During his long wait this evening Gilfoyle had grown almost uncontrollable with impatience to undertake the assault. His landlady had warned him not to return to his room until he brought some cash on account. He was for making the charge the moment he saw Jim Dyckman enter the building, but Connery insisted on giving Dyckman time to get forward with his courtship. They had seen the maid come out of the servants' entrance and hurry up the street to the vain tryst Connery had arranged with her to get her out of the way.
At length, when time had passed sufficiently, they had crossed to the apartment-house and told the elevator-boy they were expected by the tenants above. He took them up without question. They pretended to ring the bell there, waited for the elevator to disappear, then walked down a flight of steps and paused at the fatal sill.
Connery inserted the key stealthily into the lock, turned it, opened the door in silence, and let Gilfoyle slip through. He followed and closed the door without shock.
They heard Kedzie's murmurous tones and the rumble of Dyckman's answer. Then Gilfoyle strode forward. He saw Kedzie coiled on the floor with her elbows on Dyckman's knees. He caught her eye, and her start of bewilderment held him spellbound a moment. Then he cried:
“There you are! I've got you! You faithless little beast.”
Dyckman rose to an amazing height, lifted Kedzie to her feet, and answered:
“Who the devil are you, and what the devil do you want?”
“I'm the husband of that shameless woman; that's who I am,” Gilfoyle shrilled, a little cowed by Dyckman's stature.
“Oh, you are, are you!” said Dyckman. “Well, you're the very chap I'm looking for. Come in, by all means.”
Connery, seeing that the initiative was slipping from Gilfoyle's flaccid hand, pushed forward with truculence.
“None of that, you big bluff! You needn't think you can put anything over on me.”
“And who are you?” said Dyckman.
“I'm Connery the detective, and I've got the goods on you.”
He advanced on Dyckman, and Gilfoyle came with him. Gilfoyle took courage from the puzzled confusion of Dyckman, and he poured forth invectives.
“You think because you're rich you can go around breaking up homes and decoying wives away, do you? Not that she isn't willing enough to be decoyed! I wasn't good enough for her. She had to sell herself for money and jewelry and a gay time! I ought to kill you both, and maybe I will; but first I'm going to show you up in the newspapers.”
“Oh, you are, are you!” was the best that Dyckman could improvise.
“Yes, he is,” Connery roared. “I'm a newspaper man, and your name's worth head-lines in every paper in the country. And I'll see that it gets there, too. It will go on the wires to-night unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you come across with—”
“Oh, that's it, is it!” said Dyckman. “Just a little old-fashioned blackmail!”
He had tasted the joys of violence in his bout with Cheever, and now he had recourse to it again. His long arms went out swiftly toward the twain of his assailants. His big hands cupped their heads as if they were melons, and he knocked their skulls together smartly.
He might have battered them to death, but he heard Kedzie's little cry of horror, and forbore. He flung the heads from him, and the bodies followed limply. Connery went to the floor, and Gilfoyle sprawled across a chair. They were almost unconscious, their brains reduced to swirling nebulae.
Kedzie thought for a moment that she and her love-affairs had brought about a double murder. She saw herself becoming one of those little women who appear with an almost periodic regularity in the annals of crime, and whose red smiles drag now this, now that great family's name into the mud and vomit of public nausea.
She would lose Jim Dyckman, after all, and ruin him in the losing. She clung to his arm to check him in his work of devastation. He, too, stood wondering at the amazing deed of his rebellious hands, and wondering what the result would be.
He and Kedzie rejoiced at seeing the victims move. Connery began to squirm on the floor and get to his wabbly knees, and Gilfoyle writhed back to consciousness with wits a-flutter.
There was a silence of mutual attention for a while. Connery was growling from all-fours like a surly dog:
“I'll get you for this—you'll see! You'll be sorry for this.”
This restored Dyckman's temper to its throne. He seized Connery by the scruff of his coat, jerked him to his feet, and snarled at him:
“Haven't you had enough, you little mucker? You threaten me or Miss Adair again and I'll not leave enough of you to—to—”
He was not apt at phrases, but Connery felt metaphors enough in the size of the fist before his nose. He put up his hands, palms forward, in the ancient gesture of surrender. Then Gilfoyle turned cry-baby and began to sob.
