The Washington times., 1931-05-30
CHAPTER 26

not existed yesterday.
Twenty-four hours before
Avery had been alive and,
mark you. need not have died.
This was not death inevitable
and Gods will be done. This
was not death demanding.
Avery had killed himself.
There had been a small note,
written in blue pencil, and
struck into a mirror in his bed.
room:
"Dears, it was too much.-A."
They had followed the scent
Of gas and wrenched the tube
from between his teeth.
They" IA landlady and a
negro houseman in a white
duck coat) had been the first
to stumble across the strange
and almost unendurably preci-
Gus fact of the death of this
life.
They" had turned in police
alarms about it.
The Press BrayS
And it should have been
handled so privately as the
slender spar of a body that
had been Avery had suffered.
And instead, over this wound
ed-to-death boy in his casket,
the newspapers of the country
had become a giant composite
ass, braying:
SON OF FIVE-AND-TEN Null
T1MILLIONAIRE KILLS SELF
NEAR COLLEGE CAMPUS
Family Unable to Attribute Mo-
tive For the Suicide
Note From His Father. John G.
Rarick, Forbidding Him the
Purchase Of a Several-Thou
sand-Dollar Camp p-Equipment
Found Among His Effects
ANOTHER COLLEGE SUICIDE
Only Son of John G. Rarick.
American Chain-Store Million
aire, Discovered by Landlady
Dead From ASphyxiation
Death Attributed to Demand for
Luxuries Which Were Denied
Him by Self-Made Father
Let them bray. Let them
bray. 1t was better so. 1t
covered up the private, timid
truth. The truth lay scattered
In documents, some Of them
torn across the page; in com.
position-books, filled with boy.
ish scrawls; in half-written let
ters; in hand-written and hand
bound volumes of verse that
lay in a heap on the table on
which John Rarick leaned his
face into his hands.
The Soul of Avery
It was as if the contents Of
the heart of Avery. the soul and
mind OF Avery, unlocked from
the vault of his 19 years, had
been spilled there in broken
utterances of torment,
This was his boy out there,
in strange autopsy before him
fhe history of his defeat. his
pain, mis- lightningS of ecStacy
that had apparently been as
unbearable as the pain, like
Clipped bits of cornice of the
now cold marble of his being.
There, spread over the table,
in writings, were the truths that
for 10 years had lain hidden
from his father by the mere
wall of boy-flesh.
God! God! God! That wall
had been flesh of Rarick's and
yet it had shut him out. The
door through that wall, not
48 hours before. had been a
living. breathing heart with a
key to it-nobody to blame
nobody to blame-least Of all
Avery-except-unbearable lone
illness of the thought-not even
his mother had ever found the
key to it. Certainly Rarich
had not.
He beat with his fists upon
the table; he scorched his eyes
upon the revealing lines of the
documents that had been
brought him from his dead
sons effects. He read and re-
read:
This boy, then, written there
on the scraps of paper, whose
torment had been the strange
Gcohate torment of poet,
adolescent, dreamer and diviner,
potential over, and adventurer
in Hellenic islands around
which flowed the blue Med
1terranean of imagination, had
been the Avery Of the flesh.
The fledgling who had smoked
the strange little hooked pipes,
that looked inSolent and
Smelled badly.
The Avery who had piled up
card debts. The Avery whose
wants. at least as interpreted
by his mother, God forgive
her. had been the speed motor
boats, the special-body road
sters, the dressing-caSes, gold.
fitted, the five-thousand-dollar
camping outfits, the monstrous
checking accounts. polo ponies
A Budding Poet
Some liSpingS of what Avery
had really wanted rose in faint
perfume off the pages of the
book of sophomore verse
which he had written in a fine,
painstaking. private kind of
chirography that bore no re.
semblance to the modish scrawl
he had shown the world.
Even his very handwriting
had seemed to curl inward
away