Part 8

The Edgertons had decided to have a sense of humor about this sixty-eight-room white elephant, which five years previous had been rushed to completion in time for Leslie’s birthday. Henrietta Edgerton promptly christened it her “white _bête noire_” and had the coping of the superb swimming-pool, which was out of natural rock, elaborately inlaid in black and white symbolic beasts of two heads and four tails.

The white crash of this house into the finest stretch of forest land within its radius from New York was a sore point with Tom Edgerton. It had cost easily over a million and a half, and there it stood, an affront to his taste, his intelligence, and his dignity. It was the sort of home a war millionaire might have erected out of an overnight fortune.

Truth of the matter was, and bitterly he knew it, Henrietta had been deep in an affair with the architect who designed it.

Tom’s sop to his sense of the ironic was to be unfaithful to his wife, on every possible occasion, in this house which had turned into a monstrosity because she had insisted upon giving _carte blanche_ to her lover, the nincompoop young architect on dancing legs, who had created it.

“We’re a pretty lot,” Leslie Edgerton had once said to her father, who, when in his cups, could laugh uproariously at a remark he would slap her clear, heart-shaped face for when sober. “We’re a pretty lot, Dad. The only thing virgin around here is the soil. If!”

Jennifer and Berry tilted into the three-mile driveway of that virgin soil on two wheels at a sixty-mile clip. They had driven out in Berry’s underslung, boat-shaped roadster. Jennifer at first had remonstrated, holding out against cramming herself, in her slim sheaf of baby-ermine gown, into a crouched position in the natty sports-car.

“You’re a dog, Berry, to even ask it. I’m not dressed for a football game.”

“Come along. Be as boyish as your bob. I’ll wrap you in a raccoon coat, and that little white mitten you’re wearing for a dress won’t turn a hair,” he said, and brushed aside a butler who had been holding some more white ermine for her to slide arms into, during the twelve minutes of this controversy.

She liked his riding her down this way. Old cave-man stuff, she told herself. Putrid-old. But she liked it. Wasn’t often a fellow with millions, only grandson of a personage like old Rodney Rhodes, and more millions to come on top of it, came in a package like Berry. Personality. Brains. Brawn. At least if Leslie had to have a nervous breakdown, it had been a little worth-while to have it over Berry. Jennifer had heard she had a nervous twitch to her face nowadays, that was part of that nervous breakdown.

“Nervous?” he said, letting out a rip of speed, as they cleared the city line.

“Not to the point of breakdown,” she said, and tilted a look at him from the low crouch into which the car forced her.

“You girls give me a pain in the neck,” he said. “Innuendo. All lies.”

“I’m sorry, Berry,” she said, and laid a hand against his driving arm. “And I’m glad it’s all lies.”

“That’s right,” he said, “be yourself,” and smiled at her with white teeth set in a face that had been polished tan by the sun.

“What self is that?”

“The self I like. You’re a darling, Jennifer. I strongly suspect you of having brains, too, and you’re brainy enough to keep them carefully concealed under that Joan of Arc bob.”

“Give me a light, Berry.”

He flecked on his lighter and held it to her while the car sped swift and sure under his lone-hand grip.

“Oh!”

“There, you had it!”

“No, you burnt my lip. Let’s stop anyway, Berry. I can’t smoke in this open boat. Draw in here.”

“You little designing designer,” he laughed, and drew up. “It’s darling of you, though, to want our ride to last.”

“It’s darling of you, Berry, to have got me asked out to the Edgertons’ tonight. I’m on.”

“Nonsense!”

“I don’t give a damn for them or their parties, except for you----”

“By God! I think you lisp! Let me thee your tongue.”

“There!” She darted it at him. Quick. Pink.

The sultry haze of late October twilight, sharp with the smell of burning leaves, twined about them.

“Let’s see it again.”

His quick close kiss went against the second dart of pink.

“You sweet Sweet,” he said, out of its long endurance.

She pushed him back, her face suddenly smeared with the pallor of excitement.

“Berry, let’s you and me be low-down honest.”

“I choose the first. You be honest.”

“If you had half an idea of how honest I’m going to be, you’d climb out and hitch-hike your way back to town.”

“Fortify me for that exigency--this way,” he said, and kissed her again, his strong lips flaring so that involuntarily she drew the back of her hand across the feeling of the wetness of his teeth against her face.

“Berry, you and I weren’t born yesterday.”

He made to kiss her again.

“Don’t do that.”

“You egged me on.”

“I know, but----”

“You are so blamed honest, Jennifer, it makes a fellow want----”

“But now I’m going to be awful serious.”

“Awful is right, as applied to seriousness in all its forms.”

“Awful serious, Berry.”

“It can’t be done, Jen. I’m immune.”

“Berry, marry me.”

He tightened as if a lock had sprung.

“Certainly. But I haven’t my music with me.”

“Berry, get this. I’m serious. Marry me. Don’t answer. Just listen. You’re no angel, Berry. God knows I’m not. I like you. A lot. I want you to respect that. I’m pretty crazy about you. You’re a bad boy, Berry, but neither of us is sprouting wings. I think it’s a swell plan and I’m sober. I’ll marry you, not to reform you, but to reform with you.”

“The only way to get me to marry the girl, Jennifer, is at the point of the well-known gun.”

“Bing!” she said, and cocked a finger.

He grasped it and locked it between his teeth.

“I don’t know whether you’re spoofing me or not, but let’s not be serious tonight, Jennifer. Isn’t it enough--this night--us--this way----”

She let her head swing back against the crook of his arm.

“Damn you, darling,” she said, “you’re standing up the girl.”

“Jennifer, let me know you tonight--afterwards--my rooms?”

“You go plumb to hell, Berry,” she said, pushing him from her with high laughter. “Step on her, we’ll be late! And if you don’t behave, the girl will leap from the car and her mangled remains will be found on the roadside by an early-morning farmer carting his carrots to market. Daughter of Dime Millionaire leaps from speeding car of son of rubber-heel magnate!”

“Jen! Nee! Fer!”

“Step on her, I said.”

It was to her high, fast, and incessant laughter that they tilted into Parmley on two wheels at the sixty-mile clip.

At the last moment, and to the rushing of innumerable servants, the Edgertons had turned their dinner dance out-of-doors. The suddenly limpid October, the imminence of moon, the belated perfume of late white honeysuckle, had pressed their way into the ballroom, which was spread with fifty small tables and elaborately laid out across one end with a complete bar, brass rail, polished counter, battalion of bottles and glasses, and the faithful verisimilitude of a sprinkling of sawdust.

The milky light of one of those pale nights that never becomes quite dark poured down on to the blue-tile terrace. Tables had been dragged out there. A hurried platform for musicians was being set up between one pair of the lions, submerging one flight of terrace-stairs. Lanterns were run up in the groves and along the edges of the swimming-pool.

A formal party had suddenly gone violently informal. Tom Edgerton, already convivial, had conceived the idea, along with the change of party-policy, of dragging out a vast iron pot on a crane, to boil corn-on-the-cob in the open. The bar was being set up in a pergola. When the first guests arrived, Leslie Edgerton, in a bouffant white gown with wired panniers and a tumbler in one hand, was still in the act of trying to convey to a gardener her idea of how a small red bulb should dangle from the pointed left ear of a marble faun.

It was true that every few moments her rather pretty heart-shaped face twitched as if her nervousness were a prankish jack-in-the-box. The small red electric bulb refused to dangle from the left ear of the marble faun. She grasped it from the servant, and, leaping to a stone bench, began to adjust it herself.

She was in that position when Jennifer and Berry and a smattering of early guests appeared on the wide marble staircase. At sight of them, she swung herself by the neck of the faun, legs out in a rigid horizontal, and began kissing him against his chilly lips.

It started out as that kind of party.

The way, Jennifer had long since decided, to feel at ease at what she called these closed-corporation functions, was to pretend to be as intimately a part of them as everyone else was, or pretended to be.

A sense of not belonging; of not knowing these people on the easy informal basis they knew one another, assailed her, and seemed to lock her tonsils and stiffen her heart on those occasions when she penetrated into the social fastness of the gayer, if less conservative, elements of these safely intrenched families. Their intimate talk that took so much for granted. High bandying of Christian names where she was addressed as Miss Rarick. References to past functions to which she had not been bidden, and to future ones to which she would not be bidden.

