We Can\'t Have Everything

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Adna said that he had always been an admirer of the old Dyckman and
was glad to meet his boy, being as he was a railroad man himself,
in a small way. He rather gave the impression that he was at least
a third vice-president, but very modest about it.

Mrs. Thropp gleaned from the first words that Kedzie had gone
contrary to her advice and had told Dyckman the truth. She took
the credit calmly.

"I come on East to clear things up, and I advised my daughter to
tell you just the way things were--as I always say to my children,
use the truth and shame the devil."

Kedzie was too busy to notice the outrage. She was thanking Heaven
for her impulse to reveal the facts, realizing how appalling it
would have been if Gilfoyle had been the first to inform Dyckman.

They were all having a joyous family party when it suddenly came
over them that Gilfoyle had once more appeared and resubmerged.
But Dyckman said: "I'll find him for you, and I'll buy him. He'll
be cheap at any price."

He bade good night early and went to his own home, carrying a
backload of trouble. He was plainly in for it. Whatever happened,
he was the scapegoat-elect.

CHAPTER XXXVII

The villain in melodrama is as likely as not to be as decent a fellow
as any. When he slinks from the stage in his final hissed exit he
goes to his dressing-room, scours off his grease-paint, and probably
returns to his devoted family or seats himself before a bowl of
milk-and-crackers in his club.

Gilfoyle was as decent a fellow as ever villain was. Circumstances
and not himself cast him in an evil role, and as actors know, once
so established, it is almost impossible to return to heroic parts.
Gilfoyle could not even remove his grease-paint. He could not go
back to his dressing-room, for his landlady had told him that the
only key to her front door was cash. He had gone out to bring home
a millionaire, and he had achieved nothing but a headache and a
moral cataclysm.

He hardly knew how he escaped from the apartment-house. The dark
cool of the street brought him into the night of things. It came
upon him like a black fog what he had tried to do. The bitter
disgrace of a man who has been whipped in a fight was his, but
other disgraces were heaped upon it. For the first time he saw
himself as Kedzie saw him.

He had neglected his wife till she grew famous in spite of him.
He had gone back to her to share her bounty. When she repulsed
him he had entered into a conspiracy to spy on her. He had waited
impatiently for a rich man to compromise her, so that he could
surprise them in guilt and extort money from them.

He had not warned the girl of her danger from the other man or from
himself. He had not pleaded with her to be good, had not asked her
to come back to honeymoon again in poverty with him; he had preferred
to live on borrowed money and on unpaid board while he fooled with
verses and refused the manual tasks that waited everywhere about
the busy city. He might have cleaned the streets or earned a decent
living handling garbage in the city scows. But he had preferred to
speculate in blackmail and play the badger-game with his wife as
an unwitting accomplice. He had hated millionaires, and counted them
all criminals deserving spoliation, but he felt that he had sunk
lower than the millionaires.

The remembrance of Kedzie haunted him. She had been supremely
beautiful to-night, frightened into greater beauty than ever. She
was afraid of him who should have been her refuge, and she hid for
protection behind the man who should have seemed her enemy.

He recalled her as she was when he first loved her, the pretty
little candy-store clerk, the lissome, living marble in her Greek
tunic, the quaint, sweet girl who came to him in the Grand Central
Terminal, lugging her suit-case, the shy thing at the License
Bureau, the ineffably exquisite bride he had made his wife. He saw
her at the gas-stove and loved her very petulance and the pretty
way she banged the oven door and pouted at fate.

The lyrics he had written to her sang through his aching head. He
was wrung to anguish between the lover and the poet he had meant
to be, and the spurned and hated cur he had become. He stumbled
along the street at Connery's side, whispering to himself, while
his earliest verses to Kedzie ran in and out through his thoughts
like a catchy tune:

Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Anita?
Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.

He recalled the sonnets he had begun which were to make them both
immortal. He regretted the spitefulness that had led him to write
in another name than hers because she had refused to support him.
He had been a viler beast than the cutpurse poet of old France,
without the lilies of verse that bloom pure white above the dunghill
of Villon's life.

Gilfoyle's soul went down into a hell of regret and wriggled in
the flames of self-condemnation. He grew maudlin with repentance
and clung to his friend Connery with odious garrulity. Connery was
disgusted with him, but he was afraid to leave him because he kept
sighing:

"I guess the river's the only place for me now."

