K. turned the automobile toward the country roads. He was remembering acutely that other ride after Joe in his small car, the trouble he had had to get a machine, the fear of he knew not what ahead, and his arrival at last at the roadhouse, to find Max lying at the head of the stairs and Carlotta on her knees beside him.
“K.” “Yes?”
“Was there anybody you cared about,—any girl,—when you left home?”
“I was not in love with anyone, if that’s what you mean.”
“You knew Max before, didn’t you?”
“Yes. You know that.”
“If you knew things about him that I should have known, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t do that, could I? Anyhow—”
“Yes?”
“I thought everything would be all right. It seemed to me that the mere fact of your caring for him—” That was shaky ground; he got off it quickly. “Schwitter has closed up. Do you want to stop there?”
“Not tonight, please.”
They were near the white house now. Schwitter’s had closed up, indeed. The sign over the entrance was gone. The lanterns had been taken down, and in the dusk they could see Tillie rocking her baby on the porch. As if to cover the last traces of his late infamy, Schwitter himself was watering the worn places on the lawn with the garden can.
The car went by. Above the low hum of the engine they could hear Tillie’s voice, flat and unmusical, but filled with the harmonies of love as she sang to the child.
When they had left the house far behind, K. was suddenly aware that Sidney was crying. She sat with her head turned away, using her handkerchief stealthily. He drew the car up beside the road, and in a masterful fashion turned her shoulders about until she faced him.
“Now, tell me about it,” he said.
“It’s just silliness. I’m—I’m a little bit lonely.”
“Lonely!”
“Aunt Harriet’s in Paris, and with Joe gone and everybody—”
“Aunt Harriet!”
He was properly dazed, for sure. If she had said she was lonely because the cherry bookcase was in Paris, he could not have been more bewildered. And Joe! “And with you going away and never coming back—”
“I’ll come back, of course. How’s this? I’ll promise to come back when you graduate, and send you flowers.”
“I think,” said Sidney, “that I’ll become an army nurse.”
“I hope you won’t do that.”
“You won’t know, K. You’ll be back with your old friends. You’ll have forgotten the Street and all of us.”
“Do you really think that?”
“Girls who have been everywhere, and have lovely clothes, and who won’t know a T bandage from a figure eight!”
“There will never be anybody in the world like you to me, dear.”
His voice was husky.
“You are saying that to comfort me.”
“To comfort you! I—who have wanted you so long that it hurts even to think about it! Ever since the night I came up the Street, and you were sitting there on the steps—oh, my dear, my dear, if you only cared a little!”
Because he was afraid that he would get out of hand and take her in his arms,—which would be idiotic, since, of course, she did not care for him that way,—he gripped the steering-wheel. It gave him a curious appearance of making a pathetic appeal to the wind-shield.
“I have been trying to make you say that all evening!” said Sidney. “I love you so much that—K., won’t you take me in your arms?”
Take her in his arms! He almost crushed her. He held her to him and muttered incoherencies until she gasped. It was as if he must make up for long arrears of hopelessness. He held her off a bit to look at her, as if to be sure it was she and no changeling, and as if he wanted her eyes to corroborate her lips. There was no lack of confession in her eyes; they showed him a new heaven and a new earth.
“It was you always, K.,” she confessed. “I just didn’t realize it. But now, when you look back, don’t you see it was?”
He looked back over the months when she had seemed as unattainable as the stars, and he did not see it. He shook his head.
“I never had even a hope.”
“Not when I came to you with everything? I brought you all my troubles, and you always helped.”
Her eyes filled. She bent down and kissed one of his hands. He was so happy that the foolish little caress made his heart hammer in his ears.
“I think, K., that is how one can always tell when it is the right one, and will be the right one forever and ever. It is the person—one goes to in trouble.”
He had no words for that, only little caressing touches of her arm, her hand. Perhaps, without knowing it, he was formulating a sort of prayer that, since there must be troubles, she would, always come to him and he would always be able to help her.
And Sidney, too, fell silent. She was recalling the day she became engaged to Max, and the lost feeling she had had. She did not feel the same at all now. She felt as if she had been wandering, and had come home to the arms that were about her. She would be married, and take the risk that all women took, with her eyes open. She would go through the valley of the shadow, as other women did; but K. would be with her. Nothing else mattered. Looking into his steady eyes, she knew that she was safe. She would never wither for him.
Where before she had felt the clutch of inexorable destiny, the woman’s fate, now she felt only his arms about her, her cheek on his shabby coat.
“I shall love you all my life,” she said shakily.
His arms tightened about her.
The little house was dark when they got back to it. The Street, which had heard that Mr. Le Moyne approved of night air, was raising its windows for the night and pinning cheesecloth bags over its curtains to keep them clean.
In the second-story front room at Mrs. McKee’s, the barytone slept heavily, and made divers unvocal sounds. He was hardening his throat, and so slept with a wet towel about it.
Down on the doorstep, Mrs. McKee and Mr. Wagner sat and made love with the aid of a lighted match and the pencil-pad.
The car drew up at the little house, and Sidney got out. Then it drove away, for K. must take it to the garage and walk back.
Sidney sat on the doorstep and waited. How lovely it all was! How beautiful life was! If one did one’s best by life, it did its best too. How steady K.‘s eyes were! She saw the flicker of the match across the street, and knew what it meant. Once she would have thought that that was funny; now it seemed very touching to her.
Katie had heard the car, and now she came heavily along the hall. “A woman left this for Mr. K.,” she said. “If you think it’s a begging letter, you’d better keep it until he’s bought his new suit tomorrow. Almost any moment he’s likely to bust out.”
But it was not a begging letter. K. read it in the hall, with Sidney’s shining eyes on him. It began abruptly:—
“I’m going to Africa with one of my cousins. She is a medical missionary. Perhaps I can work things out there. It is a bad station on the West Coast. I am not going because I feel any call to the work, but because I do not know what else to do.
“You were kind to me the other day. I believe, if I had told you then, you would still have been kind. I tried to tell you, but I was so terribly afraid.
“If I caused death, I did not mean to. You will think that no excuse, but it is true. In the hospital, when I changed the bottles on Miss Page’s medicine-tray, I did not care much what happened. But it was different with you.
“You dismissed me, you remember. I had been careless about a sponge count. I made up my mind to get back at you. It seemed hopeless—you were so secure. For two or three days I tried to think of some way to hurt you. I almost gave up. Then I found the way.
“You remember the packets of gauze sponges we made and used in the operating-room? There were twelve to each package. When we counted them as we got them out, we counted by packages. On the night before I left, I went to the operating-room and added one sponge every here and there. Out of every dozen packets, perhaps, I fixed one that had thirteen. The next day I went away.