We Can’t Have Everything by Rupert Hughes (page 6)

ruins! Like to see’em?”

“I don’t think I could stand the sight of them. They’re my ruins, too.”

“How so?”

“Because the company won’t rebuild or go on, and most of my pictures were destroyed.”

“Your pretty, beautiful, gorgeous pictures gone! Oh, God help us! That’s too terrible to believe.”

She sighed, “It’s true.”

“Why, I’d rather lose the Metropolitan Art Gallery than your films. Can’t they be made over?”

“They could, but who’s to stand the expense?”

“I will, if you’ll let me.”

“Mr. Dyckman!”

“I thought we’d agreed that my name was Jim.”

“Jim! You would do that for me!”

“Why not?”

“But why so?”

“Because–why, simply–er–it’s the most natural thing in the world, seeing that–Well, you’re not sitting there pretending that you don’t know I love you, are you?”

“Oh dear, oh dear! It’s too wonderful to believe, you angel!”

And then for the first time she flung her arms about his neck and kissed him and hugged him, knelt on his lap and clasped him fiercely.

He felt as if a simoom of rapture had struck him, and when she told him a dozen times that she loved him he could think of nothing to say but, “Say, this is great!”

She forgave him the banality this time. When she had calmed herself a little she said:

“But it would mean a frightful lot of money.”

“Whatever it costs, it’s cheap–considering this.” He indicated her arm about his neck. “I wouldn’t let the world be robbed of the pictures of you, Anita, not for any money.” He told her to tell Ferriday to make the arrangements and send the estimates to him. And he said, “I won’t ask you to quit being photographed, even when we are married.”

“When we are married?” Kedzie parroted.

“Of course! That’s where we’re bound for, isn’t it? Where else could we pull up–that is, of course, assuming that you’ll do me the honor of anchoring a great artist like you up to a big dub like me. Will you?”

“Why–why–I’d like to think it over; this is so sudden.”

“Of course, you’d better think it over, you poor angel!”

Kedzie could not think what else to say or even what to think. The word “marriage” reminded her that she had what the ineffable Bunker Bean would have called “a little old last year’s husband” lying around in the garret of her past.

She went almost blind with rage at that beast of a Gilfoyle who had dragged her away and married her while she was not thinking. He must have hypnotized her or drugged her. If only she could quietly murder him! But she didn’t even know where he was.

CHAPTER XXI

The investigations of Messrs. Hodshon & Hindley in the life of Zada and Cheever prospered exceedingly. In blissless ignorance of it, Zada had been inspired to set a firm of sleuths on Charity’s trail. She wanted to be able to convince Cheever that Charity was intrigued with Dyckman. The operators who kept Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever under espionage had the most stupid things to report to Zada.

To Zada’s disgust, Mrs. Cheever never called upon Jim Dyckman, and he never called on her. Zada accused the bureau of cheating her, and finally put another agency to shadowing Jim Dyckman. According to the reports she had, his neglect of Mrs. Cheever was perfectly explained. He was a mere satellite of a moving-picture actress, a new-comer named Anita Adair.

The detectives reported that such gossip as they could pick up about the studio indicated that Dyckman was putting money into the firm on her account.

“A movie angel!” sneered Zada. She had wasted a hundred dollars on him to find this out, and two hundred and fifty on Mrs. Cheever to find out that she was intensely respectable. That was bitter news to Zada. She canceled her business with her detective agency. And they called in the shadows that haunted Charity’s life.

The detectives on Zada’s trail, however, had more rewarding material to work with–although they found unexpected difficulties, they said, in getting the dictagraph installed in her apartment. They did not wish to ruin the whole enterprise by too great haste–especially as they were receiving eight dollars a day and liberal expenses per man.

At last, however, Hodshon sent word to Mrs. Cheever that the dictagraph was installed and working to a T, and she could listen-in whenever she was ready.

Charity was terrified utterly now. New scales were to be shaken from her eyes at the new tree of knowledge. She was to hear her man talking to his leman.

She had almost an epilepsy of terror, but she could not resist the importunate opportunity.

She selected from her veils a heavy crêpe that she had worn during a period of mourning for one of her husband’s relatives. It seemed appropriate now, for she was going into mourning for her own husband, living, yet about to die to her.

She left the house alone after dark and walked along Fifth Avenue till she found a taxicab. She gave the street number Hodshon had given her and stepped in. She kept an eye on the lighted clock and in the dark sorted out the exact change and a tip, adding dimes as they were recorded on the meter. She did not want to have to pause for change, and she did not wish to make herself conspicuous by an extravagant tip.

As the taxicab slid along the Avenue Charity wondered if any of the passengers in other cabs could have an errand so gruesome as hers. She was tortured by fantastic imaginings of what she might hear. She wondered how a man would talk to such a person as Zada, and how she would answer. She imagined the most dreadful things she could.

The taxicab surprised her by stopping suddenly before a brown-fronted residence adjoining an apartment-house of (more or less literally) meretricious ornateness. She stepped out, paid her fare, and turned, to find Mr. Hodshon at her elbow. He had been waiting for her. He recognized her by her melodramatic veil. He gave her needed help up a high stoop and opened the door with a key.

She found herself in a shabby, smelly hall where no one else was.

He motioned her up the stairway, and she climbed with timidity. At each level there were name-plates over the electric buttons. The very labels seemed illicit. Hodshon motioned her up and up for four flights.

Then he opened a door and stepped back to let her enter a room unfurnished except for a few chairs and a table. Two men were in the room, and they were laughing with uproar. One of them had a telephone-receiver clamped to his ear, and he was making shorthand notes, explaining to his companion what he heard.

They turned in surprise at Hodshon’s entrance and rose to greet Charity with the homage due so great a client.

Charity could hardly bespeak them civilly. They took her curtness for snobbery, but it was not. It swept over her that these people were laughing over her most sacred tragedy.

She advanced on the operator and put out her hand for the headpiece he wore. He took it off and rubbed it with his handkerchief, and told her that she must remove her hat and veil.

She came out startlingly white and brilliant from the black. She put the elastic clamp over her head and set the receiver to her ear. Instantly she was assailed by dreadful noises, a jangle of inarticulate sounds like the barking of two dogs.

“I can’t hear a word,” she protested.

“They’re talkin’ too loud,” said the operator. “The only way to beat the dictagraph is to cut the wire or yell.”

“Are they quarreling, then?” Charity asked, almost with pleasure.

“Yes, ma’am. But it’s the lady and her maid. They been havin’ a terrible scrap about marketin’. He–Mr. Cheever–ain’t there yet. They’re expectin’ him, though.”

Charity felt that she had plumbed the depths of degradation in listening to a quarrel between such a creature and her maid. What must it be to be the maid of such a creature! She was about to snatch away the earpiece when she heard the noise of a door opening. She looked toward the entrance of the room she was in, but the door that opened was in the other room in the other building.

The voices of Zada and her maid stopped jangling, and she heard the most familiar of all voices asking:

“What’s the row to-day?”

There was an extra metal in the timbre and it had the effect of an old phonographic record, but there was no questioning whose voice it was.

Zada’s voice became audibly low in answer.

“She is such a fool she drives me crazy.”

A sullen, servile voice answered: “It ain’t me’s the fool, and as for crazy–her wantin’ me to bring home what they ain’t in no market. How’m I goin’ to git what ain’t to be got, I asts you. This here war is stoppin’ ev’y kind of food.”

Cheever’s answer was characteristic. He didn’t believe in servants’ rights.

“Get out. If you’re impudent again I’ll throw you out, and your baggage after you.”

“Yassar,” was the soft answer.

There was the sound of shuffling feet and a softly closed door. Then Zada’s voice, very mellow:

“I thought you’d never come, dearie.”

“Awfully busy to-day, honey.”

“You took dinner with her, of course.”

“No. It was a big day on the Street, and there was so much to do at the office that I dined down-town at the Bankers’ Club with several men and then went back to the office. I ought to be there all night, but I couldn’t keep away from you any longer.”

There were mysterious quirks of sound that meant kisses and sighs and tender inarticulations. There were cooing tones which the dictagraph repeated with hideous fidelity.

Zada asked, “Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?”

And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, “Yes, he diddums, but worst was lonelying for his Zadalums.”

“Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly–truly?”

The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity’s ear a grotesque obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer or the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, “Kissings! kissings!” Charity screamed: “Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!”

Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their panic at her outcry. But they were as oblivious of her pain or her rage as if an interplanetary space divided them. They went on with the murmur and susurrus of their communion, while Charity looked askance at the three men. They could not hear, but could imagine, and they stared at her doltishly.

“Leave the room! Go away!” she groaned.

They slipped out through the door and left her to her shame.

In the porches of her ear the hateful courtship purled on with its tender third-personal terms and its amorous diminutives, suffixed ridiculously.

“Zada was afaid her booful Peterkin had forgotten her and gone to the big old house.”

“Without coming home first?”

“Home! that’s the wordie I want. This is his homie, isn’t it, Peterkin?”

“Yessy.”

“He doesn’t love old villain who keeps us apart?”

“Nonie, nonie.”

“Never did, did he?”

“Never.”

“Only married her, didn’t he?”

“That’s allie.”

“Zada is only really wifie?”

“Only onlykins.”

Charity listened with a greed of self-torment like a fanatic penitent. The chatter of the two had none of the indecency she had expected, and that made it the more intolerably indecent.

She saw that Cheever’s affair with Zada had settled down to a state of comfort, of halcyon delight.

It had taken on domestication. He was at home with her and an alien in Charity’s home. He told the woman his business affairs and little office jokes. He laughed with a purity of cheer that he had long lost in his legal establishment. He used many of the love-words that he had once used to Charity, and her heart was wrung with the mockery of it.

Charity listened helplessly. She was as one manacled or paralyzed and submitted to such a torture as she had never endured. She harkened in vain for some hopeful note of uncongeniality, some reassurance for her love or at least her vanity, some certainty that her husband, her first possessor, had given her some emotion that he could never give another. But he was repeating to Zada the very phrases of his honeymoon, repeating them with all the fervor of a good actor playing Romeo for the hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he seemed to find in Zada a response and a unity that he had never found in Charity’s society. Her intelligence was cruelly goaded to the realization that she had never been quite the woman for Cheever.

She had known that he had not been the full complement of her own soul. They had disagreed fiercely on hundreds of topics. He had been chilled by many of her ardors, as many of his interests had bored her. She had supposed it to be an inevitable inability of a man and a woman to regard the world through the same eyes. She had let him go his way and had gone her own. And now it seemed that he had in his wanderings found some one who mated him exactly. The butterfly had liked the rose, but had fluttered away; when it found the orchid it closed its wings and rested content.

It was a frightful revelation to Charity, for it meant that Cheever had been merely flirting with her. She had caught his eye as a girl in a strange port captivates a sailor. He had haunted her window with serenades. Finding her to be what we call “a good girl,” he had called upon her father and mother that he might talk to her longer. And then he had gone to church with her and married her that he might get rid of her father and mother and her own scruples. And so he had made her his utterly, and after a few days and nights had sailed away. He had come back to her now and then as a sailor does.

Meanwhile in another port he had found what we call “a bad woman.” There had been no need to serenade her out into the streets. They were her shop. No parents had guarded her hours; no priest was intermediary to her possession. But once within her lair he had found himself where he had always wanted to be, and she had found herself with the man she had been hunting. She closed her window, drove her frequenters, old and new, from the door; and he regretted that he had given pledges to that other woman.

It was a pitiful state of affairs, no less pitiful for being old and ugly and innumerously commonplace. It meant that Cheever under the white cloak of matrimony had despoiled Charity of her innocence, and under the red domino of intrigue had restored to Zada hers.

If Charity, sitting like a recording angel, invisible but hearing everything, had found in the communion of Zada and Cheever only the fervor of an amour, she could have felt that Cheever was merely a libertine who loved his wife and his home but loved to rove as well. She had, however, ghastly evidence that Cheever was only now the rake reformed; his marriage had been merely one of his escapades; he had settled down now to monogamy with Zada, and she was his wife in all but style and title.

There was more of Darby and Joan than of Elvira and Don Juan in their conversation. He told Zada with pride that he had not had a drink all day, though he had needed alco-help and the other men had ridiculed him. She told him that she had not had a drink for a week and only one cigarette since her lonely dinner. They were in a state of mutual reformation!

Where, then, was the sacrament of marriage? Which of the women held the chalice now?

It was enforced on Charity that it was she and not Zada who had been the inspirer and the victim of Cheever’s flitting appetite. It was Zada and not she who had won him to the calm, the dignity, the sincerity, the purity that make marriage marriage. It was a hard lesson for Charity, and she did not know what she ought to do with her costly knowledge. She could only listen.

When Zada complained that she had had a dreadful day of blues Cheever made jokes for her as for a child, and she laughed like the child she was. For her amusement he even went to a piano and played, with blundering three-chord accompaniment, a song or two. He played jokes on the keyboard. He revealed none of the self-consciousness that he manifested before Charity when he exploited his little bag of parlor tricks.

Charity’s mood had changed from horror to eager curiosity, and thence to cold despair, to cold resentment. It went on to cold intelligence and a belief that her life with Cheever was over. Their marriage was a proved failure, and any further experiments with its intimacies would be unspeakably vile. Or so she thought.

She had consented to this dictagraphic inspection of her husband’s intrigue merely to confirm or refute gossip. She had had more than evidence enough to satisfy her. Her first reaction to it was a primitive lust for revenge.

Once or twice she blazed with such anger that she rose to tear the wire loose from the wall and end the torment. But her curiosity restrained her. She set the earpiece to her ear again.

At length she formed her resolution to act. She called out, “Mr. Hodshon, come here!”

He came in and found her a pillar of rage.

“I’ve heard enough. I’ll do what I refused before. I’ll go with you and break in.”

Hodshon was dazed. He was not ready to act. She had refused his plan to break in according to the classic standards. He had let the plan lapse and accepted Mrs. Cheever as a poor rich wretch whom he had contracted to provide with a certain form of morbid entertainment. He could do nothing now but stammer:

“Well–well–is that so? Do you really? You know you didn’t– O’ course–Well, let’s see now. You know we ain’t prepared. I told you we had to have a c’rob’rating witness. It wouldn’t be legal if we were to–Still, they probably would accept you as witness and us as corroboration, but you wouldn’t want to go on the stand and tell what you found–not a nice refined lady like you are. The witness-stand is no place for a lady, anyway.

“The thing is if you could get some gentleman friend to go with you and you two break in. Then you’d both be amateurs, kind of. You see? Do you know any gentleman who might be willing to do that for you? The best of friends get very shy when you suggest such a job. But if you know anybody who would be interested and wanted to help you–Do you?”

Only two names came to Charity’s searching mind–Jim Dyckman’s impossible name and one that was so sublimely unfit that she laughed as she uttered it.

“There’s the Reverend Doctor Mosely.”

Hodshon tried to laugh.

“I was reading head-lines of a sermon of his. He’s down on divorce.”

“That’s why he’d be the ideal witness,” said Charity.

“But would he come?”

“Of course not,” she laughed. “There’s no use of carrying this further. I’ve had all I can stand to-night. Let me go.”

As usual with people who have had all they can stand, Charity wanted some more. She glanced at the receiver, curious as to what winged words had flown unattended during her parley with Hodshon.

She put the receiver to her ear and fell back. Again she was greeted with clamor. They were quarreling ferociously.

That might mean either of two things: there are the quarrels that enemies maintain, and those that devoted lovers wage. The latter sort are perhaps the bitterer, the less polite. Charity could not learn what had started the wrangle between those two.

Slowly it died away. Zada’s cries turned to sobs, and her tirade to sobs.

“You don’t love me. Go back to her. You love her still.”

“No, I don’t, honey. I just don’t want her name brought into our conversation. It doesn’t seem decent, somehow. It’s like bringing her in here to listen to our quarrels. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m trying not to, but you’re so peculiarly hard to keep peace with lately. What’s the reason, darling?”

Charity was smitten with a fear more terrible than any yet. She heard its confirmation. Zada whispered:

“Can’t you guess?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Stupid!” Zada murmured. “You poor, stupid boy.”

Charity heard nothing for a long moment–then a gasp.

“Zada!”

She greeted his alarm with a chuckle and a flurry of proud laughter. He bombarded her with questions:

“Why didn’t you tell me? How long? What will you do? How could you?–you’re no fool.”

Her answers were jumbled with his questions–his voice terrified, hers victorious.

“I’ve kept it a secret for months, because I was afraid of you. It’s my right. It’s too late to do anything now. And now we’ll see whether you love me or not–and how much, if any.”

There was again silence. Charity could hardly tolerate the suspense. Both she and Zada were hanging breathlessly on Cheever’s answer.

He did not speak for so long that Zada gave up. “You don’t love me, then? I’d better kill myself, I suppose. It’s the only solution now. And I’m willing, since you don’t love me enough.”

“No, no–yes, I do. I adore you–more than ever. But it’s such a strange ambition for you; and, God! what a difference it makes, what a difference!”

That was what Charity thought. For once she agreed with Cheever, echoed his words and his dismay and stood equally stunned before the new riddle. It was a perfect riddle now, for there was no end to the answers, and every one of them was wrong.

CHAPTER XXII

Charity let the receiver fall. She had had enough. She sank into a chair and would have slipped to the floor, but her swimming eyes made out the blurred face of Hodshon, terrified at her pallor.

If she fainted he would resuscitate her. She could not add that to her other ignominies. She clenched herself like one great fist of resolution till the swoon was frustrated. She sat still for a while–then rose, put on her hat, swathed her face in the veil, and went down the flights of stairs and out into the cool, dark street.

