Part 16

The disposition of over one hundred million dollars according to a man’s temperament, family, dependents, hobbies, preferences, philanthropies, altruisms, wisdoms, principles, and conscientious convictions, was a highly personal and complex matter, to say nothing of the responsibilities, ethical and sentimental, for which there was no proviso in the erudite volumes of economics, sociology, philanthropy, or wealth in relation to peoples, land, cities, industry, and countries.

The time had come, it seemed to Rarick, to formulate into words of legal document, the groping convictions of years, which, aided and abetted by what he regarded as certain brilliant thinking of Gerkes, the death of his son had solidified in his mind.

Disposition of wealth. This much beyond a doubt: The members of his family who survived him must be made safe from his millions. These millions must be made to accumulate something besides interest and objects. Bracelets and shields, as he had read it storied of the Greeks, had also bewildered his son out of life. Smothered him to death. This much beyond a doubt: The members of his family who survived him must be made safe from those millions.

Wealth need not be in itself the arbitrary symbol of man’s ability to exploit man, as it was painted in stiff chromo against the minds of people like Hildegarde. Capital, yes, might be interpreted as that which you in your strength continued to draw from the weak. Wealth, if you were worthy of it, was what you turned back to them, wisely minted....

The time had come when Rarick contemplated with obsession the turning of his capital into wealth, wisely minted, into the largest crusade of preventive scientific and sociological research ever launched as either group or individual enterprise.

The wealth which man draws from his fellow creatures was not to descend in a crushing, golden mantle upon such shoulders as Jenny’s, to whom those fellow creatures by now had become so many millions of maggots eating away the impedimenta of life for her, that she might walk in glory.

It was thus out of the freighted solitudes of the long evenings of the long months following the death of Avery, that Rarick began writing the document that was to be his last will and testament.

The day the last steel beam was laid across the seventy-ninth story of the skeleton of the Rarick Building, Hellman arranged a ceremonial; a luncheon to take place under gay awnings on an improvised platform erected among the mortar and bricks of the parapet that surrounded the Gothic auditorium that topped the tallest building in the world.

It was a motion designed chiefly to catch the eye and headline of the press. Tables were set up exclusively for reporters and feature-writers at the most spectacular end of the platform, overlooking more span of bridge, rush of skyscraper, and bird’s-eye panorama than had yet been achieved from roof-top.

There were about seventy guests. Mayor. Aldermen. Health Commissioner. Lieutenant-Governor. Borough Presidents. Superintendent of Schools. Chief of Police. An ex-mayor of St. Louis and old personal friend of Rarick’s. A half-dozen leading St. Louis citizens. The eight most important executives of Rarick Chain, Inc. President of the Gray Department Store Chain, in which Rarick was reputed to hold large interests. Vice-president of Chicago Transit Company. Owner of the San Francisco _Commercial Journal_. Attorney-General of the State of Pennsylvania. Max Lindsey, internationally-renowned corporation lawyer. Doctors, lawyers, merchants, yes, and even a fire-chief. Myron Stahl, District Attorney. Ramon Lopez.

Wives had been invited. The publicity value of women present was incalculable. Editors would give photographs of a mixed assembly twice the space. Jenny had realized the indiscretion of asking Ramon; and yet the explanation of his presence had seemed so obvious, almost too trivial to require comment. She had motored down for the ceremony from Roslyn, where she had been superintending the doing-over of the brace of six beautiful bedrooms that overlooked a rose-garden, and had picked up Ramon, who had been week-ending at the Breckenridge Scotes’, at Scotes Manor, where she had stopped for luncheon. She had given him and Eulalie Lett a lift to town, dropping Eulalie at Charvet’s for a facial, and bringing Ramon along to the ceremonies. Nice boy--so obliging----

Indeed, so trivial was the circumstance, that when she explained it to Rarick, he scarcely heard; his nervous attention focused instead, on the arrival of guests, as they stepped out of the narrow, improvised elevator that they were obliged to take in three shifts, changing from one at the twentieth floor to another, and then out again at the sixtieth into a third, which completed the ascent.

