The threat, they knew, was preposterous, but the white judicial face, the thoughtful pursing of the lips, and the right hand, which she held loosely clenched, like a man’s, with the forefinger extended, emphasizing her proclamation with a calm, but somehow powerful gesture, froze them with a terror no amount of fierce excoriation could have produced. They received her announcement in beery stupefaction, muttering at most a startled agreement as she walked out.
“By God,” said a mountaineer, sending a brown inaccurate stream toward a cuspidor, “she’ll do it, too. That woman means business.”
“Hell!” said Tim O’Donnel, thrusting his simian face comically above his counter, “I wouldn’t give W.O. a drink now if it was fifteen cents a quart and we was alone in a privy. Is she gone yet?”
There was vast whisky laughter.
“Who is she?” some one asked.
“She’s Will Pentland’s sister.”
“By God, she’ll do it then,” cried several; and the place trembled again with their laughter.
Will Pentland was in Loughran’s when she entered. She did not greet him. When she had gone he turned to a man near him, prefacing his remark with a birdlike nod and wink: “Bet you can’t do that,” he said.
Gant, when he returned, and was publicly refused at a bar, was wild with rage and humiliation. He got whisky very easily, of course, by sending a drayman from his steps, or some negro, in for it; but, in spite of the notoriety of his conduct, which had, he knew, become a classic myth for the children of the town, he shrank at each new advertisement of his behaviour; he became, year by year, more, rather than less, sensitive to it, and his shame, his quivering humiliation on mornings after, product of rasped pride and jangled nerves, was pitiable. He felt bitterly that Eliza had with deliberate malice publicly degraded him: he screamed denunciation and abuse at her on his return home.
All through the summer Eliza walked with white boding placidity through horror — she had by now the hunger for it, waiting with terrible quiet the return of fear at night. Angered by her pregnancy, Gant went almost daily to Elizabeth’s house in Eagle Crescent, whence he was delivered nightly by a band of exhausted and terrified prostitutes into the care of his son Steve, his oldest child, by now pertly free with nearly all the women in the district, who fondled him with good-natured vulgarity, laughed heartily at his glib innuendoes, and suffered him, even, to slap them smartly on their rumps, making for him roughly as he skipped nimbly away.
“Son,” said Elizabeth, shaking Gant’s waggling head vigorously, “don’t you carry on, when you grow up, like the old rooster here. But he’s a nice old boy when he wants to be,” she continued, kissing the bald spot on his head, and deftly slipping into the boy’s hand the wallet Gant had, in a torrent of generosity, given to her. She was scrupulously honest.
The boy was usually accompanied on these errands by Jannadeau and Tom Flack, a negro hack-man, who waited in patient constraint outside the latticed door of the brothel until the advancing tumult within announced that Gant had been enticed to depart. And he would go, either struggling clumsily and screaming eloquent abuse at his suppliant captors, or jovially acquiescent, bellowing a wanton song of his youth along the latticed crescent, and through the supper-silent highways of the town.
“Up in that back room, boys,
Up in THAT back room,
All among the fleas and bugs,
I pit-tee your sad doom.”
Home, he would be cajoled up the tall veranda stairs, enticed into his bed; or, resisting all compulsion, he would seek out his wife, shut usually in her room, howling taunts at her, and accusations of unchastity, since there festered in him dark suspicion, fruit of his age, his wasting energy. Timid Daisy, pale from fright, would have fled to the neighboring arms of Sudie Isaacs, or to the Tarkintons; Helen, aged ten, even then his delight, would master him, feeding spoonfuls of scalding soup into his mouth, and slapping him sharply with her small hand when he became recalcitrant.
“You DRINK this! You better!”
He was enormously pleased: they were both strung on the same wires.
Again, he was beyond all reason. Extravagantly mad, he built roaring fires in his sitting-room, drenching the leaping fire with a can of oil; spitting exultantly into the answering roar, and striking up, until he was exhausted, a profane chant, set to a few recurrent bars of music, which ran, for forty minutes, somewhat like this:
“O-ho — Goddam,
Goddam, Goddam,
O-ho — Goddam,
Goddam — Goddam.”
— adopting usually the measure by which clock-chimes strike out the hour.
And outside, strung like apes along the wide wires of the fence, Sandy and Fergus Duncan, Seth Tarkinton, sometimes Ben and Grover themselves, joining in the glee of their friends, kept up an answering chant:
“Old man Gant
Came home drunk!
Old man Gant
Came home drunk!”
Daisy, from a neighbor’s sanctuary, wept in shame and fear. But Helen, small thin fury, held on relentlessly: presently he would subside into a chair, and receive hot soup and stinging slaps with a grin. Upstairs Eliza lay, white-faced and watchfully.
So ran the summer by. The last grapes hung in dried and rotten clusters to the vines; the wind roared distantly; September ended.
One night the dry doctor, Cardiac, said: “I think we’ll be through with this before tomorrow evening.” He departed, leaving in the house a middle-aged country woman. She was a hard-handed practical nurse.
At eight o’clock Gant returned alone. The boy Steve had stayed at home for ready dispatch at Eliza’s need; for the moment the attention was shifted from the master.
His great voice below, chanting obscenities, carried across the neighborhood: as she heard the sudden wild roar of flame up the chimney, shaking the house in its flight, she called Steve to her side, tensely: “Son, he’ll burn us all up!” she whispered.
They heard a chair fall heavily below, his curse; they heard his heavy reeling stride across the dining-room and up the hall; they heard the sagging creak of the stair-rail as his body swung against it.
“He’s coming!” she whispered. “He’s coming! Lock the door, son!”
The boy locked the door.
“Are you there?” Gant roared, pounding the flimsy door heavily with his great fist. “Miss Eliza: are you there?” howling at her the ironical title by which he addressed her at moments like this.
And he screamed a sermon of profanity and woven invective:—
“Little did I reck,” he began, getting at once into the swing of preposterous rhetoric which he used half furiously, half comically, “little did I reck the day I first saw her eighteen bitter years ago, when she came wriggling around the corner at me like a snake on her belly —(a stock epithet which from repetition was now heart-balm to him)— little did I reck that — that — that it would come to this,” he finished lamely. He waited quietly, in the heavy silence, for some answer, knowing that she lay in her white-faced calm behind the door, and filled with the old choking fury because he knew she would not answer.
“Are you there? I say, are you there, woman?” he howled, barking his big knuckles in a furious bombardment.
There was nothing but the white living silence.
“Ah me! Ah me!” he sighed with strong self-pity, then burst into forced snuffling sobs, which furnished a running accompaniment to his denunciation. “Merciful God!” he wept, “it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s croo-el. What have I ever done that God should punish me like this in my old age?”
There