We Cant Have Everything | Page 9

lower.
Dyckman tried to assuage his self-contempt by the excuse that Charity was not in the mood or in the place where such a disclosure should be made. Some day he would tell her and then ask permission to kill the blackguard for her.
The train had scuttered across many a mile while he meditated the answer to the latest riddle. His thoughts were so turbulent that Charity finally intruded.
"What's on your mind, Jim?"
"Oh, I was just thinking."
"What about?"
"Oh, things."
Suddenly he reached out and seized the hand that drooped at her knee like a wilted lily. He wrung her fingers with a vigor that hurt her, then he said, "Got any dogs to show this season?"
She laughed at the violent abruptness of this, and said, "I think I'll give an orphan-show instead."
He shook his head in despairing admiration and leaned back to watch the landscape at the window. So did she. On the windows their own reflections were cast in transparent films of light. Each wraith watched the other, seeming to read the mood and need no speech.
Dyckman's mind kept shuttling over and over the same rails of thought, like a switch-engine eternally shunting cars from one track to another. His very temples throbbed with the clickety-click of the train. At last he groaned:
"This world's too much for me. It's got me guessing."
He seemed to be so impressed with his original and profound discovery of life's unanswerable complexity that Charity smiled, the same sad, sweet smile with which she pored on the book of sorrow or listened to the questions of her orphans who asked where their fathers had gone.
She thought of Jim Dyckman as one of her orphans. There was a good deal of the mother in her love of him. For she did love him. And she would have married him if he had asked her earlier--before Peter Cheever swept over her horizon and carried her away with his zest and his magnificence.
She rebuked herself for thinking of Jim Dyckman as an orphan. He had a father and mother who doted on him. He had wealth of his own and millions to come. He had health and brawn enough for two. What right had he to anybody's pity? Yet she pitied him.
And he pitied her.
And on this same train, in this same car, unnoticed and unnoticing, sat Kedzie.
Jim and Charity grew increasingly embarrassed as the train drew into New York. Charity was uncertain whether her husband would meet her or not. Jim did not want to leave her to get home alone. She did not want her husband to find her with Jim.
Cheever had excuse enough in his own life for suspecting other people. He had always disliked Jim Dyckman because Dyckman had always disliked him, and Jim's transparent face had announced the fact with all the clarity of an illuminated signboard.
Also Charity had loved Jim before she met Cheever, and she made no secret of being fond of him still. In their occasional quarrels, Cheever had taunted her with wishing she had married Jim, and she had retorted that she had indeed made a big mistake in her choice. Lovers say such things--for lack of other weapons in such combats as lovers inevitably wage, if only for exercise.
Charity did not really mean what she said, but at times Cheever thought she did. He had warned her to keep away from Dyckman and keep Dyckman away from her or there would be trouble. Cheever was a powerful athlete and a boxer who made minor professionals look ridiculous. Dyckman was bigger, but not so clever. A battle between the two stags over the forlorn doe would be a horrible spectacle. Charity was not the sort of woman that longs for such a conflict of suitors. Just now she had seen too much of the fruits of male combat. She was sick of hatred and its devastation.
So Charity begged Dyckman to get off at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, but he would not show himself so poltroon. He answered, "I'd like to see myself!" meaning that he would not.
She retorted, "Then I'll get off there myself."
"Then I'll get off there with you," he grumbled.
Charity flounced back into her seat with a gasp of mitigated disgust. The mitigation was the irresistible thrill of his devotion. She had a husband who would desert her and a cavalier who would not. It was difficult not to forgive the cavalier a little.
Yet it would have been better if he had obeyed her command or she her impulse. Or would it have been? The worst might always have been worse.

CHAPTER V
When Kedzie was angry she called her father an "old country Jake." Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car with his