He came through the open street door, knocked perfunctorily at the door of the room, opened it and then kissed the _Mezuzah_ outside the door. Then he advanced, snatched the Rebbitzin's hand away from the handle of the coffee-pot and kissed it with equal devotion. He then seized upon Hannah's hand and pressed his grimy lips to that, murmuring in German:
Thou lookest so charming this morning, like the roses of Carmel. Next he bent down and pressed his lips to the Reb's coat-tail. Finally he said: "Good morning, sir," to Levi, who replied very affably, "Good morning, Mr. Pinchas," "Peace be unto you, Pinchas," said the Reb. "I did not see you in _Shool_ this morning, though it was the New Moon."
No, I went to the Great _Shool_, said Pinchas in German. "If you do not see me at your place you may be sure I'm somewhere else. Any one who has lived so long as I in the Land of Israel cannot bear to pray without a quorum. In the Holy Land I used to learn for an hour in the _Shool_ every morning before the service began. But I am not here to talk about myself. I come to ask you to do me the honor to accept a copy of my new volume of poems: _Metatoron's Flames_. Is it not a beautiful title? When Enoch was taken up to heaven while yet alive, he was converted to flames of fire and became Metatoron, the great spirit of the Cabalah. So am I rapt up into the heaven of lyrical poetry and I become all fire and flame and light."
The poet was a slim, dark little man, with long, matted black hair. His face was hatchet-shaped and not unlike an Aztec's. The eyes were informed by an eager brilliance. He had a heap of little paper-covered books in one hand and an extinct cigar in the other. He placed the books upon the breakfast table.
At last, he said. "See, I have got it printed--the great work which this ignorant English Judaism has left to moulder while it pays its stupid reverends thousands a year for wearing white ties."
And who paid for it now, Mr. Pinchas? said the Rebbitzin.
Who? Wh-o-o? stammered Melchitsedek. "Who but myself?"
But you say you are blood-poor.
True as the Law of Moses! But I have written articles for the jargon papers. They jump at me--there is not a man on the staff of them all who has the pen of a ready writer. I can't get any money out of them, my dear Rebbitzin, else I shouldn't be without breakfast this morning, but the proprietor of the largest of them is also a printer, and he has printed my little book in return. But I don't think I shall fill my stomach with the sales. Oh! the Holy One, blessed be He, bless you, Rebbitzin, of course I'll take a cup of coffee; I don't know any one else who makes coffee with such a sweet savor; it would do for a spice offering when the Almighty restores us our Temple. You are a happy mortal, Rabbi. You will permit that I seat myself at the table?
Without awaiting permission he pushed a chair between Levi and Hannah and sat down; then he got up again and washed his hands and helped himself to a spare egg.
Here is your copy, Reb Shemuel, he went on after an interval. "You see it is dedicated generally:
"'To the Pillars of English Judaism.' They are a set of donkey-heads, but one must give them a chance of rising to higher things. It is true that not one of them understands Hebrew, not even the Chief Rabbi, to whom courtesy made me send a copy. Perhaps he will be able to read my poems with a dictionary; he certainly can't write Hebrew without two grammatical blunders to every word. No, no, don't defend him, Reb Shemuel, because you're under him. He ought to be under you--only he expresses his ignorance in English and the fools think to talk nonsense in good English is to be qualified for the Rabbinate.""
"The remark touched the Rabbi in a tender place. It was the one worry of his life, the consciousness that persons in high quarters disapproved of him as a force impeding the Anglicization of the Ghetto. He knew his shortcomings, but could never quite comprehend the importance of becoming English. He had a latent feeling that Judaism had flourished before England was invented, and so the poet's remark was secretly pleasing to him.
You know very well, went on Pinchas, "that I and you are the only two persons in London who can write correct Holy Language."
No, no. said the Rabbi, deprecatingly.
Yes, yes, said Pinchas, emphatically. "You can write quite as well as I. But just cast your eye now on the especial dedication which I have written to you in my own autograph. 'To the light of his generation, the great Gaon, whose excellency reaches to the ends of the earth, from whose lips all the people of the Lord seek knowledge, the never-failing well, the mighty eagle soars to heaven on the wings of understanding, to Rav Shemuel, may whose light never be dimmed, and in whose day may the Redeemer come unto Zion.' There, take it, honor me by taking it. It is the homage of the man of genius to the man of learning, the humble offering of the one Hebrew scholar in England to the other."
Thank you, said the old Rabbi, much moved. "It is too handsome of you, and I shall read it at once and treasure it amongst my dearest books, for you know well that I consider that you have the truest poetic gift of any son of Israel since Jehuda Halevi."
I have! I know it! I feel it! It burns me. The sorrow of our race keeps me awake at night--the national hopes tingle like electricity through me--I bedew my couch with tears in the darkness--Pinchas paused to take another slice of bread and butter. "It is then that my poems are born. The words burst into music in my head and I sing like Isaiah the restoration of our land, and become the poet patriot of my people. But these English! They care only to make money and to stuff it down the throats of gorging reverends. My scholarship, my poetry, my divine dreams--what are these to a besotted, brutal congregation of Men-of-the-Earth? I sent Buckledorf, the rich banker, a copy of my little book, with a special dedication written in my own autograph in German, so that he might understand it. And what did he send me? A beggarly five shillings? Five shillings to the one poet in whom the heavenly fire lives! How can the heavenly fire live on five shillings? I had almost a mind to send it back. And then there was Gideon, the member of Parliament. I made one of the poems an acrostic on his name, so that he might be handed down to posterity. There, that's the one. No, the one on the page you were just looking at. Yes, that's it, beginning:
"'Great leader of our Israel's host, I sing thy high heroic deeds, Divinely gifted learned man.' I wrote his dedication in English, for he understands neither Hebrew nor German, the miserable, purse-proud, vanity-eaten Man-of-the-Earth.""
"Why, didn't he give you anything at all? said the Reb.
Worse! He sent me back the book. But I'll be revenged on him. I'll take the acrostic out of the next edition and let him rot in oblivion. I have been all over the world to every great city where Jews congregate. In Russia, in Turkey, in Germany, in Roumania, in Greece, in Morocco, in Palestine. Everywhere the greatest Rabbis have leaped like harts on the mountains with joy at my coming. They have fed and clothed me like a prince. I have preached at the synagogues, and everywhere people have said it was like the Wilna Gaon come again. From the neighboring villages for miles and miles the pious have come to be blessed by me. Look at my testimonials from all the greatest saints and savants. But in England--in England alone--what is my welcome? Do they say: 'Welcome, Melchitsedek Pinchas, welcome as the bridegroom to the bride when the long day is done and the feast is o'er; welcome to you, with the torch of your genius, with the burden of your learning that is rich with the whole wealth of Hebrew literature in all ages and countries. Here we have no great and wise men. Our Chief Rabbi is an idiot. Come thou and be our Chief Rabbi?' Do they say this? No! They greet me with scorn, coldness, slander. As for the Rev. Elkan Benjamin, who makes such a fuss of himself because he sends a wealthy congregation to sleep with his sermons, I'll expose him as sure as there's a Guardian of Israel. I'll let the world know about his four mistresses.
Nonsense! Guard yourself against the evil tongue, said the Reb. "How do you know he has?"
It's the Law of Moses, said the little poet. "True as I stand here. You ask Jacob Hermann. It was he who told me about it. Jacob Hermann said to me one day: 'That Benjamin has a mistress for every fringe of his four-corners.' And how many is that, eh? I do not know why he should be allowed to slander me and I not be allowed to tell the truth about him. One day I will shoot him. You know he said that when I first came to London I joined the _Meshumadim_ in Palestine Place."
Well, he had at least some foundation for that, said Reb Shemuel.
Foundation! Do you call that foundation--because I lived there for a week, hunting out their customs and their ways of ensnaring the souls of our brethren, so that I might write about them one day? Have I not already told you not a morsel of their food passed my lips and that the money which I had to take so as not to excite suspicion I distributed in charity among the poor Jews? Why not? From pigs we take bristles.
Still, you must remember that if you had not been such a saint and such a great poet, I might myself have believed that you sold your soul for money to escape starvation. I know how these devils set their baits for the helpless immigrant, offering bread in return for a lip-conversion. They are grown so cunning now--they print their hellish appeals in Hebrew, knowing we reverence the Holy Tongue.
Yes, the ordinary Man-of-the-Earth believes everything that's in Hebrew. That was the mistake of the Apostles--to write in Greek. But then they, too, were such Men-of-the Earth.
I wonder who writes such good Hebrew for the missionaries, said Reb Shemuel.
I wonder, gurgled Pinchas, deep in his coffee.
But, father, asked Hannah, "don't you believe any Jew ever really believes in Christianity?"
How is it possible? answered Reb Shemuel. "A Jew who has the Law from Sinai, the Law that will never be changed, to whom God has given a sensible religion and common-sense, how can such a person believe in the farrago of nonsense that makes up the worship of the Christians! No Jew has ever apostatized except to fill his purse or his stomach or to avoid persecution. 'Getting grace' they call it in English; but with poor Jews it is always grace after meals. Look at the Crypto-Jews, the Marranos, who for centuries lived a double life, outwardly Christians, but handing down secretly from generation to generation the faith, the traditions, the observances of Judaism."
Yes, no Jew was ever fool enough to turn Christian unless he was a clever man, said the poet paradoxically. "Have you not, my sweet, innocent young lady, heard the story of the two Jews in Burgos Cathedral?"
No, what is it? said Levi, eagerly.
Well, pass my cup up to your highly superior mother who is waiting to fill it with coffee. Your eminent father knows the story--I can see by the twinkle in his learned eye.
Yes, that story has a beard, said the Reb.
Two Spanish Jews, said the poet, addressing himself deferentially to Levi, "who had got grace were waiting to be baptized at Burgos Cathedral. There was a great throng of Catholics and a special Cardinal was coming to conduct the ceremony, for their conversion was a great triumph. But the Cardinal was late and the Jews fumed and fretted at the delay. The shadows of evening were falling on vault and transept. At last one turned to the other and said, 'Knowest them what, Moses? If the Holy Father does not arrive soon, we shall be too late to say _mincha_."
Levi laughed heartily; the reference to the Jewish afternoon prayer went home to him.
That story sums up in a nutshell the whole history of the great movement for the conversion of the Jews. We dip ourselves in baptismal water and wipe ourselves with a _Talith_. We are not a race to be lured out of the fixed feelings of countless centuries by the empty spirituality of a religion in which, as I soon found out when I lived among the soul-dealers, its very professors no longer believe. We are too fond of solid things, said the poet, upon whom a good breakfast was beginning to produce a soothing materialistic effect. "Do you know that anecdote about the two Jews in the Transvaal?" Pinchas went on. "That's a real _Chine_."
I don't think I know that _Maaseh_, said Reb Shemuel.
"Oh, the two Jews had made a _trek_ and were travelling onwards exploring unknown country. One night they were sitting by their campfire playing cards when suddenly one threw up his cards, tore his hair and beat his breast in terrible agony. 'What's the matter?' cried the other. 'Woe, woe,' said the first. 'To-day was the Day of Atonement! and we have eaten and gone on as usual.' 'Oh, don't take on so,' said his friend. 'After all, Heaven will take into consideration that we lost count of the Jewish calendar and didn't mean to be so wicked. And we can make up for it by fasting to-morrow.' 'Oh, no! Not for me,' said the first. 'To-day was the Day of Atonement.'""
"All laughed, the Reb appreciating most keenly the sly dig at his race. He had a kindly sense of human frailty. Jews are very fond of telling stories against themselves--for their sense of humor is too strong not to be aware of their own foibles--but they tell them with closed doors, and resent them from the outside. They chastise themselves because they love themselves, as members of the same family insult one another. The secret is, that insiders understand the limitations of the criticism, which outsiders are apt to take in bulk. No race in the world possesses a richer anecdotal lore than the Jews--such pawky, even blasphemous humor, not understandable of the heathen, and to a suspicious mind Pinchas's overflowing cornucopia of such would have suggested a prior period of Continental wandering from town to town, like the _Minnesingers_ of the middle ages, repaying the hospitality of his Jewish entertainers with a budget of good stories and gossip from the scenes of his pilgrimages.
Do you know the story? he went on, encouraged by Simcha's smiling face, "of the old Reb and the _Havdolah_? His wife left town for a few days and when she returned the Reb took out a bottle of wine, poured some into the consecration cup and began to recite the blessing. 'What art thou doing?' demanded his wife in amaze.' I am making _Havdolah_,' replied the Reb. 'But it is not the conclusion of a festival to-night,' she said. 'Oh, yes, it is,' he answered. 'My Festival's over. You've come back.'"
The Reb laughed so much over this story that Simcha's brow grew as the solid Egyptian darkness, and Pinchas perceived he had made a mistake.
But listen to the end, he said with a creditable impromptu. "The wife said--'No, you're mistaken. Your Festival's only beginning. You get no supper. It's the commencement of the Day of Atonement.'"
Simcha's brow cleared and the Reb laughed heartily.
But I don't seethe point, father, said Levi.
Point! Listen, my son. First of all he was to have a Day of Atonement, beginning with no supper, for his sin of rudeness to his faithful wife. Secondly, dost thou not know that with us the Day of Atonement is called a festival, because we rejoice at the Creator's goodness in giving us the privilege of fasting? That's it, Pinchas, isn't it?
Yes, that's the point of the story, and I think the Rebbitzin had the best of it, eh?
Rebbitzins always have the last word, said the Reb. "But did I tell you the story of the woman who asked me a question the other day? She brought me a fowl in the morning and said that in cutting open the gizzard she had found a rusty pin which the fowl must have swallowed. She wanted to know whether the fowl might be eaten. It was a very difficult point, for how could you tell whether the pin had in any way contributed to the fowl's death? I searched the _Shass_ and a heap of _Shaalotku-Tshuvos_. I went and consulted the _Maggid_ and Sugarman the _Shadchan_ and Mr. Karlkammer, and at last we decided that the fowl was _tripha_ and could not be eaten. So the same evening I sent for the woman, and when I told her of our decision she burst into tears and wrung her hands. 'Do not grieve so,' I said, taking compassion upon her, 'I will buy thee another fowl.' But she wept on, uncomforted. 'O woe! woe!' she cried. 'We ate it all up yesterday.'"
Pinchas was convulsed with laughter. Recovering himself, he lit his half-smoked cigar without asking leave.
I thought it would turn out differently, he said. "Like that story of the peacock. A man had one presented to him, and as this is such rare diet he went to the Reb to ask if it was _kosher_. The Rabbi said 'no' and confiscated the peacock. Later on the man heard that the Rabbi had given a banquet at which his peacock was the crowning dish. He went to his Rabbi and reproached him. '_I_ may eat it,' replied the Rabbi, 'because my father considers it permitted and we may always go by what some eminent Son of the Law decides. But you unfortunately came to _me_ for an opinion, and the permissibility of peacock is a point on which I have always disagreed with my father.'"
Hannah seemed to find peculiar enjoyment in the story.
Anyhow, concluded Pinchas, "you have a more pious flock than the Rabbi of my native place, who, one day, announced to his congregation that he was going to resign. Startled, they sent to him a delegate, who asked, in the name of the congregation, why he was leaving them. 'Because,' answered the Rabbi, 'this is the first question any one has ever asked me!'"
Tell Mr. Pinchas your repartee about the donkey, said Hannah, smiling.
Oh, no, it's not worth while, said the Reb.
Thou art always so backward with thine own, cried the Rebbitzin warmly. "Last Purim an impudent of face sent my husband a donkey made of sugar. My husband had a Rabbi baked in gingerbread and sent it in exchange to the donor, with the inscription 'A Rabbi sends a Rabbi.'"
Reb Shemuel laughed heartily, hearing this afresh at the lips of his wife. But Pinchas was bent double like a convulsive note of interrogation.
The clock on the mantelshelf began to strike nine. Levi jumped to his feet.
I shall be late for school! he cried, making for the door.
Stop! stop! shouted his father. "Thou hast not yet said grace."
Oh, yes, I have, father. While you were all telling stories I was _benshing_ quietly to myself.
Is Saul also among the prophets, is Levi also among the story-tellers? murmured Pinchas to himself. Aloud he said: "The child speaks truth; I saw his lips moving."
Levi gave the poet a grateful look, snatched up his satchel and ran off to No. 1 Royal Street. Pinchas followed him soon, inwardly upbraiding Reb Shemuel for meanness. He had only as yet had his breakfast for his book. Perhaps it was Simcha's presence that was to blame. She was the Reb's right hand and he did not care to let her know what his left was doing.
He retired to his study when Pinchas departed, and the Rebbitzin clattered about with a besom.
The study was a large square room lined with book-shelves and hung with portraits of the great continental Rabbis. The books were bibliographical monsters to which the Family Bibles of the Christian are mere pocket-books. They were all printed purely with the consonants, the vowels being divined grammatically or known by heart. In each there was an island of text in a sea of commentary, itself lost in an ocean of super-commentary that was bordered by a continent of super-super-commentary. Reb Shemuel knew many of these immense folios--with all their tortuous windings of argument and anecdote--much as the child knows the village it was born in, the crooked by-ways and the field paths. Such and such a Rabbi gave such and such an opinion on such and such a line from the bottom of such and such a page--his memory of it was a visual picture. And just as the child does not connect its native village with the broader world without, does not trace its streets and turnings till they lead to the great towns, does not inquire as to its origins and its history, does not view it in relation to other villages, to the country, to the continent, to the world, but loves it for itself and in itself, so Reb Shemuel regarded and reverenced and loved these gigantic pages with their serried battalions of varied type. They were facts--absolute as the globe itself--regions of wisdom, perfect and self-sufficing. A little obscure here and there, perhaps, and in need of amplification or explication for inferior intellects--a half-finished manuscript commentary on one of the super-commentaries, to be called "The Garden of Lilies," was lying open on Reb Shemuel's own desk--but yet the only true encyclopaedia of things terrestrial and divine. And, indeed, they were wonderful books. It was as difficult to say what was not in them as what was. Through them the old Rabbi held communion with his God whom he loved with all his heart and soul and thought of as a genial Father, watching tenderly over His froward children and chastising them because He loved them. Generations of saints and scholars linked Reb Shemuel with the marvels of Sinai. The infinite network of ceremonial never hampered his soul; it was his joyous privilege to obey his Father in all things and like the king who offered to reward the man who invented a new pleasure, he was ready to embrace the sage who could deduce a new commandment. He rose at four every morning to study, and snatched every odd moment he could during the day. Rabbi Meir, that ancient ethical teacher, wrote: "Whosoever labors in the Torah for its own sake, the whole world is indebted to him; he is called friend, beloved, a lover of the All-present, a lover of mankind; it clothes him in meekness and reverence; it fits him to become just, pious, upright and faithful; he becomes modest, long-suffering and forgiving of insult."
Reb Shemuel would have been scandalized if any one had applied these words to him.
At about eleven o'clock Hannah came into the room, an open letter in her hand.
Father, she said, "I have just had a letter from Samuel Levine."
Your husband? he said, looking up with a smile.
My husband, she replied, with a fainter smile.
And what does he say?
It isn't a very serious letter; he only wants to reassure me that he is coming back by Sunday week to be divorced.
All right; tell him it shall be done at cost price, he said, with the foreign accent that made him somehow seem more lovable to his daughter when he spoke English. "He shall only be charged for the scribe."
He'll take that for granted, Hannah replied. "Fathers are expected to do these little things for their own children. But how much nicer it would be if you could give me the _Gett_ yourself."
I would marry you with pleasure, said Reb Shemuel, "but divorce is another matter. The _Din_ has too much regard for a father's feelings to allow that."
And you really think I am Sam Levine's wife?
How many times shall I tell you? Some authorities do take the _intention_ into account, but the letter of the law is clearly against you. It is far safer to be formally divorced.
Then if he were to die--
Save us and grant us peace, interrupted the Reb in horror.
I should be his widow.
Yes, I suppose you would. But what _Narrischkeit_! Why should he die? It isn't as if you were really married to him, said the Reb, his eye twinkling.
But isn't it all absurd, father?
Do not talk so, said Reb Shemuel, resuming his gravity. "Is it absurd that you should be scorched if you play with fire?"
Hannah did not reply to the question.
You never told me how you got on at Manchester, she said. "Did you settle the dispute satisfactorily?"
Oh, yes, said the Reb; "but it was very difficult. Both parties were so envenomed, and it seems that the feud has been going on in the congregation ever since the Day of Atonement, when the minister refused to blow the _Shofar_ three minutes too early, as the President requested. The Treasurer sided with the minister, and there has almost been a split."
The sounding of the New Year trumpet seems often to be the signal for war, said Hannah, sarcastically.
It is so, said the Reb, sadly.
And how did you repair the breach?
Just by laughing at both sides. They would have turned a deaf ear to reasoning. I told them that Midrash about Jacob's journey to Laban.
What is that?
Oh, it's an amplification of the Biblical narrative. The verse in Genesis says that he lighted on the place, and he put up there for the night because the sun had set, and he took of the stones of the place and he made them into pillows. But later on it says that he rose up in the morning and he took _the_ stone which he had put as his pillows. Now what is the explanation? Reb Shemuel's tone became momently more sing-song: "In the night the stones quarrelled for the honor of supporting the Patriarch's head, and so by a miracle they were turned into one stone to satisfy them all. 'Now you remember that when Jacob arose in the morning he said: 'How fearful is this place; this is none other than the House of God.' So I said to the wranglers: 'Why did Jacob say that? He said it because his rest had been so disturbed by the quarrelling stones that it reminded him of the House of God--the Synagogue.' I pointed out how much better it would be if they ceased their quarrellings and became one stone. And so I made peace again in the _Kehillah_."
Till next year, said Hannah, laughing. "But, father, I have often wondered why they allow the ram's horn in the service. I thought all musical instruments were forbidden."
It is not a musical instrument--in practice, said the Reb, with evasive facetiousness. And, indeed, the performers were nearly always incompetent, marring the solemnity of great moments by asthmatic wheezings and thin far-away tootlings.
But it would be if we had trained trumpeters, persisted Hannah, smiling.
If you really want the explanation, it is that since the fall of the second Temple we have dropped out of our worship all musical instruments connected with the old Temple worship, especially such as have become associated with Christianity. But the ram's horn on the New Year is an institution older than the Temple, and specially enjoined in the Bible.
But surely there is something spiritualizing about an organ.
For reply the Reb pinched her ear. "Ah, you are a sad _Epikouros_" he said, half seriously. "If you loved God you would not want an organ to take your thoughts to heaven."
He released her ear and took up his pen, humming with unction a synagogue air full of joyous flourishes.
Hannah turned to go, then turned back.
Father, she said nervously, blushing a little, "who was that you said you had in your eye?"
Oh, nobody in particular, said the Reb, equally embarrassed and avoiding meeting her eye, as if to conceal the person in his.
But you must have meant something by it, she said gravely. "You know I'm not going to be married off to please other people."
The Reb wriggled uncomfortably in his chair. "It was only a thought--an idea. If it does not come to you, too, it shall be nothing. I didn't mean anything serious--really, my dear, I didn't. To tell you the truth," he finished suddenly with a frank, heavenly smile, "the person I had mainly in my eye when I spoke was your mother."
This time his eye met hers, and they smiled at each other with the consciousness of the humors of the situation. The Rebbitzin's broom was heard banging viciously in the passage. Hannah bent down and kissed the ample forehead beneath the black skull-cap.
Mr. Levine also writes insisting that I must go to the Purim ball with him and Leah, she said, glancing at the letter.
A husband's wishes must be obeyed, answered the Reb.
No, I will treat him as if he were really my husband, retorted Hannah. "I will have my own way: I shan't go."
The door was thrown open suddenly.
Oh yes thou wilt, said the Rebbitzin. "Thou art not going to bury thyself alive."
Esther Ansell did not welcome Levi Jacobs warmly. She had just cleared away the breakfast things and was looking forward to a glorious day's reading, and the advent of a visitor did not gratify her. And yet Levi Jacobs was a good-looking boy with brown hair and eyes, a dark glowing complexion and ruddy lips--a sort of reduced masculine edition of Hannah.
I've come to play I-spy-I, Solomon, he said when he entered "My, don't you live high up!"
I thought you had to go to school, Solomon observed with a stare.
Ours isn't a board school, Levi explained. "You might introduce a fellow to your sister."
Garn! You know Esther right enough, said Solomon and began to whistle carelessly.
How are you, Esther? said Levi awkwardly.
I'm very well, thank you, said Esther, looking up from a little brown-covered book and looking down at it again.
She was crouching on the fender trying to get some warmth at the little fire extracted from Reb Shemuel's half-crown. December continued gray; the room was dim and a spurt of flame played on her pale earnest face. It was a face that never lost a certain ardency of color even at its palest: the hair was dark and abundant, the eyes were large and thoughtful, the nose slightly aquiline and the whole cast of the features betrayed the Polish origin. The forehead was rather low. Esther had nice teeth which accident had preserved white. It was an arrestive rather than a beautiful face, though charming enough when she smiled. If the grace and candor of childhood could have been disengaged from the face, it would have been easier to say whether it was absolutely pretty. It came nearer being so on Sabbaths and holidays when scholastic supervision was removed and the hair was free to fall loosely about the shoulders instead of being screwed up into the pendulous plait so dear to the educational eye. Esther could have earned a penny quite easily by sacrificing her tresses and going about with close-cropped head like a boy, for her teacher never failed thus to reward the shorn, but in the darkest hours of hunger she held on to her hair as her mother had done before her. The prospects of Esther's post-nuptial wig were not brilliant. She was not tall for a girl who is getting on for twelve; but some little girls shoot up suddenly and there was considerable room for hope.
Sarah and Isaac were romping noisily about and under the beds; Rachel was at the table, knitting a scarf for Solomon; the grandmother pored over a bulky enchiridion for pious women, written in jargon. Moses was out in search of work. No one took any notice of the visitor.
What's that you're reading? he asked Esther politely.
Oh nothing, said Esther with a start, closing the book as if fearful he might want to look over her shoulder.
I don't see the fun of reading books out of school, said Levi.
Oh, but we don't read school books, said Solomon defensively.
I don't care. It's stupid.
At that rate you could never read books when you're grown up, said Esther contemptuously.
No, of course not, admitted Levi. "Otherwise where would be the fun of being grown up? After I leave school I don't intend to open a book."
No? Perhaps you'll open a shop, said Solomon.
What will you do when it rains? asked Esther crushingly.
I shall smoke, replied Levi loftily.
Yes, but suppose it's _Shabbos_, swiftly rejoined Esther.
Levi was nonplussed. "Well, it can't rain all day and there are only fifty-two _Shabbosim_ in the year," he said lamely. "A man can always do something."
I think there's more pleasure in reading than in doing something, remarked Esther.
Yes, you're a girl, Levi reminded her, "and girls are expected to stay indoors. Look at my sister Hannah. She reads, too. But a man can be out doing what he pleases, eh, Solomon?"
Yes, of course we've got the best of it, said Solomon. "The Prayer-book shows that. Don't I say every morning 'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast not made me a woman'?"
I don't know whether you do say it. You certainly have got to, said Esther witheringly.
'Sh, said Solomon, winking in the direction of the grandmother.
It doesn't matter, said Esther calmly. "She can't understand what I'm saying."
I don't know, said Solomon dubiously. "She sometimes catches more than you bargain for."
And then, _you_ catch more than you bargain for, said Rachel, looking up roguishly from her knitting.
Solomon stuck his tongue in his cheek and grimaced.
Isaac came behind Levi and gave his coat a pull and toddled off with a yell of delight.
Be quiet, Ikey! cried Esther. "If you don't behave better I shan't sleep in your new bed."
Oh yeth, you mutht, Ethty, lisped Ikey, his elfish face growing grave. He went about depressed for some seconds.
Kids are a beastly nuisance, said Levi, "don't you think so, Esther?"
Oh no, not always, said the little girl. "Besides we were all kids once."
That's what I complain of, said Levi. "We ought to be all born grown-up."
But that's impossible! put in Rachel.
It isn't impossible at all, said Esther. "Look at Adam and Eve!"
Levi looked at Esther gratefully instead. He felt nearer to her and thought of persuading her into playing Kiss-in-the-Ring. But he found it difficult to back out of his undertaking to play I-spy-I with Solomon; and in the end he had to leave Esther to her book.
She had little in common with her brother Solomon, least of all humor and animal spirits. Even before the responsibilities of headship had come upon her she was a preternaturally thoughtful little girl who had strange intuitions about things and was doomed to work out her own salvation as a metaphysician. When she asked her mother who made God, a slap in the face demonstrated to her the limits of human inquiry. The natural instinct of the child over-rode the long travail of the race to conceive an abstract Deity, and Esther pictured God as a mammoth cloud. In early years Esther imagined that the "body" that was buried when a person died was the corpse decapitated and she often puzzled herself to think what was done with the isolated head. When her mother was being tied up in grave-clothes, Esther hovered about with a real thirst for knowledge while the thoughts of all the other children were sensuously concentrated on the funeral and the glory of seeing a vehicle drive away from their own door. Esther was also disappointed at not seeing her mother's soul fly up to heaven though she watched vigilantly at the death-bed for the ascent of the long yellow hook-shaped thing. The genesis of this conception of the soul was probably to be sought in the pictorial representations of ghosts in the story-papers brought home by her eldest brother Benjamin. Strange shadowy conceptions of things more corporeal floated up from her solitary reading. Theatres she came across often, and a theatre was a kind of Babel plain or Vanity Fair in which performers and spectators were promiscuously mingled and wherein the richer folk clad in evening dress sat in thin deal boxes--the cases in Spitalfields market being Esther's main association with boxes. One of her day-dreams of the future was going to the theatre in a night-gown and being accommodated with an orange-box. Little rectification of such distorted views of life was to be expected from Moses Ansell, who went down to his grave without seeing even a circus, and had no interest in art apart from the "Police News" and his "Mizrach" and the synagogue decorations. Even when Esther's sceptical instinct drove her to inquire of her father how people knew that Moses got the Law on Mount Sinai, he could only repeat in horror that the Books of Moses said so, and could never be brought to see that his arguments travelled on roundabouts. She sometimes regretted that her brilliant brother Benjamin had been swallowed up by the orphan asylum, for she imagined she could have discussed many a knotty point with him. Solomon was both flippant and incompetent. But in spite of her theoretical latitudinarianism, in practice she was pious to the point of fanaticism and could scarce conceive the depths of degradation of which she heard vague horror-struck talk. There were Jews about--grown-up men and women, not insane--who struck lucifer matches on the Sabbath and housewives who carelessly mixed their butter-plates with their meat-plates even when they did not actually eat butter with meat. Esther promised herself that, please God, she would never do anything so wicked when she grew up. She at least would never fail to light the Sabbath candles nor to _kasher_ the meat. Never was child more alive to the beauty of duty, more open to the appeal of virtue, self-control, abnegation. She fasted till two o'clock on the Great White Fast when she was seven years old and accomplished the perfect feat at nine. When she read a simple little story in a prize-book, inculcating the homely moralities at which the cynic sneers, her eyes filled with tears and her breast with unselfish and dutiful determinations. She had something of the temperament of the stoic, fortified by that spiritual pride which does not look for equal goodness in others; and though she disapproved of Solomon's dodgings of duty, she did not sneak or preach, even gave him surreptitious crusts of bread before he had said his prayers, especially on Saturdays and Festivals when the praying took place in _Shool_ and was liable to be prolonged till mid-day.
Esther often went to synagogue and sat in the ladies' compartment. The drone of the "Sons of the Covenant" downstairs was part of her consciousness of home, like the musty smell of the stairs, or Becky's young men through whom she had to plough her way when she went for the morning milk, or the odors of Mr. Belcovitch's rum or the whirr of his machines, or the bent, snuffy personality of the Hebrew scholar in the adjoining garret, or the dread of Dutch Debby's dog that was ultimately transformed to friendly expectation. Esther led a double life, just as she spoke two tongues. The knowledge that she was a Jewish child, whose people had had a special history, was always at the back of her consciousness; sometimes it was brought to the front by the scoffing rhymes of Christian children, who informed her that they had stuck a piece of pork upon a fork and given it to a member of her race.
But far more vividly did she realize that she was an English girl; far keener than her pride in Judas Maccabaeus was her pride in Nelson and Wellington; she rejoiced to find that her ancestors had always beaten the French from the days of Cressy and Poictiers to the days of Waterloo, that Alfred the Great was the wisest of kings, and that Englishmen dominated the world and had planted colonies in every corner of it, that the English language was the noblest in the world and men speaking it had invented railway trains, steamships, telegraphs, and everything worth inventing. Esther absorbed these ideas from the school reading books. The experience of a month will overlay the hereditary bequest of a century. And yet, beneath all, the prepared plate remains most sensitive to the old impressions.
Sarah and Isaac had developed as distinct individualities as was possible in the time at their disposal. Isaac was just five and Sarah--who had never known her mother--just four. The thoughts of both ran strongly in the direction of sensuous enjoyment, and they preferred baked potatoes, especially potatoes touched with gravy, to all the joys of the kindergarten. Isaac's ambition ran in the direction of eider-down beds such as he had once felt at Malka's and Moses soothed him by the horizon-like prospect of such a new bed. Places of honor had already been conceded by the generous little chap to his father and brother. Heaven alone knows how he had come to conceive their common bed as his own peculiar property in which the other three resided at night on sufferance. He could not even plead it was his by right of birth in it. But Isaac was not after all wholly given over to worldly thoughts, for an intellectual problem often occupied his thoughts and led him to slap little Sarah's arms. He had been born on the 4th of December while Sarah had been born a year later on the 3d.
It ain't, it can't be, he would say. "Your birfday can't be afore mine."
'Tis, Esty thays so, Sarah would reply.
Esty's a liar, Isaac responded imperturbably.
Ask _Tatah_.
_Tatah_ dunno. Ain't I five?
Yeth.
And ain't you four?
Yeth.
And ain't I older than you?
Courth.
And wasn't I born afore you?
Yeth, Ikey.
Then 'ow can your birfday come afore mine?
'Cos it doth.
Stoopid!
It doth, arx Esty, Sarah would insist.
Than't teep in my new bed, Ikey would threaten.
Thall if I like.
Than't!
Here Sarah would generally break down in tears and Isaac with premature economic instinct, feeling it wicked to waste a cry, would proceed to justify it by hitting her. Thereupon little Sarah would hit him back and develop a terrible howl.
Hi, woe is unto me, she would wail in jargon, throwing herself on the ground in a corner and rocking herself to and fro like her far-away ancestresses remembering Zion by the waters of Babylon.
Little Sarah's lamentations never ceased till she had been avenged by a higher hand. There were several great powers but Esther was the most trusty instrument of reprisal. If Esther was out little Sarah's sobs ceased speedily, for she, too, felt the folly of fruitless tears. Though she nursed in her breast the sense of injury, she would even resume her amicable romps with Isaac. But the moment the step of the avenger was heard on the stairs, little Sarah would betake herself to the corner and howl with the pain of Isaac's pummellings. She had a strong love of abstract justice and felt that if the wrongdoer were to go unpunished, there was no security for the constitution of things.
To-day's holiday did not pass without an outbreak of this sort. It occurred about tea-time. Perhaps the infants were fractious because there was no tea. Esther had to economize her resources and a repast at seven would serve for both tea and supper. Among the poor, combination meals are as common as combination beds and chests. Esther had quieted Sarah by slapping Isaac, but as this made Isaac howl the gain was dubious. She had to put a fresh piece of coal on the fire and sing to them while their shadows contorted themselves grotesquely on the beds and then upwards along the sloping walls, terminating with twisted necks on the ceiling.
Esther usually sang melancholy things in minor keys. They seemed most attuned to the dim straggling room. There was a song her mother used to sing. It was taken from a _Purim-Spiel_, itself based upon a Midrash, one of the endless legends with which the People of One Book have broidered it, amplifying every minute detail with all the exuberance of oriental imagination and justifying their fancies with all the ingenuity of a race of lawyers. After his brethren sold Joseph to the Midianite merchants, the lad escaped from the caravan and wandered foot-sore and hungry to Bethlehem, to the grave of his mother, Rachel. And he threw himself upon the ground and wept aloud and sang to a heart-breaking melody in Yiddish.
Und hei weh ist mir,
Wie schlecht ist doch mir,
Ich bin vertrieben geworen
Junger held voon dir.
Whereof the English runs:
Alas! woe is me!
How wretched to be
Driven away and banished,
Yet so young, from thee.
Thereupon the voice of his beloved mother Rachel was heard from the grave, comforting him and bidding him be of good cheer, for that his future should be great and glorious.
Esther could not sing this without the tears trickling down her cheeks. Was it that she thought of her own dead mother and applied the lines to herself? Isaac's ill-humor scarcely ever survived the anodyne of these mournful cadences. There was another melodious wail which Alte Belcovitch had brought from Poland. The chorus ran:
Man nemt awek die chasanim voon die callohs
Hi, hi, did-a-rid-a-ree!
They tear away their lovers from the maidens,
Hi, hi, did-a-rid-a-ree!
The air mingled the melancholy of Polish music with the sadness of Jewish and the words hinted of God knew what.
"Old unhappy far-off things And battles long ago.
"And so over all the songs and stories was the trail of tragedy, under all the heart-ache of a hunted race. There are few more plaintive chants in the world than the recitation of the Psalms by the "Sons of the Covenant" on Sabbath afternoons amid the gathering shadows of twilight. Esther often stood in the passage to hear it, morbidly fascinated, tears of pensive pleasure in her eyes. Even the little jargon story-book which Moses Ansell read out that night to his _Kinder_, after tea-supper, by the light of the one candle, was prefaced with a note of pathos. "These stories have we gathered together from the Gemorah and the Midrash, wonderful stories, and we have translated the beautiful stories, using the Hebrew alphabet so that every one, little or big, shall be able to read them, and shall know that there is a God in the world who forsaketh not His people Israel and who even for us will likewise work miracles and wonders and will send us the righteous Redeemer speedily in our days, Amen." Of this same Messiah the children heard endless tales. Oriental fancy had been exhausted in picturing him for the consolation of exiled and suffering Israel. Before his days there would be a wicked Messiah of the House of Joseph; later, a king with one ear deaf to hear good but acute to hear evil; there would be a scar on his forehead, one of his hands would be an inch long and the other three miles, apparently a subtle symbol of the persecutor. The jargon story-book among its "stories, wonderful stories," had also extracts from the famous romance, or diary, of Eldad the Danite, who professed to have discovered the lost Ten Tribes. Eldad's book appeared towards the end of the ninth century and became the Arabian Nights of the Jews, and it had filtered down through the ages into the Ansell garret, in common with many other tales from the rich storehouse of mediaeval folk-lore in the diffusion of which the wandering few has played so great a part.
Sometimes Moses read to his charmed hearers the description of Heaven and Hell by Immanuel, the friend and contemporary of Dante, sometimes a jargon version of Robinson Crusoe. To-night he chose Eldad's account of the tribe of Moses dwelling beyond the wonderful river, Sambatyon, which never flows on the Sabbath.
"There is also the tribe of Moses, our just master, which is called the tribe that flees, because it fled from idol worship and clung to the fear of God. A river flows round their land for a distance of four days' journey on every side. They dwell in beautiful houses provided with handsome towers, which they have built themselves. There is nothing unclean among them, neither in the case of birds, venison nor domesticated animals; there are no wild animals, no flies, no foxes, no vermin, no serpents, no dogs, and in general, nothing which does harm; they have only sheep and cattle, which bear twice a year. They sow and reap; there are all sorts of gardens, with all kinds of fruits and cereals, viz.: beans, melons, gourds, onions, garlic, wheat and barley, and the seed grows a hundred fold. They have faith; they know the Law, the Mishnah, the Talmud and the Agadah; but their Talmud is in Hebrew. They introduce their sayings in the name of the fathers, the wise men, who heard them from the mouth of Joshua, who himself heard them from the mouth of God. They have no knowledge of the Tanaim (doctors of the Mishnah) and Amoraim (doctors of the Talmud), who flourished during the time of the second Temple, which was, of course, not known to these tribes. They speak only Hebrew, and are very strict as regards the use of wine made by others than themselves, as well as the rules of slaughtering animals; in this respect the Law of Moses is much more rigorous than that of the Tribes. They do not swear by the name of God, for fear that their breath may leave them, and they become angry with those who swear; they reprimand them, saying, 'Woe, ye poor, why do you swear with the mention of the name of God upon your lips? Use your mouth for eating bread and drinking water. Do you not know that for the sin of swearing your children die young?' And in this way they exhort every one to serve God with fear and integrity of heart. Therefore, the children of Moses, the servant of God, live long, to the age of 100 or 120 years. No child, be it son or daughter, dies during the lifetime of its parent, but they reach a third and a fourth generation, and see grandchildren and great-grandchildren with their offspring. They do all field work themselves, having no male or female servants; there are also merchants among them. They do not close their houses at night, for there is no thief nor any wicked man among them. Thus a little lad might go for days with his flock without fear of robbers, demons or danger of any other kind; they are, indeed, all holy and clean. These Levites busy themselves with the Law and with the commandments, and they still live in the holiness of our master, Moses; therefore, God has given them all this good. Moreover, they see nobody and nobody sees them, except the four tribes who dwell on the other side of the rivers of Cush; they see them, and speak to them, but the river Sambatyon is between them, as it is said: 'That thou mayest say to prisoners, Go forth' (Isaiah xlix., 9). They have plenty of gold and silver; they sow flax and cultivate the crimson worm, and make beautiful garments. Their number is double or four times the number that went out from Egypt. The river Sambatyon is 200 yards broad--'about as far as a bowshot' (Gen. xxi., 16), full of sand and stones, but without water; the stones make a great noise like the waves of the sea and a stormy wind, so that in the night the noise is heard at a distance of half a day's journey. There are sources of water which collect themselves in one pool, out of which they water the fields. There are fish in it, and all kinds of clean birds fly round it. And this river of stone and sand rolls during the six working days and rests on the Sabbath day. As soon as the Sabbath begins fire surrounds the river and the flames remain till the next evening, when the Sabbath ends. Thus no human being can reach the river for a distance of half a mile on either side; the fire consumes all that grows there. The four tribes, Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher, stand on the borders of the river. When shearing their flocks here, for the land is flat and clean without any thorns, if the children of Moses see them gathered together on the border they shout, saying, 'Brethren, tribes of Jeshurun, show us your camels, dogs and asses,' and they make their remarks about the length of the camel's neck and the shortness of the tail. Then they greet one another and go their way.""
"When this was done, Solomon called for Hell. He liked to hear about the punishment of the sinners; it gave a zest to life. Moses hardly needed a book to tell them about Hell. It had no secrets for him. The Old Testament has no reference to a future existence, but the poor Jew has no more been able to live without the hope of Hell than the poor Christian. When the wicked man has waxed fat and kicked the righteous skinny man, shall the two lie down in the same dust and the game be over? Perish the thought! One of the Hells was that in which the sinner was condemned to do over and over again the sins he had done in life.
Why, that must be jolly! said Solomon.
No, that is frightful, maintained Moses Ansell. He spoke Yiddish, the children English.
Of course, it is, said Esther. "Just fancy, Solomon, having to eat toffy all day."
It's better than eating nothing all day, replied Solomon.
But to eat it every day for ever and ever! said Moses. "There's no rest for the wicked."
What! Not even on the Sabbath? said Esther.
Oh, yes: of course, then. Like the river Sambatyon, even the flames of Hell rest on _Shabbos_.
Haven't they got no fire-_goyas_?; inquired Ikey, and everybody laughed.
_Shabbos_ is a holiday in Hell, Moses explained to the little one. "So thou seest the result of thy making out Sabbath too early on Saturday night, thou sendest the poor souls back to their tortures before the proper time."
Moses never lost an opportunity of enforcing the claims of the ceremonial law. Esther had a vivid picture flashed upon her of poor, yellow hook-shaped souls floating sullenly back towards the flames.
Solomon's chief respect for his father sprang from the halo of military service encircling Moses ever since it leaked out through the lips of the _Bube_, that he had been a conscript in Russia and been brutally treated by the sergeant. But Moses could not be got to speak of his exploits. Solomon pressed him to do so, especially when his father gave symptoms of inviting him to the study of Rashi's Commentary. To-night Moses brought out a Hebrew tome, and said, "Come, Solomon. Enough of stories. We must learn a little."
To-day is a holiday, grumbled Solomon.
It is never a holiday for the study of the Law.
Only this once, father; let's play draughts.
Moses weakly yielded. Draughts was his sole relaxation and when Solomon acquired a draught board by barter his father taught him the game. Moses played the Polish variety, in which the men are like English kings that leap backwards and forwards and the kings shoot diagonally across like bishops at chess. Solomon could not withstand these gigantic grasshoppers, whose stopping places he could never anticipate. Moses won every game to-night and was full of glee and told the _Kinder_ another story. It was about the Emperor Nicholas and is not to be found in the official histories of Russia.
Nicholas, was a wicked king, who oppressed the Jews and made their lives sore and bitter. And one day he made it known to the Jews that if a million roubles were not raised for him in a month's time they should be driven from their homes. Then the Jews prayed unto God and besought him to help them for the merits of the forefathers, but no help came. Then they tried to bribe the officials, but the officials pocketed their gold and the Emperor still demanded his tax. Then they went to the great Masters of Cabalah, who, by pondering day and night on the name and its transmutations, had won the control of all things, and they said, 'Can ye do naught for us?' Then the Masters of Cabalah took counsel together and at midnight they called up the spirits of Abraham our father, and Isaac and Jacob, and Elijah the prophet, who wept to hear of their children's sorrows. And Abraham our father, and Isaac and Jacob, and Elijah the prophet took the bed whereon Nicholas the Emperor slept and transported it to a wild place. And they took Nicholas the Emperor out of his warm bed and whipped him soundly so that he yelled for mercy. Then they asked: 'Wilt thou rescind the edict against the Jews?' And he said 'I will.' But in the morning Nicholas the Emperor woke up and called for the chief of the bed-chamber and said, 'How darest thou allow my bed to be carried out in the middle of the night into the forest?' And the chief of the bed-chamber grew pale and said that the Emperor's guards had watched all night outside the door, neither was there space for the bed to pass out. And Nicholas the Emperor, thinking he had dreamed, let the man go unhung. But the next night lo! the bed was transported again to the wild place and Abraham our father, and Isaac and Jacob, and Elijah the prophet drubbed him doubly and again he promised to remit the tax. So in the morning the chief of the bed-chamber was hanged and at night the guards were doubled. But the bed sailed away to the wild place and Nicholas the Emperor was trebly whipped. Then Nicholas the Emperor annulled the edict and the Jews rejoiced and fell at the knees of the Masters of Cabalah.
But why can't they save the Jews altogether? queried Esther.
Oh, said Moses mysteriously. "Cabalah is a great force and must not be abused. The Holy Name must not be made common. Moreover one might lose one's life."
Could the Masters make men? inquired Esther, who had recently come across Frankenstein.
Certainly, said Moses. "And what is more, it stands written that Reb Chanina and Reb Osheya fashioned a fine fat calf on Friday and enjoyed it on the Sabbath."
Oh, father! said Solomon, piteously, "don't you know Cabalah?"
A year before we got to know Esther Ansell she got to know Dutch Debby and it changed her life. Dutch Debby was a tall sallow ungainly girl who lived in the wee back room on the second floor behind Mrs. Simons and supported herself and her dog by needle-work. Nobody ever came to see her, for it was whispered that her parents had cast her out when she presented them with an illegitimate grandchild. The baby was fortunate enough to die, but she still continued to incur suspicion by keeping a dog, which is an un-Jewish trait. Bobby often squatted on the stairs guarding her door and, as it was very dark on the staircase, Esther suffered great agonies lest she should tread on his tail and provoke reprisals. Her anxiety led her to do so one afternoon and Bobby's teeth just penetrated through her stocking. The clamor brought out Dutch Debby, who took the girl into her room and soothed her. Esther had often wondered what uncanny mysteries lay behind that dark dog-guarded door and she was rather more afraid of Debby than of Bobby.
But that afternoon saw the beginning of a friendship which added one to the many factors which were moulding the future woman. For Debby turned out a very mild bogie, indeed, with a good English vocabulary and a stock of old _London Journals_, more precious to Esther than mines of Ind. Debby kept them under the bed, which, as the size of the bed all but coincided with the area of the room, was a wise arrangement. And on the long summer evenings and the Sunday afternoons when her little ones needed no looking after and were traipsing about playing "whoop!" and pussy-cat in the street downstairs, Esther slipped into the wee back room, where the treasures lay, and there, by the open window, overlooking the dingy back yard and the slanting perspectives of sun-decked red tiles where cats prowled and dingy sparrows hopped, in an atmosphere laden with whiffs from a neighboring dairyman's stables, Esther lost herself in wild tales of passion and romance. She frequently read them aloud for the benefit of the sallow-faced needle-woman, who had found romance square so sadly with the realities of her own existence. And so all a summer afternoon, Dutch Debby and Esther would be rapt away to a world of brave men and fair women, a world of fine linen and purple, of champagne and wickedness and cigarettes, a world where nobody worked or washed shirts or was hungry or had holes in boots, a world utterly ignorant of Judaism and the heinousness of eating meat with butter. Not that Esther for her part correlated her conception of this world with facts. She never realized that it was an actually possible world--never indeed asked herself whether it existed outside print or not. She never thought of it in that way at all, any more than it ever occurred to her that people once spoke the Hebrew she learned to read and translate. "Bobby" was often present at these readings, but he kept his thoughts to himself, sitting on his hind legs with his delightfully ugly nose tilted up inquiringly at Esther. For the best of all this new friendship was that Bobby was not jealous. He was only a sorry dun-colored mongrel to outsiders, but Esther learned to see him almost through Dutch Debby's eyes. And she could run up the stairs freely, knowing that if she trod on his tail now, he would take it as a mark of _camaraderie_.
I used to pay a penny a week for the _London Journal_, said Debby early in their acquaintanceship, "till one day I discovered I had a dreadful bad memory."
And what was the good of that? said Esther.
Why, it was worth shillings and shillings to me. You see I used to save up all the back numbers of the _London Journal_ because of the answers to correspondents, telling you how to do your hair and trim your nails and give yourself a nice complexion. I used to bother my head about that sort of thing in those days, dear; and one day I happened to get reading a story in a back number only about a year old and I found I was just as interested as if I had never read it before and I hadn't the slightest remembrance of it. After that I left off buying the _Journal_ and took to reading my big heap of back numbers. I get through them once every two years. Debby interrupted herself with a fit of coughing, for lengthy monologue is inadvisable for persons who bend over needle-work in dark back rooms. Recovering herself, she added, "And then I start afresh. You couldn't do that, could you?"
No, admitted Esther, with a painful feeling of inferiority. "I remember all I've ever read."
Ah, you will grow up a clever woman! said Debby, patting her hair.
Oh, do you think so? said Esther, her dark eyes lighting up with pleasure.
Oh yes, you're always first in your class, ain't you?
Is that what you judge by, Debby? said Esther, disappointed. "The other girls are so stupid and take no thought for anything but their hats and their frocks. They would rather play gobs or shuttlecock or hopscotch than read about the 'Forty Thieves.' They don't mind being kept a whole year in one class but I--oh, I feel so mad at getting on so slow. I could easily learn the standard work in three months. I want to know everything--so that I can grow up to be a teacher at our school."
And does your teacher know everything?
Oh yes! She knows the meaning of every word and all about foreign countries.
And would you like to be a teacher?
If I could only be clever enough! sighed Esther. "But then you see the teachers at our school are real ladies and they dress, oh, so beautifully! With fur tippets and six-button gloves. I could never afford it, for even when I was earning five shillings a week I should have to give most of it to father and the children."
But if you're very good--I dare say some of the great ladies like the Rothschilds will buy you nice clothes. I have heard they are very good to clever children.
No, then the other teachers would know I was getting charity! And they would mock at me. I heard Miss Hyams make fun of a teacher because she wore the same dress as last winter. I don't think I should like to be a teacher after all, though it is nice to be able to stand with your back to the fire in the winter. The girls would know--' Esther stopped and blushed.
Would know what, dear?
Well, they would know father, said Esther in low tones. "They would see him selling things in the Lane and they wouldn't do what I told them."
Nonsense, Esther. I believe most of the teachers' fathers are just as bad--I mean as poor. Look at Miss Hyams's own father.
Oh Debby! I do hope that's true. Besides when I was earning five shillings a week, I could buy father a new coat, couldn't I? And then there would be no need for him to stand in the Lane with lemons or 'four-corner fringes,' would there?
No, dear. You shall be a teacher, I prophesy, and who knows? Some day you may be Head Mistress!
Esther laughed a startled little laugh of delight, with a suspicion of a sob in it. "What! Me! Me go round and make all the teachers do their work. Oh, wouldn't I catch them gossiping! I know their tricks!"
You seem to look after your teacher well. Do you ever call her over the coals for gossiping? inquired Dutch Debby, amused.
No, no, protested Esther quite seriously. "I like to hear them gossiping. When my teacher and Miss Davis, who's in the next room, and a few other teachers get together, I learn--Oh such a lot!--from their conversation."
Then they do teach you after all, laughed Debby.
Yes, but it's not on the Time Table, said Esther, shaking her little head sapiently. "It's mostly about young men. Did you ever have a young man, Debby?"
Don't--don't ask such questions, child! Debby bent over her needle-work.
Why not? persisted Esther. "If I only had a young man when I grew up, I should be proud of him. Yes, you're trying to turn your head away. I'm sure you had. Was he nice like Lord Eversmonde or Captain Andrew Sinclair? Why you're crying, Debby!"
Don't be a little fool, Esther! A tiny fly has just flown into my eye--poor little thing! He hurts me and does himself no good.
Let me see, Debby, said Esther. "Perhaps I shall be in time to save him."
No, don't trouble.
Don't be so cruel, Debby. You're as bad as Solomon, who pulls off flies' wings to see if they can fly without them.
He's dead now. Go on with 'Lady Ann's Rival;' we've been wasting the whole afternoon talking. Take my advice, Esther, and don't stuff your head with ideas about young men. You're too young. Now, dear, I'm ready. Go on.
Where was I? Oh yes. 'Lord Eversmonde folded the fair young form to his manly bosom and pressed kiss after kiss upon her ripe young lips, which responded passionately to his own. At last she recovered herself and cried reproachfully, Oh Sigismund, why do you persist in coming here, when the Duke forbids it?' Oh, do you know, Debby, father said the other day I oughtn't to come here?
Oh no, you must, cried Debby impulsively. "I couldn't part with you now."
Father says people say you are not good, said Esther candidly.
Debby breathed painfully. "Well!" she whispered.
But I said people were liars. You _are_ good!
Oh, Esther, Esther! sobbed Debby, kissing the earnest little face with a vehemence that surprised the child.
I think father only said that, Esther went on, "because he fancies I neglect Sarah and Isaac when he's at _Shool_ and they quarrel so about their birthdays when they're together. But they don't slap one another hard. I'll tell you what! Suppose I bring Sarah down here!"
Well, but won't she cry and be miserable here, if you read, and with no Isaac to play with?
Oh no, said Esther confidently. "She'll keep Bobby company."
Bobby took kindly to little Sarah also. He knew no other dogs and in such circumstances a sensible animal falls back on human beings. He had first met Debby herself quite casually and the two lonely beings took to each other. Before that meeting Dutch Debby was subject to wild temptations. Once she half starved herself and put aside ninepence a week for almost three months and purchased one-eighth of a lottery ticket from Sugarman the _Shadchan_, who recognized her existence for the occasion. The fortune did not come off.
Debby saw less and less of Esther as the months crept on again towards winter, for the little girl feared her hostess might feel constrained to offer her food, and the children required more soothing. Esther would say very little about her home life, though Debby got to know a great deal about her school-mates and her teacher.
One summer evening after Esther had passed into the hands of Miss Miriam Hyams she came to Dutch Debby with a grave face and said: "Oh, Debby. Miss Hyams is not a heroine."
No? said Debby, amused. "You were so charmed with her at first."
Yes, she is very pretty and her hats are lovely. But she is not a heroine.
Why, what's happened?
You know what lovely weather it's been all day?
Yes.
Well, this morning all in the middle of the Scripture lesson, she said to us, 'What a pity, girls, we've got to stay cooped up here this bright weather'--you know she chats to us so nicely--'in some schools they have half-holidays on Wednesday afternoons in the summer. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have them and be out in the sunshine in Victoria Park?' 'Hoo, yes, teacher, wouldn't that be jolly?' we all cried. Then teacher said: 'Well, why not ask the Head Mistress for a holiday this afternoon? You're the highest standard in the school--I dare say if you ask for it, the whole school will get a holiday. Who will be spokes-woman?' Then all the girls said I must be because I was the first girl in the class and sounded all my h's, and when the Head Mistress came into the room I up and curtseyed and asked her if we could have a holiday this afternoon on account of the beautiful sunshine. Then the Head Mistress put on her eye-glasses and her face grew black and the sunshine seemed to go out of the room. And she said 'What! After all the holidays we have here, a month at New Year and a fortnight at Passover, and all the fast-days! I am surprised that you girls should be so lazy and idle and ask for more. Why don't you take example by your teacher? Look at Miss Hyams. We all looked at Miss Hyams, but she was looking for some papers in her desk. 'Look how Miss Hyams works!' said the Head Mistress. '_She_ never grumbles, _she_ never asks for a holiday!' We all looked again at Miss Hyams, but she hadn't yet found the papers. There was an awful silence; you could have heard a pin drop. There wasn't a single cough or rustle of a dress. Then the Head Mistress turned to me and she said: 'And you, Esther Ansell, whom I always thought so highly of, I'm surprised at your being the ringleader in such a disgraceful request. You ought to know better. I shall bear it in mind, Esther Ansell.' With that she sailed out, stiff and straight as a poker, and the door closed behind her with a bang."
Well, and what did Miss Hyams say then? asked Debby, deeply interested.
She said: 'Selina Green, and what did Moses do when the Children of Israel grumbled for water?' She just went on with the Scripture lesson, as if nothing had happened.
I should tell the Head Mistress who sent me on, cried Debby indignantly.
Oh, no, said Esther shaking her head. "That would be mean. It's a matter for her own conscience. Oh, but I do wish," she concluded, "we had had a holiday. It would have been so lovely out in the Park."
Victoria Park was _the_ Park to the Ghetto. A couple of miles off, far enough to make a visit to it an excursion, it was a perpetual blessing to the Ghetto. On rare Sunday afternoons the Ansell family minus the _Bube_ toiled there and back _en masse_, Moses carrying Isaac and Sarah by turns upon his shoulder. Esther loved the Park in all weathers, but best of all in the summer, when the great lake was bright and busy with boats, and the birds twittered in the leafy trees and the lobelias and calceolarias were woven into wonderful patterns by the gardeners. Then she would throw herself down on the thick grass and look up in mystic rapture at the brooding blue sky and forget to read the book she had brought with her, while the other children chased one another about in savage delight. Only once on a Saturday afternoon when her father was not with them, did she get Dutch Debby to break through her retired habits and accompany them, and then it was not summer but late autumn. There was an indefinable melancholy about the sere landscape. Russet refuse strewed the paths and the gaunt trees waved fleshless arms in the breeze. The November haze rose from the moist ground and dulled the blue of heaven with smoky clouds amid which the sun, a red sailless boat, floated at anchor among golden and crimson furrows and glimmering far-dotted fleeces. The small lake was slimy, reflecting the trees on its borders as a network of dirty branches. A solitary swan ruffled its plumes and elongated its throat, doubled in quivering outlines beneath the muddy surface. All at once the splash of oars was heard and the sluggish waters were stirred by the passage of a boat in which a heroic young man was rowing a no less heroic young woman.
Dutch Debby burst into tears and went home. After that she fell back entirely on Bobby and Esther and the _London Journal_ and never even saved up nine shillings again.
Sugarman the _Shadchan_ arrived one evening a few days before Purim at the tiny two-storied house in which Esther's teacher lived, with little Nehemiah tucked under his arm. Nehemiah wore shoes and short red socks. The rest of his legs was bare. Sugarman always carried him so as to demonstrate this fact. Sugarman himself was rigged out in a handsome manner, and the day not being holy, his blue bandanna peeped out from his left coat-tail, instead of being tied round his trouser band.
Good morning, marm, he said cheerfully.
Good morning, Sugarman, said Mrs. Hyams.
She was a little careworn old woman of sixty with white hair. Had she been more pious her hair would never have turned gray. But Miriam had long since put her veto on her mother's black wig. Mrs. Hyams was a meek, weak person and submitted in silence to the outrage on her deepest instincts. Old Hyams was stronger, but not strong enough. He, too, was a silent person.
P'raps you're surprised, said Sugarman, "to get a call from me in my sealskin vest-coat. But de fact is, marm, I put it on to call on a lady. I only dropped in here on my vay."
Won't you take a chair? said Mrs. Hyams. She spoke English painfully and slowly, having been schooled by Miriam.
No, I'm not tired. But I vill put Nechemyah down on one, if you permit. Dere! Sit still or I _potch_ you! P'raps you could lend me your corkscrew.
With pleasure, said Mrs. Hyams.
I dank you. You see my boy, Ebenezer, is _Barmitzvah_ next _Shabbos_ a veek, and I may not be passing again. You vill come?
I don't know, said Mrs. Hyams hesitatingly. She was not certain whether Miriam considered Sugarman on their visiting list.
Don't say dat, I expect to open dirteen bottles of lemonade! You must come, you and Mr. Hyams and the whole family.
Thank you. I will tell Miriam and Daniel and my husband.
Dat's right. Nechemyah, don't dance on de good lady's chair. Did you hear, Mrs. Hyams, of Mrs. Jonas's luck?
No.
I won her eleven pounds on the lotter_ee_.
How nice, said Mrs. Hyams, a little fluttered.
I would let you have half a ticket for two pounds.
I haven't the money.
Vell, dirty-six shillings! Dere! I have to pay dat myself.
I would if I could, but I can't.
But you can have an eighth for nine shillings.
Mrs. Hyams shook her head hopelessly.
How is your son Daniel? Sugarman asked.
Pretty well, thank you. How is your wife?
Tank Gawd!
And your Bessie?
Tank Gawd! Is your Daniel in?
Yes.
Tank Gawd! I mean, can I see him?
It won't do any good.
No, not dat, said Sugarman. "I should like to ask him to de Confirmation myself."
Daniel! called Mrs. Hyams.
He came from the back yard in rolled-up shirt-sleeves, soap-suds drying on his arms. He was a pleasant-faced, flaxen-haired young fellow, the junior of Miriam by eighteen months. There was will in the lower part of the face and tenderness in the eyes.
Good morning, sir, said Sugarman. "My Ebenezer is _Barmitzvah_ next _Shabbos_ week; vill you do me the honor to drop in wid your moder and fader after _Shool_?"
Daniel crimsoned suddenly. He had "No" on his lips, but suppressed it and ultimately articulated it in some polite periphrasis. His mother noticed the crimson. On a blonde face it tells.
Don't say dat, said Sugarman. "I expect to open dirteen bottles of lemonade. I have lent your good moder's corkscrew."
I shall be pleased to send Ebenezer a little present, but I can't come, I really can't. You must excuse me. Daniel turned away.
Vell, said Sugarman, anxious to assure him he bore no malice. "If you send a present I reckon it de same as if you come."
That's all right, said Daniel with strained heartiness.
Sugarman tucked Nehemiah under his arm but lingered on the threshold. He did not know how to broach the subject. But the inspiration came.
Do you know I have summonsed Morris Kerlinski?
No, said Daniel. "What for?"
He owes me dirty shillings. I found him a very fine maiden, but, now he is married, he says it was only worth a suvran. He offered it me but I vouldn't take it. A poor man he vas, too, and got ten pun from a marriage portion society.
Is it worth while bringing a scandal on the community for the sake of ten shillings? It will be in all the papers, and _Shadchan_ will be spelt shatcan, shodkin, shatkin, chodcan, shotgun, and goodness knows what else.
Yes, but it isn't ten shillings, said Sugarman. "It's dirty shillings."
But you say he offered you a sovereign.
So he did. He arranged for two pun ten. I took the suvran--but not in full payment.
You ought to settle it before the Beth-din, said Daniel vehemently, "or get some Jew to arbitrate. You make the Jews a laughing-stock. It is true all marriages depend on money," he added bitterly, "only it is the fashion of police court reporters to pretend the custom is limited to the Jews."
Vell, I did go to Reb Shemuel, said Sugarman "I dought he'd be the very man to arbitrate."
Why? asked Daniel.
Vy? Hasn't he been a _Shadchan_ himself? From who else shall we look for sympaty?
I see, said Daniel smiling a little. "And apparently you got none."
No, said Sugarman, growing wroth at the recollection. "He said ve are not in Poland."
Quite true.
Yes, but I gave him an answer he didn't like, said Sugarman. "I said, and ven ve are not in Poland mustn't ve keep _none_ of our religion?"
His tone changed from indignation to insinuation.
Vy vill you not let me get _you_ a vife, Mr. Hyams? I have several extra fine maidens in my eye. Come now, don't look so angry. How much commission vill you give me if I find you a maiden vid a hundred pound?
The maiden! thundered Daniel. Then it dawned upon him that he had said a humorous thing and he laughed. There was merriment as well as mysticism in Daniel's blue eyes.
But Sugarman went away, down-hearted. Love is blind, and even marriage-brokers may be myopic. Most people not concerned knew that Daniel Hyams was "sweet on" Sugarman's Bessie. And it was so. Daniel loved Bessie, and Bessie loved Daniel. Only Bessie did not speak because she was a woman and Daniel did not speak because he was a man. They were a quiet family--the Hyamses. They all bore their crosses in a silence unbroken even at home. Miriam herself, the least reticent, did not give the impression that she could not have husbands for the winking. Her demands were so high--that was all. Daniel was proud of her and her position and her cleverness and was confident she would marry as well as she dressed. He did not expect her to contribute towards the expenses of the household--though she did--for he felt he had broad shoulders. He bore his father and mother on those shoulders, semi-invalids both. In the bold bad years of shameless poverty, Hyams had been a wandering metropolitan glazier, but this open degradation became intolerable as Miriam's prospects improved. It was partly for her sake that Daniel ultimately supported his parents in idleness and refrained from speaking to Bessie. For he was only an employe in a fancy-goods warehouse, and on forty-five shillings a week you cannot keep up two respectable establishments.
Bessie was a bonnie girl and could not in the nature of things be long uncaught. There was a certain night on which Daniel did not sleep--hardly a white night as our French neighbors say; a tear-stained night rather. In the morning he was resolved to deny himself Bessie. Peace would be his instead. If it did not come immediately he knew it was on the way. For once before he had struggled and been so rewarded. That was in his eighteenth year when he awoke to the glories of free thought, and knew himself a victim to the Moloch of the Sabbath, to which fathers sacrifice their children. The proprietor of the fancy goods was a Jew, and moreover closed on Saturdays. But for this anachronism of keeping Saturday holy when you had Sunday also to laze on, Daniel felt a hundred higher careers would have been open to him. Later, when free thought waned (it was after Daniel had met Bessie), although he never returned to his father's narrowness, he found the abhorred Sabbath sanctifying his life. It made life a conscious voluntary sacrifice to an ideal, and the reward was a touch of consecration once a week. Daniel could not have described these things, nor did he speak of them, which was a pity. Once and once only in the ferment of free thought he had uncorked his soul, and it had run over with much froth, and thenceforward old Mendel Hyams and Beenah, his wife, opposed more furrowed foreheads to a world too strong for them. If Daniel had taken back his words and told them he was happier for the ruin they had made of his prospects, their gait might not have been so listless. But he was a silent man.
You will go to Sugarman's, mother, he said now. "You and father. Don't mind that I'm not going. I have another appointment for the afternoon."
It was a superfluous lie for so silent a man.
He doesn't like to be seen with us, Beenah Hyams thought. But she was silent.
He has never forgiven my putting him to the fancy goods, thought Mendel Hyams when told. But he was silent.
It was of no good discussing it with his wife. Those two had rather halved their joys than their sorrows. They had been married forty years and had never had an intimate moment. Their marriage had been a matter of contract. Forty years ago, in Poland, Mendel Hyams had awoke one morning to find a face he had never seen before on the pillow beside his. Not even on the wedding-day had he been allowed a glimpse of his bride's countenance. That was the custom of the country and the time. Beenah bore her husband four children, of whom the elder two died; but the marriage did not beget affection, often the inverse offspring of such unions. Beenah was a dutiful housewife and Mendel Hyams supported her faithfully so long as his children would let him. Love never flew out of the window for he was never in the house. They did not talk to each other much. Beenah did the housework unaided by the sprig of a servant who was engaged to satisfy the neighbors. In his enforced idleness Mendel fell back on his religion, almost a profession in itself. They were a silent couple.
At sixty there is not much chance of a forty year old silence being broken on this side of the grave. So far as his personal happiness was concerned, Mendel had only one hope left in the world--to die in Jerusalem. His feeling for Jerusalem was unique. All the hunted Jew in him combined with all the battered man to transfigure Zion with the splendor of sacred dreams and girdle it with the rainbows that are builded of bitter tears. And with it all a dread that if he were buried elsewhere, when the last trump sounded he would have to roll under the earth and under the sea to Jerusalem, the rendezvous of resurrection.
Every year at the Passover table he gave his hope voice: "Next year in Jerusalem." In her deepest soul Miriam echoed this wish of his. She felt she could like him better at a distance. Beenah Hyams had only one hope left in the world--to die.
Sam Levine duly returned for the Purim ball. Malka was away and so it was safe to arrive on the Sabbath. Sam and Leah called for Hannah in a cab, for the pavements were unfavorable to dancing shoes, and the three drove to the "Club," which was not a sixth of a mile off.
