K Part 22

"Yes'm."

"Will you sit down?"

Tillie sat. She was not daunted now. While she worked at the fingers of her silk gloves, what Harriet took for nervousness was pure abstraction.

"It's very nice of you to come to see me. Do you like my rooms?"

Tillie surveyed the rooms, and Harriet caught her first full view of her face.

"Is there anything wrong? Have you left Mrs. McKee?"

"I think so. I came to talk to you about it."

It was Harriet's turn to be overwhelmed.

"She's very fond of you. If you have had any words--"

"It's not that. I'm just leaving. I'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind."

"Certainly."

Tillie hitched her chair closer.

"I'm up against something, and I can't seem to make up my mind. Last night I said to myself, 'I've got to talk to some woman who's not married, like me, and not as young as she used to be. There's no use going to Mrs. McKee: she's a widow, and wouldn't understand.'"

Harriet's voice was a trifle sharp as she replied. She never lied about her age, but she preferred to forget it.

"I wish you'd tell me what you're getting at."

"It ain't the sort of thing to come to too sudden. But it's like this.

You and I can pretend all we like, Miss Harriet; but we're not getting all out of life that the Lord meant us to have. You've got them wax figures instead of children, and I have mealers."

A little spot of color came into Harriet's cheek. But she was interested. Regardless of the corset, she bent forward.

"Maybe that's true. Go on."

"I'm almost forty. Ten years more at the most, and I'm through. I'm slowing up. Can't get around the tables as I used to. Why, yesterday I put sugar into Mr. Le Moyne's coffee--well, never mind about that. Now I've got a chance to get a home, with a good man to look after me--I like him pretty well, and he thinks a lot of me."

"Mercy sake, Tillie! You are going to get married?"

"No'm," said Tillie; "that's it." And sat silent for a moment.

The gray curtains with their pink cording swung gently in the open windows. From the work-room came the distant hum of a sewing-machine and the sound of voices. Harriet sat with her hands in her lap and listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs. McKee's, and the house in the country; her loneliness, and the loneliness of the man; even the faint stirrings of potential motherhood, her empty arms, her advancing age--all this she knit into the fabric of her story and laid at Harriet's feet, as the ancients put their questions to their G.o.ds.

Harriet was deeply moved. Too much that Tillie poured out to her found an echo in her own breast. What was this thing she was striving for but a subst.i.tute for the real things of life--love and tenderness, children, a home of her own? Quite suddenly she loathed the gray carpet on the floor, the pink chairs, the shaded lamps. Tillie was no longer the waitress at a cheap boarding-house. She loomed large, potential, courageous, a woman who held life in her hands.

"Why don't you go to Mrs. Rosenfeld? She's your aunt, isn't she?"

"She thinks any woman's a fool to take up with a man."

"You're giving me a terrible responsibility, Tillie, if you're asking my advice."

"No'm. I'm asking what you'd do if it happened to you. Suppose you had no people that cared anything about you, n.o.body to disgrace, and all your life n.o.body had really cared anything about you. And then a chance like this came along. What would you do?"

"I don't know," said poor Harriet. "It seems to me--I'm afraid I'd be tempted. It does seem as if a woman had the right to be happy, even if--"

Her own words frightened her. It was as if some hidden self, and not she, had spoken. She hastened to point out the other side of the matter, the insecurity of it, the disgrace. Like K., she insisted that no right can be built out of a wrong. Tillie sat and smoothed her gloves. At last, when Harriet paused in sheer panic, the girl rose.

"I know how you feel, and I don't want you to take the responsibility of advising me," she said quietly. "I guess my mind was made up anyhow. But before I did it I just wanted to be sure that a decent woman would think the way I do about it."

And so, for a time, Tillie went out of the life of the Street as she went out of Harriet's handsome rooms, quietly, un.o.btrusively, with calm purpose in her eyes.

There were other changes in the Street. The Lorenz house was being painted for Christine's wedding. Johnny Rosenfeld, not perhaps of the Street itself, but certainly pertaining to it, was learning to drive Palmer Howe's new car, in mingled agony and bliss. He walked along the Street, not "right foot, left foot," but "brake foot, clutch foot," and took to calling off the vintage of pa.s.sing cars. "So-and-So 1910,"

he would say, with contempt in his voice. He spent more than he could afford on a large streamer, meant to be fastened across the rear of the automobile, which said, "Excuse our dust," and was inconsolable when Palmer refused to let him use it.

K. had yielded to Anna's insistence, and was boarding as well as rooming at the Page house. The Street, rather sn.o.bbish to its occasional floating population, was accepting and liking him. It found him tender, infinitely human. And in return he found that this seemingly empty eddy into which he had drifted was teeming with life. He busied himself with small things, and found his outlook gradually less tinged with despair.

When he found himself inclined to rail, he organized a baseball club, and sent down to everlasting defeat the Linburgs, consisting of cash-boys from Linden and Hofburg's department store.

The Rosenfelds adored him, with the single exception of the head of the family. The elder Rosenfeld having been "sent up," it was K. who discovered that by having him consigned to the workhouse his family would receive from the county some sixty-five cents a day for his labor.

As this was exactly sixty-five cents a day more than he was worth to them free, Mrs. Rosenfeld voiced the pious hope that he be kept there forever.

K. made no further attempt to avoid Max Wilson. Some day they would meet face to face. He hoped, when it happened, they two might be alone; that was all. Even had he not been bound by his promise to Sidney, flight would have been foolish. The world was a small place, and, one way and another, he had known many people. Wherever he went, there would be the same chance.

And he did not deceive himself. Other things being equal,--the eddy and all that it meant--, he would not willingly take himself out of his small share of Sidney's life.

She was never to know what she meant to him, of course. He had scourged his heart until it no longer shone in his eyes when he looked at her.

But he was very human--not at all meek. There were plenty of days when his philosophy lay in the dust and savage dogs of jealousy tore at it; more than one evening when he threw himself face downward on the bed and lay without moving for hours. And of these periods of despair he was always heartily ashamed the next day.

The meeting with Max Wilson took place early in September, and under better circ.u.mstances than he could have hoped for.

Sidney had come home for her weekly visit, and her mother's condition had alarmed her for the first time. When Le Moyne came home at six o'clock, he found her waiting for him in the hall.

"I am just a little frightened, K.," she said. "Do you think mother is looking quite well?"

"She has felt the heat, of course. The summer--I often think--"

"Her lips are blue!"

"It's probably nothing serious."

"She says you've had Dr. Ed over to see her."

She put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with appeal and something of terror in her face.

Thus cornered, he had to acknowledge that Anna had been out of sorts.

"I shall come home, of course. It's tragic and absurd that I should be caring for other people, when my own mother--"