We Can\'t Have Everything

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Charity was conscience-smitten, however, and she cast about for a way
to absolve herself. Money is the old and ever-reliable way of paying
debts physical, moral, and religious. Charity determined to arrange
some big fete to bring in a heap of money for the wounded of France,
the blind fathers, and the fatherless children.

Everybody was giving entertainments at this time in behalf of
some school of victims of the war. The only excuse for amusements
in America seemed to be that the profits went to the belligerents
in one way or another.

Charity was distressed by the need of an oddity, a novel note which
should make itself heard among the clamors for Belgian relief, for
Polish relief, for Armenian succor, for German, French, Italian,
Russian widows and orphans.

Charity's secretary, Miss Gurdon, made dozens of suggestions, but
none of them was big enough to interest Charity. One day a card
came up to her with a letter of introduction from Mrs. Noxon:

CHARITY DEAR,--This will acquaint you with a very clever girl, Miss
Grace Havender. Her mother was a school friend of mine. Miss Havender
arranges to have moving pictures taken of people. They are ever
so much quainter than stupid still-life pictures. Posterity ought
to see you with your poor wounded soldiers, but meanwhile we really
should have a chance to perpetuate you as you are. You are always
on the go, and an ordinary picture does not represent you.

Anyway, you will be nice to Miss Havender, for the sake of

Yours affectionately,

MARTHA NOXON.

Charity did not want a picture of herself, but she went down to
get rid of Miss Havender politely and to recommend her to friends
of greater passion for their own likenesses. Miss Havender was
a forward young person and launched at once into a defense of
moving pictures.

"Oh, I admire the movies immensely," Charity interposed. "We had
some of them in the hospitals abroad. If you could have seen that
dear Charlie Chaplin convulse a whole ward of battered soldiers
and make them forget their pain and their anxieties! He was more
of a nurse than a hundred of us. If he isn't a benefactor, I don't
know who is. Oh, I admire the movies, but I'd rather see them than
be them, you know.

"Still, an idea has just occurred to me. You know I'm terribly in
need of a pile of money."

Miss Havender looked about her and smiled.

"Oh, I don't mean for myself. I have far too much, but for the
soldiers. I want something that will bring in a big sum. It occurs
to me that if a lot of us got up a story and acted it ourselves,
it would be tremendously interesting to--well, to ourselves. And
our friends would flock to see it. Amateur performances are ghastly
from an artistic standpoint, but they're great fun.

"It just struck me that if we got up a play and had a cast made up
of Mr. Jim Dyckman and Tom Duane and Winnie Nicolls and Miss Bettany
and the young Stowe Webbs and Mrs. Neff and people like that it
would be dreadfully bad art, but much more amusing than if we had
all the stars in the world--Mr. Drew and his daughter and his niece
Miss Barrymore and her brothers, and Miss Anglin and Miss Bates or
Miss Adams or anybody like that. Don't you think so? Or what do you
think? Could it be done, or has it been--or what about it?"

Miss Havender gasped. She saw new vistas of business opening
before her.

"Yes, it has been done in a small way, and it was great fun, as you
say; but it would have been more fun if it hadn't been so crude.
What you would need would be a director who was not an amateur.
Now, our director is marvelous--Mr. Ferriday. He's the Belasco of
the photoplays. He's as great as Griffith. He takes his art like
a priest. If you had him you could do wonders."

"Then we must have him, by all means," said Charity, smiling a
little at the gleam in Miss Havender's eyes. She had a feeling
that Miss Havender had a deep, personal interest in Mr. Ferriday.
Miss Havender had; most of the women in his environs had. In the
first place, he was powerful and could increase or diminish or
check salaries. He distributed places and patronage with a royal
prerogative. But he was hungry for praise and suffered from the
lack of social prestige granted "the new art."

Miss Havender seconded Charity's motion with enthusiasm. After a
long conference it was agreed that Miss Havender should broach the
matter to the great Mr. Ferriday while Charity recruited actors
and authors.

As Charity rummaged in her hand-bag for a pencil to write Miss
Havender's telephone number with, she turned out Kedzie Thropp's
crumpled, shabby card. She started.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake! The poor child! I had forgotten her
completely. You might be able to do something for her. This Miss
Adair is the prettiest thing, and I promised to get her a job. She
might photograph splendidly. Won't you try to find her a place?"

"I'll guarantee her one," said Miss Havender, who was sure that the
firm would be glad to put Mrs. Cheever under obligations. The firm
was in need of patronage, as Mr. Ferriday's lavish expenditures
had crippled its treasury, while his artistic whims had held up
the delivery of nearly finished films.

