Part 23

“Yes. And now I have a new one. A stiff one. The job of dying a poor man. The entire philosophy behind that determination is in this stack of papers. The years I have left are few in which to give back intelligently the one hundred and eighty million dollars to the people from whom I have earned it. Earned it, mind you. If there is anything miraculous about the vastness of my wealth, it lies in the fact that corruption has passed me by. The average man--and woman--Gratton, is beholden to the object, the inanimate thing for his comfort and much of his happiness. I have filled the hands of the masses with objects and cluttered their minds with the easy happinesses of which they are so capable. I have stuck more atrocious paper flowers into more atrocious glass vases than probably any man in the history of the world. I have anointed the tongues of the masses of children whose humdrum lives stand ready to snatch them out of youth, with the red of the sticky lollypop, and they tell me that the sin of ugliness and cheapness is upon me. That may all be true, Gratton, but I know to what extent I have made living easier to the masses whose days are chained to the trivialities of things. My daughter Jennifer owns a six-carat pigeon-blood ruby ring. The craving for that ring is deep in the hearts of millions of women like her. I partially satisfy that craving in red-glass ten-cent rings. Women with scalded, horny hands can now cope with their dishwater in ten-cent rubber gloves--there is a side to my colossal, absurd, undignified bartering in snide objects that is labor of mercy. Don’t you forget it.”

“One isn’t apt to, after hearing you.”

“The wisest man I ever knew showed me the way to give back what I have earned. He never, even in his great wisdom, knew to what extent his mind was endowing mine. I refer to my friend Felix Gerkes.”

“Yes.”

“It was he who first set my mind working along lines toward which I had previously had only a sort of subconscious predisposition. My friend is at once a simple and profound man.”

“I see where Mengelberg intimated in Berlin the other day, after commenting on Gerkes’s last book on the theory of life, that the Nobel prize is once more about to come to America.”

“That will mean little to Gerkes.”

“It should mean a great deal to you, who have made so much of his contribution to knowledge possible.”

“Probably it does, Gratton. That’s a snapshot of Gerkes there on the table. It came this morning.”

“I’d never recognize him in his beard and all those fur togs. Is that his wife and--papoose?”

“Yes.”

“Curious.”

“Not nearly so curious as we must seem to him. Gerkes has learned a peculiar secret. That is why he is, I think, the only happy person I know. He is never impatient for his tomorrow. That enables him to completely live his present. The present and the future are inseparable to him. The one is constantly in the act of being enveloped by the other. Tomorrow is something he does not have to hurry toward. There is going on for him the perpetual phenomenon of his present turning into past, as the future encroaches and becomes the present.”

“He has the face of a happy person. So has the woman!”

“He took his wife from the Eskimos, whom he considers the happiest people he has ever encountered. I was about to tell you, not meaning to digress to the subject of my hobby Gerkes, that it was he who unconsciously sent my subconsciousness to the surface. Before he left us down here, for his new life in the North, he used to sit around with me evenings, and more or less idly, let fall out of the vast storehouses of his mind, some of his philosophies on preventive philanthropy.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I know most of it might have seemed obvious to a man like you, Gratton, but it was strangely new to me at the time. I realize now that much of what he said had been smoldering in my subconsciousness for years, but just the same, it was he who started me on the concrete thinking-out and writing of this shaggy monstrosity of a manuscript. Three years it has been in the writing. One of its by no means most important results is, that you see me sitting here, Gratton, in a house that, pending my death, is only a loan to me. I no longer own one stone in it, but lease it from those who do, and with the sale of some vast lumber properties in Maine and Canada last month, I now own not one acre of God’s territory with the exception of certain colossal and indirect mortgage holdings which in their turn will be converted. I am, of course, still a man heavily encumbered with wealth of practically every sort of valuable human possession, but already forty million of my dollars are committed to preventive philanthropies.”

“It isn’t easy for a man whose bank balance has never been larger than nine hundred dollars, to have much of a conception of forty million dollars.”

“I have endowed no cancer hospitals, but have given, with what I hope is the cumulative wisdom that is coming to men who have come into the phenomenal kind of wealth that is possible only in this country, great fortunes toward the prevention of the disease. Nothing new in all this, you say. No, but look more deeply into it and see how prolonged has been the infancy of this idea. And there is but little time left for me. My money must pour back to the people in a fresh blood transfusion. I want to wrap no rags around social sores. To accomplish, I must personally administer my moneys while I live. I must die a poor man. You see that?”

“Yes.”

“My sole heir is my daughter Jennifer. For that reason and another equally important one, she comes into no properties at my death except a life income of eight thousand dollars a year. You live on less, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Comfortably?”

“Fairly.”

“She will be stripped pretty bare of the paraphernalia that has made of her some of the things we have just been discussing, Gratton.”

“I can’t imagine her.”

“I can.”

“She will plunge like a roped steer.”

“At first.”

“I wonder if you are wise, stripping her so bare of the paraphernalia which has become part of her.”

“There is the girl under it. The one who eludes you.”

“I don’t believe, Mr. Rarick, that wealth is necessarily destructive to the individ----”

“Nor do I. On the contrary, I am convinced, for instance, that it is the business men of different civilizations, the gatherers of material wealth, who have built the foundations for art. Civilization has advanced on their gold bonds. Many of the patron saints of the creative life of Greece were the business men.”

