Now, of course, Kedzie ought to have been happy. Millions of girls of
her age were waking up that morning and calling themselves wretched
because their parents or distance or some other cause prevented them
from marrying young fellows no more prepossessing asleep than Gilfoyle
was.
In Europe that morning myriads of young girls tossed in their beds and
shivered lest their young men in the trenches might have been killed or
mangled by some shell dropped from an airship or sent over from a cannon
or shot up from a mine. And those young men, alive or dead, looked no
better than Gilfoyle, if as neat.
In Europe and in Asia, that morning, there were young girls and nuns
and wives who were in the power of foreign soldiers whose language they
could not speak but could understand all too well--poor, ruined victims
of the tidal waves of battle. There were wives, young and old, who had
got their husbands back from war blind, crippled, foolish, petulant.
They had left part of their souls on the field with their blood.
It was a time when it seemed that nobody had a right to be unhappy
who had life, health, shelter, and food. Yet America was perhaps as
discontented as Europe.
Kedzie had reason enough to make peace with life. Gilfoyle was as
valuable a citizen as she. She might have helped to make him a good
business man or a genuine poet. What is poetry, anyway, but the skilful
advertisement of emotions? She might at least have made of Gilfoyle that
all-important element of the Republic, a respectable, amiable, ordinary
man, perhaps the father of children who would be of value, even of
glory, to the world.
There was romance enough in their wedding. Others of the couples who
had bought licenses that day were rapturous in yet cheaper tenements,
greeting the new day with laughter and kisses and ambition to earn and
to save, to breed and grow old well.
But to be content with what or whom she had, Kedzie would have had to be
somebody else besides Kedzie; and then Gilfoyle would not perhaps have
met her or married her. Some man in Nimrim, Mo., would have wed the
little stay-at-home.
Kedzie, the pretty fool, apparently fancied that she would have been
happy if Gilfoyle had been a handsomer sleeper, and the apartment a
handsomer apartment, and the bank-account an inexhaustible fountain of
gold.
But would she have been? Peter Cheever was as handsome as a man dares
to be, awake or asleep; he had vast quantities of money, and he was
generous with it. But Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt in an
apartment that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of its velvets
and the height of its colors.
Yet Zada was crying this very morning--crying like mad because while she
had Cheever she had no marriage license. She tore her hair and bit it,
and peeled diamonds off her fingers and threw them at the mirror like
pebbles, and sopped up her tears with point-lace handkerchiefs and
hurled those to the floor--then hurled herself after them. She was a
tremendous weeper, Zada.
And in Newport there was a woman who had a marriage license but no
husband. She slept in a room too beautiful for Kedzie to have liked. She
did not know enough to like it. She would have found it cold. Charity
Cheever found it cold, but she slept at last, though the salt wind
blowing in from the sea tormented the light curtains and plucked at the
curls about Charity's face. There was salt in the air, and her eyelashes
were still wet with tears. She was crying in her sleep, for loneliness.
Kedzie thought her room was small, but it was nearly as big as the
bedroom where Jim Dyckman had slept. He had a bigger room, but he had
given it to his father and mother, who had come to Newport with him.
They were a stodgy old couple enough now, and snoring idyllically
in duet after a life of storms and tears and discontents in spite of
wealth.
Jim's room was big for a yacht, but the yacht was narrow, built for
speed. Thirty-six miles an hour its turbines could shoot it through
the sea. It had to be narrow. We can't have everything--especially on
yachts.
Jim was barefoot, standing in his pajamas at a port-hole and trying to
see the Noxon home, imagining Charity there. He was denied her presence
and was as miserable as any waif in a poor farm attic. Money seemed to
make no visible difference in his despair.
If he thought of Kedzie at all, he dismissed her as a trifling memory.
He wanted Charity, who did not want him. Charity had Cheever, who did
not want her. Kedzie had Gilfoyle, and did not want him. It looked as
if the old jingle ought to be changed from “Finders keepers, losers
weepers” to “Losers keepers, finders weepers.”
The day after Jim Dyckman pulled Kedzie out of the water he made a
desperate effort to convince himself that he could be happy without the
forbidden Charity Coe.
