We Can\'t Have Everything

R >> Rupert Hughes >> We Can\'t Have Everything

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41

He had such caloric that he kindled actors and actresses to
unsuspected brilliances. He made tinder of the dry-as-dusts,
and he brought the warm-hearted to a white-hot glow.

He dealt with primary emotions crudely but vigorously. A soldier
saluting an officer became in a Ferriday picture a zealot rendering
a national homage. A maid watching her lover walk away angry became
a Juliet letting Romeo go; a child weeping over a broken doll was
an epitome of all regret. A mother putting a light in the window for
an erring daughter's guidance was something new, an allegory as great
as Bartholdi's Liberty putting her lamp in the window of the nation.

He was as intense with humor as with sorrow. A girl washing dishes
brought shrieks of laughter at the little things she did--the
struggle with the slippery soap, the recoil from the hot plate,
the carelessness with the towel.

Ferriday had not talked to Kedzie two minutes before she was wringing
her hands with excitement. He was discovering her to herself. He told
her the story of a picture he wanted to put her in. He had withheld
it for months, looking for the right interpreter. He resolved to
postpone the completion of the big picture till he had finished a
five-reel idyl for the apotheosis of Kedzie.

"The backers of the enterprise will have apoplexy when they hear
of it," he laughed. "But what do I care?"

The whole army of the studio stood meanwhile at ease, drawing salary
and waiting for Ferriday to remember his day's program and give the
order to go ahead. But he was busy with his new story, in the throes
of nympholepsy, seeing visions, hearing voices.

Kedzie sat in a marble expectancy, Galatea watching Pygmalion
create her and prepare to bring her to life. She had never lived.
She realized that. All her previous existence had been but blind
gropings in the womb of time.

The backers came to remind Ferriday that there was waiting a costly
mob of actors, wooed from the speaking drama by trebled salaries.
Ferriday howled to them to get out. They did not respect his
inspirations; they suspected his motives toward Kedzie.

But Ferriday was deep in love with his art; he was panting with
the afflation of Apollo. Old motives, old scenes, old characters
that had served as "sure-fire stuff" since the earliest Hindu drama
now fell into their ancient places and he thought them new. Kedzie
was sure she had never heard such original ideas. Her gratitude to
Ferriday was absolute. And he was clever enough, or crazy enough,
to say that he was grateful to her. He had been looking for just
Her, and she had come to him just in time. He made her promises
that Solomon could not have made to Sheba, or Shakespeare to the
dark lady.

Solomon could offer to his visitor Ophirian wealth, and Shakespeare
could guarantee with some show of success (up to date) that his
words of praise would outlive all other monuments. But Ferriday
did not offer Kedzie minerals or adjectives. He cried:

"Little girl, I'll put you on a girdle of films that will encircle
the world. Your smile will run round the globe like the sun, and
light up dark places in Africa. Your tears will shower the earth.
People in thousands of towns will watch your least gesture with
anxiety. Queens will have you brought to their palaces to make them
laugh and cry. The soldiers of the world will call you their mascot
and write love-letters to you from the trenches. I will have a
billion pictures made of you, and you shall breathe and move in all
of them. You shall live a million lives at once. I will have your
other self placed in museums so that centuries from now they can
take you out and bring you to life again."

It was a mighty good speech. It would be hard to find a serenade
to beat it. And he read it superbly. He had sung it to every one
of his only girls in the world, his eternal (pro tem.) passions.
He had had about nineteen muses already.

Kedzie did not know this, of course. And it would not have mattered
much. Better the nine-and-ninetieth muse to such a man than the
first and final gas-stove slave of a Tommie Gilfoyle.

Kedzie sat in the state of nerves of a little girl alone on a
mountain-top with lightning shimmering and striking all round her.
She was so happy, so full of electrical sparks, that she was fairly
incandescent. As she said afterward, she felt "all lit up."

Ferriday spun out the plot of his new five-reel scenario until he
was like an unreeled spider. He was all out. The mechanical details
interested and refreshed him now. He must order the studio scenery
and select the outdoor "locations." He must pick the supporting cast
and devise one or two blood-curdling moments of great peril.

Kedzie was too excited to note the ghoulish joy with which he
planned to put her into the most perilous plights that had ever
threatened even a movie star with death or crippledom.

"Do they scare you, my dear?" he asked.

"Scare me?" said Kedzie. "Why, Mr. Ferriday, if you told me to,
I'd go out to the Bronx Zoo-ological Gardens and bite the ear off
the biggest lion they got in the lion-house."

