Chapter VII: Part 7

What did Jenny know? Thank God, Jennifer did not know what she knew; but just the same, sitting wrapped in fur, she hugged herself with knowing. What did Jenny know? She knew the torment and the ecstasy of Jennifer, because they were boiling within her, too--every one of these precious spring-kissed days and nights.

Upstairs, since they had not troubled to open the men’s dormitory-camp, in a beautiful old spool-bed, Ramon, who had arrived a few days before, was asleep under sheets that she had personally laid out for him; under thick silk puffs that she had personally chosen. There would be the first two crocuses of spring on his breakfast tray that she would journey down to the edge of the wild blue lake to pick. What did the older Jenny know of the excruciating pangs of love? Impudent Jennifer, to assume she knew little.

“My darling, you are all unnerved----”

“I know I’m your darling, mother, and that I am unnerved, but, for God’s sake, don’t keep telling me about it!”

“My darling, do you know what a serious nervous breakdown you are sure to have if----”

“Pretty question. Oh, no! I don’t know. I think, instead, that I am lying in the arms of my lover--his lips are soft----”

“Jennifer!”

“O God! mother, I’m flighty! I didn’t mean that. I loathe his lips.”

“Of course you do, darling. He’s a dog. My poor darling!”

“I’m a fine darling.”

“I’ll get you well, my sweet. You’re in a trance of infatuation now. You can’t help it. Mother understands.”

Strange words for one Jenny to be using to another.

Scene after scene Jenny had lived through with Jennifer those weeks, walking her through woods of wild, frozen beauty; through stiff March winds, until their limbs sagged. Tiring Jennifer. Exhausting her. Imbuing her with a sense of nausea for the potion she was craving, until, the last week of their stay, Jennifer was sleeping through entire nights.

Ecstatic nights for Jenny, wakeful even in her tiredness, as she lay there under the same roof with Ramon....

Riding homeward through the woods that were preening themselves for outburst, the something that Jennifer had promised Jenny was dead within her, began to lift its head. Through woods of running sap she was riding back to the city that contained Berry! He would be under a roof that was no farther from hers on Fifth Avenue than the lake had been from the camp. Berry was at the end of this beautiful trail. Would be within easy telephone call. Within messenger call. Berry! Poor boy! How bewildered he must have been these weeks, since that night she had stood him up as he waited for her in his car at a spot which she had appointed at a west-side gate to the Park. The letters she had written him since and never sent! There was one now, tucked on the flesh side of the single little orchid-colored undergarment she wore. The gravitation of the universe was toward Berry----

Mother had been a brick, all right, content to have burrowed-in up there at camp, while there was some of the season left in town, to say nothing of Florida. Making the best of the unseasonable isolation, content to sit in the back of the car all the hours of riding with Ramon, while she crouched silently beside the chauffeur, where there was relief from the din of talk. Mother had been a brick, all right, but, oh, how damned, damned, damned futile! As if you could stop Niagara with a handkerchief. As if you could douse a house-afire, with a squirt of eau-de-Cologne.

Jennifer had learned to sleep in camp. That meant Jennifer was getting well. That meant Jennifer was coming out of the trance of the infatuation for Berry, who wasn’t worth her little finger-nail. Jennifer had promised. Darling dumb-bell Jenny; when the truth of it was that Jennifer was flying back on purring motors to the land of Berry. He was in New York. Madness of her, to have let them put miles between them. He was in New York--enchanted destination.

It was difficult; it was impossible, sitting up there beside the chauffeur, spinning through spring, to discipline one’s thoughts, when the craving set in to see Berry. Just to be with him, to watch the squint come out along his eyelids when he talked; to get the faint cool scent of him; to tremble to his nearness; to withhold the hands from making little curved cups of themselves to inclose his cheeks. His strong hair that was full of a strange electric life. Berry’s life. It was hard to keep down an insanity of desire through the craving, and to sit silently beside the chauffeur and say to oneself, as a child repeats a catechism: “No-good Berry. Cad. Snide. Here is a man about to be a father. Jennifer, have you no pride? No decencies? No. No. No. And, damn it, I’m glad!” The days were fiery furnaces of desire for Berry. The nights. The weeks. The ride all the way to New York, hills, dales, mountains, rim-roads, and the thick slush of thawing mud, was one such fiery furnace.

Thank God, Jenny was content to sit with that beautiful nobody-home of a Ramon there on the back-seat and let her be.

At Albany she could already begin to feel, in anticipation, that moment of the rounding of her fingers about the pink-enamel French telephone in her boudoir, that would bring Berry’s voice to her. It was wonderful to be able to crave until you suffered like that. Why not? Who was to say where sacred love began and profane love left off? What had Nature’s scheme to do with puny, man-made ones? They had sent her scuttling away like any finishing-school girl, to get over a love-affair, as if miles were a panacea. If you could speak of this leaping terrific glory of a thing that was her passion for Berry in the innocuous terms of “love-affair,” then the Himalayas were pretty, the Grand Canyon cute, and God a right nice God.

Two hours below Albany, Jenny placed her hand in its white crinkled gauntlet, along her daughter’s arm.

“Jennifer dear, we’ll go down along the West Side, by way of the river drive, so we can drop Ramon at his apartment before we go home.”

Damn! Damn! Damn! That would delay them ten minutes. Her fingers ached for the pink-enamel telephone....

On the other hand, to Jenny, the river drive meant a detour, and ten minutes longer with Ramon.

* * * * *

It was not quite dusk when the car slid up before the doors that had been copied from the Florentine Campanile. A messenger boy was running down the steps. In fact, the doors that had swung open to emit him remained open to admit the mistress of her house and her daughter, chauffeurs, maids, and butlers already scurrying in the service entrance with furs, bags, and what not.

It was strange, in a household where the telegraph-boy was a figure woven carelessly into the pattern of every-day, that the sight of this one running down the steps should have bitten into Jenny’s heart with a pang of scare.

“Was that telegram for me?” she asked.

“No, madam, for Mr. Rarick.”

“Where is he?”

“In the library. Shall I let him know that you have returned?”

“No.”

“If you don’t mind, mother, I’ll rush on up to my rooms to rest--alone----”

“Yes, Jennifer.”

For some reason which she was later never able to analyze, Jenny, instead of following Jennifer to the left, and thereby avoiding the chance of an immediate encounter with Rarick, went up by the right of the broad staircase, and, trailing her heavy motor coat back off her shoulders, hurried to the library.

Its beautiful quality of dusk, as she entered, was being rattled into by the mechanical organ, which was repeating the famous “_Ah! fors e lui_” of Violetta, as if some one had forgotten to turn it off, the stained-glass story of “La Traviata” marching before Rarick, who was seated at the far end of the room in his unicorn chair, a telegram crushed in the hand from which he had just read it.

On one of those flashes out of the blue about which one hears but which one so seldom sees, Jenny looked at her husband calmly and said, “Avery is dead.”

He began to nod his head, regarding her all the while with eyes made out of two white chinies.

She started to laugh. She could not stop. She could not stop, because Rarick, sitting there, could not seem to stop nodding. And, nodding, didn’t he look for all the world like the bisque bull that used to stand on the mantelpiece in the pressed-brick house of her parents in St. Louis? It had been a black-and-white china bull, with a head that nodded. Every time there were to be guests, her mother used to tiptoe in just before arrivals and start it nodding.

Rarick, replying to her that Avery was dead, kept on nodding like that bisque bull....

To think that out of the innocent dawn of a new day could be minted the phrase, “Avery is dead.” That phrase had not existed yesterday.

Twenty-four hours before, Avery had been alive, and, mark you, need not have died. This was not death inevitable and God’s will be done. This was not death demanding.

Avery had killed himself.

There had been a small note, written in blue pencil, and stuck into a mirror in his bedroom:

Dears, it was too much.... A.

They had followed the scent of gas and wrenched the tube from between his teeth.

“They” (a landlady and a negro houseman in a white-duck coat) had been the first to stumble across the strange and almost unendurably precious fact of the death of this life.

“They” had turned in police alarms about it.

And it should have been handled so privately; as privately as the slender spar of a body that had been Avery had suffered. And instead, over this wounded-to-death boy in his casket, the newspapers of the country had become a giant composite ass, braying:

SON OF FIVE-AND-TEN MULTIMILLIONAIRE KILLS SELF NEAR COLLEGE CAMPUS

FAMILY UNABLE TO ATTRIBUTE MOTIVE FOR THE SUICIDE

NOTE FROM HIS FATHER, JOHN G. RARICK, FORBIDDING HIM THE PURCHASE OF
A SEVERAL-THOUSAND-DOLLAR CAMP-EQUIPMENT FOUND AMONG HIS EFFECTS

ANOTHER COLLEGE SUICIDE

ONLY SON OF JOHN G. RARICK, AMERICAN CHAIN-STORE MILLIONAIRE,
DISCOVERED BY LANDLADY DEAD FROM ASPHYXIATION

DEATH ATTRIBUTED TO DEMAND FOR LUXURIES WHICH WERE DENIED HIM BY
SELF-MADE FATHER

SOCIETY SHOCKED BY SUICIDE DEATH OF ONLY SON OF JOHN G. RARICK. COMES
AS SHOCK TO FAMILY. MRS. RARICK PROSTRATED. FAMILY IN SECLUSION.

Let them bray. Let them bray. It was better so. It covered up the private, timid truth. The truth lay scattered in documents, some of them torn across the page; in composition-books filled with boyish scrawls; in half-written letters; in hand-written and hand-bound volumes of verse that lay in a heap on the table on which John Rarick leaned his face into his hands.

It was as if the contents of the heart of Avery, the soul and the mind of Avery, unlocked from the vault of his nineteen years, had been spilled there in broken utterances of torment.

This was his boy out there, in strange autopsy before him, the history of his defeat, his pain, his lightnings of ecstasy that had apparently been as unbearable as the pain, like chipped bits of cornice of the now cold marble of his being.

There, spread over the table, in writings, were the truths that for nineteen years had lain hidden from his father by the mere wall of boy-flesh.

God! God! God! That wall had been flesh of Rarick’s and yet it had shut him out. The door through that wall, not forty-eight hours before, had been a living, breathing heart with a key to it--nobody to blame--nobody to blame--least of all Avery--except--unbearable loneliness of the thought--not even his mother had ever found the key to it. Certainly Rarick had not.

He beat with his fists upon the table; he scorched his eyes upon the revealing lines of the documents that had been brought him from his dead son’s effects. He read and reread:

This boy, then, written there on the scraps of paper, whose torment had been the strange inchoate torment of poet, adolescent, dreamer and diviner, potential lover, and adventurer in Hellenic islands around which flowed the blue Mediterranean of imagination, had been the Avery of the flesh. The fledgling who had smoked the strange little hooked pipes, that looked insolent and smelled badly. The Avery who had piled up card debts. The Avery whose wants, at least as interpreted by his mother, God forgive her, had been the speed motor-boats, the special-body roadsters, the dressing-cases, gold-fitted, the five-thousand-dollar camping outfits, the monstrous checking accounts, polo ponies....

