“I fear now, but I don’t pray, Rarick.”
He wanted her to pray. Deep in his heart he knew that her need of
prayer had come.
“Do you think it unbearably silly of me to keep wanting a casket made
of ivory and old gold?” (Perhaps Ramon, passing around it, would see
her lying there, the lovely color of the old ivory itself. Croziers at
her head and feet. Priceless ones, the beautiful shape of a shepherd’s
staff, one showing the Virgin and Infant, the other the Crucifixion....)
“I think it silly of you to be dwelling on death, although it sometimes
seems to me, Jenny, that life is a means to death.”
He had not meant to say that.
“What?”
“Try to sleep.”
“Rarick, I--want to say to you--it sounds so silly--it will seem
sillier in the morning--but now--tonight--I feel as if I want to say to
you----”
“Get your sleep, tonight.”
“Perhaps----”
He wanted to hear and yet could not bear it. She wanted to get said
what she could not bear to say. She had no real faith, herself, that
once more in health, she might not ridicule this craven hour of her
low-ebb. Nor had he.
Jenny, God willing, what with that wiry nervous vitality of hers, was
in all probability going to recover. Why subject her, who, with her
eyes on death, had cried only for ivory and old gold to contain the
dust of her body, to any more self-revelations?
“Get back to sleep, Jenny.”
“Yes.”
Dozing off, she hated Ramon, pimp, who had tucked himself securely
under the arm of a bat. And yet--in case--there was always the septic
danger of an operation--in case--she wanted him to have to pass around
the ivory bier, time and time again, and look upon the strange ivory
beauty of her, lying in ivory....
At eleven o’clock the following morning, Jennifer, without appointment,
presented herself at her father’s office, to be met by Hellman, whom
she disliked and who in turn considered her a snip.
“Your father’s morning is filled with important conferences, Miss
Jennifer.”
She looked what she always felt toward him. Spitfire.
“Save that, Mr. Hellman, to tell to some one who wants to sell him
spool-cotton or teething-rings.” She looked pert and as natty as a
little sailing-vessel in rig. Her hats were always such right affairs;
this one, a warrior’s tight helmet of cocoa-colored felt, fitted her
head like a wig. She was cocoa-colored from head to foot, in simple,
unrelieved lines, a triple necklace of faceted amber beads lying in
golden rope along her flat chest.
She was a thrill to the enormous office force on those rare occasions
when she appeared, eyes slanting at her from all sides.
Almost too chic, slim, svelt, right, there was an air of artificial
cocksureness about her that in some way must have accounted for
Hellman’s sense of animosity.
“Tell my father I am waiting, Mr. Hellman.”
“The Des Moines manufacturer with whom he is in conference, Miss
Rarick, has waited in New York two weeks for this interview. Your
father is not even taking telephone interruptions.”
“I’ll wait,” she said, and flung one silk knee over the other as she
sat herself down in the desk-chair Hellman had been occupying.
He took up a pad, scrutinizing.
“His next appointment is with Mr. Harold Bolt, president of the Banking
Trust Company. Mr. Bolt is already here. Your father is lunching with
Mr. Hiram Biltman and Mr. James Biltman. Most important.”
“Is it true,” said Jennifer, helping herself to one of Hellman’s
cigarette-sized cigars, “that there is some prospect of Rarick Chain
being incorporated with the Bilt Chain? As usual, my information comes
from outside patter, but I do think that the old gentleman would be
wise as hell to get out from under.”
“I am scarcely in a position to say, Miss Rarick,” said Hellman, who
was.
“Suppose I’d better tip off my friends to buy Rarick--common or
preferred?”
“I’m scarcely in a position to say, Miss Rarick,” said Hellman, who was.
“Do cigars make you feel sickish?”
“No,” he said, and thought: But you do.
“I’ll finish it if you have to carry me out on a litter. Is that father
buzzing for you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him I am here.”
“Mr. Bolt will....”
“Tell him I am here.”
When Jennifer was announced, the immediate thought smote Rarick that
Jenny must have told her of what was impending. Yet that could scarcely
be the case, since he had not yet conveyed the information to her that
he had arranged with Noon during the morning that she was to enter the
hospital that day week. Jenny was not the one to burden her daughter
with such family-freight before it became necessary.
Now what?
The sight of her father in the settings of his offices was always
impressive to Jennifer. Then, if ever, he was in the faint Napoleonic
cast that she, too, suspected him of sometimes trying to achieve. The
short, rather thickening body that he seemed to press to the ground
with twice the weight that was actually his. The look in his eyes of
seeming to see beyond some Elba. The way the thinning, center peninsula
of his graying hair dipped into forelock. The “R” embossed on a wooden
seal over the mantelpiece and on to his stationery that stood in a
Florentine “R” embossed leather box.
What elements of greatness had gone afoul in her father? What elements
of greatness had gone afoul in him in the same fashion that elements of
cleverness in herself had likewise gone afoul? What little there was to
her had gone afoul ... dear knows, dear knows....
Her father faced her, with the light from the window over his shoulder
and full on her face. An old sense of unreality, where this girl was
concerned, smote him. This urban, highly-polished, unillusioned,
sure-eyed adult was his. He had begot one whom he scarcely knew.
“Well?”
“Guess this is the last time I’ll ever visit you in these old offices,
Father. This time next year you’ll be in the Rarick Building.”
“I think so,” he said, and leaned over the vast smooth surface of
his desk, to move a crystal paper-weight half an inch. His way of
dismissing preamble and asking her to come to the point.
“It’s about Cataract Lodge, Father.”
He paused in the act of withdrawing his hand from the paper-weight, his
attitude listening.
What had she heard, and how?
“It’s a large order I am about to ask, if anything can be in the nature
of a large order for you.”
What had she heard?...
“As I have figured it out to the day, Father, we have occupied the
Cataract exactly six and one-half months in four years.”
“All part of the larger waste,” he said, dryly.
“I knew I could count on you for that agreement,” she said, too
brightly.
Smart girl. Pretty girl. His. It would be easy to be proud of Jennifer.
He thought of a sales-manager’s slogan that hung over the desk of one
of his department managers. “Be Yourself.” Jennifer was not Least of
all, when she was with him. Something must be wrong with him--Rarick----
“Father, I’ve talked over a plan I have in mind with Mother, and it is
all right with her, if it is with you.”
Whatever it was, rest assured she had talked it over with her mother
first. The old jealousy stirred miserably in Rarick.
“I have lately had occasion, Father, mostly through Gratton Davies,
to mix up with some of the girls and boys who write, or are trying to
write. You know, the beginning crowd that is trying to get it said in
plays and verse and articles and such. Novelists. Fellows who hold
up the mirror, mostly crookedly. Dramatists, meaning the set that is
still writing plays for the trunk or bottom drawer. After seeing these
struggling writers knocking about the bedlam of this town, an idea has
begun to knock about my so-called brain, Father. Most of them need a
decent place to work. The notion that a nation’s epics and not-so-epics
must necessarily be composed in garrets, went out of style with
whipping-posts.”
Her brand of pretentious cleverness was always anathema to him. Be
Yourself.
“Father, let us hand over Cataract Lodge as a sort of all-year
workshop to this crowd from here and everywhere, who haven’t got
the where or the withal. Let’s rescue ‘literachure’ from the jaws
of the hall bedroom, the sound of the steel rivet, the smell of the
lodging-house, and the sight of city swill. I’ve always had such a yen
myself for writing, Father, without being able to do much more than
make a cross-sign for my signature, that after meeting a few of these
youngsters--I kind of thought--well--give me Cataract Lodge to turn
over to them, Father. There are forty-eight rooms, not counting eight
big airy ones over the boat-house and eight over the garages. Create
a foundation committee, Father, deed over the Cataract and the three
hundred acres, and maybe some day you will have given lodging to the
birth of the great American novel, or the near-great.”
What was she up to? Was it possible that she and this young Gratton
Davies----
“Think it over, Father. It’s a grand idea, and our chance to have about
the only kind of finger we can ever hope to have in making the world
safe for genius. It’s a concrete, definable world, Father, if you make
its hair-pins, its jig-saws and its salt-cellars. There isn’t such a
well-defined law of supply and demand for soul-commodities. It pays
better to manufacture mirrors than to hold them up to nature. That line
sounds like Gratton!”
Gratton again!
“Father, am I a daughter denied or indulged? I know the appraisal on
the place. One hundred and ninety thousand, without the buildings. You
would think nothing of that for a factory site, Father. Regard this as
an intellectual factory.”
Her way of capturing his understanding. Regard this as a factory site.
His way of being important to letters--factory site--manufacture of
ideas....
“Father?”
Pretty Jennifer. It was part of his consistent faculty for error, where
his family life was concerned, that she should come to him with such a
request at a time like this. For a moment he played with the idea of a
recapitulation of his plans. He wanted to capture her, pretty thing,
so shy of him, with sugar on his finger tips; but his plans were too
deeply laid; so deeply laid that what he finally said was twice too
portentous.
“It is unfortunate that you should come to me at this time on such a
mission, Jennifer. I have had on my mind for some time to discuss a
certain matter with your Mother; but now that her illness has come up,
I do not want her bothered. Cataract Lodge is sold.”
“Sold?”
“Possession does not go into effect so long as I exercise my annual
option-privilege of renting it from the new owners.”
“You sold Cataract over our heads!”
“I suppose it amounts to that.”
“Why?”
“For reasons too intricate to enter into here.”
“You mean to tell me----”
“Are you catechizing me?”
“Father, you are not in any possible money difficul----”
“No, I am not.”
“If I thought it were that, then of course I would under----”
“You would be a misled young woman.”
“Then why?” she cried, and stamped her foot, a quick sheet of tears
forming in her eyes. “Why?”
“So far as you are concerned, Cataract Lodge is still yours, to
do everything you want with except give away. I like your impulse,
daughter, but it is out of the question.”
“But why?” she cried, rising and stamping the desk three times with her
gloved hand. “Why? Why? Don’t treat me like a half-wit, Father. Why did
you sell Cataract Lodge?”
“For the same reason that I have sold Thousand Island Camp and Beaupré
and the Nice property.”
“Father!”
“For reasons of greatest importance to me, but with the leaseholds
which I have retained in each case, of no great importance to you or
your Mother, since you are left free as ever to use them as you have
heretofore.”
“I think it is abominable,” she said, frankly crying now. “Mother and I
have every right to feel rottenly treated. Of course, it is all yours
to do with as you will; but it might have been decenter, Father; it
might have been kinder, it might have been treating us more like human
beings and less like chattels, to have told us.”
“I meant in good time to tell your Mother. This illness changed that.”
“Mother isn’t as ill as all that....”
“Never forget this, Jennifer. I have deeply-founded reasons for every
move I make. You have never taken the time to be logical....”
“I--I simply don’t know what to say to you, Father. You have me
flabbergasted, as usual. I came here full of a desire to do something
that had a wallop in it for someone besides myself. I came here
because, God knows why, I still harbored the shred of a delusion that
there was some way to get through to you. Somehow, this seemed to me
the kind of thing, if I put it up to you--even if the idea did come
from me--might help not only others, but--but us. I came here with the
desire to give a leg to the kind of people who are going to do in
life what I haven’t the guts or the brains or the character to do. But
I don’t want Cataract Lodge now. Even if it were yours to give--the
desire has died.
“What I came most of all wanting out of you, I should have known I
wasn’t going to get!” cried Jennifer, “I should have known!” and
stalked out of the office, with the bright tears standing in her eyes,
and leaving him seated there, smeared with pain and pallor, the look of
hunchback out in his face.
Jenny’s secret apprehensions grew. She was afraid for her flesh.
Rapiers of hot steel were beginning by now to jump through the pain in
her side. She did not betray by word, the rising tide of fear; but as
her mind began to take on the cruel habit of visualizing that moment
when the ether-cone would descend and consciousness plop over into
lethal torpor, the skin began to stretch across her face like hauled
tarpaulin. No one must be allowed to see her in that horrible aftermath
when a vagrant mind led one to say dangerous, revealing, etheric
things. What was that slide of steel into the perfect mesh of her flesh
to reveal?...
In a way, these thoroughly mundane terrors, reasoned Jenny to herself,
were blessed antidote to that whipping of the spirit to which she had
so cruelly been subjected by Ramon. Literal stabs of pain kept her mind
to the literalness of the flesh....
And yet, to Jennifer, even though her father had said to her once in a
voice that had for the moment given her pause, “Your mother may be a
sicker woman than we realize,” there was something of a game in this
going of Jenny to the hospital again.
Jenny had seen to it that it was like that.
“They think I’ve an appendix,” she told her daughter, “and I’m going
to have it out for all it’s worth. I don’t see why I should spare my
friends. Look at Irene Dinehardt. Freddie figured out for me the other
night on the back of an opera-program, that she was in the hospital
three weeks and cost her friends thousands in gifts and flowers. I’ve
sent my share. Now let them send theirs.”
True to her word, she began to spend her mornings, torn as she was with
frenzied desire not to be alone and yet not to exert herself, looped
around, in the angular way she had of sitting, the blue-enamel French
telephone in her boudoir, notifying friends.
By hook and crook, mostly crook, her daughter laughingly assured
her, Jenny had managed to prevail upon Dr. Noon to stretch hospital
routine sufficiently to obtain for her a three-room suite, which was
accomplished by the simple device of opening doors between the ordinary
type of room.
There hung over the Rarick household the air of some one about to be
married or about to set out on a voyage of exploration. Boxes and
packages began to arrive at the house three days before Jenny left
it. Books. Bed jackets. A tiny tickless clock with a radium-and-ruby
face. One of the first of the packages was a bulky one that sent Jenny
and Jennifer into hilarity, including a chuckle from Rarick. A large
cactus-plant arrived, well boxed, and with its tough, hand-shaped
leaves sprouting needles. Hildegarde had sent her sister-in-law a token
of her concern, a card with this angular message attached: “With the
hope that your pain will be no greater than a prick from this cactus.”
“One prick from Aunt Machiavelli’s floral offering and your
convalescence will terminate suddenly, all right,” cried Jennifer,
between gusts of laughter.
“She meant well,” said Jenny, and sat down suddenly with darkening eyes
fixed on the ridiculous sprawling object.
A flash of the first real concern she had felt or expressed,
darted over Jennifer. “You’re not turning forbearing and
last-will-and-testamenty, are you, darling, just because you’re going
in for an appendix? You know perfectly well that your austere and
well-meaning sister-in-law is a turkey-gobbler with a wattled neck.”
“God forbid!” said Jenny, and contemplated the frenzied-looking cactus
with all the absurd wryness she could muster.
“Jenny Avery,” cried Jennifer, huddling up beside her mother on to
the chaise-longue, where she was resting between telephone calls, “I
couldn’t bear to have you turn forbearing and turn-the-other-cheeky. It
would frighten me into a half-belief that you are really sick. Please
be cheeky, darling, instead of turn-the-other-cheeky.”
“Jennifer, if anything unforeseen should happen....”
“Mother, I can’t bear it! Why are you talking like that? You mustn’t
frighten me, darling. It’s disgusting.”
“Jennifer-idiot, stop being a cry-baby all over my new water-wave. I
haven’t the slightest intention of terminating my earthly engagement at
this time. I am speaking of the unforeseen....”
“Oh, I know. Of course.”
“If I should die, Jennifer----”
“Mother, I can’t bear it. You’ll make me hysterical.”
“If I should die, Jennifer, of which I haven’t the slightest damnedest
intention----”
“Then cut out the requiem mass.”
“I want you to be a good girl....”
“And not smear my pinafores....”
“And not smear your pinafores, and be good--and happy, Jennifer. I
haven’t been either. I’m rotten at moralizing, darling; I’ve never done
much for you except love you and....”
“If you say that, I’ll drown myself under eighty of these pink-satin
pillows. If I’m a mess, I’ve myself to blame. Myself, my own self,
nobody but myself.”
“As a mess, Jennifer, you are clever, beautiful, rich, and desirable. I
want you to be good and happy. I haven’t been good and happy, Jennifer.”
“If you don’t stop it,” cried Jennifer, taking a long strand of her
mother’s red-sun-colored hair between her fingers, “I’ll yank.”
She did, and as they fell together among the heaps of pillows the
telephone, for the dozenth time that hour, began to crow.
Strange days for the Raricks. Family dinner three nights in succession,
no guests, but Jenny at table in the kind of tea-gowns she affected,
high at the neck, low laces or furs crowding about her wrists, the
rather mediæval effect blending with the sonorous splendor of the
dining-room.
It was all as strange to Rarick as it was to his women. Butlers
moved through the vaulted gloom outside the circle of the dozens of
burning candles that hung over the table, and swapped comments behind
pantry doors at the spectacle of the Raricks dining _en famille_. To
be sure, three out of the three evenings Jennifer slid off quickly
to engagements, even before dessert, leaving Jenny and Rarick to
contemplate, with self-consciousness, an evening over coffee in the
library, to the marching colored-glass stories of the operas.
One of these evenings, the Quartette came in.
It was strange to be sitting with Jenny, listening, while the room
filled up softly with the selections Rarick liked best. Mozart B-Major,
No. 8, with its beautiful ’cello interlude. Beethoven A-Major, op.
18, No. 5, in its rilling variations of tone and color. There came
Schubert, D-Minor! “Death and the Maiden.” Fortunately, Jenny neither
knew it nor asked about it, but sat with her arms laid out along the
sides of her chair, and her head back against the eunuch tapestry,
vagrant thoughts drifting on the rhythm-tides.
Ramon was on the high seas by now. On an ocean that sometime, somehow,
she had hoped to sail with him. One swallowed the pain, grinding
finger-nails into tapestry. To have had a lover who could endure to be
coveted by Emanie Bursilap! Shame of that! To sit there quietly, lapped
with the low surf of this small and lovely music, and only the wall of
her sick flesh to conceal from Rarick what her heart knew. Little man,
you. Rarick, with his head slightly forward and his fingers forming
a chapel. We are stranger to each other, even now, than if one of us
had never been born. How like you, to touch your finger-tips that way!
Lightly. Shyly. Without intensity. Little man, you.
He had changed so little in the amazing years. The same little man she
had used to contemplate across the covers of the bed in the house in
Westmoreland Place in St. Louis. A hunchback face. A hunchback without
the hunch, but with the hurt, lean face of one. A little bitter.
Frustration. Well, well, well, what about her frustrations? Avery’s?
Jennifer’s? God spare Jennifer. What was out over Jennifer? She was
soft these days, in a lovely way, and subdued, in the way the fellow
at the ’cello sometimes placed a lulling hand against strings that had
been struck. Was Jennifer in love with Gratton? Soon get that nonsense
out of her head. Strange that the brilliant match she was sure to make
was so slow in coming. “I am too needed by her,” thought Jenny, “to
be snatched out of life.” Best to sit tight with Jennifer. Let her
have her head with this Gratton fellow. Up to a point. Strange that a
youth like Rodney Martens, thirty millions, a Brownlee Martens, direct
descent, clever, brisk, up-and-coming, literary after a fashion, had
never, somehow, troubled to follow up his casual acquaintanceship with
Jennifer. Something could be done about that. Best to go slowly with
Jennifer. Let this present absorption in the playwright fellow wear
itself down.... I am too needed here.
So this was how he, Rarick, largely lived his evenings. His
colored-glass operas. This Quartette. His unpronounceable gems, that,
when mounted, were ineffective and looked only semi-precious. Even
Gerkes, fossil, had gone. Found himself a squaw bride off somewhere
in a blubber-eating country. That, too, was Rarick for you! How like
him to pick for his close friend a man to whom an Eskimo bride was
satisfaction! What was there about him, Rarick, that created the little
area of isolation around him? Even Jennifer, when she spoke to her
father, rarely looked him in the eyes, but between, as if staving off
his glance. That was not right. Her period of convalescence would be
a good time to soften things up somehow between these two. After all,
he was entitled to his daughter. Since the death of Avery, it had
always seemed to Jenny, fantastically, that the furrow between Rarick’s
eyes was the shape of a cross. He was entitled to Jennifer. Naughty
Jennifer, so alien to this man, her father. A kind father, in so far as
his understanding went. It was time to see that he got some kindness
in return. He was being kind now. Trying to please. Trying to help her
cast out fear. And yet, there was nothing she could do for that little
man there, or that he could do for her. It was terrible, it was vacant,
it was loathsome to sit there beside this man--this husband who was
being kind to her--parched, as with a thirst, for the kind of kisses
that Ramon, pimp, on the high seas with Emanie Bursilap, had to bestow.
God, I need to be forgiven....
It could be said that Jenny, narrow, frilled, as elaborate as
Bernhardt, and her pallor quite beautiful, went to her ordeal with
something of the fanfare of Marie Antoinette riding her tumbrel through
the populace. The motor-car that bore her was followed by a smaller
one bearing outfittings that were part of the pomp and circumstance
of her arrival. A bed-cover of ermine, with a heavy double fringe of
black tails. An almost-life-size photograph of a head of Avery, framed
in jade, his young throat bare, his eyes unsmiling. The cactus, for
a laugh. Flowers, anticipating her arrival, were stacked in hospital
vases of painted tin, only to be rearranged when Jenny arrived, with
her urns and her vases and her graduated silver bowls.
The hospital--one accustomed to the vagaries of the celebrated and
important--grinned, the impersonal patter of the most highly personal
environment in the world passing around from nurse to interne to doctor.
“The Five-and-Ten Mrs. Rarick! New-rich, but, oh, how rich!”
“Hope she takes a fancy to the fine hand behind the ether,” said the
anæsthetist, “and endows my children’s ward at Island Hospital.”
“Hope she hears of the beautiful, Titian-haired, and virtuous girl in
the supply department and decides to make her an heiress,” said the
red-haired miss in charge of the linen-room.
“Do your best, girls,” admonished the head nurse; “she may come through
and endow our joint-disease wing.”
“She can have her millions,” said a girl in the training department,
“but, oh, how I could do with a ninety-five-dollar civet coat in Macy’s
window. If only she would take ninety-five dollars’ worth of fancy to
me.”
And so on, as Jenny, who came in like thunder, was put to bed in
a bower that later, an interne said, made him feel as if he were
wading through a meadow to reach her pulse. A meadow of the elaborate
magnificence of Jenny. There were present, at her installation, the
maid in the Breton cap, who, after seven years, knew practically
no word of English, but understood Jenny’s execrable French to the
syllable, and the English girl named Daphne Dang, whose rôle was not
exactly definable, but who had been at Jenny’s elbow in rôles of every
capacity from seamstress to masseuse to secretary for the last ten
years. Peacock, the first butler, whom Jenny had hired for his name,
carried in cushions and a screen of Aubusson panels to protect the
opening door from revealing sight of hospital corridor.
It struck Rarick, as he entered, that not a friend had felt close
enough to intrude upon this arrival. There were already telegrams and
notes that Jenny opened and pinned against the screen. They were the
personal touches toward which she seemed to be stretching her long,
cold, clear-looking fingers as toward a live grate.
He wondered, without bitterness, how she had managed with the Spanish
dancing-boy about whom she was always being so elaborately casual.
Poor Jenny! There were the records of the social struggle of the
years pinned along that Aubusson screen. A poor, insecure record. It
would never do to express some of the surge of tender sympathy for
her futilities which he felt sweep over and hurt him for her. This
was the time to be quick and concise and clear and sure. That was the
manner which seemed most successfully to keep her in a state of feeling
reassured. Treat it all as a matter of course. Give directions as you
would for the arrangement of one of her ballroom functions, or charity
bazaars. Jenny caught gratefully at that spirit of casualness. It
hypnotized fear.
But a last-minute dread had reappeared. If only she did not prattle as
she came out of the ether. At best, there had always been something
terrifying to Jenny at the idea of losing consciousness. There were
imperative reasons why Jenny must not prattle. Steadfastly she ground
into her mind the intention to go down into unconsciousness with
her mind a blank, no loose fears, memories, thoughts, desires, or
regrets floating around in it. Yet, what furtive bits of seaweed of
unspoken thoughts might drift to the surface of a mind unanchored by
consciousness! A new fear smote Jenny. Suppose, with Rarick standing
beside her bed, she should unconsciously reveal to him the tortuous
secret windings of those underground rivers of her mind that carried
so much along them that was traitorous to him. Then, too, how could
she endure the thought that her daughter be smirched with some of that
flotsam and jetsam, as it floated to the surface and revealed itself in
words?
A terror of delirium began to settle on Jenny.
“Rarick,” she said to him, as he stood beside her bed the evening
before her operation, “I want you to promise me something.”
She had been so free of this mood of last-minute promises. It
astonished him that never once had she spoken in terms of her will. She
had one, made the tenth year of their marriage. A simple, hand-written
document, duly legalized. As a matter of fact, she had never been
acquisitive in that sense. For purpose of tax distribution, huge
holdings were in her name. These papers she had signed without even
troubling to read them.
Now Rarick began to chide her, in the playful mood she seemed to demand
of the occasion.
“What solemn promise? That I will not break the will?”
“Seriously, it will be terrible to me, Rarick, if you or Jennifer come
into the room to visit me until a day after the ether has worn off and
I am once more my presentable self. I don’t want you or Jennifer to
know how green I can look. Promise me that.”
“Of course,” he said.
What lay in the troubled hinterlands of her mind? What was she afraid
of revealing? As if there were anything much that Jenny could reveal to
him that he did not already know or suspect. Poor, frightened Jenny!
For the first time her affairs were in danger of slipping a bit out
of her hands. He wanted her to keep them there as desperately as she
felt that need. No more than she, did he desire the revelation of those
fetid places that had gathered scum in the years of swampy silence
between them. Ugh!
“Jennifer, see to it that they don’t come near me with one of those
hideous Mother Hubbard hospital night-gowns. If the pain in my side
doesn’t kill me, the touch of canton flannel will.”
“I’ll dike you out in silk, mi-darling, and a fol-de-rol of lace.”
“Don’t let them be efficient and hygienic and sheety about my bed,
either, Jennifer. No matter what kind of damaged goods they bring back
to it, I want to be tucked back into this--make them stack it up for me
while I am attending my own op., darling. It will occupy your mind.”
“If you aren’t careful, I’ll make the bed myself.”
“Then I hope to heaven you have to lie on it.”
“Isn’t she beautiful, Father, lying propped up there in her well-known
magnificence?”
“You look very well, Jenny.”
She slitted her olive-colored eyes and turned her head away. One was
supposed to feel chastened in hours such as this. She did, of course.
But what if her secret distastes of the inadequacies of this man,
persisting even now, should leap through and spatter him with words of
contempt?
“I want you to go now, Rarick. You, too, Jennifer. Promise me that you
will both remain out until they have me all out of the ether.”
“We promise.”
“Of course.”
They were a constrained lot, the three of them, and finally, all bent
to keeping casual, there were good-nights; and the final departure went
something like this:
“Don’t forget to have Miss Dang telephone my regrets to the Planets.
Rarick, hadn’t you better keep this emerald ring of mine in your
waistcoat pocket along with your other glitts? I forgot to put it in
the safe.”
“Let me slide a packet of this Mirabel sachet under your pillow before
I go, Mother. It’s the latest squak. There are some novels and a copy
of _Vanity Fair_ and _Town Topics_ in that lower drawer, Nurse, in case
my Mother wants to read. I’ll bring around the new _Spur_ tomorrow.”
“Good night, Jennifer.”
“’Night, Jenny Avery.”
“Good night, Rarick.”
“Sleep well, Jenny.”
“Sure to. Good night....”
The bed that Jenny left the following morning for the operating-room
was built up during her absence, by her daughter, the maid in the
Breton cap, two nurses, and Miss Dang, into its pyramid of finery.
Tilted, there was a look of cornucopia to it, the way the avalanches of
little laces and the fine pink mists of sheets seemed to spill.
All morning, it stood waiting in its elaborate sort of trance for the
return of its occupant.
Jenny was not to come back to it.
It was one of those operations that after the first few moments, become
hopeless.
It came as shock to Rarick, that the suggestion to unload himself of
the great property of his town house should come from his daughter.
They had been sitting over after-dinner coffee, on one of those
evenings which, during the months since the death of Jenny, his
daughter had dutifully apportioned off, as if allowing him just so much
time out of the more-than-ever crowded budget of her days.
In a sense this was true. Since the death of her mother a rigid,
self-made rule, which she had not allowed to lapse in the fifteen
months, except during the periods of absence from the city, had been to
set apart two evenings of the week, either to accompany her father to a
concert or opera, or remain with him in his library.
The concussion of her mother’s death, coming, as it should not have
been permitted, out of an ignorance and innocence of the facts, had
been an irritant that sent her skyrocketing into a state half noisy,
half hysterical.
“I don’t give a damn for anything now!” she had cried, the morning
they had begun to pluck the finery from the waiting hospital bed of
Jenny, as you would pluck the feathers from a swan. She had gone rather
consistently about not giving it.
“I’d be a fine one to go into mourning, wouldn’t I?”--when she troubled
at all to explain. “She would be the first to hoot laughter at it. She
despised long faces and emotional side-shows.”
That was probably true. There had been no ostensible period of mourning
for Avery, even in the days when Jenny’s face had resembled a wax mask
that was melting downward from the corners. To Rarick, the formal
period of mourning did not even occur.
The affairs of household went on pretty much as usual, except that
after the first blank weeks of shock, Jennifer began to cram the
evenings with occasions. The formal dinner, never too frequent a
function with Jenny, because of the strain of Rarick, who never
attended, became the rule. The house glittered, that winter, with the
clusters of lights at its portal going full blast, and the curb lined
with motors. When the solemn doors swung backward, loiterers, who
sometimes stood in line formation on both sides of the stoop, could
glimpse the molten glow of Hispano Moresque art: the grand staircase
that wound upward with the curving gesture of a lovely woman’s two
arms; the liveried figures of butlers in knee-buckles and claret-reds;
the round burning pool of the rose-window, with its dominant purple of
crushed grape.
They were mixed parties Jennifer held that year, frantically-assembled
parties, without social rhyme or reason; social-fringe assemblages that
Jenny would have tried to avert; sometimes parties with the servants
mopping up small pools of wine from the dining-room floor the morning
afterward, and scraping the marred surface for fresh waxings.
In the main, Rarick did not protest, except on the occasion when young
Rodney Martens, finding one of the butlers’ bicycles propped in a rear
hall--where he must have been groping, between dances, for air to
clear his fuddled brain--had ridden it into the ballroom about three
o’clock in the morning, plunging into a great crystal-and-lapis-lazuli
candelabrum of fifty bulbs, toppling it over, blowing the fuse, and
crashing the evening into darkness, as he landed in a ringing mess that
stirred the household and reached Rarick as he lay abed, sleepless.
“I dislike to have to mention it to you, Jennifer; you are no longer
a child, but either you pick your friends with more discrimination or
don’t have them here.”
That was the evening, seated over coffee, in the library, her eyes
level and burning under her straight bang, that Jennifer burst forth:
“Let’s chuck it, Father. Sell the house!”
Sell the house! He could have told her, almost as far back as her
mission to him in behalf of Cataract Lodge, that he had already sold it.
“That is,” she added, grinding out her cigarette with a sort of fierce
enjoyment at the timeliness of her thrust, “unless you have already.”
He had.
“It’s a morgue. It’s a tomb. It’s a mausoleum. I hate it.”
“Then what?” he said, with his chin touching his shirt-front and his
eyes up at her.
“Then what? Anything. Take me to--to Korea--Abyssinia--at least they
are destinations.”
He regarded her slowly, as if he could not have done marveling that
she had no wisdom. She had been away twice that winter. First to
Paris, scuttling home after a month, full of what she called the
French heebie-jeebies. Later on, there was a yachting cruise out of
Florida waters, for which she must have stood sponsor for all expense.
Rarick’s impulse, when Hellman presented him with bills amounting to
twenty-one thousand dollars for this week’s divertissement, had been
to discipline her by radical way of refusal, under threat of public
declaration, to meet any such future expenditures! But when the time
came for him to take up with her the matter of what he regarded as
wanton and cruel waste, she took her place across the table-desk from
him with a child-like obedience that made her suddenly seem very small
to him and tortured, and something failed him. There was a wild kind
of distress about Jennifer, these days. She had the look of a person
who wants to rip open his collar for more air. She had the rolling look
to her eye of someone frightened. The disagreeable thought smote Rarick
that almost anything might happen to a girl that taut. What hurts you,
Jennifer? he wanted to say to her. Tell me where the trouble lies?
She could not have told. He realized that. It is possible that he
himself could have analyzed it before Jennifer. In those bruised and
somehow resentful months after her mother’s death, self-analysis in
Jennifer had given way before a sort of dull pride in her capacity for
pain. You were wretched. You blazed away with a chronic kind of grief
for the slender slab of Jenny lying out there beside Avery in her ivory
casket lined in silver ailanthus leaves, that the Sunday papers had got
wind of. Hers not to appraise. Hers only to clasp hands to a throat
that was always thickening with tears, and hanker for the strange kind
of maternity that had gone with Jenny.
“Jenny Rarick has left me in a hell-hole,” she once told Gratton, whom
she was seeing on fitful occasions. “I can’t seem to get out of it,
chiefly because I can’t seem to want to get out. Isn’t it strange,
Gratt? I know I’m in hell, but I can’t want sufficiently to climb out.
How do you make that out?”
“Stop trying to make yourself out, Jennifer,” he had replied. “That’s
your trouble, perhaps.”
“I hate you,” she had replied to that, and walked out of his room. He
did not follow. Waiting on the threshold outside his door for a moment,
it had seemed to her that nothing ever in the world could matter so
much as his following her, to unlock her clenched hand and tuck his
into it. He, too, stood waiting on the room side of that door, waiting
to do just that, his body rigid, though, against the move.
Rarick, trying as he had done all of her life, to clamber on to some
basis of intimacy with this girl who was so shy of him, and again
watching these months of her misbehavior, began, a little grimly, to
understand.
The futility of waiting further was borne in upon him. If the death of
Jenny, leaving them stranded in this wilderness of Gothic aisles, had
not hurled them into quick and sympathetic understanding, then it was
not to happen the way it did in the benign world of people in books.
There was too much in him that still wanted to spank her for the things
that still made her wayward and full of self and pretense. She, in
turn, could flare at him with the old antagonisms before even he voiced
rebuke. And yet, withal, she was an older, sweeter Jennifer, subdued
in a way that was even more painful to him than what he considered
her atrociousness. It was that new quality in her that saved her the
drastic rebuke of the twenty-one-thousand-dollar yachting-week, which
had angered Rarick as nothing since her gambling exploits at Cannes.
Even her high kind of despair had a subdued quality that made him feel
more nearly able to cope with this strange girl who was his. No, the
blow of death could scarcely be said to have flung them together, but
sometimes it did seem to Rarick that through the long, vertical mists
of the Gothic twilights in which they sometimes sat together, they were
approaching....
What he said to her this night, over coffee, could not have come off
this way a twelve- or even a six-month before, when a high-handed and
evasive scene would have been precipitated.
“Are you in love with young Gratton?”
“Damn it, yes!”
There was no surprise in her voice, possibly because her mind was
flooded with nothing else but the hypothetical reply to such a
hypothetical question. “Damn it, yes! Lots of good it does me.”
Constantly he was rebuking her for the coarse, free profanity he
despised in general, and particularly in a woman. He let it pass now.
“That is unfortunate.”
“You would put it that way.”
What did she expect him to do? Reveal how her hurt hurt him?
“Father, do you like him?”
That was scarcely the way to express the curiously hankering eye Rarick
sometimes cast on this young man, on those now rare occasions when
he came to dine or call for Jennifer. Their talk had been desultory,
withal curiously exciting to the older man. Gratton would go walking in
the Pyrenees. He had a stubborn, tenacious mouth that already looked
pulled as if from veering his own way. It was not that Rarick liked
him, so much as the conviction was high within him that this fellow,
who wanted what he wanted and would relentlessly go after it, was to be
envied....
“Do you like him, Father?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“You have been known not to approve my friends.”
“You’ve never brought home much worth approving.”
“You mean Berry? That was only a yen, Father.”
“A what?”
“A low-down infatuation of low-down me seeking a way out of a torment
by walking further in. The only reason I have for knowing that there is
a shred of decent person in me, Father, is because I like a boy called
Gratton, who doesn’t give a tinker’s dam for me.”
“How do you know?”
“He has told me so. It’s not the tried-and-true sex-situation that he
would scorn to do in a play--bringing two people together after three
acts and two hours and forty minutes of sex-antagonism, in order to
achieve a clutch-embrace at the final curtain. It won’t end that way
between us. Gratton hasn’t any use for my guts. Pardon anatomical
references.”
“Have you any use for your own?”
“I’m not so bad as painted, Father. The trouble with me, say I,
naïvely, is that I am not any worse than any girl in my position, only
I was slightly better to start with, making the total loss more total.”
She was uncanny to him in her quick perspicacities, always trembling,
as it were, on the border line between her legitimate kind of smartness
and her tawdry smartness.
“How many a true word, Jennifer....”
“Yes, Father, spoken in the grimmest jest that can ever befall me. I
like him, and the devil of it is, the more hopelessly I like him, the
more I like myself for being the kind of person to like Gratton, and
the more I like him for being the kind of person not to like me. Do I
make myself clear?”
There was torment for you....
“Liking him is the nicest thing about me. The neat and respectable
verb, ‘to like,’ is used here out of deference to your sense of decent
restraint. I love Gratton, Father,” she said, and smiled at him, and
kept it lifted there with the determination of a child standing on one
foot.
“Funny thing about Gratton. He’s not money-conscious about us. He is
not cowed, or infuriated, or impressed--I mean, the way you learn to
expect pretty nearly everybody to be except the few-if-anys, who have
more money than we have. Gratt doesn’t despise money as such. He does
think capital swinish. Well, so does everybody, until they get it. I
mean, in a healthy way, he wants money for himself, because God gave
him a great birthday present. A single-track mind. He wants to write;
and legend to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not want to write
in a garret. He doesn’t think garrets are intellectual and creative
clearing-houses, any more than gardens and bright clean rooms are. And
Gratton is out for the gardens and the bright clean rooms. Funny thing
about Gratt. I think he’d rather marry a rich girl than a poor one, but
I won’t do.”
If, Rarick told himself, his face wry with disgust, this was modern
frankness about and with life, then he gave up. The quality of the
picture of Jennifer, seated there with her knees flung so that the
bare pink of her flesh above the stockings was revealed, exhaling two
steady streams of cigarette smoke from her nostrils, and dangling one
cockatoo-green slipper from her toes, depended upon the particular
retina of the eye and mind of the beholder. The eye and mind of Rarick
turned away offended. After all, frankness was a virtue, except when
it became indecent exposure. There were parts of one’s mind one kept
covered, as one kept the body clothed.
“Isn’t that terrible, Father, I won’t do?” she repeated, and looked at
him and smiled with her palms lying open in her lap, loosely, in a way
that was pathetic to him.
“Come here.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Let us talk this thing out. Just you--and me----”
“I can’t. Not now. I--can’t----”
“Then later.”
“Father, be good to me.”
“How, Jennifer, how?”
“By letting me be good to you.”
Trying not to tremble and be silent, he sat and trembled and was silent.
“Child! Poor child!”
“Oh, don’t pity me, Father. That way. Don’t. Don’t. It’s you who need
that. Don’t worry about me. I’m not going in for martyrdom. I’m not
going to withdraw from the turgid world and spend the rest of my life
spreading sweetness and light through orphan asylums....”
No use, no use, was in his brain.
God, God, why am I being like this all over again, was in hers.
“... and you won’t have to take me on a trip around the world to help
me to ‘forget.’ Also, I decline the Victorian alternative of going
into a decline. It isn’t done any more. But, Father, Father, what kind
of a hit-below-the-belt world is this, anyway? I love him. And I want
the right kind of decent constructive life that I cannot work out with
anybody in the world but him. And the dumb-bell,” cried Jennifer,
sobbing out and dashing for the door--“the dumb-bell hasn’t got the
sense to know it. I won’t do!”
