We Can\'t Have Everything

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The next morning McNiven appeared before Justice Palfrey, submitted
his motion, and asked for an interlocutory decree. He left his paper
with the clerk. During the afternoon Justice Palfrey looked over
the referee's report and decided to grant McNiven's motion. In view
of the prominence of the contestants and since he had heard of
Charity's good works, and felt sure that she had suffered enough
in the wreck of her home, he ordered the evidence sealed. This
harmed nobody but the hungry reporters and the gossip-appetite
of the public.

McNiven was waiting in the office of the clerk, and as soon as
he learned that the judge had granted the motion he submitted the
formal orders to be signed. The clerk entered the interlocutory
decree. And now the marriage was ended except for three months of
grace.

The first day after that period had passed McNiven submitted an
affidavit that there had been no change in the feelings of the
parties and there was no good reason why the decree should not be
granted. He made up the final papers, gave Tessier notice, and
deposited the record with the clerk. Justice Cruden, then sitting
in Special Term, Part III., signed the judgment. And the deed was
done. Mrs. Cheever was permitted to resume her maiden name, but
that meant too much confusion; she needed the "Mrs." for protection
of a sort.

The divorce carried with it a clause forbidding the guilty husband
to marry any one else before five years had passed. But while the
divorce was legal all over the world, this restriction ended at
the State bounds.

So Peter Cheever and Zada L'Etoile went over into the convenient
realm of New Jersey the next morning, secured a license, and on the
following day were there made man and wife before all the world.
This entitled them to a triumphant return to New York. And now Peter
Cheever had also done the honorable thing. This "honorable thing"
business will be one of the first burdens dropped by the men when
the women perfect their claim to equality.

In about two weeks a daughter was born to the happy twain. Thanks to
Charity's obliging nature, it was christened in church and accepted
in law as a complete Cheever. Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Cheever now began
to live (more or less) happily ever after (temporarily).

Altogether it was a triumph of legal, social, and surgical technic.
It outraged many virtuous people. There was a good deal of harsh
criticism of everybody concerned. The worthies who believe that
divorce is the cause of the present depraved state of the United
States bewailed one more instance of the vile condition of the
lawless Gomorrah. The eternal critics of the rich used the case as
another text in proof of the complete control that wealth has over
our courts, though seventy-five divorces to obscure persons were
granted at the same time without difficulty, with little expense
and no newspaper punishment.

Dr. Mosely wrote Charity a letter of heartbroken condemnation,
and she slunk away to the mountains to escape from the reproach
of all good people and to recuperate for another try at the French
war hospitals. She had let her great moving-picture project lapse.
She felt hopelessly out of the world and she was afraid to face
her friends. Still, she had money and her "freedom," and one really
cannot expect everything.

CHAPTER VI

The ninety days following Charity's encounter with Jim Dyckman and
his bride at Sherry's had been busy times for her and epochal in
their changes. From being one of the loneliest and most approved
women in America she had become one of the loneliest and least
approved. Altruism is perhaps the most expensive of the virtues.

No less epochal were those months for the Dyckmans, bride and groom.
Their problems began to bourgeon immediately after they left New
Jersey and went to Kedzie's old apartment for further debate as to
their future lodgings.

Mr. and Mrs. Thropp were amazed by their sudden return. Adna was
a trifle sheepish. They found him sitting in the parlor in his
shirt-sleeves and stocking feet, and staring out of the window at
the neighbors opposite. In Nimrim it was a luxury to be able to spy
into the windows of one neighbor at a time. Opposite Adna there were
a hundred and fifty neighbors whom it cost nothing to watch. Some
of them were very startling; some of them were stupid old ladies who
rocked, or children who flattened their noses against the windows,
or Pekingese doglets who were born with their noses against a pane,
apparently. But some of the neighbors were fascinatingly careless
of inspection--and they always promised to be more careless than
they were.

Mrs. Thropp came rushing in from the kitchen. She had been trying
in vain to make a friend of Kedzie's one servant. But this maid,
like a self-respectful employee or a good soldier, resented the
familiarity of an official superior as an indecency and an insult.
She made up her mind to quit.

After Mrs. Thropp had expressed her wonderment at seeing her children
return, she turned the full power of her hospitality on poor Jim
Dyckman. He could not give notice and seek another job.

Mrs. Thropp's first problem was the proper style and title of
her son-in-law.

