little talk with you and my voice is weak.”
Kedzie was alarmed enough to revert to a simple phrase; “I'm awfully
sorry you're sick. Are you very sick?”
“Very. There's such a lot of me, you know. It's disgusting. I've scared
my poor husband to death. I'm glad Jim isn't here to be worried. I hope
I'll not have to send for him. But I'd like to.”
Kedzie felt a little quiver of alarm. She did not quite want Jim to
come back just yet. She had grown used to his absence. His return would
deprive poor Jakie of solace.
Mrs. Dyckman took Kedzie's hand and stared at her sadly.
“You're looking a little tired, my dear, if you'll forgive me for being
frank. I'm very old and I very much want you and Jim to win out. Lying
here I take things too anxiously, I suppose, but--I'm frightened. I
don't want my boy and you to go the way so many other couples do. He's
left you because his country needed him, or thought it did. It wouldn't
look well to have him come back and find that in his absence you had
forgotten him. Now, would it?”
“Why, Mrs. Dyckman!” Kedzie gasped, getting her hand away.
Mrs. Dyckman groped for it and took it back. “Don't be vexed. Or if you
must be, pout as you used to. You mustn't grow hard, my child. Your type
of beauty doesn't improve with cynicism. You must think sweet thoughts
or simply be petulant when you're angry. Don't grow hard! If nothing
else will move you let me appeal to your pride. You are traveling with
a hard crowd, a cruel pack, Miss Bettany's pack, and a silly lot of men
like Jake Vanderveer. And you mustn't, my child. You just mustn't get
hard and brazen. Couldn't you give up Miss Bettany? She's an absolutely
unprincipled creature. She's bad, and you must know it. Don't you?”
Kedzie could not answer, or would not. Mrs. Dyckman's voice grew
poignant.
“I've lived so long and seen so much unhappiness. There is so much
tragedy across the water. My poor daughter has had a cable that her
husband's brother has been killed in France. Her husband has been
wounded; she is sailing back. So many men, so many, many men are dying.
The machine-guns go like scythes all day long, and the poor fellows lie
out there in the shrapnel rain--Oh, it is unbelievable. And Europe's
women are undergoing such endless sorrow; every day over there the lists
contain so many names. So many of Cicely's friends have perished. Life
never was so full of sorrow, my dear, but it is such a noble sorrow that
it seems as if nobody, had any right to any other kind of sorrow.
“You are young, dear child. You are lonely and restless; but you don't
realize how loathsome it is to other people to see such recklessness
going on over here while such lofty souls are going to death in droves
over there. The sorrow you will bring on yourself and all of us, and
on poor Jim, will be such a hateful sorrow, my dear, such an unworthy
grief!”
Kedzie choked, and mumbled, “I don't think I know what you mean.”
Mrs. Dyckman petted her hand: “I don't think you do. I hope not. But
take an old woman's word for it, be--be Caesar's wife?”
“Caesar's wife?” Kedzie puzzled. “What did she do?”
“It was what she didn't do. Well, I haven't the strength--or the right,
perhaps--to tell you any more. Yes, I will. I must say this much. You
are the subject of very widespread criticism, and Jim is being pitied.”
“Me criticized? Jim pitied? Why? For what?”
“For the things you do, my dear, the places you go, and the hours you
keep--and the friends you keep.”
“That's disgusting!” Kedzie snarled. “The long-tongued gossips! They
ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
Mrs. Dyckman's fever began to mount. She dropped Kedzie's hand and
tugged at the coverlet.
“You'd better go, my dear. I apologize. It's useless! When did age ever
gain anything by warning youth? I'm an old fool, and you're a young one.
And nothing will stop your ambition to run through life to the end of it
and get all you can out of it.”
Kedzie felt dismissed and rose in bewildered anger. Mrs. Dyckman heaved
herself to one elbow and pointed her finger at Kedzie.
“But keep away from Jake Vanderveer! and Pet Bettany! or--or--Send my
nurse, please.”
She fell back gasping and Kedzie flew, in a fear that the old lady would
die of a stroke and Kedzie be blamed for it forever. Kedzie was so blue
and terrified that she had to send for Jake Vanderveer to keep from
going crazy. He told her that the market was still on the climb, and
that her sympathy had saved his life. He had been desperate enough for
suicide when he met her, and now he was one of the rising little suns of
finance.
Mrs. Dyckman did not die, but she did not get well, and Jim's father
wrote him that he'd better resign and come home. It would do his mother
a world of good, and he was doing the country no good down there.
Jim was alarmed; he wrote out his resignation and submitted it to his
colonel, who showed him a new order from the War Department announcing
that no more resignations would be accepted except on the most urgent
grounds. Idleness was destroying the Guard faster than a campaign. Jim
returned to the doldrums with a new resentment. He was a prisoner now.
He had gone to Texas to find war and his wife to Newport to find gaiety.
She found much more than that. On October 7th the old town was stirred
by something genuinely new in sensations--the arrival of a German war
submarine, the U-53.
THE FOURTH BOOK
THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS
CHAPTER I
A freight submarine, the _Bremen_, had recently excited the wonderment
of a world jaded with miracles by crossing from Helgoland to Norfolk
with a cargo. But here was a war-ship that dived underneath the British
blockade.
The dead of the Lusitania were still unrequited and unburied, but
the Germans had graciously promised President Wilson to sink no more
passenger-ships without warning, and they had been received back into
the indulgence of the super-patient neutrals.
And now came the under-sea boat to test American hospitality. It was
received with amazed politeness and the news flew through Newport,
bringing the people flocking like children. An American submarine
conducted its guest to anchorage. Mail for the ambassador was put
ashore and courtesy visits were exchanged with the commandant of the
Narragansett Bay Naval Station. In three hours the vessel, not to
overstay the bounds of neutral hospitality, returned to the ocean.
A flotilla of American destroyers convoyed it outside and calmly watched
while the monster halted nine ships off Nantucket, graciously permitted
their crews and passengers to take themselves, but no belongings, into
open boats; then torpedoed the vessels one after another.
The destroyers of the United States Navy stood by like spectators on the
bleachers, and when the submarine had quite finished the supply of ships
the obliging destroyers picked up the fragments in the open boats and
brought them ashore. And the U-53 went on unchecked, after one of the
most astounding spectacles in the history of the sea.
Charity Coe and other women waited on the docks till midnight arranging
refuge for more than two hundred victims. It was a novel method for
getting into Newport mansions. Even Kedzie took in an elderly couple.
She tried to get a few young men, but they were all taken.
The next morning there was a panic in Wall Street and nearly two million
shares were flung overboard, with a loss of five hundred million dollars
in market values. Marine insurance-rates rose from a hundred to five
hundred per cent. and it seemed that our ocean trade would be driven
from the free seas. But everything had been done according to the
approved etiquette for U-boats, and there was not even an official
protest.
Once more the Germans announced that they had wrecked the British naval
supremacy, as in the battle of Jutland, after which glorious victory the
German fleet appeared no more in the North Sea.
Nor was there any check in the throngs of merchant-vessels shuttling the
ocean for the Allies. And that disgusted the Germans. Their promises
to Mr. Wilson irked them. They lusted again for their old policy of
“ruthlessness”; “_Schrecklichkeit_” joined “_Gott strafe_” in familiar
speech, and Germany added America to her “Hymn of Hate.” Strange, that
among all the warring peoples the one nation that went to battle with
the most fervent religious spirit, even putting “_Gott mit uns_” on the
uniforms of its soldiers, that nation contributed to the slang of the
day no nobler phrases than “_Schrecklichkeit_” and “_strafe_” and the
equivalents of “scrap of paper” and “Hymn of Hate.”
All this meant little to Kedzie except that Jakie Vanderveer, who had
been her devoted squire for some time, was caught and ruined in the
market slump. Otherwise he might have ruined Kedzie, for he had been
dazzling her more and more with his lavish courtship. When he lost his
money he left Newport and Kedzie never knew how narrow an escape she
had. She only knew that she did not make the money he promised to make
for her. She said that war was terrible.
A pious soul would have credited Providence with the rescue. But
Providence had other plans. One of the victims of the U-53 was a young
English aviator, the Marquess of Strathdene. If the U-53 had not sunk
the ship that carried him Kedzie would have had an exceedingly different
future.
Strathdene had been a spendthrift, a libertine, and a loafer till
the war shook England. He had been well shaken, too, and unsuspected
emotions were aroused. He had learned to fly and insulted the law of
gravity with the same impudence he had shown for the laws of morality.
In due time he was joined to an air squadron. He risked his life every
moment he was aloft, but the danger became a negligible thing in the
thrill of the liveliest form of big-game hunting thus far known to man.
In mid-sky he stalked his prey and was stalked by it; he chased German
Taubes or was chased by them into clouds and out of them, up hill and
down dale in ether-land amid the showers from below of the raining
aircraft guns. Strathdene knew how to dodge and duck, turn somersaults,
volplane, spiral, coast downward on an invisible toboggan-slide, or
climb into heaven on an airy stair.
The sky was full of such flocks; the gallant American gentlemen who
made up the Escadrille Lafayette went clouding with him, and Mr. Robert
Lorraine, the excellent actor, and Mr. Vernon Castle, the amiable
revolutionist of the dance, and many and many another eagle heart.
Strathdene scouted valuably during the first battle of the Somme, his
companion working the gun or the camera or the bomb-dropping lever as
the need might be.
And then one day a burst of shrapnel from the remote earth shattered his
plane and him. A slug of iron went upward through his hip and another
nicked off a bit of his shoulder. But he brought his wounded machine
safely to earth and toppled into the arms of the hospital aids; went
backward in a motor-ambulance to a receiving-station, then back in a
train, then across the Channel, then across the ocean in a steamer to
be sunk by a submarine and brought ashore in a lifeboat. Strathdene had
pretty well tested the modern systems of vehicular transportation.
The surgeons mended his wounds, but his nerves had felt the shrapnel.
That was why the sea voyage had been advised. Strathdene seemed to have
a magnetic gift for adventure. An aircraft gun brought him down from the
clouds and a submersible ship came up from the deeps to have a try at
him. Before long Kedzie would be saying that fate had taken all this
trouble just to bring him and her together.
In the transfer from the ship to the lifeboat Strathdene's wounds were
wrenched and his sufferings renewed. He was lucky enough to fall into
the hands of Charity Coe Cheever. She was a war nurse of experience,
and he was soon well enough to try to flirt with her. But she had been
experienced also in the amorous symptoms of convalescent soldiers and
she repressed his ardor skilfully. She put an ice-cap on his heart and
head.
As soon as he was up and about again he met Kedzie. It seemed to be her
business to take away from Charity Coe all of Charity's conquests, and
the young Marquess found her hospitable to his hunger for friendship.
Before the first day's acquaintance was over Kedzie was as fascinated by
his chatter as Desdemona was by Othello's anecdotes.
One night Kedzie dreamed that she was a Marquessess or whatever the wife
of a Marquess would be styled.
Kedzie was herself again. Kedzie was dreaming again. She had an ambition
for something higher than her station. She made haste to encourage the
infatuated Marquess. Counting upon winning him somehow as her husband,
she gave him encouragement beyond any she had given her other swains.
But Strathdene had no intention of marrying her or any other woman. His
heart was in the highlands, the cloudlands; his heart was not there.
A purer patriot or a warrior more free of any taint of caution than
Strathdene could not be imagined, but otherwise he was as arrant a scamp
as ever. While he waited for strength to “carry on” in the brave,
new, English sense, it amused him to “carry on” in the mischievous old
American sense.
Kedzie was determined that he should live long enough for her to
free herself from Jim and make the marquisate hers. She seemed to be
succeeding. She found Strathdene as easy of fascination as her old movie
audiences had been. He even tried to write poetry about her pout; but he
was a better rider on an aeroplane than on Pegasus.
Kedzie was soon wishing for Jim's return, since she could not see how to
divorce him till he appeared. She tried to frame a letter asking for
her release, but it was not easy writing. She felt that she would have a
better chance of success if Jim were within wheedling distance. But Jim
remained away, and Kedzie grew fonder and fonder of her Marquess, and he
of her.
Perhaps they were really mated, their pettinesses and selfishnesses
peculiarly complemental. In any case, they were mutually bewitched.
Their dalliance became the talk of Newport. Everybody believed that what
was bad enough at best was even worse than it was. Charity Coe heard the
couple discussed everywhere. She was distressed on Jim's account. And
now she found herself in just the plight that had tortured Jim when he
knew that Peter Cheever was disloyal to Charity and longed to tell her,
but felt the duty too odious. So Charity pondered her own obligation.
She was tempted to write Jim an anonymous letter, but had not the
cowardice. She was tempted to write to him frankly, but had not the
courage. She did at last what Jim had done--nothing.
Jim's mother had heard of Vanderveer's disappearance from Kedzie's
entourage and she had improved with hope. When she learned that
Strathdene was apparently infatuated she grew worse and telegraphed Jim
to ask for a leave of absence. She did not tell Kedzie of her telegram
or of Jim's answer.
Pet Bettany flatly accused Kedzie of being guilty, and referred to the
Marquess as her paramour. When Kedzie furiously resented her insolence
Pet laughed.
“The more fool you, if you carry the scandal and lose the fun.”
Kedzie was more afraid of Pet's contempt than of a better woman's. She
began to think herself a big fool for not having been a bigger one.
She fell into an altogether dangerous mood and she could no longer save
herself. She almost prayed to be led into temptation. The unuttered
prayer was speedily answered.
She went motoring with Strathdene late one night in a car he had hired.
When he ventured to plead with her not to go back to her home where her
servants provided a kind of chaperonage, she made only a formal protest
or two. He stopped at a roadside inn, a secluded place well known for
its unquestioning hospitality.
Strathdene, tremulous with victory, led Kedzie to the dining-room for a
bit of sup and sip. The landlord escorted them to a nook in a corner and
beckoned a waiter. Kedzie was studying the bill of fare with blurred
and frightened vision when she heard the footsteps of the waiter plainly
audible in the quiet room. They had a curious rhythm. There was a hitch
in the step, a skip.
Her heart stopped as if it had run into a tree. The “skip” brought down
on her soul a whole five-foot shelf of remembrances of her first New
York love-affair with the lame waiter in the bakery. All her good
fortune had been set in motion by poor, old, shabby “Skip.” She had
soared away like some rainbow-hued bubble gently releasing itself from
the day pipe that inflated it out of the suds of its origin.
Kedzie had learned to be ashamed of Skip as long ago as when she was a
Greek dancer. She had not seen or heard of him since she sent him the
insulting answer to his stage-door note. And now he had saved himself
up for a ruinous reappearance when she was in the company of a
Marquess--and on such an errand!
What on earth was Skip doing so far from the Bronx and in the environs
of Newport, of all places? It occurred to Kedzie that Skip might ask her
the same question.
CHAPTER II
The terror his footsteps inspired was confirmed by the unforgetable
voice that came across her icy shoulder-blades. He slapped the china and
silver down with the familiar bravura of a quick-lunch waiter, and her
heart sank, remembering that she had once admired his skill.
The Marquess looked up at him with a glare of rebuke as Skip posed
himself patiently with one hand, knuckles down, on the table, the other
on his hip, and demanded, with misplaced enthusiasm:
“Well, folks, what's it goin' to be?”
The Marquess had been somewhat democratized by his life in the army,
and, being a true Briton, he always expected the worst in America. He
proceeded to order a light supper that would not take too long. Skip
crushed him by saying:
“Ain't the little lady takin' nothin'?”
Kedzie was afraid to speak. She put her finger on the menu at a
chafing-dish version of chicken, and the Marquess added it to his order.
Skip shuffled away without recognizing Kedzie. She waited only for his
exit to make her own.
It was terrifying enough to realize that the moment Skip caught a
glimpse of her he would hail her noisily and tell the Marquess all about
her. There still lingered in Kedzie a little more honesty than snobbery
and she felt even less dread of being “bawled out” by a waiter in the
presence of a Marquess than of having Skip Magruder know that she was
in such a place even with a Marquess. Skip had been good to her and had
counseled her to go straight.
She felt no gratitude toward him now, but she could not face his
contempt. That would be degradation beneath degradation. She was
disgusted with everything and everybody, including herself. The glamour
of the escapade was dissipated. The excitement of an illicit amour so
delicious in so many farces, so tenderly dramatic in so many novels, had
curdled. She saw what an ugly business she was in and she was revolted.
Kedzie waited only to hear the swinging door whiff after Skip's
syncopated feet, then she whispered sharply across the table to the
Marquess:
“Take me out of this awful place. I don't know what I'm doing here. I
won't stay! not a moment!”
“But we've ordered--”
“You stay and eat, then. I won't stop here another minute!”
She rose. She smothered the Marquess's protests about the awkwardness,
the ludicrousness of such a flight.
“What will the waiter think?” he asked, being afraid of a waiter, though
of no one else.
Kedzie did not care what the waiter thought, so long as he did not
know whom he thought it of. Strathdene gave the headwaiter a bill and
followed Kedzie out. He was hungry, angry, and puzzled.
Skip Magruder never knew what a chaperon he had been. If Providence
managed the affair it chose an odd instrument, and intervened, as usual,
at the last moment. Providence would save itself a good deal of work if
it came round a little earlier in these cases. Perhaps it does and finds
nobody awake.
Strathdene demanded explanations. Kedzie told him truth but not all of
it.
“It suddenly swept over me,” she gasped, “how horrible it was for me to
be there.”
She wept with shame and when he would have consoled her she kept him
aloof. The astonishing result of the outing was that both came home
better. It suddenly swept over Strathdene that Kedzie was innocenter
than he had dreamed. She was good! By gad! she was good enough to be the
wife even of a Strathdene. He told Kedzie that he wished to God he could
marry her. She answered fervently that she wished to God he could.
He asked her “You don't really love that Dyckman fella, do you?”
“I don't really love anybody but you,” said Kedzie. “You are the first
man I have really truly loved.”
She meant it and it may have been true. She said it with sincerity at
least. One usually does. At any rate, it sounded wonderful to Strathdene
and he determined to make her his. He would let England muddle along
somehow till he made this alliance with the beautiful Missourienne. But
Kedzie's plight was again what it had been; she had a husband extra. In
some cases the husband is busy enough with his own affairs to let the
lover trot alongside, like the third horse which the Greeks called the
_pareoros_. But neither Jim nor Strathdene would be content with that
sort of team-work, and Kedzie least of all.
She and Strathdene agreed that love would find the way, and Kedzie
suggested that Jim would probably be decent enough to arrange the whole
matter. He had an awfully clever lawyer, too.
Strathdene had braved nearly every peril in life except marriage. He was
determined to take a shy at that. He and Kedzie talked their honeymoon
plans with the boyishness and girlishness of nineteen and sixteen.
Then Kedzie remembered Gilfoyle. She had thanked her stars that she told
Dyckman the truth about him in time. And now she was confronted with the
same situation. Since her life was repeating its patterns, it would be
foolish to ignore the lessons. So after some hesitation she told the
Marquess that Jim Dyckman was not her first, but her second. She told it
very tragically, made quite a good story of it.
But the Marquess had been intrepid enough to laugh when, out of a large
woolly cloud a mile aloft, a German flying-machine had suddenly charged
him at a hundred miles an hour. He was calm enough now to laugh at the
menace of Kedzie's past rushing out of the pink cloud about her.
“The more the merrier,” he said. “The third time's the charm.”
He sighed when he was alone and thought it rather shabby that Cupid
should land him at last with a second-handed, a third-hearted arrow.
But, after all, these were war times and Economy was the universal
watchword. The arrow felt very cozy.
CHAPTER III
Unselfishness is an acquired art. Children rarely have it. That is
why the Greeks represented love of a certain kind as a boy, selfish,
treacherous, ingratiating, blind to appearances, naif, gracefully
ruthless.
Kedzie and Strathdene were enamoured of each other. They were both
zealots for experience, restless and reckless in their zest of life.
As soon as they were convinced of their love, every restraint became an
illegal restraint, illegal because they felt that only the law of love
had jurisdiction over them.
When Kedzie received a telegram from Jim that he had secured a leave of
absence for thirty days and would be in Newport in four she felt
cruelly used. She forgot how she had angled for Jim and hustled him into
matrimony.
She was afraid of him now. She thought of him as many women in captured
cities once regarded and have recently again regarded the triumphing
enemy as one who would count beauty the best part of the booty.
Her loyalty to Strathdene was compromised, her delicacy was horrified.
She was distraught with her plight.
She had to tell the news to Strathdene and he went into frenzies of
jealousy. She had pledged herself to be his as soon as she could lift
the Dyckman mortgage. If a man is ever going to be jealous he should
certainly find occasion for the passion when he is betrothed to the wife
of a returning soldier. Strathdene ought to have been on his way back to
the aviation-camp, but he had earned the right to humor his nerves, and
Kedzie was testing them beyond endurance.
It was a tragical-comical dilemma for Kedzie. Even she, with her
gift for self-forgiveness, could not quite see how she was to explain
prettily to her husband that in his absence she had fallen in love with
another man. Wives are not supposed to fall in love while their husbands
are at the wars. It has been done, but it is hard to prettify.
Kedzie beat her forehead in vain for a good-looking explanation. She was
still hunting one when Jim came back. He telegraphed her that he would
come right through to Newport, and asked her to meet him at the train.
She dared not refuse. She simply could not keep her glib promises to
Strathdene. It seemed almost treason to the country for a wife to give
her warrior a cold welcome after his tropical service. She met him at
the Newport station. He was still in uniform. He had taken no other
clothes to Texas with him and had not stopped to buy any. He was too
anxious about his mother to pause in New York. He had telegraphed his
tailor to fit him out and his valet to pack his things and bring them to
Newport.
Kedzie found him very brown and gaunt, far taller even than she
remembered. She was more afraid of him than ever. Strathdene was only
a little taller than she. She was afraid to tell Jim that she was
another's.
But she made a poor mimicry of perfect bliss. Jim was not critical. She
was more beautiful than he remembered her. He told her so, and she was
flattered by his courtship, miserably treacherous as she felt.
She was proud to be a soldier's wife. She was jealous now of his concern
for his mother. He had to go see her first. He was surprised to learn
that Kedzie was not living with her. His mother had begun to improve
from the moment she had Jim's telegram. But her eyes on Kedzie were
terrible.
Jim did not notice the tension. He was too happy. He was sick of
soldiering. His old uniform was like a convict's stripes. He was
childishly ambitious to get into long trousers again. For nearly half a
year he had buttoned his breeches at the knee and housed his calves in
puttees and his feet in army brogans.
It was like a Christmas morning among new toys for him to put on mufti,
and take it off. A bath-tub full of hot water was a paradise regained.
Evening clothes with a big white shirt and a top-hat were robes of
ascension. But the clothes made to his old measurements were worlds too
wide for his shrunk shanks. He had lost tons, he said, in Texas.
Before daybreak the first morning he terrified his cellmate, Kedzie, by
starting up in his sleep with a gasp: “Was that reveille? My God, I'll
be late!”
The joy of finding himself no longer in a tent and of falling back
on his pillow was worth the bad dream. Life was one long bad dream to
Kedzie. She was guilty whichever way she turned, and afraid of both men.
Jim had a valet to wait on him. He had the problem of selecting his
scarf and his socks for the morning. Jim had come into a lot of money.
He had been earning a bank clerk's salary, with no way of spending it.
And now he had a bank to spend and a plenty of places to throw it.
But it was hard for him to believe that he was a free man again. He was
amazed to find Newport without cactus and without a scorpion. He kept
looking for a scorpion on his pillow. He found one there, but did not
recognize her.
Jim was as much of a parvenu in Newport as Kedzie had ever been. He
swept her away at times by his juvenile enthusiasm and she neglected
Strathdene atrociously for a week.
A large part of the colony had decamped for New York and Boston and
Chicago, but those that remained made a throng for Jim. His mother was
not well enough to be moved back to New York, but his sister had reached
England safely and he was happy in his luxuries.
But he was the only one that was. His mother was bitter against Kedzie
for having fed the gossips. Kedzie was assured that life with Jim had
nothing new to offer and she resented him as a barrier between herself
and the glory of her future with Strathdene and “the stately homes of
England.”
Her mother and father arrived in Newport. Kedzie tried to suppress
them for fear that Strathdene might feel that they were the last two
back-breaking straws. But she needed a confidante and she told her
mother the situation.
Mrs. Thropp, like Kedzie, had an ambition that expanded as fast as
opportunity allowed. She was dazzled by the thought of being elevated to
the peerage. She supposed it made her a relative of royalty. She who
had once dreamed of being neighborly with the great Mrs. Dyckman was now
imagining herself exchanging crocheting formulas with Queen Mary. She
was saying she had always heard the Queen well spoke of. And Adna Thropp
spoke very highly of “George.”
They agreed that it was their sacred duty to place the name of Thropp as
high as it could go, cost what it would.
“After all,” said Adna one day, looking up from an article in a Sunday
paper--“after all, why ain't Thropp as likely a name as Wettin? Or
Hohenzollern? And what was Romanoff but an ordinary family once?”
The only thing that seemed to stand in Kedzie's way was the odious name
of Dyckman.
“What's Dyckman, anyway?” said Mrs. Thropp. “Nothin' but a common old
Dutch name.”
But how to shake it off was the problem. Kedzie had to cling to
Strathdene with one hand while she tried to release herself from the
Dyckmans with the other.
She had a dreadful feeling that she might lose them both if she were not
exceedingly careful and exceedingly lucky.
Help came to her unexpectedly from Charity Coe, unexpectedly, though
Charity was always helping Kedzie.
CHAPTER IV
Charity Coe had been tormented by the spectacle of her friend's wife
flirting recklessly with the young Marquess of Strathdene while her
husband was at the Border with the troops. But she was far more sharply
wrung when she saw Kedzie flirting with her husband, playing the devoted
wife with all her might and getting away with it to perfection.
There is hardly anything our eyes bring us that is more hideous than
known disloyalty successfully masquerading as fidelity. The Judas kiss
is not to be surpassed in human detestation.
With almost all the world in uniform, Newport welcomed the sight of
one of her own men returned even from what was rather a siesta than a
campaign, and old Mrs. Noxon insisted on giving a big party for Jim.
She insisted so strongly that Kedzie did not dare refuse, though she had
vowed never to step inside the grounds where she had made her Newport
debut as a hired nymph.
Charity tried to escape by alleging a journey to New York, but Mrs.
Noxon browbeat her into staying. Charity did not know that Strathdene
was invited till she saw him come in with the crowd. Neither did Kedzie.
Old Mrs. Noxon may have invited him for spite against Kedzie or just as
an international courtesy to the most distinguished foreigner in town.
She introduced Jim and the Marquess, saying, “You great warriors should
know each other.”
Jim felt sheepish because he had been to no war and Strathdene felt
sheepish because Jim was so much taller than he. He looked up at him as
Napoleon looked enviously up at men who had no glory but their altitude.
Strathdene was also sheepish because Jim said, very simply:
“Do you know my wife?”
If he had not been so tall that he saw only the top of Kedzie's coiffure
he would have seen that her face was splashed with red. She mumbled
something while Strathdene stammered, “Er--yes--I have had that
privilege.” He felt a sinking sensation as deadly as when he had his
first fall at the aviation school.
Kedzie dragged Jim away and paid violent attention to him all through
dinner. Her sympathy was entirely for her poor Strathdene. She was
afraid he would commit suicide or return to England without her, and
she could not imagine how to get rid of Jim. Then she caught sight of
Charity Coe, and greeted her with a smile of sincere delight.
For once Kedzie loved Charity. Suddenly it came upon her what a
beautiful solution it would be for everybody if Jim could take Charity
and leave Kedzie free to take Strathdene. She told herself that Jim
would be ever so much happier so, for the poor fellow would suffer
terribly when he found that his Kedzie really could not pretend to love
him any longer. Kedzie felt quite tearful over it. She was an awfully
good-hearted little thing. To turn him over to Charity would be a
charming arrangement, perfectly decent, and no harm to anybody. If only
the hateful laws did not forbid the exchange--dog-on 'em, anyway!
The more Kedzie studied Charity the more suitable she seemed as a
successor. Her heart warmed to her and she forced an opportunity to
unload Jim on Charity immediately after dinner.
There was music for the encouragement of conversation, an expensively
famous prima donna and a group of strings brought down from the Boston
Symphony Orchestra.
The prima donna sang Donna Elvira's ferocious aria full of indignation
at discovering Don Giovanni's Don Juanity.
Charity, noting that Kedzie had flitted straight to Strathdene and was
trying to appease his cold rage, felt an envy of the prima donna,
who was enabled to express her feelings at full lung power with the
fortissimo reinforcement of several powerful musicians. The primeval
woman in Charity longed for just such a howling prerogative, but the
actual Charity was so cravenly well-bred that she dared not even say to
her dearest friend, “Jim, old man, you ought to go over and wring the
neck of that little cat of yours.”
Jim sat beaming at Kedzie and Kedzie beamed back while she murmured
sweet everythings to her little Marquess. Jim seemed to imagine that he
had left her in such a pumpkin shell as Mr. Peter P. Pumpkineater left
his wife in, and kept her so very well. But Kedzie was not that kind of
kept or keepable woman.
Jim would have expected that if Kedzie were guilty of any spiritual
corruption it would show on her face. People will look for such things.
But she was still young and pretty and ingenuous and seemed incapable of
duplicity. And indeed such treachery was no more than a childish turning
from one toy to another. The traitors and traitresses have no more sense
of obligation than a child feels for a discarded doll.
Jim paid Charity the uncomfortable compliment of feeling enough at home
with her to say, “Well, Charity, that little wife of mine takes to the
English nobility like a duck seeing its first pond, eh?”
“She seems to be quite at her ease,” was all that Charity could say. Now
she felt herself a sharer in the wretched intrigue, as treacherous as
Kedzie, no better friend than Kedzie was wife, because with a word she
could have told Jim what he ought to have known, what he was almost the
only person in the room that did not know. Yet her jaw locked and her
tongue balked at the mere thought of telling him. She protected Kedzie,
and not Jim; felt it abominable, but could not brave the telling.
She resolved that she would rather brave the ocean and get back to
Europe where there were things she could do.
The support of all the French orphans she had adopted had made deep
inroads in her income, but her conscience felt the deeper inroads of
neglected duty.
It was like Charity to believe that she had sinned heinously when she
had simply neglected an opportunity for self-sacrifice. When other
people applauded their own benevolence if they said, “How the soldiers
must suffer! Poor fellows!” Charity felt ashamed if her sympathy were
not instantly mobilized for action.
A great impatience to be gone rendered her suddenly frantic. While she
encouraged Jim to talk of his experiences in Texas she was making her
plans to sail on the first available boat.
If the boat were sunk by a submarine or a mine, death in the strangling
seas would be preferable to any more of this drifting among the
strangling problems of a life that held no promise of happiness for her.
She felt gagged with the silence imposed upon her by the code in the
very face of Kedzie's disloyalty, a disloyalty so loathsome that seeing
was hardly believing.
It seemed inconceivable that a man or woman pledged in holy matrimony
could ever be tempted to an alien embrace. And yet she knew dozens
of people who made a sport of infidelity. Her own husband had found
temptation stronger than his pledge. She wondered how long he would be
true to Zada, or she to him. Charity had suffered the disgrace of being
insufficient for her husband's contentment, and now Jim must undergo the
same disgrace with Kedzie. It was a sort of post-nuptial jilt.
Of course Charity had no proof that Kedzie had been more than brazenly
indiscreet with Strathdene, but that very indifference to gossip, that
willingness to stir up slander, seemed so odious that nothing could be
more odious, not even the actual crime.
Besides, Charity found it hard to assume that a woman who held her good
name cheap would hold her good self less cheap, since reputation is
usually cherished longer than character.
In any case, Charity was smothering. Even Mrs. Noxon's vast drawing-room
was too small to hold her and Jim and Kedzie and Strathdene. America was
too strait to accommodate that jangling quartet.
She rose abruptly, thrust her hand out to Jim and said:
“Good night, old man. I've got to begin packing.”
“Packing for where? New York?”
“Yes, and then France.”
“I've told you before, I won't let you go.”
And then it came over him that he had no right even to be dejected and
alarmed at Charity's departure. Charity felt in the sudden relaxing of
his handclasp some such sudden check. She smiled patiently and went to
tell Kedzie good night.
Kedzie broke out, “Oh, don't go--yet!” then caught herself. She also for
quite a different reason must not regret Charity's departure. Charity
smiled a smile of terrifying comprehension, shook her head, and went her
ways.
And now Jim, released, wandered over and sat down by Kedzie just as she
was telling Strathdene the most important things.
She could not shake Jim. He would not talk to anybody else. She wished
that Charity had taken Jim with her. Strathdene was as comfortable as a
spy while Jim talked. Jim seemed so suspiciously amiable that Strathdene
wondered how much he knew.
Jim did not look like the sort of man who would know and be complacent,
but even if he were ignorant Strathdene was too outright a creature
to relish the necessity for casual chatter with the husband of his
sweetheart.
He, too, made a resolution to take the first boat available. He would
rather see a submarine than be one.
Strathdene also suddenly bolted, saying: “Sorry, but I've got to run
myself into the hangar. My doctor says I'm not to do any night flying.”
And now Kedzie was marooned with Jim. She was in a panic about
Strathdene; a fantastic jealousy assailed her. To the clandestine all
things are clandestine! What if he were hurrying away to meet Charity?
Charity returned to Kedzie's black books, and Jim joined her there.
“Let's go home,” said Kedzie, in the least honeymoony of tones.
Jim said, “All right, but why the sudden vinegar?”
“I hate people,” said Kedzie.
“Are husbands people?” said Jim.
“Yes!” snapped Kedzie.
She smiled beatifically as she wrung Mrs. Noxon's hand and perjured
herself like a parting guest. And that was the last smile Jim saw on her
fair face that night.
He wondered why women were so damned unreasonably whimsical. They may be
damned, but there is usually a reason for their apparent whims.
CHAPTER V
The next day Kedzie was still cantankerous, as it was perfectly natural
that she should be. She wanted to be a Marchioness and sail away to the
peerful sky. And she could not cut free from her anchor. The Marquess
was winding up his propeller to fly alone.
Jim, finding her the poorest of company, called on his mother. She was
well enough to be very peevish. So he left her and wandered about the
dull town. He had no car with him and he saw a racer that caught his
fancy. It had the lean, fleet look of a thoroughbred horse, and the
dealer promised that it could triple the speed limit. He went out with
a demonstrator and the car made good the dealer's word. It ran with such
zeal that Jim was warned by three different policemen on the Boston Post
Road that he would be arrested the next time he came by in such haste.
He decided to try it out again at night on other roads. He told the
dealer to fill up the tank and see to the lights. The dealer told the
garage man and the garage man said he would.
That evening at dinner Jim invited Kedzie to take a spin. She said that
she had to spend the evening with her mother, who was miserable. Jim
said, “Too bad!” and supposed that he'd better run in and say “Howdy-do”
to the poor soul. Kedzie hastily said that she would be unable to see
him. She would not even let Jim ride her over in his new buzz-wagon.
Again he made the profane comment to himself that women are
unreasonable. Again this statement was due to ignorance of an excellent
reason.
Kedzie had tried all day to get in touch with Strathdene. When she
ran him down at length by telephone he was dismally dignified and
terrifyingly patriotic. His poor country needed him and he must return.
This meant that Kedzie would lose her first and doubtless her last
chance at the marquisate. She pleaded for a conference. He assented
eagerly, but the problem was where to confer. She dared not invite him
to the house she had rented, for Jim would be there. She could not go to
Strathdene's rooms at the Hilltop Inn. She thought of the apartment she
had stowed her mother in, and asked him there. Then she telephoned her
mother to suppress dad and keep out of sight.
She was afraid to have Jim take her to her mother's address lest her
woeful luck should bring Strathdene and Jim together at the door.
That was her excellent reason for rebuffing her husband's courtesy and
setting out alone.
Her mother was only too willing to abet Kedzie's forlorn hope. It was
the forlornness of Kedzie that saved her. When Strathdene saw her in her
exquisite despair he was helpless. He was no Hun to break the heart of
so sweet a being, and he believed her when she told him that she would
die if he tried to cross the perilous ocean without her. She told him
that she would throw herself on Jim's mercy the next day and implore her
freedom. He would not refuse her, she assured him, for Jim was really
awfully generous, whatever faults he might have.
Strathdene could well believe that she would have her way with her
husband since he found her absolutely irresistible himself. The
conference lasted long, and they parted at last as Romeo and Juliet
would have parted if Juliet had been married to the County Paris before
Romeo met her.
Kedzie even promised Strathdene that she would not wait till the
morning, but would at once demand her husband's consent to the divorce.
It was only on such an understanding that Strathdene could endure to
intrust his delicate treasure to the big brute's keeping.
Kedzie entered her home with her oration all primed. But Jim was not
there. He did not come home that night. Kedzie's anxiety was not exactly
flattering, but it was sincere.
She wondered if some accident had befallen him in his new car. She
really could not bear the thought of losing another husband by a motor
accident. Suppose he should just be horribly crippled. Then she could
never divorce him.
She hated her thoughts, but she could not be responsible for them. Her
mind was like a lighthouse in a storm. It was not to blame for what wild
birds the winds brought in from the black to dash against her soul.
But Jim was neither killed nor crippled. The cards still ran for Kedzie.
CHAPTER VI
Speaking of cards, Jim was like a gambler with a new pack of them and
nobody to play with.
He darted hither and yon in his racer, childishly happy in its paces,
childishly lonely for somebody to show off before. As he ran along the
almost deserted sea road he passed the Noxon home.
He knew that Charity was visiting there. He wondered which of the
lighted windows was hers. After much backing and filling he turned in
and ran up to the steps. He got out and was about to ring the bell when
he heard a piano. He went along the piazza to a window, and, peering
in, saw Charity playing. She was alone in the music-room and very sadly
beautiful.
He tapped on the window. She was startled, rose to leave the room. He
tapped again, remembering an old signal they had had as boy and girl
lovers. She paused. He could see her smile tenderly. She came forward to
the window and stared out. He stared in. Only a pane of glass parted the
tips of their flattened noses. It was a sort of sterilized Eskimo kiss.
The window was a door. Charity opened it and invited Jim in, wondering
but strangely comforted. He invited her out. He explained about his
gorgeous new car and his loneliness and begged her to take the air.
She put back her hands to indicate her inappropriate costume, a flimsy
evening gown of brilliant color.
“Mrs. Noxon has gone out to dinner. I was to go with her, but I begged
off. I'm going to New York to-morrow, and I was blue and--”
“And so am I. I've got an extra coat in my car, and the night is mild.”
“No, I'd better not.”
“Aw, come along!”
“No-o--”
“Yes!”
“All right. I'll get a veil for my hair.”
She closed the French window and hurried away. She reappeared at the
front door and shut it stealthily after her.
“Nobody saw me go. You must get me back before Mrs. Noxon comes home, or
there'll be a scandal.”
“Depend on me!” said Jim.
Muffling their laughter like two runaways, they stole down the steps.
Her high-heeled slippers slipped and she toppled against him. She
caught him off his balance, and his arms went about her to save her
and himself. If he had been Irish, he would have said that he destroyed
himself, for she was so unexpectedly warm and silken and lithe that she
became instantly something other than the Charity he had adored as a
sad, sweet deity.
He realized that she was terribly a woman.
They were no longer boy and girl out on a gay little lark. They were a
man unhappily married and a woman unhappily unmarried, setting forth
on a wild steed for a wild ride through the reluctant autumn air. The
neighboring sea gave out the stored-up warmth of summer, and the moon
with the tilted face of a haloed nun yearned over them.
When Jim helped Charity into the car her arm seemed to burn in his palm.
He hesitated a moment, and a thought fluttered through his mind that he
ought not to hazard the adventure. But another thought chased it away,
a thought of the idiocy of being afraid, and another thought of how
impossible it was to ask her to get out and go back.
He found the coat, a heavy, short coat, and held it for her, saw her
ensconced comfortably, stepped in and closed the door softly. The car
went forward as smoothly as a skiff on a swift, smooth water.
Charity was not so solemn as Jim. She was excited and flattered by such
an unforeseen diversion breaking in on her doleful solitude.
“It's been so long since a man asked me to go buggy-riding,” she said,
“that I've forgotten how to behave. I'm getting to be a regular old
maid, Jim.”
“Huh!” was all that Jim could think of.
It was capable of many interpretations--reproof, anger at fate, polite
disbelief, deprecation.
Jim tried to run away from his peculiar and most annoying emotions. But
Charity went with him. She looked back and said:
“Funny how the moon rides after us in her white limousine.”
“Huh!” said Jim.
“Is that Mexican you're speaking?” she chided.
“I was just thinking,” Jim growled.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing much--except what a ghastly shame it is that so--so--well,
I don't know what to call you--but well, a woman like you--that you
should be living alone with nothing better to do than run the gantlet
of those God-awful submarines and probably get blown up and drowned,
or, worse yet, spend your days breaking your heart nursing a lot of poor
mangled, groaning Frenchmen that get shot to pieces or poisoned with gas
or--Oh, it's rotten! That's all it is: it's rotten!”
“Somebody has to take care of them.”
“Oh, I know; but it oughtn't to be you. If there was any manhood in this
country, you'd have Americans to nurse.”
“There are Americans over there, droves of them.”
“Yes, but they're not wearing our uniform. We ought to be over there
under our own flag. I ought to be over there.”
“Maybe you will be. I'll go on ahead and be waiting for you.”
There is nothing more pitiful than sorrow that tries to smile, and Jim
groaned:
“Oh, Charity Coe! Charity Coe!”
He gripped the wheel to keep from putting his hand out to hers. And they
went in silence, thinking in the epic elegy of their time.
Jim drove his car up to the end of Rhode Island and across to Tiverton;
then he left the highway for the lonelier roads. The car charged the
dark hills and galloped the levels, a black stallion with silent hoofs
and dreadful haste. There was so much death, so much death in the world!
The youth and strength and genius of all Europe were going over the
brink eternally in a Niagara of blood.
And the sea that Charity was about to venture on, the sea whose
estuaries lapped this sidelong shore so innocently with such tender
luster under the gentle moon, was drawing down every day and every night
ships and ships and ships with their treasures of labor and their brave
crews till it seemed that the floor of the ocean must be populous with
the dead.
Charity felt quite close to death. A very solemn tenderness of farewell
endeared the beautiful world and all its doomed creatures. But most dear
of all was this big, simple man at her side, the man she ought to have
married. It was all her fault that she had not. She owed him a profound
eternal apology, and she had not the right to pay the debt--that is, so
long as she lived she had not the right. But if they were never to meet
again--then she was already dying to him.
It was important that she should not depart this life without making
restitution of what she owed. She had owed Jim Dyckman the love he had
pleaded for from her and would not get from anyone else.
He had a right to love, and it was to be eternally denied to him. He
would go on bitterly grieved and shamed to think that nobody could love
him, for Charity had repulsed him, and some day he would learn that
Kedzie had deceived him.
Lacking the courage to warn him against his wife, Charity felt that she
must have at least the courage to say;
“Good-by, Jim. I have been loving you of late with a great love.”
There would be no injury done to Kedzie thus, for Charity would speak
as a ghost, an impalpable departed one. There would be no sin--only
a beautiful expiation by confession. She was enfranchised of earthly
restraints, enfranchised as the dead are from mortal obligations.
But the moods that are so holy, so pure, and so vast while they are
moods resent words. Words are like tin cups to carry the ocean in. It is
no longer an ocean when a bit of it is scooped up. It is only a little
brackish water, odious to drink and quenching no thirst.
Charity could not devise the first phrase of her huge and oceanic
emotion. It would have been only a proffer of brine that Jim could not
have relished from her. He understood better her silence. They went
blindly on and on, letting the road lead them and the first whim decide
which turn to take and which to pass.
And so they were eventually lost in the land as they were lost in their
mood.
And after a time of wonderful enthusiasms in their common grief the
realities began to claim them back. A loud report like a pistol-shot
announced that the poetry of motion had become prose.
Jim stopped the car and became a blacksmith while he went through
the tool-box, found a jack for the wheel, laboriously unshipped the
demountable rim, replaced it with the extra wheel, and set forth again.
The job had not improved the cleanliness of his hands nor spared the
chastity of his shirt-bosom. But the car had four wheels to go on, and
they regained a main road at last and found a signboard announcing,
“Tiverton, 18 miles.” That meant thirty miles to Newport.
Charity looked at her watch. It brought her back from the timelessness
of her meditation to the world where the dock had a great deal to say
about what was respectable and what not.
“Good Lord!” she groaned. “Mrs. Noxon is home long ago and scared or
shocked to death. We must fly!”
They flew, angry, both of them, at having to hurry back to school and a
withering reprimand, as if they were still mere brats. Gradually the car
began to refuse the call for haste. Its speed sickened, gasped, died.
Jim swore quite informally, and raged: “I told that infernal hound to
fill the tank. He forgot! The gas is gone.”
Charity shrugged her shoulders. “I deserved it,” she said. “I only hope
I don't get you into trouble. What will your wife say?”
“What won't she say? But I'm thinking about you.”
“It doesn't matter about me. I've got nobody who cares enough to scold
me.”
They were suddenly illumined by the headlights of an approaching car.
They shielded their faces from the glare instinctively. They felt
honest, but they did not look honest out here together.
The car was checked and a voice called from the blur, “Want any help?”
“No, thanks,” Jim answered from his shadow.
The car rolled on. While Jim made a vain post-mortem examination of the
car's machinery Charity looked about for a guide-post. She found a large
signboard proclaiming “Viewcrest Inn, 1 mile.” She told Jim.
He said: “I know of it. It has a bad name, but so long as the gasolene
is good--I'll go get some. Make yourself at home.” He paused. “I can't
leave you alone here in the wilderness at midnight.”
“I'll go along.”
“In those high-heeled shoes?”
“And these low-necked gown,” sighed Charity. “Oh, what a fool, what a
stupid fool I've been!”
But she set forth. Jim offered his arm. She declined it at first, but
she was glad enough of it later. They made an odd-looking couple, both
in evening dress, promenading a country road. All the wealth of both
of them was insufficient to purchase them so much as a street-car ride.
They were paupers--the slaves, not the captains, of their fate. Charity
stumbled and tottered, her ankles wrenched by the ruts, her stilted
slippers going to ruin. Jim offered to carry her. She refused
indignantly. She would have accepted a lift from any other vehicle now,
but none appeared. The only lights were in the sky, where a storm was
practising with fireworks.
“Just our luck to get drenched,” said Jim.
It was about the only bad luck they escaped, but the threat of it lent
Charity speed. They passed one farm, whose dogs rushed out and bayed at
them carnivorously.
“That's the way people will bark when they find out about our innocent
little picnic,” said Charity.
“They're not going to find out,” said Jim.
“Trying to keep it secret gives it a guilty look,” said Charity.
“What people don't know won't hurt 'em,” said Jim.
“What they do imagine will hurt us,” said Charity.
At the top of a knoll in a clandestine group of trees they found
“Viewcrest Inn.” It was dark but for a dim light in the office. The door
of that was locked.
Trade was dull, now that the Newport season was over, and only an
occasional couple from Fall River, Providence, or New Bedford tested
the diminished hospitality. But to-night there had been a concurrence of
visitors. Jim rattled at the door. A waiter appeared, yawning candidly.
He limped to the door with a gait that Kedzie would have recognized.
He peered out and shook his head, waving the intruders away. Jim shook
the knob and glowered back.
The waiter, who, in the classic phrase, was “none other than” Skip
Magruder, unlocked the door.
“Nothin' doin', folks,” said Skip. “Standin' room only. Not a room
left.”
“I don't want any of your dirty rooms,” said Jim. “I want some
gasolene.”
“Bar's closed,” said Skip, who had a nimble wit.
“I said gasolene!” said Jim, menacingly.
“Sorry, boss, but the last car out took the last drop we had in the
pump. We'll have some more to-morrow mornin'.”
“My God!” Jim whispered.
Then the storm broke. A thunder smash like the bolt of an indignant
Heaven. It turned on all the faucets above.
“Where's the telephone?” Jim demanded.
“T.D.,” said Skip.
“What's that?”
“Temporary discontinued.” Skip grew confidential. “The boss was a little
slow on the pay and they shut him off. We're takin' in a lot of dough
to-night, though, and he'll prob'ly get it goin' to-morrow all right.”
To-morrow again! Jim snarled back at the pack of wolfish circumstances
closing in on him. He turned to Charity.
“We've got to stay here.”
Charity “went white,” as the saying is. The rain streamed down.
“We 'ain't a room left,” said Skip.
“You've got to have,” said Jim.
“Have to speak to the artshiteck,” said Skip. Then he rubbed his head,
trying to get out an idea by massage. “There's the poller. Big lounge
there, but not made up. Would you and your wife wish the poller?”
He dragged the “wife” with a tone that nearly got him throttled. But Jim
paused. A complicated thought held him. To protest that Charity was not
his wife seemed hardly the most reassuring thing to do. He let the word
go and ignored Skip's cynical intonation. Jim's knuckles ached to rebuke
him, but he had not fought a waiter since his wild young days. And Skip
was protected by his infirmity.
Charity was frightened and revolted, abject with remorse for such a
disgusting consequence of such a sweet, harmless impulse. She was afraid
of Jim's temper. She said:
“Take the parlor by all means.”
“All right,” said Jim.
Skip fumbled about the desk for a big book, and, finding it, opened it
and handed Jim a pen.
“Register, please,” said Skip.
“I will not.”
“Rules of the house.”
“What do I care about your rules!”
“Have to wake the boss, then.”
“Give me the pen.”
He started to write his own name; that left Charity's designation in
doubt. He glanced at the other names. “Mr. and Mrs. George Washington”
were there, “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith” twice, as well as “William Jones
and wife.”
Jim wondered if the waiter knew him. So many waiters did. At length,
with a flash of angry impulse, he wrote: “James D--,” paused, finished
“Dysart,” hesitated again, then put “Mr. and Mrs.” before it. Skip read,
and grinned. He did not know who Jim was, but he knew he was no Dysart.
Skip led the way to the parlor up-stairs, lighted the lights, and
hastily disappeared, fearing that he might be asked to fetch something
to eat or drink. He was so tired and sleepy that even the prospect of
a tip did not interest him so much as the prospect of his cot in the
attic, where he could dream that he was in New York again.
Jim and Charity looked at each other. Jim munched his own curses, and
Charity laughed and cried together. Jim's arms had an instinct for
taking her to his heart, but he felt that he must be more respectful
than ever since they were in so respectless a plight. She never seemed
purer and sadder to him than then.
She noted how haggard and dismal he looked, and said, “Aren't you going
to sit down?”
“No--not here,” he said. “You curl up on that plush horror and get some
rest.”
“I will not!” said Charity.
“You will, too,” said Jim. “You're a wreck, and I ought to be shot. Get
some sleep, for God's sake!”
“What becomes of you?”
“I'll scout round and find a place in the office. I think there is a
billiard-room. If worst comes to worst, I'll do what Mrs. Leslie Carter
did in a play I saw--sleep on the dining-room table.”
“Not less than a table d'hote will hold you,” Charity smiled, wanly.
“Don't worry about me. You go by-by and pray the Lord to forgive me and
help us both.”
He waved his hand to her in a heartbreak of bemocked and benighted
tenderness and closed the door. He prowled softly about the office and
the adjacent rooms, but found no place to sleep. He was in such a fever
of wrath at himself that he walked out in the rain to cool his head.
Then he sank into a chair, read an old Boston paper twice, and fell
asleep among the advertisements.
He woke at daybreak. The rain had ended and he wandered out in the
chill, wet grounds of the shabby inn. The morning light was merciless on
the buildings, the leafless trees, and on his own costume. The promised
view from the crest was swathed in haze--so was his outlook on the
future.
His fury at the situation grew as he pondered it. He was like a tiger
in a pit. He raged as much at himself as at the people who would take
advantage of him. The ludicrousness of the situation added the ultimate
torment. He could not save Charity except by ingenious deceptions which
would be a proof of guilt if they did not succeed miraculously.
The dress he was in and the dress she was in were the very habiliments
of guilt. Getting back to Newport in evening clothes would be the
advertisement of their escapade. His expansive shirt-bosom might as
well have been a sandwich-board. His broadcloth trousers and his
patent-leather pumps would be worse than rags.
And Charity had no hat. There was an unmistakable dressed-up eveningness
about them both.
This struck him as the first evil to remedy. As with an escaped convict,
his prime necessity was a change of clothes. There was only one way
to manage that. He went back to the hotel and found a startled
early-morning waiter sweeping out the office. Jim asked where the
nearest telephone was, and learned that it was half a mile away at a
farm-house.
Jim turned up his collar, pulled down his motor-cap, and struck out
along the muddy road. He startled the farmer's family and their large
hands were not wide enough to hide their wider smiles.
On the long hike thither Jim had worked out his stratagem. He called up
his house, or, rather, Kedzie's house, in Newport, and after much delay
got his yawning valet to the telephone. He never had liked that valet
less than now.
“That you, Dallam? My car broke down out in the country,” he explained,
every syllable a sugarless quinine pill in his throat. “That is to
say, the gasolene gave out. I am in my evening clothes, so
is--er--Mrs.--er--the lady I was with. I want you to bring me at once an
outfit of day clothes, and a--one of my wife's long motor-coats--a very
long one--and one of her small hats. Then get out my wife's limousine
and send the suit-case and the coat and hat to me here at the Viewcrest
Inn, and tell the chauffeur to bring an extra can of gasolene.”
A voice with an intolerable smile in it came back: “Very good, sir. I
presume I'd better not waken Mrs. Dyckman?”
“Naturally not. I don't want to--er--alarm her.”
“She was quite alarmed when you didn't come home, sir, last night.”
“Well, I'll explain when I see her. Do you understand the situation?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
Jim writhed at that. But he had done his best and he would take the
worst.
The farmer gave him a ride to the hotel in his milk-wagon. When Jim rode
up in a parody of state he saw Charity peeping from the parlor window.
The morning light had made the situation plain to her. It did not
improve on inspection. It took very little imagination to predict a
disastrous event, though Jim explained the felicity of his scheme. He
had planned to have Charity ride in in the limousine alone, while he
took his own car back with the gasolene that was on the way.
The twain were compelled by their costume to stay in the parlor
together. They were ferociously hungry and ordered breakfast at last.
It took forever to get it, for guests of that hotel were not ordinarily
early risers.
Skip Magruder, dragged from his slumbers to serve the meal, found
Charity and Jim in the room where he had left them. He made such
vigorous efforts to overlook their appearance in bedraggled dinner
clothes at a country breakfast that Jim threatened to break his head.
Skip grew surly and was ordered out.
After breakfast Jim and Charity waited and waited, keeping to the parlor
lest the other guests see them.
At last the limousine arrived. As soon as he heard it coming Jim hurried
to the window to make sure that it was his--or, rather, his wife's.
It was--so much his wife's that she stepped out of it. Also her mother.
Also her father. They advanced on the hotel.
Jim and Charity were stupefied. There was a look on Kedzie's face that
frightened him.
“She means business,” he groaned.
Charity sighed: “Divorce! And me to be named!”
“She won't do that. She owes you everything.”
“What an ideal chance to pay off the debt!”
“Don't you worry. I'll protect you,” Jim insisted.
“How?” said Charity.
“I'll fight the case to the limit.”
“Are you so eager to keep your wife?” said Charity.
“No. I never did love her. I'll never forgive her for this.”
But he had not the courage to go and meet Kedzie and her mother and her
father. They were an unconscionable time coming.
He did not know that Kedzie and Skip Magruder were renewing old
acquaintance.
While he waited the full horror of his dilemma came over him. Kedzie
would undoubtedly sue him for divorce. If he lost, Charity would be
publicly disgraced. If he won, he would be tied to Kedzie for life.
CHAPTER VII
A quick temper is an excellent friend for bolstering up an ailing
conscience, especially if itself is bolstered by an inability to see the
point of view of the other party to a conflict.
Kedzie's wrath at Charity justified to Kedzie any cruelty, especially
as Kedzie was all harrowed up by the fear of losing the Marquess of
Strathdene. And Kedzie loved Strathdene as much as she could ever love
anybody.
For one thing Strathdene was fiercely jealous of her--and the poor child
had been simply famished for a little jealousy. Her first husband had
hardly known what the word meant. Before their marriage Gilfoyle
had permitted her to dance the Greek dances without paying her the
compliment of a beating. After their marriage he had gone to Chicago
to earn a living and left her alone in New York City where there were
millions of rivals.
Her second husband had been very philosophical about her career and
had taken the news of her previous marriage with disgusting stoicism.
Finally he had gone to the Mexican Border for an indefinite stay,
leaving her to her own devices and the devices of any man who came
along. It was too much like leaving a diamond outdoors: it cheapened the
diamond.
But Strathdene--ah, Strathdene! He turned blue at the mention of
Kedzie's husband. When Jim came back from Texas and Kedzie had to be
polite to him Strathdene almost had hydrophobia. He accused Kedzie of
actually welcoming Jim. He charged her with polyandry. He threatened to
shoot her and her husband and himself. He comported himself unlike any
traditional Englishman of literature. He was, in fact, himself and what
he did was like him. He was a born aviator. His heart was used to
racing at unheard-of speeds. He could sustain superhuman exaltations and
depressions.
Being in love with him was like going up in an airship with him, which
was one of Kedzie's ambitions for the future. She dreamed of a third
honeymoon _in excelsis._
Strathdene told her that if she ever looked at another man after she
married him he would take her up ten thousand feet in the clouds, set
his airship on fire, and drop with her as one cinder into the ocean.
What handsomer tribute could any woman ask of a man? He was a lover
worth fighting for.
But she had felt uncertain of winning him till that wonderful morning
when Jim did not come back home. She woke up early all by herself and
heard the valet answer Jim's call from Viewcrest.
She had made a friend of Dallam by her flirtation with the nobility. The
poor fellow had suffered tortures from the degradation of his master's
alliance with a commoner like Kedzie until Kedzie developed her alliance
with the Marquess. Then his valetic soul expanded again.
He looked upon her as his salvation.
Over the telephone she heard him now promising Jim that he would not
tell Kedzie. If Jim's old valet, Jules, had not gone to France and
his death he would have saved Jim from infernal distresses, but this
substitute had a malignant interest in his master's confusion. Dallam
proceeded forthwith to rap at Mrs. Dyckman's door and spoke through it,
deferentially:
“Beg pardon, ma'am, but could I have a word?”
Kedzie wrapped herself in a bath-robe and opened the door a chink to
hear the rest of what she had heard in part. The valet had no collar on
and his overnight beard not off, and he, too, was in a bath-robe. Man
and mistress stood there like genius and madness, “and thin partitions
did their bounds divide.”
“Very sorry to trouble you, ma'am,” he said, “but I'm compelled to. The
master has just telephoned me that his car broke down at the Viewcrest
Inn out Tiverton way, and he wants his morning clothes, and also--if
you'll pardon me, ma'am--he instructed me to send him a long motor-coat
of yours and a large hat and your limousine. I was directed not
to--ahem--to trouble you about it, ma'am, but I 'ardly dared.”
He helped her out so perfectly that she had no need to say anything more
than, “Quite right.”
She was glad that the door screened her from observation, for she
went through a crisis of emotions, wrath and disgust at Jim's perfidy
_versus_ ecstasy and gratitude to him for it.
She beat her breast with her hand as if to keep her trembling heart from
turning a somersault into her mouth. Then she spoke with a calm that
showed how far she had traveled in self-control.
“Very good. You were quite right. Call the chauffeur and tell him to
bring round my closed car. Then send me my maid and have the cook get me
some coffee. Then you may telephone my mother and father and ask them
to come over at once. Please send my car for them. You might have coffee
for them also. For we'll all be riding out to--did you say Viewcrest
Inn?”
“Yes, ma'am. Very good, ma'am. Thank you!”
He went away thinking to himself. He thought in cockney: “My Gawd! w'at
a milit'ry genius! She dictites a horder loike a Proosian general. I'm
beginnin' to fink she's gowing to do milord the mokkis prahd. There's no
daht abaht it. Stroike me, if there is.”
By the time Kedzie was dressed and coffeed her panicky father and mother
were collected and fed, and she had selected her best motor-coat for the
shroud of whatever woman it was at Viewcrest. She dared not dream it was
Charity.
She had time enough to tell her parents all there was to tell on the
voyage, but she had no idea that her limousine was taking her to the
very inn that Strathdene had lured her to on that night when he tested
her worthiness of his respect.
It had been dark on that occasion and she had been in such a chaos that
she had paid no heed to the name of the place or the dark roads leading
thither.
She almost swooned when she reached the Viewcrest Inn and found herself
confronted by Skip Magruder. And so did Skip. He had not recognized
the back of her head before, but her face smote him now. There was no
escaping him. Her beauty was enriched by her costume and her mien was
ripened by experience, but she was unforgetably herself. He was still
a waiter, and the apron he had on and the napkin he clutched might have
been the same one he had when she first saw him.
