“You're giving me a terrible responsibility, Tillie, if you're asking my
advice.”
“No'm. I'm asking what you'd do if it happened to you. Suppose you had
no people that cared anything about you, nobody to disgrace, and all
your life nobody had really cared anything about you. And then a chance
like this came along. What would you do?”
“I don't know,” said poor Harriet. “It seems to me--I'm afraid I'd be
tempted. It does seem as if a woman had the right to be happy, even
if--”
Her own words frightened her. It was as if some hidden self, and not
she, had spoken. She hastened to point out the other side of the matter,
the insecurity of it, the disgrace. Like K., she insisted that no right
can be built out of a wrong. Tillie sat and smoothed her gloves. At
last, when Harriet paused in sheer panic, the girl rose.
“I know how you feel, and I don't want you to take the responsibility of
advising me,” she said quietly. “I guess my mind was made up anyhow. But
before I did it I just wanted to be sure that a decent woman would think
the way I do about it.”
And so, for a time, Tillie went out of the life of the Street as she
went out of Harriet's handsome rooms, quietly, unobtrusively, with calm
purpose in her eyes.
There were other changes in the Street. The Lorenz house was being
painted for Christine's wedding. Johnny Rosenfeld, not perhaps of the
Street itself, but certainly pertaining to it, was learning to drive
Palmer Howe's new car, in mingled agony and bliss. He walked along the
Street, not “right foot, left foot,” but “brake foot, clutch foot,” and
took to calling off the vintage of passing cars. “So-and-So 1910,”
he would say, with contempt in his voice. He spent more than he could
afford on a large streamer, meant to be fastened across the rear of the
automobile, which said, “Excuse our dust,” and was inconsolable when
Palmer refused to let him use it.
K. had yielded to Anna's insistence, and was boarding as well as
rooming at the Page house. The Street, rather snobbish to its occasional
floating population, was accepting and liking him. It found him tender,
infinitely human. And in return he found that this seemingly empty eddy
into which he had drifted was teeming with life. He busied himself with
small things, and found his outlook gradually less tinged with despair.
When he found himself inclined to rail, he organized a baseball
club, and sent down to everlasting defeat the Linburgs, consisting of
cash-boys from Linden and Hofburg's department store.
The Rosenfelds adored him, with the single exception of the head of
the family. The elder Rosenfeld having been “sent up,” it was K. who
discovered that by having him consigned to the workhouse his family
would receive from the county some sixty-five cents a day for his labor.
As this was exactly sixty-five cents a day more than he was worth to
them free, Mrs. Rosenfeld voiced the pious hope that he be kept there
forever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account