Part 9

“She must be looking for us! Why the dickens did we do this, Berry? It’s this loony moonlight. We’ve been gone over an hour. Leslie shouldn’t let herself get this tipsy. Thank goodness, she’s going to dive. It will sober her. Berry, hadn’t we better slide around to the house and get into bathing-suits and ooze quietly into the crowd? Oh, Berry, I hate to!”

He raised his tousled and troubled-looking head.

“Guess we’d better,” he said, with a sudden kind of soberness.

It made her wild that what she had just said should have this power over him.

“Berry,” she cried, and caught his face in the cup of her hands and drew it to hers closely; “Berry darling--tell me the low-down--let me hear you deny, yourself, the horrid rumor that you and Leslie--oh--oh--no----”

Due to a loud series of shouts through cupped hands which Tom Edgerton was directing at an electrician, the entire scene below suddenly slipped into the incredible beauty of a moon-silvered darkness, the cone of search-light shooting upward like a great tusk of ivory, drenching the hilltop forest in glare, drenching the figures of Jennifer and Berry, lying there so closely face to face on their bed of moss.

To the bathers beneath, it was as if the heavens had opened in the fashion that was supposed to reveal God seated on a throne of mother-of-pearl. Only, there sat Berry and Jennifer instead, bathed in incalculable amperes of luminosity.

The figure on the tip edge of the diving-board was a figure transfigured.

“Leslie,” cried Henrietta Edgerton to her daughter--the only voice to find itself in that blinding shift of scene “Leslie, don’t!”

The spring-board began to jiggle. It made a creaking noise. Then came the voice of Leslie, poised on the tip of the spring-board, her arms shooting out as her silhouette became a cross.

“There you are!” screamed Leslie, and danced up and down on the spring-board. “There you are!”

“Leslie!” shouted Henrietta Edgerton.

“There you are!” called Leslie up to the glare on the hilltop. “Pretty ones! I’ll tell the world! I’ll tell the world!”

“Leslie!”

“World, that’s my husband up there! We were married yesterday. Never mind why. Keep this marriage a secret for him a few weeks, so he can settle his affairs? The devil I will! What affairs? His five-and-ten-cent affairs. The devil I will!” screamed Leslie, and dived.

* * * * *

At four o’clock of that translucent October morning, with a moon still retreating in a high sky, the only daughter of the thirteenth richest man in the world sat crouched in a huddle no larger than a spaniel, outside the door of Doctor Gerkes.

She did not quite clearly know why she was there, except that inchoately, fragmentarily, her fuddled brain had telegraphed to her fuddled feet the road to Gerkes. She did not know why. Truth of the matter was, she was generally not quite clear, except for her sense of the lump of shame. She was the lump of shame. The world was a wave, tossing a lump of shame.

There was a slit of light beneath Gerkes’s door. Behind that door, Jennifer’s fuddled sense told her, Gerkes would be sitting in a monotonous gray herring-bone suit, or, worse, the stiff gray-flannel dressing-gown she had seen hanging on the door of his bathroom the day of her exploratory trip. A small gray man, about as exciting as chalk dust. Behind that closed door he was sitting in a limitless world of ideas. The stones of Venice and the stones of Alexandria and the stones of Carthage were not mere stones to him. Like the flint and arrow-heads on his tables, they looked up at him with the wide revealing eyes of immemorial man. Heaps and heaps of these strange lusterless stones covered the fine table-tops of that room. Wisdoms were behind that closed door--and quiet----

It was then that Jennifer scratched faintly at the panel, like a little dog, not so much because she particularly wanted admission into the room, but because she wanted some of the kind solitude she seemed to sense there.

After a while, on limbs that were too wavy to carry her, the young Miss Rarick, in the white-ermine frock and her coat dragging, began a tortuous and shocking journey down the hallway, on all-fours, knee after knee, the palms of her hands padding softly along the carpet.

Her maid, dozing as she waited, heard the soft noises, ran down the hallway, and horrified, lifted and carried her bodily to bed.