The Club was the People's Palace of the Ghetto; but that it did not reach the bed-rock of the inhabitants was sufficiently evident from the fact that its language was English. The very lowest stratum was of secondary formation--the children of immigrants--while the highest touched the lower middle-class, on the mere fringes of the Ghetto. It was a happy place where young men and maidens met on equal terms and similar subscriptions, where billiards and flirtations and concerts and laughter and gay gossip were always on, and lemonade and cakes never off; a heaven where marriages were made, books borrowed and newspapers read. Muscular Judaism was well to the fore at "the Club," and entertainments were frequent. The middle classes of the community, overflowing with artistic instinct, supplied a phenomenal number of reciters, vocalists and instrumentalists ready to oblige, and the greatest favorites of the London footlights were pleased to come down, partly because they found such keenly appreciative audiences, and partly because they were so much mixed up with the race, both professionally and socially. There were serious lectures now and again, but few of the members took them seriously; they came to the Club not to improve their minds but to relax them. The Club was a blessing without disguise to the daughters of Judah, and certainly kept their brothers from harm. The ball-room, with its decorations of evergreens and winter blossoms, was a gay sight. Most of the dancers were in evening dress, and it would have been impossible to tell the ball from a Belgravian gathering, except by the preponderance of youth and beauty. Where could you match such a bevy of brunettes, where find such blondes? They were anything but lymphatic, these oriental blondes, if their eyes did not sparkle so intoxicatingly as those of the darker majority. The young men had carefully curled moustaches and ringlets oiled like the Assyrian bull, and figure-six noses, and studs glittering on their creamy shirt-fronts. How they did it on their wages was one of the many miracles of Jewish history. For socially and even in most cases financially they were only on the level of the Christian artisan. These young men in dress-coats were epitomes of one aspect of Jewish history. Not in every respect improvements on the "Sons of the Covenant," though; replacing the primitive manners and the piety of the foreign Jew by a veneer of cheap culture and a laxity of ceremonial observance. It was a merry party, almost like a family gathering, not merely because most of the dancers knew one another, but because "all Israel are brothers"--and sisters. They danced very buoyantly, not boisterously; the square dances symmetrically executed, every performer knowing his part; the waltzing full of rhythmic grace. When the music was popular they accompanied it on their voices. After supper their heels grew lighter, and the laughter and gossip louder, but never beyond the bounds of decorum. A few Dutch dancers tried to introduce the more gymnastic methods in vogue in their own clubs, where the kangaroo is dancing master, but the sentiment of the floor was against them. Hannah danced little, a voluntary wallflower, for she looked radiant in tussore silk, and there was an air of refinement about the slight, pretty girl that attracted the beaux of the Club. But she only gave a duty dance to Sam, and a waltz to Daniel Hyams, who had been brought by his sister, though he did not boast a swallow-tail to match her flowing draperies. Hannah caught a rather unamiable glance from pretty Bessie Sugarman, whom poor Daniel was trying hard not to see in the crush.
Is your sister engaged yet? Hannah asked, for want of something to say.
You would know it if she was, said Daniel, looking so troubled that Hannah reproached herself for the meaningless remark.
How well she dances! she made haste to say.
Not better than you, said Daniel, gallantly.
I see compliments are among the fancy goods you deal in. Do you reverse? she added, as they came to an awkward corner.
Yes--but not my compliments, he said smiling. "Miriam taught me."
She makes me think of Miriam dancing by the Red Sea, she said, laughing at the incongruous idea.
She played a timbrel, though, didn't she? he asked. "I confess I don't quite know what a timbrel is."
A sort of tambourine, I suppose, said Hannah merrily, "and she sang because the children of Israel were saved."
They both laughed heartily, but when the waltz was over they returned to their individual gloom. Towards supper-time, in the middle of a square dance, Sam suddenly noticing Hannah's solitude, brought her a tall bronzed gentlemanly young man in a frock coat, mumbled an introduction and rushed back to the arms of the exacting Leah.
Excuse me, I am not dancing to-night, Hannah said coldly in reply to the stranger's demand for her programme.
Well, I'm not half sorry, he said, with a frank smile. "I had to ask you, you know. But I should feel quite out of place bumping such a lot of swells."
There was something unusual about the words and the manner which impressed Hannah agreeably, in spite of herself. Her face relaxed a little as she said:
Why, haven't you been to one of these affairs before?
Oh yes, six or seven years ago, but the place seems quite altered. They've rebuilt it, haven't they? Very few of us sported dress-coats here in the days before I went to the Cape. I only came back the other day and somebody gave me a ticket and so I've looked in for auld lang syne.
An unsympathetic hearer would have detected a note of condescension in the last sentence. Hannah detected it, for the announcement that the young man had returned from the Cape froze all her nascent sympathy. She was turned to ice again. Hannah knew him well--the young man from the Cape. He was a higher and more disagreeable development of the young man in the dress-coat. He had put South African money in his purse--whether honestly or not, no one inquired--the fact remained he had put it in his purse. Sometimes the law confiscated it, pretending he had purchased diamonds illegally, or what not, but then the young man did _not_ return from the Cape. But, to do him justice, the secret of his success was less dishonesty than the opportunities for initiative energy in unexploited districts. Besides, not having to keep up appearances, he descended to menial occupations and toiled so long and terribly that he would probably have made just as much money at home, if he had had the courage. Be this as it may, there the money was, and, armed with it, the young man set sail literally for England, home and beauty, resuming his cast-off gentility with several extra layers of superciliousness. Pretty Jewesses, pranked in their prettiest clothes, hastened, metaphorically speaking, to the port to welcome the wanderer; for they knew it was from among them he would make his pick. There were several varieties of him--marked by financial ciphers--but whether he married in his old station or higher up the scale, he was always faithful to the sectarian tradition of the race, and this less from religious motives than from hereditary instinct. Like the young man in the dress-coat, he held the Christian girl to be cold of heart, and unsprightly of temperament. He laid it down that all Yiddishe girls possessed that warmth and _chic_ which, among Christians, were the birthright of a few actresses and music-hall artistes--themselves, probably, Jewesses! And on things theatrical this young man spoke as one having authority. Perhaps, though he was scarce conscious of it, at the bottom of his repulsion was the certainty that the Christian girl could not fry fish. She might be delightful for flirtation of all degrees, but had not been formed to make him permanently happy. Such was the conception which Hannah had formed for herself of the young man from the Cape. This latest specimen of the genus was prepossessing into the bargain. There was no denying he was well built, with a shapely head and a lovely moustache. Good looks alone were vouchers for insolence and conceit, but, backed by the aforesaid purse--! She turned her head away and stared at the evolutions of the "Lancers" with much interest.
They've got some pretty girls in that set, he observed admiringly. Evidently the young man did not intend to go away.
Hannah felt very annoyed. "Yes," she said, sharply, "which would you like?"
I shouldn't care to make invidious distinctions, he replied with a little laugh.
Odious prig! thought Hannah. "He actually doesn't see I'm sitting on him!" Aloud she said, "No? But you can't marry them all."
Why should I marry any? he asked in the same light tone, though there was a shade of surprise in it.
Haven't you come back to England to get a wife? Most young men do, when they don't have one exported to them in Africa.
He laughed with genuine enjoyment and strove to catch the answering gleam in her eyes, but she kept them averted. They were standing with their backs to the wall and he could only see the profile and note the graceful poise of the head upon the warm-colored neck that stood out against the white bodice. The frank ring of his laughter mixed with the merry jingle of the fifth figure--
Well, I'm afraid I'm going to be an exception, he said.
You think nobody good enough, perhaps, she could not help saying.
Oh! Why should you think that?
Perhaps you're married already.
Oh no, I'm not, he said earnestly. "You're not, either, are you?"
Me? she asked; then, with a barely perceptible pause, she said, "Of course I am."
The thought of posing as the married woman she theoretically was, flashed upon her suddenly and appealed irresistibly to her sense of fun. The recollection that the nature of the ring on her finger was concealed by her glove afforded her supplementary amusement.
Oh! was all he said. "I didn't catch your name exactly."
I didn't catch yours, she replied evasively.
David Brandon, he said readily.
It's a pretty name, she said, turning smilingly to him. The infinite possibilities of making fun of him latent in the joke quite warmed her towards him. "How unfortunate for me I have destroyed my chance of getting it."
It was the first time she had smiled, and he liked the play of light round the curves of her mouth, amid the shadows of the soft dark skin, in the black depths of the eyes.
How unfortunate for me! he said, smiling in return.
Oh yes, of course! she said with a little toss of her head. "There is no danger in saying that now."
I wouldn't care if there was.
It is easy to smooth down the serpent when the fangs are drawn, she laughed back.
What an extraordinary comparison! he exclaimed. "But where are all the people going? It isn't all over, I hope."
Why, what do you want to stay for? You're not dancing.
That is the reason. Unless I dance with you.
And then you would want to go? she flashed with mock resentment.
I see you're too sharp for me, he said lugubriously. "Roughing it among the Boers makes a fellow a bit dull in compliments."
Dull indeed! said Hannah, drawing herself up with great seriousness. "I think you're more complimentary than you have a right to be to a married woman."
His face fell. "Oh, I didn't mean anything," he said apologetically.
So I thought, retorted Hannah.
The poor fellow grew more red and confused than ever. Hannah felt quite sympathetic with him now, so pleased was she at the humiliated condition to which she had brought the young man from the Cape.
Well, I'll say good-bye, he said awkwardly. "I suppose I mustn't ask to take you down to supper. I dare say your husband will want that privilege."
I dare say, replied Hannah smiling. "Although husbands do not always appreciate their privileges."
I shall be glad if yours doesn't, he burst forth.
Thank you for your good wishes for my domestic happiness, she said severely.
Oh, why will you misconstrue everything I say? he pleaded. "You must think me an awful _Schlemihl_, putting my foot into it so often. Anyhow I hope I shall meet you again somewhere."
The world is very small, she reminded him.
I wish I knew your husband, he said ruefully.
Why? said Hannah, innocently.
Because I could call on him, he replied, smiling.
Well, you do know him, she could not help saying.
Do I? Who is it? I don't think I do, he exclaimed.
Well, considering he introduced you to me!
Sam! cried David startled.
Yes.
But-- said David, half incredulously, half in surprise. He certainly had never credited Sam with the wisdom to select or the merit to deserve a wife like this.
But what? asked Hannah with charming _naivete_.
He said--I--I--at least I think he said--I--I--understood that he introduced me to Miss Solomon, as his intended wife.
Solomon was the name of Malka's first husband, and so of Leah.
Quite right, said Hannah simply.
Then--what--how? he stammered.
She _was_ his intended wife, explained Hannah as if she were telling the most natural thing in the world. "Before he married me, you know."
I--I beg your pardon if I seemed to doubt you. I really thought you were joking.
Why, what made you think so?
Well, he blurted out. "He didn't mention he was married, and seeing him dancing with her the whole time--"
I suppose he thinks he owes her some attention, said Hannah indifferently. "By way of compensation probably. I shouldn't be at all surprised if he takes her down to supper instead of me."
There he is, struggling towards the buffet. Yes, he has her on his arm.
You speak as if she were his phylacteries, said Hannah, smiling. "It would be a pity to disturb them. So, if you like, you can have me on your arm, as you put it."
The young man's face lit up with pleasure, the keener that it was unexpected.
I am very glad to have such phylacteries on my arm, as you put it, he responded. "I fancy I should be a good deal _froomer_ if my phylacteries were like that."
What, aren't you _frooms_? she said, as they joined the hungry procession in which she noted Bessie Sugarman on the arm of Daniel Hyams.
No, I'm a regular wrong'un, he replied. "As for phylacteries, I almost forget how to lay them."
That _is_ bad, she admitted, though he could not ascertain her own point of view from the tone.
Well, everybody else is just as bad, he said cheerfully. "All the old piety seems to be breaking down. It's Purim, but how many of us have been to hear the--the what do you call it?--the _Megillah_ read? There is actually a minister here to-night bare-headed. And how many of us are going to wash our hands before supper or _bensh_ afterwards, I should like to know. Why, it's as much as can be expected if the food's _kosher_, and there's no ham sandwiches on the dishes. Lord! how my old dad, God rest his soul, would have been horrified by such a party as this!"
Yes, it's wonderful how ashamed Jews are of their religion outside a synagogue! said Hannah musingly. "_My_ father, if he were here, would put on his hat after supper and _bensh_, though there wasn't another man in the room to follow his example."
And I should admire him for it, said David, earnestly, "though I admit I shouldn't follow his example myself. I suppose he's one of the old school."
He is Reb Shemuel, said Hannah, with dignity.
Oh, indeed! he exclaimed, not without surprise, "I know him well. He used to bless me when I was a boy, and it used to cost him a halfpenny a time. Such a jolly fellow!"
I'm so glad you think so, said Hannah flushing with pleasure.
Of course I do. Does he still have all those _Greeners_ coming to ask him questions?
Oh, yes. Their piety is just the same as ever.
They're poor, observed David. "It's always those poorest in worldly goods who are richest in religion."
Well, isn't that a compensation? returned Hannah, with a little sigh. "But from my father's point of view, the truth is rather that those who have most pecuniary difficulties have most religious difficulties."
Ah, I suppose they come to your father as much to solve the first as the second.
Father is very good, she said simply.
They had by this time obtained something to eat, and for a minute or so the dialogue became merely dietary.
Do you know, he said in the course of the meal, "I feel I ought not to have told you what a wicked person I am? I put my foot into it there, too."
No, why?
Because you are Reb Shemuel's daughter.
Oh, what nonsense! I like to hear people speak their minds. Besides, you mustn't fancy I'm as _froom_ as my father.
I don't fancy that. Not quite, he laughed. "I know there's some blessed old law or other by which women haven't got the same chance of distinguishing themselves that way as men. I have a vague recollection of saying a prayer thanking God for not having made me a woman."
Ah, that must have been a long time ago, she said slyly.
Yes, when I was a boy, he admitted. Then the oddity of the premature thanksgiving struck them both and they laughed.
You've got a different form provided for you, haven't you? he said.
Yes, I have to thank God for having made me according to His will.
You don't seem satisfied for all that, he said, struck by something in the way she said it.
How can a woman be satisfied? she asked, looking up frankly. "She has no voice in her destinies. She must shut her eyes and open her mouth and swallow what it pleases God to send her."
All right, shut your eyes, he said, and putting his hand over them he gave her a titbit and restored the conversation to a more flippant level.
