"What's happened? What's the matter with him? I can't find out."
The interne didn't know exactly. He had been crushed. He was injured internally. The cause of the accident he hadn't heard.
There was more difficulty about that, but in the end he was taken upstairs, where the nurse came out to the corridor to speak to him. She was a competent, businesslike woman, with none of the emotion at contact with pain which Tom thought must be part of a nurse's equipment. But she could tell him nothing definite. Not having been on duty when the case had been brought in, she had heard no more than the facts essential to what she had to do.
"You'd have to ask the doctor that. He's not dead now. That's about as much as I can say." At sight of the big handsome fellow's distress she partly relented. "You may come in and look at him. You mustn't try to speak to him."
He followed her into a long ward, with an odor of disinfectant. White beds, mostly occupied, lined each wall. Here and there was one surrounded by a set of screens, partially secluding a sufferer. At one such set they stopped. Through an opening between two screens Tom was allowed to look at Honey who lay with face upturned, and no sign of pain on the features. He slept as Tom had seen him sleep hundreds of times when he expected to get up again next morning. The difference was in the expectation of getting up. Blinded by tears, Tom tiptoed away.
When he came next day the effect of the opiate had worn off, and yet not wholly. Honey turned his head at his approach and smiled. Sitting beside the bed, Tom took the big, calloused hand lying outside the coverlet, and held it in his own relatively tender one. More than ever it was borne in on him at whose cost that tenderness had been maintained. Honey liked to have his hand held. A part of the wall of aloofness with which he had kept himself surrounded seemed to have broken down.
A little incoherently he told what had happened. He had been stowing packing-cases in the hold of a big ship. The packing-cases were lowered by a crane. The crane as a rule was a good old thing, slow paced, gentle, safe. But this time something seemed to have gone wrong with her. Though his back was turned, Honey knew by the shadow above him that she was at her work. When he had got into its niche the case with which he was busy he would swing round and seize the new one. And then he heard a shout. It was a shout from the dock, and didn't disturb him. He was about to turn when something fell. It struck him in the back. It was all he knew. He thought he remembered the blow, but was not certain whether he did or not. When he "came to" he had already been moved to the shed, and was waiting for the ambulance. He seemed not to have a body any more. He was only a head, like one of them there angels in a picture, with wings beneath their chins.