BOOK ONEEASTILONDON WHERE THE KING LIVESTHEboat-train had disgorged its passengers, who had huddled together in a crowd round the luggage as it was dragged out of the vans, and then had jostled their way out into the London they had been so long approaching. When the crowd scattered it left like a deposit a little knot of strange-looking people in brilliant clothes who stared about them pathetically and helplessly. There were three old men who seemed to be strangers to each other and a handsome Jewess with her family—two girls and three boys. The two elder boys carried on their backs the family bedding, and the youngest clung to his mother’s skirts and was frightened by the noise, the hurrying crowds of people, the vastness and the ugly, complicated angular lines of the station. The woman looked disappointed and hurt. Her eyes searched through the crowds, through every fresh stream of people. She was baffled and anxious. Once or twice she was accosted, but she could not understand a word of what was said to her. At last she produced a piece of paper and showed it to a railway official, who came up thinking it was time these outlandish folk moved on. He could not read what was written on it, for the paper was very dirty and the characters were crabbed and awkwardly written. He turned to the old men, one of whom said excitedly the only English words he knew—“London—Jewish—Society.” The official lookedrelieved. These people did not look like Jews, and the eldest girl and the little boy were lovely. He went away, and the woman, whose hopes had risen, once more looked disconsolate. The little boy buried his face in her apron and wept.A suburban train came wheezing into the platform, which was at once alive with hurrying men in silk hats and tail-coats. Catching sight of the brilliantly attired group, the handsome woman and the lovely girl, the boys with their heads bowed beneath the billowing piles of feather bedding, some of them stopped. The little boy looked up with tears in his eyes. One man put his hand in his pocket and threw down a few coppers. Others followed his example, and the little boy ran after the showering pennies as they bounced in the air, and rolled, span, and settled. He danced from penny to penny and a crowd gathered; for, in his bright jerkin and breeches and little top-boots, dancing like a sprite, gay and wild, he was an astonishing figure to find in the grime and ugliness of the station. Silver was thrown among the pennies to keep him dancing, but at last he was exhausted and ran to his mother with his fists full of money, and the men hurried on to their offices.The official returned with an interpreter, who discovered that the woman’s name was Kühler, that she had expected to be met by her husband, that she had come from Austrian Poland, and that the address written on the piece of paper was Gun Street. The number was indecipherable.The three old men were given instructions and they went away. The interpreter took charge of the family and led them to a refuge, where he left them, saying that he would go and find Mr. Kühler. With a roof over her head and food provided for her children, Mrs. Kühler sat stoically to wait for the husband she had not seen for two years. She had no preconceived idea of London, and this bleak,bare room was London to her, quite acceptable. The stress and the anxiety of the detestable journey were over. This was peace and good. Her husband would find her. He had come to make a home in London. He had sent for her. He would come.Hours passed. They slept, ate, talked, walked about the room, and still Mr. Kühler did not come. The peace of the refuge was invaded with memories of the journey, the rattle, rattle, rattle of the train-wheels, the brusque officials who treated the poor travellers like parcels, the soldiers at the frontiers, the wet, bare quay in Holland, the first sight of the sea, immense, ominous, heaving, heaving up to the sky; the stinking ship that heaved like the sea and made the brain oscillate like milk in a pan; the solidity of the English quay, wet and bare, and of the English train, astonishingly comfortable. . . . And still Mr. Kühler did not come.The girls were cold and miserable. The boys wrestled and practised feats of strength with each other to keep warm, and looked to their mother for applause. She gave it them mechanically as she sat by the little boy, whom she had laid to sleep on the bedding. He would be hungry, she thought, when he woke up, and she must get him food. There was the money which had been thrown to him, but she did not know its value. People do not throw much money away. At home people do not throw even small money away. There such a thing could not happen. There money, like everything else, avoids the poor. But this was rich England, where it rained money.When the boy woke up she would go out and buy him something good to eat, and if Mr. Kühler did not come to-morrow she would find some work and a room, or a corner of a room, to live in. Perhaps Jacob had gone to America again.He had been there twice, and both times suddenly. People always went to America suddenly. He went out and bought a clean collar, and said he was going and would send money for her as soon as he had enough. . . . Poor Jacob, he could not endure their poverty and he would not steal, but he would always fight the soldiers and the bailiffs when they came to take the bedding. . . . The sea heaved, and it rained money. The two boys began to fight, a sudden fury in both of them. Their sisters rushed to part them and Mrs. Kühler rose.At the end of the long room she saw Jacob peering from group to group. He looked white and ill, as he had done when he came again and again to implore her to marry him, and she felt half afraid of him, as she had done when the violent fury of love in him had broken down her resistance and dragged her from her comfortable home to the bare life he had to offer her. He came to her now with the same ungraciousness that had marked his wooing, explained to her that he had just got a job and could not get away to meet her, and turned from her to the children. The boys were grown big and strong, and the eldest girl was a beauty. He was satisfied, stooped and picked up little Mendel in his strong arms. The child woke up, gave a little grunt of pleasure as he recognized the familiar smell of his father, and went to sleep again.“He’s heavy,” said Mrs. Kühler. “You cannot carry him all the way.”“His face is like a flower,” said Jacob.He went first, carrying the boy, and his family followed him into the roaring streets. The lamps were lit and the shops were dazzling. There were barrows of fruit, fish, old iron, books, cheap jewellery, all lit up with naphtha flares. The children were half frightened, half delighted. The smells and the noise of the streets excited them. Everynow and then they heard snatches of their own language and were comforted. They came to shops bearing Yiddish characters and London no longer seemed to them forbiddingly foreign, though they began to feel conscious of their clothes, which made them conspicuous. The boys cursed and growled under the bedding and began to complain that they had so far to go. Mr. Kühler found the child too heavy and had to put him down. Mendel took his mother’s hand and trotted along by her side.They turned into a darkish street which ran for some length between very tall houses. It was obscure enough to allow the clear sky to be seen, patched with cloud and deep blue, starry spaces. At the end of it was a building covered with lights and illuminated signs. They shone golden and splendid. Never had Mendel seen anything so glorious, so rich, so dream-like, so clearly corresponding to that marvellous region where all his thoughts ended, passed out of his reach, and took on a brilliant and mighty life of their own, a glory greater than that of the Emperor at home. But this was England and had only a King.“Does the King live there?” he asked his mother.“No; that is a shop.”“Has father got a shop like that?”“Not yet.”“Will he soon have a shop like that?”“Very soon.”Mendel would have liked to have stood and gazed at the glorious, glittering shop. He felt sure the King must buy his boots there, and he thought that if he stayed long enough he would see the King drive up in his crystal coach, with his crown on his head, and go into the shop. But his father led the way out of the darkish street into another that was still darker, very narrow, andflanked with little low houses. One of these they entered, and in a small, almost unfurnished room they had supper, and Mendel went to sleep hearing his father say to his mother, “Thirteen shillings.” Just before that his father had held his hands out under the candle, and they were raw and bleeding.One room was luxury to them. At home in Austria they had had a corner of a room, and the three other corners were occupied by the carpenter, the stableman, and the potter. In the centre of the room stood the common water-bucket and the common refuse-tub. London had showered money on them and provided them with a whole room. They felt hopeful.Mr. Kühler made thirteen shillings a week polishing walking-sticks, and when that trade was bad he could sometimes get work as a furrier. He had intended to take his family over to America, but finding work in London, he thought it better to stay there. Besides, he had a grudge against America, for while there he had invented a device for twisting tails of fur, but his invention had been stolen from him and he had missed his chance of making a fortune. America was evil and living was very dear. London was the more comfortable place for the struggle. And in London he had found Abramovich, the friend of his boyhood, the one creature in the world upon whom he relied. He had no reason for his faith. Abramovich had never done him any good, but he was not of those who pass. He might disappear for years, but he always came back again, and time made no difference. He was always the same. If help was needed he gave it, and if he needed help he asked for it. Abramovich was a very strong reason for staying in London. . . . The boys would soon be working and the eldest girl was a beauty. The match-makers would be busy with her. Anothertwo years, and the match-makers would find her a rich man who would help them all and put money into a business. That was Jacob’s desire, to have a business of his own, for he loathed working for another man. He could not do it for long. Always he ended with a quarrel, perhaps with blows, or he simply walked out and would not return.He was a devout Jew and despised Christians, as he despised luxury, pleasure, comfort, not actively nor with any hatred. He simply did not need them. He had lived without them, and he asked nothing of life. He was alive; that was enough. Passions seized him and he followed them. Without passion he never moved, never stirred a finger except to keep himself alive. Passion had chosen his wife for him. Golda, the beautiful, was his wife. In her he was bound more firmly to his race and his faith, and there was no need to look beyond. He was rooted. She had borne him children, but he had no more ambition for them than for himself. Leah, the beauty, should wed a rich man, not for ambitious reasons, but because, in life, beauty and riches were proper mates. There is a certain orderliness about life, and certain things can only be prevented by an irruption of passion. If that happens, then life takes its revenge and becomes hard and bleak, but it is still life, and only a fool will complain. Jacob never complained, and he took his Golda’s reproaches in silence, unless she became unjust, and then he silenced her brutally and callously. She bore with him, because she prized his honesty, his steadfast simplicity, and because she knew that his passion had never wakened a profound answer in herself. She had very slowly been roused to love, which had flowered in her with the birth of her youngest child, in whom she had learned a power of acceptance almost equal to her husband’s. Like him,she clung to her race and her faith and never looked beyond.In London she found that she was left alone and her life was no longer hemmed in by a menacing world of soldiers and police and peasants, who swore the Jews cheated them and spread terrifying tales of Jewish practices upon Christian children. Christian London was indifferent to the Jews, and she could be indifferent to Christian London. She had no curiosity about it and never went above a mile from her house. She made no attempt to learn English, but could not help gleaning a few words from her children as they picked it up at school. The synagogue was the centre of her life, and from it came all the life she cared to have outside her family. She was absorbed in little Mendel, by whom her world was coloured. If he was happy, that was sunshine to her. If he was oppressed and tearful, her sky was overcast. If he was ill, it seemed to her a menace of the end.He was a strange child and very slow in growing into a boy. The other children had seemed to shoot into independence almost as soon as they could walk. But Mendel clung to her, would not learn to feed himself, and would not go to sleep at night unless she sang to him and rocked him in the cradle, in which he slept even after he went to school. As long as he could curl up in it he slept in his cradle, and he made her learn as much as she could of an English song which had caught his fancy. It was the only English song she ever knew, and night after night she had to sing it over and over again as she rocked the heavy cradle:—Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do;I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.She had no idea what the words meant, but the boy loved the tune and her funny accent andintonation, and even when she was ill and tired she would sing him to sleep, and then sit brooding over him with her fingers just touching his curly hair. And in her complete absorption in his odd, unchildlike childhood she was perfectly content, and entirely indifferent to all that happened outside him. Brutal things, terrible things happened, but they never touched the child, and if she could, she hid the knowledge of them from him.Abramovich collected a little capital and persuaded Mr. Kühler to join him in a furrier’s business. They were not altogether unsuccessful, and Mr. Kühler took a whole house in Gun Street and bought a piano, but soon their capital was exhausted and they had given more credit than they were accorded and the business trickled through their fingers. Mr. Kühler took to his bed, for he could sleep at will and almost indefinitely, and so could avoid seeing poverty once more creeping up like a muddy sea round his wife and children. It had been bad enough when that happened at home, where at the worst there were his relations to help, and there were the potato fields to be despoiled, and, at least, the children could be happy playing in the roads or by the river, or on the sides of the mountain. But here in London poverty was black indeed, and there was no one but Abramovich to help, and he was in almost as bad case as himself. Yet astonishingly Abramovich came again and again to the rescue. He was a little squat, ugly man, the stunted product of some obscure Russian ghetto, and he seemed to live by and for his enthusiasm for the Kühler family. In their presence he glowed, greedily drank in every word that Jacob or Golda said, and was always loud in his praises of the beautiful children. . . . “The sky is dark now,” he used to say, “but they will be rich, and they will give you horses and carriages, and Turkey carpets, and footmen, and flowers in the winter, and they willbring English gentlemen to the house and what you want, that you shall have. . . .” “I want nothing,” Jacob would say. “I want nothing. I will work and be my own master. I will not steal or help other men to steal.” “You wait,” Abramovich would reply. “These children have only to go out into London and all will be given to them.”Only the eldest girl listened to these conversations, and she used to hold her head high, and her face would go pale as ferociously she followed up the ideas they suggested to her.But Abramovich could bring no consolation. Jacob would not go back to the stick-polishing, and at last he could bear it no longer, went out and bought a clean collar, clipped his beard, and without a word of farewell, went to America.
