Chapter VIII: Part 8

Wives had been invited. The publicity value of women present was incalculable. Editors would give photographs of a mixed assembly twice the space. Jenny had realized the indiscretion of asking Ramon; and yet the explanation of his presence had seemed so obvious, almost too trivial to require comment. She had motored down for the ceremony from Roslyn, where she had been superintending the doing-over of the brace of six beautiful bedrooms that overlooked a rose-garden, and had picked up Ramon, who had been week-ending at the Breckenridge Scotes’, at Scotes Manor, where she had stopped for luncheon. She had given him and Eulalie Lett a lift to town, dropping Eulalie at Charvet’s for a facial, and bringing Ramon along to the ceremonies. Nice boy--so obliging----

Indeed, so trivial was the circumstance, that when she explained it to Rarick, he scarcely heard; his nervous attention focused instead, on the arrival of guests, as they stepped out of the narrow, improvised elevator that they were obliged to take in three shifts, changing from one at the twentieth floor to another, and then out again at the sixtieth into a third, which completed the ascent.

Public ceremonial occasions were such painful and excoriating anathema to Rarick that his consistent failure to accept civic and honorary rôles could be traced to what amounted to an insurmountable disability to occupy a president’s or chairman’s position. Even board and directors’ meetings at which he must preside filled him with apprehension. Usually he evaded parliamentary procedure by calling conference in his office and seating the group about his desk, this colossal shyness also accounting for the almost total lack of social life in his scheme of things.

Hellman, who was always averring, averred that this inability to glean the best from his fellow men, coupled with a certain humorlessness, was what kept Rarick from his place among the truly great. Gerkes, in his totally different way, practically said the same thing, when, one day, apropos of Woodrow Wilson, whom he had known personally, he deplored Rarick’s policy of going it alone.

On those rare occasions when his appearance at formal functions--such as the Rarick Chain Twentieth Anniversary Banquet, the annual Rarick Chain conventions, the laying of the cornerstone of the Rarick Building, the dedication of the Rarick Stadium at a Missouri university--was imperative, it took more hours of steeling his will to make these appearances than even Hellman would ever realize.

It was rumored that Rarick paid Hellman, who was supposed to write his speeches, stage such necessary formalities as these, and appear as his proxy wherever opportunity presented, the sum of twenty thousand dollars a year.

As a matter of fact, he paid him thirty.

This was one of the occasions when not even the machinations of Hellman could prevent the affair from falling mercilessly on the shoulders of Rarick, whose place of honor at the head of the T-shaped table, even before the guests were assembled, had become dreadful to him at the sight of the small ivory gavel there.

The page of typewritten address, of decorous phrases, mock humility, and suave platitude, lay folded in the pocket of his stiff-feeling cutaway; steep sills of language to be crossed by his faltering lips. Presently, at whispered word from Hellman, he would push back the fluted-paper cup of untasted pistachio ice-cream, rest his cigar on the edge of the saucer of his demitasse, place the neat circle of his watch in very precise position, clear his throat, strike his gavel, and curtsy to the Mayor.

Your Honor the Mayor, ladies and gentlemen, friends--guests----

It was going to be blowy up on the roof. Gusts of wind snapped the bunting. The sheet of paper containing Rarick’s speech would be sure to wave and rattle. Sometimes, in spite of having memorized, it became necessary for Rarick, because of the numb nervousness, to read his address.

Greeting his guests as they stepped out of the makeshift elevator, the tongue of Rarick lay like chamois in his mouth. The great little magnate swallowed his tongue. The great little magnate was heavy with dread.

The panorama from the highest roof in the world unrolled before his glazed eyes. Dime by dime, brick by brick, he had built his pinnacle. It was of steel and it seemed to him it swayed a little in the high wind that was going to be sure to flutter his sheet of speech in his nerve-tortured fingers.

The Rarick Auditorium tilted its Gothic-shaped eyebrows out over the vastest expanse upon which windows had ever gazed. It seemed to Rarick that too many forces were meeting here for his endurance to bear up under. The agony of the nervousness. Altitude. That insistent, that terrible sense of the swaying of steel. The harbor moving out to sea. The crawling, remote island below, the streets as negligible-looking as slots. The dipping heavens....

Congratulatory phrases and the shrill extravagances of the women cluttered the high, clean altitude.

Marvelous. Breath-taking. Oh! Oh! Oh! Dramatic! Stupendous! Incredible. Finest--biggest--highest--tallest--most terrific--most expensive--gigantic--Oh!--Oh!--Look!--See!--What?--Where? Finest--tallest--highest--so--American!

One shook hands. One accompanied this one and that one to this ledge and that. That down there? Oh, of course, the Equitable Building. Over there? I say, Hellman, is that Metropolitan Tower? No-o--think that’s the Municipal Building down there. Telephone Building. Oh no, forty stories higher--wonderful--panorama--finest--biggest--tallest--highest--so American----

As Hellman confided to his wife, a large overweight woman, who was in turn suspected of writing Hellman’s speeches for Rarick, the old gentleman was a ton of coal on top of the occasion. In all of the scene of animation on the half-completed roof, Rarick’s was the one hesitant figure, requiring, on the part of Hellman, constant watching and steering, or inevitably he gravitated to a corner, there to stand unanimated, his twitching hands under his coat tails, making inaudible replies to the high falsettos of the women, meeting, but never making overtures of conversation to the men.

As a host, Hellman again confided to his wife, as he rushed past her to pilot Rarick to the Commissioner of Police, the old gentleman would make a first-rate funeral-director.

