The fiend-face I know so well, gloating upon my misery.
Look at it!
Look!
Do you see its smile of evil cunning?
Greeley, Will, The Hog, The Old Major!
The Tax Collector will get it all, and I shall die in the gutter!”
“If it hadn’t been for me,” Eliza began, stung to retaliation, “you’d have died there long ago.”
“Mama, for God’s sake!” the boy cried.
“Don’t stand there talking to him!
Can’t you see what it does to him!
Do something, in heaven’s name!
Get Helen!
Where is she?”
“I’ll make an end to it all!” Gant yelled, staggering erect.
“I’ll do for us both now.”
Eliza vanished.
“Yes, sir, papa.
It’s going to be all right,” Eugene began soothingly, pushing him back on the bed again.
He dropped quickly to his knees, and began to draw off one of Gant’s soft tongueless shoes, muttering reassurances all the time: “Yes, sir.
We’ll get you some good hot soup and put you to bed in a jiffy.
Everything’s going to be all right,” the shoe came off in his hand and, aided by the furious thrust of his father’s foot, he went sprawling back.
Gant got to his feet again and, taking a farewell kick at his fallen son, lunged toward the door.
Eugene scrambled up quickly, and leaped after him.
The two men fell heavily into the roughly grained plaster of the wall.
Gant cursed, flailing about clumsily at his tormentor.
Helen came in.
“Baby!” Gant wept, “they’re trying to kill me.
O Jesus, do something to save me, or I perish.”
“You get back in that bed,” she commanded sharply, “or I’ll knock your head off.”
Very obediently he suffered himself to be led back to bed and undressed.
In a few minutes she was sitting beside him with a bowl of smoking soup.
He grinned sheepishly as she spooned it into his opened mouth.
She laughed — almost happily — thinking of the lost and irrevocable years.
Suddenly, before he slept, he lifted himself strongly from the pillows that propped him, and with staring eyes, called out in savage terror:
“Is it a cancer?
I say, is it a cancer?”
“Hush!” she cried.
“No.
Of course not!
Don’t be foolish.”
He fell back exhausted, with eyes closed.
But they knew that it was.
He had never been told.
The terrible name of his malady was never uttered save by him.
And in his heart he knew — what they all knew and never spoke of before him — that it was, it was a cancer.
All day, with fear-stark eyes, Gant had sat, like a broken statue, among his marbles, drinking.
It was a cancer.
The boy’s right hand bled very badly across the wrist, where his father’s weight had ground it into the wall.
“Go wash it off,” said Helen.
“I’ll tie it up for you.”