We Can\'t Have Everything

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The little dancer whose foot had slipped on the wet marble of
wealth was shaken almost to pieces by philosophic vibrations too
big for her exquisite frame. They reminded her of her poet, of
Tommie Gilfoyle, who was afraid of her and paid court to her.
He appeared to her now as a radiant angel of redemption. From
Providence she telegraphed him that she would arrive at New York
at eleven-fifteen, and he would meet her if he loved her.

This done, she went to the lunch-counter, climbed on a tall stool,
and bought herself a cheap dinner. She was paying for it out of
her final moneys, and her brain once more told her stomach that
it would have to be prudent. She swung aboard the train when it
came in, and felt as secure as a lamb with a good shepherd on the
horizon. When she grew drowsy she curled up on the seat and slept
to perfection.

Her invasion of Newport was over and done--disastrously done, she
thought; but its results were just beginning for Jim Dyckman and
Charity Coe.

Eventually Kedzie reached the Grand Central Terminal--a much
different Kedzie from the one that once followed her father and
mother up that platform to that concourse! Her very name was
different, and her mind had learned multitudes of things good
and bad. She had a young man waiting for her--a poet, a socialist,
a worshiper. Her heavy suit-case could not detain her steps. She
dragged it as a little sloop drags its anchor in a gale.

Gilfoyle was waiting for her at the barrier. He bent to snatch
the suit-case from her and snatched a kiss at the same time. His
bravery thrilled her; his gallantry comforted her immeasurably.
She was so proud of herself and of him that she wasted never a
glance at the powdered gold on the blue ceiling.

"I'm terrible glad to see you, Tommie," she said.

"Are you? Honest?" he chortled.

They jostled into each other and the crowd.

"I'm awful hungry, though," she said, "and I've got oodles of
things to tell you."

"Let's eat," he said. They went to the all-night dairy restaurant
in the Terminal. He led her to one of the broad-armed chairs and
fetched her dainties--a triangle of apple pie, a circle of cruller,
and a cylinder of milk.

She leaned across the arm of the chair and told him of her mishaps.
He was so enraged that he knocked a plate to the floor. She snatched
the cruller off just in time to save it, and the room echoed
her laughter.

They talked and talked until she was talked out, and it was
midnight. He began to worry about the hour. It was a long ride
on the Subway and then a long walk to her boarding-house and then
a long walk and a long ride to his.

"I hate to go back to that awful Jambers woman and let her know
I'm fired," Kedzie moaned. "My trunk's in storage, anyhow, and
maybe she's got no room."

"Why go back?" said Tommie, not realizing the import of his words.
It was merely his philosophical habit to ask every custom "Why?"

"Where else is there to go to?" she sighed.

"If we were only married--" he sighed.

"Why, Tommie!"

"As we ought to be!"

"Why, Tommie Gilfoyle!"

And now he was committed. As when he wrote poetry the grappling-hooks
of rhyme dragged him into statements he had not dreamed of at
the start and was afraid of at the finish--so now he stumbled into
a proposal he could not clamber out of. He must flounder through.

The idea was so deliriously unexpected, so fascinatingly novel to
Kedzie, that she fell in love with it. Immediately she would rather
have died than remain unmarried to Tommie Gilfoyle.

But there were difficulties.

CHAPTER II

In the good old idyllic days it had been possible for romantic
youth to get married as easily as to get dinner--and as hard to get
unmarried as to get wings. Couples who spooned too long at seaside
resorts and missed the last train home could wake up a preacher and
be united in indissoluble bonds of holy matrimony for two dollars.
The preachers of that day slept light, in order to save the
reputations of foolish virgins.

But now a greedy and impertinent civil government had stepped in
and sacrilegiously insisted on having a license bought and paid for
before the Church could officiate. And the license bureau was not
open all night, as it should have been.

Kedzie knew nothing of this, but Gilfoyle was informed. Theoretically
he believed that marriage should be rendered impossible and divorce
easy. But he could no more have proposed an informal alliance with
his precious Kedzie than he could have wished that his mother had
made one with his father. His mother and father had eloped and been
married by a sleepy preacher, but that was poetic and picturesque,
seeing that they did not fail to wake the preacher. Gilfoyle's
reverence for Kedzie demanded at least as much sanctity about his
union with her.

