He looked inquisitively at Edward’s miserable face.
“Now, don’t you say a thing, Edward. The nurse has told me how it is. You gotter lie low and say nothing and I’ll give you noos of all the folks. All your friends surely are peeved with these old sawbones for carving you about this way. I should say so. Yes, indeed.”
This unprecedented burst of sympathy at once restored to Edward a pale gleam of the melancholy heroic light in which it was his constant effort to see himself. Still the name of Emily had not yet been mentioned and he tried to point this out. But his throat still played him false.
“Eb-gy....”
“That’s all right. That’s all right. I get you perfectly. You gotter let uncle do all the tongue work. Let me see now.... Well, there’s Melsie Stone Ponting. She’s a sport now.... What d’you guess she said when she knew you were sick? Why, she said—well, mebbe I’d better not tell you after all.... Anyway it was very smart and showed how crazy she was about you. Avery Bird I haven’t seen recently, he naturally can’t think of a thing except Rhoda’s indictment. I guess you’ve heard how Rhoda was arrested the day we all got home from Yosemite. Indicted for what they call Criminal Syndicalism. Some of the dope she put across at the W. I. L. A. kinda got somebody’s goat. You know, when we’d left you at the hospital some of us went round for a drink at Rhoda’s studio. There’s a kind of an old she-janitor, you know, located in the basement, and she met us and said how the cops had been and opened Rhoda’s bureau and gotten a wad of papers out of it. Rhoda surely was mad, and Avery—who almost never lets up on his detached pose or says anything except epigrams—I’ll say he blasphemed quite a bit. And right there in the middle of that little tableau two plain-clothes cops walked in. The door was still open and they walked in and there was Rhoda up to her elbows in her bureau, trying to find out which papers they’d gotten hold of. Well, it was a fair cinch. There was no getting around it. One of the cops read the warrant; it was all about sabbotidge and advocating unlawful methods of effecting political changes. They seemed to know a whole heap about sister Rhoda. She didn’t answer back any. She smiled and looked white. Avery said a hell of a lot, but they didn’t take much account of him. They took all our names and addresses. Of course, it’s a long ways from indictment to conviction. Avery says he’s not taking much on her chances, she’s got in good and deep. The ‘What Is Liberty’ offered to put up her bail money—but Rhoda’s got plenty of dough herself. For some reason she isn’t accepting bail. It seems like if she’s got to be arrested she wants to have it done thorough. She’s always been crazy about prisoners and jails....”
“Ebb-ly ...” hiccoughed Edward.
The nurse was beckoning to Banner. The sedate wives and mothers of other patients followed by their scrubbed and creaking children were willingly submitting to authority and leaving the ward.
“Say, I must be moving along,” said Banner Hope with alacrity. “What’s that you say? Emily? Oh, Emily’s gone to China. Take care of yourself, Edward, some of your friends’ll be around again some time soon....”
Edward was left in such an unrelieved condition of depression that he was on the verge of peace. “Gone to China.... Gone to China.... Gone to China....” his mind chanted to itself to the rhythm of the pulse drumming in his ears. He reminded himself without ceasing that Emily had gone to China. To do so put the finishing touch to his orgy of despair. But all the time he felt certain that his ears had really played him false. All the time a little secret unadmitted factory in his mind was circulating hope by making phrases with similar vowel sounds. “He must have said, ‘Emily’s doing fine,’ or he must have said, ‘Emily’s reading Heine,’ or he must have said, ‘Emily—how do I know?’” The rhymes became less and less probable as Edward approached sleep. “Penny-a-liner.... Asia Minor.... Clementina.... Norah Criner....” But gone to China seemed the most absurd of all.
Edward was long enough in this hospital to fit a kind of bare innocent interlude into his experience. No other visitor came to see him during the three weeks of his illness, and he had leisure to build upon the dark and sordid foundation of his life a sort of airy trivial superstructure of interests. He watched the manners of the nurses. He became interested in human temperatures, weights, symptoms and facetious gossip connected with physical details. The watch under his pillow became his most intimate friend and guide. Waking up at six o’clock, bathing, and bed-making were an intolerable nuisance, but he was much concerned if the nurses were a moment late. The whole day was enlivened by the jokes or scoldings of the nurses. A new joke was hardly ever made in the ward, but the old ones were always successful. All the men laughed at them because they were glad that the temper of the nurses made joking possible. Sometimes the doctors were late and, though no-one loved the doctors, everyone was exasperated with them for being late. Sometimes the doctors were so late that the breakfasts became tired of waiting, and then all the patients ate their breakfasts with a sense of incompleteness and danger. Meals were very important. Sometimes there were little red jellies at the midday meal, and when the cheerful glitter of these jellies blossomed on all the approaching trays Edward was full of an almost gay anticipation. There were no books to read, only magazines. To the nurses a magazine was a book. Any magazine would do. One did not mention the titles of books or magazines in the ward; one asked for “a book to read” as one would ask for a glass of milk. Edward was called by doctors and nurses “a great student” because he was always reading a magazine. He was not critical enough to refuse to read the bad literature that was placed before him. Sometimes he quite enjoyed the sentimental love stories. He read the comic pages with a somber interest. And he often made little tunes in his head to fit the poems, most of which seemed to have been written in imitation of each other. Some of the poems were patriotic and these annoyed Edward; it seemed so silly that anyone should love any country but England to the point of writing bad rhymes in its honor. Edward’s mind was tired, too tired to feel very acutely the need of better fare. Others in the ward were more conscious than he. The man next to Edward liked the works of Gene Stratton Porter; he thought the tales of this writer very moral and very deep. He often told their plots in great detail to Edward, announcing himself as “considerable of a student like yourself.” This man, who had a thin voice all on one note, was fond of talking to his neighbors at night. He would say, “Hope I’m not disturbing you folks,” and nobody dared to say, “You are.” They were all rather gentlemanly and talked a good deal about Americanism and the advantages of American education. In health they frequented movies rather than saloons. They all had wives or very respectable sweethearts who came conscientiously to sit with them during visiting hours. You could distinguish the sweethearts from the wives by their habit of bringing tight bundles of flowers and flinging them down ungraciously on the stomachs of the afflicted. Wives never did this. The wives brought snorting and bubbling babies instead of flowers. Neither wives nor sweethearts had anything much to say. They all looked as if they took for granted that the invalids were going to die. Visiting the sick seemed to embarrass them hopelessly.