“All right! All right!” cried Robert in a hoarse, excited tone. “That constitutes a threat!… Martha, Eugene…. I call on you to bear witness that he threatened me! We’ll just see how that sounds in a court of law.”
“Courts! Law!” said Upshaw; and even as he spoke they all felt instantly how preposterous was Robert’s threat and how meaningless such terms had become for this wisp of a man.
“Do you think I care one good God-damn now for all the courts and laws that ever were?… Do you think there has been a time for the last two years when I gave a damn whether I lived or died?”
“Except to spite Martha and me,” said Robert bitterly. “You cared about that, all right!”
“Yes,” said Upshaw quietly. “You’re right. I would have hung on to life as long as I could gasp a breath of air into what was left of my lung, and I would have lived on without a lung to breathe with in order to spoil your filthy game—that was the way I hated the two of you. You don’t understand that, do you, Robert? You don’t understand a man being able to hate so hard he can keep alive on it, he can use it instead of a lung to breathe with, he can use it instead of air. You don’t know anything about that, do you?”
“Yes, I do,” said Robert. “I knew you hated me all along!”
“Hated you!” Upshaw snarled. “Why, damn you, I hated the earth you walked upon, the air you breathed, the house you lived in, the places you went to; I hated all the people who saw you or spoke to you or had ever spent an hour in your company—you polluted the atmosphere for me if I even heard the sound of your voice.”
“I know you did,” said Robert, nodding. “What did I tell you?” he cried to Martha, with a note of triumphant conviction.
“You know! You know!” cried Upshaw fiercely. “Why, damn you, you poor cheap imitation of a contriving rascal, you damned little drugstore Casanova, you dirty little swine of a country-club snob, you village fortune-teller, you know nothing!… For two years I stayed alive with not enough sound lung left in me to cover the size of a silver dollar—and do you think it was because I was afraid to die, or wanted to live? No! No!” he whispered, and his face, or rather that eloquence of eye and tooth, grew passionate with the bitterest disgust and loathing he had ever seen. “I’ve had more than thirty years of it, and Christ! it’s been enough! I’ve had my bellyful of it…. I’m fed up all the way to here!” he whispered, and he struck himself fiercely at the base
