But now, as often happens in evil as in virtue, Kedzie had the willingness, but not the resolution. She threw her scruples into the waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went with her and her crowd to one of the most reckless dances in Greenwich Village, where men and women strove to outdo the saturnalia of Montmartre, vied with one another in exposure, and costumed themselves as closely according to the fig-leaf era as the grinning policemen dared to permit.
Kedzie screamed with laughter at some of the ribaldry and danced in a jostle of fauns, satyrs, nymphs, and maenads. Yet when her partner clenched her too straitly she could not forget that she was the wife of an absent soldier. And when on the way home he tried to flirt she could not quell the nausea in her soul.
But practice makes perfect and Kedzie was learning to be downright bad, though yet awhile she gave but stingy reward to her assiduous cavaliers. She was what Pet called ademi-veuveand unprofitable to the men she used as weapons of her revenge against her innocent and unwitting husband.
There was another factor working toward her debasement and that was the emancipation of her pocket-book. It was a fairy's purse now and she could not scatter her money faster than she found it renewed. Her entertainments grew more lavish and more reckless. She had an inspiration at last. She would put Jim's yacht into commission and take a party of friends on a cruise, well chaperoned, of course.
She sent instructions to the master of the vessel to get steam up. Knudsen sent back word that he would have to have an order from the boss. She promised to have him discharged and in her anger fired a telegram off to Jim, demanding that he rebuke the surly skipper and order the boat out.
The telegram found Jim in a state of doldrums. The food had turned against him, homesickness was like a fever in him, and the monotony of his routine had begun to get his nerves. He was startled and enraged at Kedzie's request for permission to go yachting and he fired back a telegram:
Knudsen was right I am astonished at your suggestiondo not approve in the slightest.
He regretted his anger when it was too late. Kedzie, who had already made up her list of guests and received their hilarious acceptances, was compelled to withdraw the invitations. She would have bought a yacht of her own, but she could not afford it! She was not allowed so large a fund. She, Mrs. Dyckman, wanted something and could not afford it! What was the use of anything, anyhow?
Times had changed for Kedzie indeed when the little beggar from the candy-store who had cried once when Skip Magruder, the bakery waiter, refused to take her to the movies twice in one Sunday, was crying now because her miser of a husband forbade her a turbine yacht as a plaything.
She was crushed with chagrin and she felt completely absolved of the last obligation. What kind of a brute had she married who would go away on a military picnic among his nice, warm cacti and deny his poor deserted wife a little boat-ride and a breath of fresh air?
If she had had any lingering inclination to visit Jim in Texas she gave it up now. She went to Newport instead and took Pet Bettany along for a companion—at Kedzie's expense, of course.
Charity Coe Cheever was visiting Mrs. Noxon again and Kedzie snubbed her haughtily when she met her at the Casino or on Bailey's Beach. Kedzie was admitted to that sacred surf of the Spouting Rock Association now and she was as pretty a naiad as there was.
But now she encountered occasional rebuffs from certain people, not only because she was common, but because she was reputed to be fast. When the gossip-peddlers brought her this fierce verdict she was hardened enough to scorn the respectables as frumps. She grew a little more impudent than ever and her pout began to take the form of a sneer.
She lingered in and about Newport till the autumn came. Occasional excursions on other people's yachts or in her own cars or to house-parties broke the season, but she loved Newport. Jim's name had given her entry to places and sets whence nobody quite had the courage or the authority to dismiss her.
At Newport there was a very handsome fool named Jake Vanderveer, distantly related to the charming Van-der Veers as well as the Van der Veers. He was even more distantly related to his own wife at the time Kedzie met him.
Pet Bettany had told Kedzie what a rotter Mrs. Jake was, and Kedzie felt awfully sorry for Jakie. So did Jakie. He was sophomoric enough to talk about his broken heart and she was sophomoric enough to suffer for him most enjoyably.
A little sympathy is a dangerous thing. Married people run a great risk unless they keep theirs strictly mutual and for home consumption.
Jakie said he believed in running away from his grief. Kedzie ran with him for company. People's tongues ran just as fast. Jakie was making a lot of money in Wall Street and trying to drown his sorrows there. Kedzie was thrilled by his jargon of the market and he taught her how to read the confetti streamers that pour out of the ticker. Jakie confided to her a great scheme.
“The only way I can keep that wife of mine from spending all my money is to spend it first.”
“You're a genius!” Kedzie said. A woman usually approves almost any scheme for keeping money away from another woman.
“I'm going to make a killing next week,” said Jakie, “and I'm going just quietly to put a couple of thou. up for my little pal Kedzie. You can't lose. If you win you can buy yourself five thousand dollars' worth of popcorn.”
Kedzie was enraptured. She would have some money at last that she didn't have to drag out of her husband. She prayed the Lord for a rising market.
Then Mrs. Dyckman sent for her. When Kedzie called the servants were extremely solemn. Kedzie had to wait till the doctor left. He was very solemn, too.
