It felt the salt taste on
its lips. It put up a furtive, shamed hand to dab at its
cheeks, and saw that the one who sat in the pew just ahead
was doing likewise. This is what happened when this boy of
fifteen wedded his bow to his violin. And he who makes us
feel all this has that indefinable, magic, glorious thing
known as Genius.
When it was over, there swept through the room that sigh
following tension relieved. Rabbi Thalmann passed a hand
over his tired eyes, like one returning from a far mental
journey; then rose, and came forward to the pulpit. He
began, in Hebrew, the opening words of the memorial service,
and so on to the prayers in English, with their words of
infinite humility and wisdom.
"Thou hast implanted in us the capacity for sin, but not sin
itself!"
Fanny stirred. She had learned that a brief half hour ago.
The service marched on, a moving and harrowing thing. The
amens rolled out with a new fervor from the listeners.
There seemed nothing comic now in the way old Ben Reitman,
with his slower eyes, always came out five words behind the
rest who tumbled upon the responses and scurried briskly
through them, so that his fine old voice, somewhat hoarse
and quavering now, rolled out its "Amen!" in solitary
majesty.
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