We Can\'t Have Everything

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Dyckman saw him go backward across a chair and spinning over it and
with it and under it to the floor. Then he had only the faintness
and the vomiting to fight. He made one groping, clutching, almighty
effort to stand up long enough to crow like a victorious fighting
cock, and he did. He stood up. He held to the table; he did not
drop. And he said one triumphant, "Humph!"

And now the storm of indignation began. Dyckman was a spent and
bankrupt object, and anybody could berate him. A member of the house
committee reviled him with profanity and took the names of witnesses
who could testify that Dyckman struck the first blow.

The pitiful stillness of Cheever, where a few men knelt about him,
turned the favor to him. One little whiffet told Dyckman to his
face that it was a dastardly thing he had done. He laughed. He had
his enemy on the floor. He did not want everything.

Dyckman made no answer to the accusations. He did not say that he
was a crusader punishing an infidel for his treachery to a poor,
neglected woman. He had almost forgotten what he was fighting for.
He was too weak even to oppose the vague advice he heard that
Cheever should be taken "home." He had a sardonic impulse to give
Zada's address, but he could not master his befuddled wits enough
for speech.

The little fussy rooster who called Dyckman dastardly said that he
ought to be arrested. The reception he got for his proposal to bring
a policeman into the club or take a member out of it into the jail
and the newspapers was almost annihilating. The chairman of the house
committee said:

"I trust that it is not necessary to say that this wretched and most
unheard-of affair must be kept--unheard of. But I may say that I have
here a list of the members present, and I shall make a list of the
club servants present. If one word of this leaks out, each gentleman
present will be brought before the council, and every servant will
be discharged immediately--every servant without regard to guilt,
innocence, or time of service."

Dyckman would have liked to spend the night at the club, but its
hospitable air had chilled. He sent for his big coat, turned up
the collar, pulled his hat low, and crept into a taxicab. His father
and mother were out, and he got to his room without explanations.
His valet, Dallam, gasped at the sight of him, but Dyckman laughed:

"You ought to see the other fellow."

Then he crept into the tub, thence into his bed, and slept till he
was called to the telephone the next morning by Mrs. Cheever.

As he might have expected, Charity was as far as possible from
gratitude. The only good news she gave him was that Cheever had
been brought home half dead, terribly mauled, broken in pride,
and weeping like a baby with his shame. Dyckman could not help
swelling a little at that.

But when Charity told him that Cheever accused her of setting him
on and swore that he would get even with them both, Dyckman realized
that fists are poor poultices for bruises, and revenge the worst
of all solutions. Finally, Charity denounced Jim and begged him
once more to keep out of her sight and out of her life.

Dyckman was in the depths of the blues, and a note to the effect
that he had been suspended from his club, to await action looking
toward his expulsion, left him quite alone in the world.

In such a mood Kedzie Thropp called him up, with a cheery hail
that rejoiced him like the first cheep of the first robin after
a miserable winter. He said that he would call that evening,
with the greatest possible delight. She said that she was very
lonely for him, and they should have a blissful evening with just
themselves together.

But it proved to be a rather crowded occasion in Kedzie's apartment.
Her father and mother reached there before Dyckman did, to Kedzie's
horror--and theirs.

CHAPTER XXXII

Turn a parable upside down, and nearly everything falls out of it.

Even the beautiful legend of the prodigal son returning home to
his parents could not retain its value when it was topsy-turvied
by the Thropps.

Their son was a daughter, but she had run away from them to batten
on the husks of city life, and had prospered exceedingly. It was
her parents who heard of her fame and had journeyed to the city
to ask her forgiveness and throw themselves on her neck. Kedzie
was now wonderful before the nation under the nom de film of Anita
Adair; but if her father had not spanked her that fatal day in New
York she might never have known glory. So many people have been
kicked up-stairs in this world.

But Kedzie had not forgiven the outrage, and her father had no
intention of reminding her how much she owed to it. In fact, he
wished he had thought to cut off his right hand, scripturally,
before it caused him to offend.

When the moving-picture patrons in Nimrim, Missouri, first saw
Kedzie's pictures on the screen they were thrilled far beyond the
intended effect of the thriller. The name "Anita Adair" had meant
nothing, of course, among her old neighbors, but everybody had known
Kedzie's ways ever since first she had had ways. Her image had no
sooner walked into her first scene than fellows who had kissed her,
and girls who had been jealous of her, began to buzz.

"Look, that's Kedzie."

"For mercy's sake, Kedzie Thropp!"

Yep, that's old Throppie."

