Chapter V: Part 5

A patron of the arts sat among his art-objects and listened to a discussion of the arts. And yet it was this very listening that could rankle. His Quartette, when their musical arguments rose and excluded him, was not the Quartette that made him obsequious and played to his wishes. Their manner, between themselves, was that of artist to artist. Their manner to Rarick was that of men beholden for favors that lay outside their stamina to earn. There was, in their behavior between themselves, the unconscious difference between artist to artist, and artist to financial benefactor.

They respected his riches. But Rarick, Rarick himself, well, Rarick was a rich man....

Equally aggravating to this sense of exclusion were the writers, theater groups, young aspirants in this or that form of art, who came to him for patronage and at the same time gave him that sense of isolation from their cause, except in so far as his hands held the strings to the money-bags.

They spoke to him of their projects in terms of numbers. Rentals of theaters. Price of publishing a slender book of verse. Scholarship money. Endowment money. It was among themselves that the ambitious young poets who smote their dissonant lyres of modern verse, and the young playwrights who gave birth, in travail, to their Hedda Gablers of the experimental theater, had their real beings.

They talked projects to Rarick. Lisped in numbers of box-office receipts, yearly deficit, and the ledger-book which they despised.

He was Crœsus, related only to Thyrsus, Sappho, Terpsichore, and Apollo by the strings of the money-bags.

It was in his rôle of patron that the Committee of Internationalists, Inc., which was one day to be one of the most potent forces in the young theater movement in America, came before Rarick.

They were three. A young fellow named Trigoloff, with a crooked and strangely powerful profile, who had written a two-act play in thirty-one episodes which had been produced in a cellar called the Rhomboid Theater. A Miss Virginia Adelbert, with blond hair, cropped, polished, and parted on the side, like a boy’s, in tailored clothes, soft shirt, and who carried her crush felt hat under her arm, and her package of cigarettes protruding from a tailored pocket. The third member of this group, Gratton Davies, was a young professor of dramatic composition at a city university. His comedy, “Herod’s Mask,” had been a success the season before. Here was a fellow of such abounding and amusing enthusiasm that it was inevitable he should have been elected spokesman for this occasion. He had a thatch of thick tan hair, which jumped and fell from the roots, as he sat on the edge of his chair, his opening sentence accomplishing what it set out to do as concisely as a good headline flare of advertising.

“Mr. Rarick, we have chosen you to sponsor what is without any doubt to be the most significant and far-reaching experiment in the history of the American theater. I used the word ‘chosen’ advisedly, because the man who is granted the privilege of bringing to life our plan is going to get a ride for his money to the peak of artistic-success-with-a-box-office-value.”

“Yes, young man?” said Rarick, with a bitter kind of mockery playing around his lips. This was not the fellow himself speaking. This was the young scholar, suiting his phrase, his manner, and his matter to his man. In other words, “selling his idea” to big business.

The fervor of his presentation was all right, but the manner was the rehearsed one of a traveling salesman.

Young Davies was talking down to Rarick in terms of the one aspect of the enterprise that interested him least of all, and yet which was so essential to the very life and breath of their beautiful baby of an idea. Money. Without it, that beautiful baby must perish aborning. Its soul was in the keeping of such as these three young committeemen. Its shoes, the farina to feed it, the fires to warm it, were merchant concerns. Rarick’s.

“Money, Mr. Rarick, is what we need of you.”

His resentments, he told himself were absurd. What else had he to offer? Presently these three, and the _confrères_ who spoke their language, would recede into the laboratories of their imaginations. They could talk to one another from these laboratories. Where did he, Rarick, come in? Why sit stiffly before this young barker up the Himalayas and bark back a bitter “Yes, young man,” into his enthusiasms.

These three before him were in the heyday of their walking-trip through the Pyrenees. Their walking-trip was coming off, too. After all, it was something to sit there, holding their creative destinies in the same hand that held the money-bags.

“Don’t think, Mr. Rarick, that our ideas are all visionary. We don’t propose to drive the commercial theater out of business. Nothing of the sort.”

“Now, don’t you?”

“No, sir. We propose to supplant, in time--with thought, with discrimination, with genius, with money--the garbage of the present commercial theater, by giving the people pre-digested, intellectual, artistic, and entertaining fodder. But it is not so much a matter of throwing out the commercial theater, Mr. Rarick, as cleaning out the Augean dramatic stables. That is why we dare to approach you with a proposition which will ultimately grant you full return on your money. Not that you are interested in exacting any such guaranty as that from us, but----”

Young rascal! Young walker in the Pyrenees. Young three there, who presently, once outside his doors, would revert to the swift, ruthless well-informed talk of their own world, and who might even ape and deride the holder of the strings of the money-bags....

“... Of course, I am not here to bore you with our standards of production, the literary ideals we have set for ourselves....”

“Why not?” barked Rarick. “You can’t put your cart before your horse.”

“What Mr. Davies means,” hastened Miss Adelbert, “is that we have long ago threshed out our literary policies. That has been taken care of. It’s money we----”

“Can’t see why the money-concerns of such an organization as you describe are a thing separate and apart from its policies. They overlap. My selling-policies regarding an article can only be determined after I am thoroughly familiar with the article itself.”

“In the theater, Mr. Rarick, that scarcely applies. Our production-policies have nothing to do with our financial ones. We need an initial endowment of one hundred thousand dollars to put them into what we firmly believe will be a successful practice. We want you to be the man to have sufficient faith in those production-policies to endow our baby.”

Impudent youth! Well, what rebuttal had he? Plays were foreign affairs to him. Occasionally, he sat through one with Jenny. He had not seen “Herod’s Mask.” Doubtless it would have gone monotonously over his head. Music flowed into him, whereas the drama seemed merely to use his brain as a surface of impact. Jennifer liked the Follies and the rapid revues. Once or twice he had accompanied her and sat in first-row seats or in a box. The box was more to his liking. Jennifer said it was because he could hang a crepe over the railing. But the fact was, the box was more to his liking because, as at the Greek plays he sometimes sponsored, it was possible to remain out of it an entire act without leaving the hole of an empty seat in a row.

What had he, after all, to offer these youngsters, except money? It would be dignified patronage. Miss Adelbert had already won herself a somewhat esoteric position as one of those clever and respected actresses of the intellectual school. Trigoloff, of the crooked profile, was an author and director of rising fame in both fields. The fellow Davies stood to the fore of a certain group of young rebels. What a pity--what a pity Jennifer or Avery was missing such interests as this.

A thought smote Rarick.

“Young people, take my boy into this enterprise with you!”

If he had said, “Young people, take my howling red monkey into this enterprise with you,” he could not have struck a more compelling silence across the faces of these three.

“I’ve a boy. Youngster. Bright as a new nickel. I’d like him to sharpen his teeth, come vacation, on a few young people like you. I’d like to see him get interested in groups that will get him acquainted with some of the things I think he may be missing.”

A glance, imbedded in smile, wound itself from one face to the other of the three.

“Your son is interested in the theater, Mr. Rarick?”

“I wouldn’t say that, Miss Adelbert,” snapped Rarick. “It is I who am interested in interesting him.”

“I see.”

Of course she did not see, nor did any of them, sitting there so politely mindful of the hand that held the money-bags. Nor did Rarick himself, for that matter. The need of his boy eventually coming into his affairs was more and more a pressing one, the inevitable contingency of primogeniture hovered closer; yet here he was, trying to foist him off on to a vague art-project. As it was, Avery had barely time to spare for these college years. Rarick was not minded to start him in overalls from the bottom up. Why teach a walking child to crawl? But little as Rarick could visualize his son cast into his future, the time was at hand when he must be tossed, as you would toss a youngster who must learn to swim, out into the monstrous sea of five-and-ten-cent things. High, tormenting tides of big business awaited Avery. A mantle of tin armor was hovering over his young shoulders. He was about to matriculate in that relentless university of highly limited enrollment which was to prepare him to be one of the richest men in the world. What Rarick had just suggested was as fantastic to himself as to the three who sat with masks of respectful attention drawn across their faces.

“How’s Avery’s second act?” was to explode in hilarity from Miss Adelbert’s lips as the committee of three emerged from the house of Rarick after this interview, and mounted a Fifth Avenue omnibus for an Eleventh Street restaurant, where more of their group anxiously awaited them.

And yet, after the palpable absurdity of what he had suggested came flooding over Rarick, the idea persisted. Even a few months of contact with these inquisitive pioneering young minds, might help Avery to feel healthy alienation from the world of Jenny’s making, which was already threatening to whirl around him. A few months of gambol in these adventurous fields of ideas before the lamb be shorn to the wind of being son to one of the richest men in the world.

“Let my boy in on the ground-floor of this new-theater idea--agree to take him into your fold when he comes out of college----”

“Why, of course, Mr. Rarick, if he is interested. We would want to meet him. See what’s on his mind. It could--er--of course be done. Always a place in a workshop like ours....”

“On that basis, then, and subject to specifications which Mr. Hellman will arrange at my dictation, you may consider that I will seriously take under advisement the matter of endowing your group.”

The three young people who finally, walking on air, turned their faces toward the Eleventh Street café, left Rarick sitting there crouched deeply in the enormous chair which faced the organ.

An idea had, for the moment, completely captured his fancy. What if the boy had somewhere imbedded in him a talent for this sort of creative thing. Not as a vocation. Naturally. But as an avocation. Something to keep him tinged at least with the adventurous quality of mind that flooded that young fellow Davies. Avery must not be cheated of his walking-trip through the Pyrenees. There was plenty of time later for the two-feet-on-the-ground business of training him to be the son of one of the richest men in the world.

Presently, Rarick began a letter to his son. Somehow, with the concrete pen on the concrete paper, the words began to clog in his brain. There were things that could not be broached out of a clear sky. Nothing had ever been said between father and son to prepare Avery for the popping of this notion into the head of his parent. The dread of seeming ridiculous in his son’s clear eyes began to matter above everything in Rarick’s tired brain, as he sat there, his pen drying above the paper.

It was difficult, practically impossible, to convey to his boy that the idea prompted by the three avid young faces, and most of all by the fellow named Davies, had not to do with their little enterprise itself, but somewhere behind it all was a symbol ... a symbol of some kind of release which he wanted for his boy.

One could not get that easily said, at least not without danger of appearing ridiculous to a college boy in his teens, who could want for a speed-boat as desperately as Avery had wanted for his.

The letter was to remain in the limbo of unwritten ones.

The first time Jenny received Ramon behind the closed door of her boudoir, a thousand misgivings assailed her. The creak of a chair was sufficient to stiffen her in his arms; a footstep on a stair startling her eyes into a listening expression, the pupils widening and full of dreads.

“Jenny, that is not nice! Of what are you afraid? Cannot two people have tea in privacy? Why do you not lock the door, if in your great big house you have no privacy?”

“No. No. There must be nothing like that.”

