K Part 66

"If you loved me you could do anything with me." He was half sullen.

By the way her color leaped, he knew he had struck fire. All his conjectures as to how Sidney would take the knowledge of his entanglement with Carlotta had been founded on one major premise--that she loved him. The mere suspicion made him gasp.

"But, good Heavens, Sidney, you do care for me, don't you?"

"I'm afraid I don't, Max; not enough."

She tried to explain, rather pitifully. After one look at his face, she spoke to the window.

"I'm so wretched about it. I thought I cared. To me you were the best and greatest man that ever lived. I--when I said my prayers, I--But that doesn't matter. You were a sort of G.o.d to me. When the Lamb--that's one of the internes, you know--nicknamed you the 'Little Tin G.o.d,' I was angry. You could never be anything little to me, or do anything that wasn't big. Do you see?"

He groaned under his breath.

"No man could live up to that, Sidney."

"No. I see that now. But that's the way I cared. Now I know that I didn't care for you, really, at all. I built up an idol and worshiped it. I always saw you through a sort of haze. You were operating, with everybody standing by, saying how wonderful it was. Or you were coming to the wards, and everything was excitement, getting ready for you. I blame myself terribly. But you see, don't you? It isn't that I think you are wicked. It's just that I never loved the real you, because I never knew you."

When he remained silent, she made an attempt to justify herself.

"I'd known very few men," she said. "I came into the hospital, and for a time life seemed very terrible. There were wickednesses I had never heard of, and somebody always paying for them. I was always asking, Why?

Why? Then you would come in, and a lot of them you cured and sent out.

You gave them their chance, don't you see? Until I knew about Carlotta, you always meant that to me. You were like K.--always helping."

The room was very silent. In the nurses' parlor, a few feet down the corridor, the nurses were at prayers.

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want," read the Head, her voice calm with the quiet of twilight and the end of the day.

"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters."

The nurses read the response a little slowly, as if they, too, were weary.

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death--"

The man in the chair stirred. He had come through the valley of the shadow, and for what? He was very bitter. He said to himself savagely that they would better have let him die. "You say you never loved me because you never knew me. I'm not a rotter, Sidney. Isn't it possible that the man you, cared about, who--who did his best by people and all that--is the real me?"

She gazed at him thoughtfully. He missed something out of her eyes, the sort of luminous, wistful look with which she had been wont to survey his greatness. Measured by this new glance, so clear, so appraising, he sank back into his chair.

"The man who did his best is quite real. You have always done the best in your work; you always will. But the other is a part of you too, Max.

Even if I cared, I would not dare to run the risk."

Under the window rang the sharp gong of a city patrol-wagon. It rumbled through the gates back to the courtyard, where its continued clamor summoned white-coated orderlies.

An operating-room case, probably. Sidney, chin lifted, listened carefully. If it was a case for her, the elevator would go up to the operating-room. With a renewed sense of loss, Max saw that already she had put him out of her mind. The call to service was to her a call to battle. Her sensitive nostrils quivered; her young figure stood erect, alert.

"It has gone up!"

She took a step toward the door, hesitated, came back, and put a light hand on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry, dear Max."

She had kissed him lightly on the cheek before he knew what she intended to do. So pa.s.sionless was the little caress that, perhaps more than anything else, it typified the change in their relation.

When the door closed behind her, he saw that she had left her ring on the arm of his chair. He picked it up. It was still warm from her finger. He held it to his lips with a quick gesture. In all his successful young life he had never before felt the bitterness of failure. The very warmth of the little ring hurt.

Why hadn't they let him die? He didn't want to live--he wouldn't live.

n.o.body 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."