MALKA.
The Sunday Fair, so long associated with Petticoat Lane, is dying hard,
and is still vigorous; its glories were in full swing on the dull, gray
morning when Moses Ansell took his way through the Ghetto. It was near
eleven o'clock, and the throng was thickening momently. The vendors
cried their wares in stentorian tones, and the babble of the buyers was
like the confused roar of a stormy sea. The dead walls and hoardings
were placarded with bills from which the life of the inhabitants could
be constructed. Many were in Yiddish, the most hopelessly corrupt and
hybrid jargon ever evolved. Even when the language was English the
letters were Hebrew. Whitechapel, Public Meeting, Board School, Sermon,
Police, and other modern banalities, glared at the passer-by in the
sacred guise of the Tongue associated with miracles and prophecies,
palm-trees and cedars and seraphs, lions and shepherds and harpists.
Moses stopped to read these hybrid posters--he had nothing better to
do--as he slouched along. He did not care to remember that dinner was
due in two hours. He turned aimlessly into Wentworth Street, and studied
a placard that hung in a bootmaker's window. This was the announcement
it made in jargon:
Riveters, Clickers, Lasters, Finishers,
Wanted.
BARUCH EMANUEL,
Cobbler.
Makes and Repairs Boots.
Every Bit as Cheaply
as
MORDECAI SCHWARTZ,
of 12 Goulston Street.
Mordecai Schwartz was written in the biggest and blackest of Hebrew
letters, and quite dominated the little shop-window. Baruch Emanuel was
visibly conscious of his inferiority, to his powerful rival, though
Moses had never heard of Mordecai Schwartz before. He entered the shop
and said in Hebrew "Peace be to you." Baruch Emanuel, hammering a sole,
answered in Hebrew:
"Peace be to you."
Moses dropped into Yiddish.
"I am looking for work. Peradventure have you something for me?"
"What can you do?"
"I have been a riveter."
"I cannot engage any more riveters."
Moses looked disappointed.
"I have also been a clicker," he said.
"I have all the clickers I can afford," Baruch answered.
Moses's gloom deepened. "Two years ago I worked as a finisher."
Baruch shook his head silently. He was annoyed at the man's persistence.
There was only the laster resource left.
"And before that I was a laster for a week," Moses answered.
"I don't want any!" cried Baruch, losing his temper.
"But in your window it stands that you do," protested Moses feebly.
"I don't care what stands in my window," said Baruch hotly. "Have you
not head enough to see that that is all bunkum? Unfortunately I work
single-handed, but it looks good and it isn't lies. Naturally I want
Riveters and Clickers and Lasters and Finishers. Then I could set up a
big establishment and gouge out Mordecai Schwartz's eyes. But the Most
High denies me assistants, and I am content to want."
Moses understood that attitude towards the nature of things. He went out
and wandered down another narrow dirty street in search of Mordecai
Schwartz, whose address Baruch Emanuel had so obligingly given him. He
thought of the _Maggid's_ sermon on the day before. The _Maggid_ had
explained a verse of Habakkuk in quite an original way which gave an
entirely new color to a passage in Deuteronomy. Moses experienced acute
pleasure in musing upon it, and went past Mordecai's shop without going
in, and was only awakened from his day-dream by the brazen clanging of a
bell It was the bell of the great Ghetto school, summoning its pupils
from the reeking courts and alleys, from the garrets and the cellars,
calling them to come and be Anglicized. And they came in a great
straggling procession recruited from every lane and by-way, big children
and little children, boys in blackening corduroy, and girls in
washed-out cotton; tidy children and ragged children; children in great
shapeless boots gaping at the toes; sickly children, and sturdy
children, and diseased children; bright-eyed children and hollow-eyed
children; quaint sallow foreign-looking children, and fresh-colored
English-looking children; with great pumpkin heads, with oval heads,
with pear-shaped heads; with old men's faces, with cherubs' faces, with
monkeys' faces; cold and famished children, and warm and well-fed
children; children conning their lessons and children romping
carelessly; the demure and the anaemic; the boisterous and the
blackguardly, the insolent, the idiotic, the vicious, the intelligent,
the exemplary, the dull--spawn of all countries--all hastening at the
inexorable clang of the big school-bell to be ground in the same great,
blind, inexorable Governmental machine. Here, too, was a miniature fair,
the path being lined by itinerant temptations. There was brisk traffic
in toffy, and gray peas and monkey-nuts, and the crowd was swollen by
anxious parents seeing tiny or truant offspring safe within the
school-gates. The women were bare-headed or be-shawled, with infants at
their breasts and little ones toddling at their sides, the men were
greasy, and musty, and squalid. Here a bright earnest little girl held
her vagrant big brother by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him
in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in
petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful
durance. It was a drab picture--the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy,
miry stones below, the frowsy mothers and fathers, the motley children.
