The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  And yet, for a week nothing happened: Joe came in the evenings and sat on the steps with Sidney, his honest heart, in his eyes. She could not bring herself at first to tell him about the hospital. She put it off from day to day. Anna, no longer sulky, accepted wit the childlike faith Sidney's statement that "they'd get along; she had a splendid scheme," and took to helping Harriet in her preparations for leaving. Tillie, afraid of her rebellious spirit, went to prayer meeting. And K. Le Moyne, finding his little room hot in the evenings and not wishing to intrude on the two on the doorstep, took to reading his paper in the park, and after twilight to long, rapid walks out into the country. The walks satisfied the craving of his active body for exercise, and tired him so he could sleep. On one such occasion he met Mr. Wagner, and they carried on an animated conversation until it was too dark to see the pad. Even then, it developed that Wagner could write in the dark; and he secured the last word in a long argument by doing this and striking a match for K. to read by.

  When K. was sure that the boy had gone, he would turn back toward the Street. Some of the heaviness of his spirit always left him at sight of the little house. Its kindly atmosphere seemed to reach out and envelop him. Within was order and quiet, the fresh-down bed, the tidiness of his ordered garments. There was even affection--Reginald, waiting on the fender for his supper, and regarding him with wary and bright-eyed friendliness.

  Life, that had seemed so simple, had grown very complicated for Sidney. There was her mother to break the news to, and Joe. Harriet would approve, she felt; but these others! To assure Anna that she must manage alone for three years, in order to be happy and comfortable afterward--that was hard enough to tell Joe she was planning a future without him, to destroy the light in his blue eyes--that hurt.

  After all, Sidney told K. first. One Friday evening, coming home late, as usual, he found her on the doorstep, and Joe gone. She moved over hospitably. The moon had waxed and waned, and the Street was dark. Even the ailanthus blossoms had ceased their snow-like dropping. The colored man who drove Dr. Ed in the old buggy on his daily rounds had brought out the hose and sprinkled the street. Within this zone of freshness, of wet asphalt and dripping gutters, Sidney sat, cool and silent.

  "Please sit down. It is cool now. My idea of luxury is to have the Street sprinkled on a hot night."

  K. disposed of his long legs on the steps. He was trying to fit his own ideas of luxury to a garden hose and a city street.

  "I'm afraid you're working too hard."

  "I? I do a minimum of labor for a minimum of wage.

  "But you work at night, don't you?"

  K. was natively honest. He hesitated. Then:

  "No, Miss Page."

  "But You go out every evening!" Suddenly the truth burst on her.

  "Oh, dear!" she said. "I do believe--why, how silly of you!"

  K. was most uncomfortable.

  "Really, I like it," he protested. "I hang over a desk all day, and in the evening I want to walk. I ramble around the park and see lovers on benches--it's rather thrilling. They sit on the same benches evening after evening. I know a lot of them by sight, and if they're not there I wonder if they have quarreled, or if they have finally got married and ended the romance. You can see how exciting it is."

  Quite suddenly Sidney laughed.

  "How very nice you are!" she said--"and how absurd! Why should their getting married end the romance? And don't you know that, if you insist on walking the streets and parks at night because Joe Drummond is here, I shall have to tell him not to come?"

  This did not follow, to K.'s mind. They had rather a heated argument over it, and became much better acquainted.

  "If I were engaged to him," Sidney ended, her cheeks very pink, "I--I might understand. But, as I am not--"

  "Ah!" said K., a trifle unsteadily. "So you are not?"

  Only a week--and love was one of the things she had had to give up, with others. Not, of course, that he was in love with Sidney then. But he had been desperately lonely, and, for all her practical clearheadedness, she was softly and appealingly feminine. By way of keeping his head, he talked suddenly and earnestly of Mrs. McKee, and food, and Tillie, and of Mr. Wagner and the pencil pad.

  "It's like a game," he said. "We disagree on everything, especially Mexico. If you ever tried to spell those Mexican names--"

  "Why did you think I was engaged?" she insisted.