It was about then that consciousness that there had been scratching noises came belatedly to Doctor Gerkes, who had been bending to scrutinize a dated altar-stone, 575, of Maya civilization, said to have been unearthed from the city of Matzap Ceel.

Opening his door to peer out into the now empty hallway, a faint smell that reminded him of the dried-rose-leaf scent in a third-century mummy-chamber he had once helped to excavate near Luxor, came and caused him pleasantly to sniff.

It pleased Rarick to be a patron of the arts. He liked to think that opera committees came to him to make good their deficits. Little-theater groups were appealing to him more and more frequently. Child musical prodigies of piano and violin virtuosity were constantly being brought before him.

It pleased him to sit, a Mæcenas, in his library and make chapels of his fingers and pass judgments in which he was solely assisted by Hellman, who had graduated from a South St. Louis music-school, and Alfredo Ludovici, the violin member of a chamber-music quartette which Rarick had supported for years.

Children, for the most part, were brought by mothers whose agony of nervousness was almost invariably cruelly transmitted to their prodigy offspring. Again, they were sent by music-school teachers, personal friends and some without even benefit of introduction, feverishly seeking the wedge of an audition.

Hellman arranged these auditions. He was high-handed about it, thinking nothing of keeping a mother and an alleged violinistic prodigy waiting for weeks at their hotel for the Rarick summons. It was Hellman who arranged the interviews with little-theater committees, art-foundation groups, endowment-seeking organizations, and scholarship-fund seekers, weeding out at his discretion, but lenient in his judgments, since it seemed perpetually pleasing to Rarick to sit in tribunal.

With the exception of the Firenzi Quartette, which, thanks to Rarick’s generous maintenance, had become world-renowned for the perfection of its _ensemble_, the success of most of Rarick’s musical _protégés_ was still to be achieved. To be sure, there was a thirteen-year-old Milwaukee lad, named Isa Friedberg, studying at Fontainebleau, and for whom great things were predicted; and little Leontine Bachrach of Brooklyn, thirteen and a half, who had played a piano-recital at Town Hall with outstanding success, was making spectacular headway with his teachers in Munich.

But not infrequently, Rarick’s fervor to serve the arts outclassed his critical judgments. The little Norwegian lad from Flagler, North Dakota, whom, against the better judgment of both Hellman and Ludovici, he had chosen to endow with his patronage in preference to the small Russian boy from the Boston ghetto, was now playing viola in a theater orchestra, while the small Russian boy from the Boston ghetto was winning honors as a soloist of the first rank. There was also the case of a pretty and enormously promising young soprano whom he had lifted from a stenographer’s desk in a broker’s office to the conservatory of Milan, and who had returned to America, homesick, after the second Italian month, to marry a runner in the brokerage office where she had formerly been employed.

As Hellman and Ludovici used to remark with a wink between them, the old gentleman took these debit results gamely, apparently more than compensated for failures by the majesty of his rôle of patron of the fine arts and by the first-water success of the Firenzi Quartette.

Of this last there was no question. Taking over, after one hearing, the four friendless Italian youths who had finally succeeded in winning audience, Rarick had supported them, exploited them, and launched them securely into success. It was his bounty that continued to supply them generous budget for travel, study, and leisure, long after their financial need of him had passed.

When not abroad or on American tour, they occupied a pleasant old house in West Ninth Street, fitted with a vast music-chamber across the top, and which, except for their tenancy, Rarick would long since have profitably converted into a skyscraper apartment-building.

Evening after evening, during these town periods, they played chamber music to Rarick alone, occasionally Gerkes present, semi-occasionally one or both of the Jennys appearing on the scene.

Frequently, the Quartette, which had long outgrown private-home engagements, played at one of Jenny’s functions when she decided to have a “bit of music.” But after the Firenzi Quartette became closely associated with the name of Rarick, she abandoned that habit, because it smacked of home-made economy, buying instead the professional services of some stellar vocal or violinistic attraction whose fees were notoriously high.

Besides, there came to be something about the very faces of the members of the Quartette--as they sat on the small platform which was rolled in for them to the organ end of the library--which was repellent to her, because, by association, they suggested one of Rarick’s quasi-Napoleonic attitudes. He liked to crouch into an enormous tapestry chair, done after the unicorn at Cluny, at the far end of the room from their platform, head thrust forward and downward on his chest, a little forelock, which Jenny sometimes described to herself as his Della Fox Napoleon, down over his brow, and his curiously intent gaze seeming to hook into the music as it flowed past.

His imagination, more than his senses, appeared to come awake to the warm reality of chamber music. The tumbling figures of a Tiepolo ceiling, garland-wound, music-wound, became a grove in which lazy fancy could wander. There was a tragic and a comic mask, divided by a flaming torch, woven palely into one of the tapestries that faced him. To Bach or Strauss or Massenet, these faces could tilt into laughter or screw to tears. They became his own face in layers of moods that were heart-breaking to him for their pathos or their absurdity. Again, to him, some of these faces were sublime. They were the faces of the Rarick he might have been. Some of those Rarick faces were as beautiful as Avery. Some of those Rarick faces had it in them to create the very music to which he was listening; some, to create the drama of the tragic mask. No Five-and-Ten-Cent Rarick of the Five-and-Ten-Cent thing. No industrial magnate in a tin crown. Here, under the weaving spell of music, he became the Rarick he was, deeply, secretly, and terribly, within himself. No patron of the arts, but a creator! No piler-up of wealth. Dispenser! Four-and-twenty Raricks all in a row....

Projects came to Rarick under the weaving motion of music. New loans. New stores. New policies. It was in this room, for instance, to evening after evening of the peregrinations of the small music of Schubert and Haydn, that the mammoth idea of the Rarick Building was born.

Layer by layer, to its dramatic seventy-three-story splendor, it rose on a scaffolding wrought out of these strange spirals of inspiration that seemed to wind up through him when his imagination responded to a stimulus it comprehended not at all. Story by story, to its eminence as the tallest building in the world, this Taj Mahal of industry took form. It was to take eleven years to realize, thirty million dollars to construct, and it rose out of Schubert and Haydn and Chopin and Brahms. It rose out of the winding of the imagined faces of his children as they appeared warm and sympathetic to him among the garlands of fancy that came to life on the Tiepolo ceiling. It rose out of Rarick’s visions of himself, creating the kind of beauty that money could buy.

Mozart, Schubert, Smetana, Schumann, Beethoven. His knowledge of music was negligible, and his choice of selection often secretly amusing and chromoesque to his Quartette, but somehow it was impossible to patronize Rarick musically. In one breath, he might call out, across the long reaches of the room, for “Träumerei,” “Narcissus,” and the “Scarf Dance,” but the Beethoven C-major, op. 59, with its gymnastic and tuneless ’cello-passages in the first movement, was just as apt to be his next choice. He might not remember the name of a composition or a composer; but he could hum a thread of _motif_ for them, or demand this or that movement by describing its tempo.

“Play those wild gypsies dancing in the bonfire-light,” was his way of requesting the last movement of the Schubert G-major, op. 161. Or, “Play that flowing, running one,” for the Andante Cantabile from Tchaikowsky’s Quartette, D-major.

He was an interesting, an interested, a solitarily grand audience of one. On those rare occasions when Jenny or Jennifer found time, or found it the better part of wisdom to pause for a snatch of one of these evenings, they did so, usually perched on the arms of chairs like brilliant birds of passage, their evening cloaks trailing, their ears cocked for the summons to depart. When Gerkes dropped in, after a lecture he had either delivered or attended, it was to slide into a straight chair which he kept for himself in the loft of the organ, where he could tilt back and nap to music whose chief function, where he was concerned, was to soothe him. Usually these evenings wound up with beer and talk of the habits of immortals among musicians, chiefly between Gerkes and the members of the Quartette.

“Now, take that countryman Verdi of yours; from what they tell me, he must have been pretty much of an ordinary fellow, apart from his ability to compose,” was Gerkes’ way, for instance, of starting Gigli Fortuno, the ’cellist member of the Quartette, who was well informed on the subject of musical personalities, and whose father had personally known Verdi.

