Who's speaking? "That'll do, young feller-me-lad!" The draught has awakened the dozing fat man.
His lips vibrate with growing indignation. "Shoot that winder oop and sit tha down! Awake sin' fower o'th'clock and tha wilt go playin' tricks with winders, wilt'a... ?"
The window is replaced along the full length of its groove, and with a rumbling from the gills, a slight outraged crest-heavy swinging, the fat man once more slides away into somnolence.
What shall he do as the slow miles dawdle by? Poetry! How long he has deserted poetry! What strange affinity had there been between poetry and beetles! Rarely, rarely since those old days of crackling wall-paper and whisperful spent cinders where the beetles crawled, had a pencil, busy a moment ago on the annotation of vacuous texts, found itself scrawling rhymes and dreams. He had felt that poetry would not come his way again, but now ... as the train beat like a living pulse, now that his own heart seemed to be moving forward and backward again, a great shining piston ... He hunted in his pockets for a pencil, took out a blunt stump, and lifted an envelope from the same pocket. With a quick dart of anguish he realized it was the last letter he had received from Channah, where already the signature of his mother sprawled with the impotence of death. He flung the pencil away as if the impulse which had produced it from his pocket had been treason. He remembered with bitter mirth an anticipatory consolation he had once frequently imbibed. At the same time as he had persistently assured himself of his mother's immortality, he had whispered, smirking, "Yes, but when she does die, won't I start writing wonderful poetry! Marvellous elegies that'll make Gray sound like a threepenny kettledrum! I'll make 'em sit up! And I'll have a little book bound in soft red leather..." The tortured lad winced as he brought to mind the old fatuity. He would make capital out of her death, would he, little books bound in soft red leather! How well he knew now he would be like a fallen leaf on a road trodden by a thousand feet!
Oh, swifter, train! Never train moved so slowly! He moved from against the fat man and pushed the opposite seat ludicrously with his feet to bring the train sooner to Doomington.
He was holding the envelope in his hand. And he had allowed the girl called Mamie to persuade him to take no alarm in the weakening of the signature. He had suppressed the instinct from swimming into clear consciousness, the instinct to return at once before the hand weakened into the last torpor. Now at length the contest and the protagonists of which his mind had been the arena stood starkly before him, and he knew, with what shame, what despair, who had prevailed. Mamie and a tickling of the lips, shafts of shy pleasure about the loins—and his mother, waiting. With abrupt clarity, the enamelled can which last night had prevailed over the disorder of his dreams, returned. Now clearly he realized the heart-breaking symbolism of the enamel can; not merely symbolism! Soon the can should be not merely a symbol, but a fact; soon, perhaps now!
In all his forethought of death, not in especial relation with his mother, but with anybody he loved or knew, one element in the Jewish custom had brought him most distress. Frequent observation had instructed him that when a dead body lay beyond the doors of a Jewish house, a vessel of water and a bucket to replenish it were placed at the edge of the pavement. As the living passed by the place of death, the vessel was lifted to sluice from each hand alternately of the passer-by the contamination issuing from the melancholy doors. It was a sign of death which had sometimes come upon him so suddenly but with such incontrovertible assertion that it had long filled the crevices of his mind with horror.
The actual enamel tin of his dreams he also recognized. It had been condemned a long time ago to the scullery at Angel Street, because the enamel had been chipped by old service from its edges, and it now hung, he well remembered, on a rusted nail by the sink. It had been used by his father and himself for the hand-washing which preceded every meal. There could be no vestige of doubt that when the time came for this desperate and bitter use, the enamel can would be lifted from the nail and would contain cold water for cleansing at the pavement's edge.
Ah, how he realized now what Mamie was endeavouring to do when she had lifted the enamel can in his dreams and thrown away the water, and the can had fallen from her fingers. Once more she sought to delude him into believing that all was well, that the deadly need did not exist for the cleansing of hands at the enamel can. Even as she had sought to assure him that all was well with the writing in Channah's letter! Too late! There at the pavement's edge, despite her duplicity, the enamel can lay once more, its little lake of grey water reflecting the grey sky. Here came a woman, swaying in her sorrow, her shawl slipping from her head! She stooped. Over the knuckles of the left hand washed the water, over the knuckles of the right.
Philip shivered suddenly. What if he actually found the enamel can outside the doorsteps? Could he bear to go into the house? No, that at least he had not deserved! Not that! She would wait, he knew she would wait.