XVIII
He was not too ill to eat, but too ill when not eating to stay anywhere but on his bed. He went back to it again, lying with his face buried in the pillow as before. The boy resumed his patient sitting. He would have been bored with it now, had he not had his dreams.
All the same, it was a relief when about four o'clock, just as the westering sun was beginning to wake the Red Indian to an horrific life, Mr. Honeybun, pushing the door ajar softly, peeped in with his good eye.
"I say, mate!" he whispered, "wouldn't you like me to take the young gent for a bit of a walk like? Do him good, and him a-mopin' here all by hisself."
The walk meant Tom's initiation into the life of cities as that life is led. Not that it went very far, but as far as it went it was a revelation. It took him from one end of Jane Street to the other, along the docks of the Cunard and other great lines, and as far as Eighth Avenue in the broad, exciting thoroughfare of Fourteenth Street. New York as he had seen it hitherto, from the front seat of a motor truck, had been little more entertaining than a map. Besides, he was only developing a taste for this sort of entertainment. Games, school, scraps with other boys, had been enough for him. Now he was waking to an interest in places as places, in men as men, in differences of attitude to the drama known as life. In Mr. Honeybun's attitude he grew interested especially.
"I don't believe that nothink don't belong to no one," Tom's guide observed, as the wealth of the city spread itself more splendidly. "Things is common proputty. Yer takes what yer can put yer 'and on."
"But wouldn't you be arrested?"
"Yer'd be arrested if yer didn't look out; but what's bein' arrested? No more'n the measures what a lot of poor, frightened, silly boobs'll take agin the strong man what makes 'em tremble. At least," he added, as an afterthought, "not when yer conscience is clear, it ain't."
Fascinated by this bold facing of society, Tom ventured on a question. "Have you ever been arrested, Mr. Honeybun?"
Mr. Honeybun straightened himself to the martyr's pose. "Oh, if yer puts it that way, I've suffered for my opinions. That much I'll admit. I'm—" he brought out the statement proudly—"I'm one o' them there socialists. You know what a socialist is, don't yer?"