To see into other people's hearts and homes and lives is one of the primeval instincts. In that curiosity all the sciences are rooted; and it is a scientific impulse that makes us hanker to get back of faces into brains, to push through words into thoughts, and to ferret out of silences the emotions they smother.
Gossip is one of the great vibrations of the universe. Like rain, it falls on the just and on the unjust; it ruins and it revives; it quenches thirst; it makes the desert bloom with cactuses and grotesque flowers, and it beats down violets and drowns little birds in their nests.
Gossip was now awakening a new and fearful interest in Charity Coe and Jim Dyckman.
Two women sitting at a hair-dresser's were discussing the gossip according to Prissy through the shower of their tresses. The manicure working on the nails of one of them glanced up at the coiffeur and gasped with her eyes. The manicure whispered it to her next customer—who told it to her husband in the presence of their baby. The baby was not interested, but the nurse was, and when she rode out with the baby she told the chauffeur. The chauffeur used the story as a weapon of scorn to tease Jim Dyckman's new valet with. Jules would have gone into a frenzy of denial, but Jules was by now wearing the livery of his country in the trenches. The new valet—Dallam was his name—tried to sell the story to a scavenger-editor who did not dare print it yet, though he put it in the safe where he kept such material against the day of need. Also he paid Dallam a retainer to keep him in touch with the comings and goings of Dyckman.
And thus the good name of a good woman went through the mud like a white flounce torn and dragged and unnoticed. For of course Charity never dreamed that any one was giving such importance to the coincidence of her railroad journey with Jim Dyckman.
No more did Dyckman. He knew all too well what gulfs had parted him from Charity even while he sat with her in the train. He had suffered such rebuffs from her that he was bitterly aggrieved. He was telling himself that he hated Charity for her stinginess of soul at the very time that the whispers were damning her too great generosity in his favor.
While gossip was recruiting its silent armies against her for her treason to her husband, Charity was wondering why her loyalty to him was so ill paid. She did not suspect Cheever of treason to her. That was so odious that she simply could not give it thought room.
She stumbled on a newspaper article, the same perennial essay in recurrence, to the effect that many wives lose their husbands by neglect of their own charms. It was full of advice as to the tricks by which a woman may lure her spouse back to the hearth and fasten him there, combining domestic vaudeville with an interest in his business, but relying above all on keeping Cupid's torch alight by being Delilah every day.
Charity Coe was startled. She wondered if she were losing Cheever by neglecting herself. She began to pay more heed to her dress and her hats, her hair, her complexion, her smile, her general attractiveness.
Cheever noticed the strange alteration, and it bewildered him. He could not imagine why his wife was flirting with him. She made it harder for him to get away to Zada, but far more eager to. He did not like Charity at all, in that impersonation. Neither did Charity. She hated herself after a day or two of wooing her official wooer. “You ought to be arrested,” she told her mirror-self.
There were plays and novels that counseled a neglected wife to show an interest in another man. Charity was tempted to use Jim Dyckman as a decoy for her own wild duck; but Dyckman had sailed away in his new yacht, on a cruise with his yacht club.
The gossip did not die in his absence. It oozed along like a dark stream of fly-gathering molasses. Eventually it came to the notice of a woman who was Zada's dearest friend and hated her devotedly.
She told it to Zada as a taunt, to show her that Zada's Mr. Cheever was as much deceived as deceiving. Zada, of course, was horribly delighted. She promptly told Cheever that his precious wife had been having a lovely affair with Jim Dyckman. Cheever showed her where she stood by forbidding her to mention his wife's name. He told Zada that, whatever his wife might be, she was good as gold.
He left Zada with great dignity and made up his mind to kill Jim Dyckman. In his fury he was convinced of the high and holy and cleanly necessity of murder. All of our basest deeds are always done with the noblest motives. Cheever forgot his own wickednesses in his mission to punish Dyckman. The assassination of Dyckman, he was utterly certain, would have been what Browning called “a spittle wiped from the beard of God.”
But he was not permitted to carry out his mission, for he learned that Dyckman was somewhere on the Atlantic, far beyond Cheever's reach.
Disappointed bitterly at having to let him live awhile, Cheever went to his home, to denounce his wife. He found her reading. She was overjoyed to see him. He stared at her, trying to realize her inconceivable depravity.
“Hello, honey!” she cried. “What's wrong? You've got a fever, I'm sure. I'm going to take your temperature.”
From her hospital experience she carried a little thermometer in her hand-bag. She had it by her and rose to put it under his tongue. He struck it from her, and she stared at him. He stood quivering like an overdriven horse. He called her a name highly proper in a kennel club, but inappropriate to the boudoir.
“You thought you'd get away with it, didn't you? You thought you'd get away with it, didn't you?” he panted.
“Get away with what, honey?” she said, thinking him delirious. She had seen a hundred men shrieking in wild frenzies from brains too hot.
“You and Dyckman! humph!” he raged. “So you and Jim Dyckman sneaked off to the mountains together, did you? And came back on the same train, eh? And thought I'd never find it out. Why, you—”
What he would have said she did not wait to hear. She was human, after all, and had thousands of plebeian and primitive ancestors and ancestresses. They jumped into her muscles with instant instinct. She slapped his face so hard that it rocked out of her view.
She stood and fumbled at her tingling palm, aghast at herself and at the lightning-stroke from unknown distances that shattered her whole being. Then she began to sob.
Peter Cheever's aching jaw dropped, and he gazed at her befuddled. His illogical belief in her guilt was illogically converted to a profound conviction of her innocence. The wanton whom he had accused was metamorphosed into a slandered angel who would not, could not sin. In his eyes she was hopelessly pure.
“Thank God!” he moaned. “Oh, thank God for one clean woman in this dirty world!”
He caught her bruised hand and began to kiss it and pour tears on it. And she looked down at his beautiful bent head and laid her other hand on it in benison.
It is one way of reconciling families.
Cheever was so filled with remorse that he was tempted to write Jim Dyckman a note of apology. That was one of the few temptations he ever resisted.
Now he was going to kill everybody who had been dastard enough to believe and spread the scandal he had so easily believed himself. But he would have had to begin with Zada. He was afraid of Zada. He enjoyed a few days of honeymoon with Charity.
He dodged Zada on the telephone, and he gave Mr. Hudspeth instructions to say that he was always out in case of a call from “Miss You Know.”
“I know,” Mr. Hudspeth answered.
One morning, at an incredibly early hour for Zada, she walked into his office and asked Mr. Hudspeth to retire—also the suspiciously good-looking stenographer. Then Zada said:
“Peterkin, it's time you came home.”
His laugh was hard and sharp. She took out a little weapon. She had managed to evade the Sullivan law against the purchase or possession of weapons. Peter was nauseated. Zada was calm.
“Peterkin,” she said, “did you read yesterday about that woman who shot a man and then herself?”
Peter had read it several times recently—the same story with different names. It had long been a fashionable thing: the disprized lover murders the disprizing lover and then executes the murderer. It was expensive to rugs and cheated lawyers and jurors out of fees, but saved the State no end of money.
Cheever surrendered.
“I'll come home,” he said, gulping the last quinine word. It seemed to him the most loyal thing he could do at the moment. It would have been unpardonably unkind to Charity to let himself be spattered all over his office and the newspapers by a well-known like Zada.
Once “home” with Zada, he took the pistol away from her. But she laughed and said:
“I can always buy another one, deary.”
Thus Zada re-established her rights. Cheever was very sorry. He cursed himself for being so easily led astray. He wondered why it was his lot to be so fickle and incapable of loyalty. He did not know. He could only accept himself as he was. Oneself is the most wonderful, inexplicable thing in the world.
So Charity's brief honeymoon waned, blinked out again.
Jim Dyckman came home from the yacht cruise in blissless ignorance of all this frustrated drama. He longed to see Charity, but dared not. He took sudden hope from remembering her determination to go back abroad to her nursery of wounded soldiers.
He had an inspiration. He would go abroad also—as a member of the aviation, corps. He already owned a fairly good hydro-aeroplane which had not killed him yet—he was a good swimmer, and lucky.
He ordered the best war-eagle that could be made, and began to take lessons in military maps, bird's-eye views, and explosives. He was almost happy. He would improve on the poet's dream-ideal, “Were I a little bird, I'd fly to thee.”
He would be a big bird, and he'd fly with his Thee. He would call on Charity in France when they both had an evening off, and take her up into the clouds for a sky-ride.
He had an ambition. At worst, he could die for France. It is splendid to have something to die for. It makes life worth living.
He was so ecstatic in his first flight with his finished machine that he fell and broke one of its wings, also one of his own. Charity heard of his accident and called on him at his mother's house. He told her his plans.
“Too bad!” she sighed. “I'm not going abroad. Besides, I couldn't see you if I did.”
Then she told him what Cheever had said, but not how she had slapped. Jim was wild. He rose on his bad arm and fell back again, groaning:
“I'll kill him for that.”
Everybody is always going to kill everybody. Sometimes somebody does kill somebody. But Dyckman went over to the great majority. Charity begged him not to kill her husband, and to please her he promised not to.
Charity, having insured her husband's life, said: “And now, Jimmie old boy, I mustn't see you any more. Gossip has linked our names. We must unlink them. My husband and you will butcher each other if I'm not careful, so it's good-by for keeps, and God bless you, isn't it? Promise?”
