CHAPTER IV

Now, of course, Kedzie ought to have been happy. Millions of girls of her age were waking up that morning and calling themselves wretched because their parents or distance or some other cause prevented them from marrying young fellows no more prepossessing asleep than Gilfoyle was.

In Europe that morning myriads of young girls tossed in their beds and shivered lest their young men in the trenches might have been killed or mangled by some shell dropped from an airship or sent over from a cannon or shot up from a mine. And those young men, alive or dead, looked no better than Gilfoyle, if as neat.

In Europe and in Asia, that morning, there were young girls and nuns and wives who were in the power of foreign soldiers whose language they could not speak but could understand all too well—poor, ruined victims of the tidal waves of battle. There were wives, young and old, who had got their husbands back from war blind, crippled, foolish, petulant. They had left part of their souls on the field with their blood.

It was a time when it seemed that nobody had a right to be unhappy who had life, health, shelter, and food. Yet America was perhaps as discontented as Europe.

Kedzie had reason enough to make peace with life. Gilfoyle was as valuable a citizen as she. She might have helped to make him a good business man or a genuine poet. What is poetry, anyway, but the skilful advertisement of emotions? She might at least have made of Gilfoyle that all-important element of the Republic, a respectable, amiable, ordinary man, perhaps the father of children who would be of value, even of glory, to the world.

There was romance enough in their wedding. Others of the couples who had bought licenses that day were rapturous in yet cheaper tenements, greeting the new day with laughter and kisses and ambition to earn and to save, to breed and grow old well.

But to be content with what or whom she had, Kedzie would have had to be somebody else besides Kedzie; and then Gilfoyle would not perhaps have met her or married her. Some man in Nimrim, Mo., would have wed the little stay-at-home.

Kedzie, the pretty fool, apparently fancied that she would have been happy if Gilfoyle had been a handsomer sleeper, and the apartment a handsomer apartment, and the bank-account an inexhaustible fountain of gold.

But would she have been? Peter Cheever was as handsome as a man dares to be, awake or asleep; he had vast quantities of money, and he was generous with it. But Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt in an apartment that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of its velvets and the height of its colors.

Yet Zada was crying this very morning—crying like mad because while she had Cheever she had no marriage license. She tore her hair and bit it, and peeled diamonds off her fingers and threw them at the mirror like pebbles, and sopped up her tears with point-lace handkerchiefs and hurled those to the floor—then hurled herself after them. She was a tremendous weeper, Zada.

And in Newport there was a woman who had a marriage license but no husband. She slept in a room too beautiful for Kedzie to have liked. She did not know enough to like it. She would have found it cold. Charity Cheever found it cold, but she slept at last, though the salt wind blowing in from the sea tormented the light curtains and plucked at the curls about Charity's face. There was salt in the air, and her eyelashes were still wet with tears. She was crying in her sleep, for loneliness.

Kedzie thought her room was small, but it was nearly as big as the bedroom where Jim Dyckman had slept. He had a bigger room, but he had given it to his father and mother, who had come to Newport with him. They were a stodgy old couple enough now, and snoring idyllically in duet after a life of storms and tears and discontents in spite of wealth.

Jim's room was big for a yacht, but the yacht was narrow, built for speed. Thirty-six miles an hour its turbines could shoot it through the sea. It had to be narrow. We can't have everything—especially on yachts.

Jim was barefoot, standing in his pajamas at a port-hole and trying to see the Noxon home, imagining Charity there. He was denied her presence and was as miserable as any waif in a poor farm attic. Money seemed to make no visible difference in his despair.

If he thought of Kedzie at all, he dismissed her as a trifling memory. He wanted Charity, who did not want him. Charity had Cheever, who did not want her. Kedzie had Gilfoyle, and did not want him. It looked as if the old jingle ought to be changed from “Finders keepers, losers weepers” to “Losers keepers, finders weepers.”

The day after Jim Dyckman pulled Kedzie out of the water he made a desperate effort to convince himself that he could be happy without the forbidden Charity Coe.

He breakfasted and played tennis, then swam at Bailey's Beach. Beauties of every type and every conscience were there—pale, slim ash blondes with legs like banister-spindles, and swarthy, slender brunettes of the same Sheraton furniture. There were brunettes of generous ovals, and blondes of heroic rotundities, and every scheme of shape between. Minds were equally diversified—maternal young girls and wicked old ladies, hilarious and sinister, intellectual and athletic, bookish and horsy, a woman of a sort for every mood.

And Jim Dyckman was so wealthy and so simple and so likable and important that it seemed nobody would refuse to accept him. But he wanted Charity.

