We Can\'t Have Everything

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She found herself in a shabby, smelly hall where no one else was.

He motioned her up the stairway, and she climbed with timidity. At
each level there were name-plates over the electric buttons. The
very labels seemed illicit. Hodshon motioned her up and up for four
flights.

Then he opened a door and stepped back to let her enter a room
unfurnished except for a few chairs and a table. Two men were in
the room, and they were laughing with uproar. One of them had a
telephone-receiver clamped to his ear, and he was making shorthand
notes, explaining to his companion what he heard.

They turned in surprise at Hodshon's entrance and rose to greet
Charity with the homage due so great a client.

Charity could hardly bespeak them civilly. They took her curtness
for snobbery, but it was not. It swept over her that these people
were laughing over her most sacred tragedy.

She advanced on the operator and put out her hand for the headpiece
he wore. He took it off and rubbed it with his handkerchief, and
told her that she must remove her hat and veil.

She came out startlingly white and brilliant from the black. She
put the elastic clamp over her head and set the receiver to her
ear. Instantly she was assailed by dreadful noises, a jangle of
inarticulate sounds like the barking of two dogs.

"I can't hear a word," she protested.

"They're talkin' too loud," said the operator. "The only way to beat
the dictagraph is to cut the wire or yell."

"Are they quarreling, then?" Charity asked, almost with pleasure.

"Yes, ma'am. But it's the lady and her maid. They been havin' a
terrible scrap about marketin'. He--Mr. Cheever--ain't there yet.
They're expectin' him, though."

Charity felt that she had plumbed the depths of degradation in
listening to a quarrel between such a creature and her maid. What
must it be to be the maid of such a creature! She was about to
snatch away the earpiece when she heard the noise of a door opening.
She looked toward the entrance of the room she was in, but the door
that opened was in the other room in the other building.

The voices of Zada and her maid stopped jangling, and she heard
the most familiar of all voices asking:

"What's the row to-day?"

There was an extra metal in the timbre and it had the effect of an
old phonographic record, but there was no questioning whose voice
it was.

Zada's voice became audibly low in answer.

"She is such a fool she drives me crazy."

A sullen, servile voice answered: "It ain't me's the fool, and as
for crazy--her wantin' me to bring home what they ain't in no market.
How'm I goin' to git what ain't to be got, I asts you. This here war
is stoppin' ev'y kind of food."

Cheever's answer was characteristic. He didn't believe in servants'
rights.

"Get out. If you're impudent again I'll throw you out, and your
baggage after you."

"Yassar," was the soft answer.

There was the sound of shuffling feet and a softly closed door.
Then Zada's voice, very mellow:

"I thought you'd never come, dearie."

"Awfully busy to-day, honey."

"You took dinner with her, of course."

"No. It was a big day on the Street, and there was so much to do at
the office that I dined down-town at the Bankers' Club with several
men and then went back to the office. I ought to be there all night,
but I couldn't keep away from you any longer."

There were mysterious quirks of sound that meant kisses and sighs and
tender inarticulations. There were cooing tones which the dictagraph
repeated with hideous fidelity.

Zada asked, "Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?"

And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, "Yes, he diddums, but
worst was lonelying for his Zadalums."

"Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly--truly?"

The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's ear a grotesque
obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer
or the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, "Kissings!
kissings!" Charity screamed: "Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!"

Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their
panic at her outcry. But they were as oblivious of her pain or her
rage as if an interplanetary space divided them. They went on with
the murmur and susurrus of their communion, while Charity looked
askance at the three men. They could not hear, but could imagine,
and they stared at her doltishly.

"Leave the room! Go away!" she groaned.

They slipped out through the door and left her to her shame.

In the porches of her ear the hateful courtship purled on with its
tender third-personal terms and its amorous diminutives, suffixed
ridiculously.

"Zada was afaid her booful Peterkin had forgotten her and gone to
the big old house."

"Without coming home first?"

"Home! that's the wordie I want. This is his homie, isn't it,
Peterkin?"

"Yessy."

"He doesn't love old villain who keeps us apart?"

"Nonie, nonie."

"Never did, did he?"

"Never."

"Only married her, didn't he?"

"That's allie."

"Zada is only really wifie?"

"Only onlykins."

Charity listened with a greed of self-torment like a fanatic
penitent. The chatter of the two had none of the indecency she
had expected, and that made it the more intolerably indecent.

She saw that Cheever's affair with Zada had settled down to a state
of comfort, of halcyon delight.

It had taken on domestication. He was at home with her and an alien
in Charity's home. He told the woman his business affairs and little
office jokes. He laughed with a purity of cheer that he had long lost
in his legal establishment. He used many of the love-words that he
had once used to Charity, and her heart was wrung with the mockery
of it.

Charity listened helplessly. She was as one manacled or paralyzed and
submitted to such a torture as she had never endured. She harkened
in vain for some hopeful note of uncongeniality, some reassurance
for her love or at least her vanity, some certainty that her husband,
her first possessor, had given her some emotion that he could never
give another. But he was repeating to Zada the very phrases of his
honeymoon, repeating them with all the fervor of a good actor playing
Romeo for the hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he
seemed to find in Zada a response and a unity that he had never found
in Charity's society. Her intelligence was cruelly goaded to the
realization that she had never been quite the woman for Cheever.

She had known that he had not been the full complement of her own
soul. They had disagreed fiercely on hundreds of topics. He had been
chilled by many of her ardors, as many of his interests had bored
her. She had supposed it to be an inevitable inability of a man and
a woman to regard the world through the same eyes. She had let him
go his way and had gone her own. And now it seemed that he had in
his wanderings found some one who mated him exactly. The butterfly
had liked the rose, but had fluttered away; when it found the orchid
it closed its wings and rested content.

It was a frightful revelation to Charity, for it meant that Cheever
had been merely flirting with her. She had caught his eye as a girl
in a strange port captivates a sailor. He had haunted her window
with serenades. Finding her to be what we call "a good girl," he had
called upon her father and mother that he might talk to her longer.
And then he had gone to church with her and married her that he might
get rid of her father and mother and her own scruples. And so he had
made her his utterly, and after a few days and nights had sailed away.
He had come back to her now and then as a sailor does.

Meanwhile in another port he had found what we call "a bad woman."
There had been no need to serenade her out into the streets. They
were her shop. No parents had guarded her hours; no priest was
intermediary to her possession. But once within her lair he had
found himself where he had always wanted to be, and she had found
herself with the man she had been hunting. She closed her window,
drove her frequenters, old and new, from the door; and he regretted
that he had given pledges to that other woman.

It was a pitiful state of affairs, no less pitiful for being old
and ugly and innumerously commonplace. It meant that Cheever under
the white cloak of matrimony had despoiled Charity of her innocence,
and under the red domino of intrigue had restored to Zada hers.

If Charity, sitting like a recording angel, invisible but hearing
everything, had found in the communion of Zada and Cheever only
the fervor of an amour, she could have felt that Cheever was merely
a libertine who loved his wife and his home but loved to rove as
well. She had, however, ghastly evidence that Cheever was only now
the rake reformed; his marriage had been merely one of his escapades;
he had settled down now to monogamy with Zada, and she was his wife
in all but style and title.

There was more of Darby and Joan than of Elvira and Don Juan in
their conversation. He told Zada with pride that he had not had a
drink all day, though he had needed alco-help and the other men had
ridiculed him. She told him that she had not had a drink for a week
and only one cigarette since her lonely dinner. They were in a state
of mutual reformation!

Where, then, was the sacrament of marriage? Which of the women held
the chalice now?

It was enforced on Charity that it was she and not Zada who had
been the inspirer and the victim of Cheever's flitting appetite.
It was Zada and not she who had won him to the calm, the dignity,
the sincerity, the purity that make marriage marriage. It was a hard
lesson for Charity, and she did not know what she ought to do with
her costly knowledge. She could only listen.

When Zada complained that she had had a dreadful day of blues Cheever
made jokes for her as for a child, and she laughed like the child
she was. For her amusement he even went to a piano and played, with
blundering three-chord accompaniment, a song or two. He played jokes
on the keyboard. He revealed none of the self-consciousness that he
manifested before Charity when he exploited his little bag of
parlor tricks.

Charity's mood had changed from horror to eager curiosity, and thence
to cold despair, to cold resentment. It went on to cold intelligence
and a belief that her life with Cheever was over. Their marriage was
a proved failure, and any further experiments with its intimacies
would be unspeakably vile. Or so she thought.

She had consented to this dictagraphic inspection of her husband's
intrigue merely to confirm or refute gossip. She had had more than
evidence enough to satisfy her. Her first reaction to it was a
primitive lust for revenge.

Once or twice she blazed with such anger that she rose to tear the
wire loose from the wall and end the torment. But her curiosity
restrained her. She set the earpiece to her ear again.

At length she formed her resolution to act. She called out,
"Mr. Hodshon, come here!"

He came in and found her a pillar of rage.

"I've heard enough. I'll do what I refused before. I'll go with you
and break in."

Hodshon was dazed. He was not ready to act. She had refused his plan
to break in according to the classic standards. He had let the plan
lapse and accepted Mrs. Cheever as a poor rich wretch whom he had
contracted to provide with a certain form of morbid entertainment.
He could do nothing now but stammer:

"Well--well--is that so? Do you really? You know you didn't--
O' course--Well, let's see now. You know we ain't prepared. I told
you we had to have a c'rob'rating witness. It wouldn't be legal if we
were to--Still, they probably would accept you as witness and us as
corroboration, but you wouldn't want to go on the stand and tell what
you found--not a nice refined lady like you are. The witness-stand
is no place for a lady, anyway.

"The thing is if you could get some gentleman friend to go with you
and you two break in. Then you'd both be amateurs, kind of. You see?
Do you know any gentleman who might be willing to do that for you?
The best of friends get very shy when you suggest such a job. But
if you know anybody who would be interested and wanted to help
you--Do you?"

Only two names came to Charity's searching mind--Jim Dyckman's
impossible name and one that was so sublimely unfit that she laughed
as she uttered it.

"There's the Reverend Doctor Mosely."

Hodshon tried to laugh.

"I was reading head-lines of a sermon of his. He's down on divorce."

"That's why he'd be the ideal witness," said Charity.

"But would he come?"

"Of course not," she laughed. "There's no use of carrying this
further. I've had all I can stand to-night. Let me go."

As usual with people who have had all they can stand, Charity wanted
some more. She glanced at the receiver, curious as to what winged
words had flown unattended during her parley with Hodshon.

She put the receiver to her ear and fell back. Again she was greeted
with clamor. They were quarreling ferociously.

That might mean either of two things: there are the quarrels that
enemies maintain, and those that devoted lovers wage. The latter
sort are perhaps the bitterer, the less polite. Charity could not
learn what had started the wrangle between those two.

Slowly it died away. Zada's cries turned to sobs, and her tirade
to sobs.

"You don't love me. Go back to her. You love her still."

"No, I don't, honey. I just don't want her name brought into our
conversation. It doesn't seem decent, somehow. It's like bringing
her in here to listen to our quarrels. I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm
trying not to, but you're so peculiarly hard to keep peace with
lately. What's the reason, darling?"

Charity was smitten with a fear more terrible than any yet. She
heard its confirmation. Zada whispered:

"Can't you guess?"

"No, I can't."

"Stupid!" Zada murmured. "You poor, stupid boy."

Charity heard nothing for a long moment--then a gasp.

"Zada!"

She greeted his alarm with a chuckle and a flurry of proud laughter.
He bombarded her with questions:

"Why didn't you tell me? How long? What will you do? How could
you?--you're no fool."

Her answers were jumbled with his questions--his voice terrified,
hers victorious.

"I've kept it a secret for months, because I was afraid of you.
It's my right. It's too late to do anything now. And now we'll see
whether you love me or not--and how much, if any."

There was again silence. Charity could hardly tolerate the suspense.
Both she and Zada were hanging breathlessly on Cheever's answer.

He did not speak for so long that Zada gave up. "You don't love me,
then? I'd better kill myself, I suppose. It's the only solution now.
And I'm willing, since you don't love me enough."

"No, no--yes, I do. I adore you--more than ever. But it's such a
strange ambition for you; and, God! what a difference it makes,
what a difference!"

That was what Charity thought. For once she agreed with Cheever,
echoed his words and his dismay and stood equally stunned before
the new riddle. It was a perfect riddle now, for there was no end
to the answers, and every one of them was wrong.

CHAPTER XXII

Charity let the receiver fall. She had had enough. She sank into
a chair and would have slipped to the floor, but her swimming eyes
made out the blurred face of Hodshon, terrified at her pallor.

