O. to tie a knot in the tail of the English language. It always did.”
But within two months he moaned bitterly his unwetted thirst. For several years he ordered, from time to time, the alloted quota—a gallon of whisky every two weeks—from Baltimore. It was the day of the blind tiger. The town was mined thickly with them. Bad rye and moonshine corn were the prevailing beverages. He grew old, he was sick, he still drank.
A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the parched gulley of desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery. He made pretty young summer widows at Dixieland presents of money, underwear, and silk stockings, which he drew on over their shapely legs in the dusty gloom of his little office. Smiling with imperturbable tenderness, Mrs. Selborne thrust out her heavy legs slowly to swell with warm ripe smack his gift of flowered green-silk garters. Wetting his thumb with sly thin aftersmile, he told.
A grass widow, forty-nine, with piled hair of dyed henna, corseted breasts and hips architecturally protuberant in a sharp diagonal, meaty mottled arms, and a gulched face of leaden flaccidity puttied up brightly with cosmetics, rented the upstairs of Woodson Street while Helen was absent.
“She looks like an adventuress, hey?” said Gant hopefully.
She had a son. He was fourteen, with a round olive face, a soft white body, and thin legs. He bit his nails intently. His hair and eyes were dark, his face full of sad stealth. He was wise and made himself unobtrusively scarce at proper times.
Gant came home earlier. The widow rocked brightly on the porch. He bowed sweepingly, calling her Madam. Coy-kittenish, she talked down at him, slogged against the creaking stair rail. She leered cosily at him. She came and went freely through his sitting-room, where he now slept. One evening, just after he had entered, she came in from the bathroom, scented lightly with the best soap, and beefily moulded into a flame-red kimono.
A handsome woman yet, he thought. Good evening, madam.
He got up from his rocker, put aside the crackling sheets of the
