Part 11
To the exclusive Dobson functions the John Raricks were not bidden. “Where do they get off?” gritted Jennifer between her teeth. “It’s town talk that her mother, old lady Emanie Bursilap, aged two hundred and forty-six, keeps flocks of patent-leather-haired tame robins and feeds them meal tickets. None over twenty-one need apply.”
The time had come when this horrid indictment could send a special kind of chill down Jenny’s spine.
At one o’clock Jenny entertained the members of the executive and visiting board of the International House for Defective Children at the Cosmo Club. Again it was not a social group, but the list pleased her, and she had a typed copy of it sent to the _Times_: Madame Marcella Tarafa, Buenos Aires. Mrs. Gregory Cripps. Lady Annabel Metcalf. Mrs. Hugo Thorner. Marquise de Brassac. Signora Testa Pontavice. Mrs. Beaver Kellog, Philadelphia. The Countess of Pendleton, St. John’s House. Mrs. Turner Moses. Mrs. Willie Bingham Payne. Miss Henriette Shonnard.
Jenny was not a member of the Cosmo Club, but entertained there by proxy of Miss Shonnard. It was Jenny’s way of signifying to the daughter of Senator Shonnard her desire for membership in this most socially representative women’s club in town. So far nothing had come of it.
At three, Jenny took a taxicab from the club-house, and met Ramon at the tea-room in the West Seventies. She had decided on this much of a definite policy! From now on, never to appear with him at a public function. For instance, that evening he was accompanying, at Jenny’s stipulation, young Miss Clabby Wall to a large charity dinner-dance at the Plaza, for which Jenny had taken a table in Jennifer’s name. There were to be twenty guests at her table, Ramon not among them. Jenny had sent an extra two tickets to him by mail.
Unquestionably the need of the small retreat of Ramon’s fitting-up was becoming imperative. There was such a thing as being conspicuous even at the inconspicuous little tea-rooms of the West Seventies.
Ramon, waiting in the tea-room, had a headache. Something repulsive had happened. His dancing partner, the Spanish girl, a volatile, gifted creature, desperately in love with a shiftless husband who was brutal to her, had fallen ill of a skin irritation that manifested itself on her face and disqualified her for the dance. The sight of the blemished girl had been abhorrent to Ramon, who had also been obliged to advance the improvident pair fifty dollars to cover immediate doctor bills.
Jenny loved the complete way in which he surrendered himself into her hands. “Life is confusing, Jennifer’s Jenny. I have sympathy, of course, but I cannot help being repulsed by sickness. Of course, perhaps some day I may fall ill myself.”
“No, darling!” cried Jenny, eager to be omniscient in his behalf.
“You won’t hate me if ever I do fall ill--and splotchy, Jennifer’s Jenny?”
“I’ll nurse you like an angel.”
“I am a dog and you are an angel.”
“You will be an angel to me, though, Ramon, always?”
“It gave me the shivers just now to see her. I was glad to give her money. It strapped me to let her have fifty, though, Jennifer’s Jenny.”
“I know that,” she said, slipping a yellow bill, that was already folded into the hole of her glove, from her hand into his.
He placed a kiss along a lean, suède-covered finger.
“It is hard not to feel upset, Jennifer’s Jenny, when life is just one frusteration after frusteration.”
He mispronounced “frustration,” with a lisp that was adorable to her.
“Everything will come out all right, Ramon.”
“How can everything come out all right, when I am not even to be with you tonight, but must sit with that tiresome little Clabby person at a table that is far from yours?”
“You are going to drive home with me afterward. Around the Park three times.”
“Darling--how----”
“Never mind how. There is another new chauffeur. I could not bear to live through the day, dear, if it didn’t mean that much time alone with you.”
“I am looking at you, Jennifer’s Jenny, across this ugly table-top, but in reality I am kissing you one thousand times.”
“And me you, Ramon.” Across the table their glances poured.
“I must be at Fifty-seventh Street at four o’clock.”
“Damn four!”
“Perhaps I shall drop in later at Perroquet’s; but keep away, as usual, dear.”
At four o’clock the unmounted body of a specially designed French car was submitted to Jenny in the Fifty-seventh Street show-rooms of a firm of automobile-importers.
At five o’clock Jenny picked up Madame Tarafa at her apartment-hotel and took her to Perroquet’s for tea, where Ramon danced. He did not come over; but again, from across the room, their glances poured.
At six o’clock, by appointment, a chinchilla coat, which had arrived by way of Moscow, was delivered to Jenny. In the beauty of twilit snow, it hung from her narrow shoulders as she stood before triple mirrors in her boudoir. She proposed to wear it that night. Ramon had admired one worn by Mrs. Stanley Grimes. Jenny happened to know that the Grimes garment had cost forty-five thousand dollars in Paris, plus sixty per cent duty. Her own, with the duty, came to seventy-four thousand. Rarick, who was completely easy-going about her expenditures for finery, paid such bills as these with puzzlement. Seventy-four thousand dollars to cover a woman’s back. Thoughts came jamming to the fore of his mind, but he choked them back. Well--those were the gratifications for which men beat out their lives in the market-places.
At seven o’clock the maid in the Breton cap helped Jenny into a black-satin gown that rose to a high neck in front and to a bare and daring V at the back. As she was looping herself in graduated ropes of graduated pearls, the door of her dressing-room burst open without the preamble of a knock.
It was Rarick. His face, locked in the horrible immobility of a gargoyle, was the color of granite.
“I want Jennifer.” A paper was crushed in his hand, and his lips were hauled back from his teeth, making them protrude as they do in a skull.
RARICK’S DAY
That same day began for Rarick with his usual habit of twisting reluctantly out of the belated sleep that came to him just before dawn. It was so good, this early morning drifting-down beneath the snows of consciousness. It was more like a little death, he sometimes thought, than the sleep which must come to most people. It was so absolutely dreamless. So disembodied. It was as if Rarick shot off into space for these sleeps. They bathed, they refreshed. They pumped him full of the energy you would expect from an eight-hour instead of a three-hour sleep. They were his air-tight retreats. Jenny was already up when he awoke. Sun beat against the drawn curtains. The muffled sound of the city came roaring softly, and he could hear Jenny moving about in her boudoir, giving the nervous kind of staccato orders to her maid that made her attitude toward her servants seem imperious. His opening thought had to do with an idea that had boomed into his brain during the night. Why not erect a concert-auditorium, vast, aërial, dramatically sky-high, on the roof of the seventy-nine-story Rarick Building? There must still be time to adapt construction plans to that daring scheme. A Gothic auditorium of superb twilights. Three thousand seats, each one a _fauteuil_. A cathedral organ, diapason pipes. If only the roof space would permit. Increase cost by millions--better to call in Yardsley the architect at once....
Rarick Auditorium!
There was a note on Jenny’s writing-pad for him:
Am using your Hispano this morning, as mine is up for repair. Have given orders to send around Renault sedan for you. Body of French car is here. Man will call to see Hellman. My O.K. will be on bill for chinchilla coat. Do you care to present Avery with one of those three-room portable camp sets? Nice for week-end camping-trips, in which he should be encouraged.
Plans for Adirondack house annex are in your desk drawer, right.
Jennifer wishes to charter private car, Penn., for forty guests for Navy football game, Nov. 18. Your office can arrange.
Saranac Hospital Committee will ask Hellman for an interview with you. Please give generous check in my name. These people important to me. Mrs. Carleton Murray, president. Do not snub. Not home to dinner. Charity dance at Plaza tonight. Going alone.
He preferred Jenny up and out of the room first, and her memorandum, even though so unusually verbose these days, by pad. He had no intention of seeing Mrs. Murray, whose philanthropies were conspicuous and obnoxious to him, or of presenting his son with some _deluxe_ camping paraphernalia, which he thought effete.
But how typical, this procedure! He had feigned sleep when Jenny had come trailing in between two and three. Then she had taken the opportunity of his morning sleep to tiptoe off to her dressing-room, from where he could catch her quick spatter of words to her maid. Do. Don’t. Don’t. Do. It was at least three days since they had met for more than the briefest of periods. There was one of her letters from Avery twisted and thrown on the night table beside the blue carafe. On his way to his dressing-room, the temptation to smooth it out and read it smote Rarick. The salutation, “Dearest of Mothers,” smote his eyes from a corner that had not been caught in the twist.
