We Can\'t Have Everything

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She stumbled on a newspaper article, the same perennial essay in
recurrence, to the effect that many wives lose their husbands by
neglect of their own charms. It was full of advice as to the tricks
by which a woman may lure her spouse back to the hearth and fasten
him there, combining domestic vaudeville with an interest in his
business, but relying above all on keeping Cupid's torch alight by
being Delilah every day.

Charity Coe was startled. She wondered if she were losing Cheever
by neglecting herself. She began to pay more heed to her dress
and her hats, her hair, her complexion, her smile, her general
attractiveness.

Cheever noticed the strange alteration, and it bewildered him. He
could not imagine why his wife was flirting with him. She made it
harder for him to get away to Zada, but far more eager to. He did
not like Charity at all, in that impersonation. Neither did Charity.
She hated herself after a day or two of wooing her official wooer.
"You ought to be arrested," she told her mirror-self.

There were plays and novels that counseled a neglected wife to show
an interest in another man. Charity was tempted to use Jim Dyckman
as a decoy for her own wild duck; but Dyckman had sailed away in
his new yacht, on a cruise with his yacht club.

The gossip did not die in his absence. It oozed along like a dark
stream of fly-gathering molasses. Eventually it came to the notice
of a woman who was Zada's dearest friend and hated her devotedly.

She told it to Zada as a taunt, to show her that Zada's Mr. Cheever
was as much deceived as deceiving. Zada, of course, was horribly
delighted. She promptly told Cheever that his precious wife had been
having a lovely affair with Jim Dyckman. Cheever showed her where
she stood by forbidding her to mention his wife's name. He told Zada
that, whatever his wife might be, she was good as gold.

He left Zada with great dignity and made up his mind to kill Jim
Dyckman. In his fury he was convinced of the high and holy and
cleanly necessity of murder. All of our basest deeds are always
done with the noblest motives. Cheever forgot his own wickednesses
in his mission to punish Dyckman. The assassination of Dyckman, he
was utterly certain, would have been what Browning called "a spittle
wiped from the beard of God."

But he was not permitted to carry out his mission, for he learned
that Dyckman was somewhere on the Atlantic, far beyond Cheever's
reach.

Disappointed bitterly at having to let him live awhile, Cheever
went to his home, to denounce his wife. He found her reading. She
was overjoyed to see him. He stared at her, trying to realize her
inconceivable depravity.

"Hello, honey!" she cried. "What's wrong? You've got a fever,
I'm sure. I'm going to take your temperature."

From her hospital experience she carried a little thermometer
in her hand-bag. She had it by her and rose to put it under his
tongue. He struck it from her, and she stared at him. He stood
quivering like an overdriven horse. He called her a name highly
proper in a kennel club, but inappropriate to the boudoir.

"You thought you'd get away with it, didn't you? You thought you'd
get away with it, didn't you?" he panted.

"Get away with what, honey?" she said, thinking him delirious. She
had seen a hundred men shrieking in wild frenzies from brains too
hot.

"You and Dyckman! humph!" he raged. "So you and Jim Dyckman sneaked
off to the mountains together, did you? And came back on the same
train, eh? And thought I'd never find it out. Why, you--"

What he would have said she did not wait to hear. She was human,
after all, and had thousands of plebeian and primitive ancestors
and ancestresses. They jumped into her muscles with instant instinct.
She slapped his face so hard that it rocked out of her view.

She stood and fumbled at her tingling palm, aghast at herself and
at the lightning-stroke from unknown distances that shattered her
whole being. Then she began to sob.

Peter Cheever's aching jaw dropped, and he gazed at her befuddled.
His illogical belief in her guilt was illogically converted to a
profound conviction of her innocence. The wanton whom he had accused
was metamorphosed into a slandered angel who would not, could not
sin. In his eyes she was hopelessly pure.

"Thank God!" he moaned. "Oh, thank God for one clean woman in
this dirty world!"

He caught her bruised hand and began to kiss it and pour tears on it.
And she looked down at his beautiful bent head and laid her other
hand on it in benison.

It is one way of reconciling families.

Cheever was so filled with remorse that he was tempted to write
Jim Dyckman a note of apology. That was one of the few temptations
he ever resisted.

Now he was going to kill everybody who had been dastard enough
to believe and spread the scandal he had so easily believed himself.
But he would have had to begin with Zada. He was afraid of Zada. He
enjoyed a few days of honeymoon with Charity.

