Rebellion

XXVI
EVE

Some six months later, on a hot, sticky afternoon in July, Georgia came away from a State Street department store carrying a paper-wrapped parcel under her arm. She had come down town to take advantage of an odds and ends sale of white goods advertised that morning.

In spite of the heat which beat down from a cloudless, windless sky and radiated up from the stone pavements where it had stored itself, she wore a long bluish-gray pongee coat. There were dark rings under her eyes and she felt ill and dispirited as she waited at Dearborn and Randolph for a North Clark Street car, which would drop her a block nearer her flat than the L would.

The car was slow in coming and a crowd of fifteen or twenty gathered to wait for it. Most of them were women homeward bound after the morning's shopping excitement. One of them also wore a long bluish-gray coat and Georgia remembered having seen her at the white goods remnant counter. They caught each other's eyes and smiled faintly but did not speak.

When the car stopped there was the customary rush for seats and Georgia had to content herself with a strap. She balanced her bundle against her hip and shifted her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot swaying to the motion of the car, envying men.

A passenger who looked like an oldish maid, with gold-rimmed spectacles and tightly drawn thin hair, half rose and beckoned to Georgia.

"I'm getting out at the next corner," she said, and sliding across the knees of the person next to her, gave Georgia a seat next the window on the shady side.

"Thank you, thank you very much indeed," said Georgia gratefully. Several blocks later she turned and saw the maiden lady still standing on the back platform leaning against the controller-box and trying to write something on the back of a paper novel with a fountain pen. She had a sudden warm feeling for this unknown friend who had done her a small kindness with delicacy.

Then, for she was nervously unstable and the hues and tinges of her emotions followed each other very rapidly like magic lantern slides, she became suddenly and deeply humiliated. Was she already so noticeable that strange women, much older than she, would offer her their seats! From day to day she had gone on, still hoping that she was able to deceive the casual eye. Henceforth she felt that she could not by any stretch of will bring herself to go out of the house except at night.

The car made moving pictures for her as she looked through the heavy wire grill which kept people from putting their heads out of the windows, at the men slowly walking up and down the hot sidewalk in their shirt sleeves or stopping to talk under the projecting awnings of saloons and fruit stores, at the wrappered women sitting stupidly in the upper windows of run-down brick buildings devoted to light housekeeping, at children sucking hokey-pokey cones or playing ball in a side street.

The children seemed to her the only ones with joy. Perhaps that was because they didn't know what they were up against.

The motorman clanged his gong angrily twenty times, then had to slow down and stop behind a lumbering coal wagon while the driver, a much blackened and begrimed Irishman, climbed leisurely from his seat and fussed with the neck yokes of his team, swearing sulkily at the motorman the while. A messenger boy got back at him, in the opinion of the front platform, by hailing him as Jack Johnson, the hope of the dark race. The teamster responded with some dirty language. It was a bad, hot day for tempers.

Georgia had time during the delay to become interested in a little drama which was then being enacted directly across the street from her. Its impelling power seemed to be a dead white horse which lay on the soft sticky asphalt, surrounded by a fringe of men and boys who stared quietly at a little pool of blood that came from a round hole above the animal's eye.

The horse's mate stood stolidly in harness, hitched still to his wagon. She wondered if now he would have to pull it home alone. A man with a note book pushed through the crowd. He was evidently in authority of some sort. He asked a little boy something and the boy turned and pointed toward an alley entrance cat-a-corner from where he stood.

Then a big man with a whip in his hand, a leather strap around his waist and a union button in his cap, probably the driver of the dead horse, threw his cap on the ground and stamped his foot, shook his fist at the boy and turned his back on the man with the note book and refused to answer his questions. She couldn't understand it at all. It seemed very unreasonable.

Then a street car bound the other way rolled up and came to a stop between her and the white horse. Mason Stevens sat on the seat precisely opposite hers, so near that they could have shaken hands if the two grilled iron screens had not been in the way. She noticed that his jaw fell open, like a dead person's.

She heard her conductor and the other conductor jerk simultaneously the go-ahead signals and the cars, quickly getting up speed, went in different directions. She did not turn her head, but she could feel the moment when he flipped onto the back platform. Then she heard him come up the aisle, breathing heavily from his run.

The seat beside her had become vacant and she had placed her paper package of white goods on it. Now she took it into her lap and crossed her arms over it. He sat down.

"How do you do!" he said.

"How do you do?"

They both stared straight ahead, not daring at first to look at each other.

"It's—quite a while since we—saw each other," she ventured after a long pause.

"Yes, quite a while, but—" he stopped.

"But what!"

"I don't know."

Then Georgia, first to regain control of herself, laughed, breaking the tension. "What are you doing here!" she asked. "Where have you come from and where are you going!"

"I got in from New York this morning and I'm going home—that is, to Kansas City, this evening. Had to see Cleever here."

"Is everything going well with you!"

"Yes, that is—yes."

"Business good!"

"Fine."

"Happy!"

"Oh, yes—are you!"

"Oh, yes," she said, then added "very."

They paused. "Don't let me keep you if you have business," she suggested.

"I haven't," he answered.

He thought that never in his life had he seen her look so ill, but doubted how to speak of it.

"You got all over your typhoid, of course," was the way he put it.

"Oh, yes, completely." She read him as usual, and saw what was in his mind, that her appearance had shocked him.

