Part 13

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.