K

CHAPTER XII

Tillie was gone.

Oddly enough, the last person to see her before she left was Harriet Kennedy. On the third day after Mr. Schwitter's visit, Harriet's colored maid had announced a visitor.

Harriet's business instinct had been good. She had taken expensive rooms in a good location, and furnished them with the assistance of a decor store. Then she arranged with a New York house to sell her models on commission.

Her short excursion to New York had marked for Harriet the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth. Here, at last, she found people speaking her own language. She ventured a suggestion to a manufacturer, and found it greeted, not, after the manner of the Street, with scorn, but with approval and some surprise.

“About once in ten years,” said Mr. Arthurs, “we have a woman from out of town bring us a suggestion that is both novel and practical. When we find people like that, we watch them. They climb, madame,—climb.”

Harriet's climbing was not so rapid as to make her dizzy; but business was coming. The first time she made a price of seventy-five dollars for an evening gown, she went out immediately after and took a drink of water. Her throat was parched.

She began to learn little quips of the feminine mind: that a woman who can pay seventy-five will pay double that sum; that it is not considered good form to show surprise at a dressmaker's prices, no matter how high they may be; that long mirrors and artificial light help sales—no woman over thirty but was grateful for her pink-and-gray room with its soft lights. And Harriet herself conformed to the picture. She took a lesson from the New York modistes, and wore trailing black gowns. She strapped her thin figure into the best corset she could get, and had her black hair marcelled and dressed high. And, because she was a lady by birth and instinct, the result was not incongruous, but refined and rather impressive.

She took her business home with her at night, lay awake scheming, and wakened at dawn to find fresh color combinations in the early sky. She wakened early because she kept her head tied up in a towel, so that her hair need be done only three times a week. That and the corset were the penalties she paid. Her high-heeled shoes were a torment, too; but in the work-room she kicked them off.

To this new Harriet, then, came Tillie in her distress. Tillie was rather overwhelmed at first. The Street had always considered Harriet “proud.” But Tillie's urgency was great, her methods direct.

“Why, Tillie!” said Harriet.

“Yes'm.”

“Will you sit down?”

Tillie sat. She was not daunted now. While she worked at the fingers of her silk gloves, what Harriet took for nervousness was pure abstraction.

“It's very nice of you to come to see me. Do you like my rooms?”

Tillie surveyed the rooms, and Harriet caught her first full view of her face.

“Is there anything wrong? Have you left Mrs. McKee?”

“I think so. I came to talk to you about it.”

It was Harriet's turn to be overwhelmed.

“She's very fond of you. If you have had any words—”

“It's not that. I'm just leaving. I'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind.”

“Certainly.”

Tillie hitched her chair closer.

“I'm up against something, and I can't seem to make up my mind. Last night I said to myself, 'I've got to talk to some woman who's not married, like me, and not as young as she used to be. There's no use going to Mrs. McKee: she's a widow, and wouldn't understand.'”

Harriet's voice was a trifle sharp as she replied. She never lied about her age, but she preferred to forget it.

“I wish you'd tell me what you're getting at.”

“It ain't the sort of thing to come to too sudden. But it's like this. You and I can pretend all we like, Miss Harriet; but we're not getting all out of life that the Lord meant us to have. You've got them wax figures instead of children, and I have mealers.”

A little spot of color came into Harriet's cheek. But she was interested. Regardless of the corset, she bent forward.

“Maybe that's true. Go on.”

“I'm almost forty. Ten years more at the most, and I'm through. I'm slowing up. Can't get around the tables as I used to. Why, yesterday I put sugar into Mr. Le Moyne's coffee—well, never mind about that. Now I've got a chance to get a home, with a good man to look after me—I like him pretty well, and he thinks a lot of me.”

“Mercy sake, Tillie! You are going to get married?”

“No'm,” said Tillie; “that's it.” And sat silent for a moment.

The gray curtains with their pink cording swung gently in the open windows. From the work-room came the distant hum of a sewing-machine and the sound of voices. Harriet sat with her hands in her lap and listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs. McKee's, and the house in the country; her loneliness, and the loneliness of the man; even the faint stirrings of potential motherhood, her empty arms, her advancing age—all this she knit into the fabric of her story and laid at Harriet's feet, as the ancients put their questions to their gods.

