‘He didn’t clap once!’

Mr Newman felt a laugh idiotically bubbling up in his throat, but the faces around him were not laughing. ‘Well for pete’s sake,’ he said to the faces around him, ‘I never clap. I just don’t, that’s all. Even at the show …’

‘He’s a Jew, for Christ’s sake!’

The owner of the voice was beyond the circle effaces. Mr Newman instantly stood on tiptoe as best he could – for the fist was still clamped to his collar. ‘Now you cut that out!’ he demanded.

‘Christ Almighty, can’t you see he’s a Sammy?’ The voice broke through the ring around Mr Newman, and its owner grabbed him by the lapels and pushed him against the seat. His horror shot into his back like a needle and he shouted, ‘I’m not!’ The vision of himself as a baby being baptized somehow passed before his mind as he felt a thrust against his neck and heard his jacket ripping down. Quickly he pulled off his glasses and turned his face for all to see. He met a hand slapping his face – a woman’s hand – and he was being pushed from behind. Faces rushed past him and he was struggling to reach the ground with his feet but they tread air. Not since long ago in the army had he been touched, purposely pushed, wrenched; he had never played football or done heavy work and this thing blazed his horror and his dignity and he kept shouting, although he did not know he was shouting, until something solid struck his shoulder and he spun around and almost fell, but gained his balance with his arms outstretched. And in that instant he saw the pavement under him and realized he was out on the street. For an instant he stood there hearing, seeing nothing, and then he heard his shout and felt the soreness in his throat, ‘I’m not, you damned fools, I’m not!’ and realized he had the glasses raised in one hand and was pointing at them with the other. Around him the faces clustered, but strangely he did not know whether these were the ones who had been mistreating him or whether they were curious passersby. But he no longer cared what scene he made – it never occurred to him that he was making a scene – and in his confused fury and with the driving indignation that was eating into him he started through the faces toward the lighted doorway of the hall, and he was stopped again by hands on his shoulders and on his arms. ‘Don’t be a damned fool!’ he shouted into the eyes of the faces, and the echo came back, ‘Sammy, God damn! Sammy ya, Sammy ya Sammy!’

‘But I’m not, you damned ….!’

‘That’s what they all say when you got them against the wall!’

This he heard. This he heard normally and loud, and it cut him to a halt. He looked to his right and saw a face, and he looked to his left. He turned completely around and saw still another face, remembering, madly, the frustration of arguing with Gargan about his eyes … There were only three men standing around him now. The others, he realized, had gone back inside. Now these three turned and walked past him toward the hall entrance. He did not want to be left alone by them. He did not want to be alone at all. They had to understand that he was Lawrence Newman of a family named Newman which had come from Aldwich, England, in the year 1861, and that he had pictures at home showing his baptism and if they would stop just there on the steps for one moment only he could explain how he had been employed for more than twenty years by one of the most anti-Semitic corporations in America and that he …