You mustn't do that, she said. "Suppose my husband were to see you."
Oh, bother! he said. "I don't know why it is, but I don't seem to realize you're a married woman."
Am I playing the part so badly as all that?
Is it a part? he cried eagerly.
She shook her head. His face fell again. She could hardly fail to note the change.
No, it's a stern reality, she said. "I wish it wasn't."
It seemed a bold confession, but it was easy to understand. Sam had been an old school-fellow of his, and David had not thought highly of him. He was silent a moment.
Are you not happy? he said gently.
Not in my marriage.
Sam must be a regular brute! he cried indignantly. "He doesn't know how to treat you. He ought to have his head punched the way he's going on with that fat thing in red."
Oh, don't run her down, said Hannah, struggling to repress her emotions, which were not purely of laughter. "She's my dearest friend."
They always are, said David oracularly. "But how came you to marry him?"
Accident, she said indifferently.
Accident! he repeated, open-eyed.
Ah, well, it doesn't matter, said Hannah, meditatively conveying a spoonful of trifle to her mouth. "I shall be divorced from him to-morrow. Be careful! You nearly broke that plate."
David stared at her, open-mouthed.
Going to be divorced from him to-morrow?
Yes, is there anything odd about it?
Oh, he said, after staring at her impassive face for a full minute. "Now I'm sure you've been making fun of me all along."
My dear Mr. Brandon, why will you persist in making me out a liar?
He was forced to apologize again and became such a model of perplexity and embarrassment that Hannah's gravity broke down at last and her merry peal of laughter mingled with the clatter of plates and the hubbub of voices.
I must take pity on you and enlighten you, she said, "but promise me it shall go no further. It's only our own little circle that knows about it and I don't want to be the laughing-stock of the Lane."
Of course I will promise, he said eagerly.
She kept his curiosity on the _qui vive_ to amuse herself a little longer, but ended by telling him all, amid frequent exclamations of surprise.
Well, I never! he said when it was over. "Fancy a religion in which only two per cent. of the people who profess it have ever heard of its laws. I suppose we're so mixed up with the English, that it never occurs to us we've got marriage laws of our own--like the Scotch. Anyhow I'm real glad and I congratulate you."
On what?
On not being really married to Sam.
Well, you're a nice friend of his, I must say. I don't congratulate myself, I can tell you.
You don't? he said in a disappointed tone.
She shook her head silently.
Why not? he inquired anxiously.
Well, to tell the truth, this forced marriage was my only chance of getting a husband who wasn't pious. Don't look so puzzled. I wasn't shocked at your wickedness--you mustn't be at mine. You know there's such a lot of religion in our house that I thought if I ever did get married I'd like a change.
Ha! ha! ha! So you're as the rest of us. Well, it's plucky of you to admit it.
Don't see it. My living doesn't depend on religion, thank Heaven. Father's a saint, I know, but he swallows everything he sees in his books just as he swallows everything mother and I put before him in his plate--and in spite of it all-- She was about to mention Levi's shortcomings but checked herself in time. She had no right to unveil anybody's soul but her own and she didn't know why she was doing that.
But you don't mean to say your father would forbid you to marry a man you cared for, just because he wasn't _froom_?
I'm sure he would.
But that would be cruel.
He wouldn't think so. He'd think he was saving my soul, and you must remember he can't imagine any one who has been taught to see its beauty not loving the yoke of the Law. He's the best father in the world--but when religion's concerned, the best-hearted of mankind are liable to become hard as stone. You don't know my father as I do. But apart from that, I wouldn't marry a man, myself, who might hurt my father's position. I should have to keep a _kosher_ house or look how people would talk!
And wouldn't you if you had your own way?
I don't know what I would do. It's so impossible, the idea of my having my own way. I think I should probably go in for a change, I'm so tired--so tired of this eternal ceremony. Always washing up plates and dishes. I dare say it's all for our good, but I _am_ so tired.
Oh, I don't see much difficulty about _Koshers_. I always eat _kosher_ meat myself when I can get it, providing it's not so beastly tough as it has a knack of being. Of course it's absurd to expect a man to go without meat when he's travelling up country, just because it hasn't been killed with a knife instead of a pole-axe. Besides, don't we know well enough that the folks who are most particular about those sort of things don't mind swindling and setting their houses on fire and all manner of abominations? I wouldn't be a Christian for the world, but I should like to see a little more common-sense introduced into our religion; it ought to be more up to date. If ever I marry, I should like my wife to be a girl who wouldn't want to keep anything but the higher parts of Judaism. Not out of laziness, mind you, but out of conviction.
David stopped suddenly, surprised at his own sentiments, which he learned for the first time. However vaguely they might have been simmering in his brain, he could not honestly accuse himself of having ever bestowed any reflection on "the higher parts of Judaism" or even on the religious convictions apart from the racial aspects of his future wife. Could it be that Hannah's earnestness was infecting him?
Oh, then you _would_ marry a Jewess! said Hannah.
Oh, of course, he said in astonishment. Then as he looked at her pretty, earnest face the amusing recollection that she _was_ married already came over him with a sort of shock, not wholly comical. There was a minute of silence, each pursuing a separate train of thought. Then David wound up, as if there had been no break, with an elliptical, "wouldn't you?"
Hannah shrugged her shoulders and elevated her eyebrows in a gesture that lacked her usual grace.
Not if I had only to please myself, she added.
Oh, come! Don't say that, he said anxiously. "I don't believe mixed marriages are a success. Really, I don't. Besides, look at the scandal!"
Again she shrugged her shoulders, defiantly this time.
I don't suppose I shall ever get married, she said. "I never could marry a man father would approve of, so that a Christian would be no worse than an educated Jew."
David did not quite grasp the sentence; he was trying to, when Sam and Leah passed them. Sam winked in a friendly if not very refined manner.
I see you two are getting on all right. he said.
Good gracious! said Hannah, starting up with a blush. "Everybody's going back. They _will_ think us greedy. What a pair of fools we are to have got into such serious conversation at a ball."
Was it serious? said David with a retrospective air. "Well, I never enjoyed a conversation so much in my life."
You mean the supper, Hannah said lightly.
Well, both. It's your fault that we don't behave more appropriately.
How do you mean?
You won't dance.
Do you want to?
Rather.
I thought you were afraid of all the swells.
Supper has given me courage.
Oh, very well if you want to, that's to say if you really can waltz.
Try me, only you must allow for my being out of practice. I didn't get many dances at the Cape, I can tell you.
The Cape! Hannah heard the words without making her usual grimace. She put her hand lightly on his shoulder, he encircled her waist with his arm and they surrendered themselves to the intoxication of the slow, voluptuous music.
The "Sons of the Covenant" sent no representatives to the club balls, wotting neither of waltzes nor of dress-coats, and preferring death to the embrace of a strange dancing woman. They were the congregation of which Mr. Belcovitch was President and their synagogue was the ground floor of No. 1 Royal Street--two large rooms knocked into one, and the rear partitioned off for the use of the bewigged, heavy-jawed women who might not sit with the men lest they should fascinate their thoughts away from things spiritual. Its furniture was bare benches, a raised platform with a reading desk in the centre and a wooden curtained ark at the end containing two parchment scrolls of the Law, each with a silver pointer and silver bells and pomegranates. The scrolls were in manuscript, for the printing-press has never yet sullied the sanctity of the synagogue editions of the Pentateuch. The room was badly ventilated and what little air there was was generally sucked up by a greedy company of wax candles, big and little, struck in brass holders. The back window gave on the yard and the contiguous cow-sheds, and "moos" mingled with the impassioned supplications of the worshippers, who came hither two and three times a day to batter the gates of heaven and to listen to sermons more exegetical than ethical. They dropped in, mostly in their work-a-day garments and grime, and rumbled and roared and chorused prayers with a zeal that shook the window-panes, and there was never lack of _minyan_--the congregational quorum of ten. In the West End, synagogues are built to eke out the income of poor _minyan-men_ or professional congregants; in the East End rooms are tricked up for prayer. This synagogue was all of luxury many of its Sons could boast. It was their _salon_ and their lecture-hall. It supplied them not only with their religion but their art and letters, their politics and their public amusements. It was their home as well as the Almighty's, and on occasion they were familiar and even a little vulgar with Him. It was a place in which they could sit in their slippers, metaphorically that is; for though they frequently did so literally, it was by way of reverence, not ease. They enjoyed themselves in this _Shool_ of theirs; they shouted and skipped and shook and sang, they wailed and moaned; they clenched their fists and thumped their breasts and they were not least happy when they were crying. There is an apocryphal anecdote of one of them being in the act of taking a pinch of snuff when the "Confession" caught him unexpectedly.
We have trespassed, he wailed mechanically, as he spasmodically put the snuff in his bosom and beat his nose with his clenched fist.
They prayed metaphysics, acrostics, angelology, Cabalah, history, exegetics, Talmudical controversies, _menus_, recipes, priestly prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful--like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen--a heterogeneous blend of historical strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor glittered and pitiful records of ancient persecution lay petrified. And the method of praying these things was equally complex and uncouth, equally the bond-slave of tradition; here a rising and there a bow, now three steps backwards and now a beating of the breast, this bit for the congregation and that for the minister, variants of a page, a word, a syllable, even a vowel, ready for every possible contingency. Their religious consciousness was largely a musical box--the thrill of the ram's horn, the cadenza of psalmic phrase, the jubilance of a festival "Amen" and the sobriety of a work-a-day "Amen," the Passover melodies and the Pentecost, the minor keys of Atonement and the hilarious rhapsodies of Rejoicing, the plain chant of the Law and the more ornate intonation of the Prophets--all this was known and loved and was far more important than the meaning of it all or its relation to their real lives; for page upon page was gabbled off at rates that could not be excelled by automata. But if they did not always know what they were saying they always meant it. If the service had been more intelligible it would have been less emotional and edifying. There was not a sentiment, however incomprehensible, for which they were not ready to die or to damn.
All Israel are brethren, and indeed there was a strange antique clannishness about these "Sons of the Covenant" which in the modern world, where the ends of the ages meet, is Socialism. They prayed for one another while alive, visited one another's bedsides when sick, buried one another when dead. No mercenary hands poured the yolks of eggs over their dead faces and arrayed their corpses in their praying-shawls. No hired masses were said for the sick or the troubled, for the psalm-singing services of the "Sons of the Covenant" were always available for petitioning the Heavens, even though their brother had been arrested for buying stolen goods, and the service might be an invitation to Providence to compound a felony. Little charities of their own they had, too--a Sabbath Meal Society, and a Marriage Portion Society to buy the sticks for poor couples--and when a pauper countryman arrived from Poland, one of them boarded him and another lodged him and a third taught him a trade. Strange exotics in a land of prose carrying with them through the paven highways of London the odor of Continental Ghettos and bearing in their eyes through all the shrewdness of their glances the eternal mysticism of the Orient, where God was born! Hawkers and peddlers, tailors and cigar-makers, cobblers and furriers, glaziers and cap-makers--this was in sum their life. To pray much and to work long, to beg a little and to cheat a little, to eat not over-much and to "drink" scarce at all, to beget annual children by chaste wives (disallowed them half the year), and to rear them not over-well, to study the Law and the Prophets and to reverence the Rabbinical tradition and the chaos of commentaries expounding it, to abase themselves before the "Life of Man" and Joseph Cam's "Prepared Table" as though the authors had presided at the foundation of the earth, to wear phylacteries and fringes, to keep the beard unshaven, and the corners of the hair uncut, to know no work on Sabbath and no rest on week-day. It was a series of recurrent landmarks, ritual and historical, of intimacy with God so continuous that they were in danger of forgetting His existence as of the air they breathed. They ate unleavened bread in Passover and blessed the moon and counted the days of the _Omer_ till Pentecost saw the synagogue dressed with flowers in celebration of an Asiatic fruit harvest by a European people divorced from agriculture; they passed to the terrors and triumphs of the New Year (with its domestic symbolism of apple and honey and its procession to the river) and the revelry of repentance on the Great White Fast, when they burned long candles and whirled fowls round their heads and attired themselves in grave-clothes and saw from their seats in synagogue the long fast-day darken slowly into dusk, while God was sealing the decrees of life and death; they passed to Tabernacles when they ran up rough booths in back yards draped with their bed-sheets and covered with greenery, and bore through the streets citrons in boxes and a waving combination of myrtle, and palm and willow branches, wherewith they made a pleasant rustling in the synagogue; and thence to the Rejoicing of the Law when they danced and drank rum in the House of the Lord and scrambled sweets for the little ones, and made a sevenfold circuit with the two scrolls, supplemented by toy flags and children's candles stuck in hollow carrots; and then on again to Dedication with its celebration of the Maccabaean deliverance and the miracle of the unwaning oil in the Temple, and to Purim with its masquerading and its execration of Haman's name by the banging of little hammers; and so back to Passover. And with these larger cycles, epicycles of minor fasts and feasts, multiplex, not to be overlooked, from the fast of the ninth of Ab--fatal day for the race--when they sat on the ground in shrouds, and wailed for the destruction of Jerusalem, to the feast of the Great Hosannah when they whipped away willow-leaves on the _Shool_ benches in symbolism of forgiven sins, sitting up the whole of the night before in a long paroxysm of prayer mitigated by coffee and cakes; from the period in which nuts were prohibited to the period in which marriages were commended.
And each day, too, had its cycles of religious duty, its comprehensive and cumbrous ritual with accretions of commentary and tradition.
And every contingency of the individual life was equally provided for, and the writings that regulated all this complex ritual are a marvellous monument of the patience, piety and juristic genius of the race--and of the persecution which threw it back upon its sole treasure, the Law.
Thus they lived and died, these Sons of the Covenant, half-automata, sternly disciplined by voluntary and involuntary privation, hemmed and mewed in by iron walls of form and poverty, joyfully ground under the perpetual rotary wheel of ritualism, good-humored withal and casuistic like all people whose religion stands much upon ceremony; inasmuch as a ritual law comes to count one equally with a moral, and a man is not half bad who does three-fourths of his duty.
And so the stuffy room with its guttering candles and its Chameleon-colored ark-curtain was the pivot of their barren lives. Joy came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny bits to the Lord, prosperity came in a high hat to chaffer for the holy privileges, and grief came with rent garments to lament the beloved dead and glorify the name of the Eternal.
The poorest life is to itself the universe and all that therein is, and these humble products of a great and terrible past, strange fruits of a motley-flowering secular tree whose roots are in Canaan and whose boughs overshadow the earth, were all the happier for not knowing that the fulness of life was not theirs.
And the years went rolling on, and the children grew up and here and there a parent.
The elders of the synagogue were met in council.
He is greater than a Prince, said the Shalotten _Shammos_.
If all the Princes of the Earth were put in one scale, said Mr. Belcovitch, "and our _Maggid_, Moses, in the other, he would outweigh them all. He is worth a hundred of the Chief Rabbi of England, who has been seen bareheaded."
From Moses to Moses there has been none like Moses, said old Mendel Hyams, interrupting the Yiddish with a Hebrew quotation.
Oh no, said the Shalotten _Shammos_, who was a great stickler for precision, being, as his nickname implied, a master of ceremonies. "I can't admit that. Look at my brother Nachmann."
There was a general laugh at the Shalotten _Shammos's_ bull; the proverb dealing only with Moseses.
He has the true gift, observed _Froom_ Karlkammer, shaking the flames of his hair pensively. "For the letters of his name have the same numerical value as those of the great Moses da Leon."
_Froom_ Karlkammer was listened to with respect, for he was an honorary member of the committee, who paid for two seats in a larger congregation and only worshipped with the Sons of the Covenant on special occasions. The Shalotten _Shammos_, however, was of contradictory temperament--a born dissentient, upheld by a steady consciousness of highly superior English, the drop of bitter in Belcovitch's presidential cup. He was a long thin man, who towered above the congregation, and was as tall as the bulk of them even when he was bowing his acknowledgments to his Maker.
How do you make that out? he asked Karlkammer. "Moses of course adds up the same as Moses--but while the other part of the _Maggid's_ name makes seventy-three, da Leon's makes ninety-one."
Ah, that's because you're ignorant of _Gematriyah_, said little Karlkammer, looking up contemptuously at the cantankerous giant. "You reckon all the letters on the same system, and you omit to give yourself the license of deleting the ciphers."
In philology it is well known that all consonants are interchangeable and vowels don't count; in _Gematriyah_ any letter may count for anything, and the total may be summed up anyhow.
Karlkammer was one of the curiosities of the Ghetto. In a land of _froom_ men he was the _froomest_. He had the very genius of fanaticism. On the Sabbath he spoke nothing but Hebrew whatever the inconvenience and however numerous the misunderstandings, and if he perchance paid a visit he would not perform the "work" of lifting the knocker. Of course he had his handkerchief girt round his waist to save him from carrying it, but this compromise being general was not characteristic of Karlkammer any more than his habit of wearing two gigantic sets of phylacteries where average piety was content with one of moderate size.
One of the walls of his room had an unpapered and unpainted scrap in mourning for the fall of Jerusalem. He walked through the streets to synagogue attired in his praying-shawl and phylacteries, and knocked three times at the door of God's house when he arrived. On the Day of Atonement he walked in his socks, though the heavens fell, wearing his grave-clothes. On this day he remained standing in synagogue from 6 A.M. to 7 P.M. with his body bent at an angle of ninety degrees; it was to give him bending space that he hired two seats. On Tabernacles, not having any ground whereon to erect a booth, by reason of living in an attic, he knocked a square hole in the ceiling, covered it with branches through which the free air of heaven played, and hung a quadrangle of sheets from roof to floor; he bore to synagogue the tallest _Lulav_ of palm-branches that could be procured and quarrelled with a rival pietist for the last place in the floral procession, as being the lowliest and meekest man in Israel--an ethical pedestal equally claimed by his rival. He insisted on bearing a corner of the biers of all the righteous dead. Almost every other day was a fast-day for Karlkammer, and he had a host of supplementary ceremonial observances which are not for the vulgar. Compared with him Moses Ansell and the ordinary "Sons of the Covenant" were mere heathens. He was a man of prodigious distorted mental activity. He had read omnivorously amid the vast stores of Hebrew literature, was a great authority on Cabalah, understood astronomy, and, still more, astrology, was strong on finance, and could argue coherently on any subject outside religion. His letters to the press on specifically Jewish subjects were the most hopeless, involved, incomprehensible and protracted puzzles ever penned, bristling with Hebrew quotations from the most varying, the most irrelevant and the most mutually incongruous sources and peppered with the dates of birth and death of every Rabbi mentioned.
No one had ever been known to follow one of these argumentations to the bitter end. They were written in good English modified by a few peculiar terms used in senses unsuspected by dictionary-makers; in a beautiful hand, with the t's uncrossed, but crowned with the side-stroke, so as to avoid the appearance of the symbol of Christianity, and with the dates expressed according to the Hebrew Calendar, for Karlkammer refused to recognize the chronology of the Christian. He made three copies of every letter, and each was exactly like the others in every word and every line. His bill for midnight oil must have been extraordinary, for he was a business man and had to earn his living by day. Kept within the limits of sanity by a religion without apocalyptic visions, he was saved from predicting the end of the world by mystic calculations, but he used them to prove everything else and fervently believed that endless meanings were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its supersubtle significance. The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is alleged to have written Shakspeare's plays was mere child's play compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer's belief the Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi, and in inspiring the Talmud and the holier treasures of Hebrew literature. Nor were these ideas of his own origination. His was an eclectic philosophy and religionism, of which all the elements were discoverable in old Hebrew books: scraps of Alexandrian philosophy inextricably blent with Aristotelian, Platonic, mystic.
He kept up a copious correspondence with scholars in other countries and was universally esteemed and pitied.
We haven't come to discuss the figures of the _Maggid's_ name, but of his salary. said Mr. Belcovitch, who prided himself on his capacity for conducting public business.
I have examined the finances, said Karlkammer, "and I don't see how we can possibly put aside more for our preacher than the pound a week."
But he is not satisfied, said Mr. Belcovitch.
I don't see why he shouldn't be, said the Shalotten _Shammos_. "A pound a week is luxury for a single man."
The Sons of the Covenant did not know that the poor consumptive _Maggid_ sent half his salary to his sisters in Poland to enable them to buy back their husbands from military service; also they had vague unexpressed ideas that he was not mortal, that Heaven would look after his larder, that if the worst came to the worst he could fall back on Cabalah and engage himself with the mysteries of food-creation.
I have a wife and family to keep on a pound a week, grumbled Greenberg the _Chazan_.
Besides being Reader, Greenberg blew the horn and killed cattle and circumcised male infants and educated children and discharged the functions of beadle and collector. He spent a great deal of his time in avoiding being drawn into the contending factions of the congregation and in steering equally between Belcovitch and the Shalotten _Shammos_. The Sons only gave him fifty a year for all his trouble, but they eked it out by allowing him to be on the Committee, where on the question of a rise in the Reader's salary he was always an ineffective minority of one. His other grievance was that for the High Festivals the Sons temporarily engaged a finer voiced Reader and advertised him at raised prices to repay themselves out of the surplus congregation. Not only had Greenberg to play second fiddle on these grand occasions, but he had to iterate "Pom" as a sort of musical accompaniment in the pauses of his rival's vocalization.
You can't compare yourself with the _Maggid_ the Shalotten _Shammos_ reminded him consolingly. "There are hundreds of you in the market. There are several _morceaux_ of the service which you do not sing half so well as your predecessor; your horn-blowing cannot compete with Freedman's of the Fashion Street _Chevrah_, nor can you read the Law as quickly and accurately as Prochintski. I have told you over and over again you confound the air of the Passover _Yigdal_ with the New Year ditto. And then your preliminary flourish to the Confession of Sin--it goes 'Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei'" (he mimicked Greenberg's melody) "whereas it should be 'Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi.'"
Oh no, interrupted Belcovitch. "All the _Chazanim_ I've ever heard do it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"
You are not entitled to speak on this subject, Belcovitch, said the Shalotten _Shammos_ warmly. "You are a Man-of-the-Earth. I have heard every great _Chazan_ in Europe."
What was good enough for my father is good enough for me, retorted Belcovitch. "The _Shool_ he took me to at home had a beautiful _Chazan_, and he always sang it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"
I don't care what you heard at home. In England every _Chazan_ sings 'Oi, Oi, Oi.'
We can't take our tune from England, said Karlkammer reprovingly. "England is a polluted country by reason of the Reformers whom we were compelled to excommunicate."
Do you mean to say that my father was an Epicurean? asked Belcovitch indignantly. "The tune was as Greenberg sings it. That there are impious Jews who pray bareheaded and sit in the synagogue side by side with the women has nothing to do with it."
The Reformers did neither of these things, but the Ghetto to a man believed they did, and it would have been countenancing their blasphemies to pay a visit to their synagogues and see. It was an extraordinary example of a myth flourishing in the teeth of the facts, and as such should be useful to historians sifting "the evidence of contemporary writers."
The dispute thickened; the synagogue hummed with "Eis" and "Ois" not in concord.
Shah! said the President at last. "Make an end, make an end!"
You see he knows I'm right, murmured the Shalotten _Shammos_ to his circle.
And if you are! burst forth the impeached Greenberg, who had by this time thought of a retort. "And if I do sing the Passover _Yigdal_ instead of the New Year, have I not reason, seeing I have _no bread in the house_? With my salary I have Passover all the year round."
The _Chazan's_ sally made a good impression on his audience if not on his salary. It was felt that he had a just grievance, and the conversation was hastily shifted to the original topic.
We mustn't forget the _Maggid_ draws crowds here every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, said Mendel Hyams. "Suppose he goes over to a _Chevrah_ that will pay him more!"
No, he won't do that, said another of the Committee. "He will remember that we brought him out of Poland."
Yes, but we shan't have room for the audiences soon, said Belcovitch. "There are so many outsiders turned away every time that I think we ought to let half the applicants enjoy the first two hours of the sermon and the other half the second two hours."
No, no, that would be cruel, said Karlkammer. "He will have to give the Sunday sermons at least in a larger synagogue. My own _Shool_, the German, will be glad to give him facilities."
But what if they want to take him altogether at a higher salary? said Mendel.
No, I'm on the Committee, I'll see to that, said Karlkammer reassuringly.
Then do you think we shall tell him we can't afford to give him more? asked Belcovitch.
There was a murmur of assent with a fainter mingling of dissent. The motion that the _Maggid's_ application be refused was put to the vote and carried by a large majority.
It was the fate of the _Maggid_ to be the one subject on which Belcovitch and the Shalotten _Shammos_ agreed. They agreed as to his transcendent merits and they agreed as to the adequacy of his salary.
But he's so weakly, protested Mendel Hyams, who was in the minority. "He coughs blood."
He ought to go to a sunny place for a week, said Belcovitch compassionately.
Yes, he must certainly have that, said Karlkammer. "Let us add as a rider that although we cannot pay him more per week, he must have a week's holiday in the country. The Shalotten _Shammos_ shall write the letter to Rothschild."
Rothschild was a magic name in the Ghetto; it stood next to the Almighty's as a redresser of grievances and a friend of the poor, and the Shalotten _Shammos_ made a large part of his income by writing letters to it. He charged twopence halfpenny per letter, for his English vocabulary was larger than any other scribe's in the Ghetto, and his words were as much longer than theirs as his body. He also filled up printed application forms for Soup or Passover cakes, and had a most artistic sense of the proportion of orphans permissible to widows and a correct instinct for the plausible duration of sicknesses.
The Committee agreed _nem. con._ to the grant of a seaside holiday, and the Shalotten _Shammos_ with a gratified feeling of importance waived his twopence halfpenny. He drew up a letter forthwith, not of course in the name of the Sons of the Covenant, but in the _Maggid's_ own.
He took the magniloquent sentences to the _Maggid_ for signature. He found the _Maggid_ walking up and down Royal Street waiting for the verdict. The _Maggid_ walked with a stoop that was almost a permanent bow, so that his long black beard reached well towards his baggy knees. His curved eagle nose was grown thinner, his long coat shinier, his look more haggard, his corkscrew earlocks were more matted, and when he spoke his voice was a tone more raucous. He wore his high hat--a tall cylinder that reminded one of a weather-beaten turret.
The Shalotten _Shammos_ explained briefly what he had done.
May thy strength increase! said the _Maggid_ in the Hebrew formula of gratitude.
Nay, thine is more important, replied the Shalotten _Shammos_ with hilarious heartiness, and he proceeded to read the letter as they walked along together, giant and doubled-up wizard.
But I haven't got a wife and six children, said the _Maggid_, for whom one or two phrases stood out intelligible. "My wife is dead and I never was blessed with a _Kaddish_."
It sounds better so, said the Shalotten _Shammos_ authoritatively. "Preachers are expected to have heavy families dependent upon them. It would sound lies if I told the truth."
This was an argument after the _Maggid's_ own heart, but it did not quite convince him.
But they will send and make inquiries, he murmured.
Then your family are in Poland; you send your money over there.
That is true, said the _Maggid_ feebly. "But still it likes me not."
You leave it to me, said the Shalotten _Shammos_ impressively. "A shamefaced man cannot learn, and a passionate man cannot teach. So said Hillel. When you are in the pulpit I listen to you; when I have my pen in hand, do you listen to me. As the proverb says, if I were a Rabbi the town would burn. But if you were a scribe the letter would burn. I don't pretend to be a _Maggid_, don't you set up to be a letter writer."
Well, but do you think it's honorable?
Hear, O Israel! cried the Shalotten _Shammos_, spreading out his palms impatiently. "Haven't I written letters for twenty years?"
The _Maggid_ was silenced. He walked on brooding. "And what is this place, Burnmud, I ask to go to?" he inquired.
Bournemouth, corrected the other. "It is a place on the South coast where all the most aristocratic consumptives go."
But it must be very dear, said the poor _Maggid_, affrighted.
Dear? Of course it's dear, said the Shalotten _Shammos_ pompously. "But shall we consider expense where your health is concerned?"
The _Maggid_ felt so grateful he was almost ashamed to ask whether he could eat _kosher_ there, but the Shalotten _Shammos_, who had the air of a tall encyclopaedia, set his soul at rest on all points.