We Can\'t Have Everything

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Mrs. Thropp had the will but not the power. She was palsied with
rage. "I can't," she faltered.

"Then I will!" said Adna, and he roared with ferocity, "Come here
to me, you!"

He put out his hand like a claw, and Kedzie retreated from him. She
stopped sobbing. She had never been so frightened. She felt a new
kind of fright, the fright of a nun at seeing an altar threatened
with desecration. She had not been whipped for years. She had grown
past that. Surely her body was sacred from such infamy now.

"Come here to me, I tell you!" Adna snarled, as he pursued her
slowly around the chairs.

"You better not whip me, poppa," Kedzie mumbled. "You better not
touch me, I tell you. You'll be sorry if you do! You better not!"

"Come here to me!" said Adna.

"Momma, momma, don't let him!" Kedzie whispered as she ran to her
mother and flung herself in her arms for refuge.

Mrs. Thropp then lost a great opportunity forever. She tore the
girl's hands away and handed her over to her father. And he, with
ugly fury and ugly gesture, seized the young woman who had been
his child and dragged her to him and sank into a chair and wrenched
and twisted her arms till he held her prone across his knees. Then
he spanked her with the flat of his hand.

Kedzie made one little outcry; then there was no sound but the thump
of the blows. Adna sickened soon of his task, and Kedzie's silence
and non-resistance robbed him of excuse. He growled:

"I guess that'll learn you who's boss round here."

He thrust her from his knees, and she rolled off to the floor and
lay still. She had not really swooned, but her soul had felt the
need of withdrawing into itself to ponder this awful sacrilege.

CHAPTER VIII

Her mother knew that she had not fainted. She was sick, too, and
blamed Kedzie for the scene. She spurned the girl with her foot
and said:

"You get right up off that floor this minute. Do you hear?"

Kedzie's soul came back. It had made its decision. It gathered
her body together and lifted it up to its knees and then erect,
while the lips said, "All right, momma."

She groped her way into the bathroom and washed her face, and
straightened her hair and came forth, a dazed and pallid thing.
She took up the valise her father gave her and followed her mother
out, pausing to pass her eyes about the beautiful room and the
window where the peaks of splendor were. Then she walked out,
and her father locked the door.

Kedzie saw that the elevator-boy saw that she had been crying, but
what was one shame extra? She had no pride left now, and no father
and no mother, no anybody.

Adna refused the offices of the pages who clutched at the baggage.
He went to the cashier and paid the blood-money with a grin of hate.
Then he gathered up his women and his other baggage and set out
for the station. He would leave all the baggage there while he
hunted a place to stop.

They could not find the tunnelway, but debouched on the street.
Crossing Vanderbilt Avenue was a problem for village folk heavy
laden. The taxicabs were hooting and scurrying.

Adna found himself in the middle of the street, entirely surrounded
by demoniac motors. His wife wanted to lie down there and die. Adna
dared neither to go nor to stay. Suddenly a chauffeur of an empty
limousine, fearing to lose a chance to swear at a taxi-driver,
kept his head turned to the left and steered straight for the spot
where the Thropps awaited their doom.

Adna had his wife pendent from one arm and a valise or two from
the other. Kedzie carried a third valise. Her better than normal
shoulders were sagged out of line by its weight.

When Adna saw the motor coming he had to choose between dropping
his valise or his wife. Characteristically, he saved his valise.

In spite of his wife's squawking and tugging on his left arm, he
achieved safety under the portico of the Grand Central Terminal.
He looked about for Kedzie. She was not to be seen. Adna saw the
taxicab pass over the valise she had carried. It left no trace of
Kedzie. Her annihilation was uncanny. He gaped.

"Where's Kedzie?" Mrs. Thropp screamed.

A policeman checked the traffic with uplifted hand. Adna ran to him.
Mrs. Thropp told him what had happened.

"I saw the goil drop the bag and beat it for the walk," said
the officer.

"Which way'd she go?"

"She lost herself in the crowd," said the officer.

"She was scared out of her wits," Mrs. Thropp sobbed.

The officer shook his head. "She was smilin' when I yelled at her.
It looks to me like a get-away."

"A runaway?" Mrs. Thropp gasped.

"Yes,'m. I'd have went after her, but I was cut off by a taxi."

The two old Thropps stood staring at each other and the unfathomable
New York, while the impatient chauffeurs squawked their horns in
angry protest, and train-missers with important errands thrust
their heads out of cab windows.

