Ghetto Comedies
by Israel Zangwill · English · Gutenberg #28982 · 598,183 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Ghetto Comedies
Author: Israel Zangwill
Release date: May 28, 2009 [eBook #28982]
Language: English
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GHETTO COMEDIES
by
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
* * * * *
New 6s. Novels.
THE EXPENSIVE MISS DU CANE. By S. MACNAUGHTAN. 'To resist the charm
of Hetty Du Cane one must be singularly hard to
please.'--_Spectator._
THE LOST WORD. By EVELYN UNDERHILL. 'She writes vigorously and well,
with a clear sense of the beauty of language and a notable power
of description.'--_Times._
THE COUNTRY HOUSE. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. 'It deserves the widest
measure of success as a careful study of modern life and an
interesting piece of fiction, presented with remarkable literary
ability.'--_Daily Telegraph._
MEMOIRS OF A PERSON OF QUALITY. By ASHTON HILLIERS. 'Such a recruit
as Mr. Hilliers is welcome to the ranks of novelists.... He has
absorbed the spirit of the times with remarkable ability. Mr.
Hilliers has a fine literary future before him, and we are glad
to give his maiden effort a cordial greeting.'--_Athenæum._
PAUL. By E.F. BENSON. 'A genuinely fine novel; a story marked by
powerful workmanship and glowing with the breath of
life.'--_Daily Telegraph._
THE SWIMMERS. By E.S. RORISON. 'Full of crisp dialogue and bright
descriptive passages.'--_Athenæum._
THE TRAIL TOGETHER. By H.H. BASHFORD. 'Very interesting, very well
constructed, and admirably written; altogether an excellent piece
of work.'--_Daily Telegraph._
FOOLS RUSH IN. By MARY GAUNT and J.R. ESSEX. 'A live story, full of
the stir and stress of existence on the fringe of civilization,
very vividly and interestingly written.'--_Sketch._
JOSEPH VANCE. By WILLIAM DE MORGAN. 'Humorous, thoughtful, pathetic,
and thoroughly entertaining.... Fresh, original, and unusually
clever.'--_Athenæum._
MOONFACE, AND OTHER STORIES. By JACK LONDON. 'Jack London at his
best.'--_Standard._
LOVE'S TRILOGY. By PETER NANSEN. 'Humour the author possesses, and
tenderness. Sensibility he has, and shrewd sense. The tale "God's
Peace" shows that he has a soul.'--_Evening Standard._
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21, BEDFORD STREET.
* * * * *
[Illustration: At last I said "Good morning."]
GHETTO COMEDIES
by
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Author of
'The Grey Wig,' 'Dreamers of the Ghetto,'
'The Master,' 'Children of the Ghetto,'
'Ghetto Tragedies,' etc.
With Illustrations by J.H. Amschewitz
[Illustration]
London
William Heinemann
1907
Copyright by William Heinemann, 1907
TO
MY OLD FRIEND
M.D. EDER
NOTE
Simultaneously with the publication of these 'Ghetto Comedies' a fresh
edition of my 'Ghetto Tragedies' is issued, with the original title
restored. In the old definition a comedy could be distinguished from a
tragedy by its happy ending. Dante's Hell and Purgatory could thus
appertain to a 'comedy.' This is a crude conception of the distinction
between Tragedy and Comedy, which I have ventured to disregard,
particularly in the last of these otherwise unassuming stories.
I.Z.
SHOTTERMILL,
_April, 1907._
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE MODEL OF SORROWS 1
ANGLICIZATION 49
THE JEWISH TRINITY 89
THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER 119
THE RED MARK 173
THE BEARER OF BURDENS 193
THE LUFTMENSCH 225
THE TUG OF LOVE 249
THE YIDDISH 'HAMLET' 259
THE CONVERTS 293
HOLY WEDLOCK 313
ELIJAH'S GOBLET 335
THE HIRELINGS 351
SAMOOBORONA 375
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
AT LAST I SAID 'GOOD MORNING' _Frontispiece_
_To face page_
'I WORK ON--ON _SHABBOS_' 142
'YOU COMPARE MY WIFE TO A KANGAROO!' 276
THE JEWS SCATTERED BEFORE HIM LIKE DOGS 408
THE MODEL OF SORROWS
THE MODEL OF SORROWS
CHAPTER I
HOW I FOUND THE MODEL
I cannot pretend that my ambition to paint the Man of Sorrows had any
religious inspiration, though I fear my dear old dad at the Parsonage
at first took it as a sign of awakening grace. And yet, as an artist,
I have always been loath to draw a line between the spiritual and the
beautiful; for I have ever held that the beautiful has in it the same
infinite element as forms the essence of religion. But I cannot
explain very intelligibly what I mean, for my brush is the only
instrument through which I can speak. And if I am here paradoxically
proposing to use my pen to explain what my brush failed to make clear,
it is because the criticism with which my picture of the Man of
Sorrows has been assailed drives me to this attempt at verbal
elucidation. My picture, let us suppose, is half-articulate; perhaps
my pen can manage to say the other half, especially as this other half
mainly consists of things told me and things seen.
And in the first place, let me explain that the conception of the
picture which now hangs in its gilded frame is far from the conception
with which I started--was, in fact, the ultimate stage of an
evolution--for I began with nothing deeper in my mind than to image a
realistic Christ, the Christ who sat in the synagogue of Jerusalem, or
walked about the shores of Galilee. As a painter in love with the
modern, it seemed to me that, despite the innumerable representations
of Him by the masters of all nations, few, if any, had sought their
inspiration in reality. Each nation had unconsciously given Him its
own national type, and though there was a subtle truth in this, for
what each nation worshipped was truly the God made over again in its
own highest image, this was not the truth after which I was seeking.
I started by rejecting the blonde, beardless type which Da Vinci and
others have imposed upon the world, for Christ, to begin with, must be
a Jew. And even when, in the course of my researches for a Jewish
model, I became aware that there were blonde types, too, these seemed
to me essentially Teutonic. A characteristic of the Oriental face, as
I figured it, was a sombre majesty, as of the rabbis of Rembrandt, the
very antithesis of the ruddy gods of Walhalla. The characteristic
Jewish face must suggest more of the Arab than of the Goth.
I do not know if the lay reader understands how momentous to the
artist is his model, how dependent he is on the accident of finding
his creation already anticipated, or at least shadowed forth, in
Nature. To me, as a realist, it was particularly necessary to find in
Nature the original, without which no artist can ever produce those
subtle _nuances_ which give the full sense of life. After which, if I
say, that my aim is not to copy, but to interpret and transfigure, I
suppose I shall again seem to be self-contradictory. But that, again,
must be put down to my fumbling pen-strokes.
Perhaps I ought to have gone to Palestine in search of the ideal
model, but then my father's failing health kept me within a brief
railway run of the Parsonage. Besides, I understood that the
dispersion of the Jews everywhere made it possible to find Jewish
types anywhere, and especially in London, to which flowed all the
streams of the Exile. But long days of hunting in the Jewish quarter
left me despairing. I could find types of all the Apostles, but never
of the Master.
Running down one week-end to Brighton to recuperate, I joined the
Church Parade on the lawns. It was a sunny morning in early November,
and I admired the three great even stretches of grass, sea, and sky,
making up a picture that was unspoiled even by the stuccoed
boarding-houses. The parasols fluttered amid the vast crowd of
promenaders like a swarm of brilliant butterflies. I noted with
amusement that the Church Parade was guarded by beadles from the
intrusion of the ill-dressed, and the spectacle of over-dressed Jews
paradoxically partaking in it reminded me of the object of my search.
In vain my eye roved among these; their figures were strangely lacking
in the dignity and beauty which I had found among the poorest.
Suddenly I came upon a sight that made my heart leap. There, squatting
oddly enough on the pavement-curb of a street opposite the lawns, sat
a frowsy, gaberdined Jew. Vividly set between the tiny green
cockle-shell hat on his head and the long uncombed black beard was the
face of my desire. The head was bowed towards the earth; it did not
even turn towards the gay crowd, as if the mere spectacle was
beadle-barred. I was about to accost this strange creature who sat
there so immovably, when a venerable Royal Academician who resides at
Hove came towards me with hearty hand outstretched, and bore me along
in the stream of his conversation and geniality. I looked back
yearningly; it was as if the Academy was dragging me away from true
Art.
'I think, if you don't mind, I'll get that old chap's address,' I
said.
He looked back and shook his head in laughing reproof.
'Another study in dirt and ugliness! Oh, you youngsters!'
My heart grew hot against his smug satisfaction with his own
conventional patterns and prettinesses.
'Behind that ugliness and dirt I see the Christ,' I retorted. 'I
certainly did not see Him in the Church Parade.'
'Have you gone on the religious lay now?' he asked, with a burst of
his bluff laughter.
'No, but I'm going,' I said, and turned back.
I stood, pretending to watch the gay parasols, but furtively studying
my Jew. Yes, in that odd figure, so strangely seated on the pavement,
I had chanced on the very features, the haunting sadness and mystery
of which I had been so long in quest. I wondered at the simplicity
with which he was able to maintain a pose so essentially undignified.
I told myself I beheld the East squatted broodingly as on a divan,
while the West paraded with parasol and Prayer-Book. I wondered that
the beadles were unobservant of him. Were they content with his
abstention from the holy ground of the Church Parade, and the less
sacred seats on the promenade without, or would they, if their eyes
drew towards him, move him on from further profaning those frigidly
respectable windows and stuccoed portals?
At last I said: 'Good-morning.' And he rose hurriedly and began to
move away uncomplainingly, as one used to being hounded from
everywhere.
'_Guten Morgen_,' I said in German, with a happy inspiration, for in
my futile search in London I had found that a corrupt German called
Yiddish usually proved a means of communication.
He paused, as if reassured. '_Gut' Morgen_,' he murmured; and then I
saw that his stature was kingly, like that of the sons of Anak, and
his manner a strange blend of majesty and humility.
'Pardon me,' I went on, in my scrupulously worst German, 'may I ask
you a question?'
He made a curious movement of acquiescence, compounded of a shrug and
a slight uplifting of his palms.
'Are you in need of work?'
'And why do you wish to know?' he replied, answering, as I had already
found was the Jewish way, one question by another.
'I thought I could find you some,' I said.
'Have you scrolls of the Law for me to write?' he replied
incredulously. 'You are not even a Jew.'
'Still, there may be something,' I replied. 'Let us walk along.'
I felt that the beadle's eye was at last drawn to us both, and I
hurried my model down a side-street. I noticed he hobbled as if
footsore. He did not understand what I wanted, but he understood a
pound a week, for he was starving, and when I said he must leave
Brighton for London, he replied, awe-struck: 'It is the finger of
God.' For in London were his wife and children.
His name was Israel Quarriar, his country Russia.
The picture was begun on Monday morning. Israel Quarriar's presence
dignified the studio. It was thrilling and stimulating to see his
noble figure and tragic face, the head drooped humbly, the beard like
a prophet's.
'It is the finger of God,' I, too, murmured, and fell to work,
exalted.
I worked, for the most part, in rapt silence--perhaps the model's
silence was contagious--but gradually through the days I grew to
communion with his shy soul, and piecemeal I learnt his sufferings. I
give his story, so far as I can, in his own words, which I often
paused to take down, when they were characteristic.
CHAPTER II
THE MODEL'S STORY
I came here because Russia had grown intolerable to me. All my life,
and during the lives of my parents, we Quarriars had been innkeepers,
and thereby earned our bread. But Russia took away our livelihood for
herself, and created a monopoly. Thus we were left destitute. So what
could I do with a large family? Of London and America I had long heard
as places where they have compassion on foreigners. They are not
countries like Russia, where Truth exists not. Secondly, my children
also worried me greatly. They are females, all the five, and a female
in Russia, however beautiful, good and clever she be, if she have no
dowry, has to accept any offer of marriage, however uncongenial the
man may be. These things conspired to drive me from Russia. So I
turned everything into money, and realized three hundred and fifty
roubles. People had told me that the whole journey to London should
cost us two hundred roubles, so I concluded I should have one hundred
and fifty roubles with which to begin life in the new country. It was
very bitter to me to leave my Fatherland, but as the moujik says:
'Necessity brings everything.' So we parted from our friends with many
tears: little had we thought we should be so broken up in our old age.
But what else could I do in such a wretched country? As the moujik
says: 'If the goat doesn't want to go to market it is compelled to
go.' So I started for London. We travelled to Isota on the Austrian
frontier. As we sat at the railway-station there, wondering how we
were going to smuggle ourselves across the frontier, in came a
benevolent-looking Jew with a long venerable beard, two very long
ear-locks, and a girdle round his waist, washed his hands
ostentatiously at the station tap, prayed aloud the _Asher Yotzer_
with great fervour, and on finishing his prayer looked everyone
expectantly in the eyes, and all responded 'Amen.' Then he drew up his
coat-sleeve with great deliberation, extended his hand, gave me an
effusive '_Shalom Aleichem_' and asked me how it went with me. Soon he
began to talk about the frontier. Said he: 'As you see me, an _Ish
kosher_ (a ritually correct man), I will do you a kindness, not for
money, but for the sake of the _Mitzvah_ (good deed).' I began to
smell a rat, and thought to myself, How comes it that you know I want
the frontier? Your kindness is suspicious, for, as the moujik says:
'The devil has guests.' But if we need the thief, we cut him down even
from the gallows.
Such a necessary rascal proved Elzas Kazelia. I asked him how much he
wanted to smuggle me across. He answered thus: 'I see that you are a
clever respectable man, so look upon my beard and ear-locks, and you
will understand that you will receive fair treatment from me. I want
to earn a _Mitzvah_ (good deed) and a little money thereby.'
Then he cautioned me not to leave the station and go out into the
street, because in the street were to be found Jews without beards,
who would inform on me and give me up to the police. 'The world does
not contain a sea of Kazelias,' said he. (Would that it did not
contain even that one!)
Then he continued: 'Shake out your money on the table, and we will see
how much you have, and I will change it for you.'
'Oh,' said I, 'I want first to find out the rate of exchange.'
When Kazelia heard this, he gave a great spring and shrieked '_Hoi,
hoi!_ On account of Jews like you, the _Messhiach_ (Messiah) can't
come, and the Redemption of Israel is delayed. If you go out into the
street, you will find a Jew without a beard, who will charge you more,
and even take all your money away. I swear to you, as I should wish to
see Messhiach Ben David, that I want to earn no money. I only desire
your good, and so to lay up a little _Mitzvah_ in heaven.'
Thereupon I changed my money with him. Afterwards I found that he had
swindled me to the extent of fifteen roubles. Elzas Kazelia is like to
the Russian forest robber, who waylays even the peasant.
We began to talk further about the frontier. He wanted eighty roubles,
and swore by his _kosher Yiddishkeit_ (ritually pure Judaism) that the
affair would cost him seventy-five.
Thereupon I became sorely troubled, because I had understood it would
only cost us twenty roubles for all of us, and so I told him. Said he:
'If you seek others with short beards, they will take twice as much
from you.' But I went out into the street to seek a second murderer.
The second promised to do it cheaper, said that Kazelia was a robber,
and promised to meet me at the railway station.
Immediately I left, Elzas Kazelia, the _kosher_ Jew, went to the
police, and informed them that I and my family were running away from
Russia, and were going to London; and we were at once arrested, and
thrown bag and baggage into a filthy cell, lighted only by an iron
grating in the door. No food or drink was allowed us, as though we
were the greatest criminals. Such is Russian humanity, to starve
innocent people. The little provender we had in a bag scarcely kept us
from fainting with hunger. On the second day Kazelia sent two Jews
with beards. Suddenly I heard the door unlock, and they appeared
saying: 'We have come to do you a favour, but not for nothing. If your
life and the lives of your family are dear to you, we advise you to
give the police seventy roubles, and we want ten roubles for our
kindness, and you must employ Kazelia to take you over the frontier
for eighty roubles, otherwise the police will not be bribed. If you
refuse, you are lost.'
Well, how could I answer? How could one give away the last kopeck and
arrive penniless in a strange land? Every rouble taken from us was
like a piece of our life. So my people and I began to weep and to beg
for pity. 'Have compassion,' we cried. Answered they: 'In a frontier
town compassion dwells not. Give money. That will bring compassion.'
And they slammed the door, and we were locked in once more. Tears and
cries helped nothing. My children wept agonizedly. Oh, truth, truth!
Russia, Russia! How scurvily you handle the guiltless! For an
enlightened land to be thus!
'Father, father,' the children said, 'give away everything so that we
die not in this cell of fear and hunger.'
But even had I wished, I could do nothing from behind barred doors.
Our shouting was useless. At last I attracted a warder who was
watching in the corridor. 'Bring me a Jew,' I cried; 'I wish to tell
him of our plight.' And he answered: 'Hold your peace if you don't
want your teeth knocked out. Recognise that you are a prisoner. You
know well what is required of you.'
Yes, I thought, my money or my life.
On the third day our sufferings became almost insupportable, and the
Russian cold seized on our bodies, and our strength began to fail. We
looked upon the cell as our tomb, and on Kazelia as the Angel of
Death. Here, it seemed, we were to die of hunger. We lost hope of
seeing the sun. For well we know Russia. Who seeks Truth finds Death
more easily. As the Russian proverb says, 'If you want to know Truth,
you will know Death.'
At length the warder seemed to take pity on our cries, and brought
again the two Jews. 'For the last time we tell you. Give us money, and
we will do you a kindness. We have been seized with compassion for
your family.'
So I said no more, but gave them all they asked, and Elzas Kazelia
came and said to me rebukingly: 'It is a characteristic of the Jew
never to part with his money unless chastised.' I said to Elzas
Kazelia: 'I thought you were an honourable, pious Jew. How could you
treat a poor family so?'
He answered me: 'An honourable, pious Jew must also make a little
money.'
Thereupon he conducted us from the prison, and sent for a conveyance.
No sooner had we seated ourselves than he demanded six roubles. Well,
what could I do? I had fallen among thieves, and must part with my
money. We drove to a small room, and remained there two hours, for
which we had to pay three roubles, as the preparations for our
crossing were apparently incomplete. When we finally got to the
frontier--in this case a shallow river--they warned us not even to
sneeze, for if the soldiers heard we should be shot without more ado.
I had to strip in order to wade through the water, and several men
carried over my family. My two bundles, with all my belongings,
consisting of clothes and household treasures, remained, however, on
the Russian side. Suddenly a wild disorder arose. 'The soldiers! The
soldiers! Hide! Hide! In the bushes! In the bushes!'
When all was still again--though no soldiers became visible--the men
went back for the baggage, but brought back only one bundle. The
other, worth over a hundred roubles, had disappeared. Wailing helped
nothing. Kazelia said: 'Hold your peace. Here, too, dangers lurk.'
I understood the game, but felt completely helpless in his hands. He
drove us to his house, and our remaining bundle was deposited there.
Later, when I walked into the town, I went to the Rabbi and
complained. Said he: 'What can I do with such murderers? You must
reconcile yourself to the loss.'
I went back to my family at Kazelia's house, and he cautioned me
against going into the street. On my way I had met a man who said he
would charge twenty-eight roubles each for our journey to London. So
Kazelia was evidently afraid I might yet fall into honester hands.
Then we began to talk with him of London, for it is better to deal
with the devil you know than the devil you don't know. Said he: 'It
will cost you thirty-three roubles each.' I said: 'I have had an offer
of twenty-eight roubles, but you I will give thirty.' '_Hoi, hoi!_'
shrieked he. 'On a Jew a lesson is lost. It is just as at the
frontier: you wouldn't give eighty roubles, and it cost you double.
You want the same again. One daren't do a Jew a favour.'
So I held my peace, and accepted his terms. But I saw I should be
twenty-five roubles short of what was required to finish the journey.
Said Kazelia: 'I can do you a favour: I can borrow twenty-five roubles
on your luggage at the railway, and when you get to London you can
repay.' And he took the bundle, and conveyed it to the railway. What
he did there I know not. He came back, and told me he had done me a
turn. (This time it seemed a good one.) He then took envelopes, and
placed in each the amount I was to pay at each stage of the journey.
So at last we took train and rode off. And at each place I paid the
dues from its particular envelope. The children were offered food by
our fellow-passengers, though they could only take it when it was
_kosher_, and this enabled us to keep our pride. There was one kind
Jewess from Lemberg with a heart of gold and delicious rings of
sausages.
When we arrived at Leipsic they told me the amount was twelve marks
short. So we missed our train, not knowing what to do, as I had now no
money whatever but what was in the envelopes. The officials ordered us
from the station. So we went out and walked about Leipsic; we
attracted the suspicion of the police, and they wanted to arrest us.
But we pleaded our innocence, and they let us go. So we retired into a
narrow dark street, and sat down by a blank wall, and told each other
not to murmur. We sat together through the whole rainy night, the rain
mingling with our tears.
When day broke I thought of a plan. I took twelve marks from the
envelope containing the ship's money, and ran back to the station, and
took tickets to Rotterdam, and so got to the end of our overland
journey. When we got to the ship, they led us all into a shed like
cattle. One of the Kazelia conspirators--for his arm reaches over
Europe--called us into his office, and said: 'How much money have
you?' I shook out the money from the envelopes on the table. Said he:
'The amount is twelve marks short.' He had had advices, he said, from
Kazelia that I would bring a certain amount, and I didn't have it.
'Here you can stay to-night. To-morrow you go back.' So he played on
my ignorance, for I was paying at every stage in excess of the legal
fares. But I knew not what powers he had. Every official was a
possible disaster. We hardly lived till the day.
