We Can\'t Have Everything

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CHAPTER XVI

Ferriday did not know, of course, that Kedzie was married. She hardly
knew it herself now. Gilfoyle had been three weeks late in sending
her the thirty dollars' fare to Chicago. Then she wrote him that she
was doing fairly well at the studio and she would stick to her work.
She sent him oceans of love, but she did not send him the thirty
dollars.

Besides, he had borrowed it of her in the first place, and she had
had to borrow more of Ferriday. She had neglected to pay him back.
She needed so much for her new clothes and new expenses innumerable
inflicted on her by her improved estate.

And, of course, she left the miserable little flat on the landlord's
hands. He wasted a good deal of time trying to get the rent paid.
Besides, it was rented in Gilfoyle's name and he was safe in Chicago.
And yet not very safe, for Chicago has also its Bohemia, its clusters
of real and imitation artists, its talkers and dabblers, as well as
its toilers and achievers.

Gilfoyle found some wonderful Western sirens who listened to
his poetry. They were new to him and he to them. His Eastern
pronunciations fascinated them as they had fascinated Kedzie,
and he soon found in them all the breeziness and wholesomeness
of the great prairies which are found in the mid-Western women
of literature.

Gilfoyle had apparently forgotten that his own wife was a
mid-Westerness, and the least breezy, wholesome, prairian thing
imaginable. He saw mid-Western women of all sorts about him, but
he was of those who must have a type for every section of humanity
and who will not be shaken in their belief by any majority of
exceptions.

When Gilfoyle got Kedzie's letter saying that she would not join him
yet awhile he wrote her a letter of poetic grief at the separation.
But poets, like the rest of us, are the better for getting a grief
on paper and out of the system.

Kedzie did not answer his letter for a long while and he did not
miss her answer much, for he was having his own little triumphs.
The advertisements he wrote were receiving honorable mention at the
office and he was having success with his poetry and his flirtations
of evenings.

He returned to his boarding-house one night and looked at his face
in the mirror, stared into the eyes that stared back. A certain
melting and molten and molting lady had told him that he had poet's
eyes like Julian Street's and was almost as witty. Gilfoyle tried
with his shaving-glass and the bureau mirror to study the profile
that someone else had compared to the cameonic visage of Richard
Le Gallienne.

Gilfoyle was gloriously ashamed of himself. In the voice that
someone else had compared to Charlie Towne's reading his own verses
he addressed his reflection with scorn:

"You heartless dog! You ought to be shot--forgetting that you have
a poor little deserted wife toiling in the great city. You're as
bad as Lord Byron ever was."

Then he wrote a sonnet against his own perfidy and accepted
confession as atonement and plenary indulgence.

He was one of those who, when they have cried, "I have sinned," hear
a mysterious voice saying, "Poor sufferer, go and sin some more."

So he did, and he went the way of millions of lazy-minded, lazy-
moraled husbands while Kedzie went the way of men and women who
succeed by self-exploitation and count only that bad morals which
is also bad business. And that was the status of the matrimonial
adventure of the Gilfoyles for the present. It made no perceptible
difference to anybody that they were married--least of all to
themselves--for the present. But of course Kedzie was obscurely
preparing all this while for a tremendous explosion into publicity
and into what is known as "the big money." And that was bound to
make a vast difference to Gilfoyle as well as to Mrs. Gilfoyle.

In these all-revolutionary days a man had better be a little polite
always to his wife, for in some totally unexpectable way she may
suddenly prove to be a bigger man than he is, a money-getter, a
fame or shame acquirer--if only by way of becoming the president of
a suffrage association or a best-seller or an inventor of a popular
doll.

And again, all this time--a very short time, considering the changes
it made in everybody concerned--Ferriday was Kedzie's alternate hope
and despair, good angel and bad, uplifter and down-yanker.

Sometimes he threatened to stop the picture and destroy it unless she
kissed him. And she knew that he could and would do almost anything
of that sort. Had not his backers threatened to murder him or sue him
if he did not finish the big feature? At such times Kedzie usually
kissed Ferriday to keep him quiet. But she was as careful not to give
too many kisses as she had been not to put too many caramels in half
a pound when she had clerked in the little candy-store. Nowadays she
would pause and watch the quivering scale of policy intently with one
more sweet poised as if it were worth its weight in gold. The ability
to stop while the scale wavers in the tiny zone of just-a-little-too-
little and just-a-little-too-much is what makes success in any
business of man--or woman-kind.

It was not always easy for Kedzie to withhold that extra bonbon.
There were times when Ferriday raised her hopes and her pride so
high that she fairly squealed with love of him and hugged him. That
would have been the destruction of Kedzie if there had not been the
counter-weight of conceit in Ferriday's soul, for at those times he
would sigh to himself or aloud:

"You are loving me only because I am useful to you."

This thought always sobered and chilled Mr. Ferriday. He worked
none the less for her and himself and he tried in a hundred ways
to surprise the little witch into an adoration complete enough to
make her forget herself, make her capable of that ultimate altruism
to which a woman falls or rises when she stretches herself out on
the altar of love.

Ferriday began to think seriously that the only way he could break
Kedzie's pride completely would be to make her his wife. He began
to wonder if that were not, after all, what she was driving at--or
trying to drive him to.

Life will be so much more wholesome when women propose marriage
as men do and have a plain, frank talk about it instead of their
eternal business of veils and reticences, fugitive impulses real
or coquettish, modesties real or faked.

Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so curious to know
that finally he broke out, "In the Lord's name, will you or will you
not marry me, damn you?"

And Kedzie answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't dream of such
a thing."

But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she merely wanted
to trawl him along.

She had Ferriday almost crazy--at least she had added one more to
his manias--when Jim Dyckman wandered into the studio and set up
an entirely new series of ambitions and discontents.

CHAPTER XVII

Charity Coe forgot her great moving-picture enterprise for a time
in the agony of her discovery that her husband was disloyal and
that the Church did not accept that as a cancellation of her own
loyalty.

For a long time she was in such misery of uncertainty that she went
up to the mountains to recover her strength. She came back at last,
made simple and stoical somehow by the contrast of human pettiness
with the serenity (as we call it) of those vast masses of debris
that we poetize and humanize as patient giants.

Her absence had left Cheever entirely to his own devices and to
Zada's. They had made up and fought and made up again dozens of
times and settled down at length to that normal alternation of
peace and conflict known as domestic life.

With Charity out of the way there was so little interruption to
their communion that when she came back Zada forbade Cheever to
meet her at the station, and he obeyed.

Charity felt that she had brought with her the weight of the
mountains instead of their calm when she detrained in the thronged
solitude of the Grand Central Terminal. And the house with its
sympathetic family of servants only was as home-like as the Mammoth
Cave.

She took up her work with a frenzy. The need of a man to act as her
adjutant in the business details was imperative. She thought of Jim
Dyckman again, and with a different thought.

When he pleaded to her before she had imagined that she was at least
officially a wife. Now she felt divorced and abandoned, a waif on
the public mercy.

She wanted to talk to Jim because she felt so disprized and
downtrodden that she wanted to see somebody who adored her. She
felt wild impulses to throw herself into his keeping. She wanted to
be bad just to spite the bad. But she merely convinced herself that
she was wicked enough already and deserving of her punishment.

She made the moving-picture scheme a good excuse for asking Jim
to grant her a talk--a business talk. To protect herself from him
and from herself she made a convenience of Mrs. Neff's home. Jim
met her there. She was not looking her best and her mood was one of
artificial indirectness that offended him. He never dreamed that it
was because she was afraid to show him how glad she was to see him.

He was furious at her--so he said he would do her bidding. She
dumped the financial and mechanical ends of the enterprise on his
hands and he accepted the burden. He had nothing else pressing for
his time.

One of his first duties, Charity told him, was to call at the
Hyperfilm Studio and try to engage that Mr. Ferriday for director
and learn the ropes.

"While you're there you might inquire about that little girl you
pulled out of the pool. I sent her there. They promised her a job.
Her name was--I have it at home in my address-book. I'll telephone
it to you."

And she did. She had no more acquaintance with the history
Kedzie was making in the moving-picture world than she had of
the sensational rise of the latest politician in Tibet. Neither
had Jim.

He had been traveling about on his mother's yacht and in less
correct societies, trying to convince himself that he was cured
of Charity. He did not know that the first pictures of Anita Adair
were causing lines to gather outside the moving-picture theaters
of numberless cities and towns.

When his car halted before the big studio where Ferriday was high
priest Jim might have been a traveler entering a temple in Lassa,
for all he knew of its rites and its powers.

No more did the doorman know the power and place of Jim Dyckman.
When Jim said he had an appointment with Mr. Ferriday the doorman
thumbed him up the marble stairs. There were many doors, but no
signs on them, and Dyckman blundered about. At length he turned
down a corridor and found himself in the workshop.

A vast room it was, the floor hidden with low canvas walls and doors
marked "Keep out." Overhead were girders of steel from which depended
heavy chains supporting hundreds of slanting tubes glowing with green
fire.

From somewhere in the inclosures came a voice in distress. It was
the first time Dyckman ever heard Ferriday's voice, and it puzzled
him as it cried:

"Come on, choke her--choke harder, you fool; you're not a masseur--
you're a murderer. Now drag her across to the edge of the well.
Pause, look back. Come on, Melnotte: yell at him! 'Stop, stop, you
dog!' Turn round, Higgins; draw your knife. Go to it now! Give 'em
a real fight. That's all right. Only a little cut. The blood looks
good. Get up, Miss Adair; crawl away on hands and knees. Don't
forget you've been choked. Now take the knife away, Melnotte. Rise;
look triumphant; see the girl. Get to him, Miss Adair. Easy on the
embrace: you're a shy little thing. 'My hero! you have saved me!'
Now, Melnotte: 'Clarice! it is you! you!' Cut! How many feet, Jones?

"Now we'll take the scene in the vat of sulphuric acid. Is the tank
ready? You go lie down and rest, Miss Adair. We won't want you for
half an hour."

As Kedzie left the scene she found Dyckman waiting for her. He
lifted his hat and spoke down at her:

"Pardon me, but you're Miss Adair, aren't you?"

"Yes," said Kedzie, with as much modesty as a queen could show,
incidentally noting that the man who bespoke her so timidly was
plainly a real swell. She was getting so now that she could tell
the real from the plated.

"I heard them murdering you in there and I--Well, Mrs. Cheever asked
me to look you up and see how you were getting along. I see you are."

"Mrs. Cheever!" said Kedzie, searching her memory. Then, with great
kindliness, "Oh yes! I remember her."

"You've forgotten me, I suppose. I had the pleasure--the sad pleasure
of helping you out of the water at Mrs. Noxon's."

"Oh, Lord, yes," Kedzie cried, forgetting her rank. "You're Jim
Dyckman--I mean, Mr. Dyckman."

"So you remember my name," he flushed. "Well, I must say!"

"I didn't remember to thank you," said Kedzie. "I was all damp and
mad. I've often thought of writing to you." And she had.

"I wish you had," said Dyckman. "Well, well!"

He didn't know what to say, and so he laughed and she laughed and
they were well acquainted. Then he thought of a good one.

"I pulled you out of the cold water, so it's your turn to pull me
out of the hot."

"What hot?" said Kedzie.

"I've been sent up here to learn the trade."

Kedzie had a horrible feeling that he must have lost his money.
Wouldn't it be just her luck to meet her first millionaire after he
had become an ex-?

But Dyckman said that he had come to try and engage Mr. Ferriday,
and that sounded so splendid to Kedzie that she snuggled closer.
Ordinarily when a woman cowers under the eaves of a man's shoulder
it is taken for a signal for amiabilities to begin.

Dyckman could not imagine that Kedzie was already as bad as all
that. She wasn't. She was just trying to get as close as she could
to a million dollars. Her feelings were as innocent and as imbecile
as those of the mobs that stand in line for the privilege of
pump-handling a politician.

Jim Dyckman kept forgetting that he was so rich. He hated to be
reminded of it. He did not suspect Kedzie of such a thought. He
stared down at her and thought she was cruelly pretty. He wanted
to tell her so, but he found himself saying:

"But I mustn't keep you. I heard somebody say that you were to
lie down and rest up."

"Oh, that was only Mr. Ferriday. I'm not tired a bit."

"Ferriday. Oh yes, I'm forgetting him. He's the feller I've
come to see."

"He can't be approached when he's working. Sit down, won't you?"

He sat down on an old bench and she sat down, too. She had never
felt quite so contented as this. And Dyckman had not felt so teased
by beauty in a longer time than he could remember.

Kedzie was as exotic to him as a Japanese doll. Her face was painted
in picturesque blotches that reminded him of a toy-shop. Her eyes
were made up with a delicate green that gave them an effect unknown
to him.

She was dressed as a young farm girl with a sunbonnet a-dangle at
the back of her neck, her curls trailing across her rounded shoulders
and down upon her dreamy bosom. She sat and swung her little feet
and looked up at him sidewise.

