We Can\'t Have Everything

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"No!"

"But if I don't divorce Mr. Cheever and let him marry her the child
will have no father--legally."

"The responsibility is his, not yours."

"You don't believe in infant damnation, do you? At least not on
earth, do you?"

"I cannot control the evil impulses of others. The doctrines of the
Church cannot be modified for the convenience of every sinner."

"You advise against divorce, then?"

"I am unalterably opposed to it."

"What is your solution, then, of this situation?"

"I shall have to think it over--and pray. Please go. You have
staggered me."

"When you have thought it over will you give me the help of your
advice?"

"Certainly."

"Then shall I wait till I hear from you?"

"If you will."

"Good-by, Doctor Mosely."

"Good-by, Mrs.--Charity--my child!"

He pressed her long hand in his old palms. He was trembling. He was
like a priest at bay before the altar while the arrows of the infidel
rain upon him. These arrows were soft as rain and keen as silk. He
was more afraid of them than if they had been tipped with flint or
steel.

Charity left the parsonage no wiser than she entered it. She had
accomplished nothing further than to ruin Doctor Mosely's excellent
start on an optimistic discourse in the prevailing fashion of the
enormously popular "Pollyanna" stories: it was to be a "glad" sermon,
an inexorably glad sermon. But poor Doctor Mosely could not preach
it now in the face of this ugly fact.

Charity went home with her miserable triumph, which only emphasized
her defeat.

She found at home a mass of details pressing for immediate action
if the big moving-picture project were not to lapse into inanity.
The mere toil of such a task ought to have been welcomed, at least
as a diversion. But her heart was as if dead in her.

She wondered how Jim Dyckman was progressing with his portion of
the task. He had not reported to her. She wondered why.

She decided to telephone him. She put out her hand, but did not lift
the receiver from the hook. She began to muse upon Jim Dyckman. She
began to think strange thoughts of him. If she had married him she
might not have failed so wretchedly to find happiness. Of course,
she might have failed more wretchedly and more speedily, but the
wayfarer who chooses one of two crossroads and meets a wolf upon
it does not believe that a lion was waiting on the other.

CHAPTER XXIII

Charity pondered her whole history with Jim Dyckman, from their
childhood flirtations on. He had had other flings, and she had flung
herself into Peter Cheever's arms. Peter Cheever had flung her out
again. Jim Dyckman had opened his arms again.

He had told her that she was wasting herself. He had offered her love
and devotion. She had struck his hands away and rebuked him fiercely.
A little later she had felt a pang of jealousy because he looked at
that little Greek dancer so interestedly. She had tried to atone for
this appalling thought by interesting herself in the little dancer's
welfare and hunting a position for her with the moving-picture
company. She had told Jim Dyckman to look for the girl in the studio
and find how she was getting along. He had never reported on that,
either. Charity smiled bitterly.

Last night it had come over her that her love for Peter Cheever
was dead. Was love itself, then, dead for her? or was her heart
already busy down there in the dark of her bosom, busy like a seed
germinating some new lily or fennel to thrust up into the daylight?

The sublime and the ridiculous are as close together as the opposite
sides of a sheet of cloth. The sublime is the obverse of the tapestry
with the figures heroic, saintly or sensuous, in battle or temple or
bower, in conquest, love, martyrdom, adoration. The reverse of the
tapestry is a matter of knots and tufts, broken patterns, ludicrous
accidents of contour. The same threads make up both sides.

On one side of Charity's tapestry she saw herself as a pitiful
figure, a neglected wife returned from errands of mercy to find her
husband enamoured of a wanton. She spurned the proffered heart of
a great knight while her own heart bled openly in her breast.

On the other side she saw the same red threads that crimsoned her
heart running across the arras to and from the heart of Jim Dyckman.
It was the red thread of life and love, blood-color--blood-maker,
blood-spiller, heart-quickener, heart-sickener, the red thread of
romance, of motherhood and of lust, birth and murder, family and
bawdry.

In the tapestry her heart was entire, her eyes upon her faithless
husband. On the other side her eyes faced the other knight; her
heartstrings ran out to his. She laughed harshly at the vision.
Her laugh ended in a fierce contempt of herself and of every body
and thing else in the world.

