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?"