and sensual languor with which he raised his cigarette to his lips with his powerful plasterer’s hand, drawing the smoke deep into his strong lungs and letting it trickle slowly from his nostrils as he talked—she was conscious of a feeling of enormous security and relief which she had not known in years.
And this feeling, as with every person of strong sensuous perceptions, was literal, physical, chemical, astoundingly acute. She not only felt an enormous relief and joy to get back to these working people, it even seemed to her that everything they did—the way Mr. Duncan held his strong cheap cigar in his thick dry fingers, the immense satisfaction with which he drew on it, the languid and sensual trickling of cigarette smoke from Ollie Gant’s nostrils, his deep, good-natured, indolently lazy laugh, even the perceptible bulge of tobacco-quid in Alec Ramsay’s brick-red face, his barely perceptible rumination of it—all these things, though manlike in their nature, seemed wonderfully good and fresh and living to her—the whole plain priceless glory of the earth restored to her—and gave her a feeling of wonderful happiness and joy.
And later that night when all these men, her father’s friends, had gone into his room, filling it with their enormous and full-blooded vitality, as she saw him lying there, wax-pale, bloodless, motionless, yet with a faint grin at the edge of his thin mouth as he received them, as she heard their deep full-fibred voices, Mike Fogarty’s lilting Irish, Mr. Duncan’s thick Scotch burr, Ollie Gant’s deep and lazy laugh, and the humour of Alec Ramsay’s deep, gruff and matter-of-fact tone, relating old times—“God, Will!” he said, “at your worst, you weren’t in it compared to Wes! He was a holy terror when he drank! Do you remember the day he drove his fist through your plate-glass window right in the face of Jannadeau—and went home then and tore all the plumbing out of the house and pitched the bath-tub out of the second-storey window into Orchard Street—God! Will!—you weren’t in it compared to Wes”—as she heard all this, and saw Gant’s thin grin and heard his faint and rusty cackle, his almost inaudible “E’God! Poor Wes!”—she could not believe that he was going to die, the great full-blooded working men filled the room with the vitality of a life which had returned in all its rich and living flood, and seemed intolerably near and familiar—and she kept thinking with a feeling of wonderful happiness and disbelief: “Oh, but Papa’s not going to die! It’s not possible! He can’t! He can’t!”
