The investigations of Messrs. Hodshon & Hindley in the life of Zada and
Cheever prospered exceedingly. In blissless ignorance of it, Zada had
been inspired to set a firm of sleuths on Charity's trail. She wanted to
be able to convince Cheever that Charity was intrigued with Dyckman. The
operators who kept Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever under espionage had the most
stupid things to report to Zada.
To Zada's disgust, Mrs. Cheever never called upon Jim Dyckman, and
he never called on her. Zada accused the bureau of cheating her, and
finally put another agency to shadowing Jim Dyckman. According to the
reports she had, his neglect of Mrs. Cheever was perfectly explained.
He was a mere satellite of a moving-picture actress, a new-comer named
Anita Adair.
The detectives reported that such gossip as they could pick up about
the studio indicated that Dyckman was putting money into the firm on her
account.
“A movie angel!” sneered Zada. She had wasted a hundred dollars on him
to find this out, and two hundred and fifty on Mrs. Cheever to find out
that she was intensely respectable. That was bitter news to Zada. She
canceled her business with her detective agency. And they called in the
shadows that haunted Charity's life.
The detectives on Zada's trail, however, had more rewarding material to
work with--although they found unexpected difficulties, they said, in
getting the dictagraph installed in her apartment. They did not wish to
ruin the whole enterprise by too great haste--especially as they were
receiving eight dollars a day and liberal expenses per man.
At last, however, Hodshon sent word to Mrs. Cheever that the dictagraph
was installed and working to a T, and she could listen-in whenever she
was ready.
Charity was terrified utterly now. New scales were to be shaken from her
eyes at the new tree of knowledge. She was to hear her man talking to
his leman.
She had almost an epilepsy of terror, but she could not resist the
importunate opportunity.
She selected from her veils a heavy crepe that she had worn during
a period of mourning for one of her husband's relatives. It seemed
appropriate now, for she was going into mourning for her own husband,
living, yet about to die to her.
She left the house alone after dark and walked along Fifth Avenue till
she found a taxicab. She gave the street number Hodshon had given her
and stepped in. She kept an eye on the lighted clock and in the dark
sorted out the exact change and a tip, adding dimes as they were
recorded on the meter. She did not want to have to pause for change, and
she did not wish to make herself conspicuous by an extravagant tip.
As the taxicab slid along the Avenue Charity wondered if any of the
passengers in other cabs could have an errand so gruesome as hers.
She was tortured by fantastic imaginings of what she might hear. She
wondered how a man would talk to such a person as Zada, and how she
would answer. She imagined the most dreadful things she could.
The taxicab surprised her by stopping suddenly before a brown-fronted
residence adjoining an apartment-house of (more or less literally)
meretricious ornateness. She stepped out, paid her fare, and turned,
to find Mr. Hodshon at her elbow. He had been waiting for her. He
recognized her by her melodramatic veil. He gave her needed help up a
high stoop and opened the door with a key.
She found herself in a shabby, smelly hall where no one else was.
He motioned her up the stairway, and she climbed with timidity. At each
level there were name-plates over the electric buttons. The very labels
seemed illicit. Hodshon motioned her up and up for four flights.
Then he opened a door and stepped back to let her enter a room
unfurnished except for a few chairs and a table. Two men were in
the room, and they were laughing with uproar. One of them had a
telephone-receiver clamped to his ear, and he was making shorthand
notes, explaining to his companion what he heard.
They turned in surprise at Hodshon's entrance and rose to greet Charity
with the homage due so great a client.
Charity could hardly bespeak them civilly. They took her curtness for
snobbery, but it was not. It swept over her that these people were
laughing over her most sacred tragedy.
She advanced on the operator and put out her hand for the headpiece he
wore. He took it off and rubbed it with his handkerchief, and told her
that she must remove her hat and veil.
She came out startlingly white and brilliant from the black. She put the
elastic clamp over her head and set the receiver to her ear. Instantly
she was assailed by dreadful noises, a jangle of inarticulate sounds
like the barking of two dogs.
“I can't hear a word,” she protested.
“They're talkin' too loud,” said the operator. “The only way to beat the
dictagraph is to cut the wire or yell.”
“Are they quarreling, then?” Charity asked, almost with pleasure.
“Yes, ma'am. But it's the lady and her maid. They been havin' a terrible
scrap about marketin'. He--Mr. Cheever--ain't there yet. They're
expectin' him, though.”
Charity felt that she had plumbed the depths of degradation in listening
to a quarrel between such a creature and her maid. What must it be to be
the maid of such a creature! She was about to snatch away the earpiece
when she heard the noise of a door opening. She looked toward the
entrance of the room she was in, but the door that opened was in the
other room in the other building.
The voices of Zada and her maid stopped jangling, and she heard the most
familiar of all voices asking:
“What's the row to-day?”
There was an extra metal in the timbre and it had the effect of an old
phonographic record, but there was no questioning whose voice it was.
Zada's voice became audibly low in answer.
“She is such a fool she drives me crazy.”
A sullen, servile voice answered: “It ain't me's the fool, and as for
crazy--her wantin' me to bring home what they ain't in no market.
How'm I goin' to git what ain't to be got, I asts you. This here war is
stoppin' ev'y kind of food.”
Cheever's answer was characteristic. He didn't believe in servants'
rights.
“Get out. If you're impudent again I'll throw you out, and your baggage
after you.”
“Yassar,” was the soft answer.
There was the sound of shuffling feet and a softly closed door. Then
Zada's voice, very mellow:
“I thought you'd never come, dearie.”
“Awfully busy to-day, honey.”
“You took dinner with her, of course.”
“No. It was a big day on the Street, and there was so much to do at the
office that I dined down-town at the Bankers' Club with several men
and then went back to the office. I ought to be there all night, but I
couldn't keep away from you any longer.”
There were mysterious quirks of sound that meant kisses and sighs and
tender inarticulations. There were cooing tones which the dictagraph
repeated with hideous fidelity.
Zada asked, “Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?”
And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, “Yes, he diddums, but worst
was lonelying for his Zadalums.”
“Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly--truly?”
The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's ear a grotesque
obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer or
the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, “Kissings! kissings!”
Charity screamed: “Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!”
Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their panic
at her outcry. But they were as oblivious of her pain or her rage as if
an interplanetary space divided them. They went on with the murmur and
susurrus of their communion, while Charity looked askance at the three
men. They could not hear, but could imagine, and they stared at her
doltishly.
“Leave the room! Go away!” she groaned.
They slipped out through the door and left her to her shame.
In the porches of her ear the hateful courtship purled on with its
tender third-personal terms and its amorous diminutives, suffixed
ridiculously.
“Zada was afaid her booful Peterkin had forgotten her and gone to the
big old house.”
“Without coming home first?”
“Home! that's the wordie I want. This is his homie, isn't it, Peterkin?”
“Yessy.”
“He doesn't love old villain who keeps us apart?”
“Nonie, nonie.”
“Never did, did he?”
“Never.”
“Only married her, didn't he?”
“That's allie.”
“Zada is only really wifie?”
“Only onlykins.”
Charity listened with a greed of self-torment like a fanatic penitent.
The chatter of the two had none of the indecency she had expected, and
that made it the more intolerably indecent.
She saw that Cheever's affair with Zada had settled down to a state of
comfort, of halcyon delight.
It had taken on domestication. He was at home with her and an alien in
Charity's home. He told the woman his business affairs and little office
jokes. He laughed with a purity of cheer that he had long lost in his
legal establishment. He used many of the love-words that he had once
used to Charity, and her heart was wrung with the mockery of it.
Charity listened helplessly. She was as one manacled or paralyzed and
submitted to such a torture as she had never endured. She harkened in
vain for some hopeful note of uncongeniality, some reassurance for her
love or at least her vanity, some certainty that her husband, her first
possessor, had given her some emotion that he could never give another.
But he was repeating to Zada the very phrases of his honeymoon,
repeating them with all the fervor of a good actor playing Romeo for the
hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he seemed to find
in Zada a response and a unity that he had never found in Charity's
society. Her intelligence was cruelly goaded to the realization that she
had never been quite the woman for Cheever.
She had known that he had not been the full complement of her own soul.
They had disagreed fiercely on hundreds of topics. He had been chilled
by many of her ardors, as many of his interests had bored her. She had
supposed it to be an inevitable inability of a man and a woman to regard
the world through the same eyes. She had let him go his way and had gone
her own. And now it seemed that he had in his wanderings found some
one who mated him exactly. The butterfly had liked the rose, but had
fluttered away; when it found the orchid it closed its wings and rested
content.
It was a frightful revelation to Charity, for it meant that Cheever had
been merely flirting with her. She had caught his eye as a girl in
a strange port captivates a sailor. He had haunted her window with
serenades. Finding her to be what we call “a good girl,” he had called
upon her father and mother that he might talk to her longer. And then he
had gone to church with her and married her that he might get rid of
her father and mother and her own scruples. And so he had made her his
utterly, and after a few days and nights had sailed away. He had come
back to her now and then as a sailor does.
Meanwhile in another port he had found what we call “a bad woman.” There
had been no need to serenade her out into the streets. They were her
shop. No parents had guarded her hours; no priest was intermediary to
her possession. But once within her lair he had found himself where he
had always wanted to be, and she had found herself with the man she had
been hunting. She closed her window, drove her frequenters, old and new,
from the door; and he regretted that he had given pledges to that other
woman.
It was a pitiful state of affairs, no less pitiful for being old and
ugly and innumerously commonplace. It meant that Cheever under the white
cloak of matrimony had despoiled Charity of her innocence, and under the
red domino of intrigue had restored to Zada hers.
If Charity, sitting like a recording angel, invisible but hearing
everything, had found in the communion of Zada and Cheever only the
fervor of an amour, she could have felt that Cheever was merely a
libertine who loved his wife and his home but loved to rove as well.
She had, however, ghastly evidence that Cheever was only now the rake
reformed; his marriage had been merely one of his escapades; he had
settled down now to monogamy with Zada, and she was his wife in all but
style and title.
There was more of Darby and Joan than of Elvira and Don Juan in their
conversation. He told Zada with pride that he had not had a drink all
day, though he had needed alco-help and the other men had ridiculed
him. She told him that she had not had a drink for a week and only
one cigarette since her lonely dinner. They were in a state of mutual
reformation!
Where, then, was the sacrament of marriage? Which of the women held the
chalice now?
It was enforced on Charity that it was she and not Zada who had been the
inspirer and the victim of Cheever's flitting appetite. It was Zada and
not she who had won him to the calm, the dignity, the sincerity, the
purity that make marriage marriage. It was a hard lesson for Charity,
and she did not know what she ought to do with her costly knowledge. She
could only listen.
When Zada complained that she had had a dreadful day of blues Cheever
made jokes for her as for a child, and she laughed like the child
she was. For her amusement he even went to a piano and played, with
blundering three-chord accompaniment, a song or two. He played jokes
on the keyboard. He revealed none of the self-consciousness that he
manifested before Charity when he exploited his little bag of parlor
tricks.
Charity's mood had changed from horror to eager curiosity, and thence to
cold despair, to cold resentment. It went on to cold intelligence and a
belief that her life with Cheever was over. Their marriage was a proved
failure, and any further experiments with its intimacies would be
unspeakably vile. Or so she thought.
She had consented to this dictagraphic inspection of her husband's
intrigue merely to confirm or refute gossip. She had had more than
evidence enough to satisfy her. Her first reaction to it was a primitive
lust for revenge.
