We Can\'t Have Everything

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If Kedzie had been married to Gilfoyle and besought in marriage by
another fellow of the same relative standard of income Mrs. Thropp
could have waxed as indignant as anybody. If Kedzie's new suitor
had earned as high as four thousand a year, which was a pile of
money in Nimrim, she would still have raged against the immorality
of tampering with the sacrament of marriage. She might have
withstood as much as twenty thousand a year for the sake of home
and religion. She abhorred divorce, as well as other people do
(especially divorcees).

But to resist a million dollars and all that went with it was
impossible. To resist a score of millions was twenty times
impossibler. She made up her mind that Dyckman should not escape
from this temporary alliance with the Thropps without paying at
least a handsome initiation-fee. Suddenly she set her jaw and
broke into the parley of her husband and their daughter:

"Well, I've made up my mind. Adna, you shut up awhile and get on
out this room. I'm going to have a few words with my girl."

Adna looked into the face of his wife and saw there that
red-and-white-striped expression which always puts a wise man
to flight. He was glad to be permitted to retreat. When he was
gone Mrs. Thropp beckoned Kedzie to sit by her on the _chaise
longue_. She gathered her child up as some adoring old buzzard
might cuddle her nestling and impart choice ideals of scavengery.

"Look here, honey: you listen to your mother what loves you and knows
what's best for you. You've struck out for yourself and you've won
the grandest chance any girl ever had. If you throw it away you'll
be slappin' Providence right in the face. The Lord would never have
put this op'tunity in your reach if He hadn't meant you to have it."

"What you talking about, momma?" said Kedzie.

"My father always used to say: 'Old Man Op'tunity is bald-headed
except for one long scalplock in the middle his forehead. Grab him
as he comes toward you, for there's nothing to lay holt on as he
goes by.'"

"What's all this talk about bald-heads?" Kedzie protested.

"Hush your mouth and listen to a woman that's older'n what you
are and knows more. Look at me! I've slaved all my life. I've been
a hard-workin', church-goin' woman, a good mother to a lot of
ungrateful children, a faithful, lovin' wife--and what have I got
for it? Look at me. Do you want to be like me when you get my age?
Do you?"

It was a hard question to answer politely, so Kedzie said nothing.
Mrs. Thropp went on:

"You got a chance to look like me and live hard and die poor, and
that's what'll happen if you stick by this low-life, good-for-nothing
dawg you married. Don't do it. Money's come your way. Grab it quick.
Hold on to it tight. Money's the one thing that counts. You take
my word for it. It don't matter much how you get it; the main thing
is Get it! People don't ask you How? but How Much? If you got enough
they don't care How."

"That's all right enough," said Kedzie, "but the main question with
me is How?"

"How is easy," said Mrs. Thropp, and her face seemed to turn yellow
as she lowered her voice. "This Mr. Dyckman is crazy about you. He
wants you. If he's willin' to marry you to get you, I guess he'll
be still more willin' to get you without marryin' you."

"Why, momma!"

It was just a whisper. Kedzie had lived through village perils and
city perils; she had been one of a band of dancers as scant of morals
as of clothes; she had drifted through all sorts of encounters with
all sorts of people; but she had never heard so terrible a thought
so terribly expressed. She flinched from her mother. Her mother saw
that shudder of retreat and grew harsher:

"You tell Mr. Dyckman about your husband, and you'll lose him. You
will--for sure! If you lose him, you lose the greatest chance a girl
ever had. Take him--and make him pay for you!--in advance. Do you
understand? You can't get much afterward. You can get a fortune if
you get your money first. Look at you, how pretty you are! He'd give
you a million if you asked him. Get your money; then tell him if you
want to; but don't lose this chance. Do you hear me?"

"Yes," Kedzie sighed. "Yes, momma."

"Promise me on your solemn honor!"

Kedzie giggled with sheer nervousness at the phrase. But she would
not promise.

The door-bell rang, and the maid admitted Jim Dyckman, who had
not paused to send his name up by the telephone. While he gave his
hat and stick to the maid and peeled off his gloves Kedzie was
whispering:

"It's Jim."

Mrs. Thropp struggled to her feet. "He mustn't find me here," she
said. "Don't tell him about us."

But before she could escape Dyckman was in the doorway, almost too
tall to walk through it, almost as tall as twenty million dollars.

To Mrs. Thropp he was as majestic as the Colossus of Rhodes would
have been. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, he was a gilded giant.

CHAPTER XXXV

Kedzie was paralyzed. Mrs. Thropp was inspired. Unity of purpose
guided her true. She had told her daughter to ignore Gilfoyle as
an unimportant detail. She certainly did not intend to substitute
a couple of crude parents as a new handicap.