“I'll promise anything, if you'll go on away and let me alone,” Jim groaned, his broken arm being quite sufficient trouble for him at the moment.
Charity laughed and went on away. She was deeply comforted by a promise which she knew he would not keep.
Dyckman himself, as soon as his broken bones ceased to shake his soul, groaned with loneliness and despaired of living without Charity—vowed in his sick misery that nobody could ever come between them. He could not, would not, live without her.
Still the gossip oozed along that he had not lived without her.
Kedzie had come to town with no social ambitions whatsoever beyond a childish desire to be enormously rich and marry a beautiful prince. Her ideal of heaven at first was an eternal movie show interrupted at will by several meals a day, incessant soda-water and ice-cream and a fellow or two to spoon with, and some up-to-date duds—most of all, several pairs of those white-topped shoes all the girls in town were wearing.
The time would shortly come when Kedzie would abhor the wordswelland despise the people who used it, violently forgetting that she had herself used it. She would soon be overheard saying to a mixed girl of her mixed acquaintance: “Take it from me, chick, when you find a dame calls herself a lady, she ain't. Nobody who is it says it, and if you want to be right, lay off such words asswellandclassy.”
Later, she would be finding that it took something still more than avoiding the wordladyto deserve it. She would writhe to believe that she could never quite make herself exact with the term. She would hate those who had been born and made to the title, and she would revert at times to common instincts with fierce anarchy.
But one must go forward before one can backslide, and Kedzie was on the way up the slippery hill.
She had greatly improved the quality of her lodgings, her suitors, and her clothes. Her photographic successes in risky exposures had brought her a marked increase of wages. She wore as many clothes as she could in private, to make up for her self-denial before the camera. Her taste in dress was soubrettish and flagrant, but it was not small-town. She was beginning to dislike ice-cream soda and candy and to call for beer and Welsh rabbit. She would soon be liking salads with garlic and Roquefort cheese in the dressing. She was mounting with splendid assiduity toward the cigarette and the high-ball. There was no stopping Kedzie. She kept rising on stepping-stones of her dead selves.
Landladies are ladder-rungs of progress, too; Kedzie's history might have been traced by hers.
Her camera career had led her from the flat of the delicatessen merchant, through various shabby lairs, into the pension of a vaudeville favorite of prehistoric fame. The house was dilapidated, and the brownstone front had the moth-eaten look of the plush furniture within.
Mrs. Jambers was as fat as if she fed on her own boarders, but she was once no less a person than Mrs. Trixie Jambers Coogan, of Coogan and Jambers. She had once evoked wild applause at Tony Pastor's by her clog-dancing.
There was another dancer there, an old grenadier of a woman who had been famous in her time as apremière danseuseat the opera. Mrs. Bottger had spent a large part of her early life on one toe, but now she could hardly balance herself sitting down. She held on to the table while she ate. She did not look as if she needed to eat any more.
Kedzie was proud to know people who had been as famous as these two said they had been, but Bottger and Jambers used to fight bitterly over their respective schools of expression. Bottger insisted that the buck-and-wing and the double shuffle and other forms of jiggery were low. Jambers insisted that the ballet was immoral and, what was more, insincere. Mrs. Bottger was furious at the latter charge, but the former was now rather flattering. She used secretly to take out old photographs of herself as a slim young thing in tights with one toe for support and the other resting on one knee. She would gloat over these as a miser over his gold; and she would shake her finger at her quondam self and scold it lovingly—“You wicked little thing, you!” Then she would hastily move it out of the reach of her tears. It was safe under the eaves of her bosom against her heart.
It was a merry war, with dishonors even, till a new-comer appeared, a Miss Eleanor Silsby, who taught the ultimate word in dancing; she admitted it herself. As she explained it, she went back to nature for her inspiration. Her pupils dressed as near to what nature had provided them with as they really dared. Miss Silsby said that they were trying to catch the spirit of wind and waves and trees and flowers, and translate it into the dance. They translated seaweed and whitecaps and clouds into steps. Miss Silsby was booking a few vaudeville dates “in order to bring the art of nature back to the people and bring the people back to the art of nature.” What the people would do with it she did not explain—nor what the police would do to them if they tried it.
Miss Silsby had by the use of the most high-sounding phrases attained about the final word in candor. What clothes her pupils wore were transparent and flighty. The only way to reveal more skin would have been to grow it. Her pupils were much photographed in airy attitudes on beaches, dancing with the high knee-action so much prized in horses; flinging themselves into the air; curveting, with the accent on the curve; clasping one another in groups of nymphish innocence and artificial grace. It was all, somehow, so shocking for its insincerity that its next to nudity was a minor consideration. It was so full of affectation that it seemed quite lacking in the dangers of passion.
So gradually indeed had the mania for disrobing spread about the world that there was little or no shock to be had. People generally assumed to be respectable took their children to see the dances, even permitted them to learn them. According to Miss Silsby's press-notices, “Members of wealthy and prominent families are taking up the new art.” And perhaps they were doing as well by their children as more careful parents, since nothing is decent or indecent except by acclamation, and if nudity is made commonplace, there is one multitude of temptations removed from our curiosity.
But Bottger, whose ballet-tights and tulle skirt were once the horror of all good people—Bottger was disgusted with the dances of Miss Silsby, and said so.
Miss Silsby was merely amused by Bottger's hostility. She scorned her scorn, and with the utmost scientific and ethnological support declared that clothes were immoral in origin, and the cause of immorality and extravagance, since they were not the human integument. Jambers was not quite sure what “integument” was, but she thanked God she had never had it in her family.
An interested onlooker and in-listener at these boarding-house battles was Kedzie. By now she was weary of her present occupation—of course! She was tired of photographs of herself, especially as they were secured at the cost of long hours of posing under the hot skylight of a photograph gallery. Miss Silsby gave Kedzie a pair of complimentary seats to an entertainment at which the Silsby sirens were to dance. Kedzie was swept away with envy of the hilarity, the grace, the wild animal effervescence and elegance of motion.
She contrasted the vivacity of the dancer's existence with the stupidity of her still-life poses. She longed to run and pirouette and leap into the air. She wished she could kick herself in the back of the head to music the way the Silsby girls did.
When she told this to Miss Silsby the next day Miss Silsby was politely indifferent. Kedzie added:
“You know, I'm up on that classic stuff, too. Oh, yessum, Greek costumes are just everyday duds to me.”
“Indeed!” Miss Silsby exclaimed.
Kedzie showed her some trade photographs of herself as an Athénienne, and Miss Silsby pondered. Although her dances were supposed to purify and sweeten the soul, one of her darlings had so fiendish a temper that she had torn out several Psyche knots. She was the demurest of all in seeming when she danced, but she was uncontrollably jealous.
Miss Silsby saw that Kedzie's pout had commercial value. She invited Kedzie to join her troupe. And Kedzie did. The wages were small, but the world was new. She became one of the most attractive of the dancers. But once more the rehearsals and the long hours of idleness wore out her enthusiasm. She hated the regularity of the performances; every afternoon and evening she must express raptures she did not feel, by means of laborious jumpings and runnings to the same music. And she abominated the requirement to keep kicking herself in the back of the head.
Even the thrill of clotheslessness became stupid. It was disgusting not to have beautiful gowns to dance in. Zada L'Etoile and others had a new costume for every dance. Kedzie had one tiresome hip-length shift and little else. As usual, poor Kedzie found that realization was for her the parody of anticipation.
Kedzie's new art danced into her life a few new suitors, but they came at a time when she was almost imbecile over Thomas Gilfoyle, the advertising bard. He was the first intellectual man she had met—that is, he was intellectual compared with any other of her men friends. He could read and write something besides business literature. In fact, he was a fellow of startling ideas. He called himself a socialist. What the socialists would have called him it would be hard to say; they are given to strong language.
Kedzie had known in Nimrim what church socials were, for they were about the height of Nimrim excitement. But young Mr. Gilfoyle was not a church socialist. He detested all creeds and all churches and said things about them and about religion that at first made Kedzie look up at the ceiling and dodge. But no brimstone ever broke through the plaster and she grew used to his diatribes.
She had never met one of these familiar enough figures before, and she was vaguely stirred by his chantings in behalf of humanity. He adored the poor laborers, though he did not treat the office-boy well and he was not gallant to the scrub-woman. But his theories were as beautiful as music, and he intoned them with ringing oratory. Kedzie did not know what he was talking about, any more than she knew what Caruso was singing about when she turned him on in Mrs. Jambers's phonograph, but his melodies put her heart to its paces, and so did Gilfoyle's.
Gilfoyle wrote her poems, too, real poems not meant for publication at advertising rates. Kedzie had never had anybody commit poetry at her before. It lifted her like that Biltmore elevator and sent her heart up into her head. He lauded Kedzie's pout as well as her more saltant expressions. He voiced a belief that life in a little hut with her would be luxury beyond the contemptible stupidities of life in a palace with another. Kedzie did not care for the hut detail, but the idolatry of so “brainy” a man was inspiring.
