We Can\'t Have Everything

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Charity was disappointed in Mr. Hodshon. He looked so ordinary,
and yet he must know such terrible things about people. We always
expect doctors, lawyers, priests, and detectives to show the scars
of the searing things they know. As if we did not all of us know
enough about ourselves and others to eat our eyes out, if knowledge
were corrosive!

Charity was further disappointed in Hodshon's lack of
picturesqueness. He was like no detective she had read about
between Sherlock Holmes and Philo Gubb. He was like no detective
at all. It was almost impossible to accept him as her agent.

He seemed eager to help, however, and when she told him that she
suspected her husband of being overly friendly with an insect named
Zada L'Etoile, and that she wanted them shadowed, he betrayed a
proper agitation.

Now, of course, women's scandals are no more of a luxury to a
detective than their legs were to the bus-driver of tradition or to
any one in knee-skirted 1916. Mr. Hodshon was a good man as good men
go, though he was capable of the little dishonesties and compromises
with truth that characterize every profession. A man simply cannot
succeed as a teacher, lawyer, doctor, merchant, thief, author,
scientist, or anything else if he blurts out everything he knows
or believes. No preacher could occupy a pulpit for two Sundays who
told just what he actually thought or knew or could find out. The
detective is equally compelled to manipulate the truth.

Hodshon gave his soul to Charity's cause. He outlined the various
ways of establishing Cheever's guilt and promised that the agency
would keep him shadowed and make a record of all his hours.

"It'll take some time to get the goods on 'em good," he explained,
"but there's ways we got. When we learn what we got to know we'll
arrange it and tip you off. Then you and me will go to the door and
break in on the parties at the right moment, and--"

"No, Thank You!" said Charity, with a firm pressure on each word.

"You better get some friend to go with us, for a detective needs
c'roboration, you know. The courts won't accept a detective's
uns'ported testimony. And if you could know what some of these
crooks are capable of you wouldn't wonder. Is that all right? We
get the goods on 'em and you have a friend ready, and we'll bust
in on the parties, and--"

"No, thank you!" said Charity, with undiminished enthusiasm.

This stumped Mr. Hodshon. She amazed him further. "I don't intend
to bring this case into court. I don't want to satisfy any judge
but myself."

But what he had said about the credibility of the unsupported
detective had set Charity to thinking. It would be folly to pay
these curious persons to collect evidence that was worthless when
collected. She mused aloud:

"Would it be possible--of course it wouldn't--but if it were, what
I should like would be to be able to see my hu--Mr. Ch--those two
persons without their knowing about it at all. Of course that's
impossible, isn't it?"

"Well, it was a few years ago, but we can do wonders nowadays.
There's the little dictagraph. We could string one up for you and
give you the usual stenographic report--or you could go and listen
in yourself."

"Could I really?" Charity gasped, and she began to shiver with
the frightfulness of the opportunity.

"Surest thing you know," said Hodshon.

"But how could you install a dictagraph without their finding
it out?"

"Easiest thing you know. We'll probably have to rent an apartment
in the same building or another one near-by, and--one of the
hall-boys there may be workin' for us now. If not, we can usually
bring him in. There's a hundred ways to get into a house and put
the little dictor behind a picture or somewheres and lead the wire
out to us."

"But can you really hear--if they talk low?" Charity mumbled,
with dread.

"Let 'em whisper!" said Hodshon. "The little fellow just eats
a whisper. Leave it to us, madam, and we'll surprise you."

The compact was made. Charity suggested an advance payment as a
retainer, and Hodshon permitted her to write a check and hand it
to him before he assured her that it wasn't necessary.

He went away and left Charity in a state of nerves. Her curiosity
was a mania, but she feared that assuaging it might leave her in a
worse plight. She hated herself for her enterprise and was tempted
to cancel it. But when she heard Cheever come home at midnight and
go to his room without speaking to her she felt a grim resentment
toward him that was like a young hate with a big future.

Every night Charity received a typewritten document describing
Cheever's itinerary for the day. The mute, inglorious Boswell took
him up at the front steps, heeled him to his office, out to lunch,
back to the office, thence to wherever he went.

The name of Zada did not appear in the first report at all, but on
the second day she met Cheever at luncheon, and he went shopping with
her. Charity, reading, flushed to learn that he bought her neither
jewelry nor hats, but household supplies and delicacies. He went with
her to her apartment and thence with her to dinner and the theater
and then back, and thence again after an hour to his home.

