"Well, good-bye for now—you better go to some hotel to-night," she gave him a dollar from the purse in her bosom, "and try and get work. It'll make your coming back easier."
"Thanks, mother, I'll do that same. Er—I guess I'll go in and change my collar. That'll be all right, won't it?"
"Yes, Georgia's in the dining room."
Mrs. Talbot left him. He rubbed his knuckles slowly across his eye, his breath catching quickly. Then he spied Georgia's hand bag. There was the trouble-money—twenty dollars, a round, golden double eagle. He opened the handbag to—well, to look at it. He spun it; he palmed it; he tossed it in the air, calling heads. It came tails. He tried it again and it came heads. That settled it. He slipped the coin into his pocket, and went out of the room. At least there was salvage in leaving one's wife.
After supper Georgia packed up his things, every stick and stitch of them, and with the aid of Al drew them out into the hallway.
Later in the evening a politician, one of Ed Miles', knocked at the door.
"Good evening, ma'am, I'm from the Fortieth Ward Club. I have a message for Mr. Connor. He's wanted at headquarters right away."
"He doesn't live here any more."
"He doesn't live here any more.""He doesn't live here any more."
The politician was perplexed.
"Where does he live?"
"I don't know," answered Georgia, shutting the door.
It was not until the next morning that she discovered the loss of her money.
The old man had gone to Europe for his summer vacation, leaving Georgia secure in her place with nothing to worry about. She had no more than half work to do. Business had slackened and the whole office was in the doldrums. Life's fitful fever had abated to subnormal placidity. Even her mother's chronic indignation over trifles had been quieted by the summer's drowse.
The only interesting moments in Georgia's day were nine o'clock when she came and five o'clock when she left—noon on Saturdays. The Sundays were amazingly dull.
So was her home. Al stayed away from it from breakfast unto bedtime, with a brief interval for supper. He was engrossed in prairie league baseball for one thing. That occupied him all day Sunday and half of Saturday. Of course he couldn't play after dark, but whenever Georgia asked him where he was going as he bolted from the table with his cap, he answered, "Out to see some fellahs."
If she hoped that he would stay at home to-night, for he was out last night and the one before, he would explain, with as much conviction as if he offered a clinching argument, that "the fellahs" were a-calling and he must go.
She was rather put out to find herself unable to speak with the same vehemence and authority to him as she had been able to use with Jim concerning the folly and wickedness of going out after supper. For when it comes to putting fingers on a man's destiny, a wife is a more effective agency than a sister. Even in unhappy marriages husband and wife are as two circles which intersect. They have common, identical ground between them. It may not be large, but such as it is it inevitably gives them moments of oneness. Brother and sister are as two circles, whose rims just touch. They may be very near each other, but at no time are they each other.
Georgia's restlessness and discontent increased as the summer went on, probably because she was affecting nobody else's destiny to any calculable extent. Her young brother Al kept away, perhaps warned by a deep race instinct that sisters are not meant to affect destinies. Her old mother was a settled case already. She wouldn't change; she couldn't change; she could hardly be modified, except by the weather or the rheumatism; she would merely grow old and die. No satisfaction for a young adventurous woman in experimenting on such a soul.
It has been said that neither the woman nor the man alone is the complete human being, but the man and the woman together. This woman, Georgia, who for seven years had been completed by the addition of the masculine element, was now made incomplete. She struggled in vain to find contentment in regular hours, regular sleep, regular work and regular pay.
She had supposed for years that peace and quiet, and enough money, and never the smell of whiskey were all she wanted. And here was her subconsciousness, which she couldn't understand, making her perfectly wretched, though she couldn't tell why; calling insistently for another man, though she didn't in the least realize it. She only knew she was tired of being cooped up in the house evenings; she wanted to get out now and then for a change and to see people who had some ideas.
She went for a Saturday evening supper to the Kaiser Wilhelm Zweite Beer and Music Garden with a school-girl friend and her husband. This pleasure-ground was well north, out of the smoke. The night was soft and the music lovely. She was much entertained by the husband's talk, and considered that she held up her end with him very well.
The next time they invited her she spent some little time before hand, "fixing-up" for the occasion. Ribbons were put back where they used to be long ago when she first met Jim. Her hat underwent revolutionary readjustment, as the school friend made plain by heated compliments on Georgia's millinery skill.
However, the husband seemed absolutely content with its effect and Georgia's animation increased throughout the evening, calling back a long neglected flush to her cheeks and a gay pace to her bearing. She was not asked a third time, however, which did not unflatter her. It was evidence that she had not slowed down completely—that she was not finished.
Meanwhile Jim, after spreeing away his twenty dollars, had gone West.
Mason Stevens, Sr., was a horse doctor in Rogersville, Peoria County, Illinois. He wore a gray mustache and imperial beard in tribute to that famous Chicago veterinarian who has made more race horses stand on four legs than any other man in the Mississippi Valley.
Besides horses, Mr. Stevens knew cattle, hogs, sheep, tumbler and carrier pigeons, bred-to-type poultry, and whiskey. If he hadn't carried a bottle about with him in his buggy he might be alive now.
Mason Stevens, Jr., wanted to be a real doctor, so he came up to Chicago to the Rush Medical College. After his first year, whiskey took his father, the funeral took the rest, and the young man after a brief fight gave up the vision of some day substituting "M.D." in place of "Jr." after his name.
He had been a respected boy at school, green but positive. To help him out, some of his friends persuaded their fathers, uncles or other sources of supply to give "Old Mase" a chance to write their fire insurance. He took the opening. Presently his acquaintance was wide enough for him to branch out into life as well as fire. After ten years in the city he was able to go to the general agent of his company and ask for a regular salary, in addition to his commissions, on the ground that there wasn't another solicitor in the state he had to take his hat off to.
He was a highly concentrated product, like most successful countrymen in the city. He hadn't been scattered in culture. He knew no foreign languages, no art save that on calendars, no music he could not hum, no drama save very occasionally a burlesque show when he felt that he needs must see women.
He knew, if he hadn't forgotten, how to find a kingfisher's nest up a small tunnel in the river bank, or a red-winged blackbird's pendant above the swamp waters, or a butcher-bird's in a thornbush with beheaded field mice hanging from its spears. Even now, with farmer's instinct, he looked up quickly through the skyscrapers at a sudden shift in wind.
He lived in a rooming house and ate where he happened to be. His bureau was bare of everything save the towel across the top, his derby hat, when he was in bed, and a handful of matches. His upper drawer, usually half-pulled out, was filled not with collars and ties, but with papers relating to his business; actuaries' figures; reports from all companies, his own and his rivals'; records of "prospects" that he had brought home for evening study; rough drafts of solicitation "literature" he was getting up for the company. He usually worked at night in his shirt sleeves, his hat cocked on the back of his head, his chair tilted back against the wall under a single gas jet with a ground glass globe that diverted most of the light upward toward the ceiling.
Even after he reached the point where he could afford more expensive living, he did not change. He wore better clothes because a "front" was mere business intelligence, but otherwise his habits were within a hundred and fifty dollars of his first year.
Pleasure he regarded as the enemy, not so much because of its money-cost, as because it was diverting. He didn't wish to be diverted; he wished to sell life insurance and more and more. That was as far as he went with his plans. He didn't want to get rich so as to gratify dreams, to have a beautiful wife and buy her a big house and motors. He simply wanted to get rich.
He had had no romance since he left the Rogersville High School. That one had been sweet enough for awhile, but nothing came of it. And he remembered that on account of it he had neglected his studies senior year and not graduated at the top of the class. Indeed, the object of his affection, with fitting irony, had herself achieved that distinction, which cooled his fever for her.
Mason was a great believer in the value of "bumps." When he made a failure in any enterprise, he was wont to analyze why, in order to double-guard himself against a repetition of it. None but a fool repeats a mistake. He drummed that into himself. Thus in the long run he was ready to turn every "bump" into an asset instead of a liability. It is a system of philosophy widespread in this nation, especially among country-bred people of Puritan tradition, strong, rugged people who believe in the supreme power of the individual will, who minimize luck and take no stock in fatalism. These are usually termed "the backbone of the American people," and though of course they know that God is everywhere and omnipotent, they likewise believe that He has appointed them His deputies, with a pretty free hand to act, in the conduct of the earth.
Mason Stevens came of this stock. And though his father was a backslider, his mother was not, and she brought him up on the saying, "Maybe this will teach you a lesson, my son, next time you think of doing so-and-so."
This shows why Mason Stevens did not fall in love with any woman, after the high school girl, until he fell most desperately in love with Georgia Connor.
He resisted love from conviction. One female ten years before had defeated his brains and his purpose by her charm. He wanted no more of that.
But he had to fight. Often enough as he walked through the long office through the double row of shirt-waisted figures bending over typewriters and desks, it seemed imperative for him to know them better, to wait for one of them after office hours and ride home with her on the car.
Everything else was wiped out of him for the moment but just the question of riding home with a twelve-dollar-a-week girl. Then he would walk quickly on past the girl who absorbed his imagination, his mouth set and his brows scowling. And she would confide in her neighbor that he was crazy about himself.
Sometimes when he was at home under the gas jet with his business papers on his knee, the vision of fair women would float before him, all the most beautiful in his imaginings as he had seen them in pictures or on the stage. He might dream for an hour before remembering that he was in the world to sell life insurance and that women would hamper his single-mindedness as surely as whiskey.
Who was the man he was surest of making sign an application blank when he set out after him? The man who had a woman in his head, every time; the man with the wife, and children, which are the consequences of a wife; or one who was gibbering in a fool's heaven because a young girl had graciously promised to allow him to support her for the rest of her days.
So he kept away from bad women as much as he could, and from good women always.
Especially from those in the office. Their constant propinquity was a constant menace and he had known a lot of fellows to get tangled up that way, and he wouldn't—if he could help it.
But he couldn't help it after he knew Georgia. She was so useful mentally and physically, and that was what he first noticed about her. He hated slackness of any sort, especially in women, because he had trained himself to dwell on women's faults rather than on men's.
Her manners, he thought, were precisely perfect. She seemed to hit a happy medium between gushing and shyness, and to hit it in the dead center. Her teeth were white and good, and she smiled often, but not too often. She never overdid anything, and her voice was low and full. She knew what you were driving at before you half started telling her; also she could make a fresh clerk feel foolish in one minute by the clock.
She had the charm of perfect health. About her dark irises the whites of her eyes were very white, touched with the faintest bluish tinge from the arterial blood beneath. There was a natural lustre in her hair, uncommon among indoor people. Her steps took her straight to where she wanted to go. She made no false motions. When she looked for something in her desk, she opened the drawer where it was, not the one above or below. Her muscles, nerves and proportions were so balanced that it was difficult for her to fall into an ungraceful posture.
Considering these manifold excellent qualities, the most remarkable thing about her, he thought, was that she had not long before been invited to embellish the mansion and the motors of a millionaire. He wrote enthusiastically to his mother suggesting that it would be nice to invite her to Rogersville for a portion at least of her coming summer vacation, which brought a most unhappy smile to his mother's lips. But since he did not repeat his request, the invitation was not extended.
The first time that he knew he regarded her as a woman rather than as a workwoman was one afternoon when the declining sun threw its light higher and higher into the big office. A ray shone on and from her patent leather belt and into his eyes. He looked up annoyed from his work. She was sitting a few desks ahead by the window, her back toward him. Before very long the thing had fascinated him and he found himself immensely concerned with the climb of the sun up her shirt waist.
It reached her collar in a manner entirely marvelous and then precisely at the moment when he was finally to know its effect upon her hair, she lowered the shade. What luck!
The next day was cloudy. The next was Saturday and she quit at twelve, before the sun got around to her window. Monday she lowered the shade before the light got even to her shoulder. Little did she know of the repressed anguish she was so bringing to the gloomy young hustler behind her. But on Tuesday the sunlight reached her hair momentarily as she leaned back in her chair and gleamed and glittered there, a coruscation of glory for fully thirty seconds—long enough to overturn in catastrophe his thirty years and their slowly built purposes.
He resolved hereafter to deal primarily not in life insurance, but in life, which meant Georgia.
During the ensuing days Mason was hopeless for work.
