Kedzie wanted to be a lady, and with the ladies stand—a tall tiara in her hair, a lorgnette in her hand.
She had succeeded dizzily, tremendously, in her cinema career. The timid thing that had watched the moving-picture director to see how he held his wineglass, and accepted his smile as a beam of sunshine breaking through the clouds about his godlike head, now found his gracefulness “actory,” his intimacy impudent, and his association compromising. Ferriday's very picturesqueness and artistry convinced her now that he was not quite the gentleman.
Kedzie was beginning to imitate the upper dialect already. She who but a twelvemonth past was dividing people into “hicks” and “swells,” and whose epithets were “reub” and “classy,” was now a generation advanced.
Ferriday saw it and raged. One day in discussing the cast of a picture he mentioned the screen-pet Lorraine Melnotte as the man for the principal male rôle.
Kedzie sighed; “Oh, he is so hopelessly romantic, never quite the gentleman. In costume he gets by, but in evening clothes he always suggests the handsome waiter—don't you think?”
Ferriday roared, with disgust: “Good Lord, but you're growing. What is this thing I've invented? Are you aFrankenstein?”
Kedzie looked blank and sneered, “Are you implying that I have Yiddish blood in me?”
She wondered why he laughed, but she would not ask. Along many lines Kedzie did not know much, but in others she was uncannily acute.
Kedzie was gleaning all her ideas of gentlemanship from Jim Dyckman. She knew that he had lineage and heritage and equipage and all that sort of thing, and he must be great because he knew great people. His careless simplicity, artlessness, shyness, all the things that distressed her at first, were now accepted as the standards of conduct for everybody.
In life as in other arts, the best artists grow from the complex to the simple, the tortuous to the direct, from pose to poise, from tradition to truth, from artifice to reality. Kedzie was beginning to understand this and to ape what she could not do naturally.
Her comet-like scoot from obscurity to fame in the motion-picture sky had exhausted the excitement of that sky, and now she was ashamed of being a wage-earner, a mere actress, especially a movie actress.
If the studio had not caught fire and burned up so many thousands of yards of her portraiture she would have broken her contract without scruple. But the shock of the loss of her pretty images drove her back to the scene. The pity of so much thought, emotion, action, going up in smoke was too cruel to endure.
It was not necessary for Dyckman to pay the expenses of their repetition in celluloid, as he offered. The Hyperfilm Company rented another studio and began to remake the destroyed pictures. They were speedily renewed because the scenarios had been rescued and there was little of that appalling waste of time, money, and effort which has almost wrecked the whole industry. They did not photograph a thousand feet for every two hundred used.
Kedzie's first pictures had gone to the exchanges before the fire, and they were continuing their travels about the world while she was at work revamping the rest.
About this time the Hyperfilm managers decided to move their factory to California, where the sempiternal sunlight insured better photography at far less expense. This meant that Kedzie must leave New York only partly conquered and must tear herself away from Jim Dyckman.
She broke down and cried when she told Dyckman of this, and for the first time his sympathies were stampeded on her account. He petted her, and she slid into his arms with a child-like ingratiation that made his heart swell with pity.
“What's the odds,” he said, attempting consolation, “where you work, so long as you work?”
“But it would mean,” she sobbed—“it would mean taking me away-ay from you-ou.”
This tribute enraptured Dyckman incredibly. That he should mean so much to so wonderful a thing as she was was unbelievably flattering. He had dogged Charity's heels with meek and unrewarded loyalty until he had lost all pride. Kedzie's tears at the thought of leaving him woke it to life again.
“By golly, you sha'n't go, then!” he cried. “I was thinking of coming out there to visit you, but—but it would be better yet for you to stay right here in little old New York.”
This brought back Kedzie's smile. But she faltered, “What if they hold me to my contract, though?”
“Then we'll bust the old contract. I'll buy 'em off. You needn't work for anybody.”
There was enough of the old-fashioned woman of one sort left in Kedzie to relish the slave-block glory of being fought over by two purchasers. She spoke rather slyly:
“But I'll be without wages then. How would I live? I've got to work.”
Dyckman answered at once: “Of course not. I'll take care of you. I offered to before, you know.” He had made a proposal of marriage some time before; it was the only sort of proposal that he had been tempted to make to Kedzie. He liked her immensely; she fascinated him; he loved to pet her and kiss her and talk baby talk to her; but she had never inflamed his emotions.
Either it was the same with her, or she had purposely controlled herself and him from policy, or had been restrained by coldness or by a certain decency, of which she had a good deal, after all and in spite of all.
Throughout their relations they had deceived Ferriday and other cynics. For all their indifference to appearances, they had behaved like a well-behaved pair of young betrothed Americans, with a complete freedom from chaperonage, and a considerable liberality of endearments, but no serious misdemeanor.
Kedzie knew what he meant, but she wanted to hear him propose again. So she murmured:
“How do you mean, take care of me?”
“I mean—marry you, of course.”
“Oh!” said Kedzie. And in a whirlwind of pride she twined her arms about his neck and clung to him with a desperate ardor.
Dyckman said: “This isn't my first proposal, you know. You said you wanted time to think it over. Haven't you thought it over yet?”
“Yes,” Kedzie sighed, but she said no more.
“Well, what's the answer?” he urged.
“Yes.”
She whispered, torn between rapture and despair.
Any woman might have blazed with pride at being asked to marry Jim Dyckman. The little villager was almost consumed like another Semele scorched by Jupiter's rash approach.
In Dyckman's clasp Kedzie felt how lonely she had been. She wanted to be gathered in from the dangers of the world, from poverty and from work. She had not realized how tiny a thing she was, to be combating the big city all alone, until some one offered her shelter.
People can usually be brave and grim in the presence of defeat and peril and hostility. It is the kind word, the sudden victory, the discovery of a friend that breaks one down. Even Kedzie wept.
She wept all over Jim Dyckman's waistcoat, sat on his lap and swallowed throat-lumps and tears and tugged at his cuff-links with her little fingers.
Then she looked up at him and blushed and kissed him fiercely, hugging him with all the might of her arms. He was troubled by the first frenzy she had ever shown for him, and he might have learned how much more than a merely pretty child she was if she had not suddenly felt an icy hand laid on her hands, unclasping them.
A cold arm seemed to bend about her throat and drag her back. She slid from Dyckman's knees, gasping:
“Oh!”
She could not become Mrs. Jim Dyckman, because she was Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle.
Dyckman was astounded and frightened by her action. He put his hand out, but she unclenched his fingers from her wrist, mumbling:
“Don't—please!”
“Why not? What's wrong with you, child?”
How could she tell him? What could she do? She must do a lot of thinking. On one thing she was resolved: that she would not give Dyckman up. She would find Gilfoyle and get quit of him. They had been married so easily; there must be an easy way of unmarrying.
She studied Dyckman. She must not frighten him away, or let him suspect. She laughed nervously and went back to his arms, giggling:
“Such a wonderful thing it is to have you want me for your wife! I'm not worthy of your name, or your love, or anything.”
Dyckman could hardly agree to this, whatever misgivings might be shaking his heart. He praised her with the best adjectives in his scant vocabulary and asked her when they should be wed.
“Oh, not for a long while yet,” she pleaded.
“Why?” he wondered.
“Oh, because!” It sickened and alarmed her to put off the day, but how could she name it?
When he left her at last the situation was still a bit hazy. He had proposed and been accepted vaguely. But when he had gallantly asked her to “say when” she had begged for time.
Dyckman, once outside the spell of Kedzie's eyes and her warmth, felt more and more dubious. He was ashamed of himself for entertaining any doubts of the perfection of his situation, but he was ashamed also of his easy surrender. Here he was with his freedom gone. He had escaped the marriage-net of so many women of so much brilliance and prestige, and yet a little movie actress had landed him.
He compared Anita Adair with Charity Coe, and he had to admit that his fiancée suffered woefully in every contrast. He could see the look of amazement on Charity's face when she heard the news. She would be completely polite about it, but she would be appalled. So would his father and mother. They would fight him tremendously. His friends would give him the laugh, the big ha-ha! They would say he had made a fool of himself; he had been an easy mark for a little outsider.
He wondered just how it had happened. The fact was that Kedzie had appealed to his pity. That was what none of the other eligibles had ever done, least of all Charity the ineligible.
He went home. He found his father and mother playing double Canfield and wrangling over it as usual. They were disturbed by his manner. He would not tell them what was the matter and left them to their game. It interested them no more. It seemed so unimportant whether the cards fell right or not. The points were not worth the excitement. Their son was playing solitaire, and it was not coming out at all. They discussed the possible reasons for his gloom. There were so many.
“I wish he'd get married to some nice girl,” sighed Mrs. Dyckman. A mother is pretty desperate when she wants to surrender her son to another woman.
Kedzie made a bad night of it. She hated her loneliness. She hated her room. She hated her maid. She wanted to live in the Dyckman palace and have a dozen maids and a pair of butlers to boss around, and valets, and a crest on her paper, and invitations pouring in from people whose pictures were in “the social world.” She wanted to snub somebody and show certain folks what was what.
The next morning she was sure of only one thing, and that was that Dyckman had asked her to be his wife; and be his wife she would, no matter what it cost.
She wondered how she could get rid of Gilfoyle, whom she looked upon now as nothing less than an abductor. He was one of those “cadets” the papers had been full of a few years before, who lured young girls to ruin under the guise of false marriages and then sold them as “white slaves.”
Kedzle's wrath was at the fact that Gilfoyle was not legally an abductor. She would have been glad merely to be ruined, and she would have rejoiced at the possibility of a false marriage. In the movies the second villain only pretended to be a preacher, and then confessed his guilt. But such an easy solution was not for Kedzie. New York City had licensed Gilfoyle's outrage; the clerk had sold her to him for two dollars; the Municipal Building was the too, too solid witness.
She felt a spiritual solace in the fact that she had not had a religious marriage. The sacrament was only municipal and did not count. Her wedding had lacked the blessing of the duly constituted ministry; therefore it was sacrilegious; therefore it was her conscientious duty to undo the pagan knot as quickly as possible. She reverted to the good old way of the Middle Ages. There was no curse of divorce then, and indeed there was small need of it, since annulment could usually be managed on one religious ground or another, or if not, people went about their business as if it had been managed.
Kedzie felt absolved of any fault of selfishness now, and justified in taking any steps necessary to the punishment of Gilfoyle.Religionis a large, loose word, and it can be made to fit any motive; but once assumed it seems to strengthen every resolution, to chloroform mercy and hallow any means to the self-sanctified end. What people would shrink from as inhuman they constantly embrace as divine.
Kedzie wondered how she could communicate with her adversary. She might best go to Chicago and fight herself free there. There would be less risk of Dyckman's hearing about it.
She shuddered at what she would have to tell him unless she kept the divorce secret. He might not love her if he knew she was not the nice new girl he thought her, but an old married woman. And what would he say when he found that her real name was Mrs. Thomas GilfoylenéeKedzie Thropp?
But first Kedzie must divorce herself from the Hyperfilm Company. She went to the studio with rage in her heart. She told Ferriday that she would not go to California. He proposed that she break with the Hyperfilm Company and form a corporation of her own with Dyckman as angel.
Kedzie was wroth at this. From now on, spending Dyckman's money would be like spending her own. Ferriday, once her accomplice in the noble business of getting Dyckman to back her, was revealed now as a cheap swindler trying to keep Mrs. Dyckman in trade at her husband's expense.
“I'm through with the pictures, I tell you!” she stormed. “I'm sick of the cheap notoriety. I'm tired of being public property. I can't go out on the street without being pointed at. It's disgusting. I don't want to be incorporated or photographed or interviewed. I want to be let alone. I'm tired. I've worked too hard. I need a rest.”
Ferriday hated her with great agility. He had been willing to abet her breach of contract, provided she let him form a new company, but if she would not that made a great difference. He reminded her:
“The Hyperfilm Company will hold you to your bond. They want your hundred and twenty-five pounds of flesh. If you should break with them they'd have a case against you for damages.”
“How much?” said Kedzie, feeling like Mrs. Croesus.
Ferriday whistled and murmured: “Spoken like the wife of a multimillionaire! So you've got him at last.”
“To who,” Kedzie began, with an owl-like effect that she corrected with some confusion,”—to whom do you refer to?”
Ferriday grinned: “You're going to marry out of the movies, and you're going to try to horn into sassiety. Well, I warned you before that if you became Dyckman's wife you would find his world vastly different from the ballroom and drawing-room stuff you pull off in the studio—strangely and mysteriously different.”
He frightened her. She was not sure of herself. She could not forget Nimrim, Missouri, and her arrival at the edge of societyviathe Bronx, the candy-shop, and the professional camera.
She felt that the world had not treated her squarely. Why should she have to carry all this luggage of her past through the gate with her? She wondered if it would not be better to linger in the studios till she grew more famous and could bring a little prestige along.
But Ferriday was already ousting her even from that security.
“The managers of the Hyperfilm Company will think you have done them dirt, but I'll explain that you are not really responsible. You've seen a million dollars, and you're razzle-dazzled. They'll want a bit of that million, I suppose, as liquidated damages, but I'll try to keep them down.”
Kedzie was at bay in her terror. She struck back.
“Tell 'em they won't get a cent if they try to play the hog.”
“They don't have hogs on Fifth Avenue, Anita. Don't forget that. Well, good-by and good luck.”
This was more like an eviction than a desertion. Kedzie felt a little softening of her heart toward the old homestead.
“I'm sure I'm much obliged for all you've done for me.”
Ferriday roared his scorn.
She went on: “I am. Honest-ly! And I hope I haven't caused you too much inconvenience.”
Ferriday betrayed how much he was hurt by his violent efforts to conceal it.
“Not at all. It happens that I've just found another little girl to take your place. This one drifted in among the extras, just as you did, and she's a dream. I'll show her to the managers, and they may be so glad to get her they won't charge you a cent. In fact, if you say the word, I might manage it so that they would pay you something to cancel your contract.”
This was quite too cruel. It crushed the tears out of Kedzie's eyes, and she had no fight left in her. She simply stammered:
“No, thank you. Don't bother. Well, good-by.”
“Good-by, Anita—good luck!”
He let her make her way out of his office alone. She had to skirt the studio. From behind a canvas wall over which the Cooper-Hewitt tubes rained a quivering blue glare came the words of the assistant director:
“Now choke her, Hazlitt! Harder! Register despair, Miss Hardy. Try to scream and can't! That's good. Now, Walsh, jump in to the rescue. Slug him. Knock his bean off. 'S enough! Fall, Hazlitt. Now gather up Miss Hardy, Walsh. Register devotion, gratitude, adoration—now you got it. Turn on your lamps full power, dearie! Wow! Bully! A couple of tears, please. That's the stuff. You'll be the queen of the world. Weep a little more. Real tears. That's it! Now clinch for the fade-out. Cut!”
Kedzie tiptoed away. She felt as Eve must have felt sneaking out of Eden and hearing the nightingales wrangling and the leopards at play.
We must fly fast and keep on flying if we would escape from our pasts. Ambition, adventure, or sheer luck may carry us forward out of them as in a cavalry-foray over strange frontiers, but sooner or later we must wait for our wagons or fall back to them.
Kedzie's past was catching up with her. It is a glorious thing when one's past comes up loaded with food, munitions, good deeds, charities, mercies, valued friendships. But poor little Kedzie's little past included one incompetent and unacknowledged husband and two village parents.
Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her new friends as anxiously as if he had been a baby born out of wedlock instead of a grown man born into it. And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment. He had not told his new friends in Chicago that he was married, because the Anita Adair that he had left in New York was, as F.P.A. would say, his idea of nothing to brag about.
Gilfoyle had loved Kedzie once as a pretty photographer's model, and had admired her as an exquisite dancing-creature who seemed to have spun off at a tangent from the painted side of an old Greek amphora. He had actually written poetry to her! And when a poet has done that for a girl he feels that he has done more for her than she can ever repay. Even if she gives him her mortal self, what is that to the immortality he has given her?
When Kedzie telegraphed Gilfoyle that she had lost her job in Newport and had arrived in New York lonely and afraid, had he not taken care of her good name by giving her his own? Not to mention a small matter of all his money!
She had repaid him with frantic discontent. The morning after the wedding, was she not imitating the parrot's shrill ridicule of life and love? Did she ridicule his poetry, or didn't she? She did. Instead of being his nine Muses, she had become his three Furies.
When he lost his job and she went out to get one of her own, had she succeeded in getting anything with dignity in it? No! She had become an extra woman in a movie mob. That was a belittling thing to remember. But worst of all, she had committed the unpardonable sin for a woman—she had lent him money. He could never forgive or forget the horrible fact that he had borrowed her last cash to pay his fare to Chicago.
Next to that for inexcusableness was her self-support—and, worse, self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie no money beyond returning what he had borrowed, and she had not used that to buy a ticket to Chicago with. She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money. That was mighty convenient for him, but it was extremely suspicious, and he cherished it as a further grudge.
He never found himself quite flush enough to force any money on her, because he had found that it costs money to live in Chicago, too. People in New York get the idea that it costs everything to live in New York and nothing to live anywhere else—if it can be called living.
Gilfoyle also discovered that his gifts were not appreciated in Chicago as he had expected them to be. Chicago people seemed to think it quite natural for New York to call for help from Chicago, and successful Western men were constantly going East; but for a New-Yorker to revert to Chicago looked queer. He appeared to patronize, and yet he must have had some peculiar reason for giving up New York.
All in all and by and large, Gilfoyle was not happy in Chicago. The few persons, mainly women, who took him up as an interesting novelty grew tired of him. His advertising schemes did not dazzle the alert Illini. For one reason or another the wares he celebrated did not “go big.”
He lost his first job and took an inferior wage with a shabbier firm. He took his women friends to the movies now instead of the theaters. And so it was that one night when he was beauing a Denver woman, who was on her way to New York and fame, he found the box-line extending out on the sidewalk and half-way up the block. It was irksome to wait, but people like to go to shows where the crowds are. He took his place in the line, and his Miss Clampett stood at his elbow.
The queue was slowly drawn into the theater and he finally reached a place in front of the lithographs. He almost jumped out of his skin when he saw a colossal head of Anita Adair smiling at him from a sunbonnet streaming with curls.
The letterpress informed Gilfoyle that it was indeed his own Anita. The people in the line were talking of her as the new star. They were calling her familiarly by her first name and discussing her with all the freedom of the crowd:
“That's Anita. Ain't she sweet?”
“Everybody says Anita's just too lovely.”
“Some queen, boy? Me for Anita. She can pack her clothes in my trunk!”
Gilfoyle felt that he ought in common decency to knock down this fellow who claimed the privileges belonging to himself. But he remembered that he had abandoned those privileges. And the fellow looked unrefinedly powerful.
Gilfoyle gnawed the lip of silence, realizing also that his announcement would make a strange impression on Miss Clampett. She was one of those authors one reads about who think it necessary to hunt experiences and live romances in order to find literary material.
Gilfoyle had done his best to teach her how wildly well a born New-Yorker can play the lute of emotion. To proclaim now that he was the anonymous husband of this glitterer on the billboard would have been a shocking confession.
Gilfoyle swallowed his secret, but it made his heart flutter tremendously. When at length he and Miss Clampett were admitted to the theater and walked down the aisle Kedzie came from the background of the screen forward as if to meet him. She came on and on, and finally as he reached his seat, a close-up of her brought them face to face with a vividness that almost knocked him over. She looked right at him, seemed to recognize him, and stopped short.
He felt as guilty as if she had actually caught him at a rendezvous. Yet he felt pride, too.
This luminous being was his wife. He remembered all that she had been to him. Miss Clampett noted his perturbations and made a brilliant guess at their cause. She asked him if he wanted to leave her and go around to the stage door to meet this wonderful Miss Adair. Gilfoyle laughed poorly at her quip. He was surprised to learn from her that Anita Adair was already a sensation among the film stars. He had not chanced to read the pages where her press-matter had celebrated her. He defended himself from the jealousy of Miss Clampett very lamely; for the luscious beauty of his Anita, her graphic art, and her sway over the audience rekindled his primal emotions to a greater fire than ever.
When the show was over he abandoned Miss Clampett on her door-step and went to his own boarding-house in a nympholepsy. He was a mortal wedded to a fairy. He was Endymion with a moon enamoured of him. Kedzie indeed had come down from the screen to Gilfoyle, clothed in an unearthly effulgence.
The next morning he turned to the moving-picture columns of the ChicagoTribune, theHerald, and the other papers, and he found that Kedzie was celebrated there with enthusiasm by Kitty Kelly, “Mae Tinée,” Mrs. Parsons, and the rest of the critics of the new art. On Sunday several of her interviews appeared, and her portraits, in eminent company.
Gilfoyle's forgotten affections came back to life, expanding and efflorescent. He throbbed with the wonder of it. The moving picture had brought romance again to earth.
Thousands of men all over the country were falling in love with Kedzie. Who had a better right to than her husband? Unconsciously his resentments against her fell away. His heart swelled with such plenitude of forgiveness that he might in time have overlooked the money she lent him. It was not a disgrace to accept money from a genius of her candle-power.
For a long while he had been afraid that she would telegraph him for funds, or descend on him in Chicago and bring a heavy baggage of necessities. Now he was no longer afraid of that. He was afraid that if he called on her in New York she might not remember him.
He had heard of the real and the alleged salaries of moving-picture stars, and he assumed that Kedzie must be as well paid as she was well advertised. He did not know of the measly little hundred dollars a week she was bound down to by her contract. If he had known he would have rejoiced, because one hundred dollars a week was about four times more than Gilfoyle had ever earned.
Of course Gilfoyle resolved to go to New York. Of course he started to telegraph his wife and found the telegram hard to write. Then he began a long letter and found it harder to write. And of course he finally decided to surprise her. He resigned his job. His resignation was accepted with humiliating cordiality.
Of course he took the Twentieth Century Limited to New York. It was more expensive, but it was quicker; and what did a few dollars matter, now that he was the husband of such an earner? He had unwittingly hitched his wagon to a star, and now he would take a ride through heaven. He wrote a poem or two to that effect, and the train-wheels inspired his prosody.
He dreamed of an ideal life in which he should loll upon a sofa of ease, thrumming his lyre, while his wife devoted herself to her career outside.
Where would Horace and Virgil have been if they had not had their expenses paid by old Mr. Maecenas? Since Mrs. Gilfoyle could afford to be a patroness, let her patronage begin at home. Her reward would be beyond price, for Gilfoyle decided to perpetuate her fame in powerful rhyme far outlasting the celluloid in which she was writing her name now.
Celluloid is perishable indeed, and very inflammable. Gilfoyle did not know that the Hyperfilm studio had burned to the ground before he saw Kedzie's picture in Chicago. But he blithely left that city to its fate and sped eastward.
Gilfoyle reached New York on the Twentieth Century. It was an hour late, and so the railroad company paid him a dollar. He wished it had been later. In his present plight time was anything but money to him.
It took him some time to find the Hyperfilm Company's temporary studio. He learned of the fire, and his hope wavered. When he reached the studio Kedzie was not there. The news of her resignation had percolated even to the doorman, who rarely knew anything from inside or outside the studio—an excellent non-conductor of information he was. Gilfoyle had some difficulty in finding Kedzie's address, but at last he learned it, and he made haste to her apartment.
He was impressed by its gaudy vestibule. He told the hall-boy that he wanted to see Miss Adair.
“Name, please?”
“Just say a gentleman to see her.”
“Gotta git the name, or I can't 'phome up. Miss Adair naturally won't see no gempman ain't got a name.”
“Does she see many men?” Gilfoyle asked, with sudden alarm.
“Oh, nossa. Mainly Mr. Dyckman. But that's her business.”
“What Dyckman is that, the rich Jim Dyckman?”
“Well, I ain't s'posed to give out info'mation.”
“Are you supposed to take in money?” Gilfoyle juggled with a half-dollar.
The hall-boy juggled his eyes in unison, and laughed yearningly: “I reckon I might let you up by mistake. Does you know Miss Adair right well?”
“Very well—I'm a relative of hers by marriage. I want to surprise her.”
“Oh, well, you better go on up.”
Gilfoyle applied the magic silver wafer to the itching palm and stepped into the elevator when it came.
Kedzie was alone. She had sent her maid out to get some headache powders. She had had a good cry when she reached home. She had pondered her little brain into a kink, trying to figure out her campaign. When she had a headache, or a cold, or a sleepless night, or a lethargy, she always put a powder in her stomach. It never did any good, and she was always changing the nostrum, but she never changed the idea.
She felt ill and took off her street suit and her corsets, put on a soft, veilly thing, and stretched out on her long-chair.
She was coddling a photograph of Jim Dyckman. He had scrawled across it, “To Little Anita from Big Jim.” She kissed the picture and cherished it to her aching breast.
The door-bell rang. She supposed that, as usual, the maid had forgotten to take her key with her. She went into the hall in a rage, still holding the photograph. She flung the door open—and in walked Gilfoyle.
She fell back stupefied. He grinned, and took her in with devouring eyes. If he had no right to devour her, who had? He approved of her with a rush of delight:
“Well, Anita, here I am. And how's the little wife?”
She could not answer him. He stared ferociously, and gasped as if he had forgotten how she had looked:
“Golly, but you're beautiful? Where's the little kiss?”
He threw his arms about her, garnering in the full sheaf of her beauty. She tried to escape, to protest, but he smothered her with his lips. She had been so long away from him, she had so long omitted him from her plans, that she felt a sense of outrage in his assault. Something virginal had resumed her heart, and his proprietorship revolted her.
Her shoulders were so constrained that she could not push free. She could only raise her right hand outside his left arm, and reaching his face, thrust it away. Her nails were long and sharp. They tore deep gashes in his cheeks and across his nose.
He let her go with a yelp of pain and shame. His fists gathered; primeval instinct told him to smash the mask of pale hatred he saw before him. But he saw the photograph in her left hand. It had been bent double in the scuffle. He snatched at it and tore away the lower half. He read the inscription with disgust and growled:
“That's the reason you didn't write me! That's why you don't want to see me, eh? So he's keeping you! And that's why you resigned from the studio!”
The atrocity of this slander was too much. With a little cat-like yowl she went for him, dropping the broken photograph and spreading all ten claws.
He caught her arms and held them apart where she could scratch nothing more than his wrists, which she did venomously. The cat tribe is a bad tribe to fight at close quarters. One must kill or break loose.
When Kedzie tried to bite him, Gilfoyle realized that she was in no mood for argument. He dragged her to the living-room door and then flung her as far as he could from him. She toppled over into a chair and began to cry.
It was not a pretty scene. Gilfoyle took out his handkerchief and pressed it to his face and the bridge of his nose. Then he looked at the red marks and held them out for her to observe:
“See what you did to me!”
“I'm glad of it,” she snapped. “I wish I'd torn your eyes out.”
This alone would not necessarily have proved that she did not love him devotedly, but in this case it corroborated a context of hatred. Gilfoyle felt rebuffed. There was a distinct lack of hospitality in her welcome. This reception was the very opposite of his imagined rencounter.
He did what a man usually does, revealing a masculine inability to argue with a woman. He told her all her faults of omission and commission as if that would bring her to a reconciliating humor. She listened awhile, and then answered, with a perfect logic that baffled him:
“All you say only goes to show that you don't love me. You never did. You went away and left me. I might have starved, for all you cared. But I've worked like a dog, and now that I've had a little success you come back and say: 'How's the little wife? Where's the little kiss?' Agh! And you dare to kiss me! And then you slander me. You don't give me credit for these plain little rooms that I rent with my own hard-earned money. You couldn't imagine me living in a place like this unless some man paid for it. Heaven knows I'd have lived with you long enough before I ever had a decent home. Humph! Well, I guess so! Humph!”
Gilfoyle mopped his face again and looked at his handkerchief. One's own blood is very interesting. The sight of his wounds did not touch Kedzie's heart. She could never feel sorry for anybody she was mad at.
Gilfoyle's wits were scattered. He mumbled, futilely, “Well, if that's the way you feel about it!”
“That's the way I feel about it!” Kedzie raged on. “I suppose you've had so many affairs of your own out there that you can't imagine anybody else being respectable, can you?”
Gilfoyle had not come East to publish his autobiography. He thought that a gesture of misunderstood despair would be the most effective evasion. So he made it, and turned away. He put his handkerchief to his nose and looked at it. He turned back.
“Would you mind if I went into your bathroom to wash my face?”
“I certainly would. Where do you think you are? You get on out before my maid comes back. I don't want her to think I receive men alone!”
Her heart was cold as a toad in her breast, and she loathed his presence. He repeated his excellent gesture of despair, sighed, “All right,” and left the room. The two pieces of Jim Dyckman's photograph were still on the floor of the hall. He stooped quickly and silently and picked them up as he went out. He closed the door with all the elegy one can put in a door with a snap-lock.
He was about to press the elevator button, but he did not like to present himself gory to the elevator-boy. He walked down the marble and iron steps zigzagging around the elevator shaft.
He paused on various landings to think and mop. He looked at the photograph of Dyckman, and his heart spoiled in him. He recalled his wife's anxiety lest her maid should find a man there. He recalled the hall-boy's statement that Mr. Dyckman was often there. His wife was lying to him, plainly.
