Even the beautiful legend of the prodigal son returning home to his parents could not retain its value when it was topsy-turvied by the Thropps.
Their son was a daughter, but she had run away from them to batten on the husks of city life, and had prospered exceedingly. It was her parents who heard of her fame and had journeyed to the city to ask her forgiveness and throw themselves on her neck. Kedzie was now wonderful before the nation under the nom de film of Anita Adair; but if her father had not spanked her that fatal day in New York she might never have known glory. So many people have been kicked up-stairs in this world.
But Kedzie had not forgiven the outrage, and her father had no intention of reminding her how much she owed to it. In fact, he wished he had thought to cut off his right hand, scripturally, before it caused him to offend.
When the moving-picture patrons in Nimrim, Missouri, first saw Kedzie's pictures on the screen they were thrilled far beyond the intended effect of the thriller. The name “Anita Adair” had meant nothing, of course, among her old neighbors, but everybody had known Kedzie's ways ever since first she had had ways. Her image had no sooner walked into her first scene than fellows who had kissed her, and girls who had been jealous of her, began to buzz.
“Look, that's Kedzie.”
“For mercy's sake, Kedzie Thropp!”
“Yep, that's old Throppie.”
“Why—would you believe it?—that's old Ad Thropp's girl—the one what was lost so long.”
In the Nimrim Nickeleum films were played twice of an evening. The seven-thirty audience was usually willing to go home and leave space for the nine-o'clock audience unless the night was cold. But on this immortal evening people were torn between a frenzy to watch Kedzie go by again and a frenzy to run and get Mr. and Mrs. Thropp.
A veritable Greek chorus ran and got the Thropps, and lost their seats. There was no room for the Thropps to get in. If the manager had not thrown out a few children and squeezed the parents through the crowd they would have lost the view.
The old people stood in the narrow aisle staring at the apotheosis of this brilliant creature in whose existence they had collaborated. They had the mythological experience of two old peasants seeing their child translated as in a chariot of fire. Their eyes were dazzled with tears, for they had mourned her as lost, either dead in body or dead of soul. They had imagined her drowned and floating down the Bay, or floating along the sidewalks of New York. They had feared for her the much-advertised fate of the white slaves—she might be bound out to Singapore or destined for Alaskan dance-halls. There are so many fates for parents to dread for their lost children.
To have their Kedzie float home to them on pinions of radiant beauty was an almost intolerable beatitude. Kedzie's mother started down the aisle, crying, “Kedzie, my baby! My little lost baby!” before Adna could check her.
Kedzie did not answer her mother, but went on with her work as if she were deaf. She came streaming from the projection-machine in long beams of light. This vivid, smiling, weeping, dancing, sobbing Kedzie was only a vibration rebounding from a screen. Perhaps that is all any of us are.
One thing was certain: the Thropps determined to redeem their lost lamb as soon as they could get to New York. Their lost lamb was gamboling in blessed pastures. The Nimrim people spoke to the parents with reverence, as if their son had been elected President—which would not have been, after all, so wonderful as their daughter's being a screen queen.
There is no end to the astonishments of our every-day life. While the Thropps had been watching their daughter disport before them in a little dark room in Missouri, and other people in numbers of other cities were seeing her in duplicate, she herself was in none of the places, but in her own room—with Jim Dyckman paying court to her.
Kedzie was engaged in reeling off a new life of her own for the astonishment of the angels, or whatever audience it is for whose amusement the eternal movie show of mankind is performed. Kedzie's story was progressing with cinematographic speed and with transitions almost as abrupt as the typical five-reeler.
Kedzie was an anxious spectator as well as an actor in her own life film. She did not see how she could get out of the tangled situation her whims, her necessities, and her fates had constructed about her. She had been more or less forced into a betrothal with the wealthy Jim Dyckman before she had dissolved her marriage with Tommie Gilfoyle. She could not find Gilfoyle, and she grew frenzied with the dread that her inability to find him might thwart all her dreams.
Then came the evening when Jim Dyckman telephoned her that he could not keep his appointment with her. It was the evening he responded to Charity Coe's appeal and met Peter Cheever fist to fist. Kedzie heard, in the polite lie he told, a certain tang of prevarication, and that frightened her. Why was Jim Dyckman trying to shake her? Once begun, where would the habit end?
That was a dull evening for Kedzie. She stuck at home without other society than her boredom and her terrors. She had few resources for the enrichment of solitude. She tried to read, but she could not find a popular novel or a short story in a magazine exciting enough to keep her mind off the excruciating mystery of the next instalment in her own life. Her heart ached with the fear that she might never know the majesty of being Mrs. Jim Dyckman. That almost royal prerogative grew more and more precious the more she feared to lose it. She imagined the glory with a ridiculous extravagance. Her theory of the life lived by the wealthy aristocrats was fantastic, but she liked it and longed for it.
The next day she waited to hear from Jim till she could endure the anxiety no longer. She ventured to call him at his father's home. She waited with trepidation while she was put through to his room, but his enthusiasm when he recognized her voice refreshed her hopes and her pride. She did not know that part of her welcome was due to the fierce rebuke Charity Coe had inflicted on him a little before because he had mauled her husband into a wreck.
That evening she waited for Jim Dyckman's arrival with an ardor almost akin to love. He had begged off from dinner. He did not explain that he carried two or three visible fist marks from Cheever's knuckles which he did not wish to exhibit in a public restaurant.
So Kedzie dined at home in solitary gloom. She had only herself for guest and found herself most stupid company.
She dined in her bathrobe and began immediately after dinner to dress for conquest. She hoped that Dyckman would take her out to the theater or a dance, and she put on her best bib and tucker, the bib being conspicuously missing. She was taking a last look at the arrangement of her little living-room when the telephone-bell rang and the maid came to say:
“'Scuse me, Miss Adair, but hall-boy says your father and mother is down-stairs.”
Kedzie almost fainted. She did not dare refuse to see them. She had not attained that indifference to the opinions of servants which is the only real emancipation from being the servant of one's servants.
While she fumbled with her impulses the maid rather stated than asked, “Shall I have 'em sent up, of course?”
“Of course,” Kedzie snapped.
The Thropps knew Kedzie well enough to be afraid of her. A parental intuition told them that if they wrote to her she would be a long while answering; if they telephoned her she would be out of town. So they came unannounced. It had taken them the whole day to trace her. They learned with dismay that she was no longer “working” at the Hyperfilm Studio.
Adna Thropp and his wife were impressed by the ornate lobby of the apartment-house, by the livery of the hall-boy and the elevator-boy, by the apron and cap of the maid who let them in, and by the hall furniture.
But when they saw their little Kedzie standing before them in her evening gown—her party dress as Mrs. Thropp would say—they were overwhelmed. A daughter is a fearsome thing to a father, especially when she is grown up and dressed up. Adna turned his eyes away from his shining child.
But the sense of shame is as amenable to costume as to the lack of it, and Kedzie—the shoulder-revealer—was as much shocked by what her parents had on as they by what she had off.
The three embraced automatically rather than heartily, and Kedzie came out of her mother's bosom chilled, though it was a warm night and Mrs. Thropp had traveled long. Also there was a lot of her.
Kedzie gave her parents the welcome that the prodigal's elder brother gave him. She was thinking: “What will Jim Dyckman say when he learns that my real name is Thropp and sees this pair of Thropps? They look as if their name would be Thropp.”
Adna made the apologies—glad tidings being manifestly out of place.
“Hope we 'ain't put you out, daughter. We thought we'd s'prise you. We went to the fact'ry. Man at the door says you wasn't workin' there no more. Give us this address. Right nice place here, ain't it? Looks like a nice class of folks lived here.”
Kedzie heard the rounded “r” and the flat “a” which she had discarded and scorned the more because she had once practised them. Children are generally disappointed in their parents, since they cherish ideals to which few parents may conform from lack of time, birth, breeding, or money. Kedzie was not in any mood for parents that night, anyway, but if she had to have parents, she would have chosen an earl and a countess with a Piccadilly accent and a concert-grand manner. Such parents it would have given her pleasure and pride to exhibit to Dyckman. They would awe-inspire him and arrange the marriage settlement, whatever that was.
But these poor old shabby dubs in their shabby duds—a couple who were plebeian even in Jayville! If there had not been such a popular prejudice against mauling one's innocent parents about, Kedzie would probably have taken her father and mother to the dumb-waiter and sent them down to the ash-can.
As she hung between despair and anxiety the telephone-bell rang. Jim Dyckman called her up to say that he was delayed for half an hour. Kedzie came back and invited her parents in. It made her sick to see their awkwardness among the furniture. They went like scows adrift. They priced everything with their eyes, and the beauty was spoiled by the estimated cost.
Mrs. Thropp asked Kedzie how she was half a dozen times, and, before Kedzie could answer, went on to tell about her own pains. Mr. Thropp was freshly alive to the fact that New York's population is divided into two classes—innocent visitors and resident pirates.
While they asked Kedzie questions that she did not care to answer, and answered questions she had not cared to ask, Kedzie kept wondering how she could get rid of them before Dyckman came. She thanked Heaven that there was no guest-room in her apartment. They could not live with her, at least.
Suddenly it came over the pretty, bewildered little thing with her previous riddle of how to get rid of a last-year's husband so that she might get a new model—suddenly it came over Kedzie that she had a tremendous necessity for help, advice, parentage. The crying need for a father and a mother enhanced the importance of the two she had on hand.
She broke right into her mother's description of a harrowing lumbago she had suffered from: it was that bad she couldn't neither lay nor set—that is to say, comfortable. Kedzie's own new-fangled pronunciations and phrases fell from her mind, and she spoke in purest Nimrim:
“Listen, momma and poppa. I'm in a peck of trouble, and maybe you can help me out.”
“Is it money?” Adna wailed, sepulchrally.
“No, unless it's too much of the darned stuff.”
Adna gasped at the paradox. He had no time to comment before she assailed him with:
“You see, I've gone and got married.”
This shattered them both so that the rest was only shrapnel after shell. But it was a leveling bombardment of everything near, dear, respectable, sacred. They were fairly rocked by each detonation of fact.
“Yes, I went and married a dirty little rat—name's Gilfoyle—he thinks my real name's Anita Adair. I got it out of a movie, first day I ran off from you folks. I had an awful time, momma—like to starved—would have, only for clerkin' in a candy-store. Then I got work posln' for commercial photographers. Did you see the Breathasweeta Chewin' Gum Girl? No? That was me. Then I was a dancer for a while—on the stage—and—the other girls were awful cats. But what d'you expect? The life was terrible. We didn't wear much clo'es. That didn't affect me, though; some of those nood models are terribly respectable—not that I was nood, o' course. But—well—so I married Tommie Gilfoyle. I don't know how I ever came to. He must have mesmerized me, I guess.”
“What did he work at?” said Adna.
“Poetry.”
“Is poetry work?”
“Work? That's all it is. Poetry is all work and no pay. You should have seen that gink sweatin' over the fool stuff. He'd work a week for five dollars' worth of foolishness. And besides, as soon as he married me he lost his job.”
“Poetry?” Adna mumbled.
“Advertising.”
“Oh!”
“Well, we didn't live together very long, and I was perfectly miser'ble every minute.”
“You poor little honey child!” said Mrs. Thropp, who felt her lamb coming back to her, and even Adna reached over and squeezed her hand and rubbed her knuckles with his rough thumb uncomfortably.
But it was good to have allies, and Kedzie went on:
“By an' by Gilfoyle got the offer of a position in Chicago, and he couldn't get there without borrowing all I had. But I was glad enough to pay it to him. I'd 'a' paid his fare to the moon if he'd 'a' gone there. Then I got a position with a moving-picture company—as a jobber—I began very humbly at first, you see, and I underwent great hardships.” (She was quoting now from one of her favorite interviews.) “My talent attracted the attention of the director, Mr. Ferriday. He stands very high in the p'fession, but he's very conceited—very! He thought he owned me because he was the first one I let direct me. He wanted me to marry him.”
“Did you?” said Adna, who was prepared for anything.
“I should say not!” said Kedzie. “How could I, with a husband in Chicago? He wasn't much of a husband—just enough to keep me from marrying a real man. For one day, who should come to the studio but Jim Dyckman!”
“Any relation to the big Dyckmans?” said Adna.
“He's the son of the biggest one of them all,” said Kedzie.
“And you know him?”
“Do I know him? Doesn't he want to marry me? Isn't that the whole trouble? He's coming here this evening.”
To Adna, the humble railroad claim-agent, the careless tossing off of the great railroad name of Dyckman was what it would have been to a rural parson to hear Kedzie remark:
“I'm giving a little dinner to-night to my friends Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Mr. Apostle Paul.”
When the shaken wits of the parents began to return to a partial calm they remembered that Kedzie had mentioned somebody named Gilfoyle—Gargoylewould have been a better name for him, since he grinned down in mockery upon a cathedral of hope.
Adna whispered, “When did you divorce—the other feller?”
“I didn't; that's the trouble.”
“Why don't you?”
“I can't find him.”
Adna spoke up: “I'll go to Chicago and find him and get a divorce, if I have to pound it out of him. You say he's a poet?”
Adna had the theory that poetry went with tatting and china-painting as an athletic exercise. Kedzie had no reason to think differently. She had whipped her own poet, scratched him and driven him away in disorder. She told her people of this and of her inability to recall him, and of his failure to answer the letter she had sent to Chicago.
Her father and mother grew incandescent with the strain between the obstacle and the opportunity—the irresistible opportunity chained to the immovable obstacle. They raged against the fiend who had ruined Kedzie's life, met her on her pathway, gagged and bound her, and haled her to his lair.
Poor young Gilfoyle would have been flattered at the importance they gave him, but he would not have recognized himself or Kedzie.
According to his memory, he had married Kedzie because she was a pitiful, heartbroken waif who had lost her job and thrown herself on his mercy. He had married her because he adored her and he wanted to protect her and love her under the hallowing shelter of matrimony. He had given her his money and his love and his toil, and they had not interested her. She had berated him, chucked him, taken up with a fast millionaire; and when he returned to resume his place in her heart she had greeted him with her finger-nails.
Thus, as usual in wars, each side had bitter grievances which the other could neither acknowledge nor understand. Gilfoyle was as bitter against Kedzie as she was against him.
And even while the three Thropps were wondering how they could summon this vanquished monster out of the vasty deep of Chicago they could have found him by putting their heads out of the window and shouting his name. He was loitering opposite in the areaway of an empty residence. He did not know that Kedzie's father and mother were with her, any more than they knew that he was with them.
After a deal of vain abuse of Gilfoyle for abducting their child and thwarting her golden opportunity, Adna asked at last, “What does Mr. Dyckman think of all this?”
“You don't suppose I've told him I was married, do you?” Kedzie stormed. “Do I look as loony as all that?”
“Oh!” said Adna.
“Why, he doesn't even know my name is Thropp, to say nothing of Thropp-hyphen-Gilfoyle.”
“Oh!” said Adna.
“Who does he think you are?” asked Mrs. Thropp.
“Anita Adair, the famous favorite of the screen,” said Kedzie, rather advertisingly.
“Hadn't you better tell him?” Adna ventured.
“I don't dast. He'd never speak to me again. He'd run like a rabbit if he thought I was a grass widow.”
Mrs. Thropp remonstrated: “I don't believe he'd ever give you up. He must love you a heap if he wants to marry you.”
“That's so,” said Kedzie. “He's always begging me to name the day. But I don't know what he'd think if I was to tell him I'd been lying to him all this time. He thinks I'm an innocent little girl. I just haven't got the face to tell him I'm an old married woman with a mislaid husband.”
“You mean to give him up, then?” Mrs. Thropp sighed.
Adna raged back: “Give up a billion-dollar man for a fool poet? Not on your tintype!”
Kedzie gave her father an admiring look. They were getting on sympathetic ground. They understood each other.
Adna was encouraged to say: “If I was you, Kedzie, I'd just lay the facts before him. Maybe he could buy the feller off. You could probably get him mighty cheap.”
Mrs. Thropp habitually resented all her husband's arguments. She scorned this proposal.
“Don't you do it, Kedzie. Just as you said, he'd most likely run like a rabbit.”
“Then what am I going to do?” Kedzie whimpered.
There was a long silence. Mrs. Thropp pondered bitterly. She was the most moral of women. She had brought up her children with all rigidity. She had abused them for the least dereliction. She had upheld the grimmest standard of virtue, with “Don't!” for its watchword. Of virtue as a warm-hearted, alert, eager, glowing spirit, cultivating the best and most beautiful things in life, she had no idea. Virtue was to her a critic, a satirist, a neighborhood gossip, something scathing and ascetic. That delicate balance between failing to mind one's own business and failing to respond to another's need did not bother her—nor did that theory of motherhood which instils courage, independence, originality, and enthusiasm for life, and starts children precociously toward beauty, love, grace, philanthropy, invention, art, glory.
She had the utmost contempt for girls who went right according to their individualities, or went wrong for any reason soever. The least indiscretions of her own daughters she visited with endless tirades. Kedzie had escaped them for a long while. She had succeeded as far as she had because she had escaped from the most dangerous of all influences—a perniciously repressive mother. She would have been scolded viciously now if it had not been for Dyckman's mighty prestige.
The Dyckman millions in person were about to enter this room. The Dyckman millions wanted Kedzie. If they got her it would be a wonderful thing for a poor, hard-working girl who had had the spunk to strike out for herself and make her own way without expense to her father and mother. The Dyckman millions, furthermore, would bring the millennium at once to the father and mother.
Mrs. Thropp, fresh from her village (yet not so very fresh—say, rather, recent from sordid humility), sat dreaming of herself as a Dyckman by marriage. She imagined herself and the great Mrs. Dyckman in adjoining rocking-chairs, exchanging gossip and recipes and anecdotes of their joint grandchildren-to-be. Just to inhale the aroma of that future, that vision of herself as Mr. Dyckman's mother-in-law, was like breathing in deeply of laughing-gas; a skilful dentist could have extracted a molar from her without attracting her attention. And in the vapor of that stupendous temptation the devil actually did extract from her her entire moral code without her noticing the difference.
If Kedzie had been married to Gilfoyle and besought in marriage by another fellow of the same relative standard of income Mrs. Thropp could have waxed as indignant as anybody. If Kedzie's new suitor had earned as high as four thousand a year, which was a pile of money in Nimrim, she would still have raged against the immorality of tampering with the sacrament of marriage. She might have withstood as much as twenty thousand a year for the sake of home and religion. She abhorred divorce, as well as other people do (especially divorcées).
But to resist a million dollars and all that went with it was impossible. To resist a score of millions was twenty times impossibler. She made up her mind that Dyckman should not escape from this temporary alliance with the Thropps without paying at least a handsome initiation-fee. Suddenly she set her jaw and broke into the parley of her husband and their daughter:
“Well, I've made up my mind. Adna, you shut up awhile and get on out this room. I'm going to have a few words with my girl.”
Adna looked into the face of his wife and saw there that red-and-white-striped expression which always puts a wise man to flight. He was glad to be permitted to retreat. When he was gone Mrs. Thropp beckoned Kedzie to sit by her on thechaise longue. She gathered her child up as some adoring old buzzard might cuddle her nestling and impart choice ideals of scavengery.
“Look here, honey: you listen to your mother what loves you and knows what's best for you. You've struck out for yourself and you've won the grandest chance any girl ever had. If you throw it away you'll be slappin' Providence right in the face. The Lord would never have put this op'tunity in your reach if He hadn't meant you to have it.”
“What you talking about, momma?” said Kedzie.
“My father always used to say: 'Old Man Op'tunity is bald-headed except for one long scalplock in the middle his forehead. Grab him as he comes toward you, for there's nothing to lay holt on as he goes by.'”
“What's all this talk about bald-heads?” Kedzie protested.
“Hush your mouth and listen to a woman that's older'n what you are and knows more. Look at me! I've slaved all my life. I've been a hard-workin', church-goin' woman, a good mother to a lot of ungrateful children, a faithful, lovin' wife—and what have I got for it? Look at me. Do you want to be like me when you get my age? Do you?”
It was a hard question to answer politely, so Kedzie said nothing. Mrs. Thropp went on:
“You got a chance to look like me and live hard and die poor, and that's what'll happen if you stick by this low-life, good-for-nothing dawg you married. Don't do it. Money's come your way. Grab it quick. Hold on to it tight. Money's the one thing that counts. You take my word for it. It don't matter much how you get it; the main thing is Get it! People don't ask you How? but How Much? If you got enough they don't care How.”
“That's all right enough,” said Kedzie, “but the main question with me is How?”
“How is easy,” said Mrs. Thropp, and her face seemed to turn yellow as she lowered her voice. “This Mr. Dyckman is crazy about you. He wants you. If he's willin' to marry you to get you, I guess he'll be still more willin' to get you without marryin' you.”
“Why, momma!”
It was just a whisper. Kedzie had lived through village perils and city perils; she had been one of a band of dancers as scant of morals as of clothes; she had drifted through all sorts of encounters with all sorts of people; but she had never heard so terrible a thought so terribly expressed. She flinched from her mother. Her mother saw that shudder of retreat and grew harsher:
“You tell Mr. Dyckman about your husband, and you'll lose him. You will—for sure! If you lose him, you lose the greatest chance a girl ever had. Take him—and make him pay for you!—in advance. Do you understand? You can't get much afterward. You can get a fortune if you get your money first. Look at you, how pretty you are! He'd give you a million if you asked him. Get your money; then tell him if you want to; but don't lose this chance. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Kedzie sighed. “Yes, momma.”
“Promise me on your solemn honor!”
Kedzie giggled with sheer nervousness at the phrase. But she would not promise.
The door-bell rang, and the maid admitted Jim Dyckman, who had not paused to send his name up by the telephone. While he gave his hat and stick to the maid and peeled off his gloves Kedzie was whispering:
“It's Jim.”
Mrs. Thropp struggled to her feet. “He mustn't find me here,” she said. “Don't tell him about us.”
But before she could escape Dyckman was in the doorway, almost too tall to walk through it, almost as tall as twenty million dollars.
To Mrs. Thropp he was as majestic as the Colossus of Rhodes would have been. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, he was a gilded giant.
Kedzie was paralyzed. Mrs. Thropp was inspired. Unity of purpose guided her true. She had told her daughter to ignore Gilfoyle as an unimportant detail. She certainly did not intend to substitute a couple of crude parents as a new handicap.
No one knew Mrs. Thropp's cheapness of appearance better than she did. A woman may grow shoddy and careless, but she rarely grows oblivious of her uncomeliness. She will rather cherish it as the final cruelty of circumstances. Mrs. Thropp was keenly alive to the effect it would have on Dyckman if Kedzie introduced her and Adna as the encumbrances on her beauty.
Adna, hearing the door-bell and Dyckman's entrance, returned to the living-room from the bathroom, where he had taken refuge. He stood in the hall now behind the puzzled Dyckman.
There was a dreadful silence for a moment. Jim spoke, shyly:
“Hello, Anita! How are you?”
“Hello, Jim!” Kedzie stammered. “This is—”
“I'm the janitor's wife,” said Mrs. Thropp. “My husband had to come up to see about the worter not running in the bathroom, and I came along to see Miss—the young lady. She's been awful good to me. Well, I'll be gettin' along. Good night, miss. Good night, sir.”
To save herself, she could not think of Kedzie's screen name. To save her daughter's future, she disowned her. She pushed past Dyckman, and silencing the stupefied Adna with a glare, swept him out through the dining-room into the kitchen.
It amazed Mrs. Thropp to find a kitchen so many flights up-stairs. The ingenuity of the devices, the step-saving cupboard, the dry ice-box with its coils of cold-air pipes, the gas-stove, the electric appliances, were like wonderful new toys to her.
Adna was as comfortable as a cow in a hammock, and she would have sent him away, but his hat was in the hall and she dared not go for it. Besides, she wanted to wait long enough to learn the outcome of Kedzie's adventure with Dyckman.
As soon as he was alone with Kedzie, Jim had taken her into his arms. She blushed with an unwonted timidity in a new sense of the forbiddenness of her presence there.
Her upward glance showed her that Jim had been in trouble, too. His jaw had a mottled look, and one eyebrow was a trifle mashed.
“What on earth has happened to you?” she gasped.
“Oh, I had a little run-in with a fellow.”
“What about?” said Kedzie.
“Nothing much.”
“He must have hurt you terribly.”
“Think so? Well, you ought to see him.”
“What was it all about?”
“Oh, just a bit of an argument.”
“Who was he?”
“Nobody you know.”
“You mean it's none of my business?”
“I wouldn't put it that way, honey. I'd just rather not talk about it.”
Kedzie felt rebuffed and afraid. He had spent an evening away from her and had reappeared with scars from a battle he would not describe. She would have been still more terrified if she had known that he had fought as the cavalier of Charity Coe Cheever. She would have been somewhat reassured if she had known that Jim smarted less under the bruises of Cheever's fists than under the rebuke he had had from Charity for his interference in her marital crisis.
Jim was the more in need of Kedzie's devotion for being discarded again by Charity. The warmth in Kedzie's greeting was due to her fear of losing him. But he did not know that. He only knew that she was exceedingly cordial to him, and it was his nature to repay cordiality with usury.
He noted, however, that Kedzie's warmth had an element of anxiety. He asked her what was worrying her, but she would not answer.
At length he made his usual remark. It had become a sort of standing joke for him to say, “When do we marry?”
She always answered, “Give me a little more time.” But to-night when he laughed, “Well, just to get the subject out of the way, when do we marry?” Kedzie did not make her regular answer. Her pretty face was suddenly darkened with pain. She moaned: “Never, I guess. Never, I'm afraid.”
“What's on your mind, Anita?”
She hesitated, but when he repeated his query she took the plunge and told him the truth.
Her mother had pleaded just a little too well. If Mrs. Thropp had begged Kedzie to do the right thing for the right's sake Kedzie would have felt the natural reaction daughters feel toward motherly advice. But the entreaty to do evil that evil might come of it aroused even more resistance, issuing as it did from maternal lips that traditionally give only holy counsel. It had a more reforming effect on Kedzie's crooked plans than all the exhortations of all the preachers in the world could have had.
Kedzie turned to honesty because it seemed the less horrible of two evils. She assumed the role of a little penitent, and made Jim Dyckman a father confessor. She told her story as truthfully as she could tell it or feel it. She was too sincere to be just.
She made herself the martyr that she felt herself to be. She wept plentifully and prettily, with irresistible gulps and swallowings of lumps and catches of breath, fetches of sobs, and dartings and gleamings of pearls from her shining eyelids. Her handkerchief was soon a little wad of wet lace, ridiculously pathetic; her lips were blubbered. She wept on and on till she just had to blow her little red nose. She blew it with exquisite candor, and it gave forth the heartbreaking squawk of the first toy trumpet a child breaks of a Christmas morning.
One radical difference between romance and realism is that in romance the heroines weep from the eyelashes out; in realism, some of the tears get into the nostrils. In real life it is reality that moves our hearts, and Dyckman was convinced by Kedzie's realism.
She did not need to tell him of her humble and Western birth. He had recognized her accent from the first, and forgiven it. He knew a little of her history, because Charity Coe had sent him to the studio to look her up, reminding him that she had been the little dancer he pulled out of Mrs. Noxon's pool.
