She shuddered with a rousing distaste of self. Horrible, horrible, to
lie there imagining.... There were certain scavengers of thoughts that
must be kept locked in the inner boxes of the mind. It made one feel
shameful to have a thought like that pop out. Just the same, the whole
meaning of life would be changed and exalted if that were not Rarick
lying there, but, yes, but Ramon! How horrible of her. How poisonous.
What if Rarick should die? No. No. No! And yet she could never really
see the wickedness of trying to visualize the effect upon herself of
the death of another. Death was one of the few certainties of life.
Rarick would die some day. Either before or after her. If before? She
was not wishing it. She was thinking it.
It was difficult to visualize life free of the strain of simultaneously
wanting to remain impeccably married to Rarick and yet continue to be
desired by Ramon. A life free of the strain of daring to ride three
times around Central Park with Ramon because the chauffeur was new, and
yet all the while dreading, with undercurrent of fear, the indiscretion
of it. The strain of obeying that trick in her make-up which demanded
that she be thrice as solicitous of Rarick for every disloyal act with
Ramon. The strain of keeping herself free from the shadow of a doubt in
the minds of her children.
What if Rarick should die and his restraining hand were left off that
household? What if she were herself, but free! A woman of terrific
wealth, suddenly released from over twenty years of the indefinable
depressant of a man who had grown rich with his lips tight. Would Ramon
be lying beside her then?...
She swung out of bed, shuddering, and, ringing for her maid, hurried
toward her boudoir.
Her day began earnestly now, with a nine-o’clock appointment with the
executive of a large firm of decorators, who was coming to inspect the
ballroom, with an eye to erecting at one end of it a gondola-shaped
stage, on which Jenny proposed to give a charity fête called “A Doge
for a Day.”
At ten o’clock she had a henna-rinse and shampoo, a long-drawn but
imperative performance that accelerated the pain in her side and made
her nervous. During this subsequent hour and a half in the hands of
her hairdressers, maid, masseuse, her head in towels, her face under
cream, her fingers and toes in the simultaneous process of mani- and
pedi-cure, Jenny went through the performance of an interview with her
head housekeeper, Mrs. Dill. She was exacting in her enormous household
management, known to be fair enough, but demanding careful and detailed
accounting of weekly expenditures, which, even after years of the
experience of living at the very peak of American high standards,
remained titanic to her.
“Thirty dollars a week for milk, Mrs. Dill? We don’t bathe in it!”
“That fruit bill is fantastic, Mrs. Dill. What is that item? Five
pounds of grapes, fifteen dollars? Well! Of course, I know you do your
part, but isn’t that buying grapes by the carat?”
“Surely, Mrs. Dill, there is some mistake. Seven hundred dollars for
the florist’s this month, and only three large dinners. Well!”
The days of her conservative girlhood in the modest house where she
had spent the first twenty years of her life were deeply rooted.
The servants’ wages of twenty-five hundred dollars a month, and the
greengrocer, the caterer, the butcher, and the laundry bills in
proportion were to remain unabatedly startling to her.
There was one item on these statements which always smote Jenny with a
kind of anger. Generous though she was, after a fashion, the fact that
the bill for the servants’ meat could mount to hundreds for the month
was constantly roiling. Mrs. Dill saw to it that their supplies came
from the same shops where the family viands were marketed. Of course,
the servants should be well provisioned, and one must close one’s own
eyes to the fact that Mrs. Dill shopped with an eye to her commissions,
but it did seem that the ordinary cuts of meat from the ordinary shops
should have sufficed for them. She had never found voice to convey this
to any of her housekeepers, but the earlier training of the wife of one
of the richest men in the world would persist. It would have angered
Rarick to have her question these food expenditures for the servants,
and it was not, she told herself, that she really did question them. It
was the principle of the thing. It did seem that a good stew of fowl
would suffice for the servants’ table instead of the boned squabs which
were sent from Baltimore in cotton waddings.
Certain traits that had been developed back there in the pressed-brick
eight-room house in St. Louis had persisted in the wife of the
thirteenth richest man in the world.
At eleven o’clock Jenny emerged from the barrage of cold cream to
accompany Jennifer to a loft over an armory, there to enter vigorously
into a fencing-lesson with a master from Turin. When Jenny fenced,
a curious flame leaped into her eyes. Jenny’s “glitt,” her daughter
called it. With her lower lip caught between her teeth, and her face
in the tight vise of a grimace, she danced to the steel on the balls
of feet that were surprisingly nimble. Her mother’s fencing inspired
Jennifer--who was lovely at the thrust herself--to peal after peal of
hilarity.
“You’re the spirit of war let loose, Moth, only don’t bite your tongue.
Down with humanity! Long live sin!”
Nevertheless, these hours exhilarated Jenny, not only seeming to
help the pain at her side, but endowing her with a new sense of body
buoyancy. She took an extra lesson a week now. “Good measure for you,”
she told Ramon. “I must at least be one-hundredth as lithe as you are.”
At twelve o’clock in this day of a Rarick, the executive committee of
the Manhattan Hospital for Crippled Children met at the home of Mrs.
Bursilap Dobson. This home, a somber brown one that still occupied
wide footage in a once highly conservative section of Madison Avenue
that was rapidly giving way to business, was one that Jenny had never
entered on a social basis. Curious, too, because Mrs. Bursilap Dobson
apparently went out of her way to be gracious to Jenny. On these
occasions of the weekly committee meetings, they exchanged doctor,
steamship, opera-box and motor-car preferences, as well as lore
concerning their sons who had attended the same preparatory school.
Most of the time, at Mrs. Dobson’s request, Jenny remained after the
meeting for a bit of chat.
It stopped there.
