On the morning after Sidney had invited K. Le Moyne to take her to walk,
Max Wilson came down to breakfast rather late. Dr. Ed had breakfasted an
hour before, and had already attended, with much profanity on the part
of the patient, to a boil on the back of Mr. Rosenfeld's neck.
“Better change your laundry,” cheerfully advised Dr. Ed, cutting a strip
of adhesive plaster. “Your neck's irritated from your white collars.”
Rosenfeld eyed him suspiciously, but, possessing a sense of humor also,
he grinned.
“It ain't my everyday things that bother me,” he replied. “It's my
blankety-blank dress suit. But if a man wants to be tony--”
“Tony” was not of the Street, but of its environs. Harriet was “tony”
because she walked with her elbows in and her head up. Dr. Max was
“tony” because he breakfasted late, and had a man come once a week and
take away his clothes to be pressed. He was “tony,” too, because he had
brought back from Europe narrow-shouldered English-cut clothes, when the
Street was still padding its shoulders. Even K. would have been classed
with these others, for the stick that he carried on his walks, for the
fact that his shabby gray coat was as unmistakably foreign in cut as Dr.
Max's, had the neighborhood so much as known him by sight. But K., so
far, had remained in humble obscurity, and, outside of Mrs. McKee's, was
known only as the Pages' roomer.
Mr. Rosenfeld buttoned up the blue flannel shirt which, with a pair of
Dr. Ed's cast-off trousers, was his only wear; and fished in his pocket.
“How much, Doc?”
“Two dollars,” said Dr. Ed briskly.
“Holy cats! For one jab of a knife! My old woman works a day and a half
for two dollars.”
“I guess it's worth two dollars to you to be able to sleep on your
back.” He was imperturbably straightening his small glass table. He knew
Rosenfeld. “If you don't like my price, I'll lend you the knife the next
time, and you can let your wife attend to you.”
Rosenfeld drew out a silver dollar, and followed it reluctantly with a
limp and dejected dollar bill.
“There are times,” he said, “when, if you'd put me and the missus and a
knife in the same room, you wouldn't have much left but the knife.”
Dr. Ed waited until he had made his stiff-necked exit. Then he took the
two dollars, and, putting the money into an envelope, indorsed it in his
illegible hand. He heard his brother's step on the stairs, and Dr. Ed
made haste to put away the last vestiges of his little operation.
Ed's lapses from surgical cleanliness were a sore trial to the younger
man, fresh from the clinics of Europe. In his downtown office, to which
he would presently make his leisurely progress, he wore a white coat,
and sterilized things of which Dr. Ed did not even know the names.
So, as he came down the stairs, Dr. Ed, who had wiped his tiny
knife with a bit of cotton,--he hated sterilizing it; it spoiled the
edge,--thrust it hastily into his pocket. He had cut boils without
boiling anything for a good many years, and no trouble. But he was wise
with the wisdom of the serpent and the general practitioner, and there
was no use raising a discussion.
Max's morning mood was always a cheerful one. Now and then the way of
the transgressor is disgustingly pleasant. Max, who sat up until all
hours of the night, drinking beer or whiskey-and-soda, and playing
bridge, wakened to a clean tongue and a tendency to have a cigarette
between shoes, so to speak. Ed, whose wildest dissipation had perhaps
been to bring into the world one of the neighborhood's babies, wakened
customarily to the dark hour of his day, when he dubbed himself failure
and loathed the Street with a deadly loathing.
So now Max brought his handsome self down the staircase and paused at
the office door.
“At it, already,” he said. “Or have you been to bed?”
“It's after nine,” protested Ed mildly. “If I don't start early, I never
get through.”
Max yawned.
“Better come with me,” he said. “If things go on as they've been doing,
I'll have to have an assistant. I'd rather have you than anybody, of
course.” He put his lithe surgeon's hand on his brother's shoulder.
“Where would I be if it hadn't been for you? All the fellows know what
you've done.”
In spite of himself, Ed winced. It was one thing to work hard that there
might be one success instead of two half successes. It was a different
thing to advertise one's mediocrity to the world. His sphere of the
Street and the neighborhood was his own. To give it all up and become
his younger brother's assistant--even if it meant, as it would, better
hours and more money--would be to submerge his identity. He could not
bring himself to it.
“I guess I'll stay where I am,” he said. “They know me around here, and
I know them. By the way, will you leave this envelope at Mrs. McKee's?
Maggie Rosenfeld is ironing there to-day. It's for her.”
Max took the envelope absently.
