Part 6

But whether he could or not, the rest of us have to, and the country moves Chautauqua-ward with decorous haste. From anti-canteen and anti-racing to anti-fights and anti-tights, the aunties seem to have it, the aunties have it, and the bill is passed.

Al viewed this national tendency with mixed feelings; with joy when he tasted forbidden fruit and sneaked off across the state line with Moxey in a special train full of bartenders and policemen off duty and gay brokers and butchers to see more than the law allowed; with sorrow when he considered the future of his country, as a gray, flat and feminine plain.

The preliminaries had been fought off; there was the customary nervous pause before the wind-up. Young men with official caps forced their ways between the packed crowds with "peanuts, ham sandwiches and cold bottled beer." The announcer, a tall young man in shirt sleeves, who looked as if he might be a fairly useful citizen himself in case of a difference, made the customary appeal.

"Gen-tul-men, on account of the smoke in the at-mos-phere, I am requested to request you to quit smoking." (Pause.) "The boxers find it difficult to box in this at-mos-phere, and you will wit-ness a better encounter if you do." (Applause, but no snuffing of torches.)

"The final contest of this evening's proceedings," called the announcer, first to one side of the ring, then to the other, "will be between Johnny Fiteon and Kid O'Mara, both of Chicago, _fer th' bantamweight champ'nship o' th' world_."

Handclappings and whistlings. But the announcer, being gifted with the dramatic instinct, knew how to work up his climaxes, which, so far as he personally was concerned, would culminate with the tap of the gong for the first round. It was his affair to have the house seething with excitement when that gong tapped.

"Gen-tul-men," continued the announcer; then he spied two plumes waving in the middle distance and made the amend, to delighted sniggers: "Ladees and gen-tul-men, I take pleasure in in-ter-ducing Runt Keough of Phil-ur-del-fy-a." A diminutive youth with a wise face stepped in the ring and bobbed his head to the cheers, and muttered something to the announcer. "Runt Keough hereby challenges the winner of this bout, for the championship of th' world in the 115-poung class, _to a finish_." A tumult ensued. The Runt backed out of the ring to hoots of "fourflusher" and howls of approbation.

"Ladees and gen-tul-men, I now take pleasure in in-ter-ducing to you Mr. Ed Fiteon, father and handler of Johnny Fiteon, who wears th' bantamweight crown _o' th' world_."

The crowd made evident its vehement gratitude for Ed's share in Johnny's creation.

"Chee," whispered Moxey to Al, as they sat close and rapt, with shining eyes, on the dollar seats high up and far away, "they'd tear up the chairs for Johnny's mother if they'd perduce her."

But now something was happening by the east entrance. The cheering suddenly ceased, A low anxious buzzing whisper ran over the entire assemblage. Men stood up to look eastward regardless of monitions from behind to sit down. Something was cutting through the crowd from the east entrance to the ring. It was Kid O'Mara in his cotton bathrobe preceded by a gigantic mulatto and followed by two smaller Caucasians.

Moxey's bony fingers dug suddenly into Al's biceps. "Kid, you gotta do it, Kid, you gotta," he whispered. "O, fer God's sake, Kid."

Al was surprised. "Are you with O'Mara?" he asked.

"Am I with him?" answered Moxey with a sob in his voice; "am I with him--he's me cousin."

"O'Mara _your_ cousin?"

"Lipkowsky's his right name--same as mine. Look at his beak and see."

There was no doubt of it. "Kid O'Mara's" proboscis corroborated Moxey's claim.

Johnny's entrance a few minutes later was still more effective and his reception warmer. Fight fans are courtiers, always with the king.

When the two boys stripped, Johnny showed short and stocky, the Kid lank and lithe. Johnny depended on his punch, the Kid on his reach.

They fought ten rounds and it was called a draw, probably a just decision inasmuch as the adherents of each contestant proclaimed that the referee had been corrupted against their man.

Besides, a draw meant another fight between them with plenty of money in the house.

This evening in fistiana was perhaps the most powerful single experience which influenced Al at this period of his life. For a long time he sat silent beside Moxey on the return trip, pondering the physical beauty of Johnny and the Kid and ruefully comparing their bodies with his own.

He sighed, "And now I s'pose your cousin'll go out and kill it to-night!"

"Not him," Moxey reassured; "he never touches it in any form or shape, understand."

"He's training all the time?" continued Al, bent on deciphering the secret ways of greatness.

"Yep. So you might say."

"Oh," then Al relapsed into silence to wrestle with the angel of training all the time.

Like most young fellows, Al regarded his body as the source of all the happiness that amounted to anything. The brain was merely its adjunct, its money maker and guide. Its operations might lead to life, but they were not life like the body's.

It flashed upon him in the train bound home from the fight that he might achieve joy in either of two ways, by going in for sports or "sporting," by perfecting the animal in him or by abusing it, by getting into as good shape as Kid O'Mara or into as bad shape as the pale waster crumpled in the seat across the aisle.

So began a struggle in him, not yet ended, between the Ormuzd and Ahriman of physical condition. His high achievement thus far has been sixth place in a river Marathon swimming race, his completest failure thirty-six successive drunken hours in the restricted district.

XI

FUSION

Al wasn't much of a head at books. Georgia persuaded him to start in high school, but he soon came out, for he found that it interfered with the free expression of his personality. There were too many girls about one and he became extremely apprehensive lest he develop into a regular lah-de-dah.

Georgia was more afraid of his developing into a regular rough and tough, so they had a very intense time of it in the flat while the question was under discussion.

Mother Talbot sided with neither of them. She wanted Al to continue his instructions, but in the institutions under the direction of the Church. She couldn't reconcile herself to Al's getting his learning in a place where the very name of God was banned, as it was in the public schools.

Indeed in her opinion, and you couldn't change it, no, not if you argued from now until the clap of doom, the main trouble with everything nowdays was impiety and weakening of faith, brought about how? Why, by these public schools, these atheist factories that were ashamed of the Saviour.

For her part, she couldn't see her son going to one of them with any peace of mind, and she wanted them both to remember, that he would go against her consent and in spite of her prayers. What's more, if he was undutiful in this matter he'd probably find himself sitting between a Jew and a nigger, which she must say would serve him right.

Did Georgia think, she inquired on another occasion, that the priests weren't up to teaching Al, or what? To be sure, learning was a fine thing for a boy starting out in the world and she approved of it as much as any one, but who ever heard of an ordinary priest who hadn't more wisdom in his little finger than a public school teacher had in her whole silly head!

In a church school he would receive instructions not only in temporal, but also in divine learning. He would be taught not merely history and mathematics and such like, but also goodness and pure living, which were far more important for any young fellow.

But Georgia could not be convinced. She said she had been to a convent and if she had it to do over again she would go to public high school--just as Al, who not only was a considerate and loving brother, but also could see clearly how sorry he would be in after life if he didn't, was about to decide to do.

She finally had her way and Al picked up his burden--and found it not so difficult to carry after all. For he joined the Alpha Beta Gammas and rose rapidly in that order, becoming its most expert and weariless initiator, a very terror to novitiates. But precisely at the moment when the Alpha Bets reached the zenith of their glory, the skies fell upon them--the edict coming from above that all fraternities must go.

Al went too. The place was indubitably fit for nothing but girls now. And whatever Georgia might say, this time he was going to stick, for in the last analysis she was a female and her words subject to discount.

He stuck, discounting the female; and she was distressed like a mother robin in the tree, whose youngling, that has just fluttered down, persists in hopping out of the long grass upon the shaven lawn, when, as all robinhood knew, there were cats in the kitchen around the corner of the house.

It is the impulse of youth to travel far in search of marvels, a vestige, so it is said, of the nomadic stage of human development, when the race itself was young. It was as member of a demonstration crew for a vacuum cleaning machine that Al enjoyed his _wanderjahre_. He went among strange people and heard the babbling of many tongues without passing out of Chicago.