The minute chronicle of his outdoor doings, intercalated with the
maddening bafflement of his life in that impenetrable apartment, made
such dramatic reading as Charity had never known. She grew haggard
with waiting for the arrival of her little private daily newspaper.
When she saw Cheever she could hardly keep from screaming at him
what she knew. His every entrance into the house became a hideous
insult. She felt that it was herself who was the kept woman and not
the other.

She longed to take the documents and visit the Reverend Doctor Mosely
with them, make him read them and tell her if he still thought it was
her duty to endure such infamy. She felt that the good doctor would
advise her to lay them before Cheever and confound him with guilt,
bring him to what the preachers call "a realizing sense" of it and
win him home.

She was tempted to try the imaginary advice on Cheever, but something
held her back. She wondered what it was, till suddenly she came to
a realizing sense of one fearful bit of news: her soul had so changed
toward him, her love had turned to such disgust, that she was afraid
he might come back to her! He might cast off his discovered partner
in guilt and renew his old claim to Charity's soul and body. That
would be degradation indeed!

Now she was convinced that her love had starved even unto death, that
it was a corpse in her home, corrupted the air and must be removed.

CHAPTER XX

Kedzie lay extended on her _chaise longue_, looking as much
unlike Madame Recamier as one could look who was so pretty a woman.
A Sunday supplement dropped from her hand and joined the heap of
papers on the floor. Kedzie was tired of looking at pictures of
herself.

She had had to look over all the papers, since she was in them all.
At least her other self, Anita Adair, was in them.

In every paper there was a large advertisement with a large picture
of her and the names of the theaters at which she would appear
simultaneously in her new film. In the critical pages devoted to
the moving-picture world there were also pictures of her and at least
a little text.

In two or three of the papers there were interviews with the new
comet; in others were articles by her. These entertained her at
first, because she had never seen the interviewers or the articles.
She had not thought many of the thoughts attached to her name. The
press agent of the Hyperfilm Company had written everything. He
reveled in his new star, for the editors were cordial toward her
"press stuff." They "ate it up," "gave it spread."

This was the less surprising since the advertising-man of the
Hyperfilm Company was so lavish with purchase of space that the
publishers could well afford to throw in a little free reading
matter--especially since it did not cost them a cent for the copy.

The press agent unaided has a hard life, but when the advertising-man
gives him his arm he is welcome to the most select columns.

In some of the interviews Kedzie gave opinions she had never held on
themes she had never heard of. When she read that her favorite poet
was Rabindranath Tagore she wondered who that "gink" was. When she
read that she owed her figure to certain strenuous flexion exercises
she decided that they might be worth trying some day. Her advice to
beginners in the motion-picture field proved very interesting. She
wondered how she had ever got along without it.

She was greatly excited by an article of hers in which she told of
the terrific adventures she had had in and out of the studio; there
was one time when an angry tiger would have torn her to pieces if she
had not had the presence of mind to play dead. She read of another
occasion when she had either to spoil a good film or endanger her
existence as the automobile she was steering refused to answer the
brake and plunged over a cliff. Of course she would not ruin the
film. By some miracle she escaped with only a few broken bones, and
after a week in the hospital returned to the interrupted picture.
These old stories were told with such simple sincerity that she
almost believed them. But she tossed them aside and sneered:

"Bunc!"

She yawned over her own published portraits--and to be able to do
that is to be surfeited indeed.

Suddenly Kedzie stopped purring, thought fiercely, whirled to her
flank; her hands went among the papers. She remembered something,
found it at last, an article she had glanced at and forgotten
for the moment.

She snatched it up and read. It discussed the earning powers of
several film queens. It credited them with salaries ten or twenty
times as much as hers. Two or three of them had companies of their
own with their names at the head of their films.

Kedzie groaned. She rose and paced the floor, shamed, trapped,
humbled. The misers of the Hyperfilm Company paid her a beggarly
hundred dollars a week! merely featured her among other stars of
greater magnitude, while certain women had two thousand a week
and were "incorporated," whatever that was!

Kedzie longed to get at Ferriday and tell him what a sneak he was
to lure her into such a web and tie her up with such cheap ropes.
She would break her bonds and fling them in his face.

