We Can\'t Have Everything

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He paused on various landings to think and mop. He looked at the
photograph of Dyckman, and his heart spoiled in him. He recalled
his wife's anxiety lest her maid should find a man there. He recalled
the hall-boy's statement that Mr. Dyckman was often there. His wife
was lying to him, plainly.

He had known detectives and newspaper men and had heard them speak of
what a friend they had in the usual hall-boy. He thought that he had
here the makings of a very pretty little bit of detectivity.

He reached the main floor, but made a hasty crossing of the gaudy
vestibule without stopping to speak to the hall-boy. He had left his
baggage at the station, expecting to send it to his wife's apartment
when he found it. He had found it, but he could imagine what would
happen to the baggage if he sent it there.

"All right!" he said to himself. "If it's war she wants, cry havoc
and let slip the sleuth hounds."

He went to a drug-store and had his wounds sterilized and plastered,
saying that a pet cat had scratched him.

"Just so," said the drug clerk, with a grin. "Pet cats are very
dangerous."

Gilfoyle wanted to slug him, but he wanted his wounds dressed more.
He walked and walked down the back avenues till he reached his old
boarding-house district near Greenwich Village. He found a landlady
who had trusted him often and been paid eventually. He gave his
baggage checks to an expressman and went into retirement for
meditation.

When his suit-case arrived he got out the poems he had been writing
to Anita. He clenched them for destruction, but an exquisite line
caught his eye. Why should his art suffer because of a woman's
perfidy? He had intended to sonnetize Anita into perenniality.
She had played him false. Just for that he would leave her mortal.
She should perish.

The poems would keep. He might find another and a worthier client
for posterity. Or he might put an imaginary name there, as other
poets had done. He wanted one that would slip into the poetry easily.
He could use "Pepita" without deranging the rhyme.

He glared at the picture of Dyckman. He knew the face well. He had
seen it in print numberless times. He had had the man pointed out
to him at races and horse-shows and polo-games and bazaars.

He struck the photograph in the face, realizing that he could not
have reached the face of the big athlete. He wondered why this fellow
should have been given such stature with such wealth. He was ghastly
rich, the snob, the useless cumberer of the ground!

All of Gilfoyle's pseudo-socialistic hostility to wealth and the
wealthy came to the aid of his jealousy. To despoil the man was a
duty. He had decoyed Anita from her duty by his millions. Not that
she was unwilling to be decoyed. And now she would revel in her
ill-got luxury, while her legal husband could starve in a garret.

As he brooded, the vision of Dyckman's money grew huger and huger.
The dog had not merely thousands or hundreds of thousands, but
thousands of thousands. Gilfoyle had never seen a thousand-dollar
bill. Yet Dyckman, he had heard, was worth twenty millions. If his
wealth were changed into thousand-dollar bills there would be twenty
thousand of them in a stack.

If Gilfoyle peeled off one thousand of those thousand-dollar bills
the stack would not be perceptibly diminished. If Gilfoyle could get
a million dollars from Dyckman, or any part of it, Dyckman would
never notice it; and yet it would mean a life of surety and poetry
and luxury for Gilfoyle.

If he caught Dyckman and Anita together in a compromising situation
he could collect heavily under threat of exposure. Rather than be
dragged into the newspapers and the open courts Dyckman would pay
almost any sum.

There was a law in New York against the violation of the seventh
commandment, and the penitentiary was the punishment. The law
had failed to catch its first victim, but it had been used in
Massachusetts with success. The threat against Dyckman would
surely work.

Then there was the recent Mann Law aimed at white-slavery but a more
effective weapon for blackmailers. If Gilfoyle could catch Dyckman
taking Anita motoring across the State line into New Jersey or
Connecticut he could arrest them or threaten them.

Also he could name Dyckman as co-respondent in a divorce suit--or
threaten to--and collect heavily that way. This was not blackmail
in Gilfoyle's eyes. He scorned such a crime. This was honorable and
necessary vindication of his offended dignity. There was probably
never a practiser of blackmail who did not find a better word for
the duress he applied.

Gilfoyle needed help. He had no cash to hire a detective with. But
he knew a detective or two who might go into the thing with him on
spec'.