"Oh, don't look at me that way, Mason," she exclaimed suddenly; "I know I've gone off a lot, but don't rub it in."

"You're nothing of the sort. You are a bit fagged out, that's all."

"Yes," she said, "a bit fagged. Besides, I'm a staid, settled-down old thing—and you, perhaps you're married by this time. Are you?"

"No."

"Engaged, then!" She spoke casually, but there was a beating at her heart.

"Not even that."

She pressed the button for the car to stop. She had a morbid hope that she might still keep her secret from him. But when he helped her off the car and they started to walk toward her home, she saw it in his eyes.

"You understand now?" she faltered.

"Yes."

They walked a hundred steps in silence. "Tell me one thing, Georgia," he said, "you are happy?"

"Yes," she answered firmly.

"That's all I care about."

When they reached her door he gave her the package of white goods which he had been carrying.

"Georgia," he said, as they shook hands good-bye, "remember this—if you ever need me, I'll come."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean if you ever need me I'll come—from anywhere."

She looked down at her ungainly figure in wonderment. "Surely you don't mean that now. I'm—I'm so ridiculous."

His voice choked. "God bless and keep you. God bless and keep you always, my dearest," he said, then went away.

She walked slowly and heavily up to the third flight, carrying her burden. When she opened the door with her latchkey she found her mother in blue gingham apron, cleaning Mr. Kane's room.

Mrs. Talbot paused in her operations. "Well," she vouchsafed, "Jim has turned up—just after you left. He's asleep in your room."

"Drunk?" asked Georgia.

"Of course," said Mrs. Talbot, emptying her carpet sweeper.

XXVII
THE NAPHTHALINE RIVER

    And oh, of all tortures
    That torture the worst,
The terrible, terrible torture of thirst
    For the naphthaline river
    Of Passion accurst.
                                                —Poe.

Jim was a dipsomaniac, not a villain. His vice made no one else so abysmally wretched as it made himself.

After each spree he descended into the deep hell of remorse. He thought of pistols, razors and the lake. Would not everyone he cared for be the better for his disappearance? Was it not decenter to die than to live on, a reeking beast, a stenchful sewer for whiskey?

Then as his long enduring body began once more patiently to expel the poison he had thrust into it, he slowly cheered up. He wouldn't kill himself, he would swear off forever and ever, so help him God, amen.

In a few days he was completely reassured, and not a little proud of his evident self-control. He bragged of it casually. He was Pharisaical. He pitied drinking men. "No," he would say, raising a deprecating hand when invited to smile with them, "I've cut it out for good. I don't like it, and," laughing, "it don't like me. I've had enough in my day to keep up my batting average for the rest of my life, and enough is sufficiency. A little ginger ale for mine, thank you."

And the best of it was that the whiskey didn't seem to tempt him any more. It was almost too easy, this being good. Nothing to it, if a fellow simply made up his mind.

Old Col. E. E. Morse had certainly stampeded him the other morning when he was getting over his headache. He smiled a trifle wryly. Yes, he'd actually gone so far as to contemplate suicide, which was a great sin, to avoid getting full, which was a less one—and now here he was, never feeling better in his life and not touching a drop.

The old colonel certainly did make a goat of a fellow. He had acted more like a boy than a grown-up man. The blood curdling oaths he'd taken with eyes and hands raised to heaven, by his mother's soul and his hope of meeting her again. The memory of his hysterical state somewhat embarrassed him.

Some drank and some didn't; just as some had blue eyes and some brown. Bismarck and Grant, for instance, drank. It was foolish on the face of it to suppose that those giants among men were in the habit of lying awake nights, agonizing over the question of a glass of beer or two with their evening meal. That wouldn't show they were strong, but weak.

At this point he dropped from his vocabulary the word "drunk," with its essentially ugly sound, and substituted "loaded," which is pleasanter, then "jagged," which is pleasanter still, especially if one humorously places the accent on the final ed. A further alteration in his barroom terminology made it stewed, soused, plastered, anointed, all lit up, sprung, ossified.

When a periodical gets around again to the point of calling intoxication by pet names his next spiflication is not very far ahead of him.

In gradually divesting itself of the hideous and demonic character which he was wont to ascribe to it in the first moments of his passionate remorse after a debauch, alcohol achieved the necessary preliminary work preparatory to his next one. The curious thing was that he always realized in the heat of a new resolution precisely how the next attack would presently begin against him.

"Never again," he would say to himself, "never again, Jim Connor, if you're worth the powder to blow you to hell. Never again, understand! Never mind about George Washington and Grover Cleveland. You quit. Don't you care if the doctors say it's a food. It isn't a food for you. Leave it alone or die. It's been your steady enemy since you got into long pants. Hate it."

But in spite of efforts that were sometimes gallant he could not keep his hate hot. The further he got from his last spree, the less horrible and more amusing it seemed in retrospection.

The furiously emotional character of his resolution gradually cooled off and lost its driving power.

Only near the end of a period of abstinence did alcohol make a direct assault upon his body, and even then in skillful disguise. His digestion went back on him. He would conscientiously seek to fend off his misery by pills, powders, salts, extracts, soda and charcoal tablets, pepsin gum, by giving up smoking, coffee, dessert, by hot water before meals and brisk walks; but he adopted these measures dispiritedly. A still small voice had begun to whisper that they wouldn't do and that only one thing would.

