When he was all dressed in his olive-drab she still could not let him go. She held him with her soft arms and twiddled the gun-metal b.u.t.tons of his blouse. And when at length she must make an end of farewells she hugged him with all her might and was glad that the hard b.u.t.tons hurt the delicate breast that he felt against him smotheringly sweet and perilously yielding.

Not knowing how tame the event of all this war-like circ.u.mstance was to prove, he suffered to the deeps of his being the keen ache of separation that has wrung so many hearts in this eternally battling world. War, the sunderer, had reached them with his great divorce.

When he was free of her at last she followed him and caught new kisses.

She ran shamelessly barefoot to the door to have the last of his lips, called good-by to him when the elevator carried him into the pit, and flung kisses downward after him. Then she stumbled back to her room and cried aloud. Liliane, her maid, came to help her and Liliane wept with her, knowing all too well what war could do to love.

Later Kedzie went to the armory and slipped through the ma.s.sed crowds to see Jim again. He was gloriously busy and it stirred her martially to see his men come up, click heels, salute, report, ask questions, salute, and retreat again.

A few excited days of recruiting and equipping and then the ceremony of the muster-in. Jim spent his nights at home, but his terrified mother and his none too stoical father were there to rival Kedzie in devotion.

Importance was in the air. There was a stir of history in the public mood. The flags rippled with a new twinkle of stars and a fiercer writhing of stripes. The red had the omen of blood.

On the third day there was a ruffle of drums and a crying of bra.s.s on Fifth Avenue. People recalled the great days when the boys in blue had paraded away to the wars. Only this regiment marched up, not down, the Avenue. It was the Sixty-ninth, its flagstaff solid with the silver rings of battle. It was moving north to the mobilization-camp.

On the ninth day the Seventh went down the Avenue, twelve hundred strong, to entrain for Texas. The bullets of the foe were not the only dangers. It was midsummer and these men were bound for the tropics and the cursed fields of sand where the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and the scorpion lurked under the cactus.

Jim's mother thought less of the Mexicans than of the fact that there were no sleeping-cars even for the officers. They would get them on the way, but it would be a fearsome journey ever southward into the heat, six days in the troop-trains.

Kedzie was proud of her husband, quite conceited about him, glad that he was marching instead of standing on the curb. But her heart, doubled in bulk, pounded against her side like the leaden clapper of a broken bell.

Jim caught sight of her where she stood on the steps of his father's house, and her eyes, bright with tears, saddened him. The fond gaze of his mother touched another well-spring of emotion, and the big, proud stare of his father another.

But when by chance among the mosaic of faces he saw Charity Coe there was a sorrow in her look that made him stumble, and his heart lost step with the music. Somehow it seemed cruelest of all to leave her there.

CHAPTER XVII

The town was monstrously lonely when Kedzie turned back to her widowhood. Jim's mother and father and sister were touched by her grief and begged her to make their home hers, but she shook her head.

For a while her grief and her pride sustained her. She was the Spartan wife of the brave soldier. She even took up knitting as an appropriate activity. She thought in socks.

But the hateful hours kept coming, the nights would not be brief, and the days would not curtail their length nor quicken their pace. The loathsome inevitable result arrived.

Even her grief began to bore her. Fidelity grew inane, and her young heart shrieked aloud for diversion.

If battles had happened down there, if something stirring had only appeared in the news, she could have taken some refreshment of excitement from the situation. Heroic demands breed heroes and heroines, but all that this crisis demanded was the fidelity of torpor, the loyalty of a mollusk.

Nothing happened except the stupid chronicles of heat and monotony. The rattlesnakes did not bite; the tarantulas scuttered away; the scorpions were no worse than wasps. The Mexicans did not attack or raid or attempt the a.s.sa.s.sinations which popular hostility accepted as their favorite outdoor sport. Mexico continued her siesta while the United States sentineled the bedroom.

Jim's letters told of scorching heat, of blinding duststorms, and cloudbursts that made lakes of the camps, but nothing else happened except the welter of routine.

The regiments had only police work to do, and the task grew irksome. Men began to think of their neglected businesses. The men who stayed at home were sharing bountifully in the prosperity of the times. The volunteers at the Border were wasting their abilities for fifteen dollars a month.

The officers began to resign by the score, by the hundred. As many enlisted men dropped out as could beg off. Jim could afford to stay; he would not resign, though Kedzie wrote appeals and finally demands that he return to his wretched wife.

Resentment replaced sorrow in her heart. She began to impute ugly motives to his absence. The tradition of the alluring Mexican senorita obsessed her. She imagined him engaged in wild romances with sullen beauties. She was worried about guitar music and stilettoes.

If there were beautiful senoritas there in McAllen, Jim did not see them. His dissipations were visits to the movie shows and excursions for dinner to Mr. and Mrs. Riley's hotel at Mission. Liquor was forbidden to officers and men under dire penalties, and Jim's conviviality was restricted to the soda-water fountains. He became as rabid a consumer of ice-cream cones and sundaes as a matinee girl. It was a burlesque of war to make the angels hold their sides, if the angels could forget the slaughter-house of Europe.

Jim felt that the Government had buncoed him into this comic-opera chorus. He resented the service as an incarceration. But he would not resign. For months he plodded the doleful round of his duties, ate bad food, poured out unbelievable quant.i.ties of sweat and easily believable quant.i.ties of profanity.

On the big practice hike through the wilderness who that saw him staggering along, choked with alkali dust, knouted by the sun, stabbed by the cactus, carrying two rifles belonging to worn-out soldiers in addition to his own load, looking forward to the privilege of throwing himself down by the roadside for ten minutes' respite, praying for the arrival in camp with its paradise of a little shelter tent and beans and bacon for dinner or for breakfast or supper--who could have believed that he did not have to do it? That he had indeed at home soft luxuries, a rosy little wife, a yacht, and servants to lift his shoes from the floor for him?

It was easier, however, for him to get along thus there where everybody did the same than it was for Kedzie to get along ascetically in New York where nearly everybody she knew was gay.

She might have gone down to Texas to see Jim, but when he wrote her how meager the accommodations were and how harsh the comforts, she pained him by taking his advice. Like almost all the other wives, she stayed at home and made the best of it.

The best was increasingly bad. Her lot, indeed, was none too cheerful.

After her clandestine marriage she had confronted her husband's parents, and the result was not satisfactory. She had had no honeymoon, and her husband's friends were chill toward her. Then he marched away and left her for half a year.

She was young and pretty and restless. She had acquired a greed of praise. She had given up her public glory to be her husband's private prima donna; and then her audience had abandoned her.

Though her soul traveled far in a short time by the calendar, every metamorphosis was slow and painful and imperceptible. She wept her eyes dry; then moped until her gloom grew intolerable. The first diversion she sought was really an effort of her grief to renew itself by a little repose. Her first amus.e.m.e.nt was for her grief's sake. But before long her diversions were undertaken for diversion's sake.

She had to have friends and she had to take what she could get. The more earnest elements of society did not interest her, nor she them. The fast crowd disgusted her at first, but remained the only one that did not repulse her advances.

Her first glimpses of the revelers filled her with repugnance and confirmed her in what she had heard and read of the wickedness of the rich. The fact that she had seen also the virtuous rich, solemn rich, religious rich, miserly rich, was forgotten. The fact that in every stage of means there are the same cla.s.ses escaped her memory. She had known of middle cla.s.ses where libertinism flourished, had known of licentiousness among the poor shopkeepers, shoddy intriguers in the humble boarding-houses.

But now she felt that money made vice and forgot that vice is one of the amus.e.m.e.nts accessible to the very poorest, to all who inherit flesh and its appet.i.tes.

Gradually she forgot her horror of dissipation. The outswirling eddy of the gayer crowd began to gather and compel her feet. She lacked the wisdom to attract the intellectuals, the culture to run with the artistic and musical sets, the lineage to satisfy that curious few who find a congeniality in the fact that their ancestors were respectable and recorded persons.

In the fast gang she did not need to have or use her brains. She did not need a genealogy. Her beauty was her admission-fee. Her restlessness was her qualification.

Those who were careless of their own behavior were careless of their accomplices. They accepted Kedzie without scruple. They accepted especially the invitations she could well afford. She ceased to be afraid of a compliment. She grew addicted to flattery. She learned to take a joke off-color and match it in shade.

She met women of malodorous reputation and found that they were not so black as they had been painted. She learned how warm-hearted and charitable a woman could be for whom the world had a cold shoulder and no charity.

She extended her tolerance from men whose escapades had been national topics to women who had been involved in distinguished scandals and were busily involving themselves anew. Being tolerant of them, he had to be tolerant of their ways. Forgiving the sinner helps to forgive the sin.

There are few things more endearing than forgiveness. One of the most appealing figures in literature and art is the forgiven woman taken in adultery.

And thus by easy stages and generous concessions Kedzie, who had begun her second marriage with the strictest ideals of behavior, found herself surrounded by people of a loose-reined life. Things once abhorred became familiar, amusing, charming.

It was increasingly difficult to resent advances toward her own citadel which she had smiled at in others. She grew more and more gracious toward a narrowing group of men till the safety-in-numbers approached the peril-in-fewness. She grew more and more gracious to a widening group of women, and they brought along their men.

Kedzie even forgave Pet Bettany and struck up a friendship with her.

Pet apologized to her other friends for taking up with Kedzie, by the sufficient plea, "She gives such good food and drink at her boarding-house."

Kedzie found Pet intensely comforting since Pet was full of gossip and satirized with contempt the people who had been treating Kedzie with contempt. It is mighty pleasant to hear of the foibles of our superiors.

The illusion of rising is acquired by bringing things down to us as well as by rising to them. When Pet told Kedzie something belittling about somebody big Kedzie felt herself enlarged.

Pet had another influence on Kedzie. Pet was no more contemptuous of aristocrats than she was of people who were good or tried to be, or, failing that, kept up a decent pretense.

Pet made a sn.o.bbery of vice and had many an anecdote of the lapses of the respectable and the circ.u.mspectable. Her railing way brought virtue itself into disrepute and Kedzie was frightened out of her last few senses. She fell under the tyranny of the _risque_, which is as fell as the tyranny of the prudish.

Prissy Atterbury had told Pet without delay of meeting Jim Dyckman at Charity's home. Now that Pet was a crony of Kedzie's she recalled the story. Finding Kedzie one day suffering from an attack of scruples, and declining to accept an invitation because "Jim might not like it," Pet laughed: