Chapter 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.

They said afterwards that Georgia could not have taken another small step toward death, without dying. She flickered and guttered like a lamp whose oil has been used up. For a few moments it seemed that her light had been put out altogether, but there must have been a tiny spark hidden somewhere in the charred wick, for the doctors brought her back by artificial stimulation, and you can not stimulate the dead.

If specialists and private rooms and nurses give sick people more chance of getting well, then Stevens and the old man and Mr. Silverman saved Georgia by their care of her, for she could not have had less chance to live and lived.