Sidney entered the hospital as a probationer early in August. Christine was to be married in September to Palmer Howe, and, with Harriet and K. in the house, she felt that she could safely leave her mother.
The balcony outside the parlor was already under way. On the night before she went away, Sidney took chairs out there and sat with her mother until the dew drove Anna to the lamp in the sewing-room and her “Daily Thoughts” reading.
Sidney sat alone and viewed her world from this new and pleasant angle. She could see the garden and the whitewashed fence with its morning-glories, and at the same time, by turning her head, view the Wilson house across the Street. She looked mostly at the Wilson house.
K. Le Moyne was upstairs in his room. She could hear him tramping up and down, and catch, occasionally, the bitter-sweet odor of his old brier pipe.
All the small loose ends of her life were gathered up—except Joe. She would have liked to get that clear, too. She wanted him to know how she felt about it all: that she liked him as much as ever, that she did not want to hurt him. But she wanted to make it clear, too, that she knew now that she would never marry him. She thought she would never marry; but, if she did, it would be a man doing a man's work in the world. Her eyes turned wistfully to the house across the Street.
K.'s lamp still burned overhead, but his restless tramping about had ceased. He must be reading—he read a great deal. She really ought to go to bed. A neighborhood cat came stealthily across the Street, and stared up at the little balcony with green-glowing eyes.
“Come on, Bill Taft,” she said. “Reginald is gone, so you are welcome. Come on.”
Joe Drummond, passing the house for the fourth time that evening, heard her voice, and hesitated uncertainly on the pavement.
“That you, Sid?” he called softly.
“Joe! Come in.”
“It's late; I'd better get home.”
The misery in his voice hurt her.
“I'll not keep you long. I want to talk to you.”
He came slowly toward her.
“Well?” he said hoarsely.
“You're not very kind to me, Joe.”
“My God!” said poor Joe. “Kind to you! Isn't the kindest thing I can do to keep out of your way?”
“Not if you are hating me all the time.”
“I don't hate you.”
“Then why haven't you been to see me? If I have done anything—” Her voice was a-tingle with virtue and outraged friendship.
“You haven't done anything but—show me where I get off.”
He sat down on the edge of the balcony and stared out blankly.
“If that's the way you feel about it—”
“I'm not blaming you. I was a fool to think you'd ever care about me. I don't know that I feel so bad—about the thing. I've been around seeing some other girls, and I notice they're glad to see me, and treat me right, too.” There was boyish bravado in his voice. “But what makes me sick is to have everyone saying you've jilted me.”
“Good gracious! Why, Joe, I never promised.”
“Well, we look at it in different ways; that's all. I took it for a promise.”
Then suddenly all his carefully conserved indifference fled. He bent forward quickly and, catching her hand, held it against his lips.
“I'm crazy about you, Sidney. That's the truth. I wish I could die!”
The cat, finding no active antagonism, sprang up on the balcony and rubbed against the boy's quivering shoulders; a breath of air stroked the morning-glory vine like the touch of a friendly hand. Sidney, facing for the first time the enigma of love and despair sat, rather frightened, in her chair.
“You don't mean that!”
“I mean it, all right. If it wasn't for the folks, I'd jump in the river. I lied when I said I'd been to see other girls. What do I want with other girls? I want you!”
“I'm not worth all that.”
“No girl's worth what I've been going through,” he retorted bitterly. “But that doesn't help any. I don't eat; I don't sleep—I'm afraid sometimes of the way I feel. When I saw you at the White Springs with that roomer chap—”
“Ah! You were there!”
“If I'd had a gun I'd have killed him. I thought—” So far, out of sheer pity, she had left her hand in his. Now she drew it away.
“This is wild, silly talk. You'll be sorry to-morrow.”
“It's the truth,” doggedly.
But he made a clutch at his self-respect. He was acting like a crazy boy, and he was a man, all of twenty-two!
“When are you going to the hospital?”
“To-morrow.”
“Is that Wilson's hospital?”
“Yes.”
Alas for his resolve! The red haze of jealousy came again. “You'll be seeing him every day, I suppose.”
“I dare say. I shall also be seeing twenty or thirty other doctors, and a hundred or so men patients, not to mention visitors. Joe, you're not rational.”
“No,” he said heavily, “I'm not. If it's got to be someone, Sidney, I'd rather have it the roomer upstairs than Wilson. There's a lot of talk about Wilson.”
“It isn't necessary to malign my friends.” He rose.
“I thought perhaps, since you are going away, you would let me keep Reginald. He'd be something to remember you by.”
“One would think I was about to die! I set Reginald free that day in the country. I'm sorry, Joe. You'll come to see me now and then, won't you?”
“If I do, do you think you may change your mind?”
“I'm afraid not.”