If she fainted he would resuscitate her. She could not add that
to her other ignominies. She clenched herself like one great fist
of resolution till the swoon was frustrated. She sat still for
a while--then rose, put on her hat, swathed her face in the veil,
and went down the flights of stairs and out into the cool, dark
street.

She had forgotten that she had dismissed the taxicab. Fortunately
another was lurking in the lee of the apartment-house. Hodshon
summoned it and would have ridden home with her, but she forbade
him. She passed on the way the church of Doctor Mosely and his
house adjoining. She was tempted to stop, but she was too weary
for more talk.

She slept exceedingly well that night, so well that when she woke
she regretted that she had not slept on out of the world. She fell
asleep again, but was trampled by a nightmare. She woke trying to
scream. Her eyes, opening, found her beautiful room about her and
the dream dangers vanished.

But the horrors of her waking hours of yesterday had not vanished.
They were waiting for her. She could not end them by the closing
of her eyes. In the cool, clear light of day she saw still more
problems than before--problems crying for decisions and contradicting
each other with a hopeless conflict of moralities. To move in any
direction was to commit ugly deeds; to move in no direction was to
commit the ugliest of all.

She rang for her coffee, and she could hardly sit up to it. Her maid
cried out at her age-worn look, and begged her to see a doctor.

"I'm going to as soon as I'm strong enough," said Charity Coe. But
she meant the Reverend Doctor Mosely. She thought that she could
persuade even him that surgery was necessary upon that marriage. At
any rate, she determined to force a decision from him. She telephoned
the unsuspecting old darling, and he readily consented to see her.
She spent an hour or two going over her Bible and concordance. They
gave her little comfort in her plight.

When finally she dragged herself from her home to Doctor Mosely's his
butler ushered her at once into the study. Doctor Mosely welcomed her
both as a grown-up child and as an eminent dealer in good deeds.

She went right at her business. "Doctor Mosely, I loathe myself for
adding to the burdens your parish puts upon your dear shoulders but
you're responsible for my present dilemma."

"My dear child, you don't tell me! Then you must let me help you
out of it. But first tell me--what I'm responsible for."

"You married me to Peter Cheever."

"Why, yes, I believe I did. I marry so many dear girls. Yes, I
remember your wedding perfectly. A very pretty occasion, and you
looked extremely well. So did the bridegroom. I was quite proud
of joining two such--such--"

"Please unjoin us."

"Great Heavens, my child! What are you saying?"

"I am asking you to untie the knot you tied."

The old man stared at her, took his glasses off, rubbed them, put them
on, and peered into her face to make sure of her. Then he said:

"If that were in my power--and you know perfectly well that it is
not--it would be a violation of all that I hold sacred in matrimony."

"Just what do you hold sacred, Doctor Mosely?"

"Dear, dear, this will never do. Really, I don't wish to take
advantage of my cloth, but, really, you know, Charity, you have
been taught better than to snap at the clergy like that."

"Forgive me; I'm excited, not irreverent. But--well, you don't
believe in divorce, do you?"

"I have stated so with all the power of my poor eloquence."

"Do you believe that the seventh commandment is the least important
of the lot?"

"Certainly not!"

"If a man breaks any commandment he ought to do what he can to
remedy the evil?"

"Yes."

"Then if a man violates the seventh, why shouldn't he be compelled
to make restitution, too?"

"What restitution could he make?"

"Not much. He has taken from the girl he marries her name, her
innocence, her youth--he can restore only one thing--her freedom."

"That is not for him to restore. 'What, therefore, God hath joined,
let not man put asunder.'"

The old man grew majestic when he thundered the sonorities of Holy
Writ. Charity was cowed, but she made a craven protest:

"But who is to say what God hath joined?"

"The marriage sacraments administered by the ordained clergy
established that. There is every warrant for clergymen to perform
marriages; no Christian clergyman pretends to undo them."

"You believe that marriage is an indissoluble sacrament, then?"

"Indeed I do."

"Who made my marriage a sacrament?"

"I did, as the agent of God."

"And the minute you pronounce a couple married they are registered
in heaven, and God completes the union?"

"You may put it as you please; the truth is divine."

"In other words, a man like you can pronounce two people man and
wife, but once the words have escaped his lips nothing can ever
correct the mistake."

"There are certain conditions which annul a marriage, but once it
is genuinely ratified on earth it is ratified in heaven."

"In heaven, where, as the New Testament says in several places,
married people do not live together? The woman who had seven
husbands on earth, you know, didn't have any at all in heaven."

"So Christ answered the Sadducee who tempted him with questions."

"Marriage is strictly a matter of the earth, earthy, then?"

"Nothing is strictly that, my child. But what in the name of either
earth or heaven has led you to come over here and break into my
morning's work with such a fusillade of childish questions? You know
a child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. Also, a
child can ask questions which a wise man can answer to another wise
man but not to a child. You talk like an excited, an unreasoning
girl. I am surprised to hear you ridiculing the institution of
Christian marriage, but your ridicule does not prove it to be
ridiculous."

"Oh, it's not ridiculous to me, Doctor Mosely; and I'm not
ridiculing it. I am horribly afraid of what it has done to me
and will do to me."

"Explain that, my dear."

She did explain with all bluntness: "My husband openly lives with
a mistress. He prefers her to me."

The old man was stunned. He faltered: "Dear me!"

That is most reprehensible--most! He should be subjected to
discipline."

"Whose? He isn't a member of your church. And how can you discipline
such a man--especially as you don't believe in divorce?"

"Have you tried to win him back to the path of duty, to waken him
to a realizing sense of his obliquity?"

"Often and long. It can't be done, for he loves the other woman."

"Don't use the beautiful word love for such a debasing impulse."

"But I know he loves her!"

"How could you know?"

"I heard him tell her."

"You heard him! Do you ask me to believe that he told her that in
your presence?"

"I heard him on the dictagraph."

"You have been collecting evidence for divorce, then?"

"No, I was collecting it to assure myself that the gossip I had
heard was false--and to submit to you."

"But why to me?"

"When I first learned of this hideous situation my first impulse was
to rush to the courts. I went to church instead. I heard your sermon.
It stopped me from seeing a lawyer."

"I am glad my poor words have served some useful end."

"But have they?"

"If I have prevented one divorce I have not lived in vain."

"You don't think I have a right to ask for one?"

"Absolutely and most emphatically not."

"In spite of anything he may do?"

"Anything! He will come back to you, Charity. Possess your soul
in patience. It may be years, but keep the light burning and he
will return."

"In what condition?"

"My child, you shock me! You've been reading the horrible literature
that gets printed under the guise of science."

"I must wait, then?"

"Yes, if you wish to separate from him for a time, your absence might
waken him to a realizing sense. There are no children, I believe."

"None, yet."

"Yet? Oh, then--"

"If there were, would it make a difference?"

"Of course! an infinite difference!"

"You think a man and woman ought to let their child keep them
together in any event?"

"Need I say it? What greater bond of union could there be? Is it
not God's own seal and blessing on the wedlock, rendering it, so
to speak, even more indissoluble? You blush, my child. Is it true,
then, that--"

"A child is expected."

"Ah, my dear girl! How that proves what I have maintained! The birth
of the little one will bring the errant father to his senses. The
tiny hands will unite its parents as if they were the hands of a
priest drawing them together. That child is the divine messenger
confirming the sacrament."

"You believe that?"

"Utterly. Oh, I am glad. Motherhood is the crowning triumph; it
hallows any woman howsoever lowly or wicked. And you are neither,
Charity. I know you to be good and busy in good works. But were you
never so evil, this heavenly privilege would make of you a very
vessel of sanctity."

Charity turned pale as she sprung the trap. "The child is
expected--not by me, but by the other woman."

Doctor Mosely's beatitude turned to a sick disgust. Red and white
streaked his face. His first definite reaction was wrath at the
trick that had been played upon him.

"Mrs. Cheever! This is unworthy of you! You distress me! Really!"

"I was a little distressed myself. What am I to do?"

"I will not believe what you say."

"I heard her confess it--boast of it. She agrees with you that
the tiny hands will bring her and the father together and confirm
the sacrament."

"It can't be. It must not be!"

"You don't advocate that form of birth-control? They are arresting
people who preach prevention of conception. You are not so modern
as that."

"Hush!"

"What am I to do? You advise me to possess my soul in patience for
years. But the child won't wait that long. Doesn't the situation
alter your opinion of divorce?"