as I had done with the note. “She asked that everything … as requested in the letter … without fail.” My arms weakened and the hands loosened. The check was back on the table. She is stronger than I, stronger than I. It seemed as though I were going to act as she wished. Besides … however, it is a long time before evening.
The check remained on the table. In the mirror—my distorted, broken eyebrows. Oh, why did I not have a doctor’s certificate for today? I should like to go and walk, walk without end around the Green Wall and then to fall on my bed … to the bottom of. … Yet I had to go to Auditorium No. 13, and I should have to grip myself, so as to bear up for two hours! Two hours without motion, at a time when I wanted to scream and stamp my feet!
The lecture was on. It was very strange to hear from the sparkling tube of the phono-lecturer not the usual metallic voice but a soft, velvety, mossy one. It was a woman’s voice and I seemed to have a vision of the woman: a little hook-like old woman, like the one of the Ancient House.
The Ancient House! Suddenly from within me a powerful fountain of. … I had to use all my strength to control myself, so as not to fill the auditorium with screams. The soft mossy words were piercing me, yet only empty words about children and child-production reached my ear. I was like a photographic plate: everything was making its imprint with a strange, senseless precision on me; the golden scythe which was nothing more than the reflection of light from the megaphone of the lecture apparatus, under the megaphone a child, a living illustration. It was leaning toward the megaphone, the angle of its infinitesimal unif in its mouth, its little fist clenched firmly, its thumb squeezed into the fist, a light fluffy pleat of skin at the wrist. Like a photographic plate I was taking the impression of all this. Now I saw how its naked leg hung over the edge of the platform, the pink fan of its finger waved in the air. … One minute more, one second and the child would be on the floor!