Part 8

Al grunted. Here was a concrete fact--subject to verification, yes or no. "All right," he vouchsafed curtly, "if it turns out that way--but one more thing--keep away from her after this altogether--understand." Al shot out his jaw and swung around his pocket with the barrel pointing straight at Stevens' middle. He looked just then a good deal like a young tough delivering a serious threat, which he was.

Stevens shoved his derby hat back and laughed. "If you think you can run me around with the pop-gun, guess again. I'm going to marry Georgia and you're coming to the wedding," he stepped right up to the gun and tapped Al sharply on the shoulder, "understand."

It was perhaps a chancy thing to do, for the lad had worked himself into a state of self-righteous anger, and his vanity was savagely exulted by the sensation of putting it over on a full-grown man to his face. But Stevens had acted instinctively as he frequently did in stressful moment and his instinct played him true this time.

"She ain't allowed to marry again, so you keep off the grass," he answered loudly, but his voice broke and shot up an octave as he took his hand from his pocket to clench his fist and shake it in the other's face.

Whereat Stevens knew he had him and answered quietly in his most matter-of-fact business tones, "That's for her to say--and she's said it." He smiled. "You know she's free, white, and twenty-one."

Al, not sure just what his next step ought to be, walked away, probably to consult with Moxey, muttering as he went, "Well, remember I warned you."

Stevens returned to the office and explained the incident briefly to Georgia, "Oh, the kid was excited at first, but I reassured him." While they were talking the old man rang her buzzer and asked her to have Mr. Stevens come in.

A dark, beaked, heavy-browed, much-dressed gentleman was in the old man's office, introduced to Mason as Mr. Silverman.

Mr. Silverman deserves a paragraph or two. He was said to be a Polish, a Russian or a Spanish Jew, but nobody knew for sure or dared ask him, for he didn't like it. At sixteen or thereabouts, he came to the company as an office boy, and in two months was indispensable. At thirty-seven, owing partly to the conscientious performance of his duties and more to his earnestness in pulling feet from the rungs above him, and stamping fingers from the rungs below, he was elected to a position especially created for him, to-wit, Executive Secretary to the President of The Eastern Life Insurance Company of New York, which gave him everything to say about the running of it except the very last word.

Perhaps once a quarter he was reversed, and always on some extremely important matter involving the investment of funds. This galled him beyond measure, but he kept it to himself.

At the last annual election, he would have presented himself as a candidate for president, or at least for first vice-president with power to act, but after sizing up the way the proxies were running for the new directorate, he knew that crowd would never stand for him, so he squelched his own boom for the time being, and waited. The title was re-conferred for the fifteenth time upon a charming but delicate plutocrat of the fourth generation of New Yorkers, who was compelled to spend his term health-hunting in European spas, where Mr. Silverman took delight in sending him for decision a copious stream of unimportant but vexatiously technical questions, which much disturbed the invalid's serenity, for he had entered the company at the top, and didn't know detail. Mr. Silverman himself settled the more important matters, inasmuch as there wasn't time to send to Europe and wait for an answer. Whenever he reached for a stronger hold, he had an incontrovertible excuse, and he got to know Mr. Morgan personally.

He was stocky, with ample room for his digestion, and like most fighting men, he had a good thick neck that carried plenty of blood to his head. His unpleasantest trait was his shame of race, and his most agreeable one an understanding love of music. His only exercise was strong black cigars, and everyone on the company's payroll dreaded his seemingly preternatural knowledge of what was going on.

"Mr. Stevens," said he, "sit down. I have heard of you." Then to allow that pregnant remark to sink in he turned to Georgia. "Take this, please: 'Mr. W. F. Plaisted, General Agent in charge S. W. Division, Eastern Life Insurance Company, Kansas City, Mo. Dear Sir: Please furnish the bearer, Mr. Mason Stevens, with whatever information he desires. He is my personal representative. With kind regards, Yours truly, Executive Secretary to the President.'

"That is all." He nodded to Georgia, and she departed. The old man pussy-footed after her, leaving the other two together in his private office.

"You are to take the nine o'clock train to-night for Kansas City to prepare a report for me on why we aren't getting more business in the town and our competitors less. Here are some letters from New York to certain banks there which will admit you to their confidence. Find out all you can about Plaisted and his office before you go to him. Send me a night letter to my hotel every night as to your progress. Use this code." He took a typewritten sheet of synonyms from his pocket. "Should you cross the trail of another investigator for the Eastern, you are not to reveal yourself to him. This point you are to bear in mind." He paused for an answer.

"Yes, sir," said Stevens.

"Your expense money will be liberal; and mind, no talk--not even a hint to your best girl. I suppose, of course, there is one." Mason smiled, but did not answer. "I am told you are not married."

"No, sir."

"Perhaps it is just as well. Women are to live with, not to travel with, and you're still traveling." Mr. Silverman lit a fifty-center, and then, being a natural-born commander, topped off his instructions with hopes of loot. "Good luck, young man. You're shaking hands with your future on this trip."

Mason came from the interview consecrated to the task of getting the goods on Plaisted. Going after him was like going after ivory in Africa. Landing a prospect was as tame relatively as plugging ducks on the Illinois River. For Plaisted had been a big man in the company in his day, though getting a little old now. With solid connections through Missouri, Kansas and the Southwest, if he fell, he'd fall with a smash.

Mason rather fancied that in company politics he could see as far through a grindstone as his neighbor, if it had a hole in it. He knew that there was a hidden but bitter fight for control of the business between the old New York society crowd who had inherited it, and the younger abler men, under the leadership of Silverman, who had grown up from the ranks. He knew that his own boss, the old man, lined up with Silverman, but that Plaisted had delivered the south-western proxies in a solid block, for the New York ticket. He therefore inferred that Silverman didn't feel strong enough to remove Plaisted without a pretty plausible reason and that he was being sent to Kansas City to find the reason; and failing that, to make one, which, as it turned out, was precisely what he did.

He set out on his mission with as little compunction as a soldier who had received orders to shoot to kill. For, as he told himself, surely Plaisted had also pulled down men in his time. Life is a battle. Therefore is it not well to be with the conqueror and share in the cut?

If he could now make good with Silverman, and, more especially, convince him that he was a live one who would keep on making good, the Jew would certainly recognize him in the reorganization. He had visions of tooling along the macadam in his Panno Six to a vined house in the suburbs, hidden by tall trees, where, in a trailing gown, Georgia would walk through her flowers to meet him, with a small hand clinging to each of hers.

Plaisted had now become, to all intents and purposes, his competitor; and going after your competitors is the life of trade. As for Mrs. Plaisted--if there was one--who was she against Georgia?

XVI

GEORGIA LEAVES HOME

He expected to be gone several weeks, so Georgia telephoned the janitor to tell mama that she would stay down for dinner, again, but would be home soon afterwards. Mason took her to the top of a tall building, where there was a sixty cent table d'hote. The topic, of course, was his forthcoming trip from routine to adventure and its probable effect upon their fortunes.

For all the wise saws about not talking to women, one may hardly dine with his fiancée of a day without mention of the marvelous opportunity which dropped before one that morning as from the skies. Especially if she is in the same business and heard it drop.

So, little by little, one thing leading to another, he told her everything he knew or guessed or hoped. He did not once forget Silverman's injunction to silence, as he babbled on. It stuck in his mind like a thorn in the foot; and, telling himself he was a fool to talk, he talked. The precise moment didn't seem to come when he could frankly say, without offense, "Georgia, that part of it is a secret." And he didn't see how to temporize widely, for it had become physically impossible for him to lie to her, though, of course, he retained the use of his faculties for commerce with others.

So he passed on the ever heavy load of silence, hoping that she could hold her tongue if he couldn't. It was as much her affair as his anyway, so he felt, and if by her indiscretion she should cut him out of Silverman's confidence and future big things, she would in the same motion cut herself out of a Panno Six and a house in the trees and a richer circle of friends.

But, inasmuch as she was a case-hardened private secretary, she kept her faith with him in this thing at least. If he never has a Panno Six it wasn't her fault.

The most surprising thing to her in his narrative was that it did not more greatly interest her. It seemed to her a far-off affair, impersonal, like something she was reading in the papers. Stevens seemed to stand outside her area of life, which had become narrow and curiously uneasy, heavy with a future in which he was not concerned.

At first he attributed the listlessness, which she tried to conceal but could not, to one of the widely advertised feminine moods, and he tried his best to divert her not merely with pictures of their future, blissful and automobileful, but also with quips and cranks and wanton wiles. No go.

So when course VI of the table d'hote--nuts and pecans, three of each to the order--was ended, he suggested that perhaps she would better go directly home instead of waiting downtown with him until his train went. She acquiesced. They walked to the "L" in silence.

Imagine the chagrin of a knight riding off to the bloody wars from a ladye who didn't care if he never came back. That was how it struck him. She took his arm to climb the steep iron stairs, and at the top stopped a moment to get her breath.

"Dear heart," she said, "don't have all those awful thoughts about me--don't you suppose I know what you're thinking? I've been dull to-night, but my head is simply splitting. I believe I'm in for the grip."

He looked at his watch. "I'm sure I can take you home and get back in time."

"Bather than have you risk it, I'll stay down until your train goes."

"Promise me then to get a doctor and go right to bed."

"I'll go right to bed--I can barely hold my head up, and I'll get a doctor in the morning if I'm not better."

There were only two or three other people on the long platform, so he kissed her good-bye. Then the screened iron gate was slapped to behind her, the guard jerked his cord, she smiled weakly and waved her hand back at him, and it was all over for a much longer time than he had any idea of.

He watched her train until the tail lights turned the loop, then said "Hell," lit a cigar, pushed his hat back, sighed and went to check his trunk.

He sat up in the smoking compartment gassing with drummers until the last of them turned in, sympathized for awhile with the Pullman porter, who suffered volubly as soon as Mason gave him permission to. He had been married that very afternoon and now he was off to Los Angeles and back, a ten-day journey, leaving behind him as a dark and shining mark for those who realized the devilishness of his itinerary an unprotected, young, gay-hearted bride. He appreciated the snares that would be set for her by his brothers of brush and berth. He'd been a bachelor himself. "Yas, sah, railroadin' is sure one yalla dawg's life for a fambly man."

Stevens lay awake a long time that night thinking of the future, and Georgia lay awake a long time considering the past. She felt hot and thirsty; three or four times she got out of bed and ran the faucet until the water was cold and bathed her face and drank.

After she had left Stevens she had taken a cross seat in the car facing homeward, and, placing her burning cheek against the window for coolness, had dozed off for many stations. When she awoke with a start at the one beyond her own, her personality had slipped to its earlier center as definitely as when a clutch slips from high to second speed.

It is said that the last step gained by the individual or the race is the first step lost, in sickness, age and fear. So Georgia's illness began its attack on the topmost layer of her character, that part of it which had been built in the recent years. She was driven, as it were, to a lower floor of her own edifice and no longed saw so wide a view.

Her pride and self-will crumbled--for the sick aren't proud--and her modernity trickled away. After all, was it not more peaceful to do what people thought you ought to, than to fight them constantly for your own way? Life was too short and human nature too weak for the stress and strain of such ceaseless resistance as she had made in the past few years against her family, the friends of her family, and the Church. For God's sake let her now have peace.

Yes, for God's sake. The words had come irreverently to her mind. But after all, could she or anyone else have peace except from God? and was there any other gift as sweet?

