Young Howe had been firmly resolved to give up all his bachelor habits with his wedding day. In his indolent, rather selfish way, he was much in love with his wife.
But with the inevitable misunderstandings of the first months of marriage had come a desire to be appreciated once again at his face value. Grace had taken him, not for what he was, but for what he seemed to be. With Christine the veil was rent. She knew him now—all his small indolences, his affectations, his weaknesses. Later on, like other women since the world began, she would learn to dissemble, to affect to believe him what he was not.
Grace had learned this lesson long ago. It was the ABC of her knowledge. And so, back to Grace six weeks after his wedding day came Palmer Howe, not with a suggestion to renew the old relationship, but for comradeship.
Christine sulked—he wanted good cheer; Christine was intolerant—he wanted tolerance; she disapproved of him and showed her disapproval—he wanted approval. He wanted life to be comfortable and cheerful, without recriminations, a little work and much play, a drink when one was thirsty. Distorted though it was, and founded on a wrong basis, perhaps, deep in his heart Palmer's only longing was for happiness; but this happiness must be of an active sort—not content, which is passive, but enjoyment.
“Come on out,” he said. “I've got a car now. No taxi working its head off for us. Just a little run over the country roads, eh?”
It was the afternoon of the day before Christine's night visit to Sidney. The office had been closed, owing to a death, and Palmer was in possession of a holiday.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “We'll go out to the Climbing Rose and have supper.”
“I don't want to go.”
“That's not true, Grace, and you know it.”
“You and I are through.”
“It's your doing, not mine. The roads are frozen hard; an hour's run into the country will bring your color back.”
“Much you care about that. Go and ride with your wife,” said the girl, and flung away from him.
The last few weeks had filled out her thin figure, but she still bore traces of her illness. Her short hair was curled over her head. She looked curiously boyish, almost sexless.
Because she saw him wince when she mentioned Christine, her ill temper increased. She showed her teeth.
“You get out of here,” she said suddenly. “I didn't ask you to come back. I don't want you.”
“Good Heavens, Grace! You always knew I would have to marry some day.”
“I was sick; I nearly died. I didn't hear any reports of you hanging around the hospital to learn how I was getting along.”
He laughed rather sheepishly.
“I had to be careful. You know that as well as I do. I know half the staff there. Besides, one of—” He hesitated over his wife's name. “A girl I know very well was in the training-school. There would have been the devil to pay if I'd as much as called up.”
“You never told me you were going to get married.”
Cornered, he slipped an arm around her. But she shook him off.
“I meant to tell you, honey; but you got sick. Anyhow, I—I hated to tell you, honey.”
He had furnished the flat for her. There was a comfortable feeling of coming home about going there again. And, now that the worst minute of their meeting was over, he was visibly happier. But Grace continued to stand eyeing him somberly.
“I've got something to tell you,” she said. “Don't have a fit, and don't laugh. If you do, I'll—I'll jump out of the window. I've got a place in a store. I'm going to be straight, Palmer.”
“Good for you!”
He meant it. She was a nice girl and he was fond of her. The other was a dog's life. And he was not unselfish about it. She could not belong to him. He did not want her to belong to any one else.
“One of the nurses in the hospital, a Miss Page, has got me something to do at Lipton and Homburg's. I am going on for the January white sale. If I make good they will keep me.”
He had put her aside without a qualm; and now he met her announcement with approval. He meant to let her alone. They would have a holiday together, and then they would say good-bye. And she had not fooled him. She still cared. He was getting off well, all things considered. She might have raised a row.
“Good work!” he said. “You'll be a lot happier. But that isn't any reason why we shouldn't be friends, is it? Just friends; I mean that. I would like to feel that I can stop in now and then and say how do you do.”
“I promised Miss Page.”
“Never mind Miss Page.”
The mention of Sidney's name brought up in his mind Christine as he had left her that morning. He scowled. Things were not going well at home. There was something wrong with Christine. She used to be a good sport, but she had never been the same since the day of the wedding. He thought her attitude toward him was one of suspicion. It made him uncomfortable. But any attempt on his part to fathom it only met with cold silence. That had been her attitude that morning.
“I'll tell you what we'll do,” he said. “We won't go to any of the old places. I've found a new roadhouse in the country that's respectable enough to suit anybody. We'll go out to Schwitter's and get some dinner. I'll promise to get you back early. How's that?”
In the end she gave in. And on the way out he lived up to the letter of their agreement. The situation exhilarated him: Grace with her new air of virtue, her new aloofness; his comfortable car; Johnny Rosenfeld's discreet back and alert ears.
The adventure had all the thrill of a new conquest in it. He treated the girl with deference, did not insist when she refused a cigarette, felt glowingly virtuous and exultant at the same time.
When the car drew up before the Schwitter place, he slipped a five-dollar bill into Johnny Rosenfeld's not over-clean hand.
“I don't mind the ears,” he said. “Just watch your tongue, lad.” And Johnny stalled his engine in sheer surprise.
“There's just enough of the Jew in me,” said Johnny, “to know how to talk a lot and say nothing, Mr. Howe.”
He crawled stiffly out of the car and prepared to crank it.
“I'll just give her the 'once over' now and then,” he said. “She'll freeze solid if I let her stand.”
