K

CHAPTER XIV

The supper at the White Springs Hotel had not been the last supper Carlotta Harrison and Max Wilson had taken together. Carlotta had selected for her vacation a small town within easy motoring distance of the city, and two or three times during her two weeks off duty Wilson had gone out to see her. He liked being with her. She stimulated him. For once that he could see Sidney, he saw Carlotta twice.

She had kept the affair well in hand. She was playing for high stakes. She knew quite well the kind of man with whom she was dealing—that he would pay as little as possible. But she knew, too, that, let him want a thing enough, he would pay any price for it, even marriage.

She was very skillful. The very ardor in her face was in her favor. Behind her hot eyes lurked cold calculation. She would put the thing through, and show those puling nurses, with their pious eyes and evening prayers, a thing or two.

During that entire vacation he never saw her in anything more elaborate than the simplest of white dresses modestly open at the throat, sleeves rolled up to show her satiny arms. There were no other boarders at the little farmhouse. She sat for hours in the summer evenings in the square yard filled with apple trees that bordered the highway, carefully posed over a book, but with her keen eyes always on the road. She read Browning, Emerson, Swinburne. Once he found her with a book that she hastily concealed. He insisted on seeing it, and secured it. It was a book on brain surgery. Confronted with it, she blushed and dropped her eyes.

His delighted vanity found in it the most insidious of compliments, as she had intended.

“I feel such an idiot when I am with you,” she said. “I wanted to know a little more about the things you do.”

That put their relationship on a new and advanced basis. Thereafter he occasionally talked surgery instead of sentiment. He found her responsive, intelligent. His work, a sealed book to his women before, lay open to her.

Now and then their professional discussions ended in something different. The two lines of their interest converged.

“Gad!” he said one day. “I look forward to these evenings. I can talk shop with you without either shocking or nauseating you. You are the most intelligent woman I know—and one of the prettiest.”

He had stopped the machine on the crest of a hill for the ostensible purpose of admiring the view.

“As long as you talk shop,” she said, “I feel that there is nothing wrong in our being together; but when you say the other thing—”

“Is it wrong to tell a pretty woman you admire her?”

“Under our circumstances, yes.”

He twisted himself around in the seat and sat looking at her.

“The loveliest mouth in the world!” he said, and kissed her suddenly.

She had expected it for at least a week, but her surprise was well done. Well done also was her silence during the homeward ride.

No, she was not angry, she said. It was only that he had set her thinking. When she got out of the car, she bade him good-night and good-bye. He only laughed.

“Don't you trust me?” he said, leaning out to her.

She raised her dark eyes.

“It is not that. I do not trust myself.”

After that nothing could have kept him away, and she knew it.

“Man demands both danger and play; therefore he selects woman as the most dangerous of toys.” A spice of danger had entered into their relationship. It had become infinitely piquant.

He motored out to the farm the next day, to be told that Miss Harrison had gone for a long walk and had not said when she would be back. That pleased him. Evidently she was frightened. Every man likes to think that he is a bit of a devil. Dr. Max settled his tie, and, leaving his car outside the whitewashed fence, departed blithely on foot in the direction Carlotta had taken.

She knew her man, of course. He found her, face down, under a tree, looking pale and worn and bearing all the evidence of a severe mental struggle. She rose in confusion when she heard his step, and retreated a foot or two, with her hands out before her.

“How dare you?” she cried. “How dare you follow me! I—I have got to have a little time alone. I have got to think things out.”

He knew it was play-acting, but rather liked it; and, because he was quite as skillful as she was, he struck a match on the trunk of the tree and lighted a cigarette before he answered.

“I was afraid of this,” he said, playing up. “You take it entirely too hard. I am not really a villain, Carlotta.”

It was the first time he had used her name.

“Sit down and let us talk things over.”

She sat down at a safe distance, and looked across the little clearing to him with the somber eyes that were her great asset.

“You can afford to be very calm,” she said, “because this is only play to you; I know it. I've known it all along. I'm a good listener and not—unattractive. But what is play for you is not necessarily play for me. I am going away from here.”

For the first time, he found himself believing in her sincerity. Why, the girl was white. He didn't want to hurt her. If she cried—he was at the mercy of any woman who cried.

“Give up your training?”

“What else can I do? This sort of thing cannot go on, Dr. Max.”

She did cry then—real tears; and he went over beside her and took her in his arms.

“Don't do that,” he said. “Please don't do that. You make me feel like a scoundrel, and I've only been taking a little bit of happiness. That's all. I swear it.”

She lifted her head from his shoulder.

“You mean you are happy with me?”

“Very, very happy,” said Dr. Max, and kissed her again on the lips.

