We Can\'t Have Everything

R >> Rupert Hughes >> We Can\'t Have Everything

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She was pretty, but she had not learned the commercial value of
her beauty. She was alone in the great, vicious city, but nobody
had threatened her. Nearly everybody had paid her charm the tribute
of a stare or a smile, but nobody had been polite enough to flatter
her with a menace.

She was very pretty. But then there are so very many very pretty
girls in every big city! June with her millions of exquisite roses
is no richer in beauty than New York. Yet even New York cannot keep
all her beauties supplied with temptation and peril all the time.

Kedzie sat on the bench wondering which of the ten ways to go. It
turned late, but she could not decide. She began to be a little hungry
again, but she was always that, and she told her ever-willing young
stomach that her late luncheon would have to be an early dinner.

As she sat still, people began to peer at her through the enveiling
dark. A tipsy brewery truck-driver who had absorbed too much of his
own cargo sank down by her side. He could not see Kedzie through
the froth in his brain, but she found him fearful. When he began
to talk to himself she fled.

She saw a brilliantly lighted street-car, and she boarded it. She was
all turned around, and the car twisted and turned as it proceeded.
She did not realize that it was going north till she heard the
conductor calling in higher and higher street numbers. Then she
understood, with tired wrath, that she was outbound once more. She
wanted to go toward the heart of town, but she could not afford to
get off without her nickel's worth of ride.

The car was all but empty when the conductor called to a drowsy old
lady, his penultimate passenger:

"Hunneran Semty-seckin! Hey, lady! You ast me to leave you off at
Hunneran Semty-seckin, didn't yah?"

The woman was startled from her reverie and gasped:

"Dear me! is this a Hundred and Seventy-second?"

"Thass wat I said, didn't I?"

She evicted herself with a manner of apology for intruding on
the conductor's attention.

Now Kedzie was alone with the man. His coyote bark changed to an
insinuating murmur. He sat down near Kedzie, took up an abandoned
evening paper, and said:

"Goin' all the way, Cutie, or how about it?"

"I'm get'n' off here!" said Kedzie, with royal scorn. She resented
his familiarity, and she was afraid that he was going to prove
dangerous. Perhaps he meant to abduct her in this chariot.

Being a street-car conductor, the poor fellow neither understood
women nor was understood by them. He accepted Kedzie's blow with
resignation. He helped her down the step, his hand mellowing her
arm and finding it ripe.

She flung him a rebukeful glare that he did not get. He gave the
two bells, and the car went away like a big lamp, leaving the world
to darkness and to Kedzie.

She walked for a block or two and wondered where she should sleep.
There were no hotels up here, and she would have been afraid of
their prices. Probably they all charged as much as the Biltmore.
At that rate, her money would just about pay for the privilege of
walking in and out again.

Boarding-houses there might have been, but they bore no
distinguishing marks.

Kedzie stood and strolled until she was completely fagged. Then she
encountered a huge mass of shadowy foliage, a park--Crotona Park,
although of course Kedzie did not know its name.

There were benches at the edge, and concreted paths went glimmering
among vagueness of foliage, with here and there searing arc-lights
as bright as immediate moons. Kedzie dropped to the first bench, but
a couple of lovers next to her protested, and she retreated into
the park a little.

She felt a trifle chilled with weariness and discouragement and
the lack of light. She clasped her arms together as a kind of wrap
and huddled herself close to herself. Her head teetered and tottered
and gradually sank till her delicate chin rested in her delicate
bosom. Her big hat shaded her face as in a deep blot of ink, and
she slept.

Unprotected, pretty, alone in the wicked city, she slept secure
and unassailed.

CHAPTER XI

Miss Anita Adair (_nee_ Kedzie Thropp) had dozed upon her cozy
park bench for an uncertain while when her bedroom was invaded by
visitors who did not know she was there.

Kedzie was wakened by murmurous voices. A man was talking to a woman.
They might have been Romeo and Juliet in Verona for the poetry of
their grief, but they were in the Bronx Borough, and he was valet
and she a housemaid, or so Kedzie judged. The man was saying in a
dialect new to Kedzie:

"Ah, _ma pauvre p'tite amie,_ for why you have a _jalousie_
of my _patrie_?"

There was a vague discussion from which Kedzie drowsily gleaned
that the man was going to cross the sea to the realm of destruction.
The girl was jealous of somebody that he called his _patrie,_
and he miserably endeavored to persuade her that a man could love
both his _patrie_ and his _amie_, and yet give his life
to the former at her call.

Kedzie was too sleepy to feel much curiosity. A neighbor's woe is
a soothing lullaby. In the very crisis of their debate, the little
moan of Kedzie's yawn startled and silenced the farewellers. They
stole away unseen, and she knew no more of them.

Hours later Kedzie woke, shivering and afraid. All about her was
a woodland hush, but the circle of the horizon was dimly lighted,
as if there were houses on fire everywhere in the distance.

Poor Kedzie was a-cold and filled with the night dread. She was
afraid of burglars, mice, ghosts. She was still more afraid to leave
her bench and hunt through those deep shadows for her lost New York.
Her drugged brain fell asleep as it wrestled with its fears. Her body
protested at its couch. All her limbs like separate serpents tried
to find resting-places. They could not stretch themselves out on
the bench. Fiends had placed cast-iron braces at intervals to prevent
people from doing just that. Kedzie did not know that it is against
the law of New York, if not of Nature, to sleep on park benches.

Half unconsciously she slipped down to the ground and found a bed
on the warm and dewless grass. Her members wriggled and adjusted
themselves. Her head rolled over on one round arm for a pillow;
the other arm bent itself above her head, and finding her hat in
the way, took out the pins, lifted the hat off, set it on the ground,
put the pins back in and returned to its place about her hair--all
without disturbing Kedzie's beauty sleep.

Her two arms were all the maids that Kedzie had ever had. They
were as kind to her as they could be--devoted almost exclusively
to her comfort.

CHAPTER XII

Kedzie slept alone in a meadow, and slept well. Youth spread the
sward with mattresses of eiderdown, and curtained out the stars
with silken tapestry. If she dreamed at all, it was with the full
franchise of youth in the realm of ambition. If she dreamed herself
a great lady, then fancy promised her no more than truth should
redeem. Charity Coe Cheever had a finer bed but a poorer sleep, if
any at all. She had a secretary to do her chores for her and to tell
her her engagements--where she was to go and what she had promised
and what she had better do. Charity dictated letters and committee
reports; she even dictated checks on her bank-account (which kept
filling up faster than she drew from it).

While Kedzie was trying to fit her limber frame among the little
hillocks and tussocks on the ground, Charity Coe was sitting at
her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, but seeing beyond
her own image. Her lips moved, and her secretary wrote down what
she said aloud, and her maid was kneeling to take off Charity Coe's
ballroom slippers and slip on her bedroom ditto. The secretary was
so sleepy that she tried to keep her eyes open by agitating the lids
violently. The maid was trying to keep from falling forward across
her mistress's insteps and sleeping there.

But Charity was wide-awake--wild awake. Her soul was not in her
dictation, but in her features, which she studied in the mirror as
a rich man studies his bank-account. Charity was wondering if she
had wrecked her beauty beyond repair, or if she could fight it back.

Charity Coe, being very rich, had a hundred arms and hands and feet,
eyes and ears, while Kedzie had but two of each. Charity had some one
to make her clothes for her and cut up her bread and meat and fetch
the wood for her fire and put her shoes on and take them off. She
even had her face washed for her and her hair brushed, and somebody
trimmed her finger-nails and swept out her room, sewed on her buttons
and buttoned them up or unbuttoned them, as she pleased.

If Kedzie had known how much Charity was having done for her she
would have had a colic of envy. But she slept while Charity could
not. Charity could not pay anybody to sleep for her or stay awake
for her, or love or kiss for her, and her wealth could not buy the
fidelity of the one man whose fidelity she wanted to own.

Charity had done work that Kedzie would have flinched from. Charity
had lived in a field hospital and roughed it to a loathsome degree.
She had washed the faces and bodies of grimy soldiers from the bloody
ditches of the war-front; she had been chambermaid to gas-blinded
peasants and had done the hideous chores that follow operations. Now
with a maid to change her slippers and a secretary to make up her
mind, and a score of servants within call, she was afraid that she
had squandered her substance in spendthrift alms. She was a prodigal
benefactress returned from her good works too late, perhaps. She
wondered and took stock of her charms. She rather underrated them.

Peter Cheever had been extravagantly gallant the morning after
her return from the mountains. He had added the last perfect tribute
of suspicion and jealousy. They had even breakfasted together. She
had dragged herself down to the dining-room, and he had neglected
his morning paper, and lingered for mere chatter. He had telephoned
from his office to ask her for the noon hour, too. He had taken her
to the Bankers' Club for luncheon in the big Blue Room. He had then
suggested that they dine together and go to any theater she liked.

