"You don't know what it means to be fighting for the right!"
He was so slight, so meagre in appearance, that I could not help finding something gently humorous about his utterance. But when I looked at him and saw how his eyes glowed through the dark, and how he stood straight and at full height, his narrow shoulders thrown back, in spite of his bandaged arm, and his face upraised to the summer stars, my smile passed quickly.
There came over me that same queer panging sense of being only on the outside of things—only on Life's outermost border. I was looking straight into the heart of a boy and seeing the gladness which blazed there—and yet I could not have it, as he had it. Here was this sudden, all-forgetting boldness of belief which he had won—and I could only watch it covetously through the bars of my exiled doubts.
No, no, he was right—a thousand times more right than I. If faith in the One God did all of this for him, then that faith was surely justified.
And if I could only bring myself to believe as deeply, as powerfully as he did—then my whole life would be remade as his had been—and I, too, would fight for what I must believe: would fight—for the right!
I did not let him talk any further, but sent him home. I did not want his parents to be worrying as to where he was, this time of night. I stayed on a little while, looking over the roofs and the white-faced huddlings of the fire-escapes, and then I went to bed, to toss with heat and battle with my thoughts throughout the night.
When the morning came, I went early to Frank's house. The pavements were fresh and damp with the water of a sprinkling cart, and the shops, just beginning to open, had a Sabbath air of cleanliness. It was cooler than yesterday, too, and the street corners were still cleared and quiet.
I had been granted permission to take Frank and two other boys on a picnic to Westchester. He was ready for me when I knocked at his door, and let me into the darkened kitchen.
His mother was there, too, cutting bread for sandwiches which we would take along. Her old morning wrapper and her hastily-shawled head gave her an even more forbidding appearance than ever. But when her sandwiches were packed into a box and wrapped and tied, she wiped her hands on a towel and looked at me steadfastly, not unkindly, for fully a minute.
I could not understand what she said. It was in Yiddish, and I have never learned that tongue. But here and there I caught a word which gave me enough of her meaning.