Chapter VI: Part 6

Jennifer? Thank God, then it wasn’t--Jenny! Jennifer, of course. Some nonsense of Jennifer’s. This wretched nervousness of hers! How could Rarick possibly have known what her foresight and skill had arranged that he should not know. The prospect of the drive homeward with Ramon through the Park came flowing back. Her precaution to change chauffeurs every so often was an indication of the skill with which she handled this situation. Who could be clever enough, for instance, to tie up chauffeur trouble with the fact that she and Ramon ... Jennifer, poor child! What now? One saw the child so comparatively seldom, now that the season was on--surely nothing----

“Where is Jennifer?”

“She must be dressing.”

“Call her.”

“What has happened, Rarick?”

“Call her.”

“The child is probably in her bath. Is it as imperative as all that?”

“Call her.”

“Tell Miss Jennifer,” she said in French to the maid in the Breton cap, “to come here at once. Her father wishes her.”

What row was this now? Jennifer, poor child--could you blame her?--had been distrait and erratic in her movements ever since that wretched business at the Edgertons’. Hard hit, poor child. But as if there weren’t just as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Jennifer needed change. The camp, perhaps! Could her father have got wind of that messy occasion at the Edgertons’? God! what a bore Rarick could be! No wonder his children shied from him.

“I wouldn’t start rowing with Jennifer this time of the evening, Rarick. What’s wrong? Won’t it keep until----”

The maid returned.

“Miss Jennifer is dressing and is already late for an appointment. She will come to Mr. Rarick in the library tomorrow morning.”

Rarick strode past the words, across the hall, and, without preamble of knocking, into his daughter’s suite.

“Rarick,” cried Jenny, and strode after, “don’t be a fool!”

Jennifer, evidently just risen from bed, was sitting on the edge of it, in a web of a nightgown that fell off her shoulder to the elbow, and pulling on a bit of infinitesimal stocking.

“Why, Father,” she cried, and jerked a bit of the web across her, “you mustn’t come in here!”

He hated a display of undress even in the formal attire of the women of his family. This Aphrodite rising from the foam of lace and chiffon offended him less than the bare backs they wore tapering into the waist line of evening-gowns.

“Put on some clothes,” he said. From the layer of tousled bed-clothing of more pink and more lace, his daughter regarded him throw a scowl at a jungle of hair that had fallen forward over her eyes.

“I think this is pretty thick, Father,” she cried.

Her mother picked up a white, tufted, swan’s-down robe, and tossed it to her.

“Put this on, Jennifer,” she said, in the cold, measured tones of her disapproval of Rarick.

What a bore--what a bore the man was! Joyless. Still a hardware clerk at heart. Little man, you. No wonder the flame that burned in Ramon was warming to her rigid heart. Thank God for Ramon! What was that paper....

Thrusting the crumpled sheet under his daughter’s eyes and slapping it with the back of his hand, Rarick lost no time.

“Explain that.”

The letter was from Tom Edgerton:

... unless, Mr. Rarick, this situation is to result in tragedy for
all concerned, I beg you to call instant halt to matters between
your daughter and my son-in-law. To add to an already outrageous
situation, Leslie is with child. I regret the imperative need to
bring before you what I am sure must be your first knowledge of
this dangerous dilemma for all concerned. Unless you force it to an
immediate solution....

A low cry escaped Jennifer. Pain. Rage. Surprise.

“Damn him! Damn!” she cried and began to sob instantly and wildly into her bare palm, which she clapped against her mouth. “Damn! Damn!”

“It seems to me,” cried Jenny, frightened, “that Tom Edgerton had better mind his own eggs in his own basket.”

What was this? What was this? As Jennifer had recited it that muddled morning after, both the Jennys had sat in merciless indictment upon the behavior of Berry, and of Leslie, too, for that matter. Jennifer had hurled at him merciless invective, wallop, and relentless appraisal. Surely, in these weeks subsequent, Jennifer had not been seeing Berry? The idea that Jennifer was cruelly hard hit was preposterous. What was this? Had Jennifer, for the first time, violated her mother’s confidence? That little fool there, that little fool man, there, what did he know about handling her?

“I want to know,” shouted Rarick, seeming to gnaw on his words with his long dry-looking teeth, and standing directly up before his daughter as she struggled into the sleeve of her robe, “what there is between you and Berry Rhodes?”

“And what if I don’t choose to tell you?” she cried, already breathless, as if the interview were of long duration instead of only just having begun.

“Don’t rag her, Rarick.”

“Shut up!” he said. How his jaw slid around in that circular, grinding movement! Thank God it was Jennifer and not herself on the rack before him. She could defend Jennifer----

“Either you tell me the exact situation,” went on her father, brushing the crest off of a wave of small, incredibly sheer pillows, as he began to waggle a finger at her, “or I’ll have the Rhodes dog here himself, or go where I can find him.”

“If you do,” cried Jennifer, wrapping herself in her arms, as if to withdraw from possibility of contact with the threat, “I’ll kill myself.”

“Jennifer, for God’s sake, you must learn to talk quietly to your father.”

“How can I talk quietly to him? How can I talk at all to him? How can I talk to anybody? Get out! For God’s sake, get out! Give me that letter!” She snatched it from her mother’s hands and began to twist it the shape of her own twisted lips. “Leave me alone! Get out!”

Her father caught her by the wrist, jerking her toward him until her teeth gave a click.

“What is this man to you?”

She began to sob, her face naked and dark as she struggled for her hands.

“As if you would understand if I told you.”

“What is he to you?”

Suddenly, as if the realization of her trap came flooding over her, she let her wrists relax in her father’s grip and dropped her head forward until her brow was almost against his hands, before her incredible words came.

