The next morning that parrot, still unmurdered, woke Kedzie early. She buried one ear deep in the pillow and covered the other with her hair and her hand. The parrot's voice receded to a distance, but a still smaller voice began to call to her. She was squirming deeper for a long snooze when her foot struck another.
Her husband!—King Log, audibly a-slumber. She pouted drowsily, frowned, slid away, and tried to commit temporary suicide by drowning herself in sleep.
Then her stupor faded as the tiny call resounded again in her soul. She was no longer merely Mrs. Anita Gilfoyle, the flat-dwelling nobody. She was now Anita Adair, the screen-queen. She was needed at the studio.
She sat up, looked at her husband, her unacknowledged and unacknowledging husband. A mysterious voice drew her from his side as cogently as the hand of Yahweh drew the rib that became a woman from under the elbow of Adam.
She rose and looked back and down at the man whom the law had united her with indissolubly. Eve must have wondered back at Adam with the same sense of escape while he lay asleep. According to one of the conflicting legends of the two gods of Genesis, woman was then actually one with man. Marriage has ever since been an effort to put her back among his ribs, but she has always refused to be intercostal. It is an ancient habit to pretend that she is, and sometimes she pretends to snuggle into place. Yet she has never been, can never be, re-ribbed—especially not since marriage is an attempt to fit her into the anatomy of an Adam who is always, in a sense, a stranger to her.
Kedzie gazed on her Adam with a sense of departure, of farewell. She felt a trifle sorry for Gilfoyle, and the moment she resolved to quit him he became a little more attractive.
There was something pitiful about his helpless sprawl: his very awkwardness endeared him infinitesimally. She nearly felt that tenderness which good wives and fond mothers feel for the gawky creatures they hallow with their devotion.
Kedzie leaned forward to kiss the poor wretch good-by, but, unfortunately (or fortunately), a restlessness seized him, he rolled over on his other side, and one limp, floppy hand struck Kedzie on the nose.
She sprang back with a gasp of pain and hurried away, feeling abused and exiled.
At the studio she was received by Garfinkel with distinction. Ferriday came out to meet her with a shining morning face and led her to the office of the two backers.
A contract was waiting for her and the pen and ink were handy. Kedzie had never seen a contract before and she was as afraid of this one as if it were her death warrant. It was her life warrant, rather. She tried to read it as if she had signed dozens of contracts, but she fooled nobody. She could not make head or tail of “the party of the first part” and the terms exacted of movie actors. She understood nothing but the salary. One hundred dollars a week! That bloomed like a rose in the crabbed text. She would have signed almost anything for that.
The deed was finally done. Her hundred-odd pounds of flesh belonged to the Hyperfilm Company. The partners gave her their short, warm hands. Ferriday wrung her palm with his long, lean fingers. Then he caught her by the elbow and whisked her into his studio. He began to describe her first scene in the big production. The backers had insisted that she prove her ability as a minor character in a play featuring another woman. Kedzie did not mind, especially when Ferriday winked and whispered: “We'll make you make her look like something the cat brought in. First of all, those gowns of yours—”
She had told him of her ill luck the day before in finding Lady Powell-Carewe out. He sent her flying down again in his limousine. She stepped into it now with assurance. It was beginning to be her very own. At least she was beginning to own the owner.
She felt less excitement about the ride now that it was not her first. She noticed that the upholstery was frayed in spots. Other cars passed hers. The chauffeur was not so smart as some of the drivers. And he was alone. On a few of the swagger limousines there were two men in livery on the box. She felt rather ashamed of having only one.
Her haughty discontent fell from her when she arrived at Lady Powell-Carewe's shop. She wished she had not come alone. She did not know how to behave. And what in Heaven's name did you call her—“Your Ladyship” or “Your Majesty” or what?
She walked in so meekly and was so simply clad that nobody in the place paid any heed to her at first. It was a very busy place, with girls rushing to and fro or sauntering limberly up and down in tremendously handsome gowns.
