Jim Dyckman had always loved Charity Coe, but he let another man marry her—a handsomer, livelier, more entertaining man with whom Dyckman was afraid to compete. A mingling of laziness and of modesty disarmed him.
As soon as he saw how tempestuously Peter Cheever began his courtship, Dyckman withdrew from Miss Coe's entourage. When she asked him why, he said, frankly:
“Pete Cheever's got me beat. I know when I'm licked.”
Pete's courtship was what the politicians call a whirlwind campaign. Charity was Mrs. Cheever before she knew it. Her friends continued to call her Charity Coe, but she was very much married.
Cheever was a man of shifting ardors. His soul was filled with automatic fire-extinguishers. He flared up quickly, but when his temperature reached a certain degree, sprinklers of cold water opened in his ceiling and doused the blaze, leaving him unharmed and hardly scorched. It had been so with his loves.
After a brief and blissful honeymoon, Peter Cheever's capricious soul kindled at the thought of an exploration of war-filled Europe. His blushing bride was a hurdle-rider, too, and loved a risk-neck venture. She insisted on going with him.
He accepted the steering-wheel of a motor-ambulance and left his bride to her own devices while he shot along the poplar-plumed roads of France at lightning speed.
Charity drifted into hospital service. Her first soldier, the tortured victim of a gas-attack, was bewailing the fate of his motherless child. Charity brought a smile to what lips he had by whispering:
“I am rich. I will adopt your little girl.”
It was the first time she had ever boasted of being rich. The man died, whispering: “Merci, Madame! Merci, Madame!” Another father was writhing in the premature hell of leaving a shy little unprotected boy to starve. Charity promised to care for him, too.
At a committee meeting, a week later, she learned of a horde of war orphans and divided them up with Muriel Schuyler, Mrs. Perry Merithew, and other American angels abroad.
When Charity's husband wearied of being what he called “chauffeur to a butcher-wagon,” he decided that America was a pretty good country, after all. But Charity could not tear herself away from her privilege of suffering, even to follow her bridegroom home. He had cooled to her also, and he made no protest. He promised to come back for her. He did not come. He cabled often and devotedly, telling her how lonely he was and how busy. She answered that she hoped he was lonely, but she knew he was busy. He would be!
When Cheever first returned, Jim Dyckman saw him at a club. He saw him afterward in a restaurant with one of those astonishing animals which the moving pictures have hardly caricatured as a “vampire.” This one would have been impossible if she had not been visible. She was intensely visible.
Jim Dyckman felt that her mere presence in a public restaurant was offensive. To think of her as displacing Charity Coe in Cheever's attentions was maddening. He understood for the first time why people of a sort write anonymous letters. He could not stoop to that degradation, and yet he wondered if, after all, it would be as degrading to play the informer as to be an unprotesting and therefore accessory spectator and confidant.
Gossip began to deal in the name of Cheever. One day at a club the he-old-maid “Prissy” Atterbury cackled:
“I saw Pete Cheever at a cabaret—”
Jim asked, anxiously, “Was he alone?”
“Nearly.”
“What do you mean—nearly alone?”
“Well, what he had with him is my idea of next to nothing. I wonder what sinking ship Cheever rescued her from. They tell me she was a cabaret dancer named Zada L'Etoile—that's French for Sadie Starr, I suppose.”
Dyckman's obsession escaped him.
“Somebody ought to write his wife about it.”
“That would be nice!” cried Prissy. “Oh, very, very nice! It would be better to notify the Board of Health. But it would be still better if his wife would come home and mind her own business. These Americans who hang about the edges of the war, fishing for sensations, make me very tired—oh, very, very tired.”
Prissy never knew how near he was to annihilation. Jim had to hold one fist with the other. He was afraid to yield to his impulse to smash Prissy in the droop of his mustache. Prissy was too frail to be slugged. That was his chief protection in his gossip-mongering career.
Besides, it is a questionable courtesy for a former beau to defend another man's wife's name, and Dyckman proved his devotion to Charity best by leaving her slanderer unrebuked.
