So there lay Kedzie Thropp of Nimrim, Missouri, the Girl Who Had Never Had Anything. At her side was the Man Who Had Always Had Everything. Under this canopy a duke and duchess had lain.
There was an element of faery in it; yet far stranger things have happened and will happen anew.
There was once a Catholic peasant of Lithuania who died of the plague, leaving a baby named Martha Skovronsky. A Protestant preacher adopted the waif, and while she was yet a girl got rid of her by marrying her to a common Swedish soldier, a sergeant. The Russians bombarded the town; the Swedes fled; and a Russian soldier captured the deserted wife in the ruins of, the city. He passed her on to his marshal. The marshal sold her as a kind of white slave to a prince; the prince took her to Russia as his concubine. Being of a liberal disposition, he shared her capacious heart with the young czar, who happened to be married. Martha Skovronsky bore him a daughter and won his heart for keeps. He had her baptized in the Russian Church as Catherine. He divorced his czaritza that he might marry the foundling. He set on his bride's head the imperial crown studded with twenty-five hundred gems. She became the Empress Catherine I. of Russia and went to the wars with her husband, Peter the Great, saved him from surrendering to the Turks, and made a success of a great defeat for him.
He loved her so well that when she was accused of flirting with another man he had the gentleman decapitated and his head preserved in a jar of alcohol as a mantel ornament for Catherine's room. When he died she reigned in his stead, recalling to her side as a favorite the prince who had purchased her when she was a captive.
Alongside such a fantastic history, the rise of Kedzia Thropp was petty enough. It did not even compare with the rocket-flight of that Theodosia who danced naked in a vile theater in Byzantium and later became the empress of the great Justinian.
Kedzie had never done anything very immoral. She had been a trifle immodest, according to strict standards, when she danced the Grecian dances. She had been selfish and hard-hearted, but she had never sold her body. And there is no sillier lie, as there is no commoner lie, than the trite old fallacy of the popular novels, sermons, editorials, and other works of fiction that women succeed by selling their bodies. It is one of the best ways a girl can find for going bankrupt, and it leads oftener to the dark streets than to the bright palaces.
The credit for Kedzie's staying virtuous, as the word is used, was not entirely hers. Probably if all the truth were known women are no oftener seduced than seducing. Kedzie might have gone wrong half a dozen times at least if she had not somehow inspired in the men she met a livelier sense of protection than of spoliation. She happened not to be a frenzied voluptuary, as are so many of the lost, who are victims of their own physiological or pathological estates before they make fellow-victims of the men they encounter.
The trick of success for a woman who has no other stock in trade than her charm is to awaken the chivalry of men, to promise but not relinquish the last favors till the last tributes are paid.
Meanwhile the old world is rolling into the daylight when women will sell their wits instead of their embraces, and when there will be no more compulsion for a woman to rent her body to pay her house rent than for men to do the same. The pity of it is that these great purifying, equalizing, freedom-spreading revolutions are gaining more opposition than help from the religious and the conservative.
In any case Kedzie Thropp, who slept under a park bench when first she came to town, found the city honorable, merciful, generous, as most girls do who have graces to sell and sense enough to set a high price on them.
And so Kedzie was sheltered and passed on upward by Skip Magruder the lunch-room waiter, and by Mr. Kalteyer the chewing-gum purveyor, by Eben E. Kiam the commercial photographer, by Thomas Gilfoyle the advertising bard, by Ferriday the motion-picture director, on up and up to Jim Dyckman. Every man gave her the best help he could. And even the women she met unconsciously assisted her skyward.
But there is always more sky above, and Kedzie's motto was a relentlessExcelsior!She spurned backward the ladders she rose by, and it was her misfortune (which made her fortune) that whatever rung she stood on hurt her pretty, restless feet. It was inevitable that when at last she was bedded in the best bed in one of America's most splendid homes, she should fall a-dreaming of foreign splendors beyond the Yankee sky.
On the second morning of her honeymoon, when Kedzie woke to find that she was no duchess, but a plain American “Mrs.” that disappointment colored her second impression of the Dyckman mansion.
She had her breakfast in bed. But she had enjoyed that dubious luxury in her own flat. Many poor and lazy and sick people had the same privilege. The things she had to eat were exquisitely cooked and served, when Liliane took them from the footman at the door and brought them to the bedside.
But, after all, there is not much difference between the breakfasts of the rich and of the poor. There cannot be: one kind of fruit, a cereal, an egg or two, some coffee, and some bread are about all that it is safe to put into the morning stomach. Her plutocratic father-in-law was not permitted to have even that much, and her mother-in-law, who was one of the converts to Vance Thompson'sEat and Grow Thinscriptures, had almost none at all.
Busy and anxious days followed that morning. There was a great amount of shopping to do. There were the wedding-announcement cards to order and the list of recipients to go over with Mrs. Dyckman's secretary. There was a secretary to hire for Kedzie, and it was no easy matter for Kedzie to put herself into the woman's hands without debasing her pride too utterly.
There was the problem of dinners to relatives, a reception to guests for the proper exploitation of the new Mrs. Dyckman. There was the embarrassment of meeting people who brought their prejudices with their visiting-cards and did not leave their prejudices as they did their cards.
The newspapers had to have their say, and they did not make pleasant reading to any of the Dyckmans. Kedzie took a little comfort from reading what the papers had to say about Mrs. Cheever's divorce, but she found that Jim was unresponsive to her gibes. This did not sweeten her heart toward Charity.
Kedzie was hungry for friends and playmates, but she could not find them among the new acquaintances she made. She saw curiosity in all their eyes, patronage in those who were cordial, and insult in those who were not effusive. She got along famously with the men, but their manner was not quite satisfactory, either. There was a corrosive something in their flattery, a menace in their approach.
There were the horrible experiences when Mrs. Dyckman called on Mrs. Thropp and the worse burlesque when Mrs. Thropp called on Mrs. Dyckman. The servants had a glorious time over it, and Kedzie overheard Mrs. Dyckman's report of the ordeal to her husband. She was angry at Mrs. Dyckman, but angrier still at her mother.
Kedzie's father and mother were an increasing annoyance to Kedzie's pride and her peace. They wanted to get out to Nimrim and make a triumph through the village. And Jim and Kedzie were glad to pay the freight. But once the Thropps had gloated they were anxious to get back again to the flesh-pots of New York.
The financing of the old couple was embarrassing. It did not look right to Kedzie to have the father and mother of Mrs. Dyckman a couple of shabby, poor relations, and Kedzie called it shameful that her father, who was a kind of father-in-law-in-law to the duchess, should earn a pittance as a claim-agent in the matter of damaged pigs and things.
Jim, like all millionaires, had dozens of poor relations and felt neither the right nor the obligation to enrich them all. There is no gesture that grows tiresome quicker than the gesture of shoving the hand into the cash-pocket, bringing it up full and emptying it. There is no more painful disease than money-spender's cramp.
Kedzie learned, too, that to assure her father and mother even so poor an income as five thousand dollars a year would require the setting aside of a hundred thousand dollars at least in gilt-edged securities. She began to have places where she could put a hundred thousand dollars herself. On her neck was one place, for she saw a woman with a dog-collar of that price, and it made Kedzie feel absolutely nude in contrast. She met old Mrs. Noxon with her infamously costly stomacher on, and Kedzie cried that night because she could not have one for her own midriff.
Jim growled, “When you get a stomach as big as Mrs. Noxon's you can put a lamp-post on it.”
She said he was indecent, and a miser besides.
Meanwhile her own brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts were calling her a miser, a snob, a brute. The whole family wanted to move to New York and make a house-party. They had every right to, too, for did not the Declaration of Independence make all Americans equal?
Relatives whom Kedzie had never heard of and relatives whom she knew all too well turned up in New York with schemes for extracting money from the Dyckman hoard. Kedzie grew nearly wroth enough to stand at the window and empty things on them as they dared to climb the noble steps with their ignoble impertinences.