It is curious how habits complicate life. Here were two people whom
it would greatly inconvenience to separate. Yet just because it was
a custom to close the license bureau in the late afternoon they
must wait half a night while the license clerk slept and snored,
or played cards or read detective stories or did whatever license
clerks do between midnight and office hours. And just because people
habitually crawl into bed and sleep between midnight and forenoon,
these two lovers were already finding it hard to keep awake in spite
of all their exaltation. They simply must sleep. Romance could wait.

Gilfoyle knew that there were places enough where Kedzie and he
could go and have no questions asked except, "Have you got baggage,
or will you pay in advance?" But he would not take his Kedzie to
any such place, any more than he would leave a chalice in a saloon
for safe-keeping.

In their drowsy brains projects danced sparklingly, but they could
find nothing to do except to part for the eternity of the remnant
of the night. So Gilfoyle escorted Kedzie to the Hotel Belmont door,
and told her to say she was an actress arrived on a late train. He
stood off at a distance while he saw that she registered and was
respectfully treated and led to the elevator by a page.

Then he moved west to the Hotel Manhattan and found shelter. And
thus they slept with propriety, Forty-second Street lying between
them like a sword.

The alarm-clock in Gilfoyle's head woke him at seven. He hated to
interrupt Kedzie's sleep, but he was afraid of his boss and he needed
his salary more than ever--twice as much as ever. He telephoned from
his room to Kedzie's room down the street and up ten stories and was
comforted to find that he woke her out of a sleep so sound that he
could hardly understand her words. But he eventually made sure that
she would make haste to dress and meet him in the restaurant.

They breakfasted together at half past eight. Kedzie was aglow with
the whole procedure.

"You ought to write a novel about us," she told Gilfoyle. "It would
be a lot better than most of the awful stories folks write nowadays.
And you'd make a million dollars, I bet. We need a lot of money now,
too, don't we?"

"A whole lot," said Gilfoyle, who was beginning to fret over the
probable cost of the breakfast.

It cost more than he expected--as he expected. But he was in for it,
and he trusted that the Lord would provide. They bought a ring at
a petty jewelry-shop in Forty-second Street and then descended to
a Subway express and emerged at the Brooklyn Bridge Station.

The little old City Hall sat among the overtowering buildings like
an exquisite kitten surrounded by mastiffs, but Gilfoyle's business
took him and his conquest into the enormous Municipal Building,
whose windy arcades blew Kedzie against him with a pleasant clash.

The winds of life indeed had blown them together as casually as
two leaves met in the same gutter. But they thought it a divine
encounter arranged from eons back and to continue for eons forward.
They thought it so at that time.

They went up in the elevator to the second floor, where, in the
fatal Room 258, clerks at several windows vended for a dollar apiece
the State's permission to experiment with matrimony.

There was a throng ahead of them--brides, grooms, parents, and
witnesses of various nationalities. All of them looked shabby and
common, even to Kedzie in her humility. All over the world couples
were mating, as the birds and animals and flowers and chemicals
mate in their seasons. The human pairs advertised their union by
numberless rites of numberless religions and non-religions. The
presence or absence of rite or its nature seemed to make little
difference in the prosperity of the emulsion. The presence or
absence of romance seemed to make little difference, either. But
it seemed to be generally agreed upon as a policy around the world
that marriage should be made exceedingly easy, and unmarriage
exceedingly difficult. In recruiting armies the same plan is
observed; every encouragement is offered to enlist; one has only
to step in off the street and enlist. But getting free! That is
not the object of the recruiting business.

Gilfoyle and Kedzie had to wait their turns before they could reach
a window. Then they had a cross-examination to face.

Kedzie giggled a good deal, and she leaned softly against the hard
shoulder of Gilfoyle while the clerk quizzed him as to his full name,
color, residence, age, occupation, birthplace, the name of his father
and mother and the country of their birth, and the number of his
previous marriages.

She grew abruptly solemn when the clerk looked at her for answers
to the same questions on her part; for she realized that she was
expected to tell her real name and her parents' real names. She
would have to confess to Tommie that she had deceived him and
cheated him out of a beautiful poem. Had he known the truth he
would never have written:

Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Kedzie?
Your last name is Thropp, but your first name is--

Nothing rhymed with _Kedzie_.