Miss Havender told Charity to send the girl to her at the office
any day and she would take care of her. Charity kept Kedzie's card
in her hand, and, as soon as Miss Havender was gone, ran to her desk
to write Kedzie. She told a pale lie--it seemed a gratuitous insult
to confess that she had forgotten.

DEAR MISS ADAIR,--Please forgive my delay in keeping my promise,
but I have been unable to find anything likely to interest you till
to-day. But now Miss Grace Havender, of the Hyperfilm Company, has
just assured me that if you will call on her at her office she will
see that you are engaged. You will photograph so beautifully that
I am sure you will have a great career. Please don't fail to call
on Miss Havender.

Yours, with best wishes,

CHARITY C. CHEEVER.

She sent the letter to the address Kedzie had given her--which was
that of Kedzie's abandoned boarding-house.

CHAPTER VI

Since Kedzie, by the time her marriage had reached its first
morning-after, had already found her brand-new husband odious,
there was small hope of her learning to like him or their poverty
better on close acquaintance.

When he left her for his office she missed him, and her heart
warmed toward him till he came home again. He always brought new
disillusionment with him. He spent his hours out of office in
bewailing his luck, celebrating the hardness of the times, and
proclaiming the hopelessness of his prospects.

And then one evening he arrived with so doleful a countenance that
Kedzie took pity on him. She perched herself on his lap and asked
him what was worrying him.

"Nothing much, honey," he groaned, "except that I've lost my job."

Kedzie was thunderstruck. She breathed the expletive she learned
from her latest companions. "My Gawd!"

Gilfoyle nodded dreadfully: "Business has been bad, anyway. Kalteyer,
with his chewing-gum, was about our only big customer, and now he's
gone bust. Yep. The bank's shut down on his loans, and he was caught
with a mountain of bills on his hands. And the Breathasweeta Chewing
Gum stopped selling. People didn't seem to take to the perfume idea."

"I just hate people!" Kedzie growled, pacing the floor.

Gilfoyle went on, bitterly: "Remember how they all said I was such
a genius for thinking up the name 'Breathasweeta,' and the perfumery
idea? And how they liked my catch-phrase?"

Kedzie nodded.

Gilfoyle grew sarcastic: "Well, a man's a genius if he succeeds, and
a fool if he doesn't. I'm just as sure as ever that there's a fortune
in Breathasweeta. But when Kalteyer's bankers got cold feet I lost
my halo. He and Kiam have been roasting the life out of me. They
blame me! They've kept knocking me and quoting 'Kiss me again--who
are you?' and then groaning. It's funny. I loved it when everybody
else said it was great. But I didn't care much for it myself, the
way they said it."

Kedzie flung herself on the tremulous wabbly-legged divan. Kedzie
didn't like the phrase, either, now. When he had first smitten it
from his brain she had thought it an inspiration and him a king.
Now it sounded silly, coarse, a little indecent. Of course it had
not succeeded. How could he ever have been so foolish as to utter
it--"Kiss me again--who are you?" Why, it was vulgar!

Gilfoyle looked dismally incompetent as he drooped and mumbled. It
is hard to tell an autobiography of failure and look one's best.

"Didn't you tell him you was--you were married?" queried Kedzie.

"I hadn't the courage."

"Courage! Well, I like that! So you're fired! Just like me. Funny!
And here we are, married and all. My Gaw--"

"Here we are, married and all. They'll let me finish the week, but
my goose is cooked, I guess. Jobs are mighty scarce in my line of
business. Everybody's poor except the munitions crowd. I wish I knew
how to make dynamite."

Kedzie pushed her wet hair back from her brow and tore her waist open
a little deeper at the throat. This was carrying the joke of marriage
a little too far even for her patient soul.

Soon Gilfoyle's office was closed to him and he was at home almost
all day. That finished him with Kedzie.

He had not improved on connubial acquaintance. He was lazy and
sloven of mornings, and since he had no office to go to he grew more
neglectful of his appearance than ever. His end-to-end cigarettes
got on Kedzie's nerves and cost a nagging amount of money, especially
as she could not learn to like them herself.

He tried to write poetry for the magazines and permanently destroyed
what little respect Kedzie had for the art. Hunting for some little
love-word that was unimportant when found threw him into frenzies of
rage. He went about mumbling gibberish.

"What in hell rhymes with _heaven_?" he would snarl. "_Beven,
ceven, Devon, fevon, gevin, given_--" And so on to "_zeven_."
Then "_breven, creven, dreven_" and "_bleven, eleven,
dleven_" and "_pseven, spleven, threven_" and so forth.

