It saved him eleven minutes. Sometimes he wondered about those eleven
minutes. He fought for them through human underground shambles, drew
into his lungs the breath off the lips of strap-hangers who lurched
their chins into his eyes. In prospect, those eleven minutes seemed
incalculably important to him. In retrospect, somehow, they could never
be accounted for.
At nine-thirty Hellman met him at the private door of his private
office, took his hat and coat, and handed him a drink of Vichy water.
That was part of being a man of affairs. You paid somebody to see to
it that you were properly stoked with the amount of drinking-water
prescribed by your doctor. Hellman’s concern over that drink of water
was perfectly simulated. He watched each gulp of Rarick, who was never
thirsty, with an interest that was impeccable.
Everything about Rarick’s office was contrived to keep out sound. An
artificial quiet resulted. Noises began to grind in your ears from that
quiet, as if some of the crash of the subway had accumulated against
the drums. Rugs ate in footfalls. The battery of push-buttons made
only soft, purring sounds. Two enormous electric fans were noiseless.
The vast top of Rarick’s mahogany double desk, sheeted in plate glass,
carried out the noiseless effect. It was empty of even an inkstand. The
windows overlooking New York Harbor were high enough to give the scene
below--of moving tugs, weaving elevated trains, specks of people--the
effect of silence.
Outside of these carefully insulated four walls, two hundred
stenographers crashed out furious and alarmed hurry calls for more
hair-pins, more peach-skin-faced dolls, more five-cent dictionaries,
more toothpicks, and more lollypops to match the shapes of the tongues
of the world. At nine-thirty, an order, just dictated, was being typed
out there in those frenzied aisles of the polyphonic typewriters,
for the largest single order of boys’ caps in the history of the
industry, while two men sat in conference with Rarick and concluded
this perpetration upon the youthful heads of the world of hundreds of
thousands of cotton caps with cotton linings and cotton buttons and
cotton eagles stitched against navy-blue cotton backgrounds.
At eleven o’clock there arrived, direct from the railroad station,
a president of a Cleveland bank and an executive of a real-estate
concern, on an impending deal that had to do with a Rarick Chain
property-trade on a Cleveland business block that had not yet been
inundated with the shop of petty trade, and against which public
opinion ran high. This particular situation was an old story; and
Rarick took a certain glory in signing papers that were to make way for
a Rarick store on a Cleveland avenue that boasted a museum, a library,
and a park.
At noon, while the anteroom filled up with an assortment of
charity-committee representatives, department managers, factory
executives, automobile agents, and bank messengers, two harried-looking
architects with portfolios and long rolls of blue-prints were admitted
into Rarick’s office by a secret door.
It developed that the roof auditorium, being an afterthought, would
involve structural changes of appalling magnitude and expense, to say
nothing of possible building violations, steel-beam problems, water
installations, and engineering difficulties too technical to bear
immediate discussion. Everything was possible, of course, but at cost
of millions of dollars----
But the idea of the auditorium had formed, hardened, and fastened into
the mind of Rarick. Hellman hovered, during this exhaustive interview,
offering such conservative objections as he dared, and urging deferred
decisions. Two executives of the company were called in, also a
little Russian named Osonsky, an office manager in whom Rarick had
great confidence. While the anteroom jammed itself to capacity, the
conference dragged on, two difficulties arising for every one solution.
But when the architects finally buckled up their portfolios, and the
long interview came to its end, everyone present knew that, in pointed
stalagmites toward the heavens, would presently arise the Gothic
reality of Rarick’s popular-price auditorium, built of the people’s
dimes and nickels, for them, at admission of dimes and nickels. The
greatest musicians available were to pour forth the music of the
masters to the knick-knack-ridden public that swarmed the aisles of the
Rarick Chain stores. It was to cost three million dollars, house two of
the most famous Rembrandts in existence, and the organ-builder was to
die in its loft, of heart-stroke induced by unbearable excitement, the
day the instrument pealed forth the opening-strain of “Ave Maria” to
its first audience.
So much for one of Rarick’s sleepless dreams.
At considerably past the lunch hour an office boy brought five Graham
wafers in oiled tissue-paper and a glass of “half milk, half Vichy,”
and placed them silently on the desk beside Rarick, who was now talking
long-distance to Denver, a receiver pressed against each ear.
At three o’clock, a woman evangelist whose name was constantly skidding
across a coast-to-coast press, and who had traveled eleven hundred
miles for this appointment, came to confirm a matter relating to her
dream of a world-tabernacle on a mountain-top overlooking the Pacific.
At three-fifteen, a German manufacturer of Christmas-tree ornaments
arrived with two Eastern managers, and five hundred and fifty thousand
dollars was transacted across the empty desk-top.
At three-thirty, Rarick, five members of the International Theater
Foundation Committee, Hellman, and two witnessing clerks, bent over
that desk for the signing of the Rarick endowment of one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars.
At three-forty, the flower-woman on the corner of Broadway and Pine
Street, who sold wire-stemmed carnations there for the lapels of
hurrying business men, came up to Rarick’s office, by Hellman’s
arrangement, on the anniversary of her fiftieth year on that corner.
Also by Hellman’s arrangement, and to Rarick’s surprised and angry
protest, three cameras clicked the picture of him presenting her with a
check commemorating the occasion.
At ten minutes to four, Hellman walked as far as the subway with him,
handing him a packet of letters to read upon his arrival home.
At shortly past four, after a cup of tea and two more Graham wafers,
Rarick let himself relax into the unicorn-chair in his library. For
an hour he lay back there, riding the quiet, as a swimmer floats
on his back, finally pressing a button to flood that quiet with an
organ overture called “Field of the Cloth of Gold.” No matter how
chromoesque musically, there was something about it that set Rarick’s
blood marching. He could see himself mounting--always mounting steps,
a cloak streaming off his shoulder--mounting--mounting--peaks off
in the distance, snow-capped. A viola slipped into a cadenza that
seemed to pour from a bird-throat--somewhere--high--was morning air
like ice-water. He could see himself mounting--clouds formed and
were faces--the chorister face of Avery--a woman’s face, with lips
desirable--up--up--Pyrenees of mountain-tops....
Presently Dr. Gerkes came in and drank a glass of hot Burgundy,
which a butler brought without his request. He had just returned from
Toronto, where he had lectured before a royal archæological society.
There was desultory talk of university endowments, railroads, the
Abyssinian researches of a Viennese that promised to shake the theories
of the alleged beginnings of Tertiary man, and then Rarick, spilling
out a waistcoat pocket of pearls, emeralds, jacinths, girasols,
asterias, and diamonds, saw to it that his friend screwed a glass into
his eye and appraised until it was time for him to climb into what
he called his overalls for an address he was to deliver that evening
before a scientific society at the Engineers’ Club.
Left alone, Rarick began to rip open letters off the packet that
Hellman had handed him at the subway. It was after he had read the
third of them that he burst into Jenny’s boudoir with it crushed in his
hand, and his lips flaring back in the fashion that made a skull of his
face.
* * * * *
Standing in the multiplying embrasure of her mirrors, Jenny’s hand,
emerald-incrusted, flew to her throat. What had happened? Rarick
knew something! He always did when he looked like that. Dry teeth
bare. Terror flew at her. Terror and a sudden loathing for the whole
tottering structure of her affair with Ramon. As a keeper of a gigolo
she had risked everything. Why mince matters? Keeper of a gigolo! And
at risk of security, prestige, eminence. The neuralgic pain that was
lurking in her side seemed to leap into her throat--into her spirit.
What had she pulled down about her? What terrible crash was this
impending? Out of her recklessness, out of her failure to rest content
with the security of her eminence, was she about to reap still more
failure?
“Rarick,” she cried out to him, ready, as it were, to fight for her
life, “don’t be a fool!”
How terrifyingly like a skull he was.
“Where is Jennifer?” he said along his dry jowls. “I want her.”
Jennifer? Thank God, then it wasn’t--Jenny! Jennifer, of course. Some
nonsense of Jennifer’s. This wretched nervousness of hers! How could
Rarick possibly have known what her foresight and skill had arranged
that he should not know. The prospect of the drive homeward with Ramon
through the Park came flowing back. Her precaution to change chauffeurs
every so often was an indication of the skill with which she handled
this situation. Who could be clever enough, for instance, to tie up
chauffeur trouble with the fact that she and Ramon ... Jennifer, poor
child! What now? One saw the child so comparatively seldom, now that
the season was on--surely nothing----
“Where is Jennifer?”
“She must be dressing.”
“Call her.”
“What has happened, Rarick?”
“Call her.”
“The child is probably in her bath. Is it as imperative as all that?”
“Call her.”
“Tell Miss Jennifer,” she said in French to the maid in the Breton cap,
“to come here at once. Her father wishes her.”
What row was this now? Jennifer, poor child--could you blame her?--had
been distrait and erratic in her movements ever since that wretched
business at the Edgertons’. Hard hit, poor child. But as if there
weren’t just as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Jennifer
needed change. The camp, perhaps! Could her father have got wind of
that messy occasion at the Edgertons’? God! what a bore Rarick could
be! No wonder his children shied from him.
“I wouldn’t start rowing with Jennifer this time of the evening,
Rarick. What’s wrong? Won’t it keep until----”
The maid returned.
“Miss Jennifer is dressing and is already late for an appointment. She
will come to Mr. Rarick in the library tomorrow morning.”
Rarick strode past the words, across the hall, and, without preamble of
knocking, into his daughter’s suite.
“Rarick,” cried Jenny, and strode after, “don’t be a fool!”
Jennifer, evidently just risen from bed, was sitting on the edge of it,
in a web of a nightgown that fell off her shoulder to the elbow, and
pulling on a bit of infinitesimal stocking.
“Why, Father,” she cried, and jerked a bit of the web across her, “you
mustn’t come in here!”
He hated a display of undress even in the formal attire of the women
of his family. This Aphrodite rising from the foam of lace and chiffon
offended him less than the bare backs they wore tapering into the waist
line of evening-gowns.
“Put on some clothes,” he said. From the layer of tousled bed-clothing
of more pink and more lace, his daughter regarded him throw a scowl at
a jungle of hair that had fallen forward over her eyes.
“I think this is pretty thick, Father,” she cried.
Her mother picked up a white, tufted, swan’s-down robe, and tossed it
to her.
“Put this on, Jennifer,” she said, in the cold, measured tones of her
disapproval of Rarick.
What a bore--what a bore the man was! Joyless. Still a hardware clerk
at heart. Little man, you. No wonder the flame that burned in Ramon was
warming to her rigid heart. Thank God for Ramon! What was that paper....
Thrusting the crumpled sheet under his daughter’s eyes and slapping it
with the back of his hand, Rarick lost no time.
“Explain that.”
The letter was from Tom Edgerton:
... unless, Mr. Rarick, this situation is to result in tragedy for
all concerned, I beg you to call instant halt to matters between
your daughter and my son-in-law. To add to an already outrageous
situation, Leslie is with child. I regret the imperative need to
bring before you what I am sure must be your first knowledge of
this dangerous dilemma for all concerned. Unless you force it to an
immediate solution....
A low cry escaped Jennifer. Pain. Rage. Surprise.
“Damn him! Damn!” she cried and began to sob instantly and wildly into
her bare palm, which she clapped against her mouth. “Damn! Damn!”
“It seems to me,” cried Jenny, frightened, “that Tom Edgerton had
better mind his own eggs in his own basket.”
What was this? What was this? As Jennifer had recited it that muddled
morning after, both the Jennys had sat in merciless indictment upon the
behavior of Berry, and of Leslie, too, for that matter. Jennifer had
hurled at him merciless invective, wallop, and relentless appraisal.
Surely, in these weeks subsequent, Jennifer had not been seeing Berry?
The idea that Jennifer was cruelly hard hit was preposterous. What
was this? Had Jennifer, for the first time, violated her mother’s
confidence? That little fool there, that little fool man, there, what
did he know about handling her?
“I want to know,” shouted Rarick, seeming to gnaw on his words with
his long dry-looking teeth, and standing directly up before his
daughter as she struggled into the sleeve of her robe, “what there is
between you and Berry Rhodes?”
“And what if I don’t choose to tell you?” she cried, already
breathless, as if the interview were of long duration instead of only
just having begun.
“Don’t rag her, Rarick.”
“Shut up!” he said. How his jaw slid around in that circular, grinding
movement! Thank God it was Jennifer and not herself on the rack before
him. She could defend Jennifer----
“Either you tell me the exact situation,” went on her father, brushing
the crest off of a wave of small, incredibly sheer pillows, as he began
to waggle a finger at her, “or I’ll have the Rhodes dog here himself,
or go where I can find him.”
“If you do,” cried Jennifer, wrapping herself in her arms, as if to
withdraw from possibility of contact with the threat, “I’ll kill
myself.”
“Jennifer, for God’s sake, you must learn to talk quietly to your
father.”
“How can I talk quietly to him? How can I talk at all to him? How can
I talk to anybody? Get out! For God’s sake, get out! Give me that
letter!” She snatched it from her mother’s hands and began to twist it
the shape of her own twisted lips. “Leave me alone! Get out!”
Her father caught her by the wrist, jerking her toward him until her
teeth gave a click.
“What is this man to you?”
She began to sob, her face naked and dark as she struggled for her
hands.
“As if you would understand if I told you.”
“What is he to you?”
Suddenly, as if the realization of her trap came flooding over her, she
let her wrists relax in her father’s grip and dropped her head forward
until her brow was almost against his hands, before her incredible
words came.
“I love him, Papa,” she said. “Help me, Papa, I don’t want to love him.
I want to hate him and I can’t. Help me, Papa. Please, please, Papa.”
His heart was in his mouth. His knees trembled. The “papa” had almost
unnerved him. The silly revealing child’s word. Papa. A primitive
phonetic word that must have had its etymology along the toothless gums
of babes. He was too racked to make a sound. Papa, help Jennifer....
“Oh, my darling!” cried Jenny, stung to quick, pouring tears. “And
Mother never knew. Mother never knew. My baby, what has come over you?
This isn’t like you!”
“I know it isn’t, Mother. It’s not me. That’s just it. I’m not myself.
I want to hate him. I want to keep hating him. And I love him, Mother.
Isn’t that terrible?”
“My dear! My sweet! It is just an infatuation. He isn’t worth your
little finger. My dear--my sweet!”
This bare-backed woman, with the little notches up her spine that were
repulsive to him, and the narrow head with the pink hair brushed up
straight to accentuate it, was wresting the situation from him. She was
superb as she drew the head of Jennifer to her narrow breast. Superb
with being her mother, while he stood dumb before the emergency of
his daughter, even though, at her words, “Help me, Papa,” his anger
had dissolved into the flood-stream of his heart. Still he remained
there, dumb, while Jenny, whose pain flowed in the relief of tears,
was wresting from him what had been perilously near being a moment of
contact with his girl.
“_You_ help me, Mother!”
“Why, darling, Mother never realized----”
“I’ll break every bone in his body,” Rarick began to repeat, suddenly.
“I’ll break every bone in his body.”
“That _would_ be helpful, Rarick,” said Jenny, regarding him above the
head of her daughter with cool, slitted eyes. “One of your typically
diplomatic moves.”
“I’ll break every bone in his body.”
“Mother, Mother, make him understand! There’s really been nothing
between Berry and me. If he goes to Berry, I swear I’ll kill
myself----I tell you I’ve been the--the aggressor. I am the one----”
“Shh--h-h, my darling! I understand.”
“You see, Mother, it hasn’t been Berry.”
He was out of it now. It was Jennifer and her mother. Jennifer in the
cradle of her mother’s arms, like a child.
“Yes, yes, Mother knows----”
“Down inside him somewhere, Berry’s got a sense of honor. I’m the
rotter. I haven’t let him be. After that night--even. I’ve kept
wangling him. To meet me. To be with me. Every once in a while I think
I’m cured and try not to see him. I’ve tried to be cured, Mother. I’ve
been in hell. I’m sick, Mother. You try and make Father see that. I’m
like a drug fiend. I love him and I don’t want to love him. He’s snide,
he’s swine, I keep telling myself. And now that Leslie’s going to have
a kid, that makes me twice swine. O God, I--I think I am going crazy,
Mother.”
She was like something wild, crouching beneath the wing of a protecting
arm--the bare, gleaming arm of Jenny--her muddled eyes staring through
the jungle of hair at Rarick, who, having released her wrists, stood
back, flabbergasted.
“Shh-h-h, darling! I see----”
“Make him see----”
“Yes, yes, I’ll make Father see. Mother knows. Mother understands.
Jennifer’s nervous. Jennifer has had a bad dream and Mother is going
to take her away--far--up to the Canadian camp, and get her rested and
cured.”
Jenny had wrested his moment from him, all right. A cry raged in the
silence of his heart. There they crouched from him. The Jennys. “Papa,”
she had mouthed, like a child. So far as he could remember, she had
never, even in her little-girlhood, called him that before. What a
curious thing to have happened! This little girl, this sick little
girl, this pure, good, smart, terribly alien little girl, calling him
“Papa.” And Jenny had wrested his chance. God damn her! No. No. No.
God bless her! This bare-backed woman, with the ridges up her spine
that were repulsive to him, was divine, at the moment, as she babbled
sentimental mush to this girl!
“Sh-h-h, Jennifer! You’re going to get well.”
Her sobs began to subside as she looked out fearfully under the wing of
her mother’s arm.
“I’ll get well if he will leave me alone.”
“Sh-h-h! Father will leave you alone. Won’t you, Rarick, if I promise
to help little Jennifer, who wants to get well, to be rid of the
idiotic notion that she is in love. Won’t you, Rarick? Won’t you?” sang
Jenny, in the monotony of singsong, rocking her body in soothing motion
over the crouched figure of Jennifer.
“I won’t ever see him again. I don’t want ever--to see him again----”
“Sh! That’s right. She won’t ever see him again, Rarick. Don’t cry,
sweet! Mother will help you. Nothing has happened between them; and for
you to see Berry would not only be absurd, but dangerous. Your answer
to Tom will only be the fact that Jennifer won’t ever see Berry again.
Isn’t that right, Baby?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“We’re going away for a little while. Up to the Canadian camp--to
fish--and get well. I’ll wire we’re arriving.” (Ramon could come up for
a week.) “Aren’t we, Jennifer?”
“Yes, darling.”
“You hear, Rarick?” said Jenny, always rocking, always crooning. “We’re
going up to camp--to rest--to get well.”
He sat dumb in the pool of his defeat, glorying, in a curious, crooked
way, in the power of this angular, eccentric woman he called wife, to
mother his children, yet filled with a crushing, impotent anger that
baffled and tortured him because he could not define it.
“You go now, Rarick, while Jenny puts Jennifer to bed and gives her a
bromide to make her sleep. Sh-h, my sweet----”
“Put me to sleep, Mother. Don’t let me finish dressing to go out and
meet him----”
“Shh-h! Now go, Rarick, while Jenny puts Jennifer to sleep.”
With the sensation of having no sensation at all, Rarick pressed at the
hand on his daughter and went stumbling from the room.
Dr. Gerkes was coming down the hall toward the small rear staircase he
used for his exits. He had just had his dinner. A butler was hurrying
with the remains of it hoisted on a tray. Gerkes was in his nondescript
top-coat, his collar already turned up against a fine sifting November
mist that was falling into the twilight.
Where might he be going? Wherever it was, the desire smote Rarick to
join him.
Gerkes was going for one of his walks around the reservoir in the Park.
He did a great deal of his work that way, pounding the neat geometry
of footpath that inclosed the boxed-in waters for hours on end,
formulating in his mind and hurrying back to write.
He was a known figure around that reservoir. Pedestrians, mostly with
dogs, nodded to him. Men around the waterworks knew him. Many the
blustery trip when he had things all to himself, and the grit of ice
hung to his lashes, and the wind, into which he bent the top of his
head, caused even his skimpy coat-tails to balloon.
“I’ll join you,” said Rarick, who was not much of a walker.
“Come along,” said Gerkes, practicing a rule never to be surprised.
They descended by a grand staircase instead of Gerkes’s choice of a
rear one, and two butlers swung them solemnly out of the doors that
were copied from the Florentine Campanile, into the prickled gray wash
of drizzling November.
Rain hung in the air like a curtain. It made of the evening a bead
portière. Through it, lights climbed mistily up the new architecture
of skyscraping buildings with receding terraces.
Rarick stood on his top step, no higher than a match to his house.
Traffic rolled by, filled with the silhouette of lives that he supplied
with their five-and-ten-cent needs.
It struck Rarick, in that moment while he paused for Gerkes to light
his pipe, that his own house was little more than an omnibus filled
with the hurrying figures of those who were also alien to him, except
in so far as he supplied their five-and-ten-thousand-dollar needs.
Jennifer, as she had sped past him, in that instant before Jenny had
snatched, had called, “Save me, Papa!” What atavism was that? Tucked
away in what recesses of her haughty little heart was he papa to her?
In the confusion, she had doubtless lost track. And yet the Jennys
were not all to blame for the confusion. It was the confusion that had
confused them.
_Crash_, was how his brain felt. The confusion of what seemed to Rarick
the falling of huge copper disks through jazz-splintered space that
was bottomless. And the space was divided into days. The days of the
Raricks.
A battalion of red lights flashed down the Avenue; and in the sudden
and, by contrast, deafening quiet halt of the traffic, the two men
rushed softly, bodies bent, into the Park.
There were times when the sensation of the falling of the copper disks
through the space that was divided into days, seemed to Rarick to go
on plunging through the nights. It was as if his body were some kind
of infinitude filled with a consciousness of tumult that was almost
unbearable.
Even here, in the stretches of a park that held out arms of bare
branches of trees to receive them into quiet, the tumult continued to
shoot through him in disks.
Ballet Mécanique. The world of the Raricks, still rent with Jennifer’s
cry of “Help me, Papa!” operated on a huge central piston, like a
ceiling-high steel wheel in a power-house. Ballet Mécanique. Where
had he first heard that phrase? Wherever, it stuck. Ballet Mécanique.
His life, his being, his brain were a power-house for mechanical
production. Production. Over-production. Bing! Bang! Razzle! Dazzle!
Ten-cent hats for ten-cent heads. Five-thousand-dollar speed-boats
for juniors. Production. Bing! Bang! Razzle! Dazzle! His brain was a
switchboard, as high as his house was high, as square as this Reservoir
around which they were tramping was square. Pip! Pop! Lights dancing
in and out across the switchboard. Power. Man-power. Horse-power.
Candle-power. Water-power. Brain-power. Ballet Mécanique. Out of the
switchboard of the brain ran a thousand little snaky tubings, to be
plunged into plugs. More red lights. Salted peanuts from Tennessee.
Paper snakes from Nürnberg. Under-arm shields from Trenton. Scalloped
doilies from Brooklyn. Leatherized bags from Oshkosh. Pearl buttons
from Seattle. Candied prunes from Santa Clara. Pasteboard turtles from
Tokio.
Production. The world had a hundred billion eyes that were lights on
his switchboard brain. Give me wire nails out of Pittsburgh. Raw silk
out of Shanghai. Size A-1 cans of peaches out of Sacramento. Washable
baby-ribbon out of Lyons.
Ballet Mécanique. A hot copper disk ripped off the left plate of
Rarick’s temple, as he bent into the light curtain of rain. And
another. Disk after disk after disk, a flying world of them. They
clattered, they clamored, they splintered the rain which spat against
their heat. Ballet Mécanique. The jumping pistons. The coughing
steam. The high cries of steel wheels under trains taking the steel
curves of rails. The racing of leather belts over heads bent to the
tricky business of inserting the bit of object into the machine at
the instantaneously right instant. Pistons galumphing, steel elbows
jerking. Wise old steel jaws yawning for pulp and spewing out products!
Red light. White light. Up. Down. Galumph. Give me twenty sheets of
tin at a gulp if you would have wire dish-cloths at the Five Cent
tables. Galumph! Galumph! Two hundred yards of wire for the ten-cent
boxes of assorted nails. Humdinger! Machine-stitched dish-cloths, three
for ten. Ga-dash! Ga-dash! Oilcloth books for children. Clunk! Clank!
Clink! Kodak-picture albums. Dip! Sizz! Squ! Incandescent bulbs. Spang!
Pie-pans. Yeow! The Devil limping over Hell! Chicken-wire at ten cents
a yard.
And off the wheel-sized disks that were exploding off the temple of
Rarick, began to spin images of the snow-white, copper-banded yachts of
the rich. Rows of casinos along white Rivieras, filled with overheated
men and women in elbow-deep bracelets, breathing over baccarat. Boys,
all with the chorister-faces of Avery, racing close to macadam roads
in cigar-shaped speed-monsters that were doomed for collision with
the disks. Hordes of Jennys in tight gowns with no backs, climbing up
the sides of gold amphitheaters that had been greased, and falling
back upon one another in riots of finery. Niagaras of ticker tape and
men with kidney circles under their eyes, disappearing beneath the
paper snow as it slid between their fingers. Motor-boats; chinchilla
coats, a thousand trapped little beasts to the precious garment;
four-hundred-thousand-dollar ballrooms; carved doors of a Campanile;
seven town cars; sapphire anklets from Cartier’s; thirty-five room
Adirondack camps; thirty-four servants; Jenny’s crystal bathtub; six
thousand dollars’ worth of cotillion gewgaws; private cars to football
games; eight-thousand-dollar steamship-suites; three-million-dollar
life-insurance policies; bracelets, cymbals, shields; and, smothering
under the bracelets and shields, the voice of a man’s daughter,
remote--“Papa--help me----”
“Do you know,” said Gerkes, speaking for the first time as they turned
homeward, “that certain anthropological researches seem to be proving
conclusively that man owes the dawn of his brain-power to the ice age?
When roots and berries, hitherto their principal foods, disappeared,
they were obliged to hunt reindeer, and flesh was as easy to chew as
raw oysters. That threw the jaw into disuse and gave the brain a chance
to become the larger part of the head....”
In the twenty-three years since her brother’s marriage, Hildegarde
Rarick, teacher in the primary grades in the public schools of Keokuk,
had visited him three times. Two of these highly ceremonious occasions
had taken place before the migration east.
Miss Rarick was as full of principles regarding her relationship to her
brother’s rise to fortune, as a porcupine is full of quills. And, just
so, she bristled with them.
From the very start, when rumors of Rarick’s engagement to quite
a wealthy St. Louis girl had come floating toward her on wings of
exaggerated gossip, Miss Rarick had taken her stand.
Nine years his senior, she had never, to use her own phraseology, been
beholden to him, and did not intend to begin to be so now. Trained,
by the same aunt who had reared Rarick, to become self-sustaining at
an early age, she had become that while her young brother was still
husking corn for pennies, shaking the uncongenial dust of the farm off
her feet, and attending high and normal school in Keokuk by day, while
she earned the upkeep nursing small children by night. She had seldom
clapped eyes on her brother since. At well past fifty she was teaching
the same grade, in the same school, on practically the same basis she
had taught at twenty. The check for fifty dollars which had ultimately
enabled Rarick to leave the farm for Keokuk, where he had boarded in
the same house with his sister for two years, had come from Hildegarde.
He remembered this, and off and on for years had tried to ram down
the resistance she put up against largesse from him; but she not only
continued to refuse the slightest boon of any sort, but also vigorously
resented any attempt on his part to merge her narrow path with what she
was fond of terming “the primrose one” of his family.
It is not improbable that even Miss Rarick’s state-wide fame as the
sister of John G. Rarick was equaled by the peculiar notoriety she
enjoyed as the eccentric, socialistically inclined Miss Rarick, who
would not accept a penny from her multimillionaire brother, but
continued to live in the third-floor front room of the Bustanoby family
on K Street and pay for that room (with light-housekeeping privileges)
out of the underpaid earnings of a primary teacher.
It was good copy. Miss Rarick was not. She turned a narrow back on
the vicarious distinction that was as sincerely terrifying to her
as publicity can be to the obscure, and went her way, not, however,
rejoicing.
Before the gyrations of fate, Jenny Avery, and fortune had wrenched
the situation crazily away, Miss Rarick had entertained the neat plan
of one day joining her brother in St. Louis, and, on a fifty-fifty
basis, sharing an apartment with him. They were thus to become really
acquainted, after the rather precarious years of their orphaned
childhood, and work out one of those pleasant living arrangements that
can sometimes be achieved even by relatives.
Rarick’s marriage had been a blow from which she had never completely
risen back to normal. Everything that had happened subsequently she
regarded as part of the huge prohibitive force that had come between
her and the ideal of the joint living arrangement on the fifty-fifty
basis with her brother.
Besides, from the first instant of her first visit to him, the year
after his marriage, she had detested Jenny.
One of those pointed, Chesapeake-retriever women, all peak, had been
her immediate and lasting appraisement.
“Do you mean beak?” asked her landlady, Mrs. Bustanoby, when Miss
Rarick returned and related her impressions.
“No, peak!”
“Funny,” thought Mrs. Bustanoby. “Never thought of it before, but Miss
Rarick is sort of all peak herself.”
She was, but in the most remote sense from which Jenny was that.
She was off her brother’s pattern only to the extent of the rather
thrust-up manner she had of carrying her head. Otherwise, in a sallow
kind of coloring--said by relatives to be after her father, who had
died on his sparce Iowa farm the year after John G.’s birth--and in the
lean sloping shoulders--said by relatives to be off the pattern of her
mother, who had died, lean and racked, bearing John G.--Miss Rarick was
any narrow woman, whose thin lips had obviously never been coveted and
whose eyes told that story with a thoroughly unconscious bitterness.
It synchronized with Miss Rarick’s idea of what she might expect from
her sister-in-law, that she should arrive for a long-contemplated
visit to her brother, her first trip to New York, by the way, the very
evening after the Jennys had departed suddenly for the Canadian camp.
Rarick was on hand to meet her, and that fat Mr. Hellman, who handed
her a telegram from Jenny, explaining Jennifer’s influenza and
imperative need of change, and which Miss Rarick strongly suspected
the fat Mr. Hellman of having maneuvered to send himself, by some such
device as wiring a friend in Buffalo to wire back in Jenny’s name.
As a matter of fact, the telegram had actually come from Jenny, due
to sharp admonitions from Rarick, but nothing could have suited Miss
Rarick better than this sudden and allegedly imperative absence of
Jenny. As for Jennifer and Avery, Miss Rarick had what amounted to a
pathetic desire to know these offspring whom she knew as little as she
knew their father. But even their absence was, in a sense, relief. It
eased the strain of trying not to appear so completely what she knew
she must appear, in their eyes.
It was the first year that Miss Rarick, after thirty-two years of
teaching, was enjoying her leisure and her pension at the hands of the
public-school department of her small city. For eight years she had
planned to use the first two weeks of it becoming better acquainted
with her brother.
Well, here she was. At sixty, Miss Rarick looked a nervous, an
exacting, and a narrow sixty. She had strong black hair, a face
almost the precise shape of an acorn, and penetrating black eyes that
partially redeemed her from what might have been sallow ugliness.
She was a strange and rather dread person to Rarick. A cold, remote
older sister, whose attitude had always been unspoken grievance, and
yet who never would permit him, by deed, the only gesture of which he
seemed capable, where she was concerned, to remove some of the cause
for that grievance.
