第11章 The Long Vigil

The burned arm belonged to Mulvaney's brother, and Mulvaney's brother's name was Patrick, and by the time Cornelia reached the hospital on the second night of the new year he had taken a fever and the doctors had begun to speak of the arm in the way doctors speak when they have decided to take a thing off. The men had come in shifts. Brogan came and went with the composure of a man who had watched a hundred injuries in a hundred shops, and Sheehan came and wept quietly in the corner and was comforted by no one, and Cormac came at midnight and did not leave. Cornelia came at eleven and did the thing she had learned to do, which was to be useful. She found the house surgeon and asked him for the truth, plainly, and got it: the arm would probably live and the hand would probably not, and what mattered now was the fever. She wrote a check for the private room, because the charity ward had three men in every bed and the fever was spreading through it. She sent her own doctor for a second opinion and paid him in advance so that he could not be told the patient was a printer who could not pay. And then she sat down beside Cormac in the corridor outside the room, on a hard bench under a guttering gas jet, and did not leave either. For a long time neither of them spoke. The hospital was quiet at that hour. Somewhere along the corridor a man coughed and coughed and stopped, and a nurse went past with a lamp and a covered basin, and the door of the ward swung shut behind her and the corridor went dim again. "I should thank you," Cormac said at last, "for the room." "You do not have to thank me for the room." "I do, though." He was looking straight ahead, not at her. "Because if I do not, I will start thinking of you as an owner who has been kind, and then I will spend the rest of my life being surprised when you do the owning kind of thing. It is better to say thank you for the room, and to remember exactly what it is." "And what is it?" "An heiress who can write a check for a private room where a printer's brother can breathe." He turned his head. "I mean it without insult. It is simply what it is. You have a power I do not have, and I have to keep it in front of me, or I will forget it, and a man who forgets it is a man who gets used." Cornelia considered this. She had expected, somewhere in the last weeks, that the wall between them would fall, and had begun, in the private part of herself, to want it to. Now she understood that the wall would not fall; that it would stand as long as there was money on one side of it and hunger on the other, and that any love that tried to pretend otherwise would be a lie. "I will not ask you to forget it," she said. "But I would like you to know one thing about the check, and then we need not speak of it again. The reason I can write it is the reason I am sitting here. I inherited a paper that took money from men who ruined widows, and I have spent it these three weeks trying to put the money back where it came from. If that is owning, then owning is a thing I am trying to unlearn, and you are the only person in the city who has ever let me try." He was quiet for a moment. Then he did something that surprised her, which was to take off his coat and lay it across her knees, because the corridor was cold and she had come out without a wrap, and then to sit back against the wall as though he had done nothing at all. "That was not an owning thing," he said. "That was a coat." "Thank you for the coat." "You are welcome for the coat." The night went on. At three a nurse brought them tea in two chipped cups and did not charge for it, which Cormac said was the first charity he had accepted all year, and Cornelia drank hers and watched the ward door and thought about the two hundred men on Rookery Row who were sleeping through this hour in rooms with no heat and would wake to a wage that had not yet changed. A hand held was a hand held. Brogan had told her that on the first night she set foot in the press-room, and she had carried the sentence all winter like a coin she kept turning over. Near four, Cormac fell asleep with his back against the wall and his hat on his knees, and Cornelia sat beside him in the cold and did not wake him. She had never seen him asleep. Awake he was all edges; asleep he looked like what he was, which was a tired man of thirty-four who had spent ten years being angry on behalf of people who could not afford to be angry for themselves, and who had never once, in all that time, been paid by anyone for it. She thought of her father, whose portrait hung in the study across the city, who had been certain of everything and had written a letter he never sent, and she understood that the two men had wanted the same thing in the end and had never been able to say so to each other in a room. There had been a desk between them too, she supposed. There was a desk between everyone in this city, and the whole trick of a life was to find the one or two people with whom the desk could be crossed. At half past five Cormac woke and looked at her, and for a moment his face did the thing she had seen once before, in this corridor, when Patrick's fever turned: it was open, and there was nothing in it but her. "You did not wake me," he said. "You needed the sleep more than the company." "I have needed the sleep for ten years," Cormac said, and stood up, and put on his hat, and went to find the surgeon and ask how the boy was doing, and Cornelia sat alone in the gray light with the cold cup in her hands and knew, past any argument, that she was in trouble. --- Patrick Mulvaney kept his arm and lost his hand's strength, and by dawn the fever had turned, and the house surgeon came out to tell them so with the expression of a man who has won a small private battle and wants nobody to make a fuss. Cormac stood up and shook his hand, and then turned to Cornelia, and for one unguarded moment his face was open, and what was in it was not calculation at all. She stood up too. The corridor was gray with the first light, and the gas jet had gone out, and they were standing very close in the cold. "Miss Hollingsworth," Cormac said. "Cornelia," she said. "In this corridor, at this hour, nobody is listening. Call me Cornelia." He looked at her for a long moment. "Cornelia," he said, and the word came out as if he were testing a tool to see whether it would hold. "Then you should know that I have thought about you every day for three weeks, and that I have decided this is a very bad idea, and that I am going to do it anyway, because I am not a sensible man and never have been." "I never thought you were sensible," she said. "Which is one of the reasons I did not sell the paper when the sensible thing was to sell it." A nurse came around the corner with a basin, and they stepped apart, and the moment closed as surely as a door. But it had happened, and they both knew it, and neither of them said another word about it for a long while. ---