The next morning she was sure of only one thing, and that was that Dyckman had asked her to be his wife; and be his wife she would, no matter what it cost.

She wondered how she could get rid of Gilfoyle, whom she looked upon now as nothing less than an abductor. He was one of those "cadets" the papers had been full of a few years before, who lured young girls to ruin under the guise of false marriages and then sold them as "white slaves."

Kedzle's wrath was at the fact that Gilfoyle was not legally an abductor. She would have been glad merely to be ruined, and she would have rejoiced at the possibility of a false marriage. In the movies the second villain only pretended to be a preacher, and then confessed his guilt. But such an easy solution was not for Kedzie. New York City had licensed Gilfoyle's outrage; the clerk had sold her to him for two dollars; the Munic.i.p.al Building was the too, too solid witness.

She felt a spiritual solace in the fact that she had not had a religious marriage. The sacrament was only munic.i.p.al and did not count. Her wedding had lacked the blessing of the duly const.i.tuted ministry; therefore it was sacrilegious; therefore it was her conscientious duty to undo the pagan knot as quickly as possible. She reverted to the good old way of the Middle Ages. There was no curse of divorce then, and indeed there was small need of it, since annulment could usually be managed on one religious ground or another, or if not, people went about their business as if it had been managed.

Kedzie felt absolved of any fault of selfishness now, and justified in taking any steps necessary to the punishment of Gilfoyle. _Religion_ is a large, loose word, and it can be made to fit any motive; but once a.s.sumed it seems to strengthen every resolution, to chloroform mercy and hallow any means to the self-sanctified end. What people would shrink from as inhuman they constantly embrace as divine.

Kedzie wondered how she could communicate with her adversary. She might best go to Chicago and fight herself free there. There would be less risk of Dyckman's hearing about it.

She shuddered at what she would have to tell him unless she kept the divorce secret. He might not love her if he knew she was not the nice new girl he thought her, but an old married woman. And what would he say when he found that her real name was Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle _nee_ Kedzie Thropp?

But first Kedzie must divorce herself from the Hyperfilm Company. She went to the studio with rage in her heart. She told Ferriday that she would not go to California. He proposed that she break with the Hyperfilm Company and form a corporation of her own with Dyckman as angel.

Kedzie was wroth at this. From now on, spending Dyckman's money would be like spending her own. Ferriday, once her accomplice in the n.o.ble business of getting Dyckman to back her, was revealed now as a cheap swindler trying to keep Mrs. Dyckman in trade at her husband's expense.

"I'm through with the pictures, I tell you!" she stormed. "I'm sick of the cheap notoriety. I'm tired of being public property. I can't go out on the street without being pointed at. It's disgusting. I don't want to be incorporated or photographed or interviewed. I want to be let alone.

I'm tired. I've worked too hard. I need a rest."

Ferriday hated her with great agility. He had been willing to abet her breach of contract, provided she let him form a new company, but if she would not that made a great difference. He reminded her:

"The Hyperfilm Company will hold you to your bond. They want your hundred and twenty-five pounds of flesh. If you should break with them they'd have a case against you for damages."

"How much?" said Kedzie, feeling like Mrs. Croesus.

Ferriday whistled and murmured: "Spoken like the wife of a multimillionaire! So you've got him at last."

"To who," Kedzie began, with an owl-like effect that she corrected with some confusion,"--to whom do you refer to?"

Ferriday grinned: "You're going to marry out of the movies, and you're going to try to horn into sa.s.siety. Well, I warned you before that if you became Dyckman's wife you would find his world vastly different from the ballroom and drawing-room stuff you pull off in the studio--strangely and mysteriously different."

He frightened her. She was not sure of herself. She could not forget Nimrim, Missouri, and her arrival at the edge of society _via_ the Bronx, the candy-shop, and the professional camera.

She felt that the world had not treated her squarely. Why should she have to carry all this luggage of her past through the gate with her?

She wondered if it would not be better to linger in the studios till she grew more famous and could bring a little prestige along.

But Ferriday was already ousting her even from that security.

"The managers of the Hyperfilm Company will think you have done them dirt, but I'll explain that you are not really responsible. You've seen a million dollars, and you're razzle-dazzled. They'll want a bit of that million, I suppose, as liquidated damages, but I'll try to keep them down."

Kedzie was at bay in her terror. She struck back.

"Tell 'em they won't get a cent if they try to play the hog."

"They don't have hogs on Fifth Avenue, Anita. Don't forget that. Well, good-by and good luck."

This was more like an eviction than a desertion. Kedzie felt a little softening of her heart toward the old homestead.

"I'm sure I'm much obliged for all you've done for me."

Ferriday roared his scorn.

She went on: "I am. Honest-ly! And I hope I haven't caused you too much inconvenience."

Ferriday betrayed how much he was hurt by his violent efforts to conceal it.

"Not at all. It happens that I've just found another little girl to take your place. This one drifted in among the extras, just as you did, and she's a dream. I'll show her to the managers, and they may be so glad to get her they won't charge you a cent. In fact, if you say the word, I might manage it so that they would pay you something to cancel your contract."

This was quite too cruel. It crushed the tears out of Kedzie's eyes, and she had no fight left in her. She simply stammered:

"No, thank you. Don't bother. Well, good-by."

"Good-by, Anita--good luck!"

He let her make her way out of his office alone. She had to skirt the studio. From behind a canvas wall over which the Cooper-Hewitt tubes rained a quivering blue glare came the words of the a.s.sistant director:

"Now choke her, Hazlitt! Harder! Register despair, Miss Hardy. Try to scream and can't! That's good. Now, Walsh, jump in to the rescue. Slug him. Knock his bean off. 'S enough! Fall, Hazlitt. Now gather up Miss Hardy, Walsh. Register devotion, grat.i.tude, adoration--now you got it.

Turn on your lamps full power, dearie! Wow! Bully! A couple of tears, please. That's the stuff. You'll be the queen of the world. Weep a little more. Real tears. That's it! Now clinch for the fade-out. Cut!"

Kedzie tiptoed away. She felt as Eve must have felt sneaking out of Eden and hearing the nightingales wrangling and the leopards at play.

CHAPTER XXVI

We must fly fast and keep on flying if we would escape from our pasts.

Ambition, adventure, or sheer luck may carry us forward out of them as in a cavalry-foray over strange frontiers, but sooner or later we must wait for our wagons or fall back to them.

Kedzie's past was catching up with her. It is a glorious thing when one's past comes up loaded with food, munitions, good deeds, charities, mercies, valued friendships. But poor little Kedzie's little past included one incompetent and unacknowledged husband and two village parents.

Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her new friends as anxiously as if he had been a baby born out of wedlock instead of a grown man born into it. And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment. He had not told his new friends in Chicago that he was married, because the Anita Adair that he had left in New York was, as F.P.A. would say, his idea of nothing to brag about.

Gilfoyle had loved Kedzie once as a pretty photographer's model, and had admired her as an exquisite dancing-creature who seemed to have spun off at a tangent from the painted side of an old Greek amphora. He had actually written poetry to her! And when a poet has done that for a girl he feels that he has done more for her than she can ever repay. Even if she gives him her mortal self, what is that to the immortality he has given her?

When Kedzie telegraphed Gilfoyle that she had lost her job in Newport and had arrived in New York lonely and afraid, had he not taken care of her good name by giving her his own? Not to mention a small matter of all his money!

She had repaid him with frantic discontent. The morning after the wedding, was she not imitating the parrot's shrill ridicule of life and love? Did she ridicule his poetry, or didn't she? She did. Instead of being his nine Muses, she had become his three Furies.

When he lost his job and she went out to get one of her own, had she succeeded in getting anything with dignity in it? No! She had become an extra woman in a movie mob. That was a belittling thing to remember. But worst of all, she had committed the unpardonable sin for a woman--she had lent him money. He could never forgive or forget the horrible fact that he had borrowed her last cash to pay his fare to Chicago.

Next to that for inexcusableness was her self-support--and, worse, self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie no money beyond returning what he had borrowed, and she had not used that to buy a ticket to Chicago with. She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money.

That was mighty convenient for him, but it was extremely suspicious, and he cherished it as a further grudge.

He never found himself quite flush enough to force any money on her, because he had found that it costs money to live in Chicago, too. People in New York get the idea that it costs everything to live in New York and nothing to live anywhere else--if it can be called living.

Gilfoyle also discovered that his gifts were not appreciated in Chicago as he had expected them to be. Chicago people seemed to think it quite natural for New York to call for help from Chicago, and successful Western men were constantly going East; but for a New-Yorker to revert to Chicago looked queer. He appeared to patronize, and yet he must have had some peculiar reason for giving up New York.