Part 2

Jim raised himself to his elbow, but did not dare to go further. The big fellow's eyes were still blazing.

"Honest, Ed, I was trying to help."

Miles took a step toward him. "You're a G--d d--d liar!" he shouted.

Jim tried to meet his look. It was a wretched business to be called that name before a dozen others--it had happened to him before, but he always hated it. Still the big fellow seemed especially vicious and dangerous just now; Jim knew how senseless it was to cross him when he was having one of his spells, and besides, they never lasted long, anyway. Jim dropped his eyes again, acknowledging the justice of the discipline.

Miles threw a ten-dollar bill on the bar and broke the tension with a jolly laugh. "Well, I guess we've put Coffey Neal out o' this primary," said he. "Plunge in, lads." Jack served each man, but nothing for Jim. The code provided for a final display of magnanimity by the fountainhead. "Come ahead, Jim," he growled, kindly.

Serenity unfolded again her frightened wings and the smoke of peace increased and multiplied over a leader fitted to lead and followers fitted to follow.

The ensuing celebration spread itself over many hours and into many taverns. There was some agreeable close harmony, to which Jim joined a pleasant baritone, and much revilement of all double-crossers, from Judas and Benedict Arnold down to Coffey Neal, and a certain Irish party whose name now escapes me, but who grievously misbehaved himself during a Fenian incident.

Very frequently they reached the shank of the evening--as often, indeed, as anybody wanted to go home. And in the big fellow's mouth the shank was ever a cogent argument.

Eventually the ultimate question as to their further destination was put, and here the big fellow stood aside, permitting perfect latitude of decision. He was a politician and he knew that he could not possibly afford to have it said by the wives of the ward that he influenced their husbands toward sin. He could afford to have almost everything else said about him, but not that.

Jim wavered, then resisted temptation. His record in that particular respect had been almost absolutely clean.

He walked home stiffly, fighting with the skill of the practiced alcoholic for the upright position and the shortest distance between two points.

His early morbidity had vanished. If he had done one thing badly that evening, he had done another thing well. Whatever his wife, Georgia, might urge against him in regard to his conviviality, wasn't he, after all, one of the most faithful husbands he knew? For all her superior airs, she had much to be grateful for in him.

He entered his flat with little scraping of the keyhole, and cautiously undressed in the front room. It was late--much later than he had hoped for. He could just make out the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece by the light from the street lamp.

He opened the door to their bedroom so slowly, so slowly and steadily, and then--as usual, that cursed hinge betrayed him. The number of times he had determined to oil it--yet he always forgot to. To-morrow he wouldn't forget--that was his flaming purpose.

Psychological flux and flow may be deduced from door hinges as well as from the second cup of coffee for breakfast or the plaintive lady standing immediately before your hard-won seat in the street car. Jim would never oil the hinge in the morning, because that would somehow imply he expected to come in very late again at night, and he never expected to--in the morning.

But her breathing remained regular, absolutely regular; he had this time escaped the snare of the hinge.

The gas jet burned in a tiny flame. She had fallen into the habit of keeping a night-light during the past three or four years. At first he had objected that it interfered with his sleep, but she had been singularly persistent about it. She hadn't given him her reasons; indeed, she had never analyzed them. It was nothing but a bit of preposterous feminism, which she kept to herself, that the light made a third in their room.

She lay with her back to him, far over on her side of the bed. He could see where her hip rose, and vaguely through the covering the outline of her limbs. Her shoulders were crumpled forward, and the upper one responded to her breathing, and marked it. Under her arm, crossed in front of her, he knew was the swelling of her breast.

And then at the neck was the place where the hair was parted and braided, the braids wound forward about her eyes--a very peculiar way to treat one's hair.

What a different thing a woman was! He had seen her lying so countless times, and yet the strangeness had never worn off. Indeed, curiously enough, there seemed even more of it now than when they had just married, and she was entirely new.