While she gaped, wordless, Gilfoyle magnificently spoke for her,
proudly informed the clerk that her name was "Anita Adair," that
she was white (he nearly said "pink"), that her age was--he had
to ask that, and she told him nineteen. He gave her residence as
New York and her occupation as "none."

"What is your father's first name, honey?" he said, a little
startled to realize how little he knew of her or her past. She
had learned much news of him, too, in hearing his own answers.

"Adna," she whispered, and he told the clerk that her father's name
was Adna Adair. She told the truth about her mother's maiden name.
She could afford to do that, and she could honestly aver that she
had never had any husband or husbands "up to yet," and that she
had not been divorced "so far." Also both declared that they knew
of no legal impediment to their marriage. There are so few legal
impediments to marriage, and so many to the untying of the knot
into which almost anybody can tie almost anybody!

The clerk's facile pen ran here and there, and the license was
delivered at length on the payment of a dollar. For one almighty
dollar the State gave the two souls permission to commit mutual
mortgage for life.

Gilfoyle was growing nervous. He told Kedzie that he was expected
at the office. There were several advertisements to write for the
next day's papers, and he had given the firm no warning of what
he had not foreseen the day before. If they hunted for a preacher,
Gilfoyle would get into trouble with Mr. Kiam.

If they had listened to the excellent motto, "Business before
pleasure," they might never have been married. That would have
saved them a vast amount of heartache, both blissful and hateful.
But they were afraid to postpone their nuptials. The mating
instinct had them in its grip.

They fretted awhile in the hurlyburly of other love-mad couples
and wondered what to do. Gilfoyle finally pushed up to one of
the windows again and asked:

"What's the quickest way to get married? Isn't there a preacher
or alderman or something handy?"

"Aldermen are not allowed to marry folks any more," he was told.
"But the City Clerk will hitch you up for a couple of dollars.
The marriage-room is right up-stairs."

This seemed the antipodes of romance and Gilfoyle hesitated
to decide.

But Kedzie, knowing his religious ardor against religions, said:

"What's the diff? I don't mind."

Gilfoyle smiled at last, and the impatient lovers hurried out
into the corridor. They would not wait for the elevator, but ran
up the steps. They passed a trio of youth, a girl and two young
fellows. One of the lads gave the other a shove that identified
the bridegroom. The girl was holding her left hand up and staring
at her new ring. A pessimist might have seen a portent in the
cynical amusement of her smile, and another in the aweless speed
with which Gilfoyle and Kedzie hustled toward the awful mystery
of such a union as marriage attempts.

The wedlock-factory was busy. In spite of the earliness of the hour
the waiting-room was crowded, its benches full. The only place for
Kedzie to sit was next to a couple of negroes, the man in Ethiopian
foppery grinning up into the face of a woman who held his hat and
cane, and simpered in ebony.

Kedzie whispered to Gilfoyle her displeased surprise:

"Why, they act just like we do."

Kedzie liked to use _like_ like that. She felt belittled at
sharing with such people an emotion that seemed to her far too good
for them. Also she felt that the emotion itself was cheapened by
such company. She wished she had not consented to the marriage. But
it would excite attention to back out now, and the dollar already
invested would be wasted. For all she knew, the purchase of the
license compelled the completion of the project.

A group of Italians came from Room 365--two girls in white, a
bareheaded mother who had been weeping, a fat and relieved-looking
father, an insignificant youth who was unquestionably the new-born
husband.

Gilfoyle kept looking at his watch, but he had to wait his turn.
There was a book to be signed and a two-dollar bill to be paid.
At last, when the negro pair came forth chuckling, Kedzie and
Gilfoyle rushed into the so-called "chapel" to meet their fate.

The chapel was a barrenly furnished office. Its nearest approach
to an altar was a washstand with hot and cold running water. At
the small desk the couple stood while the City Clerk read the pledge
drawn up in the Corporation Counsel's office with a sad mixture of
religious, legal, and commercial cant:

"In the name of God, Amen.

"Do either of you know of any impediment why you should not be
legally joined together in matrimony, or if any one present can
show any just cause why these parties should not be legally joined
together in matrimony let them now speak or hereafter hold their
peace.

