As he sat on his hard stool in the whitewashed workshop on the Bowery, clumsily pasting the flamboyant portrait on the boxes of the 'Yvonne Rupert cigar,' he wondered dully—after the first flush of joy at getting a job after weeks of hunger—at the strange fate that had again brought him into connection, however remote, with stageland. For even to Elkan Mandle, with his Ghetto purview, Yvonne Rupert's fame, both as a 'Parisian' star and the queen of American advertisers, had penetrated. Ever since she had summoned a Jewish florist for not paying her for the hundred and eleven bouquets with which a single week's engagement in vaudeville had enabled her to supply him, the journals had continued to paragraph her amusing, self-puffing adventures.
Not that there was much similarity between the New York star and his little actress of the humble Yiddish Theatre in London, save for that aureole of fluffy hair, which belonged rather to the genus than the individual. But as the great Yvonne's highly-coloured charms went on repeating themselves from every box-cover he manipulated (at seventy-five centsa hundred), the face of his own Gittel grew more and more vivid, till at last the whole splendid, shameful past began to rise up from its desolate tomb.
He even lived through that prologue in the Ghetto garret, when, as benevolent master-tailor receiving the highest class work from S. Cohn's in the Holloway Road, he was called upstairs to assist the penniless Polish immigrants.
There she sat, the witching she-devil, perched on the rickety table just contributed to the home, a piquant, dark-eyed, yet golden-haired, mite of eleven, calm and comparatively spruce amid the wailing litter of parents and children.
'Settle this among yourselves,' she seemed to be saying. 'When the chairs are here I will sit onthem; when the table is laid I will draw to; when the pious philanthropist provides the fire I will purr on the hearth.'
Ah,hehad come forward as the pious philanthropist—pious enough then, Heaven knew. Why had Satan thrown such lures in the way of the reputable employer, the treasurer of 'The Gates of Mercy' Synagogue, with children of his own, and the best wife in the world? Did he not pray every day to be delivered from theSatan Mekatrig? Had he not meant it for the best when he took her into his workshop? It was only when, at the age of sixteen, Gittel Goldstein left the whirring machine-room for the more lucrative and laurelled position of heroine of Goldwater's London Yiddish Theatre that he had discovered how this whimsical, coquettish creature had insinuated herself into his very being.
Ah, madness, madness! that flight with her toAmerica with all his savings, that desertion of his wife and children! But what delicious delirium that one year in New York, prodigal, reckless, ere, with the disappearance of his funds, she, too, disappeared. And now, here he was—after nigh seven apathetic years, in which the need of getting a living was the only spur to living on—glad to take a woman's place when female labour struck for five cents more a hundred. The old bitter tears came up to his eyes, blurring the cheerless scene, the shabby men and unlovely women with their red paste-pots, the medley of bare and coloured boxes, the long shelf of twine-balls. And as he wept, the vain salt drops moistened the pictures of Yvonne Rupert.
She became an obsession, this Franco-American singer and dancer, as he sat pasting and pasting, caressing her pictured face with sticky fingers. There were brief intervals of freedom from her image when he was 'edging' and 'backing,' or when he was lining the boxes with the plain paper; but Yvonne came twice on every box—once in large on the inside, once in small on the outside, with a gummed projection to be stuck down after the cigars were in. He fell to recalling what he had read of her—the convent education that had kept her chaste and distinguished beneath all her stage deviltry, the long Lenten fasts she endured (as brought to light by the fishmonger's bill she disputed in open court), the crucifix concealedupon her otherwise not too reticent person, the adorable French accent with which she enraptured the dudes, the palatial private car in which she traversed the States, with its little chapel giving on the bathroom; the swashbuckling Marquis de St. Roquière, who had crossed the Channel after her, and the maid he had once kidnapped in mistake for the mistress; the diamond necklace presented by the Rajah of Singapuri, stolen at a soirée in San Francisco, and found afterwards as single stones in a low 'hock-shop' in New Orleans.
And despite all this glitter of imposing images a subconscious thought was forcing itself more and more clearly to the surface of his mind. That aureole of golden hair, those piquant dark eyes! The Yvonne the cheap illustrated papers had made him familiar with had lacked this revelation of colour! But no, the idea was insane!
This scintillating celebrity his lost Gittel!
Bah! Misery had made him childish. Goldwater had, indeed, blossomed out since the days of his hired hall in Spitalfields, but his fame remained exclusively Yiddish and East-side. But Gittel!
How could that obscure rush-light of the London Ghetto Theatre have blazed into the Star of Paris and New York?
This Lent-keeping demoiselle the little Polish Jewess who had munched Passover cake at his table in the far-off happy days! This gilded idol the impecunious Gittel he had caressed!
'You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?' he inquired of his neighbour, a pock-marked, spectacled young woman, who, as record-breaker of the establishment,had refused to join the strike of the mere hundred-and-fifty a day.
The young woman swiftly drew a knife from the wooden pail beside her, and deftly scraped at a rough hinge as she replied: 'No, but I guess she's the actress who gets all the flowers, and won't pay for 'em.'
He saw she had mixed up the two lawsuits, but the description seemed to hit off his Gittel to the life. Yes, Gittel had always got all the flowers of life, and dodged paying. Ah, she had always been diabolically clever, unscrupulously ambitious! Who could put bounds to her achievement? She had used him and thrown him away—without a word, without a regret. She had washed her hands of him as light-heartedly as he washed his of the dirty, sticky day's paste. What other 'pious philanthropist' had she found to replace him? Whither had she fled? Why not to Paris that her theatric gifts might receive training?
This chic, this witchery, with which reputation credited her—had not Gittel possessed it all? Had not her heroines enchanted the Ghetto?
Oh, but this was a wild day-dream, insubstantial as the smoke-wreaths of the Yvonne Rupert cigar!
But the obsession persisted. In his miserable attic off Hester Street—that recalled the attic he had found her in, though it was many stories nearer the sky—he warmed himself with Gittel's image, smiling, light-darting, voluptuous. Night and sleep surrenderedhim to grotesque combinations—Gittel Goldstein smoking cigarettes in a bath-room, Yvonne Rupert playing Yiddish heroines in a little chapel.
In the clear morning these absurdities were forgotten in the realized absurdity of the initial identification. But a forenoon at the pasting-desk brought back the haunting thought. At noon he morbidly expended his lunch-dime on an 'Yvonne Rupert' cigar, and smoked it with a semi-insane feeling that he was repossessing his Gittel. Certainly it was delicious.
He wandered into the box-making room, where the man who tended the witty nail-driving machine was seated on a stack of Mexican cedar-wood, eating from a package of sausage and scrapple that sent sobering whiffs to the reckless smoker.
'You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?' he asked wistfully.
'Might as well ask if I'd smoked her cigar!' grumbled the nailer through his mouthfuls.
'But there's a gallery at Webster and Dixie's.'
'Su-er!'
'I guess I'll go some day, just for curiosity.'
But the great Yvonne, he found, was flaming in her provincial orbit. So he must needs wait.
Meantime, on a Saturday night, with a dirty two-dollar bill in his pocket, and jingling some odd cents, he lounged into the restaurant where the young Russian bloods assembled who wrote for the Yiddish Labour papers, and 'knew it all.' He would draw them out about Yvonne Rupert. He established himself near a table at which long-haired, long-fingered Freethinkers were drinking chocolate and discussing Lassalle.
'Ah, but the way he jumped on a table when only aschoolboy to protest against the master's injustice to one of his schoolfellows! How the divine fire flamed in him!'
They talked on, these clamorous sceptics, amplifying the Lassalle legend, broidering it with Messianic myths, with the same fantastic Oriental invention that had illuminated the plain Pentateuch with imaginative vignettes, and transfiguring the dry abstractions of Socialism with the same passionate personalization. He listened impatiently. He had never been caught by Socialism, even at his hungriest. He had once been an employer himself, and his point of view survived.
They talked of the woman through whom Lassalle had met his death. One of them had seen her on the American stage—a bouncing burlesque actress.
'Like Yvonne Rupert?' he ventured to interpose.
'Yvonne Rupert?' They laughed. 'Ah, if Yvonne had only had such a snap!' cried Melchitsedek Pinchas. 'To have jilted Lassalle and been died for! What an advertisement!'
'It would have been on the bill,' agreed the table.
He asked if they thought Yvonne Rupert clever.
'Off the stage! There's nothing to her on,' said Pinchas.
The table roared as if this were a good joke. 'I dare say she would play my Ophelia as well as Mrs. Goldwater,' Pinchas added zestfully.
'They say she has a Yiddish accent,' Elkan ventured again.
The table roared louder. 'I have heard of Yiddish-Deutsch,' cried Pinchas, 'never of Yiddish-Français!'
Elkan Mandle was frozen. By his disappointment he knew that he had been hoping to meet Gittel again—that his resentment was dead.
But the hope would not die. He studied the theatrical announcements, and when Yvonne Rupert once again flashed upon New York he set out to see her. But it struck him that the remote seat he could afford—for it would not do to spend a week's wage on the mere chance—would be too far off for precise identification, especially as she would probably be theatrically transmogrified. No, a wiser as well as a more economical plan would be to meet her at the stage-door, as he used to meet Gittel. He would hang about till she came.
It was a long ride to the Variety Theatre, and, the weather being sloppy, there was not even standing-room in the car, every foot of which, as it plunged and heaved ship-like through the watery night, was a suffocating jam of human beings, wedged on the seats, or clinging tightly to the overhead straps, or swarming like stuck flies on the fore and hind platforms, the squeeze and smell intensified by the shovings and writhings of damp passengers getting in and out, or by the desperate wriggling of the poor patient collector of fares boring his way through the very thick of the soldered mass. Elkan alighted with a headache, glad even of the cold rain that sprinkled his forehead. The shining carriages at the door of the theatre filled him for once with a bitter revolt. But he dared not insinuate himself among the white-wrapped, scented women and elegant cloaked men, though he itched to enter the portico and study the pictures of Yvonne Rupert, of which he caught a glimpse. He found hisway instead to the stage-door, and took up a position that afforded him a complete view of the comers and goers, if only partial shelter from the rain.
But the leaden hours passed without her, with endless fevers of expectation, heats followed by chills. The performers came and went, mostly on foot, and strange nondescript men and women passed too through the jealously-guarded door.
He was drenched to the skin with accumulated drippings ere a smart brougham drove up, a smart groom opened an umbrella, and a smart—an unimaginably smart—Gittel Goldstein alighted.
Yes, the incredible was true!
Beneath that coquettish veil, under the aureole of hair, gleamed the piquant eyes he had kissed so often.
He remained petrified an instant, dazed and staring. She passed through the door the groom held open. The doorkeeper, from his pigeon-hole, handed her some letters. Yes, he knew every trick of the shoulders, every turn of the neck. She stood surveying the envelopes. As the groom let the door swing back and turned away, he rushed forward and pushed it open again.
'Gittel!' he cried chokingly. 'Gittel!'
She turned with a quick jerk of the head, and in her flushed, startled face he read consciousness if not recognition. The reek of her old cherry-blossom smote from her costlier garments, kindling a thousand passionate memories.
'Knowest thou me not?' he cried in Yiddish.
In a flash her face, doubly veiled, was a haughty stare.
'Who is zis person?' she asked the doorkeeper in her charming French-English.
He reverted to English.
'I am Elkan, your own Elkan!'
Ah, the jostle of sweet and bitter memories. So near, so near again! The same warm seductive witch. He strove to take her daintily-gloved hand.
She shrank back shudderingly and thrust open the door that led to the dressing-rooms beside the stage.
'Ze man is mad, lunatic!' And she disappeared with that delicious shrug of the shoulders that had captivated the States.
Insensate fury overcame him. What! This creature who owed all this glory to his dragging her away from the London Ghetto Theatre, this heartless, brazen minx who had been glad to nestle in his arms, was to mock him like this, was to elude him again! He made a dash after her; the doorkeeper darted from his little room, but was hurled aside in a swift, mad tussle, and Elkan, after a blind, blood-red instant, found himself blinking and dripping in the centre of the stage, facinga great roaring audience, tier upon tier. Then he became aware of a pair of eccentric comedians whose scene he had interrupted, and who had not sufficient presence of mind to work him into it, so that the audience which had laughed at his headlong entrance now laughed the louder over its own mistake.
But its delightful moment of sensational suspense was brief. In a twinkling the doorkeeper's vengeful hands were on the intruder's collar.
'I want Yvonne Rupert!' shrieked Elkan struggling. 'She is mine—mine! She loved me once!'
A vaster wave of laughter swept back to him as he was hauled off, to be handed over to a policeman on a charge of brawling and assaulting the doorkeeper.
As he lay in his cell he chewed the cud of revenge. Yes, let them take him before the magistrate; it was not he that was afraid of justice. He would expose her, the false Catholic, the she-cat! A pretty convert! Another man would have preferred to blackmail her, he told himself with righteous indignation, especially in such straits of poverty. But he—the thought had scarcely crossed his mind. He had not even thought of her helping him, only of the joy of meeting her again.
In the chill morning, after a sleepless night, he had a panic-stricken sense of his insignificance under the crushing weight of law and order. All the strength born of bitterness oozed out as he stood before the magistrate rigidly and heard the charge preferred. He had a despairing vision of Yvonne Rupert, mocking, inaccessible, even before he was asked his occupation.
'In a cigar-box factory,' he replied curtly.
'Ah, you make cigar-boxes?'
'No, not exactly. I paste.'
'Paste what?'
He hesitated. 'Pictures of Yvonne Rupert on the boxes.'
'Ah! Then it is the "Yvonne Rupert" cigar?'
'Yes.' He had divined the court's complacent misinterpretation ere he saw its smile; the faciletheory that brooding so much over her fascinating picture had unhinged his brain. From that moment a hardness came over his heart. He shut his lips grimly. What was the use of talking? Whatever he said would be discredited on this impish theory. And, even without it, how incredible his story, how irrelevant to the charge of assaulting the doorkeeper!
'I was drunk,' was all he would say. He was committed for trial, and, having no one to bail him out, lingered in a common cell with other reprobates till the van brought him to the Law Court, and he came up to justice in an elevator under the rebuking folds of the Stars and Stripes. A fortnight's more confinement was all that was meted out to him, but he had already had time enough to reflect that he had given Yvonne Rupert one of the best advertisements of her life. It would have enhanced the prisoner's bitterness had he known, as the knowing world outside knew, that he was a poor devil in Yvonne Rupert's pay, and that New York was chuckling over the original and ingenious dodge by which she had again asserted her sovereignty as an advertiser—delicious, immense!
Short as his term of imprisonment was it coincided, much to his own surprise, with the Jewish Penitential period, and the Day of Atonement came in the middle. A wealthy Jewish philanthropist had organized a prison prayer-service, and Elkan eagerly grasped at the break in the monotony. Several of the prisonerswho posed as Jews with this same motive were detected and reprimanded; but Elkan felt, with the new grim sense of humour that meditation on Yvonne Rupert and the world she fooled was developing in him, that he was as little of a Jew as any of them. This elopement to America had meant a violent break with his whole religious past. Not once had he seen the inside of an American synagogue. Gittel had had no use for synagogues.
He entered the improvised prayer-room with this ironic sense of coming back to Judaism by the Christian prison door. But the service shook him terribly. He forgot even to be amused by the one successful impostor who had landed himself in an unforeseen deprivation of rations during the whole fast day. The passionate outcries of the old-fashionedChazan, the solemn peals and tremolo notes of the cornet, which had once been merely æsthetic effects to the reputable master-cutter, were now surcharged with doom and chastisement. The very sight of the Hebrew books and scrolls touched a thousand memories of home and innocence.
Ah, God, how he had sinned!