Kedzie could not pick out Lady Powell-Carewe. One of the promenaders was so tall and so haughty that Kedzie thought she must be at least a “Lady.” She was in a silvery, shimmery green-and-gray gown, and the man whom the customers called “Mr. Charles” said:
“Madame calls this the Blown Poplar. Isn't it bully?”
Kedzie caught Mr. Charles's eye. He spoke to her sharply:
“Well?”
He evidently thought her somebody looking for a job as bundle-carrier. She was pretty, but there were tons of pretty girls. They bored Mr. Charles to death. He had a whole beagle-pack of them to care for.
Kedzie poked at him Ferriday's letter of introduction addressed to Lady Powell-Carewe. Mr. Charles took it and, not knowing what it contained, bore it into the other room without asking Kedzie to sit down.
He reappeared at the door and bowed to her with great amazement. She slipped into a chaotic room where there were heaps of fabrics thrown about like rubbish, long streamers of samples littering a desk full of papers.
A sumptuous creature of stately manner bowed creakily to Kedzie, and Kedzie said, trying to remember the pronunciation:
“Lady Pole-Carrier?”
A little plainly dressed woman replied: “Yes, my child. So you're the Adair thing that Ferriday is gone half-witted over. He's just been talking my ear off about you. Sit down. Stop where you are. Let me see you. Turn around. I see.” She turned to the stately dame. “Rather nice, isn't she, Mrs. Congdon? H'mm!” She beckoned Kedzie to come close. “What are your eyes like?” She lorgnetted the terrified girl, as if she were a throat-specialist. “Take off that horrid hat. Let me see your hair. H'mm! Rather nice hair, isn't it, Mrs. Congdon?—that is, if she knew how to do it. Let me see. Yes, I get your color, but it will be a job to suit you and that infernal movie-camera. It kills my colors so! I have to keep remembering that crimson photographs black and cream is dirty, and blue and yellow are just nothing.”
Mr. Charles came in to say that Mrs. Noxon was outside. Kedzie recognized the great name with terror. Lady Powell-Carewe snapped:
“Tell the old camel I'm ill. I can't see her to-day. I'm ill to everybody to-day. I've taken a big job on.”
This was sublime. To have aristocrats turned away for her!
While Madame prowled among the fabrics and bit her lorgnon in study, Kedzie looked over the big albums filled with photographs of the creations of the great creatrix. For Lady Powell-Carewe was a creative artist, taking her ideas where she found them in art or nature, and in revivals and in inventions. She took her color schemes from paintings, old and new, from jewels, landscapes. It was said that she went to Niagara to study the floods of color that tumble over its brink.
She began to interest herself in Kedzie, to wish to accomplish more than the mere selling of dress goods made up. She decided to create Kedzie as well as her clothes.
“Do you wear that pout all the time?” she asked.
“Do I pout?” Kedzie asked, in an amazement.
“Don't pretend that you don't know it and do it intentionally. Also why do you Americans always answer a question by asking another?”
“Do we?” said Kedzie.
Lady Powell-Carewe decided that Kedzie was as short on brains as she was long on looks. But it was the looks that Lady Powell-Carewe was going to dress, and not the brains.
She ordered Kedzie to spend a lot of money having her hair cared for expertly.
She tried various styles on Kedzie, ordering her to throw off her frock and stand in her combination while Mrs. Congdon and Mr. Charles brought up armloads of silks and velvets and draped them on Kedzie as if she were a clothes-horse.
The feel of the crisp and whispering taffetas, the elevation of the brocades, the warm nothingness of the chiffons like wisps of fog, the rich dignity of the cloths, gave Kedzie rapture on rapture. Standing there with a burden of fabrics upon her and Lady Powell-Carewe kneeling at her feet pinning them up and tucking them here and there, Kedzie was reminded of those ancient days of six months gone when her mother used to kneel about her and fit on her the home-made school-dress cut according to Butterick patterns. Now Kedzie had a genuine Lady at her feet. It was a triumph indeed. It was not hard now to believe that she would have all the world at her feet one day.