"What am I goin' to call you, anyhow?" she said. "_Jim_ sounds
kind of familiar on short acquaintance, and _James_ is sort of
distant. _Son-in-law_ is hor'ble, and _Son_ is--How would
you like it if I was to call you '_Son_'? What does your own
mother call you?"

"_Jimsy_" Jim admitted, shamefacedly.

"_Jimsy_ is right nice," said Mrs. Thropp, and she Jimsied him
thenceforward, to his acute distress. He found that he had married
not Kedzie only but all the Thropps there were. The father and mother
were the mere foreground of a vast backward and abyss of relations,
beginning with a number of Kedzie's brothers and sisters and their
wives and husbands. Jim was a trifle stunned to learn what lowly
jobs some of his brothers-in-law were glad to hold.

Mrs. Thropp felt that it was only right to tell Jim as much as she
could about his new family. She told him for hours and hours. She
described people he had never seen or heard of and would travel many
a mile to avoid. He had never cared for genealogy, and his own long
and brilliant ancestry did not interest him in the slightest. He had
hundreds of relations of all degrees of fame and fortune, and he
felt under no further obligation to them than to let alone and be
let alone.

His interest in his new horde of relations-in-law was vastly less
than nothing. But Mrs. Thropp gave him their names, their ages,
habits, diseases, vices, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies. She recounted
doings and sayings of infinite unimportance and uninterest.

With the fatuous, blindfolded enthusiasm of an after-dinner speaker
who rambles on and on and on while the victims yawn, groan, or fold
their napkins and silently steal away, Mrs. Thropp poured out her
lethal anecdotes.

Jim went from weariness to restiveness, to amazement, to wrath,
to panic, to catalepsy, before Kedzie realized that he was being
suffocated by these reminiscences. Then she intervened.

Mrs. Thropp's final cadence was a ghastly thought:

"Well, now, I've told you s'much about all our folks, you must tell
me all about yours."

"The Lord forbid!" said Jim.

Mrs. Thropp took this to mean that he did not dare confess the
scandals of his people. She knew, of course, from reading, that rich
people are very wicked, but she did want to know some of the details.

Jim refused to make disclosures. He was wakened from his coma by
Mrs. Thropp's casual remark:

"Say, Jimsy, how do folks do, on East here? Will your mother call
on me and Kedzie, or will she look for us to call on her first?"

"My God!" thought Jim.

"What say?" said Mrs. Thropp.

Jim floundered and threshed. He had never before realized what his
mother's famous pride might mean. She had always been only mother
to him, devoted, tender, patient, forgiving, amusing, sympathetic,
anxious, flattered by his least attention. Yet he had heard her
spoken of as a human glacier for freezing social climbers and pushers
of every sort. She was huge and slow; she could be frightfully cold
and crushing.

Now he understood what congelation the trembling approachers to her
majesty must have suffered. He was afraid to think what she would
do to the Thropps. Her first glance would turn them to icicles and
her first word would snap them to bits.

It is hard enough for any mother to receive the news that her son
is in love with any woman and wants to marry her. Mrs. Dyckman
must learn that her adored child had transferred his loyalty to
a foreigner, a girl she had never seen, could not conceivably have
selected, and could never approve. Even the Prodigal Son, when
he went home, did not bring a wife with him. Ten to one if he had
brought one she would have got no veal--or if she got it she would
not have cared for it.

Jim could not be blind even now in his alarm to Kedzie's intense
prettiness, but seeing her as through his mother's eyes coldly,
he saw for the first time the plebeiance of her grace.

If she had been strong and rugged her commonness would have had a
certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined
is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off
the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it
is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C
and miss it by a comma.

Yet Jim understood that he could not long prevent the encounter of
his wife and her relatives with his mother and her relatives. He
could not be so boorishly insolent as to forbid the meeting, and he
could not be so blind as to expect success. He got away at length on
the pretext of making arrangements with his mother, who was a very
busy woman, he said. Mrs. Thropp could not imagine why a rich woman
should be busy, but she held her whist.

Jim was glad to escape, even on so gruesome an errand, and now when
he kissed Kedzie good-by he had to kiss momma as well. He would
almost rather have kissed poppa.

He entered his home in the late afternoon with the reluctance
of boyhood days when he had slunk back after some misdemeanor.
He loathed his mission and himself and felt that he had earned
a trouncing and a disinheritance.

He found his mother and father in the library playing, or rather
fighting, a game of double Canfield. In the excitement of the finish
they were like frantic children, tied in knots of hurry, squealing
with emulation. The cards were coming out right, and the speedier
of the two to play the last would score two hundred and fifty to
the other's nothing.