If that one thing were taken privately just before supper, say downtown where the crowd wasn't around to kid him for seeming backsliding and if it were immediately followed by half a teaspoonful of ground coffee from the receptacle made and provided for such contingencies, Georgia would be neither the worse nor the wiser and he would get his appetite back.

"Mind," said the small voice, "just one." Why of course, he quickly agreed with himself, just one. That was all he needed. He didn't want the stuff for its own sake. He got no pleasure out of it. In fact he rather disliked the taste of it. But purely and simply for medicine, as a last resort. Hadn't he already tried every other damn thing on the market?

Usually he escaped detection the first day or two and went to bed at night triumphant and respectable, his secret locked successfully in his breast, excitedly convinced that at last he had learned to drink like a gentleman.

Presently he sensed the need of a more exact definition. How many drinks did a gentleman take a day? Two or three, or even more on special occasions? Was getting wet or cold a special occasion? What was a "drink" anyway—two fingers, three, or a whiskey-glassful? How much beer equaled how much spirits? Wasn't liquor mixed with seltzer less harmful to the lining of the stomach than the same amount taken straight? It ought to be, for a highball, according to test, averaged no more alcohol than the light wines of France and Italy, and as was well known, a drunken man was seldom seen over there. This being indisputable, might not one increase one's prescribed allowance of whiskey if one diluted it conscientiously?

He never tired of these and similar questions. They fascinated him and centered his consciousness. His mind revolved around the whiskey proposition like a satellite around its principal. He might hate, loathe, abominate whiskey, or pooh-pooh it, or compromise with it, or succumb to it. But he thought of it most of the time, endlessly readjusting his relations with it, like an old man in the power of a harlot.

Sometimes he would admit that there was much to be said against the cumulative effect of a drink every day. Twenty-four hours was hardly long enough to get wholly rid of the last one before you put the next one in on top of it. Would it not, possibly, be more advantageous to one's system, for instance, to get a slight skate on Saturday night, nothing serious, a mere jolly, harmless bun, and cut it out altogether for the rest of the week, than to go against it daily? This suggestion usually presented itself early on Saturday evening, after he had got a good start. After a little argument pro and con, the pros won.

The pros always won without exception, yet Jim never once neglected to go through the form of argument. It was astonishing with what perfect regularity he repeated time after time the same mental sequence in his circlings around whiskey.

He did not necessarily lose his job at each spree. He was not the explosive type of drunkard. He managed sometimes to drag himself wearily through the motions of work in the day time, slipping out every hour or two, on some excuse, to "baby it along." But from night to night his drunkenness would deepen until at last, with his nerves shattered and money gone, he stumbled home to his women folk to be nursed, to threaten suicide, while they telephoned lies to his employer, to take his solemn pledge, and to begin his cycle over again.

Four times during his wife's second pregnancy he made the complete circle.

She put up with his lapses more humbly than ever before in their married life. Each time that he renewed his pledge her sustaining hope returned that he would keep it this time, until at least the baby was born and she was well enough to return to work.

Then she wouldn't be afraid any more. Disencumbered, her strength restored, she would be wholly able to take care of herself and her child. She could earn two livings. She knew precisely how to go about it. There was nothing haphazard in her plans. Either she would promptly find another first class secretarial position or else she would go into business on her own hook, get a small room about eight feet by eight, at $1.50 or $1.75 a square foot, in a big office building and put on the door

G. CONNOR
STENOGRAPHER—COURT REPORTER
NOTARY PUBLIC

She could see it in her mind's eye. It looked fine. But it was several months off yet, slow months of discomfort, culminating in hours of the acutest agony a human being can suffer and live. She knew. She had been through it once already.

But she would never go through it again, after this time. Never. They might say what they liked about race suicide, this was the last for her.

In the meantime she must keep Jim as straight as possible and get all she could out of him. For presently there would be some heavy bills to pay. She kissed and flattered him, and went through his pockets at night, racing the bartenders for his money. Wasn't a business woman a big fool, she often asked herself, to get in this fix for a man she didn't love?

The Church—the Church took a pretty theoretical view of some things.

XXVIII
ALBERT TALBOT CONNOR

When her grandson was eight days old, Mrs. Talbot took him to be baptized. Georgia, not yet out of bed, protested against the precipitancy, but her mother was armored in shining faith and prevailed.

"You know your baby's sickly," she explained, "and not doing well. We cannot afford to take any chances—in case anything happened."

So she dressed up the mite in his best white lace, and herself in her best black silk and sailed off to church in a closed carriage. He was named Albert Talbot.

Until he was brought back to her, Georgia felt savagely that there was something ridiculously primitive, something almost grotesque in the proceeding. To take her baby from her, she could hear him crying all down stairs, to a church a mile away, to be breathed on by a priest and touched with spittle and anointed with oil and wetted with water—how could such things make her perfect babe more perfect!

Why should this naïve physical rite send her son to Paradise if he died; and more especially why should the lack of it bar him out of Paradise forever? It was not fair to put such mighty conditions upon him. He was only a baby.

When young Albert was returned to her arms and her breast, she forgot her grievance. Anyway, he was on the safe side of baptism now. It couldn't do him any harm and it might do him an eternal and supreme good. It was better to take no chances with the supernatural.

She asked the doctor when she could wean him. "I am behind in my bills, you know," she explained, "especially yours, doctor. I'd better get to work."

