We Can't Have Everything Part 108

When the men came with the ropes and the tackle necessary and slowly righted the car he found that its engine ran again and he had speed and strength once more as his servants. He tried to encourage Charity with a figure of speech.

"They've got us ditched, honey, for a while, but we'll get righted soon and then life will be as smooth as smooth."

She tried to smile for his sake, but she had finished with hope.

CHAPTER XVII

While Jim and Charity sat by the roadside the Marchioness of Strathdene, _nee_ Kedzie Thropp, of Nimrim, sat on a fine cus.h.i.+on and salted with her tears the toasted English crumpet she was having with her tea.

She had been married indeed, but the same ban that fell upon Jim's remarriage had forbidden her the wedding of her dreams. She was the innocent party to the divorce and she was married in a church. But it was not of the Episcopal creed, which she was now calling the Church of England. Kedzie-like, she still wanted what she could not get and grieved over what she got. It is usual to berate people of her sort, but they are no more to be blamed than other dyspeptics. Souls, like stomachs, cannot always coordinate appet.i.te and digestion.

Kedzie had, however, found a husband who would be permanently precious to her, since she would never be certain of him. Like her, he was restless, volatile, and maintained his equilibrium as a bicycle does only by keeping on going. He was mad to be off to the clouds of France.

There was a delay because s.h.i.+ps were sailing infrequently, and their departure was kept secret. Pa.s.sengers had to go aboard and wait.

Bidding "bon voyage" was no longer the stupid dock-party plat.i.tude it had been. It was bidding "good-by" with faint hope of _"au revoir."_ Ladies going abroad, even brides, thought little of their deck costumes so long as they included a well-tailored life-preserver.

Mrs. Thropp stared at Kedzie and breathed hard in her creaking satin.

And Adna looked out at her over the high collar that took a nip at his Adam's apple every time he swallowed it.

The old parents were sad with an unwonted sorrow. They had money at last and they had even been hauled up close to the aristocracy as the tail to Kite Kedzie. But now they had time to realize that they were to lose this pretty thing they had somehow been responsible for yet unable to control. They had nearly everything else, so their child was to be taken from them.

Suddenly they loved her with a grave-side ache. She was their baby, their little girl, their youth, their beauty, their romance, their daughter. And perhaps in a few days she would be shattered and dead in a torpedoed s.h.i.+p. Perhaps in some high-flung lifeboat she would be crouching all drenched and stuttering with cold and dying with terror.

Mrs. Thropp broke into big sobs that jolted her sides and she fell over against Adna, who did not know how to comfort her. He held her in arms like a bear's and patted her with heavy paws, but she felt on her head the drip-drip of his tears. And thus Kedzie by her departure brought them together in a remarriage, a poor sort of honeymoon wherein they had little but the bitter-sweet privilege of helping each other suffer.

The picture of their welded misery brought Kedzie a return, too, to her child hunger for parentage. She wanted a mother and a father and she could not have them. She went to put her exquisite arms about them and the three so dissimilar heads were grotesquely united.

The Marquess of Strathdene pretended to be disgusted and stormed out. But that was because he did not want to be seen making an a.s.s of himself, weeping as Bottom the Weaver wept. He flung away his salted and extinguished cigarette and wondered what was the matter with the world where nothing ever came out right.

His own mother was weeping all the time and her letters told always of new losses. The newspapers kept printing stories of Strathdene's chums being put away in a trench or a hospital, or falling from the clouds dead.

And starvation was coming everywhere; in England there was talk of famine, and all America had gone mad with fear of it. But still the war went on in a universal suicide which n.o.body could stop, and peace, the one thing that everybody wanted, was wanted by n.o.body on any terms that anybody else would even discuss.

As he agonized with his philosophy and lighted another cigarette, the street roared like hurricane. Below the windows the French Mission was proceeding up Fifth Avenue. Marechal Joseph Joffre and Rene Viviani were awakening tumult in the American heart and stirring it to the rescue of France and of England and of Belgium and Italy, with what outcome none could know. One could only know that at last the great flood of war had encircled the United States, reducing it to the old primeval problems and emotions: how to get enough to eat, how to get weapons, how to find and beat down the enemy, how to endure the farewells of fathers, mothers, sons, sisters, sweethearts, wives. Everything was complex beyond understanding for minds, but things were very simple for hearts; they had only to ache with sorrow or wrath.

The Marchioness of Strathdene and her airy husband reached England without being submarined, and there, to her great surprise, Kedzie found a whole new universe of things not quite right. "If only it were otherwise!" was still the perpetual alibi of contentment.

CHAPTER XVIII

From the glory of the festivals of alliance Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe were absent. Both were so eager to be abroad in the battle that they did not miss the flag-waving. But they wanted to cross the sea together. The importance of this ambition tempted Charity to a desperate conclusion that the formalities of her union with Jim did not matter so long as they were together. Yet the risk of death was so inescapable and she was so imbued with churchliness that her dreams were filled with visions of herself dead and buried in unhallowed ground, of herself and Jim standing at heaven's gate and turned away for lack of a blessing on their union.

Her soul was about ready to break completely, but her body gave out first. It was in a small town in New Jersey that they found themselves weather-bound.

The sky seemed to rain ice-water and they took refuge in the village's one hotel, a dismal place near the freight-station. The entrance was up a narrow staircase, past a bar-room door.

The rooms were ill furnished and ill kept, and the noise of screaming locomotives and jangling freight-cars was incessant. But there was no other hospitality to be had in the town.

Jim left Charity at her door and begged her to sleep. Her dull eyes and doddering head promised for her.