She slid abruptly to the floor and began to go over the film
pages again, comparing her portraits with the portraits of those
higher-paid creatures. She hated vanity and could not endure it in
other women; it was a mere observation of a self-evident fact that
she was prettier than all the other film queens put together. She
sat there sneering at the presumptuousness of screen idols whom she
had almost literally worshiped a year before.

Then something gave her pause. The celluloid-queens had certain
pages allotted to them, the actresses certain pages.

But there was another realm where women were portrayed in fashionable
gowns--debutantes, brides, matrons. And their realm was called "The
Social World." These women toiled not, earned not; they only spent
money and time as they pleased. They were in "society," and she was
out of it. They were ladies and she was a working-woman.

Now Kedzie's cake was dough indeed. Now her pride was shame. She
did not want to be a film queen. She did not want to work for any
sum a week. She wanted to be a debutante and a bride and a matron.

She had never had a coming-out party, and never would have. She
studied the aristocrats, put their portraits on her dressing-table
and tried to copy their simple grandeur in her mirror. But she
lacked a certain something. She didn't know a human being who was
swell to use as a model.

Oh yes, she did--one--Jim Dyckman.

A dark design came to her to dally with him no longer. He had dragged
her out of that pool at Newport; now he must drag her into the swim.

The telephone-bell rang. The hall-boy said:

"A gen'leman to see you--Mistoo Ferriday."

"Send him along."

"He's on the way now."

"Oh, all right."

As Kedzie hung up the receiver it occurred to her that this little
interchange was about the un-swellest thing she had ever done. She
had been heedless of the convenances. Her business life made her
responsible only to herself, and she felt able to take care of
herself anywhere.

Now it came over her that she could not aspire to aristocracy and
allow negro hall-boys to send men up in the elevator and telephone
her afterward. She snatched up the telephone and said:

"That you?"

"Yassum, Miss Adair."

"How dare you send anybody up without sending the name up first?"

"Why, you nevva--"

"Who do you think I am that I permit anybody to walk in on me?"

"Why, we alwiz--"

"The idea of such a thing! It's disgraceful."

"Why, I'm sorry, but--"

"Don't ever do it again."

"No'm."

She slapped the receiver on the hook and fumed again, realizing that
a something of elegance had been lacking in her tirade.

The door-bell rang, and she did not wait for her maid, but answered
it in angry person. Ferriday beamed on her.

"Oh, it's you. You didn't stop to ask if I was visible. You just
came right on up, didn't you?"

He whispered: "Pardon me. Somebody else is here. Exit laughingly!"

That was insult on insult.

"Stop it! There is not anybody else. Come back. What do you want?"

He came back, his laughter changed to rage.

"Look here, you impudent little upstart from nowhere! I invented you,
and if you're not careful I'll destroy you."

"Is that so?" she answered; then, like Mr. Charles Van Loan's
baseball hero, she realized with regret that the remark was not
brilliant as repartee.

Ferriday was too wroth to do much better:

"Yes, that's so. You little nobody!"

"Nobody!" she laughed, pointing to the newspapers spangled with
her portraits.

Ferriday snorted, "Paid for by Jim Dyckman's money."

"What do you mean--Jim Dyckman's money?"

"Oh, when I saw how idiotic he was over you, and how slow you were
in landing him, and when I realized that the Hyperfilm Company was
going to slide your pictures out with no special advertising, I went
to him and tried to get him into the business."

"You had a nerve!"

"Praise from Lady Hubert!"

"Whoever she is! Well, did he bite?"

"Yes and no. He's not such a fool as he looks in your company. He
has a hard head for business; he wouldn't invest a cent."

"I thought you said--"

"But he has a soft head for you. He said he wouldn't invest a cent
in the firm, but he'd donate all I could use for you. It was to be
a little secret present. He told me you refused to accept presents
from him. Did you?"

Kedzie blushed before his cynic understanding.

He laughed: "You're all right. You know the game, but you've got
to quicken your speed. You're taking too much footage in getting
to the climax."

Kedzie was still incandescent with the new information:

"And Jim Dyckman paid for my advertising?"

"On condition that his name was kept out of it. That's why you're
famous. You couldn't have got your face in a paper if you had been
fifty times as pretty if he hadn't swamped the papers with money.
And he would never have thought of it if I hadn't gone after him.
So you'd better waste a little politeness on me or your first flare
will be your last."

Kedzie acknowledged his conquest, bowed her head, and pouted up
at him with such exquisite impudence that he groaned:

"I don't know whether I ought to kiss you or kill you."

