CHAPTER V

Jim slunk out and slunk down the marble steps and down the winding walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea, enraged at himself and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over the sea-wall. But there was little danger of Peter Cheever's being found so near his wife.

_"Tell her that wastes her time and me,"_ kept running through Jim's head. He was furious at Charity for wasting so much of him. He had followed her about and moped at her closed door like a stray dog. And she had never even thrown him a bone.

A wave ran up on the beach and seemed to try to embrace the earth, possess it. But it fell away baffled. Over its subsiding pother sprang a new wave with the same bosomful of desire and the same frantic clutching here and there--the same rebuff, the same destruction under the surge of the next and the next. The descending night gave a strange pathos to the eternal vanity.

Jim Dyckman stood and faced the ocean. Once more he discovered that life was too much for him to understand. He was ashamed of himself for his vain endeavor to envelop Charity Coe and absorb her into the deeps of his love. He was most ashamed because he had failed and must slither back into the undertow with the many other men whom Charity had refused to love.

He was ashamed of Charity Coe, too, for squandering her prime and her pride. He was enraged at her blindness to Pete Cheever's duplicity or her complacency with it. He hated Charity for a while--nearly. At any rate he was ashamed of her, ashamed of the world, in a rebel mood.

As he stood wind-blown and spray-flogged and glad to be beaten, a shabby old carriage went by. It was piled to overflowing with some of Miss Silsby's girls taking a seeing-Newport tour on the cheap.

The driver was, or said he had been in his time, coachman to some of the oldest families. He ventured their names with familiarity and knew their houses by heart. He told quaint stories of their ways, how old Mrs.

Noxon once swore down a mutinous stableman, how Miss Wossom ran away with her coachman. There was something finely old-fashioned and conservative about that. A new-rich would have run away with a chauffeur.

The driver knew Jim Dyckman's back and pointed him out. The girls laughed, remembering Kedzie's encounter with him. They laughed so loud that Dyckman turned, startled by the racket. But the carriage rolled them away and he did not hear them wondering what had become of Kedzie.

The gloaming saddened them, and they felt very sorry for her. But Jim Dyckman gave her no thought.

He was tearing apart his emotions toward Charity and resolving that he must never see her again. In the a.n.a.lytical chemistry of the soul he found that this resolution was three parts hopelessness of winning her, three parts a decent sense of the wickedness of courting another man's woman, three parts resentment at her for treating him properly, and one part a feeling that he would make himself most valuable to her by staying away.

Never a homeless dog slinking through an alley in search of a sidelong ash-barrel to sleep in felt more poverty-stricken, woebegone, than Jim Dyckman. He moped along the stately road, as much afraid of his future as Kedzie had been, trudging the same highway. She had wondered if board and lodging would fail her. This was not Jim Dyckman's fear, but his own was as great, for everybody was some dreadful elbow-companion.

Lucian showed Jupiter himself cowering on his throne in the sky and twiddling his thunderbolt with trembling hand as he wondered what the fates held in store for him, and saw on earth the increasing impudence of the skeptics.

So Jim Dyckman, unconscious that he was following in Kedzie's footsteps, walked miserably on his way. He had no place to go to but the finest yacht in the harbor. He had no money to depend on but a few millions of his own and the Pelion plus Ossa fortunes of his father and mother and their relatives--a mere sierra of gold mountains.

He drifted down to the landing-place and went out to his yacht in a hackney launch. He was received at her snowy sides as if he were the emperor of somewhere come to visit one of his rear admirals. He went up the steps as if he were a school-boy caught playing hooky and going up-stairs to play the ba.s.s drum to his mother's slipper.

His mother was on the shade-deck, reclining. The big white wicker lounge looked as if a small avalanche had fallen on it. From the upturned points of her white shoes back to her white hair she was a study in foreshortening that would have interested a draftsman.

Spread out on a huge wicker arm-chair sat Jim's father, also all white, except for his big pink hands and his big pink face. It seemed that he ought to have been smoking a white cigar. As a matter of fact, he had sat so still that half the weed was ash.

When the two moved to greet Jim there was a mighty creaking of wicker.

There was another when Jim spilled his own great weight into a chair.

A steward in white raised his eyebrows inquiringly and Jim nodded the eighth of an inch. It was the equivalent of ordering a drink.