She had forgotten that she had dismissed the taxicab. Fortunately another was lurking in the lee of the apartment-house. Hodshon summoned it and would have ridden home with her, but she forbade him. She passed on the way the church of Doctor Mosely and his house adjoining. She was tempted to stop, but she was too weary for more talk.

She slept exceedingly well that night, so well that when she woke she regretted that she had not slept on out of the world. She fell asleep again, but was trampled by a nightmare. She woke trying to scream. Her eyes, opening, found her beautiful room about her and the dream dangers vanished.

But the horrors of her waking hours of yesterday had not vanished. They were waiting for her. She could not end them by the closing of her eyes. In the cool, clear light of day she saw still more problems than before–problems crying for decisions and contradicting each other with a hopeless conflict of moralities. To move in any direction was to commit ugly deeds; to move in no direction was to commit the ugliest of all.

She rang for her coffee, and she could hardly sit up to it. Her maid cried out at her age-worn look, and begged her to see a doctor.

“I’m going to as soon as I’m strong enough,” said Charity Coe. But she meant the Reverend Doctor Mosely. She thought that she could persuade even him that surgery was necessary upon that marriage. At any rate, she determined to force a decision from him. She telephoned the unsuspecting old darling, and he readily consented to see her. She spent an hour or two going over her Bible and concordance. They gave her little comfort in her plight.

When finally she dragged herself from her home to Doctor Mosely’s his butler ushered her at once into the study. Doctor Mosely welcomed her both as a grown-up child and as an eminent dealer in good deeds.

She went right at her business. “Doctor Mosely, I loathe myself for adding to the burdens your parish puts upon your dear shoulders but you’re responsible for my present dilemma.”

“My dear child, you don’t tell me! Then you must let me help you out of it. But first tell me–what I’m responsible for.”

“You married me to Peter Cheever.”

“Why, yes, I believe I did. I marry so many dear girls. Yes, I remember your wedding perfectly. A very pretty occasion, and you looked extremely well. So did the bridegroom. I was quite proud of joining two such–such–“

“Please unjoin us.”

“Great Heavens, my child! What are you saying?”

“I am asking you to untie the knot you tied.”

The old man stared at her, took his glasses off, rubbed them, put them on, and peered into her face to make sure of her. Then he said:

“If that were in my power–and you know perfectly well that it is not–it would be a violation of all that I hold sacred in matrimony.”

“Just what do you hold sacred, Doctor Mosely?”

“Dear, dear, this will never do. Really, I don’t wish to take advantage of my cloth, but, really, you know, Charity, you have been taught better than to snap at the clergy like that.”

“Forgive me; I’m excited, not irreverent. But–well, you don’t believe in divorce, do you?”

“I have stated so with all the power of my poor eloquence.”

“Do you believe that the seventh commandment is the least important of the lot?”

“Certainly not!”

“If a man breaks any commandment he ought to do what he can to remedy the evil?”

“Yes.”

“Then if a man violates the seventh, why shouldn’t he be compelled to make restitution, too?”

“What restitution could he make?”

“Not much. He has taken from the girl he marries her name, her innocence, her youth–he can restore only one thing–her freedom.”

“That is not for him to restore. ‘What, therefore, God hath joined, let not man put asunder.'”

The old man grew majestic when he thundered the sonorities of Holy Writ. Charity was cowed, but she made a craven protest:

“But who is to say what God hath joined?”

“The marriage sacraments administered by the ordained clergy established that. There is every warrant for clergymen to perform marriages; no Christian clergyman pretends to undo them.”

“You believe that marriage is an indissoluble sacrament, then?”

“Indeed I do.”

“Who made my marriage a sacrament?”

“I did, as the agent of God.”

“And the minute you pronounce a couple married they are registered in heaven, and God completes the union?”

“You may put it as you please; the truth is divine.”

“In other words, a man like you can pronounce two people man and wife, but once the words have escaped his lips nothing can ever correct the mistake.”

“There are certain conditions which annul a marriage, but once it is genuinely ratified on earth it is ratified in heaven.”

“In heaven, where, as the New Testament says in several places, married people do not live together? The woman who had seven husbands on earth, you know, didn’t have any at all in heaven.”

“So Christ answered the Sadducee who tempted him with questions.”

“Marriage is strictly a matter of the earth, earthy, then?”

“Nothing is strictly that, my child. But what in the name of either earth or heaven has led you to come over here and break into my morning’s work with such a fusillade of childish questions? You know a child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. Also, a child can ask questions which a wise man can answer to another wise man but not to a child. You talk like an excited, an unreasoning girl. I am surprised to hear you ridiculing the institution of Christian marriage, but your ridicule does not prove it to be ridiculous.”

“Oh, it’s not ridiculous to me, Doctor Mosely; and I’m not ridiculing it. I am horribly afraid of what it has done to me and will do to me.”

“Explain that, my dear.”

She did explain with all bluntness: “My husband openly lives with a mistress. He prefers her to me.”

The old man was stunned. He faltered: “Dear me!”

That is most reprehensible–most! He should be subjected to discipline.”

“Whose? He isn’t a member of your church. And how can you discipline such a man–especially as you don’t believe in divorce?”

“Have you tried to win him back to the path of duty, to waken him to a realizing sense of his obliquity?”

“Often and long. It can’t be done, for he loves the other woman.”

“Don’t use the beautiful word love for such a debasing impulse.”

“But I know he loves her!”

“How could you know?”

“I heard him tell her.”

“You heard him! Do you ask me to believe that he told her that in your presence?”

“I heard him on the dictagraph.”

“You have been collecting evidence for divorce, then?”

“No, I was collecting it to assure myself that the gossip I had heard was false–and to submit to you.”

“But why to me?”

“When I first learned of this hideous situation my first impulse was to rush to the courts. I went to church instead. I heard your sermon. It stopped me from seeing a lawyer.”

“I am glad my poor words have served some useful end.”

“But have they?”

“If I have prevented one divorce I have not lived in vain.”

“You don’t think I have a right to ask for one?”

“Absolutely and most emphatically not.”

“In spite of anything he may do?”

“Anything! He will come back to you, Charity. Possess your soul in patience. It may be years, but keep the light burning and he will return.”

“In what condition?”

“My child, you shock me! You’ve been reading the horrible literature that gets printed under the guise of science.”

“I must wait, then?”

“Yes, if you wish to separate from him for a time, your absence might waken him to a realizing sense. There are no children, I believe.”

“None, yet.”

“Yet? Oh, then–“

“If there were, would it make a difference?”

“Of course! an infinite difference!”

“You think a man and woman ought to let their child keep them together in any event?”

“Need I say it? What greater bond of union could there be? Is it not God’s own seal and blessing on the wedlock, rendering it, so to speak, even more indissoluble? You blush, my child. Is it true, then, that–“

“A child is expected.”

“Ah, my dear girl! How that proves what I have maintained! The birth of the little one will bring the errant father to his senses. The tiny hands will unite its parents as if they were the hands of a priest drawing them together. That child is the divine messenger confirming the sacrament.”

“You believe that?”

“Utterly. Oh, I am glad. Motherhood is the crowning triumph; it hallows any woman howsoever lowly or wicked. And you are neither, Charity. I know you to be good and busy in good works. But were you never so evil, this heavenly privilege would make of you a very vessel of sanctity.”

Charity turned pale as she sprung the trap. “The child is expected–not by me, but by the other woman.”

Doctor Mosely’s beatitude turned to a sick disgust. Red and white streaked his face. His first definite reaction was wrath at the trick that had been played upon him.

“Mrs. Cheever! This is unworthy of you! You distress me! Really!”

“I was a little distressed myself. What am I to do?”

“I will not believe what you say.”

“I heard her confess it–boast of it. She agrees with you that the tiny hands will bring her and the father together and confirm the sacrament.”

“It can’t be. It must not be!”

“You don’t advocate that form of birth-control? They are arresting people who preach prevention of conception. You are not so modern as that.”

“Hush!”

“What am I to do? You advise me to possess my soul in patience for years. But the child won’t wait that long. Doesn’t the situation alter your opinion of divorce?”

“No!”

“But if I don’t divorce Mr. Cheever and let him marry her the child will have no father–legally.”

“The responsibility is his, not yours.”

“You don’t believe in infant damnation, do you? At least not on earth, do you?”

“I cannot control the evil impulses of others. The doctrines of the Church cannot be modified for the convenience of every sinner.”

“You advise against divorce, then?”

“I am unalterably opposed to it.”

“What is your solution, then, of this situation?”

“I shall have to think it over–and pray. Please go. You have staggered me.”

“When you have thought it over will you give me the help of your advice?”

“Certainly.”

“Then shall I wait till I hear from you?”

“If you will.”

“Good-by, Doctor Mosely.”