Not that she was not very much part of these scenes. The Edgertons moved in swift, newspaper-headline sets. But even here, she was consciously Miss Rarick. The way to keep a stiff upper lip when you were ill at ease and inwardly frightened was to see to it that you were conspicuously Miss Rarick. You listened, when the two on either side of you at dinner leaned across you to indulge in familiar discussion of an important social function to which you had mysteriously and damnably not been bidden, with a smile as bright as platinum drawn across your face. You let them make up a party around you to go off cruising in warm waters on the yacht of the father of a boy who had just kissed the back of your neck, and laughed at some sally about the Delaware Gap and the Delaware Yawn, as if you were not stinging at the omission.

The lively Miss Rarick was loud in her laughter. That was part of the stiff upper lip. She was daring in her dress, but impeccably so, never erring beyond the bonds of chic. A good fellow up to a point, and that point, as she was fond of putting it, an exclamation point.

When Jennifer walked down the wide staircase of the Edgertons’ famed blue terrace, with Berry at her right and a one-armed chap named Roger Madison, descendant of a President, at her left, her heart was in her mouth; insolence in her smile; and a burning humiliation before Berry, beating about in her.

Perhaps he had never realized she was not spoofing. He had, though! He had. _He had._ He had jumped like a sprung trap when she had come out with it. Perhaps he had thought her a little spifflicated. God, make him think I was tight! No, no, no, he wouldn’t. They had not even stopped for cocktails before they drove off. There came that hateful Irene Annescy! How did one address her? Hello, Irene? Or just Miss Annescy?

Miss Annescy solved it. “Hello, Berry! Haven’t seen you since three A.M. Good party at the Ruhls’, wasn’t it? Hello, Roger! Say, you’re driving with us over to Edgecombe from here for a sunrise cocktail. Howdo, Miss Rarick!”

Damn them! Damn life! “Berry darling, that’s my ankle you’re climbing.”

With the exception of a center-table which seated twelve, the flocks of surrounding smaller ones were for six. Berry and Jennifer were at one which adjoined the larger one, presided over by Leslie.

Berry’s absence from that center-table was one of those elaborately casual maneuvers which usually fail of their purpose and become merely elaborate maneuvers.

“Berry’s been banished,” said a Miss Steen der Venter, who was narrow and caustic and something of a town legend because she continued to refuse to sell or build on fifty fabulously valuable feet of vacant lot on Fifth Avenue, but maintained it as a playground for her three black poodles. “I scent a diplomatic move!”

“I’m making him eat at second table, Van Steen; his manners are too atrocious for first,” cried Leslie, whom Berry had once accused of overhearing, no matter how large the crowd, any reference to him.

Almost immediately the occasion began to progress. The amusing feature of the bar kept a steady stream of young men skating across blue tiles, imperiling waiters, and returning with assorted tumblers of assorted drinks, which they balanced precariously, to the squeals of women in _décolletée_ who feared for their shoulders. A Miss Flavverdale, impoverished, but one of the right Flavverdales, the one, by the way, who had managed things for the St. Louis Slocums, began by insisting upon carting Berry off before the fowl course, with a napkin filled with dinner rolls to be crumpled into the goldfish-pond.

“I want to stay with my field-mouse,” bawled Berry, and began to stroke Jennifer’s ermine and pull at the fringe of soft black tails which bordered it.

“Don’t be an idiot, Berry,” said the efficient Miss Flavverdale; “I’ll buy you a five-and-ten-cent one.”

“Was that a dirty dig?” said Jennifer to a beautiful boy beside her, whom she did not know, but who was in the first throes of getting drunk on champagne, which he kept sipping, while he refused all food.

“A dirty dig,” he repeated, rolling his extraordinarily blue and luminous eyes. “A dirty dig.” Apparently the octave of his conversation, at least at this stage, consisted in repeating the last three words of what was said to him.

“The Beautiful next to you, Miss Rarick,” sang out Leslie Edgerton, on a sudden surge of geniality, when she saw Berry hauled protesting along the Mediterranean of blue tiles, “is Jules Wilke-Barre. He’s going to cut a tooth for us later in the evening!”

A Wilke-Barre! A thrill shot through Jennifer. Despise herself for the snobbery of it as she would, it was impossible not to bristle with awareness among names that were whole planetary systems in the social firmament. This naughty-eyed, beautiful-eyed boy, whose knee had to be shoved away again and again as it approached hers, a Wilke-Barre! Here, gathered at these fifty tables, were the youngsters of the mighty ones of the land. Madison. Rhodes. Flavverdale. Wilke-Barre.

She leaned toward Wilke-Barre.

“I thought you were Bobby Shaftoe, who went to sea with silver buckles on his knee.”

The youth she thought was Bobby Shaftoe, who went to sea with silver buckles on his knee, was asleep, his chin resting squarely and precariously in the shallow crystal basin of his empty champagne-glass.

Before the crash came that was to gash the Rossetti-looking Wilke-Barre chin with splintered glass, Berry was back, in great and rising spirits.

“Glory! what a night!”

Its glamor was out over Jennifer. Its pollen fell over the scene and in a sheen across her flesh.

“It was on such a night as this----”

“--that I made the damnedest mistake of my life,” said Berry, and jerked the great athletic hulk of his body back to his place at the table.

“Leslie’s been looking for you, Berry,” said Irene Annescy.

“Finders keepers,” said Berry under his breath to Jennifer.

She flashed her face, with the indescribable pallor of moon over it, upon him.

“Mean that?”

“If I ever meant anything, I mean it. Find me, Jennifer.”

“You won’t let me.”

“Try me.”

“Don’t be darling to me, Berry, unless----”

Beneath the table his heavy palm clamped down on her knee.

“How can I help it, when you are darling to me.”

“How do you mean that?”

“I’ll tell you later----”

“I’ll not drive back with you alone unless----”

“Unless what?”

“Unless I damn please,” she said, and swung her smooth bare shoulder from him and turned to talk to Wilke-Barre, who was having his chin nursed by a princess of Greece.

Tom Edgerton began to beat a tom-tom in an effort to drum up trade for his boiling pot of corn on cob. He was voted ridiculous, because, while the party had gone informal, so to speak, the food had remained strictly _de rigueur_. It was difficult, after mushrooms under glass and duck soaked in sherry, to warm up to the impulse to nibble the mealy pearls off the cobs which Edgerton forked up out of the fine hullabaloo of boiling pot.

Most of those who ventured never quite reached the boiling pot. The gardens lay embalmed in a night through which the moonlight poured like spring showers. Marble curve of benches gleamed in among hedges. Islands of shadow crawled back into the groves. The waterfall that fed the natural swimming-pool made silver-tipped commotion. The dinner broke into dancing almost before the tables could be cleared from the tiles. It was as dreamy as absinthe to tango out there under the stars.

Six Hawaiian boys in shellacked hair sang to Argentine music. A jazz-band alternated. A Spanish slip of a girl, with hips which she managed like a spaniel shaking off water, danced solo with Ramon Lopez. Her bold, sinuous body-beauty went through you in points of excitement. The give of the slim jacket of her ribs as she doubled with a boneless ductility back over his elbow. Slitted eyes of Ramon, braced for her whirling body to spin into the close insinuating haven of his arms. Slow shuffling feet, too sensuous to leave the ground. Faces, as through a curtain of moonlight, dimly; the Spanish girl’s fore-shortened upper lip hiked back to reveal small wet teeth; Ramon’s face, sliding down like a warm brown breathing lid--over hers....

“God, Berry, they’re wonderful,” said Jennifer.

His body, through it all, as they stood in the thick fringe of onlookers, had been crushing against hers. It had been her dance with Berry, vicariously.

The pair broke into a tarantella then, as if to gloss over the thickening moist-lipped faces that had begun to lean out of the human wall around them.

“Come on, Jennifer, let’s get out of here. I need a drink. I need eleven drinks.” They backed off without much disturbance, moving slidingly and unnoticed along the tiles; moving hand in hand down the broad reflecting steps; moving slidingly toward the grove above the grotto of the swimming-pool.

Patches of moonlight covered the floor of the grove like lily-pads. Water, skedaddling down rocks to feed the pool, was the only sound....

* * * * *

“Life ought to be sweeter to us than it is, Berry. What’s rotten with us?”

He stared, with his head in her lap, at a patch of pale sky that reminded him of his star-sapphire studs.

“What say?”

“You’re not listening.”

“I can feel your voice. It makes darling little vibrations.”

“I begged you not to get tight, Berry.”

His eyes fluttered heavily and closed as he began fumbling out on to the moss for the frosted quart bottle and two glasses with which he had fortified himself from the buffet table that was now being spread down beside the swimming-pool.

“You can’t get tight on champagne, my field mouse. You get divine.”

Her fingers were in his hair. Her lips gave off a tiny fume.

“You’ve stood me up frightfully, Berry. What if I were to go home and blow out that portion of my anatomy called brain, with a mother-of-pearl pistol?”

“I’d embalm you in a block of ice and keep you in a casket of rose quartz.”

“You are as slippery as a glass eel.”

“You don’t know the half of it, my darling, or the half of the half of it,” he cried, and rolled over and dug his face into the soft fur moss of her gown. “God! I’m ten kinds of a fool!”

“Sweet ten kinds.”

“Rotten ten kinds.”

“Tell me one of the kinds.”

“Fee, fie, fo, fum. The kind that daren’t like little white field mice.”

“That daren’t?” she said, and lifted her head as if to listen. “Why?”

“Let me alone,” he cried into her lap, “with your whys and your whys and your whys. Why are all you girls such why-hounds?”

“Sh-h-h! Berry’s tight,” she said, smoothing his hair.

“Just go on doing that,” he said, still into the thick whiteness of her lap. “Just go on doing that--and talk----”

“Why should I do all the talking and you all the evading?”

“Is this evading?” he said, and reached up to stroke her cheek.

“Berry, Berry, what is it we want...?”

“I know what I want----”

“I feel like I belonged in one of those psychological novels they’re writing nowadays.”

“The darling has read a book and everything.”

“Where nothing happens except in the tortured brains of some tortured author’s brain-children. The cross-eyed school of literature that looks inward, and does nothing about it but look and look. Life isn’t that way. Life moves. Life is motion. Time doesn’t pass. We pass. I may be in a mess, but I don’t intend to sit in it and stew.”

“Stew in my arms, darling.”

“I hate you when you’re tight. Am I tight, Berry?”

“Not tight. Divine.”

“Let’s be good, Berry, and sober, and live so that, after it’s all over, it will have mattered a damn whether we have lived or not.”

“You’re good, Jennifer. You’re a good gal. That’s what ails you.”

“You’re no good, Berry. That’s what ails you.”

“You’re what ails me.”

“Then, for God’s sake, Berry, play fair with me! Oh! Get up, Berry! Look! They’re throwing light on the pool. It may slip up here. How long have we been away? What will Leslie say?”

A cone of light swung through the grove. He dragged her swiftly back.

“Don’t go, Pussy.”

“Berry, we must.”

“Don’t go.”

“Look, the crowd is coming down to bathe. There’s Elsie Risdon in a bathing-suit. She never travels without it. And Ramon. He looks as if he were painted in gold leaf. It’s beautiful. It’s terrible. It’s like one of those Stuck pictures--horrible loveliness. Look at the Wilke-Barre infant there in that patch of moonlight. He’s going to dive. It may sober him. Where on earth did Tom Edgerton get those striped trunks? Bacchus gone wrong. Vine leaves in his hair, or is it confetti? This is one of those swimming parties of the idle and debauched rich that they read about out in Dubuque and turn Bolsheviki or try to imitate. I’ve never seen one happen so true to form. Look, there comes----This is awful!”

They crept to the edge of their ledge, which looked down from an eminence on to the half-natural, half-contrived grotto. Slim silhouettes, all fays in the moonlight, sat on the coping, along which crawled Henrietta Edgerton’s little _bêtes noires_, and dangled bare legs into the moon-reflecting pool. A slope of hillside marched down to the pool, inclosing it like a crater. Figures were strewn over the hillside, helping one another down declivities, in monkey-chains of twos and threes. The Spanish dancer, clad in a mere dash of suit, the exact henna of her flesh, leaped down from crag to crag like a bit of lightning, zigzagging off the edges of rock. The Falstaffian figure of the over-stout young Philip Londo swaggered down in an improvised bathing-suit, a sweater tied by the sleeves about his great middle. The Spanish dancer leap-frogged over him, took the tip of the diving-board, and sliced downward like a quick thin blade. Voices in the moonlight had the musical flow to them of water. Over the ledge they peered, secure, arm in arm, their bodies flat to the soft moss, seeing, unseen. It was a scene of a Paul Veronese canvas, set to music by Stravinsky, and directed by the buxom figure of Tom Edgerton, who went stamping among his guests in his striped trunks, dragging shrinking and reluctant maidens, with dry, beautifully powdered legs, to the water’s edge, immersing them, leaping back up the hillsides for more of his strange and spectacular prey.

“Berry, there’s Leslie! In the black suit.”

She felt his head move; but even as she spoke she pressed it down again into her lap.