Then I began to beg him to take my _Tallis_ and _Tephillin_
(praying-shawl and phylacteries) for the twelve marks. Said he: 'I
have no use for them; you _must_ go back.' With difficulty I got his
permission to go out into the town, and I took my _Tallis_ and
_Tephillin_, and went into a _Shool_ (synagogue), and I begged someone
to buy them. But a good man came up, and would not permit the sale. He
took out twelve marks and gave them to me. I begged him to give me his
address that I might be able to repay him. Said he: 'I desire neither
thanks nor money.' Thus was I able to replace the amount lacking.
We embarked without a bit of bread or a farthing in money. We arrived
in London at nine o'clock in the morning, penniless and without
luggage, whereas I had calculated to have at least one hundred and
fifty roubles and my household stuff. I had a friend's address, and we
all went to look for him, but found that he had left London for
America. We walked about all day till eight o'clock at night. The
children could scarcely drag along from hunger and weariness. At last
we sat down on the steps of a house in Wellclose Square. I looked
about, and saw a building which I took to be a _Shool_ (synagogue), as
there were Hebrew posters stuck outside. I approached it. An old Jew
with a long grey beard came to meet me, and began to speak with me. I
understood soon what sort of a person he was, and turned away. This
_Meshummad_ (converted Jew) persisted, tempting me sorely with offers
of food and drink for the family, and further help. I said: 'I want
nothing of you, nor do I desire your acquaintance.'
'I went back to my family. The children sat crying for food. They
attracted the attention of a man, Baruch Zezangski (25, Ship Alley),
and he went away, returning with bread and fish. When the children saw
this, they rejoiced exceedingly, and seized the man's hand to kiss it.
Meanwhile darkness fell, and there was nowhere to pass the night. So I
begged the man to find me a lodging for the night. He led us to a
cellar in Ship Alley. It was pitch black. They say there is a hell.
This may or may not be, but more of a hell than the night we passed in
this cellar one does not require. Every vile thing in the world seemed
to have taken up its abode therein. We sat the whole night sweeping
the vermin from us. After a year of horror--as it seemed--came the
dawn. In the morning entered the landlord, and demanded a shilling. I
had not a farthing, but I had a leather bag which I gave him for the
night's lodging. I begged him to let me a room in the house. So he let
me a small back room upstairs, the size of a table, at three and
sixpence a week. He relied on our collecting his rent from the
kind-hearted.
We entered the empty room with joy, and sat down on the floor. We
remained the whole day without bread. The children managed to get a
crust now and again from other lodgers, but all day long they cried
for food, and at night they cried because they had nothing to sleep
on. I asked our landlord if he knew of any work we could do. He said
he would see what could be done. Next day he went out, and returned
with a heap of linen to be washed. The family set to work at once, but
I am sure my wife washed the things less with water than with tears.
Oh, Kazelia! We washed the whole week, the landlord each day bringing
bread and washing. At the end of the week he said: 'You have worked
out your rent, and have nothing to pay.' I should think not indeed!
My eldest daughter was fortunate enough to get a place at a tailor's
for four shillings a week, and the others sought washing and
scrubbing. So each day we had bread, and at the end of the week rent.
Bread and water alone formed our sustenance. But we were very grateful
all the same. When the holidays came on, my daughter fell out of work.
I heard a word 'slack.' I inquired, 'What is the meaning of the word
"slack"?' Then my daughter told me that it means _schlecht_ (bad).
There is nothing to be earned. Now, what should I do? I had no means
of living. The children cried for bread and something to sleep on.
Still we lived somehow till _Rosh Hashanah_ (New Year), hoping it
would indeed be a New Year.
It was _Erev Yomtov_ (the day before the holiday), and no washing was
to be had. We struggled as before death. The landlord of the house
came in. He said to me: 'Aren't you ashamed? Can't you see your
children have scarcely strength to live? Why have you not compassion
on your little ones? Go to the Charity Board. There you will receive
help.' Believe me, I would rather have died. But the little ones were
starving, and their cries wrung me. So I went to a Charity Board. I
said, weeping: 'My children are perishing for a morsel of bread. I can
no longer look upon their sufferings.' And the Board answered: 'After
_Yomtov_ we will send you back to Russia.' 'But meanwhile,' I
answered, 'the children want food.' Whereupon one of the Board struck
a bell, and in came a stalwart Angel of Death, who seized me by the
arm so that it ached all day, and thrust me through the door. I went
out, my eyes blinded with tears, so that I could not see where I went.
It was long before I found my way back to Ship Alley. My wife and
daughters already thought I had drowned myself for trouble. Such was
our plight the Eve of the Day of Atonement, and not a morsel of bread
to 'take in' the fast with! But just at the worst a woman from next
door came in, and engaged one of my daughters to look after a little
child during the fast (while she was in the synagogue) at a wage of
tenpence, paid in advance. With joy we expended it all on bread, and
then we prayed that the Day of Atonement should endure long, so that
we could fast long, and have no need to buy food; for as the moujik
says, 'If one had no mouth, one could wear a golden coat.'
I went to the Jews' Free School, which was turned into a synagogue,
and passed the whole day in tearful supplication. When I came home at
night my wife sat and wept. I asked her why she wept. She answered:
'Why have you led me to such a land, where even prayer costs money--at
least, for women? The whole day I went from one _Shool_ to another,
but they would not let me in. At last I went to the _Shool_ of the
"Sons of the Soul," where pray the pious Jews, with beards and
ear-locks, and even there I was not allowed in. The heathen policeman
begged for me, and said to them: "Shame on you not to let the poor
woman in." The _Gabbai_ (treasurer) answered: "If one hasn't money,
one sits at home."' And my wife said to him, weeping: 'My tears be on
your head,' and went home, and remained home the whole day weeping.
With a woman _Yom Kippur_ is a wonder-working day. She thought that
her prayers might be heard, that God would consider her plight if she
wept out her heart to Him in the _Shool_. But she was frustrated, and
this was perhaps the greatest blow of all to her. Moreover, she was
oppressed by her own brethren, and this was indeed bitter. If it had
been the Gentile, she would have consoled herself with the thought,
'We are in exile.' When the fast was over, we had nothing but a little
bread left to break our fast on, or to prepare for the next day's
fast. Nevertheless we sorrowfully slept. But the wretched day came
again, and the elder children went out into the street to seek
_Parnosoh_ (employment), and found scrubbing, that brought in
nine-pence. We bought bread, and continued to live further. Likewise
we obtained three shillings worth of washing to do, and were as rich
as Rothschild. When _Succoth_ (Tabernacles) came, again no money, no
bread, and I went about the streets the whole day to seek for work.
When I was asked what handicraftsman I was, of course I had to say I
had no trade, for, foolishly enough, among the Jews in my part of
Russia a trade is held in contempt, and when they wish to hold one up
to scorn, they say to him: 'Anybody can see you are a descendant of a
handicraftsman.'
I could write Holy Scrolls, indeed, and keep an inn, but what availed
these accomplishments? As I found I could obtain no work, I went into
the _Shool_ of the 'Sons of the Soul.' I seated myself next a man, and
we began to speak. I told him of my plight. Said he: 'I will give you
advice. Call on our Rabbi. He is a very fine man.'
I did so. As I entered, he sat in company with another man, holding
his _Lulov_ and _Esrog_ (palm and citron). 'What do you want?' I
couldn't answer him, my heart was so oppressed, but suddenly my tears
gushed forth. It seemed to me help was at hand. I felt assured of
sympathy, if of nothing else. I told him we were perishing for want of
bread, and asked him to give me advice. He answered nothing. He turned
to the man, and spoke concerning the Tabernacle and the Citron. He
took no further notice of me, but left me standing.
So I understood he was no better than Elzas Kazelia. And this is a
Rabbi! As I saw I might as well have talked to the wall, I left the
room without a word from him. As the moujik would say: 'Sad and bitter
is the poor man's lot. It is better to lie in the dark tomb and not to
see the sunlit world than to be a poor man and be compelled to beg for
money.'
I came home, where my family was waiting patiently for my return with
bread. I said: 'Good _Yomtov_,' weeping, for they looked scarcely
alive, having been without a morsel of food that day.
So we tried to sleep, but hunger would not permit it, but demanded his
due. 'Hunger, you old fool, why don't you let us sleep?' But he
refused to be talked over. So we passed the night. When day came the
little children began to cry: 'Father, let us go. We will beg bread in
the streets. We die of hunger. Don't hold us back.'
When the mother heard them speak of begging in the streets, she
swooned, whereupon arose a great clamour among the children. When at
length we brought her to, she reproached us bitterly for restoring her
to life. 'I would rather have died than hear you speak of begging in
the streets--rather see my children die of hunger before my eyes.'
This speech of the mother caused them to forget their hunger, and they
sat and wept together. On hearing the weeping, a man from next door,
Gershon Katcol, came in to see what was the matter. He looked around,
and his heart went out to us. So he went away, and returned speedily
with bread and fish and tea and sugar, and went away again, returning
with five shillings. He said: 'This I lend you.' Later he came back
with a man, Nathan Beck, who inquired into our story, and took away
the three little ones to stay with him. Afterwards, when I called to
see them in his house in St. George's Road, they hid themselves from
me, being afraid I should want them to return to endure again the
pangs of hunger. It was bitter to think that a stranger should have
the care of my children, and that they should shun me as one shuns a
forest-robber.
After _Yomtov_ I went to Grunbach, the shipping agent, to see whether
my luggage had arrived, as I had understood from Kazelia that it would
get here in a month's time. I showed my pawn-ticket, and inquired
concerning it. Said he: 'Your luggage won't come to London, only to
Rotterdam. If you like, I will write a letter to inquire if it is at
Rotterdam, and how much money is due to redeem it.' I told him I had
borrowed twenty-five roubles on it. Whereupon he calculated that it
would cost me £4 6s., including freight to redeem it. But I told him
to write and ask. Some days later a letter came from Rotterdam stating
the cost at eighty-three roubles (£8 13s.), irrespective of freight
dues. When I heard this, I was astounded, and I immediately wrote to
Kazelia: 'Why do you behave like a forest-robber, giving me only
twenty-five roubles where you got eighty-three?' Answered he: 'Shame
on you to write such a letter! Haven't you been in my house, and seen
what an honourable Jew I am? Shame on you! To such men as you one
can't do a favour. Do you think there are a sea of Kazelias in the
world? You are all thick-headed. You can't read a letter. I only took
fifty-four roubles on the luggage; I had to recoup myself because I
lost money through sending you to London. I calculated my loss, and
only took what was due to me.' I showed the letter to Grunbach, and he
wrote again to Rotterdam, and they answered that they knew nothing of
a Kazelia. I must pay the £8 13s. if I wanted my bundle. Well, what
was to be done? The weather grew colder. Hunger we had become inured
to. But how could we pass the winter nights on the bare boards? I
wrote again to Kazelia, but received no answer whatever. Day and night
I went about asking advice concerning the luggage. Nobody could help
me.
And as I stood thus in the middle of the sea, word came to me of a
_Landsmann_ (countryman) I had once helped to escape from the Russian
army, in the days when I was happy and had still my inn. They said he
had a great business in jewellery on a great highroad in front of the
sea in a great town called Brighton. So I started off at once to talk
to him--two days' journey, they said--for I knew he would help; and if
not he, who? I would come to him as his Sabbath guest; he would surely
fall upon my neck. The first night I slept in a barn with another
tramp, who pointed me the way; but because I stopped to earn sixpence
by chopping wood, lo! when Sabbath came I was still twelve miles away,
and durst not profane the Sabbath by walking. So I lingered that
Friday night in a village, thanking God I had at least the money for a
bed, though it was sinful even to touch my money. And all next day, I
know not why, the street-boys called me a _Goy_ (heathen) and a
fox--'Goy-Fox, Goy-Fox!'--and they let off fireworks in my face. So I
had to wander in the woods around, keeping within the Sabbath radius,
and when the three stars appeared in the sky I started for Brighton.
But so footsore was I, I came there only at midnight, and could not
search. And I sat down on a bench; it was very cold, but I was so
tired. But the policeman came and drove me away--he was God's
messenger, for I should perchance have died--and a drunken female with
a painted face told him to let me be, and gave me a shilling. How
could I refuse? I slept again in a bed. And on the Sunday morning I
started out, and walked all down in front of the sea; but my heart
grew sick, for I saw the shops were shut. At last I saw a jewellery
shop and my _Landsmann's_ name over it. It sparkled with gold and
diamonds, and little bills were spread over it--'Great sale! Great
sale!' Then I went joyfully to the door, but lo! it was bolted. So I
knocked and knocked, and at last a woman came from above, and told me
he lived in that road in Hove, where I found indeed my redeemer, but
not my _Landsmann_. It was a great house, with steps up and steps
down. I went down to a great door, and there came out a beautiful
heathen female with a shining white cap on her head and a shining
white apron, and she drove me away.
'Goy-Fox was yesterday,' she shouted with wrath and slammed the door
on my heart; and I sat down on the pavement without, and I became a
pillar of salt, all frozen tears. But when I looked up, I saw the
Angel of the Lord.
CHAPTER III
THE PICTURE EVOLVES
Such was my model's simple narrative, the homely realism of which
appealed to me on my most imaginative side, for through all its sordid
details stood revealed to me the tragedy of the Wandering Jew. Was it
Heine or another who said 'The people of Christ is the Christ of
peoples'? At any rate, such was the idea that began to take possession
of me as I painted away at the sorrow-haunted face of my much-tried
model--to paint, not the Christ that I had started out to paint, but
the Christ incarnated in a race, suffering--and who knew that He did
not suffer over again?--in its Passion. Yes, Israel Quarriar could
still be my model, but after another conception altogether.
It was an idea that called for no change in what I had already done.
For I had worked mainly upon the head, and now that I purposed to
clothe the figure in its native gaberdine, there would be little to
re-draw. And so I fell to work with renewed intensity, feeling even
safer now that I was painting and interpreting a real thing than when
I was trying to reconstruct retrospectively the sacred figure that had
walked in Galilee.
And no sooner had I fallen to work on this new conception than I found
everywhere how old it was. It appeared even to have Scriptural
warrant, for from a brief report of a historical-theological lecture
by a Protestant German Professor I gleaned that many of the passages
in the Prophets which had been interpreted as pointing to a coming
Messiah, really applied to Israel, the people. Israel it was whom
Isaiah, in that famous fifty-third chapter, had described as 'despised
and rejected of men: a man of sorrows.' Israel it was who bore the
sins of the world. 'He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he
opened not his mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.' Yes,
Israel was the Man of Sorrows. And in this view the German Professor,
I found, was only re-echoing Rabbinic opinion. My model proved a mine
of lore upon this as upon so many other points. Even the Jewish
expectation of the Messiah, he had never shared, he said--that the
_Messhiach_ would come riding upon a white ass. Israel would be
redeemed by itself, though his neighbours would have called the
sentiment 'epicurean.'
'Whoever saves me is my _Messhiach_,' he declared suddenly, and
plucked at my hand to kiss it.
'Now, you shock _me_,' I said, pushing him away.
'No, no,' he said; 'I agree with the word of the moujik: "the good
people _are_ God."'
'Then I suppose you are what is called a Zionist,' I said.
'Yes,' he replied; 'now that you have saved me, I see that God works
only through men. As for the _Messhiach_ on the white ass, they do not
really believe it, but they won't let another believe otherwise. For
my own part, when I say the prayer, "Blessed be Thou who restorest the
dead to life," I always mean it of _you_.'
Such Oriental hyperbolic gratitude would have satisfied the greediest
benefactor, and was infinitely in excess of what he owed me. He seemed
unconscious that he was doing work, journeying punctually long miles
to my studio in any and every weather. It is true that I early helped
him to redeem his household gods, but could I do less for a man who
had still no bed to sleep in?
My recovery of the Rotterdam bundle served to unveil further
complications. The agents at the East End charged him three shillings
and sixpence per letter, and conducted the business with a fine legal
delay. But it was not till Kazelia was eulogized by one of these
gentry as a very fine man that both the model and I grew suspicious
that the long chain of roguery reached even unto London, and that the
confederates on this side were playing for time, so that the option
should expire, and the railway sell the unredeemed luggage, which they
would doubtless buy in cheap, making another profit.
Ultimately Quarriar told me his second daughter--for the eldest was
blind of one eye--was prepared to journey alone to Rotterdam, as the
safest way of redeeming the goods. Admiring her pluck, I added her
fare to the expenses.
One fine morning Israel appeared, transfigured with happiness.
'When does man rejoice most?' he cried. 'When he loses and finds
again.'
'Ah, then you have got your bedding at last,' I cried, now accustomed
to his methods of expression. 'I hope you slept well.'
'We could not sleep for blessing you,' he replied unexpectedly. 'As
the Psalmist says, "All my bones praise the Lord!"'
Not that the matter had gone smoothly even now. The Kazelia gang at
Rotterdam denied all knowledge of the luggage, sent the girl to the
railway, where the dues had now mounted to £10 6s. Again the cup was
dashed from her lips, for I had only given her £9. But she went to the
Rabbi, and offered if he supplied the balance to repledge the Sabbath
silver candlesticks that were the one family heirloom in the bundle,
and therewith repay him instantly. While she was pleading with him, in
came a noble Jew, paid the balance, lodged her and fed her, and saw
her safely on board with the long-lost treasures.
CHAPTER IV
I BECOME A SORTER
As the weeks went by, my satisfaction with the progress I was making
was largely tempered by the knowledge that after the completion of my
picture my model would be thrown again on the pavement, and several
times I fancied I detected him gazing at it sadly as if watching its
advancing stages with a sort of hopeless fear. My anxiety about him
and his family grew from day to day, but I could not see any possible
way of helping him. He was touchingly faithful, anxious to please, and
uncomplaining either of cold or hunger. Once I gave him a few
shillings to purchase a second-hand pair of top-boots, which were
necessary for the picture, and these he was able to procure in the
Ghetto Sunday market for a minute sum, and he conscientiously returned
me the balance--about two-thirds.
I happened to have sold an English landscape to Sir Asher Aaronsberg,
the famous philanthropist and picture-buyer of Middleton, then up in
town in connection with his Parliamentary duties, and knowing how
indefatigably he was in touch with the London Jewish charities, I
inquired whether some committee could not do anything to assist
Quarriar. Sir Asher was not very encouraging. The man knew no trade.
However, if he would make application on the form enclosed and answer
the questions, he would see what could be done. I saw that the details
were duly filled in--the ages and sex of his five children, etc.
But the committee came to the conclusion that the only thing they
could do was to repatriate the man. 'Return to Russia!' cried Israel
in horror.
Occasionally I inquired if any plan for the future had occurred to
him. But he never raised the subject of his difficulties of his own
accord, and his very silence, born, as it seemed to me, of the
majestic dignity of the man, was infinitely pathetic. Now and again
came a fitful gleam of light. His second daughter would be given a
week's work for a few shillings by his landlord, a working
master-tailor in a small way, from whom he now rented two tiny rooms
on the top floor. But that was only when there was an extra spasm of
activity. His half-blind daughter would do a little washing, and the
landlord would allow her the use of the backyard.
At last one day I found he had an idea, and an idea, moreover, that
was carefully worked out in all its details. The scheme was certainly
a novel and surprising one to me, but it showed how the art of forcing
a livelihood amid impossible circumstances had been cultivated among
these people, forced for centuries to exist under impossible
conditions.
Briefly his scheme was this. In the innumerable tailors' workshops of
his district great piles of cuttings of every kind and quality of
cloth accumulated, and for the purchase of these cuttings a certain
competition existed among a class of people, known as piece-sorters.
The sale of these cuttings by weight and for cash brought the
master-tailors a pleasant little revenue, which was the more prized as
it was a sort of perquisite. The masters were able to command payment
for their cuttings in advance, and the sorter would call to collect
them week by week as they accumulated, till the amount he had advanced
was exhausted. Quarriar would set up as a piece-sorter, and thus be
able to employ his daughters too. The whole family would find
occupation in sorting out their purchases, and each quality and size
would be readily saleable as raw material, to be woven again into the
cheaper woollen materials. Through the recommendation of his
countrymen, there were several tailors who had readily agreed to give
him the preference. His own landlord in particular had promised to
befriend him, and even now was allowing his cuttings to accumulate at
some inconvenience, since he might have had ready money for them.
Moreover, his friends had introduced him to a very respectable and
honest sorter, who would take him into partnership, teach him, and
allow his daughters to partake in the sorting, if he could put down
twenty pounds! His friends would jointly advance him eight on the
security of his silver candlesticks, if only he could raise the other
twelve.
This promising scheme took an incubus off my mind, and I hastened,
somewhat revengefully, to acquaint the professional philanthropist,
who had been so barren of ideas, with my intention to set up Quarriar
as a piece-sorter.
'Ah,' Sir Asher replied, unmoved. 'Then you had better employ my man
Conn; he does a good deal of this sort of work for me. He will find
Quarriar a partner and professor.'
'But Quarriar has already found a partner.' I explained the scheme.
'The partner will cheat him. Twenty pounds is ridiculous. Five pounds
is quite enough. Take my advice, and let it all go through Conn. If I
wanted my portrait painted, you wouldn't advise me to go to an
amateur. By the way, here are the five pounds, but please don't tell
Conn I gave them. I don't believe the money'll do any good, and Conn
will lose his respect for me.'
My interest in piece-sorting--an occupation I had never even heard of
before--had grown abnormally, and I had gone into the figures and
quantities--so many hundredweights, purchased at fifteen shillings,
sorted into lots, and sold at various prices--with as thorough-going
an eagerness as if my own livelihood were to depend upon it.
I confess I was now rather bewildered by so serious a difference of
estimate as to the cost of a partnership, but I was inclined to set
down Sir Asher's scepticism to that pessimism which is the penalty of
professional philanthropy.
On the other hand, I felt that whether the partnership was to cost
five pounds or twenty, Quarriar's future would be safer from Kazelias
under the auspices of Sir Asher and his Conn. So I handed the latter
the five pounds, and bade him find Quarriar a guide, philosopher, and
partner.
With the advent of Conn, all my troubles began, and the picture passed
into its third and last stage.
I soon elicited that Quarriar and his friends were rather sorry Conn
had been introduced into the matter. He was alleged to favour some
people at the expense of others, and to be not at all popular among
the people amid whom he worked. And altogether it was abundantly clear
that Quarriar would rather have gone on with the scheme in his own way
without official interference.
Later, Sir Asher wrote to me direct that the partner put forward by
the Quarriar faction was a shady customer; Conn had selected his own
man, but even so there was little hope Quarriar's future would be thus
provided for.
There seemed, moreover, a note of suspicion of Quarriar sounding
underneath, but I found comfort in the reflection that to Sir Asher my
model was nothing more than the usual applicant for assistance,
whereas to me who had lived for months in daily contact with him he
was something infinitely more human.
Spring was now nearing; I finished my picture early in March--after
four months' strenuous labour--shook hands with my model, and received
his blessing. I was somewhat put out at learning that Conn had not yet
given him the five pounds necessary to start him, as I had been hoping
he might begin his new calling immediately the sittings ended. I gave
him a small present to help tide over the time of waiting.
But that tragic face on my own canvas remained to haunt me, to ask the
question of his future, and few days elapsed ere I found myself
starting out to visit him at his home. He lived near Ratcliffe
Highway, a district which I found had none of that boisterous marine
romance with which I had associated it.
The house was a narrow building of at least the sixteenth century,
with the number marked up in chalk on the rusty little door. I
happened to have stumbled on the Jewish Passover. Quarriar was called
down, evidently astonished and unprepared for my appearance at his
humble abode, but he expressed pleasure, and led me up the narrow,
steep stairway, whose ceiling almost touched my head as I climbed up
after him. On the first floor the landlord, in festal raiment,
intercepted us, introduced himself in English (which he spoke with
pretentious inaccuracy), and, barring my further ascent, took
possession of me, and led the way to his best parlour, as if it were
entirely unbecoming for his tenant to receive a gentleman in his
attic.
He was a strapping young fellow, full of acuteness and vigour--a
marked contrast to Quarriar's drooping, dignified figure standing
silently near by, and radiating poverty and suffering all the more in
the little old panelled room, elegant with a big carved walnut
cabinet, and gay with chromos and stuffed birds. Effusively the
master-tailor painted himself as the champion of the poor fellow, and
protested against this outside partnership that was being imposed on
him by the notorious Conn. He himself, though he could scarcely afford
it, was keeping his cuttings for him, in spite of tempting offers from
other quarters, even of a shilling a sack. But of course he didn't see
why an outsider foisted upon him by a philanthropic factotum should
benefit by this goodness of his. He discoursed to me in moved terms of
the sorrows and privations of his tenants in their two tiny rooms
upstairs. And all the while Quarriar preserved his attitude of
drooping dignity, saying no syllable except under special appeal.
The landlord produced a goblet of rum and shrub for the benefit of the
high-born visitor, and we all clinked glasses, the young master-tailor
beaming at me unctuously as he set down his glass.
'I love company,' he cried, with no apparent consciousness of impudent
familiarity.
I returned, however, to my central interest in life--the
piece-sorting. It occurred to me afterwards that possibly I ought not
to have insisted on such a secular subject on a Jewish holiday, but,
after all, the landlord had broached it, and both men now entered most
cordially into the discussion. The landlord started repeating his
lament--what a pity it would be if Quarriar were really forced to
accept Conn's partner--when Quarriar timidly blurted out that he had
already signed the deed of partnership, though he had not yet received
the promised capital from Conn, nor spoken over matters with the
partner provided. The landlord seemed astonished and angry at learning
this, pricking up his ears curiously at the word 'signed,' and giving
Quarriar a look of horror.
'Signed!' he cried in Yiddish. '_What_ hast thou signed?'
At this point the landlord's wife joined us in the parlour, with a
pretty child in her arms and another shy one clinging to her skirts,
completing the picture of felicity and prosperity, and throwing into
greater shadow the attic to which I shortly afterwards climbed my way
up the steep, airless stairs. I was hardly prepared for the depressing
spectacle that awaited me at their summit. It was not so much the
shabby, fusty rooms, devoid of everything save a couple of mattresses,
a rickety wooden table, a chair or two, and a heap of Passover cakes,
as the unloveliness of the three women who stood there, awkward and
flushing before their important visitor. The wife-and-mother was
dwarfed and black-wigged, the daughters were squat, with
tallow-coloured round faces, vaguely suggestive of Caucasian peasants,
while the sightless eye of the elder lent a final touch of ugliness.
How little my academic friends know me who imagine I am allured by the
ugly! It is only that sometimes I see through it a beauty that they
are blind to. But here I confess I saw nothing but the ghastly misery
and squalor, and I was oppressed almost to sickness as much by the
scene as by the atmosphere.
'May I open a window?' I could not help inquiring.
The genial landlord, who had followed in my footsteps, rushed to
anticipate me, and when I could breathe more freely, I found something
of the tragedy that had been swallowed in the sordidness. My eye fell
again on the figure of my host standing in his drooping majesty, the
droop being now necessary to avoid striking the ceiling with his
kingly head.
Surely a pretty wife and graceful daughters would have detracted from
the splendour of the tragedy. Israel stood there, surrounded by all
that was mean, yet losing nothing of his regal dignity--indeed the Man
of Sorrows.
* * * * *
Ere I left I suddenly remembered to ask after the three younger
children. They were still with their kind benefactor, the father told
me.
'I suppose you will resume possession of them when you make your
fortune by the piece-sorting?' I said.
'God grant it,' he replied. 'My bowels yearn for that day.'
Against my intention I slipped into his hand the final seven pounds I
was prepared to pay. 'If your partnership scheme fails, try again
alone,' I said.
His blessings pursued me down the steep staircase. His womankind
remained shy and dumb.
When I got home I found a telegram from the Parsonage. My father was
dangerously ill. I left everything and hastened to help nurse him. My
picture was not sent in to any Exhibition--I could not let it go
without seeing it again, without a last touch or two. When, some
months later, I returned to town, my first thought--inspired by the
sight of my picture--was how Quarriar was faring. I left the studio
and telephoned to Sir Asher Aaronsberg at the London office of his
great Middleton business.
'That!' His contempt penetrated even through the wires. 'Smashed up
long ago. Just as I expected.'
And the sneer of the professional philanthropist vibrated
triumphantly. I was much upset, but ere I could recover my composure
Sir Asher was cut off. In the evening I received a note saying
Quarriar was a rogue, who had to flee from Russia for illicit sale of
spirits. He had only two, at most three, elderly daughters; the three
younger girls were a myth. For a moment I was staggered; then all my
faith in Israel returned. Those three children a figment of the
imagination! Impossible! Why, I remembered countless little anecdotes
about these very children, told me with the most evident fatherly
pride. He had even repeated the quaint remarks the youngest had made
on her return home from her first morning at the English school.
Impossible that these things could have been invented on the spur of
the moment. No; I could not possibly doubt the genuineness of my
model's spontaneous talk, especially as in those days he had had no
reason for expecting anything from me, and he had most certainly not
demanded anything. And then I remembered that tragic passage
describing how these three little ones, sheltered and fed by a kindly
soul, hid themselves when their father came to see them, fearing to be
reclaimed by him to hunger and cold. If Quarriar could invent such
things, he was indeed a poet, for in the whole literature of
starvation I could recall no better touch.
I went to Sir Asher. He said that Quarriar, challenged by Conn to
produce these children, had refused to do so, or to answer any further
questions. I found myself approving of his conduct. 'A man ought not
to be insulted by such absurd charges,' I said. Sir Asher merely
smiled and took up his usual unshakable position behind his
impregnable wall of official distrust and pessimism.
I wrote to Quarriar to call on me without delay. He came immediately,
his head bowed, his features care-worn and full of infinite suffering.
Yes, it was true; the piece-sorting had failed. For a few weeks all
had gone well. He had bought cuttings himself, had given the partner
thrust upon him by Conn various sums for the same purpose. They had
worked together, sorting in a cellar rented for the purpose, of which
his partner kept the key. So smoothly had things gone that he had felt
encouraged to invest even the reserve seven pounds I had given him,
but when the cellar was full of their common stock, and his own
suspicions had been lulled by the regular division of the
profits--seventeen shillings per week for each--one morning, on
arriving at the cellar to start the day's work, he found the place
locked, and when he called at the partner's house for an explanation,
the man laughed in his face. Everything in the cellar now belonged to
him, he claimed, insisting that Quarriar had eaten up the original
capital and his share of the profits besides.
'Besides, it never _was_ your money,' was the rogue's ultimate
argument. 'Why shouldn't _I_ profit, too, by the Christian's
simplicity?'
Conn blindly believed his own man, for the transactions had not been
recorded in writing, and it was only a case of Quarriar's word against
the partner's. It was the latter who in his venomous craft had told
Conn the younger children did not exist. But, thank Heaven! his quiver
was not empty of them. He had blissfully taken them home when
prosperity began, but now that he was again face to face with
starvation, they had returned to his hospitable countryman, Nathan
Beck.
'You are sure you could absolutely produce the little ones?'
He looked grieved at my distrusting him. My faith in his probity was,
he said with dignity, the one thing he valued in this world. I
dismissed him with a little to tide him over the next week, thoroughly
determined that the man's good name should be cleared. The crocodile
partner must disgorge, and the eyes of my benevolent friend and of
Conn must be finally opened to the injustice they had unwittingly
sanctioned. Again I wrote to my friend. As usual, Sir Asher replied
kindly and without a trace of impatience. Would I get some
intelligible written statement from Quarriar as to what had taken
place?
So, at my request, Quarriar sent me a statement in quaint
English--probably the landlord's--alleging specifically that the
partner had detained goods and money belonging to Quarriar to the
amount of £7 9s. 5d., and had assaulted him into the bargain. When the
partner was threatened with police-court proceedings, he had defied
Quarriar with the remark that Mr. Conn would bear out his honesty.
Quarriar could give as references, to show that _he_ was an honest man
and had made a true statement as to the number of his children, seven
Russians (named) who would attest that the partner provided by Conn
was well known as a swindler. Though he was starving, Quarriar refused
to have anything further to say to Conn. Quarriar further referred to
his landlord, who would willingly testify to his honesty. But being
afraid of Conn, and not inclined to commit himself in writing, the
landlord would give his version verbally.
Against this statement my philanthropic friend had to set another as
made by the partner. Quarriar, according to this, had received the
five pounds direct from Conn, and had handed over niggardly sums to
the partner for the purchase of goods, to wit, two separate sums of
one pound each (of which he returned to Quarriar thirty-three
shillings from sales), while Quarriar only gave him as his share of
the profits for the whole of the five weeks the sum of seventeen
shillings, instead of the minimum of ten shillings each week that had
been arranged.
The partner insisted further that he had never handled any money (of
which Quarriar had always retained full control), and that all the
goods in the cellar at the time of the quarrel were only of the value
of ten shillings, to which he was entitled, as Quarriar still owed him
thirty-three shillings. Moreover, he was willing to repeat in
Quarriar's presence the lies the latter had tried to persuade him to
tell. As to the children, he challenged Quarriar to produce them.
In vain I attempted to grapple with these conflicting documents. My
head was in a whirl. It seemed to me that no judicial bench, however
eminent, could, from the bare materials presented, probe to the bottom
of this matter. The arithmetic of both parties was hopelessly beyond
me. The names of the witnesses introduced showed that there must be
two camps, and that certainly Quarriar was solidly encamped amid his
advisers.
The whole business was taking on a most painful complexion, and I was
torn by conflicting emotions and swayed alternately by suspicion and
confidence.
How sift the false from the true amid all this tangled mass? And yet
mere curiosity would not leave me content to go to my grave not
knowing whether my model was apostle or Ananias. I, too, must then
become a rag-sorter, dabbling amid dirty fragments. Was there a black
rag, and was there a white, or were both rags parti-coloured? To take
only the one point of the children, it would seem a very simple matter
to determine whether a man has five daughters or two; and yet the more
I looked into it, the more I saw the complexity. Even if three little
girls were produced for my inspection, it was utterly impossible for
me to tell whether they really were the model's. Nor was it open to me
to repeat the device of Solomon and have them hacked in two to see
whose heart would be moved.
And then, if Israel's story was false here, what of the rest? Was
Kazelia also a myth? Did the second daughter ever go to Hamburg? Was
the landlord's detaining me in the parlour a ruse to gain time for the
attics to be emptied of any comforts? Where were the silver
candlesticks? These and other questions surged up torturingly. But I
remembered the footsore figure on the Brighton pavement; I remembered
the months he had practically lived with me, the countless
conversations, and as the Man of Sorrows rose reproachful before me
from my own canvas, with his noble bowed head, my faith in his dignity
and probity returned unbroken.
I called on Sir Asher--I had to go to the House of Commons to find
him--and his practical mind quickly suggested the best course in the
circumstances. He appointed a date for all parties--himself, myself,
Conn, the two partners, and any witnesses they might care to bring--to
appear at his office. But, above all, Quarriar must bring the three
children with him.
On getting back to my studio, I found Quarriar waiting for me. He was
come to pour out his heart to me, and to complain that all sorts of
underhand inquiries were being directed against him, so that he
scarcely dared to draw breath, so thick was the air with treachery. He
was afraid that his very friends, who were anxious not to offend Conn
and Sir Asher, might turn against him. Even his landlord had
threatened to kick him out, as he had been unable to pay his rent the
last week or two.
I told him he might expect a letter asking him to attend at Sir
Asher's office, that I should be there, and he should have an
opportunity of facing his swindling partner. He welcomed it joyfully,
and enthusiastically promised to obey the call and bring the children.
I emptied my purse into his hand--there were three or four pounds--and
he promised me that quite apart from the old tangle, he could now as
an expert set up as a piece-sorter himself. And so his kingly figure
passed out of my sight.
The next document sent me in this _cause célèbre_ was a letter from
Conn to announce that he had made all arrangements for the great
meeting.
'Sir Asher's private room in his office will be placed at the disposal
of the inquiry. The original application form filled up by Quarriar
clearly condemns him. The partner will be there, and I have arranged
for Quarriar's landlord to appear if you think it necessary. I may
add that I have very good reason to believe that Quarriar does not
mean to appear. I fancy he is trying to wriggle out of the
appointment.'
I at once wrote a short note to Quarriar reminding him of the absolute
necessity of appearing with the children, who should be even kept away
from school.
I reproduce the exact reply:
'DEAR SIR,
'Referring to your welcome letter, I gratify you very much for
the trouble you have taken for me. But I'm sorry to tell you
that I refuse to go before the committee according you
arranged to, as I received a letter without any name
threatening me that I should not dare to call for the
committee to tell the truth for I will be put into mischief
and trouble. It is stated also that the same gentleman does
not require the truth. He helps only those he likes to. So I
will not call and wish you my dear gentleman not to trouble to
come. Therefore if you wish to assist me in somehow is very
good and I will certainly gratify you and if not I will have
to do without it, and will have to trust the Almighty. So
kindly do not trouble about it as I do not wish to enter a
risk, I remain your humble and grateful servant,
'ISRAEL QUARRIAR.
'P.S.--Last Wednesday a man called on my landlord and asked
him some secrets about me, and told him at last that I shall
have to state according I will be commanded to and not as I
wish. I enclose you herewith the same letter I received, it is
written in Jewish. Please not to show it to anyone but to
tear it at once as I would not trust it to any other one. I
would certainly call at the office and follow your advice. But
my life is dearer. So you should not trouble to come. I fear
already I gratify you for kind help till now, in the future
you may do as you wish.'
CHAPTER V
LAST STAGE OF ALL
This letter seemed decisive. I did not trouble Mr. Conn to English the
Yiddish epistle. My imagination saw too clearly Quarriar himself
dictating its luridly romantic phraseology. Such counter-plots, coils,
treasons, and stratagems in so simple a matter! How Quarriar could
even think them plausible I could not at first imagine; and with my
anger was mingled a flush of resentment at his low estimate of my
intellect.
After-reflection instructed me that he wrote as a Russian to whom
apparently nothing mediæval was strange. But at the moment I had only
the sense of outrage and trickery. All these months I had been fed
upon lies. Day after day I had been swathed with them as with
feathers. I had so pledged my reputation as a reader of character that
he would appear with his three younger children, bear every test, and
be triumphantly vindicated. And in that moment of hot anger and
wounded pride I had almost slashed through my canvas and mutilated
beyond redemption that kingly head. But it looked at me sadly with
its sweet majesty, and I stayed my hand, almost persuaded to have
faith in it still. I began multiplying excuses for Quarriar, figuring
him as misled by his neighbours, more skilled than he in playing upon
philanthropic heart-strings; he had been told, doubtless, that two
daughters made no impression upon the flinty heart of bureaucratic
charity, that in order to soften it one must 'increase and multiply.'
He had got himself into a network of falsehood from which, though his
better nature recoiled, he had been unable to disentangle himself. But
then I remembered how even in Russia he had pursued an illegal
calling, how he had helped a friend to evade military service, and
again I took up my knife. But the face preserved its reproachful
dignity, seemed almost to turn the other cheek. Illegal calling! No;
it was the law that was illegal--the cruel, impossible law, that in
taking away all means of livelihood had contorted the Jew's
conscience. It was the country that was illegal--the cruel country
whose frontiers could only be crossed by bribery and deceit--the
country that had made him cunning like all weak creatures in the
struggle for survival. And so, gradually softer thoughts came to me,
and less unmingled feelings. I could not doubt the general accuracy of
his melancholy wanderings between Russia and Rotterdam, between London
and Brighton. And were he spotless as the dove, that only made surer
the blackness of Kazelia and the partner--his brethren in Israel and
in the Exile.
* * * * *
And so the new Man of Sorrows shaped himself to my vision. And, taking
my brush, I added a touch here and a touch there till there came into
that face of sorrows a look of craft and guile. And as I stood back
from my work, I was startled to see how nearly I had come to a
photographic representation of my model; for those lines of guile had
indeed been there, though I had eliminated them in my confident
misrepresentation. Now that I had exaggerated them, I had idealized,
so to speak, in the reverse direction. And the more I pondered upon
this new face, the more I saw that this return to a truer homeliness
and a more real realism did but enable me to achieve a subtler beauty.
For surely here at last was the true tragedy of the people of
Christ--to have persisted sublimely, and to be as sordidly perverted;
to be king and knave in one; to survive for two thousand years the
loss of a fatherland and the pressure of persecution, only to wear on
its soul the yellow badge which had defaced its garments.
For to suffer two thousand years for an idea is a privilege that has
been accorded only to Israel--'the soldier of God.' That were no
tragedy, but an heroic epic, even as the prophet Isaiah had
prefigured. The true tragedy, the saddest sorrow, lay in the martyrdom
of an Israel _unworthy of his sufferings_. And this was the
Israel--the high tragedian in the comedy sock--that I tried humbly to
typify in my Man of Sorrows.
ANGLICIZATION
ANGLICIZATION
'English, all English, that's my dream.'
CECIL RHODES.
I
Even in his provincial days at Sudminster Solomon Cohen had
distinguished himself by his Anglican mispronunciation of Hebrew and
his insistence on a minister who spoke English and looked like a
Christian clergyman; and he had set a precedent in the congregation by
docking the 'e' of his patronymic. There are many ways of concealing
from the Briton your shame in being related through a pedigree of
three thousand years to Aaron, the High Priest of Israel, and Cohn is
one of the simplest and most effective. Once, taken to task by a
pietist, Solomon defended himself by the quibble that Hebrew has no
vowels. But even this would not account for the whittling away of his
'Solomon.' 'S. Cohn' was the insignium over his clothing
establishment. Not that he was anxious to deny his Jewishness--was not
the shop closed on Saturdays?--he was merely anxious not to obtrude
it. 'When we are in England, we are in England,' he would say, with
his Talmudic sing-song.
S. Cohn was indeed a personage in the seaport of Sudminster, and his
name had been printed on voting papers, and, what is more, he had at
last become a Town Councillor. Really the citizens liked his stanch
adherence to his ancient faith, evidenced so tangibly by his Sabbath
shutters: even the Christian clothiers bore him goodwill, not
suspecting that S. Cohn's Saturday losses were more than
counterbalanced by the general impression that a man who sacrificed
business to religion would deal more fairly by you than his fellows.
And his person, too, had the rotundity which the ratepayer demands.
But twin with his Town Councillor's pride was his pride in being
_Gabbai_ (treasurer) of the little synagogue tucked away in a back
street: in which for four generations prayer had ebbed and flowed as
regularly as the tides of the sea, with whose careless rovers the
worshippers did such lucrative business. The synagogue, not the sea,
was the poetry of these eager traffickers: here they wore phylacteries
and waved palm-branches and did other picturesque things, which in
their utter ignorance of Catholic or other ritual they deemed
unintelligible to the heathen and a barrier from mankind. Very
imposing was Solomon Cohn in his official pew under the reading
platform, for there is nothing which so enhances a man's dignity in
the synagogue as the consideration of his Christian townsmen. That is
one of the earliest stages of Anglicization.
