Part 3

Here was a man who, in casual discussion of a mediæval and practically obsolete gem, could quote from the _Divina Commedia_ the lines in which Dante uses these stones as a symbol of joy divine:

“L’altra letizia, che m’era gia nota Preclara cosa, me si fece in vista Qual fin balascio in che lo sol percota,”

and then, with a mental handspring and a Rabelaisian twist of the old rascal in him, which was absurdly out of keeping with his odor of chalk dust and blackboard, would lean his walrus mustache into Rarick’s ear with a foul bit of anecdote about a youth with a ruby studded into his flesh, who fancied the chryselephantine statue of Athena by Phidias.

After the boiling turmoil of a morning that held a conference on the feasibility of installing soda-water fountains in the west of the Mississippi areas, a complicated discussion with three architects on the standard fronts of Rarick stores, a long-distance-telephone conversation with the Chattanooga real-estate office on a ninety-nine-year lease for a second store, and the consummation of an order for one hundred thousand bathing-hats, to walk with Gerkes through the sarcophagus of his mind was like emerging from noisy sunlight into the green twilight of the Italian cypresses Rarick was fond of transplanting, in long aisles, from Sicilian hillsides to his own.

Here was a man who had a decayed-looking green circle on the front of his neck, from a brass collar-button, which he was never to discard, even after Rarick had sent him precious ones, but to whom, on the other hand, a blemish on the crystal flesh of an art-object was something to cause his own flesh to crawl upward.

Some five years after these meetings between the two, Gerkes fell ill of a flaying neuritis, and, tracing him to the lair of his dwelling, Rarick found him in a small room in the high-up rear of a Twenty-third Street rooming-house, books stacked from floor to ceiling, and exactly three personal objects in evidence. A wooden-backed hair-brush, a pocket comb, and a tooth-brush, sharing the dresser-top with an assortment of Aztec arrow-heads, proof-sheets of an article on scarabs for the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, a copy of Plato’s _Phædon_, William Langland’s _Piers Plowman_, and a _World Almanac_.

If Rarick had expected protest when he suggested the move from these quarters to the suite at the top of his home, nothing of the sort happened. With his imperviousness to environment or even to the sense of personal obligation, Gerkes took up residence under his friend’s roof. One had to live somewhere. Money was something you shared if you had it, or you accepted if you had not. Within a week the walls which Jenny had recently had done in yellow brocatelle, were plastered with maps, and the furniture itself littered, as the lodging-house room had been, with the story of the dawn of the human race as told by flint-head, ax, and spear, littering up the decorator’s idea of a perfect example of a suite done in the manner of the Second Empire.

Jenny’s kind of opposition to the invasion of Gerkes had been tinctured with the wisdom of a certain restraint. Here was one of the times it was not good to oppose Rarick. When his head seemed to jam down tightly between his shoulders, and his lower lip shot out, and his eyes, which so seldom met hers any more, slid up under their lids, leaving a horrid effect of just white ball, Jenny had the intuition to know that here was not the time to put up active opposition.

She had missed this scent a few times, once in particular over an apparently trivial matter that had to do with Avery and a week-end stag party of eleven school companions which she planned for him on board a motor-yacht which she was maneuvering for his father to give him on his fifteenth birthday.

The idea of Avery on his own private yacht, lording it as host over eleven youngsters to whom a yacht was that day’s toy, was roiling to Rarick. There had been a similar scene, not two months before, over a cigar-shaped roadster for Avery; but then there had been high, bitter, even more terrible words and Rarick’s foot had come down with an emphasis that Jenny somehow knew better than to further oppose, and Avery had not even been allowed to come home from school at Newberry over the occasion of his birthday.

There had been a matter that had to do with Jennifer, who had played high stakes beside her mother at the baccarat tables of Nice and won sums large enough for the papers to carry the story in headlines that had been the occasion of peremptory cablegrams for their return to America and had virtually shut off subsequent trips abroad.

