We must fly fast and keep on flying if we would escape from our pasts.
Ambition, adventure, or sheer luck may carry us forward out of them as
in a cavalry-foray over strange frontiers, but sooner or later we must
wait for our wagons or fall back to them.
Kedzie's past was catching up with her. It is a glorious thing when
one's past comes up loaded with food, munitions, good deeds, charities,
mercies, valued friendships. But poor little Kedzie's little past
included one incompetent and unacknowledged husband and two village
parents.
Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her new friends
as anxiously as if he had been a baby born out of wedlock instead of a
grown man born into it. And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment. He
had not told his new friends in Chicago that he was married, because the
Anita Adair that he had left in New York was, as F.P.A. would say, his
idea of nothing to brag about.
Gilfoyle had loved Kedzie once as a pretty photographer's model, and had
admired her as an exquisite dancing-creature who seemed to have spun
off at a tangent from the painted side of an old Greek amphora. He had
actually written poetry to her! And when a poet has done that for a girl
he feels that he has done more for her than she can ever repay. Even if
she gives him her mortal self, what is that to the immortality he has
given her?
When Kedzie telegraphed Gilfoyle that she had lost her job in Newport
and had arrived in New York lonely and afraid, had he not taken care of
her good name by giving her his own? Not to mention a small matter of
all his money!
She had repaid him with frantic discontent. The morning after the
wedding, was she not imitating the parrot's shrill ridicule of life and
love? Did she ridicule his poetry, or didn't she? She did. Instead of
being his nine Muses, she had become his three Furies.
When he lost his job and she went out to get one of her own, had she
succeeded in getting anything with dignity in it? No! She had become an
extra woman in a movie mob. That was a belittling thing to remember. But
worst of all, she had committed the unpardonable sin for a woman--she
had lent him money. He could never forgive or forget the horrible fact
that he had borrowed her last cash to pay his fare to Chicago.
Next to that for inexcusableness was her self-support--and, worse,
self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie no money beyond returning
what he had borrowed, and she had not used that to buy a ticket to
Chicago with. She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money.
That was mighty convenient for him, but it was extremely suspicious, and
he cherished it as a further grudge.
He never found himself quite flush enough to force any money on her,
because he had found that it costs money to live in Chicago, too. People
in New York get the idea that it costs everything to live in New York
and nothing to live anywhere else--if it can be called living.
Gilfoyle also discovered that his gifts were not appreciated in Chicago
as he had expected them to be. Chicago people seemed to think it quite
natural for New York to call for help from Chicago, and successful
Western men were constantly going East; but for a New-Yorker to revert
to Chicago looked queer. He appeared to patronize, and yet he must have
had some peculiar reason for giving up New York.
All in all and by and large, Gilfoyle was not happy in Chicago. The few
persons, mainly women, who took him up as an interesting novelty grew
tired of him. His advertising schemes did not dazzle the alert Illini.
For one reason or another the wares he celebrated did not “go big.”
He lost his first job and took an inferior wage with a shabbier firm. He
took his women friends to the movies now instead of the theaters. And so
it was that one night when he was beauing a Denver woman, who was on
her way to New York and fame, he found the box-line extending out on the
sidewalk and half-way up the block. It was irksome to wait, but people
like to go to shows where the crowds are. He took his place in the line,
and his Miss Clampett stood at his elbow.
The queue was slowly drawn into the theater and he finally reached a
place in front of the lithographs. He almost jumped out of his skin when
he saw a colossal head of Anita Adair smiling at him from a sunbonnet
streaming with curls.
The letterpress informed Gilfoyle that it was indeed his own Anita.
The people in the line were talking of her as the new star. They were
calling her familiarly by her first name and discussing her with all the
freedom of the crowd:
“That's Anita. Ain't she sweet?”
“Everybody says Anita's just too lovely.”
“Some queen, boy? Me for Anita. She can pack her clothes in my trunk!”
Gilfoyle felt that he ought in common decency to knock down this fellow
who claimed the privileges belonging to himself. But he remembered that
he had abandoned those privileges. And the fellow looked unrefinedly
powerful.
Gilfoyle gnawed the lip of silence, realizing also that his announcement
would make a strange impression on Miss Clampett. She was one of those
authors one reads about who think it necessary to hunt experiences and
live romances in order to find literary material.
Gilfoyle had done his best to teach her how wildly well a born
New-Yorker can play the lute of emotion. To proclaim now that he was the
anonymous husband of this glitterer on the billboard would have been a
shocking confession.
Gilfoyle swallowed his secret, but it made his heart flutter
tremendously. When at length he and Miss Clampett were admitted to the
theater and walked down the aisle Kedzie came from the background of the
screen forward as if to meet him. She came on and on, and finally as
he reached his seat, a close-up of her brought them face to face with a
vividness that almost knocked him over. She looked right at him, seemed
to recognize him, and stopped short.
He felt as guilty as if she had actually caught him at a rendezvous. Yet
he felt pride, too.
This luminous being was his wife. He remembered all that she had been to
him. Miss Clampett noted his perturbations and made a brilliant guess
at their cause. She asked him if he wanted to leave her and go around
to the stage door to meet this wonderful Miss Adair. Gilfoyle laughed
poorly at her quip. He was surprised to learn from her that Anita Adair
was already a sensation among the film stars. He had not chanced to read
the pages where her press-matter had celebrated her. He defended himself
from the jealousy of Miss Clampett very lamely; for the luscious beauty
of his Anita, her graphic art, and her sway over the audience rekindled
his primal emotions to a greater fire than ever.
When the show was over he abandoned Miss Clampett on her door-step and
went to his own boarding-house in a nympholepsy. He was a mortal wedded
to a fairy. He was Endymion with a moon enamoured of him. Kedzie indeed
had come down from the screen to Gilfoyle, clothed in an unearthly
effulgence.
The next morning he turned to the moving-picture columns of the Chicago
_Tribune_, the _Herald_, and the other papers, and he found that Kedzie
was celebrated there with enthusiasm by Kitty Kelly, “Mae Tinee,” Mrs.
Parsons, and the rest of the critics of the new art. On Sunday several
of her interviews appeared, and her portraits, in eminent company.
Gilfoyle's forgotten affections came back to life, expanding and
efflorescent. He throbbed with the wonder of it. The moving picture had
brought romance again to earth.
Thousands of men all over the country were falling in love with
Kedzie. Who had a better right to than her husband? Unconsciously his
resentments against her fell away. His heart swelled with such plenitude
of forgiveness that he might in time have overlooked the money she
lent him. It was not a disgrace to accept money from a genius of her
candle-power.
For a long while he had been afraid that she would telegraph him
for funds, or descend on him in Chicago and bring a heavy baggage of
necessities. Now he was no longer afraid of that. He was afraid that if
he called on her in New York she might not remember him.
He had heard of the real and the alleged salaries of moving-picture
stars, and he assumed that Kedzie must be as well paid as she was well
advertised. He did not know of the measly little hundred dollars a week
she was bound down to by her contract. If he had known he would have
rejoiced, because one hundred dollars a week was about four times more
than Gilfoyle had ever earned.
Of course Gilfoyle resolved to go to New York. Of course he started to
telegraph his wife and found the telegram hard to write. Then he began
a long letter and found it harder to write. And of course he finally
decided to surprise her. He resigned his job. His resignation was
accepted with humiliating cordiality.
Of course he took the Twentieth Century Limited to New York. It was more
expensive, but it was quicker; and what did a few dollars matter, now
that he was the husband of such an earner? He had unwittingly hitched
his wagon to a star, and now he would take a ride through heaven. He
wrote a poem or two to that effect, and the train-wheels inspired his
prosody.
He dreamed of an ideal life in which he should loll upon a sofa of
ease, thrumming his lyre, while his wife devoted herself to her career
outside.
Where would Horace and Virgil have been if they had not had their
expenses paid by old Mr. Maecenas? Since Mrs. Gilfoyle could afford to
be a patroness, let her patronage begin at home. Her reward would be
beyond price, for Gilfoyle decided to perpetuate her fame in powerful
rhyme far outlasting the celluloid in which she was writing her name
now.
Celluloid is perishable indeed, and very inflammable. Gilfoyle did not
know that the Hyperfilm studio had burned to the ground before he saw
Kedzie's picture in Chicago. But he blithely left that city to its fate
and sped eastward.