His eyes softened. There was a huskiness in his throat. The women in the kitchen lifted their aprons to their eyes. If there were any men there they cleared their throats staunchly. Philip sat on the fender stool, his heart bursting with pity for his mother. "Poor mother! my own poor mother!" he felt like whispering into her ear and throwing his arms round her neck and assuring her that he was alive and he would love her and die for her at the last. But he remembered that he was not encouraged to display vehemently his passion for his mother. Very gently he slipped from the stool, turned round into the scullery and took a knife to help her peel the potatoes. At all events, he would not allow her to work so cruelly hard. Why, her fingers were dry and thin! No! he would never let her work like this. Never mind, when he grew up...
"Poor child, poor child!" Reb Monash continued, his voice a trifle unsteady. "How can I tell you? She was suffocating there. No room for her little lungs to open and draw breath! 'Monash, the child, the child!' Chayah was saying. What could I do? How could I understand? Besides, I was davvenning—how could I interrupt? And her little face was growing grey. What? Do you understand? There was no room for her heart to beat ... so her heart stopped beating!"
Again there was a pause. The suffocation which had gripped the child in that monstrous cart years ago seemed to occupy the kitchen in Angel Street. It was not only the shut window; the beneficence of the architects of Angel Street had declared that kitchen-windows should be close-sealed as a wall. It was not the shut doors; the doors were always shut because a "draught" aggravated Reb Monash's cough and rendered him speechless for minutes. That suffocation from the Russian road had descended upon Angel Street. Some one opened his collar and craned his neck for air.
"But, of course, Chayah would not believe that anything had happened to the child. I could only see Rochke very indistinctly because we'd been separated by the crowd. 'It's only a fit! Shake her, shake her, if thou canst!' I said. 'Or perhaps a sickness of the stomach!' said Chayah. 'It will be well with the child when we stop and get down! She'll have some air and food, and she'll be all right, no? Oh yes, she will, she will! Sleep then, sleep then, babynu, all in mammy's arms!' she sang.
"God alone knows what the place was where we stopped to change horses. And Rochke, peace be upon her? Well, what need to talk? She's happier than you or me. Oh, but what an ornament to the race she would have been! Such eyes, the little one, holy, like an old woman's! But wait, the story's not finished yet. Can it be believed? The officials there, they wanted us to continue the journey with the dead child! The smirched of soul, the godless ones! Wanted us to go on with the dead child! And when even they saw it was against God and Man, they wanted to bury her there and then, in unconsecrated ground! Oi! Oi! has it been heard of since Moses? But always put your trust in the Above One and all will be well with you. Know that! Think of us, in the wilderness, with a dead baby, and no holy ground to bury her and not a friend anywhere. The cart had gone on to the next stage, with Dorah and Channah. Think of us!
"It was then the Above One came to our help. A Jewish merchant was on the road with a load of dried fruit. He stopped, God be thanked, at the station, and we told him how things lay with us. And would you believe it? Not a penny he would take—not much was there to give—but he took the baby away and gave her holy burial in his own town! Be his years long in the land! May his seed multiply to the fourth and fifth generation! And so all is well with Rochke, peace be upon her!"
Reb Monash obviously drew much consolation for the whole episode from the fact that the Above One had shown him this signal favour, and the last offices had been performed unimpeachably over Rochke's body.
But perhaps Philip was too young to be comforted by the thoughts of the propriety with which the incident had closed. He could only see very clearly the figures of his mother, blank-eyed, her hands empty, standing alone in Babylon, in that bleak Russian night.