When a young man suddenly goes mad in a cab, grapples the young woman who has intrusted herself to his protection, pins her arms to her sides, squeezes her torso till her bones crunch and she has no breath to squawk with, then kisses her deaf and dumb and blind, it is still a nice question which of the two is the helpless one and which has overpowered the other.
Appearances are never more deceitful than in such attacks, and while eye-witnesses are infrequent, they are also untrustworthy. They cannot even tell which of the two is victim of the outrage. The motionless gazelle in the folds of the constrictor may be in full control of the situation.
It undoubtedly has happened, oftener than it should have, in the history of the world that young men have made these onsets without just provocation and have been properly slapped, horsewhipped, or shot for their unwelcome violence. It has also happened that young men have failed to make these onsets when they would have been welcome.
But the perfection of the womanly art of self-pretense is when she subtly wills the young man to overpower her and is so carried away by her own success that she forgets who started it. She droops, swoons, shivers before the fury of her own inspiration, and cries out, with absolute sincerity: “How dare you! How could you! What made you!” or simply moans, “Why, Oswald!” and resists invitingly.
Kedzie had been hoping and praying that Jim Dyckman would kiss her, and mutely daring him to. Yet when he obeyed her tacit behest and asked her permission she was too frightened to refuse. He was stronger than she expected, and he held her longer. When at last she came out for air she was shattered with a pleasant horror.
She barely had the strength to gasp, “Why, Mr. Dyckman, aren't you awful?” and time to straighten her jumbled hat and hair when her apartment-building drew up alongside the limousine and came to a halt.
Dyckman pleaded, like a half-witted booby, “Let's take a little longer ride.”
But she remembered her dignity and said, with imperial scorn, “I should hope not!”
She permitted him to help her out.
He said: “When may I see you again? Soon, please!”
She smiled, with a hurt patience, and answered, “Not for a long while.”
He chuckled: “To-morrow, eh? That's great!”
She wished that he would not say, “That's great.” If he would only say, “Ripping!” or, “I say, that's ripping!” or, “Awfully good of you,” or, “No end”—anything swagger. But he would not swagger.
He escorted her to the elevator, where she gave him a queenly hand and murmured, “Good night!”
He watched her go up likeMedea in machina;then he turned away and stumbled back into his limousine. It was still fragrant from her presence. The perfume she was using then was a rather aggressive essence of a lingering tenacity upon the atmosphere. But Dyckman was so excited that he liked it. The limousine could hardly contain him.
Kedzie felicitated herself on escaping from his thrall just in time to avoid being stupefied by it. She thanked Heaven that she had not flung her arms around him and claimed him for her own. She had the cleverness of elusion that her sex displays in all the species, from Cleopatras to clams, from butterflies to rhinoceroses. How wisely they practise to evade what they demand, leaving the stupid male to ponder the mysteries of womankind!
When Kedzie reached her mirror she told the approving person she found there that she was doing pretty well for a poor young girl not long in from the country. She postured joyously as she undressed, and danced a feminine war-dance in much the same costume that she wore when Jim Dyckman fished her out of the pool at Newport. She sang:
“I dreamt that I fell in a mar-arble poolWith nobles and swells on all si-i-ides.”
She had slapped her rescuer's hands away then and groaned to learn that she had driven off a famous plutocrat. But now he was back; indeed he was in the pool now, and she had him on her hook. He had grievously disappointed her by turning out to be a commonplace young man with no gilt on his phrases. But one must be merciful to a million dollars.
The next morning she dreamed of him as a suitor presenting her with a bag of gold instead of a bouquet. Just as she reached for it the telephone rang and a hall-boyish voice told her that it was seven o'clock.
This was the midnight alarm to Cinderella, and she became again a poor working-girl. She had to abandon her prince and run from the palace of dreams to the studio of toil.
She was a trifle surly when she confronted Ferriday. He studied her, smilingly queerly and overplaying indifference:
“Have a nice dinner last night?”
Kedzie fixed him with a skewery glare: “What's your little game? Why did you turn up missing?”
“I had another engagement. Didn't you get my note?”
“Ah, behave, behave!” said Kedzie, then blushed at the plebeian phrase. She was beginning to have a quickly remorseful ear. As soon as she should learn to hear her first thoughts first, and suppress them unspoken, she would be a made lady.
“Oh, you're a true artist, Anita,” said Ferriday. “Nothing can hinder your flight into the empyrean.”
“Don't sing it. Explain it,” Kedzie sneered.
Ferriday laughed so delightedly that he must embrace her. She shoved him back and brushed the imaginary dust of his contact from the shoulders that had but lately been compressed by a million dollars.
“I see you landed him,” said Ferriday.
“And I see that all your talk about loving me so much was just a fake,” said Kedzie.
“Why do you say that? I adore you.”
“If you did, would you throw me at the head of another fellow?” asked Kedzie.
“If it was for the advancement of your career, yes,” Ferriday insisted.
“What's Mr. Dyckman got to do with my career?”
“He can make it, if he doesn't break it.”
“Come again.”
“If you fall in love with that big thug, or if you play him for a limousine like a chorus-girl on the make, your career is gone. But if you use him for your future—well, I have a little scheme that might bounce you up to the sky in a hurry. You could have your millionaire and your fame as well.”
“What's the little scheme, Ferri darling?”
“I'll tell you later. We've got to go to the projection-room and see your new film run off. It's assembled, cut, subtitled, ready for the market. Come along.”
Kedzie went along and sat in the dark room watching the reel go by. Her other selves came forth in troops to reveal themselves: Kedzie the poor little shy girl, for she was that at times; Kedzie the petulant, the revengeful, the forgiving; Kedzie on her knees in prayer—she prayed at times, as everybody does, the most villainous no less ardently than the most blameless; Kedzie dancing; Kedzie flirting, in love, tempted, tipsy; Kedzie seduced, deserted, forgiven, converted, happily married; Kedzie a mother with a little hired baby at her little breast. There was even a picture of her in a vision as a sweet old lady with snowy hair about her face, and she was surrounded by grown men who were her sons, and young mothers who were her daughters. The unending magic of the moving pictures had enabled her to see herself as others saw her, and as she saw herself, and as nobody should ever see her.
Kedzie doted on the picture of herself as a dear old lady leaning on her old husband among their children. She shed tears over that delightful, most unusual, privilege of witnessing herself peacefully, blessedly ancient.
Whether she ever reached old age and had a husband living then and children grown is beyond the knowledge of this chronicle or its prophecy, for this book goes only so far as 1917. But just for a venture, assuming Kedzie to be about twenty in 1916, that would make Kedzie born four years back in the last century. Now, adding sixty to 1896 brings one to 1956; and what the world will be like then—and who'll be in it or what they may be doing, how dressing, if at all, what riding in, fighting about, agreeing upon—it were folly to guess at.
It is safe to say only that people will then be very much at heart what they are to-day and were in the days when the Assyrian women and men felt as we do about most things. Kedzie will be scolding her children or her grandchildren and telling them that in her day little girls did not speak disrespectfully to their parents or run away from them or do immodest, forward things.
That much is certain to be true, as it has always been. The critics of then will be saying that there are no great novelists in 1956 such as there were in 1916, when giants wrote, but not for money or for cheap sensations. They will laud the Wilsonian era when America not only knew a millennium of golden fiction, poetry, drama, humor, sculpture, painting, architecture, and engineering, but revealed its greatness in moving-picture classics, in a lofty conception of the dance as an eloquence; when the nation acted as a sister of charity to bleeding Europe, pouring eleemosynary millions from the cornucopia stretched across the sea, and finally entered the war with reluctant majesty and unexampled might, her citizens unanimously patriotic. Ye gods! even the politicians will be statesmen and their debates classics.
Critics of then will be regretting that American fiction, poetry, drama, art, and journalism are so inferior to foreign work, and foreign critics will admit it and tell them why. Some military writers will be pointing out that war is no longer possible, and others will be crying out that it is inevitable and America unprepared.
Doctors will be complaining that modern restlessness is creating new nervous diseases, as doctors did in 1916 A.D., B.C., and B.A. (which is, Before Adam). Doctors will complain that modern mothers do not nurse their own babies—which has always been both true and untrue—and that women do not wear enough clothes for health, not to mention modesty.
In fact, Kedzie, if she lives, will find the spirit of the world almost altogether what grandmothers have always found it. But Kedzie must be left to find this out for herself.
When, then, Kedzie saw how beautifully she photographed and how well she looked as an old lady, she wept rapturously and sighed, “I'll never give up the pictures.”
Ferriday sighed, too, for that meant to his knowing soul that she was not long for this movie world. But he did not tell her so. He told her:
“You're as wise as you are beautiful. You'll be as famous as you'll be rich. And this Dyckman lad can hurry things up.”
“How?” asked Kedzie, already foreseeing his game.
“The backers of the Hyperfilm Company are getting writer's cramp in the spending hand. They call it conservatism, but it's really cowardice. The moving-picture business has gone from the Golconda to the gambling stage. A few years ago nearly anybody could get rich in a minute. A lot of cheap photographers and street-car conductors were caught in a cloudburst of money and thought they made it. They treated money like rain, and the wastefulness in this trade has been rivaled by nothing recent except the European war. Some of the biggest studios are dark; some of the leaders of yesterday are so bankrupt that their banks don't dare let 'em drop for fear they'll bust and blow up the whole business. Most of the actors are not getting half what they're advertised to get, but they're getting four times what they ought to get.
“There are a few men and women who are earning even more than they are getting, and that's a million a minute. Now, the one chance for you, Anita, is to have some tremendous personal backing. You've come into the game a little late. This firm you're with is tottering. They blame me for it, but it's not my fault altogether. Anyway, this company is riding for a fall, and down we may all go in the dust with a dozen other big companies, any day.”
Kedzie's heart stopped. In the dark she clutched Ferriday's arm so tightly that he ouched. To have her career smashed at its beginning would be just her luck. It grew suddenly more dear than ever, because it was imperiled. The thought of having her pictures fail of their mission throughout the world was as hideous as was the knowledge to Carlyle that the only manuscript of his history was but a shovelful of ashes.
Ferriday put his arm about her, and she crept in under his chin for safety. She felt very cozy to him, there, and he rejoiced that he had her his at last. Then as before he saw that he was no more to her than an umbrella or an awning in a shower. He wanted to fling her away; but she was still to him an invention to patent and promote. So he told her:
“If you can persuade this Dyckman to boost your career, get behind you with a bunch of kale and whoop up the publicity, we can stampede the public, and the little theater managers will mob the exchanges for reels of you. It's only a question of money, Anita. Talk about the Archimedean lever! Give me the crowbar of advertising, and I'll set the earth rolling the other way round so the sun will rise in the west and print no other pictures but yours.
“There isn't room for everybody in the movie business any more. There's room only for the people who wear lightning-rods and stand on solid gold pedestals that won't wash away. Go after your young millionaire, Anita, and put his money to work.”
Kedzie pondered. She brought to bear on the problem all the strategic intuition of her sex. She saw the importance of getting Dyckman's money into circulation. She was afraid it might not be easy.
Kedzie sighed: “It's a little early for me to ask a gentleman I've only met a couple o' times to kindly pass the millions. He must have met a lot of women by now who've held out their hands to him and said, 'Please,' and not got anything but the cold boiled eye. I don't know much about millionaires, but I have a feeling that if they started giving the money out to every girl they met, they'd last just about as long as a real bargain does in Macy's. The women would trample them to death and tear one another to pieces.”
“But Dyckman's crazy about you, Anita. I could see it in his eyes. He's plumb daffy.”
“Maybe so and maybe not. Maybe he's that way with every girl under forty. I've never seen him work, but I've seen him in the midst of that Newport bunch and they've got me lashed to the mast for clothes, looks, language, and everything.”
“You're a novelty to him, Anita. He's tired of thoseblaséescreatures.”
“They didn't look very blah-zay to me. They seemed to be up and doing every minute. But supposing he was crazy about me, if I said to him, 'You can have two kisses for a million dollars apiece?' can you see him begin to holler: 'Where am I? Please take me home!'”
Ferriday sighed: “Perhaps you're right. It wouldn't do to give a mercenary look to your interest in him too soon. Let me talk to him.”
“What's your peculiar charm?”
“I'd put it up to him as a business proposition. I'd say, 'The moving-picture field is the greatest gold-field in the world.' I'd tell him how many hundred thousand theaters there are in the world, all of them eager for your pictures and only needing to be told about them. I'd tell him that for every dollar he put in he'd take out ten, in addition to furthering the artistic glory of the most beautiful genius on the dramatic horizon. I'd show him how he couldn't lose.”
“But you just said—”
“Oh, I know, but we can't put on the screen everything we say in the projection-room. And it is a fact that there is big money in the movies.”
“There must be,” said Kedzie, “if as much has been sunk in 'em as you say.”
“Yes, and it's all there for the right man to dig up if he only goes about it intelligently. Let me talk to him.”
Kedzie thought hard. Then she said: “No! Not yet! You'd only scare him away. I'll do my best to get him interested in me, and you do your best to get him interested in the business; and then when the time is just right we can talk turkey. But not now, Ferri, not yet.”
“You're as wise as you are beautiful,” said Ferriday, again. “I can't see your beauty, but your wisdom shines in the dark. We'll do great things together, Anita.”
His arm tightened around her, reminding her that she was still in his elbow. Before she was quite alive to his purpose his lips touched her cheek.
“Don't do that!” she snapped. “How dare you!”
He laughed: “I forgot. The price on your kisses has just skyrocketed to a million apiece. Don't forget my commission.”
She growled pettishly. He spoke more soberly:
“You need me yet, little lady. Don't quench my enthusiasms too roughly or I might take up some other pretty little girl as my medium of expression. There are lots and lots of pretties born every minute, but it takes years to make a director like me.”
And she knew that this was true.
“I was only fooling,” she said. “Don't be mad at me. You can kiss me if you want to.”
“I don't want to,” he said, as hurt as an overgrown boy or a prima donna.
The door opened, and a wave of light swept into the room. A voice followed it.
“Is Miss Adair in there?”
“Yes,” Kedzie answered, in confusion.
“Gent'man to see you.”
It was Jim Dyckman. He followed closely and entered the room just as Ferriday found the electric button and switched on the light.
Kedzie and Ferriday were both encouraged when they saw a look of jealous suspicion cross his face. Ferriday hastened to explain:
“We've been editing Miss Adair's new film. Like to see an advance edition of it?”
“Love to,” said Dyckman.
“Oh, Simpson, run that last picture through again,” Ferriday called through a little hole in the wall.
A faint “All right, sir” responded.
Kedzie led Dyckman to a chair and took the next one to it.
Ferriday beamed on them and switched on the dark. Then, as if by a divine miracle, the screen at the end of the room became a world of life and light. People were there, and places. Mountains were swung into view and removed. Palaces were decreed and annulled. Fields blossomed with flowers; ballrooms swirled; streets seethed.
Anita Adair was created luminous, seraphic, composed of light and emotion. She came so near and so large that her very thoughts seemed to be photographed. She drifted away; she smiled, danced, wept, and made her human appeal with angelic eloquence.
Dyckman groaned with the very affliction of her charm. She pleased him so fiercely that he swore about it. He cried out in the dark that she was the blank-blankest little witch in the world. Then he groveled in apology, as if his profanity had not been the ultimate gallantry.
When the picture was finished he turned to Kedzie and said, “My God, you're great!” He turned to Ferriday. “Isn't she, Mr.—Fenimore?”
“I think so,” said Ferriday; “and the world will think so soon.”
Kedzie shook her head. “I'm only a beginner. I don't know anything at all.”
“Why, you're a genius!” Dyckman exploded. “You're simply great. You know everything; you—”
Ferriday touched him on the arm. “We mustn't spoil her. There is a charm and meekness about her that we must not lose.”
Dyckman swallowed his other great's and after profound thought said, “Let's lunch somewhere.”
Ferriday excused himself, but said that the air would be good for Miss Adair. She was working too hard.
So she took the air.
Dyckman had come to the studio with Charity's business as an excuse. He had forgotten to give the excuse, and now he had forgotten the business. He did not know that he was now Kedzie Thropp's business. And she was minding her own business.
Peter Cheever was going to dictagraph to his wife. The quaint charm of the dictagram is that the sender does not know he is sending it. It is a good deal like an astral something or other.
Peter had often telegraphed his wife, telephoned her, and wirelessed her. Sometimes what he had sent her was not the truth. But now she was going to hear from him straight. She would have all the advantages of the invisible cloak and the ring of Gyges—eavesdropping made easy and brought to a science, a combination of perfect alibi with intimate propinquity.
Small wonder that the device which justice has made such use of should be speedily seized upon by other interests. Everything, indeed, that helps virtue helps evil, too. And love and hate find speedy employment for all the conquests that science can make upon the physical forces of the universe.
How Charity's motives stood in heaven there is no telling. It is safe to say that they were the usual human mixture of selfish and altruistic, wise and foolish, honorable and impudent, profitable and ruinous. She came by the dictagraphic idea very gradually. She had plentiful leisure since she had taken a distaste for good works. She had been so roughly handled by the world she was toiling for that she decided to let it get along for a while without her.
It was a benumbing shock to learn definitely that her husband was in liaison with a definite person, and to be confronted in shabby clothes with that person all dressed up. When she hurried to the Church for mercy it was desolation to learn from the pulpit that her heart clamor for divorce was not a cleanly and aseptic impulse, but an impious contribution to the filthy social condition of the United States.
Charity had no one to confide in, and she had no new grievance to air. Everybody else had evidently been long assured of her husband's profligacy. For her to wake up to it only now and run bruiting the stale information would be a ridiculous nuisance—a newsgirl howling yesterday's extra to to-day's busy crowd.
Besides, she had in her time known how uninteresting and unwelcome is the celebrant of one's own misfortunes. Husbands and wives who tell of their bad luck are entertaining only so long as they are spicy and sportsmanlike. When they ask for a solution they are embarrassing, since advice is impossible for moral people. The truly good must advise him or her either to keep quiet or to quit. But to say “Keep quiet!” is to say “Don't disturb the adultery,” while to say “Quit!” is to say “Commit divorce!” which is far worse, according to the best people.
We have always had adultery and got along beautifully, while divorce is new and American and intolerable. Of course, one can and sometimes does advise a legal separation, but that comes hard to minds that face facts, since separation is only a license to—well, we all know what separation amounts to; it really cannot be prettily described.
Charity, left alone at the three-forked road of divorce, complacency, or separation, sank down and waited in dull misery for help or solution, as do most of the poor wayfarers who come upon such a break in their path of matrimony. She imagined Cheever with Zada and wondered what peculiar incantations Zada used to hold him so long. She wished that she had positive evidence against him—not for public use, but as a weapon of self-defense. She felt that from his pulpit Doctor Mosely had challenged her to a spiritual duel in that sermon against divorce and remarriage of either guilty or innocent.
Also she began to want to get evidence to silence her own soul with. She wanted to get over loving Cheever. To want to be cured of such an ailment is already the beginning of cure.
