Part 5

“I hope you are finding your quarters comfortable, Doctor Gerkes,” said Jenny from the head of her table, where they sat sparsely grouped, because it could have accommodated four times their number. The secret of the icy grace with which Jenny presided at her table, Jennifer was fond of declaring, was that her mother never permitted her head to touch the back of her tall chair, or her hand to lie along its arms.

“Very comfortable, thank you,” said Gerkes, who was interested in his portion of slim frizzled smelts. “It’s a pleasant room.”

“Room?” repeated Jenny, and swung her high, curved glance to her husband.

“You’ve a couple of them, Gerkes, or is it three? Don’t guess you’ve had time to check up.”

“Well now, Rarick, I haven’t,” said Gerkes without embarrassment. “There’s another room leads off, I take it.”

“No, old dear, you don’t take it,” said Jennifer, popping an almond into her mouth and grinning; “you apparently leave it.”

“I’m pretty much of an Eskimo,” he said. “They live in bare rooms and keep stacked such furniture as they need, outside their houses, until a piece is called in for use. Simplifies.”

“Dr. Gerkes has lived up there a lot among them, Jenny. He also spent two years in Lapland, studying.”

“You don’t say so,” said Jenny, regarding him over a smelt poised on the end of her fork. “Wasn’t it somebody or other said of the French that no race which eats little _escargots_, suffocated in their shells, can ever achieve civilization? Well, that’s the way I feel about Eskimos and blubber. Fancy being the kind of person that can drink it!”

“One must fancy it; because they don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Drink blubber.”

“But I always thought....”

“No, my dear lady, you never thought, or you wouldn’t be of the opinion that Eskimos drink blubber.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Why can’t you drink this wine-tumbler full of olive-oil?”

“Why--er--obviously--I can’t.”

“Well, for that same obvious anatomical reason, the Eskimo, who, strange as it may seem, is constructed just as you are, could not drink quantities of oil, either, and keep it down. Sorry to have to seem to be concrete.”

“You _are_ smart, aren’t you?” said Jennifer, and propped her elbows on the table and her chin in her palm, and regarded his lusterless figure across the table. “Now tell me how they put ships in bottles, and who wrote ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

“The best way to make a ship in a bottle is to begin working from the inside of the bottle, outward. Glycon is the reputed inventor of a kind of logaœdic verse. Bivalves have snouts. Biology, around the time of the Council of Trent, insisted that the vein of the fourth finger of a _fiancée’s_ hand led to the heart. Does that square me scholastically with your daughter, Rarick?” said Gerkes, irritated or stimulated to a point of loquacity that took his breath away.

“I think it must be wonderful,” said Jennifer, widening her eyes at him, “to be wise enough to play dumb. I’m always trying to be not too dumb to play wise. It can’t be got away with.”

“Nothing of the sort,” championed her mother. “You’ve a good brain. Jennifer is a graduate of Miss Pratt’s, Doctor Gerkes.”

“Yes, and I would have gone to college, Doctor, but I would have been sure to fall in love with all my professors under forty, and it would have been so complicated.”

Gerkes told a none-too-chaste tale then from the _Cent Nouvelles_, about a lady and a certain three lovers.

“He’s a nasty old _roué_,” said Jenny to herself, although she had rocked with laughter through far more pointless tales when her table blazed with friends of her own choosing.

“By the way, Rarick, there’s an idea behind the story I just told that ought to interest you. Louis Sixteenth, to whom the authorship is attributed, goes on to relate that this lady, while bathing, lost her diamond ring. While diamonds were undoubtedly not common at this time, it proves, however, that the stone which Henley picked up for you at Bruges, could easily date back to at least 1460.”

“By Jove! So it could! It also proves that they faceted their stones back in those days, too, now doesn’t it? That’s a mighty interesting point. That’s what I mean, Jennifer, by the historical value of inanimate things.”

It was Rarick’s way of attempting to justify to his daughter the telling of the _risqué_ story. “Even at his worst, the talk of Gerkes mattered, which was more than he could say of the endless sluices of it that roared through the Rarick functions,” was what he was desperately and in his clumsy, antagonizing way, trying to convey to Jennifer.

And strangely enough, Jennifer’s reaction to one whom she might just as readily have regarded as a vile old bore, was as rare to herself as it was to Rarick.

After coffee, when the candles softened down closer to their reflection in the long fine pool of table, and Jenny, maneuvering to extricate her daughter from the vise of a dull evening, suggested that she accompany her to the last act of “Louise,” for which a pair of tickets were going begging, there was hesitation from Jennifer. She knew that after the opera they were sure to join up with the Chadwicks and the Edgertons for dancing at Florentine’s. Except for the seductive fact that Berry Rhodes might also be in the party, and Berry could tango like the Argentine Republic, Jennifer for the moment, wanted to remain around the pool of quiet talk and quiet candlelight and the slow syrupy flow of liqueurs and the intellectual luster of this dim old fogey, Gerkes.

Except there was that seductive possibility that Berry might drop in at Florentine’s....

“I’m glad you’re going to stick around,” she told Gerkes, when she gave him her hand in good-night.

“Doctor Gerkes has promised to make this his home indefinitely.”

“Let me come up, will you, and get on to some books to read and some things to think about?”

“Come up and I’ll show you a manuscript of the ninth century, which I am translating for a library in Cologne. It will make the hottest sex-novel in your library look like a juvenile book.”

“I think you’re immense. You keep your feet nice and pedicured, because I am going to sit at them. Do you think you can convert a sow’s ear into a silk purse?”

“I might find I have a silk purse to start with, and what if I should unwittingly reduce it to a sow’s ear?”

“Father, where _did_ you find him!”

“Dr. Gerkes will tell you for himself tomorrow evening, if you will join us.”

“Have a footstool ready for me every evening, Doctor Gerkes. I’m going to try a new way of showing myself a good time. My present one is a flop. Until tomorrow....”

Poor Jennifer. She meant it. But, as a matter of fact, she saw him exactly two subsequent times, that high-exciting and excited winter of her twenty-third year. Once when muffled from her knees to the tip of her nose in an ermine-and-sable wrap, she had rushed downstairs between two young men who were making noises with their teeth like ukuleles, just in time to nod to Gerkes as he came out of her father’s library with a stack of books in his hand.

The second time, she had seen him quite crazily, through a keyhole. She was never to be quite clear about that, however. It was six o’clock in the morning, and she had been “on a party” with Berry Rhodes. The door before which she had crouched had lurched about so; and so had the figure of Dr. Gerkes, seen crazily through the keyhole.

Jenny, standing before a full-length, three-sided mirror, did an uncharacteristic thing. She removed from the front of her peignoir of coffee-colored lace, a small cascade of ruffles, which left her chest bare, daubed powder on to the V, and then stood off to survey. Her bathroom, an enormous one guiltless of tile, cleverly disguised in rugs, taffetas, a sunken bathtub with growing plants on its coping, and porcelain water-birds on little stands against a background of glazed Chinese wall-paper, reflected her figure over and over again. There was no angle from which she could not contemplate herself. Profile. Semi-profile. Full front. Back. She bent into them all, surveying. She was the angular type of woman that wears high neck-ruffs well. She owned dog-collars of jewels; principally pearls with vertical bars of sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, or jade. She need not have feared for her neck and shoulders. It was just that, somehow, the close collar, the narrow cuff, the high ruff of fur at the hands and wrists and neck, gave Jenny what air of distinction she could claim. Tall, narrow, her high coiffure boldly revealing her ears and planes of cheek, there was something studiedly, if remotely, Bernhardtian about Jenny. At least she grasped at the wisp of resemblance and pandered to it for all it was worth.

Yet, standing before the mirror, holding the cascade of coffee-colored lace alternately against her chest and then removing it, she finally decided to leave it off, feeling strangely not herself as she did so.

As a matter of fact, she was not herself. So strangely not herself that once she crossed her arms over her flat chest and hugged her shoulders in an exultant little fashion.

The no-longer-to-be-evaded truth of it was that Jenny, whose impeccable wifehood, extending over a period of twenty-three years, had been an easy virtue, was excited away and beyond her usual and curiously volatile air of composure, by the fact that a young Argentine, named Ramond Lopez, was coming in for a five-o’clock cocktail with her in the conservatory.

It had been arranged in the hurried breaking up of a party at the Ambassadeur the previous afternoon. Abbey Chadwick had asked twenty to tea and dancing, including young Lopez, who was said to be a paid dancer at Florentine’s, a gigolo of exalted type who mingled socially by virtue of his connections, but who, nevertheless, was paid by the management. He had sat next to Jennifer at the Ambassadeur and had coaxed her to attempt a tango which she had never before ventured on a public floor. He and a Spanish girl professionally known as Cleo, had danced two Brazilian ballroom numbers at one of Jennifer’s dinner dances a few weeks previous, and been paid handsomely for it.

The son of a partially defunct coffee king, whose fortune had been spent in defending his daughter Bianca from the charge of having shot and instantly killed her young _roué_ of a millionaire husband as he was leaving his racing-stable, Ramond’s anomalous position kept him hovering precariously between two worlds. He had been a mere lad in school, in Switzerland, at the time of the notorious case of Bianca Lopez Dakin, but the swift tides of family fortune, the death of his father, a little later the death of Bianca, and the paltriness of his inheritance, had swept him from Rio Janeiro. He was any young man with a dancing-figure and a personable air.

It was said of him, as it was said of his kind, that women contributed chiefly toward his support. Possibly. It is certain, however, that Jenny, whose social world was a happy hunting-ground for the hired or more subtly rewarded gigolo, had never bartered in the strange coin of that realm except in the out-and-out terms of signing checks to paid entertainers for services rendered and received. The case of Ramond had been different from the case of Nemo, the case of Tom and Dick and Harry, only to the extent that he had occasionally been present in social capacity at functions where she and Jennifer dined or danced.

It had all come about so suddenly that it seemed to Jenny her confused senses must be playing her a prank. As tidy about her emotions as she was about the objects on her dressing-table, and more and more given of late years to going about to all occasions and functions without Rarick, the man beside her at dinner or in an opera box or with whom she danced, catalogued readily according to these tidy emotions.

Whatever Rarick might hold against her, Jenny was given to reminding herself, infidelity by word or action, as wife, or mother to his children, could never be one of his indictments.

The former, on those not infrequent occasions when she brought this subject to the fore, Rarick let rest uncontroversial; but the latter, which was scarcely true to Rarick, was more than he could hear without rebuttal. The very fact that Jenny’s children adored her, caused him to contend bitterly that she misused her power by smothering them beneath bracelets and shields.

Be that as it may, here was Jenny now, standing before her mirror, hugging her shoulders and shaken to the very foundation of that temperamental frigidity which had always stood her in such good stead. Ramond Lopez, cross between a gigolo, and somebody or other’s tame robin, and who taught the tango for fifteen dollars a lesson at Palm Beach during the season, had suddenly walked devastatingly into her consciousness. She could trace its inchoate beginnings back to the night of Jennifer’s dinner dance, when he and the Spanish girl, the fellow Nemo and a beautifully sinuous little Russian, had alternated in exhibition dances. Later Ramond had asked her to sit out a tango with him in Rarick’s conservatory, of all places! A brackish retreat, this erstwhile breakfast-room, of hot-smelling soils and difficult pottings in Osmunda leaves and sphagnum moss, and which was devoted almost exclusively to orchid plants imported from Brazil and Japan. In the various processes of their hybridization, they were seldom, as Jenny and Jennifer were constantly complaining, sufficiently presentable to save them florist’s expenditures.

Jenny was not the one to invite the highly special attentions of slim young men with Latin eyes. She danced with them, dined, and cocktailed, even flirted in that rather excited brittle manner of hers; but, outside of that, her slate was clean. The security of that state of her mind was unconsciously apparent in the thrust of her clean scimitar-thin features.