Charity Coe's head was turned by all this attention. "Three meals
a day and a show with her own husband" was going the honeymoon pace.

But she returned to the normal speed, for he did not come home
to dress or to dine or to go to the theater. No word came from him
until Charity Coe was all dressed; then a clerk telephoned her that
her husband regretted he could not come home, as he had to rush for
the Philadelphia train.

Charity could not quite disbelieve this, nor quite believe. She
had spent the evening debating married love and honeymoons that
wax and wane and wax again, and a wife's duty and her rights and
might-have-beens, perhapses, and if-only's.

Charity had put on her jewels, which had not been taken out of
the safe for years, but he had not arrived. Alarm and resentment
wrestled for her heart; they prospered alternately. Now she trembled
with fear for her husband; now she smothered with wrath at his
indifference to her.

Who was he that he should keep her waiting, and who were the Cheevers
that they should break engagements with the Coes? It was only at such
times that her pride of birth flared in her, and then only enough
to sustain her through grievous humiliations.

But what are humiliations that we should mind them so? They come
to everybody in turn, and they are as relentless and impersonal as
the sun marching around the sky. Kedzie had hers, and Charity hers,
and the streetcar conductor Kedzie had rebuffed had his, and the Czar
with his driven army had his, with more to come, and the Kaiser with
his victorious army had his, with more to come. Even Peter Cheever
had his in plenty, and of a peculiar secret sort.

He had honestly planned to spend his evening with his wife. She
seemed to be coming back into style with him. But the long arm
of the telephone brought him within the reach of Zada L'Etoile.
Zada had plans of her own for his evening-dinner, theater, supper,
dance till dawn. Peter had answered, gently:

"Sorry, but I'm booked."

Zada had seemed to come right through the wire at him.

"With that--wife of yours, of course!"

She had used a word that fascinated the listening Central, who was
lucky enough to transact a good deal of Zada's telephone business.
Central could almost see Peter flush as he shook his head and
answered:

"Not necessarily. It's business."

"You'd better make it your business not to go out with that woman,
anywhere," Zada had threatened. "It's indecent."

Peter winced. A wife is not ordinarily called "that woman." Peter
sighed. It was a pretty pass when a man could not be allowed to go
to the theater with his own wife. Yet he felt that Zada was right,
in a way. He had forfeited the privilege of a domestic evening. He
was afraid to brave Zada's fantastic rages. He could best protect
Charity Coe by continuing to ignore her.

He consented to Zada's plan and promised to call up his wife. Zada
took a brief triumph from that. But Peter was ashamed and afraid
to speak to Charity even across the wire. He knew that it has become
as difficult to lie by telephone as face to face. The treacherous
little quavers in the voice are multiplied to a rattle, and nothing
can ever quite imitate sincerity. So much is bound to be over or
under done.

Cheever made a pretense of rushing out of his office. He looked at
his watch violently, so that his secretary should be startled--as
he politely pretended to be. Cheever gasped, then rushed his lie
with sickly histrionism:

"I say, Hudspeth, call up my--Mrs. Cheever, will you? And--er--tell
her I've had to dash for the train to--er--Phila"--cough--"delphia.
Tell her I'm awfully sorry about to-night. Back to-morrow."

"Yessir," said Hudspeth, winking at the gaping stenographer, who
looked exclamation points at her typewriter.

Hudspeth called up Mrs. Cheever. He was no more convincing than
Cheever would have been. A note of disgust at his task and of
deprecatory pity for Mrs. Cheever influenced his tone.

Charity was not convinced, but she could hardly reveal that to
Hudspeth--although, of course, she did. She was betrayed by her
very eagerness to be a good sport easily bamboozled.

"Oh, I see. Too bad! I quite understand. Thank you, Mr. Hudspeth.
Good-by."

She did not hear Hudspeth growling to the stenographer as he strolled
over and leaned on her chair unnecessarily--there were other chairs
to lean on, and she was not deaf:

"Rotten business! He ought to be ashamed of himself. A nice wife
like that!"

The stenographer sat forward and snapped, "You got a nice wife
yourself." She was a little jealous of Zada, perhaps--or of
Mrs. Cheever--or of both.

Peter left his office to escape telephoning Charity, but he could
imagine how the message crushed her. He felt as if he had stepped
on a hurt bird. When he met Zada he kept trying to be patient and
forgiving with her, in spite of her blameworthiness.

Zada saw through his sullenness, and for a little moment was proud
of her victory. Then she began to suffer, too. She understood the
frailty of her hold on Cheever. His loyalty to her was in the eyes of
the world a treachery, and his disloyalty to her would be applauded
as a holy deed. She was becoming an old story with him, as Charity
had become one.

She suffered agonies from the cloud on her title and on her name,
and she was afraid of the world. A woman of her sort has no sympathy
to expect; her stock in trade vanishes without replenishment, and
her business does not build. In spite of herself she cannot help
envying and imitating the good women. As a certain great man has
confessed, "There is so much good in the worst of us," that there
is hardly any fun in being bad. It is almost impossible to be very
bad or very good very long at a time.

So here was Zada already copying a virtuous domestic woe and wondering
how she could fasten Cheever to her, win him truly for herself. She
honestly felt that she could be of value to him, and make more of
a man of him than his lawful wife ever could. Perhaps she was right.
At any rate, she was miserable, and if a person is going to be
miserable she might as well be right while her misery is going on.

Zada had dragged Cheever to a cabaret. She could lead him thither,
but she could not make him dance. She was one-stepping unwillingly
with a young cad who insulted her subtly in everything he said and
looked. She could not resent his familiarity beyond sneering at him
and calling him a foolish cub. She left him and returned to the table
where Peter Cheever smoked a bitter cigar. It is astonishing how sad
these notorious revelers look in repose. They are solemner than
deacons.

"Come on, Peterkin--dance the rest of this with me," Zada implored.

Peterkin shook his head. He felt that it was not quite right for him
to dance in public with such persons. He had his code. Even the swine
have their ethics. Zada put her hand in Cheever's arm and cooed
to him, but in vain.

It was then that Jim Dyckman caught sight of them. He was slinking
about the roofs as lonely and dejected as a homeless cat.

His money could not buy him companionship, though his acquaintance
was innumerable and almost anybody would have been proud to be spoken
to by such a money monster. But Jim did not want to be spoken to by
anybody who was ambitious to be spoken to by him. He wanted to talk
to Charity.

He could not even interest himself in dissipation. There was plenty
of it for sale, and markets were open to him that were not available
to average means. Many a foolish woman, irreproachable and counting
herself unapproachable, would have been strangely and memorably
perturbed by an amorous glance from Jim Dyckman.

But Jim did not want what he could get. He was hungry for
the companionship of Charity Coe.

When he saw her lord and master, Peter Cheever, with Zada, Dyckman
was enraged. Cheever owned Charity Coe; he could flatter her with
a smile, beckon her with a gesture, caress her at will, or leave her
in safe deposit, while he spent his precious hours with a public
servant!

Dyckman could usually afford to do what he wanted to. But now he
wanted to go to that table and knock the heads of Cheever and Zada
together; he wanted to make their skulls whack like castanets. But
he could not afford to do that.

He was so forlorn that he went home. His sumptuous chariot with
ninety race-horses concealed in the engine and velvet in its wheels
slid him as on smoothest ice to his father's home near the cathedral.
The house was like a child of the cathedral, and he went up its
steps as a pauper entering a cathedral. He gave up his hat and stick
and went past the masterpieces on his walls as if he were a visitor
to the Metropolitan Art Gallery on a free day. He stumbled up
the stairway, itself a work of art, like a boy sent to bed without
supper: he stumbled upstairs, wanting to cry and not daring to.

His valet undressed him in a motherly way and put him to bed.
The valet was feeling very sad. Dyckman realized that he was about
to lose Jules, and he felt more disconsolate. Still, he surprised
himself by breaking out:

"I wish you wouldn't go to the war, Jules."

Jules smiled with friendship and deference subtly blended:

"I wish I would not, too, sir."

"You might get killed, you know."

"Yes, sir."

"So you're a soldier! How long did you serve?"

"Shree years, sir."

"And I don't know the first thing about soldiering! I ought to be
ashamed of myself! Well--don't get killed, Jules."

"Very good, sir."

But he did.

Jules said, "Good night, sir," and faded through the door. Dyckman
tossed for a while. Then he got up in a rage at his insomnia. He
could not find his other slipper, and he stubbed his toe plebeianly
against an aristocratic table. He cursed and limped to the window
and glowered down into the street. He might have been a jailbird
gaping through iron bars. He could not get out of himself, or his
love for Charity.

He wondered how he could live till morning without her. He went to
his telephone to call her and hear her voice. He lifted the receiver
and when Central answered, the cowardice of decency compelled him
from his resolve, and he shamefully mumbled:

"The correct time, please."

What difference did it make to him what hour it was? He was the
victim of eternity, not time.

He went back to his window-vigil over nothing and fell asleep
murmuring the biggest swear words he could remember. In his weak
mood they had the effect of a spanked boy's last whimpers.

He was a boy, and fate was spanking him hard. He could not have whom
he wanted, and he resolved that there was nothing else in the world
to want. And all the time there was a girl sleeping out in Crotona
Park on the ground. She was pretty and dangerous, another flower
tossing on the girl-tree.

CHAPTER XIII

When the daylight whitened the black air it found Dyckman sprawled
along his window-lounge and woke him to the disgust of another
morning. He had to reach up and draw a curtain between his eyes
and the hateful sun.

But Kedzie had only her vigilant arm. It slipped down across her
brow like a watchful nurse coming in on tiptoe to protect a fretful
patient from broken sleep.

Kedzie slept on and on, till at length the section of Crotona Park
immediately beneath her refused to adapt itself longer to her
squirming search for soft spots. She sat up in startled confusion
at the unfamiliar ceiling. The wall-paper was not at all what she
always woke to. At first she guessed that she must have fallen out
of bed with a vengeance. Then she decided she had fallen out of doors
and windows as well, and into the front yard.

No, these bushes were not those bushes. That beech almost overhead,
seen from below by sleep-thick eyes, was an amazing thing.

She had drowsy childhood memories of being carried up-stairs by her
father and put to bed by her mother. Once or twice she had wakened
with her head to the footboard and endured agonies of confusion
before she got the universe turned round right. But how had she got
outdoors? Her father had never carried her down-stairs and left her
in the yard before.

At last she saw that she had fallen not merely out of bed and out of
doors, but out of town. She remembered her wanderings and her lying
down to sleep. She wondered who had taken her hat off for her.

She looked about for somebody to ask questions of. There was nobody
to be seen. There were a few housetops peering over the horizon
at her.

English sparrows were jumping here and there, engaged in their
everlasting spats, but she could not ask them.

Kedzie sat up straight, her arms back of her, her feet erect on
their heels at a distance, like suspicious squirrels. She yawned
against the back of her wrist and began to remember her escapade.
She gurgled with laughter, but she felt rumpled and lame, and not
in the least like Miss Anita Adair. She almost wished she were at
home, gazing from her bed to the washstand and hearing her mother
puttering about in the kitchen making breakfast; to Kedzie's young
heart it was the superlative human luxury to know you ought to get
up and not get up.

She clambered to her feet and made what toilet she could while
her seclusion lasted. She shook out her skirts like feathers,
and shoved her disheveled hair up under her hat as she had always
swept the dust under the rug.

She was overjoyed to find that her hand-bag had not been stolen.
The powder-puff would serve temporarily for a wash-basin. The small
change in her purse would postpone starvation or surrender for
a while.

She walked out of her sleeping-porch to the path. A few people were
visible now--workmen and workwomen taking a short-cut, and leisurely
gentlemen out of a job already beginning their day's work of holding
down benches. No one asked any questions or showed any interest
in Kedzie.

She found a street-car line, made sure that the car she took was
bound down-town, and resumed her effort to recapture New York.

Nearly everybody was reading one morning paper or another, but Kedzie
was not interested in the news. One man kept brushing her nose with
his paper. She was angry at his absence of mind, but she did not
notice that her nose was being annoyed by her own name in the
head-lines.

She rode and rode and rode till her hunger distracted her. She passed
restaurant after restaurant, till at last she could stand the famine
no longer. She got down from the car and walked till she came to
a bakery lunch-room entitled, "The Bon-Ton Bakery by Joe Gidden." It
was another like the one she ate in the day before. The same kind of
waiter was there, a dish-thrower with the manners of a hostler.

But Kedzie was so meek after her night on the ground that she was
flattered by his grin. "Skip" Magruder was his title, as she learned
in time. The "Skip" came to him from a curious impediment in his gait
that caused him to drop a stitch now and then.

Not long afterward Kedzie was so far beyond this poor hamstrung
stable-soul that she could not hear the word _skip_ without
blushing as if it were an indecency. It was an indecency, too, that
such a little Aphrodite should be reduced to a love-affair with such
a dismal Vulcan. But if it could happen on Olympus, it could happen
on earth.