He breakfasted and played tennis, then swam at Bailey's Beach. Beauties
of every type and every conscience were there--pale, slim ash blondes
with legs like banister-spindles, and swarthy, slender brunettes of the
same Sheraton furniture. There were brunettes of generous ovals, and
blondes of heroic rotundities, and every scheme of shape between. Minds
were equally diversified--maternal young girls and wicked old ladies,
hilarious and sinister, intellectual and athletic, bookish and horsy, a
woman of a sort for every mood.
And Jim Dyckman was so wealthy and so simple and so likable and
important that it seemed nobody would refuse to accept him. But he
wanted Charity.
Later in the afternoon he gave up the effort to snub her and went to the
Noxon home. It was about the hour when Kedzie in her new flat had been
burning her fingers at the gas-stove. Jim Dyckman was preparing to burn
his fingers at the shrine of Mrs. Cheever.
He rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Noxon, though her motor was waiting
at the door, as he was glad to note. Mrs. Noxon came down with her hat
on and her gloves going on. She pinched Dyckman's cheek and kissed him
and said:
“It's sweet of you, Jimmie, to call on an old crone like me, and so
promptly. She'll be down in a minute. But you must be on your good
behavior, Jim, for they're talking about you, you know. They're
bracketing your name with Charity's.”
“The dirty beasts! I'll--”
“You can't, Jim. But you can behave. Cheer her up a little. She's blue
about that dog of a Cheever. I've got to go and turn over the money we
earned yesterday. Quite a tidy sum, but I'll never give another damned
show as long as I live.”
She left, and by and by Charity Coe drifted in, bringing strange
contentment with her. She greeted Jim with a weary cordiality. He took
her hand and kissed it and laid his other hand over it as usual. She put
her other hand on top of his and patted it--then withdrew her slender
fingers and sat down.
They glanced at each other and sighed. Jim was miserably informed now
that he had made the angelic Charity Coe a theme for gossip. He felt
guilty--irritatedly guilty, because he had the name without the game.
Charity Coe was in a dull mood. She was in a love lethargy. Her mind was
trying to persuade her heart that her devotion to Peter Cheever was a
wasted lealty, but her heart would not be convinced, though it began to
be afraid. She was as a watcher who sits in the next room to one who is
dying slowly and quietly. She could neither lose hope nor use it.
Jim and Charity sat brooding for a long while. He had outstretched
himself on a sumptuous divan. She was seated on a carved chair, leaning
against the tall back of it like a figure in high relief. About them the
great room brooded colossally.
Gilfoyle would have hated Charity and Jim as perfect examples of the
idle rich, too stupid to work, too pampered to be worthy of sympathy.
But whether these two had a right to suffer or not, suffer they did.
The mansion was quiet. The other house-guests were motoring or darting
about the twilit tennis-court or trading in the gossip-exchange at the
Casino. Jim and Charity were marooned in a sleeping castle.
At length Jim broke forth, “For God's sake, sing.”
Charity laughed a little and said, “All right--anything to make you
talk.”
She went to the piano and shifted the music. There were dozens of songs
about roses. She dropped to the bench and began to play and croon Edward
Carpenter's luscious music to Waller's old poem, “Go, Lovely Rose.”
Jim began to talk almost at once. Charity went on singing, smiling a
little at the familiar experience of being asked to sing only to be
talked over. Jim grew garrulous as he read across her shoulder with
characteristic impoliteness.
_“Tell her that wastes her time and me,”_ he quoted; then he groaned:
“That's you and me, Charity Coe. But you're wasting yourself most of
all.”
He bent closer to peek at the name of the author. “Who's this feller
Waller, who knows so much?”
“Hush and listen,” she said, and hummed the song through. It made a new
and deep impression on her in that humor. She felt that she had wasted
the rosiness of her own life. Girlhood was gone; youth was gone;
carefreedom was gone. Like petals they had fallen from the core of her
soul. The words of the lyric stabbed her:
Then die that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee.
How small a part of time they share
That are so sweet and fair.
Her fingers slipped from the keys and, as it were, died in her lap. Jim
Dyckman understood a woman for once, and in a gush of pity for her and
of resentment for her disprized preciousness caught at her to embrace
her. Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped to the fore. She
struck and wrenched and drove him off. She was panting with wrath.
“What a rotten thing to do! Go away and don't come near me again. I'm
ashamed of you.”
“Me, too,” he snarled.