"Lord! I'm comfortable enough," said the navvy. "Never felt better in my life."
Turning to me, the doctor lowered his voice. "He might have died while that fool conduct–guard was saying his piece. I've fixed him, though. The stuff's due in about five minutes, but there's a heap to him. I don't see how we can make him take exercise."
For the moment I felt as though seven pounds of crushed ice had been neatly applied in the form of a compress to my lower stomach.
"How—how did you manage it?" I gasped.
"I asked him if he'd have a drink. He was knocking spots out of the car—strength of his constitution, I suppose. He said he'd go 'most anywhere for a drink, so I lured onto the platform, and loaded him up. 'Cold–blooded people, you Britishers are. That train's gone, and no one seemed to care a cent."
"We've missed it," I said.
He looked at me curiously.
"We'll get another before sundown, if that's your only trouble. Say, porter, when's the next train down?"
"Seven forty–five," said the one porter, and passed out through the wicket–gate into the landscape. It was then three–twenty of a hot and sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The navvy had closed his eyes, and now nodded.
"That's bad," said the doctor. "The man, I mean, not the train. We must make him walk somehow—walk up and down."
Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and the doctor from New York turned a full bronze–green. Then he swore comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Constitution, cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through its most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench next to the sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw treachery in his eye.
What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I cannot tell. They say a slight noise rouses a sleeper more surely than a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves than the giant waked and seized that silk–faced collar in a hot right hand. There was rage in his face–rage and the realisation of new emotions.
"I'm—I'm not so comfortable as I were," he said from the deeps of his interior. "You'll wait along o' me, you will." He breathed heavily through shut lips.
Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor had dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential law–abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much–misrepresented country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a button that irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip, clutch at something, and come away empty.
"He won't kill you," I said. "He'll probably sue you in court, if I know my own people. Better give him some money from time to time."
"If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work," the doctor answered, "I'm all right. If he doesn't…my name is Emory—Julian B. Emory—193 'Steenth Street, corner of Madison and—"
"I feel worse than I've ever felt," said the navvy, with suddenness. "What–did–you–give–me–the–drink–for?"
The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact centre, looked on from afar.
I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle distance, the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame Admiral, if such a place existed, till seven forty–five. The bell of a church invisible clanked softly. There was a rustle in the horse–chestnuts to the left of the line, and the sound of sheep cropping close.
The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty–shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through space. If we impinge never so slightly upon the life of a fellow–mortal, the touch of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens and widens in unending circles across the aeons, till the far–off Gods themselves cannot say where action ceases. Also, it was I who had silently set before the doctor the tumbler of the first–class lavatory compartment now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at least, a million leagues removed from that unhappy man of another nationality, who had chosen to thrust an inexpert finger into the workings of an alien life. The machinery was dragging him up and down the sunlit platform. The two men seemed to be learning polka–mazurkas together, and the burden of their song, borne by one deep voice, was: "What did you give me the drink for?"
I saw the flash of silver in the doctor's hand. The navvy took it and pocketed it with his left; but never for an instant did his strong right leave the doctor's coat–collar, and as the crisis approached, louder and louder rose his bull–like roar: "What did you give me the drink for?"
They drifted under the great twelve–inch pinned timbers of the foot–bridge towards the bench, and, I gathered, the time was very near at hand. The stuff was getting in its work. Blue, white, and blue again, rolled over the navvy's face in waves, till all settled to one rich clay–bank yellow and—that fell which fell.
I thought of the blowing up of Hell Gate; of the geysers in the Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale: but the lively original, as I watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things. He staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron cramps into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand. It quivered and shook, as a breakwater–pile quivers to the rush of landward–racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his breath, the "scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the tide." His right hand was upon the doctor's collar, so that the two shook to one paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook with them.
It was colossal–immense; but of certain manifestations the English language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, huskily, as the wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously enough, he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the rest. The doctor exhibited gold. It was taken and retained. So, too, was the grip on the coat–collar.
"If I could stand," boomed the giant, despairingly, "I'd smash you—you an' your drinks. I'm dyin'—dyin'—dyin'!"
"That's what you think," said the doctor. "You'll find it will do you a lot of good"; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity, he added: "I'll stay by you. If you'd let go of me a minute I'd give you something that would settle you."
"You've settled me now, you damned anarchist. Takin' the bread out of the mouth of an English workin'man! But I'll keep 'old of you till I'm well or dead. I never did you no 'arm. S'pose I were a little full. They pumped me out once at Guy's with a stummick–pump. I could see that, but I can't see this 'ere, an' it's killin' of me by slow degrees."
"You'll be all right in half–an–hour. What do you suppose I'd want to kill you for?" said the doctor, who came of a logical breed.
"'Ow do I know? Tell 'em in court. You'll get seven years for this, you body–snatcher. That's what you are—a bloomin' bodysnatcher. There's justice, I tell you, in England; and my Union'll prosecute, too. We don't stand no tricks with people's insides 'ere. They give a woman ten years for a sight less than this. An' you'll 'ave to pay 'undreds an' 'undreds o' pounds, besides a pension to the missus. You'll see, you physickin' furriner. Where's your licence to do such? You'll catch it, I tell you!"