He often thought a woman didn't seem exactly a person--that is, not like him, and he was certainly a person--but something else; just as good, perhaps, but quite other. Her body, of course--well, agreeable as it might be, still he was glad he wasn't made that way, for it seemed so ineffective.

And one of them could stand a good man on his head. He simply couldn't get the hang of that. If a man was angry and sulked, he didn't mind. In fact, he preferred it to being knocked about as the big fellow sometimes did to him. He had never cared what man sulked, his brother or father or any of them.

And yet this woman, she----he looked at her intently, earnestly, as if finally to solve her--she was very beautiful. And she was his wife.

He crept into bed, very softly, for she might wake up. But then, it briefly occurred to him, what if she did! He was perfectly sober--at least to all intents and purposes. He could talk perfectly straight; he felt sure of that.

Perhaps she would now wake of her own accord. That would be the best solution, and then he could appear drowsy, as if he, too, had just been aroused from sleep.

He sighed loudly and turned himself over in the bed, but she gave no sign.

"Georgia," he whispered very low.

Pause.

"Georgia," a little louder, "are you awake?"

No answer.

He touched her, as if carelessly. She stirred. Ah, she would--no, her breathing was markedly the breathing of slumber. Perhaps she was pretending. Oh, well, what was the use of his trying, if she was going to act so?

He turned noisily back to his side of the bed. He was disappointed in her. Was it fair of her to pretend--if she was pretending? After all, she was his wife.

A husband has his rights. That was what the church said. Otherwise, what was the use of getting married and supporting a woman--well, most men supported their wives, and he intended to do so again soon, very soon.

Yes, he had the teachings on his side. He wanted nothing beyond the bond. It was holy wedlock, wasn't it?

He placed his hand upon her waist. And yet she would give no sign. More resolutely than before she counterfeited the presentment of sleep.

"Georgia!" he spoke aloud.

"What is it!" she said, quickly, sitting up, her black braids falling back on her slim shoulders.

"I just wanted to say good night," he muttered, huskily.

"Good night," she answered, curtly. "Please don't disturb me again. I am very tired."

She was turning from him, when he placed his hand on her shoulder.

"Georgia, I love you. You know I do."

The foulness of his poisoned breath filled her with loathing.

"No, Jim," she gasped, afraid. "Oh, no!"

"Georgia, you dunno how I love you," he pleaded, almost tearfully, taking her in his arms.

Quickly she jumped from the bed. "Where are you going?" asked the annoyed husband.

"I can't sleep here, Jim; I can't." She took up her underskirt and her thin flannel dressing sack and passed from the room. She made her couch on the lounge in the front room and after a time fell asleep.

Jim twitched with nightmare throughout the night, and long after she had gone downtown in the morning.

III

AN ECONOMIC UNIT

Georgia's desk was in a rectangular room which was over one hundred feet long and half as wide. There was light on three sides. Near the ceiling was a series of little gratings, each with a small silkoline American flag in front of it. These flags were constantly fluttering, indicating forced ventilation; so that although the desks were near together and the place contained its full complement of busy people, there was plenty of oxygen for them.

This arrangement was designed primarily for economic rather than philanthropic purposes. The increased average output of work due to the fresh air yielded a satisfactory interest on the cost of the ventilating apparatus; and, besides, it impressed customers favorably and had a tendency to hold employes. The office dealt in life insurance.

The desks were mounted on castors so that they could be wheeled out of the way at night while the tiled floor was being washed down with hose and long-handled mops and brooms and sometimes sand, as sailors holystone a deck. Much of the hands-and-knees scrubbing was in this way done away with.

Rubber disks hinged against the desks and set to the floor held them in place during working hours. Narrow black right-angular marks showed where each desk belonged and to what point, exactly, it must be moved back when the nightly cleaning was finished.

These details were all of profound interest to Georgia, for her desk was the most important thing in the world to her at this time in her life.

She delighted in neatness, order, precision, in the adjustment of the means to the end. Every morning just before nine, she punched the clock, which gave her a professional feeling; and hung her hat and jacket in locker 31, which seemed to her a better, a more self-respecting place for them to be than her small, untidy bedroom closet, all littered up with so many things--hers and Jim's.

Her mother, who kept house for them, was a good deal at loose ends, in Georgia's opinion. And it didn't seem quite the decent thing that a woman who had nothing else in the world to do should fail to keep a six-room flat in order. Of course her mother was getting a little old, but hardly too old to do that.

Georgia had lately had a trial promotion to "take" the general agent's letters--the previous functionary, a tall blonde girl, having married very well.

It was the first stenographic position in the office and carried the best salary, so there was a good deal of human jealousy about it--much the same sort as freshmen feel who are out for the class eleven.

Georgia had tried her hardest for five days. She had stayed overtime to rewrite whole pages for the sake of a single omitted letter; she had bought half a dozen severely plain shirt waists, and yielded up her puffs. Everyone knew how the old man hated the first sign of nonsense.

But in spite of all that the day before he had called in Miss Gerson to take his dictation.

Well--it was pretty hard, but she had done her best. And she was a better workman than Miss Gerson, she would stick to that. Only yesterday she had seen Miss G. twice hunting in a pocket dictionary hidden in her lap--and she never had to do that, practically.

Life was just one damn thing after another, as Jim was always complaining--only he could never possibly have apprehended the full truth and implication of that saying--in spite of its rather common way of putting it. She knew that he never saw deeply, really fundamentally into the dreadful mystery of being here; he couldn't for he was coarse and masculine and he drank.

Her fingers were working rapidly casting up purple letter after purple letter before her eyes, but the physiologists tell us that she was using only the front part of her brain for it. The rest of it was free to contemplate the Ultimate Purpose, or gross favoritism in the office especially in relation to Miss Gerson, or whether an ice cream soda was a silly thing to have before lunch, as she knew it was, but then one had to have some pleasure.

Rat-tat-tat-tat went the keys; ding, there was her bell. Ten letters more on this line said the front part of her brain. One thing she was sure of, said the back, she devoutly hoped her young brother Al wouldn't develop into a mere white-collared clerk--though of course she certainly wanted him to be always a gentleman. She slid her carriage for the new line.

Rat-tat-tat-tat--and again, ding. There, the end of the page. Single space and not an error. She would like to see Miss Gerson do that at her speed.

The shuffle of the old man's office boy sounded behind her. Now, wait--what would to-day's verdict be? Would he pass or stop?

"Miss Connor," a-a-ah--"the old man wants you to take some letters." (Georgia had let them suppose she was unmarried.)

The benison of perfect peace now enfolded her.

Poor little Miss Gerson--well, after all, life is a game, the loser pays, and the winner can be perfectly philosophical about it.

Georgia went to the old man's private office and closed the door behind her.

"Yes, sir." She stood at attention, pad and pencil ready.

"Will you take these please, Miss Connor? Mr. James Serviss--here's his address," the old man tossed the letter he was answering over to her. "Dear Sir: Replying to yours of the 16th inst, we regret that----. Well, tell him it's impossible. Write the letter yourself. You understand!" He was observing her as if to probe her resourcefulness.

"Perfectly, sir."

"Miss Belmont saved me a great deal of trouble in that way. She could tell what I would want to say." Miss Belmont was the blonde girl who had married and left a vacancy.

"I can do the same, sir."

"Well, here are some more," continued the old man. "This--No." He tossed another letter to her. She made a shorthand notation in the corner of it. "This--By all means,--and be polite about it. This--An appointment to-morrow afternoon."

"Yes, sir."

"This--Routine. And these--Send them to the proper departments." More notations.

"Yes, sir."

"You can start on those. Bring them in when they're ready."

"Yes, sir." Exit Georgia.

She summoned the deeper layers of her vitality, settled to her work and her fingers flew. She knew the joy--if joy it be--of creation.

Quietly she slipped back into the old man's office, without knocking. His secretary had entrance except at such times as he shut his telephone off.

She seemed very slim and neat, and calm and steady--almost prim, perhaps, as she stood with pen and blotter in her hand to take the old man's signatures.

But her being surged within her like that of a mother who waits to hear if her boy is to be expelled from school or forgiven.

The old man had been going over a campaign plan for business with one of his quickest witted solicitors, and after Georgia had waited standing for a few moments, dismissed him with, "Yes, that's the right line, Stevens. Just keep plugging along it."

As Stevens passed her on his way out he bowed slightly. He had been doing that for some time now, though he had not yet spoken to her.

Stevens was still under thirty, she concluded, though she had heard he had been with the company for ten years. A silent, sharp-featured, tall young fellow with chilly blue eyes, who had the name in the office of keeping himself to himself and being all business.

The old man, having glanced over and signed the letters, passed his verdict on her work--"Hmm, hmm, Miss Connor, you may move your things to Miss Belmont's desk. And here's a note----"

When an author conquers a stage manager; or Atchison rises 4% the very next day; or the Cubs bat it out in the tenth on a darkening September afternoon; when on the third and last trial, it's a boy; or when Handsome Harry Matinee returns you his curled likeness _signed_; or you first sip Mai Wein, you know what it is to move your things to Miss Belmont's desk.

"And here's a note," continued the old man, without the gap which we have made to put in analogues, "to Mr. Edward Miles--I'd better dictate this one myself--'Dear Mr. Miles: I should be happy to have you call--' No, strike that out. 'In response to your letter of even date, I should be glad to see you at any time that suits you, here in my office--' no, make it three o'clock to-morrow afternoon--'to confer over the subject of the Senatorial campaign in your district.' Read what you've got."

Georgia did so.

The old man changed his eyeglasses. "Maybe you'd better telephone him instead," he said. "It's Ed Miles, the politician. You can probably locate him at----"

"Yes, sir, I know," suggested Georgia.

"And get Mr. Somers on the phone--Mr. Somers does some of our legal work----"

"Yes, sir."

"And ask him to be here at the same time. Make a note of it on my list of appointments."

"Yes, sir."

"Tell him Miles is coming, and to get up a little résumé for me of the situation in those districts over there, and ah--perhaps an estimate in a general way of what we ought to do for, ah--Mr. Miles. You will indicate that to him."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, telephone him that." Georgia rose and went to the door. "Ah--Miss Connor----" She turned and looked at her employer, her head tilted forward, with a peculiar open-eyed, steady little stare, which was a trick of hers when wholly interested.

"Did I indicate to you," said he, "that you are my _private_ secretary now?"

"I understand, sir. Thank you."

IV

THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE

Each morning as Georgia entered the elevated train and spread open her paper, she cast off the centuries, being transformed from a housewife to a "modern economic unit."

She smiled at the morning cartoon or perhaps, in the celebrated phrase of Dr. Hackett, she sighed softly for the sake of its meticulous futility. Her penny to the news stand gave her full and free franchise upon the ever anxious question of the popularity of popular art. Other Georgias of Chicago were simultaneously passing like judgments in like elevated cars and the sum of their verdicts would ultimately readjust social distinctions in Cook and Lake counties, Illinois.

She always turned to the Insurance Notes next. It was her Duty to be Well-informed and Interested in the Success of Her Employer, for His Success was Hers. She hadn't been to business college for eight weeks not to know that.

Next a peek at Marion Jean Delorme's column of heart throbs, which she frankly regarded as dissipation, because she enjoyed it, and everybody who read it called it common.

By this time, home and its squabbling; its everlasting question of how far a pay envelope can stretch; her sullen contemplation of Jim's alcoholism; and irritability at her mother's pottering way had vanished into the background of her mind, where they slept through her working day.

She engaged herself with more appealing problems and a larger world. She deplored the litter of torn-up streets and the thunder of the loop, instead of the litter of the breakfast dishes and the squeak of the hinge. Not that clean dishes are less meritorious than clean streets, but, to such minds as hers had grown to be, less captivating. To change desks downtown was more fun than to change chairs at home.

