Chapter XXXII: Rebellion

Georgia walked home to the boarding house that evening, as was her custom when the weather was fair. It was quite a tramp, three miles, but then the fresh air and exercise made one feel so well. Besides, if one wants to be sure of staying slim--

Mrs. Plew, the landlady, was standing on the front stoop when she arrived, talking of carving knives to an old-fashioned scissor-grinding man, the sort who advertise with a bell and a chant.

"Good evening, Mrs. Connor."

"Good evening, Mrs. Plew."

"Lovely weather we're having."

"Yes indeed, isn't it? My partner--she lives in Woodlawn--saw two robins this morning. The buds ought to be out pretty soon now."

Mrs. Plew laughed. "The German bands are out already. That's the surest sign I know. Oh, Mrs. Connor," Georgia, who was on the top step turned, "there was a young man came to see you this afternoon. He waited nearly an hour. He didn't leave his name."

"Did he say anything about coming back?"

"No."

"And he didn't leave his name?"

"No."

"What did he look like?"

"Well, he was tall, blue clothes, black derby hat. He had on a blue tie with white dots. I don't know as I can describe him exactly. It was kind of dark in the hall and I didn't get a good look at him."

Georgia paused with her hand on the knob of the living room door, as she heard talking within, her mother's uninflected murmuring and a musical masculine voice, deeper than Al's. It must be Father Hervey, patient man, who came regularly once a fortnight, nominally to confer with Mrs. Talbot as to the activities of the ladies' advisory board of the children's summer-camp school. But his visits were less for the summer school than for mama, to cheer her in her feeble loneliness.

Georgia slipped back to her own room, by way of the hall. An instinct has been growing in her of recent months to avoid falling into talk with the priest. He was so sure and strong and dominating; and she wanted to think for herself.

Al was whistling loudly in his back little cubicle, performing sartorial miracles before his square pine-framed mirror, with a tall collar that lapped in front and a very Princeton tie, orange and black, broad stripes.

She smiled reminiscently, regretfully, as she stood in the shadow and watched his gay evolutions through the partly opened door. He had so very much ahead of him that was behind her. He had the spring.

"Why such splendor?" she asked finally.

"Oh, I didn't know you were there. Why," he explained, amazed that explanation was necessary, "to-night is the big night. Our Bachelor's Dance. Don't you remember you were invited--as chaperone. I'm on the committee."

"Hope you have a good time. Who are you taking?"

He colored defiantly. "Annie Traeger."

"Oh-ho, I thought it was Delia Williamson that you--"

"It was, but she got too gay, so I thought I'd teach her a lesson."

"Poor Delia," sighed Georgia, mischievously.

"Oh, I'll have a dance or two with her," Al promised, putting on his coat and giving his hair a last pat with the tips of his fingers. He departed with the trill of a mocking bird. He had been a famous whistler from childhood.

Georgia tiptoed to the door of the living room. There was no sound. Father Hervey must have gone. She turned the knob and went in.

"Good evening, my child," said the priest, rising courteously and extending his hand. "I was resting a moment, hoping you might be home."

"Good evening, Father. Thank you so much."

"Your mother," he lowered his voice, "isn't as strong as her friends might hope, I'm afraid. She just had a faint spell, and she's in there now, lying down. It quite worried me, Georgia."

"Yes, sometimes I'm afraid she won't get better."

"She has told me she wished to resign from the advisory board of our summer school. That shows how she thinks she is. You know how much interest she always took in the work as long as she was able."

"Yes--poor mama."

"It would be a great comfort to her if you would take her place."

"Me!" exclaimed Georgia, startled.

"Yes. She is very anxious to keep it in the family, as it were," he explained, smiling.

"Let's see," asked Georgia slowly, "who's on that board?"

"Mrs. Conway."

"Mrs. Conway," she repeated, picking up a newspaper and writing on the margin.

"Mrs. Keough, Mrs. Schweppe, Mrs. Cochrane."

Georgia wrote on the newspaper after each name. "And mama," she added. She footed the total. "Those five women aggregate more than two hundred and fifty years," she bitterly exclaimed. "They're an advisory board, because they can only advise about life. They're past living it. And I--am just thirty. No, Father, I won't go on the board--yet."

She was curiously resentful, as if she had received an insult. She walked quickly to the window and threw it open, looking out and turning her back to the priest until she might collect herself and control her strange agitation.

"Very well," he answered gently, "I only hoped that it might please your mother." He took his hat in his hand and stood up. "Before I go," he said, "I think I should tell you that I have had news from your husband." He took a letter from his pocket and held it out toward her.

"No--I won't read it, thank you."

"He's on a farm in Iowa," the priest said, "I managed it. He's been doing hard work--and is much better."

"Yes, he may raise himself up a little, and then just when people are beginning to hope for the hundredth time, he'll relapse and--wallow."

"Yes, I am afraid sometimes he is hopeless." The despondency was plain in his voice.

"He's quite hopeless. He's incurable. It's a disease; but it works slowly on him, like leprosy."

"Do you think a drunkard is wholly to blame--for his malady!"

"Oh," said Georgia, "I'm not sure that anyone's ever to blame for anything. It just happens, that's all."

Mrs. Plew knocked and half opened the door. "That young man's back," she said, "shall I show him in?" Before Georgia could answer Stevens came into the room.

Without greeting of any kind, in rapid, mechanical words, as if he had learned his piece by heart, he explained his abrupt coming.

"I have received a business offer," he began, "which if I accept will take me away from America for a term of years. It is to superintend, on behalf of Mr. Silverman, the reorganization of certain life companies along modern American lines in South America. Headquarters, Rio de Janiero, Brazil. I have come for your advice, and your advice will govern. Shall I or shall I not accept the offer?" He stopped abruptly, looking at her with a harsh, almost savage expression, as he waited for her reply.

"You know what I mean," he burst out. "Answer me yes or no."

"You know Father Hervey, Mr. Stevens," she said coolly.

"I think I have heard of you before, Mr. Stevens," the priest bowed slightly.

"And I have heard of you," answered the young man bitterly. He turned to Georgia. "Answer me," he repeated, "yes or no."

"If it is an advantageous offer from a business point of view," she said gently, "I think you should go, Mason."

"That settles it," said he between his teeth. "You'd made it plain enough with your silence. I said I'd come when you sent for me. I waited and waited, but you never sent. Every single day I've looked in the mail hoping, and the only thing I got from you was--money. And when I found that Connor had left you, had been gone a year, I had a little hope again that--Oh, Georgia," he exclaimed in his wretchedness, "you did care for me once. Why did you stop?"

"I haven't stopped, Mason, but--" she motioned toward the priest in his black and solemn garments, standing beside them like a stern guardian, "but--" she said, and her shoulders seemed to droop forward irresolutely, "I'm helpless."

Stevens took a step toward Father Hervey and there was almost a threat in his gesture. "Don't you see," he said, his two fists clenched, "that if someone in the barroom had cracked Jim Connor over the head with a whiskey bottle during his last spree or if DTs had hit him five per cent harder afterwards--I could have her with your blessing--and we'd be happy--oh, so happy as we'd be, Georgia! It isn't as if I wanted to break up a home. The home's broken up already. Don't you see? And you're telling her she can't move out of the wreck. She's got to sit in the rubbish as long as the man who made it is able to make more."

"Young man," the priest answered not unkindly, "will you listen for a moment to an old man? I believe that you are a decent sort--that your love for Georgia is honest--"

"If there is any honesty in me," and Stevens' voice caught and broke.

"Yours, I am afraid," Father Hervey went on, including them both in his words, "is an example of those rare and exceptional cases where at the first sight marriage and divorce would seem almost permissible--"

"Yes," Stevens interrupted eagerly.

"But those cases, too," continued the priest in his melodious, resonant, trained voice, "have been thoroughly contemplated and considered by the deep wisdom of the Church." He waited an instant, then pronounced sentence.

"They must be sacrificed for the rest. For if a single exception were once made, others would inevitably follow; and just as a trickle through a dike becomes a stream, and the stream a torrent, so whole people would be inundated in a flood of bestiality. If Georgia is, as you say--in any sense deprived of her womanhood, it is for the sake of millions on millions of others, who while the Church can raise her voice--and that, my friend, will be while the world lasts--shall not be abandoned in their helplessness."

But Stevens, who had not been listening to the priest's words as soon as he saw what conclusion they were coming to, clapped his hands softly together and smiled.

"I have it," he said, "I have it at last. I will give Jim Connor a job in the Rio branch--with good pay, too--to drink himself to death on. Why not," he asked himself vehemently, as if he would convince himself, "that's practical."

"It would be murder," the priest spoke in a voice of horror.

"Not by the letter of the law--and that's what you're enforcing."

"Of course I shall warn him."

"My pay will talk louder," said Stevens, knowing that the drunkard is always on ticket-of-leave, "and he'll have all the time off he wants for aguardiente, stronger than whiskey, and cheaper. No white man can go against it for long in that climate."

Georgia stood back, fascinated by the duel of the two men.

"You must be mad, Stevens," said the priest with a note of fear in his voice, as if he realized that for the first time he was losing control of the situation.

"I'm a grown man. No other man can say 'No' to me forever. If Connor's the one obstacle to our marriage--I'll remove it."

The two men looked at each other with steady and increasing anger.

The woman laid her hand upon her lover's shoulder. "I will get an absolute divorce, Mason," she said.

"What is the meaning of that?" the priest asked, and his deep voice shook.

"I could give you my soul, Father, but not his, too."

Stevens took her hands in his and they stood together, separated by nearly the width of the room from the old priest. He turned his eyes from them as from an impious spectacle, and looked upward, his lips moving silently as if in prayer. When he spoke, there was new force in his voice, as if he had received help and strength.

"Georgia," he spoke with conscious dignity, in the full authority of his office, "for fifteen hundred years your people whoever they were, artisans, farmers, lords and beggars, have belonged to our faith. The tradition is in your blood. You cannot cast it out. And as you grow older, and your blood cools, the fifteen hundred years will speak to you; you will regret your sin bitterly; and in the end you will leave him or you will die in fear."

"No, Father," she said, slowly as if feeling for her words. "It is all much plainer now. God is not a secret from the common people. He talks to each of us direct, not roundabout through priests and books and churches. He has put His purpose straight into our natures. He doesn't deal with us at second hand. And I begin to see His meaning--He gave us life to live--and to make again."

"According to His ordinance."

"Yes," her answer came quickly and boldly, "according to his ordinance, written in the heart of every woman--that the sin of sins for her is to live with a man in hate. When she does that--street girl or wife--she's much the same. Oh, there's many and many a degradation blessed by the wedding ring. That's against His plan, or why should He warn us so! Women--at least common, average women like me--were put here to love, not just to submit. If you forbid us to love in honor, you forbid us to live in honor. And the life God gave me, I will use and not refuse."

"My child! If you do not repent in time--" the suffering was plain in the old man's voice.

"I cannot repent that I have become myself."

"Then," he slowly uttered the inexorable words, "you cannot receive absolution."

"Father," she answered, "the only thing I am sorry about, and I am sorrier than you know, is that it will make you, personally so unhappy!"

For a few seconds there was neither movement nor sound in the room. Then the old priest, with trembling hands and bent shoulders, passed from the room, and forever from Georgia's sight.