not ridicule this craven hour of her
low-ebb. Nor had he.

Jenny, God willing, what with that wiry nervous vitality of hers, was
in all probability going to recover. Why subject her, who, with her
eyes on death, had cried only for ivory and old gold to contain the
dust of her body, to any more self-revelations?

“Get back to sleep, Jenny.”

“Yes.”

Dozing off, she hated Ramon, pimp, who had tucked himself securely
under the arm of a bat. And yet--in case--there was always the septic
danger of an operation--in case--she wanted him to have to pass around
the ivory bier, time and time again, and look upon the strange ivory
beauty of her, lying in ivory....




At eleven o’clock the following morning, Jennifer, without appointment,
presented herself at her father’s office, to be met by Hellman, whom
she disliked and who in turn considered her a snip.

“Your father’s morning is filled with important conferences, Miss
Jennifer.”

She looked what she always felt toward him. Spitfire.

“Save that, Mr. Hellman, to tell to some one who wants to sell him
spool-cotton or teething-rings.” She looked pert and as natty as a
little sailing-vessel in rig. Her hats were always such right affairs;
this one, a warrior’s tight helmet of cocoa-colored felt, fitted her
head like a wig. She was cocoa-colored from head to foot, in simple,
unrelieved lines, a triple necklace of faceted amber beads lying in
golden rope along her flat chest.

She was a thrill to the enormous office force on those rare occasions
when she appeared, eyes slanting at her from all sides.

Almost too chic, slim, svelt, right, there was an air of artificial
cocksureness about her that in some way must have accounted for
Hellman’s sense of animosity.

“Tell my father I am waiting, Mr. Hellman.”

“The Des Moines manufacturer with whom he is in conference, Miss
Rarick, has waited in New York two weeks for this interview. Your
father is not even taking telephone interruptions.”

“I’ll wait,” she said, and flung one silk knee over the other as she
sat herself down in the desk-chair Hellman had been occupying.

He took up a pad, scrutinizing.

“His next appointment is with Mr. Harold Bolt, president of the Banking
Trust Company. Mr. Bolt is already here. Your father is lunching with
Mr. Hiram Biltman and Mr. James Biltman. Most important.”

“Is it true,” said Jennifer, helping herself to one of Hellman’s
cigarette-sized cigars, “that there is some prospect of Rarick Chain
being incorporated with the Bilt Chain? As usual, my information comes
from outside patter, but I do think that the old gentleman would be
wise as hell to get out from under.”

“I am scarcely in a position to say, Miss Rarick,” said Hellman, who
was.

“Suppose I’d better tip off my friends to buy Rarick--common or
preferred?”

“I’m scarcely in a position to say, Miss Rarick,” said Hellman, who was.

“Do cigars make you feel sickish?”

“No,” he said, and thought: But you do.

“I’ll finish it if you have to carry me out on a litter. Is that father
buzzing for you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him I am here.”

“Mr. Bolt will....”

“Tell him I am here.”

When Jennifer was announced, the immediate thought smote Rarick that
Jenny must have told her of what was impending. Yet that could scarcely
be the case, since he had not yet conveyed the information to her that
he had arranged with Noon during the morning that she was to enter the
hospital that day week. Jenny was not the one to burden her daughter
with such family-freight before it became necessary.

Now what?

The sight of her father in the settings of his offices was always
impressive to Jennifer. Then, if ever, he was in the faint Napoleonic
cast that she, too, suspected him of sometimes trying to achieve. The
short, rather thickening body that he seemed to press to the ground
with twice the weight that was actually his. The look in his eyes of
seeming to see beyond some Elba. The way the thinning, center peninsula
of his graying hair dipped into forelock. The “R” embossed on a wooden
seal over the mantelpiece and on to his stationery that stood in a
Florentine “R” embossed leather box.

What elements of greatness had gone afoul in her father? What elements
of greatness had gone afoul in him in the same fashion that elements of
cleverness in herself had likewise gone afoul? What little there was to
her had gone afoul ... dear knows, dear knows....

Her father faced her, with the light from the window over his shoulder
and full on her face. An old sense of unreality, where this girl was
concerned, smote him. This urban, highly-polished, unillusioned,
sure-eyed adult was his. He had begot one whom he scarcely knew.

“Well?”

“Guess this is the last time I’ll ever visit you in these old offices,
Father. This time next year you’ll be in the Rarick Building.”

“I think so,” he said, and leaned over the vast smooth surface of
his desk, to move a crystal paper-weight half an inch. His way of
dismissing preamble and asking her to come to the point.

“It’s about Cataract Lodge, Father.”

He paused in the act of withdrawing his hand from the paper-weight, his
attitude listening.

What had she heard, and how?

“It’s a large order I am about to ask, if anything can be in the nature
of a large order for you.”

What had she heard?...

“As I have figured it out to the day, Father, we have occupied the
Cataract exactly six and one-half months in four years.”

“All part of the larger waste,” he said, dryly.

“I knew I could count on you for that agreement,” she said, too
brightly.

Smart girl. Pretty girl. His. It would be easy to be proud of Jennifer.
He thought of a sales-manager’s slogan that hung over the desk of one
of his department managers. “Be Yourself.” Jennifer was not Least of
all, when she was with him. Something must be wrong with him--Rarick----

“Father, I’ve talked over a plan I have in mind with Mother, and it is
all right with her, if it is with you.”

Whatever it was, rest assured she had talked it over with her mother
first. The old jealousy stirred miserably in Rarick.

“I have lately had occasion, Father, mostly through Gratton Davies,
to mix up with some of the girls and boys who write, or are trying to
write. You know, the beginning crowd that is trying to get it said in
plays and verse and articles and such. Novelists. Fellows who hold
up the mirror, mostly crookedly. Dramatists, meaning the set that is
still writing plays for the trunk or bottom drawer. After seeing these
struggling writers knocking about the bedlam of this town, an idea has
begun to knock about my so-called brain, Father. Most of them need a
decent place to work. The notion that a nation’s epics and not-so-epics
must necessarily be composed in garrets, went out of style with
whipping-posts.”

Her brand of pretentious cleverness was always anathema to him. Be
Yourself.

“Father, let us hand over Cataract Lodge as a sort of all-year
workshop to this crowd from here and everywhere, who haven’t got
the where or the withal. Let’s rescue ‘literachure’ from the jaws
of the hall bedroom, the sound of the steel rivet, the smell of the
lodging-house, and the sight of city swill. I’ve always had such a yen
myself for writing, Father, without being able to do much more than
make a cross-sign for my signature, that after meeting a few of these
youngsters--I kind of thought--well--give me Cataract Lodge to turn
over to them, Father. There are forty-eight rooms, not counting eight
big airy ones over the boat-house and eight over the garages. Create
a foundation committee, Father, deed over the Cataract and the three
hundred acres, and maybe some day you will have given lodging to the
birth of the great American novel, or the near-great.”

What was she up to? Was it possible that she and this young Gratton
Davies----

“Think it over, Father. It’s a grand idea, and our chance to have about
the only kind of finger we can ever hope to have in making the world
safe for genius. It’s a concrete, definable world, Father, if you make
its hair-pins, its jig-saws and its salt-cellars. There isn’t such a
well-defined law of supply and demand for soul-commodities. It pays
better to manufacture mirrors than to hold them up to nature. That line
sounds like Gratton!”

Gratton again!

“Father, am I a daughter denied or indulged? I know the appraisal on
the place. One hundred and ninety thousand, without the buildings. You
would think nothing of that for a factory site, Father. Regard this as
an intellectual factory.”

Her way of capturing his understanding. Regard this as a factory site.
His way of being important to letters--factory site--manufacture of
ideas....

“Father?”

Pretty Jennifer. It was part of his consistent faculty for error, where
his family life was concerned, that she should come to him with such a
request at a time like this. For a moment he played with the idea of a
recapitulation of his plans. He wanted to capture her, pretty thing,
so shy of him, with sugar on his finger tips; but his plans were too
deeply laid; so deeply laid that what he finally said was twice too
portentous.

“It is unfortunate that you should come to me at this time on such a
mission, Jennifer. I have had on my mind for some time to discuss a
certain matter with your Mother; but now that her illness has come up,
I do not want her bothered. Cataract Lodge is sold.”

