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