To the exclusive Dobson functions the John Raricks were not bidden.
“Where do they get off?” gritted Jennifer between her teeth. “It’s town
talk that her mother, old lady Emanie Bursilap, aged two hundred and
forty-six, keeps flocks of patent-leather-haired tame robins and feeds
them meal tickets. None over twenty-one need apply.”
The time had come when this horrid indictment could send a special kind
of chill down Jenny’s spine.
At one o’clock Jenny entertained the members of the executive and
visiting board of the International House for Defective Children at the
Cosmo Club. Again it was not a social group, but the list pleased her,
and she had a typed copy of it sent to the _Times_: Madame Marcella
Tarafa, Buenos Aires. Mrs. Gregory Cripps. Lady Annabel Metcalf. Mrs.
Hugo Thorner. Marquise de Brassac. Signora Testa Pontavice. Mrs. Beaver
Kellog, Philadelphia. The Countess of Pendleton, St. John’s House. Mrs.
Turner Moses. Mrs. Willie Bingham Payne. Miss Henriette Shonnard.
Jenny was not a member of the Cosmo Club, but entertained there by
proxy of Miss Shonnard. It was Jenny’s way of signifying to the
daughter of Senator Shonnard her desire for membership in this most
socially representative women’s club in town. So far nothing had come
of it.
At three, Jenny took a taxicab from the club-house, and met Ramon at
the tea-room in the West Seventies. She had decided on this much of a
definite policy! From now on, never to appear with him at a public
function. For instance, that evening he was accompanying, at Jenny’s
stipulation, young Miss Clabby Wall to a large charity dinner-dance at
the Plaza, for which Jenny had taken a table in Jennifer’s name. There
were to be twenty guests at her table, Ramon not among them. Jenny had
sent an extra two tickets to him by mail.
Unquestionably the need of the small retreat of Ramon’s fitting-up was
becoming imperative. There was such a thing as being conspicuous even
at the inconspicuous little tea-rooms of the West Seventies.
Ramon, waiting in the tea-room, had a headache. Something repulsive had
happened. His dancing partner, the Spanish girl, a volatile, gifted
creature, desperately in love with a shiftless husband who was brutal
to her, had fallen ill of a skin irritation that manifested itself on
her face and disqualified her for the dance. The sight of the blemished
girl had been abhorrent to Ramon, who had also been obliged to advance
the improvident pair fifty dollars to cover immediate doctor bills.
Jenny loved the complete way in which he surrendered himself into
her hands. “Life is confusing, Jennifer’s Jenny. I have sympathy,
of course, but I cannot help being repulsed by sickness. Of course,
perhaps some day I may fall ill myself.”
“No, darling!” cried Jenny, eager to be omniscient in his behalf.
“You won’t hate me if ever I do fall ill--and splotchy, Jennifer’s
Jenny?”
“I’ll nurse you like an angel.”
“I am a dog and you are an angel.”
“You will be an angel to me, though, Ramon, always?”
“It gave me the shivers just now to see her. I was glad to give her
money. It strapped me to let her have fifty, though, Jennifer’s Jenny.”
“I know that,” she said, slipping a yellow bill, that was already
folded into the hole of her glove, from her hand into his.
He placed a kiss along a lean, suède-covered finger.
“It is hard not to feel upset, Jennifer’s Jenny, when life is just one
frusteration after frusteration.”
He mispronounced “frustration,” with a lisp that was adorable to her.
“Everything will come out all right, Ramon.”
“How can everything come out all right, when I am not even to be with
you tonight, but must sit with that tiresome little Clabby person at a
table that is far from yours?”
“You are going to drive home with me afterward. Around the Park three
times.”
“Darling--how----”
“Never mind how. There is another new chauffeur. I could not bear to
live through the day, dear, if it didn’t mean that much time alone with
you.”
“I am looking at you, Jennifer’s Jenny, across this ugly table-top, but
in reality I am kissing you one thousand times.”
“And me you, Ramon.” Across the table their glances poured.
“I must be at Fifty-seventh Street at four o’clock.”
“Damn four!”
“Perhaps I shall drop in later at Perroquet’s; but keep away, as usual,
dear.”
At four o’clock the unmounted body of a specially designed French car
was submitted to Jenny in the Fifty-seventh Street show-rooms of a firm
of automobile-importers.
At five o’clock Jenny picked up Madame Tarafa at her apartment-hotel
and took her to Perroquet’s for tea, where Ramon danced. He did not
come over; but again, from across the room, their glances poured.
At six o’clock, by appointment, a chinchilla coat, which had arrived by
way of Moscow, was delivered to Jenny. In the beauty of twilit snow,
it hung from her narrow shoulders as she stood before triple mirrors
in her boudoir. She proposed to wear it that night. Ramon had admired
one worn by Mrs. Stanley Grimes. Jenny happened to know that the Grimes
garment had cost forty-five thousand dollars in Paris, plus sixty per
cent duty. Her own, with the duty, came to seventy-four thousand.
Rarick, who was completely easy-going about her expenditures for
finery, paid such bills as these with puzzlement. Seventy-four thousand
dollars to cover a woman’s back. Thoughts came jamming to the fore of
his mind, but he choked them back. Well--those were the gratifications
for which men beat out their lives in the market-places.
At seven o’clock the maid in the Breton cap helped Jenny into a
black-satin gown that rose to a high neck in front and to a bare and
daring V at the back. As she was looping herself in graduated ropes of
graduated pearls, the door of her dressing-room burst open without the
preamble of a knock.
It was Rarick. His face, locked in the horrible immobility of a
gargoyle, was the color of granite.
“I want Jennifer.” A paper was crushed in his hand, and his lips were
hauled back from his teeth, making them protrude as they do in a skull.