We Can\'t Have Everything

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Kedzie's first sorrow was in leaving Chicago. They changed trains
there, bouncing across the town in a bus. That transit colored
Kedzie's soul like dragging a ribbon through a vat of dye. Henceforth
she was of a city hue.

She was enamoured of every cobblestone, and she loved every man,
woman, horse, and motor she passed. She tried to flirt with
the tall buildings. She was afraid to leave Chicago lest she never
get to New York, or find it inferior. She begged to be left there.
It was plenty good enough for her.

But once aboard the sleeping-car she was blissful again, and
embarrassed her mother and father with her adoration. In all
sincerity, Kedzie mechanically worshiped people who got things
for her, and loathed people who forbade things or took them away.

She horrified the porter by calling him "Mister"--almost as much
as her parents scandalized him the next day by eating their meals
out of a filing-cabinet of shoe-boxes compiled by Mrs. Thropp. But
it was all picnic to Kedzie. Fortunately for her repose, she never
knew that there was a dining-car attached.

The ordeal of a night in a sleeping-car coffin was to Kedzie an
experience of faery. She laughed aloud when she bumped her head,
and getting out of and into her clothes was a fascinating exercise
in contortion. She was entranced by the wash-room with its hot and
cold water and its basin of apparent silver, whose contents did not
have to be lifted and splashed into a slop-jar, but magically
emptied themselves at the raising of a medallion.

She had not worn herself out with enthusiasm by the time the first
night was spent and half the next day. She pressed her nose against
the window and ached with regret at the hurry with which towns and
cities were whipped away from her eyes.

She did not care for grass and trees and cows and dull villages,
but she thrilled at the beauty of big, dark railroad stations
and noble street-cars and avenues paved with exquisite asphalt.

The train was late in arriving at New York, and it was nearer ten
than eight when it roared across the Harlem River. Kedzie was glad of
the display, for she saw the town first as one great light-spangled
banner.

The car seemed to be drawn right through people's rooms. Everybody
lived up-stairs. She caught glimpses of kitchens on the fourth floor
and she thought this adorable, except that it would be a job carrying
the wood all the way up.

The streets went by like the glistening spokes of a swift wheel.
They were packed with interesting sights. No wonder most of the
inhabitants were either in the streets or leaning out of the windows
looking down. Here it was ten o'clock, and not a sign of anybody's
having thought of going to bed. New York was a sensible place.
She liked New York.

But the train seemed to quicken its pace out of mere spitefulness
just as they reached wonderful market streets with flaring lights
over little carts all filled with things to buy.

When the wonder world was blotted from view by the tunnel it
frightened her at first with its long, dark noise and the flip-flops
of light. Then a brief glimpse of towers and walls. Then the dark
station. And they were There!

CHAPTER IV

Jim Dyckman had always loved Charity Coe, but he let another man
marry her--a handsomer, livelier, more entertaining man with whom
Dyckman was afraid to compete. A mingling of laziness and of modesty
disarmed him.

As soon as he saw how tempestuously Peter Cheever began his courtship,
Dyckman withdrew from Miss Coe's entourage. When she asked him why,
he said, frankly:

"Pete Cheever's got me beat. I know when I'm licked."

Pete's courtship was what the politicians call a whirlwind campaign.
Charity was Mrs. Cheever before she knew it. Her friends continued
to call her Charity Coe, but she was very much married.

Cheever was a man of shifting ardors. His soul was filled with
automatic fire-extinguishers. He flared up quickly, but when his
temperature reached a certain degree, sprinklers of cold water
opened in his ceiling and doused the blaze, leaving him unharmed
and hardly scorched. It had been so with his loves.

After a brief and blissful honeymoon, Peter Cheever's capricious
soul kindled at the thought of an exploration of war-filled Europe.
His blushing bride was a hurdle-rider, too, and loved a risk-neck
venture. She insisted on going with him.

He accepted the steering-wheel of a motor-ambulance and left his
bride to her own devices while he shot along the poplar-plumed roads
of France at lightning speed.

Charity drifted into hospital service. Her first soldier, the
tortured victim of a gas-attack, was bewailing the fate of his
motherless child. Charity brought a smile to what lips he had by
whispering:

"I am rich. I will adopt your little girl."

It was the first time she had ever boasted of being rich. The man
died, whispering: "_Merci, Madame! Merci, Madame!_" Another
father was writhing in the premature hell of leaving a shy little
unprotected boy to starve. Charity promised to care for him, too.