Sometimes, throughout these discourses, Gerkes remained up on his balcony, tilted back on his straight chair, while the four members of the little group worked themselves up into musical controversy that rose to the climax of shouts and heated disagreement. Occasionally, Gerkes, who dozed or relaxed, would be reminded of a pun or reference, as some name came floating dimly up to him among the floriated arches, and he would call down his comment:

“Speaking of the Fifth Symphony, Sir Henry Larrimore, the inventor of the Larrimore tuning-fork and the foremost living acoustician, told me a good one about observing an audience in Queens Hall during the first movement of the Fifth Symphony....”

Then Rarick: “Tell the gentlemen, Gerkes, the Eurasian theory of the Music of the Spheres.”

Then Gerkes: “You Quartette boys, how much do you really know about the principles of harmony?...”

Evenings far removed from the banging reality of days that were crowded with four hundred thousand sets of doll-dishes for children, or a pending order for hair-nets that had an annoying rider in the contract.

A patron of the arts sat among his art-objects and listened to a discussion of the arts. And yet it was this very listening that could rankle. His Quartette, when their musical arguments rose and excluded him, was not the Quartette that made him obsequious and played to his wishes. Their manner, between themselves, was that of artist to artist. Their manner to Rarick was that of men beholden for favors that lay outside their stamina to earn. There was, in their behavior between themselves, the unconscious difference between artist to artist, and artist to financial benefactor.

They respected his riches. But Rarick, Rarick himself, well, Rarick was a rich man....

Equally aggravating to this sense of exclusion were the writers, theater groups, young aspirants in this or that form of art, who came to him for patronage and at the same time gave him that sense of isolation from their cause, except in so far as his hands held the strings to the money-bags.

They spoke to him of their projects in terms of numbers. Rentals of theaters. Price of publishing a slender book of verse. Scholarship money. Endowment money. It was among themselves that the ambitious young poets who smote their dissonant lyres of modern verse, and the young playwrights who gave birth, in travail, to their Hedda Gablers of the experimental theater, had their real beings.

They talked projects to Rarick. Lisped in numbers of box-office receipts, yearly deficit, and the ledger-book which they despised.

He was Crœsus, related only to Thyrsus, Sappho, Terpsichore, and Apollo by the strings of the money-bags.

It was in his rôle of patron that the Committee of Internationalists, Inc., which was one day to be one of the most potent forces in the young theater movement in America, came before Rarick.

They were three. A young fellow named Trigoloff, with a crooked and strangely powerful profile, who had written a two-act play in thirty-one episodes which had been produced in a cellar called the Rhomboid Theater. A Miss Virginia Adelbert, with blond hair, cropped, polished, and parted on the side, like a boy’s, in tailored clothes, soft shirt, and who carried her crush felt hat under her arm, and her package of cigarettes protruding from a tailored pocket. The third member of this group, Gratton Davies, was a young professor of dramatic composition at a city university. His comedy, “Herod’s Mask,” had been a success the season before. Here was a fellow of such abounding and amusing enthusiasm that it was inevitable he should have been elected spokesman for this occasion. He had a thatch of thick tan hair, which jumped and fell from the roots, as he sat on the edge of his chair, his opening sentence accomplishing what it set out to do as concisely as a good headline flare of advertising.

“Mr. Rarick, we have chosen you to sponsor what is without any doubt to be the most significant and far-reaching experiment in the history of the American theater. I used the word ‘chosen’ advisedly, because the man who is granted the privilege of bringing to life our plan is going to get a ride for his money to the peak of artistic-success-with-a-box-office-value.”

“Yes, young man?” said Rarick, with a bitter kind of mockery playing around his lips. This was not the fellow himself speaking. This was the young scholar, suiting his phrase, his manner, and his matter to his man. In other words, “selling his idea” to big business.

The fervor of his presentation was all right, but the manner was the rehearsed one of a traveling salesman.

Young Davies was talking down to Rarick in terms of the one aspect of the enterprise that interested him least of all, and yet which was so essential to the very life and breath of their beautiful baby of an idea. Money. Without it, that beautiful baby must perish aborning. Its soul was in the keeping of such as these three young committeemen. Its shoes, the farina to feed it, the fires to warm it, were merchant concerns. Rarick’s.

“Money, Mr. Rarick, is what we need of you.”

His resentments, he told himself were absurd. What else had he to offer? Presently these three, and the _confrères_ who spoke their language, would recede into the laboratories of their imaginations. They could talk to one another from these laboratories. Where did he, Rarick, come in? Why sit stiffly before this young barker up the Himalayas and bark back a bitter “Yes, young man,” into his enthusiasms.

These three before him were in the heyday of their walking-trip through the Pyrenees. Their walking-trip was coming off, too. After all, it was something to sit there, holding their creative destinies in the same hand that held the money-bags.

“Don’t think, Mr. Rarick, that our ideas are all visionary. We don’t propose to drive the commercial theater out of business. Nothing of the sort.”

“Now, don’t you?”

“No, sir. We propose to supplant, in time--with thought, with discrimination, with genius, with money--the garbage of the present commercial theater, by giving the people pre-digested, intellectual, artistic, and entertaining fodder. But it is not so much a matter of throwing out the commercial theater, Mr. Rarick, as cleaning out the Augean dramatic stables. That is why we dare to approach you with a proposition which will ultimately grant you full return on your money. Not that you are interested in exacting any such guaranty as that from us, but----”

Young rascal! Young walker in the Pyrenees. Young three there, who presently, once outside his doors, would revert to the swift, ruthless well-informed talk of their own world, and who might even ape and deride the holder of the strings of the money-bags....

“... Of course, I am not here to bore you with our standards of production, the literary ideals we have set for ourselves....”

“Why not?” barked Rarick. “You can’t put your cart before your horse.”

“What Mr. Davies means,” hastened Miss Adelbert, “is that we have long ago threshed out our literary policies. That has been taken care of. It’s money we----”

“Can’t see why the money-concerns of such an organization as you describe are a thing separate and apart from its policies. They overlap. My selling-policies regarding an article can only be determined after I am thoroughly familiar with the article itself.”

“In the theater, Mr. Rarick, that scarcely applies. Our production-policies have nothing to do with our financial ones. We need an initial endowment of one hundred thousand dollars to put them into what we firmly believe will be a successful practice. We want you to be the man to have sufficient faith in those production-policies to endow our baby.”

Impudent youth! Well, what rebuttal had he? Plays were foreign affairs to him. Occasionally, he sat through one with Jenny. He had not seen “Herod’s Mask.” Doubtless it would have gone monotonously over his head. Music flowed into him, whereas the drama seemed merely to use his brain as a surface of impact. Jennifer liked the Follies and the rapid revues. Once or twice he had accompanied her and sat in first-row seats or in a box. The box was more to his liking. Jennifer said it was because he could hang a crepe over the railing. But the fact was, the box was more to his liking because, as at the Greek plays he sometimes sponsored, it was possible to remain out of it an entire act without leaving the hole of an empty seat in a row.

What had he, after all, to offer these youngsters, except money? It would be dignified patronage. Miss Adelbert had already won herself a somewhat esoteric position as one of those clever and respected actresses of the intellectual school. Trigoloff, of the crooked profile, was an author and director of rising fame in both fields. The fellow Davies stood to the fore of a certain group of young rebels. What a pity--what a pity Jennifer or Avery was missing such interests as this.

A thought smote Rarick.

“Young people, take my boy into this enterprise with you!”

If he had said, “Young people, take my howling red monkey into this enterprise with you,” he could not have struck a more compelling silence across the faces of these three.

“I’ve a boy. Youngster. Bright as a new nickel. I’d like him to sharpen his teeth, come vacation, on a few young people like you. I’d like to see him get interested in groups that will get him acquainted with some of the things I think he may be missing.”

A glance, imbedded in smile, wound itself from one face to the other of the three.

“Your son is interested in the theater, Mr. Rarick?”

“I wouldn’t say that, Miss Adelbert,” snapped Rarick. “It is I who am interested in interesting him.”

“I see.”