I doubted if he would last the winter through.
But he’s back again.
He may be back many times.”
“Can you help him at all?
Do you think the radium does any good?”
“I can give him relief for a time.
I can even check the growth of the disease for a time.
Beyond that, I can do nothing.
But his vitality is enormous.
He is a creaking gate which hangs by one hinge — but which hangs, nevertheless.”
Thus, she had brought him home, the shadow of his death suspended over them like a Damocles sword.
Fear prowled softly through their brains on leopard feet.
The girl lived in a condition of repressed hysteria: it had its outburst daily at Eliza’s or in her own home.
Hugh Barton had purchased a house to which he had taken her.
“You’ll get no peace,” he said, “as long as you’re near them.
That’s what’s wrong with you now.”
She had frequent periods of sickness.
She went constantly to the doctors for treatment and advice.
Sometimes she went to the hospital for several days.
Her illness manifested itself in various ways — sometimes in a terrible mastoid pain, sometimes in nervous exhaustion, sometimes in an hysterical collapse in which she laughed and wept by turns, and which was governed partly by Gant’s illness and a morbid despair over her failure to bear a child.
She drank stealthily at all times — she drank in nibbling draughts for stimulants, never enough for drunkenness.
She drank vile liquids — seeking only the effect of alcohol and getting at it in strange ways through a dozen abominations called “tonics” and “extracts.”
Almost deliberately she ruined her taste for the better sort of potable liquors, concealing from herself, under the convenient labellings of physic, the ugly crawling hunger in her blood.
This self-deception was characteristic of her.
Her life expressed itself through a series of deceptions — of symbols: her dislikes, affections, grievances, brandishing every cause but the real one.
But, unless actually bedridden, she was never absent from her father for many hours.
The shadow of his death lay over their lives.
They shuddered below its horror; its protracted menace, its unsearchable enigma, deprived them of dignity and courage.
They were dominated by the weary and degrading egotism of life, which is blandly philosophical over the death of the alien, but sees in its own the corruption of natural law.
It was as hard for them to think of Gant’s death as of God’s death: it was a great deal harder, because he was more real to them than God, he was more immortal than God, he was God.
This hideous twilight into which their lives had passed froze Eugene with its terror, and choked him with fury.
He would grow enraged after reading a letter from home and pound the grained plaster of the dormitory wall until his knuckles were bloody.
They have taken his courage away! he thought.
They have made a whining coward out of him!
No, and if I die, no damned family about.
Blowing their messy breaths in your face!
Snuffling down their messy noses at you!
Gathering around you till you can’t breathe.
Telling you how well you’re looking with hearty smiles, and boo-hooing behind your back.
O messy, messy, messy death!
Shall we never be alone?
Shall we never live alone, think alone, live in a house by ourselves alone?
Ah! but I shall!
I shall!
Alone, alone, and far away, with falling rain.
Then, bursting suddenly into the study, he found Elk Duncan, with unaccustomed eye bent dully upon a page of Torts, a bright bird held by the stare of that hypnotic snake, the law.
“Are we to die like rats?” he said.
“Are we to smother in a hole?”
“Damn!” said Elk Duncan, folding the big calfskin and cowering defensively behind it.
“Yes, that’s right, that’s right!