We Can't Have Everything

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WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING

BOOKS BY RUPERT HUGHES

We Can't Have Everything

In A Little Town

The Thirteenth Commandment

Clipped Wings

What Will People Say?

The Last Rose Of Summer

Empty Pockets

[Illustration: WAR, THE SUNDERER, HAD REACHED THEM WITH HIS GREAT DIVORCE]

WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING

A NOVEL BY RUPERT HUGHES

AUTHOR OF _What Will People Say?_

ILLUSTRATED BY JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG

CONTENTS

THE FIRST BOOK
MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN

THE SECOND BOOK
MRS. TOMMIE GILFOYLE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN

THE THIRD BOOK
MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT SATISFIED

THE FOURTH BOOK
THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS

THE FIRST BOOK

MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN

CHAPTER I

Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler
or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence.
She wanted to see them.

For each five minutes of the day and night, one girl comes to New
York to make her life; or so the compilers of statistics claim.

This was Kedzie Thropp's five minutes.

She did not know it, and the two highly important, because extremely
wealthy, beings in the same Pullman car never suspected her--never
imagined that the tangle they were already in would be further
knotted, then snipped, then snarled up again, by this little
mediocrity.

We never can know these things, but go blindly groping through
the crowd of fellow-gropers, guessing at our presents and getting
our pasts all wrong. What could we know of our futures?

Jim Dyckman, infamously rich (through no fault of his own), could not
see far enough past Charity Coe Cheever that day to make out Kedzie
Thropp, a few seats removed. Charity Coe--most of Mrs. Cheever's
friends still called her by her maiden name--sat with her back turned
to Kedzie; and latterly Charity Coe was not looking over her shoulder
much. She did not see Kedzie at all.

And Kedzie herself, shabby and commonplace, was so ignorant that
if she looked at either Jim or Charity Coe she gave them no heed,
for she had never even heard of them or seen their pictures,
so frequent in the papers.

They were among the whom-not-to-know-argues-one-self-unknowns.
But there were countless other facts that argued Kedzie Thropp
unknown and unknowing. As she was forever saying, she had never
had anything or been anywhere or seen anybody worth having, being,
or seeing.

But Jim Dyckman, everybody said, had always had everything, been
everywhere, known everybody who was anybody. As for Charity Coe,
she had given away more than most people ever have. And she, too,
had traveled and met.

Yet Kedzie Thropp was destined (if there is such a thing as being
destined--at any rate, it fell to her lot) to turn the lives of those
two bigwigs topsy-turvy, and to get her picture into more papers
than both of them put together. A large part of latter-day existence
has consisted of the fear or the favor of getting pictures in the
papers.

It was Kedzie's unusual distinction to win into the headlines at
her first entrance into New York, and for the quaintest of reasons.
She had somebody's else picture published for her that time; but
later she had her very own published by the thousand until the
little commoner, born in the most neglected corner of oblivion,
grew impudent enough to weary of her fame and prate of the comforts
of obscurity!

Kedzie Thropp was as plebeian as a ripe peach swung in the sun across
an old fence, almost and not quite within the grasp of any passer-by.
She also inspired appetite, but always somehow escaped plucking
and possession. It is doubtful whether anybody ever really tasted
her soul--if she had one. Her flavor was that very inaccessibility.
She was always just a little beyond. Her heart was forever fixed
on the next thing, just quitting the last thing. Eternal, delicious,
harrowing discontent was Kedzie's whole spirit.

Charity Coe's habit was self-denial; Kedzie's self-fostering,
all-demanding. She was what Napoleon would have been if the Little
Corporal had been a pretty girl with a passion for delicacies
instead of powers.

Thanks to Kedzie, two of the best people that could be were plunged
into miseries that their wealth only aggravated.

Thanks to Kedzie, Jim Dyckman, one of the richest men going and one
of the decentest fellows alive, learned what it means to lie in
shabby domicile and to salt dirty bread with tears; to be afraid
to face the public that had fawned on him, and to understand the
portion of the criminal and the pariah.

And sweet Charity Coe, who had no selfishness in any motive, who
ought to have been canonized as a saint in her smart Parisian robes
of martyrdom, found the clergy slamming their doors in her face
and bawling her name from their pulpits; she was, as it were, lynched
by the Church, thanks again to Kedzie.