The fact that Jenny and Hildegarde were congenitally uncongenial,
Rarick’s common sense had long since, after those first two harrowing
weeks she had visited them when they were bride and groom in St. Louis,
led him to accept without hope of retrieval.
But subsequently, Rarick considered that he had done everything
possible, so far as his responsibility to this narrow,
sloping-shouldered lady was concerned. Even in the first years of his
rise to prosperity he had urged her to give up her teaching and live
on the income he was beginning to be so well able to afford her.
Later, he had even gone so far as to send the junior partner of his
firm of lawyers out to Keokuk, to discuss any arrangement that might
be agreeable to Hildegarde, thus sparing her any direct endowment that
might prove embarrassing to her.
Her consistency in her refusal to accept a favor from her brother
remained flawless.
As Hellman expressed it inelegantly to his wife, “She’s a virgin even
in her financial relations with her brother.”
To Rarick, the entire situation was detestable. Hildegarde’s
punctiliousness about money matters bespoke an innate reverence for it
that her behavior attempted to belie.
Only a woman with a deeply buried respect for the importance of money
could have permitted herself so wide and conspicuous a gesture as
refusing to accept it from one so well able to give. It was the sort
of thing you were expected to respect enormously in a woman like
Hildegarde. It was supposed to make her admirable; and did, to the
citizenry of Keokuk, who would, for instance, have regarded her money
unawareness of Gerkes as meretricious.
Rarick dreaded her. She got on his nerves. She was the antithesis
of everything that set him on edge in the behaviorisms of his own
family; and yet, he asked himself regarding this admirable woman, was
Hildegarde, in the stark rigor of her life, any the better person?
Was he by way of falling into the easy indictment that the rich are all
meretricious and the poor admirable?
Hildegarde was close to impeccability. Law, church, and
society-abiding. Decent, moderate, principled. Her life was an open
moor. It was a moor, all right. Not the moor, either, of heliotropes
and mauves, where he had once spent a Christmas. Jenny, in the
fashionable name of grouse-hunting, had hankered for a Scottish castle.
Rarick had bought one, in Forfarshire, but after two seasons of social
struggle that she decided were not worth the candle, Jenny had left
it to gather moss and taxes. Rarick had since sold it, at a profit of
two hundred thousand dollars, to a Californian with a wife who also
hankered for mixed bag of deer, grouse, and social drag.
Hildegarde’s figurative moor was the moor of tradition and dictionary
definition. A tract of waste land.
The night she arrived, and sat with Rarick in her high-neck black silk,
a turquoise four-leaf clover her sole jewel, Rarick, visualizing his
glittering Jennys in their places at his dinner table of point-lace and
gold plate, felt a surge of bewilderment.
How righteous Hildegarde, in those smug precepts of life which so
decorously divided right for her from wrong!
If only, looking at her, listening to her, talking with her, he could
have felt that here, in this worthy life, were summed up some of the
realizations, mental, moral, and spiritual, that he craved so for
himself and his own.
Hildegarde was as hedged in by her grim principles as Jenny was by her
lack of them.
She held to the rigid and somewhat obsolete socialism that all men
are equal except for the accidental advantages which a capital-ridden
country gives the rich one over the day laborer. No rich man could
sincerely harbor the hope of a better poor man’s world and not choke
over the cake that came to his table. Your true economic philosopher
reduced himself, by giving away his fortune, to the impotency of
poverty, and by virtue of the asinine inconsistency of shearing himself
of his power to make his wealth work for his principles, thereby
became cleansed.
“I think,” she told her brother at the conclusion of a long meal
devoted to a discussion of the Kansas coal strikes, closed-shop
conditions in Keokuk, the Protestant vote, and a pointed dissertation
on lax youth, “that I shall take a ’bus first thing tomorrow and ride
down into the congested districts.”
“I’ll send some one down with you into some of my model tenements.”
“I don’t suppose Jenny or the girl has much time to devote to study of
that sort of thing?”
How smug she was! The mere fact of the omnibus irritated him. Her world
operated on a pivot of ready-made principles. She cerebrated about
practically nothing, but was quick to practice principle even when
meaningless, as exemplified by the ’bus ride when there were idle cars
in the garage at her disposal.
She had what Gerkes called a machine-stitched philosophy of the
interval called life. All men are equal. Marx or somebody--maybe it
was God--said so. No--Plato? Oh no, not Plato! That the scheme of the
alleged equality of man did not work out that way, never had, was
another matter. Well, anyway, all men were equal. Of course, nobody
denied that somebody had to mine coal and somebody had to teach
school, and it was important that electric lighting first be invented
and then manufactured by somebody, and, of course, there must always
be your Goethes and Edisons, your Beethovens, your paupers and your
peasants, and, for some reason, the communities of men who must have
been wood-choppers contemporaneously with Abraham Lincoln had remained
unspecial, while he----Well, just the same, all men are equal. All men
are equal in the eyes of God, anyway, even if He created some of them
with low brain-power, low vitality, and a low competency to cope with
His great ones of His earth.
How joyless she was! Men digging in subway ditches, women on hospital
cots in wards, were jocular in a way she had never been capable of
in her life. Life to Hildegarde was a roadbed bordered with spiked
principles that shot up like telegraph-poles. She lived as narrowly
within her precepts as Jenny and Jennifer lived within theirs.
Regarding her across the crystal, this smote Rarick: “It was not what
you thought about life. It was not even what you did about it. It was
what, underneath all the superimposed structure, you inherently were!”
Take Gerkes, now. Doubting old rogue, the word-magic of phrases such as
“the equality of man,” left him cool as a cucumber. He accepted their
inequality coldly, but was inflamed with the impulse to do something
about it on that basis. A better world for brick-layers, biologists,
and bankers. He was a hog for truths, Gerkes was; and turning them up
now and then with his perennially seeking spade was what kept life the
exciting predicament it so apparently was for this lusterless-looking
man in herring-bone gray and chalk dust.
God! God! God! Trying to reason out the rightness, the wrongness,
the goodness, the badness of life; of the lives around him, of his
own, of his narrow sister sitting there in the unconscious attitude
of holier-than-thou, munching an almond as if she had not sufficient
saliva for its enjoyment, the old panic arising out of his sense of
impotency, smote Rarick.
Certain people, he knew, were afflicted with a fear of high places.
Their sensations must be akin to this feeling of his. Insane fear of
loss of equilibrium. Need to feel his feet grip more closely the earth
that spun away from them.
“That is how I shall spend tomorrow, Rarick. No need for you to bother
about me. I shall take an omnibus down to the congested districts.”
He looked at her and felt that his laughter came like a bray.
“Why not the Second Avenue surface car?” he suggested. And then to
himself, “You’ll find it much more righteously uncomfortable.”
A thought that he confessed to himself was more amusing than really
valid, began to turn in Rarick’s head during the following two weeks
of his sister’s visit. He had urged her, out of what Miss Rarick
sniffingly referred to as the politeness of his heart, to prolong her
stay indefinitely, or at least specifically until the return of the
Jennys.
That was impossible. Miss Rarick was due back in Keokuk for the annual
meeting of the executive board of the Keokuk Home for Wayward Girls, of
which she was secretary and treasurer.
For seventeen years she had not missed one of these board meetings. It
was her boast, Trojan that she was at raising funds _via_ the charity
bazaar, the church social, and the Christmas drive, that she had never
approached her brother for so much as one penny contribution to her
favorite philanthropy. Roiled at her principles, which he found so
tiresome and conspicuous, Rarick had never volunteered to contribute.
It lurked in Hildegarde, rankled there. She meant, some day, in the
course of an unburdening of herself to Rarick which she had rehearsed
for years, to confront him with this omission, along with countless
other stored-away grievances she harbored. She had even rehearsed the
phraseology in which she would throw up to him the fact that the sister
of one of the richest men in the world was obliged to see her pet
philanthropy actually want for built-in bathtubs! Without ever coming
to the point, she was elaborate in her explanations of what was taking
her back to Keokuk before the return of the Jennys.
