And yet Honey and he were bound to grow apart. It was in the nature of the case that it should be so. Always of a texture finer than Honey's, schooling, association, and habits of mind were working together to refine the grain, while Honey was growing coarser. His work, Tom reasoned, kept him not only in a rut but in a brutalizing rut. Loading and unloading, unloading and re-loading, he had less use for his mind than in the days of his freebooting. Then a wild ass of the desert, he was now harnessed to a dray with no relief from hauling it. From morning to night he hauled; from night to morning he was stupefied with weariness. In on this stupefaction Tom found it more and more difficult to break. He was agog with interests and ideas; for neither interests nor ideas had Honey any room.
Nor had he, so far as Tom could judge, any room for affection. On the contrary, he repelled it. "Don't you go for to think that I've give up bein' a socialist because I got a soft side. No, sir! That wouldn't be it at all. What reely made me do it was because it didn't pay. I'd make big money now and then; but once I'd fixed the police, the lawyers, and nine times out o' ten the judge, I wouldn't have hardly nothink for meself. If out o' every hundred dollars I was able to pocket twenty-five it'd be as much as ever. This 'ere job don't pay as well to start with; but then it haven't no expenses."
Self-interest and a vague sense of responsibility were all he ever admitted as a key to his benevolence. "It's along o' my bein' an Englishman. You can't get an Englishman 'ardly ever to be satisfied a'mindin' of his own business. Ten to one he'll do that and mind somebody else's at the same time. A kind o' curse that's on 'em, I often thinks. Once when I was doin' a bit—might 'a been at Sing Sing—a guy come along to entertain us. Recited poetry at us. And I recolleck he chewed to beat the band over a piece he called, 'The White Man's Burden.' Well, that's what you are, Kid. You're my White Man's Burden. I can't chuck yer, nor nothink. I just got to carry yer till yer can git along without me; and then I'll quit. The old bunch'll be as glad to see me back as I'll be to go. There's just one thing I want yer to remember, Kid, that when yer've got yer eddication there won't be nothink to bind me to you, nor—" he held himself very straight, bringing out his words with a brutal firmness—"nor you to me. Yer'll know I'll be as glad to go the one way as you'll be to go the t'other, so there won't be no 'ard feelin' on both sides."
It was a Sunday night. Tom had taken his troubles to bed with him, because he had nowhere else to take them. In bed you struck a truce with life. You suspended operations, at least for a few hours. You could sleep; you could postpone. He slept as a rule so soundly, and so straight through the night, that, hunted as he was by care, he had once in the twenty-four hours a refuge in which the fiendish thing couldn't overtake him.
It had been a trying Sunday because Maisie had tempted him to a wilder than usual extravagance. There was enough snow on the ground for sleighing. She had been used to sleighing in Nashua. The singing of runners and the jingling of bells, as a sleigh slid joyously past her, awakened her longing for the sport. By coaxing, by teasing, by crying a little, and, worst of all, by making game of him, she had induced him to find a place where he could hire a sleigh and take her for a ride.
Snow having turned to rain, and rain to frost, the landscape through which they drove was made of crystal. Every tree was as a tree of glass, sparkling in the sun. A deep blue sky, a keen dry wind, a little horse which enjoyed the outing as briskly as Maisie herself, made the two hours vibrant with the ecstasy of cold. All Tom's nerves were taut with the pleasure of the motion, of the air, of the skill, acquired chiefly at Bere, with which he managed the spirited young nag. The knowledge of what it was costing him he was able to thrust aside. He would enjoy the moment, and face the reckoning afterward. When he did face the reckoning, he found that of his fourth ten dollars he had spent six dollars and fifty-seven cents. Only three days earlier he had had the crisp clean bill unbroken in his hand....
He had been hardly able to eat his supper, and after supper the usual two hours of study to which he gave himself on Sunday nights were as time thrown away. Luckily, Honey's consideration left him the room to himself. Honey was like that. If Tom had to work, Honey effaced himself, in summer by sitting on the doorstep, in winter by going to bed. Much of Tom's wrestling with Virgil was carried on to the tune of Honey's snores.
This being Sunday evening, and Honey less tired than on the days on which he worked, he had gone to "chew the rag," as he phrased it, with a little Jew tailor, who lived next door to Mrs. Danker. Tom was aware that behind this the motive was not love for the Jew tailor, but zeal that he, Tom, should be interfered with as little as possible in his eddication. Tom's eddication was as much an obsession to Honey as it was to Tom himself. It was an overmastering compulsion, like that which sent Peary to find the North Pole, Scott to find the South one, and Livingstone and Stanley to cross Africa. What he had to gain by it had no place in his calculation. A machine wound up, and going automatically, could not be more set on its purpose than Lemuel Honeybun on his.
But to-night his absenting of himself was of no help to Tom in giving his mind to the translation from English into Latin on which he was engaged. When he found himself rendering the expression "in the meantime" by the words in turpe tempore, he pushed books and paper away from him, with a bitter, emphatic, "Damn!"