“They had to close down on account of the flu.”
Then he turned away suddenly into the black murk, sick with his poor lie, and unable to face the fear in Ben’s gray eyes.
“All right, ‘Gene,” said Bessie Gant, with an air of authority.
“Get out of here — you and Helen both.
I’ve got one crazy Gant to look after already.
I don’t want two more in here.”
She spoke harshly, with an unpleasant laugh.
She was a thin woman of thirty-eight years, the wife of Gant’s nephew, Gilbert.
She was of mountain stock: she was coarse, hard, and vulgar, with little pity in her, and a cold lust for the miseries of sickness and death.
These inhumanities she cloaked with her professionalism, saying:
“If I gave way to my feelings, where would the patient be?”
When they got out into the hall again, Eugene said angrily to Helen:
“Why have you got that death’s-head here?
How can he get well with her around?
I don’t like her!”
“Say what you like — she’s a good nurse.”
Then, in a low voice, she said: “What do you think?”
He turned away, with a convulsive gesture.
She burst into tears, and seized his hand.
Luke was teetering about restlessly, breathing stertorously and smoking a cigarette, and Eliza, working her lips, stood with an attentive ear cocked to the door of the sick-room.
She was holding a useless kettle of hot water.
“Huh?
Hah?
What say?” asked Eliza, before any one had said anything.
“How is he?”
Her eyes darted about at them.
“Get away!
Get away!
Get away!” Eugene muttered savagely. His voice rose.
“Can’t you get away?”
He was infuriated by the sailor’s loud nervous breathing, his large awkward feet.
He was angered still more by Eliza’s useless kettle, her futile hovering, her “huh?” and “hah?”
“Can’t you see he’s fighting for his breath?
Do you want to strangle him?
It’s messy!
Messy!
Do you hear?”
His voice rose again.
The ugliness and discomfort of the death choked him; and the swarming family, whispering outside the door, pottering uselessly around, feeding with its terrible hunger for death on Ben’s strangulation, made him mad with alternate fits of rage and pity.
Indecisively, after a moment, they went downstairs, still listening for sounds in the sick-room.
“Well, I tell you,” Eliza began hopefully. “I have a feeling, I don’t know what you’d call it —” She looked about awkwardly and found herself deserted.
Then she went back to her boiling pots and pans.
Helen, with contorted face, drew him aside, and spoke to him in whispered hysteria, in the front hall.
“Did you see that sweater she’s wearing?
Did you see it?
It’s filthy!”
Her voice sank to a brooding whisper.
“Did you know that he can’t bear to look at her?
She came into the room yesterday, and he grew perfectly sick.
He turned his head away and said