“Good-by, Mrs.–Charity–my child!”

He pressed her long hand in his old palms. He was trembling. He was like a priest at bay before the altar while the arrows of the infidel rain upon him. These arrows were soft as rain and keen as silk. He was more afraid of them than if they had been tipped with flint or steel.

Charity left the parsonage no wiser than she entered it. She had accomplished nothing further than to ruin Doctor Mosely’s excellent start on an optimistic discourse in the prevailing fashion of the enormously popular “Pollyanna” stories: it was to be a “glad” sermon, an inexorably glad sermon. But poor Doctor Mosely could not preach it now in the face of this ugly fact.

Charity went home with her miserable triumph, which only emphasized her defeat.

She found at home a mass of details pressing for immediate action if the big moving-picture project were not to lapse into inanity. The mere toil of such a task ought to have been welcomed, at least as a diversion. But her heart was as if dead in her.

She wondered how Jim Dyckman was progressing with his portion of the task. He had not reported to her. She wondered why.

She decided to telephone him. She put out her hand, but did not lift the receiver from the hook. She began to muse upon Jim Dyckman. She began to think strange thoughts of him. If she had married him she might not have failed so wretchedly to find happiness. Of course, she might have failed more wretchedly and more speedily, but the wayfarer who chooses one of two crossroads and meets a wolf upon it does not believe that a lion was waiting on the other.

CHAPTER XXIII

Charity pondered her whole history with Jim Dyckman, from their childhood flirtations on. He had had other flings, and she had flung herself into Peter Cheever’s arms. Peter Cheever had flung her out again. Jim Dyckman had opened his arms again.

He had told her that she was wasting herself. He had offered her love and devotion. She had struck his hands away and rebuked him fiercely. A little later she had felt a pang of jealousy because he looked at that little Greek dancer so interestedly. She had tried to atone for this appalling thought by interesting herself in the little dancer’s welfare and hunting a position for her with the moving-picture company. She had told Jim Dyckman to look for the girl in the studio and find how she was getting along. He had never reported on that, either. Charity smiled bitterly.

Last night it had come over her that her love for Peter Cheever was dead. Was love itself, then, dead for her? or was her heart already busy down there in the dark of her bosom, busy like a seed germinating some new lily or fennel to thrust up into the daylight?

The sublime and the ridiculous are as close together as the opposite sides of a sheet of cloth. The sublime is the obverse of the tapestry with the figures heroic, saintly or sensuous, in battle or temple or bower, in conquest, love, martyrdom, adoration. The reverse of the tapestry is a matter of knots and tufts, broken patterns, ludicrous accidents of contour. The same threads make up both sides.

On one side of Charity’s tapestry she saw herself as a pitiful figure, a neglected wife returned from errands of mercy to find her husband enamoured of a wanton. She spurned the proffered heart of a great knight while her own heart bled openly in her breast.

On the other side she saw the same red threads that crimsoned her heart running across the arras to and from the heart of Jim Dyckman. It was the red thread of life and love, blood-color–blood-maker, blood-spiller, heart-quickener, heart-sickener, the red thread of romance, of motherhood and of lust, birth and murder, family and bawdry.

In the tapestry her heart was entire, her eyes upon her faithless husband. On the other side her eyes faced the other knight; her heartstrings ran out to his. She laughed harshly at the vision. Her laugh ended in a fierce contempt of herself and of every body and thing else in the world.

She was too weak to fight the law and the Church and the public in order to divorce her husband. Would it be weakness or strength to sit at home in the ashes and deny herself to life and love? She could always go to Jim Dyckman and take him as her cavalier. But then she would become one of those heartbroken, leash-broken women who are the Mænads of society, more or less circumspect and shy, but none the less lawless. But wherein were they better than the Zadas?

Charity was wrung with a nausea of love in all its activities; she forswore them. Yet she was human. She was begotten and conceived in the flesh of lovers. She was made for love and its immemorial usages. How could she expect to destroy her own primeval impulse just because one treacherous man had enjoyed her awhile and passed on to his next affair?

There was no child of hers to grow up and replace her in the eternal armies of love and compel her aside among the veteran women who have been mustered out. She was in a sense already widowed of her husband. Certainly she would never love Cheever again or receive him into her arms. He belonged to the mother of his child. Let that woman step aside into the benches of the spectators, those who have served their purpose and must become wet-nurses, child-dryers, infant-teachers, perambulator-motors, question-answerers, nose-blowers, mischief-punishers, cradleside-bards.

Charity laughed derisively at the vision of Zada as a mother. The Madonna pose had fascinated this Magdalen, but she would find that mothers have many, many other things to do for their infants than to sit for portraits and give them picturesque nourishment–many, many other things. If Zada’s child inherited its father’s and mother’s wantonness, laziness, wickedness, and violence of temper, there was going to be a lively nursery in that apartment.

Zada had so wanted a baby as a reward of love that she was willing to snatch it out of the vast waiting-room without pausing for a license. She would find that she had bought punishment at a high price. The poor baby was in for a hard life, but it would give its parents one in exchange.

Charity was appalled at this unknown harshness of her soul; it sneered at all things once held beautiful and sacred. Her soul was like a big cathedral broken into by a pagan mob that ran about smashing images, defiling fonts, burlesquing all the solemn rituals. Her quiet mind was full of sunburnt nymphs and goatish fauns with shaggy fetlocks. She saw the world as a Brocken and all the Sabbath there was was a Sabbath orgy of despicably brutish fiends.

She tried to run away. She went to her piano; her fingers would play no dirges; they grew flippant, profane in rhythm. She could think of no tunes but dances–andantes turned scherzi, the Handelian largo became a Castilian tango. She found herself playing a something strange–she realized that it was a lullaby! She fled from the piano.

She went to her books for nepenthe. There were romances in French, Italian, German, English, and American, new books, old books, all repeating the same stencils of passion in different colors. She could have spat at them and their silly ardors over the same old banality: I love him; he loves me–beatitude! I love him; he loves her–tragedy!

The novelists were like stupid children parroting the ancient monotony–_amo_, _amas_, _amat_; _amamus_, _amatis_, _amant_; _amo_, _amas_,
_amat_–away with such primer stuff! She had learned the grammar of love and was graduated from the school-books. She was a postgraduate of love and wedlock. She had had enough of them–too much; she would read no more of love, dwell no more upon it; she would forget it.

She wanted some antiseptic book, something frigid, intellectual, ascetic. At last she thought she had it. On her shelf she found an uncut volume, a present from some one who had never read it, but had bought it because it cost several dollars and would serve as a gift.

It was Gardner’s biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, “a study in the religion, literature, and history of the fourteenth century of Italy.” That sounded heartless enough. The frontispiece portrait of the wan, meager, despondent saint promised freedom from romantic balderdash.

Charity found a chair by a window and began to read. The preface announced the book to be “history centered in the work and personality of one of the most wonderful women that ever lived.” This was the medicine Charity wanted–the story of a woman who had been wonderful without love or marriage.

There followed a description of the evil times–and the wicked town in which Caterina Benincasa was born–as long ago as 1347. A pestilence swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how he had buried five of his sons in one trench. People said that the end of the world had come.

The word _trench_, the perishing of the people and the apparent end of the world, gave the story a modern sound. It might concern the murderous years of 1914-16.

Catherine was religious, as little girls are apt to be. She even wanted to enter a monastery in the disguise of a boy. Later her sister persuaded her to dye her hair and dress fashionably. Charity began to fear for her saint, but was reassured to find that already at sixteen she was a nun and had commenced that “life of almost incredible austerity,” freeing herself from all dependence on food and sleep and resting on a bare board.

Charity read with envy how Catherine had devoted herself for three whole years to silence broken only by confessions. How good it would be not to talk to anybody about anything for years and years! How blissful to live a calm, gray life in a strait cell, doing no labor but the errands of mercy and of prayer!

Charity read on, wondering a little at Catherine’s idea of God, and her morbid devotion to His blood as the essence of everything beautiful and holy. Charity could not put herself back into that Middle Age when the most concrete materialism was mingled inextricably with the most fantastic symbolism.

Suddenly she was startled to find that appalling temptations found even Catherine out even in her cloistral solitude. It frightened Charity to read such a passage as this:

There came a time, towards the end of these three years, when these assaults and temptations became horrible and unbearable. Aerial men and women, with obscene words and still more obscene gestures, seemed to invade her little cell, sweeping round her like the souls of the damned in Dante’s “Hell,” inviting her simple and chaste soul to the banquet of lust. Their suggestions grew so hideous and persistent that she fled in terror from the cell that had become like a circle of the infernal regions, and took refuge in the church; but they pursued her thither, though there their power seemed checked. And her Christ seemed far from her. At last she cried out, remembering the words in the vision: “I have chosen suffering for my consolation, and will gladly bear these and all other torments, in the name of the Saviour, for as long as shall please His Majesty.” When she said this, immediately all that assemblage of demons departed in confusion, and a great light from above appeared that illumined all the room, and in the light the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, nailed to the Cross and stained with blood, as He was when by His own blood He entered into the holy place; and from the Cross He called the holy virgin, saying: “My daughter Catherine, seest thou how much I have suffered for thee? Let it not then be hard to thee to endure for Me.”

