CHAPTER V

LAST STAGE OF ALL

This letter seemed decisive. I did not trouble Mr. Conn to English the

Yiddish epistle. My imagination saw too clearly Quarriar himself

dictating its luridly romantic phraseology. Such counter-plots, coils,

treasons, and stratagems in so simple a matter! How Quarriar could

even think them plausible I could not at first imagine; and with my

anger was mingled a flush of resentment at his low estimate of my

intellect.

After-reflection instructed me that he wrote as a Russian to whom

apparently nothing mediaeval was strange. But at the moment I had only

the sense of outrage and trickery. All these months I had been fed

upon lies. Day after day I had been swathed with them as with

feathers. I had so pledged my reputation as a reader of character that

he would appear with his three younger children, bear every test, and

be triumphantly vindicated. And in that moment of hot anger and

wounded pride I had almost slashed through my canvas and mutilated

beyond redemption that kingly head. But it looked at me sadly with

its sweet majesty, and I stayed my hand, almost persuaded to have

faith in it still. I began multiplying excuses for Quarriar, figuring

him as misled by his neighbours, more skilled than he in playing upon

philanthropic heart-strings; he had been told, doubtless, that two

daughters made no impression upon the flinty heart of bureaucratic

charity, that in order to soften it one must 'increase and multiply.'

He had got himself into a network of falsehood from which, though his

better nature recoiled, he had been unable to disentangle himself. But

then I remembered how even in Russia he had pursued an illegal

calling, how he had helped a friend to evade military service, and

again I took up my knife. But the face preserved its reproachful

dignity, seemed almost to turn the other cheek. Illegal calling! No;

it was the law that was illegal--the cruel, impossible law, that in

taking away all means of livelihood had contorted the Jew's

conscience. It was the country that was illegal--the cruel country

whose frontiers could only be crossed by bribery and deceit--the

country that had made him cunning like all weak creatures in the

struggle for survival. And so, gradually softer thoughts came to me,

and less unmingled feelings. I could not doubt the general accuracy of

his melancholy wanderings between Russia and Rotterdam, between London

and Brighton. And were he spotless as the dove, that only made surer

the blackness of Kazelia and the partner--his brethren in Israel and

in the Exile.

* * * * *

And so the new Man of Sorrows shaped himself to my vision. And, taking

my brush, I added a touch here and a touch there till there came into

that face of sorrows a look of craft and guile. And as I stood back

from my work, I was startled to see how nearly I had come to a

photographic representation of my model; for those lines of guile had

indeed been there, though I had eliminated them in my confident

misrepresentation. Now that I had exaggerated them, I had idealized,

so to speak, in the reverse direction. And the more I pondered upon

this new face, the more I saw that this return to a truer homeliness

and a more real realism did but enable me to achieve a subtler beauty.

For surely here at last was the true tragedy of the people of

Christ--to have persisted sublimely, and to be as sordidly perverted;

to be king and knave in one; to survive for two thousand years the

loss of a fatherland and the pressure of persecution, only to wear on

its soul the yellow badge which had defaced its garments.

For to suffer two thousand years for an idea is a privilege that has

been accorded only to Israel--'the soldier of God.' That were no

tragedy, but an heroic epic, even as the prophet Isaiah had

prefigured. The true tragedy, the saddest sorrow, lay in the martyrdom

of an Israel _unworthy of his sufferings_. And this was the

Israel--the high tragedian in the comedy sock--that I tried humbly to

typify in my Man of Sorrows.

ANGLICIZATION

ANGLICIZATION

'English, all English, that's my dream.'

CECIL RHODES.

I

Even in his provincial days at Sudminster Solomon Cohen had

distinguished himself by his Anglican mispronunciation of Hebrew and

his insistence on a minister who spoke English and looked like a

Christian clergyman; and he had set a precedent in the congregation by

docking the 'e' of his patronymic. There are many ways of concealing

from the Briton your shame in being related through a pedigree of

three thousand years to Aaron, the High Priest of Israel, and Cohn is

one of the simplest and most effective. Once, taken to task by a

pietist, Solomon defended himself by the quibble that Hebrew has no

vowels. But even this would not account for the whittling away of his

'Solomon.' 'S. Cohn' was the insignium over his clothing

establishment. Not that he was anxious to deny his Jewishness--was not

the shop closed on Saturdays?--he was merely anxious not to obtrude

it. 'When we are in England, we are in England,' he would say, with

his Talmudic sing-song.

S. Cohn was indeed a personage in the seaport of Sudminster, and his

name had been printed on voting papers, and, what is more, he had at

last become a Town Councillor. Really the citizens liked his stanch

adherence to his ancient faith, evidenced so tangibly by his Sabbath

shutters: even the Christian clothiers bore him goodwill, not

suspecting that S. Cohn's Saturday losses were more than

counterbalanced by the general impression that a man who sacrificed

business to religion would deal more fairly by you than his fellows.

And his person, too, had the rotundity which the ratepayer demands.

But twin with his Town Councillor's pride was his pride in being

_Gabbai_ (treasurer) of the little synagogue tucked away in a back

street: in which for four generations prayer had ebbed and flowed as

regularly as the tides of the sea, with whose careless rovers the

worshippers did such lucrative business. The synagogue, not the sea,

was the poetry of these eager traffickers: here they wore phylacteries

and waved palm-branches and did other picturesque things, which in

their utter ignorance of Catholic or other ritual they deemed

unintelligible to the heathen and a barrier from mankind. Very

imposing was Solomon Cohn in his official pew under the reading

platform, for there is nothing which so enhances a man's dignity in

the synagogue as the consideration of his Christian townsmen. That is

one of the earliest stages of Anglicization.

II

Mrs. Cohn was a pale image of Mr. Cohn, seeing things through his gold

spectacles, and walking humbly in the shadow of his greatness. She had

dutifully borne him many children, and sat on the ground for such as

died. Her figure refused the Jewess's tradition of opulency, and

remained slender as though repressed. Her work was manifold and

unceasing, for besides her domestic and shop-womanly duties she was

necessarily a philanthropist, fettered with Jewish charities as the

_Gabbai's_ wife, tangled with Christian charities as the consort of

the Town Councillor. In speech she was literally his echo, catching up

his mistakes, indeed, admonished by him of her slips in speaking the

Councillor's English. He had had the start of her by five years, for

she had been brought from Poland to marry him, through the good

offices of a friend of hers who saw in her little dowry the nucleus of

a thriving shop in a thriving port.

And from this initial inferiority she never recovered--five milestones

behind on the road of Anglicization! It was enough to keep down a more

assertive personality than poor Hannah's. The mere danger of slipping

back unconsciously to the banned Yiddish put a curb upon her tongue.

Her large, dark eyes had a dog-like look, and they were set

pathetically in a sallow face that suggested ill-health, yet immense

staying power.

That S. Cohn was a bit of a bully can scarcely be denied. It is

difficult to combine the offices of _Gabbai_ and Town Councillor

without a self-satisfaction that may easily degenerate into

dissatisfaction with others. Least endurable was S. Cohn in his

religious rigidity, and he could never understand that pietistic

exercises in which he found pleasure did not inevitably produce

ecstasy in his son and heir. And when Simon was discovered reading

'The Pirates of Pechili,' dexterously concealed in his prayer-book,

the boy received a strapping that made his mother wince. Simon's

breakfast lay only at the end of a long volume of prayers; and, having

ascertained by careful experiment the minimum of time his father would

accept for the gabbling of these empty Oriental sounds, he had fallen

back on penny numbers to while away the hungry minutes. The quartering

and burning of these tales in an avenging fireplace was not the least

of the reasons why the whipped youth wept, and it needed several

pieces of cake, maternally smuggled into his maw while the father's

back was turned, to choke his sobs.

III

With the daughters--and there were three before the son and

heir--there was less of religious friction, since women have not the

pious privileges and burdens of the sterner sex. When the eldest,

Deborah, was married, her husband received, by way of compensation,

the goodwill of the Sudminster business, while S. Cohn migrated to the

metropolis, in the ambition of making 'S. Cohn's trouserings' a

household word. He did, indeed, achieve considerable fame in the

Holloway Road.

Gradually he came to live away from his business, and in the most

fashionable street of Highbury. But he was never to recover his

exalted posts. The London parish had older inhabitants, the local

synagogue richer members. The cry for Anglicization was common

property. From pioneer, S. Cohn found himself outmoded. The minister,

indeed, was only too English--and especially his wife. One would

almost have thought from their deportment that they considered

themselves the superiors instead of the slaves of the congregation. S.

Cohn had been accustomed to a series of clergymen, who must needs be

taught painfully to parrot 'Our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, the

Prince of Wales, the Princess of Wales, and all the Royal Family'--the

indispensable atom of English in the service--so that he, the expert,

had held his breath while they groped and stumbled along the

precipitous pass. Now the whilom _Gabbai_ and Town Councillor found

himself almost patronized--as a poor provincial--by this mincing,

genteel clerical couple. He retorted by animadverting upon the

preacher's heterodoxy.

An urban unconcern met the profound views so often impressed on Simon

with a strap. 'We are not in Poland now,' said the preacher, shrugging

his shoulders.

'In Poland!' S. Cohn's blood boiled. To be twitted with Poland, after

decades of Anglicization! He, who employed a host of Anglo-Saxon

clerks, counter-jumpers, and packers! 'And where did _your_ father

come from?' he retorted hotly.

He had almost a mind to change his synagogue, but there was no other

within such easy walking distance--an important Sabbatic

consideration--and besides, the others were reported to be even worse.

Dread rumours came of a younger generation that craved almost openly

for organs in the synagogue and women's voices in the choir, nay, of

even more flagitious spirits--devotional dynamitards--whose dream was

a service all English, that could be understood instead of chanted!

Dark mutterings against the ancient Rabbis were in the very air of

these wealthier quarters of London.

'Oh, shameless ignorance of the new age,' S. Cohn was wont to

complain, 'that does not know the limits of Anglicization!'

IV

That Simon should enter his father's business was as inevitable as

that the business should prosper in spite of Simon.

His career had been settled ere his father became aware that Highbury

aspired even to law and medicine, and the idea that Simon's education

was finished was not lightly to be dislodged. Simon's education

consisted of the knowledge conveyed in seaport schools for the sons of

tradesmen, while a long course of penny dreadfuls had given him a

peculiar and extensive acquaintance with the ways of the world.

Carefully curtained away in a secret compartment, lay his elementary

Hebrew lore. It did not enter into his conception of the perfect

Englishman. Ah, how he rejoiced in this wider horizon of London, so

thickly starred with music-halls, billiard-rooms, and restaurants!

'We are emancipated now,' was his cry: 'we have too much intellect to

keep all those old laws;' and he swallowed the forbidden oyster in a

fine spiritual glow, which somehow or other would not extend to bacon.

That stuck more in his throat, and so was only taken in self-defence,

to avoid the suspicions of a convivial company.

As he sat at his father's side in the synagogue--a demure son of the

Covenant--this young Englishman lurked beneath his praying-shawl, even

as beneath his prayer-book had lurked 'The Pirates of Pechili.'

In this hidden life Mrs. S. Cohn was not an aider or abettor, except

in so far as frequent gifts from her own pocket-money might be

considered the equivalent of the surreptitious cake of childhood. She

would have shared in her husband's horror had she seen Simon

banqueting on unrighteousness, and her apoplexy would have been

original, not derivative. For her, indeed, London had proved narrowing

rather than widening. She became part of a parish instead of part of a

town, and of a Ghetto in a parish at that! The vast background of

London was practically a mirage--the London suburb was farther from

London than the provincial town. No longer did the currents of civic

life tingle through her; she sank entirely to family affairs, excluded

even from the ladies' committee. Her lord's life, too, shrank, though

his business extended--the which, uneasily suspected, did but increase

his irritability. He had now the pomp and pose of his late offices

minus any visible reason: a Sir Oracle without a shrine, an abdomen

without authority.

Even the two new sons-in-law whom his ability to clothe them had soon

procured in London, listened impatiently, once they had safely passed

under the Canopy and were ensconced in plush parlours of their own.

Home and shop became his only realm, and his autocratic tendencies

grew the stronger by compression. He read 'the largest circulation,'

and his wife became an echo of its opinions. These opinions, never

nebulous, became sharp as illuminated sky-signs when the Boer War

began.

'The impertinent rascals!' cried S. Cohn furiously. 'They have invaded

our territory.'

'Is it possible?' ejaculated Mrs. Cohn. 'This comes of our kindness to

them after Majuba!'

V

A darkness began to overhang the destinies of Britain. Three defeats

in one week!

'It is humiliating,' said S. Cohn, clenching his fist.

'It makes a miserable Christmas,' said Mrs. Cohn gloomily. Although

her spouse still set his face against the Christmas pudding which had

invaded so many Anglo-Jewish homes, the festival, with its shop-window

flamboyance, entered far more vividly into his consciousness than the

Jewish holidays, which produced no impression on the life of the

streets.

The darkness grew denser. Young men began to enlist for the front: the

City formed a new regiment of Imperial Volunteers. S. Cohn gave his

foreign houses large orders for khaki trouserings. He sent out several

parcels of clothing to the seat of war, and had the same duly

recorded in his favourite Christian newspaper, whence it was copied

into his favourite Jewish weekly, which was, if possible, still more

chauvinist, and had a full-page portrait of Sir Asher Aaronsberg, M.P.

for Middleton, who was equipping a local corps at his own expense.

Gradually S. Cohn became aware that the military fever of which he

read in both his organs was infecting his clothing emporium--that his

own counter-jumpers were in heats of adventurous resolve. The military

microbes must have lain thick in the khaki they handled. At any rate,

S. Cohn, always quick to catch the contagion of the correct thing,

announced that he would present a bonus to all who went out to fight

for their country, and that he would keep their places open for their

return. The Saturday this patriotic offer was recorded in his

newspaper--'On inquiry at S. Cohn's, the great clothing purveyor of

the Holloway Road, our representative was informed that no less than

five of the young men were taking advantage of their employer's

enthusiasm for England and the Empire'--the already puffed-up Solomon

had the honour of being called to read in the Law, and first as

befitted the sons of Aaron. It was a man restored almost to his

provincial pride who recited the ancient benediction; 'Blessed art

Thou, O Lord our God, who hast chosen us from among all peoples and

given to us His law.'

But there was a drop of vinegar in the cup.

'And why wasn't Simon in synagogue?' he inquired of his wife, as she

came down the gallery stairs to meet her lord in the lobby, where the

congregants loitered to chat.

'Do I know?' murmured Mrs. Cohn, flushing beneath her veil.

'When I left the house he said he was coming on.'

'He didn't know you were to be "called up."'

'It isn't that, Hannah,' he grumbled. 'Think of the beautiful

war-sermon he missed. In these dark days we should be thinking of our

country, not of our pleasures.' And he drew her angrily without, where

the brightly-dressed worshippers, lingeringly exchanging eulogiums on

the 'Rule Britannia' sermon, made an Oriental splotch of colour on the

wintry pavement.

VI

At lunch the reprobate appeared, looking downcast.

'Where have you been?' thundered S. Cohn, who, never growing older,

imagined Simon likewise stationary.

'I went out for a walk--it was a fine morning.'

'And where did you go?'

'Oh, don't bother!'

'But I shall bother. Where did you go?'

He grew sullen. 'It doesn't matter--they won't have me.'

'Who won't have you?'

'The War Office.'

'Thank God!' broke from Mrs. Cohn.

'Eh?' Mr. Cohn looked blankly from one to the other.

'It is nothing--he went to see the enlisting and all that. Your soup

is getting cold.'

But S. Cohn had taken off his gold spectacles and was polishing them

with his serviette--always a sign of a stormy meal.

'It seems to me something has been going on behind my back,' he said,

looking from mother to son.

'Well, I didn't want to annoy you with Simon's madcap ideas,' Hannah

murmured. 'But it's all over now, thank God!'

'Oh, he'd better know,' said Simon sulkily, 'especially as I am not

going to be choked off. It's all stuff what the doctor says. I'm as

strong as a horse. And, what's more, I'm one of the few applicants who

can ride one.'

'Hannah, will you explain to me what this _Meshuggas_ (madness) is?'

cried S. Cohn, lapsing into a non-Anglicism.

'I've got to go to the front, just like other young men!'

'What!' shrieked S. Cohn. 'Enlist! You, that I brought up as a

gentleman!'

'It's gentlemen that's going--the City Imperial Volunteers!'

'The volunteers! But that's my own clerks.'

'No; there are gentlemen among them. Read your paper.'

'But not rich Jews.'

'Oh, yes. I saw several chaps from Bayswater.'

'We Jews of this favoured country,' put in Hannah eagerly, 'grateful

to the noble people who have given us every right, every liberty,

must----'

S. Cohn was taken aback by this half-unconscious quotation from the

war-sermon of the morning. 'Yes, we must subscribe and all that,' he

interrupted.

'We must fight,' said Simon.

'You fight!' His father laughed half-hysterically. 'Why, you'd shoot

yourself with your own gun!' He had not been so upset since the day

the minister had disregarded his erudition.

'Oh, would I, though?' And Simon pursed his lips and nodded meaningly.

'As sure as to-day is the Holy Sabbath. And you'd be stuck on your own

bayonet, like an obstinate pig.'

Simon got up and left the table and the room.

Hannah kept back her tears before the servant. 'There!' she said. 'And

now he's turned sulky and won't eat.'

'Didn't I say an obstinate pig? He's always been like that from a

baby. But his stomach always surrenders.' He resumed his meal with a

wronged air, keeping his spectacles on the table, for frequent nervous

polishing.

Of a sudden the door reopened and a soldier presented himself--gun on

shoulder. For a moment S. Cohn, devoid of his glasses, stared without

recognition. Wild hereditary tremors ran through him, born of the

Russian persecution, and he had a vague nightmare sense of the

_Chappers_, the Jewish man-gatherers who collected the tribute of

young Jews for the Little Father. But as Simon began to loom through

the red fog, 'A gun on the Sabbath!' he cried. It was as if the bullet

had gone through all his conceptions of life and of Simon.

Hannah snatched at the side-issue. 'I read in Josephus--Simon's prize

for Hebrew, you know--that the Jews fought against the Romans on

Sabbath.'

'Yes; but they fought for themselves--for our Holy Temple.'

'But it's for ourselves now,' said Simon. 'Didn't you always say we

are English?'

S. Cohn opened his mouth in angry retort. Then he discovered he had no

retort, only anger. And this made him angrier, and his mouth remained

open, quite terrifyingly for poor Mrs. Cohn.

'What is the use of arguing with him?' she said imploringly. 'The War

Office has been sensible enough to refuse him.'

'We shall see,' said Simon. 'I am going to peg away at 'em again, and

if I don't get into the Mounted Infantry, I'm a Dutchman--and of the

Boer variety.'

He seemed any kind of man save a Jew to the puzzled father. 'Hannah,

you must have known of this--these clothes,' S. Cohn spluttered.

'They don't cost anything,' she murmured. 'The child amuses himself.

He will never really be called out.'

'If he is, I'll stop his supplies.'

'Oh,' said Simon airily, 'the Government will attend to that.'

'Indeed!' And S. Cohn's face grew black. 'But remember--you may go,

but you shall never come back.'

'Oh, Solomon! How can you utter such an awful omen?'

Simon laughed. 'Don't bother, mother. He's bound to take me back.

Isn't it in the papers that he promised?'

S. Cohn went from black to green.

VII

Simon got his way. The authorities reconsidered their decision. But

the father would not reconsider his. Ignorant of his boy's graceless

existence, he fumed at the first fine thing in the boy's life. 'Tis a

wise father that knows his own child.

Mere emulation of his Christian comrades, and the fun of the thing,

had long ago induced the lad to add volunteering to his other

dissipations. But, once in it, the love of arms seized him, and when

the call for serious fighters came, some new passion that surprised

even himself leapt to his breast--the first call upon an idealism,

choked, rather than fed, by a misunderstood Judaism. Anglicization had

done its work; from his schooldays he had felt himself a descendant,

not of Judas Maccabaeus, but of Nelson and Wellington; and now that his

brethren were being mowed down by a kopje-guarded foe, his whole soul

rose in venomous sympathy. And, mixed with this genuine instinct of

devotion to the great cause of country, were stirrings of anticipated

adventure, gorgeous visions of charges, forlorn hopes, picked-up

shells, redoubts stormed; heritages of 'The Pirates of Pechili,' and

all the military romances that his prayer-book had masked.

He looked every inch an Anglo-Saxon, in his khaki uniform and his

great slouch hat, with his bayonet and his bandolier.

The night before he sailed for South Africa there was a service in St.

Paul's Cathedral, for which each volunteer had two tickets. Simon sent

his to his father. 'The Lord Mayor will attend in state. I dare say

you'll like to see the show,' he wrote flippantly.

'He'll become a Christian next,' said S. Cohn, tearing the cards in

twain.

Later, Mrs. Cohn pieced them together. It was the last chance of

seeing her boy.

VIII

Unfortunately the Cathedral service fell on a Friday night, when S.

Cohn, the Emporium closed, was wont to absorb the Sabbath peace. He

would sit, after high tea, of which cold fried fish was the prime

ingredient, dozing over the Jewish weekly. He still approved

platonically of its bellicose sentiments. This January night, the

Sabbath arriving early in the afternoon, he was snoring before seven,

and Mrs. Cohn slipped out, risking his wrath. Her religion forced her

to make the long journey on foot; but, hurrying, she arrived at St.

Paul's before the doors were opened. And throughout the long walk was

a morbid sense of one wasted ticket. She almost stopped at a friend's

house to offer the exciting spectacle, but dread of a religious rebuff

carried her past. With Christians she was not intimate enough to

invite companionship. Besides, would not everybody ask why she was

going without her husband?

She inquired for the door mentioned on her ticket, and soon found

herself one of a crowd of parents on the steps. A very genteel crowd,

she noted with pleasure. Her boy would be in good company. The scraps

of conversation she caught dealt with a world of alien things--how

little she was Anglicized, she thought, after all those years! And

when she was borne forward into the Cathedral, her heart beat with a

sense of dim, remote glories. To have lived so long in London and

never to have entered here! She was awed and soothed by the solemn

vistas, the perspectives of pillars and arches, the great nave, the

white robes of the choir vaguely stirring a sense of angels, the

overarching dome, defined by a fiery rim, but otherwise suggesting

dim, skyey space.

Suddenly she realized that she was sitting among the men. But it did

not seem to matter. The building kept one's thoughts religious. Around

the waiting congregation, the human sea outside the Cathedral

rumoured, and whenever the door was opened to admit some dignitary the

roar of cheering was heard like a salvo saluting his entry. The Lord

Mayor and the Aldermen passed along the aisle, preceded by

mace-bearers; and mingled with this dazzle of gilded grandeur and

robes, was a regretful memory of the days when, as a Town Councillor's

consort, she had at least touched the hem of this unknown historic

English life. The skirl of bagpipes shrilled from without--that

exotic, half-barbarous sound now coming intimately into her life. And

then, a little later, the wild cheers swept into the Cathedral like a

furious wind, and the thrill of the marching soldiers passed into the

air, and the congregation jumped up on the chairs and craned towards

the right aisle to stare at the khaki couples. How she looked for

Simon!

The volunteers filed on, filed on--beardless youths mostly, a few with

a touch of thought in the face, many with the honest nullity of the

clerk and the shopman, some with the prizefighter's jaw, but every

face set and serious. Ah! at last, there was her Simon--manlier,

handsomer than them all! But he did not see her: he marched on

stiffly; he was already sucked up into this strange life. Her heart

grew heavy. But it lightened again when the organ pealed out. The

newspapers the next day found fault with the plain music, with the

responses all in monotone, but to her it was divine. Only the words of

the opening hymn, which she read in the 'Form of Prayer,' discomforted

her:

'Fight the good fight with all thy might,

Christ is thy Strength and Christ thy Right'

But the bulk of the liturgy surprised her, so strangely like was it to

the Jewish. The ninety-first Psalm! Did they, then, pray the Jewish

prayers in Christian churches? 'For He shall give His angels charge

over thee: to keep thee in all thy ways.' Ah! how she prayed that for

Simon!

As the ecclesiastical voice droned on, unintelligibly, inaudibly, in

echoing, vaulted space, she studied the hymns and verses, with their

insistent Old Testament savour, culminating in the farewell blessing:

'The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon

you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of His

countenance upon you and give you peace.'

How often she had heard it in Hebrew from the priests as they blessed

the other tribes! Her husband himself had chanted it, with uplifted

palms and curiously grouped fingers. But never before had she felt its

beauty: she had never even understood its words till she read the

English of them in the gilt-edged Prayer-Book that marked rising

wealth. Surely there had been some monstrous mistake in conceiving the

two creeds as at daggers drawn, and though she only pretended to kneel

with the others, she felt her knees sinking in surrender to the larger

life around her.

As the volunteers filed out and the cheers came in, she wormed her way

nearer to the aisle, scrambling even over backs of chairs in the

general mellay. This time Simon saw her. He stretched out his martial

arm and blew her a kiss. Oh, delicious tears, full of heartbreak and

exaltation! This was their farewell.