"Why--would you believe it?--that's old Ad Thropp's girl--the one
what was lost so long."

In the Nimrim Nickeleum films were played twice of an evening. The
seven-thirty audience was usually willing to go home and leave space
for the nine-o'clock audience unless the night was cold. But on this
immortal evening people were torn between a frenzy to watch Kedzie
go by again and a frenzy to run and get Mr. and Mrs. Thropp.

A veritable Greek chorus ran and got the Thropps, and lost their
seats. There was no room for the Thropps to get in. If the manager
had not thrown out a few children and squeezed the parents through
the crowd they would have lost the view.

The old people stood in the narrow aisle staring at the apotheosis
of this brilliant creature in whose existence they had collaborated.
They had the mythological experience of two old peasants seeing their
child translated as in a chariot of fire. Their eyes were dazzled
with tears, for they had mourned her as lost, either dead in body
or dead of soul. They had imagined her drowned and floating down the
Bay, or floating along the sidewalks of New York. They had feared
for her the much-advertised fate of the white slaves--she might be
bound out to Singapore or destined for Alaskan dance-halls. There
are so many fates for parents to dread for their lost children.

To have their Kedzie float home to them on pinions of radiant beauty
was an almost intolerable beatitude. Kedzie's mother started down
the aisle, crying, "Kedzie, my baby! My little lost baby!" before
Adna could check her.

Kedzie did not answer her mother, but went on with her work as if
she were deaf. She came streaming from the projection-machine in
long beams of light. This vivid, smiling, weeping, dancing, sobbing
Kedzie was only a vibration rebounding from a screen. Perhaps that
is all any of us are.

One thing was certain: the Thropps determined to redeem their lost
lamb as soon as they could get to New York. Their lost lamb was
gamboling in blessed pastures. The Nimrim people spoke to the parents
with reverence, as if their son had been elected President--which
would not have been, after all, so wonderful as their daughter's
being a screen queen.

There is no end to the astonishments of our every-day life. While
the Thropps had been watching their daughter disport before them in
a little dark room in Missouri, and other people in numbers of other
cities were seeing her in duplicate, she herself was in none of the
places, but in her own room--with Jim Dyckman paying court to her.

Kedzie was engaged in reeling off a new life of her own for the
astonishment of the angels, or whatever audience it is for whose
amusement the eternal movie show of mankind is performed. Kedzie's
story was progressing with cinematographic speed and with transitions
almost as abrupt as the typical five-reeler.

Kedzie was an anxious spectator as well as an actor in her own life
film. She did not see how she could get out of the tangled situation
her whims, her necessities, and her fates had constructed about her.
She had been more or less forced into a betrothal with the wealthy
Jim Dyckman before she had dissolved her marriage with Tommie
Gilfoyle. She could not find Gilfoyle, and she grew frenzied with
the dread that her inability to find him might thwart all her dreams.

Then came the evening when Jim Dyckman telephoned her that he could
not keep his appointment with her. It was the evening he responded
to Charity Coe's appeal and met Peter Cheever fist to fist. Kedzie
heard, in the polite lie he told, a certain tang of prevarication,
and that frightened her. Why was Jim Dyckman trying to shake her?
Once begun, where would the habit end?

That was a dull evening for Kedzie. She stuck at home without other
society than her boredom and her terrors. She had few resources for
the enrichment of solitude. She tried to read, but she could not
find a popular novel or a short story in a magazine exciting enough
to keep her mind off the excruciating mystery of the next instalment
in her own life. Her heart ached with the fear that she might never
know the majesty of being Mrs. Jim Dyckman. That almost royal
prerogative grew more and more precious the more she feared to lose
it. She imagined the glory with a ridiculous extravagance. Her
theory of the life lived by the wealthy aristocrats was fantastic,
but she liked it and longed for it.

The next day she waited to hear from Jim till she could endure the
anxiety no longer. She ventured to call him at his father's home.
She waited with trepidation while she was put through to his room,
but his enthusiasm when he recognized her voice refreshed her hopes
and her pride. She did not know that part of her welcome was due to
the fierce rebuke Charity Coe had inflicted on him a little before
because he had mauled her husband into a wreck.

That evening she waited for Jim Dyckman's arrival with an ardor
almost akin to love. He had begged off from dinner. He did not
explain that he carried two or three visible fist marks from
Cheever's knuckles which he did not wish to exhibit in a public
restaurant.

So Kedzie dined at home in solitary gloom. She had only herself
for guest and found herself most stupid company.