“I've got to fight this out alone, and the less I see of you the better.” But his next words belied his intention. “And Wilson had better lookout. I'll be watching. If I see him playing any of his tricks around you—well, he'd better look out!”
That, as it turned out, was Joe's farewell. He had reached the breaking-point. He gave her a long look, blinked, and walked rapidly out to the Street. Some of the dignity of his retreat was lost by the fact that the cat followed him, close at his heels.
Sidney was hurt, greatly troubled. If this was love, she did not want it—this strange compound of suspicion and despair, injured pride and threats. Lovers in fiction were of two classes—the accepted ones, who loved and trusted, and the rejected ones, who took themselves away in despair, but at least took themselves away. The thought of a future with Joe always around a corner, watching her, obsessed her. She felt aggrieved, insulted. She even shed a tear or two, very surreptitiously; and then, being human and much upset, and the cat startling her by its sudden return and selfish advances, she shooed it off the veranda and set an imaginary dog after it. Whereupon, feeling somewhat better, she went in and locked the balcony window and proceeded upstairs.
Le Moyne's light was still going. The rest of the household slept. She paused outside the door.
“Are you sleepy?”—very softly.
There was a movement inside, the sound of a book put down. Then: “No, indeed.”
“I may not see you in the morning. I leave to-morrow.”
“Just a minute.”
From the sounds, she judged that he was putting on his shabby gray coat. The next moment he had opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.
“I believe you had forgotten!”
“I? Certainly not. I started downstairs a while ago, but you had a visitor.”
“Only Joe Drummond.”
He gazed down at her quizzically.
“And—is Joe more reasonable?”
“He will be. He knows now that I—that I shall not marry him.”
“Poor chap! He'll buck up, of course. But it's a little hard just now.”
“I believe you think I should have married him.”
“I am only putting myself in his place and realizing—When do you leave?”
“Just after breakfast.”
“I am going very early. Perhaps—”
He hesitated. Then, hurriedly:—
“I got a little present for you—nothing much, but your mother was quite willing. In fact, we bought it together.”
He went back into his room, and returned with a small box.
“With all sorts of good luck,” he said, and placed it in her hands.
“How dear of you! And may I look now?”
“I wish you would. Because, if you would rather have something else—”
She opened the box with excited fingers. Ticking away on its satin bed was a small gold watch.
“You'll need it, you see,” he explained nervously, “It wasn't extravagant under the circumstances. Your mother's watch, which you had intended to take, had no second-hand. You'll need a second-hand to take pulses, you know.”
“A watch,” said Sidney, eyes on it. “A dear little watch, to pin on and not put in a pocket. Why, you're the best person!”
“I was afraid you might think it presumptuous,” he said. “I haven't any right, of course. I thought of flowers—but they fade and what have you? You said that, you know, about Joe's roses. And then, your mother said you wouldn't be offended—”
“Don't apologize for making me so happy!” she cried. “It's wonderful, really. And the little hand is for pulses! How many queer things you know!”
After that she must pin it on, and slip in to stand before his mirror and inspect the result. It gave Le Moyne a queer thrill to see her there in the room among his books and his pipes. It make him a little sick, too, in view of to-morrow and the thousand-odd to-morrows when she would not be there.
“I've kept you up shamefully,'” she said at last, “and you get up so early. I shall write you a note from the hospital, delivering a little lecture on extravagance—because how can I now, with this joy shining on me? And about how to keep Katie in order about your socks, and all sorts of things. And—and now, good-night.”
She had moved to the door, and he followed her, stooping a little to pass under the low chandelier.
“Good-night,” said Sidney.
“Good-bye—and God bless you.”
She went out, and he closed the door softly behind her.
Sidney never forgot her early impressions of the hospital, although they were chaotic enough at first. There were uniformed young women coming and going, efficient, cool-eyed, low of voice. There were medicine-closets with orderly rows of labeled bottles, linen-rooms with great stacks of sheets and towels, long vistas of shining floors and lines of beds. There were brisk internes with duck clothes and brass buttons, who eyed her with friendly, patronizing glances. There were bandages and dressings, and great white screens behind which were played little or big dramas, baths or deaths, as the case might be. And over all brooded the mysterious authority of the superintendent of the training-school, dubbed the Head, for short.
Twelve hours a day, from seven to seven, with the off-duty intermission, Sidney labored at tasks which revolted her soul. She swept and dusted the wards, cleaned closets, folded sheets and towels, rolled bandages—did everything but nurse the sick, which was what she had come to do.
At night she did not go home. She sat on the edge of her narrow white bed and soaked her aching feet in hot water and witch hazel, and practiced taking pulses on her own slender wrist, with K.'s little watch.
Out of all the long, hot days, two periods stood out clearly, to be waited for and cherished. One was when, early in the afternoon, with the ward in spotless order, the shades drawn against the August sun, the tables covered with their red covers, and the only sound the drone of the bandage-machine as Sidney steadily turned it, Dr. Max passed the door on his way to the surgical ward beyond, and gave her a cheery greeting. At these times Sidney's heart beat almost in time with the ticking of the little watch.
The other hour was at twilight, when, work over for the day, the night nurse, with her rubber-soled shoes and tired eyes and jangling keys, having reported and received the night orders, the nurses gathered in their small parlor for prayers. It was months before Sidney got over the exaltation of that twilight hour, and never did it cease to bring her healing and peace. In a way, it crystallized for her what the day's work meant: charity and its sister, service, the promise of rest and peace. Into the little parlor filed the nurses, and knelt, folding their tired hands.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” read the Head out of her worn Bible; “I shall not want.”
And the nurses: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”
And so on through the psalm to the assurance at the end, “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Now and then there was a death behind one of the white screens. It caused little change in the routine of the ward. A nurse stayed behind the screen, and her work was done by the others. When everything was over, the time was recorded exactly on the record, and the body was taken away.
At first it seemed to Sidney that she could not stand this nearness to death. She thought the nurses hard because they took it quietly. Then she found that it was only stoicism, resignation, that they had learned. These things must be, and the work must go on. Their philosophy made them no less tender. Some such patient detachment must be that of the angels who keep the Great Record.
On her first Sunday half-holiday she was free in the morning, and went to church with her mother, going back to the hospital after the service. So it was two weeks before she saw Le Moyne again. Even then, it was only for a short time. Christine and Palmer Howe came in to see her, and to inspect the balcony, now finished.
But Sidney and Le Moyne had a few words together first.
There was a change in Sidney. Le Moyne was quick to see it. She was a trifle subdued, with a puzzled look in her blue eyes. Her mouth was tender, as always, but he thought it drooped. There was a new atmosphere of wistfulness about the girl that made his heart ache.
They were alone in the little parlor with its brown lamp and blue silk shade, and its small nude Eve—which Anna kept because it had been a gift from her husband, but retired behind a photograph of the minister, so that only the head and a bare arm holding the apple appeared above the reverend gentleman.
K. never smoked in the parlor, but by sheer force of habit he held the pipe in his teeth.
“And how have things been going?” asked Sidney practically.
“Your steward has little to report. Aunt Harriet, who left you her love, has had the complete order for the Lorenz trousseau. She and I have picked out a stunning design for the wedding dress. I thought I'd ask you about the veil. We're rather in a quandary. Do you like this new fashion of draping the veil from behind the coiffure in the back—”
Sidney had been sitting on the edge of her chair, staring.
“There,” she said—“I knew it! This house is fatal! They're making an old woman of you already.” Her tone was tragic.
“Miss Lorenz likes the new method, but my personal preference is for the old way, with the bride's face covered.”
He sucked calmly at his dead pipe.
“Katie has a new prescription—recipe—for bread. It has more bread and fewer air-holes. One cake of yeast—”
Sidney sprang to her feet.
“It's perfectly terrible!” she cried. “Because you rent a room in this house is no reason why you should give up your personality and your—intelligence. Not but that it's good for you. But Katie has made bread without masculine assistance for a good many years, and if Christine can't decide about her own veil she'd better not get married. Mother says you water the flowers every evening, and lock up the house before you go to bed. I—I never meant you to adopt the family!”
K. removed his pipe and gazed earnestly into the bowl.
“Bill Taft has had kittens under the porch,” he said. “And the groceryman has been sending short weight. We've bought scales now, and weigh everything.”
“You are evading the question.”
“Dear child, I am doing these things because I like to do them. For—for some time I've been floating, and now I've got a home. Every time I lock up the windows at night, or cut a picture out of a magazine as a suggestion to your Aunt Harriet, it's an anchor to windward.”
Sidney gazed helplessly at his imperturbable face. He seemed older than she had recalled him: the hair over his ears was almost white. And yet, he was just thirty. That was Palmer Howe's age, and Palmer seemed like a boy. But he held himself more erect than he had in the first days of his occupancy of the second-floor front.
“And now,” he said cheerfully, “what about yourself? You've lost a lot of illusions, of course, but perhaps you've gained ideals. That's a step.”
“Life,” observed Sidney, with the wisdom of two weeks out in the world, “life is a terrible thing, K. We think we've got it, and—it's got us.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“When I think of how simple I used to think it all was! One grew up and got married, and—and perhaps had children. And when one got very old, one died. Lately, I've been seeing that life really consists of exceptions—children who don't grow up, and grown-ups who die before they are old. And”—this took an effort, but she looked at him squarely—“and people who have children, but are not married. It all rather hurts.”
“All knowledge that is worth while hurts in the getting.”
Sidney got up and wandered around the room, touching its little familiar objects with tender hands. K. watched her. There was this curious element in his love for her, that when he was with her it took on the guise of friendship and deceived even himself. It was only in the lonely hours that it took on truth, became a hopeless yearning for the touch of her hand or a glance from her clear eyes.
Sidney, having picked up the minister's picture, replaced it absently, so that Eve stood revealed in all her pre-apple innocence.
“There is something else,” she said absently. “I cannot talk it over with mother. There is a girl in the ward—”
“A patient?”
“Yes. She is quite pretty. She has had typhoid, but she is a little better. She's—not a good person.”
“I see.”
“At first I couldn't bear to go near her. I shivered when I had to straighten her bed. I—I'm being very frank, but I've got to talk this out with someone. I worried a lot about it, because, although at first I hated her, now I don't. I rather like her.”
She looked at K. defiantly, but there was no disapproval in his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Well, this is the question. She's getting better. She'll be able to go out soon. Don't you think something ought to be done to keep her from—going back?”
There was a shadow in K.'s eyes now. She was so young to face all this; and yet, since face it she must, how much better to have her do it squarely.
“Does she want to change her mode of life?”
“I don't know, of course. There are some things one doesn't discuss. She cares a great deal for some man. The other day I propped her up in bed and gave her a newspaper, and after a while I found the paper on the floor, and she was crying. The other patients avoid her, and it was some time before I noticed it. The next day she told me that the man was going to marry some one else. 'He wouldn't marry me, of course,' she said; 'but he might have told me.'”
Le Moyne did his best, that afternoon in the little parlor, to provide Sidney with a philosophy to carry her through her training. He told her that certain responsibilities were hers, but that she could not reform the world. Broad charity, tenderness, and healing were her province.
“Help them all you can,” he finished, feeling inadequate and hopelessly didactic. “Cure them; send them out with a smile; and—leave the rest to the Almighty.”
Sidney was resigned, but not content. Newly facing the evil of the world, she was a rampant reformer at once. Only the arrival of Christine and her fiance saved his philosophy from complete rout. He had time for a question between the ring of the bell and Katie's deliberate progress from the kitchen to the front door.
“How about the surgeon, young Wilson? Do you ever see him?” His tone was carefully casual.
“Almost every day. He stops at the door of the ward and speaks to me. It makes me quite distinguished, for a probationer. Usually, you know, the staff never even see the probationers.”
“And—the glamour persists?” He smiled down at her.
“I think he is very wonderful,” said Sidney valiantly.
Christine Lorenz, while not large, seemed to fill the little room. Her voice, which was frequent and penetrating, her smile, which was wide and showed very white teeth that were a trifle large for beauty, her all-embracing good nature, dominated the entire lower floor. K., who had met her before, retired into silence and a corner. Young Howe smoked a cigarette in the hall.
“You poor thing!” said Christine, and put her cheek against Sidney's. “Why, you're positively thin! Palmer gives you a month to tire of it all; but I said—”
“I take that back,” Palmer spoke indolently from the corridor. “There is the look of willing martyrdom in her face. Where is Reginald? I've brought some nuts for him.”
“Reginald is back in the woods again.”
“Now, look here,” he said solemnly. “When we arranged about these rooms, there were certain properties that went with them—the lady next door who plays Paderewski's 'Minuet' six hours a day, and K. here, and Reginald. If you must take something to the woods, why not the minuet person?”
Howe was a good-looking man, thin, smooth-shaven, aggressively well dressed. This Sunday afternoon, in a cutaway coat and high hat, with an English malacca stick, he was just a little out of the picture. The Street said that he was “wild,” and that to get into the Country Club set Christine was losing more than she was gaining.
Christine had stepped out on the balcony, and was speaking to K. just inside.
“It's rather a queer way to live, of course,” she said. “But Palmer is a pauper, practically. We are going to take our meals at home for a while. You see, certain things that we want we can't have if we take a house—a car, for instance. We'll need one for running out to the Country Club to dinner. Of course, unless father gives me one for a wedding present, it will be a cheap one. And we're getting the Rosenfeld boy to drive it. He's crazy about machinery, and he'll come for practically nothing.”
K. had never known a married couple to take two rooms and go to the bride's mother's for meals in order to keep a car. He looked faintly dazed. Also, certain sophistries of his former world about a cheap chauffeur being costly in the end rose in his mind and were carefully suppressed.
“You'll find a car a great comfort, I'm sure,” he said politely.
Christine considered K. rather distinguished. She liked his graying hair and steady eyes, and insisted on considering his shabbiness a pose. She was conscious that she made a pretty picture in the French window, and preened herself like a bright bird.
“You'll come out with us now and then, I hope.”
“Thank you.”
“Isn't it odd to think that we are going to be practically one family!”
“Odd, but very pleasant.”
