VI
Bunny didn’t expect to find Paul, but there he lay, flat on his back, with several people bending over him. His left eye was a mass of blood, and seemed as if destroyed by a blow; he lay, limp and motionless, and when Bunny called his name he did not answer. But he was alive, gasping with a kind of snoring sound.
A doctor! A doctor! There were several in the neighborhood, and people rushed away to look for them. From the days of Bunny’s residence in Beach City he knew the name of a surgeon, and hurried to a phone, and was so fortunate as to find the surgeon at home. Bunny told what had happened, and the other said he would come at once; in the case of injury to skull or other bones, X-ray pictures would be needed, so he gave the name of doctors who did such work, and Bunny did more telephoning, and arranged for one of these to be at his laboratory and await developments. Also he ordered an ambulance from a hospital.
Then back to the hall, where Paul lay in the same condition. Rachel had laid a clean handkerchief over the battered eye, and put a pillow under his head. The other victims had been carried away, and the door of the wrecked hall shut against the curious crowd.
The surgeon came, and said it was concussion of the brain. There was evidence of a heavy blow at the base of the skull—either Paul had been struck in the eye, and had hit the back of his head in falling, or else he had been knocked down by a blow from behind, and later struck or trampled over the eye. The first thing was a picture; so the unconscious body was taken to the X-ray laboratory, and pictures were made, and the surgeon showed Bunny and Rachel the line of a fracture at the base of the skull, running to the front above the oral cavity. There was nothing to be done, it was impossible to operate in such a place. It was a question of how the brain had been affected, and as to that only time could tell. They must keep the patient quiet.
There was a private hospital in the town; so before long Paul was lying on a bed, with a bandage over his eye, and his head in a sling to avoid pressure on the injured place; and Bunny and Rachel were sitting by the bedside, gazing mournfully. Womanlike, Rachel was reading his thoughts. “Dear heart, are you going to blame yourself all your life because you didn’t rush in and get your skull broken, too?” No, he couldn’t have prevented the harm, he knew it; but oh, why did it have to be Paul’s brain—the best brain that Bunny had ever known! He sat with a horrified, brooding stare.
But there was another ordeal to be faced. Rachel reminded him, “We’ve got to tell Ruth.” She offered to attend to it, to spare his feelings. She got her brother Jacob on the phone—he had just got home from a committee meeting, and now he must call a taxi, and drive to Ruth’s home and bring her to the harbor.
Two hours later Ruth came running up the stairs, her face like a mask of fright. “How is he? How is he?” When she entered the room, and saw Paul, she stopped. “Oh, what is it?” And when they told her—“Is he going to live?” She drew nearer, never taking her eyes off his face. Her hands would stretch out to him, and then draw back, because she might not touch him; they would go out again, as if they had a will of their own. Suddenly her knees gave way, and she sank to the floor, and covered her face with her hands, sobbing, sobbing.
They tried to comfort her, but she hardly knew they were there. She was alone, in the dreadful corridors of grief. Bunny, watching her, felt hot tears stealing down his cheeks. It wasn’t natural for a girl to feel that way about a brother, Vee had said; but Bunny knew how it was—Ruth was back in those childhood days on the lonely hills of Paradise, when Paul had been her only friend, a refuge from a family of fanatics, with a father who beat her to make her think like him. Back there she had known that Paul was a great man, and had followed him all these years; she had watched his mind unfolding, and learned everything she knew from it—and now, to see it destroyed by a brute with a piece of iron pipe!