Part 7

He looked unutterably distressed, for he loved her, and foresaw ruin enfolding her. He knew that women aren't allowed to act according to their natures, if their natures are as natural as all that.

"I haven't seen Jim for over a year," she went on, "nor heard of him for ten months. He may be dead. He is the same as dead to me. My heart is the heart of a widow--grateful for her weeds. The Church may say otherwise--and I might obey unwillingly--but my own being tells me that there is nothing wrong in my love for Mason Stevens--any more than it's sin to breathe air or drink water. That's how we're made. When I lived with Jim, I played no tricks. But that's over now, it's over for good. What's the difference whether he's under the sod or above it, so far as I'm concerned?" Her eyes were alight and she walked back and forth, gesticulating like a Beveridge, persuading herself that what she wished was just because she wished it. "I've got a few good years of youth left. I'll not throw them away for a religious quibble."

"You mean divorce and marry again--openly!"

"What does the ceremony matter? I'm not sure we'd take the trouble of going through it," she shrugged her shoulders, "the Church says that it means nothing anyway; that it makes the sin no less."

"But, Georgia," he was beginning now to fear for her common sense, "for God's sake, if you do such a thing, first go through the civil form anyway."

She laughed triumphantly. She had caught him. "There spoke your heart. Of course, we'll have a legal marriage. You see the Church hasn't convinced you, either, that divorce and remarriage is the same as adultery."

She had crystallized her vague desires into positive determination by the daring sound of her own words.

XIII

REËNTER JIM

Al reflected moodily that arguing with a woman never gets you anything. If he had been trying to interest Georgia in a vacuum cleaner, he would have known better than to start in by arousing her to a fervor for brooms. Now he would have to wait a few days until she had cooled out, and then try her on a different tack, appealing to her affection and begging her not to bring disgrace upon the whole family.

She was half-sitting, half-kneeling on the window seat, her elbows on the sill, her cheeks in her hands, looking out into the dim urban night. Directly to the south, over the loop, where Chicago was wide awake and playing, the diffused electric radiance was brightest and highest--a man-made borealis.

She took pride in her big city. It was unafraid. It followed no rules but its own, and didn't always follow them. It owned the future in fee and pitied the past. It said, not "Ought I?" but "I will." It was modern, just as she was modern. She was more characteristically the offspring of her city than of her mother. For she was new, like Chicago; and her mother was old, like the Church.

So she pondered in the pleasant after-glow of decision, buttressing her resolve.

The bell rang from the vestibule below and she went to the speaking tube to find out what was wanted. "Yes?" she inquired, then without saying anything more she walked slowly to her room.

"Who was it!" asked Al, but she closed the door behind her without answering. Funny things, women. He went to the tube himself.

"What you want?"

"It's Jim."

"Jim?--well, for the love of goodness godness Agnes--d'you want to come up?"

"Yes, if it's all right."

Al pressed the door-opener, but before climbing the stairs Jim shouted another question through the tube: "Wasn't that Georgia who spoke first?"

"Yes."

"Well, why did she--how is she, anyway!"

"Fine. Come along."

There was a great change in Jim. He must have taken off forty or fifty pounds. His eyes were clear, his skin healthily brown, and he had hardened up all over. He looked a good ten years younger than the last time Al saw him, except for one thing, that his hair had thinned out a great deal. He was almost bald on top.

They shook hands and Jim gave him a solid grip. "Cheese," said the younger fellow heartily, "you look good--primed for a battle, almost." He put his fingers on the other's biceps.

Jim drew up his clenched fist, showing a very respectable bunch of muscle. "More than there ever used to be, eh?" he asked, smiling broadly.

Al whistled, stepped back for a better look at the miracle, and whistled. "And yet they say they never come back. Hm-m-m--how'd you do it?"

"Working. Rousty on a dredge in Oklahoma."

"Rousty?"