She felt her solidarity with the other people who streamed into the business district at eight forty-five, to get money by writing or talking. It was the master's end of the game and she belonged to it. Outside-the-loop worked with its arms and hands--she worked merely with her fingers. The time might come when she would need to work only with her tongue--and triple her income. She was in line for that.

She was no mean citizen of no mean city throughout the day: at the lunch club where she coöperated; in the big white-tiled vestibule of her building where she exchanged ten words of weather prophecy with the elevator starter between clicks; in the rest room where they talked office politics, and shows, and woman suffrage, as well as beaux and hats; behind her machine which rattled "twenty dollars a week by your own ten fingers and no man's gratuity."

There were no oaths, no bonds unbreakable, no church to tell her she couldn't change her job, as it tells the housed and covered women who get their bread by wifehood.

If she didn't like the temperature of the room, or the size of her employer's ears, she could walk across the street and do as well--perhaps better.

If he had sworn at her, or come ugly drunk into her presence--but that was inconceivable. Employers didn't do that, only husbands, because they knew they had you.

It was the full life and the free life which she lived, she and her sisters of the skyscrapers. It was the emancipation of woman, and the curse of Eve was lifted from them.

But the tide of her being which flowed regularly each work-morning, ebbed regularly each night. Her horizon became smaller and less bold after she had slid her nickel over the glass to the spectacled cashier in the L cage and was herded for home on the jammed platform. Her boldness continuously diminished as station after station was called and she stood to her strap, glancing from the direct imperatives, "Uneeda Union Suit and We Can Prove It," "Hasten to the House of Hoopelheimer," "Smart Set Collars for Swell Spenders," "Blemishes Blasted by Blackfeeto," to the limp, sallow people who, like herself, had left their vitality downtown.

When she pushed away from the light of her home station into the gloom and up the ineffectually lighted street between rows upon rows of three and four story flats, her head slightly bent, scurrying along with the working woman's nightfall pace, like Lucifer, she felt the mighty distance. She had shrunk into a middle-class wife who had been a poor picker.

So it usually happened. But the day of her triumph over Miss Gerson was an exception, and the corona of the office extended and enveloped her through the rows of flat buildings and up two flights of stairs to the door of her own apartment.

She entered happily, gaily. And there was Jim sprawled in one chair, his dusty boots in another, without a coat to hide his soiled shirt sleeves, without a collar to apologize for his unshaven chin, a frazzled cigar between his fingers and a heap of ashes beside him where he had let them fall upon the carpet--her carpet that she had earned and paid for.

Ashes had fallen, too, upon his protruding abdomen. He breathed very heavily, almost wheezed. He looked up to speak. His eyes were rather swinish in recovery from debauch. His teeth were bad and the gap which had come under the cut lip was not a scar of honor. She hoped he wouldn't speak--but of course he did.

"Hello, Georgia."

"Hello," she answered mechanically.

"What you been doing?"

What a stupid question. What did he suppose she had been doing? For when a husband doesn't suit, he doesn't suit at all--his very attempts at peacemaking become an offense in him.

"Working," she said curtly and passed on to their bedroom.

"Oh, hell! cut out the everlasting grouch," he called after her, and went to the window and looked out, kneeling moodily on the window seat. He was Henpecko the Monk, all right. What she needed was a firm hand. Women took all the rope you gave them--they took advantage of you. He ought to have begun long ago to shut down on her nonsense. Other husbands did, and by God, he would begin. Then he rubbed his prickly chin and smiled ruefully. For hadn't he begun a great many times and had he ever been able to finish?

Besides, he was broke, and it was strictly necessary, most unfortunately in view of his present disfavor, for him to obtain a loan.

Maybe Al would help him out and he wouldn't have to ask Georgia. There was an idea. It was more dignified, too.

He didn't know whether Al had come in yet.