At length Connery steered him into a saloon for medicine and bought
him a stiff bracer of whisky and vermouth. But it only threw Gilfoyle
into deeper befuddlement. He was like Charles Lamb, in that a
thimbleful of alcohol affected him as much as a tumbler another.
He wanted to tell his troubles to the barkeeper, and Connery had
to drag him away.

In the hope that a walk in the air might help to steady him, Connery
set out toward his own boarding-house. They started across Columbus
Avenue under the pillars of the Elevated tracks.

Habituated to the traffic customs, the New-Yorker crossing a street
looks to the left for traffic till he gets half-way across, then
looks to the right for traffic bound in the opposite direction.
Connery led Gilfoyle to the middle of the avenue, paused for a
south-bound street-car to go banging by them, darted back of it
and looked to the right for a north-bound car or motor. But a
taxicab trying to pass the south-bound car was shooting south
along the north-bound tracks.

Connery saw it barely in time to jump back. He yanked Gilfoyle's
arm, but Gilfoyle had plunged forward. He might have escaped if
Connery had let him go. But the cab struck him, hurled him in air
against an iron pillar, caught him on the rebound and ran him down.
Kedzie Thropp was a widow.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Deaths from the wheeled torpedoes that shoot along the city streets
are too monotonously numerous to make a stir in the newspapers unless
the victims have some other claim on the public attention.

Gilfoyle had been writing advertisements of other people's wares, but
nobody was going to pay for the advertisement of him. The things that
he might have become were even more obscure than the things he was.
The pity of his taking-off would have had no more record than a few
lines of small type, but for one further accident.

The taxicab-driver whose reckless haste had sent him down the wrong
side of the street had been spurred on by the reckless haste of his
passenger. The pretty Mrs. Twyford had been for years encouraging
the reporters to emphasize her social altitude, and had seen that
they obtained her photographs at frequent intervals. But on this
night she had gone up-town upon one of the few affairs for which
she did not wish publicity. She had learned by telephone that her
husband had returned to New York unexpectedly, and she was intensely
impatient to be at home when he got there.

When her scudding taxicab solved all of Gilfoyle's earthly problems
in one fierce erasure she made such efforts to escape from the
instantly gathered crowd that she attracted the attention of the
policeman who happened to be at the next corner. He proceeded to
take the name and addresses of witnesses and principals, and he
detained her as an important accessory.

Connery was one of the news-men who had been indebted to Mrs. Twyford
for many a half-column of gossip, and he recognized her at once. He
was a reporter, first, last, and all the time, and he was very much
in need of something to sell.

He was greatly shattered by the annihilation of his friend, but
his instinctive journalism led him to control himself long enough
to call Mrs. Twyford by name and assure the policeman that she was
a lady of high degree who should not be bothered.

Neither the policeman nor Mrs. Twyford thanked him. They were
equally rude to him and to each other, Connery thought the incident
might interest the night city editor of his paper, and so he
telephoned a good story in to the office as soon as he had released
himself from the inquisition and had seen an ambulance carry poor
Gilfoyle away.

Mrs. Twyford reached home too late, and in such a state of nerves
that she made the most unconvincing replies to the cross-examination
that ensued. When she saw her name in the paper the next morning
her friends also began to make inquiries--and eventually to deny
that they were her friends or had ever been.

It was her name in the heavy type that caught the heavy eyes of
Jim Dyckman at breakfast the next morning. It was thus that he came
upon the fate of Thomas Gilfoyle, whose death had been the cause
of all this pother.

Before he could telephone Anita--or Kedzie, as he mentally corrected
himself--he was informed that a Mr. Connery was at the door, asking
for him. He nodded and went into the library, carrying the newspaper
with him.

Connery grinned sadly and mumbled: "I see you've seen it. I thought
you'd like to know about it."

"I should," said Dyckman. "Sit down."

Connery sat down and told of the accident and what led up to it.
He spoke in a lowered voice and kept his eye on the door. When he
had finished his story he said, "Now, of course this all comes out
very convenient for you, but I suppose you see how easy it would
be for me to tell what I know, and that mightn't be so convenient
for you."

"Are you beginning your blackmail again so early in the morning?"

"Cut out that kind of talk or there's nothing doing," said Connery.
"I can make a lot of trouble for you, and I can hush up a lot. Unless
I speak I don't suppose anybody else is going to peep about Miss
Adair being Mrs. Gilfoyle, and about Mr. Dyckman being interested
in his wife. If I do speak it would take a lot of explaining."