“You call her Miss Adair! But she's my wife. Mrs. Gilfoyle is what she is, and you've taken her away from me. This is a rotten country, and you rotten millionaires can do nearly anything you want to—but not quite. You'll find that out. There are still a few courts and a few newspapers you can't muzzle.”
Dyckman advanced against him, but Gilfoyle merely clung to the back of his chair, and his non-resistance was his best shelter. It was impossible for Dyckman to strike him. Secure in his helplessness, he took full advantage of the tyranny of impotence. He rose to his feet and went on with his lachrymose philippic.
“You're going to pay for what you've done, and pay high!”
The one thing that restrained Dyckman from offering to buy him out was that he demanded purchase. Like most rich people, Dyckman was the everlasting target of prayers and threats. He could be generous to an appeal, but a demand locked his heart.
He answered Gilfoyle's menace, bluntly, “I'll pay you when hell freezes over, and not a cent before.”
“Well, then, you stand from under,” Gilfoyle squealed. “There's a law in this State against home-wreckers like you, and I can send you to the penitentiary for breaking it.”
Dyckman's rage blackened again; he caught Gilfoyle by the shoulder and roared: “You foul-mouthed, filthy-minded little sneak! You say a word against your wife and I'll throw you out of the window. She's too decent for you to understand. You get down on your knees and ask her pardon.”
He forced Gilfoyle to his knees, but he could not make him pray. And Kedzie fell back from him. She was afraid to pose as a saint worthy of genuflection. Connery re-entered the conflict with a sneer:
“Aw, tell it to the judge, Dyckman! Tell it to the judge! See how good it listens to him. We'll tell him how we found you here; and you tell him you were holding a prayer-meeting. You didn't want to be disturbed, so you didn't have even a servant around—all alone together at this hour.”
Then a new, strange voice spoke in.
“Who said they were alone?”
The four turned to see Mrs. Thropp filling the hall doorway, and Adna's head back of her shoulder. It was really a little too melodramatic. The village lassie goes to the great city; her father and mother arrive in all their bucolic innocence just in time to save her from destruction.
Connery, whose climax she had spoiled, though she had probably saved his bones, gasped, “Who the hell are you?”
“I'm this child's mother; that's who I am. And that's her father. And what's more, we've been here all evening, and you'd better look out how you swear at me or I'll sick Mr. Dyckman on you.”
If there are gallery gods in heaven, and angels with a melodramatic taste (as there must be, for how else could we have acquired it?), they must have shaken the cloudy rafters with applause. Only one touch was needed to perfect the scene, and that was for theFirstandSecondVillains to slink off, cursing and muttering, “Foiled again!”
But these villains were not professionals, and they had not been rehearsed. They were like childish actors in a juvenile production at five pins per admission. An unexpected line threw them into complete disorder.
Connery turned to Gilfoyle. “Did you ever lamp this old lady before?”
Gilfoyle answered, stoutly enough, “I never laid eyes on her.”
Connery was about to order Mrs. Thropp out of the room as an impostor, but she would not be denied her retort.
“O' course he never laid eyes on me. If he had have he'd never tried to pull the wool over that innocent baby's eyes; and if I'd ever laid eyes on him I'd have run him out of the country before I'd ever have let my child look at him a second time.”
Connery made one last struggle: “What proof have you got that you're her mother?”
“Ask my husband here.”
“What good is his word in such a matter?”
Connery did not mean this as in any sense a reflection on Mrs. Thropp's marital integrity, but she took it so. Now, in Nimrim the question of fidelity is not dealt with lightly, at least in repartee. Mrs. Thropp emitted a roar of scandalized virtue and would have attacked the young men with her fists if her husband, who should have attacked them in her stead, had not clung to her, murmuring:
“Now, momma, don't get excited. You young fellers better vamoose quick. I can't holt her very long.”
So they vamosed and were much obliged for the opportunity, leaving Kedzie to fling her arms about her mother with spontaneous filial affection, and to present Dyckman to her with genuine pride.
Dyckman had been almost as frightened as Kedzie, He had been more afraid of his own temper than of his assailants, but afraid enough of their shadowy powers. Mrs. Thropp would have had to be far less comely than she was to be unwelcome. She had the ultimate charm of perfect timeliness. He greeted her with that deference he paid to all women, and she adored him at once, independently of his fortune.
Adna said that he had always been an admirer of the old Dyckman and was glad to meet his boy, being as he was a railroad man himself, in a small way. He rather gave the impression that he was at least a third vice-president, but very modest about it.
Mrs. Thropp gleaned from the first words that Kedzie had gone contrary to her advice and had told Dyckman the truth. She took the credit calmly.
“I come on East to clear things up, and I advised my daughter to tell you just the way things were—as I always say to my children, use the truth and shame the devil.”
Kedzie was too busy to notice the outrage. She was thanking Heaven for her impulse to reveal the facts, realizing how appalling it would have been if Gilfoyle had been the first to inform Dyckman.
They were all having a joyous family party when it suddenly came over them that Gilfoyle had once more appeared and resubmerged. But Dyckman said: “I'll find him for you, and I'll buy him. He'll be cheap at any price.”
He bade good night early and went to his own home, carrying a backload of trouble. He was plainly in for it. Whatever happened, he was the scapegoat-elect.
The villain in melodrama is as likely as not to be as decent a fellow as any. When he slinks from the stage in his final hissed exit he goes to his dressing-room, scours off his grease-paint, and probably returns to his devoted family or seats himself before a bowl of milk-and-crackers in his club.
Gilfoyle was as decent a fellow as ever villain was. Circumstances and not himself cast him in an evil rôle, and as actors know, once so established, it is almost impossible to return to heroic parts. Gilfoyle could not even remove his grease-paint. He could not go back to his dressing-room, for his landlady had told him that the only key to her front door was cash. He had gone out to bring home a millionaire, and he had achieved nothing but a headache and a moral cataclysm.
He hardly knew how he escaped from the apartment-house. The dark cool of the street brought him into the night of things. It came upon him like a black fog what he had tried to do. The bitter disgrace of a man who has been whipped in a fight was his, but other disgraces were heaped upon it. For the first time he saw himself as Kedzie saw him.
He had neglected his wife till she grew famous in spite of him. He had gone back to her to share her bounty. When she repulsed him he had entered into a conspiracy to spy on her. He had waited impatiently for a rich man to compromise her, so that he could surprise them in guilt and extort money from them.
He had not warned the girl of her danger from the other man or from himself. He had not pleaded with her to be good, had not asked her to come back to honeymoon again in poverty with him; he had preferred to live on borrowed money and on unpaid board while he fooled with verses and refused the manual tasks that waited everywhere about the busy city. He might have cleaned the streets or earned a decent living handling garbage in the city scows. But he had preferred to speculate in blackmail and play the badger-game with his wife as an unwitting accomplice. He had hated millionaires, and counted them all criminals deserving spoliation, but he felt that he had sunk lower than the millionaires.
The remembrance of Kedzie haunted him. She had been supremely beautiful to-night, frightened into greater beauty than ever. She was afraid of him who should have been her refuge, and she hid for protection behind the man who should have seemed her enemy.
He recalled her as she was when he first loved her, the pretty little candy-store clerk, the lissome, living marble in her Greek tunic, the quaint, sweet girl who came to him in the Grand Central Terminal, lugging her suit-case, the shy thing at the License Bureau, the ineffably exquisite bride he had made his wife. He saw her at the gas-stove and loved her very petulance and the pretty way she banged the oven door and pouted at fate.
The lyrics he had written to her sang through his aching head. He was wrung to anguish between the lover and the poet he had meant to be, and the spurned and hated cur he had become. He stumbled along the street at Connery's side, whispering to himself, while his earliest verses to Kedzie ran in and out through his thoughts like a catchy tune:
Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Anita?Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.
He recalled the sonnets he had begun which were to make them both immortal. He regretted the spitefulness that had led him to write in another name than hers because she had refused to support him. He had been a viler beast than the cutpurse poet of old France, without the lilies of verse that bloom pure white above the dunghill of Villon's life.
Gilfoyle's soul went down into a hell of regret and wriggled in the flames of self-condemnation. He grew maudlin with repentance and clung to his friend Connery with odious garrulity. Connery was disgusted with him, but he was afraid to leave him because he kept sighing:
“I guess the river's the only place for me now.”
At length Connery steered him into a saloon for medicine and bought him a stiff bracer of whisky and vermouth. But it only threw Gilfoyle into deeper befuddlement. He was like Charles Lamb, in that a thimbleful of alcohol affected him as much as a tumbler another. He wanted to tell his troubles to the barkeeper, and Connery had to drag him away.
In the hope that a walk in the air might help to steady him, Connery set out toward his own boarding-house. They started across Columbus Avenue under the pillars of the Elevated tracks.
Habituated to the traffic customs, the New-Yorker crossing a street looks to the left for traffic till he gets half-way across, then looks to the right for traffic bound in the opposite direction. Connery led Gilfoyle to the middle of the avenue, paused for a south-bound street-car to go banging by them, darted back of it and looked to the right for a north-bound car or motor. But a taxicab trying to pass the south-bound car was shooting south along the north-bound tracks.
Connery saw it barely in time to jump back. He yanked Gilfoyle's arm, but Gilfoyle had plunged forward. He might have escaped if Connery had let him go. But the cab struck him, hurled him in air against an iron pillar, caught him on the rebound and ran him down. Kedzie Thropp was a widow.
Deaths from the wheeled torpedoes that shoot along the city streets are too monotonously numerous to make a stir in the newspapers unless the victims have some other claim on the public attention.
Gilfoyle had been writing advertisements of other people's wares, but nobody was going to pay for the advertisement of him. The things that he might have become were even more obscure than the things he was. The pity of his taking-off would have had no more record than a few lines of small type, but for one further accident.
The taxicab-driver whose reckless haste had sent him down the wrong side of the street had been spurred on by the reckless haste of his passenger. The pretty Mrs. Twyford had been for years encouraging the reporters to emphasize her social altitude, and had seen that they obtained her photographs at frequent intervals. But on this night she had gone up-town upon one of the few affairs for which she did not wish publicity. She had learned by telephone that her husband had returned to New York unexpectedly, and she was intensely impatient to be at home when he got there.
When her scudding taxicab solved all of Gilfoyle's earthly problems in one fierce erasure she made such efforts to escape from the instantly gathered crowd that she attracted the attention of the policeman who happened to be at the next corner. He proceeded to take the name and addresses of witnesses and principals, and he detained her as an important accessory.
Connery was one of the news-men who had been indebted to Mrs. Twyford for many a half-column of gossip, and he recognized her at once. He was a reporter, first, last, and all the time, and he was very much in need of something to sell.
He was greatly shattered by the annihilation of his friend, but his instinctive journalism led him to control himself long enough to call Mrs. Twyford by name and assure the policeman that she was a lady of high degree who should not be bothered.
Neither the policeman nor Mrs. Twyford thanked him. They were equally rude to him and to each other, Connery thought the incident might interest the night city editor of his paper, and so he telephoned a good story in to the office as soon as he had released himself from the inquisition and had seen an ambulance carry poor Gilfoyle away.
Mrs. Twyford reached home too late, and in such a state of nerves that she made the most unconvincing replies to the cross-examination that ensued. When she saw her name in the paper the next morning her friends also began to make inquiries—and eventually to deny that they were her friends or had ever been.
It was her name in the heavy type that caught the heavy eyes of Jim Dyckman at breakfast the next morning. It was thus that he came upon the fate of Thomas Gilfoyle, whose death had been the cause of all this pother.
Before he could telephone Anita—or Kedzie, as he mentally corrected himself—he was informed that a Mr. Connery was at the door, asking for him. He nodded and went into the library, carrying the newspaper with him.
Connery grinned sadly and mumbled: “I see you've seen it. I thought you'd like to know about it.”
“I should,” said Dyckman. “Sit down.”
Connery sat down and told of the accident and what led up to it. He spoke in a lowered voice and kept his eye on the door. When he had finished his story he said, “Now, of course this all comes out very convenient for you, but I suppose you see how easy it would be for me to tell what I know, and that mightn't be so convenient for you.”
“Are you beginning your blackmail again so early in the morning?”
“Cut out that kind of talk or there's nothing doing,” said Connery. “I can make a lot of trouble for you, and I can hush up a lot. Unless I speak I don't suppose anybody else is going to peep about Miss Adair being Mrs. Gilfoyle, and about Mr. Dyckman being interested in his wife. If I do speak it would take a lot of explaining.”
“I am not afraid of explaining to the whole world that Miss Adair is a friend of mine and that her father and mother were present when I called.”
Connery met this with a smile. “But how often were they present when you called?”
Dyckman grew belligerent again: “Do you want me to finish what I began on you last night?”
“I'm in no hurry, thank you. You can outclass me in the ring, but it wouldn't help you much to beat me up, would it?—or Miss Adair, either. She's got some rights, hasn't she?”
“Has she any that you are capable of respecting?”
“Sure she has. I don't want to cause the little lady any inconvenience. She and Tommie Gilfoyle didn't belong together, anyway. She was through with him long ago, and the only thing that saved his face was the fact that he's dead—poor fellow!
“But you see I've got to appear as a witness in the trial of the taxicab-driver, who'll be held for manslaughter or something. If I say that Gilfoyle and I had just come from a battle with you and that he got the wits knocked out of him because he accused you of making a mistress out of his wife—”
“Be careful!”
“The same to you, Mr. Dyckman.”
Dyckman felt himself nettled. Kedzie's silence about the existence of a husband had enmeshed him. He would not attempt to justify himself. It would do no good to thresh about. The big gladiator sat still waiting for theretiariusto finish him. But Connery's voice grew merciful. It was a luxury beyond price to extend an alms to this plutocrat.
“What I'm getting at, Mr. Dyckman,” he resumed, “is this: Tommie owed some money to his landlady. He owed me some money that I could use. He's got a mother and father up-State. He told me he'd never told them about his marriage. They'll want him back, I suppose. From what he's told me, it would be a real hardship for them to pay the funeral expenses. You could pay all that, and you could even say that he had a little money in the bank and send that along with him, and never know the difference. But they would.”
“I see,” said Dyckman, very solemnly.
“You called me some rough names, Mr. Dyckman, and I guess I earned 'em. Looking things over the morning after, I'm not so stuck on myself as I was, but you stack up pretty well. I like a man who can use his hands in an argument. My name is Connery, you know. What you did to me was a plenty, but it looks better to me now than it felt last night.
“You know a reporter just gets naturally hungry to see a man face a scandal in a manly way. If you had shown a yellow streak and tried to buy your way out I would have taken your money and thought I was doing a public service in getting it away from a quitter. But when you cracked my bean against poor Gilfoyle's you made me see a lot of things besides stars.
“There's nothing to be gained by keeping up this war. I want to put it all out of sight for your sake and for Gilfoyle's mother's sake, and for the sake of that pretty little Adair lady. I don't know what she's been or done, but she's pretty and she's got a nice, spunky mother.
“I'm a good newspaper man, Mr. Dyckman, and that means I've kept quiet about even better stories than I've sprung. If I had a lot of money now I'd add this story to the list and treat Gilfoyle's folks right without giving you a look-in. But being dead-broke, I thought maybe you'd like to see things done in a decent manner. It's going to be hard enough for that old couple up-State to get Tommie back, as they've got to, without taking any excess heartbreak up in the baggage-car. Do you follow me?”
“I do,” said Dyckman; and now he asked the “How much?” that he had refused to speak the night before.
Connery did a little figuring with a pencil, and Dyckman thought that some life-insurance in the mother's name would be a pleasant thing to add. Then he doubled the total, wrote a check for it, and said:
“There'll probably be something left over. I wish you'd keep it as your—attorney-fee, Mr. Connery.”
They shook hands as they parted.
Dyckman telephoned to Kedzie and asked if he could see her. She said that he could, and dressed furiously while he made the distance to her apartment.
She gleaned from his look and from the way he took her two hands in his that he had serious news to bring her. She had not been awake long enough to read the papers, and this was her first death. She cried helplessly when she learned that her husband was gone away with all her bitterness for his farewell. She remembered the best of him, and he came back to her for a while as the poet who had made her his muse—the only one she could telegraph to when she returned to New York alone, her first and only husband.
She was afraid that she belittled herself in Dyckman's eyes when she let slip the remorseful Wail, “I wish I had been kinder to the poor boy!”
But she did not belittle herself in any such tendernesses of regret. She endeared herself by her grief, her self-reproach, her childish humility before the power of death. Her tears were beautiful in Jim's sight. But it is the blessing and the shame of tears that they cure the grief that causes them. At first they bleed and burn; then they flow soft and cool. They cleanse and brighten the eyes and even wash away the cinders from the funeral smoke.
Dyckman's heart was drawn out of him toward Kedzie and his arms held her shaken body devotedly. But at length she ceased to weep, and a last long sob became dangerously like a sigh of relief. She smiled through the rain and apologized for weeping, when she should have apologized for stopping weeping. Then Dyckman's love of her seemed to withdraw backward into his heart. And his arms suddenly wearied of clasping her.
When she had seemed hardly to know that he was there he felt necessary and justified. When she took comfort in his arms and held them about her he felt ashamed, revolted, profane.
Mrs. Thropp had wept a little in sympathy with Kedzie, and Adna had looked amiably disconsolate; but by and by Mrs. Thropp was murmuring:
“After all, perhaps it was for the best. The Lord's will be done!”
Dyckman shrank as if a blasphemy had been shouted. In a hideously short time Mrs. Thropp was saying, briskly:
“Of course, honey, you've got no idea of puttin' on black for him.”
“If I believed in mourning, I would,” Kedzie answered without delay, “but the true mourning is in the heart.”
Dyckman felt an almost uncontrollable desire to get away before he said something that might be true. He began to wonder what, after all, poor Gilfoyle had experienced from this hard-hearted little beauty. He saw that he was almost forgotten already. He thought, “How fast they go, the dead!” That same Villon had said it centuries before: “Les morts vont vites.”
The Thropps settled down to a comfortable discussion of future plans. One ledger had been finished. They would open a new one. Jim saw that Gilfoyle's departure had been accepted as a Heaven-sent solution of Kedzie's problems.
Abruptly it came to Dyckman that the solution of their problem was the beginning of a whole volume of new problems for him. He recalled that while he had become Kedzie's fiancé in ignorance of his predecessor, he had rashly promised to buy off Gilfoyle as soon as he learned of him. But death had come in like a perfect waiter and subtly removed from the banquet-table the thing that offended. Nothing had happened, however, to release Dyckman from his engagement. Gilfoyle's death ought not to have made a more important difference than his life would have made, and yet it made all the difference in the world to Dyckman's feelings.
He could not say this, however. He could not ask to be excused from his compact. His heart and his brain cried out that they did not want this merry little widow for their wife, but his lips could not frame the words. During the long silences and the evasive chatter that alternated he felt one idea in the air: “Why doesn't Mr. Dyckman offer to go on with the marriage?” Yet he could not make the offer. Nor could he make the counterclaim for a dissolving of the betrothal.
He studied the Thropp trio and pictured the ridicule and the hostility they would arouse among his family and friends—not because they were poor and simple and lowly, but because they were not honest and sweet and meek. The Dyckmans had poor relations and friends in poverty and old peasant-folk whom they loved and admired and were proud to know. But Dyckman felt that the elder Thropps deserved to be rebuffed with snobbery because of their own snobbery. Nevertheless, he was absolutely incapable of administering discipline.
At last Mrs. Thropp grew restive, fearsome that the marriage might not take place, and desperately fearful that she might be cheated out of her visit in the spare room, at the home of the great Mrs. Dyckman. She said, grimly:
“Well, we might as well understand one another, Mr. Dyckman. You asked my daughter to marry you, didn't you?”
“Yes, Mrs. Thropp.”
“Do you see anything in what's happened to prevent your getting married?”
“No, Mrs. Thropp.”
“Then I don't see much use wastin' time, do you? Life's too uncertain to go postponin' happiness when it's right within your reach. Kedzie's father and I ought to be gettin' back home, and I'd feel a heap more comfortable if I could know my poor little chick was safe in the care of a good man.”
The possibility of getting Mr. and Mrs. Thropp out of town soon was the one bright thought in Dyckman's mind. He felt compelled to say:
“Then let us have the ceremony, by all means. We shall have to wait awhile, I suppose, for decency's sake.”
“Decency!” said Mrs. Thropp, managerially. “My Kedzie hadn't lived with the man for a long while. Nobody but us knows that she ever did live with him. He'd abandoned her, and when he came back it was only to try to get money out of her. I can't see that she has any call to worry about decency's sake. He's done her harm enough. She can't do him any good by keepin' you waitin'.”
“Just as you think best, Mrs. Thropp,” said Dyckman. He began to smile in spite of himself. He was thinking how many mothers and daughters had tried to get him to the altar, not because they loved him, but because they loved his father's money and fame. Jim had dodged them all and made a kind of sport of it. And now he was cornered and captured by this old barbarian with her movie-beauty daughter who was a widow and wouldn't wear weeds.
Mrs. Thropp saw Dyckman's smile, but did not dare to ask its origin. She asked, instead:
“Would you be having a church wedding, do you think?”
“Indeed not,” said Dyckman, with such incision that Mrs. Thropp felt it best not to risk a debate.
“Just a quiet wedding, then?”
“As quiet as possible, if you don't mind.”
Kedzie sat speechless through all this. She wished that Jim would show more ardor for her, but she felt that he was doing fairly well not to knock her parents' heads together the way he had her husband's and his friend's. She was as eager as Jim to get rid of the elder Thropps, but she wanted to make sure of the wedding, and her mother was evidently to be trusted to bring it about. At length Jim spoke in the tone of the condemned man who says, “Well, let's hurry up and get the execution off our minds”.
“I'll go and see a lawyer and make inquiries about how the marriage can be done.”
He started to say to Kedzie, “You ought to know.”
She started to tell him about the Marriage License Bureau in the Municipal Building. Both recaptured silence tactfully.
He kissed Kedzie, and he had a narrow escape from being kissed by Mrs. Thropp.
In the history of nations sometimes a paragraph serves for a certain decade, while a volume is not enough for a certain day. It is so with the history of persons.
In the thirty-six hours after he received Charity Coe's invitation to call Jim Dyckman passed from being Charity's champion against her own husband to being Kedzie's champion against hers. Charity rewarded his chivalrous pommeling of Cheever by asking him never to come near her again. Kedzie rewarded his punishment of Gilfoyle by arranging that he should never leave her again.
It was Charity that he longed for, and Kedzie that he engaged to marry.
In that period Peter Cheever had traveled a very short distance in a journey he had postponed too long. Cheever had been hardly conscious when they smuggled him at midnight from his club to his own home. He had slept ill and achily. He was ashamed to face the servants, and he wanted to murder his valet for being aware of the master's defeat.
He did not know how ashamed the household retainers were of him and of themselves. The valet and butler had earned good sums on occasions by taking tips from Cheever on prize-fighters and jockeys. But they felt betrayed now, and as disconsolate as the bottle-holders and towel-flappers of a defeated pugilist.
They did not know who had whipped their master till the word came from the Dyckman household that their master had come home glorious from whipping the stuffing out of somebody. It was easy to put one and one together and make two.
One of Cheever's worst embarrassments was the matter of Zada. His battered head suffered tortures before it contrived a proper lie for her. Then he called Zada up from his house and explained that as he was leaving his club to fly to her, his car had skidded into another, with the result that he had been knocked senseless and cut up with flying glass; otherwise he was in perfect shape. Unfortunately, he had been recognized and taken to his official home instead of to the residence of his heart.
