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

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The boy locked the door.

"Are you there?" Gant roared, pounding the flimsy door heavily with his great fist. "Miss Eliza: are you there?" howling at her the ironical title by which he addressed her at moments like this.

And he screamed a sermon of profanity and woven invective:—

"Little did I reck," he began, getting at once into the swing of preposterous rhetoric which he used half furiously, half comically, "little did I reck the day I first saw her eighteen bitter years ago, when she came wriggling around the corner at me like a snake on her belly—[a stock epithet which from repetition was now heart-balm to him]—little did I reck that—that—that it would come to this," he finished lamely. He waited quietly, in the heavy silence, for some answer, knowing that she lay in her white-faced calm behind the door, and filled with the old choking fury because he knew she would not answer.

"Are you there? I say, are you there, woman?" he howled, barking his big knuckles in a furious bombardment.