"Toted coal to the firemen, later got to firing myself--on the night shift. We kept her going steady. Funny thing, irrigating way out there, t'hell an' gone, in the middle of the frogs barking and the cattle bawling feeding your old thirty-horse and watching the old scoop lifting out her yard of sludge every six minutes. You got so it seemed the most natural thing in the world, but it ain't, is it!"

"What'd they pay!"

"Fifty and board. But the money's being in the business. Me and our day trainman was talking of getting shares in a dredge. There's work there for a thousand years. Where's Georgia?"

Al nodded his head toward her door.

"So's not to see me!"

Al nodded.

"I came clear from there in the busy season for the sight of her and I didn't come alone. I've three hundred here," said Jim, taking a roll of bills from his pocket. "And to be turned down this way, with my heart full of love----" He was greatly moved and he showed it, for his lip trembled and his voice shook.

Al was sorry for him. "Aw, she'll come around. She's got a stubborn streak, you know that, but she does right in the end. Give her time. I'll talk to her."

Jim felt sure that she must have heard their conversation, especially the last part of it, for he had talked quite distinctly and he remembered from the old days how readily all the sounds in the flat penetrated into that room. He got on his hands and knees and looked at the crack beneath her door to see if her room was lighted.

"She's sitting in the dark," he whispered, "Would it be all right to knock!"

"I don't know," said Al uncertainly.

Jim knocked softly, then a little more loudly, but there was no answer. He put his ear to the door to listen, then tip-toed away.

"She's crying," he whispered to Al, "crying to beat the band. Those heavy deep kind of sobs. I could barely hear her. Must have her face in the pillow. Now what do you know about that!"

"That's a good sign," said Al, "means she's coming around. When she just turns white and don't speak----"

Jim privately opined that he understood Georgia's moods vastly better than Al ever would, and was in no need of instruction on this subject.

"You mean when she has one of her silences," he said, giving the thing its proper name.

"Yes, that's when you can't handle her. But now, she's begun to melt already. So to-morrow evening come for supper, and I bet my shirt you are all made up in thirty minutes."

Jim wrung his hand. "You're a thoroughbred, Al--and take this from me now, I've learned sense. If I get her back, I'll keep her. No more booze, never one drop."

He counted out four five-dollar bills upon the center table. "That's what I borrowed, when I quit," he explained. As he reached the door he turned to confirm his happy appointment. "Six thirty to-morrow evening?"

XIV

THE PALACE OF THE UNBORN

The following morning brother and sister rode down-town together in the cars. "Don't you think you might have consulted me before asking Jim to supper?" she inquired.

"Don't be foolish," he replied cheerfully, "you were locked in your room."

She worked all day in that state of suppressed excitement which presages great events, from the first ride on the lodge goat to the codicil part of uncle's will. Everything she saw or touched was more vivid than usual to her senses. Her typewriter keys seemed picked out in the air against a deep perspective, their lettering very heavy, their clicking singularly loud. One of the little flags caught in a ventilation grill, and instead of fluttering out freely, flapped and bellied, making a small snapping noise. A flag wasn't meant to do that, so she crossed the big room, pulled up a chair and released it, somewhat to the surprise of the youth sitting directly beneath it.

The old man, usually rapid enough with his letters, seemed hopelessly slow and awkward this morning, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from helping him out with the proper word when he got stuck. He was leaning back in his swivel chair, wasting interminable time with pauses and laryngeal interjections, the tips of his fingers together, his eyes half closed, droning out his sentences. He wore a little butterfly tie, to-day, blue spots on brown, just below his active Adam's apple and thin, corded neck. Under the point of his chin was a little patch which his razor had skipped, hopelessly white. She wondered what could be in it for him any more, and why he didn't retire.

She rattled off her letters, then added a note for Stevens, "Dinner to-night?" and left it in the S compartment of the _Letters Received_ box.

When he came in later for his afternoon mail he caught her eye and nodded, and on the way out of the old man's office stopped at her desk for a few hasty words: "What time, and where?"

"Wherever you like--at six thirty."

"Max's?" he suggested, "we'll have snails."

"Oh, what a perfectly dear place--in every sense of the word."

"My treat," he said.

"No."

"You never dined with me before; you might let me celebrate.

"We'll celebrate anyway, Dutch. Make it Max's."

He didn't prolong the argument. They had long before made a compact that the expenses of their expeditions should be shared.

"I suppose," he inquired, "your six thirty really means seven. I've an appointment, might keep me till then, unless----"

"I'll meet you on the stroke of half-past," she said, and was as good as her word.

They had snails _à la Max_, whereof the frame is finer than the picture, as well as Maxian frogs' legs, boned and wrapped in lettuce leaves, and, not without misgivings, a bottle of claret.

Stevens, unaware that it was their last time of pretending, abided by the rules. They talked shop and shows and vacations. Georgia slipped in a few appropriate words concerning her cultural progress. They were both somewhat severe upon the orchestra, because there was too much noise to the music, so Mason beckoned the head waiter and "requested" the barcarole from _Tales of Hoffman_, and they floated off in it toward the edge of what they knew.

It is said that most people have at least two personalities. In this respect Georgia was like them. One side of her was the woman of 1850, and the times previous; whether mother, wife, daughter, maiden or mistress, primarily something in relation to man, her individuality submerged in this relationship, as a soldier's individuality is submerged in his uniform.

The other aspect of Georgia's nature was that of the "new woman," the women hoped for in 1950. Bold, determined, taught to think, relentless in defense of her own personality, insistent that men shall have less and she shall have more sexual freedom, she is first of all herself and only next to that, something to a man.

When the woman of 1850 managed to get in a word about Jim and his fruitless wait at home, the woman of 1950 answered, "Shall you now be absurd enough to leave the man you love for one you hate?"

"Shall we take in a show?" he suggested when they had finished their coffee.

"I believe I'd rather walk home."

"Why, it's five miles." He was somewhat disconcerted by her energy, for he was distinctly let down, in reaction from his day's work, and his afternoon's excitement of looking forward to an unusual meeting with her, which had turned out after all to be more than commonly placid.

"Five miles--and a heavenly night. The first of spring. Come, brace up."

"You must be feeling pretty strong."

"No," she said, "I am getting a bit headachy, I want some air, to get out of four walls and merge into the darkness--if you know what I mean."

"You're not going to be sick?" he asked concernedly.

"O, no--it's just a touch of spring fever, I imagine."

There is a cement path with a sloping concrete breakwater which winds between Lake Michigan on one side and Lincoln Park on the other for a distance of several miles. Here come the people in endless procession from morning until midnight, two by two, male and female, walking slow and talking low, permeated by the souls of children begging life.

It is a chamber of Maeterlinck's azure palace of the unborn.

Presently, by good luck, Georgia and her lover came upon a bench just as another couple was quitting it--the supply of benches being inadequate to the demands of pleasant evenings in spring. The departing two passed, one around each end of the seat, and walked rapidly, several feet apart, across the strip of lawn and bridal path beyond. They were delayed at the curb by the stream of automobiles and stood out in clear relief against the passing headlights.

It was evident they had been quarreling, for the man looked sullen and the woman, half turned away, shrugged her shoulders to what he was saying.

Georgia had been watching them. "Too bad," said she, "they're having a row."

"Perhaps they're not meant for each other."

"Everyone quarrels sometimes," she answered, "meant or not."

"Do you think we would, if----"

"I'm sure of it," she replied sharply. "We're human beings, not angels."

There was doubtless common sense in what she said, but nevertheless it delighted him not. He wished that she could in such moments as these, yield herself fully to the illusion which possessed him that their life together would be one sempiternal climax of joy.

"I honestly believe," he asserted solemnly, "that sometimes two natures are so perfectly adjusted that there is no friction between them."

"Rubbish," she replied, quoting a newly read Shaw preface, "people aren't meant to stew in love from the cradle to the grave."

She couldn't understand her own mood. She had arranged this evening with Stevens to tell him that she was ready to marry him, and she found herself unable to. Her conscious purpose was the same as ever.