“Sold?”

“Possession does not go into effect so long as I exercise my annual
option-privilege of renting it from the new owners.”

“You sold Cataract over our heads!”

“I suppose it amounts to that.”

“Why?”

“For reasons too intricate to enter into here.”

“You mean to tell me----”

“Are you catechizing me?”

“Father, you are not in any possible money difficul----”

“No, I am not.”

“If I thought it were that, then of course I would under----”

“You would be a misled young woman.”

“Then why?” she cried, and stamped her foot, a quick sheet of tears
forming in her eyes. “Why?”

“So far as you are concerned, Cataract Lodge is still yours, to
do everything you want with except give away. I like your impulse,
daughter, but it is out of the question.”

“But why?” she cried, rising and stamping the desk three times with her
gloved hand. “Why? Why? Don’t treat me like a half-wit, Father. Why did
you sell Cataract Lodge?”

“For the same reason that I have sold Thousand Island Camp and Beaupré
and the Nice property.”

“Father!”

“For reasons of greatest importance to me, but with the leaseholds
which I have retained in each case, of no great importance to you or
your Mother, since you are left free as ever to use them as you have
heretofore.”

“I think it is abominable,” she said, frankly crying now. “Mother and I
have every right to feel rottenly treated. Of course, it is all yours
to do with as you will; but it might have been decenter, Father; it
might have been kinder, it might have been treating us more like human
beings and less like chattels, to have told us.”

“I meant in good time to tell your Mother. This illness changed that.”

“Mother isn’t as ill as all that....”

“Never forget this, Jennifer. I have deeply-founded reasons for every
move I make. You have never taken the time to be logical....”

“I--I simply don’t know what to say to you, Father. You have me
flabbergasted, as usual. I came here full of a desire to do something
that had a wallop in it for someone besides myself. I came here
because, God knows why, I still harbored the shred of a delusion that
there was some way to get through to you. Somehow, this seemed to me
the kind of thing, if I put it up to you--even if the idea did come
from me--might help not only others, but--but us. I came here with the
desire to give a leg to the kind of people who are going to do in
life what I haven’t the guts or the brains or the character to do. But
I don’t want Cataract Lodge now. Even if it were yours to give--the
desire has died.

“What I came most of all wanting out of you, I should have known I
wasn’t going to get!” cried Jennifer, “I should have known!” and
stalked out of the office, with the bright tears standing in her eyes,
and leaving him seated there, smeared with pain and pallor, the look of
hunchback out in his face.




Jenny’s secret apprehensions grew. She was afraid for her flesh.
Rapiers of hot steel were beginning by now to jump through the pain in
her side. She did not betray by word, the rising tide of fear; but as
her mind began to take on the cruel habit of visualizing that moment
when the ether-cone would descend and consciousness plop over into
lethal torpor, the skin began to stretch across her face like hauled
tarpaulin. No one must be allowed to see her in that horrible aftermath
when a vagrant mind led one to say dangerous, revealing, etheric
things. What was that slide of steel into the perfect mesh of her flesh
to reveal?...

In a way, these thoroughly mundane terrors, reasoned Jenny to herself,
were blessed antidote to that whipping of the spirit to which she had
so cruelly been subjected by Ramon. Literal stabs of pain kept her mind
to the literalness of the flesh....

And yet, to Jennifer, even though her father had said to her once in a
voice that had for the moment given her pause, “Your mother may be a
sicker woman than we realize,” there was something of a game in this
going of Jenny to the hospital again.

Jenny had seen to it that it was like that.

“They think I’ve an appendix,” she told her daughter, “and I’m going
to have it out for all it’s worth. I don’t see why I should spare my
friends. Look at Irene Dinehardt. Freddie figured out for me the other
night on the back of an opera-program, that she was in the hospital
three weeks and cost her friends thousands in gifts and flowers. I’ve
sent my share. Now let them send theirs.”

True to her word, she began to spend her mornings, torn as she was with
frenzied desire not to be alone and yet not to exert herself, looped
around, in the angular way she had of sitting, the blue-enamel French
telephone in her boudoir, notifying friends.

By hook and crook, mostly crook, her daughter laughingly assured
her, Jenny had managed to prevail upon Dr. Noon to stretch hospital
routine sufficiently to obtain for her a three-room suite, which was
accomplished by the simple device of opening doors between the ordinary
type of room.

There hung over the Rarick household the air of some one about to be
married or about to set out on a voyage of exploration. Boxes and
packages began to arrive at the house three days before Jenny left
it. Books. Bed jackets. A tiny tickless clock with a radium-and-ruby
face. One of the first of the packages was a bulky one that sent Jenny
and Jennifer into hilarity, including a chuckle from Rarick. A large
cactus-plant arrived, well boxed, and with its tough, hand-shaped
leaves sprouting needles. Hildegarde had sent her sister-in-law a token
of her concern, a card with this angular message attached: “With the
hope that your pain will be no greater than a prick from this cactus.”

“One prick from Aunt Machiavelli’s floral offering and your
convalescence will terminate suddenly, all right,” cried Jennifer,
between gusts of laughter.

“She meant well,” said Jenny, and sat down suddenly with darkening eyes
fixed on the ridiculous sprawling object.

A flash of the first real concern she had felt or expressed,
darted over Jennifer. “You’re not turning forbearing and
last-will-and-testamenty, are you, darling, just because you’re going
in for an appendix? You know perfectly well that your austere and
well-meaning sister-in-law is a turkey-gobbler with a wattled neck.”

“God forbid!” said Jenny, and contemplated the frenzied-looking cactus
with all the absurd wryness she could muster.

“Jenny Avery,” cried Jennifer, huddling up beside her mother on to
the chaise-longue, where she was resting between telephone calls, “I
couldn’t bear to have you turn forbearing and turn-the-other-cheeky. It
would frighten me into a half-belief that you are really sick. Please
be cheeky, darling, instead of turn-the-other-cheeky.”

“Jennifer, if anything unforeseen should happen....”

“Mother, I can’t bear it! Why are you talking like that? You mustn’t
frighten me, darling. It’s disgusting.”

“Jennifer-idiot, stop being a cry-baby all over my new water-wave. I
haven’t the slightest intention of terminating my earthly engagement at
this time. I am speaking of the unforeseen....”

“Oh, I know. Of course.”

“If I should die, Jennifer----”

“Mother, I can’t bear it. You’ll make me hysterical.”

“If I should die, Jennifer, of which I haven’t the slightest damnedest
intention----”

“Then cut out the requiem mass.”

“I want you to be a good girl....”

“And not smear my pinafores....”

“And not smear your pinafores, and be good--and happy, Jennifer. I
haven’t been either. I’m rotten at moralizing, darling; I’ve never done
much for you except love you and....”

“If you say that, I’ll drown myself under eighty of these pink-satin
pillows. If I’m a mess, I’ve myself to blame. Myself, my own self,
nobody but myself.”

“As a mess, Jennifer, you are clever, beautiful, rich, and desirable. I
want you to be good and happy. I haven’t been good and happy, Jennifer.”

“If you don’t stop it,” cried Jennifer, taking a long strand of her
mother’s red-sun-colored hair between her fingers, “I’ll yank.”
She did, and as they fell together among the heaps of pillows the
telephone, for the dozenth time that hour, began to crow.




Strange days for the Raricks. Family dinner three nights in succession,
no guests, but Jenny at table in the kind of tea-gowns she affected,
high at the neck, low laces or furs crowding about her wrists, the
rather mediæval effect blending with the sonorous splendor of the
dining-room.

It was all as strange to Rarick as it was to his women. Butlers
moved through the vaulted gloom outside the circle of the dozens of
burning candles that hung over the table, and swapped comments behind
pantry doors at the spectacle of the Raricks dining _en famille_. To
be sure, three out of the three evenings Jennifer slid off quickly
to engagements, even before dessert, leaving Jenny and Rarick to
contemplate, with self-consciousness, an evening over coffee in the
library, to the marching colored-glass stories of the operas.

One of these evenings, the Quartette came in.

It was strange to be sitting with Jenny, listening, while the room
filled up softly with the selections Rarick liked best. Mozart B-Major,
No. 8, with its beautiful ’cello interlude. Beethoven A-Major, op.
18, No. 5, in its rilling variations of tone and color. There came
Schubert, D-Minor! “Death and the Maiden.” Fortunately, Jenny neither
knew it nor asked about it, but sat with her arms laid out along the
sides of her chair, and her head back against the eunuch tapestry,
vagrant thoughts drifting on the rhythm-tides.

Ramon was on the high seas by now. On an ocean that sometime, somehow,
she had hoped to sail with him. One swallowed the pain, grinding
finger-nails into tapestry. To have had a lover who could endure to be
coveted by Emanie Bursilap! Shame of that! To sit there quietly, lapped
with the low surf of this small and lovely music, and only the wall of
her sick flesh to conceal from Rarick what her heart knew. Little man,
you. Rarick, with his head slightly forward and his fingers forming
a chapel. We are stranger to each other, even now, than if one of us
had never been born. How like you, to touch your finger-tips that way!
Lightly. Shyly. Without intensity. Little man, you.

He had changed so little in the amazing years. The same little man she
had used to contemplate across the covers of the bed in the house in
Westmoreland Place in St. Louis. A hunchback face. A hunchback without
the hunch, but with the hurt, lean face of one. A little bitter.
Frustration. Well, well, well, what about her frustrations? Avery’s?
Jennifer’s? God spare Jennifer. What was out over Jennifer? She was
soft these days, in a lovely way, and subdued, in the way the fellow
at the ’cello sometimes placed a lulling hand against strings that had
been struck. Was Jennifer in love with Gratton? Soon get that nonsense
out of her head. Strange that the brilliant match she was sure to make
was so slow in coming. “I am too needed by her,” thought Jenny, “to
be snatched out of life.” Best to sit tight with Jennifer. Let her
have her head with this Gratton fellow. Up to a point. Strange that a
youth like Rodney Martens, thirty millions, a Brownlee Martens, direct
descent, clever, brisk, up-and-coming, literary after a fashion, had
never, somehow, troubled to follow up his casual acquaintanceship with
Jennifer. Something could be done about that. Best to go slowly with
Jennifer. Let this present absorption in the playwright fellow wear
itself down.... I am too needed here.

So this was how he, Rarick, largely lived his evenings. His
colored-glass operas. This Quartette. His unpronounceable gems, that,
when mounted, were ineffective and looked only semi-precious. Even
Gerkes, fossil, had gone. Found himself a squaw bride off somewhere
in a blubber-eating country. That, too, was Rarick for you! How like
him to pick for his close friend a man to whom an Eskimo bride was
satisfaction! What was there about him, Rarick, that created the little
area of isolation around him? Even Jennifer, when she spoke to her
father, rarely looked him in the eyes, but between, as if staving off
his glance. That was not right. Her period of convalescence would be
a good time to soften things up somehow between these two. After all,
he was entitled to his daughter. Since the death of Avery, it had
always seemed to Jenny, fantastically, that the furrow between Rarick’s
eyes was the shape of a cross. He was entitled to Jennifer. Naughty
Jennifer, so alien to this man, her father. A kind father, in so far as
his understanding went. It was time to see that he got some kindness
in return. He was being kind now. Trying to please. Trying to help her
cast out fear. And yet, there was nothing she could do for that little
man there, or that he could do for her. It was terrible, it was vacant,
it was loathsome to sit there beside this man--this husband who was
being kind to her--parched, as with a thirst, for the kind of kisses
that Ramon, pimp, on the high seas with Emanie Bursilap, had to bestow.
God, I need to be forgiven....




It could be said that Jenny, narrow, frilled, as elaborate as
Bernhardt, and her pallor quite beautiful, went to her ordeal with
something of the fanfare of Marie Antoinette riding her tumbrel through
the populace. The motor-car that bore her was followed by a smaller
one bearing outfittings that were part of the pomp and circumstance
of her arrival. A bed-cover of ermine, with a heavy double fringe of
black tails. An almost-life-size photograph of a head of Avery, framed
in jade, his young throat bare, his eyes unsmiling. The cactus, for
a laugh. Flowers, anticipating her arrival, were stacked in hospital
vases of painted tin, only to be rearranged when Jenny arrived, with
her urns and her vases and her graduated silver bowls.

The hospital--one accustomed to the vagaries of the celebrated and
important--grinned, the impersonal patter of the most highly personal
environment in the world passing around from nurse to interne to doctor.

“The Five-and-Ten Mrs. Rarick! New-rich, but, oh, how rich!”

“Hope she takes a fancy to the fine hand behind the ether,” said the
anæsthetist, “and endows my children’s ward at Island Hospital.”

“Hope she hears of the beautiful, Titian-haired, and virtuous girl in
the supply department and decides to make her an heiress,” said the
red-haired miss in charge of the linen-room.

“Do your best, girls,” admonished the head nurse; “she may come through
and endow our joint-disease wing.”

“She can have her millions,” said a girl in the training department,
“but, oh, how I could do with a ninety-five-dollar civet coat in Macy’s
window. If only she would take ninety-five dollars’ worth of fancy to
me.”

And so on, as Jenny, who came in like thunder, was put to bed in
a bower that later, an interne said, made him feel as if he were
wading through a meadow to reach her pulse. A meadow of the elaborate
magnificence of Jenny. There were present, at her installation, the
maid in the Breton cap, who, after seven years, knew practically
no word of English, but understood Jenny’s execrable French to the
syllable, and the English girl named Daphne Dang, whose rôle was not
exactly definable, but who had been at Jenny’s elbow in rôles of every
capacity from seamstress to masseuse to secretary for the last ten
years. Peacock, the first butler, whom Jenny had hired for his name,
carried in cushions and a screen of Aubusson panels to protect the
opening door from revealing sight of hospital corridor.

It struck Rarick, as he entered, that not a friend had felt close
enough to intrude upon this arrival. There were already telegrams and
notes that Jenny opened and pinned against the screen. They were the
personal touches toward which she seemed to be stretching her long,
cold, clear-looking fingers as toward a live grate.

He wondered, without bitterness, how she had managed with the Spanish
dancing-boy about whom she was always being so elaborately casual.
Poor Jenny! There were the records of the social struggle of the
years pinned along that Aubusson screen. A poor, insecure record. It
would never do to express some of the surge of tender sympathy for
her futilities which he felt sweep over and hurt him for her. This
was the time to be quick and concise and clear and sure. That was the
manner which seemed most successfully to keep her in a state of feeling
reassured. Treat it all as a matter of course. Give directions as you
would for the arrangement of one of her ballroom functions, or charity
bazaars. Jenny caught gratefully at that spirit of casualness. It
hypnotized fear.

But a last-minute dread had reappeared. If only she did not prattle as
she came out of the ether. At best, there had always been something
terrifying to Jenny at the idea of losing consciousness. There were
imperative reasons why Jenny must not prattle. Steadfastly she ground
into her mind the intention to go down into unconsciousness with
her mind a blank, no loose fears, memories, thoughts, desires, or
regrets floating around in it. Yet, what furtive bits of seaweed of
unspoken thoughts might drift to the surface of a mind unanchored by
consciousness! A new fear smote Jenny. Suppose, with Rarick standing
beside her bed, she should unconsciously reveal to him the tortuous
secret windings of those underground rivers of her mind that carried
so much along them that was traitorous to him. Then, too, how could
she endure the thought that her daughter be smirched with some of that
flotsam and jetsam, as it floated to the surface and revealed itself in
words?

A terror of delirium began to settle on Jenny.

“Rarick,” she said to him, as he stood beside her bed the evening
before her operation, “I want you to promise me something.”

She had been so free of this mood of last-minute promises. It
astonished him that never once had she spoken in terms of her will. She
had one, made the tenth year of their marriage. A simple, hand-written
document, duly legalized. As a matter of fact, she had never been
acquisitive in that sense. For purpose of tax distribution, huge
holdings were in her name. These papers she had signed without even
troubling to read them.

Now Rarick began to chide her, in the playful mood she seemed to demand
of the occasion.

“What solemn promise? That I will not break the will?”

