We Can't Have Everything Part 55

All in all and by and large, Gilfoyle was not happy in Chicago. The few persons, mainly women, who took him up as an interesting novelty grew tired of him. His advertising schemes did not dazzle the alert Illini.

For one reason or another the wares he celebrated did not "go big."

He lost his first job and took an inferior wage with a shabbier firm. He took his women friends to the movies now instead of the theaters. And so it was that one night when he was beauing a Denver woman, who was on her way to New York and fame, he found the box-line extending out on the sidewalk and half-way up the block. It was irksome to wait, but people like to go to shows where the crowds are. He took his place in the line, and his Miss Clampett stood at his elbow.

The queue was slowly drawn into the theater and he finally reached a place in front of the lithographs. He almost jumped out of his skin when he saw a colossal head of Anita Adair smiling at him from a sunbonnet streaming with curls.

The letterpress informed Gilfoyle that it was indeed his own Anita.

The people in the line were talking of her as the new star. They were calling her familiarly by her first name and discussing her with all the freedom of the crowd:

"That's Anita. Ain't she sweet?"

"Everybody says Anita's just too lovely."

"Some queen, boy? Me for Anita. She can pack her clothes in my trunk!"

Gilfoyle felt that he ought in common decency to knock down this fellow who claimed the privileges belonging to himself. But he remembered that he had abandoned those privileges. And the fellow looked unrefinedly powerful.

Gilfoyle gnawed the lip of silence, realizing also that his announcement would make a strange impression on Miss Clampett. She was one of those authors one reads about who think it necessary to hunt experiences and live romances in order to find literary material.

Gilfoyle had done his best to teach her how wildly well a born New-Yorker can play the lute of emotion. To proclaim now that he was the anonymous husband of this glitterer on the billboard would have been a shocking confession.

Gilfoyle swallowed his secret, but it made his heart flutter tremendously. When at length he and Miss Clampett were admitted to the theater and walked down the aisle Kedzie came from the background of the screen forward as if to meet him. She came on and on, and finally as he reached his seat, a close-up of her brought them face to face with a vividness that almost knocked him over. She looked right at him, seemed to recognize him, and stopped short.

He felt as guilty as if she had actually caught him at a rendezvous. Yet he felt pride, too.

This luminous being was his wife. He remembered all that she had been to him. Miss Clampett noted his perturbations and made a brilliant guess at their cause. She asked him if he wanted to leave her and go around to the stage door to meet this wonderful Miss Adair. Gilfoyle laughed poorly at her quip. He was surprised to learn from her that Anita Adair was already a sensation among the film stars. He had not chanced to read the pages where her press-matter had celebrated her. He defended himself from the jealousy of Miss Clampett very lamely; for the luscious beauty of his Anita, her graphic art, and her sway over the audience rekindled his primal emotions to a greater fire than ever.

When the show was over he abandoned Miss Clampett on her door-step and went to his own boarding-house in a nympholepsy. He was a mortal wedded to a fairy. He was Endymion with a moon enamoured of him. Kedzie indeed had come down from the screen to Gilfoyle, clothed in an unearthly effulgence.

The next morning he turned to the moving-picture columns of the Chicago _Tribune_, the _Herald_, and the other papers, and he found that Kedzie was celebrated there with enthusiasm by Kitty Kelly, "Mae Tinee," Mrs.

Parsons, and the rest of the critics of the new art. On Sunday several of her interviews appeared, and her portraits, in eminent company.

Gilfoyle's forgotten affections came back to life, expanding and efflorescent. He throbbed with the wonder of it. The moving picture had brought romance again to earth.

Thousands of men all over the country were falling in love with Kedzie. Who had a better right to than her husband? Unconsciously his resentments against her fell away. His heart swelled with such plenitude of forgiveness that he might in time have overlooked the money she lent him. It was not a disgrace to accept money from a genius of her candle-power.

For a long while he had been afraid that she would telegraph him for funds, or descend on him in Chicago and bring a heavy baggage of necessities. Now he was no longer afraid of that. He was afraid that if he called on her in New York she might not remember him.

He had heard of the real and the alleged salaries of moving-picture stars, and he a.s.sumed that Kedzie must be as well paid as she was well advertised. He did not know of the measly little hundred dollars a week she was bound down to by her contract. If he had known he would have rejoiced, because one hundred dollars a week was about four times more than Gilfoyle had ever earned.

Of course Gilfoyle resolved to go to New York. Of course he started to telegraph his wife and found the telegram hard to write. Then he began a long letter and found it harder to write. And of course he finally decided to surprise her. He resigned his job. His resignation was accepted with humiliating cordiality.

Of course he took the Twentieth Century Limited to New York. It was more expensive, but it was quicker; and what did a few dollars matter, now that he was the husband of such an earner? He had unwittingly hitched his wagon to a star, and now he would take a ride through heaven. He wrote a poem or two to that effect, and the train-wheels inspired his prosody.

He dreamed of an ideal life in which he should loll upon a sofa of ease, thrumming his lyre, while his wife devoted herself to her career outside.

Where would Horace and Virgil have been if they had not had their expenses paid by old Mr. Maecenas? Since Mrs. Gilfoyle could afford to be a patroness, let her patronage begin at home. Her reward would be beyond price, for Gilfoyle decided to perpetuate her fame in powerful rhyme far outlasting the celluloid in which she was writing her name now.

Celluloid is perishable indeed, and very inflammable. Gilfoyle did not know that the Hyperfilm studio had burned to the ground before he saw Kedzie's picture in Chicago. But he blithely left that city to its fate and sped eastward.

CHAPTER XXVII

Gilfoyle reached New York on the Twentieth Century. It was an hour late, and so the railroad company paid him a dollar. He wished it had been later. In his present plight time was anything but money to him.

It took him some time to find the Hyperfilm Company's temporary studio.

He learned of the fire, and his hope wavered. When he reached the studio Kedzie was not there. The news of her resignation had percolated even to the doorman, who rarely knew anything from inside or outside the studio--an excellent non-conductor of information he was. Gilfoyle had some difficulty in finding Kedzie's address, but at last he learned it, and he made haste to her apartment.

He was impressed by its gaudy vestibule. He told the hall-boy that he wanted to see Miss Adair.

"Name, please?"

"Just say a gentleman to see her."

"Gotta git the name, or I can't 'phome up. Miss Adair naturally won't see no gempman ain't got a name."

"Does she see many men?" Gilfoyle asked, with sudden alarm.

"Oh, nossa. Mainly Mr. Dyckman. But that's her business."

"What Dyckman is that, the rich Jim Dyckman?"

"Well, I ain't s'posed to give out info'mation."

"Are you supposed to take in money?" Gilfoyle juggled with a half-dollar.

The hall-boy juggled his eyes in unison, and laughed yearningly: "I reckon I might let you up by mistake. Does you know Miss Adair right well?"

"Very well--I'm a relative of hers by marriage. I want to surprise her."

"Oh, well, you better go on up."

Gilfoyle applied the magic silver wafer to the itching palm and stepped into the elevator when it came.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Kedzie was alone. She had sent her maid out to get some headache powders. She had had a good cry when she reached home. She had pondered her little brain into a kink, trying to figure out her campaign. When she had a headache, or a cold, or a sleepless night, or a lethargy, she always put a powder in her stomach. It never did any good, and she was always changing the nostrum, but she never changed the idea.

She felt ill and took off her street suit and her corsets, put on a soft, veilly thing, and stretched out on her long-chair.

She was coddling a photograph of Jim Dyckman. He had scrawled across it, "To Little Anita from Big Jim." She kissed the picture and cherished it to her aching breast.

The door-bell rang. She supposed that, as usual, the maid had forgotten to take her key with her. She went into the hall in a rage, still holding the photograph. She flung the door open--and in walked Gilfoyle.