“I love him, Papa,” she said. “Help me, Papa, I don’t want to love him. I want to hate him and I can’t. Help me, Papa. Please, please, Papa.”

His heart was in his mouth. His knees trembled. The “papa” had almost unnerved him. The silly revealing child’s word. Papa. A primitive phonetic word that must have had its etymology along the toothless gums of babes. He was too racked to make a sound. Papa, help Jennifer....

“Oh, my darling!” cried Jenny, stung to quick, pouring tears. “And Mother never knew. Mother never knew. My baby, what has come over you? This isn’t like you!”

“I know it isn’t, Mother. It’s not me. That’s just it. I’m not myself. I want to hate him. I want to keep hating him. And I love him, Mother. Isn’t that terrible?”

“My dear! My sweet! It is just an infatuation. He isn’t worth your little finger. My dear--my sweet!”

This bare-backed woman, with the little notches up her spine that were repulsive to him, and the narrow head with the pink hair brushed up straight to accentuate it, was wresting the situation from him. She was superb as she drew the head of Jennifer to her narrow breast. Superb with being her mother, while he stood dumb before the emergency of his daughter, even though, at her words, “Help me, Papa,” his anger had dissolved into the flood-stream of his heart. Still he remained there, dumb, while Jenny, whose pain flowed in the relief of tears, was wresting from him what had been perilously near being a moment of contact with his girl.

“_You_ help me, Mother!”

“Why, darling, Mother never realized----”

“I’ll break every bone in his body,” Rarick began to repeat, suddenly. “I’ll break every bone in his body.”

“That _would_ be helpful, Rarick,” said Jenny, regarding him above the head of her daughter with cool, slitted eyes. “One of your typically diplomatic moves.”

“I’ll break every bone in his body.”

“Mother, Mother, make him understand! There’s really been nothing between Berry and me. If he goes to Berry, I swear I’ll kill myself----I tell you I’ve been the--the aggressor. I am the one----”

“Shh--h-h, my darling! I understand.”

“You see, Mother, it hasn’t been Berry.”

He was out of it now. It was Jennifer and her mother. Jennifer in the cradle of her mother’s arms, like a child.

“Yes, yes, Mother knows----”

“Down inside him somewhere, Berry’s got a sense of honor. I’m the rotter. I haven’t let him be. After that night--even. I’ve kept wangling him. To meet me. To be with me. Every once in a while I think I’m cured and try not to see him. I’ve tried to be cured, Mother. I’ve been in hell. I’m sick, Mother. You try and make Father see that. I’m like a drug fiend. I love him and I don’t want to love him. He’s snide, he’s swine, I keep telling myself. And now that Leslie’s going to have a kid, that makes me twice swine. O God, I--I think I am going crazy, Mother.”

She was like something wild, crouching beneath the wing of a protecting arm--the bare, gleaming arm of Jenny--her muddled eyes staring through the jungle of hair at Rarick, who, having released her wrists, stood back, flabbergasted.

“Shh-h-h, darling! I see----”

“Make him see----”

“Yes, yes, I’ll make Father see. Mother knows. Mother understands. Jennifer’s nervous. Jennifer has had a bad dream and Mother is going to take her away--far--up to the Canadian camp, and get her rested and cured.”

Jenny had wrested his moment from him, all right. A cry raged in the silence of his heart. There they crouched from him. The Jennys. “Papa,” she had mouthed, like a child. So far as he could remember, she had never, even in her little-girlhood, called him that before. What a curious thing to have happened! This little girl, this sick little girl, this pure, good, smart, terribly alien little girl, calling him “Papa.” And Jenny had wrested his chance. God damn her! No. No. No. God bless her! This bare-backed woman, with the ridges up her spine that were repulsive to him, was divine, at the moment, as she babbled sentimental mush to this girl!

“Sh-h-h, Jennifer! You’re going to get well.”

Her sobs began to subside as she looked out fearfully under the wing of her mother’s arm.

“I’ll get well if he will leave me alone.”

“Sh-h-h! Father will leave you alone. Won’t you, Rarick, if I promise to help little Jennifer, who wants to get well, to be rid of the idiotic notion that she is in love. Won’t you, Rarick? Won’t you?” sang Jenny, in the monotony of singsong, rocking her body in soothing motion over the crouched figure of Jennifer.

“I won’t ever see him again. I don’t want ever--to see him again----”

“Sh! That’s right. She won’t ever see him again, Rarick. Don’t cry, sweet! Mother will help you. Nothing has happened between them; and for you to see Berry would not only be absurd, but dangerous. Your answer to Tom will only be the fact that Jennifer won’t ever see Berry again. Isn’t that right, Baby?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“We’re going away for a little while. Up to the Canadian camp--to fish--and get well. I’ll wire we’re arriving.” (Ramon could come up for a week.) “Aren’t we, Jennifer?”

“Yes, darling.”

“You hear, Rarick?” said Jenny, always rocking, always crooning. “We’re going up to camp--to rest--to get well.”

He sat dumb in the pool of his defeat, glorying, in a curious, crooked way, in the power of this angular, eccentric woman he called wife, to mother his children, yet filled with a crushing, impotent anger that baffled and tortured him because he could not define it.

“You go now, Rarick, while Jenny puts Jennifer to bed and gives her a bromide to make her sleep. Sh-h, my sweet----”

“Put me to sleep, Mother. Don’t let me finish dressing to go out and meet him----”

“Shh-h! Now go, Rarick, while Jenny puts Jennifer to sleep.”

With the sensation of having no sensation at all, Rarick pressed at the hand on his daughter and went stumbling from the room.

Dr. Gerkes was coming down the hall toward the small rear staircase he used for his exits. He had just had his dinner. A butler was hurrying with the remains of it hoisted on a tray. Gerkes was in his nondescript top-coat, his collar already turned up against a fine sifting November mist that was falling into the twilight.