She was too weak to fight the law and the Church and the public
in order to divorce her husband. Would it be weakness or strength
to sit at home in the ashes and deny herself to life and love? She
could always go to Jim Dyckman and take him as her cavalier. But
then she would become one of those heartbroken, leash-broken women
who are the Maenads of society, more or less circumspect and shy, but
none the less lawless. But wherein were they better than the Zadas?

Charity was wrung with a nausea of love in all its activities; she
forswore them. Yet she was human. She was begotten and conceived in
the flesh of lovers. She was made for love and its immemorial usages.
How could she expect to destroy her own primeval impulse just because
one treacherous man had enjoyed her awhile and passed on to his next
affair?

There was no child of hers to grow up and replace her in the eternal
armies of love and compel her aside among the veteran women who have
been mustered out. She was in a sense already widowed of her husband.
Certainly she would never love Cheever again or receive him into her
arms. He belonged to the mother of his child. Let that woman step
aside into the benches of the spectators, those who have served their
purpose and must become wet-nurses, child-dryers, infant-teachers,
perambulator-motors, question-answerers, nose-blowers,
mischief-punishers, cradleside-bards.

Charity laughed derisively at the vision of Zada as a mother. The
Madonna pose had fascinated this Magdalen, but she would find that
mothers have many, many other things to do for their infants than
to sit for portraits and give them picturesque nourishment--many,
many other things. If Zada's child inherited its father's and
mother's wantonness, laziness, wickedness, and violence of temper,
there was going to be a lively nursery in that apartment.

Zada had so wanted a baby as a reward of love that she was willing
to snatch it out of the vast waiting-room without pausing for a
license. She would find that she had bought punishment at a high
price. The poor baby was in for a hard life, but it would give its
parents one in exchange.

Charity was appalled at this unknown harshness of her soul; it
sneered at all things once held beautiful and sacred. Her soul was
like a big cathedral broken into by a pagan mob that ran about
smashing images, defiling fonts, burlesquing all the solemn rituals.
Her quiet mind was full of sunburnt nymphs and goatish fauns with
shaggy fetlocks. She saw the world as a Brocken and all the Sabbath
there was was a Sabbath orgy of despicably brutish fiends.

She tried to run away. She went to her piano; her fingers would play
no dirges; they grew flippant, profane in rhythm. She could think of
no tunes but dances--andantes turned scherzi, the Handelian largo
became a Castilian tango. She found herself playing a something
strange--she realized that it was a lullaby! She fled from the piano.

She went to her books for nepenthe. There were romances in French,
Italian, German, English, and American, new books, old books, all
repeating the same stencils of passion in different colors. She
could have spat at them and their silly ardors over the same old
banality: I love him; he loves me--beatitude! I love him; he loves
her--tragedy!

The novelists were like stupid children parroting the ancient
monotony--_amo_, _amas_, _amat_; _amamus_,
_amatis_, _amant_; _amo_, _amas_,
_amat_--away with such primer stuff! She had learned the
grammar of love and was graduated from the school-books. She was
a postgraduate of love and wedlock. She had had enough of them--too
much; she would read no more of love, dwell no more upon it; she
would forget it.

She wanted some antiseptic book, something frigid, intellectual,
ascetic. At last she thought she had it. On her shelf she found
an uncut volume, a present from some one who had never read it,
but had bought it because it cost several dollars and would serve
as a gift.

It was Gardner's biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, "a study
in the religion, literature, and history of the fourteenth century
of Italy." That sounded heartless enough. The frontispiece portrait
of the wan, meager, despondent saint promised freedom from romantic
balderdash.

Charity found a chair by a window and began to read. The preface
announced the book to be "history centered in the work and
personality of one of the most wonderful women that ever lived."
This was the medicine Charity wanted--the story of a woman who
had been wonderful without love or marriage.

There followed a description of the evil times--and the wicked
town in which Caterina Benincasa was born--as long ago as 1347. A
pestilence swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how
he had buried five of his sons in one trench. People said that the
end of the world had come.

The word _trench_, the perishing of the people and the apparent
end of the world, gave the story a modern sound. It might concern
the murderous years of 1914-16.

Catherine was religious, as little girls are apt to be. She even
wanted to enter a monastery in the disguise of a boy. Later her
sister persuaded her to dye her hair and dress fashionably. Charity
began to fear for her saint, but was reassured to find that already
at sixteen she was a nun and had commenced that "life of almost
incredible austerity," freeing herself from all dependence on food
and sleep and resting on a bare board.

Charity read with envy how Catherine had devoted herself for three
whole years to silence broken only by confessions. How good it would
be not to talk to anybody about anything for years and years! How
blissful to live a calm, gray life in a strait cell, doing no labor
but the errands of mercy and of prayer!

Charity read on, wondering a little at Catherine's idea of God,
and her morbid devotion to His blood as the essence of everything
beautiful and holy. Charity could not put herself back into
that Middle Age when the most concrete materialism was mingled
inextricably with the most fantastic symbolism.

Suddenly she was startled to find that appalling temptations found
even Catherine out even in her cloistral solitude. It frightened
Charity to read such a passage as this:

There came a time, towards the end of these three years, when these
assaults and temptations became horrible and unbearable. Aerial men
and women, with obscene words and still more obscene gestures, seemed
to invade her little cell, sweeping round her like the souls of the
damned in Dante's "Hell," inviting her simple and chaste soul to
the banquet of lust. Their suggestions grew so hideous and persistent
that she fled in terror from the cell that had become like a circle
of the infernal regions, and took refuge in the church; but they
pursued her thither, though there their power seemed checked. And her
Christ seemed far from her. At last she cried out, remembering the
words in the vision: "I have chosen suffering for my consolation,
and will gladly bear these and all other torments, in the name of
the Saviour, for as long as shall please His Majesty." When she said
this, immediately all that assemblage of demons departed in confusion,
and a great light from above appeared that illumined all the room,
and in the light the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, nailed to the Cross
and stained with blood, as He was when by His own blood He entered
into the holy place; and from the Cross He called the holy virgin,
saying: "My daughter Catherine, seest thou how much I have suffered
for thee? Let it not then be hard to thee to endure for Me."

This terrified Charity, and the further she read the less comfort she
gained. Her matter-of-fact Manhattan mind could vaguely understand
Saint Catherine's mystic nuptials with Christ; but that definite gold
ring He placed on her finger, that diamond with four pearls around
it, frustrated her comprehension.

When she read on and learned how Catherine's utter self-denial
offended the other churchmen and church-women; how her confessions
of sinful thought brought accusations of sinful deed; how the friars
actually threw her out of a church at noon and kicked her as she lay
senseless in the dust; how she was threatened with assassination and
was turned from the doors of the people; and in what torment she died
--from these strange events in the progress of a strange soul through
a strange world Charity found no parallel to guide her life along.

For hours she read; but all that remained to her was the vision of
that poor woman who could find no refuge from her flesh and from
the demons that played evil rhapsodies upon the harp-strings of
her nerves.

Charity closed the book and understood fear. She was now not so much
sick of love as afraid of it. She was afraid of solitude, afraid of
religion and of the good works that cause ridicule or resentment.

Darkness gathered about her with the closing of the day. She dreaded
the night and the day, people and the absence of people. She knew no
woman she could take her anguish to for sympathy; it would provoke
only rebuke or laughter. The Church had rebuffed her. There remained
only men, and what could she hope from them? Even Jim Dyckman had not
been a friend merely. He had told her that she wasted herself as well
as him.

Beyond this night there were years of nights, years on years of days.
She could not even be alone; for who was ever actually alone? Even in
the hush and the gloom of the deepening twilight there were figures
here, shadows that sighed, delicate insinuators. There were no satyrs
or bassarids, but gentlemen in polo garb, in evening dress, in
yachting flannels. There were moon-nights in Florida, electric floods
on dancing-floors, this dim corner of this room with some one leaning
on her chair, bending his head and whispering:

"Charity, it's Jim. I love you."

She rose and thrust aside the arms that were not there. She could not
order him away, because he was not there. And yet he was there.

She was afraid that he still loved her and afraid that he did not.
She was afraid that she had always loved him and that she never
could. She was afraid that she would go to him or send for him,
and afraid that she would be afraid to. She thrust away the phantom,
but her palms pleaded against his departure. Softer than a whisper
and noisier than a cry was her thought:

"I don't want to be alone, I am afraid to be alone."

CHAPTER XXIV

Kedzie wanted to be a lady, and with the ladies stand--a tall tiara
in her hair, a lorgnette in her hand.

She had succeeded dizzily, tremendously, in her cinema career. The
timid thing that had watched the moving-picture director to see how
he held his wineglass, and accepted his smile as a beam of sunshine
breaking through the clouds about his godlike head, now found his
gracefulness "actory," his intimacy impudent, and his association
compromising. Ferriday's very picturesqueness and artistry convinced
her now that he was not quite the gentleman.

