Days of Your Fathers Read Online Free PDF

brilliant and curious a world.
    A group of his compatriots gathered round him; they were oddly out of place in the South Atlantic, for they had no clothes but those in which they had left their cities, and they all wore cloth caps, bought in the firm belief that a sea voyage demanded them. They seemed to have just stepped out of an office to visit a shop across the road.
    â€˜All the same,’ said the chess-player, determined from now on to be a cynic, ‘he is here to watch us.’
    â€˜To watch over us,’ Mr Feitel corrected him dreamily. ‘To watch over us.’
    â€˜He is not a police agent at all,’ added Berta indignantly.
    â€˜But what did he come here for?’ insisted the fat man with the lisp. ‘Would you come down from the first-class for nothing? No! Would I? No! Would Berta? No! Why did he come here? Tell me that!’
    He put his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest, and walked two steps away and two steps back. For him, said his serious expression, there was logic, nothing but logic.
    â€˜I do not know,’ Berta answered truthfully.
    She was convinced, however, that she did know why he had returned again and again. She blushed. Mr Feitel saw her embarrassment unmoved. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that, while his friends commiserated with him on his daughter’s thinness, she was devastatingly attractive to the Gentiles.
    â€˜What is he?’ he asked.
    â€˜He doctors animals,’ said Berta faintly.
    â€˜Animals! Do animals have doctors? What kind of animals?’ asked the chess-player.
    â€˜Sheep,’ answered Berta, waiting for the outburst of comment.
    It came. When the hands had ceased to wave and the mouths to gabble, Mr Feitel murmured:
    â€˜He doctors sheep? So gentle, so humble that even sheep he cares for? My daughter, the man should be a Jew.’
    â€˜He is not,’ said Berta.
    â€˜In the eyes of God he has a Jewish heart. Has any one of you seen prejudice in him? Has he ever shown that he shows a difference between Jew and Gentile?’
    â€˜No,’ the fat man admitted. ‘But he is a fool.’
    â€˜You have well said the man is a fool. To such God allows greatness and from such shall come deliverance,’ said Mr Feitel impressively.
    Danno Flynn appeared at the after end of the promenade deck. There was no immediate evidence of greatness in him, nor did he descend to them in a manner befitting the deliverer of Israel – for he slid down the rail of the ladder to the main deck – but he undeniably had an air, and he was not in the least put out by the eyes that, almost reverently, gazed at him.
    â€˜Sure and I knew me old cock would be on deck!’ he exclaimed.
    He seemed to slap Mr Feitel on the back, but his patient felt the hand alight firmly, gently, giving strength.
    The chess-player moved his lips, rehearsing a speech that he had just composed in his school English; he considered that there were still too many mysteries unsolved.
    â€˜Pardon me, noble Mr Doctor, will you have the kindness to tell me please whether it is your purpose to practise in Brazil?’
    â€˜â€™Tis not me purpose, ’tis the curse that is on me,’ answered Danno. ‘For, God help me, I am the biggest fool in Eire!’
    Mr Feitel smiled benignly and began to talk to himself in a soft sing-song. Danno looked at him anxiously.
    â€˜Now be off with you!’ he said, waving his arms at the little group as if they had been an obstinate herd of sheep. ‘And let you not be troubling his reverence with your foreign talk and him with no strength to listen to his own!’
    Mr Feitel’s friends hastily moved on. The deck had become for them a street, with a person in authority to prohibit loitering.
    Berta laughed.
    â€˜He is not light-headed,’ she said. ‘He is praying for you.’
    â€˜â€™Tis very civil,’ Danno answered. ‘But he should be sleeping