Gant was incapable of resignation. He had the most burning of all lusts—the lust of memory, the ravenous hunger of the will which tries to waken what is dead. He had reached the time of life when he read the papers greedily for news of death. As friends and acquaintances died he shook his head with the melancholy hypocrisy of old men, saying: “They’re all going, one by one. Ah, Lord! The old man will be the next.” But he did not believe it. Death was still for the others, not for himself.
He grew old very rapidly. He began to die before their eyes—a quick age, and a slow death, impotent, disintegrating, horrible because his life had been so much identified with physical excess—huge drinking, huge eating, huge rioting debauchery. It was fantastic and terrible to see the great body waste. They began to watch the progress of his disease with something of the horror with which one watches the movements of a dog with a broken leg, before he is destroyed—a horror greater than that one feels when a man has a similar hurt, because a man may live without legs. A dog is all included in his hide.
His wild bombast was tempered now by senile petulance. He cursed and whined by intervals. At the dead of night he would rise, full of pain and terror, blaspheming vilely against his God at one moment, and frantically entreating forgiveness at the next. Through all this tirade ran the high quivering exhalation of physical pain—actual and undeniable.
“Oh-h-h-h-h! I curse the day I was born! … I curse the day I was given life by that bloodthirsty Monster up above … Oh-h-h-h-h! Jesus! I beg of you. I know I’ve been bad. Forgive me. Have mercy and pity upon me! Give me another chance, in Jesus’ name … Oh-h-h-h-h!”
Eugene had moments of furious anger because of these demonstrations. He was angry that Gant, having eaten his cake, now howled because he had stomachache and at the same time begged for more. Bitterly he reflected that his father’s life had devoured whatever had served it, and that few men had had more sensuous enjoyment, or had been more ruthless in their demands on others. He found these exhibitions, these wild denunciations and cowardly grovellings in propitiation of a God none of them paid any attention to in health, ugly and abominable. The constant meditation of both Gant and Eliza on the death of others, their morbid raking of the news for items announcing the death of some person known to them, their weird absorption with the death of some toothless hag who, galled by bedsores, at length found release after her eightieth year, while fire, famine, and slaughter in other parts of the world passed unnoticed by them, their extravagant superstition over what was local and unimportant, seeing the intervention of God in the death of a peasant, and the suspension of divine law and natural order in their own, filled him with choking fury.
But Eliza was in splendid condition now to ponder upon the death of others. Her health was perfect. She was in her middle fifties: she had grown triumphantly stronger after the diseases of the middle years. White, compact, a great deal heavier now than she had ever been, she performed daily tasks of drudgery in the maintenance of Dixieland, that would have floored a strong negro. She hardly ever got to bed before two o’clock in the morning, and was up again before seven.
She admitted her health grudgingly. She made the most of every ache, and she infuriated Gant by meeting every complaint with a corresponding account of her own disorders. When badgered by Helen because of her supposed neglect of the sick man or when the concentration of attention upon the invalid piqued her jealousy, she smiled with white tremulous bitterness, hinting darkly:
“He may not be the first to go. I had a premonition—I don’t know what else you’d call it—the other day. I tell you what—it may not be long now—” Her eyes bleared with pity—shaking her puckered mouth, she wept at her own funeral.
“Good heavens, mama!” Helen burst out furiously. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Papa’s a sick man! Don’t you realize that?”
She didn’t.
“Pshaw!” she said. “There’s nothing much wrong with him. McGuire told me two men out of three have it after they’re fifty.”
His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of hatred against her crescent health. It made him mad to see her stand so strong. Murderous impotent, baffled—a maniacal anger against her groped for an outlet in him, sometimes exploding in a wild inchoate scream.
He yielded weakly to invalidism, he became tyrannous of attention, jealous of service. Her indifference to his health maddened him, created a morbid hunger for pity and tears. At times he got insanely drunk and tried to frighten her by feigning death, one time so successfully that Ben, bending over his rigid form in the hallway, was whitened with conviction.
“I can’t feel his heart, mama,” he said, with a nervous whicker of his lips.
“Well,” she said, picking her language with deliberate choosiness, “the pitcher went to the well once too often. I knew it would happen sooner or later.”
Through a slotted eye he glared murderously at her. Judicially, with placid folded hands, she studied him. Her calm eye caught the slow movement of a stealthy inhalation.
“You get his purse, son, and any papers he may have,” she directed. “I’ll call the undertaker.”
With an infuriate scream the dead awakened.
“I thought that would bring you to,” she said complacently.
He scrambled to his feet.
“You hellhound!” he yelled. “You would drink my heart’s blood. You are without mercy and without pity—inhuman and