Public ceremonial occasions were such painful and excoriating anathema to Rarick that his consistent failure to accept civic and honorary rôles could be traced to what amounted to an insurmountable disability to occupy a president’s or chairman’s position. Even board and directors’ meetings at which he must preside filled him with apprehension. Usually he evaded parliamentary procedure by calling conference in his office and seating the group about his desk, this colossal shyness also accounting for the almost total lack of social life in his scheme of things.

Hellman, who was always averring, averred that this inability to glean the best from his fellow men, coupled with a certain humorlessness, was what kept Rarick from his place among the truly great. Gerkes, in his totally different way, practically said the same thing, when, one day, apropos of Woodrow Wilson, whom he had known personally, he deplored Rarick’s policy of going it alone.

On those rare occasions when his appearance at formal functions--such as the Rarick Chain Twentieth Anniversary Banquet, the annual Rarick Chain conventions, the laying of the cornerstone of the Rarick Building, the dedication of the Rarick Stadium at a Missouri university--was imperative, it took more hours of steeling his will to make these appearances than even Hellman would ever realize.

It was rumored that Rarick paid Hellman, who was supposed to write his speeches, stage such necessary formalities as these, and appear as his proxy wherever opportunity presented, the sum of twenty thousand dollars a year.

As a matter of fact, he paid him thirty.

This was one of the occasions when not even the machinations of Hellman could prevent the affair from falling mercilessly on the shoulders of Rarick, whose place of honor at the head of the T-shaped table, even before the guests were assembled, had become dreadful to him at the sight of the small ivory gavel there.

The page of typewritten address, of decorous phrases, mock humility, and suave platitude, lay folded in the pocket of his stiff-feeling cutaway; steep sills of language to be crossed by his faltering lips. Presently, at whispered word from Hellman, he would push back the fluted-paper cup of untasted pistachio ice-cream, rest his cigar on the edge of the saucer of his demitasse, place the neat circle of his watch in very precise position, clear his throat, strike his gavel, and curtsy to the Mayor.

Your Honor the Mayor, ladies and gentlemen, friends--guests----

It was going to be blowy up on the roof. Gusts of wind snapped the bunting. The sheet of paper containing Rarick’s speech would be sure to wave and rattle. Sometimes, in spite of having memorized, it became necessary for Rarick, because of the numb nervousness, to read his address.

Greeting his guests as they stepped out of the makeshift elevator, the tongue of Rarick lay like chamois in his mouth. The great little magnate swallowed his tongue. The great little magnate was heavy with dread.

The panorama from the highest roof in the world unrolled before his glazed eyes. Dime by dime, brick by brick, he had built his pinnacle. It was of steel and it seemed to him it swayed a little in the high wind that was going to be sure to flutter his sheet of speech in his nerve-tortured fingers.

The Rarick Auditorium tilted its Gothic-shaped eyebrows out over the vastest expanse upon which windows had ever gazed. It seemed to Rarick that too many forces were meeting here for his endurance to bear up under. The agony of the nervousness. Altitude. That insistent, that terrible sense of the swaying of steel. The harbor moving out to sea. The crawling, remote island below, the streets as negligible-looking as slots. The dipping heavens....

Congratulatory phrases and the shrill extravagances of the women cluttered the high, clean altitude.

Marvelous. Breath-taking. Oh! Oh! Oh! Dramatic! Stupendous! Incredible. Finest--biggest--highest--tallest--most terrific--most expensive--gigantic--Oh!--Oh!--Look!--See!--What?--Where? Finest--tallest--highest--so--American!

One shook hands. One accompanied this one and that one to this ledge and that. That down there? Oh, of course, the Equitable Building. Over there? I say, Hellman, is that Metropolitan Tower? No-o--think that’s the Municipal Building down there. Telephone Building. Oh no, forty stories higher--wonderful--panorama--finest--biggest--tallest--highest--so American----

As Hellman confided to his wife, a large overweight woman, who was in turn suspected of writing Hellman’s speeches for Rarick, the old gentleman was a ton of coal on top of the occasion. In all of the scene of animation on the half-completed roof, Rarick’s was the one hesitant figure, requiring, on the part of Hellman, constant watching and steering, or inevitably he gravitated to a corner, there to stand unanimated, his twitching hands under his coat tails, making inaudible replies to the high falsettos of the women, meeting, but never making overtures of conversation to the men.

As a host, Hellman again confided to his wife, as he rushed past her to pilot Rarick to the Commissioner of Police, the old gentleman would make a first-rate funeral-director.

Motion-picture machines ground. Cameras clicked. Groups leaned against parapets and were photographed. The wife of the Mayor, in a feather boa that was well known to rotogravures, was snapped with the wife of Rarick, who posed tall and lean, with sables high about her neck and wrists. The entire group of sixty was photographed. Then twenty. Then ten. Finally Rarick and the Mayor.

Luncheon itself, served by a bankers’ club in Wall Street, was a cold and tasteless affair by the time it was relayed up the seventy-nine stories. The wind was a nagging one that became bothersome to the women and forced Senator Grimes to dine with his high hat clamped tightly down against neuralgia.

There were souvenirs. Snow-storm paper-weights of the Rarick Building enclosed in crystal.

At the escarole-salad course, Miss Jennifer Rarick, slender in black tailored things and high white fox, apologetically late and becomingly breathless, arrived with a young man named Davies, for whom an extra chair had to be crammed beside Jennifer’s.

The occasion marched to the address by Rarick, who, by the time the pistachio ice-cream arrived, knew that this was to be one of the excessively nervous times he would be obliged to read his few remarks.

He did so after coffee, the decorous phrases, the mock humilities that had been written for him either by his secretary or by the wife of his secretary, dropping heavily on to the assemblage.

On occasions when Rarick made address, Jenny invariably rolled bread balls and kept her eyes down. Zigzags of disagreeable sensation ran up and down her spine. From his place beside her, the knee of Ramon pressed up sympathetically against hers. “Awful!” she whispered, and pressed back; “he simply should not attempt it.”

The voice of Rarick went over its rutted road:

“... share with you--proudest moment of my life--generous public--lifetime ambition--service of the people--humble servant--owe everything to generosity of those who have encouraged [applause]--temple of music dedicated to people [applause]--from the people back to the people--your generous coöperation--my humble efforts--fine spirit of coöperation in my organization [applause]--thanks due to officials--employees [applause]--I wish I had ability to express--dedicated to people--dedicated to people----”

“Awful! Awful! He said coöperation eleven times.”

Ramon’s knee so gently pressing hers! It made it easier, after the polite applause had died down, to look up from her plate.

Thank God, chairs were scraping back. Another horror of an occasion over. Curious, that the figure of Rarick could be so consistently a depressant. Never knew it to fail.

“You mustn’t mind it, Jenny.”

“I do mind, terribly. Why does he attempt it? Oh, Jennifer, there you are! Wasn’t it ghastly?”

“Not at all, Mother. Father is my idea of a bat in the pulpit, or is it belfry? I love the bat, if only I didn’t have such a horror of getting him caught in my hair. Gratton, you’re supposed to be a word-prestidigitator. Pull me a phrase out of the blue that can do justice to that view down there.”

They leaned over the parapet, young and exultant, stricken with the wonder of what they were, even more than with the wonder of what they beheld.

“It’s the book of life written on a postage-stamp,” he said.

“Putrid! I can do better than that. It’s the story of the circulation of the blood being told by those crawling caterpillars down there.”

“Zero. It’s Lucifer being hurled, and splitting, as he strikes bottom, into land and water, skyscrapers and taxicabs.”

Elegant, but dumb.

The wind in their faces could not budge her in the tight black helmet that covered her head like close hair. It lifted the light tan thatch of Gratton’s, though, as if it were a wig. It was difficult to indulge in any but a breathless sort of discourse, and yet, they did discourse, these two, smartly at first, young, exultant, and high-keyed each to the other’s presence.

“The roof of the world isn’t so cozy as the low little old thatched ones of Devonshire and English poetry.”

“After spending a summer in a picturesque, damp, uncomfortable and gloomy thatched cottage in Sussex, I am convinced that love in a cottage may lead to lumbago.”

“Love! Must all conversational roads lead to love?”

“Pretty many, I suppose, between the delightfully unattached like ourselves. Daring to assume that you are as unattached as I yearn to believe.”

“Your way, I suppose, of asking how, or if, I have recovered from my last devastating love-affair?”

“Many a true word....”

