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.