We Can\'t Have Everything

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"They've got us ditched, honey, for a while, but we'll get righted
soon and then life will be as smooth as smooth."

She tried to smile for his sake, but she had finished with hope.

CHAPTER XVII

While Jim and Charity sat by the roadside the Marchioness of
Strathdene, _nee_ Kedzie Thropp, of Nimrim, sat on a fine
cushion and salted with her tears the toasted English crumpet
she was having with her tea.

She had been married indeed, but the same ban that fell upon Jim's
remarriage had forbidden her the wedding of her dreams. She was
the innocent party to the divorce and she was married in a church.
But it was not of the Episcopal creed, which she was now calling the
Church of England. Kedzie-like, she still wanted what she could not
get and grieved over what she got. It is usual to berate people of
her sort, but they are no more to be blamed than other dyspeptics.
Souls, like stomachs, cannot always coordinate appetite and
digestion.

Kedzie had, however, found a husband who would be permanently
precious to her, since she would never be certain of him. Like
her, he was restless, volatile, and maintained his equilibrium as
a bicycle does only by keeping on going. He was mad to be off to
the clouds of France. There was a delay because ships were sailing
infrequently, and their departure was kept secret. Passengers had
to go aboard and wait.

Bidding "bon voyage" was no longer the stupid dock-party platitude
it had been. It was bidding "good-by" with faint hope of _"au
revoir."_ Ladies going abroad, even brides, thought little of
their deck costumes so long as they included a well-tailored
life-preserver.

Mrs. Thropp stared at Kedzie and breathed hard in her creaking
satin. And Adna looked out at her over the high collar that took
a nip at his Adam's apple every time he swallowed it.

The old parents were sad with an unwonted sorrow. They had money at
last and they had even been hauled up close to the aristocracy as
the tail to Kite Kedzie. But now they had time to realize that they
were to lose this pretty thing they had somehow been responsible
for yet unable to control. They had nearly everything else, so their
child was to be taken from them.

Suddenly they loved her with a grave-side ache. She was their baby,
their little girl, their youth, their beauty, their romance, their
daughter. And perhaps in a few days she would be shattered and dead
in a torpedoed ship. Perhaps in some high-flung lifeboat she would
be crouching all drenched and stuttering with cold and dying with
terror.

Mrs. Thropp broke into big sobs that jolted her sides and she fell
over against Adna, who did not know how to comfort her. He held
her in arms like a bear's and patted her with heavy paws, but she
felt on her head the drip-drip of his tears. And thus Kedzie by her
departure brought them together in a remarriage, a poor sort of
honeymoon wherein they had little but the bitter-sweet privilege
of helping each other suffer.

The picture of their welded misery brought Kedzie a return, too,
to her child hunger for parentage. She wanted a mother and a
father and she could not have them. She went to put her exquisite
arms about them and the three so dissimilar heads were grotesquely
united.

The Marquess of Strathdene pretended to be disgusted and stormed
out. But that was because he did not want to be seen making an ass
of himself, weeping as Bottom the Weaver wept. He flung away his
salted and extinguished cigarette and wondered what was the matter
with the world where nothing ever came out right.

His own mother was weeping all the time and her letters told always
of new losses. The newspapers kept printing stories of Strathdene's
chums being put away in a trench or a hospital, or falling from
the clouds dead.

And starvation was coming everywhere; in England there was talk
of famine, and all America had gone mad with fear of it. But still
the war went on in a universal suicide which nobody could stop, and
peace, the one thing that everybody wanted, was wanted by nobody
on any terms that anybody else would even discuss.

As he agonized with his philosophy and lighted another cigarette,
the street roared like hurricane. Below the windows the French
Mission was proceeding up Fifth Avenue. Marechal Joseph Joffre
and Rene Viviani were awakening tumult in the American heart and
stirring it to the rescue of France and of England and of Belgium
and Italy, with what outcome none could know. One could only know
that at last the great flood of war had encircled the United
States, reducing it to the old primeval problems and emotions:
how to get enough to eat, how to get weapons, how to find and beat
down the enemy, how to endure the farewells of fathers, mothers,
sons, sisters, sweethearts, wives. Everything was complex beyond
understanding for minds, but things were very simple for hearts;
they had only to ache with sorrow or wrath.

The Marchioness of Strathdene and her airy husband reached England
without being submarined, and there, to her great surprise, Kedzie
found a whole new universe of things not quite right. "If only it
were otherwise!" was still the perpetual alibi of contentment.

CHAPTER XVIII

From the glory of the festivals of alliance Jim Dyckman and Charity
Coe were absent. Both were so eager to be abroad in the battle that
they did not miss the flag-waving. But they wanted to cross the
sea together. The importance of this ambition tempted Charity to
a desperate conclusion that the formalities of her union with Jim
did not matter so long as they were together. Yet the risk of death
was so inescapable and she was so imbued with churchliness that
her dreams were filled with visions of herself dead and buried in
unhallowed ground, of herself and Jim standing at heaven's gate
and turned away for lack of a blessing on their union.

Her soul was about ready to break completely, but her body gave
out first. It was in a small town in New Jersey that they found
themselves weather-bound.

The sky seemed to rain ice-water and they took refuge in the
village's one hotel, a dismal place near the freight-station.
The entrance was up a narrow staircase, past a bar-room door.

The rooms were ill furnished and ill kept, and the noise of
screaming locomotives and jangling freight-cars was incessant.
But there was no other hospitality to be had in the town.

Jim left Charity at her door and begged her to sleep. Her dull
eyes and doddering head promised for her.

He went to his own room and laughed at the cheap wretchedness of it:
the cracked pitcher in the cracked bowl, the washstand whose lower
door would not stay open, the two yellow towels in the rack, the
bureau, the cane chairs, and the iron bed with its thin mattress
and neglected drapery.

He lowered himself into a rickety rocker and looked out through
the dirtier window at the dirty town. The only place to go was to
sleep, and he tried to make the journey. But a ferocious resentment
at the idiocy of things drove away repose.

He resolved that he had been a fool long enough. He would give up
the vain effort to conform, and would take Charity without sanction.
He was impatient to go to her then and there, but he dared not
approach her till she had rested.

He remembered a book he had picked up at one of their villages of
denial. It was one of those numberless books everybody is supposed
to have read. For that reason he had found it almost impossible to
begin. But he was desperate enough to read even a classic. He hoped
that it would be a soporific. That was his definition of a classic.

The book was the Reverend Charles Kingsley's _Hypatia._ Jim was
down on the Episcopal clergy one and all, and he read with prejudice,
skipping the preface, of course, which set forth the unusual impulse
of a churchman to help the Church of his own day by pointing out the
crimes and errors of the Church of an earlier day; a too, too rare
appeal to truth for the sake of salvation by the way of truth.

As Jim glanced angrily through the early pages, the pictures of life
in the fifth century caught and quickened his gritty eyes. He skimmed
the passages that did not hold him, but as the hours went on he grew
more unable to let go.

The sacred lunch hour passed by ignored. The rain beat down on the
roof as the words rained up from the page. The character of that
eminently wise and beautiful and good Hypatia seemed to be Charity
in ancient costume. The hostility of the grimy churchmen of that day
infuriated him. He cursed and growled as he read.

The persecution of Hypatia wrought him to such wrath that he wanted
to turn back the centuries and go to her defense. He breathed hard as
he came to the last of the book and read of the lynching of Hypatia,
the attack of the Christians upon her chariot, the dragging of her
exquisite body through the streets, and even into the church, and up
to the altar, up to the foot of "the colossal Christ watching unmoved
from off the wall, his right hand raised to give a blessing--or
a curse?"

Jim panted as Philammon did, tracing her through the streets by the
fragments of her torn robes and fighting through the mob in vain to
reach her and shield her. He became Philammon and saw not words on
a page, but a tragedy that lived again.

She shook herself free from her tormentors, and, springing back,
rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against
the dusky mass around--shame and indignation in those wide clear
eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden
locks around her; the other long white arm was stretched upward
toward the great still Christ, appealing--and who dare say, in
vain?--from man to God.

Her lips were opened to speak; but the words that should have come
from them reached God's ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck
her down, the dark mass closed over her again ... and then wail on
wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, rang along the vaulted roofs and
thrilled like the trumpet of avenging angels through Philammon's
ears.

Crushed against a pillar, unable to move in the dense mass, he
pressed his hands over his ears. He could not shut out those
shrieks! When would they end? What in the name of the God of mercy
were they doing? Tearing her piecemeal? Yes, and worse than that.
And still the shrieks rang on, and still the great Christ looked
down on Philammon with that calm, intolerable eye, and would not
turn away. And over His head was written in the rainbow, "I am the
same, yesterday, to-day, and forever!" The same as He was in Judea
of old, Philammon? Then what are these, and in whose temple? And
he covered his face with his hands, and longed to die.

It was over. The shrieks had died away into moans; the moans to
silence. How long had he been there? An hour, or an eternity?
Thank God it was over! For her sake--but for theirs?

Startled by the vividness of the murder, Jim looked up from the
book, thinking that he had heard indeed the shrieks of Charity
in a death-agony. The walls seemed to quiver still with their
reverberation.

He put down the book in terror and saw where he was. It was like
waking from a nightmare. He was glad to find that he was not in
a temple of ancient Alexandria, but in even that dingy New Jersey
inn.

He wondered if Charity had not died. He hesitated to go to her door
and knock. She needed sleep so much that he hardly dared to risk
waking her, even to assure himself that she was alive.

He went to the window and saw two men under umbrellas talking in
the yard between the hotel wings. They would not have been laughing
as they were if they had heard shrieks.

His eye was caught by a window opposite his. There sat Charity in
a heavy bath-robe; her hair was down; she had evidently dropped
into the chair by the open window and fallen asleep.

Jim stared at her and was reminded of how he had stared at Kedzie
on his other wedding journey. Only, Kedzie had been his bride, and
Charity was not yet, and might never be. Kedzie was girlish against
an auroral sky; she was rather illumined than dressed in silk.
Charity was a heart-sick woman, driven and fagged, and swaddled now
in a heavy woolen blanket of great bunches and wrinkles. Kedzie was
new and pink and fresh as any dew-dotted morning-glory that ever
sounded its little bugle-note of fragrance. Charity was an old
sweetheart, worn, drooping, wilted as a broken rose left to parch
with thirst.

Yet it was Charity that made his heart race with love and desire
and determination. She was Hypatia to him and he vowed that the
churchmen should not deny her nor destroy her. He clenched his
fists with resolution, then went back to his book and finished
it. He loved it so well that he forgave the Church and the clergy
somewhat for the sake of this clergyman who had spoken so sturdily
for truth and beauty and mercy. He loved the book so well that he
even read the preface and learned that Hypatia really lived once
and was virtuous, though pagan, and was stripped and slain at
the Christian altar, chopped and mutilated with oyster shells in
a literal ostracism, her bones burned and her ashes flung into
the sea.

The lesson Kingsley drew from her fate was that the Church was
fatally wrong to sanction "those habits of doing evil that good
may come, of pious intrigue, and at last of open persecution,
which are certain to creep in wheresoever men attempt to set up
a merely religious empire, independent of human relationships
and civil laws." The preacher-novelist warned the Church of now
that the same old sins of then were still at work.

Jim closed the book and returned to the window to study Charity.
He vowed that he would protect her from that ostracism. His wealth
was but a broken sword, but it should save her.

He felt it childish of her to be so set upon a wedding at the hands
of one of the clergymen who stoned her, but he liked her better for
finding something childish and stubborn in her. She was so good,
so wise, so noble, so all-for-others, that she needed a bit of
obstinate foolishness to keep her from being absolute marble.

He put on his hat and his raincoat and went out into the town,
hunting a clergyman, resolved to compel him at all costs. The sudden
shower became lyrical to his mood as a railroad train clicks to the
mood of the passenger.

There was but one Episcopal church in the village and the
parsonage was a doleful little cottage against a shabby temple.
The hotelkeeper had told him how to find it, and the name of the
parson.

Jim tapped piously on the door, then knocked, then pounded. At
length a voice came to him from somewhere, calling:

"Come into the church!"

"That's what I've been trying to do for weeks," Jim growled. He
went into the church and found the parson in his shirt-sleeves. He
had been setting dishpans and wash-tubs and pails under the various
jets of water that came in through the patched roof in unwelcome
libations.

His sleeves were rolled up and he was rolling up pew cushions. He
gave Jim a wet hand and peered at him curiously. It relieved Jim
not to be recognized and regarded as a visiting demon.

The clergyman's high black waistcoat was frayed and shiny, as well
as wet, and his reverted collar had an evident edge from the way
the preacher kept moistening his finger and running it along the
rim. In spite of this worse than a hair-shirt martyrdom, the parson
seemed to be a mild and pitiful soul, and Jim felt hopeful of him
as he began:

"I must apologize, Mr. Rutledge, for intruding on you, but I--well,
I've got more money than I need and I imagine you've got less. I
want to give you a little of mine for your own use. Is there any
place you could put ten thousand dollars where it would do some
good?"

Young Mr. Rutledge felt for a moment that he was dreaming or
delirious. He made Jim repeat his speech; then he stammered:

"Oh, my dear sir! The wants of this parish! and my poor chapel! You
can see the state of the roof, and the broken windows. The people
are too poor to pay for repairs. My own pittance is far in arrears,
but I can't complain of that since so many of my dear flock are
in need. I was just about persuaded that we should have to abandon
the fight to keep the church alive. I had not counted on miracles,
but it seems that they do occur."

"Well, I'm not exactly a miracle-worker, but I've got some money
you can have if--there's a string to it, of course. But you could
use ten thousand dollars, couldn't you?"

"Indeed not," said Mr. Rutledge, feeling as Faust must have felt
when Mephisto began to promise things. A spurt of water from a new
leak brought him back from the Middle Ages and he cried: "You might
lend a hand with this tub, sir, if you will."

When the new cascade was provided for, Jim renewed his bids for
the preacher's soul:

"If you can't use ten thousand, how much could you use?"

"I don't know."

"Well, you could use a new roof at least. I'll give you a new roof,
and a real stained-glass window of Charity to replace that broken
imitation atrocity, and a new organ and hymn-books, and new pew
covers, and I'll pay your arrears of salary and guarantee your
future, and I'll give you an unlimited drawing account for your
poor, and--any other little things you may think of."

Mr. Rutledge protested:

"It's rather cruel of you, sir, to make such jokes at such a time."

"God bless you, old man! I never was so much in earnest. It's easy
for me to do those little trifles."

"Then you must be an angel straight from heaven."

"I'm an angel, they tell me, but from the opposite direction. It's
plain you don't know who I am. Sit down and I'll tell you the story
of my life."

So the little clergyman in his shirt-sleeves sat shivering with
incipient pneumonia and beatitude, and by his side in the damp pew
in the dark chapel Jim sat in his raincoat and unloaded his message.

The Reverend Mr. Rutledge had heard of Jim and of Charity, and had
regretted the assault of their moneyed determination on the bulwarks
of his faith. But somehow as he heard Jim talk he found him simple,
honest, forlorn, despised and rejected, and in desperate necessity.

He looked at his miserable church and thought of his flock. Jim's
money would put shingles on the rafters and music in the hymns and
food in the hungry. It became a largess from heaven.

He could see nothing, hear nothing, but a call to accept. He asked
for a moment to consider. He retired to pray.

His prayer was interrupted by one of his hungriest parishioners, a
Mrs. McGillicuddy, one of those poor old washerwomen whose woes pile
up till they are almost laughable to a less humorous heart than the
little preacher's. He asked her to wait and returned to his prayers.

His sheep seemed to gather about their shepherd and bleat for
pasture and shelter. They answered his prayer for him. He came
back and said:

"I will."

* * * * *

"I do," was what Jim and Charity said a little later when Jim had
wrested Charity from her sleep by pounding at her door. He waited,
frantically, while she dressed. And he had the town's one hack at
the door below. He was afraid that the parson would change his mind
before they could get the all-important words out of him.

They rode through the rain like Heine's couple in the old stage-
coach, with Cupid, the blind passenger, between them. They ran into
the church under the last bucketfuls of shower. Jim produced the
license he had carried so long in vain. The washerwoman consented
to be one witness; the sexton-janitor made the other.

Jim had the ring ready, too. He had carried it long enough. It made
a little smoldering glimmer in the dusk church. He knelt by Charity
during the prayer, and helped her to her feet, and the little
clergyman kissed her with fearsome lips. Jim nearly kissed him
himself.

He did hug Mrs. McGillicuddy, and pressed into her hand a bill that
she thought was a dollar and blessed him for. When she got home and
found what it was she almost fainted into one of her own tubs.

Jim left a signed check for the minister, with the sumlines blank,
and begged him not to be a miser. They left with him a great doubt
as to what the Church would do to him for doing what he had done
for his chapel. But he was as near to a perfection of happiness
as he was likely ever to be.

His future woes were for him, as Charity's and Jim's were for them.
They would be sufficient to their several days; but for this black
rainy night there were no sorrows.

It was too late to get back to the city and luxury--and notoriety.
They stayed where they were and were glad enough. They expected to
fare worse on the battle-front in France where they would spend
their honeymoon.

There was some hesitation as to which of their two rooms at the
hotel was the less incommodious, but the furniture had been magically
changed. Everything was velvet and silk; what had been barrenness
was a noble simplicity; what had been dingy was glamorous.

The ghastly dinner sent up from the dining-room was a great banquet,
and the locomotive whistles and the thunderous freight-cars were
epithalamial flutes and drums.

Outside, the world was a rainy, clamorous, benighted place. And
to-morrow they must go forth into it again. But for the moment
they would snatch a little rapture, finding it the more fearfully
beautiful because it was so dearly bought and so fleeting, but
chiefly beautiful because they could share it together.

They were mated from the first, and all the people and the trials
that had kept them apart were but incidents in a struggle toward each
other. Henceforth they should win on side by side as one completed
being, doing their part in war and peace, and compelling at last from
the world, along with the blame and the indifference that every one
has always had from the world, a certain praise and gratitude which
the world gives only to those who defy it for the sake of what their
own souls tell them is good and true and honorable.

THE END