Chapter X: Part 10

“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.”