Kedzie

“ Ferriday delighted in Kedzie's battle for space with the other members of the troupe. They kept everybody intense. The lover loved her better on the screen for hating her personal avarice. Her mother in the picture was more meltingly tender in her caresses for wanting to scratch the little cat's eyes out. The clergyman who pointed her the way to heaven grew more ardently devout for having to grip the floor with his feet to keep the adoring Kedzie from edging him off his own pulpit. ”

“ Some man in Nimrim, Mo., would have wed the little stay-at-home.
Kedzie, the pretty fool, apparently fancied that she would have been happy if Gilfoyle had been a handsomer sleeper, and the apartment a handsomer apartment, and the bank-account an inexhaustible fountain of gold.
But would she have been? Peter Cheever was as handsome as a man dares to be, awake or asleep; he had vast quantities of money, and he was generous with it. But Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt in an apartment that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of its velvets and the height of its colors. ”

“ Kedzie wished she had locked her own door—only there was no door, merely a shoddy portière, for there was not room to open a door. Her old ambitions came back to her. She had planned to know rich people and rebuke their wicked wiles. One rich man had held her in his arms, lifted her out of the pool. It was no less a man than Jim Dyckman, and she had repulsed him. ”

“ He resolved to postpone the completion of the big picture till he had finished a five-reel idyl for the apotheosis of Kedzie.
“The backers of the enterprise will have apoplexy when they hear of it,” he laughed. “But what do I care?”
The whole army of the studio stood meanwhile at ease, drawing salary and waiting for Ferriday to remember his day's program and give the order to go ahead. But he was busy with his new story, in the throes of nympholepsy, seeing visions, hearing voices.
Kedzie sat in a marble expectancy, Galatea watching Pygmalion create her and prepare to bring her to life. ”

“ There still lingered in Kedzie a little more honesty than snobbery and she felt even less dread of being “bawled out” by a waiter in the presence of a Marquess than of having Skip Magruder know that she was in such a place even with a Marquess. Skip had been good to her and had counseled her to go straight.
She felt no gratitude toward him now, but she could not face his contempt. That would be degradation beneath degradation. She was disgusted with everything and everybody, including herself. The glamour of the escapade was dissipated. ”

“ Her invasion of Newport was over and done—disastrously done, she thought; but its results were just beginning for Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe.
Eventually Kedzie reached the Grand Central Terminal—a much different Kedzie from the one that once followed her father and mother up that platform to that concourse! Her very name was different, and her mind had learned multitudes of things good and bad. She had a young man waiting for her—a poet, a socialist, a worshiper. Her heavy suit-case could not detain her steps. She dragged it as a little sloop drags its anchor in a gale. ”

“ The plot of The Kedziad was to be based on the From-Rags-to-Riches leitmotiv, Kedzie was to be a cruelly treated waif brought up as a boy by a demoniac Italian padrone who made her steal. She was to be sent into a rich man's home to rob it. She would find the rich man about to commit suicide all over his sumptuous library. ”

“ Kedzie's past was catching up with her. It is a glorious thing when one's past comes up loaded with food, munitions, good deeds, charities, mercies, valued friendships. But poor little Kedzie's little past included one incompetent and unacknowledged husband and two village parents.
Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her new friends as anxiously as if he had been a baby born out of wedlock instead of a grown man born into it. And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment. ”

“ Any woman might have blazed with pride at being asked to marry Jim Dyckman. The little villager was almost consumed like another Semele scorched by Jupiter's rash approach.
In Dyckman's clasp Kedzie felt how lonely she had been. She wanted to be gathered in from the dangers of the world, from poverty and from work. She had not realized how tiny a thing she was, to be combating the big city all alone, until some one offered her shelter.
People can usually be brave and grim in the presence of defeat and peril and hostility. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In any case Kedzie Thropp, who slept under a park bench when first she came to town, found the city honorable, merciful, generous, as most girls do who have graces to sell and sense enough to set a high price on them.
And so Kedzie was sheltered and passed on upward by Skip Magruder the lunch-room waiter, and by Mr. Kalteyer the chewing-gum purveyor, by Eben E. Kiam the commercial photographer, by Thomas Gilfoyle the advertising bard, by Ferriday the motion-picture director, on up and up to Jim Dyckman. Every man gave her the best help he could. ”

“ Kedzie resolved to prove this for herself. She prayed for a chance to be tempted so that she might rebuke some swell villain. But she intended to postpone the rebuke until she had seen a lot of high life. This would serve a double purpose: Kedzie would get to see more millionairishness, and the rebuke would be more—more “scatting.” It is hard even to think a word you cannot pronounce.
Kedzie gained one thing further from the pictures—a new name. She had been musing incessantly on choosing one. She had always hated both Thropp and Kedzie, and had counted on marriage to reform her surname. ”

“ He wondered how any human being could live in such epochal weeks and take no thought of events. She was not interested even in the accounts of the marvelous sufferings of women and their marvelous achievements in the munition-plants, the fields, and hospitals. He watched Kedzie skip the head-lines detailing some sublime feat of endeavor like the defense of Verdun and turn to the page where her name was included or not among the guests at a dinner well advertised by the hostess. ”

“ She was enamoured of every cobblestone, and she loved every man, woman, horse, and motor she passed. She tried to flirt with the tall buildings. She was afraid to leave Chicago lest she never get to New York, or find it inferior. She begged to be left there. It was plenty good enough for her.
But once aboard the sleeping-car she was blissful again, and embarrassed her mother and father with her adoration. In all sincerity, Kedzie mechanically worshiped people who got things for her, and loathed people who forbade things or took them away. ”