Gilfoyle began to compose a scheme of poetic revenge. It should be
his palinode to Anita. He would keep her under surveillance, but he
would not let her know of his propinquity. A happy thought delighted
him. To throw her off her guard, he wrote and sent a little note:

DEAR ANITA,--Since you evidently don't love me any longer, I will not
bother you any more. I am taking the train back to Chicago. Address
me there care of General Delivery if you ever want to see me again.

YOUR ONCE LOVED HUSBAND.

He addressed it and gave it to the waitress to drop in the mail-box.
He had no money to squander on detectives, but he had a friend,
Connery, who as a reporter had achieved a few bits of sleuthing
in cases that had baffled the police. That evening Gilfoyle went
hunting for Connery.

CHAPTER XXIX

Kedzie simmered in her own wrath a long while before she realized
that she had let Gilfoyle escape. He was the very man she was looking
for, and she had planned to go even to Chicago to find him.

He had stumbled into her trap, and she had driven him out. She ran to
the window and stared up and down the street, but there was no trace
of him. She had no idea where he could have gone. She wrung her hands
and denounced herself for a fool.

She went to the hall to pick up the photograph of Jim Dyckman. Both
halves of it were gone. Now she was frightened. Gilfoyle had departed
meekly, but he had taken the picture; therefore he must have been
filled with hate. He had revenge in his mind. And she trembled at
her danger. He might strike at any time.

She suspected his exact intention. She dreaded to have Jim Dyckman
call on her. She had a wild notion of asking him to take her away
from New York--down to Atlantic City or up to the Berkshires--anywhere
to be rid of Gilfoyle without being left alone. If she had done this
she would have done just what Gilfoyle wanted her to, and the Mann
Act could have been wielded again as a blackjack.

Meanwhile Anita was afraid to have Dyckman come to her apartment
as he constantly did. She telephoned to him that she would be busy
at the studio all day. She would meet him at dinner somewhere. But
afterward she would come home alone on one pretext or another.

She carried out this plan--and spent a day of confused terror
and anger.

When Gilfoyle's letter arrived, saying that he was on his way to
Chicago, it gave her more delight than any other writing of his had
ever given her. She need not skulk any more. Her problem was as far
from solution as ever, but she wanted a respite from it, and she
gave herself up to a few days of rapture. She was free from her work
at the studio, and she was like a girl home from boarding-school on
a vacation.

Dyckman found her charming in this mood. She made a child of him,
and his years of dissatisfaction were forgotten. He romped through
the festivals of New York like a cub.

There was no discussion of any date of marriage, and he was glad
enough to let the matter drift. He did not want to marry Kedzie.
He was satisfied to have her as a playmate. He was afraid to think
of her as a wife, not only from fear of the public sensation it
would make, but from fear of her in his home. Young men also know
the timidities that are considered maidenly. He did not dream of
Kedzie's reason for postponing always the matter of a wedding date.

Kedzie had come to depend on Jim for her entertainment. He took
care of her evenings, gave them vivacity and opulence. He took her
to theaters, to the opera, the music-halls, the midnight roofs,
and other resorts for the postponement of sleep. Occasionally he
introduced her to friends of his whom they encountered. It pained
and angered him, and Kedzie, too, to note that the men were inclined
to eye Kedzie with tolerant amusement. There was a twinkle of
contempt in their smiling eyes that seemed to say:

"Where did Dyckman pick you up, my pretty?"

Kedzie's movie fame was unknown to Dyckman's crowd. She was treated,
accordingly, as some exquisite chorus-girl or cabaret-pony that he
had selected as a running-mate.

Dyckman could not openly resent what was subtly implied, but it
touched his chivalry, and since he was engaged to Kedzie he felt
that he ought at least to announce the fact. He was getting the
game without the name, and that seemed unfair to Kedzie.

Kedzie felt the same veiled scorn, and it alarmed her; yet when
Dyckman proposed the publication of their troth she forbade it
vigorously. She writhed at the worse than Tantalus fate that
compelled her to push from her own thirsty lips the grapes of
felicity.

She had no intention of committing bigamy, even if she had been
temptable to such recklessness. The inevitable brevity of its success
was only too evident. A large part of the fun of marrying Dyckman
would be the publication of it, and that would bring Gilfoyle back.
She never before longed so ardently to see her husband as now.

She finally wrote him a letter begging him to return to New York
for a conference. She couched it in luringly affectionate tones
and apologized lavishly for scratching his face when he called. She
addressed the appeal to the General Delivery in Chicago, as he had
directed in the letter he wrote as a blind.

