"Him," said Mrs. Rosenfeld, who was occasionally flowery, "sittin' up as straight as this washboard, and his silk hat shinin' in the sun; but exceptin' the car, which was workin' hard and gettin' nowhere, the whole outfit in the arms of Morpheus."
Mrs. Lorenz, whose day it was to have Mrs. Rosenfeld, and who was unfamiliar with mythology, gasped at the last word.
"Mercy!" she said. "Do you mean to say he's got that awful drug habit!"
Down the clean steps went Dr. Max that morning, a big man, almost as tall as K. Le Moyne, eager of life, strong and a bit reckless, not fine, perhaps, but not evil. He had the same zest of living as Sidney, but with this difference--the girl stood ready to give herself to life: he knew that life would come to him. All-dominating male was Dr. Max, that morning, as he drew on his gloves before stepping into his car. It was after nine o'clock. K. Le Moyne had been an hour at his desk. The McKee napkins lay ironed in orderly piles.
Nevertheless, Dr. Max was suffering under a sense of defeat as he rode downtown. The night before, he had proposed to a girl and had been rejected. He was not in love with the girl,--she would have been a suitable wife, and a surgeon ought to be married; it gives people confidence,--but his pride was hurt. He recalled the exact words of the rejection.
"You're too good-looking, Max," she had said, "and that's the truth. Now that operations are as popular as fancy dancing, and much less bother, half the women I know are crazy about their surgeons. I'm too fond of my peace of mind."
"But, good Heavens! haven't you any confidence in me?" he had demanded.
"None whatever, Max dear." She had looked at him with level, understanding eyes.
He put the disagreeable recollection out of his mind as he parked his car and made his way to his office. Here would be people who believed in him, from the middle-aged nurse in her prim uniform to the row of patients sitting stiffly around the walls of the waiting-room. Dr. Max, pausing in the hall outside the door of his private office, drew a long breath. This was the real thing--work and plenty of it, a chance to show the other men what he could do, a battle to win! No humanitarian was he, but a fighter: each day he came to his office with the same battle lust.
The office nurse had her back to him. When she turned, he faced an agreeable surprise. Instead of Miss Simpson, he faced a young and attractive girl, faintly familiar.
"We tried to get you by telephone," she explained. "I am from the hospital. Miss Simpson's father died this morning, and she knew you would have to have some one. I was just starting for my vacation, so they sent me."
"Rather a poor substitute for a vacation," he commented.
She was a very pretty girl. He had seen her before in the hospital, but he had never really noticed how attractive she was. Rather stunning she was, he thought. The combination of yellow hair and dark eyes was unusual. He remembered, just in time, to express regret at Miss Simpson's bereavement.
"I am Miss Harrison," explained the substitute, and held out his long white coat. The ceremony, purely perfunctory with Miss Simpson on duty, proved interesting, Miss Harrison, in spite of her high heels, being small and the young surgeon tall. When he was finally in the coat, she was rather flushed and palpitating.
"But I KNEW your name, of course," lied Dr. Max. "And--I'm sorry about the vacation."
After that came work. Miss Harrison was nimble and alert, but the surgeon worked quickly and with few words, was impatient when she could not find the things he called for, even broke into restrained profanity now and then. She went a little pale over her mistakes, but preserved her dignity and her wits. Now and then he found her dark eyes fixed on him, with something inscrutable but pleasing in their depths. The situation was: rather piquant. Consciously he was thinking only of what he was doing. Subconsciously his busy ego was finding solace after last night's rebuff.
Once, during the cleaning up between cases, he dropped to a personality. He was drying his hands, while she placed freshly sterilized instruments on a glass table.
"You are almost a foreign type, Miss Harrison. Last year, in a London ballet, I saw a blonde Spanish girl who looked like you."
"My mother was a Spaniard." She did not look up.
Where Miss Simpson was in the habit of clumping through the morning in flat, heavy shoes, Miss Harrison's small heels beat a busy tattoo on the tiled floor. With the rustling of her starched dress, the sound was essentially feminine, almost insistent. When he had time to notice it, it amused him that he did not find it annoying.
Once, as she passed him a bistoury, he deliberately placed his fine hand over her fingers and smiled into her eyes. It was play for him; it lightened the day's work.
Sidney was in the waiting-room. There had been no tedium in the morning's waiting. Like all imaginative people, she had the gift of dramatizing herself. She was seeing herself in white from head to foot, like this efficient young woman who came now and then to the waiting-room door; she was healing the sick and closing tired eyes; she was even imagining herself proposed to by an aged widower with grown children and quantities of money, one of her patients.
She sat very demurely in the waiting-room with a magazine in her lap, and told her aged patient that she admired and respected him, but that she had given herself to the suffering poor.
"Everything in the world that you want," begged the elderly gentleman. "You should see the world, child, and I will see it again through your eyes. To Paris first for clothes and the opera, and then--"
"But I do not love you," Sidney replied, mentally but steadily. "In all the world I love only one man. He is--"
She hesitated here. It certainly was not Joe, or K. Le Moyne of the gas office. It seem to her suddenly very sad that there was no one she loved. So many people went into hospitals because they had been disappointed in love.
"Dr. Wilson will see you now."
She followed Miss Harrison into the consulting room. Dr. Max--not the gloved and hatted Dr. Max of the Street, but a new person, one she had never known--stood in his white office, tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired, competent, holding out his long, immaculate surgeon's hand, and smiling down at her.
Men, like jewels, require a setting. A clerk on a high stool, poring over a ledger, is not unimpressive, or a cook over her stove. But place the cook on the stool, poring over the ledger! Dr. Max, who had lived all his life on the edge of Sidney's horizon, now, by the simple changing of her point of view, loomed large and magnificent. Perhaps he knew it. Certainly he stood very erect. Certainly, too, there was considerable manner in the way in which he asked Miss Harrison to go out and close the door behind her.
Sidney's heart, considering what was happening to it, behaved very well.
"For goodness' sake, Sidney," said Dr. Max, "here you are a young lady and I've never noticed it!"
This, of course, was not what he had intended to say, being staff and all that. But Sidney, visibly palpitant, was very pretty, much prettier than the Harrison girl, beating a tattoo with her heels in the next room.
Dr. Max, belonging to the class of man who settles his tie every time he sees an attractive woman, thrust his hands into the pockets of his long white coat and surveyed her quizzically.
"Did Dr. Ed tell you?"
"Sit down. He said something about the hospital. How's your mother and Aunt Harriet?"
"Very well--that is, mother's never quite well." She was sitting forward on her chair, her wide young eyes on him. "Is that--is your nurse from the hospital here?"
"Yes. But she's not my nurse. She's a substitute."
"The uniform is so pretty." Poor Sidney! with all the things she had meant to say about a life of service, and that, although she was young, she was terribly in earnest.
"It takes a lot of plugging before one gets the uniform. Look here, Sidney; if you are going to the hospital because of the uniform, and with any idea of soothing fevered brows and all that nonsense--"
She interrupted him, deeply flushed. Indeed, no. She wanted to work. She was young and strong,
and surely a pair of willing hands--that was absurd about the uniform. She had no silly ideas. There was so much to do in the world, and she wanted to help. Some people could give money, but she couldn't. She could only offer service. And, partly through earnestness and partly through excitement, she ended in a sort of nervous sob, and, going to the window, stood with her back to him.
He followed her, and, because they were old neighbors, she did not resent it when he put his hand on her shoulder.
"I don't know--of course, if you feel like that about it," he said, "we'll see what can be done. It's hard work, and a good many times it seems futile. They die, you know, in spite of all we can do. And there are many things that are worse than death--"
His voice trailed off. When he had started out in his profession, he had had some such ideal of service as this girl beside him. For just a moment, as he stood there close to her, he saw things again with the eyes of his young faith: to relieve pain, to straighten the crooked, to hurt that he might heal,--not to show the other men what he could do,--that had been his early creed. He sighed a little as he turned away.
"I'll speak to the superintendent about you," he said. "Perhaps you'd like me to show you around a little."
"When? To-day?"
He had meant in a month, or a year. It was quite a minute before he replied:--
"Yes, to-day, if you say. I'm operating at four. How about three o'clock?"
She held out both hands, and he took them, smiling.
"You are the kindest person I ever met."
"And--perhaps you'd better not say you are applying until we find out if there is a vacancy."
"May I tell one person?"
"Mother?"
"No. We--we have a roomer now. He is very much interested. I should like to tell him."
He dropped her hands and looked at her in mock severity.
"Much interested! Is he in love with you?"
"Mercy, no!"
"I don't believe it. I'm jealous. You know, I've always been more than half in love with you myself!"
Play for him--the same victorious instinct that had made him touch Miss Harrison's fingers as she gave him the instrument. And Sidney knew how it was meant; she smiled into his eyes and drew down her veil briskly.
"Then we'll say at three," she said calmly, and took an orderly and unflurried departure.
But the little seed of tenderness had taken root. Sidney, passing in the last week or two from girlhood to womanhood,--outgrowing Joe, had she only known it, as she had outgrown the Street,--had come that day into her first contact with a man of the world. True, there was K. Le Moyne. But K. was now of the Street, of that small world of one dimension that she was leaving behind her.
She sent him a note at noon, with word to Tillie at Mrs. McKee's to put it under his plate:--
DEAR MR. LE MOYNE,--I am so excited I can hardly write. Dr. Wilson, the surgeon, is going to take me through the hospital this afternoon. Wish me luck. SIDNEY PAGE.
K. read it, and, perhaps because the day was hot and his butter soft and the other "mealers" irritable with the heat, he ate little or no luncheon. Before he went out into the sun, he read the note again. To his jealous eyes came a vision of that excursion to the hospital. Sidney, all vibrant eagerness, luminous of eye, quick of bosom; and Wilson, sardonically smiling, amused and interested in spite of himself. He drew a long breath, and thrust the note in his pocket.
The little house across the way sat square in the sun. The shades of his windows had been lowered against the heat. K. Le Moyne made an impulsive movement toward it and checked himself.
As he went down the Street, Wilson's car came around the corner. Le Moyne moved quietly into the shadow of the church and watched the car go by.
CHAPTER V
Sidney and K. Le Moyne sat under a tree and talked. In Sidney's lap lay a small pasteboard box, punched with many holes. It was the day of releasing Reginald, but she had not yet been able to bring herself to the point of separation. Now and then a furry nose protruded from one of the apertures and sniffed the welcome scent of pine and buttonball, red and white clover, the thousand spicy odors of field and woodland.
"And so," said K. Le Moyne, "you liked it all? It didn't startle you?"
"Well, in one way, of course--you see, I didn't know it was quite like that: all order and peace and quiet, and white beds and whispers, on top,--you know what I mean,--and the misery there just the same. Have you ever gone through a hospital?"
K. Le Moyne was stretched out on the grass, his arms under his head. For this excursion to the end of the street-car line he had donned a pair of white flannel trousers and a belted Norfolk coat. Sidney had been divided between pride in his appearance and fear that the Street would deem him overdressed.
At her question he closed his eyes, shutting out the peaceful arch and the bit of blue heaven overhead. He did not reply at once.
"Good gracious, I believe he's asleep!" said Sidney to the pasteboard box.
But he opened his eyes and smiled at her.
"I've been around hospitals a little. I suppose now there is no question about your going?"
"The superintendent said I was young, but that any protegee of Dr. Wilson's would certainly be given a chance."
"It is hard work, night and day."
"Do you think I am afraid of work?"
"And--Joe?"
Sidney colored vigorously and sat erect.
"He is very silly. He's taken all sorts of idiotic notions in his head."
"Such as--"
"Well, he HATES the hospital, of course. As if, even if I meant to marry him, it wouldn't be years before he can be ready."
"Do you think you are quite fair to Joe?"
"I haven't promised to marry him."
"But he thinks you mean to. If you have quite made up your mind not to, better tell him, don't you think? What--what are these idiotic notions?"
Sidney considered, poking a slim finger into the little holes in the box.
"You can see how stupid he is, and--and young. For one thing, he's jealous of you!"
"I see. Of course that is silly, although your attitude toward his suspicion is hardly flattering to me."
He smiled up at her.
"I told him that I had asked you to bring me here to-day. He was furious. And that wasn't all."
"No?"
"He said I was flirting desperately with Dr. Wilson. You see, the day we went through the hospital, it was hot, and we went to Henderson's for soda-water. And, of course, Joe was there. It was really dramatic."
K. Le Moyne was daily gaining the ability to see things from the angle of the Street. A month ago he could have seen no situation in two people, a man and a girl, drinking soda-water together, even with a boy lover on the next stool. Now he could view things through Joe's tragic eyes. And there as more than that. All day he had noticed how inevitably the conversation turned to the young surgeon. Did they start with Reginald, with the condition of the morning-glory vines, with the proposition of taking up the quaint paving-stones and macadamizing the Street, they ended with the younger Wilson.
Sidney's active young brain, turned inward for the first time in her life, was still on herself.
"Mother is plaintively resigned--and Aunt Harriet has been a trump. She's going to keep her room. It's really up to you."
"To me?"
"To your staying on. Mother trusts you absolutely. I hope you noticed that you got one of the apostle spoons with the custard she sent up to you the other night. And she didn't object to this trip to-day. Of course, as she said herself, it isn't as if you were young, or at all wild."
In spite of himself, K. was rather startled. He felt old enough, God knew, but he had always thought of it as an age of the spirit. How old did this child think he was?
"I have promised to stay on, in the capacity of watch-dog, burglar-alarm, and occasional recipient of an apostle spoon in a dish of custard. Lightning-conductor, too--your mother says she isn't afraid of storms
if there is a man in the house. I'll stay, of course."
The thought of his age weighed on him. He rose to his feet and threw back his fine shoulders.
"Aunt Harriet and your mother and Christine and her husband-to-be, whatever his name is--we'll be a happy family. But, I warn you, if I ever hear of Christine's husband getting an apostle spoon--"
She smiled up at him. "You are looking very grand to-day. But you have grass stains on your white trousers. Perhaps Katie can take them out."
Quite suddenly K. felt that she thought him too old for such frivolity of dress. It put him on his mettle.
"How old do you think I am, Miss Sidney?"
She considered, giving him, after her kindly way, the benefit of the doubt.
"Not over forty, I'm sure."
"I'm almost thirty. It is middle age, of course, but it is not senility."
She was genuinely surprised, almost disturbed.
"Perhaps we'd better not tell mother," she said. "You don't mind being thought older?"
"Not at all."
Clearly the subject of his years did not interest her vitally, for she harked back to the grass stains.
"I'm afraid you're not saving, as you promised. Those are new clothes, aren't they?"
"No, indeed. Bought years ago in England--the coat in London, the trousers in Bath, on a motor tour. Cost something like twelve shillings. Awfully cheap. They wear them for cricket."
That was a wrong move, of course. Sidney must hear about England; and she marveled politely, in view of his poverty, about his being there. Poor Le Moyne floundered in a sea of mendacity, rose to a truth here and there, clutched at luncheon, and achieved safety at last.
"To think," said Sidney, "that you have really been across the ocean! I never knew but one person who had been abroad. It is Dr. Max Wilson."
Back again to Dr. Max! Le Moyne, unpacking sandwiches from a basket, was aroused by a sheer resentment to an indiscretion.
"You like this Wilson chap pretty well, don't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You talk about him rather a lot."
This was sheer recklessness, of course. He expected fury, annihilation. He did not look up, but busied himself with the luncheon. When the silence grew oppressive, he ventured to glance toward her. She was leaning forward, her chin cupped in her palms, staring out over the valley that stretched at their feet.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 127