It was appalling even to Boaz; even to the cat.  Listening became more than a labour.  He began to have to fight against a growing impulse to shout out loud, to leap, sprawl forward without aim in that unstirred darkness—­do something.  Sweat rolled down from behind his ears, into his shirt-collar.  He gripped the chair-arms.  To keep quiet he sank his teeth into his lower lip.  He would not!  He would not!

And of a sudden he heard before him, in the centre of the room, an outburst of breath, an outrush from lungs in the extremity of pain, thick, laborious, fearful.  A coughing up of dammed air.

Pushing himself from the arms of the chair, Boaz leaped.

His fingers, passing swiftly through the air, closed on something.  It was a sheaf of hair, bristly and thick.  It was a man’s beard.

On the road outside, up and down the street for a hundred yards, merry-making people turned to look at one another.  With an abrupt cessation of laughter, of speech.  Inquiringly.  Even with an unconscious dilation of the pupils of their eyes.

“What was that?”

There had been a scream.  There could be no doubt of that.  A single, long-drawn note.  Immensely high-pitched.  Not as if it were human.

“God’s sake!  What was that?  Where’d it come from?”

Those nearest said it came from the cobbler-shop of Boaz Negro.

They went and tried the door.  It was closed; even locked, as if for the night.  There was no light behind the window-shade.  But Boaz would not have a light.  They beat on the door.  No answer.

But from where, then, had that prolonged, as if animal, note come?

They ran about, penetrating into the side lanes, interrogating, prying.  Coming back at last, inevitably, to the neighbourhood of Boaz Negro’s shop.

The body lay on the floor at Boaz’s feet, where it had tumbled down slowly after a moment from the spasmodic embrace of his arms; those ivory-coloured arms which had beaten so long upon the bare iron surface of a last.  Blows continuous and powerful.  It seemed incredible.  They were so weak now.  They could not have lifted the hammer now.

But that beard!  That bristly, thick, square beard of a stranger!

His hands remembered it.  Standing with his shoulders fallen forward and his weak arms hanging down, Boaz began to shiver.  The whole thing was incredible.  What was on the floor there, upheld in the vast gulf of darkness, he could not see.  Neither could he hear it; smell it.  Nor (if he did not move his foot) could he feel it.  What he did not hear, smell, or touch did not exist.  It was not there.  Incredible!

But that beard!  All the accumulated doubtings of those years fell down upon him.  After all, the thing he had been so fearful of in his weak imaginings had happened.  He had killed a stranger.  He, Boaz Negro, had murdered an innocent man!

And all on account of that beard.  His deep panic made him light-headed.  He began to confuse cause and effect.  If it were not for that beard, it would have been that cachorra.