The other roommate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child. He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness of his face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them. Instead, he concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that echoed at all the wrong places, and a silly grin full of an absurd and devilish knowingness. His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy, he smoked cigarettes with a debauched leer, and cursed loudly and uneasily with the accent of a depraved clergyman.
“Harold! Harold!” said Elk Duncan reprovingly. “Damn, son! You’re getting hard! If you go on like this, you’ll begin to chew gum, and fritter away your Sunday-school money at the movies. Think of the rest of us, please. ’Gene here’s only a young boy, as pure as a barnyard privy, and, as for me, I’ve always moved in the best circles, and associated with only the highest class of bartenders and ladylike streetwalkers. What would your father say if he could hear you? Don’t you know he’d be shocked? He’d cut off your cigarette money, son.”
“I don’t give a damn what he’d do, Elk, nor you either!” said Harold toughly, grinning. “So, what the hell!” he roared as loudly as he could. There was an answering howl from the windows of the whole dormitory—cries of “Go to hell!” “Cut it out!” and ironical cheers, at which he was pleased.
The scattered family drew together again at Christmas. A sense of impending dissolution, of loss and death, brought them back. The surgeon at Baltimore had given no hope. He had, rather, confirmed Gant’s death-warrant.
“Then how long can he live?” asked Helen.
He shrugged his shoulders. “My dear girl!” he said. “I have no idea. The man’s a miracle. Do you know that he’s Exhibit A here? Every surgeon in the place has had a look. How long can he last? I’ll swear to nothing—I no longer have any idea. When your father left here, the first time, after his operation, I never expected to see him again. 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
