We Can\'t Have Everything

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"I wish he'd get married to some nice girl," sighed Mrs. Dyckman.
A mother is pretty desperate when she wants to surrender her son
to another woman.

CHAPTER XXV

Kedzie made a bad night of it. She hated her loneliness. She hated
her room. She hated her maid. She wanted to live in the Dyckman
palace and have a dozen maids and a pair of butlers to boss around,
and valets, and a crest on her paper, and invitations pouring in
from people whose pictures were in "the social world." She wanted
to snub somebody and show certain folks what was what.

The next morning she was sure of only one thing, and that was that
Dyckman had asked her to be his wife; and be his wife she would,
no matter what it cost.

She wondered how she could get rid of Gilfoyle, whom she looked upon
now as nothing less than an abductor. He was one of those "cadets"
the papers had been full of a few years before, who lured young
girls to ruin under the guise of false marriages and then sold them
as "white slaves."

Kedzle's wrath was at the fact that Gilfoyle was not legally an
abductor. She would have been glad merely to be ruined, and she
would have rejoiced at the possibility of a false marriage. In the
movies the second villain only pretended to be a preacher, and then
confessed his guilt. But such an easy solution was not for Kedzie.
New York City had licensed Gilfoyle's outrage; the clerk had sold
her to him for two dollars; the Municipal Building was the too, too
solid witness.

She felt a spiritual solace in the fact that she had not had a
religious marriage. The sacrament was only municipal and did not
count. Her wedding had lacked the blessing of the duly constituted
ministry; therefore it was sacrilegious; therefore it was her
conscientious duty to undo the pagan knot as quickly as possible.
She reverted to the good old way of the Middle Ages. There was
no curse of divorce then, and indeed there was small need of it,
since annulment could usually be managed on one religious ground
or another, or if not, people went about their business as if it
had been managed.

Kedzie felt absolved of any fault of selfishness now, and justified
in taking any steps necessary to the punishment of Gilfoyle.
_Religion_ is a large, loose word, and it can be made to fit
any motive; but once assumed it seems to strengthen every resolution,
to chloroform mercy and hallow any means to the self-sanctified end.
What people would shrink from as inhuman they constantly embrace
as divine.

Kedzie wondered how she could communicate with her adversary. She
might best go to Chicago and fight herself free there. There would
be less risk of Dyckman's hearing about it.

She shuddered at what she would have to tell him unless she kept the
divorce secret. He might not love her if he knew she was not the nice
new girl he thought her, but an old married woman. And what would he
say when he found that her real name was Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle
_nee_ Kedzie Thropp?

But first Kedzie must divorce herself from the Hyperfilm Company.
She went to the studio with rage in her heart. She told Ferriday
that she would not go to California. He proposed that she break
with the Hyperfilm Company and form a corporation of her own with
Dyckman as angel.

Kedzie was wroth at this. From now on, spending Dyckman's money
would be like spending her own. Ferriday, once her accomplice in
the noble business of getting Dyckman to back her, was revealed
now as a cheap swindler trying to keep Mrs. Dyckman in trade at
her husband's expense.

"I'm through with the pictures, I tell you!" she stormed. "I'm sick
of the cheap notoriety. I'm tired of being public property. I can't
go out on the street without being pointed at. It's disgusting. I
don't want to be incorporated or photographed or interviewed. I want
to be let alone. I'm tired. I've worked too hard. I need a rest."

Ferriday hated her with great agility. He had been willing to abet
her breach of contract, provided she let him form a new company, but
if she would not that made a great difference. He reminded her:

"The Hyperfilm Company will hold you to your bond. They want your
hundred and twenty-five pounds of flesh. If you should break with
them they'd have a case against you for damages."

"How much?" said Kedzie, feeling like Mrs. Croesus.

Ferriday whistled and murmured: "Spoken like the wife of a
multimillionaire! So you've got him at last."

"To who," Kedzie began, with an owl-like effect that she corrected
with some confusion,"--to whom do you refer to?"

Ferriday grinned: "You're going to marry out of the movies, and
you're going to try to horn into sassiety. Well, I warned you before
that if you became Dyckman's wife you would find his world vastly
different from the ballroom and drawing-room stuff you pull off in
the studio--strangely and mysteriously different."

He frightened her. She was not sure of herself. She could not forget
Nimrim, Missouri, and her arrival at the edge of society _via_
the Bronx, the candy-shop, and the professional camera.

She felt that the world had not treated her squarely. Why should she
have to carry all this luggage of her past through the gate with her?
She wondered if it would not be better to linger in the studios till
she grew more famous and could bring a little prestige along.

But Ferriday was already ousting her even from that security.

"The managers of the Hyperfilm Company will think you have done them
dirt, but I'll explain that you are not really responsible. You've
seen a million dollars, and you're razzle-dazzled. They'll want a bit
of that million, I suppose, as liquidated damages, but I'll try to
keep them down."

Kedzie was at bay in her terror. She struck back.

"Tell 'em they won't get a cent if they try to play the hog."

"They don't have hogs on Fifth Avenue, Anita. Don't forget that.
Well, good-by and good luck."

This was more like an eviction than a desertion. Kedzie felt a
little softening of her heart toward the old homestead.

"I'm sure I'm much obliged for all you've done for me."

Ferriday roared his scorn.

She went on: "I am. Honest-ly! And I hope I haven't caused you too
much inconvenience."

Ferriday betrayed how much he was hurt by his violent efforts to
conceal it.

"Not at all. It happens that I've just found another little girl to
take your place. This one drifted in among the extras, just as you
did, and she's a dream. I'll show her to the managers, and they may
be so glad to get her they won't charge you a cent. In fact, if you
say the word, I might manage it so that they would pay you something
to cancel your contract."

This was quite too cruel. It crushed the tears out of Kedzie's eyes,
and she had no fight left in her. She simply stammered:

"No, thank you. Don't bother. Well, good-by."

"Good-by, Anita--good luck!"

He let her make her way out of his office alone. She had to skirt
the studio. From behind a canvas wall over which the Cooper-Hewitt
tubes rained a quivering blue glare came the words of the assistant
director:

"Now choke her, Hazlitt! Harder! Register despair, Miss Hardy. Try
to scream and can't! That's good. Now, Walsh, jump in to the rescue.
Slug him. Knock his bean off. 'S enough! Fall, Hazlitt. Now gather up
Miss Hardy, Walsh. Register devotion, gratitude, adoration--now you
got it. Turn on your lamps full power, dearie! Wow! Bully! A couple
of tears, please. That's the stuff. You'll be the queen of the world.
Weep a little more. Real tears. That's it! Now clinch for the
fade-out. Cut!"

Kedzie tiptoed away. She felt as Eve must have felt sneaking out of
Eden and hearing the nightingales wrangling and the leopards at play.

CHAPTER XXVI

We must fly fast and keep on flying if we would escape from our
pasts. Ambition, adventure, or sheer luck may carry us forward out
of them as in a cavalry-foray over strange frontiers, but sooner or
later we must wait for our wagons or fall back to them.

Kedzie's past was catching up with her. It is a glorious thing
when one's past comes up loaded with food, munitions, good deeds,
charities, mercies, valued friendships. But poor little Kedzie's
little past included one incompetent and unacknowledged husband
and two village parents.

Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her new friends
as anxiously as if he had been a baby born out of wedlock instead of
a grown man born into it. And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment.
He had not told his new friends in Chicago that he was married,
because the Anita Adair that he had left in New York was, as F.P.A.
would say, his idea of nothing to brag about.

Gilfoyle had loved Kedzie once as a pretty photographer's model, and
had admired her as an exquisite dancing-creature who seemed to have
spun off at a tangent from the painted side of an old Greek amphora.
He had actually written poetry to her! And when a poet has done that
for a girl he feels that he has done more for her than she can ever
repay. Even if she gives him her mortal self, what is that to the
immortality he has given her?

When Kedzie telegraphed Gilfoyle that she had lost her job in Newport
and had arrived in New York lonely and afraid, had he not taken care
of her good name by giving her his own? Not to mention a small matter
of all his money!

She had repaid him with frantic discontent. The morning after the
wedding, was she not imitating the parrot's shrill ridicule of life
and love? Did she ridicule his poetry, or didn't she? She did.
Instead of being his nine Muses, she had become his three Furies.

When he lost his job and she went out to get one of her own, had she
succeeded in getting anything with dignity in it? No! She had become
an extra woman in a movie mob. That was a belittling thing to
remember. But worst of all, she had committed the unpardonable sin
for a woman--she had lent him money. He could never forgive or forget
the horrible fact that he had borrowed her last cash to pay his fare
to Chicago.

