"Pop!" I called, going toward his bed-room.
The door leading into it slowly opened. The little, dark widow was in there with him.
"Hush! your father is asleep."
A hatred of both him and her shot up quick in my heart. I sensed their abandonment to the sheerly physical, till it took in their whole horizon. It was utterly ignoble. I had a vision of all humanity, living, for the most part, merely for food and sex, letting art and poetry and beauty and adventure pass by, content if they only achieved the bare opportunity of daily wallowing in their mire.
I was bad and mean enough, but the conception of a single poem in my brain, till it found birth on paper, was, I swore, bigger and finer than all this world-mess at its best. Also there was in me somewhat the thwarted, sinister hatred of the celibate....
"You mustn't bother your father now," little Mrs. Jenkins interposed, as I started in, "you must let him rest for awhile, and not wake him."
Through the door, half open, I caught a glimpse of a hollow, wax-white face ... he looked as if all the blood had been let out of his body, little by little. The little, pretty, dark woman looked like a crafty animal ... there was a beady shine of triumph, which she could not conceal, in her eyes, as she opposed my entering. I smelt the pungent smell of her physical womanhood. There was a plumpness about her body, a ruddiness to her lips, that gave me the phantasy that, perhaps, the moment before, she had drunk of my father's blood, and that she was preventing me from going in to where he lay till a certain tiny, red puncture over his jugular vein had closed.
"You forget, Mrs. Jenkins, that he is my father."
"You shan't go in ... please, Johnnie ... let him sleep just a little longer ... as soon as he wakes he asks for another drink!"