II
Mrs. Cohn was a pale image of Mr. Cohn, seeing things through his gold
spectacles, and walking humbly in the shadow of his greatness. She had
dutifully borne him many children, and sat on the ground for such as
died. Her figure refused the Jewess's tradition of opulency, and
remained slender as though repressed. Her work was manifold and
unceasing, for besides her domestic and shop-womanly duties she was
necessarily a philanthropist, fettered with Jewish charities as the
_Gabbai's_ wife, tangled with Christian charities as the consort of
the Town Councillor. In speech she was literally his echo, catching up
his mistakes, indeed, admonished by him of her slips in speaking the
Councillor's English. He had had the start of her by five years, for
she had been brought from Poland to marry him, through the good
offices of a friend of hers who saw in her little dowry the nucleus of
a thriving shop in a thriving port.
And from this initial inferiority she never recovered--five milestones
behind on the road of Anglicization! It was enough to keep down a more
assertive personality than poor Hannah's. The mere danger of slipping
back unconsciously to the banned Yiddish put a curb upon her tongue.
Her large, dark eyes had a dog-like look, and they were set
pathetically in a sallow face that suggested ill-health, yet immense
staying power.
That S. Cohn was a bit of a bully can scarcely be denied. It is
difficult to combine the offices of _Gabbai_ and Town Councillor
without a self-satisfaction that may easily degenerate into
dissatisfaction with others. Least endurable was S. Cohn in his
religious rigidity, and he could never understand that pietistic
exercises in which he found pleasure did not inevitably produce
ecstasy in his son and heir. And when Simon was discovered reading
'The Pirates of Pechili,' dexterously concealed in his prayer-book,
the boy received a strapping that made his mother wince. Simon's
breakfast lay only at the end of a long volume of prayers; and, having
ascertained by careful experiment the minimum of time his father would
accept for the gabbling of these empty Oriental sounds, he had fallen
back on penny numbers to while away the hungry minutes. The quartering
and burning of these tales in an avenging fireplace was not the least
of the reasons why the whipped youth wept, and it needed several
pieces of cake, maternally smuggled into his maw while the father's
back was turned, to choke his sobs.
III
With the daughters--and there were three before the son and
heir--there was less of religious friction, since women have not the
pious privileges and burdens of the sterner sex. When the eldest,
Deborah, was married, her husband received, by way of compensation,
the goodwill of the Sudminster business, while S. Cohn migrated to the
metropolis, in the ambition of making 'S. Cohn's trouserings' a
household word. He did, indeed, achieve considerable fame in the
Holloway Road.
Gradually he came to live away from his business, and in the most
fashionable street of Highbury. But he was never to recover his
exalted posts. The London parish had older inhabitants, the local
synagogue richer members. The cry for Anglicization was common
property. From pioneer, S. Cohn found himself outmoded. The minister,
indeed, was only too English--and especially his wife. One would
almost have thought from their deportment that they considered
themselves the superiors instead of the slaves of the congregation. S.
Cohn had been accustomed to a series of clergymen, who must needs be
taught painfully to parrot 'Our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, the
Prince of Wales, the Princess of Wales, and all the Royal Family'--the
indispensable atom of English in the service--so that he, the expert,
had held his breath while they groped and stumbled along the
precipitous pass. Now the whilom _Gabbai_ and Town Councillor found
himself almost patronized--as a poor provincial--by this mincing,
genteel clerical couple. He retorted by animadverting upon the
preacher's heterodoxy.
An urban unconcern met the profound views so often impressed on Simon
with a strap. 'We are not in Poland now,' said the preacher, shrugging
his shoulders.
'In Poland!' S. Cohn's blood boiled. To be twitted with Poland, after
decades of Anglicization! He, who employed a host of Anglo-Saxon
clerks, counter-jumpers, and packers! 'And where did _your_ father
come from?' he retorted hotly.
He had almost a mind to change his synagogue, but there was no other
within such easy walking distance--an important Sabbatic
consideration--and besides, the others were reported to be even worse.
Dread rumours came of a younger generation that craved almost openly
for organs in the synagogue and women's voices in the choir, nay, of
even more flagitious spirits--devotional dynamitards--whose dream was
a service all English, that could be understood instead of chanted!
Dark mutterings against the ancient Rabbis were in the very air of
these wealthier quarters of London.
'Oh, shameless ignorance of the new age,' S. Cohn was wont to
complain, 'that does not know the limits of Anglicization!'
IV
That Simon should enter his father's business was as inevitable as
that the business should prosper in spite of Simon.
His career had been settled ere his father became aware that Highbury
aspired even to law and medicine, and the idea that Simon's education
was finished was not lightly to be dislodged. Simon's education
consisted of the knowledge conveyed in seaport schools for the sons of
tradesmen, while a long course of penny dreadfuls had given him a
peculiar and extensive acquaintance with the ways of the world.
Carefully curtained away in a secret compartment, lay his elementary
Hebrew lore. It did not enter into his conception of the perfect
Englishman. Ah, how he rejoiced in this wider horizon of London, so
thickly starred with music-halls, billiard-rooms, and restaurants!
'We are emancipated now,' was his cry: 'we have too much intellect to
keep all those old laws;' and he swallowed the forbidden oyster in a
fine spiritual glow, which somehow or other would not extend to bacon.
That stuck more in his throat, and so was only taken in self-defence,
to avoid the suspicions of a convivial company.
As he sat at his father's side in the synagogue--a demure son of the
Covenant--this young Englishman lurked beneath his praying-shawl, even
as beneath his prayer-book had lurked 'The Pirates of Pechili.'
In this hidden life Mrs. S. Cohn was not an aider or abettor, except
in so far as frequent gifts from her own pocket-money might be
considered the equivalent of the surreptitious cake of childhood. She
would have shared in her husband's horror had she seen Simon
banqueting on unrighteousness, and her apoplexy would have been
original, not derivative. For her, indeed, London had proved narrowing
rather than widening. She became part of a parish instead of part of a
town, and of a Ghetto in a parish at that! The vast background of
London was practically a mirage--the London suburb was farther from
London than the provincial town. No longer did the currents of civic
life tingle through her; she sank entirely to family affairs, excluded
even from the ladies' committee. Her lord's life, too, shrank, though
his business extended--the which, uneasily suspected, did but increase
his irritability. He had now the pomp and pose of his late offices
minus any visible reason: a Sir Oracle without a shrine, an abdomen
without authority.
Even the two new sons-in-law whom his ability to clothe them had soon
procured in London, listened impatiently, once they had safely passed
under the Canopy and were ensconced in plush parlours of their own.
Home and shop became his only realm, and his autocratic tendencies
grew the stronger by compression. He read 'the largest circulation,'
and his wife became an echo of its opinions. These opinions, never
nebulous, became sharp as illuminated sky-signs when the Boer War
began.
'The impertinent rascals!' cried S. Cohn furiously. 'They have invaded
our territory.'
'Is it possible?' ejaculated Mrs. Cohn. 'This comes of our kindness to
them after Majuba!'
V
A darkness began to overhang the destinies of Britain. Three defeats
in one week!
'It is humiliating,' said S. Cohn, clenching his fist.
'It makes a miserable Christmas,' said Mrs. Cohn gloomily. Although
her spouse still set his face against the Christmas pudding which had
invaded so many Anglo-Jewish homes, the festival, with its shop-window
flamboyance, entered far more vividly into his consciousness than the
Jewish holidays, which produced no impression on the life of the
streets.
The darkness grew denser. Young men began to enlist for the front: the
City formed a new regiment of Imperial Volunteers. S. Cohn gave his
foreign houses large orders for khaki trouserings. He sent out several
parcels of clothing to the seat of war, and had the same duly
recorded in his favourite Christian newspaper, whence it was copied
into his favourite Jewish weekly, which was, if possible, still more
chauvinist, and had a full-page portrait of Sir Asher Aaronsberg, M.P.
for Middleton, who was equipping a local corps at his own expense.
Gradually S. Cohn became aware that the military fever of which he
read in both his organs was infecting his clothing emporium--that his
own counter-jumpers were in heats of adventurous resolve. The military
microbes must have lain thick in the khaki they handled. At any rate,
S. Cohn, always quick to catch the contagion of the correct thing,
announced that he would present a bonus to all who went out to fight
for their country, and that he would keep their places open for their
return. The Saturday this patriotic offer was recorded in his
newspaper--'On inquiry at S. Cohn's, the great clothing purveyor of
the Holloway Road, our representative was informed that no less than
five of the young men were taking advantage of their employer's
enthusiasm for England and the Empire'--the already puffed-up Solomon
had the honour of being called to read in the Law, and first as
befitted the sons of Aaron. It was a man restored almost to his
provincial pride who recited the ancient benediction; 'Blessed art
Thou, O Lord our God, who hast chosen us from among all peoples and
given to us His law.'
But there was a drop of vinegar in the cup.
'And why wasn't Simon in synagogue?' he inquired of his wife, as she
came down the gallery stairs to meet her lord in the lobby, where the
congregants loitered to chat.
'Do I know?' murmured Mrs. Cohn, flushing beneath her veil.
'When I left the house he said he was coming on.'
'He didn't know you were to be "called up."'
'It isn't that, Hannah,' he grumbled. 'Think of the beautiful
war-sermon he missed. In these dark days we should be thinking of our
country, not of our pleasures.' And he drew her angrily without, where
the brightly-dressed worshippers, lingeringly exchanging eulogiums on
the 'Rule Britannia' sermon, made an Oriental splotch of colour on the
wintry pavement.
VI
At lunch the reprobate appeared, looking downcast.
'Where have you been?' thundered S. Cohn, who, never growing older,
imagined Simon likewise stationary.
'I went out for a walk--it was a fine morning.'
'And where did you go?'
'Oh, don't bother!'
'But I shall bother. Where did you go?'
He grew sullen. 'It doesn't matter--they won't have me.'
'Who won't have you?'
'The War Office.'
'Thank God!' broke from Mrs. Cohn.
'Eh?' Mr. Cohn looked blankly from one to the other.
'It is nothing--he went to see the enlisting and all that. Your soup
is getting cold.'
But S. Cohn had taken off his gold spectacles and was polishing them
with his serviette--always a sign of a stormy meal.
'It seems to me something has been going on behind my back,' he said,
looking from mother to son.
'Well, I didn't want to annoy you with Simon's madcap ideas,' Hannah
murmured. 'But it's all over now, thank God!'
'Oh, he'd better know,' said Simon sulkily, 'especially as I am not
going to be choked off. It's all stuff what the doctor says. I'm as
strong as a horse. And, what's more, I'm one of the few applicants who
can ride one.'
'Hannah, will you explain to me what this _Meshuggas_ (madness) is?'
cried S. Cohn, lapsing into a non-Anglicism.
'I've got to go to the front, just like other young men!'
'What!' shrieked S. Cohn. 'Enlist! You, that I brought up as a
gentleman!'
'It's gentlemen that's going--the City Imperial Volunteers!'
'The volunteers! But that's my own clerks.'
'No; there are gentlemen among them. Read your paper.'
'But not rich Jews.'
'Oh, yes. I saw several chaps from Bayswater.'
'We Jews of this favoured country,' put in Hannah eagerly, 'grateful
to the noble people who have given us every right, every liberty,
must----'
S. Cohn was taken aback by this half-unconscious quotation from the
war-sermon of the morning. 'Yes, we must subscribe and all that,' he
interrupted.
'We must fight,' said Simon.
'You fight!' His father laughed half-hysterically. 'Why, you'd shoot
yourself with your own gun!' He had not been so upset since the day
the minister had disregarded his erudition.
'Oh, would I, though?' And Simon pursed his lips and nodded meaningly.
'As sure as to-day is the Holy Sabbath. And you'd be stuck on your own
bayonet, like an obstinate pig.'
Simon got up and left the table and the room.
Hannah kept back her tears before the servant. 'There!' she said. 'And
now he's turned sulky and won't eat.'
'Didn't I say an obstinate pig? He's always been like that from a
baby. But his stomach always surrenders.' He resumed his meal with a
wronged air, keeping his spectacles on the table, for frequent nervous
polishing.
Of a sudden the door reopened and a soldier presented himself--gun on
shoulder. For a moment S. Cohn, devoid of his glasses, stared without
recognition. Wild hereditary tremors ran through him, born of the
Russian persecution, and he had a vague nightmare sense of the
_Chappers_, the Jewish man-gatherers who collected the tribute of
young Jews for the Little Father. But as Simon began to loom through
the red fog, 'A gun on the Sabbath!' he cried. It was as if the bullet
had gone through all his conceptions of life and of Simon.
Hannah snatched at the side-issue. 'I read in Josephus--Simon's prize
for Hebrew, you know--that the Jews fought against the Romans on
Sabbath.'
'Yes; but they fought for themselves--for our Holy Temple.'
'But it's for ourselves now,' said Simon. 'Didn't you always say we
are English?'
S. Cohn opened his mouth in angry retort. Then he discovered he had no
retort, only anger. And this made him angrier, and his mouth remained
open, quite terrifyingly for poor Mrs. Cohn.
'What is the use of arguing with him?' she said imploringly. 'The War
Office has been sensible enough to refuse him.'
'We shall see,' said Simon. 'I am going to peg away at 'em again, and
if I don't get into the Mounted Infantry, I'm a Dutchman--and of the
Boer variety.'
He seemed any kind of man save a Jew to the puzzled father. 'Hannah,
you must have known of this--these clothes,' S. Cohn spluttered.
'They don't cost anything,' she murmured. 'The child amuses himself.
He will never really be called out.'
'If he is, I'll stop his supplies.'
'Oh,' said Simon airily, 'the Government will attend to that.'
'Indeed!' And S. Cohn's face grew black. 'But remember--you may go,
but you shall never come back.'
'Oh, Solomon! How can you utter such an awful omen?'
Simon laughed. 'Don't bother, mother. He's bound to take me back.
Isn't it in the papers that he promised?'
S. Cohn went from black to green.
VII
Simon got his way. The authorities reconsidered their decision. But
the father would not reconsider his. Ignorant of his boy's graceless
existence, he fumed at the first fine thing in the boy's life. 'Tis a
wise father that knows his own child.
Mere emulation of his Christian comrades, and the fun of the thing,
had long ago induced the lad to add volunteering to his other
dissipations. But, once in it, the love of arms seized him, and when
the call for serious fighters came, some new passion that surprised
even himself leapt to his breast--the first call upon an idealism,
choked, rather than fed, by a misunderstood Judaism. Anglicization had
done its work; from his schooldays he had felt himself a descendant,
not of Judas Maccabæus, but of Nelson and Wellington; and now that his
brethren were being mowed down by a kopje-guarded foe, his whole soul
rose in venomous sympathy. And, mixed with this genuine instinct of
devotion to the great cause of country, were stirrings of anticipated
adventure, gorgeous visions of charges, forlorn hopes, picked-up
shells, redoubts stormed; heritages of 'The Pirates of Pechili,' and
all the military romances that his prayer-book had masked.
He looked every inch an Anglo-Saxon, in his khaki uniform and his
great slouch hat, with his bayonet and his bandolier.
The night before he sailed for South Africa there was a service in St.
Paul's Cathedral, for which each volunteer had two tickets. Simon sent
his to his father. 'The Lord Mayor will attend in state. I dare say
you'll like to see the show,' he wrote flippantly.
'He'll become a Christian next,' said S. Cohn, tearing the cards in
twain.
Later, Mrs. Cohn pieced them together. It was the last chance of
seeing her boy.
VIII
Unfortunately the Cathedral service fell on a Friday night, when S.
Cohn, the Emporium closed, was wont to absorb the Sabbath peace. He
would sit, after high tea, of which cold fried fish was the prime
ingredient, dozing over the Jewish weekly. He still approved
platonically of its bellicose sentiments. This January night, the
Sabbath arriving early in the afternoon, he was snoring before seven,
and Mrs. Cohn slipped out, risking his wrath. Her religion forced her
to make the long journey on foot; but, hurrying, she arrived at St.
Paul's before the doors were opened. And throughout the long walk was
a morbid sense of one wasted ticket. She almost stopped at a friend's
house to offer the exciting spectacle, but dread of a religious rebuff
carried her past. With Christians she was not intimate enough to
invite companionship. Besides, would not everybody ask why she was
going without her husband?
She inquired for the door mentioned on her ticket, and soon found
herself one of a crowd of parents on the steps. A very genteel crowd,
she noted with pleasure. Her boy would be in good company. The scraps
of conversation she caught dealt with a world of alien things--how
little she was Anglicized, she thought, after all those years! And
when she was borne forward into the Cathedral, her heart beat with a
sense of dim, remote glories. To have lived so long in London and
never to have entered here! She was awed and soothed by the solemn
vistas, the perspectives of pillars and arches, the great nave, the
white robes of the choir vaguely stirring a sense of angels, the
overarching dome, defined by a fiery rim, but otherwise suggesting
dim, skyey space.
Suddenly she realized that she was sitting among the men. But it did
not seem to matter. The building kept one's thoughts religious. Around
the waiting congregation, the human sea outside the Cathedral
rumoured, and whenever the door was opened to admit some dignitary the
roar of cheering was heard like a salvo saluting his entry. The Lord
Mayor and the Aldermen passed along the aisle, preceded by
mace-bearers; and mingled with this dazzle of gilded grandeur and
robes, was a regretful memory of the days when, as a Town Councillor's
consort, she had at least touched the hem of this unknown historic
English life. The skirl of bagpipes shrilled from without--that
exotic, half-barbarous sound now coming intimately into her life. And
then, a little later, the wild cheers swept into the Cathedral like a
furious wind, and the thrill of the marching soldiers passed into the
air, and the congregation jumped up on the chairs and craned towards
the right aisle to stare at the khaki couples. How she looked for
Simon!
The volunteers filed on, filed on--beardless youths mostly, a few with
a touch of thought in the face, many with the honest nullity of the
clerk and the shopman, some with the prizefighter's jaw, but every
face set and serious. Ah! at last, there was her Simon--manlier,
handsomer than them all! But he did not see her: he marched on
stiffly; he was already sucked up into this strange life. Her heart
grew heavy. But it lightened again when the organ pealed out. The
newspapers the next day found fault with the plain music, with the
responses all in monotone, but to her it was divine. Only the words of
the opening hymn, which she read in the 'Form of Prayer,' discomforted
her:
'Fight the good fight with all thy might,
Christ is thy Strength and Christ thy Right'
But the bulk of the liturgy surprised her, so strangely like was it to
the Jewish. The ninety-first Psalm! Did they, then, pray the Jewish
prayers in Christian churches? 'For He shall give His angels charge
over thee: to keep thee in all thy ways.' Ah! how she prayed that for
Simon!
As the ecclesiastical voice droned on, unintelligibly, inaudibly, in
echoing, vaulted space, she studied the hymns and verses, with their
insistent Old Testament savour, culminating in the farewell blessing:
'The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon
you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of His
countenance upon you and give you peace.'
How often she had heard it in Hebrew from the priests as they blessed
the other tribes! Her husband himself had chanted it, with uplifted
palms and curiously grouped fingers. But never before had she felt its
beauty: she had never even understood its words till she read the
English of them in the gilt-edged Prayer-Book that marked rising
wealth. Surely there had been some monstrous mistake in conceiving the
two creeds as at daggers drawn, and though she only pretended to kneel
with the others, she felt her knees sinking in surrender to the larger
life around her.
As the volunteers filed out and the cheers came in, she wormed her way
nearer to the aisle, scrambling even over backs of chairs in the
general mellay. This time Simon saw her. He stretched out his martial
arm and blew her a kiss. Oh, delicious tears, full of heartbreak and
exaltation! This was their farewell.
She passed out into the roaring crowd, with a fantastic dream-sense of
a night-sky and a great stone building, dark with age and solemnity,
and unreal figures perched on railings and points of vantage, and
hurrahing hordes that fused themselves with the procession and became
part of its marching. She yearned forwards to vague glories, aware of
a poor past. She ran with the crowd. How they cheered her boy! _Her_
boy! She saw him carried off on the shoulders of Christian citizens.
Yes; he was a hero. She was the mother of a hero.
IX
The first news she got from him was posted at St. Vincent. He wrote to
her alone, with a jocose hope that his father would be satisfied with
his sufferings on the voyage. Not only had the sea been rough, but he
had suffered diabolically from the inoculation against enteric fever,
which, even after he had got his sea-legs, kept him to his berth and
gave him a 'Day of Atonement' thirst.
'Ah!' growled S. Cohn; 'he sees what a fool he's been, and he'll take
the next boat back.'
'But that would be desertion.'
'Well, he didn't mind deserting the business.'
Mr. Cohn's bewilderment increased with every letter. The boy was
sleeping in sodden trenches, sometimes without blankets; and instead of
grumbling at that, his one grievance was that the regiment was not
getting to the front. Heat and frost, hurricane and dust-storm--nothing
came amiss. And he described himself as stronger than ever, and poured
scorn on the medical wiseacre who had tried to refuse him.
'All the same,' sighed Hannah, 'I do hope they will just be used to
guard the lines of communication.' She was full of war-knowledge
acquired with painful eagerness, prattled of Basuto ponies and Mauser
bullets, pontoons and pom-poms, knew the exact position of the armies,
and marked her war-map with coloured pins.