"I can't conscientiously advise you to do anything of the sort," he answered.

"But why not? Most babies are put on a bottle nowadays."

"This one is a delicate little fellow—not five pounds at birth. You want him to get strong—mother's milk is the best medicine."

"That settles it," she said slowly. "How long will it be? Six months?"

"Yes, six months anyway, perhaps more—perhaps a year. It depends on how he does. I won't disguise it from you—he's worried me once or twice."

A year! She didn't know a child was ever nursed a year. A year more of humbleness to Jim, of asking money from her brother, now called big Al, of fear that Mr. Kane might get annoyed and leave, of contriving and skimping and bill dodging. Another year of "womanly" womanhood, clinging to males for support.

The doctor saw her disappointment. "It's your sex' share of the world's work, you know," he said, "your duty to society."

"I have a baby and we're poor. If I'd had none, we'd be well off this moment," she said sharply. "If I really have done a duty to society why does society punish me for it?"

"I don't know," said the doctor.

He came rather frequently to the flat at this time, partly on the baby's account, partly on Mrs. Talbot's.

The river of life in the elder woman was becoming sluggish; rheumatism crippled her. The doctor veiled his explanation. "Synovial infusion," he called it, "but," he added reassuringly, "pericarditis is not in the least to be apprehended. I will stake my reputation on that." Which gave her new heart.

The rivulet of life in the child trickled uncertainly, obstinately refusing to increase. "Hmm," he muttered once, "microcephalic."

"What does that mean?" Georgia asked with quick suspicion.

"It means that he has a rather small head," smiled the doctor, "but then he is a rather small boy."

"Yes, he is tiny, isn't he?" said the mother pressing him to her soft, distended breast. "Little one—little one of mine." She looked at the doctor proudly. "He knows me," she said, "don't you think so?"

"Of course he does," he answered, and she knew that nothing else which had ever been or ever would be really mattered.

Whenever the doctor came to the flat he found time to tarry in the midst of his busy life of many patients and small fees for a chat with Georgia. He was a happy, crinkled, red faced, blue-gilled little man, who inevitably suggested outdoors, though he wasn't there much, for he drove a closed electric runabout. He always meant some day to write a novel, a true novel, something on the order of "The Old Wives' Tale," showing people as they really were. He thought he had the necessary information. He had seen all sorts of folks come and go for thirty years. But he never seemed to get around to the actual writing. He was so pressed for time.

Georgia Connor, nicely disguised, would be a good character for his book. Change the color of her hair, for instance, put a couple of inches on her height, make her something else but a stenographer, say a cashier—and neither she nor anybody else would suspect. So he had many little talks with his model, getting material. Besides, he liked her. She was intelligent, she never bored him and she always had her own point of view, and half the time an unexpected one. She had been twice educated—first by the convent and next by the loop. One could never tell which side of her was going to speak next.

Eventually one side would prevail. Which it would be depended on the baby question. If she had enough of them tugging at her skirts she'd revert to type. He knew. He'd seen 'em come and go for thirty years. Persistent mothers don't aviate.

When little Al was a month old, shortly after midnight on the thirteenth of November—she will never forget the day—Georgia awoke suddenly as if a pistol had been shot off by her ear. The baby was wailing in a feeble little singsong. She looked at the clock. It wanted half an hour to his feeding time.

She walked slowly up and down the room, whispering to her son. Sometimes she stopped at the open window to look out into the cool pleasant night, but nothing she knew how to do made any difference. He kept steadily on with his heart-breaking little singsong wail.

At one precisely, before the single stroke of the small clock had stopped ringing through the room, she gave him breast. He took a little, then gasped and choked and "spit it up" again. She waited ten minutes as she had been instructed, then gave him a very little—not more than three or four swallows. He rejected it. After twenty minutes she tried again. The warm, white life-giving fluid ran over his lips and chin, and trickled down his neck, wetting the neckband and sleeve of his thin woolen garment. But he kept a little down she thought. And then after awhile a little more. She did not wish him to be as far from her as his crib, so he dozed off in the crook of her elbow, while she took short naps a few minutes at a time until dawn.

At five she took in Mr. Kane's coffee. This duty now accrued to her, because the doctor had warned Mrs. Talbot not to overdo.

When Georgia returned with her empty tray she dropped into a chair for just a moment's rest. An hour later when she awoke she found little Al lying rigid on the bed, his small fists clenched, his eyes rolled up until only the whites could be seen through his half-closed lids, his under lip sucked in between his gums. She was not sure that he breathed.

Hastily she ran to the bathroom and turned the hot water tap on full. Hastily she ran back, and took the child in her arms. She knocked at the door of big Al's room.

"Al," she cried, "Al, Al, Al—wake up."

"What—eh, oh, what?" came a sleepy voice.

"Telephone the doctor, quick, quick, quick, the baby is—Oh, hurry, Al."

She ran to the bathroom and put her hand in the running stream from the faucet. Tepid, only tepid. Would it never get warm? If God ever wanted anything more from her—in the way of belief or devotion—let Him make this water hot, now, on the instant.

Her wet hand and her dry one moved rapidly together at her baby's clothes, unpinning the safety pins. Even in her haste she put them in her mouth mechanically, one after another. Once more she plunged her hand into the water. Warmer now, yes, almost warm enough. She put the round rubber stopper in the escape.