He dodged Zada on the telephone, and he gave Mr. Hudspeth
instructions to say that he was always out in case of a call
from "Miss You Know."

"I know," Mr. Hudspeth answered.

One morning, at an incredibly early hour for Zada, she walked into
his office and asked Mr. Hudspeth to retire--also the suspiciously
good-looking stenographer. Then Zada said:

"Peterkin, it's time you came home."

His laugh was hard and sharp. She took out a little weapon. She had
managed to evade the Sullivan law against the purchase or possession
of weapons. Peter was nauseated. Zada was calm.

"Peterkin," she said, "did you read yesterday about that woman who
shot a man and then herself?"

Peter had read it several times recently--the same story with
different names. It had long been a fashionable thing: the disprized
lover murders the disprizing lover and then executes the murderer.
It was expensive to rugs and cheated lawyers and jurors out of fees,
but saved the State no end of money.

Cheever surrendered.

"I'll come home," he said, gulping the last quinine word. It seemed
to him the most loyal thing he could do at the moment. It would have
been unpardonably unkind to Charity to let himself be spattered all
over his office and the newspapers by a well-known like Zada.

Once "home" with Zada, he took the pistol away from her. But she
laughed and said:

"I can always buy another one, deary."

Thus Zada re-established her rights. Cheever was very sorry. He
cursed himself for being so easily led astray. He wondered why it
was his lot to be so fickle and incapable of loyalty. He did not
know. He could only accept himself as he was. Oneself is the most
wonderful, inexplicable thing in the world.

So Charity's brief honeymoon waned, blinked out again.

Jim Dyckman came home from the yacht cruise in blissless ignorance
of all this frustrated drama. He longed to see Charity, but dared
not. He took sudden hope from remembering her determination to go
back abroad to her nursery of wounded soldiers.

He had an inspiration. He would go abroad also--as a member of
the aviation, corps. He already owned a fairly good hydro-aeroplane
which had not killed him yet--he was a good swimmer, and lucky.

He ordered the best war-eagle that could be made, and began to take
lessons in military maps, bird's-eye views, and explosives. He was
almost happy. He would improve on the poet's dream-ideal, "Were I
a little bird, I'd fly to thee."

He would be a big bird, and he'd fly with his Thee. He would call on
Charity in France when they both had an evening off, and take her up
into the clouds for a sky-ride.

He had an ambition. At worst, he could die for France. It is splendid
to have something to die for. It makes life worth living.

He was so ecstatic in his first flight with his finished machine
that he fell and broke one of its wings, also one of his own. Charity
heard of his accident and called on him at his mother's house. He
told her his plans.

"Too bad!" she sighed. "I'm not going abroad. Besides, I couldn't see
you if I did."

Then she told him what Cheever had said, but not how she had slapped.
Jim was wild. He rose on his bad arm and fell back again, groaning:

"I'll kill him for that."

Everybody is always going to kill everybody. Sometimes somebody does
kill somebody. But Dyckman went over to the great majority. Charity
begged him not to kill her husband, and to please her he promised
not to.

Charity, having insured her husband's life, said: "And now, Jimmie
old boy, I mustn't see you any more. Gossip has linked our names. We
must unlink them. My husband and you will butcher each other if I'm
not careful, so it's good-by for keeps, and God bless you, isn't it?
Promise?"

"I'll promise anything, if you'll go on away and let me alone,"
Jim groaned, his broken arm being quite sufficient trouble for him
at the moment.

Charity laughed and went on away. She was deeply comforted by
a promise which she knew he would not keep.

Dyckman himself, as soon as his broken bones ceased to shake his soul,
groaned with loneliness and despaired of living without Charity--vowed
in his sick misery that nobody could ever come between them. He
could not, would not, live without her.

Still the gossip oozed along that he had not lived without her.

CHAPTER XVI

Kedzie had come to town with no social ambitions whatsoever beyond
a childish desire to be enormously rich and marry a beautiful prince.
Her ideal of heaven at first was an eternal movie show interrupted
at will by several meals a day, incessant soda-water and ice-cream
and a fellow or two to spoon with, and some up-to-date duds--most
of all, several pairs of those white-topped shoes all the girls
in town were wearing.

The time would shortly come when Kedzie would abhor the word
_swell_ and despise the people who used it, violently forgetting
that she had herself used it. She would soon be overheard saying
to a mixed girl of her mixed acquaintance: "Take it from me, chick,
when you find a dame calls herself a lady, she ain't. Nobody who
is it says it, and if you want to be right, lay off such words as
_swell_ and _classy_."