It was no anonymous better that brought Charity Coe home. It was the breakdown of her powers of resistance. Even the soldiers had to be granted vacations from the trenches; and so an eminent American surgeon in charge of the hospital she adorned finally drove Mrs. Cheever back to America. He disguised his solicitude with brutality; he told her he did not want her to die on their hands.
When Charity came back, Cheever met her and celebrated her return. She was a new sensation to him again for a week or two, but her need of seclusion and quiet drove him frantic and he grew busy once more. He recalled Miss L'Etoile from the hardships of dancing for her supper. Unlike Charity, Zada never failed to be exciting. Cheever was never sure what she would do or say or throw next. She was delicious.
When Dyckman learned of Cheever's extra establishment it enraged him. He had let Cheever push him aside and carry off Charity Coe, and now he must watch Cheever push Charity Coe aside and carry on the next choice of his whims.
To Dyckman, Charity was perfection. To lose her and find her in the ash-barrel with Cheever's other discarded dolls was intolerable. Yet what could Dyckman do about it? He dared not even meet Charity. He hated her husband, and he knew that her husband hated him. Cheever somehow realized the dogged fidelity of Dyckman's love for Charity and resented it—feared it as a menace, perhaps.
Dyckman had two or three narrow escapes from running into Charity, and he finally took to his heels. He lingered in the Canadian wilds till he thought it safe to return. And now she chanced to board the same train. The problem he had run away from had cornered him.
He had cherished a sneaking hope that she would learn the truth somehow before he met her. He was not sure what she ought to do when she learned it. He was sure that what she would do would be the one right thing.
Yet he realized from her placid manner of parrying his threats at her husband that she still loved the wretch and trusted him. It was up to Jim to tell her what he knew about Cheever. He felt that he ought to. Yet how could he?
It was hideous that she should sit there smiling tolerantly at a critic of her infernal husband as serenely as a priestess who is patient with an unenlightened skeptic.
It was atrocious that Cheever should be permitted to prosper with this scandal unrebuked, unpunished, actually unsnubbed, accepting the worship of an angel like Charity Coe and repaying it with black treachery! To keep silent was to co-operate in the evil—to pander to it. Dyckman thought it was hideous. The word he thought was “rotten”!
He actually opened his mouth to break the news. His voice mutinied. He could not say a word.
Something throttled him. It was that strange instinct which makes criminals of every degree feel that no crime is so low but that tattling on it is a degree lower.
Dyckman tried to assuage his self-contempt by the excuse that Charity was not in the mood or in the place where such a disclosure should be made. Some day he would tell her and then ask permission to kill the blackguard for her.
The train had scuttered across many a mile while he meditated the answer to the latest riddle. His thoughts were so turbulent that Charity finally intruded.
“What's on your mind, Jim?”
“Oh, I was just thinking.”
“What about?”
“Oh, things.”
Suddenly he reached out and seized the hand that drooped at her knee like a wilted lily. He wrung her fingers with a vigor that hurt her, then he said, “Got any dogs to show this season?”
She laughed at the violent abruptness of this, and said, “I think I'll give an orphan-show instead.”
He shook his head in despairing admiration and leaned back to watch the landscape at the window. So did she. On the windows their own reflections were cast in transparent films of light. Each wraith watched the other, seeming to read the mood and need no speech.
Dyckman's mind kept shuttling over and over the same rails of thought, like a switch-engine eternally shunting cars from one track to another. His very temples throbbed with theclickety-clickof the train. At last he groaned:
“This world's too much for me. It's got me guessing.”
He seemed to be so impressed with his original and profound discovery of life's unanswerable complexity that Charity smiled, the same sad, sweet smile with which she pored on the book of sorrow or listened to the questions of her orphans who asked where their fathers had gone.
She thought of Jim Dyckman as one of her orphans. There was a good deal of the mother in her love of him. For she did love him. And she would have married him if he had asked her earlier—before Peter Cheever swept over her horizon and carried her away with his zest and his magnificence.
She rebuked herself for thinking of Jim Dyckman as an orphan. He had a father and mother who doted on him. He had wealth of his own and millions to come. He had health and brawn enough for two. What right had he to anybody's pity? Yet she pitied him.
And he pitied her.
And on this same train, in this same car, unnoticed and unnoticing, sat Kedzie.
Jim and Charity grew increasingly embarrassed as the train drew into New York. Charity was uncertain whether her husband would meet her or not. Jim did not want to leave her to get home alone. She did not want her husband to find her with Jim.
Cheever had excuse enough in his own life for suspecting other people. He had always disliked Jim Dyckman because Dyckman had always disliked him, and Jim's transparent face had announced the fact with all the clarity of an illuminated signboard.
Also Charity had loved Jim before she met Cheever, and she made no secret of being fond of him still. In their occasional quarrels, Cheever had taunted her with wishing she had married Jim, and she had retorted that she had indeed made a big mistake in her choice. Lovers say such things—for lack of other weapons in such combats as lovers inevitably wage, if only for exercise.
Charity did not really mean what she said, but at times Cheever thought she did. He had warned her to keep away from Dyckman and keep Dyckman away from her or there would be trouble. Cheever was a powerful athlete and a boxer who made minor professionals look ridiculous. Dyckman was bigger, but not so clever. A battle between the two stags over the forlorn doe would be a horrible spectacle. Charity was not the sort of woman that longs for such a conflict of suitors. Just now she had seen too much of the fruits of male combat. She was sick of hatred and its devastation.
So Charity begged Dyckman to get off at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, but he would not show himself so poltroon. He answered, “I'd like to see myself!” meaning that he would not.
She retorted, “Then I'll get off there myself.”
“Then I'll get off there with you,” he grumbled.
Charity flounced back into her seat with a gasp of mitigated disgust. The mitigation was the irresistible thrill of his devotion. She had a husband who would desert her and a cavalier who would not. It was difficult not to forgive the cavalier a little.
Yet it would have been better if he had obeyed her command or she her impulse. Or would it have been? The worst might always have been worse.
When Kedzie was angry she called her father an “old country Jake.” Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car with his cocksure criticisms of cities that he had never seen. He had condemned New York with all the mercilessness of a small-town superiority, and he had told funny stories that were as funny as the moss-bearded cypresses in a lone bayou. While he was denouncing New York as the home of ignorance and vice, the other men were having sport with him—sport so cruel that only his own cruelty blinded him to it.
When the porter summoned the passengers to pass under the whisk broom, Adna remembered that he had not settled upon his headquarters in New York, and he said to a man on whom he had inflicted a vile cigar: “Say, I forgot to ask you. What's a good hotel in New York that ain't too far from the railroad and don't rob you of your last nickel? Or is they one?”
One of the smoking-room humorists mocked his accent and ventured a crude jape.
“You can save the price of a hack-ride by going to Mrs. Biltmore's new boarding-house. It's right across the road from the depot.”
If Adna had been as keen as he thought he was, or if the porter had not alarmed him just then by his affectionate interest, even Adna would have noted the grins on the faces of the men.
But he broke the porter's heart by dodging the whisk broom and hustling his excited family to their feet. They were permitted to hale their own hand-baggage to the platform, where two red-capped Kaffirs reached for it together. There was danger of an altercation, but the bigger of the two frightened the smaller away by snapping his shiny eyeballs alarmingly. The smaller one took a second look at Adna and retreated with scorn, snickering:
“You kin have him.”
The other, who was a good loser at craps or tips, re-examined his clients, flickered his eyelids, and started down the platform to have it over with as soon as possible. He paused to say:
“Where you-all want to go to—a taxicab?”
Adna, who was a little nervous about his property, answered with some asperity:
“No, we don't need any hack to git to Biltmore's.”
“Nossah!” said the red-cap.
“Right across the street, ain't it?”
“Yassah!” The porter chuckled. The mention of the family's destination had cheered him a little. He might get a tip, after all. You couldn't always sometimes tell by a man's clothes how he tipped.
While Kedzie stood watching the red-cap bestow the various parcels under his arms and along his fingers, a man bumped into her and murmured:
“Sorry!”
