“Talking is the only thing that does us any good, isn’t it?”
“It helps you, but it never could help me for long.” He was silent, trying to fit this last strange news in with the rest of his picture of her.
She changed the subject at once, saying: “What have you done to father? Usually a man is under the microscope for a long time before he’s accepted as you’ve been.”
“He has a good instinct. He sees that I’m harmless,” said Kildare.
“But his whole attitude is rather odd. It’s almost as though he needed you!”
He was glad when she let that topic drop, in turn, and went on to something else.
They had left the thicker traffic, in the meanwhile, but he was blind to where they were going, lost in his problem. He was only aware of the summery warmth of the air, a strange Indian summer mildness that had melted the ice away and dried the pavements and left a soft languor in the blood. He was half aroused when she brought the car up to the kerb.
“Here we are,” she said. “Here’s a place that I’ve heard about. No one that we know is apt to, be here, and we can talk, Johnny, and do a whole ocean of forgetting.”
There was an odd touch of familiarity about the scene, as though he had at least noticed a picture of it somewhere, but his mind was not clear at all until they walked down steps from the street under a sign that said “Cesare’s Restaurant.” He remembered well enough then. He had seen Cesare’s scrawny little daughter, Francesca, through a bad attack of scarlet fever, and he had watched her with such care that Cesare and his wife felt he had given their girl back to them from the dead. The restaurant, in fact, was not six blocks from the hospital. They were in the very centre of Hell’s Kitchen where anyone on the street might recognize him at any moment. He was “doc” to the whole district, and one single use of that nickname would expose him and identify him in the eyes of Nancy, who dreaded and hated all doctors. He would be revealed as a spy. The shock was so complete and unexpected that he could not bring to his lips a single word of protest before they were in the place and it was too late to turn the girl about.
It was far, far too late, for a big form turned from the bar at this moment and he saw Weyman, the ambulance driver, wave a great arm of recognition above his head, shouting, “Hi…”
Kildare, looking at him without a flicker of recognition, closed his left eye and kept it closed for an instant. Weyman dropped his arm. The joy melted from his face in separate chunks, leaving the features in an odd disarray.
“Sorry. Took you for somebody else,” said Weyman, turning abruptly away. “Another shot, bartender,” he ordered.
A waiter was taking Kildare and the girl to a corner table.
“Poor fellow,” said Nancy. “The man at the bar thought for a moment that you were an old friend, didn’t he?”
“Old friend” Weyman had at that moment stopped Cesare as he swept in to greet the new customers. On the Italian’s face appeared first a momentary fog of bewilderment, then a grin of understanding so profound that it wrinkled the stiff red varnish of high health that covered his cheekbones. He turned, disappeared into the kitchen, and presently came magnificently into the dining-room again. Kildare could rest assured that the wife and the daughter had been well warned against recognising their doctor in that interval. In fact Cesare, as he bowed by the table and pointed out his recommendations for the evening, had eyes only for the “signorina”; he gave not so much as a trailing side glance to Kildare. Yonder was the tall, awkward bulk of Weyman taking another newcomer by the shoulder and dragging him up to the bar for a drink. A fine perspiration turned the face of Kildare cold as he recognised young Nick himself, who might have burned up Salt Creek had it not been for the “doc”; but neither Nick nor Weyman turned even for a fleeting instant toward the intern.
There seemed no real hope that he could escape from the district without being hailed by some affectionate voice, maudlin with good feeling, but his heart was warmed by the tact of Weyman and the rest. He would not have dreamed of finding such a quick response from them.
He wanted to use this, which was probably his last moment with the girl, in some desperate effort to break through to her secret, that hidden cause of unhappiness from which, she seemed to think, escape was impossible; but she grew interested in the Neapolitan songs of that fat Caruso who sweated over his mandolin and sang for the pleasure of Cesare’s customers, and between the music and the many courses there was no chance for continued conversation. The restaurant had filled every chair before they left. There were at least ten people whom he knew, but not an eye turned toward him as he took the girl out of the place at last.
As they stepped to the automobile at the kerb, his sense of relief was like a fresh wind in his face, but Nancy was instantly pointing out a crowd which filled an adjoining block of the street near a settlement house. They had a blaring music of horns and drums and hundreds of people were dancing.
“There! There we are!” said Nancy. “Come on, Johnny! Isn’t it better than all the night clubs in the world?”
“You’ll wear out your shoes—you’ll drag yourself to death trying to get over the pavement,” protested Kildare.
“Oh, I can pick up my feet and make them step,” said Nancy, laughing, and Kildare went gloomily with her toward the excitement.
He had escaped recognition in the restaurant owing to the providential foresight of Weyman, but he could not escape it in the happy, cheerful, milling crowd that filled the street. A hundred people would know him. Weyman and Nick, stepping long and large, went past them, Weyman giving his arm a hard nudge as he moved by. He noticed that with a dull eye of trouble, and then he came with Nancy to the roped-off area. Before him, vaguely, he saw Nick and Weyman separately accosting people, then lost in the mob as he stepped out in the dance with Nancy in his arms.
He had not taken ten steps with her when a twelve-year-old lad pointed a sudden arm at him and cried: “Hey! Look at…”
His partner, a freckle-faced, scrawny little girl, slapped him suddenly across the mouth; they whirled away into the crowd.
“What in the world was the matter with that boy?” asked Nancy.
“He didn’t like my dancing steps,” said Kildare. “And his partner thought he was being rude. Wasn’t that it?”
“No, I think they like the way you dance; or else they like you, Johnny,” said the girl. “Every one of those children has a smile when we go past them.”
Half of them, in fact, were gaping and grinning at Kildare as he moved slowly on with Nancy, but not a word of greeting reached him, not a single voice hailed him by the nickname which they had learned to call him through the district. It came over him suddenly that the word of Nick and Weyman already had been passed from mouth to mouth through the entire throng—the “doc” wished to walk invisible tonight, and they were willing to play the game for him with all their might. The older lads and girls grew elaborately unaware of him as he came near; the very children managed to keep their voices still even if they could not turn their eyes away. Nancy had her own interpretation.
“We amuse the children,” she said, “but the grown-ups don’t like us. They want to have their good time to themselves and to them we’re intruders.”
“I think you’re right, And we’d better go,” said Kildare.
“I wouldn’t go for worlds,” she answered. “There’s something queer about the way they treat us, and I want to find out what it is. A lot of them simply fail to see us, for instance. We might as well be two ghosts, Johnny. Do you notice?”
“We don’t belong. That may be it,” agreed Kildare.