Helen turned quietly to Coker, who was standing in shadow by the window, chewing upon his long unlighted cigar.
“Is there nothing more you can do? Have you tried everything? I mean—EVERYTHING?”
Her voice was prayerful and low. Coker turned toward her slowly, taking the cigar between his big stained fingers. Then, gently, with his weary yellow smile, he answered: “Everything. Not all the king’s horses, not all the doctors and nurses in the world, can help him now.”
“How long have you known this?” she said.
“For two days,” he answered. “From the beginning.” He was silent for a moment. “For ten years!” he went on with growing energy. “Since I first saw him, at three in the morning, in the Greasy Spoon, with a doughnut in one hand and a cigarette in the other. My dear, dear girl,” he said gently as she tried to speak, “we can’t turn back the days that have gone. We can’t turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire—a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron—which we cannot get back.”
He picked up his greasy black slouch hat, and jammed it carelessly upon his head. Then he fumbled for a match and lit the chewed cigar.
“Has everything been done?” she said again. “I want to know! Is there anything left worth trying?”
He made a weary gesture of his arms.
“My dear girl!” he said. “He’s drowning! Drowning!”
She stood frozen with the horror of his pronouncement.
Coker looked for a moment at the gray twisted shadow on the bed. Then, quietly, sadly, with tenderness and tired wonder, he said: “Old Ben. When shall we see HIS like again?”
Then he went quietly out, the long cigar clamped firmly in his mouth.
In a moment, Bessie Gant, breaking harshly in upon their silence with ugly and triumphant matter-of-factness, said: “Well, it will be a relief to get this over. I’d rather be called into forty outside cases than one in which any of these damn relations are concerned. I’m dead for sleep.”