When she was not repelling repulsive relatives Kedzie was trying to dodge old acquaintances. It seemed that everybody she had ever met had learned of her rise in the world. Her old landladies wrote whining letters. Moving-picture people out of a job asked her for temporary loans.
But the worst trial came one day when she was present at a committee meeting for a war-relief benefit and that fiend of a Pet Bettany proposed that one of the numbers should be Miss Silsby's troupe of Greek dancers. She asked if anybody had any objections, and when nobody spoke she turned to Kedzie and dared to ask her if she had ever seen the dancers.
“Not recently,” Kedzie mumbled, while her very legs blushed under their stockings, remembering how bare they had been in the old days when she was one of the Silsby slaves.
All the other women simmered pleasantly in the uncomfortable situation till Mrs. Charity Cheever, who chanced to be there, came to the rescue amazingly by turning the tables on the Bettany creature:
“Anybody who ever saw you in a bathing-suit, Pet, would know that there were two good reasons why you were never one of the Silsbies.”
Charity could be cruel to be kind. Everybody roared at Pet, whose crooked shanks had kept her modest from the knees down, at least. Kedzie wanted to kiss Charity, but she suffered too much from the reminder of her past.
She fiercely wanted to have been born of an aristocratic family. Of all the vain wishes, the retroactive pluperfect are the vainest, and an antenatal wish is sublimely ridiculous. But Kedzie wished it. This was one of the wishes she did not get.
Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman received many jars of ointment, but her pretty eyes found a fly in every one. She that should have gone about boasting, “I came from a village and slept under a park bench, and now look at me!” was slinking about, wishing that she could rather say: “Oh, see my wonderful ancestors! Without them you could not see me at all.”
Kedzie had her picture printed at last in the “Social World” departments of the newspapers. She had full-page portraits of herself by the mystic Dr. Arnold Genthe and by other camera-masters printed inTown and CountryandThe Spur, Vanity Fair, VogueandHarper's Bazar. But some cursed spite half the time led to the statement under her picture that she had been in the movies. No adjectives of praise could sweeten that. Small wonder she pouted!
And she found the competition terrific. She had thought that when she got into the upper world she would be on a sparsely populated plateau. But she said to Jim:
“Good Lord! this is a merry-go-round! It's so crowded everybody is falling off.”
The most “exclusive” restaurants were packed like bargain-counters. She went to highly advertised balls where there were so many people that the crowd simply oozed and the effort to dance or to eat was a struggle for life.
New York's four hundred families had swollen, it seemed, to four hundred thousand, and the journals of society published countless pictures of the aristocratic sets of everywhere else. There were aristocrats of the Long Island sets—a dozen sets for one small island—the Berkshire set, the Back Bay set, the Rhode Island reds, the Plymouth Rock fowl, the old Connecticut connections, the Bar Harbor oligarchy, the Tuxedonians, the Morristown and Germantown noblesse, the pride of Philadelphia, the Baltimorioles, the diplomatic cliques of Washington, the Virginia patricians, the Piedmont Hunt set, the North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and all the other State sets, the Cleveland coteries, the Chicagocracy, the St. Louis and New Orleans and San Francisco optimates.
Exclusiveness was a joke. And yet Kedzie felt lonely and afraid. She had too many rivals. There were young girls in myriads, beauties by the drove, sirens in herds, millionaires in packs. The country was so prosperous with the privilege of selling Europe the weapons of suicide that the vast destructiveness of the German submarines was a bagatelle.
There was a curious mixture of stupendous Samaritanism and tremendous indifference. Millions were poured into charities and millions were squandered on dissipation.
Kedzie's funds were drawn away astoundingly faster than even Dyckman could replenish them. Hideous accounts of starving legions were brandished before the eyes of all Americans. Every day Kedzie's mail contained circulars about blind soldiers, orphan-throngs, bread-lines in every nation at war. There were hellish chronicles of Armenian women and children driven like cattle from desert to desert, outraged and flogged and starved by the thousand.
The imagination gave up the task. The miseries of the earth were more numerous than the sands, and the eyes came to regard them as impassively as one looks at the night sky without pausing to count the flakes in that snowstorm of stars. One says, “It is a nice night.” One said, “These are terrible times.” Then one said, “May I have the next dance?” or, “Isn't supper ready yet?”
Kedzie tried for a while to lift herself from the common ruck of the aristocracy by outshining the others in charities and in splendors. She soon grew weary of the everlasting appeals for money to send to Europe. She grew weary of writing checks and putting on costumes for bazaars, spectacles, parades, and carnivals. She found herself circumscribed by so much altruism. Her benevolences left her too little for her magnificences.
She grew frantic for more fun and more personal glory. The extravagance of other women dazed her. Some of them had inexhaustible resources. Some of them were bankrupting their own boodle-bag husbands. Some of them flourished ingeniously by running up bills and never running them down.
The competition was merciless. She kept turning to Jim for money. He grew less and less gracious, because her extravagances were more and more selfish. He grew less and less superior to complaints. He started bank-accounts to get rid of her, but she got rid of them with a speed that frightened him. He hated to be used.
Kedzie took umbrage at Mrs. Dyckman's manner. Mrs. Dyckman tried for a while to be good to the child, strove to love her, forgave her for her youth and her humble origin; but finally she tired of her, because Kedzie was not making Jim's life happier, more useful, or more distinguished.
Then one day Mrs. Dyckman asked Kedzie for a few moments of her time. Kedzie was in a hurry to an appointment at her hairdresser's, but she seated herself patiently. Mrs. Dyckman said:
“My dear, I have just had a cable from my daughter Cicely. She has broken down, and her physician has ordered her out of England for a rest. She is homesick, she says, and Heaven knows we are homesick for her.
“I am afraid she would not feel at home in any room but her old one, and I know you won't mind. You can have your choice. Some of the other rooms are really pleasanter. Will you look them over and let me know, so that I can have your things moved?”
“Certainly, my dear m'mah!” said Kedzie.
She walked blindly down the Avenue, snubbing her most precious acquaintances. She was being put out of her room! She was being shoved back to the second place. They'd ask her to eat at the second table next, or have her meals in her room as the secretaries did.
Not much! Having slept in a duchess's bed, Kedzie would not backslide. She would get a bed of her own. She remembered a nice young man she had met, whose people were in real estate. She telephoned to him from the Biltmore.
“Is that you, Polly? This is Kedzie Dyckman. Say, Polly, do you know of a decent house that is for sale or rent right away quick? Oh, I don't care how much it costs, so it's a cracker jack of a house. I suppose I've got to take it furnished, being in such a hurry; or could you get a gang of decorators in and do a rush job? All right, look up your list right away and telephone me here at the hairdresser's.”
From under her cascade of hair she talked to him later and arranged to be taken from place to place. She now dismissed chateaux with contempt as too small, too old-fashioned, lacking in servants' rooms, what not. She had quite forgotten the poor little Mrs. Gilfoyle she had been, and her footsore tramp from cheap flat to cheap flat, ending in the place that cost three hundred dollars a year furnished.
She finally decided not to attempt housekeeping yet awhile, and selected a double-decked apartment of twenty-four rooms and forty-eight baths. And she talked the agent down to a rental of ten thousand dollars a year unfurnished. She would show Jim that she could economize.
When Kedzie told Mrs. Dyckman that she had decided to move, Mrs. Dyckman was very much concerned lest Kedzie feel put out. But she smiled to herself: she knew her Kedzie.
Jim was not at all pleased with the arrangement, but he yielded. In the American family the wife is the quartermaster, selects the camp and equips it. Jim spent more of his time at his clubs than at his duplex home. So did Kedzie. She had been railroaded into the Colony and one or two other clubs before they knew her so well.
When the Duchess Cicely came back Kedzie was invited to the family dinner, of course. Cicely was Kedzie's first duchess, and though Kedzie had met any number of titled people by now, she approached this one with strange apprehensions. She was horribly disappointed. Cicely turned out to be a poor shred of a woman in black, worn out, meager, forlorn, broken in heart and soul with what she had been through.
