Part 22

The futility of waiting further was borne in upon him. If the death of Jenny, leaving them stranded in this wilderness of Gothic aisles, had not hurled them into quick and sympathetic understanding, then it was not to happen the way it did in the benign world of people in books.

There was too much in him that still wanted to spank her for the things that still made her wayward and full of self and pretense. She, in turn, could flare at him with the old antagonisms before even he voiced rebuke. And yet, withal, she was an older, sweeter Jennifer, subdued in a way that was even more painful to him than what he considered her atrociousness. It was that new quality in her that saved her the drastic rebuke of the twenty-one-thousand-dollar yachting-week, which had angered Rarick as nothing since her gambling exploits at Cannes. Even her high kind of despair had a subdued quality that made him feel more nearly able to cope with this strange girl who was his. No, the blow of death could scarcely be said to have flung them together, but sometimes it did seem to Rarick that through the long, vertical mists of the Gothic twilights in which they sometimes sat together, they were approaching....

What he said to her this night, over coffee, could not have come off this way a twelve- or even a six-month before, when a high-handed and evasive scene would have been precipitated.

“Are you in love with young Gratton?”

“Damn it, yes!”

There was no surprise in her voice, possibly because her mind was flooded with nothing else but the hypothetical reply to such a hypothetical question. “Damn it, yes! Lots of good it does me.”

Constantly he was rebuking her for the coarse, free profanity he despised in general, and particularly in a woman. He let it pass now.

“That is unfortunate.”

“You would put it that way.”

What did she expect him to do? Reveal how her hurt hurt him?

“Father, do you like him?”

That was scarcely the way to express the curiously hankering eye Rarick sometimes cast on this young man, on those now rare occasions when he came to dine or call for Jennifer. Their talk had been desultory, withal curiously exciting to the older man. Gratton would go walking in the Pyrenees. He had a stubborn, tenacious mouth that already looked pulled as if from veering his own way. It was not that Rarick liked him, so much as the conviction was high within him that this fellow, who wanted what he wanted and would relentlessly go after it, was to be envied....

“Do you like him, Father?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“You have been known not to approve my friends.”

“You’ve never brought home much worth approving.”

“You mean Berry? That was only a yen, Father.”

“A what?”

“A low-down infatuation of low-down me seeking a way out of a torment by walking further in. The only reason I have for knowing that there is a shred of decent person in me, Father, is because I like a boy called Gratton, who doesn’t give a tinker’s dam for me.”

“How do you know?”

“He has told me so. It’s not the tried-and-true sex-situation that he would scorn to do in a play--bringing two people together after three acts and two hours and forty minutes of sex-antagonism, in order to achieve a clutch-embrace at the final curtain. It won’t end that way between us. Gratton hasn’t any use for my guts. Pardon anatomical references.”

“Have you any use for your own?”

“I’m not so bad as painted, Father. The trouble with me, say I, naïvely, is that I am not any worse than any girl in my position, only I was slightly better to start with, making the total loss more total.”

She was uncanny to him in her quick perspicacities, always trembling, as it were, on the border line between her legitimate kind of smartness and her tawdry smartness.

“How many a true word, Jennifer....”

“Yes, Father, spoken in the grimmest jest that can ever befall me. I like him, and the devil of it is, the more hopelessly I like him, the more I like myself for being the kind of person to like Gratton, and the more I like him for being the kind of person not to like me. Do I make myself clear?”

There was torment for you....

“Liking him is the nicest thing about me. The neat and respectable verb, ‘to like,’ is used here out of deference to your sense of decent restraint. I love Gratton, Father,” she said, and smiled at him, and kept it lifted there with the determination of a child standing on one foot.

“Funny thing about Gratton. He’s not money-conscious about us. He is not cowed, or infuriated, or impressed--I mean, the way you learn to expect pretty nearly everybody to be except the few-if-anys, who have more money than we have. Gratt doesn’t despise money as such. He does think capital swinish. Well, so does everybody, until they get it. I mean, in a healthy way, he wants money for himself, because God gave him a great birthday present. A single-track mind. He wants to write; and legend to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not want to write in a garret. He doesn’t think garrets are intellectual and creative clearing-houses, any more than gardens and bright clean rooms are. And Gratton is out for the gardens and the bright clean rooms. Funny thing about Gratt. I think he’d rather marry a rich girl than a poor one, but I won’t do.”