This terrified Charity, and the further she read the less comfort she gained. Her matter-of-fact Manhattan mind could vaguely understand Saint Catherine’s mystic nuptials with Christ; but that definite gold ring He placed on her finger, that diamond with four pearls around it, frustrated her comprehension.

When she read on and learned how Catherine’s utter self-denial offended the other churchmen and church-women; how her confessions of sinful thought brought accusations of sinful deed; how the friars actually threw her out of a church at noon and kicked her as she lay senseless in the dust; how she was threatened with assassination and was turned from the doors of the people; and in what torment she died –from these strange events in the progress of a strange soul through a strange world Charity found no parallel to guide her life along.

For hours she read; but all that remained to her was the vision of that poor woman who could find no refuge from her flesh and from the demons that played evil rhapsodies upon the harp-strings of her nerves.

Charity closed the book and understood fear. She was now not so much sick of love as afraid of it. She was afraid of solitude, afraid of religion and of the good works that cause ridicule or resentment.

Darkness gathered about her with the closing of the day. She dreaded the night and the day, people and the absence of people. She knew no woman she could take her anguish to for sympathy; it would provoke only rebuke or laughter. The Church had rebuffed her. There remained only men, and what could she hope from them? Even Jim Dyckman had not been a friend merely. He had told her that she wasted herself as well as him.

Beyond this night there were years of nights, years on years of days. She could not even be alone; for who was ever actually alone? Even in the hush and the gloom of the deepening twilight there were figures here, shadows that sighed, delicate insinuators. There were no satyrs or bassarids, but gentlemen in polo garb, in evening dress, in yachting flannels. There were moon-nights in Florida, electric floods on dancing-floors, this dim corner of this room with some one leaning on her chair, bending his head and whispering:

“Charity, it’s Jim. I love you.”

She rose and thrust aside the arms that were not there. She could not order him away, because he was not there. And yet he was there.

She was afraid that he still loved her and afraid that he did not. She was afraid that she had always loved him and that she never could. She was afraid that she would go to him or send for him, and afraid that she would be afraid to. She thrust away the phantom, but her palms pleaded against his departure. Softer than a whisper and noisier than a cry was her thought:

“I don’t want to be alone, I am afraid to be alone.”

CHAPTER XXIV

Kedzie wanted to be a lady, and with the ladies stand–a tall tiara in her hair, a lorgnette in her hand.

She had succeeded dizzily, tremendously, in her cinema career. The timid thing that had watched the moving-picture director to see how he held his wineglass, and accepted his smile as a beam of sunshine breaking through the clouds about his godlike head, now found his gracefulness “actory,” his intimacy impudent, and his association compromising. Ferriday’s very picturesqueness and artistry convinced her now that he was not quite the gentleman.

Kedzie was beginning to imitate the upper dialect already. She who but a twelvemonth past was dividing people into “hicks” and “swells,” and whose epithets were “reub” and “classy,” was now a generation advanced.

Ferriday saw it and raged. One day in discussing the cast of a picture he mentioned the screen-pet Lorraine Melnotte as the man for the principal male rôle.

Kedzie sighed; “Oh, he is so hopelessly romantic, never quite the gentleman. In costume he gets by, but in evening clothes he always suggests the handsome waiter–don’t you think?”

Ferriday roared, with disgust: “Good Lord, but you’re growing. What is this thing I’ve invented? Are you a _Frankenstein?_”

Kedzie looked blank and sneered, “Are you implying that I have Yiddish blood in me?”

She wondered why he laughed, but she would not ask. Along many lines Kedzie did not know much, but in others she was uncannily acute.

Kedzie was gleaning all her ideas of gentlemanship from Jim Dyckman. She knew that he had lineage and heritage and equipage and all that sort of thing, and he must be great because he knew great people. His careless simplicity, artlessness, shyness, all the things that distressed her at first, were now accepted as the standards of conduct for everybody.

In life as in other arts, the best artists grow from the complex to the simple, the tortuous to the direct, from pose to poise, from tradition to truth, from artifice to reality. Kedzie was beginning to understand this and to ape what she could not do naturally.

Her comet-like scoot from obscurity to fame in the motion-picture sky had exhausted the excitement of that sky, and now she was ashamed of being a wage-earner, a mere actress, especially a movie actress.

If the studio had not caught fire and burned up so many thousands of yards of her portraiture she would have broken her contract without scruple. But the shock of the loss of her pretty images drove her back to the scene. The pity of so much thought, emotion, action, going up in smoke was too cruel to endure.

It was not necessary for Dyckman to pay the expenses of their repetition in celluloid, as he offered. The Hyperfilm Company rented another studio and began to remake the destroyed pictures. They were speedily renewed because the scenarios had been rescued and there was little of that appalling waste of time, money, and effort which has almost wrecked the whole industry. They did not photograph a thousand feet for every two hundred used.

Kedzie’s first pictures had gone to the exchanges before the fire, and they were continuing their travels about the world while she was at work revamping the rest.

About this time the Hyperfilm managers decided to move their factory to California, where the sempiternal sunlight insured better photography at far less expense. This meant that Kedzie must leave New York only partly conquered and must tear herself away from Jim Dyckman.

She broke down and cried when she told Dyckman of this, and for the first time his sympathies were stampeded on her account. He petted her, and she slid into his arms with a child-like ingratiation that made his heart swell with pity.

“What’s the odds,” he said, attempting consolation, “where you work, so long as you work?”

“But it would mean,” she sobbed–“it would mean taking me away-ay from you-ou.”

This tribute enraptured Dyckman incredibly. That he should mean so much to so wonderful a thing as she was was unbelievably flattering. He had dogged Charity’s heels with meek and unrewarded loyalty until he had lost all pride. Kedzie’s tears at the thought of leaving him woke it to life again.

“By golly, you sha’n’t go, then!” he cried. “I was thinking of coming out there to visit you, but–but it would be better yet for you to stay right here in little old New York.”

This brought back Kedzie’s smile. But she faltered, “What if they hold me to my contract, though?”

“Then we’ll bust the old contract. I’ll buy ’em off. You needn’t work for anybody.”

There was enough of the old-fashioned woman of one sort left in Kedzie to relish the slave-block glory of being fought over by two purchasers. She spoke rather slyly:

“But I’ll be without wages then. How would I live? I’ve got to work.”

Dyckman answered at once: “Of course not. I’ll take care of you. I offered to before, you know.” He had made a proposal of marriage some time before; it was the only sort of proposal that he had been tempted to make to Kedzie. He liked her immensely; she fascinated him; he loved to pet her and kiss her and talk baby talk to her; but she had never inflamed his emotions.

Either it was the same with her, or she had purposely controlled herself and him from policy, or had been restrained by coldness or by a certain decency, of which she had a good deal, after all and in spite of all.

Throughout their relations they had deceived Ferriday and other cynics. For all their indifference to appearances, they had behaved like a well-behaved pair of young betrothed Americans, with a complete freedom from chaperonage, and a considerable liberality of endearments, but no serious misdemeanor.

Kedzie knew what he meant, but she wanted to hear him propose again. So she murmured:

“How do you mean, take care of me?”

“I mean–marry you, of course.”

“Oh!” said Kedzie. And in a whirlwind of pride she twined her arms about his neck and clung to him with a desperate ardor.

Dyckman said: “This isn’t my first proposal, you know. You said you wanted time to think it over. Haven’t you thought it over yet?”

“Yes,” Kedzie sighed, but she said no more.

“Well, what’s the answer?” he urged.

“Yes.”

She whispered, torn between rapture and despair.

Any woman might have blazed with pride at being asked to marry Jim Dyckman. The little villager was almost consumed like another Semele scorched by Jupiter’s rash approach.

In Dyckman’s clasp Kedzie felt how lonely she had been. She wanted to be gathered in from the dangers of the world, from poverty and from work. She had not realized how tiny a thing she was, to be combating the big city all alone, until some one offered her shelter.

People can usually be brave and grim in the presence of defeat and peril and hostility. It is the kind word, the sudden victory, the discovery of a friend that breaks one down. Even Kedzie wept.

She wept all over Jim Dyckman’s waistcoat, sat on his lap and swallowed throat-lumps and tears and tugged at his cuff-links with her little fingers.

Then she looked up at him and blushed and kissed him fiercely, hugging him with all the might of her arms. He was troubled by the first frenzy she had ever shown for him, and he might have learned how much more than a merely pretty child she was if she had not suddenly felt an icy hand laid on her hands, unclasping them.

A cold arm seemed to bend about her throat and drag her back. She slid from Dyckman’s knees, gasping:

“Oh!”

She could not become Mrs. Jim Dyckman, because she was Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle.

Dyckman was astounded and frightened by her action. He put his hand out, but she unclenched his fingers from her wrist, mumbling:

“Don’t–please!”

“Why not? What’s wrong with you, child?”

How could she tell him? What could she do? She must do a lot of thinking. On one thing she was resolved: that she would not give Dyckman up. She would find Gilfoyle and get quit of him. They had been married so easily; there must be an easy way of unmarrying.

She studied Dyckman. She must not frighten him away, or let him suspect. She laughed nervously and went back to his arms, giggling:

“Such a wonderful thing it is to have you want me for your wife! I’m not worthy of your name, or your love, or anything.”

Dyckman could hardly agree to this, whatever misgivings might be shaking his heart. He praised her with the best adjectives in his scant vocabulary and asked her when they should be wed.

“Oh, not for a long while yet,” she pleaded.

“Why?” he wondered.

“Oh, because!” It sickened and alarmed her to put off the day, but how could she name it?

When he left her at last the situation was still a bit hazy. He had proposed and been accepted vaguely. But when he had gallantly asked her to “say when” she had begged for time.

Dyckman, once outside the spell of Kedzie’s eyes and her warmth, felt more and more dubious. He was ashamed of himself for entertaining any doubts of the perfection of his situation, but he was ashamed also of his easy surrender. Here he was with his freedom gone. He had escaped the marriage-net of so many women of so much brilliance and prestige, and yet a little movie actress had landed him.

He compared Anita Adair with Charity Coe, and he had to admit that his fiancée suffered woefully in every contrast. He could see the look of amazement on Charity’s face when she heard the news. She would be completely polite about it, but she would be appalled. So would his father and mother. They would fight him tremendously. His friends would give him the laugh, the big ha-ha! They would say he had made a fool of himself; he had been an easy mark for a little outsider.

He wondered just how it had happened. The fact was that Kedzie had appealed to his pity. That was what none of the other eligibles had ever done, least of all Charity the ineligible.

He went home. He found his father and mother playing double Canfield and wrangling over it as usual. They were disturbed by his manner. He would not tell them what was the matter and left them to their game. It interested them no more. It seemed so unimportant whether the cards fell right or not. The points were not worth the excitement. Their son was playing solitaire, and it was not coming out at all. They discussed the possible reasons for his gloom. There were so many.

“I wish he’d get married to some nice girl,” sighed Mrs. Dyckman. A mother is pretty desperate when she wants to surrender her son to another woman.

CHAPTER XXV

Kedzie made a bad night of it. She hated her loneliness. She hated her room. She hated her maid. She wanted to live in the Dyckman palace and have a dozen maids and a pair of butlers to boss around, and valets, and a crest on her paper, and invitations pouring in from people whose pictures were in “the social world.” She wanted to snub somebody and show certain folks what was what.

The next morning she was sure of only one thing, and that was that Dyckman had asked her to be his wife; and be his wife she would, no matter what it cost.

She wondered how she could get rid of Gilfoyle, whom she looked upon now as nothing less than an abductor. He was one of those “cadets” the papers had been full of a few years before, who lured young girls to ruin under the guise of false marriages and then sold them as “white slaves.”

Kedzle’s wrath was at the fact that Gilfoyle was not legally an abductor. She would have been glad merely to be ruined, and she would have rejoiced at the possibility of a false marriage. In the movies the second villain only pretended to be a preacher, and then confessed his guilt. But such an easy solution was not for Kedzie. New York City had licensed Gilfoyle’s outrage; the clerk had sold her to him for two dollars; the Municipal Building was the too, too solid witness.

She felt a spiritual solace in the fact that she had not had a religious marriage. The sacrament was only municipal and did not count. Her wedding had lacked the blessing of the duly constituted ministry; therefore it was sacrilegious; therefore it was her conscientious duty to undo the pagan knot as quickly as possible. She reverted to the good old way of the Middle Ages. There was no curse of divorce then, and indeed there was small need of it, since annulment could usually be managed on one religious ground or another, or if not, people went about their business as if it had been managed.

Kedzie felt absolved of any fault of selfishness now, and justified in taking any steps necessary to the punishment of Gilfoyle. _Religion_ is a large, loose word, and it can be made to fit any motive; but once assumed it seems to strengthen every resolution, to chloroform mercy and hallow any means to the self-sanctified end. What people would shrink from as inhuman they constantly embrace as divine.

Kedzie wondered how she could communicate with her adversary. She might best go to Chicago and fight herself free there. There would be less risk of Dyckman’s hearing about it.

She shuddered at what she would have to tell him unless she kept the divorce secret. He might not love her if he knew she was not the nice new girl he thought her, but an old married woman. And what would he say when he found that her real name was Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle _née_ Kedzie Thropp?

But first Kedzie must divorce herself from the Hyperfilm Company. She went to the studio with rage in her heart. She told Ferriday that she would not go to California. He proposed that she break with the Hyperfilm Company and form a corporation of her own with Dyckman as angel.

Kedzie was wroth at this. From now on, spending Dyckman’s money would be like spending her own. Ferriday, once her accomplice in the noble business of getting Dyckman to back her, was revealed now as a cheap swindler trying to keep Mrs. Dyckman in trade at her husband’s expense.

“I’m through with the pictures, I tell you!” she stormed. “I’m sick of the cheap notoriety. I’m tired of being public property. I can’t go out on the street without being pointed at. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to be incorporated or photographed or interviewed. I want to be let alone. I’m tired. I’ve worked too hard. I need a rest.”

Ferriday hated her with great agility. He had been willing to abet her breach of contract, provided she let him form a new company, but if she would not that made a great difference. He reminded her:

“The Hyperfilm Company will hold you to your bond. They want your hundred and twenty-five pounds of flesh. If you should break with them they’d have a case against you for damages.”

“How much?” said Kedzie, feeling like Mrs. Croesus.

Ferriday whistled and murmured: “Spoken like the wife of a multimillionaire! So you’ve got him at last.”

“To who,” Kedzie began, with an owl-like effect that she corrected with some confusion,”–to whom do you refer to?”

Ferriday grinned: “You’re going to marry out of the movies, and you’re going to try to horn into sassiety. Well, I warned you before that if you became Dyckman’s wife you would find his world vastly different from the ballroom and drawing-room stuff you pull off in the studio–strangely and mysteriously different.”

He frightened her. She was not sure of herself. She could not forget Nimrim, Missouri, and her arrival at the edge of society _via_ the Bronx, the candy-shop, and the professional camera.

She felt that the world had not treated her squarely. Why should she have to carry all this luggage of her past through the gate with her? She wondered if it would not be better to linger in the studios till she grew more famous and could bring a little prestige along.

But Ferriday was already ousting her even from that security.

“The managers of the Hyperfilm Company will think you have done them dirt, but I’ll explain that you are not really responsible. You’ve seen a million dollars, and you’re razzle-dazzled. They’ll want a bit of that million, I suppose, as liquidated damages, but I’ll try to keep them down.”

Kedzie was at bay in her terror. She struck back.

“Tell ’em they won’t get a cent if they try to play the hog.”

“They don’t have hogs on Fifth Avenue, Anita. Don’t forget that. Well, good-by and good luck.”

This was more like an eviction than a desertion. Kedzie felt a little softening of her heart toward the old homestead.

“I’m sure I’m much obliged for all you’ve done for me.”

Ferriday roared his scorn.

She went on: “I am. Honest-ly! And I hope I haven’t caused you too much inconvenience.”

Ferriday betrayed how much he was hurt by his violent efforts to conceal it.

“Not at all. It happens that I’ve just found another little girl to take your place. This one drifted in among the extras, just as you did, and she’s a dream. I’ll show her to the managers, and they may be so glad to get her they won’t charge you a cent. In fact, if you say the word, I might manage it so that they would pay you something to cancel your contract.”

This was quite too cruel. It crushed the tears out of Kedzie’s eyes, and she had no fight left in her. She simply stammered:

“No, thank you. Don’t bother. Well, good-by.”

“Good-by, Anita–good luck!”

He let her make her way out of his office alone. She had to skirt the studio. From behind a canvas wall over which the Cooper-Hewitt tubes rained a quivering blue glare came the words of the assistant director:

“Now choke her, Hazlitt! Harder! Register despair, Miss Hardy. Try to scream and can’t! That’s good. Now, Walsh, jump in to the rescue. Slug him. Knock his bean off. ‘S enough! Fall, Hazlitt. Now gather up Miss Hardy, Walsh. Register devotion, gratitude, adoration–now you got it. Turn on your lamps full power, dearie! Wow! Bully! A couple of tears, please. That’s the stuff. You’ll be the queen of the world. Weep a little more. Real tears. That’s it! Now clinch for the fade-out. Cut!”

