We Can\'t Have Everything

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There were tomboys and hoydens and solemn students; hard-working
sculptresses and dreamy poetesses; girls who wanted to be boys, and
girls who wanted to be nuns; girls who were frantic to vote, and
girls who loathed the thought of independence; girls who ached to
shock people, and girls of the prunes-and-prismatic type, patricians
and precisians, anarchists and Bohemians.

She encountered girls who talked appallingly about breeding dogs and
babies, about Freudian erotics, and new schools of art, Futurism,
Vorticism. Their main interest was Ismism. There were others whose
intellectuality ran to new card-mathematics in pirate bridge,
gambling algebra.

Kedzie was in a chaos of sincere convictions and even more sincere
affectations. She could not select an attitude for herself. She could
not recapture her own soul or decide what she wanted to be.

Her life was busy. She had to learn French and numberless intricacies
of fashionable ethics. She had already learned to ride a horse for
her moving-picture work, but Jim warned her that she must learn to
jump so that she could follow the hounds with him. She watched pupils
in hurdling and dreaded to add that to her accomplishments. It made
her seasick to witness the race to the barrier, the gathering of the
horse, the launch into space, the clatter of the top bar as it came
off sometimes, the grunting thud of the big brute as he returned to
earth and galloped away, not always with the rider still aboard. She
imagined herself skirled along the tan-bark and was afraid.

She had to summon all the courage of her movie days before she
could intrust herself to a riding-master. Soon she grew to like
the excitement; she learned to charge a fence, hand the horse his
head at the right moment, and take him up at the exact second. And
by and by she was laughing at other beginners and talking horsy talk
with such assurance that she rather gave the impression of tracing
straight back to the Centaur family.

Likewise now she watched other new-comers and rank outsiders break
into the sacred inclosure. She mocked them and derided them. She
regretted aloud the unfortunate marriages of well-born fellows with
actresses and commoners from beyond the pale. Among the first French
words she learned to use was _mesalliance_.

She began to wonder if she had not made one herself. She found
inside the paddock so many men more brilliant than her husband.
There were as many types of man as of woman--the earnest, the
ascetic, the socialistic, the pious youth, wastrels, rakes, fops.
There were richer men than Jim and men of still older family, men
of even greater wealth.

She had been married only a few weeks and she was already
speculating in comparisons! It was a more or less inescapable
result of a marriage for ambition, since each ambition achieved
opens a horizon of further ambitions.

She had a brief spell of delight in the rehearsals of the "Day of
the Bud." She met new people informally and they were all so shy
and self-conscious that they were not inclined to resent Kedzie's
intrusion. Kedzie would once have ridiculed them as "amachoors";
now she wished that she, too, were only an "amaturr" instead of
a reformed professional.

If some of the ladies snubbed her she found others that cultivated
her; a few of the humbler women even toadied to her position; a few
of the men snuggled up to her picturesque beauty. She snubbed them
with vigor. She hated them and felt smirched by their challenges.
That was splendid of her.

She was beginning to find herself and her party, but outside the
circle of Jim's immediate entourage. And Jim was beginning to find
himself a new ambition and a new circle of friends.

CHAPTER XV

Jim was becoming quite the military man. His new passion took him
away from womankind, saved him from temptation, and freed his
thoughts from the obsession of either Kedzie or Charity. The whole
nation was turning again toward soldiering, drifting slowly and
resistingly, but helplessly, into the very things it had long
denounced as Prussianism and conscription. A universal mobilization
was brewing that should one day compel all men and all women, even
little boys and girls and the very old, to become part of a giant
machinery for warfare.

England, too, had railed at conscription, and when the war smote her
had seen her little army of a quarter of a million almost annihilated
under the first avalanche of the German descent toward Paris. England
had gathered volunteers and trained them behind the bulwark of her
navy and the red wall of the bleeding French nation. And England had
given up volunteering and gone into the business of making everybody,
without distinction of sex, age, or degree, contribute life and
liberty and luxury to the common cause.

Behind the bulwark of the British fleet and the Allied armies
the United States had debated, not for weeks or months, but for
years with academic sloth the enlargement of its tiny army. It had
accomplished only the debate, a ludicrous haggle between those who
turned their backs on the world war and said that war was impossible
and those who declared that it was inevitable.

Some Americans asserted that it was none of America's business what
happened in Europe or how many American citizens died on the free
seas, and that the one way to bring war into our country was to be
prepared for it. Other Americans grew angry enough to forswear their
allegiance to a nation of poltroons and dotards; they went to France
or Canada to fight or fly for the Allies. Many of them died. Yet
others tried to equip themselves at home somewhat to meet the red
flood when it should break the dam and sweep across the American
borders.

Of these last was Jim Dyckman. Since he had joined the National
Guard he gave it more and more of his enthusiasm. Unhappily married
men have always fled to the barracks or the deck as ill-mated women
fled to convents.

Night after night Jim spent at the armory, drilling with his company,
conferring at headquarters, laboring for recruits, toiling over the
paper work.

Kedzie pouted awhile at his patriotism, ridiculed it and hated it,
and then accepted it as a matter of course. She could either stay
at home and read herself to sleep or join the crowds. The rehearsals
of the "Day of the Bud" gave her some business, and she picked up
a few new friends. She made her appearance with the company in a
three-nights' performance that netted several thousands of dollars.
Jim saw her once. She was gorgeous, a little too gorgeous. She did
not belong. She felt it herself, and overworked her carelessness.
Her non-success hurt her bitterly. People did not say of her, as
in the movies, "How sweet!" but, "Rather common!"

And now Kedzie was bewildered and lost. She found no comfort in
Jim. She had to seek companionship somewhere. At first she made her
engagements only on Jim's drill nights. Soon she made them on nights
when he was free.

When they met, each found the other's experiences of no importance.
Her indifference to the portentous meanings and campaigns of the
European war dazed him. He wondered how any human being could live
in such epochal weeks and take no thought of events. She was not
interested even in the accounts of the marvelous sufferings of women
and their marvelous achievements in the munition-plants, the fields,
and hospitals. He watched Kedzie skip the head-lines detailing some
sublime feat of endeavor like the defense of Verdun and turn to
the page where her name was included or not among the guests at
a dinner well advertised by the hostess. She would skip the pages of
photographs showing forth the daily epics of Europe and ponder the
illustrations of some new smock. He shook his head over her as if she
were a doll come to life and nothing stirring within but a music-box
and a sawdust heart. He was disappointed in her--abysmally. He
devoted himself to his military work as if he were a bachelor.

For the third year now the Americans were still discussing just what
sort of army it should have, and meanwhile getting none at all.

The opponents of preparedness grew so ferocious in their attacks
on the pleaders for troops that the word "pacifist" became
ironical. They seemed to think it a crime to assault anybody
but a fellow-countryman.

All the while the various factions of unhappy Mexico fought together
and threatened the peace of the United States. The Government that
had helped drag President Huerta from his chair with the help of
Villa and Carranza found itself in turn at odds with both its allies
and its allies at war with each other.

There were scenes of rapine and flights of refugees that brought
a little of Belgium to our frontier. And then the sombreros came
over the border at Columbus, New Mexico, one night with massacre
and escape, and the tiny American army under Pershing went over the
border to get its erstwhile ally, Villa, dead or alive, and got him
neither way.

And still Congress pondered the question of the army as if it were
something as remote and patient as a problem in sidereal arithmetic.
Some asked for volunteers and some for universal service and some
for neither. The National Guard was a bone of contention, and when
the hour struck it was the only bone there was.

In June Jim Dyckman went to the officers' school of application at
Peekskill for a week to get a smattering of tuition under Regular
Army instructors. He slept on a cot in a tent and studied map-making
and military bookkeeping and mimic warfare, and was tremendously
happy.

Kedzie made a bad week of it. She missed him sadly. There was no one
to quarrel with or make up with. When he came back late Saturday
night she was so glad to see him that she cried blissfully upon his
proud bosom.

They had a little imitation honeymoon and went a-motoring on Sunday
out into the lands where June was embroidering the grass with
flowers and shaking the petals off the branches where young fruit
was fashioning.

They discussed their summer schemes and she dreaded the knowledge
that in July he must go to the manoeuvers for three weeks. They
agreed to get aboard his yacht for a little cruise before that
dreadful interlude.

And then, early the next morning, the morning of the 19th of June,
the knuckles of his valet on the door woke Jim from his slumber
and a voice through the panels murmured:

"Very sorry, sir, but you are wanted on the telephone, sir--it's
your regiment."

That was the way the Paul Reveres of 1916 summoned the troops to
arms.

Mr. Minute-Man Dyckman sat on the edge of his bed in his silk pajamas
with the telephone-receiver at his ear, and yawned: "H'lo.... Who
is it?... What is it?... Oh, it's you, sergeant.... Yes?... No!...
For God's sake!... I'll get out right away."

"What's the matter? Is the house on fire?" Kedzie gasped from her
pillow, half-awake and only half-afraid, so prettily befuddled she
was with sleep. She would have made a picture if Jim had had eyes
to see her as she struggled to one elbow and thrust with her other
hand her curls back into her nightcap, all askew. Her gown was
sliding over one shoulder down to her elbow and up to one out-thrust
knee.

Jim put away the telephone and pondered a moment.

Kedzie caught at his arm. "What's the matter? Why don't you
tell me!"

He spoke with a boyish pride of war and a husbandly solemnity: "The
President has called out the National Guard. We're to mobilize to-day
and get to the border as soon as we can. They hope that our regiment
will be the first to move."

CHAPTER XVI

Kedzie's answer was a fierce seizure of him in her arms. She was
palsied with fright for him. She had seen more pictures of dead
soldiers than he knew, and now she saw her man shattered and tortured
with wounds and thirst. She felt in one swift shock what the wives
of Europe had felt by the million. She clung to Jim and sobbed:

"You sha'n't go! I won't let them take you! You belong to me!"

He gathered her awkwardly into his arms and they were more nearly
married then than they had ever been or should ever be again.

The pity of it! that only their separation could bring them
together! Fate is the original Irish-bullster.

Jim tried hurriedly to console Kedzie. He found her hard to make
brave. The early-morningness of the shock, the panic of scattered
sleep, gave her added terror. He had to be cruel at last. Without
intention of humor he said:

"Really, honey, you know you just can't keep the President
waiting."

He tore loose the tendrils of her fingers and ran to his own
dressing-room. She wept awhile, then rose to help accoutre him.
He had his uniform at home still.

In the Grecian simplicity of her nightgown, the very cream of silk,
she might have been Andromache harnessing Hector. Only there was no
baby for him to leave with her, no baby to shrink in fright from
the horsehair crest of the helmet that he did not wear.

When he was all dressed in his olive-drab she still could not let
him go. She held him with her soft arms and twiddled the gun-metal
buttons of his blouse. And when at length she must make an end of
farewells she hugged him with all her might and was glad that the
hard buttons hurt the delicate breast that he felt against him
smotheringly sweet and perilously yielding.

Not knowing how tame the event of all this war-like circumstance was
to prove, he suffered to the deeps of his being the keen ache of
separation that has wrung so many hearts in this eternally battling
world. War, the sunderer, had reached them with his great divorce.

When he was free of her at last she followed him and caught new
kisses. She ran shamelessly barefoot to the door to have the last
of his lips, called good-by to him when the elevator carried him
into the pit, and flung kisses downward after him. Then she stumbled
back to her room and cried aloud. Liliane, her maid, came to help
her and Liliane wept with her, knowing all too well what war could
do to love.

Later Kedzie went to the armory and slipped through the massed crowds
to see Jim again. He was gloriously busy and it stirred her martially
to see his men come up, click heels, salute, report, ask questions,
salute, and retreat again.

A few excited days of recruiting and equipping and then the ceremony
of the muster-in. Jim spent his nights at home, but his terrified
mother and his none too stoical father were there to rival Kedzie
in devotion.

Importance was in the air. There was a stir of history in the public
mood. The flags rippled with a new twinkle of stars and a fiercer
writhing of stripes. The red had the omen of blood.

On the third day there was a ruffle of drums and a crying of brass
on Fifth Avenue. People recalled the great days when the boys in
blue had paraded away to the wars. Only this regiment marched up,
not down, the Avenue. It was the Sixty-ninth, its flagstaff solid
with the silver rings of battle. It was moving north to the
mobilization-camp.