If, Rarick told himself, his face wry with disgust, this was modern frankness about and with life, then he gave up. The quality of the picture of Jennifer, seated there with her knees flung so that the bare pink of her flesh above the stockings was revealed, exhaling two steady streams of cigarette smoke from her nostrils, and dangling one cockatoo-green slipper from her toes, depended upon the particular retina of the eye and mind of the beholder. The eye and mind of Rarick turned away offended. After all, frankness was a virtue, except when it became indecent exposure. There were parts of one’s mind one kept covered, as one kept the body clothed.

“Isn’t that terrible, Father, I won’t do?” she repeated, and looked at him and smiled with her palms lying open in her lap, loosely, in a way that was pathetic to him.

“Come here.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Let us talk this thing out. Just you--and me----”

“I can’t. Not now. I--can’t----”

“Then later.”

“Father, be good to me.”

“How, Jennifer, how?”

“By letting me be good to you.”

Trying not to tremble and be silent, he sat and trembled and was silent.

“Child! Poor child!”

“Oh, don’t pity me, Father. That way. Don’t. Don’t. It’s you who need that. Don’t worry about me. I’m not going in for martyrdom. I’m not going to withdraw from the turgid world and spend the rest of my life spreading sweetness and light through orphan asylums....”

No use, no use, was in his brain.

God, God, why am I being like this all over again, was in hers.

“... and you won’t have to take me on a trip around the world to help me to ‘forget.’ Also, I decline the Victorian alternative of going into a decline. It isn’t done any more. But, Father, Father, what kind of a hit-below-the-belt world is this, anyway? I love him. And I want the right kind of decent constructive life that I cannot work out with anybody in the world but him. And the dumb-bell,” cried Jennifer, sobbing out and dashing for the door--“the dumb-bell hasn’t got the sense to know it. I won’t do!”

Once up in the security of her bedroom, which she made more secure by locking the door, she turned out the lights and plunged face downward on her bed.

There came the time, in one of those tall, somber twilights, the kind that Rarick loved as they came stalking as if on stilts into the vaultings of his library, when the pile of his writings, which he had kept stacked in a high and shaggy manuscript on a side-table, was replaced by a single piece of typewritten paper, held in place by a paper-weight of alleged B. C. limestone, in cursive Egyptian writing.

It was a twilight that smelled of snow. There had been flurries of it throughout the day, and by now it clung in small triangles to the corners of windows, and seeped its intangible odor of white, which assailed the nostrils like the feel of camphor, into the room.

There had been a high blaze along the logs, which Rarick, seated before the embrasure of a fireplace in which he could have stood without stooping, had let die to embers. Late light from the high, leaded window above him came pouring down on his back and rested along the stooped ridge of him.

In that posture, the hint of hunch was quite marked. It was a womanish back, narrow, tired, and with a little peak to it, as if he had been hung up and a peg had left its imprint.

There was an agate in his hand, which he twiddled without seeing; an eccentric sapphire cat’s-eye, said to be one of two of its kind in existence. After a while he slid it into his waistcoat pocket and drew out a glyptograf cut in old red dreamy amber. Presently the arm of his chair was strewn with stones, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Renaissance, a ruby from the famous collection of Signor Medina, an Italian Jew of the eighteenth century. Two opals from Lord Arundel’s collection. A black pearl from the first Duke of Marlborough. Another that had belonged to Prince Miravisky.

At five o’clock, Gratton Davies, who had walked his wire-haired terrier up a twilit Fifth Avenue, vaulted the snowless stoop of the house with the Campanile doors, gave over his dog to the keeping of Peacock, and was promptly admitted to the presence of Rarick.

It was the first time they had met subsequent to that evening when Jennifer had damned a hit-below-the-belt world to her father.

“I am glad you sent for me, sir,” said Gratton, who was easy in all personal contacts. “I’ve been meaning for a long while to have a visit with you.”

“Sit there.”

“Shall I remove this array of lapidarian loot of yours?” he said, as, seating himself, his arm brushed a ring of Pectunculus shell and sent it scurrying toward the hearth. “Say, that’s an aquamarine there, isn’t it? My birthstone.” He scooped the stones into his hand, pouring them into Rarick’s. “I once had a pretty fine pair of aquamarine cuff-links. Traded them for an Oxford Dictionary. I’m a great trader, Mr. Rarick. Belong back in the days when men bartered merchandise for merchandise. Must seem strange to a man like you, who has built his fortune on the modern rudiments of big business, but I’m like the old Thracians, who couldn’t get accustomed to the idea of just a small coin in exchange for a whole flask of wine. I’ll trade my aquamarine cuff-links for an Oxford Dictionary much more quickly than for cold cash. That disqualifies me, doesn’t it, as too unimaginative for business?”

“Perhaps you do yourself an injustice. One of the most outstanding business dickers of all time was that of a soul in exchange for a mess of pottage.”

“That is the one kind of trade I don’t expect to fall for, Mr. Rarick.”

“I believe that.”

“You may well believe it.”

“What is it you want most out of life, anyway, Gratton?”

“That’s a large order. You mean it in specific relation to what you’ve sent for me about, or----”

“Rather.”

“Good! But before we get to it, there is something I have wanted to say to you ever since it happened. I tried to put it into a message at the time. No one could understand better, Mr. Rarick, what the death of your son means to you than I. It’s because, of course, I realize the workings of that boy so well. I fought his same kind of losing fight back in those years; only, where he went through the door, I managed to jump back. I--won’t bore you; but I could have been that boy of yours, Mr. Rarick--I think I know what his kind of aloneness meant, and the kind of black waters it can put between even those who need most desperately to clutch to one another--well, I know what it means--I know Avery----”

A row of little cords popped out in Rarick’s neck, and it was a moment before his throat would unflex enough to swallow.

“Yi.” He had wanted to say “Yes.”

“Avery wasn’t able to swim across to you, and you didn’t see his hands go up for the third time. I made my swim to an island of sanity. I’ve clung to it ever since. Avery couldn’t--make it----You would have been his island....”

“A thought like that helps one to keep on living.”

His voice sounded to him like a Lilliputian’s. High and narrow. What the devil....

“Well, anyway, Mr. Rarick, that’s out of my system. I’ve spilled it like a ton of coal. But I’ve always felt strangely entitled to say it to you. Now, to get back to what I want out of life. Don’t know as I’ve ever thought of it that concretely, but I suppose I’m rank enough hedonist to ask nothing more than a certain ability to create within myself, and in turn endow, a certain amount of happiness. Why do you ask?”

“I have always thought of you as a young man who knows precisely where he is going.”

“I haven’t always known that. I do now. As I tried to tell you a moment ago, my feet haven’t always been on the ground. They are now. I may not reach my destination, but I am hell-bent for it.”

“I like that. Chiefly because most of my life I have always been hell-bent for a destination that I’ve never cared whether I reached or not.”

“Strange, to hear you, who would seem to have reached a high peak of destination that few men achieve, say that.”

“We won’t discuss that. The point of this interview is a strange one, Gratton. I am informed by my daughter, that you, to use her own picturesque phrasing, do not care a tinker’s dam for her. That interests me. I want to know why.”

“Now, look here,” said Gratton, without surprise, but unfolding a knee and sitting forward, “aren’t you accepting evidence without hearing both sides?”

“That is what I intend to do now.”

“I don’t know just what your daughter may have told you, but it is just possible, considering the amount of adulation that has been Jennifer’s since you brought her into an ornate world, that the slightly tempered qualities I bring to bear upon our friendship may, by token of comparison, appear frigid to your high-handed young daughter.”

“Just possible, yes.”

“I don’t know by what metric system you weigh up tinkers’ dams, but I do know that my regard for your daughter is quite unrelated to a tinker’s approbrium.”

“You might find it difficult to convince her of that.”

“Am I to understand, Mr. Rarick, that the young man is being asked his intentions?”