She turned and said, “Huh?”
He did not look around. She did not see his face. It was the first conversation between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie Thropp.
Charity Coe, when the train stopped, had flatly refused to walk up the station platform with Jim Dyckman. She had not only virtue, but St. Paul's idea of the importance of avoiding even the appearance of evil. She would not budge from the car till Jim had gone. He was forced to leave her at last.
He swung through the crowd in a fury, jostling and begging pardon and staring over the heads of the pack to see if Cheever were at the barrier. He jolted Kedzie Thropp among others, apologized, and thought no more of her.
Cheever had not come to meet his wife. Her telegram was waiting for him at his official home; he was at his other residence.
When Dyckman saw that no one was there to welcome the fagged-out Charity, he paused and waited for her himself. When Charity came along her anxious eyes found nobody she knew except Dyckman. The disappointment she revealed hurt him profoundly. But he would not be shaken off again. He turned in at her side and walked along, and the two porters with their luggage walked side by side.
Prissy Atterbury was hurrying to a train that would take him for a week-end visitation to people who hated him but needed him to cancel a female bore with. As Prissy saw it and described it, Dyckman came into the big waiting-room alone, looked about everywhere, paused, turned back for Charity Coe; then walked away with her, followed by their twinned porters. Prissy said “Aha!” behind his big mustaches and stared till he nearly lost his train.
Atterbury had gained a new topic to carry with him, a topic of such fertile resources that it went far to pay his board and lodging. He made a snowball out of the clean reputations of Charity and Jim and started it downhill, gathering dirt and momentum as it rolled. It was bound to roll before long into the ken of Peter Cheever, and he was not the man to tolerate any levity in a wife. Cheever might be as wicked as Caesar, but his wife must be as Caesar's.
When Charity Coe was garrulous and inordinately gay, Jim Dyckman, who had known her from childhood, knew that she was trying to rush across the thin ice over some deep grief.
When he saw how hurt she was at not being met, and he insisted on taking her home, she chattered and snickered hysterically at his most stupid remarks. So he said:
“Don't let him break your heart in you, old girl.”
She laughed uproariously, almost vulgarly, over that, and answered: “Me? Let a man break my heart? That's very likely, isn't it?”
“Very!” Jim groaned.
When they reached her magnificent home it had a deserted look.
“Wait here a minute,” said Charity when Jim got out to help her out. She ran up the steps and rang the bell. There was a delay before the second man in an improvised toilet opened the door to her and expressed as much surprise as delight at seeing her. “Didn't Mr. Cheever tell you I was coming home?” she gasped.
“We haven't seen him, ma'am. There's a telegram here for him, but of course—”
Charity was still in a frantic mood. She wanted to escape brooding, at all costs. She ran back to where Jim waited at the motor door.
“Got any date to-night, Jim?” she demanded. He shook his head dolefully, and she said: “Go home, jump into your dancing-shoes, and come back for me. I'll throw on something light and you can take me somewhere to dance. I'll go crazy mad, insane, if you don't. I can't endure this empty house. You don't mind my making a convenience of you, do you, Jim?”
“I love it, Charity Coe,” he groaned. He reached for her hand, but she was fleeting up the steps. He crept into the car and went to his home, flung off his traveling-togs, passed through a hot tub and a cold shower into evening clothes, and hastened away.
Charity kept him waiting hardly a moment. She floated down the stairs in a something fleetily volatile, and he said:
“You look like a dandelion puff.”
“That's right, tell me some nice things,” she said. She did not tell the servant where she was going. She did not know. She hardly cared.
To Kedzie Thropp the waiting-room of the Grand Central Terminal was the terminus of human splendor. It was the waiting-room to heaven. And indeed it is a majestic chamber.
The girl walked with her face high, staring at the loftily columned recesses with the bay-trees set between the huge square pillars, and above all the feigned blue sky and the monsters of the zodiac in powdered gold.
Kedzie could hardly breathe—it was so beautiful, so much superior to the plain every-night sky she was used to, with stars of tin instead of gold like these.
Even her mother said “Well!” and Adna paid the architects the tribute of an exclamation: “Humph! So this is the new station we was readin' about. Some bigger'n ours at home, eh, Kedzie?”
But Kedzie was not there. They had lost her and had to turn back. She was in a trance. When they snatched her down to earth again and pulled her through the crowds she began to adore the people. They were dressed in unbelievable splendor—millions, she guessed, in far better than the best Sunday best she had ever seen. She wondered if she would ever have nice clothes. She vowed that she would if she had to murder somebody to get them.
The porter led the way from the vastitude of a corridor under the street and through vast empty rooms and up a stairway and down a few steps and through the first squirrel-cage door Kedzie had ever seen (she had to run round it thrice before they could get her out) into a sumptuousness beyond her dream.
At the foot of more stairs the porter let down his burdens, and a boy in a general's uniform seized them. The porter said, mopping his brow to emphasize his achievement:
“This is fur's I go.”
“Oh, all right! Much obliged,” said Adna. He just pretended to walk away as a joke on the porter. When he saw the man's white stare aggravated sufficiently, Adna smiled and handed him a dime.
The porter stared and turned away in bitter grief. Then his chuckle returned as he went his way, telling himself: “And the bes' of it was, I fit for him! I just had to git that man.”
He told the little porter about it, and when the little porter, who had been scared away from the Thropps and left to carry Charity Coe's dainty hand-bags, showed the big porter what he had received, still the big porter laughed. He knew how to live, that big porter.
Kedzie followed the little general up the steps and around to the desk. Her father realized that his fellow-passenger had been teasing him when he referred to this place as a boarding-house, but he was not at all crushed by the magnificence he was encountering. He felt that he was in for it—so he cocked his toothpick pluckily and wrote on the loose-leaf register the room clerk handed him:
A. Thropp, wife and daughter, Nimrim, Mo.
The room clerk read the name as if it were that of a potentate whose incognito he would respect, and murmured:
“About what accommodation would you want, Mr. Thropp?”
“Two rooms—one for the wife and m'self, one for the daughter.”
“Yes, sir. And about how much would you want to pay?”
“How do they run?”
“We can give you two nice adjoining rooms for twelve dollars—up.”
Mr. Thropp made a hasty calculation. Twelve dollars a week for board and lodging was not so bad. He nodded.
The room clerk marked down a number and slid a key to the page, who gathered the family treasures together. Kedzie had more or less helplessly recognized the page's admiration of her when he first took the things from the porter. The sense of her beauty had choked the boy's amusement at her parents.
Later Kedzie caught the glance of the room clerk and saw that she startled him and cheated him of his smile at Adna. Still later the elevator-boy gave her one respectful look of approval. Kedzie's New York stir was already beginning.
The page ushered the Thropps into the elevator, and said, “Nineteen.”
It was the number of the floor, not the room. Adna warned his women folk that “she” was about to go up, but they were not prepared for that swift vertical leap toward the clouds. Another floor, and Mrs. Thropp would have screamed. The altitude affected her.
Then the thing stopped, and the boy led them down a corridor so long that Adna said, “Looks like we'd be stranded a hundred miles from nowheres.”
The boy turned in at a door at last. He flashed on the lights, set the bags on a bag-rack, hung up the coats, opened a window, adjusted the shade, lighted the lights in Kedzie's room, opened her window, adjusted the shade, and asked if there were anything else.
Adna knew what the little villain meant, but he knew what was expected, and he said, sternly, “Ice-water.”
“Right here, sir,” said the boy, and indicated in the bathroom a special faucet marked “Drinking Water.”
This startled even Adna so much that it shook a dime out of him. The boy sighed and went away. Kedzie surprised his eye as he left. It plainly found no fault with her.
Here in seclusion Mrs. Thropp dared to exclaim at the wonders of modern invention. Kedzie was enfranchised and began to jump and squeal at the almost suffocating majesty. Adna took to himself the credit for everything.
“Well, momma, here we are in New York at last. Here we are, daughter. You got your wish.”
