"Well, I wait a bit.
"But in half an hour things got suddenly worse. She snatches at my hand, falls back on the pillows, makes grimaces. Bad!
"She begins to moan. I call for help, no one answers. There is a great noise from the fair—nobody hears me. Among a thousand men and women—and we might have been in a wilderness. I want to pull away my hands, go and call somebody, but she holds them tight.
"Two, three minutes pass, it grows late, things are bad. I tear away my hands and I run thither. The circumcision was at the further end of the town. I fly along roads, over bales of merchandise, I fly and fly! It is all too long to me. It was July and yet I shivered with cold as I ran—there, there is Tsemach's house, where the ceremony has taken place."
———
"My heart beats as though I were a malefactor; I feel that there, at home, a soul is about to escape. There I am at the first window! I will not wait for the door, I will break a pane and get in that way. I run up to the window, I see the Rebbe is really in the room, he is walking up and down, I am about to enter like a housebreaker. I gather my remaining strength—there is a cry in my ears: Father, father! I leap."
The narrator was out of breath. He takes a rest, lowers his eyes, which are full of large tears, and ends quietly with a broken voice:
"But it was not to be! There was a heap of manure and stones before the window—I fell, and nearly broke my neck. I have a mark on my forehead to this day. When they brought me in to the Rebbe, he motioned me away with his hand.
"When I got home (how I got there, I don't know), she was lying on the floor—either she fell out of bed dying, or I pulled her out tearing away my hands."
The listeners were silent, a stone weighed on our hearts.