"Yes, confound him! His handsome features have been my ruin."

She could smile at that inverted compliment. But Dyckman began to think very hard. He was suddenly confronted with one of the conundrums in duty which life incessantly propounds--life that squats at all the crossroads with a sphinxic riddle for every wayfarer.

CHAPTER III

Kedzie--to say it again--did not know enough about New York or the world to recognize Mrs. Cheever and Mr. Dyckman when she glanced at them and glanced away. They did not at all come up to Kedzie's idea or ideal of what swells should be, and she had not even grown up enough to study the society news that makes such thrilling reading to those who thrill to that sort of thing. The society notes in the town paper in Kedzie's town (Nimrim, Missouri) consisted of bombastic chronicles of church sociables or lists of those present at surprise-parties.

This girl's home was one of the cheapest in that cheap town. Her people not only were poor, but lived more poorly than they had to. They had, in consequence, a little reserve of funds, which they took pride in keeping up. The three Thropps came now to New York for the first time in their three lives. They were almost as ignorant as the other peasant immigrants that steam in from the sea.

Adna Thropp, the father, was a local claim-agent on a small railroad.

He spent his life pitting his wits against the petty greed of honest farmers and G.o.d-fearing, railroad-hating citizens. If a granger let his fence fall down and a rickety cow disputed the right of way with a locomotive's cow-catcher, the granger naturally put in a claim for the destruction of a prize-winning animal with a record as an amazing milker; also he added something for damage to the feelings of the family in the loss of a household pet. It was Adna's business to beat the shyster lawyers to the granger and beat the granger to the last penny.

One of his best baits was a roll of cash tantalizingly waved in front of his victim while he breathed proverbs about the delayful courts.

This being Adna's livelihood, it was not surprising that his habit of mind gave pennies a grave importance. Of course, he carried his mind home with him from the office, and every demand of his wife or children for money was again a test of ability in claim-agency tactics. He fought so earnestly for every cent he gave down that his dependents felt that it was generally better to go without things than to enter into a life-and-death struggle for them with Pa.

For that reason Ma Thropp did the cooking, baked the "light bread," and made the clothes and washed them and mended them till they vanished. She cut the boys' hair; she schooled the girls to help her in the kitchen and at the sewing-machine and with the preserve-jars. Her day's work ended when she could no longer see her darning-needle. It began as soon as she could see daylight to light the fire by. In winter the day began in her dark, cold kitchen long before the sun started his fire on the eastern hills.

She upheld a standard of morals as high as Mount Everest and as bleak.

She made home a region of everlasting ch.o.r.es, rebukes, sayings wiser than tender, complaints and bitter criticisms of husband, children, merchants, neighbors, weather, prices, fabrics--of everything on earth but of nothing in heaven.

Strange to say, the children did not appreciate the advantages of their life. The boys had begun to earn their own money early by the splitting of wood and the shoveling of snow, by the vending of soap, and the conduct of delivery-wagons. They spent their evenings at pool-tables or on corners. The elder girls had accepted positions in the various emporia of the village as soon as they could. They counted the long hours of the shop life as an escape from worse. Their free evenings were not devoted to self-improvement. They did not turn out to be really very good girls. They were up to all sorts of village mischief and shabby frivolity. Their poor mother could not account for it. She could scold them well, but she could not scold them good.

The daughter on the train, the youngest--named Kedzie after an aunt who was the least poor of the relatives--was just growing up into a similar career. Her highest prayer was that her path might lead her to a clerkship in a candy-shop. Then this miracle! Her father announced that he was going to New York.

Adna was always traveling on the railroad, but he had never traveled far. To undertake New York was hardly less remarkable than to run over to the moon for a few days.

When he brought the news home he could hardly get up the front steps with it. When he announced it at the table, and tried to be careless, his hand trembled till the saucerful of coffee at his quivering lips splashed over on the clean red-plaid table-cloth.

The occasion of Thropp's call to New York was this: he had joined a "benevolent order" of the Knights of Something-or-other in his early years and had risen high in the chapter in his home town. When one of the members died, the others attended his funeral in full regalia, consisting of each individual's Sunday clothes, enhanced with a fringed sash and lappets. Also there was a sword to carry. The advantage of belonging to the order was that the member got the funeral for nothing and his wife got the further consolation of a sum of money.

Mrs. Thropp bore her neighbors no more ill-will than they deserved, but she did enjoy their funerals. They gave her husband an excuse for his venerable silk hat and his gilded glave. Sometimes as she took her hands out of the dough and dried them on her ap.r.o.n to fasten his sash about him, she felt all the glory of a medieval countess buckling the armor on her doughty earl. She had never heard of such persons, but she knew their epic uplift.

Now, Mr. Thropp had paid his dues and his insurance premiums for years and years. They were his one extravagance. Also he had persuaded Mrs.

Thropp's brother Sol to do the same. Sol had died recently and left his insurance money to Mrs. Thropp. Sol's own wife, after cherishing long-deferred hopes of spending that money herself, had been hauled away first. She never got that insurance money. Neither did any one else; the central office in New York failed to pay up.

The annual convention was about to be held in the metropolis, and there was to be a tremendous investigation of the insurance scandal. Adna was elected the delegate of the Nimrim chapter, for he was known to be a demon in a money-fight.

And this was the glittering news that Adna brought home. Small wonder it spilled his coffee. And that wife of his not only had to go and yell at him about a little coffee-stain, but she had to announce that she hardly saw how she could get ready to go right away--and who was to look after those children?

Adna's jaw fell. Perhaps he had ventured on dreams of being set free in New York all by himself. She soon woke him. She said she wouldn't no more allow him loose in that wicked place than she would--well, she didn't know what! He could get a pa.s.s for self and wife as easy as shootin'. Adna yielded to the inevitable with a sorry grace and told her to come along if she'd a mind to.

And then came a still, small voice from daughter Kedzie. She spoke with a menacing sweetness: "Goody, goody! Besides seeing New York, I won't have to go to school for--How long we goin' to be gone, poppa?"

Both parents stared at her aghast and told her to hush her mouth. It was a very pretty mouth even in anger, and Kedzie declined to hush it. She said:

"Well, if you two think you're goin' to leave me home, you got another think comin'--that's all I got to say."

She betrayed an appalling stubbornness, a fiendish determination to subdue her parents or talk them to death.

"I never get to go any place," she wailed. "I never been anywhere or seen anything or had anything; I might as well be a b.u.mp on a log. And now you're goin' to New York. I'd sooner go there than to heaven. It's my first chance to see a city, and I just tell you right here and now, I'm not goin' to lose it! You take me or you'll be mighty sorry.

I'll--I'll--"

"You'll what?" her father sneered. What, after all, could a young girl do?

"I'll run off, that's what I'll do! And disgrace you! I'll run away and you'll never see me again. If you're mean enough to not take me, I'm mean enough to do something desprut. You'll see!"

Her father realized that there were several things a young girl could do to punish her parents. Kedzie frightened hers with her fanatic zeal.

They gave in at last from sheer terror. Immediately she became almost intolerably rapturous. She shrieked and jumped; and she kissed and hugged every member of the household, including the dogs and the cats.

She must go down-town and torment her girl friends with her superiority and she could hardly live through the hours that intervened before the train started.

The Thropps rode all day in the day-coach to Chicago, and Kedzie loved every cinder that flew into her gorgeous eyes. Now and then she slept curled up kittenwise on a seat, and the motion of the train lulled her as with angelic pinions. She dreamed impossible glories in unheard-of cities.

But her mother bulked large and had been too long accustomed to her own rocking-chair to rest in a day-coach. She reached Chicago in a state of collapse. She told Adna that she would have to travel the rest of the way in a sleeper or in a baggage-car, for she just naturally had to lay down. So Adna paid for two berths. It weakened him like a hemorrhage.

Kedzie's first sorrow was in leaving Chicago. They changed trains there, bouncing across the town in a bus. That transit colored Kedzie's soul like dragging a ribbon through a vat of dye. Henceforth she was of a city hue.

She was enamoured of every cobblestone, and she loved every man, woman, horse, and motor she pa.s.sed. She tried to flirt with the tall buildings.

She was afraid to leave Chicago lest she never get to New York, or find it inferior. She begged to be left there. It was plenty good enough for her.

But once aboard the sleeping-car she was blissful again, and embarra.s.sed her mother and father with her adoration. In all sincerity, Kedzie mechanically worshiped people who got things for her, and loathed people who forbade things or took them away.

She horrified the porter by calling him "Mister"--almost as much as her parents scandalized him the next day by eating their meals out of a filing-cabinet of shoe-boxes compiled by Mrs. Thropp. But it was all picnic to Kedzie. Fortunately for her repose, she never knew that there was a dining-car attached.

The ordeal of a night in a sleeping-car coffin was to Kedzie an experience of faery. She laughed aloud when she b.u.mped her head, and getting out of and into her clothes was a fascinating exercise in contortion. She was entranced by the wash-room with its hot and cold water and its basin of apparent silver, whose contents did not have to be lifted and splashed into a slop-jar, but magically emptied themselves at the raising of a medallion.

She had not worn herself out with enthusiasm by the time the first night was spent and half the next day. She pressed her nose against the window and ached with regret at the hurry with which towns and cities were whipped away from her eyes.

She did not care for gra.s.s and trees and cows and dull villages, but she thrilled at the beauty of big, dark railroad stations and n.o.ble street-cars and avenues paved with exquisite asphalt.

The train was late in arriving at New York, and it was nearer ten than eight when it roared across the Harlem River. Kedzie was glad of the display, for she saw the town first as one great light-spangled banner.

The car seemed to be drawn right through people's rooms. Everybody lived up-stairs. She caught glimpses of kitchens on the fourth floor and she thought this adorable, except that it would be a job carrying the wood all the way up.

The streets went by like the glistening spokes of a swift wheel. They were packed with interesting sights. No wonder most of the inhabitants were either in the streets or leaning out of the windows looking down.

Here it was ten o'clock, and not a sign of anybody's having thought of going to bed. New York was a sensible place. She liked New York.

But the train seemed to quicken its pace out of mere spitefulness just as they reached wonderful market streets with flaring lights over little carts all filled with things to buy.

When the wonder world was blotted from view by the tunnel it frightened her at first with its long, dark noise and the flip-flops of light. Then a brief glimpse of towers and walls. Then the dark station. And they were There!

CHAPTER IV