Kedzie found her mother-in-law in bed. She looked like a small mountain after a snow-storm. It was strange to Kedzie to find one so mighty brought low and speaking in so tiny a voice. Her husband was there and he was haggard with sympathy and alarm, a very elephant in terror. He was less courteous than usual to Kedzie and he left the room at his wife's signal. Mrs. Dyckman was more gentle than ever.
“Draw your chair up close, my child,” she whispered. “I want to have a little talk with you and my voice is weak.”
Kedzie was alarmed enough to revert to a simple phrase; “I'm awfully sorry you're sick. Are you very sick?”
“Very. There's such a lot of me, you know. It's disgusting. I've scared my poor husband to death. I'm glad Jim isn't here to be worried. I hope I'll not have to send for him. But I'd like to.”
Kedzie felt a little quiver of alarm. She did not quite want Jim to come back just yet. She had grown used to his absence. His return would deprive poor Jakie of solace.
Mrs. Dyckman took Kedzie's hand and stared at her sadly.
“You're looking a little tired, my dear, if you'll forgive me for being frank. I'm very old and I very much want you and Jim to win out. Lying here I take things too anxiously, I suppose, but—I'm frightened. I don't want my boy and you to go the way so many other couples do. He's left you because his country needed him, or thought it did. It wouldn't look well to have him come back and find that in his absence you had forgotten him. Now, would it?”
“Why, Mrs. Dyckman!” Kedzie gasped, getting her hand away.
Mrs. Dyckman groped for it and took it back. “Don't be vexed. Or if you must be, pout as you used to. You mustn't grow hard, my child. Your type of beauty doesn't improve with cynicism. You must think sweet thoughts or simply be petulant when you're angry. Don't grow hard! If nothing else will move you let me appeal to your pride. You are traveling with a hard crowd, a cruel pack, Miss Bettany's pack, and a silly lot of men like Jake Vanderveer. And you mustn't, my child. You just mustn't get hard and brazen. Couldn't you give up Miss Bettany? She's an absolutely unprincipled creature. She's bad, and you must know it. Don't you?”
Kedzie could not answer, or would not. Mrs. Dyckman's voice grew poignant.
“I've lived so long and seen so much unhappiness. There is so much tragedy across the water. My poor daughter has had a cable that her husband's brother has been killed in France. Her husband has been wounded; she is sailing back. So many men, so many, many men are dying. The machine-guns go like scythes all day long, and the poor fellows lie out there in the shrapnel rain—Oh, it is unbelievable. And Europe's women are undergoing such endless sorrow; every day over there the lists contain so many names. So many of Cicely's friends have perished. Life never was so full of sorrow, my dear, but it is such a noble sorrow that it seems as if nobody, had any right to any other kind of sorrow.
“You are young, dear child. You are lonely and restless; but you don't realize how loathsome it is to other people to see such recklessness going on over here while such lofty souls are going to death in droves over there. The sorrow you will bring on yourself and all of us, and on poor Jim, will be such a hateful sorrow, my dear, such an unworthy grief!”
Kedzie choked, and mumbled, “I don't think I know what you mean.”
Mrs. Dyckman petted her hand: “I don't think you do. I hope not. But take an old woman's word for it, be—be Caesar's wife?”
“Caesar's wife?” Kedzie puzzled. “What did she do?”
“It was what she didn't do. Well, I haven't the strength—or the right, perhaps—to tell you any more. Yes, I will. I must say this much. You are the subject of very widespread criticism, and Jim is being pitied.”
“Me criticized? Jim pitied? Why? For what?”
“For the things you do, my dear, the places you go, and the hours you keep—and the friends you keep.”
“That's disgusting!” Kedzie snarled. “The long-tongued gossips! They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
Mrs. Dyckman's fever began to mount. She dropped Kedzie's hand and tugged at the coverlet.
“You'd better go, my dear. I apologize. It's useless! When did age ever gain anything by warning youth? I'm an old fool, and you're a young one. And nothing will stop your ambition to run through life to the end of it and get all you can out of it.”
Kedzie felt dismissed and rose in bewildered anger. Mrs. Dyckman heaved herself to one elbow and pointed her finger at Kedzie.
“But keep away from Jake Vanderveer! and Pet Bettany! or—or—Send my nurse, please.”
She fell back gasping and Kedzie flew, in a fear that the old lady would die of a stroke and Kedzie be blamed for it forever. Kedzie was so blue and terrified that she had to send for Jake Vanderveer to keep from going crazy. He told her that the market was still on the climb, and that her sympathy had saved his life. He had been desperate enough for suicide when he met her, and now he was one of the rising little suns of finance.
Mrs. Dyckman did not die, but she did not get well, and Jim's father wrote him that he'd better resign and come home. It would do his mother a world of good, and he was doing the country no good down there.
Jim was alarmed; he wrote out his resignation and submitted it to his colonel, who showed him a new order from the War Department announcing that no more resignations would be accepted except on the most urgent grounds. Idleness was destroying the Guard faster than a campaign. Jim returned to the doldrums with a new resentment. He was a prisoner now.
He had gone to Texas to find war and his wife to Newport to find gaiety. She found much more than that. On October 7th the old town was stirred by something genuinely new in sensations—the arrival of a German war submarine, the U-53.
A freight submarine, theBremen, had recently excited the wonderment of a world jaded with miracles by crossing from Helgoland to Norfolk with a cargo. But here was a war-ship that dived underneath the British blockade.
The dead of the Lusitania were still unrequited and unburied, but the Germans had graciously promised President Wilson to sink no more passenger-ships without warning, and they had been received back into the indulgence of the super-patient neutrals.
And now came the under-sea boat to test American hospitality. It was received with amazed politeness and the news flew through Newport, bringing the people flocking like children. An American submarine conducted its guest to anchorage. Mail for the ambassador was put ashore and courtesy visits were exchanged with the commandant of the Narragansett Bay Naval Station. In three hours the vessel, not to overstay the bounds of neutral hospitality, returned to the ocean.
A flotilla of American destroyers convoyed it outside and calmly watched while the monster halted nine ships off Nantucket, graciously permitted their crews and passengers to take themselves, but no belongings, into open boats; then torpedoed the vessels one after another.
The destroyers of the United States Navy stood by like spectators on the bleachers, and when the submarine had quite finished the supply of ships the obliging destroyers picked up the fragments in the open boats and brought them ashore. And the U-53 went on unchecked, after one of the most astounding spectacles in the history of the sea.
Charity Coe and other women waited on the docks till midnight arranging refuge for more than two hundred victims. It was a novel method for getting into Newport mansions. Even Kedzie took in an elderly couple. She tried to get a few young men, but they were all taken.
The next morning there was a panic in Wall Street and nearly two million shares were flung overboard, with a loss of five hundred million dollars in market values. Marine insurance-rates rose from a hundred to five hundred per cent. and it seemed that our ocean trade would be driven from the free seas. But everything had been done according to the approved etiquette for U-boats, and there was not even an official protest.
Once more the Germans announced that they had wrecked the British naval supremacy, as in the battle of Jutland, after which glorious victory the German fleet appeared no more in the North Sea.
Nor was there any check in the throngs of merchant-vessels shuttling the ocean for the Allies. And that disgusted the Germans. Their promises to Mr. Wilson irked them. They lusted again for their old policy of “ruthlessness”; “Schrecklichkeit” joined “Gott strafe” in familiar speech, and Germany added America to her “Hymn of Hate.” Strange, that among all the warring peoples the one nation that went to battle with the most fervent religious spirit, even putting “Gott mit uns” on the uniforms of its soldiers, that nation contributed to the slang of the day no nobler phrases than “Schrecklichkeit” and “strafe” and the equivalents of “scrap of paper” and “Hymn of Hate.”
All this meant little to Kedzie except that Jakie Vanderveer, who had been her devoted squire for some time, was caught and ruined in the market slump. Otherwise he might have ruined Kedzie, for he had been dazzling her more and more with his lavish courtship. When he lost his money he left Newport and Kedzie never knew how narrow an escape she had. She only knew that she did not make the money he promised to make for her. She said that war was terrible.
A pious soul would have credited Providence with the rescue. But Providence had other plans. One of the victims of the U-53 was a young English aviator, the Marquess of Strathdene. If the U-53 had not sunk the ship that carried him Kedzie would have had an exceedingly different future.
Strathdene had been a spendthrift, a libertine, and a loafer till the war shook England. He had been well shaken, too, and unsuspected emotions were aroused. He had learned to fly and insulted the law of gravity with the same impudence he had shown for the laws of morality.
In due time he was joined to an air squadron. He risked his life every moment he was aloft, but the danger became a negligible thing in the thrill of the liveliest form of big-game hunting thus far known to man. In mid-sky he stalked his prey and was stalked by it; he chased German Taubes or was chased by them into clouds and out of them, up hill and down dale in ether-land amid the showers from below of the raining aircraft guns. Strathdene knew how to dodge and duck, turn somersaults, volplane, spiral, coast downward on an invisible toboggan-slide, or climb into heaven on an airy stair.
The sky was full of such flocks; the gallant American gentlemen who made up the Escadrille Lafayette went clouding with him, and Mr. Robert Lorraine, the excellent actor, and Mr. Vernon Castle, the amiable revolutionist of the dance, and many and many another eagle heart. Strathdene scouted valuably during the first battle of the Somme, his companion working the gun or the camera or the bomb-dropping lever as the need might be.
And then one day a burst of shrapnel from the remote earth shattered his plane and him. A slug of iron went upward through his hip and another nicked off a bit of his shoulder. But he brought his wounded machine safely to earth and toppled into the arms of the hospital aids; went backward in a motor-ambulance to a receiving-station, then back in a train, then across the Channel, then across the ocean in a steamer to be sunk by a submarine and brought ashore in a lifeboat. Strathdene had pretty well tested the modern systems of vehicular transportation.
The surgeons mended his wounds, but his nerves had felt the shrapnel. That was why the sea voyage had been advised. Strathdene seemed to have a magnetic gift for adventure. An aircraft gun brought him down from the clouds and a submersible ship came up from the deeps to have a try at him. Before long Kedzie would be saying that fate had taken all this trouble just to bring him and her together.
In the transfer from the ship to the lifeboat Strathdene's wounds were wrenched and his sufferings renewed. He was lucky enough to fall into the hands of Charity Coe Cheever. She was a war nurse of experience, and he was soon well enough to try to flirt with her. But she had been experienced also in the amorous symptoms of convalescent soldiers and she repressed his ardor skilfully. She put an ice-cap on his heart and head.
As soon as he was up and about again he met Kedzie. It seemed to be her business to take away from Charity Coe all of Charity's conquests, and the young Marquess found her hospitable to his hunger for friendship.
Before the first day's acquaintance was over Kedzie was as fascinated by his chatter as Desdemona was by Othello's anecdotes.
One night Kedzie dreamed that she was a Marquessess or whatever the wife of a Marquess would be styled.
Kedzie was herself again. Kedzie was dreaming again. She had an ambition for something higher than her station. She made haste to encourage the infatuated Marquess. Counting upon winning him somehow as her husband, she gave him encouragement beyond any she had given her other swains.
But Strathdene had no intention of marrying her or any other woman. His heart was in the highlands, the cloudlands; his heart was not there.
A purer patriot or a warrior more free of any taint of caution than Strathdene could not be imagined, but otherwise he was as arrant a scamp as ever. While he waited for strength to “carry on” in the brave, new, English sense, it amused him to “carry on” in the mischievous old American sense.
Kedzie was determined that he should live long enough for her to free herself from Jim and make the marquisate hers. She seemed to be succeeding. She found Strathdene as easy of fascination as her old movie audiences had been. He even tried to write poetry about her pout; but he was a better rider on an aeroplane than on Pegasus.
Kedzie was soon wishing for Jim's return, since she could not see how to divorce him till he appeared. She tried to frame a letter asking for her release, but it was not easy writing. She felt that she would have a better chance of success if Jim were within wheedling distance. But Jim remained away, and Kedzie grew fonder and fonder of her Marquess, and he of her.
Perhaps they were really mated, their pettinesses and selfishnesses peculiarly complemental. In any case, they were mutually bewitched.
Their dalliance became the talk of Newport. Everybody believed that what was bad enough at best was even worse than it was. Charity Coe heard the couple discussed everywhere. She was distressed on Jim's account. And now she found herself in just the plight that had tortured Jim when he knew that Peter Cheever was disloyal to Charity and longed to tell her, but felt the duty too odious. So Charity pondered her own obligation. She was tempted to write Jim an anonymous letter, but had not the cowardice. She was tempted to write to him frankly, but had not the courage. She did at last what Jim had done—nothing.
Jim's mother had heard of Vanderveer's disappearance from Kedzie's entourage and she had improved with hope. When she learned that Strathdene was apparently infatuated she grew worse and telegraphed Jim to ask for a leave of absence. She did not tell Kedzie of her telegram or of Jim's answer.
Pet Bettany flatly accused Kedzie of being guilty, and referred to the Marquess as her paramour. When Kedzie furiously resented her insolence Pet laughed.
“The more fool you, if you carry the scandal and lose the fun.”
Kedzie was more afraid of Pet's contempt than of a better woman's. She began to think herself a big fool for not having been a bigger one. She fell into an altogether dangerous mood and she could no longer save herself. She almost prayed to be led into temptation. The unuttered prayer was speedily answered.
She went motoring with Strathdene late one night in a car he had hired. When he ventured to plead with her not to go back to her home where her servants provided a kind of chaperonage, she made only a formal protest or two. He stopped at a roadside inn, a secluded place well known for its unquestioning hospitality.
Strathdene, tremulous with victory, led Kedzie to the dining-room for a bit of sup and sip. The landlord escorted them to a nook in a corner and beckoned a waiter. Kedzie was studying the bill of fare with blurred and frightened vision when she heard the footsteps of the waiter plainly audible in the quiet room. They had a curious rhythm. There was a hitch in the step, a skip.
Her heart stopped as if it had run into a tree. The “skip” brought down on her soul a whole five-foot shelf of remembrances of her first New York love-affair with the lame waiter in the bakery. All her good fortune had been set in motion by poor, old, shabby “Skip.” She had soared away like some rainbow-hued bubble gently releasing itself from the day pipe that inflated it out of the suds of its origin.