Grace had gone up the narrow path to the house. She had the gift of looking well in her clothes, and her small hat with its long quill and her motor-coat were chic and becoming. She never overdressed, as Christine was inclined to do.
Fortunately for Palmer, Tillie did not see him. A heavy German maid waited at the table in the dining-room, while Tillie baked waffles in the kitchen.
Johnny Rosenfeld, going around the side path to the kitchen door with visions of hot coffee and a country supper for his frozen stomach, saw her through the window bending flushed over the stove, and hesitated. Then, without a word, he tiptoed back to the car again, and, crawling into the tonneau, covered himself with rugs. In his untutored mind were certain great qualities, and loyalty to his employer was one. The five dollars in his pocket had nothing whatever to do with it.
At eighteen he had developed a philosophy of four words. It took the place of the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, and the Catechism. It was: “Mind your own business.”
The discovery of Tillie's hiding-place interested but did not thrill him. Tillie was his cousin. If she wanted to do the sort of thing she was doing, that was her affair. Tillie and her middle-aged lover, Palmer Howe and Grace—the alley was not unfamiliar with such relationships. It viewed them with tolerance until they were found out, when it raised its hands.
True to his promise, Palmer wakened the sleeping boy before nine o'clock. Grace had eaten little and drunk nothing; but Howe was slightly stimulated.
“Give her the 'once over,'” he told Johnny, “and then go back and crawl into the rugs again. I'll drive in.”
Grace sat beside him. Their progress was slow and rough over the country roads, but when they reached the State road Howe threw open the throttle. He drove well. The liquor was in his blood. He took chances and got away with them, laughing at the girl's gasps of dismay.
“Wait until I get beyond Simkinsville,” he said, “and I'll let her out. You're going to travel tonight, honey.”
The girl sat beside him with her eyes fixed ahead. He had been drinking, and the warmth of the liquor was in his voice. She was determined on one thing. She was going to make him live up to the letter of his promise to go away at the house door; and more and more she realized that it would be difficult. His mood was reckless, masterful. Instead of laughing when she drew back from a proffered caress, he turned surly. Obstinate lines that she remembered appeared from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. She was uneasy.
Finally she hit on a plan to make him stop somewhere in her neighborhood and let her get out of the car. She would not come back after that.
There was another car going toward the city. Now it passed them, and as often they passed it. It became a contest of wits. Palmer's car lost on the hills, but gained on the long level stretches, which gleamed with a coating of thin ice.
“I wish you'd let them get ahead, Palmer. It's silly and it's reckless.”
“I told you we'd travel to-night.”
He turned a little glance at her. What the deuce was the matter with women, anyhow? Were none of them cheerful any more? Here was Grace as sober as Christine. He felt outraged, defrauded.
His light car skidded and struck the big car heavily. On a smooth road perhaps nothing more serious than broken mudguards would have been the result. But on the ice the small car slewed around and slid over the edge of the bank. At the bottom of the declivity it turned over.
Grace was flung clear of the wreckage. Howe freed himself and stood erect, with one arm hanging at his side. There was no sound at all from the boy under the tonneau.
The big car had stopped. Down the bank plunged a heavy, gorilla-like figure, long arms pushing aside the frozen branches of trees. When he reached the car, O'Hara found Grace sitting unhurt on the ground. In the wreck of the car the lamps had not been extinguished, and by their light he made out Howe, swaying dizzily.
“Anybody underneath?”
“The chauffeur. He's dead, I think. He doesn't answer.”
The other members of O'Hara's party had crawled down the bank by that time. With the aid of a jack, they got the car up. Johnny Rosenfeld lay doubled on his face underneath. When he came to and opened his eyes, Grace almost shrieked with relief.
“I'm all right,” said Johnny Rosenfeld. And, when they offered him whiskey: “Away with the fire-water. I am no drinker. I—I—” A spasm of pain twisted his face. “I guess I'll get up.” With his arms he lifted himself to a sitting position, and fell back again.
“God!” he said. “I can't move my legs.”
By Christmas Day Sidney was back in the hospital, a little wan, but valiantly determined to keep her life to its mark of service. She had a talk with K. the night before she left.
Katie was out, and Sidney had put the dining-room in order. K. sat by the table and watched her as she moved about the room.
The past few weeks had been very wonderful to him: to help her up and down the stairs, to read to her in the evenings as she lay on the couch in the sewing-room; later, as she improved, to bring small dainties home for her tray, and, having stood over Katie while she cooked them, to bear them in triumph to that upper room—he had not been so happy in years.
And now it was over. He drew a long breath.
“I hope you don't feel as if you must stay on,” she said anxiously. “Not that we don't want you—you know better than that.”
“There is no place else in the whole world that I want to go to,” he said simply.
“I seem to be always relying on somebody's kindness to—to keep things together. First, for years and years, it was Aunt Harriet; now it is you.”
“Don't you realize that, instead of your being grateful to me, it is I who am undeniably grateful to you? This is home now. I have lived around—in different places and in different ways. I would rather be here than anywhere else in the world.”
But he did not look at her. There was so much that was hopeless in his eyes that he did not want her to see. She would be quite capable, he told himself savagely, of marrying him out of sheer pity if she ever guessed. And he was afraid—afraid, since he wanted her so much—that he would be fool and weakling enough to take her even on those terms. So he looked away.
