We Can\'t Have Everything

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Pet made a snobbery of vice and had many an anecdote of the lapses
of the respectable and the circumspectable. Her railing way brought
virtue itself into disrepute and Kedzie was frightened out of her
last few senses. She fell under the tyranny of the _risque_,
which is as fell as the tyranny of the prudish.

Prissy Atterbury had told Pet without delay of meeting Jim Dyckman
at Charity's home. Now that Pet was a crony of Kedzie's she recalled
the story. Finding Kedzie one day suffering from an attack of
scruples, and declining to accept an invitation because "Jim might
not like it," Pet laughed:

"Oh, Jim! What right has he got to kick? He didn't lose much time
getting back to his Charity Coe after he married you."

"His Charity Coe!" Kedzie gasped. "What do you mean by his Charity
Coe?"

"Why, his old reliable sweetheart. He's been silly about her since
babyhood. When she married Pete Cheever he moped like a sick hound.
And didn't he beat up Pete in a club only a few days before he
married you?"

This was all news to Kedzie and it sickened her. She demanded more
poison, and Pet ladled it out joyously.

She told Kedzie how Prissy Atterbury found Jim at Charity's home.
But Kedzie remembered vividly that Jim had said he met Charity on
the street. And now she had caught him in a lie, a woman-lie! He
was not there to explain that he visited Charity in Kedzie's behalf,
and if he had explained it would only have embittered her the more.

Being quite convinced now of Jim's perfidy, she denied the
possibility of it.

"Jim's square, I'm sure. There couldn't be anything wrong with him.
And Mrs. Cheever is an awful prig, everybody says."

Pet whooped with laughter: "They're the worst sort. Why, only
a couple of years ago Jim and Charity were up in the Adirondacks
alone together. Prissy Atterbury caught them sneaking back."

So one lie was used to bolster another. The firmest structures can
be thus established by locking together things that will not stand
alone--as soldiers stack arms. Pet went on stacking lies and Kedzie
grew more and more distressed, then infuriated. Her bitterness
against Charity grew the more acid. Charity's good repute became now
the whitewash on a sepulcher of corruption. Her resentment of the
woman's imagined hypocrisy and of her husband's apparent duplicity
blazed into an eagerness for vengeance--the classic vengeance of
punishing a crime by committing another of the sort. Like revenges
like; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a loyalty for a
loyalty.

CHAPTER XVIII

But now, as often happens in evil as in virtue, Kedzie had the
willingness, but not the resolution. She threw her scruples into
the waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went with her and
her crowd to one of the most reckless dances in Greenwich Village,
where men and women strove to outdo the saturnalia of Montmartre,
vied with one another in exposure, and costumed themselves as
closely according to the fig-leaf era as the grinning policemen
dared to permit.

Kedzie screamed with laughter at some of the ribaldry and danced in
a jostle of fauns, satyrs, nymphs, and maenads. Yet when her partner
clenched her too straitly she could not forget that she was the wife
of an absent soldier. And when on the way home he tried to flirt
she could not quell the nausea in her soul.

But practice makes perfect and Kedzie was learning to be downright
bad, though yet awhile she gave but stingy reward to her assiduous
cavaliers. She was what Pet called a _demi-veuve_ and unprofitable
to the men she used as weapons of her revenge against her innocent
and unwitting husband.

There was another factor working toward her debasement and that was
the emancipation of her pocket-book. It was a fairy's purse now and
she could not scatter her money faster than she found it renewed.
Her entertainments grew more lavish and more reckless. She had an
inspiration at last. She would put Jim's yacht into commission and
take a party of friends on a cruise, well chaperoned, of course.

She sent instructions to the master of the vessel to get steam up.
Knudsen sent back word that he would have to have an order from the
boss. She promised to have him discharged and in her anger fired
a telegram off to Jim, demanding that he rebuke the surly skipper
and order the boat out.

The telegram found Jim in a state of doldrums. The food had turned
against him, homesickness was like a fever in him, and the monotony
of his routine had begun to get his nerves. He was startled and
enraged at Kedzie's request for permission to go yachting and he
fired back a telegram:

Knudsen was right I am astonished at your suggestion
do not approve in the slightest.

He regretted his anger when it was too late. Kedzie, who had already
made up her list of guests and received their hilarious acceptances,
was compelled to withdraw the invitations. She would have bought
a yacht of her own, but she could not afford it! She was not allowed
so large a fund. She, Mrs. Dyckman, wanted something and could not
afford it! What was the use of anything, anyhow?

Times had changed for Kedzie indeed when the little beggar from the
candy-store who had cried once when Skip Magruder, the bakery waiter,
refused to take her to the movies twice in one Sunday, was crying
now because her miser of a husband forbade her a turbine yacht as
a plaything.

She was crushed with chagrin and she felt completely absolved of the
last obligation. What kind of a brute had she married who would go
away on a military picnic among his nice, warm cacti and deny his
poor deserted wife a little boat-ride and a breath of fresh air?

If she had had any lingering inclination to visit Jim in Texas she
gave it up now. She went to Newport instead and took Pet Bettany
along for a companion--at Kedzie's expense, of course.

Charity Coe Cheever was visiting Mrs. Noxon again and Kedzie
snubbed her haughtily when she met her at the Casino or on Bailey's
Beach. Kedzie was admitted to that sacred surf of the Spouting Rock
Association now and she was as pretty a naiad as there was.

But now she encountered occasional rebuffs from certain people,
not only because she was common, but because she was reputed to be
fast. When the gossip-peddlers brought her this fierce verdict she
was hardened enough to scorn the respectables as frumps. She grew
a little more impudent than ever and her pout began to take the form
of a sneer.

She lingered in and about Newport till the autumn came. Occasional
excursions on other people's yachts or in her own cars or to
house-parties broke the season, but she loved Newport. Jim's name
had given her entry to places and sets whence nobody quite had the
courage or the authority to dismiss her.

At Newport there was a very handsome fool named Jake Vanderveer,
distantly related to the charming Van-der Veers as well as the Van
der Veers. He was even more distantly related to his own wife at
the time Kedzie met him.

Pet Bettany had told Kedzie what a rotter Mrs. Jake was, and Kedzie
felt awfully sorry for Jakie. So did Jakie. He was sophomoric enough
to talk about his broken heart and she was sophomoric enough to
suffer for him most enjoyably.

A little sympathy is a dangerous thing. Married people run a
great risk unless they keep theirs strictly mutual and for home
consumption.

Jakie said he believed in running away from his grief. Kedzie ran
with him for company. People's tongues ran just as fast. Jakie was
making a lot of money in Wall Street and trying to drown his sorrows
there. Kedzie was thrilled by his jargon of the market and he taught
her how to read the confetti streamers that pour out of the ticker.
Jakie confided to her a great scheme.

"The only way I can keep that wife of mine from spending all my
money is to spend it first."

"You're a genius!" Kedzie said. A woman usually approves almost
any scheme for keeping money away from another woman.

"I'm going to make a killing next week," said Jakie, "and I'm going
just quietly to put a couple of thou. up for my little pal Kedzie.
You can't lose. If you win you can buy yourself five thousand
dollars' worth of popcorn."

Kedzie was enraptured. She would have some money at last that she
didn't have to drag out of her husband. She prayed the Lord for
a rising market.

Then Mrs. Dyckman sent for her. When Kedzie called the servants were
extremely solemn. Kedzie had to wait till the doctor left. He was
very solemn, too.

Kedzie found her mother-in-law in bed. She looked like a small
mountain after a snow-storm. It was strange to Kedzie to find one
so mighty brought low and speaking in so tiny a voice. Her husband
was there and he was haggard with sympathy and alarm, a very elephant
in terror. He was less courteous than usual to Kedzie and he left the
room at his wife's signal. Mrs. Dyckman was more gentle than ever.

"Draw your chair up close, my child," she whispered. "I want to have
a little talk with you and my voice is weak."

Kedzie was alarmed enough to revert to a simple phrase; "I'm awfully
sorry you're sick. Are you very sick?"

"Very. There's such a lot of me, you know. It's disgusting. I've
scared my poor husband to death. I'm glad Jim isn't here to be
worried. I hope I'll not have to send for him. But I'd like to."

Kedzie felt a little quiver of alarm. She did not quite want Jim
to come back just yet. She had grown used to his absence. His return
would deprive poor Jakie of solace.

Mrs. Dyckman took Kedzie's hand and stared at her sadly.

"You're looking a little tired, my dear, if you'll forgive me for
being frank. I'm very old and I very much want you and Jim to win
out. Lying here I take things too anxiously, I suppose, but--I'm
frightened. I don't want my boy and you to go the way so many other
couples do. He's left you because his country needed him, or thought
it did. It wouldn't look well to have him come back and find that
in his absence you had forgotten him. Now, would it?"

"Why, Mrs. Dyckman!" Kedzie gasped, getting her hand away.

