K Part 43

"You're very good to me, Mr. Le Moyne," she said. "I don't wish the poor soul any harm, but--oh, my G.o.d! if she's going, let it be before the next four months are over."

K. had fallen into the habit, after his long walks, of dropping into Christine's little parlor for a chat before he went upstairs. Those early spring days found Harriet Kennedy busy late in the evenings, and, save for Christine and K., the house was practically deserted.

The breach between Palmer and Christine was steadily widening. She was too proud to ask him to spend more of his evenings with her. On those occasions when he voluntarily stayed at home with her, he was so discontented that he drove her almost to distraction. Although she was convinced that he was seeing nothing of the girl who had been with him the night of the accident, she did not trust him. Not that girl, perhaps, but there were others. There would always be others.

Into Christine's little parlor, then, K. turned, the evening after he had seen Tillie. She was reading by the lamp, and the door into the hall stood open.

"Come in," she said, as he hesitated in the doorway.

"I am frightfully dusty."

"There's a brush in the drawer of the hat-rack--although I don't really mind how you look."

The little room always cheered K. Its warmth and light appealed to his aesthetic sense; after the bareness of his bedroom, it spelled luxury.

And perhaps, to be entirely frank, there was more than physical comfort and satisfaction in the evenings he spent in Christine's firelit parlor.

He was entirely masculine, and her evident pleasure in his society gratified him. He had fallen into a way of thinking of himself as a sort of older brother to all the world because he was a sort of older brother to Sidney. The evenings with her did something to reinstate him in his own self-esteem. It was subtle, psychological, but also it was very human.

"Come and sit down," said Christine. "Here's a chair, and here are cigarettes and there are matches. Now!"

But, for once, K. declined the chair. He stood in front of the fireplace and looked down at her, his head bent slightly to one side.

"I wonder if you would like to do a very kind thing," he said unexpectedly.

"Make you coffee?"

"Something much more trouble and not so pleasant."

Christine glanced up at him. When she was with him, when his steady eyes looked down at her, small affectations fell away. She was more genuine with K. than with anyone else, even herself.

"Tell me what it is, or shall I promise first?"

"I want you to promise just one thing: to keep a secret."

"Yours?"

Christine was not over-intelligent, perhaps, but she was shrewd. That Le Moyne's past held a secret she had felt from the beginning. She sat up with eager curiosity.

"No, not mine. Is it a promise?"

"Of course."

"I've found Tillie, Christine. I want you to go out to see her."

Christine's red lips parted. The Street did not go out to see women in Tillie's situation.

"But, K.!" she protested.

"She needs another woman just now. She's going to have a child, Christine; and she has had no one to talk to but her hus--but Mr.

Schwitter and myself. She is depressed and not very well."

"But what shall I say to her? I'd really rather not go, K. Not,"

she hastened to set herself right in his eyes--"not that I feel any unwillingness to see her. I know you understand that. But--what in the world shall I say to her?"

"Say what your own kind heart prompts."

It had been rather a long time since Christine had been accused of having a kind heart. Not that she was unkind, but in all her self-centered young life there had been little call on her sympathies.

Her eyes clouded.

"I wish I were as good as you think I am."

There was a little silence between them. Then Le Moyne spoke briskly:--

"I'll tell you how to get there; perhaps I would better write it."

He moved over to Christine's small writing-table and, seating himself, proceeded to write out the directions for reaching Hillfoot.

Behind him, Christine had taken his place on the hearth-rug and stood watching his head in the light of the desk-lamp. "What a strong, quiet face it is," she thought. Why did she get the impression of such a tremendous reserve power in this man who was a clerk, and a clerk only?

Behind him she made a quick, unconscious gesture of appeal, both hands out for an instant. She dropped them guiltily as K. rose with the paper in his hand.

"I've drawn a sort of map of the roads," he began. "You see, this--"

Christine was looking, not at the paper, but up at him.

"I wonder if you know, K.," she said, "what a lucky woman the woman will be who marries you?"

He laughed good-humoredly.

"I wonder how long I could hypnotize her into thinking that."

He was still holding out the paper.

"I've had time to do a little thinking lately," she said, without bitterness. "Palmer is away so much now. I've been looking back, wondering if I ever thought that about him. I don't believe I ever did.

I wonder--"

She checked herself abruptly and took the paper from his hand.

"I'll go to see Tillie, of course," she consented. "It is like you to have found her."

She sat down. Although she picked up the book that she had been reading with the evident intention of discussing it, her thoughts were still on Tillie, on Palmer, on herself. After a moment:--

"Has it ever occurred to you how terribly mixed up things are? Take this Street, for instance. Can you think of anybody on it that--that things have gone entirely right with?"

"It's a little world of its own, of course," said K., "and it has plenty of contact points with life. But wherever one finds people, many or few, one finds all the elements that make up life--joy and sorrow, birth and death, and even tragedy. That's rather trite, isn't it?"

Christine was still pursuing her thoughts.

"Men are different," she said. "To a certain extent they make their own fates. But when you think of the women on the Street,--Tillie, Harriet Kennedy, Sidney Page, myself, even Mrs. Rosenfeld back in the alley,--somebody else moulds things for us, and all we can do is to sit back and suffer. I am beginning to think the world is a terrible place, K. Why do people so often marry the wrong people? Why can't a man care for one woman and only one all his life? Why--why is it all so complicated?"

"There are men who care for only one woman all their lives."