Some lispings of what Avery had really wanted rose in faint perfume off the pages of the book of sophomoric verse which he had written in a fine, painstaking, private kind of chirography that bore no resemblance to the modish scrawl he had shown the world.

Even his very handwriting had seemed to curl inward--away----

He had tried, in those notebooks, for the perfection of the sonnet. In fourteen lines, had begged the right to “walk the untessellated grandeur of simplicity.” The boy who at seventeen had appeared in Sunday rotogravure sections for the perfection of his riding-accouterments, wrote in plaintive, if obviously Shelleyan mood of that “brighter freedom,” and of “peace, cerulean-blue.” Sang in whispered numbers among the ruled pages of the composition-books of “the pain that lies under the heart and is canker there.” Rarick followed these lines with the stub of his finger, and went back again and again. “The pain that lies under the heart and is canker there....”

“Avery, was that your only heritage from me ... that hurting canker there...?”

Dears, it was too much.... A.

What was too much? Jenny, you, up there, can you answer that? What had been too much for him? What had?

His bewilderment had been too much. His frailty, his hunger, glimpsed through darting, wing-swift beauties. His desire for some one to share those moments when “pain broke like surf into starry ecstasy.” Page after page of Avery, in treble, sophomoric mood, crying for a hand in his, through the aisles that were tormentingly black....

Avery, boy, why not my hand? I would have given....

Life had been too much for him.

Pages and pages of saying it in treble iambic and slenderly lyric sonneteering.

There was free verse too, waddling thinly down the white sheets. “My heart is a grail of many-colored glass. It contains me--and yet--want out--translucent whiteness----”

Not bathos to Rarick, nor mewling of a spirit in the throes of trying to cast off its swaddlings. But Avery, whose heart had died wanting the Pyrenees.

And this was the boy whom his father had not dared to approach on even the matter of an experimental theater....

This was the boy....

There were pages of the journal that broke the heart, when it was endurable to read them through.... “My dear mother, who is everything to me and absolutely nothing....”

“When I look at my own mother and father, I realize that I have never seen anything so beautiful as their marriage is dreadful ... there are worse lonelinesses than mine ... whom I admire so much more than I like.... Would like to go up to him and say.... Look here, Father----Why--why--cannot even write it----”

Say it to me now, son. It may seem too late, but not for everything. Say it to me now----

“... Mother, now, has nothing to fall back upon but the excitements that take the place of imagination. What I cannot understand is Jennifer, who is so much more than clever, and yet to whom cleverness matters above everything--nice Jennifer who cares so terribly--about the things that are not worth caring about ... if only father would ... if only father would----”

That, too, was unfinished. If only father would what? Call it back to me, Avery--if only father would what?----

There was a fragment of a letter that had apparently been crushed and torn in three pieces. A third of it was left. It had been written to his father on the subject of a year he wished to spend in Paris.

“... months of hesitation lie behind this request--feel the need of getting my bearings--think we could understand each other if only--my great admiration for you--hesitate to say--too much for me--time to think--alone--hesitate--unable to say to you face to face--what I--alone to think and work and dream--please don’t think--beauty of ideals--please don’t think--young man must believe first and--hesitate to say--Father please----”

Upstairs, Jenny lay on her bed, chill after chill of crushed heart, crushed pride, crushed hope, racking her thin body. Rarick had tried his part in comforting, but everyone who appeared in the room seemed to stalk at her out of this catastrophe, so finally the doctor forbade even Rarick, or Jennifer, who sat for the most part in her bedroom, close to its pale walls, and huddled there.

Down in the library, which seemed to wrap itself grandly about this occasion, was stretched the boy out of whose incredible act had sprung the new-coined phrase, “Avery is dead,” lying straight and beautiful as ivory in his casket.

“God! God! God!” cried Rarick from his clenched lips, through his clenched eyelids, down into his clenched heart. “Teach me through my failure! Avery, call back to me!...”

No way to turn....

Yet, out of all the deluge of mail and telegrams and cablegrams that came pouring through the defeated silence of that house, was one for Rarick, a Western Union message that he kept folded in his pocket and took out to reread occasionally.

At first he had not recognized the signature:

I think I understand the thing you did not get said to Avery.

GRATTON DAVIES.

Gratton Davies? Ah, ah, yes! That likable young fellow on the committee, who had written _Herod’s Mask_.

Somehow it was the only message out of hundreds that was to open the way for tears to work their thin, tortuous way from his clenched heart to his clenched eyelids.

JENNY

What, what, in God’s name, had prompted this death act of Avery’s? How could this darling of her indulgence, her adoration, have snipped the cord that bound his heart to hers, as casually as you would snip the cord on a candy-box?

How could an offshoot of her own body-fiber have committed an act so outside the dimensions of her own comprehensions?

One did things like this for concrete reasons. There had been no love-affair. Avery’s adolescence had been almost too timid. There had been no debts. Notwithstanding the ugly and humiliating innuendos of the headlines, Jenny had always seen to it that Avery’s pockets were well stocked, even when his bank account was exhausted and his father questioning and stern.

Slow, smoldering conviction became Jenny’s that Rarick had been the stone wall before which Avery had found life meaningless.

Rarick had crossed him so constantly. Passively, rather more than by deed or stricture. That was what made it maddening to her and subtle. You could not quite put your finger on--anything. And yet, it was impossible not to know how dumbly and how gropingly he had failed to understand his boy. Rarick was not vicious. He was just part of the failure.... Her heart even bled for him, as he sat alone, looking at the glow in his stones for hours on end now, or with Gerkes, in those weeks preceding his departure, while the organ plowed up the more melodious of the operas. Sometimes, particularly after the departure of Gerkes for absurd points north, Rarick was just sitting. Pity of a sort lay in her heart for him. Pity of sorts lay in her heart for herself.

