Chapter IX: Part 9

Jennifer, in inchoate fashion, sensed this. Elusive, self-sufficient by nature to a degree that she found terrifying, his success, when it came, would hedge him in more securely into a world which he loved a little more than he despised, and which he was one day to rebuke brilliantly in two plays, “Marsdon and Son” and “The Tragedy of Laughter.”

Gratton wanted one thing, really. To get said this brilliant foment. Jennifer knew that and found it frightening.

She told him so one evening, about a month after “Sacred Cow” had gone down to its by no means ignominious failure. They were at dinner in his rooms, a Japanese student, who came in by the hour, serving them at a table drawn up before the fire.

It was Jennifer who had first suggested these excursions to Gratton’s rooms. Their booky, firelit shabbiness rested her. Fascinated her a little. They were intimate, lived-in, purposeful sort of rooms. They pretended no period. They catered to the needs of their owner. The need of a good couch, with a head-lamp for reading. The need of an extra-built table with a spacious top for spreading papers. The need of book-shelves, that had overflowed into stacks of volumes standing in rows on the floor.

The smell of these rooms was tobacco and wood fire, leather and wire-haired spaniel.

When Jennifer had first suggested their going there, Gratton had acquiesced at once. As a matter of fact, she had only said it out of an indefinite desire to arouse in him some spark of the personal or protective. Gratton should have demurred at subjecting her to what might so easily be interpreted as a compromising act. Instead, he casually agreed, in the impersonal manner so characteristic of him.

In all her subsequent visits to his rooms--for meals, for afternoon cocktails, for brief interludes in between the exigencies of rehearsal--Gratton never so much as lingered at the business of helping her remove her wraps.

Her coming was too impersonal to matter much one way or another. He fell in with her suggestion to dine at a restaurant just as casually. It was as it should be. It was as Jennifer, bruised, would have told you she desired it to be; and yet....

“Are you as self-centered as you seem, Gratton?” she asked him one evening, after the Japanese student had washed his last dish and departed, leaving them seated over coffee.

“I reckon I are, Jennifer. I think an awful lot of me.”

“You do nothing of the sort. You are interested in everything from better Chinese babies to the decadence of our decade; from the decline of philosophy to ‘Kilts, why plaid’? Things and movements and causes and literatures and new schools and, to use a grand old smear of a phrase of my father’s famous fossil, Dr. Gerkes, who eloped with a Lapp or something off-color, things ideational are your major interests. I want you to be interested in me, Gratt. I may not be ideational, but I’m mighty nice, if I do say it as shouldn’t.”

“Hang it, Jennifer! I’m not even sure you’re nice!”

She raised her eyes at him across the small litter of after-dinner dishes between them, bit off a third of a lump of sugar, and drank her coffee through it slowly.

“You mean that, Gratt?”

“I think I do, Jennifer.”

“I’m not so sure, either, that I’m nice,” she said, slowly.

“Wonder if we both mean the same thing by nice.”

“Don’t qualify.”

“Haven’t the slightest intention of it. I don’t know whether money has harmed you, Jennifer, but it hasn’t made you a nicer person.”

“Money-conscious!”

“One has to be, where you are concerned. Every bit of assurance you have is, consciously or unconsciously, founded on your recognition of the authority that goes with great wealth. Any stock dramatist could write you, Jennifer. You are fundamentally, I think, sound and fine, but....”

“Don’t qualify.”

“Damn it, Jennifer, I’m not! That’s just it. You cannot imagine that I would dare not to qualify. That’s part of your assurance. But let me go on. Fundamentally sound and fine, but cocksure with a sense of power. Spoiled, chiefly because you are spoilable material. Grown simply big and not big, simply. Chaser after false gods. Wise-cracker. More self-ful than selfish, but a little of both. Clever. Good mind and nothing to do with it. A giver, but considerably more of a taker. Vain, but not without reason. Good intentions. Feeble execution. A non-producer. A personality. A faker. A darling Jennifer, that’s you.”

“Yes, Mr. God, but why, since you say that I am fundamentally f. and s., don’t you make me over?”

“I haven’t the right.”

“What if I give it to you?”

“What if I can’t?”

“I see. You mean you haven’t the right that goes with caring enough to do a big job like that?”

“If you will be personal, I wouldn’t be it that cruelly, if I were you.”

“I’m lonely as hell, Gratton.”

“Are you, really, Jennifer, or is it just a dramatic state of mind that for the moment, seems desirable to you?”

“Lord, you’re cold!”

“What are you lonely for, Jennifer?”

“For the kind of thing you are not saying to me now.”

“Well put, my lamb! May you never know more of the reaches of profound loneliness! I know a lonely man, Jennifer. Your father.”

“Well,” she cried, high and angrily; “well, well, what if he is? So is everybody connected with him. Shut-outs from one another. And Father, don’t you forget it, has done his share of shutting out. All of us have, in our family, I’m afraid. My brother--between us--we--we--somehow managed to shut Avery out of life. Mother is a shut-out if ever there was one. God knows Father is. I am. The rich Raricks, if anybody should ask you, are a bunch of bankrupts. You talk about Father being lonely, damn it, as if I didn’t know! Well, just the same, you can’t do anything about somebody who lives on Mars, can you? Neither can I do anything about Father. He is simply where I can’t get at him, wherever that is. Damn it, always has been! I’ve tried. Father is a man who ordered a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee from life, and got stung when the waiter brought him caviar and diamond-back terrapin instead. I’m part of the banquet he found himself served up with, along with the terrapin and caviar. He can’t digest me. Lonely--as if I don’t know how lonely he is...!”

“You don’t really, Jennifer. You perceive it with that clever brain of yours. You don’t know it, though, as one who is really lonely can know it in another.”

“I suppose you mean as you can know it.”

“Yes, Jennifer.”

She blew him a ring of smoke; and across the table, in the mellow light of an old-fashioned oil-burning student-lamp, with a parchment map of Eastern Europe for a shade, they regarded each other slowly.

“Have we the newfangled complaint called sex-antagonism, Gratton?”

“I don’t think the discussion important here.”

“You never do, when it concerns us. Are you open to a discussion about dialectic writing, or how about the use of pleonasm in Irish drama, Gratton?”

“Jennifer, that isn’t kind.”

“You’re not.”

“You’re so blamed brittle, Jennifer. You break to pieces under a fellow’s touch.”

“How do you know? You’ve never touched me.”

“That isn’t worthy of you.”

Tears sprang across her eyes.

“Just like me to blurt that out to you, of all people, whom I most want to impress. Don’t think I’m in love with you because I said that.”

“I don’t.”

“I want--oh, I don’t know how to say what I want out of life, Gratton--but I want--passionately----”

“That’s it, Jennifer. You’re a wanter. You want and you won’t pay.”

“Do you know the nicest thing about me, Gratton?”

“I think you are the nicest thing about you, Jennifer.”

“No, the nicest thing about me is the fact that I like you, Gratt.”

“Don’t say that. It hurts. First, because it is not true, and secondly because I hate your arrogance; but your meekness would just about kill me. Humble, you would break my heart, Jennifer.”

“I am humble, Gratt, before the things you stand for.”

“Good Lord! don’t say that, Jennifer!” he said, and kicked back his chair and began to plow into a rubber pouch for pipe tobacco. “I’m jolly well what you said I am. A self-centered, would-be egomaniac, trying to get on, by crawling away from that center known as self....”

“Your saying that I am fundamentally f. and s. means a lot to me, Gratt.”

“You are, Jennifer, and some day somebody is going to sink the proper kind of shaft and mine the f. and s. out of you.”

“Who and how?”

“A husband with the sense to understand you.”

“I think I prefer to remain fundamentally unsafe and unsound.”

“The devil you do!”

“Your way of rubbing in the fact that there is a serious possibility that I may be in love with you.”

“Scarlet-fever symptoms may only mean measles.”

“You mean because of what I was idiot enough to tell you about Berry?”

“No; but now that you remind me....”

“Be careful, Gratt ... because if there is any sure test for me to determine whether or not I am in love with you, it is to compare what I am feeling now to what I did not feel then. The most counterfeit part of that entire situation was me. Not Berry.”

“Out of the frying-pan and into the divine fire,” he said, and tilted her face with the tip of three fingers.

It was the first time he had ever touched her.

Reliving the scene to herself later, at home, in bed, under covers, it seemed to her that she had felt illuminated, like a switchboard. Lights had popped out all over her, in goose-flesh, each prickle a bulb. He had done it with the light touch of three fingers, tilting her chin slightly backward.

She remembered with a flaying flush that she had sat down on the couch and crammed a pillow into the small of her back, and, trying to command a level voice, had said, “Sit down, Gratt, here, beside me, and let’s talk things over.” Knocking out his pipe, he had said, with a casualness that made her ridiculous:

“No. Come along. There’s a mystery-play over at the National, and I feel in the mood for who-killed-cock-robin.”

He had felt in the mood for who-killed-cock-robin when, at the touch of the three finger tips that had tilted back her chin, Jennifer had been brought to realize how phony had been everything that preceded this....

It was after midnight when Jennifer arrived home after the mystery-play. The lift, if you used it in the dead of night, made a soughing noise that could be disturbingly heard throughout the house; and, after her habit, she wound up the great curlicue of staircase instead. A rose-window, bits of its floral design said to date from a twelfth-century cloister at Tours, shone down into the majestic forest of stone pillars of the hallway. Under it, Jennifer paused for a moment. She loved its bath of color. Like an enormous flower it bloomed over the tiredness of her spirit that transmitted itself in fatigue to her body and made the walk upstairs a drag. There were rings under the eyes of Jennifer, and her cheeks were narrow planes of pallor. The tiredness that had clamped down upon her after she left Gratton, made her shoulders droop and her feet creep. She wound on slowly....

There were routine signals along the way, to tell her certain trifles that registered languidly along her brain. Her father was in bed. She could tell by the closed bedroom door and the color of the rim of night light. Her mother was not yet in. The figure of the maid in the Breton cap nodding in a chair with her mouth open, as she passed Jenny’s boudoir, testified to that.

Ever since she had been old enough to take cognizance of it, there had been something horrible to Jennifer in the idea of the bed and bedroom which her parents had so submissively shared throughout the years. It was one of the few subjects Jennifer had never dared broach to her mother. But it was horrid to her. There was something of a tomb about that chamber. In it lay dead love. About it were strewn wilted passions. Two husks lay side by side in it, desire long since dead. Florentine chamber-of-horror....

Jennifer’s maid was waiting for her, and there was a glass of chilled orange-juice on a table beside her bed; and on the bed itself, her night things of rosy satin and pale lace. She fell out of her clothes, and into them, gratefully eager to have her lights out before the arrival of her mother. So long as a lamp burned in one or the other of their boudoirs, they never went to bed without exchange of tiptoe visits. Youngish visits, curled up on the chaise-longue in Jennifer’s dressing-room, or Jenny’s. A curious quality of girlishness had persisted in Jenny. There had never been a time when to Jennifer, who adored her, there had not been something of sister in their relationship.

Just the same, it was with a sense of relief that Jennifer found herself deeply in bed, lights clicked out, and still no Jenny.

The sense of hurt that was out all over her had not necessarily direct bearing on the evening she had just spent with Gratton. It was rather the sense that had risen to its culmination with this evening, that nothing she could hope to be or do was to have bearing upon the life of Gratton. He was constantly flipping her off, as he would ash off his cigarette. She merely had flavor for him. He sometimes said of her that she gave him appetite for work.

“By sense of contrast?”

“Probably.”

And probably it was. Not because she exhilarated him. Not because she was some one who was restless for his achievement. His plane of life was one that excluded her. And suddenly, lying there in a little knot of pain in bed, Jennifer, as she had never desired in her life, wanted access to that plane. Everything that heretofore had been of prime importance to Jennifer was secondary, if not second-rate, to Gratton. Always had been. Unconsciously, in what he revealed to her about his past life, was he constantly showing himself up to her. The things that mattered most to her were the things that Gratton had never even had time to despise.

For instance, the two years that Gratton had lived in Oxford, England, doing graduate work there on money he had earned waiting on table at a summer hotel, Jennifer had been making notoriety for herself at the baccarat tables of Cannes. The summer he had spent living on seventy-five cents a day in a room in Assisi that overlooked the upper and lower chapel of St. Francis, and writing one of the plays that helped make his trunk excess baggage, Jennifer had been lying most of her days on Lido sands in a bathing-suit that looked painted on, her head lounging against the lap of a well-oiled young Italian count to whom she was reported engaged....

How far the Raricks had missed fire! Two of them, Jennifer and her father, lying there now, with elaborate walls between them, in a pile of grandeur that rose above them in the elegance of this Renaissance tomb, one of them lying out there in a slim boy’s grave, into which the worms must be finding way by now.

What sense of defeat was there perching now in the heart of her father, lying, himself, not forty of the appallingly expensive feet from her own bed. What bankruptcy there? What had Gratton meant by the really lonely person of her father? What indictment against her had lurked in his eyes? No. No. Rarick’s loneliness was of his own making. He had built it up massively about himself. Jennifer had not been cast out, because she had never been let in. Presently her mother would come home, carrying on her narrow shoulders enough in chinchilla and square diamonds to support a family of ten through a lifetime. She would go to that room--to that tomb--to that bed--to that sleepless little heart-twisting bankrupt there--Father----

After a while there was the sound of Jenny in the hallway. Jennifer, lying there, could hear the tinkling noise her sequined gown made as she came along. Like the welt that her body left on a bed, the footfall of Jenny was light. It fell past Jennifer’s door softly. It turned into snow, falling into a dream of Jennifer’s, that she was walking ankle-deep in it toward a student-lamp that burned in the window of a small mellow house, and that smelled of leather and a wire-haired terrier and a pipe that hung from an amused-looking lip....

* * * * *

Jenny had been to the closing function of what had been a series of elaborate entertainments in connection with a Street Fair which had been held down the center of Park Avenue, where junior members of social-register families pinned fifty-dollar carnations on the senior lapels of telephone-directory families.

Socially and financially, it had been a success. The Street Fair charity-week had concluded with a supper dance held at the residence of the chairman of the executive committee, Mrs. Grant Fillimore Speigel, Sr., who had contributed her enormous ballroom for the purpose.

Entrance was by one-thousand-dollar check, and then only if you were bidden. It was one of those occasions when the Raricks were sure not to be overlooked. It was the first time Jenny had ever set foot in the old-fashioned Murray Hill home of the Grant Speigels. The evening had been sufficiently dull to keep its social inviolability to the fore in Jenny’s mind. She had apparently made a personal dent upon the consciousness of Mrs. Grant Speigel, and there was an engagement between them for luncheon three weeks hence. The evening had been more than justified. But her shoulders ached from fatigue; and once or twice during the supper, which you ate off of knees, the old sense of sickness had overtaken Jenny.

Ramon had not been there. She had taken Tom Lamentier, widowed brother-in-law of a Wilke-Barre, on the thousand-dollar check that should have admitted Rarick himself. Ramon, on one of the absences that was becoming more and more intolerably mysterious to her, was off on a week-end at the shooting-lodge of one of the sons-in-law of Mrs. Emanie Bursilap, an inclusion that was fantastic, so far as the burly Harrington Powers, who had married Edith Bursilap was concerned, and which must have been manipulated at no small discretion by his mother-in-law.

But at any rate, Ramon was returning tomorrow, and Jenny was lunching with him, quite openly, as they did upon rare occasion, at the Ritz. They must talk things out. Oh, how imperative it was that they talk things out! Something corrosive and frightening was at the heart of Jenny.

There was a list of memoranda under the lamp of her dressing-table that had been left there by her secretary, Miss Dang, and holding it down, as paper-weight, a small jeweler’s package, with a red seal splashed over it. It contained four dreaming, perfect little pearls, which she had ordered clipped off the end of one of her necklaces and mounted as studs. Ramon’s. The time had come when Jenny, no one the wiser, was resorting thus to the device of clipping such gifts off the edge of her magnificence. She had already presented Ramon with star-sapphire cuff-links off the rear end of another necklace; and the large canary-diamond center to another cigarette-case had been pried out by a jeweler and replaced with a blue diamond from a ring which Jenny no longer fancied. The canary had been worth thousands, and it was like Ramon, lover of beauty, to defer selling it, even in the face of needs that clamored.

One memorandum reminded her of an exceptionally early morning-fitting at Valli Sœurs before her eleven-o’clock contract-bridge lesson. Propped up conspicuously against a Lalique perfume-urn was an isolated item: “Dr. Noon telephoned that he will expect you without fail at his office at one o’clock tomorrow (Thursday).”

A stab of concern smote Jenny. For the first time since her period at the hospital, a sense of the old discomfort had been over her at dinner. Tiresome old body. Well, Dr. Noon would have to wait. Apparently his findings were not bothersome. There was something casual about the message. As it was, the bridge lesson would have to go overboard. Ramon was meeting her early.

The maid slid her out of the sequined gown and laid the string of square diamonds in a satin-lined box with a groove for each stone, and placed it and the chinchilla wrap in a steel vault at one end of the bathroom.

In her underthings, Jenny looked like a paper doll. Most fastidious in her personal habits, there was about her one specific carelessness that her maid swapped below-stairs with servants who are hawklike in such appraisals. Invariably Jenny went to bed with her make-up on. It was as if her frail flesh, tested by function after function to the limit of endurance, could not hold up under the smearing process of having it removed. Jenny slept in her painted lips, her mask of white enamel, and her high and narrow coiffure.

It was this Jenny, in a black-chiffon nightdress through which her body shone like a narrow candle, who finally made her way to the room where already lay her husband.

Lightly, in the painted mask off which her lips stared so redly, she placed herself beside him, drawing over her half of the sheets and coverlets. Lightly, silently, she lay wakeful beside him.

Lightly, silently, he lay wakeful beside her.

Due no doubt to subtleties of presentation, the news that she was to be let in for a surgical operation did not at first come as shock to Jenny.

Lying face downward on her chaise-longue, with her arms flung to a peak over her head in an attitude of relaxation taught her by a masseuse she had brought home from Stockholm one summer, Jenny’s predicament, phase after phase of it, began procession across her awareness.

Good Lord! What was the matter with her? Sitting there in his office, himself seeming so invulnerable to body ill, perhaps Noon had told her everything except the truth. What if I have cancer? Millions of women have had before me. Was Noon holding off facts that might terrify----Nonsense! A man like Noon had no time for subtle psychological evasions. Besides, no man could simulate his kind of casualness....

Good Lord! acting like an old-wife poring over a medical book and reading her own symptoms into every page. Not every woman with a pain in her side had cancer.... Good Lord!... Fool--fool--fool----

Take the case of Mrs. de Witte Yonge, wife of the Austrian ambassador, with whom she had recently had the honor to dine. Mary Yonge had just successfully undergone a major operation. You belonged to a negligible minority if you still boasted an appendix. Dr. Noon seemed of the opinion that much of her own difficulty might hover around that superfluous organ. So interesting to hear Dr. Noon explain the history of the atrophy of that organ.... Dr. Noon so graphic....

Come to think of it, Jenny’s florist-bills alone--to say nothing of inroads into Rarick’s conservatories--to friends who were constantly convalescing from operations in hospitals, were enormous. Naturally you got things the matter with you in the course of a lifetime. Didn’t expect your motor-car to run without overhauling, did you? Well, same principle applied to the human body....

Of course, the serious side to the story might be in the cards, too. Didn’t cross that bridge, however, until you came to it. Particularly if that bridge happened to be across the Styx. Nifty of herself to indulge in grim humor at a time like this, Jenny decided. Don’t cross the bridge across the Styx until you come to it. If Fifi Putnam, with her tubercular history, had survived three major operations, why not Jenny? Dr. Noon had been by no means certain hers would be major. Lydia Mason, to be sure, had died on the table, but Lydia had been awfully wrong on the inside ever since the birth of her third child. Besides, the--the sort of thing that did for Lydia, ran in her family. Look how Georgie Prescott had gone to his operating-table weighing one hundred and twelve pounds, and now tipped into the heavy-weight amateur class at all the private boxing-bouts at the Beaverbrook Club. An operation was something to be casual about these days. In the main, Jenny truly was. There were little scare-spots in her. As a matter of fact, the day she saw Noon, she had returned home from his office instead of going on to meet Roxy Gravure at the Dog Show, where Roxy was showing a pair of the finest Kerry Blues ever registered.

The very smell of Dr. Noon’s offices, she told herself, had been unnerving. They invented everything else, why must doctors’ offices and hospitals continue to reek to heaven of the suggestion of antiseptic....

Then, too, this season of seasons, just when Jenny had made what she considered her most important social wedge! Mrs. Grant Speigel had undoubtedly taken a fancy to Jenny. Herself one of the founders of the Cosmo Club, she had all but volunteered to put Jenny up for membership. They had lunched together. Jenny was already harboring the plan of arranging an elaborate function around the dowager figure of Mrs. Grant Speigel. The surgical operation would put a serious kink in that important plan. In countless plans.

Then, of course, there was that wave of recurring fear about Ramon. In the scare-specked hours which followed her knowledge that in a week she must go on the operating-table, her thoughts and fears, trepidations and concerns, had floated about without anchorage.

It was difficult to imagine Ramon coming to her through the etheric smell of hospital corridors. Prying nurses! She had successfully kept the period of her observation in the hospital from him. But this time he must know. How curious to be confronted with the need of telling Ramon that she must go to a hospital for an operation.