He had known detectives and newspaper men and had heard them speak of what a friend they had in the usual hall-boy. He thought that he had here the makings of a very pretty little bit of detectivity.
He reached the main floor, but made a hasty crossing of the gaudy vestibule without stopping to speak to the hall-boy. He had left his baggage at the station, expecting to send it to his wife's apartment when he found it. He had found it, but he could imagine what would happen to the baggage if he sent it there.
“All right!” he said to himself. “If it's war she wants, cry havoc and let slip the sleuth hounds.”
He went to a drug-store and had his wounds sterilized and plastered, saying that a pet cat had scratched him.
“Just so,” said the drug clerk, with a grin. “Pet cats are very dangerous.”
Gilfoyle wanted to slug him, but he wanted his wounds dressed more. He walked and walked down the back avenues till he reached his old boarding-house district near Greenwich Village. He found a landlady who had trusted him often and been paid eventually. He gave his baggage checks to an expressman and went into retirement for meditation.
When his suit-case arrived he got out the poems he had been writing to Anita. He clenched them for destruction, but an exquisite line caught his eye. Why should his art suffer because of a woman's perfidy? He had intended to sonnetize Anita into perenniality. She had played him false. Just for that he would leave her mortal. She should perish.
The poems would keep. He might find another and a worthier client for posterity. Or he might put an imaginary name there, as other poets had done. He wanted one that would slip into the poetry easily. He could use “Pepita” without deranging the rhyme.
He glared at the picture of Dyckman. He knew the face well. He had seen it in print numberless times. He had had the man pointed out to him at races and horse-shows and polo-games and bazaars.
He struck the photograph in the face, realizing that he could not have reached the face of the big athlete. He wondered why this fellow should have been given such stature with such wealth. He was ghastly rich, the snob, the useless cumberer of the ground!
All of Gilfoyle's pseudo-socialistic hostility to wealth and the wealthy came to the aid of his jealousy. To despoil the man was a duty. He had decoyed Anita from her duty by his millions. Not that she was unwilling to be decoyed. And now she would revel in her ill-got luxury, while her legal husband could starve in a garret.
As he brooded, the vision of Dyckman's money grew huger and huger. The dog had not merely thousands or hundreds of thousands, but thousands of thousands. Gilfoyle had never seen a thousand-dollar bill. Yet Dyckman, he had heard, was worth twenty millions. If his wealth were changed into thousand-dollar bills there would be twenty thousand of them in a stack.
If Gilfoyle peeled off one thousand of those thousand-dollar bills the stack would not be perceptibly diminished. If Gilfoyle could get a million dollars from Dyckman, or any part of it, Dyckman would never notice it; and yet it would mean a life of surety and poetry and luxury for Gilfoyle.
If he caught Dyckman and Anita together in a compromising situation he could collect heavily under threat of exposure. Rather than be dragged into the newspapers and the open courts Dyckman would pay almost any sum.
There was a law in New York against the violation of the seventh commandment, and the penitentiary was the punishment. The law had failed to catch its first victim, but it had been used in Massachusetts with success. The threat against Dyckman would surely work.
Then there was the recent Mann Law aimed at white-slavery but a more effective weapon for blackmailers. If Gilfoyle could catch Dyckman taking Anita motoring across the State line into New Jersey or Connecticut he could arrest them or threaten them.
Also he could name Dyckman as co-respondent in a divorce suit—or threaten to—and collect heavily that way. This was not blackmail in Gilfoyle's eyes. He scorned such a crime. This was honorable and necessary vindication of his offended dignity. There was probably never a practiser of blackmail who did not find a better word for the duress he applied.
Gilfoyle needed help. He had no cash to hire a detective with. But he knew a detective or two who might go into the thing with him on spec'.
Gilfoyle began to compose a scheme of poetic revenge. It should be his palinode to Anita. He would keep her under surveillance, but he would not let her know of his propinquity. A happy thought delighted him. To throw her off her guard, he wrote and sent a little note:
DEAR ANITA,—Since you evidently don't love me any longer, I will not bother you any more. I am taking the train back to Chicago. Address me there care of General Delivery if you ever want to see me again.
He addressed it and gave it to the waitress to drop in the mail-box. He had no money to squander on detectives, but he had a friend, Connery, who as a reporter had achieved a few bits of sleuthing in cases that had baffled the police. That evening Gilfoyle went hunting for Connery.