"Monkey-nuts! Monkey-nuts!" croaked a wizened old woman.
"Oppea! Oppea!" droned a doddering old Dutchman. He bore a great can of
hot peas in one hand and a lighthouse-looking pepper-pot in the other.
Some of the children swallowed the dainties hastily out of miniature
basins, others carried them within in paper packets for surreptitious
munching.
"Call that a ay-puth?" a small boy would say.
"Not enough!" the old man would exclaim in surprise. "Here you are,
then!" And he would give the peas another sprinkling from the
pepper-pot.
Moses Ansell's progeny were not in the picture. The younger children
were at home, the elder had gone to school an hour before to run about
and get warm in the spacious playgrounds. A slice of bread each and the
wish-wash of a thrice-brewed pennyworth of tea had been their morning
meal, and there was no prospect of dinner. The thought of them made
Moses's heart heavy again; he forgot the _Maggid's_ explanation of the
verse in Habakkuk, and he retraced his steps towards Mordecai Schwartz's
shop. But like his humbler rival, Mordecai had no use for the many-sided
Moses; he was "full up" with swarthy "hands," though, as there were
rumors of strikes in the air, he prudently took note of Moses's address.
After this rebuff, Moses shuffled hopelessly about for more than an
hour; the dinner-hour was getting desperately near; already children
passed him, carrying the Sunday dinners from the bakeries, and there
were wafts of vague poetry in the atmosphere. Moses felt he could not
face his own children.
At last he nerved himself to an audacious resolution, and elbowed his
way blusterously towards the Ruins, lest he might break down if his
courage had time to cool.
"The Ruins" was a great stony square, partly bordered by houses, and
only picturesque on Sundays when it became a branch of the all-ramifying
Fair. Moses could have bought anything there from elastic braces to
green parrots in gilt cages. That is to say if he had had money. At
present he had nothing in his pocket except holes.
What he might be able to do on his way back was another matter; for it
was Malka that Moses Ansell was going to see. She was the cousin of his
deceased wife, and lived in Zachariah Square. Moses had not been there
for a month, for Malka was a wealthy twig of the family tree, to be
approached with awe and trembling. She kept a second-hand clothes store
in Houndsditch, a supplementary stall in the Halfpenny Exchange, and a
barrow on the "Ruins" of a Sunday; and she had set up Ephraim, her
newly-acquired son-in-law, in the same line of business in the same
district. Like most things she dealt in, her son-in-law was second-hand,
having lost his first wife four years ago in Poland. But he was only
twenty-two, and a second-hand son-in-law of twenty-two is superior to
many brand new ones. The two domestic establishments were a few minutes
away from the shops, facing each other diagonally across the square.
They were small, three-roomed houses, without basements, the ground
floor window in each being filled up with a black gauze blind (an
invariable index of gentility) which allowed the occupants to see all
that was passing outside, but confronted gazers with their own
rejections. Passers-by postured at these mirrors, twisting moustaches
perkily, or giving coquettish pats to bonnets, unwitting of the grinning
inhabitants. Most of the doors were ajar, wintry as the air was: for the
Zachariah Squareites lived a good deal on the door-step. In the summer,
the housewives sat outside on chairs and gossiped and knitted, as if the
sea foamed at their feel, and wrinkled good-humored old men played nap
on tea-trays. Some of the doors were blocked below with sliding barriers
of wood, a sure token of infants inside given to straying. More obvious
tokens of child-life were the swings nailed to the lintels of a few
doors, in which, despite the cold, toothless babes swayed like monkeys
on a branch. But the Square, with its broad area of quadrangular
pavement, was an ideal playing-ground for children, since other animals
came not within its precincts, except an inquisitive dog or a local cat.