Harriet was deeply moved. Too much that Tillie poured out to her found an echo in her own breast. What was this thing she was striving for but a substitute for the real things of life—love and tenderness, children, a home of her own? Quite suddenly she loathed the gray carpet on the floor, the pink chairs, the shaded lamps. Tillie was no longer the waitress at a cheap boarding-house. She loomed large, potential, courageous, a woman who held life in her hands.

“Why don't you go to Mrs. Rosenfeld? She's your aunt, isn't she?”

“She thinks any woman's a fool to take up with a man.”

“You're giving me a terrible responsibility, Tillie, if you're asking my advice.”

“No'm. I'm asking what you'd do if it happened to you. Suppose you had no people that cared anything about you, nobody to disgrace, and all your life nobody had really cared anything about you. And then a chance like this came along. What would you do?”

“I don't know,” said poor Harriet. “It seems to me—I'm afraid I'd be tempted. It does seem as if a woman had the right to be happy, even if—”

Her own words frightened her. It was as if some hidden self, and not she, had spoken. She hastened to point out the other side of the matter, the insecurity of it, the disgrace. Like K., she insisted that no right can be built out of a wrong. Tillie sat and smoothed her gloves. At last, when Harriet paused in sheer panic, the girl rose.

“I know how you feel, and I don't want you to take the responsibility of advising me,” she said quietly. “I guess my mind was made up anyhow. But before I did it I just wanted to be sure that a decent woman would think the way I do about it.”

And so, for a time, Tillie went out of the life of the Street as she went out of Harriet's handsome rooms, quietly, unobtrusively, with calm purpose in her eyes.

There were other changes in the Street. The Lorenz house was being painted for Christine's wedding. Johnny Rosenfeld, not perhaps of the Street itself, but certainly pertaining to it, was learning to drive Palmer Howe's new car, in mingled agony and bliss. He walked along the Street, not “right foot, left foot,” but “brake foot, clutch foot,” and took to calling off the vintage of passing cars. “So-and-So 1910,” he would say, with contempt in his voice. He spent more than he could afford on a large streamer, meant to be fastened across the rear of the automobile, which said, “Excuse our dust,” and was inconsolable when Palmer refused to let him use it.

K. had yielded to Anna's insistence, and was boarding as well as rooming at the Page house. The Street, rather snobbish to its occasional floating population, was accepting and liking him. It found him tender, infinitely human. And in return he found that this seemingly empty eddy into which he had drifted was teeming with life. He busied himself with small things, and found his outlook gradually less tinged with despair. When he found himself inclined to rail, he organized a baseball club, and sent down to everlasting defeat the Linburgs, consisting of cash-boys from Linden and Hofburg's department store.

The Rosenfelds adored him, with the single exception of the head of the family. The elder Rosenfeld having been “sent up,” it was K. who discovered that by having him consigned to the workhouse his family would receive from the county some sixty-five cents a day for his labor. As this was exactly sixty-five cents a day more than he was worth to them free, Mrs. Rosenfeld voiced the pious hope that he be kept there forever.

K. made no further attempt to avoid Max Wilson. Some day they would meet face to face. He hoped, when it happened, they two might be alone; that was all. Even had he not been bound by his promise to Sidney, flight would have been foolish. The world was a small place, and, one way and another, he had known many people. Wherever he went, there would be the same chance.

And he did not deceive himself. Other things being equal,—the eddy and all that it meant—, he would not willingly take himself out of his small share of Sidney's life.

She was never to know what she meant to him, of course. He had scourged his heart until it no longer shone in his eyes when he looked at her. But he was very human—not at all meek. There were plenty of days when his philosophy lay in the dust and savage dogs of jealousy tore at it; more than one evening when he threw himself face downward on the bed and lay without moving for hours. And of these periods of despair he was always heartily ashamed the next day.

The meeting with Max Wilson took place early in September, and under better circumstances than he could have hoped for.

Sidney had come home for her weekly visit, and her mother's condition had alarmed her for the first time. When Le Moyne came home at six o'clock, he found her waiting for him in the hall.

“I am just a little frightened, K.,” she said. “Do you think mother is looking quite well?”

“She has felt the heat, of course. The summer—I often think—”

“Her lips are blue!”

“It's probably nothing serious.”

“She says you've had Dr. Ed over to see her.”

She put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with appeal and something of terror in her face.

Thus cornered, he had to acknowledge that Anna had been out of sorts.

“I shall come home, of course. It's tragic and absurd that I should be caring for other people, when my own mother—”

She dropped her head on his arm, and he saw that she was crying. If he made a gesture to draw her to him, she never knew it. After a moment she looked up.

“I'm much braver than this in the hospital. But when it's one's own!”

K. was sorely tempted to tell her the truth and bring her back to the little house: to their old evenings together, to seeing the younger Wilson, not as the white god of the operating-room and the hospital, but as the dandy of the Street and the neighbor of her childhood—back even to Joe.

But, with Anna's precarious health and Harriet's increasing engrossment in her business, he felt it more and more necessary that Sidney go on with her training. A profession was a safeguard. And there was another point: it had been decided that Anna was not to know her condition. If she was not worried she might live for years. There was no surer way to make her suspect it than by bringing Sidney home.

Sidney sent Katie to ask Dr. Ed to come over after dinner. With the sunset Anna seemed better. She insisted on coming downstairs, and even sat with them on the balcony until the stars came out, talking of Christine's trousseau, and, rather fretfully, of what she would do without the parlors.

“You shall have your own boudoir upstairs,” said Sidney valiantly. “Katie can carry your tray up there. We are going to make the sewing-room into your private sitting-room, and I shall nail the machine-top down.”

This pleased her. When K. insisted on carrying her upstairs, she went in a flutter.

“He is so strong, Sidney!” she said, when he had placed her on her bed. “How can a clerk, bending over a ledger, be so muscular? When I have callers, will it be all right for Katie to show them upstairs?”

She dropped asleep before the doctor came; and when, at something after eight, the door of the Wilson house slammed and a figure crossed the street, it was not Ed at all, but the surgeon.

Sidney had been talking rather more frankly than usual. Lately there had been a reserve about her. K., listening intently that night, read between words a story of small persecutions and jealousies. But the girl minimized them, after her way.

“It's always hard for probationers,” she said. “I often think Miss Harrison is trying my mettle.”

“Harrison!”

“Carlotta Harrison. And now that Miss Gregg has said she will accept me, it's really all over. The other nurses are wonderful—so kind and so helpful. I hope I shall look well in my cap.”

Carlotta Harrison was in Sidney's hospital! A thousand contingencies flashed through his mind. Sidney might grow to like her and bring her to the house. Sidney might insist on the thing she always spoke of—that he visit the hospital; and he would meet her, face to face. He could have depended on a man to keep his secret. This girl with her somber eyes and her threat to pay him out for what had happened to her—she meant danger of a sort that no man could fight.

“Soon,” said Sidney, through the warm darkness, “I shall have a cap, and be always forgetting it and putting my hat on over it—the new ones always do. One of the girls slept in hers the other night! They are tulle, you know, and quite stiff, and it was the most erratic-looking thing the next day!”

It was then that the door across the street closed. Sidney did not hear it, but K. bent forward. There was a part of his brain always automatically on watch.

“I shall get my operating-room training, too,” she went on. “That is the real romance of the hospital. A—a surgeon is a sort of hero in a hospital. You wouldn't think that, would you? There was a lot of excitement to-day. Even the probationers' table was talking about it. Dr. Max Wilson did the Edwardes operation.”

The figure across the Street was lighting a cigarette. Perhaps, after all—

“Something tremendously difficult—I don't know what. It's going into the medical journals. A Dr. Edwardes invented it, or whatever they call it. They took a picture of the operating-room for the article. The photographer had to put on operating clothes and wrap the camera in sterilized towels. It was the most thrilling thing, they say—”

Her voice died away as her eyes followed K.'s. Max, cigarette in hand, was coming across, under the ailanthus tree. He hesitated on the pavement, his eyes searching the shadowy balcony.

“Sidney?”

“Here! Right back here!”

There was vibrant gladness in her tone. He came slowly toward them.