The one element Carlotta had left out of her calculations was herself. She had known the man, had taken the situation at its proper value. But she had left out this important factor in the equation,—that factor which in every relationship between man and woman determines the equation,—the woman.

Into her calculating ambition had come a new and destroying element. She who, like K. in his little room on the Street, had put aside love and the things thereof, found that it would not be put aside. By the end of her short vacation Carlotta Harrison was wildly in love with the younger Wilson.

They continued to meet, not as often as before, but once a week, perhaps. The meetings were full of danger now; and if for the girl they lost by this quality, they gained attraction for the man. She was shrewd enough to realize her own situation. The thing had gone wrong. She cared, and he did not. It was all a game now, not hers.

All women are intuitive; women in love are dangerously so. As well as she knew that his passion for her was not the real thing, so also she realized that there was growing up in his heart something akin to the real thing for Sidney Page. Suspicion became certainty after a talk they had over the supper table at a country road-house the day after Christine's wedding.

“How was the wedding—tiresome?” she asked.

“Thrilling! There's always something thrilling to me in a man tying himself up for life to one woman. It's—it's so reckless.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That's not exactly the Law and the Prophets, is it?”

“It's the truth. To think of selecting out of all the world one woman, and electing to spend the rest of one's days with her! Although—”

His eyes looked past Carlotta into distance.

“Sidney Page was one of the bridesmaids,” he said irrelevantly. “She was lovelier than the bride.”

“Pretty, but stupid,” said Carlotta. “I like her. I've really tried to teach her things, but—you know—” She shrugged her shoulders.

Dr. Max was learning wisdom. If there was a twinkle in his eye, he veiled it discreetly. But, once again in the machine, he bent over and put his cheek against hers.

“You little cat! You're jealous,” he said exultantly.

Nevertheless, although he might smile, the image of Sidney lay very close to his heart those autumn days. And Carlotta knew it.

Sidney came off night duty the middle of November. The night duty had been a time of comparative peace to Carlotta. There were no evenings when Dr. Max could bring Sidney back to the hospital in his car.

Sidney's half-days at home were occasions for agonies of jealousy on Carlotta's part. On such an occasion, a month after the wedding, she could not contain herself. She pleaded her old excuse of headache, and took the trolley to a point near the end of the Street. After twilight fell, she slowly walked the length of the Street. Christine and Palmer had not returned from their wedding journey. The November evening was not cold, and on the little balcony sat Sidney and Dr. Max. K. was there, too, had she only known it, sitting back in the shadow and saying little, his steady eyes on Sidney's profile.

But this Carlotta did not know. She went on down the Street in a frenzy of jealous anger.

After that two ideas ran concurrent in Carlotta's mind: one was to get Sidney out of the way, the other was to make Wilson propose to her. In her heart she knew that on the first depended the second.

A week later she made the same frantic excursion, but with a different result. Sidney was not in sight, or Wilson. But standing on the wooden doorstep of the little house was Le Moyne. The ailanthus trees were bare at that time, throwing gaunt arms upward to the November sky. The street-lamp, which in the summer left the doorstep in the shadow, now shone through the branches and threw into strong relief Le Moyne's tall figure and set face. Carlotta saw him too late to retreat. But he did not see her. She went on, startled, her busy brain scheming anew. Another element had entered into her plotting. It was the first time she had known that K. lived in the Page house. It gave her a sense of uncertainty and deadly fear.

She made her first friendly overture of many days to Sidney the following day. They met in the locker-room in the basement where the street clothing for the ward patients was kept. Here, rolled in bundles and ticketed, side by side lay the heterogeneous garments in which the patients had met accident or illness. Rags and tidiness, filth and cleanliness, lay almost touching.

Far away on the other side of the white-washed basement, men were unloading gleaming cans of milk. Floods of sunlight came down the cellar-way, touching their white coats and turning the cans to silver. Everywhere was the religion of the hospital, which is order.

Sidney, harking back from recent slights to the staircase conversation of her night duty, smiled at Carlotta cheerfully.

“A miracle is happening,” she said. “Grace Irving is going out to-day. When one remembers how ill she was and how we thought she could not live, it's rather a triumph, isn't it?”

“Are those her clothes?”

Sidney examined with some dismay the elaborate negligee garments in her hand.

“She can't go out in those; I shall have to lend her something.” A little of the light died out of her face. “She's had a hard fight, and she has won,” she said. “But when I think of what she's probably going back to—”

Carlotta shrugged her shoulders.

“It's all in the day's work,” she observed indifferently. “You can take them up into the kitchen and give them steady work paring potatoes, or put them in the laundry ironing. In the end it's the same thing. They all go back.”

She drew a package from the locker and looked at it ruefully.