Solomon Ansell knew no greater privilege than to accompany his father to
these fashionable quarters and whip his humming-top across the ample
spaces, the while Moses transacted his business with Malka. Last time
the business was psalm-saying. Milly had been brought to bed of a son,
but it was doubtful if she would survive, despite the charms hung upon
the bedpost to counteract the nefarious designs of Lilith, the wicked
first wife of Adam, and of the Not-Good Ones who hover about women in
childbirth. So Moses was sent for, post-haste, to intercede with the
Almighty. His piety, it was felt, would command attention. For an
average of three hundred and sixty-two days a year Moses was a miserable
worm, a nonentity, but on the other three, when death threatened to
visit Malka or her little clan, Moses became a personage of prime
importance, and was summoned at all hours of the day and night to
wrestle with the angel Azrael. When the angel had retired, worsted,
after a match sometimes protracted into days, Moses relapsed into his
primitive insignificance, and was dismissed with a mouthful of rum and a
shilling. It never seemed to him an unfair equivalent, for nobody could
make less demand on the universe than Moses. Give him two solid meals
and three solid services a day, and he was satisfied, and he craved more
for spiritual snacks between meals than for physical.
The last crisis had been brief, and there was so little danger that,
when Milly's child was circumcised, Moses had not even been bidden to
the feast, though his piety would have made him the ideal _sandek_ or
god-father. He did not resent this, knowing himself dust--and that
anything but gold-dust.
Moses had hardly emerged from the little arched passage which led to the
Square, when sounds of strife fell upon his ears. Two stout women
chatting amicably at their doors, had suddenly developed a dispute. In
Zachariah Square, when you wanted to get to the bottom of a quarrel, the
cue was not "find the woman," but find the child. The high-spirited
bantlings had a way of pummelling one another in fistic duels, and of
calling in their respective mothers when they got the worse of it--which
is cowardly, but human. The mother of the beaten belligerent would then
threaten to wring the "year," or to twist the nose of the victorious
party--sometimes she did it. In either case, the other mother would
intervene, and then the two bantlings would retire into the background
and leave their mothers to take up the duel while they resumed their
interrupted game.
Of such sort was the squabble betwixt Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs. Mrs.
Isaacs pointed out with superfluous vehemence that her poor lamb had
been mangled beyond recognition. Mrs. Jacobs, _per contra_, asseverated
with superfluous gesture that it was _her_ poor lamb who had received
irreparable injury. These statements were not in mutual contradiction,
but Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs were, and so the point at issue was
gradually absorbed in more personal recriminations.
"By my life, and by my Fanny's life, I'll leave my seal on the first
child of yours that comes across my way! There!" Thus Mrs. Isaacs.
"Lay a linger on a hair of a child of mine, and, by my husband's life,
I'll summons you; I'll have the law on you." Thus Mrs. Jacobs; to the
gratification of the resident populace.
Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs rarely quarrelled with each other, uniting
rather in opposition to the rest of the Square. They were English, quite
English, their grandfather having been born in Dresden; and they gave
themselves airs in consequence, and called their _kinder_ "children,"
which annoyed those neighbors who found a larger admixture of Yiddish
necessary for conversation. These very _kinder_, again, attained
considerable importance among their school-fellows by refusing to
pronounce the guttural "ch" of the Hebrew otherwise than as an English
"k."
"Summons me, indeed," laughed back Mrs. Isaacs. "A fat lot I'd care for
that. You'd jolly soon expose your character to the magistrate.
Everybody knows what _you_ are."
