The word “breakfast” was magic stimulant to the Thropps. Kedzie put on her clothes, and the family went down to the elevator together.
They found their way to the Tudor Room, where a small number of men, mostly barricaded behind newspapers, ate briskly. A captain showed the Thropps to a table; three waiters pulled out their chairs and pushed them in under them. Another laid large pasteboards before them. Another planted ice-water and butter and salt and pepper here and there.
Adna had traveled enough to know that the way to order a meal in a hotel is to give the waiter a wise look and say, “Bring me the best you got.”
This waiter looked a little surprised, but he said, “Yes, sir. Do you like fruit and eggs and rolls, maybe?”
“Nah,” said Adna. “Breakfast's my best meal. Bring us suthin' hearty and plenty of it. I like a nice piece of steak and fried potatoes and some griddle-cakes and maple-surrup, and if you got any nice sawsitch—and the wife usually likes some oatmeal, and she takes tea and toast, but bring me some hot bread. And the girl—What you want, Kedzie? The same's I'm takin'? All right. Oh, some grape-fruit, eh? She wants grape-fruit. Got any good? All right. I guess I'll take some grape-fruit, too; and let me see—I guess that'll do to start on—Wait! What's that those folks are eatin' over there? Looks good—spring chicken—humm! I guess you'd like that better'n steak, ma? Yes. She'd rather have the chicken. All right, George, you hustle us in a nice meal and I'll make it all right with you. You understand.”
Adna called all waiters “George.” It saved their feelings, he had heard.
The waiter bowed and retired. Adna spoke to his family:
“Since we pay the same, anyway, might's well have the best they got.”
The waiter gave the three a meal fitter for the ancient days when kings had dinner at nine in the morning than for these degenerate times when breakfast hardly lives up to its name.
The waiter and his cronies stood at a safe distance and watched the Thropps surround that banquet. They wondered where the old man got money enough to buy such breakfasts and why he didn't spend some of it on clothes.
The favorite theory was that he was a farmer on whose acres somebody had discovered oil or gold and bought him out for a million. Mr. Thropp's proper waiter hoped that he would be as extravagant with his tip as he was with his order. He feared not. His waiterly intuition told him the old man put in with more enthusiasm than he paid out.
At last the meal was over. The Thropps were groaning. They had not quite absorbed the feast, but they had wrecked it utterly. Mr. Thropp found only one omission in the perfect service. The toothpicks had to be asked for. All three Thropps wanted them.
While Thropp was fishing in his pocket for a quarter, and finding only half a dollar which he did not want to reveal, the waiter placed before him a closely written manuscript, face down, with a lead-pencil on top of it.
“What's this?” said Thropp.
“Will you please to sign your name and room number, sir?” the waiter suggested.
“Oh, I see,” said Thropp, and explained to his little flock. “You see, they got to keep tabs on the regular boarders.”
Then he turned the face of the bill to the light. His pencil could hardly find a place to put his name in the long catalogue. He noted a sum scrawled in red ink: “$11.75.”
“Wha-what's this?” he said, faintly.
The surprised waiter explained with all suavity: “The price of the breakfast. If it is not added correctlee—”
Thropp added it with accurate, but tremulous, pencil. The total was correct, if the items were. He explained:
“But I'm a regular—er—roomer here. I pay by the week.”
“Yes, sir—if you will sign, it will be all right.”
“But that don't mean they're going to charge me for breakfast? 'Levum dollars and seventy-five cents for—for breakfast?—for a small family like mine is? Well, I'd like to see 'em! What do they think I am!”
The waiter maintained his courtesy, but Adna was infuriated. He put down no tip at all. He lifted his family from the table with a yank of the eyes and snapped at the waiter:
“I'll soon find out who's tryin' to stick me.—you or the proprietor.”
The old man stalked out, followed by his fat ewe and their ewe lamb. Adna's very toothpick was like a small bayonet.
His wife and daughter hung back to avoid being spattered with the gore of the unfortunate hotel clerk. The morning trains were unloading their mobs, and it was difficult to reach the desk at all.