“Seriously, it will be terrible to me, Rarick, if you or Jennifer come
into the room to visit me until a day after the ether has worn off and
I am once more my presentable self. I don’t want you or Jennifer to
know how green I can look. Promise me that.”

“Of course,” he said.

What lay in the troubled hinterlands of her mind? What was she afraid
of revealing? As if there were anything much that Jenny could reveal to
him that he did not already know or suspect. Poor, frightened Jenny!
For the first time her affairs were in danger of slipping a bit out
of her hands. He wanted her to keep them there as desperately as she
felt that need. No more than she, did he desire the revelation of those
fetid places that had gathered scum in the years of swampy silence
between them. Ugh!

“Jennifer, see to it that they don’t come near me with one of those
hideous Mother Hubbard hospital night-gowns. If the pain in my side
doesn’t kill me, the touch of canton flannel will.”

“I’ll dike you out in silk, mi-darling, and a fol-de-rol of lace.”

“Don’t let them be efficient and hygienic and sheety about my bed,
either, Jennifer. No matter what kind of damaged goods they bring back
to it, I want to be tucked back into this--make them stack it up for me
while I am attending my own op., darling. It will occupy your mind.”

“If you aren’t careful, I’ll make the bed myself.”

“Then I hope to heaven you have to lie on it.”

“Isn’t she beautiful, Father, lying propped up there in her well-known
magnificence?”

“You look very well, Jenny.”

She slitted her olive-colored eyes and turned her head away. One was
supposed to feel chastened in hours such as this. She did, of course.
But what if her secret distastes of the inadequacies of this man,
persisting even now, should leap through and spatter him with words of
contempt?

“I want you to go now, Rarick. You, too, Jennifer. Promise me that you
will both remain out until they have me all out of the ether.”

“We promise.”

“Of course.”

They were a constrained lot, the three of them, and finally, all bent
to keeping casual, there were good-nights; and the final departure went
something like this:

“Don’t forget to have Miss Dang telephone my regrets to the Planets.
Rarick, hadn’t you better keep this emerald ring of mine in your
waistcoat pocket along with your other glitts? I forgot to put it in
the safe.”

“Let me slide a packet of this Mirabel sachet under your pillow before
I go, Mother. It’s the latest squak. There are some novels and a copy
of _Vanity Fair_ and _Town Topics_ in that lower drawer, Nurse, in case
my Mother wants to read. I’ll bring around the new _Spur_ tomorrow.”

“Good night, Jennifer.”

“’Night, Jenny Avery.”

“Good night, Rarick.”

“Sleep well, Jenny.”

“Sure to. Good night....”

The bed that Jenny left the following morning for the operating-room
was built up during her absence, by her daughter, the maid in the
Breton cap, two nurses, and Miss Dang, into its pyramid of finery.
Tilted, there was a look of cornucopia to it, the way the avalanches of
little laces and the fine pink mists of sheets seemed to spill.

All morning, it stood waiting in its elaborate sort of trance for the
return of its occupant.

Jenny was not to come back to it.

It was one of those operations that after the first few moments, become
hopeless.




It came as shock to Rarick, that the suggestion to unload himself of
the great property of his town house should come from his daughter.

They had been sitting over after-dinner coffee, on one of those
evenings which, during the months since the death of Jenny, his
daughter had dutifully apportioned off, as if allowing him just so much
time out of the more-than-ever crowded budget of her days.

In a sense this was true. Since the death of her mother a rigid,
self-made rule, which she had not allowed to lapse in the fifteen
months, except during the periods of absence from the city, had been to
set apart two evenings of the week, either to accompany her father to a
concert or opera, or remain with him in his library.

The concussion of her mother’s death, coming, as it should not have
been permitted, out of an ignorance and innocence of the facts, had
been an irritant that sent her skyrocketing into a state half noisy,
half hysterical.

“I don’t give a damn for anything now!” she had cried, the morning
they had begun to pluck the finery from the waiting hospital bed of
Jenny, as you would pluck the feathers from a swan. She had gone rather
consistently about not giving it.

“I’d be a fine one to go into mourning, wouldn’t I?”--when she troubled
at all to explain. “She would be the first to hoot laughter at it. She
despised long faces and emotional side-shows.”

That was probably true. There had been no ostensible period of mourning
for Avery, even in the days when Jenny’s face had resembled a wax mask
that was melting downward from the corners. To Rarick, the formal
period of mourning did not even occur.

The affairs of household went on pretty much as usual, except that
after the first blank weeks of shock, Jennifer began to cram the
evenings with occasions. The formal dinner, never too frequent a
function with Jenny, because of the strain of Rarick, who never
attended, became the rule. The house glittered, that winter, with the
clusters of lights at its portal going full blast, and the curb lined
with motors. When the solemn doors swung backward, loiterers, who
sometimes stood in line formation on both sides of the stoop, could
glimpse the molten glow of Hispano Moresque art: the grand staircase
that wound upward with the curving gesture of a lovely woman’s two
arms; the liveried figures of butlers in knee-buckles and claret-reds;
the round burning pool of the rose-window, with its dominant purple of
crushed grape.

They were mixed parties Jennifer held that year, frantically-assembled
parties, without social rhyme or reason; social-fringe assemblages that
Jenny would have tried to avert; sometimes parties with the servants
mopping up small pools of wine from the dining-room floor the morning
afterward, and scraping the marred surface for fresh waxings.

In the main, Rarick did not protest, except on the occasion when young
Rodney Martens, finding one of the butlers’ bicycles propped in a rear
hall--where he must have been groping, between dances, for air to
clear his fuddled brain--had ridden it into the ballroom about three
o’clock in the morning, plunging into a great crystal-and-lapis-lazuli
candelabrum of fifty bulbs, toppling it over, blowing the fuse, and
crashing the evening into darkness, as he landed in a ringing mess that
stirred the household and reached Rarick as he lay abed, sleepless.

“I dislike to have to mention it to you, Jennifer; you are no longer
a child, but either you pick your friends with more discrimination or
don’t have them here.”

That was the evening, seated over coffee, in the library, her eyes
level and burning under her straight bang, that Jennifer burst forth:

“Let’s chuck it, Father. Sell the house!”

Sell the house! He could have told her, almost as far back as her
mission to him in behalf of Cataract Lodge, that he had already sold it.

“That is,” she added, grinding out her cigarette with a sort of fierce
enjoyment at the timeliness of her thrust, “unless you have already.”

He had.

“It’s a morgue. It’s a tomb. It’s a mausoleum. I hate it.”

“Then what?” he said, with his chin touching his shirt-front and his
eyes up at her.

“Then what? Anything. Take me to--to Korea--Abyssinia--at least they
are destinations.”

He regarded her slowly, as if he could not have done marveling that
she had no wisdom. She had been away twice that winter. First to
Paris, scuttling home after a month, full of what she called the
French heebie-jeebies. Later on, there was a yachting cruise out of
Florida waters, for which she must have stood sponsor for all expense.
Rarick’s impulse, when Hellman presented him with bills amounting to
twenty-one thousand dollars for this week’s divertissement, had been
to discipline her by radical way of refusal, under threat of public
declaration, to meet any such future expenditures! But when the time
came for him to take up with her the matter of what he regarded as
wanton and cruel waste, she took her place across the table-desk from
him with a child-like obedience that made her suddenly seem very small
to him and tortured, and something failed him. There was a wild kind
of distress about Jennifer, these days. She had the look of a person
who wants to rip open his collar for more air. She had the rolling look
to her eye of someone frightened. The disagreeable thought smote Rarick
that almost anything might happen to a girl that taut. What hurts you,
Jennifer? he wanted to say to her. Tell me where the trouble lies?

She could not have told. He realized that. It is possible that he
himself could have analyzed it before Jennifer. In those bruised and
somehow resentful months after her mother’s death, self-analysis in
Jennifer had given way before a sort of dull pride in her capacity for
pain. You were wretched. You blazed away with a chronic kind of grief
for the slender slab of Jenny lying out there beside Avery in her ivory
casket lined in silver ailanthus leaves, that the Sunday papers had got
wind of. Hers not to appraise. Hers only to clasp hands to a throat
that was always thickening with tears, and hanker for the strange kind
of maternity that had gone with Jenny.