Kedzie tiptoed away. She felt as Eve must have felt sneaking out of Eden and hearing the nightingales wrangling and the leopards at play.

CHAPTER XXVI

We must fly fast and keep on flying if we would escape from our pasts. Ambition, adventure, or sheer luck may carry us forward out of them as in a cavalry-foray over strange frontiers, but sooner or later we must wait for our wagons or fall back to them.

Kedzie’s past was catching up with her. It is a glorious thing when one’s past comes up loaded with food, munitions, good deeds, charities, mercies, valued friendships. But poor little Kedzie’s little past included one incompetent and unacknowledged husband and two village parents.

Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her new friends as anxiously as if he had been a baby born out of wedlock instead of a grown man born into it. And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment. He had not told his new friends in Chicago that he was married, because the Anita Adair that he had left in New York was, as F.P.A. would say, his idea of nothing to brag about.

Gilfoyle had loved Kedzie once as a pretty photographer’s model, and had admired her as an exquisite dancing-creature who seemed to have spun off at a tangent from the painted side of an old Greek amphora. He had actually written poetry to her! And when a poet has done that for a girl he feels that he has done more for her than she can ever repay. Even if she gives him her mortal self, what is that to the immortality he has given her?

When Kedzie telegraphed Gilfoyle that she had lost her job in Newport and had arrived in New York lonely and afraid, had he not taken care of her good name by giving her his own? Not to mention a small matter of all his money!

She had repaid him with frantic discontent. The morning after the wedding, was she not imitating the parrot’s shrill ridicule of life and love? Did she ridicule his poetry, or didn’t she? She did. Instead of being his nine Muses, she had become his three Furies.

When he lost his job and she went out to get one of her own, had she succeeded in getting anything with dignity in it? No! She had become an extra woman in a movie mob. That was a belittling thing to remember. But worst of all, she had committed the unpardonable sin for a woman–she had lent him money. He could never forgive or forget the horrible fact that he had borrowed her last cash to pay his fare to Chicago.

Next to that for inexcusableness was her self-support–and, worse, self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie no money beyond returning what he had borrowed, and she had not used that to buy a ticket to Chicago with. She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money. That was mighty convenient for him, but it was extremely suspicious, and he cherished it as a further grudge.

He never found himself quite flush enough to force any money on her, because he had found that it costs money to live in Chicago, too. People in New York get the idea that it costs everything to live in New York and nothing to live anywhere else–if it can be called living.

Gilfoyle also discovered that his gifts were not appreciated in Chicago as he had expected them to be. Chicago people seemed to think it quite natural for New York to call for help from Chicago, and successful Western men were constantly going East; but for a New-Yorker to revert to Chicago looked queer. He appeared to patronize, and yet he must have had some peculiar reason for giving up New York.

All in all and by and large, Gilfoyle was not happy in Chicago. The few persons, mainly women, who took him up as an interesting novelty grew tired of him. His advertising schemes did not dazzle the alert Illini. For one reason or another the wares he celebrated did not “go big.”

He lost his first job and took an inferior wage with a shabbier firm. He took his women friends to the movies now instead of the theaters. And so it was that one night when he was beauing a Denver woman, who was on her way to New York and fame, he found the box-line extending out on the sidewalk and half-way up the block. It was irksome to wait, but people like to go to shows where the crowds are. He took his place in the line, and his Miss Clampett stood at his elbow.

The queue was slowly drawn into the theater and he finally reached a place in front of the lithographs. He almost jumped out of his skin when he saw a colossal head of Anita Adair smiling at him from a sunbonnet streaming with curls.

The letterpress informed Gilfoyle that it was indeed his own Anita. The people in the line were talking of her as the new star. They were calling her familiarly by her first name and discussing her with all the freedom of the crowd:

“That’s Anita. Ain’t she sweet?”

“Everybody says Anita’s just too lovely.”

“Some queen, boy? Me for Anita. She can pack her clothes in my trunk!”

Gilfoyle felt that he ought in common decency to knock down this fellow who claimed the privileges belonging to himself. But he remembered that he had abandoned those privileges. And the fellow looked unrefinedly powerful.

Gilfoyle gnawed the lip of silence, realizing also that his announcement would make a strange impression on Miss Clampett. She was one of those authors one reads about who think it necessary to hunt experiences and live romances in order to find literary material.

Gilfoyle had done his best to teach her how wildly well a born New-Yorker can play the lute of emotion. To proclaim now that he was the anonymous husband of this glitterer on the billboard would have been a shocking confession.

Gilfoyle swallowed his secret, but it made his heart flutter tremendously. When at length he and Miss Clampett were admitted to the theater and walked down the aisle Kedzie came from the background of the screen forward as if to meet him. She came on and on, and finally as he reached his seat, a close-up of her brought them face to face with a vividness that almost knocked him over. She looked right at him, seemed to recognize him, and stopped short.

He felt as guilty as if she had actually caught him at a rendezvous. Yet he felt pride, too.

This luminous being was his wife. He remembered all that she had been to him. Miss Clampett noted his perturbations and made a brilliant guess at their cause. She asked him if he wanted to leave her and go around to the stage door to meet this wonderful Miss Adair. Gilfoyle laughed poorly at her quip. He was surprised to learn from her that Anita Adair was already a sensation among the film stars. He had not chanced to read the pages where her press-matter had celebrated her. He defended himself from the jealousy of Miss Clampett very lamely; for the luscious beauty of his Anita, her graphic art, and her sway over the audience rekindled his primal emotions to a greater fire than ever.

When the show was over he abandoned Miss Clampett on her door-step and went to his own boarding-house in a nympholepsy. He was a mortal wedded to a fairy. He was Endymion with a moon enamoured of him. Kedzie indeed had come down from the screen to Gilfoyle, clothed in an unearthly effulgence.

The next morning he turned to the moving-picture columns of the Chicago _Tribune_, the _Herald_, and the other papers, and he found that Kedzie was celebrated there with enthusiasm by Kitty Kelly, “Mae Tinée,” Mrs. Parsons, and the rest of the critics of the new art. On Sunday several of her interviews appeared, and her portraits, in eminent company.

Gilfoyle’s forgotten affections came back to life, expanding and efflorescent. He throbbed with the wonder of it. The moving picture had brought romance again to earth.

Thousands of men all over the country were falling in love with Kedzie. Who had a better right to than her husband? Unconsciously his resentments against her fell away. His heart swelled with such plenitude of forgiveness that he might in time have overlooked the money she lent him. It was not a disgrace to accept money from a genius of her candle-power.

For a long while he had been afraid that she would telegraph him for funds, or descend on him in Chicago and bring a heavy baggage of necessities. Now he was no longer afraid of that. He was afraid that if he called on her in New York she might not remember him.

He had heard of the real and the alleged salaries of moving-picture stars, and he assumed that Kedzie must be as well paid as she was well advertised. He did not know of the measly little hundred dollars a week she was bound down to by her contract. If he had known he would have rejoiced, because one hundred dollars a week was about four times more than Gilfoyle had ever earned.

Of course Gilfoyle resolved to go to New York. Of course he started to telegraph his wife and found the telegram hard to write. Then he began a long letter and found it harder to write. And of course he finally decided to surprise her. He resigned his job. His resignation was accepted with humiliating cordiality.

Of course he took the Twentieth Century Limited to New York. It was more expensive, but it was quicker; and what did a few dollars matter, now that he was the husband of such an earner? He had unwittingly hitched his wagon to a star, and now he would take a ride through heaven. He wrote a poem or two to that effect, and the train-wheels inspired his prosody.

He dreamed of an ideal life in which he should loll upon a sofa of ease, thrumming his lyre, while his wife devoted herself to her career outside.

Where would Horace and Virgil have been if they had not had their expenses paid by old Mr. Maecenas? Since Mrs. Gilfoyle could afford to be a patroness, let her patronage begin at home. Her reward would be beyond price, for Gilfoyle decided to perpetuate her fame in powerful rhyme far outlasting the celluloid in which she was writing her name now.

Celluloid is perishable indeed, and very inflammable. Gilfoyle did not know that the Hyperfilm studio had burned to the ground before he saw Kedzie’s picture in Chicago. But he blithely left that city to its fate and sped eastward.

CHAPTER XXVII

Gilfoyle reached New York on the Twentieth Century. It was an hour late, and so the railroad company paid him a dollar. He wished it had been later. In his present plight time was anything but money to him.

It took him some time to find the Hyperfilm Company’s temporary studio. He learned of the fire, and his hope wavered. When he reached the studio Kedzie was not there. The news of her resignation had percolated even to the doorman, who rarely knew anything from inside or outside the studio–an excellent non-conductor of information he was. Gilfoyle had some difficulty in finding Kedzie’s address, but at last he learned it, and he made haste to her apartment.

He was impressed by its gaudy vestibule. He told the hall-boy that he wanted to see Miss Adair.

