Then he went softly upstairs with Luke and Helen, approaching the sick-room with a shrivelled heart and limbs which had gone cold and bloodless. They paused for a moment, whispering, before he entered. The wretched conspiracy in the face of death filled him with horror.
“N-n-n-now, I wouldn’t stay but a m-m-m-minute,” whispered Luke. “It m-m-might make him nervous.”
Eugene, bracing himself, followed Helen blindly into the room.
“Look who’s come to see you,” her voice came heartily. “It’s Highpockets.”
For a moment Eugene could see nothing, for dizziness and fear. Then, in the gray shaded light of the room, he descried Bessie Gant, the nurse, and the long yellow skull’s-head of Coker, smiling wearily at him, with big stained teeth, over a long chewed cigar. Then, under the terrible light which fell directly and brutally upon the bed alone, he saw Ben. And in that moment of searing recognition he saw, what they had all seen, that Ben was dying.
Ben’s long thin body lay three-quarters covered by the bedding; its gaunt outline was bitterly twisted below the covers, in an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him, it was somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal. And the sallow yellow of his face had turned gray; out of this granite tint of death, lit by two red flags of fever, the stiff black furze of a three-day beard was growing. The beard was somehow horrible; it recalled the corrupt vitality of hair, which can grow from a rotting corpse. And Ben’s thin lips were lifted, in a constant grimace of torture and strangulation, about his white somehow dead-looking teeth, as inch by inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs.
And the sound of this gasping — loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable, filling the room, and orchestrating every moment in it — gave to the scene its final note of horror.
Ben lay upon the bed below them, drenched in light, like some enormous insect on a naturalist’s table, fighting, while they looked at him, to save with his poor wasted body the life that no one could save for him. It was monstrous, brutal.
As Eugene approached, Ben’s fear-bright eyes rested upon the younger brother for the first time and bodilessly, without support, he lifted his tortured lungs from the pillow, seizing the boy’s wrists fiercely in the hot white circle of his hands, and gasping in strong terror like a child: “Why have you come? Why have you come home, ‘Gene?”
The boy stood white and dumb for a moment, while swarming pity and horror rose in him.
“They gave us a vacation, Ben,” he said presently. “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 ‘O Helen, for God’s sake, take her out of here.’ You hear that, don’t you. Do you hear? He can’t stand to have her come near him. He doesn’t want her in the room.”
“Stop! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!” Eugene said, clawing at his throat.
The girl was for the moment insane with hatred and hysteria.
“It may be a terrible thing to say, but if he dies I shall hate her. Do you think I can forget the way she’s acted? Do you?” Her voice rose almost to a scream. “She’s let him die here before her very eyes. Why, only day before yesterday, when his temperature was 104, she was talking to Old Doctor Doak about a lot. Did you know that?”
“Forget about it!” he said frantically. “She’ll always be like that! It’s not her fault. Can’t you see that? O God, how horrible! How horrible!”
“Poor old mama!” said Helen, beginning to weep. “She’ll never get over this. She’s scared to death! Did you see her eyes? She knows, of course she knows!”
Then suddenly, with mad brooding face, she said: “Sometimes I think I hate her! I really think I hate her.” She plucked at her large chin, absently. “Well, we mustn’t talk like this,” she said. “It’s not right. Cheer up. We’re all tired and nervous. I believe he’s going to get all right yet.”
Day came gray and chill, with a drear reek of murk and fog. Eliza bustled about eagerly, pathetically busy, preparing breakfast. Once she hurried awkwardly upstairs with a kettle of water, and stood for a second at the door as Bessie Gant opened it, peering in at the terrible bed, with her white puckered face. Bessie Gant blocked her further entrance, and closed the door rudely. Eliza went away making flustered apologies.
For, what the girl had said was true, and Eliza knew it. She was not wanted in the sick-room; the dying boy did not want to see her. She had seen him turn his head wearily away when she had gone in. Behind her white face dwelt this horror, but she made no confession, no complaint. She bustled around doing useless things with an eager matter-of-factness. And Eugene, choked with exasperation at one moment, because of her heavy optimism, was blind with pity the next when he saw the terrible fear and pain in her dull black eyes. He rushed toward her suddenly, as she stood above the hot stove, and seized her rough worn hand, kissing it and babbling helplessly.
“O mama!