"I'll go for two or three hours!" said Dorah. "When I come down, you must go up at once!" Her lanky figure bent awkwardly over Mrs. Massel. Her thin lips touched the forehead fleetingly. Channah threw herself down on her knees beside the bed and babbled incoherent words.
"Go thou, go, my own one!" murmured her mother. "Thou hast not slept—how long! Go, darling, sleep, sleep!"
There followed silence after the women had withdrawn. Not a word passed between his mother and Philip. Sometimes she would close her eyes for some minutes, then open them once more full and deep upon her son's. He remembered how Time had been so dilatory in the train; how he had wanted hours to shrivel into minutes, the long minutes to be brief as a spark. Now Time moved too swiftly, with deadly deliberate speed.
Beyond the parlour window and high beyond the houses on the other side of Angel Street, he heard the galloping of horses and the abateless revolutions of wheels. Oh, that the moments could expand into hours, and the hours once more into the years in which he had loved her so little and she had loved him so well, so well despite the danger that lay between and the cloud that had always enveloped them.
But now at least there was no danger, no cloud; nothing hindered their unity. The whispering of Doomington, that ceased not even in a snow-muffled winter midnight, now on all sides withdrew, leaving the dim parlour in Angel Street aloof and calm. The incandescent light choked and spat no more. A still light, steadier than the moon, less garish than the tree-shaded twilight of glades, invested the room, converting each object there into a significance beyond ugliness and beauty. All accidentals of space and birth and time were stripped from the woman on the bed, from the boy at her side. She was the mother, he was the son, nothing more. There was a pulsation in the air, between them and about them, linking them though they were far apart as Aldebaran and the Earth, though she lay crumbling under her wooden lid and he strode sun-engirdled over the morning hills.
How long this thing lasted the boy did not know at all, for he did not even know that it came. He only knew that Channah was peering round the door, fearful of waking them if they had fallen asleep. She wondered how it came that his face was shining as with dawn, though still the night was deep and the black incandescent gas flared and gasped. She wondered also at the smile which lay curled at the edges of her mother's lips. She saw, at one moment, how his eyes looked calmly towards hers, and how the next moment his head had fallen limply on his breast. She came forward swiftly to prevent him slipping to the ground.
He awoke to find himself lying under a blanket in his own former bedroom, whither, he learned later, Dorah and Reb Monash had lifted him. He stared unseeing for some time into the blotched ceiling, then the words came tolling against his ears, "The Last Morning! The Last Morning!" He did not at once seize the meaning of the phrase. He knew merely that this morning was to be an ending of things. But when the phrase became particularized, whose last morning had dawned, slowly he rose from his bed as a doomed man for the gallows.
It was morning. The blind had been drawn, but they had left the gas feebly talking in the incandescent burner. Shadowy people had already gathered in the lobby and there were several neighbours in the parlour. Reb Monash was standing over her bed listening to the faint words she was endeavouring to shape. A flicker of jealousy touched the boy's heart.
"Monash," she said, "it is shabbos, yes?"
"Yah, Chayah, the Holy Day!"