Simon, too, had developed quite a literary talent under the pressure
of so much vivid new life, and from his cheery letters she learned
much that was not in the papers, especially in those tense days when
the C.I.V.'S did at last get to the front--and remained there: tales
of horses mercifully shot, and sheep mercilessly poisoned, and oxen
dropping dead as they dragged the convoys; tales of muddle and
accident, tales of British soldiers slain by their own protective
cannon as they lay behind ant-heaps facing the enemy, and British
officers culled under the very eyes of the polo-match; tales of
hospital and camp, of shirts turned sable and putties worn to rags,
and all the hidden miseries of uncleanliness and insanitation that
underlie the glories of war. There were tales, too, of quarter-rations;
but these she did not read to her husband, lest the mention of
'bully-beef' should remind him of how his son must be eating forbidden
food. Once, even, two fat pigs were captured at a hungry moment for the
battalion. But there came a day when S. Cohn seized those letters and
read them first. He began to speak of his boy at the war--nay, to read
the letters to enthralled groups in the synagogue lobby--groups that
swallowed without reproach the _tripha_ meat cooked in Simon's
mess-tin.
It was like being _Gabbai_ over again.
Moreover, Simon's view of the Boer was so strictly orthodox as to give
almost religious satisfaction to the proud parent. 'A canting
hypocrite, a psalm-singer and devil-dodger, he has no civilization
worth the name, and his customs are filthy. Since the great trek he
has acquired, from long intercourse with his Kaffir slaves, many of
the native's savage traits. In short, a born liar, credulous and
barbarous, crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn.'
'Crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn,' repeated S. Cohn,
pausing impressively. 'Haven't I always said that? The boy only bears
out what I knew without going there. But hear further! "Is it to be
wondered at that the Boer farmer, hidden in the vast undulations of
the endless veldt, with his wife, his children and his slaves, should
lose all sense of proportion, ignorant of the outside world, his sole
knowledge filtering through Jo-burgh?"'
As S. Cohn made another dramatic pause, it was suddenly borne in on
his wife with a stab of insight that he was reading a description of
himself--nay, of herself, of her whole race, hidden in the great
world, awaiting some vague future of glory that never came. The
important voice of her husband broke again upon her reflections:
'"He has held many nights of supplication to his fetish, and is still
unconvinced that his God of Battles is asleep."' The reader chuckled,
and a broad smile overspread the synagogue lobby. '"They are
brave--oh, yes, but it is not what we mean by it--they are good
fighters, because they have Dutch blood at the back of them, and a
profound contempt for us. Their whole life has been spent on the open
veldt (we are always fighting them on somebody's farm, who knows every
inch of the ground), and they never risk anything except in the trap
sort of manoeuvres. The brave rush of our Tommies is unknown to them,
and their slim nature would only see the idiocy of walking into a
death-trap, cool as in a play. Were there ever two races less alike?"'
wound up the youthful philosopher in his tent. '"I really do not see
how they are to live together after the war."'
'That's easy enough,' S. Cohn had already commented to his wife as
oracularly as if she did not read the same morning paper.
'Intermarriage! In a generation or two there will be one fine
Anglo-African race. That's the solution--mark my words. And you can
tell the boy as much--only don't say I told you to write to him.'
'Father says I'm to tell you intermarriage is the solution,' Mrs. Cohn
wrote obediently. 'He really is getting much softer towards you.'
'Tell father that's nonsense,' Simon wrote back. 'The worst
individuals we have to deal with come from a Boer mother and an
English father, deposited here by the first Transvaal war.'
S. Cohn snorted angrily at the message. 'That was because there were
two Governments--he forgets there will be only one United Empire now.'
He was not appeased till Private Cohn was promoted, and sent home a
thrilling adventure, which the proud reader was persuaded by the lobby
to forward to the communal organ. The organ asked for a photograph to
boot. Then S. Cohn felt not only _Gabbai_, but town councillor again.
This wonderful letter, of which S. Cohn distributed printed copies to
the staff of the Emporium with a bean-feast air, ran:
'We go out every day--I am speaking of my own squadron--each
officer taking his turn with twenty to fifty men, and sweep
round the farms a few miles out; and we seldom come back
without seeing Boers hanging round on the chance of a snipe at
our flanks, or waiting to put up a trap if we go too far. The
local commando fell on our cattle-guard the other day--a
hundred and fifty to our twenty-five--and we suffered; it was
a horrible bit of country. There was a young chap,
Winstay--rather a pal of mine--he had a narrow squeak, knocked
over by a shot in his breast. I managed to get him safe back
to camp--Heaven knows how!--and they made me a lance-corporal,
and the beggar says I saved his life; but it was really
through carrying a fat letter from his sister--not even his
sweetheart. We chaff him at missing such a romantic chance.
He got off with a flesh wound, but there is a great blot of
red ink on the letter. You may imagine we were not anxious to
let our comrades go unavenged. My superiors being sick or
otherwise occupied, I was allowed to make a night-march with
thirty-five men on a farm nine miles away--just to get square.
It was a nasty piece of work, as we were within a few miles of
the Boer laager, three hundred strong. There was moonlight,
too--it was like a dream, that strange, silent ride, with only
the stumble of a horse breaking the regular thud of the hoofs.
We surrounded the farm in absolute silence, dismounting some
thousand yards away, and fixing bayonets. I told the men I
wanted no shots--that would have brought down the
commando--but cold steel and silence. We crept up and swept
the farm--it was weird, but, alas! they were out on the loot.
The men were furious, but we live in hopes.'
The end was a trifle disappointing, but S. Cohn, too, lived in
hopes--of some monstrous and memorable butchery. Even his wife had got
used to the firing-line, now that neither shot nor shell could harm
her boy. 'For He shall give His angels charge over thee.' She had come
to think her secret daily repetition of the ninety-first Psalm
talismanic.
When Simon sent home the box which had held the chocolates presented
by the Queen, a Boer bullet, and other curios, S. Cohn displayed them
in his window, and the crowd and the business they brought him put him
more and more in sympathy with Simon and the Empire. In conversation
he deprecated the non-militarism of the Jew: 'If I were only a
younger man myself, sir....'
The night Mafeking was relieved, the Emporium was decorated with
bunting from roof to basement, and a great illuminated window revealed
nothing but stacks of khaki trouserings.
So that, although the good man still sulked over Simon to his wife,
she was not deceived; and, the time drawing nigh for Simon's return,
she began to look happily forward to a truly reunited family.
In her wildest anxiety it never occurred to her that it was her
husband who would die. Yet this is what the irony of fate brought to
pass. In the unending campaign which death wages with life, S. Cohn
was slain, and Simon returned unscratched from the war to recite the
_Kaddish_ in his memory.
X
Simon came back bronzed and a man. The shock of finding his father
buried had supplied the last transforming touch; and, somewhat to his
mother's surprise, he settled down contentedly to the business he had
inherited. And now that he had practically unlimited money to spend,
he did not seem to be spending it, but to be keeping better hours than
when dodging his father's eye. His only absences from home he
accounted for as visits to Winstay, his pal of the campaign, with whom
he had got chummier than ever since the affair of the cattle-guard.
Winstay, he said, was of good English family, with an old house in
Harrow--fortunately on the London and North Western Railway, so that
he could easily get a breath of country air on Saturday and Sunday
afternoons. He seemed to have forgotten (although the Emporium was
still closed on Saturdays) that riding was forbidden, and his mother
did not remind him of it. The life that had been risked for the larger
cause, she vaguely felt as enfranchised from the limitations of the
smaller.
Nearly two months after Simon's return, a special military service was
held at the Great Synagogue on the feast of _Chanukah_--the
commemoration of the heroic days of Judas Maccabæus--and the Jewish
C.I.V.'s were among the soldiers invited. Mrs. Cohn, too, got a ticket
for the imposing ceremony which was fixed for a Sunday afternoon.
As they sat at the midday meal on the exciting day, Mrs. Cohn said
suddenly: 'Guess who paid me a visit yesterday.'
'Goodness knows,' said Simon.
'Mr. Sugarman.' And she smiled nervously.
'Sugarman?' repeated Simon blankly.
'The--the--er--the matrimonial agent.'
'What impudence! Before your year of mourning is up!'
Mrs. Cohn's sallow face became one flame. 'Not me! You!' she blurted.
'Me! Well, of all the cheek!' And Simon's flush matched his mother's.
'Oh, it's not so unreasonable,' she murmured deprecatingly. 'I suppose
he thought you would be looking for a wife before long; and
naturally,' she added, her voice growing bolder, 'I should like to see
you settled before I follow your father. After all, you are no
ordinary match. Sugarman says there isn't a girl in Bayswater, even,
who would refuse you.'
'The very reason for refusing them,' cried Simon hotly. 'What a
ghastly idea, that your wife would just as soon have married any other
fellow with the same income!'
Mrs. Cohn cowered under his scorn, yet felt vaguely exalted by it, as
by the organ in St. Paul's, and strange tears of shame came to
complicate her emotions further. She remembered how she had been
exported from Poland to marry the unseen S. Cohn. Ah! how this new
young generation was snapping asunder the ancient coils! how the new
and diviner sap ran in its veins!
'I shall only marry a girl I love, mother. And it's not likely to be
one of these Jewish girls, I tell you frankly.'
She trembled. 'One of which Jewish girls?' she faltered.
'Oh, any sort. They don't appeal to me.'
Her face grew sallower. 'I am glad your father isn't alive to hear
that,' she breathed.
'But father said intermarriage is the solution,' retorted Simon.
Mrs. Cohn was struck dumb. 'He was thinking how to make the Boers
English,' she said at last.
'And didn't he say the Jews must be English, too?'
'Aren't there plenty of Jewish girls who are English?' she murmured
miserably.
'You mean, who don't care a pin about the old customs? Then where's
the difference?' retorted Simon.
The meal finished in uncomfortable silence, and Simon went off to don
his khaki regimentals and join in the synagogue parade.
Mrs. Cohn's heart was heavy as she dressed for the same spectacle. Her
brain was busy piecing it all together. Yes, she understood it all
now--those sedulous Saturday and Sunday afternoons at Harrow. She
lived at Harrow, then, this Christian, this grateful sister of the
rescued Winstay: it was she who had steadied his life; hers were those
'fat letters,' faintly aromatic. It must be very wonderful, this
strange passion, luring her son from his people with its forbidden
glamour. How Highbury would be scandalized, robbed of so eligible a
bridegroom! The sons-in-law she had enriched would reproach her for
the shame imported into the family--they who had cleaved to the Faith!
And--more formidable than all the rest--she heard the tongue of her
cast-off seaport, to whose reverence or disesteem she still
instinctively referred all her triumphs and failures.
Yet, on the other hand, surged her hero-son's scorn at the union by
contract consecrated by the generations! But surely a compromise could
be found. He should have love--this strange English thing--but could
he not find a Jewess? Ah, happy inspiration! he should marry a quite
poor Jewess--he had money enough, thank Heaven! That would show him he
was not making a match, that he was truly in love.
But this strange girl at Harrow--he would never be happy with her! No,
no; there were limits to Anglicization.
XI
It was not till she was seated in the ancient synagogue, relieved from
the squeeze of entry in the wake of soldiers and the exhilaration of
hearing 'See the Conquering Hero comes' pealing, she knew not whence,
that she woke to the full strangeness of it all, and to the
consciousness that she was actually sitting among the men--just as in
St. Paul's. And what men! Everywhere the scarlet and grey of uniforms,
the glister of gold lace--the familiar decorous lines of devout
top-hats broken by glittering helmets, bear-skins, white nodding
plumes, busbies, red caps a-cock, glengarries, all the colour of the
British army, mixed with the feathered jauntiness of the Colonies and
the khaki sombreros of the C.I.V.'s! Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards,
Dragoon Guards, Lancers, Hussars, Artillery, Engineers, King's Royal
Rifles, all the corps that had for the first time come clearly into
her consciousness in her tardy absorption into English realities, Jews
seemed to be among them all. And without conscription--oh, what would
poor Solomon have thought of that?
The Great Synagogue itself struck a note of modern English gaiety, as
of an hotel dining-room, freshly gilded, divested of its historic
mellowness, the electric light replacing the ancient candles and
flooding the winter afternoon with white resplendence. The
pulpit--yes, the pulpit--was swathed in the Union Jack; and looking
towards the box of the _Parnass_ and _Gabbai_, she saw it was occupied
by officers with gold sashes. Somebody whispered that he with the
medalled breast was a Christian Knight and Commander of the Bath--'a
great honour for the synagogue!' What! were Christians coming to
Jewish services, even as she had gone to Christian? Why, here was
actually a white cross on an officer's sleeve.
And before these alien eyes, the cantor, intoning his Hebrew chant on
the steps of the Ark, lit the great many-branched _Chanukah_
candlestick. Truly, the world was changing under her eyes.
And when the Chief Rabbi went toward the Ark in his turn, she saw that
he wore a strange scarlet and white gown (military, too, she imagined
in her ignorance), and--oh, even rarer sight!--he was followed by a
helmeted soldier, who drew the curtain revealing the ornate Scrolls of
the Law.
And amid it all a sound broke forth that sent a sweetness through her
blood. An organ! An organ in the Synagogue! Ah! here indeed was
Anglicization.
It was thin and reedy even to _her_ ears, compared with that divine
resonance in St. Paul's: a tinkling apology, timidly disconnected from
the congregational singing, and hovering meekly on the borders of the
service--she read afterwards that it was only a harmonium--yet it
brought a strange exaltation, and there was an uplifting even to tears
in the glittering uniforms and nodding plumes. Simon's eyes met his
mother's, and a flash of the old childish love passed between them.
There was a sermon--the text taken with dual appropriateness from the
Book of Maccabees. Fully one in ten of the Jewish volunteers, said the
preacher, had gone forth to drive out the bold invader of the Queen's
dominions. Their beloved country had no more devoted citizens than
the children of Israel who had settled under her flag. They had been
gratified, but not surprised, to see in the Jewish press the names of
more than seven hundred Jews serving Queen and country. Many more had
gone unrecorded, so that they had proportionally contributed more
soldiers--from Colonel to bugler-boy--than their mere numbers would
warrant. So at one in spirit and ideals were the Englishman and the
Jew whose Scriptures he had imbibed, that it was no accident that the
Anglophobes of Europe were also Anti-Semites.
And then the congregation rose, while the preacher behind the folds of
the Union Jack read out the names of the Jews who had died for England
in the far-off veldt. Every head was bent as the names rose on the
hushed air of the synagogue. It went on and on, this list, reeking
with each bloody historic field, recalling every regiment, British or
colonial; on and on in the reverent silence, till a black pall seemed
to descend, inch by inch, overspreading the synagogue. She had never
dreamed so many of her brethren had died out there. Ah! surely they
were knit now, these races: their friendship sealed in blood!
As the soldiers filed out of synagogue, she squeezed towards Simon and
seized his hand for an instant, whispering passionately: 'My lamb,
marry her--we are all English alike.'
Nor did she ever know that she had said these words in Yiddish!
XII
Now came an enchanting season of confidences; the mother, caught up in
the glow of this strange love, learning to see the girl through the
boy's eyes, though the only aid to his eloquence was the photograph of
a plump little blonde with bewitching dimples. The time was not ripe
yet for bringing Lucy and her together, he explained. In fact, he
hadn't actually proposed. His mother understood he was waiting for the
year of mourning to be up.
'But how will you be married?' she once asked.
'Oh, there's the registrar,' he said carelessly.
'But can't you make her a proselyte?' she ventured timidly.
He coloured. 'It would be absurd to suddenly start talking religion to
her.'
'But she knows you're a Jew.'
'Oh, I dare say. I never hid it from her brother, so why shouldn't she
know? But her father's a bit of a crank, so I rather avoid the
subject.'
'A crank? About Jews?'
'Well, old Winstay has got it into his noddle that the Jews are
responsible for the war--and that they leave the fighting to the
English. It's rather sickening: even in South Africa we are not
treated as we should be, considering----'
Her dark eye lost its pathetic humility. 'But how can he say that,
when you yourself--when you saved his----'
'Well, I suppose just because he knows I _was_ fighting, he doesn't
think of me as a Jew. It's a bit illogical, I know.' And he smiled
ruefully. 'But, then, logic is not the old boy's strong point.'
'He seemed such a nice old man,' said Mrs. Cohn, as she recalled the
photograph of the white-haired cherub writing with a quill at a
property desk.
'Oh, off his hobby-horse he's a dear old boy. That's why I don't help
him into the saddle.'
'But how can he be ignorant that we've sent seven hundred at least to
the war?' she persisted. 'Why, the paper had all their photographs!'
'What paper?' said Simon, laughing. 'Do you suppose he reads the
Jewish what's-a-name, like you? Why, he's never heard of it!'
'Then you ought to show him a copy.'
'Oh, mother!' and he laughed again. 'That would only prove to him
there are too many Jews everywhere.'
A cloud began to spread over Mrs. Cohn's hard-won content. But
apparently it only shadowed her own horizon. Simon was as happily full
of his Lucy as ever.
Nevertheless, there came a Sunday evening when Simon returned from
Harrow earlier than his wont, and Hannah's dog-like eye noted that the
cloud had at last reached his brow.
'You have had a quarrel?' she cried.
'Only with the old boy.'
'But what about?'
'The old driveller has just joined some League of Londoners for the
suppression of the immigrant alien.'
'But you should have told him we all agree there should be
decentralization,' said Mrs. Cohn, quoting her favourite Jewish
organ.
'It isn't that--it's the old fellow's vanity that's hurt. You see, he
composed the "Appeal to the Briton," and gloated over it so
conceitedly that I couldn't help pointing out the horrible
contradictions.'
'But Lucy----' his mother began anxiously.
'Lucy's a brick. I don't know what my life would have been without the
little darling. But listen, mother.' And he drew out a portentous
prospectus. 'They say aliens should not be admitted unless they
produce a certificate of industrial capacity, and in the same breath
they accuse them of taking the work away from the British workman. Now
this isn't a Jewish question, and I didn't raise it as such--just a
piece of muddle--and even as an Englishman I can't see how we can
exclude Outlanders here after fighting for the Outland----'
'But Lucy----' his mother interrupted.
His vehement self-assertion passed into an affectionate smile.
'Lucy was dimpling all over her face. She knows the old boy's vanity.
Of course she couldn't side with me openly.'
'But what will happen? Will you go there again?'
The cloud returned to his brow. 'Oh, well, we'll see.'
A letter from Lucy saved him the trouble of deciding the point.
'DEAR SILLY OLD SIM,' it ran,
'Father has been going on dreadfully, so you had better wait a
few Sundays till he has cooled down. After all, you yourself
admit there is a grievance of congestion and high rents in the
East End. And it is only natural--isn't it?--that after
shedding our blood and treasure for the Empire we should not
be in a mood to see our country overrun by dirty aliens.'
'Dirty!' muttered Simon, as he read. 'Has she seen the Christian
slums--Flower and Dean Street?' And his handsome Oriental brow grew
duskier with anger. It did not clear till he came to:
'Let us meet at the Crystal Palace next Saturday, dear
quarrelsome person. Three o'clock, in the Pompeian Room. I
_have_ got an aunt at Sydenham, and I _can_ go in to tea after
the concert and hear all about the missionary work in the
South Sea Islands.'
XIII
Ensued a new phase in the relation of Simon and Lucy. Once they had
met in freedom, neither felt inclined to revert to the restricted
courtship of the drawing-room. Even though their chat was merely of
books and music and pictures, it was delicious to make their own
atmosphere, untroubled by the flippancy of the brother or the
earnestness of the father. In the presence of Lucy's artistic
knowledge Simon was at once abashed and stimulated. She moved in a
delicate world of symphonies and silver-point drawings of whose very
existence he had been unaware, and reverence quickened the sense of
romance which their secret meetings had already enhanced.
Once or twice he spoke of resuming his visits to Harrow, but the
longer he delayed the more difficult the conciliatory visit grew.
'Father is now deeper in the League than ever,' she told him. 'He has
joined the committee, and the prospectus has gone forth in all its
glorious self-contradiction.'
'But, considering I am the son of an alien, and I have fought for----'
'There, there! quarrelsome person,' she interrupted laughingly. 'No,
no, no, you had better not come till you can forget your remote
genealogy. You see, even now father doesn't quite realize you are a
Jew. He thinks you have a strain of Jewish blood, but are in every
other respect a decent Christian body.'
'Christian!' cried Simon in horror.
'Why not? You fought side by side with my brother; you ate ham with
us.'
Simon blushed hotly. 'But, Lucy, you don't think religion is ham?'
'What, then? Merely Shem?' she laughed.
Simon laughed too. How clever she was! 'But you know I never could
believe in the Trinity and all that. And, what's more, I don't believe
you do yourself.'
'It isn't exactly what one believes. I was baptized into the Church of
England--I feel myself a member. Really, Sim, you are a dreadfully
argumentative and quarrelsome person.'
'I'll never quarrel with you, Lucy,' he said half entreatingly; for
somehow he felt a shiver of cold at the word 'baptized,' as though
himself plunged into the font.
In this wise did both glide away from any deep issue or decision till
the summer itself glided away. Mrs. Cohn, anxiously following the
courtship through Sim's love-smitten eyes, her suggestion that the
girl be brought to see her received with equal postponement, began to
fret for the great thing to come to pass. One cannot be always
heroically stiffened to receive the cavalry of communal criticism.
Waiting weakens the backbone. But she concealed from her boy these
flaccid relapses.
'You said you'd bring her to see me when she returned from the
seaside,' she ventured to remind him.
'So I did; but now her father is dragging her away to Scotland.'
'You ought to get married the moment she gets back.'
'I can't expect her to rush things--with her father to square. Still,
you are not wrong, mother. It's high time we came to a definite
understanding between ourselves at least.'
'What!' gasped Mrs. Cohn. 'Aren't you engaged?'
'Oh, in a way, of course. But we've never said so in so many words.'
For fear this should be the 'English' way, Mrs. Cohn forbore to remark
that the definiteness of the Sugarman method was not without
compensations. She merely applauded Simon's more sensible mood.
But Mrs. Cohn was fated to a further season of fret. Day after day the
'fat letters' arrived with the Scottish postmark and the faint perfume
that always stirred her own wistful sense of lost romance--something
far-off and delicious, with the sweetness of roses and the salt of
tears. And still the lover, floating in his golden mist, vouchsafed
her no definite news.
One night she found him restive beyond his wont. She knew the reason.
For two days there had been no scented letter, and she saw how he
started at every creak of the garden-gate, as he waited for the last
post. When at length a step was heard crunching on the gravel, he
rushed from the room, and Mrs. Cohn heard the hall-door open. Her ear,
disappointed of the rat-tat, morbidly followed every sound; but it
seemed a long time before her boy's returning footstep reached her.
The strange, slow drag of it worked upon her nerves, and her heart
grew sick with premonition.
He held out the letter towards her. His face was white. 'She cannot
marry me, because I am a Jew,' he said tonelessly.
'Cannot marry you!' she whispered huskily. 'Oh, but this must not be!
I will go to the father; I will explain! You saved his son--he owes
you his daughter.'
He waved her hopelessly back to her seat--for she had started up. 'It
isn't the father, it's herself. Now that I won't let her drift any
longer, she can't bring herself to it. She's honest, anyway, my little
Lucy. She won't fall back on the old Jew-baiter.'
'But how dare she--how dare she think herself above you!' Her dog-like
eyes were blazing yet once again.
'Why are you Jews surprised?' he said bitterly. 'You've held yourself
aloof from the others long enough, God knows. Yet you wonder they've
got their prejudices, too.'
And, suddenly laying his head on the table, he broke into sobs--sobs
that tore at his mother's heart, that were charged with memories of
his ancient tears, of the days of paternal wrath and the rending of
'The Pirates of Pechili.' And, again, as in the days when his boyish
treasures were changed to ashes, she stole towards him, with an
involuntary furtive look to see if S. Cohn's back was turned, and laid
her hands upon his heaving shoulders. But he shook her off! 'Why
didn't a Boer bullet strike me down?' Then with a swift pang of
remorse he raised his contorted face and drew hers close against
it--their love the one thing saved from Anglicization.
THE JEWISH TRINITY
THE JEWISH TRINITY
I
With the Christian Mayoress of Middleton to take in to dinner at Sir
Asher Aaronsberg's, Leopold Barstein as a Jewish native of that
thriving British centre, should have felt proud and happy. But
Barstein was young and a sculptor, fresh from the Paris schools and
Salon triumphs. He had long parted company with Jews and Judaism, and
to his ardent irreverence even the Christian glories of Middleton
seemed unspeakably parochial. In Paris he had danced at night on the
Boule Miche out of sheer joy of life, and joined in choruses over
midnight bocks; and London itself now seemed drab and joyless, though
many a gay circle welcomed the wit and high spirits and even the
physical graces of this fortunate young man who seemed to shed a
blonde radiance all around him. The factories of Middleton, which had
manufactured Sir Asher Aaronsberg, ex-M.P., and nearly all his wealthy
guests, were to his artistic eye an outrage upon a beautiful planet,
and he was still in that crude phase of juvenile revolt in which one
speaks one's thoughts of the mess humanity has made of its world. But,
unfortunately, the Mayoress of Middleton was deafish, so that he
could not even shock her with his epigrams. It was extremely
disconcerting to have his bland blasphemies met with an equally bland
smile. On his other hand sat Mrs. Samuels, the buxom and highly
charitable relict of 'The People's Clothier,' whose ugly pictorial
posters had overshadowed Barstein's youth. Little wonder that the
artist's glance frequently wandered across the great shining table
towards a girl who, if they had not been so plaguily intent on
honouring his fame, might have now been replacing the Mayoress at his
side. True, the girl was merely a Jewess, and he disliked the breed.
But Mabel Aaronsberg was unexpected. She had a statuesque purity of
outline and complexion; seemed, indeed, worthy of being a creation of
his own. How the tedious old manufacturer could have produced this
marmoreal prodigy provided a problem for the sculptor, as he almost
silently ate his way through the long and exquisite menu.
Not that Sir Asher himself was unpicturesque. Indeed, he was the very
picture of the bluff and burly Briton, white-bearded like Father
Christmas. But he did not seem to lead to yonder vision of poetry and
purity. Lady Aaronsberg, who might have supplied the missing link, was
dead--before even arriving at ladyship, alas!--and when she was alive
Barstein had not enjoyed the privilege of moving in these high
municipal circles. This he owed entirely to his foreign fame, and to
his invitation by the Corporation to help in the organization of a
local Art Exhibition.
'I do admire Sir Asher,' the Mayoress broke in suddenly upon his
reflections; 'he seems to me exactly like your patriarchs.'
A Palestinian patriarch was the last person Sir Asher, with his
hovering lackeys, would have recalled to the sculptor, who, in so far
as the patriarchs ever crossed his mind, conceived them as resembling
Rembrandt's Rabbis. But he replied blandly: 'Our patriarchs were
polygamists.'
'Exactly,' assented the deaf Mayoress.
Barstein, disconcerted, yearned to repeat his statement in a shout,
but neither the pitch nor the proposition seemed suitable to the
dinner-table. The Mayoress added ecstatically: 'You can imagine him
sitting at the door of his tent, talking with the angels.'
This time Barstein did shout, but with laughter. All eyes turned a bit
enviously in his direction. 'You're having all the fun down there,'
called out Sir Asher benevolently; and the bluff Briton--even to the
northerly burr--was so vividly stamped upon Barstein's mind that he
wondered the more that the Mayoress could see him as anything but the
prosy, provincial, whilom Member of Parliament he so transparently
was. 'A mere literary illusion,' he thought. 'She has read the Bible,
and now reads Sir Asher into it. As well see a Saxon pirate or a
Norman jongleur in a modern Londoner.'
As if to confirm Barstein's vision of the bluff and burly Briton, Sir
Asher was soon heard over the clatter of conversation protesting
vehemently against the views of Tom Fuller, the degenerate son of a
Tory squire.
'Give Ireland Home Rule?' he was crying passionately. 'Oh, my dear Mr.
Fuller, it would be the beginning of the end of our Empire!'
'But the Irish have as much right to govern themselves as we have!'
the young Englishman maintained.
'They would not so much govern themselves as misgovern the Protestant
minority,' cried Sir Asher, becoming almost epigrammatic in his
excitement. 'Home Rule simply means the triumph of Roman Catholicism.'
It occurred to the cynical Barstein that even the defeat of Roman
Catholicism meant no victory for Judaism, but he stayed his tongue
with a salted almond. Let the Briton make the running. This the young
gentleman proceeded to do at a great pace.
'Then how about Home Rule for India? There's no Catholic majority
there!'
'Give up India!' Sir Asher opened horrified eyes. This heresy was new
to him. 'Give up the brightest jewel in the British crown! And let the
Russian bear come and swallow it up! No, no! A thousand times no!' Sir
Asher even gestured with his fork in his patriotic fervour, forgetting
he was not on the platform.
'So I imagine the patriarchs to have talked!' said the Mayoress,
admiringly observing his animation. Whereat the sculptor laughed once
more. He was amused, too, at the completeness with which the lion of
Judah had endued himself with the skin of the British lion. To a
cosmopolitan artist this bourgeois patriotism was peculiarly
irritating. But soon his eyes wandered again towards Miss Aaronsberg,
and he forgot trivialities.
II
The end of the meal was punctuated, not by the rising of the ladies,
but by the host's assumption of a black cap, which popped up from his
coat-tail pocket. With his head thus orientally equipped for prayer,
Sir Asher suddenly changed into a Rembrandtesque figure, his white
beard hiding the society shirtfront; and as he began intoning the
grace in Hebrew, the startled Barstein felt that the Mayoress had at
least a superficial justification. There came to him a touch of new
and artistic interest in this prosy, provincial ex-M.P., who,
environed by powdered footmen, sat at the end of his glittering
dinner-table uttering the language of the ancient prophets; and he
respected at least the sturdiness with which Miss Aaronsberg's father
wore his faith, like a phylactery, on his forehead. It said much for
his character that these fellow-citizens of his had once elected him
as their Member, despite his unpopular creed and race, and were now
willing to sit at his table under this tedious benediction. Sir Asher
did not even let them off with the shorter form of grace invented by a
wise Rabbi for these difficult occasions, yet so far as was visible it
was only the Jewish guests--comically distinguished by serviettes
shamefacedly dabbed on their heads--who fidgeted under the pious
torrent. These were no doubt fearful of boring the Christians whose
precious society the Jew enjoyed on a parlous tenure. In the host's
son Julius a superadded intellectual impatience was traceable. He had
brought back from Oxford a contempt for his father's creed which was
patent to every Jew save Sir Asher. Barstein, observing all this
uneasiness, became curiously angry with his fellow-Jews, despite that
he had scrupulously forborne to cover his own head with his serviette;
a racial pride he had not known latent in him surged up through all
his cosmopolitanism, and he maliciously trusted that the brave Sir
Asher would pray his longest. He himself had been a tolerable Hebraist
in his forcedly pious boyhood, and though he had neither prayed nor
heard any Hebrew prayers for many a year, his new artistic interest
led him to listen to the grace, and to disentangle the meaning from
the obscuring layers of verbal association and from the peculiar chant
enlivened by occasional snatches of melody with which it was intoned.
How he had hated this grace as a boy--this pious task-work that almost
spoilt the anticipation of meals! But to-night, after so long an
interval, he could look at it without prejudice, and with artistic
aloofness render to himself a true impression of its spiritual value.
'_We thank Thee, O Lord our God, because Thou didst give as an
heritage unto our fathers a desirable, good, and ample land, and
because Thou didst bring us forth, O Lord our God, from the land of
Egypt, and didst deliver us from the house of bondage----_'
Barstein heard no more for the moment; the paradox of this
retrospective gratitude was too absorbing. What! Sir Asher was
thankful because over three thousand years ago his ancestors had
obtained--not without hard fighting for it--a land which had already
been lost again for eighteen centuries. What a marvellous long memory
for a race to have!
Delivered from the house of bondage, forsooth! Sir Asher, himself--and
here a musing smile crossed the artist's lips--had never even known a
house of bondage, unless, indeed, the House of Commons (from which he
had been delivered by the Radical reaction) might be so regarded, and
his own house was, as he was fond of saying, Liberty Hall. But that
the Russian Jew should still rejoice in the redemption from Egypt! O
miracle of pious patience! O sublime that grazed the ridiculous!
But Sir Asher was still praying on:
'_Have mercy, O Lord our God, upon Israel Thy people, upon Jerusalem
Thy city, upon Zion the abiding place of Thy glory, upon the kingdom
of the house of David, Thine anointed...._'
Barstein lost himself in a fresh reverie. Here was indeed the
Palestinian patriarch. Not with the corporation of Middleton, nor the
lobbies of Westminster, not with his colossal business, not even with
the glories of the British Empire, was Sir Asher's true heart. He had
but caught phrases from the environment. To his deepest self he was
not even a Briton. '_Have mercy, O Lord, upon Israel Thy people._'
Despite all his outward pomp and prosperity, he felt himself one of
that dispersed and maltreated band of brothers who had for eighteen
centuries resisted alike the storm of persecution and the sunshine of
tolerance, and whose one consolation in the long exile was the dream
of Zion. The artist in Barstein began to thrill. What more fascinating
than to catch sight of the dreamer beneath the manufacturer, the
Hebrew visionary behind the English M.P.!
This palatial dwelling-place with its liveried lackeys was, then, no
fort of Philistinism in which an artist must needs asphyxiate, but a
very citadel of the spirit. A new respect for his host began to steal
upon him. Involuntarily he sought the face of the daughter; the
secret of her beauty was, after all, not so mysterious. Old Asher had
a soul, and 'the soul is form and doth the body make.'
Unconscious of the effect he was producing on the sensitive artist,
the Rembrandtesque figure prayed on: '_And rebuild Jerusalem, the holy
city, speedily and in our days...._'
It was the climax of the romance that had so strangely stolen over the
British dinner-table. Rebuild Jerusalem to-day! Did Jews really
conceive it as a contemporary possibility? Barstein went hot and cold.
The idea was absolutely novel to him; evidently as a boy he had not
understood his own prayers or his own people. All his imagination was
inflamed. He conjured up a Zion built up by such virile hands as Sir
Asher's, and peopled by such beautiful mothers as his daughter: the
great Empire that would spring from the unity and liberty of a race
which even under dispersion and oppression was one of the most potent
peoples on the planet. And thus, when the ladies at last rose, he was
in so deep a reverie that he almost forgot to rise too, and when he
did rise, he accompanied the ladies outside the door. It was only Miss
Aaronsberg's tactful 'Don't you want to smoke?' that saved him.
'Almost as long a grace as the dinner!' Tom Fuller murmured to him as
he returned to the table. 'Do the Jews say that after every meal?'
'They're supposed to,' Barstein replied, a little jarred as he picked
up a cigar.
'No wonder they beat the Christians,' observed the young Radical, who
evidently took original views. 'So much time for digestion would
enable any race to survive in this age of quick lunches. In America,
now they should rule the roast. Literally,' he added, with a laugh.
'It's a beautiful grace,' said Barstein rebukingly. 'The glamour of
Zion thrown over the prose of diet.'
'You're not a Jew?' said Tom, with a sudden suspicion.
'Yes, I am,' the artist replied with a dignity that surprised himself.
'I should never have taken you for one!' said Tom ingenuously.
Despite himself, Barstein felt a thrill of satisfaction. 'But why?' he
asked himself instantly. 'To feel complimented at not being taken for
a Jew--what does it mean? Is there a core of anti-Semitism in my
nature? Has our race reached self-contempt?'
'I beg your pardon,' Tom went on. 'I didn't mean to be irreverent. I
appreciate the picturesqueness of it all--hearing the very language of
the Bible, and all that. And I do sympathize with your desire for
Jewish Home Rule.'
'My desire?' murmured the artist, taken aback. Sir Asher here
interrupted them by pressing his '48 port upon both, and directing the
artist's attention in particular to the pictures that hung around the
stately dining-room. There was a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, a Landseer.
He drew Barstein round the walls.
'I am very fond of the English school,' he said. His cap was back in
his coat-tail, and he had become again the bluff and burly Briton.
'You don't patronize the Italians at all?' asked the artist.
'No,' said Sir Asher. He lowered his voice. 'Between you and I,' said
he--it was his main fault of grammar--'in Italian art one is never
safe from the Madonna, not to mention her Son.' It was a fresh
reminder of the Palestinian patriarch. Sir Asher never discussed
theology except with those who agreed with him. Nor did he ever,
whether in private or in public, breathe an unfriendly word against
his Christian fellow-citizens. All were sons of the same Father, as he
would frequently say from the platform. But in his heart of hearts he
cherished a contempt, softened by stupefaction, for the arithmetical
incapacity of Trinitarians.
Christianity under any other aspect did not exist for him. It was a
blunder impossible to a race with a genius for calculation. 'How can
three be one?' he would demand witheringly of his cronies. The
question was in his eye now as he summed up Italian art to the
sculptor, and a faint smile twitching about his lips invited his
fellow-Jew to share with him his feeling of spiritual and intellectual
superiority to the poor blind Christians at his table, as well as to
Christendom generally.
But the artist refused to come up on the pedestal. 'Surely the Madonna
was a very beautiful conception,' he said.
Sir Asher looked startled. 'Ah yes, you are an artist,' he remembered.
'You think only of the beautiful outside. But how can there be
three-in-one or one-in-three?'
Barstein did not reply, and Sir Asher added in a low scornful tone:
'Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.'
III
A sudden commission recalled Barstein to town before he could even pay
his after-dinner call. But the seed sown in his soul that evening was
not to be stifled. This seed was nothing less than the idea of a
national revival of his people. He hunted up his old prayer-books, and
made many discoveries as his modern consciousness depolarized page
upon page that had never in boyhood been anything to him but a series
of syllables to be gabbled off as rapidly as possible, when their
meaning was not still further overlaid by being sung slowly to a tune.
'I might as well have turned a prayer-wheel,' he said regretfully, as
he perceived with what iron tenacity the race beaten down by the Roman
Empire and by every power that had reigned since, had preserved its
aspiration for its old territory. And this mystery of race and blood,
this beauty of unforgetting aspiration, was all physically incarnate
in Mabel Aaronsberg.
He did not move one inch out of his way to see her, because he saw her
all day long. She appeared all over his studio in countless designs in
clay. But from this image of the beauty of the race, his deepening
insight drove him to interpret the tragedy also, and he sought out
from the slums and small synagogues of the East End strange forlorn
figures, with ragged curls and wistful eyes. It was from one of these
figures that he learnt to his astonishment that the dream of Zion,
whereof he imagined himself the sole dreamer, was shared by myriads,
and had even materialized into a national movement.
He joined the movement, and it led him into strange conventicles. He
was put on a committee which met in a little back-room, and which at
first treated him and his arguments with deference, soon with
familiarity, and occasionally with contempt. Hucksters and
cigar-makers held forth much more eloquently on their ideals than he
could, with far greater command of Talmudic quotation, while their
knowledge of how to run their local organization was naturally
superior. But throughout all the mean surroundings, the petty
wrangles, and the grotesque jealousies that tarnished the movement he
retained his inner exaltation. He had at last found himself and found
his art. He fell to work upon a great Michel-angelesque figure of the
awakening genius of his people, blowing the trumpet of resurrection.
It was sent for exhibition to a Zionist Congress, where it caused a
furore, and where the artist met other artists who had long been
working under the very inspiration which was so novel to him, and
whose work was all around him in plaque and picture, in bust and book,
and even postcard. Some of them were setting out for Palestine to
start a School of Arts and Crafts.
Barstein began to think of joining them. Meantime the Bohemian circles
which he had adorned with his gaiety and good-fellowship had been
wondering what had become of him. His new work in the Exhibitions
supplied a sort of answer, and the few who chanced to meet him
reported dolefully that he was a changed man. Gone was the
light-hearted and light-footed dancer of the Paris pavement. Silent
the licentious wit of the neo-Pagan. This was a new being with
brooding brow and pained eyes that lit up only when they beheld his
dream. Never had Bohemia known such a transformation.
IV
But a change came over the spirit of the dream. Before he could
seriously plan out his journey to Palestine, he met Mabel Aaronsberg
in the flesh. She was staying in town for the season in charge of an
aunt, and the meeting occurred in one of the galleries of the newer
art, in front of Mabel's own self in marble. She praised the Psyche
without in the least recognising herself, and Barstein, albeit
disconcerted, could not but admit how far his statue was from the
breathing beauty of the original.
After this the Jewish borderland of Bohemia, where writers and
painters are courted, began to see Barstein again. But, unfortunately,
this was not Mabel's circle, and Barstein was reduced to getting
himself invited to that Jewish Bayswater, his loathing for which had
not been overcome even by his new-found nationalism. Here, amid
hundreds of talking and dancing shadows, with which some shadowy self
of his own danced and talked, he occasionally had a magic hour of
reality--with Mabel.
One could not be real and not talk of the national dream. Mabel, who
took most of her opinions from her brother Julius, was frankly
puzzled, though her marmoreal gift of beautiful silence saved her
lover from premature shocks. She had, indeed, scarcely heard of such
things. Zionism was something in the East End. Nobody in her class
ever mentioned it. But, then, Barstein was a sculptor and strange,
and, besides, he did not look at all like a Jew, so it didn't sound so
horrible in his mouth. His lithe figure stood out almost Anglo-Saxon
amid the crowds of hulking undersized young men, and though his
manners were not so good as a Christian's--she never forgot his
blunder at her father's dinner-party--still, he looked up to one with
almost a Christian's adoration, instead of sizing one up with an
Oriental's calculation. These other London Jews thought her
provincial, she knew, whereas Barstein had one day informed her she
was universal. Julius, too, had admired Barstein's sculpture, the
modern note in which had been hailed by the Oxford elect. But what
most fascinated Mabel was the constant eulogy of her lover's work in
the Christian papers; and when at last the formal proposal came, it
found her fearful only of her father's disapproval.
'He's so orthodox,' she murmured, as they sat in a rose-garlanded
niche at a great Jewish Charity Ball, lapped around by waltz-music and
the sweetness of love confessed.
'Well, I'm not so wicked as I was,' he smiled.
'But you smoke on the Sabbath, Leo--you told me.'
'And you told me your brother Julius does the same.'
'Yes, but father doesn't know. If Julius wants to smoke on Friday
evening, he always goes to his own room.'
'And I shan't smoke in your father's.'
'No--but you'll tell him. You're so outspoken.'
'Well, I won't tell him--unless he asks me.'
She looked sad. 'He won't ask you--he'll never get as far.'
