Catholics -- Fiction; Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Divorce -- Fiction; Married women -- Fiction
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!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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