The scene was like one of the overcrowded tapestries of the Middle Ages. At the top was the Noxon palace, majestic, serene, self-confident in the correctness of its architecture and not afraid even of the ocean outspread below.
The house looked something like Mrs. Noxon at her best. Just now she was at her worst. She stood by her marble pool and glared at her mob of guests dispersing in knots of laughter and indifference. There were hundreds of men and women of all ages and sizes, and almost all of them were startling the summer of 1915 with the fashion-plates of 1916.
Mrs. Noxon turned from them to the dispersing nymphs of Miss Silsby's troupe. The nymphs were dressed in the fashion of 916 B.C. They also were laughing and snickering, as they sauntered toward the clump of trees and shrubs which masked their dressing-tent. One of them was not laughing—Kedzie. She was slinking along in wet clothes and doused pride. The beautiful wrap that Mrs. Charity Cheever had flung about her she had let fall and drag in a damp mess.
Mrs. Noxon was tempted to hobble after Kedzie and smack her for her outrageous mishap. But she could not afford the luxury. She must laugh with her guests. She marched after them to take her medicine of raillery more or less concealed as they went to look at the other sideshows and permit themselves to be robbed handsomely for charity.
Kedzie was afraid to meet Miss Silsby, but there was no escape. The moment the shrubs closed behind her she fell into the ambush. Miss Silsby was shrill with rage and scarlet in the face. She swore, and she looked as if she would scratch.
“You miserable little fool!” she began. “You ought to be whipped within an inch of your life. You have ruined me! It was the biggest chance of my career. I should have been a made woman if it hadn't been for you. Now I shall be the joke of the world!”
“Please, Miss Silsby,” Kedzie protested, “if you please, Miss Silsby—I didn't mean to fall into the water. I'm as sorry as I can be.”
“What good does it do me for you to be sorry? I'm the one to be sorry. I should think you would have had more sense than to do such a thing!”
“How could I help it, dog on it!” Kedzie retorted, her anger recrudescent.
“Help it? Are you a dancer or are you a cow?”
Kedzie quivered as if she had been lashed. She struck back with her best Nimrim repartee, “You're a nice one to call me a cow, you big, fat, old lummox!”
Miss Silsby fairly mooed at this.
“You—you insolent little rat, you! You—oh, you—you! I'll never let you dance for me again—never!”
“I'd better resign, then, I suppose,” said Kedzie.
“Resign? How dare you resign! You're fired! That's how you'll resign. You're fired! The impudence of her! She turns my life-work into a laughing-stock and then says she'd better resign!”
“How about to-night?” Kedzie put in, dazed.
“Never you mind about to-night. I'll get along without you if I have to dance myself.”
The other nymphs shook under this, like corn-stalks in a wind.
But Kedzie was a statuette of pathos. She stood cowering barelegged before Miss Silsby, fully clothed in everything but her right mind. There was nothing Grecian about Miss Silsby except the Medusa glare, and that turned Kedzie into stone. She finished her tirade by thrusting some money into Kedzie's hand and clamoring:
“Get into your clothes and get out of my sight.”
Rage made Miss Silsby generous. She paid Kedzie an extra week and her fare to New York. Kedzie had no pocket to put her money in. She carried it in her hand and laid it on the table in the tent as she bent to whip her lithe form out of her one dripping garment.
The other nymphs followed her into the tent and made a Parthenonian frieze as they writhed out of their tunics and into their petticoats. They gathered about Kedzie in an ivory cluster and murmured their sympathy—Miss Silsby not being within ear-shot.
Kedzie blubbered bitterly as she glided into her everyday things, hooking her corsets askew, drawing her stockings up loosely, and lacing her boots all wrong. She was still jolted with sobs as she pushed the hat-pins home in her traveling-hat.
She kissed the other girls good-by. They were sorry to see her go, now that she was going. And she was very sorry to go, now that she had to.
If she had lingered awhile Miss Silsby would have found her there when she relented from sheer exhaustion of wrath, and would have restored her to favor. But Kedzie had stolen away in craven meekness.
To reach the trade-entrance Kedzie had to skirt the accursed pool of her destruction. Charity Coe was near it, seated on a marble bench alone. She was pensive with curious thoughts. She heard Kedzie's childish snivel as she passed. Charity looked up, recognized the girl with difficulty, and after a moment's hesitation called to her:
“What's the matter, you poor child? Come here! What's wrong?”