He caught the flash of Christine's smile, and smiled back. Christine was glad she had decided to take the rooms, glad that K. lived there. This thing of marriage being the end of all things was absurd. A married woman should have men friends; they kept her up. She would take him to the Country Club. The women would be mad to know him. How clean-cut his profile was!
Across the Street, the Rosenfeld boy had stopped by Dr. Wilson's car, and was eyeing it with the cool, appraising glance of the street boy whose sole knowledge of machinery has been acquired from the clothes-washer at home. Joe Drummond, eyes carefully ahead, went up the Street. Tillie, at Mrs. McKee's, stood in the doorway and fanned herself with her apron. Max Wilson came out of the house and got into his car. For a minute, perhaps, all the actors, save Carlotta and Dr. Ed, were on the stage. It was that bete noir of the playwright, an ensemble; K. Le Moyne and Sidney, Palmer Howe, Christine, Tillie, the younger Wilson, Joe, even young Rosenfeld, all within speaking distance, almost touching distance, gathered within and about the little house on a side street which K. at first grimly and now tenderly called “home.”
On Monday morning, shortly after the McKee prolonged breakfast was over, a small man of perhaps fifty, with iron-gray hair and a sparse goatee, made his way along the Street. He moved with the air of one having a definite destination but a by no means definite reception.
As he walked along he eyed with a professional glance the ailanthus and maple trees which, with an occasional poplar, lined the Street. At the door of Mrs. McKee's boarding-house he stopped. Owing to a slight change in the grade of the street, the McKee house had no stoop, but one flat doorstep. Thus it was possible to ring the doorbell from the pavement, and this the stranger did. It gave him a curious appearance of being ready to cut and run if things were unfavorable.
For a moment things were indeed unfavorable. Mrs. McKee herself opened the door. She recognized him at once, but no smile met the nervous one that formed itself on the stranger's face.
“Oh, it's you, is it?”
“It's me, Mrs. McKee.”
“Well?”
He made a conciliatory effort.
“I was thinking, as I came along,” he said, “that you and the neighbors had better get after these here caterpillars. Look at them maples, now.”
“If you want to see Tillie, she's busy.”
“I only want to say how-d 'ye-do. I'm just on my way through town.”
“I'll say it for you.”
A certain doggedness took the place of his tentative smile.
“I'll say it to myself, I guess. I don't want any unpleasantness, but I've come a good ways to see her and I'll hang around until I do.”
Mrs. McKee knew herself routed, and retreated to the kitchen.
“You're wanted out front,” she said.
“Who is it?”
“Never mind. Only, my advice to you is, don't be a fool.”
Tillie went suddenly pale. The hands with which she tied a white apron over her gingham one were shaking.
Her visitor had accepted the open door as permission to enter and was standing in the hall.
He went rather white himself when he saw Tillie coming toward him down the hall. He knew that for Tillie this visit would mean that he was free—and he was not free. Sheer terror of his errand filled him.
“Well, here I am, Tillie.”
“All dressed up and highly perfumed!” said poor Tillie, with the question in her eyes. “You're quite a stranger, Mr. Schwitter.”
“I was passing through, and I just thought I'd call around and tell you—My God, Tillie, I'm glad to see you!”
She made no reply, but opened the door into the cool and shaded little parlor. He followed her in and closed the door behind him.
“I couldn't help it. I know I promised.”
“Then she—?”
“She's still living. Playing with paper dolls—that's the latest.”
Tillie sat down suddenly on one of the stiff chairs. Her lips were as white as her face.
“I thought, when I saw you—”
“I was afraid you'd think that.”
Neither spoke for a moment. Tillie's hands twisted nervously in her lap. Mr. Schwitter's eyes were fixed on the window, which looked back on the McKee yard.
“That spiraea back there's not looking very good. If you'll save the cigar butts around here and put them in water, and spray it, you'll kill the lice.”
Tillie found speech at last.
“I don't know why you come around bothering me,” she said dully. “I've been getting along all right; now you come and upset everything.”
Mr. Schwitter rose and took a step toward her.
“Well, I'll tell you why I came. Look at me. I ain't getting any younger, am I? Time's going on, and I'm wanting you all the time. And what am I getting? What've I got out of life, anyhow? I'm lonely, Tillie!”
“What's that got to do with me?”
“You're lonely, too, ain't you?”
“Me? I haven't got time to be. And, anyhow, there's always a crowd here.”
“You can be lonely in a crowd, and I guess—is there any one around here you like better than me?”
“Oh, what's the use!” cried poor Tillie. “We can talk our heads off and not get anywhere. You've got a wife living, and, unless you intend to do away with her, I guess that's all there is to it.”
“Is that all, Tillie? Haven't you got a right to be happy?”
She was quick of wit, and she read his tone as well as his words.
“You get out of here—and get out quick!”
She had jumped to her feet; but he only looked at her with understanding eyes.