Once up in the security of her bedroom, which she made more secure by
locking the door, she turned out the lights and plunged face downward
on her bed.
There came the time, in one of those tall, somber twilights, the kind
that Rarick loved as they came stalking as if on stilts into the
vaultings of his library, when the pile of his writings, which he had
kept stacked in a high and shaggy manuscript on a side-table, was
replaced by a single piece of typewritten paper, held in place by a
paper-weight of alleged B. C. limestone, in cursive Egyptian writing.
It was a twilight that smelled of snow. There had been flurries of
it throughout the day, and by now it clung in small triangles to the
corners of windows, and seeped its intangible odor of white, which
assailed the nostrils like the feel of camphor, into the room.
There had been a high blaze along the logs, which Rarick, seated before
the embrasure of a fireplace in which he could have stood without
stooping, had let die to embers. Late light from the high, leaded
window above him came pouring down on his back and rested along the
stooped ridge of him.
In that posture, the hint of hunch was quite marked. It was a womanish
back, narrow, tired, and with a little peak to it, as if he had been
hung up and a peg had left its imprint.
There was an agate in his hand, which he twiddled without seeing; an
eccentric sapphire cat’s-eye, said to be one of two of its kind in
existence. After a while he slid it into his waistcoat pocket and drew
out a glyptograf cut in old red dreamy amber. Presently the arm of
his chair was strewn with stones, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Etruscan,
Renaissance, a ruby from the famous collection of Signor Medina, an
Italian Jew of the eighteenth century. Two opals from Lord Arundel’s
collection. A black pearl from the first Duke of Marlborough. Another
that had belonged to Prince Miravisky.
At five o’clock, Gratton Davies, who had walked his wire-haired terrier
up a twilit Fifth Avenue, vaulted the snowless stoop of the house with
the Campanile doors, gave over his dog to the keeping of Peacock, and
was promptly admitted to the presence of Rarick.
It was the first time they had met subsequent to that evening when
Jennifer had damned a hit-below-the-belt world to her father.
“I am glad you sent for me, sir,” said Gratton, who was easy in all
personal contacts. “I’ve been meaning for a long while to have a visit
with you.”
“Sit there.”
“Shall I remove this array of lapidarian loot of yours?” he said, as,
seating himself, his arm brushed a ring of Pectunculus shell and sent
it scurrying toward the hearth. “Say, that’s an aquamarine there, isn’t
it? My birthstone.” He scooped the stones into his hand, pouring them
into Rarick’s. “I once had a pretty fine pair of aquamarine cuff-links.
Traded them for an Oxford Dictionary. I’m a great trader, Mr. Rarick.
Belong back in the days when men bartered merchandise for merchandise.
Must seem strange to a man like you, who has built his fortune on the
modern rudiments of big business, but I’m like the old Thracians, who
couldn’t get accustomed to the idea of just a small coin in exchange
for a whole flask of wine. I’ll trade my aquamarine cuff-links for
an Oxford Dictionary much more quickly than for cold cash. That
disqualifies me, doesn’t it, as too unimaginative for business?”
“Perhaps you do yourself an injustice. One of the most outstanding
business dickers of all time was that of a soul in exchange for a mess
of pottage.”
“That is the one kind of trade I don’t expect to fall for, Mr. Rarick.”
“I believe that.”
“You may well believe it.”
“What is it you want most out of life, anyway, Gratton?”
“That’s a large order. You mean it in specific relation to what you’ve
sent for me about, or----”
“Rather.”
“Good! But before we get to it, there is something I have wanted to say
to you ever since it happened. I tried to put it into a message at the
time. No one could understand better, Mr. Rarick, what the death of
your son means to you than I. It’s because, of course, I realize the
workings of that boy so well. I fought his same kind of losing fight
back in those years; only, where he went through the door, I managed
to jump back. I--won’t bore you; but I could have been that boy of
yours, Mr. Rarick--I think I know what his kind of aloneness meant, and
the kind of black waters it can put between even those who need most
desperately to clutch to one another--well, I know what it means--I
know Avery----”
A row of little cords popped out in Rarick’s neck, and it was a moment
before his throat would unflex enough to swallow.
“Yi.” He had wanted to say “Yes.”
“Avery wasn’t able to swim across to you, and you didn’t see his hands
go up for the third time. I made my swim to an island of sanity. I’ve
clung to it ever since. Avery couldn’t--make it----You would have been
his island....”
“A thought like that helps one to keep on living.”
His voice sounded to him like a Lilliputian’s. High and narrow. What
the devil....
“Well, anyway, Mr. Rarick, that’s out of my system. I’ve spilled it
like a ton of coal. But I’ve always felt strangely entitled to say it
to you. Now, to get back to what I want out of life. Don’t know as
I’ve ever thought of it that concretely, but I suppose I’m rank enough
hedonist to ask nothing more than a certain ability to create within
myself, and in turn endow, a certain amount of happiness. Why do you
ask?”
“I have always thought of you as a young man who knows precisely where
he is going.”
“I haven’t always known that. I do now. As I tried to tell you a moment
ago, my feet haven’t always been on the ground. They are now. I may not
reach my destination, but I am hell-bent for it.”
“I like that. Chiefly because most of my life I have always been
hell-bent for a destination that I’ve never cared whether I reached or
not.”
“Strange, to hear you, who would seem to have reached a high peak of
destination that few men achieve, say that.”
“We won’t discuss that. The point of this interview is a strange
one, Gratton. I am informed by my daughter, that you, to use her
own picturesque phrasing, do not care a tinker’s dam for her. That
interests me. I want to know why.”
“Now, look here,” said Gratton, without surprise, but unfolding a knee
and sitting forward, “aren’t you accepting evidence without hearing
both sides?”
“That is what I intend to do now.”
“I don’t know just what your daughter may have told you, but it is just
possible, considering the amount of adulation that has been Jennifer’s
since you brought her into an ornate world, that the slightly tempered
qualities I bring to bear upon our friendship may, by token of
comparison, appear frigid to your high-handed young daughter.”
“Just possible, yes.”
“I don’t know by what metric system you weigh up tinkers’ dams, but
I do know that my regard for your daughter is quite unrelated to a
tinker’s approbrium.”
“You might find it difficult to convince her of that.”
“Am I to understand, Mr. Rarick, that the young man is being asked his
intentions?”
“It is embarrassing and astute for you to put it that way. As a matter
of fact, however, you are being asked just that. Your intentions.”
“To remain, I hope, in so far as it is going to be possible, one of
your daughter’s well-wishing friends.”
“I see. I suppose you are aware, Gratton, that my daughter entertains a
disturbing set of feelings toward you.”
“On those occasions when that fact does seem more or less apparent, it
is embarrassing to one who is so keenly on to himself as I am.”
“It would interest me, as her father, to know just wherein my daughter
fails.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Rarick, you are too keen a man to attempt to place
me in an utterly equivocal position like that.”
“There is nothing equivocal in honesty, Gratton.”
“I like your daughter, Mr. Rarick. I don’t feel called upon, however,
to qualify, even to you.”
“You are entirely right not to feel called upon. I was appealing to
you.”
“I see. I’m sorry. Jennifer likes me, Mr. Rarick. I’d be a fool not to
see it. She may be in love for the first time in her life, if you will
permit me to say so, both of us knowing Jennifer as we do, with some
one besides herself.”
“No doubt of it. That is my justification for opening this subject with
you.”
“That being the case, her being in love is no special tribute to me,
but rather to herself. Jennifer, of course, thinks otherwise. She has
told me, bless her funniness, that her self-esteem is being enormously
bolstered by the fact that she likes me. That is poppycock. A big
sweeping energy like Jennifer, intelligent, gregarious creature that
she is, must have outlet.”
“But?”
“I hate like the devil to say it to you, particularly since it does not
convey to you what extent I am in danger of being in love with your
daughter, but Jennifer does not quite come through, Mr. Rarick.”
“It’s fine of you to be this honest.”
“It’s fine of you not to kick me out for a presumptuous, if
well-meaning idiot.”
“To get back to Jennifer....”
