VII

Jael looked at the time. It was 3:30 A.M. Not late for her. She wished to think; and the proceedure was as follows:

First she built up the open fire, near it she placed a reading lamp, by the lamp a small table with smoking materials, and pulled up a deep chair. Next she tapped a cup of coffee from the urn that was still hot and brought it to the table. These movements were performed in a pattern, that is to say, absently, as from habit. Then she opened a chest that was full of current French fiction in paper jackets and lifted out an armful. The first one she looked at was “Three Who Loved.” She threw it back. The second was “The Sadist.” That went back. Then “The Remorse of Virtue.” She let it fall. The next one bore a jacket illustration of a young woman smoothing the brow of her sleeping Apache with one hand while holding a dagger in the other. She hesitated and looked at the next, whose author in the new fashion disdained titles. In place of a title was a very striking design—a woman smiling ironically into the face of an angry serpent. Deciding for that one, she threw all the rest back, slammed the lid of the chest, kicked off her shoes, and settled herself to read. When she came to again she would have the answer to what it was she had been thinking about.

It often was that as she capsized herself in this manner she remembered her father, who did the same thing in almost the same way. That was before the Freudian literature of psychology had put within reach of every owner of a mind the appropriate hinges, single or double acting, full instructions with each set, no skill required, merely the commonest household tools, so that anyone could do it.

Her father got his money in Wall street. He was not a banker, not a broker, not a speculator in the ordinary meaning of that word. A mysterious person, who worked alone and never spoke but to say buy or sell and name the quantities. David Saint-Leon. The Silent Saint. He kept an office without books; his records were in his head. He had no habits, no methods. For six months or a year he might not appear once on the tilting ground, or, if at all, only for a moment as a knight on the hill in black silhouette against the sky. If he tarried it was to act. His movements were swift, daring, always at first incomprehensible. Invariably they turned out to be disastrous for some powerful inner group of financiers with a golden cargo in transit. Always at some point they were obliged to cross the open road. There stood Saint-Leon. Before defence or reprisals could be organized he was gone with the booty.

What he did in the meantime was to read or travel. He would sit for months in his library reading Dumas, Hugo, Reade, Scott, Dickens. He had read all the fiction bound up in sets that existed in the English language. When he traveled it was in Egypt, up and down the Nile, the same path over and over, gazing at the scenery which he never saw. He knew less about Egypt than a child in its first geography.

He was a small man with an eagle head and a lifting, sardonic voice. Most people feared him at sight, probably for his eyes, which pierced what they looked at, penetrating the surface as if it did not exist, or as if he did not see it. One of his unpredictable acts was to marry a famous opera singer. She was a large, thrilling woman, not beautiful. Jael was their only child. Her father named her; it was not until long afterward that her mother by accident learned of the first Jael. By that time she was numb; and besides, the child—well, once more perhaps the man had been right in his diabolic way. The name was the only touch of Eveness the child had.

With a father like that and a mother pursuing an international career, Jael’s childhood was a superintended affair. Acquaintance with her parents progressed by intervals, with sometimes as much as a year between; and after she was three the experience of being re-introduced to them became an ordeal.

She was conscious of disappointing them, each time a little more. Her manners were all right; the reports were excellent. Her governess and tutors were enthusiastic about her merits. Nevertheless, her father wrinkled his eyes and her mother frowned and kept regarding her with an air of tragic perplexity. Then it would wear off; but then they were gone again.

She did not know what was wrong. She got the notion it was her way of greeting them. She was not exuberant; they expected more warmth. So she tried hurling herself at them. Then it was worse. Gradually she began to realize it was in her looks she disappointed them. But she was not responsible for the way she looked; she did not pick out her own things to wear.

She was twelve before she knew it was deeper than clothes. That year her mother gave her a grand party. There were thirty children. Her mother looked in on them from time to time, each time with the same expression because each time the facts were the same. It was Jael’s party; but Jael was not the center of it. She was nowhere in it. Fifteen little aspects of the male principle behaved as if she were non-existent.

This was one of the occasions, not very frequent, when both her father and mother were home at the same time. At dinner her mother was in hectic color, and from the conversation Jael understood they had been talking about her, had talked themselves into a temper, and were continuing the subject obliquely, thinking they were over her head.

“I wanted to see,” said her mother, aloud, but to herself, as one talks to an echoing thought. She must have said it already many times.

“Let her buy it, then,” said her father in his cynical voice. “Buy it. She’ll have the money. As many nice men as nice women now go around holding up their skirts.”

“Oh, you beast!” said her mother.

