We Can\'t Have Everything

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"In general, yes; but why just now?"

"Your wife will never make friends with me."

"Of course she will. She's lonely enough to take up with anybody."

"Thanks!"

"Well, will you call?"

"Have you told her you were going to ask me to?"

"Not yet."

"Then I'll call, on one condition."

"What's that, Charity Coe?"

"That you don't tell her. You'd better not, or she'll have my eyes
and your scalp."

"But you'll call, won't you?"

"Of course. Anything you say--always."

"You're the damnedest decentest woman in the world, Charity Coe;
and if--"

He paused. It is just as well not to go iffing about such matters.

Charity stopped short in her laughter. She and Jim stared at each
other again across that abyss. It was terribly deep, but only
a step over.

They heard the door-bell faintly, and a sense of guilt confused
them again. Jim rose and wished himself out of it.

"It's only Prissy Atterbury," said Charity.

Prissy came in tugging at the ferocious mustaches that only
emphasized his lady-like carriage. He paused on the door-sill
to stare and gasp, "My Gawd, at it again!"

They did not know what he meant, and he would not explain that he
had seen them together ages ago and spread the gossip that they were
in intrigue. The coincidence of his recurrence on their scene was not
strange, for Charity had been using him as a kind of messenger-boy.

Prissy was that sort. He looked the gentleman and was, a somewhat
too gentle gentleman, but very useful to ladies who needed an
uncompromising escort and were no longer young enough to permit
of chaperonage. He was considered perfectly harmless, but he was
a fiend of gossip, and he rejoiced in the recrudescence of the Jim
and Charity affair.

Jim confirmed Prissy's eager suspicions by taking himself off with
a maximum of embarrassment. Charity went to the door with him--to
kiss him good-by, as Prissy gloatingly supposed, but actually to
say:

"I'll call on your wife to-morrow."

"You're an angel," said Jim, and meant it.

He thought all the way home what an angel she was, and Charity was
thinking at the same time what a fool she had been to let Peter
Cheever dazzle her to the fact that Jim Dyckman was the one man in
the world that she belonged to. She needed just him and he just her.

CHAPTER XII

Sometimes Jim Dyckman was foolish enough to wish that he had been
his wife's first lover. But a man has to get up pretty early to be
that to any woman. The minxes begin to flirt with the milk-bottle,
then with the doctor, and then to cherish a precocious passion for
the first rag sailor-doll.

Jim had come as near as any man may to being a woman's first love
in the case of Charity, and what good had it done him? He was the
first boy Charity had ever played with. Her nurse had bragged about
her to his nurse when Charity was just beginning to take notice
of other than alimentary things. By that time Jim was a blase roue
of five and his main interest in Charity was a desire to poke his
finger into the soft spot in her head.

The nurses restrained him in time, and his proud, young, little
mother of then, when she heard of it, decided that he was destined
to be a great explorer. His young father sniffed that he was more
likely to be a gynecologist. They had a grand quarrel over their
son's future. He became none of the things they feared or hoped that
he would and he carried out none of his own early ambitions.

His first impressions of Charity had ranged from contempt, through
curiosity, to protectiveness and affection. She got his heart first
by being helpless. He began by picking up the things she let fall
from her carriage or threw overboard and immediately cried for again.
She had been human enough to do a good deal of that. When things
cumbered her crib or her perambulator she brushed them into space
and then repented after them.

Following her marriage to Peter Cheever she did just that with Jim
Dyckman. His love cluttered up her domestic serenity and she chucked
it overboard. And then she wanted it again. Then her husband chucked
her overboard and she felt that it would not be so lonesome out there
since Jim would be out there, too. But she found that he had picked
himself up and toddled away with Kedzie. And now he could not pick
Charity up any more. His wife wouldn't let him.

Jim did not know that he wanted to pick Charity up again till he
called on her to ask her to call on his wife and pick Kedzie up out
of her loneliness. It was a terrific thought to the simple-minded
Jim when it came over him that the Charity Coe he had adored and
given up as beyond his reach on her high pedestal was now lying at
the foot of it with no worshiper at all.

Jim was the very reverse of a snob. Kedzie had won his devotion by
seeming to need it. She had lost it by showing that she cared less
for him than for the things she thought he could get for her. And
now Charity needed his love.

