Jim and Charity were beautifully suited to the purposes of both sorts; the newspapers that pulpiteered the news and wrote highly moral editorials for sensation's sake; and the pulpiteers who shouted head-lines and yellow journalism from their rostrums, more for the purpose of self-advertis.e.m.e.nt than for any devotion to Christly principles of sympathy and gentle comprehension.

Jim was stupefied to find himself once more pilloried and portraited and ballyhooed in the newspapers. But he tightened his jaws and refused to be howled from his path by any coyote pursuit.

His next thought was of the New Jersey clergyman who had married him to Kedzie. He motored over to him.

Jim had told Dr. Mosely that clergymen ought to keep up with the news.

He found, to his regret, that the New Jersey dominie did.

He remembered Jim well and heard him out, but shook his head. He explained why, patiently. He had been greatly impressed by the action of the House of Deputies of the Protestant Episcopal Church convened at St.

Louis in October, 1916. A new canon had been proposed declaring that "no marriage shall be solemnized in this Church between parties, either of whom has a husband or wife still living, who has been divorced for any cause arising after marriage."

This meant that the innocent party, as well as the guilty, should be denied another chance. The canon had been hotly debated--so hotly that one preacher referred to any wedding of divorced persons as "filth marriage," and others were heard insisting that even Christ's acceptance of adultery as a cause for divorce was an interpolation in the text, and that the whole pa.s.sage concerning the woman taken in adultery was absent from some ancient ma.n.u.scripts. A halt was called to this dangerous line of argument, and one clergyman protested that "the question of the integrity of the Scriptures is more important than the question of marriage and divorce." Another clergyman pleaded: "An indissoluble marriage is a fiction. What is the use of tying the Church up to a fiction? It is our business to teach and not to legislate." Eventually the canon was defeated. But many of the clergy were determined to follow it, anyway.

In any case, not only was Charity divorced, but she had been involved in Jim's divorce, and Jim, as the New Jersey preacher pointed out to him, was denied remarriage even by the civil law of New York. The appeal to New Jersey was plainly a subterfuge, and he begged Jim to give Charity up.

"You don't know what you ask," Jim cried. "I'll find somebody with a heart!" And he stormed out.

CHAPTER XVI

Jim reported to Charity his two defeats and the language he had heard and read. Charity's conscience was so clean that her reaction was one of wrath. She pondered her future and Jim's. She could not see what either of them had done so vile that they should be sentenced to celibacy for life, or more probably to an eventual inevitable horror of outward conformity and secret intrigue.

She knew too many people whose wedlock had been a lifelong tolerance of infamy on the part of one or both. Some of the bitterest enemies of divorce were persons who had found it quite unnecessary. She felt that to forgive and to forget became so anti-social a habit in matrimony that no divorce could be worse.

She was afraid of herself, too. She dared not trust herself with life alone. She was too human to be safe. Marriage with Jim would protect him and her from each other and from the numberless temptations awaiting them. Finally, there were no children in the matter.

All arguments prove too much and too little, and in the end become simply our own briefs for our own inclinations. Charity's mood being what it was, she adopted the line of reasoning that led to her own ambition. She spent much time on her knees, but communed chiefly with herself, and rose always confirmed in her belief that to marry Jim Dyckman was the next great business of her existence.

Jim, too, had grown unwontedly earnest. The marriage denounced by the religious had taken on a religious quality. He was inclined to battle for it as for a creed, as the clergymen had battled vainly for the new canon.

He, too, felt a spirit of genuflexion and wanted to speak to G.o.d personally; to appeal to Him by a private pet.i.tion as to a king whose ministers denied mercy.

By his bed he sank down and prayed. He was very solemn, but too uncertain of the solemn voice to use it. He half whispered, half thought:

"O G.o.d, I don't know how you want me to act. I only know that my heart keeps on calling for Charity and a home with her, and children some day.

There'll never be any children for either of us if we obey the Church.

Forgive me if I doubt what these preachers tell me, but I just can't believe it to be your voice. If it is not your voice, what is it that makes me feel it such a sin not to marry Charity? I'm going to, G.o.d, unless you stop me. I may be making a big mistake, but if I am you'll understand. You will not be mad at me any more than I am mad at my dog when he misunderstands me, for I know he is a good dog and wants to do what I want him to if he can only learn what it is. If it is not your will that I should marry Charity tell me now so that I can't misunderstand, for if you don't I'm going ahead. If I have to take the punishment afterward, I'll take it rather than leave that poor soul alone. Bless her, O G.o.d, and help me. Amen."

And now both Charity and Jim were ready for battle. She set her hand in Jim's and said that she would marry him in spite of all, but that she would not give up her hope of being married by one of her own faith until she had canva.s.sed the entire clergy.