At length he would hurl his pen across the room, pull at his hair,
and light another cigarette. Cigarette always rhymed with cigarette.

After a day or two of this drivel he produced a brief lyric with
a certain fleetness of movement; it had small freight to carry. He
took it to a number of editors he knew, and one of them accepted
it as a kindness.

Kedzie was delighted till she heard that it would bring into the
exchequer about seven dollars when the check came, which would be
in two weeks.

When Gilfoyle was not fighting at composition he was calling the
editors hard names and deploring the small remuneration given to
poets by a pork-packing nation. Or he would be hooting ridicule
at the successful poets and growing almost as furious against the
persons addicted to the fashionable _vers libre_ as he was
against the wealthy classes.

It seemed to Kedzie that nothing on earth was less important than
prosody, and that however badly poets were paid, they were paid more
than they earned. She grew so lonely for some one to talk to that
she decided to call on old Mrs. Jambers at the boarding-house. She
planned to stop in at dinner-time, in the hope of being asked to
sit in at a real meal. The task of cooking what she could afford
to buy robbed her of all appetite, and she was living mainly on
fumes of food and gas.

She was growing thinner and shabbier of soul, and she knew it.
She put off the call till she could endure her solitude no longer;
then she visited Mrs. Jambers. A new maid met her at the door and
barred her entrance suspiciously. Mrs. Jambers was out. So was Mrs.
Bottger. So were the old boarders that Kedzie knew. New boarders
had their rooms, Kedzie was exiled indeed.

She turned away, saying: "Tell Mrs. Jambers that Anita Adair stopped
to say hello. I was just passing."

"Anita Adair?" said the maid. "You was Anita Adair, yes? Wait once.
It is a letter for you by downstairs."

She closed the door in Kedzie's face. Some time later she came back
and gave Anita the letter from Charity. It was several days old. She
read it with amazement. The impulse to tear it up as she had torn
up Charity's card in Newport did not last long. She went at once
to a drugstore and looked up the telephone number and the address
of the Hyperfilm Company. She repaid the druggist with a smile and
a word of thanks; then she took a street-car to the office.

Miss Havender, who was also a scenario-writer and editor, was very
busy. She had an executive manner that strangely contradicted her
abilities to suffer under the pangs of love and unrequited idolatry.
But then, business men are no more immune to the foolish venom on
Cupid's arrows than poets--perhaps less, since they have no outlet
of rhapsody. That was one of the troubles with Kedzie's poet. By
the time Gilfoyle had finished a poem of love he was so exhausted
that any other emotion was welcome, best of all a good quarrel and
the healthful exercise of his poetic gifts for hate. He could hate
at the drop of a hat.

When the office-boy brought Charity's letter of introduction to Miss
Havender with the verbal message that Miss Adair was waiting outside
Miss Havender nodded. She decided to procure this Miss Adair a good
job in order to curry favor with Mrs. Cheever. She would advise Mr.
Ferriday to pay her marked attention, too.

But when she caught sight of Kedzie running the gantlet of the
battery of authors and typists, and noted how pretty she was, Miss
Havender decided that it would not be good for Mr. Ferriday to pay
marked attention to this minx. He had a habit of falling in love
with women more ardently than with scenarios. He was a despot with
a scenario, and he could quickly make a famous novel unrecognizable
by its own father or mother. But a pretty woman could rule him
ludicrously while her charm lasted.

Miss Havender would gladly have turned Kedzie from the door, but
she did not dare. She had promised Mrs. Cheever to give the girl
a job. But she had not promised what kind of job it should be.

She received Kedzie with such brusqueness that the frightened girl
almost fell off the small rim of chair she dared to occupy. She
offered Kedzie a post as a typist, but Kedzie could not type; as
a film-cutter's assistant, but Kedzie had never seen a film; as
a printing-machine engineer or a bookkeeper's clerk, but Kedzie
had no ability to do things. She could merely look things.

Finally Miss Havender said: "I'm awfully sorry, Miss Adair, but the
only position open is a place as extra woman. There is a big ballroom
scene to be staged tomorrow, and a low dance-hall the next day, and
on Monday a crowd of starving Belgian peasants. We could use you in
those, but of course you wouldn't care to accept the pay."

She said this hopefully. Kedzie answered, hopelessly:

"What's the pay?"

"Three dollars."

"I'll take it."

Miss Havender accepted the inevitable, gave her the address
of the studio--far up-town in the Bronx--and told her to report
at eight the next morning.

Kedzie went back to her home in a new mood. She was the breadwinner
now, if not a cake-earner. Gilfoyle was depressed by her good news,
and she was indignant because he was not happy. The poor fellow was
simply ashamed of his own inability to support her in the style she
had been accustomed to dreaming about.

Kedzie was sullen at having to get the dinner that night. The hot
water would not help to give her hands the ballroom texture. The
next morning she had to leave early. Gilfoyle was too tired of doing
nothing to get up, and she resolved to buy her breakfast ready-made
outside. Her last glance at her husband with his frowsy hair on his
frowsy pillow infuriated her.

The experience at the big studio assuaged her wrath against life.
It was something new, and there was a thrill in the concerted action
of the crowds. She wore a rented ball-gown which did not fit her.
Seeing how her very shoulders winced at their exposure, one would
not have believed that she was a graduate of the Silsby school of
near to nature in next to nothing.

She danced with an extra man, Mr. Clarence Yoder, a portly actor
out of work. He was a costume-play gentleman, and Kedzie thought him
something grand. He found her an entrancing armload. He was rather
aggressive and held her somewhat straitly to his exuberant form, but
he gave her so much information that she did not snub him. She did
not even tell him that she was married. Indeed, when at the close
of a busy day he hinted at a willingness to take her out to see
a picture that evening, she made other excuses than those that
actually prevented her accepting. She spent a doleful evening at
home with her dour husband and resented him more than ever.

On the second day Kedzie was a slum waif and did not like it. She
pouted with a sincerity that was irresistible.

Mr. Ferriday did not direct the crowd scenes in these pictures. His
assistant, Mr. Garfinkel, was the slave-driver. Mr. Yoder cleverly
called him "Simon Legree." Kedzie did not know who Mr. Legree was,
but she laughed because Mr. Yoder looked as if he wanted her to
laugh, and she had decided that he was worth cultivating.

During the course of the day, however, Mr. Garfinkel fell afoul of
Mr. Yoder because of the way he danced with Kedzie. It was a rough
dance prettily entitled "Walking the Dog." Mr. Yoder, who did a
minuet in satin breeches to his own satisfaction, pleased neither
himself nor Mr. Garfinkel in the more modern expression of the
dancer's art.

Mr. Garfinkel called him a number of names which Mr. Yoder would
never have tolerated if he had not needed the money. He quivered
with humiliation and struggled to conform, but he could not please
the sneering overseer. He sought the last resort of those persecuted
by critics:

"Maybe you can do better yourself!"

"Well, I hope I choke if I can't," Garfinkel said as he passed the
manuscript to the camera-man and summoned Kedzie to his embrace.
"Here, Miss What's-your-name, git to me."

Kedzie slipped into his clutch, and he took her as if she were a
sheaf of wheat. His arms loved her lithe elasticities. He dragged
her through the steps with a wondering increase of interest. "Well,
say!" he muttered for her private consumption, "you're a little bit
of all right. I'm not so worse myself when I have such help."

He danced with her longer than was necessary for the demonstration.
Then he reluctantly turned her over to Mr. Yoder. Kedzie did not
like Mr. Yoder any more. She found him fat and clumsy, and his hands
were fat and clammy.

Mr. Garfinkel had to show him again.

Kedzie could not help murmuring up toward his chin, "I wish I could
dance with you instead of him."

Garfinkel muttered down into her topknot: "You can, girlie, but not
before the camera. There's a reason. How about a little roof garden
this evening, huh?"

Kedzie sighed, "I'm sorry--I can't."

Garfinkel realized that the crowd was sitting up and taking notice,
and so he flung Kedzie back to Yoder and proceeded with the picture.
He was angry at himself and at Kedzie, but Kedzie was angered at her
husband, who was keeping her from every opportunity of advancement.
Even as he loafed at home he prevented her ambitions. "The dog in
the manger!" she called him.

Garfinkel paid her no further attention except to take a close-up
of her standing at a soppy table and drinking a glass of stale beer
with a look of desperate pathos. She was supposed to be a slum waif
who had never had a mother's care. Kedzie had had too much of
the same.

The next day was a Saturday. Kedzie did not work. She was lonely for
toil, and she abhorred the flat and the neighbors. The expressive
parrot was growing tautological. Kedzie went out shopping to be
rid of Gilfoyle's nerves. He was in travail of another love-jingle,
and his tantrums were odious. He kept repeating _love_ and
_dove_ and _above_, and _tender, slender, offend her,
defender_, and _kiss_ and _bliss_ till the very words
grew gibberish, detestable nonsense.

