CHAPTER XXIX
Late September had come, with the Street, after its summer indolence taking up the burden of the year. At eight-thirty and at one the school bell called the children. Little girls in pig-tails, carrying freshly sharpened pencils, went primly toward the school, gathering, comet fashion, a tail of unwilling brothers as they went.
An occasional football hurtled through the air. Le Moyne had promised the baseball club a football outfit, rumor said, but would not coach them himself this year. A story was going about that Mr. Le Moyne intended to go away.
The Street had been furiously busy for a month. The cobblestones had gone, and from curb to curb stretched smooth asphalt. The fascination of writing on it with chalk still obsessed the children. Every few yards was a hop-scotch diagram. Generally speaking, too, the Street had put up new curtains, and even, here and there, had added a coat of paint.
To this general excitement the strange case of Mr. Le Moyne had added its quota. One day he was in the gas office, making out statements that were absolutely ridiculous. (What with no baking all last month, and every Sunday spent in the country, nobody could have used that amount of gas. They could come and take their old meter out!) And the next there was the news that Mr. Le Moyne had been only taking a holiday in the gas office,—paying off old scores, the barytone at Mrs. McKee's hazarded!—and that he was really a very great surgeon and had saved Dr. Max Wilson.
The Street, which was busy at the time deciding whether to leave the old sidewalks or to put down cement ones, had one evening of mad excitement over the matter,—of K., not the sidewalks,—and then had accepted the new situation.
But over the news of K.'s approaching departure it mourned. What was the matter with things, anyhow? Here was Christine's marriage, which had promised so well,—awnings and palms and everything,—turning out badly. True, Palmer Howe was doing better, but he would break out again. And Johnny Rosenfeld was dead, so that his mother came on washing-days, and brought no cheery gossip; but bent over her tubs dry-eyed and silent—even the approaching move to a larger house failed to thrill her. There was Tillie, too. But one did not speak of her. She was married now, of course; but the Street did not tolerate such a reversal of the usual processes as Tillie had indulged in. It censured Mrs. McKee severely for having been, so to speak, and accessory after the fact.
The Street made a resolve to keep K., if possible. If he had shown any “high and mightiness,” as they called it, since the change in his estate, it would have let him go without protest. But when a man is the real thing,—so that the newspapers give a column to his having been in the city almost two years,—and still goes about in the same shabby clothes, with the same friendly greeting for every one, it demonstrates clearly, as the barytone put it, that “he's got no swelled head on him; that's sure.”
“Anybody can see by the way he drives that machine of Wilson's that he's been used to a car—likely a foreign one. All the swells have foreign cars.” Still the barytone, who was almost as fond of conversation as of what he termed “vocal.” “And another thing. Do you notice the way he takes Dr. Ed around? Has him at every consultation. The old boy's tickled to death.”