She had been a good mother, neither Avery nor Jennifer nor even Rarick himself had denied her that. Wherein had she failed? Or had Avery failed? Her dear. Her beautiful. She had seen to it that his hands were crammed unto bursting with all her love and indulgence could give him. Nor had she stopped there, which would have made indictment of her easy. She had crept into his spiritual life as far as she dared. She had once discharged one of his tutors whom she suspected of being agnostic. When Avery was twelve, she had attended a series of morning lectures, at the Plaza, on “You and Your Child,” and had taken him for a drive one morning before he left for Newberry, and told him “plain little facts,” to which he had politely listened, without surprise or embarrassment, or even, she suspected, enlightenment. The one, “Babies, dear, do not just grow under the heart; it is not quite so simple as that,” had not quite come off as the lecturer had anticipated. Avery had sniggered.

But he had sent her roses that afternoon. When he was only fourteen, there had been grace to Avery! Tears were at the edges of her lids these months after the death, ever quick ones, ready to flow.

To go back and back and back, could there, after all, have been a hopeless passion for a girl? Or a woman? Or was there something secret and terrible that a mother could not understand? Ah no! Avery was innocent. There was the case of young Tremoil, the college-senior son of Augustin Tremoil, president of the Civic Bank, who had been a college suicide over his hopeless infatuation for the happily married wife, eleven years his senior, of a French viscount. No, no, there had been no such attachment in the life of this boy of hers. Nothing in his papers indicated it. Or, for that matter, indicated anything. Just bits of verse--so sweet--and the journals of any growing lad. She had not read them through. Rarick had sort of hogged them greedily for himself, as if for what comfort he could squeeze out of them. Jenny had for herself the sweet, personal mementoes. Things. Avery’s beautiful platinum watch, the flatness of a dollar, that had ticked near to the dear tick of his heart. Avery’s beautiful books. This superb edition of Shelley. His collection of portraits of Shelley. His beautiful pearl studs that had lain to the beat of his dear heart. She had thought of the pearly quality of his pallor as she had purchased the set. Avery’s signed photograph of Tagore. Out of it all, Jennifer had only asked for his mauled copy of Marie Bashkirtseff.

Yes, Jenny had the dear things. Over them she cried and she cried. His own portrait, in a soft shirt open at the neck, and his fair hair seeming to fly backward to some breeze.

Dears, it was too much.... A.

What was too much, my darling? Avery, my darling, what, oh, what? Avery, am I in a dream? Are you dead?

It was to Ramon she turned.

“Oh, my darling,” she told him over the small table of a smaller-than-ever tea-room in West Ninety-seventh Street, where they were venturing to meet, “you must be everything to me now.”

“You will not let me be.”

She knew what he meant. Ramon was more and more restive. This furtive meeting here and there was degrading. To both. Sure as fate, it would begin to attract notice. Cannot get away with this kind of thing indefinitely.

“Yes, yes, darling, but----”

“But why procrastination? This eternal procrastination. Two years of it now....”

“Darling, you are killing me. If ever I needed to mark time, it is now. Lightning has struck my life....”

His beautiful black eyes could fill with tears for her. The death of Avery, whom he had never seen, had affected him in a manner strange to him. He, to whom sickness was an ugly misdemeanor, felt a strange beauty in Avery’s kind of death. He thought of this boy nights, as he lay trying to sleep. He had died with the flower of his body in full bloom. No decay. No organs withering of disease. Avery had reminded him of some one who had looked through the door of life, found what he saw not pretty, and bowed out. The superb insolence of that gesture cast a strange luster over the mother of such a boy.

She had given life, and the power of death, to that slim blond fellow whose photograph, in a soft shirt with the neck open, was smeared now with her tears. The glow of vicarious mystery was out over Jenny these days. How damnable life was! Ramon, who wanted desperately to live, yet found it so hard to be allowed to live. Struggle. Struggle. That most precarious of struggles for existence off the whimsical bounty of women. That strange boy in the photograph, with the open collar and the hair flying backward like a woman’s in the wind, had willed not to live, because the bursting cornucopia of life’s good things for him had overflowed and suffocated him.

What a strange, a terrible, a revealing, a shameful note, “It was too much.”

Too much, when Ramon, who loved life, was starving. Well, anyway, starving for the good things of life. Perhaps this tragedy was writing on the wall. Good times ahead. Out of the machine-stitched infatuation which he allowed himself for this enormously rich woman, must come security. Yes, “allowed oneself the infatuation” was what it amounted to. One must live. It made it pleasantly decent that in his relationship with this woman, who could do much for him, he had been able to steam up a certain modicum of fascination. It gave him ethical standing with himself.

Curious, slim, greenish woman, sitting opposite him in the glamorless little tea-shop. Mother of a beautiful boy who had done a strange, wild thing. Her grief made her sweet.

“Sweetheart, when you cry, your eyes are like deep pools filled with sea water that cannot break into surf.”

“What would I do without you, Ramon? I need things like that said to me. I’m frightened, Ramon. Life has showed a fang at me. Ramon, I was a good mother to him. You know that!”

“You were too good, Jenny.”

“You mean I spoiled----”

“God has no use for protection. It leaves Him idle----”

“You are perfection, Ramon.”

“I am kissing you,” he said, letting his eyes, that were velvet to her, lie along her narrow fretted face.

“Ramon,” she said, giving words to a thought that had smitten and smitten her, “do you think it--possible--that some way--somehow--my boy--could have known--about us----”

That thought, too, had flashed through his brain.

“That, Jenny, you know is impossible.”

In a way she did, only the thought would wedge in.

“He idealized me. He was sensitive. That could kill....”

