“Some day,” Eliza observed, “you’ll cry wolf-wolf once too often.”
He went three times a week to Cardiac’s office for treatment. The dry doctor had grown old; behind his dusty restraint, the prim authority of his manner, there was a deepening well of senile bawdry. He had a comfortable fortune, he cared little for his dwindling practice. He was still a brilliant bacteriologist: he spent hours over slides etched in flowering patterns of bacilli, and he was sought after by diseased prostitutes, to whom he rendered competent service.
He dissuaded the Gants from surgery. He was jealously absorbed in the treatment of Gant’s disease, scoffed at operations, and insisted he could give adequate relief by manipulation of the affected parts and the use of the catheter.
The two men became devoted friends. The doctor gave up entire mornings to the treatment of Gant’s disease. The consulting-room was filled with their sly laughter while scrofulous mountaineers glared dully at the pages of Life in the antechamber. As Gant sprawled out voluptuously on the table after his masseur had finished his work, he listened appreciatively to the secrets of light women, or to tidbits from books of pseudoscientific pornography, of which the doctor had a large number.
“You say,” he demanded eagerly, “that the monks petitioned the archbishop?”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “They suffered during the hot weather. He wrote ‘granted’ across the petition. Here’s a photograph of the document.” He held the book open in his clean parched fingers.
“Merciful God!” said Gant, staring. “I suppose it’s pretty bad in those hot countries.”
He licked his thumb, smiling lewdly to himself. The late Oscar Wilde, for instance.
XXI
During the first years of this illness Gant showed a diminished, but not a seriously impaired, energy. At first he had, under the doctor’s treatment, periods of tranquillity when he almost believed himself well. There were also times when he became a whining dotard over night, lay indolently abed for days, and was flabbily acquiescent to his disorder. These climaxes usually came on the heels of a roaring spree. The saloons had been closed for years: the town had been one of the first to vote on “local option.”
Gant had piously contributed his vote for purity. Eugene remembered the day, years before, when he went proudly with his father to the polls. The militant “drys” had agreed to advertise their vote by wearing a scrap of white silk in their lapels. That was for purity. The defiant wets wore “red.”
Announced by violent trumpetings in the Protestant churches, the day of atonement dawned on a seasoned army of well drilled teetotalers. Those wets who had victoriously withstood the pressure of hearth and pulpit—their number (aië, aië,) was small—went to their death with the gallant swagger, and with the gleam of purloined honor, of men who are to die fighting most desperately against the engulfing mob.
They did not know how gallant was their cause: they knew only that they had stood against the will of a priest-ridden community—the most annihilating force in the village. They had never been told they stood for liberty; they stood rubily, stubbornly, with the strong brown smell of shame in their nostrils, for the bloodshot, malt-mouthed, red-nosed, loose-pursed Demon Rum. So, they came down with vine leaves in their hair, and a good fog of rye upon their breaths, and with brave set smiles around their determined mouths.
As they approached the polls, glancing, like surrounded knights, for an embattled brother, the church women of the town, bent like huntresses above the straining leash, gave the word to the eager children of the Sunday schools. Dressed all in white, and clutching firmly in their small hands the tiny stems of American flags, the pygmies, monstrous as only children can be when they become the witless mouths of slogans and crusades, charged hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their Gulliver.
“There he is, children. Go get him.”
Swirling around the marked man in wild elves’ dance, they sang with piping empty violence:
“We are some fond mother’s treasure,
Men and women of tomorrow,
For a moment’s empty pleasure
Would you give us lifelong sorrow?Think of sisters, wives, and mothers,
Of helpless babes in some low slum,
Think not of yourself, but others,
Vote against the Demon Rum.”
Eugene shuddered, and looked up at Gant’s white emblem with coy pride. They walked happily by unhappy alcoholics, deltaed in foaming eddies of innocence, and smiling murderously down at some fond mother’s treasure.
If they were mine I’d warm their little tails, they thought—privately.
Outside the corrugated walls of the warehouse, Gant paused for a moment to acknowledge the fervent congratulation of a group of ladies from the First Baptist Church: Mrs. Tarkinton, Mrs. Fagg Sluder, Mrs. C. M. McDonnel, and Mrs. W. H. (Pett) Pentland, who, heavily powdered, trailed her long skirt of gray silk with a musty rustle, and sneered elegantly down over her whaleboned collar. She was very fond of Gant.
“Where’s Will?” he asked.
“Feathering the pockets of the licker interests, when he ought to be down here doing the Lord’s Work,” she replied with Christian bitterness. “Nobody but you knows what I’ve had to put up with, Mr. Gant. You’ve had to put up with the queer Pentland streak, in your own home,” she added with lucid significance.
He shook his head regretfully, and stared sorrowfully at the gutter.
“Ah, Lord, Pett! We’ve been through the mill—both of us.”
A smell of drying roots and sassafras twisted a sharp spiral from the warehouse into the thin slits of his nostrils.
“When the time comes to speak up for the right,” Pett announced to several of the ladies, “you’ll always find Will Gant ready to do his part.”
With farseeing statesmanship he looked westward toward Pisgah.
“Licker,” he said, “is a curse and a care. It has caused the sufferings of untold millions—”
“Amen, Amen,” Mrs. Tarkinton chanted softly, swaying her wide hips rhythmically.
“—it has brought poverty, disease, and suffering to hundreds of thousands of homes, broken the hearts of wives and mothers, and taken
