Harriet had gone abroad for a flying trip in March and came back laden with new ideas, model gowns, and fresh enthusiasm. She carried out and planted flowers on her sister’s grave, and went back to her work with a feeling of duty done. A combination of crocuses and snow on the ground had given her an inspiration for a gown. She drew it in pencil on an envelope on her way back in the street car.
Grace Irving, having made good during the white sales, had been sent to the spring cottons. She began to walk with her head higher. The day she sold Sidney material for a simple white gown, she was very happy. Once a customer brought her a bunch of primroses. All day she kept them under the counter in a glass of water, and at evening she took them to Johnny Rosenfeld, still lying prone in the hospital.
On Sidney, on K., and on Christine the winter had left its mark heavily. Christine, readjusting her life to new conditions, was graver, more thoughtful. She was alone most of the time now. Under K.‘s guidance, she had given up the “Duchess” and was reading real books. She was thinking real thoughts, too, for the first time in her life.
Sidney, as tender as ever, had lost a little of the radiance from her eyes; her voice had deepened. Where she had been a pretty girl, she was now lovely. She was back in the hospital again, this time in the children’s ward. K., going in one day to take Johnny Rosenfeld a basket of fruit, saw her there with a child in her arms, and a light in her eyes that he had never seen before. It hurt him, rather—things being as they were with him. When he came out he looked straight ahead.
With the opening of spring the little house at Hillfoot took on fresh activities. Tillie was house-cleaning with great thoroughness. She scrubbed carpets, took down the clean curtains, and put them up again freshly starched. It was as if she found in sheer activity and fatigue a remedy for her uneasiness.
Business had not been very good. The impeccable character of the little house had been against it. True, Mr. Schwitter had a little bar and served the best liquors he could buy; but he discouraged rowdiness—had been known to refuse to sell to boys under twenty-one and to men who had already overindulged. The word went about that Schwitter’s was no place for a good time. Even Tillie’s chicken and waffles failed against this handicap.
By the middle of April the house-cleaning was done. One or two motor parties had come out, dined sedately and wined moderately, and had gone back to the city again. The next two weeks saw the weather clear. The roads dried up, robins filled the trees with their noisy spring songs, and still business continued dull.
By the first day of May, Tillie’s uneasiness had become certainty. On that morning Mr. Schwitter, coming in from the early milking, found her sitting in the kitchen, her face buried in her apron. He put down the milk-pails and, going over to her, put a hand on her head.
“I guess there’s no mistake, then?”
“There’s no mistake,” said poor Tillie into her apron.
He bent down and kissed the back of her neck. Then, when she failed to brighten, he tiptoed around the kitchen, poured the milk into pans, and rinsed the buckets, working methodically in his heavy way. The tea-kettle had boiled dry. He filled that, too. Then:—
“Do you want to see a doctor?”
“I’d better see somebody,” she said, without looking up. “And—don’t think I’m blaming you. I guess I don’t really blame anybody. As far as that goes, I’ve wanted a child right along. It isn’t the trouble I am thinking of either.”
He nodded. Words were unnecessary between them. He made some tea clumsily and browned her a piece of toast. When he had put them on one end of the kitchen table, he went over to her again.
“I guess I’d ought to have thought of this before, but all I thought of was trying to get a little happiness out of life. And,”—he stroked her arm,—“as far as I am concerned, it’s been worth while, Tillie. No matter what I’ve had to do, I’ve always looked forward to coming back here to you in the evening. Maybe I don’t say it enough, but I guess you know I feel it all right.”
Without looking up, she placed her hand over his.
“I guess we started wrong,” he went on. “You can’t build happiness on what isn’t right. You and I can manage well enough; but now that there’s going to be another, it looks different, somehow.”
After that morning Tillie took up her burden stoically. The hope of motherhood alternated with black fits of depression. She sang at her work, to burst out into sudden tears.
Other things were not going well. Schwitter had given up his nursery business; but the motorists who came to Hillfoot did not come back. When, at last, he took the horse and buggy and drove about the country for orders, he was too late. Other nurserymen had been before him; shrubberies and orchards were already being set out. The second payment on his mortgage would be due in July. By the middle of May they were frankly up against it. Schwitter at last dared to put the situation into words.
“We’re not making good, Til,” he said. “And I guess you know the reason. We are too decent; that’s what’s the matter with us.” There was no irony in his words.
With all her sophistication, Tillie was vastly ignorant of life. He had to explain.
“We’ll have to keep a sort of hotel,” he said lamely. “Sell to everybody that comes along, and—if parties want to stay over-night—”
Tillie’s white face turned crimson.
He attempted a compromise. “If it’s bad weather, and they’re married—”
“How are we to know if they are married or not?”
He admired her very much for it. He had always respected her. But the situation was not less acute. There were two or three unfurnished rooms on the second floor. He began to make tentative suggestions as to their furnishing. Once he got a catalogue from an installment house, and tried to hide it from her. Tillie’s eyes blazed. She burned it in the kitchen stove.
Schwitter himself was ashamed; but the idea obsessed him. Other people fattened on the frailties of human nature. Two miles away, on the other road, was a public house that had netted the owner ten thousand dollars profit the year before. They bought their beer from the same concern. He was not as young as he had been; there was the expense of keeping his wife—he had never allowed her to go into the charity ward at the asylum. Now that there was going to be a child, there would be three people dependent upon him. He was past fifty, and not robust.
One night, after Tillie was asleep, he slipped noiselessly into his clothes and out to the barn, where he hitched up the horse with nervous fingers.
Tillie never learned of that midnight excursion to the “Climbing Rose,” two miles away. Lights blazed in every window; a dozen automobiles were parked before the barn. Somebody was playing a piano. From the bar came the jingle of glasses and loud, cheerful conversation.
When Schwitter turned the horse’s head back toward Hillfoot, his mind was made up. He would furnish the upper rooms; he would bring a barkeeper from town—these people wanted mixed drinks; he could get a second-hand piano somewhere.
Tillie’s rebellion was instant and complete. When she found him determined, she made the compromise that her condition necessitated. She could not leave him, but she would not stay in the rehabilitated little house. When, a week after Schwitter’s visit to the “Climbing Rose,” an installment van arrived from town with the new furniture, Tillie moved out to what had been the harness-room of the old barn and there established herself.
“I am not leaving you,” she told him. “I don’t even know that I am blaming you. But I am not going to have anything to do with it, and that’s flat.”