“I know,” he said. “That's the way I thought of it at first. Maybe I've just got used to the idea, but it doesn't seem so bad to me now. Here are you, drudging for other people when you ought to have a place all your own—and not gettin' younger any more than I am. Here's both of us lonely. I'd be a good husband to you, Till—because, whatever it'd be in law, I'd be your husband before God.”
Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her, embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the look in her eyes and stared out of the front window.
“Them poplars out there ought to be taken away,” he said heavily. “They're hell on sewers.”
Tillie found her voice at last:—
“I couldn't do it, Mr. Schwitter. I guess I'm a coward. Maybe I'll be sorry.”
“Perhaps, if you got used to the idea—”
“What's that to do with the right and wrong of it?”
“Maybe I'm queer. It don't seem like wrongdoing to me. It seems to me that the Lord would make an exception of us if He knew the circumstances. Perhaps, after you get used to the idea—What I thought was like this. I've got a little farm about seven miles from the city limits, and the tenant on it says that nearly every Sunday somebody motors out from town and wants a chicken-and-waffle supper. There ain't much in the nursery business anymore. These landscape fellows buy their stuff direct, and the middleman's out. I've got a good orchard, and there's a spring, so I could put running water in the house. I'd be good to you, Tillie,—I swear it. It'd be just the same as marriage. Nobody need know it.”
“You'd know it. You wouldn't respect me.”
“Don't a man respect a woman that's got courage enough to give up everything for him?”
Tillie was crying softly into her apron. He put a work-hardened hand on her head.
“It isn't as if I'd run around after women,” he said. “You're the only one, since Maggie—” He drew a long breath. “I'll give you time to think it over. Suppose I stop in to-morrow morning. It doesn't commit you to anything to talk it over.”
There had been no passion in the interview, and there was none in the touch of his hand. He was not young, and the tragic loneliness of approaching old age confronted him. He was trying to solve his problem and Tillie's, and what he had found was no solution, but a compromise.
“To-morrow morning, then,” he said quietly, and went out the door.
All that hot August morning Tillie worked in a daze. Mrs. McKee watched her and said nothing. She interpreted the girl's white face and set lips as the result of having had to dismiss Schwitter again, and looked for time to bring peace, as it had done before.
Le Moyne came late to his midday meal. For once, the mental anaesthesia of endless figures had failed him. On his way home he had drawn his small savings from the bank, and mailed them, in cash and registered, to a back street in the slums of a distant city. He had done this before, and always with a feeling of exaltation, as if, for a time at least, the burden he carried was lightened. But to-day he experienced no compensatory relief. Life was dull and stale to him, effort ineffectual. At thirty a man should look back with tenderness, forward with hope. K. Le Moyne dared not look back, and had no desire to look ahead into empty years.
Although he ate little, the dining-room was empty when he finished. Usually he had some cheerful banter for Tillie, to which she responded in kind. But, what with the heat and with heaviness of spirit, he did not notice her depression until he rose.
“Why, you're not sick, are you, Tillie?”
“Me? Oh, no. Low in my mind, I guess.”
“It's the heat. It's fearful. Look here. If I send you two tickets to a roof garden where there's a variety show, can't you take a friend and go to-night?”
“Thanks; I guess I'll not go out.”
Then, unexpectedly, she bent her head against a chair-back and fell to silent crying. K. let her cry for a moment. Then:—
“Now—tell me about it.”
“I'm just worried; that's all.”
“Let's see if we can't fix up the worries. Come, now, out with them!”
“I'm a wicked woman, Mr. Le Moyne.”
“Then I'm the person to tell it to. I—I'm pretty much a lost soul myself.”
He put an arm over her shoulders and drew her up, facing him.
“Suppose we go into the parlor and talk it out. I'll bet things are not as bad as you imagine.”
But when, in the parlor that had seen Mr. Schwitter's strange proposal of the morning, Tillie poured out her story, K.'s face grew grave.
“The wicked part is that I want to go with him,” she finished. “I keep thinking about being out in the country, and him coming into supper, and everything nice for him and me cleaned up and waiting—O my God! I've always been a good woman until now.”
“I—I understand a great deal better than you think I do. You're not wicked. The only thing is—”
“Go on. Hit me with it.”
“You might go on and be very happy. And as for the—for his wife, it won't do her any harm. It's only—if there are children.”
“I know. I've thought of that. But I'm so crazy for children!”
“Exactly. So you should be. But when they come, and you cannot give them a name—don't you see? I'm not preaching morality. God forbid that I—But no happiness is built on a foundation of wrong. It's been tried before, Tillie, and it doesn't pan out.”
He was conscious of a feeling of failure when he left her at last. She had acquiesced in what he said, knew he was right, and even promised to talk to him again before making a decision one way or the other. But against his abstractions of conduct and morality there was pleading in Tillie the hungry mother-heart; law and creed and early training were fighting against the strongest instinct of the race. It was a losing battle.
The hot August days dragged on. Merciless sunlight beat in through the slatted shutters of ward windows. At night, from the roof to which the nurses retired after prayers for a breath of air, lower surrounding roofs were seen to be covered with sleepers. Children dozed precariously on the edge of eternity; men and women sprawled in the grotesque postures of sleep.
There was a sort of feverish irritability in the air. Even the nurses, stoically unmindful of bodily discomfort, spoke curtly or not at all. Miss Dana, in Sidney's ward, went down with a low fever, and for a day or so Sidney and Miss Grange got along as best they could. Sidney worked like two or more, performed marvels of bed-making, learned to give alcohol baths for fever with the maximum of result and the minimum of time, even made rounds with a member of the staff and came through creditably.
Dr. Ed Wilson had sent a woman patient into the ward, and his visits were the breath of life to the girl.
“How're they treating you?” he asked her, one day, abruptly.
“Very well.”
“Look at me squarely. You're pretty and you're young. Some of them will try to take it out of you. That's human nature. Has anyone tried it yet?”
Sidney looked distressed.
“Positively, no. It's been hot, and of course it's troublesome to tell me everything. I—I think they're all very kind.”
He reached out a square, competent hand, and put it over hers.
“We miss you in the Street,” he said. “It's all sort of dead there since you left. Joe Drummond doesn't moon up and down any more, for one thing. What was wrong between you and Joe, Sidney?”
“I didn't want to marry him; that's all.”
“That's considerable. The boy's taking it hard.”
Then, seeing her face:—
“But you're right, of course. Don't marry anyone unless you can't live without him. That's been my motto, and here I am, still single.”
He went out and down the corridor. He had known Sidney all his life. During the lonely times when Max was at college and in Europe, he had watched her grow from a child to a young girl. He did not suspect for a moment that in that secret heart of hers he sat newly enthroned, in a glow of white light, as Max's brother; that the mere thought that he lived in Max's house (it was, of course Max's house to her), sat at Max's breakfast table, could see him whenever he wished, made the touch of his hand on hers a benediction and a caress.
Sidney finished folding linen and went back to the ward. It was Friday and a visiting day. Almost every bed had its visitor beside it; but Sidney, running an eye over the ward, found the girl of whom she had spoken to Le Moyne quite alone. She was propped up in bed, reading; but at each new step in the corridor hope would spring into her eyes and die again.
“Want anything, Grace?”
“Me? I'm all right. If these people would only get out and let me read in peace—Say, sit down and talk to me, won't you? It beats the mischief the way your friends forget you when you're laid up in a place like this.”
“People can't always come at visiting hours. Besides, it's hot.”
“A girl I knew was sick here last year, and it wasn't too hot for me to trot in twice a week with a bunch of flowers for her. Do you think she's been here once? She hasn't.”
Then, suddenly:—
“You know that man I told you about the other day?”
Sidney nodded. The girl's anxious eyes were on her.
“It was a shock to me, that's all. I didn't want you to think I'd break my heart over any fellow. All I meant was, I wished he'd let me know.”
Her eyes searched Sidney's. They looked unnaturally large and somber in her face. Her hair had been cut short, and her nightgown, open at the neck, showed her thin throat and prominent clavicles.
“You're from the city, aren't you, Miss Page?”
“Yes.”
“You told me the street, but I've forgotten it.”
Sidney repeated the name of the Street, and slipped a fresh pillow under the girl's head.
“The evening paper says there's a girl going to be married on your street.”
“Really! Oh, I think I know. A friend of mine is going to be married. Was the name Lorenz?”
“The girl's name was Lorenz. I—I don't remember the man's name.”
“She is going to marry a Mr. Howe,” said Sidney briskly. “Now, how do you feel? More comfy?”
“Fine! I suppose you'll be going to that wedding?”
“If I ever get time to have a dress made, I'll surely go.”
Toward six o'clock the next morning, the night nurse was making out her reports. On one record, which said at the top, “Grace Irving, age 19,” and an address which, to the initiated, told all her story, the night nurse wrote:—
“Did not sleep at all during night. Face set and eyes staring, but complains of no pain. Refused milk at eleven and three.”
Carlotta Harrison, back from her vacation, reported for duty the next morning, and was assigned to E ward, which was Sidney's. She gave Sidney a curt little nod, and proceeded to change the entire routine with the thoroughness of a Central American revolutionary president. Sidney, who had yet to learn that with some people authority can only assert itself by change, found herself confused, at sea, half resentful.
Once she ventured a protest:—
“I've been taught to do it that way, Miss Harrison. If my method is wrong, show me what you want, and I'll do my best.”
“I am not responsible for what you have been taught. And you will not speak back when you are spoken to.”
