He squirmed in his corner of the cab. They had desecrated her sleep, these minions of Christ! It seemed at that moment that no life henceforward lay before him excepting the shattering from His throne of the thorn-crowned Hypocrite, in whose service those long-legged blackguards jeered at Death. This mood passed quickly. A memory came to him of a picture he had seen somewhere, the eyes of Christ lifted in anguish, the heavy blood thickening about the wounds. But he felt that a bitter brew had been forced down his throat. A taste of crude salt lay in the hollow of his tongue.
The cab arrived at Angel Street. Dorah and Channah sat waiting in the kitchen on low stools, and low stools (on which alone the bereaved of a Jewish family may sit during the shiveh, the seven days' mourning) were set for Reb Monash and Philip. The neighbours had prepared some food, but Philip could not eat. Each mouthful became impregnated with the evil liquid flowing round his tongue. He was conscious of nothing but intense irritation and dared not trust himself to utter a word. He winced when a door opened, squeaking, and brutally he kicked the cat as it meowed into his face. When Channah put her hand on his forehead, he threw it off with a suppressed scream. He was annoyed that the women let the food lie about so long, and when they removed it, he was annoyed that they removed it so clumsily. A ring of hot metal seemed to lie behind each eye. He shut his eyes, but only set the rings rolling on their axes and throwing off sparks.
A sing-song monologue was drumming into his ears. One or two of Reb Monash's friends had come in and his father was narrating the virtues of the dead woman.
"Oi, such a wife!" he was moaning, "A Yiddish soul and good as gold! Nothing which it is right for a Yiddish woman to do, she did not do! No mitzvah was too hard for her! And on Friday night what a table it was! Not a speck on the tablecloth and the candles shining like the heavens! Oi, my buried Chayah! Where shall I find me such another one? Where, where? And on yom tovvim....!"
The teeth of Philip's bitterness fastened close on this harangue. This was the first moment since his return from Wenton that he had become conscious of Reb Monash as a separate and complete entity. He had been irrelevant hitherto. Only his mother, living or dead, had occupied the full circle of his vision. There had been room for no one, nothing but her. The incident on the return from the cemetery had made a hole in the walls of his isolation, an acid had come trickling into him, corroding him. What did the old man mean by this futility? What interest was all this to the nodding old fools on the sofa? Indeed, what interest were her virtues to the man himself, eulogizing her from the low stool, in the same chant he had heard often in the bygone years, rising fitfully from the room where the living woman lay sleepless and frightened in her bed?
"And what think you she would do? She would borrow money on her bracelets to lend to Yashka, the fisher's wife! And when a woman gave birth she would forget she was ill herself: she'd go out through the rain to make her some dainty and clean her floor! What a house she kept for me....!"
It was intolerable! Would he never finish? Whither was he leading? Faster and faster revolved the wheels behind his eyes. He dug his nails into his hands and the voice proceeded evenly. He had stopped. No, it was to draw breath! He was proceeding again. This man his father? Oh, a stranger surely! They had lost sympathy enough, God knows, these years. But the man incanting now so monotonously, who was he, what was he doing here?
Philip found his own lips in motion. Reb Monash was silent and turned his head towards his son.
"You've found it all out now, have you?" he said. The voice was raw and dry, a voice he had never uttered nor heard before. Was it himself had asked that question, and himself who asked again with words that stabbed the tranced silence in which the room lay frozen—
"So you've found it out now that you've killed her?"