Later in the afternoon he gave up the effort to snub her and went to the Noxon home. It was about the hour when Kedzie in her new flat had been burning her fingers at the gas-stove. Jim Dyckman was preparing to burn his fingers at the shrine of Mrs. Cheever.

He rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Noxon, though her motor was waiting at the door, as he was glad to note. Mrs. Noxon came down with her hat on and her gloves going on. She pinched Dyckman's cheek and kissed him and said:

“It's sweet of you, Jimmie, to call on an old crone like me, and so promptly. She'll be down in a minute. But you must be on your good behavior, Jim, for they're talking about you, you know. They're bracketing your name with Charity's.”

“The dirty beasts! I'll—”

“You can't, Jim. But you can behave. Cheer her up a little. She's blue about that dog of a Cheever. I've got to go and turn over the money we earned yesterday. Quite a tidy sum, but I'll never give another damned show as long as I live.”

She left, and by and by Charity Coe drifted in, bringing strange contentment with her. She greeted Jim with a weary cordiality. He took her hand and kissed it and laid his other hand over it as usual. She put her other hand on top of his and patted it—then withdrew her slender fingers and sat down.

They glanced at each other and sighed. Jim was miserably informed now that he had made the angelic Charity Coe a theme for gossip. He felt guilty—irritatedly guilty, because he had the name without the game.

Charity Coe was in a dull mood. She was in a love lethargy. Her mind was trying to persuade her heart that her devotion to Peter Cheever was a wasted lealty, but her heart would not be convinced, though it began to be afraid. She was as a watcher who sits in the next room to one who is dying slowly and quietly. She could neither lose hope nor use it.

Jim and Charity sat brooding for a long while. He had outstretched himself on a sumptuous divan. She was seated on a carved chair, leaning against the tall back of it like a figure in high relief. About them the great room brooded colossally.

Gilfoyle would have hated Charity and Jim as perfect examples of the idle rich, too stupid to work, too pampered to be worthy of sympathy. But whether these two had a right to suffer or not, suffer they did.

The mansion was quiet. The other house-guests were motoring or darting about the twilit tennis-court or trading in the gossip-exchange at the Casino. Jim and Charity were marooned in a sleeping castle.

At length Jim broke forth, “For God's sake, sing.”

Charity laughed a little and said, “All right—anything to make you talk.”

She went to the piano and shifted the music. There were dozens of songs about roses. She dropped to the bench and began to play and croon Edward Carpenter's luscious music to Waller's old poem, “Go, Lovely Rose.”

Jim began to talk almost at once. Charity went on singing, smiling a little at the familiar experience of being asked to sing only to be talked over. Jim grew garrulous as he read across her shoulder with characteristic impoliteness.

“Tell her that wastes her time and me,”he quoted; then he groaned: “That's you and me, Charity Coe. But you're wasting yourself most of all.”

He bent closer to peek at the name of the author. “Who's this feller Waller, who knows so much?”

“Hush and listen,” she said, and hummed the song through. It made a new and deep impression on her in that humor. She felt that she had wasted the rosiness of her own life. Girlhood was gone; youth was gone; carefreedom was gone. Like petals they had fallen from the core of her soul. The words of the lyric stabbed her:

Then die that sheThe common fate of all things rareMay read in thee.How small a part of time they shareThat are so sweet and fair.

Her fingers slipped from the keys and, as it were, died in her lap. Jim Dyckman understood a woman for once, and in a gush of pity for her and of resentment for her disprized preciousness caught at her to embrace her. Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped to the fore. She struck and wrenched and drove him off. She was panting with wrath.

“What a rotten thing to do! Go away and don't come near me again. I'm ashamed of you.”

“Me, too,” he snarled.

Jim slunk out and slunk down the marble steps and down the winding walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea, enraged at himself and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over the sea-wall. But there was little danger of Peter Cheever's being found so near his wife.

“Tell her that wastes her time and me,”kept running through Jim's head. He was furious at Charity for wasting so much of him. He had followed her about and moped at her closed door like a stray dog. And she had never even thrown him a bone.

A wave ran up on the beach and seemed to try to embrace the earth, possess it. But it fell away baffled. Over its subsiding pother sprang a new wave with the same bosomful of desire and the same frantic clutching here and there—the same rebuff, the same destruction under the surge of the next and the next. The descending night gave a strange pathos to the eternal vanity.

