The next morning proved to be a Sunday and she felt a need of spiritual help in her hour of affliction. Man had betrayed her; religion would sustain her grim determination to end the unwholesome condition of her household. The Bible said (didn't it?), “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” That surely meant, “If thy husband offend thee, divorce him.”
She went to church, her ancestral Episcopalian church, where her revered Doctor Mosely, the kindliest old gentleman in the world, had poured sermons down at her like ointment and sent prayers up like smoke since she was a little girl. But on this day he chose to preach a ferocious harangue against divorce as the chief peril, the ruination of modern society.
The cowering Charity got from him the impression that home life had always been flawless in this country until the last few years, when divorce began to prosper, and that domestic life in countries where there is little or no divorce had always been an unmitigated success. If only divorce and remarriage were ended, the millennium of our fathers would return.
This had not been her previous opinion; it was her vivid impression from Doctor Mosely, as honest an old darling as ever ran facts through a sieve and threw away all the big chunks that would not go through the fine mesh of his prejudices. He abhorred falsehood, cruelty, skepticism, sectarianism, and narrowness, and his sermons were unconscious mixtures of hand-picked truth and eloquent legends, ruthless denunciations of misunderstood people and views, atheism toward the revelations of all the sciences (particularly the science of biblical criticism, which he hated worse than he hated Haeckel), and a narrowness that kept trying to sharpen itself into a razor edge.
Fortunately he belied in his life almost all of his pulpit crimes and moved about, a tender, chivalrous, lovable old gentleman. It was this phase that Charity knew, for she had not heard one of his sermons for a year or more, though she saw him often in his parish work. She was the more amenable to his pulpit logic to-day.
Charity had always assumed that the United States was the most virtuous, enlightened, and humane of nations. According to Doctor Mosely, it was shockingly corrupt, disgusting. The family as an institution was almost completely gone; its only salvation would be an immediate return to a divorceless condition. (Like that of Italy and Spain and France during the Middle Ages?)
Hitherto Charity had not thought much about divorce, except to regret that certain friends of hers had not hit it off better and had had to undergo cruel notoriety after their private distresses. But divorce was no longer an academic question to her. It had come home.
When she realized that her husband had been not only neglectful of her, but devoted to a definite other woman, she felt at first that it would be heinous to receive him back in her arms fresh from the arms of a vile creature like Zada L'Etoile. Now she got from the pulpit the distinct message that just this was her one important duty, and that any attempt to break from such a triple yoke would be a monstrous iniquity which the Church could not condone.
Doctor Mosely implied that when one partner to a marriage wandered aside into forbidden paths (as he very prettily phrased the very ugly matter) it was always the fault of the other partner. He thundered that the wives of to-day were not like their simple-minded mothers, because they played bridge and smoked cigarettes and did not attend prayer-meetings and would not have children. It was small wonder, he said, that their husbands could not be held. Doctor Mosely had preached the same sermon at Charity's mother and her generation, and his father had preached it at his generation, with the necessary terms changed and the spirit the same. He and his kind had been trying since time began to cure the inherent ills of human relationships by railing at old errors and calling them new.
So in the dark ages the good priests had tried to cure insane people by shouting denunciations at the devils that inhabited them. The less they cured the louder they shouted, and when the remedy failed they blamed the patients.
So fathers try to keep their little sons from being naughty and untruthful by telling them how good and obedient little boys were when they were little boys. They tell a silly lie to rebuke a lie and wonder at their non-success.
Marital unrest is no more a sign of wickedness than stomach-ache is; it is a result of indigestion or ptomaine poisoning, and divorce is only a strong purge or an emetic, equally distressing and often the only remedy.
But Doctor Mosely honestly abominated divorce; he regretted it almost as much as he regretted the Methodist Episcopal heresies or the perverseness of the low-Church doctrines.
Charity had always been religious; she had wrecked her health visiting the sick and cherishing the orphan and she had believed everything she was told to believe. But now when she went to church for strength and comfort she came away feeling herself a condemned and branded failure, blameworthy for all her husband's sins and sins of her own that she had not suspected.
She prayed to be forgiven for causing her husband to sin and asked strength to win him back to his duty. She reached home in such a mood of holy devotion that when she found her husband there she bespoke him tenderly and put out her arms to him and moaned:
“Forgive me!”
“For what?” he said as he went to her from habit before he could check himself. But even as he clasped her she felt that his very sleeves were warm from Zada L'Etoile's embrace and she slipped through his arms to the floor.
When she came to, she was lying on a couch with a cushion under her heels, and Cheever was chafing her wrists and kissing her hand. She drew it away feebly and said:
“Thank you. I'll be all right. Just leave me alone.”
He remembered that Zada had said much the same thing. He was glad to leave the room. When he had gone Charity got up and washed her hands, particularly the hand, particularly the spot, he had kissed.
She seemed to feel that some of the rouge from Zada's lips had been left there by Cheever's lips. There was a red stain there and she could not wash it away. Perhaps it was there because she tried so hard to rub it off. But it tormented her as she went sleep-walking, rubbing her hand like another Lady Macbeth.
On Monday there was a meeting of one of the committees she had organized for the furtherance of what she called the movie stunt. The committee met at the Colony Club. Most of the committee were women of large wealth and of executive ability, and they accomplished a deal of business with expedition in their own way.
There was some chatter, but it was to the point. At length during a discussion of various forms of entertainment Mrs. Noxon said she was afraid that the show would be deadly dull with only amateurs in it. Mrs. Dyckman thought that professionals would make the amateurs look more amateurish than ever. The debate swayed from side to side, but finally inclined toward the belief that a few professional bits would refresh the audience.
And then suddenly Mrs. Neff had to sing out: “Oh, Charity, I've an idea. Let's get some stunning dancer to do a special number. I remember one who would be just the ticket. What's the name—Zada Le Something or other. She's a gorgeous creature. Have you seen her recently?”
Several women began signaling wildly to Mrs. Neff to keep quiet. Charity saw their semaphores at work, but Mrs. Neff was blind—blind, but not speechless. She kept on singing the praises of Zada till everybody wanted to gag her.
An open mind to gossip is an important thing. We ought to keep up with all the scandals concerning our friends and enemies. Otherwise we lose many an opportunity to undercut the latter and we are constantly annoying the former.
It was Mrs. Neff, of all people—and she loved Charity Coe dearly—who caused her public shame and suffering. Mrs. Neff had defended Charity from the slanderous assumptions of Prissy Atterbury and had refused to listen to Pet Bettany's echoes.
She had, indeed, a bad reputation for rebuking well-meaning disseminators of spice. This attitude discouraged several persons who would otherwise have told her all sorts of interesting things about Charity's husband'sentente cordialewith Zada.
Charity had dwelt in a fool's paradise of trust in Peter Cheever for a while, then had dropped back into a fool's purgatory of doubt, where she wandered bewildered. Now she was thrown into the fool's hell. She knew that her love had been betrayed. Everybody else knew it and was wondering how she would act.
Charity was sick. This was really more than she had bargained for. As before, she felt it immodest to expose her emotions in public, so she said:
“Yes, I've seen her. She is very attractive, isn't she? I don't know if she is dancing in public any more, but I'll find out.”
Mrs. Neff sat back triumphantly and let the meeting proceed. But there was a gray pall on the occasion. Women began to look at their wrist-watches and pretend to be shocked at the lateness of the hour, and all of them shook hands solemnly with Charity. There was a poorly veiled condolence in their tone.
Charity carried it off pluckily, but she was in a dangerous humor. She really could not endure the patronizing mercy of these women.
That night Cheever made again his appearance at the dinner-table. He had some notion of putting Charity off her guard or of atoning to her in part for his resumed alliance with Zada. He could not have told what his own motives were, for he was in a state of bewilderment between his duties to Mrs. Charity Tweedledum and Miss Zada Tweedledee. He could not tell which one had the greater claim on his favors.
Charity studied him across the table and wondered what he really was, faun or traitor, Mormon or weakling. He was certainly handsome, but the influence of Zada L'Etoile seemed to hang about him like a green slime on a statue.
She could not find any small talk to carry the meal along. At length Cheever asked:
“What you been up to all day?”
“Oh, committee stuff—that movie thing, you know.”
“How's it coming on? Got a manager yet?”
“Not yet. We were talking about getting some professionals in to brighten up the evening.”
“Good work! Those amateurs make me sick.”
“Mrs. Neff proposed that we get some stunning dancer to do a turn.”
“Not a bad idea. For instance—”
He emptied his glass of Chablis and the butler was standing by to refill it when Charity answered:
“Mrs. Neff suggested a dancer I haven't seen on the stage for some time. You used to admire her.”
“Yes?” said Cheever, pushing his glass along the table toward the butler, who began to pour as Charity slid home hercoup de grâce.
“Zada L'Etoile. What's become of her?”
Cheever's eyes gaped and his jaws dropped. The butler's expression was the same. He poured the Chablis on the back of Cheever's hand and neither noticed it till Charity laughed hysterically and drove the sword a little deeper:
“Is she still alive? Have you seen her?”
Cheever glared at her, breathed hard, swore at the butler, wiped his hand on his napkin, gnawed his lips, twisted his mustache, threw down the napkin, rose, and left the table.
Charity's smile turned to a grimace. She saw that the butler was ashamed of her. He almost told her that she ought to have known better than subject him and the other servants to such a scene.
Charity caught herself about to say, “I beg your pardon, Hammond.”
She felt as if she ought to beg the pardon of everybody in the world.
She could not stand the lonely dining-room long. She rose and walked out. It seemed that she would never reach the door. It was avia crucisto her. Her back ached with the sense of eyes upon it.
The hall was lonely. The thud of the front door jarred her. She went into the library. It was a dark and frowning cavern. She went into the music-room, approached the piano, looked over the music, turned up “Go, Lovely Rose.” The rose that Jim Dyckman said she was had been thrown into the mud. She went up to her room. The maid was arranging her bed for the night. She had turned down one corner of the cover, built up one heap of pillows, set one pair of slippers by the edge.
Charity felt like a rejected old spinster. She sat and mused and her thoughts were bitter. She remembered Doctor Mosely's sermon and wondered if he would preach what he preached if he knew what she knew. She would go to him and tell him.
But what did she know? Enough to convince herself, but nothing at all that even a preacher would call evidence.
She must have proof. She resolved to get it. There must be an abundance of it. She wondered how one went at the getting of evidence.
While Charity was resolving to tear down her life Kedzie Thropp was building herself a new one on the foundations that Charity had laid for her with a card of introduction to Miss Havender.
In the motion-picture world Kedzie had found herself. Her very limitations were to her advantage. She would have failed dismally in the spoken drama, but the flowing photograma was just to her measure.
The actor must not only know how to read his lines and express emotions, but must keep up the same spontaneity night after night, sometimes for a thousand performances or more. The movie actor is expected to respond to a situation once or twice for rehearsal, and once or twice for the camera. There is no audience to struggle against and listen for—and to. The director is always there at the side calling, reminding, pleading, encouraging, threatening, suggesting the thoughts, the lines, and the expression, doing all the work except the pantomime.
That was Kedzie's salvation. Tell her a story and make her the heroine of it, and her excitable heart would thrill to the emotional crisis. Take a snapshot of her, and the picture was caught.
Ferriday soon learned this and protected her from her own helpless vice of discontent. She lapsed always from her enthusiasm after it was once cold. As an actress she would have been one of those frequent flashers who give a splendid rehearsal or two and then sink back into a torpor. She might have risen to an appealing first-night performance. Thereafter, she would have become dismal. The second week would have found the audiences disgusted and the third would have found her breaking her contract and running away with somebody. A horse that has run away once is likely to run away again. Kedzie had run away twice.
But the movie life was just the thing for her. She did not play always the same set scenes in the same scene sets. She was not required even to follow the logic of the story. For a while she would play a bit in a tiny angle representing a drawing-room. When that was taken she would play, not the next moment of the story, but the next scene in that scene. It might be a year further along in the story. It was exciting.
Her second picture had great success. She played the girl brought up as a boy by a cruel Italian padrone who made her steal. Her third picture was as nearly the same as possible.
Now she was a ragged waif, a girl, who dressed as a boy and sold newspapers so as to keep her old father in liquor. The garret was a rickety table, a rusty stove, a broken chair, and a V of painted canvas walls with a broken window and a paper snowstorm falling back of it. There Kedzie was found in very becoming ragged breeches, pouting with starvation. Her father drove her out for gin.
She walked out of the set, picked up a bottle, and brought it back. The scene in the saloon would be taken later: also the street scenes to and from.
An officer of the “Cruelty” came and took her from the garret. That was the beginning of a series of adventures culminating in a marriage with a multimillionaire. While the garret was set, the finish of the story was taken.
She ran and changed her costume to one of wealth with ermine. She came in with the handsome young millionaire. It was the next winter. Her father was dying. He asked her forgiveness and gave her his blessing. Then Kedzie changed back to her first costume and went in the motor to a dismal street where she was shown coming out of the tenement, and going back to it gin-laden, and again with the officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
She changed once more to her wealthy garb with the ermine and was photographed going in with her young millionaire.
The next day the scene in the Cruelty office was built and she acted in it. The drawing-room in the millionaire's home was assembled and she acted in that. Then she went out in rags and sold newspapers on a corner. So it went. The chronology hopelessly jumbled, but the change incessant.
The studio was a palace of industry. Many of the scenes were played on the great glass-covered roof. On bright days she would ride in a closed automobile to some street or some lonely glen or to the home of some wealthy person who had lent his house to the movies on the bribe of a gift to his favorite benevolence.
There was the thrill of sitting in the projection-room and watching herself scamper across the scene, or flirt or weep, look pretty or gorgeous, sad or gay.
One's own portrait is always a terribly fascinating thing, for it is always the inaccurate portrait of a stranger curiously akin to one and curiously alien. But to see one's portrait move and breathe and feel is magic unbelievable.
In the enlarged close-ups when Kedzie was a girl giantess, the effect was uncanny. She loved herself and was glad of the friendly dark that hid her own wild pride in her beauty, but did not prevent her from hearing the exclamations of Ferriday and the backers and the other actors who were admitted to the preliminary views.
There was a quality in her work that surpassed Ferriday's expectations and made her pantomime singularly legible. The modulations of her thought from one extreme mood to another were always traceable. This was true of the least feelings. Ferriday would say: “Now you decide to telephone your lover. You hesitate, you telephone, a girl answers, you wait, he speaks, you smile.”
Kedzie would nod with impatient zest and one could read each gradation of thought. “I'd better telephone him. I will. No, I'd better not. Yes. No. Shall I? Well, I will. Hello! Hello, Central! Hurry up! Gramercy 816. What takes so long? Is this Gramercy 816? Mr. Monteith. Oh, isn't she smart? What keeps him? Is he out? No, there he is! Oh, joy! I must be very severe. Hello, Harry.”
All these thoughts the spectator could follow. They ran, as it were, under her skin. There was no stolidity or phlegm. She was astoundingly alive and real. Unimportant, without sublimity of emotion or intellectual power, she was irresistibly real. The public understood all she told it, and adored her.
Her petulance, quick temper, pretty discontent, did not harm her on the screen, but helped immensely, for they gave her character. It was delicious to see her eyes narrow with sudden resentment or girlish malice and widen again with equally abrupt affection. She was so pretty that she could afford to act ugly.
It took time, however, to get Kedzie from the studio to the negative, then to the positive. There was editing to do, and it seemed to her that her most delicious bits had to be cut out, because Ferriday always took three or four thousand feet of film for every thousand he used. They had to cut out more Kedzie to let in the titles and subtitles, and it angered her to see how much space was given to other members of the cast. She simply loathed the scenes she was not the center of, and she developed an acerbity of protest against any “trespass” on her “rights” that proved her a genuine business woman.
She learned the tricks of the trade with magnificent speed. She was never so meek and helpless of expression as when she slipped in front of another actor or actress and filled as much of the foreground as her slenderness permitted. When she was crowded into the background she knew how to divert attention to herself during the best moments of the other people in the scene. And she could most innocently spoil any bit that she did not like to do herself or have done by another.
In the studio she was speedily recognized as an ambitious young woman zealous for self-advancement. In fact, they called her a “reel hog” and a “glutton for footage.” A number of minor feuds were turned into deep friendships through a common resentment at Kedzie's impartial robberies.
Ferriday did not object to these professional traits. They exist in all trades, and success is never won in large measure without them. Almost all businesses are little trusts, monopolies more or less tiny, more or less ruthless.
Ferriday delighted in Kedzie's battle for space with the other members of the troupe. They kept everybody intense. The lover loved her better on the screen for hating her personal avarice. Her mother in the picture was more meltingly tender in her caresses for wanting to scratch the little cat's eyes out. The clergyman who pointed her the way to heaven grew more ardently devout for having to grip the floor with his feet to keep the adoring Kedzie from edging him off his own pulpit.
This rivalry is better than any number of chaperons, and Kedzie was saved from any danger of falling in love with the unspeakably beautiful leading man by the ferocity of her jealousy of him. She had once, as a little girl in Nimrim, Missouri, nearly swooned at the glory of this Lorraine Melnotte, and she had written him a little letter of adoration, one of some nineteen he received that day from lovelorn girls about the globe.
When she met him first in the studio he was painted as delicately as a barber-pole, and he stood sweating in a scene under the full blast of a battery of sick green Cooper-Hewitt lights. He looked about three days dead and loathsome as an iguana. He was in full evening dress, and Kedzie had always marveled at the snowiness of his linen.
Now she saw how he got the effect. He wore a yellow shirt, collar, tie, and waistcoat in order that the photographic result should be the purest white. The yellow linen was the completing horror under the spoiled mustard color of his face with its mouth the color of an overripe plum.
His expression did not redeem his appalling features that day, nor did his language help. While the cameraman leaned on his idle machine and looked weary Lorraine Melnotte was having a sweet little row with the actress playing his sainted mother. He was threatening to have her fired if she didn't keep her place.
That finished him for Kedzie. She could not tolerate professional jealousy. She never could. Her own was merely a defense of her dignity and her rights against the peculiarly impossible people who infested the studio. That was Kedzie's own phrase, for she had not lived with a poet long before she began to experiment with large words. She practised before a mirror any phrases she particularly liked. She had probably heard Ferriday use the expression and she got herself up on it till she was glib. Anybody who can be glib with “peculiarly impossible” is in a fair way to be articulate. All Kedzie needed was a little more certainty on her grammar; and her ear was giving her that.
Her contempt for Lorraine Melnotte culminated in a dark suspicion that that was not his real born name. If Anita Adair was Kedzie Thropp what would Lorraine Melnotte have been? It was a pretty problem in algebra. But Kedzie despised a man that would take another name. And such a name—as unworthy of a man as a box of chocolate fudge.
So the image of Mr. Melnotte fell out of the niche in her heart and went over into the gallery of her hates. She fought him with every weapon and every foul thrust known to shy little women in dealing with big, blustering men. She loved to call him “Melnit” or “naughty Mel.”
He was lost from the start and was soon begging to be released from his contract. The backers were too sure of his vogue, however, to let him go, and it was none of their affair how fiercely Adair and Melnotte indulged in mutual loathing, so long as their screen-love was so wholesomely sweet.
With Ferriday Kedzie's relations were more perilous. He had invented her and was patenting her. She dreaded his wisdom and accepted his least theory as gospel—at first. He combined a remote and godlike intellect with a bending and fatherly grace. And now and then, like the other gods of all the mythologies, he came down to earth in an amorous mood.
Now Kedzie's surety was her canny realization of the value of tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of his record for flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit from her as soon as he conquered her. Her duty was plain.
She played him well and drove him frantic. It would have been hard to say whether he hated her or loved her more when he found her always just a little beyond. He had begun with the greatest gift in his power. He had promised her world-wide fame, and no other gift could count till he had made that good. And it would take a long, long while of incessant labor to build.
Ferriday belittled himself in Kedzie's eyes by his groans of baffled egotism. She could read his plots on his countenance, and thwart him in advance. But this was not always easy for her, and again and again he had only himself to blame for his non-success with Kedzie's heart. With Kedzie's fame he was having a very sudden and phenomenal triumph—if anything could be called phenomenal in a field which itself was phenomenal always.
Ferriday did not know, of course, that Kedzie was married. She hardly knew it herself now. Gilfoyle had been three weeks late in sending her the thirty dollars' fare to Chicago. Then she wrote him that she was doing fairly well at the studio and she would stick to her work. She sent him oceans of love, but she did not send him the thirty dollars.
Besides, he had borrowed it of her in the first place, and she had had to borrow more of Ferriday. She had neglected to pay him back. She needed so much for her new clothes and new expenses innumerable inflicted on her by her improved estate.
And, of course, she left the miserable little flat on the landlord's hands. He wasted a good deal of time trying to get the rent paid. Besides, it was rented in Gilfoyle's name and he was safe in Chicago. And yet not very safe, for Chicago has also its Bohemia, its clusters of real and imitation artists, its talkers and dabblers, as well as its toilers and achievers.
Gilfoyle found some wonderful Western sirens who listened to his poetry. They were new to him and he to them. His Eastern pronunciations fascinated them as they had fascinated Kedzie, and he soon found in them all the breeziness and wholesomeness of the great prairies which are found in the mid-Western women of literature.
Gilfoyle had apparently forgotten that his own wife was a mid-Westerness, and the least breezy, wholesome, prairian thing imaginable. He saw mid-Western women of all sorts about him, but he was of those who must have a type for every section of humanity and who will not be shaken in their belief by any majority of exceptions.
When Gilfoyle got Kedzie's letter saying that she would not join him yet awhile he wrote her a letter of poetic grief at the separation. But poets, like the rest of us, are the better for getting a grief on paper and out of the system.
Kedzie did not answer his letter for a long while and he did not miss her answer much, for he was having his own little triumphs. The advertisements he wrote were receiving honorable mention at the office and he was having success with his poetry and his flirtations of evenings.
He returned to his boarding-house one night and looked at his face in the mirror, stared into the eyes that stared back. A certain melting and molten and molting lady had told him that he had poet's eyes like Julian Street's and was almost as witty. Gilfoyle tried with his shaving-glass and the bureau mirror to study the profile that someone else had compared to the cameonic visage of Richard Le Gallienne.
Gilfoyle was gloriously ashamed of himself. In the voice that someone else had compared to Charlie Towne's reading his own verses he addressed his reflection with scorn:
“You heartless dog! You ought to be shot—forgetting that you have a poor little deserted wife toiling in the great city. You're as bad as Lord Byron ever was.”
Then he wrote a sonnet against his own perfidy and accepted confession as atonement and plenary indulgence.
He was one of those who, when they have cried, “I have sinned,” hear a mysterious voice saying, “Poor sufferer, go and sin some more.”
So he did, and he went the way of millions of lazy-minded, lazy-moraled husbands while Kedzie went the way of men and women who succeed by self-exploitation and count only that bad morals which is also bad business. And that was the status of the matrimonial adventure of the Gilfoyles for the present. It made no perceptible difference to anybody that they were married—least of all to themselves—for the present. But of course Kedzie was obscurely preparing all this while for a tremendous explosion into publicity and into what is known as “the big money.” And that was bound to make a vast difference to Gilfoyle as well as to Mrs. Gilfoyle.
In these all-revolutionary days a man had better be a little polite always to his wife, for in some totally unexpectable way she may suddenly prove to be a bigger man than he is, a money-getter, a fame or shame acquirer—if only by way of becoming the president of a suffrage association or a best-seller or an inventor of a popular doll.
And again, all this time—a very short time, considering the changes it made in everybody concerned—Ferriday was Kedzie's alternate hope and despair, good angel and bad, uplifter and down-yanker.
Sometimes he threatened to stop the picture and destroy it unless she kissed him. And she knew that he could and would do almost anything of that sort. Had not his backers threatened to murder him or sue him if he did not finish the big feature? At such times Kedzie usually kissed Ferriday to keep him quiet. But she was as careful not to give too many kisses as she had been not to put too many caramels in half a pound when she had clerked in the little candy-store. Nowadays she would pause and watch the quivering scale of policy intently with one more sweet poised as if it were worth its weight in gold. The ability to stop while the scale wavers in the tiny zone of just-a-little-too-little and just-a-little-too-much is what makes success in any business of man—or woman-kind.
It was not always easy for Kedzie to withhold that extra bonbon. There were times when Ferriday raised her hopes and her pride so high that she fairly squealed with love of him and hugged him. That would have been the destruction of Kedzie if there had not been the counter-weight of conceit in Ferriday's soul, for at those times he would sigh to himself or aloud:
“You are loving me only because I am useful to you.”
This thought always sobered and chilled Mr. Ferriday. He worked none the less for her and himself and he tried in a hundred ways to surprise the little witch into an adoration complete enough to make her forget herself, make her capable of that ultimate altruism to which a woman falls or rises when she stretches herself out on the altar of love.
Ferriday began to think seriously that the only way he could break Kedzie's pride completely would be to make her his wife. He began to wonder if that were not, after all, what she was driving at—or trying to drive him to.
Life will be so much more wholesome when women propose marriage as men do and have a plain, frank talk about it instead of their eternal business of veils and reticences, fugitive impulses real or coquettish, modesties real or faked.
Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so curious to know that finally he broke out, “In the Lord's name, will you or will you not marry me, damn you?”
And Kedzie answered: “Of course not. I wouldn't dream of such a thing.”
But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she merely wanted to trawl him along.
She had Ferriday almost crazy—at least she had added one more to his manias—when Jim Dyckman wandered into the studio and set up an entirely new series of ambitions and discontents.
Charity Coe forgot her great moving-picture enterprise for a time in the agony of her discovery that her husband was disloyal and that the Church did not accept that as a cancellation of her own loyalty.
For a long time she was in such misery of uncertainty that she went up to the mountains to recover her strength. She came back at last, made simple and stoical somehow by the contrast of human pettiness with the serenity (as we call it) of those vast masses of débris that we poetize and humanize as patient giants.
Her absence had left Cheever entirely to his own devices and to Zada's. They had made up and fought and made up again dozens of times and settled down at length to that normal alternation of peace and conflict known as domestic life.
With Charity out of the way there was so little interruption to their communion that when she came back Zada forbade Cheever to meet her at the station, and he obeyed.
Charity felt that she had brought with her the weight of the mountains instead of their calm when she detrained in the thronged solitude of the Grand Central Terminal. And the house with its sympathetic family of servants only was as home-like as the Mammoth Cave.
She took up her work with a frenzy. The need of a man to act as her adjutant in the business details was imperative. She thought of Jim Dyckman again, and with a different thought.
When he pleaded to her before she had imagined that she was at least officially a wife. Now she felt divorced and abandoned, a waif on the public mercy.
She wanted to talk to Jim because she felt so disprized and downtrodden that she wanted to see somebody who adored her. She felt wild impulses to throw herself into his keeping. She wanted to be bad just to spite the bad. But she merely convinced herself that she was wicked enough already and deserving of her punishment.
She made the moving-picture scheme a good excuse for asking Jim to grant her a talk—a business talk. To protect herself from him and from herself she made a convenience of Mrs. Neff's home. Jim met her there. She was not looking her best and her mood was one of artificial indirectness that offended him. He never dreamed that it was because she was afraid to show him how glad she was to see him.
He was furious at her—so he said he would do her bidding. She dumped the financial and mechanical ends of the enterprise on his hands and he accepted the burden. He had nothing else pressing for his time.
One of his first duties, Charity told him, was to call at the Hyperfilm Studio and try to engage that Mr. Ferriday for director and learn the ropes.
“While you're there you might inquire about that little girl you pulled out of the pool. I sent her there. They promised her a job. Her name was—I have it at home in my address-book. I'll telephone it to you.”
And she did. She had no more acquaintance with the history Kedzie was making in the moving-picture world than she had of the sensational rise of the latest politician in Tibet. Neither had Jim.
He had been traveling about on his mother's yacht and in less correct societies, trying to convince himself that he was cured of Charity. He did not know that the first pictures of Anita Adair were causing lines to gather outside the moving-picture theaters of numberless cities and towns.
When his car halted before the big studio where Ferriday was high priest Jim might have been a traveler entering a temple in Lassa, for all he knew of its rites and its powers.
No more did the doorman know the power and place of Jim Dyckman. When Jim said he had an appointment with Mr. Ferriday the doorman thumbed him up the marble stairs. There were many doors, but no signs on them, and Dyckman blundered about. At length he turned down a corridor and found himself in the workshop.
A vast room it was, the floor hidden with low canvas walls and doors marked “Keep out.” Overhead were girders of steel from which depended heavy chains supporting hundreds of slanting tubes glowing with green fire.
From somewhere in the inclosures came a voice in distress. It was the first time Dyckman ever heard Ferriday's voice, and it puzzled him as it cried:
“Come on, choke her—choke harder, you fool; you're not a masseur—you're a murderer. Now drag her across to the edge of the well. Pause, look back. Come on, Melnotte: yell at him! 'Stop, stop, you dog!' Turn round, Higgins; draw your knife. Go to it now! Give 'em a real fight. That's all right. Only a little cut. The blood looks good. Get up, Miss Adair; crawl away on hands and knees. Don't forget you've been choked. Now take the knife away, Melnotte. Rise; look triumphant; see the girl. Get to him, Miss Adair. Easy on the embrace: you're a shy little thing. 'My hero! you have saved me!' Now, Melnotte: 'Clarice! it is you! you!' Cut! How many feet, Jones?
“Now we'll take the scene in the vat of sulphuric acid. Is the tank ready? You go lie down and rest, Miss Adair. We won't want you for half an hour.”
As Kedzie left the scene she found Dyckman waiting for her. He lifted his hat and spoke down at her:
“Pardon me, but you're Miss Adair, aren't you?”
“Yes,” said Kedzie, with as much modesty as a queen could show, incidentally noting that the man who bespoke her so timidly was plainly a real swell. She was getting so now that she could tell the real from the plated.
“I heard them murdering you in there and I—Well, Mrs. Cheever asked me to look you up and see how you were getting along. I see you are.”
“Mrs. Cheever!” said Kedzie, searching her memory. Then, with great kindliness, “Oh yes! I remember her.”
“You've forgotten me, I suppose. I had the pleasure—the sad pleasure of helping you out of the water at Mrs. Noxon's.”
“Oh, Lord, yes,” Kedzie cried, forgetting her rank. “You're Jim Dyckman—I mean, Mr. Dyckman.”
“So you remember my name,” he flushed. “Well, I must say!”
“I didn't remember to thank you,” said Kedzie. “I was all damp and mad. I've often thought of writing to you.” And she had.
“I wish you had,” said Dyckman. “Well, well!”
He didn't know what to say, and so he laughed and she laughed and they were well acquainted. Then he thought of a good one.
“I pulled you out of the cold water, so it's your turn to pull me out of the hot.”
“What hot?” said Kedzie.
“I've been sent up here to learn the trade.”
Kedzie had a horrible feeling that he must have lost his money. Wouldn't it be just her luck to meet her first millionaire after he had become an ex-?
But Dyckman said that he had come to try and engage Mr. Ferriday, and that sounded so splendid to Kedzie that she snuggled closer. Ordinarily when a woman cowers under the eaves of a man's shoulder it is taken for a signal for amiabilities to begin.
Dyckman could not imagine that Kedzie was already as bad as all that. She wasn't. She was just trying to get as close as she could to a million dollars. Her feelings were as innocent and as imbecile as those of the mobs that stand in line for the privilege of pump-handling a politician.
Jim Dyckman kept forgetting that he was so rich. He hated to be reminded of it. He did not suspect Kedzie of such a thought. He stared down at her and thought she was cruelly pretty. He wanted to tell her so, but he found himself saying:
“But I mustn't keep you. I heard somebody say that you were to lie down and rest up.”
“Oh, that was only Mr. Ferriday. I'm not tired a bit.”
“Ferriday. Oh yes, I'm forgetting him. He's the feller I've come to see.”
“He can't be approached when he's working. Sit down, won't you?”
He sat down on an old bench and she sat down, too. She had never felt quite so contented as this. And Dyckman had not felt so teased by beauty in a longer time than he could remember.
Kedzie was as exotic to him as a Japanese doll. Her face was painted in picturesque blotches that reminded him of a toy-shop. Her eyes were made up with a delicate green that gave them an effect unknown to him.
She was dressed as a young farm girl with a sunbonnet a-dangle at the back of her neck, her curls trailing across her rounded shoulders and down upon her dreamy bosom. She sat and swung her little feet and looked up at him sidewise.
He forgot all about Ferriday, and when Ferriday came along did not see him. Kedzie did not tell him. She pretended not to see Ferriday, though she enjoyed enormously the shock it gave him to find her so much at ease with that big stranger.
Ferriday was so indignant at being snubbed in his own domain by his own creation that he sent Garfinkel to see who the fellow was and throw him out. Garfinkel came back with Dyckman, followed by Kedzie.
Before Garfinkel could present Dyckman to the great Ferriday, Kedzie made the introduction. Dyckman was already her own property. She had seen him first.
Ferriday was jolted by the impact of the great name of Dyckman. He was restored by the suppliant attitude of his visitor. He said that he doubted if he could find the time to direct an amateur picture. Dyckman hastened to say:
“Of course, money is no object to us....”
“Nor to me,” Ferriday said, coldly.
Dyckman went on as if he had not heard: “... Except that the more the show costs the less there is for the charity.”
“I should be glad to donate my services to the cause,” said Ferriday, who could be magnificent.
“Three cheers for you!” said Dyckman, who could not.
Ferriday had neither the time nor the patience for the task. But when the chance came to dazzle the rich by the rich generosity of working for nothing, he could not afford to let it pass. To tip a millionaire! He had to do that.
He saw incidentally that Kedzie was fairly hypnotized by Dyckman and Dyckman by her. His first flare of jealousy died out. To be cut out by a prince has always been a kind of ennoblement in itself.
Also one of Ferriday's inspirations came to him. If he could get those two infatuated with each other it would not only take Kedzie off his heart, but it might be made to redound to the further advantage of his own genius. A scheme occurred to him. He was building the scenario of it in the back room of his head while his guest occupied his parlor.
He wanted to be alone and he wanted Dyckman and Kedzie to be alone together. And so did Kedzie. Ferriday suggested:
“Perhaps Mr. Dyckman would like to look over the studio—and perhaps Miss Adair would show him about.”
Kedzie started to cry, “You bet your boots,” but she caught herself in time and shifted to, “I should be chawmed.” Millionaires did not use plain words.
Then Dyckman said, “Great!”
He followed Kedzie wherever she led. He was as awkward and out of place as a school-boy at his first big dance. Kedzie showed him a murder scene being enacted under the bluesome light. She took great pains not to let any of it stain her skin. She showed him a comic scene with a skeletonic man on a comic bicycle. Dyckman roared when the other comedian lubricated the cyclist's joints with an oil-can.
Kedzie showed him the projection-room and told the operator to run off a bit of a scene in which she was revealed to no disadvantage. She sat alone in the dark with a million dollars that were crazy about her. She could tell that Dyckman was tremendously excited.
Here at last was her long-sought opportunity to rebuff the advances of a wicked plutocrat. But he didn't make any, and she might not have rebuffed them. Still, the air was a-quiver with that electricity generated almost audibly by a man and a woman alone in the dark.
Dyckman was ashamed of himself and of his arm for wanting to gather in that delectable partridge, but he behaved himself admirably.
He told her that she was a “corker,” a “dream,” and “one sweet song,” and that the picture did not do her justice.
Kedzie showed him the other departments of the picture-factory and he was amazed at all she knew. So was she. He stayed a long while and saw everything and yet he said he would come again.
He suggested that it might be nice if Mr. Ferriday and Miss Adair would dine with him soon. Ferriday was free “to-morrow,” and so they made it to-morrow evening at the Vanderbilt.
Kedzie was there and Dyckman was there, but a boy brought a note from Mr. Ferriday saying that he was unavoidably prevented from being present.
Dyckman grinned: “We'll have to bear up under it the best we can. You won't run away just because your chaperon is gone, will you?”
Kedzie smiled and said she would stay. But she was puzzled. What was Ferriday up to? One always suspected that Ferriday was up to something and thinking of something other than what he did or said.
Kedzie was not ashamed of her clothes this time. Indeed, when she gave her opera-cloak to the maid she came out so resplendent that Jim Dyckman said:
“Zowie! but you're a—Whew! aren't you great? Some change-o from the little farm girl I saw up at the studio. I don't suppose you'll eat anything but a little bird-seed.”
She was elated to see themaître d'hôtelshake hands with her escort and ask him how he was and where he had been. Jim apologized for neglecting to call recently, and the two sauntered like friends across to a table where half a dozen waiters bowed and smiled and welcomed the prodigal home.
When they were seated the headwaiter said, “The moosels vit sauce marinière are nize to-nide.”
Dyckman shook his head: “Ump-umm! I'm on the water-wagon and the diet kitchen. Miss Adair can go as far as she likes, but I've got to stick to a little thick soup, a big, thick steak, and after, a little French pastry, some coffee, and a bottle of polly water—and I'll risk a mug of old musty.” He turned to Kedzie: “And now I've ordered, what do you want? I never could order for anybody else.”
Kedzie was disappointed in him. He was nothing like Ferriday. He didn't use a French word once. She was afraid to venture on her own.
“I'll take the same things,” she said.
“Sensible lady,” said Jim. “Women who work must eat.”
Kedzie hated to be referred to as a worker by an idler. She little knew how much Jim Dyckman wished he were a worker.
She could not make him out. Her little hook had dragged out Leviathan and she was surprised to find how unlike he was to her plans for her first millionaire. He ate like a hungry man who ordered what he wanted and made no effort to want what he did not want. He had had so much elaborated food that he craved few courses and simple. He said what came into his head, without frills or pose. He was sincerely delighted with Kedzie and made neither secret nor poetry of it.
Toward the last of the dinner Kedzie ceased to try to find in him what was not there. She accepted him as the least affected person she had ever met. He could afford to be unaffected and careless and spontaneous. He had nothing to gain. He had everything already. Kedzie would have said that he ought to have been happy because of that, as if that were not as good an excuse for discontent as any. In any case, Kedzie said to herself:
“He's the real thing.”
She wanted to be that very thing—that most difficult thing—real. It became her new ambition.
After the dinner Dyckman offered to take her home. He had a limousine waiting for him. She did not ask him to put her into a taxicab. She was not afraid to have him ride home with her. She was afraid he wouldn't. She was not ashamed of the apartment-house she was living in now. It was nothing wonderful, but all the money had been spent on the hall. And that was as far as Dyckman would get—yet.
Kedzie had acquired a serenity toward all the world except what she called “high society.” In her mind the wordhighhad the significance it has with reference to game that has been kept to the last critical moments, and trembles, exquisitely putrid, between being eaten immediately and being thrown away soon.
There is enough and to spare of that high element among the wealthy, but so there is among the poor and among all the middlings. Kedzie had met with it on her way up, and she expected to find it in Dyckman. She looked forward to a thrilling adventure.
She could not have imagined that Dyckman was far more afraid of her than she of him. She was so tiny and he so big that she terrorized him as a mouse an elephant, or a baby a saddle-horse. The elephant is probably afraid that he will squash the little gliding insect, the horse that he might step on the child.
The disparity between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie was not so great, and they were both of the same species. But he felt a kind of terror of her. And yet she fascinated him as an interesting toy that laughed and talked and probably would not say “Mamma!” if squeezed.
Dyckman had been lonely and blue, rejected and dejected. Kedzie was something different. He had known lots of actresses, large and small, stately, learned, cheap, stupid, brilliant, bad, good, gorgeous, shabby, wanton, icy. But Kedzie was his first movie actress. She dwelt in a strange realm of unknown colors and machineries.
She was a new toy in a new toyhouse—a whole Noah's ark of queer toys. He wanted to play with those toys. She made him arevenantto childhood. Or, as he put it:
“Gee! but you make me feel as silly as a kid.”
That surprised Kedzie. It was not the sort of talk she expected from a world which was stranger to her than the movie studio to him. He was perfectly natural, and that threw her into a spasm of artificiality.
He sat staring down at her. He put his hands under his knees and sat on them to keep them from touching her, as they wanted to. For all he knew, she was covered with fresh paint. That made her practically irresistible. Would it come off if he kissed her? He had to find out.
Finally he said, so helplessly, passively, that it would be more accurate to say it was said by him:
“Say, Miss Adair, I'm a dead-goner if you don't gimme a kiss.”
Kedzie was horrified. Skip Magruder would have been eleganter than that. She answered, with dignity:
“Certainly, if you so desire.”
That ought to have chaperoned him back to his senses, but he was too far gone. His long arms shot out, went round her, gathered her up to his breast. His high head came down like a swan's, and his lips pressed hers.
Whatever her soul was, her flesh was all girlhood in one flower of lithe stem, leaf, petal, sepal, and perfume. There was nothing of the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, or even that velvet voluptuary, the rose. She was like a great pink, sweet, shy, fragrant, common wild honeysuckle blossom.
Jim Dyckman was so whelmed by the youth and flavor of her that his rapture exploded in an unsmothered gasp:
“Golly! but you're great!”
Kedzie was heartbroken. Gilfoyle had done better than that. She had been kissed by several million dollars, and she was not satisfied!
But Dyckman was. He felt that Kedzie had solved the problem of Charity Coe. She had cleared his soul of that hopeless obsession—he thought—just then.