Everything was ready for her return to the hospital. She had been out that day to put flowers on the quiet grave where Anna lay with folded hands; she had made her round of little visits on the Street; and now her suit-case, packed, was in the hall.
“In one way, it will be a little better for you than if Christine and Palmer were not in the house. You like Christine, don't you?”
“Very much.”
“She likes you, K. She depends on you, too, especially since that night when you took care of Palmer's arm before we got Dr. Max. I often think, K., what a good doctor you would have been. You knew so well what to do for mother.”
She broke off. She still could not trust her voice about her mother.
“Palmer's arm is going to be quite straight. Dr. Ed is so proud of Max over it. It was a bad fracture.”
He had been waiting for that. Once at least, whenever they were together, she brought Max into the conversation. She was quite unconscious of it.
“You and Max are great friends. I knew you would like him. He is interesting, don't you think?”
“Very,” said K.
To save his life, he could not put any warmth into his voice. He would be fair. It was not in human nature to expect more of him.
“Those long talks you have, shut in your room—what in the world do you talk about? Politics?”
“Occasionally.”
She was a little jealous of those evenings, when she sat alone, or when Harriet, sitting with her, made sketches under the lamp to the accompaniment of a steady hum of masculine voices from across the hall. Not that she was ignored, of course. Max came in always, before he went, and, leaning over the back of a chair, would inform her of the absolute blankness of life in the hospital without her.
“I go every day because I must,” he would assure her gayly; “but, I tell you, the snap is gone out of it. When there was a chance that every cap was YOUR cap, the mere progress along a corridor became thrilling.” He had a foreign trick of throwing out his hands, with a little shrug of the shoulders. “Cui bono?” he said—which, being translated, means: “What the devil's the use!”
And K. would stand in the doorway, quietly smoking, or go back to his room and lock away in his trunk the great German books on surgery with which he and Max had been working out a case.
So K. sat by the dining-room table and listened to her talk of Max that last evening together.
“I told Mrs. Rosenfeld to-day not to be too much discouraged about Johnny. I had seen Dr. Max do such wonderful things. Now that you are such friends,”—she eyed him wistfully,—“perhaps some day you will come to one of his operations. Even if you didn't understand exactly, I know it would thrill you. And—I'd like you to see me in my uniform, K. You never have.”
She grew a little sad as the evening went on. She was going to miss K. very much. While she was ill she had watched the clock for the time to listen for him. She knew the way he slammed the front door. Palmer never slammed the door. She knew too that, just after a bang that threatened the very glass in the transom, K. would come to the foot of the stairs and call:—
“Ahoy, there!”
“Aye, aye,” she would answer—which was, he assured her, the proper response.
Whether he came up the stairs at once or took his way back to Katie had depended on whether his tribute for the day was fruit or sweetbreads.
Now that was all over. They were such good friends. He would miss her, too; but he would have Harriet and Christine and—Max. Back in a circle to Max, of course.
She insisted, that last evening, on sitting up with him until midnight ushered in Christmas Day. Christine and Palmer were out; Harriet, having presented Sidney with a blouse that had been left over in the shop from the autumn's business, had yawned herself to bed.
When the bells announced midnight, Sidney roused with a start. She realized that neither of them had spoken, and that K.'s eyes were fixed on her. The little clock on the shelf took up the burden of the churches, and struck the hour in quick staccato notes.
Sidney rose and went over to K., her black dress in soft folds about her.
“He is born, K.”
“He is born, dear.”
She stooped and kissed his cheek lightly.
Christmas Day dawned thick and white. Sidney left the little house at six, with the street light still burning through a mist of falling snow.
The hospital wards and corridors were still lighted when she went on duty at seven o'clock. She had been assigned to the men's surgical ward, and went there at once. She had not seen Carlotta Harrison since her mother's death; but she found her on duty in the surgical ward. For the second time in four months, the two girls were working side by side.
Sidney's recollection of her previous service under Carlotta made her nervous. But the older girl greeted her pleasantly.
“We were all sorry to hear of your trouble,” she said. “I hope we shall get on nicely.”
Sidney surveyed the ward, full to overflowing. At the far end two cots had been placed.
“The ward is heavy, isn't it?”
“Very. I've been almost mad at dressing hour. There are three of us—you, myself, and a probationer.”
The first light of the Christmas morning was coming through the windows. Carlotta put out the lights and turned in a business-like way to her records.
“The probationer's name is Wardwell,” she said. “Perhaps you'd better help her with the breakfasts. If there's any way to make a mistake, she makes it.”
It was after eight when Sidney found Johnny Rosenfeld.
“You here in the ward, Johnny!” she said.
Suffering had refined the boy's features. His dark, heavily fringed eyes looked at her from a pale face. But he smiled up at her cheerfully.
“I was in a private room; but it cost thirty plunks a week, so I moved. Why pay rent?”
Sidney had not seen him since his accident. She had wished to go, but K. had urged against it. She was not strong, and she had already suffered much. And now the work of the ward pressed hard. She had only a moment. She stood beside him and stroked his hand.
“I'm sorry, Johnny.”
He pretended to think that her sympathy was for his fall from the estate of a private patient to the free ward.