“Your own taste, madame,” said her father.

Presently her mother said, “Well, it can’t be laid at my door.”

“No?” said her father, feigning polite astonishment. “It came by the window, or down the chimney.”

When Jael was fourteen her mother died of a heart attack in Berlin.

Before that her father had begun to be interested in her talk, it was so droll, so serious and unexpected. After her mother’s death her father passed more time at home and saw more of her. They often talked half the evening, lingering at the dinner table. Their contacts however were mental only. He treated her as friend and equal, sometimes as one woman to another, then again as one man to another.

She was sixteen when one day he sent for her to come to his private abode. This was one wing of the house—first a very large museum room, then a library, off the library sleeping rooms for himself and man-servant.

He was in bed, propped up in pillows, smoking a strong cigar. She had not seen him for several days and did not know he was ill. She was pulling up a chair; he made her a gesture to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Jael,” he said, “you have not my nature but you have my mind. It will be your curse. But you will have also a lot of money, more than you can spend. All I suggest is that when you are through with it you will leave it free, as I leave it to you.”

He smoked a little, thoughtfully.

“There’s a silly saying,” he said, “that money will not buy happiness, as if happiness were a thing you might hope to acquire. It cannot be acquired. Nobody can give it to you. It’s a silly bauble. Ruminants are born with it. All others, if they want it, have to create it in their minds. Money is no hindrance. Only the people who haven’t any say it is and they don’t believe it.”

Then the premonition seized her.

With it came two intense emotions, one of tenderness and one of regret, both rising from a sudden appalling sense of the selfish loneliness of his life.

She fell upon him weeping, took him in her arms. Never before had she wept for anything from her heart.

He was passive for awhile. Stroking her hair he said, in a dry voice, “That’s all, Jael. Now I want to think.”

But he called to her when she was at the door.

“Don’t marry if you can help it,” he said. “If you can’t help it, marry a man with red hair and plenty of it. It is my best opinion.”

With that he took up the book from his knee and began to read. She had noticed what the book was. Fiction: “Eugene Aram.”

The next morning she was amazed that the paper made first page news of his death. Never having once thought of him in relation to the world, she had no notion how important he was.

It seemed strange that anybody else should have known him at all. But how little she knew him herself! She read eagerly all that was said about him; and although the newspapers added much to her picture of him she realized that their knowledge of him, too, was limited. His importance as news lay in the legends that had grown up about him in Wall street, legends of his daring, his success, his wizardry and the extent of his wealth. Their estimates of this seemed to her incredible, little as she could weigh such matters.

The facts were more incredible. His fortune was greater than anyone had guessed.

When the will was filed, leaving the whole of it to her to do with as she pleased, she suffered a violent collision with public opinion. Reporters beseiged the place, got into the house by subterfuge, accosted her as she went in and out, even in her own hallway, demanding her picture, and shouting always one question: what would she do with the money? There was no picture; she had never had one. This she did not say. In a moment of great exasperation when she had been unable to enter her own doorway for the mob that held it against her, she did say, to the question they shouted at her, that it was nobody’s business.

A thoughtless, natural remark. Yet it was instantly telegraphed all over the world and appeared within ten minutes under great black headlines in the afternoon papers. Then it was treated editorially.

It became the text for a brutal attack upon the character of her father. What had he done to be possessed of millions? He had never built anything; he had never thought anything. Out of his vast fortune he had contributed nothing to the aid of art, science or charity. By speculation, which was not labor, he had amassed immense wealth, only in the end to leave it to a sixteen-year-old child who, when asked what she would do with it, replied in that manner—it was nobody’s business.

Her mail was astonishing. Black Hand letters, begging letters, religious letters, form letters, one from a clipping bureau containing examples of these insulting opinions and offering to clip and send all of them for so much per hundred.

One of the cuttings enclosed was from a periodical she had never heard of before. It described her personal appearance with cruel unfeeling; and the paragraph ended: “But she has one very fetching feature—fifty millions of dollars.”

This was a blow her mind could not parry. She felt it deep in her body. All her life she had been starved. The bread of affection and the sweet of love she could do without. Her desperate hunger was for that glance of appraisal that returns and lingers. And as this hunger was never fed, the more her pride of person grew to be a fierce and jealous passion. The unanswered craving to be touched may make one untouchable.

To be suddenly confronted with an unexpected world all eyes, teeth and claws was a nightmare. But to see her person published to ridicule was agony.