There were two potent principles in Jim's nature, as in many another
man's and woman's; one was an instant eagerness to help anybody
in trouble; another was an instant resentment of any coercion. Jim
could endure neither bossing nor being bossed; restraint of any sort
irked him. There may have been Irish blood in him, but at any rate
the saying was as true of him as of the typical Irishman--"You can
lead him to hell easier than you can drive him an inch."

When Jim left Charity's house his heart ached to think of her
distressful with loneliness. When he realized that somehow Kedzie
was automatically preventing him from helping Charity his marital
bonds began to chafe. He began to understand that matrimony was
hampering his freedom. He had something to resent on his own
behalf.

He had been so troubled with the thought of his shortcomings
in devotion to Kedzie that he had not pondered how much he had
surrendered. He had repented his inability to give Kedzie his
entire and fanatic love. He saw that he had at least given his
precious liberty of soul into her little hands.

Galled as he was at this comprehension, he began to think over the
lessons of his honeymoon and to see that Kedzie had not given him
entirety of devotion any more than he her. Little selfishnesses,
exactions, tyrannies, petulances, began to recur to him.

He was in the dangerous frame of mind of a bridegroom thinking
things over. At that time it behooves the bride to exert her
fascinations and prove her devotion as never before.

Kedzie, knowing nothing of Jim's call on Charity or of his new mood,
chanced to be in a most unfortunate humor. She criticized Jim;
she declined to be amused or entertained; rebuffed his advances,
ridiculed his pretensions of love. She even chose to denounce his
mother for her heartlessness, his sister for her neglect, his father
for his snobbery. That is always bad business. It puts a husband
at bay with his back against the foundation walls of loyalty. They
quarreled wonderfully and slept dos-a-dos. They did not speak the
next morning.

The next afternoon Jim saw to his dismay that Kedzie was putting on
her hat and gloves to go out on a shopping-cruise. If she went she
would miss Charity's call.

He knew that he ought not to tell her of Charity's visit in advance.
In fact, Charity had pledged him to a benevolent conspiracy in the
matter. He put up a flag of truce and resumed diplomatic relations.

With the diplomatic cunning of a hippopotamus he tried to decoy
Kedzie into staying at home awhile. His ponderous subtlety aroused
Kedzie's suspicions, and at length he confirmed them by desperately
confessing:

"Mrs. Cheever is going to call."

Kedzie's first thought was of Peter Cheever's new wife, who had been
taken up by a certain set of those whom one may call loose-principled
or divinely tolerant, as one's own prejudices direct. Kedzie could
not yet afford to be so forgiving. She flared up.

"Mrs. Cheever! That Zada thing going to call on me? How dare she!"

"Of course not."

"Oh, the other one, then?"

"Yes."

"The abandoned one?"

"That's pretty rough. She's been very kind to you and she wants
to be again."

"Where did you learn so much?"

"We were talking about you."

"Oh, you were, were you? That's nice! And where was all this?"

He indulged in a concessive lie for the sake or the peace. "I met
her in the street and walked along with her."

"Fine! And how did my name come to come up?"

"It naturally would. I was saying that I wished she'd--er--I wished
that you and she might be friends."

"So that you and she could see each other still oftener, I suppose."

"It's rotten of you to say that."

"And it's rottener of you to go talking to another woman about
your wife."

"But it was in the friendliest spirit, and she took it so."

"I see! Her first name is Charity and I'm to be one of her patients.
Well, you can receive her yourself. I don't want any of her old alms!
I won't be here!"

"Oh yes, you will!"

"Oh no, I won't!"

"You can't be as ill-mannered as that!"

"You talk to me of manners! Why, I've seen manners in your gang that
would disgrace a brakeman and a lunch-counter girl on one of dad's
railroads." Her father already had railroads! So many people had
them in the crowd she met that Kedzie was not strong enough to deny
her father one or two.

Kedzie had taken the most violent dislike to Charity for a dozen
reasons, all of them perfectly human and natural, and nasty and
unjustifiable, and therefore ineradicable. The first one was that
odious matter of obligation. Gratitude has been wisely diagnosticated
as a lively sense of benefits to come. The deadly sense of benefits
gone by is known as ingratitude.

No one knows just what the divinely unpardonable sin is, but the
humanly or at least womanly unpardonable sin is to have known one's
husband well before the wife met him, and then to try to be nice
to the wife. To have known the wife in her humble days and to have
done her a favor makes the sin unmentionable as well as unpardonable.