When finally Adna got to the bar he had lost some of his running start. With somewhat weakly anger he said to the first clerk he reached:
“Looky here! I registered here last night, and another young feller was here said the two rooms would be twelve dollars.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, they sent me up to roost on a cloud, but I didn't kick. Now they're tryin' to charge me for meals extry. Don't that twelve dollars include meals?”
“Oh no, sir. The hotel is on the European plan.”
Adna took the shock bravely but bitterly: “Well, all I got to say is the Europeans got mighty poor plans. I kind of suspicioned there was a ketch in it somewheres. After this we'll eat outside, and at the end of the week we'll take our custom somewheres else. Maybe there was a joke in that twelve dollars a week for the rooms, too.”
“Twelve dollars a week! Oh no, sir; the charge is by the day.”
Adna's knees seemed to turn to sand and run down into his shoes. He supported himself on his elbows.
“Twelve dollars a day—for those two rooms on the top of the moon?”
“Yes, sir; that's the rate, sir.”
Adna was going rapidly. He chattered, “Ain't there no police in this town at tall?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I've heard they're the wust robbers of all. We'll see about this.” He went back to his women folk and mumbled, “Come on up-stairs.”
They followed, Mrs. Thropp murmuring to Kedzie: “Looks like poppa was goin' to be sick. I'm afraid he et too much of that rich food.”
The elevator flashed them to their empyrean floor. Adna did not speak till they were in their room and he had lowered himself feebly into a chair. He spoke thickly:
“Do you know what that Judas Iscariot down there is doin' to us? Chargin' us twelve dollars a day for these two cubby-holes—a day! Twelve dollars a day! Eighty-four dollars a week! And that breakfast was 'levum dollars and seventy-five cents! If I'd gave the waiter the quarter I was goin' to, it would have made an even dozen dollars! for breakfast! I don't suppose anybody would ever dast order a dinner here. Why, they'd skin a millionaire and pick his bones in a week. We'd better get out before they slap a mortgage on my house.”
“Well, I just wouldn't pay it,” said Mrs. Thropp. “I'd see the police about such goings-on.”
“The police!” groaned Thropp. “They're in cahoots with the burglars here. This hull town is a den of thieves. I've always heard it, and now I know it.”
He was ashamed of himself for being taken in so. He began to throw into the valises the duds that had been removed.
Throughout the panic Kedzie had stood about in a kind of stupor. When her father tapped her on the shoulder and repeated his “C'm'on!” she turned to him eyes all tears glistening like bubbles, and she whimpered:
“Oh, daddy, the view! The nice things!”
Adna snapped: “View? Our next view will be the poorhouse if we don't hustle our stumps. We got to get out of here and find the cheapest place they is in town to live or go back home on the next train.”
Kedzie began to cry, to cry as she had cried when she wept in her cradle because candy had been taken from her, or a box of carpet-tacks, or the scissors that she had somehow got hold of.
Adna dropped his valises with a thud. He began to upbraid her. He had endured too much. He had still his bill to pay. He told her that she was a good-for-nothin' nuisance and he wished he had left her home. He'd never take her anywheres again, you bet. Kedzie lost her reason entirely. She was shattered with spasms of grief aggravated by her mother's ferocity and her father's. She could not give up this splendor. She would not go to a cheap place to live. She would never go back home. She would rather die.
Her mother boxed her ears and shook her and scolded with all her vim. But Kedzie only shook out more sobs till they wondered what the people next door would think. Adna was wan with wrath. Kedzie was afraid of her father's look. She had a kind of lockjaw of grief such as children suffer and suffer for.
All she would answer to her father's threats was: “I won't! I won't! I tell you I won't!”
Her cheeks were blubbered, her nose red, her mouth swollen, her hair wet and stringy. She gulped and swallowed and beat her hands together and stamped her feet.
Adna glared at her in hatred equal to her own for him. He said to his wife: “Ma, we got to go back to first principles with that girl. You got to give her a good beatin'.”
Mrs. Thropp had the will but not the power. She was palsied with rage. “I can't,” she faltered.
