and from that moment she knew only one frenzied desire; somehow to get to her father before he died.
The breath caught hoarse and sharp in her throat in a kind of nervous sob, it seemed that her heart had stopped beating and that her whole life-force was paralyzed; but she was out of her bed with a movement that left the old springs rattling, and she came across the back-porch with a kind of tornado-like speed that just came instantly from nowhere: in a moment she was standing in the open door with the sudden bolted look of a person who had been shot through the heart, staring at the silent group of people, and at the figure on the bed, with a dull strained stare of disbelief and horror.
All the time, although she was not conscious of it, her breath kept coming in a kind of hoarse short sob, her large big-boned face had an almost animal look of anguish and surprise, her mouth was partly open, her large chin hung down, and at this moment, as they turned towards her she began to moan, “Oh-h, oh-h, oh-h, oh-h!” in the same unconscious way, like a person who has received a heavy blow in the pit of the stomach. Then her mouth gaped open, a hoarse and ugly cry was torn from her throat—a cry not of grief but loss—and she rushed forward like a mad woman. They tried to stop her, to restrain her, she flung them away as if they had been rag dolls and hurled herself down across the body on the bed, raving like a maniac.
“Oh, Papa, Papa…. Why didn’t they tell me?… Why didn’t they let me know?… Why didn’t they call me?… Oh, Papa, Papa, Papa!… dead, dead, dead… and they didn’t tell me… they didn’t let me know… they let you die… and I wasn’t here!… I wasn’t here!”—and she wept harshly, horribly, bitterly, rocking back and forth like a mad woman, with a dead man in her arms. She kept moaning, “… They didn’t tell me… they let you die without me… I wasn’t here… I wasn’t here…”
And even when they lifted her up from the bed, detached her arms from the body they had held in such a desperate hug, she still kept moaning in a demented manner, as if talking to the corpse, and oblivious of the presence of these living people:
“They never told me… they never told me…. They let you die here all by yourself… and I wasn’t here… I wasn’t here.”
All of the women, except Bessie Gant, had now begun to weep hysterically, more from shock, exhaustion, and the nervous strain than from grief,