Lady Powell-Carewe used Kedzie's frame as a mere standard to fly banners from. Leaving the head and shoulders to stand out like the wax bust of a wistful doll, she started a cloud of fabric about her in the most extravagant fashion. She reined it in sharply at the waist, but again it flared to such distances on all sides that Kedzie could never have sailed through any door but that of a garage without compression.
On this vast bell of silk she hung streamers of rosettes, flowers of colors that would have been strident if they had been the eighteenth of a shade stronger. As it was, they were as delicious as cream curdled in a syrup of cherries. The whole effect would have been burlesque if it had not been the whim of a brilliant taste. Men would look it at and say, “Good Lord!” Women would murmur, enviously, “Oh, Lord!” Kedzie's soul expanded to the ultimate fringe of the farthest furbelow.
When the fantasy was assured Lady Powell-Carewe had Kedzie extracted from it. Then pondering her sapling slenderness, once more she caught from the air an inspiration. She would incase Kedzie in a sheath of soft, white kid marked with delicate lines and set off with black gloves and a hat of green leaves. And this she would call “The White Birch.”
And that was all the creating she felt up to for the day. She had Kedzie's measure taken in order to have a slip made as a model for use in the hours when Kedzie should be too busy to stand for fitting.
It was well for Kedzie that there was a free ride waiting for her. Her journey to the studio was harrowed by the financial problem which has often tortured people in limousines. She did not like to ask Mr. Ferriday for money in advance. He might think she was poor. There is nothing that bankrupts the poor so much as the effort to look unconcerned while they wait for their next penny.
Kedzie was frantic with worry and was reduced to prayer. “O Lord, send me some money somehow.” The number of such prayers going up to heaven must cause some embarrassment, since money can usually be given to one person only by taking it from another—and that other is doubtless praying for more at the very moment.
To Kedzie's dismay, when she arrived at the studio and asked for Mr. Ferriday, Mr. Garfinkel appeared. He was very deferential, but he was, after all, only a Garfinkel and she needed a Ferriday. He explained that his chief was very busy and had instructed Garfinkel to teach Miss Adair the science of make-up for the camera, to take test pictures of her, and give her valuable hints in lens behavior.
Late in the afternoon Ferriday came in to see the result of the first lesson. He said, “Much obliged, Garfinkel” and Garfinkel remembered pressing duty elsewhere.
His departure left Kedzie alone with Ferriday in a cavern pitch black save for the cone of light spreading from the little hole in the wall at the back to the screen where the spray of light-dust became living pictures of Kedzie.
Kedzie did not know that the operator behind the wall could peek and peer while his picture-wheel rolled out the cataract of photographs. Ferriday was careful of her—or of himself. He held her hand, of course, and murmured to her how stunning she was, but he made no effort to make love, to her great comfort and regret.
At length he invited her to ride home in his limousine, but he did not invite her to dinner. She told herself that she would have had to decline. But she would have liked to be asked.
While he rhapsodized once more about her future she was thinking of her immediate penury. As she approached the street of her residence she realized that she must either starve till pay-day or borrow. It was a bad beginning, but better than a hopeless ending. After several gasps of hesitation she finally made her plea:
“I'm awfully sorry to have to trouble you, Mr. Ferriday, but I'm—Well, could you lend me twenty-five dollars?”
“My dear child, take fifty,” he cried.
She shook her head, but it hurt her to see the roll of bills he dived for and brought up, and the careless grace with which he peeled two leaves from the cabbage. Easy money is always attended with resentment that more did not come along. Kedzie pouted at her folly in not accepting the fifty. If she had said, “Lend me fifty,” he would have offered her a hundred. But the twenty-five was salvation, and it would buy her food enough to keep her and her useless husband alive, and to buy her a pair of shoes and some gloves.
As the car drew near her corner she cried that she had some shopping to do and escaped again at the drug-store.
She found her husband at home. There was an unwonted authority about his greeting:
“Well, young woman, you may approach and kiss my hand. I am a gentleman with a job. I am a Chicago gentleman with a job.”
“You don't mean it!” Kedzie gasped; and kissed him from habit with more respect than her recent habit had shown.
“I mean it,” said Gilfoyle. “I am now on the staff of the Deshler Advertising Agency. I was afraid when Mr. D. offered me an unsolicited position (he could say it to-day) that it was the red wine and not the real money that was talking, but he was painfully sober this noon, took me out to lunch, and told me that he would be proud to avail himself of my services.”
“Splendid!” said Kedzie, with sincere enthusiasm. It is always pleasant to learn that money is setting toward the family.
But something told Kedzie that her late acquisition of twenty-five dollars would not be with her long. Easy come, easy go. “How much is the fare to Chicago?” she asked, in a hollow voice.
“Twenty-two dollars is the fare,” said Gilfoyle, “with about eight dollars extra. I couldn't borrow a cent. I've got only five dollars.”
“I thought so,” said Kedzie.
“Thought what so?” said Gilfoyle.
“Nothing,” said Kedzie. “Well, I happen to have twenty-five dollars.”
“That's funny,” said Gilfoyle. “Where did you get it?”
“Oh, I saved it up.”
“From what?”
“Well, do you want the twenty-five, or don't you?”
Gilfoyle pondered. If he questioned the source of the money he might find it out, and be unable to accept it. He wanted the money more than the hazardous information; so he said:
“Of course I want the twenty-five, darling, but I hate to rob you. Of course I'll send for you as soon as I can make a nest out there, but how will you get along?”
“Oh, I'll get along,” said Kedzie; “there'll be some movie-money coming to me Saturday.”
“Well, that's fine,” Gilfoyle said, feeling a weight of horrible guilt mingled with superior wings of relief. He hesitated, hemmed, hawed, perspired, and finally looked to that old source of so many escapes, his watch. “There's a train at eight-two; I could just about make it if I scoot now.”
“You'd better scoot,” said Kedzie. And she gave him the money.
“I'd like to have dinner with you,” Gilfoyle faltered, “but—”
“Yes, I'd like to have you, but—”
They looked at each other wretchedly. Their love was so lukewarm already that they bothered each other. There was no impulse to the delicious bitter-sweet of a passionate farewell. She was as eager to have him gone as he to go, and each blamed the other for that.
“I'll write you every day,” he said, “and I'll send the fare to you as soon as I can get it.”
“Yes, of course,” Kedzie mumbled. “Well, good-by—don't miss your train, darling.”
“Good-by, honey.”
They had to embrace. Their arms went out about each other and clasped behind each other's backs. Then some impulse moved them to a fierce clench of desperate sorrow. They were embracing their dead loves, the corpses that lay dead in these alienated bodies. It was an embrace across a grave, and they felt the thud of clods upon their love.
They gasped with the pity of it, and Kedzie's eyes were reeking with tears and Gilfoyle's lips were shivering when they wrenched out of that lock of torment.
He caught her back to him and kissed her salt-sweet mouth. Her kiss was brackish on his lips as life was. She felt a kind of assault in the fervor of his kiss, but she did not resist. He was a stranger who sprang at her from the dark, but he was also very like a poet she had loved poetically long, long ago.
Then they wrung hands and called good-bys and he caught up his suit-case and rushed through the door.
She hung from the window to wave to him as he ran down the street to the Subway, pausing now and again to wave to her vaguely, then stumbling on his course.
At last she could not see him, whether for the tears or for the distance, and she bowed her head on her lonely sill and wept.
She had a splendid cry that flushed her heart clean as a new whistle. She washed her eyes with fine cold water and half sobbed, half laughed, “Well, that's over.”
Charity Coe Cheever was making less progress with her amateur movie-show than Kedzie with her professional cinematic career.
Charity telephoned to ask Jim Dyckman to act, but he proved to be camera-shy and intractable.
She had difficulties with all her cast. It was impossible to satisfy the people who were willing to act with the rôles they were willing to assume.
Charity was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton with Mrs. Noxon when she saw Jim Dyckman come in with his mother. Mrs. Noxon left Charity and went over to speak to Mrs. Dyckman. So Charity beckoned Jim over and urged him to accept the job of impresario.
He protested, but she pleaded for his help at least on an errand or two.
“Jim, I want you to go up to the studio of these people and find this great man Ferriday and get him to promise to direct for us. And by the way, that little girl you pulled out of the pool, you know—well, they promised to get her a job at the studio. You look her up and find out how she's doing—there's a darling.”
He shook his head, resisting her for once, and answered:
“Go to the devil, Charity darling. You won't let me love you, so I'll be cussed if I'll let you get me to working for you. I've had you bad and I'm trying to get well of you. So let me alone.”
That was how Peter Cheever, talking to the headwaiter at the head of the stairs, saw his wife and Jim Dyckman with their heads together at a table. He wanted to go over and crack a water-bottle over Dyckman's head. He did not do it, for the excellent reason that Zada L'Etoile was at his side. She had insisted on his taking her there “to lunch with the bunch,” as she expressed it.
She also saw Charity and Jim and Cheever's sudden flush of rage. She felt that the way was opening for her dreams to come true. She was so happy over the situation that she helped Cheever out of the appalling problem before him.
He did not know how to go forward or how to retreat. He could think of nothing to say to the headwaiter who offered him his choice of tables.
Zada caught his elbow and murmured in her very best voice just loud enough for the headwaiter's benefit:
“Mr. Cheever, I'm so sorry—but I'm feeling dizzy. I'm afraid I shall faint if I don't get out in the air. It's very close in here.”
“It is very close, madam,” said the headwaiter, and he helped to support her down the steps quietly and deferentially, just as if he believed it.
Zada and Cheever thought they were escaping from a crisis, but they were drifting deeper and deeper into the converging currents. When they were safe in the motor outside Zada was proud.
“Some get-away, that?” she laughed.
“Wonderful!” said Cheever. “I didn't know you had so much social skill.”
“You don't know me,” she said. “I'm learning! You'll be proud of me yet.”
“I am now,” he said. “You're the most beautiful thing in the world.”
“Oh, that's old stuff,” she said. “Any cow can be glossy. But I'm going in for the real thing, Peterkin. I've cut out the cocktails and I don't dance with anybody but you lately. Have you noticed that? It's the quiet life and the nice ways for me. Do you mind?”
“It's very becoming” he said. “Anything for a novelty.”
Yet he liked her surprisingly well in this phase. She had been cutting down his liquor, too. She had been cutting down his extravagances. She had even achieved the height of denying herself luxuries—one of the surest and least-trodden short-cuts to a man's heart—a little secret path he hardly knows himself.
The affair of Zada and Cheever was going the normal course. It had lost the charm of the wild and wicked—through familiarity; and it was tending to domestication, as all such moods do if nothing interrupts them. There are all sorts of endings to such illicit relations: most of them end with the mutual treachery of two fickle creatures; some of them end with bitter grief for one or the other or both; some of them end in crime, or at least disgrace; and some of them finish, with disconcerting immorality, in an inexcusable respectability.
The improvement in Zada's mind and heart was, curiously, the most dangerous thing in the world for Cheever. If she had stayed noisy and promiscuous and bad, he would have tired of her. But she was growing soft and homey, gentle as ivy, and as hard to tear away or to want to tear away. After all, marriage is only the formalizing of an instinct that existed long before—exists in some animals and birds who mate without formality and stay mated without compulsion.
When Zada and Cheever had escaped from the Ritz-Carlton they took lunch at another restaurant. Zada was childishly proud of her tact and of Cheever's appreciation. But afterward, on the way “home”—as she called what other people called her “lair”—she grew suddenly and deeply solemn.
“So your wife is with Dyckman again,” she said. “It looks to me like a sketch.”
Cheever flushed. He hated her slang and he did not accept her conclusion, but this time he did not forbid her to mention his wife. He could hardly do that when her tact had saved him and Charity from the results of their double indiscretion and the shame of amusing that roomful of gossips.
Zada misunderstood his silence for approval; so she spoke her thoughts aloud:
“If that He and She business goes on I suppose you'll have to divorce the lady.”
“Divorce Charity!” Cheever gasped. “Are you dotty?”
That hit Zada pretty hard, but she bore it. She came back by another door.
“I guess I am—nearly as dotty as she is about Dyckman. First thing you know she'll be trying to get free herself. What if she asks you for a divorce?”
“I'd like to see her!”
“You mean you wouldn't give her her freedom?”
“Not in a thousand years.”
He was astounded at the sepulchral woe of Zada's groan. “O Lord, and I thought—oh—you don't love me at all then! You never really loved me—really! God help me.”
Cheever wondered what Zada would smash first. He hoped it would not be the window of the car. He hoped he could get her safely indoors before the smashing began.
He did. She was a grim and murky storm-cloud full of tornado when they crossed the pavement and the vestibule of the apartment-house and went up in the elevator.
But once inside the door, her breast began to heave, her nostrils to quiver, her fingers to work. Her maid came to take her hat, and paled to see her torment. Zada gave her her things and motioned her away. She motioned her four or five times. The maid had needed only one motion.
Cheever watched Zada out of the corner of his eye and wondered why he had ever been fated to fall in love with such a creature. He was convinced that he had been fate-forced into the intrigue. He had no sense whatever of volition or wicked intent. He could only feel that he had tried to be decent and play fair and be generous.
The thought of what the neighbors were about to hear made him sick with chagrin. The fact that the neighbors were under suspicion themselves only aggravated the burden of shame.
The hardest part of Zada's agony was her pitiful effort to take her medicine like a lady. It was terrific how hard it was for one of a wildcat heritage and habit to keep the caterwaul back and the claws muffled. The self-duel nearly wrecked Zada, but she won it. She was not thoroughbred, but she had tried to be thoroughgoing. She was evidently not a success as a self-made lady. She kept whispering to herself:
“What's the use? Oh, why did I try? Oh, oh, oh, what a fool I've been! To think!—to think!—to think!”
Cheever was distraught. He had waited for the outbreak, and when it did not come he suffered from the recoil of his own tension.
“For the Lord's sake, yell!” he implored.
She turned on him eyes of extraordinary abjection. She saw at last where her lawlessness had brought her, and she despised herself. But she did not love him any the more for understanding him. She saw at last that one cannot be an honest woman without actually being—an honest woman. She was going to get honesty if it broke a bone.
She told her accomplice: “I want you to go away and stay away. Whatever you do, leave me be. There's nothing else you can do for me except to take back all the stuff you've bought me. Give it to that wife you love so much and wouldn't suspect no matter what she did. You love her so much that you wouldn't let her go even if she wanted to leave you. So go back to her and take these things to her with my comp'ments.”
Now it was Cheever who wanted to scream as he had not screamed since he was the purple-faced boy who used to kick the floor and his adoring nurse. But he had lost the safety valve of the scream. He smothered.
When Zada began to peel off her rings and thrust them out to him he swiftly turned on his heel and fled. He never knew whether Zada woke the block with her howls or not when he left her forever.
He forgot to ask when he came back.
First he went home to take his temper to Charity. On the way he worked up a splendid rage at her for giving such a woman as Zada grounds for gossip. He went straight to her room and walked in without knocking.
Charity was dictating a letter to her secretary. Cheever surprised a phrase before she saw him.
“'Thousands of blind soldiers and thousands of orphans hold out their hands to us. We must all do what we can—' Why, hello! Where did you drop from? Give me just a minute while I finish this letter. Let me see. Where was I?”
The secretary read in a dull, secretarial voice:
“'Thousblinsoldiersorphs—wem'sdo'll we can.'”
“Oh yes,” said Charity. “'You have never failed to respond to such an appeal,' comma; no, semicolon; no, period. 'So I shall put you down for a subscription of dash 'how much' question-mark. 'Thanking you in adv'—no, just say, 'My husband joins me in kindest regards to your dear wife and yourself, cordially yours'—and that will be all for the present.”
The secretary garnered her sheaves and went out. Charity said to Cheever:
“Well, young man, sit down and tell us what's on your mind. But first let me tell you my troubles. There's a match on my dresser there. Peter, I'm in an awful mess with this movie stunt. I can get plenty of people to pose for the camera, but I can't find a man to manage the business end of it. I was lunching with Mrs. Noxon at the Ritz to-day. I called your friend Jim Dyckman over from another table and begged him to take the job. But he refused flatly, the lazy brute. Don't you think you could take it on? I wish you would. It's such a big chance to make a pile of money for those poor soldiers.”
Cheever was lost. Unconsciously she had cleared up the scandal of her talk with Dyckman. He remembered that he had seen Mrs. Noxon at another table, standing. He felt like a dog and he wanted to fawn at the heels he had prepared to bite. He felt unworthy to be the associate of his sainted wife in her good works. He said:
“You flatter me. I couldn't manage a thing like that. I'm busy. I—I couldn't.”
“You've got to play a part, then,” she said. “You're looking so well nowadays, taking such good care of yourself. Will you?”
“I might,” he said. “I'll think it over.”
She was called to the telephone then and he escaped to his own room. He moped about and sulked in his uncomfortable virtue. He dressed for dinner with unusual care. He was trying to make a hit with his wife.
In going through his pocket-book he came across two theater tickets. He had promised to take Zada. He felt like a low hound, both for planning to take her and for not taking her. She would have a dismal evening. And she was capable of such ferocious lonelinesses. He had driven away all her old friends. She would recall them now, he supposed. That would be a pity, for they were an odious gang. It would be his fault if she relapsed. It was his duty, in a way, to help her to reform.
The ludicrous sublimity of such an ethical snarl reduced him to inanity. He stayed to dinner. Charity had not expected him to stop. She had planned an evening's excavation into her correspondence and had not changed her street dress. She was surprised and childishly delighted to have him with her—then childishly unhappy as she observed:
“But you're all togged up. You're going out.”
“No—well—that is—er—I was thinking you would like to see a show. I've got tickets.”
“But it's late. I'm not dressed.”
“What's the odds? You look all right. There's never anybody but muckers there Saturday nights. We'll miss it all if you stop to prink.”
“All right,” she cried, and hurried through the dinner.
He was glad at least that he had escaped a solemn evening at home. He could not keep awake at home.
So they went to the theater; but there was not “nobody there,” as he had promised.
Zada was there—alone in a box, dressed in her best, and wearing her East-Lynniest look of pathos.
The coincidence was not occult. After several hours of brave battle with grief and a lonely dinner Zada had been faced by the appalling prospect of an evening alone.
She remembered Cheever's purchase of the theater tickets, and she was startled with an intuition that he would take his wife in her place. Men are capable of such indecent economies.
Zada was suffocated with rage at the possibility. She always believed implicitly in the worst things she could think of. If Peter Cheever dared do such a thing! And of course he would! Well, she would just find out!
She threw a lonely wineglass at the fern-dish and smashed a decanter. Then she pushed off the table about a hundred dollars' worth of chinaware, and kicked her chair over backward. She had been famous for her back-kick in her public dancing-days.
She howled to her maid and went into her wardrobe with both hands. She acted like a windmill in a dress-shop. Finally she came upon what she was looking for—the most ladylike theater-gown that ever combined magnificence with dazzling respectability.
She made up her face like a lady's—it took some paint to do that. Meanwhile, her maid was telephoning speculators for a box. Zada arrived before Cheever and Charity did. She waited a long time, haughtily indifferent to the admiration she and her gown were achieving. At last she was punished and rewarded, revenged, and destroyed by the sight of Cheever coming down the aisle with Charity. They had to pause to let a fat couple rise, and they paused, facing Zada. Cheever caught her eye and halted, petrified, long enough for Charity to sit down, look up at him, follow the line of his gaze, and catch a full blast of Zada's beauty and of the fierce look she fastened on Cheever. Charity's eyes ran back on the almost visible clothes-line of that taut gaze and found Cheever wilting with several kinds of shame.
He sat down glum and scarlet, and Charity's heart began to throb. A second glance told her who Zada was. She had seen the woman often when Zada had danced in the theaters and the hotel ballrooms.
Charity found herself thinking that she was not Cheever's wife, but only a poor relation—by marriage. The worst of it was that she was not dressed for the theater. The gown she wore was exquisite in its place, but it was dull and informal and it gave her no help in the ordeal she was suddenly submitted to. Her hair had not been coiffed by the high-elbowed artist with the waving-tongs. Her brains were not marceled for a beauty-contest with her rival. She was at her worst and Zada was at her supreme.
Zada was not entirely unknown to Charity. She had not been able to escape all the gossip that linked Cheever with her, but she had naturally heard little of it, and then only from people of the sort who run to their friends with all the bad news they can collect. They are easily discredited.
Charity had spent so many bad hours wondering at her husband's indifference and had heard his name linked with so many names that she had temporized with the situation. Cheever was of the sort that looks at every woman with desire, or looks as if he looked so. The wives of such men grow calloused or quit them.
Charity had not quit Cheever. She had hardly dreamed of it. She had not outgrown being hurt. Her slow wrath had not begun to manifest itself. This crushing humiliation smote her from a clear sky.
She was not ready for it. She did not know what to do. She only knew, by long training, that she must not do what she first wanted to do. She had been taught from childhood what Zada was only now trying to learn.
Charity pretended a great interest in her program and laughed flightily. Cheever was morose. He stole glances at Zada and saw that she was in anguish. He felt that he had treated her like dirt. He was unworthy of her, or of his wife, or of anything but a horsewhip.
He glanced at Charity and was fooled by her casual chatter. He supposed that she was as ignorant of the affair with Zada as he wanted her to be. He wished that he could pretend to be unconcerned, but he could not keep his program from shivering; his throat was full of phlegm; he choked on the simplest words. He thought for some trick of escape, a pretended illness, a remembered business engagement, a disgust with the play.
He was afraid to trust his voice to any proposal or even to go out between the acts.
The worst of it was that he felt sorrier for Zada than for his wife. Poor Zada had nothing, Charity had everything. How easily we vote other people everything! Cheever was afraid of the ride home with Charity; he dreaded to be at home to-night and to-morrow and always. He longed to go to Zada and help her and let her revile him and scratch him, perhaps, provided only that she would throw her arms about him afterward. He never imagined that a duel of self-control, a mortal combat in refinement, was being fought over him by those two women.
Zada's strength gave out long before Charity's; she was newer to the game. During a dark scene she surrendered the field and decamped. But Cheever and his wife both caught the faint shimmer of her respectable robe as it floated from the rail and vanished in the curtains. It was like a dematerialization at a séance.
Cheever wanted to crane his neck and dared not. Charity felt a great withdrawal of support in the flight of her rival. She had not Zada's presence now to sustain her through the last act. But she sat it out.
She was bitter against Cheever, and her thoughts dark. The burden of his infidelity was heavy enough for her to bear, but for him to subject her to such a confrontation was outrageous. She had no doubt that it was a cooked-up scheme. That vile creature had planned it and that worm of a husband had consented to it!
The most unforgivable thing of all, of course, was the clothes of it.
Charity, in the course of time, forgave nearly everybody everything, but she never forgave her husband that.
On the way home she had nothing to say. Neither had Cheever. He felt homesick for Zada. Charity felt homeless. She must have been the laughing-stock or the pitying-stock of the whole world for a long time.
When they reached home she bade Cheever a perfectly cheerful good-night and left him to a cold supper the butler had laid out for him. She did not know that he stole from the house and flew to Zada.
Charity was tempted to an immediate denunciation of Cheever and a declaration of divorce. She would certainly not live with him another day. That would be to make herself an accomplice, a silent partner of Zada's. It would be intolerable, immoral, not nice.