Motion-picture machines ground. Cameras clicked. Groups leaned against parapets and were photographed. The wife of the Mayor, in a feather boa that was well known to rotogravures, was snapped with the wife of Rarick, who posed tall and lean, with sables high about her neck and wrists. The entire group of sixty was photographed. Then twenty. Then ten. Finally Rarick and the Mayor.

Luncheon itself, served by a bankers’ club in Wall Street, was a cold and tasteless affair by the time it was relayed up the seventy-nine stories. The wind was a nagging one that became bothersome to the women and forced Senator Grimes to dine with his high hat clamped tightly down against neuralgia.

There were souvenirs. Snow-storm paper-weights of the Rarick Building enclosed in crystal.

At the escarole-salad course, Miss Jennifer Rarick, slender in black tailored things and high white fox, apologetically late and becomingly breathless, arrived with a young man named Davies, for whom an extra chair had to be crammed beside Jennifer’s.

The occasion marched to the address by Rarick, who, by the time the pistachio ice-cream arrived, knew that this was to be one of the excessively nervous times he would be obliged to read his few remarks.

He did so after coffee, the decorous phrases, the mock humilities that had been written for him either by his secretary or by the wife of his secretary, dropping heavily on to the assemblage.

On occasions when Rarick made address, Jenny invariably rolled bread balls and kept her eyes down. Zigzags of disagreeable sensation ran up and down her spine. From his place beside her, the knee of Ramon pressed up sympathetically against hers. “Awful!” she whispered, and pressed back; “he simply should not attempt it.”

The voice of Rarick went over its rutted road:

“... share with you--proudest moment of my life--generous public--lifetime ambition--service of the people--humble servant--owe everything to generosity of those who have encouraged [applause]--temple of music dedicated to people [applause]--from the people back to the people--your generous coöperation--my humble efforts--fine spirit of coöperation in my organization [applause]--thanks due to officials--employees [applause]--I wish I had ability to express--dedicated to people--dedicated to people----”

“Awful! Awful! He said coöperation eleven times.”

Ramon’s knee so gently pressing hers! It made it easier, after the polite applause had died down, to look up from her plate.

Thank God, chairs were scraping back. Another horror of an occasion over. Curious, that the figure of Rarick could be so consistently a depressant. Never knew it to fail.

“You mustn’t mind it, Jenny.”

“I do mind, terribly. Why does he attempt it? Oh, Jennifer, there you are! Wasn’t it ghastly?”

“Not at all, Mother. Father is my idea of a bat in the pulpit, or is it belfry? I love the bat, if only I didn’t have such a horror of getting him caught in my hair. Gratton, you’re supposed to be a word-prestidigitator. Pull me a phrase out of the blue that can do justice to that view down there.”

They leaned over the parapet, young and exultant, stricken with the wonder of what they were, even more than with the wonder of what they beheld.

“It’s the book of life written on a postage-stamp,” he said.

“Putrid! I can do better than that. It’s the story of the circulation of the blood being told by those crawling caterpillars down there.”

“Zero. It’s Lucifer being hurled, and splitting, as he strikes bottom, into land and water, skyscrapers and taxicabs.”

Elegant, but dumb.

The wind in their faces could not budge her in the tight black helmet that covered her head like close hair. It lifted the light tan thatch of Gratton’s, though, as if it were a wig. It was difficult to indulge in any but a breathless sort of discourse, and yet, they did discourse, these two, smartly at first, young, exultant, and high-keyed each to the other’s presence.

“The roof of the world isn’t so cozy as the low little old thatched ones of Devonshire and English poetry.”

“After spending a summer in a picturesque, damp, uncomfortable and gloomy thatched cottage in Sussex, I am convinced that love in a cottage may lead to lumbago.”

“Love! Must all conversational roads lead to love?”

“Pretty many, I suppose, between the delightfully unattached like ourselves. Daring to assume that you are as unattached as I yearn to believe.”

“Your way, I suppose, of asking how, or if, I have recovered from my last devastating love-affair?”

“Many a true word....”

“Many and many a true word ...” she said, fastening her hard, hurt eyes upon him. “Well, to whom it may concern, the dead past has buried its Berry. I’m so unattached it hurts! I think I’m in love now, with the idea of being in love with you, Gratton.”

“I wish you could manage to get all the way through to being in love with me, Jennifer. I need to be rich. I’ve a low kind of Indiana background that I don’t seem able to live down. I can’t feel the swank in evading my creditors. An unpaid dry-cleaner’s bill will insist upon keeping me too worried to tackle a second act.”

“An admirable but low instinct, my lad, not acknowledged in circles of the highest creative impulse.”

“I know it! But hang it all, my highest creative impulses, whatever that means, get all obscured by fear that the dry-cleaner’s thirteenth child may be dying of rickets, for need of pure, fresh milk. Of course, dry-cleaner can probably buy and sell me ten times over, but that doesn’t seem to lessen my obligation.”

“Go on.”

“Where?”

“Not being all the wise-crack things we seem to pretend to be, whenever we are together.”

“It’s you who sets that pace, Jennifer.”

“I need the wise-crack, to divert the eye of the beholder from seeing through how I do my poor little mental tricks. You don’t.”

“Jennifer, are you being humble?”

“I want to be.”

“That’s terrible! It somehow ... hurts. I prefer you naughty.”

“I think you do.”

“I think I don’t--really----”

“Gratton, guess why my face aches.”

“Too loaded with the seductiveness of youth and beauty.”

“Don’t rag. I am being profound and introspective. Altitude does that to me. My face aches, Gratton, from pretending to look like what it isn’t.”

“Perhaps it is your heart that aches, Jennifer.”

Their bright young eyes poured against each other and she did something that was adorable to him. She placed her hand up against the region of the heart in question, and her lips came lightly apart like a small, thirsty bird’s.

“That’s it! The ache is down there and my face hurts from pretending that it isn’t.”

“It’s too dear a face to ache.”

“Meaning expensive?”

“Not kind, Jennifer.”

“If I were to start in allowing myself to be kind to you, Gratton, I might not know where to stop.”

“Wonderful of you to say that.”

“Wonderful to be able to say that.”

“It’s nice, our being this way,” he said, on a blurt of words.

“Yes. It rests the face.”

“What on earth do you mean, Jennifer?”

“Being this way. Just simple. To hell with persiflage.”

“I hope it isn’t all due to altitude that you’re so nice today. Perhaps attitude has a bit to do with it?”

She grasped his arm. “Look down there, Gratton! See that steamer. Looks like a fruit-boat, nosing into slip.”

“Where?”

“No, darling, we’re not docking boats this season on top of the Woolworth Building. Look to the left. See, there’s the Aquitania, beyond her are two ferries passing one another, and just beyond them there’s a steamer sliding alongside her pier.”

“Yes! Two red funnels.”

“Right. I want a port, Gratton. I want to slip alongside a pier. That’s what Father always says about you. You’ve destination.”

“What kind of port do you want, Jennifer?”

“A snug harbor into which I can bring useful wares--such as they are.”

“Yours would be first-rate.”

“Are you thinking, or saying, that?”

“Both?”

She hooked into his arm.

“Aren’t I grotesque to you, Gratton, up here on this peak of dimes. Don’t I appall you?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Look at Father over there. Bewildered, frustrated, with dimes. Sometimes he seems to me like a little man whose eyes have turned to dimes and whose spirit cannot shine through them. Dimes have flowed over his life, making of it a metal prairie. My mother stands in the middle of such a prairie. I do. My brother lies buried in it. This building is a monument of dimes to the futility of dimes ... and in a way, a monument to the curious, groping genius of my father. I am part of his great frustration--Gratton--never for a moment doubt but what I know that.”

He laid his gloved hand against her mouth as if to crush back the words and the wind tugged at them, and beyond, where both their gazes focused, the harbor looked like a tarpaulin being dragged.

“There are times when I come perilously near liking you perilously, Jennifer.”

“Like me enough to understand me, Gratton.”

“Then you understand him,” he said, and nodded to the form of Rarick, who seemed perpetually to be hovering on the edge of groups to which he did not quite belong.

“I try,” she said, on a small click of teeth. “I try. I try. I try. Believe that.”

“Curious how simple he seems to me. A man who is too stern an idealist to compromise. A man who asked for bread and got a gold nugget.”

“A gold brick, if you mean me.”

“I don’t.”

“I’m crazy to help him. I’m crazy to--love him.”

“I should think his pathos would help you to that; the pathos of his terrible, heart-breaking grandeur.”

“It does.”

“Jennifer, you are sweeter today than I have ever known you. Please don’t ever again let your face ache from looking like what it isn’t.”

“Yes, but what about my heart?”

“It’s a dear heart. In the right place.”

“Gratton, if you prove that to Father, some day, when I do things for him that he won’t believe I had it in me to do, will I be proving it to you at the same time?”

“If you haven’t already.”

“I need more money than anybody in the world, Gratton. The chances are that I’m apt to always have money. I wouldn’t want ever not to have money, and yet, I suppose that the only real chance I’d ever have to show what I think I’m made of, is to wake up some morning broke--God forbid!”

“I’m beginning to strangely suspect you of being made of what you think you are.”

“Don’t make this strong man weep, Gratt. She might proceed to tell you how ghastly lonesome and misunderstood she is. Than which....”

“Don’t take advantage of my youthful susceptibility. I am on the verge of thinking you more of a person than is good for my peace of mind.”

“... and so, snapping out of the mood of better-self which had crossed her fair and petulant face, the fêted and ill-fated heiress to the Rarick millions hurled her champagne tumbler from her hand and--ate the glass....”

“Idjut!”

He stooped to pick up her glove which had fallen crumpled to her feet.

“Give me your hand,” he said. “I’ll draw this on for you.”

“Are you suing for my hand?”

“No.”

“Well, then, keep my gauntlet until you are ready to come suing.”

“Idjut,” he said again.

This was the conversation between those two, as they stood at the parapet, overlooking the world, high wind in their faces, and their words jerked off their lips and swallowed up by gusts. Once or twice Rarick hovered. The very atmosphere about them was built up of the kind of particles that kept him gingerly on edge. Their sureness and brightness and youngness oppressed him with a sense of his own unsureness. He felt ill at ease, just as much so, in a very different way, as he did when he bobbed about helplessly among the dancing young men with no faces in particular, that Jenny dangled around with her as you would bangles on a bracelet. That was pretty generally his feeling about the narrow young dancing-men, who looked as if they might be slid back into their shoe-boxes at night, and put in place along the shelf.

This Davies, now, was another matter. This fellow had a sure, uncompromising look to him. He knew what races were worth entering--for him. He knew his track--he knew his goal....

Even as he stood there, keyed by the slim Jennifer beside him, to his facetious worst, Rarick, abominating what was sure to be the flying foam of their conversation, was ready to like him. He had written that message, “I think I understand what you failed to get said to Avery....”

“Well, young man,” said Rarick, greeting him a little later, “how is the enterprise coming along?”

“Not for the moment, so surely as this one of yours, sir. This building has been headed for its roof ever since you laid the cornerstone. We are not certain yet where we are heading.”

“We’ve just come from a reading rehearsal of one of Gratton’s plays, Father. Talk about not seeing the woods for the trees! We couldn’t hear the lines for the adenoids.”

“That remark, I shall explain to your daughter when I have her alone, Mr. Rarick, was both unæsthetic and untrue. The fact is, the cast at the moment doesn’t measure up.”

“Gratton’s polite way of saying, Father, that the first thing the committee did after feeling money in its pocket was to go out and buy the most expensive Broadway casting-director they could find, thus launching the experimental idea safely and smugly toward the commercial theater from which it was so passionately revolting when you came across. You should have endowed Gratton, Father. Not a half-baked idea.”

“Jennifer!”

“Modesty ill becomes you, my young man. You may leave something to be desired as a playwright, but you are as bona-fide an idealist as ever let himself in for a bumping. But anyway, I’m for Gratton’s play, Father. Louder and funnier--more situations and less psychology--is all anyone could have asked of the first rehearsal. Also a new and not quite so comic hat for the leading lady.”

“I’d like to come around sometime, Mr. Rarick, and talk to you about this baby of yours ... that is what it is, in a way ... your money made it possible.”

“Are you speaking of me, sir? Father, I think the young man is about to sue for my hand.”

“Jennifer, idiot, if your comedy cannot be funnier, let it at least be deferred. I’ve a notion you’ll be interested in seeing first hand, sir, what we are doing with your money. Jennifer isn’t entirely correct in what she says; but it does seem that with money in our cash-box the committee is about to commit the understandable error of becoming pretentious. I’m for adhering to our pre-affluent _répertoire_. I would like to talk over our production end with you, sir.”

A broad, slow smile moved across the sallow features of Rarick, seeming to widen them, his lips lifted, revealing seldom-revealed white oblongs of teeth, then drew back as slowly as portières.

“My hours, young man, for conferring advice for the furtherance of our native and esoteric drama are for the present overcrowded, but if you will consult with my Mr. Hellman, he will arrange an appointment.”

“Darling,” said Jennifer as they turned away, “I wish to commemorate this occasion by sliding down seventy-nine stories and rushing to the first corner orangeadery for an ade--or a ginfizz. You may not realize it, but you succeeded in eliciting a smile and a witticism from my father.”

“I’m for him.”

“I’m of him.”

“That makes me vicariously for you.”

“Viciously, did you say?”

And so on and so on and so on, as, stepping into the elevator they began descent through the stories of steel that were rising to the tunes of the jingling of the dimes.

* * * * *

By unexplainable oversight that offhand would seem almost impossible, Rarick, what with Hellman rushing off with the newspaper men and the guests paying their departing platitudes, was left on the roof alone after the elevator man had made his last descent and apparently gone from the building. There were no bells. It meant a walk down thousands of stairs that were little more than ladders. For an hour now, the sun had been in behind banking clouds, the wind stiffening. Meanwhile Rarick waited, hoping for a return of some of the waiters to clear away the few remaining camp-chairs, or for a watchman on his rounds.

It was not unpleasant up there on the rim of his skyscraper, except that with the rising wind he could have wished for a warmer coat. Clouds scurried low, and the heavens seemed to scamper. Vessels with slanting funnels were riding out on their first lap eastward. There were a few coming in. You could tell by the direction of the slant of the funnels and the way the waves fawned at the cutting prows.

With the instinct of man to ponder from high places, Rarick, looking out, looking down, stood with his elbows on a parapet and his cheeks crushed between his palms.

The leaping bridges rushing to jerk land to land. Ships that not improbably were majestically putting to sea or making harbor on some such petty mission as dolls with peach-skin faces or pressed-tin ash-trays. Belching funnels of fruit-steamers that were packed with enormous cargoes of green-skinned bananas to sell by the puny penny-piece off East Side pushcarts. Vertically below, the winding of the crisscross streets, slots into which to drop your dime; the winding play of elevated railroad; the animated dartings of the specks of little humans rushing about with hearts buttoned up underneath their coats. The moving clouds, the moving streets, the moving waters, the ever-moving specks of heartbeat. The little Rarick, elevated on his parapet of the nickels and the dimes. The little Rarick--contemplating....

What Rarick was actually contemplating at the moment, as he stood there in the midst of space, in the midst of a Saturday afternoon--his last guest gone, Jenny with her narrow youth, Jennifer with her heckled and heckling companion--was, that here he stood with miles of steps to walk down and no place in particular to go after he had walked them.

One of those hiatuses which, because they occur so seldom in the map of a busy man’s affairs, flabbergast.

Well, here goes!

It was almost dusk when he reached the street, after the fifty and more flights of stairs, mortar streaks along his coat, the dizzying descent and the Saturday-afternoon bedlam of shoppers, ferry-boat commuters, trucksters, newsboys, clerks, stenographers, brokers, causing the scene to seem to sway by the time he reached sidewalk-level.

Women with oilcloth bags, that had been stocked at a Rarick Five-and-Ten across the way, jostled him.

There was a small triangle of park opposite, set out sparsely with the geometry of two dusty maple-trees, two scrofulaed benches, a refuse-can, and an inset of gray grass. There was a vacant place on one of the benches, between a bulging woman with one of the oilcloth shopping-bags and a sandwich man who had unhooked his boards and had sat down to rest from them. There Rarick slid in.

The red front of the Five-and-Ten was ground into the pallid scene. Its windows glittered. There was a handkerchief display this week, of pink and blue and striped cotton squares. Rarick had sat in conference on this buy of the two million run-of-the-mill output of a New England concern. The vista that faced him was plastered with the small cotton squares edged in a horrible kind of cotton lace that presently, after a washing or two, would fray into so much string. Cotton handkerchiefs, destined to dry against mirrors and window-panes; cotton handkerchiefs for the customers with the cotton-looking faces who poured in and out. They brought their ten-cent pieces to this fount of abominable things with an acquiescence that had pathos in it. Kitchenware, celluloid fine-combs, under-arm shields, glass jewelry, were the mission of these men and women who, from the heights only a few moments before, seen as specks, had seemed sublime. Ten-cent trailers after ten-cent things!

