"It's already a long time ago," said Reb Monash. "I wasn't fifteen yet. I wasn't married. It's all over now, it's all over. Besides," he went on comfortably, at the risk of disturbing the atmosphere he had created by his subtle modulations of tone, his pauses, his notes of drawn tension, "besides, they'll all be frying in hell, the wood-cutters, one and all! What will you?"
A slight murmur of satisfaction went round among the women. The assurance coming from so authoritative a source as Reb Monash himself, no one could doubt that the wood-cutters had long ago met their deserts and were still adequately enduring them.
"Nu tatte, what about Mendel, the Red One?" This from Philip in an anxious quaver.
Reb Monash looked round and down on Philip, a significant droop in his eyelids, his lips tightening a little.
"Schweig," he said. "Silence! is thy tatte running away?"
"Hush!" Mrs. Massel echoed, very quietly, from her corner of the sofa.
Reb Monash could not resist the temptation of taking out one of his Silver Virginia cigarettes, deliberately setting it in his mouthpiece, lighting it, and drawing smoke two or three times contemplatively.
Somebody's foot tapped in a corner. He resumed. "Yah, a gun pointing at him through a chink. What was there to do, I ask you? If they fired—well, they fired, and he was dead. If they didn't fire, he was alive. And if a man's alive, a man must live. Not so? So he took his quill in his hand again ... and he heard a little noise in the wall behind him. He looked round. Another gun. There, held by unseen hands in the night. Another gun. Pointing at him. Two guns pointing at him. He turned round to his table again. A Jew's not a Jew for nothing. He said a few blessings. Thou hearest, Feivel?" turning to Philip.
Philip swallowed a lump in his throat fearfully. He was afraid to answer. It was perhaps one of those rhetorical questions to which an answer was somehow, mysteriously, an offence. He thrust his head deeper into his hands and blinked.
"He said a few blessings," Reb Monash repeated, to press the moral home upon his listeners. "Well, what will you? He was a good clerk, very neat. And while the minutes in his clock were ticking as slowly as the years during the Time of Bondage, his figures he brought over from column to column. When came the first sign of morning so that the lamp shone less strongly on the two guns in the walls there, pointed at his heart," these last words with slow emphasis and repeated, "pointed at his heart—he dipped his head and hands into his bowl of water, took out his tallus and his tephilim; and when he was passing the strap round his arm, he heard very faintly the guns withdrawn through the chinks in the walls. But he could hear no feet creeping away. Besides, he was davenning; how could he listen to anything else? It's only God you must think about when you're davenning, no?