“Then I will!” said Adna, and he roared with ferocity, “Come here to me, you!”
He put out his hand like a claw, and Kedzie retreated from him. She stopped sobbing. She had never been so frightened. She felt a new kind of fright, the fright of a nun at seeing an altar threatened with desecration. She had not been whipped for years. She had grown past that. Surely her body was sacred from such infamy now.
“Come here to me, I tell you!” Adna snarled, as he pursued her slowly around the chairs.
“You better not whip me, poppa,” Kedzie mumbled. “You better not touch me, I tell you. You'll be sorry if you do! You better not!”
“Come here to me!” said Adna.
“Momma, momma, don't let him!” Kedzie whispered as she ran to her mother and flung herself in her arms for refuge.
Mrs. Thropp then lost a great opportunity forever. She tore the girl's hands away and handed her over to her father. And he, with ugly fury and ugly gesture, seized the young woman who had been his child and dragged her to him and sank into a chair and wrenched and twisted her arms till he held her prone across his knees. Then he spanked her with the flat of his hand.
Kedzie made one little outcry; then there was no sound but the thump of the blows. Adna sickened soon of his task, and Kedzie's silence and non-resistance robbed him of excuse. He growled:
“I guess that'll learn you who's boss round here.”
He thrust her from his knees, and she rolled off to the floor and lay still. She had not really swooned, but her soul had felt the need of withdrawing into itself to ponder this awful sacrilege.
Her mother knew that she had not fainted. She was sick, too, and blamed Kedzie for the scene. She spurned the girl with her foot and said:
“You get right up off that floor this minute. Do you hear?”
Kedzie's soul came back. It had made its decision. It gathered her body together and lifted it up to its knees and then erect, while the lips said, “All right, momma.”
She groped her way into the bathroom and washed her face, and straightened her hair and came forth, a dazed and pallid thing. She took up the valise her father gave her and followed her mother out, pausing to pass her eyes about the beautiful room and the window where the peaks of splendor were. Then she walked out, and her father locked the door.
Kedzie saw that the elevator-boy saw that she had been crying, but what was one shame extra? She had no pride left now, and no father and no mother, no anybody.
Adna refused the offices of the pages who clutched at the baggage. He went to the cashier and paid the blood-money with a grin of hate. Then he gathered up his women and his other baggage and set out for the station. He would leave all the baggage there while he hunted a place to stop.
They could not find the tunnelway, but debouched on the street. Crossing Vanderbilt Avenue was a problem for village folk heavy laden. The taxicabs were hooting and scurrying.
Adna found himself in the middle of the street, entirely surrounded by demoniac motors. His wife wanted to lie down there and die. Adna dared neither to go nor to stay. Suddenly a chauffeur of an empty limousine, fearing to lose a chance to swear at a taxi-driver, kept his head turned to the left and steered straight for the spot where the Thropps awaited their doom.
Adna had his wife pendent from one arm and a valise or two from the other. Kedzie carried a third valise. Her better than normal shoulders were sagged out of line by its weight.
When Adna saw the motor coming he had to choose between dropping his valise or his wife. Characteristically, he saved his valise.
In spite of his wife's squawking and tugging on his left arm, he achieved safety under the portico of the Grand Central Terminal. He looked about for Kedzie. She was not to be seen. Adna saw the taxicab pass over the valise she had carried. It left no trace of Kedzie. Her annihilation was uncanny. He gaped.
“Where's Kedzie?” Mrs. Thropp screamed.
A policeman checked the traffic with uplifted hand. Adna ran to him. Mrs. Thropp told him what had happened.
“I saw the goil drop the bag and beat it for the walk,” said the officer.
“Which way'd she go?”
“She lost herself in the crowd,” said the officer.
“She was scared out of her wits,” Mrs. Thropp sobbed.
The officer shook his head. “She was smilin' when I yelled at her. It looks to me like a get-away.”
“A runaway?” Mrs. Thropp gasped.
“Yes'm. I'd have went after her, but I was cut off by a taxi.”