“He was too much of a poet. He would have idealized our love.”

“You dear! You would see it that way.”

He laid hands over her small cold ones.

“Strange you,” he said, confusing her with the strange aura of the strange death that hung over her.

“Am I strange to you, Ramon?”

“Only in the sense that the strange is beautiful and full of mystery, like a little sea-flower captured in a bottle.”

“In that sense, Ramon, I think I was strange to my boy.”

“Strange....”

“He must have found life too--too----”

“Too exquisite.”

“Too exquisite.”

Too exquisite. They bandied words, prettily minted ones, across the table, their glances jeweled with points of excitement.

“Too exquisite on one hand, Jenny--too putrid on the other.”

He meant Rarick. The strange, locked sense of her second-rate loyalty kept her silent. With his capacity for reticence at the right moment, he let the conversation end abruptly, as at a precipice, folding her once more into the cloak of his dark-velvet glance.

“It is easy to imagine a death for love of you, Jenny.”

“You are all the strength I have, Ramon.”

He put out his hand again, stroking hers, insinuating his palm beneath her palm.

“Ramon, dear, please! Those people at that table are glancing at us.”

He drew back stiff, taut, flushing down into his collar; and suddenly she too flushed riotously.

“Dearest--of course. I have not forgotten what you asked in your note. Here--forgive----”

She felt out timidly for his offended hand, pressing it, leaving a small, folded five-hundred-dollar bill in it.

JENNIFER

“The death of Jennifer Rarick’s brother has played the dickens with her,” people were saying in one way or another.

It had played this kind of a dickens with her, sobering her in a way that made her dull, most of all to herself.

“I’ve gone dry rot,” she said one night to her mirror, propping her cheeks in her palms and gazing at herself through a sudden attack of inertia that had swooped down upon her in the midst of dressing for an early-dinner appointment that had kept her knees feeling like sand under her all day.

The dinner appointment was a clandestine one with Berry. They were to meet and dine at a business men’s chop-house near Wall Street. Afterward, Berry was to join his mother-in-law for another dinner and a benefit performance of “The Port of Salute.” Jennifer was also to dine with Hartley Slocum at the Ambassadeur Club and go on to that same occasion. It was not the first time that their respective appetites, blunted by the six-o’clock clandestine meal near Wall Street, were later to be commented upon in the course of a second and more formal meal.

It made it easier to eat as they met. Berry had discovered that it kept down Jennifer’s late tendency to hysteria. Jennifer no longer made terms, but complied.

There had been only four such occasions. The death of Avery had been a crash into the apple-cart. Why couldn’t life jell neatly the way it did in the copy-books? According to rhyme and reason, if there were such, this hit between the eyes, this barge into the solar plexus, this death of a boy, should have jerked her to the sanity for which she had prayed those weeks at the camp. This should have made an end of that monstrosity of her state of mind and soul and heart toward Berry. She should have come through the fire of that ordeal of the death of a life that had been sweet to her, cleansed. And here she was, with the feeling of running sand through her knees, dressing to meet Berry. Waiting to meet Berry, as she had been waiting since last they met.

“I can’t go,” she said, and began to cry weakly to herself in the mirror. “I’m too tired to go. I’m too sick to go and I can’t not go.”

“Damn it!” as her eyes dried. “Berry was so much tripe.” Many happy returns to him on the birth of a son, and may the next be twins! Well, it would be worth the trip down to the Wall Street restaurant to see him in this new rôle of father. Comedy lay ahead.... You didn’t go sober over life just because of death--you certainly didn’t go sober over death.

Avery had been in on the know, that was all, and had seen fit to pop off. Thank God, one Rarick had dared to be honest about the waste of time so solemnly called life. An Indian philosopher had said it! Time passes. We don’t. Avery had turned into Time.

Fool nonsense called grief. One hurt, yes, like the devil. He had been such a regular kid to be on to life that way, secretly down inside of him.

He had written her a letter only a few weeks before. It was soggy now with her secret tears:

DEAR JENNIF: Come on up to college over next week-end and let’s talk.
I’m for cultivating more of that indoor sport among the Raricks.

She had sent him, by telegraph, what she called one of their nuttyisms.

Darling, can’t. I’m doppling with a darling doppus to a chic shindig
on Saturday.

The darling doppus had been Berry and the chic shindig a furtive rendezvous with him at a road-house where the tables offered the doubtful seclusion of little three sided booths.

“Oh, darling,” she cried into her palms, sitting there half dressed before her mirror, her maid dismissed, and lacking herself the impulse to lift brush to her hair, “how in on the know you looked in your beautiful coffin. Were you just afraid, Avery, or was it something too terrible and adolescent to understand--or, I wonder, Avery, were you just low-down frightened and a quitter?...”

“I’m frightened,” said Jennifer to herself, and lifted her face out of her hands to regard it in the mirror. “You’ve knocked what few props I had left right out from under me, Avery. I don’t want it all, any more than you wanted it, only I don’t know what to do about it. I haven’t got the guts, or I’ve got too many, to do it your way. Which is it, darling? I don’t want to get dressed. I don’t want to go on. There’s no place to go. All dressed up and no place to go, Avery. That’s me. Why the devil did you, darling? It’s a mess. Was it on account of the Rarick? God! but you did for him, Av! He looks as if somebody had put him wise, five minutes after they had been sold to the McCreey chain, to five million toy balloons that went cheap at enforced sale. He isn’t a bad party. He deserved a better break. So did you, darling. Damned little I did to see that you got it. That’s wisdom after the event, like the Raricks. Why did you do it, Av? You’ve been on to the Jenny ever since you were born. We both know that her square is crooked, but it looks square to her. I’m for her, Av. So were you. Why did you do it? I know--I know--only I can’t say it, any more than I can describe the taste of tripe. Damn it, Avery, life’s got a core to it somewhere! Look how many have nibbled through to it. The Rarick suspects the core, only he hasn’t nibbled through. Gerkes has nibbled through, but on a cotton apple. The world you thumbed your nose at, and quit cold, is the Rarick-world. There are better ones. That’s why the copy-books say riches can’t buy happiness. That’s why Indians, who sit and look all day at their navels, are happy. Damn it, darling! I don’t want to sit all day and look at mine. But I want to be happy, sweet Avery, and be something decent to atone for the way life didn’t come off for you. Damn it, I do!” sobbed Jennifer into her sobs.

