“Overwork and grief,” Dr. Ed said, and sternly forbade the hospital again until Christmas. Morning and evening K. stopped at her door and inquired for her, and morning and evening came Sidney’s reply:—
“Much better. I’ll surely be up tomorrow!”
But the days dragged on and she did not get about.
Downstairs, Christine and Palmer had entered on the round of midwinter gayeties. Palmer’s “crowd” was a lively one. There were dinners and dances, week-end excursions to country-houses. The Street grew accustomed to seeing automobiles stop before the little house at all hours of the night. Johnny Rosenfeld, driving Palmer’s car, took to falling asleep at the wheel in broad daylight, and voiced his discontent to his mother.
“You never know where you are with them guys,” he said briefly. “We start out for half an hour’s run in the evening, and get home with the milk-wagons. And the more some of them have had to drink, the more they want to drive the machine. If I get a chance, I’m going to beat it while the wind’s my way.”
But, talk as he might, in Johnny Rosenfeld’s loyal heart there was no thought of desertion. Palmer had given him a man’s job, and he would stick by it, no matter what came.
There were some things that Johnny Rosenfeld did not tell his mother. There were evenings when the Howe car was filled, not with Christine and her friends, but with women of a different world; evenings when the destination was not a country estate, but a roadhouse; evenings when Johnny Rosenfeld, ousted from the driver’s seat by some drunken youth, would hold tight to the swinging car and say such fragments of prayers as he could remember. Johnny Rosenfeld, who had started life with few illusions, was in danger of losing such as he had.
One such night Christine put in, lying wakefully in her bed, while the clock on the mantel tolled hour after hour into the night. Palmer did not come home at all. He sent a note from the office in the morning:
“I hope you are not worried, darling. The car broke down near the Country Club last night, and there was nothing to do but to spend the night there. I would have sent you word, but I did not want to rouse you. What do you say to the theater tonight and supper afterward?”
Christine was learning. She telephoned the Country Club that morning, and found that Palmer had not been there. But, although she knew now that he was deceiving her, as he always had deceived her, as probably he always would, she hesitated to confront him with what she knew. She shrank, as many a woman has shrunk before, from confronting him with his lie.
But the second time it happened, she was roused. It was almost Christmas then, and Sidney was well on the way to recovery, thinner and very white, but going slowly up and down the staircase on K.‘s arm, and sitting with Harriet and K. at the dinner table. She was begging to be back on duty for Christmas, and K. felt that he would have to give her up soon.
At three o’clock one morning Sidney roused from a light sleep to hear a rapping on her door.
“Is that you, Aunt Harriet?” she called.
“It’s Christine. May I come in?”
Sidney unlocked her door. Christine slipped into the room. She carried a candle, and before she spoke she looked at Sidney’s watch on the bedside table.
“I hoped my clock was wrong,” she said. “I am sorry to waken you, Sidney, but I don’t know what to do.”
“Are you ill?”
“No. Palmer has not come home.”
“What time is it?”
“After three o’clock.”
Sidney had lighted the gas and was throwing on her dressing-gown.
“When he went out did he say—”
“He said nothing. We had been quarreling. Sidney, I am going home in the morning.”
“You don’t mean that, do you?”
“Don’t I look as if I mean it? How much of this sort of thing is a woman supposed to endure?”
“Perhaps he has been delayed. These things always seem terrible in the middle of the night, but by morning—”
Christine whirled on her.
“This isn’t the first time. You remember the letter I got on my wedding day?”
“Yes.”
“He’s gone back to her.”
“Christine! Oh, I am sure you’re wrong. He’s devoted to you. I don’t believe it!”
“Believe it or not,” said Christine doggedly, “that’s exactly what has happened. I got something out of that little rat of a Rosenfeld boy, and the rest I know because I know Palmer. He’s out with her tonight.”
The hospital had taught Sidney one thing: that it took many people to make a world, and that out of these some were inevitably vicious. But vice had remained for her a clear abstraction. There were such people, and because one was in the world for service one cared for them. Even the Saviour had been kind to the woman of the streets.
But here abruptly Sidney found the great injustice of the world—that because of this vice the good suffer more than the wicked. Her young spirit rose in hot rebellion.
“It isn’t fair!” she cried. “It makes me hate all the men in the world. Palmer cares for you, and yet he can do a thing like this!”
Christine was pacing nervously up and down the room. Mere companionship had soothed her. She was now, on the surface at least, less excited than Sidney.
“They are not all like Palmer, thank Heaven,” she said. “There are decent men. My father is one, and your K., here in the house, is another.”
At four o’clock in the morning Palmer Howe came home. Christine met him in the lower hall. He was rather pale, but entirely sober. She confronted him in her straight white gown and waited for him to speak.
“I am sorry to be so late, Chris,” he said. “The fact is, I am all in. I was driving the car out Seven Mile Run. We blew out a tire and the thing turned over.”
Christine noticed then that his right arm was hanging inert by his side.
CHAPTER XVI
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.”