From the office books he found out where she lived, slyly as he supposed, but not so slyly that the information clerk didn't tell someone, who told someone who teased Georgia at the luncheon club, not thereby displeasing her. For he was a good-looking fellow and capable; furthermore, he had always kept himself to himself, so putting several noses out of joint, it was said.
He had moments of anguished self-reproach as he sat in his room in his boarding house, his chair tilted against the wall under the gas jet, his coat on his bed, his derby hat tilted back on his head.
He knew that his life had been utterly unworthy. He had drunk it to the lees, pretty near. But now he was through with all that. Hereafter, for her sake, he would conquer himself and others.
His sense of beauty was limited by inheritance and by disuse, but now he began to draw upon all the poetry in his soul—not to write to her, but to think of her.
His imagination, naturally fertile and strengthened by the practice of his profession, centered itself on the question of his first kiss from her—where, when and how should it happen? He called all great lovers from Romeo to Robert W. Chambers to his aid—it must be under the moon, the fragrance about them. And a lake, a little lake, for the moon to shine upon and magically increase its magic. He remembered the moon on the river back in Rogersville, with the other girl—the first one. What mere children they were. That was puppy love, but this was love; love such as no man ever felt before for a woman.
He was hard hit.
The lake suggested a train of thought, so he packed his bag on Saturday and went to southern Wisconsin. The resort dining room was full of noisy youths and maidens who, in his decided opinion had no proper reverence for love, though they seemed perfectly amorous whenever he suddenly came upon a pair of them as much as one hundred yards from the hotel.
He chartered a flatbottom after supper to row out alone and contemplate the moon and her, but the voices of the night and the frogs were overwhelmed by the detestable mandolins tinkling "My Wife's Gone to the Country, Hurray."
When finally he turned in he discovered there was a drummers' poker party on the other side of the pine partition, so it wasn't until nearly daylight he dozed off, to wake a couple of hours later when the dishes began to rattle.
The boat concessionaire reported pickerel in the lake and he joined the Sunday piscatorial posse. He returned with two croppies and the record of many bites, mostly on himself.
He concluded he wasn't interested in fishing anyway. It was just a device to cheat himself and make himself suppose he was having a good time. He couldn't have a good time and wouldn't if he could, until he knew her, until at least he knew her. Why he had never said ten words to her more than "Good morning" and "Good evening." He would call on her; he had her address. He would go to her apartment and ring the bell and say, "Miss Connor, I have come to call on you. Do you mind?"
No, that would hardly do. It was too bold. He mustn't seem at all crude to her, but mannerly and suave and self-possessed. A girl, and especially one of her sort, would object to crudeness. He must be very courtly, knightly. Flowers on her desk every morning, perhaps, not a card, not a word. A handful of sweet blossoms each day to greet her and bear her silent testimony that there was one who—— She would know, of course, in due time whence they came. Not that he would ever so much as hint at his gifts, but her woman's intuition would tell her. And when she did realize in this way his silent though passionate devotion, she would thank him, gently and sadly, and a bond would be made between them.
But then, what if the other people in the office had intuition, too, or saw him bringing in flowers! No, decidedly that wouldn't do.
And then—just in time for him to catch the 3:40—a blinding flash of warning illumined his whole being. What if, while he was there shilly-shallying at a summer resort, some other fellow was with her in Chicago at that very moment!
"What if"—a ridiculous way to put it. Wasn't it sure in the nature of things, that at that very moment some other man was with her?
He caught the 3:40. He would call on her that very evening and if indeed he didn't declare himself bluntly in so many words—hadn't he heard of numberless women who had been won at first sight!—he would at least intimate to her strongly, unmistakably, that she was the object of his respectful consideration and attention.
There were others in the field. It was time he declared himself in, too.
It wasn't until 5:37, when the train reached Clybourn Junction, that he began to repent his precipitancy. He was going to see her again in the office to-morrow, wasn't he? Wouldn't it look queer if he went out to call on her to-night without warning? She might be wholly unprepared for callers and annoyed.
But his presumable rival bobbed up again and spoiled his supper, so after dropping his bag at home, he walked presently into the entry way of 2667 Pearl Avenue. Her name was not on the left side; perhaps she had moved. No, here on the right, floor 3, in letters of glory—"Connor." Above it, "Talbot."
Who was Talbot? Married sister, roommate or landlady from whom she sublet? He raised his thumb to the bell. He had never before experienced a moment of such acute consciousness.
Wait a second—she might not be in. He walked out and looked up at the third floor right. There was certainly a light, a bright one, and the window was open and the curtain fluttering out.
Somebody was in. It might be Talbot. In that case he wouldn't go up or leave his name either. It certainly was none of Talbot's business, whoever Talbot was.
He pressed the button under her name. "Yes?" Heavens above, it was she, Georgia, the woman herself.
"Yes, who is it!" came the voice once more.
"Stevens."
"Mr. Stevens?" with a decided tone of interrogation. Evidently she did not place him at all. Probably not, with so many other men about her. It would be absurd to suppose anything else. She didn't place him—might not even recognize him out of the office.
"Mason Stevens of the office."
"Oh, Mr. Stevens of the office. How do you do?" and she spoke with a delightful access of cordiality. "Will you come up?"
"Just for a minute, if I may. I won't keep you long."
"Wait, I'll let you in." The click-click-click sounded and he was on his way upstairs. She opened the door for him.
A quick glance. There was no other man in the room, anyway.
"Good evening," she said. "Won't you come in?"
"Why, yes," then very apologetically; "that is, if I'm not putting you out."
"No, indeed." He sat and paused. She smiled and did not help him.
"You're nicely located here, Miss Connor."
"Oh, yes, we like it."
"Near the express station?"
"Yes. I usually get a seat in the morning, but not coming back, of course."
"About three blocks, isn't it?"
"Three long ones."
"A nice walk."
"Yes, this time of year, but not so nice in winter when they don't clean the snow off the sidewalks."
He felt that it was a bit jerky. Perhaps he should first have asked her permission to call. What a goat he was not to think of that beforehand instead of now. He paused until the pause grew uncomfortable.
She tried to help him out, "We're out of the smoke belt, that's one thing."
He was seated in a rocking chair and began to rock violently, then suddenly he stopped and leaned toward her, his elbows on his knees.
