“I know you haven’t! I know that!” The sailor turned to Eugene in his excitement, gesticulating. “That g-g-girl’s worked her fingers to the bone. If it hadn’t been for her—” His eyes got wet; he turned his head away and blew his nose.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Eugene yelled, springing up from the table. “Stop it, won’t you! Let’s wait till later.”
In this way, the terrible hours of the morning lengthened out, while they spent themselves trying to escape from the tragic net of frustration and loss in which they were caught. Their spirits soared to brief moments of insane joy and exultancy, and plunged into black pits of despair and hysteria. Eliza alone seemed consistently hopeful. Trembling with exacerbated nerves, the sailor and Eugene paced the lower hall, smoking incessant cigarettes, bristling as they approached each other, ironically polite when their bodies touched. Gant dozed in the parlor or in his own room, waking and sleeping by starts, moaning petulantly, detached, vaguely aware only of the meaning of events, and resentful because of the sudden indifference to him. Helen went in and out of the sickroom constantly, dominating the dying boy by the power of her vitality, infusing him with moments of hope and confidence. But when she came out, her hearty cheerfulness was supplanted by the strained blur of hysteria; she wept, laughed, brooded, loved, and hated by turns.
Eliza went only once into the room. She intruded with a hot-water bag, timidly, awkwardly, like a child, devouring Ben’s face with her dull black eyes. But when above the loud labor of his breath his bright eyes rested on her, his clawed white fingers tightened their grip in the sheets, and he gasped strongly, as if in terror:
“Get out! Out! Don’t want you.”
Eliza left the room. As she walked she stumbled a little, as if her feet were numb and dead. Her white face had an ashen tinge, and her dull eyes had grown bright and staring. As the door closed behind her, she leaned against the wall and put one hand across her face. Then, in a moment, she went down to her pots again.
Frantically, angrily, with twitching limbs they demanded calm and steady nerves from one another; they insisted that they keep away from the sickroom—but, as if drawn by some terrible magnet, they found themselves again and again outside the door, listening, on tiptoe, with caught breath, with an insatiate thirst for horror, to the hoarse noise of his gasping as he strove to force air down into his strangled and cemented lungs. And eagerly, jealously, they sought entrance to the room, waiting their turn for carrying water, towels, supplies.
Mrs. Pert, from her refuge in the boardinghouse across the street, called Helen on the phone each half-hour, and the girl talked to her while Eliza came from the kitchen into the hall, and stood, hands folded, lips pursed, with eyes that sparkled with her hate.
The girl cried and laughed as she talked.
“Well … that’s all right, Fatty. … You know how I feel about it. … I’ve always said that if he had one true friend in the world, it’s you … and don’t think we’re all ungrateful for what you’ve done. …”
During the pauses, Eugene could hear the voice of the other woman across the wires, sobbing.
And Eliza said, grimly: “If she calls up again you let me talk to her. I’ll fix her!”
“Good heavens, mama!” Helen cried angrily. “You’ve done enough already. You drove her out of the house when she’d done more for him than all his family put together.” Her big strained features worked convulsively. “Why, it’s ridiculous!”
Within Eugene, as he paced restlessly up and down the hall or prowled through the house a-search for some entrance he had never found, a bright and stricken thing kept twisting about like a trapped bird. This bright thing, the core of him, his Stranger, kept twisting its head about, unable to look at horror, until at length it gazed steadfastly, as if under a dreadful hypnosis, into the eyes of death and darkness. And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt that he could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain and ugliness, from the eclipsing horror and pity of it all. And as he walked, he twisted his own neck about, and beat the air with his arm like a wing, as if he had received a blow in his kidneys. He felt that he might be clean and free if he could only escape into a single burning passion—hard, and hot, and glittering—of love, hatred, terror, or disgust. But he was caught, he was strangling, in the web of futility—there was no moment of hate that was not touched by a dozen shafts of pity: impotently, he wanted to seize them, cuff them, shake them, as one might a trying brat, and at the same time to caress them, love them, comfort them.
As he thought of the dying boy upstairs, the messy ugliness of it—as they stood whimpering by while he strangled—choked him with fury and horror. The old fantasy of his childhood came back to him: he remembered his hatred of the semiprivate bathroom, his messy discomfort while he sat at stool and stared at the tub filled with dirty wash, sloppily puffed and ballooned by cold gray soapy water. He thought of this as Ben lay dying.
Their hopes revived strongly in the forenoon when word came to them that the patient’s temperature was lower, his pulse stronger, the congestion of the lungs slightly relieved. But at one o’clock, after a fit of coughing, he grew delirious, his temperature mounted, he had increasing difficulty in getting his breath. Eugene and Luke raced to Wood’s pharmacy in Hugh Barton’s car, for an oxygen tank. When they returned, Ben had almost choked to death.
Quickly they carried the tank into the room, and placed it