The two old Thropps stood staring at each other and the unfathomable New York, while the impatient chauffeurs squawked their horns in angry protest, and train-missers with important errands thrust their heads out of cab windows.
The officer led his bewildered charges to the sidewalk, motioned the traffic to proceed, and beckoned to a patrolman. “Tell your troubles to him,” he said, and went back into his private maelstrom.
The patrolman heard the Thropp story and tried to keep the crowd away. He patted Mrs. Thropp's back and said they'd find the kid easy, not to distoib herself. He told the father which station-house to go to and advised him to have the “skipper” send out a “general.”
Thropp wondered what language he spoke, but he went; and a soft-hearted walrus in uniform sprawling across a lofty desk took down names and notes and minute descriptions of Kedzie and her costume. He told the two babes in the wood that such t'ings happened constant, and the goil would toin up in no time. He sent out a general alarm.
Mrs. Thropp told him the whole story, putting all the blame on her husband with such enthusiasm that the sympathy of everybody went out to him. Everybody included a number of reporters who asked Mrs. Thropp questions and particularly desired a photograph of Kedzie.
Mrs. Thropp confessed that she had not brought any along. She had never dreamed that the girl would run away. If she had have, she wouldn't have brought the girl along, to say nothing of her photograph.
The amiable walrus in the cap and brass buttons recommended the Thropps to a boarding-house whose prices were commensurate with Adna's ideas and means, and he and his wife went thither, where they told a shabby and sentimental landlady all their troubles. She reassured them as best she could, and made a cup of tea for Mrs. Thropp and told Mr. Thropp there was a young fellow lived in the house who was working for a private detective bureau. He'd find the kid sure, for it was a small woild, after all.
There was a lull in the European-war news the next day—only a few hundreds killed in an interchange of trenches. There was a dearth of big local news also. So the morning papers all gave Kedzie Thropp the hospitality of their head-lines. The illustrated journals published what they said was her photograph. No two of the photographs were alike, but they were all pretty.
The copy-writers loved the details of the event. They gave the dialogue of the Thropps in many versions, all emphasizing what is known as “the human note.”
Every one of them gave due emphasis to the historic fact that Kedzie Thropp had been spanked.
The boarding-house was shaken from attic to basement by the news. The Thropps read the papers. They were astounded and enraged at gaining publicity for such a deed. They visited the walrus in his den. But there was no word of Kedzie Thropp. The sea of people had opened and swallowed the little girl. Her mother wondered where she had slept and if she were hungry and into whose hands she had fallen. But there was no answer from anywhere.
People who call a child in from All Outdoors and make it their infant owe it to their victim to be rich, brilliant, and generous. Kedzie Thropp's parents were poor, stupid, and stingy.
They were respectable enough, but not respectful at all. Children have more dignity than anybody else, because they have not lived long enough to have their natal dignity knocked out of them.
Kedzie's parents ought to have respected hers, but they subjected her to odious humiliation. When her father threatened to spank her—and did—and when her mother aided and abetted him, they forfeited all claim to her tolerance. The inspiration to run away was forced on Kedzie, though she would have said that her parents ran away from her first.
Kedzie had preferred her own life to the security of her valise. She dropped the bag without hesitation. When the taxicab parted her family in the middle, Kedzie ran to the opposite sidewalk. She saw a policeman dashing into the thick of the motors. Her eye caught his. He beckoned to her that he would ferry her across the torrent. He was a nice-looking man, but she shook her head at him. She smiled, however, and hastened away.
Freedom had been forced on her. Why should she relinquish the boon?
She lost herself in the crowd. She had no purpose or destination, for the whole city was a mystery to her. Soon she noted that part of the human stream flowed down into the yawning maw of a Subway kiosk as the water ran out of the bath-tub in the hotel. She floated down the steps and found herself in a big subterrene room with walls tiled like those of the hotel bathroom. Everybody was buying tickets from a man in a funny little cage.
Kedzie had a hand-bag slung at her wrist. In it was some small money. She fished out a nickel and slid it across the glass sill as the others did.
Beneath her eyes she saw a card that asked, “How many?” She said, “One.”
