Kedzie wore her new frock when she reached the studio on Monday morning. She greeted Mr. Garfinkel with an entreating smile, and was alarmed by the remoteness of his response. He was cold because she was not for him. He led her respectfully to the anteroom of the sacred inclosure where Ferriday was behaving like a lion in a cage, belching his wrath at his keepers, ordering the fund-finders to find more funds for his great picture. It threatened to bankrupt them before it was finished, but he derided them as imbeciles, moneychangers, misers.
Garfinkel was manifestly afraid of Ferriday's very echo, and he cowered a little when Ferriday burst through the door with mane bristling and fangs bared.
“Well, well, well!” Ferriday stormed. “What do you want, Garfinkel? What do you want, Garfinkel? What do you want?”
“You told me to bring Miss Adair to you as soon as she arrived, and—”
The lion roared as gentle as a sucking dove.
“And this is Miss Adair, is it? Of course it is. Welcome to our little boiler-factory, my dear. Come in and sit down. Garfinkel, get her a chair and then get out. Sit down, child. I never bite pretty girls.”
Kedzie was pleasantly terrified, and she wondered what would befall her next. She gave the retreating Garfinkel no further thought. She sat and trembled before the devouring gaze of the great Ferriday. He studied her professionally, but he was intensely, extravagantly human. That was why he appealed to the public so potently. He took their feelings and set them on fire and juggled with them flaming.
He had such caloric that he kindled actors and actresses to unsuspected brilliances. He made tinder of the dry-as-dusts, and he brought the warm-hearted to a white-hot glow.
He dealt with primary emotions crudely but vigorously. A soldier saluting an officer became in a Ferriday picture a zealot rendering a national homage. A maid watching her lover walk away angry became a Juliet letting Romeo go; a child weeping over a broken doll was an epitome of all regret. A mother putting a light in the window for an erring daughter's guidance was something new, an allegory as great as Bartholdi's Liberty putting her lamp in the window of the nation.
He was as intense with humor as with sorrow. A girl washing dishes brought shrieks of laughter at the little things she did—the struggle with the slippery soap, the recoil from the hot plate, the carelessness with the towel.
Ferriday had not talked to Kedzie two minutes before she was wringing her hands with excitement. He was discovering her to herself. He told her the story of a picture he wanted to put her in. He had withheld it for months, looking for the right interpreter. He resolved to postpone the completion of the big picture till he had finished a five-reel idyl for the apotheosis of Kedzie.
“The backers of the enterprise will have apoplexy when they hear of it,” he laughed. “But what do I care?”
The whole army of the studio stood meanwhile at ease, drawing salary and waiting for Ferriday to remember his day's program and give the order to go ahead. But he was busy with his new story, in the throes of nympholepsy, seeing visions, hearing voices.
Kedzie sat in a marble expectancy, Galatea watching Pygmalion create her and prepare to bring her to life. She had never lived. She realized that. All her previous existence had been but blind gropings in the womb of time.
The backers came to remind Ferriday that there was waiting a costly mob of actors, wooed from the speaking drama by trebled salaries. Ferriday howled to them to get out. They did not respect his inspirations; they suspected his motives toward Kedzie.
But Ferriday was deep in love with his art; he was panting with the afflation of Apollo. Old motives, old scenes, old characters that had served as “sure-fire stuff” since the earliest Hindu drama now fell into their ancient places and he thought them new. Kedzie was sure she had never heard such original ideas. Her gratitude to Ferriday was absolute. And he was clever enough, or crazy enough, to say that he was grateful to her. He had been looking for just Her, and she had come to him just in time. He made her promises that Solomon could not have made to Sheba, or Shakespeare to the dark lady.
Solomon could offer to his visitor Ophirian wealth, and Shakespeare could guarantee with some show of success (up to date) that his words of praise would outlive all other monuments. But Ferriday did not offer Kedzie minerals or adjectives. He cried:
“Little girl, I'll put you on a girdle of films that will encircle the world. Your smile will run round the globe like the sun, and light up dark places in Africa. Your tears will shower the earth. People in thousands of towns will watch your least gesture with anxiety. Queens will have you brought to their palaces to make them laugh and cry. The soldiers of the world will call you their mascot and write love-letters to you from the trenches. I will have a billion pictures made of you, and you shall breathe and move in all of them. You shall live a million lives at once. I will have your other self placed in museums so that centuries from now they can take you out and bring you to life again.”
