them to scared
attention. From somewhere distant there traveled a dull noise of
shouts and singing, a confused blatancy of far voices; and as it
swelled and sank and swelled again, a tremor ran over that silent
waiting throng like a wind-ripple on standing crops. Overhead the
sky shone with pin-point stars; a breath of air stirred about them
faintly; all seemed keyed to that tense furtive quiet of the doomed
Jews. Not a child cried, not a woman sobbed; they had learned,
direfully enough, the piteous art of the oppressed--the knack of
silence and concealment.

It was by slow degrees that the distant shoutings came nearer; the
mob had yet to unite in purpose and ferocity. Truda, listening, and
marking its approach, could almost tell by the violence of its noise
how it wound through the streets, staggering drunkenly, waving
bludgeons, working itself to the necessary point of brutal fury. And
always it grew nearer. Its note changed and deepened, till it sank to
a long snarling drone; she, wise in the moods of men in the mass, a
practicer on the minds of multitudes, knew the moment was at hand;
this was the voice of human beings with the passions of beasts. The
noise dwindled as the mob poured through an alley, and then broke out
again, loud and daunting, as it emerged. It was near at hand; now
there was added to its voice the drum of its footsteps on cobble-
paved streets, and suddenly, brief and agonizing, a wild outcry of
shrieks as some wretched creature was found out of hiding and the
bludgeons beat it out of human semblance. All round Truda there was a
stir among the Jews; a child wrought beyond endurance whimpered and
was gagged under an apron; the howl of the mob startled her ears as
it poured along the street outside the great gate.

Then came confusion, a chaos of voices, of ringing blows upon the
gate, screams and moans, the shrill sound of the glee that goes with
open murder, and a sudden light that shot up against the sky from a
house on fire. The crowd of Jews in the courtyard thinned as some
slipped swiftly into the dark doorways to be ready for flight,
startled by a tattoo of blows on the gate that broke out abruptly.
Truda stood fast where she was, listening with a kind of detachment.
The blows on the gate increased; she could even hear, among the other
sounds, the heavy breathing of those who strove to break a way in.
Men came running to aid them, and the stout gate bent under their
efforts. It was faste