The window was a door. Charity opened it and invited Jim in, wondering but strangely comforted. He invited her out. He explained about his gorgeous new car and his loneliness and begged her to take the air.

She put back her hands to indicate her inappropriate costume, a flimsy evening gown of brilliant color.

"Mrs. Noxon has gone out to dinner. I was to go with her, but I begged off. I'm going to New York to-morrow, and I was blue and—"

"And so am I. I've got an extra coat in my car, and the night is mild."

"No, I'd better not."

"Aw, come along!"

"No-o—"

"Yes!"

"All right. I'll get a veil for my hair."

She closed the French window and hurried away. She reappeared at the front door and shut it stealthily after her.

"Nobody saw me go. You must get me back before Mrs. Noxon comes home, or there'll be a scandal."

"Depend on me!" said Jim.

Muffling their laughter like two runaways, they stole down the steps. Her high-heeled slippers slipped and she toppled against him. She caught him off his balance, and his arms went about her to save her and himself. If he had been Irish, he would have said that he destroyed himself, for she was so unexpectedly warm and silken and lithe that she became instantly something other than the Charity he had adored as a sad, sweet deity.

He realized that she was terribly a woman.

They were no longer boy and girl out on a gay little lark. They were a man unhappily married and a woman unhappily unmarried, setting forth on a wild steed for a wild ride through the reluctant autumn air. The neighboring sea gave out the stored-up warmth of summer, and the moon with the tilted face of a haloed nun yearned over them.

When Jim helped Charity into the car her arm seemed to burn in his palm. He hesitated a moment, and a thought fluttered through his mind that he ought not to hazard the adventure. But another thought chased it away, a thought of the idiocy of being afraid, and another thought of how impossible it was to ask her to get out and go back.

He found the coat, a heavy, short coat, and held it for her, saw her ensconced comfortably, stepped in and closed the door softly. The car went forward as smoothly as a skiff on a swift, smooth water.

Charity was not so solemn as Jim. She was excited and flattered by such an unforeseen diversion breaking in on her doleful solitude.

"It's been so long since a man asked me to go buggy-riding," she said, "that I've forgotten how to behave. I'm getting to be a regular old maid, Jim."

"Huh!" was all that Jim could think of.

It was capable of many interpretations—reproof, anger at fate, polite disbelief, deprecation.

Jim tried to run away from his peculiar and most annoying emotions. But Charity went with him. She looked back and said:

"Funny how the moon rides after us in her white limousine."

"Huh!" said Jim.

"Is that Mexican you're speaking?" she chided.

"I was just thinking," Jim growled.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing much—except what a ghastly shame it is that so—so—well, I don't know what to call you—but well, a woman like you—that you should be living alone with nothing better to do than run the gantlet of those God-awful submarines and probably get blown up and drowned, or, worse yet, spend your days breaking your heart nursing a lot of poor mangled, groaning Frenchmen that get shot to pieces or poisoned with gas or—Oh, it's rotten! That's all it is: it's rotten!"

"Somebody has to take care of them."

"Oh, I know; but it oughtn't to be you. If there was any manhood in this country, you'd have Americans to nurse."

"There are Americans over there, droves of them."

"Yes, but they're not wearing our uniform. We ought to be over there under our own flag. I ought to be over there."

"Maybe you will be. I'll go on ahead and be waiting for you."

There is nothing more pitiful than sorrow that tries to smile, and Jim groaned:

"Oh, Charity Coe! Charity Coe!"

He gripped the wheel to keep from putting his hand out to hers. And they went in silence, thinking in the epic elegy of their time.

Jim drove his car up to the end of Rhode Island and across to Tiverton; then he left the highway for the lonelier roads. The car charged the dark hills and galloped the levels, a black stallion with silent hoofs and dreadful haste. There was so much death, so much death in the world! The youth and strength and genius of all Europe were going over the brink eternally in a Niagara of blood.

And the sea that Charity was about to venture on, the sea whose estuaries lapped this sidelong shore so innocently with such tender luster under the gentle moon, was drawing down every day and every night ships and ships and ships with their treasures of labor and their brave crews till it seemed that the floor of the ocean must be populous with the dead.

Charity felt quite close to death. A very solemn tenderness of farewell endeared the beautiful world and all its doomed creatures. But most dear of all was this big, simple man at her side, the man she ought to have married. It was all her fault that she had not. She owed him a profound eternal apology, and she had not the right to pay the debt—that is, so long as she lived she had not the right. But if they were never to meet again—then she was already dying to him.

It was important that she should not depart this life without making restitution of what she owed. She had owed Jim Dyckman the love he had pleaded for from her and would not get from anyone else.

He had a right to love, and it was to be eternally denied to him. He would go on bitterly grieved and shamed to think that nobody could love him, for Charity had repulsed him, and some day he would learn that Kedzie had deceived him.

Lacking the courage to warn him against his wife, Charity felt that she must have at least the courage to say;

"Good-by, Jim. I have been loving you of late with a great love."

There would be no injury done to Kedzie thus, for Charity would speak as a ghost, an impalpable departed one. There would be no sin—only a beautiful expiation by confession. She was enfranchised of earthly restraints, enfranchised as the dead are from mortal obligations.

But the moods that are so holy, so pure, and so vast while they are moods resent words. Words are like tin cups to carry the ocean in. It is no longer an ocean when a bit of it is scooped up. It is only a little brackish water, odious to drink and quenching no thirst.

Charity could not devise the first phrase of her huge and oceanic emotion. It would have been only a proffer of brine that Jim could not have relished from her. He understood better her silence. They went blindly on and on, letting the road lead them and the first whim decide which turn to take and which to pass.

And so they were eventually lost in the land as they were lost in their mood.

And after a time of wonderful enthusiasms in their common grief the realities began to claim them back. A loud report like a pistol-shot announced that the poetry of motion had become prose.

Jim stopped the car and became a blacksmith while he went through the tool-box, found a jack for the wheel, laboriously unshipped the demountable rim, replaced it with the extra wheel, and set forth again.

The job had not improved the cleanliness of his hands nor spared the chastity of his shirt-bosom. But the car had four wheels to go on, and they regained a main road at last and found a signboard announcing, "Tiverton, 18 miles." That meant thirty miles to Newport.

Charity looked at her watch. It brought her back from the timelessness of her meditation to the world where the dock had a great deal to say about what was respectable and what not.

"Good Lord!" she groaned. "Mrs. Noxon is home long ago and scared or shocked to death. We must fly!"

They flew, angry, both of them, at having to hurry back to school and a withering reprimand, as if they were still mere brats. Gradually the car began to refuse the call for haste. Its speed sickened, gasped, died.

Jim swore quite informally, and raged: "I told that infernal hound to fill the tank. He forgot! The gas is gone."

Charity shrugged her shoulders. "I deserved it," she said. "I only hope I don't get you into trouble. What will your wife say?"

"What won't she say? But I'm thinking about you."

"It doesn't matter about me. I've got nobody who cares enough to scold me."

They were suddenly illumined by the headlights of an approaching car. They shielded their faces from the glare instinctively. They felt honest, but they did not look honest out here together.

The car was checked and a voice called from the blur, "Want any help?"

"No, thanks," Jim answered from his shadow.

The car rolled on. While Jim made a vain post-mortem examination of the car's machinery Charity looked about for a guide-post. She found a large signboard proclaiming "Viewcrest Inn, 1 mile." She told Jim.

He said: "I know of it. It has a bad name, but so long as the gasolene is good—I'll go get some. Make yourself at home." He paused. "I can't leave you alone here in the wilderness at midnight."

"I'll go along."

"In those high-heeled shoes?"

"And these low-necked gown," sighed Charity. "Oh, what a fool, what a stupid fool I've been!"

But she set forth. Jim offered his arm. She declined it at first, but she was glad enough of it later. They made an odd-looking couple, both in evening dress, promenading a country road. All the wealth of both of them was insufficient to purchase them so much as a street-car ride. They were paupers—the slaves, not the captains, of their fate. Charity stumbled and tottered, her ankles wrenched by the ruts, her stilted slippers going to ruin. Jim offered to carry her. She refused indignantly. She would have accepted a lift from any other vehicle now, but none appeared. The only lights were in the sky, where a storm was practising with fireworks.

"Just our luck to get drenched," said Jim.

It was about the only bad luck they escaped, but the threat of it lent Charity speed. They passed one farm, whose dogs rushed out and bayed at them carnivorously.

"That's the way people will bark when they find out about our innocent little picnic," said Charity.

"They're not going to find out," said Jim.

"Trying to keep it secret gives it a guilty look," said Charity.

"What people don't know won't hurt 'em," said Jim.

"What they do imagine will hurt us," said Charity.

At the top of a knoll in a clandestine group of trees they found "Viewcrest Inn." It was dark but for a dim light in the office. The door of that was locked.

Trade was dull, now that the Newport season was over, and only an occasional couple from Fall River, Providence, or New Bedford tested the diminished hospitality. But to-night there had been a concurrence of visitors. Jim rattled at the door. A waiter appeared, yawning candidly. He limped to the door with a gait that Kedzie would have recognized.

He peered out and shook his head, waving the intruders away. Jim shook the knob and glowered back.

The waiter, who, in the classic phrase, was "none other than" Skip Magruder, unlocked the door.

"Nothin' doin', folks," said Skip. "Standin' room only. Not a room left."

"I don't want any of your dirty rooms," said Jim. "I want some gasolene."

"Bar's closed," said Skip, who had a nimble wit.

"I said gasolene!" said Jim, menacingly.

"Sorry, boss, but the last car out took the last drop we had in the pump. We'll have some more to-morrow mornin'."

"My God!" Jim whispered.

Then the storm broke. A thunder smash like the bolt of an indignant Heaven. It turned on all the faucets above.

"Where's the telephone?" Jim demanded.

"T.D.," said Skip.

"What's that?"

"Temporary discontinued." Skip grew confidential. "The boss was a little slow on the pay and they shut him off. We're takin' in a lot of dough to-night, though, and he'll prob'ly get it goin' to-morrow all right."

To-morrow again! Jim snarled back at the pack of wolfish circumstances closing in on him. He turned to Charity.

"We've got to stay here."

Charity "went white," as the saying is. The rain streamed down.

"We 'ain't a room left," said Skip.

"You've got to have," said Jim.

"Have to speak to the artshiteck," said Skip. Then he rubbed his head, trying to get out an idea by massage. "There's the poller. Big lounge there, but not made up. Would you and your wife wish the poller?"

He dragged the "wife" with a tone that nearly got him throttled. But Jim paused. A complicated thought held him. To protest that Charity was not his wife seemed hardly the most reassuring thing to do. He let the word go and ignored Skip's cynical intonation. Jim's knuckles ached to rebuke him, but he had not fought a waiter since his wild young days. And Skip was protected by his infirmity.

Charity was frightened and revolted, abject with remorse for such a disgusting consequence of such a sweet, harmless impulse. She was afraid of Jim's temper. She said:

"Take the parlor by all means."

"All right," said Jim.

Skip fumbled about the desk for a big book, and, finding it, opened it and handed Jim a pen.

"Register, please," said Skip.

"I will not."

"Rules of the house."

"What do I care about your rules!"

"Have to wake the boss, then."

"Give me the pen."

He started to write his own name; that left Charity's designation in doubt. He glanced at the other names. "Mr. and Mrs. George Washington" were there, "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith" twice, as well as "William Jones and wife."

Jim wondered if the waiter knew him. So many waiters did. At length, with a flash of angry impulse, he wrote: "James D—," paused, finished "Dysart," hesitated again, then put "Mr. and Mrs." before it. Skip read, and grinned. He did not know who Jim was, but he knew he was no Dysart.

Skip led the way to the parlor up-stairs, lighted the lights, and hastily disappeared, fearing that he might be asked to fetch something to eat or drink. He was so tired and sleepy that even the prospect of a tip did not interest him so much as the prospect of his cot in the attic, where he could dream that he was in New York again.

Jim and Charity looked at each other. Jim munched his own curses, and Charity laughed and cried together. Jim's arms had an instinct for taking her to his heart, but he felt that he must be more respectful than ever since they were in so respectless a plight. She never seemed purer and sadder to him than then.

She noted how haggard and dismal he looked, and said, "Aren't you going to sit down?"

"No—not here," he said. "You curl up on that plush horror and get some rest."

"I will not!" said Charity.

"You will, too," said Jim. "You're a wreck, and I ought to be shot. Get some sleep, for God's sake!"

"What becomes of you?"

"I'll scout round and find a place in the office. I think there is a billiard-room. If worst comes to worst, I'll do what Mrs. Leslie Carter did in a play I saw—sleep on the dining-room table."

"Not less than a table d'hote will hold you," Charity smiled, wanly.

"Don't worry about me. You go by-by and pray the Lord to forgive me and help us both."

He waved his hand to her in a heartbreak of bemocked and benighted tenderness and closed the door. He prowled softly about the office and the adjacent rooms, but found no place to sleep. He was in such a fever of wrath at himself that he walked out in the rain to cool his head. Then he sank into a chair, read an old Boston paper twice, and fell asleep among the advertisements.

He woke at daybreak. The rain had ended and he wandered out in the chill, wet grounds of the shabby inn. The morning light was merciless on the buildings, the leafless trees, and on his own costume. The promised view from the crest was swathed in haze—so was his outlook on the future.

His fury at the situation grew as he pondered it. He was like a tiger in a pit. He raged as much at himself as at the people who would take advantage of him. The ludicrousness of the situation added the ultimate torment. He could not save Charity except by ingenious deceptions which would be a proof of guilt if they did not succeed miraculously.

The dress he was in and the dress she was in were the very habiliments of guilt. Getting back to Newport in evening clothes would be the advertisement of their escapade. His expansive shirt-bosom might as well have been a sandwich-board. His broadcloth trousers and his patent-leather pumps would be worse than rags.

And Charity had no hat. There was an unmistakable dressed-up eveningness about them both.

This struck him as the first evil to remedy. As with an escaped convict, his prime necessity was a change of clothes. There was only one way to manage that. He went back to the hotel and found a startled early-morning waiter sweeping out the office. Jim asked where the nearest telephone was, and learned that it was half a mile away at a farm-house.

Jim turned up his collar, pulled down his motor-cap, and struck out along the muddy road. He startled the farmer's family and their large hands were not wide enough to hide their wider smiles.

On the long hike thither Jim had worked out his stratagem. He called up his house, or, rather, Kedzie's house, in Newport, and after much delay got his yawning valet to the telephone. He never had liked that valet less than now.

"That you, Dallam? My car broke down out in the country," he explained, every syllable a sugarless quinine pill in his throat. "That is to say, the gasolene gave out. I am in my evening clothes, so is—er—Mrs.—er—the lady I was with. I want you to bring me at once an outfit of day clothes, and a—one of my wife's long motor-coats—a very long one—and one of her small hats. Then get out my wife's limousine and send the suit-case and the coat and hat to me here at the Viewcrest Inn, and tell the chauffeur to bring an extra can of gasolene."

A voice with an intolerable smile in it came back: "Very good, sir. I presume I'd better not waken Mrs. Dyckman?"

"Naturally not. I don't want to—er—alarm her."

"She was quite alarmed when you didn't come home, sir, last night."

"Well, I'll explain when I see her. Do you understand the situation?"

"Perfectly, sir."

Jim writhed at that. But he had done his best and he would take the worst.

The farmer gave him a ride to the hotel in his milk-wagon. When Jim rode up in a parody of state he saw Charity peeping from the parlor window. The morning light had made the situation plain to her. It did not improve on inspection. It took very little imagination to predict a disastrous event, though Jim explained the felicity of his scheme. He had planned to have Charity ride in in the limousine alone, while he took his own car back with the gasolene that was on the way.

The twain were compelled by their costume to stay in the parlor together. They were ferociously hungry and ordered breakfast at last. It took forever to get it, for guests of that hotel were not ordinarily early risers.

Skip Magruder, dragged from his slumbers to serve the meal, found Charity and Jim in the room where he had left them. He made such vigorous efforts to overlook their appearance in bedraggled dinner clothes at a country breakfast that Jim threatened to break his head. Skip grew surly and was ordered out.

After breakfast Jim and Charity waited and waited, keeping to the parlor lest the other guests see them.

At last the limousine arrived. As soon as he heard it coming Jim hurried to the window to make sure that it was his—or, rather, his wife's.

It was—so much his wife's that she stepped out of it. Also her mother. Also her father. They advanced on the hotel.

Jim and Charity were stupefied. There was a look on Kedzie's face that frightened him.

"She means business," he groaned.

Charity sighed: "Divorce! And me to be named!"

"She won't do that. She owes you everything."

"What an ideal chance to pay off the debt!"

"Don't you worry. I'll protect you," Jim insisted.

"How?" said Charity.

"I'll fight the case to the limit."

"Are you so eager to keep your wife?" said Charity.

"No. I never did love her. I'll never forgive her for this."

But he had not the courage to go and meet Kedzie and her mother and her father. They were an unconscionable time coming.

He did not know that Kedzie and Skip Magruder were renewing old acquaintance.

While he waited the full horror of his dilemma came over him. Kedzie would undoubtedly sue him for divorce. If he lost, Charity would be publicly disgraced. If he won, he would be tied to Kedzie for life.



CHAPTER VII

A quick temper is an excellent friend for bolstering up an ailing conscience, especially if itself is bolstered by an inability to see the point of view of the other party to a conflict.

Kedzie's wrath at Charity justified to Kedzie any cruelty, especially as Kedzie was all harrowed up by the fear of losing the Marquess of Strathdene. And Kedzie loved Strathdene as much as she could ever love anybody.

For one thing Strathdene was fiercely jealous of her—and the poor child had been simply famished for a little jealousy. Her first husband had hardly known what the word meant. Before their marriage Gilfoyle had permitted her to dance the Greek dances without paying her the compliment of a beating. After their marriage he had gone to Chicago to earn a living and left her alone in New York City where there were millions of rivals.