It was a mighty good speech. It would be hard to find a serenade to beat it. And he read it superbly. He had sung it to every one of his only girls in the world, his eternal (pro tem.) passions. He had had about nineteen muses already.
Kedzie did not know this, of course. And it would not have mattered much. Better the nine-and-ninetieth muse to such a man than the first and final gas-stove slave of a Tommie Gilfoyle.
Kedzie sat in the state of nerves of a little girl alone on a mountain-top with lightning shimmering and striking all round her. She was so happy, so full of electrical sparks, that she was fairly incandescent. As she said afterward, she felt “all lit up.”
Ferriday spun out the plot of his new five-reel scenario until he was like an unreeled spider. He was all out. The mechanical details interested and refreshed him now. He must order the studio scenery and select the outdoor “locations.” He must pick the supporting cast and devise one or two blood-curdling moments of great peril.
Kedzie was too excited to note the ghoulish joy with which he planned to put her into the most perilous plights that had ever threatened even a movie star with death or crippledom.
“Do they scare you, my dear?” he asked.
“Scare me?” said Kedzie. “Why, Mr. Ferriday, if you told me to, I'd go out to the Bronx Zoo-ological Gardens and bite the ear off the biggest lion they got in the lion-house.”
Ferriday reached out, put his arm about her farther shoulder, and squeezed her to him after the manner of dosing an accordeon. Kedzie emitted the same kind of squeak. But she was not unhappy, and she did not even say, “Sir!”
The plot of The Kedziad was to be based on the From-Rags-to-Richesleitmotiv, Kedzie was to be a cruelly treated waif brought up as a boy by a demoniac Italian padrone who made her steal. She was to be sent into a rich man's home to rob it. She would find the rich man about to commit suicide all over his sumptuous library. She would save him, and he would save her from the padrone's revenge, on condition that she should dress as a girl (he had not, of course, suspected that she really was one at the time—had always been one, in fact). She would dress as a girl and conduct a very delicate diplomatic mission with a foreign ambassador, involving a submarine wrecked (in the studio tank) and a terrific ride across one of the deadliest battle-fields of Verdun (New Jersey) with a vast army of three hundred supers.
When Kedzie had saved two or three nations and kept the United States from war the millionaire would regret that she was, after all, only a boy and be overcome with rapture when she told him the truth. The three hundred supers would then serve as wedding-guests in the biggest church wedding ever pulled off.
Kedzie liked this last touch immensely. It would make up for that disgusting guestless ceremony in the Municipal Building.
Ferriday got rid of her exquisitely by writing a note and saying to her:
“Now you run down and hop into my car and take this note to Lady Powell-Carewe—don't fail to call her 'Pole Cary.' She is to design your wealthy wardrobe, and I want her to study you and do something unheard of in novelty and beauty. Tell her that the more she spends the better I'll like it.”
Kedzie was really a heroine. She did not swoon even at that.
When Ferriday dismissed her he enfolded her to his beautiful waistcoat, and then held her off by her two arms and said:
“Little girl, you've made me so happy! So happy! Ah! We'll do great things together! This is a red-letter day for the movie art.”
Kedzie never feared that it might have a scarlet-letter significance. She forgot that she was anything but a newborn, full-fledged angel without a past—only a future with the sky for its limit. Alas! we always have our pasts. Even the unborn babe has already centuries of a past.
It was Ferriday who brought Kedzie home to hers.
“What about dinner to-night, my dear? I feel like having a wonderful dinner to-night! Are partridge in season now? What is your favorite sherry? Let me call for you at, say, seven. Where shall I call?”
Kedzie flopped back from the empyrean to her flat. Gilfoyle again blockaded her.
She nearly swooned then. Her soul rummaged frantically through a brain like her own work-basket. She finally dug up an excuse.
“I'd rather meet you at the restaurant.”
Ferriday smiled. He understood. The poor thing was ashamed of her boarding-house.
“Well, Cinderella, let me send my pumpkin for you, at least. I won't come. Where shall my chauffeur find you?”
Kedzie whimpered the shabby number of the shabby street.
“Shall he ask for Miss Adair, or—”
Kedzie was inspired: “I live in Mrs. Gilfoyle's flat-partment.”
“I see,” said Ferriday. “Miss Anita Adair—ring Mrs. Gilfoyle's bell. All right, my angel, at seven. Run along.”
He kissed her, and she was ice-cold. But then women were often like that before Ferriday's genius.
The things we are ashamed of are an acid test of our souls. Kedzie Thropp was constantly improving the quality of her disgusts.
A few months ago she was hardly ashamed of sleeping under a park bench. And already here she was sliding through the street in a limousine. It was a shabby limousine, but she was not yet ready to be ashamed of any limousine. She was proud to have it lent to her, proud to know anybody who owned such a thing.
What she was ashamed of now was the home it must take her to and the jobless husband waiting for her there. She was ashamed of herself for tying up with a husband so soon. She had married in haste and repented in haste. And there was a lot of leisure for more repentance.
Already her husband was such a handicap that she had refrained from mentioning his existence to the great moving-picture director who had opened a new world of glory to her—thrown on a screen, as it were, a cinemation of her future, where triumphs followed one another with moving-picture rapidity. He had made a scenario of her and invited her to dinner.
She smiled a little at the inspiration that had saved her from confessing that she was Mrs. Gilfoyle. It was neat of her to tell Mr. Ferriday that she could be addressed “in care of Mrs. Gilfoyle.” In care of herself! That was just what she was. Who else was so interested in Kedzie's advancement as Kedzie?
She was a bitterly disappointed Kedzie just now. Ferriday had told her to go to Lady Powell-Carewe and get herself a bevy of specially designed gowns at the expense of the firm. There was hardly a woman alive who would not have rejoiced at such a mission. To Kedzie, who had never had a gown made by anything higher than a sewing-woman, the privilege was heavenly. Also, she had never met a Lady with a capital L.
The dual strain might have been the death of her, but she was saved by the absence of Lady Powell-Carewe. Kedzie went back to the street, sick with deferred hope. Ferriday's chauffeur was waiting to take her home. She felt grateful for the thoughtfulness of Ferriday and crept in.
The nearer Kedzie came to her lowly highly flat the less she wanted even the chauffeur of Mr. Ferriday's limousine to see her enter it. He would come for her again at night, but the building did not look so bad at night.
So she tapped on the glass and told him to let her out, please, at the drug-store, as she had some marketing to do.
“Sure, Miss,” said the chauffeur.
Kedzie liked that “Miss.” It was ever so much prettier than “Mizzuz.” She bought some postage-stamps at the drug-store and some pork chops at the butcher's and went down the street and up the stairs to her life-partner, dog on him!
Gilfoyle was just finishing a poem, and he was the least attractive thing in the world to her, next to his poem. He was in his sock feet; his suspenders were down—he would wear the hateful things! his collar was off, his sleeves up; his detachable cuffs were detached and stuck on the mantelpiece; his hair was crazy, and he had ink smears on his nose.
“Don't speak to me!” he said, frantically, as he thumped the table with finger after finger to verify the meter.
“No danger!” said Kedzie, and went into the bedroom to look over her scant wardrobe and choose the least of its evils to wear.
She shook her head at her poverty and went to the kitchen to cook lunch for her man. He followed her and read her his poem while she slammed the oven door of the gas-stove at the exquisitely wrong moments. She broke his heart by her indifference and he tore up the poem, carefully saving the pieces.
“A whole day's work and five dollars gone!” he groaned. He was so sulky that he forgot to ask her why she had come home so early. He assumed that she had been turned off. She taxed her ingenuity to devise some way of getting to the dinner with Ferriday without letting Gilfoyle know of it. At last she made so bold as to tell her husband that she thought she would drop in at her old boarding-house and stay for dinner if she got asked.
“I'm sick of my cooking,” she said.
“So am I, darling. Go by all means!” said Gilfoyle, who owed her one for the poem.
Kedzie was suspicious of his willingness to let her go, but already she had outgrown jealousy of him. As a matter of fact, he had been invited to join a few cronies at dinner in a grimy Italian boarding-house. They gave it a little interest by calling it a “speak-easy,” because the proprietor sold liquor without a license. Gilfoyle's cronies did not know of his marriage and he was sure that Kedzie would not fit. She did not even know the names of the successful, therefore mercenary, writers and illustrators, much less the names of the unsuccessful, therefore artistic and sincere.
To Kedzie's delight, Gilfoyle took himself off at the end of a perfect day of misery. He left her alone with her ambitions. She was in very grand company. She hated the duds she had to wear, but she solaced herself with planning what she should buy when money was rolling in.
When Ferriday's car came for her she was standing in the doorway. She hopped in like the Cinderella that Ferriday had called her. When the car rolled up to the Knickerbocker Hotel she pretended that it was her own motor.
Ferriday was standing at the curb, humbly bareheaded. He wore a dinner-jacket and a soft hat which he tucked under his arm so that he might clasp her hands in both of his with a costume-play fervor. He had been an actor once—and he boasted that he had been a very bad one.
Kedzie felt as if he were helping her from a sedan chair. She imagined her knee skirts lengthened to a brocaded train, and his trousers gathered up into knee breeches with silver buckles.
Bitterness came back to her as she entered the hotel and her slimpsy little cloth gown must brush the Parisian skirts of the richly clad other women.
She pouted in right earnest and it was infinitely becoming to her. Ferriday was not thinking of the price or cut of her frock. He was perceiving the flexile figure that informed it, the virginal shoulders that curved up out of it, the slender, limber throat that aspired from them and the flower-poise of her head on its white stalk.
“You are perfect” he groaned into her ear, with a flattering agony of appreciation.
That made everything all right and she did not tremble much even before themaître d'hôtel. She was a trifle alarmed at the covey of waiters who hastened to their table to pull out the chairs and push them in and fetch the water and bread and butter and silver and plates. She was glad to have long gloves to take off slowly while she recovered herself and took in the gorgeous room full of gorgeous people. Gloves are most useful coming off and going on.
Kedzie was afraid of the bill of fare with its complex French terms, but Ferriday took command of the menu.
When he was working Ferriday could wolf a sandwich with the greed of a busy artist and give orders with a shred of meat in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. But when he luxuriated he luxuriated.
Tonight he was tired of life and dejected from a battle with the stingy backers, who had warned him for the last time once more that he had to economize. He needed to forget such people and the loathsome enemy of fancy, economy.
“I want to order something as exquisite as you are,” he said. “Of course, there could be nothing as exquisite as you are, Miss Adair—you were curled up on a silver dish with a little apple in your mouth like a young roast pig. Ever read Lamb on pig?”
Kedzie laughed with glancing tintinnabulations as if one tapped a row of glasses with a knife.
Ferriday sighed. He saw that she had never heard of Lamb and thought he was perpetrating an ancient pun. But he did not like bookish women and he often said that nothing was more becoming to a woman than ignorance. They should have wisdom, but no learning.
Ferriday was one of those terrifying persons who know, or pretend to know, curious secrets about restaurants and their resources. Wine-cellars and the individualities of chefs had no terror for him so far as she could see. He expressed contempt for apparent commonplaces that Kedzie had never heard of. He used French words with an accent that Kedzie supposed to be perfect.
The waiters knew that he did not know much and had merely picked up a smattering of dining-room lore, but they humored his affectations. And of all affectations, what is more futile than the printing of American bills of fare in French?
“Would you prefer the Astrakhan caviar?” he began on Kedzie, “or some or-durv? The caviar here is fairly trustworthy.”
Kedzie shrugged her perfectly accented shoulders in a cowardly evasion, and he ordered the first caviar Kedzie had ever eaten. It looked as if it came from a munitions-factory, but she liked it immensely, especially as a side-long glance at the bill of fare told her that it cost one dollar and twenty-five cents per person.
Next he proposed either a potage madrilène or a crême de volaille, Marie Louise.
Kedzie chose the latter because it was the latter. She mumbled:
“I think a little cremmy vly Marie Louisa would be nice.”
She was amazed to find later how much it tasted like chicken soup.
“We don't want any fish, do we?” Ferriday moaned. “Or do we? They don't really understand the suprême de sole à la Verdi here, so suppose we skip to the roast, unless you would risk the aigulette de pompano, Coquelin. The last time I had a tronçon de saumon here I had to send it back.”
Kedzie said, “Let's skip.”
