“I’m — I’m—” He gasped for breath.
“God’s fool!” Aunt Bertha rasped under her breath. “My man! My man! May earth gape for you this very hour! You see what you’ve wrought!”
“Me?” Uncle Nathan groaned. “My fault? How did I—”
“So — s-somebody — wanted to take it. The k-kite. And I called. And I said — look out! Look out! So I–I was his friend. Leo. He had skates and then — Ow! Papa! Papa! And we went to Aunt Bertha’s. And we got Esther on the other side — in the yard. He got her — And he gave her the skates. And then, ow! Ow! He took her in — in the cellar. And he — he—”
“He what!” The implacable voice was like a goad.
“I don’t know! Ow! He p-played — he played — bad!”
“Anh!”
“Don’t you come near him!” his mother screamed. “Don’t you dare! That’s enough, child! Hush! That’s enough!”
“H-he did! Not me, Papa! Papa, not me! I didn’t! Ow! Papa! Papa!” He clung frenziedly to his mother.
“That’s hers! Her spawn! Mark me! Hers!” He seemed to be stifling in a wild insane joy. “Not mine! Not a jot of me! Bertha, cow! Not mine! You, Nathan! Rouse your sheep-wits! Your mate’s betrayed my wife! Do you know it? Blabbed her secret! Told him whose he was. An organist somewhere. How I harbored a goy’s get! A rake! A rogue’s! His and hers! But not mine! I knew it! I knew it all the time! And now I’m driving her out! Her and him, the brat! Let him beat her in time to come. But I’m free! He’s no part of me! I’m free!”
“He’s mad!” The other two whispered hoarsely and shrank away.
“Hear me!” He was slavering at the mouth. “I nurtured him! Three years I throttled surmise, I was the beast of burden! Good fortune I never met! Happiness never! Joy never! And — and that was right! Why should I meet anything but misfortune! That was right! I was tainted. I was bridled with another’s sin. But for that — for all that suffering I have one privilege! Who will deny me? Who? One privilege! To wreak! To quench! Once!”
And before anyone could move, he had lunged forward at David’s mother.
“Ow! Papa! Papa! Don’t!”
Those steel fingers closed like a crunching trap on David’s shoulders — yanked him out of her hands. And the whip! The whip in air! And—
“Ow! Ow! Papa! Ow!”
Bit like a brand across his back. Again! Again! And he fell howling to the floor.
His mother screamed. He felt himself grabbed, pulled to his feet, dragged away. And now his aunt was screaming, Uncle Nathan’s hoarse outcry swelling the tumult. In the shadows, figures swayed, grappled — And suddenly his father’s voice, exultant, possessed, hypnotic—
“What’s that? That! Look! Look at the floor! There! Who disbelieves me now? Look what’s lying there! There where he fell! A sign! A sign I tell you! Who doubts? A sign!”
“Unh!” Uncle Nathan grunted as though in sudden pain.
“Woe me!” Aunt Bertha gasped in horror. “It’s—! What! No!”
Terror impinging on terror, David squirmed about in his mother’s arms — looked down—
There, stretched from the green square to the white square of the checkered linoleum lay the black beads — the gold cross framed in the glimmering, wan glaze. Horror magnified the figure on it. He screamed.
“Papa! Papa! Leo — he gave them! That boy! It fell out! Papa!” His words were lost in the uproar.
“God’s own hand! A sign! A witness!” his father was raving, whirling the whip in his flying arms. “A proof of my word! The truth! Another’s! A goy’s! A cross! A sign of filth! Let me strangle him! Let me rid the world of a sin!”
“Put him out! Genya! Put him out! David! David! Him! Hurry! Let him run!” Aunt Bertha and Uncle Nathan were grappling with his father. “Hurry! Out!”
“No! No!” his mother’s frenzied cry.
“Hurry! I say! Hurry! Help! We can’t hold him!” Uncle Nathan had been shaken off. With knees bent, Aunt Bertha was hanging like a dead weight from his father’s whip-hand. “He’ll slay him,” she shrieked. “He’ll trample on him as he let his father be trampled on. Hurry, Genya!”
Screaming, his mother sprang toward the door — threw it open— “Run! Run down! Run! Run!”
She thrust him from her, slammed the door after him. He could hear the thud her body flung against it. With a wild shriek he plunged toward the stairs—
On the whole floor and even on the one below it, doors had been opened. Spears of gas-lamps crisscrossed in the unlit hallway. Gaping, craning faces peered out, listening, exclaiming, reporting to others behind them—
“Hey, boychick! Vus is? A fight! Hey vot’s de maddeh? Hooz hollerin’? Leibeleh! Dun’ go op! You hea’ vot I say. Dun go op! Oy! Cull a cop! Tek keh! Quick! Vehzee runnin’? Hey, boychick!”
A reeling smear of words, twitching gestures, fractured lights, features, a flickering gauntlet of tumult and dismay. He never answered, but plunged down. None stopped him. Only a miracle saved him from crashing down the dark steps. And now the voices were above him, and he heard feet trampling on the stairs, and now all noises merged to a flurried humming and now almost unheard — his down-drumming feet had reached the hallway—
Blue light in the door-frame.
Arms up and gasping like a runner to the tape—
The street.
The street. He dared to breathe. And stumbled to the sidewalk and stood there, stood there.
XX
DUSK. Storelight and lamplight condensed — too early for assertion. The casual, canceled stir and snarling of distance. And on the sidewalks, men and women striding with too certain a gait, and in the gutter, children crossing, calling, not yet conceding the dark’s dominion. The world dim-featured in mouldering light, floating, faceted and without dimension. For a moment the wild threshing of voices, bodies, the screams, the fury in the pent and shrunken kitchen split their bands in the brain, flew out to the darkened east, the flagging west beyond the elevated, the steep immensity of twilight that dyed the air above the housetops. For a moment, the rare coolness of a July evening dissolved all agony in a wind as light as with the passing of a wand. And suddenly there was space even between the hedges of stone and suddenly there was quiet even in the fret of cities. And there was time, inviolable even to terror, time to watch the smudged and cluttered russet in the west beckon to the night to cover it. A moment, but a moment only, then he whimpered and ran.
— Can’t! Ow! Can’t! Can’t run! Can’t! Hurts! Hurts! Ow! Mama! Legs! Mama!
He had no more than reached the corner when every racked fibre in his body screamed out in exhaustion. Each time his foot fell was like a plunger through his skull. On buckling legs, he crossed Avenue D, stopped, wobbling with faintness, rubbed his thighs.
— Can’t go! Can’t! Hurt! Ow! Mama! Mama!
Fearfully, he peered over his shoulder, eyes traveling upward. From the first to the third floor of his house, the lighted kitchens behind bedrooms cast their dull stain on the windows — one dusky brass, one fawn, one murky grey. A column of drab yet reassuring light — except his own on the fourth floor, still sullen, aloof and dark. He caught his breath in a new onslaught of terror. Waves of fear serried his breast and back—
— Ain’t not yet! Ow! Fighting yet! Him! What’s he doing! Mama! Mama! He’s hitting! Ow! Can’t run! Some place! Stay here! Find! Watch! Wait till— Wait! Wait! Scared! Hide! Some place … Where?
A short distance to his left, the closed dairy store between Ninth and Tenth was unlit. He stumbled toward it. Behind the barricade of milk cans chained to the cellar-railing, he crouched down on the store-step, fixed lifted, imploring eyes to his windows. Dark, still dark. Baleful, unrelenting, they hid yet betrayed the fury and disaster behind them. He moaned, bit his fingers in agony, stared about him with a wild, tortured gaze.