“Well, what do you know about this? Here's a woman who came in in a nightgown and pair of slippers. And now she wants to go out in half an hour!”

She turned, on her way out of the locker-room, and shot a quick glance at Sidney.

“I happened to be on your street the other night,” she said. “You live across the street from Wilsons', don't you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so; I had heard you speak of the house. Your—your brother was standing on the steps.”

Sidney laughed.

“I have no brother. That's a roomer, a Mr. Le Moyne. It isn't really right to call him a roomer; he's one of the family now.”

“Le Moyne!”

He had even taken another name. It had hit him hard, for sure.

K.'s name had struck an always responsive chord in Sidney. The two girls went toward the elevator together. With a very little encouragement, Sidney talked of K. She was pleased at Miss Harrison's friendly tone, glad that things were all right between them again. At her floor, she put a timid hand on the girl's arm.

“I was afraid I had offended you or displeased you,” she said. “I'm so glad it isn't so.”

Carlotta shivered under her hand.

Things were not going any too well with K. True, he had received his promotion at the office, and with this present affluence of twenty-two dollars a week he was able to do several things. Mrs. Rosenfeld now washed and ironed one day a week at the little house, so that Katie might have more time to look after Anna. He had increased also the amount of money that he periodically sent East.

So far, well enough. The thing that rankled and filled him with a sense of failure was Max Wilson's attitude. It was not unfriendly; it was, indeed, consistently respectful, almost reverential. But he clearly considered Le Moyne's position absurd.

There was no true comradeship between the two men; but there was beginning to be constant association, and lately a certain amount of friction. They thought differently about almost everything.

Wilson began to bring all his problems to Le Moyne. There were long consultations in that small upper room. Perhaps more than one man or woman who did not know of K.'s existence owed his life to him that fall.

Under K.'s direction, Max did marvels. Cases began to come in to him from the surrounding towns. To his own daring was added a new and remarkable technique. But Le Moyne, who had found resignation if not content, was once again in touch with the work he loved. There were times when, having thrashed a case out together and outlined the next day's work for Max, he would walk for hours into the night out over the hills, fighting his battle. The longing was on him to be in the thick of things again. The thought of the gas office and its deadly round sickened him.

It was on one of his long walks that K. found Tillie.

It was December then, gray and raw, with a wet snow that changed to rain as it fell. The country roads were ankle-deep with mud, the wayside paths thick with sodden leaves. The dreariness of the countryside that Saturday afternoon suited his mood. He had ridden to the end of the street-car line, and started his walk from there. As was his custom, he wore no overcoat, but a short sweater under his coat. Somewhere along the road he had picked up a mongrel dog, and, as if in sheer desire for human society, it trotted companionably at his heels.

Seven miles from the end of the car line he found a road-house, and stopped in for a glass of Scotch. He was chilled through. The dog went in with him, and stood looking up into his face. It was as if he submitted, but wondered why this indoors, with the scents of the road ahead and the trails of rabbits over the fields.

The house was set in a valley at the foot of two hills. Through the mist of the December afternoon, it had loomed pleasantly before him. The door was ajar, and he stepped into a little hall covered with ingrain carpet. To the right was the dining-room, the table covered with a white cloth, and in its exact center an uncompromising bunch of dried flowers. To the left, the typical parlor of such places. It might have been the parlor of the White Springs Hotel in duplicate, plush self-rocker and all. Over everything was silence and a pervading smell of fresh varnish. The house was aggressive with new paint—the sagging old floors shone with it, the doors gleamed.

“Hello!” called K.

There were slow footsteps upstairs, the closing of a bureau drawer, the rustle of a woman's dress coming down the stairs. K., standing uncertainly on a carpet oasis that was the center of the parlor varnish, stripped off his sweater.

“Not very busy here this afternoon!” he said to the unseen female on the staircase. Then he saw her. It was Tillie. She put a hand against the doorframe to steady herself. Tillie surely, but a new Tillie! With her hair loosened around her face, a fresh blue chintz dress open at the throat, a black velvet bow on her breast, here was a Tillie fuller, infinitely more attractive, than he had remembered her. But she did not smile at him. There was something about her eyes not unlike the dog's expression, submissive, but questioning.

“Well, you've found me, Mr. Le Moyne.” And, when he held out his hand, smiling: “I just had to do it, Mr. K.”

“And how's everything going? You look mighty fine and—happy, Tillie.”

“I'm all right. Mr. Schwitter's gone to the postoffice. He'll be back at five. Will you have a cup of tea, or will you have something else?”

The instinct of the Street was still strong in Tillie. The Street did not approve of “something else.”

“Scotch-and-soda,” said Le Moyne. “And shall I buy a ticket for you to punch?”