She lowered the stiff and naked little child into the tub, one hand behind his neck, the other held to shelter his face from the spray of the hot water which was pouring from the open tap.

Al stood at the door in bare feet, his trousers slipped on over his nightshirt.

"D'you want the doctor to come right away?" he asked.

"Do you mean to say you haven't gone yet?" she said piteously without turning her head as she knelt by the bathtub, "of course, right away—now, this instant."

The young fellow departed on the run for the janitor's telephone in the basement.

The water had become quite hot, but still the child did not relax. Georgia tried to undo one tiny fist with her forefinger, but she felt with agony of heart that it would not unclench easily. She sensed a touch on her shoulder, then saw another older hand put in the water behind the child's head.

"No, mother, you shan't," she said, "it is my baby, leave him to me."

"Shall I ask Father Hervey to come?" said Mrs. Talbot.

Georgia was too intent to answer.

Mrs. Talbot walked slowly down stairs, stiff with rheumatism. She met Al coming up, four steps at a time.

"How is he?" he shouted as he passed. She turned to explain, but he vanished out of sight around the turn at the landing, not waiting for an answer.

When she got Father Hervey on the telephone he asked if she was speaking of the young child he had baptized a month or so back.

"Three weeks come Tuesday," she said.

"Ah, then he has been baptized. That, at least, is well."

"But Father, if you could come, and pray, maybe it would save his life here, too."

He hesitated but a moment. Truly there was no priestly obligation to visit sick infants who had already been baptized, whenever their grandparents became excited. To baptize dying babies or to administer the last rites to those who had reached the age of reason was his duty. This was not. But if he did it, it would be an act of human kindness.

"I will come," he said over the wire, "at once."

XXIX
THE DOCTOR TALKS

When the doctor arrived the convulsion had passed. Little Al was lying in his crib, asleep, breathing easily, the snarls in his nerves unravelled. Georgia explained what had happened.

"You did just the right thing," said the physician.

"Doctor," she asked slowly, "will he ever be well?"

"What do you mean by well?"

"I mean, when he grows up will he be as strong—and—and bright as other men?"

"That is impossible to answer, Mrs. Connor, without the gift of prophecy."

"Don't put me off," said she staring at him, "tell me the truth. I have a right to know."

"I should first have to have a little more definite knowledge of his antecedents, his family history. Is there anything which might explain—"

"Not on our side of the family," Mrs. Talbot interrupted quickly, "they're clean people, every one."

"His father," said Georgia, "is a drunkard and the son of a drunkard."

"In that case it is possible, mind you I only say possible, that he has inherited a—a nervous tendency."

"Inherited, ah, I knew. There was something in me that warned me steadily not to go back to him. Something that made me shudder to think of it. But at last I gave in, because everyone in the world seemed in a conspiracy to make me."

"Yes," the doctor answered drily, "we run into such histories frequently."

"But," she pleaded suppliantly, as if he had the power to do or undo, "surely my baby can grow out of this—nervous tendency. Tell me he can grow out of it. With the right care and training, surely he can grow out of it."

He placed his hand on her shoulder, and honesty seemed to her to be patent and apparent in his voice. "Yes," he said, "it is possible, it is probable. I have seen many a mother make her child over with love."

"Ah, that's all I want," she gave a happy little sigh, "for I can do what they have done."

There was a tap at the door. Mrs. Talbot opened it and Father Hervey came in. "Oh," she said, "Father, the baby's well again. I shouldn't have bothered you."

"I'm glad for once it's an occasion for rejoicing," he said quietly. "Good morning, doctor."

"Good morning, Father. Was the poor fellow long after I left?"

"About half an hour."

"Were you at a deathbed last night, you two?" asked Georgia.

"Yes, Georgia, we were," said the priest.

"It seems somehow strange," she pondered, "that you two, so different, should be called together at the end."

"Oh, it happens often enough," explained the doctor. "Poor people. They want to keep them here a little longer, and the priest to bid them Godspeed in case they've got to go."

"It must be terrible," reflected Mrs. Talbot, "to die without a priest."

"Yes," answered the doctor, "Catholics have the best of us there. They always go hopefully, and they're the only ones that do. I've sometimes wished that I could accept the faith, but—" he shook his head slowly.

"Why can't you?" said Georgia quickly. Father Hervey smiled. He and the doctor were trusted friends. There was no poaching on each other's preserves.

"Do you honestly believe in a future life?" she asked again, staring at the man of science with her peculiar little wide-eyed stare.

"Yes, I believe all of us here will probably have it—except perhaps Father Hervey."

"Well, doctor," said Mrs. Talbot most indignantly, "I must say you've no call to be disrespectful. If any of us is certain to have it, it's him."

"Oh, that's one of his little jokes," he said, "he means the rest of you'll likely leave children behind you to be carrying your living eyes and nose and mouth about the earth long after the headstones are atop of you—and that's denied me."

"If they'd been denied me," its chronic undertone of humor momentarily leaving the doctor's voice, "or were taken now—I'd just as soon quit. I've four; one's learning to crawl, one to walk, one to read and the oldest," he made a vain effort to conceal his pride in such a son, "Oh—he's a boy. He can work his mother as easy as grease with a sore throat story whenever he wants to stay out of school. Pretty clever, eh, with a doctor right in the family? He'll be a great bunco steerer—or a great lawyer—some day and make his name—he's a junior—bristle in the headlines of 1950. That's the real life after death—our blood lives on, we don't."

