Part 1

FIVE & TEN

BROADWAY EDITION

FIVE AND TEN

by _FANNIE HURST_

P. F. COLLIER & SON CORPORATION

Publishers New York

FIVE AND TEN COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY FANNIE HURST PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

EA

TO

NEW YORK CITY OF CITIES

... Whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones.

MATTHEW, XXIII, 27.

Those who want fewest things are nearest to the gods.

SOCRATES.

FIVE & TEN

In the long reaches of what had become chronic insomnia John G. Rarick found himself mentally mouthing to himself phrases such as this: I am a rich man. I am a very rich man. Me, John G., rich!

It was his way of striving to grind into his overtaxed realizations the fact that, as he lay there, wheels of industry, turning by now of their own momentum, were pouring more and more gold into Rarick coffers.

Even in a land where such annals of achievement as textbooks and success magazines were crowded with the names of those who had vaulted from petty beginnings into high places, there was something about the rapid phantasmagoria from obscurity to rapid success that never failed to tax Rarick’s credulities.

Now, Jenny Rarick, lying there beside him in the elaborate marquetry bed, the first piece of signed furniture, by the way, which they had acquired, had less imagination to startle with the fecundity of events. She had a capacity to take for granted many of the phenomena of the world in which she lived.

A sunset was something to admire, but not to wonder about.

She had once remarked to a poet of no small repute, that she regretted she had never found time to become a writer.

Yet it was obviously a nervous woman lying there asleep beside Rarick. The face, always too angular for beauty, was constantly ridden across with expressions, as if, while the body slept, the mind kept open shop.

Above the fine coverlet, her shoulders, narrow white ones, with firm breasts that had not sagged from child-bearing, rose and fell to irregular breathing. Here was someone asleep with much on her mind.

With Rarick, the difference lay in his not being able to sleep at all. As a boy, back on his stepaunt’s farm, twenty miles out of Keokuk, he had known the torments of insomnia, coming in, time after time, from a long back-splitting day in the fields, to lie sleepless for hours after he had sought his bed.

His room then had been an unfurnished attic with a window set into a slanting roof. Stars had gleamed into his insomnia through that window.

Stars gleamed into his insomnia now. They were gilt, hand-wrought ones, against a ceiling of billow, cherub, and streamer, done after the manner of Tiepolo’s Labia Palace painting of “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Whimsically Rarick lay on the marquetry bed, ruminating on the divergence of causes that had contributed to the years of his insomnia. Everything, from a sick calf; the haunting lilt of “The Ancient Mariner”; a harsh word from his stepaunt’s farmer husband; fear of losing his clerkship in a hardware store, to one million dishpans; Avery’s croup; a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bank-loan; a rare and exclusive obsidian mirror with native textile string which he coveted for his Aztec collection, was fodder to his sleeplessness.

No subject was too casual to tempt his insomnia. He built empires and warehouses by night. He dreamed into flooding darkness of achieving his nine-hundred-and-sixty-first store, of possessing the Gutenberg Bible, of tin tacks, of beholding with his own eyes, in his own conservatories, the opening of a passion-flower. Into that darkness he designed window displays, calculated floor space, inaugurated Eskimo pie for his soda-fountains, and coveted a tode-stone ring from Clusium, the ancient capital of the Etruscans.

Across his relentless insomnia there stalked contemplations of new sites for new Five and Tens. Insolent sites within shadow of Hellenic marble libraries and along boulevarded frontage; more and more Rarick temples to tin tacks, paper napkins, hooks and eyes, sink-swabbers, and paste jewelry mounted on pasteboard and sold in bins.

His way of sleeping over a matter was to lie sleepless over it. A chain of six hundred and forty-two stores might virtually be said to have crocheted itself out of these hours of enforced contemplations. Problems of population of a given town, types and habits of the people, study of main industries, bank deposits and clearings, number of different industries, proportion of workers to clerks, of women employees to men, prevailing local rental conditions, had been pondered to their minutiæ from the flat of his back.