Kedzie wandered the shops in a famine of desire for some of the new
styles. Her pretty body cried out for appropriate adornment as its
birthright. She was ashamed to go to the studio a third time in
the same old suit. She ordered one little slip of a dress sent home
"collect." She had hoarded the remnant of her Silsby dollars. When
she reached home the delivery-wagon was at the curb and the man was
up-stairs. Gilfoyle greeted Kedzie with resentment.

"What's this thing? I've got no money to pay it. You know that."

"Oh, I know that well," said Kedzie, and she went to the kitchen,
where she surreptitiously extracted the money from the depths of
the coffee-canister.

She paid for the dress and put it on. But she would not let Gilfoyle
see her in it. She did not mind buying his cigarettes half so much
as she minded paying for her own clothes. It outraged the very
foundation principles of matrimony to have to pay for her own
clothes.

Sunday was an appallingly long day to get through. She was so
frantic for diversion that she would have gone to church if she
had had anything fashionable enough to worship in. In the afternoon
she went out alone and sat on a bench in upper Riverside Drive.
A number of passers-by tried to flirt with her, but it was rather
her bitterness against men than any scruple that kept her eyes
lowered.

She would have been excited enough if she had known that the
pictures in which she played a small part were being run off in
the projection-room at the studio for Mr. Ferriday's benefit.

Everybody was afraid of him. The heads of the firm were hoping that
he would approve the reels and not order them thrown out. They were
convinced that they would have to break with him before he broke
them. Mr. Garfinkel was hoping for a word of approval from the
artistic tyrant.

But Ferriday was fretful and sarcastic about everything. Suddenly
Miss Havender noted that he was interested, noted it by the negative
proof of his sudden repose and silence. She could tell that he was
leaning forward, taut with interest. She saw that Anita Adair was
floating across the screen in the arms of Mr. Yoder.

There followed various scenes in which Kedzie did not appear,
close-up pictures of other people. Ferriday fell back growling.
Then he came bolt upright as the purring spinning-wheel of
the projection machine poured out more of Kedzie.

Suddenly he shouted through the dark: "Stop! Wait! Go back! Give
us the last twenty feet again. Who is that girl--that dream? Who
is she, Garfinkel?"

"I don't know her name, sir."

"Don't know her name! You wouldn't! Well, the whole world will know
her name before I get through with her. Who is she, anyway?"

Miss Havender spoke. "Her name is Adair--Anita Adair."

"Anita Adair, eh? Well, where did she come from? Who dug her up?"

"I did," said Miss Havender.

"Good for you, old girl! She's just what I need." And now he studied
again the scene in which Kedzie took down the draught of bitter
beer, and there was a superhuman vividness in the close-up, with
its magnified details in which every tiny muscle revealed its soul.

"Look at her!" Ferriday cried. "She's perfect. The pathos of her!
She wants training, like the devil, but, Lord, what material!"

He was as fanatic as a Michelangelo finding in a quarry a neglected
block of marble and seeing through its hard edges the mellow contours
of an ideal. He was as impatient to assail his task and beat off
the encumbering weight.

CHAPTER VII

Kedzie wore her new frock when she reached the studio on Monday
morning. She greeted Mr. Garfinkel with an entreating smile, and
was alarmed by the remoteness of his response. He was cold because
she was not for him. He led her respectfully to the anteroom of
the sacred inclosure where Ferriday was behaving like a lion in
a cage, belching his wrath at his keepers, ordering the fund-finders
to find more funds for his great picture. It threatened to bankrupt
them before it was finished, but he derided them as imbeciles,
moneychangers, misers.

Garfinkel was manifestly afraid of Ferriday's very echo, and he
cowered a little when Ferriday burst through the door with mane
bristling and fangs bared.

"Well, well, well!" Ferriday stormed. "What do you want, Garfinkel?
What do you want, Garfinkel? What do you want?"

"You told me to bring Miss Adair to you as soon as she arrived,
and--"

The lion roared as gentle as a sucking dove.

"And this is Miss Adair, is it? Of course it is. Welcome to our
little boiler-factory, my dear. Come in and sit down. Garfinkel,
get her a chair and then get out. Sit down, child. I never bite
pretty girls."

Kedzie was pleasantly terrified, and she wondered what would befall
her next. She gave the retreating Garfinkel no further thought. She
sat and trembled before the devouring gaze of the great Ferriday.
He studied her professionally, but he was intensely, extravagantly
human. That was why he appealed to the public so potently. He took
their feelings and set them on fire and juggled with them flaming.