Read Ebook: We Can't Have Everything: A Novel by Hughes Rupert

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Ebook has 4837 lines and 182306 words, and 97 pages

She was clad even more plainly than he, and had the same spirit of neglectful elegance. She was big, too, for a woman; somewhat lank but well muscled, and decisive in her motions as if she normally abounded in strength. What grace she had was an athlete's, but she looked overtrained or undernourished. Seeing that she did not look well, Dyckman said:

"How well you're looking, Charity."

She did not look like Charity, either; but her name had been given to her before she was born. There had nearly always been a girl called Charity in the Coe family. They had brought the name with them from New England when they settled in Westchester County some two hundred years before. They had kept little of their Puritanism except a few of the names.

This sportswoman called Charity had been trying to live up to her name, of late. That was why she was haggard. She smiled at her friend's unmerited praise.

"Thanks, Jim. I need a compliment like the devil."

"Where've you been since you got back?"

"Up in the camp, trying to get a little rest and exercise. But it's too lonesome nights. I rest better when I keep on the jump."

"You're in black; that doesn't mean--?"

She shook her head. A light of eagerness in his eyes was quenched, and he growled:

"Too bad!" He could afford to say it, since the object of his obloquy was alive. If the person mentioned had not been alive, the phrase he used would have been the same more gently intoned.

Charity protested: "Shame on you! I know you mean it for flattery, but you mustn't, you really mustn't. I'm in black for--for Europe." She laughed pitifully at the conceit.

He answered, with admiring awe: "I've heard about you. You're a wonder; that's what you are, Charity Coe, a wonder. Here's a big hulk like me loafing around trying to kill time, and a little tike like you over there in France spending a fortune of money and more strength than even you've got in a slaughter-house of a war hospital. How did you stand it?"

"It wasn't much fun," she sighed, "but the nurses can't feel sorry for themselves when they see--what they see."

"I can imagine," he said.

But he could not have imagined her as she daily had been. She and the other princesses of blood royal or bourgeois had been moiling among the red human d?bris of war, the living garbage of battle, as the wagons and trains emptied it into the receiving stations.

She and they had stood till they slept standing. They had done harder, filthier jobs than the women who worked in machine-shops and in furrows, while the male-kind fought. She had gone about bedabbled in blood, her hair drenched with it. Her delicate hands had performed tasks that would have been obscene if they had not been sublime in a realm of suffering where nothing was obscene except the cause of it all.

She sickened at it more in retrospect than in action, and tried to shake it from her mind by a change of subject.

"And what have you been up to, Jim?"

"Ah, nothing but the same old useless loafing. Been up in the North Woods for some hunting and fishing," he snarled. His voice always grew contemptuous when he spoke of himself, but idolatrous when he spoke of her--as now when he asked: "I heard you had gone back abroad. But you're not going, are you?"

"Yes, as soon as I get my nerves a little steadier."

"I won't let you go back!" He checked himself. He had no right to dictate to her. He amended to: "You mustn't. It's dangerous crossing, with all those submarines and floating mines. You've done your bit and more."

"But there's so horribly much to do."

"You've done enough. How many children have you got now?"

"About a hundred."

"Holy mother!" he whispered, with a profane piety. "Can even you afford as big a family as that?"

"Well, I've had to call for some help."

"Let me chip in? Will you?"

"Sure I will. Go as far as you like."

"All right; it's a bet. Name the sum, and I'll mail it to you."

"You'd better not mail me anything, Jim" she said.

He blenched and mumbled: "Oh, all right! I'll write you a check now."

"Later," she said. "I don't like to talk much about such things, please."

"Promise me you won't go back."

She simply waived the theme: "Let's talk of something pleasant, if you don't mind."

"Something pleasant, eh? Then I can't ask about--him, I suppose."

"Of course. Why not?"

"How is the hound?--begging the pardon of all honest hounds."

She was too sure of her own feelings toward her husband to feel it necessary to rush to his defense--against a former rival. Her answer was, "He's well enough to raise a handsome row if he saw you and me together."

He grumbled a full double-barreled oath and did not apologize for it. She spoke coldly:

"You'd better go back to your seat."

She was as severe as a woman can well be with a man who adores her and writhes with jealousy of a man she adores.

"I'll be good, Teacher," he said. "Was he over there with you?"

She evidently liked to talk about her husband. She brightened as she spoke. "Yes, for a while. He drove a motor-ambulance, you know, but it bored him after a month or two. They wouldn't let him up to the firing-lines, so he quit. Have you seen him?"

"Once or twice."

"He's looking well, isn't he?"

"Yes, confound him! His handsome features have been my ruin."

She could smile at that inverted compliment. But Dyckman began to think very hard. He was suddenly confronted with one of the conundrums in duty which life incessantly propounds--life that squats at all the crossroads with a sphinxic riddle for every wayfarer.

Kedzie--to say it again--did not know enough about New York or the world to recognize Mrs. Cheever and Mr. Dyckman when she glanced at them and glanced away. They did not at all come up to Kedzie's idea or ideal of what swells should be, and she had not even grown up enough to study the society news that makes such thrilling reading to those who thrill to that sort of thing. The society notes in the town paper in Kedzie's town consisted of bombastic chronicles of church sociables or lists of those present at surprise-parties.

This girl's home was one of the cheapest in that cheap town. Her people not only were poor, but lived more poorly than they had to. They had, in consequence, a little reserve of funds, which they took pride in keeping up. The three Thropps came now to New York for the first time in their three lives. They were almost as ignorant as the other peasant immigrants that steam in from the sea.

Adna Thropp, the father, was a local claim-agent on a small railroad. He spent his life pitting his wits against the petty greed of honest farmers and God-fearing, railroad-hating citizens. If a granger let his fence fall down and a rickety cow disputed the right of way with a locomotive's cow-catcher, the granger naturally put in a claim for the destruction of a prize-winning animal with a record as an amazing milker; also he added something for damage to the feelings of the family in the loss of a household pet. It was Adna's business to beat the shyster lawyers to the granger and beat the granger to the last penny. One of his best baits was a roll of cash tantalizingly waved in front of his victim while he breathed proverbs about the delayful courts.

This being Adna's livelihood, it was not surprising that his habit of mind gave pennies a grave importance. Of course, he carried his mind home with him from the office, and every demand of his wife or children for money was again a test of ability in claim-agency tactics. He fought so earnestly for every cent he gave down that his dependents felt that it was generally better to go without things than to enter into a life-and-death struggle for them with Pa.

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