“Jenny Rarick has left me in a hell-hole,” she once told Gratton, whom
she was seeing on fitful occasions. “I can’t seem to get out of it,
chiefly because I can’t seem to want to get out. Isn’t it strange,
Gratt? I know I’m in hell, but I can’t want sufficiently to climb out.
How do you make that out?”

“Stop trying to make yourself out, Jennifer,” he had replied. “That’s
your trouble, perhaps.”

“I hate you,” she had replied to that, and walked out of his room. He
did not follow. Waiting on the threshold outside his door for a moment,
it had seemed to her that nothing ever in the world could matter so
much as his following her, to unlock her clenched hand and tuck his
into it. He, too, stood waiting on the room side of that door, waiting
to do just that, his body rigid, though, against the move.

Rarick, trying as he had done all of her life, to clamber on to some
basis of intimacy with this girl who was so shy of him, and again
watching these months of her misbehavior, began, a little grimly, to
understand.

The futility of waiting further was borne in upon him. If the death of
Jenny, leaving them stranded in this wilderness of Gothic aisles, had
not hurled them into quick and sympathetic understanding, then it was
not to happen the way it did in the benign world of people in books.

There was too much in him that still wanted to spank her for the things
that still made her wayward and full of self and pretense. She, in
turn, could flare at him with the old antagonisms before even he voiced
rebuke. And yet, withal, she was an older, sweeter Jennifer, subdued
in a way that was even more painful to him than what he considered
her atrociousness. It was that new quality in her that saved her the
drastic rebuke of the twenty-one-thousand-dollar yachting-week, which
had angered Rarick as nothing since her gambling exploits at Cannes.
Even her high kind of despair had a subdued quality that made him feel
more nearly able to cope with this strange girl who was his. No, the
blow of death could scarcely be said to have flung them together, but
sometimes it did seem to Rarick that through the long, vertical mists
of the Gothic twilights in which they sometimes sat together, they were
approaching....

What he said to her this night, over coffee, could not have come off
this way a twelve- or even a six-month before, when a high-handed and
evasive scene would have been precipitated.

“Are you in love with young Gratton?”

“Damn it, yes!”

There was no surprise in her voice, possibly because her mind was
flooded with nothing else but the hypothetical reply to such a
hypothetical question. “Damn it, yes! Lots of good it does me.”

Constantly he was rebuking her for the coarse, free profanity he
despised in general, and particularly in a woman. He let it pass now.

“That is unfortunate.”

“You would put it that way.”

What did she expect him to do? Reveal how her hurt hurt him?

“Father, do you like him?”

That was scarcely the way to express the curiously hankering eye Rarick
sometimes cast on this young man, on those now rare occasions when
he came to dine or call for Jennifer. Their talk had been desultory,
withal curiously exciting to the older man. Gratton would go walking in
the Pyrenees. He had a stubborn, tenacious mouth that already looked
pulled as if from veering his own way. It was not that Rarick liked
him, so much as the conviction was high within him that this fellow,
who wanted what he wanted and would relentlessly go after it, was to be
envied....

“Do you like him, Father?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“You have been known not to approve my friends.”

“You’ve never brought home much worth approving.”

“You mean Berry? That was only a yen, Father.”

“A what?”

“A low-down infatuation of low-down me seeking a way out of a torment
by walking further in. The only reason I have for knowing that there is
a shred of decent person in me, Father, is because I like a boy called
Gratton, who doesn’t give a tinker’s dam for me.”

“How do you know?”

“He has told me so. It’s not the tried-and-true sex-situation that he
would scorn to do in a play--bringing two people together after three
acts and two hours and forty minutes of sex-antagonism, in order to
achieve a clutch-embrace at the final curtain. It won’t end that way
between us. Gratton hasn’t any use for my guts. Pardon anatomical
references.”

“Have you any use for your own?”

“I’m not so bad as painted, Father. The trouble with me, say I,
naïvely, is that I am not any worse than any girl in my position, only
I was slightly better to start with, making the total loss more total.”

She was uncanny to him in her quick perspicacities, always trembling,
as it were, on the border line between her legitimate kind of smartness
and her tawdry smartness.

“How many a true word, Jennifer....”

“Yes, Father, spoken in the grimmest jest that can ever befall me. I
like him, and the devil of it is, the more hopelessly I like him, the
more I like myself for being the kind of person to like Gratton, and
the more I like him for being the kind of person not to like me. Do I
make myself clear?”

There was torment for you....

“Liking him is the nicest thing about me. The neat and respectable
verb, ‘to like,’ is used here out of deference to your sense of decent
restraint. I love Gratton, Father,” she said, and smiled at him, and
kept it lifted there with the determination of a child standing on one
foot.

“Funny thing about Gratton. He’s not money-conscious about us. He is
not cowed, or infuriated, or impressed--I mean, the way you learn to
expect pretty nearly everybody to be except the few-if-anys, who have
more money than we have. Gratt doesn’t despise money as such. He does
think capital swinish. Well, so does everybody, until they get it. I
mean, in a healthy way, he wants money for himself, because God gave
him a great birthday present. A single-track mind. He wants to write;
and legend to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not want to write
in a garret. He doesn’t think garrets are intellectual and creative
clearing-houses, any more than gardens and bright clean rooms are. And
Gratton is out for the gardens and the bright clean rooms. Funny thing
about Gratt. I think he’d rather marry a rich girl than a poor one, but
I won’t do.”

If, Rarick told himself, his face wry with disgust, this was modern
frankness about and with life, then he gave up. The quality of the
picture of Jennifer, seated there with her knees flung so that the
bare pink of her flesh above the stockings was revealed, exhaling two
steady streams of cigarette smoke from her nostrils, and dangling one
cockatoo-green slipper from her toes, depended upon the particular
retina of the eye and mind of the beholder. The eye and mind of Rarick
turned away offended. After all, frankness was a virtue, except when
it became indecent exposure. There were parts of one’s mind one kept
covered, as one kept the body clothed.

“Isn’t that terrible, Father, I won’t do?” she repeated, and looked at
him and smiled with her palms lying open in her lap, loosely, in a way
that was pathetic to him.

“Come here.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Let us talk this thing out. Just you--and me----”

“I can’t. Not now. I--can’t----”

“Then later.”

“Father, be good to me.”

“How, Jennifer, how?”

“By letting me be good to you.”

Trying not to tremble and be silent, he sat and trembled and was silent.

“Child! Poor child!”

“Oh, don’t pity me, Father. That way. Don’t. Don’t. It’s you who need
that. Don’t worry about me. I’m not going in for martyrdom. I’m not
going to withdraw from the turgid world and spend the rest of my life
spreading sweetness and light through orphan asylums....”

No use, no use, was in his brain.

God, God, why am I being like this all over again, was in hers.

“... and you won’t have to take me on a trip around the world to help
me to ‘forget.’ Also, I decline the Victorian alternative of going
into a decline. It isn’t done any more. But, Father, Father, what kind
of a hit-below-the-belt world is this, anyway? I love him. And I want
the right kind of decent constructive life that I cannot work out with
anybody in the world but him. And the dumb-bell,” cried Jennifer,
sobbing out and dashing for the door--“the dumb-bell hasn’t got the
sense to know it. I won’t do!”

Once up in the security of her bedroom, which she made more secure by
locking the door, she turned out the lights and plunged face downward
on her bed.




There came the time, in one of those tall, somber twilights, the kind
that Rarick loved as they came stalking as if on stilts into the
vaultings of his library, when the pile of his writings, which he had
kept stacked in a high and shaggy manuscript on a side-table, was
replaced by a single piece of typewritten paper, held in place by a
paper-weight of alleged B. C. limestone, in cursive Egyptian writing.

It was a twilight that smelled of snow. There had been flurries of
it throughout the day, and by now it clung in small triangles to the
corners of windows, and seeped its intangible odor of white, which
assailed the nostrils like the feel of camphor, into the room.

There had been a high blaze along the logs, which Rarick, seated before
the embrasure of a fireplace in which he could have stood without
stooping, had let die to embers. Late light from the high, leaded
window above him came pouring down on his back and rested along the
stooped ridge of him.