He smiled confidently. 'You're not very encouraging, dear; what's the
matter with me?'
'Everything. You're an artist, with all sorts of queer notions. And
you're not so'--she blushed and hesitated--'not so rich----'
He pressed her fingers. 'Yes, I am; I'm the richest man here.'
A little delighted laugh broke from her lips, though they went on:
'But you told me your profits are small--marble is so dear.'
'So is celibacy. I shall economize dreadfully by marrying.'
She pouted; his flippancy seemed inadequate to the situation, and he
seemed scarcely to realize that she was an heiress. But he continued
to laugh away her fears. She was so beautiful and he was so
strong--what could stand between them? Certainly not the Palestinian
patriarch with whose inmost psychology he had, fortunately, become in
such cordial sympathy.
But Mabel's pessimism was not to be banished even by the supper
champagne. They had secured a little table for two, and were
recklessly absorbed in themselves.
'At the worst, we can elope to Palestine,' he said at last, gaily
serious.
Mabel shuddered. 'Live entirely among Jews!' she cried.
The radiance died suddenly out of his face; it was as if she had
thrust the knife she was wielding through his heart. Her silent
reception of his nationalist rhapsodies he had always taken for
agreement.
Nor might Mabel have undeceived him had his ideas remained Platonic.
Their irruption into the world of practical politics, into her own
life, was, however, another pair of shoes. Since Barstein had brought
Zionism to her consciousness, she had noted that distinguished
Christians were quite sympathetic, but this was the one subject on
which Christian opinion failed to impress Mabel. 'Zionism's all very
well for Christians--they're in no danger of having to go to
Palestine,' she had reflected shrewdly.
'And why couldn't you live entirely among Jews?' Barstein asked
slowly.
Mabel drew a great breath, as if throwing off a suffocating weight.
'One couldn't breathe,' she explained.
'Aren't you living among Jews now?'
'Don't look so glum, silly. You don't want Jews as background as well
as foreground. A great Ghetto!' And again she shuddered instinctively.
'Every other people is background as well as foreground. And you don't
call France a Ghetto or Italy a Ghetto?' There was anti-Semitism, he
felt--unconscious anti-Semitism--behind Mabel's instinctive repugnance
to an aggregation of Jews. And he knew that her instinct would be
shared by every Jew in that festive aggregation around him. His heart
sank. Never--even in those East End back-rooms where the pitiful
disproportion of his consumptive-looking collaborators to their great
task was sometimes borne in dismally upon him--had he felt so black a
despair as in this brilliant supper-room, surrounded by all that was
strong and strenuous in the race--lawyers and soldiers, and men of
affairs, whose united forces and finances could achieve almost
anything they set their heart upon.
'Jews can't live off one another,' Mabel explained with an air of
philosophy.
Barstein did not reply. He was asking himself with an artist's
analytical curiosity whence came this suicidal anti-Semitism. Was it
the self-contempt natural to a race that had not the strength to build
and fend for itself? No, alas! it did not even spring from so
comparatively noble a source. It was merely a part of their general
imitation of their neighbours--Jews, reflecting everything, had
reflected even the dislike for the Jew; only since the individual
could not dislike himself, he applied the dislike to the race. And
this unconscious assumption of the prevailing point of view was
quickened by the fact that the Jewish firstcomers were always aware of
an existence on sufferance, with their slowly-won privileges
jeopardized if too many other Jews came in their wake. He consulted
his own pre-Zionist psychology. 'Yes,' he decided. 'Every Jew who
moves into our country, our city, our watering-place, our street even,
seems to us an invader or an interloper. He draws attention to us, he
accentuates our difference from the normal, he increases the chance of
the renewal of _Rishus_ (malice). And so we become anti-Semites
ourselves. But by what a comical confusion of logic is it that we
carry over the objection to Jewish aggregation even to an aggregation
in Palestine, in our own land! Or is it only too logical? Is it that
the rise of a Jewish autonomous power would be a standing reminder to
our fellow-citizens that we others are not so radically British or
German or French or American as we have vaunted ourselves? Are we
afraid of being packed off to Palestine and is the fulfilment of the
dream of eighteen centuries our deadliest dread?'
The thought forced from him a sardonic smile.
'And I feared you were like King Henry--never going to smile again.'
Mabel smiled back in relief.
'We're such a ridiculous people,' he answered, his smile fading into
sombreness. 'Neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring.'
'Well, finish your good white fowl,' laughed Mabel. She had felt her
hold over him slipping, and her own apprehensions now vanished in the
effort to banish his gloom.
But she had only started him on a new tack. 'Fowl!' he cried grimly.
'_Kosher_, of course, but with bits of fried _Wurst_ to ape the scraps
of bacon. And presently we shall be having water ices to simulate
cream. We can't even preserve our dietary individuality. Truly said
Feuerbach, "Der Mensch ist was er isst." In Palestine we shall at
least dare to be true to our own gullets.' He laughed bitterly.
'You're not very romantic,' Mabel pouted. Indeed, this Barstein, whose
mere ideal could so interrupt the rhapsodies due to her admissions of
affection, was distinctly unsatisfactory. She touched his hand
furtively under the tablecloth.
'After all, she is very young,' he thought, thrilling. And youth was
plastic--he, the sculptor, could surely mould her. Besides, was she
not Sir Asher's daughter? She must surely have inherited some of his
love for Palestine and his people. It was this Philistine set that had
spoiled her. Julius, too, that young Oxford prig--he reflected
illogically--had no doubt been a baleful influence.
'Shall I give you some almond-pudding?' he replied tenderly.
Mabel laughed uneasily. 'I ask for romance, and you offer me
almond-pudding. Oh, I _should_ like to go to a Jewish party where
there wasn't almond-pudding!'
'You shall--in Palestine,' he laughed back.
She pouted again. 'All roads lead to Palestine.'
'They do,' he said seriously. 'Without Palestine our past is a
shipwreck and our future a quicksand.'
She looked frightened again. 'But what should we do there? We can't
pray all day long.'
'Of course not,' he said eagerly. 'There's the new generation to train
for its glorious future. I shall teach in the Arts and Crafts School.
_Bezalel_, it's called; isn't that a beautiful name? It's from
Bezalel, the first man mentioned in the Bible as filled with Divine
wisdom and understanding in all manner of workmanship.'
She shook her head. 'You'll be excommunicated. The Palestine Rabbis
always excommunicate everything and everybody.'
He laughed. 'What do you know about Palestine?'
'More than you think. Father gets endless letters from there with
pressed flowers and citrons, and olive-wood boxes and paper-knives--a
perennial shower. The letters are generally in the most killing
English. And he won't let me laugh at them because he has a vague
feeling that even Palestine spelling and grammar are holy.'
Barstein laughed again. 'We'll send all the Rabbis to Jericho.'
She smiled, but retorted: 'That's where they'll send you, you maker of
graven images. Why, your very profession is forbidden.'
'I'll corner 'em with this very Bezalel text. The cutting of stones is
just one of the arts which God says He had inspired Bezalel with.
Besides, you forget my statue at the Bâle Congress.'
'Bâle isn't Palestine. There's nothing but superstition and squalor,
and I'm sorry to say father's always bolstering it all up with his
cheques.'
'Bravo, Sir Asher! Unconsciously he has been bolstering up the
eventual Renaissance. Your father and his kind have kept the seed
alive; we shall bring it to blossom.'
His prophetic assurance cast a fresh shade of apprehension over her
marmoreal brow. But her face lightened with a sudden thought. 'Well,
perhaps, after all, we shan't need to elope.'
'I never thought for a moment we should,' he answered as cheerfully.
'But, all the same, we can spend our honeymoon in Palestine.'
'Oh, I don't mind that,' said Mabel. 'Lots of Christians do that.
There was a Cook's party went out from Middleton for last Easter.'
The lover was too pleased with her acquiescence in the Palestinian
honeymoon to analyse the terms in which it was given. He looked into
her eyes, and saw there the _Shechinah_--the Divine glory that once
rested on Zion.
V
It was in this happier mood that Barstein ran down to Middleton to
plead his suit verbally with Sir Asher Aaronsberg. Mabel had feared to
commit their fates to a letter, whether from herself or her lover. A
plump negative would be so difficult to fight against. A personal
interview permitted one to sound the ground, to break the thing
delicately, to reason, to explain, to charm away objections. It was
clearly the man's duty to face the music.
Not that Barstein expected anything but the music of the Wedding
March. He was glad that his original contempt for Sir Asher had been
exchanged for sincere respect, and that the bluff Briton was a mere
veneer. It was to the Palestinian patriarch that he would pour out his
hopes and his dreams.
Alas! he found only the bluff Briton, and a Briton no longer genially,
but bluntly, bluff.
'It is perfectly impossible.'
Barstein, bewildered, pleaded for enlightenment. Was he not pious
enough, or not rich enough, too artistic or too low-born? Or did Sir
Asher consider his past life improper or his future behaviour dubious?
Let Sir Asher say.
But Sir Asher would not say. 'I am not bound to give my reasons. We
are all proud of your work--it confers honour on our community. The
Mayor alluded to it only yesterday.' He spoke in his best platform
manner. 'But to receive you into my family--that is another matter.'
And all the talk advanced things no further.
'It would be an entirely unsuitable match.' Sir Asher caressed his
long beard with an air of finality.
With a lover's impatience, Barstein had made the mistake of seeking
Sir Asher in his counting-house, where the municipal magnate sat among
his solidities. The mahogany furniture, the iron safes, the ledgers,
the silent obsequious clerks and attendants through whom Barstein had
had to penetrate, the factory buildings stretching around, with their
sense of throbbing machinery and disciplined workers, all gave the
burly Briton a background against which visions and emotions seemed as
unreal as ghosts under gaslight. The artist felt all this solid life
closing round him like the walls of a torture-chamber, squeezing out
his confidence, his aspirations, his very life.
'Then you prefer to break your daughter's heart!' he cried
desperately.
'Break my daughter's heart!' echoed Sir Asher in amaze. It was
apparently a new aspect to him.
'You don't suppose she won't suffer dreadfully?' Barstein went on,
perceiving his advantage.
'Break her heart!' repeated Sir Asher, startled out of his discreet
reticence. 'I'd sooner break her heart than see her married to a
Zionist!'
This time it was the sculptor's turn to gasp.
'To a what?' he cried.
'To a Zionist. You don't mean to deny you're a Zionist?' said Sir
Asher sternly.
Barstein gazed at him in silence.
'Come, come,' said Sir Asher. 'You don't suppose I don't read the
Jewish papers? I know all about your goings-on.'
The artist found his tongue. 'But--but,' he stammered, 'you yearn for
Zion too.'
'Naturally. But I don't presume to force the hand of Providence.'
'How can any of us force Providence to do anything it doesn't want to?
Surely it is through human agency that Providence always works. God
helps those who help themselves.'
'Spare me your blasphemies. Perhaps you think you are the Messiah.'
'I can be an atom of Him. The whole Jewish people is its own
Messiah--God working through it.'
'Take care, young man; you'll be talking Trinity next. And with these
heathen notions you expect to marry my daughter! You must excuse me if
I wish to hear no further.' His hand began to wander towards the row
of electric bells on his desk.
'Then how do you suppose we shall ever get to Palestine?' inquired the
irritated artist.
Sir Asher raised his eyes to the ceiling. 'In God's good time,' he
said.
'And when will that be?'
'When we are either too good or too bad for our present sphere. To-day
we are too neutral. Besides, there will be signs enough.'
'What signs?'
'Read your Bible. Mount Zion will be split by an earthquake, as the
prophet----'
Barstein interrupted him with an impatient gesture. 'But why can't we
go to Jerusalem and wait for the earthquake there?' he asked.
'Because we have a mission to the nations. We must live dispersed. We
have to preach the unity of God.'
'I have never heard you preach it. You lowered your voice when you
denounced the Trinity to me, lest the Christians should hear.'
'We have to preach silently, by our example. Merely by keeping our own
religion we convert the world.'
'But who keeps it? Dispersion among Sunday-keeping peoples makes our
very Sabbath an economic impossibility.'
'I have not found it so,' said Sir Asher crushingly. 'Indeed, the
growth of the Saturday half-holiday since my young days is a
remarkable instance of Judaizing.'
'So we have to remain dispersed to promote the week-end holiday?'
'To teach international truth,' Sir Asher corrected sharply; 'not
narrow tribalism.'
'But we don't remain dispersed. Five millions are herded in the
Russian Pale to begin with.'
'The Providence of God has long been scattering them to New York.'
'Yes, four hundred thousand in one square mile. A pretty scattering!'
Sir Asher flushed angrily. 'But they go to the Argentine too. I heard
of a colony even in Paraguay.'
'Where they are preaching the Unity to the Indians.'
'I do not discuss religion with a mocker. We are in exile by God's
decree--we must suffer.'
'Suffer!' The artist's glance wandered cynically round the snug
solidities of Sir Asher's exile, but he forbore to be personal. 'Then
if we _must_ suffer, why did you subscribe so much to the fund for the
Russian Jews?'
Sir Asher looked mollified at Barstein's acquaintance with his
generosity. 'That I might suffer with them,' he replied, with a touch
of humour.
'Then you _are_ a Jewish patriot,' retorted Barstein.
The bluff British face grew clouded again.
'Heaven forbid. I only know of British patriots. You talk treason to
your country, young man.'
'Treason--I!' The young man laughed bitterly.
'It is you Zionists that will undermine all the rights we have so
painfully won in the West.'
'Oh, then you're not really a British patriot,' Barstein began.
'I will beg you to remember, sir, that I equipped a corps of
volunteers for the Transvaal.'
'I dare say. But a corps of volunteers for Zion--that is blasphemy,
narrow tribalism.'
'Zion's soil is holy; we want no volunteers there: we want saints and
teachers. And what would your volunteers do in Zion? Fight the Sultan
with his million soldiers? They couldn't even live in Palestine as men
of peace. There is neither coal nor iron--hence no manufactures.
Agriculture? It's largely stones and swamps. Not to mention it's too
hot for Jews to work in the fields. They'd all starve. You've no right
to play recklessly with human lives. Besides, even if Palestine were
as fertile as England, Jews could never live off one another. And
think how they'd quarrel!'
Sir Asher ended almost good-humouredly. His array of arguments seemed
to him a row of steam-hammers.
'We can live off one another as easily as any other people. As for
quarrelling, weren't you in Parliament? Party government makes quarrel
the very basis of the Constitution.'
Sir Asher flushed again. A long lifetime of laying down the law had
ill prepared him for repartee.
'A pretty mess we should make of Government!' he sneered.
'Why? We have given Ministers to every Cabinet in the world.'
'Yes--we're all right as long as we're under others. Sir Asher was
recovering his serenity.
'All right so long as we're under others!' gasped the artist. 'Do you
realize what you're saying, Sir Asher? The Boers against whom you
equipped volunteers fought frenziedly for three years not to be under
others! And we--the thought of Jewish autonomy makes us foam at the
mouth. The idea of independence makes us turn in the graves we call
our fatherlands.'
Sir Asher dismissed the subject with a Podsnappian wave of the hand.
'This is all a waste of breath. Fortunately the acquisition of
Palestine is impossible.'
'Then why do you pray for it--"speedily and in our days"?'
Sir Asher glared at the bold questioner.
'That seems a worse waste of breath,' added Barstein drily.
'I said you were a mocker,' said Sir Asher severely. 'It is a Divine
event I pray for--not the creation of a Ghetto.'
'A Ghetto!' Barstein groaned in sheer hopelessness. 'Yes, you're an
anti-Semite too--like your daughter, like your son, like all of us.
We're all anti-Semites.'
'I an anti-Semite! Ho! ho! ho!' Sir Asher's anger broke down in sheer
amusement. 'I have made every allowance for your excitement,' he said,
recovering his magisterial note. 'I was once in love myself. But when
it comes to calling _me_ an anti-Semite, it is obvious you are not in
a fit state to continue this interview. Indeed, I no longer wonder
that you think yourself the Messiah.'
'Even if I do, our tradition only makes the Messiah a man; somebody
some day will have to win your belief. But what I said was that God
acts through man.'
'Ah yes,' said Sir Asher good-humouredly. 'Three-in-one and
one-in-three.'
'And why not?' said Barstein with a flash of angry intuition. 'Aren't
you a trinity yourself?'
'Me?' Sir Asher was now quite sure of the sculptor's derangement.
'Yes--the Briton, the Jew, and the anti-Semite--three-in-one and
one-in-three.'
Sir Asher touched one of the electric bells with a jerk. He was quite
alarmed.
Barstein turned white with rage at his dismissal. Never would he marry
into these triune tribes. 'And it's the same in every land where we're
emancipated, as it is called,' he went on furiously. 'The Jew's a
patriot everywhere, and a Jew everywhere and an anti-Semite
everywhere. Passionate Hungarians, and true-born Italians,
eagle-waving Americans, and loyal Frenchmen, imperial Germans, and
double Dutchmen, we are dispersed to preach the Unity, and what we
illustrate is the Jewish trinity. A delicious irony! Three-in-one and
one-in-three.' He laughed; to Sir Asher his laugh sounded maniacal.
The old gentleman was relieved to see his stalwart doorkeeper enter.
Barstein turned scornfully on his heel. 'Neither confounding the
persons nor dividing the substance,' he ended grimly.
THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER
THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER
I
There was a storm in Sudminster, not on the waters which washed its
leading Jews their living, but in the breasts of these same marine
storekeepers. For a competitor had appeared in their hive of
industry--an alien immigrant, without roots or even relatives at
Sudminster. And Simeon Samuels was equipped not only with capital and
enterprise--the showy plate-glass front of his shop revealed an
enticing miscellany--but with blasphemy and bravado. For he did not
close on Friday eve, and he opened on Saturday morning as usual.
The rumour did not get round all Sudminster the first Friday night,
but by the Sabbath morning the synagogue hummed with it. It set a
clammy horror in the breasts of the congregants, distracted their
prayers, gave an unreal tone to the cantor's roulades, brought a
tremor of insecurity into the very foundations of their universe. For
nearly three generations a congregation had been established in
Sudminster--like every Jewish congregation, a camp in not friendly
country--struggling at every sacrifice to keep the Holy Day despite
the supplementary burden of Sunday closing, and the God of their
fathers had not left unperformed His part of the contract. For 'the
harvests' of profit were abundant, and if 'the latter and the former
rain' of their unchanging supplication were mere dried metaphors to a
people divorced from Palestine and the soil for eighteen centuries,
the wine and the oil came in casks, and the corn in cakes. The poor
were few and well provided for; even the mortgage on the synagogue was
paid off. And now this Epicurean was come to trouble the snug
security, to break the long chain of Sabbath observance which
stretched from Sinai. What wonder if some of the worshippers,
especially such as had passed his blatant shop-window on their return
from synagogue on Friday evening, were literally surprised that the
earth had not opened beneath him as it had opened beneath Korah.
'Even the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath was stoned to death,'
whispered the squat Solomon Barzinsky to the lanky Ephraim Mendel,
marine-dealers both.
'Alas! that would not be permitted in this heathen country,' sighed
Ephraim Mendel, hitching his praying-shawl more over his left
shoulder. 'But at least his windows should be stoned.'
Solomon Barzinsky smiled, with a gleeful imagining of the shattering
of the shameless plate-glass. 'Yes, and that wax-dummy of a sailor
should be hung as an atonement for his--Holy, holy, holy is the Lord
of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.' The last phrase
Solomon suddenly shouted in Hebrew, in antiphonal response to the
cantor, and he rose three times on his toes, bowing his head piously.
'No wonder he can offer gold lace for the price of silver,' he
concluded bitterly.
'He sells shoddy new reach-me-downs as pawned old clo,' complained
Lazarus Levy, who had taken over S. Cohn's business, together with his
daughter Deborah, 'and he charges the Sudminster donkey-heads more
than the price we ask for 'em as new.'
Talk of the devil----! At this point Simeon Samuels stalked into the
synagogue, late but serene.
Had the real horned Asmodeus walked in, the agitation could not have
been greater. The first appearance in synagogue of a new settler was
an event in itself; but that this Sabbath-breaker should appear at all
was startling to a primitive community. Escorted by the obsequious and
unruffled beadle to the seat he seemed already to have engaged--that
high-priced seat facing the presidential pew that had remained vacant
since the death of Tevele the pawnbroker--Simeon Samuels wrapped
himself reverently in his praying-shawl, and became absorbed in the
service. His glossy high hat bespoke an immaculate orthodoxy, his long
black beard had a Rabbinic religiousness, his devotion was a rebuke to
his gossiping neighbours.
A wave of uneasiness passed over the synagogue. Had he been the victim
of a jealous libel? Even those whose own eyes had seen him behind his
counter when he should have been consecrating the Sabbath-wine at his
supper-table, wondered if they had been the dupe of some
hallucination.
When, in accordance with hospitable etiquette, the new-comer was
summoned canorously to the reading of the Law--'Shall stand Simeon,
the son of Nehemiah'--and he arose and solemnly mounted the central
platform, his familiarity with the due obeisances and osculations and
benedictions seemed a withering reply to the libel. When he
descended, and the _Parnass_ proffered his presidential hand in pious
congratulation upon the holy privilege, all the congregants who found
themselves upon his line of return shot forth their arms with
remorseful eagerness, and thus was Simeon Samuels switched on to the
brotherhood of Sudminsterian Israel. Yet as his now trusting
co-religionists passed his shop on their homeward walk--and many a
pair of legs went considerably out of its way to do so--their eyes
became again saucers of horror and amaze. The broad plate-glass
glittered nakedly, unveiled by a single shutter; the waxen dummy of
the sailor hitched devil-may-care breeches; the gold lace, ticketed
with layers of erased figures, boasted brazenly of its cheapness; the
procession of customers came and went, and the pavement, splashed with
sunshine, remained imperturbably, perturbingly acquiescent.