He watched them come. He watched them go. The woman on the bench beside him began to open a package and count hair-pins. Rarick pins. Children emerged from the red front opposite, jamming Rarick lollypops along tongues. Women lugged Rarick mops and Rarick clothes-hangers. Men came out with Rarick celluloid collars and Rarick ten-cent socks tucked into their coat pockets, and more Rarick lollypops, for more babies, turning gummy in their Rarick paper bags.

The feet that turned in at the fount of Rarick were for the most part tired, crooked feet. The splayed feet of women who have borne too many children under too many handicaps. The side-tilting feet of men who are on them too many hours a day. The pitiful feet of girls in short vamps and tall heels. Tawdry feet, filled with a mysterious eagerness.

Contemplating them for at least two hours, Rarick finally dove down into the subway, and home, to write throughout the evening at the document that was slowly becoming his will.

The third day that Jenny’s meals, every nine of them, had consistently disagreed, she rather angrily decided to see a specialist.

Deep down within herself she sensed the trouble. As a child she had been subject to fits of nervous indigestion following punishment or spells of rage. She had subsequently outgrown all this, and, for the years since, had enjoyed the singular hardihood that is so often the lot of the wiry and apparently nervous temperament.

Jenny could and did truthfully boast that she had never spent a day in bed. Small ailments, such as the sciatic twinge that had come of late, yes. But in the main she was entitled to regard herself as a creature well thewed.

The old nervous unease, asserting itself in this physical fashion, was, as Jenny frenziedly diagnosed it to herself, due to a sense of panic that went to the very roots of her being. It smote her with terror, with a sense of aloneness, with a growing despair of years, such as nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet.

Ramon was growing tired. The symptoms were out in him. The guarded manner. The wary voice. The evaded appointment. The placating manner. The roving eye. Slowly, surely, unrelentingly, the realization was closing in on Jenny.

His telephone no longer responded to her call when too well she knew he was lying within reach of it. The old punctiliousness about appointments was a thing of the past. Almost invariably now it was a matter of waiting for him; and on one or two occasions he had failed to appear at all, sending a telephone message, explaining unavoidable delay, by way of the cashier of the tea-room where already Jenny awaited him.

His tendency to be irritable was growing. He disliked the pink, Chinese polish to her finger nails; hated the manner in which she shrouded her throat in furs and tulles, and told her so.

“It makes you look so blamed manufacturedly exotic.”

“But, Ramon, you once told me that Dusé and Bernhardt----”

“Never mind what I once told you. This is now.”

“Why, Ramon!” she gasped, tears spurting. “Why--Ramon!”

He had leaned over the table of the tea-room to pat her hand, as you would the hand of some one who innocently irritates you beyond endurance.

“Never mind, dear.”

Never mind! Jenny was minding to such a degree that when she laid herself in bed at night, after a day filled with a tormenting attempt to drown out with activities the rising fears about Ramon, the blood kept whirring in her veins and flooding her with flushes.

The boy was tiring, no doubt of that. More-frequent exchange of handclasps that left notes of larger and larger denomination in his palm did not seem to matter, except for the moment.

The pallor of terror was high in the face of Jenny these days; so high that Jennifer, marveling at such a lapse in her mother, reproved her for rouging badly.

“A bit thick, darling.”

What was Ramon wanting? The apartment? The retreat to which he used to refer? Her discretion continued to shrink from that. The present suited her so well. Careful. Satisfying. Cautious. Having your cake and, as Ramon repeatedly added these days, eating it, too. But, curiously, even that mooted subject was laid now. Ramon no longer talked in terms of their jewel-box of a rendezvous which was to be of his designing.

Was Ramon’s eye straying? The younger girls, including Jennifer, interested him strangely little. Significantly little, the men would have put it. He had appeared at the opera in Mrs. Emanie Bursilap’s box of late. But that was unthinkable. Emanie Bursilap was a great-grandmother, and sixty-eight if a day. Rich beyond the count, it is true, but a rather horrible great-grandmother, with a wattled, wrinkled face that had been lifted into a mask, and a neck with grooves for the pearls to nest in. A naughty old gray bat of a woman, jealous of her own daughters and haunted by terrors of becoming what she already was.

Had the time come when Jenny must face her issues? What issues? It was unthinkable that this outward scheme of things, this scheme of having her cake and eating it, too, could ever be any different until--until what? Until something happened! Well, things did happen. Death changed the maps of families. Women had been left widows before--free--O God, forgive me for that thought----

Ramon must be placated. There had never as yet been a time when Jenny, in Ramon’s behalf, had drawn against her account for sums that would be noticeably unusual. But, in a pinch, that could be managed. There were ways of arranging with jewelers and furriers for bills to be presented for goods never delivered. That was a common device employed by women who, unbeknown to husbands, lost large sums at gambling. You arranged with your furrier, for instance, to send in a statement for a five-thousand-dollar mink coat. You returned the wrap, but paid the check, which in good time was returned to you in currency by your tradesman....

When one was desperate ... and yet, somehow, terribly, relentlessly, Ramon did not seem to want to be placated. What--what in God’s name did one, who felt the universe slipping, do to reclaim it?...

It was then that digestion seemed to go nervously back on her and that Jenny decided to visit the specialist. Actually, Ramon’s antipathy for illness was something reprehensible, of course, but at the same time, adorable and fascinating and fastidious in him. His sympathies poured out, you felt sure of that; but the little sense of aversion would creep in, wounding his æsthetic sense. Illness to the young blade Ramon was decay, antithetical to his sleek beauty. No wonder that he shrank.