Over and over again she recounted, to his adamant smile, the shortness
of budget, the hovering mortgage, the crying need for lavatories
with built-in bathtubs, laundries where the girls could do their own
washings-out (a good bright laundry would keep many a girl off the
street of an evening).
With the same elaborate politeness Rarick listened, as determined that
she would ask for what she wanted as Hildegarde was determined not to
ask.
“Speak, Fido,” said Rarick, with his look of amused silence.
“Why, I’ve had girls come to me since we’ve put up the cretonne
curtains in the recreation-room at the Home and say to me, ‘Miss
Rarick, funny thing, but I just don’t feel like running around nights
any more!’ That girl did not realize it, but the simple fact of bright
and cozy surroundings was filling a need in her.”
It was at that stage that the impulse to throttle, until the prim words
fairly bounced off her lips, would overtake Rarick, causing him to
smile through his outrageous sense of aggravation. It was at times like
this that he could visualize his daughter, her knees crossed, probably
revealing their bareness, her mocking eyes pouring their naughty
contempt: “Keep the laundry brightly lighted,” or “Cretonnes cure the
canker in many a lassie’s heart.”
Nevertheless, it was out of the evenings that he spent with his sister,
Dr. Gerkes looking in on many of them, that the thought which was more
amusing than really valid began to bestir itself.
Hildegarde and Gerkes got on well. He let her talk. Once or twice they
had attended the opera together, two straight, narrow, and dun-colored
figures, in the Rarick box from which the Jennys usually contributed
their share of blaze to the tier.
Hildegarde admired Gerkes. Sometimes Rarick suspected her of being
more interested in Gerkes himself than in his collections, over which
she craned a long, conscientious neck; but the fact remained that
she assisted him in various catalogue work, classified some Eskimo
needle-cases and Upper Magdalenian harpoons for him, and attended those
of his lectures before the Anthropological Institute which were open to
the general public.
“It’s been a liberal education,” Hildegarde told her brother one
evening after she had returned from one of these lectures. “A person
could live a lifetime and never learn some of the things I have tonight
about prehistoric man. And as for Miocene apes--well! And that skull
recently discovered at Taunga--in Bechuanaland--yes, that’s right.
I jotted it down in my notes. Just fancy there being a place called
Bechuanaland! Mighty interesting! Live and learn. Have you seen those
stereopticon views of human skulls that Dr. Gerkes took in Alaska?
Mighty instructive.”
Gerkes came in then, tamping down his pipe. “I wish,” he said, his mood
facetiously biotic, “that the element of the human race which sees fit
to attend these so-called popular lectures of mine was as interested
in the story of its life as the ladies in my tonight’s audience,
judging from the flashing of pocket mirrors, were in the angle of
light-refraction on their noses. Do you know what Piltdown women are
supposed to have used for vanity-cases, Miss Rarick----”
“Dr. Gerkes, I was just remarking to my brother, your lecture tonight
has been a liberal education. And to think I never knew there was such
a thing as the Mousterian industry....”
“Did you ever hear the story, Miss Rarick, of the _Pithecanthropus
erectus_ who got into an argument with a small saurian creature of
snake-like stature?...”
“Now, Dr. Gerkes, you’re going to tease!”
“Perhaps I am,” sighed the doctor, “and you’ve reminded me that I’m too
tired for it. Rarick, would you raise your gloating eye from the bloody
fire of those balas-rubies, touch the sapphire button with which you
summon slaves, and ask the fourteenth eunuch to bring me a large bowl
with one inch of _fin_ champagne? To swing one inch of _fin_ champagne
around a rock-crystal basin, Miss Rarick, makes the swinging of the
filigree-and-tourmaline censers seem commonplace.”
“Explain to my sister, Dr. Gerkes, that reference to the tourmaline
censers. That is one of them, hanging up over the Cimabue Madonna
there, Hildegarde.”
“Don’t mind if I turn off the ‘Tales of Hoffman,’ do you, Rarick? Those
doll-babies get me fuddled.”
It was out of evenings often as oblique as this one that the idea in
Rarick’s mind ceased to be quaint and became remotely feasible. Why
not? Here were two lone souls playing a solitary game. Hildegarde might
react to matrimony as a stiff sponge softens in water. Here might be a
new and receptive Hildegarde, who would accept, in the name of their
wedding, the financial endowments Rarick could so legitimately bestow.
Gerkes had countless times given voice to the wear and tear upon him
of these lectures. Gerkes needed leisure, repose of mind, money,
isolation. Hildegarde was past the time when the secluded walks of life
would be irksome. Gerkes had constantly spoken about his intention of
one day seeking out again, what to him had been the beauty and the fine
seclusion of Alaska. Why not? Hildegarde had no youth to shed. Both
she and Gerkes, for that matter, were adults about life. If Gerkes was
playful about it all, it was partly because his lust for the truth of
it revealed to him the unexpected grins, like crevices occurring in
terrific masses of granite.
Why not? Given these two people; a dower of a million; facilities;
leisure for research. A million for every new truth. Two million! Why
not?
Rarick was saved from what might have been an embarrassing hole to
have stepped into, in this friendship that was so very special to him,
by the soft-footed diplomacy with which he approached the subject the
last evening of Hidegarde’s visit, after she had bidden good night to
the two men still seated over their Cointreau, and ascended to the
mauve-and-gold suite of rooms that suited her sparseness so mockingly.
First there had been some talk of a nature that, to his surprise, was
so inwardly exciting to Rarick, that it was all he could do to control
his voice.
Gerkes had gone off, on the slight impetus of an irrelevant remark
about the Rockefeller Foundation, upon the subject of constructive
philanthropies, and from that to the more general discussion of vast
personal fortunes and their dispensation. It was like him to be able
to think aloud on a subject so intimately relevant to Rarick, as
impersonally as if he were discussing the map of Great Britain after
the Würm glaciation. What he had to say along lines that were fairly
hackneyed, for one reason or another, set Rarick to thinking along
lines that were new. A slight talk; scarcely more than the thread of a
discourse, considering how far-reaching were to be its results.
“I am convinced that the basis of progress, Rarick, is prevention.”
“Prevention?”
“Yes. Prevent cancer. It will save the more expensive process of
eliminating it. Prevent slums. Prevent wars. Prevent disease. Prevent
social abuses. That not only takes terrific moneys, it takes an excess
of imagination. A man will give his money to eliminate cancer. It is
another matter to make a man living in a cancerless world visualize the
incalculable importance of cancer-prevention. Rockefeller Foundation
is a rare and fine example of subtle, far-reaching, and humanitarian
expenditure of acquired wealth. A man doing that kind of philanthropy
in his lifetime, instead of leaving fortunes to organizations and
causes that may outlive their usefulness a few years after his death,
displays the power to distribute as well as accumulate. That’s what
makes this little story of mankind that I putter around with, a
full-size job. Finding out the bad places ahead, and then steering
around them, preventing.”
“That’s a pretty big order of a thought, Gerkes.”
“Nothing particularly new about it. Preventive philanthropy is here.”
“It’s new if a fellow hasn’t given it any particular thought.”
“It’s a more thankless job to prevent hookworm than to cure it.”
“Doubtless. But the basis of progress, I’ve always held, in my
business, is elimination, Gerkes. Get rid of excess baggage----”
“I maintain, avoid excess baggage.”
“There’s a world of practical wisdom behind that idea.”
“I’m going to bury myself behind that idea some day--north--where the
nights are long and cold and quiet--fit for a man to work in.”
Out of a ten-minute silence that continued to be as inwardly exciting
as anything that had ever happened to him, filled as it was with the
words of Gerkes surging in birth against the brain of Rarick, there
came from Rarick something, this laconic:
“Wonder you don’t marry, Gerkes, before you dig yourself into those
long Arctic nights you’re always talking about.”
“Extraordinary you should mention that.”
What then! The sly fellow had lifted the thought off his mind.
“Fact is, Rarick, I’m about to.”
(Sly fellow.)
“Yes?”
(Could it be that Hildegarde had been equally sly? Good!)
“Yes.”
“Yes? Have I met the lady?”
“No.”
“Oh!”
Silence.
“Who is she?”
“An Eskimo.”
“A what?”
“Eskimo. I met Illun twelve years ago on my first expedition to
Mackenzie River. Her father is a fur-trader.”
“Eskimo!”
“Yes. Then, six years ago, I met her in Nome, where she was stopping
with her father’s brother, also a trader, and attending high school.”
“So....”
“She’s back in Alaska now, teaching. The Eskimos are close about family
ties and the old mother is pretty well along. We’ve drifted for years.
Waiting. But I have about made up my mind that too much is enough. Life
is passing us by. I’m going back, Rarick.”
“For her?”
“No, to her. Curious thing, from your point of view, anyhow, but
Eskimos, accustomed as they are to rigors of climate, do not thrive in
our so-called temperate parts. I do in theirs. I’m going to them.”
“I see.” Gerkes, Rarick figured, as he sat dumbfounded, would have
received news as surprising to him as this was to Rarick, with the
non-committal attitude of one who is the complete cosmopolite. Besides,
one did not betray anything so personal as surprise to Gerkes.
“The old folks still live out on the edge of the town. But Illun, who
is teaching in the next village, lives with an American family of
missionaries named Anderson. For solid comfort, Rarick,” said Gerkes,
taking the crystal bowl of _fin_ champagne from a butler, “I recommend
a well-built Eskimo house.”
“I see.”
“I’ve work to do, Rarick. This scheme of life down here lures me away
from singleness of purpose. At my best, Rarick, when I’m surrounded by
the world itself, instead of its clatter, I’ve a single-track mind. One
thing matters pretty terribly to me. Facts. Then from there, truth.”
“Fine. Fine.”
“I need leisure. These lectures--pah! I need simplicity. I need the
long white nights for work and my leisure for the contacts with the
strange wisdoms of simple people. I need to think. Life with Illun on
the Colville River can give me all these. Can you understand this?
Down here, everything is going out, precious little coming in. I
need leisure, Rarick, damnably, and my finger-nails out of my palms.
I’ve books to write. Collections to assemble. There is knowledge and
truth for me to unearth before I bow out in demise. I am one of those
scientific-minded hounds with a nose to the truth-scent. Facts are more
panoramic, more majestic, more extraordinary than fantasy. I need
leisure to run them down.”
“And money?”
“God, yes!”
“Would you still go North?”
“More than ever. I tell you, I’m digging in, Rarick, for my long white
night. A woman who is attractive to me. Books. Leisure. Simplicity. My
big work now lies in assembling knowledge. I need money for men who are
still young enough to get out into the fields and feed my mind with
their findings. I want to send an expedition to Abyssinia to do some
digging there. I want to study certain of the flying-bases between
Nome and Shanghai. There are weather observations I want made, over a
sustained period, from a Greenland observatory. I want men to follow
up the fine excavations that Scotelly started last year before his
death in Brindisi. My active years are done. Now I want to assemble and
deduce.”
“I’m going to give you the money for that, Gerkes.”
“That’s mighty fine of you, Rarick. I’ve wondered a bit about you
and your plans for making your wealth reap. The root of all evil
lies in the root. As I was saying, there is curative and preventive
philanthropy. Forestall the root. The great trend of modern
humanitarianism, Rarick, lies in preventive measures. The way to
prevent fallacy is to know truth. Buy truth with your money, Rarick; it
is cheap at any price. Bear that in mind when you decide to put your
terrific house in order.”
“I’d like to give you a million, Gerkes.”
“The world, Rarick, is your debtor for that. Not I.”
“I’ll assign it as an endowment to you.”
“No, don’t do that. Organize a fund-committee to finance my expeditions
as I need and form them. One that will keep me in bounds, but at
the same time give me free enough rein in my choice of actual and
intellectual excavation.”
“And you?”
“Leave me out, Rarick. I’m headed for my white nights of long leisure.”
“Even there, you must live.”
“I’ve saved a bit.”
“How much?”
“I think I stack up to somewhere around fifteen hundred in the bank.”
“You’ll need more.”
“Well, you might allow me about fifty a month, Rarick, if you’ve a mind
to. It will cost me around that much to afford the leisure for work.”
It occurred to Rarick, sitting there, sharing with his friend their
unspoken pangs at the prospect of parting, that it cost his own family
about eighteen thousand dollars a week, to afford leisure for play.
Three weeks later, the Jennys made the trip down from upper Quebec by
motor, a second car, containing two personal maids and the lighter
luggage, following.
A premature burst of spring was already on the heels of a languid
winter, so that much of the trip was taken on dry roads and to the
first freckling of foliage.
Lovely. Lovely. Lovely. Particularly lovely to a pallid Jennifer, who
had a habit nowadays of seeing through a glass not so much darkly, as
dimly. Low vitality, her doctors easily termed it. There was no form
yet to the leaves, or even color. Just the soft pointed promise of
them. Lovely. Lovely. Lovely.
Jenny, whose effort all the way down from Canada had been not to
seem too constantly excited, was grateful, too, for the loveliness.
It helped to account for the exultant something that kept rising and
overflowing in her. Ramon was along!
He had spent two of the three weeks with them in camp. Jennifer had
been glad for her mother’s sake. Her incredible mother, who could while
away time, for want of something better, with this boy, pleasant enough
timber for an evening’s flirtation, provided there was plenty of the
slow windings of tango music to sustain illusion, but who had actually
sufficed to keep her mother amused during all of what might have been
the interminable stretches of their stay at camp.
Could it be that he was smitten with her mother? The slim thought
trailed through her tired mind and petered out as she sat looking out
at the flashing of spring....
How good her mother had been! How heavenly good! From that strange and
terrifying moment when her father had sat looking at her as if his eyes
were conflagrations that would leap out in flame over her body, the
dearness of Jenny had poured like sweet oil over the terrible burnings
from those eyes.
The indulgent compassion of this woman where her children were
concerned! What if she petted them even more than she pitied or
understood them? What if to try to explain to Jenny the minute phases
of her torture was to bring down upon herself an avalanche of automatic
maternalism that sometimes made her wild with frenzy!
“Mother, please, please don’t keep on talking. You’ve said that over
and over again. I know you think there are as good fish in the sea as
ever came out of it. You’ve told me. What good does that do me if I
don’t care what is in the sea? For God’s sake, Mother, please----”
Not even such an outburst could puncture the quality of Jenny’s
compassion.
“He’s not worth the nail of your little finger, much less the mental
anguish you are wasting on him.”
“I know. I know. I know it all by heart. Only don’t keep on saying it,
mother, or I’ll go screaming mad.”
“I know, dear, I know. I know.”
“You know!” laughed Jennifer, scornfully, one midnight when clad in
pajamas, she had been walking the floor of the long living-room of
the main camp, and her mother, hearing her, had tiptoed down with a
fur coat thrown over the flimsiness of her nightdress. “You know!”
Jennifer had risen from a sleepless bed, and her hair was tousled
and angry-looking, and one of her cheeks, too hot, was smeared with
crinkles from where it had dug and dug into the pillow. “You know! What
do you know of anything that I am going through!”
What did Jenny know? Thank God, Jennifer did not know what she knew;
but just the same, sitting wrapped in fur, she hugged herself with
knowing. What did Jenny know? She knew the torment and the ecstasy of
Jennifer, because they were boiling within her, too--every one of these
precious spring-kissed days and nights.
Upstairs, since they had not troubled to open the men’s dormitory-camp,
in a beautiful old spool-bed, Ramon, who had arrived a few days before,
was asleep under sheets that she had personally laid out for him;
under thick silk puffs that she had personally chosen. There would be
the first two crocuses of spring on his breakfast tray that she would
journey down to the edge of the wild blue lake to pick. What did the
older Jenny know of the excruciating pangs of love? Impudent Jennifer,
to assume she knew little.