“It is embarrassing and astute for you to put it that way. As a matter of fact, however, you are being asked just that. Your intentions.”

“To remain, I hope, in so far as it is going to be possible, one of your daughter’s well-wishing friends.”

“I see. I suppose you are aware, Gratton, that my daughter entertains a disturbing set of feelings toward you.”

“On those occasions when that fact does seem more or less apparent, it is embarrassing to one who is so keenly on to himself as I am.”

“It would interest me, as her father, to know just wherein my daughter fails.”

“Oh, come now, Mr. Rarick, you are too keen a man to attempt to place me in an utterly equivocal position like that.”

“There is nothing equivocal in honesty, Gratton.”

“I like your daughter, Mr. Rarick. I don’t feel called upon, however, to qualify, even to you.”

“You are entirely right not to feel called upon. I was appealing to you.”

“I see. I’m sorry. Jennifer likes me, Mr. Rarick. I’d be a fool not to see it. She may be in love for the first time in her life, if you will permit me to say so, both of us knowing Jennifer as we do, with some one besides herself.”

“No doubt of it. That is my justification for opening this subject with you.”

“That being the case, her being in love is no special tribute to me, but rather to herself. Jennifer, of course, thinks otherwise. She has told me, bless her funniness, that her self-esteem is being enormously bolstered by the fact that she likes me. That is poppycock. A big sweeping energy like Jennifer, intelligent, gregarious creature that she is, must have outlet.”

“But?”

“I hate like the devil to say it to you, particularly since it does not convey to you what extent I am in danger of being in love with your daughter, but Jennifer does not quite come through, Mr. Rarick.”

“It’s fine of you to be this honest.”

“It’s fine of you not to kick me out for a presumptuous, if well-meaning idiot.”

“To get back to Jennifer....”

“One of the reasons I have tried not to see much of Jennifer since her return from her cruise, Mr. Rarick, is practically an admission of my own weakness. She fascinates and amuses and delights me more than any other woman I have ever known. She is full of the power to be pretty nearly everything she is not....”

“Right.”

“Mark my word, Mr. Rarick, your chance for a bunch of fine realizations lies buried somewhere in that girl.”

“Right.”

“On the other hand, she is arrogant and without a certain type of pity. She is sophisticated without taking the time to use her fine brain to be wise. She is super-critical without being profound. She is without great accomplishment and intolerant of others. She has a genuine intellectual curiosity, but pretends to despise what she and the rest of her set term ‘highbrow.’”

“You are despising the setting of the ring, rather than the stone.”

“Perhaps. I do despise the picture of Jennifer and her set. It has always been a facetious credo of mind, Mr. Rarick, that great personal wealth, even fabulous wealth like yours, is a maligned institution and that in private fortunes there lurks great power for good. In my heart, though, I am coming not to believe it. The very things I despise in Jennifer are the things great wealth should have corrected in her and somehow didn’t. Look at this room. Kings, artists, dreamers, contrived its magnificence for her. This home. Beauty, prodigality, dignity, peace, and out of this conspiracy of the so-called better things of life has come a flimsy Jennifer caring passionately about few of the things that make life so passionately worth living. Hang it! if I were not so afraid that it would mean that I am dangerously near loving her, I would hate her.”

“I think I see clearly everything you have said.”

“You can’t. Diametrically different as you are in some things, you and Jennifer are fundamentally alike in others. She’s yours.”

“I want to say some things to you, Gratton, that I don’t believe I have ever formulated even to myself, much less put into words before.”

“I feel like the devil. The things I’ve let out aren’t usually said, and then, hang it all, I’ve said just about half, and the less important half of what I feel.”

“This seems to be the time and the place for saying. I don’t mind telling you that much of what you have just admitted, while not new to me, is bitter. I’m not so resilient any more. I’m near to sixty, young fellow.”

“Not----”

“Oh, not so old, but, as the span goes, time to put the house in order.”

“It’s a big house.”

“An appallingly big one. I’m going to tell you about that house. The house that Jennifer lives in.”

“The house-that-Jennifer-lives-in. That should be the nicest house there is!”