A young wag of a society writer for a caustic weekly had described Jenny’s face as two profiles pasted together. It was enormously apt. Lopez, at Jennifer’s dance, had sat among the unflowering hybrids of Rarick’s odontiodes, cypripediums, and other curious orchids of purely botanical interest, and with his immediate eyes covering her face like a mask of sweet ether, had solemnly refuted this delicious indictment, paying her, instead, breathy compliments that somehow failed to arouse her usual sure-fire ability to laugh a bad boy cruelly into his place.

At Ramond’s lispings, something starved in Jenny had lifted its desolate head. Excepting for the months of courtship, when an eager, rather timidly idealistic young clerk had wooed the intelligent-looking Jenny Avery on the “chigger”-infested banks of the Meramac, there had been precious few words, except in platitude, addressed warmly and closely into Jenny’s eyes.

Almost immediately after her marriage, the alienating affair of the twenty-five hundred had mattered terribly in their relationship.

Bitter with having given, bitter with having allowed himself to accept, once Rarick had seen her reaction set in, the honey dried out of the brief flower of marriage.

No, it had been many a day since close, fervent things had been said to Jenny. Ramond had made her suddenly and hurtingly aware of it. Something in her had thawed and was aching. Ramond, half her age, had interpreted her with a melancholy kind of wisdom.

“Why do you try to deceive me, as you do the others, with your icy manner?” he said to her, with the slight accent that lifted his lips in a flare off his square white teeth.

“My dear boy,” she said, starting to be brittle and annihilating in the cocksure way she had, “you are now in the act of telling me how misunderstood I am.”

To her surprise, he was neither annihilated nor subdued. He caught both her slim cool wings of hands, half-buried under wrist-ruffs, in the grip of his own.

“You must not talk like that to me. You do not mean what you say. You are the most interesting woman that I know. One cannot bear to be in the company of the insipid young girls, once he has known you. Do not pretend, Mrs. Rarick, that you need to be told that you are fascinating. Sometimes I think you are as Dante would have been if he had been beautiful and a woman. Sometimes I think you are most like Bernhardt. Then I think you are like the best of both of them.”

“Why, you foolish boy!” she said, the words, from lack of conviction, slow and stiff on her lips. American men simply did not look at one like that. They had not the eyes....

“I want to see more of you, Mrs. Rarick. I want to know you. Am I impertinent----”

He was.

“--or just one more admirer. After all, I cannot be what you call in America, such a ‘total loss,’ Mrs. Rarick, or I would not have the good sense to recognize so quickly a brilliant and worth-while woman when I see one. It is easy to dance with your beautiful girls over here--but they are not so nimble with their brains as with their feet and tongues. Am I impertinent?”

He was. Yet how amusing of him! Here was no mere patent-leather-haired gigolo, with a gift for wearing evening clothes and making middle-aged women horrible. Impudent of him to have insinuated his fingers up under the fur cuff of her long, tight sleeve--in flames--she did not withdraw them----

* * * * *

There was a letter between Jenny’s bodice and her flesh, as she maneuvered before the mirror. It was a line from Ramond, confirming what had been the hurried arrangement for this afternoon’s cocktail.

Lest you forget what is unforgettably important to me. This afternoon at five, where the orchids dare not bloom for fear of comparison.

RAMON.

The “d” off the “Ramon” had somehow excited her more than the note itself. She was aware, as she sat up that morning in bed and put the square white envelope back on her breakfast tray, that her legs, which were stretched between the sheets, were trembling and would have doubled under her had she attempted to stand. The place at her side, with the covers folded back by Rarick, as he had risen from his night there, was still dented with his body. Through the years, there had been no gesture from either of them to alter these arrangements in any of their town or country homes, with the exception of the camp in the Adirondacks, where the women’s quarters of _de luxe_ simplicity were in one twenty-four-room log building, and the men’s in another of equal size.

A wave of self-pity, not unmixed with anger, drenched Jenny as she sat and dipped strawberries-in-November, into a small brown bowl of sour cream. What a starveling she must be, if just the ordinary homage and admiration from a boy such as Ramon could bring about all this turmoil within her.

Why, in the last few years she and Rarick had left off even pecking each other good-night. She had been aware of it, and, in the spirit of letting the old cat die, had managed to seem asleep first, if they retired together, which was rare.

It was well over twenty years since the days when he had placed kisses against her lips when he came home evenings, or stretched himself out after dinner on a couch, holding her hand while she sat beside him and read aloud. Twenty years, or was it ever? There were limits to the memory of the flesh. The feeling of the print of caresses had long since died from Jenny’s. Not that Jenny was a type to whom the end of every road was the arms of the man she loves. Her temperamental frigidity saw to that. And yet, suddenly sitting there in bed, the sense of desiring a great deal and being not desired, stabbed through her consciousness.

Life was passing her by. And for what? For nothing more than a dumb-animal response to the instinct to abide by her sense of wifely duty. For what? For Rarick, to whom even her fidelity might be a matter of indifference? For her children? Bless them, they were no worse and possibly not much better than the average. Life was going to be bountiful to them. Jennifer would marry brilliantly. Avery, you somehow felt about him, even then, in his adolescence, was sure in some way to be as distinguished as he was rich. She would be crowded out of their lives. And then what? A specter of an old age with Rarick, whose eccentricities and cloistered habits were sure to grow upon him, stalked down a corridor of her imagination--then what?----Thank God, thank God, it was still left in her to feel that cut of thrill at the left-off “d.”

Ramon was coming.

She handed the small cascade of ruffles to the maid in the Breton cap and hurried out as if she dared not glance back at this symbol of the soiled inner workings of the mind of Jenny Avery Rarick, mother of two grown children.

Ramon was in the conservatory, poking about among goldfish which darted about a beautiful wall-fountain of Pulhamite stone that Rarick had brought over, with its lichen still clinging to it, from a rock-garden he had admired in Taormina.

He kissed her hand, lifting back some lace first, and then regarded her in long silence, a slight film of moisture across his eyes making them deeper.

The quick picture of half a dozen men she knew, including Rarick, flashed across her mind’s eye. How clumsily they would have paid this same simple tribute. Mark House, an American who had been fabulously rich all his life and lived much abroad, always employed this continental greeting. But how clumsily, creaking where his shirt bent, and leaving the disagreeable feeling of smear across the knuckles. A Count Luckow, whom Jenny suspected of casting amorous eyes at Jennifer, who had only ridicule for him, had this habit gracefully. Rarick, somehow, would not visualize.

She could imagine that, to a young man like Ramon, whose masculinity was not mere maleness, there must be something chapped and a little funny about the unkissed hands of American women.

Twenty and more years of the perfunctory pats of greeting and adieu from Rarick had been Jenny’s sole share in a world which she was suddenly aware must be filled with the grand passions between women and men. Not that anything she had not received from Rarick mattered, but the slow anger of resentment flared just the same.

Women who had been less meticulous than she about their marriage-vows were loved women. There were women of Jenny’s acquaintance, of great wealth and social security, who had not been meticulous, whose wifehood was far from irreproachable, but who somehow had the gift of demanding full measure of homage from their husbands.

Precious little Jenny had demanded or received. A stab of self-pity, the immemorial self-pity of a woman feeling denied, cut Jenny. Rarick as a husband and lover! It was inconceivable that he could be missing in his turn any of those things he denied her. The lover had died back there in the beginning; and for the twenty and more subsequent years she had been living with a husband. What would even this Latin-eyed youngster, who was paying her pretty, slightly old-fashioned compliments, and letting his eye linger far too long on the spot where the insert of ruffles had been removed, think of her sterile kind of life if he knew? Really, his eyes, black-velvet ones of deepest nap, were naughty, roving as they did, from hers down to the tip of the V-neck which she had calculated before her mirror. A wave of self-disgust made her redden. With a prim reaction, over which she had no control, she suddenly felt stripped, and withdrew her hand, to clap it against her chest.

He regarded her with gentle reproach.

“Why are you like that?”

“Like what?”

“Shy, like a--like one of those beautiful wild pumas that used to live on the edge of one of my father’s estates in the interior of Peru.”

Puma! She did not know whether to laugh down what she regarded as his absurdity or incinerate him with the rebuff of which she was so capable.

“You don’t understand the strange wild beauty of these graceful creatures. You must not think the comparison odious, Mrs. Rarick.”