“My brother is not at home, so I came over. How select you are, with your balcony!”

“Can you see the step?”

“Coming, with bells on.”

K. had risen and pushed back his chair. His mind was working quickly. Here in the darkness he could hold the situation for a moment. If he could get Sidney into the house, the rest would not matter. Luckily, the balcony was very dark.

“Is any one ill?”

“Mother is not well. This is Mr. Le Moyne, and he knows who you are very well, indeed.”

The two men shook hands.

“I've heard a lot of Mr. Le Moyne. Didn't the Street beat the Linburgs the other day? And I believe the Rosenfelds are in receipt of sixty-five cents a day and considerable peace and quiet through you, Mr. Le Moyne. You're the most popular man on the Street.”

“I've always heard that about YOU. Sidney, if Dr. Wilson is here to see your mother—”

“Going,” said Sidney. “And Dr. Wilson is a very great person, K., so be polite to him.”

Max had roused at the sound of Le Moyne's voice, not to suspicion, of course, but to memory. Without any apparent reason, he was back in Berlin, tramping the country roads, and beside him—

“Wonderful night!”

“Great,” he replied. “The mind's a curious thing, isn't it. In the instant since Miss Page went through that window I've been to Berlin and back! Will you have a cigarette?”

“Thanks; I have my pipe here.”

K. struck a match with his steady hands. Now that the thing had come, he was glad to face it. In the flare, his quiet profile glowed against the night. Then he flung the match over the rail.

“Perhaps my voice took you back to Berlin.”

Max stared; then he rose. Blackness had descended on them again, except for the dull glow of K.'s old pipe.

“For God's sake!”

“Sh! The neighbors next door have a bad habit of sitting just inside the curtains.”

“But—you!”

“Sit down. Sidney will be back in a moment. I'll talk to you, if you'll sit still. Can you hear me plainly?”

After a moment—“Yes.”

“I've been here—in the city, I mean—for a year. Name's Le Moyne. Don't forget it—Le Moyne. I've got a position in the gas office, clerical. I get fifteen dollars a week. I have reason to think I'm going to be moved up. That will be twenty, maybe twenty-two.”

Wilson stirred, but he found no adequate words. Only a part of what K. said got to him. For a moment he was back in a famous clinic, and this man across from him—it was not believable!

“It's not hard work, and it's safe. If I make a mistake there's no life hanging on it. Once I made a blunder, a month or two ago. It was a big one. It cost me three dollars out of my own pocket. But—that's all it cost.”

Wilson's voice showed that he was more than incredulous; he was profoundly moved.

“We thought you were dead. There were all sorts of stories. When a year went by—the Titanic had gone down, and nobody knew but what you were on it—we gave up. I—in June we put up a tablet for you at the college. I went down for the—for the services.”

“Let it stay,” said K. quietly. “I'm dead as far as the college goes, anyhow. I'll never go back. I'm Le Moyne now. And, for Heaven's sake, don't be sorry for me. I'm more contented than I've been for a long time.”

The wonder in Wilson's voice was giving way to irritation.

“But—when you had everything! Why, good Heavens, man, I did your operation to-day, and I've been blowing about it ever since.”

“I had everything for a while. Then I lost the essential. When that happened I gave up. All a man in our profession has is a certain method, knowledge—call it what you like,—and faith in himself. I lost my self-confidence; that's all. Certain things happened; kept on happening. So I gave it up. That's all. It's not dramatic. For about a year I was damned sorry for myself. I've stopped whining now.”

“If every surgeon gave up because he lost cases—I've just told you I did your operation to-day. There was just a chance for the man, and I took my courage in my hands and tried it. The poor devil's dead.”

K. rose rather wearily and emptied his pipe over the balcony rail.

“That's not the same. That's the chance he and you took. What happened to me was—different.”

Pipe in hand, he stood staring out at the ailanthus tree with its crown of stars. Instead of the Street with its quiet houses, he saw the men he had known and worked with and taught, his friends who spoke his language, who had loved him, many of them, gathered about a bronze tablet set in a wall of the old college; he saw their earnest faces and grave eyes. He heard—

He heard the soft rustle of Sidney's dress as she came into the little room behind them.