Like a reporter, or a mendicant friar of old, he knocked on all doors. The slouch, the slattern, the miser and the saint opened to him; the pale young mother with a child at her breast and another at her skirts and both her eyes black and blue; or the gray old sewing woman who for her plainness had known neither the bliss nor the horror of a man. One rolling-mill husky in South Chicago chased him down stairs with a stick of wood, and another heaved his big arm around him and made him come in and wait while little Jerry took the pail to the corner.

He came upon a household where one life was coming as another was going, and a little girl of twelve who could no longer contain the excitement of the day beneath her small bosom followed him into the entry way as he hastily backed out, and whispered between gasps to catch her breath her version of family history in the making.

He learned early the value of the smooth tongue, the timely bluff and the signed contract; and grew rapidly from boy to man in the forcing-bed of the city.

Meanwhile Moxey, not yet twenty, was swimming in a sea of sentiment. There was a young Italian girl who worked in the paper-box factory.

"Angelica," said he, "come to the dance to-night."

"Nit," she responded.

"Why?"

"Oh, they'd give me the laugh, if I----" She paused tactfully.

"Account of----," he drew a semi-circle about his nose and laughed unhappily.

"We-ell." It was explicit enough.

"Can't see a guinea has anything on a Yiddisher." Tit for tat in love's badinage.

"I'm no guinea, I'm not," she exclaimed passionately. "I'm Amurrican."

"So'm I," he answered briskly. "I'm Amurrican--and I don't wear no hoops in my ears." Perhaps that would hold her for a while. It did. She retreated in tears, thinking of her sire's shame.

But her bosom was deep and her lips were as red as an anarchist flag, and her little nose tilted the other way. So why stay mad with her? Her eyebrows nearly met in the center, though she was only sixteen.

And as for dancing--well, he'd looked 'em all over in vaudeville and he couldn't see where they had anything on her. More steps perhaps, but no more looks--or class.

And Angelica went to dances with Irishers, loafers who'd never take care of her, and she wouldn't go with him. Well, he'd see if she wouldn't. He'd own that little nose of hers some day or know why. He'd make money, he'd be rich, he'd woo her with rings and pins and tickets of admission. He would be irresistible in his lavishness.

Johnny Fiteon, bantamweight champion of the world, contributed to the discomforture of those members of his race who liked to dance with Angelica, for on his second time out with Moxey's cousin he lost the decision by a shade.

Moxey knew he would beforehand. Johnny redeemed himself in their next encounter, however, and put the cousin away, so there could be no question about it.

And again Moxey, knowing beforehand that he would, prospered and showered Angelica with brooches. Also he purchased an equity in a two-story frame cottage with Greeks in the basement and Hunkies above. One shouldn't, he reflected, depend too much on sports to keep up the supply of brooches.

"Aggie," said he, as they returned from a dance together, "take a peep at this." He extracted a diamond solitaire pin from his tie and stopping under an arc light gave it to her to examine.

"I seen it," she snapped. "You been flashing it at me all evening. Think I'm blind?"

"Make up into a nice ring, wouldn't it?"

Angelica was wise. She knew what men were after. She didn't work in a paper-box factory for nothing. She would let them go just so far, to be sure, if they were good fellows, but she could draw the line. Indeed she had already drawn it once or twice with five thick little fingers on astonished cheeks. She measured her distance from the ardent Hebrew unconscious of his danger, but still she paused for greater certainty. Did the diamond mean another proposition--or was it maybe a proposal this time?

"I got my uncle in jail in Napoli," she said very quietly.

"I'm sorry," he answered simply. "But what of it? They had my brother Steve in Pontiac once."

"My uncle he killed the man that spoilt his daughter."

"That ain't nothing to be ashamed of, Aggie," he spoke kindly, seeking to console her, and took her small and stubby hand gently in his long sinewy ones; "he done right."

She never let him know, for her dignity, how low she once had feared he held her, and she kissed him goodnight many times.

"They say you people are good to their women, Moxey," she whispered. "Ours ain't, always." She paused. "Gee, my pa'll have a fit."

Moxey laughed. "Mine too, I guess," said he, "but we won't have to ask them for nothing, understand."