Kedzie suffered herself to be checked. She dropped on the bench alongside Charity and wailed:
“I fell into that damn' pool, and I've lost my jah-ob!”
Charity patted the shaken back a moment, and said, “But there are other jobs, aren't there?”
“I don't know of any.”
“Well, I'll find you one, my dear, if you'll only smile. You have such a pretty smile.”
“How do you know?” Kedzie queried, giving her a sample of her best.
Charity laughed. “See! That proves it. You are a darling, and too pretty to lack for a job. Give me your address, and I'll get you a better place than you lost. I promise you.”
Kedzie ransacked her hand-bag and found a printed card, crumpled and rouge-stained. She poked it at Charity, who read and commented:
“Miss Anita Adair, eh? Such a pretty name! And the address, my dear—if you don't mind. I am Mrs. Cheever.”
“Oh, are you!” Kedzie exclaimed. “I've heard of you. Pleased to meet you.”
Then Kedzie whimpered, and Charity wrote the address and repeated her assurances. She also gave Kedzie her own card and asked her to write to her. That seemed to end the interview, and so Kedzie rose and said: “Much obliged. I guess I gotta go now. G'-by!”
“Good-by,” said Charity. “I'll not forget you.”
Kedzie moved on humbly. She looked back. Charity had fallen again into a listless reverie. She seemed sad. Kedzie wondered what on earth she could have to be sorry about. She had money and a husband, and she was swagger.
Kedzie slipped through the gate out to the road. She did not dare hire a carriage, now that she was jobless. She wished she had not left paradise. But she dared not try to return. She was not “classy” enough. Suddenly a spasm of resentment shook the girl.
She felt the hatred of the rich that always set Tommie Gilfoyle afire. What right had such people to such majesty when Kedzie must walk? What right had they to homes and yards so big that it tired Kedzie out just to trudge past? Who was this Mrs. Cheever, that she should be so top-lofty and bend-downy? Kedzie ground her teeth in anger and tore Charity's card to bits. She flung them at the sea, but the wind brought them back about her face stingingly. She walked on, loathing the very motors that flashed by, flocks of geese squawking contempt.
She walked and walked and walked. The overpowering might of the big houses in their green demesnes made her feel smaller and wearier, but big with bitterness. She would have been glad to have a suit-case full of bombs to blow those snobbish residences into flinders.
She was dog tired when, after losing her way again and again, she reached the boarding-house where the dancers lodged. She packed her things and went to the train, lugging her own baggage. When she reached the station she was footsore, heartsore, soulsore. Her only comfort was that the Silsby dancers had been placed early enough on Mrs. Noxon's program for her to have failed in time to get home the same day. She hated Newport now. It had not been good to her. New York was home once more.
“When's the next train to New York?” she asked a porter.
“It's wint,” said the porter. “Wint at four-five.”
“I said when's the next train,” Kedzie snapped.
“T'-marra' marnin',” said the porter.
“My Gawd!” said Kedzie. “Have I gotta spend the night in this hole?”
The porter stared. He was not used to hearing Mecca called a hole.
“Well, if it's that bad,” he grinned, “you might take the five-five to Providence and pick up the six-forty there. But you'll have to git a move on.”
Kedzie got a move on. The train swept her out along the edge of Rhode Island. She knew nothing of its heroic history. She cared nothing for its heroic splendor. She thought of it only as the stronghold of an embattled aristocracy. She did not blame Miss Silsby for her disgrace, nor herself. She blamed the audience, as other actors and authors and politicians do. She blazed with the merciless hatred of the rich that poor people feel when they are thwarted in their efforts to rival or cultivate or sell to the rich. Their own sins they forget as absolved, because the sins have failed. It is the success of sin and the sin of success that cannot be forgiven.
The little dancer whose foot had slipped on the wet marble of wealth was shaken almost to pieces by philosophic vibrations too big for her exquisite frame. They reminded her of her poet, of Tommie Gilfoyle, who was afraid of her and paid court to her. He appeared to her now as a radiant angel of redemption. From Providence she telegraphed him that she would arrive at New York at eleven-fifteen, and he would meet her if he loved her.
This done, she went to the lunch-counter, climbed on a tall stool, and bought herself a cheap dinner. She was paying for it out of her final moneys, and her brain once more told her stomach that it would have to be prudent. She swung aboard the train when it came in, and felt as secure as a lamb with a good shepherd on the horizon. When she grew drowsy she curled up on the seat and slept to perfection.
Her invasion of Newport was over and done—disastrously done, she thought; but its results were just beginning for Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe.
Eventually Kedzie reached the Grand Central Terminal—a much different Kedzie from the one that once followed her father and mother up that platform to that concourse! Her very name was different, and her mind had learned multitudes of things good and bad. She had a young man waiting for her—a poet, a socialist, a worshiper. Her heavy suit-case could not detain her steps. She dragged it as a little sloop drags its anchor in a gale.
Gilfoyle was waiting for her at the barrier. He bent to snatch the suit-case from her and snatched a kiss at the same time. His bravery thrilled her; his gallantry comforted her immeasurably. She was so proud of herself and of him that she wasted never a glance at the powdered gold on the blue ceiling.
“I'm terrible glad to see you, Tommie,” she said.
“Are you? Honest?” he chortled.
They jostled into each other and the crowd.
“I'm awful hungry, though,” she said, “and I've got oodles of things to tell you.”
“Let's eat,” he said. They went to the all-night dairy restaurant in the Terminal. He led her to one of the broad-armed chairs and fetched her dainties—a triangle of apple pie, a circle of cruller, and a cylinder of milk.
She leaned across the arm of the chair and told him of her mishaps. He was so enraged that he knocked a plate to the floor. She snatched the cruller off just in time to save it, and the room echoed her laughter.
They talked and talked until she was talked out, and it was midnight. He began to worry about the hour. It was a long ride on the Subway and then a long walk to her boarding-house and then a long walk and a long ride to his.
“I hate to go back to that awful Jambers woman and let her know I'm fired,” Kedzie moaned. “My trunk's in storage, anyhow, and maybe she's got no room.”
“Why go back?” said Tommie, not realizing the import of his words. It was merely his philosophical habit to ask every custom “Why?”
“Where else is there to go to?” she sighed.
“If we were only married—” he sighed.
“Why, Tommie!”
“As we ought to be!”
“Why, Tommie Gilfoyle!”
And now he was committed. As when he wrote poetry the grappling-hooks of rhyme dragged him into statements he had not dreamed of at the start and was afraid of at the finish—so now he stumbled into a proposal he could not clamber out of. He must flounder through.
The idea was so deliriously unexpected, so fascinatingly novel to Kedzie, that she fell in love with it. Immediately she would rather have died than remain unmarried to Tommie Gilfoyle.
But there were difficulties.
In the good old idyllic days it had been possible for romantic youth to get married as easily as to get dinner—and as hard to get unmarried as to get wings. Couples who spooned too long at seaside resorts and missed the last train home could wake up a preacher and be united in indissoluble bonds of holy matrimony for two dollars. The preachers of that day slept light, in order to save the reputations of foolish virgins.
But now a greedy and impertinent civil government had stepped in and sacrilegiously insisted on having a license bought and paid for before the Church could officiate. And the license bureau was not open all night, as it should have been.
Kedzie knew nothing of this, but Gilfoyle was informed. Theoretically he believed that marriage should be rendered impossible and divorce easy. But he could no more have proposed an informal alliance with his precious Kedzie than he could have wished that his mother had made one with his father. His mother and father had eloped and been married by a sleepy preacher, but that was poetic and picturesque, seeing that they did not fail to wake the preacher. Gilfoyle's reverence for Kedzie demanded at least as much sanctity about his union with her.
It is curious how habits complicate life. Here were two people whom it would greatly inconvenience to separate. Yet just because it was a custom to close the license bureau in the late afternoon they must wait half a night while the license clerk slept and snored, or played cards or read detective stories or did whatever license clerks do between midnight and office hours. And just because people habitually crawl into bed and sleep between midnight and forenoon, these two lovers were already finding it hard to keep awake in spite of all their exaltation. They simply must sleep. Romance could wait.
Gilfoyle knew that there were places enough where Kedzie and he could go and have no questions asked except, “Have you got baggage, or will you pay in advance?” But he would not take his Kedzie to any such place, any more than he would leave a chalice in a saloon for safe-keeping.
In their drowsy brains projects danced sparklingly, but they could find nothing to do except to part for the eternity of the remnant of the night. So Gilfoyle escorted Kedzie to the Hotel Belmont door, and told her to say she was an actress arrived on a late train. He stood off at a distance while he saw that she registered and was respectfully treated and led to the elevator by a page.
Then he moved west to the Hotel Manhattan and found shelter. And thus they slept with propriety, Forty-second Street lying between them like a sword.
The alarm-clock in Gilfoyle's head woke him at seven. He hated to interrupt Kedzie's sleep, but he was afraid of his boss and he needed his salary more than ever—twice as much as ever. He telephoned from his room to Kedzie's room down the street and up ten stories and was comforted to find that he woke her out of a sleep so sound that he could hardly understand her words. But he eventually made sure that she would make haste to dress and meet him in the restaurant.
They breakfasted together at half past eight. Kedzie was aglow with the whole procedure.
“You ought to write a novel about us,” she told Gilfoyle. “It would be a lot better than most of the awful stories folks write nowadays. And you'd make a million dollars, I bet. We need a lot of money now, too, don't we?”
“A whole lot,” said Gilfoyle, who was beginning to fret over the probable cost of the breakfast.
It cost more than he expected—as he expected. But he was in for it, and he trusted that the Lord would provide. They bought a ring at a petty jewelry-shop in Forty-second Street and then descended to a Subway express and emerged at the Brooklyn Bridge Station.
The little old City Hall sat among the overtowering buildings like an exquisite kitten surrounded by mastiffs, but Gilfoyle's business took him and his conquest into the enormous Municipal Building, whose windy arcades blew Kedzie against him with a pleasant clash.
The winds of life indeed had blown them together as casually as two leaves met in the same gutter. But they thought it a divine encounter arranged from eons back and to continue for eons forward. They thought it so at that time.
They went up in the elevator to the second floor, where, in the fatal Room 258, clerks at several windows vended for a dollar apiece the State's permission to experiment with matrimony.
There was a throng ahead of them—brides, grooms, parents, and witnesses of various nationalities. All of them looked shabby and common, even to Kedzie in her humility. All over the world couples were mating, as the birds and animals and flowers and chemicals mate in their seasons. The human pairs advertised their union by numberless rites of numberless religions and non-religions. The presence or absence of rite or its nature seemed to make little difference in the prosperity of the emulsion. The presence or absence of romance seemed to make little difference, either. But it seemed to be generally agreed upon as a policy around the world that marriage should be made exceedingly easy, and unmarriage exceedingly difficult. In recruiting armies the same plan is observed; every encouragement is offered to enlist; one has only to step in off the street and enlist. But getting free! That is not the object of the recruiting business.
Gilfoyle and Kedzie had to wait their turns before they could reach a window. Then they had a cross-examination to face.
Kedzie giggled a good deal, and she leaned softly against the hard shoulder of Gilfoyle while the clerk quizzed him as to his full name, color, residence, age, occupation, birthplace, the name of his father and mother and the country of their birth, and the number of his previous marriages.
She grew abruptly solemn when the clerk looked at her for answers to the same questions on her part; for she realized that she was expected to tell her real name and her parents' real names. She would have to confess to Tommie that she had deceived him and cheated him out of a beautiful poem. Had he known the truth he would never have written:
Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Kedzie?Your last name is Thropp, but your first name is—
Nothing rhymed withKedzie.
While she gaped, wordless, Gilfoyle magnificently spoke for her, proudly informed the clerk that her name was “Anita Adair,” that she was white (he nearly said “pink”), that her age was—he had to ask that, and she told him nineteen. He gave her residence as New York and her occupation as “none.”
“What is your father's first name, honey?” he said, a little startled to realize how little he knew of her or her past. She had learned much news of him, too, in hearing his own answers.
“Adna,” she whispered, and he told the clerk that her father's name was Adna Adair. She told the truth about her mother's maiden name. She could afford to do that, and she could honestly aver that she had never had any husband or husbands “up to yet,” and that she had not been divorced “so far.” Also both declared that they knew of no legal impediment to their marriage. There are so few legal impediments to marriage, and so many to the untying of the knot into which almost anybody can tie almost anybody!
The clerk's facile pen ran here and there, and the license was delivered at length on the payment of a dollar. For one almighty dollar the State gave the two souls permission to commit mutual mortgage for life.