Jim Dyckman had involved himself in Charity's crime by trying to get
Charity to help his wife again. It was bad enough that Charity had
got Kedzie a job in the past and had sent Jim Dyckman to make sure
that she got it. But for Jim, after Kedzie and he had been married
and all, to ask Charity to rescue Kedzie from her social failure was
monstrous.

The fact that Jim had felt sorry for his lonely Kedzie marooned on
an iceberg in mid-society was humiliating enough; but for Charity
to dare to feel sorry for Kedzie, too, and to come sailing after
her--Kedzie shuddered when she thought of it.

She fought with her husband until it was too late for her to get
away. Charity's card came in while they were still wrangling. Kedzie
announced that she was not at home. Jim told the servant, "Wait!"
and gave Kedzie a look that she rather enjoyed. It was what they
call a caveman look. She felt that he already had his hands in her
hair and was dragging her across the floor bumpitty-bump. It made
her scalp creep deliciously. She was rather tempted to goad him
on to action. It would have a movie thrill.

But the look faded from Jim's eye and the blaze of wrath dulled to
a gray contempt. She was afraid that he might call her what she had
once overheard Pet Bettany call her--"A common little mucker." That
sort of contempt seared like a splash of vitriol.

Kedzie, like Zada, was a self-made lady and she wanted to conceal the
authorship from the great-grandmother-built ladies she encountered.

She pouted a moment, then she said to the servant, "We'll see her."
She turned to Jim. "Come along. I'll go and pet your old cat and
get her off my chest."

CHAPTER XIII

Jim thudded dismally along in her wake. Charity was in the
drawing-room wearing her politest face. She could tell from
Kedzie's very pose that she was as welcome as a submarine.

Kedzie said, "Awfully decent of you to come," and gave her
a handful of cold, limp fingers.

Charity politely pretended that she had called unexpectedly and that
she was in dire need of Kedzie's aid. She made herself unwittingly
ridiculous in the eyes of Kedzie, who knew and despised her motive,
not appreciating at all the consideration Charity was trying to show.

"I'm sorry to bother you, Mrs. Dyckman," Charity began, "but I've
got to throw myself on your mercy. A few of us are getting up a new
stunt for the settlement-work fund. It is to be rather elaborate
and ought to make a lot of money. It is to represent a day in the
life of a New York Bud. You can have your choice of several roles,
and I hope you will lend us a hand."

Kedzie had heard of this project and she had gnawed her bitter
heart in a chagrin of yearning to take part in it. She had not been
invited, and she had blenched every time she thought of it. She was
so much relieved at being asked that she almost forgave Charity for
her benevolence. She stammered: "It's awfully decent of you to ask
me. I'll do my bit with the greatest of pleasure."

She rather regretted those last five words. They were a bit
_Nimrimmy._

Charity sketched the program for her.

"The Bud is discovered in bed. A street piano wakes her. There is
to be a dance to a hurdy-gurdy. Then the Bud has breakfast. It is
served by a dancing maid and butler. Tom Duane is to be the butler.
You could be--no, you wouldn't fancy the maid, I imagine."

Kedzie did not fancy the maid.

Charity went on: "The girl dresses and goes to a rehearsal of the
Junior League. That's to be a ballet of harlequins and columbines.
She goes from there to her dressmaker's. I am to play the dressmaker.
I have my _mannequins,_ and you might want to play one of those
and wear the latest thing--or you could be one of the customers. You
can think it over.

"Then the girl is seen reading a magazine and there is a dance of
cover girls. If you have any favorite illustrator you could be one
of his types.

"Next the Bud goes to an art exhibition. This year Zuloaga is the
craze, and several of his canvases will come to life. Do you care
for Zuloaga?"

"Immensely, but--" Kedzie said, wondering just what Zuloaga did to
his canvases. She had seen a cubist exhibition that gave her a
headache, and she thought it might have something to do with Zulus.

Charity ran on: "After dinner the Bud goes to the theater and sees
a pantomime and a series of ballets, dolls of the nations--Chinese,
Polish, also nursery characters. You could select something in one
of those dances, perhaps.

"And last of all there is a chimney-sweeps' dance as the worn-out
Bud crawls into bed. If none of these suit you we'd be glad to have
any suggestion that occurs to you. Of course, a girl of to-day does
a thousand more things than I've mentioned. But the main thing is,
we want you to help us out.