'Forgive us now, pardon us now, atone for us now!' he cried, smiting his breast and rocking to and fro.
His poor deserted wife and children! How terrible for Haigitcha to wake up one morning and find him gone! As terrible as for him to wake up one morning and find Gittel gone. Ah, God had indeed paid him in kind! Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
The philanthropist himself preached the sermon. God could never forgive sins till the sinner had first straightened out the human wrongs.
Ah, true, true! If he could only find his family again. If he could try by love and immeasurable devotion to atone for the past. Then again life would have a meaning and an aim. Poor, poor Haigitcha! How he would weep over her and cherish her. And his children! They must be grown up. Yankely must be quite a young man. Yes, he would be seventeen by now. And Rachel, that pretty, clinging cherub!
In all those years he had not dared to let his thoughts pause upon them. His past lay like a misty dream behind those thousand leagues of ocean. But now it started up in all the colours of daylight, warm, appealing. Yes, he would go back to his dear ones who must still crave his love and guidance; he would plead and be forgiven, and end his days piously at the sacred hearth of duty.
'Forgive us now, pardon us now, atone for us now!'
If only he could get back to old England.
He appealed to the philanthropist, and lied amid all his contrition. It was desperation at the severance from his wife and children that had driven him to drink, lust of gold that had spurred him across the Atlantic. Now a wiser and sadder man, he would be content with a modicum and the wife of his bosom.
He arrived at last, with a few charity coins in his pocket, in the familiar Spitalfields alley, guarded by the three iron posts over which he remembered hisYankely leaping. His heart was full of tears and memories. Ah, there was the butcher's shop still underneath the old apartment, with the tin labels stuck in thekoshermeat, and there was Gideon, the fat, genial butcher, flourishing his great carving-knife as of yore, though without that ancient smile of brotherly recognition. Gideon's frigidity chilled him; it was an inauspicious omen, a symptom of things altered, irrevocable.
'Does Mrs. Mandle still live here?' he asked with a horrible heart-sinking.
'Yes, first floor,' said Gideon, staring.
Ah, how his heart leapt up again! Haigitcha, his dear Haigitcha! He went up the ever-open dusty staircase jostling against a spruce, handsome young fellow who was hurrying down. He looked back with a sudden conviction that it was his son. His heart swelled with pride and affection; but ere he could cry 'Yankely' the young fellow was gone. He heard the whirr of machines. Yes, she had kept on the workshop, the wonderful creature, though crippled by his loss and the want of capital. Doubtless S. Cohn's kind-hearted firm had helped her to tide over the crisis. Ah, what a blackguard he had been! And she had brought up the children unaided. Dear Haigitcha! What madness had driven him from her side? But he would make amends—yes, he would make amends. He would slip again into his own niche, take up the old burdens and the old delights—perhaps even be again treasurer of 'The Gates of Mercy.'
He knocked at the door. Haigitcha herself opened it.
He wanted to cry her name, but the word stuck in his throat. For this was not his Haigitcha; this was a new creature, cold, stern, tragic, prematurely aged, framed in the sombre shadows of the staircase. And in her eyes was neither rapture nor remembrance.
'What is it?' she asked.
'I am Elkan; don't you know me?'
She stared with a little gasp, and a heaving of the flat breasts. Then she said icily: 'And what do you want?'
'I am come back,' he muttered hoarsely in Yiddish.
'And where is Gittel?' she answered in the same idiom.
The needles of the whirring machines seemed piercing through his brain. So London knew that Gittel had been the companion of his flight! He hung his head.
'I was only with her one year,' he whispered.
'Then go back to thy dung-heap!' She shut the door.
He thrust his foot in desperately ere it banged to. 'Haigitcha!' he shrieked. 'Let me come in. Forgive me, forgive me!'
It was a tug-of-war. He forced open the door; he had a vision of surprised 'hands' stopping their machines, of a beautiful, startled girl holding the ends of a half-laid tablecloth—his Rachel, oh, his Rachel!
'Open the window, one of you!' panted Haigitcha, her shoulders still straining against the door. 'Call a policeman—the man is drunk!'