The officer led his bewildered charges to the sidewalk, motioned
the traffic to proceed, and beckoned to a patrolman. "Tell your
troubles to him," he said, and went back into his private maelstrom.

The patrolman heard the Thropp story and tried to keep the crowd away.
He patted Mrs. Thropp's back and said they'd find the kid easy, not
to distoib herself. He told the father which station-house to go to
and advised him to have the "skipper" send out a "general."

Thropp wondered what language he spoke, but he went; and a
soft-hearted walrus in uniform sprawling across a lofty desk
took down names and notes and minute descriptions of Kedzie and
her costume. He told the two babes in the wood that such t'ings
happened constant, and the goil would toin up in no time. He sent
out a general alarm.

Mrs. Thropp told him the whole story, putting all the blame on
her husband with such enthusiasm that the sympathy of everybody
went out to him. Everybody included a number of reporters who
asked Mrs. Thropp questions and particularly desired a photograph
of Kedzie.

Mrs. Thropp confessed that she had not brought any along. She
had never dreamed that the girl would run away. If she had have,
she wouldn't have brought the girl along, to say nothing of
her photograph.

The amiable walrus in the cap and brass buttons recommended the
Thropps to a boarding-house whose prices were commensurate with
Adna's ideas and means, and he and his wife went thither, where
they told a shabby and sentimental landlady all their troubles.
She reassured them as best she could, and made a cup of tea for
Mrs. Thropp and told Mr. Thropp there was a young fellow lived in
the house who was working for a private detective bureau. He'd
find the kid sure, for it was a small woild, after all.

There was a lull in the European-war news the next day--only a few
hundreds killed in an interchange of trenches. There was a dearth
of big local news also. So the morning papers all gave Kedzie Thropp
the hospitality of their head-lines. The illustrated journals
published what they said was her photograph. No two of the
photographs were alike, but they were all pretty.

The copy-writers loved the details of the event. They gave the
dialogue of the Thropps in many versions, all emphasizing what
is known as "the human note."

Every one of them gave due emphasis to the historic fact that Kedzie
Thropp had been spanked.

The boarding-house was shaken from attic to basement by the news.
The Thropps read the papers. They were astounded and enraged at
gaining publicity for such a deed. They visited the walrus in his den.
But there was no word of Kedzie Thropp. The sea of people had opened
and swallowed the little girl. Her mother wondered where she had
slept and if she were hungry and into whose hands she had fallen.
But there was no answer from anywhere.

CHAPTER IX

People who call a child in from All Outdoors and make it their infant
owe it to their victim to be rich, brilliant, and generous. Kedzie
Thropp's parents were poor, stupid, and stingy.

They were respectable enough, but not respectful at all. Children
have more dignity than anybody else, because they have not lived
long enough to have their natal dignity knocked out of them.

Kedzie's parents ought to have respected hers, but they subjected her
to odious humiliation. When her father threatened to spank her--and
did--and when her mother aided and abetted him, they forfeited all
claim to her tolerance. The inspiration to run away was forced on
Kedzie, though she would have said that her parents ran away from
her first.

Kedzie had preferred her own life to the security of her valise.
She dropped the bag without hesitation. When the taxicab parted her
family in the middle, Kedzie ran to the opposite sidewalk. She saw
a policeman dashing into the thick of the motors. Her eye caught his.
He beckoned to her that he would ferry her across the torrent. He
was a nice-looking man, but she shook her head at him. She smiled,
however, and hastened away.

Freedom had been forced on her. Why should she relinquish the boon?

She lost herself in the crowd. She had no purpose or destination,
for the whole city was a mystery to her. Soon she noted that part of
the human stream flowed down into the yawning maw of a Subway kiosk
as the water ran out of the bath-tub in the hotel. She floated down
the steps and found herself in a big subterrene room with walls tiled
like those of the hotel bathroom. Everybody was buying tickets from
a man in a funny little cage.

Kedzie had a hand-bag slung at her wrist. In it was some small money.
She fished out a nickel and slid it across the glass sill as the
others did.

Beneath her eyes she saw a card that asked, "How many?" She said,
"One."

The doleful ticket-seller was annoyed at the tautology of passing
him a nickel and saying, "One!" He shot out an angry glance with
the ticket, but he melted at sight of Kedzie's lush beauty, recognized
her unquestionable plebeiance, and hailed her with a "Here you are,
Cutie."