“Think of the gigantic power for good you are about to release out of the nickels and dimes of the people.”

“I have thought--and thought--and out of it has come my philosophy of why I must die a poor man and why this wealth that I have drawn out of the coin purses of American people must be released back now.”

“Tremendous idea....”

“My power to forecast the nature and needs of the future is limited. Vast accumulations like mine must cope with the contemporary problems of the people who helped to create the wealth. What is the use of leaving five million dollars to build tubercular hospitals when two years after my death, it is not impossible that a cure or a preventive may be found for the white plague. Let future generations wrestle freshly with their fresh issues. I want to leave no moneys that a few years after my death must be expended upon dead issues because of a will made during the period when those issues were alive. My death, Gratton, is a much more important matter to the world than my life.”

“In a special sense, yes.”

“So you see, my surplus fortune is not mine to leave Jennifer, even if I would. And I would not. It is difficult for me to talk to you any further than I have, young man, about my feeling of what the effect of stupendous personal wealth has been on the little group of my family. But just the same, Gratton, therein lies the tragedy of my life. A tragedy I do not intend to see perpetuated through the sole surviving member after me, my daughter, who will live to thank the dead hand that at first may seem so cruelly disciplinarian to her....”

“I simply cannot imagine Jennifer on eight thousand a year.”

“I can. Hand me that paper on my desk.”

“Here?”

“This single typewritten sheet is the boiled-down version of the five hundred and forty-eight pages of that manuscript. This simple sheet, Gratton, is my last will and testament, duly sworn and witnessed. My philosophy of life, and of death. My bow to the world, my tribute to it, my hope for its betterment, my bow out of it. My sighs for its defects, my hope for its future. My hope in my child. My faith in her. Listen,” he said, and began to read.

When Gratton was moved by a scene he was writing, especially in those earlier years before his “Tragedy of Laughter” had been written, he always complained of the physical discomfort he experienced while at work. His ears rang. A curious little elevator of hunger seemed to ride up and down the pit of his stomach. His tonsils wanted to burst and his ears became bright, polished pink. Jennifer once wrote of him in a monograph: “I could tell how the work on ‘Tragedy of Laughter’ was coming by the color of his ears.”

In addition now, to those roaring symptoms, Gratton, after Rarick had completed his reading, had a horrible fear he was going to cry. Not tears, but some brute noises. The sound of an emotion scraping bottom, as the soul of the man who had just read had scraped bottom.

“There, in a nutshell, is some of the wisdom I have tried to squeeze out of my defeat, Gratton. Not much of a job to a literary man like you--but it’s my legacy....”

“Well--guess I’ll be getting along now. Don’t suppose you know it. I may be wrong. But seems to me, that’s the stuff immortal literature is made of--that page you just read me. It’s the thing Lincoln poured into his address at Gettysburg. It’s as close to God as Senator Vest’s plea for a dog. It’s Shelley and Goethe crying for justice in prose. Its wisdom will live after you. I may be crazy, but that is the kind of stuff that achieves immortality. That last will and testament of yours is literature....”

“I don’t want immortality. At the moment I want milk and Graham crackers. Have them with me.”

“There’s Jennifer!”

“Where?”

“I heard her step.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Ah yes, I do hear now. Strange that you should have known her step at the great distance of the lower hall. Shall I call her?”

“No--no. I must be going.”

“Strange that you should have heard her.”

“I’ve a glove of hers. She dropped it one day. I’ll ask to see her on my way out--to give it back.”

“Will you ring as you go? I want milk and crackers. Share some?”

“No--no. The glove....”

“These evenings chill ... good warm milk ... crackers ... Graham ones.”

“Good night, sir.”

The wind had risen, hardening the triangles of snow against the leaded windows into crust, and blowing the cold, beautiful smell of snow in through the weather-strippings.

Waiting for his milk and crackers, Rarick, alone, poked up the embers and pressed one of the battalion of buttons alongside the organ.

Seated, small, the look of hunchback in his face, the tall, Gothic twilight climbing into vaulted shadows, the yarn of Pagliacci began to stalk across stained glass, the organ ballooning into the dusk.

Waiting, as he loved to, for the bursting sob that concluded the “Laugh, Clown, Laugh,” the chin of Rarick fell forward a little tiredly.

Clouds of music came up like thunder....

THE END

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation was standardized.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following change:

Page 9: “oeen a lucky gesture” “been a lucky gesture” Page 27: “sapphire, jacinth, dyamont” “sapphire, jacinth, diamond” Page 72: “son to Duse or Cleopatra” “son to Dusé or Cleopatra” Page 87: “inlaid wtih heraldic” “inlaid with heraldic” Page 156: “pointed stalagmities toward” “pointed stalagmites toward” Page 172: “for fifty dolars which” “for fifty dollars which” Page 269: “this Rennaisance tomb” “this Renaissance tomb” Page 276: “Cosmos Club, she had” “Cosmo Club, she had” Page 298: “ising and stamping the” “rising and stamping the” Page 319: “and her tawdry smartiness” “and her tawdry smartness”