Kedzie nearly broke his neck with her hug, and called him the best father that ever was. And she meant it at the moment, for the moment.
Mrs. Thropp was already making herself at home, loosening her waistband and her corset-laces.
Adna made himself at home, too—that is, he took off his coat and collar and shoes. But Kedzie could not waste her time on comfort while there was so much ecstasy to be had.
She went to the window, shoved the sash high, and—discovered New York. She greeted it with an outcry of wonder. She called to her mother and father to “Come here and looky!”
Her mother moaned, “I wouldn't come that far to look at New Jerusalem.”
Adna yawned noisily and pulled out his watch. His very eyes yawned at it, and he said: “'Levum o'clock. Good Lord! Git to bed quick!”
Kedzie was furious at ending the day so abruptly. She wanted to go out for a walk, and they sent her to her room. She watched at the window as she peeled off her coarse garments and put her soft body into a rough nightgown as ill-cut and shapeless as she was neither. She had been turned by a master's lathe.
She waited till she heard her father's well-known snore seesawing through the panels. Then she went to the window again to gaze her fill at the town. She fell in love with it and told it so. She vowed that she would never leave it. She had not come to a strange city; she had just reached home.
She leaned far out across the ledge to look down at the tremendously inferior street. She nearly pitched head foremost and scrambled back, but with a giggle of bliss at the excitement. She stared at the dark buildings of various heights before her. There was something awe-inspiring about them.
Across a space of roofs was the electric sign of an electric company, partly hidden by buildings. All Kedzie could see of it was the huge phrase LIGHT—HEAT—POWER. She thought that those three graces would make an excellent motto.
She could see across and down into the well of the Grand Central Terminal. On its front was some enormous winged figure facing down the street. She did not know who it was or what street it was. She did not know any of the streets by name, but she wanted to. She had a passionate longing for streets.
Farther south or north, east or west, or whichever way it was, was a tall building with glowing bulbs looped like the strings of evergreen she had helped to drape the home church with at Christmas-time. Here it was Christmas every day—all holidays in one.
Down in the ravine a little in front of her she could read the sign ATHENS HOTEL. She had heard of Athens. It was the capital of some place in her geography. She who had so much of Grecian in her soul was not quite sure of Athens!
In one of the opposite office buildings people were working late. The curtains were drawn, but the casements were filled with light, a honey-colored light. The buildings were like great honeycombs; the dark windows were like the cells that had no honey in them. Light and life were honey. Kedzie wondered what folks they were behind those curtains—who they were, and what were they up to. She bet it was something interesting. She wished she knew them. She wished she knew a whole lot of city people. But she didn't know a soul.
It was all too glorious to believe. She was in New York! imparadised in New York!
“Kedzie! Ked-zee-ee!”
“Yes, momma.”
“Are you in bed?”
“Yes, momma.” She tried to give her voice a faraway, sleepy sound, for fear that her mother might open the door to be sure.
She crept into bed. The lights burned her weary eyes. She could not reach them to put them out.
By the head of her bed was a little toy lamp. A chain hung from it. She tugged at the chain—pouff! Out went the light. She tugged at the chain. On went the light. A magical chain, that! It put the light on and off, both. Kedzie could find no chains to pull the ceiling lights out with. She let them burn.
Kedzie covered her head and yet could not sleep. She sat up quickly. Was that music she heard? Somebody was giving a party, maybe.
She got up and out again and ran barefoot to the hall door, opened it an inch, and peeked through. She saw a man and two ladies swishing along the hall to the elevator. They were not sleepy at all, and the ladies were dressed—whew! skirts short and no sleeves whatever. They really were going to a party.
Kedzie closed the door and drooped back to bed—an awful place to go when all the rest of the world was just starting out to parties.
She flopped and gasped in her bed like a fish ashore. Then a gorgeous whim came to her. She would dive into her element. Light and fun were her element. She came out of bed like a watch-spring leaping from a case. She tiptoed to the parental door—heard nothing but the rumor of slumber.
She began to dress. She put on her extra-good dress.
She had brought it along in the big valise in case of an accident to the every-day dress. When she had squirmed through the ordeal of hooking it up, she realized that its skirts were too long for decency. She pinned them up at the hem.
The gown had a village low-neck—that is, it was a trifle V'd at the throat. Kedzie tried to copy the corsage of the women who passed in the hall. She withdrew from the sleeves, and gathering the waist together under her arms, fastened it as best she could. The revelation was terrifying. All of her chest and shoulders and shoulderblades were bare.
She dared hardly look at herself. Yet she could not possibly deny the fearful charm of those contours. She put her clothes on again and prinked as much as she could. Then she sallied forth, opening and closing the door with pious care. She went to the elevator, and the car began to drop. The elevator-boy politely lowered it without plunge or jolt.
Kedzie followed the sound of the music. The lobbies were thronged with brilliant crowds flocking from theaters for supper and a dance. Kedzie made her way to the edge of the supper-room. The floor, like a pool surrounded by chairs and tables, was alive with couples dancing contentedly. Every woman was in evening dress and so was every man. The splendor of the costumes made her blink. The shabbiness of her own made her blush.
She blushed because her own dress was indecent and immoral. It was indecent and immoral because it was unlike that of the majority. In this parish, conventionality, which is the one true synonym for morality, called for bare shoulders and arms unsleeved. Kedzie was conspicuous, which is a perfect synonym for immoral. If she had fallen through the ceiling out of a bathtub she could not have felt more in need of a hiding-place. She shrank into a corner and sought cover and concealment, for she was afraid to go back to the elevator through the ceaseless inflow of the décolletées.
She throbbed to the music of the big band; her feet burned to dance; her waist ached for the sash of a manly arm. She knew that she could dance better than some of those stodgy old men and block-bodied old women. But she had no clothes on—for dancing.
But there was one woman whom Kedzie felt she could not surpass, a dazzling woman with a recklessly graceful young man. The young man took the woman from a table almost over Kedzie's head. They left at the table a man in evening dress who smoked a big cigar and seemed not to be jealous of the two dancers.
Some one among the spectators about Kedzie said that the woman was Zada L'Etoile, and her partner was Haviland Devoe. Zada was amazing in her postures and gyrations, but Kedzie thought that she herself could have danced as well if she had had that music, that costume, that partner, and a little practice.
When Zada had completed her calisthenics she did not sit down with Mr. Devoe, but went back to the table where the lone smoker sat. Now that she looked at him again, Kedzie thought what an extraordinarily handsome, gloriously wicked-looking, swell-looking man he was. Yet the girl who had danced called him Peterkin—which didn't sound very swell to Kedzie.
He had very little to say to Zada, who did most of the talking. He smiled at her now and then behind his cigar and gave her a queer look that Kedzie only vaguely understood. She thought little of him, though, because the next dance began, and she had a whole riot of costumes to study.
There was a constant movement of new-comers past Kedzie's nook. Sometimes people halted to look the crowd over before they went up the steps, and asked two handsome gentlemen in full-dress suits if they could have a table. The gentlemen—managers, probably, who got up the party—usually said no. Sometimes they looked at papers in their hands and marked off something, and then the people got a table.
By and by two men and an elderly woman dressed like a very youngerly woman paused near Kedzie. Both of the men were tall, but the one called Jim was so tall he could see over the rail, or over the moon, for all Kedzie knew.
The elderly lady said, “Come along, boys; we're missing a love of a trot.”
The less tall of the men said: “Now, mother, restrain yourself. Remember I've had a hard day and I'm only a young feller. How about you, Jim?”
“I'll eat something, but I'm not dancing, if you'll pardon me, Mrs. Duane,” said Jim. “And I'm waiting for Charity Coe. She's in the cloak-room.”
“Oh, come along,” said Mrs. Duane. “I've got a table and I don't want to lose it.”
She started away, and her son started to follow, but paused as the other man caught his sleeve and growled:
“I say, isn't that Pete Cheever—there, right there by the rail? Yes, it is—and with—!”