The problems of Jenny, now, or of his small son Avery, or his daughter Jennifer, were another matter. They made him restless and unable to concentrate. The fact that approximately eight per cent of all candy sales in America are made to men was a reasonable hypothesis on which to work out a system of extensive candy departments in those stores which drew their business from the wholesale districts.

The fact, however, that Jenny’s nervous dissatisfactions with the gratifications of today, in order that she might yearn for those of tomorrow, seemed to increase in just such proportion as her creature-cares decreased, was an unreasonable hypothesis upon which to base nothing.

How dissatisfiedly she slept, two perpendicular lines flashing in and out between her eyes. Her strong hooked nose flashed slightly, too, at the nostrils, and in the pale light from a transom, the triangular planes of her cheeks, far too thin, rippled now and then. There was something of a frail, pale Dante about the sleeping face of Jenny. A face that walked in a hell.

Prop himself on an elbow, and gaze as he would across the mound of delicate coverings between them, the pale splotch of the face of Jenny had a habit of seeming to recede through the darkness.

What was it she wanted? Strange angular woman whom he called wife, lying there sharing his bed, what is there that will ease your hunger, slake your thirst, gratify your indomitable appetites. Appetites for what? God knows! Love? Bah! she was as empty as a meal-sack of it for him, yet she was not the woman to seek it elsewhere. Up to now, hers had been the easy morality of the frigid.

Lying there beside him, in a house that already contained a sister portrait to an “El Greco” that hung in the Prado; a pear-shaped pearl said to have been given by Jérôme Bonaparte to Queen Hortense; and the largest private collection of Stücks in the world, what was the secret of the anguish that rippled beneath her cheeks?

Rarick owned, in his already considerable collection of precious stones of religious uses, a small steatite cup said to have been found in a Japanese grave of the Iron Age. There was a pinhead hole through the bottom of the precious thing. It seemed to Rarick that Jenny’s cup of happiness must be something like that. The contents ran out of the wrong end when she tilted it to her thirsty lips.

And what thirsty lips! She was thirsty now in her sleep. And, as always, that sense of her desire for what lay just beyond her present transmitted itself to him.

What did she want? She had her children, as much as one seemed to have one’s children nowadays.

What did she want? She had the security that goes with a fifteen-year-old marriage that has borne the fruit of offspring and material success. Indeed, a material success that taxed the credulities. As to the underlying gratifications of the passions, romance, oneness of purpose, sympathy, companionship, love--well, well, what proportion of human beings _can_ hope to sustain those?

Rarick had once hoped. But the young clerk who had come to St. Louis from Keokuk and had married, rather considerably above his station, a Miss Jenny Avery, had cast off many a dead skin since then. It seemed to him terribly certain that Jenny had. Where was that somewhat caustic, but intellectual-faced girl of those eager, wooing days, who had sat opposite him in a canoe that cut through the Meramac River with the same lean swiftness of their dreams? Where was that girl, a high-school graduate, from whom he could learn; who had talked to him of life in terms of the grave, simple, beautiful things that had somehow started so consistently to elude them, once they seemed to be in a position to make some of those early yearnings come true?

Where was that eager, narrow, intelligent-faced Jenny? Why, he had almost lost sight of her the first year of their marriage, when there had been so little time for the old talks of those days when the mind of each to the other had seemed an oyster-shell crammed with pearls!

Their marriage had routinized so quickly. Perhaps because of the circumstance that it had been Jenny’s total capital of twenty-five hundred dollars which had embarked him on the enterprise of the Nick Nack Store on Olive Street.

After that, her face had immediately taken on some of the pinch and strain from which it was never to recover. Jenny’s money had started him. Had that had something to do with the immediate reversal of what had been their pre-nuptial relationship of idealization of life and love? Undoubtedly. Jenny had begun to fear terribly for her investment. Naturally. The money represented the careful total of the tiny estate that had been held in trust for her in the five years between the death of her parents and her coming of age. And the first few years after, the investment had been unbelievably precarious. Rarick never held it against her judgment that she had resisted, with all her vehemence, his determination to try and reëstablish the almost defunct business which her money had launched, on the new basis of the five-and-ten-cent Nick Nack Store.

As a matter of fact, it had been a maneuver of desperation rather than of logic. No more than Jenny had he even remotely anticipated the enormity of that move....

And now ... perhaps he had been the one to change. The desire for passionate love with the Jenny Avery who had dreamed with him of walking-trips through the Pyrenees, was by now nothing more than a sense of frustration lying back in the dim reaches of his mind.

That walking-trip through the Pyrenees! She had been so bright! A high-school girl, educated by rote, rather than by the desultory reading of such books as his older sister Hildegarde in Keokuk had sometimes sent him by mail. Jenny, at his very first mention, had known at once of the Pyrenees, and their highest peak, the Maladetta. She had leaned so sympathetically into the yearnings of his untutored mind and spirit ... and now.... Something of that same frustration, mutual to them both, must be what kept her face flickering so in her sleep.

Well? Then what? How many times, leaning on his elbow, gazing at her through the pale darkness, had that question of his dropped down into the cistern of a silence from which there was no answer.

Presently the gilt stars, among the foliated stars, the festoons, and the adumbrated cherubs on the ceiling, would begin to fade; and dawn, a pale horse, would ride through the Corinthian archway that inclosed the exclusive residential Westmoreland Place where the Raricks occupied the most pretentious house of all the pretentious row.

It was about this time that John Rarick was due to drop off into brief but resuscitative sleep.

* * * * *

It was about this same time that Jenny, an early waker against her will, was due to open her eyes almost with a click, as it were, and start to a sitting posture at once, as if she had been called. Called she had been, by the pressure of the procession of her thoughts, which were marching so closely beneath the surface of her sleep.

Ficke house! Cretonne covers for the sedan. Box for the San Carlo Opera. Mermord and Jaccard’s about the twenty-ninth pearl for Jennifer’s necklace. Wednesday Club. Wire Long Island Kennels to ship Russian wolfhound to pose in the portrait Shandig was doing. Pour tea at St. Louis Water-Colorists Exhibit. Toy electric motor-boat for Avery. Meeting advisory board Garrison Avenue Home for Wayward Girls. Bridge-tea St. Louis Club. Garden Swing. Sit for Shandig. Oh yes! Mermord and Jaccard’s, too, about the gold bouillon-spoons. They could also be used for grapefruit. Avery must be forced, if necessary, to attend dancing-school. Avery’s riding-lesson. Rarick must telegraph bid on the Ficke house.

All this on the instant of awakening. Jenny’s mind might have been a memorandum-book, the leaves turning.

... Oh yes, and remind Rarick to indicate which plants in the conservatory were to be sent to the Chrysanthemum Show, and then, the Ficke house. FICKE HOUSE.

How he slept! Across the mound of the sheets that sprayed lace and sometimes made him flick as if at a fly, she too had to raise herself on an elbow, in order to find his face, which slept in the position of staring upright through closed eyes.

A little man. In the beginning, his shortness of stature had been merely something to regret and then adjust oneself to, with the immemorial processes of a woman compromising between the Lothario of her dreams and the stocky reality of her husband.

Subsequently, she had come almost to hate him for that shortness. A stunted man. Curious, that to her he had always given the effect of a hunchback. Not so much because his head, on a short neck, was so deeply set into the valley of high shoulders, but because, even in the days when he had wooed and fascinated her, the little hardware clerk from Keokuk, who had first been brought to see Jenny by a poor relation who boarded in the same house with him, had somehow had the face of a hunchback. A bony, up-thrust, hurt face. Short sinews of rear neck, rather than the slightest indication of an actual hunch, kept it thrust upward. Rarick’s face was always cocked to a world slightly taller than he. It was already upturned to his fourteen-year-old daughter Jennifer. Fervently Jenny found herself hoping, as her son’s slight frame and threat of short stature began to prove worrisome, that some day it would be necessary for Rarick to look up to his son.