No one knew Mrs. Thropp's cheapness of appearance better than she did.
A woman may grow shoddy and careless, but she rarely grows oblivious
of her uncomeliness. She will rather cherish it as the final cruelty
of circumstances. Mrs. Thropp was keenly alive to the effect it would
have on Dyckman if Kedzie introduced her and Adna as the encumbrances
on her beauty.

Adna, hearing the door-bell and Dyckman's entrance, returned to
the living-room from the bathroom, where he had taken refuge. He
stood in the hall now behind the puzzled Dyckman.

There was a dreadful silence for a moment. Jim spoke, shyly:

"Hello, Anita! How are you?"

"Hello, Jim!" Kedzie stammered. "This is--"

"I'm the janitor's wife," said Mrs. Thropp. "My husband had to come
up to see about the worter not running in the bathroom, and I came
along to see Miss--the young lady. She's been awful good to me.
Well, I'll be gettin' along. Good night, miss. Good night, sir."

To save herself, she could not think of Kedzie's screen name.
To save her daughter's future, she disowned her. She pushed past
Dyckman, and silencing the stupefied Adna with a glare, swept him
out through the dining-room into the kitchen.

It amazed Mrs. Thropp to find a kitchen so many flights up-stairs.
The ingenuity of the devices, the step-saving cupboard, the dry
ice-box with its coils of cold-air pipes, the gas-stove, the
electric appliances, were like wonderful new toys to her.

Adna was as comfortable as a cow in a hammock, and she would have
sent him away, but his hat was in the hall and she dared not go for
it. Besides, she wanted to wait long enough to learn the outcome
of Kedzie's adventure with Dyckman.

As soon as he was alone with Kedzie, Jim had taken her into his
arms. She blushed with an unwonted timidity in a new sense of the
forbiddenness of her presence there.

Her upward glance showed her that Jim had been in trouble, too. His
jaw had a mottled look, and one eyebrow was a trifle mashed.

"What on earth has happened to you?" she gasped.

"Oh, I had a little run-in with a fellow."

"What about?" said Kedzie.

"Nothing much."

"He must have hurt you terribly."

"Think so? Well, you ought to see him."

"What was it all about?"

"Oh, just a bit of an argument."

"Who was he?"

"Nobody you know."

"You mean it's none of my business?"

"I wouldn't put it that way, honey. I'd just rather not talk
about it."

Kedzie felt rebuffed and afraid. He had spent an evening away from
her and had reappeared with scars from a battle he would not describe.
She would have been still more terrified if she had known that he had
fought as the cavalier of Charity Coe Cheever. She would have been
somewhat reassured if she had known that Jim smarted less under the
bruises of Cheever's fists than under the rebuke he had had from
Charity for his interference in her marital crisis.

Jim was the more in need of Kedzie's devotion for being discarded
again by Charity. The warmth in Kedzie's greeting was due to her
fear of losing him. But he did not know that. He only knew that
she was exceedingly cordial to him, and it was his nature to repay
cordiality with usury.

He noted, however, that Kedzie's warmth had an element of anxiety.
He asked her what was worrying her, but she would not answer.

At length he made his usual remark. It had become a sort of standing
joke for him to say, "When do we marry?"

She always answered, "Give me a little more time." But to-night when
he laughed, "Well, just to get the subject out of the way, when do
we marry?" Kedzie did not make her regular answer. Her pretty face
was suddenly darkened with pain. She moaned: "Never, I guess. Never,
I'm afraid."

"What's on your mind, Anita?"

She hesitated, but when he repeated his query she took the plunge
and told him the truth.

Her mother had pleaded just a little too well. If Mrs. Thropp had
begged Kedzie to do the right thing for the right's sake Kedzie
would have felt the natural reaction daughters feel toward motherly
advice. But the entreaty to do evil that evil might come of it
aroused even more resistance, issuing as it did from maternal lips
that traditionally give only holy counsel. It had a more reforming
effect on Kedzie's crooked plans than all the exhortations of all
the preachers in the world could have had.

Kedzie turned to honesty because it seemed the less horrible of
two evils. She assumed the role of a little penitent, and made
Jim Dyckman a father confessor. She told her story as truthfully
as she could tell it or feel it. She was too sincere to be just.

She made herself the martyr that she felt herself to be. She wept
plentifully and prettily, with irresistible gulps and swallowings
of lumps and catches of breath, fetches of sobs, and dartings and
gleamings of pearls from her shining eyelids. Her handkerchief was
soon a little wad of wet lace, ridiculously pathetic; her lips were
blubbered. She wept on and on till she just had to blow her little
red nose. She blew it with exquisite candor, and it gave forth the
heartbreaking squawk of the first toy trumpet a child breaks of
a Christmas morning.

One radical difference between romance and realism is that in romance
the heroines weep from the eyelashes out; in realism, some of the
tears get into the nostrils. In real life it is reality that moves
our hearts, and Dyckman was convinced by Kedzie's realism.

She did not need to tell him of her humble and Western birth. He
had recognized her accent from the first, and forgiven it. He knew
a little of her history, because Charity Coe had sent him to the
studio to look her up, reminding him that she had been the little
dancer he pulled out of Mrs. Noxon's pool.

At length Kedzie revealed the horrible fact that her real name was
Kedzie Thropp. He laughed aloud. He was so tickled by her babyish
remorse that he made her say it again. He told her he loved it
twice as well as the stilted, stagy "Anita Adair."

"That's one of the reasons I wanted you to marry me," he said,
"so that I could change your horrible name."

"But I changed it myself first," Kedzie howled; and now the truth
came ripping. "The day after you pulled me out of the pool at Newport
I--I--married a fellow named Tommie Gilfoyle."

Dyckman's smile was swept from his face; his chuckle ended in a
groan. Kedzie's explanation was a little different from the one she
gave her parents. Unconsciously she tuned it to her audience. It
grew a trifle more literary.

"What could I do? I was alone in the world, without friends or money
or position. He happened to be at the railroad station. He saw how
frightened I was, and he had loved me for a long time. He begged me
to take mercy on him and on myself, and marry him. He offered me
his protection; he said I should be his wife in name only until I
learned to love him. And I was alone in the world, without friends
or money--but I told you that once, didn't I?"

Dyckman was thinking hard, aching hard. He mumbled, "What became
of him?"

"When he saw that I couldn't love him he took some money I had
left from my earnings and abandoned me. I had a desperate struggle
to get along, and then I got my chance in the moving pictures, and
I met you there--and--learned what love is--too late--too late!"

Dyckman broke in on her lyric grief, "What became of the man
you married?"

"He never came near me till awhile ago. He saw my pictures on the
screen and thought I must be making a big lot of money. He came here
and tried to sneak back into my good graces. He even tried to kiss
me, and I nearly tore his eyes out."

"Why?" Jim asked.

"Because I belong to nobody but you--at least, I did belong to
nobody but you. But now you won't want me any more. I don't blame
you for hating me. I hate myself. I've deceived you, and you'll
never believe me again, or love me, or anything."

She wept ardently, for she was appalled by the magnitude of her
deception, now that it stood exposed. She had no idea of the
magnitude of Dyckman's chivalry. She slipped to the floor and
laid her head on his knee.

It was Dyckman's nature to respond at once to any appeal to his
sympathy or his courtesy. Automatically his heart warmed toward
human distress. He felt a deeper interest in Kedzie than before,
because she threw herself on his mercy as never before. His hand
went out to her head and fell upon her hair with a kind of apostolic
benediction. He poured, as it were, an ointment of absolution and
acceptance upon her curls.

She felt in his very fingers so much reassurance that she was
encouraged to unburden herself altogether of her hoard of secrets.

"There's one more awful thing you'll never forgive me for, Jim. I
want to tell you that, and then you'll know all the worst of me. My
father and mother came to town to-day, and--and that was my mother
who said she was the janitor's wife."

"Why did she do that?" said Jim.

"I had been telling them how much I loved you, and poor dear mother
was afraid you might be scared away if you knew how poor my people
are."

"What kind of a ghastly snob do they take me for?" Jim growled.

"They don't know you as I do," said Kedzie; "but even I can't expect
you to forgive everything. I've lied to you about everything except
about loving you, and I was a long while telling you the truth about
that. But now you know all there is to know about me, and I wouldn't
blame you for despising me. Of course I don't expect you to want to
marry me any longer, so I'll give you back your beautiful engagement
ring."

With her arms across his knees, one of her delicate hands began to
draw from the other a gold circlet knobbed with diamonds.

"Don't do that," Jim said, taking her hands in his. "The engagement
stands."

"But how can it, darling?" said Kedzie. "You can't love me
any more."

"Of course I do, more and more."

"But you can never marry me, and surely you don't want--"

Suddenly she ran plump into the situation her mother had imagined
and encouraged. She blushed at the collision with it, and became
a very allegory of innocence confronted with abhorrent evil.

"Of course I don't," said Dyckman, divining exactly what she meant.
"I'll find this Gilfoyle and buy him up or beat him to a pulp."

Kedzie lifted her downcast eyes in gratitude for such a godlike
resolution. But before she could cry out in praise of it she cried
out in terror.

For right before her stood the long-lost Gilfoyle.

CHAPTER XXXVI

During his long wait this evening Gilfoyle had grown almost
uncontrollable with impatience to undertake the assault. His landlady
had warned him not to return to his room until he brought some cash
on account. He was for making the charge the moment he saw Jim
Dyckman enter the building, but Connery insisted on giving Dyckman
time to get forward with his courtship. They had seen the maid come
out of the servants' entrance and hurry up the street to the vain
tryst Connery had arranged with her to get her out of the way.

At length, when time had passed sufficiently, they had crossed to
the apartment-house and told the elevator-boy they were expected by
the tenants above. He took them up without question. They pretended
to ring the bell there, waited for the elevator to disappear, then
walked down a flight of steps and paused at the fatal sill.

Connery inserted the key stealthily into the lock, turned it, opened
the door in silence, and let Gilfoyle slip through. He followed and
closed the door without shock.

They heard Kedzie's murmurous tones and the rumble of Dyckman's
answer. Then Gilfoyle strode forward. He saw Kedzie coiled on the
floor with her elbows on Dyckman's knees. He caught her eye, and
her start of bewilderment held him spellbound a moment. Then he
cried:

"There you are! I've got you! You faithless little beast."

Dyckman rose to an amazing height, lifted Kedzie to her feet,
and answered:

"Who the devil are you, and what the devil do you want?"

"I'm the husband of that shameless woman; that's who I am," Gilfoyle
shrilled, a little cowed by Dyckman's stature.

"Oh, you are, are you!" said Dyckman. "Well, you're the very chap
I'm looking for. Come in, by all means."

Connery, seeing that the initiative was slipping from Gilfoyle's
flaccid hand, pushed forward with truculence.

"None of that, you big bluff! You needn't think you can put
anything over on me."

"And who are you?" said Dyckman.

"I'm Connery the detective, and I've got the goods on you."

He advanced on Dyckman, and Gilfoyle came with him. Gilfoyle took
courage from the puzzled confusion of Dyckman, and he poured forth
invectives.

"You think because you're rich you can go around breaking up homes
and decoying wives away, do you? Not that she isn't willing enough
to be decoyed! I wasn't good enough for her. She had to sell herself
for money and jewelry and a gay time! I ought to kill you both, and
maybe I will; but first I'm going to show you up in the newspapers."

"Oh, you are, are you!" was the best that Dyckman could improvise.

"Yes, he is," Connery roared. "I'm a newspaper man, and your name's
worth head-lines in every paper in the country. And I'll see that it
gets there, too. It will go on the wires to-night unless--"

"Unless what?"

"Unless you come across with--"

"Oh, that's it, is it!" said Dyckman. "Just a little old-fashioned
blackmail!"

He had tasted the joys of violence in his bout with Cheever, and now
he had recourse to it again. His long arms went out swiftly toward
the twain of his assailants. His big hands cupped their heads as if
they were melons, and he knocked their skulls together smartly.

He might have battered them to death, but he heard Kedzie's little
cry of horror, and forbore. He flung the heads from him, and the
bodies followed limply. Connery went to the floor, and Gilfoyle
sprawled across a chair. They were almost unconscious, their brains
reduced to swirling nebulae.

Kedzie thought for a moment that she and her love-affairs had brought
about a double murder. She saw herself becoming one of those little
women who appear with an almost periodic regularity in the annals of
crime, and whose red smiles drag now this, now that great family's
name into the mud and vomit of public nausea.

She would lose Jim Dyckman, after all, and ruin him in the losing.
She clung to his arm to check him in his work of devastation. He,
too, stood wondering at the amazing deed of his rebellious hands,
and wondering what the result would be.

He and Kedzie rejoiced at seeing the victims move. Connery began
to squirm on the floor and get to his wabbly knees, and Gilfoyle
writhed back to consciousness with wits a-flutter.

There was a silence of mutual attention for a while. Connery was
growling from all-fours like a surly dog:

"I'll get you for this--you'll see! You'll be sorry for this."

This restored Dyckman's temper to its throne. He seized Connery by
the scruff of his coat, jerked him to his feet, and snarled at him:

"Haven't you had enough, you little mucker? You threaten me or
Miss Adair again and I'll not leave enough of you to--to--"

He was not apt at phrases, but Connery felt metaphors enough in
the size of the fist before his nose. He put up his hands, palms
forward, in the ancient gesture of surrender. Then Gilfoyle turned
cry-baby and began to sob.

"You call her Miss Adair! But she's my wife. Mrs. Gilfoyle is what
she is, and you've taken her away from me. This is a rotten country,
and you rotten millionaires can do nearly anything you want to--but
not quite. You'll find that out. There are still a few courts and
a few newspapers you can't muzzle."

Dyckman advanced against him, but Gilfoyle merely clung to the back
of his chair, and his non-resistance was his best shelter. It was
impossible for Dyckman to strike him. Secure in his helplessness,
he took full advantage of the tyranny of impotence. He rose to his
feet and went on with his lachrymose philippic.

"You're going to pay for what you've done, and pay high!"

The one thing that restrained Dyckman from offering to buy him out
was that he demanded purchase. Like most rich people, Dyckman was
the everlasting target of prayers and threats. He could be generous
to an appeal, but a demand locked his heart.

He answered Gilfoyle's menace, bluntly, "I'll pay you when hell
freezes over, and not a cent before."

"Well, then, you stand from under," Gilfoyle squealed. "There's a
law in this State against home-wreckers like you, and I can send
you to the penitentiary for breaking it."

Dyckman's rage blackened again; he caught Gilfoyle by the shoulder
and roared: "You foul-mouthed, filthy-minded little sneak! You say
a word against your wife and I'll throw you out of the window.
She's too decent for you to understand. You get down on your knees
and ask her pardon."

He forced Gilfoyle to his knees, but he could not make him pray. And
Kedzie fell back from him. She was afraid to pose as a saint worthy
of genuflection. Connery re-entered the conflict with a sneer:

"Aw, tell it to the judge, Dyckman! Tell it to the judge! See how
good it listens to him. We'll tell him how we found you here; and
you tell him you were holding a prayer-meeting. You didn't want to
be disturbed, so you didn't have even a servant around--all alone
together at this hour."

Then a new, strange voice spoke in.

"Who said they were alone?"

The four turned to see Mrs. Thropp filling the hall doorway, and
Adna's head back of her shoulder. It was really a little too
melodramatic. The village lassie goes to the great city; her father
and mother arrive in all their bucolic innocence just in time to
save her from destruction.

Connery, whose climax she had spoiled, though she had probably saved
his bones, gasped, "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm this child's mother; that's who I am. And that's her father.
And what's more, we've been here all evening, and you'd better look
out how you swear at me or I'll sick Mr. Dyckman on you."

If there are gallery gods in heaven, and angels with a melodramatic
taste (as there must be, for how else could we have acquired it?),
they must have shaken the cloudy rafters with applause. Only one
touch was needed to perfect the scene, and that was for the
_First_ and _Second_ Villains to slink off, cursing
and muttering, "Foiled again!"

But these villains were not professionals, and they had not been
rehearsed. They were like childish actors in a juvenile production
at five pins per admission. An unexpected line threw them into
complete disorder.

Connery turned to Gilfoyle. "Did you ever lamp this old lady
before?"

Gilfoyle answered, stoutly enough, "I never laid eyes on her."

Connery was about to order Mrs. Thropp out of the room as an
impostor, but she would not be denied her retort.

"O' course he never laid eyes on me. If he had have he'd never tried
to pull the wool over that innocent baby's eyes; and if I'd ever laid
eyes on him I'd have run him out of the country before I'd ever have
let my child look at him a second time."

Connery made one last struggle: "What proof have you got that
you're her mother?"

"Ask my husband here."

"What good is his word in such a matter?"

Connery did not mean this as in any sense a reflection on Mrs.
Thropp's marital integrity, but she took it so. Now, in Nimrim
the question of fidelity is not dealt with lightly, at least in
repartee. Mrs. Thropp emitted a roar of scandalized virtue and
would have attacked the young men with her fists if her husband,
who should have attacked them in her stead, had not clung to her,
murmuring:

"Now, momma, don't get excited. You young fellers better vamoose
quick. I can't holt her very long."

So they vamosed and were much obliged for the opportunity, leaving
Kedzie to fling her arms about her mother with spontaneous filial
affection, and to present Dyckman to her with genuine pride.

Dyckman had been almost as frightened as Kedzie, He had been more
afraid of his own temper than of his assailants, but afraid enough
of their shadowy powers. Mrs. Thropp would have had to be far less
comely than she was to be unwelcome. She had the ultimate charm
of perfect timeliness. He greeted her with that deference he paid
to all women, and she adored him at once, independently of his
fortune.