Later, she would be finding that it took something still more than
avoiding the word _lady_ to deserve it. She would writhe to
believe that she could never quite make herself exact with the term.
She would hate those who had been born and made to the title, and
she would revert at times to common instincts with fierce anarchy.

But one must go forward before one can backslide, and Kedzie was
on the way up the slippery hill.

She had greatly improved the quality of her lodgings, her suitors,
and her clothes. Her photographic successes in risky exposures had
brought her a marked increase of wages. She wore as many clothes
as she could in private, to make up for her self-denial before
the camera. Her taste in dress was soubrettish and flagrant, but
it was not small-town. She was beginning to dislike ice-cream soda
and candy and to call for beer and Welsh rabbit. She would soon
be liking salads with garlic and Roquefort cheese in the dressing.
She was mounting with splendid assiduity toward the cigarette and
the high-ball. There was no stopping Kedzie. She kept rising on
stepping-stones of her dead selves.

Landladies are ladder-rungs of progress, too; Kedzie's history
might have been traced by hers.

Her camera career had led her from the flat of the delicatessen
merchant, through various shabby lairs, into the pension of a
vaudeville favorite of prehistoric fame. The house was dilapidated,
and the brownstone front had the moth-eaten look of the plush
furniture within.

Mrs. Jambers was as fat as if she fed on her own boarders, but she
was once no less a person than Mrs. Trixie Jambers Coogan, of Coogan
and Jambers. She had once evoked wild applause at Tony Pastor's by
her clog-dancing.

There was another dancer there, an old grenadier of a woman who
had been famous in her time as a _premiere danseuse_ at
the opera. Mrs. Bottger had spent a large part of her early life
on one toe, but now she could hardly balance herself sitting down.
She held on to the table while she ate. She did not look as if
she needed to eat any more.

Kedzie was proud to know people who had been as famous as these two
said they had been, but Bottger and Jambers used to fight bitterly
over their respective schools of expression. Bottger insisted that
the buck-and-wing and the double shuffle and other forms of jiggery
were low. Jambers insisted that the ballet was immoral and, what
was more, insincere. Mrs. Bottger was furious at the latter charge,
but the former was now rather flattering. She used secretly to take
out old photographs of herself as a slim young thing in tights with
one toe for support and the other resting on one knee. She would
gloat over these as a miser over his gold; and she would shake her
finger at her quondam self and scold it lovingly--"You wicked little
thing, you!" Then she would hastily move it out of the reach of her
tears. It was safe under the eaves of her bosom against her heart.

It was a merry war, with dishonors even, till a new-comer appeared,
a Miss Eleanor Silsby, who taught the ultimate word in dancing; she
admitted it herself. As she explained it, she went back to nature
for her inspiration. Her pupils dressed as near to what nature
had provided them with as they really dared. Miss Silsby said that
they were trying to catch the spirit of wind and waves and trees
and flowers, and translate it into the dance. They translated
seaweed and whitecaps and clouds into steps. Miss Silsby was booking
a few vaudeville dates "in order to bring the art of nature back
to the people and bring the people back to the art of nature." What
the people would do with it she did not explain--nor what the police
would do to them if they tried it.

Miss Silsby had by the use of the most high-sounding phrases
attained about the final word in candor. What clothes her pupils
wore were transparent and flighty. The only way to reveal more skin
would have been to grow it. Her pupils were much photographed in
airy attitudes on beaches, dancing with the high knee-action so much
prized in horses; flinging themselves into the air; curveting, with
the accent on the curve; clasping one another in groups of nymphish
innocence and artificial grace. It was all, somehow, so shocking for
its insincerity that its next to nudity was a minor consideration.
It was so full of affectation that it seemed quite lacking in the
dangers of passion.

So gradually indeed had the mania for disrobing spread about
the world that there was little or no shock to be had. People
generally assumed to be respectable took their children to see
the dances, even permitted them to learn them. According to Miss
Silsby's press-notices, "Members of wealthy and prominent families
are taking up the new art." And perhaps they were doing as well by
their children as more careful parents, since nothing is decent or
indecent except by acclamation, and if nudity is made commonplace,
there is one multitude of temptations removed from our curiosity.

But Bottger, whose ballet-tights and tulle skirt were once the
horror of all good people--Bottger was disgusted with the dances
of Miss Silsby, and said so.

