We Can't Have Everything Part 10

Suddenly the Subway shot out into midair and became a superway. The street which had been invisible above was suddenly visible below, with street-cars on it. Also there was a still higher track overhead. Three layers of tracks! It was heavenly, the noise they made! She enjoyed hearing the mounting numbers of the streets shouted antiphonally by the gentlemen at either door.

At 180th Street, however, the train stopped for good, and the handsome young man at the front door called, "All out!" He said it to Kedzie with a beautiful courtesy, adding, "This is as far as we go, lady."

That was tremendous, to be called "lady." Kedzie tried to get out like one. She smiled at the guard and left his protection with some reluctance. He studied her as she walked along the platform. She seemed to meet with his approval in general, and in particular. He sighed when she turned out of his sight.

The station here was very high up in the world. Kedzie counted seventy-seven steps on her way to the level. She was distressed to find herself in a shabby, noisy community where streets radiated in six directions. Her fears were true. She had left New York. She must get home to it again.

She walked back along the way she had come, on the sidewalk beneath the tracks. This meandering street was called Boston Road. Kedzie had no ideas as to the distance of Boston. She only knew that New York was good enough for her--the New York of Forty-second Street, of course. Kedzie did not know yet how many, many New Yorks there are in New York.

She was discouraged by her present surroundings. Along the rough and neglected streets were little rows of shanty shops, and there were stubby frame residences.

There was one two-story cottage snuggling against a hill; it had a little picket fence with a little picket gate leading to a little ragged yard with an old apple-tree in it; and there was a pair of steps up to the front door, and a rough trellis from there to the woodshed with a grapevine draped across it. It was of the James Whitcomb Riley school of architecture--a house with a woodshed.

Rich people who were tired of the city, and chanced that way, used to pause and look at that little nook and admire its meek attractiveness.

It made them homesick.

But Kedzie was sick of home. This lowly cot was too much like her father's. It had a sign on it that said, "To Let." It was a funny expression. Kedzie studied it a long time before she decided that it was New-Yorkese for "For Rent."

She shuddered at the idea of renting or letting such a house--especially as it was so close to a church, a small, seedy, frame church nearly all roof, a narrow-chested, slope-shouldered churchlet with a frame cupola for a steeple. It looked abandoned, and an ivy flourished on it so impudently that it almost closed the unfrequented portal.

The bill-boards here made mighty interesting reading. There were magnificent works of an art on the grand scale of a people's gallery; one structure promulgated the glories of a notorious chewing-gum. There was a gorgeous proclamation of a fas.h.i.+onable glove with a picture of an extremely swell slim lady all dressed up--or rather all dressed down--for the opera.

Kedzie prayed the Lord to send her some day a pair of full-length white kid gloves like those. As for a box at the opera, she would take her chances on the sunniest cloud-sofa in heaven for an evening at the opera. And for a dress cut deckolett and an aigret in her hair, she would have swapped a halo and a set of wings.

There was no end to the big pages of this literature, and Kedzie read dozens of them from right to left in a southerly direction. Finally she abandoned the Boston Road and walked over to a better-groomed avenue with more of a city atmosphere.

But she saw a police signal-station at 175th Street, and she thought it better to abandon the Southern Boulevard. She was not sure of her police yet, and she had an uneasy feeling that her father and mother were at that moment telling their troubles to some policeman who would shortly be putting her description in the hands of detectives. She did not want to be arrested. Poppa might try to spank her again. She did not want to have to murder anybody, especially her parents. She liked them better when she was away from them.

She hated to waste five cents on a street-car, but finally she achieved the extravagance. The car went sliding and grinding through an amazing amount of paved street, with an inconceivable succession of apartment-houses and shops.

At length she reached a center of what she most desired--noise and mob and hurry. At 164th Street she came to a star of streets where the Third Avenue Elevated collaborated with the surface-cars and the loose traffic to create a delicious pandemonium. She loved those high numbers--a hundred and eighty streets! Beautiful! At home Main Street dissolved into pastures at Tenth Street.

She wanted to find Main Street in New York and see what First Street looked like. It was probably along the Atlantic Ocean. That also was one of the things she must see--her first ocean!

But while Kedzie was reveling in the splendors of 164th Street her eye was caught by the gaudy placards of a moving-picture emporium. There was a movie-palace at home. It was the town's one metropolitan charm.

There was a lithograph here that reached out and caught her like a bale-hook. It represented an impossibly large-eyed girl, cowering behind a door on whose other side stood a handsome devil in evening dress.

He was tugging villainously at a wicked mustache, and his eyes were thrillingly leery. Behind a curtain stood a young man who held a revolver and waited. The t.i.tle of the picture decided Kedzie. It was "The Vampire's Victim; a Scathing Exposure of High Society."

Kedzie studied hard. For all her gipsy wildness, she had a trace of her father's parsimony, and she hated to spend money that was her very own.

Some of the dimes and quarters in that little purse had been there for ages. Besides, her treasury would have to sustain her for an indefinite period.

But she wanted to know about high society. She was not sure what _scathing_ meant, or what the p.r.o.nunciation of it was. She rather inclined to _"scat-ting."_ Anyway, it looked important.

She stumbled into the black theater and found a seat among mysterious persons dully silhouetted against the screen. This was none of the latter-day temples where moving pictures are run through with cathedral solemnity, soft lights, flowers, orchestral uplift, and nearly cla.s.sic song. This was a dismal little tunnel with one end lighted by the twinkling pictures. Tired mothers came here to escape from their children, and children came here to escape from their tired mothers. The plots of the pictures were as trite and as rancid as spoiled meat, but they suited the market. This plot concerned a beautiful girl who came to the city from a small town. She was a good girl, because she came from a small town and had poor parents.

She was dazzled a little, however, by the attentions of a swell devil of great wealth, and she neglected her poor--therefore honest--lover temporarily. She learned the fearful joys of a limousined life, and was lured into a false marriage which nearly proved her ruin. The villain got a fellow-demon to pretend to be a minister, put on false hair, reversed his collar, and read the wedding ceremony; and the heroine was taken to the rich man's home.

The rooms were as full of furniture as a furniture-store, and so Kedzie knew it was a swell home. Also there was a butler who walked and acted like a wooden man.

The heroine was becomingly shy of her husband, but finally went to her room, where a swell maid put her to bed (with a proper omission of critical moments) in a bed that must have cost a million dollars. Some womanly, though welching, intuition led the bride to lock her door. Some manly intuition led the hero to enter the gardens and climb in through a window into the house. If he had not been a hero it would have been a rather reprehensible act. But to the heroes all things are pure. He prowled through the house heroically without attracting attention. Every step of his burglarious progress was applauded by the audience.

The hero hid behind one of those numberless portieres that hang everywhere in the homes of the _moveaux riches,_ and waited with drawn revolver for the dastard bridegroom to attempt his h.e.l.lish purpose.

The locked door thwarted the villain for the time, and he decided to wait till he got the girl aboard one of those yachts which rich people keep for evil purposes. Thus the villain unwittingly saved the hero from the painful necessity of committing murder, and added another reel to the picture.

It is not necessary and it might infringe a copyright to tell the rest of the story. It would be insulting to say that the false minister, repenting, told the hero, who told the heroine after he rescued her from the satanic yacht and various other temptations. Of course she married the plain-clothes man and lived happily ever after in a sin-proof cottage with a garden of virtuous roses.

Kedzie was so excited that she annoyed the people about her, but she learned again the invaluable lesson that rich men are unfit companions for nice girls. Kedzie resolved to prove this for herself. She prayed for a chance to be tempted so that she might rebuke some swell villain.

But she intended to postpone the rebuke until she had seen a lot of high life. This would serve a double purpose: Kedzie would get to see more millionairishness, and the rebuke would be more--more "_scatting_." It is hard even to think a word you cannot p.r.o.nounce.

Kedzie gained one thing further from the pictures--a new name. She had been musing incessantly on choosing one. She had always hated both _Thropp_ and _Kedzie,_ and had counted on marriage to reform her surname. But she could not wait. She wanted an alias at once. The police were after her. The heroine of this picture was named _Anita Adair,_ and the name just suited Kedzie. She intended to be known by it henceforth.

She had not settled on what town she had come from. Perhaps she would decide to have been born in New York. She rather fancied the notion of being a daughter of a terrible swell family who wanted to force her to marry a wicked old n.o.bleman, but she ran away sooner than submit to the _"imfany"_--that was the way Kedzie p.r.o.nounced it in her head. It was a word she had often seen but never heard.

Meanwhile she was sure of one thing: Kedzie Thropp was annihilated and Anita Adair was born full grown.

At the conclusion of the film Kedzie was saddened by a ballad sung by an adenoid tenor. The song was a scatting exposure of the wickedness of Broadway. The refrain touched Kedzie deeply, and alarmed her somewhat.

It reiterated and reiterated:

"There's a browkin hawt for everee light ton Broadway-ee."

Kedzie began to fear that she would furnish one more. And yet it would be rather nice to have a broken heart, Kedzie thought, especially on Broadway.

CHAPTER X

Kedzie watched the moving picture twice through. The second time it was not so good. It lacked spontaneity and sincerity.

At the first vision everything seemed to rise from what preceded; people did what was natural or n.o.ble. The second time it looked mechanical, rehea.r.s.ed; the thrill was gone, too, because she knew positively that the hero was not really going to shoot, and the villain was not really going to break through the door.

She wandered forth in a tragedy of disillusionment. That was really the cause of the pout that seemed to say, "Please kiss me!" She pouted because when she got what she wanted she no longer wanted it.

There are hearts like cold storage. They keep what they get fresh and cool; and there are hearts that spoil whatever is intrusted to them. In Kedzie's hot young soul, things spoiled soon.

She was hungry, and she could not resist the impulse to enter a cheap restaurant. She did not know how cheap it was. It was as good as the best restaurant in Nimrim, Mo.

Kedzie ordered unfamiliar things for the sake of educating her illiterate mid-Western stomach. She ordered clam chowder and Hamburger steak, spaghetti Italienne, lobster salad, and Neapolitan ice-cream. She ate too much--much too much.

The total bill was ninety-five cents, and she was terrified. She had thought her father a miser for complaining of the breakfast bill of eleven-odd dollars at the Biltmore, but that was his money, not hers.

When she finished her meal she did not dream of tipping the waiter. He seemed not to expect it, but he grinned as he asked her to come again.

He hoped she would. He went to the door and stared after her, sadly, longingly. The dishes she had left he carried away with an elegiac solemnity.

The streets were darkened now and the lights bewildered Kedzie. The town grew more solemn. It withdrew into itself. People were going home.