She was plainly not much impressed with Kedzie, and she said to her mother later: “Poor Jim, he always plays in the rottenest luck, doesn't he? Still, he's got a pretty doll, and what does anything matter nowadays?”
She tried to be polite about the family banquet. But the food choked her. She had seen so many gaunt hands pleading upward for a crust of bread. She had seen so many shriveled lips guzzling over a bowl of soup. She had seen so many once beautiful soldiers who had nothing to eat anything with.
Cicely apologized for being such a death's head at the feast, but she was ashamed of her people, ashamed of her country for keeping out of the war and fattening on it. All the motives of pacifism, of neutrality, of co-operation by financing and munitioning the war, were foul in her eyes. She knew only her side of the conflict, and she cared for no other. She found America craven and indifferent either to its own obligations or its own dangers. She accused the United States of basking in the protection of the British navy and the Allied armies. She felt that the immortal crime of theLusitaniawith its flotsam of dead women and children was more disgraceful to the nation that endured it than to the nation that committed it. She was very, very bitter, and Kedzie found her most depressing company, especially for a dinner-table.
But she excited Jim Dyckman tremendously. He broke out into fierce diatribes against the Chinafying of the United States with its Lilliputian army guarding its gigantic interests. He began to toy with the idea of enlisting in the Canadian army or of joining the American aviators flying for France.
“The national bird is an eagle,” he said, with unwonted poesy, “and the best place an American eagle can fly is over France.”
When Kedzie protested: “But you've got a family to consider. Let the single men go,” Jim laughed louder and longer than he had laughed for weeks.
Cicely smiled her first smile and squeezed Jim's hand.
Kedzie went home early. It was depressing there, too. Now that she had a house of her own, she found an extraordinary isolation in it. Almost nobody called.
When she lived under the Dyckman roof she was included in the cards left by all the callers; she was invited into the drawing-room to meet them; she was present at all the big and little dinners, and breakfasts and teas and suppers.
People who wanted to be asked to more of the Dyckman meals and parties swapped meals and parties with them and included Kedzie in their invitations, since she was one of the family. She went about much in stately homes, and her name was celebrated in what the newspapers insist upon calling the “exclusive” circles.
Kedzie laughed at the extraordinary inclusiveness of their High Exclusivenesses until she got her own home. And then she learned its bitter meaning. It was not that Mrs. Dyckman meant to freeze her out. She urged her to “come in any time.” But, as Kedzie told Jim, “an invitation to come any time is an invitation to stay away all the time.” Kedzie's pride kept her aloof. She made it so hard to get her to come that Mrs. Dyckman sincerely said to Cicely:
“We are too old and stupid for the child. She is glad to be rid of us.”
Mrs. Dyckman planned to call often, but she was an extremely busy woman, doing many good works and many foolish works that were just as hard. She said, “I ought to call,” and failed to call, just as one says, “I ought to visit the sick,” and leaves them to their supine loneliness.
Thus Kedzie floated out of the swirling eddies where the social driftwood jostled in eternal circles. She sulked and considered the formalities of who should call on whom and who owed whom a call. New York life had grown too busy for anybody to pay much attention to the older reciprocities of etiquette.
Almost nobody called on Kedzie. She took a pride in smothering her complaints from Jim, who was not very much alive to her hours. He was busy, too. He had joined the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard, and it absorbed a vast amount of his time. He had gone to the Plattsburg encampment the summer before and had kept up with the correspondence-school work in map problems, and finally he had obtained a second lieutenancy in the Seventh Regiment. It was his little protest against the unpreparedness of the nation as it toppled on the brink of the crater where the European war boiled and smoked.
One midnight after a drill he found Kedzie crying bitterly. He took her in his arms, and his tenderness softened her pride so that she wept like a disconsolate baby and told him how lonely she was. Nobody called; nobody invited her out; nobody took her places. She had no friends, and her husband had abandoned her for his old regiment.
He was deeply touched by her woe and promised that he would take better care of her. But his military engagements were not elastic. He dared not neglect them. They took more and more of his evenings and invaded his days. Besides, he was poor company for Kedzie's mood. He had little of the humming-bird restlessness, and he could not keep up with her flights. She had darted her beak into a flower, and its nectar was finished for her before she had realized that it was a flower.
He felt that what she needed was friends of her own sex. There were women enough who would accept Kedzie's company and gad with her, vie with her quivering speed. But they were not the sort he wanted her to fly with. He wanted her to make friends with the Charity Coe type.
The next day Jim grew desperate enough to call on Charity. She was out, but expected in at any moment. He sat down to wait for her. The room, the books, the piano—all spoke of her lovingly and lovably. He went to the piano and found there the song she had played for him once in Newport—“Go, Lovely Rose!”
He thought it a marvelous coincidence that it should be there on the rack. Like most coincidences, this was not hard to explain. It chanced to be there because Charity played it often. She was lonelier than Kedzie and almost as helpless to amuse herself. She read vastly, but the stories of other people's unhappy loves were a poor anodyne for her own. She thought incessantly of Jim Dyckman. Remembering the song she had played for him, and his bitter comment on the verse, “Tell her that wastes her time and me,” she hunted it out, and the plaintive chimes of Carpenter's music made a knell for her own hopes.
She had played it this very afternoon and wrought herself to such sardonic regret that she forced herself into the open air. She walked a mile or two, but slunk back home again to be rid of the crowds.
She was thinking of Dyckman when she entered her house. She let herself in with her own key, and, walking into the drawing-room, surprised him at the piano, reading the tender elegy of the rose.
“Jim!” she gasped.
“Charity!” he groaned.
Their souls seemed to rush from their bodies and embrace. But their bodies stood fast before the abyss that gaped between them.
She whipped off her glove before she gave him her hand. That meeting of the flesh was so bitter-sweet that their hands unclasped guiltily by a kind of honest instinct of danger.
“What on earth brought you here?” Charity faltered.
“Why—I—Well, you see—it's like this.” He groped for words, but, having no genius in invention, he blurted the truth helplessly: “I came to ask you if you wouldn't—You see, my poor wife isn't making out very well with people—she's lonesome—and blue—and—why can't you lend a hand and make friends with her?”
Charity laughed aloud. “Oh, Jim, Jim, what a darling old numskull you are!”
“In general, yes; but why just now?”
“Your wife will never make friends with me.”
“Of course she will. She's lonely enough to take up with anybody.”
“Thanks!”
“Well, will you call?”
“Have you told her you were going to ask me to?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I'll call, on one condition.”
“What's that, Charity Coe?”
“That you don't tell her. You'd better not, or she'll have my eyes and your scalp.”
“But you'll call, won't you?”
“Of course. Anything you say—always.”
“You're the damnedest decentest woman in the world, Charity Coe; and if—”
He paused. It is just as well not to go iffing about such matters.
Charity stopped short in her laughter. She and Jim stared at each other again across that abyss. It was terribly deep, but only a step over.
They heard the door-bell faintly, and a sense of guilt confused them again. Jim rose and wished himself out of it.
“It's only Prissy Atterbury,” said Charity.
Prissy came in tugging at the ferocious mustaches that only emphasized his lady-like carriage. He paused on the door-sill to stare and gasp, “My Gawd, at it again!”
They did not know what he meant, and he would not explain that he had seen them together ages ago and spread the gossip that they were in intrigue. The coincidence of his recurrence on their scene was not strange, for Charity had been using him as a kind of messenger-boy.
Prissy was that sort. He looked the gentleman and was, a somewhat too gentle gentleman, but very useful to ladies who needed an uncompromising escort and were no longer young enough to permit of chaperonage. He was considered perfectly harmless, but he was a fiend of gossip, and he rejoiced in the recrudescence of the Jim and Charity affair.
Jim confirmed Prissy's eager suspicions by taking himself off with a maximum of embarrassment. Charity went to the door with him—to kiss him good-by, as Prissy gloatingly supposed, but actually to say:
“I'll call on your wife to-morrow.”
“You're an angel,” said Jim, and meant it.
He thought all the way home what an angel she was, and Charity was thinking at the same time what a fool she had been to let Peter Cheever dazzle her to the fact that Jim Dyckman was the one man in the world that she belonged to. She needed just him and he just her.
Sometimes Jim Dyckman was foolish enough to wish that he had been his wife's first lover. But a man has to get up pretty early to be that to any woman. The minxes begin to flirt with the milk-bottle, then with the doctor, and then to cherish a precocious passion for the first rag sailor-doll.
Jim had come as near as any man may to being a woman's first love in the case of Charity, and what good had it done him? He was the first boy Charity had ever played with. Her nurse had bragged about her to his nurse when Charity was just beginning to take notice of other than alimentary things. By that time Jim was a blasé roué of five and his main interest in Charity was a desire to poke his finger into the soft spot in her head.
The nurses restrained him in time, and his proud, young, little mother of then, when she heard of it, decided that he was destined to be a great explorer. His young father sniffed that he was more likely to be a gynecologist. They had a grand quarrel over their son's future. He became none of the things they feared or hoped that he would and he carried out none of his own early ambitions.
His first impressions of Charity had ranged from contempt, through curiosity, to protectiveness and affection. She got his heart first by being helpless. He began by picking up the things she let fall from her carriage or threw overboard and immediately cried for again. She had been human enough to do a good deal of that. When things cumbered her crib or her perambulator she brushed them into space and then repented after them.
Following her marriage to Peter Cheever she did just that with Jim Dyckman. His love cluttered up her domestic serenity and she chucked it overboard. And then she wanted it again. Then her husband chucked her overboard and she felt that it would not be so lonesome out there since Jim would be out there, too. But she found that he had picked himself up and toddled away with Kedzie. And now he could not pick Charity up any more. His wife wouldn't let him.
Jim did not know that he wanted to pick Charity up again till he called on her to ask her to call on his wife and pick Kedzie up out of her loneliness. It was a terrific thought to the simple-minded Jim when it came over him that the Charity Coe he had adored and given up as beyond his reach on her high pedestal was now lying at the foot of it with no worshiper at all.
Jim was the very reverse of a snob. Kedzie had won his devotion by seeming to need it. She had lost it by showing that she cared less for him than for the things she thought he could get for her. And now Charity needed his love.
There were two potent principles in Jim's nature, as in many another man's and woman's; one was an instant eagerness to help anybody in trouble; another was an instant resentment of any coercion. Jim could endure neither bossing nor being bossed; restraint of any sort irked him. There may have been Irish blood in him, but at any rate the saying was as true of him as of the typical Irishman—“You can lead him to hell easier than you can drive him an inch.”
When Jim left Charity's house his heart ached to think of her distressful with loneliness. When he realized that somehow Kedzie was automatically preventing him from helping Charity his marital bonds began to chafe. He began to understand that matrimony was hampering his freedom. He had something to resent on his own behalf.
He had been so troubled with the thought of his shortcomings in devotion to Kedzie that he had not pondered how much he had surrendered. He had repented his inability to give Kedzie his entire and fanatic love. He saw that he had at least given his precious liberty of soul into her little hands.
Galled as he was at this comprehension, he began to think over the lessons of his honeymoon and to see that Kedzie had not given him entirety of devotion any more than he her. Little selfishnesses, exactions, tyrannies, petulances, began to recur to him.
He was in the dangerous frame of mind of a bridegroom thinking things over. At that time it behooves the bride to exert her fascinations and prove her devotion as never before.
Kedzie, knowing nothing of Jim's call on Charity or of his new mood, chanced to be in a most unfortunate humor. She criticized Jim; she declined to be amused or entertained; rebuffed his advances, ridiculed his pretensions of love. She even chose to denounce his mother for her heartlessness, his sister for her neglect, his father for his snobbery. That is always bad business. It puts a husband at bay with his back against the foundation walls of loyalty. They quarreled wonderfully and slept dos-à-dos. They did not speak the next morning.
The next afternoon Jim saw to his dismay that Kedzie was putting on her hat and gloves to go out on a shopping-cruise. If she went she would miss Charity's call.
