CHAPTER X

Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman received many jars of ointment, but her pretty eyes found a fly in every one. She that should have gone about boasting, "I came from a village and slept under a park bench, and now look at me!"

was slinking about, wishing that she could rather say: "Oh, see my wonderful ancestors! Without them you could not see me at all."

Kedzie had her picture printed at last in the "Social World" departments of the newspapers. She had full-page portraits of herself by the mystic Dr. Arnold Genthe and by other camera-masters printed in _Town and Country_ and _The Spur, Vanity Fair, Vogue_ and _Harper's Bazar_. But some cursed spite half the time led to the statement under her picture that she had been in the movies. No adjectives of praise could sweeten that. Small wonder she pouted!

And she found the compet.i.tion terrific. She had thought that when she got into the upper world she would be on a spa.r.s.ely populated plateau.

But she said to Jim:

"Good Lord! this is a merry-go-round! It's so crowded everybody is falling off."

The most "exclusive" restaurants were packed like bargain-counters. She went to highly advertised b.a.l.l.s where there were so many people that the crowd simply oozed and the effort to dance or to eat was a struggle for life.

New York's four hundred families had swollen, it seemed, to four hundred thousand, and the journals of society published countless pictures of the aristocratic sets of everywhere else. There were aristocrats of the Long Island sets--a dozen sets for one small island--the Berkshire set, the Back Bay set, the Rhode Island reds, the Plymouth Rock fowl, the old Connecticut connections, the Bar Harbor oligarchy, the Tuxedonians, the Morristown and Germantown n.o.blesse, the pride of Philadelphia, the Baltimorioles, the diplomatic cliques of Washington, the Virginia patricians, the Piedmont Hunt set, the North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and all the other State sets, the Cleveland coteries, the Chicagocracy, the St. Louis and New Orleans and San Francisco optimates.

Exclusiveness was a joke. And yet Kedzie felt lonely and afraid. She had too many rivals. There were young girls in myriads, beauties by the drove, sirens in herds, millionaires in packs. The country was so prosperous with the privilege of selling Europe the weapons of suicide that the vast destructiveness of the German submarines was a bagatelle.

There was a curious mixture of stupendous Samaritanism and tremendous indifference. Millions were poured into charities and millions were squandered on dissipation.

Kedzie's funds were drawn away astoundingly faster than even Dyckman could replenish them. Hideous accounts of starving legions were brandished before the eyes of all Americans. Every day Kedzie's mail contained circulars about blind soldiers, orphan-throngs, bread-lines in every nation at war. There were h.e.l.lish chronicles of Armenian women and children driven like cattle from desert to desert, outraged and flogged and starved by the thousand.

The imagination gave up the task. The miseries of the earth were more numerous than the sands, and the eyes came to regard them as impa.s.sively as one looks at the night sky without pausing to count the flakes in that snowstorm of stars. One says, "It is a nice night." One said, "These are terrible times." Then one said, "May I have the next dance?"

or, "Isn't supper ready yet?"

Kedzie tried for a while to lift herself from the common ruck of the aristocracy by outshining the others in charities and in splendors. She soon grew weary of the everlasting appeals for money to send to Europe.

She grew weary of writing checks and putting on costumes for bazaars, spectacles, parades, and carnivals. She found herself circ.u.mscribed by so much altruism. Her benevolences left her too little for her magnificences.

She grew frantic for more fun and more personal glory. The extravagance of other women dazed her. Some of them had inexhaustible resources. Some of them were bankrupting their own boodle-bag husbands. Some of them flourished ingeniously by running up bills and never running them down.

The compet.i.tion was merciless. She kept turning to Jim for money. He grew less and less gracious, because her extravagances were more and more selfish. He grew less and less superior to complaints. He started bank-accounts to get rid of her, but she got rid of them with a speed that frightened him. He hated to be used.

Kedzie took umbrage at Mrs. Dyckman's manner. Mrs. Dyckman tried for a while to be good to the child, strove to love her, forgave her for her youth and her humble origin; but finally she tired of her, because Kedzie was not making Jim's life happier, more useful, or more distinguished.

Then one day Mrs. Dyckman asked Kedzie for a few moments of her time.

Kedzie was in a hurry to an appointment at her hairdresser's, but she seated herself patiently. Mrs. Dyckman said:

"My dear, I have just had a cable from my daughter Cicely. She has broken down, and her physician has ordered her out of England for a rest. She is homesick, she says, and Heaven knows we are homesick for her.

"I am afraid she would not feel at home in any room but her old one, and I know you won't mind. You can have your choice. Some of the other rooms are really pleasanter. Will you look them over and let me know, so that I can have your things moved?"

"Certainly, my dear m'mah!" said Kedzie.

She walked blindly down the Avenue, snubbing her most precious acquaintances. She was being put out of her room! She was being shoved back to the second place. They'd ask her to eat at the second table next, or have her meals in her room as the secretaries did.

Not much! Having slept in a d.u.c.h.ess's bed, Kedzie would not backslide.

She would get a bed of her own. She remembered a nice young man she had met, whose people were in real estate. She telephoned to him from the Biltmore.

"Is that you, Polly? This is Kedzie Dyckman. Say, Polly, do you know of a decent house that is for sale or rent right away quick? Oh, I don't care how much it costs, so it's a cracker jack of a house. I suppose I've got to take it furnished, being in such a hurry; or could you get a gang of decorators in and do a rush job? All right, look up your list right away and telephone me here at the hairdresser's."

From under her cascade of hair she talked to him later and arranged to be taken from place to place. She now dismissed chateaux with contempt as too small, too old-fashioned, lacking in servants' rooms, what not.

She had quite forgotten the poor little Mrs. Gilfoyle she had been, and her footsore tramp from cheap flat to cheap flat, ending in the place that cost three hundred dollars a year furnished.

She finally decided not to attempt housekeeping yet awhile, and selected a double-decked apartment of twenty-four rooms and forty-eight baths.

And she talked the agent down to a rental of ten thousand dollars a year unfurnished. She would show Jim that she could economize.

When Kedzie told Mrs. Dyckman that she had decided to move, Mrs. Dyckman was very much concerned lest Kedzie feel put out. But she smiled to herself: she knew her Kedzie.

Jim was not at all pleased with the arrangement, but he yielded. In the American family the wife is the quartermaster, selects the camp and equips it. Jim spent more of his time at his clubs than at his duplex home. So did Kedzie. She had been railroaded into the Colony and one or two other clubs before they knew her so well.

When the d.u.c.h.ess Cicely came back Kedzie was invited to the family dinner, of course. Cicely was Kedzie's first d.u.c.h.ess, and though Kedzie had met any number of t.i.tled people by now, she approached this one with strange apprehensions. She was horribly disappointed. Cicely turned out to be a poor shred of a woman in black, worn out, meager, forlorn, broken in heart and soul with what she had been through.

She was plainly not much impressed with Kedzie, and she said to her mother later: "Poor Jim, he always plays in the rottenest luck, doesn't he? Still, he's got a pretty doll, and what does anything matter nowadays?"

She tried to be polite about the family banquet. But the food choked her. She had seen so many gaunt hands pleading upward for a crust of bread. She had seen so many shriveled lips guzzling over a bowl of soup.

She had seen so many once beautiful soldiers who had nothing to eat anything with.

Cicely apologized for being such a death's head at the feast, but she was ashamed of her people, ashamed of her country for keeping out of the war and fattening on it. All the motives of pacifism, of neutrality, of co-operation by financing and munitioning the war, were foul in her eyes. She knew only her side of the conflict, and she cared for no other. She found America craven and indifferent either to its own obligations or its own dangers. She accused the United States of basking in the protection of the British navy and the Allied armies. She felt that the immortal crime of the _Lusitania_ with its flotsam of dead women and children was more disgraceful to the nation that endured it than to the nation that committed it. She was very, very bitter, and Kedzie found her most depressing company, especially for a dinner-table.

But she excited Jim Dyckman tremendously. He broke out into fierce diatribes against the Chinafying of the United States with its Lilliputian army guarding its gigantic interests. He began to toy with the idea of enlisting in the Canadian army or of joining the American aviators flying for France.

"The national bird is an eagle," he said, with unwonted poesy, "and the best place an American eagle can fly is over France."

When Kedzie protested: "But you've got a family to consider. Let the single men go," Jim laughed louder and longer than he had laughed for weeks.

Cicely smiled her first smile and squeezed Jim's hand.

CHAPTER XI

Kedzie went home early. It was depressing there, too. Now that she had a house of her own, she found an extraordinary isolation in it. Almost n.o.body called.

When she lived under the Dyckman roof she was included in the cards left by all the callers; she was invited into the drawing-room to meet them; she was present at all the big and little dinners, and breakfasts and teas and suppers.

People who wanted to be asked to more of the Dyckman meals and parties swapped meals and parties with them and included Kedzie in their invitations, since she was one of the family. She went about much in stately homes, and her name was celebrated in what the newspapers insist upon calling the "exclusive" circles.

Kedzie laughed at the extraordinary inclusiveness of their High Exclusivenesses until she got her own home. And then she learned its bitter meaning. It was not that Mrs. Dyckman meant to freeze her out.

She urged her to "come in any time." But, as Kedzie told Jim, "an invitation to come any time is an invitation to stay away all the time."

Kedzie's pride kept her aloof. She made it so hard to get her to come that Mrs. Dyckman sincerely said to Cicely:

"We are too old and stupid for the child. She is glad to be rid of us."

Mrs. Dyckman planned to call often, but she was an extremely busy woman, doing many good works and many foolish works that were just as hard. She said, "I ought to call," and failed to call, just as one says, "I ought to visit the sick," and leaves them to their supine loneliness.

Thus Kedzie floated out of the swirling eddies where the social driftwood jostled in eternal circles. She sulked and considered the formalities of who should call on whom and who owed whom a call. New York life had grown too busy for anybody to pay much attention to the older reciprocities of etiquette.