“Name, please?”

“Just say a gentleman to see her.”

“Gotta git the name, or I can’t ‘phome up. Miss Adair naturally won’t see no gempman ain’t got a name.”

“Does she see many men?” Gilfoyle asked, with sudden alarm.

“Oh, nossa. Mainly Mr. Dyckman. But that’s her business.”

“What Dyckman is that, the rich Jim Dyckman?”

“Well, I ain’t s’posed to give out info’mation.”

“Are you supposed to take in money?” Gilfoyle juggled with a half-dollar.

The hall-boy juggled his eyes in unison, and laughed yearningly: “I reckon I might let you up by mistake. Does you know Miss Adair right well?”

“Very well–I’m a relative of hers by marriage. I want to surprise her.”

“Oh, well, you better go on up.”

Gilfoyle applied the magic silver wafer to the itching palm and stepped into the elevator when it came.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Kedzie was alone. She had sent her maid out to get some headache powders. She had had a good cry when she reached home. She had pondered her little brain into a kink, trying to figure out her campaign. When she had a headache, or a cold, or a sleepless night, or a lethargy, she always put a powder in her stomach. It never did any good, and she was always changing the nostrum, but she never changed the idea.

She felt ill and took off her street suit and her corsets, put on a soft, veilly thing, and stretched out on her long-chair.

She was coddling a photograph of Jim Dyckman. He had scrawled across it, “To Little Anita from Big Jim.” She kissed the picture and cherished it to her aching breast.

The door-bell rang. She supposed that, as usual, the maid had forgotten to take her key with her. She went into the hall in a rage, still holding the photograph. She flung the door open–and in walked Gilfoyle.

She fell back stupefied. He grinned, and took her in with devouring eyes. If he had no right to devour her, who had? He approved of her with a rush of delight:

“Well, Anita, here I am. And how’s the little wife?”

She could not answer him. He stared ferociously, and gasped as if he had forgotten how she had looked:

“Golly, but you’re beautiful? Where’s the little kiss?”

He threw his arms about her, garnering in the full sheaf of her beauty. She tried to escape, to protest, but he smothered her with his lips. She had been so long away from him, she had so long omitted him from her plans, that she felt a sense of outrage in his assault. Something virginal had resumed her heart, and his proprietorship revolted her.

Her shoulders were so constrained that she could not push free. She could only raise her right hand outside his left arm, and reaching his face, thrust it away. Her nails were long and sharp. They tore deep gashes in his cheeks and across his nose.

He let her go with a yelp of pain and shame. His fists gathered; primeval instinct told him to smash the mask of pale hatred he saw before him. But he saw the photograph in her left hand. It had been bent double in the scuffle. He snatched at it and tore away the lower half. He read the inscription with disgust and growled:

“That’s the reason you didn’t write me! That’s why you don’t want to see me, eh? So he’s keeping you! And that’s why you resigned from the studio!”

The atrocity of this slander was too much. With a little cat-like yowl she went for him, dropping the broken photograph and spreading all ten claws.

He caught her arms and held them apart where she could scratch nothing more than his wrists, which she did venomously. The cat tribe is a bad tribe to fight at close quarters. One must kill or break loose.

When Kedzie tried to bite him, Gilfoyle realized that she was in no mood for argument. He dragged her to the living-room door and then flung her as far as he could from him. She toppled over into a chair and began to cry.

It was not a pretty scene. Gilfoyle took out his handkerchief and pressed it to his face and the bridge of his nose. Then he looked at the red marks and held them out for her to observe:

“See what you did to me!”

“I’m glad of it,” she snapped. “I wish I’d torn your eyes out.”

This alone would not necessarily have proved that she did not love him devotedly, but in this case it corroborated a context of hatred. Gilfoyle felt rebuffed. There was a distinct lack of hospitality in her welcome. This reception was the very opposite of his imagined rencounter.

He did what a man usually does, revealing a masculine inability to argue with a woman. He told her all her faults of omission and commission as if that would bring her to a reconciliating humor. She listened awhile, and then answered, with a perfect logic that baffled him:

“All you say only goes to show that you don’t love me. You never did. You went away and left me. I might have starved, for all you cared. But I’ve worked like a dog, and now that I’ve had a little success you come back and say: ‘How’s the little wife? Where’s the little kiss?’ Agh! And you dare to kiss me! And then you slander me. You don’t give me credit for these plain little rooms that I rent with my own hard-earned money. You couldn’t imagine me living in a place like this unless some man paid for it. Heaven knows I’d have lived with you long enough before I ever had a decent home. Humph! Well, I guess so! Humph!”

Gilfoyle mopped his face again and looked at his handkerchief. One’s own blood is very interesting. The sight of his wounds did not touch Kedzie’s heart. She could never feel sorry for anybody she was mad at.

Gilfoyle’s wits were scattered. He mumbled, futilely, “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it!”

“That’s the way I feel about it!” Kedzie raged on. “I suppose you’ve had so many affairs of your own out there that you can’t imagine anybody else being respectable, can you?”

Gilfoyle had not come East to publish his autobiography. He thought that a gesture of misunderstood despair would be the most effective evasion. So he made it, and turned away. He put his handkerchief to his nose and looked at it. He turned back.

“Would you mind if I went into your bathroom to wash my face?”

“I certainly would. Where do you think you are? You get on out before my maid comes back. I don’t want her to think I receive men alone!”

Her heart was cold as a toad in her breast, and she loathed his presence. He repeated his excellent gesture of despair, sighed, “All right,” and left the room. The two pieces of Jim Dyckman’s photograph were still on the floor of the hall. He stooped quickly and silently and picked them up as he went out. He closed the door with all the elegy one can put in a door with a snap-lock.

He was about to press the elevator button, but he did not like to present himself gory to the elevator-boy. He walked down the marble and iron steps zigzagging around the elevator shaft.

He paused on various landings to think and mop. He looked at the photograph of Dyckman, and his heart spoiled in him. He recalled his wife’s anxiety lest her maid should find a man there. He recalled the hall-boy’s statement that Mr. Dyckman was often there. His wife was lying to him, plainly.

He had known detectives and newspaper men and had heard them speak of what a friend they had in the usual hall-boy. He thought that he had here the makings of a very pretty little bit of detectivity.

He reached the main floor, but made a hasty crossing of the gaudy vestibule without stopping to speak to the hall-boy. He had left his baggage at the station, expecting to send it to his wife’s apartment when he found it. He had found it, but he could imagine what would happen to the baggage if he sent it there.

“All right!” he said to himself. “If it’s war she wants, cry havoc and let slip the sleuth hounds.”

He went to a drug-store and had his wounds sterilized and plastered, saying that a pet cat had scratched him.

“Just so,” said the drug clerk, with a grin. “Pet cats are very dangerous.”

Gilfoyle wanted to slug him, but he wanted his wounds dressed more. He walked and walked down the back avenues till he reached his old boarding-house district near Greenwich Village. He found a landlady who had trusted him often and been paid eventually. He gave his baggage checks to an expressman and went into retirement for meditation.

When his suit-case arrived he got out the poems he had been writing to Anita. He clenched them for destruction, but an exquisite line caught his eye. Why should his art suffer because of a woman’s perfidy? He had intended to sonnetize Anita into perenniality. She had played him false. Just for that he would leave her mortal. She should perish.

The poems would keep. He might find another and a worthier client for posterity. Or he might put an imaginary name there, as other poets had done. He wanted one that would slip into the poetry easily. He could use “Pepita” without deranging the rhyme.

He glared at the picture of Dyckman. He knew the face well. He had seen it in print numberless times. He had had the man pointed out to him at races and horse-shows and polo-games and bazaars.

He struck the photograph in the face, realizing that he could not have reached the face of the big athlete. He wondered why this fellow should have been given such stature with such wealth. He was ghastly rich, the snob, the useless cumberer of the ground!

All of Gilfoyle’s pseudo-socialistic hostility to wealth and the wealthy came to the aid of his jealousy. To despoil the man was a duty. He had decoyed Anita from her duty by his millions. Not that she was unwilling to be decoyed. And now she would revel in her ill-got luxury, while her legal husband could starve in a garret.

As he brooded, the vision of Dyckman’s money grew huger and huger. The dog had not merely thousands or hundreds of thousands, but thousands of thousands. Gilfoyle had never seen a thousand-dollar bill. Yet Dyckman, he had heard, was worth twenty millions. If his wealth were changed into thousand-dollar bills there would be twenty thousand of them in a stack.

If Gilfoyle peeled off one thousand of those thousand-dollar bills the stack would not be perceptibly diminished. If Gilfoyle could get a million dollars from Dyckman, or any part of it, Dyckman would never notice it; and yet it would mean a life of surety and poetry and luxury for Gilfoyle.

If he caught Dyckman and Anita together in a compromising situation he could collect heavily under threat of exposure. Rather than be