Part 12

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.