Part 13

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.