Dyckman senior turned to Dyckman seniora and said, "Enter Hamlet in the graveyard! Where's the skull, my boy, where's the skull?"

"Let the child alone," Mrs. Dyckman protested. "It's too hot for fooling. You might kiss your poor mother, though. No, don't get up, just throw me one."

Jim rose heavily, went to her, bent far down, kissed her, and would have risen again, but her big arms encompa.s.sed his neck and held him, uncomfortably, till he knelt by her side and laid his head on her bosom.

He felt exceedingly foolish, but nearer to comfort than he had been for a long while. He wished that he might be a boy again in his mother's arms and be altogether content and carefree as he had been there. As if children were content and carefree! Great Heavens! do they not begin to squirm and kick before they are born?

Mrs. Dyckman was suffocated a trifle by his weight and her own and her corsets, but her heart ached for him somewhere down deep and she whispered:

"Can't he tell his mother what he wants? Maybe she can get it for him."

He laughed bitterly and extricated himself from her clasp, patted her fat arm, and turned away. His father jealously seized his sleeve.

"Anything serious, old man? You know I'm here."

Jim squeezed his father's hand and shook his head and turned to the drink which had arrived. He took it from the tray to his chair and sat meditating Newport across the top of his gla.s.s. Between the rail of the deck and the edge of the awning he saw a long slice of it. It was vanity and emptiness to him. He spoke at length.

"Fact is, folks, I've got to go back to New York or somewhere."

"Good Lord!" his father said. "I'm all mixed up in a golf tournament. I think I've got a chance to lick the boots off old Wainwright."

"Oh dear!" sighed Mrs. Dyckman, "there's to be the most interesting lecture by that Hindu poet. And it's so much more comfortable here than ash.o.r.e. This boat is the coziest you've ever had."

"Stay here, darling," said Jim. "I'll make you a present of her."

"Oh, that's glorious," said Mrs. Dyckman. "I've never had a yacht of my own. It's a shame to take it from you, but you can get another. And of course you'll always be welcome here--which is more than a certain other big Dyckman will be if he doesn't look sharp."

"For the Lord's sake, Jim, don't give it to her. She's the meanest old miser about her own things." Dyckman senior pushed his chair back against the rail.

"Watch out!" Mrs. Dyckman gasped. "You're sc.r.a.ping the paint off my yacht."

Jim rose again. "I've just about time to make the last train for the day," he said.

His mother sat up and clutched at his hand. "Can't I help you, honey?

Please let me! What is the matter?"

"The matter is I'm a lunkhead and Newport bores me stiff. That's all.

Don't worry. I'll go get the packing started."

He went along the deck, and his parents helplessly craned their necks after him. His father groaned. Jim had "everything." There was nothing to get for him, no toy to buy to divert him with.

"He wants a new toy, and he doesn't know what it is," said the old man.

But Jim wanted an old toy on a shelf too high for his reach. He ran away from the sight of it.

And Dyckman was fleeing to Charity's next resting-place, after all, for she also returned in a few days to New York. She was restive under the goad to return to France. She repented her selfish neglect of the children of all ages she had adopted abroad. One thing held her back--the dread of putting the ocean again between her and her husband.

She thought it small of her to leave so many heroes to suffer without her ministrations, in order that she might prevent one non-hero from having too good a time without her ministrations. But womankind has never been encouraged to adopt the policy of the greatest good to the greatest number. Hardly!

Charity was conscience-smitten, however, and she cast about for a way to absolve herself. Money is the old and ever-reliable way of paying debts physical, moral, and religious. Charity determined to arrange some big fete to bring in a heap of money for the wounded of France, the blind fathers, and the fatherless children.

Everybody was giving entertainments at this time in behalf of some school of victims of the war. The only excuse for amus.e.m.e.nts in America seemed to be that the profits went to the belligerents in one way or another.

Charity was distressed by the need of an oddity, a novel note which should make itself heard among the clamors for Belgian relief, for Polish relief, for Armenian succor, for German, French, Italian, Russian widows and orphans.

Charity's secretary, Miss Gurdon, made dozens of suggestions, but none of them was big enough to interest Charity. One day a card came up to her with a letter of introduction from Mrs. Noxon: