Ferriday did not know, of course, that Kedzie was married. She hardly
knew it herself now. Gilfoyle had been three weeks late in sending her
the thirty dollars' fare to Chicago. Then she wrote him that she was
doing fairly well at the studio and she would stick to her work. She
sent him oceans of love, but she did not send him the thirty dollars.
Besides, he had borrowed it of her in the first place, and she had
had to borrow more of Ferriday. She had neglected to pay him back.
She needed so much for her new clothes and new expenses innumerable
inflicted on her by her improved estate.
And, of course, she left the miserable little flat on the landlord's
hands. He wasted a good deal of time trying to get the rent paid.
Besides, it was rented in Gilfoyle's name and he was safe in Chicago.
And yet not very safe, for Chicago has also its Bohemia, its clusters
of real and imitation artists, its talkers and dabblers, as well as its
toilers and achievers.
Gilfoyle found some wonderful Western sirens who listened to his
poetry. They were new to him and he to them. His Eastern pronunciations
fascinated them as they had fascinated Kedzie, and he soon found in them
all the breeziness and wholesomeness of the great prairies which are
found in the mid-Western women of literature.
Gilfoyle had apparently forgotten that his own wife was a
mid-Westerness, and the least breezy, wholesome, prairian thing
imaginable. He saw mid-Western women of all sorts about him, but he was
of those who must have a type for every section of humanity and who will
not be shaken in their belief by any majority of exceptions.
When Gilfoyle got Kedzie's letter saying that she would not join him
yet awhile he wrote her a letter of poetic grief at the separation. But
poets, like the rest of us, are the better for getting a grief on paper
and out of the system.
Kedzie did not answer his letter for a long while and he did not
miss her answer much, for he was having his own little triumphs. The
advertisements he wrote were receiving honorable mention at the office
and he was having success with his poetry and his flirtations of
evenings.
He returned to his boarding-house one night and looked at his face in
the mirror, stared into the eyes that stared back. A certain melting and
molten and molting lady had told him that he had poet's eyes like Julian
Street's and was almost as witty. Gilfoyle tried with his shaving-glass
and the bureau mirror to study the profile that someone else had
compared to the cameonic visage of Richard Le Gallienne.
Gilfoyle was gloriously ashamed of himself. In the voice that someone
else had compared to Charlie Towne's reading his own verses he addressed
his reflection with scorn:
“You heartless dog! You ought to be shot--forgetting that you have a
poor little deserted wife toiling in the great city. You're as bad as
Lord Byron ever was.”
Then he wrote a sonnet against his own perfidy and accepted confession
as atonement and plenary indulgence.
He was one of those who, when they have cried, “I have sinned,” hear a
mysterious voice saying, “Poor sufferer, go and sin some more.”
So he did, and he went the way of millions of lazy-minded, lazy-moraled
husbands while Kedzie went the way of men and women who succeed by
self-exploitation and count only that bad morals which is also bad
business. And that was the status of the matrimonial adventure of the
Gilfoyles for the present. It made no perceptible difference to anybody
that they were married--least of all to themselves--for the present. But
of course Kedzie was obscurely preparing all this while for a tremendous
explosion into publicity and into what is known as “the big money.” And
that was bound to make a vast difference to Gilfoyle as well as to Mrs.
Gilfoyle.
In these all-revolutionary days a man had better be a little polite
always to his wife, for in some totally unexpectable way she may
suddenly prove to be a bigger man than he is, a money-getter, a fame or
shame acquirer--if only by way of becoming the president of a suffrage
association or a best-seller or an inventor of a popular doll.
And again, all this time--a very short time, considering the changes it
made in everybody concerned--Ferriday was Kedzie's alternate hope and
despair, good angel and bad, uplifter and down-yanker.
Sometimes he threatened to stop the picture and destroy it unless she
kissed him. And she knew that he could and would do almost anything of
that sort. Had not his backers threatened to murder him or sue him if
he did not finish the big feature? At such times Kedzie usually kissed
Ferriday to keep him quiet. But she was as careful not to give too many
kisses as she had been not to put too many caramels in half a pound when
she had clerked in the little candy-store. Nowadays she would pause and
watch the quivering scale of policy intently with one more sweet poised
as if it were worth its weight in gold. The ability to stop while
the scale wavers in the tiny zone of just-a-little-too-little and
just-a-little-too-much is what makes success in any business of man--or
woman-kind.
It was not always easy for Kedzie to withhold that extra bonbon. There
were times when Ferriday raised her hopes and her pride so high that she
fairly squealed with love of him and hugged him. That would have been
the destruction of Kedzie if there had not been the counter-weight of
conceit in Ferriday's soul, for at those times he would sigh to himself
or aloud:
“You are loving me only because I am useful to you.”
This thought always sobered and chilled Mr. Ferriday. He worked none the
less for her and himself and he tried in a hundred ways to surprise
the little witch into an adoration complete enough to make her forget
herself, make her capable of that ultimate altruism to which a woman
falls or rises when she stretches herself out on the altar of love.
Ferriday began to think seriously that the only way he could break
Kedzie's pride completely would be to make her his wife. He began to
wonder if that were not, after all, what she was driving at--or trying
to drive him to.
Life will be so much more wholesome when women propose marriage as
men do and have a plain, frank talk about it instead of their eternal
business of veils and reticences, fugitive impulses real or coquettish,
modesties real or faked.
Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so curious to know
that finally he broke out, “In the Lord's name, will you or will you not
marry me, damn you?”
And Kedzie answered: “Of course not. I wouldn't dream of such a thing.”
But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she merely wanted to
trawl him along.
She had Ferriday almost crazy--at least she had added one more to his
manias--when Jim Dyckman wandered into the studio and set up an entirely
new series of ambitions and discontents.