Miss Anita Adair (néeKedzie Thropp) had dozed upon her cozy park bench for an uncertain while when her bedroom was invaded by visitors who did not know she was there.
Kedzie was wakened by murmurous voices. A man was talking to a woman. They might have been Romeo and Juliet in Verona for the poetry of their grief, but they were in the Bronx Borough, and he was valet and she a housemaid, or so Kedzie judged. The man was saying in a dialect new to Kedzie:
“Ah,ma pauvre p'tite amie,for why you have ajalousieof mypatrie?”
There was a vague discussion from which Kedzie drowsily gleaned that the man was going to cross the sea to the realm of destruction. The girl was jealous of somebody that he called hispatrie,and he miserably endeavored to persuade her that a man could love both hispatrieand hisamie, and yet give his life to the former at her call.
Kedzie was too sleepy to feel much curiosity. A neighbor's woe is a soothing lullaby. In the very crisis of their debate, the little moan of Kedzie's yawn startled and silenced the farewellers. They stole away unseen, and she knew no more of them.
Hours later Kedzie woke, shivering and afraid. All about her was a woodland hush, but the circle of the horizon was dimly lighted, as if there were houses on fire everywhere in the distance.
Poor Kedzie was a-cold and filled with the night dread. She was afraid of burglars, mice, ghosts. She was still more afraid to leave her bench and hunt through those deep shadows for her lost New York. Her drugged brain fell asleep as it wrestled with its fears. Her body protested at its couch. All her limbs like separate serpents tried to find resting-places. They could not stretch themselves out on the bench. Fiends had placed cast-iron braces at intervals to prevent people from doing just that. Kedzie did not know that it is against the law of New York, if not of Nature, to sleep on park benches.
Half unconsciously she slipped down to the ground and found a bed on the warm and dewless grass. Her members wriggled and adjusted themselves. Her head rolled over on one round arm for a pillow; the other arm bent itself above her head, and finding her hat in the way, took out the pins, lifted the hat off, set it on the ground, put the pins back in and returned to its place about her hair—all without disturbing Kedzie's beauty sleep.
Her two arms were all the maids that Kedzie had ever had. They were as kind to her as they could be—devoted almost exclusively to her comfort.
Kedzie slept alone in a meadow, and slept well. Youth spread the sward with mattresses of eiderdown, and curtained out the stars with silken tapestry. If she dreamed at all, it was with the full franchise of youth in the realm of ambition. If she dreamed herself a great lady, then fancy promised her no more than truth should redeem. Charity Coe Cheever had a finer bed but a poorer sleep, if any at all. She had a secretary to do her chores for her and to tell her her engagements—where she was to go and what she had promised and what she had better do. Charity dictated letters and committee reports; she even dictated checks on her bank-account (which kept filling up faster than she drew from it).
While Kedzie was trying to fit her limber frame among the little hillocks and tussocks on the ground, Charity Coe was sitting at her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, but seeing beyond her own image. Her lips moved, and her secretary wrote down what she said aloud, and her maid was kneeling to take off Charity Coe's ballroom slippers and slip on her bedroom ditto. The secretary was so sleepy that she tried to keep her eyes open by agitating the lids violently. The maid was trying to keep from falling forward across her mistress's insteps and sleeping there.
But Charity was wide-awake—wild awake. Her soul was not in her dictation, but in her features, which she studied in the mirror as a rich man studies his bank-account. Charity was wondering if she had wrecked her beauty beyond repair, or if she could fight it back.
Charity Coe, being very rich, had a hundred arms and hands and feet, eyes and ears, while Kedzie had but two of each. Charity had some one to make her clothes for her and cut up her bread and meat and fetch the wood for her fire and put her shoes on and take them off. She even had her face washed for her and her hair brushed, and somebody trimmed her finger-nails and swept out her room, sewed on her buttons and buttoned them up or unbuttoned them, as she pleased.
If Kedzie had known how much Charity was having done for her she would have had a colic of envy. But she slept while Charity could not. Charity could not pay anybody to sleep for her or stay awake for her, or love or kiss for her, and her wealth could not buy the fidelity of the one man whose fidelity she wanted to own.
Charity had done work that Kedzie would have flinched from. Charity had lived in a field hospital and roughed it to a loathsome degree. She had washed the faces and bodies of grimy soldiers from the bloody ditches of the war-front; she had been chambermaid to gas-blinded peasants and had done the hideous chores that follow operations. Now with a maid to change her slippers and a secretary to make up her mind, and a score of servants within call, she was afraid that she had squandered her substance in spendthrift alms. She was a prodigal benefactress returned from her good works too late, perhaps. She wondered and took stock of her charms. She rather underrated them.
Peter Cheever had been extravagantly gallant the morning after her return from the mountains. He had added the last perfect tribute of suspicion and jealousy. They had even breakfasted together. She had dragged herself down to the dining-room, and he had neglected his morning paper, and lingered for mere chatter. He had telephoned from his office to ask her for the noon hour, too. He had taken her to the Bankers' Club for luncheon in the big Blue Room. He had then suggested that they dine together and go to any theater she liked.
Charity Coe's head was turned by all this attention. “Three meals a day and a show with her own husband” was going the honeymoon pace.
But she returned to the normal speed, for he did not come home to dress or to dine or to go to the theater. No word came from him until Charity Coe was all dressed; then a clerk telephoned her that her husband regretted he could not come home, as he had to rush for the Philadelphia train.
Charity could not quite disbelieve this, nor quite believe. She had spent the evening debating married love and honeymoons that wax and wane and wax again, and a wife's duty and her rights and might-have-beens, perhapses, and if-only's.
Charity had put on her jewels, which had not been taken out of the safe for years, but he had not arrived. Alarm and resentment wrestled for her heart; they prospered alternately. Now she trembled with fear for her husband; now she smothered with wrath at his indifference to her.
Who was he that he should keep her waiting, and who were the Cheevers that they should break engagements with the Coes? It was only at such times that her pride of birth flared in her, and then only enough to sustain her through grievous humiliations.
But what are humiliations that we should mind them so? They come to everybody in turn, and they are as relentless and impersonal as the sun marching around the sky. Kedzie had hers, and Charity hers, and the streetcar conductor Kedzie had rebuffed had his, and the Czar with his driven army had his, with more to come, and the Kaiser with his victorious army had his, with more to come. Even Peter Cheever had his in plenty, and of a peculiar secret sort.
He had honestly planned to spend his evening with his wife. She seemed to be coming back into style with him. But the long arm of the telephone brought him within the reach of Zada L'Etoile. Zada had plans of her own for his evening-dinner, theater, supper, dance till dawn. Peter had answered, gently:
“Sorry, but I'm booked.”
Zada had seemed to come right through the wire at him.
“With that—wife of yours, of course!”
She had used a word that fascinated the listening Central, who was lucky enough to transact a good deal of Zada's telephone business. Central could almost see Peter flush as he shook his head and answered:
“Not necessarily. It's business.”
“You'd better make it your business not to go out with that woman, anywhere,” Zada had threatened. “It's indecent.”
Peter winced. A wife is not ordinarily called “that woman.” Peter sighed. It was a pretty pass when a man could not be allowed to go to the theater with his own wife. Yet he felt that Zada was right, in a way. He had forfeited the privilege of a domestic evening. He was afraid to brave Zada's fantastic rages. He could best protect Charity Coe by continuing to ignore her.
He consented to Zada's plan and promised to call up his wife. Zada took a brief triumph from that. But Peter was ashamed and afraid to speak to Charity even across the wire. He knew that it has become as difficult to lie by telephone as face to face. The treacherous little quavers in the voice are multiplied to a rattle, and nothing can ever quite imitate sincerity. So much is bound to be over or under done.
Cheever made a pretense of rushing out of his office. He looked at his watch violently, so that his secretary should be startled—as he politely pretended to be. Cheever gasped, then rushed his lie with sickly histrionism:
“I say, Hudspeth, call up my—Mrs. Cheever, will you? And—er—tell her I've had to dash for the train to—er—Phila”—cough—“delphia. Tell her I'm awfully sorry about to-night. Back to-morrow.”
“Yessir,” said Hudspeth, winking at the gaping stenographer, who looked exclamation points at her typewriter.
Hudspeth called up Mrs. Cheever. He was no more convincing than Cheever would have been. A note of disgust at his task and of deprecatory pity for Mrs. Cheever influenced his tone.
Charity was not convinced, but she could hardly reveal that to Hudspeth—although, of course, she did. She was betrayed by her very eagerness to be a good sport easily bamboozled.
“Oh, I see. Too bad! I quite understand. Thank you, Mr. Hudspeth. Good-by.”
She did not hear Hudspeth growling to the stenographer as he strolled over and leaned on her chair unnecessarily—there were other chairs to lean on, and she was not deaf:
“Rotten business! He ought to be ashamed of himself. A nice wife like that!”
The stenographer sat forward and snapped, “You got a nice wife yourself.” She was a little jealous of Zada, perhaps—or of Mrs. Cheever—or of both.
Peter left his office to escape telephoning Charity, but he could imagine how the message crushed her. He felt as if he had stepped on a hurt bird. When he met Zada he kept trying to be patient and forgiving with her, in spite of her blameworthiness.
