kitchen, poured the milk into pans, and rinsed the buckets, working methodically in his heavy way. The tea-kettle had boiled dry. He filled that, too. Then:—
“Do you want to see a doctor?”
“I’d better see somebody,” she said, without looking up. “And—don’t think I’m blaming you. I guess I don’t really blame anybody. As far as that goes, I’ve wanted a child right along. It isn’t the trouble I am thinking of either.”
He nodded. Words were unnecessary between them. He made some tea clumsily and browned her a piece of toast. When he had put them on one end of the kitchen table, he went over to her again.
“I guess I’d ought to have thought of this before, but all I thought of was trying to get a little happiness out of life. And,”—he stroked her arm,—“as far as I am concerned, it’s been worth while, Tillie. No matter what I’ve had to do, I’ve always looked forward to coming back here to you in the evening. Maybe I don’t say it enough, but I guess you know I feel it all right.”
Without looking up, she placed her hand over his.
“I guess we started wrong,” he went on. “You can’t build happiness on what isn’t right. You and I can manage well enough; but now that there’s going to be another, it looks different, somehow.”
After that morning Tillie took up her burden stoically. The hope of motherhood alternated with black fits of depression. She sang at her work, to burst out into sudden tears.
Other things were not going well. Schwitter had given up his nursery business; but the motorists who came to Hillfoot did not come back. When, at last, he took the horse and buggy and drove about the country for orders, he was too late. Other nurserymen had been before him; shrubberies and orchards were already being set out. The second payment on his mortgage would be due in July. By the middle of May they were frankly up against it. Schwitter at last dared to put the situation into words.
“We’re not making good, Til,” he said. “And I guess you know the reason. We are too decent; that’s what’s the matter with us.” There was no irony in his words.
With all her sophistication, Tillie was vastly ignorant of life. He had to explain.
“We’ll have to keep a sort of hotel,” he said lamely. “Sell to everybody that comes along, and—if parties want to stay over-night—”
Tillie’s white face turned crimson.
He attempted a compromise. “If it’s bad weather, and they’re married—”
“How are we to know if they are married or not?”
He admired her very much for it. He had always respected her. But the situation was not less acute. There were two or three unfurnished rooms on the second floor. He began to make tentative suggestions as to their furnishing. Once he got a catalogue from an installment house, and tried to hide it from her. Tillie’s eyes blazed. She burned it in the kitchen stove.
Schwitter himself was ashamed; but the idea obsessed him. Other people fattened on the frailties of human nature. Two miles away, on the other road, was a public house that had netted the owner ten thousand dollars profit the year before. They bought their beer from the same concern. He was not as young as he had been; there was the expense of keeping his wife—he had never allowed her to go into the charity ward at the asylum. Now that there was going to be a child, there would be three people dependent upon him. He was past fifty, and not robust.
One night, after Tillie was asleep, he slipped noiselessly into his clothes and out to the barn, where he hitched up the horse with nervous fingers.
Tillie never learned of that midnight excursion to the “Climbing Rose,” two miles away. Lights blazed in every window; a dozen automobiles were parked before the barn. Somebody was playing a piano. From the bar came the jingle of glasses and loud, cheerful conversation.
When Schwitter turned the horse’s head back toward Hillfoot, his mind was made up. He would furnish the upper rooms; he would bring a barkeeper from town—these people wanted mixed drinks; he could get a second- hand piano somewhere.
Tillie’s rebellion was instant and complete. When she found him determined, she made the compromise that her condition necessitated. She could not leave him, but she would not stay in the rehabilitated little house. When, a week after Schwitter’s visit to the “Climbing Rose,” an installment van arrived from town with the new furniture, Tillie moved out to what had been the harness-room of the old barn and there established herself.
“I am not leaving you,” she told him. “I don’t even know that I am blaming you. But I am not going to have anything to do with it, and that’s flat.”
So it happened that K., making a spring pilgrimage to see Tillie, stopped astounded in the road. The weather was warm, and he carried his Norfolk coat over his arm. The little house was bustling; a dozen automobiles were parked in the barnyard. The bar was crowded, and a barkeeper in a white coat was mixing drinks with the casual indifference of his kind. There were tables under the trees on the lawn, and a new sign on the gate.
Even Schwitter bore a new look of prosperity. Over his schooner of beer K. gathered something of the story.
“I’m not proud of it, Mr. Le Moyne. I’ve come to do a good many things the last year or so that I never thought I would do. But one thing leads to another. First I took Tillie away from her good position, and after that nothing went right. Then there were things coming on”—he looked at K. anxiously—“that meant more expense. I would be glad if you wouldn’t say anything about it at Mrs. McKee’s.”
“I’ll not speak of it, of course.”
It was then, when K. asked for Tillie, that Mr. Schwitter’s unhappiness became more apparent.
“She wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “She moved out the day I furnished the rooms upstairs and got the piano.”
“Do you mean she has gone?”
“As far as the barn. She wouldn’t stay in the house. I—I’ll take you out there, if you would like to see her.”