Once or twice she blazed with such anger that she rose to tear the wire
loose from the wall and end the torment. But her curiosity restrained
her. She set the earpiece to her ear again.
At length she formed her resolution to act. She called out, “Mr.
Hodshon, come here!”
He came in and found her a pillar of rage.
“I've heard enough. I'll do what I refused before. I'll go with you and
break in.”
Hodshon was dazed. He was not ready to act. She had refused his plan to
break in according to the classic standards. He had let the plan lapse
and accepted Mrs. Cheever as a poor rich wretch whom he had contracted
to provide with a certain form of morbid entertainment. He could do
nothing now but stammer:
“Well--well--is that so? Do you really? You know you didn't--O'
course--Well, let's see now. You know we ain't prepared. I told you
we had to have a c'rob'rating witness. It wouldn't be legal if we
were to--Still, they probably would accept you as witness and us as
corroboration, but you wouldn't want to go on the stand and tell what
you found--not a nice refined lady like you are. The witness-stand is no
place for a lady, anyway.
“The thing is if you could get some gentleman friend to go with you and
you two break in. Then you'd both be amateurs, kind of. You see? Do you
know any gentleman who might be willing to do that for you? The best
of friends get very shy when you suggest such a job. But if you know
anybody who would be interested and wanted to help you--Do you?”
Only two names came to Charity's searching mind--Jim Dyckman's
impossible name and one that was so sublimely unfit that she laughed as
she uttered it.
“There's the Reverend Doctor Mosely.”
Hodshon tried to laugh.
“I was reading head-lines of a sermon of his. He's down on divorce.”
“That's why he'd be the ideal witness,” said Charity.
“But would he come?”
“Of course not,” she laughed. “There's no use of carrying this further.
I've had all I can stand to-night. Let me go.”
As usual with people who have had all they can stand, Charity wanted
some more. She glanced at the receiver, curious as to what winged words
had flown unattended during her parley with Hodshon.
She put the receiver to her ear and fell back. Again she was greeted
with clamor. They were quarreling ferociously.
That might mean either of two things: there are the quarrels that
enemies maintain, and those that devoted lovers wage. The latter sort
are perhaps the bitterer, the less polite. Charity could not learn what
had started the wrangle between those two.
Slowly it died away. Zada's cries turned to sobs, and her tirade to
sobs.
“You don't love me. Go back to her. You love her still.”
“No, I don't, honey. I just don't want her name brought into our
conversation. It doesn't seem decent, somehow. It's like bringing her in
here to listen to our quarrels. I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm trying not
to, but you're so peculiarly hard to keep peace with lately. What's the
reason, darling?”
Charity was smitten with a fear more terrible than any yet. She heard
its confirmation. Zada whispered:
“Can't you guess?”
“No, I can't.”
“Stupid!” Zada murmured. “You poor, stupid boy.”
Charity heard nothing for a long moment--then a gasp.
“Zada!”
She greeted his alarm with a chuckle and a flurry of proud laughter. He
bombarded her with questions:
“Why didn't you tell me? How long? What will you do? How could
you?--you're no fool.”
Her answers were jumbled with his questions--his voice terrified, hers
victorious.
“I've kept it a secret for months, because I was afraid of you. It's my
right. It's too late to do anything now. And now we'll see whether you
love me or not--and how much, if any.”
There was again silence. Charity could hardly tolerate the suspense.
Both she and Zada were hanging breathlessly on Cheever's answer.
He did not speak for so long that Zada gave up. “You don't love me,
then? I'd better kill myself, I suppose. It's the only solution now. And
I'm willing, since you don't love me enough.”
“No, no--yes, I do. I adore you--more than ever. But it's such a
strange ambition for you; and, God! what a difference it makes, what a
difference!”
That was what Charity thought. For once she agreed with Cheever, echoed
his words and his dismay and stood equally stunned before the new
riddle. It was a perfect riddle now, for there was no end to the
answers, and every one of them was wrong.