We Can't Have Everything Part 24

Dainty-minded couples have separate bedrooms. Ordinary people accept the homely phases of coexistence as inevitable and therefore unimportant.

They grow to enjoy the intimacy: they give and take informality as one of the comforts of a home. They see frowsy hair and unshaven cheeks and yawns as a homely, wholesome part of life and make a pleasant indolence of them.

But Kedzie was in an unreasoning mood. She had hoped for unreasonable delights. Marriage had been a goal beyond the horizon, at the base of the rainbow. She had reached it. The girl Kedzie was no more. She was a wife. Kedzie Thropp and Anita Adair were now Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle. Her soul cried out:

"This is my honeymoon! I am married, married forever to that tousle-headed, bristle-jawed, brainless, heartless dub. I won't stand for it. I won't! I won't!"

She wanted to outscream the parrot. Its inarticulate, horrible cachinnations voiced her humor uncannily. She had to bury her pouting lips in her round young arm to keep from insanely echoing that maniacal Ha-ha-ha! That green-and-red philosopher expressed her own mockery of life and love, with its profound and eloquent Ha-ha-ha! Oh, ha-ha-ha!

Ee, ha-ha-ha!

CHAPTER IV

Now, of course, Kedzie ought to have been happy. Millions of girls of her age were waking up that morning and calling themselves wretched because their parents or distance or some other cause prevented them from marrying young fellows no more prepossessing asleep than Gilfoyle was.

In Europe that morning myriads of young girls tossed in their beds and s.h.i.+vered lest their young men in the trenches might have been killed or mangled by some sh.e.l.l dropped from an airs.h.i.+p or sent over from a cannon or shot up from a mine. And those young men, alive or dead, looked no better than Gilfoyle, if as neat.

In Europe and in Asia, that morning, there were young girls and nuns and wives who were in the power of foreign soldiers whose language they could not speak but could understand all too well--poor, ruined victims of the tidal waves of battle. There were wives, young and old, who had got their husbands back from war blind, crippled, foolish, petulant.

They had left part of their souls on the field with their blood.

It was a time when it seemed that n.o.body had a right to be unhappy who had life, health, shelter, and food. Yet America was perhaps as discontented as Europe.

Kedzie had reason enough to make peace with life. Gilfoyle was as valuable a citizen as she. She might have helped to make him a good business man or a genuine poet. What is poetry, anyway, but the skilful advertis.e.m.e.nt of emotions? She might at least have made of Gilfoyle that all-important element of the Republic, a respectable, amiable, ordinary man, perhaps the father of children who would be of value, even of glory, to the world.

There was romance enough in their wedding. Others of the couples who had bought licenses that day were rapturous in yet cheaper tenements, greeting the new day with laughter and kisses and ambition to earn and to save, to breed and grow old well.

But to be content with what or whom she had, Kedzie would have had to be somebody else besides Kedzie; and then Gilfoyle would not perhaps have met her or married her. Some man in Nimrim, Mo., would have wed the little stay-at-home.

Kedzie, the pretty fool, apparently fancied that she would have been happy if Gilfoyle had been a handsomer sleeper, and the apartment a handsomer apartment, and the bank-account an inexhaustible fountain of gold.

But would she have been? Peter Cheever was as handsome as a man dares to be, awake or asleep; he had vast quant.i.ties of money, and he was generous with it. But Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt in an apartment that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of its velvets and the height of its colors.

Yet Zada was crying this very morning--crying like mad because while she had Cheever she had no marriage license. She tore her hair and bit it, and peeled diamonds off her fingers and threw them at the mirror like pebbles, and sopped up her tears with point-lace handkerchiefs and hurled those to the floor--then hurled herself after them. She was a tremendous weeper, Zada.

And in Newport there was a woman who had a marriage license but no husband. She slept in a room too beautiful for Kedzie to have liked. She did not know enough to like it. She would have found it cold. Charity Cheever found it cold, but she slept at last, though the salt wind blowing in from the sea tormented the light curtains and plucked at the curls about Charity's face. There was salt in the air, and her eyelashes were still wet with tears. She was crying in her sleep, for loneliness.

Kedzie thought her room was small, but it was nearly as big as the bedroom where Jim Dyckman had slept. He had a bigger room, but he had given it to his father and mother, who had come to Newport with him.

They were a stodgy old couple enough now, and snoring idyllically in duet after a life of storms and tears and discontents in spite of wealth.

Jim's room was big for a yacht, but the yacht was narrow, built for speed. Thirty-six miles an hour its turbines could shoot it through the sea. It had to be narrow. We can't have everything--especially on yachts.

Jim was barefoot, standing in his pajamas at a port-hole and trying to see the Noxon home, imagining Charity there. He was denied her presence and was as miserable as any waif in a poor farm attic. Money seemed to make no visible difference in his despair.

If he thought of Kedzie at all, he dismissed her as a trifling memory.

He wanted Charity, who did not want him. Charity had Cheever, who did not want her. Kedzie had Gilfoyle, and did not want him. It looked as if the old jingle ought to be changed from "Finders keepers, losers weepers" to "Losers keepers, finders weepers."

The day after Jim Dyckman pulled Kedzie out of the water he made a desperate effort to convince himself that he could be happy without the forbidden Charity Coe.

He breakfasted and played tennis, then swam at Bailey's Beach. Beauties of every type and every conscience were there--pale, slim ash blondes with legs like banister-spindles, and swarthy, slender brunettes of the same Sheraton furniture. There were brunettes of generous ovals, and blondes of heroic rotundities, and every scheme of shape between. Minds were equally diversified--maternal young girls and wicked old ladies, hilarious and sinister, intellectual and athletic, bookish and horsy, a woman of a sort for every mood.

And Jim Dyckman was so wealthy and so simple and so likable and important that it seemed n.o.body would refuse to accept him. But he wanted Charity.

Later in the afternoon he gave up the effort to snub her and went to the Noxon home. It was about the hour when Kedzie in her new flat had been burning her fingers at the gas-stove. Jim Dyckman was preparing to burn his fingers at the shrine of Mrs. Cheever.

He rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Noxon, though her motor was waiting at the door, as he was glad to note. Mrs. Noxon came down with her hat on and her gloves going on. She pinched Dyckman's cheek and kissed him and said:

"It's sweet of you, Jimmie, to call on an old crone like me, and so promptly. She'll be down in a minute. But you must be on your good behavior, Jim, for they're talking about you, you know. They're bracketing your name with Charity's."

"The dirty beasts! I'll--"

"You can't, Jim. But you can behave. Cheer her up a little. She's blue about that dog of a Cheever. I've got to go and turn over the money we earned yesterday. Quite a tidy sum, but I'll never give another d.a.m.ned show as long as I live."

She left, and by and by Charity Coe drifted in, bringing strange contentment with her. She greeted Jim with a weary cordiality. He took her hand and kissed it and laid his other hand over it as usual. She put her other hand on top of his and patted it--then withdrew her slender fingers and sat down.

They glanced at each other and sighed. Jim was miserably informed now that he had made the angelic Charity Coe a theme for gossip. He felt guilty--irritatedly guilty, because he had the name without the game.

Charity Coe was in a dull mood. She was in a love lethargy. Her mind was trying to persuade her heart that her devotion to Peter Cheever was a wasted lealty, but her heart would not be convinced, though it began to be afraid. She was as a watcher who sits in the next room to one who is dying slowly and quietly. She could neither lose hope nor use it.

Jim and Charity sat brooding for a long while. He had outstretched himself on a sumptuous divan. She was seated on a carved chair, leaning against the tall back of it like a figure in high relief. About them the great room brooded colossally.

Gilfoyle would have hated Charity and Jim as perfect examples of the idle rich, too stupid to work, too pampered to be worthy of sympathy.

But whether these two had a right to suffer or not, suffer they did.

The mansion was quiet. The other house-guests were motoring or darting about the twilit tennis-court or trading in the gossip-exchange at the Casino. Jim and Charity were marooned in a sleeping castle.

At length Jim broke forth, "For G.o.d's sake, sing."

Charity laughed a little and said, "All right--anything to make you talk."

She went to the piano and s.h.i.+fted the music. There were dozens of songs about roses. She dropped to the bench and began to play and croon Edward Carpenter's luscious music to Waller's old poem, "Go, Lovely Rose."

Jim began to talk almost at once. Charity went on singing, smiling a little at the familiar experience of being asked to sing only to be talked over. Jim grew garrulous as he read across her shoulder with characteristic impoliteness.

_"Tell her that wastes her time and me,"_ he quoted; then he groaned: "That's you and me, Charity Coe. But you're wasting yourself most of all."

He bent closer to peek at the name of the author. "Who's this feller Waller, who knows so much?"

"Hush and listen," she said, and hummed the song through. It made a new and deep impression on her in that humor. She felt that she had wasted the rosiness of her own life. Girlhood was gone; youth was gone; carefreedom was gone. Like petals they had fallen from the core of her soul. The words of the lyric stabbed her:

Then die that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee.

How small a part of time they share That are so sweet and fair.

Her fingers slipped from the keys and, as it were, died in her lap. Jim Dyckman understood a woman for once, and in a gush of pity for her and of resentment for her disprized preciousness caught at her to embrace her. Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped to the fore. She struck and wrenched and drove him off. She was panting with wrath.

"What a rotten thing to do! Go away and don't come near me again. I'm ashamed of you."

"Me, too," he snarled.