We Can\'t Have Everything

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By a roundabout road of self-surrender she had come to the same
destination that she might have reached by the straight path of
self-indulgence. She was perilously near to resolving that she had
been a fool not to have taken happiness, physical happiness, first.
A grand red passion seemed so much more beautiful than a petty blue
asceticism.

When she got home from the will-making session with McNiven she
began to go over her papers and close the books of her years.
She attacked old heaps of bundles of her husband's letters and
telegrams, and burned them with difficulty in her fireplace.

She felt no temptation to glance over them, though her lip curled
in a grimace of sardonic disgust to consider how much Peter Cheever
had been to her and how little he was to her now. The first parcels
she burned were addressed to "Miss Charity Coe." How far off it
seemed since she had been called "Miss"!

She had been a girl when Cheever's written and spoken words inflamed
her. They blazed now as she had blazed. Into that holocaust had gone
her youth, her illusions, her virginity, her bridehood, her wifely
trust. And all that was left was a black char.

She came upon letters from Jim Dyckman, also, a few. She flung them
into the fire with the rest. He had had nothing from her except
friendship and girlish romance and a grass-widow's belated affection.
Crimson thoughts stole through her dark heart like the lithe blazes
interlacing the letters; she wondered if she would have done better
to have followed desire and taken love instead of solitude.

She knew that she could have made Jim hers long ago with a little
less severity, a less harsh rebuff. The Church condemned her for
openly divorcing her husband. She might have kept him on the leash
and carried on the affair with Jim that Cheever accused her of if
Jim had been complacent and stealthy. Or, she might have kept Jim
at her heels till she was rid of Cheever and then have married him.
She would have saved him at least from floundering through the marsh
where that Kedzie-o'-the-wisp had led him to ultimate disaster.

And now that she had taken stock of her past and put it into the
fire, she felt strangely exiled. She had no past, no present, and
a future all hazy. Her loneliness was complete. She had to talk
to some one, and she telephoned to Jim Dyckman, making her good-bys
an excuse.

It was the first time he had been permitted to hear her voice for
weeks, and the lonely joy that cried out in his greeting brought
warm tears to her dull, dry eyes.

He heard her weeping and he demanded the right to come to see her.
She refused him and cut off his plea, hoping that he would come,
anyway, and waiting tremulously till the door-bell rang with a
forgotten thrill of a caller, a lover calling.

Her maid, who brought her Jim's name, begged with her eyes that
he should not be turned away again. Charity nodded and prinked
a little and went down-stairs into Jim's arms.

He took her there as if she belonged there and she felt that she
did, though she protested, feebly:

"You are not unmarried yet."

They were in that No-Man's-Land. She was neither maid, wife, nor
widow, but divorcee. He was neither bachelor, husband, nor widower;
he was not even a divorce. He was a _Nisi Prius_.

CHAPTER XV

The childish old fates played one of their cheapest jokes on Jim
Dyckman when, after they had dangled Charity Coe just out of his
reach for a lifetime, they flung her at his head. They do those
things. They waken the Juliets just a moment too late to save
the Romeos and themselves.

Jim had revered Charity as far too good for him, and now everybody
wondered if he would do the right thing by her. Prissy Atterbury
in a burst of chivalry said it when he said:

"Jim's no gentleman if he doesn't marry Charity."

Pet put it in a more womanly way:

"Unless he's mighty spry she'll nab him. Trust her!"

Among the few people who had caught a glimpse of Charity, no one had
been quite cruel enough to say those things to her face, but Charity
imagined them. Housed with her sick and terrified imagination for
companion, she had imagined nearly everything dismal.

And now, when, by the mere laws of gravitation, she had floated into
Jim Dyckman's arms for a moment, she heard the popular doom of them
both in the joke he attempted:

"Charity, I've got to marry you to make you an honest woman."

She wrenched free of his embrace with a violence that staggered him.
He saw that she was taking his effort at playfulness seriously, even
tragically.

"No, no, Jim!" she gasped. "I've brought you enough trouble and
enough disgrace. I won't let you ruin your life by marrying me
out of pity."

"Pity! Good God!" Jim groaned. "Why, you don't think I meant that,
do you? I was just trying to be funny, because I was so happy.
I'll promise never to try to be funny again. It was like saying to
Venus, 'You're a homely old thing, but I'll let you cook for me';
or saying to--whoever it was was the Goddess of Wisdom, 'You don't
know much, but'--Why, Charity Coe, you're Venus and Minerva and all
the goddesses rolled into one."

Charity shook her head.

He roared: "If it's pity you're talking about, isn't it about time
you had a little for me? Life won't be worth a single continental
damn to me if I don't get you."

Charity had needed something of this sort for a long time. It
sounded to her like a serenade by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Her acknowledgment was a tearful, smileful giggle-sob:

"Honestly?"

"Honest-to-God-ly!"

"All right, as soon as you're a free man fetch the parson, for I'm
pretty tired of being a free woman."

Jim had learned from McNiven that a part of his freedom, when he got
it, would be a judicial denial of the right to surrender it for five
years. He had learned that if he wanted to marry Charity he must
persuade her over into New Jersey. It did not please Jim to have to
follow the example of Zada and Cheever, and it hit him as a peculiar
cruelty that he and Charity had to accept not only an unearned
increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but also a marriage
contrary to the laws of New York.

New York would respect the ceremonies of New Jersey, but there would
be a shadow on the title. Still, such marriages were recognized by
the public with little question, just as in the countries where
divorce is almost or quite impossible society of all grades has
always countenanced unions not too lightly entered into or continued.
In such countries words like "mistress," "concubine," and "morganatic
wife" take on a decided respectability with a touch of pathos rather
than reproach.

Jim had come to beg Charity to accept a marriage with an impediment.
He had expected a scene when he proposed a flight across the river
and a return to Father Knickerbocker with a request for pardon.
But her light suggestion of a religious ceremony threw him into
confusion. He mumbled:

"Is a parson absolutely necessary?"

Charity's lips set into a grim line.

"I'll be married by a parson or I'll not be married at all. The
Church has enough against me on account of my divorce and this
last ghastly thing. To get married outside the Church would cut
me off entirely from everything that's sacred. There won't be
any difficulty about getting a parson, will there?"

"Oh no, not at all!" Jim protested, "only--oh no, not at all,
except--"

"Only what? Except what?"

"You'll have to go to New Jersey to be married."

"Why should I?"

"Entirely on my account, honey. It's because I'm in disgrace."

This way of putting it brought her over that sill with a rush.
To be able to endure something for him was a precious ability.
She hugged him devoutly, then put his arms away.

When he left her he had a brilliant inspiration. He thought how
soothing it would be to her bruised heart, what carron-oil to her
blistered reputation, if he got Doctor Mosely to perform the
ceremony. Jim was so delighted with the stroke of genius that he
went immediately to the pastor's house. The dear old man greeted
him with a subdued warmth.

"This is an unusual privilege, dear boy. I haven't seen you for--oh,
ever so long. Of course, I have read of you--er--that is--what--to
what am I indebted for--"

"You perform marriages, don't you?"

"That is one of my perilous prerogatives. But, of course, I can't
guarantee how well my marriages will wear in these restless times."

Jim braved a flippancy: "Then, being an honest dealer, you replace
any damaged article, of course?"

"I am afraid I could hardly go so far as that."

"Could you go as far as New Jersey?"

"In my time I have ventured into Macedonia. But why do you ask?"

"You see, in a day or two, I'll be free from my present--that is,
my absent wife; and I wanted to know if you could come over and
marry me."

"But I thought--I fear--do you mean to say you are marrying some
young woman from over there?"

"I'm marrying Charity Coe."

"My dear, dear boy! Really! You can't, you know! She has been
divorced and so have you."

"Yes, all quite legally."

"And you ask me to join your hands in holy matrimony?"

"No, just plain legal matrimony. I was joined in holy matrimony
once, and I don't insist on that part of it again. But Charity
wants a clergyman and I don't mind."

"Really, my son, you know better than to assume this tone to me.
You've been away from church too long."

"Well, if you want to get me back, fasten me to Charity. You know
she's the best woman that ever lived."

"She is a trifle too rebellious to merit that tribute, I fear."

"Well, give her another chance. She has had enough hard knocks.
You ought to go to her rescue."

"Do you think that to be the duty of the Church?"

"It used to be, didn't it? But don't get me into theology. I can't
swim. The point is, will you marry Charity to me?"

"No!"

"Wouldn't you marry her to any man?"

