He was so ecstatic in his first flight with his finished machine that he fell and broke one of its wings, also one of his own. Charity heard of his accident and called on him at his mother's house. He told her his plans.

"Too bad!" she sighed. "I'm not going abroad. Besides, I couldn't see you if I did."

Then she told him what Cheever had said, but not how she had slapped.

Jim was wild. He rose on his bad arm and fell back again, groaning:

"I'll kill him for that."

Everybody is always going to kill everybody. Sometimes somebody does kill somebody. But Dyckman went over to the great majority. Charity begged him not to kill her husband, and to please her he promised not to.

Charity, having insured her husband's life, said: "And now, Jimmie old boy, I mustn't see you any more. Gossip has linked our names. We must unlink them. My husband and you will butcher each other if I'm not careful, so it's good-by for keeps, and G.o.d bless you, isn't it?

Promise?"

"I'll promise anything, if you'll go on away and let me alone," Jim groaned, his broken arm being quite sufficient trouble for him at the moment.

Charity laughed and went on away. She was deeply comforted by a promise which she knew he would not keep.

Dyckman himself, as soon as his broken bones ceased to shake his soul, groaned with loneliness and despaired of living without Charity--vowed in his sick misery that n.o.body could ever come between them. He could not, would not, live without her.

Still the gossip oozed along that he had not lived without her.

CHAPTER XVI

Kedzie had come to town with no social ambitions whatsoever beyond a childish desire to be enormously rich and marry a beautiful prince. Her ideal of heaven at first was an eternal movie show interrupted at will by several meals a day, incessant soda-water and ice-cream and a fellow or two to spoon with, and some up-to-date duds--most of all, several pairs of those white-topped shoes all the girls in town were wearing.

The time would shortly come when Kedzie would abhor the word _swell_ and despise the people who used it, violently forgetting that she had herself used it. She would soon be overheard saying to a mixed girl of her mixed acquaintance: "Take it from me, chick, when you find a dame calls herself a lady, she ain't. n.o.body who is it says it, and if you want to be right, lay off such words as _swell_ and _cla.s.sy_."

Later, she would be finding that it took something still more than avoiding the word _lady_ to deserve it. She would writhe to believe that she could never quite make herself exact with the term. She would hate those who had been born and made to the t.i.tle, and she would revert at times to common instincts with fierce anarchy.

But one must go forward before one can backslide, and Kedzie was on the way up the slippery hill.

She had greatly improved the quality of her lodgings, her suitors, and her clothes. Her photographic successes in risky exposures had brought her a marked increase of wages. She wore as many clothes as she could in private, to make up for her self-denial before the camera. Her taste in dress was soubrettish and flagrant, but it was not small-town. She was beginning to dislike ice-cream soda and candy and to call for beer and Welsh rabbit. She would soon be liking salads with garlic and Roquefort cheese in the dressing. She was mounting with splendid a.s.siduity toward the cigarette and the high-ball. There was no stopping Kedzie. She kept rising on stepping-stones of her dead selves.

Landladies are ladder-rungs of progress, too; Kedzie's history might have been traced by hers.

Her camera career had led her from the flat of the delicatessen merchant, through various shabby lairs, into the pension of a vaudeville favorite of prehistoric fame. The house was dilapidated, and the brownstone front had the moth-eaten look of the plush furniture within.

Mrs. Jambers was as fat as if she fed on her own boarders, but she was once no less a person than Mrs. Trixie Jambers Coogan, of Coogan and Jambers. She had once evoked wild applause at Tony Pastor's by her clog-dancing.

There was another dancer there, an old grenadier of a woman who had been famous in her time as a _premiere danseuse_ at the opera. Mrs. Bottger had spent a large part of her early life on one toe, but now she could hardly balance herself sitting down. She held on to the table while she ate. She did not look as if she needed to eat any more.

Kedzie was proud to know people who had been as famous as these two said they had been, but Bottger and Jambers used to fight bitterly over their respective schools of expression. Bottger insisted that the buck-and-wing and the double shuffle and other forms of jiggery were low. Jambers insisted that the ballet was immoral and, what was more, insincere. Mrs. Bottger was furious at the latter charge, but the former was now rather flattering. She used secretly to take out old photographs of herself as a slim young thing in tights with one toe for support and the other resting on one knee. She would gloat over these as a miser over his gold; and she would shake her finger at her quondam self and scold it lovingly--"You wicked little thing, you!" Then she would hastily move it out of the reach of her tears. It was safe under the eaves of her bosom against her heart.

It was a merry war, with dishonors even, till a new-comer appeared, a Miss Eleanor Silsby, who taught the ultimate word in dancing; she admitted it herself. As she explained it, she went back to nature for her inspiration. Her pupils dressed as near to what nature had provided them with as they really dared. Miss Silsby said that they were trying to catch the spirit of wind and waves and trees and flowers, and translate it into the dance. They translated seaweed and whitecaps and clouds into steps. Miss Silsby was booking a few vaudeville dates "in order to bring the art of nature back to the people and bring the people back to the art of nature." What the people would do with it she did not explain--nor what the police would do to them if they tried it.

Miss Silsby had by the use of the most high-sounding phrases attained about the final word in candor. What clothes her pupils wore were transparent and flighty. The only way to reveal more skin would have been to grow it. Her pupils were much photographed in airy att.i.tudes on beaches, dancing with the high knee-action so much prized in horses; flinging themselves into the air; curveting, with the accent on the curve; clasping one another in groups of nymphish innocence and artificial grace. It was all, somehow, so shocking for its insincerity that its next to nudity was a minor consideration. It was so full of affectation that it seemed quite lacking in the dangers of pa.s.sion.

So gradually indeed had the mania for disrobing spread about the world that there was little or no shock to be had. People generally a.s.sumed to be respectable took their children to see the dances, even permitted them to learn them. According to Miss Silsby's press-notices, "Members of wealthy and prominent families are taking up the new art." And perhaps they were doing as well by their children as more careful parents, since nothing is decent or indecent except by acclamation, and if nudity is made commonplace, there is one mult.i.tude of temptations removed from our curiosity.

But Bottger, whose ballet-tights and tulle skirt were once the horror of all good people--Bottger was disgusted with the dances of Miss Silsby, and said so.

Miss Silsby was merely amused by Bottger's hostility. She scorned her scorn, and with the utmost scientific and ethnological support declared that clothes were immoral in origin, and the cause of immorality and extravagance, since they were not the human integument. Jambers was not quite sure what "integument" was, but she thanked G.o.d she had never had it in her family.

An interested onlooker and in-listener at these boarding-house battles was Kedzie. By now she was weary of her present occupation--of course!

She was tired of photographs of herself, especially as they were secured at the cost of long hours of posing under the hot skylight of a photograph gallery. Miss Silsby gave Kedzie a pair of complimentary seats to an entertainment at which the Silsby sirens were to dance.

Kedzie was swept away with envy of the hilarity, the grace, the wild animal effervescence and elegance of motion.

She contrasted the vivacity of the dancer's existence with the stupidity of her still-life poses. She longed to run and pirouette and leap into the air. She wished she could kick herself in the back of the head to music the way the Silsby girls did.

When she told this to Miss Silsby the next day Miss Silsby was politely indifferent. Kedzie added:

"You know, I'm up on that cla.s.sic stuff, too. Oh, yessum, Greek costumes are just everyday duds to me."

"Indeed!" Miss Silsby exclaimed.

Kedzie showed her some trade photographs of herself as an Athenienne, and Miss Silsby pondered. Although her dances were supposed to purify and sweeten the soul, one of her darlings had so fiendish a temper that she had torn out several Psyche knots. She was the demurest of all in seeming when she danced, but she was uncontrollably jealous.

Miss Silsby saw that Kedzie's pout had commercial value. She invited Kedzie to join her troupe. And Kedzie did. The wages were small, but the world was new. She became one of the most attractive of the dancers.

But once more the rehearsals and the long hours of idleness wore out her enthusiasm. She hated the regularity of the performances; every afternoon and evening she must express raptures she did not feel, by means of laborious jumpings and runnings to the same music. And she abominated the requirement to keep kicking herself in the back of the head.

Even the thrill of clotheslessness became stupid. It was disgusting not to have beautiful gowns to dance in. Zada L'Etoile and others had a new costume for every dance. Kedzie had one tiresome hip-length shift and little else. As usual, poor Kedzie found that realization was for her the parody of antic.i.p.ation.

Kedzie's new art danced into her life a few new suitors, but they came at a time when she was almost imbecile over Thomas Gilfoyle, the advertising bard. He was the first intellectual man she had met--that is, he was intellectual compared with any other of her men friends. He could read and write something besides business literature. In fact, he was a fellow of startling ideas. He called himself a socialist. What the socialists would have called him it would be hard to say; they are given to strong language.

Kedzie had known in Nimrim what church socials were, for they were about the height of Nimrim excitement. But young Mr. Gilfoyle was not a church socialist. He detested all creeds and all churches and said things about them and about religion that at first made Kedzie look up at the ceiling and dodge. But no brimstone ever broke through the plaster and she grew used to his diatribes.

She had never met one of these familiar enough figures before, and she was vaguely stirred by his chantings in behalf of humanity. He adored the poor laborers, though he did not treat the office-boy well and he was not gallant to the scrub-woman. But his theories were as beautiful as music, and he intoned them with ringing oratory. Kedzie did not know what he was talking about, any more than she knew what Caruso was singing about when she turned him on in Mrs. Jambers's phonograph, but his melodies put her heart to its paces, and so did Gilfoyle's.

Gilfoyle wrote her poems, too, real poems not meant for publication at advertising rates. Kedzie had never had anybody commit poetry at her before. It lifted her like that Biltmore elevator and sent her heart up into her head. He lauded Kedzie's pout as well as her more saltant expressions. He voiced a belief that life in a little hut with her would be luxury beyond the contemptible stupidities of life in a palace with another. Kedzie did not care for the hut detail, but the idolatry of so "brainy" a man was inspiring.

Kedzie and Gilfoyle were mutually afraid: she of his intellect, he of her beauty and of her very fragility. Of course, he called her by her new name, "Miss Adair." Later he implored the priceless joy of calling her by her first name.

Gilfoyle feared to ask this privilege in prose, and so he put it in verse. Kedzie found it in her mail at the stage door. She huddled in a corner of the big undressing-room where the nymphs prepared for their task. The young rowdies kept peeking over her shoulder and s.n.a.t.c.hing at her letter, but when finally she read it aloud to them as a punishment and a triumph, they were stricken with awe. It ran thus:

Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you "Anita"?

Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.

Kedzie stumbled over this, because she had not yet eradicated the Western final "r" from her p.r.o.nunciation. She thought Mr. Gilfoyle was awful swell because he dropped it naturally. But she read on, scrambling over some of the words the way a horse jumps a fence one rail too high.

You are so adorable I find it deplorable, Absurd and abnormal.

To cling to the formal 'Twere such a good omen To drop the cognomen.

So I beg you to promise That you'll call me "Thomas,"

Or better yet, "Tommie,"

Instead of th' abomi- Nable "Mr. Gilfoyle."

You can, and you will foil My torments Mephistian By using my Christian Name and permitting Yours Truly To call you yours too-ly.