"This world's too much for me. It's got me guessing."

He seemed to be so impressed with his original and profound discovery of life's unanswerable complexity that Charity smiled, the same sad, sweet smile with which she pored on the book of sorrow or listened to the questions of her orphans who asked where their fathers had gone.

She thought of Jim Dyckman as one of her orphans. There was a good deal of the mother in her love of him. For she did love him. And she would have married him if he had asked her earlier--before Peter Cheever swept over her horizon and carried her away with his zest and his magnificence.

She rebuked herself for thinking of Jim Dyckman as an orphan. He had a father and mother who doted on him. He had wealth of his own and millions to come. He had health and brawn enough for two. What right had he to anybody's pity? Yet she pitied him.

And he pitied her.

And on this same train, in this same car, unnoticed and unnoticing, sat Kedzie.

Jim and Charity grew increasingly embarra.s.sed as the train drew into New York. Charity was uncertain whether her husband would meet her or not.

Jim did not want to leave her to get home alone. She did not want her husband to find her with Jim.

Cheever had excuse enough in his own life for suspecting other people.

He had always disliked Jim Dyckman because Dyckman had always disliked him, and Jim's transparent face had announced the fact with all the clarity of an illuminated signboard.

Also Charity had loved Jim before she met Cheever, and she made no secret of being fond of him still. In their occasional quarrels, Cheever had taunted her with wishing she had married Jim, and she had retorted that she had indeed made a big mistake in her choice. Lovers say such things--for lack of other weapons in such combats as lovers inevitably wage, if only for exercise.

Charity did not really mean what she said, but at times Cheever thought she did. He had warned her to keep away from Dyckman and keep Dyckman away from her or there would be trouble. Cheever was a powerful athlete and a boxer who made minor professionals look ridiculous. Dyckman was bigger, but not so clever. A battle between the two stags over the forlorn doe would be a horrible spectacle. Charity was not the sort of woman that longs for such a conflict of suitors. Just now she had seen too much of the fruits of male combat. She was sick of hatred and its devastation.

So Charity begged Dyckman to get off at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, but he would not show himself so poltroon. He answered, "I'd like to see myself!" meaning that he would not.

She retorted, "Then I'll get off there myself."

"Then I'll get off there with you," he grumbled.

Charity flounced back into her seat with a gasp of mitigated disgust.

The mitigation was the irresistible thrill of his devotion. She had a husband who would desert her and a cavalier who would not. It was difficult not to forgive the cavalier a little.

Yet it would have been better if he had obeyed her command or she her impulse. Or would it have been? The worst might always have been worse.

CHAPTER V

When Kedzie was angry she called her father an "old country Jake."

Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car with his c.o.c.ksure criticisms of cities that he had never seen. He had condemned New York with all the mercilessness of a small-town superiority, and he had told funny stories that were as funny as the moss-bearded cypresses in a lone bayou. While he was denouncing New York as the home of ignorance and vice, the other men were having sport with him--sport so cruel that only his own cruelty blinded him to it.

When the porter summoned the pa.s.sengers to pa.s.s under the whisk broom, Adna remembered that he had not settled upon his headquarters in New York, and he said to a man on whom he had inflicted a vile cigar: "Say, I forgot to ask you. What's a good hotel in New York that ain't too far from the railroad and don't rob you of your last nickel? Or is they one?"

One of the smoking-room humorists mocked his accent and ventured a crude j.a.pe.

"You can save the price of a hack-ride by going to Mrs. Biltmore's new boarding-house. It's right across the road from the depot."

If Adna had been as keen as he thought he was, or if the porter had not alarmed him just then by his affectionate interest, even Adna would have noted the grins on the faces of the men.

But he broke the porter's heart by dodging the whisk broom and hustling his excited family to their feet. They were permitted to hale their own hand-baggage to the platform, where two red-capped Kaffirs reached for it together. There was danger of an altercation, but the bigger of the two frightened the smaller away by snapping his shiny eyeb.a.l.l.s alarmingly. The smaller one took a second look at Adna and retreated with scorn, snickering:

"You kin have him."

The other, who was a good loser at c.r.a.ps or tips, re-examined his clients, flickered his eyelids, and started down the platform to have it over with as soon as possible. He paused to say:

"Where you-all want to go to--a taxicab?"

Adna, who was a little nervous about his property, answered with some asperity:

"No, we don't need any hack to git to Biltmore's."

"Nossah!" said the red-cap.

"Right across the street, ain't it?"

"Ya.s.sah!" The porter chuckled. The mention of the family's destination had cheered him a little. He might get a tip, after all. You couldn't always sometimes tell by a man's clothes how he tipped.

While Kedzie stood watching the red-cap bestow the various parcels under his arms and along his fingers, a man b.u.mped into her and murmured:

"Sorry!"

She turned and said, "Huh?"

He did not look around. She did not see his face. It was the first conversation between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie Thropp.

Charity Coe, when the train stopped, had flatly refused to walk up the station platform with Jim Dyckman. She had not only virtue, but St.

Paul's idea of the importance of avoiding even the appearance of evil.

She would not budge from the car till Jim had gone. He was forced to leave her at last.

He swung through the crowd in a fury, jostling and begging pardon and staring over the heads of the pack to see if Cheever were at the barrier. He jolted Kedzie Thropp among others, apologized, and thought no more of her.

Cheever had not come to meet his wife. Her telegram was waiting for him at his official home; he was at his other residence.

When Dyckman saw that no one was there to welcome the f.a.gged-out Charity, he paused and waited for her himself. When Charity came along her anxious eyes found n.o.body she knew except Dyckman. The disappointment she revealed hurt him profoundly. But he would not be shaken off again. He turned in at her side and walked along, and the two porters with their luggage walked side by side.

Prissy Atterbury was hurrying to a train that would take him for a week-end visitation to people who hated him but needed him to cancel a female bore with. As Prissy saw it and described it, Dyckman came into the big waiting-room alone, looked about everywhere, paused, turned back for Charity Coe; then walked away with her, followed by their twinned porters. Prissy said "Aha!" behind his big mustaches and stared till he nearly lost his train.

Atterbury had gained a new topic to carry with him, a topic of such fertile resources that it went far to pay his board and lodging. He made a s...o...b..ll out of the clean reputations of Charity and Jim and started it downhill, gathering dirt and momentum as it rolled. It was bound to roll before long into the ken of Peter Cheever, and he was not the man to tolerate any levity in a wife. Cheever might be as wicked as Caesar, but his wife must be as Caesar's.

When Charity Coe was garrulous and inordinately gay, Jim Dyckman, who had known her from childhood, knew that she was trying to rush across the thin ice over some deep grief.

When he saw how hurt she was at not being met, and he insisted on taking her home, she chattered and snickered hysterically at his most stupid remarks. So he said:

"Don't let him break your heart in you, old girl."

She laughed uproariously, almost vulgarly, over that, and answered: "Me?

Let a man break my heart? That's very likely, isn't it?"

"Very!" Jim groaned.