Gilfoyle was growing nervous. He told Kedzie that he was expected at the office. There were several advertisements to write for the next day's papers, and he had given the firm no warning of what he had not foreseen the day before. If they hunted for a preacher, Gilfoyle would get into trouble with Mr. Kiam.
If they had listened to the excellent motto, “Business before pleasure,” they might never have been married. That would have saved them a vast amount of heartache, both blissful and hateful. But they were afraid to postpone their nuptials. The mating instinct had them in its grip.
They fretted awhile in the hurlyburly of other love-mad couples and wondered what to do. Gilfoyle finally pushed up to one of the windows again and asked:
“What's the quickest way to get married? Isn't there a preacher or alderman or something handy?”
“Aldermen are not allowed to marry folks any more,” he was told. “But the City Clerk will hitch you up for a couple of dollars. The marriage-room is right up-stairs.”
This seemed the antipodes of romance and Gilfoyle hesitated to decide.
But Kedzie, knowing his religious ardor against religions, said:
“What's the diff? I don't mind.”
Gilfoyle smiled at last, and the impatient lovers hurried out into the corridor. They would not wait for the elevator, but ran up the steps. They passed a trio of youth, a girl and two young fellows. One of the lads gave the other a shove that identified the bridegroom. The girl was holding her left hand up and staring at her new ring. A pessimist might have seen a portent in the cynical amusement of her smile, and another in the aweless speed with which Gilfoyle and Kedzie hustled toward the awful mystery of such a union as marriage attempts.
The wedlock-factory was busy. In spite of the earliness of the hour the waiting-room was crowded, its benches full. The only place for Kedzie to sit was next to a couple of negroes, the man in Ethiopian foppery grinning up into the face of a woman who held his hat and cane, and simpered in ebony.
Kedzie whispered to Gilfoyle her displeased surprise:
“Why, they act just like we do.”
Kedzie liked to uselikelike that. She felt belittled at sharing with such people an emotion that seemed to her far too good for them. Also she felt that the emotion itself was cheapened by such company. She wished she had not consented to the marriage. But it would excite attention to back out now, and the dollar already invested would be wasted. For all she knew, the purchase of the license compelled the completion of the project.
A group of Italians came from Room 365—two girls in white, a bareheaded mother who had been weeping, a fat and relieved-looking father, an insignificant youth who was unquestionably the new-born husband.
Gilfoyle kept looking at his watch, but he had to wait his turn. There was a book to be signed and a two-dollar bill to be paid. At last, when the negro pair came forth chuckling, Kedzie and Gilfoyle rushed into the so-called “chapel” to meet their fate.
The chapel was a barrenly furnished office. Its nearest approach to an altar was a washstand with hot and cold running water. At the small desk the couple stood while the City Clerk read the pledge drawn up in the Corporation Counsel's office with a sad mixture of religious, legal, and commercial cant:
“In the name of God, Amen.
“Do either of you know of any impediment why you should not be legally joined together in matrimony, or if any one present can show any just cause why these parties should not be legally joined together in matrimony let them now speak or hereafter hold their peace.
“Do you, Thomas Gilfoyle, take this woman as your lawfully wedded wife, to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love, honor, and keep her, as a faithful man is bound to do, in health, sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all others keep you alone unto her as long as you both shall live?
“Do you, Anita Adair, take this man for your lawfully wedded husband to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love, honor, and cherish him as a faithful woman is bound to do, in health, sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all others keep you alone unto him as along as you both shall live?
“For as both have consented in wedlock and have acknowledged same before this company I do by virtue of the authority vested in me by the laws of the State of New York now pronounce you husband and wife.
“And may God bless your union.”
The City Clerk had to furnish witnesses from his own staff while he administered the secular rites and exacted the solemn promises which so few have kept, and invoked the help of God which is so rarely manifest or so subtly hidden, in the human-animal-angel relation of marriage.
And now Anita Adair and Thomas Gilfoyle were officially welded into one. They had received the full franchise each of the other's body, soul, brain, time, temper, liberty, leisure, admiration, education, past, future, health, wealth, strength, weakness, virtue, vice, destructive power, procreative power, parental gift or lack, domestic or bedouin genius, prejudice, inheritance—all.
It was a large purchase for three dollars, and it remained to be seen whether either or both delivered the goods. At the altar of Hymen, Kedzie had publicly vowed to love, honor, and cherish under all circumstances. It was like swearing to walk in air or water as well as on earth. The futile old oath to “obey” had been omitted as a perjury enforced.
Kedzie Thropp, who had dome to New York only a few months before, had done one more impulsive thing. First she had run away from her parents. Now she had run away from herself. She had loved New York first. Now she was infatuated with Tommie Gilfoyle. He was as complex and mysterious a city as Manhattan. She would be as long in reaching the heart of him.
There had been no bridesmaids to give the scene social grace, no music or flowers to give it poetry, no minister to give it an odor of sanctity. It was marriage in its cold, business-like actuality, without hypnotism, superstition, or false pretense. Small wonder that Kedzie had hardly left the marriage-room before she felt that she was not married at all. The vaccination had not taken. She was not one with Gilfoyle. And yet she must pretend that she was. She must act as if they were one soul, one flesh; must share his tenement, his food, his joys and anxieties. Of these last there promised to be no famine.
Gilfoyle was in a panic about his office. He told Kedzie to devote the morning to looking up some place to live. He would join her at luncheon. He fidgeted while they waited for the elevator, Kedzie staring at her ring with the same curious smile as the other girl.
They rode up-town in a Subway express to Forty-second Street. Their first business treaty had to be drawn up in the crowd.
“How much do you want to pay for the flat, honey?” said Kedzie.
Gilfoyle was startled. Already the money-snake was in their Eden. And she asked him how much he “wanted” to pay! It was only a form of speech, but it grated on him.
“I haven't time to figure it out,” he fretted. “I get twenty-five dollars a week—darling. That's a hundred a month—dear.” His pet names came afterward, mere trailers. “Out of that we've got to get something to eat and to wear, and there'll be street-car fare to pay and—tooth-powder to buy, and we'll want something for theater tickets, and—” He was aghast; at the multitude of things married people need. He added, “And we ought to save a little, I suppose.”
“I suppose so,” said Kedzie, who was as much taken aback by the mention of economy at such a time as he was by the mention of expenditure. But she rose bravely to the responsibility: “I'll do the best I can, and we'll be so cozy—ooh!”
Kedzie was used to small figures. He put into her hand all the cash he had with him, which was all he had on earth—forty-two dollars. He borrowed back the two dollars. Kedzie had her own money, about forty more dollars. This, with twenty-five dollars a week, seemed big; enough to her to keep them in luxury. They parted at the Grand Central Terminal with looks of devoted agony.
She set out at once to look at flats and to visit furniture-stores. She bought aHeraldand read the numberless advertisements. Something was the matter everywhere. She had gone far and found nothing but discouragement when the luncheon hour arrived.
Humble as her ideas were, they rebelled at what she and her bridegroom would have to accept for their home. She had always dreamed of marrying a beautiful man with a million dollars and a steam yacht. She was to have been married by a swagger parson, in a swagger church, and to have gone on a long voyage somewhere, and come back at last to a castle on Fifth Avenue. She had lost the parson; the voyage was not to be thought of; and the castle was not even in the air.
She looked at one or two expensive apartments, just to see what real apartments could be like. They stunned her with their splendors, their liveried outguards, their elevators clanking like caparisoned chariot-horses, their conveniences, their rentals—six or eight thousand dollars a year, unfurnished!—six or seven times her husband's whole annual earnings. They were beyond the folly of a dream.
She would have to be content with what one could rent furnished for twenty-five dollars a month. She would have to be her own hired girl. She would have to toil in a few cells of a beehive on a side-street. She would be chauffeuse to a gas-stove only.
She went to the luncheon tryst with a load of forebodings, but Gilfoyle did not appear. She heard her name paged by a corridor-crier and was called to the telephone, where her husband's voice told her that there was a big upset at the office and he dared not leave. He forgot to be tender in his endearments, and he forgot to explain to her that he was talking in a crowded office with an impatient boss waiting for him and a telephone-girl probably listening in.
Kedzie lunched alone, already a business man's wife.
She scoured the town all afternoon, and at last, in desperation, took the furnished flat she happened to be in when she could go no farther. She had to sign a year's lease, and pay twenty-five dollars in advance.
They would live a condensed life there. Even the hall was shared with another family. The secrets were also to be shared, evidently, for Kedzie could hear all that went on in the other home—all, all!
But by this time she was so tired that any cranny would have been welcome. She was even wearier than she had been when she occupied the outdoor apartment under the park bench where she spent her second night in New York. She called that an “aparkment” and liked the pun so well that she longed to tell her husband. But that would have compelled the telling of her real name, and she did not know him well enough for that yet. She found that she did not know him well enough yet for an increasing number of things. She began to be afraid to have him come home. What would he be like as a husband? What would she be like as a wife? Those are all-important facts that one is permitted to learn after the vows of perfection are sealed.
When Kedzie had rested awhile she grew braver and lonelier. She would welcome almost any husband for companionship's sake. She resolved to have Tom's dinner ready for him. She dragged herself down the stairs and up the hill to the grocer's and the butcher's and bought the raw material for dinner and breakfast.
She telephoned Gilfoyle at his office, gave him the address and invited him to dine with “Mrs. Gilfoyle.” She chuckled over the romance of it, but he was harrowed with office troubles. Her ardor was a trifle dampened by his voice, but she found new thrills in the gas-stove, a most dramatic instrument to play. It frightened her with every manifestation. She turned the wrong handles and got bad odors from it, and explosions. She burned her fingers and the chops.
She stared in dismay at the charred first banquet and then marched her weary feet down the stairs again and up the hill again to a delicatessen shop. She had previously learned the fatal ease of the ready-made meals they vend at such places, and she compiled her first menu there.
When Gilfoyle came down the street and up the steps into his new home and into her arms he tried to lay off care for a while. But he could not hide his anxiety—and his ecstasy was half an ecstasy of dread.
He did not like the shabby, showy furniture the landlord had selected. But the warmed-up dinner amazed him. He had not imagined Kedzie so scholarly a cook. She dared not tell him that she had cheated. He found her wonderfully refreshing after a day of office toil and told her how happy they would be, and she said, “You bet.” Kedzie cleared the table by scooping up all the dishes and dumping them into a big pan and turning the hot water into it with a cake of soap. Then she retreated to the wabbly divan in the living-room.
Gilfoyle went over to Kedzie like a lonely hound; and she laced still tighter the arms that encircled her. They told each other that they were all they had in the world, and they forgot the outside world for the world within themselves. But the evening was maliciously hot and muggy; it was going to rain in a day or so. That divan would hardly support two, and there was no comfort in sitting close; it merely added two furnaces together.
Clamor rose in the adjoining apartment. Their neighbors had children, and the children did not want to go to bed. The parents nagged the children and each other. The wrangle was insufferable. And the idea came to Kedzie and Gilfoyle that children were one of the liabilities of their own marriage. They were afraid of each other, now, as well as of the world. If only they had not been in such haste to be married! If only they could recall those hasty words!
Gilfoyle put out the lights—“because they draw the insects,” he said, but Kedzie thought that he was beginning to economize. He was. Across the street they could see other heat-victims miserably preparing for the night. They were careless of appearances.
In the back of the parlor was a window opening into a narrow air-shaft. The one bedroom's one window opened on the same cleft. If the curtain were not kept down the neighbors across the area could see and be seen. If the window were left open they could be heard; and when the curtain flapped in the occasional little puffs of hot air, it gave brief glimpses of family life next door. That family had a squalling child, too. Somewhere above, a rickety phonograph was at work; and somewhere below, a piano was being mauled; and somewhere else a ukelele was being thumped and a doleful singer was snarling “The Beach at Waikiki.” This racket was their only epithalamium. It was more like the “chivaree” with which ironic crowds tormented bridal couples back in Nimrim, Mo.
Gilfoyle was poet enough to enjoy a little extra doldrums at what might have made a longshoreman peevish. He mopped sweat and fanned himself with a newspaper till he grew frantic. He flung down the paper and rose with a yawn.
“Well, this is one helluva honeymoon. I'm going to crawl into the oven and fry.”
Kedzie sat alone in the dark parlor a long while. She was cold now. She had danced Greek dances in public, but she blushed in the dark as she loitered over her shoelaces. She was so forlorn and so disappointed with life that tears would have been bliss.
Somebody on that populous, mysterious air-shaft kept a parrot. It woke Kedzie early in the morning with hysterical laughter that pierced the ears like steel saws. There was something uncannily real but hideously mirthless in its Ha-ha-ha! It would gurgle with thick-tongued idiocy: “Polly? Polly? Polly wanny clacky? Polly? Polly?”