Miss Silsby was merely amused by Bottger's hostility. She scorned
her scorn, and with the utmost scientific and ethnological support
declared that clothes were immoral in origin, and the cause
of immorality and extravagance, since they were not the human
integument. Jambers was not quite sure what "integument" was,
but she thanked God she had never had it in her family.

An interested onlooker and in-listener at these boarding-house battles
was Kedzie. By now she was weary of her present occupation--of course!
She was tired of photographs of herself, especially as they were
secured at the cost of long hours of posing under the hot skylight
of a photograph gallery. Miss Silsby gave Kedzie a pair of
complimentary seats to an entertainment at which the Silsby sirens
were to dance. Kedzie was swept away with envy of the hilarity,
the grace, the wild animal effervescence and elegance of motion.

She contrasted the vivacity of the dancer's existence with the
stupidity of her still-life poses. She longed to run and pirouette
and leap into the air. She wished she could kick herself in the back
of the head to music the way the Silsby girls did.

When she told this to Miss Silsby the next day Miss Silsby was
politely indifferent. Kedzie added:

"You know, I'm up on that classic stuff, too. Oh, yessum, Greek
costumes are just everyday duds to me."

"Indeed!" Miss Silsby exclaimed.

Kedzie showed her some trade photographs of herself as an Athenienne,
and Miss Silsby pondered. Although her dances were supposed to purify
and sweeten the soul, one of her darlings had so fiendish a temper
that she had torn out several Psyche knots. She was the demurest of
all in seeming when she danced, but she was uncontrollably jealous.

Miss Silsby saw that Kedzie's pout had commercial value. She
invited Kedzie to join her troupe. And Kedzie did. The wages were
small, but the world was new. She became one of the most attractive
of the dancers. But once more the rehearsals and the long hours
of idleness wore out her enthusiasm. She hated the regularity
of the performances; every afternoon and evening she must express
raptures she did not feel, by means of laborious jumpings and
runnings to the same music. And she abominated the requirement
to keep kicking herself in the back of the head.

Even the thrill of clotheslessness became stupid. It was disgusting
not to have beautiful gowns to dance in. Zada L'Etoile and others had
a new costume for every dance. Kedzie had one tiresome hip-length
shift and little else. As usual, poor Kedzie found that realization
was for her the parody of anticipation.

Kedzie's new art danced into her life a few new suitors, but they
came at a time when she was almost imbecile over Thomas Gilfoyle, the
advertising bard. He was the first intellectual man she had met--that
is, he was intellectual compared with any other of her men friends.
He could read and write something besides business literature.
In fact, he was a fellow of startling ideas. He called himself
a socialist. What the socialists would have called him it would be
hard to say; they are given to strong language.

Kedzie had known in Nimrim what church socials were, for they were
about the height of Nimrim excitement. But young Mr. Gilfoyle was not
a church socialist. He detested all creeds and all churches and said
things about them and about religion that at first made Kedzie look
up at the ceiling and dodge. But no brimstone ever broke through
the plaster and she grew used to his diatribes.

She had never met one of these familiar enough figures before, and
she was vaguely stirred by his chantings in behalf of humanity. He
adored the poor laborers, though he did not treat the office-boy well
and he was not gallant to the scrub-woman. But his theories were as
beautiful as music, and he intoned them with ringing oratory. Kedzie
did not know what he was talking about, any more than she knew what
Caruso was singing about when she turned him on in Mrs. Jambers's
phonograph, but his melodies put her heart to its paces, and so did
Gilfoyle's.

Gilfoyle wrote her poems, too, real poems not meant for publication
at advertising rates. Kedzie had never had anybody commit poetry
at her before. It lifted her like that Biltmore elevator and sent
her heart up into her head. He lauded Kedzie's pout as well as her
more saltant expressions. He voiced a belief that life in a little
hut with her would be luxury beyond the contemptible stupidities
of life in a palace with another. Kedzie did not care for the hut
detail, but the idolatry of so "brainy" a man was inspiring.

Kedzie and Gilfoyle were mutually afraid: she of his intellect, he
of her beauty and of her very fragility. Of course, he called her
by her new name, "Miss Adair." Later he implored the priceless joy
of calling her by her first name.

Gilfoyle feared to ask this privilege in prose, and so he put it
in verse. Kedzie found it in her mail at the stage door. She huddled
in a corner of the big undressing-room where the nymphs prepared for
their task. The young rowdies kept peeking over her shoulder and
snatching at her letter, but when finally she read it aloud to them
as a punishment and a triumph, they were stricken with awe. It ran
thus:

Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you "Anita"?
Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.

Kedzie stumbled over this, because she had not yet eradicated
the Western final "r" from her pronunciation. She thought Mr.
Gilfoyle was awful swell because he dropped it naturally. But she
read on, scrambling over some of the words the way a horse jumps
a fence one rail too high.

You are so adorable
I find it deplorable,
Absurd and abnormal.
To cling to the formal
'Twere such a good omen
To drop the cognomen.
So I beg you to promise
That you'll call me "Thomas,"
Or better yet, "Tommie,"
Instead of th' abomi-
Nable "Mr. Gilfoyle."
You can, and you will foil
My torments Mephistian
By using my Christian
Name and permitting Yours Truly
To call you yours too-ly.

Miss Adair,
Hear my prayer
Do I dare
Call my love when I meet her
"Anita"? Anita! Anita!!

In the silence that followed she whisked out a box of shrimp-pink
letter-paper she had bought at a drugstore. It was daintily ruled
in violet lines and had a mauve "A" at the top. It was called
"The Nobby Note," and so she knew that it was all right.

She wrote on it the simple but thrilling answer:

DEAR TOMMIE,--You bet your boots!
ANITA.

By the time she had sealed and addressed the shrimpy envelope and
begun feverishly to make up for lost time in changing her costume,
the other girls had recovered a little from the suffocation of her
glory. One of them murmured:

"Say, Aneet, what is your first name? Your really truly one."

Another snarled, "What's your really truly last name?"

A third dryad whooped, "I bet it's Lizzie Smoots or Mag Wimpfhauser."

The others had other suggestions to howl, and Anita cowered in
silence, wondering if one of the fiends would not at any moment
guess "Kedzie Thropp."

The call to arms and legs cut short her torment, and for once
the music seemed appropriate. Never had she danced with such
lyricism.

Gilfoyle had the presence of mind to be waiting in the alley after
the matinee, and took from her hand the note she was carrying to
the mail-box. When he read it he almost embraced her right there.

They took a street-car to Mrs. Jambers's boarding-house, but cruel
disappointment waited for them. Another boarder was entertaining
her gentleman friend in the parlor. Kedzie was furious. So was
the other boarder.

That night Gilfoyle met Kedzie again at the stage door, but they
could not go to the boarding-house, for Mrs. Jambers occupied at
that time a kind of false mantelpiece that turned out to be a bed
in disguise. So they went to the Park.

Young Gilfoyle treated Kedzie with almost more respect than she
might have desired. He was one of those self-chaperoning young men
who spout anarchy and practise asceticism. Even in his poetry it
was the necessitous limitations of rhyme-words that dragged him
into his boldest thoughts.

Sitting on a dark Park bench with Kedzie, he could not have been
more circumspect if there had been sixteen duennas gathered around.
The first time he hugged her was a rainy night when Kedzie had to
snuggle close and haul his arm around her, and then his heart beat
so fast against her shoulder that she was afraid he would die of it.

Cool, wet, windy nights in late summer feel very cold, and a damp
bench under dripping trees was a nuisance to a tired dancing-girl.
Love was so inconvenient that when Kedzie bewailed the restrictions
imposed on unmarried people Gilfoyle proposed marriage. It popped
out of him so suddenly that Kedzie felt his heart stop and listen.
Then it began to race, and hers ran away, too.

"Why, Mr. Gilfoyle! Why, Tommie!" she gurgled. It was her first
proposal of marriage, and she lost her head. "And you a socialist
and telling me you didn't believe in marriages!"

"I don't," said Gilfoyle, with lovely sublimity above petty
consistencies, "except with you, Anita. I don't believe in anything
exclusive for anybody except you for me and me for you. We've just
got to be each other's own, haven't we?"

Kedzie could think of nothing to add except a little emphasis; so
she cried, "Each other's very ownest own!"

Thus they became engaged. That made it possible for her to have him
in her own room at the boarding-house. Also it enabled him to borrow
money from her with propriety when they were hungry for supper.
Fortunately, he did not mind her going on working. Not at all.

Gilfoyle was a fiend of jealousy concerning individuals, but he was
not jealous of the public. It did not hurt him at all to have Kedzie
publishing her structural design to the public, because he loved
the public, and the public paid indirectly. He wanted the masses
to have what the classes have. That delighted Kedzie, at first.