“Oh, I'm all right, Miss Sidney,” he said. “Mr. Howe is paying six dollars a week for me. The difference between me and the other fellows around here is that I get a napkin on my tray and they don't.”
Before his determined cheerfulness Sidney choked.
“Six dollars a week for a napkin is going some. I wish you'd tell Mr. Howe to give ma the six dollars. She'll be needing it. I'm no bloated aristocrat; I don't have to have a napkin.”
“Have they told you what the trouble is?”
“Back's broke. But don't let that worry you. Dr. Max Wilson is going to operate on me. I'll be doing the tango yet.”
Sidney's eyes shone. Of course, Max could do it. What a thing it was to be able to take this life-in-death of Johnny Rosenfeld's and make it life again!
All sorts of men made up Sidney's world: the derelicts who wandered through the ward in flapping slippers, listlessly carrying trays; the unshaven men in the beds, looking forward to another day of boredom, if not of pain; Palmer Howe with his broken arm; K., tender and strong, but filling no especial place in the world. Towering over them all was the younger Wilson. He meant for her, that Christmas morning, all that the other men were not—to their weakness strength, courage, daring, power.
Johnny Rosenfeld lay back on the pillows and watched her face.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “and ran along the Street, calling Dr. Max a dude, I never thought I'd lie here watching that door to see him come in. You have had trouble, too. Ain't it the hell of a world, anyhow? It ain't much of a Christmas to you, either.”
Sidney fed him his morning beef tea, and, because her eyes filled up with tears now and then at his helplessness, she was not so skillful as she might have been. When one spoonful had gone down his neck, he smiled up at her whimsically.
“Run for your life. The dam's burst!” he said.
As much as was possible, the hospital rested on that Christmas Day. The internes went about in fresh white ducks with sprays of mistletoe in their buttonholes, doing few dressings. Over the upper floors, where the kitchens were located, spread toward noon the insidious odor of roasting turkeys. Every ward had its vase of holly. In the afternoon, services were held in the chapel downstairs.
Wheel-chairs made their slow progress along corridors and down elevators. Convalescents who were able to walk flapped along in carpet slippers.
Gradually the chapel filled up. Outside the wide doors of the corridor the wheel-chairs were arranged in a semicircle. Behind them, dressed for the occasion, were the elevator-men, the orderlies, and Big John, who drove the ambulance.
On one side of the aisle, near the front, sat the nurses in rows, in crisp caps and fresh uniforms. On the other side had been reserved a place for the staff. The internes stood back against the wall, ready to run out between rejoicings, as it were—for a cigarette or an ambulance call, as the case might be.
Over everything brooded the after-dinner peace of Christmas afternoon.
The nurses sang, and Sidney sang with them, her fresh young voice rising above the rest. Yellow winter sunlight came through the stained-glass windows and shone on her lovely flushed face, her smooth kerchief, her cap, always just a little awry.
Dr. Max, lounging against the wall, across the chapel, found his eyes straying toward her constantly. How she stood out from the others! What a zest for living and for happiness she had!
The Episcopal clergyman read the Epistle:
“Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.”
That was Sidney. She was good, and she had been anointed with the oil of gladness. And he—
His brother was singing. His deep bass voice, not always true, boomed out above the sound of the small organ. Ed had been a good brother to him; he had been a good son.
Max's vagrant mind wandered away from the service to the picture of his mother over his brother's littered desk, to the Street, to K., to the girl who had refused to marry him because she did not trust him, to Carlotta last of all. He turned a little and ran his eyes along the line of nurses.
Ah, there she was. As if she were conscious of his scrutiny, she lifted her head and glanced toward him. Swift color flooded her face.
The nurses sang:—
“O holy Child of Bethlehem!Descend to us, we pray;Cast out our sin, and enter in,Be born in us to-day.”
The wheel-chairs and convalescents quavered the familiar words. Dr. Ed's heavy throat shook with earnestness.
The Head, sitting a little apart with her hands folded in her lap and weary with the suffering of the world, closed her eyes and listened.
The Christmas morning had brought Sidney half a dozen gifts. K. sent her a silver thermometer case with her monogram, Christine a toilet mirror. But the gift of gifts, over which Sidney's eyes had glowed, was a great box of roses marked in Dr. Max's copper-plate writing, “From a neighbor.”
Tucked in the soft folds of her kerchief was one of the roses that afternoon.
Services over, the nurses filed out. Max was waiting for Sidney in the corridor.
“Merry Christmas!” he said, and held out his hand.
“Merry Christmas!” she said. “You see!”—she glanced down to the rose she wore. “The others make the most splendid bit of color in the ward.”
“But they were for you!”
“They are not any the less mine because I am letting other people have a chance to enjoy them.”
Under all his gayety he was curiously diffident with her. All the pretty speeches he would have made to Carlotta under the circumstances died before her frank glance.
There were many things he wanted to say to her. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry her mother had died; that the Street was empty without her; that he looked forward to these daily meetings with her as a holy man to his hour before his saint. What he really said was to inquire politely whether she had had her Christmas dinner.
Sidney eyed him, half amused, half hurt.
“What have I done, Max? Is it bad for discipline for us to be good friends?”
“Damn discipline!” said the pride of the staff.