“But you make it like that with your nervousness.”

“I want your coming here to be the most natural thing in the world. I am going to begin to make it a habit to have afternoon cocktails always served in here. That will make it seem less strange. It is a nice room, isn’t it, Ramon--all these soft yellows----”

“Any room that contains you is a beautiful room.”

She took his face between her hands.

“Sweet.”

“You do feel that way, don’t you, Jenny?”

“You know that I do.”

“Then what are we going to do about it?”

A question like that could send the fears rushing back over her.

“I don’t know, Ramon.”

“We cannot go on like this, Jenny.”

“Why? Of course not, Ramon----”

“It is not fair to me.”

“I know that, Ramon. There must be a way.”

“There must be a way--for me to live--if I am to go on neglecting my work this way----”

Once, when he pressed her thus, she had unwittingly asked him, “what work?” and filled his eyes with reproach that looked near to tears. His stalkings in this fashion around the subject of money, somehow sullied perfection.

“I have given up everything, Jenny. My teaching, my----”

“I know you have, Ramon.”

“I love giving up everything; but it has its practical side, dearest, since we live in a practical world.”

“I know that. There is a thousand-dollar-bill in registered mail for you now, dearest.”

It was like her to see that these transactions took place easily, in currency. He kissed her.

“That is for the thought,” he said; “the money itself is horrible, practical necessity.”

“That is for the kiss,” she said, kissing him back.

He would have slid easily off this sand-bar of a subject, but the procession of her thoughts matched the fact that she lay in his arms and his smooth olive pallor was hers to lift up a hand and stroke.

“How cruel and wrong and spiteful life can be, Ramon.”

“Not if we do something about it, to see that it is not so.”

It occurred to her, as she lay there, that everything there was to do about it she would never dare to do. And yet it was sweet to contemplate doing it.

In just such proportion as her sense of disloyalty toward Rarick grew, her efforts to reawaken some sort of a relationship between them began asserting itself. With the immemorial psychology of the guilty wife, she developed an entirely new attitude of solicitude where her husband was concerned.

She began the unprecedented business of leaving notes explaining her whereabouts on those evenings when she was not going to be at home when he arrived. Elaborate, unclever, and superfluous notes of evasion. She no longer pretended to be asleep mornings, while he moved about the bedroom. It was with difficulty that she held herself in leash, in order not to overdo these efforts to placate herself.

As it was, Rarick, always obtuse, only dimly noticed, and was not seriously impressed one way or another. Jenny would think ahead for five or ten minutes how best to casually introduce the name of Ramon into her conversation, so that if rumor by mischance should come wagging, he would cast it off as a distorted version of something she had herself told him. When she finally did trump up a manner to remark casually that Ramon was a dear boy, absolutely invaluable as a last-minute escort, so good-natured and harmless, it was to fall on what amounted to unheeding ears. Jenny’s prattle, particularly of late, was so constant. It gave you a headache if you did not let it run over the surface of your mind like so much patter. She was unusually nervous these days--talking more than usual.

The anomaly of her position, as she lay there in Ramon’s arms, smote and smote her. A woman could want to remain secure in her marriage and yet be passionately in love with some one not her husband. It was possible to want two things desperately at the same time. Not that Jenny was in love with her husband, but she was in love with wanting to remain secure as his wife.

“I want to arrange my life, Ramon--ours, I should say--so that while we are waiting for our ultimate happiness, everything connected with us shall seem casual.”

She did not quite know what she meant by ultimate happiness.

“You are the one to be considered, Jenny. It is heaven to be with you--to drop everything--my work--but a man must live.”

She did not again say, “What work, what work?” His boyishness was irresistible to her.

“There must be no gossip about us, Ramon. Even if my children are grown, Ramon, I am an ideal to them.”

“So are you to me.”

“It would kill me to hurt them.”

“You are good.”

“Thank God, though, I have reared them with sophisticated heads on their sensible shoulders.”

“It is you who are not sophisticated, my love.”

“I never want to grow sufficiently sophisticated, my Ramon, not to love our love as the dearest thing in life. Jennifer would be the first to want me to grasp at that part of life which has so nearly passed me by.”

“I would like, Jenny, to look up the fellow who has that paragraph about her in this week’s _Town Tattle_--about the affair at the Edgertons--and punch his----”

“Nothing like that, Ramon! Coming from you, it would look obvious. If only her father doesn’t see it! It will all be forgotten in a week; but meanwhile it is awful. Town talk. They say Berry had to marry Leslie to save her from a scandal and that Leslie had to announce it to save herself from Jennifer.... Ramon, what was that noise?”

“How nervous you are, my Jenny! Only something creaking.”

“I must get my household accustomed to taking my tea-hour for granted. It will make it so much easier for us, Ramon. Everything in my life hereafter will revolve around that, Ramon.”

“Jenny, how soon will we have a nook somewhere--ours--alone....”

She hid her face in her hands.

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Soon.”

“You remember, Jenny, what you promised?”

“What?”

“I am to fix up our nook--and bring you to it after it is all complete.”

“Yes.”

“It is hard to say what I must say now, Jenny, except that, between us, everything must be said.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I want to do that nook terribly. I would be doing something for--us.”

“You darling.”

“And yet, you see, my hands are tied. I do not do it.”

She knew what was coming and bated her breath for it because she did not want it to come.

“It takes money to fix up that kind of a place, Jenny.”

She lay in silence against his coat.

“Does it offend you to have me say that, Jenny?”

“No--only I hate the talk of money between us----”

“I know, dearest, but it must be said. I have given up my----”

“There is the thousand in the mail----”

“But I must live, Jenny. Besides, what is a thousand? You would not want me to build you a nook that was not worthy of our love.”

“It isn’t that he ever questions what I draw. But a conspicuously large amount is noticeable when I have nothing to show for it, and he is sure to think I am indulging the children against his wishes.”

“Surely you have money of your own.”

“Just a drawing-account. I’ve never bothered. He is generous.”

“But you say, yourself, you cannot even indulge your children.”

“That is his one difficult spot, Ramon.”

“It is not right. No woman should be dependent!”

“I’ve never thought about it in that light before. There has never been occasion.”

“You mean to say no properties are in your name!”

“Of course, silly! I’m always signing papers. I’m one of the stockholders in the new Rarick Building. I’m a big stockholder in the Rarick Chain. Don’t forget that, dearest.”

Jenny had not forgotten it. Neither had she forgotten certain easily accessible holdings which it did not please her to relate just now. She had no intention of permitting Ramon to furnish a place such as he described. Not for the present, at least, she told herself, when desire ate through the better part of caution. Having one’s cake and eating it, too, was almost as insanely paradoxical as it sounded. Besides, a mental picture that was repulsive to her, had a habit of leaning into her bliss with this boy.

Was she one of the horrible, wattled, painted women, as in the notorious case of the dowager, Mrs. Emanie Bursilap, who at seventy years, after her own youth had fled from her as if in disgust, still kept young boys in luxury for the sake of maintaining the delusion of that departed youth? Was this thing between her and Ramon no better than that? Sometimes it seemed to her she must find a way to peer into the heart of this youth, whose time of life, whose flexible, godlike body entitled him to the first bloom of a woman. He and Jennifer were of an age to frolic in the same gardens--and yet he seemed not to see Jennifer, for Jenny----

“Dear Ramon, everything will come out all right.”

“I love to hear you say that, Jenny,” he said, and crushed kisses against her eyes.

This time, of the volition of a force that was stronger than her fears, she reached out and turned the key in the door.

In the phraseology of Jennifer and Avery, between whom existed a gay nonsense-code, any period of time fraught with comings and goings, telephone bells, messenger boys, arrivals, departures, in, out, bang, hasten, bag, baggage, up, down, motor-cars, golf-bags, theater tickets, opera wraps, bridge tables, packages, flowers, caterers, bustle and rush, constituted a “day among the Raricks.”

Hurried scrawls of notes or telegrams, interchanged between them, read like this:

DEAREST AVERY: It’s been a hell of a day among the Raricks down home
here. How cum with brother Rarick up among the Campus Cut Clothes
Boys?

DEAR JENNIF: This day among this Rarick has been no go. This Rarick
has a new speed-boat. This day among this Rarick has been spent
feeling seasick in and about said speed-boat. It’s a wamble. To be a
wamble means to be built for land and live on water. That’s me, too.
I am built for where I ain’t....

That was about as far as these two ever ventured across the chasm of the six years’ difference in their ages.

Jennif was a peach, but you couldn’t let off steam to her, because when you tried to talk she was always listening to some one beyond your shoulder who wasn’t there.

You couldn’t talk to Avery, whose mind was always on his own young stuff. Hard to make out what his own stuff was. But there was something to Avery, all right. The boy ran deep ... he already knew the strange heart-aches of seeing illusions tarnish and had learned his game of compromise. Life among the Raricks wasn’t the joke he pretended it was....

* * * * *

The “day among the Raricks” that precipitated a galling scene between Jennifer and her father began as any run-of-the-mill day for Rarick, for Jenny, and for Jennifer might have begun.

JENNY’S DAY

This particular one started with a pain in her side. An annoying neuralgic one, against which she usually carried tablets in a beautiful gold-and-enamel snuff-box (Napoleona) which she had begged from Rarick’s collection.

Rarick, who had slept no better and no worse than usual, and whose night had been a procession of projects for the Rarick Building, dropped into one of his brief deep slumbers just as Jenny beside him flew awake, her lids popping back suddenly.

The flooding memory of the night before, when she had dared, because the chauffeur was new, to drive home from the opera with Ramon by way of three circumferences of the Park, came sparkling over her in goose-flesh.

It made her shudder. It made her lift eyes that were still brilliant from the night before, up to the sound-eating radiations of shirred brocade that hung in a canopy over the bed and then dropped in more sound-eating drapes between her and the vista of six full-length windows that looked out on Fifth Avenue.

There was a small blue-enamel French telephone, a blue-enamel thermos carafe, a blue-enamel engagement-pad, and the blue-enamel box of tablets on the night table beside her. One of these tablets she presently swallowed.

This habit of her early awaking was still abominable to her. Precious hours of needed rest, even when they were filled with contemplations that were sweet to her, were wasted lying in bed thus, waiting for her day to begin.

How he slept! Deep in the cave of his pillow, with his face upward. “Little man, you! What do you know of me--here--lying by your side--sharing your bed? Nothing!”

A fear smote her. What if he knew more than she realized! That was absurd. He was not astute.

How strange, after all these years of the disillusionment of a love-life that had spluttered out like a feeble match, that a Ramon should find her desirable. It made her lie slim and straight in bed, with arms folded across her breast in the beatific attitude of feeling herself desirable.

The aspirin made one pleasantly at ease.

What if that were not Rarick beside her, but----

She shuddered with a rousing distaste of self. Horrible, horrible, to lie there imagining.... There were certain scavengers of thoughts that must be kept locked in the inner boxes of the mind. It made one feel shameful to have a thought like that pop out. Just the same, the whole meaning of life would be changed and exalted if that were not Rarick lying there, but, yes, but Ramon! How horrible of her. How poisonous.

What if Rarick should die? No. No. No! And yet she could never really see the wickedness of trying to visualize the effect upon herself of the death of another. Death was one of the few certainties of life. Rarick would die some day. Either before or after her. If before? She was not wishing it. She was thinking it.

It was difficult to visualize life free of the strain of simultaneously wanting to remain impeccably married to Rarick and yet continue to be desired by Ramon. A life free of the strain of daring to ride three times around Central Park with Ramon because the chauffeur was new, and yet all the while dreading, with undercurrent of fear, the indiscretion of it. The strain of obeying that trick in her make-up which demanded that she be thrice as solicitous of Rarick for every disloyal act with Ramon. The strain of keeping herself free from the shadow of a doubt in the minds of her children.

What if Rarick should die and his restraining hand were left off that household? What if she were herself, but free! A woman of terrific wealth, suddenly released from over twenty years of the indefinable depressant of a man who had grown rich with his lips tight. Would Ramon be lying beside her then?...

She swung out of bed, shuddering, and, ringing for her maid, hurried toward her boudoir.

Her day began earnestly now, with a nine-o’clock appointment with the executive of a large firm of decorators, who was coming to inspect the ballroom, with an eye to erecting at one end of it a gondola-shaped stage, on which Jenny proposed to give a charity fête called “A Doge for a Day.”

At ten o’clock she had a henna-rinse and shampoo, a long-drawn but imperative performance that accelerated the pain in her side and made her nervous. During this subsequent hour and a half in the hands of her hairdressers, maid, masseuse, her head in towels, her face under cream, her fingers and toes in the simultaneous process of mani- and pedi-cure, Jenny went through the performance of an interview with her head housekeeper, Mrs. Dill. She was exacting in her enormous household management, known to be fair enough, but demanding careful and detailed accounting of weekly expenditures, which, even after years of the experience of living at the very peak of American high standards, remained titanic to her.

“Thirty dollars a week for milk, Mrs. Dill? We don’t bathe in it!”

“That fruit bill is fantastic, Mrs. Dill. What is that item? Five pounds of grapes, fifteen dollars? Well! Of course, I know you do your part, but isn’t that buying grapes by the carat?”

“Surely, Mrs. Dill, there is some mistake. Seven hundred dollars for the florist’s this month, and only three large dinners. Well!”

The days of her conservative girlhood in the modest house where she had spent the first twenty years of her life were deeply rooted. The servants’ wages of twenty-five hundred dollars a month, and the greengrocer, the caterer, the butcher, and the laundry bills in proportion were to remain unabatedly startling to her.

There was one item on these statements which always smote Jenny with a kind of anger. Generous though she was, after a fashion, the fact that the bill for the servants’ meat could mount to hundreds for the month was constantly roiling. Mrs. Dill saw to it that their supplies came from the same shops where the family viands were marketed. Of course, the servants should be well provisioned, and one must close one’s own eyes to the fact that Mrs. Dill shopped with an eye to her commissions, but it did seem that the ordinary cuts of meat from the ordinary shops should have sufficed for them. She had never found voice to convey this to any of her housekeepers, but the earlier training of the wife of one of the richest men in the world would persist. It would have angered Rarick to have her question these food expenditures for the servants, and it was not, she told herself, that she really did question them. It was the principle of the thing. It did seem that a good stew of fowl would suffice for the servants’ table instead of the boned squabs which were sent from Baltimore in cotton waddings.

Certain traits that had been developed back there in the pressed-brick eight-room house in St. Louis had persisted in the wife of the thirteenth richest man in the world.

At eleven o’clock Jenny emerged from the barrage of cold cream to accompany Jennifer to a loft over an armory, there to enter vigorously into a fencing-lesson with a master from Turin. When Jenny fenced, a curious flame leaped into her eyes. Jenny’s “glitt,” her daughter called it. With her lower lip caught between her teeth, and her face in the tight vise of a grimace, she danced to the steel on the balls of feet that were surprisingly nimble. Her mother’s fencing inspired Jennifer--who was lovely at the thrust herself--to peal after peal of hilarity.

“You’re the spirit of war let loose, Moth, only don’t bite your tongue. Down with humanity! Long live sin!”

Nevertheless, these hours exhilarated Jenny, not only seeming to help the pain at her side, but endowing her with a new sense of body buoyancy. She took an extra lesson a week now. “Good measure for you,” she told Ramon. “I must at least be one-hundredth as lithe as you are.”

At twelve o’clock in this day of a Rarick, the executive committee of the Manhattan Hospital for Crippled Children met at the home of Mrs. Bursilap Dobson. This home, a somber brown one that still occupied wide footage in a once highly conservative section of Madison Avenue that was rapidly giving way to business, was one that Jenny had never entered on a social basis. Curious, too, because Mrs. Bursilap Dobson apparently went out of her way to be gracious to Jenny. On these occasions of the weekly committee meetings, they exchanged doctor, steamship, opera-box and motor-car preferences, as well as lore concerning their sons who had attended the same preparatory school. Most of the time, at Mrs. Dobson’s request, Jenny remained after the meeting for a bit of chat.

It stopped there.

To the exclusive Dobson functions the John Raricks were not bidden. “Where do they get off?” gritted Jennifer between her teeth. “It’s town talk that her mother, old lady Emanie Bursilap, aged two hundred and forty-six, keeps flocks of patent-leather-haired tame robins and feeds them meal tickets. None over twenty-one need apply.”

The time had come when this horrid indictment could send a special kind of chill down Jenny’s spine.

At one o’clock Jenny entertained the members of the executive and visiting board of the International House for Defective Children at the Cosmo Club. Again it was not a social group, but the list pleased her, and she had a typed copy of it sent to the _Times_: Madame Marcella Tarafa, Buenos Aires. Mrs. Gregory Cripps. Lady Annabel Metcalf. Mrs. Hugo Thorner. Marquise de Brassac. Signora Testa Pontavice. Mrs. Beaver Kellog, Philadelphia. The Countess of Pendleton, St. John’s House. Mrs. Turner Moses. Mrs. Willie Bingham Payne. Miss Henriette Shonnard.

Jenny was not a member of the Cosmo Club, but entertained there by proxy of Miss Shonnard. It was Jenny’s way of signifying to the daughter of Senator Shonnard her desire for membership in this most socially representative women’s club in town. So far nothing had come of it.

At three, Jenny took a taxicab from the club-house, and met Ramon at the tea-room in the West Seventies. She had decided on this much of a definite policy! From now on, never to appear with him at a public function. For instance, that evening he was accompanying, at Jenny’s stipulation, young Miss Clabby Wall to a large charity dinner-dance at the Plaza, for which Jenny had taken a table in Jennifer’s name. There were to be twenty guests at her table, Ramon not among them. Jenny had sent an extra two tickets to him by mail.

Unquestionably the need of the small retreat of Ramon’s fitting-up was becoming imperative. There was such a thing as being conspicuous even at the inconspicuous little tea-rooms of the West Seventies.

Ramon, waiting in the tea-room, had a headache. Something repulsive had happened. His dancing partner, the Spanish girl, a volatile, gifted creature, desperately in love with a shiftless husband who was brutal to her, had fallen ill of a skin irritation that manifested itself on her face and disqualified her for the dance. The sight of the blemished girl had been abhorrent to Ramon, who had also been obliged to advance the improvident pair fifty dollars to cover immediate doctor bills.

Jenny loved the complete way in which he surrendered himself into her hands. “Life is confusing, Jennifer’s Jenny. I have sympathy, of course, but I cannot help being repulsed by sickness. Of course, perhaps some day I may fall ill myself.”

“No, darling!” cried Jenny, eager to be omniscient in his behalf.

“You won’t hate me if ever I do fall ill--and splotchy, Jennifer’s Jenny?”

“I’ll nurse you like an angel.”

“I am a dog and you are an angel.”

“You will be an angel to me, though, Ramon, always?”

“It gave me the shivers just now to see her. I was glad to give her money. It strapped me to let her have fifty, though, Jennifer’s Jenny.”

“I know that,” she said, slipping a yellow bill, that was already folded into the hole of her glove, from her hand into his.

He placed a kiss along a lean, suède-covered finger.

“It is hard not to feel upset, Jennifer’s Jenny, when life is just one frusteration after frusteration.”

He mispronounced “frustration,” with a lisp that was adorable to her.

“Everything will come out all right, Ramon.”

“How can everything come out all right, when I am not even to be with you tonight, but must sit with that tiresome little Clabby person at a table that is far from yours?”

“You are going to drive home with me afterward. Around the Park three times.”

“Darling--how----”

“Never mind how. There is another new chauffeur. I could not bear to live through the day, dear, if it didn’t mean that much time alone with you.”

“I am looking at you, Jennifer’s Jenny, across this ugly table-top, but in reality I am kissing you one thousand times.”

“And me you, Ramon.” Across the table their glances poured.

“I must be at Fifty-seventh Street at four o’clock.”

“Damn four!”

“Perhaps I shall drop in later at Perroquet’s; but keep away, as usual, dear.”

At four o’clock the unmounted body of a specially designed French car was submitted to Jenny in the Fifty-seventh Street show-rooms of a firm of automobile-importers.

At five o’clock Jenny picked up Madame Tarafa at her apartment-hotel and took her to Perroquet’s for tea, where Ramon danced. He did not come over; but again, from across the room, their glances poured.

At six o’clock, by appointment, a chinchilla coat, which had arrived by way of Moscow, was delivered to Jenny. In the beauty of twilit snow, it hung from her narrow shoulders as she stood before triple mirrors in her boudoir. She proposed to wear it that night. Ramon had admired one worn by Mrs. Stanley Grimes. Jenny happened to know that the Grimes garment had cost forty-five thousand dollars in Paris, plus sixty per cent duty. Her own, with the duty, came to seventy-four thousand. Rarick, who was completely easy-going about her expenditures for finery, paid such bills as these with puzzlement. Seventy-four thousand dollars to cover a woman’s back. Thoughts came jamming to the fore of his mind, but he choked them back. Well--those were the gratifications for which men beat out their lives in the market-places.

At seven o’clock the maid in the Breton cap helped Jenny into a black-satin gown that rose to a high neck in front and to a bare and daring V at the back. As she was looping herself in graduated ropes of graduated pearls, the door of her dressing-room burst open without the preamble of a knock.

It was Rarick. His face, locked in the horrible immobility of a gargoyle, was the color of granite.

“I want Jennifer.” A paper was crushed in his hand, and his lips were hauled back from his teeth, making them protrude as they do in a skull.

RARICK’S DAY

That same day began for Rarick with his usual habit of twisting reluctantly out of the belated sleep that came to him just before dawn. It was so good, this early morning drifting-down beneath the snows of consciousness. It was more like a little death, he sometimes thought, than the sleep which must come to most people. It was so absolutely dreamless. So disembodied. It was as if Rarick shot off into space for these sleeps. They bathed, they refreshed. They pumped him full of the energy you would expect from an eight-hour instead of a three-hour sleep. They were his air-tight retreats. Jenny was already up when he awoke. Sun beat against the drawn curtains. The muffled sound of the city came roaring softly, and he could hear Jenny moving about in her boudoir, giving the nervous kind of staccato orders to her maid that made her attitude toward her servants seem imperious. His opening thought had to do with an idea that had boomed into his brain during the night. Why not erect a concert-auditorium, vast, aërial, dramatically sky-high, on the roof of the seventy-nine-story Rarick Building? There must still be time to adapt construction plans to that daring scheme. A Gothic auditorium of superb twilights. Three thousand seats, each one a _fauteuil_. A cathedral organ, diapason pipes. If only the roof space would permit. Increase cost by millions--better to call in Yardsley the architect at once....

Rarick Auditorium!

There was a note on Jenny’s writing-pad for him:

Am using your Hispano this morning, as mine is up for repair. Have
given orders to send around Renault sedan for you. Body of French
car is here. Man will call to see Hellman. My O.K. will be on bill
for chinchilla coat. Do you care to present Avery with one of those
three-room portable camp sets? Nice for week-end camping-trips, in
which he should be encouraged.

Plans for Adirondack house annex are in your desk drawer, right.

Jennifer wishes to charter private car, Penn., for forty guests for
Navy football game, Nov. 18. Your office can arrange.

Saranac Hospital Committee will ask Hellman for an interview with
you. Please give generous check in my name. These people important to
me. Mrs. Carleton Murray, president. Do not snub. Not home to dinner.
Charity dance at Plaza tonight. Going alone.

He preferred Jenny up and out of the room first, and her memorandum, even though so unusually verbose these days, by pad. He had no intention of seeing Mrs. Murray, whose philanthropies were conspicuous and obnoxious to him, or of presenting his son with some _deluxe_ camping paraphernalia, which he thought effete.

But how typical, this procedure! He had feigned sleep when Jenny had come trailing in between two and three. Then she had taken the opportunity of his morning sleep to tiptoe off to her dressing-room, from where he could catch her quick spatter of words to her maid. Do. Don’t. Don’t. Do. It was at least three days since they had met for more than the briefest of periods. There was one of her letters from Avery twisted and thrown on the night table beside the blue carafe. On his way to his dressing-room, the temptation to smooth it out and read it smote Rarick. The salutation, “Dearest of Mothers,” smote his eyes from a corner that had not been caught in the twist.

He did not pause to pry into it.

At eight-thirty, an attorney came to sit beside him while he had his breakfast in a small sun-room of superb walnut walls, inlaid with Rarick’s collection of bronze medallions. The discussion was in regard to a pending suit against Rarick Chain for infringement of copyright law on a toy edition of a pocket dictionary they were about to distribute in hundreds of thousands at five cents the copy.

At nine o’clock they rode downtown together in the Renault sedan as far as Times Square, where Rarick dived into the subway.

He had been much headlined for that custom of his.

MAGNATE MINGLES WITH STRAP-HANGING CROWD

It saved him eleven minutes. Sometimes he wondered about those eleven minutes. He fought for them through human underground shambles, drew into his lungs the breath off the lips of strap-hangers who lurched their chins into his eyes. In prospect, those eleven minutes seemed incalculably important to him. In retrospect, somehow, they could never be accounted for.

At nine-thirty Hellman met him at the private door of his private office, took his hat and coat, and handed him a drink of Vichy water.

That was part of being a man of affairs. You paid somebody to see to it that you were properly stoked with the amount of drinking-water prescribed by your doctor. Hellman’s concern over that drink of water was perfectly simulated. He watched each gulp of Rarick, who was never thirsty, with an interest that was impeccable.

Everything about Rarick’s office was contrived to keep out sound. An artificial quiet resulted. Noises began to grind in your ears from that quiet, as if some of the crash of the subway had accumulated against the drums. Rugs ate in footfalls. The battery of push-buttons made only soft, purring sounds. Two enormous electric fans were noiseless. The vast top of Rarick’s mahogany double desk, sheeted in plate glass, carried out the noiseless effect. It was empty of even an inkstand. The windows overlooking New York Harbor were high enough to give the scene below--of moving tugs, weaving elevated trains, specks of people--the effect of silence.

Outside of these carefully insulated four walls, two hundred stenographers crashed out furious and alarmed hurry calls for more hair-pins, more peach-skin-faced dolls, more five-cent dictionaries, more toothpicks, and more lollypops to match the shapes of the tongues of the world. At nine-thirty, an order, just dictated, was being typed out there in those frenzied aisles of the polyphonic typewriters, for the largest single order of boys’ caps in the history of the industry, while two men sat in conference with Rarick and concluded this perpetration upon the youthful heads of the world of hundreds of thousands of cotton caps with cotton linings and cotton buttons and cotton eagles stitched against navy-blue cotton backgrounds.

At eleven o’clock there arrived, direct from the railroad station, a president of a Cleveland bank and an executive of a real-estate concern, on an impending deal that had to do with a Rarick Chain property-trade on a Cleveland business block that had not yet been inundated with the shop of petty trade, and against which public opinion ran high. This particular situation was an old story; and Rarick took a certain glory in signing papers that were to make way for a Rarick store on a Cleveland avenue that boasted a museum, a library, and a park.

At noon, while the anteroom filled up with an assortment of charity-committee representatives, department managers, factory executives, automobile agents, and bank messengers, two harried-looking architects with portfolios and long rolls of blue-prints were admitted into Rarick’s office by a secret door.

It developed that the roof auditorium, being an afterthought, would involve structural changes of appalling magnitude and expense, to say nothing of possible building violations, steel-beam problems, water installations, and engineering difficulties too technical to bear immediate discussion. Everything was possible, of course, but at cost of millions of dollars----

But the idea of the auditorium had formed, hardened, and fastened into the mind of Rarick. Hellman hovered, during this exhaustive interview, offering such conservative objections as he dared, and urging deferred decisions. Two executives of the company were called in, also a little Russian named Osonsky, an office manager in whom Rarick had great confidence. While the anteroom jammed itself to capacity, the conference dragged on, two difficulties arising for every one solution. But when the architects finally buckled up their portfolios, and the long interview came to its end, everyone present knew that, in pointed stalagmites toward the heavens, would presently arise the Gothic reality of Rarick’s popular-price auditorium, built of the people’s dimes and nickels, for them, at admission of dimes and nickels. The greatest musicians available were to pour forth the music of the masters to the knick-knack-ridden public that swarmed the aisles of the Rarick Chain stores. It was to cost three million dollars, house two of the most famous Rembrandts in existence, and the organ-builder was to die in its loft, of heart-stroke induced by unbearable excitement, the day the instrument pealed forth the opening-strain of “Ave Maria” to its first audience.

So much for one of Rarick’s sleepless dreams.

At considerably past the lunch hour an office boy brought five Graham wafers in oiled tissue-paper and a glass of “half milk, half Vichy,” and placed them silently on the desk beside Rarick, who was now talking long-distance to Denver, a receiver pressed against each ear.

At three o’clock, a woman evangelist whose name was constantly skidding across a coast-to-coast press, and who had traveled eleven hundred miles for this appointment, came to confirm a matter relating to her dream of a world-tabernacle on a mountain-top overlooking the Pacific.

At three-fifteen, a German manufacturer of Christmas-tree ornaments arrived with two Eastern managers, and five hundred and fifty thousand dollars was transacted across the empty desk-top.

At three-thirty, Rarick, five members of the International Theater Foundation Committee, Hellman, and two witnessing clerks, bent over that desk for the signing of the Rarick endowment of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

At three-forty, the flower-woman on the corner of Broadway and Pine Street, who sold wire-stemmed carnations there for the lapels of hurrying business men, came up to Rarick’s office, by Hellman’s arrangement, on the anniversary of her fiftieth year on that corner. Also by Hellman’s arrangement, and to Rarick’s surprised and angry protest, three cameras clicked the picture of him presenting her with a check commemorating the occasion.

At ten minutes to four, Hellman walked as far as the subway with him, handing him a packet of letters to read upon his arrival home.

At shortly past four, after a cup of tea and two more Graham wafers, Rarick let himself relax into the unicorn-chair in his library. For an hour he lay back there, riding the quiet, as a swimmer floats on his back, finally pressing a button to flood that quiet with an organ overture called “Field of the Cloth of Gold.” No matter how chromoesque musically, there was something about it that set Rarick’s blood marching. He could see himself mounting--always mounting steps, a cloak streaming off his shoulder--mounting--mounting--peaks off in the distance, snow-capped. A viola slipped into a cadenza that seemed to pour from a bird-throat--somewhere--high--was morning air like ice-water. He could see himself mounting--clouds formed and were faces--the chorister face of Avery--a woman’s face, with lips desirable--up--up--Pyrenees of mountain-tops....

Presently Dr. Gerkes came in and drank a glass of hot Burgundy, which a butler brought without his request. He had just returned from Toronto, where he had lectured before a royal archæological society. There was desultory talk of university endowments, railroads, the Abyssinian researches of a Viennese that promised to shake the theories of the alleged beginnings of Tertiary man, and then Rarick, spilling out a waistcoat pocket of pearls, emeralds, jacinths, girasols, asterias, and diamonds, saw to it that his friend screwed a glass into his eye and appraised until it was time for him to climb into what he called his overalls for an address he was to deliver that evening before a scientific society at the Engineers’ Club.

Left alone, Rarick began to rip open letters off the packet that Hellman had handed him at the subway. It was after he had read the third of them that he burst into Jenny’s boudoir with it crushed in his hand, and his lips flaring back in the fashion that made a skull of his face.

* * * * *

Standing in the multiplying embrasure of her mirrors, Jenny’s hand, emerald-incrusted, flew to her throat. What had happened? Rarick knew something! He always did when he looked like that. Dry teeth bare. Terror flew at her. Terror and a sudden loathing for the whole tottering structure of her affair with Ramon. As a keeper of a gigolo she had risked everything. Why mince matters? Keeper of a gigolo! And at risk of security, prestige, eminence. The neuralgic pain that was lurking in her side seemed to leap into her throat--into her spirit. What had she pulled down about her? What terrible crash was this impending? Out of her recklessness, out of her failure to rest content with the security of her eminence, was she about to reap still more failure?

“Rarick,” she cried out to him, ready, as it were, to fight for her life, “don’t be a fool!”

How terrifyingly like a skull he was.

“Where is Jennifer?” he said along his dry jowls. “I want her.”