In that posture, the hint of hunch was quite marked. It was a womanish
back, narrow, tired, and with a little peak to it, as if he had been
hung up and a peg had left its imprint.

There was an agate in his hand, which he twiddled without seeing; an
eccentric sapphire cat’s-eye, said to be one of two of its kind in
existence. After a while he slid it into his waistcoat pocket and drew
out a glyptograf cut in old red dreamy amber. Presently the arm of
his chair was strewn with stones, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Etruscan,
Renaissance, a ruby from the famous collection of Signor Medina, an
Italian Jew of the eighteenth century. Two opals from Lord Arundel’s
collection. A black pearl from the first Duke of Marlborough. Another
that had belonged to Prince Miravisky.

At five o’clock, Gratton Davies, who had walked his wire-haired terrier
up a twilit Fifth Avenue, vaulted the snowless stoop of the house with
the Campanile doors, gave over his dog to the keeping of Peacock, and
was promptly admitted to the presence of Rarick.

It was the first time they had met subsequent to that evening when
Jennifer had damned a hit-below-the-belt world to her father.

“I am glad you sent for me, sir,” said Gratton, who was easy in all
personal contacts. “I’ve been meaning for a long while to have a visit
with you.”

“Sit there.”

“Shall I remove this array of lapidarian loot of yours?” he said, as,
seating himself, his arm brushed a ring of Pectunculus shell and sent
it scurrying toward the hearth. “Say, that’s an aquamarine there, isn’t
it? My birthstone.” He scooped the stones into his hand, pouring them
into Rarick’s. “I once had a pretty fine pair of aquamarine cuff-links.
Traded them for an Oxford Dictionary. I’m a great trader, Mr. Rarick.
Belong back in the days when men bartered merchandise for merchandise.
Must seem strange to a man like you, who has built his fortune on the
modern rudiments of big business, but I’m like the old Thracians, who
couldn’t get accustomed to the idea of just a small coin in exchange
for a whole flask of wine. I’ll trade my aquamarine cuff-links for
an Oxford Dictionary much more quickly than for cold cash. That
disqualifies me, doesn’t it, as too unimaginative for business?”

“Perhaps you do yourself an injustice. One of the most outstanding
business dickers of all time was that of a soul in exchange for a mess
of pottage.”

“That is the one kind of trade I don’t expect to fall for, Mr. Rarick.”

“I believe that.”

“You may well believe it.”

“What is it you want most out of life, anyway, Gratton?”

“That’s a large order. You mean it in specific relation to what you’ve
sent for me about, or----”

“Rather.”

“Good! But before we get to it, there is something I have wanted to say
to you ever since it happened. I tried to put it into a message at the
time. No one could understand better, Mr. Rarick, what the death of
your son means to you than I. It’s because, of course, I realize the
workings of that boy so well. I fought his same kind of losing fight
back in those years; only, where he went through the door, I managed
to jump back. I--won’t bore you; but I could have been that boy of
yours, Mr. Rarick--I think I know what his kind of aloneness meant, and
the kind of black waters it can put between even those who need most
desperately to clutch to one another--well, I know what it means--I
know Avery----”

A row of little cords popped out in Rarick’s neck, and it was a moment
before his throat would unflex enough to swallow.

“Yi.” He had wanted to say “Yes.”

“Avery wasn’t able to swim across to you, and you didn’t see his hands
go up for the third time. I made my swim to an island of sanity. I’ve
clung to it ever since. Avery couldn’t--make it----You would have been
his island....”

“A thought like that helps one to keep on living.”

His voice sounded to him like a Lilliputian’s. High and narrow. What
the devil....

“Well, anyway, Mr. Rarick, that’s out of my system. I’ve spilled it
like a ton of coal. But I’ve always felt strangely entitled to say it
to you. Now, to get back to what I want out of life. Don’t know as
I’ve ever thought of it that concretely, but I suppose I’m rank enough
hedonist to ask nothing more than a certain ability to create within
myself, and in turn endow, a certain amount of happiness. Why do you
ask?”

“I have always thought of you as a young man who knows precisely where
he is going.”

“I haven’t always known that. I do now. As I tried to tell you a moment
ago, my feet haven’t always been on the ground. They are now. I may not
reach my destination, but I am hell-bent for it.”

“I like that. Chiefly because most of my life I have always been
hell-bent for a destination that I’ve never cared whether I reached or
not.”

“Strange, to hear you, who would seem to have reached a high peak of
destination that few men achieve, say that.”

“We won’t discuss that. The point of this interview is a strange
one, Gratton. I am informed by my daughter, that you, to use her
own picturesque phrasing, do not care a tinker’s dam for her. That
interests me. I want to know why.”

“Now, look here,” said Gratton, without surprise, but unfolding a knee
and sitting forward, “aren’t you accepting evidence without hearing
both sides?”

“That is what I intend to do now.”

“I don’t know just what your daughter may have told you, but it is just
possible, considering the amount of adulation that has been Jennifer’s
since you brought her into an ornate world, that the slightly tempered
qualities I bring to bear upon our friendship may, by token of
comparison, appear frigid to your high-handed young daughter.”

“Just possible, yes.”

“I don’t know by what metric system you weigh up tinkers’ dams, but
I do know that my regard for your daughter is quite unrelated to a
tinker’s approbrium.”

“You might find it difficult to convince her of that.”

“Am I to understand, Mr. Rarick, that the young man is being asked his
intentions?”

“It is embarrassing and astute for you to put it that way. As a matter
of fact, however, you are being asked just that. Your intentions.”

“To remain, I hope, in so far as it is going to be possible, one of
your daughter’s well-wishing friends.”

“I see. I suppose you are aware, Gratton, that my daughter entertains a
disturbing set of feelings toward you.”

“On those occasions when that fact does seem more or less apparent, it
is embarrassing to one who is so keenly on to himself as I am.”

“It would interest me, as her father, to know just wherein my daughter
fails.”

“Oh, come now, Mr. Rarick, you are too keen a man to attempt to place
me in an utterly equivocal position like that.”

“There is nothing equivocal in honesty, Gratton.”

“I like your daughter, Mr. Rarick. I don’t feel called upon, however,
to qualify, even to you.”

“You are entirely right not to feel called upon. I was appealing to
you.”

“I see. I’m sorry. Jennifer likes me, Mr. Rarick. I’d be a fool not to
see it. She may be in love for the first time in her life, if you will
permit me to say so, both of us knowing Jennifer as we do, with some
one besides herself.”

“No doubt of it. That is my justification for opening this subject with
you.”

“That being the case, her being in love is no special tribute to me,
but rather to herself. Jennifer, of course, thinks otherwise. She has
told me, bless her funniness, that her self-esteem is being enormously
bolstered by the fact that she likes me. That is poppycock. A big
sweeping energy like Jennifer, intelligent, gregarious creature that
she is, must have outlet.”

“But?”

“I hate like the devil to say it to you, particularly since it does not
convey to you what extent I am in danger of being in love with your
daughter, but Jennifer does not quite come through, Mr. Rarick.”

“It’s fine of you to be this honest.”

“It’s fine of you not to kick me out for a presumptuous, if
well-meaning idiot.”

“To get back to Jennifer....”

“One of the reasons I have tried not to see much of Jennifer since her
return from her cruise, Mr. Rarick, is practically an admission of my
own weakness. She fascinates and amuses and delights me more than any
other woman I have ever known. She is full of the power to be pretty
nearly everything she is not....”

“Right.”

“Mark my word, Mr. Rarick, your chance for a bunch of fine realizations
lies buried somewhere in that girl.”

“Right.”

“On the other hand, she is arrogant and without a certain type of pity.
She is sophisticated without taking the time to use her fine brain to
be wise. She is super-critical without being profound. She is without
great accomplishment and intolerant of others. She has a genuine
intellectual curiosity, but pretends to despise what she and the rest
of her set term ‘highbrow.’”

“You are despising the setting of the ring, rather than the stone.”

