“Very well, Dr. Edwardes.”
The confusion in Sidney’s mind cleared away
suddenly. K. was Dr. Edwardes! It was K.
who had performed the miracle operation—K.
who had dared and perhaps won! Dear K., with
his steady eyes and his long surgeon’s fingers!
Then, because she seemed to see ahead as well as back
into the past in that flash that comes to the drowning
and to those recovering from shock, and because she
knew that now the little house would no longer be home
to K., she turned her face into her pillow and cried.
Her world had fallen indeed. Her lover was
not true and might be dying; her friend would go away
to his own world, which was not the Street.
K. left her at last and went back to Seventeen, where
Dr. Ed still sat by the bed. Inaction was telling
on him. If Max would only open his eyes, so
he could tell him what had been in his mind all these
years—his pride in him and all that.
With a sort of belated desire to make up for where
he had failed, he put the bag that had been Max’s
bete noir on the bedside table, and began to clear
it of rubbish—odd bits of dirty cotton,
the tubing from a long defunct stethoscope, glass
from a broken bottle, a scrap of paper on which was
a memorandum, in his illegible writing, to send Max
a check for his graduating suit. When K. came
in, he had the old dog-collar in his hand.
“Belonged to an old collie of ours,” he
said heavily. “Milkman ran over him and
killed him. Max chased the wagon and licked the
driver with his own whip.”
His face worked.
“Poor old Bobby Burns!” he said.
“We’d raised him from a pup. Got
him in a grape-basket.”
The sick man opened his eyes.
Max had rallied well, and things looked bright for
him. His patient did not need him, but K. was
anxious to find Joe; so he telephoned the gas office
and got a day off. The sordid little tragedy
was easy to reconstruct, except that, like Joe, K.
did not believe in the innocence of the excursion
to Schwitter’s. His spirit was heavy with
the conviction that he had saved Wilson to make Sidney
ultimately wretched.
For the present, at least, K.’s revealed identity
was safe. Hospitals keep their secrets well.
And it is doubtful if the Street would have been
greatly concerned even had it known. It had never
heard of Edwardes, of the Edwardes clinic or the Edwardes
operation. Its medical knowledge comprised the
two Wilsons and the osteopath around the corner.
When, as would happen soon, it learned of Max Wilson’s
injury, it would be more concerned with his chances
of recovery than with the manner of it. That
was as it should be.
But Joe’s affair with Sidney had been the talk
of the neighborhood. If the boy disappeared,
a scandal would be inevitable. Twenty people
had seen him at Schwitter’s and would know him
again.
To save Joe, then, was K.’s first care.
