“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'.”
That was the last Kedzie saw of Skip. She did not miss him. She hated him for annoying her pride and she hated the law that she used for her divorce, because it required her to wait three months before the interlocutory decree should become final. The time was hazardously long yet short, in a sense, for her alimony was to end at the end of three months if she married again, and marrying again was her next ambition. The judge had fixed her alimony at $30,000 a year, and an allowance for costs. Beattie tried to make a huge cost settlement, but McNiven knew of Kedzie's interest in the Marquess and he refused the bait. So Kedzie got only $7,500. She found it a ruinously small capital to begin life as a Marchioness on—she that had had only two dollars to begin life in New York on! The Marquess was very nice about it, and said he didn't want any of Dyckman's dirty money. But Kedzie thought of life in England with alarm, especially as she had the American comic-opera idea that all foreign peers are penniless. She dreaded to think what might happen in that three months' interregnum between husband II and husband III. Enough was happening in the rest of the world.
The annus miserabilis 1917 had begun with the determination of the German Empire to render the seas impassable and to withdraw the pledge to President Wilson that merchant ships should not be sunk till the passengers and crew had a chance to get into open boats. On January 31, 1917, “Frightfulness” began anew, and the undersea fleets, enormously increased, were set loose in shoals. Having no commerce of her own afloat, it was safe for Germany to sink any vessel anywhere.
Kedzie began to wonder if she would ever dare to sail for he future ancestral home, and if she did how long her ship would last.
On February 3d the U-53, which had sunk Strathdene's ship off Newport, sank an American freighter bound from Galveston to Liverpool. Other American vessels followed her into the depths. On February 27th the Laconia, of 18,000 tons burden, was torpedoed and twelve passengers died of exposure in the bitter weather. In one of the open boats a Catholic priest administered the last rites to seven persons.
Mrs. Hoy, of Chicago, died in the arms of her daughter and her body slipped into the icy waves, to be followed by her daughter's a few minutes later.
These seemed to make up a sufficient total of American women drowned, and on the next day the President declared that the long-awaited “overt act” had been committed. He asked Congress to declare that peace with Germany was ended. Her ambassador was sent home and ours called home.
In March the British captured Bagdad and the Germans suddenly retreated along a sixty-mile front in France; then the Russian revolution abruptly changed the almighty Czar into a weeping prisoner digging snow. And the vast burying-ground of Siberia gave up its living dead in a sudden apocalypse of freedom. Fifty thousand sledges sped across the steppes laden with returning exiles, chains stil dangling at many a wrist from the dearth of blacksmiths to strike them off.
Kedzie did not value the privilege of living in times when epochs of history were crowded into weeks and cycles completed in days. The revolution in Russia disturbed Kedzie as it did many a monarch, and she said to her mother: