But Toria, Betkin’s mother, stayed him in this movement.
“Take him alive,” she cried.
And she plucked out his white hairs by handfuls, and tore his face with her nails.
And she howled with grief and fury.
The weer-wolf, his hands fast in the engine and stumbling about the roadway, through his keen sufferings:
“Pity,” said he, “pity! take this woman away. I will give two carolus. Break those bells! Where are those children that are calling?”
“Keep him alive!” cried Toria, “keep him alive, let him pay! The bells for the dead, the death bells for thee, murderer. By slow fire, by red-hot pincers. Keep him alive! let him pay!”
Meanwhile, Toria had picked up on the road a waffle iron with long arms. Looking closely at it in the light of the torches, she saw it deeply engraved between the two iron plates with lozenges in the Brabant fashion, but armed besides, like an iron mouth, with long sharp teeth. And when she opened it, it was like the mouth of a greyhound.
Then Toria, holding the waffle iron, opening it and shutting it and making the iron ring, seemed as though she had lost her wits for male fury, and gnashing her teeth and with hoarse rattle breath like a woman dying, bit the prisoner with this engine in the arms, the legs, everywhere, seeking most of all his neck, and with every bite saying:
“Thus he did to Betkin with the iron teeth. He pays. Dost thou bleed, murderer? God is just. The bells for the dead! Betkin is calling me to revenge. Dost thou feel the teeth? ’Tis the mouth of God.”