When he saw her now again he gasped the name he had known her by:
“Anitar! Anitar Adair! Well, I'll be--”
Then his face darkened with the memory of disprized love. He recalled
the cruel answer, “Nothing doing,” that she had indorsed on the
stage-door letter he sent her long ago.
But the military genius that had guided Kedzie this morning inspired her
still. She was not going to lose her victory for any flank attack from
an ally in ambush. She sent out a flag of truce.
“Why, Skip!” she cried. “Dear old Skip! I want you to meet my father
and mother. Mr. Magruder was terribly kind to me when I was alone and
friendless in New York.”
Mrs. Thropp had outgrown waiters and even Adna regretted the reversion
to Nimrim that led him to shake hands and say, “Please to meecher.”
The stupefied proprietor of the inn was begging for explanations of this
unheard-of colloquy, but Skip flicked him away with his napkin as if
he were a bluebottle fly and motioned Kedzie to a corner of the office.
Kedzie explained, breathlessly:
“Skip, I'm in terrible trouble, and I'm so glad to find you here, for
you never failed me. I was very rude to you when you sent me that note,
but I--I was engaged to be married at the time and I didn't think it
proper to see anybody. And--well, I'm getting my punishment now, for my
husband is here with a strange woman--and--oh, it's terrible, Skip! My
heart is broken, but you've got to help me. I know I can rely on you,
can't I, dear old Skip?”
The girl was so efficient that she almost deserved her success. It cost
her something, though, to beguile a waiter with intimate appeals that
she might earn a title. But then in time of war no ally is to be scorned
and the lowliest recruit is worth enlisting. A Christian can piously
engage a Turk to help him whip another Christian.
When Kedzie pulled out the tremolo stop and looked up, big-eyed, and
pouted at him, Skip was hers.
“Your husband, Anitar? Your husband here? Why, the low-life hound! I'll
go up and kill him for you if you want me to.”
Kedzie explained that she didn't want to get her dear Skip into any
trouble, but she did want his help. Skip found her a good boarding-place
the first time he met her, and now she had to dupe him into securing her
furnished rooms and board in a castle. She may have rather encouraged
him to imagine that once she was free from Jim she would listen once
more to Skip. But there is no evidence on that point and he must have
felt a certain awe of her. His pretty duckling had become so gorgeous a
swan.
Her parley with Skip had delayed her march up-stairs to the attack, but
Jim and Charity could only wait in befuddled suspense, unwilling and
afraid to attempt a flight.
Kedzie went up-stairs at last, backed by her father and mother and Skip
and the chauffeur with the suit-case of Jim's clothes. Kedzie was dazed
at the sight of Charity.
But there was no need of any oration.
After a little sniffing and nodding of the head she spoke:
“Well, I thought as much! Jim, you telephoned for some things of mine
and of yours. Here they are. There's a can of gasolene down-stairs for
you. Here's your suit-case, and the coat and hat for Mrs. Cheever. I
presume you will go back in your own car.”
Jim nodded.
“Then we needn't keep you any longer. Mr. McNiven is your lawyer still,
I suppose. I'll send my lawyer to him. Come along, mother--and father.”
She led her little cohort down-stairs and bade Skip a very cordial _au
revoir._
CHAPTER VIII
The Dyckman divorce farce might have been as politely performed as
_l'affaire Cheever_--or even more so than that, since practice makes
perfect. At least a temporary secrecy could have been secured with
leisureliness by a residence in another State.
But Kedzie felt as Zada did, that she simply could not wait, though her
reason was well to the opposite. Zada had been afraid that a child would
arrive before the divorce, but Kedzie that a gentleman would depart.
Strathdene was straining at the anchor like one of his own biplanes with
the wind nudging its wings. In Europe they were shooting down airships
by the score nearly every day and Strathdene wanted to go back. “It's
not fair to the Huns,” he said. “They haven't had a pot-shot at me for
so long they'll forget I was ever over. And some of those men that were
corporals when I made my Ace, are Aces now as well and they're crawling
up on my score! I'll have to fly all the time to catch up.”
But he wanted to take with him his beauty. He was jealous of Uncle Sam
and afraid to trust Kedzie to him. The more inconvenient she became
to him the more determined he grew to overcome the obstacles to her
possession.
He abominated the necessity of taking his bride through the side door of
the court-house to the altar, but he would not give her up. It looked,
however, as if he would have to. And then he received mysteriously
an assignment to the inspection of flying-machines purchased in the
American market. Kedzie told him that it was a Heaven-sent answer to her
prayers, and he believed it.
But it was his poor mother's work; she had written to a friend in the
British Embassy imploring him to keep her precious boy out of France as
long as possible. Hecatombs of gallant young lords were being butchered
and she had lost a son, two brothers, a nephew, and unnumbered friends.
The whole nobility of Europe was as deep in mourning as all the other
grades of prestige. She wanted a brief respite from terror. She did not
know till later to what further risks she was exposing her boy.
Kedzie was grimly resolute about getting her freedom from Jim in order
to transfer it to Strathdene. She planned to manage it quietly for the
sake of her own future. But a sickening mess was made of it. For Kedzie
fell into the hands of a too, too conscientious lawyer. It is impossible
to be loyal in all directions, and young Mr. Anson Beattie was loyal
first to his wife and children, whom he loved devotedly. They needed
money and clients came slowly to him.
His wife had relatives in Newport and they chanced to be visiting there.
The relatives were shopkeepers, to whom Pet Bettany owed much money.
That was how Kedzie came to consult Mr. Beattie. Kedzie telephoned Pet
the moment she got back from the Viewcrest Inn, and Pet told her of
Beattie.
When Kedzie drifted into his ken with a word of introduction from
Pet Bettany he hailed her as a Heaven-sent messenger. She brought him
advertisement, and big fees on a platter.
The very name of Dyckman was incense and myrrh. Mr. Beattie smelled
gold. When Kedzie poured out her story and explained that the famous
Mrs. Charity Cheever was the wreckress of her home Mr. Beattie saw
head-lines everywhere.
If the Dyckmans had been a humble couple he would have tried to
reconcile them, perhaps, or he would have separated them with little
noise. But it was noise he wanted. The longer and louder the trial the
more free space Mr. Beattie would get.
“It Pays to Advertise” is a necessary motto for all professions. The
lawyer is advertised by his hating enemies, Beattie said to himself,
and to his ecstatic wife when he went to her room after Kedzie left. His
wife would never have taken a divorce if divorces were distributed at
every door like handbills. Mr. Beattie said to Mrs. Beattie:
“Soul o' my soul, I'm going to handle this case in such a way that it
will stir up a smell from here to California. I'll get that little woman
an alimony that will break all known records and I'll take a percentage
of the gate receipts as they come in. I wouldn't trust my little client
a foot away.”
“Don't trust her too close, either,” said his devoted spouse, who was
just jealous enough to be remembered in time of stress.
Beattie was the sort of lawyer one reads about oftener than one meets,
and he wanted to be read about. He had the almost necessary lawyer gift
of beginning to hate the opposition as soon as he learned what it was.
If Jim had engaged him he would have hated Kedzie with religious ardor.
Kedzie engaged him; so he abominated Jim and everybody and everything
associated with him from his name to his scarf-pin.
He warned Kedzie not to spend an hour under Jim Dyckman's roof, lest she
seem to condone what she discovered. He advised her to disappear till
Beattie was ready to strike.
That was the reason why there was no compromise, no concession, no
politeness in the divorce. If collusion is vicious this case was
certainly pure of it.
Jim was not permitted a quiet talk with Kedzie from the moment she found
him at the Viewcrest Inn. Her arrival there plus her family had thrown
him into a stupor. It was a situation for a genius to handle, since the
honester a man is the more he is confused at being found in a situation
that looks dishonest. Jim was never less a genius than then. Even
Charity, who usually found a word when a word was needed, said not one.
What could she say? Kedzie ignored her, accused her of nothing, and did
not linger.
When Jim and Charity, left alone together again, looked at each other
they were too disgusted to regret that they had not been as guilty as
they looked. Life had the jaundice in their eyes.
But they had to get back to the world by way of material things. Jim had
to change his evening clothes. He asked Charity to wait in the office
below. He pointed to the motor-coat and hat that Kedzie had brought and
tossed on a lounge.
Charity recoiled from wearing Kedzie's cast-off clothes or from
disguising as Jim's wife, but her downcast eyes revealed her bare
shoulders and arms and her delicate evening gown. They had been
exquisitely appropriate to night and night lights, but they were ghastly
in the day.
She put on Kedzie's mantle; it blistered her like the mantle Medea sent
to her successor in her husband's love. She sat in the office and some
of the guests passed through. She could see that they took her to be one
of their sort, and shocks of red and white alternated through her skin.
When Jim was ready he came down with his evening clothes in the
suit-case. The baggage was the final convincing touch. He picked up the
gasolene-can and toted it that weary mile. One of the hotel servants
offered to carry it, but Jim was in no mood for company. There are
things that the wealthiest man does not want to have done for him.
They found the car studded with pools of water from the rain, and
Charity shook out the cushions while Jim filled up the tank.
“Quite domestic,” said Charity, in the last dregs of bitterness.
Jim did not answer. He flung the can over into a field and hopped into
the car. He regretted that he had no spurs to dig into its sides, no
curb bit to jerk. He owed his destruction to that car. For want of
gasolene, the car was lost; for want of the car, a reputation was lost.
He thought with frenzy as he drove. He had little imagination, but it
did not require an expert dreamer to foresee dire possibilities ahead.
He was so sorry for Charity that he could have wept. He wanted to enfold
her in his arms and promise her security. He wanted to stand in front of
her and take in his own breast all the arrows of scorn that might shower
upon her.
But the nearest approach to protection in his power lay along the lines
of appearing to be indifferent to her. He had not been told of Kedzie's
infatuation for Strathdene and he had not suspected it.
Charity was tempted to refer to it, but she felt that it would be
contemptibly petty at the moment. So Jim was permitted to hope that he
could find Kedzie, throw himself on her mercy and implore her to believe
in his innocence. It was a sickly hope, and his heart filled with gall
and with hatred of Kedzie and all she had brought on him.
He reached Newport with a terrific speed, and left Charity at Mrs.
Noxon's to make her own explanations. Mrs. Noxon had defended Charity
against gossip once before, but to defend her against appearances was
too much to ask.