Kedzie and Gilfoyle were mutually afraid: she of his intellect, he of her beauty and of her very fragility. Of course, he called her by her new name, “Miss Adair.” Later he implored the priceless joy of calling her by her first name.
Gilfoyle feared to ask this privilege in prose, and so he put it in verse. Kedzie found it in her mail at the stage door. She huddled in a corner of the big undressing-room where the nymphs prepared for their task. The young rowdies kept peeking over her shoulder and snatching at her letter, but when finally she read it aloud to them as a punishment and a triumph, they were stricken with awe. It ran thus:
Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you “Anita”?Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.
Kedzie stumbled over this, because she had not yet eradicated the Western final “r” from her pronunciation. She thought Mr. Gilfoyle was awful swell because he dropped it naturally. But she read on, scrambling over some of the words the way a horse jumps a fence one rail too high.
You are so adorableI find it deplorable,Absurd and abnormal.To cling to the formal'Twere such a good omenTo drop the cognomen.So I beg you to promiseThat you'll call me “Thomas,”Or better yet, “Tommie,”Instead of th' abomi-Nable “Mr. Gilfoyle.”You can, and you will foilMy torments MephistianBy using my ChristianName and permitting Yours TrulyTo call you yours too-ly.Miss Adair,Hear my prayerDo I dareCall my love when I meet her“Anita”? Anita! Anita!!
In the silence that followed she whisked out a box of shrimp-pink letter-paper she had bought at a drugstore. It was daintily ruled in violet lines and had a mauve “A” at the top. It was called “The Nobby Note,” and so she knew that it was all right.
She wrote on it the simple but thrilling answer:
DEAR TOMMIE,—You bet your boots!
By the time she had sealed and addressed the shrimpy envelope and begun feverishly to make up for lost time in changing her costume, the other girls had recovered a little from the suffocation of her glory. One of them murmured:
“Say, Aneet, what is your first name? Your really truly one.”
Another snarled, “What's your really truly last name?”
A third dryad whooped, “I bet it's Lizzie Smoots or Mag Wimpfhauser.”
The others had other suggestions to howl, and Anita cowered in silence, wondering if one of the fiends would not at any moment guess “Kedzie Thropp.”
The call to arms and legs cut short her torment, and for once the music seemed appropriate. Never had she danced with such lyricism.
Gilfoyle had the presence of mind to be waiting in the alley after the matinee, and took from her hand the note she was carrying to the mail-box. When he read it he almost embraced her right there.
They took a street-car to Mrs. Jambers's boarding-house, but cruel disappointment waited for them. Another boarder was entertaining her gentleman friend in the parlor. Kedzie was furious. So was the other boarder.
That night Gilfoyle met Kedzie again at the stage door, but they could not go to the boarding-house, for Mrs. Jambers occupied at that time a kind of false mantelpiece that turned out to be a bed in disguise. So they went to the Park.
Young Gilfoyle treated Kedzie with almost more respect than she might have desired. He was one of those self-chaperoning young men who spout anarchy and practise asceticism. Even in his poetry it was the necessitous limitations of rhyme-words that dragged him into his boldest thoughts.
Sitting on a dark Park bench with Kedzie, he could not have been more circumspect if there had been sixteen duennas gathered around. The first time he hugged her was a rainy night when Kedzie had to snuggle close and haul his arm around her, and then his heart beat so fast against her shoulder that she was afraid he would die of it.
Cool, wet, windy nights in late summer feel very cold, and a damp bench under dripping trees was a nuisance to a tired dancing-girl. Love was so inconvenient that when Kedzie bewailed the restrictions imposed on unmarried people Gilfoyle proposed marriage. It popped out of him so suddenly that Kedzie felt his heart stop and listen. Then it began to race, and hers ran away, too.
“Why, Mr. Gilfoyle! Why, Tommie!” she gurgled. It was her first proposal of marriage, and she lost her head. “And you a socialist and telling me you didn't believe in marriages!”
“I don't,” said Gilfoyle, with lovely sublimity above petty consistencies, “except with you, Anita. I don't believe in anything exclusive for anybody except you for me and me for you. We've just got to be each other's own, haven't we?”
Kedzie could think of nothing to add except a little emphasis; so she cried, “Each other's very ownest own!”
Thus they became engaged. That made it possible for her to have him in her own room at the boarding-house. Also it enabled him to borrow money from her with propriety when they were hungry for supper. Fortunately, he did not mind her going on working. Not at all.
Gilfoyle was a fiend of jealousy concerning individuals, but he was not jealous of the public. It did not hurt him at all to have Kedzie publishing her structural design to the public, because he loved the public, and the public paid indirectly. He wanted the masses to have what the classes have. That delighted Kedzie, at first.
What she thought she understood of his socialistic scheme was that every poor girl like herself was going to have her limousine and her maid and a couple of footmen. She did not pause to figure out how complicated that would be, since the maid would have to have her maid, and that maid hers, and so on,ad infinitum, ad absurdum.
Later Kedzie found that Gilfoyle's first intention was to impoverish the rich, elimousinate their wives, and put an end to luxury. It astonished her how furious he got when he read of a ball given by people of wealth, though a Bohemian dance at Webster Hall pleased him very much, even though some of the costumes made Kedzie's Greek vest look prudish.
But all this Kedzie was to find out after she had married the wretch. One finds out so many things when one marries one. It is like going behind the scenes at a performance of “Romeo and Juliet,” seeing the stage-braces that prop the canvas palaces, and hearing Juliet bawl out Romeo for crabbing her big scene. The shock is apt to be fatal to romance unless one is prepared for it in advance as an inevitable and natural conflict.
Kedzie and Tommie enjoyed a cozy betrothal. He was busy at his shop, and she was busy at hers. They did not see much of each other, and that made for the prosperity of their love. They talked a great deal of marriage, but it seemed expedient to wait till one or the other acquired a raise of wage. The Silsby dancers were playing at cut salaries in accord with the summer schedules, and business was very light at the advertising agency.
The last week the troupe was playing at the Bronx Opera House, and there Skip Magruder chanced to see her—to see more of her than he had ever expected to on the hither side of matrimony.
His old love came back with a tidal rush, and he sent her a note written with care in a barroom—or so Kedzie judged from the beery fragrance of it. It said:
DEAR ANITA,—Was considerable supprise to see you to-night as didn't know you was working in vawdvul and as I have been very loansome for you thought would ask you would you care to take supper after show with your loveing admirror and friend will wait for anser at stage door hopping to see you for Old Lang's Sign.
Kedzie did not read this letter to the gang of nymphs. She blushed bitterly and mumbled, “Well, of all the nerve!” After some hesitation she wrote on Skip's note the “scatting” words,“Nothing doing”and sent it back by the dismal stage doorkeeper.
She had hoped Skip would have the decency to go away and die quietly and not hang round to see her leave with Mr. Gilfoyle. Skip had a hitch in one leg, but Mr. Gilfoyle had a touch of writer's cramp, and Kedzie had no desire to see the result of a conflict between two such victims of unpreparedness.
She forgot both rivals in the excitement of a sudden incursion of Miss Silsby, who came crying:
“Oh, girls, girls, what Do you sup-Pose has Happened? I have been en-Gaged to give my dances at Noxon's—old Mrs. Noxon's, in Newport.”
Miss Silsby always used the first person singular, though she never danced; and if she had, in the costume of her charges, the effect would have been a fatal satire.
By now Kedzie was familiar enough with names of great places to realize the accolade. To be recognized by the Noxons was to be patented by royalty. And Newport was Mecca.
The pilgrimage thither was a voyage of discovery with all an explorer's zest. Her first view of the city disappointed her, but her education had progressed so far that she was able to call the pleasant, crooked streets of the older towns “picturesque.” A person who is able to murmur “How picturesque!” has made progress in snobbical education. Kedzie murmured, “How picturesque!” when she saw the humbler portions of Newport.
But there was a poignant sincerity in her admiration of the homes of the rich. Bad taste with ostentation moved her as deeply as true stateliness. Her heart made outcry for experience of opulence. She now despised the palaces of New York because they had no yards. Newport houses had parks. Newport was the next candy-shop she wanted to work in.
The splendor of the visit was dimmed for her, however, when she learned that she would not be permitted to swim at Bailey's Beach. Immediately she felt that swimming anywhere else was contemptible.
Still, she was seeing Newport, and she could not tell what swagger fate might now be within reach of her hands—or her feet, rather—for Kedzie was gaining her golden apples not by clutching at them, but by kicking them off the tree of opportunity with her carefully manicured little toes.
Also she said “swagger” now instead of “classy” or “swell.” Also she forgot to telegraph Tommie Gilfoyle, as she promised, of her safe arrival. Also she was too busy to write to him that first night.
When Prissy Atterbury started the gossip rolling that he had seen Jim Dyckman enter the Grand Central Terminal alone and wait for Charity Coe Cheever to come from the same train it did not take long for the story to roll on to Newport. By then it was a pretty definite testimony of guilt in a vile intrigue. When Mrs. Noxon announced her charity circus people wondered if even she would dare include Mrs. Cheever on her bead-roll. The afternoon was for guests; the evening was for the public at five dollars a head.
One old crony of Charity's, a Mrs. Platen, revived the story for Mrs. Noxon at the time when she was editing the list of invitations for the afternoon. Mrs. Noxon seemed to be properly shocked.
“Of course, you'll not invite her now,” said Mrs. Platen.
“Not invite her!” Mrs. Noxon snorted. “I'll invite her twice. In the first place, I don't believe it of Charity Coe. I knew her mother. In the second, if it's true, what of it? Charity Coe has done so much good that she has a right to do no end of bad to balance her books.”
To emphasize her support, Mrs. Noxon insisted on Charity Coe's coming to her as a house-guest for a week before the fête. This got into all the papers and redeemed Charity's good name amazingly. Perhaps Jim Dyckman saw it in the papers. At least he and his yacht drifted into the harbor the day of the affair. Of course he had an invitation.
The Noxon affair was the usual thing, only a little more so. People dressed themselves as costlily as they could, for hours beforehand—then spent a half-hour or more fuming in a carriage-and-motor tangle waiting to arrive at the entrance, while the heat sweat all the starch out of themselves and their clothes.
A constant flood poured in upon Mrs. Noxon, or tried to find her at the receiving-post. She was usually not there. She was like a general running a big battle. She had to gallop to odd spots now and then.
The tradition of her selectness received a severe strain in the presence of such hordes of guests. They trod on one another's toes, tripped on one another's parasols, beg-pardoned with ill-restrained wrath, failed to get near enough to see the sights, stood on tiptoe or bent down to peer through elbows like children outside a ball-park.
The entertainment was vaudeville disguised by expense. It was not easy to hold the attention of those surfeited eyes and ears. Actors and actresses of note almost perished with wrath and humiliation at the indifference to their arts. Loud laughter from the back rows broke in at the wrong time, and appalling silences greeted the times to laugh.
The fame, or notoriety, of the Silsby dancers attracted a part of the throng to the marble swimming-pool and the terraced fountain with its deluged statuary. Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe suddenly found themselves together. They hated it, but they could not easily escape. Jim felt that all eyes were bulging out at them. He had murder in his heart.
There was the usual delay, the frank impatience and leg-fag of people unused to standing about except at receptions and dressmakers'. Finally the snobbish string-orchestra from Boston, which played only the most exclusive music, began to tune up, and at length, after much mysterious wigwagging of signals to play, it played a hunting-piece.
Suddenly from the foliage came what was supposed to be a startled nymph. The spectators were startled, too, for a moment, for her costume was amazing. Even on Bailey's Beach it would have attracted attention.
Kedzie was the nymph. She was making her début into great society. What would her mother have said if she could have seen her there? Her father would have said nothing. He would have fainted unobtrusively, for the first time in his life.
Kedzie was scared. She had stage-fright of all these great people so overdressed when she was not even underclothed.
“Poor little thing!” said Charity, and began to applaud to cheer her up. She nudged Jim. “Come on, help her out. Isn't she beautiful?”
“Is she?” said Jim, applauding.
It did not seem right to praise one woman's beauty to another. It was like praising one author's work to another, or praising another preacher's sermon to a preacher's face.
Still, Jim had to admit that Kedzie was pretty. Suddenly he wanted to torment Charity, and so he exclaimed:
“You're right, she is a little corker, a very pleasant dream!” Anger at Charity snatched away the blindfold which is another name for fidelity. Scales fell from his eyes, and he saw truth in nakedness. He saw beauty everywhere. All about him were beautiful women in rich costume. He saw that beauty is not a matter of opinion, a decision of love's, but a happening to be regular or curvilinear or warm of color or hospitable in expression.
Particularly he saw the beauty of Kedzie. There was more of her to see than of those other women behind their screens of silk and lace and linen. His infatuation for Charity Coe had befuddled him, wrapped him in a fog through which all other women passed like swaddled figures. He felt free now.
Over Charity's shoulder and through the spray of the goura on her hat he saw Kedzie sharp and stark, her suavities of line and the milk-smooth fabric of her envelope. He studied Kedzie with emancipation, not seeing Charity at all any more—nor she him.
For Charity studied Kedzie, too. She felt academically the delight of the girl's beauty, a statue coming to life, or a living being going back into statue—Galatea in one phase or the other. She felt the delight of the girl's successful drawing. She smiled to behold it. Then her smile drooped, for the words of the old song came back crooning the ancient regret:
How small a part of time they share—
There was elegy now in Kedzie's graces. Youth was of their essence, and youth shakes off like the dust on the moth's wing. Youth is gone at a touch.
In her sorrow she turned to look up at Jim. She was shocked to see how attentively he regarded Kedzie. He startled her by the fascination in his mien. She looked again at Kedzie.
Somehow the girl immediately grew ugly—or what beauty she had was that of a poisonous snake. And she looked common, too. Who else but a common creature would come out on a lawn thus unclothed for a few dollars?
She looked again at Jim Dyckman, and he was not what he had been. He was as changed as the visions in Lewis Carroll's poem. She saw that he had his common streak, too: he was mere man, animal, temptable. But she forgave him. Curiously, he grew more valuable since she felt that she was losing him.
There was an impatient shaking at her breast. In anybody else she would have called it jealousy. This astounded her, made her afraid of herself and of him. What right had she to be jealous of anybody but Peter Cheever? She felt that she was more indecent than Kedzie. She bowed her head and blushed. Scales fell from her eyes also. She was like Eve after the apple had taught her what she was. She wanted to hide. But she could not break through the crowd. She must stand and watch the dance through.
All this brief while Kedzie had stood wavering. There had been a hitch somewhere. The other nymphs were delayed in their entrance. One of them had stepped on a thorny rose and another had ripped her tunic—she came in at last with a safety-pin to protect her from the law; but then, safety-pins are among the primeval inventions.
According to the libretto, the wood-nymphs, terrified by a hunting-party, ran to take refuge with the water-nymphs. The water-nymphs were late likewise. The dryads came suddenly through Mrs. Noxon's imported shrubs, puncturing them with rhythmic attitudes. These lost something of their poetry from being held so long that equilibria were lost foolishly.
Finally, the water-sprites came forth from cleverly managed concealment in a bower and stood mid-thigh in the water about the fountain. They attitudinized also, with a kind of childish poetry that did not quite convince, for the fountain rained on them, and some of them shivered as cold gouts of water smote their shoulder-blades. One little Yiddish nymph gasped, “Oi, oi!” which was perfect Greek, though she didn't know it. Neither did anybody else. Several people snickered.
The hunting-music died away, and the wood-nymphs decided not to go into the water home; instead, they implored the water-nymphs to come forth from their liquid residence. But the water-nymphs refused. The dryads tried to lure them with gestures and dances. It was all dreadfully puerile, and yet somehow worth while.
The wood-nymphs wreathed a human chain about the marge of the pool. Unfortunately the marble had been splashed in spots by the fountain spray, and it was on the slipperiest of the spots that Kedzie had to execute a pirouette.
Her pivotal foot slid; the other stabbed down in a wild effort to restore her balance. It slipped. She knew that she was gone. She made frenzied clutches at the air, but it would not sustain her. She was strangely sincere now in her gestures. The crowd laughed—then stopped short.
It was funny till it looked as if the nymph might be hurt. Jim Dyckman darted forward to save her. He knocked Charity aside roughly and did not know it. He arrived too late to catch Kedzie.
Kedzie sat into the pool with great violence. The spray she cast up fatally spotted several delicate robes. That would have been of some consolation to Kedzie if she had known it. But all she knew was that she went backward into the wrong element. Her wrath was greater than her sorrow.
Her head went down: she swallowed a lot of water, and when she kicked herself erect at last she was half strangled, entirely drenched, and quite blinded. The other nymphs, wood and water, giggled and shook with sisterly affection.
Kedzie was the wettest dryad that ever was. She stumbled forward, groping. Jim Dyckman bent, slipped his hands under her arms, and hoisted her to land. He felt ludicrous, but his chivalry was automatic.
Kedzie was so angry at herself and everybody else that she flung off his hands and snapped, “Quit it, dog on it!”
Jim Dyckman quit it. He had for his pains an insult and a suit of clothes so drenched that he had to go back to his yacht, running the gantlet of a hundred ridicules.
When he vanished Kedzie found herself in garments doubly clinging from being soaked. She was ashamed now, and hid her face in her arm.
Charity Coe took pity on her, and before the jealous Charity could check the generous Charity she had stepped forward and thrown about the girl's shoulders a light wrap she carried. She led the child to the other wood-nymphs, and they took her back into the shrubbery.
“Wait till you hear what Miss Silsby's gotta say!” said one dryad, and another added:
“Woisse than that is this: you know who that was you flang out at so regardless?”
“I don't know, and I don't care,” sobbed Kedzie.
“You would care if you was wise to who His Nibs was!”
“Who was it?” Kedzie gasped.
“Jim Dyckman—no less! You was right in his arms, and you hadda go an' biff him.”
“Oh, Lord!” sighed Kedzie. “I'll never do.” She was thinking that destiny had tossed her into the very arms of the aristocracy and she had been fool enough to fight her way out.
Jim Dyckman, meanwhile, was clambering into his car with clothes and ardor dampened. He was swearing to cut out the whole herd of women.
And Charity Coe Cheever was chattering flippantly with a group of the dispersing audience, while her heart was in throes of dismay at her own feelings and Jim Dyckman's.