But one ought not to hate Kedzie. It was not her fault (was it?)
that she was cooked up out of sugar and spice and everything nice
into a little candy allegory of selfishness with one pink hand
over her little heartless heart-place and one pink hand always
outstretched for more.

Kedzie of the sugar lip and the honey eye! She was going to be carried
through New York from the sub-sub-cellar of its poverty to its highest
tower of wealth. She would sleep one night alone under a public bench
in a park, and another night, with all sorts of nights between, she
would sleep in a bed where a duchess had lain, and in arms Americanly
royal.

So much can the grand jumble of causes and effects that we call fate
do with a wanderer through life.

During the same five minutes which were Kedzie's other girls were
making for New York; some of them to succeed apparently, some of them
to fail undeniably, some of them to become fine, clean wives; some
of them to flare, then blacken against the sky because of famous
scandals and fascinating crimes in which they were to be involved.

Their motives were as various as their fates, and only one thing
is safe to say--that their motives and their fates had little to do
with one another. Few of the girls, if any, got what they came for
and strove for; and if they got it, it was not just what they thought
it was going to be.

This is Kedzie's history, and the history of the problem confronting
Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe Cheever: the problem that Kedzie was going
to seem to solve--as one solves any problem humanly, which is by
substituting one or more new problems in place of the old.

This girl Kedzie who had never had anything had one thing--a fetching
pout. Perhaps she had the pout because she had never had anything.
An Elizabethan poet would have said of her upper lip that a bee
in search of honey had stung it in anger at finding it not the rose
it seemed, but something fairer.

She had eyes full of appeal--appeal for something--what? Who knows?
She didn't. Her eyes said, "Have mercy on me; be kind to me."
The shoddy beaux in her home town said that Kedzie's eyes said,
"Kiss me quick!" They had obeyed her eyes, and yet the look of appeal
was not quenched. She came to New York with no plan to stay. But she
did stay, and she left her footprints in many lives, most deeply
in the life of Jim Dyckman.

CHAPTER II

Miss Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler
or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence.
She wanted to see them. To Jim Dyckman these things were commonplace.
What he wanted was simple, complex, cheap, priceless things--love,
home, repose, contentment.

He was on the top of the world, and he wanted to get down or have
somebody else come up to him. Peaks are by definition and necessity
limited to small foothold. Climbing up is hardly more dangerous
than climbing down. Even to bend and lift some one else up alongside
involves a risk of falling or of being pushed overboard.

But at present Jim Dyckman was thinking of the other girl, Charity
Coe Cheever, perched on a peak as cold and high as his own, but far
removed from his reach.

Even the double seat in the sleeping-car was too small for Jim. He
sprawled from back to back, slumped and hunched in curves and angles
that should have looked peasant and yet somehow had the opposite
effect.

His shoes were thick-soled but unquestionably expensive, his clothes
of loose, rough stuff manifestly fashionable. Like them, he had a
kind of burly grace. He had been used to a well-upholstered life.

He was one of those giants that often grow in rich men's homes. His
father was such another, and his mother suggested the Statue of
Liberty in corsets and on high heels.

Dyckman was reading a weekly journal devoted to horses and dogs,
and reading with such interest that he hardly knew when the train
stopped.

He did not see the woman who got out of a motor and got into the
train, and whose small baggage the porter put in the empty place
opposite his. He did not see that she leaned into the aisle and
regarded him with a pathetic amusement in her caressing eyes. She
took her time about making herself known; then she uttered only
a discreet:

"Ahem!"

She put into the cough many subtle implications. Hardly more could
be crowded into a shrug.

Dyckman came out of his kennels and paddocks, blinked, stared, gaped.
Then he began to stand up by first stepping down. He bestrode the
narrow aisle like a Colossus.

He caught her two hands, brought them together, placed them in one
of his, and covered them with the other as in a big muff, and bent
close to pour into her eyes such ardor that for a moment she closed
hers against the flame.

Then, as if in that silent greeting their souls had made a too loud
and startling noise of welcome, both of them looked about with
an effect of surreptition and alarm.

There were not many people in the car, and they were absorbed in
their own books, gossips, or naps. Only a few head-tops showing
above the high-backed seats, and no eyes or ears.

"Do you know anybody on the train?" the woman asked.

The man shook his head and sank into the seat opposite her, still
clinging to her hands. She extricated them:

"But everybody knows you."

He dismissed this with a sniff of reproof. Then they settled down
in the small trench and seemed to take a childish delight in the
peril of their rencounter.

"Lord, but it's good to see you!" he sighed, luxuriously. "And
you're stunninger than ever!"

"I'm a sight!" she said.

She was clad even more plainly than he, and had the same spirit
of neglectful elegance. She was big, too, for a woman; somewhat lank
but well muscled, and decisive in her motions as if she normally
abounded in strength. What grace she had was an athlete's, but she
looked overtrained or undernourished. Seeing that she did not look
well, Dyckman said:

"How well you're looking, Charity."

She did not look like Charity, either; but her name had been given
to her before she was born. There had nearly always been a girl
called Charity in the Coe family. They had brought the name with
them from New England when they settled in Westchester County some
two hundred years before. They had kept little of their Puritanism
except a few of the names.

This sportswoman called Charity had been trying to live up to her
name, of late. That was why she was haggard. She smiled at her
friend's unmerited praise.

"Thanks, Jim. I need a compliment like the devil."

"Where've you been since you got back?"

"Up in the camp, trying to get a little rest and exercise. But it's
too lonesome nights. I rest better when I keep on the jump."

"You're in black; that doesn't mean--?"

She shook her head. A light of eagerness in his eyes was quenched,
and he growled:

"Too bad!" He could afford to say it, since the object of his obloquy
was alive. If the person mentioned had not been alive, the phrase
he used would have been the same more gently intoned.

Charity protested: "Shame on you! I know you mean it for flattery,
but you mustn't, you really mustn't. I'm in black for--for Europe."
She laughed pitifully at the conceit.

He answered, with admiring awe: "I've heard about you. You're a
wonder; that's what you are, Charity Coe, a wonder. Here's a big
hulk like me loafing around trying to kill time, and a little tike
like you over there in France spending a fortune of money and more
strength than even you've got in a slaughter-house of a war hospital.
How did you stand it?"

"It wasn't much fun," she sighed, "but the nurses can't feel sorry
for themselves when they see--what they see."

"I can imagine," he said.

But he could not have imagined her as she daily had been. She and
the other princesses of blood royal or bourgeois had been moiling
among the red human debris of war, the living garbage of battle,
as the wagons and trains emptied it into the receiving stations.

She and they had stood till they slept standing. They had done
harder, filthier jobs than the women who worked in machine-shops and
in furrows, while the male-kind fought. She had gone about bedabbled
in blood, her hair drenched with it. Her delicate hands had performed
tasks that would have been obscene if they had not been sublime
in a realm of suffering where nothing was obscene except the cause
of it all.

She sickened at it more in retrospect than in action, and tried
to shake it from her mind by a change of subject.

"And what have you been up to, Jim?"

"Ah, nothing but the same old useless loafing. Been up in the North
Woods for some hunting and fishing," he snarled. His voice always
grew contemptuous when he spoke of himself, but idolatrous when
he spoke of her--as now when he asked: "I heard you had gone back
abroad. But you're not going, are you?"

"Yes, as soon as I get my nerves a little steadier."

"I won't let you go back!" He checked himself. He had no right to
dictate to her. He amended to: "You mustn't. It's dangerous crossing,
with all those submarines and floating mines. You've done your bit
and more."

"But there's so horribly much to do."

"You've done enough. How many children have you got now?"

"About a hundred."

"Holy mother!" he whispered, with a profane piety. "Can even you
afford as big a family as that?"

"Well, I've had to call for some help."

"Let me chip in? Will you?"

"Sure I will. Go as far as you like."

"All right; it's a bet. Name the sum, and I'll mail it to you."

"You'd better not mail me anything, Jim" she said.

He blenched and mumbled: "Oh, all right! I'll write you a check now."

"Later," she said. "I don't like to talk much about such things,
please."

"Promise me you won't go back."

She simply waived the theme: "Let's talk of something pleasant,
if you don't mind."

"Something pleasant, eh? Then I can't ask about--him, I suppose."

"Of course. Why not?"

"How is the hound?--begging the pardon of all honest hounds."

She was too sure of her own feelings toward her husband to feel it
necessary to rush to his defense--against a former rival. Her answer
was, "He's well enough to raise a handsome row if he saw you and me
together."

He grumbled a full double-barreled oath and did not apologize for it.
She spoke coldly:

"You'd better go back to your seat."

She was as severe as a woman can well be with a man who adores her
and writhes with jealousy of a man she adores.

"I'll be good, Teacher," he said. "Was he over there with you?"

She evidently liked to talk about her husband. She brightened as
she spoke. "Yes, for a while. He drove a motor-ambulance, you know,
but it bored him after a month or two. They wouldn't let him up to
the firing-lines, so he quit. Have you seen him?"

"Once or twice."

"He's looking well, isn't he?"

"Yes, confound him! His handsome features have been my ruin."

She could smile at that inverted compliment. But Dyckman began
to think very hard. He was suddenly confronted with one of
the conundrums in duty which life incessantly propounds--life that
squats at all the crossroads with a sphinxic riddle for every
wayfarer.

CHAPTER III

Kedzie--to say it again--did not know enough about New York or
the world to recognize Mrs. Cheever and Mr. Dyckman when she glanced
at them and glanced away. They did not at all come up to Kedzie's
idea or ideal of what swells should be, and she had not even grown
up enough to study the society news that makes such thrilling reading
to those who thrill to that sort of thing. The society notes in
the town paper in Kedzie's town (Nimrim, Missouri) consisted of
bombastic chronicles of church sociables or lists of those present
at surprise-parties.

This girl's home was one of the cheapest in that cheap town. Her
people not only were poor, but lived more poorly than they had to.
They had, in consequence, a little reserve of funds, which they
took pride in keeping up. The three Thropps came now to New York
for the first time in their three lives. They were almost as ignorant
as the other peasant immigrants that steam in from the sea.

Adna Thropp, the father, was a local claim-agent on a small railroad.
He spent his life pitting his wits against the petty greed of honest
farmers and God-fearing, railroad-hating citizens. If a granger let
his fence fall down and a rickety cow disputed the right of way with
a locomotive's cow-catcher, the granger naturally put in a claim for
the destruction of a prize-winning animal with a record as an amazing
milker; also he added something for damage to the feelings of the
family in the loss of a household pet. It was Adna's business to beat
the shyster lawyers to the granger and beat the granger to the last
penny. One of his best baits was a roll of cash tantalizingly waved
in front of his victim while he breathed proverbs about the delayful
courts.

This being Adna's livelihood, it was not surprising that his habit
of mind gave pennies a grave importance. Of course, he carried his
mind home with him from the office, and every demand of his wife
or children for money was again a test of ability in claim-agency
tactics. He fought so earnestly for every cent he gave down that his
dependents felt that it was generally better to go without things
than to enter into a life-and-death struggle for them with Pa.

For that reason Ma Thropp did the cooking, baked the "light bread,"
and made the clothes and washed them and mended them till they
vanished. She cut the boys' hair; she schooled the girls to help her
in the kitchen and at the sewing-machine and with the preserve-jars.
Her day's work ended when she could no longer see her darning-needle.
It began as soon as she could see daylight to light the fire by. In
winter the day began in her dark, cold kitchen long before the sun
started his fire on the eastern hills.

She upheld a standard of morals as high as Mount Everest and as bleak.
She made home a region of everlasting chores, rebukes, sayings wiser
than tender, complaints and bitter criticisms of husband, children,
merchants, neighbors, weather, prices, fabrics--of everything on
earth but of nothing in heaven.

Strange to say, the children did not appreciate the advantages
of their life. The boys had begun to earn their own money early by
the splitting of wood and the shoveling of snow, by the vending of
soap, and the conduct of delivery-wagons. They spent their evenings
at pool-tables or on corners. The elder girls had accepted positions
in the various emporia of the village as soon as they could. They
counted the long hours of the shop life as an escape from worse.
Their free evenings were not devoted to self-improvement. They
did not turn out to be really very good girls. They were up to all
sorts of village mischief and shabby frivolity. Their poor mother
could not account for it. She could scold them well, but she could
not scold them good.

The daughter on the train, the youngest--named Kedzie after an aunt
who was the least poor of the relatives--was just growing up into
a similar career. Her highest prayer was that her path might lead
her to a clerkship in a candy-shop. Then this miracle! Her father
announced that he was going to New York.

Adna was always traveling on the railroad, but he had never traveled
far. To undertake New York was hardly less remarkable than to run
over to the moon for a few days.

When he brought the news home he could hardly get up the front steps
with it. When he announced it at the table, and tried to be careless,
his hand trembled till the saucerful of coffee at his quivering lips
splashed over on the clean red-plaid table-cloth.

The occasion of Thropp's call to New York was this: he had joined
a "benevolent order" of the Knights of Something-or-other in his
early years and had risen high in the chapter in his home town.
When one of the members died, the others attended his funeral in
full regalia, consisting of each individual's Sunday clothes,
enhanced with a fringed sash and lappets. Also there was a sword
to carry. The advantage of belonging to the order was that the
member got the funeral for nothing and his wife got the further
consolation of a sum of money.

Mrs. Thropp bore her neighbors no more ill-will than they deserved,
but she did enjoy their funerals. They gave her husband an excuse
for his venerable silk hat and his gilded glave. Sometimes as she
took her hands out of the dough and dried them on her apron to fasten
his sash about him, she felt all the glory of a medieval countess
buckling the armor on her doughty earl. She had never heard of such
persons, but she knew their epic uplift.

Now, Mr. Thropp had paid his dues and his insurance premiums
for years and years. They were his one extravagance. Also he had
persuaded Mrs. Thropp's brother Sol to do the same. Sol had died
recently and left his insurance money to Mrs. Thropp. Sol's own wife,
after cherishing long-deferred hopes of spending that money herself,
had been hauled away first. She never got that insurance money.
Neither did any one else; the central office in New York failed
to pay up.

The annual convention was about to be held in the metropolis, and
there was to be a tremendous investigation of the insurance scandal.
Adna was elected the delegate of the Nimrim chapter, for he was known
to be a demon in a money-fight.

And this was the glittering news that Adna brought home. Small wonder
it spilled his coffee. And that wife of his not only had to go and
yell at him about a little coffee-stain, but she had to announce that
she hardly saw how she could get ready to go right away--and who was
to look after those children?

Adna's jaw fell. Perhaps he had ventured on dreams of being set free
in New York all by himself. She soon woke him. She said she wouldn't
no more allow him loose in that wicked place than she would--well,
she didn't know what! He could get a pass for self and wife as easy
as shootin'. Adna yielded to the inevitable with a sorry grace and
told her to come along if she'd a mind to.

And then came a still, small voice from daughter Kedzie. She spoke
with a menacing sweetness: "Goody, goody! Besides seeing New York,
I won't have to go to school for--How long we goin' to be gone,
poppa?"

Both parents stared at her aghast and told her to hush her mouth.
It was a very pretty mouth even in anger, and Kedzie declined to
hush it. She said:

"Well, if you two think you're goin' to leave me home, you got
another think comin'--that's all I got to say."

She betrayed an appalling stubbornness, a fiendish determination
to subdue her parents or talk them to death.

"I never get to go any place," she wailed. "I never been anywhere or
seen anything or had anything; I might as well be a bump on a log.
And now you're goin' to New York. I'd sooner go there than to heaven.
It's my first chance to see a city, and I just tell you right here
and now, I'm not goin' to lose it! You take me or you'll be mighty
sorry. I'll--I'll--"

"You'll what?" her father sneered. What, after all, could a young
girl do?

"I'll run off, that's what I'll do! And disgrace you! I'll run away
and you'll never see me again. If you're mean enough to not take me,
I'm mean enough to do something desprut. You'll see!"

Her father realized that there were several things a young girl
could do to punish her parents. Kedzie frightened hers with her
fanatic zeal. They gave in at last from sheer terror. Immediately
she became almost intolerably rapturous. She shrieked and jumped;
and she kissed and hugged every member of the household, including
the dogs and the cats. She must go down-town and torment her girl
friends with her superiority and she could hardly live through
the hours that intervened before the train started.

The Thropps rode all day in the day-coach to Chicago, and Kedzie
loved every cinder that flew into her gorgeous eyes. Now and then
she slept curled up kittenwise on a seat, and the motion of the train
lulled her as with angelic pinions. She dreamed impossible glories
in unheard-of cities.

But her mother bulked large and had been too long accustomed to
her own rocking-chair to rest in a day-coach. She reached Chicago
in a state of collapse. She told Adna that she would have to travel
the rest of the way in a sleeper or in a baggage-car, for she just
naturally had to lay down. So Adna paid for two berths. It weakened
him like a hemorrhage.