"Your mother!" retorted Mrs. Jacobs mechanically; the elliptical method
of expression being greatly in vogue for conversation of a loud
character. Quick as lightning came the parrying stroke.
"Yah! And what was your father, I should like to know?"
Mrs. Isaacs had no sooner made this inquiry than she became conscious of
an environment of suppressed laughter; Mrs. Jacobs awoke to the
situation a second later, and the two women stood suddenly dumbfounded,
petrified, with arms akimbo, staring at each other.
The wise, if apocryphal, Ecclesiasticus, sagely and pithily remarked,
many centuries before modern civilization was invented: Jest not with a
rude man lest thy ancestors be disgraced. To this day the oriental
methods of insult have survived in the Ghetto. The dead past is never
allowed to bury its dead; the genealogical dust-heap is always liable to
be raked up, and even innocuous ancestors may be traduced to the third
and fourth generation.
Now it so happened that Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs were sisters. And
when it dawned upon them into what dilemma their automatic methods of
carte and tierce had inveigled them, they were frozen with confusion.
They retired crestfallen to their respective parlors, and sported their
oaks. The resources of repartee were dried up for the moment. Relatives
are unduly handicapped in these verbal duels; especially relatives with
the same mother and father.
Presently Mrs. Isaacs reappeared. She had thought of something she ought
to have said. She went up to her sister's closed door, and shouted into
the key-hole: "None of my children ever had bandy-legs!"
Almost immediately the window of the front bedroom was flung up, and
Mrs. Jacobs leant out of it waving what looked like an immense streamer.
"Aha," she observed, dangling it tantalizingly up and down. "Morry
antique!"
The dress fluttered in the breeze. Mrs. Jacobs caressed the stuff
between her thumb and forefinger.
"Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk," she announced with a long ecstatic quaver.
Mrs. Isaacs stood paralyzed by the brilliancy of the repartee.
Mrs. Jacobs withdrew the moiré antique and exhibited a mauve gown.
"Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk."
The mauve fluttered for a triumphant instant, the next a puce and amber
dress floated on the breeze.
"Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk." Mrs. Jacobs's fingers smoothed it lovingly,
then it was drawn within to be instantly replaced by a green dress.
Mrs. Jacobs passed the skirt slowly through her fingers.
"Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk!" she quavered mockingly.
By this time Mrs. Isaacs's face was the color of the latest flag of
victory.
"The tallyman!" she tried to retort, but the words stuck in her throat.
Fortunately just then she caught sight of her poor lamb playing with the
other poor lamb. She dashed at her offspring, boxed its ears and crying,
"You little blackguard, if I ever catch you playing with blackguards
again, I'll wring your neck for you," she hustled the infant into the
house and slammed the door viciously behind her.
Moses had welcomed this every-day scene, for it put off a few moments
his encounter with the formidable Malka. As she had not appeared at door
or window, he concluded she was in a bad temper or out of London;
neither alternative was pleasant.
He knocked at the door of Milly's house where her mother was generally
to be found, and an elderly char-woman opened it. There were some
bottles of spirit, standing on a wooden side-table covered with a
colored cloth, and some unopened biscuit bags. At these familiar
premonitory signs of a festival, Moses felt tempted to beat a retreat.
He could not think for the moment what was up, but whatever it was he
had no doubt the well-to-do persons would supply him with ice. The
char-woman, with brow darkened by soot and gloom, told him that Milly
was upstairs, but that her mother had gone across to her own house with
the clothes-brush.