Kedzie was not at all insulted. She gave him smile for smile, took up
her pasteboard and followed the crowd through the gate.

The ticket-chopper yelled at the back of her head, "Here, where you
goin'?"

She turned to him, and his scowl relaxed. He pointed to the box
and pleaded:

"Put her there, miss, if you please."

She smiled at the ticket-chopper and dropped the flake into the box.
She moved down the stairway as an express rolled in. People ran.
Kedzie ran. They squeezed in at the side door, and so did Kedzie.
The wicker seats were full, and so Kedzie stood. She could not reach
the handles that looked like cruppers. Men and women saw how pretty
she was. She was so pretty that one or two men nearly rose and
offered her their seats. When the train whooped round the curve
beneath Times Square Kedzie was spun into the lap of a man reading
a prematurely born "Night Edition."

She came through the paper like a circus-lady, and the man was
indignant till he saw what he held. Then he laughed foolishly,
helped the giggling Kedzie to her feet and rose to his own, gave her
his place, and went blushing into the next car. For an hour after
his arms felt as if they had clasped a fugitive nymph for a moment
before she escaped.

This train chanced to be an express to 180th Street in the Bronx
Borough. If any one had asked Kedzie if she knew the Bronx she would
probably have answered that she did not know them. She did not even
know what a borough was.

It was fascinating how much Kedzie did not know. She had an infinite
fund of things to find out.

She was thrilled thoroughly by the glorious velocity through
the tunnel. The train stopped at Seventy-second Street and at
Ninety-sixth Street and at many other stations. People got on
or off. But Kedzie was too well entertained to care to leave.

She did not know that the train ran under a corner of Central Park
and beneath the Harlem River. She would have liked to know. To run
under a river would tell well at home.

Suddenly the Subway shot out into midair and became a superway.
The street which had been invisible above was suddenly visible below,
with street-cars on it. Also there was a still higher track overhead.
Three layers of tracks! It was heavenly, the noise they made! She
enjoyed hearing the mounting numbers of the streets shouted
antiphonally by the gentlemen at either door.

At 180th Street, however, the train stopped for good, and the handsome
young man at the front door called, "All out!" He said it to Kedzie
with a beautiful courtesy, adding, "This is as far as we go, lady."

That was tremendous, to be called "lady." Kedzie tried to get out
like one. She smiled at the guard and left his protection with some
reluctance. He studied her as she walked along the platform. She
seemed to meet with his approval in general, and in particular.
He sighed when she turned out of his sight.

The station here was very high up in the world. Kedzie counted
seventy-seven steps on her way to the level. She was distressed
to find herself in a shabby, noisy community where streets radiated
in six directions. Her fears were true. She had left New York. She
must get home to it again.

She walked back along the way she had come, on the sidewalk beneath
the tracks. This meandering street was called Boston Road. Kedzie had
no ideas as to the distance of Boston. She only knew that New York
was good enough for her--the New York of Forty-second Street,
of course. Kedzie did not know yet how many, many New Yorks there
are in New York.

She was discouraged by her present surroundings. Along the rough
and neglected streets were little rows of shanty shops, and there
were stubby frame residences.

There was one two-story cottage snuggling against a hill; it had
a little picket fence with a little picket gate leading to a little
ragged yard with an old apple-tree in it; and there was a pair of
steps up to the front door, and a rough trellis from there to the
woodshed with a grapevine draped across it. It was of the James
Whitcomb Riley school of architecture--a house with a woodshed.

Rich people who were tired of the city, and chanced that way,
used to pause and look at that little nook and admire its meek
attractiveness. It made them homesick.

But Kedzie was sick of home. This lowly cot was too much like
her father's. It had a sign on it that said, "To Let." It was
a funny expression. Kedzie studied it a long time before she
decided that it was New-Yorkese for "For Rent."

She shuddered at the idea of renting or letting such a house--
especially as it was so close to a church, a small, seedy,
frame church nearly all roof, a narrow-chested, slope-shouldered
churchlet with a frame cupola for a steeple. It looked abandoned,
and an ivy flourished on it so impudently that it almost closed
the unfrequented portal.

The bill-boards here made mighty interesting reading. There were
magnificent works of an art on the grand scale of a people's
gallery; one structure promulgated the glories of a notorious
chewing-gum. There was a gorgeous proclamation of a fashionable
glove with a picture of an extremely swell slim lady all dressed
up--or rather all dressed down--for the opera.

Kedzie prayed the Lord to send her some day a pair of full-length
white kid gloves like those. As for a box at the opera, she would
take her chances on the sunniest cloud-sofa in heaven for an evening
at the opera. And for a dress cut deckolett and an aigret in her
hair, she would have swapped a halo and a set of wings.

There was no end to the big pages of this literature, and Kedzie read
dozens of them from right to left in a southerly direction. Finally
she abandoned the Boston Road and walked over to a better-groomed
avenue with more of a city atmosphere.

But she saw a police signal-station at 175th Street, and she thought
it better to abandon the Southern Boulevard. She was not sure of her
police yet, and she had an uneasy feeling that her father and mother
were at that moment telling their troubles to some policeman who
would shortly be putting her description in the hands of detectives.
She did not want to be arrested. Poppa might try to spank her again.
She did not want to have to murder anybody, especially her parents.
She liked them better when she was away from them.

She hated to waste five cents on a street-car, but finally she
achieved the extravagance. The car went sliding and grinding through
an amazing amount of paved street, with an inconceivable succession
of apartment-houses and shops.

At length she reached a center of what she most desired--noise and
mob and hurry. At 164th Street she came to a star of streets where
the Third Avenue Elevated collaborated with the surface-cars and the
loose traffic to create a delicious pandemonium. She loved those high
numbers--a hundred and eighty streets! Beautiful! At home Main Street
dissolved into pastures at Tenth Street.

She wanted to find Main Street in New York and see what First Street
looked like. It was probably along the Atlantic Ocean. That also was
one of the things she must see--her first ocean!

But while Kedzie was reveling in the splendors of 164th Street her
eye was caught by the gaudy placards of a moving-picture emporium.
There was a movie-palace at home. It was the town's one metropolitan
charm.

There was a lithograph here that reached out and caught her like
a bale-hook. It represented an impossibly large-eyed girl, cowering
behind a door on whose other side stood a handsome devil in evening
dress. He was tugging villainously at a wicked mustache, and his eyes
were thrillingly leery. Behind a curtain stood a young man who held
a revolver and waited. The title of the picture decided Kedzie. It
was "The Vampire's Victim; a Scathing Exposure of High Society."

Kedzie studied hard. For all her gipsy wildness, she had a trace
of her father's parsimony, and she hated to spend money that was
her very own. Some of the dimes and quarters in that little purse
had been there for ages. Besides, her treasury would have to sustain
her for an indefinite period.

But she wanted to know about high society. She was not sure what
_scathing_ meant, or what the pronunciation of it was. She
rather inclined to _"scat-ting."_ Anyway, it looked important.

She stumbled into the black theater and found a seat among mysterious
persons dully silhouetted against the screen. This was none of
the latter-day temples where moving pictures are run through with
cathedral solemnity, soft lights, flowers, orchestral uplift, and
nearly classic song. This was a dismal little tunnel with one end
lighted by the twinkling pictures. Tired mothers came here to escape
from their children, and children came here to escape from their
tired mothers. The plots of the pictures were as trite and as rancid
as spoiled meat, but they suited the market. This plot concerned
a beautiful girl who came to the city from a small town. She was a
good girl, because she came from a small town and had poor parents.

She was dazzled a little, however, by the attentions of a swell devil
of great wealth, and she neglected her poor--therefore honest--lover
temporarily. She learned the fearful joys of a limousined life, and
was lured into a false marriage which nearly proved her ruin. The
villain got a fellow-demon to pretend to be a minister, put on false
hair, reversed his collar, and read the wedding ceremony; and the
heroine was taken to the rich man's home.

The rooms were as full of furniture as a furniture-store, and so
Kedzie knew it was a swell home. Also there was a butler who walked
and acted like a wooden man.

The heroine was becomingly shy of her husband, but finally went to
her room, where a swell maid put her to bed (with a proper omission
of critical moments) in a bed that must have cost a million dollars.
Some womanly, though welching, intuition led the bride to lock
her door. Some manly intuition led the hero to enter the gardens
and climb in through a window into the house. If he had not been
a hero it would have been a rather reprehensible act. But to the
heroes all things are pure. He prowled through the house heroically
without attracting attention. Every step of his burglarious progress
was applauded by the audience.

The hero hid behind one of those numberless portieres that hang
everywhere in the homes of the _moveaux riches,_ and waited
with drawn revolver for the dastard bridegroom to attempt his
hellish purpose.

The locked door thwarted the villain for the time, and he decided
to wait till he got the girl aboard one of those yachts which rich
people keep for evil purposes. Thus the villain unwittingly saved
the hero from the painful necessity of committing murder, and added
another reel to the picture.

It is not necessary and it might infringe a copyright to tell
the rest of the story. It would be insulting to say that the false
minister, repenting, told the hero, who told the heroine after he
rescued her from the satanic yacht and various other temptations.
Of course she married the plain-clothes man and lived happily ever
after in a sin-proof cottage with a garden of virtuous roses.

Kedzie was so excited that she annoyed the people about her, but
she learned again the invaluable lesson that rich men are unfit
companions for nice girls. Kedzie resolved to prove this for herself.
She prayed for a chance to be tempted so that she might rebuke some
swell villain. But she intended to postpone the rebuke until she had
seen a lot of high life. This would serve a double purpose: Kedzie
would get to see more millionairishness, and the rebuke would be
more--more "_scatting_." It is hard even to think a word you
cannot pronounce.

Kedzie gained one thing further from the pictures--a new name. She
had been musing incessantly on choosing one. She had always hated
both _Thropp_ and _Kedzie,_ and had counted on marriage
to reform her surname. But she could not wait. She wanted an alias
at once. The police were after her. The heroine of this picture
was named _Anita Adair,_ and the name just suited Kedzie. She
intended to be known by it henceforth.

She had not settled on what town she had come from. Perhaps she would
decide to have been born in New York. She rather fancied the notion
of being a daughter of a terrible swell family who wanted to force
her to marry a wicked old nobleman, but she ran away sooner than
submit to the _"imfany"_--that was the way Kedzie pronounced
it in her head. It was a word she had often seen but never heard.

Meanwhile she was sure of one thing: Kedzie Thropp was annihilated
and Anita Adair was born full grown.

At the conclusion of the film Kedzie was saddened by a ballad sung by
an adenoid tenor. The song was a scatting exposure of the wickedness
of Broadway. The refrain touched Kedzie deeply, and alarmed her
somewhat. It reiterated and reiterated:

"There's a browkin hawt for everee light ton Broadway-ee."

Kedzie began to fear that she would furnish one more. And yet
it would be rather nice to have a broken heart, Kedzie thought,
especially on Broadway.

CHAPTER X

Kedzie watched the moving picture twice through. The second time
it was not so good. It lacked spontaneity and sincerity.

At the first vision everything seemed to rise from what preceded;
people did what was natural or noble. The second time it looked
mechanical, rehearsed; the thrill was gone, too, because she knew
positively that the hero was not really going to shoot, and
the villain was not really going to break through the door.

She wandered forth in a tragedy of disillusionment. That was really
the cause of the pout that seemed to say, "Please kiss me!" She pouted
because when she got what she wanted she no longer wanted it.

There are hearts like cold storage. They keep what they get fresh and
cool; and there are hearts that spoil whatever is intrusted to them.
In Kedzie's hot young soul, things spoiled soon.

She was hungry, and she could not resist the impulse to enter a cheap
restaurant. She did not know how cheap it was. It was as good as
the best restaurant in Nimrim, Mo.

Kedzie ordered unfamiliar things for the sake of educating her
illiterate mid-Western stomach. She ordered clam chowder and Hamburger
steak, spaghetti Italienne, lobster salad, and Neapolitan ice-cream.
She ate too much--much too much.

The total bill was ninety-five cents, and she was terrified. She had
thought her father a miser for complaining of the breakfast bill of
eleven-odd dollars at the Biltmore, but that was his money, not hers.

When she finished her meal she did not dream of tipping the waiter.
He seemed not to expect it, but he grinned as he asked her to come
again. He hoped she would. He went to the door and stared after her,
sadly, longingly. The dishes she had left he carried away with
an elegiac solemnity.

The streets were darkened now and the lights bewildered Kedzie.
The town grew more solemn. It withdrew into itself. People were
going home.

Kedzie did not know where to go. She walked for fear of standing
still. The noise fatigued her. She turned west to escape it and
found a little park at 161st Street.

Many streets flowed thence. There were ten ways to follow, and she
could not choose one among them.