“My darling, you are all unnerved----”
“I know I’m your darling, mother, and that I am unnerved, but, for
God’s sake, don’t keep telling me about it!”
“My darling, do you know what a serious nervous breakdown you are sure
to have if----”
“Pretty question. Oh, no! I don’t know. I think, instead, that I am
lying in the arms of my lover--his lips are soft----”
“Jennifer!”
“O God! mother, I’m flighty! I didn’t mean that. I loathe his lips.”
“Of course you do, darling. He’s a dog. My poor darling!”
“I’m a fine darling.”
“I’ll get you well, my sweet. You’re in a trance of infatuation now.
You can’t help it. Mother understands.”
Strange words for one Jenny to be using to another.
Scene after scene Jenny had lived through with Jennifer those weeks,
walking her through woods of wild, frozen beauty; through stiff March
winds, until their limbs sagged. Tiring Jennifer. Exhausting her.
Imbuing her with a sense of nausea for the potion she was craving,
until, the last week of their stay, Jennifer was sleeping through
entire nights.
Ecstatic nights for Jenny, wakeful even in her tiredness, as she lay
there under the same roof with Ramon....
Riding homeward through the woods that were preening themselves for
outburst, the something that Jennifer had promised Jenny was dead
within her, began to lift its head. Through woods of running sap she
was riding back to the city that contained Berry! He would be under a
roof that was no farther from hers on Fifth Avenue than the lake had
been from the camp. Berry was at the end of this beautiful trail. Would
be within easy telephone call. Within messenger call. Berry! Poor boy!
How bewildered he must have been these weeks, since that night she had
stood him up as he waited for her in his car at a spot which she had
appointed at a west-side gate to the Park. The letters she had written
him since and never sent! There was one now, tucked on the flesh
side of the single little orchid-colored undergarment she wore. The
gravitation of the universe was toward Berry----
Mother had been a brick, all right, content to have burrowed-in up
there at camp, while there was some of the season left in town, to say
nothing of Florida. Making the best of the unseasonable isolation,
content to sit in the back of the car all the hours of riding with
Ramon, while she crouched silently beside the chauffeur, where there
was relief from the din of talk. Mother had been a brick, all right,
but, oh, how damned, damned, damned futile! As if you could stop
Niagara with a handkerchief. As if you could douse a house-afire, with
a squirt of eau-de-Cologne.
Jennifer had learned to sleep in camp. That meant Jennifer was
getting well. That meant Jennifer was coming out of the trance of
the infatuation for Berry, who wasn’t worth her little finger-nail.
Jennifer had promised. Darling dumb-bell Jenny; when the truth of it
was that Jennifer was flying back on purring motors to the land of
Berry. He was in New York. Madness of her, to have let them put miles
between them. He was in New York--enchanted destination.
It was difficult; it was impossible, sitting up there beside the
chauffeur, spinning through spring, to discipline one’s thoughts, when
the craving set in to see Berry. Just to be with him, to watch the
squint come out along his eyelids when he talked; to get the faint cool
scent of him; to tremble to his nearness; to withhold the hands from
making little curved cups of themselves to inclose his cheeks. His
strong hair that was full of a strange electric life. Berry’s life. It
was hard to keep down an insanity of desire through the craving, and
to sit silently beside the chauffeur and say to oneself, as a child
repeats a catechism: “No-good Berry. Cad. Snide. Here is a man about
to be a father. Jennifer, have you no pride? No decencies? No. No. No.
And, damn it, I’m glad!” The days were fiery furnaces of desire for
Berry. The nights. The weeks. The ride all the way to New York, hills,
dales, mountains, rim-roads, and the thick slush of thawing mud, was
one such fiery furnace.
Thank God, Jenny was content to sit with that beautiful nobody-home of
a Ramon there on the back-seat and let her be.
At Albany she could already begin to feel, in anticipation, that
moment of the rounding of her fingers about the pink-enamel French
telephone in her boudoir, that would bring Berry’s voice to her. It
was wonderful to be able to crave until you suffered like that. Why
not? Who was to say where sacred love began and profane love left off?
What had Nature’s scheme to do with puny, man-made ones? They had
sent her scuttling away like any finishing-school girl, to get over a
love-affair, as if miles were a panacea. If you could speak of this
leaping terrific glory of a thing that was her passion for Berry in the
innocuous terms of “love-affair,” then the Himalayas were pretty, the
Grand Canyon cute, and God a right nice God.
Two hours below Albany, Jenny placed her hand in its white crinkled
gauntlet, along her daughter’s arm.
“Jennifer dear, we’ll go down along the West Side, by way of the river
drive, so we can drop Ramon at his apartment before we go home.”
Damn! Damn! Damn! That would delay them ten minutes. Her fingers ached
for the pink-enamel telephone....
On the other hand, to Jenny, the river drive meant a detour, and ten
minutes longer with Ramon.
* * * * *
It was not quite dusk when the car slid up before the doors that had
been copied from the Florentine Campanile. A messenger boy was running
down the steps. In fact, the doors that had swung open to emit him
remained open to admit the mistress of her house and her daughter,
chauffeurs, maids, and butlers already scurrying in the service
entrance with furs, bags, and what not.
It was strange, in a household where the telegraph-boy was a figure
woven carelessly into the pattern of every-day, that the sight of this
one running down the steps should have bitten into Jenny’s heart with a
pang of scare.
“Was that telegram for me?” she asked.
“No, madam, for Mr. Rarick.”
“Where is he?”
“In the library. Shall I let him know that you have returned?”
“No.”
“If you don’t mind, mother, I’ll rush on up to my rooms to
rest--alone----”
“Yes, Jennifer.”
For some reason which she was later never able to analyze, Jenny,
instead of following Jennifer to the left, and thereby avoiding the
chance of an immediate encounter with Rarick, went up by the right of
the broad staircase, and, trailing her heavy motor coat back off her
shoulders, hurried to the library.
Its beautiful quality of dusk, as she entered, was being rattled into
by the mechanical organ, which was repeating the famous “_Ah! fors e
lui_” of Violetta, as if some one had forgotten to turn it off, the
stained-glass story of “La Traviata” marching before Rarick, who was
seated at the far end of the room in his unicorn chair, a telegram
crushed in the hand from which he had just read it.
On one of those flashes out of the blue about which one hears but which
one so seldom sees, Jenny looked at her husband calmly and said, “Avery
is dead.”
He began to nod his head, regarding her all the while with eyes made
out of two white chinies.
She started to laugh. She could not stop. She could not stop, because
Rarick, sitting there, could not seem to stop nodding. And, nodding,
didn’t he look for all the world like the bisque bull that used to
stand on the mantelpiece in the pressed-brick house of her parents in
St. Louis? It had been a black-and-white china bull, with a head that
nodded. Every time there were to be guests, her mother used to tiptoe
in just before arrivals and start it nodding.
Rarick, replying to her that Avery was dead, kept on nodding like that
bisque bull....
To think that out of the innocent dawn of a new day could be minted the
phrase, “Avery is dead.” That phrase had not existed yesterday.
Twenty-four hours before, Avery had been alive, and, mark you, need not
have died. This was not death inevitable and God’s will be done. This
was not death demanding.
Avery had killed himself.
There had been a small note, written in blue pencil, and stuck into a
mirror in his bedroom:
Dears, it was too much.... A.
They had followed the scent of gas and wrenched the tube from between
his teeth.
“They” (a landlady and a negro houseman in a white-duck coat) had been
the first to stumble across the strange and almost unendurably precious
fact of the death of this life.
“They” had turned in police alarms about it.
And it should have been handled so privately; as privately as the
slender spar of a body that had been Avery had suffered. And instead,
over this wounded-to-death boy in his casket, the newspapers of the
country had become a giant composite ass, braying: