Chapter I: Part 1

FIVE & TEN

BROADWAY EDITION

FIVE AND TEN

by _FANNIE HURST_

P. F. COLLIER & SON CORPORATION

Publishers New York

FIVE AND TEN COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY FANNIE HURST PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

EA

TO

NEW YORK CITY OF CITIES

... Whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are
within full of dead men’s bones.

MATTHEW, XXIII, 27.

Those who want fewest things are nearest to the gods.

SOCRATES.

FIVE & TEN

In the long reaches of what had become chronic insomnia John G. Rarick found himself mentally mouthing to himself phrases such as this: I am a rich man. I am a very rich man. Me, John G., rich!

It was his way of striving to grind into his overtaxed realizations the fact that, as he lay there, wheels of industry, turning by now of their own momentum, were pouring more and more gold into Rarick coffers.

Even in a land where such annals of achievement as textbooks and success magazines were crowded with the names of those who had vaulted from petty beginnings into high places, there was something about the rapid phantasmagoria from obscurity to rapid success that never failed to tax Rarick’s credulities.

Now, Jenny Rarick, lying there beside him in the elaborate marquetry bed, the first piece of signed furniture, by the way, which they had acquired, had less imagination to startle with the fecundity of events. She had a capacity to take for granted many of the phenomena of the world in which she lived.

A sunset was something to admire, but not to wonder about.

She had once remarked to a poet of no small repute, that she regretted she had never found time to become a writer.

Yet it was obviously a nervous woman lying there asleep beside Rarick. The face, always too angular for beauty, was constantly ridden across with expressions, as if, while the body slept, the mind kept open shop.

Above the fine coverlet, her shoulders, narrow white ones, with firm breasts that had not sagged from child-bearing, rose and fell to irregular breathing. Here was someone asleep with much on her mind.

With Rarick, the difference lay in his not being able to sleep at all. As a boy, back on his stepaunt’s farm, twenty miles out of Keokuk, he had known the torments of insomnia, coming in, time after time, from a long back-splitting day in the fields, to lie sleepless for hours after he had sought his bed.

His room then had been an unfurnished attic with a window set into a slanting roof. Stars had gleamed into his insomnia through that window.

Stars gleamed into his insomnia now. They were gilt, hand-wrought ones, against a ceiling of billow, cherub, and streamer, done after the manner of Tiepolo’s Labia Palace painting of “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Whimsically Rarick lay on the marquetry bed, ruminating on the divergence of causes that had contributed to the years of his insomnia. Everything, from a sick calf; the haunting lilt of “The Ancient Mariner”; a harsh word from his stepaunt’s farmer husband; fear of losing his clerkship in a hardware store, to one million dishpans; Avery’s croup; a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bank-loan; a rare and exclusive obsidian mirror with native textile string which he coveted for his Aztec collection, was fodder to his sleeplessness.

No subject was too casual to tempt his insomnia. He built empires and warehouses by night. He dreamed into flooding darkness of achieving his nine-hundred-and-sixty-first store, of possessing the Gutenberg Bible, of tin tacks, of beholding with his own eyes, in his own conservatories, the opening of a passion-flower. Into that darkness he designed window displays, calculated floor space, inaugurated Eskimo pie for his soda-fountains, and coveted a tode-stone ring from Clusium, the ancient capital of the Etruscans.

Across his relentless insomnia there stalked contemplations of new sites for new Five and Tens. Insolent sites within shadow of Hellenic marble libraries and along boulevarded frontage; more and more Rarick temples to tin tacks, paper napkins, hooks and eyes, sink-swabbers, and paste jewelry mounted on pasteboard and sold in bins.

His way of sleeping over a matter was to lie sleepless over it. A chain of six hundred and forty-two stores might virtually be said to have crocheted itself out of these hours of enforced contemplations. Problems of population of a given town, types and habits of the people, study of main industries, bank deposits and clearings, number of different industries, proportion of workers to clerks, of women employees to men, prevailing local rental conditions, had been pondered to their minutiæ from the flat of his back.

The problems of Jenny, now, or of his small son Avery, or his daughter Jennifer, were another matter. They made him restless and unable to concentrate. The fact that approximately eight per cent of all candy sales in America are made to men was a reasonable hypothesis on which to work out a system of extensive candy departments in those stores which drew their business from the wholesale districts.

The fact, however, that Jenny’s nervous dissatisfactions with the gratifications of today, in order that she might yearn for those of tomorrow, seemed to increase in just such proportion as her creature-cares decreased, was an unreasonable hypothesis upon which to base nothing.

How dissatisfiedly she slept, two perpendicular lines flashing in and out between her eyes. Her strong hooked nose flashed slightly, too, at the nostrils, and in the pale light from a transom, the triangular planes of her cheeks, far too thin, rippled now and then. There was something of a frail, pale Dante about the sleeping face of Jenny. A face that walked in a hell.

Prop himself on an elbow, and gaze as he would across the mound of delicate coverings between them, the pale splotch of the face of Jenny had a habit of seeming to recede through the darkness.

What was it she wanted? Strange angular woman whom he called wife, lying there sharing his bed, what is there that will ease your hunger, slake your thirst, gratify your indomitable appetites. Appetites for what? God knows! Love? Bah! she was as empty as a meal-sack of it for him, yet she was not the woman to seek it elsewhere. Up to now, hers had been the easy morality of the frigid.

Lying there beside him, in a house that already contained a sister portrait to an “El Greco” that hung in the Prado; a pear-shaped pearl said to have been given by Jérôme Bonaparte to Queen Hortense; and the largest private collection of Stücks in the world, what was the secret of the anguish that rippled beneath her cheeks?

Rarick owned, in his already considerable collection of precious stones of religious uses, a small steatite cup said to have been found in a Japanese grave of the Iron Age. There was a pinhead hole through the bottom of the precious thing. It seemed to Rarick that Jenny’s cup of happiness must be something like that. The contents ran out of the wrong end when she tilted it to her thirsty lips.

And what thirsty lips! She was thirsty now in her sleep. And, as always, that sense of her desire for what lay just beyond her present transmitted itself to him.

What did she want? She had her children, as much as one seemed to have one’s children nowadays.

What did she want? She had the security that goes with a fifteen-year-old marriage that has borne the fruit of offspring and material success. Indeed, a material success that taxed the credulities. As to the underlying gratifications of the passions, romance, oneness of purpose, sympathy, companionship, love--well, well, what proportion of human beings _can_ hope to sustain those?

Rarick had once hoped. But the young clerk who had come to St. Louis from Keokuk and had married, rather considerably above his station, a Miss Jenny Avery, had cast off many a dead skin since then. It seemed to him terribly certain that Jenny had. Where was that somewhat caustic, but intellectual-faced girl of those eager, wooing days, who had sat opposite him in a canoe that cut through the Meramac River with the same lean swiftness of their dreams? Where was that girl, a high-school graduate, from whom he could learn; who had talked to him of life in terms of the grave, simple, beautiful things that had somehow started so consistently to elude them, once they seemed to be in a position to make some of those early yearnings come true?

Where was that eager, narrow, intelligent-faced Jenny? Why, he had almost lost sight of her the first year of their marriage, when there had been so little time for the old talks of those days when the mind of each to the other had seemed an oyster-shell crammed with pearls!

Their marriage had routinized so quickly. Perhaps because of the circumstance that it had been Jenny’s total capital of twenty-five hundred dollars which had embarked him on the enterprise of the Nick Nack Store on Olive Street.

After that, her face had immediately taken on some of the pinch and strain from which it was never to recover. Jenny’s money had started him. Had that had something to do with the immediate reversal of what had been their pre-nuptial relationship of idealization of life and love? Undoubtedly. Jenny had begun to fear terribly for her investment. Naturally. The money represented the careful total of the tiny estate that had been held in trust for her in the five years between the death of her parents and her coming of age. And the first few years after, the investment had been unbelievably precarious. Rarick never held it against her judgment that she had resisted, with all her vehemence, his determination to try and reëstablish the almost defunct business which her money had launched, on the new basis of the five-and-ten-cent Nick Nack Store.

As a matter of fact, it had been a maneuver of desperation rather than of logic. No more than Jenny had he even remotely anticipated the enormity of that move....

And now ... perhaps he had been the one to change. The desire for passionate love with the Jenny Avery who had dreamed with him of walking-trips through the Pyrenees, was by now nothing more than a sense of frustration lying back in the dim reaches of his mind.

That walking-trip through the Pyrenees! She had been so bright! A high-school girl, educated by rote, rather than by the desultory reading of such books as his older sister Hildegarde in Keokuk had sometimes sent him by mail. Jenny, at his very first mention, had known at once of the Pyrenees, and their highest peak, the Maladetta. She had leaned so sympathetically into the yearnings of his untutored mind and spirit ... and now.... Something of that same frustration, mutual to them both, must be what kept her face flickering so in her sleep.

Well? Then what? How many times, leaning on his elbow, gazing at her through the pale darkness, had that question of his dropped down into the cistern of a silence from which there was no answer.

Presently the gilt stars, among the foliated stars, the festoons, and the adumbrated cherubs on the ceiling, would begin to fade; and dawn, a pale horse, would ride through the Corinthian archway that inclosed the exclusive residential Westmoreland Place where the Raricks occupied the most pretentious house of all the pretentious row.

It was about this time that John Rarick was due to drop off into brief but resuscitative sleep.

* * * * *

It was about this same time that Jenny, an early waker against her will, was due to open her eyes almost with a click, as it were, and start to a sitting posture at once, as if she had been called. Called she had been, by the pressure of the procession of her thoughts, which were marching so closely beneath the surface of her sleep.

Ficke house! Cretonne covers for the sedan. Box for the San Carlo Opera. Mermord and Jaccard’s about the twenty-ninth pearl for Jennifer’s necklace. Wednesday Club. Wire Long Island Kennels to ship Russian wolfhound to pose in the portrait Shandig was doing. Pour tea at St. Louis Water-Colorists Exhibit. Toy electric motor-boat for Avery. Meeting advisory board Garrison Avenue Home for Wayward Girls. Bridge-tea St. Louis Club. Garden Swing. Sit for Shandig. Oh yes! Mermord and Jaccard’s, too, about the gold bouillon-spoons. They could also be used for grapefruit. Avery must be forced, if necessary, to attend dancing-school. Avery’s riding-lesson. Rarick must telegraph bid on the Ficke house.

All this on the instant of awakening. Jenny’s mind might have been a memorandum-book, the leaves turning.

... Oh yes, and remind Rarick to indicate which plants in the conservatory were to be sent to the Chrysanthemum Show, and then, the Ficke house. FICKE HOUSE.

How he slept! Across the mound of the sheets that sprayed lace and sometimes made him flick as if at a fly, she too had to raise herself on an elbow, in order to find his face, which slept in the position of staring upright through closed eyes.

A little man. In the beginning, his shortness of stature had been merely something to regret and then adjust oneself to, with the immemorial processes of a woman compromising between the Lothario of her dreams and the stocky reality of her husband.

Subsequently, she had come almost to hate him for that shortness. A stunted man. Curious, that to her he had always given the effect of a hunchback. Not so much because his head, on a short neck, was so deeply set into the valley of high shoulders, but because, even in the days when he had wooed and fascinated her, the little hardware clerk from Keokuk, who had first been brought to see Jenny by a poor relation who boarded in the same house with him, had somehow had the face of a hunchback. A bony, up-thrust, hurt face. Short sinews of rear neck, rather than the slightest indication of an actual hunch, kept it thrust upward. Rarick’s face was always cocked to a world slightly taller than he. It was already upturned to his fourteen-year-old daughter Jennifer. Fervently Jenny found herself hoping, as her son’s slight frame and threat of short stature began to prove worrisome, that some day it would be necessary for Rarick to look up to his son.

All this talk that men of brief stature had ruled the world--poppycock! What about Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Bismarck, Lincoln? Jenny was not sure about the heroic proportions of most of them. Lincoln, of course, and Alexander, the vast-minded Macedonian, and Charlemagne, must surely have matched up to the heroic proportions of their names. On the other hand, Rarick, Jenny felt certain, had steeped himself in the sugared legend of the magnificence of the small.

His collection of Napoleonana already included a desk from Versailles, an inkstand flanked by onyx horses, and an enameled snuff-box worn down by the Corsican’s own thumb. The entire north end of his library, fourteen shelves of it behind copper grating, either pertained or appertained to the small Emperor.

How much of his success, Jenny asked herself, leaning on her elbow and gazing at him who slept there with his hunchback’s face washed in dawn, was due to luck or power? Without the incalculable boon of her patrimony of twenty-five hundred dollars which had first set him up in the Nick Nack Store, might he not still be clerking in the Schwebbe hardware establishment from which he had taken a day off for his marriage to her?

How much of this man’s success was due to an initial stroke of luck, her patrimony, and her distaste for his petty rôle of selling wire nails over Schwebbe’s hardware counter? Little as it seemed to matter, this speculation was one of tireless interest to Jenny.

How much foresight had Rarick ever manifested in his business moves? Precious little. Credited already in the industrial world with vision, acumen, and imagination, was it not rather that every move he had made had been a lucky gesture in the dark? The result of an imminent need to jump this way or that; and Rarick had happened to jump right. How well she could recall the move that had precipitated the change in the policy of the Nick Nack Store to the five-and-ten-cent idea. It had been nothing more or less than a clutch at a straw to avoid going under. Mingling even with her sense of pride, as she had sat beside him one day at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon and heard him referred to by a speaker as “that far-sighted industrial peer right in our very own midst--John Rarick (applause),” had been her merciless appraisal of him. Without the incalculable boon of her patrimony ... where would he be?

The chain-store idea, originating long before his time, had never really entered Rarick’s head as a scheme of scope, insistent as his biographers were to credit him with a canny and pioneer eye that had anticipated the dawn of mass-production and quantity-buying.

It had all just happened. Of this much she felt powerfully certain. Rarick had not foreseen his magnificent business maneuvers. They were born out of circumstance and stress. She did not want the world to know what she knew, but she wanted Rarick to know that she knew!

Without the initial patrimony that had been scrimped for her by deceased parents, where would Rarick be now? She was so fairly sure that she knew. Clerking at Schwebbe’s or possibly following up an old dream of his to acquire a Missouri farm and a sufficient formal education to divide his time between working it and teaching in some rural school.

It had taken courage to hand over that sum to a young clerk with such lofty ideals as this and who was constantly chafing under penny-wise business methods of the old German firm that employed him. And moreover, in the very first year of their marriage, when she was already carrying Jennifer and the fear of childbirth was upon her! He had rowed her on the Meramac those days, on Sundays and holidays, or taken her across the river to Cahokia to see the Indian mounds; and they had talked, not of big business, but of a dream which was to be only deferred by this rather unanticipated coming of the child--that walking-trip through the Pyrenees. The trip through the Pyrenees had come true, twice over, in fact, in a Hispano-Suiza car; and some of the most important of the excavations at Cahokia had subsequently been made at Rarick’s expense. But what was the use pretending? A wife, peering into the sleeping face of her husband as he lay beside her, need play no rôle before her own soul....

In Jenny’s mind, Rarick had not even succeeded in being educated to greatness. He was like a man who, at fifty, still spends most of his time reliving his college days. He had not gone on in spirit. The handsome house that contained him inclosed him as loosely as a gigantic pod holds an ordinary-sized pea. He rattled about inside his setting. And talk about penny-wise! He was still dreaming dreams the stature of that walking-trip through the Pyrenees and the farm that was to be worked as a sideline to teaching the young that Hannibal crossed the Alps.

The pea had not grown with its pod. Jenny had, mark you that! Breeding will tell. Her maternal forebears had been Piexottos who had settled in St. Louis as early as Pierre Laclede. You could not come of that kind of colonizing stock and not know how to meet success with the same kind of indomitability with which they had met adversity. Jenny spoke frequently of her colonizing ancestors. One grew to the demands of circumstance. In other words, Jenny Avery was being educated to greatness. After all, not even the Corsican upon whom Rarick doted, had remained the Corsican.

What was it that this man, her husband, lay there wanting, even in his sleep? What were the citadels behind those closed lids of his, upon which shone some secret inner sun of his private own? Was he inscrutable or just inadequate? The smallish young man who had fascinated her, way back there, with his inchoate desires that had never entered the heads of the sons of the St. Louis business men who had milled about the wealthy-in-her-own-name Miss Avery, had remained a sophomore on the campus of that youth.

One outgrew being a sophomore about life. One ceased desiring what one had achieved ten times over. In many ways, Rarick was like a man whose garages are filled with high-power motor-cars, but who, by the force of fondness for old dreams, continues to tour on his velocipede. The comparison was Jenny’s.

He had what he wanted ten times, forty times, over, but in the forty times, had missed the once.

But was it desire behind those closed lids, or just a gnawing frustration? As a matter of fact, their marriage had borne the fruits of love, four times over. Two children between Jennifer and Avery had died in infancy. She had submitted to Rarick’s bed with the same unequivocal acceptance of marriage that she expected and received from him.

She had seen the glance of this allegedly great little man, her husband, follow many a time the living, flowing line of a beautiful woman’s body, but with much the appraisement with which he was fond of observing, in its glass case, a fine example of a wooden statuette of the Virgin of San Domingo in his North American collection, one of whose breasts was studded with a turquoise-incrusted marine clam-shell.

There was no telling....

Little man, you, I think I hate you. He must telegraph bid on the Ficke house. He must! He must! He must! Cretonne covers for sedan. Box for the San Carlo Opera. Mermord and Jaccard’s about the twenty-ninth pearl for Jennifer’s necklace. Wednesday Club. Sealed bid on the Ficke house....

If anyone had told Rarick on the morning of the day he wired the sealed bid on the Ficke house that before his sun set on another afternoon he would be owner of two million five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of mortar-stone lace and Italian Renaissance façade, flanked by two famous Grecian urns which guarded a pair of doors, superb copies of the Campanile doors in Florence, he would have listened to it with that polite third ear of his which enabled him to appear attentive to the discourse of another while thinking of something entirely removed. A quality, by the way, which was to win and sustain him the reputation of being a canny and silent listener.

A maid entered on the seven-thirty chime of a hall clock, drew back curtains and lowered spacious windows that looked out upon the elaborately boulevarded, landscaped, and very private precincts of Westmoreland Place, before he lifted back his eyelids from the deep kind of sleep that invariably capped his insomnia.

From the depths of her pillow, where for an hour her open eyes had lain upturned to the gilt stars, it was as if Jenny had heard the flicker of his lids.

It was characteristic of her that she should resume conversation, upon his awaking, at precisely the point where they had left off the night before.

“Sooner or later, Rarick, the move is inevitable! Wire your bid today!” The phrase beat against his brain as if it had been there all night, and yet with his conscious mind he had forgotten it. That room in which he slept was always beating with repetitious little phrases that were Jenny’s. Do this. Do that.

Wire what bid? Of course, that had been her last phrase before dropping off to sleep. Ding. Dong. Here it was again. “Sooner or later the move is inevitable. It is Providence that the Ficke house should be on the market just at this time.”

“Not necessarily inevitable, Jenny. The roots of our lives are down here.”

“Nonsense! The roots of life are where one chooses they should be. You wouldn’t have a Guatemala orchid in your conservatory if that were not partially true.”

“Well, then, I choose that our roots should be here.”

“You choose. You choose. You choose. As usual, that closes the controversy?”

His eyes, as he lifted them into quizzical peaks, made him look Asiatic in a way she detested. Oh yes, that closes the controversy, he was saying to himself. Oh yes. Oh yes. Rather, it kept it running in great sluices of talk through all-too-brief silences which he craved.

“No, Jenny, but it is scarcely necessary to argue that my greatest interests are here.”

“At the moment, yes. But your main office is practically now in the East. You are on trains half your time.”

That was true. But the prospect of reiterating, as if it had never been said before, this two-year-old argument between them, made him long to close his eyes and sink back, at least on to the rim of the slumber which had visited him so reluctantly.

“We have outgrown St. Louis, Rarick. Anyone can remain a big frog in a small pond.”

“My home is here.”

“You have the opportunity to live in one of the most beautiful homes in America. Do you realize that you are rich enough to buy the home of the man who endowed the Metropolitan Gallery with the Ficke Collection? I have been prophesying for the six months, ever since the death of Emanie Ficke, that the house would come on the market. Don’t be all kinds of a fool, Rarick. Wire your bid.”

“And what then?”

And what then? She sat up in bed at that, her nightgown, plain but impeccably sheer, falling down off one shoulder, her brick-colored, eccentric hair, which she wore brushed up perpendicularly off her ears as if to accentuate the narrowness of her face, falling in thin spray along her shoulders. A sort of tremor, faint as a blue flame, seemed to burn along the pale wick of her lips, making them flicker.

And then what! The most beautiful house in the world, Rarick, built out of damned little ugly things.

Things. Things. Things and things. It was as if, so that he put his hands over his eyes to squeeze back their pressure, there came marching out of his insomnia the nightly procession of the million dishpans, bins of hair-pins, carloads of coin-purses, glass beads, curtain rods, rubber gloves, cotton stockings, eye-shades, flower-seed, pink soaps, tooth-brushes, darning-cottons, water-tumblers, salted peanuts, baby-dolls, lead-pencils, paper flowers, gimcrack vases, and chewing-gums.

“Things.”

“Exactly, Rarick. Titians out of stewpans. Conservatories out of cotton stockings. Pipe-organs out of gas tubing. Libraries out of tooth-paste. Polo ponies out of Eskimo pies. Rarick, where is your imagination!”

She was not the one to cajole with any grace. Her thin face, in a way that was no longer lovely to him, propped on its elbow, was all covered over with an expression that, starting with her lips, had burst like paper into flame. She desired with an intensity that was embarrassing. It grated Rarick horribly to see her wanting anything. It stretched her face so, drawing the tight skin back further still from the bony outline, nakedly, like a person biting down pain.

Wherever his imagination was, it left him lying there with his tired hand pressed against his eyes, and his lips lifted back slightly from his teeth, as her voice grated:

“Do you realize that you’re a richer man than Cyrus Breckenridge, Rarick?”

Trust Jenny to have heard, almost before the proposition had been put into writing, this newest offer of the Breckenridge group of Southwestern stores to buy in the Rarick chain. His reply to it had been to add six new links to his own. Youngstown, Altoona, Akron, Fall River, Lowell, and New Bedford. Her entire being was like a hateful little antenna. Sensing. He wanted her not to be hateful to him, and the knowledge that she was, kept him in a state of constant mental retribution toward her. Through the lattice of his fingers he regarded her, his lids half down to blur the eager, tight-skinned thrust of her face.

“I suppose I am a richer man than Breckenridge.”

“Hellman figures you out about the thirteenth richest man in the world, Rarick. Know that?”

As a matter of fact, he did. His confidential secretary, Harry Hellman, an exceedingly stout young Jew, with excellent qualifications for his position, had called his attention to that new fact only that week. He had thought about it subsequently and with the sustained sort of incredulity that had caused him to clutch toward reality by repeating to himself such phrases as: I am a rich man. I am a very rich man. Me, John Rarick, born Fancy Prairie, Iowa, October 7th, 1870, son of Anna Masey Rarick and John Geoffrey Rarick. m. Jenny Avery, St. Louis, 1898. President Rarick Chain, Inc. Vice-president Dime Savings Bank. Vice-president Ajoy Soap Company. Board directors Dime Savings Bank. Board directors Corn Belt Traction Company. Vice-president Empire State Trust Company. Vice-president Croton Mills. Trustee Guaranty Trust Association. Director St. Louis Art Center; Municipal Opera Company; Americana Association; Lapidarian Club Society; Hispano Association; Society for Preservation of Indian Culture; Missouri Historical Association; Member of.... Me, John G. ... all those ... me, John!

It was like Jenny to take this dazzling fact, rather indiscreetly handed her by Hellman, for granted, and without wasting either analysis or wonderment upon it, begin to cut her cloth accordingly. One became the thirteenth richest man in the world and then set immediately about adjusting one’s life to the requirements of being the thirteenth richest man in the land. Hers not to reason why.

He was being constantly ashamed of the way she could grate on him. Coming from Jenny, the selfsame statement that had caused him a rise of goose-flesh when Hellman had called his attention to this new notch on his hickory stick, filled him with a dull resentment.

What new desires and cravings and ambitions for herself, and, worst of all, crazy plots for her children, were there left to set in motion?

What was it that being the wife of the thirteenth richest man in the world could give her that she had not enjoyed as the wife of the thirteenth hundredth richest man in the world?

It did not seem so long ago to Rarick when their first car, a Buick sedan, had stood new and shiny one Sunday morning at the curbstone of their seven-room house on Kensington Avenue, and Jenny, with his overcoat thrown on over her kimono, had rushed out to try its upholstery. There had been a small tag on the steering-wheel:

Rarick]

That was about as demonstrative as Rarick could bring himself to be, even back in the days before their fairy tale had begun to happen.

“Good morning, Jenny. Your street car days are over,” he had written during the fifth year of their marriage. During the first year he had sent her a modest little traveling-case for a birthday present, but the card had read: “Pack my love and some of our dear dreams in this, for our walking-trip through the Pyrenees.”

That had been before the acquisitive, tight-skinned look had spread itself over the face of Jenny: before the fox had leaned out of the nervous and intelligently homely face of the girl he had been proud of himself for choosing from a world that seemed to him populated with girls with no faces at all, only a vacuous geometry of pleasantly related features.

No one but God and Rarick knew that the dowry that went with Jenny had played no part in his choice. Sometimes, as the something flowed out of their relationship that had been precious to him, it seemed there must be some way to tear open the secret chambers of his heart and reveal this truth to Jenny, on to whose lips, not so many years after marriage, had crept occasional innuendo.

What she did not or would not remember was that it actually was well after their engagement that Rarick, a young man from the outside of her circle, had come to know about the twenty-five hundred dollars.

What she did and would remember, as if her mind were a magnifying-glass under which a small mental image could become Gargantuan, was the hot August day when they had taken the street car together for the Union Trust Company, and withdrawn from her safety-deposit box there, the twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of government bonds which were to be converted into capital investment in the Nick Nack Store.

That fact, in these years when Jenny was already buying an eighty-five-hundred-dollar bauble far more casually than she had once bought an eighty-dollar one, never lost its luminosity in the dark places of her mind. It was a piece of phosphorescent memory. A cold, flameless light that tinged every aisle of her mind where he was concerned, and which she kept dancing before the eyes of her husband like a signalman on a bridge at night swinging his lantern.

Behind her reminder to him that he was the thirteenth richest man in the world there trailed the unspoken tagline, “thanks to the start I gave you by intrusting you with my inheritance,” a string of words which, spoken or unspoken, traveled through him in a groove that innuendo had worn down, his live nerves the trolley of transmission. Rebuttal would have meant the fatal act of admission to her implied word. Rarick had learned various kinds of silences.

“I haven’t minded the years of your stubborn refusal to pretty nearly everything I’ve asked for myself, Rarick. It is Jennifer now. I want the child to see the light of her fifteenth birthday in the Ficke house. That’s not asking much of a man many times a millionaire. The pity is that it has to be coaxed out of you.”

“The pity of it” clung in a burr-like phrase to his brain.

The pity of it. The pity somehow of everything, including this flavorless beginning of another day. Pretty Jennifer, who had everything, and now, at barely fifteen, was so cruelly fretted, aided and abetted by a doting mother, with wanting more than everything. After all, if you had two motor-cars, there was only left for you to want three, if the goal of your acquisitiveness was things. And things. And things. It was an entirely different kind of wanting from the desire to own a Buick sedan when you owned no car at all. The difference between desiring a Buick sedan when you owned no car, or desiring a third car when you already owned two, was all the difference in the world. The pity of it. Jennifer at fifteen, who had a good mind, was a good pupil, and was a phantom of delight to her father, already too busy wanting more than everything.

That kind of thinking made him heavy and pedantic and old-as-the-hills, as a father.

The little girl who wanted more than everything.

Damn her mother.

The phrase shot through his mind like a burst of flame, startling him horribly.

Under cover of Jenny’s steady runnel of accusative and importuning talk, he began to reason with himself, to calm himself, to rid his mind of the taste of the phrase that had shot through his mind in sacrilege to this woman who shared his bed.

As mothers went, Jenny would have stood impeccable before any jury. She wanted passionately for her young. She was forever baring herself to his scorn by asking in their name. She was a doting, gloating mother, fierce for her offspring, yet, withal, sweet with them and to them. Many a night through she had sat unnecessarily, but tirelessly, beside the bed of Avery, whose first years had been precarious ones. The death of two infants had gone hard with her. Jennifer was her doting, her waking, and her sleeping thought.

Rarick, whose manner was not fortunate with his children because he was seldom at ease with them, could not have formulated into words, except in vague fashion to the effect that she spoiled them, the stubborn wall of opposition which he erected between himself and Jenny’s plans and dreams for her children.

“It is as if you were jealous of them,” she had barked at him once, hysterically, when he was opposing an indoor roller-skating rink across the top of the house.

No. No. No.

Without his knowing how to reach out a hand to stay them, except in vague fumings and consistent conservatisms, the entire kingdom of his household was drifting like a bit of land disassociating itself from the mainland to become island, out into some high tide beyond his reach. Jenny and Jennifer and his boy Avery were on that island. He was back helplessly on the mainland; and Jenny, mark you, mind you, no otherwise to it, was to blame! The bitterness of that tore at him constantly, like a flame pulling itself off the candle.

Jennifer, for a time, while she had been a little pupil at Mary Institute, had been something of an eager student, with a hint of her mother’s old air of desire to know, about her. Rarick had said little, but her school reports had been a source of deep private pleasure to him; and once he had carried about in his pocket an essay of hers, written on ruled paper, called “WHY WE LOVE RUSKIN.” He had filched it off her desk and returned it there a few evenings later when he observed the child scrambling among her possessions for what might have been the essay.

Rarick had not, up to that time, known who Ruskin was, and it elated him no little that the enlightenment should have come by way of his daughter. “In mastery of prose language he has never been surpassed,” the thirteen-year-old daughter of Rarick, undismayed by discursive eagerness and floriated mannerism, had written in her roundly vertical chirography. It was this phrase out of the mouth of his babe that must have lain engraved upon Rarick’s memory when, years later, he acquired, at what was said to be an astonishingly high price, a page of the original manuscript of Ruskin’s _Præterita_.

Suddenly that brownish, rather studious Jennifer of those days back in the solid square house on MacPherson Avenue had slipped from her little-girlhood into a high-strung, mature-faced disciple of her mother’s ambitions for her. The home in Westmoreland Place. Finishing school in Tarrytown.

Now here was family history repeating itself. It had been the same way when Jenny began to “feel her oats,” as Rarick was in the habit of putting it, in the MacPherson Avenue house, and was casting an eye toward Westmoreland Place. Jennifer’s graduation reception must be held in the new home, and not in the twelve-room yellow-brick one on MacPherson. The neighborhood was running down so. Stores. Flats. Even the G. H. Francises were talking of selling.

The little brown jug of a Jennifer of the MacPherson Avenue house was now the slip of a young miss, straight as a paper-cutter, with the sophisticated eyes that for the life of him her father could never catch and hold in a glance.

And now that brown child back there, whitened because her freckles seemed to have come off, this Jennifer whom he was casting about, in his futile way, to save, what was left of her, for himself, must have her fifteenth birthday in a house on Fifth Avenue that almost faced the Metropolitan Museum.

To think that he, John Rarick, who had once dreamed dreams no bigger than that walking-trip through the Pyrenees, should be in a position to give her such a house. Was Jenny, after all, the natural and doting parent, and was he to Jennifer the grudging, silent father? Was he too finished with youth to know his own children?

Could his dreams for Avery, the boy, slip between his fingers, too, as this mother of his began to demand his rights for him? Would Avery grow up alien to a father who seemed to have no shred of youth left that would enable him the better to understand the youth in his children?

From what was it he was struggling to save them? His own innate sense of rightness could be no deeper than his wisdom, and who was he to be cocksure of his wisdom? After all, what was the meaning of this success, which sometimes threatened to seem chimeric to him, if it was not to enable him to do just such things as give Jennifer her fifteenth birthday in one of the most beautiful and expensive houses in the world?

Success had done its share to teach Rarick himself new and complex appetites. He was a philatelist of elaborate and expensive tastes. There was in one of the pockets of his waistcoat, which was hanging over the foot of the bed, a famous Gnostic gem, heliotrope, engraved with the sacred name “Abrasax.” A museum in Boston had been bidder against him for that gem. There were in that same pocket, result of those same tastes acquired through his growing wealth, an ominous and luminous opal, a tiny agate ring with a runic inscription of the late-Saxon period, and a transparent aquamarine cut _en cabochon_ with the figure of a hump-bull. In his library, at this period, were celebrated “firsts” upon the shelves; a Tintoretto, a Greuze, and a triptych of the Cimabue period upon his walls.

What Jenny was demanding for herself and her children were the equivalents of the runic gems, the celebrated firsts, and the misty Greuzes.

No wonder, as she lay there beside him, silent for the moment, the lines about her thin lips were tight with the distaste of their state of constant asking, and the stretched look across her face was the look that had been written there by the constant and almost automatic opposition he had been erecting for years against the nature of her desires for herself and her children.

His children, even the small boy Avery, approached him only through the mother. The mother herself approached him as a diplomat goes to the conference table, her points carefully tabulated in the portfolio of her mind.

A man, if he loved them, could hold out only so long against his children....

He swung himself to a sitting posture on the side of the bed, and reached for a robe to slip on over his nightshirt. He was short, somber, gnome-like, and a little ridiculous in his nightshirt; and he never forgot it.

“I’ll buy you the Ficke house, Jenny.”

During the last six months of the six years the Raricks had occupied the Ficke mansion, a man by the name of Dr. Felix Gerkes had lived on the top floor of the house. He occupied two rooms and a green bathroom with a frieze of mermaids over the tub. His meals for the most part were brought to him and served on a card table beside a window that overlooked Central Park, which separated him in a diagonal from the Museum, where he had spent twenty-one years in the archæological department. He was also an Indianologist of first-rank repute, a man who had been frequently endowed with honorary degrees in the realms of scholarship and science.

He was the author of numerous brochures and pamphlets, a text-book on geology that was in general use throughout American colleges, had written three books on amulets, precious stones, and meteorites, and was regarded as a foremost living authority on religious uses of stones among primitive peoples.

He was a lean, shabby fellow, with a walrus-like mustache and a conspicuously prominent forehead with thin stringlets of hair brushed sidewise across what threatened to become a bald horseshoe. His clothing, so loosely it hung, seemed to have no points of contact with his body.

The women of the household, even though weeks might pass without their so much as encountering him, and then only in a hallway or on the rare occasions when he dined with the family, thought him repulsive, and considered it disgusting of Rarick to insist upon having him there.

A curious bond existed between these two men. They had first met when Rarick had been directed to him for advice concerning a contemplated purchase, for his collection, of a necklace of banded and variegated agates, onyx, carnelians, and sards, attributed to the first century, A.D.

In the course of a long and enlightening conversation with this wise, strange man, who wore a hexagon-shaped Chinese skull-cap with a crystal button on its peak, Gerkes had quoted from the _Pantagruel_ of Rabelais, reciting almost word for word that part of the book which describes the oracle of the Dive Bouteilly and its seven columns of sapphire, jacinth, diamond, ruby, emerald, “_more brilliant and glistening than those which were set in place of eyes in the marble lion stretched before the tomb of King Hermias. The sixth column of agate, the seventh of transparent syenite with a splendor like that of Hymettian honey, and within appeared the moon in form and motion such as she is in the heavens, full and new, waxing and waning._” In the further course of that casual hour’s conversation, Gerkes had discoursed upon the seven heavens of the Mohammedans, white lapis-lazuli, the sack of Constantinople by the Sassanian Persian king, Khusrau II, Navajo silversmiths, Figdor collection in Vienna, use of black and white enamel on bezel, cramp-rings, Edward the Confessor, native Indian mountaineers of California, Liberian silver, Catherine von Bora and her marriage to Martin Luther, Cleveland Museum of Art, Antiochus IV, aluminum kitchenware, alleged curative effects of violet-blue, John Ruskin on crystals, balas-rubies, Flinders Petrie, Field Museum of Natural History, and the snake story in _Gesta Romanorum_.

Rarick, who had just returned from Atlanta, where he had contracted for the annual run-of-the-mill output of two million cotton handkerchiefs of the largest three concerns in the South, sat in the musty little office of Gerkes, which was laid out at the moment with stone arrow-heads of a Navajo collection, and let the wisdom of this slow man flow against ear-drums that were still throbbing with the barter for the delivery of the two million cotton squares that were to be sold in eleven hundred and eight stores at five cents apiece.

There were lying undercurrent in Rarick’s mind at the time of this talk, an impending conference of the Mountain region and Eastern store-managers, with an eye to further standardization of window display; a contemplated monopoly of the output of a paper-napkin factory near Brattleboro, Vermont, and a trip to Springfield, with one of his buyers, a German, for the purpose of demonstrating to an American toy-manufacturer how to produce a celluloid doll, the equivalent of the German product, which could retail for ten cents. There was further at work under the surface of Rarick’s consciousness, a major plan for the formation of a policy, not yet revealed to his company, for the establishment of a Rarick store in every city of seven thousand or over, in the entire country.

Years of nights of lying awake over that immense project were about to fructify into action.

The thirteenth richest man in the world sat in that musty pocket of an office with Gerkes until museum attendants began to turn off the lights and rattle keys. Then Gerkes, who loved talk, and who, deep in the midst of a discourse on amber deposits in the Stone Age, had found a listener, clapped on his shapeless hat and walked home with Rarick across the twilit park, depositing him at his door, without so much as a glance up at the pale splendor of the façade of the Ficke house, which John Rarick had purchased by sealed bid at sensational auction seven years before. That meeting was the beginning of an impeccable friendship between these two.

A week later, Rarick invited Gerkes to lunch at a downtown business men’s club. Gerkes did not belong to the world of men to whom lunch is a social or business ritual. He either took his off a lunch-stand in the vicinity of the Museum or cut slivers with a pocket knife off the small loaf of American cheese he kept in a desk drawer along with a box of Swedish biscuit.

His imperviousness to surroundings was colossal. He had once lunched with the King of England over a matter pertaining to the Jubilee jewels, and was unable later to describe the occasion in anything except the contents of the discussion.

He ate sparingly of Rarick’s carefully ordered luncheon, giving little if any heed to it, and once more, apropos of the first-century string of agates and sards, let his discourse flow from the crammed stock-room of his mind.

Here was a man who, in casual discussion of a mediæval and practically obsolete gem, could quote from the _Divina Commedia_ the lines in which Dante uses these stones as a symbol of joy divine:

“L’altra letizia, che m’era gia nota
Preclara cosa, me si fece in vista
Qual fin balascio in che lo sol percota,”

and then, with a mental handspring and a Rabelaisian twist of the old rascal in him, which was absurdly out of keeping with his odor of chalk dust and blackboard, would lean his walrus mustache into Rarick’s ear with a foul bit of anecdote about a youth with a ruby studded into his flesh, who fancied the chryselephantine statue of Athena by Phidias.

After the boiling turmoil of a morning that held a conference on the feasibility of installing soda-water fountains in the west of the Mississippi areas, a complicated discussion with three architects on the standard fronts of Rarick stores, a long-distance-telephone conversation with the Chattanooga real-estate office on a ninety-nine-year lease for a second store, and the consummation of an order for one hundred thousand bathing-hats, to walk with Gerkes through the sarcophagus of his mind was like emerging from noisy sunlight into the green twilight of the Italian cypresses Rarick was fond of transplanting, in long aisles, from Sicilian hillsides to his own.

Here was a man who had a decayed-looking green circle on the front of his neck, from a brass collar-button, which he was never to discard, even after Rarick had sent him precious ones, but to whom, on the other hand, a blemish on the crystal flesh of an art-object was something to cause his own flesh to crawl upward.

Some five years after these meetings between the two, Gerkes fell ill of a flaying neuritis, and, tracing him to the lair of his dwelling, Rarick found him in a small room in the high-up rear of a Twenty-third Street rooming-house, books stacked from floor to ceiling, and exactly three personal objects in evidence. A wooden-backed hair-brush, a pocket comb, and a tooth-brush, sharing the dresser-top with an assortment of Aztec arrow-heads, proof-sheets of an article on scarabs for the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, a copy of Plato’s _Phædon_, William Langland’s _Piers Plowman_, and a _World Almanac_.

If Rarick had expected protest when he suggested the move from these quarters to the suite at the top of his home, nothing of the sort happened. With his imperviousness to environment or even to the sense of personal obligation, Gerkes took up residence under his friend’s roof. One had to live somewhere. Money was something you shared if you had it, or you accepted if you had not. Within a week the walls which Jenny had recently had done in yellow brocatelle, were plastered with maps, and the furniture itself littered, as the lodging-house room had been, with the story of the dawn of the human race as told by flint-head, ax, and spear, littering up the decorator’s idea of a perfect example of a suite done in the manner of the Second Empire.

Jenny’s kind of opposition to the invasion of Gerkes had been tinctured with the wisdom of a certain restraint. Here was one of the times it was not good to oppose Rarick. When his head seemed to jam down tightly between his shoulders, and his lower lip shot out, and his eyes, which so seldom met hers any more, slid up under their lids, leaving a horrid effect of just white ball, Jenny had the intuition to know that here was not the time to put up active opposition.

She had missed this scent a few times, once in particular over an apparently trivial matter that had to do with Avery and a week-end stag party of eleven school companions which she planned for him on board a motor-yacht which she was maneuvering for his father to give him on his fifteenth birthday.

The idea of Avery on his own private yacht, lording it as host over eleven youngsters to whom a yacht was that day’s toy, was roiling to Rarick. There had been a similar scene, not two months before, over a cigar-shaped roadster for Avery; but then there had been high, bitter, even more terrible words and Rarick’s foot had come down with an emphasis that Jenny somehow knew better than to further oppose, and Avery had not even been allowed to come home from school at Newberry over the occasion of his birthday.