"I am not afraid of explaining to the whole world that Miss Adair
is a friend of mine and that her father and mother were present
when I called."

Connery met this with a smile. "But how often were they present
when you called?"

Dyckman grew belligerent again: "Do you want me to finish what
I began on you last night?"

"I'm in no hurry, thank you. You can outclass me in the ring, but
it wouldn't help you much to beat me up, would it?--or Miss Adair,
either. She's got some rights, hasn't she?"

"Has she any that you are capable of respecting?"

"Sure she has. I don't want to cause the little lady any
inconvenience. She and Tommie Gilfoyle didn't belong together,
anyway. She was through with him long ago, and the only thing
that saved his face was the fact that he's dead--poor fellow!

"But you see I've got to appear as a witness in the trial of
the taxicab-driver, who'll be held for manslaughter or something.
If I say that Gilfoyle and I had just come from a battle with you
and that he got the wits knocked out of him because he accused
you of making a mistress out of his wife--"

"Be careful!"

"The same to you, Mr. Dyckman."

Dyckman felt himself nettled. Kedzie's silence about the existence
of a husband had enmeshed him. He would not attempt to justify
himself. It would do no good to thresh about. The big gladiator
sat still waiting for the _retiarius_ to finish him. But
Connery's voice grew merciful. It was a luxury beyond price to
extend an alms to this plutocrat.

"What I'm getting at, Mr. Dyckman," he resumed, "is this: Tommie
owed some money to his landlady. He owed me some money that I could
use. He's got a mother and father up-State. He told me he'd never
told them about his marriage. They'll want him back, I suppose.
From what he's told me, it would be a real hardship for them to pay
the funeral expenses. You could pay all that, and you could even say
that he had a little money in the bank and send that along with him,
and never know the difference. But they would."

"I see," said Dyckman, very solemnly.

"You called me some rough names, Mr. Dyckman, and I guess I earned
'em. Looking things over the morning after, I'm not so stuck on
myself as I was, but you stack up pretty well. I like a man who can
use his hands in an argument. My name is Connery, you know. What you
did to me was a plenty, but it looks better to me now than it felt
last night.

"You know a reporter just gets naturally hungry to see a man face
a scandal in a manly way. If you had shown a yellow streak and tried
to buy your way out I would have taken your money and thought I was
doing a public service in getting it away from a quitter. But when
you cracked my bean against poor Gilfoyle's you made me see a lot
of things besides stars.

"There's nothing to be gained by keeping up this war. I want to put
it all out of sight for your sake and for Gilfoyle's mother's sake,
and for the sake of that pretty little Adair lady. I don't know what
she's been or done, but she's pretty and she's got a nice, spunky
mother.

"I'm a good newspaper man, Mr. Dyckman, and that means I've kept
quiet about even better stories than I've sprung. If I had a lot of
money now I'd add this story to the list and treat Gilfoyle's folks
right without giving you a look-in. But being dead-broke, I thought
maybe you'd like to see things done in a decent manner. It's going
to be hard enough for that old couple up-State to get Tommie back,
as they've got to, without taking any excess heartbreak up in the
baggage-car. Do you follow me?"

"I do," said Dyckman; and now he asked the "How much?" that he
had refused to speak the night before.

Connery did a little figuring with a pencil, and Dyckman thought
that some life-insurance in the mother's name would be a pleasant
thing to add. Then he doubled the total, wrote a check for it, and
said:

"There'll probably be something left over. I wish you'd keep it
as your--attorney-fee, Mr. Connery."

They shook hands as they parted.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Dyckman telephoned to Kedzie and asked if he could see her. She said
that he could, and dressed furiously while he made the distance to
her apartment.

She gleaned from his look and from the way he took her two hands
in his that he had serious news to bring her. She had not been
awake long enough to read the papers, and this was her first death.
She cried helplessly when she learned that her husband was gone away
with all her bitterness for his farewell. She remembered the best
of him, and he came back to her for a while as the poet who had
made her his muse--the only one she could telegraph to when she
returned to New York alone, her first and only husband.

She was afraid that she belittled herself in Dyckman's eyes when
she let slip the remorseful Wail, "I wish I had been kinder to
the poor boy!"

But she did not belittle herself in any such tendernesses of regret.
She endeared herself by her grief, her self-reproach, her childish
humility before the power of death. Her tears were beautiful in Jim's
sight. But it is the blessing and the shame of tears that they cure
the grief that causes them. At first they bleed and burn; then they
flow soft and cool. They cleanse and brighten the eyes and even wash
away the cinders from the funeral smoke.

Dyckman's heart was drawn out of him toward Kedzie and his arms
held her shaken body devotedly. But at length she ceased to weep,
and a last long sob became dangerously like a sigh of relief. She
smiled through the rain and apologized for weeping, when she should
have apologized for stopping weeping. Then Dyckman's love of her
seemed to withdraw backward into his heart. And his arms suddenly
wearied of clasping her.

When she had seemed hardly to know that he was there he felt
necessary and justified. When she took comfort in his arms and
held them about her he felt ashamed, revolted, profane.

Mrs. Thropp had wept a little in sympathy with Kedzie, and Adna
had looked amiably disconsolate; but by and by Mrs. Thropp was
murmuring:

"After all, perhaps it was for the best. The Lord's will be done!"

Dyckman shrank as if a blasphemy had been shouted. In a hideously
short time Mrs. Thropp was saying, briskly:

"Of course, honey, you've got no idea of puttin' on black for him."

"If I believed in mourning, I would," Kedzie answered without delay,
"but the true mourning is in the heart."

Dyckman felt an almost uncontrollable desire to get away before he
said something that might be true. He began to wonder what, after
all, poor Gilfoyle had experienced from this hard-hearted little
beauty. He saw that he was almost forgotten already. He thought,
"How fast they go, the dead!" That same Villon had said it centuries
before: "_Les morts vont vites_."

The Thropps settled down to a comfortable discussion of future plans.
One ledger had been finished. They would open a new one. Jim saw that
Gilfoyle's departure had been accepted as a Heaven-sent solution of
Kedzie's problems.

Abruptly it came to Dyckman that the solution of their problem
was the beginning of a whole volume of new problems for him. He
recalled that while he had become Kedzie's fiance in ignorance of
his predecessor, he had rashly promised to buy off Gilfoyle as soon
as he learned of him. But death had come in like a perfect waiter
and subtly removed from the banquet-table the thing that offended.
Nothing had happened, however, to release Dyckman from his
engagement. Gilfoyle's death ought not to have made a more
important difference than his life would have made, and yet it
made all the difference in the world to Dyckman's feelings.

He could not say this, however. He could not ask to be excused
from his compact. His heart and his brain cried out that they
did not want this merry little widow for their wife, but his lips
could not frame the words. During the long silences and the evasive
chatter that alternated he felt one idea in the air: "Why doesn't
Mr. Dyckman offer to go on with the marriage?" Yet he could not
make the offer. Nor could he make the counterclaim for a dissolving
of the betrothal.

He studied the Thropp trio and pictured the ridicule and the
hostility they would arouse among his family and friends--not
because they were poor and simple and lowly, but because they were
not honest and sweet and meek. The Dyckmans had poor relations and
friends in poverty and old peasant-folk whom they loved and admired
and were proud to know. But Dyckman felt that the elder Thropps
deserved to be rebuffed with snobbery because of their own snobbery.
Nevertheless, he was absolutely incapable of administering
discipline.

At last Mrs. Thropp grew restive, fearsome that the marriage might
not take place, and desperately fearful that she might be cheated
out of her visit in the spare room, at the home of the great Mrs.
Dyckman. She said, grimly:

"Well, we might as well understand one another, Mr. Dyckman. You
asked my daughter to marry you, didn't you?"

"Yes, Mrs. Thropp."

"Do you see anything in what's happened to prevent your getting
married?"

"No, Mrs. Thropp."

"Then I don't see much use wastin' time, do you? Life's too uncertain
to go postponin' happiness when it's right within your reach.
Kedzie's father and I ought to be gettin' back home, and I'd feel
a heap more comfortable if I could know my poor little chick was
safe in the care of a good man."

The possibility of getting Mr. and Mrs. Thropp out of town soon was
the one bright thought in Dyckman's mind. He felt compelled to say:

"Then let us have the ceremony, by all means. We shall have to wait
awhile, I suppose, for decency's sake."

