Life resumed itself next day as if there had been no dramatic
interlude. Proud of the scrap, as he named it, which had taken place
in his room, Guy made the best of it for all concerned. His version
was tactful, hurting nobody's feelings. The trick on the old man was
a merry one, and after a fight about its humor Tad Whitelaw and the
Whitelaw Baby had run off together to let the old fellow out. Spit
Castle's tapir nose had got badly hurt in the scrimmage, and bled all
over the sofa. The splash of ink on the wall was further evidence that
Guy's room was a rendezvous of sports. But sports being sports the
honors had been even on the whole, and no hard feeling left behind. Tad
and the Whitelaw Baby would now, Guy predicted, be better friends.
But of that there was no sign. There was no sign of anything at all.
When the Whitelaw Baby met the Whitelaw Baby's brother they passed in
exactly the same way as heretofore. You would not have said that the
one was any more conscious of the other than two strangers who pass in
Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue. In Tad there was no show of resentment; in
Tom there was none of pride. As far as Tom was concerned, there was
only a humiliated sense of regret.
And then, in April, life again took another turn. Coming back one day
to his rooms, Tom found a message requesting him to call a number
which he knew to be Mrs. Danker's. His first thought was of Maisie,
with whom his letters had begun to be infrequent. Mrs. Danker told him,
however, that Honey had had an accident. It was a bad accident, how bad
she didn't know. Giving him the name of the hospital to which he had
been taken, she begged him to go to him at once. After all the years
they had lived with Mrs. Danker she considered them almost as relatives.
The hospital, near the foot of Grove Street, preserved the air of the
sedate old Boston of the middle nineteenth century. Its low dome, its
pillared façade, its grounds, its fine old trees, had been familiar to
Tom ever since he had lived on Beacon Hill. In less than an hour after
ringing up Mrs. Danker he was in the office asking for news.
News was scanty. Expecting everyone to understand what he meant to
Honey and Honey meant to him, he had looked for the reception which
friends in trouble and excitement give to the friend who brings his
anxiety to mix with theirs. It would be, "Oh, come in. Poor fellow,
he's suffering terribly. It happened thus and so." But to the interne
in the office, a young man wearing a white jacket, Honey was not so
much as a name. His case was but one among other cases. A good many
came in a day. In a week, or a month, or a year, there was no keeping
account of them, except as they were registered. Individual suffering
was lost sight of in the immense amount of it. But the interne was
polite, and said that if Tom would sit down he would find out.
Among the hardest minutes Tom had ever gone through were those in the
little reception room. Not only was there suspense; there was remorse.
He had treated Honey like a cad. He had never been decent to him. He
had never really been grateful. There had never been a minute, in the
whole of the nearly six years they had lived together, in which he had
not been sorry, either consciously or subconsciously, at being mixed up
with an ex-convict. It was the ex-convict he had always seen before he
had seen the friend.
A second interne wearing a white jacket came to question him, to ask
him who he was, and the nature of his business with the patient. If he
was only a friend he could hardly expect to see him. The man was under
opiates, he needed to be kept quiet.
"What's happened? What's the matter with him? I can't find out."
The interne didn't know exactly. He had been crushed. He was injured
internally. The cause of the accident he hadn't heard.
"Could I see his nurse?"
There was more difficulty about that, but in the end he was taken
upstairs, where the nurse came out to the corridor to speak to him.
She was a competent, businesslike woman, with none of the emotion
at contact with pain which Tom thought must be part of a nurse's
equipment. But she could tell him nothing definite. Not having been on
duty when the case had been brought in, she had heard no more than the
facts essential to what she had to do.
"Do you think he'll die?"
"You'd have to ask the doctor that. He's not dead now. That's about as
much as I can say." At sight of the big handsome fellow's distress she
partly relented. "You may come in and look at him. You mustn't try to
speak to him."
He followed her into a long ward, with an odor of disinfectant.
White beds, mostly occupied, lined each wall. Here and there was one
surrounded by a set of screens, partially secluding a sufferer. At one
such set they stopped. Through an opening between two screens Tom was
allowed to look at Honey who lay with face upturned, and no sign of
pain on the features. He slept as Tom had seen him sleep hundreds of
times when he expected to get up again next morning. The difference was
in the expectation of getting up. Blinded by tears, Tom tiptoed away.
When he came next day the effect of the opiate had worn off, and yet
not wholly. Honey turned his head at his approach and smiled. Sitting
beside the bed, Tom took the big, calloused hand lying outside the
coverlet, and held it in his own relatively tender one. More than
ever it was borne in on him at whose cost that tenderness had been
maintained. Honey liked to have his hand held. A part of the wall of
aloofness with which he had kept himself surrounded seemed to have
broken down.
A little incoherently he told what had happened. He had been stowing
packing-cases in the hold of a big ship. The packing-cases were lowered
by a crane. The crane as a rule was a good old thing, slow paced,
gentle, safe. But this time something seemed to have gone wrong with
her. Though his back was turned, Honey knew by the shadow above him
that she was at her work. When he had got into its niche the case with
which he was busy he would swing round and seize the new one. And then
he heard a shout. It was a shout from the dock, and didn't disturb him.
He was about to turn when something fell. It struck him in the back. It
was all he knew. He thought he remembered the blow, but was not certain
whether he did or not. When he "came to" he had already been moved to
the shed, and was waiting for the ambulance. He seemed not to have a
body any more. He was only a head, like one of them there angels in a
picture, with wings beneath their chins.
He laughed at that, and with the laugh the nurse took Tom away; but
when he came back on the following day Honey's mind was clearer.
"I've made me will long ago," he said, when Tom had given him such bits
of news as he asked for. "It's all legal and reg'lar. Had a lawyer fix
it up. Never told yer nothink about it. Everythink left to you."
"Oh, Honey, don't let us talk about that. You'll be up and around in a
week or so."
"Sure I'll be up and around. Yer don't think a little thing like this
is goin' to bust me. Why, I don't feel 'ardly nothink, not below the
neck. All the same, it can't do no harm for you to know what's likely
to be what. If I was to croak, which I don't intend to, yer'd have
about sixteen hundred dollars what I've saved to finish yer eddication
on. The will is in the bottom of me trunk at Danker's."
On another day he said, "If anyone was to pop up and say I owed 'em
that money, because I took it from 'em...."
He held the sentence there, leaving Tom to wonder if he had thoughts of
restitution, or possibly of repentance.
"I don't owe 'em nothink," he ended. "Belonged to me just as much as it
belonged to them. Nothink don't belong to nobody. I never was able to
figger it out just the way I wanted to, because I ain't never had no
eddication; but Gord's lor I believes it is. Never could get the 'ang
o' the lor o' man, not nohow."
To comfort him, Tom suggested that perhaps when he got through college
he might be able to take the subject up.
"I wouldn't bind yer to it, Kiddy. Tough job! Why, when I give up
socializin' to try and win over some o' them orthodocks I thought as
they'd jump to 'ear me. Not a bit of it! The more I told 'em that
nothink didn't belong to nobody the more they said I was a nut."
Having lain silent for a minute he continued, with that light in his
face which corresponded to a wink of the blind eye: "I don't bind yer
to nothink, Kiddy. That's what I've always wanted yer to feel. You're a
free boy. When I'm up and around again, and yer've got yer eddication,
and have gone out on yer own, yer won't have me a-'angin' on yer 'ands.
No, sir! I'll be off--free as a bird--back with the old gang again--and
yer needn't be worried a-thinkin' I'll miss you--nor nothink!"
It was a few days after this that the businesslike nurse who had first
admitted him hinted that, if she were Tom, Honey would have a clergyman
come to visit him. A few days more and it might be too late.
Honey with a clergyman! It was something Tom had never thought of.
The incongruous combination made him smile. Nevertheless, it was
what people who were dying had--a clergyman come to visit them. If a
clergyman could do Honey any good....
"Honey," he suggested, artfully, next day, "now that you're pinned
to bed for awhile, and have got the time, wouldn't you like to see a
clergyman sometimes, and talk things over?"
There was again that light in the face which took the place of a wink.
"What things?"