"Only to one."

"Who's that?"

"Her former husband."

"But he's married to another woman."

"I do not recognize that marriage."

"Good Lord! Would you like to see Charity married to Cheever
again?"

"Yes."

"To Peter Cheever?"

"Yes."

"Whew! Say, Doctor, that's going it pretty strong."

"I do not care to discuss the sacraments with you in your present
humor."

"Did you read the trial of that woman last week who killed her
husband and was acquitted? Mrs. What's-her-name? You must have
read it."

"I pay little attention to the newspaper scandals."

"You ought to--they're what make life what it is. Anyway, this woman
had a husband who turned out bad. He was a grafter and a gambler,
a drunkard and a brute. He beat her and their five children horribly,
and finally she divorced him. The law gave her her freedom in five
minutes and there was no fuss about it, because she was poor, and
the newspapers have no room for poor folks' marriage troubles--unless
they up and kill somebody.

"Well, this woman was getting along all right when some good
religious people got at her about the sin of her divorce and the
broken sacrament, and they kept at her till finally she consented
to remarry her husband--for the children's sake! There was great
rejoicing by everybody--except the poor woman. After the remarriage
he returned to his old ways and began to beat her again, and finally
she emptied a revolver into him."

"Horrible, horrible!"

"Wasn't it? The jury disagreed on the first trial. But on the second
the churchpeople who persuaded her to remarry him went on the stand
and confessed--or perhaps you would say, boasted--that they persuaded
her to remarry him. And then she was acquitted. And that's why the
civil law has always had to protect people from--"

Doctor Mosely turned purple at the implication and the insolence.
He scolded Jim loftily, but Jim did not cower. He was upheld by
his own religion, which was Charity Coe's right to vindication
and happiness.

At length he realized that he was harming Charity and not Doctor
Mosely. Suddenly he was apologizing humbly:

"I'm very much ashamed of myself. You're an older man and venerable,
and I--I oughtn't to have forgotten that."

"You ought not."

"I'll do any penance you say, if you'll only marry Charity and me."

"Don't speak of that again."

He thought of his old friend and attorney, money. He put that
forward.

"I'll pay anything."

"Mr. Dyckman!"

"I'll give the church a solid gold reredos or contribute any sum
to any alms--"

"Please go. I cannot tolerate any more."

Jim left the old man in such agitation that a reporter named Hallard,
who shadowed him, feeling in his journalistic bones that a big story
would break about him soon, noted his condition and called on Doctor
Mosely. He was still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals
from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an admission that
Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matrimony, also a scathing diatribe on the
remarriage of divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing
degeneracy of public morals.

* * * * *

Hallard's paper carried a lovely exclusive story the next morning
in noisy head-lines. The other newspapers enviously plagiarized
it and set their news-sleuths on Jim's trail. The clergy of all
denominations took up the matter as a theme of vital timeliness.

Jim and Charity were beautifully suited to the purposes of both
sorts; the newspapers that pulpiteered the news and wrote highly
moral editorials for sensation's sake; and the pulpiteers who
shouted head-lines and yellow journalism from their rostrums,
more for the purpose of self-advertisement than for any devotion
to Christly principles of sympathy and gentle comprehension.

Jim was stupefied to find himself once more pilloried and portraited
and ballyhooed in the newspapers. But he tightened his jaws and
refused to be howled from his path by any coyote pursuit.

His next thought was of the New Jersey clergyman who had married
him to Kedzie. He motored over to him.

Jim had told Dr. Mosely that clergymen ought to keep up with the
news. He found, to his regret, that the New Jersey dominie did.

He remembered Jim well and heard him out, but shook his head.
He explained why, patiently. He had been greatly impressed by the
action of the House of Deputies of the Protestant Episcopal Church
convened at St. Louis in October, 1916. A new canon had been proposed
declaring that "no marriage shall be solemnized in this Church
between parties, either of whom has a husband or wife still living,
who has been divorced for any cause arising after marriage."

This meant that the innocent party, as well as the guilty, should
be denied another chance. The canon had been hotly debated--so hotly
that one preacher referred to any wedding of divorced persons as
"filth marriage," and others were heard insisting that even Christ's
acceptance of adultery as a cause for divorce was an interpolation
in the text, and that the whole passage concerning the woman taken in
adultery was absent from some ancient manuscripts. A halt was called
to this dangerous line of argument, and one clergyman protested that
"the question of the integrity of the Scriptures is more important
than the question of marriage and divorce." Another clergyman
pleaded: "An indissoluble marriage is a fiction. What is the use of
tying the Church up to a fiction? It is our business to teach and
not to legislate." Eventually the canon was defeated. But many of
the clergy were determined to follow it, anyway.

In any case, not only was Charity divorced, but she had been involved
in Jim's divorce, and Jim, as the New Jersey preacher pointed out
to him, was denied remarriage even by the civil law of New York. The
appeal to New Jersey was plainly a subterfuge, and he begged Jim to
give Charity up.

"You don't know what you ask," Jim cried. "I'll find somebody with
a heart!" And he stormed out.

CHAPTER XVI

Jim reported to Charity his two defeats and the language he had heard
and read. Charity's conscience was so clean that her reaction was one
of wrath. She pondered her future and Jim's. She could not see what
either of them had done so vile that they should be sentenced to
celibacy for life, or more probably to an eventual inevitable horror
of outward conformity and secret intrigue.

She knew too many people whose wedlock had been a lifelong tolerance
of infamy on the part of one or both. Some of the bitterest enemies
of divorce were persons who had found it quite unnecessary. She
felt that to forgive and to forget became so anti-social a habit
in matrimony that no divorce could be worse.

She was afraid of herself, too. She dared not trust herself with life
alone. She was too human to be safe. Marriage with Jim would protect
him and her from each other and from the numberless temptations
awaiting them. Finally, there were no children in the matter.

All arguments prove too much and too little, and in the end become
simply our own briefs for our own inclinations. Charity's mood being
what it was, she adopted the line of reasoning that led to her own
ambition. She spent much time on her knees, but communed chiefly
with herself, and rose always confirmed in her belief that to marry
Jim Dyckman was the next great business of her existence.

Jim, too, had grown unwontedly earnest. The marriage denounced by
the religious had taken on a religious quality. He was inclined to
battle for it as for a creed, as the clergymen had battled vainly
for the new canon.

He, too, felt a spirit of genuflexion and wanted to speak to God
personally; to appeal to Him by a private petition as to a king
whose ministers denied mercy.

By his bed he sank down and prayed. He was very solemn, but too
uncertain of the solemn voice to use it. He half whispered, half
thought:

"O God, I don't know how you want me to act. I only know that my
heart keeps on calling for Charity and a home with her, and children
some day. There'll never be any children for either of us if we obey
the Church. Forgive me if I doubt what these preachers tell me, but
I just can't believe it to be your voice. If it is not your voice,
what is it that makes me feel it such a sin not to marry Charity?
I'm going to, God, unless you stop me. I may be making a big mistake,
but if I am you'll understand. You will not be mad at me any more
than I am mad at my dog when he misunderstands me, for I know he is
a good dog and wants to do what I want him to if he can only learn
what it is. If it is not your will that I should marry Charity tell
me now so that I can't misunderstand, for if you don't I'm going
ahead. If I have to take the punishment afterward, I'll take it
rather than leave that poor soul alone. Bless her, O God, and help
me. Amen."

And now both Charity and Jim were ready for battle. She set her hand
in Jim's and said that she would marry him in spite of all, but that
she would not give up her hope of being married by one of her own
faith until she had canvassed the entire clergy.

And then began one of the strangest quests ever undertaken, even
in this transitional period of matrimony as an institution--a quest
so strange that it would seem impossible if it had not actually
happened. Jim and Charity hunted a preacher and the press hunted
them.

While the journalists waited for the United States to enter the war
with soldiers, the reporters kept in practice by scouting after Jim
Dyckman and sniping him whenever he showed his head. He succeeded
only in getting his resignation from his regiment accepted. He
planned to sail for France and fight for France as soon as he had
married Charity.

When he failed to secure a minister by letter or telegram he set
forth to make personal visits. Sometimes Charity went with him so
that there should be no delay or time for a change of mood.

From city to town they went, from village to city, searching for
an Episcopalian clergyman to say the desired words. Jim offered any
bribery that might suffice, but ahead of him went his notoriety.

Many a warm-hearted clergyman felt sympathy for Jim and Charity and
longed to end their curious pilgrimage, but dared not brave the wrath
of his fellow-preachers or accept the unwelcome fame that awaited
his blessing, and the discipline that would be meted out to him.

Jim's picture was so widely published that when he eluded one crowd
another posse sprang up wherever he reappeared. His entrance into
a town was a signal for the clergy to scurry to cover. Some of them,
to put themselves on record and insure themselves against temptation,
denounced Jim and his attachee as traveling fiends, emissaries of
the devil.

The wealth that was their drag was proclaimed as their weapon.

The storm grew fiercer and the language more unrestrained. Jim and
Charity, reading in the papers the terms applied to them, cowered
and shuddered.

Charity grew haggard and peevish. Her obstinacy was hardly more than
a lockjaw of fright, the stubbornness of a drowning child afraid to
let go.

Jim was almost equally sick. The newspaper pursuit covered him with
chagrin. His good old name was precious to him, and he knew how his
mother and father were suffering at its abuse, as well as for him
in his fugitive distress.

Jim's mother was very much mother. She took into her breast every
arrow shot at him. When she saw him she held him fiercely in her
arms, her big frame aching with a Valkyrian ardor to lift the brave
warrior on a winged horse and carry him away from the earth.

It is hard for the best of mothers to love even the best of
daughters-in-law, for how can two fires prosper on the same fuel?
It had been a little too hard for Mrs. Dyckman to love Kedzie. It
was all too easy to hate her now and to denounce her till even Jim
winced.

"Don't think of her, mother," he pleaded. "Don't let's speak of
her any more. She's only one of my past mistakes. You never mention
those--why not let her drop?"

"All right, honey. You must forgive me. I'm only a sour old woman
and it breaks my heart to think of that little, common--"

"There you go again," her husband growled, sick with grief, too.
"Let the little cat go."

"What's killing me," Jim said, "is thinking of what I've brought on
Charity. It makes me want to die."

"But you'll have to live for her sake--and your mother's," said his
mother. "Charity's the only woman I know that's worth fighting for.
I've known her since she was born and I never knew her to do or say
one single petty thing. She hasn't got one of those qualities that
women hate so much in women."

"Then why should she have to suffer such persecution?" Jim cried.
"My God! is chivalry dead in the world?"

His father flung his arm around him and hugged him roughly. "Not
while there's a man like you to fight for a woman like her. I never
was so proud of anything as I am of being the father of a big fellow
like you, who can make a battle like yours for love of a woman."

"But why should I have to fight for her? Whose business is it but
ours that we want to get married decently and live together quietly?
Isn't this a free country?"

"Only the press is free," said his father. "And poor Charity is
getting nothing more than women have always got who've dared to ask
for their own way. They used to throw 'em to the lions, or bowstring
'em in the harems. And in the days of real chivalry they burned 'em
at the stake or locked 'em up in convents or castles. But don't you
worry, Jim, Charity has you for a champion and she's mighty lucky.
Go on and fight the muckers and the muck-rakers, and don't let the
reporters or the preachers scare you away from doing the one right
thing."

The newspapers kept within the almost boundless limits of the
libel law. Jim had publicity enough, and he did not care to add to
it by a libel suit, nor could he bring himself to make a personal
attack on any of his pursuers. His discretion took on the look
of poltroonery and he groveled in shame.

One bitter day he motored with Charity to a village where a
clergyman lived who had wearied of the persecution and volunteered
his offices. When they arrived his wife told Jim that he was
stricken ill. He had fretted himself into his bed.

Jim bundled Charity into his car and set forth again in a storm.
The car skidded and turned turtle in a ditch. By some chance neither
of them was more than bruised and muddied. The hamper of food was
spilled and broken and they had hours to wait by the roadside while
a wrecking crew came from the nearest city to right the car.

While they waited, forlorn and shivering, like two tramps rather
than like two malefactors of great wealth, their hunger drove them
to banquet on their little store.

Jim, gnawing at a crust of suspicious cleanliness, studied Charity
where she huddled in the shelter of a dripping tree, like a queen
driven forth into exile. And the tears poured from his eyes and
salted the bread. He had eaten the food of his own tears. He had
tasted life and found it bitter.

When the men came with the ropes and the tackle necessary and
slowly righted the car he found that its engine ran again and he
had speed and strength once more as his servants. He tried to
encourage Charity with a figure of speech.