FIVE & TEN (continued 4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, peak!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Prevention?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I maintain, avoid excess baggage.”

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

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

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

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

“Extraordinary you should mention that.”

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

“Fact is, Rarick, I’m about to.”

(Sly fellow.)

“Yes?”

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

“Yes.”

“Yes? Have I met the lady?”

“No.”

“Oh!”

Silence.

“Who is she?”

“An Eskimo.”

“A what?”

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

“Eskimo!”

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

“So....”

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

“For her?”

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

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

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

“I see.”

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

“Fine. Fine.”

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

“And money?”

“God, yes!”

“Would you still go North?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you?”

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

“Even there, you must live.”

“I’ve saved a bit.”

“How much?”

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

“You’ll need more.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know, dear, I know. I know.”

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

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

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

“My darling, you are all unnerved——”

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

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

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

“Jennifer!”

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

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

“I’m a fine darling.”

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

Strange words for one Jenny to be using to another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was that telegram for me?” she asked.

“No, madam, for Mr. Rarick.”

“Where is he?”

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

“No.”

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

“Yes, Jennifer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avery had killed himself.

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

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

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

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

“They” had turned in police alarms about it.

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

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

Family Unable to Attribute Motive for the Suicide

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

ANOTHER COLLEGE SUICIDE

Only Son of John G. Rarick, American Chain-Store Millionaire, Discovered by Landlady Dead from Asphyxiation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life had been too much for him.

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

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

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

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

This was the boy....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No way to turn....

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

At first he had not recognized the signature:

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

Gratton Davies.

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

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

Jenny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was to Ramon she turned.

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

“You will not let me be.”

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

“Yes, yes, darling, but——”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You were too good, Jenny.”

“You mean I spoiled——”

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

“You are perfection, Ramon.”

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

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

That thought, too, had flashed through his brain.

“That, Jenny, you know is impossible.”

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

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

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

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

He laid hands over her small cold ones.

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

“Am I strange to you, Ramon?”

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

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

“Strange....”

“He must have found life too—too——”

“Too exquisite.”

“Too exquisite.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Look here, Jennif, make allowances.”

“For what?”

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

“Berry dear——”

“Jennifer dear——”

“I’m dense.”

“I—I’m—I guess I’m confused, Jennif.”

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

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

“Whew, yes!”

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

“Where do you get that, Jennif?”

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

“I see.”

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

“What the devil....”

“What the devil?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about me?”

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

“To what?”

“Us.”

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

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

“Then what?”

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

“Pretty picture.”

“I hate it more than you do.”

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

“So it should, Berry.”

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

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

“Not nice.”

“Sorry, Berry.”

“Dear girl....”

“Don’t say that, Berry.”

“Now what?”

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

“You should have been a writer of fantasies.”

“I’m a liver of them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God forbid!”

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

“But I don’t want to be guv.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why the devil....”

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

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

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

“Damn it, yes!”

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

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

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

“I’ll go!”

“Berry, I’m for your kid——”

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

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

“But, Jennifer——”

“But, Berry——”

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

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

“That’s my business.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were books on Rarick’s night-table, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Shaw’s Socialism for Millionaires, Karl Marx’s Capital, Stuart Chase’s The Tragedy of Waste, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, Weston’s Economics for the Business Man, William Morris’s Letters on Socialism, John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, many of which he found out-of-date, confusing, un- or mis-informing, and coldly technical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”