Jim Dyckman stood and faced the ocean. Once more he discovered that life was too much for him to understand. He was ashamed of himself for his vain endeavor to envelop Charity Coe and absorb her into the deeps of his love. He was most ashamed because he had failed and must slither back into the undertow with the many other men whom Charity had refused to love.

He was ashamed of Charity Coe, too, for squandering her prime and her pride. He was enraged at her blindness to Pete Cheever's duplicity or her complacency with it. He hated Charity for a while—nearly. At any rate he was ashamed of her, ashamed of the world, in a rebel mood.

As he stood wind-blown and spray-flogged and glad to be beaten, a shabby old carriage went by. It was piled to overflowing with some of Miss Silsby's girls taking a seeing-Newport tour on the cheap.

The driver was, or said he had been in his time, coachman to some of the oldest families. He ventured their names with familiarity and knew their houses by heart. He told quaint stories of their ways, how old Mrs. Noxon once swore down a mutinous stableman, how Miss Wossom ran away with her coachman. There was something finely old-fashioned and conservative about that. A new-rich would have run away with a chauffeur.

The driver knew Jim Dyckman's back and pointed him out. The girls laughed, remembering Kedzie's encounter with him. They laughed so loud that Dyckman turned, startled by the racket. But the carriage rolled them away and he did not hear them wondering what had become of Kedzie. The gloaming saddened them, and they felt very sorry for her. But Jim Dyckman gave her no thought.

He was tearing apart his emotions toward Charity and resolving that he must never see her again. In the analytical chemistry of the soul he found that this resolution was three parts hopelessness of winning her, three parts a decent sense of the wickedness of courting another man's woman, three parts resentment at her for treating him properly, and one part a feeling that he would make himself most valuable to her by staying away.

Never a homeless dog slinking through an alley in search of a sidelong ash-barrel to sleep in felt more poverty-stricken, woebegone, than Jim Dyckman. He moped along the stately road, as much afraid of his future as Kedzie had been, trudging the same highway. She had wondered if board and lodging would fail her. This was not Jim Dyckman's fear, but his own was as great, for everybody was some dreadful elbow-companion.

Lucian showed Jupiter himself cowering on his throne in the sky and twiddling his thunderbolt with trembling hand as he wondered what the fates held in store for him, and saw on earth the increasing impudence of the skeptics.

So Jim Dyckman, unconscious that he was following in Kedzie's footsteps, walked miserably on his way. He had no place to go to but the finest yacht in the harbor. He had no money to depend on but a few millions of his own and the Pelion plus Ossa fortunes of his father and mother and their relatives—a mere sierra of gold mountains.

He drifted down to the landing-place and went out to his yacht in a hackney launch. He was received at her snowy sides as if he were the emperor of somewhere come to visit one of his rear admirals. He went up the steps as if he were a school-boy caught playing hooky and going up-stairs to play the bass drum to his mother's slipper.

His mother was on the shade-deck, reclining. The big white wicker lounge looked as if a small avalanche had fallen on it. From the upturned points of her white shoes back to her white hair she was a study in foreshortening that would have interested a draftsman.

Spread out on a huge wicker arm-chair sat Jim's father, also all white, except for his big pink hands and his big pink face. It seemed that he ought to have been smoking a white cigar. As a matter of fact, he had sat so still that half the weed was ash.

When the two moved to greet Jim there was a mighty creaking of wicker. There was another when Jim spilled his own great weight into a chair. A steward in white raised his eyebrows inquiringly and Jim nodded the eighth of an inch. It was the equivalent of ordering a drink.

Dyckman senior turned to Dyckman seniora and said, “Enter Hamlet in the graveyard! Where's the skull, my boy, where's the skull?”

“Let the child alone,” Mrs. Dyckman protested. “It's too hot for fooling. You might kiss your poor mother, though. No, don't get up, just throw me one.”

Jim rose heavily, went to her, bent far down, kissed her, and would have risen again, but her big arms encompassed his neck and held him, uncomfortably, till he knelt by her side and laid his head on her bosom.

He felt exceedingly foolish, but nearer to comfort than he had been for a long while. He wished that he might be a boy again in his mother's arms and be altogether content and carefree as he had been there. As if children were content and carefree! Great Heavens! do they not begin to squirm and kick before they are born?

Mrs. Dyckman was suffocated a trifle by his weight and her own and her corsets, but her heart ached for him somewhere down deep and she whispered:

“Can't he tell his mother what he wants? Maybe she can get it for him.”

He laughed bitterly and extricated himself from her clasp, patted her fat arm, and turned away. His father jealously seized his sleeve.

“Anything serious, old man? You know I'm here.”

Jim squeezed his father's hand and shook his head and turned to the drink which had arrived. He took it from the tray to his chair and sat meditating Newport across the top of his glass. Between the rail of the deck and the edge of the awning he saw a long slice of it. It was vanity and emptiness to him. He spoke at length.

“Fact is, folks, I've got to go back to New York or somewhere.”

“Good Lord!” his father said. “I'm all mixed up in a golf tournament. I think I've got a chance to lick the boots off old Wainwright.”

“Oh dear!” sighed Mrs. Dyckman, “there's to be the most interesting lecture by that Hindu poet. And it's so much more comfortable here than ashore. This boat is the coziest you've ever had.”

“Stay here, darling,” said Jim. “I'll make you a present of her.”

“Oh, that's glorious,” said Mrs. Dyckman. “I've never had a yacht of my own. It's a shame to take it from you, but you can get another. And of course you'll always be welcome here—which is more than a certain other big Dyckman will be if he doesn't look sharp.”

“For the Lord's sake, Jim, don't give it to her. She's the meanest old miser about her own things.” Dyckman senior pushed his chair back against the rail.

“Watch out!” Mrs. Dyckman gasped. “You're scraping the paint off my yacht.”

Jim rose again. “I've just about time to make the last train for the day,” he said.

His mother sat up and clutched at his hand. “Can't I help you, honey? Please let me! What is the matter?”

“The matter is I'm a lunkhead and Newport bores me stiff. That's all. Don't worry. I'll go get the packing started.”

He went along the deck, and his parents helplessly craned their necks after him. His father groaned. Jim had “everything.” There was nothing to get for him, no toy to buy to divert him with.

“He wants a new toy, and he doesn't know what it is,” said the old man.

But Jim wanted an old toy on a shelf too high for his reach. He ran away from the sight of it.

And Dyckman was fleeing to Charity's next resting-place, after all, for she also returned in a few days to New York. She was restive under the goad to return to France. She repented her selfish neglect of the children of all ages she had adopted abroad. One thing held her back—the dread of putting the ocean again between her and her husband.

She thought it small of her to leave so many heroes to suffer without her ministrations, in order that she might prevent one non-hero from having too good a time without her ministrations. But womankind has never been encouraged to adopt the policy of the greatest good to the greatest number. Hardly!

Charity was conscience-smitten, however, and she cast about for a way to absolve herself. Money is the old and ever-reliable way of paying debts physical, moral, and religious. Charity determined to arrange some big fête to bring in a heap of money for the wounded of France, the blind fathers, and the fatherless children.

Everybody was giving entertainments at this time in behalf of some school of victims of the war. The only excuse for amusements in America seemed to be that the profits went to the belligerents in one way or another.

Charity was distressed by the need of an oddity, a novel note which should make itself heard among the clamors for Belgian relief, for Polish relief, for Armenian succor, for German, French, Italian, Russian widows and orphans.

Charity's secretary, Miss Gurdon, made dozens of suggestions, but none of them was big enough to interest Charity. One day a card came up to her with a letter of introduction from Mrs. Noxon:

CHARITY DEAR,—This will acquaint you with a very clever girl, Miss Grace Havender. Her mother was a school friend of mine. Miss Havender arranges to have moving pictures taken of people. They are ever so much quainter than stupid still-life pictures. Posterity ought to see you with your poor wounded soldiers, but meanwhile we really should have a chance to perpetuate you as you are. You are always on the go, and an ordinary picture does not represent you.

Anyway, you will be nice to Miss Havender, for the sake of

Yours affectionately,

Charity did not want a picture of herself, but she went down to get rid of Miss Havender politely and to recommend her to friends of greater passion for their own likenesses. Miss Havender was a forward young person and launched at once into a defense of moving pictures.

“Oh, I admire the movies immensely,” Charity interposed. “We had some of them in the hospitals abroad. If you could have seen that dear Charlie Chaplin convulse a whole ward of battered soldiers and make them forget their pain and their anxieties! He was more of a nurse than a hundred of us. If he isn't a benefactor, I don't know who is. Oh, I admire the movies, but I'd rather see them than be them, you know.

“Still, an idea has just occurred to me. You know I'm terribly in need of a pile of money.”

Miss Havender looked about her and smiled.

“Oh, I don't mean for myself. I have far too much, but for the soldiers. I want something that will bring in a big sum. It occurs to me that if a lot of us got up a story and acted it ourselves, it would be tremendously interesting to—well, to ourselves. And our friends would flock to see it. Amateur performances are ghastly from an artistic standpoint, but they're great fun.