"Do you, Thomas Gilfoyle, take this woman as your lawfully wedded
wife, to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love,
honor, and keep her, as a faithful man is bound to do, in health,
sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all others
keep you alone unto her as long as you both shall live?

"Do you, Anita Adair, take this man for your lawfully wedded husband
to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love, honor,
and cherish him as a faithful woman is bound to do, in health,
sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all others
keep you alone unto him as along as you both shall live?

"For as both have consented in wedlock and have acknowledged same
before this company I do by virtue of the authority vested in me
by the laws of the State of New York now pronounce you husband
and wife.

"And may God bless your union."

The City Clerk had to furnish witnesses from his own staff while
he administered the secular rites and exacted the solemn promises
which so few have kept, and invoked the help of God which is so
rarely manifest or so subtly hidden, in the human-animal-angel
relation of marriage.

And now Anita Adair and Thomas Gilfoyle were officially welded into
one. They had received the full franchise each of the other's body,
soul, brain, time, temper, liberty, leisure, admiration, education,
past, future, health, wealth, strength, weakness, virtue, vice,
destructive power, procreative power, parental gift or lack,
domestic or bedouin genius, prejudice, inheritance--all.

It was a large purchase for three dollars, and it remained to be
seen whether either or both delivered the goods. At the altar of
Hymen, Kedzie had publicly vowed to love, honor, and cherish under
all circumstances. It was like swearing to walk in air or water as
well as on earth. The futile old oath to "obey" had been omitted
as a perjury enforced.

Kedzie Thropp, who had dome to New York only a few months before,
had done one more impulsive thing. First she had run away from her
parents. Now she had run away from herself. She had loved New York
first. Now she was infatuated with Tommie Gilfoyle. He was as
complex and mysterious a city as Manhattan. She would be as long
in reaching the heart of him.

There had been no bridesmaids to give the scene social grace, no
music or flowers to give it poetry, no minister to give it an odor
of sanctity. It was marriage in its cold, business-like actuality,
without hypnotism, superstition, or false pretense. Small wonder
that Kedzie had hardly left the marriage-room before she felt that
she was not married at all. The vaccination had not taken. She
was not one with Gilfoyle. And yet she must pretend that she was.
She must act as if they were one soul, one flesh; must share his
tenement, his food, his joys and anxieties. Of these last there
promised to be no famine.

Gilfoyle was in a panic about his office. He told Kedzie to devote
the morning to looking up some place to live. He would join her
at luncheon. He fidgeted while they waited for the elevator, Kedzie
staring at her ring with the same curious smile as the other girl.

CHAPTER III

They rode up-town in a Subway express to Forty-second Street.
heir first business treaty had to be drawn up in the crowd.

"How much do you want to pay for the flat, honey?" said Kedzie.

Gilfoyle was startled. Already the money-snake was in their Eden.
And she asked him how much he "wanted" to pay! It was only a form
of speech, but it grated on him.

"I haven't time to figure it out," he fretted. "I get twenty-five
dollars a week--darling. That's a hundred a month--dear." His pet
names came afterward, mere trailers. "Out of that we've got to get
something to eat and to wear, and there'll be street-car fare to
pay and--tooth-powder to buy, and we'll want something for theater
tickets, and--" He was aghast; at the multitude of things married
people need. He added, "And we ought to save a little, I suppose."

"I suppose so," said Kedzie, who was as much taken aback by the
mention of economy at such a time as he was by the mention of
expenditure. But she rose bravely to the responsibility: "I'll
do the best I can, and we'll be so cozy--ooh!"

Kedzie was used to small figures. He put into her hand all the cash
he had with him, which was all he had on earth--forty-two dollars.
He borrowed back the two dollars. Kedzie had her own money, about
forty more dollars. This, with twenty-five dollars a week, seemed
big; enough to her to keep them in luxury. They parted at the Grand
Central Terminal with looks of devoted agony.

She set out at once to look at flats and to visit furniture-stores.
She bought a _Herald_ and read the numberless advertisements.
Something was the matter everywhere. She had gone far and found
nothing but discouragement when the luncheon hour arrived.

Humble as her ideas were, they rebelled at what she and her
bridegroom would have to accept for their home. She had always
dreamed of marrying a beautiful man with a million dollars and
a steam yacht. She was to have been married by a swagger parson,
in a swagger church, and to have gone on a long voyage somewhere,
and come back at last to a castle on Fifth Avenue. She had lost
the parson; the voyage was not to be thought of; and the castle
was not even in the air.