There were situations in which you simply could not imagine certain people. Perhaps, though, thought Jenny, on the anxious drive home from Dr. Noon’s, it is just the providential circumstance to tide us over this bad place. Jenny, in laces, on her bed of pain, wan to him, esoteric, might conceivably, by way of temporary and delicious lassitude, fascinate more than in health.

He had been distrait at lunch at the Ritz the day before. Terribly so, the lurking pain in her side seemed to collide with the fear that kept knocking about in the region of her heart.

There was a card crushed into the hand that was flung high over her head as she lay on the chaise-longue. It was part of the damnable wrongness. It had added to her impending state of high nervousness to receive this invitation from Mrs. Grant-Speigel to week-end at her place in Lenox beginning the very day that she had arranged with Dr. Noon to enter the hospital. The night she would probably be plowing her way out of ether, a wound in her side, was to be a gala one at the opera, when a visiting queen was to sit in the Gerinald box, which adjoined the Raricks’, to say nothing of the minutiæ of plans that clotted the lines of her engagement-book and which suddenly had become part of a daily routine that was precious.

Then there was this business of telling Rarick and Jennifer--to Jenny, a shamefaced procedure of trying to get said to your intimates the intimate things that had to do with the plights of the flesh. Jennifer must not be frightened. Rarick would be kind....

Lying there, crushed into a silence that moved in a procession of her incipient terrors, there crept slowly into Jenny a desire that had to do with Rarick. Even if her illness turned out to be as responsive to the knife as it promised (Noon had been so casual!), there persisted in Jenny a sense of need of Rarick. To be sure, he would in all probability do little more than sit humbly beside her or at best say lusterless things, but just the same he would be there!

An impulse to cancel her four-o’clock engagement with Ramon at the tea-room the next afternoon flooded over Jenny. But even as she considered, she knew that, punctiliously, dragging herself up from the chaise-longue, she would be at the appointed place at the appointed time.

It was in the intervals between seeing Ramon that revulsions like this could sometimes overtake her. Revulsion of self. A commiserate desire to creep back somehow into the old unevil life with Rarick that dated back to the days when she had first set up housekeeping and had presented a first child to the serious young man who, with his feet on the clay banks of the Meramac and his eyes on the Pyrenees, had wooed her.

Time and time again, these periods of revulsion had ridden her, and time and time again receded, leaving her marooned on the strange shores of her infatuation for this boy with the eyes that nowadays were more insolent than amorous, and whose half-baked æsthetics, even as she succumbed to them, she realized were spurious.

For the moment, in her fright, Jenny turned to Rarick. Ramon, who hated illness, might find her ugly to him. Rarick, on the other hand, was not the man to waste impatience or rebellion upon the inevitable. His sympathies, always susceptible, were not hard to muster. He was a kindly light on a landscape that to Jenny had suddenly become threatening and sinister.

Jenny, who had no God in particular, except one she resurrected for herself in times of great stress, felt suddenly and terribly the need of God and Rarick. Her emergency God had last been on her lips in her paroxysms of grief and pity over Avery. She was about to have need of Him again. His name bubbled along her lips in tears. God, get me out of this. God, pull me through. God, make a better person of me. God, I need you. God, spare Jennifer any shock. God, forgive me all--everything. And, strangely, paradoxically, even as she lay there, chastened of mood and supplicating: God, keep me well and desirable to Ramon.

And, of course, she did see him that following afternoon at four. As a matter of fact, she sent a chauffeur to her milliner’s so that she should have to wear a new tall and narrow Russian turban of black krimmer that glittered down the front with a long dagger of diamonds. Ramon might find it effective and amusing. Her white face, long and narrow as the hat itself, not a rim of hair showing, was almost like a transparent face, on to which had been hung a deep-crimson butterfly made of two painted lips. Strange, glittering Jenny, at whom people stared without admiring.

As usual, on the edge of one more experience of seeing Ramon, her revulsion fell away from her and became anticipation that tingled.

There were picked words with which to tell Ramon this thing; words that would not offend or frighten or hurt him. Ramon was a sensualist by extraordinary virtue of the fact that he shrank so from wounding the senses. His senses. She would wound them ever so much less than she would charm them....

Riding along in a snide taxicab toward the place of their appointment, the ordeal ahead of her began to set itself like a stage.

She saw herself, tilted on her hospital bed, surrounded by tall Lalique jars of lilies and a jade bowl of green orchids with flecks on them, at her side. She would bind her hair in a tight fillet, so that her face shone out like a sly, sophisticated nun’s. Ramon had once jerked the hair back from her face, held the bandeau of his handkerchief tight above her brow, and called her that. Sly, sophisticated nun. She liked being called that. Sly, sophisticated nun. He had not meant it really, had said it to her in the key of endearment and had kissed her throat through the barrier of high, scented ruche that closed it in like a wimple. Well, well, no matter how hard had been the sledding; the wretchedness of the deception; the dreadful sense that somehow Avery, Jennifer, and Rarick had been smirched, and decencies that sprang from the very magnesia of the soil of the years in St. Louis, defiled ... it had been worth it.

To have never had this, toward which she was riding in the abominable yellow taxicab with cigar-butts on its floor, lean into her life and redeem some of its vanished luster was unthinkable. It had been worth it ... was worth struggling to hold....

Contrary to his habit of late, Ramon was in the tea-room first, seated at the small table toward the rear, under a wall-bracket of one incandescent bulb with a pink-paper tissue shade. They could count on this place to be fairly empty at this hour. She could smell his cigarette smoke and see the black shellacked armor of his hair as she entered. Their public habit was to shake hands formally. It struck her with chill that the hand which had used to cling to prolong that instant was something inanimate that had to be propped around her own, like a dead one.

What subsequently happened, although she was not to realize it, amounted, considering the facts of Ramon, to a display of courage on his part. With what secret misgivings, fear of scene, and perhaps terror of slaying with pain, Ramon must have prepared what he was about to launch without giving her opportunity to preamble, Jenny was never to know. He came at her in short hammer-blows that left her stunned and unable to resuscitate in time to stave them off.

“I want good hot tea quick,” she said, and drew off the long, beautiful gloves which she always wore in heavy, loose crinkles along her forearm.

“I cannot stay to tea,” he said, shortly.

The pain in her heart and the pain in her side began to thump simultaneously.

“Why not, dear?” she said, evenly.

“I am going away.”

“Where?” she said, evenly again, as if her words were to be quiet oil on so much troubled water.

“You have seen it coming. You have made it hard.”

“What, Ramon?” she said, trying to quiet herself, and the jumping of the pains, with the thought that always there had been women who had been forced to face just such stark misery as this one of losing love. There might be women, at this very moment, in this very city, who were being crucified as she was being crucified....

“I am sailing straight for Seville tomorrow with Mrs. Bursilap. We will be gone--indefinitely.”

“You mean Mrs. Emanie----”

“You know whom I mean, Jenny. It is your way of always making it so hard for me.”

“But, Ramon--Emanie Bursilap--seventy, if a day--grandchildren....”

“Beggars cannot be choosers. You know what I am by temperament. I cannot struggle. One must live.”

“Is that why----”

“No, Jenny. You wanted, as you say it so well in your language, to have your cake and eat it, too. You were too afraid for yourself. You were not generous. I mean in the spirit. You would not risk. I go with Mrs. Bursilap, and her granddaughter Ellen, to Seville, as secretary and interpreter. Ellen does not know it, but there her grandmother and I are to be married.”

“I see,” she said, her lips feeling so dry and gritty against her teeth that they felt to her as if they must make a scraping sound as she lifted them to smile. “I see.”

“I am glad you do. I have never pretended to you that I am what I am not. One must live.”

“I see.”

If only she could stop mouthing “I see!” She wanted to cry out into the cheap, tawdry stuffiness of that tea-room. She wanted to see his face darken because her fingers were at his throat. She wanted to hurl arms about his knees and anchor there to this lean, narrow pillar of her happiness. And there she kept sitting, smoothing her long, sinuous gloves which were the color and scent of gardenia, and mouthing, “I see.”

And suddenly it smote her that in her hour of need, there she sat in a specked, third-rate tea-room, being dismissed across a dingy tablecloth by a narrow young man who was trying to keep his furtive eyes pretentious. Jenny, who had borne Avery, who had been too precious for life, and Jennifer, in whom leaped flame; Jenny Avery who, twenty-six years before, had been wooed by a serious young man whose mind was tipped with beauty, sitting there being dismissed by a gigolo who had found her fare too meager.

“I see.”

“The--Mrs. Bursilap does not know about--this. She is not so broad about some things. You must never----”

“I see.”

She looked at him from under the high, narrow turban; and his eyes, as if hooked on to the dagger of diamonds, would not travel down to meet hers.

“I wish you happiness, Ramon,” she said, politely.

“I will have to be going,” he said. “Packing.” And placed a dollar-bill under the glass of orangeade he had pretended to be drinking before she arrived.

“I see.”

It dawned upon her, as they neared the door, that the aluminum-colored limousine which she had noticed at the curb as she stepped out of the taxicab, must be waiting for him.

“I will take you home, Jenny,” he said, flushing.

“No, please, a taxicab,” she said, and shuddered along her teeth.

He hailed one, and, assisting her into it, stood bareheaded at the curb, replacing his hat, as she drove away, with a swinging gesture that had given her many a thrill.

Even as her misery blurred her last glimpse of him, the fantastic and devastating thought smote her that his young, slim body-beauty had gone back into the sea, as a fish floundering off its hook dives back, only to be baited again.

Now that the bolt had come straight and sure at her feet, there was only a deathly kind of fatigue of the spirit, hard to endure, but far from being the active torment against which she had been steeling herself.

Ramon going over into the fold of Mrs. Bursilap suggested the wattled and ugly thought to her of a bright bird of flight being folded into, along with little insects of prey, the webbed wings of a bat, and fast becoming part and color of that horrible under-arm débris.

There were folds of old flesh down the face of Mrs. Bursilap that must be down her body too, and pleats of loose skin along her upper arms, and a cave of shadow on either side of her lean old nose that made her bat-like. And as if to bear out the unconscious cousinship, she wore gray mostly, fine chiffons that floated and formed web between her body and arms.

Ramon folded into that, was something to shudder over, rather than to shed the salt tears one locked in the keg of one’s heart. She had shuddered her share, hurt pride, shocked vanity, loneliness, and a modicum of grief for a fantasy that had perished, going down before horror of Ramon and horror of self.

It was as if suddenly she had walked out of some foul lethal garden into gray but open day. Rarick was in the day, precisely as if she had been off in some long, embroidered faint, from which she had just emerged to find him precisely where she had left him. A little grayer, a little graver, without eagerness, certainly without gayety, and, consistently as ever, remote from her. And yet so substantially there; for which, and without shame, she showed her gratefulness.

She woke him up one night, as she thought, out of a sound sleep, when her growing panic of the operation was heavy upon her.

“Rarick,” she said, softly, filled, there in the dead hours of the night, with a lonely fear that if she did not speak she would cry out.

He stirred lightly as he lay motionless in his insomnia, not quite sure that she had spoken.

“Rarick, could you wake up for a moment?”

“Yes. What is it, Jenny?”

“I am all right. I want to talk, though.”

She thought, a little bitterly, that she need not trouble to reassure him, who had no anxiety for her.

He was relieved that it had come. He had been lying there, pitying her in her sleep. A week had passed; and since she had not spoken, he had resolved to see Noon again the following day. But now it had come....

“I’ve been meaning to tell you something of a nuisance, Rarick. You never asked about what they found at the hospital--so there seemed no hurry.”

“I knew if there had been anything serious....”

“There isn’t. But I’m in for an operation.”

He tried to lift his words carefully into the casual.

“That _is_ a nuisance,” he said after a pause. “I thought perhaps there might be a little ulcerous condition there.”

“That is exactly what it is.”

“It is wise to operate, then, and clear up the difficulty once and for all.”

She could not help but reach out her hand and touch his lightly at the surge of relief that flowed over her at his calm, inferential way of regarding her recovery.

“I think so, too. Rarick.”

“We had better have it over at once, then, Jenny.”

We! Nothing he could have said would so have snatched away her terrifying sense of aloneness. She found herself wanting to reach out and touch his hand lightly again, and refrained.

“Any time you say, Rarick.”

“Suppose you let me take the matter in hand. I will arrange with Noon.”

“Yes, Rarick.” She felt so small, lying there beside him, so in need, so oppressed by sudden awareness of how solitary to be born--how solitary to die!

“I guess I’m a little frightened, Rarick. There is something about the knife--like cutting the rope to a moored boat----”

This time his hand felt for hers.

The very texture of her flesh, it occurred to her, scorchingly, had been softened, since last he had touched it, by a lover’s touch. If flesh, except by way of act of lips, could speak....

“The inevitable is frightening, Jenny, but chiefly because we usually have to sit on the rear seat and watch some one else at the wheel.”

She thought he was going to moralize, and stiffened.

“Let’s be honest, Rarick. Ulcers may be another name for--for anything. O God! Rarick, I don’t want to have anything terrible happen to me. I’ve so much to do, Rarick. So much that must be straightened....”

The mother of Avery was lying beside him, frightened. The feeling of chronic open wound somewhere around his heart began to move.

“We are going to come through this, Jenny.”

“We are, aren’t we, Rarick? It isn’t that I am afraid to die----”

It was!

“... it is just that I’m not ready, Rarick. So much to be straightened.”

Was the matter of this tawdry affair with the Spanish dancer with whom she was fiddling away time lying heavily upon her, he wondered, some of his dull and passive anger against her riding him for the moment.

“I don’t want to die, Rarick. I need you to bolster me over that silly fear. I mustn’t leave Jennifer. I mustn’t leave life. Funny; all of a sudden, it’s so sweet. We haven’t made much of a go of our lives together, have we, Rarick? Why?”

“Yes, yes, why?” How was it that the business of living had so cruelly deterred them from life itself? Jenny, here in her blazing tent that was hung in bracelets and shields and all the barbaric splendor of old, of which he had read in the histories, trembling empty-handed before a God she had never before found time to contemplate. She had paid God. Pew-rent. An occasional Sunday-morning obsequy. Ready-made reverences. He had approached with a new closeness when He had taken Avery. But now--now----

“Rarick, strange that we who have had so few joys together must always share the sorrows--first Avery--now this----”

Avery. Avery. Avery. His lips, from hurting, could not bear to say the word.

“I give myself the pollywoggles, Rarick, talking about death.”

“Then don’t, Jenny.”

“You must help me through, Rarick.”

“I will, Jenny.”

“I mean the courage part. ‘Spiritually,’ is the way the pious pulpiteers would say it. I do dread death, Rarick. Tomorrow I’ll laugh at tonight’s pollywoggles. It’s the nights--they get bad--you can help----”

“Yes, Jenny.” How? He wanted to. The mother of Avery must have it in her to rise on spiritual wings out of that fear.

“If I die----”

“You are talking morbid fancies....”

“If I should die, Rarick.”

“But why----”

“I want a beautiful casket. You can give it me. I want the most beautiful. One that will hold them for many a long while.”

“Why dwell on such non----”

“You can do that for me.”

That was what he could do for her.

“Somewhere back, Rarick, when I was a girl in Central High School in St. Louis, I remember we used to read in class, wasn’t it Héloïse or Annabel Lee or somebody slim and white in a poem, who dreamed of a casket lined in ailanthus leaves out of beaten silver....”

He supposed so, but why plan for death when there was life to be thought of?...

“Life, of course. Perhaps a better life than we have been pulling off together, Rarick. Death does terrify....”

What an Imperial Highness even the shadow of death could be, forcing to their knees those who approached.... “I shall never live to be an old man,” Rarick had once said to Gerkes, “therefore I want to make a friend of the idea of death early.” Jenny had neglected to make a friend of the idea. Poor Jenny. He would have given much not to have been too shy to reach over and fold the startled whiteness of her body against what comfort he had to offer. Fear was pecking at her....

“You know that beautiful ivory panel that you use for a chest door to your collection of jades? The one with the Virgin Mary seated, with a crown of pearls on her head?”

“Byzantium of the ninth century,” he said, mechanically.

“Isn’t it catalogued as the lower side of a casket?”

“Perhaps.”