Her second husband had been very philosophical about her career and had taken the news of her previous marriage with disgusting stoicism. Finally he had gone to the Mexican Border for an indefinite stay, leaving her to her own devices and the devices of any man who came along. It was too much like leaving a diamond outdoors: it cheapened the diamond.

But Strathdene—ah, Strathdene! He turned blue at the mention of Kedzie's husband. When Jim came back from Texas and Kedzie had to be polite to him Strathdene almost had hydrophobia. He accused Kedzie of actually welcoming Jim. He charged her with polyandry. He threatened to shoot her and her husband and himself. He comported himself unlike any traditional Englishman of literature. He was, in fact, himself and what he did was like him. He was a born aviator. His heart was used to racing at unheard-of speeds. He could sustain superhuman exaltations and depressions.

Being in love with him was like going up in an airship with him, which was one of Kedzie's ambitions for the future. She dreamed of a third honeymoon in excelsis.

Strathdene told her that if she ever looked at another man after she married him he would take her up ten thousand feet in the clouds, set his airship on fire, and drop with her as one cinder into the ocean. What handsomer tribute could any woman ask of a man? He was a lover worth fighting for.

But she had felt uncertain of winning him till that wonderful morning when Jim did not come back home. She woke up early all by herself and heard the valet answer Jim's call from Viewcrest.

She had made a friend of Dallam by her flirtation with the nobility. The poor fellow had suffered tortures from the degradation of his master's alliance with a commoner like Kedzie until Kedzie developed her alliance with the Marquess. Then his valetic soul expanded again.

He looked upon her as his salvation.

Over the telephone she heard him now promising Jim that he would not tell Kedzie. If Jim's old valet, Jules, had not gone to France and his death he would have saved Jim from infernal distresses, but this substitute had a malignant interest in his master's confusion. Dallam proceeded forthwith to rap at Mrs. Dyckman's door and spoke through it, deferentially:

"Beg pardon, ma'am, but could I have a word?"

Kedzie wrapped herself in a bath-robe and opened the door a chink to hear the rest of what she had heard in part. The valet had no collar on and his overnight beard not off, and he, too, was in a bath-robe. Man and mistress stood there like genius and madness, "and thin partitions did their bounds divide."

"Very sorry to trouble you, ma'am," he said, "but I'm compelled to. The master has just telephoned me that his car broke down at the Viewcrest Inn out Tiverton way, and he wants his morning clothes, and also—if you'll pardon me, ma'am—he instructed me to send him a long motor-coat of yours and a large hat and your limousine. I was directed not to—ahem—to trouble you about it, ma'am, but I 'ardly dared."

He helped her out so perfectly that she had no need to say anything more than, "Quite right."

She was glad that the door screened her from observation, for she went through a crisis of emotions, wrath and disgust at Jim's perfidy versus ecstasy and gratitude to him for it.

She beat her breast with her hand as if to keep her trembling heart from turning a somersault into her mouth. Then she spoke with a calm that showed how far she had traveled in self-control.

"Very good. You were quite right. Call the chauffeur and tell him to bring round my closed car. Then send me my maid and have the cook get me some coffee. Then you may telephone my mother and father and ask them to come over at once. Please send my car for them. You might have coffee for them also. For we'll all be riding out to—did you say Viewcrest Inn?"

"Yes, ma'am. Very good, ma'am. Thank you!"

He went away thinking to himself. He thought in cockney: "My Gawd! w'at a milit'ry genius! She dictites a horder loike a Proosian general. I'm beginnin' to fink she's gowing to do milord the mokkis prahd. There's no daht abaht it. Stroike me, if there is."

By the time Kedzie was dressed and coffeed her panicky father and mother were collected and fed, and she had selected her best motor-coat for the shroud of whatever woman it was at Viewcrest. She dared not dream it was Charity.

She had time enough to tell her parents all there was to tell on the voyage, but she had no idea that her limousine was taking her to the very inn that Strathdene had lured her to on that night when he tested her worthiness of his respect.

It had been dark on that occasion and she had been in such a chaos that she had paid no heed to the name of the place or the dark roads leading thither.

She almost swooned when she reached the Viewcrest Inn and found herself confronted by Skip Magruder. And so did Skip. He had not recognized the back of her head before, but her face smote him now. There was no escaping him. Her beauty was enriched by her costume and her mien was ripened by experience, but she was unforgetably herself. He was still a waiter, and the apron he had on and the napkin he clutched might have been the same one he had when she first saw him.

When he saw her now again he gasped the name he had known her by: "Anitar! Anitar Adair! Well, I'll be—"

Then his face darkened with the memory of disprized love. He recalled the cruel answer, "Nothing doing," that she had indorsed on the stage-door letter he sent her long ago.

But the military genius that had guided Kedzie this morning inspired her still. She was not going to lose her victory for any flank attack from an ally in ambush. She sent out a flag of truce.

"Why, Skip!" she cried. "Dear old Skip! I want you to meet my father and mother. Mr. Magruder was terribly kind to me when I was alone and friendless in New York."

Mrs. Thropp had outgrown waiters and even Adna regretted the reversion to Nimrim that led him to shake hands and say, "Please to meecher."

The stupefied proprietor of the inn was begging for explanations of this unheard-of colloquy, but Skip flicked him away with his napkin as if he were a bluebottle fly and motioned Kedzie to a corner of the office. Kedzie explained, breathlessly:

"Skip, I'm in terrible trouble, and I'm so glad to find you here, for you never failed me. I was very rude to you when you sent me that note, but I—I was engaged to be married at the time and I didn't think it proper to see anybody. And—well, I'm getting my punishment now, for my husband is here with a strange woman—and—oh, it's terrible, Skip! My heart is broken, but you've got to help me. I know I can rely on you, can't I, dear old Skip?"

The girl was so efficient that she almost deserved her success. It cost her something, though, to beguile a waiter with intimate appeals that she might earn a title. But then in time of war no ally is to be scorned and the lowliest recruit is worth enlisting. A Christian can piously engage a Turk to help him whip another Christian.

When Kedzie pulled out the tremolo stop and looked up, big-eyed, and pouted at him, Skip was hers.

"Your husband, Anitar? Your husband here? Why, the low-life hound! I'll go up and kill him for you if you want me to."

Kedzie explained that she didn't want to get her dear Skip into any trouble, but she did want his help. Skip found her a good boarding-place the first time he met her, and now she had to dupe him into securing her furnished rooms and board in a castle. She may have rather encouraged him to imagine that once she was free from Jim she would listen once more to Skip. But there is no evidence on that point and he must have felt a certain awe of her. His pretty duckling had become so gorgeous a swan.

Her parley with Skip had delayed her march up-stairs to the attack, but Jim and Charity could only wait in befuddled suspense, unwilling and afraid to attempt a flight.

Kedzie went up-stairs at last, backed by her father and mother and Skip and the chauffeur with the suit-case of Jim's clothes. Kedzie was dazed at the sight of Charity.

But there was no need of any oration.

After a little sniffing and nodding of the head she spoke:

"Well, I thought as much! Jim, you telephoned for some things of mine and of yours. Here they are. There's a can of gasolene down-stairs for you. Here's your suit-case, and the coat and hat for Mrs. Cheever. I presume you will go back in your own car."

Jim nodded.

"Then we needn't keep you any longer. Mr. McNiven is your lawyer still, I suppose. I'll send my lawyer to him. Come along, mother—and father."

She led her little cohort down-stairs and bade Skip a very cordial au revoir.



CHAPTER VIII

The Dyckman divorce farce might have been as politely performed as l'affaire Cheever—or even more so than that, since practice makes perfect. At least a temporary secrecy could have been secured with leisureliness by a residence in another State.

But Kedzie felt as Zada did, that she simply could not wait, though her reason was well to the opposite. Zada had been afraid that a child would arrive before the divorce, but Kedzie that a gentleman would depart.

Strathdene was straining at the anchor like one of his own biplanes with the wind nudging its wings. In Europe they were shooting down airships by the score nearly every day and Strathdene wanted to go back. "It's not fair to the Huns," he said. "They haven't had a pot-shot at me for so long they'll forget I was ever over. And some of those men that were corporals when I made my Ace, are Aces now as well and they're crawling up on my score! I'll have to fly all the time to catch up."

But he wanted to take with him his beauty. He was jealous of Uncle Sam and afraid to trust Kedzie to him. The more inconvenient she became to him the more determined he grew to overcome the obstacles to her possession.

He abominated the necessity of taking his bride through the side door of the court-house to the altar, but he would not give her up. It looked, however, as if he would have to. And then he received mysteriously an assignment to the inspection of flying-machines purchased in the American market. Kedzie told him that it was a Heaven-sent answer to her prayers, and he believed it.