Abruptly the idea came to her to put a detective on the track of Zada and Cheever. She had no acquaintance in that field, and it was a matter of importance that she should not put herself in the hands of an indelicate detective. She ought to have consulted a lawyer first, but her soul preferred the risk of disaster to the shame of asking counsel.
She consulted the newspapers and found a number of advertisements, some of them a little too mysterious, a little too promiseful. But she took a chance on the Hodshon & Hindley Bureau, especially as it advertised a night telephone, and it was night when she reached her decision.
She surprised Mr. Hodshon in the bosom of his family. He was dandling a new baby in the air and trying not to step on the penultimate child, who was treating one of his legs as a tree. When the telephone rang he tossed the latest edition to its mother and hobbled to the table, trying to tear loose the clinger, for it does not sound well to hear a child gurgling at a detective's elbow.
When Charity told Hodshon who she was his eyes popped and he was greatly excited. When she asked Mr. Hodshon to call at once he looked at his family and his slippers and said he didn't see how he could till the next day. Charity did not want to go to a detective's office in broad daylight or to have anybody see a detective coming to her house. She had an idea that a detective could be recognized at once by his disguise. He probably could be if he wore one; and he usually can be, anyway, if any one is looking for him. But she could not get Hodshon till she threatened to telephone elsewhere. At that, he said he would postpone his other engagement and come right up.
Charity was disappointed in Mr. Hodshon. He looked so ordinary, and yet he must know such terrible things about people. We always expect doctors, lawyers, priests, and detectives to show the scars of the searing things they know. As if we did not all of us know enough about ourselves and others to eat our eyes out, if knowledge were corrosive!
Charity was further disappointed in Hodshon's lack of picturesqueness. He was like no detective she had read about between Sherlock Holmes and Philo Gubb. He was like no detective at all. It was almost impossible to accept him as her agent.
He seemed eager to help, however, and when she told him that she suspected her husband of being overly friendly with an insect named Zada L'Etoile, and that she wanted them shadowed, he betrayed a proper agitation.
Now, of course, women's scandals are no more of a luxury to a detective than their legs were to the bus-driver of tradition or to any one in knee-skirted 1916. Mr. Hodshon was a good man as good men go, though he was capable of the little dishonesties and compromises with truth that characterize every profession. A man simply cannot succeed as a teacher, lawyer, doctor, merchant, thief, author, scientist, or anything else if he blurts out everything he knows or believes. No preacher could occupy a pulpit for two Sundays who told just what he actually thought or knew or could find out. The detective is equally compelled to manipulate the truth.
Hodshon gave his soul to Charity's cause. He outlined the various ways of establishing Cheever's guilt and promised that the agency would keep him shadowed and make a record of all his hours.
“It'll take some time to get the goods on 'em good,” he explained, “but there's ways we got. When we learn what we got to know we'll arrange it and tip you off. Then you and me will go to the door and break in on the parties at the right moment, and—”
“No, Thank You!” said Charity, with a firm pressure on each word.
“You better get some friend to go with us, for a detective needs c'roboration, you know. The courts won't accept a detective's uns'ported testimony. And if you could know what some of these crooks are capable of you wouldn't wonder. Is that all right? We get the goods on 'em and you have a friend ready, and we'll bust in on the parties, and—”
“No, thank you!” said Charity, with undiminished enthusiasm.
This stumped Mr. Hodshon. She amazed him further. “I don't intend to bring this case into court. I don't want to satisfy any judge but myself.”
But what he had said about the credibility of the unsupported detective had set Charity to thinking. It would be folly to pay these curious persons to collect evidence that was worthless when collected. She mused aloud:
“Would it be possible—of course it wouldn't—but if it were, what I should like would be to be able to see my hu—Mr. Ch—those two persons without their knowing about it at all. Of course that's impossible, isn't it?”
“Well, it was a few years ago, but we can do wonders nowadays. There's the little dictagraph. We could string one up for you and give you the usual stenographic report—or you could go and listen in yourself.”
“Could I really?” Charity gasped, and she began to shiver with the frightfulness of the opportunity.
“Surest thing you know,” said Hodshon.
“But how could you install a dictagraph without their finding it out?”
“Easiest thing you know. We'll probably have to rent an apartment in the same building or another one near-by, and—one of the hall-boys there may be workin' for us now. If not, we can usually bring him in. There's a hundred ways to get into a house and put the little dictor behind a picture or somewheres and lead the wire out to us.”
“But can you really hear—if they talk low?” Charity mumbled, with dread.
“Let 'em whisper!” said Hodshon. “The little fellow just eats a whisper. Leave it to us, madam, and we'll surprise you.”
The compact was made. Charity suggested an advance payment as a retainer, and Hodshon permitted her to write a check and hand it to him before he assured her that it wasn't necessary.
He went away and left Charity in a state of nerves. Her curiosity was a mania, but she feared that assuaging it might leave her in a worse plight. She hated herself for her enterprise and was tempted to cancel it. But when she heard Cheever come home at midnight and go to his room without speaking to her she felt a grim resentment toward him that was like a young hate with a big future.
Every night Charity received a typewritten document describing Cheever's itinerary for the day. The mute, inglorious Boswell took him up at the front steps, heeled him to his office, out to lunch, back to the office, thence to wherever he went.
The name of Zada did not appear in the first report at all, but on the second day she met Cheever at luncheon, and he went shopping with her. Charity, reading, flushed to learn that he bought her neither jewelry nor hats, but household supplies and delicacies. He went with her to her apartment and thence with her to dinner and the theater and then back, and thence again after an hour to his home.
The minute chronicle of his outdoor doings, intercalated with the maddening bafflement of his life in that impenetrable apartment, made such dramatic reading as Charity had never known. She grew haggard with waiting for the arrival of her little private daily newspaper. When she saw Cheever she could hardly keep from screaming at him what she knew. His every entrance into the house became a hideous insult. She felt that it was herself who was the kept woman and not the other.
She longed to take the documents and visit the Reverend Doctor Mosely with them, make him read them and tell her if he still thought it was her duty to endure such infamy. She felt that the good doctor would advise her to lay them before Cheever and confound him with guilt, bring him to what the preachers call “a realizing sense” of it and win him home.
She was tempted to try the imaginary advice on Cheever, but something held her back. She wondered what it was, till suddenly she came to a realizing sense of one fearful bit of news: her soul had so changed toward him, her love had turned to such disgust, that she was afraid he might come back to her! He might cast off his discovered partner in guilt and renew his old claim to Charity's soul and body. That would be degradation indeed!
Now she was convinced that her love had starved even unto death, that it was a corpse in her home, corrupted the air and must be removed.
Kedzie lay extended on herchaise longue, looking as much unlike Madame Récamier as one could look who was so pretty a woman. A Sunday supplement dropped from her hand and joined the heap of papers on the floor. Kedzie was tired of looking at pictures of herself.
She had had to look over all the papers, since she was in them all. At least her other self, Anita Adair, was in them.
In every paper there was a large advertisement with a large picture of her and the names of the theaters at which she would appear simultaneously in her new film. In the critical pages devoted to the moving-picture world there were also pictures of her and at least a little text.
In two or three of the papers there were interviews with the new comet; in others were articles by her. These entertained her at first, because she had never seen the interviewers or the articles. She had not thought many of the thoughts attached to her name. The press agent of the Hyperfilm Company had written everything. He reveled in his new star, for the editors were cordial toward her “press stuff.” They “ate it up,” “gave it spread.”
This was the less surprising since the advertising-man of the Hyperfilm Company was so lavish with purchase of space that the publishers could well afford to throw in a little free reading matter—especially since it did not cost them a cent for the copy.
The press agent unaided has a hard life, but when the advertising-man gives him his arm he is welcome to the most select columns.
In some of the interviews Kedzie gave opinions she had never held on themes she had never heard of. When she read that her favorite poet was Rabindranath Tagore she wondered who that “gink” was. When she read that she owed her figure to certain strenuous flexion exercises she decided that they might be worth trying some day. Her advice to beginners in the motion-picture field proved very interesting. She wondered how she had ever got along without it.
She was greatly excited by an article of hers in which she told of the terrific adventures she had had in and out of the studio; there was one time when an angry tiger would have torn her to pieces if she had not had the presence of mind to play dead. She read of another occasion when she had either to spoil a good film or endanger her existence as the automobile she was steering refused to answer the brake and plunged over a cliff. Of course she would not ruin the film. By some miracle she escaped with only a few broken bones, and after a week in the hospital returned to the interrupted picture. These old stories were told with such simple sincerity that she almost believed them. But she tossed them aside and sneered:
“Bunc!”
She yawned over her own published portraits—and to be able to do that is to be surfeited indeed.
Suddenly Kedzie stopped purring, thought fiercely, whirled to her flank; her hands went among the papers. She remembered something, found it at last, an article she had glanced at and forgotten for the moment.
She snatched it up and read. It discussed the earning powers of several film queens. It credited them with salaries ten or twenty times as much as hers. Two or three of them had companies of their own with their names at the head of their films.
Kedzie groaned. She rose and paced the floor, shamed, trapped, humbled. The misers of the Hyperfilm Company paid her a beggarly hundred dollars a week! merely featured her among other stars of greater magnitude, while certain women had two thousand a week and were “incorporated,” whatever that was!
Kedzie longed to get at Ferriday and tell him what a sneak he was to lure her into such a web and tie her up with such cheap ropes. She would break her bonds and fling them in his face.
She slid abruptly to the floor and began to go over the film pages again, comparing her portraits with the portraits of those higher-paid creatures. She hated vanity and could not endure it in other women; it was a mere observation of a self-evident fact that she was prettier than all the other film queens put together. She sat there sneering at the presumptuousness of screen idols whom she had almost literally worshiped a year before.
Then something gave her pause. The celluloid-queens had certain pages allotted to them, the actresses certain pages.
But there was another realm where women were portrayed in fashionable gowns—débutantes, brides, matrons. And their realm was called “The Social World.” These women toiled not, earned not; they only spent money and time as they pleased. They were in “society,” and she was out of it. They were ladies and she was a working-woman.
Now Kedzie's cake was dough indeed. Now her pride was shame. She did not want to be a film queen. She did not want to work for any sum a week. She wanted to be a débutante and a bride and a matron.
She had never had a coming-out party, and never would have. She studied the aristocrats, put their portraits on her dressing-table and tried to copy their simple grandeur in her mirror. But she lacked a certain something. She didn't know a human being who was swell to use as a model.
Oh yes, she did—one—Jim Dyckman.
A dark design came to her to dally with him no longer. He had dragged her out of that pool at Newport; now he must drag her into the swim.
The telephone-bell rang. The hall-boy said:
“A gen'leman to see you—Mistoo Ferriday.”
“Send him along.”
“He's on the way now.”
“Oh, all right.”
As Kedzie hung up the receiver it occurred to her that this little interchange was about the un-swellest thing she had ever done. She had been heedless of the convenances. Her business life made her responsible only to herself, and she felt able to take care of herself anywhere.
Now it came over her that she could not aspire to aristocracy and allow negro hall-boys to send men up in the elevator and telephone her afterward. She snatched up the telephone and said:
“That you?”
“Yassum, Miss Adair.”
“How dare you send anybody up without sending the name up first?”
“Why, you nevva—”
“Who do you think I am that I permit anybody to walk in on me?”
“Why, we alwiz—”
“The idea of such a thing! It's disgraceful.”
“Why, I'm sorry, but—”
“Don't ever do it again.”
“No'm.”
She slapped the receiver on the hook and fumed again, realizing that a something of elegance had been lacking in her tirade.
The door-bell rang, and she did not wait for her maid, but answered it in angry person. Ferriday beamed on her.
“Oh, it's you. You didn't stop to ask if I was visible. You just came right on up, didn't you?”
He whispered: “Pardon me. Somebody else is here. Exit laughingly!”
That was insult on insult.
“Stop it! There is not anybody else. Come back. What do you want?”
He came back, his laughter changed to rage.
“Look here, you impudent little upstart from nowhere! I invented you, and if you're not careful I'll destroy you.”
“Is that so?” she answered; then, like Mr. Charles Van Loan's baseball hero, she realized with regret that the remark was not brilliant as repartee.
Ferriday was too wroth to do much better:
“Yes, that's so. You little nobody!”
“Nobody!” she laughed, pointing to the newspapers spangled with her portraits.
Ferriday snorted, “Paid for by Jim Dyckman's money.”
“What do you mean—Jim Dyckman's money?”
“Oh, when I saw how idiotic he was over you, and how slow you were in landing him, and when I realized that the Hyperfilm Company was going to slide your pictures out with no special advertising, I went to him and tried to get him into the business.”
“You had a nerve!”
“Praise from Lady Hubert!”
“Whoever she is! Well, did he bite?”
“Yes and no. He's not such a fool as he looks in your company. He has a hard head for business; he wouldn't invest a cent.”
“I thought you said—”
“But he has a soft head for you. He said he wouldn't invest a cent in the firm, but he'd donate all I could use for you. It was to be a little secret present. He told me you refused to accept presents from him. Did you?”
Kedzie blushed before his cynic understanding.
He laughed: “You're all right. You know the game, but you've got to quicken your speed. You're taking too much footage in getting to the climax.”
Kedzie was still incandescent with the new information:
“And Jim Dyckman paid for my advertising?”
“On condition that his name was kept out of it. That's why you're famous. You couldn't have got your face in a paper if you had been fifty times as pretty if he hadn't swamped the papers with money. And he would never have thought of it if I hadn't gone after him. So you'd better waste a little politeness on me or your first flare will be your last.”
Kedzie acknowledged his conquest, bowed her head, and pouted up at him with such exquisite impudence that he groaned:
“I don't know whether I ought to kiss you or kill you.”
“Take your choice, my master,” Kedzie cooed.
He snarled at her: “I guess the news I bring will do for you. There was a fire in the studio last night. You didn't know of it?”
Kedzie, dumbly aghast, shook her head.
“If you'd read any part of the newspapers except your own press stuff you'd have seen that there was a war in Europe yesterday and a fire in New York last night. I was there trying to save what I could. I got a few blisters and not much else. Most of your unfinished work is finished—gone up in smoke.”
“You don't mean that my beautiful, wonderful films are destroyed?”
He nodded—then caught her as her knees gave way. He felt a stab of pity for her as he dragged her to herchaise longueand let her fall there. She was dazed with the shock.
She had been indifferent to the destruction of fortresses and cathedrals—even of Rheims, with its titanic granite lace. She had read, or might have read, of the airship that dropped a bomb through the great fresco in Venice where Tiepolo revealed his unequaled mastery of aerial perspective, taking the eye up through the dome and the human witnesses, cloud by cloud, past the hierarchies of angels, past Christ and the Mother of God, on up to Jehovah himself, bending down from infinite heights. The eternal loss of this picture meant nothing to her. But the destruction of her own recorded smiles and tears and the pretty twistings and turnings of her young body—that was cataclysm.
She was like everybody else, in that no multiplication of other people's torments could be so vivid as the catching of her own thumb in a door. Kedzie was too crushed to weep. This little personal Pompeii brought to the dust all the palaces and turrets of her hope upon her head. She whispered to Ferriday:
“What are you going to do? Must you make them over again?”
He shook his head. “The Hyperfilm Company will probably shut up shop now.”
“And let my pictures die?”
He nodded.
She beckoned him close and clung to him, babbling: “What will become of me? Oh, my poor pictures! My pretty pictures! The company owes me a week's salary. And I had counted on the money. What's to become of me?”
Ferriday resented her eternal use of him for her own advantages. “Why do you appeal to me? Where's your friend Dyckman?”
“I was to see him this evening—dine with him.”
“Well, he can build you ten new studios and not feel it. Better ask him to set you up in business.”
Kedzie revolted at this, but she had no answer. Ferriday saw the papers folded open at the society pages. He stared at them, at her, then sniffed:
“So that's your new ambition!”
“What?”
“'In the Social World!' You want to get in with that gang, eh? Has Dyckman asked you to marry him?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, if he does, don't ever let him take you into his own set.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just to warn you. Those social worldlings wouldn't stand for you, Anita darling. You can make monkeys of us poor men. But those queens will make a little scared worm out of you and step on you. And they won't stop smiling for one minute.”
“Is that so?” Kedzie snarled. There it was again.
The telephone rang. Kedzie answered it. The hall-boy timidly announced:
“Mistoo Dyckman is down year askin' kin he see you. Kin he?”
“Send him up, please,” said Kedzie. Then she turned to Ferriday. “He's here—at this hour! I wonder why.”
“I'd better slope.”
“Do you mind?”
“Not in the least. I'll go up a flight of stairs and take the elevator after His Majesty has finished with it. Good-by. Get busy!”
He slid out, and Kedzie scurried about her primping. The bell rang. She sent her maid to the door. Dyckman came in. She let him wait awhile—then went to him with an elegiac manner.
She accepted his salute on a martyr-white brow. He said:
“I read about the fire. I was scared to death for you till I learned that all the people were safe. I motored up to see the ruins. Some ruins! Like to see'em?”
“I don't think I could stand the sight of them. They're my ruins, too.”
“How so?”
“Because the company won't rebuild or go on, and most of my pictures were destroyed.”
“Your pretty, beautiful, gorgeous pictures gone! Oh, God help us! That's too terrible to believe.”
She sighed, “It's true.”
“Why, I'd rather lose the Metropolitan Art Gallery than your films. Can't they be made over?”
“They could, but who's to stand the expense?”
“I will, if you'll let me.”
“Mr. Dyckman!”
“I thought we'd agreed that my name was Jim.”
“Jim! You would do that for me!”
“Why not?”
“But why so?”
“Because—why, simply—er—it's the most natural thing in the world, seeing that—Well, you're not sitting there pretending that you don't know I love you, are you?”
“Oh dear, oh dear! It's too wonderful to believe, you angel!”
And then for the first time she flung her arms about his neck and kissed him and hugged him, knelt on his lap and clasped him fiercely.
He felt as if a simoom of rapture had struck him, and when she told him a dozen times that she loved him he could think of nothing to say but, “Say, this is great!”
She forgave him the banality this time. When she had calmed herself a little she said:
“But it would mean a frightful lot of money.”
“Whatever it costs, it's cheap—considering this.” He indicated her arm about his neck. “I wouldn't let the world be robbed of the pictures of you, Anita, not for any money.” He told her to tell Ferriday to make the arrangements and send the estimates to him. And he said, “I won't ask you to quit being photographed, even when we are married.”
“When we are married?” Kedzie parroted.
“Of course! That's where we're bound for, isn't it? Where else could we pull up—that is, of course, assuming that you'll do me the honor of anchoring a great artist like you up to a big dub like me. Will you?”
“Why—why—I'd like to think it over; this is so sudden.”
“Of course, you'd better think it over, you poor angel!”
Kedzie could not think what else to say or even what to think. The word “marriage” reminded her that she had what the ineffable Bunker Bean would have called “a little old last year's husband” lying around in the garret of her past.
She went almost blind with rage at that beast of a Gilfoyle who had dragged her away and married her while she was not thinking. He must have hypnotized her or drugged her. If only she could quietly murder him! But she didn't even know where he was.