"Take your choice, my master," Kedzie cooed.

He snarled at her: "I guess the news I bring will do for you. There
was a fire in the studio last night. You didn't know of it?"

Kedzie, dumbly aghast, shook her head.

"If you'd read any part of the newspapers except your own press stuff
you'd have seen that there was a war in Europe yesterday and a fire
in New York last night. I was there trying to save what I could.
I got a few blisters and not much else. Most of your unfinished work
is finished--gone up in smoke."

"You don't mean that my beautiful, wonderful films are destroyed?"

He nodded--then caught her as her knees gave way. He felt a stab of
pity for her as he dragged her to her _chaise longue_ and let
her fall there. She was dazed with the shock.

She had been indifferent to the destruction of fortresses and
cathedrals--even of Rheims, with its titanic granite lace. She had
read, or might have read, of the airship that dropped a bomb through
the great fresco in Venice where Tiepolo revealed his unequaled
mastery of aerial perspective, taking the eye up through the dome
and the human witnesses, cloud by cloud, past the hierarchies
of angels, past Christ and the Mother of God, on up to Jehovah
himself, bending down from infinite heights. The eternal loss of
this picture meant nothing to her. But the destruction of her own
recorded smiles and tears and the pretty twistings and turnings of
her young body--that was cataclysm.

She was like everybody else, in that no multiplication of other
people's torments could be so vivid as the catching of her own thumb
in a door. Kedzie was too crushed to weep. This little personal
Pompeii brought to the dust all the palaces and turrets of her hope
upon her head. She whispered to Ferriday:

"What are you going to do? Must you make them over again?"

He shook his head. "The Hyperfilm Company will probably shut up
shop now."

"And let my pictures die?"

He nodded.

She beckoned him close and clung to him, babbling: "What will become
of me? Oh, my poor pictures! My pretty pictures! The company owes me
a week's salary. And I had counted on the money. What's to become of
me?"

Ferriday resented her eternal use of him for her own advantages.
"Why do you appeal to me? Where's your friend Dyckman?"

"I was to see him this evening--dine with him."

"Well, he can build you ten new studios and not feel it. Better ask
him to set you up in business."

Kedzie revolted at this, but she had no answer. Ferriday saw the
papers folded open at the society pages. He stared at them, at her,
then sniffed:

"So that's your new ambition!"

"What?"

"'In the Social World!' You want to get in with that gang, eh? Has
Dyckman asked you to marry him?"

"Of course not."

"Well, if he does, don't ever let him take you into his own set."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Just to warn you. Those social worldlings wouldn't stand for you,
Anita darling. You can make monkeys of us poor men. But those queens
will make a little scared worm out of you and step on you. And they
won't stop smiling for one minute."

"Is that so?" Kedzie snarled. There it was again.

The telephone rang. Kedzie answered it. The hall-boy timidly
announced:

"Mistoo Dyckman is down year askin' kin he see you. Kin he?"

"Send him up, please," said Kedzie. Then she turned to Ferriday.
"He's here--at this hour! I wonder why."

"I'd better slope."

"Do you mind?"

"Not in the least. I'll go up a flight of stairs and take the
elevator after His Majesty has finished with it. Good-by.
Get busy!"

He slid out, and Kedzie scurried about her primping. The bell rang.
She sent her maid to the door. Dyckman came in. She let him wait
awhile--then went to him with an elegiac manner.

She accepted his salute on a martyr-white brow. He said:

"I read about the fire. I was scared to death for you till I learned
that all the people were safe. I motored up to see the ruins. Some
ruins! Like to see'em?"

"I don't think I could stand the sight of them. They're my ruins,
too."

"How so?"

"Because the company won't rebuild or go on, and most of my pictures
were destroyed."

"Your pretty, beautiful, gorgeous pictures gone! Oh, God help us!
That's too terrible to believe."

She sighed, "It's true."

"Why, I'd rather lose the Metropolitan Art Gallery than your films.
Can't they be made over?"

"They could, but who's to stand the expense?"

"I will, if you'll let me."

"Mr. Dyckman!"

"I thought we'd agreed that my name was Jim."

"Jim! You would do that for me!"

"Why not?"

"But why so?"

"Because--why, simply--er--it's the most natural thing in the world,
seeing that--Well, you're not sitting there pretending that you don't
know I love you, are you?"

