Eight days bad elapsed since the memorable evening when the young men bad conversed and sung together on the meadow. On the ninth day, after sunset, Meir left the Ha-Midrash and stood in its high portico.
Obedient to the order of the head of the family, he had spent the week in utter solitude, reading the Talmud which he knew so well already, and for which, in spite of all the doubts which troubled his mind, he never lost the reverence implanted into him from his childhood. The penance had not brought him any physical discomforts; his meals were carried to him from home, where the charitable women had tried to make them even more palatable than usual. Nevertheless, he was much changed. He looked paler, thinner, yet withal more manly. Neither in his expression nor bearing was there any trace of his former almost childish timidity. Perhaps his intelligence had rebelled against the injustice of the punishment; it may be the solitude and the study of the many volumes in the Ha-Midrash had called forth new ideas and confirmed him in the old ones. The nervous contraction of his brow and his feverish burning eyes betrayed hard mental work, all the harder because without help or guide. The penance inflicted upon him bad missed its aim. Instead of quieting and soothing the restless spirit, it made him bolder and more rebellious.
When Meir descended the steps into the court another feeling took hold of him—that of shame. At the sight of several people crossing the courtyard he dropped his eyes and blushed. They were elders of the Kahol, who seeing Meir, pointed at him and laughed. One of them, Jankiel Kamionker, did not laugh, and seemingly had not noticed the young man. He was walking apart from his companions, and his face looked troubled and preoccupied. Instead of entering into the Kahol building with the other men, he almost stealthily approached the almshouse; he only passed it, but it was sufficient to exchange a few whispered words with a man whose shaggy hair and swollen face appeared at the open window. Meir knew the man, and silently wondered what business the rich and pious Jankiel could have with a thief and vagrant like the carrier Johel. But he did not think much about it, and directed his steps, not towards home, but to a small passage near the school, which would bring him out into the fields; he was longing for space and air. He stood still for a few minutes. An odd murmuring noise, rising and falling, mixed with an occasional wailing reached his ear; it was dominated by a thick, hoarse voice alternately reading, talking, and scolding.
A peculiar smile crossed Meir's face; it expressed anger and compassion. He was standing near the school where the melamed Reb Moshe infused knowledge into the juvenile minds. Something seemed to attract him there; he leaned his elbows on the window-sill and looked in.
It was a narrow, low and evil-smelling room. Between the blackened ceiling, the wall and the floor full of dirt and litter, which filled the air with a damp and heavy vapour, there seethed and rocked a compact, gray mass which produced the murmuring noise. By and by, as if out of a dense fog, childish faces seemed to detach themselves. The faces were various, some dark and coarse, as if swollen with disease; others pale, delicate and finely cut. As various as the faces were their expressions; there were those who, with mouth wide open and idiotic eyes stared into vacancy; others twitched and fretted with ill concealed impatience but most of them, though suffering, looked patient and submissive. Their outward appearance showed an equal variety, from the decent coat of the rich man's child, in gentle graduations to the sleeveless jackets and tatters of the very poorest classes.
Some fifty children were crowded into that room which barely accommodated half that number. They sat almost one upon the other, on hard dirty benches, closely packed together. This was not the only school in Szybow but none of the others was so eagerly sought after by parents as the one conducted by Reb Moshe, known by his piety and cabalistic knowledge, the favourite of the Rabbi. It must not be thought that Reb Moshe initiated his scholars into the first steps of learning; this would have been sheer waste of his capabilities—which aimed at something higher.
The children he received were from ten to twelve years old, who had already been taught in other schools to read Hebrew and the Chumesh or Five Books of Moses, with all their explanations and commentaries; after that they came under the tuition of Reb Moshe and were introduced to the Talmud, with all its chapters, paragraphs, debatable points, and commentaries above commentaries.
All this would have been more than sufficient to enlarge or confuse the minds of those pale, miserable children; but Reb Moshe in his zeal did not content himself with exercising the memory of his scholars; he wanted also to develop their imagination, and sometimes treated them to extracts from the metaphysical Kabala. The reading or expounding of parts of those books was looked upon by him as a kind of rest or recreation, which sometimes it proved to be when the melamed was too deeply absorbed to watch his audience.
The melamed was thus occupied when Meir looked through the window. He was bending over a heavy book with an expression of ecstatic rapture, and rocking his body to and fro with the chair upon which he sat. The scholars with their books before them were also rocking themselves and repeating their lessons in a loud murmur, sometimes smiting the edge of the bench with their fists by way of emphasis, or burying their hands in their already tangled manes.
Suddenly the melamed left off rocking himself, took the heavy book in both hands and struck it with all his might on the table. It was the signal for silence. The scholars left off rocking and raised their eyes in sudden alarm, thinking the time bad come to give out their lessons.