At a committee meeting, a week later, she learned of a horde of
war orphans and divided them up with Muriel Schuyler, Mrs. Perry
Merithew, and other American angels abroad.

When Charity's husband wearied of being what he called "chauffeur to
a butcher-wagon," he decided that America was a pretty good country,
after all. But Charity could not tear herself away from her privilege
of suffering, even to follow her bridegroom home. He had cooled to
her also, and he made no protest. He promised to come back for her.
He did not come. He cabled often and devotedly, telling her how
lonely he was and how busy. She answered that she hoped he was
lonely, but she knew he was busy. He would be!

When Cheever first returned, Jim Dyckman saw him at a club. He saw
him afterward in a restaurant with one of those astonishing animals
which the moving pictures have hardly caricatured as a "vampire."
This one would have been impossible if she had not been visible.
She was intensely visible.

Jim Dyckman felt that her mere presence in a public restaurant was
offensive. To think of her as displacing Charity Coe in Cheever's
attentions was maddening. He understood for the first time why
people of a sort write anonymous letters. He could not stoop to
that degradation, and yet he wondered if, after all, it would be
as degrading to play the informer as to be an unprotesting and
therefore accessory spectator and confidant.

Gossip began to deal in the name of Cheever. One day at a club
the he-old-maid "Prissy" Atterbury cackled:

"I saw Pete Cheever at a cabaret--"

Jim asked, anxiously, "Was he alone?"

"Nearly."

"What do you mean--nearly alone?"

"Well, what he had with him is my idea of next to nothing. I wonder
what sinking ship Cheever rescued her from. They tell me she was
a cabaret dancer named Zada L'Etoile--that's French for Sadie Starr,
I suppose."

Dyckman's obsession escaped him.

"Somebody ought to write his wife about it."

"That would be nice!" cried Prissy. "Oh, very, very nice! It would be
better to notify the Board of Health. But it would be still better if
his wife would come home and mind her own business. These Americans
who hang about the edges of the war, fishing for sensations, make me
very tired--oh, very, very tired."

Prissy never knew how near he was to annihilation. Jim had to hold
one fist with the other. He was afraid to yield to his impulse to
smash Prissy in the droop of his mustache. Prissy was too frail to
be slugged. That was his chief protection in his gossip-mongering
career.

Besides, it is a questionable courtesy for a former beau to defend
another man's wife's name, and Dyckman proved his devotion to Charity
best by leaving her slanderer unrebuked.

It was no anonymous better that brought Charity Coe home. It was
the breakdown of her powers of resistance. Even the soldiers had to
be granted vacations from the trenches; and so an eminent American
surgeon in charge of the hospital she adorned finally drove Mrs.
Cheever back to America. He disguised his solicitude with brutality;
he told her he did not want her to die on their hands.

When Charity came back, Cheever met her and celebrated her return.
She was a new sensation to him again for a week or two, but her need
of seclusion and quiet drove him frantic and he grew busy once more.
He recalled Miss L'Etoile from the hardships of dancing for her
supper. Unlike Charity, Zada never failed to be exciting. Cheever
was never sure what she would do or say or throw next. She was
delicious.

When Dyckman learned of Cheever's extra establishment it enraged him.
He had let Cheever push him aside and carry off Charity Coe, and now
he must watch Cheever push Charity Coe aside and carry on the next
choice of his whims.

To Dyckman, Charity was perfection. To lose her and find her in
the ash-barrel with Cheever's other discarded dolls was intolerable.
Yet what could Dyckman do about it? He dared not even meet Charity.
He hated her husband, and he knew that her husband hated him. Cheever
somehow realized the dogged fidelity of Dyckman's love for Charity
and resented it--feared it as a menace, perhaps.

Dyckman had two or three narrow escapes from running into Charity,
and he finally took to his heels. He lingered in the Canadian wilds
till he thought it safe to return. And now she chanced to board the
same train. The problem he had run away from had cornered him.

He had cherished a sneaking hope that she would learn the truth
somehow before he met her. He was not sure what she ought to do
when she learned it. He was sure that what she would do would be
the one right thing.

Yet he realized from her placid manner of parrying his threats at
her husband that she still loved the wretch and trusted him. It was
up to Jim to tell her what he knew about Cheever. He felt that he
ought to. Yet how could he?

It was hideous that she should sit there smiling tolerantly at
a critic of her infernal husband as serenely as a priestess who
is patient with an unenlightened skeptic.

It was atrocious that Cheever should be permitted to prosper with
this scandal unrebuked, unpunished, actually unsnubbed, accepting
the worship of an angel like Charity Coe and repaying it with black
treachery! To keep silent was to co-operate in the evil--to pander
to it. Dyckman thought it was hideous. The word he thought was
"rotten"!

He actually opened his mouth to break the news. His voice mutinied.
He could not say a word.

Something throttled him. It was that strange instinct which makes
criminals of every degree feel that no crime is so low but that
tattling on it is a degree lower.

Dyckman tried to assuage his self-contempt by the excuse that Charity
was not in the mood or in the place where such a disclosure should
be made. Some day he would tell her and then ask permission to kill
the blackguard for her.

The train had scuttered across many a mile while he meditated the
answer to the latest riddle. His thoughts were so turbulent that
Charity finally intruded.

"What's on your mind, Jim?"

"Oh, I was just thinking."

"What about?"

"Oh, things."

Suddenly he reached out and seized the hand that drooped at her knee
like a wilted lily. He wrung her fingers with a vigor that hurt her,
then he said, "Got any dogs to show this season?"

She laughed at the violent abruptness of this, and said, "I think
I'll give an orphan-show instead."

He shook his head in despairing admiration and leaned back to watch
the landscape at the window. So did she. On the windows their own
reflections were cast in transparent films of light. Each wraith
watched the other, seeming to read the mood and need no speech.

Dyckman's mind kept shuttling over and over the same rails of
thought, like a switch-engine eternally shunting cars from one track
to another. His very temples throbbed with the _clickety-click_
of the train. At last he groaned:

"This world's too much for me. It's got me guessing."

He seemed to be so impressed with his original and profound discovery
of life's unanswerable complexity that Charity smiled, the same sad,
sweet smile with which she pored on the book of sorrow or listened to
the questions of her orphans who asked where their fathers had gone.

She thought of Jim Dyckman as one of her orphans. There was a good
deal of the mother in her love of him. For she did love him. And she
would have married him if he had asked her earlier--before Peter
Cheever swept over her horizon and carried her away with his zest
and his magnificence.

She rebuked herself for thinking of Jim Dyckman as an orphan. He had
a father and mother who doted on him. He had wealth of his own and
millions to come. He had health and brawn enough for two. What right
had he to anybody's pity? Yet she pitied him.

And he pitied her.

And on this same train, in this same car, unnoticed and unnoticing,
sat Kedzie.

Jim and Charity grew increasingly embarrassed as the train drew into
New York. Charity was uncertain whether her husband would meet her
or not. Jim did not want to leave her to get home alone. She did not
want her husband to find her with Jim.

Cheever had excuse enough in his own life for suspecting other
people. He had always disliked Jim Dyckman because Dyckman had
always disliked him, and Jim's transparent face had announced the
fact with all the clarity of an illuminated signboard.

Also Charity had loved Jim before she met Cheever, and she made no
secret of being fond of him still. In their occasional quarrels,
Cheever had taunted her with wishing she had married Jim, and she
had retorted that she had indeed made a big mistake in her choice.
Lovers say such things--for lack of other weapons in such combats
as lovers inevitably wage, if only for exercise.

Charity did not really mean what she said, but at times Cheever
thought she did. He had warned her to keep away from Dyckman and
keep Dyckman away from her or there would be trouble. Cheever was
a powerful athlete and a boxer who made minor professionals look
ridiculous. Dyckman was bigger, but not so clever. A battle between
the two stags over the forlorn doe would be a horrible spectacle.
Charity was not the sort of woman that longs for such a conflict
of suitors. Just now she had seen too much of the fruits of male
combat. She was sick of hatred and its devastation.

So Charity begged Dyckman to get off at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth
Street, but he would not show himself so poltroon. He answered, "I'd
like to see myself!" meaning that he would not.

She retorted, "Then I'll get off there myself."

"Then I'll get off there with you," he grumbled.

Charity flounced back into her seat with a gasp of mitigated disgust.
The mitigation was the irresistible thrill of his devotion. She had
a husband who would desert her and a cavalier who would not. It was
difficult not to forgive the cavalier a little.

Yet it would have been better if he had obeyed her command or she
her impulse. Or would it have been? The worst might always have been
worse.