Moses's face fell. When his wife was alive, she had been a link of
connection between "The Family" and himself, her cousin having
generously employed her as a char-woman. So Moses knew the import of the
clothes-brush. Malka was very particular about her appearance and loved
to be externally speckless, but somehow or other she had no
clothes-brush at home. This deficiency did not matter ordinarily, for
she practically lived at Milly's. But when she had words with Milly or
her husband, she retired to her own house to sulk or _schmull_, as they
called it. The carrying away of the clothes-brush was, thus, a sign that
she considered the breach serious and hostilities likely to be
protracted. Sometimes a whole week would go by without the two houses
ceasing to stare sullenly across at each other, the situation in Milly's
camp being aggravated by the lack of a clothes-brush. In such moments of
irritation, Milly's husband was apt to declare that his mother-in-law
had abundance of clothes-brushes, for, he pertinently asked, how did she
manage during her frequent business tours in the country? He gave it as
his conviction that Malka merely took the clothes-brush away to afford
herself a handle for returning. But then Ephraim Phillips was a
graceless young fellow, the death of whose first wife was probably a
judgment on his levity, and everybody except his second mother-in-law
knew that he had a book of tickets for the Oxbridge Music Hall, and went
there on Friday nights. Still, in spite of these facts, experience did
show that whenever Milly's camp had outsulked Malka's, the old woman's
surrender was always veiled under the formula of: "Oh Milly, I've
brought you over your clothes-brush. I just noticed it, and thought you
might be wanting it." After this, conversation was comparatively easy.
Moses hardly cared to face Malka in such a crisis of the clothes-brush.
He turned away despairingly, and was going back through the small
archway which led to the Ruins and the outside world, when a grating
voice startled his ear.
"Well, Méshe, whither fliest thou? Has my Milly forbidden thee to see
me?"
He looked back. Malka was standing at her house-door. He retraced his
steps.
"N-n-o," he murmured. "I thought you still out with your stall."
That was where she should have been, at any rate, till half an hour ago.
She did not care to tell herself, much less Moses, that she had been
waiting at home for the envoy of peace from the filial camp summoning
her to the ceremony of the Redemption of her grandson.
"Well, now thou seest me," she said, speaking Yiddish for his behoof,
"thou lookest not outwardly anxious to know how it goes with me."
"How goes it with you?"
"As well as an old woman has a right to expect. The Most High is good!"
Malka was in her most amiable mood, to emphasize to outsiders the
injustice of her kin in quarrelling with her. She was a tall woman of
fifty, with a tanned equine gypsy face surmounted by a black wig, and
decorated laterally by great gold earrings. Great black eyes blazed
beneath great black eyebrows, and the skin between them was capable of
wrinkling itself black with wrath. A gold chain was wound thrice round
her neck, and looped up within her black silk bodice. There were
numerous rings on her fingers, and she perpetually smelt of peppermint.
"_Nu_, stand not chattering there," she went on. "Come in. Dost thou
wish me to catch my death of cold?"
Moses slouched timidly within, his head bowed as if in dread of knocking
against the top of the door. The room was a perfect fac-simile of
Milly's parlor at the other end of the diagonal, save that instead of
the festive bottles and paper bags on the small side-table, there was a
cheerless clothes-brush. Like Milly's, the room contained a round table,
a chest of drawers with decanters on the top, and a high mantelpiece
decorated with pendant green fringes, fastened by big-headed brass
nails. Here cheap china dogs, that had had more than their day squatted
amid lustres with crystal drops. Before the fire was a lofty steel
guard, which, useful enough in Milly's household, had survived its
function in Malka's, where no one was ever likely to tumble into the
grate. In a corner of the room a little staircase began to go upstairs.
There was oilcloth on the floor. In Zachariah Square anybody could go
into anybody else's house and feel at home. There was no visible
difference between one and another. Moses sat down awkwardly on a chair
and refused a peppermint. In the end he accepted an apple, blessed God
for creating the fruit of the tree, and made a ravenous bite at it.
"I must take peppermints," Malka explained. "It's for the spasms."
"But you said you were well," murmured Moses.
"And suppose? If I did not take peppermint I should have the spasms. My
poor sister Rosina, peace be upon him, who died of typhoid, suffered
greatly from the spasms. It's in the family. She would have died of
asthma if she had lived long enough. _Nu_, how goes it with thee?" she
went on, suddenly remembering that Moses, too, had a right to be ill. At
bottom, Malka felt a real respect for Moses, though he did not know it.
It dated from the day he cut a chip of mahogany out of her best round
table. He had finished cutting his nails, and wanted a morsel of wood to
burn with them in witness of his fulfilment of the pious custom. Malka
raged, but in her inmost heart there was admiration for such
unscrupulous sanctity.