THEboat-train had disgorged its passengers, who had huddled together in a crowd round the luggage as it was dragged out of the vans, and then had jostled their way out into the London they had been so long approaching. When the crowd scattered it left like a deposit a little knot of strange-looking people in brilliant clothes who stared about them pathetically and helplessly. There were three old men who seemed to be strangers to each other and a handsome Jewess with her family—two girls and three boys. The two elder boys carried on their backs the family bedding, and the youngest clung to his mother’s skirts and was frightened by the noise, the hurrying crowds of people, the vastness and the ugly, complicated angular lines of the station. The woman looked disappointed and hurt. Her eyes searched through the crowds, through every fresh stream of people. She was baffled and anxious. Once or twice she was accosted, but she could not understand a word of what was said to her. At last she produced a piece of paper and showed it to a railway official, who came up thinking it was time these outlandish folk moved on. He could not read what was written on it, for the paper was very dirty and the characters were crabbed and awkwardly written. He turned to the old men, one of whom said excitedly the only English words he knew—“London—Jewish—Society.” The official lookedrelieved. These people did not look like Jews, and the eldest girl and the little boy were lovely. He went away, and the woman, whose hopes had risen, once more looked disconsolate. The little boy buried his face in her apron and wept.
A suburban train came wheezing into the platform, which was at once alive with hurrying men in silk hats and tail-coats. Catching sight of the brilliantly attired group, the handsome woman and the lovely girl, the boys with their heads bowed beneath the billowing piles of feather bedding, some of them stopped. The little boy looked up with tears in his eyes. One man put his hand in his pocket and threw down a few coppers. Others followed his example, and the little boy ran after the showering pennies as they bounced in the air, and rolled, span, and settled. He danced from penny to penny and a crowd gathered; for, in his bright jerkin and breeches and little top-boots, dancing like a sprite, gay and wild, he was an astonishing figure to find in the grime and ugliness of the station. Silver was thrown among the pennies to keep him dancing, but at last he was exhausted and ran to his mother with his fists full of money, and the men hurried on to their offices.
The official returned with an interpreter, who discovered that the woman’s name was Kühler, that she had expected to be met by her husband, that she had come from Austrian Poland, and that the address written on the piece of paper was Gun Street. The number was indecipherable.
The three old men were given instructions and they went away. The interpreter took charge of the family and led them to a refuge, where he left them, saying that he would go and find Mr. Kühler. With a roof over her head and food provided for her children, Mrs. Kühler sat stoically to wait for the husband she had not seen for two years. She had no preconceived idea of London, and this bleak,bare room was London to her, quite acceptable. The stress and the anxiety of the detestable journey were over. This was peace and good. Her husband would find her. He had come to make a home in London. He had sent for her. He would come.
Hours passed. They slept, ate, talked, walked about the room, and still Mr. Kühler did not come. The peace of the refuge was invaded with memories of the journey, the rattle, rattle, rattle of the train-wheels, the brusque officials who treated the poor travellers like parcels, the soldiers at the frontiers, the wet, bare quay in Holland, the first sight of the sea, immense, ominous, heaving, heaving up to the sky; the stinking ship that heaved like the sea and made the brain oscillate like milk in a pan; the solidity of the English quay, wet and bare, and of the English train, astonishingly comfortable. . . . And still Mr. Kühler did not come.
The girls were cold and miserable. The boys wrestled and practised feats of strength with each other to keep warm, and looked to their mother for applause. She gave it them mechanically as she sat by the little boy, whom she had laid to sleep on the bedding. He would be hungry, she thought, when he woke up, and she must get him food. There was the money which had been thrown to him, but she did not know its value. People do not throw much money away. At home people do not throw even small money away. There such a thing could not happen. There money, like everything else, avoids the poor. But this was rich England, where it rained money.
When the boy woke up she would go out and buy him something good to eat, and if Mr. Kühler did not come to-morrow she would find some work and a room, or a corner of a room, to live in. Perhaps Jacob had gone to America again.He had been there twice, and both times suddenly. People always went to America suddenly. He went out and bought a clean collar, and said he was going and would send money for her as soon as he had enough. . . . Poor Jacob, he could not endure their poverty and he would not steal, but he would always fight the soldiers and the bailiffs when they came to take the bedding. . . . The sea heaved, and it rained money. The two boys began to fight, a sudden fury in both of them. Their sisters rushed to part them and Mrs. Kühler rose.