Kedzie had learned to be ashamed of Skip as long ago as when she was a Greek dancer. She had not seen or heard of him since she sent him the insulting answer to his stage-door note. And now he had saved himself up for a ruinous reappearance when she was in the company of a Marquess—and on such an errand!
What on earth was Skip doing so far from the Bronx and in the environs of Newport, of all places? It occurred to Kedzie that Skip might ask her the same question.
The terror his footsteps inspired was confirmed by the unforgetable voice that came across her icy shoulder-blades. He slapped the china and silver down with the familiar bravura of a quick-lunch waiter, and her heart sank, remembering that she had once admired his skill.
The Marquess looked up at him with a glare of rebuke as Skip posed himself patiently with one hand, knuckles down, on the table, the other on his hip, and demanded, with misplaced enthusiasm:
“Well, folks, what's it goin' to be?”
The Marquess had been somewhat democratized by his life in the army, and, being a true Briton, he always expected the worst in America. He proceeded to order a light supper that would not take too long. Skip crushed him by saying:
“Ain't the little lady takin' nothin'?”
Kedzie was afraid to speak. She put her finger on the menu at a chafing-dish version of chicken, and the Marquess added it to his order. Skip shuffled away without recognizing Kedzie. She waited only for his exit to make her own.
It was terrifying enough to realize that the moment Skip caught a glimpse of her he would hail her noisily and tell the Marquess all about her. There still lingered in Kedzie a little more honesty than snobbery and she felt even less dread of being “bawled out” by a waiter in the presence of a Marquess than of having Skip Magruder know that she was in such a place even with a Marquess. Skip had been good to her and had counseled her to go straight.
She felt no gratitude toward him now, but she could not face his contempt. That would be degradation beneath degradation. She was disgusted with everything and everybody, including herself. The glamour of the escapade was dissipated. The excitement of an illicit amour so delicious in so many farces, so tenderly dramatic in so many novels, had curdled. She saw what an ugly business she was in and she was revolted.
Kedzie waited only to hear the swinging door whiff after Skip's syncopated feet, then she whispered sharply across the table to the Marquess:
“Take me out of this awful place. I don't know what I'm doing here. I won't stay! not a moment!”
“But we've ordered—”
“You stay and eat, then. I won't stop here another minute!”
She rose. She smothered the Marquess's protests about the awkwardness, the ludicrousness of such a flight.
“What will the waiter think?” he asked, being afraid of a waiter, though of no one else.
Kedzie did not care what the waiter thought, so long as he did not know whom he thought it of. Strathdene gave the headwaiter a bill and followed Kedzie out. He was hungry, angry, and puzzled.
Skip Magruder never knew what a chaperon he had been. If Providence managed the affair it chose an odd instrument, and intervened, as usual, at the last moment. Providence would save itself a good deal of work if it came round a little earlier in these cases. Perhaps it does and finds nobody awake.
Strathdene demanded explanations. Kedzie told him truth but not all of it.
“It suddenly swept over me,” she gasped, “how horrible it was for me to be there.”
She wept with shame and when he would have consoled her she kept him aloof. The astonishing result of the outing was that both came home better. It suddenly swept over Strathdene that Kedzie was innocenter than he had dreamed. She was good! By gad! she was good enough to be the wife even of a Strathdene. He told Kedzie that he wished to God he could marry her. She answered fervently that she wished to God he could.
He asked her “You don't really love that Dyckman fella, do you?”
“I don't really love anybody but you,” said Kedzie. “You are the first man I have really truly loved.”
She meant it and it may have been true. She said it with sincerity at least. One usually does. At any rate, it sounded wonderful to Strathdene and he determined to make her his. He would let England muddle along somehow till he made this alliance with the beautiful Missourienne. But Kedzie's plight was again what it had been; she had a husband extra. In some cases the husband is busy enough with his own affairs to let the lover trot alongside, like the third horse which the Greeks called thepareoros. But neither Jim nor Strathdene would be content with that sort of team-work, and Kedzie least of all.
She and Strathdene agreed that love would find the way, and Kedzie suggested that Jim would probably be decent enough to arrange the whole matter. He had an awfully clever lawyer, too.
Strathdene had braved nearly every peril in life except marriage. He was determined to take a shy at that. He and Kedzie talked their honeymoon plans with the boyishness and girlishness of nineteen and sixteen.
Then Kedzie remembered Gilfoyle. She had thanked her stars that she told Dyckman the truth about him in time. And now she was confronted with the same situation. Since her life was repeating its patterns, it would be foolish to ignore the lessons. So after some hesitation she told the Marquess that Jim Dyckman was not her first, but her second. She told it very tragically, made quite a good story of it.
But the Marquess had been intrepid enough to laugh when, out of a large woolly cloud a mile aloft, a German flying-machine had suddenly charged him at a hundred miles an hour. He was calm enough now to laugh at the menace of Kedzie's past rushing out of the pink cloud about her.
“The more the merrier,” he said. “The third time's the charm.”
He sighed when he was alone and thought it rather shabby that Cupid should land him at last with a second-handed, a third-hearted arrow. But, after all, these were war times and Economy was the universal watchword. The arrow felt very cozy.
Unselfishness is an acquired art. Children rarely have it. That is why the Greeks represented love of a certain kind as a boy, selfish, treacherous, ingratiating, blind to appearances, naif, gracefully ruthless.
Kedzie and Strathdene were enamoured of each other. They were both zealots for experience, restless and reckless in their zest of life. As soon as they were convinced of their love, every restraint became an illegal restraint, illegal because they felt that only the law of love had jurisdiction over them.
When Kedzie received a telegram from Jim that he had secured a leave of absence for thirty days and would be in Newport in four she felt cruelly used. She forgot how she had angled for Jim and hustled him into matrimony.
She was afraid of him now. She thought of him as many women in captured cities once regarded and have recently again regarded the triumphing enemy as one who would count beauty the best part of the booty.
Her loyalty to Strathdene was compromised, her delicacy was horrified. She was distraught with her plight.
She had to tell the news to Strathdene and he went into frenzies of jealousy. She had pledged herself to be his as soon as she could lift the Dyckman mortgage. If a man is ever going to be jealous he should certainly find occasion for the passion when he is betrothed to the wife of a returning soldier. Strathdene ought to have been on his way back to the aviation-camp, but he had earned the right to humor his nerves, and Kedzie was testing them beyond endurance.
It was a tragical-comical dilemma for Kedzie. Even she, with her gift for self-forgiveness, could not quite see how she was to explain prettily to her husband that in his absence she had fallen in love with another man. Wives are not supposed to fall in love while their husbands are at the wars. It has been done, but it is hard to prettify.
Kedzie beat her forehead in vain for a good-looking explanation. She was still hunting one when Jim came back. He telegraphed her that he would come right through to Newport, and asked her to meet him at the train. She dared not refuse. She simply could not keep her glib promises to Strathdene. It seemed almost treason to the country for a wife to give her warrior a cold welcome after his tropical service. She met him at the Newport station. He was still in uniform. He had taken no other clothes to Texas with him and had not stopped to buy any. He was too anxious about his mother to pause in New York. He had telegraphed his tailor to fit him out and his valet to pack his things and bring them to Newport.
Kedzie found him very brown and gaunt, far taller even than she remembered. She was more afraid of him than ever. Strathdene was only a little taller than she. She was afraid to tell Jim that she was another's.
But she made a poor mimicry of perfect bliss. Jim was not critical. She was more beautiful than he remembered her. He told her so, and she was flattered by his courtship, miserably treacherous as she felt.
She was proud to be a soldier's wife. She was jealous now of his concern for his mother. He had to go see her first. He was surprised to learn that Kedzie was not living with her. His mother had begun to improve from the moment she had Jim's telegram. But her eyes on Kedzie were terrible.
Jim did not notice the tension. He was too happy. He was sick of soldiering. His old uniform was like a convict's stripes. He was childishly ambitious to get into long trousers again. For nearly half a year he had buttoned his breeches at the knee and housed his calves in puttees and his feet in army brogans.
It was like a Christmas morning among new toys for him to put on mufti, and take it off. A bath-tub full of hot water was a paradise regained. Evening clothes with a big white shirt and a top-hat were robes of ascension. But the clothes made to his old measurements were worlds too wide for his shrunk shanks. He had lost tons, he said, in Texas.
Before daybreak the first morning he terrified his cellmate, Kedzie, by starting up in his sleep with a gasp: “Was that reveille? My God, I'll be late!”
The joy of finding himself no longer in a tent and of falling back on his pillow was worth the bad dream. Life was one long bad dream to Kedzie. She was guilty whichever way she turned, and afraid of both men.
Jim had a valet to wait on him. He had the problem of selecting his scarf and his socks for the morning. Jim had come into a lot of money. He had been earning a bank clerk's salary, with no way of spending it. And now he had a bank to spend and a plenty of places to throw it.
But it was hard for him to believe that he was a free man again. He was amazed to find Newport without cactus and without a scorpion. He kept looking for a scorpion on his pillow. He found one there, but did not recognize her.
Jim was as much of a parvenu in Newport as Kedzie had ever been. He swept her away at times by his juvenile enthusiasm and she neglected Strathdene atrociously for a week.
A large part of the colony had decamped for New York and Boston and Chicago, but those that remained made a throng for Jim. His mother was not well enough to be moved back to New York, but his sister had reached England safely and he was happy in his luxuries.
But he was the only one that was. His mother was bitter against Kedzie for having fed the gossips. Kedzie was assured that life with Jim had nothing new to offer and she resented him as a barrier between herself and the glory of her future with Strathdene and “the stately homes of England.”
Her mother and father arrived in Newport. Kedzie tried to suppress them for fear that Strathdene might feel that they were the last two back-breaking straws. But she needed a confidante and she told her mother the situation.
Mrs. Thropp, like Kedzie, had an ambition that expanded as fast as opportunity allowed. She was dazzled by the thought of being elevated to the peerage. She supposed it made her a relative of royalty. She who had once dreamed of being neighborly with the great Mrs. Dyckman was now imagining herself exchanging crocheting formulas with Queen Mary. She was saying she had always heard the Queen well spoke of. And Adna Thropp spoke very highly of “George.”
They agreed that it was their sacred duty to place the name of Thropp as high as it could go, cost what it would.
“After all,” said Adna one day, looking up from an article in a Sunday paper—“after all, why ain't Thropp as likely a name as Wettin? Or Hohenzollern? And what was Romanoff but an ordinary family once?”
The only thing that seemed to stand in Kedzie's way was the odious name of Dyckman.
“What's Dyckman, anyway?” said Mrs. Thropp. “Nothin' but a common old Dutch name.”
But how to shake it off was the problem. Kedzie had to cling to Strathdene with one hand while she tried to release herself from the Dyckmans with the other.
She had a dreadful feeling that she might lose them both if she were not exceedingly careful and exceedingly lucky.
Help came to her unexpectedly from Charity Coe, unexpectedly, though Charity was always helping Kedzie.
Charity Coe had been tormented by the spectacle of her friend's wife flirting recklessly with the young Marquess of Strathdene while her husband was at the Border with the troops. But she was far more sharply wrung when she saw Kedzie flirting with her husband, playing the devoted wife with all her might and getting away with it to perfection.
There is hardly anything our eyes bring us that is more hideous than known disloyalty successfully masquerading as fidelity. The Judas kiss is not to be surpassed in human detestation.
With almost all the world in uniform, Newport welcomed the sight of one of her own men returned even from what was rather a siesta than a campaign, and old Mrs. Noxon insisted on giving a big party for Jim. She insisted so strongly that Kedzie did not dare refuse, though she had vowed never to step inside the grounds where she had made her Newport debut as a hired nymph.
Charity tried to escape by alleging a journey to New York, but Mrs. Noxon browbeat her into staying. Charity did not know that Strathdene was invited till she saw him come in with the crowd. Neither did Kedzie. Old Mrs. Noxon may have invited him for spite against Kedzie or just as an international courtesy to the most distinguished foreigner in town.
She introduced Jim and the Marquess, saying, “You great warriors should know each other.”
Jim felt sheepish because he had been to no war and Strathdene felt sheepish because Jim was so much taller than he. He looked up at him as Napoleon looked enviously up at men who had no glory but their altitude. Strathdene was also sheepish because Jim said, very simply:
“Do you know my wife?”
If he had not been so tall that he saw only the top of Kedzie's coiffure he would have seen that her face was splashed with red. She mumbled something while Strathdene stammered, “Er—yes—I have had that privilege.” He felt a sinking sensation as deadly as when he had his first fall at the aviation school.
Kedzie dragged Jim away and paid violent attention to him all through dinner. Her sympathy was entirely for her poor Strathdene. She was afraid he would commit suicide or return to England without her, and she could not imagine how to get rid of Jim. Then she caught sight of Charity Coe, and greeted her with a smile of sincere delight.
For once Kedzie loved Charity. Suddenly it came upon her what a beautiful solution it would be for everybody if Jim could take Charity and leave Kedzie free to take Strathdene. She told herself that Jim would be ever so much happier so, for the poor fellow would suffer terribly when he found that his Kedzie really could not pretend to love him any longer. Kedzie felt quite tearful over it. She was an awfully good-hearted little thing. To turn him over to Charity would be a charming arrangement, perfectly decent, and no harm to anybody. If only the hateful laws did not forbid the exchange—dog-on 'em, anyway!
The more Kedzie studied Charity the more suitable she seemed as a successor. Her heart warmed to her and she forced an opportunity to unload Jim on Charity immediately after dinner.
There was music for the encouragement of conversation, an expensively famous prima donna and a group of strings brought down from the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The prima donna sang Donna Elvira's ferocious aria full of indignation at discovering Don Giovanni's Don Juanity.
Charity, noting that Kedzie had flitted straight to Strathdene and was trying to appease his cold rage, felt an envy of the prima donna, who was enabled to express her feelings at full lung power with the fortissimo reinforcement of several powerful musicians. The primeval woman in Charity longed for just such a howling prerogative, but the actual Charity was so cravenly well-bred that she dared not even say to her dearest friend, “Jim, old man, you ought to go over and wring the neck of that little cat of yours.”
Jim sat beaming at Kedzie and Kedzie beamed back while she murmured sweet everythings to her little Marquess. Jim seemed to imagine that he had left her in such a pumpkin shell as Mr. Peter P. Pumpkineater left his wife in, and kept her so very well. But Kedzie was not that kind of kept or keepable woman.
