he caught sight of the sullen respectability of the negress’expression. Helen came back into the house with an angry perturbed face.
“She’ll tell this all over town,” she announced.
Gant moaned in lengthy exhalations. Eugene, shocked at first, and frightened, flung madly across the kitchen linoleum in twisting leaps, falling catlike on his bare soles. He squealed ecstatically at Ben who loped in scowling, and began to snicker in short contemptuous fragments.
“And of course she’ll tell Mrs. Selborne all about it, as soon as she goes back to Henderson,” Helen continued.
“O my God!” Gant whined, “why was this put on me—”
“O gotohell! Gotohell!” she said comically, her wrath loosened suddenly by a ribald and exasperated smile. They howled.
“I shall dy-ee.”
Eugene choked in faint hiccoughs and began to slide gently down the kitchen-washroom door jamb.
“Ah! you little idiot!” Ben snarled, lifting his white hand sharply. He turned away quickly with a flickering smile.
At this moment, Annie appeared on the walk outside the door, with a face full of grieved decorum.
Luke looked nervously and gravely from his father to the negress, fidgeting from one big foot to the other.
“I’se a married woman,” said Annie. “I ain’t used to nothin’like dis. I wants my money.”
Luke blew up in an explosion of wild laughter.
“Whah-whah!” He pronged her larded ribs with scooped fingers. She moved away angrily, muttering.
Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one leg out gently as if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling blindly at the neckband of his nightshirt. A faint clucking sound came at intervals from his wide-open mouth.
They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad laughter all the welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered in them, washing out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and fatality of their lives, the pain of age and death.
Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament against God’s lidless stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with uneasy
