jerome brown proved, on the whole, the worst of cressida’s husbands, and, with the possible exception of her eldest brother, buchanan garnet, he was the most rapacious of the men with whom she had had to do. it was one thing to gratify every wish of a cake-loving fellow like bouchalka, but quite another to stand behind a financier. and brown would be a financier or nothing. after her marriage with him, cressida grew rapidly older. for the first time in her life she wanted to go abroad and live — to get jerome brown away from the scene of his unsuccessful but undiscouraged activities. but brown was not a man who could be amused and kept out of mischief in continental hotels. he had to be a figure, if only a “mark,” in wall street. nothing else would gratify his peculiar vanity. the deeper he went in, the more affectionately he told cressida that now all her cares and anxieties were over. to try to get related facts out of his optimism was like trying to find framework in a feather bed. all cressida knew was that she was perpetually “investing” to save investments. when she told me she had put a mortgage on the tenth street house, her eyes filled with tears. “why is it? i have never cared about money, except to make people happy with it, and it has been the curse of my life. it has spoiled all my relations with people. fortunately,” she added irrelevantly, drying her eyes, “jerome and poppas get along well.” jerome could have got along with anybody; that is a promoter’s business. his warm hand, his flushed face, his bright eye, and his newest funny story, — poppas had no weapons that could do execution with a man like that.
though brown’s ventures never came home, there was nothing openly disastrous until the outbreak of the revolution in mexico jeopardized his interests there. then cressida went to england — where she could always raise money from a faithful public — for a winter concert tour. when she sailed, her friends knew that her husband’s affairs were in a bad way; but we did not know how bad until after cressida’s death.
cressida garnet, as all the world knows, was lost on the titanic. poppas and horace, who had been travelling with her, were sent on a week earlier and came as safely to port as if they had never stepped out of their london hotel. but cressida had waited for the first trip of the sea monster — she still believed that all advertising was good — and she went down on the road between the old world and the new. she had been ill, and when the collision occurred she was in her stateroom, a modest one somewhere down in the boat, for she was travelling economically. apparently she never left her cabin. she was not seen on the decks, and none of the survivors brought any word of her.
on monday, when the wireless messages were coming from the carpathia with the names of the passengers who had been saved, i went, with so many hundred others, down to the white star offices. there i saw cressida’s motor, her redoubtable initials on the door, with four men sitting in the limousine. jerome brown, stripped of the promoter’s joviality and looking flabby and old, sat behind with buchanan garnet, who had come on from ohio. i had not seen him for years. he was now an old man, but he was still conscious of being in the public eye, and sat turning a cigar about in his face with that foolish look of importance which cressida’s achievement had stamped upon all the garnets. poppas was in front, with horace. he was gnawing the finger of his chamois glove as it rested on the top of his cane. his head was sunk, his shoulders drawn together; he looked as old as jewry. i watched them, wondering whether cressida would come back to them if she could. after the last names were posted, the four men settled back into the powerful car — one of the best made — and the chauffeur backed off. i saw him dash away the tears from his face with the back of his driving glove. he was an irish boy, and had been devoted to cressida.
when the will was read, henry gilbert, the lawyer, an old friend of her early youth, and i, were named executors. a nice job we had of it. most of her large fortune had been converted into stocks that were almost worthless. the marketable property realized only a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. to defeat the bequest of fifty thousand dollars to poppas, jerome brown and her family contested the will. they brought cressida’s letters into court to prove that the will did not represent her intentions, often expressed in writing through many years, to “provide well” for them.
such letters they were! the writing of a tired, overdriven woman; promising money, sending money herewith, asking for an acknowledgment of the draft sent last month, etc. in the letters to jerome brown she begged for information about his affairs and entreated him to go with her to some foreign city where they could live quietly and where she could rest; if they were careful, there would “be enough for all.” neither brown nor her brothers and sisters had any sense of shame about these letters. it seemed never to occur to them that this golden stream, whether it rushed or whether it trickled, came out of the industry, out of the mortal body of a woman. they regarded her as a natural source of wealth; a copper vein, a diamond mine.
henry gilbert is a good lawyer himself, and he employed an able man to defend the will. we determined that in this crisis we would stand by poppas, believing it would be cressida’s wish. out of the lot of them, he was the only one who had helped her to make one penny of the money that had brought her so much misery. he was at least more deserving than the others. we saw to it that poppas got his fifty thousand, and he actually departed, at last, for his city in la sainte asie, where it never rains and where he will never again have to hold a hot water bottle to his face.
the rest of the property was fought for to a finish. poppas out of the way, horace and brown and the garnets quarrelled over her personal effects. they went from floor to floor of the tenth street house. the will provided that cressida’s jewels and furs and gowns were to go to her sisters. georgie and julia wrangled over them down to the last moleskin. they were deeply disappointed that some of the muffs and stoles which they remembered as very large, proved, when exhumed from storage and exhibited beside furs of a modern cut, to be ridiculously scant. a year ago the sisters were still reasoning with each other about pearls and opals and emeralds.
i wrote poppas some account of these horrors, as during the court proceedings we had become rather better friends than of old. his reply arrived only a few days ago; a photograph of himself upon a camel, under which is written:
traulich und treu
ist’s nur in der tiefe:
falsch und feig
ist was dort oben sich freut!
his reply, and the memories it awakens — memories which have followed poppas into the middle of asia, seemingly, — prompted this informal narration.