“One of the reasons I have tried not to see much of Jennifer since her
return from her cruise, Mr. Rarick, is practically an admission of my
own weakness. She fascinates and amuses and delights me more than any
other woman I have ever known. She is full of the power to be pretty
nearly everything she is not....”
“Right.”
“Mark my word, Mr. Rarick, your chance for a bunch of fine realizations
lies buried somewhere in that girl.”
“Right.”
“On the other hand, she is arrogant and without a certain type of pity.
She is sophisticated without taking the time to use her fine brain to
be wise. She is super-critical without being profound. She is without
great accomplishment and intolerant of others. She has a genuine
intellectual curiosity, but pretends to despise what she and the rest
of her set term ‘highbrow.’”
“You are despising the setting of the ring, rather than the stone.”
“Perhaps. I do despise the picture of Jennifer and her set. It has
always been a facetious credo of mind, Mr. Rarick, that great personal
wealth, even fabulous wealth like yours, is a maligned institution and
that in private fortunes there lurks great power for good. In my heart,
though, I am coming not to believe it. The very things I despise in
Jennifer are the things great wealth should have corrected in her and
somehow didn’t. Look at this room. Kings, artists, dreamers, contrived
its magnificence for her. This home. Beauty, prodigality, dignity,
peace, and out of this conspiracy of the so-called better things of
life has come a flimsy Jennifer caring passionately about few of the
things that make life so passionately worth living. Hang it! if I were
not so afraid that it would mean that I am dangerously near loving her,
I would hate her.”
“I think I see clearly everything you have said.”
“You can’t. Diametrically different as you are in some things, you and
Jennifer are fundamentally alike in others. She’s yours.”
“I want to say some things to you, Gratton, that I don’t believe I have
ever formulated even to myself, much less put into words before.”
“I feel like the devil. The things I’ve let out aren’t usually said,
and then, hang it all, I’ve said just about half, and the less
important half of what I feel.”
“This seems to be the time and the place for saying. I don’t mind
telling you that much of what you have just admitted, while not new to
me, is bitter. I’m not so resilient any more. I’m near to sixty, young
fellow.”
“Not----”
“Oh, not so old, but, as the span goes, time to put the house in order.”
“It’s a big house.”
“An appallingly big one. I’m going to tell you about that house. The
house that Jennifer lives in.”
“The house-that-Jennifer-lives-in. That should be the nicest house
there is!”
“Perhaps, in view of all you have told me, there isn’t much point, but
I’m going to say it anyway. I want Jennifer settled, young man. She is
twenty-eight now. Motherless. Her brother is gone. I am not going to
live to be an old man. There are certain things we know irrevocably.
That is one of them. I have always known it. I will not get old.”
“I hate to hear you say that.”
“I would give a great deal if you could like my girl.”
“That’s what I meant just now when I said, I’ve said just half of what
I feel, and that half the less important half....”
“You probably know, without my dwelling upon it, the failure of a
parent I’ve been to her.”
“It’s been a mutual failure.”
“She’s got brains and sweetness----”
“God knows she has. Too much of both for my peace of mind. You’re going
to reap from them, too--mark you----”
“I want to tell you a little about myself, Gratton.”
“Yes.”
“Young man, I am worth one hundred and eighty million dollars. And yet,
personally, I have never succeeded. My success succeeded.”
“I see what you mean.”
“In my youth, Gratton, I wanted one thing out of life as hard-headedly
as you seem to want one thing. My success snatched it away.”
“I think I summed it up when I said once of you that you asked for
bread and got a gold nugget.”
“Excellent. I would have a hard time getting a jury to vote me
sympathy, but I am as short of success, today, Gratton, as you see me
sitting here, as I was in the days when I used to figure my plans on
the backs of envelopes behind a counter in a hardware store.”
“I know that.”
“That is why there is something about a young fellow like you, so sure
not to be deterred; something that to an old fellow like me, is just
about sublime. I want you to look at me, seated here as you say, in a
home contrived by kings, and try to understand some of the things that
I am going to tell you. Follow?”
“Yes.”
“First, as to family. You see me practically bankrupt. My wife gone.
That I cannot discuss, even here. Need I say to you,” he went on, and
began to twist his face--“need I say to you that my life was finished
the day Avery took his? We never got to each other. But I--no fool
like an old fool, that boy was my reason for having the endurance to
fight through the black and colossal years of my success. He made
the nights, filled with my wakefulness, endurable. He was the hope
of my loneliness. He was my real success waiting to be accomplished
and in my dumbness, I crossed him in everything that did not point
toward that success. I saw the paraphernalia of wealth crushing him.
The steam-roller flattening him into a pattern just as you see it
threatening Jennifer. I saw his success in picking out a rich man for
his father, threatening to succeed. I have no graces, Gratton. If ever
a man was lacking in manner, that man is me. I had no way to ingratiate
the boy, no talent for parenthood. I didn’t deserve him. I let him
starve for the very things I would have given my life to feed him. He
got lost, you see, in the maze of the things and the things. I don’t
intend to have that happen to my girl....”
“It needn’t.”
“I am not a man to take life lightly, Gratton. My wife used to say of
me that I lacked a cardinal sense of humor. I have never believed she
was right. That is the last thing a man wants to believe of himself,
but it is true that I do not take this matter of my colossal wealth
lightly. I have given it more profound thought, its relationship to
the world from which I derived it, the economic scheme which made it
possible and my responsibilities toward those sources, than even you
might think. I am not an educated man, Gratton, like you. But I have
thought my share and pondered....”
“I once heard it said of you, Mr. Rarick, or perhaps read it in some
magazine, that you never reached a conclusion that was not based upon
at least several of the best opinions you could muster and that those
several opinions were almost invariably all yours.”
“I’ve gone my road alone. Open the third drawer of that table.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Take out that pile of manuscript.”
“This?”
“Yes.”
“Whew!”
“Yes, five hundred and forty-eight pages longhand.”
“Yes, and what fine, steel-point longhand. Yours?”
“Yes. Brevity being the soul of wit, that would just about be the bulk
of my story.”
“Your life?”
“Everything but, and yet nothing else. It is the story of the house and
man my wealth built. Of the walls it reared for me and the hearth it
kindled. It is filled with moralizing, the kind nobody will take the
time to read. It is the result of my study, my thoughts, my experience.
It is my last will and testament. But more of that presently. I wonder
if you happen to have heard, Gratton, rumors that Rarick Chain is about
to be absorbed by Bilt Chain?”
“Yes.”
“They are founded on fact.”
“You have completed that job.”
“Yes. And now I have a new one. A stiff one. The job of dying a poor
man. The entire philosophy behind that determination is in this
stack of papers. The years I have left are few in which to give back
intelligently the one hundred and eighty million dollars to the people
from whom I have earned it. Earned it, mind you. If there is anything
miraculous about the vastness of my wealth, it lies in the fact that
corruption has passed me by. The average man--and woman--Gratton, is
beholden to the object, the inanimate thing for his comfort and much of
his happiness. I have filled the hands of the masses with objects and
cluttered their minds with the easy happinesses of which they are so
capable. I have stuck more atrocious paper flowers into more atrocious
glass vases than probably any man in the history of the world. I have
anointed the tongues of the masses of children whose humdrum lives
stand ready to snatch them out of youth, with the red of the sticky
lollypop, and they tell me that the sin of ugliness and cheapness is
upon me. That may all be true, Gratton, but I know to what extent
I have made living easier to the masses whose days are chained to
the trivialities of things. My daughter Jennifer owns a six-carat
pigeon-blood ruby ring. The craving for that ring is deep in the hearts
of millions of women like her. I partially satisfy that craving in
red-glass ten-cent rings. Women with scalded, horny hands can now cope
with their dishwater in ten-cent rubber gloves--there is a side to my
colossal, absurd, undignified bartering in snide objects that is labor
of mercy. Don’t you forget it.”
“One isn’t apt to, after hearing you.”
“The wisest man I ever knew showed me the way to give back what I have
earned. He never, even in his great wisdom, knew to what extent his
mind was endowing mine. I refer to my friend Felix Gerkes.”
“Yes.”
“It was he who first set my mind working along lines toward which I had
previously had only a sort of subconscious predisposition. My friend is
at once a simple and profound man.”
“I see where Mengelberg intimated in Berlin the other day, after
commenting on Gerkes’s last book on the theory of life, that the Nobel
prize is once more about to come to America.”
“That will mean little to Gerkes.”
“It should mean a great deal to you, who have made so much of his
contribution to knowledge possible.”
“Probably it does, Gratton. That’s a snapshot of Gerkes there on the
table. It came this morning.”
“I’d never recognize him in his beard and all those fur togs. Is that
his wife and--papoose?”
“Yes.”
“Curious.”
“Not nearly so curious as we must seem to him. Gerkes has learned a
peculiar secret. That is why he is, I think, the only happy person
I know. He is never impatient for his tomorrow. That enables him to
completely live his present. The present and the future are inseparable
to him. The one is constantly in the act of being enveloped by the
other. Tomorrow is something he does not have to hurry toward. There is
going on for him the perpetual phenomenon of his present turning into
past, as the future encroaches and becomes the present.”
“He has the face of a happy person. So has the woman!”
“He took his wife from the Eskimos, whom he considers the happiest
people he has ever encountered. I was about to tell you, not meaning
to digress to the subject of my hobby Gerkes, that it was he who
unconsciously sent my subconsciousness to the surface. Before he
left us down here, for his new life in the North, he used to sit
around with me evenings, and more or less idly, let fall out of the
vast storehouses of his mind, some of his philosophies on preventive
philanthropy.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I know most of it might have seemed obvious to a man like you,
Gratton, but it was strangely new to me at the time. I realize now
that much of what he said had been smoldering in my subconsciousness
for years, but just the same, it was he who started me on the concrete
thinking-out and writing of this shaggy monstrosity of a manuscript.
Three years it has been in the writing. One of its by no means most
important results is, that you see me sitting here, Gratton, in a
house that, pending my death, is only a loan to me. I no longer own
one stone in it, but lease it from those who do, and with the sale of
some vast lumber properties in Maine and Canada last month, I now own
not one acre of God’s territory with the exception of certain colossal
and indirect mortgage holdings which in their turn will be converted.
I am, of course, still a man heavily encumbered with wealth of
practically every sort of valuable human possession, but already forty
million of my dollars are committed to preventive philanthropies.”
“It isn’t easy for a man whose bank balance has never been larger than
nine hundred dollars, to have much of a conception of forty million
dollars.”
“I have endowed no cancer hospitals, but have given, with what I hope
is the cumulative wisdom that is coming to men who have come into the
phenomenal kind of wealth that is possible only in this country, great
fortunes toward the prevention of the disease. Nothing new in all this,
you say. No, but look more deeply into it and see how prolonged has
been the infancy of this idea. And there is but little time left for
me. My money must pour back to the people in a fresh blood transfusion.
I want to wrap no rags around social sores. To accomplish, I must
personally administer my moneys while I live. I must die a poor man.
You see that?”
“Yes.”
“My sole heir is my daughter Jennifer. For that reason and another
equally important one, she comes into no properties at my death except
a life income of eight thousand dollars a year. You live on less, don’t
you?”
“Yes.”
“Comfortably?”
“Fairly.”
“She will be stripped pretty bare of the paraphernalia that has made of
her some of the things we have just been discussing, Gratton.”
“I can’t imagine her.”
“I can.”
“She will plunge like a roped steer.”
“At first.”
“I wonder if you are wise, stripping her so bare of the paraphernalia
which has become part of her.”
“There is the girl under it. The one who eludes you.”
“I don’t believe, Mr. Rarick, that wealth is necessarily destructive to
the individ----”
“Nor do I. On the contrary, I am convinced, for instance, that it is
the business men of different civilizations, the gatherers of material
wealth, who have built the foundations for art. Civilization has
advanced on their gold bonds. Many of the patron saints of the creative
life of Greece were the business men.”
“Think of the gigantic power for good you are about to release out of
the nickels and dimes of the people.”
“I have thought--and thought--and out of it has come my philosophy of
why I must die a poor man and why this wealth that I have drawn out of
the coin purses of American people must be released back now.”
“Tremendous idea....”
“My power to forecast the nature and needs of the future is limited.
Vast accumulations like mine must cope with the contemporary problems
of the people who helped to create the wealth. What is the use of
leaving five million dollars to build tubercular hospitals when two
years after my death, it is not impossible that a cure or a preventive
may be found for the white plague. Let future generations wrestle
freshly with their fresh issues. I want to leave no moneys that a few
years after my death must be expended upon dead issues because of a
will made during the period when those issues were alive. My death,
Gratton, is a much more important matter to the world than my life.”
“In a special sense, yes.”
“So you see, my surplus fortune is not mine to leave Jennifer, even if
I would. And I would not. It is difficult for me to talk to you any
further than I have, young man, about my feeling of what the effect of
stupendous personal wealth has been on the little group of my family.
But just the same, Gratton, therein lies the tragedy of my life. A
tragedy I do not intend to see perpetuated through the sole surviving
member after me, my daughter, who will live to thank the dead hand that
at first may seem so cruelly disciplinarian to her....”
“I simply cannot imagine Jennifer on eight thousand a year.”
“I can. Hand me that paper on my desk.”
“Here?”
“This single typewritten sheet is the boiled-down version of the five
hundred and forty-eight pages of that manuscript. This simple sheet,
Gratton, is my last will and testament, duly sworn and witnessed. My
philosophy of life, and of death. My bow to the world, my tribute to
it, my hope for its betterment, my bow out of it. My sighs for its
defects, my hope for its future. My hope in my child. My faith in her.
Listen,” he said, and began to read.
When Gratton was moved by a scene he was writing, especially in those
earlier years before his “Tragedy of Laughter” had been written, he
always complained of the physical discomfort he experienced while at
work. His ears rang. A curious little elevator of hunger seemed to ride
up and down the pit of his stomach. His tonsils wanted to burst and
his ears became bright, polished pink. Jennifer once wrote of him in
a monograph: “I could tell how the work on ‘Tragedy of Laughter’ was
coming by the color of his ears.”
In addition now, to those roaring symptoms, Gratton, after Rarick had
completed his reading, had a horrible fear he was going to cry. Not
tears, but some brute noises. The sound of an emotion scraping bottom,
as the soul of the man who had just read had scraped bottom.
“There, in a nutshell, is some of the wisdom I have tried to squeeze
out of my defeat, Gratton. Not much of a job to a literary man like
you--but it’s my legacy....”
“Well--guess I’ll be getting along now. Don’t suppose you know it. I
may be wrong. But seems to me, that’s the stuff immortal literature
is made of--that page you just read me. It’s the thing Lincoln poured
into his address at Gettysburg. It’s as close to God as Senator Vest’s
plea for a dog. It’s Shelley and Goethe crying for justice in prose.
Its wisdom will live after you. I may be crazy, but that is the kind of
stuff that achieves immortality. That last will and testament of yours
is literature....”
“I don’t want immortality. At the moment I want milk and Graham
crackers. Have them with me.”
“There’s Jennifer!”
“Where?”
“I heard her step.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Ah yes, I do hear now. Strange that you should have known her step at
the great distance of the lower hall. Shall I call her?”
“No--no. I must be going.”
“Strange that you should have heard her.”
“I’ve a glove of hers. She dropped it one day. I’ll ask to see her on
my way out--to give it back.”
“Will you ring as you go? I want milk and crackers. Share some?”
“No--no. The glove....”
“These evenings chill ... good warm milk ... crackers ... Graham ones.”
“Good night, sir.”
The wind had risen, hardening the triangles of snow against the leaded
windows into crust, and blowing the cold, beautiful smell of snow in
through the weather-strippings.
Waiting for his milk and crackers, Rarick, alone, poked up the embers
and pressed one of the battalion of buttons alongside the organ.
Seated, small, the look of hunchback in his face, the tall, Gothic
twilight climbing into vaulted shadows, the yarn of Pagliacci began to
stalk across stained glass, the organ ballooning into the dusk.
Waiting, as he loved to, for the bursting sob that concluded the
“Laugh, Clown, Laugh,” the chin of Rarick fell forward a little tiredly.
Clouds of music came up like thunder....