Ferriday reached out, put his arm about her farther shoulder, and
squeezed her to him after the manner of dosing an accordeon. Kedzie
emitted the same kind of squeak. But she was not unhappy, and she
did not even say, "Sir!"

The plot of The Kedziad was to be based on the From-Rags-to-Riches
_leitmotiv_, Kedzie was to be a cruelly treated waif brought up
as a boy by a demoniac Italian padrone who made her steal. She was
to be sent into a rich man's home to rob it. She would find the rich
man about to commit suicide all over his sumptuous library. She
would save him, and he would save her from the padrone's revenge,
on condition that she should dress as a girl (he had not, of course,
suspected that she really was one at the time--had always been one,
in fact). She would dress as a girl and conduct a very delicate
diplomatic mission with a foreign ambassador, involving a submarine
wrecked (in the studio tank) and a terrific ride across one of
the deadliest battle-fields of Verdun (New Jersey) with a vast army
of three hundred supers.

When Kedzie had saved two or three nations and kept the United
States from war the millionaire would regret that she was, after
all, only a boy and be overcome with rapture when she told him the
truth. The three hundred supers would then serve as wedding-guests
in the biggest church wedding ever pulled off.

Kedzie liked this last touch immensely. It would make up for that
disgusting guestless ceremony in the Municipal Building.

Ferriday got rid of her exquisitely by writing a note and saying
to her:

"Now you run down and hop into my car and take this note to Lady
Powell-Carewe--don't fail to call her 'Pole Cary.' She is to design
your wealthy wardrobe, and I want her to study you and do something
unheard of in novelty and beauty. Tell her that the more she spends
the better I'll like it."

Kedzie was really a heroine. She did not swoon even at that.

When Ferriday dismissed her he enfolded her to his beautiful
waistcoat, and then held her off by her two arms and said:

"Little girl, you've made me so happy! So happy! Ah! We'll do great
things together! This is a red-letter day for the movie art."

Kedzie never feared that it might have a scarlet-letter significance.
She forgot that she was anything but a newborn, full-fledged angel
without a past--only a future with the sky for its limit. Alas! we
always have our pasts. Even the unborn babe has already centuries
of a past.

It was Ferriday who brought Kedzie home to hers.

"What about dinner to-night, my dear? I feel like having a wonderful
dinner to-night! Are partridge in season now? What is your favorite
sherry? Let me call for you at, say, seven. Where shall I call?"

Kedzie flopped back from the empyrean to her flat. Gilfoyle again
blockaded her.

She nearly swooned then. Her soul rummaged frantically through a
brain like her own work-basket. She finally dug up an excuse.

"I'd rather meet you at the restaurant."

Ferriday smiled. He understood. The poor thing was ashamed of her
boarding-house.

"Well, Cinderella, let me send my pumpkin for you, at least. I won't
come. Where shall my chauffeur find you?"

Kedzie whimpered the shabby number of the shabby street.

"Shall he ask for Miss Adair, or--"

Kedzie was inspired: "I live in Mrs. Gilfoyle's flat-partment."

"I see," said Ferriday. "Miss Anita Adair--ring Mrs. Gilfoyle's
bell. All right, my angel, at seven. Run along."

He kissed her, and she was ice-cold. But then women were often
like that before Ferriday's genius.

CHAPTER VIII

The things we are ashamed of are an acid test of our souls. Kedzie
Thropp was constantly improving the quality of her disgusts.

A few months ago she was hardly ashamed of sleeping under a park
bench. And already here she was sliding through the street in
a limousine. It was a shabby limousine, but she was not yet ready
to be ashamed of any limousine. She was proud to have it lent to
her, proud to know anybody who owned such a thing.

What she was ashamed of now was the home it must take her to and
the jobless husband waiting for her there. She was ashamed of
herself for tying up with a husband so soon. She had married in
haste and repented in haste. And there was a lot of leisure for
more repentance.

Already her husband was such a handicap that she had refrained
from mentioning his existence to the great moving-picture director
who had opened a new world of glory to her--thrown on a screen,
as it were, a cinemation of her future, where triumphs followed
one another with moving-picture rapidity. He had made a scenario
of her and invited her to dinner.

She smiled a little at the inspiration that had saved her from
confessing that she was Mrs. Gilfoyle. It was neat of her to tell
Mr. Ferriday that she could be addressed "in care of Mrs. Gilfoyle."
In care of herself! That was just what she was. Who else was so
interested in Kedzie's advancement as Kedzie?

She was a bitterly disappointed Kedzie just now. Ferriday had told
her to go to Lady Powell-Carewe and get herself a bevy of specially
designed gowns at the expense of the firm. There was hardly a woman
alive who would not have rejoiced at such a mission. To Kedzie, who
had never had a gown made by anything higher than a sewing-woman,
the privilege was heavenly. Also, she had never met a Lady with
a capital L.

The dual strain might have been the death of her, but she was saved
by the absence of Lady Powell-Carewe. Kedzie went back to the street,
sick with deferred hope. Ferriday's chauffeur was waiting to take
her home. She felt grateful for the thoughtfulness of Ferriday and
crept in.

The nearer Kedzie came to her lowly highly flat the less she wanted
even the chauffeur of Mr. Ferriday's limousine to see her enter it.
He would come for her again at night, but the building did not look
so bad at night.

So she tapped on the glass and told him to let her out, please,
at the drug-store, as she had some marketing to do.

"Sure, Miss," said the chauffeur.

Kedzie liked that "Miss." It was ever so much prettier than "Mizzuz."
She bought some postage-stamps at the drug-store and some pork chops
at the butcher's and went down the street and up the stairs to her
life-partner, dog on him!

Gilfoyle was just finishing a poem, and he was the least attractive
thing in the world to her, next to his poem. He was in his sock
feet; his suspenders were down--he would wear the hateful things!
his collar was off, his sleeves up; his detachable cuffs were
detached and stuck on the mantelpiece; his hair was crazy, and he
had ink smears on his nose.

"Don't speak to me!" he said, frantically, as he thumped the table
with finger after finger to verify the meter.

"No danger!" said Kedzie, and went into the bedroom to look over
her scant wardrobe and choose the least of its evils to wear.

She shook her head at her poverty and went to the kitchen to cook
lunch for her man. He followed her and read her his poem while she
slammed the oven door of the gas-stove at the exquisitely wrong
moments. She broke his heart by her indifference and he tore up
the poem, carefully saving the pieces.

"A whole day's work and five dollars gone!" he groaned. He was
so sulky that he forgot to ask her why she had come home so early.
He assumed that she had been turned off. She taxed her ingenuity
to devise some way of getting to the dinner with Ferriday without
letting Gilfoyle know of it. At last she made so bold as to tell her
husband that she thought she would drop in at her old boarding-house
and stay for dinner if she got asked.

"I'm sick of my cooking," she said.

"So am I, darling. Go by all means!" said Gilfoyle, who owed her one
for the poem.

Kedzie was suspicious of his willingness to let her go, but already
she had outgrown jealousy of him. As a matter of fact, he had been
invited to join a few cronies at dinner in a grimy Italian boarding-
house. They gave it a little interest by calling it a "speak-easy,"
because the proprietor sold liquor without a license. Gilfoyle's
cronies did not know of his marriage and he was sure that Kedzie
would not fit. She did not even know the names of the successful,
therefore mercenary, writers and illustrators, much less the names
of the unsuccessful, therefore artistic and sincere.

To Kedzie's delight, Gilfoyle took himself off at the end of a
perfect day of misery. He left her alone with her ambitions. She
was in very grand company. She hated the duds she had to wear, but
she solaced herself with planning what she should buy when money
was rolling in.

When Ferriday's car came for her she was standing in the doorway.
She hopped in like the Cinderella that Ferriday had called her. When
the car rolled up to the Knickerbocker Hotel she pretended that it
was her own motor.

Ferriday was standing at the curb, humbly bareheaded. He wore a
dinner-jacket and a soft hat which he tucked under his arm so that
he might clasp her hands in both of his with a costume-play fervor.
He had been an actor once--and he boasted that he had been a very
bad one.

Kedzie felt as if he were helping her from a sedan chair. She
imagined her knee skirts lengthened to a brocaded train, and his
trousers gathered up into knee breeches with silver buckles.

Bitterness came back to her as she entered the hotel and her slimpsy
little cloth gown must brush the Parisian skirts of the richly clad
other women.

She pouted in right earnest and it was infinitely becoming to her.
Ferriday was not thinking of the price or cut of her frock. He
was perceiving the flexile figure that informed it, the virginal
shoulders that curved up out of it, the slender, limber throat
that aspired from them and the flower-poise of her head on its
white stalk.

"You are perfect" he groaned into her ear, with a flattering agony
of appreciation.