All this talk that men of brief stature had ruled the world--poppycock! What about Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Bismarck, Lincoln? Jenny was not sure about the heroic proportions of most of them. Lincoln, of course, and Alexander, the vast-minded Macedonian, and Charlemagne, must surely have matched up to the heroic proportions of their names. On the other hand, Rarick, Jenny felt certain, had steeped himself in the sugared legend of the magnificence of the small.

His collection of Napoleonana already included a desk from Versailles, an inkstand flanked by onyx horses, and an enameled snuff-box worn down by the Corsican’s own thumb. The entire north end of his library, fourteen shelves of it behind copper grating, either pertained or appertained to the small Emperor.

How much of his success, Jenny asked herself, leaning on her elbow and gazing at him who slept there with his hunchback’s face washed in dawn, was due to luck or power? Without the incalculable boon of her patrimony of twenty-five hundred dollars which had first set him up in the Nick Nack Store, might he not still be clerking in the Schwebbe hardware establishment from which he had taken a day off for his marriage to her?

How much of this man’s success was due to an initial stroke of luck, her patrimony, and her distaste for his petty rôle of selling wire nails over Schwebbe’s hardware counter? Little as it seemed to matter, this speculation was one of tireless interest to Jenny.

How much foresight had Rarick ever manifested in his business moves? Precious little. Credited already in the industrial world with vision, acumen, and imagination, was it not rather that every move he had made had been a lucky gesture in the dark? The result of an imminent need to jump this way or that; and Rarick had happened to jump right. How well she could recall the move that had precipitated the change in the policy of the Nick Nack Store to the five-and-ten-cent idea. It had been nothing more or less than a clutch at a straw to avoid going under. Mingling even with her sense of pride, as she had sat beside him one day at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon and heard him referred to by a speaker as “that far-sighted industrial peer right in our very own midst--John Rarick (applause),” had been her merciless appraisal of him. Without the incalculable boon of her patrimony ... where would he be?

The chain-store idea, originating long before his time, had never really entered Rarick’s head as a scheme of scope, insistent as his biographers were to credit him with a canny and pioneer eye that had anticipated the dawn of mass-production and quantity-buying.

It had all just happened. Of this much she felt powerfully certain. Rarick had not foreseen his magnificent business maneuvers. They were born out of circumstance and stress. She did not want the world to know what she knew, but she wanted Rarick to know that she knew!

Without the initial patrimony that had been scrimped for her by deceased parents, where would Rarick be now? She was so fairly sure that she knew. Clerking at Schwebbe’s or possibly following up an old dream of his to acquire a Missouri farm and a sufficient formal education to divide his time between working it and teaching in some rural school.

It had taken courage to hand over that sum to a young clerk with such lofty ideals as this and who was constantly chafing under penny-wise business methods of the old German firm that employed him. And moreover, in the very first year of their marriage, when she was already carrying Jennifer and the fear of childbirth was upon her! He had rowed her on the Meramac those days, on Sundays and holidays, or taken her across the river to Cahokia to see the Indian mounds; and they had talked, not of big business, but of a dream which was to be only deferred by this rather unanticipated coming of the child--that walking-trip through the Pyrenees. The trip through the Pyrenees had come true, twice over, in fact, in a Hispano-Suiza car; and some of the most important of the excavations at Cahokia had subsequently been made at Rarick’s expense. But what was the use pretending? A wife, peering into the sleeping face of her husband as he lay beside her, need play no rôle before her own soul....

In Jenny’s mind, Rarick had not even succeeded in being educated to greatness. He was like a man who, at fifty, still spends most of his time reliving his college days. He had not gone on in spirit. The handsome house that contained him inclosed him as loosely as a gigantic pod holds an ordinary-sized pea. He rattled about inside his setting. And talk about penny-wise! He was still dreaming dreams the stature of that walking-trip through the Pyrenees and the farm that was to be worked as a sideline to teaching the young that Hannibal crossed the Alps.