“Well-behaved people,” she told Charity, “do not have appearances.”
She was so cold that Charity froze also, and set her maid to packing.
Mrs. Noxon's frigidity was a terrifying example of what she was to
expect. She returned to New York on the first train. Jim was on it, too.
He had sped home, expecting to find Kedzie. She was gone and none of the
servants knew where. If he had found her in the ferocious humor he
had arrived at he might have given her the sort of divorce popular
in divorce-less countries, where they annul the wife instead of the
marriage. He might have sent Kedzie to the realm where there is neither
marrying nor giving in marriage--which should save a heap of trouble.
Jim fancied that Kedzie must have taken the train to New York, since she
spoke of sending her lawyer to McNiven. It did not occur to him that she
could find a New York lawyer in Newport.
He met Charity, and not Kedzie, on the train. That made bad look worse.
But it gave Jim and Charity an opportunity to face the calamity that
was impending. Jim tried to reassure Charity that he would keep her
from suffering any public harm. The mere thought of her liability to
notoriety, the realization that her long life of decency and devotion
were at the mercy of the whim of a woman like Kedzie, drove her frantic.
She begged Jim to leave her to her thoughts and he went away to the
purgatory of his own. Reaching New York, he returned to Charity to offer
his escort to her home. She broke out, petulantly:
“Don't take me any more places, Jim. I beg you!”
“Forgive me,” he mumbled, and relieved her of his compromising chivalry.
They went to their homes in separate taxicabs. Jim made haste to his
apartment. Kedzie was not there and had not been heard from.
Late as it was, he set out on a telephone chase for McNiven and
dragged him to a conference. It was midnight and Jim was haggard with
excitement.
There are two people at least to whom a wise man tells the truth--his
doctor and his lawyer. Neither of them has many illusions left, but both
usually know fact when they get a chance to face it.
Jim had nothing to conceal from McNiven and his innocence transpired
through all his bewilderment. He told just what had happened in its
farcical-funeral details. McNiven did not smile. Jim finished with all
his energy:
“Sandy, you know that Charity is the whitest woman on earth, a saint if
ever there was a saint. She's the one that's got to be protected. Not a
breath of her name must come out. If it takes the last cent I've got and
dad's got I want you to buy off that wife of mine. You warned me against
marrying her, and I wish to God I'd listened to you. I'm not blaming her
for being suspicious, but I can't let her smash Charity. I'll protect
Charity if I have to build a wall of solid gold around her.”
McNiven tried to quiet him. He saw no reason for alarm. “You don't have
to urge me to protect Charity,” he said. “She's an angel as well as
my client. All you need is a little sleep. Go to bed and don't worry.
Remember, there never was a storm so big that it didn't blow over.”
“Yes, but what does it blow over before it blows over?” said Jim.
“You're talking in your sleep already. Good night,” said McNiven.
CHAPTER IX
The next morning McNiven found Charity at his office when he arrived.
She had evidently been awake all night.
She told McNiven a story that agreed in the essentials with Jim's except
that she made herself out the fool where he had blamed himself. McNiven
had no success in trying to quiet her with soothing promises of a tame
conclusion. She dreaded Kedzie.
“If it were just an outburst of jealousy,” she said, “you might talk to
the woman. But she's not jealous of her husband. She was as cool as a
cucumber when she found us together. She was glad of it, because she
had got a way to get her Marquess now. She's ambitious and Lady Macbeth
couldn't outdo her.”
She told McNiven what she had not had the heart to tell Jim about
Strathdene. It worried him more than he admitted. While he meditated
on a measure to meet this sort of attack, Charity suggested one. It
was drastic, but she was desperate. She proposed the threat of a
countercharge against Kedzie.
McNiven shook his head and made strange noises in his pipe. He asked for
evidence against Kedzie. Charity could only quote the general opinion.
McNiven said: “No. You allege innocence on your part in spite of
appearances which you admit are almost conclusive. You can hardly claim
that more innocent appearances on her part prove that she is guilty.
Besides, we don't want to stir up any more sediment. We'll do everything
on the Q. T. Money talks, and the little lady is not deaf. My legal
advice to you is, 'Don't fret,' and my medical advice is, 'Go to bed and
stay there till I send you word that it's all over.' Remember one thing,
there never was a storm so big that it didn't blow over.”
Charity was not in the least quieted. His sedative only annoyed her
ragged nerves.
“Keep my name clean,” she whispered.
As she rode home in a taxicab that was like a refrigerator she passed
in the Fifth Avenue melee Zada L'Etoile, now Mrs. Cheever, with the tiny
little Cheever like a princelet asleep at her breast, hiding with its
pink head the letter “A” that had grown there.
People of cautious respectability spoke to Zada now with amiable
respect, and murmured:
“Funny thing! She's made a man of that good-for-nothing Peter Cheever.
They're as happy and as thick as thieves.”
Charity had heard this saying, and she dreaded to realize that perhaps
in a few days respectable people would be turning from herself, not
seeing her, or storing up credit by snubbing her and muttering:
“No wonder poor Cheever couldn't get along with her. He took the blame
like a gentleman, and now she's found out. She was a sly one, but you
can't fool all the people all the time.”
Charity had not been gone from McNiven's office long before a lawyer's
clerk arrived bearing the papers for a divorce on statutory grounds
in the case of Dyckman versus Dyckman, Mrs. Charity C. Cheever,
co-respondent, Anson Beattie counsel for plaintiff.
McNiven went after Beattie at once and proposed a quiet treaty and a
settlement out of court. Beattie grinned so odiously that McNiven had to
say:
“Oh, I remember you. You used to be an ambulance-chaser. What are you
after now--a little dirty advertising?” “What are you after?” said
Beattie. “A little collusive juggling with the Seventh Commandment?”
“The one against false witness is the Ninth,” said McNiven, “But let's
have a conference. This war in Europe might have been avoided by a
little heart-to-heart talk beforehand. Let's profit by the lesson.”
Beattie consented to this, and promised to arrange it on condition that
in the mean while McNiven would accept service for his client. This was
done, and Beattie left.
He saw his great publicity campaign being thwarted, and changed his
mind. He hankered for fame more than gold. He filed the papers and
meditated. He did not know how much or how little Kedzie loved her
husband, and she had told him nothing of Strathdene. He feared that a
compromise might be patched up and perhaps a reconciliation effected.
He had had women come to him imploring a divorce from their abominable
husbands only to see the couple link up again, kiss and make up, and
call him an abominable villain for trying to part them.
After some earnest consideration of the right of his own career and his
family to the full profit of this windfall, he looked up a reporter and
through him a group of reporters and promised them a peep at something
interesting.
He had the privilege of calling for the papers from the clerk of the
court, so he took them out and permitted the reporters to glance within
and make note of the contents.
Late editions of the evening papers gave the Dyckman divorce a fanfare
rivaling the evidence that the Germans were about to resume their
unrestricted submarine _Schrecklichkeit_.
If the spoken word is impossible to recall, how much more irretrievable
the word that is printed in millions of newspapers. The name of Dyckman
was a household word. It resounded now in every household throughout the
country, and across the sea, where the name had become familiar in all
the nations from the big financial dealings of the elder Dyckman as a
banker for the Allies.
Reporters played about Jim Dyckman that night as if they were
_banderilleros_ and he a raging bull. He fought them with the same
success.
They tried to find Charity, but she was in the doctor's care--actually.
The doctor himself dismissed the reporters. He called them “ghouls,”
which did not sweeten their hearts toward his patient.
The next day there was probably not a morning paper in the United States
in any language that failed to star the news that Mrs. Dyckman had found
her husband's relations with Mrs. Cheever intolerable.
That morning saw the conference in McNiven's office, as promised by
Beattie. But Kedzie did not appear; she had vanished to some place where
she could not be found by anybody except the man who wrote her highly
imaginative affidavits for her and the notary public who attested her
signature.
At the conference with Jim, Kedzie was represented by counsel, also by
father. Jim called the lawyer Beattie some hard old Anglo-Saxon names,
and told him that if he were a little bigger he would give him the
beating that was coming to him. Then he turned to Kedzie's father.
“Mr. Thropp,” he pleaded, “you and I have always got along all right.
You know I've tried to do the right thing by your daughter. I'm ready to
now. She's too decent a girl to have done this thing on her own. This
is the work of that rotten skunk of a lawyer--I apologize to the other
skunks and the real lawyers. She has done a frightful injustice to the
best woman on earth. She can never undo it, but surely she doesn't want
to do any more. She's through with me, I suppose, but we ought to be
able to clean up this affair respectably and quietly and not in the
front show-window of all the damned newspapers in the world.
“Can't you and I make a little quiet gentleman's agreement to withdraw
the charge and let the divorce go through decently? I'll make any
settlement on your daughter that she wants.”
Adna pondered aloud, his claim-agent instincts alert: “Settlement, eh?
What might you call settlement?”
“Whatever you'd consider fair. How much would you say was right?”
Adna filled his lungs and mouthed the deliciously liquid word as if it
were a veritable _aurum potabile_:
“Millions!”
“What!” Jim gasped.
Adna fairly gargled it again:
“Millillions!”
The greed in the old man's eyes shot Dyckman's eyes with blood. He
snarled:
“So it's the plain old blackmail, eh? Well, you can go plumb to hell!”
“All right,” said Adna, felicitously, “but we won't go alone. I and
daughter will have comp'ny. Come on, Mr. Beattie.”
After they had gone Jim realized that his hatred of being gouged had
involved Charity's priceless reputation. He told McNiven to recall
Beattie, but Charity herself appeared in a new and militant humor.
The first realization that her good name was gone had crushed her. She
had built it up like a mansion, adding a white stone day by day. When it
fell about her in ruins her soul had swooned with the disaster.
After a night and a day of groveling terror she had recaptured the valor
that makes and keeps a woman good, and she leaped from her sick bed and
her sick soul into an armor of rage.
She burst in on McNiven and Jim and demanded a share in the battle. When
Jim told her of his latest blunder she spoke up, stoutly:
“You did the right thing. To try to buy them off would be to confess
guilt. The damage is done. The whole world has read the lie. Now we'll
make it read the truth. There must be some way for me to defend my name,
and I want to know what it is.”
McNiven told her that the law allowed her to enter the case and seek
vindication, but he advised her against it. She thanked him for the
information and rejected the advice. She was gray with battle-ardor and
her very nostrils were fierce.