Mrs. Dyckman groped for it and took it back. "Don't be vexed. Or if
you must be, pout as you used to. You mustn't grow hard, my child.
Your type of beauty doesn't improve with cynicism. You must think
sweet thoughts or simply be petulant when you're angry. Don't grow
hard! If nothing else will move you let me appeal to your pride.
You are traveling with a hard crowd, a cruel pack, Miss Bettany's
pack, and a silly lot of men like Jake Vanderveer. And you mustn't,
my child. You just mustn't get hard and brazen. Couldn't you give
up Miss Bettany? She's an absolutely unprincipled creature. She's
bad, and you must know it. Don't you?"

Kedzie could not answer, or would not. Mrs. Dyckman's voice grew
poignant.

"I've lived so long and seen so much unhappiness. There is so much
tragedy across the water. My poor daughter has had a cable that her
husband's brother has been killed in France. Her husband has been
wounded; she is sailing back. So many men, so many, many men are
dying. The machine-guns go like scythes all day long, and the poor
fellows lie out there in the shrapnel rain--Oh, it is unbelievable.
And Europe's women are undergoing such endless sorrow; every day
over there the lists contain so many names. So many of Cicely's
friends have perished. Life never was so full of sorrow, my dear,
but it is such a noble sorrow that it seems as if nobody, had any
right to any other kind of sorrow.

"You are young, dear child. You are lonely and restless; but you
don't realize how loathsome it is to other people to see such
recklessness going on over here while such lofty souls are going to
death in droves over there. The sorrow you will bring on yourself
and all of us, and on poor Jim, will be such a hateful sorrow, my
dear, such an unworthy grief!"

Kedzie choked, and mumbled, "I don't think I know what you mean."

Mrs. Dyckman petted her hand: "I don't think you do. I hope not.
But take an old woman's word for it, be--be Caesar's wife?"

"Caesar's wife?" Kedzie puzzled. "What did she do?"

"It was what she didn't do. Well, I haven't the strength--or the
right, perhaps--to tell you any more. Yes, I will. I must say this
much. You are the subject of very widespread criticism, and Jim
is being pitied."

"Me criticized? Jim pitied? Why? For what?"

"For the things you do, my dear, the places you go, and the hours
you keep--and the friends you keep."

"That's disgusting!" Kedzie snarled. "The long-tongued gossips!
They ought to be ashamed of themselves."

Mrs. Dyckman's fever began to mount. She dropped Kedzie's hand
and tugged at the coverlet.

"You'd better go, my dear. I apologize. It's useless! When did age
ever gain anything by warning youth? I'm an old fool, and you're
a young one. And nothing will stop your ambition to run through
life to the end of it and get all you can out of it."

Kedzie felt dismissed and rose in bewildered anger. Mrs. Dyckman
heaved herself to one elbow and pointed her finger at Kedzie.

"But keep away from Jake Vanderveer! and Pet Bettany! or--or--Send
my nurse, please."

She fell back gasping and Kedzie flew, in a fear that the old lady
would die of a stroke and Kedzie be blamed for it forever. Kedzie
was so blue and terrified that she had to send for Jake Vanderveer
to keep from going crazy. He told her that the market was still on
the climb, and that her sympathy had saved his life. He had been
desperate enough for suicide when he met her, and now he was one
of the rising little suns of finance.

Mrs. Dyckman did not die, but she did not get well, and Jim's
father wrote him that he'd better resign and come home. It would do
his mother a world of good, and he was doing the country no good
down there.

Jim was alarmed; he wrote out his resignation and submitted it to
his colonel, who showed him a new order from the War Department
announcing that no more resignations would be accepted except on
the most urgent grounds. Idleness was destroying the Guard faster
than a campaign. Jim returned to the doldrums with a new resentment.
He was a prisoner now.

He had gone to Texas to find war and his wife to Newport to find
gaiety. She found much more than that. On October 7th the old town
was stirred by something genuinely new in sensations--the arrival
of a German war submarine, the U-53.

THE FOURTH BOOK

THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS

CHAPTER I

A freight submarine, the _Bremen_, had recently excited
the wonderment of a world jaded with miracles by crossing from
Helgoland to Norfolk with a cargo. But here was a war-ship that
dived underneath the British blockade.

The dead of the Lusitania were still unrequited and unburied, but
the Germans had graciously promised President Wilson to sink no
more passenger-ships without warning, and they had been received
back into the indulgence of the super-patient neutrals.

And now came the under-sea boat to test American hospitality. It was
received with amazed politeness and the news flew through Newport,
bringing the people flocking like children. An American submarine
conducted its guest to anchorage. Mail for the ambassador was put
ashore and courtesy visits were exchanged with the commandant of the
Narragansett Bay Naval Station. In three hours the vessel, not to
overstay the bounds of neutral hospitality, returned to the ocean.

A flotilla of American destroyers convoyed it outside and calmly
watched while the monster halted nine ships off Nantucket, graciously
permitted their crews and passengers to take themselves, but no
belongings, into open boats; then torpedoed the vessels one after
another.

The destroyers of the United States Navy stood by like spectators on
the bleachers, and when the submarine had quite finished the supply
of ships the obliging destroyers picked up the fragments in the open
boats and brought them ashore. And the U-53 went on unchecked, after
one of the most astounding spectacles in the history of the sea.

Charity Coe and other women waited on the docks till midnight
arranging refuge for more than two hundred victims. It was a novel
method for getting into Newport mansions. Even Kedzie took in an
elderly couple. She tried to get a few young men, but they were
all taken.

The next morning there was a panic in Wall Street and nearly two
million shares were flung overboard, with a loss of five hundred
million dollars in market values. Marine insurance-rates rose from
a hundred to five hundred per cent. and it seemed that our ocean
trade would be driven from the free seas. But everything had been
done according to the approved etiquette for U-boats, and there
was not even an official protest.

Once more the Germans announced that they had wrecked the British
naval supremacy, as in the battle of Jutland, after which glorious
victory the German fleet appeared no more in the North Sea.

Nor was there any check in the throngs of merchant-vessels shuttling
the ocean for the Allies. And that disgusted the Germans. Their
promises to Mr. Wilson irked them. They lusted again for their old
policy of "ruthlessness"; "_Schrecklichkeit_" joined "_Gott
strafe_" in familiar speech, and Germany added America to her
"Hymn of Hate." Strange, that among all the warring peoples the one
nation that went to battle with the most fervent religious spirit,
even putting "_Gott mit uns_" on the uniforms of its soldiers,
that nation contributed to the slang of the day no nobler phrases
than "_Schrecklichkeit_" and "_strafe_" and the equivalents
of "scrap of paper" and "Hymn of Hate."

All this meant little to Kedzie except that Jakie Vanderveer, who had
been her devoted squire for some time, was caught and ruined in the
market slump. Otherwise he might have ruined Kedzie, for he had been
dazzling her more and more with his lavish courtship. When he lost
his money he left Newport and Kedzie never knew how narrow an escape
she had. She only knew that she did not make the money he promised
to make for her. She said that war was terrible.

A pious soul would have credited Providence with the rescue. But
Providence had other plans. One of the victims of the U-53 was a
young English aviator, the Marquess of Strathdene. If the U-53
had not sunk the ship that carried him Kedzie would have had an
exceedingly different future.

Strathdene had been a spendthrift, a libertine, and a loafer till
the war shook England. He had been well shaken, too, and unsuspected
emotions were aroused. He had learned to fly and insulted the law
of gravity with the same impudence he had shown for the laws of
morality.

In due time he was joined to an air squadron. He risked his life
every moment he was aloft, but the danger became a negligible thing
in the thrill of the liveliest form of big-game hunting thus far
known to man. In mid-sky he stalked his prey and was stalked by it;
he chased German Taubes or was chased by them into clouds and out of
them, up hill and down dale in ether-land amid the showers from below
of the raining aircraft guns. Strathdene knew how to dodge and duck,
turn somersaults, volplane, spiral, coast downward on an invisible
toboggan-slide, or climb into heaven on an airy stair.

The sky was full of such flocks; the gallant American gentlemen
who made up the Escadrille Lafayette went clouding with him, and
Mr. Robert Lorraine, the excellent actor, and Mr. Vernon Castle,
the amiable revolutionist of the dance, and many and many another
eagle heart. Strathdene scouted valuably during the first battle
of the Somme, his companion working the gun or the camera or the
bomb-dropping lever as the need might be.

And then one day a burst of shrapnel from the remote earth shattered
his plane and him. A slug of iron went upward through his hip and
another nicked off a bit of his shoulder. But he brought his wounded
machine safely to earth and toppled into the arms of the hospital
aids; went backward in a motor-ambulance to a receiving-station, then
back in a train, then across the Channel, then across the ocean in
a steamer to be sunk by a submarine and brought ashore in a lifeboat.
Strathdene had pretty well tested the modern systems of vehicular
transportation.

