There was a spring like that of a cat. There was also a snarl like a cat's snarl. "You tam Harvard student!"
Feeling he had done and said enough, Tom took to his heels; but as someone else was taking to his heels, and running close behind him, he judged that Tad had escaped.
Back in his room, Tom felt spent. In his bed he was in emotional revolt against his victory. He loathed it. He loathed everything that had led up to it. The eyes that had stared into his, when the two had lain together on the floor, were like those of something he had murdered. What was it? What was the thing that deep down within him, rooted in the primal impulses that must have been there before there was a world—what was the thing that had been devastated, outraged? Once more, he didn't know.
XXXII
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.