CHAPTER V

When Kedzie was angry she called her father an "old country Jake."
Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed
the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car
with his cocksure criticisms of cities that he had never seen. He
had condemned New York with all the mercilessness of a small-town
superiority, and he had told funny stories that were as funny as
the moss-bearded cypresses in a lone bayou. While he was denouncing
New York as the home of ignorance and vice, the other men were having
sport with him--sport so cruel that only his own cruelty blinded
him to it.

When the porter summoned the passengers to pass under the whisk broom,
Adna remembered that he had not settled upon his headquarters in
New York, and he said to a man on whom he had inflicted a vile cigar:
"Say, I forgot to ask you. What's a good hotel in New York that ain't
too far from the railroad and don't rob you of your last nickel?
Or is they one?"

One of the smoking-room humorists mocked his accent and ventured
a crude jape.

"You can save the price of a hack-ride by going to Mrs. Biltmore's
new boarding-house. It's right across the road from the depot."

If Adna had been as keen as he thought he was, or if the porter
had not alarmed him just then by his affectionate interest, even
Adna would have noted the grins on the faces of the men.

But he broke the porter's heart by dodging the whisk broom and
hustling his excited family to their feet. They were permitted to
hale their own hand-baggage to the platform, where two red-capped
Kaffirs reached for it together. There was danger of an altercation,
but the bigger of the two frightened the smaller away by snapping
his shiny eyeballs alarmingly. The smaller one took a second look
at Adna and retreated with scorn, snickering:

"You kin have him."

The other, who was a good loser at craps or tips, re-examined his
clients, flickered his eyelids, and started down the platform to
have it over with as soon as possible. He paused to say:

"Where you-all want to go to--a taxicab?"

Adna, who was a little nervous about his property, answered with
some asperity:

"No, we don't need any hack to git to Biltmore's."

"Nossah!" said the red-cap.

"Right across the street, ain't it?"

"Yassah!" The porter chuckled. The mention of the family's destination
had cheered him a little. He might get a tip, after all. You couldn't
always sometimes tell by a man's clothes how he tipped.

While Kedzie stood watching the red-cap bestow the various parcels
under his arms and along his fingers, a man bumped into her and
murmured:

"Sorry!"

She turned and said, "Huh?"

He did not look around. She did not see his face. It was the first
conversation between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie Thropp.

Charity Coe, when the train stopped, had flatly refused to walk up
the station platform with Jim Dyckman. She had not only virtue, but
St. Paul's idea of the importance of avoiding even the appearance
of evil. She would not budge from the car till Jim had gone. He
was forced to leave her at last.

He swung through the crowd in a fury, jostling and begging pardon
and staring over the heads of the pack to see if Cheever were at
the barrier. He jolted Kedzie Thropp among others, apologized,
and thought no more of her.

Cheever had not come to meet his wife. Her telegram was waiting
for him at his official home; he was at his other residence.

When Dyckman saw that no one was there to welcome the fagged-out
Charity, he paused and waited for her himself. When Charity
came along her anxious eyes found nobody she knew except Dyckman.
The disappointment she revealed hurt him profoundly. But he would
not be shaken off again. He turned in at her side and walked along,
and the two porters with their luggage walked side by side.

Prissy Atterbury was hurrying to a train that would take him for a
week-end visitation to people who hated him but needed him to cancel
a female bore with. As Prissy saw it and described it, Dyckman came
into the big waiting-room alone, looked about everywhere, paused,
turned back for Charity Coe; then walked away with her, followed by
their twinned porters. Prissy said "Aha!" behind his big mustaches
and stared till he nearly lost his train.

Atterbury had gained a new topic to carry with him, a topic of such
fertile resources that it went far to pay his board and lodging.
He made a snowball out of the clean reputations of Charity and Jim
and started it downhill, gathering dirt and momentum as it rolled.
It was bound to roll before long into the ken of Peter Cheever,
and he was not the man to tolerate any levity in a wife. Cheever
might be as wicked as Caesar, but his wife must be as Caesar's.

When Charity Coe was garrulous and inordinately gay, Jim Dyckman,
who had known her from childhood, knew that she was trying to rush
across the thin ice over some deep grief.

When he saw how hurt she was at not being met, and he insisted on
taking her home, she chattered and snickered hysterically at his
most stupid remarks. So he said:

"Don't let him break your heart in you, old girl."