The doleful ticket-seller was annoyed at the tautology of passing him a nickel and saying, “One!” He shot out an angry glance with the ticket, but he melted at sight of Kedzie's lush beauty, recognized her unquestionable plebeiance, and hailed her with a “Here you are, Cutie.”
Kedzie was not at all insulted. She gave him smile for smile, took up her pasteboard and followed the crowd through the gate.
The ticket-chopper yelled at the back of her head, “Here, where you goin'?”
She turned to him, and his scowl relaxed. He pointed to the box and pleaded:
“Put her there, miss, if you please.”
She smiled at the ticket-chopper and dropped the flake into the box. She moved down the stairway as an express rolled in. People ran. Kedzie ran. They squeezed in at the side door, and so did Kedzie. The wicker seats were full, and so Kedzie stood. She could not reach the handles that looked like cruppers. Men and women saw how pretty she was. She was so pretty that one or two men nearly rose and offered her their seats. When the train whooped round the curve beneath Times Square Kedzie was spun into the lap of a man reading a prematurely born “Night Edition.”
She came through the paper like a circus-lady, and the man was indignant till he saw what he held. Then he laughed foolishly, helped the giggling Kedzie to her feet and rose to his own, gave her his place, and went blushing into the next car. For an hour after his arms felt as if they had clasped a fugitive nymph for a moment before she escaped.
This train chanced to be an express to 180th Street in the Bronx Borough. If any one had asked Kedzie if she knew the Bronx she would probably have answered that she did not know them. She did not even know what a borough was.
It was fascinating how much Kedzie did not know. She had an infinite fund of things to find out.
She was thrilled thoroughly by the glorious velocity through the tunnel. The train stopped at Seventy-second Street and at Ninety-sixth Street and at many other stations. People got on or off. But Kedzie was too well entertained to care to leave.
She did not know that the train ran under a corner of Central Park and beneath the Harlem River. She would have liked to know. To run under a river would tell well at home.
Suddenly the Subway shot out into midair and became a superway. The street which had been invisible above was suddenly visible below, with street-cars on it. Also there was a still higher track overhead. Three layers of tracks! It was heavenly, the noise they made! She enjoyed hearing the mounting numbers of the streets shouted antiphonally by the gentlemen at either door.
At 180th Street, however, the train stopped for good, and the handsome young man at the front door called, “All out!” He said it to Kedzie with a beautiful courtesy, adding, “This is as far as we go, lady.”
That was tremendous, to be called “lady.” Kedzie tried to get out like one. She smiled at the guard and left his protection with some reluctance. He studied her as she walked along the platform. She seemed to meet with his approval in general, and in particular. He sighed when she turned out of his sight.
The station here was very high up in the world. Kedzie counted seventy-seven steps on her way to the level. She was distressed to find herself in a shabby, noisy community where streets radiated in six directions. Her fears were true. She had left New York. She must get home to it again.
She walked back along the way she had come, on the sidewalk beneath the tracks. This meandering street was called Boston Road. Kedzie had no ideas as to the distance of Boston. She only knew that New York was good enough for her—the New York of Forty-second Street, of course. Kedzie did not know yet how many, many New Yorks there are in New York.
She was discouraged by her present surroundings. Along the rough and neglected streets were little rows of shanty shops, and there were stubby frame residences.
There was one two-story cottage snuggling against a hill; it had a little picket fence with a little picket gate leading to a little ragged yard with an old apple-tree in it; and there was a pair of steps up to the front door, and a rough trellis from there to the woodshed with a grapevine draped across it. It was of the James Whitcomb Riley school of architecture—a house with a woodshed.
Rich people who were tired of the city, and chanced that way, used to pause and look at that little nook and admire its meek attractiveness. It made them homesick.
But Kedzie was sick of home. This lowly cot was too much like her father's. It had a sign on it that said, “To Let.” It was a funny expression. Kedzie studied it a long time before she decided that it was New-Yorkese for “For Rent.”
She shuddered at the idea of renting or letting such a house—especially as it was so close to a church, a small, seedy, frame church nearly all roof, a narrow-chested, slope-shouldered churchlet with a frame cupola for a steeple. It looked abandoned, and an ivy flourished on it so impudently that it almost closed the unfrequented portal.
The bill-boards here made mighty interesting reading. There were magnificent works of an art on the grand scale of a people's gallery; one structure promulgated the glories of a notorious chewing-gum. There was a gorgeous proclamation of a fashionable glove with a picture of an extremely swell slim lady all dressed up—or rather all dressed down—for the opera.
Kedzie prayed the Lord to send her some day a pair of full-length white kid gloves like those. As for a box at the opera, she would take her chances on the sunniest cloud-sofa in heaven for an evening at the opera. And for a dress cut deckolett and an aigret in her hair, she would have swapped a halo and a set of wings.
There was no end to the big pages of this literature, and Kedzie read dozens of them from right to left in a southerly direction. Finally she abandoned the Boston Road and walked over to a better-groomed avenue with more of a city atmosphere.
But she saw a police signal-station at 175th Street, and she thought it better to abandon the Southern Boulevard. She was not sure of her police yet, and she had an uneasy feeling that her father and mother were at that moment telling their troubles to some policeman who would shortly be putting her description in the hands of detectives. She did not want to be arrested. Poppa might try to spank her again. She did not want to have to murder anybody, especially her parents. She liked them better when she was away from them.
She hated to waste five cents on a street-car, but finally she achieved the extravagance. The car went sliding and grinding through an amazing amount of paved street, with an inconceivable succession of apartment-houses and shops.
At length she reached a center of what she most desired—noise and mob and hurry. At 164th Street she came to a star of streets where the Third Avenue Elevated collaborated with the surface-cars and the loose traffic to create a delicious pandemonium. She loved those high numbers—a hundred and eighty streets! Beautiful! At home Main Street dissolved into pastures at Tenth Street.
She wanted to find Main Street in New York and see what First Street looked like. It was probably along the Atlantic Ocean. That also was one of the things she must see—her first ocean!
But while Kedzie was reveling in the splendors of 164th Street her eye was caught by the gaudy placards of a moving-picture emporium. There was a movie-palace at home. It was the town's one metropolitan charm.
There was a lithograph here that reached out and caught her like a bale-hook. It represented an impossibly large-eyed girl, cowering behind a door on whose other side stood a handsome devil in evening dress. He was tugging villainously at a wicked mustache, and his eyes were thrillingly leery. Behind a curtain stood a young man who held a revolver and waited. The title of the picture decided Kedzie. It was “The Vampire's Victim; a Scathing Exposure of High Society.”
Kedzie studied hard. For all her gipsy wildness, she had a trace of her father's parsimony, and she hated to spend money that was her very own. Some of the dimes and quarters in that little purse had been there for ages. Besides, her treasury would have to sustain her for an indefinite period.
But she wanted to know about high society. She was not sure whatscathingmeant, or what the pronunciation of it was. She rather inclined to“scat-ting.”Anyway, it looked important.
She stumbled into the black theater and found a seat among mysterious persons dully silhouetted against the screen. This was none of the latter-day temples where moving pictures are run through with cathedral solemnity, soft lights, flowers, orchestral uplift, and nearly classic song. This was a dismal little tunnel with one end lighted by the twinkling pictures. Tired mothers came here to escape from their children, and children came here to escape from their tired mothers. The plots of the pictures were as trite and as rancid as spoiled meat, but they suited the market. This plot concerned a beautiful girl who came to the city from a small town. She was a good girl, because she came from a small town and had poor parents.
She was dazzled a little, however, by the attentions of a swell devil of great wealth, and she neglected her poor—therefore honest—lover temporarily. She learned the fearful joys of a limousined life, and was lured into a false marriage which nearly proved her ruin. The villain got a fellow-demon to pretend to be a minister, put on false hair, reversed his collar, and read the wedding ceremony; and the heroine was taken to the rich man's home.
The rooms were as full of furniture as a furniture-store, and so Kedzie knew it was a swell home. Also there was a butler who walked and acted like a wooden man.
The heroine was becomingly shy of her husband, but finally went to her room, where a swell maid put her to bed (with a proper omission of critical moments) in a bed that must have cost a million dollars. Some womanly, though welching, intuition led the bride to lock her door. Some manly intuition led the hero to enter the gardens and climb in through a window into the house. If he had not been a hero it would have been a rather reprehensible act. But to the heroes all things are pure. He prowled through the house heroically without attracting attention. Every step of his burglarious progress was applauded by the audience.
The hero hid behind one of those numberless portières that hang everywhere in the homes of themoveaux riches,and waited with drawn revolver for the dastard bridegroom to attempt his hellish purpose.
The locked door thwarted the villain for the time, and he decided to wait till he got the girl aboard one of those yachts which rich people keep for evil purposes. Thus the villain unwittingly saved the hero from the painful necessity of committing murder, and added another reel to the picture.
It is not necessary and it might infringe a copyright to tell the rest of the story. It would be insulting to say that the false minister, repenting, told the hero, who told the heroine after he rescued her from the satanic yacht and various other temptations. Of course she married the plain-clothes man and lived happily ever after in a sin-proof cottage with a garden of virtuous roses.
Kedzie was so excited that she annoyed the people about her, but she learned again the invaluable lesson that rich men are unfit companions for nice girls. Kedzie resolved to prove this for herself. She prayed for a chance to be tempted so that she might rebuke some swell villain. But she intended to postpone the rebuke until she had seen a lot of high life. This would serve a double purpose: Kedzie would get to see more millionairishness, and the rebuke would be more—more “scatting.” It is hard even to think a word you cannot pronounce.
Kedzie gained one thing further from the pictures—a new name. She had been musing incessantly on choosing one. She had always hated bothThroppandKedzie,and had counted on marriage to reform her surname. But she could not wait. She wanted an alias at once. The police were after her. The heroine of this picture was namedAnita Adair,and the name just suited Kedzie. She intended to be known by it henceforth.
She had not settled on what town she had come from. Perhaps she would decide to have been born in New York. She rather fancied the notion of being a daughter of a terrible swell family who wanted to force her to marry a wicked old nobleman, but she ran away sooner than submit to the“imfany”—that was the way Kedzie pronounced it in her head. It was a word she had often seen but never heard.
Meanwhile she was sure of one thing: Kedzie Thropp was annihilated and Anita Adair was born full grown.
At the conclusion of the film Kedzie was saddened by a ballad sung by an adenoid tenor. The song was a scatting exposure of the wickedness of Broadway. The refrain touched Kedzie deeply, and alarmed her somewhat. It reiterated and reiterated:
“There's a browkin hawt for everee light ton Broadway-ee.”
Kedzie began to fear that she would furnish one more. And yet it would be rather nice to have a broken heart, Kedzie thought, especially on Broadway.
Kedzie watched the moving picture twice through. The second time it was not so good. It lacked spontaneity and sincerity.
At the first vision everything seemed to rise from what preceded; people did what was natural or noble. The second time it looked mechanical, rehearsed; the thrill was gone, too, because she knew positively that the hero was not really going to shoot, and the villain was not really going to break through the door.
She wandered forth in a tragedy of disillusionment. That was really the cause of the pout that seemed to say, “Please kiss me!” She pouted because when she got what she wanted she no longer wanted it.
There are hearts like cold storage. They keep what they get fresh and cool; and there are hearts that spoil whatever is intrusted to them. In Kedzie's hot young soul, things spoiled soon.
She was hungry, and she could not resist the impulse to enter a cheap restaurant. She did not know how cheap it was. It was as good as the best restaurant in Nimrim, Mo.
Kedzie ordered unfamiliar things for the sake of educating her illiterate mid-Western stomach. She ordered clam chowder and Hamburger steak, spaghetti Italienne, lobster salad, and Neapolitan ice-cream. She ate too much—much too much.
The total bill was ninety-five cents, and she was terrified. She had thought her father a miser for complaining of the breakfast bill of eleven-odd dollars at the Biltmore, but that was his money, not hers.