He went to his own room and laughed at the cheap wretchedness of it: the cracked pitcher in the cracked bowl, the washstand whose lower door would not stay open, the two yellow towels in the rack, the bureau, the cane chairs, and the iron bed with its thin mattress and neglected drapery.

He lowered himself into a rickety rocker and looked out through the dirtier window at the dirty town. The only place to go was to sleep, and he tried to make the journey. But a ferocious resentment at the idiocy of things drove away repose.

He resolved that he had been a fool long enough. He would give up the vain effort to conform, and would take Charity without sanction. He was impatient to go to her then and there, but he dared not approach her till she had rested.

He remembered a book he had picked up at one of their villages of denial. It was one of those numberless books everybody is supposed to have read. For that reason he had found it almost impossible to begin.

But he was desperate enough to read even a cla.s.sic. He hoped that it would be a soporific. That was his definition of a cla.s.sic.

The book was the Reverend Charles Kingsley's _Hypatia._ Jim was down on the Episcopal clergy one and all, and he read with prejudice, skipping the preface, of course, which set forth the unusual impulse of a churchman to help the Church of his own day by pointing out the crimes and errors of the Church of an earlier day; a too, too rare appeal to truth for the sake of salvation by the way of truth.

As Jim glanced angrily through the early pages, the pictures of life in the fifth century caught and quickened his gritty eyes. He skimmed the pa.s.sages that did not hold him, but as the hours went on he grew more unable to let go.

The sacred lunch hour pa.s.sed by ignored. The rain beat down on the roof as the words rained up from the page. The character of that eminently wise and beautiful and good Hypatia seemed to be Charity in ancient costume. The hostility of the grimy churchmen of that day infuriated him. He cursed and growled as he read.

The persecution of Hypatia wrought him to such wrath that he wanted to turn back the centuries and go to her defense. He breathed hard as he came to the last of the book and read of the lynching of Hypatia, the attack of the Christians upon her chariot, the dragging of her exquisite body through the streets, and even into the church, and up to the altar, up to the foot of "the colossal Christ watching unmoved from off the wall, his right hand raised to give a blessing--or a curse?"

Jim panted as Philammon did, tracing her through the streets by the fragments of her torn robes and fighting through the mob in vain to reach her and s.h.i.+eld her. He became Philammon and saw not words on a page, but a tragedy that lived again.

She shook herself free from her tormentors, and, springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky ma.s.s around--shame and indignation in those wide clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ, appealing--and who dare say, in vain?--from man to G.o.d.

Her lips were opened to speak; but the words that should have come from them reached G.o.d's ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck her down, the dark ma.s.s closed over her again ... and then wail on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, rang along the vaulted roofs and thrilled like the trumpet of avenging angels through Philammon's ears.

Crushed against a pillar, unable to move in the dense ma.s.s, he pressed his hands over his ears. He could not shut out those shrieks! When would they end? What in the name of the G.o.d of mercy were they doing? Tearing her piecemeal? Yes, and worse than that. And still the shrieks rang on, and still the great Christ looked down on Philammon with that calm, intolerable eye, and would not turn away. And over His head was written in the rainbow, "I am the same, yesterday, to-day, and forever!" The same as He was in Judea of old, Philammon? Then what are these, and in whose temple? And he covered his face with his hands, and longed to die.

It was over. The shrieks had died away into moans; the moans to silence.

How long had he been there? An hour, or an eternity? Thank G.o.d it was over! For her sake--but for theirs?

Startled by the vividness of the murder, Jim looked up from the book, thinking that he had heard indeed the shrieks of Charity in a death-agony. The walls seemed to quiver still with their reverberation.

He put down the book in terror and saw where he was. It was like waking from a nightmare. He was glad to find that he was not in a temple of ancient Alexandria, but in even that dingy New Jersey inn.

He wondered if Charity had not died. He hesitated to go to her door and knock. She needed sleep so much that he hardly dared to risk waking her, even to a.s.sure himself that she was alive.

He went to the window and saw two men under umbrellas talking in the yard between the hotel wings. They would not have been laughing as they were if they had heard shrieks.

His eye was caught by a window opposite his. There sat Charity in a heavy bath-robe; her hair was down; she had evidently dropped into the chair by the open window and fallen asleep.

Jim stared at her and was reminded of how he had stared at Kedzie on his other wedding journey. Only, Kedzie had been his bride, and Charity was not yet, and might never be. Kedzie was girlish against an auroral sky; she was rather illumined than dressed in silk. Charity was a heart-sick woman, driven and f.a.gged, and swaddled now in a heavy woolen blanket of great bunches and wrinkles. Kedzie was new and pink and fresh as any dew-dotted morning-glory that ever sounded its little bugle-note of fragrance. Charity was an old sweetheart, worn, drooping, wilted as a broken rose left to parch with thirst.

Yet it was Charity that made his heart race with love and desire and determination. She was Hypatia to him and he vowed that the churchmen should not deny her nor destroy her. He clenched his fists with resolution, then went back to his book and finished it. He loved it so well that he forgave the Church and the clergy somewhat for the sake of this clergyman who had spoken so st.u.r.dily for truth and beauty and mercy. He loved the book so well that he even read the preface and learned that Hypatia really lived once and was virtuous, though pagan, and was stripped and slain at the Christian altar, chopped and mutilated with oyster sh.e.l.ls in a literal ostracism, her bones burned and her ashes flung into the sea.

The lesson Kingsley drew from her fate was that the Church was fatally wrong to sanction "those habits of doing evil that good may come, of pious intrigue, and at last of open persecution, which are certain to creep in wheresoever men attempt to set up a merely religious empire, independent of human relations.h.i.+ps and civil laws." The preacher-novelist warned the Church of now that the same old sins of then were still at work.