“Perhaps, in view of all you have told me, there isn’t much point, but I’m going to say it anyway. I want Jennifer settled, young man. She is twenty-eight now. Motherless. Her brother is gone. I am not going to live to be an old man. There are certain things we know irrevocably. That is one of them. I have always known it. I will not get old.”

“I hate to hear you say that.”

“I would give a great deal if you could like my girl.”

“That’s what I meant just now when I said, I’ve said just half of what I feel, and that half the less important half....”

“You probably know, without my dwelling upon it, the failure of a parent I’ve been to her.”

“It’s been a mutual failure.”

“She’s got brains and sweetness----”

“God knows she has. Too much of both for my peace of mind. You’re going to reap from them, too--mark you----”

“I want to tell you a little about myself, Gratton.”

“Yes.”

“Young man, I am worth one hundred and eighty million dollars. And yet, personally, I have never succeeded. My success succeeded.”

“I see what you mean.”

“In my youth, Gratton, I wanted one thing out of life as hard-headedly as you seem to want one thing. My success snatched it away.”

“I think I summed it up when I said once of you that you asked for bread and got a gold nugget.”

“Excellent. I would have a hard time getting a jury to vote me sympathy, but I am as short of success, today, Gratton, as you see me sitting here, as I was in the days when I used to figure my plans on the backs of envelopes behind a counter in a hardware store.”

“I know that.”

“That is why there is something about a young fellow like you, so sure not to be deterred; something that to an old fellow like me, is just about sublime. I want you to look at me, seated here as you say, in a home contrived by kings, and try to understand some of the things that I am going to tell you. Follow?”

“Yes.”

“First, as to family. You see me practically bankrupt. My wife gone. That I cannot discuss, even here. Need I say to you,” he went on, and began to twist his face--“need I say to you that my life was finished the day Avery took his? We never got to each other. But I--no fool like an old fool, that boy was my reason for having the endurance to fight through the black and colossal years of my success. He made the nights, filled with my wakefulness, endurable. He was the hope of my loneliness. He was my real success waiting to be accomplished and in my dumbness, I crossed him in everything that did not point toward that success. I saw the paraphernalia of wealth crushing him. The steam-roller flattening him into a pattern just as you see it threatening Jennifer. I saw his success in picking out a rich man for his father, threatening to succeed. I have no graces, Gratton. If ever a man was lacking in manner, that man is me. I had no way to ingratiate the boy, no talent for parenthood. I didn’t deserve him. I let him starve for the very things I would have given my life to feed him. He got lost, you see, in the maze of the things and the things. I don’t intend to have that happen to my girl....”

“It needn’t.”

“I am not a man to take life lightly, Gratton. My wife used to say of me that I lacked a cardinal sense of humor. I have never believed she was right. That is the last thing a man wants to believe of himself, but it is true that I do not take this matter of my colossal wealth lightly. I have given it more profound thought, its relationship to the world from which I derived it, the economic scheme which made it possible and my responsibilities toward those sources, than even you might think. I am not an educated man, Gratton, like you. But I have thought my share and pondered....”

“I once heard it said of you, Mr. Rarick, or perhaps read it in some magazine, that you never reached a conclusion that was not based upon at least several of the best opinions you could muster and that those several opinions were almost invariably all yours.”

“I’ve gone my road alone. Open the third drawer of that table.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Take out that pile of manuscript.”

“This?”

“Yes.”

“Whew!”

“Yes, five hundred and forty-eight pages longhand.”

“Yes, and what fine, steel-point longhand. Yours?”

“Yes. Brevity being the soul of wit, that would just about be the bulk of my story.”

“Your life?”

“Everything but, and yet nothing else. It is the story of the house and man my wealth built. Of the walls it reared for me and the hearth it kindled. It is filled with moralizing, the kind nobody will take the time to read. It is the result of my study, my thoughts, my experience. It is my last will and testament. But more of that presently. I wonder if you happen to have heard, Gratton, rumors that Rarick Chain is about to be absorbed by Bilt Chain?”

“Yes.”

“They are founded on fact.”

“You have completed that job.”