On the day when K. had told Max his reason for giving up his work, Max was allowed out of bed for the first time. It was a great day. A box of red roses came that day from the girl who had refused him a year or more ago. He viewed them with a carelessness that was half assumed.
The news had traveled to the Street that he was to get up that day. Early that morning the doorkeeper had opened the door to a gentleman who did not speak, but who handed in a bunch of early chrysanthemums and proceeded to write, on a pad he drew from his pocket:—
“From Mrs. McKee’s family and guests, with their congratulations on your recovery, and their hope that they will see you again soon. If their ends are clipped every day and they are placed in ammonia water, they will last indefinitely.” Sidney spent her hour with Max that evening as usual. His big chair had been drawn close to a window, and she found him there, looking out. She kissed him. But this time, instead of letting her draw away, he put out his arms and caught her to him.
“Are you glad?”
“Very glad, indeed,” she said soberly.
“Then smile at me. You don’t smile any more. You ought to smile; your mouth—”
“I am almost always tired; that’s all, Max.”
She eyed him bravely.
“Aren’t you going to let me make love to you at all? You get away beyond my reach.”
“I was looking for the paper to read to you.”
A sudden suspicion flamed in his eyes.
“Sidney.”
“Yes, dear.”
“You don’t like me to touch you any more. Come here where I can see you.”
The fear of agitating him brought her quickly. For a moment he was appeased.
“That’s more like it. How lovely you are, Sidney!” He lifted first one hand and then the other to his lips. “Are you ever going to forgive me?”
“If you mean about Carlotta, I forgave that long ago.”
He was almost boyishly relieved. What a wonder she was! So lovely, and so sane. Many a woman would have held that over him for years—not that he had done anything really wrong on that nightmare excursion. But so many women are exigent about promises.
“When are you going to marry me?”
“We needn’t discuss that tonight, Max.”
“I want you so very much. I don’t want to wait, dear. Let me tell Ed that you will marry me soon. Then, when I go away, I’ll take you with me.”
“Can’t we talk things over when you are stronger?”
Her tone caught his attention, and turned him a little white. He faced her to the window, so that the light fell full on her.
“What things? What do you mean?”
He had forced her hand. She had meant to wait; but, with his keen eyes on her, she could not dissemble.
“I am going to make you very unhappy for a little while.”
“Well?”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think. If you had really wanted me, Max—”
“My God, of course I want you!”
“It isn’t that I am angry. I am not even jealous. I was at first. It isn’t that. It’s hard to make you understand. I think you care for me—”
“I love you! I swear I never loved any other woman as I love you.”
Suddenly he remembered that he had also sworn to put Carlotta out of his life. He knew that Sidney remembered, too; but she gave no sign.
“Perhaps that’s true. You might go on caring for me. Sometimes I think you would. But there would always be other women, Max. You’re like that. Perhaps you can’t help it.”
“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 god to me. When the Lamb—that’s one of the internes, you know—nicknamed you the ‘Little Tin God,’ 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 passionless 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.