At the end of the long room she saw Jacob peering from group to group. He looked white and ill, as he had done when he came again and again to implore her to marry him, and she felt half afraid of him, as she had done when the violent fury of love in him had broken down her resistance and dragged her from her comfortable home to the bare life he had to offer her. He came to her now with the same ungraciousness that had marked his wooing, explained to her that he had just got a job and could not get away to meet her, and turned from her to the children. The boys were grown big and strong, and the eldest girl was a beauty. He was satisfied, stooped and picked up little Mendel in his strong arms. The child woke up, gave a little grunt of pleasure as he recognized the familiar smell of his father, and went to sleep again.
“He’s heavy,” said Mrs. Kühler. “You cannot carry him all the way.”
“His face is like a flower,” said Jacob.
He went first, carrying the boy, and his family followed him into the roaring streets. The lamps were lit and the shops were dazzling. There were barrows of fruit, fish, old iron, books, cheap jewellery, all lit up with naphtha flares. The children were half frightened, half delighted. The smells and the noise of the streets excited them. Everynow and then they heard snatches of their own language and were comforted. They came to shops bearing Yiddish characters and London no longer seemed to them forbiddingly foreign, though they began to feel conscious of their clothes, which made them conspicuous. The boys cursed and growled under the bedding and began to complain that they had so far to go. Mr. Kühler found the child too heavy and had to put him down. Mendel took his mother’s hand and trotted along by her side.
They turned into a darkish street which ran for some length between very tall houses. It was obscure enough to allow the clear sky to be seen, patched with cloud and deep blue, starry spaces. At the end of it was a building covered with lights and illuminated signs. They shone golden and splendid. Never had Mendel seen anything so glorious, so rich, so dream-like, so clearly corresponding to that marvellous region where all his thoughts ended, passed out of his reach, and took on a brilliant and mighty life of their own, a glory greater than that of the Emperor at home. But this was England and had only a King.
“Does the King live there?” he asked his mother.
“No; that is a shop.”
“Has father got a shop like that?”
“Not yet.”
“Will he soon have a shop like that?”
“Very soon.”
Mendel would have liked to have stood and gazed at the glorious, glittering shop. He felt sure the King must buy his boots there, and he thought that if he stayed long enough he would see the King drive up in his crystal coach, with his crown on his head, and go into the shop. But his father led the way out of the darkish street into another that was still darker, very narrow, andflanked with little low houses. One of these they entered, and in a small, almost unfurnished room they had supper, and Mendel went to sleep hearing his father say to his mother, “Thirteen shillings.” Just before that his father had held his hands out under the candle, and they were raw and bleeding.
One room was luxury to them. At home in Austria they had had a corner of a room, and the three other corners were occupied by the carpenter, the stableman, and the potter. In the centre of the room stood the common water-bucket and the common refuse-tub. London had showered money on them and provided them with a whole room. They felt hopeful.
Mr. Kühler made thirteen shillings a week polishing walking-sticks, and when that trade was bad he could sometimes get work as a furrier. He had intended to take his family over to America, but finding work in London, he thought it better to stay there. Besides, he had a grudge against America, for while there he had invented a device for twisting tails of fur, but his invention had been stolen from him and he had missed his chance of making a fortune. America was evil and living was very dear. London was the more comfortable place for the struggle. And in London he had found Abramovich, the friend of his boyhood, the one creature in the world upon whom he relied. He had no reason for his faith. Abramovich had never done him any good, but he was not of those who pass. He might disappear for years, but he always came back again, and time made no difference. He was always the same. If help was needed he gave it, and if he needed help he asked for it. Abramovich was a very strong reason for staying in London. . . . The boys would soon be working and the eldest girl was a beauty. The match-makers would be busy with her. Anothertwo years, and the match-makers would find her a rich man who would help them all and put money into a business. That was Jacob’s desire, to have a business of his own, for he loathed working for another man. He could not do it for long. Always he ended with a quarrel, perhaps with blows, or he simply walked out and would not return.
He was a devout Jew and despised Christians, as he despised luxury, pleasure, comfort, not actively nor with any hatred. He simply did not need them. He had lived without them, and he asked nothing of life. He was alive; that was enough. Passions seized him and he followed them. Without passion he never moved, never stirred a finger except to keep himself alive. Passion had chosen his wife for him. Golda, the beautiful, was his wife. In her he was bound more firmly to his race and his faith, and there was no need to look beyond. He was rooted. She had borne him children, but he had no more ambition for them than for himself. Leah, the beauty, should wed a rich man, not for ambitious reasons, but because, in life, beauty and riches were proper mates. There is a certain orderliness about life, and certain things can only be prevented by an irruption of passion. If that happens, then life takes its revenge and becomes hard and bleak, but it is still life, and only a fool will complain. Jacob never complained, and he took his Golda’s reproaches in silence, unless she became unjust, and then he silenced her brutally and callously. She bore with him, because she prized his honesty, his steadfast simplicity, and because she knew that his passion had never wakened a profound answer in herself. She had very slowly been roused to love, which had flowered in her with the birth of her youngest child, in whom she had learned a power of acceptance almost equal to her husband’s. Like him,she clung to her race and her faith and never looked beyond.
In London she found that she was left alone and her life was no longer hemmed in by a menacing world of soldiers and police and peasants, who swore the Jews cheated them and spread terrifying tales of Jewish practices upon Christian children. Christian London was indifferent to the Jews, and she could be indifferent to Christian London. She had no curiosity about it and never went above a mile from her house. She made no attempt to learn English, but could not help gleaning a few words from her children as they picked it up at school. The synagogue was the centre of her life, and from it came all the life she cared to have outside her family. She was absorbed in little Mendel, by whom her world was coloured. If he was happy, that was sunshine to her. If he was oppressed and tearful, her sky was overcast. If he was ill, it seemed to her a menace of the end.
He was a strange child and very slow in growing into a boy. The other children had seemed to shoot into independence almost as soon as they could walk. But Mendel clung to her, would not learn to feed himself, and would not go to sleep at night unless she sang to him and rocked him in the cradle, in which he slept even after he went to school. As long as he could curl up in it he slept in his cradle, and he made her learn as much as she could of an English song which had caught his fancy. It was the only English song she ever knew, and night after night she had to sing it over and over again as she rocked the heavy cradle:—
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do;I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do;
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
She had no idea what the words meant, but the boy loved the tune and her funny accent andintonation, and even when she was ill and tired she would sing him to sleep, and then sit brooding over him with her fingers just touching his curly hair. And in her complete absorption in his odd, unchildlike childhood she was perfectly content, and entirely indifferent to all that happened outside him. Brutal things, terrible things happened, but they never touched the child, and if she could, she hid the knowledge of them from him.
Abramovich collected a little capital and persuaded Mr. Kühler to join him in a furrier’s business. They were not altogether unsuccessful, and Mr. Kühler took a whole house in Gun Street and bought a piano, but soon their capital was exhausted and they had given more credit than they were accorded and the business trickled through their fingers. Mr. Kühler took to his bed, for he could sleep at will and almost indefinitely, and so could avoid seeing poverty once more creeping up like a muddy sea round his wife and children. It had been bad enough when that happened at home, where at the worst there were his relations to help, and there were the potato fields to be despoiled, and, at least, the children could be happy playing in the roads or by the river, or on the sides of the mountain. But here in London poverty was black indeed, and there was no one but Abramovich to help, and he was in almost as bad case as himself. Yet astonishingly Abramovich came again and again to the rescue. He was a little squat, ugly man, the stunted product of some obscure Russian ghetto, and he seemed to live by and for his enthusiasm for the Kühler family. In their presence he glowed, greedily drank in every word that Jacob or Golda said, and was always loud in his praises of the beautiful children. . . . “The sky is dark now,” he used to say, “but they will be rich, and they will give you horses and carriages, and Turkey carpets, and footmen, and flowers in the winter, and they willbring English gentlemen to the house and what you want, that you shall have. . . .” “I want nothing,” Jacob would say. “I want nothing. I will work and be my own master. I will not steal or help other men to steal.” “You wait,” Abramovich would reply. “These children have only to go out into London and all will be given to them.”
Only the eldest girl listened to these conversations, and she used to hold her head high, and her face would go pale as ferociously she followed up the ideas they suggested to her.
But Abramovich could bring no consolation. Jacob would not go back to the stick-polishing, and at last he could bear it no longer, went out and bought a clean collar, clipped his beard, and without a word of farewell, went to America.