There was a shuffling with utensils on the bedside table. The sound seemed to relax a chain which had held the boy taut. He staggered a few steps and, perceiving the moth-eaten yellow plush arm-chair near him, he sank into it with convulsive abandonment. Now he became consciously and fully aware of the shock he had endured. Sometimes in his dreams he had seen her dead. One dream of them all had lifted his eyelids at midnight from eyes glassy with horror. Now as it came back to him, he winced and writhed. He had seen her head lying on that copper tray where each Sabbath eve she had placed the uncut bread before her husband. Beside her head lay a squat beaker of wine, the beaker over which, before the meal began, Reb Monash incanted the _kiddush_ with shut eyes. In a groping, childish way he had endeavoured to exorcise the terror of this dream by rationalizing it, by relating the hideous phantasm to the fabric of reality. He knew that the copper tray gleaming always like smooth dark mahogany might stand as symbol of the heavy labours which year by year reduced her to a ghost. She had the Jewish housewife's intense pride in the cleanliness and beauty of her home. Each Thursday evening the kitchen table was littered with trays, brass candlesticks, beakers, tins of polish, dusters. Though the reek of the polish was offensive to her lungs and sent her into fits of coughing, no Thursday evening saw the arduous ritual abated by one iota. But Philip knew that the significance of the dream lay deeper than this. Obscurely he realized that the beaker of wine represented all the sacerdotalism of his race; in some way far too profound for his guessing the vision of the severed head was complicated with that antique ritual, so magnificently alive and yet so ineffably dead. The head was lying on that tray of her own devoted polishing throughout the doomed years, lying as an offering to the impendent bearded God of his race. The cavernous lips opened as the beaker rose to their glooms. "I am that I am!" a voice moaned among endless colonnades of hills toppling towards the verges of space. How came it that the eyes of Jehovah aloof among the chasmed clouds were the eyes of Reb Monash, sitting upon his peculiar and inalienable chair in the corner of the kitchen? And the copper tray was a lake profound with many distances and many generations where dim ancestral shapes flickered from deep to deep. Twofold tyrannies along the deliberate reaches of the Nile, wildernesses and weak lads straggling and dying in the wake of the wanderers, smitten lands of exile, _Kossacken_ galloping in with sabres and flung beards, a slight lad crumpled in a moth-eaten yellow plush armchair, crumpled, broken, too mournful for any tears.