“Don’t you be interrupting,” said Jaye, who was waxing fat like Jeshurun, and would willingly kick with his one leg. “You don’t understand nothing with your four arms and legs.”
Helen thought over rapidly what she knew of Jaye, for that was the first part of the problem. She had thought him a simple quiet boy when he first came, then a very nervous boy, when the time for his operation approached, then an almost angelic boy, because he had wanted her to be with him during it. (The want, it must be understood, was angelic, the demand the most trying that had ever been made of her.) Since then, as his convalescence restored him, he had ceased to be simple and quiet, and had become a bumptious life and soul of the ward, who, Miss Hawker said, should be sternly suppressed. And yet, all the time, in all his phases, he was only being a boy....
That was only the first part of the problem: the second part was even more vital to the correct solution, but it implied a knowledge of the character of Jaye’s girl, and Helen at present had not the privilege of her acquaintanceship.
“You must get your girl to come down and see you here, Jaye,” she said. “I don’t know what she’s like. She may be so fond of you that she doesn’t care a bit about your leg. She may not care two straws how many legs you have. But I think I should give her a chance, if I were you, instead of taking it for granted, quite straight off, that she can’t care for you any more.”
Jaye was suddenly seized with diffidence.
“Gawd! Fancy me talking to a real lady about my girl and me!” he said. “Seems cheek, doesn’t it?”
“Not a bit. We’ll have her down some afternoon,” said Helen. “Where does she live?”
“Isle o’ Man,” said Jaye uncompromisingly. “She had a situation in Hammersmith when we first met, and it was on a Bank Holiday it was, and we fair clutched each other, first time of meeting, in one of them hurly-go-rounds. Or was it a cock-shy at cocoanuts? I couldn’t say.”
And this was the quiet boy, reduced to apathy by pain and injury, now blossoming out again into his ordinary self. How many identities, how many characters, seemingly complete in themselves, she asked herself, went to make up one quite ordinary human being? And did she not supply, in herself, another case in point? So few months ago she had been the engrossed pilot in extravagant and rudderless voyagings: now, anchored in the same waters, she was equally engrossed in the not very promising love-affairs of a one-legged boy, with whom she had nothing in common except a bond of humanity, and the bond of the cause in which he had suffered. So long as all was well with Robin, she could not better spend priceless irrecoverable time than in participating in Jaye’s love-affairs.
“Isle o’ Man,” repeated Jaye again. “Her mother drank herself to death, and, like a good girl, she went back to see after her father. That was before I had my little accident.”