“It just struck me that if we got up a play and had a cast made up of Mr. Jim Dyckman and Tom Duane and Winnie Nicolls and Miss Bettany and the young Stowe Webbs and Mrs. Neff and people like that it would be dreadfully bad art, but much more amusing than if we had all the stars in the world—Mr. Drew and his daughter and his niece Miss Barrymore and her brothers, and Miss Anglin and Miss Bates or Miss Adams or anybody like that. Don't you think so? Or what do you think? Could it be done, or has it been—or what about it?”

Miss Havender gasped. She saw new vistas of business opening before her.

“Yes, it has been done in a small way, and it was great fun, as you say; but it would have been more fun if it hadn't been so crude. What you would need would be a director who was not an amateur. Now, our director is marvelous—Mr. Ferriday. He's the Belasco of the photoplays. He's as great as Griffith. He takes his art like a priest. If you had him you could do wonders.”

“Then we must have him, by all means,” said Charity, smiling a little at the gleam in Miss Havender's eyes. She had a feeling that Miss Havender had a deep, personal interest in Mr. Ferriday. Miss Havender had; most of the women in his environs had. In the first place, he was powerful and could increase or diminish or check salaries. He distributed places and patronage with a royal prerogative. But he was hungry for praise and suffered from the lack of social prestige granted “the new art.”

Miss Havender seconded Charity's motion with enthusiasm. After a long conference it was agreed that Miss Havender should broach the matter to the great Mr. Ferriday while Charity recruited actors and authors.

As Charity rummaged in her hand-bag for a pencil to write Miss Havender's telephone number with, she turned out Kedzie Thropp's crumpled, shabby card. She started.

“Oh, for Heaven's sake! The poor child! I had forgotten her completely. You might be able to do something for her. This Miss Adair is the prettiest thing, and I promised to get her a job. She might photograph splendidly. Won't you try to find her a place?”

“I'll guarantee her one,” said Miss Havender, who was sure that the firm would be glad to put Mrs. Cheever under obligations. The firm was in need of patronage, as Mr. Ferriday's lavish expenditures had crippled its treasury, while his artistic whims had held up the delivery of nearly finished films.

Miss Havender told Charity to send the girl to her at the office any day and she would take care of her. Charity kept Kedzie's card in her hand, and, as soon as Miss Havender was gone, ran to her desk to write Kedzie. She told a pale lie—it seemed a gratuitous insult to confess that she had forgotten.

DEAR MISS ADAIR,—Please forgive my delay in keeping my promise, but I have been unable to find anything likely to interest you till to-day. But now Miss Grace Havender, of the Hyperfilm Company, has just assured me that if you will call on her at her office she will see that you are engaged. You will photograph so beautifully that I am sure you will have a great career. Please don't fail to call on Miss Havender.

Yours, with best wishes,

She sent the letter to the address Kedzie had given her—which was that of Kedzie's abandoned boarding-house.

Since Kedzie, by the time her marriage had reached its first morning-after, had already found her brand-new husband odious, there was small hope of her learning to like him or their poverty better on close acquaintance.

When he left her for his office she missed him, and her heart warmed toward him till he came home again. He always brought new disillusionment with him. He spent his hours out of office in bewailing his luck, celebrating the hardness of the times, and proclaiming the hopelessness of his prospects.

And then one evening he arrived with so doleful a countenance that Kedzie took pity on him. She perched herself on his lap and asked him what was worrying him.

“Nothing much, honey,” he groaned, “except that I've lost my job.”

Kedzie was thunderstruck. She breathed the expletive she learned from her latest companions. “My Gawd!”

Gilfoyle nodded dreadfully: “Business has been bad, anyway. Kalteyer, with his chewing-gum, was about our only big customer, and now he's gone bust. Yep. The bank's shut down on his loans, and he was caught with a mountain of bills on his hands. And the Breathasweeta Chewing Gum stopped selling. People didn't seem to take to the perfume idea.”

“I just hate people!” Kedzie growled, pacing the floor.

Gilfoyle went on, bitterly: “Remember how they all said I was such a genius for thinking up the name 'Breathasweeta,' and the perfumery idea? And how they liked my catch-phrase?”

Kedzie nodded.

Gilfoyle grew sarcastic: “Well, a man's a genius if he succeeds, and a fool if he doesn't. I'm just as sure as ever that there's a fortune in Breathasweeta. But when Kalteyer's bankers got cold feet I lost my halo. He and Kiam have been roasting the life out of me. They blame me! They've kept knocking me and quoting 'Kiss me again—who are you?' and then groaning. It's funny. I loved it when everybody else said it was great. But I didn't care much for it myself, the way they said it.”

Kedzie flung herself on the tremulous wabbly-legged divan. Kedzie didn't like the phrase, either, now. When he had first smitten it from his brain she had thought it an inspiration and him a king. Now it sounded silly, coarse, a little indecent. Of course it had not succeeded. How could he ever have been so foolish as to utter it—“Kiss me again—who are you?” Why, it was vulgar!

Gilfoyle looked dismally incompetent as he drooped and mumbled. It is hard to tell an autobiography of failure and look one's best.

“Didn't you tell him you was—you were married?” queried Kedzie.

“I hadn't the courage.”

“Courage! Well, I like that! So you're fired! Just like me. Funny! And here we are, married and all. My Gaw—”

“Here we are, married and all. They'll let me finish the week, but my goose is cooked, I guess. Jobs are mighty scarce in my line of business. Everybody's poor except the munitions crowd. I wish I knew how to make dynamite.”

Kedzie pushed her wet hair back from her brow and tore her waist open a little deeper at the throat. This was carrying the joke of marriage a little too far even for her patient soul.

Soon Gilfoyle's office was closed to him and he was at home almost all day. That finished him with Kedzie.

He had not improved on connubial acquaintance. He was lazy and sloven of mornings, and since he had no office to go to he grew more neglectful of his appearance than ever. His end-to-end cigarettes got on Kedzie's nerves and cost a nagging amount of money, especially as she could not learn to like them herself.

He tried to write poetry for the magazines and permanently destroyed what little respect Kedzie had for the art. Hunting for some little love-word that was unimportant when found threw him into frenzies of rage. He went about mumbling gibberish.

“What in hell rhymes withheaven?” he would snarl. “Beven, ceven, Devon, fevon, gevin, given—” And so on to “zeven.” Then “breven, creven, dreven” and “bleven, eleven, dleven” and “pseven, spleven, threven” and so forth.

At length he would hurl his pen across the room, pull at his hair, and light another cigarette. Cigarette always rhymed with cigarette.

After a day or two of this drivel he produced a brief lyric with a certain fleetness of movement; it had small freight to carry. He took it to a number of editors he knew, and one of them accepted it as a kindness.

Kedzie was delighted till she heard that it would bring into the exchequer about seven dollars when the check came, which would be in two weeks.

When Gilfoyle was not fighting at composition he was calling the editors hard names and deploring the small remuneration given to poets by a pork-packing nation. Or he would be hooting ridicule at the successful poets and growing almost as furious against the persons addicted to the fashionablevers libreas he was against the wealthy classes.

It seemed to Kedzie that nothing on earth was less important than prosody, and that however badly poets were paid, they were paid more than they earned. She grew so lonely for some one to talk to that she decided to call on old Mrs. Jambers at the boarding-house. She planned to stop in at dinner-time, in the hope of being asked to sit in at a real meal. The task of cooking what she could afford to buy robbed her of all appetite, and she was living mainly on fumes of food and gas.

She was growing thinner and shabbier of soul, and she knew it. She put off the call till she could endure her solitude no longer; then she visited Mrs. Jambers. A new maid met her at the door and barred her entrance suspiciously. Mrs. Jambers was out. So was Mrs. Bottger. So were the old boarders that Kedzie knew. New boarders had their rooms, Kedzie was exiled indeed.

She turned away, saying: “Tell Mrs. Jambers that Anita Adair stopped to say hello. I was just passing.”

“Anita Adair?” said the maid. “You was Anita Adair, yes? Wait once. It is a letter for you by downstairs.”

She closed the door in Kedzie's face. Some time later she came back and gave Anita the letter from Charity. It was several days old. She read it with amazement. The impulse to tear it up as she had torn up Charity's card in Newport did not last long. She went at once to a drugstore and looked up the telephone number and the address of the Hyperfilm Company. She repaid the druggist with a smile and a word of thanks; then she took a street-car to the office.

Miss Havender, who was also a scenario-writer and editor, was very busy. She had an executive manner that strangely contradicted her abilities to suffer under the pangs of love and unrequited idolatry. But then, business men are no more immune to the foolish venom on Cupid's arrows than poets—perhaps less, since they have no outlet of rhapsody. That was one of the troubles with Kedzie's poet. By the time Gilfoyle had finished a poem of love he was so exhausted that any other emotion was welcome, best of all a good quarrel and the healthful exercise of his poetic gifts for hate. He could hate at the drop of a hat.

When the office-boy brought Charity's letter of introduction to Miss Havender with the verbal message that Miss Adair was waiting outside Miss Havender nodded. She decided to procure this Miss Adair a good job in order to curry favor with Mrs. Cheever. She would advise Mr. Ferriday to pay her marked attention, too.

But when she caught sight of Kedzie running the gantlet of the battery of authors and typists, and noted how pretty she was, Miss Havender decided that it would not be good for Mr. Ferriday to pay marked attention to this minx. He had a habit of falling in love with women more ardently than with scenarios. He was a despot with a scenario, and he could quickly make a famous novel unrecognizable by its own father or mother. But a pretty woman could rule him ludicrously while her charm lasted.

Miss Havender would gladly have turned Kedzie from the door, but she did not dare. She had promised Mrs. Cheever to give the girl a job. But she had not promised what kind of job it should be.

She received Kedzie with such brusqueness that the frightened girl almost fell off the small rim of chair she dared to occupy. She offered Kedzie a post as a typist, but Kedzie could not type; as a film-cutter's assistant, but Kedzie had never seen a film; as a printing-machine engineer or a bookkeeper's clerk, but Kedzie had no ability to do things. She could merely look things.

Finally Miss Havender said: “I'm awfully sorry, Miss Adair, but the only position open is a place as extra woman. There is a big ballroom scene to be staged tomorrow, and a low dance-hall the next day, and on Monday a crowd of starving Belgian peasants. We could use you in those, but of course you wouldn't care to accept the pay.”

She said this hopefully. Kedzie answered, hopelessly:

“What's the pay?”

“Three dollars.”

“I'll take it.”

Miss Havender accepted the inevitable, gave her the address of the studio—far up-town in the Bronx—and told her to report at eight the next morning.

Kedzie went back to her home in a new mood. She was the breadwinner now, if not a cake-earner. Gilfoyle was depressed by her good news, and she was indignant because he was not happy. The poor fellow was simply ashamed of his own inability to support her in the style she had been accustomed to dreaming about.

Kedzie was sullen at having to get the dinner that night. The hot water would not help to give her hands the ballroom texture. The next morning she had to leave early. Gilfoyle was too tired of doing nothing to get up, and she resolved to buy her breakfast ready-made outside. Her last glance at her husband with his frowsy hair on his frowsy pillow infuriated her.

The experience at the big studio assuaged her wrath against life. It was something new, and there was a thrill in the concerted action of the crowds. She wore a rented ball-gown which did not fit her. Seeing how her very shoulders winced at their exposure, one would not have believed that she was a graduate of the Silsby school of near to nature in next to nothing.

She danced with an extra man, Mr. Clarence Yoder, a portly actor out of work. He was a costume-play gentleman, and Kedzie thought him something grand. He found her an entrancing armload. He was rather aggressive and held her somewhat straitly to his exuberant form, but he gave her so much information that she did not snub him. She did not even tell him that she was married. Indeed, when at the close of a busy day he hinted at a willingness to take her out to see a picture that evening, she made other excuses than those that actually prevented her accepting. She spent a doleful evening at home with her dour husband and resented him more than ever.

On the second day Kedzie was a slum waif and did not like it. She pouted with a sincerity that was irresistible.

Mr. Ferriday did not direct the crowd scenes in these pictures. His assistant, Mr. Garfinkel, was the slave-driver. Mr. Yoder cleverly called him “Simon Legree.” Kedzie did not know who Mr. Legree was, but she laughed because Mr. Yoder looked as if he wanted her to laugh, and she had decided that he was worth cultivating.

During the course of the day, however, Mr. Garfinkel fell afoul of Mr. Yoder because of the way he danced with Kedzie. It was a rough dance prettily entitled “Walking the Dog.” Mr. Yoder, who did a minuet in satin breeches to his own satisfaction, pleased neither himself nor Mr. Garfinkel in the more modern expression of the dancer's art.

Mr. Garfinkel called him a number of names which Mr. Yoder would never have tolerated if he had not needed the money. He quivered with humiliation and struggled to conform, but he could not please the sneering overseer. He sought the last resort of those persecuted by critics:

“Maybe you can do better yourself!”

“Well, I hope I choke if I can't,” Garfinkel said as he passed the manuscript to the camera-man and summoned Kedzie to his embrace. “Here, Miss What's-your-name, git to me.”

Kedzie slipped into his clutch, and he took her as if she were a sheaf of wheat. His arms loved her lithe elasticities. He dragged her through the steps with a wondering increase of interest. “Well, say!” he muttered for her private consumption, “you're a little bit of all right. I'm not so worse myself when I have such help.”