He did not pause to pry into it.
At eight-thirty, an attorney came to sit beside him while he had his breakfast in a small sun-room of superb walnut walls, inlaid with Rarick’s collection of bronze medallions. The discussion was in regard to a pending suit against Rarick Chain for infringement of copyright law on a toy edition of a pocket dictionary they were about to distribute in hundreds of thousands at five cents the copy.
At nine o’clock they rode downtown together in the Renault sedan as far as Times Square, where Rarick dived into the subway.
He had been much headlined for that custom of his.
MAGNATE MINGLES WITH STRAP-HANGING CROWD
It saved him eleven minutes. Sometimes he wondered about those eleven minutes. He fought for them through human underground shambles, drew into his lungs the breath off the lips of strap-hangers who lurched their chins into his eyes. In prospect, those eleven minutes seemed incalculably important to him. In retrospect, somehow, they could never be accounted for.
At nine-thirty Hellman met him at the private door of his private office, took his hat and coat, and handed him a drink of Vichy water.
That was part of being a man of affairs. You paid somebody to see to it that you were properly stoked with the amount of drinking-water prescribed by your doctor. Hellman’s concern over that drink of water was perfectly simulated. He watched each gulp of Rarick, who was never thirsty, with an interest that was impeccable.
Everything about Rarick’s office was contrived to keep out sound. An artificial quiet resulted. Noises began to grind in your ears from that quiet, as if some of the crash of the subway had accumulated against the drums. Rugs ate in footfalls. The battery of push-buttons made only soft, purring sounds. Two enormous electric fans were noiseless. The vast top of Rarick’s mahogany double desk, sheeted in plate glass, carried out the noiseless effect. It was empty of even an inkstand. The windows overlooking New York Harbor were high enough to give the scene below--of moving tugs, weaving elevated trains, specks of people--the effect of silence.
Outside of these carefully insulated four walls, two hundred stenographers crashed out furious and alarmed hurry calls for more hair-pins, more peach-skin-faced dolls, more five-cent dictionaries, more toothpicks, and more lollypops to match the shapes of the tongues of the world. At nine-thirty, an order, just dictated, was being typed out there in those frenzied aisles of the polyphonic typewriters, for the largest single order of boys’ caps in the history of the industry, while two men sat in conference with Rarick and concluded this perpetration upon the youthful heads of the world of hundreds of thousands of cotton caps with cotton linings and cotton buttons and cotton eagles stitched against navy-blue cotton backgrounds.
At eleven o’clock there arrived, direct from the railroad station, a president of a Cleveland bank and an executive of a real-estate concern, on an impending deal that had to do with a Rarick Chain property-trade on a Cleveland business block that had not yet been inundated with the shop of petty trade, and against which public opinion ran high. This particular situation was an old story; and Rarick took a certain glory in signing papers that were to make way for a Rarick store on a Cleveland avenue that boasted a museum, a library, and a park.
At noon, while the anteroom filled up with an assortment of charity-committee representatives, department managers, factory executives, automobile agents, and bank messengers, two harried-looking architects with portfolios and long rolls of blue-prints were admitted into Rarick’s office by a secret door.
It developed that the roof auditorium, being an afterthought, would involve structural changes of appalling magnitude and expense, to say nothing of possible building violations, steel-beam problems, water installations, and engineering difficulties too technical to bear immediate discussion. Everything was possible, of course, but at cost of millions of dollars----
But the idea of the auditorium had formed, hardened, and fastened into the mind of Rarick. Hellman hovered, during this exhaustive interview, offering such conservative objections as he dared, and urging deferred decisions. Two executives of the company were called in, also a little Russian named Osonsky, an office manager in whom Rarick had great confidence. While the anteroom jammed itself to capacity, the conference dragged on, two difficulties arising for every one solution. But when the architects finally buckled up their portfolios, and the long interview came to its end, everyone present knew that, in pointed stalagmites toward the heavens, would presently arise the Gothic reality of Rarick’s popular-price auditorium, built of the people’s dimes and nickels, for them, at admission of dimes and nickels. The greatest musicians available were to pour forth the music of the masters to the knick-knack-ridden public that swarmed the aisles of the Rarick Chain stores. It was to cost three million dollars, house two of the most famous Rembrandts in existence, and the organ-builder was to die in its loft, of heart-stroke induced by unbearable excitement, the day the instrument pealed forth the opening-strain of “Ave Maria” to its first audience.
So much for one of Rarick’s sleepless dreams.
At considerably past the lunch hour an office boy brought five Graham wafers in oiled tissue-paper and a glass of “half milk, half Vichy,” and placed them silently on the desk beside Rarick, who was now talking long-distance to Denver, a receiver pressed against each ear.
At three o’clock, a woman evangelist whose name was constantly skidding across a coast-to-coast press, and who had traveled eleven hundred miles for this appointment, came to confirm a matter relating to her dream of a world-tabernacle on a mountain-top overlooking the Pacific.
At three-fifteen, a German manufacturer of Christmas-tree ornaments arrived with two Eastern managers, and five hundred and fifty thousand dollars was transacted across the empty desk-top.
At three-thirty, Rarick, five members of the International Theater Foundation Committee, Hellman, and two witnessing clerks, bent over that desk for the signing of the Rarick endowment of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
At three-forty, the flower-woman on the corner of Broadway and Pine Street, who sold wire-stemmed carnations there for the lapels of hurrying business men, came up to Rarick’s office, by Hellman’s arrangement, on the anniversary of her fiftieth year on that corner. Also by Hellman’s arrangement, and to Rarick’s surprised and angry protest, three cameras clicked the picture of him presenting her with a check commemorating the occasion.
At ten minutes to four, Hellman walked as far as the subway with him, handing him a packet of letters to read upon his arrival home.
At shortly past four, after a cup of tea and two more Graham wafers, Rarick let himself relax into the unicorn-chair in his library. For an hour he lay back there, riding the quiet, as a swimmer floats on his back, finally pressing a button to flood that quiet with an organ overture called “Field of the Cloth of Gold.” No matter how chromoesque musically, there was something about it that set Rarick’s blood marching. He could see himself mounting--always mounting steps, a cloak streaming off his shoulder--mounting--mounting--peaks off in the distance, snow-capped. A viola slipped into a cadenza that seemed to pour from a bird-throat--somewhere--high--was morning air like ice-water. He could see himself mounting--clouds formed and were faces--the chorister face of Avery--a woman’s face, with lips desirable--up--up--Pyrenees of mountain-tops....
Presently Dr. Gerkes came in and drank a glass of hot Burgundy, which a butler brought without his request. He had just returned from Toronto, where he had lectured before a royal archæological society. There was desultory talk of university endowments, railroads, the Abyssinian researches of a Viennese that promised to shake the theories of the alleged beginnings of Tertiary man, and then Rarick, spilling out a waistcoat pocket of pearls, emeralds, jacinths, girasols, asterias, and diamonds, saw to it that his friend screwed a glass into his eye and appraised until it was time for him to climb into what he called his overalls for an address he was to deliver that evening before a scientific society at the Engineers’ Club.
Left alone, Rarick began to rip open letters off the packet that Hellman had handed him at the subway. It was after he had read the third of them that he burst into Jenny’s boudoir with it crushed in his hand, and his lips flaring back in the fashion that made a skull of his face.
* * * * *
Standing in the multiplying embrasure of her mirrors, Jenny’s hand, emerald-incrusted, flew to her throat. What had happened? Rarick knew something! He always did when he looked like that. Dry teeth bare. Terror flew at her. Terror and a sudden loathing for the whole tottering structure of her affair with Ramon. As a keeper of a gigolo she had risked everything. Why mince matters? Keeper of a gigolo! And at risk of security, prestige, eminence. The neuralgic pain that was lurking in her side seemed to leap into her throat--into her spirit. What had she pulled down about her? What terrible crash was this impending? Out of her recklessness, out of her failure to rest content with the security of her eminence, was she about to reap still more failure?
“Rarick,” she cried out to him, ready, as it were, to fight for her life, “don’t be a fool!”
How terrifyingly like a skull he was.
“Where is Jennifer?” he said along his dry jowls. “I want her.”
Jennifer? Thank God, then it wasn’t--Jenny! Jennifer, of course. Some nonsense of Jennifer’s. This wretched nervousness of hers! How could Rarick possibly have known what her foresight and skill had arranged that he should not know. The prospect of the drive homeward with Ramon through the Park came flowing back. Her precaution to change chauffeurs every so often was an indication of the skill with which she handled this situation. Who could be clever enough, for instance, to tie up chauffeur trouble with the fact that she and Ramon ... Jennifer, poor child! What now? One saw the child so comparatively seldom, now that the season was on--surely nothing----
“Where is Jennifer?”
“She must be dressing.”
“Call her.”
“What has happened, Rarick?”
“Call her.”
“The child is probably in her bath. Is it as imperative as all that?”
“Call her.”
“Tell Miss Jennifer,” she said in French to the maid in the Breton cap, “to come here at once. Her father wishes her.”
What row was this now? Jennifer, poor child--could you blame her?--had been distrait and erratic in her movements ever since that wretched business at the Edgertons’. Hard hit, poor child. But as if there weren’t just as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Jennifer needed change. The camp, perhaps! Could her father have got wind of that messy occasion at the Edgertons’? God! what a bore Rarick could be! No wonder his children shied from him.
“I wouldn’t start rowing with Jennifer this time of the evening, Rarick. What’s wrong? Won’t it keep until----”
The maid returned.
“Miss Jennifer is dressing and is already late for an appointment. She will come to Mr. Rarick in the library tomorrow morning.”
Rarick strode past the words, across the hall, and, without preamble of knocking, into his daughter’s suite.
“Rarick,” cried Jenny, and strode after, “don’t be a fool!”
Jennifer, evidently just risen from bed, was sitting on the edge of it, in a web of a nightgown that fell off her shoulder to the elbow, and pulling on a bit of infinitesimal stocking.
“Why, Father,” she cried, and jerked a bit of the web across her, “you mustn’t come in here!”
He hated a display of undress even in the formal attire of the women of his family. This Aphrodite rising from the foam of lace and chiffon offended him less than the bare backs they wore tapering into the waist line of evening-gowns.
“Put on some clothes,” he said. From the layer of tousled bed-clothing of more pink and more lace, his daughter regarded him throw a scowl at a jungle of hair that had fallen forward over her eyes.
“I think this is pretty thick, Father,” she cried.
Her mother picked up a white, tufted, swan’s-down robe, and tossed it to her.
“Put this on, Jennifer,” she said, in the cold, measured tones of her disapproval of Rarick.
What a bore--what a bore the man was! Joyless. Still a hardware clerk at heart. Little man, you. No wonder the flame that burned in Ramon was warming to her rigid heart. Thank God for Ramon! What was that paper....
Thrusting the crumpled sheet under his daughter’s eyes and slapping it with the back of his hand, Rarick lost no time.
“Explain that.”
The letter was from Tom Edgerton:
... unless, Mr. Rarick, this situation is to result in tragedy for all concerned, I beg you to call instant halt to matters between your daughter and my son-in-law. To add to an already outrageous situation, Leslie is with child. I regret the imperative need to bring before you what I am sure must be your first knowledge of this dangerous dilemma for all concerned. Unless you force it to an immediate solution....
A low cry escaped Jennifer. Pain. Rage. Surprise.
“Damn him! Damn!” she cried and began to sob instantly and wildly into her bare palm, which she clapped against her mouth. “Damn! Damn!”
“It seems to me,” cried Jenny, frightened, “that Tom Edgerton had better mind his own eggs in his own basket.”
What was this? What was this? As Jennifer had recited it that muddled morning after, both the Jennys had sat in merciless indictment upon the behavior of Berry, and of Leslie, too, for that matter. Jennifer had hurled at him merciless invective, wallop, and relentless appraisal. Surely, in these weeks subsequent, Jennifer had not been seeing Berry? The idea that Jennifer was cruelly hard hit was preposterous. What was this? Had Jennifer, for the first time, violated her mother’s confidence? That little fool there, that little fool man, there, what did he know about handling her?
“I want to know,” shouted Rarick, seeming to gnaw on his words with his long dry-looking teeth, and standing directly up before his daughter as she struggled into the sleeve of her robe, “what there is between you and Berry Rhodes?”