She laughed uproariously, almost vulgarly, over that, and answered:
"Me? Let a man break my heart? That's very likely, isn't it?"

"Very!" Jim groaned.

When they reached her magnificent home it had a deserted look.

"Wait here a minute," said Charity when Jim got out to help her out.
She ran up the steps and rang the bell. There was a delay before
the second man in an improvised toilet opened the door to her and
expressed as much surprise as delight at seeing her. "Didn't Mr.
Cheever tell you I was coming home?" she gasped.

"We haven't seen him, ma'am. There's a telegram here for him, but
of course--"

Charity was still in a frantic mood. She wanted to escape brooding,
at all costs. She ran back to where Jim waited at the motor door.

"Got any date to-night, Jim?" she demanded. He shook his head
dolefully, and she said: "Go home, jump into your dancing-shoes,
and come back for me. I'll throw on something light and you can
take me somewhere to dance. I'll go crazy mad, insane, if you
don't. I can't endure this empty house. You don't mind my making
a convenience of you, do you, Jim?"

"I love it, Charity Coe," he groaned. He reached for her hand, but
she was fleeting up the steps. He crept into the car and went to
his home, flung off his traveling-togs, passed through a hot tub
and a cold shower into evening clothes, and hastened away.

Charity kept him waiting hardly a moment. She floated down the stairs
in a something fleetily volatile, and he said:

"You look like a dandelion puff."

"That's right, tell me some nice things," she said. She did not tell
the servant where she was going. She did not know. She hardly cared.

CHAPTER VI

To Kedzie Thropp the waiting-room of the Grand Central Terminal was
the terminus of human splendor. It was the waiting-room to heaven.
And indeed it is a majestic chamber.

The girl walked with her face high, staring at the loftily columned
recesses with the bay-trees set between the huge square pillars,
and above all the feigned blue sky and the monsters of the zodiac
in powdered gold.

Kedzie could hardly breathe--it was so beautiful, so much superior
to the plain every-night sky she was used to, with stars of tin
instead of gold like these.

Even her mother said "Well!" and Adna paid the architects the tribute
of an exclamation: "Humph! So this is the new station we was readin'
about. Some bigger'n ours at home, eh, Kedzie?"

But Kedzie was not there. They had lost her and had to turn back. She
was in a trance. When they snatched her down to earth again and pulled
her through the crowds she began to adore the people. They were
dressed in unbelievable splendor--millions, she guessed, in far better
than the best Sunday best she had ever seen. She wondered if she would
ever have nice clothes. She vowed that she would if she had to murder
somebody to get them.

The porter led the way from the vastitude of a corridor under
the street and through vast empty rooms and up a stairway and down
a few steps and through the first squirrel-cage door Kedzie had ever
seen (she had to run round it thrice before they could get her out)
into a sumptuousness beyond her dream.

At the foot of more stairs the porter let down his burdens, and a boy
in a general's uniform seized them. The porter said, mopping his brow
to emphasize his achievement:

"This is fur's I go."

"Oh, all right! Much obliged," said Adna. He just pretended to walk
away as a joke on the porter. When he saw the man's white stare
aggravated sufficiently, Adna smiled and handed him a dime.

The porter stared and turned away in bitter grief. Then his chuckle
returned as he went his way, telling himself: "And the bes' of it
was, I fit for him! I just had to git that man."

He told the little porter about it, and when the little porter, who
had been scared away from the Thropps and left to carry Charity Coe's
dainty hand-bags, showed the big porter what he had received, still
the big porter laughed. He knew how to live, that big porter.

Kedzie followed the little general up the steps and around to
the desk. Her father realized that his fellow-passenger had been
teasing him when he referred to this place as a boarding-house, but
he was not at all crushed by the magnificence he was encountering.
He felt that he was in for it--so he cocked his toothpick pluckily
and wrote on the loose-leaf register the room clerk handed him:

A. Thropp, wife and daughter, Nimrim, Mo.

The room clerk read the name as if it were that of a potentate whose
incognito he would respect, and murmured:

"About what accommodation would you want, Mr. Thropp?"

"Two rooms--one for the wife and m'self, one for the daughter."

"Yes, sir. And about how much would you want to pay?"

"How do they run?"

"We can give you two nice adjoining rooms for twelve dollars--up."

Mr. Thropp made a hasty calculation. Twelve dollars a week for board
and lodging was not so bad. He nodded.