We Can\'t Have Everything

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He yowled as he slipped his arms into a long bathrobe, and he struck
at the valet when the wretch suggested a little powder for one eye.

Charity had seen Cheever brought in at midnight and had looked
to it that he had every care. But now she came into his room with a
maidenly timidity. He did not know that she had rebuked Jim Dyckman
with uncharacteristic wrath for the attack. She did not tell Cheever
this, even though his first words to her demanded some such defense.

In the quarrels of lovers, or of those who have exchanged loves,
it makes little difference what the accusation is all about: the
thing that hurts is the fact of accusation.

Charity was so shamed at being stormed at by her husband that it
was a mere detail that he stormed at her with a charge that she
had goaded Jim Dyckman on to attack him.

Cheever had a favor to ask; so he put the charge more mildly now
than he had in his first bewildered rage. He accepted Charity's
silence as pleading guilty. So he went on:

"The fact that you chose Dyckman for your authorized thug and
bravo proves what I have thought for some time, that you love him
and he loves you. Now I have no desire to come between two such
turtle-doves, especially when one of them is one of those German
flying-machine _Taubes_ and goes around dropping dynamite-bombs
on me through club roofs.

"I'm not afraid of your little friend, and as soon as I get well
I'll get him; but I want it to be purely an exercise in the fistic
art, and not a public fluttering of family linen. So since you want
Jim Dyckman, take him, by all means, and let me bow myself out of
the trio.

"I'll give you a nice, quiet little divorce, and do the fair thing
in the alimony line, and then after a proper interval you and
little Jimmie can toddle over to the parson and then toddle off to
hell-and-gone, for all I care. How does that strike you, my dear?"

Charity pondered, and then she said, "And where do you toddle off
to?"

"Does that interest you?"

"Anything that concerns your welfare interests me."

"I see. Well, don't worry about me."

"There's no hurry, of course?"

"Not on my part," said Cheever. "But Dyckman must be growing
impatient, since he tries to murder me to save the lawyer's
fees."

"Well, if you're in no hurry, Peter, I'm not. I'll think it over
for a few months. It's bad weather for divorces now, anyway."

Cheever's heart churned in his breast. He knew that Zada could not
afford to wait. He should have married her long ago, and there was
no time to spare now. Charity's indifference frightened him. He did
not dream that through the dictagraph Charity had shared with him
Zada's annunciation of her approaching motherhood.

He turned and twisted in flesh and spirit, trying to persuade
Charity to proceed immediately for a divorce, but in vain.

Finally she ceased to laugh at him and demanded, sternly, "Why
don't you tell me the truth for once?"

He stared at her, and after a crisis of hesitation broke and
informed her of what she already knew. Now that he was at her feet,
Charity felt only pity for him, and even for Zada. She was sorrier
for them than for herself.

So she said: "All right, old man; let's divorce us. Will you or
shall I?"

"You'd better, of course; but you must not mention poor Zada."

"Oh, of course not!"

A brief and friendly discussion of ways and means followed, and
then Charity turned to go, saying:

"Well, I'll let you know when you're free. Are there any other
little chores I can do for you?"

"No, thanks. You're one damned good sport, and I'm infernally
sorry I--"

"Let's not begin on sorries. Good night!"

And such was unmarriage _a la mode_.

CHAPTER II

And now having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity began to
feel pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her own rebuke of him for
assaulting Cheever had absolved him. In the retrospect, the attack
took on a knightliness of devotion. She recalled his lonely dogging
of her footsteps. If he had played the dog, after all, she loved
dogs. What was so faithful, trustworthy, and lovable as a dog?

But how was Charity to get word to Jim of her new heart? She could
not whistle him back. She could hardly go to him and apologize for
having been a good wife to a bad husband. And a married lady simply
must not say to a bachelor: "Pardon me a moment, while I divorce my
present consort. I'd like to wear your name for a change."

Charity might have been capable even of such a derring-do if she
had known that Jim Dyckman's bachelorhood was threatened with
immediate extinction by the Thropps. But she could not know. For,
however Jim's soul may have been mumbling, "Help, help!" he made no
audible sound. Unwilling brides may shriek for rescue, but unwilling
bridegrooms must not complain.