“Many and many a true word ...” she said, fastening her hard, hurt eyes upon him. “Well, to whom it may concern, the dead past has buried its Berry. I’m so unattached it hurts! I think I’m in love now, with the idea of being in love with you, Gratton.”

“I wish you could manage to get all the way through to being in love with me, Jennifer. I need to be rich. I’ve a low kind of Indiana background that I don’t seem able to live down. I can’t feel the swank in evading my creditors. An unpaid dry-cleaner’s bill will insist upon keeping me too worried to tackle a second act.”

“An admirable but low instinct, my lad, not acknowledged in circles of the highest creative impulse.”

“I know it! But hang it all, my highest creative impulses, whatever that means, get all obscured by fear that the dry-cleaner’s thirteenth child may be dying of rickets, for need of pure, fresh milk. Of course, dry-cleaner can probably buy and sell me ten times over, but that doesn’t seem to lessen my obligation.”

“Go on.”

“Where?”

“Not being all the wise-crack things we seem to pretend to be, whenever we are together.”

“It’s you who sets that pace, Jennifer.”

“I need the wise-crack, to divert the eye of the beholder from seeing through how I do my poor little mental tricks. You don’t.”

“Jennifer, are you being humble?”

“I want to be.”

“That’s terrible! It somehow ... hurts. I prefer you naughty.”

“I think you do.”

“I think I don’t--really----”

“Gratton, guess why my face aches.”

“Too loaded with the seductiveness of youth and beauty.”

“Don’t rag. I am being profound and introspective. Altitude does that to me. My face aches, Gratton, from pretending to look like what it isn’t.”

“Perhaps it is your heart that aches, Jennifer.”

Their bright young eyes poured against each other and she did something that was adorable to him. She placed her hand up against the region of the heart in question, and her lips came lightly apart like a small, thirsty bird’s.

“That’s it! The ache is down there and my face hurts from pretending that it isn’t.”

“It’s too dear a face to ache.”

“Meaning expensive?”

“Not kind, Jennifer.”

“If I were to start in allowing myself to be kind to you, Gratton, I might not know where to stop.”

“Wonderful of you to say that.”

“Wonderful to be able to say that.”

“It’s nice, our being this way,” he said, on a blurt of words.

“Yes. It rests the face.”

“What on earth do you mean, Jennifer?”

“Being this way. Just simple. To hell with persiflage.”

“I hope it isn’t all due to altitude that you’re so nice today. Perhaps attitude has a bit to do with it?”

She grasped his arm. “Look down there, Gratton! See that steamer. Looks like a fruit-boat, nosing into slip.”

“Where?”

“No, darling, we’re not docking boats this season on top of the Woolworth Building. Look to the left. See, there’s the Aquitania, beyond her are two ferries passing one another, and just beyond them there’s a steamer sliding alongside her pier.”

“Yes! Two red funnels.”

“Right. I want a port, Gratton. I want to slip alongside a pier. That’s what Father always says about you. You’ve destination.”

“What kind of port do you want, Jennifer?”

“A snug harbor into which I can bring useful wares--such as they are.”

“Yours would be first-rate.”

“Are you thinking, or saying, that?”

“Both?”

She hooked into his arm.

“Aren’t I grotesque to you, Gratton, up here on this peak of dimes. Don’t I appall you?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Look at Father over there. Bewildered, frustrated, with dimes. Sometimes he seems to me like a little man whose eyes have turned to dimes and whose spirit cannot shine through them. Dimes have flowed over his life, making of it a metal prairie. My mother stands in the middle of such a prairie. I do. My brother lies buried in it. This building is a monument of dimes to the futility of dimes ... and in a way, a monument to the curious, groping genius of my father. I am part of his great frustration--Gratton--never for a moment doubt but what I know that.”

He laid his gloved hand against her mouth as if to crush back the words and the wind tugged at them, and beyond, where both their gazes focused, the harbor looked like a tarpaulin being dragged.

“There are times when I come perilously near liking you perilously, Jennifer.”

“Like me enough to understand me, Gratton.”

“Then you understand him,” he said, and nodded to the form of Rarick, who seemed perpetually to be hovering on the edge of groups to which he did not quite belong.

“I try,” she said, on a small click of teeth. “I try. I try. I try. Believe that.”

“Curious how simple he seems to me. A man who is too stern an idealist to compromise. A man who asked for bread and got a gold nugget.”

“A gold brick, if you mean me.”

“I don’t.”

“I’m crazy to help him. I’m crazy to--love him.”

“I should think his pathos would help you to that; the pathos of his terrible, heart-breaking grandeur.”

“It does.”

“Jennifer, you are sweeter today than I have ever known you. Please don’t ever again let your face ache from looking like what it isn’t.”

“Yes, but what about my heart?”

“It’s a dear heart. In the right place.”

“Gratton, if you prove that to Father, some day, when I do things for him that he won’t believe I had it in me to do, will I be proving it to you at the same time?”

“If you haven’t already.”

“I need more money than anybody in the world, Gratton. The chances are that I’m apt to always have money. I wouldn’t want ever not to have money, and yet, I suppose that the only real chance I’d ever have to show what I think I’m made of, is to wake up some morning broke--God forbid!”

“I’m beginning to strangely suspect you of being made of what you think you are.”

“Don’t make this strong man weep, Gratt. She might proceed to tell you how ghastly lonesome and misunderstood she is. Than which....”

“Don’t take advantage of my youthful susceptibility. I am on the verge of thinking you more of a person than is good for my peace of mind.”

“... and so, snapping out of the mood of better-self which had crossed her fair and petulant face, the fêted and ill-fated heiress to the Rarick millions hurled her champagne tumbler from her hand and--ate the glass....”

“Idjut!”

He stooped to pick up her glove which had fallen crumpled to her feet.

“Give me your hand,” he said. “I’ll draw this on for you.”

“Are you suing for my hand?”

“No.”

“Well, then, keep my gauntlet until you are ready to come suing.”

“Idjut,” he said again.

This was the conversation between those two, as they stood at the parapet, overlooking the world, high wind in their faces, and their words jerked off their lips and swallowed up by gusts. Once or twice Rarick hovered. The very atmosphere about them was built up of the kind of particles that kept him gingerly on edge. Their sureness and brightness and youngness oppressed him with a sense of his own unsureness. He felt ill at ease, just as much so, in a very different way, as he did when he bobbed about helplessly among the dancing young men with no faces in particular, that Jenny dangled around with her as you would bangles on a bracelet. That was pretty generally his feeling about the narrow young dancing-men, who looked as if they might be slid back into their shoe-boxes at night, and put in place along the shelf.

This Davies, now, was another matter. This fellow had a sure, uncompromising look to him. He knew what races were worth entering--for him. He knew his track--he knew his goal....

Even as he stood there, keyed by the slim Jennifer beside him, to his facetious worst, Rarick, abominating what was sure to be the flying foam of their conversation, was ready to like him. He had written that message, “I think I understand what you failed to get said to Avery....”

“Well, young man,” said Rarick, greeting him a little later, “how is the enterprise coming along?”

“Not for the moment, so surely as this one of yours, sir. This building has been headed for its roof ever since you laid the cornerstone. We are not certain yet where we are heading.”

“We’ve just come from a reading rehearsal of one of Gratton’s plays, Father. Talk about not seeing the woods for the trees! We couldn’t hear the lines for the adenoids.”

“That remark, I shall explain to your daughter when I have her alone, Mr. Rarick, was both unæsthetic and untrue. The fact is, the cast at the moment doesn’t measure up.”

“Gratton’s polite way of saying, Father, that the first thing the committee did after feeling money in its pocket was to go out and buy the most expensive Broadway casting-director they could find, thus launching the experimental idea safely and smugly toward the commercial theater from which it was so passionately revolting when you came across. You should have endowed Gratton, Father. Not a half-baked idea.”

“Jennifer!”

“Modesty ill becomes you, my young man. You may leave something to be desired as a playwright, but you are as bona-fide an idealist as ever let himself in for a bumping. But anyway, I’m for Gratton’s play, Father. Louder and funnier--more situations and less psychology--is all anyone could have asked of the first rehearsal. Also a new and not quite so comic hat for the leading lady.”

“I’d like to come around sometime, Mr. Rarick, and talk to you about this baby of yours ... that is what it is, in a way ... your money made it possible.”