We Can\'t Have Everything

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Gilfoyle put out the lights--"because they draw the insects," he
said, but Kedzie thought that he was beginning to economize. He
was. Across the street they could see other heat-victims miserably
preparing for the night. They were careless of appearances.

In the back of the parlor was a window opening into a narrow
air-shaft. The one bedroom's one window opened on the same cleft.
If the curtain were not kept down the neighbors across the area
could see and be seen. If the window were left open they could be
heard; and when the curtain flapped in the occasional little puffs
of hot air, it gave brief glimpses of family life next door. That
family had a squalling child, too. Somewhere above, a rickety
phonograph was at work; and somewhere below, a piano was being
mauled; and somewhere else a ukelele was being thumped and a
doleful singer was snarling "The Beach at Waikiki." This racket
was their only epithalamium. It was more like the "chivaree" with
which ironic crowds tormented bridal couples back in Nimrim, Mo.

Gilfoyle was poet enough to enjoy a little extra doldrums at what
might have made a longshoreman peevish. He mopped sweat and fanned
himself with a newspaper till he grew frantic. He flung down the
paper and rose with a yawn.

"Well, this is one helluva honeymoon. I'm going to crawl into
the oven and fry."

Kedzie sat alone in the dark parlor a long while. She was cold now.
She had danced Greek dances in public, but she blushed in the dark
as she loitered over her shoelaces. She was so forlorn and so
disappointed with life that tears would have been bliss.

Somebody on that populous, mysterious air-shaft kept a parrot.
It woke Kedzie early in the morning with hysterical laughter that
pierced the ears like steel saws. There was something uncannily
real but hideously mirthless in its Ha-ha-ha! It would gurgle with
thick-tongued idiocy: "Polly? Polly? Polly wanny clacky? Polly?
Polly?"

Kedzie wondered how any one could care or dare to keep such a pest.
She wanted to kill it. She leaned out of the window and stared up.
Somewhere above the fire-escape rungs she could see the bottom of
its cage. If only she had a gun, how gladly she would have blown
Polly to bits.

She saw a frowsy-haired man in a nightgown staring up from another
window and yelling at the parrot. She drew her head in hastily.

The idol of her soul slept on. The inpouring day illumined him to
his disadvantage. His head was far back, his jaw down, his mouth
agape. During the night a beard had crept out on his cheeks. He was
startlingly unattractive.

Kedzie crouched on the bed and stared at him in wonder, in a
fascination of disgust. This was the being she had selected from
all mankind for her companion through the long, long years to come.
This was her playmate, partner, hero, master, financier, bedfellow,
lifefellow. For him she had given up her rights to freedom, to
praise, to chivalry, to individuality, her hopes of wealth, luxury,
flattery.

She glanced about the room--the pine bureau with its imitation
stain, broken handles, and curdled mirror, the ugly chairs, the
gilt radiator, the worn rug, the bed that other wretches had
occupied. She wondered who they were and where they were.

She remembered Newport, the Noxon home. She tried to picture a
bedroom there. She saw a palace of the best moving-picture period.
She remembered the first moving picture she had seen in New York,
and contrasted the Anita Adair of that adventure with the Anita
Adair of this. She recalled that girl locking her door against the
swell husband, and the poor but honest lover with the revolver.

Kedzie wished she had locked her own door--only there was no door,
merely a shoddy portiere, for there was not room to open a door.
Her old ambitions came back to her. She had planned to know rich
people and rebuke their wicked wiles. One rich man had held her in
his arms, lifted her out of the pool. It was no less a man than
Jim Dyckman, and she had repulsed him.

She caught a glimpse of her own tousled head in the mirror,
and she sneered at it. "You darn fool--oh, you darn fool!"

At last the parrot woke Gilfoyle. He snorted, bored his fists
into his eyes, yawned, scratched his head, stared at the unusual
furniture, flounced over, saw his mate, stared again, grinned,
said:

"Why, hello, Anita!"

He put out his hand to her. She wiggled away; he followed. She
slid to the floor and gasped:

"Don't touch me!"

"Why, what's the matter, honey?"

"Huh! What isn't the matter?"

He fumbled under the pillow for his watch, looked at it, yawned:

"Lord, it's only five o'clock. Good _night_!" He disposed
himself for sleep again. The parrot broke out in another horrible
Ha-ha! He sat up with an oath. "I'd like to murder the beast."