By a coincidence that was not strange Charity selected for her lawyer
Travers McNiven, the very man that Jim Dyckman selected. All three
had been friends since childhood. McNiven had been taken into the
famous partnership of Hamnett, Dawsey, Coggeshall, Thurlow & McNiven.

When Jim Dyckman telephoned him for an appointment he was told
to make it the next morning, as another client had pre-empted the
afternoon. Jim was glad enough of an excuse to postpone his marriage
by a day, never dreaming that Charity was the client who had
preempted McNiven.

McNiven wondered at the synchrony, but naturally mentioned neither
client to the other. His office was far down-town and far up in
the air. Its windows gave an amplitudinous vision of the Harbor
which Mr. Ernest Poole has made his own, but which was now a
vestibule to the hell of the European war. All the adjoining
land was choked far backward with a vast blockade of explosive
freight-trains waiting to be unloaded into the unheard-of multitude
of munition-ships waiting to run the gantlet of the German
submarines.

Charity had run that gantlet and was ready to run it again on another
errand of mercy, but first she must make sure that Zada's baby should
not enter the world before its mother entered wedlock.

After McNiven had proffered her a chair and she had exclaimed upon
the grandeur of the harborscape, she began:

"Sandy, I've come to see you about--"

"One moment!" McNiven broke in. "Before you speak I must as an
honest lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate."

"But you don't know what it is yet."

"I don't have to. I know that people come to lawyers only to get
out of scrapes or to get into scrapes dishonestly or unwisely.
Furthermore, every step that any human being contemplates is
a dangerous one and bound to lead to trouble."

"Oh, hush!" said Charity. "Am I supposed to pay you for that sort
of advice?"

"Being a friend, and a woman, and very rich, you will doubtless
never pay me at all. But let me warn you, Charity, that there is
nothing in life more dangerous than taking a step in any possible
direction--unless it is staying where you are."

"Oh, dear," sighed Charity, "you're worse than dear Doctor Mosely."

"Ah, you've been to the dear old doctor! And he's refused to help
you. When the Church denies a woman her way she comes to the devil.
You interest me. It's a divorce, then?"

"Yes."

McNiven remembered Jim Dyckman's ancient squiredom to Charity and
his recent telephony and he said to himself, "Aha!" But he said to
Charity, "Go on."

"Sandy, my husband and I have agreed to disagree."

"Then for Heaven's sake don't tell me about it!"

"But I've got to."

"But you mustn't! Say, rather, I have decided to divorce my husband."

"All right. Consider my first break unmade. Peter has asked me--I
mean, Peter has said that he will furnish me with the evidence on
one condition: that I shall not mention a certain person with whom
he has been living. He offers to provide me with any sort of evidence
you lawyers care to cook up."

McNiven stared at her and spoke with startling rigor. "Are you trying
to involve me in your own crimes?"

"Don't be silly. Peter says it is done all the time."

"Not in this office. Do you think I'd risk and deserve disbarment
even to oblige a friend?"

"You mean you won't help me, then?" Charity sighed, rising with
a forlorn sense of friendlessness.

McNiven growled: "Sit down! Of course I'll help you, but I don't
intend to let you drag me into ruin, and I won't help you get
a divorce that would be disallowed at the first peep of light."

"What can I do then? Peter said it could be managed quickly
and quietly."

"There are ways and ways, Charity Coe. The great curse of divorce
is the awful word 'collusion.' It can be avoided as other curses
can with a little attention to the language. Remember the old song,
'It's not so much the thing you say, as the nasty way you say it.'
That hound of a husband of yours wants to protect that creature
he has been flaunting before the world. So he offers to arrange
to be caught in a trap with another woman, and make you a present
of the evidence. Isn't that so?"

"I believe it is."

"Now the law says that 'any understanding preceding the act of
adultery' is collusion; it involves the committing of a crime. It
would be appalling for a nice little body like you to connive at
such a thing, wouldn't it?"

Charity turned pale. "I hadn't realized just what it meant."

"I thought not," said McNiven.

"He'll have to give me evidence of--of something that has already
happened, then, won't he?"

"The law calls that collusion also."

"Then what am I to do?"

"Couldn't you get evidence somehow without taking it from him?"

Charity was about to shake her head, but she nodded it violently.
She remembered the detectives she had engaged and the superabundant
evidence they had furnished her. She told McNiven about it and he
was delighted till she reminded him that she had promised not to
make use of Zada's name.

McNiven told her that she had no other recourse, and advised her
to see her husband. She said that it was hopeless and she expressed
a bitter opinion of the law. It seemed harsher than the Church,
especially harsh to those who did not flout its authority.

While Charity talked McNiven let his pipe-smoke trail out of the
window into the infinite where dreams fade from reality and often
from memory, and he thought, "If I can help Jim and Charity to get
together after all this blundering it will be a good job."

He was tempted to tell her that Jim was coming to see him, too, but
he was afraid that she knew it. If he had told her--but there goes
that eternal "if" again!

CHAPTER III

It is a fierce and searching test of a woman's mettle when first
she is confronted with temptation to rebel against the control of
her preacher. Men are used to it, and women must grow more and more
used to it as they advance into their long-deferred heritage.

Charity Coe Cheever was religious by every instinct. From childhood
she had thrilled to the creed and the music and the eloquence of
her Sundays. The beautiful industries of Christianity had engaged
her. She had been happy within the walls and had felt that her
piety gave her wings rather than chains.

And then she came abruptly to the end of her tether. She found
her soul revolted by a situation which her pastor commanded her
to accept as her lifelong portion. She found that to tolerate, and
by tolerating to collaborate in, the adultery of her husband and
his mistress was better religion than to free herself from odious
triplicity. She found that it was better religion to annul her
womanhood and remain childless, husbandless, and comfortless than
to claim the privileges, the freedoms, the renewing opportunities
the law allowed.

She came suddenly face to face with the terrifying fact that the
State offered her help and strength that the Church denied her.

She had reached indeed what the doleful balladists would call
"the parting of the ways," though no poet has yet chosen for his
heroine the distraught wretch who is driven to the bleak refuge
of divorce.

So long as it concerned only her own happiness Charity could
put away the choice. But the more she pondered that unless she
divorced her husband his mistress's baby would come into the world
with a hideous birthmark, the more she felt it her duty to flout
the Church. She shuddered to think of the future for that
baby, especially if it should be a girl. She felt curiously a
mother-obligation toward it. She blamed herself for her husband's
infidelity. She humbled herself and bowed her neck to the shame.

She left the Church and went to the law. And then she found that
the law had its own cruelties, its own fetters and walls and
loopholes and hypocrisies. She found that it is not even possible
to be a martyr and retain all one's dignity. One cannot even go
to the stake without some guile.

The wicked law which the Church abhorred had its own idea of
wickedness, and in the eyes of the law the agreement of a husband
and a wife to part was something loathsome. She expressed her
amazement to McNiven.

"It seems to me," she sighed, "if both husband and wife want
a divorce, they know best; and that fact ought to be sufficient
grounds in itself. And yet you tell me that if the law once gets
wind of the fact they've got to live together forever."

"That's it. They've got to live together whether they love together
or not--though of course you can get a separation very easily, on
almost any ground."

"But a separation is only a guarantee of--of infidelity,
I should think."

"Of course it is," said Lawyer McNiven.

"Then everything seems all wrong."

"Of course it is."

"Then why doesn't somebody correct it?"

"Who's going to bell the cat? Anybody who advocates divorce by mutual
consent is sure to be lynched more or less fatally, and especially
lynched by the very people who are making a mockery of matrimony in
their own lives.

"One marriage in twelve in the United States ends in divorce. You'll
not find anybody who dares to say that that is not a crying scandal.
Yet you and I know that home life in America is as pure and honorable
as in any other country. I'm an awful heathen, of course, but I'll
bet you I'm a true prophet when I say that divorce will increase
as the world goes on, instead of decreasing, and that in all the
countries where divorce is forbidden or restricted it will grow freer
and freer. Statistics prove it all over the globe."

To Charity Coe, the devout churchwoman, this picture was appalling.

"Oh, in Heaven's name, what will happen? The world will go all
to pieces!"

"That's what they said when men asked for the vote and for education,
when women asked for education and the vote; that's what they said
when people opposed the divine right of kings, and when they asked
for religious freedom; that's what they said when people opposed
slavery; that's what they said when people said that insane people
were not inhabited by devils and should be treated as invalids.
The trouble, Charity, is that a certain spirit has always been abroad
in the world fighting imaginary devils with the best intentions in
the world. And in all history there has never been anybody so
dangerous to human welfare as the zealot who wants to protect other
people from themselves and from the devils.