Next to that for inexcusableness was her self-support--and, worse,
self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie no money beyond returning
what he had borrowed, and she had not used that to buy a ticket to
Chicago with. She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money.
That was mighty convenient for him, but it was extremely suspicious,
and he cherished it as a further grudge.

He never found himself quite flush enough to force any money on her,
because he had found that it costs money to live in Chicago, too.
People in New York get the idea that it costs everything to live
in New York and nothing to live anywhere else--if it can be called
living.

Gilfoyle also discovered that his gifts were not appreciated in
Chicago as he had expected them to be. Chicago people seemed to
think it quite natural for New York to call for help from Chicago,
and successful Western men were constantly going East; but for
a New-Yorker to revert to Chicago looked queer. He appeared to
patronize, and yet he must have had some peculiar reason for giving
up New York.

All in all and by and large, Gilfoyle was not happy in Chicago. The
few persons, mainly women, who took him up as an interesting novelty
grew tired of him. His advertising schemes did not dazzle the alert
Illini. For one reason or another the wares he celebrated did not
"go big."

He lost his first job and took an inferior wage with a shabbier firm.
He took his women friends to the movies now instead of the theaters.
And so it was that one night when he was beauing a Denver woman, who
was on her way to New York and fame, he found the box-line extending
out on the sidewalk and half-way up the block. It was irksome to wait,
but people like to go to shows where the crowds are. He took his place
in the line, and his Miss Clampett stood at his elbow.

The queue was slowly drawn into the theater and he finally reached
a place in front of the lithographs. He almost jumped out of his
skin when he saw a colossal head of Anita Adair smiling at him from
a sunbonnet streaming with curls.

The letterpress informed Gilfoyle that it was indeed his own Anita.
The people in the line were talking of her as the new star. They were
calling her familiarly by her first name and discussing her with all
the freedom of the crowd:

"That's Anita. Ain't she sweet?"

"Everybody says Anita's just too lovely."

"Some queen, boy? Me for Anita. She can pack her clothes in my
trunk!"

Gilfoyle felt that he ought in common decency to knock down this
fellow who claimed the privileges belonging to himself. But he
remembered that he had abandoned those privileges. And the fellow
looked unrefinedly powerful.

Gilfoyle gnawed the lip of silence, realizing also that his
announcement would make a strange impression on Miss Clampett.
She was one of those authors one reads about who think it necessary
to hunt experiences and live romances in order to find literary
material.

Gilfoyle had done his best to teach her how wildly well a born
New-Yorker can play the lute of emotion. To proclaim now that he was
the anonymous husband of this glitterer on the billboard would have
been a shocking confession.

Gilfoyle swallowed his secret, but it made his heart flutter
tremendously. When at length he and Miss Clampett were admitted to
the theater and walked down the aisle Kedzie came from the background
of the screen forward as if to meet him. She came on and on, and
finally as he reached his seat, a close-up of her brought them face
to face with a vividness that almost knocked him over. She looked
right at him, seemed to recognize him, and stopped short.

He felt as guilty as if she had actually caught him at a rendezvous.
Yet he felt pride, too.

This luminous being was his wife. He remembered all that she had been
to him. Miss Clampett noted his perturbations and made a brilliant
guess at their cause. She asked him if he wanted to leave her and go
around to the stage door to meet this wonderful Miss Adair. Gilfoyle
laughed poorly at her quip. He was surprised to learn from her that
Anita Adair was already a sensation among the film stars. He had not
chanced to read the pages where her press-matter had celebrated her.
He defended himself from the jealousy of Miss Clampett very lamely;
for the luscious beauty of his Anita, her graphic art, and her sway
over the audience rekindled his primal emotions to a greater fire
than ever.

When the show was over he abandoned Miss Clampett on her door-step
and went to his own boarding-house in a nympholepsy. He was a mortal
wedded to a fairy. He was Endymion with a moon enamoured of him.
Kedzie indeed had come down from the screen to Gilfoyle, clothed
in an unearthly effulgence.

The next morning he turned to the moving-picture columns of the
Chicago _Tribune_, the _Herald_, and the other papers, and
he found that Kedzie was celebrated there with enthusiasm by Kitty
Kelly, "Mae Tinee," Mrs. Parsons, and the rest of the critics of
the new art. On Sunday several of her interviews appeared, and her
portraits, in eminent company.

Gilfoyle's forgotten affections came back to life, expanding and
efflorescent. He throbbed with the wonder of it. The moving picture
had brought romance again to earth.

Thousands of men all over the country were falling in love with
Kedzie. Who had a better right to than her husband? Unconsciously
his resentments against her fell away. His heart swelled with such
plenitude of forgiveness that he might in time have overlooked
the money she lent him. It was not a disgrace to accept money from
a genius of her candle-power.

For a long while he had been afraid that she would telegraph him
for funds, or descend on him in Chicago and bring a heavy baggage of
necessities. Now he was no longer afraid of that. He was afraid that
if he called on her in New York she might not remember him.

He had heard of the real and the alleged salaries of moving-picture
stars, and he assumed that Kedzie must be as well paid as she was
well advertised. He did not know of the measly little hundred dollars
a week she was bound down to by her contract. If he had known he would
have rejoiced, because one hundred dollars a week was about four times
more than Gilfoyle had ever earned.

Of course Gilfoyle resolved to go to New York. Of course he started
to telegraph his wife and found the telegram hard to write. Then he
began a long letter and found it harder to write. And of course he
finally decided to surprise her. He resigned his job. His resignation
was accepted with humiliating cordiality.

Of course he took the Twentieth Century Limited to New York. It was
more expensive, but it was quicker; and what did a few dollars matter,
now that he was the husband of such an earner? He had unwittingly
hitched his wagon to a star, and now he would take a ride through
heaven. He wrote a poem or two to that effect, and the train-wheels
inspired his prosody.

He dreamed of an ideal life in which he should loll upon a sofa of
ease, thrumming his lyre, while his wife devoted herself to her
career outside.

Where would Horace and Virgil have been if they had not had their
expenses paid by old Mr. Maecenas? Since Mrs. Gilfoyle could afford
to be a patroness, let her patronage begin at home. Her reward would
be beyond price, for Gilfoyle decided to perpetuate her fame in
powerful rhyme far outlasting the celluloid in which she was writing
her name now.

Celluloid is perishable indeed, and very inflammable. Gilfoyle did
not know that the Hyperfilm studio had burned to the ground before
he saw Kedzie's picture in Chicago. But he blithely left that city
to its fate and sped eastward.

CHAPTER XXVII

Gilfoyle reached New York on the Twentieth Century. It was an hour
late, and so the railroad company paid him a dollar. He wished it
had been later. In his present plight time was anything but money
to him.

It took him some time to find the Hyperfilm Company's temporary
studio. He learned of the fire, and his hope wavered. When he reached
the studio Kedzie was not there. The news of her resignation had
percolated even to the doorman, who rarely knew anything from inside
or outside the studio--an excellent non-conductor of information he
was. Gilfoyle had some difficulty in finding Kedzie's address, but
at last he learned it, and he made haste to her apartment.

He was impressed by its gaudy vestibule. He told the hall-boy that
he wanted to see Miss Adair.

"Name, please?"

"Just say a gentleman to see her."

"Gotta git the name, or I can't 'phome up. Miss Adair naturally
won't see no gempman ain't got a name."

"Does she see many men?" Gilfoyle asked, with sudden alarm.

"Oh, nossa. Mainly Mr. Dyckman. But that's her business."

"What Dyckman is that, the rich Jim Dyckman?"

"Well, I ain't s'posed to give out info'mation."

"Are you supposed to take in money?" Gilfoyle juggled with
a half-dollar.

The hall-boy juggled his eyes in unison, and laughed yearningly:
"I reckon I might let you up by mistake. Does you know Miss Adair
right well?"

"Very well--I'm a relative of hers by marriage. I want to surprise
her."

"Oh, well, you better go on up."

Gilfoyle applied the magic silver wafer to the itching palm and
stepped into the elevator when it came.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Kedzie was alone. She had sent her maid out to get some headache
powders. She had had a good cry when she reached home. She had
pondered her little brain into a kink, trying to figure out her
campaign. When she had a headache, or a cold, or a sleepless night,
or a lethargy, she always put a powder in her stomach. It never did
any good, and she was always changing the nostrum, but she never
changed the idea.

She felt ill and took off her street suit and her corsets, put on
a soft, veilly thing, and stretched out on her long-chair.

She was coddling a photograph of Jim Dyckman. He had scrawled across
it, "To Little Anita from Big Jim." She kissed the picture and
cherished it to her aching breast.

The door-bell rang. She supposed that, as usual, the maid had
forgotten to take her key with her. She went into the hall in a
rage, still holding the photograph. She flung the door open--and
in walked Gilfoyle.

She fell back stupefied. He grinned, and took her in with devouring
eyes. If he had no right to devour her, who had? He approved of her
with a rush of delight:

"Well, Anita, here I am. And how's the little wife?"

She could not answer him. He stared ferociously, and gasped as if
he had forgotten how she had looked:

"Golly, but you're beautiful? Where's the little kiss?"

He threw his arms about her, garnering in the full sheaf of her
beauty. She tried to escape, to protest, but he smothered her with
his lips. She had been so long away from him, she had so long omitted
him from her plans, that she felt a sense of outrage in his assault.
Something virginal had resumed her heart, and his proprietorship
revolted her.

Her shoulders were so constrained that she could not push free. She
could only raise her right hand outside his left arm, and reaching
his face, thrust it away. Her nails were long and sharp. They tore
deep gashes in his cheeks and across his nose.

He let her go with a yelp of pain and shame. His fists gathered;
primeval instinct told him to smash the mask of pale hatred he saw
before him. But he saw the photograph in her left hand. It had been
bent double in the scuffle. He snatched at it and tore away the
lower half. He read the inscription with disgust and growled:

"That's the reason you didn't write me! That's why you don't want
to see me, eh? So he's keeping you! And that's why you resigned
from the studio!"

The atrocity of this slander was too much. With a little cat-like
yowl she went for him, dropping the broken photograph and spreading
all ten claws.

He caught her arms and held them apart where she could scratch
nothing more than his wrists, which she did venomously. The cat
tribe is a bad tribe to fight at close quarters. One must kill or
break loose.

When Kedzie tried to bite him, Gilfoyle realized that she was in no
mood for argument. He dragged her to the living-room door and then
flung her as far as he could from him. She toppled over into a chair
and began to cry.

It was not a pretty scene. Gilfoyle took out his handkerchief and
pressed it to his face and the bridge of his nose. Then he looked
at the red marks and held them out for her to observe:

"See what you did to me!"

"I'm glad of it," she snapped. "I wish I'd torn your eyes out."

This alone would not necessarily have proved that she did not love
him devotedly, but in this case it corroborated a context of hatred.
Gilfoyle felt rebuffed. There was a distinct lack of hospitality in
her welcome. This reception was the very opposite of his imagined
rencounter.

He did what a man usually does, revealing a masculine inability
to argue with a woman. He told her all her faults of omission and
commission as if that would bring her to a reconciliating humor.
She listened awhile, and then answered, with a perfect logic that
baffled him:

"All you say only goes to show that you don't love me. You never did.
You went away and left me. I might have starved, for all you cared.
But I've worked like a dog, and now that I've had a little success
you come back and say: 'How's the little wife? Where's the little
kiss?' Agh! And you dare to kiss me! And then you slander me. You
don't give me credit for these plain little rooms that I rent with
my own hard-earned money. You couldn't imagine me living in a place
like this unless some man paid for it. Heaven knows I'd have lived
with you long enough before I ever had a decent home. Humph! Well,
I guess so! Humph!"

Gilfoyle mopped his face again and looked at his handkerchief. One's
own blood is very interesting. The sight of his wounds did not touch
Kedzie's heart. She could never feel sorry for anybody she was
mad at.

Gilfoyle's wits were scattered. He mumbled, futilely, "Well, if
that's the way you feel about it!"

"That's the way I feel about it!" Kedzie raged on. "I suppose you've
had so many affairs of your own out there that you can't imagine
anybody else being respectable, can you?"

Gilfoyle had not come East to publish his autobiography. He thought
that a gesture of misunderstood despair would be the most effective
evasion. So he made it, and turned away. He put his handkerchief to
his nose and looked at it. He turned back.

"Would you mind if I went into your bathroom to wash my face?"

"I certainly would. Where do you think you are? You get on out before
my maid comes back. I don't want her to think I receive men alone!"

Her heart was cold as a toad in her breast, and she loathed his
presence. He repeated his excellent gesture of despair, sighed,
"All right," and left the room. The two pieces of Jim Dyckman's
photograph were still on the floor of the hall. He stooped quickly
and silently and picked them up as he went out. He closed the door
with all the elegy one can put in a door with a snap-lock.

He was about to press the elevator button, but he did not like to
present himself gory to the elevator-boy. He walked down the marble
and iron steps zigzagging around the elevator shaft.