At length the stage comes, after almost three hours delay. There are two travelers who sit down together at one table. From the conversation of the travelers he learns the following facts. At the last post station, there was a murder committed the night before in a rest-house run by a Jew. The post horses were always changed here. But the robbers stole the horses and escaped to another village, and until other horses could be procured, the travelers were forced to observe the scene of the crime.
If the house had not been robbed one would have thought it an act of revenge or religious fanaticism. In stories told about certain religious sects, there were just such crimes. Even in the fever that was consuming him, Leiba began to shiver.
Then followed something that evidently filled the conductor of the stage with deep respect.
The passengers were two students—one of philosophy and one of medicine. Between the students now arose a debate. Atavism—alcoholism and its pathological results. Theories of heredity—mistakes of training and education—neurosis! All the discoveries of modern science. But first—reversion to type—Darwin—Haeckel—Lombroso—Between Darwin and Lombroso the enthusiastic guests had found time to sip a little of Schopenhauer, too,—“toward Heaven and toward the light!”
Zibal was a long way from comprehending these enlightened theories. Perhaps for the first time exalted words like these vibrated upon the feverish swamp-air of Podeni.
But one thing Leiba had understood better than all the rest, and that was “reversion to type”—that was an exact description of George. This picture, which he had only visioned dimly, now blazed out in his mind with the vividness of reality. He saw it in its most unessential details.
The stage was far away now. Leiba watched it out of sight until it turned around a corner of the mountains. The sun had just dipped behind one of the black peaks and evening began to veil with its shadows the lonely valley of Podeni. Restless and unhappy he drops down upon the chair again and turns over in his mind all that he has heard.
In the lonely night, in the darkness, a man, two women and two children were snatched from sleep and murdered. The shrieks of the children which brutal blows silence, when they slit their bellies open—and then the last one to die, who had to sit in a corner and watch all that happened—until his own turn came. It was worse than an execution, and there is no hope for a Jew when he falls into the hands of the Christians.
The feverish lips of Leiba follow all these thoughts mechanically. Shivers run down his back; with trembling step he walks along the passageway in the rest-house.
“Without doubt,” thinks Sura—“Leiba is bad. He’s ill. He has queer thoughts in his head.”