XII

MOXEY'S SISTER

"You'll stand up with me, won't you?" Moxey asked, a bit anxiously.

"Sure, of course," said Al.

"It's at night, and"--here was to be at least one wedding where the groom was no lay figure--"dress suits de rigger, understand."

"Sure, of course," Al assented impatiently. Did Moxey think he didn't know anything?

"We ain't going to tell the old folks for a couple of weeks to save hard feelings on both sides, that's our motto. And the kids is to be Catholics, she stood pat on that."

"Sure, of course, what did you expect 'em to be, kikes?" Perhaps Al spoke a trifle too explicitly, for Moxey flushed as he frequently did. It was his last remaining signal to the world that his hide wasn't as tough as he pretended.

"I ain't marr'in' her just because she's a peach," Moxey rhapsodized, "but she is. Wait till you see her and I'll leave it to you. But she's got principle, too. Her uncle killed a fellow for wronging his daughter and Aggie says he done right, if he is still doing time in the old country. Oh, there's plenty of principle in dagoes, you can say what you like. When you go foolin' around their women you gotta take a chance."

It was as if Moxey had pressed a bell in his friend's mind and opened a chamber there, where vague shapes appeared and suspicion had been gathering. For Al had observed Georgia's mysteries and evasions, her care before her mirror, her new hats and pretty ribbons, her day-long Sunday absences. Twice he had met her on the street, walking and chatting most gayly with some strange man. Besides his mother had plainly hinted that all might not be right.

"What do you think a fellow ought to do if a man's after his sister?" Al asked slowly. "This unwritten law thing don't seem to work any more except down South."

"You can't lay down no rule," said Moxey. "Depends on if you like your sister."

"If you do?"

"Then go the limit and take a chance with your jury." He paused and great shame came to his cheeks again. "I had a sister, oncet ... and she, well y' understand.... I sometimes thought I oughta of killed him ... but I never did ... I kept askin' myself 'what's the good of killing him now? Becky's done for anyhow, and it'd just do for me, too.' ... The time to look out for a girl is beforehand, not afterwards."

There was no doubt about that, especially in theory. But Al contemplated somewhat dubiously the task of safeguarding Georgia. She was so blamed independent. She might say he was impertinent, or she might just laugh at him. She was fairly certain, at all events, not to acquiesce readily in any watch and ward policy which he might seek to institute for her benefit. Still--in a well conducted family the men were supposed to look out for the women and keep the breath of dishonor from them. He was the man of the family now, if he was only eighteen, and so it was up to him to find out if Georgia was in danger, and if she was, to get her out of it _beforehand_.

"I seen your sister once," remarked Moxey, guessing his thoughts.

Al was silent.

"Looked like she could take care of herself."

"Oh, she's got good sense," said Al, "but you know the riddle, 'Why's a woman like a ship? Because it takes a man to manage her.'"

"Yes," assented Moxey, "and they have more respect, understand, for the fellow who can say no to 'em when it's right."

So after supper that evening, instead of going over to the pool parlor, Al stayed at home waiting for his mother to go to bed, when he could have a talk with Georgia and pump her and find out about this strange man she knew, and if necessary say _no_.

His mother drew up to the lamp and darned his socks and talked and talked on endlessly it seemed to him. He felt a little abused when nine o'clock came, which was her bed time, and still she made no move to go.

She did get a little tiresome at times. He would acknowledge that frankly to himself, though he would not let her see it for worlds--except by staying away from her most of the time, and not paying attention to her when he was with her.

If his most affectionate greeting of the day came as a rule when he said "Good night, mother dear," he didn't realize it; and it would have amazed him to know that sometimes she sniffled for as much as half an hour after she went to bed, because he had shown so plainly that he was glad to be rid of her. She supposed in her sadness that he was an unnatural, almost unparalleled example of unfilial ingratitude; not suspecting he was only a rear rank file in the Ever Victorious Army of Youth.

Al wound his watch. "Gee, quarter of ten," he remarked, through a yawn. He stretched himself elaborately. Mother was certainly delaying the game. Until she went he couldn't have his round-up with Georgia, who was in one of her after-supper reading spells and had hardly said a word all evening.