"I've been slow getting to the point," he remarked abruptly, "but I came here on business."
"Oh, I wasn't just sure what."
Stevens took half a dozen life insurance advertising folders from his pocket. "You know this literature we're using," he said, running two or three through his fingers and indicating them by their titles, "'Do You Want Your Wife to Want When She's a Widow?' 'Friendship for the Fatherless,' 'Death's Dice Are Loaded.'"
"Oh, yes." She took them from him and read aloud. "'Over the Hills to the Poorhouse,' with a photograph of it, 'Will Your Little Girl Have to Scrub?' with thumbnail pictures of scrub ladies. Ugh, what a gloomy trade we're in, aren't we, Mr. Stevens?"
"This is the line of talk that gets the business." He spoke earnestly, tapping the folders. "You can't make papa dig up premiums for forty or fifty years unless you first scare him and scare him blue about his family."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"And what I came for is—well, will you—would you just as soon help me get up some more of these?"
"You mean work with you on them?" She was truly surprised.
"Exactly."
She hesitated and then she said it was impossible, but that she appreciated his kind compliment, was flattered by it and thanked him deeply, deeply. For, of course, she realized that Mr. Stevens was one of the very best men in town at that sort of work and she was afraid she couldn't possibly be of any real use to him.
"Not at all, not at all;" he was talking business now and waved aside her objections with his customary confidence. Everybody always objected to his plans for them when he began talking, but in the end he was apt to change their minds. That was why he was considered a premier solicitor. "You've a clear head and a good ear for words, that's what's needed, and——"
"But—" she tried to interrupt.
"And ideas, that's the point, ideas. You're clever."
"What makes you think so?"
"I don't think so; I know."
"I'm flattered," she said firmly. "But no—really."
"Well, I won't take that for a definite answer yet." Of course not. He never did. "I want you to think it over. I have the utmost confidence in the scheme and your ability to carry it out. You can tell me Monday in the office what you decide."
"I can tell you now, Mr. Stevens."
He rose. "Think it over anyway. You may change your mind."
She rose, too, not encouraging him to stay.
"Miss Connor," he spoke gravely, "there was something else I came to ask you. I'd like to know you personally as well as in a business way, if you'd just as soon. May I come to see you now and then?"
She did not answer. She saw that it counted with him. He seemed really to care. She must not be brusque with him. He must not think her merely light-minded, unappreciative of the compliment of his interest. She must tell him of her marriage.
"Of course, if you'd rather not for any reason, why, that settles it," there was a check in his voice, "and we'll say no more about it." Still she did not answer. He held out his hand. "Well, good-bye, then."
"Good-bye."
He went to the door and opened it.
"Mr. Stevens."
"Yes, Miss Connor."
"I think you ought to know that isn't my name."
"What is it, then?"
"Mrs. Connor."
"Mrs. Connor? Missis Connor?"
"Yes."
He came down into the room. His glance traveled rapidly to the four corners, like a wild animal dodging men and dogs. He had one question left, one chance of escape.
"Are you a widow?" he said.
"No, a married woman."
Stevens went slowly out of the door without replying. The woman whom he loved belonged to another man. It was like the end of the world.
If Mason had been in thejeunesse doréehe must now have gone to Monte Carlo to buck the tiger or to India to shoot him.
As it was, he smoked all night and turned up at the office half an hour ahead of time in a voluble, erratic mood, brought about by suppressing so much excitement within himself. If he had known how to tell his troubles to a friend over a glass of beer he might have had an easier time of it in his life. But he wasn't that sort. He took things hard and kept them in.
He decided that the best thing to do with his sentiment for Georgia was to strangle it. Whenever he caught himself thinking of her, which would certainly be often at first, he must turn his mind away. He must avoid seeing her; if they met accidentally he would give no further sign than a curt nod.
He remembered the farmers used to say that there was one thing to do with Canada thistles—keep them under, never let the sun shine on them. His love for this other man's wife was like a thistle. He must keep it under, never let the sun shine on it.
He did it thoroughly. He nodded to her in the most indifferent way in the world when they happened to meet, but he found no occasion to stop at her desk to chat an instant. Two weeks of his change of manner began to pique her. He was acting in a rather absurd way, she thought. After all they weren't lovers who had quarreled, but simply acquaintances, friends after a fashion, fellow workers. Why shouldn't they continue to be friends? It would be amusing to have some one besides the family and the girls to talk to.
She would not let him treat her in this stiff way any longer, just because she had had the bad luck to marry a bad man years before. What rubbish that was. And what self-consciousness on his part. Men had a very guilty way of looking at things.
They met quite or almost quite by accident in front of the office building during the noon hour of the following day. He was about to pass without stopping.
"How do you do, Mr. Stevens?" Her voice was quite distinct.
So he turned and lifted his hat. "How do you do!"
She did not precisely move toward him, but she did so contrive the pause that it was up to him, if he weren't to be boorish, to stop for a moment and speak with her.
She threw a disarming candor into her first question. "Is there any particular reason," said she, "why we are no longer friends?"
"Friends?"
"Yes. You've been frowning at me for about three weeks and I haven't the least idea how I've offended you."
He did not answer immediately and his expression hardened.
"There, you're doing it now," said she with apparent perplexity. "Why?"
"You know," he spoke doggedly.
"No, I don't."
"Yes you do, too," he answered curtly and roughly. "You do."
"Just as you please." She turned from him, apparently offended by his tone, slightly nodded and walked slowly away. She was of medium height, no more than that, and slender. A brute of a man bumped her with his shoulder as he passed her.
Stevens waited for the brute of a man, dug his elbow into his ribs and overtook her at the Madison Street corner.
"Miss—Mrs. Connor, I didn't mean to be rude."
"You were a little, you know."
"Will you excuse me?"
"Why, of course."
He didn't quite know what to do next, so he awkwardly extended his hand. She took it with a man-to-man shake of wiping out the score, which completely demolished his cynical attitude in reference to platonic friendship.
"Where were you bound for?" he asked.
"Nowhere, just strolling. Over to the lake front for a breath of air."
"May I walk along?"
"Surely."
On their way back they reflected that they had been without lunch, so they stopped at a drug store for a malted milk with egg, chocolate flavor, nutmeg on top.
They touched their glasses together.
"It's very nourishing," said he with wonderment.
"Very," she replied, delightedly; "very."
They returned to their work in that state of high elation induced by interviews such as theirs, wherein the spoken words mean twenty times what they say—and more.
Georgia and Mason did not overpass the outward signs and boundaries of platonism, learning to avoid not merely evil, but the appearance of evil. When they met in the hundred-eyed office they were casual.
During the autumn they took long walks together every Sunday. There had been a dry spell that year, lasting with hardly a break from the fore part of June, which baked the land and sucked out the wells and put the Northern woods in danger of their lives. The broad corn leaves withered yellow and the husbandmen of the great valley protested that the ears were but "lil' nubbins with three inches of nuthin' at the tips, taperin' down to a point, and where'll we get our seed next spring?"
When the huge downpour came at last and by its miracle saved the crop which had been given up for lost a fortnight since, Mason cursed the day, for it fell on the first day of the week and cost him, item, one walk and talk with Georgia Connor. She stood so near his eyes as to hide from his sight a billion bushels parching in the valley—though he was country bred.
To her their Sundays together brought not a joy as definite as his, but rather a sense of contentment, of relief from the precision of the other days of her week. It pleased her to wander to the big aviary and look at the condors and cockatoos and wonder about South America where they came from, then to stroll slowly over to the animals and have a vague difference of opinion with him about whether a lion could whip a tiger.
She thought so because the lion was the king of beasts, but Mason didn't, because he'd read of a fight where it had been tried. Once he even grew a trifle heated because she wouldn't listen to reason and fact and stuck to the lion because he'd been called the king of beasts, whereas all naturalists knew the elephant and the gorilla and the rhinoc—— There she interrupted him with a laugh and called him a boy and too literal.
Every Sunday they had this same dispute until finally they both learned to laugh about it and made it a joke between them, and she told him he was doing much better. They walked by the inside lake and wondered if the wild ducks and geese on the wooded isle liked to have to stay there, and they took lunch when they got good and ready, perhaps not until two or three or even four o'clock in the afternoon.
She always went home for supper, but often she came out again afterwards, and took the car down town to a Sunday Evening Ethical Society which foregathered in an old-fashioned theatre building.
There was almost always some well-known speaker whose name was often in the papers, perhaps a professor or a radical Ohio Mayor or a labor lawyer, to address them on up-to-date topics like Municipal Ownership in Europe or the Russian Revolution or the Androcentric World, which showed women had as much right to vote as men, or non-resistance, a kind of Christianity that wasn't practical. Stevens didn't like that lecture much.
Jane Addams spoke once about the children that lived in her neighborhood. He thought her talk the best of all; so did Georgia. He said to her that Jane Addams was as much of a saint as any of those old-timers that were burnt and pulled to pieces and fed to lions, and a useful kind of a saint as well, because she helped children instead of just believing in something or other. Georgia didn't answer his remark at the time, but nearly half an hour later as she was bidding him good night she had him repeat it to her, and the next day she told him that what he had said about Miss Addams was very interesting.
They had organ music at these meetings and a collection, so that he felt it was the next thing to going to church. But Georgia in arguing out the matter with herself concluded that there was so little religion in the services that in attending them she violated the Church's law against worshiping with heretics hardly more than if she went to a political meeting. She would never go to a regular Protestant service with Mason, even if he asked her. She made up her mind firmly on that point. So perhaps it was as well he didn't ask her.
Her waking memories of Jim were now much fainter and dimmer. She tried not to think of him at all. She refused to let her mother or Al speak his name or make allusion to him. At the beginning, just after his departure, mama had harped on the subject until she thought it would drive her crazy.
Over and over and over again she traversed the same ground—about his being her husband, and Christian charity, and one more trial, and the disgrace of it, and that it was the first time such a thing ever happened in the family.
Finally in self-defense and to save herself from being upset every night when she was tired and worn out anyway, she told her mother that the next time she mentioned Jim's name she would leave the room. And she only had actually to do this three times before poor mama succumbed, as she always did when she was met firmly. However, she still managed to say a volume in Jim's favor with her deep sighs and her "Oh, Georgia's," but Georgia always pretended she didn't know the meaning of such signs and manifestations. Of course, especially at the beginning, her husband's face often came unbidden between her and her page, but she gathered up her will each time to banish it again, and it's surprising what a woman can do if she only makes up her mind andsticks to it.
But her dreams were the trouble. Jim would enter them. She didn't know how to keep him out. And he always came, sometimes two or three nights in succession, to bring her pain.
She usually appointed her Sunday rendezvous for an hour before noon at Shakespeare's statue in the Park, and sailed off cheerily in her best bib and tucker to meet Mason, leaving behind her a fine trail of excuses, a complete new set each week, to explain to mama why she couldn't go to mass. On this particular morning she said she had a date with a girl-friend from the office.
With the best intention in the world she was never on time and always kept him waiting. She was so unalterably punctual for six days a week that the seventh day it was simply impossible.
Stevens usually became slightly irritated during these few minutes—what business man wouldn't?—and referred to his watch at hundred-second intervals, determined to ask her once and for all why she wasted so much time in tardiness. But when finally he distinguished her slim little figure in the Sunday throng that was streaming toward him, his impatience left not a wrack behind.
They started gayly northward, bantering each other in urban repartee. As they passed gray Columbus Hospital their mood swerved suddenly and they talked of sickness and death and immortality.
Her belief was orthodox, but it did not hold her as vividly as it held the old folk in the old days. Had she lived nearer to the miracles of the sun going down in darkness and coming up in light; or thunderstorms and young oats springing green out of black, with wild mustard interspersed among them like deeds of sin; of the frost coming out of the ground; and the leaves dying and the trees sleeping; she would perhaps have lived nearer to the miracles of bread and wine, of Christ sleeping that the world may wake.
But she lived in a place of obvious cause and effect. When the sun went down, the footlights came up for you if you had a ticket, and man's miracle banished God's even though you might be in the flying balcony and the tenor almost a block away. Thunderstorms meant that it was reckless to telephone; oats, wheat and corn, something they controlled on the board of trade; the melting of the snows showed the city hall was weak on the sewer side—what else could you expect of politicians?—the dying leaves presaged the end of the Riverview season and young Al's excitement over the world's series.