And then began one of the strangest quests ever undertaken, even in this transitional period of matrimony as an inst.i.tution--a quest so strange that it would seem impossible if it had not actually happened. Jim and Charity hunted a preacher and the press hunted them.

While the journalists waited for the United States to enter the war with soldiers, the reporters kept in practice by scouting after Jim Dyckman and sniping him whenever he showed his head. He succeeded only in getting his resignation from his regiment accepted. He planned to sail for France and fight for France as soon as he had married Charity.

When he failed to secure a minister by letter or telegram he set forth to make personal visits. Sometimes Charity went with him so that there should be no delay or time for a change of mood.

From city to town they went, from village to city, searching for an Episcopalian clergyman to say the desired words. Jim offered any bribery that might suffice, but ahead of him went his notoriety.

Many a warm-hearted clergyman felt sympathy for Jim and Charity and longed to end their curious pilgrimage, but dared not brave the wrath of his fellow-preachers or accept the unwelcome fame that awaited his blessing, and the discipline that would be meted out to him.

Jim's picture was so widely published that when he eluded one crowd another posse sprang up wherever he reappeared. His entrance into a town was a signal for the clergy to scurry to cover. Some of them, to put themselves on record and insure themselves against temptation, denounced Jim and his attachee as traveling fiends, emissaries of the devil.

The wealth that was their drag was proclaimed as their weapon.

The storm grew fiercer and the language more unrestrained. Jim and Charity, reading in the papers the terms applied to them, cowered and shuddered.

Charity grew haggard and peevish. Her obstinacy was hardly more than a lockjaw of fright, the stubbornness of a drowning child afraid to let go.

Jim was almost equally sick. The newspaper pursuit covered him with chagrin. His good old name was precious to him, and he knew how his mother and father were suffering at its abuse, as well as for him in his fugitive distress.

Jim's mother was very much mother. She took into her breast every arrow shot at him. When she saw him she held him fiercely in her arms, her big frame aching with a Valkyrian ardor to lift the brave warrior on a winged horse and carry him away from the earth.

It is hard for the best of mothers to love even the best of daughters-in-law, for how can two fires prosper on the same fuel? It had been a little too hard for Mrs. Dyckman to love Kedzie. It was all too easy to hate her now and to denounce her till even Jim winced.

"Don't think of her, mother," he pleaded. "Don't let's speak of her any more. She's only one of my past mistakes. You never mention those--why not let her drop?"

"All right, honey. You must forgive me. I'm only a sour old woman and it breaks my heart to think of that little, common--"

"There you go again," her husband growled, sick with grief, too. "Let the little cat go."

"What's killing me," Jim said, "is thinking of what I've brought on Charity. It makes me want to die."

"But you'll have to live for her sake--and your mother's," said his mother. "Charity's the only woman I know that's worth fighting for.

I've known her since she was born and I never knew her to do or say one single petty thing. She hasn't got one of those qualities that women hate so much in women."

"Then why should she have to suffer such persecution?" Jim cried. "My G.o.d! is chivalry dead in the world?"

His father flung his arm around him and hugged him roughly. "Not while there's a man like you to fight for a woman like her. I never was so proud of anything as I am of being the father of a big fellow like you, who can make a battle like yours for love of a woman."

"But why should I have to fight for her? Whose business is it but ours that we want to get married decently and live together quietly? Isn't this a free country?"

"Only the press is free," said his father. "And poor Charity is getting nothing more than women have always got who've dared to ask for their own way. They used to throw 'em to the lions, or bowstring 'em in the harems. And in the days of real chivalry they burned 'em at the stake or locked 'em up in convents or castles. But don't you worry, Jim, Charity has you for a champion and she's mighty lucky. Go on and fight the muckers and the muck-rakers, and don't let the reporters or the preachers scare you away from doing the one right thing."

The newspapers kept within the almost boundless limits of the libel law.

Jim had publicity enough, and he did not care to add to it by a libel suit, nor could he bring himself to make a personal attack on any of his pursuers. His discretion took on the look of poltroonery and he groveled in shame.

One bitter day he motored with Charity to a village where a clergyman lived who had wearied of the persecution and volunteered his offices.

When they arrived his wife told Jim that he was stricken ill. He had fretted himself into his bed.

Jim bundled Charity into his car and set forth again in a storm. The car skidded and turned turtle in a ditch. By some chance neither of them was more than bruised and muddied. The hamper of food was spilled and broken and they had hours to wait by the roadside while a wrecking crew came from the nearest city to right the car.

While they waited, forlorn and shivering, like two tramps rather than like two malefactors of great wealth, their hunger drove them to banquet on their little store.

Jim, gnawing at a crust of suspicious cleanliness, studied Charity where she huddled in the shelter of a dripping tree, like a queen driven forth into exile. And the tears poured from his eyes and salted the bread.

He had eaten the food of his own tears. He had tasted life and found it bitter.