cluck! Oh, do, oh, don’t, we will, we won’t, but we don’t ag-ree with you at aw-ull!”—the rich injured undulations of aggrieved protest, the omened menace of impending hysteria awoke in an alien spirit a powerful surge of desire and humour, a wave of wild choking laughter mixed with love and lust as one listened to the sensual, aggrieved, hen-clucking protest of their souls.
The Jewish women were as old as nature and as round as the earth: they had a curve in them. They had gone to the wailing walls of death and love for seven thousand years, the strong convulsive faces of the Jews were ripe with grief and wisdom, and the curve of the soul of the Jewish women was still unbroken. Female, fertile, yolky, fruitful as the earth, and ready for the plough, they offered to the famished wanderer, the alien, the exile, the baffled and infuriated man, escape and surcease of the handsome barren women, the hard varnished sawdust dolls, the arrogant and sterile women, false in look and promise as a hot-house peach, who walked the street and had no curves or fruitfulness in them. The Jewish women waited with rich yolky cries for him, and the news they brought him; the wisdom that they gave to him was that he need not strangle like a mad dog in a barren dark, nor perish, famished, unassuaged, within the wilderness beside a rusted lance—but that there was still good earth for the plough to cleave and furrow, deep cellars for the grain, a sheath for the shining sword, rich pockets of spiced fertility for all the maddened lunges of desire.
They pressed around him at his table with insistent surge, and he looked at them and saw that they were young; and sometimes they belonged to the whole vast family of the earth: they were like all the young people who had ever lived—they seemed clumsy and noisy and good, full of hope and loyalty and folly; and sometimes again, it seemed to him that none of them had ever known youth or innocence, that they had been born with old and weary souls, that they were born instructed in the huge dark history of pain, the thousand mad and tortured sicknesses of the soul, and that the only thirst and hunger that they knew, the desire that drove them with an insatiate lust, was for sorrow, grief, and human misery. Had they ever cried into the howling winds at night? Had they ever felt the sharp and tongueless ecstasy of spring or held their breath at night when great wheels pounded at the rail, or trembled with a vast dark wave of pain, a wordless cry of joy, when they heard ships calling at the harbour’s mouth and thought of new lands in the morning?