"The insane people were never inhabited by devils, and neither are
the sane people. Most men want one wife and most women want one
husband. Even in the polygamous countries you'll not find any more
real polygamy than you find in the countries with the strictest
marriage laws. Bluebeard was a Mohammedan, but Don Juan was a
Christian. Spain has no divorce on any grounds; neither has Italy.
Would you point to those countries as models of domestic purity?
Does any sane person dare say that home life in Spain is purer than
in the United States?

"I tell you, easy divorce goes right along with merciful laws,
public schools, clean prisons, free press, free speech."

Mrs. Cheever was a very good woman, and she abominated divorces.
She had very peculiar reasons for wanting one herself, as every one
has who wants one, but she felt her case to be so exceptional that
it proved the rule against divorces. She shrank a little from the
iconoclastic lawyer she had come to for aid, and reminded him of
the solemnity of the theme.

"Don't you believe in the sanctity of matrimony?"

"Just as much as I believe in the sanctity of personal liberty and
a contract and a debt and the obligation to vote and bear arms and
equality of opportunity and responsibility and--oh, a lot of other
sacred things--just as much and no more."

"But the Church calls marriage a sacrament."

"It does now, yes; but it didn't for over fifteen hundred years."

"What!"

"It's true. The trouble with you religious people is that you never
know the history of your own religion. And remember one more thing:
the marriage rules of the Christian Church are all founded on the
theories of men who never married. No wonder they found it easy
to lay down hard and fast rules. Remember another thing: the early
Church fathers, Saint Paul, Hieronymus, and thousands of others,
believed that marriage was only a little bit better than the worst
evil, and that womankind was hardly more than the devil's natural
weapon.

"It was not until the Church was eleven hundred and sixty-four years
old that Peter Lombard put marriage among the seven sacraments. And
marriage did not become an official matter of Church jurisdiction
till the Council of Trent in fifteen hundred and sixty-three. Think
of that! Marriage was not a sacrament for fifteen centuries, and
it has been one for less than four. And at that the Church could
only manage the problem by increasing the number of impediments to
marriage, which meant that it increased the number of excuses for
annulling it.

"The total number of marriages annulled would amaze you. History
is full of the most picturesque devices for granting divorce
without seeming to. Sometimes they would illegitimize two or
three generations in order to find a marriage within the forbidden
degrees.

"According to Saint Matthew, Christ allowed divorce on the ground
of adultery; according to Mark and Luke he made no such allowance.
New York State follows Saint Matthew. The Catholic Church follows
Luke and John. Old Martin Luther said that marriage was none of
the Church's business. And that's what I think."

"You don't believe in the religious ceremony?"

"I'm afraid I don't believe in religious ceremonies about anything.
I'm rather a heathen, you know--brought up in a good Presbyterian
Calvinistic atmosphere, but I've lost it all. I'll give three
cheers for virtue and the home as well as anybody; but my study
and my experience lead me to distrust preachers and preaching.

"Still, this is a free country, and married people have a right to
go to church if they want to, or to stay away. But I believe that
marriage must be a civil contract and that no preacher has a right
to denounce the State's prerogative, or try to belittle it. It is
strange, but true, that when the Church has ruled the State the
world has always groaned in corruption and cruelty.

"I believe that the law of New York is ridiculous in allowing only
one ground for divorce, and if the United States ever arranges
a uniform divorce law it will undoubtedly follow the policy of
the more liberal States. I believe, with Bernard Shaw and John
Galsworthy and a number of other good, great men, in cheap and
easy divorce, divorce within reach of the poor.

"As for morality, you have only to read the literature of the time
when there was no divorce to realize how little a safeguard it is
for the home. Boccaccio gives a social portrait of such a life,
and he is almost too indecent to read. Yet the picture he gives
is not half so terrible as Saint Catherine of Siena gives. They
had to cut that chapter out of her works."

"Oh, do you read her works, too?" said Charity, remembering her
experience with that flaming biography.