Illness was something from which you protected Ramon.

As a matter of fact, be it said for Jenny, illness, hers, was something from which she, in general, protected those about her.

It was an acutely wretched week of physical distress that preceded this visit to the specialist, about which neither Jennifer nor Rarick had inkling. Not even the maid in the Breton cap, a stanch south-of-France woman, who had served Jenny well and long, knew to what extent she had been in torment.

The physician, a social-register one in East, slightly East, Sixty-third Street, to whom she finally presented herself, directed her, after discovering that the seat of her difficulties lay in an anatomical area two and three-quarter inches removed from the region on which his skill focused, to an eminent man in East Seventy-second Street, who, after a more or less cursory examination, awaited Jenny in his office, while she climbed back into her clothes in the examination-room.

A trying moment, this interval between physical examination and doctor’s verdict, and one that added to Jenny’s state of general nervousness and made her sharp with the attendant nurse.

It was not that she feared. It was more the idea that in the handsome adjoining office was sitting a professional figure endowed with the power of certain vital verdicts.

If there were anything serious the matter with her--well, that was life--and death.

If there was something only superficially wrong--dear Ramon....

The verdict was neither so good as she had hoped nor so bad as she had feared.

Some digestive complication. His manner was casual and reassuring. Thank God for that. Life was good. But the best method of diagnosis and determination would mean a short period of observation at a hospital. Few days. A little troublesome but nothing to worry about. X-rays. Fluoroscope. Test meals. A chill rattled itself against Jenny. Hospital!

“Nothing to be alarmed about. Most efficient method. Merely a checking-up process.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

Then and there the matter was arranged by telephone.

“A large suite, doctor?”

He placed his hand across the mouthpiece.

“The hospital is too crowded to allow for suites, Mrs. Rarick. You are fortunate to be able to obtain a single and bath. Is Friday all right?”

“Yes.”

The suite did not matter, except for Ramon. Flowers to the ceiling of a sitting-room. Chaise-longue. None of the onus of illness. One simply could not be ill in a hard white hospital fashion, for Ramon’s sake....

“... besides, Mrs. Rarick, I have no intention of confining you to the hospital those few days. You may leave every afternoon after we have tinkered at you for a few hours, but you must have all your meals at the hospital and return six o’clock evenings for your dinner and early bed.”

Perhaps, then, Ramon need never know! There could be nothing seriously amiss with one who was allowed such leniency. Come to think about it, Bettina Slocum had been obliged to undergo such observation last month, only to discover that her trouble all the while had been due to nothing more than tooth infection.

Ramon need not know. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday would pass quickly. She could disappear under pretext of week-end. Nuisance, having to tell Jennifer and Rarick. And, oh dear, Friday was the Gluxom dinner (not that the Gluxoms really counted) and Saturday the automobile contest at the Garden, a society competitive gala contest for the most beautiful car. Jenny’s new special-body Twin Hercules had just arrived from Italy--oh dear....

* * * * *

What a disgusting nuisance! They rode you down formaldehyde-smelling corridors on something that resembled the hand-trucks on which porters rumble trunks at railroad-stations. They stood you up against walls and unwound you of your last decent shred of sheet, and forced you to drink lead-heavy liquids that made you transparent, so that they could watch the tiresome processes of your alimentary canal or whatever it was. They stretched you on a table and covered you with metal plates and took pictures of your liver or whatever it was on the side where the sciatic pain made you feel like a persimmon. They punctured your perfectly good arm and drew thimblefuls of blood that felt like bucketfuls. They counted your pulse and they counted your blood and they took your metabolism, whatever that was. Internes, such unhandsome ones, laid dingy ears to your heart....

So Jenny took the overhauling, for the most part in good nature, rushing back to the hospital apologetically late, and creating in her wake a confusion, a specialness, and a lavishness that were as outwardly annoying as they were secretly impressive to the nurses.

The rich Mrs. Rarick was a patient not soon to be forgotten even in a hospital designed to meet the needs of the rich. Jenny lay in her narrow bed that was fluffed up as if it were a shell to hold the pearl of her magnificence. The young internes related among themselves, in hilarity, the amount of clawing it took to part the sheets and the laces and the billows that confined the patient. Placing an ear to the breast of Jenny was not just that. Laces crept up around the stethoscope like saucy surf. The slim ridge of Mrs. Rarick was the least of all in that bed. Silks, laces, scents, puffs, made it riotous. Jenny, packed in splendor.

Rarick sat stiffly in the room the evenings he came to visit her. Strangely, his comings created almost as much stir as the arrival of a motion-picture star, two weeks before, for a major operation. Nurses and internes remained on duty, past hours, to catch glimpses of him as he arrived and departed. The head chef lurked behind a doorway. But for the most part, except for Jennifer, who darted in and out, and the maid in the Breton cap--who occupied a room adjoining--secrecy prevailed.

At the end of the three days, Jenny, her maid, her pillows, her special bedding, her framed photograph of Avery, her bottles of scents, her thermos flasks, her silver flower-vases, her special breakfast china, her frilled bed-jackets, her character dolls and stuffed dogs, departed from the hospital for home.

Three days after that, the reports on her tests were completed.

Something that had not happened to Rarick in years occurred one morning. At least it had not happened to him since his clerkship days in Schwebbe’s hardware store.

A peremptory command, in the form of a hand-delivered message, lay on his desk. Hellman had laid it face-up on the top of his sorted mail.

It is imperative that you come to my office alone at four o’clock
this afternoon. Regard this as confidential.

JOHN NOON.

Noon was the man under whose care Jenny had been during this recent little disturbance. An illustrious figure in medicine, who had recently operated on an ex-President of the United States, and who was almost certain to be called in first or named as consultant in the illnesses of the great.