Kedzie wondered how any one could care or dare to keep such a pest. She wanted to kill it. She leaned out of the window and stared up. Somewhere above the fire-escape rungs she could see the bottom of its cage. If only she had a gun, how gladly she would have blown Polly to bits.
She saw a frowsy-haired man in a nightgown staring up from another window and yelling at the parrot. She drew her head in hastily.
The idol of her soul slept on. The inpouring day illumined him to his disadvantage. His head was far back, his jaw down, his mouth agape. During the night a beard had crept out on his cheeks. He was startlingly unattractive.
Kedzie crouched on the bed and stared at him in wonder, in a fascination of disgust. This was the being she had selected from all mankind for her companion through the long, long years to come. This was her playmate, partner, hero, master, financier, bedfellow, lifefellow. For him she had given up her rights to freedom, to praise, to chivalry, to individuality, her hopes of wealth, luxury, flattery.
She glanced about the room—the pine bureau with its imitation stain, broken handles, and curdled mirror, the ugly chairs, the gilt radiator, the worn rug, the bed that other wretches had occupied. She wondered who they were and where they were.
She remembered Newport, the Noxon home. She tried to picture a bedroom there. She saw a palace of the best moving-picture period. She remembered the first moving picture she had seen in New York, and contrasted the Anita Adair of that adventure with the Anita Adair of this. She recalled that girl locking her door against the swell husband, and the poor but honest lover with the revolver.
Kedzie wished she had locked her own door—only there was no door, merely a shoddy portière, for there was not room to open a door. Her old ambitions came back to her. She had planned to know rich people and rebuke their wicked wiles. One rich man had held her in his arms, lifted her out of the pool. It was no less a man than Jim Dyckman, and she had repulsed him.
She caught a glimpse of her own tousled head in the mirror, and she sneered at it. “You darn fool—oh, you darn fool!”
At last the parrot woke Gilfoyle. He snorted, bored his fists into his eyes, yawned, scratched his head, stared at the unusual furniture, flounced over, saw his mate, stared again, grinned, said:
“Why, hello, Anita!”
He put out his hand to her. She wiggled away; he followed. She slid to the floor and gasped:
“Don't touch me!”
“Why, what's the matter, honey?”
“Huh! What isn't the matter?”
He fumbled under the pillow for his watch, looked at it, yawned:
“Lord, it's only five o'clock. Goodnight!” He disposed himself for sleep again. The parrot broke out in another horrible Ha-ha! He sat up with an oath. “I'd like to murder the beast.”
“Don't! I'm much obliged to it.”
“Obliged to it? You must be crazy. Good Lord! hear it scream.”
“Well, ain't life a scream?”
Gilfoyle was a graceless sleeper and a surly waker. He forgot that he was a bridegroom.
He sniffed, yawned, flopped, buried one ear in the pillow and pulled the cover over the other and almost instantly slept. His head on the pillow looked like some ugly, shaggy vegetable. Kedzie wanted to uproot the object and throw it out of the window, out of her life. That was the head of her husband, the lord and master of her dreams!
Dainty-minded couples have separate bedrooms. Ordinary people accept the homely phases of coexistence as inevitable and therefore unimportant. They grow to enjoy the intimacy: they give and take informality as one of the comforts of a home. They see frowsy hair and unshaven cheeks and yawns as a homely, wholesome part of life and make a pleasant indolence of them.
But Kedzie was in an unreasoning mood. She had hoped for unreasonable delights. Marriage had been a goal beyond the horizon, at the base of the rainbow. She had reached it. The girl Kedzie was no more. She was a wife. Kedzie Thropp and Anita Adair were now Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle. Her soul cried out:
“This is my honeymoon! I am married, married forever to that tousle-headed, bristle-jawed, brainless, heartless dub. I won't stand for it. I won't! I won't!”
She wanted to outscream the parrot. Its inarticulate, horrible cachinnations voiced her humor uncannily. She had to bury her pouting lips in her round young arm to keep from insanely echoing that maniacal Ha-ha-ha! That green-and-red philosopher expressed her own mockery of life and love, with its profound and eloquent Ha-ha-ha! Oh, ha-ha-ha! Ee, ha-ha-ha!