A clock struck then, and Jennifer began climbing into what she would have called her “dud.” A lace frock, the beautiful color of coffee, well creamed. It weighed less than half a pound, cost three hundred and sixty-five dollars, and its trade name in the fashion-show of the French _couturière_ who had created it, had been “Irresistible.”

* * * * *

Berry kept her waiting twenty minutes, so that she sat alone in the business men’s restaurant, trying, behind her flaming discomfort, to look interested in the large menu proclaiming its specialties of grilled dishes. Fool to have come! Berry at last was probably going to stand her up. He had begged her to leave off writing, not meaning it, of course. Perhaps his new dignity as father of his son! Strange, how curious that made her to see him, although to visualize him, even vicariously, in the rôle that was almost unbearable to her, was pain. Berry was the father of Leslie’s child, and here was Jennifer waiting for him, the week after the birth, in a downtown restaurant, as she sat trying to hide her face behind the huge menu of grilled chops and planked steaks. Sickness of spirit smote her. She was on the point of pushing back her chair and leaving the waiter an apologetic tip, when the revolving-door spun Berry into the room, and with his usual capacity to make any place he entered look busy, a hat girl, two waiters, and a _maître d’hôtel_ bowed him to his place.

He ordered abruptly, without consulting her. She liked that. There was a great straight seam horizontally across Berry’s brow. She tried to remember if it had ever been there in unbroken line before.

“Well,” he said, and rubbed it, “this hasn’t been what you would call a nice getaway. Too many lies.”

How matter-of-fact he was, and hot-looking, as if he had perspired. Business men looked that way after a hard day. It made him appear like a big rumpled boy. That softened her.

“You might have spared me this waiting around beneath a grilled mutton chop, Berry.”

“Good lord, Jennifer!” he said, and looked at her with incredulity in his big chiseled face. “Do you realize that I had a kid born a few days ago? Nine pounds, all to the good.”

There was nothing to say to that, and so she stared with her palm up against where she felt her throat beating.

“It’s a hell of a job, getting born, Jennifer.”

“Well, what do you expect me to do about it?”

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

They stared and stared across the catsup-bottle and the A-1 sauce and the jar of chutney. Stared as if they could never have done with staring.

“Look here, Jennif, make allowances.”

“For what?”

“Good God! for the birth of a man’s son.”

“Berry dear----”

“Jennifer dear----”

“I’m dense.”

“I--I’m--I guess I’m confused, Jennif.”

She wanted to feel, and she was not feeling; so she spoke words that she felt she would have spoken had she been feeling.

“Dearest Berry, we’ve passed that milestone.”

“Whew, yes!”

“We’ve never exactly discussed what then--but doesn’t it seem to you like release, Berry? Like a release for us, now that it’s over?”

“Where do you get that, Jennif?”

“She’ll be back in normal health now--Leslie----”

“I see.”

“There’s no question of money. You’ve both so much....”

“What the devil....”

“What the devil?”

“Yes? What? I say, Jennifer, it _is_ a hell of a job getting born.”

“Well, as I seem to have remarked before, what do you expect me to do about it?”

They were staring again, across the chutney, staring and staring in incredulity at each other. Simultaneously, the impulse to laugh smote them. A side-twisting, strangulating gust of it shook Jennifer, not hysterical, but what Berry later designated as an eleven-dollar, orchestra-seat, below-the-belt laugh. He swept in on it. Waiters turned away to hide their smiles behind palms, as, gasping, they regarded each other across the table through the thick lenses of laughter-induced tears; and no sooner were their faces untwisted of their simply inexorable mirth, off they were again. It buckled them around the waists. It strained at the chest. It jammed in their windpipes and made them purple and full of exhausted little “oh’s” and “ah’s.”

“Oh! oh! oh!” gasped Jennifer, and clasped herself at the right side of her waist line.

“Good lord!” panted Berry, and kept wiping at his tears, and poking his handkerchief back into his breast pocket, and wiping his tears again and poking it back. “I’ve paid eleven dollars an orchestra seat for a laugh that didn’t come through like that. Whew! Now how do you think we got that way, Jennifer?”

“I don’t know, Berry,” she said, still laughing in a soft exhausted way.

“Give you my word, Jennif. I think we were laughing at us.”

“I hope so, Berry. It will help me to seem funny to me.”

“What about me?”

“I--I’m afraid all of a sudden you are funny to me, Berry--and that’s fatal.”

“To what?”

“Us.”

“Us is a nice word, Jennifer, when applied to us.”

“You don’t mean that. You wish to God I’d let you be.”

“Then what?”

“So you could settle down to being what you are at heart. A husband. A fast, rich, gay stockbroker on the side, who thinks girls were made to pinch and wives were made to have nine-pound sons. A father whose son is a miracle, chiefly because he resembles his daddy.”

“Pretty picture.”

“I hate it more than you do.”

“Hang it, Jennif! I’ll say it, even at the risk of bringing down that well-known scorn of yours--that kid, getting himself born as mine, gave me the kick of a lifetime.”