Could this little upset of Jenny’s have a graver significance than he, Rarick, had realized? She had made so light of it. He had scarcely regarded it as more than a faddistic bit of rest-cure. His trips to the hospital had impressed him chiefly for the air of festivity in the sick-room. Jenny lying in her frills and going through what she called rigmarole. Even Dr. Noon himself, whom Rarick had encountered there on one of those occasions, had held her pulse lightly and joked at her joking.

Women got out of gear like that. Not Jenny, it is true, but the expensive hospitals fairly yawned for the run of them.

There was something about this wiry woman, Jenny, that had seemed to him, immediately after his marriage to her, to be highly cutaneous, as if she were incased in an armor of brittle, but resistant skin. Pain did not get at her. She never perspired. Her hands had the cool, polished feel to them of having been dipped in tallow. It struck Rarick that he had never seen her blood. If she had ever pricked her finger, it had not yielded a drop.

That was why, without his being able to analyze it concretely, the idea of Jenny in any kind of physical predicament was difficult to conjure. She was part of a surface, just as she had lain lightly on the ridiculous ruffled bed in the hospital, making no physical dent. It again smote Rarick, funnily, that in her place beside him, Jenny never left dent. Or warmth. Her side of the bed, when she rose from it, was as cool and untouched-looking as if human form had not rested there. And now this from the doctor under whose observation she had been, suggesting that, after all, Jenny might be more than just a corporeal surface....

It is imperative that you come to my office alone at four o’clock
this afternoon....

He did what was rather unusual for him. He thought up a pretext for telephoning Jenny. She was not at home. Her secretary, the pale Miss Dang, offered to locate her at one of three places. André Trianon’s for a facial and wave. The Children’s Charity Show, in the Leslie van Blarcoms’ ballroom, or in the Oval Room at the Ritz.

“No, never mind.”

There was something reassuringly normal about Jenny immersed in her usual kind of morning, which was crammed to capacity with the piffle of such minutiæ as facials, marionettes, Oval Room.

Probably it was on the score of just this frenzied futility that her doctor wanted to see him. A woman as high-strung and curiously nervous as Jenny might go on indefinitely and then snap. At least that was what you heard was constantly happening to women in society, and perhaps more especially to those so frantically on the rim of it. Well, you could not expect even so astute a man as this Noon appeared to be, to understand. No need to acquaint him with unnecessary facts, of course; but precious little Rarick could do about it. Jenny wanted--well, Jenny wanted what she wanted.

Nevertheless, at four o’clock, Rarick stepped out of his car and into the tall, narrow building that contained the four stories of offices, laboratories, consultation-and-observation rooms of Dr. John Noon.

The trip from the first step into the lower hall up to a fourth-floor waiting-room was past five women in the starched uniforms of nurses. One verified his appointment, and as he gave his name, mysteriously the news was transmitted, and portières began to stir and eye-gleams to appear between slits of door and curtain.

“The Five-and-Ten Rarick! Sh-h-h-h!”

Another nurse for his hat. Another to admit him into the two-passenger elevator. Another to operate it. Another to meet him as he stepped out. And still another to turn him over to still another, who rose from a desk in the waiting-room and advised him that his wait would be brief.

It was. His summons into an inner office came almost immediately. It struck Rarick with surprise that he was trembling. Here was a firm that dealt in human destinies. He was doing business with it. What if Jenny had a deep-seated illness of the blood and bone? All this was nonsense about her corporeal specialness. She was frailty. Women somehow, soft, complicated creatures that they were, were subject to mysterious maladjustments. There were special hospitals for the diseases of women. What if Jenny....

An old man sat at an old desk in an old room. At least, the Dr. Noon of this room looked older than the Dr. Noon of the hospital. His desk was as uncluttered as Rarick’s own. Again it was the uncluttered desk of a busy man. There were two sheets of white paper spread on it.

Jenny’s destiny, thought Rarick, as he seated himself on the leather edge of the chair proffered him.

“I have sent for you, Mr. Rarick, before communicating with your wife. In cases like this it seems best.”

So then, Jenny did not know.... “In cases like this.” The great man was meeting just another case. Jenny’s, perhaps a little special by virtue of the impact of the name of Rarick, but to a man like Noon, who ministered to the powerful ones of the earth, not sufficiently differentiated to remove it from the category of “cases like this.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Rarick’s tests are in. I am going to explain our findings to you.”

“Yes.”

“You are not, I take it, the man to want beating around the bush.”

“No.”

“There is a possibility that Mrs. Rarick’s trouble may be a major one. I say possibility advisedly, because an operation may reveal it to be an unmalignant complaint that will respond to surgery. Miss Bart, bring in Mrs. Rarick’s X-ray plates.”

What a devilish formula for saying everything there was to be said, without saying anything. Surgery. Malignant. Operation. Major. So! This was the whither of all the frenzied, struggling, ambitious years of the Jenny Avery whose eyes, way back there in the St. Louis beginnings, had turned with his toward the dream of the Pyrenees. This was the whither? That he might sit in a doctor’s office, twenty-five years later, without ever having walked those Pyrenees with her in the flesh or the spirit, and listen to what sounded cryptically like her doom.

Jenny, who had seemed so frenziedly to be going some place through all the years, must at last pause and heed....

“Here are our findings, Mr. Rarick. See this negative.” There was a wall-frame ready to receive it, with an electric bulb behind, that made transparent the story of the flesh of Jenny, told in bits of waving lines and clumps of shadow. So there was the bit that was Jenny--on glass--in light--in shadow----

“Those heavy spots in there, Mr. Rarick, are what concern us. The X-ray cannot reveal their depth. But these shadows indicate er--a--an obstruction--alimentary canal--may merely be ulcerous--if inoperable--close up wound--but better to explore--in other words--imperative that the attempt at surgery be made....”

God knows that was plain enough. All this elaborate preamble boiled itself down to the fact that Jenny must go under the knife. Either her complaint was operable or not. The exploratory knife would tell, and, if operable--well, then, science, skill, turn of the knife, destiny--what--Jenny was sitting squarely in the lap of the gods....

“The exploratory knife will tell?”

“You have about summed it up, Mr. Rarick. It is not improbable that Mrs. Rarick’s complaint may prove itself to be of a nature that will respond to surgery.”

“Of course.”

“I am sorry to have been obliged to call you here on such a mission, Mr. Rarick. There is, of course, reason to feel concern. On the other hand, there is reason to feel optimism. Strong constitution, excellent health-history ... hope....”

“Of course. Of course....”

“... In case you feel the need of more opinions--stand ready to call in consultants--but nothing puzzling in the situation--no emergency, but advise haste--immediate operation--every day may count....”

“Of course. Of course. Of course.”

“I--shall discreetly advise your wife--do not acquaint any other members of your family--keep atmosphere free of anxiety--spare her any undue nervous shock--I will be the one to advise her--make all arrangements--within week--exceedingly regret--better to look situation squarely in face--keep sanguine--extremely glad to have met you, Mr. Rarick--long been an admirer. Rarick Building fitting monument--uncertain weather for this time of year--Miss Scow will show you to the elevator--Have Mrs. McCormack come in--Good afternoon, Mr. Rarick----”

Late sunlight lay on the stoop of the house as he left it.

“Where, sir?” said his chauffeur, after he had stood at attention for several minutes after Rarick had seated himself in the car.

“Where? Just drive.”

“Sacred Cow,” a three-act comedy by Gratton Davies, produced by the Internationalists, Inc., failed.

It was one of those failures _d’estime_ that closed its doors to a large audience of repeaters and deadheads and received obituaries and epitaphs from a minority not mighty enough to sustain it.

It was a galling failure to Gratton. “Sacred Cow” had been purposely written in the out-and-out key of high comedy. A burlesque in sheep’s clothing, the bray to sound behind the straight-faced baa. Nothing of the sort happened. Gradually, but surely, during rehearsals, it seemed to Gratton that his play became broadly the thing he had wanted it to be only inferentially.

“Sacred Cow” as a social satire wore its burlesque on its sleeve, and, failing, carried down with it three years of the work and high hope of its author.

As Gratton, in the scant words he had to say about the _débâcle_, remarked, it was not the failure that hurt. A good legitimate failure that was a fellow’s own, was one matter. But, hang it! “Sacred Cow” had not been his failure. It had been a failure of interpretation, direction, and production. His own version of “Sacred Cow” still remained to be seen.

Gratton’s tongue had been so neatly in his cheek when he wrote that play; and yet, all the loud braying had gone over the footlights in his name. In his young, passionately ambitious, rebellious name.

In the eyes of certain of the groups about whose opinions he youthfully still cared most, he had written a rather obvious and old-fashioned slap-stick satire.

To Gratton, at that stage, the most damning of all possible indictments was “old-fashioned.”

In the eyes of certain critics who, even while they admitted his intent, scored him for precisely the indiscretions of which he had been guiltless, he had sprained a wrist trying to be clever, but a wrist that very conceivably might some day write the significant comedy of manners that this one seemed to forecast.

In the eyes of the box-office, he had committed the fatal sin of failing to entertain.

And so Gratton wore his failure ruefully, if silently. It hurt.

Strangely enough, and bothersome to her because she thought it despicable, a sense of relief welled in Jennifer when Gratton’s failure came.

But she had not until then realized with what submerged sense of dread she had read the brilliant manuscript, lingered through many of the rehearsals, attended tryouts, and for long hours sat opposite Gratton across a restaurant table after a siege in the theater had been particularly trying or discouraging to him.

Dispassionately, Jennifer desired success for Gratton. But passionately, greedily, almost enviously, she was jealous of it. He was somehow more closely hers while he only skirted achievement. Not that he ever permitted her to cross certain ice-barriers of aloofness in him that baffled and wounded her terribly; but while he was hungry and hankered, she was sort of a self-constituted wailing-wall. He needed her to come to when he was tired and discouraged almost beyond endurance, as they began in rehearsal to bray his play. He sought her out over their favorite restaurant table in the bow-window of a small restaurant opposite the theater, or they journeyed down for a kitchenette-brewed luncheon in the quiet of his three small rooms over a bookstore in West Fourth Street, or just walked around the milling block of the theater, or sometimes had tea out of beautiful little white jade Ch’ieni-Lung cups in Jennifer’s small sitting-room, which had been redone in Chinese lacquer.

There was no outside world to lean into the quiet of these little retreats. Neither Gratton’s world, which was one you wedged into and which would not come to you, nor Jennifer’s, which seldom, if ever, played up that kind of street. Gratton came mighty near needing Jennifer, those days of rehearsals, and Jennifer was jealous of her rôle.

His success might snatch it from her; and about Gratton, to Jennifer at least, was something of the foreordained kind of success of a single-track mind. There was about him, even before he achieved, the aroma of a man who cannot be deterred. He had given up a place in the throne-room of a magazine that was rapidly becoming the most significant publication of the sort ever accomplished in America, without a backward glance, because the time had come, due to a scanty inheritance, when he could afford to fasten his level eye upon the goal of his choice.

Gratton wanted to say it in dramatic form. You knew inevitably that sooner or later he would. Without compromise. He had started to do that with his magazine.