He staggered back, his pressure relaxed, the door slammed. This repetition of his 'Yvonne Rupert' experience sobered him effectually. What right,indeed, had he to force himself upon this woman, upon these children, to whom he was dead? So might a suicide hope to win back his place in the old life. Life had gone on without him—had no need of him. Ah, what a punishment God had prepared for him! Closed doors to the past, closed doors everywhere.
And this terrible sense of exclusion had not now the same palliative of righteous resentment. With Yvonne Rupert, the splendid-flaming, vicious ingrate, he had felt himself the sinned against. But before this wife-widow, this dutiful, hard-working, tragic creature, he had nothing but self-contempt. He tottered downstairs. How should he even get his bread—he whose ill-fame was doubtless the gossip of the Ghetto? If he could only get hold of Gideon's carving-knife!
But he did not commit suicide, nor did he starve. There is always one last refuge for the failures of the Ghetto, and Elkan's easy experience with the Jewish philanthropist had prepared the way for dealings with the Christian.
To-day the Rev. Moses Elkan, 'the converted Jew,' preaches eloquently to his blind brethren who never come to hear him. For he has 'found the light.' Exeter Hall's exposition of the Jewish prophecies has opened his eyes, and though his foes have been those of his own household, yet, remembering the terrible text, 'He that loveth son or daughter more than Meis not worthy of Me,' he has taken up his cross and followed after Christ alone.
And even if the good souls for whose thousands of pounds he is the annual interest should discover his true past—through this tale-bearer or another—is there not but the more joy over the sinner that repenteth?
Duties neglected, deadly sins trailing in the actual world their unchangeable irreversible consequences—all this is irrelevant. He has 'found the light.'
And so, while Haigitcha walks in darkness, Yvonne prays in her chapel and Elkan preaches in his church.
When Schneemann, the artist, returned from Rome to his native village in Galicia, he found it humming with gossip concerning his paternal grandmother, universally known as theBubeYenta. It would seem that the giddy old thing hobbled home from synagogue conversing with Yossel Mandelstein, the hunchback, and sometimes even offered the unshapely septuagenarian her snuffbox as he passed the door of her cottage. More than one village censor managed to acquaint the artist with the flirtation ere he had found energy to walk the muddy mile to her dwelling. Even his own mother came out strongly in disapproval of the ancient dame; perhaps the remembrance of how fanatically her mother-in-law had disapproved of her married head for not being shrouded in a pious wig lent zest to her tongue. The artist controlled his facial muscles, having learnt tolerance and Bohemianism in the Eternal City.
'Old blood will have its way,' he said blandly.
'Yes, old blood's way is sometimes worse than young blood's,' said Frau Schneemann, unsmiling. 'You must not forget that Yossel is still a bachelor.'
'Yes, and therefore a sinner in Israel—I remember,' quoth the artist with a twinkle. How all this would amuse his bachelor friends, Leopold Barstein and Rozenoffski the pianist!
'Make not mock. 'Tis high time you, too, should lead a maiden under the Canopy.'
'I am so shy—there are few so forward as grandmother.'
'Heaven be thanked!' said his mother fervently. 'When I refused to cover my tresses she spoke as if I were a brazen Epicurean, but I had rather have died than carry on so shamelessly with a man to whom I was not betrothed.'
'Perhaps theyarebetrothed.'
'Webetrothed to Yossel! May his name be blotted out!'
'Why, what is wrong with Yossel? Moses Mendelssohn himself had a hump.'
'Who speaks of humps? Have you forgotten we are of Rabbinic family?'
Her son had quite forgotten it, as he had forgotten so much of this naïve life to which he was paying a holiday visit.
'Ah yes,' he murmured. 'But Yossel is pious—surely?' A vision of the psalm-droners and prayer-shriekers in the little synagogue, among whom the hunchback had been conspicuous, surged up vividly.
'He may shake himself from dawn-service to night-service, he will never shake off his father, the innkeeper,' said Frau Schneemann hotly. 'If I were in your grandmother's place I would be weaving my shroud, not thinking of young men.'
'But she's thinking of old men, you said.'
'Compared with her he is young—she is eighty-four, he is only seventy-five.'
'Well, they won't be married long,' he laughed.
Frau Schneemann laid her hand on his mouth.
'Heaven forbid the omen,' she cried. ''Tis bringing aBilbul(scandal) upon a respectable family.'
'I will go and talk to her,' he said gravely. 'Indeed, I ought to have gone to see her days ago.' And as he trudged to the other end of the village towards the cottage where the lively old lady lived in self-sufficient solitude, he was full of the contrast between his mother's mental world and his own. People live in their own minds, and not in streets or fields, he philosophized.
Through her diamond-paned window he saw the wrinkled, white-capped old creature spinning peacefully at the rustic chimney-corner, a pure cloistral crone. It seemed profane to connect such a figure with flirtation—this was surely the very virgin of senility. What a fine picture she made too! Why had he never thought of painting her? Yes, such a picture of 'The Spinster' would be distinctly interesting. And he would put in theKesubah, the marriage certificate that hung over the mantelpiece, in ironical reminder of her days of bloom. He unlatched the door—he had never been used to knock at grannie's door, and the childish instinct came back to him.
'Guten Abend,' he said.
She adjusted a pair of horn spectacles, and peered at him.
'Guten Abend,' she murmured.
'You don't remember me—Vroomkely.' He used the old childish diminutive of Abraham, though he had almost forgotten he owned the name in full.
'Vroomkely,' she gasped, almost overturning her wheel as she sprang to hug him in her skinny arms. He had a painful sense that she had shrunk back almost to childish dimensions. Her hands seemed trembling as much with decay as with emotion. She hastened to produce from the well-known cupboard home-madeKuchenand other dainties of his youth, with no sense of the tragedy that lay in his no longer being tempted by them.
'And how goes your trade?' she said. 'They say you have never been slack. They must build many houses in Rome.' Her notion that he was a house-painter he hardly cared to contradict, especially as picture-painting was contrary to the Mosaic dispensation.
'Oh, I haven't been only in Rome,' he said evasively. 'I have been in many lands.'
Fire came into her eyes, and flashed through the big spectacles. 'You have been to Palestine?' she cried.
'No, only as far as Egypt. Why?'
'I thought you might have brought me a clod of Palestine earth to put in my grave.' The fire died out of her spectacles, she sighed, and took a consolatory pinch of snuff.
'Don't talk of graves—you will live to be a hundred and more,' he cried. But he was thinking howridiculous gossip was. It spared neither age nor sexlessness, not even this shrivelled ancient who was meditating on her latter end. Suddenly he became aware of a shadow darkening the doorway. At the same instant the fire leapt back into his grandmother's glasses. Instinctively, almost before he turned his head, he knew it was the hero of the romance.
Yossel Mandelstein looked even less of a hero than the artist had remembered. There had been something wistful and pathetic in the hunchback's expression, some hint of inner eager fire, but this—if he had not merely imagined it—seemed to have died of age and hopelessness. He used crutches, too, to help himself along with, so that he seemed less the hunchback of yore than the conventional contortion of time, and but for the familiar earlocks pendent on either side of the fur cap, but for the great hooked nose and the small chin hidden in the big beard, the artist might have doubted if this was indeed the Yossel he had sometimes mocked at in the crude cruelty of boyhood.
Yossel, propped on his crutches, was pulling out a mouldering black-covered book from under his greasy caftan. 'I have brought you back yourChovoth Halvovoth,' he said.
In the vivid presence of the actual romance the artist could not suppress the smile he had kept back at the mere shadowy recital. In Rome he himself had not infrequently called on young ladies by way of returning books to them. It was true that the books he returned were not Hebrew treatises, but he smiled again to think that the name of Yossel's volume signified 'the duties of the heart.' TheBubeYentareceived the book with thanks, and a moment of embarrassment ensued, only slightly mitigated by the offer of the snuffbox. Yossel took a pinch, but his eyes seemed roving in amaze, less over the stranger than over the bespread table, as though he might unaccountably have overlooked some sacred festival. That two are company and three none seemed at this point a proverb to be heeded, and without waiting to renew the hero's acquaintance, the artist escaped from the idyllic cottage. Let the lover profit by the pastry for which he himself was too old.
So the gossips spoke the truth, he thought, his amusement not unblended with a touch of his mother's indignation. Surely, if his grandmother wished to cultivate a grand passion, she might have chosen a more sightly object of devotion. Not that there was much to be said for Yossel's taste either. When after seventy-five years of celibacy the fascinations of the other sex began to tell upon him, he might at least have succumbed to a less matriarchal form of femininity. But perhaps his grandmother had fascinations of another order. Perhaps she had money. He put the question to his mother.
'Certainly she has money,' said his mother vindictively. 'She has thousands ofGuldenin her stocking. Twenty years ago she could have had her pick of a dozen well-to-do widowers, yet now that she has one foot in the grave, madness has entered her soul, and she has cast her eye upon this pauper.'
'But I thought his father left him his inn,' said the artist.
'His inn—yes. His sense—no. Yossel ruined himself long ago paying too much attention to theTalmud instead of his business. He was always aSchlemihl.'
'But can one pay too much attention to the Talmud? That is a strange saying for a Rabbi's daughter.'
'King Solomon tells us there is a time for everything,' returned the Rabbi's daughter. 'Yossel neglected what the wise King said, and so now he comes trying to wheedle your poor grandmother out of her money. If he wanted to marry, why didn't he marry before eighteen, as the Talmud prescribes?'
'He seems to do everything at the wrong time,' laughed her son. 'Do you suppose, by the way, that King Solomon made all his thousand marriages before he was eighteen?'
'Make not mock of holy things,' replied his mother angrily.
The monetary explanation of the romance, he found, was the popular one in the village. It did not, however, exculpate the grandame from the charge of forwardness, since if she wished to contract another marriage it could have been arranged legitimately by theShadchan, and then the poor marriage-broker, who got little enough to do in this God-forsaken village, might have made a fewGuldenout of it.
Beneath all his artistic perception of the humours of the thing, Schneemann found himself prosaically sharing the general disapprobation of the marriage. Really, when one came to think of it, it was ridiculous that he should have a new grandfather thrust upon him. And such a grandfather! Perhaps theBubewas, indeed, losing her reason. Or was it he himself who was losing his reason, taking seriously thisparochial scandal, and believing that because a doddering hunchback of seventy-five had borrowed an ethical treatise from an octogenarian a marriage must be on the tapis? Yet, on more than one occasion, he came upon circumstances which seemed to justify the popular supposition. There could be no doubt, for example, that when at the conclusion of the synagogue service the feminine stream from the women's gallery poured out to mingle with the issuing males, these two atoms drifted together with unnatural celerity. It appeared to be established beyond question that on the preceding Feast of Tabernacles theBubehad lent and practically abandoned to the hunchback's use the ritual palm-branch he was too poor to afford. Of course this might only have been gratitude, inasmuch as a fortnight earlier on the solemn New Year Day when, by an untimely decree, the grandmother lay ill abed, Yossel had obtained possession of theShofar, and leaving the synagogue had gone to blow it to her. He had blown the holy horn—with due regard to the proprieties—in the downstairs room of her cottage so that she above had heard it, and having heard it could breakfast. It was a performance that charity reasonably required for a disabled fellow-creature, and yet what medieval knight had found a more delicate way of trumpeting his mistress's charms? Besides, how had Yossel known that the heroine was ill? His eye must have roved over the women's gallery, and disentangled her absence even from the huddled mass of weeping and swaying womanhood.
One day came the crowning item of evidence. The grandmother had actually asked the village postmanto oblige her by delivering a brown parcel at Yossel's lodgings. The postman was not a Child of the Covenant, but Yossel's landlady was, and within an hour all Jewry knew that Yenta had sent Yossel a phylacteries-bag—the very symbol of love offered by a maiden to her bridegroom. Could shameless passion further go?