That made everything all right and she did not tremble much even
before the _maitre d'hotel_. She was a trifle alarmed at the
covey of waiters who hastened to their table to pull out the chairs
and push them in and fetch the water and bread and butter and silver
and plates. She was glad to have long gloves to take off slowly while
she recovered herself and took in the gorgeous room full of gorgeous
people. Gloves are most useful coming off and going on.

Kedzie was afraid of the bill of fare with its complex French terms,
but Ferriday took command of the menu.

When he was working Ferriday could wolf a sandwich with the greed of
a busy artist and give orders with a shred of meat in one hand and
a mug of coffee in the other. But when he luxuriated he luxuriated.

Tonight he was tired of life and dejected from a battle with the
stingy backers, who had warned him for the last time once more
that he had to economize. He needed to forget such people and
the loathsome enemy of fancy, economy.

"I want to order something as exquisite as you are," he said.
"Of course, there could be nothing as exquisite as you are, Miss
Adair--you were curled up on a silver dish with a little apple
in your mouth like a young roast pig. Ever read Lamb on pig?"

Kedzie laughed with glancing tintinnabulations as if one tapped
a row of glasses with a knife.

Ferriday sighed. He saw that she had never heard of Lamb and thought
he was perpetrating an ancient pun. But he did not like bookish women
and he often said that nothing was more becoming to a woman than
ignorance. They should have wisdom, but no learning.

Ferriday was one of those terrifying persons who know, or pretend
to know, curious secrets about restaurants and their resources.
Wine-cellars and the individualities of chefs had no terror for
him so far as she could see. He expressed contempt for apparent
commonplaces that Kedzie had never heard of. He used French words
with an accent that Kedzie supposed to be perfect.

The waiters knew that he did not know much and had merely picked up
a smattering of dining-room lore, but they humored his affectations.
And of all affectations, what is more futile than the printing of
American bills of fare in French?

"Would you prefer the Astrakhan caviar?" he began on Kedzie, "or
some or-durv? The caviar here is fairly trustworthy."

Kedzie shrugged her perfectly accented shoulders in a cowardly
evasion, and he ordered the first caviar Kedzie had ever eaten.
It looked as if it came from a munitions-factory, but she liked it
immensely, especially as a side-long glance at the bill of fare told
her that it cost one dollar and twenty-five cents per person.

Next he proposed either a potage madrilene or a creme de volaille,
Marie Louise.

Kedzie chose the latter because it was the latter. She mumbled:

"I think a little cremmy vly Marie Louisa would be nice."

She was amazed to find later how much it tasted like chicken soup.

"We don't want any fish, do we?" Ferriday moaned. "Or do we? They
don't really understand the supreme de sole a la Verdi here, so
suppose we skip to the roast, unless you would risk the aigulette
de pompano, Coquelin. The last time I had a troncon de saumon here
I had to send it back."

Kedzie said, "Let's skip."

She shuddered. The word reminded her, as always, of Skip Magruder.
She remembered how he had hung over the table that far-away morning
and recommended ham 'n'eggs. His dirty shirt-sleeves and his grin
came back to her now. The gruesome Banquo reminded her so vividly
of her early guilt of plebeiancy that she shivered. The alert
Ferriday noticed it and called:

"Have that window closed at once. There's an infernal draught here."

Kedzie was thrilled at his autocratic manner. He scared off the ghost
of Magruder.

Ferriday pondered aloud the bill of fare as if it were the plot of
a new feature film.

"Capon en casserole, milk-fed guinea-hen escoffier, plover en
cocotte, English golden pheasant, partridge--do any of those
tiresome things interest you?"

It was like asking her whether she would have a Gorham tea-set,
a Balcom gown, or a Packard landaulet. She wanted them all.

But her eyes caught the prices. Four dollars for an English pheasant!
No wonder they called it golden. It seemed a shame, though, to stick
such a nice man, after he had already ordered two dollars and a
half's worth of caviar.

She chose the cheapest thing. She was already falling in love
with Ferriday.

The plover was only a dollar. She was not quite sure what kind of
animal it would turn out to be. She had a womanly intuition that it
was a fowl of some breed. She wanted to know. She had come to the
stomach school.

"I think I'll take a bit of the plover," she said.

"Nice girl!" thought Ferriday, who recognized her vicarious economy.

"Plover it is," he said to the waiter, and added, "tell Pierre it's
for me and he'd better not burn it again."

The waiter was crushed by Pierre's lapse, especially as the chef's
name was Achille.

Ferriday went on: "With the plover we might have some champignons
frais sous cloche and a salade de laitue avec French dressing,
yes? Then a substantial sweet: a coupe aux marrons or a nesselrode
pudding, yes?"

Kedzie wanted to ask for a plain, familiar vanilla ice-cream, but
she knew better. She ordered the nesselrode--and got her ice-cream,
after all. There were chestnuts in it, too--so she was glad she
had not selected the coupe aux marrons.

Ferriday did not take a sweet, but had a cheese instead, after an
anxious debate with the waiter about the health of the Camembert
and the decadence of the Roquefort. When this weighty matter was
settled he returned to Kedzie:

"Now for something to drink. A little sherry and bitters to begin
with, of course; and a--oh, umm, let me see--simple things are best;
suppose we stick to champagne." He called it "shah pine," according
to Kedzie's ear, but she hoped he meant shampane. She had always
wanted to taste "wealthy water," as Gilfoyle called it, but never
called for it.

Kedzie was a trifle alarmed when Ferriday said: "I hope you don't
like it sweet. It can't be too dry for me."

"Me, either," Kedzie assured him--and made a face implying that she
always took it in the form of a powder.

Ferriday smiled benignly and said to the waiter: "You might bring us
een boo-tay de Bollinger Numero--er--katter--vang--kanz." He knew
that the French for ninety-five was four-twenties-fifteen, but the
waiter could not understand till he placed his finger on the number
with his best French accent. He saved himself from collapse by a
stern post-dictum:

"Remember, it's the vintage of nineteen hundred. If you bring that
loathsome eighteen ninety-three I'll have to crack the bottle over
your head. You wouldn't want that, would you?"

"_Non, m'zoo, oui, monzoo_," said the German waiter.

"Then we'll have some black coffee and a liqueur--a Curacao, say,
or a green Chartreuse, or a white mint. Which?"

Naturally Kedzie said the white mint, please.

With that Ferriday released the waiter, who hurried away, hoping
that Ferriday's affectations included extravagant tips.

Kedzie gobbled prettily the food before her. Ferriday could tell that
she was anxiously watching and copying his methods of attack. He soon
knew that this was her first real meal _de luxe_, but he did not
mind that. Columbus was not angry at America because it had never
seen an explorer before.

It delighted Ferriday to think that he had discovered Kedzie. He
would say later that he invented her. And she wanted tremendously
to be discovered or invented or anything else, by anybody who could
find a gold-mine in her somewhere and pay her a royalty on her own
mineral wealth.

When her lips met the shell-edge of the champagne-glass and the
essence of all mischief flung its spray against the tip of her
cleverly whittled nose she winced at first. But she went boldly
back, and soon the sprites that rained upward in her glass were
sending tiny balloons of hope through her brain. They soared past
her small skull and her braided hair and the crown of her hat and
on up through the ceiling, and none of them broke--as yet.

Her soul was pleasantly a-simmer now and she could not tell whether
the wine made her exultant or she the wine. But she was sure that
she had at last discovered her life.

And with it all she was dreadfully canny. She was only a little
village girl unused to city ways, and the handsome city stranger
was plying her with wine; but she was none of your stencil figures
that blot romance.

Kedzie was thinking over the cold, hard precepts that women acquire
somehow. She was resolving that since she was to be as great as he
said she should be, she must not cheapen herself now.

Many of these little village girls have come to town since time
was and brought with them the level heads of icily wise women who
make love a business and not a folly. Many men are keeping sober
mainly nowadays because it is good business; many women pure for
the same reason.

Turkish sultans as fierce as Suleiman the Magnificent have bought
country girls kidnapped by slave-merchants and have bought tyrants
in the bargain. Ferriday the Magnificent was playing with holocaust
when he set a match to Kedzie.

But now she was an attractive little flame and he watched her soul
flicker and gave it fuel. He also gave it a cigarette; at least he
proffered her his silver case, but she shook her head.

"Why not?" he asked. "All the women, old and young, are smoking
here."

She tightened her plump lips and answered, "I don't like 'em; and
they give me the fidgets."

"You'll do!" he cried, softly, reaching out and clenching her
knuckles in his palm a moment. "You're the wise one! I felt sure
that pretty little face of yours was only a mask for the ugliest
and most valuable thing a woman can possess."

"What's that?" said Kedzie, hoping he was not going to begin big
talk.

"Wisdom," said Ferriday. "A woman ought to be as wise as the serpent,
but she ought to have the eyes of a dove. Your baby sweetness is
worth a fortune on the screen if you have brains enough to manage
it, and I fancy you have. Here's to you, Miss Anita Adair!"