And at this moment two more wonder-works of God came in from the street and walked rapidly across the lobby, speaking the golden and poetic language which their Maker had so marvellously bestowed on them.
“Cheezus!” said one of them, a large man with a grey hat and a huge, dead, massive face of tallowy grey which receded in an indecipherable manner into the sagging flesh-folds of his flabby neck—“Cheezus!” he eloquently continued with a protesting laugh that emerged from his tallowy lips in a hoarse expletive mixed with spittle—“Yuh may be right about him, Eddie, but Cheezus!”—again the hoarse protesting laugh. “Duh guy may be all right, but Cheezus!—I don’t know! If he’d come in dere like duh rest of dem an’let me know about it—but Cheezus!—duh guy may be all right like you say!—but Cheezus! Eddie, I don’t know!”
Doctor Thornton bestowed on them the benevolent approval of her glance as they went by and then, turning to her awed listeners again, declared sonorously with a majestic and expressive gesture of her hand:
“Tired? How could one ever grow tired, my friends, in this great world of ours?”
XLIX
At the end of his classes, the final end, when all had spoken, when that hot wave of life and turbulence had withdrawn, the last clattering footfalls had echoed away along the corridors, the last loud aggressive voices had faded into silence, leaving, it seemed, an odour of exhaustion, use, and weariness even in the walls, boards and benches of the room, so that the empty class-room had a tired but living presence of fatigue, the indefinable but sharply felt character of a room with people absent from it, and seemed somehow to relax, settle, and respire with relief and weariness—at this final, fagged, and burned-out candle-end of day, Abraham Jones, as relentless as destiny, would be there waiting for Eugene. He waited there, grim, grey, unsmiling, tortured-looking behind an ominous wink of glasses, a picture of Yiddish melancholy and discontent, and as Eugene looked at him his heart went numb and dead; he hated the sight of him. He sat there now in the front rows of the class like a nemesis of scorn, a merciless censor of Eugene’s ignorance and incompetence: the sight of his dreary discontented face, with its vast grey acreage of a painful Jewish and involuted intellectualism, was enough, even at the crest of a passionate burst of inspiration, to curdle his blood, freeze his heart, stun
