K Part 51

"I want her to have it," he said. "She got corns on her fingers from rubbing me when I came in first; and, besides--"

"Yes?" said K. He was tying a most complicated knot, and could not look up.

"I know something," said Johnny. "I'm not going to get in wrong by talking, but I know something. You give her the basket."

K. looked up then, and surprised Johnny's secret in his face.

"Ah!" he said.

"If I'd squealed she'd have finished me for good. They've got me, you know. I'm not running in 2.40 these days."

"I'll not tell, or make it uncomfortable for you. What do you know?"

Johnny looked around. The ward was in the somnolence of mid-afternoon.

The nearest patient, a man in a wheel-chair, was snoring heavily.

"It was the dark-eyed one that changed the medicine on me," he said.

"The one with the heels that were always tapping around, waking me up.

She did it; I saw her."

After all, it was only what K. had suspected before. But a sense of impending danger to Sidney obsessed him. If Carlotta would do that, what would she do when she learned of the engagement? And he had known her before. He believed she was totally unscrupulous. The odd coincidence of their paths crossing again troubled him.

Carlotta Harrison was well again, and back on duty. Luckily for Sidney, her three months' service in the operating-room kept them apart. For Carlotta was now not merely jealous. She found herself neglected, ignored. It ate her like a fever.

But she did not yet suspect an engagement. It had been her theory that Wilson would not marry easily--that, in a sense, he would have to be coerced into marriage. Some clever woman would marry him some day, and no one would be more astonished than himself. She thought merely that Sidney was playing a game like her own, with different weapons. So she planned her battle, ignorant that she had lost already.

Her method was simple enough. She stopped sulking, met Max with smiles, made no overtures toward a renewal of their relations. At first this annoyed him. Later it piqued him. To desert a woman was justifiable, under certain circ.u.mstances. But to desert a woman, and have her apparently not even know it, was against the rules of the game.

During a surgical dressing in a private room, one day, he allowed his fingers to touch hers, as on that day a year before when she had taken Miss Simpson's place in his office. He was rewarded by the same slow, smouldering glance that had caught his attention before. So she was only acting indifference!

Then Carlotta made her second move. A new interne had come into the house, and was going through the process of learning that from a senior at the medical school to a half-baked junior interne is a long step back. He had to endure the good-humored contempt of the older men, the patronizing instructions of nurses as to rules.

Carlotta alone treated him with deference. His uneasy rounds in Carlotta's precinct took on the state and form of staff visitations. She flattered, cajoled, looked up to him.

After a time it dawned on Wilson that this junior cub was getting more attention than himself: that, wherever he happened to be, somewhere in the offing would be Carlotta and the Lamb, the latter eyeing her with wors.h.i.+p. Her indifference had only piqued him. The enthroning of a successor galled him. Between them, the Lamb suffered mightily--was subject to frequent "bawling out," as he termed it, in the operating-room as he a.s.sisted the anaesthetist. He took his troubles to Carlotta, who soothed him in the corridor--in plain sight of her quarry, of course--by putting a sympathetic hand on his sleeve.

Then, one day, Wilson was goaded to speech.

"For the love of Heaven, Carlotta," he said impatiently, "stop making love to that wretched boy. He wriggles like a worm if you look at him."

"I like him. He is thoroughly genuine. I respect him, and--he respects me."

"It's rather a silly game, you know."

"What game?"

"Do you think I don't understand?"

"Perhaps you do. I--I don't really care a lot about him, Max. But I've been down-hearted. He cheers me up."

Her attraction for him was almost gone--not quite. He felt rather sorry for her.

"I'm sorry. Then you are not angry with me?"

"Angry? No." She lifted her eyes to his, and for once she was not acting. "I knew it would end, of course. I have lost a--a lover. I expected that. But I wanted to keep a friend."

It was the right note. Why, after all, should he not be her friend? He had treated her cruelly, hideously. If she still desired his friends.h.i.+p, there was no disloyalty to Sidney in giving it. And Carlotta was very careful. Not once again did she allow him to see what lay in her eyes.

She told him of her worries. Her training was almost over. She had a chance to take up inst.i.tutional work. She abhorred the thought of private duty. What would he advise?

The Lamb was hovering near, hot eyes on them both. It was no place to talk.

"Come to the office and we'll talk it over."

"I don't like to go there; Miss Simpson is suspicious."

The inst.i.tution she spoke of was in another city. It occurred to Wilson that if she took it the affair would have reached a graceful and legitimate end.

Also, the thought of another stolen evening alone with her was not unpleasant. It would be the last, he promised himself. After all, it was owing to her. He had treated her badly.

Sidney would be at a lecture that night. The evening loomed temptingly free.

"Suppose you meet me at the old corner," he said carelessly, eyes on the Lamb, who was forgetting that he was only a junior interne and was glaring ferociously. "We'll run out into the country and talk things over."

She demurred, with her heart beating triumphantly.

"What's the use of going back to that? It's over, isn't it?"

Her objection made him determined. When at last she had yielded, and he made his way down to the smoking-room, it was with the feeling that he had won a victory.

K. had been uneasy all that day; his ledgers irritated him. He had been sleeping badly since Sidney's announcement of her engagement. At five o'clock, when he left the office, he found Joe Drummond waiting outside on the pavement.

"Mother said you'd been up to see me a couple of times. I thought I'd come around."

K. looked at his watch.

"What do you say to a walk?"

"Not out in the country. I'm not as muscular as you are. I'll go about town for a half-hour or so."

Thus forestalled, K. found his subject hard to lead up to. But here again Joe met him more than halfway.

"Well, go on," he said, when they found themselves in the park; "I don't suppose you were paying a call."

"No."

"I guess I know what you are going to say."

"I'm not going to preach, if you're expecting that. Ordinarily, if a man insists on making a fool of himself, I let him alone."