“Perhaps. I do despise the picture of Jennifer and her set. It has
always been a facetious credo of mind, Mr. Rarick, that great personal
wealth, even fabulous wealth like yours, is a maligned institution and
that in private fortunes there lurks great power for good. In my heart,
though, I am coming not to believe it. The very things I despise in
Jennifer are the things great wealth should have corrected in her and
somehow didn’t. Look at this room. Kings, artists, dreamers, contrived
its magnificence for her. This home. Beauty, prodigality, dignity,
peace, and out of this conspiracy of the so-called better things of
life has come a flimsy Jennifer caring passionately about few of the
things that make life so passionately worth living. Hang it! if I were
not so afraid that it would mean that I am dangerously near loving her,
I would hate her.”

“I think I see clearly everything you have said.”

“You can’t. Diametrically different as you are in some things, you and
Jennifer are fundamentally alike in others. She’s yours.”

“I want to say some things to you, Gratton, that I don’t believe I have
ever formulated even to myself, much less put into words before.”

“I feel like the devil. The things I’ve let out aren’t usually said,
and then, hang it all, I’ve said just about half, and the less
important half of what I feel.”

“This seems to be the time and the place for saying. I don’t mind
telling you that much of what you have just admitted, while not new to
me, is bitter. I’m not so resilient any more. I’m near to sixty, young
fellow.”

“Not----”

“Oh, not so old, but, as the span goes, time to put the house in order.”

“It’s a big house.”

“An appallingly big one. I’m going to tell you about that house. The
house that Jennifer lives in.”

“The house-that-Jennifer-lives-in. That should be the nicest house
there is!”

“Perhaps, in view of all you have told me, there isn’t much point, but
I’m going to say it anyway. I want Jennifer settled, young man. She is
twenty-eight now. Motherless. Her brother is gone. I am not going to
live to be an old man. There are certain things we know irrevocably.
That is one of them. I have always known it. I will not get old.”

“I hate to hear you say that.”

“I would give a great deal if you could like my girl.”

“That’s what I meant just now when I said, I’ve said just half of what
I feel, and that half the less important half....”

“You probably know, without my dwelling upon it, the failure of a
parent I’ve been to her.”

“It’s been a mutual failure.”

“She’s got brains and sweetness----”

“God knows she has. Too much of both for my peace of mind. You’re going
to reap from them, too--mark you----”

“I want to tell you a little about myself, Gratton.”

“Yes.”

“Young man, I am worth one hundred and eighty million dollars. And yet,
personally, I have never succeeded. My success succeeded.”

“I see what you mean.”

“In my youth, Gratton, I wanted one thing out of life as hard-headedly
as you seem to want one thing. My success snatched it away.”

“I think I summed it up when I said once of you that you asked for
bread and got a gold nugget.”

“Excellent. I would have a hard time getting a jury to vote me
sympathy, but I am as short of success, today, Gratton, as you see me
sitting here, as I was in the days when I used to figure my plans on
the backs of envelopes behind a counter in a hardware store.”

“I know that.”

“That is why there is something about a young fellow like you, so sure
not to be deterred; something that to an old fellow like me, is just
about sublime. I want you to look at me, seated here as you say, in a
home contrived by kings, and try to understand some of the things that
I am going to tell you. Follow?”

“Yes.”

“First, as to family. You see me practically bankrupt. My wife gone.
That I cannot discuss, even here. Need I say to you,” he went on, and
began to twist his face--“need I say to you that my life was finished
the day Avery took his? We never got to each other. But I--no fool
like an old fool, that boy was my reason for having the endurance to
fight through the black and colossal years of my success. He made
the nights, filled with my wakefulness, endurable. He was the hope
of my loneliness. He was my real success waiting to be accomplished
and in my dumbness, I crossed him in everything that did not point
toward that success. I saw the paraphernalia of wealth crushing him.
The steam-roller flattening him into a pattern just as you see it
threatening Jennifer. I saw his success in picking out a rich man for
his father, threatening to succeed. I have no graces, Gratton. If ever
a man was lacking in manner, that man is me. I had no way to ingratiate
the boy, no talent for parenthood. I didn’t deserve him. I let him
starve for the very things I would have given my life to feed him. He
got lost, you see, in the maze of the things and the things. I don’t
intend to have that happen to my girl....”

“It needn’t.”

“I am not a man to take life lightly, Gratton. My wife used to say of
me that I lacked a cardinal sense of humor. I have never believed she
was right. That is the last thing a man wants to believe of himself,
but it is true that I do not take this matter of my colossal wealth
lightly. I have given it more profound thought, its relationship to
the world from which I derived it, the economic scheme which made it
possible and my responsibilities toward those sources, than even you
might think. I am not an educated man, Gratton, like you. But I have
thought my share and pondered....”

“I once heard it said of you, Mr. Rarick, or perhaps read it in some
magazine, that you never reached a conclusion that was not based upon
at least several of the best opinions you could muster and that those
several opinions were almost invariably all yours.”

“I’ve gone my road alone. Open the third drawer of that table.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Take out that pile of manuscript.”

“This?”

“Yes.”

“Whew!”

“Yes, five hundred and forty-eight pages longhand.”

“Yes, and what fine, steel-point longhand. Yours?”

“Yes. Brevity being the soul of wit, that would just about be the bulk
of my story.”

“Your life?”

“Everything but, and yet nothing else. It is the story of the house and
man my wealth built. Of the walls it reared for me and the hearth it
kindled. It is filled with moralizing, the kind nobody will take the
time to read. It is the result of my study, my thoughts, my experience.
It is my last will and testament. But more of that presently. I wonder
if you happen to have heard, Gratton, rumors that Rarick Chain is about
to be absorbed by Bilt Chain?”

“Yes.”

“They are founded on fact.”

“You have completed that job.”

“Yes. And now I have a new one. A stiff one. The job of dying a poor
man. The entire philosophy behind that determination is in this
stack of papers. The years I have left are few in which to give back
intelligently the one hundred and eighty million dollars to the people
from whom I have earned it. Earned it, mind you. If there is anything
miraculous about the vastness of my wealth, it lies in the fact that
corruption has passed me by. The average man--and woman--Gratton, is
beholden to the object, the inanimate thing for his comfort and much of
his happiness. I have filled the hands of the masses with objects and
cluttered their minds with the easy happinesses of which they are so
capable. I have stuck more atrocious paper flowers into more atrocious
glass vases than probably any man in the history of the world. I have
anointed the tongues of the masses of children whose humdrum lives
stand ready to snatch them out of youth, with the red of the sticky
lollypop, and they tell me that the sin of ugliness and cheapness is
upon me. That may all be true, Gratton, but I know to what extent
I have made living easier to the masses whose days are chained to
the trivialities of things. My daughter Jennifer owns a six-carat
pigeon-blood ruby ring. The craving for that ring is deep in the hearts
of millions of women like her. I partially satisfy that craving in
red-glass ten-cent rings. Women with scalded, horny hands can now cope
with their dishwater in ten-cent rubber gloves--there is a side to my
colossal, absurd, undignified bartering in snide objects that is labor
of mercy. Don’t you forget it.”

“One isn’t apt to, after hearing you.”

“The wisest man I ever knew showed me the way to give back what I have
earned. He never, even in his great wisdom, knew to what extent his
mind was endowing mine. I refer to my friend Felix Gerkes.”

“Yes.”

“It was he who first set my mind working along lines toward which I had
previously had only a sort of subconscious predisposition. My friend is
at once a simple and profound man.”

“I see where Mengelberg intimated in Berlin the other day, after
commenting on Gerkes’s last book on the theory of life, that the Nobel
prize is once more about to come to America.”

“That will mean little to Gerkes.”

“It should mean a great deal to you, who have made so much of his
contribution to knowledge possible.”

“Probably it does, Gratton. That’s a snapshot of Gerkes there on the
table. It came this morning.”

“I’d never recognize him in his beard and all those fur togs. Is that
his wife and--papoose?”

“Yes.”

“Curious.”

“Not nearly so curious as we must seem to him. Gerkes has learned a
peculiar secret. That is why he is, I think, the only happy person
I know. He is never impatient for his tomorrow. That enables him to
completely live his present. The present and the future are inseparable
to him. The one is constantly in the act of being enveloped by the
other. Tomorrow is something he does not have to hurry toward. There is
going on for him the perpetual phenomenon of his present turning into
past, as the future encroaches and becomes the present.”

“He has the face of a happy person. So has the woman!”

“He took his wife from the Eskimos, whom he considers the happiest
people he has ever encountered. I was about to tell you, not meaning
to digress to the subject of my hobby Gerkes, that it was he who
unconsciously sent my subconsciousness to the surface. Before he
left us down here, for his new life in the North, he used to sit
around with me evenings, and more or less idly, let fall out of the
vast storehouses of his mind, some of his philosophies on preventive
philanthropy.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I know most of it might have seemed obvious to a man like you,
Gratton, but it was strangely new to me at the time. I realize now
that much of what he said had been smoldering in my subconsciousness
for years, but just the same, it was he who started me on the concrete
thinking-out and writing of this shaggy monstrosity of a manuscript.
Three years it has been in the writing. One of its by no means most
important results is, that you see me sitting here, Gratton, in a
house that, pending my death, is only a loan to me. I no longer own
one stone in it, but lease it from those who do, and with the sale of
some vast lumber properties in Maine and Canada last month, I now own
not one acre of God’s territory with the exception of certain colossal
and indirect mortgage holdings which in their turn will be converted.
I am, of course, still a man heavily encumbered with wealth of
practically every sort of valuable human possession, but already forty
million of my dollars are committed to preventive philanthropies.”

“It isn’t easy for a man whose bank balance has never been larger than
nine hundred dollars, to have much of a conception of forty million
dollars.”

“I have endowed no cancer hospitals, but have given, with what I hope
is the cumulative wisdom that is coming to men who have come into the
phenomenal kind of wealth that is possible only in this country, great
fortunes toward the prevention of the disease. Nothing new in all this,
you say. No, but look more deeply into it and see how prolonged has
been the infancy of this idea. And there is but little time left for
me. My money must pour back to the people in a fresh blood transfusion.
I want to wrap no rags around social sores. To accomplish, I must
personally administer my moneys while I live. I must die a poor man.
You see that?”

“Yes.”

“My sole heir is my daughter Jennifer. For that reason and another
equally important one, she comes into no properties at my death except
a life income of eight thousand dollars a year. You live on less, don’t
you?”

“Yes.”

“Comfortably?”

“Fairly.”

“She will be stripped pretty bare of the paraphernalia that has made of
her some of the things we have just been discussing, Gratton.”

“I can’t imagine her.”

“I can.”

“She will plunge like a roped steer.”

“At first.”

“I wonder if you are wise, stripping her so bare of the paraphernalia
which has become part of her.”

“There is the girl under it. The one who eludes you.”

“I don’t believe, Mr. Rarick, that wealth is necessarily destructive to
the individ----”

“Nor do I. On the contrary, I am convinced, for instance, that it is
the business men of different civilizations, the gatherers of material
wealth, who have built the foundations for art. Civilization has
advanced on their gold bonds. Many of the patron saints of the creative
life of Greece were the business men.”

“Think of the gigantic power for good you are about to release out of
the nickels and dimes of the people.”

“I have thought--and thought--and out of it has come my philosophy of
why I must die a poor man and why this wealth that I have drawn out of
the coin purses of American people must be released back now.”

“Tremendous idea....”

“My power to forecast the nature and needs of the future is limited.
Vast accumulations like mine must cope with the contemporary problems
of the people who helped to create the wealth. What is the use of
leaving five million dollars to build tubercular hospitals when two
years after my death, it is not impossible that a cure or a preventive
may be found for the white plague. Let future generations wrestle
freshly with their fresh issues. I want to leave no moneys that a few
years after my death must be expended upon dead issues because of a
will made during the period when those issues were alive. My death,
Gratton, is a much more important matter to the world than my life.”

“In a special sense, yes.”

“So you see, my surplus fortune is not mine to leave Jennifer, even if
I would. And I would not. It is difficult for me to talk to you any
further than I have, young man, about my feeling of what the effect of
stupendous personal wealth has been on the little group of my family.
But just the same, Gratton, therein lies the tragedy of my life. A
tragedy I do not intend to see perpetuated through the sole surviving
member after me, my daughter, who will live to thank the dead hand that
at first may seem so cruelly disciplinarian to her....”

“I simply cannot imagine Jennifer on eight thousand a year.”

“I can. Hand me that paper on my desk.”

“Here?”

“This single typewritten sheet is the boiled-down version of the five
hundred and forty-eight pages of that manuscript. This simple sheet,
Gratton, is my last will and testament, duly sworn and witnessed. My
philosophy of life, and of death. My bow to the world, my tribute to
it, my hope for its betterment, my bow out of it. My sighs for its
defects, my hope for its future. My hope in my child. My faith in her.
Listen,” he said, and began to read.

When Gratton was moved by a scene he was writing, especially in those
earlier years before his “Tragedy of Laughter” had been written, he
always complained of the physical discomfort he experienced while at
work. His ears rang. A curious little elevator of hunger seemed to ride
up and down the pit of his stomach. His tonsils wanted to burst and
his ears became bright, polished pink. Jennifer once wrote of him in
a monograph: “I could tell how the work on ‘Tragedy of Laughter’ was
coming by the color of his ears.”

In addition now, to those roaring symptoms, Gratton, after Rarick had
completed his reading, had a horrible fear he was going to cry. Not
tears, but some brute noises. The sound of an emotion scraping bottom,
as the soul of the man who had just read had scraped bottom.

“There, in a nutshell, is some of the wisdom I have tried to squeeze
out of my defeat, Gratton. Not much of a job to a literary man like
you--but it’s my legacy....”

“Well--guess I’ll be getting along now. Don’t suppose you know it. I
may be wrong. But seems to me, that’s the stuff immortal literature
is made of--that page you just read me. It’s the thing Lincoln poured
into his address at Gettysburg. It’s as close to God as Senator Vest’s
plea for a dog. It’s Shelley and Goethe crying for justice in prose.
Its wisdom will live after you. I may be crazy, but that is the kind of
stuff that achieves immortality. That last will and testament of yours
is literature....”

“I don’t want immortality. At the moment I want milk and Graham
crackers. Have them with me.”

“There’s Jennifer!”

“Where?”

“I heard her step.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Ah yes, I do hear now. Strange that you should have known her step at
the great distance of the lower hall. Shall I call her?”

“No--no. I must be going.”

“Strange that you should have heard her.”

“I’ve a glove of hers. She dropped it one day. I’ll ask to see her on
my way out--to give it back.”

“Will you ring as you go? I want milk and crackers. Share some?”

“No--no. The glove....”

“These evenings chill ... good warm milk ... crackers ... Graham ones.”

“Good night, sir.”

The wind had risen, hardening the triangles of snow against the leaded
windows into crust, and blowing the cold, beautiful smell of snow in
through the weather-strippings.

Waiting for his milk and crackers, Rarick, alone, poked up the embers
and pressed one of the battalion of buttons alongside the organ.

Seated, small, the look of hunchback in his face, the tall, Gothic
twilight climbing into vaulted shadows, the yarn of Pagliacci began to
stalk across stained glass, the organ ballooning into the dusk.

Waiting, as he loved to, for the bursting sob that concluded the
“Laugh, Clown, Laugh,” the chin of Rarick fell forward a little tiredly.

Clouds of music came up like thunder....


THE END

       *       *       *       *       *




Transcriber’s note


Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation
was standardized.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following
change:

  Page 9:  “oeen a lucky gesture”           “been a lucky gesture”
  Page 27: “sapphire, jacinth, dyamont”     “sapphire, jacinth, diamond”
  Page 72: “son to Duse or Cleopatra”       “son to Dusé or Cleopatra”
  Page 87: “inlaid wtih heraldic”           “inlaid with heraldic”
  Page 156: “pointed stalagmities toward”   “pointed stalagmites toward”
  Page 172: “for fifty dolars which”        “for fifty dollars which”
  Page 269: “this Rennaisance tomb”         “this Renaissance tomb”
  Page 276: “Cosmos Club, she had”          “Cosmo Club, she had”
  Page 298: “ising and stamping the”        “rising and stamping the”
  Page 319: “and her tawdry smartiness”     “and her tawdry smartness”



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