Jim would have expected that if Kedzie were guilty of any spiritual corruption it would show on her face. People will look for such things. But she was still young and pretty and ingenuous and seemed incapable of duplicity. And indeed such treachery was no more than a childish turning from one toy to another. The traitors and traitresses have no more sense of obligation than a child feels for a discarded doll.
Jim paid Charity the uncomfortable compliment of feeling enough at home with her to say, “Well, Charity, that little wife of mine takes to the English nobility like a duck seeing its first pond, eh?”
“She seems to be quite at her ease,” was all that Charity could say. Now she felt herself a sharer in the wretched intrigue, as treacherous as Kedzie, no better friend than Kedzie was wife, because with a word she could have told Jim what he ought to have known, what he was almost the only person in the room that did not know. Yet her jaw locked and her tongue balked at the mere thought of telling him. She protected Kedzie, and not Jim; felt it abominable, but could not brave the telling.
She resolved that she would rather brave the ocean and get back to Europe where there were things she could do.
The support of all the French orphans she had adopted had made deep inroads in her income, but her conscience felt the deeper inroads of neglected duty.
It was like Charity to believe that she had sinned heinously when she had simply neglected an opportunity for self-sacrifice. When other people applauded their own benevolence if they said, “How the soldiers must suffer! Poor fellows!” Charity felt ashamed if her sympathy were not instantly mobilized for action.
A great impatience to be gone rendered her suddenly frantic. While she encouraged Jim to talk of his experiences in Texas she was making her plans to sail on the first available boat.
If the boat were sunk by a submarine or a mine, death in the strangling seas would be preferable to any more of this drifting among the strangling problems of a life that held no promise of happiness for her. She felt gagged with the silence imposed upon her by the code in the very face of Kedzie's disloyalty, a disloyalty so loathsome that seeing was hardly believing.
It seemed inconceivable that a man or woman pledged in holy matrimony could ever be tempted to an alien embrace. And yet she knew dozens of people who made a sport of infidelity. Her own husband had found temptation stronger than his pledge. She wondered how long he would be true to Zada, or she to him. Charity had suffered the disgrace of being insufficient for her husband's contentment, and now Jim must undergo the same disgrace with Kedzie. It was a sort of post-nuptial jilt.
Of course Charity had no proof that Kedzie had been more than brazenly indiscreet with Strathdene, but that very indifference to gossip, that willingness to stir up slander, seemed so odious that nothing could be more odious, not even the actual crime.
Besides, Charity found it hard to assume that a woman who held her good name cheap would hold her good self less cheap, since reputation is usually cherished longer than character.
In any case, Charity was smothering. Even Mrs. Noxon's vast drawing-room was too small to hold her and Jim and Kedzie and Strathdene. America was too strait to accommodate that jangling quartet.
She rose abruptly, thrust her hand out to Jim and said:
“Good night, old man. I've got to begin packing.”
“Packing for where? New York?”
“Yes, and then France.”
“I've told you before, I won't let you go.”
And then it came over him that he had no right even to be dejected and alarmed at Charity's departure. Charity felt in the sudden relaxing of his handclasp some such sudden check. She smiled patiently and went to tell Kedzie good night.
Kedzie broke out, “Oh, don't go—yet!” then caught herself. She also for quite a different reason must not regret Charity's departure. Charity smiled a smile of terrifying comprehension, shook her head, and went her ways.
And now Jim, released, wandered over and sat down by Kedzie just as she was telling Strathdene the most important things.
She could not shake Jim. He would not talk to anybody else. She wished that Charity had taken Jim with her. Strathdene was as comfortable as a spy while Jim talked. Jim seemed so suspiciously amiable that Strathdene wondered how much he knew.
Jim did not look like the sort of man who would know and be complacent, but even if he were ignorant Strathdene was too outright a creature to relish the necessity for casual chatter with the husband of his sweetheart.
He, too, made a resolution to take the first boat available. He would rather see a submarine than be one.
Strathdene also suddenly bolted, saying: “Sorry, but I've got to run myself into the hangar. My doctor says I'm not to do any night flying.”
And now Kedzie was marooned with Jim. She was in a panic about Strathdene; a fantastic jealousy assailed her. To the clandestine all things are clandestine! What if he were hurrying away to meet Charity? Charity returned to Kedzie's black books, and Jim joined her there.
“Let's go home,” said Kedzie, in the least honeymoony of tones.
Jim said, “All right, but why the sudden vinegar?”
“I hate people,” said Kedzie.
“Are husbands people?” said Jim.
“Yes!” snapped Kedzie.
She smiled beatifically as she wrung Mrs. Noxon's hand and perjured herself like a parting guest. And that was the last smile Jim saw on her fair face that night.
He wondered why women were so damned unreasonably whimsical. They may be damned, but there is usually a reason for their apparent whims.