Carlotta was watching them from the chapel. Something in her eyes roused the devil of mischief that always slumbered in him.
“My car's been stalled in a snowdrift downtown since early this morning, and I have Ed's Peggy in a sleigh. Put on your things and come for a ride.”
He hoped Carlotta could hear what he said; to be certain of it, he maliciously raised his voice a trifle.
“Just a little run,” he urged. “Put on your warmest things.”
Sidney protested. She was to be free that afternoon until six o'clock; but she had promised to go home.
“K. is alone.”
“K. can sit with Christine. Ten to one, he's with her now.”
The temptation was very strong. She had been working hard all day. The heavy odor of the hospital, mingled with the scent of pine and evergreen in the chapel; made her dizzy. The fresh outdoors called her. And, besides, if K. were with Christine—
“It's forbidden, isn't it?”
“I believe it is.” He smiled at her.
“And yet, you continue to tempt me and expect me to yield!”
“One of the most delightful things about temptation is yielding now and then.”
After all, the situation seemed absurd. Here was her old friend and neighbor asking to take her out for a daylight ride. The swift rebellion of youth against authority surged up in Sidney.
“Very well; I'll go.”
Carlotta had gone by that time—gone with hate in her heart and black despair. She knew very well what the issue would be. Sidney would drive with him, and he would tell her how lovely she looked with the air on her face and the snow about her. The jerky motion of the little sleigh would throw them close together. How well she knew it all! He would touch Sidney's hand daringly and smile in her eyes. That was his method: to play at love-making like an audacious boy, until quite suddenly the cloak dropped and the danger was there.
The Christmas excitement had not died out in the ward when Carlotta went back to it. On each bedside table was an orange, and beside it a pair of woolen gloves and a folded white handkerchief. There were sprays of holly scattered about, too, and the after-dinner content of roast turkey and ice-cream.
The lame girl who played the violin limped down the corridor into the ward. She was greeted with silence, that truest tribute, and with the instant composing of the restless ward to peace.
She was pretty in a young, pathetic way, and because to her Christmas was a festival and meant hope and the promise of the young Lord, she played cheerful things.
The ward sat up, remembered that it was not the Sabbath, smiled across from bed to bed.
The probationer, whose name was Wardwell, was a tall, lean girl with a long, pointed nose. She kept up a running accompaniment of small talk to the music.
“Last Christmas,” she said plaintively, “we went out into the country in a hay-wagon and had a real time. I don't know what I am here for, anyhow. I am a fool.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Carlotta.
“Turkey and goose, mince pie and pumpkin pie, four kinds of cake; that's the sort of spread we have up in our part of the world. When I think of what I sat down to to-day—!”
She had a profound respect for Carlotta, and her motto in the hospital differed from Sidney's in that it was to placate her superiors, while Sidney's had been to care for her patients.
Seeing Carlotta bored, she ventured a little gossip. She had idly glued the label of a medicine bottle on the back of her hand, and was scratching a skull and cross-bones on it.
“I wonder if you have noticed something,” she said, eyes on the label.
“I have noticed that the three-o'clock medicines are not given,” said Carlotta sharply; and Miss Wardwell, still labeled and adorned, made the rounds of the ward.
When she came back she was sulky.
“I'm no gossip,” she said, putting the tray on the table. “If you won't see, you won't. That Rosenfeld boy is crying.”
As it was not required that tears be recorded on the record, Carlotta paid no attention to this.
“What won't I see?”
It required a little urging now. Miss Wardwell swelled with importance and let her superior ask her twice. Then:—
“Dr. Wilson's crazy about Miss Page.”
A hand seemed to catch Carlotta's heart and hold it.
“They're old friends.”
“Piffle! Being an old friend doesn't make you look at a girl as if you wanted to take a bite out of her. Mark my word, Miss Harrison, she'll never finish her training; she'll marry him. I wish,” concluded the probationer plaintively, “that some good-looking fellow like that would take a fancy to me. I'd do him credit. I am as ugly as a mud fence, but I've got style.”
She was right, probably. She was long and sinuous, but she wore her lanky, ill-fitting clothes with a certain distinction. Harriet Kennedy would have dressed her in jade green to match her eyes, and with long jade earrings, and made her a fashion.
Carlotta's lips were dry. The violinist had seen the tears on Johnny Rosenfeld's white cheeks, and had rushed into rollicking, joyous music. The ward echoed with it. “I'm twenty-one and she's eighteen,” hummed the ward under its breath. Miss Wardwell's thin body swayed.
“Lord, how I'd like to dance! If I ever get out of this charnel-house!”
The medicine-tray lay at Carlotta's elbow; beside it the box of labels. This crude girl was right—right. Carlotta knew it down to the depths of her tortured brain. As inevitably as the night followed the day, she was losing her game. She had lost already, unless—
If she could get Sidney out of the hospital, it would simplify things. She surmised shrewdly that on the Street their interests were wide apart. It was here that they met on common ground.
The lame violin-player limped out of the ward; the shadows of the early winter twilight settled down. At five o'clock Carlotta sent Miss Wardwell to first supper, to the surprise of that seldom surprised person. The ward lay still or shuffled abut quietly. Christmas was over, and there were no evening papers to look forward to.