"Oh dear, oh dear! It's too wonderful to believe, you angel!"

And then for the first time she flung her arms about his neck and
kissed him and hugged him, knelt on his lap and clasped him fiercely.

He felt as if a simoom of rapture had struck him, and when she told
him a dozen times that she loved him he could think of nothing to
say but, "Say, this is great!"

She forgave him the banality this time. When she had calmed herself
a little she said:

"But it would mean a frightful lot of money."

"Whatever it costs, it's cheap--considering this." He indicated
her arm about his neck. "I wouldn't let the world be robbed of
the pictures of you, Anita, not for any money." He told her to tell
Ferriday to make the arrangements and send the estimates to him. And
he said, "I won't ask you to quit being photographed, even when we
are married."

"When we are married?" Kedzie parroted.

"Of course! That's where we're bound for, isn't it? Where else could
we pull up--that is, of course, assuming that you'll do me the honor
of anchoring a great artist like you up to a big dub like me. Will
you?"

"Why--why--I'd like to think it over; this is so sudden."

"Of course, you'd better think it over, you poor angel!"

Kedzie could not think what else to say or even what to think. The
word "marriage" reminded her that she had what the ineffable Bunker
Bean would have called "a little old last year's husband" lying
around in the garret of her past.

She went almost blind with rage at that beast of a Gilfoyle who had
dragged her away and married her while she was not thinking. He must
have hypnotized her or drugged her. If only she could quietly murder
him! But she didn't even know where he was.

CHAPTER XXI

The investigations of Messrs. Hodshon & Hindley in the life of Zada
and Cheever prospered exceedingly. In blissless ignorance of it,
Zada had been inspired to set a firm of sleuths on Charity's trail.
She wanted to be able to convince Cheever that Charity was intrigued
with Dyckman. The operators who kept Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever under
espionage had the most stupid things to report to Zada.

To Zada's disgust, Mrs. Cheever never called upon Jim Dyckman, and
he never called on her. Zada accused the bureau of cheating her,
and finally put another agency to shadowing Jim Dyckman. According
to the reports she had, his neglect of Mrs. Cheever was perfectly
explained. He was a mere satellite of a moving-picture actress,
a new-comer named Anita Adair.

The detectives reported that such gossip as they could pick up about
the studio indicated that Dyckman was putting money into the firm
on her account.

"A movie angel!" sneered Zada. She had wasted a hundred dollars on
him to find this out, and two hundred and fifty on Mrs. Cheever to
find out that she was intensely respectable. That was bitter news
to Zada. She canceled her business with her detective agency. And
they called in the shadows that haunted Charity's life.

The detectives on Zada's trail, however, had more rewarding material
to work with--although they found unexpected difficulties, they said,
in getting the dictagraph installed in her apartment. They did not
wish to ruin the whole enterprise by too great haste--especially as
they were receiving eight dollars a day and liberal expenses per man.

At last, however, Hodshon sent word to Mrs. Cheever that the
dictagraph was installed and working to a T, and she could listen-in
whenever she was ready.

Charity was terrified utterly now. New scales were to be shaken
from her eyes at the new tree of knowledge. She was to hear her man
talking to his leman.

She had almost an epilepsy of terror, but she could not resist the
importunate opportunity.

She selected from her veils a heavy crepe that she had worn during
a period of mourning for one of her husband's relatives. It seemed
appropriate now, for she was going into mourning for her own husband,
living, yet about to die to her.

She left the house alone after dark and walked along Fifth Avenue
till she found a taxicab. She gave the street number Hodshon had
given her and stepped in. She kept an eye on the lighted clock and
in the dark sorted out the exact change and a tip, adding dimes as
they were recorded on the meter. She did not want to have to pause
for change, and she did not wish to make herself conspicuous by an
extravagant tip.

As the taxicab slid along the Avenue Charity wondered if any of the
passengers in other cabs could have an errand so gruesome as hers.
She was tortured by fantastic imaginings of what she might hear. She
wondered how a man would talk to such a person as Zada, and how she
would answer. She imagined the most dreadful things she could.

The taxicab surprised her by stopping suddenly before a brown-fronted
residence adjoining an apartment-house of (more or less literally)
meretricious ornateness. She stepped out, paid her fare, and turned,
to find Mr. Hodshon at her elbow. He had been waiting for her. He
recognized her by her melodramatic veil. He gave her needed help up
a high stoop and opened the door with a key.