ently, staggers._]

VERA [_Alarmed_]
You are ill!

DAVID
It is nothing, I--not much music at Kishineff! No, only the
Death-March!... Mother! Father! Ah--cowards, murderers! And you!
[_He shakes his fist at the air._]
You, looking on with your cold butcher's face! O God! O God!
[_He bursts into hysterical sobs and runs, shamefacedly, through
the door to his room._]

VERA [_Wildly_]
What have I said? What have I done?

MENDEL
Oh, I was afraid of this, I was afraid of this.

FRAU QUIXANO [_Who has fallen asleep over her book, wakes as if with a
sense of the horror and gazes dazedly around, adding to the
thrillingness of the moment_]
_Dovidel! Wu is' Dovidel! Mir dacht sach_----

MENDEL [_Pressing her back to her slumbers_]
_Du traeumst, Mutter! Schlaf!_
[_She sinks back to sleep._]

VERA [_In hoarse whisper_]
His father and mother were massacred?

MENDEL [_In same tense tone_]
Before his eyes--father, mother, sisters, down to the youngest babe,
whose skull was battered in by a hooligan's heel.

VERA
How did _he_ escape?

MENDEL
He was shot in the shoulder, and fell unconscious. As he wasn't a girl,
the hooligans left him for dead and hurried to fresh sport.

VERA
Terrible! Terrible!
[_Almost in tears._]

MENDEL [_Shrugging shoulders, hopelessly_]
It is only Jewish history!... David belongs to the species of _pogrom_
orphan--they arrive in the States by almost every ship.

VERA
Poor boy! Poor boy! And he looked so happy!
[_She half sobs._]

MENDEL
So he is, most of the time--a sunbeam took human shape when he was born.
But naturally that dreadful scene left a scar on his brain, as the
bullet left a scar on his shoulder, and he is always liable to see red
when Kishineff is mentioned.

VERA
I will never mention my miserable birthplace to him again.

MENDEL
But you see every few months the newspapers tell us of another _pogrom_,
and then he screams out against what he calls that butcher's face, so
that I tremble for his reason. I tremble even when I see him writing
that crazy music about America, for it only means he is brooding over
the difference between America and Russia.

VERA
But perhaps--perhaps--all the terrible memory will pass peacefully away
in his music.

MENDEL
There will always be the scar on his shoulder to remind him--whenever
the wound twinges, it brings up these terrible faces and visions.

VERA
Is it on his right shoulder?

M