On the ninth day the Seventh went down the Avenue, twelve hundred
strong, to entrain for Texas. The bullets of the foe were not the
only dangers. It was midsummer and these men were bound for the
tropics and the cursed fields of sand where the tarantula, the
rattlesnake, and the scorpion lurked under the cactus.

Jim's mother thought less of the Mexicans than of the fact that
there were no sleeping-cars even for the officers. They would get
them on the way, but it would be a fearsome journey ever southward
into the heat, six days in the troop-trains.

Kedzie was proud of her husband, quite conceited about him, glad
that he was marching instead of standing on the curb. But her heart,
doubled in bulk, pounded against her side like the leaden clapper
of a broken bell.

Jim caught sight of her where she stood on the steps of his father's
house, and her eyes, bright with tears, saddened him. The fond gaze
of his mother touched another well-spring of emotion, and the big,
proud stare of his father another.

But when by chance among the mosaic of faces he saw Charity Coe
there was a sorrow in her look that made him stumble, and his heart
lost step with the music. Somehow it seemed cruelest of all to leave
her there.

CHAPTER XVII

The town was monstrously lonely when Kedzie turned back to her
widowhood. Jim's mother and father and sister were touched by her
grief and begged her to make their home hers, but she shook her
head.

For a while her grief and her pride sustained her. She was the
Spartan wife of the brave soldier. She even took up knitting as
an appropriate activity. She thought in socks.

But the hateful hours kept coming, the nights would not be brief,
and the days would not curtail their length nor quicken their pace.
The loathsome inevitable result arrived.

Even her grief began to bore her. Fidelity grew inane, and her
young heart shrieked aloud for diversion.

If battles had happened down there, if something stirring had only
appeared in the news, she could have taken some refreshment of
excitement from the situation. Heroic demands breed heroes and
heroines, but all that this crisis demanded was the fidelity of
torpor, the loyalty of a mollusk.

Nothing happened except the stupid chronicles of heat and monotony.
The rattlesnakes did not bite; the tarantulas scuttered away; the
scorpions were no worse than wasps. The Mexicans did not attack or
raid or attempt the assassinations which popular hostility accepted
as their favorite outdoor sport. Mexico continued her siesta while
the United States sentineled the bedroom.

Jim's letters told of scorching heat, of blinding duststorms, and
cloudbursts that made lakes of the camps, but nothing else happened
except the welter of routine.

The regiments had only police work to do, and the task grew irksome.
Men began to think of their neglected businesses. The men who stayed
at home were sharing bountifully in the prosperity of the times. The
volunteers at the Border were wasting their abilities for fifteen
dollars a month.

The officers began to resign by the score, by the hundred. As many
enlisted men dropped out as could beg off. Jim could afford to stay;
he would not resign, though Kedzie wrote appeals and finally demands
that he return to his wretched wife.

Resentment replaced sorrow in her heart. She began to impute ugly
motives to his absence. The tradition of the alluring Mexican
senorita obsessed her. She imagined him engaged in wild romances
with sullen beauties. She was worried about guitar music and
stilettoes.

If there were beautiful senoritas there in McAllen, Jim did not see
them. His dissipations were visits to the movie shows and excursions
for dinner to Mr. and Mrs. Riley's hotel at Mission. Liquor was
forbidden to officers and men under dire penalties, and Jim's
conviviality was restricted to the soda-water fountains. He became
as rabid a consumer of ice-cream cones and sundaes as a matinee
girl. It was a burlesque of war to make the angels hold their sides,
if the angels could forget the slaughter-house of Europe.

Jim felt that the Government had buncoed him into this comic-opera
chorus. He resented the service as an incarceration. But he would
not resign. For months he plodded the doleful round of his duties,
ate bad food, poured out unbelievable quantities of sweat and easily
believable quantities of profanity.

On the big practice hike through the wilderness who that saw him
staggering along, choked with alkali dust, knouted by the sun,
stabbed by the cactus, carrying two rifles belonging to worn-out
soldiers in addition to his own load, looking forward to the
privilege of throwing himself down by the roadside for ten minutes'
respite, praying for the arrival in camp with its paradise of a
little shelter tent and beans and bacon for dinner or for breakfast
or supper--who could have believed that he did not have to do it?
That he had indeed at home soft luxuries, a rosy little wife, a
yacht, and servants to lift his shoes from the floor for him?

It was easier, however, for him to get along thus there where
everybody did the same than it was for Kedzie to get along
ascetically in New York where nearly everybody she knew was gay.

She might have gone down to Texas to see Jim, but when he wrote
her how meager the accommodations were and how harsh the comforts,
she pained him by taking his advice. Like almost all the other
wives, she stayed at home and made the best of it.

The best was increasingly bad. Her lot, indeed, was none too
cheerful. After her clandestine marriage she had confronted her
husband's parents, and the result was not satisfactory. She had
had no honeymoon, and her husband's friends were chill toward her.
Then he marched away and left her for half a year.

She was young and pretty and restless. She had acquired a greed
of praise. She had given up her public glory to be her husband's
private prima donna; and then her audience had abandoned her.

Though her soul traveled far in a short time by the calendar, every
metamorphosis was slow and painful and imperceptible. She wept her
eyes dry; then moped until her gloom grew intolerable. The first
diversion she sought was really an effort of her grief to renew
itself by a little repose. Her first amusement was for her grief's
sake. But before long her diversions were undertaken for diversion's
sake.

She had to have friends and she had to take what she could get. The
more earnest elements of society did not interest her, nor she them.
The fast crowd disgusted her at first, but remained the only one
that did not repulse her advances.

Her first glimpses of the revelers filled her with repugnance and
confirmed her in what she had heard and read of the wickedness of
the rich. The fact that she had seen also the virtuous rich, solemn
rich, religious rich, miserly rich, was forgotten. The fact that in
every stage of means there are the same classes escaped her memory.
She had known of middle classes where libertinism flourished, had
known of licentiousness among the poor shopkeepers, shoddy intriguers
in the humble boarding-houses.

But now she felt that money made vice and forgot that vice is one
of the amusements accessible to the very poorest, to all who inherit
flesh and its appetites.

Gradually she forgot her horror of dissipation. The outswirling eddy
of the gayer crowd began to gather and compel her feet. She lacked
the wisdom to attract the intellectuals, the culture to run with
the artistic and musical sets, the lineage to satisfy that curious
few who find a congeniality in the fact that their ancestors were
respectable and recorded persons.

In the fast gang she did not need to have or use her brains. She
did not need a genealogy. Her beauty was her admission-fee. Her
restlessness was her qualification.

Those who were careless of their own behavior were careless of their
accomplices. They accepted Kedzie without scruple. They accepted
especially the invitations she could well afford. She ceased to be
afraid of a compliment. She grew addicted to flattery. She learned
to take a joke off-color and match it in shade.

She met women of malodorous reputation and found that they were not
so black as they had been painted. She learned how warm-hearted and
charitable a woman could be for whom the world had a cold shoulder
and no charity.

She extended her tolerance from men whose escapades had been
national topics to women who had been involved in distinguished
scandals and were busily involving themselves anew. Being tolerant
of them, he had to be tolerant of their ways. Forgiving the sinner
helps to forgive the sin. There are few things more endearing than
forgiveness. One of the most appealing figures in literature and
art is the forgiven woman taken in adultery.

And thus by easy stages and generous concessions Kedzie, who had
begun her second marriage with the strictest ideals of behavior,
found herself surrounded by people of a loose-reined life. Things
once abhorred became familiar, amusing, charming.

It was increasingly difficult to resent advances toward her own
citadel which she had smiled at in others. She grew more and more
gracious toward a narrowing group of men till the safety-in-numbers
approached the peril-in-fewness. She grew more and more gracious
to a widening group of women, and they brought along their men.

Kedzie even forgave Pet Bettany and struck up a friendship with her.
Pet apologized to her other friends for taking up with Kedzie, by
the sufficient plea, "She gives such good food and drink at her
boarding-house."

Kedzie found Pet intensely comforting since Pet was full of gossip
and satirized with contempt the people who had been treating Kedzie
with contempt. It is mighty pleasant to hear of the foibles of our
superiors. The illusion of rising is acquired by bringing things down
to us as well as by rising to them. When Pet told Kedzie something
belittling about somebody big Kedzie felt herself enlarged.

Pet had another influence on Kedzie. Pet was no more contemptuous
of aristocrats than she was of people who were good or tried to be,
or, failing that, kept up a decent pretense.