Part 14

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.”