Читать книгу Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life онлайн
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"When he's sober?" said Will, winking at him in the dark. "What about when he's asleep?"
"He's all right the minute Helen gets hold of him," Mr. Duncan remarked in his rich voice. "It's wonderful what that little girl can do to him."
"Ah, I tell you!" Jannadeau laughed with guttural pleasure. "That little girl knows her daddy in and out."
The child sat in the big chair by the waning sitting-room fire: she read until the flames had died to coals—then quietly she shovelled ashes on them. Gant, fathoms deep in slumber, lay on the smooth leather sofa against the wall. She had wrapped him well in a blanket; now she put a pillow on a chair and placed his feet on it. He was rank with whisky stench; the window rattled as he snored.
Thus, drowned in oblivion, ran his night; he slept when the great pangs of birth began in Eliza at two o'clock; slept through all the patient pain and care of doctor, nurse, and wife.
IV
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The baby was, to reverse an epigram, an unconscionable time in getting born; but when Gant finally awoke just after ten o'clock next morning, whimpering from tangled nerves, and the quivering shame of dim remembrance, he heard, as he drank the hot coffee Helen brought to him, a loud, long lungy cry above.