He danced with her longer than was necessary for the demonstration. Then he reluctantly turned her over to Mr. Yoder. Kedzie did not like Mr. Yoder any more. She found him fat and clumsy, and his hands were fat and clammy.

Mr. Garfinkel had to show him again.

Kedzie could not help murmuring up toward his chin, “I wish I could dance with you instead of him.”

Garfinkel muttered down into her topknot: “You can, girlie, but not before the camera. There's a reason. How about a little roof garden this evening, huh?”

Kedzie sighed, “I'm sorry—I can't.”

Garfinkel realized that the crowd was sitting up and taking notice, and so he flung Kedzie back to Yoder and proceeded with the picture. He was angry at himself and at Kedzie, but Kedzie was angered at her husband, who was keeping her from every opportunity of advancement. Even as he loafed at home he prevented her ambitions. “The dog in the manger!” she called him.

Garfinkel paid her no further attention except to take a close-up of her standing at a soppy table and drinking a glass of stale beer with a look of desperate pathos. She was supposed to be a slum waif who had never had a mother's care. Kedzie had had too much of the same.

The next day was a Saturday. Kedzie did not work. She was lonely for toil, and she abhorred the flat and the neighbors. The expressive parrot was growing tautological. Kedzie went out shopping to be rid of Gilfoyle's nerves. He was in travail of another love-jingle, and his tantrums were odious. He kept repeatingloveanddoveandabove, andtender, slender, offend her, defender, andkissandblisstill the very words grew gibberish, detestable nonsense.

Kedzie wandered the shops in a famine of desire for some of the new styles. Her pretty body cried out for appropriate adornment as its birthright. She was ashamed to go to the studio a third time in the same old suit. She ordered one little slip of a dress sent home “collect.” She had hoarded the remnant of her Silsby dollars. When she reached home the delivery-wagon was at the curb and the man was up-stairs. Gilfoyle greeted Kedzie with resentment.

“What's this thing? I've got no money to pay it. You know that.”

“Oh, I know that well,” said Kedzie, and she went to the kitchen, where she surreptitiously extracted the money from the depths of the coffee-canister.

She paid for the dress and put it on. But she would not let Gilfoyle see her in it. She did not mind buying his cigarettes half so much as she minded paying for her own clothes. It outraged the very foundation principles of matrimony to have to pay for her own clothes.

Sunday was an appallingly long day to get through. She was so frantic for diversion that she would have gone to church if she had had anything fashionable enough to worship in. In the afternoon she went out alone and sat on a bench in upper Riverside Drive. A number of passers-by tried to flirt with her, but it was rather her bitterness against men than any scruple that kept her eyes lowered.

She would have been excited enough if she had known that the pictures in which she played a small part were being run off in the projection-room at the studio for Mr. Ferriday's benefit.

Everybody was afraid of him. The heads of the firm were hoping that he would approve the reels and not order them thrown out. They were convinced that they would have to break with him before he broke them. Mr. Garfinkel was hoping for a word of approval from the artistic tyrant.

But Ferriday was fretful and sarcastic about everything. Suddenly Miss Havender noted that he was interested, noted it by the negative proof of his sudden repose and silence. She could tell that he was leaning forward, taut with interest. She saw that Anita Adair was floating across the screen in the arms of Mr. Yoder.

There followed various scenes in which Kedzie did not appear, close-up pictures of other people. Ferriday fell back growling. Then he came bolt upright as the purring spinning-wheel of the projection machine poured out more of Kedzie.

Suddenly he shouted through the dark: “Stop! Wait! Go back! Give us the last twenty feet again. Who is that girl—that dream? Who is she, Garfinkel?”

“I don't know her name, sir.”

“Don't know her name! You wouldn't! Well, the whole world will know her name before I get through with her. Who is she, anyway?”

Miss Havender spoke. “Her name is Adair—Anita Adair.”

“Anita Adair, eh? Well, where did she come from? Who dug her up?”

“I did,” said Miss Havender.

“Good for you, old girl! She's just what I need.” And now he studied again the scene in which Kedzie took down the draught of bitter beer, and there was a superhuman vividness in the close-up, with its magnified details in which every tiny muscle revealed its soul.

“Look at her!” Ferriday cried. “She's perfect. The pathos of her! She wants training, like the devil, but, Lord, what material!”

He was as fanatic as a Michelangelo finding in a quarry a neglected block of marble and seeing through its hard edges the mellow contours of an ideal. He was as impatient to assail his task and beat off the encumbering weight.

Back to IndexNext