Small as the incident was, it marked a change in Sidney's position in the ward. She got the worst off-duty of the day, or none. Small humiliations were hers: late meals, disagreeable duties, endless and often unnecessary tasks. Even Miss Grange, now reduced to second place, remonstrated with her senior.
“I think a certain amount of severity is good for a probationer,” she said, “but you are brutal, Miss Harrison.”
“She's stupid.”
“She's not at all stupid. She's going to be one of the best nurses in the house.”
“Report me, then. Tell the Head I'm abusing Dr. Wilson's pet probationer, that I don't always say 'please' when I ask her to change a bed or take a temperature.”
Miss Grange was not lacking in keenness. She did not go to the Head, which is unethical under any circumstances; but gradually there spread through the training-school a story that Carlotta Harrison was jealous of the new Page girl, Dr. Wilson's protegee. Things were still highly unpleasant in the ward, but they grew much better when Sidney was off duty. She was asked to join a small class that was studying French at night. As ignorant of the cause of her popularity as of the reason of her persecution, she went steadily on her way.
And she was gaining every day. Her mind was forming. She was learning to think for herself. For the first time, she was facing problems and demanding an answer. Why must there be Grace Irvings in the world? Why must the healthy babies of the obstetric ward go out to the slums and come back, in months or years, crippled for the great fight by the handicap of their environment, rickety, tuberculous, twisted? Why need the huge mills feed the hospitals daily with injured men?
And there were other things that she thought of. Every night, on her knees in the nurses' parlor at prayers, she promised, if she were accepted as a nurse, to try never to become calloused, never to regard her patients as “cases,” never to allow the cleanliness and routine of her ward to delay a cup of water to the thirsty, or her arms to a sick child.
On the whole, the world was good, she found. And, of all the good things in it, the best was service. True, there were hot days and restless nights, weary feet, and now and then a heartache. There was Miss Harrison, too. But to offset these there was the sound of Dr. Max's step in the corridor, and his smiling nod from the door; there was a “God bless you” now and then for the comfort she gave; there were wonderful nights on the roof under the stars, until K.'s little watch warned her to bed.
While Sidney watched the stars from her hospital roof, while all around her the slum children, on other roofs, fought for the very breath of life, others who knew and loved her watched the stars, too. K. was having his own troubles in those days. Late at night, when Anna and Harriet had retired, he sat on the balcony and thought of many things. Anna Page was not well. He had noticed that her lips were rather blue, and had called in Dr. Ed. It was valvular heart disease. Anna was not to be told, or Sidney. It was Harriet's ruling.
“Sidney can't help any,” said Harriet, “and for Heaven's sake let her have her chance. Anna may live for years. You know her as well as I do. If you tell her anything at all, she'll have Sidney here, waiting on her hand and foot.”
And Le Moyne, fearful of urging too much because his own heart was crying out to have the girl back, assented.
Then, K. was anxious about Joe. The boy did not seem to get over the thing the way he should. Now and then Le Moyne, resuming his old habit of wearying himself into sleep, would walk out into the country. On one such night he had overtaken Joe, tramping along with his head down.
Joe had not wanted his company, had plainly sulked. But Le Moyne had persisted.
“I'll not talk,” he said; “but, since we're going the same way, we might as well walk together.”
But after a time Joe had talked, after all. It was not much at first—a feverish complaint about the heat, and that if there was trouble in Mexico he thought he'd go.
“Wait until fall, if you're thinking of it,” K. advised. “This is tepid compared with what you'll get down there.”
“I've got to get away from here.”
K. nodded understandingly. Since the scene at the White Springs Hotel, both knew that no explanation was necessary.
“It isn't so much that I mind her turning me down,” Joe said, after a silence. “A girl can't marry all the men who want her. But I don't like this hospital idea. I don't understand it. She didn't have to go. Sometimes”—he turned bloodshot eyes on Le Moyne—“I think she went because she was crazy about somebody there.”
“She went because she wanted to be useful.”
“She could be useful at home.”
For almost twenty minutes they tramped on without speech. They had made a circle, and the lights of the city were close again. K. stopped and put a kindly hand on Joe's shoulder.
“A man's got to stand up under a thing like this, you know. I mean, it mustn't be a knockout. Keeping busy is a darned good method.”
Joe shook himself free, but without resentment. “I'll tell you what's eating me up,” he exploded. “It's Max Wilson. Don't talk to me about her going to the hospital to be useful. She's crazy about him, and he's as crooked as a dog's hind leg.”
“Perhaps. But it's always up to the girl. You know that.”
He felt immeasurably old beside Joe's boyish blustering—old and rather helpless.
“I'm watching him. Some of these days I'll get something on him. Then she'll know what to think of her hero!”
“That's not quite square, is it?”
“He's not square.”
Joe had left him then, wheeling abruptly off into the shadows. K. had gone home alone, rather uneasy. There seemed to be mischief in the very air.