"I have been out of work for three weeks," Moses answered, omitting to
expound the state of his health in view of more urgent matters.
"Unlucky fool! What my silly cousin Gittel, peace be upon him, could see
to marry in thee, I know not."
Moses could not enlighten her. He might have informed her that _olov
hasholom_, "peace be upon him," was an absurdity when applied to a
woman, but then he used the pious phrase himself, although aware of its
grammatical shortcomings.
"I told her thou wouldst never be able to keep her, poor lamb," Malka
went on. "But she was always an obstinate pig. And she kept her head
high up, too, as if she had five pounds a week! Never would let her
children earn money like other people's children. But thou oughtest not
to be so obstinate. Thou shouldst have more sense, Méshe; _thou_
belongest not to my family. Why can't Solomon go out with matches?"
"Gittel's soul would not like it."
"But the living have bodies! Thou rather seest thy children starve than
work. There's Esther,--an idle, lazy brat, always reading story-books;
why doesn't she sell flowers or pull out bastings in the evening?"
"Esther and Solomon have their lessons to do."
"Lessons!" snorted Malka. "What's the good of lessons? It's English, not
Judaism, they teach them in that godless school. _I_ could never read or
write anything but Hebrew in all my life; but God be thanked, I have
thriven without it. All they teach them in the school is English
nonsense. The teachers are a pack of heathens, who eat forbidden things,
but the good Yiddishkeit goes to the wall. I'm ashamed of thee, Méshe:
thou dost not even send thy boys to a Hebrew class in the evening."
"I have no money, and they must do their English lessons. Else, perhaps,
their clothes will be stopped. Besides, I teach them myself every
_Shabbos_ afternoon and Sunday. Solomon translates into Yiddish the
whole Pentateuch with Rashi."
"Yes, he may know _Térah_" said Malka, not to be baffled. "But he'll
never know _Gemorah_ or _Mishnayis_." Malka herself knew very little of
these abstruse subjects beyond their names, and the fact that they were
studied out of minutely-printed folios by men of extreme sanctity.
"He knows a little _Gemorah_, too," said Moses. "I can't teach him at
home because I haven't got a _Gemorah_,--it's so expensive, as you know.
But he went with me to the _Beth-Medrash_, when the _Maggid_ was
studying it with a class free of charge, and we learnt the whole of the
_Tractate Niddah_. Solomon understands very well all about the Divorce
Laws, and he could adjudicate on the duties of women to their husbands."
"Ah, but he'll never know _Cabbulah_," said Malka, driven to her last
citadel. "But then no one in England can study _Cabbulah_ since the days
of Rabbi Falk (the memory of the righteous for a blessing) any more than
a born Englishman can learn Talmud. There's something in the air that
prevents it. In my town there was a Rabbi who could do _Cabbulah_; he
could call Abraham our father from the grave. But in this pig-eating
country no one can be holy enough for the Name, blessed be It, to grant
him the privilege. I don't believe the _Shochetim_ kill the animals
properly; the statutes are violated; even pious people eat _tripha_
cheese and butter. I don't say thou dost, Méshe, but thou lettest thy
children."
"Well, your own butter is not _kosher_," said Moses, nettled.
"My butter? What does it matter about my butter? I never set up for a
purist. I don't come of a family of Rabbonim. I'm only a business woman.
It's the _froom_ people that I complain of; the people who ought to set
an example, and are lowering the standard of _Froomkeit_. I caught a
beadle's wife the other day washing her meat and butter plates in the
same bowl of water. In time they will be frying steaks in butter, and
they will end by eating _tripha_ meat out of butter plates, and the
judgment of God will come. But what is become of thine apple? Thou hast
not gorged it already?" Moses nervously pointed to his trousers pocket,
bulged out by the mutilated globe. After his first ravenous bite Moses
had bethought himself of his responsibilities.
"It's for the _kinder_," he explained.
"_Nu_, the _kinder_!" snorted Malka disdainfully. "And what will they
give thee for it? Verily, not a thank you. In my young days we trembled
before the father and the mother, and my mother, peace be upon him,
_potched_ my face after I was a married woman. I shall never forget that
slap--it nearly made me adhere to the wall. But now-a-days our children
sit on our heads. I gave my Milly all she has in the world--a house, a
shop, a husband, and my best bed-linen. And now when I want her to call
the child Yosef, after my first husband, peace be on him, her own
father, she would out of sheer vexatiousness, call it Yechezkel."
Malka's voice became more strident than ever. She had been anxious to
make a species of vicarious reparation to her first husband, and the
failure of Milly to acquiesce in the arrangement was a source of real
vexation.
Moses could think of nothing better to say than to inquire how her
present husband was.
"He overworks himself," Malka replied, shaking her head. "The misfortune
is that he thinks himself a good man of business, and he is always
starting new enterprises without consulting me. If he would only take my
advice more!"
Moses shook his head in sympathetic deprecation of Michael Birnbaum's
wilfulness.
"Is he at home?" he asked.
"No, but I expect him back from the country every minute. I believe they
have invited him for the _Pidyun Haben_ to-day."
"Oh, is that to-day?"
"Of course. Didst thou not know?"
"No, no one told me."
"Thine own sense should have told thee. Is it not the thirty-first day
since the birth? But of course he won't accept when he knows that my own
daughter has driven me out of her house."
"You say not!" exclaimed Moses in horror.
"I do say," said Malka, unconsciously taking up the clothes-brush and
thumping with it on the table to emphasize the outrage. "I told her that
when Yechezkel cried so much, it would be better to look for the pin
than to dose the child for gripes. 'I dressed it myself, Mother,' says
she. 'Thou art an obstinate cat's head. Milly,' says I. 'I say there
_is_ a pin.' 'And I know better,' says she. 'How canst thou know better
than I?' says I. 'Why, I was a mother before thou wast born.' So I
unrolled the child's flannel, and sure enough underneath it just over
the stomach I found--"
"The pin," concluded Moses, shaking his head gravely.
"No, not exactly. But a red mark where the pin had been pricking the
poor little thing."
"And what did Milly say then?" said Moses in sympathetic triumph.
"Milly said it was a flea-bite! and I said, 'Gott in Himmel, Milly, dost
thou want to swear my eyes away? My enemies shall have such a
flea-bite.' And because Red Rivkah was in the room, Milly said I was
shedding her blood in public, and she began to cry as if I had committed
a crime against her in looking after her child. And I rushed out,
leaving the two babies howling together. That was a week ago."
"And how is the child?"
"How should I know? I am only the grandmother, I only supplied the
bed-linen it was born on."
"But is it recovered from the circumcision?"
"Oh, yes, all our family have good healing flesh. It's a fine, child,
_imbeshreer_. It's got my eyes and nose. It's a rare handsome baby,
_imbeshreer_. Only it won't be its mother's fault if the Almighty takes
it not back again. Milly has picked up so many ignorant Lane women who
come in and blight the child, by admiring it aloud, not even saying
_imbeshreer_. And then there's an old witch, a beggar-woman that
Ephraim, my son-in-law, used to give a shilling a week to. Now he only
gives her ninepence. She asked him 'why?' and he said, 'I'm married now.
I can't afford more.' 'What!' she shrieked, 'you got married on my
money!' And one Friday when the nurse had baby downstairs, the old
beggar-woman knocked for her weekly allowance, and she opened the door,
and she saw the child, and she looked at it with her Evil Eye! I hope to
Heaven nothing will come of it."
"I will pray for Yechezkel," said Moses.
"Pray for Milly also, while thou art about it, that she may remember
what is owing to a mother before the earth covers me. I don't know
what's coming over children. Look at my Leah. She _will_ marry that Sam
Levine, though he belongs to a lax English family, and I suspect his
mother was a proselyte. She can't fry fish any way. I don't say anything
against Sam, but still I do think my Leah might have told me before
falling in love with him. And yet see how I treat them! My Michael made
a _Missheberach_ for them in synagogue the Sabbath after the engagement;
not a common eighteen-penny benediction, but a guinea one, with
half-crown blessings thrown in for his parents and the congregation, and
a gift of five shillings to the minister. That was of course in our own
_Chevrah_, not reckoning the guinea my Michael _shnodared_ at Duke's
Plaizer _Shool_. You know we always keep two seats at Duke's Plaizer as
well." Duke's Plaizer was the current distortion of Duke's Place.
"What magnanimity," said Moses overawed.
"I like to do everything with decorum," said Malka. "No one can say I
have ever acted otherwise than as a fine person. I dare say thou couldst
do with a few shillings thyself now."
Moses hung his head still lower. "You see my mother is so poorly," he
stammered. "She is a very old woman, and without anything to eat she may
not live long."
"They ought to take her into the Aged Widows' Home. I'm sure I gave her
_my_ votes."
"God shall bless you for it. But people say I was lucky enough to get
my Benjamin into the Orphan Asylum, and that I ought not to have brought
her from Poland. They say we grow enough poor old widows here."
"People say quite right--at least she would have starved in, a Yiddishë
country, not in a land of heathens."
"But she was lonely and miserable out there, exposed to all the malice
of the Christians. And I was earning a pound a week. Tailoring was a
good trade then. The few roubles I used to send her did not always reach
her."
"Thou hadst no right to send her anything, nor to send for her. Mothers
are not everything. Thou didst marry my cousin Gittel, peace be upon
him, and it was thy duty to support _her_ and her children. Thy mother
took the bread out of the mouth of Gittel, and but for her my poor
cousin might have been alive to-day. Believe me it was no _Mitzvah_."
_Mitzvah_ is a "portmanteau-word." It means a commandment and a good
deed, the two conceptions being regarded as interchangeable.
"Nay, thou errest there," answered Moses. "'Gittel was not a phoenix
which alone ate not of the Tree of Knowledge and lives for ever. Women
have no need to live as long as men, for they have not so many
_Mitzvahs_ to perform as men; and inasmuch as"--here his tones
involuntarily assumed the argumentative sing-song--"their souls profit
by all the _Mitzvahs_ performed by their husbands and children, Gittel
will profit by the _Mitzvah_ I did in bringing over my mother, so that
even if she did die through it, she will not be the loser thereby. It
stands in the Verse that _man_ shall do the _Mitzvahs_ and live by them.
To live is a _Mitzvah_, but it is plainly one of those _Mitzvahs_ that
have to be done at a definite time, from which species women, by reason
of their household duties, are exempt; wherefore I would deduce by
another circuit that it is not so incumbent upon women to live as upon
men. Nevertheless, if God had willed it, she would have been still
alive. The Holy One, blessed be He, will provide for the little ones He
has sent into the world. He fed Elijah the prophet by ravens, and He
will never send me a black Sabbath."
"Oh, you are a saint, Méshe," said Malka, so impressed that she
admitted him to the equality of the second person plural. "If everybody
knew as much _Térah_ as you, the Messiah would soon be here. Here are
five shillings. For five shillings you can get a basket of lemons in the
Orange Market in Duke's Place, and if you sell them in the Lane at a
halfpenny each, you will make a good profit. Put aside five shillings of
your takings and get another basket, and so you will be able to live
till the tailoring picks up a bit." Moses listened as if he had never
heard of the elementary principles of barter.
"May the Name, blessed be It, bless you, and may you see rejoicings on
your children's children."
So Moses went away and bought dinner, treating his family to some
_beuglich_, or circular twisted rolls, in his joy. But on the morrow he
repaired to the Market, thinking on the way of the ethical distinction
between "duties of the heart" and "duties of the limbs," as expounded in
choice Hebrew by Rabbenu Bachja, and he laid out the remnant in lemons.
Then he stationed himself in Petticoat Lane, crying, in his imperfect
English, "Lemans, verra good lemans, two a penny each, two a penny
each!"