patches, and weathered and dilapidated as Eugene had never seen it before, but incredibly near, incredibly natural and familiar, so that all its ghosts of pain and grief and bitterness, its memories of joy and magic and lost time, the thousand histories of all the vanished people it had sheltered, whom all of them had known, revived instantly with an intolerable and dream-like strangeness and familiarity.
And now, as they looked up at the bleak windows of the room in which he died, the memory of his death’s black horror passed across their souls a minute, and then was gone, leaving them only with the fatality of weary resignation which they had learned from it. In a moment, with a look of ancient and indifferent weariness and grief in her eyes, Helen turned to him, and with a faint rough smile around her mouth, said quietly:
“Does he ever bother you at night?—When the wind begins to howl around the house, do you ever hear him walking up there? Has he been in to see you yet?—K-k-k k-k-k!” she poked him with her big stiff finger, laughing huskily, and then in a low, sombrely brooding tone, as if the grisly suggestion were his, she shook her head, saying:
“Forget about it! They don’t come back, Eugene! I used to think they did, but now I know they never do.—He won’t come,” she muttered, as she shook her head. “Forget about it. He won’t come. Just forget about it,” she continued, looking at Eliza with weary resignation. “It’s not her fault. I used to think that you could change them. But you can’t. Uh-uh!” she muttered, plucking at her large cleft chin. “It can’t be done. They never change.”
Luke stood distractedly for a moment on the curbstone, breathing his large unhappy breath and thrusting his clumsy fingers strongly through the flashing whirls and coils of his incredible hair.
“Now—ah!” he sang out richly. “Let me see! I—wy—I fink! M-m-m-mama, if you please!” he said. “Wy if you please!” with an exasperated and ironic obsequiousness.
She had been standing there, planted squarely on the sidewalk, facing her house. She stood with her hands clasped loosely across her stomach, and as she looked at the gaunt weathered shape of the old house, her mouth was puckered in an expression of powerful rumination in which the whole terrible legend of blood and hunger and desperate tenacity—the huge clutch of property and possession which, with her, was like the desperate clutch of life itself—was evident.
What was this great claw in her life—this thing that was stronger than life
