Читать книгу Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life онлайн

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"You drink this! You better!"

He was enormously pleased: they were both strung on the same wires.

Again, he was beyond all reason. Extravagantly mad, he built roaring fires in his sitting-room, drenching the leaping fire with a can of oil; spitting exultantly into the answering roar, and striking up, until he was exhausted, a profane chant, set to a few recurrent bars of music, which ran, for forty minutes, somewhat like this:

"O-ho—Goddam, Goddam, Goddam, O-ho—Goddam, Goddam—Goddam."

—adopting usually the measure by which clock-chimes strike out the hour.

And outside, strung like apes along the wide wires of the fence, Sandy and Fergus Duncan, Seth Tarkinton, sometimes Ben and Grover themselves, joining in the glee of their friends, kept up an answering chant:

"Old man Gant Came home drunk! Old man Gant Came home drunk!"

Daisy, from a neighbour's sanctuary, wept in shame and fear. But Helen, small thin fury, held on relentlessly: presently he would subside into a chair, and receive hot soup and stinging slaps with a grin. Upstairs Eliza lay, white-faced and watchfully.