Living in the country puts a God in one's thoughts, for man did not make the country and its changes, yet they are there. Farmers pray for rain or its cessation according to their needs. To live in the city is to diminish God and the seeming daily want of Him, for man built his own city of steel and steam and stone, unhelped, did he not?
God may have made the pansies, but He did not make "the loop." His majesty is hidden from its people by their self-sufficing skill, and they turn their faces from Him. West-siders do not pray for universal transfers.
Never had Georgia questioned her faith. Its extent remained as great as ever. She had consciously yielded no part of her creed. But its living quality was infected by the daily realism of her life, as spring ice is honeycombed throughout with tiny fissures before its final sudden disappearance.
So she talked to Stevens of her convictions, but in a calm dispassionate way, without emotional fervor.
Stevens' great-grandparents whenever they referred to the Romanist Church, which was often, spoke of "the scarlet woman" or "the whore of Babylon." His grandparents, products of a softer, weaker generation, stopped at adjectives, "papist," "Jesuitical," "idolatrous."
His parents receded still further from the traditions of the Pilgrims. Indeed his father, being a popular horse doctor, kept his mouth shut altogether on the subject, and his mother seldom went beyond remarking that there was considerable superstition in the Catholic service and too much form to suit her.
As for the son himself, he could as soon have quarreled about the rights and wrongs of the Mexican war as he would about religion. He wasn't especially interested in either. He thought there was a lot of flim-flam for women in all religion, especially in Catholicism. But it was an amiable weakness of the sex, like corsets. So he let Georgia run on, explaining her faith, without interruption.
Then most wretched luck befell them. Georgia looked up from the tips of her toes, being vaguely engaged, as she talked, in stepping on each large pebble in the gravel path and her eyes rested squarely upon her mother. Mrs. Talbot mottled; Georgia blushed.
All progress was temporarily arrested; then the older woman puffed out her chest and waddled away with all the dignity at her summons. But she could not resist the Parthian shot—what Celt can!—and she turned to throw back over her shoulder, "Who's your girl-friend, Georgia?" Her teeth clicked and she continued her departure.
Stevens realized that there had been a contretemps of some sort and that it was his place, as a man of the world, to laugh it off.
"Who's the old pouter pigeon?" he inquired.
"Mama."
"Oh!"
Feeling that candor was now thrust upon her, Georgia proceeded to explain to Stevens that she had never explained about him to her mother, for mama couldn't possibly understand, being old-fashioned and prejudiced in some regards.
"So you've made me fib for you," she finished. "Aren't you ashamed!"
"Yes," said he, in truth much gratified by her clandestineness.
"But what I don't see is——," he began, then broke off.
"Is what?"
"Is why you should be so disturbed about yourmother'sknowing."
"I've told you—for the sake of peace and a quiet life."
"But what about your husband?" He blurted it out suddenly, the word which had crucified him since his one and only visit to her home; the word which he had kept dumb between them until now. "What about him? Doesn't he mind?"
"He left me six months ago. You never supposed I would take a man's bread and—fool him, did you, Mason?" She called him by his name for the first time.
"I didn't know," he muttered, "I've been to hell and back thinking of it."
"How did you suppose it would come out?" she asked, fascinated objectively by the drama of her life.
"I felt we were playing bean-bag with dynamite—and we ought to quit—made up my mind—while I was waiting for you this morning to tell you this must be the last time, because we were drifting straight into——" He paused.
"Into what?" There was a touch of gentlest irony in her tone.
"Into trouble, lots of it." There was a touch of apology in his.
"And you didn't want trouble, lots of it?" Her irony was not less. "At least not on my account?"
"I was thinking of what would be best for all of us. I was trying to do the square thing—the greatest happiness for the greatest number." There was a pause, unsympathetic. "Wasn't that right?" he ended with no great confidence.
"Why, of course, perfectly right," she assented heartily. "It shows consideration. You considered the case systematically from all sides. Yours, and mine, and my husband's, and the rest of the family's, and the rest of yours, too, I suppose, didn't you?" She looked extremely efficient and spoke in her business voice with a little snap to her words.
She was quite unfair in taking this tack with unhappy Stevens, who, however often he thought of his duty in these twisted premises, would surely not have done it if she beckoned him away. For she owned the only two hands in the world which he wanted to hold.
A woman, however, prefers to be the custodian of her own morals and it gratifies her at most no more than slightly to find that her lover has been plotting with himself to preserve her virtue. It is for the man to ask and for her to deny, sadly but sweetly—and she doesn't care to be anticipated. Especially when she is self-perceptibly interested.
"But since you are already separated from——"
"Yes, that makes it pleasanter all around, doesn't it?" she led him on most treacherously.
"Why, of course—that's what I was saying," he blundered. "Now I can ask you to——"
"Mason, I've a frightful headache, the sun perhaps—and I think I will go home and lie down, if you don't mind."
He looked up in some amazement at the lord of day half hidden by the haze in his November station, and it suddenly occurred to him that woman is a various and mutable proposition always.
"What's the matter with you, anyway?"
"Nothing," she responded with deliberate unconvincingness, "nothing in the world, but a headache." She held out her hand. "Don't bother to come with me. We might be seen. Good-bye." And she was off.
It was a winding gravel path and she was lost behind a curving hedge before he started in pursuit. She quickened her pace when she heard his step behind and it was almost a walking race before he overtook her.
"Georgia," he exclaimed, somewhat ruffled by her unreasonableness. She neither turned her head nor answered.
"Georgia!" he repeated more loudly. Then he took her wrist and forcibly arrested her.
"Please let me go," she requested with supreme dignity, "you are hurting me."
"Not until you hear what I have to say. Will you marry me?"
"Marry you?" She dropped her eyes before his frowning ones. The shoulders which had been thrown so squarely back seemed to yield like her will and drooped forward into softer lines.
"Yes," he tightened his hold on her wrist, "will you?"
"I am a Catholic."
"But isn't there some way around that?" Your man of business believes there is some way around everything.
"No. Divorce and remarriage aren't permitted to us."
"Don't they ever annul a marriage?"
"Not if it has been marriage." A look of misery came over his face. She perceived it and went steadily on. "I had a child once—that died."
He dropped her hand, unconsciously to himself, but she felt it as a clear signal between them.
"You see how little you have known me," she said softly. "Poor old fellow, I'm sorry. Too bad it had to end like this." Her eyes were now swimming in tears which she did not try to conceal. "Don't you see, dear, that is why I kept putting off telling you things about my affairs, and why I had tried to keep it—friendship, because I knew when we came as far as this we would have to stop."
"It will never stop," he said tensely, "never."
Response seemed to sweep through her suddenly, bewildering her by its unexpected strength.
"Perhaps not," she assented slowly, "if—if we—dare."
"Georgia," he pleaded, "you know that I——"
"Yes," in a whisper, "I know."
"And do you care, too?"
She looked up, and her answer was plain for him to read.
"More than you will ever know, Mason," she said.
"Georgia, are you a devout Catholic? Does it mean all of life to you here and hereafter?"
"No, not very devout. Nothing like mother, for instance. I have grown very careless about some things."
"Would you always be governed by the teaching of the Church in this matter—always—never decide for yourself?"
"When it came to such a big thing," she said slowly, "I don't think I'd dare disobey."
"What are you afraid of—future punishment?"
"Why, yes, partly that," she smiled; "it isn't a very jolly prospect, you know."
He was truly astonished. He supposed that everybody nowadays, even Catholics, had tacitly agreed to give up hell. Hell was too ridiculously unreasonable to be believed in any more.
"Georgia," he asked, "have you ever looked much at the stars?"
"Why, yes; once in awhile. Last Sunday evening at Bismarck Garden Al and I found the dipper—it was just as plain—is that what you mean? Of course I don't pretend to be much of an astronomer."
"Some nights," he said, "when it's clear I go up on the roof and lie on my back, and, well, it's a great course in personal modesty. Some of those stars, those little points of light, are as much bigger than our whole world as an elephant is bigger than a mosquito, and live as much longer."
"Of course," she answered, "we know that everything is bigger than people used to think, but still couldn't God have made it all, just the same?"
"Do you honestly believe," he rejoined, speaking very earnestly, intent on shaking her faith, if that were possible, "that Whoever or Whatever was big enough to put the stars in the sky is small enough to take revenge forever on a tiny little molecule like you—or me? Do you honestly suppose that after you are dead, perhaps a long time dead, this mighty God will hunt for you through all the heavens, and when he has found you, you poor little atom of a dead dot, that he will torment and pester you forever and ever because you had once for a space no longer than the wink of an eye acted according to the nature he gave you? If that is your God, he has put nothing in his universe as cruel as Himself."
She frowned in a puzzled way for a few seconds, looking at him with an odd little wide-eyed stare, then shook her head slowly.
"Yes," said he in answer. "Some day you will take your life in your own hands and use it. You're not the stuff they make nuns out of. There's too much vitality in you.
"How old are you?" he asked suddenly.
"Twenty-six."
"Twenty-six and ready to quit? I don't believe it."
"You don't understand, Mason," she answered, "you can't. You're not a Catholic. Catholicism is different from all other creeds. It is not just something you think and argue about, but it has you—you belong to it; it is as much a part of you as your blood and bones." There was a finality in her voice, a resignation of self, which bespoke the vast accumulated will of the Church operating upon and through her.
Stevens knew suddenly that she was not an individualized woman in the same sense that he was an individualized man, with the private possibility of doing what he pleased so long as he did not interfere with the private possibilities of others; he realized that in certain important intimate matters such as the one which had arisen between them she was without power of decision, the decision having been made for her many centuries ago; and he felt the awe which comes to every man when first he is confronted by the Roman Catholic Church.
"You mean there is no way out of it—but death?—your husband's death?" His self-confidence seemed to have departed as if he, too, had met fate in the road.
"Yes," she answered gently, "that is the only way." And then she smiled with some little effort, but still she smiled, for she detested gloom on her day off. "Oh, Mason," said she, "why wasn't grandpa a Swede?"
He looked at her with amazement and not without a trace of disapprobation, for her eyes were dancing. Was she actually making jokes about his misery—to say nothing of hers—if indeed she felt any? He was learning more about women every minute.
Now she was practically giggling. He frowned deeper and sighed. Perhaps, perhaps everything was for the best, after all. He might as well tell her so, too. No reason to make himself wretched for something she seemed to think hilariously humorous.
"Well, Georgia, I must say," he began portentously—'twas the voice of the husband—almost. She could hear him complain. Whereat she simply threw back her head and laughed again.
He noticed, as he had often noticed, that her strong little teeth were white and regular, that her positive little nose was straight and slender, and the laughter creases about her eyes reminded him of the time she thought it such fun to be caught in Ravinia Park in the rain without an umbrella.
So presently he tempered his frown, then put it away altogether, and his eyes twinkled and he turned the corners of his mouth up instead of down.
"Oh, dear me," he mocked, half in fun and half not, "as the fellow says, 'we can't live with 'em and we can't live without 'em.'"
But she, who had been reading him like a book in plain print, asked, "Come, tell aunty your idea of a jolly Sunday in the park with your best girl. To sit her on a bench and make her listen while you mourn for the universe?"
"But what are we going to do about it?" he asked solemnly, "that's what I want to know."
"Do?" she responded with a certain gay definiteness, "do nothing."
"You mean not see each other any more at all?" he asked desperately. "I absolutely refuse."
"No, silly, of course I don't mean that. We'll go on just as before, friends, comrades, pals."
"When we love each other—when we've told each other we love each other?"
"Certainly. What's that got to do with it?"
"It would be the merest pretense," he declared solemnly.
"Then let's begin the pretense now, and go up and throw a peanut at the elephant. Come along." She hooked her arm into his. Her levity of behavior undoubtedly got past him at times.
"Georgia"—he was once more on the verge of remonstrance—"if you cared as you say you do, if youlovedme as I l——"
She unhooked her arm and now she was serious enough.
"Don't you understand," she said, "what I mean? We can't talk about that any more."
"You mean not at all?"
"Precisely."
"But what if I can't conceal the most important thing in my whole life? What if I can't smirk and smile about it? What if I am not as good an actor as you? What if I can't pretend? What then?" He was very, very fierce with her.
"Then I suppose I'll have to go home." They stood irresolute, facing each other, neither wishing to carry it too far.
"Not that that would be much fun—— Oh, come, don't be silly—let's go attack the elephant. What must be, must be, you know."
She paused to allow him time to yield with grieved dignity, then she headed for the animal house; he trailed in silence about half a step behind her during the first hundred yards, but finally sighed and surrendered and then fell into step and pretended during the rest of the afternoon with quite decent success.
So his education began. And though he was by no means pliable material, she managed, being vastly the more expert, to keep him pretending with hardly a lapse throughout the winter.
She found it more difficult, however, to keep herself pretending.
Moxey was a Jew boy and a catcher. His last name ended in sky, and he came from the West-side ghetto. His father and mother came from the pale in Russia when Moxey's elder brother Steve was in arms and before Moxey himself appeared.
Moxey would have been captain of the Prairie View Semi-Pro. B. B. Club, if merit ruled the world. But there was the crime of nineteen centuries ago against him, so they made McClaughrey captain; Georgia's sixteen-year-old brother Al played third base.
The Prairie Views had one triumph in the morning, it being Sunday, the day for two and sometimes three games. They had the use of one of the diamonds on a public playground from Donovan, the wise cop.
I have seen Donovan keep peace and order among eighteen warring lads from sixteen to twenty years old by a couple of looks, a smile and a silence. When there was money on the game, too.
There has been good material wasted in Donovan. Properly environed and taught the language, though he doesn't depend on language very much, he could have been presiding officer of the French Chamber of Deputies—and presided.
It was the ninth inning, last half, tie score, two out, three on, with two and three on the batter. In other words, the precise moment when the fictionist is allowed to step in. Moxey up.
He fouled off a couple, the coachers screeched; the umpire, who was also stakeholder, dripped a bit freer and hoped Donovan would stick around for a few seconds longer.
The pitcher took a short wind-up and the ball, which seemed to start for the platter, reached Moxey in the neighborhood of the heart. He collapsed. They rallied round the umpire.
"He done it on purpose—the sheeny—he done it on purpose, I tell you—he run into it——"
"Naw, ye're a liar!"
"Prove it."
"It's a dead ball—take your base—come in there, youse," waving to the man on third.
"We win. Give us our money."
All participated but Moxey, who lay moaning on the ground by the home plate.
Donovan strolled out to the debate and smiled his magic smile. "Take yer base," bawled the emboldened ump, and waved the run in. Al got five dollars for the day's playing and three dollars for the day's betting, and the Prairie Views walked off, bats conspicuous on shoulders, yelling, "Yah!" at the enemy.
"Chee," said Moxey to his playmates when they reached the family entrance, "me for the big irrigation." And it was so.
Moxey shifted his foot, called his little circle around him close and then inserted his dark, fleshless talon into his baseball shirt. "That gave me an awful wallop what win the game," he said; "if I hadn't slipped me little pad in after the eight', it might a' put me away, understand." He took out his protection against dead balls, an ingenious and inconspicuous felt arrangement to be worn under the left arm by right-handed batters. And all present felt again that there had been injustice in the preference of McClaughrey.
Whenever they asked Moxey where he lived, he answered, "West," and let it go at that. He always turned up for the next game, no matter how often plans had been changed since he had last seen any of them. That was all they knew about him. He caught for them, often won for them, drank beer with them and then disappeared completely until the next half-holiday.
Perhaps Al was his most intimate friend, and Al was the only one who learned his secret. "Say, Al," he blurted out almost fiercely one evening, "your folks is Irish, ain't they?"
"Irish-American," corrected Al.
"Well, mine's Yiddishers, and the most Yiddish Yiddishers y'ever see."
Moxey seemed very bitter about it and Al waited for more.
"My old man, well——" Moxey swallowed. It seemed to Al as if he would not go on, but finally it came out with a rush. "He pushes a cart—yes, sir—honest to God, he pushes a cart—I thought maybe I ought to tell you, Al."
"He does?" It was a shock to the Irish-American, which showed in his tone.
"Yes, sir, he does," Moxey answered defiantly, "and if you don't like it—why—well, I won't say nuthin' ugly to you, Al—you're only like the rest. S'long."
Al threw his arm around the other's shoulder. "Forget it, Moxey." Which was the only oath ever taken in this particular David and Jonathan affair.
Not long afterwards, Moxey proposed to Al attendance at a prizefight just across the State line, the Illinois laws being unfavorable to such exhibitions of manly skill or brutality, whichever it is. It was Al's first fight.
They boarded a special train, filled with coarse men bent upon coarse pleasure. But then, if they had been bent upon refined pleasure they wouldn't have been coarse or it wouldn't have been pleasure.
The prizefighting question illustrates well the gulf between the social and the individual conscience and demonstrates that the whole is sometimes considerably greater than the sum of its parts. Probably eight out of ten men in this country enjoy seeing two hearty young micks belt each other around a padded ring with padded gloves. But they hesitate to come out in the open and proclaim their enjoyment, for fear of writing themselves down brutes, and the deepest yearning of the American people at the present day is to be gentlemanly and ladylike.
So whenever sparring matches are proposed the community works itself up into a state of fake indignation. All the softer and sweeter elements telegraph the Governor and if that isn't enough, pray for him; and inasmuch as the Governor gets no immoral support on the other side from those who are afraid of jeopardizing their gentlemanliness, he yields, and appears in the newspapers as a strong man who dared beard the sports, whereas, he was really a frightened politician who didn't dare beard the Christian Endeavorers.
One of the most illuminating essays of the late and great William James concerned Chautauqua Lake. He spent a week at that beautiful camp, where sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness pervade the air.
There were popular lectures by popular lecturers, a chorus of seven hundred voices, kindergartens, secondary schools, every sort of refined athletics, and perpetually running soda fountains.
There was neither zymotic disease, poverty, drunkenness, crime or police.
There was culture, kindness, cheapness, equality, in short what mankind has been striving for under the name of civilization, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.
And yet when he left the camp he quotes himself as saying to himself: "Ouf! What a relief. Now for something primordial to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninteresting. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice cream soda is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things—I cannot abide with them."
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 crowno' 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."