Where might he be going? Wherever it was, the desire smote Rarick to join him.

Gerkes was going for one of his walks around the reservoir in the Park. He did a great deal of his work that way, pounding the neat geometry of footpath that inclosed the boxed-in waters for hours on end, formulating in his mind and hurrying back to write.

He was a known figure around that reservoir. Pedestrians, mostly with dogs, nodded to him. Men around the waterworks knew him. Many the blustery trip when he had things all to himself, and the grit of ice hung to his lashes, and the wind, into which he bent the top of his head, caused even his skimpy coat-tails to balloon.

“I’ll join you,” said Rarick, who was not much of a walker.

“Come along,” said Gerkes, practicing a rule never to be surprised. They descended by a grand staircase instead of Gerkes’s choice of a rear one, and two butlers swung them solemnly out of the doors that were copied from the Florentine Campanile, into the prickled gray wash of drizzling November.

Rain hung in the air like a curtain. It made of the evening a bead portière. Through it, lights climbed mistily up the new architecture of skyscraping buildings with receding terraces.

Rarick stood on his top step, no higher than a match to his house. Traffic rolled by, filled with the silhouette of lives that he supplied with their five-and-ten-cent needs.

It struck Rarick, in that moment while he paused for Gerkes to light his pipe, that his own house was little more than an omnibus filled with the hurrying figures of those who were also alien to him, except in so far as he supplied their five-and-ten-thousand-dollar needs.

Jennifer, as she had sped past him, in that instant before Jenny had snatched, had called, “Save me, Papa!” What atavism was that? Tucked away in what recesses of her haughty little heart was he papa to her? In the confusion, she had doubtless lost track. And yet the Jennys were not all to blame for the confusion. It was the confusion that had confused them.

_Crash_, was how his brain felt. The confusion of what seemed to Rarick the falling of huge copper disks through jazz-splintered space that was bottomless. And the space was divided into days. The days of the Raricks.

A battalion of red lights flashed down the Avenue; and in the sudden and, by contrast, deafening quiet halt of the traffic, the two men rushed softly, bodies bent, into the Park.

There were times when the sensation of the falling of the copper disks through the space that was divided into days, seemed to Rarick to go on plunging through the nights. It was as if his body were some kind of infinitude filled with a consciousness of tumult that was almost unbearable.

Even here, in the stretches of a park that held out arms of bare branches of trees to receive them into quiet, the tumult continued to shoot through him in disks.

Ballet Mécanique. The world of the Raricks, still rent with Jennifer’s cry of “Help me, Papa!” operated on a huge central piston, like a ceiling-high steel wheel in a power-house. Ballet Mécanique. Where had he first heard that phrase? Wherever, it stuck. Ballet Mécanique. His life, his being, his brain were a power-house for mechanical production. Production. Over-production. Bing! Bang! Razzle! Dazzle! Ten-cent hats for ten-cent heads. Five-thousand-dollar speed-boats for juniors. Production. Bing! Bang! Razzle! Dazzle! His brain was a switchboard, as high as his house was high, as square as this Reservoir around which they were tramping was square. Pip! Pop! Lights dancing in and out across the switchboard. Power. Man-power. Horse-power. Candle-power. Water-power. Brain-power. Ballet Mécanique. Out of the switchboard of the brain ran a thousand little snaky tubings, to be plunged into plugs. More red lights. Salted peanuts from Tennessee. Paper snakes from Nürnberg. Under-arm shields from Trenton. Scalloped doilies from Brooklyn. Leatherized bags from Oshkosh. Pearl buttons from Seattle. Candied prunes from Santa Clara. Pasteboard turtles from Tokio.

Production. The world had a hundred billion eyes that were lights on his switchboard brain. Give me wire nails out of Pittsburgh. Raw silk out of Shanghai. Size A-1 cans of peaches out of Sacramento. Washable baby-ribbon out of Lyons.

Ballet Mécanique. A hot copper disk ripped off the left plate of Rarick’s temple, as he bent into the light curtain of rain. And another. Disk after disk after disk, a flying world of them. They clattered, they clamored, they splintered the rain which spat against their heat. Ballet Mécanique. The jumping pistons. The coughing steam. The high cries of steel wheels under trains taking the steel curves of rails. The racing of leather belts over heads bent to the tricky business of inserting the bit of object into the machine at the instantaneously right instant. Pistons galumphing, steel elbows jerking. Wise old steel jaws yawning for pulp and spewing out products! Red light. White light. Up. Down. Galumph. Give me twenty sheets of tin at a gulp if you would have wire dish-cloths at the Five Cent tables. Galumph! Galumph! Two hundred yards of wire for the ten-cent boxes of assorted nails. Humdinger! Machine-stitched dish-cloths, three for ten. Ga-dash! Ga-dash! Oilcloth books for children. Clunk! Clank! Clink! Kodak-picture albums. Dip! Sizz! Squ! Incandescent bulbs. Spang! Pie-pans. Yeow! The Devil limping over Hell! Chicken-wire at ten cents a yard.

