The parlour door was flung open suddenly. With her hair escaped from the pins, her hands beating wildly, there stood Dorah, crying shrilly, with broken catches! "Come here, Channah, Philip! Come, look at her for the last time! Quick, quick, it'll be too late!"
Channah clung back against him.
"We must go!" Philip whispered. "Poor old girl, let's go!"
All but her face was covered where she lay, the lid revealing the calm head. The room was full of unchecked sobbing. Grief was round her like a whirlpool. How calm she lay at its centre, unperturbed, serene! A woman was tearing her hair, Dorah beating her breast savagely! Reb Monash stood heaped against a corner, his head drooped upon his breast. Channah, her shoulders convulsively shaking, lay clasped in a woman's arms. Philip looked tearless upon his mother's tearless face. She knew how to take Death quietly, like a queen! The tinge of yellow had gone from her cheeks. They were only white now, placidly white. Never before had her face been so wise and sweet. Oh, the queenly lady ... mother as never before!
"Go out now, you must go out!" a voice said.
"Never, never! You'll never take her away!" Dorah shrieked, but the woman led Dorah out, and Channah after her. For one moment Reb Monash and Philip remained in the room, the body between them. Then they too went.
Little trickles faltered down the kitchen windows, dulling the light already so meagre. Philip looked out into the yard and saw a slow drizzle falling miserably. The ground would be sodden, out there. He shivered. A chill rain faltered within him as he turned away, a drizzle soaking his heart till it was sodden like the cemetery out along the paved roads, somewhere at a corner of Doomington. As he sat motionless, a man approached him and asked him to unfasten his coat. With leaden fingers he obeyed. The man seized his waistcoat a little distance above the first button-hole and held it taut with the left thumb and first finger. A razor in the right hand made a two-inch incision. The canvas threads sprawled from the gap like exposed nerves.
When the first cab came crunching along Angel Street, he observed with abstract interest how the wheels, though superficially they seemed to be arrested outside the front door, still went heavily revolving towards his ribs and crunched them below their passing, till he could hardly breathe for the sharp bits of bone sticking in his chest. Other vehicles followed. Two cabs had been subscribed for and sent by the Polisher Shool to express the sympathy and respect of the congregation. One or two other synagogues which had witnessed Reb Monash's oratorical triumphs paid a like tribute, and there was, of course, a quotum provided by the burial society out of the Sunday fund to which Reb Monash had contributed from the first week of his arrival in Doomington, as knowing that though his family's living might be a doubtful affair, of death's coming, soon or late, there could be no doubt.
Some one told him that his father, the parnass and the gabboim of the Polisher Shool were already installed in the leading cab. They were waiting for him. A lethargy had been creeping about his brain. "Wasn't there any way of getting out of it? Why must he go? Why must any one go? Wasn't it finished, finished beyond recall?"
Dorah sat on the sofa swaying regularly from side to side. He heard the crying of Channah, hidden somewhere.