"Decency!" said Mrs. Thropp, managerially. "My Kedzie hadn't lived
with the man for a long while. Nobody but us knows that she ever did
live with him. He'd abandoned her, and when he came back it was only
to try to get money out of her. I can't see that she has any call
to worry about decency's sake. He's done her harm enough. She can't
do him any good by keepin' you waitin'."

"Just as you think best, Mrs. Thropp," said Dyckman. He began to
smile in spite of himself. He was thinking how many mothers and
daughters had tried to get him to the altar, not because they loved
him, but because they loved his father's money and fame. Jim had
dodged them all and made a kind of sport of it. And now he was
cornered and captured by this old barbarian with her movie-beauty
daughter who was a widow and wouldn't wear weeds.

Mrs. Thropp saw Dyckman's smile, but did not dare to ask its origin.
She asked, instead:

"Would you be having a church wedding, do you think?"

"Indeed not," said Dyckman, with such incision that Mrs. Thropp
felt it best not to risk a debate.

"Just a quiet wedding, then?"

"As quiet as possible, if you don't mind."

Kedzie sat speechless through all this. She wished that Jim would
show more ardor for her, but she felt that he was doing fairly well
not to knock her parents' heads together the way he had her husband's
and his friend's. She was as eager as Jim to get rid of the elder
Thropps, but she wanted to make sure of the wedding, and her mother
was evidently to be trusted to bring it about. At length Jim spoke
in the tone of the condemned man who says, "Well, let's hurry up
and get the execution off our minds".

"I'll go and see a lawyer and make inquiries about how the marriage
can be done."

He started to say to Kedzie, "You ought to know."

She started to tell him about the Marriage License Bureau in the
Municipal Building. Both recaptured silence tactfully.

He kissed Kedzie, and he had a narrow escape from being kissed
by Mrs. Thropp.

THE THIRD BOOK

MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT SATISFIED

CHAPTER I

In the history of nations sometimes a paragraph serves for a certain
decade, while a volume is not enough for a certain day. It is so with
the history of persons.

In the thirty-six hours after he received Charity Coe's invitation to
call Jim Dyckman passed from being Charity's champion against her own
husband to being Kedzie's champion against hers. Charity rewarded his
chivalrous pommeling of Cheever by asking him never to come near her
again. Kedzie rewarded his punishment of Gilfoyle by arranging that
he should never leave her again.

It was Charity that he longed for, and Kedzie that he engaged to
marry.

In that period Peter Cheever had traveled a very short distance
in a journey he had postponed too long. Cheever had been hardly
conscious when they smuggled him at midnight from his club to his
own home. He had slept ill and achily. He was ashamed to face the
servants, and he wanted to murder his valet for being aware of
the master's defeat.

He did not know how ashamed the household retainers were of him and
of themselves. The valet and butler had earned good sums on occasions
by taking tips from Cheever on prize-fighters and jockeys. But they
felt betrayed now, and as disconsolate as the bottle-holders and
towel-flappers of a defeated pugilist.

They did not know who had whipped their master till the word came
from the Dyckman household that their master had come home glorious
from whipping the stuffing out of somebody. It was easy to put one
and one together and make two.

One of Cheever's worst embarrassments was the matter of Zada.
His battered head suffered tortures before it contrived a proper
lie for her. Then he called Zada up from his house and explained
that as he was leaving his club to fly to her, his car had skidded
into another, with the result that he had been knocked senseless
and cut up with flying glass; otherwise he was in perfect shape.
Unfortunately, he had been recognized and taken to his official
home instead of to the residence of his heart.

Zada was all for dashing to him at once; but he persuaded her that
that would be quite impossible. He was in no real danger in his own
house, and he would come back to his heart's one real first, last,
only, and onliest darling love just as soon as he could.

She subsided in wails of terror and loneliness. They touched his
heart so that he determined to end his effort at amphibian existence,
give up his legal establishment and legalize the illegal.

He wrote a note to Charity with much difficulty, since his knuckles
were sore and his pride was black and blue. His spoken language was
of the same tints. His written language was polite and formal.

It was a silly, tragic situation that led a husband to write
his wife a letter requesting an interview. Charity sent back
a scrawl--"_Yes, in fifteen minutes_."

Cheever spent a bad quarter of an hour dressing himself. His face
was too raw to endure a razor, and the surgeon had put little
cross-patches of adhesive tape on one of his cheek-bones and at
the edge of his mouth, where his lip had split as the tooth behind
it went overboard.