And off the wheel-sized disks that were exploding off the temple of Rarick, began to spin images of the snow-white, copper-banded yachts of the rich. Rows of casinos along white Rivieras, filled with overheated men and women in elbow-deep bracelets, breathing over baccarat. Boys, all with the chorister-faces of Avery, racing close to macadam roads in cigar-shaped speed-monsters that were doomed for collision with the disks. Hordes of Jennys in tight gowns with no backs, climbing up the sides of gold amphitheaters that had been greased, and falling back upon one another in riots of finery. Niagaras of ticker tape and men with kidney circles under their eyes, disappearing beneath the paper snow as it slid between their fingers. Motor-boats; chinchilla coats, a thousand trapped little beasts to the precious garment; four-hundred-thousand-dollar ballrooms; carved doors of a Campanile; seven town cars; sapphire anklets from Cartier’s; thirty-five room Adirondack camps; thirty-four servants; Jenny’s crystal bathtub; six thousand dollars’ worth of cotillion gewgaws; private cars to football games; eight-thousand-dollar steamship-suites; three-million-dollar life-insurance policies; bracelets, cymbals, shields; and, smothering under the bracelets and shields, the voice of a man’s daughter, remote--“Papa--help me----”

“Do you know,” said Gerkes, speaking for the first time as they turned homeward, “that certain anthropological researches seem to be proving conclusively that man owes the dawn of his brain-power to the ice age? When roots and berries, hitherto their principal foods, disappeared, they were obliged to hunt reindeer, and flesh was as easy to chew as raw oysters. That threw the jaw into disuse and gave the brain a chance to become the larger part of the head....”

In the twenty-three years since her brother’s marriage, Hildegarde Rarick, teacher in the primary grades in the public schools of Keokuk, had visited him three times. Two of these highly ceremonious occasions had taken place before the migration east.

Miss Rarick was as full of principles regarding her relationship to her brother’s rise to fortune, as a porcupine is full of quills. And, just so, she bristled with them.

From the very start, when rumors of Rarick’s engagement to quite a wealthy St. Louis girl had come floating toward her on wings of exaggerated gossip, Miss Rarick had taken her stand.

Nine years his senior, she had never, to use her own phraseology, been beholden to him, and did not intend to begin to be so now. Trained, by the same aunt who had reared Rarick, to become self-sustaining at an early age, she had become that while her young brother was still husking corn for pennies, shaking the uncongenial dust of the farm off her feet, and attending high and normal school in Keokuk by day, while she earned the upkeep nursing small children by night. She had seldom clapped eyes on her brother since. At well past fifty she was teaching the same grade, in the same school, on practically the same basis she had taught at twenty. The check for fifty dollars which had ultimately enabled Rarick to leave the farm for Keokuk, where he had boarded in the same house with his sister for two years, had come from Hildegarde.

He remembered this, and off and on for years had tried to ram down the resistance she put up against largesse from him; but she not only continued to refuse the slightest boon of any sort, but also vigorously resented any attempt on his part to merge her narrow path with what she was fond of terming “the primrose one” of his family.

It is not improbable that even Miss Rarick’s state-wide fame as the sister of John G. Rarick was equaled by the peculiar notoriety she enjoyed as the eccentric, socialistically inclined Miss Rarick, who would not accept a penny from her multimillionaire brother, but continued to live in the third-floor front room of the Bustanoby family on K Street and pay for that room (with light-housekeeping privileges) out of the underpaid earnings of a primary teacher.

It was good copy. Miss Rarick was not. She turned a narrow back on the vicarious distinction that was as sincerely terrifying to her as publicity can be to the obscure, and went her way, not, however, rejoicing.

Before the gyrations of fate, Jenny Avery, and fortune had wrenched the situation crazily away, Miss Rarick had entertained the neat plan of one day joining her brother in St. Louis, and, on a fifty-fifty basis, sharing an apartment with him. They were thus to become really acquainted, after the rather precarious years of their orphaned childhood, and work out one of those pleasant living arrangements that can sometimes be achieved even by relatives.

Rarick’s marriage had been a blow from which she had never completely risen back to normal. Everything that had happened subsequently she regarded as part of the huge prohibitive force that had come between her and the ideal of the joint living arrangement on the fifty-fifty basis with her brother.

Besides, from the first instant of her first visit to him, the year after his marriage, she had detested Jenny.

One of those pointed, Chesapeake-retriever women, all peak, had been her immediate and lasting appraisement.

“Do you mean beak?” asked her landlady, Mrs. Bustanoby, when Miss Rarick returned and related her impressions.

“No, peak!”

“Funny,” thought Mrs. Bustanoby. “Never thought of it before, but Miss Rarick is sort of all peak herself.”

She was, but in the most remote sense from which Jenny was that. She was off her brother’s pattern only to the extent of the rather thrust-up manner she had of carrying her head. Otherwise, in a sallow kind of coloring--said by relatives to be after her father, who had died on his sparce Iowa farm the year after John G.’s birth--and in the lean sloping shoulders--said by relatives to be off the pattern of her mother, who had died, lean and racked, bearing John G.--Miss Rarick was any narrow woman, whose thin lips had obviously never been coveted and whose eyes told that story with a thoroughly unconscious bitterness.

It synchronized with Miss Rarick’s idea of what she might expect from her sister-in-law, that she should arrive for a long-contemplated visit to her brother, her first trip to New York, by the way, the very evening after the Jennys had departed suddenly for the Canadian camp.

Rarick was on hand to meet her, and that fat Mr. Hellman, who handed her a telegram from Jenny, explaining Jennifer’s influenza and imperative need of change, and which Miss Rarick strongly suspected the fat Mr. Hellman of having maneuvered to send himself, by some such device as wiring a friend in Buffalo to wire back in Jenny’s name.

As a matter of fact, the telegram had actually come from Jenny, due to sharp admonitions from Rarick, but nothing could have suited Miss Rarick better than this sudden and allegedly imperative absence of Jenny. As for Jennifer and Avery, Miss Rarick had what amounted to a pathetic desire to know these offspring whom she knew as little as she knew their father. But even their absence was, in a sense, relief. It eased the strain of trying not to appear so completely what she knew she must appear, in their eyes.

It was the first year that Miss Rarick, after thirty-two years of teaching, was enjoying her leisure and her pension at the hands of the public-school department of her small city. For eight years she had planned to use the first two weeks of it becoming better acquainted with her brother.

Well, here she was. At sixty, Miss Rarick looked a nervous, an exacting, and a narrow sixty. She had strong black hair, a face almost the precise shape of an acorn, and penetrating black eyes that partially redeemed her from what might have been sallow ugliness.

She was a strange and rather dread person to Rarick. A cold, remote older sister, whose attitude had always been unspoken grievance, and yet who never would permit him, by deed, the only gesture of which he seemed capable, where she was concerned, to remove some of the cause for that grievance.

The fact that Jenny and Hildegarde were congenitally uncongenial, Rarick’s common sense had long since, after those first two harrowing weeks she had visited them when they were bride and groom in St. Louis, led him to accept without hope of retrieval.

But subsequently, Rarick considered that he had done everything possible, so far as his responsibility to this narrow, sloping-shouldered lady was concerned. Even in the first years of his rise to prosperity he had urged her to give up her teaching and live on the income he was beginning to be so well able to afford her.

Later, he had even gone so far as to send the junior partner of his firm of lawyers out to Keokuk, to discuss any arrangement that might be agreeable to Hildegarde, thus sparing her any direct endowment that might prove embarrassing to her.

Her consistency in her refusal to accept a favor from her brother remained flawless.

As Hellman expressed it inelegantly to his wife, “She’s a virgin even in her financial relations with her brother.”

To Rarick, the entire situation was detestable. Hildegarde’s punctiliousness about money matters bespoke an innate reverence for it that her behavior attempted to belie.

Only a woman with a deeply buried respect for the importance of money could have permitted herself so wide and conspicuous a gesture as refusing to accept it from one so well able to give. It was the sort of thing you were expected to respect enormously in a woman like Hildegarde. It was supposed to make her admirable; and did, to the citizenry of Keokuk, who would, for instance, have regarded her money unawareness of Gerkes as meretricious.

Rarick dreaded her. She got on his nerves. She was the antithesis of everything that set him on edge in the behaviorisms of his own family; and yet, he asked himself regarding this admirable woman, was Hildegarde, in the stark rigor of her life, any the better person?

Was he by way of falling into the easy indictment that the rich are all meretricious and the poor admirable?

Hildegarde was close to impeccability. Law, church, and society-abiding. Decent, moderate, principled. Her life was an open moor. It was a moor, all right. Not the moor, either, of heliotropes and mauves, where he had once spent a Christmas. Jenny, in the fashionable name of grouse-hunting, had hankered for a Scottish castle. Rarick had bought one, in Forfarshire, but after two seasons of social struggle that she decided were not worth the candle, Jenny had left it to gather moss and taxes. Rarick had since sold it, at a profit of two hundred thousand dollars, to a Californian with a wife who also hankered for mixed bag of deer, grouse, and social drag.

Hildegarde’s figurative moor was the moor of tradition and dictionary definition. A tract of waste land.

The night she arrived, and sat with Rarick in her high-neck black silk, a turquoise four-leaf clover her sole jewel, Rarick, visualizing his glittering Jennys in their places at his dinner table of point-lace and gold plate, felt a surge of bewilderment.

How righteous Hildegarde, in those smug precepts of life which so decorously divided right for her from wrong!

If only, looking at her, listening to her, talking with her, he could have felt that here, in this worthy life, were summed up some of the realizations, mental, moral, and spiritual, that he craved so for himself and his own.

Hildegarde was as hedged in by her grim principles as Jenny was by her lack of them.

She held to the rigid and somewhat obsolete socialism that all men are equal except for the accidental advantages which a capital-ridden country gives the rich one over the day laborer. No rich man could sincerely harbor the hope of a better poor man’s world and not choke over the cake that came to his table. Your true economic philosopher reduced himself, by giving away his fortune, to the impotency of poverty, and by virtue of the asinine inconsistency of shearing himself of his power to make his wealth work for his principles, thereby became cleansed.

“I think,” she told her brother at the conclusion of a long meal devoted to a discussion of the Kansas coal strikes, closed-shop conditions in Keokuk, the Protestant vote, and a pointed dissertation on lax youth, “that I shall take a ’bus first thing tomorrow and ride down into the congested districts.”

“I’ll send some one down with you into some of my model tenements.”

“I don’t suppose Jenny or the girl has much time to devote to study of that sort of thing?”

How smug she was! The mere fact of the omnibus irritated him. Her world operated on a pivot of ready-made principles. She cerebrated about practically nothing, but was quick to practice principle even when meaningless, as exemplified by the ’bus ride when there were idle cars in the garage at her disposal.

She had what Gerkes called a machine-stitched philosophy of the interval called life. All men are equal. Marx or somebody--maybe it was God--said so. No--Plato? Oh no, not Plato! That the scheme of the alleged equality of man did not work out that way, never had, was another matter. Well, anyway, all men were equal. Of course, nobody denied that somebody had to mine coal and somebody had to teach school, and it was important that electric lighting first be invented and then manufactured by somebody, and, of course, there must always be your Goethes and Edisons, your Beethovens, your paupers and your peasants, and, for some reason, the communities of men who must have been wood-choppers contemporaneously with Abraham Lincoln had remained unspecial, while he----Well, just the same, all men are equal. All men are equal in the eyes of God, anyway, even if He created some of them with low brain-power, low vitality, and a low competency to cope with His great ones of His earth.

How joyless she was! Men digging in subway ditches, women on hospital cots in wards, were jocular in a way she had never been capable of in her life. Life to Hildegarde was a roadbed bordered with spiked principles that shot up like telegraph-poles. She lived as narrowly within her precepts as Jenny and Jennifer lived within theirs. Regarding her across the crystal, this smote Rarick: “It was not what you thought about life. It was not even what you did about it. It was what, underneath all the superimposed structure, you inherently were!”