She knew there was one sure anodyne for her troubled spirit, and only one--the confessional. She had kept away too long already, for more than two years. She would go to-morrow, or perhaps the next day, and wash her soul clean. Father Hervey would talk to her as if to rip her heart strings out, but in the end he would leave her with peace, after she had promised and vowed to give up her mortal sin. Poor Mason, that meant him. She wept a few weak tears, then dried her eyes on the corner of the sheet.

So this was to be the end of her spiritual adventuring, the end of the free expression of her free being, and selfhood, and all those other valorous things she had rejoiced in.

She wasn't able any longer to go on with it. She must desert the army of women in the day of battle, the army led by Curie, Key, Pankhurst, Schreiner, Addams, Gilman, and cross over to the adversary, the encompassing Church. It would absorb her into its vast unity as a drop disappears in the sea. It would think for her and will for her. She would be animated with its life, not her own; but it would suffuse her with the comfort that is past understanding. She would eat the lotus and submit. She was not strong, like great people.

Perhaps the priest would suggest her return to Jim. But that wasn't in the law. He could only suggest and urge it. He could not insist on it. She couldn't go back to Jim, she couldn't, she couldn't. She sobbed as if there were a presence in the room which she hoped to move by her tears.

A clear vision of her husband came before her, as she had often seen him, sitting on the edge of this very bed, in undershirt and trousers, leaning forward, breathing abominably loud, his paunch sagging, unlacing his shoes. Right or wrong, good or bad, heaven or hell, that was one sight the priest should never make her see again. She hated Jim and loathed him forever.

As she was dressing next morning she called to Al to please go down and telephone for the doctor, for she knew she could never go through the day's work without medicine.

Presently Dr. Randall bowled up, a jolly stout man, smiling gayly and crinkling up the corners of his eyes, though he had slept just eight hours in the last seventy-two. The family was glumly finishing breakfast when he came. Throughout the meal Mrs. Talbot had been burningly aware of the contrast between decent, self-respecting women with a thought to themselves, and brazen young fly-by-nights in thin waists, who run after men and make themselves free; but she threw only a few pertinent remarks into the atmosphere, because the poor girl was so evidently out of sorts, with her high color and not touching a bite of food. Indeed, a body could hardly help feeling sorry for her, for all her wicked pride of will; very likely this sickness was a judgment on her for it.

When Dr. Randall had considered her pulse, her temperature and her tongue, and asked half a dozen questions, he told Al to send for a carriage and take her immediately to Columbus Hospital.

"Why, doctor," exclaimed Mrs. Talbot, terrorized, "is it anything serious?"

"Typhoid--I'll go telephone to let 'em know you're coming."

The doctor departed and Mrs. Talbot took Georgia on her lap and crooned over her until the carriage came.

XVII

THE LIGHT FLICKERS

It was decided that Georgia was to have a bed in a ward at eight dollars a week. Private rooms were twenty-five and they couldn't afford that during the month she would be laid up, particularly since her pay would stop automatically after her third day of absence. The office rule was very strict on that point.

She sat limply in the waiting room while Al was attending to her registration and her mother was upstairs with the nurse unpacking her things. On the opposite wall were a couple of windows, sharply framing vistas into the park across the street, and she saw two fragments of the path where she had often walked on Sunday mornings with Stevens.

It was this same wall in front of her which had seemed so sullen gray and prison-color from the other side and which had sometimes turned their talk to sombre things--death and immortality. From the inside, as she now saw it, the wall was not gray but cheerfully reddish brown, patterned vertically like a thrasher's wing.

Two pictures hung by the window, of the pope and of Frances Xavier Cabrini, founder of the order of nuns that conducted the hospital. They were photographs, she thought, or reproductions from photographs.

She looked closely at them, first at the old man, then at the old woman. She saw in them more than she had ever seen in such pictures before. They offered at least one positive answer to the riddle, perhaps the safest answer for such as she--to submit oneself through one's lifetime so as to attain at the end of it the matchless serenity of those two untroubled faces.