Kedzie was beginning to imitate the upper dialect already. She who
but a twelvemonth past was dividing people into "hicks" and "swells,"
and whose epithets were "reub" and "classy," was now a generation
advanced.

Ferriday saw it and raged. One day in discussing the cast of a
picture he mentioned the screen-pet Lorraine Melnotte as the man
for the principal male role.

Kedzie sighed; "Oh, he is so hopelessly romantic, never quite the
gentleman. In costume he gets by, but in evening clothes he always
suggests the handsome waiter--don't you think?"

Ferriday roared, with disgust: "Good Lord, but you're growing. What
is this thing I've invented? Are you a _Frankenstein?_"

Kedzie looked blank and sneered, "Are you implying that I have
Yiddish blood in me?"

She wondered why he laughed, but she would not ask. Along many lines
Kedzie did not know much, but in others she was uncannily acute.

Kedzie was gleaning all her ideas of gentlemanship from Jim Dyckman.
She knew that he had lineage and heritage and equipage and all that
sort of thing, and he must be great because he knew great people.
His careless simplicity, artlessness, shyness, all the things that
distressed her at first, were now accepted as the standards of
conduct for everybody.

In life as in other arts, the best artists grow from the complex to
the simple, the tortuous to the direct, from pose to poise, from
tradition to truth, from artifice to reality. Kedzie was beginning
to understand this and to ape what she could not do naturally.

Her comet-like scoot from obscurity to fame in the motion-picture sky
had exhausted the excitement of that sky, and now she was ashamed of
being a wage-earner, a mere actress, especially a movie actress.

If the studio had not caught fire and burned up so many thousands of
yards of her portraiture she would have broken her contract without
scruple. But the shock of the loss of her pretty images drove her
back to the scene. The pity of so much thought, emotion, action,
going up in smoke was too cruel to endure.

It was not necessary for Dyckman to pay the expenses of their
repetition in celluloid, as he offered. The Hyperfilm Company rented
another studio and began to remake the destroyed pictures. They were
speedily renewed because the scenarios had been rescued and there was
little of that appalling waste of time, money, and effort which has
almost wrecked the whole industry. They did not photograph a thousand
feet for every two hundred used.

Kedzie's first pictures had gone to the exchanges before the fire,
and they were continuing their travels about the world while she was
at work revamping the rest.

About this time the Hyperfilm managers decided to move their factory
to California, where the sempiternal sunlight insured better
photography at far less expense. This meant that Kedzie must leave
New York only partly conquered and must tear herself away from Jim
Dyckman.

She broke down and cried when she told Dyckman of this, and for the
first time his sympathies were stampeded on her account. He petted
her, and she slid into his arms with a child-like ingratiation that
made his heart swell with pity.

"What's the odds," he said, attempting consolation, "where you work,
so long as you work?"

"But it would mean," she sobbed--"it would mean taking me away-ay
from you-ou."

This tribute enraptured Dyckman incredibly. That he should mean so
much to so wonderful a thing as she was was unbelievably flattering.
He had dogged Charity's heels with meek and unrewarded loyalty until
he had lost all pride. Kedzie's tears at the thought of leaving him
woke it to life again.

"By golly, you sha'n't go, then!" he cried. "I was thinking of coming
out there to visit you, but--but it would be better yet for you to
stay right here in little old New York."

This brought back Kedzie's smile. But she faltered, "What if they
hold me to my contract, though?"

"Then we'll bust the old contract. I'll buy 'em off. You needn't
work for anybody."

There was enough of the old-fashioned woman of one sort left in
Kedzie to relish the slave-block glory of being fought over by two
purchasers. She spoke rather slyly:

"But I'll be without wages then. How would I live? I've got
to work."

Dyckman answered at once: "Of course not. I'll take care of you.
I offered to before, you know." He had made a proposal of marriage
some time before; it was the only sort of proposal that he had been
tempted to make to Kedzie. He liked her immensely; she fascinated
him; he loved to pet her and kiss her and talk baby talk to her; but
she had never inflamed his emotions.

Either it was the same with her, or she had purposely controlled
herself and him from policy, or had been restrained by coldness or
by a certain decency, of which she had a good deal, after all and
in spite of all.

Throughout their relations they had deceived Ferriday and other
cynics. For all their indifference to appearances, they had behaved
like a well-behaved pair of young betrothed Americans, with a
complete freedom from chaperonage, and a considerable liberality
of endearments, but no serious misdemeanor.

Kedzie knew what he meant, but she wanted to hear him propose again.
So she murmured:

"How do you mean, take care of me?"

"I mean--marry you, of course."

"Oh!" said Kedzie. And in a whirlwind of pride she twined her arms
about his neck and clung to him with a desperate ardor.

Dyckman said: "This isn't my first proposal, you know. You said you
wanted time to think it over. Haven't you thought it over yet?"

"Yes," Kedzie sighed, but she said no more.

"Well, what's the answer?" he urged.

"Yes."

She whispered, torn between rapture and despair.

Any woman might have blazed with pride at being asked to marry Jim
Dyckman. The little villager was almost consumed like another Semele
scorched by Jupiter's rash approach.

In Dyckman's clasp Kedzie felt how lonely she had been. She wanted to
be gathered in from the dangers of the world, from poverty and from
work. She had not realized how tiny a thing she was, to be combating
the big city all alone, until some one offered her shelter.

People can usually be brave and grim in the presence of defeat and
peril and hostility. It is the kind word, the sudden victory, the
discovery of a friend that breaks one down. Even Kedzie wept.

She wept all over Jim Dyckman's waistcoat, sat on his lap and
swallowed throat-lumps and tears and tugged at his cuff-links with
her little fingers.

Then she looked up at him and blushed and kissed him fiercely,
hugging him with all the might of her arms. He was troubled by the
first frenzy she had ever shown for him, and he might have learned
how much more than a merely pretty child she was if she had not
suddenly felt an icy hand laid on her hands, unclasping them.

A cold arm seemed to bend about her throat and drag her back. She
slid from Dyckman's knees, gasping:

"Oh!"

She could not become Mrs. Jim Dyckman, because she was Mrs. Thomas
Gilfoyle.

Dyckman was astounded and frightened by her action. He put his hand
out, but she unclenched his fingers from her wrist, mumbling:

"Don't--please!"

"Why not? What's wrong with you, child?"

How could she tell him? What could she do? She must do a lot of
thinking. On one thing she was resolved: that she would not give
Dyckman up. She would find Gilfoyle and get quit of him. They had
been married so easily; there must be an easy way of unmarrying.

She studied Dyckman. She must not frighten him away, or let him
suspect. She laughed nervously and went back to his arms, giggling:

"Such a wonderful thing it is to have you want me for your wife!
I'm not worthy of your name, or your love, or anything."

Dyckman could hardly agree to this, whatever misgivings might be
shaking his heart. He praised her with the best adjectives in his
scant vocabulary and asked her when they should be wed.

"Oh, not for a long while yet," she pleaded.

"Why?" he wondered.

"Oh, because!" It sickened and alarmed her to put off the day, but
how could she name it?

When he left her at last the situation was still a bit hazy. He had
proposed and been accepted vaguely. But when he had gallantly asked
her to "say when" she had begged for time.

Dyckman, once outside the spell of Kedzie's eyes and her warmth, felt
more and more dubious. He was ashamed of himself for entertaining any
doubts of the perfection of his situation, but he was ashamed also of
his easy surrender. Here he was with his freedom gone. He had escaped
the marriage-net of so many women of so much brilliance and prestige,
and yet a little movie actress had landed him.

He compared Anita Adair with Charity Coe, and he had to admit that
his fiancee suffered woefully in every contrast. He could see the
look of amazement on Charity's face when she heard the news. She
would be completely polite about it, but she would be appalled. So
would his father and mother. They would fight him tremendously. His
friends would give him the laugh, the big ha-ha! They would say he
had made a fool of himself; he had been an easy mark for a little
outsider.

He wondered just how it had happened. The fact was that Kedzie had
appealed to his pity. That was what none of the other eligibles had
ever done, least of all Charity the ineligible.

He went home. He found his father and mother playing double Canfield
and wrangling over it as usual. They were disturbed by his manner.
He would not tell them what was the matter and left them to their
game. It interested them no more. It seemed so unimportant whether
the cards fell right or not. The points were not worth the excitement.
Their son was playing solitaire, and it was not coming out at all.
They discussed the possible reasons for his gloom. There were so
many.