"Yes," said Georgia tenderly glancing at the crib, "our blood lives on, it lives on."

"When a little shop girl takes the boat over to St. Joe," said the medical man, folding his arms, well started on his favorite eugenics, "she may be preparing a blend that will endure as long as the race—ten thousand or one hundred thousand years, while any of the descendants are alive. Marriage—true marriage, where children grow up and beget others—outlasts death by centuries, perhaps eons." He paused to let it sink in. "Whatever else there may be in addition," he said, bowing slightly in the direction of the priest, "this much is certain true—in our children we find immortality."

"Yes," said Georgia softly, looking at the crib where lay her child, "in our children there is immortality. My sweet little lamb," she whispered, going to her child, "my sweet—" her voice changed suddenly, growing very harsh. "Doctor," she said, "come here."

The doctor placed his ear to the child's heart, then took his stethoscope from his satchel to listen for the least fluttering. He heard none. As he straightened up again, she saw his answer in his face.

"Is—he—dead!" she asked.

"Yes." He spoke to the priest. "I will come this afternoon, in case I can be of any use," he whispered, and quietly withdrew.

The priest sprinkled the small dead body with holy water. Mrs. Talbot and Al fell on their knees, but Georgia stood. She was unable to kneel to a God who had done that. The priest prayed, half murmuring. Then in a louder voice he said, "As for me, Thou hast received me because of mine innocence."

"And hast set me before Thy face forever," muttered Mrs. Talbot, who knew the response. Al was silent, for he was not sure of the words. Georgia stood dumb, watching her child with her wide-eyed little stare.

"The Lord be with thee—" came the deep musical voice of the priest.

"And with thy spirit," muttered Mrs. Talbot.

There was a moment of silence, then came a knock at the door. It was repeated twice, imperatively.

Then the door was opened from outside and Carl Schroeder, president of the Fortieth Ward Club, entered, half carrying and half guiding Jim Connor, who was stupidly drunk.

Schroeder placed Jim in a chair and quickly slunk out. Jim swayed an instant in the chair, trying to hold his balance, then fell forward out of it. His hand struck the crib as he lay inert, unknowing, obscene.

Georgia looked at him for an instant, she began to giggle, to laugh. Her laughter grew louder and louder. It came in waves, each wilder and higher than the last.

It was long before they could quiet her.

XXX
FRANKLAND & CONNOR

Georgia and Jim Connor parted at the cemetery gate after the burial of their son. They have not, since then, seen each other.

Exclusive of her debt to Stevens, Georgia owed more than two hundred dollars, nearly half of which was for the funeral. Mrs. Talbot had ordered eight carriages.

Big Al behaved very well, turning in everything beyond carfare and lunch money for several weeks. Then he relaxed to the extent of five bright neckties and a pair of pointed patent leathers. But on the whole he was a very good boy, and Georgia told him so.

Her own wardrobe was in no condition for effective job-hunting. "Old faithful," the tan suit, once the pride of her heart and the queen of her closet, had dated beyond hope. Time had robbed the tan, not so much of substance as of essence, of smartness and caste.

The models of Paris hadn't worn a six yard pleated skirt for three years. So Georgia couldn't either, without proclaiming to her kind that she was either green or broke.

As for the blue serge, that was out of the question too, because it was simply worn out. She bought a black broadcloth coat and skirt that fitted wonderfully, as if they had been made for her, and a half dozen ruffled shirt waists. To these she added a severe black toque and low laced shoes. The total outlay ran to eighty-five dollars, but she considered it essentially a business investment, as no doubt it was.

She was pale, and her face had grown thin, which made her big eyes seem bigger. Her heavy black hair worn low on her forehead accentuated her pallor. She was what is frequently termed "interesting looking." At all events many people on the street were interested enough to turn and look again.

She clung to the idea of an office of her own some day, but because of the impracticability of starting business with a capital of five hundred dollars less than nothing, concluded to begin as assistant to some already established stenographer. Thus, she could learn the game, make acquaintances, get a following. Then when it was time to take the plunge, it would be simple enough to circularize this trade and switch at least part of it over to herself from her former employer.

She went up and down in many elevators and through many ground-glass doors in her hunt for work. One prosperous-looking, buxom, extreme blonde of thirty-eight, dressed a coquettish twenty-five, paid her a compliment.

"Listen," she said in a stage whisper, motioning to Georgia with a stubby forefinger to bend her head nearer, "listen. I wouldn't hire you for a dollar a week." She laughed merrily. "You're too much of a doll-baby yourself."

Georgia noted that the blonde lady's two assistants, hammering away in the dark inside corners of the room, were without menace, sallow and flat-chested.

In a small suite in the newest, highest-rented building in town, she found three tall, thin young men, apparently brothers. They were all very busy, writing by touch, their eyes fixed steadily on their notes. She spoke to the nearest, but his flying fingers did not even pause for her. "No women," he replied succinctly.

Many of the public stenographers had no employes; few more than one. Georgia found several places where they had just hired a girl. Apparently it was nowhere near so easy to find a place where they had just fired one. It was getting discouraging.

But her luck turned at the sign of L. Frankland, room 1241, the Sixth National Building. 1241 had a single narrow window which gave upon eight hundred others in the tall rectangular court. The room was not strategically desirable because there was another stenographic office between it and the elevator bank. Georgia felt sure she had seen L. Frankland before, but couldn't just place her.

"Do you need help? I am an expert stenographer." That was her formula.

"Yes, I do," came the wholly surprising answer. Georgia promptly sat down.

"But," continued L. Frankland, "I cannot afford to pay for it."

Georgia rose. "In that case," she said stiffly, "good-day."

"Why not," suggested L. Frankland, "go in with me as partner?"

"Partner—that would be fine—but I haven't any money."

"Neither have I—and I'll be turned out of here a week from to-morrow if I haven't twenty-seven fifty by then. That's how much I'm behind." She smiled cheerfully. Then Georgia remembered her. She was the nice old maid who had given her the seat in the car on the day she had met Mason.

"What's your rent!"

"Twenty-seven fifty."

"What arrangements do you want to make?"

"Fifty-fifty on everything."

"I'll take a chance," said Georgia, removing her hat. "But," she exclaimed, looking around, "why you've only got one machine—and a double keyboard at that. I'm not used to them."

"We can rent another for a dollar a week—any sort you want," L. Frankland suggested with ready resource.

"We can't get it here to-day. Let's see, Miss, Miss ah—what is your name?" They told each other. "Miss Frankland, are you a fast writer?"

"No," she answered, composedly rattling off a few test lines—"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party." It was true enough. She was slow.

"How much work do you get?"

"Four ten-cent letters and a short brief this morning. That's all to-day."

"What's the idea now—wait?" asked Georgia, taking off her coat and leaning against the solitary desk.

"Yep—like young lawyers."

"No use our both waiting with one machine between us. I tell you what—you go over to the Standard Company, on Wabash Avenue, and order a number four sent here, then traipse around to some other public offices—you can find plenty in the back of the telephone book—and see if they won't sublet us some of their work at half rates. I'll hold down the place, and get the hang of this keyboard while you're gone."

L. Frankland saluted. "Aye, aye, ma'am," said she. "I likewise do now promote you to be captain of this brig."

When she returned she brought a sheaf, the manuscript of a drama.

Georgia knocked it out in twenty-four hours, in triplicate, and took it back to the firm of origin in the Opera House Block. "Z. & Z.—Theatrical Typists" was the sign on the door.

The room was small, and thick with smoke. There must have been a dozen men in it, all important-looking. Mr. Zingmeister, the senior partner, a fat young Hebrew, received Georgia's work.

"Rotten," he said, glancing through it.

"Why?" she asked sharply.

"Wrong spacing. A script plays a minute to the page if typed right. How could anyone tell how long this would play?" He held it up between two fingers, contemptuously.

"Give me a sample act for a guide and I'll do it over for nothing."

He hesitated. "Too many novices in this profession already," he grumbled.

"My time's up," said she, reaching for her work. "If you don't want to pay me for it, I'll take it back."

He laid his hand on it.

"Come, come," said she, impatiently.

"Oh, keep your shirt on while I think it over," he answered. "All right, do it over again and do it right," he sighed plaintively, "and space it this way. Speeches solid. Drop two for character's name. Capitalize them—caps, understand?—with red underlines. Also red underline the business, so."

He demonstrated with a spoiled page from the waste basket.

"That'll give you the code, understand," he concluded, shoving it in her hand. "Now shake a foot."

The important-looking beings in the room apparently neither saw nor heard. Save for the clouds of smoke that issued from them they might have been graven.

When she got back to 1241 she was bursting with an idea.

"How long does your lease run, Miss Frankland?" she asked.

"Until May first."

"You can't get out of it!"

"No, I signed up."

"Well, if we don't pay our rent they'll put us out." It proved to be a prophecy.

Frankland & Connor found a bigger room for sixteen a month in the theatrical district, which for some unexplained reason converges from three sides upon the Court House. They described themselves as "experts in theatrical work," and presently they were.

They learned to give a dramatic criticism with each receipted bill. The play they had just transcribed was deeply moving, especially in the big scene, or one long roar, sure-fire. Playwrights were as thick as July blackberries and the firm prospered.

Occasionally Georgia sat up most of the night with a scared author and an impatient stage director, altering the script of a play after it had flivvered on the opening, and getting out new parts for it.

At first, she and L. Frankland found themselves forced into overtime almost every evening, because the theatrical people were invariably in such a raging hurry to get their work done, vast enterprises apparently hanging upon the rapid, if not the immediate, completion thereof. With growing experience, however, the firm learned to promise impossibilities for the sake of peace, but not to attempt them.

When the orders came in faster than they could handle them, Frankland & Connor jobbed them out again at fifty per cent. Georgia had three or four private stenographers on her list who were glad to pick up a little pin money on their employers' machines after hours. Perhaps in hours, too. She didn't know or care.

At the end of a twelvemonth she had paid off her debts, except the one to Mason, on which she sent interest.

She was also able to employ a woman to help her mother with the housework two afternoons a week.

Early in the firm's second year of existence, L. Frankland came in one Monday morning with a long face, a rare thing for her.

"I want to make a change," she said, "I'm not satisfied. I've been thinking it over. This isn't an impulse."

"A change?"

"Yes."

