The Last Adam Read Online Free PDF

her saying: "Some dreadful people named Oppenheimer have that fine old house. They're the most odious and pushing sort of Jews. But what can you do? They simply force their way in everywhere. —"
    George Bull's laugh boomed out unabashed by solitude. Suddenly remembering what he had come for; that he had at least a dozen of those damn brats to vaccinate, he took his bag. Walking round the bleak, unpainted corner of the barn, he swung open a gate and so approached the back door of the Crowe house.
     
     
     
    It was after three o'clock when George Bull, down from Cold Hill, drove into Janet Cardmaker's road. He had just gone through the shadows lying along behind the Cobble, past the white, restored Colonial of the Lincoln place, past the Hoyts'. He was later than he had meant to be. The Crowes had given him dinner after he finished with the children—great quantities of tasteless, scalding food and tumblers full of hard cider. He felt very cheerful. When, just past the Hoyts', he encountered Virginia Banning, driving a new Ford Coupé, he roared, "All right. Wait a minute." With some difficulty he backed a hundred feet to a point where she could pass. She said, curt, unsmiling: "Thank you."
    George Bull didn't resent the attitude, copied from her mother, for he guessed that Virginia was a longer thorn than he was when it came to pricking Mrs. Banning. "Got a bit of old Paul in her," he decided, remembering Mr. Banning's father. He liked her frail, still adolescent face; the cheeks a little hollowed; her sulky small mouth. Virginia Banning's blue eyes had a defiant gleam, as though she would like to tell everyone to go to hell. There was, too, a wiry rebelliousness about her narrow, fleshless buttocks—he could picture her best walking down to the post office, the wind tightening her skirt around a frank, limber stride; a short, fur-collared leather jacket buttoned across her practically breastless chest. Only one of the lot with any guts, he always thought; and that amused him, for he guessed if she had been born fifteen years later, a hell-bent for science fellow like Doctor Verney at Sansbury would have changed her altogether. Irradiated ergosterol might have done the trick. Verney would tell you all about it—a trifling deficiency of the antirachitic vitamin D, with a consequent shortage of actually assimilated lime and phosphorus. That accounted for the constriction of the jawbones, giving her face that fragile, determined shape; a flattening of the chest cavity; a narrow, somewhat rachitic pelvis.
    Normal parturition would probably kill her; but fellows like Verney considered the course of nature undignified and poorly planned anyway. All that waiting around and mess, when a nice little Cesarean section —
    He laughed, thinking: "I guess I needn't figure how to get it out until she finds somebody to put it in"; and then he laughed again, with relish, for he could imagine Mrs. Banning probably having a stroke at the impropriety of such gross speculations. He blinked into the golden sun and brought his car to a halt. Stepping out on the snow, beaten hard, stained with horse-dung, polished in spots by the runners of a big sled, he went and banged on the kitchen door.
    There was no answer. Turning, he saw yellow electric light in the small square windows piercing the concrete foundations of the big barn. Janet might be down there.
    As he pressed his bulk through it, the narrow opening left in the wagon doors was forced wider. His boots resounded on the planking while he walked familiarly to the stairs in the corner. Down their dark turnings the cobwebs came off on his swinging fur. He shoved the door at the bottom open with his foot and stepped out.
    "Hello, George," Janet nodded. "I could tell you a mile off. Harold thought it was an elephant upstairs."
    Harold Rogers, her farmer, sallow, unshaven, in overalls and a black leather coat, grinned. "'Lo, Doc," he said. "One of those little Devons is kind of sick. Don't