Public curiousity is a busy gadfly. The clamor very soon subsided. She picked her own college, entered quietly and lived in a very modest way, attracting friends of both sexes by the qualities of her mind. Her thinking was free and hearty, and she tended naturally toward the radical process for two reasons. First, she found among rebels a kind of reckless comradeship that stopped the ache of her hunger. Secondly, radical taste in art and literature offered revenge upon the conventional standards of beauty and good-lookingness. She embraced socialism without reflecting upon its implications or the incongruity of her own relation to that doctrine. She saw only its idealism. Communism was even better.

It was not until she left college that she came to have any sense of her wealth. The income was piling up. When her bankers wished to know what to do with it, she asked them what was the safest of all investments. They said government bonds. She said, “Then put it in government bonds,” and went to live three years abroad.

She hated it. Returning, she began to look about for her college friends. They were pursuing their ideas earnestly and fanatically, some as teachers, some as writers, some as artists, some as settlement workers, some as researchers. They came to sec her. It was much pleasanter going to see them where they lived in tenements, shabby studios, lofts, community houses, for then the fact that she was rich made no difference, since they liked her as a human being.

In her Fifth avenue house it was either that they were strange or she was ashamed. She imagined they were musing adversely on her father. What had he done to possess these millions? He had never built anything; he had never thought anything. Out of his vast fortune he had contributed nothing to the support of art, science or charity.

Her secret defence of him was plausible. The world’s case was gratuitous for the simple reason that he had not spent the money. Instead he had left it to her. She was to do with it what she pleased. From this she evolved the notion that he had expected her to spend it in some honorable manner. This of course she never said to anyone but herself.

It was she who proposed to her radical friends the idea of the Lothian College of Social Science. They were to conduct it in their own way, freely; she was merely to house and support it. Her theory was that earnest thinking, however it begins, will ultimately find some truth. She didn’t care what else they taught if only they taught thinking.

When they came to make away with certain dilapidated tenements to clear a site for the building, she was appealed to on behalf of some old craftsmen who bitterly complained at being dispossessed. They could not find cheaper places: they were unable to afford more expensive ones. All old world people they were, who had brought with them nothing but the cunning of their hands and found it not very saleable. That is, they did not know how to sell it.

Among them was a solitary Bohemian coppersmith of rare skill. She sat for hours watching him draw a sheet of soft copper into any shape his imagination desired, a teapot, for instance, all in one piece without a seam, by beating the metal gently with a hammer on a curious horn, one kind of blow when he wished to thicken it and another kind when he wished to thin it. Not alone the art; the material by its color, malleability, and texture excited her fancy. She induced him to teach her.

Out of this experience grew her guild of handicrafts, which became a mild passion. She gathered up those old workmen, placed them comfortably, then opened a shop in lower Fifth avenue for the display of their things. She put a sign in the window: “Money may be exchanged for these beautiful objects.” That made them easy to sell.

The Lothian College gave her a kind of prestige she did not really like. She found herself certified among rich patrons of the masses; the best doors of that cult stood open to her.

In the full phase of a luxurious, highly competitive civilization society breaks at the top. The old rich, becoming weary of their own world, which had no divinity of caste to begin with, abandon its values to the new rich. Then two main roads lie open. One is the jazz road, with manners adapted from the underworld, short, dangerous and jolly. The other is for grave, respectable natures and leads back to a footing with the herd. It is the longer road by about twenty years, and has this further advantage that it offers many beautiful sites for noble monuments on which may be inscribed the particulars of one’s interest in his fellow man. Fame, in short. This is really the smart, exclusive road, not only because it is the more difficult but because also it is the more expensive. It is a road to the people, but not a people’s road.

Jael went about in this society for a while, exchanging amenities with it, and was amused to see anarchists, revolutionaries, violent dispraisers of wealth, partaking of its hospitality in fine houses, scornfully at ease there. Then she began to see it cynically. What: a blurred design! How involved the meaning, if any meaning it had. How much more honestly vivid the human tapestry must have been with the Scribe, the Pharisee, the Samaritan, a certain rich man, a certain poor man, Herod, Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist, the Great Disturber out of Galilee, each as such!

Besides, it was tiresome. The same talk over and over, endless in monotony, endless in reason, always inconclusive. She was at that age of the mind when the thirst for certitude begins. Surely all things could be settled, one at a time. Yet nothing was ever settled, all thinking seemed a process of absurd upheaval, as if digging up the mental universe were a pastime for its own sake, with no treasure in prospect.