“You'll go on here to the end of your days, working for a pittance,”
he objected. “Inside of ten years there'll be no general practitioners;
then where will you be?”
“I'll manage somehow,” said his brother placidly. “I guess there will
always be a few that can pay my prices better than what you specialists
ask.”
Max laughed with genuine amusement.
“I dare say, if this is the way you let them pay your prices.”
He held out the envelope, and the older man colored.
Very proud of Dr. Max was his brother, unselfishly proud, of his skill,
of his handsome person, of his easy good manners; very humble, too, of
his own knowledge and experience. If he ever suspected any lack of
finer fiber in Max, he put the thought away. Probably he was too rigid
himself. Max was young, a hard worker. He had a right to play hard.
He prepared his black bag for the day's calls--stethoscope, thermometer,
eye-cup, bandages, case of small vials, a lump of absorbent cotton in
a not over-fresh towel; in the bottom, a heterogeneous collection of
instruments, a roll of adhesive plaster, a bottle or two of sugar-milk
tablets for the children, a dog collar that had belonged to a dead
collie, and had put in the bag in some curious fashion and there
remained.
He prepared the bag a little nervously, while Max ate. He felt that
modern methods and the best usage might not have approved of the bag. On
his way out he paused at the dining-room door.
“Are you going to the hospital?”
“Operating at four--wish you could come in.”
“I'm afraid not, Max. I've promised Sidney Page to speak about her to
you. She wants to enter the training-school.”
“Too young,” said Max briefly. “Why, she can't be over sixteen.”
“She's eighteen.”
“Well, even eighteen. Do you think any girl of that age is responsible
enough to have life and death put in her hands? Besides, although I
haven't noticed her lately, she used to be a pretty little thing. There
is no use filling up the wards with a lot of ornaments; it keeps the
internes all stewed up.”
“Since when,” asked Dr. Ed mildly, “have you found good looks in a girl
a handicap?”
In the end they compromised. Max would see Sidney at his office. It
would be better than having her run across the Street--would put things
on the right footing. For, if he did have her admitted, she would have
to learn at once that he was no longer “Dr. Max”; that, as a matter of
fact, he was now staff, and entitled to much dignity, to speech without
contradiction or argument, to clean towels, and a deferential interne at
his elbow.
Having given his promise, Max promptly forgot about it. The Street did
not interest him. Christine and Sidney had been children when he went to
Vienna, and since his return he had hardly noticed them. Society, always
kind to single men of good appearance and easy good manners, had taken
him up. He wore dinner or evening clothes five nights out of seven, and
was supposed by his conservative old neighbors to be going the pace. The
rumor had been fed by Mrs. Rosenfeld, who, starting out for her day's
washing at six o'clock one morning, had found Dr. Max's car, lamps
lighted, and engine going, drawn up before the house door, with its
owner asleep at the wheel. The story traveled the length of the Street
that day.
“Him,” said Mrs. Rosenfeld, who was occasionally flowery, “sittin' up
as straight as this washboard, and his silk hat shinin' in the sun; but
exceptin' the car, which was workin' hard and gettin' nowhere, the whole
outfit in the arms of Morpheus.”
Mrs. Lorenz, whose day it was to have Mrs. Rosenfeld, and who was
unfamiliar with mythology, gasped at the last word.
“Mercy!” she said. “Do you mean to say he's got that awful drug habit!”
Down the clean steps went Dr. Max that morning, a big man, almost as
tall as K. Le Moyne, eager of life, strong and a bit reckless, not fine,
perhaps, but not evil. He had the same zest of living as Sidney, but
with this difference--the girl stood ready to give herself to life: he
knew that life would come to him. All-dominating male was Dr. Max, that
morning, as he drew on his gloves before stepping into his car. It was
after nine o'clock. K. Le Moyne had been an hour at his desk. The McKee
napkins lay ironed in orderly piles.
Nevertheless, Dr. Max was suffering under a sense of defeat as he rode
downtown. The night before, he had proposed to a girl and had been
rejected. He was not in love with the girl,--she would have been a
suitable wife, and a surgeon ought to be married; it gives people
confidence,--but his pride was hurt. He recalled the exact words of the
rejection.
“You're too good-looking, Max,” she had said, “and that's the truth. Now
that operations are as popular as fancy dancing, and much less bother,
half the women I know are crazy about their surgeons. I'm too fond of my
peace of mind.”
“But, good Heavens! haven't you any confidence in me?” he had demanded.
“None whatever, Max dear.” She had looked at him with level,
understanding eyes.
He put the disagreeable recollection out of his mind as he parked his
car and made his way to his office. Here would be people who believed
in him, from the middle-aged nurse in her prim uniform to the row of
patients sitting stiffly around the walls of the waiting-room. Dr. Max,
pausing in the hall outside the door of his private office, drew a long
breath. This was the real thing--work and plenty of it, a chance to show
the other men what he could do, a battle to win! No humanitarian was he,
but a fighter: each day he came to his office with the same battle lust.
The office nurse had her back to him. When she turned, he faced an
agreeable surprise. Instead of Miss Simpson, he faced a young and
attractive girl, faintly familiar.
“We tried to get you by telephone,” she explained. “I am from the
hospital. Miss Simpson's father died this morning, and she knew you
would have to have some one. I was just starting for my vacation, so
they sent me.”
“Rather a poor substitute for a vacation,” he commented.
She was a very pretty girl. He had seen her before in the hospital, but
he had never really noticed how attractive she was. Rather stunning
she was, he thought. The combination of yellow hair and dark eyes
was unusual. He remembered, just in time, to express regret at Miss
Simpson's bereavement.
“I am Miss Harrison,” explained the substitute, and held out his long
white coat. The ceremony, purely perfunctory with Miss Simpson on duty,
proved interesting, Miss Harrison, in spite of her high heels, being
small and the young surgeon tall. When he was finally in the coat, she
was rather flushed and palpitating.
“But I KNEW your name, of course,” lied Dr. Max. “And--I'm sorry about
the vacation.”
After that came work. Miss Harrison was nimble and alert, but the
surgeon worked quickly and with few words, was impatient when she could
not find the things he called for, even broke into restrained profanity
now and then. She went a little pale over her mistakes, but preserved
her dignity and her wits. Now and then he found her dark eyes fixed
on him, with something inscrutable but pleasing in their depths. The
situation was rather piquant. Consciously he was thinking only of what
he was doing. Subconsciously his busy ego was finding solace after last
night's rebuff.
Once, during the cleaning up between cases, he dropped to a personality.
He was drying his hands, while she placed freshly sterilized instruments
on a glass table.
“You are almost a foreign type, Miss Harrison. Last year, in a London
ballet, I saw a blonde Spanish girl who looked like you.”
“My mother was a Spaniard.” She did not look up.
Where Miss Simpson was in the habit of clumping through the morning in
flat, heavy shoes, Miss Harrison's small heels beat a busy tattoo on
the tiled floor. With the rustling of her starched dress, the sound was
essentially feminine, almost insistent. When he had time to notice it,
it amused him that he did not find it annoying.
Once, as she passed him a bistoury, he deliberately placed his fine
hand over her fingers and smiled into her eyes. It was play for him; it
lightened the day's work.
Sidney was in the waiting-room. There had been no tedium in the
morning's waiting. Like all imaginative people, she had the gift of
dramatizing herself. She was seeing herself in white from head to
foot, like this efficient young woman who came now and then to the
waiting-room door; she was healing the sick and closing tired eyes; she
was even imagining herself proposed to by an aged widower with grown
children and quantities of money, one of her patients.
She sat very demurely in the waiting-room with a magazine in her lap,
and told her aged patient that she admired and respected him, but that
she had given herself to the suffering poor.
“Everything in the world that you want,” begged the elderly gentleman.
“You should see the world, child, and I will see it again through your
eyes. To Paris first for clothes and the opera, and then--”
“But I do not love you,” Sidney replied, mentally but steadily. “In all
the world I love only one man. He is--”
She hesitated here. It certainly was not Joe, or K. Le Moyne of the
gas office. It seem to her suddenly very sad that there was no one
she loved. So many people went into hospitals because they had been
disappointed in love.
“Dr. Wilson will see you now.”
She followed Miss Harrison into the consulting room. Dr. Max--not the
gloved and hatted Dr. Max of the Street, but a new person, one she had
never known--stood in his white office, tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired,
competent, holding out his long, immaculate surgeon's hand, and smiling
down at her.
Men, like jewels, require a setting. A clerk on a high stool, poring
over a ledger, is not unimpressive, or a cook over her stove. But place
the cook on the stool, poring over the ledger! Dr. Max, who had lived
all his life on the edge of Sidney's horizon, now, by the simple
changing of her point of view, loomed large and magnificent. Perhaps
he knew it. Certainly he stood very erect. Certainly, too, there was
considerable manner in the way in which he asked Miss Harrison to go out
and close the door behind her.
Sidney's heart, considering what was happening to it, behaved very well.
“For goodness' sake, Sidney,” said Dr. Max, “here you are a young lady
and I've never noticed it!”
This, of course, was not what he had intended to say, being staff and
all that. But Sidney, visibly palpitant, was very pretty, much prettier
than the Harrison girl, beating a tattoo with her heels in the next
room.
Dr. Max, belonging to the class of man who settles his tie every time he
sees an attractive woman, thrust his hands into the pockets of his long
white coat and surveyed her quizzically.
“Did Dr. Ed tell you?”
“Sit down. He said something about the hospital. How's your mother and
Aunt Harriet?”
“Very well--that is, mother's never quite well.” She was sitting forward
on her chair, her wide young eyes on him. “Is that--is your nurse from
the hospital here?”
“Yes. But she's not my nurse. She's a substitute.”
“The uniform is so pretty.” Poor Sidney! with all the things she had
meant to say about a life of service, and that, although she was young,
she was terribly in earnest.
“It takes a lot of plugging before one gets the uniform. Look here,
Sidney; if you are going to the hospital because of the uniform, and
with any idea of soothing fevered brows and all that nonsense--”
She interrupted him, deeply flushed. Indeed, no. She wanted to work.
She was young and strong, and surely a pair of willing hands--that was
absurd about the uniform. She had no silly ideas. There was so much to
do in the world, and she wanted to help. Some people could give money,
but she couldn't. She could only offer service. And, partly through
earnestness and partly through excitement, she ended in a sort of
nervous sob, and, going to the window, stood with her back to him.
He followed her, and, because they were old neighbors, she did not
resent it when he put his hand on her shoulder.
“I don't know--of course, if you feel like that about it,” he said,
“we'll see what can be done. It's hard work, and a good many times it
seems futile. They die, you know, in spite of all we can do. And there
are many things that are worse than death--”
His voice trailed off. When he had started out in his profession, he
had had some such ideal of service as this girl beside him. For just
a moment, as he stood there close to her, he saw things again with the
eyes of his young faith: to relieve pain, to straighten the crooked,
to hurt that he might heal,--not to show the other men what he could
do,--that had been his early creed. He sighed a little as he turned
away.
“I'll speak to the superintendent about you,” he said. “Perhaps you'd
like me to show you around a little.”
“When? To-day?”
He had meant in a month, or a year. It was quite a minute before he
replied:--
“Yes, to-day, if you say. I'm operating at four. How about three
o'clock?”
She held out both hands, and he took them, smiling.
“You are the kindest person I ever met.”
“And--perhaps you'd better not say you are applying until we find out if
there is a vacancy.”
“May I tell one person?”
“Mother?”
“No. We--we have a roomer now. He is very much interested. I should like
to tell him.”
He dropped her hands and looked at her in mock severity.
“Much interested! Is he in love with you?”
“Mercy, no!”
“I don't believe it. I'm jealous. You know, I've always been more than
half in love with you myself!”
Play for him--the same victorious instinct that had made him touch Miss
Harrison's fingers as she gave him the instrument. And Sidney knew how
it was meant; she smiled into his eyes and drew down her veil briskly.
“Then we'll say at three,” she said calmly, and took an orderly and
unflurried departure.
But the little seed of tenderness had taken root. Sidney, passing in the
last week or two from girlhood to womanhood,--outgrowing Joe, had she
only known it, as she had outgrown the Street,--had come that day into
her first contact with a man of the world. True, there was K. Le Moyne.
But K. was now of the Street, of that small world of one dimension that
she was leaving behind her.
She sent him a note at noon, with word to Tillie at Mrs. McKee's to put
it under his plate:--
DEAR MR. LE MOYNE,--I am so excited I can hardly write. Dr. Wilson, the
surgeon, is going to take me through the hospital this afternoon. Wish
me luck. SIDNEY PAGE.
K. read it, and, perhaps because the day was hot and his butter soft
and the other “mealers” irritable with the heat, he ate little or no
luncheon. Before he went out into the sun, he read the note again.
To his jealous eyes came a vision of that excursion to the hospital.
Sidney, all vibrant eagerness, luminous of eye, quick of bosom; and
Wilson, sardonically smiling, amused and interested in spite of himself.
He drew a long breath, and thrust the note in his pocket.
The little house across the way sat square in the sun. The shades of his
windows had been lowered against the heat. K. Le Moyne made an impulsive
movement toward it and checked himself.
As he went down the Street, Wilson's car came around the corner. Le
Moyne moved quietly into the shadow of the church and watched the car go
by.