“F-f-f-forty years ago,” he began, in a hoarse voice, “I might have refused, but now I can’t, G-G-G-God help me!
I c-c-c-c-can’t!”
Gant’s sickness had returned on him with increased virulence.
His face was haggard and yellow: a tottering weakness crept into his limbs.
It was decided that he must go again to Baltimore.
Helen would go with him.
“Mr. Gant,” said Eliza persuasively, “why don’t you just give up everything and settle down to take things easy the rest of your days?
You don’t feel good enough to tend to business any more; if I were you, I’d retire.
We could get $20,000 for your shop without any trouble — If I had that much money to work with, I’d show them a thing or two.”
She nodded pertly with a smart wink.
“I could turn it over two or three times within two years’ time.
You’ve got to trade quick to keep the ball a-rolling.
That’s the way it’s done.”
“Merciful God,” he groaned.
“That’s my last refuge on earth.
Woman, have you no mercy?
I beg of you, leave me to die in peace: it won’t be long now.
You can do what you please with it after I’m gone, but give me a little peace now.
In the name of Jesus, I ask it!”
He sniffled affectedly.
“Pshaw!” said Eliza, thinking no doubt to encourage him.
“There’s nothing wrong with you.
Half of it’s only imagination.”
He groaned, turning his head away.
Summer died upon the hills.
There was a hue, barely guessed, upon the foliage, of red rust.
The streets at night were filled with sad lispings: all through the night, upon his porch, as in a coma, he heard the strange noise of autumn.
And all the people who had given the town its light thronging gaiety were vanished strangely overnight.
They had gone back into the vast South again.
The solemn tension of the war gathered about the nation.
A twilight of grim effort hovered around him, above him.
He felt the death of joy; but the groping within him of wonder, of glory.
Out of the huge sprawl of its first delirium, the nation was beginning to articulate the engines of war — engines to mill and print out hatred and falsehood, engines to pump up glory, engines to manacle and crush opposition, engines to drill and regiment men.
But something of true wonder had come upon the land — the flares and rockets of the battle-fields cast their light across the plains as well.
Young men from Kansas were going to die in Picardy.
In some foreign earth lay the iron, as yet unmoulded, that was to slay them.
The strangeness of death and destiny was legible upon lives and faces which held no strangeness of their own.
For, it is the union of the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.
Luke had gone away to the training-school at Newport.
Ben went to Baltimore with Helen and Gant, who, before entering the hospital again for radium treatment, had gone on a violent and unruly spree which had compelled their rapid transference from one hotel to another and had finally brought Gant moaning to his bed, hurling against God the anathemas that should have been saved for huge riotings in raw oysters washed down chaotically with beer and whisky.
They all drank a great deal: Gant’s excesses, however, reduced the girl to a state of angry frenzy, and Ben to one of scowling and cursing disgust.
“You damned old man!” cried Helen, seizing and shaking his passive shoulders as he lay reeking and sodden on an untidy bed.
“I could wear you out!
You’re not sick; I’ve wasted my life nursing you, and you’re not as sick as I am!
You’ll be here long after I’m gone, you selfish old man!
It makes me furious!”
“Why, baby!” he roared, with a vast gesture of his arms,
“God bless you, I couldn’t do without you.”
“Don’t ‘baby’ me!” she cried.
But she held his hand next day as they rode out to the hospital, held it as, quaking, he turned for an instant and looked sadly at the city stretched behind and below him.