Why hadn’t they let him die? He didn’t want to live—he wouldn’t live. Nobody cared for him! He would—
His eyes, lifted from the ring, fell on the red glow of the roses that had come that morning. Even in the half light, they glowed with fiery color.
The ring was in his right hand. With the left he settled his collar and soft silk tie.
K. saw Carlotta that evening for the last time. Katie brought word to him, where he was helping Harriet close her trunk,—she was on her way to Europe for the fall styles,—that he was wanted in the lower hall.
“A lady!” she said, closing the door behind her by way of caution. “And a good thing for her she’s not from the alley. The way those people beg off you is a sin and a shame, and it’s not at home you’re going to be to them from now on.”
So K. had put on his coat and, without so much as a glance in Harriet’s mirror, had gone down the stairs. Carlotta was in the lower hall. She stood under the chandelier, and he saw at once the ravages that trouble had made in her. She was a dead white, and she looked ten years older than her age.
“I came, you see, Dr. Edwardes.”
Now and then, when some one came to him for help, which was generally money, he used Christine’s parlor, if she happened to be out. So now, finding the door ajar, and the room dark, he went in and turned on the light.
“Come in here; we can talk better.”
She did not sit down at first; but, observing that her standing kept him on his feet, she sat finally. Evidently she found it hard to speak.
“You were to come,” K. encouraged her, “to see if we couldn’t plan something for you. Now, I think I’ve got it.”
“If it’s another hospital—and I don’t want to stay here, in the city.”
“You like surgical work, don’t you?”
“I don’t care for anything else.”
“Before we settle this, I’d better tell you what I’m thinking of. You know, of course, that I closed my hospital. I—a series of things happened, and I decided I was in the wrong business. That wouldn’t be important, except for what it leads to. They are trying to persuade me to go back, and—I’m trying to persuade myself that I’m fit to go back. You see,”—his tone was determinedly cheerful, “my faith in myself has been pretty nearly gone. When one loses that, there isn’t much left.”
“You had been very successful.” She did not look up.
“Well, I had and I hadn’t. I’m not going to worry you about that. My offer is this: We’ll just try to forget about—about Schwitter’s and all the rest, and if I go back I’ll take you on in the operating-room.”
“You sent me away once!”
“Well, I can ask you to come back, can’t I?” He smiled at her encouragingly.
“Are you sure you understand about Max Wilson and myself?”
“I understand.”
“Don’t you think you are taking a risk?”
“Every one makes mistakes now and then, and loving women have made mistakes since the world began. Most people live in glass houses, Miss Harrison. And don’t make any mistake about this: people can always come back. No depth is too low. All they need is the willpower.”
He smiled down at her. She had come armed with confession. But the offer he made was too alluring. It meant reinstatement, another chance, when she had thought everything was over. After all, why should she damn herself? She would go back. She would work her finger-ends off for him. She would make it up to him in other ways. But she could not tell him and lose everything.
“Come,” he said. “Shall we go back and start over again?”
He held out his hand.
CHAPTER XXIX
Late September had come, with the Street, after its summer indolence taking up the burden of the year. At eight-thirty and at one the school bell called the children. Little girls in pig-tails, carrying freshly sharpened pencils, went primly toward the school, gathering, comet fashion, a tail of unwilling brothers as they went.
An occasional football hurtled through the air. Le Moyne had promised the baseball club a football outfit, rumor said, but would not coach them himself this year. A story was going about that Mr. Le Moyne intended to go away.
The Street had been furiously busy for a month. The cobblestones had gone, and from curb to curb stretched smooth asphalt. The fascination of writing on it with chalk still obsessed the children. Every few yards was a hop-scotch diagram. Generally speaking, too, the Street had put up new curtains, and even, here and there, had added a coat of paint.
To this general excitement the strange case of Mr. Le Moyne had added its quota. One day he was in the gas office, making out statements that were absolutely ridiculous. (What with no baking all last month, and every Sunday spent in the country, nobody could have used that amount of gas. They could come and take their old meter out!) And the next there was the news that Mr. Le Moyne had been only taking a holiday in the gas office,—paying off old scores, the barytone at Mrs. McKee’s hazarded!—and that he was really a very great surgeon and had saved Dr. Max Wilson.
The Street, which was busy at the time deciding whether to leave the old sidewalks or to put down cement ones, had one evening of mad excitement over the matter,—of K., not the sidewalks,—and then had accepted the new situation.
But over the news of K.‘s approaching departure it mourned. What was the matter with things, anyhow? Here was Christine’s marriage, which had promised so well,—awnings and palms and everything,—turning out badly. True, Palmer Howe was doing better, but he would break out again. And Johnny Rosenfeld was dead, so that his mother came on washing-days, and brought no cheery gossip; but bent over her tubs dry-eyed and silent—even the approaching move to a larger house failed to thrill her. There was Tillie, too. But one did not speak of her. She was married now, of course; but the Street did not tolerate such a reversal of the usual processes as Tillie had indulged in. It censured Mrs. McKee severely for having been, so to speak, and accessory after the fact.
The Street made a resolve to keep K., if possible. If he had shown any “high and mightiness,” as they called it, since the change in his estate, it would have let him go without protest. But when a man is the real thing,—so that the newspapers give a column to his having been in the city almost two years,—and still goes about in the same shabby clothes, with the same friendly greeting for every one, it demonstrates clearly, as the barytone put it, that “he’s got no swelled head on him; that’s sure.”
“Anybody can see by the way he drives that machine of Wilson’s that he’s been used to a car—likely a foreign one. All the swells have foreign cars.” Still the barytone, who was almost as fond of conversation as of what he termed “vocal.” “And another thing. Do you notice the way he takes Dr. Ed around? Has him at every consultation. The old boy’s tickled to death.”
A little later, K., coming up the Street as he had that first day, heard the barytone singing:—
“Home is the hunter, home from the hill, And the sailor, home from sea.”
Home! Why, this WAS home. The Street seemed to stretch out its arms to him. The ailanthus tree waved in the sunlight before the little house. Tree and house were old; September had touched them. Christine sat sewing on the balcony. A boy with a piece of chalk was writing something on the new cement under the tree. He stood back, head on one side, when he had finished, and inspected his work. K. caught him up from behind, and, swinging him around—
“Hey!” he said severely. “Don’t you know better than to write all over the street? What’ll I do to you? Give you to a policeman?”
“Aw, lemme down, Mr. K.”
“You tell the boys that if I find this street scrawled over any more, the picnic’s off.”
“Aw, Mr. K.!”
“I mean it. Go and spend some of that chalk energy of yours in school.”