Chapter XXVI: EVE

Some six months later, on a hot, sticky afternoon in July, Georgia came away from a State Street department store carrying a paper-wrapped parcel under her arm. She had come down town to take advantage of an odds and ends sale of white goods advertised that morning.

In spite of the heat which beat down from a cloudless, windless sky and radiated up from the stone pavements where it had stored itself, she wore a long bluish-gray pongee coat. There were dark rings under her eyes and she felt ill and dispirited as she waited at Dearborn and Randolph for a North Clark Street car, which would drop her a block nearer her flat than the L would.

The car was slow in coming and a crowd of fifteen or twenty gathered to wait for it. Most of them were women homeward bound after the morning's shopping excitement. One of them also wore a long bluish-gray coat and Georgia remembered having seen her at the white goods remnant counter. They caught each other's eyes and smiled faintly but did not speak.

When the car stopped there was the customary rush for seats and Georgia had to content herself with a strap. She balanced her bundle against her hip and shifted her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot swaying to the motion of the car, envying men.

A passenger who looked like an oldish maid, with gold-rimmed spectacles and tightly drawn thin hair, half rose and beckoned to Georgia.

"I'm getting out at the next corner," she said, and sliding across the knees of the person next to her, gave Georgia a seat next the window on the shady side.

"Thank you, thank you very much indeed," said Georgia gratefully. Several blocks later she turned and saw the maiden lady still standing on the back platform leaning against the controller-box and trying to write something on the back of a paper novel with a fountain pen. She had a sudden warm feeling for this unknown friend who had done her a small kindness with delicacy.

Then, for she was nervously unstable and the hues and tinges of her emotions followed each other very rapidly like magic lantern slides, she became suddenly and deeply humiliated. Was she already so noticeable that strange women, much older than she, would offer her their seats! From day to day she had gone on, still hoping that she was able to deceive the casual eye. Henceforth she felt that she could not by any stretch of will bring herself to go out of the house except at night.

The car made moving pictures for her as she looked through the heavy wire grill which kept people from putting their heads out of the windows, at the men slowly walking up and down the hot sidewalk in their shirt sleeves or stopping to talk under the projecting awnings of saloons and fruit stores, at the wrappered women sitting stupidly in the upper windows of run-down brick buildings devoted to light housekeeping, at children sucking hokey-pokey cones or playing ball in a side street.

The children seemed to her the only ones with joy. Perhaps that was because they didn't know what they were up against.

The motorman clanged his gong angrily twenty times, then had to slow down and stop behind a lumbering coal wagon while the driver, a much blackened and begrimed Irishman, climbed leisurely from his seat and fussed with the neck yokes of his team, swearing sulkily at the motorman the while. A messenger boy got back at him, in the opinion of the front platform, by hailing him as Jack Johnson, the hope of the dark race. The teamster responded with some dirty language. It was a bad, hot day for tempers.

Georgia had time during the delay to become interested in a little drama which was then being enacted directly across the street from her. Its impelling power seemed to be a dead white horse which lay on the soft sticky asphalt, surrounded by a fringe of men and boys who stared quietly at a little pool of blood that came from a round hole above the animal's eye.

The horse's mate stood stolidly in harness, hitched still to his wagon. She wondered if now he would have to pull it home alone. A man with a note book pushed through the crowd. He was evidently in authority of some sort. He asked a little boy something and the boy turned and pointed toward an alley entrance cat-a-corner from where he stood.

Then a big man with a whip in his hand, a leather strap around his waist and a union button in his cap, probably the driver of the dead horse, threw his cap on the ground and stamped his foot, shook his fist at the boy and turned his back on the man with the note book and refused to answer his questions. She couldn't understand it at all. It seemed very unreasonable.

Then a street car bound the other way rolled up and came to a stop between her and the white horse. Mason Stevens sat on the seat precisely opposite hers, so near that they could have shaken hands if the two grilled iron screens had not been in the way. She noticed that his jaw fell open, like a dead person's.

She heard her conductor and the other conductor jerk simultaneously the go-ahead signals and the cars, quickly getting up speed, went in different directions. She did not turn her head, but she could feel the moment when he flipped onto the back platform. Then she heard him come up the aisle, breathing heavily from his run.

The seat beside her had become vacant and she had placed her paper package of white goods on it. Now she took it into her lap and crossed her arms over it. He sat down.

"How do you do!" he said.

"How do you do?"

They both stared straight ahead, not daring at first to look at each other.

"It's--quite a while since we--saw each other," she ventured after a long pause.

"Yes, quite a while, but--" he stopped.

"But what!"

"I don't know."

Then Georgia, first to regain control of herself, laughed, breaking the tension. "What are you doing here!" she asked. "Where have you come from and where are you going!"

"I got in from New York this morning and I'm going home--that is, to Kansas City, this evening. Had to see Cleever here."

"Is everything going well with you!"

"Yes, that is--yes."

"Business good!"

"Fine."

"Happy!"

"Oh, yes--are you!"

"Oh, yes," she said, then added "very."

They paused. "Don't let me keep you if you have business," she suggested.

"I haven't," he answered.

He thought that never in his life had he seen her look so ill, but doubted how to speak of it.

"You got all over your typhoid, of course," was the way he put it.

"Oh, yes, completely." She read him as usual, and saw what was in his mind, that her appearance had shocked him.

"Oh, don't look at me that way, Mason," she exclaimed suddenly; "I know I've gone off a lot, but don't rub it in."

"You're nothing of the sort. You are a bit fagged out, that's all."

"Yes," she said, "a bit fagged. Besides, I'm a staid, settled-down old thing--and you, perhaps you're married by this time. Are you?"

"No."

"Engaged, then!" She spoke casually, but there was a beating at her heart.

"Not even that."

She pressed the button for the car to stop. She had a morbid hope that she might still keep her secret from him. But when he helped her off the car and they started to walk toward her home, she saw it in his eyes.

"You understand now?" she faltered.

"Yes."

They walked a hundred steps in silence. "Tell me one thing, Georgia," he said, "you _are happy_?"

"Yes," she answered firmly.

"That's all I care about."

When they reached her door he gave her the package of white goods which he had been carrying.

"Georgia," he said, as they shook hands good-bye, "remember this--if you ever need me, I'll come."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean if you ever need me I'll come--from anywhere."

She looked down at her ungainly figure in wonderment. "Surely you don't mean that now. I'm--I'm so ridiculous."

His voice choked. "God bless and keep you. God bless and keep you always, my dearest," he said, then went away.

She walked slowly and heavily up to the third flight, carrying her burden. When she opened the door with her latchkey she found her mother in blue gingham apron, cleaning Mr. Kane's room.

Mrs. Talbot paused in her operations. "Well," she vouchsafed, "Jim has turned up--just after you left. He's asleep in your room."

"Drunk?" asked Georgia.

"Of course," said Mrs. Talbot, emptying her carpet sweeper.