"Lord love you, Kiddy, I know how to sackerfice meself. If I'm to be yer next o' kin, I'll be it and be damned. Done 'arder things than this in me life, and pulled 'em off, too. I'll stick to yer, kid, as long as yer wants me, if I never have another nice time in my life, and never see another quart bottle."
The pathos of the life for which he might be letting himself in turned his thoughts backward over his career.
"Why, if I'd 'a stuck at not puttin' others before meself I might still 'a been a gasfitter in Liverpool, Eng. That's where I was born. True 'eart-of-oak Englishman I was. Some people thinks they can tell it in the way I talk. Been over 'ere so long, though, seems to me I 'andle the Yankee end of it pretty good. Englishman I met the other day--steward on one of the Cunarders he was--said he wouldn't 'a knowed me from a born New Yorker. Always had a gift for langwidges. Used to know a Frenchman onst; and I'll be 'anged if I wasn't soon parley-vooin' with him till he'd thought I was his mother's son. But it's doin' my dooty by others as has brought me where I am, and I don't make no complaint of it. Job over at the Gansevoort whenever I wants one, which ain't always. Quite a tidy little sum in the savings bank in Brooklyn. Friends as 'll stick by me as long as I'll stick by them. And if I hadn't lost me eye--but how was I to know that that low-down butler was a-layin' for me at the silver-pantry door, and 'd let me have it anywhere he could 'it me?... And when that eyeball cracked, why, I yelled fit to bring the whole p'lice-force in New York right atop o' me."
Tom was astounded. "But you said you lost your eye saving a young lady's life."
Mr. Honeybun's embarrassment lasted no more than the time needed for finding the right words.
"Oh, did I? Well, that was the other side of it. Yer've heard that there's always two sides to a story, haven't yer? I can't tell yer both sides to onst, now can I?"
He judged it best, however, to revert to the autobiographical. The son of a dock hand in Liverpool, he had been apprenticed to a gasfitter at the age of seventeen.
"But my genius was for somethink bigger. I didn't know just what it'd be, but I could see it ahead o' me, all wuzzy-like. After a bit I come to know it was to fight agin the lor o' proputty. Used to seem to me orful to look around and see that everythink was owned by somebody. Took to goin' to meetin's, I did. Found out that me and me class was the uninherited. 'Gord,' I says to meself then, 'I'll inherit somethink, or I'll bust all Liverpool.' Well, I did inherit somethink--inherited a good warm coat what a guy had left to mark his seat in the Midland Station. Got away with it, too. Knowin' it was mine as much as his, I walks up and throws it over my arm. Ten minutes later I was a-wearin' of it in Lime Street. That was the beginnin', and havin' started in, I begun to inherit quite a lot o' things. 'Nothink's easier,' says I, 'onst you realizes that the soul o' man is free, and that nothink don't belong to nobody.' Fightin' for me class, I was. Tried to make 'em see as they ought to stop bein' the uninherited, and get a move on--and the first thing I know I was landed in Walton jail. You're not asleep, Kiddy, are you?"