Carlotta gave the five-o'clock medicines. Then she sat down at the table near the door, with the tray in front of her. There are certain thoughts that are at first functions of the brain; after a long time the spinal cord takes them up and converts them into acts almost automatically. Perhaps because for the last month she had done the thing so often in her mind, its actual performance was almost without conscious thought.
Carlotta took a bottle from her medicine cupboard, and, writing a new label for it, pasted it over the old one. Then she exchanged it for one of the same size on the medicine tray.
In the dining-room, at the probationers' table, Miss Wardwell was talking.
“Believe me,” she said, “me for the country and the simple life after this. They think I'm only a probationer and don't see anything, but I've got eyes in my head. Harrison is stark crazy over Dr. Wilson, and she thinks I don't see it. But never mind; I paid, her up to-day for a few of the jolts she has given me.”
Throughout the dining-room busy and competent young women came and ate, hastily or leisurely as their opportunity was, and went on their way again. In their hands they held the keys, not always of life and death perhaps, but of ease from pain, of tenderness, of smooth pillows, and cups of water to thirsty lips. In their eyes, as in Sidney's, burned the light of service.
But here and there one found women, like Carlotta and Miss Wardwell, who had mistaken their vocation, who railed against the monotony of the life, its limitations, its endless sacrifices. They showed it in their eyes.
Fifty or so against two—fifty who looked out on the world with the fearless glance of those who have seen life to its depths, and, with the broad understanding of actual contact, still found it good. Fifty who were learning or had learned not to draw aside their clean starched skirts from the drab of the streets. And the fifty, who found the very scum of the gutters not too filthy for tenderness and care, let Carlotta and, in lesser measure, the new probationer alone. They could not have voiced their reasons.
The supper-room was filled with their soft voices, the rustle of their skirts, the gleam of their stiff white caps.
When Carlotta came in, she greeted none of them. They did not like her, and she knew it.
Before her, instead of the tidy supper-table, she was seeing the medicine-tray as she had left it.
“I guess I've fixed her,” she said to herself.
Her very soul was sick with fear of what she had done.
K. saw Sidney for only a moment on Christmas Day. This was when the gay little sleigh had stopped in front of the house.
Sidney had hurried radiantly in for a moment. Christine's parlor was gay with firelight and noisy with chatter and with the clatter of her tea-cups.
K., lounging indolently in front of the fire, had turned to see Sidney in the doorway, and leaped to his feet.
“I can't come in,” she cried. “I am only here for a moment. I am out sleigh-riding with Dr. Wilson. It's perfectly delightful.”
“Ask him in for a cup of tea,” Christine called out. “Here's Aunt Harriet and mother and even Palmer!”
Christine had aged during the last weeks, but she was putting up a brave front.
“I'll ask him.”
Sidney ran to the front door and called: “Will you come in for a cup of tea?”
“Tea! Good Heavens, no. Hurry.”
As Sidney turned back into the house, she met Palmer. He had come out in the hall, and had closed the door into the parlor behind him. His arm was still in splints, and swung suspended in a gay silk sling.
The sound of laughter came through the door faintly.
“How is he to-day?” He meant Johnny, of course. The boy's face was always with him.
“Better in some ways, but of course—”
“When are they going to operate?”
“When he is a little stronger. Why don't you come into see him?”
“I can't. That's the truth. I can't face the poor youngster.”
“He doesn't seem to blame you; he says it's all in the game.”
“Sidney, does Christine know that I was not alone that night?”
“If she guesses, it is not because of anything the boy has said. He has told nothing.”
Out of the firelight, away from the chatter and the laughter, Palmer's face showed worn and haggard. He put his free hand on Sidney's shoulder.
“I was thinking that perhaps if I went away—”
“That would be cowardly, wouldn't it?”
“If Christine would only say something and get it over with! She doesn't sulk; I think she's really trying to be kind. But she hates me, Sidney. She turns pale every time I touch her hand.”
All the light had died out of Sidney's face. Life was terrible, after all—overwhelming. One did wrong things, and other people suffered; or one was good, as her mother had been, and was left lonely, a widow, or like Aunt Harriet. Life was a sham, too. Things were so different from what they seemed to be: Christine beyond the door, pouring tea and laughing with her heart in ashes; Palmer beside her, faultlessly dressed and wretched. The only one she thought really contented was K. He seemed to move so calmly in his little orbit. He was always so steady, so balanced. If life held no heights for him, at least it held no depths.
So Sidney thought, in her ignorance!
“There's only one thing, Palmer,” she said gravely. “Johnny Rosenfeld is going to have his chance. If anybody in the world can save him, Max Wilson can.”
The light of that speech was in her eyes when she went out to the sleigh again. K. followed her out and tucked the robes in carefully about her.
“Warm enough?”
“All right, thank you.”
“Don't go too far. Is there any chance of having you home for supper?”
“I think not. I am to go on duty at six again.”
If there was a shadow in K.'s eyes, she did not see it. He waved them off smilingly from the pavement, and went rather heavily back into the house.
“Just how many men are in love with you, Sidney?” asked Max, as Peggy started up the Street.
“No one that I know of, unless—”
“Exactly. Unless—”
“What I meant,” she said with dignity, “is that unless one counts very young men, and that isn't really love.”
“We'll leave out Joe Drummond and myself—for, of course, I am very young. Who is in love with you besides Le Moyne? Any of the internes at the hospital?”
“Me! Le Moyne is not in love with me.”
There was such sincerity in her voice that Wilson was relieved.
K., older than himself and more grave, had always had an odd attraction for women. He had been frankly bored by them, but the fact had remained. And Max more than suspected that now, at last, he had been caught.
“Don't you really mean that you are in love with Le Moyne?”
“Please don't be absurd. I am not in love with anybody; I haven't time to be in love. I have my profession now.”
“Bah! A woman's real profession is love.”
Sidney differed from this hotly. So warm did the argument become that they passed without seeing a middle-aged gentleman, short and rather heavy set, struggling through a snowdrift on foot, and carrying in his hand a dilapidated leather bag.
Dr. Ed hailed them. But the cutter slipped by and left him knee-deep, looking ruefully after them.
“The young scamp!” he said. “So that's where Peggy is!”
Nevertheless, there was no anger in Dr. Ed's mind, only a vague and inarticulate regret. These things that came so easily to Max, the affection of women, gay little irresponsibilities like the stealing of Peggy and the sleigh, had never been his. If there was any faint resentment, it was at himself. He had raised the boy wrong—he had taught him to be selfish. Holding the bag high out of the drifts, he made his slow progress up the Street.
At something after two o'clock that night, K. put down his pipe and listened. He had not been able to sleep since midnight. In his dressing-gown he had sat by the small fire, thinking. The content of his first few months on the Street was rapidly giving way to unrest. He who had meant to cut himself off from life found himself again in close touch with it; his eddy was deep with it.
For the first time, he had begun to question the wisdom of what he had done. Had it been cowardice, after all? It had taken courage, God knew, to give up everything and come away. In a way, it would have taken more courage to have stayed. Had he been right or wrong?
And there was a new element. He had thought, at first, that he could fight down this love for Sidney. But it was increasingly hard. The innocent touch of her hand on his arm, the moment when he had held her in his arms after her mother's death, the thousand small contacts of her returns to the little house—all these set his blood on fire. And it was fighting blood.
Under his quiet exterior K. fought many conflicts those winter days—over his desk and ledger at the office, in his room alone, with Harriet planning fresh triumphs beyond the partition, even by Christine's fire, with Christine just across, sitting in silence and watching his grave profile and steady eyes.
He had a little picture of Sidney—a snap-shot that he had taken himself. It showed Sidney minus a hand, which had been out of range when the camera had been snapped, and standing on a steep declivity which would have been quite a level had he held the camera straight. Nevertheless it was Sidney, her hair blowing about her, eyes looking out, tender lips smiling. When she was not at home, it sat on K.'s dresser, propped against his collar-box. When she was in the house, it lay under the pin-cushion.
Two o'clock in the morning, then, and K. in his dressing-gown, with the picture propped, not against the collar-box, but against his lamp, where he could see it.
He sat forward in his chair, his hands folded around his knee, and looked at it. He was trying to picture the Sidney of the photograph in his old life—trying to find a place for her. But it was difficult. There had been few women in his old life. His mother had died many years before. There had been women who had cared for him, but he put them impatiently out of his mind.
Then the bell rang.
Christine was moving about below. He could hear her quick steps. Almost before he had heaved his long legs out of the chair, she was tapping at his door outside.
“It's Mrs. Rosenfeld. She says she wants to see you.”
He went down the stairs. Mrs. Rosenfeld was standing in the lower hall, a shawl about her shoulders. Her face was white and drawn above it.
“I've had word to go to the hospital,” she said. “I thought maybe you'd go with me. It seems as if I can't stand it alone. Oh, Johnny, Johnny!”
“Where's Palmer?” K. demanded of Christine.
“He's not in yet.”
“Are you afraid to stay in the house alone?”
“No; please go.”
He ran up the staircase to his room and flung on some clothing. In the lower hall, Mrs. Rosenfeld's sobs had become low moans; Christine stood helplessly over her.
“I am terribly sorry,” she said—“terribly sorry! When I think whose fault all this is!”
Mrs. Rosenfeld put out a work-hardened hand and caught Christine's fingers.
“Never mind that,” she said. “You didn't do it. I guess you and I understand each other. Only pray God you never have a child.”
K. never forgot the scene in the small emergency ward to which Johnny had been taken. Under the white lights his boyish figure looked strangely long. There was a group around the bed—Max Wilson, two or three internes, the night nurse on duty, and the Head.
Sitting just inside the door on a straight chair was Sidney—such a Sidney as he never had seen before, her face colorless, her eyes wide and unseeing, her hands clenched in her lap. When he stood beside her, she did not move or look up. The group around the bed had parted to admit Mrs. Rosenfeld, and closed again. Only Sidney and K. remained by the door, isolated, alone.
“You must not take it like that, dear. It's sad, of course. But, after all, in that condition—”
It was her first knowledge that he was there. But she did not turn.
“They say I poisoned him.” Her voice was dreary, inflectionless.
“You—what?”
“They say I gave him the wrong medicine; that he's dying; that I murdered him.” She shivered.
K. touched her hands. They were ice-cold.
“Tell me about it.”
“There is nothing to tell. I came on duty at six o'clock and gave the medicines. When the night nurse came on at seven, everything was all right. The medicine-tray was just as it should be. Johnny was asleep. I went to say good-night to him and he—he was asleep. I didn't give him anything but what was on the tray,” she finished piteously. “I looked at the label; I always look.”
By a shifting of the group around the bed, K.'s eyes looked for a moment directly into Carlotta's. Just for a moment; then the crowd closed up again. It was well for Carlotta that it did. She looked as if she had seen a ghost—closed her eyes, even reeled.
“Miss Harrison is worn out,” Dr. Wilson said brusquely. “Get some one to take her place.”
But Carlotta rallied. After all, the presence of this man in this room at such a time meant nothing. He was Sidney's friend, that was all.
But her nerve was shaken. The thing had gone beyond her. She had not meant to kill. It was the boy's weakened condition that was turning her revenge into tragedy.
“I am all right,” she pleaded across the bed to the Head. “Let me stay, please. He's from my ward. I—I am responsible.”
Wilson was at his wits' end. He had done everything he knew without result. The boy, rousing for an instant, would lapse again into stupor. With a healthy man they could have tried more vigorous measures—could have forced him to his feet and walked him about, could have beaten him with knotted towels dipped in ice-water. But the wrecked body on the bed could stand no such heroic treatment.
It was Le Moyne, after all, who saved Johnny Rosenfeld's life. For, when staff and nurses had exhausted all their resources, he stepped forward with a quiet word that brought the internes to their feet astonished.
There was a new treatment for such cases—it had been tried abroad. He looked at Max.
Max had never heard of it. He threw out his hands.
“Try it, for Heaven's sake,” he said. “I'm all in.”
The apparatus was not in the house—must be extemporized, indeed, at last, of odds and ends from the operating-room. K. did the work, his long fingers deft and skillful—while Mrs. Rosenfeld knelt by the bed with her face buried; while Sidney sat, dazed and bewildered, on her little chair inside the door; while night nurses tiptoed along the corridor, and the night watchman stared incredulous from outside the door.
When the two great rectangles that were the emergency ward windows had turned from mirrors reflecting the room to gray rectangles in the morning light; Johnny Rosenfeld opened his eyes and spoke the first words that marked his return from the dark valley.
“Gee, this is the life!” he said, and smiled into K.'s watchful face.
When it was clear that the boy would live, K. rose stiffly from the bedside and went over to Sidney's chair.
“He's all right now,” he said—“as all right as he can be, poor lad!”
“You did it—you! How strange that you should know such a thing. How am I to thank you?”
The internes, talking among themselves, had wandered down to their dining-room for early coffee. Wilson was giving a few last instructions as to the boy's care. Quite unexpectedly, Sidney caught K.'s hand and held it to her lips. The iron repression of the night, of months indeed, fell away before her simple caress.
“My dear, my dear,” he said huskily. “Anything that I can do—for you—at any time—”
It was after Sidney had crept like a broken thing to her room that Carlotta Harrison and K. came face to face. Johnny was quite conscious by that time, a little blue around the lips, but valiantly cheerful.
“More things can happen to a fellow than I ever knew there was!” he said to his mother, and submitted rather sheepishly to her tears and caresses.
“You were always a good boy, Johnny,” she said. “Just you get well enough to come home. I'll take care of you the rest of my life. We will get you a wheel-chair when you can be about, and I can take you out in the park when I come from work.”
“I'll be passenger and you'll be chauffeur, ma.”
“Mr. Le Moyne is going to get your father sent up again. With sixty-five cents a day and what I make, we'll get along.”
“You bet we will!”
“Oh, Johnny, if I could see you coming in the door again and yelling 'mother' and 'supper' in one breath!”
The meeting between Carlotta and Le Moyne was very quiet. She had been making a sort of subconscious impression on the retina of his mind during all the night. It would be difficult to tell when he actually knew her.
When the preparations for moving Johnny back to the big ward had been made, the other nurses left the room, and Carlotta and the boy were together. K. stopped her on her way to the door.
“Miss Harrison!”
“Yes, Dr. Edwardes.”
“I am not Dr. Edwardes here; my name is Le Moyne.”
“Ah!”
“I have not seen you since you left St. John's.”
“No; I—I rested for a few months.”
“I suppose they do not know that you were—that you have had any previous hospital experience.”
“No. Are you going to tell them?”
“I shall not tell them, of course.”
And thus, by simple mutual consent, it was arranged that each should respect the other's confidence.
Carlotta staggered to her room. There had been a time, just before dawn, when she had had one of those swift revelations that sometimes come at the end of a long night. She had seen herself as she was. The boy was very low, hardly breathing. Her past stretched behind her, a series of small revenges and passionate outbursts, swift yieldings, slow remorse. She dared not look ahead. She would have given every hope she had in the world, just then, for Sidney's stainless past.
She hated herself with that deadliest loathing that comes of complete self-revelation.
And she carried to her room the knowledge that the night's struggle had been in vain—that, although Johnny Rosenfeld would live, she had gained nothing by what he had suffered. The whole night had shown her the hopelessness of any stratagem to win Wilson from his new allegiance. She had surprised him in the hallway, watching Sidney's slender figure as she made her way up the stairs to her room. Never, in all his past overtures to her, had she seen that look in his eyes.