"I read a little of everybody. But everything I read and see confirms
my opinion that too much law is the curse of the world. Still, as I
say, I'm not a lawmaker. I'm a law-manipulator. I've been wondering
how long you would stand Cheever's scandalous behavior, and how long
you could be convinced that you were helping the morals of the world
by condoning and encouraging such immorality. Now that you've brought
your troubles to my shop I'm going to help you if I can. But I don't
want to get you or myself into the clutches of the law. You'll have
to take care of your Church relations as best you can. They may turn
you out, and you may roast on a gridiron hereafter, but that's your
business. Personally, I think the only wicked thing I've ever heard
of you doing was permitting your husband to board and lodge at your
house while he carried on with that--woman. A harem divided against
itself will not stand."

Charity was terrified by the man's profane view of sacred things,
and she was horrified to learn that she could only release herself
and Cheever from the shackles by a kind of trickery. She would have
to make her escape somewhat as she had seen Houdini break from his
ropes in the vaudevilles, by retiring behind dark curtains for
a while.

She felt guilty and craven whichever way she turned, and she imagined
the revulsion with which the good pastor would regard her. Yet she
was in a kind of mania to accept the scapegoat's burdens and be off
into the wilderness. She was resolved to undergo everything for the
sake of that poor child of Zada's hastening toward the world. She
thanked Heaven she had no child of her own to complicate her duty.

She understood why Cheever wanted to protect the name of the child's
mother from the courts, and she was baffled by the situation. The
lawyer, who was so flippant about the things the Church held so
sacred, was like a priest in his abhorrence of any tampering with
the letter of the law.

She left his office for a conference with Cheever. She found at home
that he had been telephoning to her. She called him up, and he came
over at once.

"I'm in a devil of a mess, Charity," he said. "My lawyer refuses
to help me give you evidence, and Zada--Miss L'Etoile--has developed
a peculiar streak of obstinacy. She is determined that no other woman
shall be named as the--er--co-respondent. She would rather be named
herself. She says everybody knows about our--er--relations, anyway;
and she doesn't care if they do."

Zada's character and her career had rendered her as contemptuous
of public disapproval as any zealot of a loftier cause than love.
There was a kind of barbaric insolence in her passion that Charity
could not help admiring a little. She felt a whit ashamed of her
own timidities and delicacies. The trouble with these proud defiers
of the public, however, is that they do not ask the consent of the
babies that are more or less implied in their superb amours.

Cheever was so distracted between the scruples of his lawyer and
Zada's lack of them that when Charity confessed how she had set
detectives on him and had secured a dictagraphic record of his
alliance with Zada he was overcome with gratitude.

So little a shift of circumstances makes all the difference between
a spy and a savior. The deed that he would once have cursed his wife
for stooping to, perhaps have beaten her for, was now an occasion
for overwhelming her with thanks.

He hurried away to his lawyer, and Charity telephoned McNiven for
another appointment the next afternoon. Jim Dyckman's appointment
was for the next morning.

CHAPTER IV

When Jim reached his office the next morning McNiven recommended
the view to him, gave him a chair, refused a cigar, lighted his pipe
instead, opened a drawer in his desk, put his feet in it, and leaned
far back in his swivel chair.

Jim began, "Well, you see, Sandy, it's like this--"

"One moment," McNiven broke in. "Before you speak I must as an
honest lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate."

"But, damn it, you don't know what it is yet."

"I don't have to. I know you, and I know that people don't come
to lawyers, as a rule, except to get out of a scrape dishonestly
or to get into one unwisely."

It was his office joke, and something more, a kind of formula for
squaring himself with his conscience, a phrase for warding off
the devil--as a beggar spits on the penny he accepts.

Having exorcised the demon, he said, "Go on, tell me: what's her
name and how much does she want for silence?"

"How much do you want for silence?" Jim growled.

"Shoot!"

McNiven was startled and grieved when he learned that Jim was not
making ready to marry Charity Coe, but some one else. Jim told
him as much as he thought necessary, and McNiven guessed the rest.
He groaned: "It seems impossible to surround marriage with such
difficulties that people won't break in and out. I've got a friend
of yours trying to bust a home as quietly as you're trying to
build one."

Of course, he did not mention Charity's name. He tried fervently
to convince Jim that he ought not to marry Kedzie, but, failing to
persuade him from the perils of matrimony, he did his best to help
him to a decent secrecy. His best was the program Jim and Kedzie
followed.