She neglected, as usual, to put her own address on the envelope
or inside on the letter, which she signed with a mere "Anita."
Gilfoyle did not call for the letter in Chicago, since he was in
New York. It was held in Chicago for the legal period and then it
was sent to the Dead Letter Office, where a clerk wasted a deal
of time and ingenuity in an effort to trace the sender or the
addressee.

Kedzie meanwhile had watched for the postman and hunted through
her mail with frenzy. There was a vast amount of mail, for it is
one of the hardships of the movie business that the actors are fairly
showered with letters of praise, criticism, query, and flirtation.

But there was no letter ever from Gilfoyle.

Yet Gilfoyle was constantly within hailing distance. With the aid of
his friend Connery he had concocted a scheme for keeping Kedzie and
Dyckman under espionage. They had speedily learned that Dyckman was
in constant attendance on Kedzie, and that they were careless of
the hours alone, careless of appearances.

Gilfoyle never dreamed that the couple was chaperoned doubly by
a certain lukewarmth of emotion and by an ambition to become man
and wife. Gilfoyle imagined their relations to be as intimate as
their opportunities permitted. He suffered jealous wrath, and would
have assaulted Dyckman in public if Connery had not quelled him.

Connery kept a cool head in the matter because his heart was not
involved. He saw the wealth of Dyckman as the true object of their
attack, and he convinced Gilfoyle of the profitableness of a little
blackmail. He convinced Gilfoyle easily when they were far from
Kedzie and close to poverty; but when they hovered near Kedzie,
Connery had the convincing to do all over again.

He worked up an elaborate campaign for gaining entrance to Kedzie's
apartment without following the classic method of smashing the door
down. He disliked that noisy approach because it would command
notice; and publicity, as he well knew, is death to blackmail.

Connery adopted a familiar stratagem of the private detectives. He
went to the apartment one day when he knew that Kedzie was out, and
inquired for an alleged sister of his who had worked for Kedzie. He
claimed to be a soldier on furlough. He engaged the maid in a casual
parley which he led swiftly to a flirtation. She was a lonely maid
and her plighted lover was away on a canal-boat. Connery had little
difficulty in winning her to the acceptance of an invitation to visit
a movie-show on her first evening off.

He paid the girl flattering attentions, and when he brought her back,
gallantly asked for the key to unlock the door for her. He dropped
the key on the floor, stooped for it, pressed it against a bit of
soft soap he had in his left palm. Having secured the outline of
the key, he secured also a return engagement for the next evening
off. On this occasion he brought with him a duplicate of the key,
and when he unlocked the door for the maid this time he gave her
the duplicate and kept the original.

And now that he and Gilfoyle had an "open sesame" to the dovecote
they grew impatient with delay. Gilfoyle's landlady had also grown
impatient with delay, but Connery forced her to wait for what he
called the psychological moment.

And thus Kedzie moved about, her life watched over by an invisible
husband like a malignant Satan to whom she had sold her soul.

CHAPTER XXX

Jim Dyckman had many notes from Kedzie, gushing, all adjectives and
adverbs, capitalized and underscored. He left them about carelessly,
or locked them up and left the key. If he had not done that the lock
on his desk was one that could be opened with a hairpin or with
a penknife or with almost any key of a proper size.

There was no one to care except his valet. Dallam cared and read and
made notes. He was horrified at the thought of Dyckman's marrying a
movie actress. He would have preferred any intrigue to that disgrace.
It would mean the loss of a good position, too, for while Dyckman
was an easy boss, if he were going to be an easy marrier as well,
Dallam had too much self-respect to countenance a marriage beneath
them.

If he could only have known of Gilfoyle's existence and his quests,
how the two of them could have collaborated!

But Dallam's interest in life woke anew when one evening, as he was
putting away the clothes Dyckman had thrown off, he searched his
master's coat and found a letter from Mrs. Cheever.

DEAR OLD JIM,--What's happent you? I haven't seen you for ages.
Couldn't you spare this evening to me? I'm alone--as always--and
lonelier than usual. Do take pity on

Your devoted
CHARITY C.

That note, so lightly written in seeming, had been torn from
a desperate heart and written in tears and blood.

Since she had learned that her husband really loved Zada and that
she was going to mother him a child, Charity had been unable to
adjust her soul to the new problem.

The Reverend Doctor Mosely had promised her advice, but the poor man
could not match his counsel with the situation. He did not believe
in divorce, and yet he did not approve of illegal infants. How happy
he could have been with either problem, with t'other away! In his
dilemma he simply avoided Charity and turned his attention to the
more regular chores of his parish.

Charity understood his silence, and it served to deepen her own
perplexity. She was sure of only one thing--that she was caged
and forgotten.

Cheever came home less and less, and he was evidently so harrowed
with his own situation that Charity felt almost more sorry for him
than angry at him. She imagined that he must be enduring no little
from the whims and terrors of Zada. He was evidently afraid to
speak to Charity. To ask for her mercy was contrary to all his
nature. He never dreamed that the dictagraph had brought her with
him when he learned of Zada's intensely interesting condition, and
her exceedingly onerous demands. He did not dare ask Charity for
a divorce in order that he might legitimize this byblow of his.
He could imagine only that she would use the information for
some ruinous vengeance. So he dallied with his fate in dismal
irresolution.

Charity had his woes to bear as well as her own. She knew that she
had lost him forever. The coquetries she had used to win him back
were impossible even to attempt. He had no use for her forgiveness
or her charms. He was a mere specter in her home, doomed for his
sins to walk the night.

In despising herself she rendered herself lonelier. She had not even
herself for companion. Her heart had always been eager with love
and eager for it. The spirit that impelled her to endure hardships
in order to expend her surplusage of love was unemployed now. She
had feasted upon love, and now she starved.

Cheever had been a passionate courtier and, while he was interested,
a fiery devotee. When he abandoned her she suffered with the
devastation that deserted wives and recent widows endure but must
not speak of. It meant terribly much to Charity Coe to be left
alone. It was dangerous to herself, her creeds, her ideals.

She began to be more afraid of being alone than of any other fear.
She grew resentful toward the conventions that held her. She was like
a tigress in a wicker cage, growing hungrier, lither, more gracefully
fierce.

People who do not use their beauty lose it, and Charity had lost much
of hers in her vigils and labors in the hospitals, and it had waned
in her humiliations of Cheever's preference for another woman. Her
jealous shame at being disprized and notoriously neglected had given
her wanness and bitterness, instead of warmth and sweetness.

But now the wish to be loved brought back loveliness. She did not know
how beautiful she was again. She thought that she wanted to see Jim
Dyckman merely because she wanted to be flattered and because--as
women say in such moods--men are so much more sensible than women.
Often they mean more sensitive. Charity did not know that it was
love, not friendship, that she required when at last she wrote to
Jim Dyckman and begged him to call on her.

The note struck him hard. It puzzled him by its tone. And he,
remembering how vainly he had pursued her, forgot her disdain and
recalled only how worthy of pursuit she was. He hated himself for
his disloyalty to Anita in comparing his fiancee with Charity, and
he cursed himself for finding Charity infinitely Anita's superior
in every way. But he hated and cursed in vain.

Kedzie, or "Anita," as he called her, was an outsider, a pretty thing
like a geisha, fascinating by her oddity and her foreignness, but,
after all, an alien who could interest one only temporarily. There
was something transient about Kedzie in his heart, and he had felt
it vaguely the moment he found himself pledged to her forever.
But Charity--he had loved her from perambulator days. She was his
tradition. His thoughts and desires had always come home to Charity.

Yet he was astonished at the sudden upheaval of his old passion.
It shook off the new affair as a volcano burns away the weeds that
have grown about its crater. He supposed that Charity wanted to
take up the moving-picture scheme in earnest, and he repented the
fact that he had gone to the studio for information and had come
away with a flirtation.

One thing was certain: he must not fail to answer Charity's summons.
He had an engagement with Kedzie, but he called her up and told her
the politest lie he could concoct. Then he made himself ready and
put on his festival attire.

* * * * *

Charity had grown sick of having people say, "How pale you are!"
"You've lost flesh, haven't you?" "Have you been ill, dear?"--those
tactless observations that so many people feel it necessary to make,
as if there were no mirrors or scales or symptoms for one's
information and distress.

Annoyed by these conversational harrowers, Charity had finally gone
to her dressmaker, Dutilh, and asked him to save her from vegetation!
He saw that she was a young woman in sore need of a compliment, and
he flattered her lavishly. He did more for her improvement in five
minutes than six doctors, seventeen clergymen, and thirty financiers
could have done. A compliment in time is a heart-stimulant with no
acetanilid reaction. Also he told her how wonderful she had been in
the past, recalling by its name and by the name of its French author
many a gown she had worn, as one would tell a great actress what
roles he had seen her in.

He clothed her with praise and encouragement, threw a mantle of
crimson velvet about her. And she crimsoned with pride, and her
hard, thin lips velveted with beauty.

She responded so heartily that he was enabled to sell her a gown
of very sumptuous mode, its colors laid on as with the long sweeps
of a Sargent's brush. A good deal of flesh was not left to the
imagination; as in a Sargent painting, the throat, shoulders, and
arms were part of the color scheme. It was a gown to stride in,
to stand still in, in an attitude of heroic repose, or to recline
in with a Parthenonian grandeur.

This gown did not fit her perfectly, just as it came from Paris, but
it revealed its possibilities and restored her shaken self-confidence
immeasurably. If women--or their husbands--could afford it, they
would find perhaps more consolation, restoration, and exaltation at
the dressmakers' than at--it would be sacrilege to say where.

By the time Charity's new gown was ready for the last fitting Charity
had lost her start, and when Dutilh went into the room where she had
dressed he was aghast at the difference. On the first day the gown
had thrilled her to a collaboration with it. Now she hardly stood
up in it. She drooped with exaggerated awkwardness, shrugged her
shoulders with sarcasm, and made a face of disgust.

Dutilh tried to mask his disappointment with anger. When Charity
groaned, "Aren't we awful--this dress and I?" he retorted: "You are,
but don't blame the gown. For God's sake, do something for the dress.
It would do wonders for you if you would help it!" He believed in
a golden rule for his wares: do for your clothes what you would have
them do for you.

He threatened not to let Charity have the gown at all at any price.
He ordered her to take it off. She refused. In the excitement of
the battle she grew more animated. Then he whirled her to a mirror
and said:

"Look like that, and you're a made woman."

She was startled by the vivacity, the authority she saw in her
features so long dispirited. She caught the trick of the expression.
And actors know that one's expression can control one's moods almost
as much as one's moods control one's expressions.

So she persuaded Dutilh to sell her the dress. When she got it she
did not know just when to wear it, for she was going out but rarely,
and then she did not want to be conspicuous. She decided to make
Jim Dyckman's call the occasion for the launching of the gown. His
name came up long before she had put it on to be locked in for
the evening.

When she thrust her arms forward like a diver and entered the gown
by way of the fourth dimension her maid cried out with pride, and,
standing with her fingertips scattered over her face, wept tears
down to her knuckles. She welcomed the prodigal back to beauty.

"Oh, ma'am, but it's good to see you lookin' lovely again!"

While she bent to the engagement of the hooks Charity feasted on
her reflection in the cheval-glass. She was afraid that she was
a little too much dressed up and a little too much undressed. There
in Dutilh's shop, with the models and the assistants about, she was
but a lay figure, a clothes-horse. At the opera she would have been
one of a thousand shoulder-showing women. For a descent upon one poor
caller, and a former lover at that, the costume frightened her.

But it was too late to change, and she caught up a scarf of gossamer
and twined it round her neck to serve as a mitigation.

Hearing her footsteps on the stairs at last, Dyckman hurried to
meet her. As she swept into the room she collided with him, softly,
fragrantly. They both laughed nervously, they were both a little
influenced.

She found the drawing-room too formal and led him into the library.
She pointed him to a great chair and seated herself on the corner
of a leather divan nearly as big as a touring-car. In the dark, hard
frame she looked richer than ever. He could not help seeing how much
more important she was than his Anita.

Anita was pretty and peachy, delicious, kissable, huggable,
a pleasant armful, a lapload of girlish mischief. Charity was
beautiful, noble, perilous, a woman to live for, fight for, die
for. Kedzie was to Charity as Rosalind to Isolde.

It was time for Jim to play Tristan, but he had no more blank
verse in him than a polo score-card. Yet the simple marks on such
a form stand for tremendous energy and the utmost thrill.

"Well, how are you, anyway, Charity? How goes it with you?" he
said. "Gee! but you look great to-night. What's the matter with
you? You're stunning!"

Charity laughed uncannily. "You're the only one that thinks so,
Jim."

"I always did admire you more than anybody else could; but, good
Lord! everybody must have eyes."