hopefulness, of wondering disbelief, but there was something shameful in them, too. In these feeble smiles of the old men there was something pleased and impotent, as if they had been adroitly castrated in the hospital and shorn of their manhood. And for some reason, one felt suddenly a choking anger and resentment against some force in life which had betrayed these old men and made them impotent—something unspeakably ruthless, cruel, and savage in the world which had made these old and useless capons. And this anger against this unknown force suddenly took personal form in a blind resentment against doctors, nurses, internes, and the whole sinister and suave perfection of the hospital which under glozing words and cynical assurances, could painlessly and deftly mutilate a living man.
The great engine of the hospital, with all its secret, sinister, and inhuman perfections, together with its clean and sterile smells which seemed to blot out the smell of rotting death around one, became a hateful presage of man’s destined end. Suddenly, one got an image of his own death in such a place as this—of all that death had come to be—and the image of that death was somehow shameful. It was an image of a death without man’s ancient pains and old gaunt ageing—an image of death drugged and stupefied out of its ancient terror and stern dignities—of a shameful death that went out softly, dully in anæsthetized oblivion, with the fading smell of chemicals on man’s final breath. And the image of that death was hateful.
Thus, as Gant sat there, his great figure wasted to the bone, his skin yellow and transparent, his eyes old and dead, his chin hanging loose and petulant, as he stared dully and unseeingly out across the great city of his youth, his life seemed already to have been consumed and wasted, emptied out into the void of this cruel and inhuman space. Nothing was left, now, to suggest his life of fury, strength and passion except his hands. And the hands were still the great hands of the stone-cutter, powerful, sinewy, and hairy as they had always been, attached now with a shocking incongruity to the wasted figure of a scarecrow.
Then, as he sat there staring dully and feebly out upon the city, his great hairy hands quietly at rest upon the sides of his chair, the door opened and his two sons came out upon the porch.
“W-w-w-well, Papa,” Luke sang out in his rich stammering tones. “Wy-wy wy, wy, I fought we’d just c-c-c-come by for a m-m-m-moment to let Gene say g-g-good-bye to you.” In a low tone to his younger brother