She dined in her bathrobe and began immediately after dinner
to dress for conquest. She hoped that Dyckman would take her out
to the theater or a dance, and she put on her best bib and tucker,
the bib being conspicuously missing. She was taking a last look at
the arrangement of her little living-room when the telephone-bell
rang and the maid came to say:

"'Scuse me, Miss Adair, but hall-boy says your father and mother
is down-stairs."

Kedzie almost fainted. She did not dare refuse to see them. She had
not attained that indifference to the opinions of servants which is
the only real emancipation from being the servant of one's servants.

While she fumbled with her impulses the maid rather stated than
asked, "Shall I have 'em sent up, of course?"

"Of course," Kedzie snapped.

CHAPTER XXXIII

The Thropps knew Kedzie well enough to be afraid of her. A parental
intuition told them that if they wrote to her she would be a long
while answering; if they telephoned her she would be out of town.
So they came unannounced. It had taken them the whole day to trace
her. They learned with dismay that she was no longer "working" at
the Hyperfilm Studio.

Adna Thropp and his wife were impressed by the ornate lobby of the
apartment-house, by the livery of the hall-boy and the elevator-boy,
by the apron and cap of the maid who let them in, and by the hall
furniture.

But when they saw their little Kedzie standing before them in her
evening gown--her party dress as Mrs. Thropp would say--they were
overwhelmed. A daughter is a fearsome thing to a father, especially
when she is grown up and dressed up. Adna turned his eyes away from
his shining child.

But the sense of shame is as amenable to costume as to the lack of
it, and Kedzie--the shoulder-revealer--was as much shocked by what
her parents had on as they by what she had off.

The three embraced automatically rather than heartily, and Kedzie
came out of her mother's bosom chilled, though it was a warm night
and Mrs. Thropp had traveled long. Also there was a lot of her.

Kedzie gave her parents the welcome that the prodigal's elder brother
gave him. She was thinking: "What will Jim Dyckman say when he learns
that my real name is Thropp and sees this pair of Thropps? They look
as if their name would be Thropp."

Adna made the apologies--glad tidings being manifestly out of place.

"Hope we 'ain't put you out, daughter. We thought we'd s'prise you.
We went to the fact'ry. Man at the door says you wasn't workin' there
no more. Give us this address. Right nice place here, ain't it? Looks
like a nice class of folks lived here."

Kedzie heard the rounded "r" and the flat "a" which she had discarded
and scorned the more because she had once practised them. Children
are generally disappointed in their parents, since they cherish
ideals to which few parents may conform from lack of time, birth,
breeding, or money. Kedzie was not in any mood for parents that
night, anyway, but if she had to have parents, she would have chosen
an earl and a countess with a Piccadilly accent and a concert-grand
manner. Such parents it would have given her pleasure and pride to
exhibit to Dyckman. They would awe-inspire him and arrange the
marriage settlement, whatever that was.

But these poor old shabby dubs in their shabby duds--a couple who
were plebeian even in Jayville! If there had not been such a popular
prejudice against mauling one's innocent parents about, Kedzie would
probably have taken her father and mother to the dumb-waiter and sent
them down to the ash-can.

As she hung between despair and anxiety the telephone-bell rang. Jim
Dyckman called her up to say that he was delayed for half an hour.
Kedzie came back and invited her parents in. It made her sick to see
their awkwardness among the furniture. They went like scows adrift.
They priced everything with their eyes, and the beauty was spoiled
by the estimated cost.

Mrs. Thropp asked Kedzie how she was half a dozen times, and, before
Kedzie could answer, went on to tell about her own pains. Mr. Thropp
was freshly alive to the fact that New York's population is divided
into two classes--innocent visitors and resident pirates.

While they asked Kedzie questions that she did not care to answer,
and answered questions she had not cared to ask, Kedzie kept
wondering how she could get rid of them before Dyckman came. She
thanked Heaven that there was no guest-room in her apartment. They
could not live with her, at least.

Suddenly it came over the pretty, bewildered little thing with her
previous riddle of how to get rid of a last-year's husband so that
she might get a new model--suddenly it came over Kedzie that she had
a tremendous necessity for help, advice, parentage. The crying need
for a father and a mother enhanced the importance of the two she had
on hand.

She broke right into her mother's description of a harrowing lumbago
she had suffered from: it was that bad she couldn't neither lay
nor set--that is to say, comfortable. Kedzie's own new-fangled
pronunciations and phrases fell from her mind, and she spoke in
purest Nimrim:

"Listen, momma and poppa. I'm in a peck of trouble, and maybe you
can help me out."

"Is it money?" Adna wailed, sepulchrally.

"No, unless it's too much of the darned stuff."

Adna gasped at the paradox. He had no time to comment before she
assailed him with:

"You see, I've gone and got married."

This shattered them both so that the rest was only shrapnel after
shell. But it was a leveling bombardment of everything near, dear,
respectable, sacred. They were fairly rocked by each detonation
of fact.

"Yes, I went and married a dirty little rat--name's Gilfoyle--he
thinks my real name's Anita Adair. I got it out of a movie, first
day I ran off from you folks. I had an awful time, momma--like
to starved--would have, only for clerkin' in a candy-store. Then
I got work posln' for commercial photographers. Did you see the
Breathasweeta Chewin' Gum Girl? No? That was me. Then I was a dancer
for a while--on the stage--and--the other girls were awful cats. But
what d'you expect? The life was terrible. We didn't wear much clo'es.
That didn't affect me, though; some of those nood models are terribly
respectable--not that I was nood, o' course. But--well--so I married
Tommie Gilfoyle. I don't know how I ever came to. He must have
mesmerized me, I guess."

"What did he work at?" said Adna.

"Poetry."

"Is poetry work?"

"Work? That's all it is. Poetry is all work and no pay. You should
have seen that gink sweatin' over the fool stuff. He'd work a week
for five dollars' worth of foolishness. And besides, as soon as he
married me he lost his job."

"Poetry?" Adna mumbled.

"Advertising."

"Oh!"

"Well, we didn't live together very long, and I was perfectly
miser'ble every minute."

"You poor little honey child!" said Mrs. Thropp, who felt her lamb
coming back to her, and even Adna reached over and squeezed her hand
and rubbed her knuckles with his rough thumb uncomfortably.

But it was good to have allies, and Kedzie went on:

"By an' by Gilfoyle got the offer of a position in Chicago, and he
couldn't get there without borrowing all I had. But I was glad enough
to pay it to him. I'd 'a' paid his fare to the moon if he'd 'a' gone
there. Then I got a position with a moving-picture company--as
a jobber--I began very humbly at first, you see, and I underwent
great hardships." (She was quoting now from one of her favorite
interviews.) "My talent attracted the attention of the director,
Mr. Ferriday. He stands very high in the p'fession, but he's very
conceited--very! He thought he owned me because he was the first
one I let direct me. He wanted me to marry him."

"Did you?" said Adna, who was prepared for anything.

"I should say not!" said Kedzie. "How could I, with a husband in
Chicago? He wasn't much of a husband--just enough to keep me from
marrying a real man. For one day, who should come to the studio
but Jim Dyckman!"

"Any relation to the big Dyckmans?" said Adna.

"He's the son of the biggest one of them all," said Kedzie.

"And you know him?"

"Do I know him? Doesn't he want to marry me? Isn't that the whole
trouble? He's coming here this evening."

To Adna, the humble railroad claim-agent, the careless tossing off
of the great railroad name of Dyckman was what it would have been
to a rural parson to hear Kedzie remark:

"I'm giving a little dinner to-night to my friends Isaiah, Jeremiah,
and Mr. Apostle Paul."

When the shaken wits of the parents began to return to a partial
calm they remembered that Kedzie had mentioned somebody named
Gilfoyle--_Gargoyle_ would have been a better name for him,
since he grinned down in mockery upon a cathedral of hope.

Adna whispered, "When did you divorce--the other feller?"

"I didn't; that's the trouble."

"Why don't you?"

"I can't find him."

Adna spoke up: "I'll go to Chicago and find him and get a divorce,
if I have to pound it out of him. You say he's a poet?"

Adna had the theory that poetry went with tatting and china-painting
as an athletic exercise. Kedzie had no reason to think differently.
She had whipped her own poet, scratched him and driven him away in
disorder. She told her people of this and of her inability to recall
him, and of his failure to answer the letter she had sent to Chicago.

Her father and mother grew incandescent with the strain between the
obstacle and the opportunity--the irresistible opportunity chained
to the immovable obstacle. They raged against the fiend who had
ruined Kedzie's life, met her on her pathway, gagged and bound her,
and haled her to his lair.

Poor young Gilfoyle would have been flattered at the importance they
gave him, but he would not have recognized himself or Kedzie.

According to his memory, he had married Kedzie because she was a
pitiful, heartbroken waif who had lost her job and thrown herself
on his mercy. He had married her because he adored her and he wanted
to protect her and love her under the hallowing shelter of matrimony.
He had given her his money and his love and his toil, and they had
not interested her. She had berated him, chucked him, taken up with
a fast millionaire; and when he returned to resume his place in her
heart she had greeted him with her finger-nails.

Thus, as usual in wars, each side had bitter grievances which the
other could neither acknowledge nor understand. Gilfoyle was as
bitter against Kedzie as she was against him.

And even while the three Thropps were wondering how they could summon
this vanquished monster out of the vasty deep of Chicago they could
have found him by putting their heads out of the window and shouting
his name. He was loitering opposite in the areaway of an empty
residence. He did not know that Kedzie's father and mother were
with her, any more than they knew that he was with them.

CHAPTER XXXIV

After a deal of vain abuse of Gilfoyle for abducting their child
and thwarting her golden opportunity, Adna asked at last, "What
does Mr. Dyckman think of all this?"

"You don't suppose I've told him I was married, do you?" Kedzie
stormed. "Do I look as loony as all that?"

"Oh!" said Adna.

"Why, he doesn't even know my name is Thropp, to say nothing of
Thropp-hyphen-Gilfoyle."

"Oh!" said Adna.

"Who does he think you are?" asked Mrs. Thropp.

"Anita Adair, the famous favorite of the screen," said Kedzie,
rather advertisingly.

"Hadn't you better tell him?" Adna ventured.

"I don't dast. He'd never speak to me again. He'd run like a rabbit
if he thought I was a grass widow."

Mrs. Thropp remonstrated: "I don't believe he'd ever give you up.
He must love you a heap if he wants to marry you."

"That's so," said Kedzie. "He's always begging me to name the day.
But I don't know what he'd think if I was to tell him I'd been
lying to him all this time. He thinks I'm an innocent little girl.
I just haven't got the face to tell him I'm an old married woman
with a mislaid husband."

"You mean to give him up, then?" Mrs. Thropp sighed.

Adna raged back: "Give up a billion-dollar man for a fool poet?
Not on your tintype!"

Kedzie gave her father an admiring look. They were getting on
sympathetic ground. They understood each other.

Adna was encouraged to say: "If I was you, Kedzie, I'd just lay
the facts before him. Maybe he could buy the feller off. You could
probably get him mighty cheap."

Mrs. Thropp habitually resented all her husband's arguments. She
scorned this proposal.

"Don't you do it, Kedzie. Just as you said, he'd most likely run
like a rabbit."

"Then what am I going to do?" Kedzie whimpered.

There was a long silence. Mrs. Thropp pondered bitterly. She was
the most moral of women. She had brought up her children with
all rigidity. She had abused them for the least dereliction. She
had upheld the grimmest standard of virtue, with "Don't!" for its
watchword. Of virtue as a warm-hearted, alert, eager, glowing spirit,
cultivating the best and most beautiful things in life, she had no
idea. Virtue was to her a critic, a satirist, a neighborhood gossip,
something scathing and ascetic. That delicate balance between failing
to mind one's own business and failing to respond to another's
need did not bother her--nor did that theory of motherhood which
instils courage, independence, originality, and enthusiasm for life,
and starts children precociously toward beauty, love, grace,
philanthropy, invention, art, glory.

She had the utmost contempt for girls who went right according to
their individualities, or went wrong for any reason soever. The least
indiscretions of her own daughters she visited with endless tirades.
Kedzie had escaped them for a long while. She had succeeded as far
as she had because she had escaped from the most dangerous of all
influences--a perniciously repressive mother. She would have been
scolded viciously now if it had not been for Dyckman's mighty
prestige.

The Dyckman millions in person were about to enter this room.
The Dyckman millions wanted Kedzie. If they got her it would be
a wonderful thing for a poor, hard-working girl who had had the
spunk to strike out for herself and make her own way without expense
to her father and mother. The Dyckman millions, furthermore, would
bring the millennium at once to the father and mother.

Mrs. Thropp, fresh from her village (yet not so very fresh--say,
rather, recent from sordid humility), sat dreaming of herself
as a Dyckman by marriage. She imagined herself and the great
Mrs. Dyckman in adjoining rocking-chairs, exchanging gossip and
recipes and anecdotes of their joint grandchildren-to-be. Just
to inhale the aroma of that future, that vision of herself as
Mr. Dyckman's mother-in-law, was like breathing in deeply of
laughing-gas; a skilful dentist could have extracted a molar
from her without attracting her attention. And in the vapor of
that stupendous temptation the devil actually did extract from her
her entire moral code without her noticing the difference.