II
On the Sunday night Solomon Barzinsky and Ephraim Mendel in pious
black velvet caps, and their stout spouses in gold chains and diamond
earrings, found themselves playing solo whist in the _Parnass's_
parlour, and their religious grievance weighed upon the game. The
_Parnass_, though at heart as outraged as they by the new departure,
felt it always incumbent upon him to display his presidential
impartiality and his dry humour. His authority, mainly based on his
being the only retired shopkeeper in the community, was greatly
strengthened by his slow manner of taking snuff at a crisis. 'My dear
Mendel,' observed the wizened senior, flicking away the spilth with a
blue handkerchief, 'Simeon Samuels has already paid his annual
subscription--and you haven't!'
'My money is good,' Mendel replied, reddening.
'No wonder he can pay so quickly!' said Solomon Barzinsky, shuffling
the cards savagely.
'How he makes his money is not the question,' said the _Parnass_
weightily. 'He has paid it, and therefore if I were to expel him, as
you suggest, he might go to Law.'
'Law!' retorted Solomon. 'Can't we prove he has broken the Law of
Moses?'
'And suppose?' said the _Parnass_, picking up his cards placidly. 'Do
we want to wash our dirty _Talysim_ (praying-shawls) in public?'
'He is right, Solomon,' said Mrs. Barzinsky. 'We should become a
laughing-stock among the heathen.'
'I don't believe he'd drag us to the Christian courts,' the little man
persisted. 'I pass.'
The rubber continued cheerlessly. 'A man who keeps his shop open on
Sabbath is capable of anything,' said the lanky Mendel, gloomily
sweeping in his winnings.
The _Parnass_ took snuff judicially. 'Besides, he may have a Christian
partner who keeps all the Saturday profits,' he suggested.
'That would be just as forbidden,' said Barzinsky, as he dealt the
cards.
'But your cousin David,' his wife reminded him, 'sells his groceries
to a Christian at Passover.'
'That is permitted. It would not be reasonable to destroy hundreds of
pounds of leaven. But Sabbath partnerships are not permitted.'
'Perhaps the question has never been raised,' said the _Parnass_.
'I am enough of a _Lamdan_ (pundit) to answer it,' retorted Barzinsky.
'I prefer going to a specialist,' rejoined the _Parnass_.
Barzinsky threw down his cards. 'You can go to the devil!' he cried.
'For shame, Solomon!' said his wife. 'Don't disturb the game.'
'To Gehenna with the game! The shame is on a _Parnass_ to talk like an
_Epikouros_ (Epicurean).'
The _Parnass_ blew his nose elaborately. 'It stands in the Talmud:
"For vain swearing noxious beasts came into the world." And if----'
'It stands in the Psalmist,' Barzinsky interrupted: '"The Law of Thy
mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver."'
'It stands in the Perek,' the _Parnass_ rejoined severely, 'that the
wise man does not break in upon the speech of his fellow.'
'It stands in the Shulchan Aruch,' Barzinsky shrieked, 'that for the
sanctification of the Sabbath----'
'It stands in the Talmud,' interposed Mendel, with unwonted animation
in his long figure, 'that one must not even offer a nut to allure
customers. From light to heavy, therefore, it may be deduced that----'
A still small voice broke in upon the storm. 'But Simeon Samuels
hasn't a Christian partner,' said Mrs. Mendel.
There was an embarrassed pause.
'He has only his wife to help him,' she went on. 'I know, because I
went to the shop Friday morning on pretence of asking for a
cuckoo-clock.'
'But a marine-dealer doesn't sell clocks,' put in the _Parnass's_ wife
timidly. It was her first contribution to the conversation, for she
was overpowered by her husband's greatness.
'Don't be silly, Hannah!' said the _Parnass_. 'That was just why Mrs.
Mendel asked for it.'
'Yes, but unfortunately Simeon Samuels did have one,' Mrs. Mendel
confessed; 'and I couldn't get out of buying it.'
There was a general laugh.
'Cut-throat competition, I call it,' snarled Solomon Barzinsky,
recovering from his merriment.
'But _you_ don't sell clocks,' said the _Parnass_.
'That's just it; he gets hold of our customers on pretence of selling
them something else. The Talmudical prohibition cited by Mendel
applies to that too.'
'So I wasn't so silly,' put in the _Parnass's_ wife, feeling vaguely
vindicated.
'Well, you saw his wife,' said the _Parnass_ to Mendel's wife,
disregarding his own. 'More than I've done, for she wasn't in
synagogue. Perhaps _she_ is the Christian partner.' His suggestion
brought a new and holier horror over the card-table.
'No, no,' replied Mrs. Mendel reassuringly. 'I caught sight of her
frying fish in the kitchen.'
This proof of her Jewishness passed unquestioned, and the new-born
horror subsided.
'But in spite of the fish,' said Mr. Mendel, 'she served in the shop
while he was at synagogue.'
'Yes,' hissed Barzinsky; 'and in spite of the synagogue _he_ served
in the shop. A greater mockery was never known!'
'Not at all, not at all,' said the _Parnass_ judicially. 'If a man
breaks one commandment, that's no reason he should break two.'
'But he does break two,' Solomon thundered, smiting the green cloth
with his fist; 'for he steals my custom by opening when I'm closed.'
'Take care--you will break my plates,' said the _Parnass_. 'Take a
sandwich.'
'Thank you--you've taken away my appetite.'
'I'm sorry--but the sandwiches would have done the same. I really
can't expel a respectable seat-holder before I know that he is truly a
sinner in Israel. As it is written, "Thou shalt inquire and make
search and ask diligently." He may have only opened this once by way
of a send-off. Every dog is allowed one bite.'
'At that rate, it would be permitted to eat a ham-sandwich--just for
once,' said Solomon scathingly.
'Don't say _I_ called you a dog,' the _Parnass_ laughed.
'A mezaire!' announced the hostess hurriedly. 'After all, it's the
Almighty's business, not ours.'
'No, it's our business,' Solomon insisted.
'Yes,' agreed the _Parnass_ drily; 'it _is_ your business.'
III
The week went by, with no lull in the storm, though the plate-glass
window was unshaken by the gusts. It maintained its flaunting
seductiveness, assisted, people observed, by Simeon Samuels' habit of
lounging at his shop-door and sucking in the hesitating spectator. And
it did not shutter itself on the Sabbath that succeeded.
The horror was tinged with consternation. The strange apathy of the
pavement and the sky, the remissness of the volcanic fires and the
celestial thunderbolts in face of this staring profanity, lent the
cosmos an air almost of accessory after the fact. Never had the
congregation seen Heaven so openly defied, and the consequences did
not at all correspond with their deep if undefined forebodings. It is
true a horse and carriage dashed into Peleg, the pawnbroker's, window
down the street, frightened, Peleg maintained, by the oilskins
fluttering outside Simeon Samuels' shop; but as the suffering was
entirely limited to the nerves of Mrs. Peleg, who was pious, and to
the innocent nose of the horse, this catastrophe was not quite what
was expected. Solomon Barzinsky made himself the spokesman of the
general dissatisfaction, and his remarks to the minister after the
Sabbath service almost insinuated that the reverend gentleman had
connived at a breach of contract.
The Rev. Elkan Gabriel quoted Scripture. 'The Lord is merciful and
long-suffering, and will not at once awaken all His wrath.'
'But meantime the sinner makes a pretty penny!' quoth Solomon,
unappeased. 'Saturday is pay-day, and the heathen haven't patience to
wait till the three stars are out and our shops can open. It is your
duty, Mr. Gabriel, to put a stop to this profanation.'
The minister hummed and ha'd. He was middle-aged, and shabby, with a
German diploma and accent and a large family. It was the first time in
his five years of office that one of his congregants had suggested
such authoritativeness on his part. Elected by their vote, he was
treated as their servant, his duties rigidly prescribed, his religious
ideas curbed and corrected by theirs. What wonder if he could not
suddenly rise to dictatorship? Even at home Mrs. Gabriel was a
congregation in herself. But as the week went by he found Barzinsky
was not the only man to egg him on to prophetic denunciation; the
congregation at large treated him as responsible for the scandal, and
if the seven marine-dealers were the bitterest, the pawnbrokers and
the linen-drapers were none the less outraged.
'It is a profanation of the Name,' they said unanimously, 'and such a
bad example to our poor!'
'He would not listen to me,' the poor minister would protest. 'You had
much better talk to him yourself.'
'Me!' the button-holer would ejaculate. 'I would not lower myself.
He'd think I was jealous of his success.'
Simeon Samuels seemed, indeed, a formidable person to tackle. Bland
and aloof, he pursued his own affairs, meeting the congregation only
in synagogue, and then more bland and aloof than ever.
At last the Minister received a presidential command to preach upon
the subject forthwith.
'But there's no text suitable just yet,' he pleaded. 'We are still in
Genesis.'
'Bah!' replied the _Parnass_ impatiently, 'any text can be twisted to
point any moral. You must preach next Sabbath.'
'But we are reading the _Sedrah_ (weekly portion) about Joseph. How
are you going to work Sabbath-keeping into that?'
'It is not my profession. I am a mere man-of-the-earth. But what's the
use of a preacher if he can't make any text mean something else?'
'Well, of course, every text usually does,' said the preacher
defensively. 'There is the hidden meaning and the plain meaning. But
Joseph is merely historical narrative. The Sabbath, although mentioned
in Genesis, chapter two, wasn't even formally ordained yet.'
'And what about Potiphar's wife?'
'That's the Seventh Commandment, not the Fourth.'
'Thank you for the information. Do you mean to say you can't jump from
one Commandment to another?'
'Oh, well----' The minister meditated.
IV
'And Joseph was a goodly person, and well favoured. And it came to
pass that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph....'
The congregation looked startled. Really this was not a text which
they wished their pastor to enlarge upon. There were things in the
Bible that should be left in the obscurity of the Hebrew, especially
when one's womenkind were within earshot. Uneasily their eyes lifted
towards the bonnets behind the balcony-grating.
'But Joseph refused.'
Solomon Barzinsky coughed. Peleg the pawnbroker blew his nose like a
protesting trumpet. The congregation's eyes returned from the balcony
and converged upon the _Parnass_. He was taking snuff as usual.
'My brethren,' began the preacher impressively, 'temptation comes to
us all----'
A sniff of indignant repudiation proceeded from many nostrils. A blush
overspread many cheeks.
'But not always in the shape it came to Joseph. In this congregation,
where, by the blessing of the Almighty, we are free from almost every
form of wrong-doing, there is yet one temptation which has power to
touch us--the temptation of unholy profit, the seduction of
Sabbath-breaking.'
A great sigh of dual relief went up to the balcony, and Simeon Samuels
became now the focus of every eye. His face was turned towards the
preacher, wearing its wonted synagogue expression of reverential
dignity.
'Oh, my brethren, that it could always be said of us: "And Joseph
refused"!'
A genial warmth came back to every breast. Ah, now the cosmos was
righting itself; Heaven was speaking through the mouth of its
minister.
The Rev. Elkan Gabriel expanded under this warmth which radiated back
to him. His stature grew, his eloquence poured forth, polysyllabic. As
he ended, the congregation burst into a heartfelt '_Yosher Koach_'
('May thy strength increase!').
The minister descended the Ark-steps, and stalked back solemnly to his
seat. As he passed Simeon Samuels, that gentleman whipped out his
hand and grasped the man of God's, and his neighbours testified that
there was a look of contrite exaltation upon his goodly features.
V
The Sabbath came round again, but, alas! it brought no balm to the
congregation; rather, was it a day of unrest. The plate-glass window
still flashed in iniquitous effrontery; still the ungodly proprietor
allured the stream of custom.
'He does not even refuse to take money,' Solomon Barzinsky exclaimed
to Peleg the pawnbroker, as they passed the blasphemous window on
their way from the Friday-evening service.
'Why, what would be the good of keeping open if you didn't take
money?' naïvely inquired Peleg.
'_Behemah_ (animal)!' replied Solomon impatiently. 'Don't you know
it's forbidden to touch money on the Sabbath?'
'Of course, I know that. But if you open your shop----!'
'All the same, you might compromise. You might give the customers the
things they need, as it is written, "Open thy hand to the needy!" but
they could pay on Saturday night.'
'And if they didn't pay? If they drank their money away?' said the
pawnbroker.
'True, but why couldn't they pay in advance?'
'How in advance?'
'They could deposit a sum of money with you, and draw against it.'
'Not with me!' Peleg made a grimace. 'All very well for your line, but
in mine I should have to deposit a sum of money with _them_. I don't
suppose they'd bring their pledges on Friday night, and wait till
Saturday night for the money. Besides, how could one remember? One
would have to profane the Sabbath by writing!'
'Write! Heaven forbid!' ejaculated Solomon Barzinsky. 'But you could
have a system of marking the amounts against their names in your
register. A pin could be stuck in to represent a pound, or a stamp
stuck on to indicate a crown. There are lots of ways. One could always
give one's self a device,' he concluded in Yiddish.
'But it is written in Job, "He disappointeth the devices of the
crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise." Have a
little of Job's patience, and trust the Lord to confound the sinner.
We shall yet see Simeon Samuels in the Bankruptcy Court.'
'I hope not, the rogue! I'd like to see him ruined!'
'That's what I mean. Leave him to the Lord.'
'The Lord is too long-suffering,' said Solomon. 'Ah, our _Parnass_ has
caught us up. Good _Shabbos_ (Sabbath), _Parnass_. This is a fine
scandal for a God-fearing congregation. I congratulate you.'
'Is he open again?' gasped the _Parnass_, hurled from his judicial
calm.
'Is my eye open?' witheringly retorted Barzinsky. 'A fat lot of good
your preacher does.'
'It was you who would elect him instead of Rochinsky,' the _Parnass_
reminded him. Barzinsky was taken aback.
'Well, we don't want foreigners, do we?' he murmured.
'And you caught an Englishman in Simeon Samuels,' chuckled the
_Parnass_, in whose breast the defeat of his candidate had never
ceased to rankle.
'Not he. An Englishman plays fair,' retorted Barzinsky. He seriously
considered himself a Briton, regarding his naturalization papers as
retrospective. 'We are just passing the Reverend Gabriel's house,' he
went on. 'Let us wait a moment; he'll come along, and we'll give him a
piece of our minds.'
'I can't keep my family waiting for _Kiddush'_ (home service), said
Peleg.
'Come home, father; I'm hungry,' put in Peleg junior, who with various
Barzinsky boys had been trailing in the parental wake.
'Silence, impudent face!' snapped Barzinsky. 'If I was your
father----Ah, here comes the minister. Good _Shabbos_ (Sabbath), Mr.
Gabriel. I congratulate you on the effect of your last sermon.'
An exultant light leapt into the minister's eye. 'Is he shut?'
'Is your mouth shut?' Solomon replied scathingly. 'I doubt if he'll
even come to _Shool_ (synagogue) to-morrow.'
The ministerial mouth remained open in a fishy gasp, but no words came
from it.
'I'm afraid you'll have to use stronger language, Mr. Gabriel,' said
the _Parnass_ soothingly.
'But if he is not there to hear it.'
'Oh, don't listen to Barzinsky. He'll be there right enough. Just give
it to him hot!'
'Your sermon was too general,' added Peleg, who had lingered, though
his son had not. 'You might have meant any of us.'
'But we must not shame our brother in public,' urged the minister. 'It
is written in the Talmud that he who does so has no share in the world
to come.'
'Well, you shamed us all,' retorted Barzinsky. 'A stranger would
imagine we were a congregation of Sabbath-breakers.'
'But there wasn't any stranger,' said the minister.
'There was Simeon Samuels,' the _Parnass_ reminded him. 'Perhaps your
sermon against Sabbath-breaking made him fancy he was just one of a
crowd, and that you have therefore only hardened him----'
'But you told me to preach against Sabbath-breaking,' said the poor
minister.
'Against the Sabbath-breaker,' corrected the _Parnass_.
'You didn't single him out,' added Barzinsky; 'you didn't even make it
clear that Joseph wasn't myself.'
'I said Joseph was a goodly person and well-favoured,' retorted the
goaded minister.
The _Parnass_ took snuff, and his sneeze sounded like a guffaw.
'Well, well,' he said more kindly, 'you must try again to-morrow.'
'I didn't undertake to preach every Saturday,' grumbled the minister,
growing bolder.
'As long as Simeon Samuels keeps open, you can't shut,' said Solomon
angrily.
'It's a duel between you,' added Peleg.
'And Simeon actually comes into to-morrow's _Sedrah_' (portion),
Barzinsky remembered exultantly. '"And took from them Simeon, and
bound him before their eyes." There's your very text. You'll pick out
Simeon from among us, and bind him to keep the Sabbath.'
'Or you can say Satan has taken Simeon and bound him,' added the
_Parnass_. 'You have a choice--yourself or Satan.'
'Perhaps you had better preach yourself, then,' said the minister
sullenly. 'I still can't see what that text has to do with
Sabbath-breaking.'
'It has as much to do with Sabbath-breaking as Potiphar's wife,'
shrieked Solomon Barzinsky.
VI
'"And Jacob their father said unto them, Me have ye bereaved. Joseph
is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin."'
As the word 'Simeon' came hissing from the preacher's lips, a
veritable thrill passed through the synagogue. Even Simeon Samuels
seemed shaken, for he readjusted his praying-shawl with a nervous
movement.
'My brethren, these words of Israel, the great forefather of our
tribes, are still ringing in our ears. To-day more than ever is Israel
crying. Joseph is not--our Holy Land is lost. Simeon is not--our Holy
Temple is razed to the ground. One thing only is left us--one blessing
with which the almighty father has blessed us--our Holy Sabbath. And
ye will take Benjamin.' The pathos of his accents melted every heart.
Tears rolled down many a feminine cheek. Simeon Samuels was seen to
blow his nose softly.
Thus successfully launched, the Rev. Elkan Gabriel proceeded to draw a
tender picture of the love between Israel and his Benjamin,
Sabbath--the one consolation of his exile, and he skilfully worked in
the subsequent verse: 'If mischief befall him by the way on which ye
go, then shall ye bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.'
Yes, it would be the destruction of Israel, he urged, if the Sabbath
decayed. Woe to those sons of Israel who dared to endanger Benjamin.
'From Reuben and _Simeon_ down to Gad and Asher, his life shall be
required at their hands.' Oh, it was a red-hot-cannon-ball-firing
sermon, and Solomon Barzinsky could not resist leaning across and
whispering to the _Parnass_: 'Wasn't I right in refusing to vote for
Rochinsky?' This reminder of his candidate's defeat was wormwood to
the _Parnass_, spoiling all his satisfaction in the sermon. He rebuked
the talker with a noisy '_Shaa_' (silence).
The congregation shrank delicately from looking at the sinner; it
would be too painful to watch his wriggles. His neighbours stared
pointedly every other way. Thus, the only record of his deportment
under fire came from Yankele, the poor glazier's boy, who said that he
kept looking from face to face, as if to mark the effect on the
congregation, stroking his beard placidly the while. But as to his
behaviour after the guns were still, there was no dubiety, for
everybody saw him approach the _Parnass_ in the exodus from synagogue,
and many heard him say in hearty accents: 'I really must congratulate
you, Mr. President, on your selection of your minister.'
VII
'You touched his heart so,' shrieked Solomon Barzinsky an hour later
to the Reverend Elkan Gabriel, 'that he went straight from _Shool_
(synagogue) to his shop.' Solomon had rushed out the first thing after
breakfast, risking the digestion of his Sabbath fish, to call upon the
unsuccessful minister.
'That is not my fault,' said the preacher, crestfallen.
'Yes, it is--if you had only stuck to _my_ text. But no! You must set
yourself up over all our heads.'
'You told me to get in Simeon, and I obeyed.'
'Yes, you got him in. But what did you call him? The Holy Temple! A
fine thing, upon my soul!'
'It was only an--an--analogy,' stammered the poor minister.
'An apology! Oh, so you apologized to him, too! Better and better.'
'No, no, I mean a comparison.'
'A comparison! You never compared me to the Holy Temple. And I'm
Solomon--Solomon who built it.'
'Solomon was wise,' murmured the minister.
'Oh, and I'm silly. If I were you, Mr. Gabriel, I'd remember my place
and who I owed it to. But for me, Rochinsky would have stood in your
shoes----'
'Rochinsky is lucky.'
'Oh, indeed! So this is your gratitude. Very well. Either Simeon
Samuels shuts up shop or you do. That's final. Don't forget you were
only elected for three years.' And the little man flung out.
The _Parnass_, meeting his minister later in the street, took a
similar view.
'You really must preach again next Sabbath,' he said. 'The
congregation is terribly wrought up. There may even be a riot. If
Simeon Samuels keeps open next Sabbath, I can't answer that they won't
go and break his windows.'
'Then _they_ will break the Sabbath.'
'Oh, they may wait till the Sabbath is out.'
'They'll be too busy opening their own shops.'
'Don't argue. You _must_ preach his shop shut.'
'Very well,' said the Reverend Gabriel sullenly.
'That's right. A man with a family must rise to great occasions. Do
you think I'
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