Then Tom gave a start and said: “Ssh! Here's Charity Coe.”
Both men looked confused; then they brightened and greeted a new batch of drifters, and there was a babble of:
“Why, hello! How are you, Tom! How goes it, Jim? What's the good word, Mary? What you doing here, Charity, and all in black? Oh, I have to get out or go mad.”
Kedzie, eavesdropping on the chatter, wondered at the commonplace names and the small-town conversation. With such costumes she must have expected at least blank verse.
She was interested to see what the stern sentinels would do to this knot of Toms, Jims, and Marys. She peeked around the corner, and to her surprise saw them greeted with great cordiality. They smiled and chatted with the sentinels and were passed through the silken barrier.
Other people paused and passed in or were rejected. Kedzie watched Mr. Cheever with new interest, but not much understanding. He had next to nothing to say. After a time she overheard Zada say to him, raising her voice to top the noise of the band: “Say, Peterkin, see that great big lad over there, the human lighthouse by the sea? Peterkin, you can't miss him—he's just standing up—yes—isn't that Jim Dyckman? Is he really so rich as they say?”
“He's rotten rich!” said Peterkin.
Then Zada said something and pointed. She seemed to be excited, but not half so excited as Peter was. His face was all shot up with red, and he looked as if he had eaten something that didn't sit easy.
Then he looked as if he wanted to fight somebody. He began to chew on his words.
Kedzie caught only a few phrases in the holes in the noisy music.
“When did she get back? And she's here with him? I'll kill him—”
Kedzie stood on tiptoe, primevally trying to lift her ears higher still to hear what followed. She saw Zada putting her hand on Peter's sleeve, and she heard Zada say:
“Don't start anything here. Remember I got a reputation to lose, if you haven't.”
This had the oddest effect on Peter. He stared at Zada, and his anger ran out of his face just as the water ran out of the silver washbowl in the sleeping-car. Then he began to laugh softly, but as if he wanted to laugh right out loud. He put his napkin up and laughed into that.
And then the anger he had lost ran up into Zada's face, and she looked at Peter as if she wanted to kill him.
Now it was Peter who put his hand on her arm and patted it and said, “I didn't mean anything.”
Mean what? Kedzie wondered. But she had no chance to find out, for Peter rose from the table and, dodging around the dancing couples, made his escape. He reappeared in the very nook where Kedzie watched, and called up to Zada:
“Did they see me?”
Zada shook her head. Peter threw her a kiss. She threw him a shrug of contempt. Peter went away laughing. Kedzie waited a few minutes and saw that Mr. Devoe had come to sit with Zada.
After a moment the music was resumed, and Zada rose to dance again with Mr. Devoe—a curious sort of dance, in which she lifted her feet high and placed them carefully, as if she were walking on a floor covered with eggs and didn't want to break any.
But Kedzie's eyes were filling with sand. They had gazed too long at brilliance. She dashed back to the elevator and to her room. She was exhausted, and she pulled off her clothes and let them lie where they fell. She slid her weary frame between the sheets and instantly slept.
Charity Coe danced till all hours with Jim, with Tom Duane and other men, and no one could have fancied that she had ever known or cared what horrors filled the war hospitals across the sea.
She was frantic enough to accept a luncheon engagement with Jim and his mother for the next day. She telephoned him in the morning: “Your angel of a mother will forgive me when you tell her I'm lunching down-town with my husband. The poor boy was detained at his office last night and didn't get my telegram till he got home. When he learned that I had come in and gone out again he was furious with himself and me. I hadn't left word where I was, so he couldn't come running after me. He waited at home and gave me a love of a call-down for my dissipation. It was a treat. I really think he was jealous.”
Jim Dyckman did not laugh with her. He was thinking hard. He had seen Cheever at the Biltmore, and a little later Cheever vanished. Cheever must have seen Charity Coe then. And if he saw her, he saw him. Then why had he kept silent? Dyckman had a chilling intuition that Cheever was lying in ambush for him.
Again he was wrung with the impulse to tell Charity Coe the truth about her husband. Again some dubious decency withheld him.