Jerome Brown proved, on the whole, the worst of Cressida's husbands, and,
with the possible exception of her eldest brother, Buchanan Garnet, he
was the most rapacious of the men with whom she had had to do. It was one
thing to gratify every wish of a cake-loving fellow like Bouchalka, but
quite another to stand behind a financier. And Brown would be a financier
or nothing. After her marriage with him, Cressida grew rapidly older. For
the first time in her life she wanted to go abroad and live--to get
Jerome Brown away from the scene of his unsuccessful but undiscouraged
activities. But Brown was not a man who could be amused and kept out of
mischief in Continental hotels. He had to be a figure, if only a "mark,"
in Wall street. Nothing else would gratify his peculiar vanity. The
deeper he went in, the more affectionately he told Cressida that now all
her cares and anxieties were over. To try to get related facts out of his
optimism was like trying to find framework in a feather bed. All Cressida
knew was that she was perpetually "investing" to save investments. When
she told me she had put a mortgage on the Tenth Street house, her eyes
filled with tears. "Why is it? I have never cared about money, except to
make people happy with it, and it has been the curse of my life. It has
spoiled all my relations with people. Fortunately," she added
irrelevantly, drying her eyes, "Jerome and Poppas get along well." Jerome
could have got along with anybody; that is a promoter's business. His
warm hand, his flushed face, his bright eye, and his newest funny
story,--Poppas had no weapons that could do execution with a man like
that.
Though Brown's ventures never came home, there was nothing openly
disastrous until the outbreak of the revolution in Mexico jeopardized
his interests there. Then Cressida went to England--where she could
always raise money from a faithful public--for a winter concert tour.
When she sailed, her friends knew that her husband's affairs were in a
bad way; but we did not know how bad until after Cressida's death.
Cressida Garnet, as all the world knows, was lost on the _Titanic_.
Poppas and Horace, who had been travelling with her, were sent on a week
earlier and came as safely to port as if they had never stepped out of
their London hotel. But Cressida had waited for the first trip of the sea
monster--she still believed that all advertising was good--and she went
down on the road between the old world and the new. She had been ill, and
when the collision occurred she was in her stateroom, a modest one
somewhere down in the boat, for she was travelling economically.
Apparently she never left her cabin. She was not seen on the decks, and
none of the survivors brought any word of her.
On Monday, when the wireless messages were coming from the _Carpathia_
with the names of the passengers who had been saved, I went, with so
many hundred others, down to the White Star offices. There I saw
Cressida's motor, her redoubtable initials on the door, with four men
sitting in the limousine. Jerome Brown, stripped of the promoter's
joviality and looking flabby and old, sat behind with Buchanan Garnet,
who had come on from Ohio. I had not seen him for years. He was now an
old man, but he was still conscious of being in the public eye, and sat
turning a cigar about in his face with that foolish look of importance
which Cressida's achievement had stamped upon all the Garnets. Poppas was
in front, with Horace. He was gnawing the finger of his chamois glove as
it rested on the top of his cane. His head was sunk, his shoulders drawn
together; he looked as old as Jewry. I watched them, wondering whether
Cressida would come back to them if she could. After the last names were
posted, the four men settled back into the powerful car--one of the best
made--and the chauffeur backed off. I saw him dash away the tears from
his face with the back of his driving glove. He was an Irish boy, and had
been devoted to Cressida.
When the will was read, Henry Gilbert, the lawyer, an old friend of her
early youth, and I, were named executors. A nice job we had of it. Most
of her large fortune had been converted into stocks that were almost
worthless. The marketable property realized only a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. To defeat the bequest of fifty thousand dollars to
Poppas, Jerome Brown and her family contested the will. They brought
Cressida's letters into court to prove that the will did not represent
her intentions, often expressed in writing through many years, to
"provide well" for them.
Such letters they were! The writing of a tired, overdriven woman;
promising money, sending money herewith, asking for an acknowledgment
of the draft sent last month, etc. In the letters to Jerome Brown she
begged for information about his affairs and entreated him to go with her
to some foreign city where they could live quietly and where she could
rest; if they were careful, there would "be enough for all." Neither
Brown nor her brothers and sisters had any sense of shame about these
letters. It seemed never to occur to them that this golden stream,
whether it rushed or whether it trickled, came out of the industry, out
of the mortal body of a woman. They regarded her as a natural source
of wealth; a copper vein, a diamond mine.
Henry Gilbert is a good lawyer himself, and he employed an able man to
defend the will. We determined that in this crisis we would stand by
Poppas, believing it would be Cressida's wish. Out of the lot of them, he
was the only one who had helped her to make one penny of the money that
had brought her so much misery. He was at least more deserving than the
others. We saw to it that Poppas got his fifty thousand, and he actually
departed, at last, for his city in la sainte Asie, where it never rains
and where he will never again have to hold a hot water bottle to his
face.
The rest of the property was fought for to a finish. Poppas out of the
way, Horace and Brown and the Garnets quarrelled over her personal
effects. They went from floor to floor of the Tenth Street house. The
will provided that Cressida's jewels and furs and gowns were to go to her
sisters. Georgie and Julia wrangled over them down to the last moleskin.
They were deeply disappointed that some of the muffs and stoles which
they remembered as very large, proved, when exhumed from storage and
exhibited beside furs of a modern cut, to be ridiculously scant. A year
ago the sisters were still reasoning with each other about pearls and
opals and emeralds.
I wrote Poppas some account of these horrors, as during the court
proceedings we had become rather better friends than of old. His reply
arrived only a few days ago; a photograph of himself upon a camel, under
which is written:
Traulich und Treu
ist's nur in der Tiefe:
falsch und feig
ist was dort oben sich freut!
His reply, and the memories it awakens--memories which have followed
Poppas into the middle of Asia, seemingly,--prompted this informal
narration.