Take Gerkes, now. Doubting old rogue, the word-magic of phrases such as “the equality of man,” left him cool as a cucumber. He accepted their inequality coldly, but was inflamed with the impulse to do something about it on that basis. A better world for brick-layers, biologists, and bankers. He was a hog for truths, Gerkes was; and turning them up now and then with his perennially seeking spade was what kept life the exciting predicament it so apparently was for this lusterless-looking man in herring-bone gray and chalk dust.

God! God! God! Trying to reason out the rightness, the wrongness, the goodness, the badness of life; of the lives around him, of his own, of his narrow sister sitting there in the unconscious attitude of holier-than-thou, munching an almond as if she had not sufficient saliva for its enjoyment, the old panic arising out of his sense of impotency, smote Rarick.

Certain people, he knew, were afflicted with a fear of high places. Their sensations must be akin to this feeling of his. Insane fear of loss of equilibrium. Need to feel his feet grip more closely the earth that spun away from them.

“That is how I shall spend tomorrow, Rarick. No need for you to bother about me. I shall take an omnibus down to the congested districts.”

He looked at her and felt that his laughter came like a bray.

“Why not the Second Avenue surface car?” he suggested. And then to himself, “You’ll find it much more righteously uncomfortable.”

A thought that he confessed to himself was more amusing than really valid, began to turn in Rarick’s head during the following two weeks of his sister’s visit. He had urged her, out of what Miss Rarick sniffingly referred to as the politeness of his heart, to prolong her stay indefinitely, or at least specifically until the return of the Jennys.

That was impossible. Miss Rarick was due back in Keokuk for the annual meeting of the executive board of the Keokuk Home for Wayward Girls, of which she was secretary and treasurer.

For seventeen years she had not missed one of these board meetings. It was her boast, Trojan that she was at raising funds _via_ the charity bazaar, the church social, and the Christmas drive, that she had never approached her brother for so much as one penny contribution to her favorite philanthropy. Roiled at her principles, which he found so tiresome and conspicuous, Rarick had never volunteered to contribute.

It lurked in Hildegarde, rankled there. She meant, some day, in the course of an unburdening of herself to Rarick which she had rehearsed for years, to confront him with this omission, along with countless other stored-away grievances she harbored. She had even rehearsed the phraseology in which she would throw up to him the fact that the sister of one of the richest men in the world was obliged to see her pet philanthropy actually want for built-in bathtubs! Without ever coming to the point, she was elaborate in her explanations of what was taking her back to Keokuk before the return of the Jennys.

Over and over again she recounted, to his adamant smile, the shortness of budget, the hovering mortgage, the crying need for lavatories with built-in bathtubs, laundries where the girls could do their own washings-out (a good bright laundry would keep many a girl off the street of an evening).

With the same elaborate politeness Rarick listened, as determined that she would ask for what she wanted as Hildegarde was determined not to ask.

“Speak, Fido,” said Rarick, with his look of amused silence.

“Why, I’ve had girls come to me since we’ve put up the cretonne curtains in the recreation-room at the Home and say to me, ‘Miss Rarick, funny thing, but I just don’t feel like running around nights any more!’ That girl did not realize it, but the simple fact of bright and cozy surroundings was filling a need in her.”

It was at that stage that the impulse to throttle, until the prim words fairly bounced off her lips, would overtake Rarick, causing him to smile through his outrageous sense of aggravation. It was at times like this that he could visualize his daughter, her knees crossed, probably revealing their bareness, her mocking eyes pouring their naughty contempt: “Keep the laundry brightly lighted,” or “Cretonnes cure the canker in many a lassie’s heart.”

Nevertheless, it was out of the evenings that he spent with his sister, Dr. Gerkes looking in on many of them, that the thought which was more amusing than really valid began to bestir itself.

Hildegarde and Gerkes got on well. He let her talk. Once or twice they had attended the opera together, two straight, narrow, and dun-colored figures, in the Rarick box from which the Jennys usually contributed their share of blaze to the tier.

Hildegarde admired Gerkes. Sometimes Rarick suspected her of being more interested in Gerkes himself than in his collections, over which she craned a long, conscientious neck; but the fact remained that she assisted him in various catalogue work, classified some Eskimo needle-cases and Upper Magdalenian harpoons for him, and attended those of his lectures before the Anthropological Institute which were open to the general public.

“It’s been a liberal education,” Hildegarde told her brother one evening after she had returned from one of these lectures. “A person could live a lifetime and never learn some of the things I have tonight about prehistoric man. And as for Miocene apes--well! And that skull recently discovered at Taunga--in Bechuanaland--yes, that’s right. I jotted it down in my notes. Just fancy there being a place called Bechuanaland! Mighty interesting! Live and learn. Have you seen those stereopticon views of human skulls that Dr. Gerkes took in Alaska? Mighty instructive.”

Gerkes came in then, tamping down his pipe. “I wish,” he said, his mood facetiously biotic, “that the element of the human race which sees fit to attend these so-called popular lectures of mine was as interested in the story of its life as the ladies in my tonight’s audience, judging from the flashing of pocket mirrors, were in the angle of light-refraction on their noses. Do you know what Piltdown women are supposed to have used for vanity-cases, Miss Rarick----”

“Dr. Gerkes, I was just remarking to my brother, your lecture tonight has been a liberal education. And to think I never knew there was such a thing as the Mousterian industry....”

“Did you ever hear the story, Miss Rarick, of the _Pithecanthropus erectus_ who got into an argument with a small saurian creature of snake-like stature?...”

“Now, Dr. Gerkes, you’re going to tease!”

“Perhaps I am,” sighed the doctor, “and you’ve reminded me that I’m too tired for it. Rarick, would you raise your gloating eye from the bloody fire of those balas-rubies, touch the sapphire button with which you summon slaves, and ask the fourteenth eunuch to bring me a large bowl with one inch of _fin_ champagne? To swing one inch of _fin_ champagne around a rock-crystal basin, Miss Rarick, makes the swinging of the filigree-and-tourmaline censers seem commonplace.”

“Explain to my sister, Dr. Gerkes, that reference to the tourmaline censers. That is one of them, hanging up over the Cimabue Madonna there, Hildegarde.”

“Don’t mind if I turn off the ‘Tales of Hoffman,’ do you, Rarick? Those doll-babies get me fuddled.”

It was out of evenings often as oblique as this one that the idea in Rarick’s mind ceased to be quaint and became remotely feasible. Why not? Here were two lone souls playing a solitary game. Hildegarde might react to matrimony as a stiff sponge softens in water. Here might be a new and receptive Hildegarde, who would accept, in the name of their wedding, the financial endowments Rarick could so legitimately bestow.

Gerkes had countless times given voice to the wear and tear upon him of these lectures. Gerkes needed leisure, repose of mind, money, isolation. Hildegarde was past the time when the secluded walks of life would be irksome. Gerkes had constantly spoken about his intention of one day seeking out again, what to him had been the beauty and the fine seclusion of Alaska. Why not? Hildegarde had no youth to shed. Both she and Gerkes, for that matter, were adults about life. If Gerkes was playful about it all, it was partly because his lust for the truth of it revealed to him the unexpected grins, like crevices occurring in terrific masses of granite.

Why not? Given these two people; a dower of a million; facilities; leisure for research. A million for every new truth. Two million! Why not?

Rarick was saved from what might have been an embarrassing hole to have stepped into, in this friendship that was so very special to him, by the soft-footed diplomacy with which he approached the subject the last evening of Hidegarde’s visit, after she had bidden good night to the two men still seated over their Cointreau, and ascended to the mauve-and-gold suite of rooms that suited her sparseness so mockingly.

First there had been some talk of a nature that, to his surprise, was so inwardly exciting to Rarick, that it was all he could do to control his voice.

Gerkes had gone off, on the slight impetus of an irrelevant remark about the Rockefeller Foundation, upon the subject of constructive philanthropies, and from that to the more general discussion of vast personal fortunes and their dispensation. It was like him to be able to think aloud on a subject so intimately relevant to Rarick, as impersonally as if he were discussing the map of Great Britain after the Würm glaciation. What he had to say along lines that were fairly hackneyed, for one reason or another, set Rarick to thinking along lines that were new. A slight talk; scarcely more than the thread of a discourse, considering how far-reaching were to be its results.

“I am convinced that the basis of progress, Rarick, is prevention.”

“Prevention?”

“Yes. Prevent cancer. It will save the more expensive process of eliminating it. Prevent slums. Prevent wars. Prevent disease. Prevent social abuses. That not only takes terrific moneys, it takes an excess of imagination. A man will give his money to eliminate cancer. It is another matter to make a man living in a cancerless world visualize the incalculable importance of cancer-prevention. Rockefeller Foundation is a rare and fine example of subtle, far-reaching, and humanitarian expenditure of acquired wealth. A man doing that kind of philanthropy in his lifetime, instead of leaving fortunes to organizations and causes that may outlive their usefulness a few years after his death, displays the power to distribute as well as accumulate. That’s what makes this little story of mankind that I putter around with, a full-size job. Finding out the bad places ahead, and then steering around them, preventing.”

“That’s a pretty big order of a thought, Gerkes.”

“Nothing particularly new about it. Preventive philanthropy is here.”

“It’s new if a fellow hasn’t given it any particular thought.”

“It’s a more thankless job to prevent hookworm than to cure it.”

“Doubtless. But the basis of progress, I’ve always held, in my business, is elimination, Gerkes. Get rid of excess baggage----”

“I maintain, avoid excess baggage.”

“There’s a world of practical wisdom behind that idea.”

“I’m going to bury myself behind that idea some day--north--where the nights are long and cold and quiet--fit for a man to work in.”

Out of a ten-minute silence that continued to be as inwardly exciting as anything that had ever happened to him, filled as it was with the words of Gerkes surging in birth against the brain of Rarick, there came from Rarick something, this laconic:

“Wonder you don’t marry, Gerkes, before you dig yourself into those long Arctic nights you’re always talking about.”

“Extraordinary you should mention that.”

What then! The sly fellow had lifted the thought off his mind.

“Fact is, Rarick, I’m about to.”

(Sly fellow.)

“Yes?”

(Could it be that Hildegarde had been equally sly? Good!)

“Yes.”

“Yes? Have I met the lady?”

“No.”

“Oh!”

Silence.

“Who is she?”

“An Eskimo.”

“A what?”

“Eskimo. I met Illun twelve years ago on my first expedition to Mackenzie River. Her father is a fur-trader.”

“Eskimo!”

“Yes. Then, six years ago, I met her in Nome, where she was stopping with her father’s brother, also a trader, and attending high school.”

“So....”

“She’s back in Alaska now, teaching. The Eskimos are close about family ties and the old mother is pretty well along. We’ve drifted for years. Waiting. But I have about made up my mind that too much is enough. Life is passing us by. I’m going back, Rarick.”

“For her?”

“No, to her. Curious thing, from your point of view, anyhow, but Eskimos, accustomed as they are to rigors of climate, do not thrive in our so-called temperate parts. I do in theirs. I’m going to them.”

“I see.” Gerkes, Rarick figured, as he sat dumbfounded, would have received news as surprising to him as this was to Rarick, with the non-committal attitude of one who is the complete cosmopolite. Besides, one did not betray anything so personal as surprise to Gerkes.