But she only smiled faintly. He was sorry he had made the blunder. Evidently the Street and all that pertained was a sore subject.

So this was Tillie's new home! It was for this that she had exchanged the virginal integrity of her life at Mrs. McKee's—for this wind-swept little house, tidily ugly, infinitely lonely. There were two crayon enlargements over the mantel. One was Schwitter, evidently. The other was the paper-doll wife. K. wondered what curious instinct of self-abnegation had caused Tillie to leave the wife there undisturbed. Back of its position of honor he saw the girl's realization of her own situation. On a wooden shelf, exactly between the two pictures, was another vase of dried flowers.

Tillie brought the Scotch, already mixed, in a tall glass. K. would have preferred to mix it himself, but the Scotch was good. He felt a new respect for Mr. Schwitter.

“You gave me a turn at first,” said Tillie. “But I am right glad to see you, Mr. Le Moyne. Now that the roads are bad, nobody comes very much. It's lonely.”

Until now, K. and Tillie, when they met, had met conversationally on the common ground of food. They no longer had that, and between them both lay like a barrier their last conversation.

“Are you happy, Tillie?” said K. suddenly.

“I expected you'd ask me that. I've been thinking what to say.”

Her reply set him watching her face. More attractive it certainly was, but happy? There was a wistfulness about Tillie's mouth that set him wondering.

“Is he good to you?”

“He's about the best man on earth. He's never said a cross word to me—even at first, when I was panicky and scared at every sound.”

Le Moyne nodded understandingly.

“I burned a lot of victuals when I first came, running off and hiding when I heard people around the place. It used to seem to me that what I'd done was written on my face. But he never said a word.”

“That's over now?”

“I don't run. I am still frightened.”

“Then it has been worth while?”

Tillie glanced up at the two pictures over the mantel.

“Sometimes it is—when he comes in tired, and I've a chicken ready or some fried ham and eggs for his supper, and I see him begin to look rested. He lights his pipe, and many an evening he helps me with the dishes. He's happy; he's getting fat.”

“But you?” Le Moyne persisted.

“I wouldn't go back to where I was, but I am not happy, Mr. Le Moyne. There's no use pretending. I want a baby. All along I've wanted a baby. He wants one. This place is his, and he'd like a boy to come into it when he's gone. But, my God! if I did have one; what would it be?”

K.'s eyes followed hers to the picture and the everlastings underneath.

“And she—there isn't any prospect of her—?”

“No.”

There was no solution to Tillie's problem. Le Moyne, standing on the hearth and looking down at her, realized that, after all, Tillie must work out her own salvation. He could offer her no comfort.

They talked far into the growing twilight of the afternoon. Tillie was hungry for news of the Street: must know of Christine's wedding, of Harriet, of Sidney in her hospital. And when he had told her all, she sat silent, rolling her handkerchief in her fingers. Then:—

“Take the four of us,” she said suddenly,—“Christine Lorenz and Sidney Page and Miss Harriet and me,—and which one would you have picked to go wrong like this? I guess, from the looks of things, most folks would have thought it would be the Lorenz girl. They'd have picked Harriet Kennedy for the hospital, and me for the dressmaking, and it would have been Sidney Page that got married and had an automobile. Well, that's life.”

She looked up at K. shrewdly.

“There were some people out here lately. They didn't know me, and I heard them talking. They said Sidney Page was going to marry Dr. Max Wilson.”

“Possibly. I believe there is no engagement yet.”

He had finished with his glass. Tillie rose to take it away. As she stood before him she looked up into his face.

“If you like her as well as I think you do, Mr. Le Moyne, you won't let him get her.”

“I am afraid that's not up to me, is it? What would I do with a wife, Tillie?”

“You'd be faithful to her. That's more than he would be. I guess, in the long run, that would count more than money.”

That was what K. took home with him after his encounter with Tillie. He pondered it on his way back to the street-car, as he struggled against the wind. The weather had changed. Wagon-tracks along the road were filled with water and had begun to freeze. The rain had turned to a driving sleet that cut his face. Halfway to the trolley line, the dog turned off into a by-road. K. did not miss him. The dog stared after him, one foot raised. Once again his eyes were like Tillie's, as she had waved good-bye from the porch.

His head sunk on his breast, K. covered miles of road with his long, swinging pace, and fought his battle. Was Tillie right, after all, and had he been wrong? Why should he efface himself, if it meant Sidney's unhappiness? Why not accept Wilson's offer and start over again? Then if things went well—the temptation was strong that stormy afternoon. He put it from him at last, because of the conviction that whatever he did would make no change in Sidney's ultimate decision. If she cared enough for Wilson, she would marry him. He felt that she cared enough.