We Can\'t Have Everything

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Whatever her soul was, her flesh was all girlhood in one flower of
lithe stem, leaf, petal, sepal, and perfume. There was nothing of
the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, or even that velvet voluptuary,
the rose. She was like a great pink, sweet, shy, fragrant, common
wild honeysuckle blossom.

Jim Dyckman was so whelmed by the youth and flavor of her that
his rapture exploded in an unsmothered gasp:

"Golly! but you're great!"

Kedzie was heartbroken. Gilfoyle had done better than that. She had
been kissed by several million dollars, and she was not satisfied!

But Dyckman was. He felt that Kedzie had solved the problem of
Charity Coe. She had cleared his soul of that hopeless obsession--he
thought--just then.

CHAPTER XVIII

When a young man suddenly goes mad in a cab, grapples the young
woman who has intrusted herself to his protection, pins her arms
to her sides, squeezes her torso till her bones crunch and she has
no breath to squawk with, then kisses her deaf and dumb and blind,
it is still a nice question which of the two is the helpless one
and which has overpowered the other.

Appearances are never more deceitful than in such attacks, and
while eye-witnesses are infrequent, they are also untrustworthy.
They cannot even tell which of the two is victim of the outrage.
The motionless gazelle in the folds of the constrictor may be in
full control of the situation.

It undoubtedly has happened, oftener than it should have, in the
history of the world that young men have made these onsets without
just provocation and have been properly slapped, horsewhipped, or
shot for their unwelcome violence. It has also happened that young
men have failed to make these onsets when they would have been
welcome.

But the perfection of the womanly art of self-pretense is when
she subtly wills the young man to overpower her and is so carried
away by her own success that she forgets who started it. She droops,
swoons, shivers before the fury of her own inspiration, and cries
out, with absolute sincerity: "How dare you! How could you! What
made you!" or simply moans, "Why, Oswald!" and resists invitingly.

Kedzie had been hoping and praying that Jim Dyckman would kiss
her, and mutely daring him to. Yet when he obeyed her tacit behest
and asked her permission she was too frightened to refuse. He was
stronger than she expected, and he held her longer. When at last
she came out for air she was shattered with a pleasant horror.

She barely had the strength to gasp, "Why, Mr. Dyckman, aren't you
awful?" and time to straighten her jumbled hat and hair when her
apartment-building drew up alongside the limousine and came to
a halt.

Dyckman pleaded, like a half-witted booby, "Let's take a little
longer ride."

But she remembered her dignity and said, with imperial scorn,
"I should hope not!"

She permitted him to help her out.

He said: "When may I see you again? Soon, please!"

She smiled, with a hurt patience, and answered, "Not for
a long while."

He chuckled: "To-morrow, eh? That's great!"

She wished that he would not say, "That's great." If he would only
say, "Ripping!" or, "I say, that's ripping!" or, "Awfully good of
you," or, "No end"--anything swagger. But he would not swagger.

He escorted her to the elevator, where she gave him a queenly hand
and murmured, "Good night!"

He watched her go up like _Medea in machina;_ then he turned
away and stumbled back into his limousine. It was still fragrant
from her presence. The perfume she was using then was a rather
aggressive essence of a lingering tenacity upon the atmosphere.
But Dyckman was so excited that he liked it. The limousine could
hardly contain him.

Kedzie felicitated herself on escaping from his thrall just in time
to avoid being stupefied by it. She thanked Heaven that she had not
flung her arms around him and claimed him for her own. She had the
cleverness of elusion that her sex displays in all the species, from
Cleopatras to clams, from butterflies to rhinoceroses. How wisely
they practise to evade what they demand, leaving the stupid male
to ponder the mysteries of womankind!

When Kedzie reached her mirror she told the approving person she
found there that she was doing pretty well for a poor young girl not
long in from the country. She postured joyously as she undressed,
and danced a feminine war-dance in much the same costume that she
wore when Jim Dyckman fished her out of the pool at Newport. She
sang:

"I dreamt that I fell in a mar-arble pool
With nobles and swells on all si-i-ides."

She had slapped her rescuer's hands away then and groaned to learn
that she had driven off a famous plutocrat. But now he was back;
indeed he was in the pool now, and she had him on her hook. He
had grievously disappointed her by turning out to be a commonplace
young man with no gilt on his phrases. But one must be merciful
to a million dollars.

The next morning she dreamed of him as a suitor presenting her
with a bag of gold instead of a bouquet. Just as she reached for
it the telephone rang and a hall-boyish voice told her that it was
seven o'clock.

This was the midnight alarm to Cinderella, and she became again
a poor working-girl. She had to abandon her prince and run from
the palace of dreams to the studio of toil.

She was a trifle surly when she confronted Ferriday. He studied
her, smilingly queerly and overplaying indifference:

"Have a nice dinner last night?"

Kedzie fixed him with a skewery glare: "What's your little game?
Why did you turn up missing?"

"I had another engagement. Didn't you get my note?"

"Ah, behave, behave!" said Kedzie, then blushed at the plebeian
phrase. She was beginning to have a quickly remorseful ear. As soon
as she should learn to hear her first thoughts first, and suppress
them unspoken, she would be a made lady.

"Oh, you're a true artist, Anita," said Ferriday. "Nothing can
hinder your flight into the empyrean."

"Don't sing it. Explain it," Kedzie sneered.

Ferriday laughed so delightedly that he must embrace her. She shoved
him back and brushed the imaginary dust of his contact from the
shoulders that had but lately been compressed by a million dollars.

"I see you landed him," said Ferriday.

"And I see that all your talk about loving me so much was just
a fake," said Kedzie.

"Why do you say that? I adore you."

"If you did, would you throw me at the head of another fellow?"
asked Kedzie.

"If it was for the advancement of your career, yes," Ferriday
insisted.

"What's Mr. Dyckman got to do with my career?"

"He can make it, if he doesn't break it."

"Come again."

"If you fall in love with that big thug, or if you play him for
a limousine like a chorus-girl on the make, your career is gone.
But if you use him for your future--well, I have a little scheme
that might bounce you up to the sky in a hurry. You could have your
millionaire and your fame as well."

"What's the little scheme, Ferri darling?"

"I'll tell you later. We've got to go to the projection-room and
see your new film run off. It's assembled, cut, subtitled, ready
for the market. Come along."

Kedzie went along and sat in the dark room watching the reel go by.
Her other selves came forth in troops to reveal themselves: Kedzie
the poor little shy girl, for she was that at times; Kedzie the
petulant, the revengeful, the forgiving; Kedzie on her knees in
prayer--she prayed at times, as everybody does, the most villainous
no less ardently than the most blameless; Kedzie dancing; Kedzie
flirting, in love, tempted, tipsy; Kedzie seduced, deserted,
forgiven, converted, happily married; Kedzie a mother with a little
hired baby at her little breast. There was even a picture of her
in a vision as a sweet old lady with snowy hair about her face, and
she was surrounded by grown men who were her sons, and young mothers
who were her daughters. The unending magic of the moving pictures
had enabled her to see herself as others saw her, and as she saw
herself, and as nobody should ever see her.

Kedzie doted on the picture of herself as a dear old lady leaning
on her old husband among their children. She shed tears over that
delightful, most unusual, privilege of witnessing herself peacefully,
blessedly ancient.

Whether she ever reached old age and had a husband living then
and children grown is beyond the knowledge of this chronicle or
its prophecy, for this book goes only so far as 1917. But just for
a venture, assuming Kedzie to be about twenty in 1916, that would
make Kedzie born four years back in the last century. Now, adding
sixty to 1896 brings one to 1956; and what the world will be like
then--and who'll be in it or what they may be doing, how dressing,
if at all, what riding in, fighting about, agreeing upon--it were
folly to guess at.

It is safe to say only that people will then be very much at heart
what they are to-day and were in the days when the Assyrian women
and men felt as we do about most things. Kedzie will be scolding
her children or her grandchildren and telling them that in her
day little girls did not speak disrespectfully to their parents
or run away from them or do immodest, forward things.

That much is certain to be true, as it has always been. The critics
of then will be saying that there are no great novelists in 1956 such
as there were in 1916, when giants wrote, but not for money or for
cheap sensations. They will laud the Wilsonian era when America
not only knew a millennium of golden fiction, poetry, drama, humor,
sculpture, painting, architecture, and engineering, but revealed
its greatness in moving-picture classics, in a lofty conception
of the dance as an eloquence; when the nation acted as a sister
of charity to bleeding Europe, pouring eleemosynary millions from
the cornucopia stretched across the sea, and finally entered the war
with reluctant majesty and unexampled might, her citizens unanimously
patriotic. Ye gods! even the politicians will be statesmen and their
debates classics.

Critics of then will be regretting that American fiction, poetry,
drama, art, and journalism are so inferior to foreign work, and
foreign critics will admit it and tell them why. Some military
writers will be pointing out that war is no longer possible,
and others will be crying out that it is inevitable and America
unprepared.

Doctors will be complaining that modern restlessness is creating
new nervous diseases, as doctors did in 1916 A.D., B.C., and B.A.
(which is, Before Adam). Doctors will complain that modern mothers
do not nurse their own babies--which has always been both true and
untrue--and that women do not wear enough clothes for health, not
to mention modesty.

In fact, Kedzie, if she lives, will find the spirit of the world
almost altogether what grandmothers have always found it. But Kedzie
must be left to find this out for herself.

When, then, Kedzie saw how beautifully she photographed and how well
she looked as an old lady, she wept rapturously and sighed, "I'll
never give up the pictures."

Ferriday sighed, too, for that meant to his knowing soul that she
was not long for this movie world. But he did not tell her so. He
told her:

"You're as wise as you are beautiful. You'll be as famous as you'll
be rich. And this Dyckman lad can hurry things up."

"How?" asked Kedzie, already foreseeing his game.

"The backers of the Hyperfilm Company are getting writer's cramp
in the spending hand. They call it conservatism, but it's really
cowardice. The moving-picture business has gone from the Golconda
to the gambling stage. A few years ago nearly anybody could get rich
in a minute. A lot of cheap photographers and street-car conductors
were caught in a cloudburst of money and thought they made it. They
treated money like rain, and the wastefulness in this trade has
been rivaled by nothing recent except the European war. Some of the
biggest studios are dark; some of the leaders of yesterday are so
bankrupt that their banks don't dare let 'em drop for fear they'll
bust and blow up the whole business. Most of the actors are not
getting half what they're advertised to get, but they're getting
four times what they ought to get.

"There are a few men and women who are earning even more than they
are getting, and that's a million a minute. Now, the one chance
for you, Anita, is to have some tremendous personal backing. You've
come into the game a little late. This firm you're with is tottering.
They blame me for it, but it's not my fault altogether. Anyway, this
company is riding for a fall, and down we may all go in the dust
with a dozen other big companies, any day."

Kedzie's heart stopped. In the dark she clutched Ferriday's arm so
tightly that he ouched. To have her career smashed at its beginning
would be just her luck. It grew suddenly more dear than ever, because
it was imperiled. The thought of having her pictures fail of their
mission throughout the world was as hideous as was the knowledge
to Carlyle that the only manuscript of his history was but a
shovelful of ashes.

Ferriday put his arm about her, and she crept in under his chin for
safety. She felt very cozy to him, there, and he rejoiced that he
had her his at last. Then as before he saw that he was no more to
her than an umbrella or an awning in a shower. He wanted to fling
her away; but she was still to him an invention to patent and
promote. So he told her:

"If you can persuade this Dyckman to boost your career, get behind
you with a bunch of kale and whoop up the publicity, we can stampede
the public, and the little theater managers will mob the exchanges
for reels of you. It's only a question of money, Anita. Talk about
the Archimedean lever! Give me the crowbar of advertising, and I'll
set the earth rolling the other way round so the sun will rise in
the west and print no other pictures but yours.

"There isn't room for everybody in the movie business any more.
There's room only for the people who wear lightning-rods and stand
on solid gold pedestals that won't wash away. Go after your young
millionaire, Anita, and put his money to work."

Kedzie pondered. She brought to bear on the problem all the strategic
intuition of her sex. She saw the importance of getting Dyckman's
money into circulation. She was afraid it might not be easy.

Kedzie sighed: "It's a little early for me to ask a gentleman I've
only met a couple o' times to kindly pass the millions. He must
have met a lot of women by now who've held out their hands to him
and said, 'Please,' and not got anything but the cold boiled eye.
I don't know much about millionaires, but I have a feeling that if
they started giving the money out to every girl they met, they'd
last just about as long as a real bargain does in Macy's. The women
would trample them to death and tear one another to pieces."

"But Dyckman's crazy about you, Anita. I could see it in his eyes.
He's plumb daffy."

"Maybe so and maybe not. Maybe he's that way with every girl under
forty. I've never seen him work, but I've seen him in the midst of
that Newport bunch and they've got me lashed to the mast for clothes,
looks, language, and everything."

"You're a novelty to him, Anita. He's tired of those _blasees_
creatures."

"They didn't look very blah-zay to me. They seemed to be up and doing
every minute. But supposing he was crazy about me, if I said to him,
'You can have two kisses for a million dollars apiece?' can you see
him begin to holler: 'Where am I? Please take me home!'"

Ferriday sighed: "Perhaps you're right. It wouldn't do to give
a mercenary look to your interest in him too soon. Let me talk
to him."

"What's your peculiar charm?"

"I'd put it up to him as a business proposition. I'd say, 'The
moving-picture field is the greatest gold-field in the world.' I'd
tell him how many hundred thousand theaters there are in the world,
all of them eager for your pictures and only needing to be told about
them. I'd tell him that for every dollar he put in he'd take out ten,
in addition to furthering the artistic glory of the most beautiful
genius on the dramatic horizon. I'd show him how he couldn't lose."

"But you just said--"

"Oh, I know, but we can't put on the screen everything we say in
the projection-room. And it is a fact that there is big money in
the movies."

"There must be," said Kedzie, "if as much has been sunk in 'em
as you say."

"Yes, and it's all there for the right man to dig up if he only
goes about it intelligently. Let me talk to him."

Kedzie thought hard. Then she said: "No! Not yet! You'd only scare
him away. I'll do my best to get him interested in me, and you do
your best to get him interested in the business; and then when the
time is just right we can talk turkey. But not now, Ferri, not yet."

"You're as wise as you are beautiful," said Ferriday, again. "I
can't see your beauty, but your wisdom shines in the dark. We'll
do great things together, Anita."

His arm tightened around her, reminding her that she was still
in his elbow. Before she was quite alive to his purpose his lips
touched her cheek.

"Don't do that!" she snapped. "How dare you!"

He laughed: "I forgot. The price on your kisses has just skyrocketed
to a million apiece. Don't forget my commission."

She growled pettishly. He spoke more soberly:

"You need me yet, little lady. Don't quench my enthusiasms too
roughly or I might take up some other pretty little girl as my
medium of expression. There are lots and lots of pretties born
every minute, but it takes years to make a director like me."

And she knew that this was true.

"I was only fooling," she said. "Don't be mad at me. You can kiss
me if you want to."

"I don't want to," he said, as hurt as an overgrown boy or
a prima donna.

The door opened, and a wave of light swept into the room. A voice
followed it.

"Is Miss Adair in there?"

"Yes," Kedzie answered, in confusion.

"Gent'man to see you."

It was Jim Dyckman. He followed closely and entered the room just as
Ferriday found the electric button and switched on the light.

Kedzie and Ferriday were both encouraged when they saw a look of
jealous suspicion cross his face. Ferriday hastened to explain:

"We've been editing Miss Adair's new film. Like to see an advance
edition of it?"

"Love to," said Dyckman.

"Oh, Simpson, run that last picture through again," Ferriday called
through a little hole in the wall.

A faint "All right, sir" responded.

Kedzie led Dyckman to a chair and took the next one to it.

Ferriday beamed on them and switched on the dark. Then, as if by a
divine miracle, the screen at the end of the room became a world of
life and light. People were there, and places. Mountains were swung
into view and removed. Palaces were decreed and annulled. Fields
blossomed with flowers; ballrooms swirled; streets seethed.

Anita Adair was created luminous, seraphic, composed of light and
emotion. She came so near and so large that her very thoughts seemed
to be photographed. She drifted away; she smiled, danced, wept, and
made her human appeal with angelic eloquence.

Dyckman groaned with the very affliction of her charm. She pleased
him so fiercely that he swore about it. He cried out in the dark
that she was the blank-blankest little witch in the world. Then he
groveled in apology, as if his profanity had not been the ultimate
gallantry.

When the picture was finished he turned to Kedzie and said, "My God,
you're great!" He turned to Ferriday. "Isn't she, Mr.--Fenimore?"

"I think so," said Ferriday; "and the world will think so soon."

Kedzie shook her head. "I'm only a beginner. I don't know anything
at all."

"Why, you're a genius!" Dyckman exploded. "You're simply great.
You know everything; you--"

Ferriday touched him on the arm. "We mustn't spoil her. There is
a charm and meekness about her that we must not lose."

Dyckman swallowed his other great's and after profound thought said,
"Let's lunch somewhere."

Ferriday excused himself, but said that the air would be good for
Miss Adair. She was working too hard.

So she took the air.

Dyckman had come to the studio with Charity's business as an excuse.
He had forgotten to give the excuse, and now he had forgotten the
business. He did not know that he was now Kedzie Thropp's business.
And she was minding her own business.

CHAPTER XIX

Peter Cheever was going to dictagraph to his wife. The quaint charm
of the dictagram is that the sender does not know he is sending it.
It is a good deal like an astral something or other.

Peter had often telegraphed his wife, telephoned her, and wirelessed
her. Sometimes what he had sent her was not the truth. But now
she was going to hear from him straight. She would have all the
advantages of the invisible cloak and the ring of Gyges--eavesdropping
made easy and brought to a science, a combination of perfect alibi
with intimate propinquity.

Small wonder that the device which justice has made such use of
should be speedily seized upon by other interests. Everything,
indeed, that helps virtue helps evil, too. And love and hate find
speedy employment for all the conquests that science can make upon
the physical forces of the universe.

How Charity's motives stood in heaven there is no telling. It is
safe to say that they were the usual human mixture of selfish and
altruistic, wise and foolish, honorable and impudent, profitable
and ruinous. She came by the dictagraphic idea very gradually. She
had plentiful leisure since she had taken a distaste for good works.
She had been so roughly handled by the world she was toiling for
that she decided to let it get along for a while without her.

It was a benumbing shock to learn definitely that her husband was
in liaison with a definite person, and to be confronted in shabby
clothes with that person all dressed up. When she hurried to the
Church for mercy it was desolation to learn from the pulpit that
her heart clamor for divorce was not a cleanly and aseptic impulse,
but an impious contribution to the filthy social condition of the
United States.

Charity had no one to confide in, and she had no new grievance to
air. Everybody else had evidently been long assured of her husband's
profligacy. For her to wake up to it only now and run bruiting the
stale information would be a ridiculous nuisance--a newsgirl howling
yesterday's extra to to-day's busy crowd.

Besides, she had in her time known how uninteresting and unwelcome
is the celebrant of one's own misfortunes. Husbands and wives who
tell of their bad luck are entertaining only so long as they are
spicy and sportsmanlike. When they ask for a solution they are
embarrassing, since advice is impossible for moral people. The truly
good must advise him or her either to keep quiet or to quit. But to
say "Keep quiet!" is to say "Don't disturb the adultery," while to
say "Quit!" is to say "Commit divorce!" which is far worse, according
to the best people.

We have always had adultery and got along beautifully, while divorce
is new and American and intolerable. Of course, one can and sometimes
does advise a legal separation, but that comes hard to minds that
face facts, since separation is only a license to--well, we all know
what separation amounts to; it really cannot be prettily described.

Charity, left alone at the three-forked road of divorce, complacency,
or separation, sank down and waited in dull misery for help or
solution, as do most of the poor wayfarers who come upon such a
break in their path of matrimony. She imagined Cheever with Zada and
wondered what peculiar incantations Zada used to hold him so long.
She wished that she had positive evidence against him--not for public
use, but as a weapon of self-defense. She felt that from his pulpit
Doctor Mosely had challenged her to a spiritual duel in that sermon
against divorce and remarriage of either guilty or innocent.

Also she began to want to get evidence to silence her own soul with.
She wanted to get over loving Cheever. To want to be cured of such
an ailment is already the beginning of cure.

Abruptly the idea came to her to put a detective on the track of
Zada and Cheever. She had no acquaintance in that field, and it was
a matter of importance that she should not put herself in the hands
of an indelicate detective. She ought to have consulted a lawyer
first, but her soul preferred the risk of disaster to the shame
of asking counsel.

She consulted the newspapers and found a number of advertisements,
some of them a little too mysterious, a little too promiseful. But
she took a chance on the Hodshon & Hindley Bureau, especially as it
advertised a night telephone, and it was night when she reached her
decision.

She surprised Mr. Hodshon in the bosom of his family. He was dandling
a new baby in the air and trying not to step on the penultimate
child, who was treating one of his legs as a tree. When the telephone
rang he tossed the latest edition to its mother and hobbled to the
table, trying to tear loose the clinger, for it does not sound well
to hear a child gurgling at a detective's elbow.

When Charity told Hodshon who she was his eyes popped and he was
greatly excited. When she asked Mr. Hodshon to call at once he looked
at his family and his slippers and said he didn't see how he could
till the next day. Charity did not want to go to a detective's office
in broad daylight or to have anybody see a detective coming to her
house. She had an idea that a detective could be recognized at once
by his disguise. He probably could be if he wore one; and he usually
can be, anyway, if any one is looking for him. But she could not get
Hodshon till she threatened to telephone elsewhere. At that, he said
he would postpone his other engagement and come right up.