“The old folks still live out on the edge of the town. But Illun, who is teaching in the next village, lives with an American family of missionaries named Anderson. For solid comfort, Rarick,” said Gerkes, taking the crystal bowl of _fin_ champagne from a butler, “I recommend a well-built Eskimo house.”

“I see.”

“I’ve work to do, Rarick. This scheme of life down here lures me away from singleness of purpose. At my best, Rarick, when I’m surrounded by the world itself, instead of its clatter, I’ve a single-track mind. One thing matters pretty terribly to me. Facts. Then from there, truth.”

“Fine. Fine.”

“I need leisure. These lectures--pah! I need simplicity. I need the long white nights for work and my leisure for the contacts with the strange wisdoms of simple people. I need to think. Life with Illun on the Colville River can give me all these. Can you understand this? Down here, everything is going out, precious little coming in. I need leisure, Rarick, damnably, and my finger-nails out of my palms. I’ve books to write. Collections to assemble. There is knowledge and truth for me to unearth before I bow out in demise. I am one of those scientific-minded hounds with a nose to the truth-scent. Facts are more panoramic, more majestic, more extraordinary than fantasy. I need leisure to run them down.”

“And money?”

“God, yes!”

“Would you still go North?”

“More than ever. I tell you, I’m digging in, Rarick, for my long white night. A woman who is attractive to me. Books. Leisure. Simplicity. My big work now lies in assembling knowledge. I need money for men who are still young enough to get out into the fields and feed my mind with their findings. I want to send an expedition to Abyssinia to do some digging there. I want to study certain of the flying-bases between Nome and Shanghai. There are weather observations I want made, over a sustained period, from a Greenland observatory. I want men to follow up the fine excavations that Scotelly started last year before his death in Brindisi. My active years are done. Now I want to assemble and deduce.”

“I’m going to give you the money for that, Gerkes.”

“That’s mighty fine of you, Rarick. I’ve wondered a bit about you and your plans for making your wealth reap. The root of all evil lies in the root. As I was saying, there is curative and preventive philanthropy. Forestall the root. The great trend of modern humanitarianism, Rarick, lies in preventive measures. The way to prevent fallacy is to know truth. Buy truth with your money, Rarick; it is cheap at any price. Bear that in mind when you decide to put your terrific house in order.”

“I’d like to give you a million, Gerkes.”

“The world, Rarick, is your debtor for that. Not I.”

“I’ll assign it as an endowment to you.”

“No, don’t do that. Organize a fund-committee to finance my expeditions as I need and form them. One that will keep me in bounds, but at the same time give me free enough rein in my choice of actual and intellectual excavation.”

“And you?”

“Leave me out, Rarick. I’m headed for my white nights of long leisure.”

“Even there, you must live.”

“I’ve saved a bit.”

“How much?”

“I think I stack up to somewhere around fifteen hundred in the bank.”

“You’ll need more.”

“Well, you might allow me about fifty a month, Rarick, if you’ve a mind to. It will cost me around that much to afford the leisure for work.”

It occurred to Rarick, sitting there, sharing with his friend their unspoken pangs at the prospect of parting, that it cost his own family about eighteen thousand dollars a week, to afford leisure for play.

Three weeks later, the Jennys made the trip down from upper Quebec by motor, a second car, containing two personal maids and the lighter luggage, following.

A premature burst of spring was already on the heels of a languid winter, so that much of the trip was taken on dry roads and to the first freckling of foliage.

Lovely. Lovely. Lovely. Particularly lovely to a pallid Jennifer, who had a habit nowadays of seeing through a glass not so much darkly, as dimly. Low vitality, her doctors easily termed it. There was no form yet to the leaves, or even color. Just the soft pointed promise of them. Lovely. Lovely. Lovely.

Jenny, whose effort all the way down from Canada had been not to seem too constantly excited, was grateful, too, for the loveliness. It helped to account for the exultant something that kept rising and overflowing in her. Ramon was along!

He had spent two of the three weeks with them in camp. Jennifer had been glad for her mother’s sake. Her incredible mother, who could while away time, for want of something better, with this boy, pleasant enough timber for an evening’s flirtation, provided there was plenty of the slow windings of tango music to sustain illusion, but who had actually sufficed to keep her mother amused during all of what might have been the interminable stretches of their stay at camp.

Could it be that he was smitten with her mother? The slim thought trailed through her tired mind and petered out as she sat looking out at the flashing of spring....

How good her mother had been! How heavenly good! From that strange and terrifying moment when her father had sat looking at her as if his eyes were conflagrations that would leap out in flame over her body, the dearness of Jenny had poured like sweet oil over the terrible burnings from those eyes.

The indulgent compassion of this woman where her children were concerned! What if she petted them even more than she pitied or understood them? What if to try to explain to Jenny the minute phases of her torture was to bring down upon herself an avalanche of automatic maternalism that sometimes made her wild with frenzy!

“Mother, please, please don’t keep on talking. You’ve said that over and over again. I know you think there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. You’ve told me. What good does that do me if I don’t care what is in the sea? For God’s sake, Mother, please----”

Not even such an outburst could puncture the quality of Jenny’s compassion.

“He’s not worth the nail of your little finger, much less the mental anguish you are wasting on him.”

“I know. I know. I know it all by heart. Only don’t keep on saying it, mother, or I’ll go screaming mad.”

“I know, dear, I know. I know.”

“You know!” laughed Jennifer, scornfully, one midnight when clad in pajamas, she had been walking the floor of the long living-room of the main camp, and her mother, hearing her, had tiptoed down with a fur coat thrown over the flimsiness of her nightdress. “You know!” Jennifer had risen from a sleepless bed, and her hair was tousled and angry-looking, and one of her cheeks, too hot, was smeared with crinkles from where it had dug and dug into the pillow. “You know! What do you know of anything that I am going through!”