The sidewalks were filled with loafers, men and women who wore the
gloomiest or surliest looks. As I passed slowly along, trying to read
the almost obliterated numbers, I caught fragments of their
conversation. A group of them, men and women, were talking about the man
who had been killed and his family. The universal assertion was that it
served him right, and his family, too. I gleaned from their talk that
the family had been boycotted even after he was dead, and that he had
had to be buried by the city, and, what was more, that the cruel
ostracism still went on against his family.
"Ay-aye, let 'em starve, we'll teach 'em to take the bread out of our
mouths," said one woman, while another told gleefully of her little boy
throwing stones at the girl as she came home from outside somewhere. She
had given him a cake for doing it. The others applauded both of these.
The milk of human kindness appeared to be frozen in their breasts.
"Much good it will do you! Do you get any more money for doing it?" said
an old man with round shoulders and a thin face; but even he did not
seem to protest on account of the cruelty. It was rather a snarl. Two or
three young men growled at him; but he did not appear afraid of them; he
only snarled back.
I asked one of the men which house was the one I was seeking. He told
me, while half a dozen hooted something about the "scab."
When I came to the door pointed out I had no difficulty in recognizing
it. The panels and sides were "daubed" up with mud, which still stuck in
many places, showing the persecution which had been carried on. Inside,
I never saw a more deplorable sight. The poor woman who came to the
door, her face drawn with pain and white with terror, and her eyes red
with weeping, would not apparently have been more astonished to have
found a ghost on the steps. She gave a hasty, frightened glance up the
street in both directions, and moaned her distress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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