But it was his poor mother's work; she had written to a friend in the British Embassy imploring him to keep her precious boy out of France as long as possible. Hecatombs of gallant young lords were being butchered and she had lost a son, two brothers, a nephew, and unnumbered friends. The whole nobility of Europe was as deep in mourning as all the other grades of prestige. She wanted a brief respite from terror. She did not know till later to what further risks she was exposing her boy.

Kedzie was grimly resolute about getting her freedom from Jim in order to transfer it to Strathdene. She planned to manage it quietly for the sake of her own future. But a sickening mess was made of it. For Kedzie fell into the hands of a too, too conscientious lawyer. It is impossible to be loyal in all directions, and young Mr. Anson Beattie was loyal first to his wife and children, whom he loved devotedly. They needed money and clients came slowly to him.

His wife had relatives in Newport and they chanced to be visiting there. The relatives were shopkeepers, to whom Pet Bettany owed much money. That was how Kedzie came to consult Mr. Beattie. Kedzie telephoned Pet the moment she got back from the Viewcrest Inn, and Pet told her of Beattie.

When Kedzie drifted into his ken with a word of introduction from Pet Bettany he hailed her as a Heaven-sent messenger. She brought him advertisement, and big fees on a platter.

The very name of Dyckman was incense and myrrh. Mr. Beattie smelled gold. When Kedzie poured out her story and explained that the famous Mrs. Charity Cheever was the wreckress of her home Mr. Beattie saw head-lines everywhere.

If the Dyckmans had been a humble couple he would have tried to reconcile them, perhaps, or he would have separated them with little noise. But it was noise he wanted. The longer and louder the trial the more free space Mr. Beattie would get.

"It Pays to Advertise" is a necessary motto for all professions. The lawyer is advertised by his hating enemies, Beattie said to himself, and to his ecstatic wife when he went to her room after Kedzie left. His wife would never have taken a divorce if divorces were distributed at every door like handbills. Mr. Beattie said to Mrs. Beattie:

"Soul o' my soul, I'm going to handle this case in such a way that it will stir up a smell from here to California. I'll get that little woman an alimony that will break all known records and I'll take a percentage of the gate receipts as they come in. I wouldn't trust my little client a foot away."

"Don't trust her too close, either," said his devoted spouse, who was just jealous enough to be remembered in time of stress.

Beattie was the sort of lawyer one reads about oftener than one meets, and he wanted to be read about. He had the almost necessary lawyer gift of beginning to hate the opposition as soon as he learned what it was. If Jim had engaged him he would have hated Kedzie with religious ardor. Kedzie engaged him; so he abominated Jim and everybody and everything associated with him from his name to his scarf-pin.

He warned Kedzie not to spend an hour under Jim Dyckman's roof, lest she seem to condone what she discovered. He advised her to disappear till Beattie was ready to strike.

That was the reason why there was no compromise, no concession, no politeness in the divorce. If collusion is vicious this case was certainly pure of it.

Jim was not permitted a quiet talk with Kedzie from the moment she found him at the Viewcrest Inn. Her arrival there plus her family had thrown him into a stupor. It was a situation for a genius to handle, since the honester a man is the more he is confused at being found in a situation that looks dishonest. Jim was never less a genius than then. Even Charity, who usually found a word when a word was needed, said not one. What could she say? Kedzie ignored her, accused her of nothing, and did not linger.

When Jim and Charity, left alone together again, looked at each other they were too disgusted to regret that they had not been as guilty as they looked. Life had the jaundice in their eyes.

But they had to get back to the world by way of material things. Jim had to change his evening clothes. He asked Charity to wait in the office below. He pointed to the motor-coat and hat that Kedzie had brought and tossed on a lounge.

Charity recoiled from wearing Kedzie's cast-off clothes or from disguising as Jim's wife, but her downcast eyes revealed her bare shoulders and arms and her delicate evening gown. They had been exquisitely appropriate to night and night lights, but they were ghastly in the day.

She put on Kedzie's mantle; it blistered her like the mantle Medea sent to her successor in her husband's love. She sat in the office and some of the guests passed through. She could see that they took her to be one of their sort, and shocks of red and white alternated through her skin.

When Jim was ready he came down with his evening clothes in the suit-case. The baggage was the final convincing touch. He picked up the gasolene-can and toted it that weary mile. One of the hotel servants offered to carry it, but Jim was in no mood for company. There are things that the wealthiest man does not want to have done for him.

They found the car studded with pools of water from the rain, and Charity shook out the cushions while Jim filled up the tank.

"Quite domestic," said Charity, in the last dregs of bitterness.

Jim did not answer. He flung the can over into a field and hopped into the car. He regretted that he had no spurs to dig into its sides, no curb bit to jerk. He owed his destruction to that car. For want of gasolene, the car was lost; for want of the car, a reputation was lost.

He thought with frenzy as he drove. He had little imagination, but it did not require an expert dreamer to foresee dire possibilities ahead. He was so sorry for Charity that he could have wept. He wanted to enfold her in his arms and promise her security. He wanted to stand in front of her and take in his own breast all the arrows of scorn that might shower upon her.

But the nearest approach to protection in his power lay along the lines of appearing to be indifferent to her. He had not been told of Kedzie's infatuation for Strathdene and he had not suspected it.

Charity was tempted to refer to it, but she felt that it would be contemptibly petty at the moment. So Jim was permitted to hope that he could find Kedzie, throw himself on her mercy and implore her to believe in his innocence. It was a sickly hope, and his heart filled with gall and with hatred of Kedzie and all she had brought on him.

He reached Newport with a terrific speed, and left Charity at Mrs. Noxon's to make her own explanations. Mrs. Noxon had defended Charity against gossip once before, but to defend her against appearances was too much to ask.

"Well-behaved people," she told Charity, "do not have appearances."

She was so cold that Charity froze also, and set her maid to packing. Mrs. Noxon's frigidity was a terrifying example of what she was to expect. She returned to New York on the first train. Jim was on it, too.

He had sped home, expecting to find Kedzie. She was gone and none of the servants knew where. If he had found her in the ferocious humor he had arrived at he might have given her the sort of divorce popular in divorce-less countries, where they annul the wife instead of the marriage. He might have sent Kedzie to the realm where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage—which should save a heap of trouble.

Jim fancied that Kedzie must have taken the train to New York, since she spoke of sending her lawyer to McNiven. It did not occur to him that she could find a New York lawyer in Newport.

He met Charity, and not Kedzie, on the train. That made bad look worse. But it gave Jim and Charity an opportunity to face the calamity that was impending. Jim tried to reassure Charity that he would keep her from suffering any public harm. The mere thought of her liability to notoriety, the realization that her long life of decency and devotion were at the mercy of the whim of a woman like Kedzie, drove her frantic.

She begged Jim to leave her to her thoughts and he went away to the purgatory of his own. Reaching New York, he returned to Charity to offer his escort to her home. She broke out, petulantly:

"Don't take me any more places, Jim. I beg you!"

"Forgive me," he mumbled, and relieved her of his compromising chivalry.

They went to their homes in separate taxicabs. Jim made haste to his apartment. Kedzie was not there and had not been heard from.

Late as it was, he set out on a telephone chase for McNiven and dragged him to a conference. It was midnight and Jim was haggard with excitement.

There are two people at least to whom a wise man tells the truth—his doctor and his lawyer. Neither of them has many illusions left, but both usually know fact when they get a chance to face it.

Jim had nothing to conceal from McNiven and his innocence transpired through all his bewilderment. He told just what had happened in its farcical-funeral details. McNiven did not smile. Jim finished with all his energy:

"Sandy, you know that Charity is the whitest woman on earth, a saint if ever there was a saint. She's the one that's got to be protected. Not a breath of her name must come out. If it takes the last cent I've got and dad's got I want you to buy off that wife of mine. You warned me against marrying her, and I wish to God I'd listened to you. I'm not blaming her for being suspicious, but I can't let her smash Charity. I'll protect Charity if I have to build a wall of solid gold around her."

McNiven tried to quiet him. He saw no reason for alarm. "You don't have to urge me to protect Charity," he said. "She's an angel as well as my client. All you need is a little sleep. Go to bed and don't worry. Remember, there never was a storm so big that it didn't blow over."

"Yes, but what does it blow over before it blows over?" said Jim.

"You're talking in your sleep already. Good night," said McNiven.



CHAPTER IX

The next morning McNiven found Charity at his office when he arrived. She had evidently been awake all night.

She told McNiven a story that agreed in the essentials with Jim's except that she made herself out the fool where he had blamed himself. McNiven had no success in trying to quiet her with soothing promises of a tame conclusion. She dreaded Kedzie.

"If it were just an outburst of jealousy," she said, "you might talk to the woman. But she's not jealous of her husband. She was as cool as a cucumber when she found us together. She was glad of it, because she had got a way to get her Marquess now. She's ambitious and Lady Macbeth couldn't outdo her."

She told McNiven what she had not had the heart to tell Jim about Strathdene. It worried him more than he admitted. While he meditated on a measure to meet this sort of attack, Charity suggested one. It was drastic, but she was desperate. She proposed the threat of a countercharge against Kedzie.

McNiven shook his head and made strange noises in his pipe. He asked for evidence against Kedzie. Charity could only quote the general opinion.

McNiven said: "No. You allege innocence on your part in spite of appearances which you admit are almost conclusive. You can hardly claim that more innocent appearances on her part prove that she is guilty. Besides, we don't want to stir up any more sediment. We'll do everything on the Q. T. Money talks, and the little lady is not deaf. My legal advice to you is, 'Don't fret,' and my medical advice is, 'Go to bed and stay there till I send you word that it's all over.' Remember one thing, there never was a storm so big that it didn't blow over."

Charity was not in the least quieted. His sedative only annoyed her ragged nerves.

"Keep my name clean," she whispered.

As she rode home in a taxicab that was like a refrigerator she passed in the Fifth Avenue melee Zada L'Etoile, now Mrs. Cheever, with the tiny little Cheever like a princelet asleep at her breast, hiding with its pink head the letter "A" that had grown there.

People of cautious respectability spoke to Zada now with amiable respect, and murmured:

"Funny thing! She's made a man of that good-for-nothing Peter Cheever. They're as happy and as thick as thieves."

Charity had heard this saying, and she dreaded to realize that perhaps in a few days respectable people would be turning from herself, not seeing her, or storing up credit by snubbing her and muttering:

"No wonder poor Cheever couldn't get along with her. He took the blame like a gentleman, and now she's found out. She was a sly one, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

Charity had not been gone from McNiven's office long before a lawyer's clerk arrived bearing the papers for a divorce on statutory grounds in the case of Dyckman versus Dyckman, Mrs. Charity C. Cheever, co-respondent, Anson Beattie counsel for plaintiff.

McNiven went after Beattie at once and proposed a quiet treaty and a settlement out of court. Beattie grinned so odiously that McNiven had to say:

"Oh, I remember you. You used to be an ambulance-chaser. What are you after now—a little dirty advertising?" "What are you after?" said Beattie. "A little collusive juggling with the Seventh Commandment?"

"The one against false witness is the Ninth," said McNiven, "But let's have a conference. This war in Europe might have been avoided by a little heart-to-heart talk beforehand. Let's profit by the lesson."

Beattie consented to this, and promised to arrange it on condition that in the mean while McNiven would accept service for his client. This was done, and Beattie left.

He saw his great publicity campaign being thwarted, and changed his mind. He hankered for fame more than gold. He filed the papers and meditated. He did not know how much or how little Kedzie loved her husband, and she had told him nothing of Strathdene. He feared that a compromise might be patched up and perhaps a reconciliation effected. He had had women come to him imploring a divorce from their abominable husbands only to see the couple link up again, kiss and make up, and call him an abominable villain for trying to part them.

After some earnest consideration of the right of his own career and his family to the full profit of this windfall, he looked up a reporter and through him a group of reporters and promised them a peep at something interesting.

He had the privilege of calling for the papers from the clerk of the court, so he took them out and permitted the reporters to glance within and make note of the contents.

Late editions of the evening papers gave the Dyckman divorce a fanfare rivaling the evidence that the Germans were about to resume their unrestricted submarine Schrecklichkeit.

If the spoken word is impossible to recall, how much more irretrievable the word that is printed in millions of newspapers. The name of Dyckman was a household word. It resounded now in every household throughout the country, and across the sea, where the name had become familiar in all the nations from the big financial dealings of the elder Dyckman as a banker for the Allies.

Reporters played about Jim Dyckman that night as if they were banderilleros and he a raging bull. He fought them with the same success.

They tried to find Charity, but she was in the doctor's care— actually. The doctor himself dismissed the reporters. He called them "ghouls," which did not sweeten their hearts toward his patient.

The next day there was probably not a morning paper in the United States in any language that failed to star the news that Mrs. Dyckman had found her husband's relations with Mrs. Cheever intolerable.

That morning saw the conference in McNiven's office, as promised by Beattie. But Kedzie did not appear; she had vanished to some place where she could not be found by anybody except the man who wrote her highly imaginative affidavits for her and the notary public who attested her signature.

At the conference with Jim, Kedzie was represented by counsel, also by father. Jim called the lawyer Beattie some hard old Anglo-Saxon names, and told him that if he were a little bigger he would give him the beating that was coming to him. Then he turned to Kedzie's father.

"Mr. Thropp," he pleaded, "you and I have always got along all right. You know I've tried to do the right thing by your daughter. I'm ready to now. She's too decent a girl to have done this thing on her own. This is the work of that rotten skunk of a lawyer—I apologize to the other skunks and the real lawyers. She has done a frightful injustice to the best woman on earth. She can never undo it, but surely she doesn't want to do any more. She's through with me, I suppose, but we ought to be able to clean up this affair respectably and quietly and not in the front show-window of all the damned newspapers in the world.

"Can't you and I make a little quiet gentleman's agreement to withdraw the charge and let the divorce go through decently? I'll make any settlement on your daughter that she wants."

Adna pondered aloud, his claim-agent instincts alert: "Settlement, eh? What might you call settlement?"

"Whatever you'd consider fair. How much would you say was right?"

Adna filled his lungs and mouthed the deliciously liquid word as if it were a veritable aurum potabile:

"Millions!"

"What!" Jim gasped.

Adna fairly gargled it again:

"Millillions!"

The greed in the old man's eyes shot Dyckman's eyes with blood. He snarled:

"So it's the plain old blackmail, eh? Well, you can go plumb to hell!"

"All right," said Adna, felicitously, "but we won't go alone. I and daughter will have comp'ny. Come on, Mr. Beattie."

After they had gone Jim realized that his hatred of being gouged had involved Charity's priceless reputation. He told McNiven to recall Beattie, but Charity herself appeared in a new and militant humor.

The first realization that her good name was gone had crushed her. She had built it up like a mansion, adding a white stone day by day. When it fell about her in ruins her soul had swooned with the disaster.

After a night and a day of groveling terror she had recaptured the valor that makes and keeps a woman good, and she leaped from her sick bed and her sick soul into an armor of rage.

She burst in on McNiven and Jim and demanded a share in the battle. When Jim told her of his latest blunder she spoke up, stoutly:

"You did the right thing. To try to buy them off would be to confess guilt. The damage is done. The whole world has read the lie. Now we'll make it read the truth. There must be some way for me to defend my name, and I want to know what it is."

McNiven told her that the law allowed her to enter the case and seek vindication, but he advised her against it. She thanked him for the information and rejected the advice. She was gray with battle-ardor and her very nostrils were fierce.

"I'm sorry to do anything to interfere with your welfare, Jim, for if I win she wins you; but you can get rid of her some other way. The little beast! She thinks she can make use of me as a bridge to cross over to her Marquess, but she can't!"

"Her Marquess?" Jim mumbled. "What does that mean?"

Charity regretted her impetuous speech, but McNiven explained it.

Jim was pretty well deadened to shocks by this time, but the news that his wife had been disloyal found an untouched spot in his heart to stab. It gave him a needed resentment, however, and a much-needed something to feel wronged about.

He caught a spark of Charity's blazing anger, and they resolved to fight the case to the limit. And that was where it took them.



CHAPTER X

Once the battle was joined, a fierce desire for haste impelled all of these people. Kedzie dreaded every hour's delay as a new risk of losing Strathdene, who was showing an increasing rage at having the name of his wife-to-be bandied about in the press, with her portraits in formal pose or snapped by batteries of reporters.

Her lawyer emphasized the heartbreak it was to her to learn that her adored husband had been led astray by her trusted friend. This did not make pleasant reading for the jealous Strathdene, and he wished himself jolly well out of the whole affair.

It was not long before his own name began to slip into the case by innuendo. Once he was in, he could not decently abandon his Kedzie, though he had to prove his devotion by denying it and threatening to shoot anybody who implied that his interest in Mrs. Dyckman was anything more than formal.

Jim Dyckman was impatient to have done with the suit, however it ended. He was tossed on both horns of the dilemma. He was compelled to fight one woman to save another. He could not defend Charity without striking Kedzie and he could not spare Kedzie without destroying Charity.

In a situation that would have overwhelmed the greatest tacticians he floundered miserably. He vowed that whatever the outcome of the case might be, he would never look at a woman again. Men find it very easy to condemn womankind en bloc, and they are forever forswearing the sex as if it were a unit or a bad habit.

During the necessary delay in reaching trial Jim asked and received an extension of his leave of absence; then his regiment came home from the Border and was mustered out of the Federal service and received again into the State control. Jim felt almost as much ashamed of involving his regiment in his scandal as Charity.

He had suffered so greatly from the embarrassment of the publicity that he could hardly endure to face his regiment and drill with his company. He offered his resignation again, but it was not accepted.

In fact, under the new condition of the National Guard service, his immediate officers had nothing to do with his resignation.

The probability of a call to arms, not against Mexico, but against the almost almighty German Empire, was so great that it looked like slackery or cowardice to ask to be excused. His next dread was that the regiment would be mustered in before the case was finished, compelling its postponement and leaving Charity to languish unrevenged.

For his inclusive anger at Everywoman soon changed back to deeper affection than ever. The first sight of her on the witness-stand at the mercy of the inquisition of the unscrupulous Beattie brought back all his old emotions for her and unnumbered new.

He had seen a picture of one of the Christian martyrs whose torture was inflicted on her by a man armed with steel pincers to pluck off her flesh from her shuddering soul bit by bit. It seemed to him that his sainted Charity was condemned to like atrocity. Her hands were bound by the thongs of the law, her body was stripped to the eyes of the crowd, and the tormentor went here and there, nipping at the quick with intolerable cruelty.

And Jim must not go to her rescue. He must not protest or lift a hand in her behalf. He must sit and suffer with her while the anguish squeezed the big sweat out of his knotted brows.

It had been hard enough to await the appearance of the case on the docket, to sit through the selection of the jury, and to study the gradual recruitment of that squad of twelve sphinxes, all commonplace, yet mysterious, lacking in all divinity of comprehension and eager to be entertained with an exciting conflict.

The fact that a woman was the plaintiff was a tremendous handicap for Jim, even though a woman was allied with him in the defense. The very name "co-respondent" condemned her in advance in the public mind. And then she was rich and therefore dissipated in the minds of those who cannot imagine wealth as providing other fascinating businesses besides vice. And Jim was wealthy and therefore a proper object for punishment. If he had earned his millions it must have been by tyrannous corruption; if he had only inherited them that was worse yet.

Beattie lost no chance to play on the baser phases of the noble and essential suspicions of the democratic soul and also on Kedzie's humble origin, her child-like prettiness proving absolutely a child-like innocence and trust, and the homely simplicity of her parents, who, being poor and ignorant, were therefore inevitably virtuous and sincere.

Jim had realized from the first what a guilty aspect his unfortunate excursion with Charity must wear in the eyes of any one but her and him. Even the waiter who was on the ground had unwittingly conspired with their delicacy to put them in a most indelicate situation. Skip went on the stand, reveling in his first experience of fame, basking in the spot-light like a cheap actor, and acting very badly, yet well enough for the groundlings he amused.

Jim and Charity underwent a martyrdom of ridicule during his testimony. A man and woman riding backward on a mule through a jeering mob might seem pathetic enough if one had the heart to deny himself the laughter, but Jim and Charity made their grotesque pilgrimage without exciting sympathy.

Beattie had tried to get Mrs. Noxon on the stand to confirm the proof that Charity had spent the night away, but the old lady showed her contempt of the court and of the submarines by sailing for Europe to escape the ordeal. The chauffeur, the valet, and the Viewcrest servants were enough, however, to corroborate Skip Magruder's story beyond any assailing, and handwriting experts had no difficulty in convincing the jury that Jim's signature on the hotel register was in his own handwriting. He had made no effort to disguise it or even to change his name till the last of it was well begun.

Mr. and Mrs. Thropp made splendid witnesses for their child and the old mother's tears melted a jury that had never seen her weep for meaner reasons.

When Charity reached the stand the case against her was so complete that all her bravery was gone. She felt herself a fool for having brought the ordeal on herself. She took not even self-respect with her to the chair of torture.



CHAPTER XI

In the good old days of Hester Prynne they published a faithless wife by sewing a scarlet "A" upon the bosom of her dress. Nowadays the word is pronounced "co-respondent," and it may be affixed to any woman's name by any newspaper, or any plaintiff in a divorce case.

So fearful a power was so much abused that since 1911 in New York the co-respondent has been permitted to come into the court and oppose the label. It is in sort a revival of the ancient right to trial by ordeal. This hideous privilege of proving innocence by walking unshod over hot plowshares is most frigidly set forth in the statute where the lawyer's gift for putting terrible things in desiccated phrases was never better shown than in Section 1757.

In an action brought to obtain a divorce on the ground of adultery, the plaintiff or defendant may serve a copy of his pleading on the co-respondent named therein. At any time within twenty days after such service on said co-respondent he may appear to defend such action, so far as the issues affect such co-respondent. If no such service be made, then at any time before the entry of judgment any co-respondent named in any of the pleadings shall have the right, at any time before the entry of judgment, to appear either in person or by attorney in said action and demand of plaintiff's attorney a copy of the summons and complaint, which must be served within ten days thereafter, and he may appear to defend such action, so far as the issues affect such co-respondent. In case no one of the allegations of adultery controverted by such co-respondent shall be proved, such co-respondent shall be entitled to a bill of costs against the person naming him as such co-respondent, which bill of costs shall consist only of the sum now allowed by law as a trial fee, and disbursements, and such co-respondent shall be entitled to have an execution issue for the collection of the same.

The exact amount of money was set forth in another place, in Section 3251, where it is stated that the sums obtainable are "for trial of an issue of fact, $30, and when the trial necessarily occupies more than two days, $10 in addition thereto."

In other words, Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever, finding her life of good works and pure deeds crowned with the infamy which Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman in her anger and her haste pressed on her brow, had the full permission of the law to come into the public court, face a vitriolic lawyer, and deny her guilt.

If she survived the trip through hell she could collect from her accuser forty dollars to pay her lawyer with. The priceless boon of such a vindication she could keep for herself. And that ended her.

This is only one of the numberless vicious and filthy and merciless consequences of the things done in the name of virtue by those who believe divorce to be so great an evil that they will commit every other evil in order to oppose it.

In no other realm of law and punishment has severity had more need of hypocrisy to justify itself than in the realm of wedlock. What grosser burlesque could there be than the conflict between the theory and the practice? The law and the Church, claiming what few people will deny, that marriage is an immensely solemn, even a sacred, condition, have made entrance into it as easy as possible and the escape from it as difficult. It is as if one were to say, "Revolvers are very dangerous weapons, therefore they shall be placed within the reach of infants, but they must on no account be taken away from them, and once grasped they must never be laid down."

The most stringent rules have been formulated to prevent those people from marrying each other who are least likely to want to—namely, blood relations. But there is no law against total strangers meeting at the altar for the first time, and the marriage by proxy of people who have never seen each other has had the frequent blessing of ecclesiastic pomp.

At a time when legal divorce was too horrible to contemplate they made very pretty festivals of betrothing little children who could not understand the ceremony or even parrot the pledge. Who indeed can understand the pledge before its meaning is made clear by life?

And why should people be forced to make an eternal pledge whose keeping is beyond their power or prophecy and from which there is no release? What is it but a subornation of perjury?

Those who so blithely scatter flowers before bridal couples and old shoes after them are perfectly benevolent, of course, in their abhorrence of separating the twain if they begin to throw their old shoes at each other; for they are sincerely convinced that if people were permitted to do as they pleased, nothing on earth would please them but vice. And so those who have the lawmaking itch set about saving humanity from itself by making inhuman laws, which the clever and the criminal evade or break through, leaving the gentle and the timid in the net.

For there was never no divorce. No amount of law has ever availed to keep those together who had the courage or the cruelty to break the bonds. By hook or by crook, if not by book, they will be free.

The question of the children is often used to cloud the issue, as if all that children needed for their welfare were the formal alliance of their parents, and as if a home where hatred rages or complacent vice is serene were the ideal rearing-ground for the young. When love of their children is enough to keep two incompatible souls together there is no need of the law. When that love is insufficient what can the law accomplish? And what of the innumerable families where there have been no children, or where they are dead or grown-up?

The experiment of forbidding what cannot be prevented and of refusing legal sanction to what human nature demands has been given centuries of trial with no success.

Marriage is among the last of the institutions to have the daylight let in and the windows thrown open. For the home is no more threatened by liberty than the State is, and that pair which is kept together only by the shackles of the law is already divorced; its cohabitation is a scandal. Free love in the promiscuous sense is no uglier than coupled loathing. The social life of that community where divorce is least free is no purer than that where divorce is not difficult. Otherwise South Carolina, which alone of the States permits no divorce on any ground, should be an incomparable Eden of marital innocence. Is it? And New York, which has only one ground, and that the scriptural, should be the next most innocent. Is it?

Meanwhile the mismated of our day who are struggling through the transition period between the despotism of matrimony and its republic can be sure that the righteous will omit no abuse that they can inflict. Those who would free Russias must face Siberias.

The worst phase of it is that some of those who are determined to be free and cannot otherwise get free will not hesitate to destroy innocent persons who may be useful to their escape.

Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman had her heart set on releasing herself from the husband she had in order that she might try another who promised her more happiness, more love, and more prestige. The husband she had would have been willing enough to set her free, both because he liked to give her whatever she wanted and because he was not in love with their marriage himself.

But the law of New York State says that married couples shall not uncouple amicably and intelligently. If they will part it must be with bitterness and laceration. One of the two must be driven out through the ugly gate of adultery. They must part as enemies and they must sacrifice some third person as a blood-offering on the altar.

It is a strange thing that the lamb, which is the symbol of innocence and harmlessness, should have always been the favorite for sacrifice.

Charity Coe had happened along at the convenient moment.



CHAPTER XII

"Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever, take the stand...."

"Ju swear tell tru thole tru noth buth tru thelpugod?"

"I do."

McNiven, in the direct examination, asked only such questions as Charity easily answered with proud denials of guilt. Beattie began the cross-examination with a sneering scorn of her good faith.

"Mrs. Cheever, you are the co-respondent in this case of Dyckman versus Dyckman?"

"I am."

"And on this night you went motoring with defendant?"

"Yes."

"Was his wife with you?"

"No; you see—"

"Was any other person with you?"

"You see, it was a new car and it was only our intention to—"

"Was any other person with you?"

"No."

"And you spent the night with the defendant in the Viewcrest Inn?"

"That is hardly the way I should put it."

"Answer the question, please."

"I will not answer such an insulting question."

"I beg your pardon most humbly. Were you registered as the defendant's wife?"

McNiven's voice: "I 'bject. There is no evidence witness even saw the book."

The judge: "Objection s'tained."

"Well, then, Mrs. Cheever, did you see the defendant write in the book?"

"I—I—perhaps I did—"

"Perhaps you did. You heard the waiter Magruder testify here awhile ago that he insisted on defendant registering, and defendant reluctantly complied. Do you remember that?"

"I—I—I believe I do. But I didn't see what he wrote."

"You didn't see what he wrote. Exhibit A shows that he wrote 'Mr. and Mrs. James Dysart.' You heard the handwriting experts testify that the writing was Dyckman's. But you did not see the writing. Did you not, however, hear the waiter speak of you as the defendant's wife?"

"Well—I may have heard him."

"You didn't tell him that you were not the defendant's wife?"

"I didn't speak to the waiter at all. It was a very embarrassing situation."

"It must have been. So you did not deny that you were the defendant's wife?"

"You see, it was like this. When Mr. Dyckman asked me to try his new car—"

"You did not deny that you were the defendant's wife?"

"I hadn't the faintest idea that we could have gone so far—"

"Answer the question!"

"But I'm coming to that—"

The judge: "Witness will answer question."

"But, your Honor, can't I explain? Has he a right to ask these horrible things in that horrible way?"

The lawyer: "We are trying to get at the horrible truth. But if you prefer not to answer I will not press the point. The waiter showed you to the parlor, saying that the rest of the hotel was occupied?"

"Yes."

"He left you there together, you and the defendant?"

"Well, he went away, but—"

"And left you together. He so testified. He also testified that he found you together the next morning. Is that true?"

"Oh, that's outrageous. I refuse to answer."

Jim Dyckman rose from his chair in a frenzy of wrath. His lawyer, McNiven, pressed him back and pleaded with him in a whisper to remember the court. He yielded helplessly, cursing himself for his disgraceful lack of chivalry.

The judge spoke sternly. "Witness will answer questions of counsel or—"

"But, your Honor, he is trying to make me say that I—Oh, it's loathsome. I didn't. I didn't. He has no right!"

When a woman's hair is caught in a traveling belt and she is drawn backward, screaming, into the wheels of a great machinery that will mangle her beauty if it does not helplessly murder her there are not many people whose hearts are hard enough to withhold pity until they learn whether or not her plight was due to carelessness.

There are always a few, however, who will add their blame to her burden, and they usually invoke the name of justice for their lethargy of spirit.

Yet even the cruelty of that severity is a form of self-protection against a shattering grief; and a perfect heart would have pity even for the pitiless, since they, too, are the victims of their own carelessness; they, too, are drawn backward into the soul-crushing cogs of the world.

Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever, as good a woman as ever was, was being dragged to the meeting-point of great wheels, but she had turned about and was fighting to escape, at least with what was dearer than her life. The pain and the terror were supreme, and even if she wrenched free from destruction it would be at the cost of lasting scars. Yet she fought.

It had been all too easy for the infuriated Kedzie Dyckman to entangle Charity in the machinery. Kedzie was a little terrified at the consequences of her own act, though she would have said that she did it in self-defense and to punish an outrage upon her rights. But when persons set out to punish other persons, it is not often that their own hands are altogether innocent.

If the Christly edict, "Let him that is without sin cast the first stone," had been followed out there would never have been another stone cast. And one might ask if the world would have been, or could have been, the worse for that abstention. For, whatever else may be true, the venerable practices of justice have been false and futile.

And now, nearly two thousand years later, after two thousand years more of heartbreaking history, an increasing few are asking bitterly if punishment has ever paid.

Vaguely imagining on one side the infinite misery and ugliness of the dungeons and tortures, the disgraces and executions of the ages with their counter-punishment on the inquisitors and the executioners, and setting against them that uninterrupted stream of deeds we call crimes, what is the picture but a ghastly vanity—an eternal process of trying to dam the floods of old Nile by flinging in forever poor wretch after poor wretch to drown unredeemed and unavailing?

Charity was the latest sacrifice. If she had been guilty of loving too wildly well, or of drifting unconsciously into a situation where opportunity made temptation irresistible, there would be a certain reaction to pity after she had been definitely condemned. There are at times advantages in weakness, as women well know, though Charity despised them now.

Kedzie's lawyer, however, felt it good tactics to assume now the pose of benevolent patience with an erring one. Seeing that Charity was in danger of stirring the hearts of the jurors by her suffering, he forestalled their sympathy and murmured:

"I will wait till Mrs. Cheever has regained control of herself."

Instantly Charity's pride quickened in her. She wanted none of that beast's pity. She responded to the strange sense of discipline before fate that makes a man walk soldierly to the electric chair; inspires a caught spy to stand placidly before his own coffin and face the firing-squad; led Joan of Arc after one panic of terror to wait serene among the crackling fagots.

The lawyer was relieved. He had been afraid that Charity would weep. He resumed the probe:

"And now, Mrs. Cheever, if you are quite calm I will proceed. I regret the necessity of asking these questions, but you were not compelled to come into court. You came of your own volition, did you not?"

"Yes."

"Witnesses have testified and you have not denied that you arrived at the Viewcrest Inn late at night; that you saw the defendant register; that you and he went to the only room left; that the waiter left you together and found you together the next morning. You have heard that testimony, have you not?"

"Yes."

"Knowing all this, do you still claim that your conduct was above reproach?"

"For discretion, no. I was foolish and indiscreet."

"And that was all?"

"Yes."

"You are innocent of the charge, then?"

"Yes."

"Do you ask the jury to believe you?"

"I ask them to—yes! Yes! I ask them to."

"Do you expect them to?"

"Oh, they ought to."

"If you had been guilty of misconduct would you admit it?"

"Yes."

"Do you expect them to believe that?"

"If they knew me they would."

"Well, we haven't all the privilege of knowing you as well as the defendant does. You may step down, Mrs. Cheever, thank you."

McNiven rose. "One moment, Mrs. Cheever. You testified on direct examination that the defendant left you immediately after the waiter did?"

"Yes."

"And that he did not return till the next morning, just before the waiter returned."

"Yes."

"That is all, Mrs. Cheever."

McNiven would have done better to leave things alone. The sturdy last answer of Charity and the unsportsmanlike sneer of Kedzie's lawyer had inclined the jury her way. McNiven's explanation awoke again the skeptic spirit.

Charity descended from her pillory with a feeling that she had said none of the things she had planned to say. The eloquence of her thoughts had seemed incompatible somehow with the witness-stand. At a time when she needed to say so much she had said so little and all of it wrong.



CHAPTER XIII

Jim Dyckman's heart was so wrung with pity for Charity when she stepped down and sought her place in a haze of despair that he resolved to make a fight for her himself. He insisted on McNiven's calling him to the stand, though McNiven begged him to let ill enough alone.

He took the oath with a fierce enthusiasm that woke the jury a little, and he answered his own lawyer's questions with a fervor that stirred a hope in the jury's heart, a sorely wrung heart it was, for its pity for Charity was at war with its pity for Kedzie, and its admiration for Jim Dyckman, who was plainly a gentleman and a good sport even if he had gone wrong, could only express itself by punishing Kedzie, whose large eyes and sweet mouth the jury could not ignore or resist.

When his own lawyer had elicited from Jim the story as he wanted it told, which chanced to be the truth, McNiven abandoned him to Beattie with the words:

"Your witness."

Beattie was in fine fettle. He had become a name talked about transcontinentally, and now he was crossing swords with the famous Dyckman. And Dyckman was at a hideous disadvantage. He could only parry, he could not counter-thrust. There was hardly a trick forbidden to the cross-examiner and hardly a defense permitted to the witness.

And yet that very helplessness gave the witness a certain shadowy aide at his side.

Jim's heart was beating high with his fervor to defend Charity, but it stumbled when Beattie rose and faced him. And Beattie faced him a long while before he spoke.

A slow smile crept over the lawyer's mien as he made an excuse for silence out of the important task of scrubbing his eye-glasses.

Before that alkaline grin Jim felt his faith in himself wavering. He remembered unworthy thoughts he had entertained, graceless things he had done; he felt that his presence here as a knight of unassailable purity was hypocritical. He winced at all points from the uncertainty as to the point to be attacked. His life was like a long frontier and his enemy was mobilized for a sudden offensive. He would know the point selected for the assault when he felt the assault. The first gun was that popular device, a supposititious question.

"Mr. Dyckman, you are accused of—well, we'll say co-respondence with the co-respondent. You have denied your guilt in sundry affidavits and on the witness-stand here. Remembering the classic and royal ideal of the man who 'perjured himself like a gentleman,' and assuming—I say 'assuming' what you deny—that you had been guilty, would you have admitted it?"

"I could not have been guilty."

"Could not? Really! you astonish me! And why not, please?"

"Because Mrs. Cheever would never have consented. She is a good woman."

This unexpected answer to the old trick question jolted Beattie perceptibly and brought the jury forward a little. The tears gushed to Charity's eyes and she felt herself unworthy a champion so pious.

Beattie acknowledged the jolt with a wry smile and returned:

"Very gallant, Mr. Dyckman; you want to be a gentleman and avoid the perjury, too. But I must ask you to answer the question. Suppose you had been guilty."

Silence.

"Answer the question!"

Silence.

"Will his Honor kindly instruct the witness to answer the question?"

Jim broke in, "His Honor cannot compel me to suppose something that is impossible."

The jury rejoiced unwillingly, like the crowd in the bleachers when a man on the opposing team knocks a home run. The jury liked Jim better. But what they liked, after all, was what they falsely imagined. They assumed that Jim had been out on a lark and got caught and was putting up a good scrap for his lady friend. He was a hum-dinger, and no wonder the lady fell for him. Into such slang their souls translated the holiness of his emotions, and they voted him guilty even in awarding him their admiration for his defense.

Beattie paused again, then suddenly asked, "Mr. Dyckman, how long have you loved Mrs. Cheever?"

"What do you mean by 'loved'?"

"It is a familiar word. Answer the question."

"I have admired Mrs. Cheever since she was a child. We have always been friends."

"Your 'friendship' was considerably excited when she married Mr. Cheever, wasn't it?"

"I—I thought he was unworthy of her."

"Was that why you beat him up in a fist fight at your club?"

This startled the entire court. Even reporters who had missed the news were excited. McNiven sprang to his feet, crying:

"I 'bject! There is no evidence before the court that there ever was such a fight. The question is incompirrelvimmaterial."

"S'tained!" said the judge.

Beattie was satisfied. The arrow had been pulled out, but its poison remained. He made use of another of his tantalizing pauses, then:

"It was shortly afterward that Mrs. Cheever divorced her husband, was it not?"

"I 'bject," McNiven barked.

"S'tained!" the judge growled.

"Let us get back to the night when you and Mrs. Cheever went a-motoring." Beattie smiled. "There was a beautiful moon on that occasion, I believe."

The jury grinned. The word "moon" meant foolishness. Beattie took Jim through the story of that ride and that sojourn at the tavern, and every question he asked condemned Jim to a choice of answers, either alternative making him out ridiculously virtuous or criminal.

Beattie rehearsed the undenied facts, but substituted for the glamour of innocence in bad luck the sickly glare of cynicism. He asked Jim if he had ever heard of the expression, "The time, the place, and the girl." He had the jury snickering at the thought of a big rich youth like Jim being such a ninny, such a milksop and mollycoddle, as to defy an opportunity so perfect.

The public mind has its dirt as well as its grandeurs; the pool that mirrors the sky is easily roiled and muddied. It was possible for the same people to abhor Jim and Charity for being guilty and to feel that if they were not guilty with such an occasion they were still more contemptible.

Thus ridicule, which shakes down the ancient wrongs and the tyrants' pretenses, shakes down also the ancient virtues and the struggling ideals.

Finally Beattie said, "You say you left the fair corespondent alone in the hotel parlor?"

"I did."

"All alone?"

"Yes."

"And you went out into the night, as the saying is?"

"Yes."

"But you testified that it was raining."

"It was."

"You went out into the rain?"

"Yes."

"To cool your fevered brow?"

Silence from Jim; shrieks of laughter from the silly spectators. The jury was shattered with amusement; the judge wiped a grin from his lips. Beattie resumed:

"Where did you sleep?"

"In the office chair."

"You paid for the parlor! You registered! And you slept in the chair!" [Gales of laughter. His Honor threatens to clear the court.] "Who saw you asleep in the chair?"

"I don't know—I was asleep."

"Are you sure that you did not just dream about the chair?"

"I am sure."

"That's all."

Jim stepped down, feeling idiotic.

There is a dignity that survives and is illumined by flames of martyrdom, but there is no dignity that is improved by a bladder- buffeting. Jim slunk back to his place and cowered, while the attorneys made their harangues.

McNiven spoke with passion and he had the truth on his side, but it lacked the convincing look. Beattie rocked the jury-box with laughter and showed a gift for parodying seriousness that would carry him far on his career. Then he switched to an ardent defense of the purity of the American home, and ennobled the jury to a knighthood of chivalry and of democracy. As he pointed out, the well-known vices of the rich make every household unsafe unless they are sternly checked by the dread hand of the law.

He called upon the jury to inflict on the Lothario a verdict that would not only insure comfort to the poor little woman whose home had been destroyed, but would also be severe enough to make even a multimillionaire realize and remember that the despoiler of the American home cannot continue on his nefarious path with impunity.

The judge gave a long and solemn charge to the jury. It was fair according to the law and the evidence, but the evidence had been juggled by the fates.

The jury retired and remained a hideous while.



CHAPTER XIV

It was only a pleasant clubby discussion of the problem of Jim's and Charity's innocence that delayed the jury's verdict. One or two of the twelve had a sneaking suspicion that they had told the truth, but these were laughed out of their wits by the wiser majority who were not such fools as to believe in fairy-stories.

As one of the ten put it: "That Dyckman guy may have gone out into the rain, but, believe me, he knew enough to come in out of the wet."

A very benevolent old gentleman who sympathized with everybody concerned made a little speech:

"It seems to me, gentlemen, that when a man and wife have quarreled as bitterly as those two and have taken their troubles to court, there is no use trying to force them together again. If we give a verdict of not guilty, that will leave Mr. and Mrs. Dyckman married. But they must hate each other by now and that would mean lifelong misery and sin for both. So I think we will save valuable time and satisfy everybody best by giving a verdict of guilty. It won't hurt Dyckman any."

"What about Mrs. Cheever?"

"Oh, she's gotta lotta money."

None of the jury had ever had so much as that and it was equivalent to a good time and the answer to all prayers, so they did not fret about Charity's future. On the first ballot, after a proper reminiscence of the amusing incidents of the trial they proceeded to a decision. The verdict was unanimous that Jim was guilty as charged. Charity was not to get her forty dollars nor her good name.

When the jurors filed back into the box the court came to attention and listened to the verdict.

Jim and Charity were dazed as if some footpad had struck them over the head with a slingshot. Kedzie was hysterical with relief. She had suffered, too, throughout the trial. And now she had been vindicated.

She went to the jury and she shook hands with each member and thanked him.

"You know I accept the verdict as just one big beautiful birthday present." It was not her birthday, but it sounded well, and she added, "I shall always remember your kindly faces. Never can I forget one of you."

Two days later she met one of the unforgetable jurors on the street and did not recognize him. He had been one-twelfth of her knightly champions, but she cut him dead as an impertinent stranger when he tried to speak to her. She cut Skip Magruder still deader when he tried to ride home with her.

He came to call and showed an inclination to settle down as a member of Kedzie's intimate circle. He had speedily recovered from his first awe at the sight of her splendor. Finding himself necessary to her, he grew odiously presumptuous. She had not dared to rebuke him. Now she thought she would have to buy him off. Skip had had his witness fees and his expenses, and nothing else for his pains. Then Beattie warned Kedzie that it would look bad to pay Skip any money; it might cast suspicion on his testimony. Kedzie would not have done that for worlds. Besides, when she learned what Mr. Beattie's fee was to be, she felt too poor to pay anybody anything.

The only thing she could do, therefore, was to remind Skip of the beautiful old song, "Lovers once, but strangers now."

"Besides, Skippie dear, I'm engaged."

"Already?"

"Yes."

"You woiked that excuse on me when you tried to explain why you toined me down when I wrote you the letter at the stage door."

"Yes, I did."

"Say, Anitar, you'd oughter git some new material. Your act is growin' familiar."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Oh no! You wasn't never in vawdvul, was you, oh, no! not a tall!" Kedzie played her pout on him, but Skip glared at her, shook his head, kicked himself with his game leg, and said, "I gotta give you credit, Anitar, you're the real thing as a user."

"A what?" said Kedzie.

"A user," he explained in his elliptical style. "You're one them dames uses a fella like he was a napkin, then trows him down. You used me twice and used me good. I desoived the second one, for I'm the kind o' guy gets his once and comes back for more in the same place. I'd go tell Jimmie Dyckman I was a liar but I ain't anxious to be run up for poijury, and I ain't achin' to advertise what a John I been. So long, Anitar, and Gaw delp the next guy crosses your pat'."