“They change the books in the school too often,” he declared in a loud voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an audience. “It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I will not stand it.”
Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a message upon it.
“Be silent,” he wrote. “If you say another word or make another sound to disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the street.”
Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his pocket.
“A dog is dead, eh?” he shouted. “Well you’re getting too big and smart, lad. What do I care for a dead dog?”
Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
“I must not kill,” he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a stranger. “I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill.”
In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise, struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.
“I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so little extra pressure,” he thought.