He forgot all about Ferriday, and when Ferriday came along did not
see him. Kedzie did not tell him. She pretended not to see Ferriday,
though she enjoyed enormously the shock it gave him to find her
so much at ease with that big stranger.

Ferriday was so indignant at being snubbed in his own domain by
his own creation that he sent Garfinkel to see who the fellow was
and throw him out. Garfinkel came back with Dyckman, followed
by Kedzie.

Before Garfinkel could present Dyckman to the great Ferriday, Kedzie
made the introduction. Dyckman was already her own property. She had
seen him first.

Ferriday was jolted by the impact of the great name of Dyckman. He
was restored by the suppliant attitude of his visitor. He said that
he doubted if he could find the time to direct an amateur picture.
Dyckman hastened to say:

"Of course, money is no object to us...."

"Nor to me," Ferriday said, coldly.

Dyckman went on as if he had not heard: "... Except that the more
the show costs the less there is for the charity."

"I should be glad to donate my services to the cause," said
Ferriday, who could be magnificent.

"Three cheers for you!" said Dyckman, who could not.

Ferriday had neither the time nor the patience for the task. But
when the chance came to dazzle the rich by the rich generosity of
working for nothing, he could not afford to let it pass. To tip
a millionaire! He had to do that.

He saw incidentally that Kedzie was fairly hypnotized by Dyckman and
Dyckman by her. His first flare of jealousy died out. To be cut out
by a prince has always been a kind of ennoblement in itself.

Also one of Ferriday's inspirations came to him. If he could get
those two infatuated with each other it would not only take Kedzie
off his heart, but it might be made to redound to the further
advantage of his own genius. A scheme occurred to him. He was
building the scenario of it in the back room of his head while
his guest occupied his parlor.

He wanted to be alone and he wanted Dyckman and Kedzie to be alone
together. And so did Kedzie. Ferriday suggested:

"Perhaps Mr. Dyckman would like to look over the studio--and perhaps
Miss Adair would show him about."

Kedzie started to cry, "You bet your boots," but she caught herself
in time and shifted to, "I should be chawmed." Millionaires did not
use plain words.

Then Dyckman said, "Great!"

He followed Kedzie wherever she led. He was as awkward and out of
place as a school-boy at his first big dance. Kedzie showed him
a murder scene being enacted under the bluesome light. She took
great pains not to let any of it stain her skin. She showed him
a comic scene with a skeletonic man on a comic bicycle. Dyckman
roared when the other comedian lubricated the cyclist's joints
with an oil-can.

Kedzie showed him the projection-room and told the operator to run
off a bit of a scene in which she was revealed to no disadvantage.
She sat alone in the dark with a million dollars that were crazy
about her. She could tell that Dyckman was tremendously excited.

Here at last was her long-sought opportunity to rebuff the advances
of a wicked plutocrat. But he didn't make any, and she might not have
rebuffed them. Still, the air was a-quiver with that electricity
generated almost audibly by a man and a woman alone in the dark.

Dyckman was ashamed of himself and of his arm for wanting to gather
in that delectable partridge, but he behaved himself admirably.

He told her that she was a "corker," a "dream," and "one sweet song,"
and that the picture did not do her justice.

Kedzie showed him the other departments of the picture-factory and
he was amazed at all she knew. So was she. He stayed a long while
and saw everything and yet he said he would come again.

He suggested that it might be nice if Mr. Ferriday and Miss Adair
would dine with him soon. Ferriday was free "to-morrow," and so they
made it to-morrow evening at the Vanderbilt.

Kedzie was there and Dyckman was there, but a boy brought a note
from Mr. Ferriday saying that he was unavoidably prevented from
being present.

Dyckman grinned: "We'll have to bear up under it the best we can.
You won't run away just because your chaperon is gone, will you?"

Kedzie smiled and said she would stay. But she was puzzled. What
was Ferriday up to? One always suspected that Ferriday was up to
something and thinking of something other than what he did or said.

Kedzie was not ashamed of her clothes this time. Indeed, when she
gave her opera-cloak to the maid she came out so resplendent that
Jim Dyckman said:

"Zowie! but you're a--Whew! aren't you great? Some change-o from
the little farm girl I saw up at the studio. I don't suppose you'll
eat anything but a little bird-seed."

She was elated to see the _maitre d'hotel_ shake hands with
her escort and ask him how he was and where he had been. Jim
apologized for neglecting to call recently, and the two sauntered
like friends across to a table where half a dozen waiters bowed
and smiled and welcomed the prodigal home.

When they were seated the headwaiter said, "The moosels vit sauce
mariniere are nize to-nide."

Dyckman shook his head: "Ump-umm! I'm on the water-wagon and the
diet kitchen. Miss Adair can go as far as she likes, but I've got
to stick to a little thick soup, a big, thick steak, and after, a
little French pastry, some coffee, and a bottle of polly water--and
I'll risk a mug of old musty." He turned to Kedzie: "And now I've
ordered, what do you want? I never could order for anybody else."

Kedzie was disappointed in him. He was nothing like Ferriday. He
didn't use a French word once. She was afraid to venture on her own.

"I'll take the same things," she said.

"Sensible lady," said Jim. "Women who work must eat."

Kedzie hated to be referred to as a worker by an idler. She little
knew how much Jim Dyckman wished he were a worker.

She could not make him out. Her little hook had dragged out Leviathan
and she was surprised to find how unlike he was to her plans for
her first millionaire. He ate like a hungry man who ordered what he
wanted and made no effort to want what he did not want. He had had so
much elaborated food that he craved few courses and simple. He said
what came into his head, without frills or pose. He was sincerely
delighted with Kedzie and made neither secret nor poetry of it.

Toward the last of the dinner Kedzie ceased to try to find in him
what was not there. She accepted him as the least affected person
she had ever met. He could afford to be unaffected and careless
and spontaneous. He had nothing to gain. He had everything already.
Kedzie would have said that he ought to have been happy because of
that, as if that were not as good an excuse for discontent as any.
In any case, Kedzie said to herself:

"He's the real thing."

She wanted to be that very thing--that most difficult thing--real.
It became her new ambition.

After the dinner Dyckman offered to take her home. He had a limousine
waiting for him. She did not ask him to put her into a taxicab. She
was not afraid to have him ride home with her. She was afraid he
wouldn't. She was not ashamed of the apartment-house she was living
in now. It was nothing wonderful, but all the money had been spent
on the hall. And that was as far as Dyckman would get--yet.

Kedzie had acquired a serenity toward all the world except what
she called "high society." In her mind the word _high_ had
the significance it has with reference to game that has been kept
to the last critical moments, and trembles, exquisitely putrid,
between being eaten immediately and being thrown away soon.

There is enough and to spare of that high element among the wealthy,
but so there is among the poor and among all the middlings. Kedzie
had met with it on her way up, and she expected to find it in
Dyckman. She looked forward to a thrilling adventure.

She could not have imagined that Dyckman was far more afraid of her
than she of him. She was so tiny and he so big that she terrorized
him as a mouse an elephant, or a baby a saddle-horse. The elephant
is probably afraid that he will squash the little gliding insect,
the horse that he might step on the child.

The disparity between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie was not so great, and
they were both of the same species. But he felt a kind of terror of
her. And yet she fascinated him as an interesting toy that laughed
and talked and probably would not say "Mamma!" if squeezed.

Dyckman had been lonely and blue, rejected and dejected. Kedzie was
something different. He had known lots of actresses, large and small,
stately, learned, cheap, stupid, brilliant, bad, good, gorgeous,
shabby, wanton, icy. But Kedzie was his first movie actress. She
dwelt in a strange realm of unknown colors and machineries.

She was a new toy in a new toyhouse--a whole Noah's ark of queer
toys. He wanted to play with those toys. She made him a
_revenant_ to childhood. Or, as he put it:

"Gee! but you make me feel as silly as a kid."

That surprised Kedzie. It was not the sort of talk she expected
from a world which was stranger to her than the movie studio to
him. He was perfectly natural, and that threw her into a spasm of
artificiality.

He sat staring down at her. He put his hands under his knees and sat
on them to keep them from touching her, as they wanted to. For all
he knew, she was covered with fresh paint. That made her practically
irresistible. Would it come off if he kissed her? He had to find out.

Finally he said, so helplessly, passively, that it would be more
accurate to say it was said by him:

"Say, Miss Adair, I'm a dead-goner if you don't gimme a kiss."

Kedzie was horrified. Skip Magruder would have been eleganter than
that. She answered, with dignity:

"Certainly, if you so desire."

That ought to have chaperoned him back to his senses, but he was too
far gone. His long arms shot out, went round her, gathered her up
to his breast. His high head came down like a swan's, and his lips
pressed hers.