‘So I see,’ said Richard drily, ‘and going at a good pace.’
‘To the hospital,’ added the runner.
Storm clutched his arm. ‘Nothing wrong at Littlegate, I hope?’
‘Nothing that I know of. It’s my mother — an accident — at least I’m afraid so. Shall know soon.’
Somehow it gave Richard a most curious feeling to think of this troublesome youth possessed of a mother — and a mother who’d had an accident.
From being an irritating automaton to be kicked out of the way, he suddenly became a human person with a skin that could be pricked, with flesh that could bleed.
‘Oh I am so very sorry!’ he murmured sympathetically. ‘I hope it’s nothing serious — but of course, as you say, you don’t know. Have you only just heard by wire or something?’
‘Walk a little faster, do you mind?’ was the youth’s response.
Richard quickened his pace. ‘I can run with you for a bit if you like,’ he said.
‘No! No! Get my breath. Can’t go it like that all the way. Make no difference.’
‘Does your mother live in this neighbourhood?’ inquired the older man as they strode along side by side.
‘Here?’ Oh no! London. Maida Vale. That’s what the paper said. That’s what’s made me afraid it is her.’
And the youth explained briefly to his companion by what chance he had learned of the accident.
Richard insisted upon falling into a dog-trot with him; and thus they soon arrived at the outskirts of the town. ‘May I come with you to the hospital?’ he asked panting, when they had secured directions as to its whereabouts. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance or to intrude — but I might be of service — one never can tell.’
Canyot expressed himself as grateful for the offer; and a little later they mounted side by side the steps of the quiet, unprofessional-looking building where Selshurst tended its sick.
A short hurried interview at the office in the hallway satisfied the young man that it really was his mother who had met with the injury.
‘I’ll wait for you here,’ said Richard, noticing with sympathetic alarm that the boy’s face had grown suddenly white when he had finished his interview and obtained permission to see the patient.
Canyot nodded to him in a dazed sort of way, and accompanied by a stolid attendant disappeared in the lift.
The writer sank down on a bench in the lobby and fell into nervous and troubled thought.
From the interior of the newly painted lift, as it carried the youth out of his sight, had been wafted that well-known smell of ether, reminding him painfully of old wartime tragedies.
The coming and going of uniformed nurses, scared white-faced visitors, silent impassive officials, deepened his sense of depression and gloom.
All his recent irresponsibility left him, like something shallow and out of place, and the time-old weight of humanity’s bitter lot upon earth laid its burden upon him.
He realized then clearly enough where it was that he had failed hitherto in his attempts after a more enduring poetic method. He had contented himself with isolated ‘occasional’ poems; forgetting that it is only in a certain accumulated weight of human vision, carried steadily on in a premeditated direction, that any value beyond mere nuances of technique is attained.
And as he sat waiting, full of genuine anxiety as to what the young man might be finding up there in some bare cabin of that great ship of human wreckage, it came vividly upon him that he could never fight quite freely, quite unscrupulously for his own hand and his own pleasure, in a world where all men are bitten by the same adder’s tooth.
He made no vow, he registered no purpose, but he made a note of the fact that in a place like this those were lucky, both among such as suffered and such as served, who had hands tolerably clean of their fellows’ blood; blood that needed no outward sign of its shedding!
He kept his eye on that fatal lift as it went up and down, the very look of its white paint suggestive of the smell of disaster; and his heart beat a little each time it discharged any person not in hospital dress.
He could not help being thankful that he himself had neither parent nor child — those all too fragile links in the great chain of the world’s suffering!
At last the figure Storm looked for did actually appear.
He knew at once from the way the boy approached him that his mother was dead. Two great strands of his tow-coloured hair hung limp over his forehead. His cheeks were tear-stained. His mouth twitched.
He sat down on the bench by Richard’s side without a word and stared straight in front of him, his solitary hand resting upon his knee.
Richard in the helplessness of an outsider touched this great fist and closed his fingers over it.
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid things are bad.’
‘She’s gone,’ the boy muttered without moving a muscle.
‘Did she know you?’ asked Richard.
The young man choked and bit his lip to keep down his sobs. With a fierce effort, shaking his heavy head like a bewildered animal, he turned and looked at the writer, great globular tears running down his cheeks and falling upon the collar of his coat.
Yes! she knew me. They say it was a miracle. She wouldn’t let herself go till I’d come to her. She came down to bring me something; she thought it was fame for me at last; an exhibition in New York — a silly invitation. It was just like her to want to bring it to me herself. But what’s the damned thing to me now?’
He made an effort to smile and the contortion of his queer corrugated countenance was piteous. ‘Oh mother!’ he cried stretching his one arm straight out in front of him with the fingers clenched. Then he pulled himself gallantly together and looked quietly and directly into his companion’s face. ‘You must excuse me,’ he said. She was awfully fond of me. She had no one else.’
A hospital nurse with a kind nun-like face approached them. ‘We’re ready for you,’ she said with a sort of wan smile that seemed to Richard as if it were the final indictment of a grief-exhausted planet, addressed to the Unknown.
The youth moved away with her and then suddenly turned and came back.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said, holding out his hand.
Chapter 6
The sudden catastrophe that had overtaken Mr Canyot produced many drastic effects upon the lives of those whom destiny had entangled with his life.
Soon after his departure to London to superintend his mother’s funeral and to settle his business matters and the disposal of the poor lady’s small possessions, Richard received a surprising letter from him, addressed to the Crown Inn.
‘Dear Mr Storm,’ the letter ran. ‘It may seem to you a laughable thing that I should write like this, but I want you to feel quite free as far as I am concerned. You well know what I mean by free. I’ve written to Miss Moreton, sending back certain little things she’d given me, and have asked her to do the same. It is not your fault that you’ve come between us. It has just happened so. I am writing to you like this because Miss Moreton seems for some reason reluctant to return me what I asked for and I attribute her reluctance to pity. She pities me. This I cannot endure. I will not be the person to take advantage of a great loss to soften a girl’s heart where it really belongs to someone else. I shall come down and say goodbye before I start for America; by which time she will have to choose definitely between us. But I did not wish, especially after your kindness to me at the hospital to leave you with the feeling that you also, out of pity, must leave things as they were. I don’t want pity from anybody. I don’t want to bind anybody. I’ve lived till now for my work; and I can continue to do so. If however, by any chance in which I cannot believe, you are trifling with Nelly, you may count on it you will have me to deal with. She has no mother and you have seen what her father is like. But I won’t have our engagement kept on out of pity. I won’t have it! Yours, with gratitude for your kindness, Robert Canyot.’