It came to her then in a moment of more than natural revelation, as it seemed, that she must seek the peace which these two had found.

She crossed slowly to the desk in the corner, to write what she knew might be the last of the thousands of letters she had written.

_My dear_, she began on the hospital paper, _I am here with_, not to cause him anxiety in the beginning of his great enterprise, _a touch of the grip. Nothing serious. In haste and headache. Georgia._

She paused. Even if it must end by her giving him up, she loved him. Should she, by an omission so significant, upset and distress him and perhaps hinder him in a task which, well performed, would bring great things to him, if never now to her! _I love you_, she added, _always_.

A second note she dated a week forward. _My dear, I haven't pulled around again as soon as I expected, but the rest has done me a world of good. Don't worry about me--they say I've a constitution like a horse. For my sake, make good, Mason--you've got to. With love, lots of it, always, G._

A third she put two weeks ahead. _Dearest, I'm doing fine and will be out soon now. Your letters have been such a comfort. It's almost two thousand years since we've seen each other, isn't it? I love you, dear. Georgia._

She put them in their envelopes, addressed them, and wrote 1, 2 and 3 respectively in the upper right hand corners in such a way that the stamps would conceal them. Al came in as she was finishing, and she explained how she wanted them mailed a week apart. At first he refused, but at last was over-persuaded by her misery. He promised to do her errand as she asked, and kept his promise faithfully.

A page boy chanting "Mis-ter Stev-uns, Mis-ter Riggle-hei-murr, Mis-ter An-droo Brown, Mis-ter Noise, Mis-ter Stevuns," caught Mason in the grill paying a lot of attention to a first vice-president over a planked tenderloin, German fried and large coffee. Accordingly he made his first report not to Silverman, but to the old man, thus:

Night Letter

548 ch jf 63

Kansas City Mo 10/17 Fredk. Tatton, Eastern Life Insurance Co. 60 Monroe st., Chicago.

Strict confidence am engaged marry your secretary Georgia Connor who now sick columbus hospital please arrange hospital authorities give her best care private room special trained nurse my expense don't let her know my participation say attention comes from company gratitude her fidelity ability also keep her name payroll until return duty charge my account confidential my progress here satisfactory wire answer collect. Stevens 814 AM

The old man himself had not been entirely immune to Georgia's charm, although in the office and before him she had steadily veiled her personality behind her status as a precise, prompt and well-lubricated appanage of a Standard Typewriter No. 4. So it was only a well subdued charm that the old man sensed in her, stimulating as a small glass of syrupy liqueur.

It seemed to him pathetic that the silent, presentable, self-respecting young woman, to whom for over a year now he had been revealing his most private, money-making thoughts almost as fast as they came to him, might never smile him another "good morning," agree with him pleasantly that it was hot or cold or wet, and get rapidly to work on his business.

She was so accustomed to his ways, and he hated the thought of breaking in another one--but, damn it, that wasn't all by any means, he liked the girl on her own account--she was such a little lady.

The old man did some rapid telephoning and was able to answer Stevens' wire half an hour after he got it.

Chicago Ills. Oct. 18

Mr. Mason Stevens, Hotel Boston, K C Mo

Best accommodations provided as stipulated salary continues your expense diagnosis simple case typical convalescense anticipated will wire promptly new developments regarding patient warm congratulations

Fredk. Tatton 949 AM

The old man naturally supposed that Mason knew the nature of Georgia's illness and was trying to reassure him, in a kindly way, that as typhoid cases go it was only a very little one.

Indeed, the old man, if he was a little lax later on in wiring all the developments in the case--because he didn't want to frighten the young man into throwing up his investigation in the very middle of it--was more valuably helpful in another way.

When the fever reached its crisis he got a great specialist out of bed for a three o'clock in the morning consultation over the little stenographer, and charged his costly loss of sleep to the company instead of to Mason Stevens, Mr. Silverman cordially approving.