  Now, in K.'s walk of life--that walk of life where there are no toothpicks, and no one would have believed that twenty-one meals could have been secured for five dollars with a ticket punch thrown in--young girls did not receive the attention of one young man to the exclusion of others unless they were engaged. But he could hardly say that.

  "Oh, I don't know. Those things get in the air. I am quite certain, for instance, that Reginald suspects it."

  "It's Johnny Rosenfeld," said Sidney, with decision. "It's horrible, the way things get about. Because Joe sent me a box of roses--As a matter of fact, I'm not engaged, or going to be, Mr. Le Moyne. I'm going into a hospital to be a nurse."

  Le Moyne said nothing. For just a moment he closed his eyes. A man is in a rather a bad way when, every time he closes his eyes, he sees the same thing, especially if it is rather terrible. When it gets to a point where he lies awake at night and reads, for fear of closing them--

  "You're too young, aren't you?"

  "Dr. Ed--one of the Wilsons across the Street--is going to help me about that. His brother Max is a big surgeon there. I expect you've heard of him. We're very proud of him in the Street."

  Lucky for K. Le Moyne that the moon no longer shone on the low gray doorstep, that Sidney's mind had traveled far away to shining floors and rows of white beds. "Life--in the raw," Dr. Ed had said that other afternoon. Closer to her than the hospital was life in the raw that night.

  So, even here, on this quiet street in this distant city, there was to be no peace. Max Wilson just across the way! It--it was ironic. Was there no place where a man could lose himself? He would have to move on again, of course.

  But that, it seemed, was just what he could not do. For:

  "I want to ask you to do something, and I hope you'll be quite frank," said Sidney.

  "Anything that I can do--"

  "It's this. If you are comfortable, and--and like the room and all that, I wish you'd stay." She hurried on: "If I could feel that mother had a dependable person like you in the house, it would all be easier."

  Dependable! That stung.

  "But--forgive my asking; I'm really interested--can your mother manage? You'll get practically no money during your training."

  "I've thought of that. A friend of mine, Christine Lorenz, is going to be married. Her people are wealthy, but she'll have nothing but what Palmer makes. She'd like to have the parlor and the sitting room behind. They wouldn't interfere with you at all," she added hastily. "Christine's father would build a little balcony at the side for them, a sort of porch, and they'd sit there in the evenings."

  Behind Sidney's carefully practical tone the man read appeal. Never before had he realized how narrow the girl's world had been. The Street, with but one dimension, bounded it! In her perplexity, she was appealing to him who was practically a stranger.

  And he knew then that he must do the thing she asked. He, who had fled so long, could roam no more. Here on the Street, with its menace just across, he must live, that she might work. In his world, men had worked that women might live in certain places, certain ways. This girl was going out to earn her living, and he would stay to make it possible. But no hint of all this was in his voice.

  "I shall stay, of course," he said gravely. "I--this is the nearest thing to home that I've known for a long time. I want you to know that."

  So they moved their puppets about, Anna and Harriet, Christine and her husband-to-be, Dr. Ed, even Tillie and the Rosenfelds; shifted and placed them, and, planning, obeyed inevitable law.

  "Christine shall come, then," said Sidney forsooth, "and w
e will throw out a balcony."

  So they planned, calmly ignorant that poor Christine's story and Tillie's and Johnny Rosenfeld's and all the others' were already written among the things that are, and the things that shall be hereafter.

  "You are very good to me," said Sidney.

  When she rose, K. Le Moyne sprang to his feet.

  Anna had noticed that he always rose when she entered his room,--with fresh towels on Katie's day out, for instance,--and she liked him for it. Years ago, the men she had known had shown this courtesy to their women; but the Street regarded such things as affectation.

  "I wonder if you would do me another favor? I'm afraid you'll take to avoiding me, if I keep on."

  "I don't think you need fear that."

  "This stupid story about Joe Drummond--I'm not saying I'll never marry him, but I'm certainly not engaged. Now and then, when you are taking your evening walks, if you would ask me to walk with you--"

  K. looked rather dazed.

  "I can't imagine anything pleasanter; but I wish you'd explain just how--"

  Sidney smiled at him. As he stood on the lowest step, their eyes were almost level.

  "If I walk with you, they'll know I'm not engaged to Joe," she said, with engaging directness.

  The house was quiet. He waited in the lower hall until she had reached the top of the staircase. For some curious reason, in the time to come, that was the way Sidney always remembered K. Le Moyne--standing in the little hall, one hand upstretched to shut off the gas overhead, and his eyes on hers above.

  "Good-night," said K. Le Moyne. And all the things he had put out of his life were in his voice.

  CHAPTER IV

  On the morning after Sidney had invited K. Le Moyne to take her to walk, Max Wilson came down to breakfast rather late. Dr. Ed had breakfasted an hour before, and had already attended, with much profanity on the part of the patient, to a boil on the back of Mr. Rosenfeld's neck.

  "Better change your laundry," cheerfully advised Dr. Ed, cutting a strip of adhesive plaster. "Your neck's irritated from your white collars."

  Rosenfeld eyed him suspiciously, but, possessing a sense of humor also, he grinned.

  "It ain't my everyday things that bother me," he replied. "It's my blankety-blank dress suit. But if a man wants to be tony--"

  "Tony" was not of the Street, but of its environs. Harriet was "tony" because she walked with her elbows in and her head up. Dr. Max was "tony" because he breakfasted late, and had a man come once a week and take away his clothes to be pressed. He was "tony," too, because he had brought back from Europe narrow-shouldered English-cut clothes, when the Street was still padding its shoulders. Even K. would have been classed with these others, for the stick that he carried on his walks, for the fact that his shabby gray coat was as unmistakably foreign in cut as Dr. Max's, had the neighborhood so much as known him by sight. But K., so far, had remained in humble obscurity, and, outside of Mrs. McKee's, was known only as the Pages' roomer.

  Mr. Rosenfeld buttoned up the blue flannel shirt which, with a pair of Dr. Ed's cast-off trousers, was his only wear; and fished in his pocket.

  "How much, Doc?"

  "Two dollars," said Dr. Ed briskly.

  "Holy cats! For one jab of a knife! My old woman works a day and a half for two dollars."

  "I guess it's worth two dollars to you to be able to sleep on your back." He was imperturbably straightening his small glass table. He knew Rosenfeld. "If you don't like my price, I'll lend you the knife the next time, and you can let your wife attend to you."

  Rosenfeld drew out a silver dollar, and followed it reluctantly with a limp and dejected dollar bill.

  "There are times," he said, "when, if you'd put me and the missus and a knife in the same room, you wouldn't have much left but the knife."

  Dr. Ed waited until he had made his stiff-necked exit. Then he took the two dollars, and, putting the money into an envelope, indorsed it in his illegible hand. He heard his brother's step on the stairs, and Dr. Ed made haste to put away the last vestiges of his little operation.

  Ed's lapses from surgical cleanliness were a sore trial to the younger man, fresh from the clinics of Europe. In his downtown office, to which he would presently make his leisurely progress, he wore a white coat, and sterilized things of which Dr. Ed did not even know the names.

  So, as he came down the stairs, Dr. Ed, who had wiped his tiny knife with a bit of cotton,--he hated sterilizing it; it spoiled the edge,--thrust it hastily into his pocket. He had cut boils without boiling anything for a good many years, and no trouble. But he was wise with the wisdom of the serpent and the general practitioner, and there was no use raising a discussion.

  Max's morning mood was always a cheerful one. Now and then the way of the transgressor is disgustingly pleasant. Max, who sat up until all hours of the night, drinking beer or whiskey-and-soda, and playing bridge, wakened to a clean tongue and a tendency to have a cigarette between shoes, so to speak. Ed, whose wildest dissipation had perhaps been to bring into the world one of the neighborhood's babies, wakened customarily to the dark hour of his day, when he dubbed himself failure and loathed the Street with a deadly loathing.

  So now Max brought his handsome self down the staircase and paused at the office door.

  "At it, already," he said. "Or have you been to bed?"

  "It's after nine," protested Ed mildly. "If I don't start early, I never get through."

  Max yawned.

  "Better come with me," he said. "If things go on as they've been doing, I'll have to have an assistant. I'd rather have you than anybody, of course." He put his lithe surgeon's hand on his brother's shoulder. "Where would I be if it hadn't been for you? All the fellows know what you've done."

  In spite of himself, Ed winced. It was one thing to work hard that there might be one success instead of two half successes. It was a different thing to advertise one's mediocrity to the world. His sphere of the Street and the neighborhood was his own. To give it all up and become his younger brother's assistant--even if it meant, as it would, better hours and more money--would be to submerge his identity. He could not bring himself to it.

  "I guess I'll stay where I am," he said. "They know me around here, and I know them. By the way, will you leave this envelope at Mrs. McKee's? Maggie Rosenfeld is ironing there to-day. It's for her."

  Max took the envelope absently.

  "You'll go on here to the end of your days, working for a pittance," he objected. "Inside of ten years there'll be no general practitioners; then where will you be?"

  "I'll manage somehow," said his brother placidly. "I guess there will always be a few that can pay my prices better than what you specialists ask."

  Max laughed with genuine amusement.

  "I dare say, if this is the way you let them pay your prices."

  He held out the envelope, and the older man colored.

  Very proud of Dr. Max was his brother, unselfishly proud, of his skill, of his handsome person, of his easy good manners; very humble, too, of his own knowledge and experience. If he ever suspected any lack of finer fiber in Max, he put the thought away. Probably he was too rigid himself. Max was young, a hard worker. He had a right to play hard.

  He prepared his black bag for the day's calls--stethoscope, thermometer, eye-cup, bandages, case of small vials, a lump of absorbent cotton in a not over-fresh towel; in the bottom, a heterogeneous collection of instruments, a roll of adhesive plaster, a bottle or two of sugar-milk tablets for the children, a dog collar that had belonged to a dead collie, and had put in the bag in some curious fashion and there remained.

  He prepared the bag a little nervously, while Max ate. He felt that modern methods and the best usage might not have approved of the bag. On his way out he paused at the dining-room door.

  "Are you going to the hospital?"

  "Operating at four--wish you could come in."

  "I'm afraid not, Max. I've promised Sidney Page to speak about her to you. She wants to enter th
e training-school."

  "Too young," said Max briefly. "Why, she can't be over sixteen."

  "She's eighteen."

  "Well, even eighteen. Do you think any girl of that age is responsible enough to have life and death put in her hands? Besides, although I haven't noticed her lately, she used to be a pretty little thing. There is no use filling up the wards with a lot of ornaments; it keeps the internes all stewed up."

  "Since when," asked Dr. Ed mildly, "have you found good looks in a girl a handicap?"

  In the end they compromised. Max would see Sidney at his office. It would be better than having her run across the Street--would put things on the right footing. For, if he did have her admitted, she would have to learn at once that he was no longer "Dr. Max"; that, as a matter of fact, he was now staff, and entitled to much dignity, to speech without contradiction or argument, to clean towels, and a deferential interne at his elbow.

  Having given his promise, Max promptly forgot about it. The Street did not interest him. Christine and Sidney had been children when he went to Vienna, and since his return he had hardly noticed them. Society, always kind to single men of good appearance and easy good manners, had taken him up. He wore dinner or evening clothes five nights out of seven, and was supposed by his conservative old neighbors to be going the pace. The rumor had been fed by Mrs. Rosenfeld, who, starting out for her day's washing at six o'clock one morning, had found Dr. Max's car, lamps lighted, and engine going, drawn up before the house door, with its owner asleep at the wheel. The story traveled the length of the Street that day.