Yet as often as she summoned herself to look the look or keep the silence which would put in train his declaration, it seemed as if she received from her depths a sudden and imperative mandate against it.

It was her long silence while she was pondering over these strange things which gave him a false cue and he entered to the center of her consciousness.

"This wasting of ourselves must go on until he dies?"

"The only way out is death," she said slowly, "or apostasy."

"Apostasy!" The word had an ugly sound even for him.

"I know one woman who did it for love of a man."

"And she is happy?"

Georgia did not answer at once.

"And she is happy," he repeated seriously, as if much depended on the question, "or not?"

"She says she is," she answered, "but I don't think so. She doesn't look happy--about the eyes--one notices those things. She seems changed--and--reckless and--and she's not always been faithful to her husband. I found it out."

"You found it out!"

"Yes, she asked me to go to a dinner party. Her husband was away from town--there were four of us--and I could tell what it meant. She wanted me to do what she was doing--and we had been friends so long--we took our first communion together."

"Georgia," he asked, chilled through with fright, "do you often have that sort of thing put in your way?"

"I have plenty of chances to make a mess of life," she replied, "every woman does, who's passable looking, especially downtown women."

"Dearest heart," he begged, "I can't go on thinking of that the rest of my life. Marry me and let me shield and shelter you from all this----"

"This what?"

"Temptation," he blurted, "and rotten, unwomanly down-town life. A woman ought to be taken care of, in her own home, by the man who loves her and respects and honors her."

Georgia smiled. "Do you know," she asked, "that's almost exactly word for word the way he talked to this friend of mine and persuaded her to get her divorce and leave the Church and marry him--almost word for word--she told me about it at the time. And now she's--fooling him. It didn't shield her from temptation."

"But I have known people to be divorced and marry again and live perfectly happy and respectable lives."

"Protestants--weren't they?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Ah, that's the point. They do what they think is right, but a Catholic does what she knows is wrong, and begins her new marriage in a wilful sin, so what can grow from it but more sin?"

Her voice, naturally full and resonant like a trained speaker's, was thin and uncertain as she told of the apostate. Her other self, the woman of the past, was ascendant, but she fought against what she conceived to be a momentary weakness, and forced her resolution as a skillful rider forces an unwilling horse over a jump. "But if you want me," she said in words that trembled, "you can have me."

"If I want you----" He took her in his arms and kissed her.

It seemed to her definitely in that instant that nothing could ever be quite the same with her again, that a certain fine purity had passed from her forever and she must live thereafter on a lower plane.

All the modernistic teachings, books, lectures, pamphlets with which she had in recent years packed her head, on woman's right to selfhood, parasitic females, prostitution in marriage, endowed motherhood, sexual slavery; and all the practical philosophy of the success school which she had learned from years of contact with money-makers, that life is more for the daring than for the good, were washed away by the earlier-formed and deeper-lying impressions of her youth.

She was aware of a fleeting return of her virginal feeling that to give herself to one man was humbleness sufficient for a lifetime; but to give herself to two would be the permanent lowering of pride.

But she felt that for her the moving finger had writ and passed. There could be no more going back or shadow of turning. Henceforth, for good or evil, she belonged to this man.

She yielded to his kisses, as many as he wished, in passive submission.

"You will always be good to me--promise that, promise me, dear," she begged, "because if you're not I'll----" Her voice choked and two tears rolled down her cheeks. Gone was her freedom and her pride. She spoke, not as her ideal had been, partner speaking to partner on even terms, but as a servant to her master, asking not justice but mercy.

Her solitary happiness in this hour was the feeling that the man was the stronger, that despite his greenness and awkwardness and the ease with which she had hitherto controlled him, fundamentally his nature was bigger than hers and that she was compelled to follow him. In her new feebleness she rejoiced that she sinned not boldly and resolutely, but because she had been taken in the traditional manner by the overpowering male.

"I have been looking forward to this for longer than you suspect," said she, "and now that it's come, I feel as if I were at a play watching it happen to some one else."

He put his hand on her shoulder, then quickly turned her white face to his. "Why, what is the matter?" he asked. "You are shaking like a leaf."

"I think I'd better go home. It is damp and cold sitting here." After they had gone a few steps, she said, with a weak little laugh, "I've lost my enthusiasm for walking. Put me on the car."

He began to be thoroughly frightened. "Don't worry, dear," she reassured him. "Nothing can change us now. We belong to each other--for keeps."

They said little to each other in the brightly lighted street car. She sat slightly crumpled, her shoulders rounded, swaying to the stops and starts. She breathed slowly through her lips, and her eyes had the strange wide-open look of a young bird's, when you hold it in your hands. And he, but partly understanding, yearned for her helplessly, and covenanted with his nameless gods that no sorrow should ever come to her from him.

She hung to his arm as they walked up the half-lighted street where she lived, between rows of three, four and five story flat buildings full of drama. Outside her own she stopped and looked up to her windows. They were brightly lighted.

Instead of using her key, she rang the bell to her apartment. She heard Al's voice in answer.

"Is Jim there?" she asked.

"Yes."

She turned to Stevens with a flash of her old positiveness.

"I must go somewhere else. And I don't feel like telling my troubles to any friend to-night. So will you take me to a hotel?"

They returned to the car line by an unusual street, lest Al should come looking after her, she driving her sick frame along by sheer will, her lover resolved that if need be he would save her from herself.

She waited while he engaged her room, and when he came bringing her key, he said, "I have put you down as Miss Talbot."

"Oh, you were nice to think of that. I like to imagine sometimes it still is so." She took his hand. "Good night, dear," she whispered. "I will be a true wife to you."

XV

MR. SILVERMAN

Stevens called up Georgia's room in the morning to ask how she had slept and she reported, "Well--that is, pretty well," which wasn't true, for she had tossed wretchedly through the night. By careful brushing and buying a shirtwaist she managed to measurably freshen her appearance, though she reached the office with tired eyes and hectic splotches beneath her eyes. Al was there before her waiting with white face.

"Georgia," he began miserably, "I've been hunting the town for you. Where have you been?"

"Alone."

"You've frightened us half to death. Mother's sick over it."

"You can have Jim in the house, or me, but not both of us."

She would give him no more satisfaction, and he was turning away angry at her obstinacy, when Mason came up to greet her.

"Good morning."

"Good morning."

Al quickly divined that here was the man. It was written in the way he looked at her, and in Georgia's sudden sidelong glance at Al to see if he saw.

"I'd like a word with you," said the brother to the lover, tapping him on the shoulder with studied rudeness, "now."

Stevens didn't understand the situation, but he was properly resentful, and lowered at the stranger. In these subtle days of commerce, finger-tips on collar bones may convey all that was once meant by a glove in the face.

"My brother, Mr. Stevens," she explained. They did not shake hands. Mason was not quite sure from the young fellow's expression just what might happen, but he was sure it had better not happen right there. "Let's get out of the office--and you can have as many words as you want," said he. Georgia arose to go with them.

"No, don't you come," said Stevens.

"I think perhaps it would be better."

"But it wouldn't. You stay here," the man answered with great positiveness. She sank obediently in the chair, to the disgusted amazement of her brother, and let them go alone.

"Were you out with her last night?"

"Yes."

The lad sunk his hand to his coat pocket, his wild young brain aflame with violence and romance and vengeance and the memory of Moxey's sweetheart's uncle who had slain the despoiler of his home. Stevens was near death and he knew it, but he never batted an eye as Al reported later to Moxey.

"I knew it damned well. She said she was alone." His hand tightened on the automatic, pressing down the safety lock, and he pointed the gun, so that he could shoot through his pocket and kill.

"She was, after eleven. I left her then."

"Prove it. You've got to," insultingly.

"Go look at the hotel register, for the name of Miss Georgia Talbot."