Chapter XI: Fusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Nit," she responded.

"Why?"

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

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

"We-ell." It was explicit enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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