"Don't! I'm much obliged to it."

"Obliged to it? You must be crazy. Good Lord! hear it scream."

"Well, ain't life a scream?"

Gilfoyle was a graceless sleeper and a surly waker. He forgot that
he was a bridegroom.

He sniffed, yawned, flopped, buried one ear in the pillow and pulled
the cover over the other and almost instantly slept. His head on
the pillow looked like some ugly, shaggy vegetable. Kedzie wanted to
uproot the object and throw it out of the window, out of her life.
That was the head of her husband, the lord and master of her dreams!

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 shivered lest their young men in the trenches might have been
killed or mangled by some shell dropped from an airship 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 nobody 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 advertisement 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 quantities 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 nobody 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 damned 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 God's sake, sing."

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

She went to the piano and shifted 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.

CHAPTER V

Jim slunk out and slunk down the marble steps and down the winding
walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea,
enraged at himself and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met
Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over the sea-wall.
But there was little danger of Peter Cheever's being found so near
his wife.

_"Tell her that wastes her time and me,"_ kept running through
Jim's head. He was furious at Charity for wasting so much of him. He
had followed her about and moped at her closed door like a stray dog.
And she had never even thrown him a bone.

A wave ran up on the beach and seemed to try to embrace the earth,
possess it. But it fell away baffled. Over its subsiding pother sprang
a new wave with the same bosomful of desire and the same frantic
clutching here and there--the same rebuff, the same destruction
under the surge of the next and the next. The descending night gave
a strange pathos to the eternal vanity.

Jim Dyckman stood and faced the ocean. Once more he discovered that
life was too much for him to understand. He was ashamed of himself
for his vain endeavor to envelop Charity Coe and absorb her into
the deeps of his love. He was most ashamed because he had failed
and must slither back into the undertow with the many other men
whom Charity had refused to love.

He was ashamed of Charity Coe, too, for squandering her prime
and her pride. He was enraged at her blindness to Pete Cheever's
duplicity or her complacency with it. He hated Charity for a
while--nearly. At any rate he was ashamed of her, ashamed of
the world, in a rebel mood.

As he stood wind-blown and spray-flogged and glad to be beaten, a
shabby old carriage went by. It was piled to overflowing with some
of Miss Silsby's girls taking a seeing-Newport tour on the cheap.

The driver was, or said he had been in his time, coachman to some
of the oldest families. He ventured their names with familiarity
and knew their houses by heart. He told quaint stories of their
ways, how old Mrs. Noxon once swore down a mutinous stableman, how
Miss Wossom ran away with her coachman. There was something finely
old-fashioned and conservative about that. A new-rich would have
run away with a chauffeur.

The driver knew Jim Dyckman's back and pointed him out. The girls
laughed, remembering Kedzie's encounter with him. They laughed so
loud that Dyckman turned, startled by the racket. But the carriage
rolled them away and he did not hear them wondering what had become
of Kedzie. The gloaming saddened them, and they felt very sorry for
her. But Jim Dyckman gave her no thought.

He was tearing apart his emotions toward Charity and resolving that
he must never see her again. In the analytical chemistry of the soul
he found that this resolution was three parts hopelessness of winning
her, three parts a decent sense of the wickedness of courting another
man's woman, three parts resentment at her for treating him properly,
and one part a feeling that he would make himself most valuable to
her by staying away.

Never a homeless dog slinking through an alley in search of a
sidelong ash-barrel to sleep in felt more poverty-stricken, woebegone,
than Jim Dyckman. He moped along the stately road, as much afraid of
his future as Kedzie had been, trudging the same highway. She had
wondered if board and lodging would fail her. This was not Jim
Dyckman's fear, but his own was as great, for everybody was some
dreadful elbow-companion.

Lucian showed Jupiter himself cowering on his throne in the sky and
twiddling his thunderbolt with trembling hand as he wondered what
the fates held in store for him, and saw on earth the increasing
impudence of the skeptics.

So Jim Dyckman, unconscious that he was following in Kedzie's
footsteps, walked miserably on his way. He had no place to go to
but the finest yacht in the harbor. He had no money to depend on
but a few millions of his own and the Pelion plus Ossa fortunes
of his father and mother and their relatives--a mere sierra of
gold mountains.

He drifted down to the landing-place and went out to his yacht
in a hackney launch. He was received at her snowy sides as if he
were the emperor of somewhere come to visit one of his rear admirals.
He went up the steps as if he were a school-boy caught playing hooky
and going up-stairs to play the bass drum to his mother's slipper.

His mother was on the shade-deck, reclining. The big white wicker
lounge looked as if a small avalanche had fallen on it. From the
upturned points of her white shoes back to her white hair she was
a study in foreshortening that would have interested a draftsman.

Spread out on a huge wicker arm-chair sat Jim's father, also all
white, except for his big pink hands and his big pink face. It
seemed that he ought to have been smoking a white cigar. As a matter
of fact, he had sat so still that half the weed was ash.

When the two moved to greet Jim there was a mighty creaking of wicker.
There was another when Jim spilled his own great weight into a chair.
A steward in white raised his eyebrows inquiringly and Jim nodded
the eighth of an inch. It was the equivalent of ordering a drink.

Dyckman senior turned to Dyckman seniora and said, "Enter Hamlet in
the graveyard! Where's the skull, my boy, where's the skull?"

"Let the child alone," Mrs. Dyckman protested. "It's too hot for
fooling. You might kiss your poor mother, though. No, don't get up,
just throw me one."

Jim rose heavily, went to her, bent far down, kissed her, and
would have risen again, but her big arms encompassed his neck and
held him, uncomfortably, till he knelt by her side and laid his
head on her bosom.

He felt exceedingly foolish, but nearer to comfort than he had been
for a long while. He wished that he might be a boy again in his
mother's arms and be altogether content and carefree as he had been
there. As if children were content and carefree! Great Heavens!
do they not begin to squirm and kick before they are born?

Mrs. Dyckman was suffocated a trifle by his weight and her own and
her corsets, but her heart ached for him somewhere down deep and
she whispered:

"Can't he tell his mother what he wants? Maybe she can get it
for him."

He laughed bitterly and extricated himself from her clasp, patted
her fat arm, and turned away. His father jealously seized his
sleeve.

"Anything serious, old man? You know I'm here."

Jim squeezed his father's hand and shook his head and turned to
the drink which had arrived. He took it from the tray to his chair
and sat meditating Newport across the top of his glass. Between
the rail of the deck and the edge of the awning he saw a long slice
of it. It was vanity and emptiness to him. He spoke at length.

"Fact is, folks, I've got to go back to New York or somewhere."

"Good Lord!" his father said. "I'm all mixed up in a golf tournament.
I think I've got a chance to lick the boots off old Wainwright."

"Oh dear!" sighed Mrs. Dyckman, "there's to be the most interesting
lecture by that Hindu poet. And it's so much more comfortable here
than ashore. This boat is the coziest you've ever had."

"Stay here, darling," said Jim. "I'll make you a present of her."

"Oh, that's glorious," said Mrs. Dyckman. "I've never had a yacht
of my own. It's a shame to take it from you, but you can get another.
And of course you'll always be welcome here--which is more than
a certain other big Dyckman will be if he doesn't look sharp."

"For the Lord's sake, Jim, don't give it to her. She's the meanest
old miser about her own things." Dyckman senior pushed his chair
back against the rail.

"Watch out!" Mrs. Dyckman gasped. "You're scraping the paint off
my yacht."

Jim rose again. "I've just about time to make the last train
for the day," he said.

His mother sat up and clutched at his hand. "Can't I help you, honey?
Please let me! What is the matter?"

"The matter is I'm a lunkhead and Newport bores me stiff. That's all.
Don't worry. I'll go get the packing started."

He went along the deck, and his parents helplessly craned their
necks after him. His father groaned. Jim had "everything." There
was nothing to get for him, no toy to buy to divert him with.

"He wants a new toy, and he doesn't know what it is," said
the old man.

But Jim wanted an old toy on a shelf too high for his reach. He
ran away from the sight of it.

And Dyckman was fleeing to Charity's next resting-place, after all,
for she also returned in a few days to New York. She was restive
under the goad to return to France. She repented her selfish neglect
of the children of all ages she had adopted abroad. One thing
held her back--the dread of putting the ocean again between her
and her husband.

She thought it small of her to leave so many heroes to suffer without
her ministrations, in order that she might prevent one non-hero
from having too good a time without her ministrations. But womankind
has never been encouraged to adopt the policy of the greatest good
to the greatest number. Hardly!