We Can't Have Everything Part 56

She fell back stupefied. He grinned, and took her in with devouring eyes. If he had no right to devour her, who had? He approved of her with a rush of delight:

"Well, Anita, here I am. And how's the little wife?"

She could not answer him. He stared ferociously, and gasped as if he had forgotten how she had looked:

"Golly, but you're beautiful? Where's the little kiss?"

He threw his arms about her, garnering in the full sheaf of her beauty.

She tried to escape, to protest, but he smothered her with his lips.

She had been so long away from him, she had so long omitted him from her plans, that she felt a sense of outrage in his a.s.sault. Something virginal had resumed her heart, and his proprietorship revolted her.

Her shoulders were so constrained that she could not push free. She could only raise her right hand outside his left arm, and reaching his face, thrust it away. Her nails were long and sharp. They tore deep gashes in his cheeks and across his nose.

He let her go with a yelp of pain and shame. His fists gathered; primeval instinct told him to smash the mask of pale hatred he saw before him. But he saw the photograph in her left hand. It had been bent double in the scuffle. He s.n.a.t.c.hed at it and tore away the lower half.

He read the inscription with disgust and growled:

"That's the reason you didn't write me! That's why you don't want to see me, eh? So he's keeping you! And that's why you resigned from the studio!"

The atrocity of this slander was too much. With a little cat-like yowl she went for him, dropping the broken photograph and spreading all ten claws.

He caught her arms and held them apart where she could scratch nothing more than his wrists, which she did venomously. The cat tribe is a bad tribe to fight at close quarters. One must kill or break loose.

When Kedzie tried to bite him, Gilfoyle realized that she was in no mood for argument. He dragged her to the living-room door and then flung her as far as he could from him. She toppled over into a chair and began to cry.

It was not a pretty scene. Gilfoyle took out his handkerchief and pressed it to his face and the bridge of his nose. Then he looked at the red marks and held them out for her to observe:

"See what you did to me!"

"I'm glad of it," she snapped. "I wish I'd torn your eyes out."

This alone would not necessarily have proved that she did not love him devotedly, but in this case it corroborated a context of hatred.

Gilfoyle felt rebuffed. There was a distinct lack of hospitality in her welcome. This reception was the very opposite of his imagined rencounter.

He did what a man usually does, revealing a masculine inability to argue with a woman. He told her all her faults of omission and commission as if that would bring her to a reconciliating humor. She listened awhile, and then answered, with a perfect logic that baffled him:

"All you say only goes to show that you don't love me. You never did.

You went away and left me. I might have starved, for all you cared. But I've worked like a dog, and now that I've had a little success you come back and say: 'How's the little wife? Where's the little kiss?' Agh! And you dare to kiss me! And then you slander me. You don't give me credit for these plain little rooms that I rent with my own hard-earned money.

You couldn't imagine me living in a place like this unless some man paid for it. Heaven knows I'd have lived with you long enough before I ever had a decent home. Humph! Well, I guess so! Humph!"

Gilfoyle mopped his face again and looked at his handkerchief. One's own blood is very interesting. The sight of his wounds did not touch Kedzie's heart. She could never feel sorry for anybody she was mad at.

Gilfoyle's wits were scattered. He mumbled, futilely, "Well, if that's the way you feel about it!"

"That's the way I feel about it!" Kedzie raged on. "I suppose you've had so many affairs of your own out there that you can't imagine anybody else being respectable, can you?"

Gilfoyle had not come East to publish his autobiography. He thought that a gesture of misunderstood despair would be the most effective evasion.

So he made it, and turned away. He put his handkerchief to his nose and looked at it. He turned back.

"Would you mind if I went into your bathroom to wash my face?"

"I certainly would. Where do you think you are? You get on out before my maid comes back. I don't want her to think I receive men alone!"

Her heart was cold as a toad in her breast, and she loathed his presence. He repeated his excellent gesture of despair, sighed, "All right," and left the room. The two pieces of Jim Dyckman's photograph were still on the floor of the hall. He stooped quickly and silently and picked them up as he went out. He closed the door with all the elegy one can put in a door with a snap-lock.

He was about to press the elevator b.u.t.ton, but he did not like to present himself gory to the elevator-boy. He walked down the marble and iron steps zigzagging around the elevator shaft.