There had been the affair, too, of the young Argentinian, son of a castor-bean magnate, driving his Hispano-Suiza into the swimming-pool at the Roslyn, Long Island, estate. Jenny had been as outraged as Rarick, except that he went to the extreme of keeping the house closed for two subsequent seasons.

There were certain well-defined limits to opposing Rarick, which were none the less tricky limits, because there seemed to be no way, except the intuitive one, to anticipate them. He would give in on many a grand issue, such, for instance, as the Ficke house, Jennifer’s fabulous string of matched pearls, or Jenny’s whim for five thousand acres of French-Canadian tract north of Quebec, upon which they had built an artificial lake, a forty-room chalet, “The Cataract,” and which had been opened exactly twenty days in five years. On the other hand, a trifle like Avery’s roadster, or this matter of Dr. Gerkes, would set his head rigidly into the valley of his shoulders and square him for fight.

The coming of Dr. Gerkes was one of those occasions. This time Jenny knew it even before she raised the first faint dust of issue; but she could not forego that first faint dust. The coming of Gerkes angered her. It went against the grain. Not that, offhand, it would seem to cause much of a ripple in a household where thirty-one servants reported to the housekeeper every morning; but it did matter more than was discernible at the first glance.

From the first, Jenny had found the Ficke house deceptive. A Gothic library, two stories high, which ran across the entire Fifth Avenue frontage, a drawing-room of enormous proportions, a Roman dining-room into which you ascended by Pompeian-marble steps, and a glassed-in conservatory for which a breakfast-room had been sacrificed as Rarick’s passion for difficult and exotic transplantation began to grow, left embarrassingly few bedroom suites.

An additional story would have marred the Hellenic grace of the building, and the owner of the adjoining pile of magnificence felt affronted, rather than tempted, by the Rarick offer to buy.

The yellow suite assigned to Dr. Gerkes subtracted one from the five small suites of guest-chambers that Jenny had so elaborately planned and redone. It is true that the comings and goings of Gerkes, who preferred to use what was known as the service-entrance and the small rear staircase that led quite privately up to his rooms, made practically no dent in that household. He dined in his rooms, except on those rare occasions when the family was home alone and Rarick wanted him at table. He was seldom, if ever, seen in the wide, beautifully vaulted corridors of the house; and yet to Jenny there was something repulsive about his being there at all. The shabby black figure somehow recalled the musty memory and figure of an old music-teacher back in her St. Louis girlhood, whose face, close beside hers at the piano, and his audible breathing had been repellent to her. A lady’s-maid had gossiped to Jennifer, who gossiped to Jenny, that he used only three towels a week, and no bed-linen, because he slept on the floor, wrapped in one of the beautiful canary-yellow camel’s-hair blankets. A secret survey of his rooms, one day during his absence, revealed to Jenny’s horrified eyes the yellow-brocade hangings and bed-coverings removed and crammed into a corner, the tops of her lovely curving period-furniture covered with a layout of lean-looking hair-brush, a whisk broom, and primitive stone implements, her paneled yellow walls hung with pin-studded maps, and, on the mantelpiece, beside the meticulously right ormolu clock, a box of Swedish biscuit, a cube of American cheese, and a huge pocket knife, open.

That evening, before they went down to dinner, Jenny’s anger overflowed her discretion.

“There’s a time and a place for everything, Rarick,” she said to him, as he stood tugging at his collar in the enormous mirrored bathroom which gave off their bedroom. “That man is no more comfortable here than we are in having him.”

Standing in a foundation slip of coral-colored silk, over which she was presently to slip a coral-colored evening dress of all front and no back, her carrot-colored hair caught upward in the tight perpendicular line which accentuated the narrowness of her head, she could see Rarick’s neck, through the wall of mirror, drop into the slit of his shoulders, and that peculiar look of the hunchback which she dreaded, and of which she was wary, come cunningly into his face.

“What man?”

“Gerson, or whatever it was you said his name is.”

He turned, in his black trousers, stiff white shirt, black suspenders, still tinkering with his tie, so that, as he faced her, she could see his eyes ride up under his lids.

“I said his name is Felix Gerkes,” he pronounced, slowly and meticulously, as you might mouth a lesson to a child. “Dr. Felix Gerkes has condescended to come and make his home here.”

“Isn’t it usual, Rarick,” she said, her rising anger crowding closer on her discretion, “for even so great a patron saint of indigent college professors as yourself to consult the members of his family before introducing a worthy outsider into the household?”

“There are few demands I make here. This is one of them.”

“You have a young-lady daughter to consider.”

“That is precisely what I did, when I introduced into this madhouse a human being out of the world of ideas.”

“I see. You feel that Jennifer’s scientific education has been neglected and that no young woman is equipped for life without a Ph.D. knowledge of the glacial age,” she said, and glittered as she stood there with her bronze-colored eyes and the points of light off the tapping toe of her slipper. She could have plunged her long jeweled fingers into the valleys of his shoulders and shaken him, as a smothering sense of futility began to crowd her in.

“Not at all, Jenny. Our daughter’s education is all one could ask. She knows a Hispano-Suiza from a Rolls-Royce. She knows a Cartier setting, Theodore at the Ritz, her finishing-school ‘R’s,’ and how to stack her artichoke leaves. I notice our son, too, already has quite a way with his artichokes.”

The speech was not like him, but rather in mimicry of what she might have said under similar circumstances.

“What a devil you are, Rarick!”

“A poor devil, Jenny,” he said, his face as pulled-looking as tarpaulin.

“You are a poor father.” She was going to add, “and a poor husband,” but she let the words lodge in her eyes.

“I am that,” he said, replying to the spoken and unspoken indictment.

“What is it you want of us?” she cried. “Must you oppose your children on every occasion, just as you have always opposed me? Is merely the fact that we want something, sufficient itself to dispose you against it? Why must you always be the stern parent to them, with me the buffer between? What do you want?”

She did not know it, but she was voicing the cry within his heart.

What did he want? He wanted some of the intimacy from that boy of his that was Jenny’s. He wanted some of that intimacy from Jennifer. He wanted.... What did he want?...

“Do you want your children to skip their youth, so that they may follow in the footsteps of some doddering college professor who spends his life fiddling among arrow-heads?”

“I want Felix Gerkes in my house,” he said, climbing back from what was sure to be a discussion of defeat by reason of what he considered her colossal lack of logic, “because he knows things that we don’t know. That we cannot buy for them. He has not mere learning. He has wisdom.”

“I see. Why Eskimo Indians like blubber.”

There was absolutely no way to capture a focal point of discussion when you found yourself in argument with such a woman. She invariably answered you in terms of something irrelevant, making you wild with futility. Damn her! Damn her! In the years since that thought first lightened into his brain, it had flashed there with recurring frequency.

“Yes, Jenny,” he said again, driven to the extremity of employing her same skidding method, “and why your son, a second-year boy at Newberry, maintains two roadsters, a motor-boat, a trotting horse, and fails in his mid-year examinations.”

“No man ever understood a high-strung boy less than you understand yours!”

The dart struck sure, and sent his head retreating down into his shoulders. True. True. Too, too true.

“Nor a gay and beautiful daughter, one with brains, let me tell you that, although you prefer to treat her as if she were a moron. She’s a match for your professors. Jennifer’s got brains!”

“Exactly, damn it all! And for what? Waste. Waste.”

In a world of superficial interests, filled with the need to be clever and sophisticated, you could be clever with the sharp edge of your brain, if you had one, and sophisticated on a shoestring of intelligence and no heart.

“Your merely clever person is only a first-rate second rather.”

“Try being one.”

“I can’t; it’s not in me.”

“Lots of things are not in you, Rarick. The ability to meet your world is not in you.”

“I wish to God it were not so deeply in you.”

“Gerkes’s world, I suppose....”

“I don’t know his world. He knows the secret of things and of not being smothered by them. Like you. Like me. Like your children.”

“Obviously, from the look of his hair-brush.”

You couldn’t argue with a woman like that. You couldn’t. You couldn’t. The crazing sense of futility....

She was in her gown by now, a sort of henna-colored affair, as if the threads had been picked from her hair--a gown that wrapped her eccentrically thin body on a diagonal, rushing to a high ruff about her neck in front, cut daringly, almost to her waist line, behind. Between the bang of her hair and a stiff, enormously brilliant dog-collar of diamonds, her eyes were red and level and full of the impudence of her remark.

“Doctor Gerkes remains, Jenny.”

She shrugged her shoulders and walked out.

Damn her! Damn her! Damn her!

A story about Jennifer Rarick went the rounds that winter, creating hilarity at many a cocktail and dinner party.

It seemed that the Rarick house, shiningly conditioned, was now being shouted out by sight-seeing-omnibus megaphones as the billion-dollar Ficke-Rarick mansion purchased with Rarick dimes.

One morning, just as Jennifer, in riding-habit, was emerging from the house to enter a large fawn-colored roadster which she was accustomed to drive herself across the Park to the academy where she kept her mounts, one of these omnibuses slowed while the megaphone roared of Rarick dimes and billion-dollar mansions.

Throughout this canned oration, the daughter of John Rarick, one hand against her slim hip, the other thumbing her nose at the omnibus, held posture, precipitating the picture by a dash into her roadster at its conclusion, and leaving a gasping and bucolic sight-seeing omnibus load not quite sure that it had happened.

Whether it did happen or not, the gesture might be said to be somewhat typical of Jennifer. I am. You are. Take me. Leave me.

Usually you took her. Even at her worst, when she was cocksure and tiresomely sophisticated and pseudo and pretentious, there was about her a hearty self-loathing, concerning which she was robustly frank.

“I despise myself,” she was constantly saying to people on club verandas and in grand stands at polo matches, where patter predominated. “I am a swine. I’m N. G. I’m stealing a ride through life. I’m a panhandler.”

After a fashion she meant it. After the fashion of one who attempts to appease a dissatisfaction by throwing to it slops of words.

People were always saying of her, “She has brains,” in the key of saying, “Too bad, the girl has brains.”

“So’s my old man,” was Jennifer’s usual retort, in the slang with which she hung her speech. She meant this. She admired her father from the distance that lay between them. She wanted his respect and, strangely enough, gave him precious little of hers.

The evening following his scene with Jenny regarding the coming of Gerkes, Rarick sent for his daughter.

In a house filled with the confusions, the comings, the goings, the ringing of telephones, and the hurrying of servants, that the two women, mother and daughter, managed to create about themselves, the occasions of family conference were seldom enough.

When the summons came for Jennifer to go to her father, in the library, she was in the act of slapping about her rooms, with her own confused English maid and her mother’s Breton maid hurrying at her heels, in the effort to help her toward a dinner engagement for which she was already thirty minutes late.

The fact of the matter was, she had remained shockingly overtime at a bridge game at the Mayfair, vainly trying to retrieve a several-hundred-dollar loss.

Jennifer was of that species of tormentor who, abusive of her servants, was none the less beloved by them, because, quickly contrite, she wooed them back by anointing their wounds with tips and gifts.

It was her maid Mariana’s boast that these tantrums kept her supplied with furs, French gowns, and even jewels.

The last time Jennifer had been summoned in this fashion by her father was about two years before. She had bought on a dare, at the auction of a famous Long Island estate, a cigar-shaped roadster with an Italian engine of very special make, for eleven thousand dollars. The estate was being sold because the owner had been killed in this very car. Jennifer had stood on a table in the garage and led the spirited bidding.

Rarick, after a high and ugly scene with her in the library, had paid the eleven thousand dollars, and the day following, in her enraged and humiliated presence, had sold it to a dealer for twenty-five hundred.

“The meanest man in the world,” Jennifer had ground through clenched teeth into her mirror after the episode, the tears of her humiliation splashing down a face which, although molded after her father’s, had a lightning beauty that darted into it and played around her eyes and her lips. A straight brown slab of a girl, with a brilliant sort of Jeanne d’Arc directness to her eyes, which were surrounded by a mediæval-looking curtain of straight brown bob.

There had been, too, the highly unpleasant occasion when, like a small girl, Jennifer at twenty had been obliged to endure the unendurable indignity of standing beside her much younger brother for a dressing-down from Rarick that had to do with Avery’s presence--to say nothing of her own--at a swimming-pool party at Greenwich that had found its way into insinuating print.

As a matter of fact, both Jennifer’s and Avery’s presence had been the result of a flat tire in front of the estate of the friends who had detained them. But somehow, facing her father, as she stood beside her slim brother, there on the mysterious beauty of a sixteenth-century Kuba hunting-rug, the truth of the story seemed too flimsy to bear the telling, or something grim and hating in these children kept them silent. Rarick was always to believe, not from what they said, but from what they did not say, that their presence on this notorious occasion had been deliberate.

In any event, a summons to her father in the library was grimly associated with the scratching memory of scenes like those.

Then there had been the excruciating occasion when Jennifer and her mother, returning from a season at Deauville and Le Touquet, had successfully passed customs officials without declaring three important and perfectly matched pearls, which they had sewn on to a beaded gown. There had been an outrageous scene in the library when these facts became known to Rarick; in fact, rage and terror had caused Jenny to swoon--cutting her forehead as she went down--at her husband’s reiterated threats to reveal the whole untidy business.

There was rankling, in some terror at the moment, in Jennifer’s mind, a dread that an extremely private dramatic evening, entitled “Casanova, Be Careful,” which had been staged with great lavishness in the garden-amphitheater of a Connecticut estate, was through some mysterious leak about to find its way into notorious publicity.

Hang it all! she had been lured into the thing chiefly because it had given her an opportunity to try her hand at what she secretly suspected in herself to be a talent for lyrical writing.

Hang it all! the way to avoid such jams as this was to ditch the home condition. Marry forty-million-dollar Charley Kempner and spawn him square-faced little Kempner heirs with Kempner casts in their Kempner eyes. Or not marry Lew Bissinger and live in embroidered sin with an already married man. Or pursue Berry Rhodes, who was simply unassailable with social position, and who fascinated her. Or just ditch it. Open a tea-room. Write a scandalous book. Hang it all! No parent can hope to get away with _moyenâge_, maiden-in-a-tower stuff. Yes, she had written the “Casanova, Be Careful” lyrics and danced in the last of seven veils. Damned talented job, if she did say it. “Well, Father,” she improvised to her mirror, “it’s come to this between you and me; has been coming to this between you and me since you popped me into a world I didn’t ask to be popped into. I’m no nincompoop. You’d see to it that a daughter of yours wasn’t. But I’m tired being treated like one. I’m finished. If you want to throw me a million or two to save me from being somebody’s expensive hussy, I’m not too proud to accept it. If you don’t, and since I’m not made of the stuff you seem to think your daughter should be made of, I’m through, anyway. I’ll go off and write a dirty play and show up the whole wretched business of life as it is lived behind the tessellated walls of the million-dollar Rarick mansion that is built out of dimes. If the walls aren’t tessellated, they ought to be. I’ll give them a megaphonefull that they’ll remember. I’ll tell the story of how somebody took a couple of hair-pins and bent them into a couple of frowns and stuck them into sour dough and made a little man who lived in tall marble halls that kept him looking like a dwarf, and who would have thought he was Napoleon, if he had quite had the nerve, but who only got as far as owning everything in the world he could lay his hands on that had belonged to Napoleon or was about Napoleon. I’ll tell the world about this little man who got so rich on needles and pins that he hated himself--and his family. I’ll tell the world, damn it! I’ll tell....” cried Jennifer to herself, as she ran down the hall toward the library; but not without pausing to snatch up a spangled scarf to throw across the back of her dinner gown, which was cut to one inch above the waist line, where a topaz buckle bit softly into the flesh.

What Rarick wanted with his daughter was to have her meet Gerkes.

He was standing waiting for her, on the hearthstone of a vaulted fireplace that had been lifted out of the palace of a Milanese Sforza, a small man who was forever to be dwarfed by the Gothic grandeur through which he moved, and yet to whom the Druid twilight of such splendor was to become a fetish.