“So it should, Berry.”

“Hang it, Jennif! I’ll say it again, even if I afford you the laugh of your life, that kid getting himself born as mine gave me the kick of a lifetime.”

“I hope it’s the only one he’ll ever give you.”

“Not nice.”

“Sorry, Berry.”

“Dear girl....”

“Don’t say that, Berry.”

“Now what?”

“Because it’s as if--as if I lifted the words off this table and put them on your lips.”

“You should have been a writer of fantasies.”

“I’m a liver of them.”

“Nothing fantastic about this mutton chop,” he said, and slid a black-handled steel knife into the “specialty of the house.”

“And I am expected to nibble boned breast of chicken with Hartley Slocum at seven,” she said, slicing down, too, into mutton that flowed red.

“And me, breast-of-something-or-other with my mother-in-law, who will have many a bone to pick with me besides, if I’m late. Jennifer, ever see a new kid?”

“Yes. They cause strong men to falter and bad girls to trek across the snow----”

“Damn it, I like my kid! Now what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m afraid, Berry, I’m going to be noble.”

“God forbid!”

“I’m going to give you back to your wife and your chee-ild.”

“But I don’t want to be guv.”

“You do. Only, this surreptitious thing on the side with me satisfies the bounder instinct in you. I satisfy your instinct for show-girls. I’m one to you now, being pinched.”

“God, you can say the low-down to a man, Jennifer!”

“Funny, Berry, that I can say it to you so quietly. I’m all helped. Look, I can throw away my crutches. Note the way in which she carves her mutton chop until the bloody juices run, scoops up some baked potato and says, ‘Pass the A-1 sauce.’ I’m awfully afraid something has happened over this mutton chop, Berry. I’m out of love. I see you now in your true light. Perforce, villain, you’re a family-man at heart. You’re a Babbit in sheik’s clothing. I’m for you, but not after you.”

“If a man did the square thing by you and himself, he’d turn you over his knee and spank you for making a continual fool of him, going and coming.”

“That’s all that is needed to give this occasion the truly heroic ending it deserves. I’m renouncing you, Berry, not--denouncing.”

“Why the devil....”

“Is your kid all beety and underdone? Do his fingers twine around yours?...”

“Gad! a woman has got to be sure of herself to get away with that....”

“Does the sight of his crib warm the cockles of your heart? Why is it cockles are always warmed?...”

“Damn it, yes!”

“Berry, there are little spangles all across your forehead. You’re perspiring. Not nice. Hanky.”

“God! I wouldn’t treat a dog the way you’re treating me.”

“Neither would I. The husband-and-father technique applies to this case better than canine technique would.”

“I’ll go!”

“Berry, I’m _for_ your kid----”

“I know you are. You’re so damned for him that I strongly suspect you of being noble----”

“Maybe I am. But if that’s true--it’s such easy, incidental nobility--it’s easy for me to want to play square by your youngster and your wife, Berry--chiefly because I’ve come to the conclusion that one good husband and father is worth more than a bounder.”

“But, Jennifer----”

“But, Berry----”

“Damn it, Jennif! now that this has happened--maybe it is for the best.”

“Maybe, nothing. Surely, you mean. Here, Berry, my hanky. Wipe your forehead--it’s damp--and pay our check. You’ll be late for Mother-in-law.”

“That’s my business.”

“No, Berry. Thank God, now it’s my business to see that you’re not late for Mother-in-law.”

They drove uptown in his car, their fingers interlaced after an old fashion between them, his knee ingratiated against hers, but in a silence that began to embarrass.

“I say, Jennifer,” he said, as they approached the Plaza. “I say----”

“Don’t say, Berry,” she said. “It would spoil the perfect thing that has happened between us. Wait until I’ve gone, and then say ‘Amen. Fini. Curtain.’”

She alighted, leaving him standing bareheaded and perspiring, as she ran up the hotel steps.

That was the night, after dinner and the benefit performance with Hartley Slocum, that Jennifer met, for the first time, the author of _Port of Salute_--a young man named Gratton Davies.

An idea began slowly, surely, and roundly to form itself in Rarick’s brain. With the characteristically slow metabolism of a mind that thinks its way cautiously to destination, even the consummation took place so gradually that up to a certain point it was scarcely perceptible to Rarick himself.

It was his way, nerve-racking, sometimes, to those dependent upon his decision, to wake up one morning with clear-cut plan of action seeming to spring full-grown out of long periods of what appeared to be a languid series of procrastinations.

For instance, over a period of four and one-half years, Rarick had held up certain final building decisions that had delayed the breaking of ground for the Rarick Building almost beyond the endurance of those intimately connected with the gigantic project.

At the conclusion of the fifty-fourth month of procrastination, certain franchise developments and new subway constructions gave the delays a most providential significance, although it had been impossible to get out of Rarick whether he had foreseen, maneuvered, or been just characteristically slow, careful, and lucky. There were those who maintained that both the franchise developments and the subway constructions had been the outgrowth of only the last six months of the four and one-half years, and that it must have been foresight, not insight. Hellman, who possibly was closest of all to this particular situation, maintained a face carved out of cherry-stone, insinuating with his manner, that circumstances similar to this happened too frequently to leave doubt, in any except the most obtuse, of the enormous quality of generalship behind such slow-moving maneuver.

On the other hand, there was Jenny, wife, to whom all things were still flowing from the accident of her initial twenty-five hundred dollars. This success of his, engendered by her, was merely going on succeeding and succeeding....

The ideas, which, it seemed to Rarick now, must have been slowly congealing in his subconscious mind for years and years before a chance dissertation from Gerkes had jelled them, so to speak, had reached, these months since the death of Avery, a sudden consistency.

Half-thoughts, semi-intentions, parts of ideas, seemed to come awake. It was to be expected that Rarick, in his upper fifties, should already have expended much thought upon the growing problem of the ultimate dispositions of his ever-accruing fortunes. A man pondered over his riches. Pondered and vexed himself over apportionments, contemplated, wondered, and faltered. Rarick had done his share of all of these, and, from time to time, always with ultimate revision in mind, had made temporary wills to cover the exigency of sudden death, adding codicil by codicil, as occasions arose.

It was when Avery had been dead a six-month that the slowly congealing major idea became determination.

Day after day, in the maelstrom of his affairs, in conference, in trips of coast-to-coast inspection, on tours through the raw scaffolding of the partially erected Rarick Building; night after night, sitting in his library in discussion with Gerkes, poring over his amulets or his orchids, the idea, gathering specks from all corners of his mind, was slowly swimming into pattern.

“The wealth which man draws from his fellow creatures as clouds draw moisture from poisonous and sweet waters alike, must be made to descend again in productive rains, or what availeth it?”

Or what availeth it? Avery had answered that. His death had simultaneously seemed to promulgate and answer that question. Without progeny of son, Rarick sat in his Gothic aisle, pondering his responsibilities of disposing of a wealth that up to now had chiefly accrued interest and objects.

According to the charts of the companies that carried his enormous insurances, his span of life was two-thirds spent. Even with long-life expectancy, and somehow in Rarick that expectancy had never run high, the time had come when a man whose share in the wealth of the world, if you figured it per capita, was several millions of human heads, must prepare to put his house in order.

“The wealth which man draws from his fellow creatures as clouds draw rain from poisonous and sweet waters alike, must be made to descend again in productive rains, or what availeth it?”

There were books on Rarick’s night-table, Adam Smith’s _Wealth of Nations_, Shaw’s _Socialism for Millionaires_, Karl Marx’s _Capital_, Stuart Chase’s _The Tragedy of Waste_, Veblen’s _Theory of the Leisure Class_, Weston’s _Economics for the Business Man_, William Morris’s _Letters on Socialism_, John Stuart Mill’s _Principles of Political Economy_, many of which he found out-of-date, confusing, un- or mis-informing, and coldly technical.

Disposition of wealth, life being what it was, human ties being what they were, was not a matter that springs so completely, as the theorists seemed to reckon, out of the tenets of mathematics, sociology, and geometric, economic patterns. Human equations of greed, ego, blood-ties, preferences, hates, loves, sentiment, emotions, irrationalities, devotion and lack of it, leaned into the situation.

The disposition of over one hundred million dollars according to a man’s temperament, family, dependents, hobbies, preferences, philanthropies, altruisms, wisdoms, principles, and conscientious convictions, was a highly personal and complex matter, to say nothing of the responsibilities, ethical and sentimental, for which there was no proviso in the erudite volumes of economics, sociology, philanthropy, or wealth in relation to peoples, land, cities, industry, and countries.

The time had come, it seemed to Rarick, to formulate into words of legal document, the groping convictions of years, which, aided and abetted by what he regarded as certain brilliant thinking of Gerkes, the death of his son had solidified in his mind.

Disposition of wealth. This much beyond a doubt: The members of his family who survived him must be made safe from his millions. These millions must be made to accumulate something besides interest and objects. Bracelets and shields, as he had read it storied of the Greeks, had also bewildered his son out of life. Smothered him to death. This much beyond a doubt: The members of his family who survived him must be made safe from those millions.

Wealth need not be in itself the arbitrary symbol of man’s ability to exploit man, as it was painted in stiff chromo against the minds of people like Hildegarde. Capital, yes, might be interpreted as that which you in your strength continued to draw from the weak. Wealth, if you were worthy of it, was what you turned back to them, wisely minted....

The time had come when Rarick contemplated with obsession the turning of his capital into wealth, wisely minted, into the largest crusade of preventive scientific and sociological research ever launched as either group or individual enterprise.

The wealth which man draws from his fellow creatures was not to descend in a crushing, golden mantle upon such shoulders as Jenny’s, to whom those fellow creatures by now had become so many millions of maggots eating away the impedimenta of life for her, that she might walk in glory.

It was thus out of the freighted solitudes of the long evenings of the long months following the death of Avery, that Rarick began writing the document that was to be his last will and testament.

The day the last steel beam was laid across the seventy-ninth story of the skeleton of the Rarick Building, Hellman arranged a ceremonial; a luncheon to take place under gay awnings on an improvised platform erected among the mortar and bricks of the parapet that surrounded the Gothic auditorium that topped the tallest building in the world.

It was a motion designed chiefly to catch the eye and headline of the press. Tables were set up exclusively for reporters and feature-writers at the most spectacular end of the platform, overlooking more span of bridge, rush of skyscraper, and bird’s-eye panorama than had yet been achieved from roof-top.

There were about seventy guests. Mayor. Aldermen. Health Commissioner. Lieutenant-Governor. Borough Presidents. Superintendent of Schools. Chief of Police. An ex-mayor of St. Louis and old personal friend of Rarick’s. A half-dozen leading St. Louis citizens. The eight most important executives of Rarick Chain, Inc. President of the Gray Department Store Chain, in which Rarick was reputed to hold large interests. Vice-president of Chicago Transit Company. Owner of the San Francisco _Commercial Journal_. Attorney-General of the State of Pennsylvania. Max Lindsey, internationally-renowned corporation lawyer. Doctors, lawyers, merchants, yes, and even a fire-chief. Myron Stahl, District Attorney. Ramon Lopez.