She looked at one or two expensive apartments, just to see what real
apartments could be like. They stunned her with their splendors,
their liveried outguards, their elevators clanking like caparisoned
chariot-horses, their conveniences, their rentals--six or eight
thousand dollars a year, unfurnished!--six or seven times her
husband's whole annual earnings. They were beyond the folly of
a dream.

She would have to be content with what one could rent furnished
for twenty-five dollars a month. She would have to be her own
hired girl. She would have to toil in a few cells of a beehive
on a side-street. She would be chauffeuse to a gas-stove only.

She went to the luncheon tryst with a load of forebodings, but
Gilfoyle did not appear. She heard her name paged by a corridor-crier
and was called to the telephone, where her husband's voice told her
that there was a big upset at the office and he dared not leave.
He forgot to be tender in his endearments, and he forgot to explain
to her that he was talking in a crowded office with an impatient
boss waiting for him and a telephone-girl probably listening in.

Kedzie lunched alone, already a business man's wife.

She scoured the town all afternoon, and at last, in desperation,
took the furnished flat she happened to be in when she could go
no farther. She had to sign a year's lease, and pay twenty-five
dollars in advance.

They would live a condensed life there. Even the hall was shared
with another family. The secrets were also to be shared, evidently,
for Kedzie could hear all that went on in the other home--all, all!

But by this time she was so tired that any cranny would have been
welcome. She was even wearier than she had been when she occupied
the outdoor apartment under the park bench where she spent her second
night in New York. She called that an "aparkment" and liked the pun
so well that she longed to tell her husband. But that would have
compelled the telling of her real name, and she did not know him
well enough for that yet. She found that she did not know him
well enough yet for an increasing number of things. She began to be
afraid to have him come home. What would he be like as a husband?
What would she be like as a wife? Those are all-important facts that
one is permitted to learn after the vows of perfection are sealed.

When Kedzie had rested awhile she grew braver and lonelier. She would
welcome almost any husband for companionship's sake. She resolved to
have Tom's dinner ready for him. She dragged herself down the stairs
and up the hill to the grocer's and the butcher's and bought the raw
material for dinner and breakfast.

She telephoned Gilfoyle at his office, gave him the address and
invited him to dine with "Mrs. Gilfoyle." She chuckled over the
romance of it, but he was harrowed with office troubles. Her ardor
was a trifle dampened by his voice, but she found new thrills in
the gas-stove, a most dramatic instrument to play. It frightened
her with every manifestation. She turned the wrong handles and got
bad odors from it, and explosions. She burned her fingers and
the chops.

She stared in dismay at the charred first banquet and then marched
her weary feet down the stairs again and up the hill again to
a delicatessen shop. She had previously learned the fatal ease of
the ready-made meals they vend at such places, and she compiled
her first menu there.

When Gilfoyle came down the street and up the steps into his new
home and into her arms he tried to lay off care for a while. But
he could not hide his anxiety--and his ecstasy was half an ecstasy
of dread.

He did not like the shabby, showy furniture the landlord had selected.
But the warmed-up dinner amazed him. He had not imagined Kedzie so
scholarly a cook. She dared not tell him that she had cheated. He
found her wonderfully refreshing after a day of office toil and told
her how happy they would be, and she said, "You bet." Kedzie cleared
the table by scooping up all the dishes and dumping them into a big
pan and turning the hot water into it with a cake of soap. Then she
retreated to the wabbly divan in the living-room.

Gilfoyle went over to Kedzie like a lonely hound; and she laced still
tighter the arms that encircled her. They told each other that they
were all they had in the world, and they forgot the outside world for
the world within themselves. But the evening was maliciously hot and
muggy; it was going to rain in a day or so. That divan would hardly
support two, and there was no comfort in sitting close; it merely
added two furnaces together.

Clamor rose in the adjoining apartment. Their neighbors had children,
and the children did not want to go to bed. The parents nagged the
children and each other. The wrangle was insufferable. And the idea
came to Kedzie and Gilfoyle that children were one of the liabilities
of their own marriage. They were afraid of each other, now, as well
as of the world. If only they had not been in such haste to be
married! If only they could recall those hasty words!