Part 45 (1/2)

”You will miss the wood again!”

”The wood!”--he gives himself a twist with a bitter smile--”my wife went into the wood the evening before last, to gather berries, and they marched her out and treated her to the whip.”

”There is the river,”--I want to take him away from his sad thoughts.

His pale face grew paler.

”The river? In the summer it took one of my children.”

I hurried away from the luckless home.

THE MADMAN

I returned to my lodgings quite unnerved, and lay a long time on the hard sofa without closing an eye.... A noise wakes me. Something is stealing in to me through the window. I see on the window ledge two long, bony, dirty hands, and there raises itself from behind them an unkempt head with two gleaming eyes in a livid face.

”Won't you enter _me_?” asks the head, softly.

I do not know how to answer. He, meanwhile, has taken silence for consent, and stands in the middle of the room.

Alarmed, and still more astonished, I keep my eye on him.

”Write!” he says impatiently. ”Shall I give you the ink and a pen?”

Without waiting for an answer, he pushes up to my sofa the little table with the writing materials.

”Write, please, write!”

And his voice is so soft and gentle, it finds its way into my heart, and I am no longer frightened.

I sit up to write. I question him, and he answers me.

”Your name?”

”Jonah.”

”Your surname?”

”When I was a little boy, they called me Jonah Zieg. After my wedding, Jonah Drong, but since the misfortune happened to me, Mad Jonah.”

”What is your German name?”

”O, you mean _that_?... Directly, directly. Perelmann. You see my pearls?”

He points to a torn, red kerchief round his neck, and says: ”Real pearls, _ha_? But that's what I'm called. How can I help it?”

”A wife?”

”You had better _not_ put her down: she doesn't live with me. Since the misfortune, she doesn't live with me ... a nice wife, too. I would gladly have given her a divorce, but the rabbi wouldn't allow it. He said I mustn't. A nice little wife!”

And his eyes grew moist.