He paused on various landings to think and mop. He looked at the photograph of Dyckman, and his heart spoiled in him. He recalled his wife's anxiety lest her maid should find a man there. He recalled the hall-boy's statement that Mr. Dyckman was often there. His wife was lying to him, plainly.

He had known detectives and newspaper men and had heard them speak of what a friend they had in the usual hall-boy. He thought that he had here the makings of a very pretty little bit of detectivity.

He reached the main floor, but made a hasty crossing of the gaudy vestibule without stopping to speak to the hall-boy. He had left his baggage at the station, expecting to send it to his wife's apartment when he found it. He had found it, but he could imagine what would happen to the baggage if he sent it there.

"All right!" he said to himself. "If it's war she wants, cry havoc and let slip the sleuth hounds."

He went to a drug-store and had his wounds sterilized and plastered, saying that a pet cat had scratched him.

"Just so," said the drug clerk, with a grin. "Pet cats are very dangerous."

Gilfoyle wanted to slug him, but he wanted his wounds dressed more.

He walked and walked down the back avenues till he reached his old boarding-house district near Greenwich Village. He found a landlady who had trusted him often and been paid eventually. He gave his baggage checks to an expressman and went into retirement for meditation.

When his suit-case arrived he got out the poems he had been writing to Anita. He clenched them for destruction, but an exquisite line caught his eye. Why should his art suffer because of a woman's perfidy? He had intended to sonnetize Anita into perenniality. She had played him false.

Just for that he would leave her mortal. She should perish.

The poems would keep. He might find another and a worthier client for posterity. Or he might put an imaginary name there, as other poets had done. He wanted one that would slip into the poetry easily. He could use "Pepita" without deranging the rhyme.

He glared at the picture of Dyckman. He knew the face well. He had seen it in print numberless times. He had had the man pointed out to him at races and horse-shows and polo-games and bazaars.

He struck the photograph in the face, realizing that he could not have reached the face of the big athlete. He wondered why this fellow should have been given such stature with such wealth. He was ghastly rich, the sn.o.b, the useless c.u.mberer of the ground!

All of Gilfoyle's pseudo-socialistic hostility to wealth and the wealthy came to the aid of his jealousy. To despoil the man was a duty. He had decoyed Anita from her duty by his millions. Not that she was unwilling to be decoyed. And now she would revel in her ill-got luxury, while her legal husband could starve in a garret.

As he brooded, the vision of Dyckman's money grew huger and huger. The dog had not merely thousands or hundreds of thousands, but thousands of thousands. Gilfoyle had never seen a thousand-dollar bill. Yet Dyckman, he had heard, was worth twenty millions. If his wealth were changed into thousand-dollar bills there would be twenty thousand of them in a stack.

If Gilfoyle peeled off one thousand of those thousand-dollar bills the stack would not be perceptibly diminished. If Gilfoyle could get a million dollars from Dyckman, or any part of it, Dyckman would never notice it; and yet it would mean a life of surety and poetry and luxury for Gilfoyle.

If he caught Dyckman and Anita together in a compromising situation he could collect heavily under threat of exposure. Rather than be dragged into the newspapers and the open courts Dyckman would pay almost any sum.

There was a law in New York against the violation of the seventh commandment, and the penitentiary was the punishment. The law had failed to catch its first victim, but it had been used in Ma.s.sachusetts with success. The threat against Dyckman would surely work.

Then there was the recent Mann Law aimed at white-slavery but a more effective weapon for blackmailers. If Gilfoyle could catch Dyckman taking Anita motoring across the State line into New Jersey or Connecticut he could arrest them or threaten them.

Also he could name Dyckman as co-respondent in a divorce suit--or threaten to--and collect heavily that way. This was not blackmail in Gilfoyle's eyes. He scorned such a crime. This was honorable and necessary vindication of his offended dignity. There was probably never a practiser of blackmail who did not find a better word for the duress he applied.

Gilfoyle needed help. He had no cash to hire a detective with. But he knew a detective or two who might go into the thing with him on spec'.

Gilfoyle began to compose a scheme of poetic revenge. It should be his palinode to Anita. He would keep her under surveillance, but he would not let her know of his propinquity. A happy thought delighted him. To throw her off her guard, he wrote and sent a little note:

DEAR ANITA,--Since you evidently don't love me any longer, I will not bother you any more. I am taking the train back to Chicago. Address me there care of General Delivery if you ever want to see me again.