Sugarman theShadchanarrived one evening a few days before Purim at the tiny two-storied house in which Esther's teacher lived, with little Nehemiah tucked under his arm. Nehemiah wore shoes and short red socks. The rest of his legs was bare. Sugarman always carried him so as to demonstrate this fact. Sugarman himself was rigged out in a handsome manner, and the day not being holy, his blue bandanna peeped out from his left coat-tail, instead of being tied round his trouser band.
"Good morning, marm," he said cheerfully.
"Good morning, Sugarman," said Mrs. Hyams.
She was a little careworn old woman of sixty with white hair. Had she been more pious her hair would never have turned gray. But Miriam had long since put her veto on her mother's black wig. Mrs. Hyams was a meek, weak person and submitted in silence to the outrage on her deepest instincts. Old Hyams was stronger, but not strong enough. He, too, was a silent person.
"P'raps you're surprised," said Sugarman, "to get a call from me in my sealskin vest-coat. But de fact is, marm, I put it on to call on a lady. I only dropped in here on my vay."
"Won't you take a chair?" said Mrs. Hyams. She spoke English painfully and slowly, having been schooled by Miriam.
"No, I'm not tired. But I vill put Nechemyah down on one, if you permit. Dere! Sit still or Ipotchyou! P'raps you could lend me your corkscrew."
"With pleasure," said Mrs. Hyams.
"I dank you. You see my boy, Ebenezer, isBarmitzvahnextShabbosa veek, and I may not be passing again. You vill come?"
"I don't know," said Mrs. Hyams hesitatingly. She was not certain whether Miriam considered Sugarman on their visiting list.
"Don't say dat, I expect to open dirteen bottles of lemonade! You must come, you and Mr. Hyams and the whole family."
"Thank you. I will tell Miriam and Daniel and my husband."
"Dat's right. Nechemyah, don't dance on de good lady's chair. Did you hear, Mrs. Hyams, of Mrs. Jonas's luck?"
"No."
"I won her eleven pounds on the lotter_ee_."
"How nice," said Mrs. Hyams, a little fluttered.
"I would let you have half a ticket for two pounds."
"I haven't the money."
"Vell, dirty-six shillings! Dere! I have to pay dat myself."
"I would if I could, but I can't."
"But you can have an eighth for nine shillings."
Mrs. Hyams shook her head hopelessly.
"How is your son Daniel?" Sugarman asked.
"Pretty well, thank you. How is your wife?"
"Tank Gawd!"
"And your Bessie?"
"Tank Gawd! Is your Daniel in?"
"Yes."
"Tank Gawd! I mean, can I see him?"
"It won't do any good."
"No, not dat," said Sugarman. "I should like to ask him to deConfirmation myself."
"Daniel!" called Mrs. Hyams.
He came from the back yard in rolled-up shirt-sleeves, soap-suds drying on his arms. He was a pleasant-faced, flaxen-haired young fellow, the junior of Miriam by eighteen months. There was will in the lower part of the face and tenderness in the eyes.
"Good morning, sir," said Sugarman. "My Ebenezer isBarmitzvahnextShabbosweek; vill you do me the honor to drop in wid your moder and fader afterShool?"
Daniel crimsoned suddenly. He had "No" on his lips, but suppressed it and ultimately articulated it in some polite periphrasis. His mother noticed the crimson. On a blonde face it tells.
"Don't say dat," said Sugarman. "I expect to open dirteen bottles of lemonade. I have lent your good moder's corkscrew."
"I shall be pleased to send Ebenezer a little present, but I can't come,I really can't. You must excuse me." Daniel turned away.
"Vell," said Sugarman, anxious to assure him he bore no malice. "If you send a present I reckon it de same as if you come."
"That's all right," said Daniel with strained heartiness.
Sugarman tucked Nehemiah under his arm but lingered on the threshold. He did not know how to broach the subject. But the inspiration came.
"Do you know I have summonsed Morris Kerlinski?"
"No," said Daniel. "What for?"
"He owes me dirty shillings. I found him a very fine maiden, but, now he is married, he says it was only worth a suvran. He offered it me but I vouldn't take it. A poor man he vas, too, and got ten pun from a marriage portion society."
"Is it worth while bringing a scandal on the community for the sake of ten shillings? It will be in all the papers, andShadchanwill be spelt shatcan, shodkin, shatkin, chodcan, shotgun, and goodness knows what else."
"Yes, but it isn't ten shillings," said Sugarman. "It's dirty shillings."
"But you say he offered you a sovereign."
"So he did. He arranged for two pun ten. I took the suvran—but not in full payment."
"You ought to settle it before the Beth-din," said Daniel vehemently, "or get some Jew to arbitrate. You make the Jews a laughing-stock. It is true all marriages depend on money," he added bitterly, "only it is the fashion of police court reporters to pretend the custom is limited to the Jews."
"Vell, I did go to Reb Shemuel," said Sugarman "I dought he'd be the very man to arbitrate."
"Why?" asked Daniel.
"Vy? Hasn't he been aShadchanhimself? From who else shall we look for sympaty?"
"I see," said Daniel smiling a little. "And apparently you got none."
"No," said Sugarman, growing wroth at the recollection. "He said ve are not in Poland."
"Quite true."
"Yes, but I gave him an answer he didn't like," said Sugarman. "I said, and ven ve are not in Poland mustn't ve keepnoneof our religion?"
His tone changed from indignation to insinuation.
"Vy vill you not let me getyoua vife, Mr. Hyams? I have several extra fine maidens in my eye. Come now, don't look so angry. How much commission vill you give me if I find you a maiden vid a hundred pound?"
"The maiden!" thundered Daniel. Then it dawned upon him that he had said a humorous thing and he laughed. There was merriment as well as mysticism in Daniel's blue eyes.
But Sugarman went away, down-hearted. Love is blind, and even marriage-brokers may be myopic. Most people not concerned knew that Daniel Hyams was "sweet on" Sugarman's Bessie. And it was so. Daniel loved Bessie, and Bessie loved Daniel. Only Bessie did not speak because she was a woman and Daniel did not speak because he was a man. They were a quiet family—the Hyamses. They all bore their crosses in a silence unbroken even at home. Miriam herself, the least reticent, did not give the impression that she could not have husbands for the winking. Her demands were so high—that was all. Daniel was proud of her and her position and her cleverness and was confident she would marry as well as she dressed. He did not expect her to contribute towards the expenses of the household—though she did—for he felt he had broad shoulders. He bore his father and mother on those shoulders, semi-invalids both. In the bold bad years of shameless poverty, Hyams had been a wandering metropolitan glazier, but this open degradation became intolerable as Miriam's prospects improved. It was partly for her sake that Daniel ultimately supported his parents in idleness and refrained from speaking to Bessie. For he was only an employé in a fancy-goods warehouse, and on forty-five shillings a week you cannot keep up two respectable establishments.
Bessie was a bonnie girl and could not in the nature of things be long uncaught. There was a certain night on which Daniel did not sleep—hardly a white night as our French neighbors say; a tear-stained night rather. In the morning he was resolved to deny himself Bessie. Peace would be his instead. If it did not come immediately he knew it was on the way. For once before he had struggled and been so rewarded. That was in his eighteenth year when he awoke to the glories of free thought, and knew himself a victim to the Moloch of the Sabbath, to which fathers sacrifice their children. The proprietor of the fancy goods was a Jew, and moreover closed on Saturdays. But for this anachronism of keeping Saturday holy when you had Sunday also to laze on, Daniel felt a hundred higher careers would have been open to him. Later, when free thought waned (it was after Daniel had met Bessie), although he never returned to his father's narrowness, he found the abhorred Sabbath sanctifying his life. It made life a conscious voluntary sacrifice to an ideal, and the reward was a touch of consecration once a week. Daniel could not have described these things, nor did he speak of them, which was a pity. Once and once only in the ferment of free thought he had uncorked his soul, and it had run over with much froth, and thenceforward old Mendel Hyams and Beenah, his wife, opposed more furrowed foreheads to a world too strong for them. If Daniel had taken back his words and told them he was happier for the ruin they had made of his prospects, their gait might not have been so listless. But he was a silent man.
"You will go to Sugarman's, mother," he said now. "You and father. Don't mind that I'm not going. I have another appointment for the afternoon."
It was a superfluous lie for so silent a man.
"He doesn't like to be seen with us," Beenah Hyams thought. But she was silent.
"He has never forgiven my putting him to the fancy goods," thoughtMendel Hyams when told. But he was silent.
It was of no good discussing it with his wife. Those two had rather halved their joys than their sorrows. They had been married forty years and had never had an intimate moment. Their marriage had been a matter of contract. Forty years ago, in Poland, Mendel Hyams had awoke one morning to find a face he had never seen before on the pillow beside his. Not even on the wedding-day had he been allowed a glimpse of his bride's countenance. That was the custom of the country and the time. Beenah bore her husband four children, of whom the elder two died; but the marriage did not beget affection, often the inverse offspring of such unions. Beenah was a dutiful housewife and Mendel Hyams supported her faithfully so long as his children would let him. Love never flew out of the window for he was never in the house. They did not talk to each other much. Beenah did the housework unaided by the sprig of a servant who was engaged to satisfy the neighbors. In his enforced idleness Mendel fell back on his religion, almost a profession in itself. They were a silent couple.
At sixty there is not much chance of a forty year old silence being broken on this side of the grave. So far as his personal happiness was concerned, Mendel had only one hope left in the world—to die in Jerusalem. His feeling for Jerusalem was unique. All the hunted Jew in him combined with all the battered man to transfigure Zion with the splendor of sacred dreams and girdle it with the rainbows that are builded of bitter tears. And with it all a dread that if he were buried elsewhere, when the last trump sounded he would have to roll under the earth and under the sea to Jerusalem, the rendezvous of resurrection.
Every year at the Passover table he gave his hope voice: "Next year in Jerusalem." In her deepest soul Miriam echoed this wish of his. She felt she could like him better at a distance. Beenah Hyams had only one hope left in the world—to die.
Sam Levine duly returned for the Purim ball. Malka was away and so it was safe to arrive on the Sabbath. Sam and Leah called for Hannah in a cab, for the pavements were unfavorable to dancing shoes, and the three drove to the "Club," which was not a sixth of a mile off.
"The Club" was the People's Palace of the Ghetto; but that it did not reach the bed-rock of the inhabitants was sufficiently evident from the fact that its language was English. The very lowest stratum was of secondary formation—the children of immigrants—while the highest touched the lower middle-class, on the mere fringes of the Ghetto. It was a happy place where young men and maidens met on equal terms and similar subscriptions, where billiards and flirtations and concerts and laughter and gay gossip were always on, and lemonade and cakes never off; a heaven where marriages were made, books borrowed and newspapers read. Muscular Judaism was well to the fore at "the Club," and entertainments were frequent. The middle classes of the community, overflowing with artistic instinct, supplied a phenomenal number of reciters, vocalists and instrumentalists ready to oblige, and the greatest favorites of the London footlights were pleased to come down, partly because they found such keenly appreciative audiences, and partly because they were so much mixed up with the race, both professionally and socially. There were serious lectures now and again, but few of the members took them seriously; they came to the Club not to improve their minds but to relax them. The Club was a blessing without disguise to the daughters of Judah, and certainly kept their brothers from harm. The ball-room, with its decorations of evergreens and winter blossoms, was a gay sight. Most of the dancers were in evening dress, and it would have been impossible to tell the ball from a Belgravian gathering, except by the preponderance of youth and beauty. Where could you match such a bevy of brunettes, where find such blondes? They were anything but lymphatic, these oriental blondes, if their eyes did not sparkle so intoxicatingly as those of the darker majority. The young men had carefully curled moustaches and ringlets oiled like the Assyrian bull, and figure-six noses, and studs glittering on their creamy shirt-fronts. How they did it on their wages was one of the many miracles of Jewish history. For socially and even in most cases financially they were only on the level of the Christian artisan. These young men in dress-coats were epitomes of one aspect of Jewish history. Not in every respect improvements on the "Sons of the Covenant," though; replacing the primitive manners and the piety of the foreign Jew by a veneer of cheap culture and a laxity of ceremonial observance. It was a merry party, almost like a family gathering, not merely because most of the dancers knew one another, but because "all Israel are brothers"—and sisters. They danced very buoyantly, not boisterously; the square dances symmetrically executed, every performer knowing his part; the waltzing full of rhythmic grace. When the music was popular they accompanied it on their voices. After supper their heels grew lighter, and the laughter and gossip louder, but never beyond the bounds of decorum. A few Dutch dancers tried to introduce the more gymnastic methods in vogue in their own clubs, where the kangaroo is dancing master, but the sentiment of the floor was against them. Hannah danced little, a voluntary wallflower, for she looked radiant in tussore silk, and there was an air of refinement about the slight, pretty girl that attracted the beaux of the Club. But she only gave a duty dance to Sam, and a waltz to Daniel Hyams, who had been brought by his sister, though he did not boast a swallow-tail to match her flowing draperies. Hannah caught a rather unamiable glance from pretty Bessie Sugarman, whom poor Daniel was trying hard not to see in the crush.
"Is your sister engaged yet?" Hannah asked, for want of something to say.
"You would know it if she was," said Daniel, looking so troubled thatHannah reproached herself for the meaningless remark.
"How well she dances!" she made haste to say.
"Not better than you," said Daniel, gallantly.
"I see compliments are among the fancy goods you deal in. Do you reverse?" she added, as they came to an awkward corner.
"Yes—but not my compliments," he said smiling. "Miriam taught me."
"She makes me think of Miriam dancing by the Red Sea," she said, laughing at the incongruous idea.
"She played a timbrel, though, didn't she?" he asked. "I confess I don't quite know what a timbrel is."
"A sort of tambourine, I suppose," said Hannah merrily, "and she sang because the children of Israel were saved."
They both laughed heartily, but when the waltz was over they returned to their individual gloom. Towards supper-time, in the middle of a square dance, Sam suddenly noticing Hannah's solitude, brought her a tall bronzed gentlemanly young man in a frock coat, mumbled an introduction and rushed back to the arms of the exacting Leah.
"Excuse me, I am not dancing to-night," Hannah said coldly in reply to the stranger's demand for her programme.
"Well, I'm not half sorry," he said, with a frank smile. "I had to ask you, you know. But I should feel quite out of place bumping such a lot of swells."
There was something unusual about the words and the manner which impressed Hannah agreeably, in spite of herself. Her face relaxed a little as she said:
"Why, haven't you been to one of these affairs before?"
"Oh yes, six or seven years ago, but the place seems quite altered. They've rebuilt it, haven't they? Very few of us sported dress-coats here in the days before I went to the Cape. I only came back the other day and somebody gave me a ticket and so I've looked in for auld lang syne."
An unsympathetic hearer would have detected a note of condescension in the last sentence. Hannah detected it, for the announcement that the young man had returned from the Cape froze all her nascent sympathy. She was turned to ice again. Hannah knew him well—the young man from the Cape. He was a higher and more disagreeable development of the young man in the dress-coat. He had put South African money in his purse—whether honestly or not, no one inquired—the fact remained he had put it in his purse. Sometimes the law confiscated it, pretending he had purchased diamonds illegally, or what not, but then the young man didnotreturn from the Cape. But, to do him justice, the secret of his success was less dishonesty than the opportunities for initiative energy in unexploited districts. Besides, not having to keep up appearances, he descended to menial occupations and toiled so long and terribly that he would probably have made just as much money at home, if he had had the courage. Be this as it may, there the money was, and, armed with it, the young man set sail literally for England, home and beauty, resuming his cast-off gentility with several extra layers of superciliousness. Pretty Jewesses, pranked in their prettiest clothes, hastened, metaphorically speaking, to the port to welcome the wanderer; for they knew it was from among them he would make his pick. There were several varieties of him—marked by financial ciphers—but whether he married in his old station or higher up the scale, he was always faithful to the sectarian tradition of the race, and this less from religious motives than from hereditary instinct. Like the young man in the dress-coat, he held the Christian girl to be cold of heart, and unsprightly of temperament. He laid it down that all Yiddishë girls possessed that warmth andchicwhich, among Christians, were the birthright of a few actresses and music-hall artistes—themselves, probably, Jewesses! And on things theatrical this young man spoke as one having authority. Perhaps, though he was scarce conscious of it, at the bottom of his repulsion was the certainty that the Christian girl could not fry fish. She might be delightful for flirtation of all degrees, but had not been formed to make him permanently happy. Such was the conception which Hannah had formed for herself of the young man from the Cape. This latest specimen of the genus was prepossessing into the bargain. There was no denying he was well built, with a shapely head and a lovely moustache. Good looks alone were vouchers for insolence and conceit, but, backed by the aforesaid purse—! She turned her head away and stared at the evolutions of the "Lancers" with much interest.
"They've got some pretty girls in that set," he observed admiringly.Evidently the young man did not intend to go away.
Hannah felt very annoyed. "Yes," she said, sharply, "which would you like?"
"I shouldn't care to make invidious distinctions," he replied with a little laugh.
"Odious prig!" thought Hannah. "He actually doesn't see I'm sitting on him!" Aloud she said, "No? But you can't marry them all."
"Why should I marry any?" he asked in the same light tone, though there was a shade of surprise in it.
"Haven't you come back to England to get a wife? Most young men do, when they don't have one exported to them in Africa."
He laughed with genuine enjoyment and strove to catch the answering gleam in her eyes, but she kept them averted. They were standing with their backs to the wall and he could only see the profile and note the graceful poise of the head upon the warm-colored neck that stood out against the white bodice. The frank ring of his laughter mixed with the merry jingle of the fifth figure—
"Well, I'm afraid I'm going to be an exception," he said.
"You think nobody good enough, perhaps," she could not help saying.
"Oh! Why should you think that?"
"Perhaps you're married already."
"Oh no, I'm not," he said earnestly. "You're not, either, are you?"
"Me?" she asked; then, with a barely perceptible pause, she said, "Of course I am."
The thought of posing as the married woman she theoretically was, flashed upon her suddenly and appealed irresistibly to her sense of fun. The recollection that the nature of the ring on her finger was concealed by her glove afforded her supplementary amusement.
"Oh!" was all he said. "I didn't catch your name exactly."
"I didn't catch yours," she replied evasively.
"David Brandon," he said readily.
"It's a pretty name," she said, turning smilingly to him. The infinite possibilities of making fun of him latent in the joke quite warmed her towards him. "How unfortunate for me I have destroyed my chance of getting it."
It was the first time she had smiled, and he liked the play of light round the curves of her mouth, amid the shadows of the soft dark skin, in the black depths of the eyes.
"How unfortunate for me!" he said, smiling in return.
"Oh yes, of course!" she said with a little toss of her head. "There is no danger in saying that now."
"I wouldn't care if there was."
"It is easy to smooth down the serpent when the fangs are drawn," she laughed back.
"What an extraordinary comparison!" he exclaimed. "But where are all the people going? It isn't all over, I hope."
"Why, what do you want to stay for? You're not dancing."
"That is the reason. Unless I dance with you."
"And then you would want to go?" she flashed with mock resentment.
"I see you're too sharp for me," he said lugubriously. "Roughing it among the Boers makes a fellow a bit dull in compliments."
"Dull indeed!" said Hannah, drawing herself up with great seriousness. "I think you're more complimentary than you have a right to be to a married woman."
His face fell. "Oh, I didn't mean anything," he said apologetically.
"So I thought," retorted Hannah.
The poor fellow grew more red and confused than ever. Hannah felt quite sympathetic with him now, so pleased was she at the humiliated condition to which she had brought the young man from the Cape.
"Well, I'll say good-bye," he said awkwardly. "I suppose I mustn't ask to take you down to supper. I dare say your husband will want that privilege."
"I dare say," replied Hannah smiling. "Although husbands do not always appreciate their privileges."
"I shall be glad if yours doesn't," he burst forth.
"Thank you for your good wishes for my domestic happiness," she said severely.
"Oh, why will you misconstrue everything I say?" he pleaded. "You must think me an awfulSchlemihl, putting my foot into it so often. Anyhow I hope I shall meet you again somewhere."
"The world is very small," she reminded him.
"I wish I knew your husband," he said ruefully.
"Why?" said Hannah, innocently.
"Because I could call on him," he replied, smiling.
"Well, you do know him," she could not help saying.
"Do I? Who is it? I don't think I do," he exclaimed.
"Well, considering he introduced you to me!"
"Sam!" cried David startled.
"Yes."
"But—" said David, half incredulously, half in surprise. He certainly had never credited Sam with the wisdom to select or the merit to deserve a wife like this.
"But what?" asked Hannah with charmingnaïveté.
"He said—I—I—at least I think he said—I—I—understood that he introduced me to Miss Solomon, as his intended wife."
Solomon was the name of Malka's first husband, and so of Leah.
"Quite right," said Hannah simply.
"Then—what—how?" he stammered.
"Shewashis intended wife," explained Hannah as if she were telling the most natural thing in the world. "Before he married me, you know."
"I—I beg your pardon if I seemed to doubt you. I really thought you were joking."
"Why, what made you think so?"
"Well," he blurted out. "He didn't mention he was married, and seeing him dancing with her the whole time—"
"I suppose he thinks he owes her some attention," said Hannah indifferently. "By way of compensation probably. I shouldn't be at all surprised if he takes her down to supper instead of me."
"There he is, struggling towards the buffet. Yes, he has her on his arm."
"You speak as if she were his phylacteries," said Hannah, smiling. "It would be a pity to disturb them. So, if you like, you can have me on your arm, as you put it."
The young man's face lit up with pleasure, the keener that it was unexpected.
"I am very glad to have such phylacteries on my arm, as you put it," he responded. "I fancy I should be a good dealfroomerif my phylacteries were like that."
"What, aren't youfrooms?" she said, as they joined the hungry procession in which she noted Bessie Sugarman on the arm of Daniel Hyams.
"No, I'm a regular wrong'un," he replied. "As for phylacteries, I almost forget how to lay them."
"Thatisbad," she admitted, though he could not ascertain her own point of view from the tone.
"Well, everybody else is just as bad," he said cheerfully. "All the old piety seems to be breaking down. It's Purim, but how many of us have been to hear the—the what do you call it?—theMegillahread? There is actually a minister here to-night bare-headed. And how many of us are going to wash our hands before supper orbenshafterwards, I should like to know. Why, it's as much as can be expected if the food'skosher, and there's no ham sandwiches on the dishes. Lord! how my old dad, God rest his soul, would have been horrified by such a party as this!"
"Yes, it's wonderful how ashamed Jews are of their religion outside a synagogue!" said Hannah musingly. "Myfather, if he were here, would put on his hat after supper andbensh, though there wasn't another man in the room to follow his example."
"And I should admire him for it," said David, earnestly, "though I admit I shouldn't follow his example myself. I suppose he's one of the old school."
"He is Reb Shemuel," said Hannah, with dignity.
"Oh, indeed!" he exclaimed, not without surprise, "I know him well. He used to bless me when I was a boy, and it used to cost him a halfpenny a time. Such a jolly fellow!"
"I'm so glad you think so," said Hannah flushing with pleasure.
"Of course I do. Does he still have all thoseGreenerscoming to ask him questions?"
"Oh, yes. Their piety is just the same as ever."
"They're poor," observed David. "It's always those poorest in worldly goods who are richest in religion."
"Well, isn't that a compensation?" returned Hannah, with a little sigh. "But from my father's point of view, the truth is rather that those who have most pecuniary difficulties have most religious difficulties."
"Ah, I suppose they come to your father as much to solve the first as the second."
"Father is very good," she said simply.
They had by this time obtained something to eat, and for a minute or so the dialogue became merely dietary.
"Do you know," he said in the course of the meal, "I feel I ought not to have told you what a wicked person I am? I put my foot into it there, too."
"No, why?"
"Because you are Reb Shemuel's daughter."
"Oh, what nonsense! I like to hear people speak their minds. Besides, you mustn't fancy I'm asfroomas my father."
"I don't fancy that. Not quite," he laughed. "I know there's some blessed old law or other by which women haven't got the same chance of distinguishing themselves that way as men. I have a vague recollection of saying a prayer thanking God for not having made me a woman."
"Ah, that must have been a long time ago," she said slyly.
"Yes, when I was a boy," he admitted. Then the oddity of the premature thanksgiving struck them both and they laughed.
"You've got a different form provided for you, haven't you?" he said.
"Yes, I have to thank God for having made me according to His will."
"You don't seem satisfied for all that," he said, struck by something in the way she said it.
"How can a woman be satisfied?" she asked, looking up frankly. "She has no voice in her destinies. She must shut her eyes and open her mouth and swallow what it pleases God to send her."
"All right, shut your eyes," he said, and putting his hand over them he gave her a titbit and restored the conversation to a more flippant level.
"You mustn't do that," she said. "Suppose my husband were to see you."
"Oh, bother!" he said. "I don't know why it is, but I don't seem to realize you're a married woman."
"Am I playing the part so badly as all that?"
"Is it a part?" he cried eagerly.
She shook her head. His face fell again. She could hardly fail to note the change.
"No, it's a stern reality," she said. "I wish it wasn't."
It seemed a bold confession, but it was easy to understand. Sam had been an old school-fellow of his, and David had not thought highly of him. He was silent a moment.
"Are you not happy?" he said gently.
"Not in my marriage."
"Sam must be a regular brute!" he cried indignantly. "He doesn't know how to treat you. He ought to have his head punched the way he's going on with that fat thing in red."
"Oh, don't run her down," said Hannah, struggling to repress her emotions, which were not purely of laughter. "She's my dearest friend."
"They always are," said David oracularly. "But how came you to marry him?"
"Accident," she said indifferently.
"Accident!" he repeated, open-eyed.
"Ah, well, it doesn't matter," said Hannah, meditatively conveying a spoonful of trifle to her mouth. "I shall be divorced from him to-morrow. Be careful! You nearly broke that plate."
David stared at her, open-mouthed.
"Going to be divorced from him to-morrow?"
"Yes, is there anything odd about it?"
"Oh," he said, after staring at her impassive face for a full minute."Now I'm sure you've been making fun of me all along."
"My dear Mr. Brandon, why will you persist in making me out a liar?"
He was forced to apologize again and became such a model of perplexity and embarrassment that Hannah's gravity broke down at last and her merry peal of laughter mingled with the clatter of plates and the hubbub of voices.
"I must take pity on you and enlighten you," she said, "but promise me it shall go no further. It's only our own little circle that knows about it and I don't want to be the laughing-stock of the Lane."
"Of course I will promise," he said eagerly.
She kept his curiosity on thequi viveto amuse herself a little longer, but ended by telling him all, amid frequent exclamations of surprise.
"Well, I never!" he said when it was over. "Fancy a religion in which only two per cent. of the people who profess it have ever heard of its laws. I suppose we're so mixed up with the English, that it never occurs to us we've got marriage laws of our own—like the Scotch. Anyhow I'm real glad and I congratulate you."
"On what?"
"On not being really married to Sam."
"Well, you're a nice friend of his, I must say. I don't congratulate myself, I can tell you."
"You don't?" he said in a disappointed tone.
She shook her head silently.
"Why not?" he inquired anxiously.
"Well, to tell the truth, this forced marriage was my only chance of getting a husband who wasn't pious. Don't look so puzzled. I wasn't shocked at your wickedness—you mustn't be at mine. You know there's such a lot of religion in our house that I thought if I ever did get married I'd like a change."
"Ha! ha! ha! So you're as the rest of us. Well, it's plucky of you to admit it."
"Don't see it. My living doesn't depend on religion, thank Heaven. Father's a saint, I know, but he swallows everything he sees in his books just as he swallows everything mother and I put before him in his plate—and in spite of it all—" She was about to mention Levi's shortcomings but checked herself in time. She had no right to unveil anybody's soul but her own and she didn't know why she was doing that.
"But you don't mean to say your father would forbid you to marry a man you cared for, just because he wasn'tfroom?"
"I'm sure he would."
"But that would be cruel."
"He wouldn't think so. He'd think he was saving my soul, and you must remember he can't imagine any one who has been taught to see its beauty not loving the yoke of the Law. He's the best father in the world—but when religion's concerned, the best-hearted of mankind are liable to become hard as stone. You don't know my father as I do. But apart from that, I wouldn't marry a man, myself, who might hurt my father's position. I should have to keep akosherhouse or look how people would talk!"
"And wouldn't you if you had your own way?"
"I don't know what I would do. It's so impossible, the idea of my having my own way. I think I should probably go in for a change, I'm so tired—so tired of this eternal ceremony. Always washing up plates and dishes. I dare say it's all for our good, but Iamso tired."
"Oh, I don't see much difficulty aboutKoshers. I always eatkoshermeat myself when I can get it, providing it's not so beastly tough as it has a knack of being. Of course it's absurd to expect a man to go without meat when he's travelling up country, just because it hasn't been killed with a knife instead of a pole-axe. Besides, don't we know well enough that the folks who are most particular about those sort of things don't mind swindling and setting their houses on fire and all manner of abominations? I wouldn't be a Christian for the world, but I should like to see a little more common-sense introduced into our religion; it ought to be more up to date. If ever I marry, I should like my wife to be a girl who wouldn't want to keep anything but the higher parts of Judaism. Not out of laziness, mind you, but out of conviction."
David stopped suddenly, surprised at his own sentiments, which he learned for the first time. However vaguely they might have been simmering in his brain, he could not honestly accuse himself of having ever bestowed any reflection on "the higher parts of Judaism" or even on the religious convictions apart from the racial aspects of his future wife. Could it be that Hannah's earnestness was infecting him?
"Oh, then youwouldmarry a Jewess!" said Hannah.
"Oh, of course," he said in astonishment. Then as he looked at her pretty, earnest face the amusing recollection that shewasmarried already came over him with a sort of shock, not wholly comical. There was a minute of silence, each pursuing a separate train of thought. Then David wound up, as if there had been no break, with an elliptical, "wouldn't you?"
Hannah shrugged her shoulders and elevated her eyebrows in a gesture that lacked her usual grace.
"Not if I had only to please myself," she added.
"Oh, come! Don't say that," he said anxiously. "I don't believe mixed marriages are a success. Really, I don't. Besides, look at the scandal!"
Again she shrugged her shoulders, defiantly this time.
"I don't suppose I shall ever get married," she said. "I never could marry a man father would approve of, so that a Christian would be no worse than an educated Jew."
David did not quite grasp the sentence; he was trying to, when Sam andLeah passed them. Sam winked in a friendly if not very refined manner.
"I see you two are getting on all right." he said.
"Good gracious!" said Hannah, starting up with a blush. "Everybody's going back. Theywillthink us greedy. What a pair of fools we are to have got into such serious conversation at a ball."
"Was it serious?" said David with a retrospective air. "Well, I never enjoyed a conversation so much in my life."
"You mean the supper," Hannah said lightly.
"Well, both. It's your fault that we don't behave more appropriately."
"How do you mean?"
"You won't dance."
"Do you want to?"
"Rather."
"I thought you were afraid of all the swells."
"Supper has given me courage."
"Oh, very well if you want to, that's to say if you really can waltz."
"Try me, only you must allow for my being out of practice. I didn't get many dances at the Cape, I can tell you."
"The Cape!" Hannah heard the words without making her usual grimace. She put her hand lightly on his shoulder, he encircled her waist with his arm and they surrendered themselves to the intoxication of the slow, voluptuous music.
The "Sons of the Covenant" sent no representatives to the club balls, wotting neither of waltzes nor of dress-coats, and preferring death to the embrace of a strange dancing woman. They were the congregation of which Mr. Belcovitch was President and their synagogue was the ground floor of No. 1 Royal Street—two large rooms knocked into one, and the rear partitioned off for the use of the bewigged, heavy-jawed women who might not sit with the men lest they should fascinate their thoughts away from things spiritual. Its furniture was bare benches, a raised platform with a reading desk in the centre and a wooden curtained ark at the end containing two parchment scrolls of the Law, each with a silver pointer and silver bells and pomegranates. The scrolls were in manuscript, for the printing-press has never yet sullied the sanctity of the synagogue editions of the Pentateuch. The room was badly ventilated and what little air there was was generally sucked up by a greedy company of wax candles, big and little, struck in brass holders. The back window gave on the yard and the contiguous cow-sheds, and "moos" mingled with the impassioned supplications of the worshippers, who came hither two and three times a day to batter the gates of heaven and to listen to sermons more exegetical than ethical. They dropped in, mostly in their work-a-day garments and grime, and rumbled and roared and chorused prayers with a zeal that shook the window-panes, and there was never lack ofminyan—the congregational quorum of ten. In the West End, synagogues are built to eke out the income of poorminyan-menor professional congregants; in the East End rooms are tricked up for prayer. This synagogue was all of luxury many of its Sons could boast. It was theirsalonand their lecture-hall. It supplied them not only with their religion but their art and letters, their politics and their public amusements. It was their home as well as the Almighty's, and on occasion they were familiar and even a little vulgar with Him. It was a place in which they could sit in their slippers, metaphorically that is; for though they frequently did so literally, it was by way of reverence, not ease. They enjoyed themselves in thisShoolof theirs; they shouted and skipped and shook and sang, they wailed and moaned; they clenched their fists and thumped their breasts and they were not least happy when they were crying. There is an apocryphal anecdote of one of them being in the act of taking a pinch of snuff when the "Confession" caught him unexpectedly.
"We have trespassed," he wailed mechanically, as he spasmodically put the snuff in his bosom and beat his nose with his clenched fist.
They prayed metaphysics, acrostics, angelology, Cabalah, history, exegetics, Talmudical controversies,menus, recipes, priestly prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful—like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen—a heterogeneous blend of historical strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor glittered and pitiful records of ancient persecution lay petrified. And the method of praying these things was equally complex and uncouth, equally the bond-slave of tradition; here a rising and there a bow, now three steps backwards and now a beating of the breast, this bit for the congregation and that for the minister, variants of a page, a word, a syllable, even a vowel, ready for every possible contingency. Their religious consciousness was largely a musical box—the thrill of the ram's horn, the cadenza of psalmic phrase, the jubilance of a festival "Amen" and the sobriety of a work-a-day "Amen," the Passover melodies and the Pentecost, the minor keys of Atonement and the hilarious rhapsodies of Rejoicing, the plain chant of the Law and the more ornate intonation of the Prophets—all this was known and loved and was far more important than the meaning of it all or its relation to their real lives; for page upon page was gabbled off at rates that could not be excelled by automata. But if they did not always know what they were saying they always meant it. If the service had been more intelligible it would have been less emotional and edifying. There was not a sentiment, however incomprehensible, for which they were not ready to die or to damn.
"All Israel are brethren," and indeed there was a strange antique clannishness about these "Sons of the Covenant" which in the modern world, where the ends of the ages meet, is Socialism. They prayed for one another while alive, visited one another's bedsides when sick, buried one another when dead. No mercenary hands poured the yolks of eggs over their dead faces and arrayed their corpses in their praying-shawls. No hired masses were said for the sick or the troubled, for the psalm-singing services of the "Sons of the Covenant" were always available for petitioning the Heavens, even though their brother had been arrested for buying stolen goods, and the service might be an invitation to Providence to compound a felony. Little charities of their own they had, too—a Sabbath Meal Society, and a Marriage Portion Society to buy the sticks for poor couples—and when a pauper countryman arrived from Poland, one of them boarded him and another lodged him and a third taught him a trade. Strange exotics in a land of prose carrying with them through the paven highways of London the odor of Continental Ghettos and bearing in their eyes through all the shrewdness of their glances the eternal mysticism of the Orient, where God was born! Hawkers and peddlers, tailors and cigar-makers, cobblers and furriers, glaziers and cap-makers—this was in sum their life. To pray much and to work long, to beg a little and to cheat a little, to eat not over-much and to "drink" scarce at all, to beget annual children by chaste wives (disallowed them half the year), and to rear them not over-well, to study the Law and the Prophets and to reverence the Rabbinical tradition and the chaos of commentaries expounding it, to abase themselves before the "Life of Man" and Joseph Cam's "Prepared Table" as though the authors had presided at the foundation of the earth, to wear phylacteries and fringes, to keep the beard unshaven, and the corners of the hair uncut, to know no work on Sabbath and no rest on week-day. It was a series of recurrent landmarks, ritual and historical, of intimacy with God so continuous that they were in danger of forgetting His existence as of the air they breathed. They ate unleavened bread in Passover and blessed the moon and counted the days of theOmertill Pentecost saw the synagogue dressed with flowers in celebration of an Asiatic fruit harvest by a European people divorced from agriculture; they passed to the terrors and triumphs of the New Year (with its domestic symbolism of apple and honey and its procession to the river) and the revelry of repentance on the Great White Fast, when they burned long candles and whirled fowls round their heads and attired themselves in grave-clothes and saw from their seats in synagogue the long fast-day darken slowly into dusk, while God was sealing the decrees of life and death; they passed to Tabernacles when they ran up rough booths in back yards draped with their bed-sheets and covered with greenery, and bore through the streets citrons in boxes and a waving combination of myrtle, and palm and willow branches, wherewith they made a pleasant rustling in the synagogue; and thence to the Rejoicing of the Law when they danced and drank rum in the House of the Lord and scrambled sweets for the little ones, and made a sevenfold circuit with the two scrolls, supplemented by toy flags and children's candles stuck in hollow carrots; and then on again to Dedication with its celebration of the Maccabaean deliverance and the miracle of the unwaning oil in the Temple, and to Purim with its masquerading and its execration of Haman's name by the banging of little hammers; and so back to Passover. And with these larger cycles, epicycles of minor fasts and feasts, multiplex, not to be overlooked, from the fast of the ninth of Ab—fatal day for the race—when they sat on the ground in shrouds, and wailed for the destruction of Jerusalem, to the feast of the Great Hosannah when they whipped away willow-leaves on theShoolbenches in symbolism of forgiven sins, sitting up the whole of the night before in a long paroxysm of prayer mitigated by coffee and cakes; from the period in which nuts were prohibited to the period in which marriages were commended.
And each day, too, had its cycles of religious duty, its comprehensive and cumbrous ritual with accretions of commentary and tradition.
And every contingency of the individual life was equally provided for, and the writings that regulated all this complex ritual are a marvellous monument of the patience, piety and juristic genius of the race—and of the persecution which threw it back upon its sole treasure, the Law.
Thus they lived and died, these Sons of the Covenant, half-automata, sternly disciplined by voluntary and involuntary privation, hemmed and mewed in by iron walls of form and poverty, joyfully ground under the perpetual rotary wheel of ritualism, good-humored withal and casuistic like all people whose religion stands much upon ceremony; inasmuch as a ritual law comes to count one equally with a moral, and a man is not half bad who does three-fourths of his duty.
And so the stuffy room with its guttering candles and its Chameleon-colored ark-curtain was the pivot of their barren lives. Joy came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny bits to the Lord, prosperity came in a high hat to chaffer for the holy privileges, and grief came with rent garments to lament the beloved dead and glorify the name of the Eternal.
The poorest life is to itself the universe and all that therein is, and these humble products of a great and terrible past, strange fruits of a motley-flowering secular tree whose roots are in Canaan and whose boughs overshadow the earth, were all the happier for not knowing that the fulness of life was not theirs.
And the years went rolling on, and the children grew up and here and there a parent.
* * * * *
The elders of the synagogue were met in council.
"He is greater than a Prince," said the ShalottenShammos.
"If all the Princes of the Earth were put in one scale," said Mr. Belcovitch, "and ourMaggid, Moses, in the other, he would outweigh them all. He is worth a hundred of the Chief Rabbi of England, who has been seen bareheaded."
"From Moses to Moses there has been none like Moses," said old MendelHyams, interrupting the Yiddish with a Hebrew quotation.
"Oh no," said the ShalottenShammos, who was a great stickler for precision, being, as his nickname implied, a master of ceremonies. "I can't admit that. Look at my brother Nachmann."
There was a general laugh at the ShalottenShammos'sbull; the proverb dealing only with Moseses.
"He has the true gift," observedFroomKarlkammer, shaking the flames of his hair pensively. "For the letters of his name have the same numerical value as those of the great Moses da Leon."
FroomKarlkammer was listened to with respect, for he was an honorary member of the committee, who paid for two seats in a larger congregation and only worshipped with the Sons of the Covenant on special occasions. The ShalottenShammos, however, was of contradictory temperament—a born dissentient, upheld by a steady consciousness of highly superior English, the drop of bitter in Belcovitch's presidential cup. He was a long thin man, who towered above the congregation, and was as tall as the bulk of them even when he was bowing his acknowledgments to his Maker.
"How do you make that out?" he asked Karlkammer. "Moses of course adds up the same as Moses—but while the other part of theMaggid'sname makes seventy-three, da Leon's makes ninety-one."
"Ah, that's because you're ignorant ofGematriyah," said little Karlkammer, looking up contemptuously at the cantankerous giant. "You reckon all the letters on the same system, and you omit to give yourself the license of deleting the ciphers."
In philology it is well known that all consonants are interchangeable and vowels don't count; inGematriyahany letter may count for anything, and the total may be summed up anyhow.
Karlkammer was one of the curiosities of the Ghetto. In a land offroommen he was thefroomest. He had the very genius of fanaticism. On the Sabbath he spoke nothing but Hebrew whatever the inconvenience and however numerous the misunderstandings, and if he perchance paid a visit he would not perform the "work" of lifting the knocker. Of course he had his handkerchief girt round his waist to save him from carrying it, but this compromise being general was not characteristic of Karlkammer any more than his habit of wearing two gigantic sets of phylacteries where average piety was content with one of moderate size.
One of the walls of his room had an unpapered and unpainted scrap in mourning for the fall of Jerusalem. He walked through the streets to synagogue attired in his praying-shawl and phylacteries, and knocked three times at the door of God's house when he arrived. On the Day of Atonement he walked in his socks, though the heavens fell, wearing his grave-clothes. On this day he remained standing in synagogue from 6 A.M. to 7 P.M. with his body bent at an angle of ninety degrees; it was to give him bending space that he hired two seats. On Tabernacles, not having any ground whereon to erect a booth, by reason of living in an attic, he knocked a square hole in the ceiling, covered it with branches through which the free air of heaven played, and hung a quadrangle of sheets from roof to floor; he bore to synagogue the tallestLulavof palm-branches that could be procured and quarrelled with a rival pietist for the last place in the floral procession, as being the lowliest and meekest man in Israel—an ethical pedestal equally claimed by his rival. He insisted on bearing a corner of the biers of all the righteous dead. Almost every other day was a fast-day for Karlkammer, and he had a host of supplementary ceremonial observances which are not for the vulgar. Compared with him Moses Ansell and the ordinary "Sons of the Covenant" were mere heathens. He was a man of prodigious distorted mental activity. He had read omnivorously amid the vast stores of Hebrew literature, was a great authority on Cabalah, understood astronomy, and, still more, astrology, was strong on finance, and could argue coherently on any subject outside religion. His letters to the press on specifically Jewish subjects were the most hopeless, involved, incomprehensible and protracted puzzles ever penned, bristling with Hebrew quotations from the most varying, the most irrelevant and the most mutually incongruous sources and peppered with the dates of birth and death of every Rabbi mentioned.
No one had ever been known to follow one of these argumentations to the bitter end. They were written in good English modified by a few peculiar terms used in senses unsuspected by dictionary-makers; in a beautiful hand, with the t's uncrossed, but crowned with the side-stroke, so as to avoid the appearance of the symbol of Christianity, and with the dates expressed according to the Hebrew Calendar, for Karlkammer refused to recognize the chronology of the Christian. He made three copies of every letter, and each was exactly like the others in every word and every line. His bill for midnight oil must have been extraordinary, for he was a business man and had to earn his living by day. Kept within the limits of sanity by a religion without apocalyptic visions, he was saved from predicting the end of the world by mystic calculations, but he used them to prove everything else and fervently believed that endless meanings were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its supersubtle significance. The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is alleged to have written Shakspeare's plays was mere child's play compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer's belief the Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi, and in inspiring the Talmud and the holier treasures of Hebrew literature. Nor were these ideas of his own origination. His was an eclectic philosophy and religionism, of which all the elements were discoverable in old Hebrew books: scraps of Alexandrian philosophy inextricably blent with Aristotelian, Platonic, mystic.
He kept up a copious correspondence with scholars in other countries and was universally esteemed and pitied.
"We haven't come to discuss the figures of theMaggid'sname, but of his salary." said Mr. Belcovitch, who prided himself on his capacity for conducting public business.
"I have examined the finances," said Karlkammer, "and I don't see how we can possibly put aside more for our preacher than the pound a week."
"But he is not satisfied," said Mr. Belcovitch.
"I don't see why he shouldn't be," said the ShalottenShammos. "A pound a week is luxury for a single man."
The Sons of the Covenant did not know that the poor consumptiveMaggidsent half his salary to his sisters in Poland to enable them to buy back their husbands from military service; also they had vague unexpressed ideas that he was not mortal, that Heaven would look after his larder, that if the worst came to the worst he could fall back on Cabalah and engage himself with the mysteries of food-creation.
"I have a wife and family to keep on a pound a week," grumbled Greenberg theChazan.
Besides being Reader, Greenberg blew the horn and killed cattle and circumcised male infants and educated children and discharged the functions of beadle and collector. He spent a great deal of his time in avoiding being drawn into the contending factions of the congregation and in steering equally between Belcovitch and the ShalottenShammos. The Sons only gave him fifty a year for all his trouble, but they eked it out by allowing him to be on the Committee, where on the question of a rise in the Reader's salary he was always an ineffective minority of one. His other grievance was that for the High Festivals the Sons temporarily engaged a finer voiced Reader and advertised him at raised prices to repay themselves out of the surplus congregation. Not only had Greenberg to play second fiddle on these grand occasions, but he had to iterate "Pom" as a sort of musical accompaniment in the pauses of his rival's vocalization.
"You can't compare yourself with theMaggid" the ShalottenShammosreminded him consolingly. "There are hundreds of you in the market. There are severalmorceauxof the service which you do not sing half so well as your predecessor; your horn-blowing cannot compete with Freedman's of the Fashion StreetChevrah, nor can you read the Law as quickly and accurately as Prochintski. I have told you over and over again you confound the air of the PassoverYigdalwith the New Year ditto. And then your preliminary flourish to the Confession of Sin—it goes 'Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei'" (he mimicked Greenberg's melody) "whereas it should be 'Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi.'"
"Oh no," interrupted Belcovitch. "All theChazanimI've ever heard do it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"
"You are not entitled to speak on this subject, Belcovitch," said the ShalottenShammoswarmly. "You are a Man-of-the-Earth. I have heard every greatChazanin Europe."
"What was good enough for my father is good enough for me," retorted Belcovitch. "TheShoolhe took me to at home had a beautifulChazan, and he always sang it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"
"I don't care what you heard at home. In England everyChazansings'Oi, Oi, Oi.'"
"We can't take our tune from England," said Karlkammer reprovingly. "England is a polluted country by reason of the Reformers whom we were compelled to excommunicate."
"Do you mean to say that my father was an Epicurean?" asked Belcovitch indignantly. "The tune was as Greenberg sings it. That there are impious Jews who pray bareheaded and sit in the synagogue side by side with the women has nothing to do with it."
The Reformers did neither of these things, but the Ghetto to a man believed they did, and it would have been countenancing their blasphemies to pay a visit to their synagogues and see. It was an extraordinary example of a myth flourishing in the teeth of the facts, and as such should be useful to historians sifting "the evidence of contemporary writers."
The dispute thickened; the synagogue hummed with "Eis" and "Ois" not in concord.
"Shah!" said the President at last. "Make an end, make an end!"
"You see he knows I'm right," murmured the ShalottenShammosto his circle.
"And if you are!" burst forth the impeached Greenberg, who had by this time thought of a retort. "And if I do sing the PassoverYigdalinstead of the New Year, have I not reason, seeing I haveno bread in the house? With my salary I have Passover all the year round."
TheChazan'ssally made a good impression on his audience if not on his salary. It was felt that he had a just grievance, and the conversation was hastily shifted to the original topic.
"We mustn't forget theMaggiddraws crowds here every Saturday and Sunday afternoon," said Mendel Hyams. "Suppose he goes over to aChevrahthat will pay him more!"
"No, he won't do that," said another of the Committee. "He will remember that we brought him out of Poland."
"Yes, but we shan't have room for the audiences soon," said Belcovitch. "There are so many outsiders turned away every time that I think we ought to let half the applicants enjoy the first two hours of the sermon and the other half the second two hours."
"No, no, that would be cruel," said Karlkammer. "He will have to give the Sunday sermons at least in a larger synagogue. My ownShool, the German, will be glad to give him facilities."
"But what if they want to take him altogether at a higher salary?" saidMendel.
"No, I'm on the Committee, I'll see to that," said Karlkammer reassuringly.
"Then do you think we shall tell him we can't afford to give him more?" asked Belcovitch.
There was a murmur of assent with a fainter mingling of dissent. The motion that theMaggid'sapplication be refused was put to the vote and carried by a large majority.
It was the fate of theMaggidto be the one subject on which Belcovitch and the ShalottenShammosagreed. They agreed as to his transcendent merits and they agreed as to the adequacy of his salary.
"But he's so weakly," protested Mendel Hyams, who was in the minority."He coughs blood."
"He ought to go to a sunny place for a week," said Belcovitch compassionately.
"Yes, he must certainly have that," said Karlkammer. "Let us add as a rider that although we cannot pay him more per week, he must have a week's holiday in the country. The ShalottenShammosshall write the letter to Rothschild."
Rothschild was a magic name in the Ghetto; it stood next to the Almighty's as a redresser of grievances and a friend of the poor, and the ShalottenShammosmade a large part of his income by writing letters to it. He charged twopence halfpenny per letter, for his English vocabulary was larger than any other scribe's in the Ghetto, and his words were as much longer than theirs as his body. He also filled up printed application forms for Soup or Passover cakes, and had a most artistic sense of the proportion of orphans permissible to widows and a correct instinct for the plausible duration of sicknesses.
The Committee agreednem. con.to the grant of a seaside holiday, and the ShalottenShammoswith a gratified feeling of importance waived his twopence halfpenny. He drew up a letter forthwith, not of course in the name of the Sons of the Covenant, but in theMaggid'sown.
He took the magniloquent sentences to theMaggidfor signature. He found theMaggidwalking up and down Royal Street waiting for the verdict. TheMaggidwalked with a stoop that was almost a permanent bow, so that his long black beard reached well towards his baggy knees. His curved eagle nose was grown thinner, his long coat shinier, his look more haggard, his corkscrew earlocks were more matted, and when he spoke his voice was a tone more raucous. He wore his high hat—a tall cylinder that reminded one of a weather-beaten turret.
The ShalottenShammosexplained briefly what he had done.
"May thy strength increase!" said theMaggidin the Hebrew formula of gratitude.
"Nay, thine is more important," replied the ShalottenShammoswith hilarious heartiness, and he proceeded to read the letter as they walked along together, giant and doubled-up wizard.
"But I haven't got a wife and six children," said theMaggid, for whom one or two phrases stood out intelligible. "My wife is dead and I never was blessed with aKaddish."
"It sounds better so," said the ShalottenShammosauthoritatively. "Preachers are expected to have heavy families dependent upon them. It would sound lies if I told the truth."
This was an argument after theMaggid'sown heart, but it did not quite convince him.
"But they will send and make inquiries," he murmured.
"Then your family are in Poland; you send your money over there."
"That is true," said theMaggidfeebly. "But still it likes me not."
"You leave it to me," said the ShalottenShammosimpressively. "A shamefaced man cannot learn, and a passionate man cannot teach. So said Hillel. When you are in the pulpit I listen to you; when I have my pen in hand, do you listen to me. As the proverb says, if I were a Rabbi the town would burn. But if you were a scribe the letter would burn. I don't pretend to be aMaggid, don't you set up to be a letter writer."