Part 15

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

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

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

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

“You were too good, Jenny.”

“You mean I spoiled----”

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

“You are perfection, Ramon.”

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

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

That thought, too, had flashed through his brain.

“That, Jenny, you know is impossible.”

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

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

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

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

He laid hands over her small cold ones.

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

“Am I strange to you, Ramon?”

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

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

“Strange....”

“He must have found life too--too----”

“Too exquisite.”

“Too exquisite.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JENNIFER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Look here, Jennif, make allowances.”

“For what?”

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

“Berry dear----”

“Jennifer dear----”

“I’m dense.”

“I--I’m--I guess I’m confused, Jennif.”

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

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

“Whew, yes!”

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

“Where do you get that, Jennif?”

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

“I see.”

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

“What the devil....”

“What the devil?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about me?”

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

“To what?”

“Us.”

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

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

“Then what?”

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

“Pretty picture.”

“I hate it more than you do.”

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

“So it should, Berry.”

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

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

“Not nice.”

“Sorry, Berry.”

“Dear girl....”

“Don’t say that, Berry.”

“Now what?”

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

“You should have been a writer of fantasies.”

“I’m a liver of them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God forbid!”

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

“But I don’t want to be guv.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why the devil....”

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

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

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

“Damn it, yes!”

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

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

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

“I’ll go!”

“Berry, I’m _for_ your kid----”

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

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

“But, Jennifer----”

“But, Berry----”

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

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

“That’s my business.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were books on Rarick’s night-table, Adam Smith’s _Wealth of Nations_, Shaw’s _Socialism for Millionaires_, Karl Marx’s _Capital_, Stuart Chase’s _The Tragedy of Waste_, Veblen’s _Theory of the Leisure Class_, Weston’s _Economics for the Business Man_, William Morris’s _Letters on Socialism_, John Stuart Mill’s _Principles of Political Economy_, many of which he found out-of-date, confusing, un- or mis-informing, and coldly technical.

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