We Can't Have Everything Part 21

Kedzie slipped through the gate out to the road. She did not dare hire a carriage, now that she was jobless. She wished she had not left paradise. But she dared not try to return. She was not "cla.s.sy" enough.

Suddenly a spasm of resentment shook the girl.

She felt the hatred of the rich that always set Tommie Gilfoyle afire.

What right had such people to such majesty when Kedzie must walk? What right had they to homes and yards so big that it tired Kedzie out just to trudge past? Who was this Mrs. Cheever, that she should be so top-lofty and bend-downy? Kedzie ground her teeth in anger and tore Charity's card to bits. She flung them at the sea, but the wind brought them back about her face stingingly. She walked on, loathing the very motors that flashed by, flocks of geese squawking contempt.

She walked and walked and walked. The overpowering might of the big houses in their green demesnes made her feel smaller and wearier, but big with bitterness. She would have been glad to have a suit-case full of bombs to blow those sn.o.bbish residences into flinders.

She was dog tired when, after losing her way again and again, she reached the boarding-house where the dancers lodged. She packed her things and went to the train, lugging her own baggage. When she reached the station she was footsore, heartsore, soulsore. Her only comfort was that the Silsby dancers had been placed early enough on Mrs. Noxon's program for her to have failed in time to get home the same day. She hated Newport now. It had not been good to her. New York was home once more.

"When's the next train to New York?" she asked a porter.

"It's wint," said the porter. "Wint at four-five."

"I said when's the next train," Kedzie snapped.

"T'-marra' marnin'," said the porter.

"My Gawd!" said Kedzie. "Have I gotta spend the night in this hole?"

The porter stared. He was not used to hearing Mecca called a hole.

"Well, if it's that bad," he grinned, "you might take the five-five to Providence and pick up the six-forty there. But you'll have to git a move on."

Kedzie got a move on. The train swept her out along the edge of Rhode Island. She knew nothing of its heroic history. She cared nothing for its heroic splendor. She thought of it only as the stronghold of an embattled aristocracy. She did not blame Miss Silsby for her disgrace, nor herself. She blamed the audience, as other actors and authors and politicians do. She blazed with the merciless hatred of the rich that poor people feel when they are thwarted in their efforts to rival or cultivate or sell to the rich. Their own sins they forget as absolved, because the sins have failed. It is the success of sin and the sin of success that cannot be forgiven.

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 mult.i.tudes 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 s.n.a.t.c.h the suit-case from her and s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 sanct.i.ty 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.