We Can't Have Everything Part 11

Kedzie did not know where to go. She walked for fear of standing still.

The noise fatigued her. She turned west to escape it and found a little park at 161st Street.

Many streets flowed thence. There were ten ways to follow, and she could not choose one among them.

She was pretty, but she had not learned the commercial value of her beauty. She was alone in the great, vicious city, but n.o.body had threatened her. Nearly everybody had paid her charm the tribute of a stare or a smile, but n.o.body 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 pa.s.senger:

"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?"

"Tha.s.s 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 f.a.gged. Then she encountered a huge ma.s.s 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 una.s.sailed.

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't.i.te 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 gra.s.s. 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 ch.o.r.es 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 b.u.t.tons and b.u.t.toned them up or unb.u.t.toned 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 b.l.o.o.d.y ditches of the war-front; she had been chambermaid to gas-blinded peasants and had done the hideous ch.o.r.es 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.