The surgeons mended his wounds, but his nerves had felt the shrapnel.
That was why the sea voyage had been advised. Strathdene seemed to
have a magnetic gift for adventure. An aircraft gun brought him down
from the clouds and a submersible ship came up from the deeps to have
a try at him. Before long Kedzie would be saying that fate had taken
all this trouble just to bring him and her together.

In the transfer from the ship to the lifeboat Strathdene's wounds
were wrenched and his sufferings renewed. He was lucky enough to
fall into the hands of Charity Coe Cheever. She was a war nurse
of experience, and he was soon well enough to try to flirt with
her. But she had been experienced also in the amorous symptoms of
convalescent soldiers and she repressed his ardor skilfully. She
put an ice-cap on his heart and head.

As soon as he was up and about again he met Kedzie. It seemed to
be her business to take away from Charity Coe all of Charity's
conquests, and the young Marquess found her hospitable to his
hunger for friendship.

Before the first day's acquaintance was over Kedzie was as fascinated
by his chatter as Desdemona was by Othello's anecdotes.

One night Kedzie dreamed that she was a Marquessess or whatever
the wife of a Marquess would be styled.

Kedzie was herself again. Kedzie was dreaming again. She had an
ambition for something higher than her station. She made haste to
encourage the infatuated Marquess. Counting upon winning him somehow
as her husband, she gave him encouragement beyond any she had given
her other swains.

But Strathdene had no intention of marrying her or any other woman.
His heart was in the highlands, the cloudlands; his heart was not
there.

A purer patriot or a warrior more free of any taint of caution than
Strathdene could not be imagined, but otherwise he was as arrant
a scamp as ever. While he waited for strength to "carry on" in the
brave, new, English sense, it amused him to "carry on" in the
mischievous old American sense.

Kedzie was determined that he should live long enough for her to
free herself from Jim and make the marquisate hers. She seemed to be
succeeding. She found Strathdene as easy of fascination as her old
movie audiences had been. He even tried to write poetry about her
pout; but he was a better rider on an aeroplane than on Pegasus.

Kedzie was soon wishing for Jim's return, since she could not see how
to divorce him till he appeared. She tried to frame a letter asking
for her release, but it was not easy writing. She felt that she
would have a better chance of success if Jim were within wheedling
distance. But Jim remained away, and Kedzie grew fonder and fonder
of her Marquess, and he of her.

Perhaps they were really mated, their pettinesses and selfishnesses
peculiarly complemental. In any case, they were mutually bewitched.

Their dalliance became the talk of Newport. Everybody believed that
what was bad enough at best was even worse than it was. Charity Coe
heard the couple discussed everywhere. She was distressed on Jim's
account. And now she found herself in just the plight that had
tortured Jim when he knew that Peter Cheever was disloyal to Charity
and longed to tell her, but felt the duty too odious. So Charity
pondered her own obligation. She was tempted to write Jim an
anonymous letter, but had not the cowardice. She was tempted to
write to him frankly, but had not the courage. She did at last what
Jim had done--nothing.

Jim's mother had heard of Vanderveer's disappearance from Kedzie's
entourage and she had improved with hope. When she learned that
Strathdene was apparently infatuated she grew worse and telegraphed
Jim to ask for a leave of absence. She did not tell Kedzie of her
telegram or of Jim's answer.

Pet Bettany flatly accused Kedzie of being guilty, and referred to
the Marquess as her paramour. When Kedzie furiously resented her
insolence Pet laughed.

"The more fool you, if you carry the scandal and lose the fun."

Kedzie was more afraid of Pet's contempt than of a better woman's.
She began to think herself a big fool for not having been a bigger
one. She fell into an altogether dangerous mood and she could no
longer save herself. She almost prayed to be led into temptation.
The unuttered prayer was speedily answered.

She went motoring with Strathdene late one night in a car he had
hired. When he ventured to plead with her not to go back to her home
where her servants provided a kind of chaperonage, she made only
a formal protest or two. He stopped at a roadside inn, a secluded
place well known for its unquestioning hospitality.

Strathdene, tremulous with victory, led Kedzie to the dining-room
for a bit of sup and sip. The landlord escorted them to a nook in
a corner and beckoned a waiter. Kedzie was studying the bill of fare
with blurred and frightened vision when she heard the footsteps of
the waiter plainly audible in the quiet room. They had a curious
rhythm. There was a hitch in the step, a skip.