“ He romped through the festivals of New York like a cub.
There was no discussion of any date of marriage, and he was glad enough to let the matter drift. He did not want to marry Kedzie. He was satisfied to have her as a playmate. He was afraid to think of her as a wife, not only from fear of the public sensation it would make, but from fear of her in his home. Young men also know the timidities that are considered maidenly. He did not dream of Kedzie's reason for postponing always the matter of a wedding date.
Kedzie had come to depend on Jim for her entertainment. ”

“ Kedzie felt absolved of any fault of selfishness now, and justified in taking any steps necessary to the punishment of Gilfoyle. Religion is a large, loose word, and it can be made to fit any motive; but once assumed it seems to strengthen every resolution, to chloroform mercy and hallow any means to the self-sanctified end. What people would shrink from as inhuman they constantly embrace as divine.
Kedzie wondered how she could communicate with her adversary. She might best go to Chicago and fight herself free there. There would be less risk of Dyckman's hearing about it. ”

“ I'd show him how he couldn't lose.”
“But you just said—”
“Oh, I know, but we can't put on the screen everything we say in the projection-room. And it is a fact that there is big money in the movies.”
“There must be,” said Kedzie, “if as much has been sunk in 'em as you say.”
“Yes, and it's all there for the right man to dig up if he only goes about it intelligently. Let me talk to him.”
Kedzie thought hard. Then she said: “No! Not yet! You'd only scare him away. I'll do my best to get him interested in me, and you do your best to get him interested in the business ”

“ He called himself a socialist. What the socialists would have called him it would be hard to say; they are given to strong language.
Kedzie had known in Nimrim what church socials were, for they were about the height of Nimrim excitement. But young Mr. Gilfoyle was not a church socialist. He detested all creeds and all churches and said things about them and about religion that at first made Kedzie look up at the ceiling and dodge. But no brimstone ever broke through the plaster and she grew used to his diatribes. ”

“ This is Kedzie's history, and the history of the problem confronting Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe Cheever: the problem that Kedzie was going to seem to solve—as one solves any problem humanly, which is by substituting one or more new problems in place of the old. ”

“ Now, of course, Kedzie ought to have been happy. Millions of girls of her age were waking up that morning and calling themselves wretched because their parents or distance or some other cause prevented them from marrying young fellows no more prepossessing asleep than Gilfoyle was.
In Europe that morning myriads of young girls tossed in their beds and shivered lest their young men in the trenches might have been killed or mangled by some shell dropped from an airship or sent over from a cannon or shot up from a mine. ”

“ But I guess you're a goil can take care yourself.”
Kedzie guessed she was. But she was in need of help. Where else could she turn? Whom else had she for a beau in this multitude of strangers? So she laughed encouragingly.
“All right. You're elected. Gimme the address.”
Skip wrote it on one of the business cards of the bakery. He added:
“Another thing: I know a good expressman will rustle your trunk over from—Where you boardin' at now?”
Kedzie flushed. She could hardly tell him that she had boarded in a park up-town somewhere. ”

“ It is mighty pleasant to hear of the foibles of our superiors. The illusion of rising is acquired by bringing things down to us as well as by rising to them. When Pet told Kedzie something belittling about somebody big Kedzie felt herself enlarged.
Pet had another influence on Kedzie. Pet was no more contemptuous of aristocrats than she was of people who were good or tried to be, or, failing that, kept up a decent pretense.
Pet made a snobbery of vice and had many an anecdote of the lapses of the respectable and the circumspectable. ”

“ Kedzie was inspired: “I live in Mrs. Gilfoyle's flat-partment.”
“I see,” said Ferriday. “Miss Anita Adair—ring Mrs. Gilfoyle's bell. All right, my angel, at seven. Run along.”
He kissed her, and she was ice-cold. But then women were often like that before Ferriday's genius.
CHAPTER VIII
The things we are ashamed of are an acid test of our souls. Kedzie Thropp was constantly improving the quality of her disgusts.
A few months ago she was hardly ashamed of sleeping under a park bench. And already here she was sliding through the street in a limousine. ”

“ If a young man appeared it was always to buy a box of candy for some other girl. It made Kedzie cynical to see him haggle and ponder, trying to make the maximum hit with a minimum of ammunition. It made her more distrustful to see young men trying to flirt with her while they bought tributes of devotion to somebody else. But Kedzie also found out that several of the neighborhood girls accepted candy from several gentlemen simultaneously, and she drew many cynical conclusions from the candy business.
Skip Magruder was attentive and took her out to moving pictures when he was free. ”

“ Gilfoyle. It was neat of her to tell Mr. Ferriday that she could be addressed “in care of Mrs. Gilfoyle.” In care of herself! That was just what she was. Who else was so interested in Kedzie's advancement as Kedzie?
She was a bitterly disappointed Kedzie just now. Ferriday had told her to go to Lady Powell-Carewe and get herself a bevy of specially designed gowns at the expense of the firm. There was hardly a woman alive who would not have rejoiced at such a mission. ”

“ Kedzie revolted at this, but she had no answer. Ferriday saw the papers folded open at the society pages. He stared at them, at her, then sniffed:
“So that's your new ambition!”
“What?”
“'In the Social World!' You want to get in with that gang, eh? Has Dyckman asked you to marry him?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, if he does, don't ever let him take you into his own set.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just to warn you. Those social worldlings wouldn't stand for you, Anita darling. You can make monkeys of us poor men. ”