Zada saw through his sullenness, and for a little moment was proud of her victory. Then she began to suffer, too. She understood the frailty of her hold on Cheever. His loyalty to her was in the eyes of the world a treachery, and his disloyalty to her would be applauded as a holy deed. She was becoming an old story with him, as Charity had become one.
She suffered agonies from the cloud on her title and on her name, and she was afraid of the world. A woman of her sort has no sympathy to expect; her stock in trade vanishes without replenishment, and her business does not build. In spite of herself she cannot help envying and imitating the good women. As a certain great man has confessed, “There is so much good in the worst of us,” that there is hardly any fun in being bad. It is almost impossible to be very bad or very good very long at a time.
So here was Zada already copying a virtuous domestic woe and wondering how she could fasten Cheever to her, win him truly for herself. She honestly felt that she could be of value to him, and make more of a man of him than his lawful wife ever could. Perhaps she was right. At any rate, she was miserable, and if a person is going to be miserable she might as well be right while her misery is going on.
Zada had dragged Cheever to a cabaret. She could lead him thither, but she could not make him dance. She was one-stepping unwillingly with a young cad who insulted her subtly in everything he said and looked. She could not resent his familiarity beyond sneering at him and calling him a foolish cub. She left him and returned to the table where Peter Cheever smoked a bitter cigar. It is astonishing how sad these notorious revelers look in repose. They are solemner than deacons.
“Come on, Peterkin—dance the rest of this with me,” Zada implored.
Peterkin shook his head. He felt that it was not quite right for him to dance in public with such persons. He had his code. Even the swine have their ethics. Zada put her hand in Cheever's arm and cooed to him, but in vain.
It was then that Jim Dyckman caught sight of them. He was slinking about the roofs as lonely and dejected as a homeless cat.
His money could not buy him companionship, though his acquaintance was innumerable and almost anybody would have been proud to be spoken to by such a money monster. But Jim did not want to be spoken to by anybody who was ambitious to be spoken to by him. He wanted to talk to Charity.
He could not even interest himself in dissipation. There was plenty of it for sale, and markets were open to him that were not available to average means. Many a foolish woman, irreproachable and counting herself unapproachable, would have been strangely and memorably perturbed by an amorous glance from Jim Dyckman.
But Jim did not want what he could get. He was hungry for the companionship of Charity Coe.
When he saw her lord and master, Peter Cheever, with Zada, Dyckman was enraged. Cheever owned Charity Coe; he could flatter her with a smile, beckon her with a gesture, caress her at will, or leave her in safe deposit, while he spent his precious hours with a public servant!
Dyckman could usually afford to do what he wanted to. But now he wanted to go to that table and knock the heads of Cheever and Zada together; he wanted to make their skulls whack like castanets. But he could not afford to do that.
He was so forlorn that he went home. His sumptuous chariot with ninety race-horses concealed in the engine and velvet in its wheels slid him as on smoothest ice to his father's home near the cathedral. The house was like a child of the cathedral, and he went up its steps as a pauper entering a cathedral. He gave up his hat and stick and went past the masterpieces on his walls as if he were a visitor to the Metropolitan Art Gallery on a free day. He stumbled up the stairway, itself a work of art, like a boy sent to bed without supper: he stumbled upstairs, wanting to cry and not daring to.
His valet undressed him in a motherly way and put him to bed. The valet was feeling very sad. Dyckman realized that he was about to lose Jules, and he felt more disconsolate. Still, he surprised himself by breaking out:
“I wish you wouldn't go to the war, Jules.”
Jules smiled with friendship and deference subtly blended:
“I wish I would not, too, sir.”
“You might get killed, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you're a soldier! How long did you serve?”
“Shree years, sir.”
“And I don't know the first thing about soldiering! I ought to be ashamed of myself! Well—don't get killed, Jules.”
“Very good, sir.”
But he did.
Jules said, “Good night, sir,” and faded through the door. Dyckman tossed for a while. Then he got up in a rage at his insomnia. He could not find his other slipper, and he stubbed his toe plebeianly against an aristocratic table. He cursed and limped to the window and glowered down into the street. He might have been a jailbird gaping through iron bars. He could not get out of himself, or his love for Charity.
He wondered how he could live till morning without her. He went to his telephone to call her and hear her voice. He lifted the receiver and when Central answered, the cowardice of decency compelled him from his resolve, and he shamefully mumbled:
“The correct time, please.”
What difference did it make to him what hour it was? He was the victim of eternity, not time.
He went back to his window-vigil over nothing and fell asleep murmuring the biggest swear words he could remember. In his weak mood they had the effect of a spanked boy's last whimpers.
He was a boy, and fate was spanking him hard. He could not have whom he wanted, and he resolved that there was nothing else in the world to want. And all the time there was a girl sleeping out in Crotona Park on the ground. She was pretty and dangerous, another flower tossing on the girl-tree.
When the daylight whitened the black air it found Dyckman sprawled along his window-lounge and woke him to the disgust of another morning. He had to reach up and draw a curtain between his eyes and the hateful sun.
But Kedzie had only her vigilant arm. It slipped down across her brow like a watchful nurse coming in on tiptoe to protect a fretful patient from broken sleep.
Kedzie slept on and on, till at length the section of Crotona Park immediately beneath her refused to adapt itself longer to her squirming search for soft spots. She sat up in startled confusion at the unfamiliar ceiling. The wall-paper was not at all what she always woke to. At first she guessed that she must have fallen out of bed with a vengeance. Then she decided she had fallen out of doors and windows as well, and into the front yard.
No, these bushes were not those bushes. That beech almost overhead, seen from below by sleep-thick eyes, was an amazing thing.
She had drowsy childhood memories of being carried up-stairs by her father and put to bed by her mother. Once or twice she had wakened with her head to the footboard and endured agonies of confusion before she got the universe turned round right. But how had she got outdoors? Her father had never carried her down-stairs and left her in the yard before.
At last she saw that she had fallen not merely out of bed and out of doors, but out of town. She remembered her wanderings and her lying down to sleep. She wondered who had taken her hat off for her.
She looked about for somebody to ask questions of. There was nobody to be seen. There were a few housetops peering over the horizon at her.
English sparrows were jumping here and there, engaged in their everlasting spats, but she could not ask them.
Kedzie sat up straight, her arms back of her, her feet erect on their heels at a distance, like suspicious squirrels. She yawned against the back of her wrist and began to remember her escapade. She gurgled with laughter, but she felt rumpled and lame, and not in the least like Miss Anita Adair. She almost wished she were at home, gazing from her bed to the washstand and hearing her mother puttering about in the kitchen making breakfast; to Kedzie's young heart it was the superlative human luxury to know you ought to get up and not get up.
She clambered to her feet and made what toilet she could while her seclusion lasted. She shook out her skirts like feathers, and shoved her disheveled hair up under her hat as she had always swept the dust under the rug.
She was overjoyed to find that her hand-bag had not been stolen. The powder-puff would serve temporarily for a wash-basin. The small change in her purse would postpone starvation or surrender for a while.
She walked out of her sleeping-porch to the path. A few people were visible now—workmen and workwomen taking a short-cut, and leisurely gentlemen out of a job already beginning their day's work of holding down benches. No one asked any questions or showed any interest in Kedzie.
She found a street-car line, made sure that the car she took was bound down-town, and resumed her effort to recapture New York.
Nearly everybody was reading one morning paper or another, but Kedzie was not interested in the news. One man kept brushing her nose with his paper. She was angry at his absence of mind, but she did not notice that her nose was being annoyed by her own name in the head-lines.
She rode and rode and rode till her hunger distracted her. She passed restaurant after restaurant, till at last she could stand the famine no longer. She got down from the car and walked till she came to a bakery lunch-room entitled, “The Bon-Ton Bakery by Joe Gidden.” It was another like the one she ate in the day before. The same kind of waiter was there, a dish-thrower with the manners of a hostler.
But Kedzie was so meek after her night on the ground that she was flattered by his grin. “Skip” Magruder was his title, as she learned in time. The “Skip” came to him from a curious impediment in his gait that caused him to drop a stitch now and then.
Not long afterward Kedzie was so far beyond this poor hamstrung stable-soul that she could not hear the wordskipwithout blushing as if it were an indecency. It was an indecency, too, that such a little Aphrodite should be reduced to a love-affair with such a dismal Vulcan. But if it could happen on Olympus, it could happen on earth.
Proximity is said to breed love, but priority has its virtues no less. Skip Magruder was the first New-Yorker to help Kedzie in her hour of dismay, and she thought him a great and powerful being profoundly informed about the city of her dreams.
Skip did know a thing or two—possibly three. He was a New-Yorker of a sort, and he had his New York as well as Jim Dyckman had his or Peter Cheever his. He sized Kedzie up for the ignoramus she was, but he was good to her in so far as his skippy faculties permitted. He dropped the paper he was reading when she wandered in, and won her at once by not calling her “Cutie.”
“W'at 'll y'ave, lady?” he said as he skirled a plate and a glass of ice-water along the oil-cloth with exquisite skill, slapped a knife and fork and spoon alongside, and flipped her a check to be punched as she ordered, and a fly-frequented bill of fare to order from.
Kedzie was stumped by the array of dishes. Skip volunteered his aid—suggested “A nor'nge, ham 'n'eggs, a plate o' wheats, anna cuppa corfee.”
“All right,” said Kedzie, wondering how much such a barbecue would cost.
Skip went to bellow the order through a sliding door and grab it when it should be pushed forth from a mysterious realm. Kedzie picked up a newspaper that Skip had picked up after some early client left it.
Kedzie glanced at the front page and saw that the Germans had taken three towns and the Allies one trench. She could not pronounce the towns, and trenches meant nothing in her life. She was about to toss the paper aside when a head-line caught her eye. She read with pardonable astonishment:
Beautiful Kedzie Thropp, Western Society Belle, Deserts Her Wealthy Parents at Biltmore and Vanishes
Kedzie felt the world blow up about her. Her name was in the New York papers the second morning of her first visit! Her father and mother were called wealthy! She was a society belle! Who could ever hereafter deny these ideal splendors, now that there had been a piece in the paper about them?
But dog on it! Why did they have to go and do such a thing as put in about her being spanked? She blushed all over with rage. She had once planned to go back home with wondrous gossip of her visit to the big city. She had seen herself gloating over the other girls who had never been to a big city.
Now they would all give her the laugh. The boys would make up rhymes and yell them at her from a safe distance. She could kill her father for being so mean to her. It was bad enough to hurt her as he did, but to go and tattle when her back was turned was simply awful. She could never go home now. She'd rather die.
Yet the paper said the police of the nation were searching for her. She understood how Eliza felt with the bloodhounds after her. She must keep out of sight of the police. One good thing was the picture of her that they printed in the paper. It was not her picture at all, and nothing like her. Besides, she had selected a new name. “Anita Adair” was a fine disguise. It sounded awful swell, too. It sounded like her folks had money. She was glad to be rid of “Kedzie Thropp.” She would never be Kedzie Thropp again.
Then the waiter came with her breakfast. It smelled so grand that she forgot to be afraid for a while. The coffee smoked aroma; the ham and eggs were fragrant; and the orange sent up a golden fume of delight.
Skip entered into conversation as she entered into the orange. “Where you woikin' now?” he said.
Kedzie did not know what his dialect meant at first. When she learned that “woikin'” was the same as “wurrkin”' she confessed that she had no job. She trembled lest he should recognize her from the paper. He eyed her narrowly and tried to flirt with her across the very head-lines that told who she was.
She could not be sure that he did not know her. He might be a detective in disguise looking for a reward.
Skip had been reading about Kedzie when she came in. But he never dreamed that she was she. He befriended her, however, out of the goodness of his heart and the desire to retain her in the neighborhood—also out of respect for the good old brass rule, “Do good unto others now, so that they will do good to you later.”
Slap told Kedzie that he knew a place right near where a goil was wanted. When he told her that it was a candy-store she was elated. A candy-store was her idea of a good place to work.
Skip told Kedzie where to go and what to say, and to mention that Skip sent her.
Skip also recommended lodgings next his own in the flat of Mr. and Mrs. Rietzvoller, delicatessen merchants.
“Nice rooms reasonable,” he said, “and I'll be near to look after you.”
“You're awful fresh, seems to me, on short acquaintance,” was Kedzie's stinging rebuke.
Skip laughed. “Didn't you see the special-delivery stamp on me forehead? But I guess you're a goil can take care yourself.”
Kedzie guessed she was. But she was in need of help. Where else could she turn? Whom else had she for a beau in this multitude of strangers? So she laughed encouragingly.
“All right. You're elected. Gimme the address.”
Skip wrote it on one of the business cards of the bakery. He added:
“Another thing: I know a good expressman will rustle your trunk over from—Where you boardin' at now?”
Kedzie flushed. She could hardly tell him that she had boarded in a park up-town somewhere.
Skip saw that she was confused. He showed exquisite tact.
“I'm wise, goilie. She's holdin' your trunk out on you. I been in the same boat m'self.”
Kedzie was willing to let it go at that, but Skip pondered:
“But, say—that ain't goin' to make such a hell of a hit—scuse me, lady—but I mean if you tell your new landlady about your trunk bein' left on your old one, that ain't goin' to get you nothin' but the door-slam in the snoot.... I tell you: tell her you just come in on the train and your wardrobe-trunk is on the way unless it got delayed in changin' cars at—oh, any old place. I guess you did come in, at that, from Buffalo or Pittsboig or some them Western joints, didn' you?”
Kedzie just looked at him. Her big eyes lied for her, and he hastened to say:
“Well, scuse me nosin' in on your own business. Tell the landlady what you want to, only tell her it was me sent you. That's as good as a guarantee—that she'll have to wait for her money.”
Kedzie laughed at his excruciating wit, but she was touched also by his courtesy, and she told him he was awful kind and she was terrible obliged.
That bowled him over. But when she rose with stateliness and, reaching for her money, offered to pay, he had the presence of mind to snarl, amiably:
“Ah, ferget it and beat it. This meal's on me, and wishing you many happy returns of the same.”
He certainly was one grand gentleman. The proprietor was away, and Skip could afford to be generous.
Kedzie left him and found the landlady and got a home; and then she found the store and got a job. For a time she was in Eden. The doleful proprietor's doleful wife was usually down-cellar making ice-cream while her husband was out in the kitchen cooking candy. Kedzie was free to guzzle soda-water at her will. Her forefinger and thumb went along the stacks of candy, dipping like a robin's beak. She was forever licking her fingers and brushing marshmallow dust off her chest. She usually had a large, square caramel outlined in one round cheek.
But the ecstasy did not abide. Kedzie began to realize why Mr. and Mrs. Fleissig were sad. Sweets were a sour business; the people who came into the shop were mainly children who spent whole half-hours choosing a cent's worth of burnt sugar, or young, foolish girls who giggled into the soda bubbles, or housewives ordering ice-cream for Sunday.
If a young man appeared it was always to buy a box of candy for some other girl. It made Kedzie cynical to see him haggle and ponder, trying to make the maximum hit with a minimum of ammunition. It made her more distrustful to see young men trying to flirt with her while they bought tributes of devotion to somebody else. But Kedzie also found out that several of the neighborhood girls accepted candy from several gentlemen simultaneously, and she drew many cynical conclusions from the candy business.
Skip Magruder was attentive and took her out to moving pictures when he was free. In return for the courtesy she took her meals at “The Bon-Ton Bakery by Joe Gidden.” Whenever he dared, Skip skipped the change. He could always slip her an extra titbit.
On that account she had to be a little extra gracious to him when he took her to the movies. Holding hands didn't hurt.
Not a week had gone before Skip had rivals. He caught Kedzie in deceptions. She kept him guessing, and the poor fool suffered the torments and thrills of jealousy. A flip young fellow named Hoke, agent for a jobber in ice-cream cones, and a tubby old codger named Kalteyer, who facetiously claimed to own a chewing-gum mine, were added competitors for Kedzie's smiles, while Skip teetered between homicide and suicide.
Skip was wretched, and Kedzie was enthralled by her own success. She had conquered New York. She had a job in a candy-store, a room in a flat with the family of a delicatessen merchant; she had as many flirtations as she could carry, and an increasing waiting-list. What more could woman ask?
And all this was in far upper Third Avenue. She had not yet been down to First Street. In fact, she was in New York two weeks before she got as far south as 100th Street. She had almost forgotten that she had ever dwelt elsewhere than in New York. Her imitative instinct was already exchanging her Western burr for a New York purr.
Her father and mother would hardly have known her voice if they had heard it. And they would hardly meet her, since they had given her up and gone back home, far sadder, no wiser, much poorer. They did not capture the insurance money, and they had no rewards to offer for Kedzie.
Now and then a Kedzie would be reported in some part of the country, and a wild paragraph would be printed about her. Now and then she would be found dead in a river or would be traced as a white slave drugged and sold and shipped to the Philippine Islands. The stories were heinously cruel to her father and mother, who mourned her in Nimrim and repented dismally of their harshness to the best and pirtiest girl ever lived.
Meanwhile Kedzie sold candy and ate less and less of it. She began to see more pretentious phases of city life and to be discontent with her social triumph. She began to understand how cheap her lovers were. She called them “mutts.” She came to suffer agonies of remorse at the liberties she had given them.
Mr. Kalteyer, the chewing-gum prince, in an effort to overcome the handicap of weight and age which Mr. Hoke did not carry, told Kedzie that her picture ought to be on every counter in the world, and he could get it there. He'd love to see her presented as a classy dame showing her ivories and proving how “beneficiary” his chewing-gum was for the teeth as well as the digestion.
Kedzie told the delicatessen merchant's wife all about his glorious promises, and she said, very sagely:
“Bevare vit dose bo'quet fellers. Better as so many roses is it he should brink you a slice roastbif once. Lengwidge of flowers is nice, but money is de svell talker. Take it by me, money is de svell talker!”
Kedzie was glad of such wisdom, and she convinced Mr. Kalteyer that it took more than conversation to buy her favor. He kept his word under some duress, and took Kedzie to Mr. Eben E. Kiam, a manufacturer of show-cards and lithographs, with an advertising agency besides.
Mr. Edam studied her poses and smiles for days before he got her at her best. An interested observer and a fertile suggester in his office was a young Mr. Gilfoyle, who wrote legends for show-cards, catch-lines for new wares, and poems, if pressed.
Gilfoyle had the poet's prophetic eye, and he murmured to Mr. Kiam that there were millions in “Miss Adair's” face and form if they were worked right. He took pains to let Kedzie overhear this. It pleased her. Millions were something she decided she would like.
Gilfoyle developed wonderfully in the sun of Kedzie's interest. He told Kalteyer that there was no money in handling chewing-gum in a small way as a piker; what he wanted was a catchy name, a special selling-argument, and a national publicity campaign. He advised Kalteyer to borrow a lot of money at the banks and sling himself.
Kalteyer breathed hard. Gilfoyle was assailed by an epilepsy of inspirations. In place of “Kalteyer's Peerless Gum,” he proposed the enthralling title, “Breathasweeta.” Others had mixed pepsin in their edible rubber goods of various flavors. Gilfoyle proposed perfume!
Kalteyer was astounded at the boy's genius. He praised him till Kedzie began to think him worth cultivation, especially as he proposed to flood the country with portraits of Kedzie as the Breathasweeta Girl.
The muse of advertising swooped down and whispered to Gilfoyle the delicious lines to be printed under Kedzie's smile.
Kiss me again. Who are you?You use Breathasweeta. You must be all right.
Kalteyer was swept off his feet. He ran to the bank while Kiam raised Gilfoyle's salary.
The life-size card of Kedzie was made with a prop to hold it up. It was so much retouched and altered in the printing that her own father, seeing it in a Nimrim drugstore, never recognized it. Nearly every drug-store in the country set up a Kedzie in its show-window.
The Breathasweeta came into such demand that Kalteyer was temporarily bankrupted by prosperity. He had to borrow so much money to float his wares that he had none for Kedzie's entertainment.
Mr. Kiam took her up as a valuable model for advertising purposes.
He aroused in Kedzie an inordinate appetite for pictures of herself. All day long she was posed in costumes for various calendars, as a farmer's daughter, as a society queen, as a camera girl, as a sausage nymph, and as the patron saint of a brewery.
In a week she had arrived at classic poses in Greek robes. One by one these were abbreviated, till Kedzie was being very generally revealed to the public eye.
The modesty her mother had whipped into her was gradually unlearned step by step, garment by garment, without Kedzie's noticing the change in her soul.
Just about the hour of that historic day when Kedzie was running away from her father and mother Prissy Atterbury was springing his great story about Jim Dyckman and Charity.
Prissy had gone on to his destination, the home of the Winnsboros in Greenwich, but he arrived late, and the house guests were too profoundly absorbed in their games of auction to make a fit audience for such a story. So Prissy saved it for a correct moment, though he nearly burst with it. He slept ill that night from indigestion due to retention of gossip.
The next forenoon he watched as the week-end prisoners dawdled down from their gorgeous cells, to a living-room as big and as full of seats as a hotel lobby. They threw themselves, on lounges and huge chairs and every form of encouragement to indolence. They threw themselves also on the mercy and the ingenuity of their hostess. But Mrs. Winnsboro expected her guests to bring their own plans and take care of themselves. They were marooned.
When the last malingerer arrived with yawns still unfinished, Prissy seized upon a temporary hush and began to laugh. Pet Bettany, who was always sullen before luncheon, grumbled:
“What ails you, Priss? Just seeing some joke you heard last night?”
Priss snapped, “I was thinking.”
“You flatter yourself,” said Pet. “But I suppose you've got to get it off your chest. I'll be the goat. What is it?”
Prissy would have liked to punish the cat by not telling her a single word of it, but he could not withhold the scandal another moment.
“Well, I'll tell you the oddest thing you ever heard in all your life.”
Pretending to tell it to Pet, he was reaching out with voice and eyes to muster the rest. He longed for a megaphone and cursed such big rooms.
“I was passing through the Grand Central to take my train up here, you understand, and who should I see walk in from an incoming express, you understand, but—who, I say, should I see but—oh, you never would guess—you simply never would guess. Nev-vir-ir!”
“Who cares who you saw,” said Pet, and viciously started to change the subject, so that Prissy had to jump the prelude.
“It was Jim Dyckman. Well, in he comes from the train, you understand, and looks about among the crowd of people waiting for the train—to meet people, you understand.”
Pet broke in, frantically: “Yes, I understand! But if you say 'understand' once more I'll scream and chew up the furniture!”
Prissy regarded her with patient pity and went on:
“Jim didn't see me, you un—you see—and—but just as I was about to say hello to him he turns around and begins to stare into the crowd of other people getting off the same train that he got off, you underst—Well, I had plenty of time for my train, so I waited—not to see what was up, you un—I do say it a lot, don't I? Well, I waited, and who should come along but—well, this you never would guess—not in a month of Sundays.”
A couple of flanneled oaves impatient for the tennis-court stole away, and Pet said,
“Speed it up, Priss; they're walking out on you.”
“Well, they won't walk out when they know who the woman was. Jim was waiting for—he was waiting for—”
He paused a moment. Nobody seemed interested, and so he hastened to explode the name of the woman.
“Charity Coe! It was Charity Coe Jim was waiting for! They had come in on the same train, you understand, and yet they didn't come up the platform together. Why? I ask you. Why didn't they come up the platform together? Why did Jim come along first and wait? Was it to see if the coast was clear? Now, I ask you!”
There was respect enough paid to Prissy's narrative now. In fact, the name of Charity in such a story made the blood of everybody run cold—not unpleasantly—yet not altogether pleasantly.
Some of the guests scouted Prissy's theory. Mrs. Neff was there, and she liked Charity. She puffed contempt and cigarette-smoke at Atterbury, and murmured, sweetly, “Prissy, you're a dirty little liar, and your long tongue ought to be cut out and nailed up on a wall.”
Prissy nearly wept at the injustice of such skepticism. It was Pet Bettany, of all people, who came to his rescue with credulity. She was sincerely convinced. A voluptuary and intrigante herself, she believed that her own ideas of happiness and her own impulses were shared by everybody, and that people who frowned on vice were either hypocrites or cowards.
She could not imagine how small a part and how momentary a part evil ambitions play in the lives of clean, busy souls like Charity. In fact, Pet flattered herself as to her own wickedness, and pretended to be worse than she was, in order to establish a reputation for candor.
Vice has its hypocrisies as well as virtue.
Pet had long been impatient of the celebration of Charity Coe's saintly attributes, and it had irked her to see so desirable a catch as Jim Dyckman squandering his time on a woman who was already married and liked it. He might have been interested in Pet if Charity had let him alone.
Pet also was stirred with the detestation of sin in orderly people that actuates disorderly people. She broke out with surprising earnestness.
“Well, I thought as much! So Charity Coe is human, after all, the sly devil! She's fooling even that foxy husband of hers. She's playing the same game, too—and a sweet little foursome it makes.”
She laughed so abominably that Mrs. Neff threw away her cigarette and growled:
“Oh, shut up, Pet; you make me sick! Let's go out in the air.”
Mrs. Neff was old enough to say such things, and Pet dampered her noise a trifle. But she held Prissy back and made him recount his adventure again. They had a good laugh over it—Prissy giggling and hugging one knee, Pet whooping with that peasant mirth of hers.
The same night, at just about the hour when Kedzie Thropp was falling asleep in Crotona Park and Jim Dyckman was sulking alone in his home and Charity was brooding alone in hers, Prissy Atterbury was delighted to see a party of raiders from another house-party motor up to the Winnsboros' and demand a drink.
Prissy was a trifle glorious by this time. He had been frequenting a bowl of punch subtly liquored, but too much sweetened. He leaned heavily on a new-comer as he began his story. The new-comer pushed Prissy aside with scant courtesy.
“Ah, tell us a new one!” he said. “That's ancient history!”
“What-what-what,” Prissy stammered. “Who told you s'mush?”
“Pet Bet. telephoned it to us this morning. I heard it from three other people to-day.”
“Well, ain't that abslooshly abdominable.”
Prissy began to cry softly. He knew the pangs of an author circumvented by a plagiarist.
The next morning his head ached and he rang up an eye-opener or two. The valet found him in violet pajamas, holding his jangling head and moaning:
“There was too much sugar in the punch.”
He remembered Pet's treachery, and he groaned that there was too much vinegar in life. But he determined to fight for his story, and he did. Long after Pet had turned her attention to other reputations, Prissy was still peddling his yarn.
The story went circlewise outward and onward like the influence of a pebble thrown into a pool. Two people who had heard the story and doubted it met; one told it to the other; the other said she had heard it before; and they parted mutually supported and definitely convinced that the rumor was fact. Repetition is confirmation, and history is made up of just such self-propelled lies—fact founded on fiction.
We create for ourselves a Nero or a Cleopatra, a Washington or a Molly Pitcher, from the gossip of enemies or friends or imaginers, and we can be sure of only one thing—that we do not know the true truth.
But we also do wrong to hold gossip in too much discredit. It gives life fascination, makes the most stupid neighbors interesting. It keeps up the love of the great art of fiction and the industry of character-analysis. A small wonder that human beings are addicted to it, when we are so emphatically assured that heaven itself is devoted to it, and that we are under the incessant espionage of our Deity, while the angels are eavesdroppers and reporters carrying note-books in which they write with indelible ink the least things we do or say or think.