“Rarick, I want that panel for the lower side of my casket.”

“Yes, yes; but that, we hope, will be many a long day away.”

“And those beautiful Episcopal croziers in gold and ivory, from the Walton Collection, that stand beside the organ, I want them for head-pieces. You can afford to build me the most beautiful casket in the world, Rarick, starting with those priceless antiques of old ivory and old gold. Don’t line it in satin, Rarick. I shall hate to lie in shiny white satin like a Catholic cook who has saved up for her funeral. I want to lie in leaves--ailanthus leaves of beaten silver ... you can do that for me....”

Of all the things he ached to do for her, now that the open wound of his heart was bleeding in pity for her fear, this was what she wanted of him. There was a pair of lines from Chaucer, engraved on an ivory oliphant of his collection:

A pair of tables all of ivory,
And a Poyntal polish’d fetishly.

That was all he could do for Jenny. Send her “polished fetishly” out of the tent that was hung in the splendor of bracelets and shields.

“Of course, Rarick, I’m pretty apt to turn around on you and not die,” she said, pertly and mockingly out of the darkness, on a rattle of the brittle, malicious kind of humor she practiced. “You may not be rid of me, after all.”

“I don’t want to be, Jenny.”

“Do you believe, Rarick, in a beyond?”

He did passionately, now that it held his son. He dared not, however, because of the shyness, tell her that his belief in that ultimate reunion was chiefly what made the strings of days, laden with their job-lots of rubberized table mats and gilded curtain rods, bearable. You could not exactly tell a woman like Jenny, who, even while she quailed, might suddenly rattle off into one of her brittle moods, that somewhere across the chasm of death, a story that had never been spoken was waiting to be told by you to your boy.

“I believe in something, Jenny, beyond myself.”

“Do you ever pray?”

“Yes; but, like you, chiefly when I despair. I don’t suppose you would call that worship, so much as fear....”

“When Avery died, I didn’t fear. I blasphemed.”

He could not talk about him--to her----

“I fear now, but I don’t pray, Rarick.”

He wanted her to pray. Deep in his heart he knew that her need of prayer had come.

“Do you think it unbearably silly of me to keep wanting a casket made of ivory and old gold?” (Perhaps Ramon, passing around it, would see her lying there, the lovely color of the old ivory itself. Croziers at her head and feet. Priceless ones, the beautiful shape of a shepherd’s staff, one showing the Virgin and Infant, the other the Crucifixion....)

“I think it silly of you to be dwelling on death, although it sometimes seems to me, Jenny, that life is a means to death.”

He had not meant to say that.

“What?”

“Try to sleep.”

“Rarick, I--want to say to you--it sounds so silly--it will seem sillier in the morning--but now--tonight--I feel as if I want to say to you----”

“Get your sleep, tonight.”

“Perhaps----”

He wanted to hear and yet could not bear it. She wanted to get said what she could not bear to say. She had no real faith, herself, that once more in health, she might not ridicule this craven hour of her low-ebb. Nor had he.

Jenny, God willing, what with that wiry nervous vitality of hers, was in all probability going to recover. Why subject her, who, with her eyes on death, had cried only for ivory and old gold to contain the dust of her body, to any more self-revelations?

“Get back to sleep, Jenny.”

“Yes.”

Dozing off, she hated Ramon, pimp, who had tucked himself securely under the arm of a bat. And yet--in case--there was always the septic danger of an operation--in case--she wanted him to have to pass around the ivory bier, time and time again, and look upon the strange ivory beauty of her, lying in ivory....

At eleven o’clock the following morning, Jennifer, without appointment, presented herself at her father’s office, to be met by Hellman, whom she disliked and who in turn considered her a snip.

“Your father’s morning is filled with important conferences, Miss Jennifer.”

She looked what she always felt toward him. Spitfire.

“Save that, Mr. Hellman, to tell to some one who wants to sell him spool-cotton or teething-rings.” She looked pert and as natty as a little sailing-vessel in rig. Her hats were always such right affairs; this one, a warrior’s tight helmet of cocoa-colored felt, fitted her head like a wig. She was cocoa-colored from head to foot, in simple, unrelieved lines, a triple necklace of faceted amber beads lying in golden rope along her flat chest.

She was a thrill to the enormous office force on those rare occasions when she appeared, eyes slanting at her from all sides.

Almost too chic, slim, svelt, right, there was an air of artificial cocksureness about her that in some way must have accounted for Hellman’s sense of animosity.

“Tell my father I am waiting, Mr. Hellman.”

“The Des Moines manufacturer with whom he is in conference, Miss Rarick, has waited in New York two weeks for this interview. Your father is not even taking telephone interruptions.”

“I’ll wait,” she said, and flung one silk knee over the other as she sat herself down in the desk-chair Hellman had been occupying.

He took up a pad, scrutinizing.

“His next appointment is with Mr. Harold Bolt, president of the Banking Trust Company. Mr. Bolt is already here. Your father is lunching with Mr. Hiram Biltman and Mr. James Biltman. Most important.”

“Is it true,” said Jennifer, helping herself to one of Hellman’s cigarette-sized cigars, “that there is some prospect of Rarick Chain being incorporated with the Bilt Chain? As usual, my information comes from outside patter, but I do think that the old gentleman would be wise as hell to get out from under.”

“I am scarcely in a position to say, Miss Rarick,” said Hellman, who was.

“Suppose I’d better tip off my friends to buy Rarick--common or preferred?”

“I’m scarcely in a position to say, Miss Rarick,” said Hellman, who was.