lived carelessly and lustily—enlargement of the prostate gland. It was not often in itself a fatal disease—it was more often one of the flags of age and death, but it was ugly and uncomfortable. It was generally treated successfully by surgery—the operation was not desperate. But Gant hated and feared the knife: he listened eagerly to all persuasions against it.
He had no gift for philosophy. He could not view with amusement and detachment the death of the senses, the waning of desire, the waxing of physical impotence. He fed hungrily, lewdly, on all news of seduction: his amusement had in it the eyes of eagerness, the hot breath of desire. He was incapable of the pleasant irony by which the philosophic spirit mocks that folly it is no longer able to enjoy.
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! I curse the day I was born!… I curse