He knew that he ought not to tell her of Charity's visit in advance. In fact, Charity had pledged him to a benevolent conspiracy in the matter. He put up a flag of truce and resumed diplomatic relations.
With the diplomatic cunning of a hippopotamus he tried to decoy Kedzie into staying at home awhile. His ponderous subtlety aroused Kedzie's suspicions, and at length he confirmed them by desperately confessing:
“Mrs. Cheever is going to call.”
Kedzie's first thought was of Peter Cheever's new wife, who had been taken up by a certain set of those whom one may call loose-principled or divinely tolerant, as one's own prejudices direct. Kedzie could not yet afford to be so forgiving. She flared up.
“Mrs. Cheever! That Zada thing going to call on me? How dare she!”
“Of course not.”
“Oh, the other one, then?”
“Yes.”
“The abandoned one?”
“That's pretty rough. She's been very kind to you and she wants to be again.”
“Where did you learn so much?”
“We were talking about you.”
“Oh, you were, were you? That's nice! And where was all this?”
He indulged in a concessive lie for the sake or the peace. “I met her in the street and walked along with her.”
“Fine! And how did my name come to come up?”
“It naturally would. I was saying that I wished she'd—er—I wished that you and she might be friends.”
“So that you and she could see each other still oftener, I suppose.”
“It's rotten of you to say that.”
“And it's rottener of you to go talking to another woman about your wife.”
“But it was in the friendliest spirit, and she took it so.”
“I see! Her first name is Charity and I'm to be one of her patients. Well, you can receive her yourself. I don't want any of her old alms! I won't be here!”
“Oh yes, you will!”
“Oh no, I won't!”
“You can't be as ill-mannered as that!”
“You talk to me of manners! Why, I've seen manners in your gang that would disgrace a brakeman and a lunch-counter girl on one of dad's railroads.” Her father already had railroads! So many people had them in the crowd she met that Kedzie was not strong enough to deny her father one or two.
Kedzie had taken the most violent dislike to Charity for a dozen reasons, all of them perfectly human and natural, and nasty and unjustifiable, and therefore ineradicable. The first one was that odious matter of obligation. Gratitude has been wisely diagnosticated as a lively sense of benefits to come. The deadly sense of benefits gone by is known as ingratitude.
No one knows just what the divinely unpardonable sin is, but the humanly or at least womanly unpardonable sin is to have known one's husband well before the wife met him, and then to try to be nice to the wife. To have known the wife in her humble days and to have done her a favor makes the sin unmentionable as well as unpardonable.
Jim Dyckman had involved himself in Charity's crime by trying to get Charity to help his wife again. It was bad enough that Charity had got Kedzie a job in the past and had sent Jim Dyckman to make sure that she got it. But for Jim, after Kedzie and he had been married and all, to ask Charity to rescue Kedzie from her social failure was monstrous.
The fact that Jim had felt sorry for his lonely Kedzie marooned on an iceberg in mid-society was humiliating enough; but for Charity to dare to feel sorry for Kedzie, too, and to come sailing after her—Kedzie shuddered when she thought of it.
She fought with her husband until it was too late for her to get away. Charity's card came in while they were still wrangling. Kedzie announced that she was not at home. Jim told the servant, “Wait!” and gave Kedzie a look that she rather enjoyed. It was what they call a caveman look. She felt that he already had his hands in her hair and was dragging her across the floor bumpitty-bump. It made her scalp creep deliciously. She was rather tempted to goad him on to action. It would have a movie thrill.
But the look faded from Jim's eye and the blaze of wrath dulled to a gray contempt. She was afraid that he might call her what she had once overheard Pet Bettany call her—“A common little mucker.” That sort of contempt seared like a splash of vitriol.
Kedzie, like Zada, was a self-made lady and she wanted to conceal the authorship from the great-grandmother-built ladies she encountered.
She pouted a moment, then she said to the servant, “We'll see her.” She turned to Jim. “Come along. I'll go and pet your old cat and get her off my chest.”