Chapter IV: Part 4

“It’s all right, son; I understand this may be a bit premature. No hurry. I think I know what’s brought you down from college today. Want you to start back this afternoon.”

“But, Father----”

“Don’t like sloppy attendance. Don’t like sloppy anything. Wait a minute. Hold your horses. You’re going back with what you came down for. I don’t like speed-boats, as a general rule. Don’t like speed-devices in general, when they’ve no other purpose than saving time that you don’t know what to do with after it’s saved. Nerve-racking. Extravagant. Dumb. But I figure you’re getting to an age when your own judgments should count. I’m glad to give in. Is that all right with you, son?” said Rarick, and took out his check-book.

They sat there, knee to knee, in their straight chairs, their faces seeming to swim together as twilight came to blur them. Rarick, a sudden sliding blur to his son; Avery, a sliding blur to his father.

“Is it all right, son?”

“It’s all right with me, Father--if it is with you--I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I mean--it’s all right with me, Father--if it is with you----”

The pen of Rarick began to splutter along his check-book.

The consciousness had long since begun to dawn upon Jenny, in whom the impulse to climb was an acquired, rather than an inherent characteristic, that she had started off, socially speaking, on the wrong foot.

The advent of the John G. Raricks, from out of the Middle West, had not been a planned campaign, for the reason that the need for strategy had simply not occurred to her until the propitious moment had passed and the house of Rarick had settled. Subsequently her mistakes had been fast and successive. After the dust of the publicity attending the purchase by John G. Rarick of the famous Ficke mansion had been laid, Jenny, appalled by the lull, had snatched, with more nervousness than diplomacy, at old relationships, mostly families of wealth and no particular social position, whose migration from the Middle West had preceded theirs.

Thereafter, the Raricks bobbed about in uneven waters, sometimes riding up to quite a social crest, but in an erratic, unstable way that was precarious, and then, just as likely as not, sliding down again into the valleys between the waves.

No gainsaying the fact that the Raricks were invited to six houses outside the social register for every one within. Jenny’s awareness of social-register discriminations did not even begin to dawn upon her until well after the move, when that dawn came up like thunder.

The time was not slow in coming when she was to encounter the difficulty of rounding up a formal dinner composed of the people she came gradually to realize were the right ones, and when she was to scorch under such mortifications as sending out thirty-six invitations to the alleged right ones and have twenty-eight regrets come home to roost heavily upon her heart.

It was not exactly in the spirit of snubbing. The Raricks were not sufficiently in the running for that. It was just that in settings where even great wealth required proper exploitation, the Raricks had somehow not arrived right.

What brought this home with sudden acuteness to Jenny was the fact that the Isaac Slocums, whose wealth and social connections back in the St. Louis days, when they were neighbors in Westmoreland Place, were comparatively negligible, had moved East considerably after the Raricks, and were now moving securely and consistently in social circles which Jenny achieved only sporadically.

Betty Slocum’s careful social sense had accomplished that. She had planned ahead. She had surveyed, and ended by employing, at a vast sum, the services of a woman of impeccable social position, whose chief financial resources flowed in bountifully in return for achieving a wedge for the socially ambitious. One of Jenny’s sources of undying regret was the fact that at the time such services would have been invaluable to her, she had never even heard of the Slocum method of crashing the social gate.

There was no going back. The best that could be hoped for was less uneven sledding.

The mistake had rebounded most cruelly on Jennifer. Passionately Jenny had wasted heartburn on the futility of wishing that Jennifer and Avery had been born to her in reverse order. An eligible son, somehow, millions in his offing, would have accelerated social matters. As it was, Jennifer, always popular, whirled nevertheless in three worlds. A Bohemian one which her set invaded in “slumming-parties”; an outer-fringe one which represented wealth and perhaps a bit too much gayety; and, far too occasionally, the one within the walls which the Slocums had scaled by careful maneuver and which Jenny had mistakenly planned to hurdle by a running high-jump.

It was not, Jenny felt sure, that Rarick money could not have accomplished anything that Rarick money set out to do; it was that Rarick money had not taken its psychological moment.

These realizations began to marshal themselves into Jennifer’s younger and more nimble mind the first year that she was out of Miss Pratt’s School for Girls. To begin with, Miss Pratt’s School had been a mistake. The daughters of millionaires attended all right, but not the daughters of the socially-right millionaires. Jennifer kept a stiff and even an impudent upper lip about it all, but in the seclusion of talks with her mother those lips of hers could drag at the corners.

“Where do they get off, leaving us out! I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel to go to the Monkton-Beck’s cotillion. I thought cotillions went out with bustles, anyhow. But what do you bet they don’t forget father’s name on their Joint-Disease Hospital subscription list?”

“Let them get it!”

“Don’t be silly, darling. You know perfectly well Leila Monkton has as good as got you down for five thousand.”

Jenny did. “Well, just the same,” went on Jenny, whose eyes were heavy from a sleepless night over this same case of omission, “what can you expect? Your father never accepts an invitation of any sort. People don’t know quite how to approach us, the women of the family always either asking permission to bring another man, or attending alone.”

“Nonsense, Mother! Look at the Slocums. Does their old man ever show himself? Look at the Turpitzes. The face of the husband and father of that family has almost become extinct. Fewer and funnier husbands is the social cry of the hour. Bring your own gigolo. Don’t kid yourself along, darling, that’s not the reason we’re zero.”

In the inelegant parlance of her daughter, that was precisely what Jenny was doing, casting about within her troubled spirit for some sort of satisfactory explanation of a position that was hourly becoming more enigmatical to her.

“There’s nothing mysterious about it, Mother, we’ve treated the exact science of social climbing inexactly, that’s all.”

“But just the same, Jennifer, assuming that we are horrible people, with intellectual harelips and no ‘g’s,’ this is a country where money is supposed to buy everything.”

“And so it does, if you know how to go about spending it. Money will buy anything from a plush horse to an Aubusson tapestry. You’re out of luck if you go after the plush horse when Aubusson tapestries are the swanky buy. We should have employed a social, interior-decorator to keep us from making mistakes such as cultivating plush horses, like the Ben Wimans or the Maxfield Doons. Not that I would give one blondined Wiman hair in order to crash into the Monkton cotillion. But just the same, you’ve got to know your onions.”

“Do you know, I sometimes think,” said Jenny, contemplatively, and with the crinkled look of continuing to break her head for more satisfactory explanation, “that there’s such a thing as being too nice? There is nothing more ghastly than the hung-on smile of trying to be too amiable.”

“Perhaps, socially speaking, darling, we haven’t got ‘It.’”

“Nonsense!” said her mother, regarding her with tilted lids of admiration. “You have every kind of ‘It.’”

“Oh, I get by in a crowd. That is, if I can manage to care enough. I’m so damned half-baked! Even the desire in me to be something besides the thing I am is half-baked, or I’d go be it. I’ve got a brain, Mother.”

“Use it, Jennifer,” said her mother, regarding her through lids that were untilted now. “On Berry Rhodes.”

“You’re being disgusting, darling,” said Jennifer, and rose to her height, stretching as a cat stretches, one arm climbing over the other.

“Don’t be an idiot, Jennifer, you’re too intelligent.”

“In other words, the beautiful and reluctant daughter of wealth must jerk her family into social security by marrying the scion of a great family. What is a scion, anyway?”

“Jennifer, you’re being coy. It’s horrible.”

“Honestly, Mother, you’re the one who’s being idiotic,” cried Jennifer, and began to flush in waves.

“Berry is a person on his own, you’ve said so yourself. Why not come out and own you like him?”

“Why Mother, you pain and surprise me!”

“You’re not clever in the rôle of _ingénue_, darling. A little awful, in fact.”

“Well, all right, if you insist. He’s a bad boy, but I like him. God knows why, but I do.”

“You like him because you have the good sense to believe in my adage that it is as easy to fall in love with the right one as with the wrong.”

“That adage gives me shivers down my spine. But then, so does Berry.”

“Leslie Edgerton hasn’t asked you to her dance tonight because she loves you.”

“Mother, you continue to pain and surprise me.”

“Berry got you asked there. She must have thought it the better part of wisdom not to refuse.”

“It’s all off there!”

“Are you sure, Jennifer?”

“That’s the devilish part. I’m not.”

“Jennifer, there’s one thing I must say for your father. He never played for small stakes in his life.”

“There was all that talk that Leslie’s trip to Europe was a trip to Brooklyn to have a baby--Berry’s.”

“You know that if that were true, it would have been marry-the-girl at the point of the merciless Edgerton tongue!”

“Berry’s a queer, evasive devil of a darling-on-wheels. I don’t know where I get off with him.”

“Find out.”

“Of course he got me asked out to the Edgertons’ tonight, but I don’t give a damn. I’m going! With him. I like him, Mother. Hang it! I like him,” said Jennifer; and, and to add to the horror of the sound of her own voice giggling in a key beyond her control, the laugh petered out suddenly and became a thin cry. “He’s a bad boy, but, hang it! I like him.”

“You know perfectly well that he is better than the average would be in his position. He has everything, and besides, a clever girl can settle him down. Jennifer, if you would!”

“You mean if I could.”

“You can.”

“I will.”

The great-grandfather of Leslie Edgerton had once been governor of a Confederate state. It had cost the grandfather of Leslie Edgerton one million and a half dollars to run on a foredoomed ticket for President of the United States.

The father of Leslie Edgerton had married a Miss Henrietta Crosby, of Crosby, Connecticut, and had retrieved the million and many more by subsequently inheriting, by proxy of this wife, the Crosby watch-factories.

The paths of the Crosbys and the Raricks crossed occasionally, chiefly at Bailey’s Beach, public charity functions, bridges, bazaars, teas, and occasionally in a purely social way.

Jenny had ventured to include the Crosbys in what had been the largest dinner dance of the season, with which she had magnificently set the winter ball rolling the night after the opening of the opera.

The Crosbys had “regretted.”

Jennifer had cried, with her usual irrelevant questionnaire, which she hurled, while smarting, at such situations, “Where do they get off? The Edgertons don’t set my hair on fire.”

Be that as it may, when the Edgertons regretted, one of the high-water-mark hopes for their dinner had fainted within Jennifer and her mother.

Leslie had sat opposite Jennifer at a Hunt Club subscription-luncheon two days later, and made no reference either to the occasion of the dinner dance itself, which had caused talk because of its elaborateness, or to her regrets.

That had somehow rankled in Jennifer more than the original refusal. It was as if, with a preciosity that was chiseled thinly into her face and lay along the delicate arch of her brows, Leslie had set about wounding a wound.

A Rarick had never set foot on Parmley, where the Edgertons kept open house all winter on their enormous estates skirting Tarrytown.

Jennifer was about to set foot there now. A small, bizarre-looking foot, in a white-fur sandal that was mounted on a four-inch ivory heel.

* * * * *

Parmley ran back into the Pocantico Hills. The house itself rose off a cleared eminence in the heart of four hundred heavily wooded acres. A terrace, tiled in bright blue, shone around it like a lake. Marble stairs, flanked with balustrades and lions, led to the blue-tiled terrace from lower ones of green turf. The building itself was a long low one, of enormous width, no particular depth, and a whiteness to it as if a Mediterranean sun were perpetually beating down. Some wag had tagged it “Carnegie Library” because of this low width and the pairs of Carrara lions that crouched beside the four flights of marble staircases.

The Edgertons had decided to have a sense of humor about this sixty-eight-room white elephant, which five years previous had been rushed to completion in time for Leslie’s birthday. Henrietta Edgerton promptly christened it her “white _bête noire_” and had the coping of the superb swimming-pool, which was out of natural rock, elaborately inlaid in black and white symbolic beasts of two heads and four tails.

The white crash of this house into the finest stretch of forest land within its radius from New York was a sore point with Tom Edgerton. It had cost easily over a million and a half, and there it stood, an affront to his taste, his intelligence, and his dignity. It was the sort of home a war millionaire might have erected out of an overnight fortune.

Truth of the matter was, and bitterly he knew it, Henrietta had been deep in an affair with the architect who designed it.

Tom’s sop to his sense of the ironic was to be unfaithful to his wife, on every possible occasion, in this house which had turned into a monstrosity because she had insisted upon giving _carte blanche_ to her lover, the nincompoop young architect on dancing legs, who had created it.

“We’re a pretty lot,” Leslie Edgerton had once said to her father, who, when in his cups, could laugh uproariously at a remark he would slap her clear, heart-shaped face for when sober. “We’re a pretty lot, Dad. The only thing virgin around here is the soil. If!”

Jennifer and Berry tilted into the three-mile driveway of that virgin soil on two wheels at a sixty-mile clip. They had driven out in Berry’s underslung, boat-shaped roadster. Jennifer at first had remonstrated, holding out against cramming herself, in her slim sheaf of baby-ermine gown, into a crouched position in the natty sports-car.

“You’re a dog, Berry, to even ask it. I’m not dressed for a football game.”

“Come along. Be as boyish as your bob. I’ll wrap you in a raccoon coat, and that little white mitten you’re wearing for a dress won’t turn a hair,” he said, and brushed aside a butler who had been holding some more white ermine for her to slide arms into, during the twelve minutes of this controversy.

She liked his riding her down this way. Old cave-man stuff, she told herself. Putrid-old. But she liked it. Wasn’t often a fellow with millions, only grandson of a personage like old Rodney Rhodes, and more millions to come on top of it, came in a package like Berry. Personality. Brains. Brawn. At least if Leslie had to have a nervous breakdown, it had been a little worth-while to have it over Berry. Jennifer had heard she had a nervous twitch to her face nowadays, that was part of that nervous breakdown.

“Nervous?” he said, letting out a rip of speed, as they cleared the city line.

“Not to the point of breakdown,” she said, and tilted a look at him from the low crouch into which the car forced her.

“You girls give me a pain in the neck,” he said. “Innuendo. All lies.”

“I’m sorry, Berry,” she said, and laid a hand against his driving arm. “And I’m glad it’s all lies.”

“That’s right,” he said, “be yourself,” and smiled at her with white teeth set in a face that had been polished tan by the sun.

“What self is that?”

“The self I like. You’re a darling, Jennifer. I strongly suspect you of having brains, too, and you’re brainy enough to keep them carefully concealed under that Joan of Arc bob.”

“Give me a light, Berry.”

He flecked on his lighter and held it to her while the car sped swift and sure under his lone-hand grip.

“Oh!”

“There, you had it!”

“No, you burnt my lip. Let’s stop anyway, Berry. I can’t smoke in this open boat. Draw in here.”

“You little designing designer,” he laughed, and drew up. “It’s darling of you, though, to want our ride to last.”

“It’s darling of you, Berry, to have got me asked out to the Edgertons’ tonight. I’m on.”

“Nonsense!”

“I don’t give a damn for them or their parties, except for you----”

“By God! I think you lisp! Let me thee your tongue.”

“There!” She darted it at him. Quick. Pink.

The sultry haze of late October twilight, sharp with the smell of burning leaves, twined about them.

“Let’s see it again.”

His quick close kiss went against the second dart of pink.

“You sweet Sweet,” he said, out of its long endurance.

She pushed him back, her face suddenly smeared with the pallor of excitement.

“Berry, let’s you and me be low-down honest.”

“I choose the first. You be honest.”

“If you had half an idea of how honest I’m going to be, you’d climb out and hitch-hike your way back to town.”

“Fortify me for that exigency--this way,” he said, and kissed her again, his strong lips flaring so that involuntarily she drew the back of her hand across the feeling of the wetness of his teeth against her face.

“Berry, you and I weren’t born yesterday.”

He made to kiss her again.

“Don’t do that.”

“You egged me on.”

“I know, but----”

“You are so blamed honest, Jennifer, it makes a fellow want----”

“But now I’m going to be awful serious.”

“Awful is right, as applied to seriousness in all its forms.”

“Awful serious, Berry.”

“It can’t be done, Jen. I’m immune.”

“Berry, marry me.”

He tightened as if a lock had sprung.

“Certainly. But I haven’t my music with me.”

“Berry, get this. I’m serious. Marry me. Don’t answer. Just listen. You’re no angel, Berry. God knows I’m not. I like you. A lot. I want you to respect that. I’m pretty crazy about you. You’re a bad boy, Berry, but neither of us is sprouting wings. I think it’s a swell plan and I’m sober. I’ll marry you, not to reform you, but to reform with you.”

“The only way to get me to marry the girl, Jennifer, is at the point of the well-known gun.”

“Bing!” she said, and cocked a finger.

He grasped it and locked it between his teeth.

“I don’t know whether you’re spoofing me or not, but let’s not be serious tonight, Jennifer. Isn’t it enough--this night--us--this way----”

She let her head swing back against the crook of his arm.

“Damn you, darling,” she said, “you’re standing up the girl.”

“Jennifer, let me know you tonight--afterwards--my rooms?”

“You go plumb to hell, Berry,” she said, pushing him from her with high laughter. “Step on her, we’ll be late! And if you don’t behave, the girl will leap from the car and her mangled remains will be found on the roadside by an early-morning farmer carting his carrots to market. Daughter of Dime Millionaire leaps from speeding car of son of rubber-heel magnate!”

“Jen! Nee! Fer!”

“Step on her, I said.”

It was to her high, fast, and incessant laughter that they tilted into Parmley on two wheels at the sixty-mile clip.

At the last moment, and to the rushing of innumerable servants, the Edgertons had turned their dinner dance out-of-doors. The suddenly limpid October, the imminence of moon, the belated perfume of late white honeysuckle, had pressed their way into the ballroom, which was spread with fifty small tables and elaborately laid out across one end with a complete bar, brass rail, polished counter, battalion of bottles and glasses, and the faithful verisimilitude of a sprinkling of sawdust.

The milky light of one of those pale nights that never becomes quite dark poured down on to the blue-tile terrace. Tables had been dragged out there. A hurried platform for musicians was being set up between one pair of the lions, submerging one flight of terrace-stairs. Lanterns were run up in the groves and along the edges of the swimming-pool.

A formal party had suddenly gone violently informal. Tom Edgerton, already convivial, had conceived the idea, along with the change of party-policy, of dragging out a vast iron pot on a crane, to boil corn-on-the-cob in the open. The bar was being set up in a pergola. When the first guests arrived, Leslie Edgerton, in a bouffant white gown with wired panniers and a tumbler in one hand, was still in the act of trying to convey to a gardener her idea of how a small red bulb should dangle from the pointed left ear of a marble faun.

It was true that every few moments her rather pretty heart-shaped face twitched as if her nervousness were a prankish jack-in-the-box. The small red electric bulb refused to dangle from the left ear of the marble faun. She grasped it from the servant, and, leaping to a stone bench, began to adjust it herself.

She was in that position when Jennifer and Berry and a smattering of early guests appeared on the wide marble staircase. At sight of them, she swung herself by the neck of the faun, legs out in a rigid horizontal, and began kissing him against his chilly lips.

It started out as that kind of party.

The way, Jennifer had long since decided, to feel at ease at what she called these closed-corporation functions, was to pretend to be as intimately a part of them as everyone else was, or pretended to be.

A sense of not belonging; of not knowing these people on the easy informal basis they knew one another, assailed her, and seemed to lock her tonsils and stiffen her heart on those occasions when she penetrated into the social fastness of the gayer, if less conservative, elements of these safely intrenched families. Their intimate talk that took so much for granted. High bandying of Christian names where she was addressed as Miss Rarick. References to past functions to which she had not been bidden, and to future ones to which she would not be bidden.

Not that she was not very much part of these scenes. The Edgertons moved in swift, newspaper-headline sets. But even here, she was consciously Miss Rarick. The way to keep a stiff upper lip when you were ill at ease and inwardly frightened was to see to it that you were conspicuously Miss Rarick. You listened, when the two on either side of you at dinner leaned across you to indulge in familiar discussion of an important social function to which you had mysteriously and damnably not been bidden, with a smile as bright as platinum drawn across your face. You let them make up a party around you to go off cruising in warm waters on the yacht of the father of a boy who had just kissed the back of your neck, and laughed at some sally about the Delaware Gap and the Delaware Yawn, as if you were not stinging at the omission.

The lively Miss Rarick was loud in her laughter. That was part of the stiff upper lip. She was daring in her dress, but impeccably so, never erring beyond the bonds of chic. A good fellow up to a point, and that point, as she was fond of putting it, an exclamation point.

When Jennifer walked down the wide staircase of the Edgertons’ famed blue terrace, with Berry at her right and a one-armed chap named Roger Madison, descendant of a President, at her left, her heart was in her mouth; insolence in her smile; and a burning humiliation before Berry, beating about in her.

Perhaps he had never realized she was not spoofing. He had, though! He had. _He had._ He had jumped like a sprung trap when she had come out with it. Perhaps he had thought her a little spifflicated. God, make him think I was tight! No, no, no, he wouldn’t. They had not even stopped for cocktails before they drove off. There came that hateful Irene Annescy! How did one address her? Hello, Irene? Or just Miss Annescy?

Miss Annescy solved it. “Hello, Berry! Haven’t seen you since three A.M. Good party at the Ruhls’, wasn’t it? Hello, Roger! Say, you’re driving with us over to Edgecombe from here for a sunrise cocktail. Howdo, Miss Rarick!”

Damn them! Damn life! “Berry darling, that’s my ankle you’re climbing.”

With the exception of a center-table which seated twelve, the flocks of surrounding smaller ones were for six. Berry and Jennifer were at one which adjoined the larger one, presided over by Leslie.

Berry’s absence from that center-table was one of those elaborately casual maneuvers which usually fail of their purpose and become merely elaborate maneuvers.

“Berry’s been banished,” said a Miss Steen der Venter, who was narrow and caustic and something of a town legend because she continued to refuse to sell or build on fifty fabulously valuable feet of vacant lot on Fifth Avenue, but maintained it as a playground for her three black poodles. “I scent a diplomatic move!”

“I’m making him eat at second table, Van Steen; his manners are too atrocious for first,” cried Leslie, whom Berry had once accused of overhearing, no matter how large the crowd, any reference to him.

Almost immediately the occasion began to progress. The amusing feature of the bar kept a steady stream of young men skating across blue tiles, imperiling waiters, and returning with assorted tumblers of assorted drinks, which they balanced precariously, to the squeals of women in _décolletée_ who feared for their shoulders. A Miss Flavverdale, impoverished, but one of the right Flavverdales, the one, by the way, who had managed things for the St. Louis Slocums, began by insisting upon carting Berry off before the fowl course, with a napkin filled with dinner rolls to be crumpled into the goldfish-pond.

“I want to stay with my field-mouse,” bawled Berry, and began to stroke Jennifer’s ermine and pull at the fringe of soft black tails which bordered it.

“Don’t be an idiot, Berry,” said the efficient Miss Flavverdale; “I’ll buy you a five-and-ten-cent one.”

“Was that a dirty dig?” said Jennifer to a beautiful boy beside her, whom she did not know, but who was in the first throes of getting drunk on champagne, which he kept sipping, while he refused all food.

“A dirty dig,” he repeated, rolling his extraordinarily blue and luminous eyes. “A dirty dig.” Apparently the octave of his conversation, at least at this stage, consisted in repeating the last three words of what was said to him.

“The Beautiful next to you, Miss Rarick,” sang out Leslie Edgerton, on a sudden surge of geniality, when she saw Berry hauled protesting along the Mediterranean of blue tiles, “is Jules Wilke-Barre. He’s going to cut a tooth for us later in the evening!”

A Wilke-Barre! A thrill shot through Jennifer. Despise herself for the snobbery of it as she would, it was impossible not to bristle with awareness among names that were whole planetary systems in the social firmament. This naughty-eyed, beautiful-eyed boy, whose knee had to be shoved away again and again as it approached hers, a Wilke-Barre! Here, gathered at these fifty tables, were the youngsters of the mighty ones of the land. Madison. Rhodes. Flavverdale. Wilke-Barre.

She leaned toward Wilke-Barre.

“I thought you were Bobby Shaftoe, who went to sea with silver buckles on his knee.”

The youth she thought was Bobby Shaftoe, who went to sea with silver buckles on his knee, was asleep, his chin resting squarely and precariously in the shallow crystal basin of his empty champagne-glass.

Before the crash came that was to gash the Rossetti-looking Wilke-Barre chin with splintered glass, Berry was back, in great and rising spirits.

“Glory! what a night!”

Its glamor was out over Jennifer. Its pollen fell over the scene and in a sheen across her flesh.

“It was on such a night as this----”

“--that I made the damnedest mistake of my life,” said Berry, and jerked the great athletic hulk of his body back to his place at the table.

“Leslie’s been looking for you, Berry,” said Irene Annescy.

“Finders keepers,” said Berry under his breath to Jennifer.

She flashed her face, with the indescribable pallor of moon over it, upon him.

“Mean that?”

“If I ever meant anything, I mean it. Find me, Jennifer.”

“You won’t let me.”

“Try me.”

“Don’t be darling to me, Berry, unless----”

Beneath the table his heavy palm clamped down on her knee.

“How can I help it, when you are darling to me.”

“How do you mean that?”

“I’ll tell you later----”

“I’ll not drive back with you alone unless----”

“Unless what?”

“Unless I damn please,” she said, and swung her smooth bare shoulder from him and turned to talk to Wilke-Barre, who was having his chin nursed by a princess of Greece.

Tom Edgerton began to beat a tom-tom in an effort to drum up trade for his boiling pot of corn on cob. He was voted ridiculous, because, while the party had gone informal, so to speak, the food had remained strictly _de rigueur_. It was difficult, after mushrooms under glass and duck soaked in sherry, to warm up to the impulse to nibble the mealy pearls off the cobs which Edgerton forked up out of the fine hullabaloo of boiling pot.

Most of those who ventured never quite reached the boiling pot. The gardens lay embalmed in a night through which the moonlight poured like spring showers. Marble curve of benches gleamed in among hedges. Islands of shadow crawled back into the groves. The waterfall that fed the natural swimming-pool made silver-tipped commotion. The dinner broke into dancing almost before the tables could be cleared from the tiles. It was as dreamy as absinthe to tango out there under the stars.

Six Hawaiian boys in shellacked hair sang to Argentine music. A jazz-band alternated. A Spanish slip of a girl, with hips which she managed like a spaniel shaking off water, danced solo with Ramon Lopez. Her bold, sinuous body-beauty went through you in points of excitement. The give of the slim jacket of her ribs as she doubled with a boneless ductility back over his elbow. Slitted eyes of Ramon, braced for her whirling body to spin into the close insinuating haven of his arms. Slow shuffling feet, too sensuous to leave the ground. Faces, as through a curtain of moonlight, dimly; the Spanish girl’s fore-shortened upper lip hiked back to reveal small wet teeth; Ramon’s face, sliding down like a warm brown breathing lid--over hers....

“God, Berry, they’re wonderful,” said Jennifer.

His body, through it all, as they stood in the thick fringe of onlookers, had been crushing against hers. It had been her dance with Berry, vicariously.

The pair broke into a tarantella then, as if to gloss over the thickening moist-lipped faces that had begun to lean out of the human wall around them.

“Come on, Jennifer, let’s get out of here. I need a drink. I need eleven drinks.” They backed off without much disturbance, moving slidingly and unnoticed along the tiles; moving hand in hand down the broad reflecting steps; moving slidingly toward the grove above the grotto of the swimming-pool.

Patches of moonlight covered the floor of the grove like lily-pads. Water, skedaddling down rocks to feed the pool, was the only sound....

* * * * *

“Life ought to be sweeter to us than it is, Berry. What’s rotten with us?”

He stared, with his head in her lap, at a patch of pale sky that reminded him of his star-sapphire studs.

“What say?”

“You’re not listening.”

“I can feel your voice. It makes darling little vibrations.”

“I begged you not to get tight, Berry.”

His eyes fluttered heavily and closed as he began fumbling out on to the moss for the frosted quart bottle and two glasses with which he had fortified himself from the buffet table that was now being spread down beside the swimming-pool.

“You can’t get tight on champagne, my field mouse. You get divine.”

Her fingers were in his hair. Her lips gave off a tiny fume.

“You’ve stood me up frightfully, Berry. What if I were to go home and blow out that portion of my anatomy called brain, with a mother-of-pearl pistol?”

“I’d embalm you in a block of ice and keep you in a casket of rose quartz.”

“You are as slippery as a glass eel.”

“You don’t know the half of it, my darling, or the half of the half of it,” he cried, and rolled over and dug his face into the soft fur moss of her gown. “God! I’m ten kinds of a fool!”

“Sweet ten kinds.”

“Rotten ten kinds.”

“Tell me one of the kinds.”

“Fee, fie, fo, fum. The kind that daren’t like little white field mice.”

“That daren’t?” she said, and lifted her head as if to listen. “Why?”

“Let me alone,” he cried into her lap, “with your whys and your whys and your whys. Why are all you girls such why-hounds?”

“Sh-h-h! Berry’s tight,” she said, smoothing his hair.

“Just go on doing that,” he said, still into the thick whiteness of her lap. “Just go on doing that--and talk----”

“Why should I do all the talking and you all the evading?”

“Is this evading?” he said, and reached up to stroke her cheek.

“Berry, Berry, what is it we want...?”

“I know what I want----”

“I feel like I belonged in one of those psychological novels they’re writing nowadays.”

“The darling has read a book and everything.”

“Where nothing happens except in the tortured brains of some tortured author’s brain-children. The cross-eyed school of literature that looks inward, and does nothing about it but look and look. Life isn’t that way. Life moves. Life is motion. Time doesn’t pass. We pass. I may be in a mess, but I don’t intend to sit in it and stew.”

“Stew in my arms, darling.”

“I hate you when you’re tight. Am I tight, Berry?”

“Not tight. Divine.”

“Let’s be good, Berry, and sober, and live so that, after it’s all over, it will have mattered a damn whether we have lived or not.”

“You’re good, Jennifer. You’re a good gal. That’s what ails you.”

“You’re no good, Berry. That’s what ails you.”

“You’re what ails me.”

“Then, for God’s sake, Berry, play fair with me! Oh! Get up, Berry! Look! They’re throwing light on the pool. It may slip up here. How long have we been away? What will Leslie say?”

A cone of light swung through the grove. He dragged her swiftly back.

“Don’t go, Pussy.”

“Berry, we must.”

“Don’t go.”

“Look, the crowd is coming down to bathe. There’s Elsie Risdon in a bathing-suit. She never travels without it. And Ramon. He looks as if he were painted in gold leaf. It’s beautiful. It’s terrible. It’s like one of those Stuck pictures--horrible loveliness. Look at the Wilke-Barre infant there in that patch of moonlight. He’s going to dive. It may sober him. Where on earth did Tom Edgerton get those striped trunks? Bacchus gone wrong. Vine leaves in his hair, or is it confetti? This is one of those swimming parties of the idle and debauched rich that they read about out in Dubuque and turn Bolsheviki or try to imitate. I’ve never seen one happen so true to form. Look, there comes----This is awful!”

They crept to the edge of their ledge, which looked down from an eminence on to the half-natural, half-contrived grotto. Slim silhouettes, all fays in the moonlight, sat on the coping, along which crawled Henrietta Edgerton’s little _bêtes noires_, and dangled bare legs into the moon-reflecting pool. A slope of hillside marched down to the pool, inclosing it like a crater. Figures were strewn over the hillside, helping one another down declivities, in monkey-chains of twos and threes. The Spanish dancer, clad in a mere dash of suit, the exact henna of her flesh, leaped down from crag to crag like a bit of lightning, zigzagging off the edges of rock. The Falstaffian figure of the over-stout young Philip Londo swaggered down in an improvised bathing-suit, a sweater tied by the sleeves about his great middle. The Spanish dancer leap-frogged over him, took the tip of the diving-board, and sliced downward like a quick thin blade. Voices in the moonlight had the musical flow to them of water. Over the ledge they peered, secure, arm in arm, their bodies flat to the soft moss, seeing, unseen. It was a scene of a Paul Veronese canvas, set to music by Stravinsky, and directed by the buxom figure of Tom Edgerton, who went stamping among his guests in his striped trunks, dragging shrinking and reluctant maidens, with dry, beautifully powdered legs, to the water’s edge, immersing them, leaping back up the hillsides for more of his strange and spectacular prey.

“Berry, there’s Leslie! In the black suit.”

She felt his head move; but even as she spoke she pressed it down again into her lap.

“She must be looking for us! Why the dickens did we do this, Berry? It’s this loony moonlight. We’ve been gone over an hour. Leslie shouldn’t let herself get this tipsy. Thank goodness, she’s going to dive. It will sober her. Berry, hadn’t we better slide around to the house and get into bathing-suits and ooze quietly into the crowd? Oh, Berry, I hate to!”

He raised his tousled and troubled-looking head.

“Guess we’d better,” he said, with a sudden kind of soberness.

It made her wild that what she had just said should have this power over him.

“Berry,” she cried, and caught his face in the cup of her hands and drew it to hers closely; “Berry darling--tell me the low-down--let me hear you deny, yourself, the horrid rumor that you and Leslie--oh--oh--no----”

Due to a loud series of shouts through cupped hands which Tom Edgerton was directing at an electrician, the entire scene below suddenly slipped into the incredible beauty of a moon-silvered darkness, the cone of search-light shooting upward like a great tusk of ivory, drenching the hilltop forest in glare, drenching the figures of Jennifer and Berry, lying there so closely face to face on their bed of moss.

To the bathers beneath, it was as if the heavens had opened in the fashion that was supposed to reveal God seated on a throne of mother-of-pearl. Only, there sat Berry and Jennifer instead, bathed in incalculable amperes of luminosity.

The figure on the tip edge of the diving-board was a figure transfigured.

“Leslie,” cried Henrietta Edgerton to her daughter--the only voice to find itself in that blinding shift of scene “Leslie, don’t!”

The spring-board began to jiggle. It made a creaking noise. Then came the voice of Leslie, poised on the tip of the spring-board, her arms shooting out as her silhouette became a cross.

“There you are!” screamed Leslie, and danced up and down on the spring-board. “There you are!”

“Leslie!” shouted Henrietta Edgerton.

“There you are!” called Leslie up to the glare on the hilltop. “Pretty ones! I’ll tell the world! I’ll tell the world!”

“Leslie!”

“World, that’s my husband up there! We were married yesterday. Never mind why. Keep this marriage a secret for him a few weeks, so he can settle his affairs? The devil I will! What affairs? His five-and-ten-cent affairs. The devil I will!” screamed Leslie, and dived.

* * * * *

At four o’clock of that translucent October morning, with a moon still retreating in a high sky, the only daughter of the thirteenth richest man in the world sat crouched in a huddle no larger than a spaniel, outside the door of Doctor Gerkes.

She did not quite clearly know why she was there, except that inchoately, fragmentarily, her fuddled brain had telegraphed to her fuddled feet the road to Gerkes. She did not know why. Truth of the matter was, she was generally not quite clear, except for her sense of the lump of shame. She was the lump of shame. The world was a wave, tossing a lump of shame.

There was a slit of light beneath Gerkes’s door. Behind that door, Jennifer’s fuddled sense told her, Gerkes would be sitting in a monotonous gray herring-bone suit, or, worse, the stiff gray-flannel dressing-gown she had seen hanging on the door of his bathroom the day of her exploratory trip. A small gray man, about as exciting as chalk dust. Behind that closed door he was sitting in a limitless world of ideas. The stones of Venice and the stones of Alexandria and the stones of Carthage were not mere stones to him. Like the flint and arrow-heads on his tables, they looked up at him with the wide revealing eyes of immemorial man. Heaps and heaps of these strange lusterless stones covered the fine table-tops of that room. Wisdoms were behind that closed door--and quiet----

It was then that Jennifer scratched faintly at the panel, like a little dog, not so much because she particularly wanted admission into the room, but because she wanted some of the kind solitude she seemed to sense there.

After a while, on limbs that were too wavy to carry her, the young Miss Rarick, in the white-ermine frock and her coat dragging, began a tortuous and shocking journey down the hallway, on all-fours, knee after knee, the palms of her hands padding softly along the carpet.

Her maid, dozing as she waited, heard the soft noises, ran down the hallway, and horrified, lifted and carried her bodily to bed.

It was about then that consciousness that there had been scratching noises came belatedly to Doctor Gerkes, who had been bending to scrutinize a dated altar-stone, 575, of Maya civilization, said to have been unearthed from the city of Matzap Ceel.

Opening his door to peer out into the now empty hallway, a faint smell that reminded him of the dried-rose-leaf scent in a third-century mummy-chamber he had once helped to excavate near Luxor, came and caused him pleasantly to sniff.

It pleased Rarick to be a patron of the arts. He liked to think that opera committees came to him to make good their deficits. Little-theater groups were appealing to him more and more frequently. Child musical prodigies of piano and violin virtuosity were constantly being brought before him.

It pleased him to sit, a Mæcenas, in his library and make chapels of his fingers and pass judgments in which he was solely assisted by Hellman, who had graduated from a South St. Louis music-school, and Alfredo Ludovici, the violin member of a chamber-music quartette which Rarick had supported for years.

Children, for the most part, were brought by mothers whose agony of nervousness was almost invariably cruelly transmitted to their prodigy offspring. Again, they were sent by music-school teachers, personal friends and some without even benefit of introduction, feverishly seeking the wedge of an audition.

Hellman arranged these auditions. He was high-handed about it, thinking nothing of keeping a mother and an alleged violinistic prodigy waiting for weeks at their hotel for the Rarick summons. It was Hellman who arranged the interviews with little-theater committees, art-foundation groups, endowment-seeking organizations, and scholarship-fund seekers, weeding out at his discretion, but lenient in his judgments, since it seemed perpetually pleasing to Rarick to sit in tribunal.

With the exception of the Firenzi Quartette, which, thanks to Rarick’s generous maintenance, had become world-renowned for the perfection of its _ensemble_, the success of most of Rarick’s musical _protégés_ was still to be achieved. To be sure, there was a thirteen-year-old Milwaukee lad, named Isa Friedberg, studying at Fontainebleau, and for whom great things were predicted; and little Leontine Bachrach of Brooklyn, thirteen and a half, who had played a piano-recital at Town Hall with outstanding success, was making spectacular headway with his teachers in Munich.

But not infrequently, Rarick’s fervor to serve the arts outclassed his critical judgments. The little Norwegian lad from Flagler, North Dakota, whom, against the better judgment of both Hellman and Ludovici, he had chosen to endow with his patronage in preference to the small Russian boy from the Boston ghetto, was now playing viola in a theater orchestra, while the small Russian boy from the Boston ghetto was winning honors as a soloist of the first rank. There was also the case of a pretty and enormously promising young soprano whom he had lifted from a stenographer’s desk in a broker’s office to the conservatory of Milan, and who had returned to America, homesick, after the second Italian month, to marry a runner in the brokerage office where she had formerly been employed.

As Hellman and Ludovici used to remark with a wink between them, the old gentleman took these debit results gamely, apparently more than compensated for failures by the majesty of his rôle of patron of the fine arts and by the first-water success of the Firenzi Quartette.

Of this last there was no question. Taking over, after one hearing, the four friendless Italian youths who had finally succeeded in winning audience, Rarick had supported them, exploited them, and launched them securely into success. It was his bounty that continued to supply them generous budget for travel, study, and leisure, long after their financial need of him had passed.

When not abroad or on American tour, they occupied a pleasant old house in West Ninth Street, fitted with a vast music-chamber across the top, and which, except for their tenancy, Rarick would long since have profitably converted into a skyscraper apartment-building.

Evening after evening, during these town periods, they played chamber music to Rarick alone, occasionally Gerkes present, semi-occasionally one or both of the Jennys appearing on the scene.

Frequently, the Quartette, which had long outgrown private-home engagements, played at one of Jenny’s functions when she decided to have a “bit of music.” But after the Firenzi Quartette became closely associated with the name of Rarick, she abandoned that habit, because it smacked of home-made economy, buying instead the professional services of some stellar vocal or violinistic attraction whose fees were notoriously high.

Besides, there came to be something about the very faces of the members of the Quartette--as they sat on the small platform which was rolled in for them to the organ end of the library--which was repellent to her, because, by association, they suggested one of Rarick’s quasi-Napoleonic attitudes. He liked to crouch into an enormous tapestry chair, done after the unicorn at Cluny, at the far end of the room from their platform, head thrust forward and downward on his chest, a little forelock, which Jenny sometimes described to herself as his Della Fox Napoleon, down over his brow, and his curiously intent gaze seeming to hook into the music as it flowed past.

His imagination, more than his senses, appeared to come awake to the warm reality of chamber music. The tumbling figures of a Tiepolo ceiling, garland-wound, music-wound, became a grove in which lazy fancy could wander. There was a tragic and a comic mask, divided by a flaming torch, woven palely into one of the tapestries that faced him. To Bach or Strauss or Massenet, these faces could tilt into laughter or screw to tears. They became his own face in layers of moods that were heart-breaking to him for their pathos or their absurdity. Again, to him, some of these faces were sublime. They were the faces of the Rarick he might have been. Some of those Rarick faces were as beautiful as Avery. Some of those Rarick faces had it in them to create the very music to which he was listening; some, to create the drama of the tragic mask. No Five-and-Ten-Cent Rarick of the Five-and-Ten-Cent thing. No industrial magnate in a tin crown. Here, under the weaving spell of music, he became the Rarick he was, deeply, secretly, and terribly, within himself. No patron of the arts, but a creator! No piler-up of wealth. Dispenser! Four-and-twenty Raricks all in a row....

Projects came to Rarick under the weaving motion of music. New loans. New stores. New policies. It was in this room, for instance, to evening after evening of the peregrinations of the small music of Schubert and Haydn, that the mammoth idea of the Rarick Building was born.

Layer by layer, to its dramatic seventy-three-story splendor, it rose on a scaffolding wrought out of these strange spirals of inspiration that seemed to wind up through him when his imagination responded to a stimulus it comprehended not at all. Story by story, to its eminence as the tallest building in the world, this Taj Mahal of industry took form. It was to take eleven years to realize, thirty million dollars to construct, and it rose out of Schubert and Haydn and Chopin and Brahms. It rose out of the winding of the imagined faces of his children as they appeared warm and sympathetic to him among the garlands of fancy that came to life on the Tiepolo ceiling. It rose out of Rarick’s visions of himself, creating the kind of beauty that money could buy.

Mozart, Schubert, Smetana, Schumann, Beethoven. His knowledge of music was negligible, and his choice of selection often secretly amusing and chromoesque to his Quartette, but somehow it was impossible to patronize Rarick musically. In one breath, he might call out, across the long reaches of the room, for “Träumerei,” “Narcissus,” and the “Scarf Dance,” but the Beethoven C-major, op. 59, with its gymnastic and tuneless ’cello-passages in the first movement, was just as apt to be his next choice. He might not remember the name of a composition or a composer; but he could hum a thread of _motif_ for them, or demand this or that movement by describing its tempo.

“Play those wild gypsies dancing in the bonfire-light,” was his way of requesting the last movement of the Schubert G-major, op. 161. Or, “Play that flowing, running one,” for the Andante Cantabile from Tchaikowsky’s Quartette, D-major.

He was an interesting, an interested, a solitarily grand audience of one. On those rare occasions when Jenny or Jennifer found time, or found it the better part of wisdom to pause for a snatch of one of these evenings, they did so, usually perched on the arms of chairs like brilliant birds of passage, their evening cloaks trailing, their ears cocked for the summons to depart. When Gerkes dropped in, after a lecture he had either delivered or attended, it was to slide into a straight chair which he kept for himself in the loft of the organ, where he could tilt back and nap to music whose chief function, where he was concerned, was to soothe him. Usually these evenings wound up with beer and talk of the habits of immortals among musicians, chiefly between Gerkes and the members of the Quartette.

“Now, take that countryman Verdi of yours; from what they tell me, he must have been pretty much of an ordinary fellow, apart from his ability to compose,” was Gerkes’ way, for instance, of starting Gigli Fortuno, the ’cellist member of the Quartette, who was well informed on the subject of musical personalities, and whose father had personally known Verdi.

Sometimes, throughout these discourses, Gerkes remained up on his balcony, tilted back on his straight chair, while the four members of the little group worked themselves up into musical controversy that rose to the climax of shouts and heated disagreement. Occasionally, Gerkes, who dozed or relaxed, would be reminded of a pun or reference, as some name came floating dimly up to him among the floriated arches, and he would call down his comment:

“Speaking of the Fifth Symphony, Sir Henry Larrimore, the inventor of the Larrimore tuning-fork and the foremost living acoustician, told me a good one about observing an audience in Queens Hall during the first movement of the Fifth Symphony....”

Then Rarick: “Tell the gentlemen, Gerkes, the Eurasian theory of the Music of the Spheres.”

Then Gerkes: “You Quartette boys, how much do you really know about the principles of harmony?...”

Evenings far removed from the banging reality of days that were crowded with four hundred thousand sets of doll-dishes for children, or a pending order for hair-nets that had an annoying rider in the contract.