She shuddered. The word reminded her, as always, of Skip Magruder. She remembered how he had hung over the table that far-away morning and recommended ham 'n'eggs. His dirty shirt-sleeves and his grin came back to her now. The gruesome Banquo reminded her so vividly of her early guilt of plebeiancy that she shivered. The alert Ferriday noticed it and called:
“Have that window closed at once. There's an infernal draught here.”
Kedzie was thrilled at his autocratic manner. He scared off the ghost of Magruder.
Ferriday pondered aloud the bill of fare as if it were the plot of a new feature film.
“Capon en casserole, milk-fed guinea-hen escoffier, plover en cocotte, English golden pheasant, partridge—do any of those tiresome things interest you?”
It was like asking her whether she would have a Gorham tea-set, a Balcom gown, or a Packard landaulet. She wanted them all.
But her eyes caught the prices. Four dollars for an English pheasant! No wonder they called it golden. It seemed a shame, though, to stick such a nice man, after he had already ordered two dollars and a half's worth of caviar.
She chose the cheapest thing. She was already falling in love with Ferriday.
The plover was only a dollar. She was not quite sure what kind of animal it would turn out to be. She had a womanly intuition that it was a fowl of some breed. She wanted to know. She had come to the stomach school.
“I think I'll take a bit of the plover,” she said.
“Nice girl!” thought Ferriday, who recognized her vicarious economy.
“Plover it is,” he said to the waiter, and added, “tell Pierre it's for me and he'd better not burn it again.”
The waiter was crushed by Pierre's lapse, especially as the chef's name was Achille.
Ferriday went on: “With the plover we might have some champignons frais sous cloche and a salade de laitue avec French dressing, yes? Then a substantial sweet: a coupe aux marrons or a nesselrode pudding, yes?”
Kedzie wanted to ask for a plain, familiar vanilla ice-cream, but she knew better. She ordered the nesselrode—and got her ice-cream, after all. There were chestnuts in it, too—so she was glad she had not selected the coupe aux marrons.
Ferriday did not take a sweet, but had a cheese instead, after an anxious debate with the waiter about the health of the Camembert and the decadence of the Roquefort. When this weighty matter was settled he returned to Kedzie:
“Now for something to drink. A little sherry and bitters to begin with, of course; and a—oh, umm, let me see—simple things are best; suppose we stick to champagne.” He called it “shah pine,” according to Kedzie's ear, but she hoped he meant shampane. She had always wanted to taste “wealthy water,” as Gilfoyle called it, but never called for it.
Kedzie was a trifle alarmed when Ferriday said: “I hope you don't like it sweet. It can't be too dry for me.”
“Me, either,” Kedzie assured him—and made a face implying that she always took it in the form of a powder.
Ferriday smiled benignly and said to the waiter: “You might bring us een boo-tay de Bollinger Numéro—er—katter—vang—kanz.” He knew that the French for ninety-five was four-twenties-fifteen, but the waiter could not understand till he placed his finger on the number with his best French accent. He saved himself from collapse by a stern post-dictum:
“Remember, it's the vintage of nineteen hundred. If you bring that loathsome eighteen ninety-three I'll have to crack the bottle over your head. You wouldn't want that, would you?”
“Non, m'zoo, oui, monzoo,” said the German waiter.
“Then we'll have some black coffee and a liqueur—a Curaçao, say, or a green Chartreuse, or a white mint. Which?”
Naturally Kedzie said the white mint, please.
With that Ferriday released the waiter, who hurried away, hoping that Ferriday's affectations included extravagant tips.
Kedzie gobbled prettily the food before her. Ferriday could tell that she was anxiously watching and copying his methods of attack. He soon knew that this was her first real mealde luxe, but he did not mind that. Columbus was not angry at America because it had never seen an explorer before.
It delighted Ferriday to think that he had discovered Kedzie. He would say later that he invented her. And she wanted tremendously to be discovered or invented or anything else, by anybody who could find a gold-mine in her somewhere and pay her a royalty on her own mineral wealth.
When her lips met the shell-edge of the champagne-glass and the essence of all mischief flung its spray against the tip of her cleverly whittled nose she winced at first. But she went boldly back, and soon the sprites that rained upward in her glass were sending tiny balloons of hope through her brain. They soared past her small skull and her braided hair and the crown of her hat and on up through the ceiling, and none of them broke—as yet.
Her soul was pleasantly a-simmer now and she could not tell whether the wine made her exultant or she the wine. But she was sure that she had at last discovered her life.
And with it all she was dreadfully canny. She was only a little village girl unused to city ways, and the handsome city stranger was plying her with wine; but she was none of your stencil figures that blot romance.
Kedzie was thinking over the cold, hard precepts that women acquire somehow. She was resolving that since she was to be as great as he said she should be, she must not cheapen herself now.
Many of these little village girls have come to town since time was and brought with them the level heads of icily wise women who make love a business and not a folly. Many men are keeping sober mainly nowadays because it is good business; many women pure for the same reason.
Turkish sultans as fierce as Suleiman the Magnificent have bought country girls kidnapped by slave-merchants and have bought tyrants in the bargain. Ferriday the Magnificent was playing with holocaust when he set a match to Kedzie.
But now she was an attractive little flame and he watched her soul flicker and gave it fuel. He also gave it a cigarette; at least he proffered her his silver case, but she shook her head.
“Why not?” he asked. “All the women, old and young, are smoking here.”
She tightened her plump lips and answered, “I don't like 'em; and they give me the fidgets.”
“You'll do!” he cried, softly, reaching out and clenching her knuckles in his palm a moment. “You're the wise one! I felt sure that pretty little face of yours was only a mask for the ugliest and most valuable thing a woman can possess.”
“What's that?” said Kedzie, hoping he was not going to begin big talk.
“Wisdom,” said Ferriday. “A woman ought to be as wise as the serpent, but she ought to have the eyes of a dove. Your baby sweetness is worth a fortune on the screen if you have brains enough to manage it, and I fancy you have. Here's to you, Miss Anita Adair!”
He drank deep, but she only touched the brim. She saw that he was drinking too much—he had had several cocktails while he waited for her to arrive. Kedzie felt that one of the two must keep a clear head. She found that ice-water was a good antidote for champagne.
When Ferriday sharply ordered the waiter to look to her glass she shook her head. When he finished the bottle and the waiter put it mouth down in the ice as an eloquent reminder Ferriday accepted the challenge and ordered another bottle. He was just thickened of tongue enough to say “boddle.”
Kedzie spoke, quickly: “Please, no. I must go home. It's later than I thought, and—”
“And Mrs. Gilfoyle will wonder,” Ferriday laughed. “That's right, my dear. You've got to keep good hours if you are going to succeethe on the screen. Early to bed, for you must early-to-rise.Garçon, garçon, l'addition, s'il vousplease.”
While he was paying the bill Kedzie was thinking fleetly of her next problem. He would want to take her home in his car, and it would be just her luck to find her husband on the door-step. In any case, she was afraid that Ferriday would be sentimental and she did not want Ferriday to be sentimental just yet. And she would not tolerate a sentiment inspired or influenced by wine. Love from a bottle is the poorest of compliments.
Already she was a little disappointed in Ferriday. He was a great man, but he had his fault, and she had found him out. If he were going to be of use to her she must snub that vinous phase at once.
The cool air outside seemed to gratify Ferriday and he took off his hat while the carriage-starter whistled up his car. Now Kedzie said:
“Please, Mr. Ferriday, just put me in a taxicab.”
“Nonsense! I'll take you home. I'll certainly take you home.”
“No, please; it's 'way out of your way, and I—I'd rather—really I would.”
Ferriday stared hard at her as if she were just a trifle blurred. He frowned; then he smiled.
“Why, bless your soul, if you'd rather I wouldn't oppose you, I wouldn't—not for worlds. But you sha'n't go home in any old cabby taxishab; you'll take my wagon and I'll walk. The walk will do me good.”
Kedzie thought it would, too, so she consented with appropriate reluctance. He lifted her in and closed the door—then leaned in to laugh:
“Give my love to old Mrs. Gilfoyle. And don't fail to be at the shudio bright and early. We'll have to make sun while the hay shines, you know. Good night, Miss Adair!”
“Good night, Mr. Ferriday, and thank you ever so much for the perfectly lovely evening.”
“It has been l-l-lovely. Goo-ood night!”
The car swept away and made a big turn. She saw Ferriday marching grandiosely along the street, with his head bared to the cool moonlight. She settled back and snuggled into the cushions, imagining the car her very own.
She left her glory behind her as she climbed the long stairs, briskly preparing her lies and her defensive temper for her husband's wrathful greeting.
He was not there.
Kedzie had no sooner rejoiced in the fortunate absence of her husband than she began to worry because he was away. Where was he and with whom? She sat by the window and looked up and down the street, but she could find none among the pedestrians who looked like her possessor. She forgot him in the beauty of the town—all black velvet and diamonds.
Once more she sat with her window open toward her Jerusalem and worshiped the holy city of her desire. That night at the Biltmore she was an ignorant country-town girl who had never had anything. Now she had had a good deal, including a husband. But, strangely, there was just as much to long for as before—more, indeed, for she knew more things to want.
As the scientist finds in every new discovery a new dark continent, in each atom a universe, so Kedzie found from each acquired desire infinite new desires radiating fanwise to the horizon and beyond.
At first she had wanted to know the town—now she wanted to be known by the town. Then her father stood in her way; now, her husband. She had eloped from her parents with ease and they had never found her again. She had succeeded in being lost.
She did not want to be lost any more; but she was lost, utterly nobody to anybody that mattered. Now was her chance, but she could not run away from her husband and get famous without his finding her. If he found her he would spoil her fun and her fame. She did not know how many public favorites are married, how many matinée idols are managed by their wives. She had never heard of the prima donna's husband.
She fell asleep among her worries. She was awakened by the noisy entrance of her spouse. He was hardly recognizable. She thought at first that her eyes were bleary with sleep, but it was his face that was bleary. He was what a Flagg caricature of him would be, with the same merciless truth in the grotesque.
Kedzie had never seen him boozy before. She groaned, expressively, “My Gawd! you're pie-eyed.”
He sang an old song, “The girl guessed right the very first time, very firstime, verfirstime.”
He tried to take her into his arms. She slapped his hands away. He laughed and flopped into a chair, giggling. She studied him with almost more interest than repugnance. He was idiotically jovial, as sly as an idiot and as inscrutable.
Without waiting to be asked he began a recital of his chronicles. He was as evidently concealing certain things as boasting of others. Kedzie rather hoped he had done something to conceal, since that would be an atonement for her own subtleties.
“I have been in Bohemia,” he said, “zhenuine old Bohemia where hearts are true and eyes are blue and ev'body loves ev'body else. Down there a handclasp is a pledzh of loyalty. There's no hypocrisy in Bohemia—not a dambit. No, sirree. The idle rish with their shnobberies and worship of mere—mere someshing or oth' have no place in Bohemia, for in Bohemia hearsh are true and wine is blue and—”
“Oh, shut up!” said Kedzie.
“Thass way you're always repressin' me. You're a hopeless Philisterine. But I have no intentions of shuttin' up, my darlin' Anita—Anita—Shh! shh!”
He was hushing himself. He was very patently remembering something and conspicuously warning himself not to divulge it. Kedzie loathed him too much to care. Now that he was safely housed he ceased to interest her. She went to bed. He spiraled into a chair to meditate his wickedness. He felt that he was as near to being a hypocrite as was possible in Bohemia.
He had met two talented ladies at the dinner, one was a sculptress from Mr. Samuel Merwin's Washington Square and the other was a paintress from Mr. Owen Johnson's Lincoln Square. Neither lady had had any work accepted by the Academy or bought by a dealer. Both were consequently as fierce against intrenched art as Gilfoyle was against intrenched capital and literature.
They were there in the company of two writers. One of these could not get anything published at all except in the toy magazines, which paid little and late and died early. The other writer could get published, but not sold. Both were young and needed only to pound their irons on the anvil to get them hot, but they blamed the world for being cold to true art. In time they would make the sparks fly and would be in their turn assailed as mere blacksmiths by the next line of younger apprentices. They were at present in the same stage as any other new business—they were building up custom in a neighborhood of strangers.
But at present they were suppressed, all four, men and women; suppressed and smothered as next June's flowers and weeds are held back by the conspiracy of December's snows and the harsh criticisms of March.
The sculptress's first name was Marguerite and Gilfoyle longed to call her by it, after his second goblet of claret-and-water. He had a passion for first names. He had the quick enthusiasm of a lawyer or an advertising-man for a new client. Before he quite realized the enormity of his perfidy he was pretending to compose a poem to Marguerite. He wrote busily on an old bill of fare which had already been persecuted by an artist or two. And he wrote his Anita poem over again in Marguerite's honor,mutatis mutandis.
Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I say Marguerita?Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.
And so on to the bitter end.
He slipped the lyric to Marguerite and she read it with squeals of delight, while Gilfoyle looked as modest as such a genius could. The other girl had to read it, of course, while Gilfoyle tried to look unconscious. He was as successful as one is who tries to hold a casual expression for a photograph.
The other girl's reward was a shrug and the diluted claret of a “Very nice!” Gilfoyle said, “You're no judge or else you're jealous.” The two men read it, and said, “Mush!” and “Slushgusher!” but Marguerite's eyes belonged to Gilfoyle the rest of the evening, also her hands now and then.
Remembering this, Gilfoyle was uneasy. One ought to be careful to keep an aseptic memory at home. Yet if this was not infidelity, what would be? In a rich man Gilfoyle would have called it a typical result of the evil influence of wealth. In the absence of wealth it was a gay little Pierrot-perfidy of thevie de Bohême. Still, poets have to be like that. An actor must make love to whatever leading lady confronts him, and so must poets, the lawyers and press agents of love.
But when he got home Gilfoyle repented as he remembered. He suffered on a rack of guilty bliss, but he managed to hold back the secret which was bubbling up in him with a bromo-seltzer effervescence. Incidentally his “pretty maid, pretty maid, Marguerite” had kept back the fact that she had a husband in the hardware business in Terre Haute. What the husband was keeping back is none of this history's business.
It was all as old and unoriginal as original sin. The important thing to Kedzie was the fact that shortly after the poem had been revamped a stranger had joined, first in song with Gilfoyle's table-load and then in conversation. He had ended by introducing his companion and bringing her over. Had it not been for the fine democracy of Bohemia they would have cut the creature dead. She was a buyer, one of Miss Ferber's Emma McChesneys on a lark.
Gilfoyle did not tell Kedzie any of this. He told what followed as he toiled at the fearfully complicated problem of his shoe-laces, a problem rendered almost insuperable by the fact that he could not hold his foot high very long and dared not hold his head low at all.
“Wonnerful thing happent t'night, Anita. Just shows you never know where your lucksh goin' to hit you. I'm down there with—er—er—couple of old frensh, you know, and who comes over to our table but big feller from out Wesh—Chicago—Chicago—Gobbless Ch'cag! His name is entitled Deshler. In coursh conv'sation I mention Breathasweeta Shewing Gum—see?—he says he knew that gum and he'd sheen the advershments, bes' ol' ad-vershments ever sheen, thass what Mr. Beshler said and I'm not lyin' to you, Anita. No, sir.
“Whereupon—whereupon I modesly remark, 'Of course they're clever—nashurally they're clever, because they were written by l'i'l Mr. ME!' He says, 'You really wrote 'em?' and I say, 'I roally wretem!' And Mr. Keshler says, 'Well, I'll be g'dam'.' Then he says, 'Who coined that name Breathasweeta?' And I says, 'I did!' and he says, 'Well, I'll be g'dam'!'
“Anyway, to make long shory stort, Mr. Nestor he says, 'What you doin' now? Writen copy for the Kaiser or the K-zar?' and I says, 'I am a gen'leman of leisure,' and he says, 'There's a good job waitin' fer lad your size out in Ch'cag! Would you come 'way out there?' and I says, 'I fear nothing!'
“So Mr. Zeisselberg wrote his name on a card, and if I haven't los' card, or he doesn't change his old mind, I am now Mr. John J. Job of Chicago. And now I got a unsolishited posish—imposishible solishion—solution—unpolusion solishible—you know what I mean. So kiss me!”
Kedzie escaped the kiss, but she asked, with a sleepy eagerness, “Did you tell him you were married?”
“Nashurly not, my dear. It was stric'ly business conv'sation. I didn' ask him how many shildren he had and he didn' ask me if I was a Benedictine or a—or a pony of brandy—thass pretty good. Hope I can rememmer it to-mor'.”
Kedzie smiled, but not at his boozy pun. She seemed more comfortable. She fell asleep. Next to being innocent, being absolved is the most soothing of sensations.