At length Kedzie revealed the horrible fact that her real name was Kedzie Thropp. He laughed aloud. He was so tickled by her babyish remorse that he made her say it again. He told her he loved it twice as well as the stilted, stagy “Anita Adair.”
“That's one of the reasons I wanted you to marry me,” he said, “so that I could change your horrible name.”
“But I changed it myself first,” Kedzie howled; and now the truth came ripping. “The day after you pulled me out of the pool at Newport I—I—married a fellow named Tommie Gilfoyle.”
Dyckman's smile was swept from his face; his chuckle ended in a groan. Kedzie's explanation was a little different from the one she gave her parents. Unconsciously she tuned it to her audience. It grew a trifle more literary.
“What could I do? I was alone in the world, without friends or money or position. He happened to be at the railroad station. He saw how frightened I was, and he had loved me for a long time. He begged me to take mercy on him and on myself, and marry him. He offered me his protection; he said I should be his wife in name only until I learned to love him. And I was alone in the world, without friends or money—but I told you that once, didn't I?”
Dyckman was thinking hard, aching hard. He mumbled, “What became of him?”
“When he saw that I couldn't love him he took some money I had left from my earnings and abandoned me. I had a desperate struggle to get along, and then I got my chance in the moving pictures, and I met you there—and—learned what love is—too late—too late!”
Dyckman broke in on her lyric grief, “What became of the man you married?”
“He never came near me till awhile ago. He saw my pictures on the screen and thought I must be making a big lot of money. He came here and tried to sneak back into my good graces. He even tried to kiss me, and I nearly tore his eyes out.”
“Why?” Jim asked.
“Because I belong to nobody but you—at least, I did belong to nobody but you. But now you won't want me any more. I don't blame you for hating me. I hate myself. I've deceived you, and you'll never believe me again, or love me, or anything.”
She wept ardently, for she was appalled by the magnitude of her deception, now that it stood exposed. She had no idea of the magnitude of Dyckman's chivalry. She slipped to the floor and laid her head on his knee.
It was Dyckman's nature to respond at once to any appeal to his sympathy or his courtesy. Automatically his heart warmed toward human distress. He felt a deeper interest in Kedzie than before, because she threw herself on his mercy as never before. His hand went out to her head and fell upon her hair with a kind of apostolic benediction. He poured, as it were, an ointment of absolution and acceptance upon her curls.
She felt in his very fingers so much reassurance that she was encouraged to unburden herself altogether of her hoard of secrets.
“There's one more awful thing you'll never forgive me for, Jim. I want to tell you that, and then you'll know all the worst of me. My father and mother came to town to-day, and—and that was my mother who said she was the janitor's wife.”
“Why did she do that?” said Jim.
“I had been telling them how much I loved you, and poor dear mother was afraid you might be scared away if you knew how poor my people are.”
“What kind of a ghastly snob do they take me for?” Jim growled.
“They don't know you as I do,” said Kedzie; “but even I can't expect you to forgive everything. I've lied to you about everything except about loving you, and I was a long while telling you the truth about that. But now you know all there is to know about me, and I wouldn't blame you for despising me. Of course I don't expect you to want to marry me any longer, so I'll give you back your beautiful engagement ring.”
With her arms across his knees, one of her delicate hands began to draw from the other a gold circlet knobbed with diamonds.
“Don't do that,” Jim said, taking her hands in his. “The engagement stands.”
“But how can it, darling?” said Kedzie. “You can't love me any more.”
“Of course I do, more and more.”
“But you can never marry me, and surely you don't want—”
Suddenly she ran plump into the situation her mother had imagined and encouraged. She blushed at the collision with it, and became a very allegory of innocence confronted with abhorrent evil.
“Of course I don't,” said Dyckman, divining exactly what she meant. “I'll find this Gilfoyle and buy him up or beat him to a pulp.”
Kedzie lifted her downcast eyes in gratitude for such a godlike resolution. But before she could cry out in praise of it she cried out in terror.
For right before her stood the long-lost Gilfoyle.