We Can't Have Everything: A Novel

by Rupert Hughes

In any case he had always hated flamboyant weddings with crowds and splendor. He did not believe that a marriage should be circused.

And thus at last he and Kedzie were united into one soul and one flesh, for better, for worse, etc., etc. Then they sped away to the remotest pleasant hotel to be found in darkest Jersey.

Jim registered under his own name, but blushed more hotly than if he had been engaged in an escapade. He could, perhaps, have taken Kedzie so with less regret than under the blessing of the clergy. For now he felt that he owed to her the all-hallowing grace of that utter love which was something he could not bestow.

She was the first wife he had ever had, and he wished a devoutness in that consummation. Lacking the sanctifying ardor, he was remorseful rather than triumphant, feeling himself more of a brute than even a bridegroom usually feels.

Kedzie did not seem to miss any perfection in his devotion, but he imputed that more to her innocent kindliness than to any grace of his own. The more he studied her the more he wondered why he did not love her more. She was tremendously exquisite, ferociously delicate, and almighty pretty. She was altogether too delectable, too cunningly wrought and fragile, for a hulking Titan like him.

He was positively afraid of her, and greatly amazed to see that she was not at all afraid of him. The moment the parson had done his worst a new Kedzie had appeared. She took command of everything instantly: ordered the parson about, shipped her mother and father back to town as if they were bothersome children, gave directions to Jim's chauffeur in a way that taught him who was to be who thenceforward, and made demands upon the hotel clerk in a tone that was more convincing of her wifehood than a marriage license could have been.

The quality missing in Kedzie was the sense of terror and meekness expectable in brides. Her sole distress was, to Jim's amazement, the obscurity and solitude of their retreat. Kedzie was rapturous, but she had not the slightest desire to hide it from the world. She was Mrs. Jim Dyckman, and she didn't care who knew it.

Poor Kedzie had her own sorrows to mar her triumph. She was being driven to believe that the world was as badly managed as the Hyperfilm Studio. Providence seemed to provide tribulations for her like a scenario editor pursuing a movie heroine. The second reel had begun well, the rich but honest lover putting the poor but dishonest husband to flight. And now Honeymoon Number Two! She had dreamed of a gorgeous church ceremony with two pipe-organs, and an enlarged cast of clergymen, and wedding guests composed of real millionaires instead of movie “extras.” But lo and behold, her adorer whisks her off to a little town in New Jersey and the great treaty is sealed in the shoddy parlor of a village parsonage! Gilfoyle's Municipal Building was a cathedral compared to this.

Then with never a white ribbon fluttering, not an old shoe or a grain of rice hurtling, the limousine of love rolled away to a neglected roadhouse. It was attractive enough as a roadhouse, but it was wretched as an imitation paradise.

In the face of this outrage everything else was a detail, a minor humiliation. There was no parrot on an area fire-escape to mock her next morning, but there was a still earlier rooster to banish sleep and parody her triumph. She slipped out of bed and went barefoot to the window-seat and gazed out into a garden.