Mrs. Dyckman was the more agile in snatching up her cards and
placing them. Her eyes darted along the stacks with certainty,
and she came in first by a lead of three cards.

Dyckman was puffing with exhaustion and pop-eyed from the effort
to look in seven directions at once. It rendered him scarlet to
be outrun by his wife, who was no Atalanta to look at. Besides,
she always crowed over him insufferably when she won, and that was
worse than the winning. When Jim entered the room she was laughing
uproariously, pointing the finger of derision at her husband and
crying:

"Where did you get a reputation as a man of brains? There must be
an awful crowd of simpletons in Wall Street." Then she caught sight
of her son and beckoned to him. "Come in and hold your father's
head, Jimsy."

"Please don't call me Jimsy!" Jim exploded, prematurely.

His mother did not hear him, because his father exploded at the
same moment:

"Come in and teach your mother how to be a sport. She won't play
fair. She cheats all the time and has no shame when she gets caught.
When she loses she won't pay, and when she wins she wants cash on
the nail."

"Of course I do!"

"Why, there isn't a club in the country that wouldn't expel you
twice a week."

"Well, pay me what you owe me, before you die of apoplexy."

"How much do I owe you?"

"Eight dollars and thirty-two cents."

"I do not! That's robbery. Look here: you omitted my score twice
and added your own up wrong."

"Did I really?"

"Do five and two make nine?"

"Don't they?"

"They do not!"

"Well, must you have hydrophobia about it? What difference
does it make?"

"It makes the difference that I only owe you three dollars
and twenty-six cents."

"All right, pay it and simmer down. Isn't he wonderful, Jimsy? He
just sent a check for ten thousand dollars to the fund for blind
French soldiers and then begrudges his poor wife five dollars."

"But that's charity and this is cards; and it's humiliating to
think that you haven't learned addition yet."

Mrs. Dyckman winked at Jim and motioned him to sit beside her.
He could not help thinking of the humiliating addition he was about
to announce to the family. While his father counted out the change
with a miserly accuracy he winked his off eye at Jim and growled,
with a one-sided smile:

"Where have you been for the past few days, and what mischief have
you been up to? You have a guilty face."

But Mrs. Dyckman threw her great arm about his great shoulders,
stared at him as she kissed him, and murmured: "You don't look
happy. What's wrong?"

Jim scraped his feet along the floor gawkily and mumbled: "Well, I
suppose I'd better tell you. I was going to break it to you gently,
but I don't know how."

Mrs. Dyckman took alarm at once. "Break it gently? Bad news? Oh,
Jim, you Haven't gone and got yourself engaged to some fool girl,
have you? Not that?"

"Worse than that, mother!"

"Oh dear! what could be worse? Only one thing, Jim! You haven't--you
haven't married a circus-rider or a settlement-worker or anything
like that, have you?"

"No."

"Lord! what a relief! I breathe again."

Jim fired off his secret without further delay. "I've been married,
though."

"Married? Already? Married to what? Anybody I ever heard of?"

His mother was gasping in a dangerous approach to heart failure.
Jim protested.

"You never saw her, but she's a very nice girl. You'll love her
when you meet her."

Jim's father sputtered as he pulled himself out of his chair:
"Wha-what's this? You--you damned young cub! You--why--what--who--oh,
you jackass! You big, lumbering, brainless, heartless bonehead!
Oh--whew! Look at your poor mother!"

Jim was frightened. She was pounding at her huge breast with one
hand and clutching her big throat with another. Her husband whirled
to a siphon, filled a glass with vichy, and gave it to Jim to hold
to her lips while he ran to throw open a window.

Jim knelt by his mother and felt like Cain bringing home the news
of the first crime. Her son's remorse was the first thing that
Eve felt, no doubt; at least, it was the first that Mrs. Dyckman
understood when the paroxysm left her. She felt so sorry for her
lad that she could not blame him. She blamed the woman, of course.
She cried awhile before she spoke; then she caressed Jim's cheeks
and blubbered:

"But we mustn't make too much of a fuss about a little thing like
a wedding. It's his first offense of the kind. I suppose he fell
into the trap of some little devil with a pretty face. Poor innocent
child, with no mother to protect him!"

"Poor innocent scoundrel!" old Dyckman snarled. "He probably got
her into trouble, and she played on his sympathy."

This was what Jim sorely needed, some unjust accusation to spur him
out of his shame. He sprang to his feet and confronted his father.

"Don't you dare say a word against my wife."

"Oh, look at him!" his father smiled. "He's grown so big he can
lick his old dad. Well, let me tell you, my young jackanapes, that
if anybody has said anything against your wife it was you."

"What have I said?"

"You've said that you married her secretly. You've not dared to let
us see her first. You've not dared to announce your engagement and
take her to the church like a gentleman. Why? Why? Answer me that,
before you grow so tall. And who is she, anyway? I hear that you had
a prize-fight with Peter Cheever and got expelled from the club."

"When did you hear that?"

"It's all over town. What was the fight about? Was he interested
in this lady, too?"

One set of Jim's muscles leaped to the attack; another set held
them in restraint.

"Be careful, dad!" he groaned. "Peter Cheever never met my wife."

"Well, then, what were you fighting him about?"

"That's my business."

"Well, it's my business, too, when I find the name of my son posted
for expulsion on the board of my pet club. You used to be sweet on
Cheever's wife. You weren't fighting about her, were you?"

This chance hit jolted the bridegroom so perceptibly that his
father regretted having made it. He gasped:

"Great Lord, but you're the busy young man! Solomon in all
his glory--"

"Let him alone now," Mrs. Dyckman broke in, "or you'll have me on
your hands." She needed only her husband's hostility to inflame her
in defense of her son. "If he's married, he's married, and words
won't divorce him. We might as well make the best of it. I've no
doubt the girl is a darling, or Jim wouldn't have cared for her.
Would you, Jimsy?"

"Naturally not," Jim agreed, with a rather sickly enthusiasm.

"Is she nice-looking?"

"She is famous for her beauty."

"Famous! Oh, Heavens! That sounds ominous. You mean she's
well known?"

"Very--in certain circles."

"In certain circles!" Mrs. Dyckman was like a terrified echo. She
had known of such appalling misalliances that there was no telling
how far her son might have descended.

Old Dyckman snarled, "Do you mean that you've gone slumming for
a wife?"

Jim dared not answer this. His mother ignored it, too. But her
thoughts were in a panic.

"What circles is she famous in, your wife, for her beauty?"

Jim could not achieve the awful word "movies" at the moment. He
prowled round it.

"In professional circles."

"Oh, an actress, then?"

"Well, sort of."

"They call everything an actress nowadays. She isn't a--a chorus-girl
or a show-girl?"

"Lord, no!" His indignation was reassuring to a degree.

His father broke in again, "It might save a few hours of dodging
and cross-examination if you'd tell us who and what she is."

"She is known professionally as Anita Adair."

So parochial a thing is fame that the title which millions of
people had learned to know and love meant absolutely nothing to
the Dyckmans. They were so ignorant of the new arts that even Mary
Pickford meant hardly more to them than Picasso or Matisse.

Jim brought out a photograph of Kedzie, a small one that he carried
in his pocket-book for company. The problem of what she looked like
distracted attention for the moment from the problem of what she did
and was.

Mrs. Dyckman took the picture and perused it anxiously. Her husband
leaned over her shoulder and studied it, too. He was mollified
and won by the big, gentle eyes and that bee-stung upper lip. He
grumbled:

"Well, you're a good chooser for looks, anyway. Sweet little thing."

Mrs. Dyckman examined the face more knowingly. She saw in those big,
innocent eyes a serene selfishness and a kind of sweet ruthlessness.
In the pouting lips she saw discontent and a gift for wheedling. But
all she said was, "She's a darling."

Jim caught the knell-tone in her praise and feared that Kedzie was
dead to her already. He saw more elegy in her sigh of resignation
to fate and her resolution to take up her cross--the mother's cross
of a pretty, selfish daughter-in-law.

"You haven't told us yet how she won her--fame, you said."

And now Jim had to tell it.

"She has had great success in the--the--er--pictures."

"She's a painter--an illustrator?"

"No, she--well--you know, the moving pictures have become very
important; they're the fifth largest industry in the world, I
believe, and--"

The silence of the parents was deafening. Their eyes rolled together
and clashed, as it were, like cannon-balls meeting. Dyckman senior
dropped back into his chair and whistled "Whew!" Then he laughed
a little:

"Well, I'm sure we should be proud of our alliance with the fifth
largest industry. The Dyckmans are coming up in the world."

"Hush!" said Mrs. Dyckman. She was thinking of the laugh that rival
mothers would have on her. She was thinking of the bitterness of
her other children, of her daughter who was a duchess in England,
and of the squirming of her relatives-in-law. But she was too fond
of her boy to mention her dreads. She passed on to the next topic.

"Where are you living?"

"Nowhere yet," Jim confessed. "We just got in from our--er--honeymoon
this morning. We haven't decided what to do."

Then Mrs. Dyckman took one of those heroic steps she was capable of.

"You'd better bring her here."

"Oh no; she'd be in your way. She'd put you out."

"I hope not, not so soon," Mrs. Dyckman laughed, dismally. "She'll
probably not like us at all, but we can start her off right."

"That's mighty white of you, mother."

"Did you expect me to be--yellow?"

"No, but I thought you might be a little--blue."

"If she'll make you happy I'll thank Heaven for her every day and
night of my life. So let's give her every chance we can, and I hope
she'll give us a chance."

Jim's arms were long enough to encircle her and hug her tight. He
whispered to her, "I never needed you more, you God-blessed--mother!"

Her tears streamed down her cheeks upon his lips, and he had a little
taste of the bitterness of maternal love. She felt better after she
had cried a little, and she said, with courage:

"Now we mustn't keep you away from her. If you want me to, I'll go
along with you and call on her and extend a formal invitation."

Jim could not permit his revered mother to make so complete a
submission as that. He shook his head:

"That won't be necessary. I'll go get Kedzie."

"Kedzie? I thought her name was Anita."

"That was her stage name--her film name."

"Oh! And her name wasn't Adair, either, perhaps?"

"No, it was--er--Thropp!"

"Oh!" She wanted to say "What a pretty name!" to make it easier for
him, but she could not arrange the words on her tongue. She asked,
instead, "Is she American?"

"American? I should say so! Born in Missouri."

Another "Oh!" from the mother.

Jim swallowed a bit more of quinine and made his escape, saying:

"You're as fine as they make 'em, mother. I won't be gone long."

The father was so disgusted with the whole affair that he could only
save himself from breaking the furniture by a sardonic taunt:

"Tell our daughter-in-law that if she wants to bring along her camera
she can have the ballroom for a studio. We never use it, anyway."

"Shame on you!" his wife cried. "Don't mind him, Jimsy."

"Jimsy" reminded Jim of Mrs. Thropp and his promise to ask his mother
to call on her. But he had confessed all that he could endure. He
was glad to get away without letting slip the fact that "Thropp" had
changed to "Dyckman" _via_ "Gilfoyle."

His mother called him back for another embrace and then let him go.
She had nowhere to turn for support but to her raging husband, and
she found herself crying her eyes out in his arms. He had his own
heartbreak and pridebreak, but he was only a man and no sympathy need
be wasted on him. He wasted none on himself. He laughed ruefully.

"You were saying, mother, only awhile ago that you wished he'd marry
some nice girl. Well, he's married, and we'll have to take what he
brings us. But, oh, these children, these damned children!"

A little later he was trying to brace himself and his wife against
the future.

"After all, marriage is only an infernal gamble. We might have
scoured the world and picked out an angel for him, and she might
have run off with the chauffeur the second week. I guess I got the
only real angel that's been captured in the last fifty years. The
boy may have stumbled on a prize unbeknownst. We'll give the kid
the benefit of the doubt, anyway. Won't we?"

"Of course, dear, if she'll give us the same."

"Well, Jim said she came from Missouri. We've got to show her."

"Ring for Wotton, will you?"

"What are you going to tell him?"

"The truth."

"Good Lord! Do you dare do that?"

"I don't dare not to. They'll find it out down-stairs quickly
enough in their own way."

"I see. You want to beat 'em to it."

"Exactly."

For years the American world had been discussing the duty of parents
to teach their children the things they must inevitably learn in
uglier and more perilous ways. There were editorials on it, stories,
poems, novels, numberless volumes. It even reached the stage. Mrs.
Dyckman had left her own children to find things out for themselves.
It occurred to her that she should not make the same mistake with
the eager servants who gave the walls ears and the keyholes eyes.

It was a ferocious test of her courage, but she knew that she
would have all possible help from Wotton. He had not only been the
head steward of the family ship in countless storms, but he had an
inherited knowledge of the sufferings of homes. He had learned his
profession as page to his father, who had been a butler and the son
of a butler.

Wotton came in like a sweet old earl and waited while Mrs. Dyckman
gathered strength to say as offhandedly as if she were merely
announcing that Jim was arrested for murder: