She was too weak to fight the law and the Church and the public in order to divorce her husband. Would it be weakness or strength to sit at home in the ashes and deny herself to life and love? She could always go to Jim Dyckman and take him as her cavalier. But then she would become one of those heartbroken, leash-broken women who are the Maenads of society, more or less circ.u.mspect and shy, but none the less lawless. But wherein were they better than the Zadas?

Charity was wrung with a nausea of love in all its activities; she forswore them. Yet she was human. She was begotten and conceived in the flesh of lovers. She was made for love and its immemorial usages. How could she expect to destroy her own primeval impulse just because one treacherous man had enjoyed her awhile and pa.s.sed on to his next affair?

There was no child of hers to grow up and replace her in the eternal armies of love and compel her aside among the veteran women who have been mustered out. She was in a sense already widowed of her husband.

Certainly she would never love Cheever again or receive him into her arms. He belonged to the mother of his child. Let that woman step aside into the benches of the spectators, those who have served their purpose and must become wet-nurses, child-dryers, infant-teachers, perambulator-motors, question-answerers, nose-blowers, mischief-punishers, cradleside-bards.

Charity laughed derisively at the vision of Zada as a mother. The Madonna pose had fascinated this Magdalen, but she would find that mothers have many, many other things to do for their infants than to sit for portraits and give them picturesque nourishment--many, many other things. If Zada's child inherited its father's and mother's wantonness, laziness, wickedness, and violence of temper, there was going to be a lively nursery in that apartment.

Zada had so wanted a baby as a reward of love that she was willing to s.n.a.t.c.h it out of the vast waiting-room without pausing for a license.

She would find that she had bought punishment at a high price. The poor baby was in for a hard life, but it would give its parents one in exchange.

Charity was appalled at this unknown harshness of her soul; it sneered at all things once held beautiful and sacred. Her soul was like a big cathedral broken into by a pagan mob that ran about smashing images, defiling fonts, burlesquing all the solemn rituals. Her quiet mind was full of sunburnt nymphs and goatish fauns with s.h.a.ggy fetlocks. She saw the world as a Brocken and all the Sabbath there was was a Sabbath orgy of despicably brutish fiends.

She tried to run away. She went to her piano; her fingers would play no dirges; they grew flippant, profane in rhythm. She could think of no tunes but dances--andantes turned scherzi, the Handelian largo became a Castilian tango. She found herself playing a something strange--she realized that it was a lullaby! She fled from the piano.

She went to her books for nepenthe. There were romances in French, Italian, German, English, and American, new books, old books, all repeating the same stencils of pa.s.sion in different colors. She could have spat at them and their silly ardors over the same old ba.n.a.lity: I love him; he loves me--beat.i.tude! I love him; he loves her--tragedy!

The novelists were like stupid children parroting the ancient monotony--_amo_, _amas_, _amat_; _amamus_, _amatis_, _amant_; _amo_, _amas_, _amat_--away with such primer stuff! She had learned the grammar of love and was graduated from the school-books. She was a postgraduate of love and wedlock. She had had enough of them--too much; she would read no more of love, dwell no more upon it; she would forget it.

She wanted some antiseptic book, something frigid, intellectual, ascetic. At last she thought she had it. On her shelf she found an uncut volume, a present from some one who had never read it, but had bought it because it cost several dollars and would serve as a gift.

It was Gardner's biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, "a study in the religion, literature, and history of the fourteenth century of Italy."

That sounded heartless enough. The frontispiece portrait of the wan, meager, despondent saint promised freedom from romantic balderdash.

Charity found a chair by a window and began to read. The preface announced the book to be "history centered in the work and personality of one of the most wonderful women that ever lived." This was the medicine Charity wanted--the story of a woman who had been wonderful without love or marriage.

There followed a description of the evil times--and the wicked town in which Caterina Benincasa was born--as long ago as 1347. A pestilence swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how he had buried five of his sons in one trench. People said that the end of the world had come.

The word _trench_, the perishing of the people and the apparent end of the world, gave the story a modern sound. It might concern the murderous years of 1914-16.

Catherine was religious, as little girls are apt to be. She even wanted to enter a monastery in the disguise of a boy. Later her sister persuaded her to dye her hair and dress fashionably. Charity began to fear for her saint, but was rea.s.sured to find that already at sixteen she was a nun and had commenced that "life of almost incredible austerity," freeing herself from all dependence on food and sleep and resting on a bare board.

Charity read with envy how Catherine had devoted herself for three whole years to silence broken only by confessions. How good it would be not to talk to anybody about anything for years and years! How blissful to live a calm, gray life in a strait cell, doing no labor but the errands of mercy and of prayer!

Charity read on, wondering a little at Catherine's idea of G.o.d, and her morbid devotion to His blood as the essence of everything beautiful and holy. Charity could not put herself back into that Middle Age when the most concrete materialism was mingled inextricably with the most fantastic symbolism.

Suddenly she was startled to find that appalling temptations found even Catherine out even in her cloistral solitude. It frightened Charity to read such a pa.s.sage as this:

There came a time, towards the end of these three years, when these a.s.saults and temptations became horrible and unbearable. Aerial men and women, with obscene words and still more obscene gestures, seemed to invade her little cell, sweeping round her like the souls of the d.a.m.ned in Dante's "h.e.l.l," inviting her simple and chaste soul to the banquet of l.u.s.t. Their suggestions grew so hideous and persistent that she fled in terror from the cell that had become like a circle of the infernal regions, and took refuge in the church; but they pursued her thither, though there their power seemed checked. And her Christ seemed far from her. At last she cried out, remembering the words in the vision: "I have chosen suffering for my consolation, and will gladly bear these and all other torments, in the name of the Saviour, for as long as shall please His Majesty." When she said this, immediately all that a.s.semblage of demons departed in confusion, and a great light from above appeared that illumined all the room, and in the light the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, nailed to the Cross and stained with blood, as He was when by His own blood He entered into the holy place; and from the Cross He called the holy virgin, saying: "My daughter Catherine, seest thou how much I have suffered for thee? Let it not then be hard to thee to endure for Me."

This terrified Charity, and the further she read the less comfort she gained. Her matter-of-fact Manhattan mind could vaguely understand Saint Catherine's mystic nuptials with Christ; but that definite gold ring He placed on her finger, that diamond with four pearls around it, frustrated her comprehension.

When she read on and learned how Catherine's utter self-denial offended the other churchmen and church-women; how her confessions of sinful thought brought accusations of sinful deed; how the friars actually threw her out of a church at noon and kicked her as she lay senseless in the dust; how she was threatened with a.s.sa.s.sination and was turned from the doors of the people; and in what torment she died--from these strange events in the progress of a strange soul through a strange world Charity found no parallel to guide her life along.

For hours she read; but all that remained to her was the vision of that poor woman who could find no refuge from her flesh and from the demons that played evil rhapsodies upon the harp-strings of her nerves.

Charity closed the book and understood fear. She was now not so much sick of love as afraid of it. She was afraid of solitude, afraid of religion and of the good works that cause ridicule or resentment.

Darkness gathered about her with the closing of the day. She dreaded the night and the day, people and the absence of people. She knew no woman she could take her anguish to for sympathy; it would provoke only rebuke or laughter. The Church had rebuffed her. There remained only men, and what could she hope from them? Even Jim Dyckman had not been a friend merely. He had told her that she wasted herself as well as him.

Beyond this night there were years of nights, years on years of days.

She could not even be alone; for who was ever actually alone? Even in the hush and the gloom of the deepening twilight there were figures here, shadows that sighed, delicate insinuators. There were no satyrs or ba.s.sarids, but gentlemen in polo garb, in evening dress, in yachting flannels. There were moon-nights in Florida, electric floods on dancing-floors, this dim corner of this room with some one leaning on her chair, bending his head and whispering:

"Charity, it's Jim. I love you."

She rose and thrust aside the arms that were not there. She could not order him away, because he was not there. And yet he was there.

She was afraid that he still loved her and afraid that he did not. She was afraid that she had always loved him and that she never could. She was afraid that she would go to him or send for him, and afraid that she would be afraid to. She thrust away the phantom, but her palms pleaded against his departure. Softer than a whisper and noisier than a cry was her thought:

"I don't want to be alone, I am afraid to be alone."

CHAPTER XXIV

Kedzie wanted to be a lady, and with the ladies stand--a tall tiara in her hair, a lorgnette in her hand.

She had succeeded dizzily, tremendously, in her cinema career. The timid thing that had watched the moving-picture director to see how he held his winegla.s.s, and accepted his smile as a beam of sunshine breaking through the clouds about his G.o.dlike head, now found his gracefulness "actory," his intimacy impudent, and his a.s.sociation compromising.

Ferriday's very picturesqueness and artistry convinced her now that he was not quite the gentleman.

Kedzie was beginning to imitate the upper dialect already. She who but a twelvemonth past was dividing people into "hicks" and "swells," and whose epithets were "reub" and "cla.s.sy," was now a generation advanced.

Ferriday saw it and raged. One day in discussing the cast of a picture he mentioned the screen-pet Lorraine Melnotte as the man for the princ.i.p.al male role.

Kedzie sighed; "Oh, he is so hopelessly romantic, never quite the gentleman. In costume he gets by, but in evening clothes he always suggests the handsome waiter--don't you think?"

Ferriday roared, with disgust: "Good Lord, but you're growing. What is this thing I've invented? Are you a _Frankenstein?_"

Kedzie looked blank and sneered, "Are you implying that I have Yiddish blood in me?"

She wondered why he laughed, but she would not ask. Along many lines Kedzie did not know much, but in others she was uncannily acute.

Kedzie was gleaning all her ideas of gentlemanship from Jim Dyckman. She knew that he had lineage and heritage and equipage and all that sort of thing, and he must be great because he knew great people. His careless simplicity, artlessness, shyness, all the things that distressed her at first, were now accepted as the standards of conduct for everybody.

In life as in other arts, the best artists grow from the complex to the simple, the tortuous to the direct, from pose to poise, from tradition to truth, from artifice to reality. Kedzie was beginning to understand this and to ape what she could not do naturally.

Her comet-like scoot from obscurity to fame in the motion-picture sky had exhausted the excitement of that sky, and now she was ashamed of being a wage-earner, a mere actress, especially a movie actress.

If the studio had not caught fire and burned up so many thousands of yards of her portraiture she would have broken her contract without scruple. But the shock of the loss of her pretty images drove her back to the scene. The pity of so much thought, emotion, action, going up in smoke was too cruel to endure.

It was not necessary for Dyckman to pay the expenses of their repet.i.tion in celluloid, as he offered. The Hyperfilm Company rented another studio and began to remake the destroyed pictures. They were speedily renewed because the scenarios had been rescued and there was little of that appalling waste of time, money, and effort which has almost wrecked the whole industry. They did not photograph a thousand feet for every two hundred used.

Kedzie's first pictures had gone to the exchanges before the fire, and they were continuing their travels about the world while she was at work revamping the rest.

About this time the Hyperfilm managers decided to move their factory to California, where the sempiternal sunlight insured better photography at far less expense. This meant that Kedzie must leave New York only partly conquered and must tear herself away from Jim Dyckman.

She broke down and cried when she told Dyckman of this, and for the first time his sympathies were stampeded on her account. He petted her, and she slid into his arms with a child-like ingratiation that made his heart swell with pity.