Jones street was in that aspect an adventure of the mind. She resolved to create there a truly radical atmosphere, free of posture, cant or conventional restraint. She did not wish to talk, only to listen. Women were not discouraged; men were preferred. Few women liked it as a matter of fact. Men did. It was comfortable, they were well fed, nothing was expected of them, any humor had its rights, and above all she stimulated them to display their powers of mind.

The more she listened the more perplexed she was. It amazed her to see two men of equal powers proceed by divine logic from the same premises to opposite conclusions. If three reasoned together there were three conclusions. If the number was four, there were four conclusions. It was so as to everything—an economic matter, a social principle, a work of art, an interpretation of historical facts. Worse, the more intellectual their reasoning was the more uncertain they were of their own conclusions. In the highest case they were not dogmatic; they would admit they might be wrong and probably were; yet starting all over again each would come inevitably to the same place as before, and hopelessly, as she saw, for each mind had a fixed direction. Reasoning did not determine the result; it was the certainty beforehand of the one result that determined the character of the reasoning. Anything could be proved; therefore nothing was proved.

For a long time she suffered the humiliation of supposing their powers were superior to hers. This was from the repetition of a disconcerting experience. There was a point at which she lost them entirely. As they ascended higher and higher on the slopes of the upper mind, she trudging breathlessly behind, suddenly they disappeared as in a mist. Then she had no idea what they were talking about. Their words made no pattern of sense. When they descended again into view, that is, to her plane of comprehension, they were a little awkward and self-conscious, like mystics fresh from a vision. She wondered if perhaps they agreed, off in the mist without her.

She was tormented by the fear that there was a rift in her mind, corresponding to what musical people mean by a hole in the ear. Total deafness to a certain tone interval.

At this time she conceived a worshipful respect for man’s gift of abstraction. Man’s power, alas! was in the movements of his mind; woman’s in the movements of her heart. Therefore she was on the wrong road. Still she was not sure.

One day, between a Cézanne and a Matisse, both notable examples of a kind of perception for which the critics had been obliged to invent a new language, she hung a hideous chromo, processed upon glass, from a Sixth avenue furniture shop, price $2.98. Two of the great art critics were in to dinner that evening. They were startled, then tentatively facetious, and very curious. They kept looking at it and she held her tongue. At length one of them asked her guardedly what she saw in it.

“I don’t see the picture,” she answered, “if that’s what you mean. I haven’t any notion what the picture is like.”

“What do you see?”

“That bit of red,” she said.

They got up and looked at it closely. “That?” one said, pointing.

“Yes,” she said.

“But it doesn’t belong there.”

“Silly,” she answered. “Now you are looking at the picture.”

She would say no more; and they were shaken. For all their patter of critical wisdom they were not sure. There was the possibility she had seen something they could not see. She had taken them in; and it occurred to her that she might have produced a similar result by standing suddenly still in Broadway and gazing hard at an imaginary elephant floating in upper space.

Again she did it with the literary critics. They were surprised to find on her tables all at once a great quantity of old dime novels, of a series written entirely by one man who had recently died. His achievement, disclosed for the first time in the obituary news, was that he had written one novel a week regularly during nearly thirty years, in all about fifteen hundred. They asked her what she found in them.

“The pure line of the tale,” she said, gravely. “The story itself and nothing else. No surface, no writing, no obstructions whatever. An amazing example of the unconscious method. You know of course how the man worked. Listen!”

She read to them bits here and there, daring as she went on to choose the most banal passages, and they were deeply impressed. One borrowed some of the novels to read carefully, and then wrote a profound literary essay on her text—the pure line of the tale.

After that she was sure they never agreed in the mist and suspected, too, that they never themselves understood what they were saying as they departed from her into their heaven of intellectual obscurities. Yet always some doubt. She cherished the story of the man in the Cape Cod fishing village who, thinking to make a place for himself at the stove in the grocery store, said he heard there was a whale on the beach. It worked as he thought. One man got up and went to see. That gave him the chair he wanted. But then another got up and went to see. Neither came back. Then a third went. Presently the man who invented the whale was alone by the fire; and when he heard the crunching footsteps of people passing the door in the direction of the beach, he, too, went out in the cold to see. Maybe after all there was a whale.

Her case was somewhat different. She stood fixed in doubt about her own whale. Nevertheless, if she had been certain of its non-existence and of their absurdity, still she would have gone on with them in the same way, never letting them know. It was men she liked, not their minds. She liked their sounds, their smell, their funny ways, their quarrels, their ungrown-up demeanor when she caught sudden glimpses of them as little boys. Seeing them so she discovered how much older women are than men from the moment they are born.

There were no romantic attachments; never had been any. For this two reasons, one on each side.

The only free and natural way she had with men Was to challenge their minds. Not otherwise could she challenge them at all. What other women did she saw. She could analyze it. She understood it. As for herself, she could not manage its first most trifling gesture.

Only once had she ever tried. That was in childhood. She was seven. One rainy day as she sat in her window reading, a boy of the same age appeared in the window of the adjoining house. He was fat and wore glasses. A visitor, perhaps. She had never seen him before. He came the next day at the same hour to ogle her. The third day she expected him, and she threw him a kiss. He returned it. On this small motive she built a romance that filled the world. Every day for two weeks they gazed at each other.

Then they met in the street. She waited for him to speak. He only glanced at her and went by. She ran after him and plucked him by the sleeve. He was eating peanut brittle. For a minute he stood staring at her, with a short-sighted squint, his mouth too full of the sweet to speak, then turned and went on without a word. Ever afterward the sight of peanut brittle produced in her a tremor of dread and a sensation of reeling.

When she was eighteen she began to imagine men looked at her in a certain way and was hysterically furious. Later she learned what that was. When she was twenty objects of feminine loveliness excited extravagant emotions in her. Later she knew also what that meant, and one use of Miss Lillibridge was to remind her that no trace of it was left.

In every situation it was her mind that saved her. The mind of her one self could gaze down on her elemental other self, seeing it as a lake that was meant to be a torrent. She could see the bottom of the lake. Disagreeable things lived there, slowly groping about, eldritch, terrifying things until she conceived them to be natural creatures distorted by the view as everything under the water is; distorted also and perhaps much more by the accident of having got themselves trapped there.

And the other reason why there were no romantic attachments, the one on the other side, was that these men with whom she did surround herself were intellectual. High thinking cools the blood. Or is it that only the cool blooded think—that way? The frustrated female of her craved not the mentality of man so much as the hot-bloodedness of him, more that as a desperate fact than even the character, the shape or the color of him.

For her coming to live in Jones street there was one explanation Fitzjerald had either missed or found it impossible to mention. In a fastidious mood she detested it. Yet with no disguise of social or aesthetic interests she would have passed at least a part of her time there or in a street of that character. Those groping creatures in the lake of her elemental self required it. They became active, even demonish, when she denied them entirely. They craved contact with vulgar, odorous, commonplace life. Here it was thinly sheathed, sometimes for a moment stark naked, and so oblivious that one could get close up. Its emotions were not in deep wells; they were artesian, suddenly overflowing to the surface. Then the quarrel, the oath, the blow, the caress, the swift, blinding uncoil of the watchful reptile.

There was a time when she did her own shopping for fruits, vegetables, condiments and oil, solely for the secret pleasure of observing a Corsican whose shop was around the corner. He had the look, the easy walk, the animal dignity of a bandit. There was insolence in the way he carried his clothes, especially his trousers. His wife was exquisitely pigmented, and although she was fat she was not stuffed and her movements were all the more voluptuous. They were always together in the shop and yet they almost never spoke. Jael understood the basic meaning of their relationship. The sight of it thrilled her.

One evening as she was passing the shop, over which the pair lived, she heard the woman screaming. Her bandit was beating her. Jael was neither scandalized nor horrified. Her blood leaped and her throat was dry. One might have thought she was angry. She would have thought so herself if she had thought about it at all. But her emotions begged not to be analyzed.

The next day she saw them together again in the shop, as if nothing had happened. The woman bore no visible marks; he had evidently been careful. Jael regarded him with intense interest. She was particularly fascinated by his hands, one holding out to her a paper bag and the other, palm upward, waiting for her money. They were thick, soft hands, not ugly. As she came to her own door a few minutes later she was conscious of having walked very fast; and then of a phantasy she had been making.

It began with the thought: “What I should do with him if he were mine!” Then either he was hers or she was his and it had to be decided. They were alone on an island. The struggle was terriffic, brutal, dangerous. If he conquered her she would be his slave; yet she was afraid he might not.

“How interesting!” she said to herself. “My own phantasy. Therefore I could do anything I pleased with it. I might have hit him on the head with a stone. But I didn’t.”

She went no more to the Corsican’s shop, perceiving clearly why she had been doing it.

---

It was six-thirty when she turned the last page of her French novel. Yawning, she tossed the book in the fire, then sat down at her desk and wrote a note for Miss Lillibridge to find. This was the note: “Get Mr. Capuchin at his hotel and have him in to tea. Tell him I am interested in his newspaper.”

Then she went to bed, saying to herself aloud: “What a blessing it must be to have a one-storey mind.”