Jim thudded dismally along in her wake. Charity was in the drawing-room wearing her politest face. She could tell from Kedzie's very pose that she was as welcome as a submarine.
Kedzie said, “Awfully decent of you to come,” and gave her a handful of cold, limp fingers.
Charity politely pretended that she had called unexpectedly and that she was in dire need of Kedzie's aid. She made herself unwittingly ridiculous in the eyes of Kedzie, who knew and despised her motive, not appreciating at all the consideration Charity was trying to show.
“I'm sorry to bother you, Mrs. Dyckman,” Charity began, “but I've got to throw myself on your mercy. A few of us are getting up a new stunt for the settlement-work fund. It is to be rather elaborate and ought to make a lot of money. It is to represent a day in the life of a New York Bud. You can have your choice of several rôles, and I hope you will lend us a hand.”
Kedzie had heard of this project and she had gnawed her bitter heart in a chagrin of yearning to take part in it. She had not been invited, and she had blenched every time she thought of it. She was so much relieved at being asked that she almost forgave Charity for her benevolence. She stammered: “It's awfully decent of you to ask me. I'll do my bit with the greatest of pleasure.”
She rather regretted those last five words. They were a bitNimrimmy.
Charity sketched the program for her.
“The Bud is discovered in bed. A street piano wakes her. There is to be a dance to a hurdy-gurdy. Then the Bud has breakfast. It is served by a dancing maid and butler. Tom Duane is to be the butler. You could be—no, you wouldn't fancy the maid, I imagine.”
Kedzie did not fancy the maid.
Charity went on: “The girl dresses and goes to a rehearsal of the Junior League. That's to be a ballet of harlequins and columbines. She goes from there to her dressmaker's. I am to play the dressmaker. I have mymannequins,and you might want to play one of those and wear the latest thing—or you could be one of the customers. You can think it over.
“Then the girl is seen reading a magazine and there is a dance of cover girls. If you have any favorite illustrator you could be one of his types.
“Next the Bud goes to an art exhibition. This year Zuloaga is the craze, and several of his canvases will come to life. Do you care for Zuloaga?”
“Immensely, but—” Kedzie said, wondering just what Zuloaga did to his canvases. She had seen a cubist exhibition that gave her a headache, and she thought it might have something to do with Zulus.
Charity ran on: “After dinner the Bud goes to the theater and sees a pantomime and a series of ballets, dolls of the nations—Chinese, Polish, also nursery characters. You could select something in one of those dances, perhaps.
“And last of all there is a chimney-sweeps' dance as the worn-out Bud crawls into bed. If none of these suit you we'd be glad to have any suggestion that occurs to you. Of course, a girl of to-day does a thousand more things than I've mentioned. But the main thing is, we want you to help us out.
“You are—if you'll forgive me for slapping you in the face with a bouquet—you are exquisitely beautiful and I know that you dance exquisitely.”
“How do you know that?” Kedzie asked, rashly.
“I saw you once as a—” Charity paused, seeing the red run across Kedzie's face. She had stumbled into Kedzie's past again, and Kedzie's resentment braced her hurt pride.
Charity tried to mend matters by a little advice: “You mustn't blush, my dear Mrs. Dyckman. If I were in your place I'd go around bragging about it. To have been a Greek dancer, what a beautiful past!”
“Thanks!” said Kedzie, curtly, with basilisk eyes. “I think I'd rather not dance any more. I'm an old married woman now. If you don't mind, I'll be one of the customers at your shop. I'll come in in the rippingest gown Jim can buy. I'll feel more comfortable, too, under your protection, Mrs. Cheever.”
Jim laughed and Kedzie grinned. But she was canny. She was thinking that she would be safest among that pack of wolves if she relied on her money to buy something dazzling rather than on the beauty that Charity alleged. She did not want to dance before those people again. She would never forget how her foot had slipped at Newport.
Thirdly, she felt that she would be sheltered a little from persecution beneath the wing of Charity. It rather pleased her to treat Charity as a motherly sort of person. It is the most deliciously malicious compliment a woman can pay another.
Charity did not fail to receive the stab. But it amused her so far as she was concerned. She felt that Kedzie was like one of those incorrigiblegamineswho throw things at kindly visitors to the slums. She felt sorry for Jim, and wondered again by what strange devices he had been led to marry so incompatible a girl as Kedzie.
Jim wondered, too. He sat and watched the two women, wondering as men do when they see women painfully courteous to each other; wondering as women must when they see men polite to their enemies.
Charity and Kedzie prattled on in a kind of two-story conversation, and Jim studied them with shameless objectivity. He hardly heard what they said. He watched the pantomime of their so different souls and bodies: Charity, lean and smart and aristocratic, beautiful in a peculiar mixture of sophistication and tenderness; Kedzie, small and nymph-like and plebeian, beautiful in a mixture of innocence and hardness of heart.
Charity's body was like the work of a dashing painter—long lines drawn with brave force and direction. Kedzie's body was a thing of dainty curves and timidities. Charity was fashionable and wise, but her wisdom had lifted her above pettiness. Kedzie was of the village, for all her Parisian garb, and she had cunning, which is the lowest form of wisdom.
When at length Charity left, Jim and Kedzie sat brooding. Kedzie wanted to say something nice about Charity and was afraid to. The poor child always distrusted her generous impulses. She thought it cleverer to withhold trust from everybody, lest she misplace it in somebody. At length an imp of perversity taught her how to get rid of the credit she owed to Charity. She spoke after a long silence.
“Mrs. Cheever must be horribly fond of you.”
“Why do you say that?” said Jim, startled.
“Because she's so nice to me.”
Jim groaned with disgust. Kedzie giggled, accepting the groan as confession of a palpable hit. She sat musing on various costumes she might wear. She had a woman's memory for things she had caught a glimpse of in a shop-window or in a fashion magazine; she had a woman's imagination for dressing herself up mentally.
As a trained mathematician can do amazing sums in his head, so Kedzie could juggle modes and combinations, colors and stuffs, and wrap hem about herself. While Kedzie composed her new gown, her husband studied her, still wondering at her and his inability to get past the barriers of her flesh to her soul. Charity's flesh seemed but the expression of herself. It was cordial and benevolent, warm and expressive in his eyes. Her hands were for handclasp, her lips for good words, her eyes for honest language. He had not embraced her except in dances years before, and in that one quickly broken embrace at Newport. He had not kissed her since they had been boy and girl lovers, but the savor of her lips was still sweet in his memory. He felt that he knew her soul utterly.
He had possessed all the advantages of Kedzie without seeming to get acquainted with the ultimate interior Kedzie at all. She was to him well-known flesh inhabited by a total stranger, who fled from him mysteriously. When she embraced him she held him aloof. When she kissed him her lips pressed him back. He could not outgrow the feeling that their life together was rather a reckless flirtation than a communion of merged souls.
He stared at her now and saw dark eyebrows and eyelashes etched on a white skin, starred with irises of strange hue, a nose deftly shaped, a mouth as pretty and as impersonal as a flower, a throat of some ineffably exquisite petal material. She sat with one knee lifted a little and clasped in her hands, and there was something miraculous about the felicity of the lines, the arms penciled downward from the shoulders and meeting in the delicately contoured buckle of her ten fingers, the thigh springing in a suave arc from the confluent planes of her torse, the straight shin to the curve of instep and toe and heel. Her hair was an altogether incredible extravagance of manufacture.
George Meredith has described a woman's hair once for all, and if Jim had ever read anything so important asThe Egoisthe would have said that Kedzie's poll was illustrated in that wonderfully coiffed hair-like sentence picturing Clara Middleton and “the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-colored irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—waved or fell, waved over or up to involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long, round locks of gold to trick the heart.”
Kedzie's hair was as fascinating as that, and she had many graces and charms. For a while they had proved fascinating, but a man does not want to have a cartoon, however complexly beautiful, for a wife. Jim wanted a congenial companion—that is to say, he wanted Charity Coe.
But he could not have her. If he had been one of the patriarchs or a virtuous man of Mohammedan stock he could have tried, by marrying a female quartet, to make up one good, all-round wife. But he was doomed to a single try, and he had picked the wrong one.
The agonies of the woman who has been married to the wrong man have been celebrated innumerably and vats of tears spilled over them. She used to be consigned to a husband by parental choice and compulsion. Those days are part of the good old times.
For a man there never has been any sympathy, since he has not usually been the victim of parental despotism in the matter of selecting a spouse, or, when he has been, he has had certain privileges of excursion. The excursion is still a popular form of mitigating the severities of an unsuccessful marriage. Some commit murder, some commit suicide, some commit other things. Marriage is the one field in which instinct is least trustworthy and it is the one field in which it is accounted immoral to repent errors of judgments or to correct them.
The law has found it well to concede a good deal to the criminals. After centuries of vain cruelty it was found that certain people simply could not be made good by any rigor of confinement or any heaping up of punishment. So the law has come down to the criminal with results no worse at the worst than before, and sublimely better at the best than before. The civil law is doing the same slowly for the mal-married.
But Jim Dyckman was not even dreaming of seeking a rescue from his mistake by way of a divorce.
Charity had entered the divorce court and she would always bear the reproach of some of her most valued friends. She could not imaginably encourage Jim Dyckman to free himself by the same channel, and if he did, how could Charity marry him? The marriage of two divorced persons would provoke a tempest of horror from part of the world, and gales of ridicule from the rest. Besides, there was no sign that Kedzie would ever give Jim cause for divorce, or that he would make use of it if she gave it him.
Charity could not help pondering the situation, for she saw that Jim was hopelessly mismated. Jim could not help pondering the situation, for he saw the same thing. But he made no plans for release. Kedzie had given no hint of an inclination to misconduct. She was certainly not going to follow Gilfoyle into the beyond. Jim was left helpless with an unanswerable riddle on his mind.
He could only curse himself for being fool enough to get married, and join the vast club of the Repenters at Leisure. He felt sorrier for Kedzie than ever, but he also felt sorry for himself.
The better he came to know his wife the more he came to know how alien she was to him in how many ways. The things she wanted to be or seem were utterly foreign to his own ideals, and if people's ambitions war what hope have they of sympathy?
Jim could not help noticing how Kedzie was progressing in her snobology. She had had many languages to learn in her brief day. She had had to change from Missouri to flat New York, then upward through various strata of diction. She had learned to speak with a certain elegance as a movie princess. But she had learned that people of social position do not talk on stilts outside of fiction. She had since been trying to acquire the rough slang of her set. It was not easy to be glib in it. She had attained only a careful carelessness as yet. But she was learning! As soon as she had attained a careless carelessness she would be qualified.
But there was another difficulty. She had not yet been able to make up her mind as to what character she should play in her new world. That had to be settled before she could make her final choice of dialect, for dialect is character, and she had found, to her surprise, that the upper world contained as great a variety of characters as any other level.
There were tomboys and hoydens and solemn students; hard-working sculptresses and dreamy poetesses; girls who wanted to be boys, and girls who wanted to be nuns; girls who were frantic to vote, and girls who loathed the thought of independence; girls who ached to shock people, and girls of the prunes-and-prismatic type, patricians and precisians, anarchists and Bohemians.
She encountered girls who talked appallingly about breeding dogs and babies, about Freudian erotics, and new schools of art, Futurism, Vorticism. Their main interest was Ismism. There were others whose intellectuality ran to new card-mathematics in pirate bridge, gambling algebra.
Kedzie was in a chaos of sincere convictions and even more sincere affectations. She could not select an attitude for herself. She could not recapture her own soul or decide what she wanted to be.
Her life was busy. She had to learn French and numberless intricacies of fashionable ethics. She had already learned to ride a horse for her moving-picture work, but Jim warned her that she must learn to jump so that she could follow the hounds with him. She watched pupils in hurdling and dreaded to add that to her accomplishments. It made her seasick to witness the race to the barrier, the gathering of the horse, the launch into space, the clatter of the top bar as it came off sometimes, the grunting thud of the big brute as he returned to earth and galloped away, not always with the rider still aboard. She imagined herself skirled along the tan-bark and was afraid.
She had to summon all the courage of her movie days before she could intrust herself to a riding-master. Soon she grew to like the excitement; she learned to charge a fence, hand the horse his head at the right moment, and take him up at the exact second. And by and by she was laughing at other beginners and talking horsy talk with such assurance that she rather gave the impression of tracing straight back to the Centaur family.
Likewise now she watched other new-comers and rank outsiders break into the sacred inclosure. She mocked them and derided them. She regretted aloud the unfortunate marriages of well-born fellows with actresses and commoners from beyond the pale. Among the first French words she learned to use wasmésalliance.
She began to wonder if she had not made one herself. She found inside the paddock so many men more brilliant than her husband. There were as many types of man as of woman—the earnest, the ascetic, the socialistic, the pious youth, wastrels, rakes, fops. There were richer men than Jim and men of still older family, men of even greater wealth.
She had been married only a few weeks and she was already speculating in comparisons! It was a more or less inescapable result of a marriage for ambition, since each ambition achieved opens a horizon of further ambitions.
She had a brief spell of delight in the rehearsals of the “Day of the Bud.” She met new people informally and they were all so shy and self-conscious that they were not inclined to resent Kedzie's intrusion. Kedzie would once have ridiculed them as “amachoors”; now she wished that she, too, were only an “amaturr” instead of a reformed professional.
If some of the ladies snubbed her she found others that cultivated her; a few of the humbler women even toadied to her position; a few of the men snuggled up to her picturesque beauty. She snubbed them with vigor. She hated them and felt smirched by their challenges. That was splendid of her.
She was beginning to find herself and her party, but outside the circle of Jim's immediate entourage. And Jim was beginning to find himself a new ambition and a new circle of friends.
Jim was becoming quite the military man. His new passion took him away from womankind, saved him from temptation, and freed his thoughts from the obsession of either Kedzie or Charity. The whole nation was turning again toward soldiering, drifting slowly and resistingly, but helplessly, into the very things it had long denounced as Prussianism and conscription. A universal mobilization was brewing that should one day compel all men and all women, even little boys and girls and the very old, to become part of a giant machinery for warfare.
England, too, had railed at conscription, and when the war smote her had seen her little army of a quarter of a million almost annihilated under the first avalanche of the German descent toward Paris. England had gathered volunteers and trained them behind the bulwark of her navy and the red wall of the bleeding French nation. And England had given up volunteering and gone into the business of making everybody, without distinction of sex, age, or degree, contribute life and liberty and luxury to the common cause.
Behind the bulwark of the British fleet and the Allied armies the United States had debated, not for weeks or months, but for years with academic sloth the enlargement of its tiny army. It had accomplished only the debate, a ludicrous haggle between those who turned their backs on the world war and said that war was impossible and those who declared that it was inevitable.
Some Americans asserted that it was none of America's business what happened in Europe or how many American citizens died on the free seas, and that the one way to bring war into our country was to be prepared for it. Other Americans grew angry enough to forswear their allegiance to a nation of poltroons and dotards; they went to France or Canada to fight or fly for the Allies. Many of them died. Yet others tried to equip themselves at home somewhat to meet the red flood when it should break the dam and sweep across the American borders.
Of these last was Jim Dyckman. Since he had joined the National Guard he gave it more and more of his enthusiasm. Unhappily married men have always fled to the barracks or the deck as ill-mated women fled to convents.
Night after night Jim spent at the armory, drilling with his company, conferring at headquarters, laboring for recruits, toiling over the paper work.
Kedzie pouted awhile at his patriotism, ridiculed it and hated it, and then accepted it as a matter of course. She could either stay at home and read herself to sleep or join the crowds. The rehearsals of the “Day of the Bud” gave her some business, and she picked up a few new friends. She made her appearance with the company in a three-nights' performance that netted several thousands of dollars. Jim saw her once. She was gorgeous, a little too gorgeous. She did not belong. She felt it herself, and overworked her carelessness. Her non-success hurt her bitterly. People did not say of her, as in the movies, “How sweet!” but, “Rather common!”
And now Kedzie was bewildered and lost. She found no comfort in Jim. She had to seek companionship somewhere. At first she made her engagements only on Jim's drill nights. Soon she made them on nights when he was free.
When they met, each found the other's experiences of no importance. Her indifference to the portentous meanings and campaigns of the European war dazed him. He wondered how any human being could live in such epochal weeks and take no thought of events. She was not interested even in the accounts of the marvelous sufferings of women and their marvelous achievements in the munition-plants, the fields, and hospitals. He watched Kedzie skip the head-lines detailing some sublime feat of endeavor like the defense of Verdun and turn to the page where her name was included or not among the guests at a dinner well advertised by the hostess. She would skip the pages of photographs showing forth the daily epics of Europe and ponder the illustrations of some new smock. He shook his head over her as if she were a doll come to life and nothing stirring within but a music-box and a sawdust heart. He was disappointed in her—abysmally. He devoted himself to his military work as if he were a bachelor.
For the third year now the Americans were still discussing just what sort of army it should have, and meanwhile getting none at all.
The opponents of preparedness grew so ferocious in their attacks on the pleaders for troops that the word “pacifist” became ironical. They seemed to think it a crime to assault anybody but a fellow-countryman.
All the while the various factions of unhappy Mexico fought together and threatened the peace of the United States. The Government that had helped drag President Huerta from his chair with the help of Villa and Carranza found itself in turn at odds with both its allies and its allies at war with each other.
There were scenes of rapine and flights of refugees that brought a little of Belgium to our frontier. And then the sombreros came over the border at Columbus, New Mexico, one night with massacre and escape, and the tiny American army under Pershing went over the border to get its erstwhile ally, Villa, dead or alive, and got him neither way.
And still Congress pondered the question of the army as if it were something as remote and patient as a problem in sidereal arithmetic. Some asked for volunteers and some for universal service and some for neither. The National Guard was a bone of contention, and when the hour struck it was the only bone there was.
In June Jim Dyckman went to the officers' school of application at Peekskill for a week to get a smattering of tuition under Regular Army instructors. He slept on a cot in a tent and studied map-making and military bookkeeping and mimic warfare, and was tremendously happy.
Kedzie made a bad week of it. She missed him sadly. There was no one to quarrel with or make up with. When he came back late Saturday night she was so glad to see him that she cried blissfully upon his proud bosom.
They had a little imitation honeymoon and went a-motoring on Sunday out into the lands where June was embroidering the grass with flowers and shaking the petals off the branches where young fruit was fashioning.
They discussed their summer schemes and she dreaded the knowledge that in July he must go to the manoeuvers for three weeks. They agreed to get aboard his yacht for a little cruise before that dreadful interlude.
And then, early the next morning, the morning of the 19th of June, the knuckles of his valet on the door woke Jim from his slumber and a voice through the panels murmured:
“Very sorry, sir, but you are wanted on the telephone, sir—it's your regiment.”
That was the way the Paul Reveres of 1916 summoned the troops to arms.
Mr. Minute-Man Dyckman sat on the edge of his bed in his silk pajamas with the telephone-receiver at his ear, and yawned: “H'lo.... Who is it?... What is it?... Oh, it's you, sergeant.... Yes?... No!... For God's sake!... I'll get out right away.”
“What's the matter? Is the house on fire?” Kedzie gasped from her pillow, half-awake and only half-afraid, so prettily befuddled she was with sleep. She would have made a picture if Jim had had eyes to see her as she struggled to one elbow and thrust with her other hand her curls back into her nightcap, all askew. Her gown was sliding over one shoulder down to her elbow and up to one out-thrust knee.
Jim put away the telephone and pondered a moment.
Kedzie caught at his arm. “What's the matter? Why don't you tell me!”
He spoke with a boyish pride of war and a husbandly solemnity: “The President has called out the National Guard. We're to mobilize to-day and get to the border as soon as we can. They hope that our regiment will be the first to move.”
Kedzie's answer was a fierce seizure of him in her arms. She was palsied with fright for him. She had seen more pictures of dead soldiers than he knew, and now she saw her man shattered and tortured with wounds and thirst. She felt in one swift shock what the wives of Europe had felt by the million. She clung to Jim and sobbed:
“You sha'n't go! I won't let them take you! You belong to me!”
He gathered her awkwardly into his arms and they were more nearly married then than they had ever been or should ever be again.
The pity of it! that only their separation could bring them together! Fate is the original Irish-bullster.
Jim tried hurriedly to console Kedzie. He found her hard to make brave. The early-morningness of the shock, the panic of scattered sleep, gave her added terror. He had to be cruel at last. Without intention of humor he said:
“Really, honey, you know you just can't keep the President waiting.”
He tore loose the tendrils of her fingers and ran to his own dressing-room. She wept awhile, then rose to help accoutre him. He had his uniform at home still.
In the Grecian simplicity of her nightgown, the very cream of silk, she might have been Andromache harnessing Hector. Only there was no baby for him to leave with her, no baby to shrink in fright from the horsehair crest of the helmet that he did not wear.
When he was all dressed in his olive-drab she still could not let him go. She held him with her soft arms and twiddled the gun-metal buttons of his blouse. And when at length she must make an end of farewells she hugged him with all her might and was glad that the hard buttons hurt the delicate breast that he felt against him smotheringly sweet and perilously yielding.
Not knowing how tame the event of all this war-like circumstance was to prove, he suffered to the deeps of his being the keen ache of separation that has wrung so many hearts in this eternally battling world. War, the sunderer, had reached them with his great divorce.
When he was free of her at last she followed him and caught new kisses. She ran shamelessly barefoot to the door to have the last of his lips, called good-by to him when the elevator carried him into the pit, and flung kisses downward after him. Then she stumbled back to her room and cried aloud. Liliane, her maid, came to help her and Liliane wept with her, knowing all too well what war could do to love.
Later Kedzie went to the armory and slipped through the massed crowds to see Jim again. He was gloriously busy and it stirred her martially to see his men come up, click heels, salute, report, ask questions, salute, and retreat again.
A few excited days of recruiting and equipping and then the ceremony of the muster-in. Jim spent his nights at home, but his terrified mother and his none too stoical father were there to rival Kedzie in devotion.
Importance was in the air. There was a stir of history in the public mood. The flags rippled with a new twinkle of stars and a fiercer writhing of stripes. The red had the omen of blood.
On the third day there was a ruffle of drums and a crying of brass on Fifth Avenue. People recalled the great days when the boys in blue had paraded away to the wars. Only this regiment marched up, not down, the Avenue. It was the Sixty-ninth, its flagstaff solid with the silver rings of battle. It was moving north to the mobilization-camp.
On the ninth day the Seventh went down the Avenue, twelve hundred strong, to entrain for Texas. The bullets of the foe were not the only dangers. It was midsummer and these men were bound for the tropics and the cursed fields of sand where the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and the scorpion lurked under the cactus.
Jim's mother thought less of the Mexicans than of the fact that there were no sleeping-cars even for the officers. They would get them on the way, but it would be a fearsome journey ever southward into the heat, six days in the troop-trains.
Kedzie was proud of her husband, quite conceited about him, glad that he was marching instead of standing on the curb. But her heart, doubled in bulk, pounded against her side like the leaden clapper of a broken bell.
Jim caught sight of her where she stood on the steps of his father's house, and her eyes, bright with tears, saddened him. The fond gaze of his mother touched another well-spring of emotion, and the big, proud stare of his father another.
But when by chance among the mosaic of faces he saw Charity Coe there was a sorrow in her look that made him stumble, and his heart lost step with the music. Somehow it seemed cruelest of all to leave her there.
The town was monstrously lonely when Kedzie turned back to her widowhood. Jim's mother and father and sister were touched by her grief and begged her to make their home hers, but she shook her head.
For a while her grief and her pride sustained her. She was the Spartan wife of the brave soldier. She even took up knitting as an appropriate activity. She thought in socks.
But the hateful hours kept coming, the nights would not be brief, and the days would not curtail their length nor quicken their pace. The loathsome inevitable result arrived.
Even her grief began to bore her. Fidelity grew inane, and her young heart shrieked aloud for diversion.
If battles had happened down there, if something stirring had only appeared in the news, she could have taken some refreshment of excitement from the situation. Heroic demands breed heroes and heroines, but all that this crisis demanded was the fidelity of torpor, the loyalty of a mollusk.
Nothing happened except the stupid chronicles of heat and monotony. The rattlesnakes did not bite; the tarantulas scuttered away; the scorpions were no worse than wasps. The Mexicans did not attack or raid or attempt the assassinations which popular hostility accepted as their favorite outdoor sport. Mexico continued her siesta while the United States sentineled the bedroom.
Jim's letters told of scorching heat, of blinding duststorms, and cloudbursts that made lakes of the camps, but nothing else happened except the welter of routine.
The regiments had only police work to do, and the task grew irksome. Men began to think of their neglected businesses. The men who stayed at home were sharing bountifully in the prosperity of the times. The volunteers at the Border were wasting their abilities for fifteen dollars a month.
The officers began to resign by the score, by the hundred. As many enlisted men dropped out as could beg off. Jim could afford to stay; he would not resign, though Kedzie wrote appeals and finally demands that he return to his wretched wife.
Resentment replaced sorrow in her heart. She began to impute ugly motives to his absence. The tradition of the alluring Mexican senorita obsessed her. She imagined him engaged in wild romances with sullen beauties. She was worried about guitar music and stilettoes.
If there were beautiful señoritas there in McAllen, Jim did not see them. His dissipations were visits to the movie shows and excursions for dinner to Mr. and Mrs. Riley's hotel at Mission. Liquor was forbidden to officers and men under dire penalties, and Jim's conviviality was restricted to the soda-water fountains. He became as rabid a consumer of ice-cream cones and sundaes as a matinée girl. It was a burlesque of war to make the angels hold their sides, if the angels could forget the slaughter-house of Europe.
Jim felt that the Government had buncoed him into this comic-opera chorus. He resented the service as an incarceration. But he would not resign. For months he plodded the doleful round of his duties, ate bad food, poured out unbelievable quantities of sweat and easily believable quantities of profanity.
On the big practice hike through the wilderness who that saw him staggering along, choked with alkali dust, knouted by the sun, stabbed by the cactus, carrying two rifles belonging to worn-out soldiers in addition to his own load, looking forward to the privilege of throwing himself down by the roadside for ten minutes' respite, praying for the arrival in camp with its paradise of a little shelter tent and beans and bacon for dinner or for breakfast or supper—who could have believed that he did not have to do it? That he had indeed at home soft luxuries, a rosy little wife, a yacht, and servants to lift his shoes from the floor for him?
It was easier, however, for him to get along thus there where everybody did the same than it was for Kedzie to get along ascetically in New York where nearly everybody she knew was gay.
She might have gone down to Texas to see Jim, but when he wrote her how meager the accommodations were and how harsh the comforts, she pained him by taking his advice. Like almost all the other wives, she stayed at home and made the best of it.
The best was increasingly bad. Her lot, indeed, was none too cheerful. After her clandestine marriage she had confronted her husband's parents, and the result was not satisfactory. She had had no honeymoon, and her husband's friends were chill toward her. Then he marched away and left her for half a year.
She was young and pretty and restless. She had acquired a greed of praise. She had given up her public glory to be her husband's private prima donna; and then her audience had abandoned her.
Though her soul traveled far in a short time by the calendar, every metamorphosis was slow and painful and imperceptible. She wept her eyes dry; then moped until her gloom grew intolerable. The first diversion she sought was really an effort of her grief to renew itself by a little repose. Her first amusement was for her grief's sake. But before long her diversions were undertaken for diversion's sake.
She had to have friends and she had to take what she could get. The more earnest elements of society did not interest her, nor she them. The fast crowd disgusted her at first, but remained the only one that did not repulse her advances.
Her first glimpses of the revelers filled her with repugnance and confirmed her in what she had heard and read of the wickedness of the rich. The fact that she had seen also the virtuous rich, solemn rich, religious rich, miserly rich, was forgotten. The fact that in every stage of means there are the same classes escaped her memory. She had known of middle classes where libertinism flourished, had known of licentiousness among the poor shopkeepers, shoddy intriguers in the humble boarding-houses.
But now she felt that money made vice and forgot that vice is one of the amusements accessible to the very poorest, to all who inherit flesh and its appetites.
Gradually she forgot her horror of dissipation. The outswirling eddy of the gayer crowd began to gather and compel her feet. She lacked the wisdom to attract the intellectuals, the culture to run with the artistic and musical sets, the lineage to satisfy that curious few who find a congeniality in the fact that their ancestors were respectable and recorded persons.
In the fast gang she did not need to have or use her brains. She did not need a genealogy. Her beauty was her admission-fee. Her restlessness was her qualification.
Those who were careless of their own behavior were careless of their accomplices. They accepted Kedzie without scruple. They accepted especially the invitations she could well afford. She ceased to be afraid of a compliment. She grew addicted to flattery. She learned to take a joke off-color and match it in shade.
She met women of malodorous reputation and found that they were not so black as they had been painted. She learned how warm-hearted and charitable a woman could be for whom the world had a cold shoulder and no charity.
She extended her tolerance from men whose escapades had been national topics to women who had been involved in distinguished scandals and were busily involving themselves anew. Being tolerant of them, he had to be tolerant of their ways. Forgiving the sinner helps to forgive the sin. There are few things more endearing than forgiveness. One of the most appealing figures in literature and art is the forgiven woman taken in adultery.
And thus by easy stages and generous concessions Kedzie, who had begun her second marriage with the strictest ideals of behavior, found herself surrounded by people of a loose-reined life. Things once abhorred became familiar, amusing, charming.
It was increasingly difficult to resent advances toward her own citadel which she had smiled at in others. She grew more and more gracious toward a narrowing group of men till the safety-in-numbers approached the peril-in-fewness. She grew more and more gracious to a widening group of women, and they brought along their men.
Kedzie even forgave Pet Bettany and struck up a friendship with her. Pet apologized to her other friends for taking up with Kedzie, by the sufficient plea, “She gives such good food and drink at her boarding-house.”
Kedzie found Pet intensely comforting since Pet was full of gossip and satirized with contempt the people who had been treating Kedzie with contempt. It is mighty pleasant to hear of the foibles of our superiors. The illusion of rising is acquired by bringing things down to us as well as by rising to them. When Pet told Kedzie something belittling about somebody big Kedzie felt herself enlarged.
Pet had another influence on Kedzie. Pet was no more contemptuous of aristocrats than she was of people who were good or tried to be, or, failing that, kept up a decent pretense.
Pet made a snobbery of vice and had many an anecdote of the lapses of the respectable and the circumspectable. Her railing way brought virtue itself into disrepute and Kedzie was frightened out of her last few senses. She fell under the tyranny of therisqué, which is as fell as the tyranny of the prudish.
Prissy Atterbury had told Pet without delay of meeting Jim Dyckman at Charity's home. Now that Pet was a crony of Kedzie's she recalled the story. Finding Kedzie one day suffering from an attack of scruples, and declining to accept an invitation because “Jim might not like it,” Pet laughed:
“Oh, Jim! What right has he got to kick? He didn't lose much time getting back to his Charity Coe after he married you.”
“His Charity Coe!” Kedzie gasped. “What do you mean by his Charity Coe?”
“Why, his old reliable sweetheart. He's been silly about her since babyhood. When she married Pete Cheever he moped like a sick hound. And didn't he beat up Pete in a club only a few days before he married you?”
This was all news to Kedzie and it sickened her. She demanded more poison, and Pet ladled it out joyously.
She told Kedzie how Prissy Atterbury found Jim at Charity's home. But Kedzie remembered vividly that Jim had said he met Charity on the street. And now she had caught him in a lie, a woman-lie! He was not there to explain that he visited Charity in Kedzie's behalf, and if he had explained it would only have embittered her the more.
Being quite convinced now of Jim's perfidy, she denied the possibility of it.
“Jim's square, I'm sure. There couldn't be anything wrong with him. And Mrs. Cheever is an awful prig, everybody says.”
Pet whooped with laughter: “They're the worst sort. Why, only a couple of years ago Jim and Charity were up in the Adirondacks alone together. Prissy Atterbury caught them sneaking back.”
So one lie was used to bolster another. The firmest structures can be thus established by locking together things that will not stand alone—as soldiers stack arms. Pet went on stacking lies and Kedzie grew more and more distressed, then infuriated. Her bitterness against Charity grew the more acid. Charity's good repute became now the whitewash on a sepulcher of corruption. Her resentment of the woman's imagined hypocrisy and of her husband's apparent duplicity blazed into an eagerness for vengeance—the classic vengeance of punishing a crime by committing another of the sort. Like revenges like; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a loyalty for a loyalty.