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 a _Herald_ and 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 portiere, 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. Good _night_!” 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!