The pea had not grown with its pod. Jenny had, mark you that! Breeding will tell. Her maternal forebears had been Piexottos who had settled in St. Louis as early as Pierre Laclede. You could not come of that kind of colonizing stock and not know how to meet success with the same kind of indomitability with which they had met adversity. Jenny spoke frequently of her colonizing ancestors. One grew to the demands of circumstance. In other words, Jenny Avery was being educated to greatness. After all, not even the Corsican upon whom Rarick doted, had remained the Corsican.

What was it that this man, her husband, lay there wanting, even in his sleep? What were the citadels behind those closed lids of his, upon which shone some secret inner sun of his private own? Was he inscrutable or just inadequate? The smallish young man who had fascinated her, way back there, with his inchoate desires that had never entered the heads of the sons of the St. Louis business men who had milled about the wealthy-in-her-own-name Miss Avery, had remained a sophomore on the campus of that youth.

One outgrew being a sophomore about life. One ceased desiring what one had achieved ten times over. In many ways, Rarick was like a man whose garages are filled with high-power motor-cars, but who, by the force of fondness for old dreams, continues to tour on his velocipede. The comparison was Jenny’s.

He had what he wanted ten times, forty times, over, but in the forty times, had missed the once.

But was it desire behind those closed lids, or just a gnawing frustration? As a matter of fact, their marriage had borne the fruits of love, four times over. Two children between Jennifer and Avery had died in infancy. She had submitted to Rarick’s bed with the same unequivocal acceptance of marriage that she expected and received from him.

She had seen the glance of this allegedly great little man, her husband, follow many a time the living, flowing line of a beautiful woman’s body, but with much the appraisement with which he was fond of observing, in its glass case, a fine example of a wooden statuette of the Virgin of San Domingo in his North American collection, one of whose breasts was studded with a turquoise-incrusted marine clam-shell.

There was no telling....

Little man, you, I think I hate you. He must telegraph bid on the Ficke house. He must! He must! He must! Cretonne covers for sedan. Box for the San Carlo Opera. Mermord and Jaccard’s about the twenty-ninth pearl for Jennifer’s necklace. Wednesday Club. Sealed bid on the Ficke house....

If anyone had told Rarick on the morning of the day he wired the sealed bid on the Ficke house that before his sun set on another afternoon he would be owner of two million five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of mortar-stone lace and Italian Renaissance façade, flanked by two famous Grecian urns which guarded a pair of doors, superb copies of the Campanile doors in Florence, he would have listened to it with that polite third ear of his which enabled him to appear attentive to the discourse of another while thinking of something entirely removed. A quality, by the way, which was to win and sustain him the reputation of being a canny and silent listener.

A maid entered on the seven-thirty chime of a hall clock, drew back curtains and lowered spacious windows that looked out upon the elaborately boulevarded, landscaped, and very private precincts of Westmoreland Place, before he lifted back his eyelids from the deep kind of sleep that invariably capped his insomnia.

From the depths of her pillow, where for an hour her open eyes had lain upturned to the gilt stars, it was as if Jenny had heard the flicker of his lids.

It was characteristic of her that she should resume conversation, upon his awaking, at precisely the point where they had left off the night before.

“Sooner or later, Rarick, the move is inevitable! Wire your bid today!” The phrase beat against his brain as if it had been there all night, and yet with his conscious mind he had forgotten it. That room in which he slept was always beating with repetitious little phrases that were Jenny’s. Do this. Do that.

Wire what bid? Of course, that had been her last phrase before dropping off to sleep. Ding. Dong. Here it was again. “Sooner or later the move is inevitable. It is Providence that the Ficke house should be on the market just at this time.”

“Not necessarily inevitable, Jenny. The roots of our lives are down here.”

“Nonsense! The roots of life are where one chooses they should be. You wouldn’t have a Guatemala orchid in your conservatory if that were not partially true.”

“Well, then, I choose that our roots should be here.”

“You choose. You choose. You choose. As usual, that closes the controversy?”