He moved the few steps to the parlour door and turned the handle. He was at her bedside. Only her eyes he first saw. They were larger, warmer, deeper than they had been at any time before. Because of the eyes, he was not immediately conscious with the whole of his mind of the pallor in which they were set: not merely pallor, a bloodless yellow.
But the consciousness of this pallor was soaking through each pore of his body and mind, even as he bent to kiss her powerless lips; even as he rose and was saying, "Look, mother, mother! I'm back from Wenton!" The consciousness of her pallor so steeped each atom, each corpuscle in him that he became yellow as she. Still, for her sake, he held his lips firm against his teeth, subdued the impulse in his four limbs to fling themselves wildly, wildly, upon the floor. She was too weak to answer. He saw her mouth endeavour to frame words and abandon the attempt. Only by a lifting of the eyelids she showed the joy at the centre of that waning heart, and by the dim flush of colour which spread across her cheeks.
He knew not for what length of time he stood motionless over a body so thin it hardly seemed to break the line of the counterpane. At last he became aware that the door had opened and Channah had come through.
"Let me just come near her, Philip, I'll see if she can take a drop of milk! Dorah's in the kitchen! She wants you to go in and have some food!"
"Not now!" he whispered.
There was a shuffling with utensils on the bedside table. The sound seemed to relax a chain which had held the boy taut. He staggered a few steps and, perceiving the moth-eaten yellow plush arm-chair near him, he sank into it with convulsive abandonment. Now he became consciously and fully aware of the shock he had endured. Sometimes in his dreams he had seen her dead. One dream of them all had lifted his eyelids at midnight from eyes glassy with horror. Now as it came back to him, he winced and writhed. He had seen her head lying on that copper tray where each Sabbath eve she had placed the uncut bread before her husband. Beside her head lay a squat beaker of wine, the beaker over which, before the meal began, Reb Monash incanted the kiddush with shut eyes. In a groping, childish way he had endeavoured to exorcise the terror of this dream by rationalizing it, by relating the hideous phantasm to the fabric of reality. He knew that the copper tray gleaming always like smooth dark mahogany might stand as symbol of the heavy labours which year by year reduced her to a ghost. She had the Jewish housewife's intense pride in the cleanliness and beauty of her home. Each Thursday evening the kitchen table was littered with trays, brass candlesticks, beakers, tins of polish, dusters. Though the reek of the polish was offensive to her lungs and sent her into fits of coughing, no Thursday evening saw the arduous ritual abated by one iota. But Philip knew that the significance of the dream lay deeper than this. Obscurely he realized that the beaker of wine represented all the sacerdotalism of his race; in some way far too profound for his guessing the vision of the severed head was complicated with that antique ritual, so magnificently alive and yet so ineffably dead. The head was lying on that tray of her own devoted polishing throughout the doomed years, lying as an offering to the impendent bearded God of his race. The cavernous lips opened as the beaker rose to their glooms. "I am that I am!" a voice moaned among endless colonnades of hills toppling towards the verges of space. How came it that the eyes of Jehovah aloof among the chasmed clouds were the eyes of Reb Monash, sitting upon his peculiar and inalienable chair in the corner of the kitchen? And the copper tray was a lake profound with many distances and many generations where dim ancestral shapes flickered from deep to deep. Twofold tyrannies along the deliberate reaches of the Nile, wildernesses and weak lads straggling and dying in the wake of the wanderers, smitten lands of exile, Kossacken galloping in with sabres and flung beards, a slight lad crumpled in a moth-eaten yellow plush armchair, crumpled, broken, too mournful for any tears.
He had seen her dead in dreams, but never so pale, so shrunken as now, her mouth retaining little if any at all of the weak, warm milk Channah was lifting on a spoon. An ague shivering visited his whole body. Clearly he brought her to mind as she hovered round him with cherries and tea on those immortal afternoons; he saw her struggling with the Acroceraunian mountains, her lips humorously twisting to shape the alien syllables. He remembered the quiet pride with which, long ago, she had regarded Reb Monash as he sat oracular in his chair, his admirers drinking with reverent avidity the wine of wisdom flowing from his lips. The boy's throat shook with harsh, suppressed sobs.
Channah spoke. "Philip, she's calling to you!"
Not a tear had risen to his eyes. He bent over his mother with a wan smile. Weakly, slowly, she spoke. He knew that she had been lying there, waiting to summon up the strength with which to frame a few words.
"Nu, Feivele, my own one. Art thou feeling stronger for being away?"