Chapter XIII: Reënter Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What you want?"

"It's Jim."

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

"Yes, if it's all right."

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

"Yes."

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

"Fine. Come along."

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

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

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

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

"Working. Rousty on a dredge in Oklahoma."

"Rousty?"

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

"What'd they pay!"

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

Al nodded his head toward her door.

"So's not to see me!"

Al nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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