"What are they crying about?" I wondered.
"Do you want some candy? Your uncle has plenty of it," said he, bending over me, as if to protect me. "Or maybe your feet hurt you? Let your uncle take you on his arms." As soon as I heard "candy," I felt that the man was the Catcher himself, and I tried to break away. But the "uncle" held me fast. Then I began to yell. It was near our house, and the people of our alley rushed towards us, some yelling, some crying, some armed with sticks. Pretty soon I recognized my mother's voice in the mixture of voices and noises. You see, peculiar is the charm of a mother's voice: a knife may be held to one's throat, but the mere sound of mother's voice awakens new courage and begets new hope. Mother made a way for herself, and fell upon the Catcher like a wild beast. She struck, she pinched, she scratched, she pulled his hair, she bit him. But what can a woman do in the line of beating? Nothing! Her neighbors joined her, one, two, three; and all tried hard to take me out of the hands of the Catcher. What can a few women do against one able-bodied man? Nothing at all! That happened during the dinner hour. One of our neighbors got the best of the Catcher, a woman who happened rather to dislike me and my mother; they quarreled frequently. Perhaps on account of this very dislike she was not over-excited, and was able to hit upon the right course to take at the critical moment. She went to our house, took in one hand a potful of roasted groats, ready for dinner, and in the other a kettle of boiling water. Unnoticed she approached the Catcher, spilled the hot groats upon his hands, and at the same time she poured the boiling water over them. A wild yell escaped from the mouth of the Catcher—and I was free.—
There was no more tobacco in the pipe, and the old man lost his speech. That was the way of Samuel the Beadle; he could tell his story only from behind the smoke of his pipe, when he did not see his hearers, nor his hearers saw him. In that way he found it easy to put his boyhood before his mind's eye and conjure up the reminiscences of those days. Meanwhile the horses had stopped, and let us know that a high and steep hill was ahead of us, and that it was our turn to trudge through the mud. We had to submit to the will of the animals, and we dismounted.
III
After tramping a while alongside the coach, the old man lit his pipe, emitted a cloud of smoke, and continued:—
I do not know what happened then. I cannot tell who caught me, nor the place I was taken to. I must have been in a trance all the while.
When I awoke, I found myself surrounded by a flock of sheep, in a meadow near the woods. Near me was my brother Solomon; but I hardly recognized him. He wore peasant clothes: a linen shirt turned out over linen breeches and gathered in by a broad belt. I was eyeing my brother, and he was eyeing me, both of us equally bewildered, for I was disguised like himself.
A little boy, a real peasant boy, was standing near us. He smiled at us in a good-natured, hospitable way. It was the chore-boy of the Jewish quarter. On the Sabbaths of the winter months he kept up the fires in the Jewish houses; that is why he could jabber a few words of Yiddish. During the summer he took care of the flocks of the peasants that lived in the neighborhood.
When I awoke, my mother was with us too. She kissed us amid tears, gave us some bread and salt, and, departing, strictly forbade us to speak any Yiddish. "For God's sake, speak no Yiddish," said she, "you might be recognized! Hide here till the Catcher leaves town."
It was easy enough to say, "Speak no Yiddish"; but did we know how to speak any other language?