Georgia was genuinely distressed, because she had grown very fond of Miss Frankland. There was no more cheerful person in the world, she thought, than this dry, twinkling old maid. And she had hoped her feeling was returned. Real friendships were too rare to be tossed away so suddenly.

"I'm not satisfied," repeated L. Frankland, "because the present deal between us isn't fair. You've pulled the big half of the load ever since we started—so, give me a third interest instead of a half—I'd be better pleased, honest Injun, hope to die."

"Oh, shut up, Frank, and get to work. I've no time for foolishness," responded Georgia, much relieved. "Fifty-fifty it started and fifty-fifty it sticks."

Which it did.

XXXI
THE STODGY MAN

Mrs. Talbot was beginning to break. Her bones ached barometrically before rain; she noticed that after she had been on her feet a great deal, on cleaning days for instance, her ankles began to puff. Also she learned to avoid short breath by taking the stairs more easily. Sometimes she grew dizzy and little black specks floated before her eyes.

Fortunately she regarded her symptoms as a series of disconnected, unrelated phenomena. The heart was one thing, the liver another, rheumatism a third. Swollen joints were still different. That came from overdoing. For different diseases different remedies. She took her medicine very conscientiously, treating her symptoms, not her annodomini.

She thought of her children as young, not of herself as old. She wasn't sixty yet, just the time when people learn at last to profit by experience—the same age as most of the people she knew, Mrs. Conway, for instance, and Mrs. Schweppe, Mrs. Keough and Mrs. Cochrane.

The last two had recently been the victims of a sad and striking coincidence. They had lost their husbands within twenty-four hours of each other, in the preceding February, on the seventh and eighth of the month as Mrs. Talbot recalled it, anyway it was of a Tuesday and Wednesday. Dan Keough, to be sure, had been ailing some time, but it would have been a day's journey to find a heartier looking man than Jerry Cochrane, up to the very day he came home coughing. And a week after, they laid him out.

They say a green Christmas makes a fat churchyard, and goodness knows last winter proved it. It had been very wet and sloppy, hardly any snow at all until January, and then it didn't last long. She had followed the hearse to Calvary one, two, three, four times in a twelvemonth. The climate had lately changed for the worse. She could remember when all the Christmases were white and didn't use to kill people.

The first time that Georgia suggested giving up housekeeping, mama vehemently repudiated the idea. The third time she agreed to it, but on one sole condition, namely, that the change was to be only temporary. They were to take another flat as soon as she got to feeling more like herself again.

The family moved to the parlor floor of a long and narrow gray block house farther north. What had been designed, in 1880, for the front parlor was now the living room of the suite. Georgia put a piano in it, and Al a rack of bulldog pipes and a row of steins, like college men. The back parlor became Mrs. Talbot's room, the dining room Georgia's, and Al took the small one in the rear, overlooking the back yard.

The meals were served, 7 to 8:30, 1 to 2, 6 to 7, in the half-basement immediately under the front parlor. They were standardized—corned beef Thursday, fish Friday, roast beef Saturday, chicken Sunday. Mrs. Talbot and her children had their own private table, and they gave her the best seat with her back to the window, as titular head of the family. They had an arrangement that the young folks were never to be away from supper at the same time and leave mama alone.

Georgia saw no reason why she should not now and then accept an invitation from some man or other to dine and go to the theatre, provided she had sized him up for a decent sort. She always made the condition, though, that she would provide the theatre seats, which she usually managed to do inexpensively, owing to her acquaintance with advance men and agents in a rush to get their Sunday flimsies written.

At intervals she received an avowal which flattered her sufficiently, if made well. And she had plenty of hints that she might evoke a declaration without any serious difficulty.

But she had very little trouble in keeping men where she wanted them, for she had the faculty of knowing what they were going to think before they thought it.

A young, pink-cheeked, country lawyer lately moved in from Iowa, and famous there as a stump orator, gave her the biggest surprise. She liked him; she appreciated he had real brains. But on the very first evening that they ever went anywhere together, when he was driving her home from the play, he became suddenly and violently obsessed with the idea that a taxicab was liberty hall. After a few seconds' struggle, she rapped on the window, made the chauffeur stop, and went home in the car after a few pat words to her host.

There came from him next morning by special messenger sixteen closely and cleverly written pages, which started with a graceful and humble expression of contrition and ended with an offer of marriage.

The messenger was to wait an answer. He didn't have to wait long. She at once accepted the apology and rejected the proposal.

She admitted frankly that as a rule she liked men much better than women (except, of course, L. Frankland). They had a bigger outlook. But she didn't want and wouldn't have even the mildest sort of a flirtation.

She thought it would be cheap and cowardly and absurd, after murdering real love as she had done, to philander across its grave.

When at last she was able to pay back Mason's loan in full, with accumulated interest, she was surprised to find how little happier it made her. For nearly three years she had lived with her debt on the assumption that it was life's most insupportable burden. Now that it was settled, she began to realize that she had entertained the angel of success in disguise. The debt had been her most dynamic inspiration.

The man she loved had borrowed to lend to her. Quite possibly in so doing he had saved her life. In return she had broken her promise to marry him. Immediately he had begun to prosper and she to fall on evil days. Pride could not be more humiliated. To save her face before him, it was absolutely indispensable for her to prosper also in her turn, by her own will and skill; to pay him off to the last accumulated mill of interest; to prove to him that she had done as well without him as he had done without her; to make him know that she was very, very happy and content.