"You are--if you'll forgive me for slapping you in the face with
a bouquet--you are exquisitely beautiful and I know that you dance
exquisitely."

"How do you know that?" Kedzie asked, rashly.

"I saw you once as a--" Charity paused, seeing the red run across
Kedzie's face. She had stumbled into Kedzie's past again, and
Kedzie's resentment braced her hurt pride.

Charity tried to mend matters by a little advice: "You mustn't blush,
my dear Mrs. Dyckman. If I were in your place I'd go around bragging
about it. To have been a Greek dancer, what a beautiful past!"

"Thanks!" said Kedzie, curtly, with basilisk eyes. "I think I'd
rather not dance any more. I'm an old married woman now. If you
don't mind, I'll be one of the customers at your shop. I'll come
in in the rippingest gown Jim can buy. I'll feel more comfortable,
too, under your protection, Mrs. Cheever."

Jim laughed and Kedzie grinned. But she was canny. She was thinking
that she would be safest among that pack of wolves if she relied on
her money to buy something dazzling rather than on the beauty that
Charity alleged. She did not want to dance before those people again.
She would never forget how her foot had slipped at Newport.

Thirdly, she felt that she would be sheltered a little from
persecution beneath the wing of Charity. It rather pleased her
to treat Charity as a motherly sort of person. It is the most
deliciously malicious compliment a woman can pay another.

Charity did not fail to receive the stab. But it amused her so far
as she was concerned. She felt that Kedzie was like one of those
incorrigible _gamines_ who throw things at kindly visitors to
the slums. She felt sorry for Jim, and wondered again by what strange
devices he had been led to marry so incompatible a girl as Kedzie.

Jim wondered, too. He sat and watched the two women, wondering as men
do when they see women painfully courteous to each other; wondering
as women must when they see men polite to their enemies.

Charity and Kedzie prattled on in a kind of two-story conversation,
and Jim studied them with shameless objectivity. He hardly heard
what they said. He watched the pantomime of their so different souls
and bodies: Charity, lean and smart and aristocratic, beautiful in
a peculiar mixture of sophistication and tenderness; Kedzie, small
and nymph-like and plebeian, beautiful in a mixture of innocence
and hardness of heart.

Charity's body was like the work of a dashing painter--long lines
drawn with brave force and direction. Kedzie's body was a thing of
dainty curves and timidities. Charity was fashionable and wise, but
her wisdom had lifted her above pettiness. Kedzie was of the village,
for all her Parisian garb, and she had cunning, which is the lowest
form of wisdom.

When at length Charity left, Jim and Kedzie sat brooding. Kedzie
wanted to say something nice about Charity and was afraid to. The
poor child always distrusted her generous impulses. She thought it
cleverer to withhold trust from everybody, lest she misplace it in
somebody. At length an imp of perversity taught her how to get rid
of the credit she owed to Charity. She spoke after a long silence.

"Mrs. Cheever must be horribly fond of you."

"Why do you say that?" said Jim, startled.

"Because she's so nice to me."

Jim groaned with disgust. Kedzie giggled, accepting the groan as
confession of a palpable hit. She sat musing on various costumes
she might wear. She had a woman's memory for things she had caught
a glimpse of in a shop-window or in a fashion magazine; she had
a woman's imagination for dressing herself up mentally.

As a trained mathematician can do amazing sums in his head, so Kedzie
could juggle modes and combinations, colors and stuffs, and wrap
hem about herself. While Kedzie composed her new gown, her husband
studied her, still wondering at her and his inability to get past
the barriers of her flesh to her soul. Charity's flesh seemed but
the expression of herself. It was cordial and benevolent, warm and
expressive in his eyes. Her hands were for handclasp, her lips for
good words, her eyes for honest language. He had not embraced her
except in dances years before, and in that one quickly broken embrace
at Newport. He had not kissed her since they had been boy and girl
lovers, but the savor of her lips was still sweet in his memory. He
felt that he knew her soul utterly.

He had possessed all the advantages of Kedzie without seeming to get
acquainted with the ultimate interior Kedzie at all. She was to him
well-known flesh inhabited by a total stranger, who fled from him
mysteriously. When she embraced him she held him aloof. When she
kissed him her lips pressed him back. He could not outgrow the
feeling that their life together was rather a reckless flirtation
than a communion of merged souls.

He stared at her now and saw dark eyebrows and eyelashes etched
on a white skin, starred with irises of strange hue, a nose deftly
shaped, a mouth as pretty and as impersonal as a flower, a throat
of some ineffably exquisite petal material. She sat with one knee
lifted a little and clasped in her hands, and there was something
miraculous about the felicity of the lines, the arms penciled
downward from the shoulders and meeting in the delicately contoured
buckle of her ten fingers, the thigh springing in a suave arc from
the confluent planes of her torse, the straight shin to the curve
of instep and toe and heel. Her hair was an altogether incredible
extravagance of manufacture.

George Meredith has described a woman's hair once for all, and
if Jim had ever read anything so important as _The Egoist_
he would have said that Kedzie's poll was illustrated in that
wonderfully coiffed hair-like sentence picturing Clara Middleton
and "the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that
the little lighter-colored irreclaimable curls running truant from
the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets,
wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps--waved
or fell, waved over or up to involutedly, or strayed, loose and
downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much
thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long, round locks of
gold to trick the heart."

Kedzie's hair was as fascinating as that, and she had many graces
and charms. For a while they had proved fascinating, but a man does
not want to have a cartoon, however complexly beautiful, for a wife.
Jim wanted a congenial companion--that is to say, he wanted Charity
Coe.

But he could not have her. If he had been one of the patriarchs or
a virtuous man of Mohammedan stock he could have tried, by marrying
a female quartet, to make up one good, all-round wife. But he was
doomed to a single try, and he had picked the wrong one.

CHAPTER XIV

What is a man to do who realizes that he has married the wrong
woman?

The agonies of the woman who has been married to the wrong man have
been celebrated innumerably and vats of tears spilled over them. She
used to be consigned to a husband by parental choice and compulsion.
Those days are part of the good old times.

For a man there never has been any sympathy, since he has not usually
been the victim of parental despotism in the matter of selecting
a spouse, or, when he has been, he has had certain privileges of
excursion. The excursion is still a popular form of mitigating the
severities of an unsuccessful marriage. Some commit murder, some
commit suicide, some commit other things. Marriage is the one field
in which instinct is least trustworthy and it is the one field in
which it is accounted immoral to repent errors of judgments or to
correct them.

The law has found it well to concede a good deal to the criminals.
After centuries of vain cruelty it was found that certain people
simply could not be made good by any rigor of confinement or any
heaping up of punishment. So the law has come down to the criminal
with results no worse at the worst than before, and sublimely better
at the best than before. The civil law is doing the same slowly for
the mal-married.

But Jim Dyckman was not even dreaming of seeking a rescue from
his mistake by way of a divorce.

Charity had entered the divorce court and she would always bear
the reproach of some of her most valued friends. She could not
imaginably encourage Jim Dyckman to free himself by the same
channel, and if he did, how could Charity marry him? The marriage
of two divorced persons would provoke a tempest of horror from part
of the world, and gales of ridicule from the rest. Besides, there
was no sign that Kedzie would ever give Jim cause for divorce, or
that he would make use of it if she gave it him.

Charity could not help pondering the situation, for she saw that Jim
was hopelessly mismated. Jim could not help pondering the situation,
for he saw the same thing. But he made no plans for release. Kedzie
had given no hint of an inclination to misconduct. She was certainly
not going to follow Gilfoyle into the beyond. Jim was left helpless
with an unanswerable riddle on his mind.

He could only curse himself for being fool enough to get married,
and join the vast club of the Repenters at Leisure. He felt sorrier
for Kedzie than ever, but he also felt sorry for himself.

The better he came to know his wife the more he came to know how
alien she was to him in how many ways. The things she wanted to be
or seem were utterly foreign to his own ideals, and if people's
ambitions war what hope have they of sympathy?

Jim could not help noticing how Kedzie was progressing in her
snobology. She had had many languages to learn in her brief day. She
had had to change from Missouri to flat New York, then upward through
various strata of diction. She had learned to speak with a certain
elegance as a movie princess. But she had learned that people of
social position do not talk on stilts outside of fiction. She had
since been trying to acquire the rough slang of her set. It was not
easy to be glib in it. She had attained only a careful carelessness
as yet. But she was learning! As soon as she had attained a careless
carelessness she would be qualified.

But there was another difficulty. She had not yet been able to make
up her mind as to what character she should play in her new world.
That had to be settled before she could make her final choice
of dialect, for dialect is character, and she had found, to her
surprise, that the upper world contained as great a variety of
characters as any other level.