"I didn't mean it, ma—I swear! Don't rub it in this way—please—please—"
"Why, I never wanted anything in my life like I want this, Sammy—that you should enlist—a woman to look in on—I been a bad woman, Sammy, I—I—oh—"
It was then that Mr. Lipkind tore to the telephone, his hands so frenzied that they would not properly hold the receiver.
At eight o'clock, and without even a further word, Mrs. Lipkind breathed out quietly, a little tiredly, and yet so eloquent of eye. To her son, pleading there beside her for the life she had not left to give, it was as if the swollen bosom of some stream were carrying her rapidly but gently down its surface, her gaze back at him and begging him to stay the current.
"Mamma! Darling! Doctor—please—for God's sakes—please—she wants something—-she can't say it—give it to her! Try to make her tell me what she wants—she wants something—this is terrible—don't let her want something—mamma—just one word to me—try—try—O my God—Doctor—"
A black arm then reached down to withdraw him from the glazed stare which had begun to set in from the pillow.
By ten o'clock a light snow had set in, blowing almost horizontally across the window-pane. He sat his second hour there in a rather forward huddle beside the drawn shade of that window, the sotto-voce comings and goings, all the black-coated parvenus that follow the wake of death, moving about him. A clock shaped like a pilot's wheel, a boyhood property which had marked the time of twenty years, finally chimed the thin, tin stroke of eleven and after a swimming, nebulous interval, twelve. He glanced up each time with his swollen eyes, and then almost automatically out to the wall telephone in the hall opposite the open door. But he did not move. In fact, for two more hours sat there impervious to proffered warmth of word or deed. Meanwhile, the snow behind the drawn shade had turned to rain that beat and washed against the pane.
Just so the iciness that had locked Samuel Lipkind seemed suddenly to melt in a tornado of sobs that swept him, felled him into a prostration of the terrible tears that men weep.
At a training-camp—somewhere—from his side of a tent that had flapped like a captive wing all through a wind-swept night, Lieutenant Lipkind stirred rather painfully for a final snuggle into the crotch of an elbow that was stiff with chill and night damp.
Out over the peaked city that had been pitched rather than built, and on beyond over the frozen stubble of fields, sounded the bugle-cry of the reveille, which shrills so potently: