Kedzie was paralyzed. Mrs. Thropp was inspired. Unity of purpose guided
her true. She had told her daughter to ignore Gilfoyle as an unimportant
detail. She certainly did not intend to substitute a couple of crude
parents as a new handicap.
No one knew Mrs. Thropp's cheapness of appearance better than she did.
A woman may grow shoddy and careless, but she rarely grows oblivious
of her uncomeliness. She will rather cherish it as the final cruelty of
circumstances. Mrs. Thropp was keenly alive to the effect it would have
on Dyckman if Kedzie introduced her and Adna as the encumbrances on her
beauty.
Adna, hearing the door-bell and Dyckman's entrance, returned to the
living-room from the bathroom, where he had taken refuge. He stood in
the hall now behind the puzzled Dyckman.
There was a dreadful silence for a moment. Jim spoke, shyly:
“Hello, Anita! How are you?”
“Hello, Jim!” Kedzie stammered. “This is--”
“I'm the janitor's wife,” said Mrs. Thropp. “My husband had to come up
to see about the worter not running in the bathroom, and I came along
to see Miss--the young lady. She's been awful good to me. Well, I'll be
gettin' along. Good night, miss. Good night, sir.”
To save herself, she could not think of Kedzie's screen name. To save
her daughter's future, she disowned her. She pushed past Dyckman, and
silencing the stupefied Adna with a glare, swept him out through the
dining-room into the kitchen.
It amazed Mrs. Thropp to find a kitchen so many flights up-stairs. The
ingenuity of the devices, the step-saving cupboard, the dry ice-box with
its coils of cold-air pipes, the gas-stove, the electric appliances,
were like wonderful new toys to her.
Adna was as comfortable as a cow in a hammock, and she would have sent
him away, but his hat was in the hall and she dared not go for it.
Besides, she wanted to wait long enough to learn the outcome of Kedzie's
adventure with Dyckman.
As soon as he was alone with Kedzie, Jim had taken her into his
arms. She blushed with an unwonted timidity in a new sense of the
forbiddenness of her presence there.
Her upward glance showed her that Jim had been in trouble, too. His jaw
had a mottled look, and one eyebrow was a trifle mashed.
“What on earth has happened to you?” she gasped.
“Oh, I had a little run-in with a fellow.”
“What about?” said Kedzie.
“Nothing much.”
“He must have hurt you terribly.”
“Think so? Well, you ought to see him.”
“What was it all about?”
“Oh, just a bit of an argument.”
“Who was he?”
“Nobody you know.”
“You mean it's none of my business?”
“I wouldn't put it that way, honey. I'd just rather not talk about it.”
Kedzie felt rebuffed and afraid. He had spent an evening away from her
and had reappeared with scars from a battle he would not describe. She
would have been still more terrified if she had known that he had fought
as the cavalier of Charity Coe Cheever. She would have been somewhat
reassured if she had known that Jim smarted less under the bruises of
Cheever's fists than under the rebuke he had had from Charity for his
interference in her marital crisis.
Jim was the more in need of Kedzie's devotion for being discarded again
by Charity. The warmth in Kedzie's greeting was due to her fear
of losing him. But he did not know that. He only knew that she was
exceedingly cordial to him, and it was his nature to repay cordiality
with usury.
He noted, however, that Kedzie's warmth had an element of anxiety. He
asked her what was worrying her, but she would not answer.
At length he made his usual remark. It had become a sort of standing
joke for him to say, “When do we marry?”
She always answered, “Give me a little more time.” But to-night when
he laughed, “Well, just to get the subject out of the way, when do we
marry?” Kedzie did not make her regular answer. Her pretty face was
suddenly darkened with pain. She moaned: “Never, I guess. Never, I'm
afraid.”
“What's on your mind, Anita?”
She hesitated, but when he repeated his query she took the plunge and
told him the truth.
Her mother had pleaded just a little too well. If Mrs. Thropp had begged
Kedzie to do the right thing for the right's sake Kedzie would have
felt the natural reaction daughters feel toward motherly advice. But
the entreaty to do evil that evil might come of it aroused even more
resistance, issuing as it did from maternal lips that traditionally give
only holy counsel. It had a more reforming effect on Kedzie's crooked
plans than all the exhortations of all the preachers in the world could
have had.
Kedzie turned to honesty because it seemed the less horrible of two
evils. She assumed the role of a little penitent, and made Jim Dyckman a
father confessor. She told her story as truthfully as she could tell it
or feel it. She was too sincere to be just.
She made herself the martyr that she felt herself to be. She wept
plentifully and prettily, with irresistible gulps and swallowings of
lumps and catches of breath, fetches of sobs, and dartings and gleamings
of pearls from her shining eyelids. Her handkerchief was soon a little
wad of wet lace, ridiculously pathetic; her lips were blubbered. She
wept on and on till she just had to blow her little red nose. She blew
it with exquisite candor, and it gave forth the heartbreaking squawk of
the first toy trumpet a child breaks of a Christmas morning.
One radical difference between romance and realism is that in romance
the heroines weep from the eyelashes out; in realism, some of the tears
get into the nostrils. In real life it is reality that moves our hearts,
and Dyckman was convinced by Kedzie's realism.
She did not need to tell him of her humble and Western birth. He had
recognized her accent from the first, and forgiven it. He knew a little
of her history, because Charity Coe had sent him to the studio to look
her up, reminding him that she had been the little dancer he pulled out
of Mrs. Noxon's pool.
At length Kedzie revealed the horrible fact that her real name was
Kedzie Thropp. He laughed aloud. He was so tickled by her babyish
remorse that he made her say it again. He told her he loved it twice as
well as the stilted, stagy “Anita Adair.”
“That's one of the reasons I wanted you to marry me,” he said, “so that
I could change your horrible name.”
“But I changed it myself first,” Kedzie howled; and now the truth
came ripping. “The day after you pulled me out of the pool at Newport
I--I--married a fellow named Tommie Gilfoyle.”
Dyckman's smile was swept from his face; his chuckle ended in a groan.
Kedzie's explanation was a little different from the one she gave her
parents. Unconsciously she tuned it to her audience. It grew a trifle
more literary.
“What could I do? I was alone in the world, without friends or money
or position. He happened to be at the railroad station. He saw how
frightened I was, and he had loved me for a long time. He begged me
to take mercy on him and on myself, and marry him. He offered me his
protection; he said I should be his wife in name only until I learned to
love him. And I was alone in the world, without friends or money--but I
told you that once, didn't I?”
Dyckman was thinking hard, aching hard. He mumbled, “What became of
him?”
“When he saw that I couldn't love him he took some money I had left from
my earnings and abandoned me. I had a desperate struggle to get
along, and then I got my chance in the moving pictures, and I met you
there--and--learned what love is--too late--too late!”
Dyckman broke in on her lyric grief, “What became of the man you
married?”
“He never came near me till awhile ago. He saw my pictures on the screen
and thought I must be making a big lot of money. He came here and tried
to sneak back into my good graces. He even tried to kiss me, and I
nearly tore his eyes out.”
“Why?” Jim asked.
“Because I belong to nobody but you--at least, I did belong to nobody
but you. But now you won't want me any more. I don't blame you for
hating me. I hate myself. I've deceived you, and you'll never believe me
again, or love me, or anything.”
She wept ardently, for she was appalled by the magnitude of her
deception, now that it stood exposed. She had no idea of the magnitude
of Dyckman's chivalry. She slipped to the floor and laid her head on his
knee.
It was Dyckman's nature to respond at once to any appeal to his sympathy
or his courtesy. Automatically his heart warmed toward human distress.
He felt a deeper interest in Kedzie than before, because she threw
herself on his mercy as never before. His hand went out to her head and
fell upon her hair with a kind of apostolic benediction. He poured, as
it were, an ointment of absolution and acceptance upon her curls.
She felt in his very fingers so much reassurance that she was encouraged
to unburden herself altogether of her hoard of secrets.
“There's one more awful thing you'll never forgive me for, Jim. I want
to tell you that, and then you'll know all the worst of me. My father
and mother came to town to-day, and--and that was my mother who said she
was the janitor's wife.”
“Why did she do that?” said Jim.
“I had been telling them how much I loved you, and poor dear mother was
afraid you might be scared away if you knew how poor my people are.”
“What kind of a ghastly snob do they take me for?” Jim growled.
“They don't know you as I do,” said Kedzie; “but even I can't expect you
to forgive everything. I've lied to you about everything except about
loving you, and I was a long while telling you the truth about that. But
now you know all there is to know about me, and I wouldn't blame you
for despising me. Of course I don't expect you to want to marry me any
longer, so I'll give you back your beautiful engagement ring.”
With her arms across his knees, one of her delicate hands began to draw
from the other a gold circlet knobbed with diamonds.
“Don't do that,” Jim said, taking her hands in his. “The engagement
stands.”
“But how can it, darling?” said Kedzie. “You can't love me any more.”
“Of course I do, more and more.”
“But you can never marry me, and surely you don't want--”
Suddenly she ran plump into the situation her mother had imagined and
encouraged. She blushed at the collision with it, and became a very
allegory of innocence confronted with abhorrent evil.
“Of course I don't,” said Dyckman, divining exactly what she meant.
“I'll find this Gilfoyle and buy him up or beat him to a pulp.”
Kedzie lifted her downcast eyes in gratitude for such a godlike
resolution. But before she could cry out in praise of it she cried out
in terror.
For right before her stood the long-lost Gilfoyle.