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 died 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.
CHAPTER XII
Tillie was gone.
Oddly enough, the last person to see her before she left was Harriet Kennedy. On the third day after Mr. Schwitter's visit, Harriet's colored maid had announced a visitor.
Harriet's business instinct had been good. She had taken expensive rooms in a good location, and furnished them with the assistance of a decor store. Then she arranged with a New York house to sell her models on commission.
Her short excursion to New York had marked for Harriet the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth. Here, at last, she found people speaking her own language. She ventured a suggestion to a manufacturer, and found it greeted, not, after the manner of the Street, with scorn, but with approval and some surprise.
"About once in ten years," said Mr. Arthurs, "we have a woman from out of town bring us a suggestion that is both novel and practical. When we find people like that, we watch them. They climb, madame,--climb."
Harriet's climbing was not so rapid as to make her dizzy; but business was coming. The first time she made a price of seventy-five dollars for an evening gown, she went out immediately after and took a drink of water. Her throat was parched.
She began to learn little quips of the feminine mind: that a woman who can pay seventy-five will pay double that sum; that it is not considered good form to show surprise at a dressmaker's prices, no matter how high they may be; that long mirrors and artificial light help sales--no woman over thirty but was grateful for her pink-and-gray room with its soft lights. And Harriet herself conformed to the picture. She took a lesson from the New York modistes, and wore trailing black gowns. She strapped her thin figure into the best corset she could get, and had her black hair marcelled and dressed h
igh. And, because she was a lady by birth and instinct, the result was not incongruous, but refined and rather impressive.
She took her business home with her at night, lay awake scheming, and wakened at dawn to find fresh color combinations in the early sky. She wakened early because she kept her head tied up in a towel, so that her hair need be done only three times a week. That and the corset were the penalties she paid. Her high-heeled shoes were a torment, too; but in the work-room she kicked them off.
To this new Harriet, then, came Tillie in her distress. Tillie was rather overwhelmed at first. The Street had always considered Harriet "proud." But Tillie's urgency was great, her methods direct.
"Why, Tillie!" said Harriet.
"Yes'm."
"Will you sit down?"
Tillie sat. She was not daunted now. While she worked at the fingers of her silk gloves, what Harriet took for nervousness was pure abstraction.
"It's very nice of you to come to see me. Do you like my rooms?"
Tillie surveyed the rooms, and Harriet caught her first full view of her face.
"Is there anything wrong? Have you left Mrs. McKee?"
"I think so. I came to talk to you about it."
It was Harriet's turn to be overwhelmed.
"She's very fond of you. If you have had any words--"
"It's not that. I'm just leaving. I'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind."
"Certainly."
Tillie hitched her chair closer.
"I'm up against something, and I can't seem to make up my mind. Last night I said to myself, 'I've got to talk to some woman who's not married, like me, and not as young as she used to be. There's no use going to Mrs. McKee: she's a widow, and wouldn't understand.'"
Harriet's voice was a trifle sharp as she replied. She never lied about her age, but she preferred to forget it.
"I wish you'd tell me what you're getting at."
"It ain't the sort of thing to come to too sudden. But it's like this. You and I can pretend all we like, Miss Harriet; but we're not getting all out of life that the Lord meant us to have. You've got them wax figures instead of children, and I have mealers."
A little spot of color came into Harriet's cheek. But she was interested. Regardless of the corset, she bent forward.
"Maybe that's true. Go on."
"I'm almost forty. Ten years more at the most, and I'm through. I'm slowing up. Can't get around the tables as I used to. Why, yesterday I put sugar into Mr. Le Moyne's coffee--well, never mind about that. Now I've got a chance to get a home, with a good man to look after me--I like him pretty well, and he thinks a lot of me."
"Mercy sake, Tillie! You are going to get married?"
"No'm," said Tillie; "that's it." And sat silent for a moment.
The gray curtains with their pink cording swung gently in the open windows. From the work-room came the distant hum of a sewing-machine and the sound of voices. Harriet sat with her hands in her lap and listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs. McKee's, and the house in the country; her loneliness, and the loneliness of the man; even the faint stirrings of potential motherhood, her empty arms, her advancing age--all this she knit into the fabric of her story and laid at Harriet's feet, as the ancients put their questions to their gods.
Harriet was deeply moved. Too much that Tillie poured out to her found an echo in her own breast. What was this thing she was striving for but a substitute for the real things of life--love and tenderness, children, a home of her own? Quite suddenly she loathed the gray carpet on the floor, the pink chairs, the shaded lamps. Tillie was no longer the waitress at a cheap boarding-house. She loomed large, potential, courageous, a woman who held life in her hands.
"Why don't you go to Mrs. Rosenfeld? She's your aunt, isn't she?"
"She thinks any woman's a fool to take up with a man."
"You're giving me a terrible responsibility, Tillie, if you're asking my advice."
"No'm. I'm asking what you'd do if it happened to you. Suppose you had no people that cared anything about you, nobody to disgrace, and all your life nobody had really cared anything about you. And then a chance like this came along. What would you do?"