Zada was all for dashing to him at once; but he persuaded her that that would be quite impossible. He was in no real danger in his own house, and he would come back to his heart's one real first, last, only, and onliest darling love just as soon as he could.
She subsided in wails of terror and loneliness. They touched his heart so that he determined to end his effort at amphibian existence, give up his legal establishment and legalize the illegal.
He wrote a note to Charity with much difficulty, since his knuckles were sore and his pride was black and blue. His spoken language was of the same tints. His written language was polite and formal.
It was a silly, tragic situation that led a husband to write his wife a letter requesting an interview. Charity sent back a scrawl—“Yes, in fifteen minutes.”
Cheever spent a bad quarter of an hour dressing himself. His face was too raw to endure a razor, and the surgeon had put little cross-patches of adhesive tape on one of his cheek-bones and at the edge of his mouth, where his lip had split as the tooth behind it went overboard.
He yowled as he slipped his arms into a long bathrobe, and he struck at the valet when the wretch suggested a little powder for one eye.
Charity had seen Cheever brought in at midnight and had looked to it that he had every care. But now she came into his room with a maidenly timidity. He did not know that she had rebuked Jim Dyckman with uncharacteristic wrath for the attack. She did not tell Cheever this, even though his first words to her demanded some such defense.
In the quarrels of lovers, or of those who have exchanged loves, it makes little difference what the accusation is all about: the thing that hurts is the fact of accusation.
Charity was so shamed at being stormed at by her husband that it was a mere detail that he stormed at her with a charge that she had goaded Jim Dyckman on to attack him.
Cheever had a favor to ask; so he put the charge more mildly now than he had in his first bewildered rage. He accepted Charity's silence as pleading guilty. So he went on:
“The fact that you chose Dyckman for your authorized thug and bravo proves what I have thought for some time, that you love him and he loves you. Now I have no desire to come between two such turtle-doves, especially when one of them is one of those German flying-machineTaubesand goes around dropping dynamite-bombs on me through club roofs.
“I'm not afraid of your little friend, and as soon as I get well I'll get him; but I want it to be purely an exercise in the fistic art, and not a public fluttering of family linen. So since you want Jim Dyckman, take him, by all means, and let me bow myself out of the trio.
“I'll give you a nice, quiet little divorce, and do the fair thing in the alimony line, and then after a proper interval you and little Jimmie can toddle over to the parson and then toddle off to hell-and-gone, for all I care. How does that strike you, my dear?”
Charity pondered, and then she said, “And where do you toddle off to?”
“Does that interest you?”
“Anything that concerns your welfare interests me.”
“I see. Well, don't worry about me.”
“There's no hurry, of course?”
“Not on my part,” said Cheever. “But Dyckman must be growing impatient, since he tries to murder me to save the lawyer's fees.”
“Well, if you're in no hurry, Peter, I'm not. I'll think it over for a few months. It's bad weather for divorces now, anyway.”
Cheever's heart churned in his breast. He knew that Zada could not afford to wait. He should have married her long ago, and there was no time to spare now. Charity's indifference frightened him. He did not dream that through the dictagraph Charity had shared with him Zada's annunciation of her approaching motherhood.
He turned and twisted in flesh and spirit, trying to persuade Charity to proceed immediately for a divorce, but in vain.
Finally she ceased to laugh at him and demanded, sternly, “Why don't you tell me the truth for once?”
He stared at her, and after a crisis of hesitation broke and informed her of what she already knew. Now that he was at her feet, Charity felt only pity for him, and even for Zada. She was sorrier for them than for herself.
So she said: “All right, old man; let's divorce us. Will you or shall I?”
“You'd better, of course; but you must not mention poor Zada.”
“Oh, of course not!”
A brief and friendly discussion of ways and means followed, and then Charity turned to go, saying:
“Well, I'll let you know when you're free. Are there any other little chores I can do for you?”
“No, thanks. You're one damned good sport, and I'm infernally sorry I—”
“Let's not begin on sorries. Good night!”
And such was unmarriageà la mode.