When she finished her meal she did not dream of tipping the waiter. He seemed not to expect it, but he grinned as he asked her to come again. He hoped she would. He went to the door and stared after her, sadly, longingly. The dishes she had left he carried away with an elegiac solemnity.
The streets were darkened now and the lights bewildered Kedzie. The town grew more solemn. It withdrew into itself. People were going home.
Kedzie did not know where to go. She walked for fear of standing still. The noise fatigued her. She turned west to escape it and found a little park at 161st Street.
Many streets flowed thence. There were ten ways to follow, and she could not choose one among them.
She was pretty, but she had not learned the commercial value of her beauty. She was alone in the great, vicious city, but nobody had threatened her. Nearly everybody had paid her charm the tribute of a stare or a smile, but nobody had been polite enough to flatter her with a menace.
She was very pretty. But then there are so very many very pretty girls in every big city! June with her millions of exquisite roses is no richer in beauty than New York. Yet even New York cannot keep all her beauties supplied with temptation and peril all the time.
Kedzie sat on the bench wondering which of the ten ways to go. It turned late, but she could not decide. She began to be a little hungry again, but she was always that, and she told her ever-willing young stomach that her late luncheon would have to be an early dinner.
As she sat still, people began to peer at her through the enveiling dark. A tipsy brewery truck-driver who had absorbed too much of his own cargo sank down by her side. He could not see Kedzie through the froth in his brain, but she found him fearful. When he began to talk to himself she fled.
She saw a brilliantly lighted street-car, and she boarded it. She was all turned around, and the car twisted and turned as it proceeded. She did not realize that it was going north till she heard the conductor calling in higher and higher street numbers. Then she understood, with tired wrath, that she was outbound once more. She wanted to go toward the heart of town, but she could not afford to get off without her nickel's worth of ride.
The car was all but empty when the conductor called to a drowsy old lady, his penultimate passenger:
“Hunneran Semty-seckin! Hey, lady! You ast me to leave you off at Hunneran Semty-seckin, didn't yah?”
The woman was startled from her reverie and gasped:
“Dear me! is this a Hundred and Seventy-second?”
“Thass wat I said, didn't I?”
She evicted herself with a manner of apology for intruding on the conductor's attention.
Now Kedzie was alone with the man. His coyote bark changed to an insinuating murmur. He sat down near Kedzie, took up an abandoned evening paper, and said:
“Goin' all the way, Cutie, or how about it?”
“I'm get'n' off here!” said Kedzie, with royal scorn. She resented his familiarity, and she was afraid that he was going to prove dangerous. Perhaps he meant to abduct her in this chariot.
Being a street-car conductor, the poor fellow neither understood women nor was understood by them. He accepted Kedzie's blow with resignation. He helped her down the step, his hand mellowing her arm and finding it ripe.
She flung him a rebukeful glare that he did not get. He gave the two bells, and the car went away like a big lamp, leaving the world to darkness and to Kedzie.
She walked for a block or two and wondered where she should sleep. There were no hotels up here, and she would have been afraid of their prices. Probably they all charged as much as the Biltmore. At that rate, her money would just about pay for the privilege of walking in and out again.
Boarding-houses there might have been, but they bore no distinguishing marks.
Kedzie stood and strolled until she was completely fagged. Then she encountered a huge mass of shadowy foliage, a park—Crotona Park, although of course Kedzie did not know its name.
There were benches at the edge, and concreted paths went glimmering among vagueness of foliage, with here and there searing arc-lights as bright as immediate moons. Kedzie dropped to the first bench, but a couple of lovers next to her protested, and she retreated into the park a little.
She felt a trifle chilled with weariness and discouragement and the lack of light. She clasped her arms together as a kind of wrap and huddled herself close to herself. Her head teetered and tottered and gradually sank till her delicate chin rested in her delicate bosom. Her big hat shaded her face as in a deep blot of ink, and she slept.
Unprotected, pretty, alone in the wicked city, she slept secure and unassailed.