She now had a fad for those little books bound in imitation green leather that constituted the World's Epitome of Culture series and cost thirty-five cents apiece, or two magazines and an extra Sunday paper, as she put it.

She had been through twenty of them already and was now on her twenty-first. He didn't deny that it was creditable to go in for culture. If that was the sort of thing she liked, why, as the fellow says, he supposed she liked that sort of thing. It's a free country. But as for him, when he was tired with the day's work, he thought he was entitled to a little recreation--a game of pool, a couple of glasses of beer, maybe a swim in a "nat"--he wasn't bad at the middle distances--and he couldn't see drawing up a chair under a lamp and going to work again, for that was what it amounted to, on a little green Epitome that you had to study over to get the meaning, or maybe look in the dictionary, as she was doing now. She had told him that they were more interesting than the other kind of books and had even got him to start on a couple she said he was sure to like, because they were so exciting--Marco Polo's Travels and Froissart's Chronicles--but they didn't excite him any, and he made only about thirty pages in each of them.

Indeed, it was his private opinion that Georgia was more or less bunking herself with this upward and onward stuff. She fell for it because it helped her feel superior. And then she worked herself up to believing she really liked it because people were surprised she knew so much and said she had a naturally fine mind. A vicious circle.

In all of which cogitations he was perhaps not entirely astray; though her chief incitement was more concrete than he supposed. She wanted to impress Stevens in particular, rather than people in general--she was determined to keep even with him so that he could never talk down to her as to a mere "womanly woman" who held him by sex and nothing more.

When at last Mrs. Talbot arose, Al hastened to her, kissed her affectionately, slipped his arm around her, impelled her towards the door, opened it rapidly, kissed her again, closed it firmly behind her, lit a cigarette, and began: "Georgia, I want to have a heart to heart with you."

"In a second." She read the last half page of her chapter so rapidly that she was compelled to read it over again for conscience' sake, then inserted her book-mark and turned to him: "Fire away."

"Who's the mysterious stranger!"

She had known it was coming for the last half hour. From the corner of her eye, she had spied the importance of the occasion actually oozing out of young Al. At first she thought of side-stepping the interview, but eventually decided not to, partly to please the lad and more still to hear how her case would stand when discussed aloud. She had been in a most chaotic state of mind ever since the agreement with Stevens to pretend; that which wasn't clear then was hazier now; she was of ten minds a day whether to give in to her lover or to give in to the Church. Now she would listen to Georgia and Al talk about the case as if they were two other people, in the hope of finding guidance in her eavesdropping.

"He is a man in the office whom I like," she answered.

"How much?"

"A lot."

"And he does, too?"

"Yes, a lot."

"Hmm--you know I hate to preach, but--" Hesitation.

"You think you will, all the same. Go on, I'm listening."

"You know I'm liberal. If you were just fooling with this fellow, I'd never peep, honest, I wouldn't."

She smiled, "I'll promise to only fool with my next beau."

"Now, this is no laughing matter," he rebuked her levity. "If you're really--stuck on each other--it may bust you all to pieces before you're done with it--unless you quit in time."

"What do you mean by 'quit'?"

"Give up seeing him altogether. It would be safer."

"Yes, so it would. But what's that got to do with it?"

"A woman can't afford to take chances," he retorted impressively.

"It seems to me the people who get the most fun out of life are the ones who do take chances. Your little tin hero, Roosevelt, for instance--you like him because he'd rather hunt a lion or a trust than a sure thing. Jim Horan didn't eat smoke for the money in it, but because he thought a wall might fall on him some day--or might not. That's what he wanted to find out. Well, perhaps I want to find out if a wall will fall on me some day--or not."

Al was astounded. There was something more than bold, something hardly decent in the comparison of her own dubious flirtation to a great fireman's martyrdom or a soldier-statesman-sportsman's courage and career.

"But, Georgia," he expostulated, "you speak like a man in a manhole. Horan and Roosevelt did their duty taking chances."

"Rubbish," she said. "They acted according to their natures and I will act according to mine--some day."