"I don't know," said poor Harriet. "It seems to me--I'm afraid I'd be tempted. It does seem as if a woman had the right to be happy, even if--"
Her own words frightened her. It was as if some hidden self, and not she, had spoken. She hastened to point out the other side of the matter, the insecurity of it, the disgrace. Like K., she insisted that no right can be built out of a wrong. Tillie sat and smoothed her gloves. At last, when Harriet paused in sheer panic, the girl rose.
"I know how you feel, and I don't want you to take the responsibility of advising me," she said quietly. "I guess my mind was made up anyhow. But before I did it I just wanted to be sure that a decent woman would think the way I do about it."
And so, for a time, Tillie went out of the life of the Street as she went out of Harriet's handsome rooms, quietly, unobtrusively, with calm purpose in her eyes.
There were other changes in the Street. The Lorenz house was being painted for Christine's wedding. Johnny Rosenfeld, not perhaps of the Street itself, but certainly pertaining to it, was learning to drive Palmer Howe's new car, in mingled agony and bliss. He walked along the Street, not "right foot, left foot," but "brake foot, clutch foot," and took to calling off the vintage of passing cars. "So-and-So 1910," he would say, with contempt in his voice. He spent more than he could afford on a large streamer, meant to be fastened across the rear of the automobile, which said, "Excuse our dust," and was inconsolable when Palmer refused to let him use it.
K. had yielded to Anna's insistence, and was boarding as well as rooming at the Page house. The Street, rather snobbish to its occasional floating population, was accepting and liking him. It found him tender, infinitely human. And in return he found that this seemingly empty eddy into which he had drifted was teeming with life. He busied himself with small things, and found his outlook gradually less tinged with despair. When he found himself inclined to rail, he organized a baseball club, and sent down to everlasting defeat the Linburgs, consisting of cash-boys from Linden and Hofburg's department store.
The Rosenfelds adored him, with the single exception of the head of the family. The elder Rosenfeld having been "sent up," it was K. who discovered that by having him consigned to the workhouse his family would receive from the county some sixty-five cents a day for his labor. As this was exactly sixty-five cents a day more than he was worth to them free, Mrs. Rosenfeld voiced the pious hope that he be kept there forever.
K. made no further attempt to avoid Max Wilson. Some day they would meet face to face. He hoped, when it happened, they two might be alone; that was all. Even had he not been bound by his promise to Sidney, flight would have been foolish. The world was a small place, and, one way and another, he had known many people. Wherever he went, there would be the same chance.
And he did not deceive himself. Other things being equal,--the eddy and all that it meant--, he would not willingly take himself out of his small share of Sidney's life.
She was never to know what she meant to him, of course. He had scourged his heart until it no longer shone in his eyes when he looked at her. But he was very human--not at all meek. There were plenty of days when his philosophy lay in the dust and savage dogs of jealousy tore at it; more than one evening when he threw himself face downward on the bed and lay without moving for hours. And of these periods of despair he was always heartily ashamed the next day.
The meeting with Max Wilson took place early in September, and under better circumstances than he could have hoped for.
Sidney had come home for her weekly visit, and her mother's condition had alarmed her for the first time. When Le Moyne came home at six o'clock, he found her waiting for him in the hall.
"I am just a little frightened, K.," s
he said. "Do you think mother is looking quite well?"
"She has felt the heat, of course. The summer--I often think--"
"Her lips are blue!"
"It's probably nothing serious."
"She says you've had Dr. Ed over to see her."
She put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with appeal and something of terror in her face.
Thus cornered, he had to acknowledge that Anna had been out of sorts.
"I shall come home, of course. It's tragic and absurd that I should be caring for other people, when my own mother--"
She dropped her head on his arm, and he saw that she was crying. If he made a gesture to draw her to him, she never knew it. After a moment she looked up.
"I'm much braver than this in the hospital. But when it's one's own!"
K. was sorely tempted to tell her the truth and bring her back to the little house: to their old evenings together, to seeing the younger Wilson, not as the white god of the operating-room and the hospital, but as the dandy of the Street and the neighbor of her childhood--back even to Joe.
But, with Anna's precarious health and Harriet's increasing engrossment in her business, he felt it more and more necessary that Sidney go on with her training. A profession was a safeguard. And there was another point: it had been decided that Anna was not to know her condition. If she was not worried she might live for years. There was no surer way to make her suspect it than by bringing Sidney home.
Sidney sent Katie to ask Dr. Ed to come over after dinner. With the sunset Anna seemed better. She insisted on coming downstairs, and even sat with them on the balcony until the stars came out, talking of Christine's trousseau, and, rather fretfully, of what she would do without the parlors.
"You shall have your own boudoir upstairs," said Sidney valiantly. "Katie can carry your tray up there. We are going to make the sewing-room into your private sitting-room, and I shall nail the machine-top down."
This pleased her. When K. insisted on carrying her upstairs, she went in a flutter.
"He is so strong, Sidney!" she said, when he had placed her on her bed. "How can a clerk, bending over a ledger, be so muscular? When I have callers, will it be all right for Katie to show them upstairs?"
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