She passed out into the roaring crowd, with a fantastic dream-sense of

a night-sky and a great stone building, dark with age and solemnity,

and unreal figures perched on railings and points of vantage, and

hurrahing hordes that fused themselves with the procession and became

part of its marching. She yearned forwards to vague glories, aware of

a poor past. She ran with the crowd. How they cheered her boy! _Her_

boy! She saw him carried off on the shoulders of Christian citizens.

Yes; he was a hero. She was the mother of a hero.

IX

The first news she got from him was posted at St. Vincent. He wrote to

her alone, with a jocose hope that his father would be satisfied with

his sufferings on the voyage. Not only had the sea been rough, but he

had suffered diabolically from the inoculation against enteric fever,

which, even after he had got his sea-legs, kept him to his berth and

gave him a 'Day of Atonement' thirst.

'Ah!' growled S. Cohn; 'he sees what a fool he's been, and he'll take

the next boat back.'

'But that would be desertion.'

'Well, he didn't mind deserting the business.'

Mr. Cohn's bewilderment increased with every letter. The boy was

sleeping in sodden trenches, sometimes without blankets; and instead of

grumbling at that, his one grievance was that the regiment was not

getting to the front. Heat and frost, hurricane and dust-storm--nothing

came amiss. And he described himself as stronger than ever, and poured

scorn on the medical wiseacre who had tried to refuse him.

'All the same,' sighed Hannah, 'I do hope they will just be used to

guard the lines of communication.' She was full of war-knowledge

acquired with painful eagerness, prattled of Basuto ponies and Mauser

bullets, pontoons and pom-poms, knew the exact position of the armies,

and marked her war-map with coloured pins.

Simon, too, had developed quite a literary talent under the pressure

of so much vivid new life, and from his cheery letters she learned

much that was not in the papers, especially in those tense days when

the C.I.V.'S did at last get to the front--and remained there: tales

of horses mercifully shot, and sheep mercilessly poisoned, and oxen

dropping dead as they dragged the convoys; tales of muddle and

accident, tales of British soldiers slain by their own protective

cannon as they lay behind ant-heaps facing the enemy, and British

officers culled under the very eyes of the polo-match; tales of

hospital and camp, of shirts turned sable and putties worn to rags,

and all the hidden miseries of uncleanliness and insanitation that

underlie the glories of war. There were tales, too, of quarter-rations;

but these she did not read to her husband, lest the mention of

'bully-beef' should remind him of how his son must be eating forbidden

food. Once, even, two fat pigs were captured at a hungry moment for the

battalion. But there came a day when S. Cohn seized those letters and

read them first. He began to speak of his boy at the war--nay, to read

the letters to enthralled groups in the synagogue lobby--groups that

swallowed without reproach the _tripha_ meat cooked in Simon's

mess-tin.

It was like being _Gabbai_ over again.

Moreover, Simon's view of the Boer was so strictly orthodox as to give

almost religious satisfaction to the proud parent. 'A canting

hypocrite, a psalm-singer and devil-dodger, he has no civilization

worth the name, and his customs are filthy. Since the great trek he

has acquired, from long intercourse with his Kaffir slaves, many of

the native's savage traits. In short, a born liar, credulous and

barbarous, crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn.'

'Crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn,' repeated S. Cohn,

pausing impressively. 'Haven't I always said that? The boy only bears

out what I knew without going there. But hear further! "Is it to be

wondered at that the Boer farmer, hidden in the vast undulations of

the endless veldt, with his wife, his children and his slaves, should

lose all sense of proportion, ignorant of the outside world, his sole

knowledge filtering through Jo-burgh?"'

As S. Cohn made another dramatic pause, it was suddenly borne in on

his wife with a stab of insight that he was reading a description of

himself--nay, of herself, of her whole race, hidden in the great

world, awaiting some vague future of glory that never came. The

important voice of her husband broke again upon her reflections:

'"He has held many nights of supplication to his fetish, and is still

unconvinced that his God of Battles is asleep."' The reader chuckled,

and a broad smile overspread the synagogue lobby. '"They are

brave--oh, yes, but it is not what we mean by it--they are good

fighters, because they have Dutch blood at the back of them, and a

profound contempt for us. Their whole life has been spent on the open

veldt (we are always fighting them on somebody's farm, who knows every

inch of the ground), and they never risk anything except in the trap

sort of manoeuvres. The brave rush of our Tommies is unknown to them,

and their slim nature would only see the idiocy of walking into a

death-trap, cool as in a play. Were there ever two races less alike?"'

wound up the youthful philosopher in his tent. '"I really do not see

how they are to live together after the war."'

'That's easy enough,' S. Cohn had already commented to his wife as

oracularly as if she did not read the same morning paper.

'Intermarriage! In a generation or two there will be one fine

Anglo-African race. That's the solution--mark my words. And you can

tell the boy as much--only don't say I told you to write to him.'

'Father says I'm to tell you intermarriage is the solution,' Mrs. Cohn

wrote obediently. 'He really is getting much softer towards you.'

'Tell father that's nonsense,' Simon wrote back. 'The worst

individuals we have to deal with come from a Boer mother and an

English father, deposited here by the first Transvaal war.'

S. Cohn snorted angrily at the message. 'That was because there were

two Governments--he forgets there will be only one United Empire now.'

He was not appeased till Private Cohn was promoted, and sent home a

thrilling adventure, which the proud reader was persuaded by the lobby

to forward to the communal organ. The organ asked for a photograph to

boot. Then S. Cohn felt not only _Gabbai_, but town councillor again.

This wonderful letter, of which S. Cohn distributed printed copies to

the staff of the Emporium with a bean-feast air, ran:

'We go out every day--I am speaking of my own squadron--each

officer taking his turn with twenty to fifty men, and sweep

round the farms a few miles out; and we seldom come back

without seeing Boers hanging round on the chance of a snipe at

our flanks, or waiting to put up a trap if we go too far. The

local commando fell on our cattle-guard the other day--a

hundred and fifty to our twenty-five--and we suffered; it was

a horrible bit of country. There was a young chap,

Winstay--rather a pal of mine--he had a narrow squeak, knocked

over by a shot in his breast. I managed to get him safe back

to camp--Heaven knows how!--and they made me a lance-corporal,

and the beggar says I saved his life; but it was really

through carrying a fat letter from his sister--not even his

sweetheart. We chaff him at missing such a romantic chance.

He got off with a flesh wound, but there is a great blot of

red ink on the letter. You may imagine we were not anxious to

let our comrades go unavenged. My superiors being sick or

otherwise occupied, I was allowed to make a night-march with

thirty-five men on a farm nine miles away--just to get square.

It was a nasty piece of work, as we were within a few miles of

the Boer laager, three hundred strong. There was moonlight,

too--it was like a dream, that strange, silent ride, with only

the stumble of a horse breaking the regular thud of the hoofs.

We surrounded the farm in absolute silence, dismounting some

thousand yards away, and fixing bayonets. I told the men I

wanted no shots--that would have brought down the

commando--but cold steel and silence. We crept up and swept

the farm--it was weird, but, alas! they were out on the loot.

The men were furious, but we live in hopes.'

The end was a trifle disappointing, but S. Cohn, too, lived in

hopes--of some monstrous and memorable butchery. Even his wife had got

used to the firing-line, now that neither shot nor shell could harm

her boy. 'For He shall give His angels charge over thee.' She had come

to think her secret daily repetition of the ninety-first Psalm

talismanic.

When Simon sent home the box which had held the chocolates presented

by the Queen, a Boer bullet, and other curios, S. Cohn displayed them

in his window, and the crowd and the business they brought him put him

more and more in sympathy with Simon and the Empire. In conversation

he deprecated the non-militarism of the Jew: 'If I were only a

younger man myself, sir....'

The night Mafeking was relieved, the Emporium was decorated with

bunting from roof to basement, and a great illuminated window revealed

nothing but stacks of khaki trouserings.

So that, although the good man still sulked over Simon to his wife,

she was not deceived; and, the time drawing nigh for Simon's return,

she began to look happily forward to a truly reunited family.

In her wildest anxiety it never occurred to her that it was her

husband who would die. Yet this is what the irony of fate brought to

pass. In the unending campaign which death wages with life, S. Cohn

was slain, and Simon returned unscratched from the war to recite the

_Kaddish_ in his memory.

X

Simon came back bronzed and a man. The shock of finding his father

buried had supplied the last transforming touch; and, somewhat to his

mother's surprise, he settled down contentedly to the business he had

inherited. And now that he had practically unlimited money to spend,

he did not seem to be spending it, but to be keeping better hours than

when dodging his father's eye. His only absences from home he

accounted for as visits to Winstay, his pal of the campaign, with whom

he had got chummier than ever since the affair of the cattle-guard.

Winstay, he said, was of good English family, with an old house in

Harrow--fortunately on the London and North Western Railway, so that

he could easily get a breath of country air on Saturday and Sunday

afternoons. He seemed to have forgotten (although the Emporium was

still closed on Saturdays) that riding was forbidden, and his mother

did not remind him of it. The life that had been risked for the larger

cause, she vaguely felt as enfranchised from the limitations of the

smaller.

Nearly two months after Simon's return, a special military service was

held at the Great Synagogue on the feast of _Chanukah_--the

commemoration of the heroic days of Judas Maccabaeus--and the Jewish

C.I.V.'s were among the soldiers invited. Mrs. Cohn, too, got a ticket

for the imposing ceremony which was fixed for a Sunday afternoon.

As they sat at the midday meal on the exciting day, Mrs. Cohn said

suddenly: 'Guess who paid me a visit yesterday.'

'Goodness knows,' said Simon.

'Mr. Sugarman.' And she smiled nervously.

'Sugarman?' repeated Simon blankly.

'The--the--er--the matrimonial agent.'

'What impudence! Before your year of mourning is up!'

Mrs. Cohn's sallow face became one flame. 'Not me! You!' she blurted.

'Me! Well, of all the cheek!' And Simon's flush matched his mother's.

'Oh, it's not so unreasonable,' she murmured deprecatingly. 'I suppose

he thought you would be looking for a wife before long; and

naturally,' she added, her voice growing bolder, 'I should like to see

you settled before I follow your father. After all, you are no

ordinary match. Sugarman says there isn't a girl in Bayswater, even,

who would refuse you.'

'The very reason for refusing them,' cried Simon hotly. 'What a

ghastly idea, that your wife would just as soon have married any other

fellow with the same income!'

Mrs. Cohn cowered under his scorn, yet felt vaguely exalted by it, as

by the organ in St. Paul's, and strange tears of shame came to

complicate her emotions further. She remembered how she had been

exported from Poland to marry the unseen S. Cohn. Ah! how this new

young generation was snapping asunder the ancient coils! how the new

and diviner sap ran in its veins!

'I shall only marry a girl I love, mother. And it's not likely to be

one of these Jewish girls, I tell you frankly.'

She trembled. 'One of which Jewish girls?' she faltered.

'Oh, any sort. They don't appeal to me.'

Her face grew sallower. 'I am glad your father isn't alive to hear

that,' she breathed.

'But father said intermarriage is the solution,' retorted Simon.

Mrs. Cohn was struck dumb. 'He was thinking how to make the Boers

English,' she said at last.

'And didn't he say the Jews must be English, too?'

'Aren't there plenty of Jewish girls who are English?' she murmured

miserably.

'You mean, who don't care a pin about the old customs? Then where's

the difference?' retorted Simon.

The meal finished in uncomfortable silence, and Simon went off to don

his khaki regimentals and join in the synagogue parade.

Mrs. Cohn's heart was heavy as she dressed for the same spectacle. Her

brain was busy piecing it all together. Yes, she understood it all

now--those sedulous Saturday and Sunday afternoons at Harrow. She

lived at Harrow, then, this Christian, this grateful sister of the

rescued Winstay: it was she who had steadied his life; hers were those

'fat letters,' faintly aromatic. It must be very wonderful, this

strange passion, luring her son from his people with its forbidden

glamour. How Highbury would be scandalized, robbed of so eligible a

bridegroom! The sons-in-law she had enriched would reproach her for

the shame imported into the family--they who had cleaved to the Faith!

And--more formidable than all the rest--she heard the tongue of her

cast-off seaport, to whose reverence or disesteem she still

instinctively referred all her triumphs and failures.

Yet, on the other hand, surged her hero-son's scorn at the union by

contract consecrated by the generations! But surely a compromise could

be found. He should have love--this strange English thing--but could

he not find a Jewess? Ah, happy inspiration! he should marry a quite

poor Jewess--he had money enough, thank Heaven! That would show him he

was not making a match, that he was truly in love.

But this strange girl at Harrow--he would never be happy with her! No,

no; there were limits to Anglicization.

XI

It was not till she was seated in the ancient synagogue, relieved from

the squeeze of entry in the wake of soldiers and the exhilaration of

hearing 'See the Conquering Hero comes' pealing, she knew not whence,

that she woke to the full strangeness of it all, and to the

consciousness that she was actually sitting among the men--just as in

St. Paul's. And what men! Everywhere the scarlet and grey of uniforms,

the glister of gold lace--the familiar decorous lines of devout

top-hats broken by glittering helmets, bear-skins, white nodding

plumes, busbies, red caps a-cock, glengarries, all the colour of the

British army, mixed with the feathered jauntiness of the Colonies and

the khaki sombreros of the C.I.V.'s! Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards,

Dragoon Guards, Lancers, Hussars, Artillery, Engineers, King's Royal

Rifles, all the corps that had for the first time come clearly into

her consciousness in her tardy absorption into English realities, Jews

seemed to be among them all. And without conscription--oh, what would

poor Solomon have thought of that?

The Great Synagogue itself struck a note of modern English gaiety, as

of an hotel dining-room, freshly gilded, divested of its historic

mellowness, the electric light replacing the ancient candles and

flooding the winter afternoon with white resplendence. The

pulpit--yes, the pulpit--was swathed in the Union Jack; and looking

towards the box of the _Parnass_ and _Gabbai_, she saw it was occupied

by officers with gold sashes. Somebody whispered that he with the

medalled breast was a Christian Knight and Commander of the Bath--'a

great honour for the synagogue!' What! were Christians coming to

Jewish services, even as she had gone to Christian? Why, here was

actually a white cross on an officer's sleeve.

And before these alien eyes, the cantor, intoning his Hebrew chant on

the steps of the Ark, lit the great many-branched _Chanukah_

candlestick. Truly, the world was changing under her eyes.

And when the Chief Rabbi went toward the Ark in his turn, she saw that

he wore a strange scarlet and white gown (military, too, she imagined

in her ignorance), and--oh, even rarer sight!--he was followed by a

helmeted soldier, who drew the curtain revealing the ornate Scrolls of

the Law.

And amid it all a sound broke forth that sent a sweetness through her

blood. An organ! An organ in the Synagogue! Ah! here indeed was

Anglicization.

It was thin and reedy even to _her_ ears, compared with that divine

resonance in St. Paul's: a tinkling apology, timidly disconnected from

the congregational singing, and hovering meekly on the borders of the

service--she read afterwards that it was only a harmonium--yet it

brought a strange exaltation, and there was an uplifting even to tears

in the glittering uniforms and nodding plumes. Simon's eyes met his

mother's, and a flash of the old childish love passed between them.

There was a sermon--the text taken with dual appropriateness from the

Book of Maccabees. Fully one in ten of the Jewish volunteers, said the

preacher, had gone forth to drive out the bold invader of the Queen's

dominions. Their beloved country had no more devoted citizens than

the children of Israel who had settled under her flag. They had been

gratified, but not surprised, to see in the Jewish press the names of

more than seven hundred Jews serving Queen and country. Many more had

gone unrecorded, so that they had proportionally contributed more

soldiers--from Colonel to bugler-boy--than their mere numbers would

warrant. So at one in spirit and ideals were the Englishman and the

Jew whose Scriptures he had imbibed, that it was no accident that the

Anglophobes of Europe were also Anti-Semites.

And then the congregation rose, while the preacher behind the folds of

the Union Jack read out the names of the Jews who had died for England

in the far-off veldt. Every head was bent as the names rose on the

hushed air of the synagogue. It went on and on, this list, reeking

with each bloody historic field, recalling every regiment, British or

colonial; on and on in the reverent silence, till a black pall seemed

to descend, inch by inch, overspreading the synagogue. She had never

dreamed so many of her brethren had died out there. Ah! surely they

were knit now, these races: their friendship sealed in blood!

As the soldiers filed out of synagogue, she squeezed towards Simon and

seized his hand for an instant, whispering passionately: 'My lamb,

marry her--we are all English alike.'

Nor did she ever know that she had said these words in Yiddish!

XII

Now came an enchanting season of confidences; the mother, caught up in

the glow of this strange love, learning to see the girl through the

boy's eyes, though the only aid to his eloquence was the photograph of

a plump little blonde with bewitching dimples. The time was not ripe

yet for bringing Lucy and her together, he explained. In fact, he

hadn't actually proposed. His mother understood he was waiting for the

year of mourning to be up.

'But how will you be married?' she once asked.

'Oh, there's the registrar,' he said carelessly.

'But can't you make her a proselyte?' she ventured timidly.

He coloured. 'It would be absurd to suddenly start talking religion to

her.'

'But she knows you're a Jew.'

'Oh, I dare say. I never hid it from her brother, so why shouldn't she

know? But her father's a bit of a crank, so I rather avoid the

subject.'

'A crank? About Jews?'

'Well, old Winstay has got it into his noddle that the Jews are

responsible for the war--and that they leave the fighting to the

English. It's rather sickening: even in South Africa we are not

treated as we should be, considering----'

Her dark eye lost its pathetic humility. 'But how can he say that,

when you yourself--when you saved his----'

'Well, I suppose just because he knows I _was_ fighting, he doesn't

think of me as a Jew. It's a bit illogical, I know.' And he smiled

ruefully. 'But, then, logic is not the old boy's strong point.'

'He seemed such a nice old man,' said Mrs. Cohn, as she recalled the

photograph of the white-haired cherub writing with a quill at a

property desk.

'Oh, off his hobby-horse he's a dear old boy. That's why I don't help

him into the saddle.'

'But how can he be ignorant that we've sent seven hundred at least to

the war?' she persisted. 'Why, the paper had all their photographs!'

'What paper?' said Simon, laughing. 'Do you suppose he reads the

Jewish what's-a-name, like you? Why, he's never heard of it!'

'Then you ought to show him a copy.'

'Oh, mother!' and he laughed again. 'That would only prove to him

there are too many Jews everywhere.'

A cloud began to spread over Mrs. Cohn's hard-won content. But

apparently it only shadowed her own horizon. Simon was as happily full

of his Lucy as ever.

Nevertheless, there came a Sunday evening when Simon returned from

Harrow earlier than his wont, and Hannah's dog-like eye noted that the

cloud had at last reached his brow.

'You have had a quarrel?' she cried.

'Only with the old boy.'

'But what about?'

'The old driveller has just joined some League of Londoners for the

suppression of the immigrant alien.'

'But you should have told him we all agree there should be

decentralization,' said Mrs. Cohn, quoting her favourite Jewish

organ.

'It isn't that--it's the old fellow's vanity that's hurt. You see, he

composed the "Appeal to the Briton," and gloated over it so

conceitedly that I couldn't help pointing out the horrible

contradictions.'

'But Lucy----' his mother began anxiously.

'Lucy's a brick. I don't know what my life would have been without the

little darling. But listen, mother.' And he drew out a portentous

prospectus. 'They say aliens should not be admitted unless they

produce a certificate of industrial capacity, and in the same breath

they accuse them of taking the work away from the British workman. Now

this isn't a Jewish question, and I didn't raise it as such--just a

piece of muddle--and even as an Englishman I can't see how we can

exclude Outlanders here after fighting for the Outland----'

'But Lucy----' his mother interrupted.

His vehement self-assertion passed into an affectionate smile.

'Lucy was dimpling all over her face. She knows the old boy's vanity.

Of course she couldn't side with me openly.'

'But what will happen? Will you go there again?'

The cloud returned to his brow. 'Oh, well, we'll see.'

A letter from Lucy saved him the trouble of deciding the point.

'DEAR SILLY OLD SIM,' it ran,

'Father has been going on dreadfully, so you had better wait a

few Sundays till he has cooled down. After all, you yourself

admit there is a grievance of congestion and high rents in the

East End. And it is only natural--isn't it?--that after

shedding our blood and treasure for the Empire we should not

be in a mood to see our country overrun by dirty aliens.'

'Dirty!' muttered Simon, as he read. 'Has she seen the Christian

slums--Flower and Dean Street?' And his handsome Oriental brow grew

duskier with anger. It did not clear till he came to:

'Let us meet at the Crystal Palace next Saturday, dear

quarrelsome person. Three o'clock, in the Pompeian Room. I

_have_ got an aunt at Sydenham, and I _can_ go in to tea after

the concert and hear all about the missionary work in the

South Sea Islands.'

XIII

Ensued a new phase in the relation of Simon and Lucy. Once they had

met in freedom, neither felt inclined to revert to the restricted

courtship of the drawing-room. Even though their chat was merely of

books and music and pictures, it was delicious to make their own

atmosphere, untroubled by the flippancy of the brother or the

earnestness of the father. In the presence of Lucy's artistic

knowledge Simon was at once abashed and stimulated. She moved in a

delicate world of symphonies and silver-point drawings of whose very

existence he had been unaware, and reverence quickened the sense of

romance which their secret meetings had already enhanced.

Once or twice he spoke of resuming his visits to Harrow, but the

longer he delayed the more difficult the conciliatory visit grew.

'Father is now deeper in the League than ever,' she told him. 'He has

joined the committee, and the prospectus has gone forth in all its

glorious self-contradiction.'

'But, considering I am the son of an alien, and I have fought for----'

'There, there! quarrelsome person,' she interrupted laughingly. 'No,

no, no, you had better not come till you can forget your remote

genealogy. You see, even now father doesn't quite realize you are a

Jew. He thinks you have a strain of Jewish blood, but are in every

other respect a decent Christian body.'

'Christian!' cried Simon in horror.

'Why not? You fought side by side with my brother; you ate ham with

us.'

Simon blushed hotly. 'But, Lucy, you don't think religion is ham?'

'What, then? Merely Shem?' she laughed.

Simon laughed too. How clever she was! 'But you know I never could

believe in the Trinity and all that. And, what's more, I don't believe

you do yourself.'

'It isn't exactly what one believes. I was baptized into the Church of

England--I feel myself a member. Really, Sim, you are a dreadfully

argumentative and quarrelsome person.'

'I'll never quarrel with you, Lucy,' he said half entreatingly; for

somehow he felt a shiver of cold at the word 'baptized,' as though

himself plunged into the font.

In this wise did both glide away from any deep issue or decision till

the summer itself glided away. Mrs. Cohn, anxiously following the

courtship through Sim's love-smitten eyes, her suggestion that the

girl be brought to see her received with equal postponement, began to

fret for the great thing to come to pass. One cannot be always

heroically stiffened to receive the cavalry of communal criticism.

Waiting weakens the backbone. But she concealed from her boy these

flaccid relapses.

'You said you'd bring her to see me when she returned from the

seaside,' she ventured to remind him.

'So I did; but now her father is dragging her away to Scotland.'

'You ought to get married the moment she gets back.'

'I can't expect her to rush things--with her father to square. Still,

you are not wrong, mother. It's high time we came to a definite

understanding between ourselves at least.'

'What!' gasped Mrs. Cohn. 'Aren't you engaged?'

'Oh, in a way, of course. But we've never said so in so many words.'

For fear this should be the 'English' way, Mrs. Cohn forbore to remark

that the definiteness of the Sugarman method was not without

compensations. She merely applauded Simon's more sensible mood.

But Mrs. Cohn was fated to a further season of fret. Day after day the

'fat letters' arrived with the Scottish postmark and the faint perfume

that always stirred her own wistful sense of lost romance--something

far-off and delicious, with the sweetness of roses and the salt of

tears. And still the lover, floating in his golden mist, vouchsafed

her no definite news.

One night she found him restive beyond his wont. She knew the reason.

For two days there had been no scented letter, and she saw how he

started at every creak of the garden-gate, as he waited for the last

post. When at length a step was heard crunching on the gravel, he

rushed from the room, and Mrs. Cohn heard the hall-door open. Her ear,

disappointed of the rat-tat, morbidly followed every sound; but it

seemed a long time before her boy's returning footstep reached her.

The strange, slow drag of it worked upon her nerves, and her heart

grew sick with premonition.

He held out the letter towards her. His face was white. 'She cannot

marry me, because I am a Jew,' he said tonelessly.

'Cannot marry you!' she whispered huskily. 'Oh, but this must not be!

I will go to the father; I will explain! You saved his son--he owes

you his daughter.'

He waved her hopelessly back to her seat--for she had started up. 'It

isn't the father, it's herself. Now that I won't let her drift any

longer, she can't bring herself to it. She's honest, anyway, my little

Lucy. She won't fall back on the old Jew-baiter.'

'But how dare she--how dare she think herself above you!' Her dog-like

eyes were blazing yet once again.

'Why are you Jews surprised?' he said bitterly. 'You've held yourself

aloof from the others long enough, God knows. Yet you wonder they've

got their prejudices, too.'

And, suddenly laying his head on the table, he broke into sobs--sobs

that tore at his mother's heart, that were charged with memories of

his ancient tears, of the days of paternal wrath and the rending of

'The Pirates of Pechili.' And, again, as in the days when his boyish

treasures were changed to ashes, she stole towards him, with an

involuntary furtive look to see if S. Cohn's back was turned, and laid

her hands upon his heaving shoulders. But he shook her off! 'Why

didn't a Boer bullet strike me down?' Then with a swift pang of

remorse he raised his contorted face and drew hers close against

it--their love the one thing saved from Anglicization.

THE JEWISH TRINITY

THE JEWISH TRINITY

I

With the Christian Mayoress of Middleton to take in to dinner at Sir

Asher Aaronsberg's, Leopold Barstein as a Jewish native of that

thriving British centre, should have felt proud and happy. But

Barstein was young and a sculptor, fresh from the Paris schools and

Salon triumphs. He had long parted company with Jews and Judaism, and

to his ardent irreverence even the Christian glories of Middleton

seemed unspeakably parochial. In Paris he had danced at night on the

Boule Miche out of sheer joy of life, and joined in choruses over

midnight bocks; and London itself now seemed drab and joyless, though

many a gay circle welcomed the wit and high spirits and even the

physical graces of this fortunate young man who seemed to shed a

blonde radiance all around him. The factories of Middleton, which had

manufactured Sir Asher Aaronsberg, ex-M.P., and nearly all his wealthy

guests, were to his artistic eye an outrage upon a beautiful planet,

and he was still in that crude phase of juvenile revolt in which one

speaks one's thoughts of the mess humanity has made of its world. But,

unfortunately, the Mayoress of Middleton was deafish, so that he

could not even shock her with his epigrams. It was extremely

disconcerting to have his bland blasphemies met with an equally bland

smile. On his other hand sat Mrs. Samuels, the buxom and highly

charitable relict of 'The People's Clothier,' whose ugly pictorial

posters had overshadowed Barstein's youth. Little wonder that the

artist's glance frequently wandered across the great shining table

towards a girl who, if they had not been so plaguily intent on

honouring his fame, might have now been replacing the Mayoress at his

side. True, the girl was merely a Jewess, and he disliked the breed.

But Mabel Aaronsberg was unexpected. She had a statuesque purity of

outline and complexion; seemed, indeed, worthy of being a creation of

his own. How the tedious old manufacturer could have produced this

marmoreal prodigy provided a problem for the sculptor, as he almost

silently ate his way through the long and exquisite menu.

Not that Sir Asher himself was unpicturesque. Indeed, he was the very

picture of the bluff and burly Briton, white-bearded like Father

Christmas. But he did not seem to lead to yonder vision of poetry and

purity. Lady Aaronsberg, who might have supplied the missing link, was

dead--before even arriving at ladyship, alas!--and when she was alive

Barstein had not enjoyed the privilege of moving in these high

municipal circles. This he owed entirely to his foreign fame, and to

his invitation by the Corporation to help in the organization of a

local Art Exhibition.

'I do admire Sir Asher,' the Mayoress broke in suddenly upon his

reflections; 'he seems to me exactly like your patriarchs.'

A Palestinian patriarch was the last person Sir Asher, with his

hovering lackeys, would have recalled to the sculptor, who, in so far

as the patriarchs ever crossed his mind, conceived them as resembling

Rembrandt's Rabbis. But he replied blandly: 'Our patriarchs were

polygamists.'

'Exactly,' assented the deaf Mayoress.

Barstein, disconcerted, yearned to repeat his statement in a shout,

but neither the pitch nor the proposition seemed suitable to the

dinner-table. The Mayoress added ecstatically: 'You can imagine him

sitting at the door of his tent, talking with the angels.'

This time Barstein did shout, but with laughter. All eyes turned a bit

enviously in his direction. 'You're having all the fun down there,'

called out Sir Asher benevolently; and the bluff Briton--even to the

northerly burr--was so vividly stamped upon Barstein's mind that he

wondered the more that the Mayoress could see him as anything but the

prosy, provincial, whilom Member of Parliament he so transparently

was. 'A mere literary illusion,' he thought. 'She has read the Bible,

and now reads Sir Asher into it. As well see a Saxon pirate or a

Norman jongleur in a modern Londoner.'

As if to confirm Barstein's vision of the bluff and burly Briton, Sir

Asher was soon heard over the clatter of conversation protesting

vehemently against the views of Tom Fuller, the degenerate son of a

Tory squire.

'Give Ireland Home Rule?' he was crying passionately. 'Oh, my dear Mr.

Fuller, it would be the beginning of the end of our Empire!'

'But the Irish have as much right to govern themselves as we have!'

the young Englishman maintained.

'They would not so much govern themselves as misgovern the Protestant

minority,' cried Sir Asher, becoming almost epigrammatic in his

excitement. 'Home Rule simply means the triumph of Roman Catholicism.'

It occurred to the cynical Barstein that even the defeat of Roman

Catholicism meant no victory for Judaism, but he stayed his tongue

with a salted almond. Let the Briton make the running. This the young

gentleman proceeded to do at a great pace.

'Then how about Home Rule for India? There's no Catholic majority

there!'

'Give up India!' Sir Asher opened horrified eyes. This heresy was new

to him. 'Give up the brightest jewel in the British crown! And let the

Russian bear come and swallow it up! No, no! A thousand times no!' Sir

Asher even gestured with his fork in his patriotic fervour, forgetting

he was not on the platform.

'So I imagine the patriarchs to have talked!' said the Mayoress,

admiringly observing his animation. Whereat the sculptor laughed once

more. He was amused, too, at the completeness with which the lion of

Judah had endued himself with the skin of the British lion. To a

cosmopolitan artist this bourgeois patriotism was peculiarly

irritating. But soon his eyes wandered again towards Miss Aaronsberg,

and he forgot trivialities.

II

The end of the meal was punctuated, not by the rising of the ladies,

but by the host's assumption of a black cap, which popped up from his

coat-tail pocket. With his head thus orientally equipped for prayer,

Sir Asher suddenly changed into a Rembrandtesque figure, his white

beard hiding the society shirtfront; and as he began intoning the

grace in Hebrew, the startled Barstein felt that the Mayoress had at

least a superficial justification. There came to him a touch of new

and artistic interest in this prosy, provincial ex-M.P., who,

environed by powdered footmen, sat at the end of his glittering

dinner-table uttering the language of the ancient prophets; and he

respected at least the sturdiness with which Miss Aaronsberg's father

wore his faith, like a phylactery, on his forehead. It said much for

his character that these fellow-citizens of his had once elected him

as their Member, despite his unpopular creed and race, and were now

willing to sit at his table under this tedious benediction. Sir Asher

did not even let them off with the shorter form of grace invented by a

wise Rabbi for these difficult occasions, yet so far as was visible it

was only the Jewish guests--comically distinguished by serviettes

shamefacedly dabbed on their heads--who fidgeted under the pious

torrent. These were no doubt fearful of boring the Christians whose

precious society the Jew enjoyed on a parlous tenure. In the host's

son Julius a superadded intellectual impatience was traceable. He had

brought back from Oxford a contempt for his father's creed which was

patent to every Jew save Sir Asher. Barstein, observing all this

uneasiness, became curiously angry with his fellow-Jews, despite that

he had scrupulously forborne to cover his own head with his serviette;

a racial pride he had not known latent in him surged up through all

his cosmopolitanism, and he maliciously trusted that the brave Sir

Asher would pray his longest. He himself had been a tolerable Hebraist

in his forcedly pious boyhood, and though he had neither prayed nor

heard any Hebrew prayers for many a year, his new artistic interest

led him to listen to the grace, and to disentangle the meaning from

the obscuring layers of verbal association and from the peculiar chant

enlivened by occasional snatches of melody with which it was intoned.

How he had hated this grace as a boy--this pious task-work that almost

spoilt the anticipation of meals! But to-night, after so long an

interval, he could look at it without prejudice, and with artistic

aloofness render to himself a true impression of its spiritual value.

'_We thank Thee, O Lord our God, because Thou didst give as an

heritage unto our fathers a desirable, good, and ample land, and

because Thou didst bring us forth, O Lord our God, from the land of

Egypt, and didst deliver us from the house of bondage----_'

Barstein heard no more for the moment; the paradox of this

retrospective gratitude was too absorbing. What! Sir Asher was

thankful because over three thousand years ago his ancestors had

obtained--not without hard fighting for it--a land which had already

been lost again for eighteen centuries. What a marvellous long memory

for a race to have!

Delivered from the house of bondage, forsooth! Sir Asher, himself--and

here a musing smile crossed the artist's lips--had never even known a

house of bondage, unless, indeed, the House of Commons (from which he

had been delivered by the Radical reaction) might be so regarded, and

his own house was, as he was fond of saying, Liberty Hall. But that

the Russian Jew should still rejoice in the redemption from Egypt! O

miracle of pious patience! O sublime that grazed the ridiculous!

But Sir Asher was still praying on:

'_Have mercy, O Lord our God, upon Israel Thy people, upon Jerusalem

Thy city, upon Zion the abiding place of Thy glory, upon the kingdom

of the house of David, Thine anointed...._'

Barstein lost himself in a fresh reverie. Here was indeed the

Palestinian patriarch. Not with the corporation of Middleton, nor the

lobbies of Westminster, not with his colossal business, not even with

the glories of the British Empire, was Sir Asher's true heart. He had

but caught phrases from the environment. To his deepest self he was

not even a Briton. '_Have mercy, O Lord, upon Israel Thy people._'

Despite all his outward pomp and prosperity, he felt himself one of

that dispersed and maltreated band of brothers who had for eighteen

centuries resisted alike the storm of persecution and the sunshine of

tolerance, and whose one consolation in the long exile was the dream

of Zion. The artist in Barstein began to thrill. What more fascinating

than to catch sight of the dreamer beneath the manufacturer, the

Hebrew visionary behind the English M.P.!

This palatial dwelling-place with its liveried lackeys was, then, no

fort of Philistinism in which an artist must needs asphyxiate, but a

very citadel of the spirit. A new respect for his host began to steal

upon him. Involuntarily he sought the face of the daughter; the

secret of her beauty was, after all, not so mysterious. Old Asher had

a soul, and 'the soul is form and doth the body make.'

Unconscious of the effect he was producing on the sensitive artist,

the Rembrandtesque figure prayed on: '_And rebuild Jerusalem, the holy

city, speedily and in our days...._'

It was the climax of the romance that had so strangely stolen over the

British dinner-table. Rebuild Jerusalem to-day! Did Jews really

conceive it as a contemporary possibility? Barstein went hot and cold.

The idea was absolutely novel to him; evidently as a boy he had not

understood his own prayers or his own people. All his imagination was

inflamed. He conjured up a Zion built up by such virile hands as Sir

Asher's, and peopled by such beautiful mothers as his daughter: the

great Empire that would spring from the unity and liberty of a race

which even under dispersion and oppression was one of the most potent

peoples on the planet. And thus, when the ladies at last rose, he was

in so deep a reverie that he almost forgot to rise too, and when he

did rise, he accompanied the ladies outside the door. It was only Miss

Aaronsberg's tactful 'Don't you want to smoke?' that saved him.

'Almost as long a grace as the dinner!' Tom Fuller murmured to him as

he returned to the table. 'Do the Jews say that after every meal?'

'They're supposed to,' Barstein replied, a little jarred as he picked

up a cigar.

'No wonder they beat the Christians,' observed the young Radical, who

evidently took original views. 'So much time for digestion would

enable any race to survive in this age of quick lunches. In America,

now they should rule the roast. Literally,' he added, with a laugh.

'It's a beautiful grace,' said Barstein rebukingly. 'The glamour of

Zion thrown over the prose of diet.'

'You're not a Jew?' said Tom, with a sudden suspicion.

'Yes, I am,' the artist replied with a dignity that surprised himself.

'I should never have taken you for one!' said Tom ingenuously.

Despite himself, Barstein felt a thrill of satisfaction. 'But why?' he

asked himself instantly. 'To feel complimented at not being taken for

a Jew--what does it mean? Is there a core of anti-Semitism in my

nature? Has our race reached self-contempt?'

'I beg your pardon,' Tom went on. 'I didn't mean to be irreverent. I

appreciate the picturesqueness of it all--hearing the very language of

the Bible, and all that. And I do sympathize with your desire for

Jewish Home Rule.'

'My desire?' murmured the artist, taken aback. Sir Asher here

interrupted them by pressing his '48 port upon both, and directing the

artist's attention in particular to the pictures that hung around the

stately dining-room. There was a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, a Landseer.

He drew Barstein round the walls.

'I am very fond of the English school,' he said. His cap was back in

his coat-tail, and he had become again the bluff and burly Briton.

'You don't patronize the Italians at all?' asked the artist.

'No,' said Sir Asher. He lowered his voice. 'Between you and I,' said

he--it was his main fault of grammar--'in Italian art one is never

safe from the Madonna, not to mention her Son.' It was a fresh

reminder of the Palestinian patriarch. Sir Asher never discussed

theology except with those who agreed with him. Nor did he ever,

whether in private or in public, breathe an unfriendly word against

his Christian fellow-citizens. All were sons of the same Father, as he

would frequently say from the platform. But in his heart of hearts he

cherished a contempt, softened by stupefaction, for the arithmetical

incapacity of Trinitarians.

Christianity under any other aspect did not exist for him. It was a

blunder impossible to a race with a genius for calculation. 'How can

three be one?' he would demand witheringly of his cronies. The

question was in his eye now as he summed up Italian art to the

sculptor, and a faint smile twitching about his lips invited his

fellow-Jew to share with him his feeling of spiritual and intellectual

superiority to the poor blind Christians at his table, as well as to

Christendom generally.

But the artist refused to come up on the pedestal. 'Surely the Madonna

was a very beautiful conception,' he said.

Sir Asher looked startled. 'Ah yes, you are an artist,' he remembered.

'You think only of the beautiful outside. But how can there be

three-in-one or one-in-three?'

Barstein did not reply, and Sir Asher added in a low scornful tone:

'Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.'

III

A sudden commission recalled Barstein to town before he could even pay

his after-dinner call. But the seed sown in his soul that evening was

not to be stifled. This seed was nothing less than the idea of a

national revival of his people. He hunted up his old prayer-books, and

made many discoveries as his modern consciousness depolarized page

upon page that had never in boyhood been anything to him but a series

of syllables to be gabbled off as rapidly as possible, when their

meaning was not still further overlaid by being sung slowly to a tune.

'I might as well have turned a prayer-wheel,' he said regretfully, as

he perceived with what iron tenacity the race beaten down by the Roman

Empire and by every power that had reigned since, had preserved its

aspiration for its old territory. And this mystery of race and blood,

this beauty of unforgetting aspiration, was all physically incarnate

in Mabel Aaronsberg.

He did not move one inch out of his way to see her, because he saw her

all day long. She appeared all over his studio in countless designs in

clay. But from this image of the beauty of the race, his deepening

insight drove him to interpret the tragedy also, and he sought out

from the slums and small synagogues of the East End strange forlorn

figures, with ragged curls and wistful eyes. It was from one of these

figures that he learnt to his astonishment that the dream of Zion,

whereof he imagined himself the sole dreamer, was shared by myriads,

and had even materialized into a national movement.

He joined the movement, and it led him into strange conventicles. He

was put on a committee which met in a little back-room, and which at

first treated him and his arguments with deference, soon with

familiarity, and occasionally with contempt. Hucksters and

cigar-makers held forth much more eloquently on their ideals than he

could, with far greater command of Talmudic quotation, while their

knowledge of how to run their local organization was naturally

superior. But throughout all the mean surroundings, the petty

wrangles, and the grotesque jealousies that tarnished the movement he

retained his inner exaltation. He had at last found himself and found

his art. He fell to work upon a great Michel-angelesque figure of the

awakening genius of his people, blowing the trumpet of resurrection.

It was sent for exhibition to a Zionist Congress, where it caused a

furore, and where the artist met other artists who had long been

working under the very inspiration which was so novel to him, and

whose work was all around him in plaque and picture, in bust and book,

and even postcard. Some of them were setting out for Palestine to

start a School of Arts and Crafts.

Barstein began to think of joining them. Meantime the Bohemian circles

which he had adorned with his gaiety and good-fellowship had been

wondering what had become of him. His new work in the Exhibitions

supplied a sort of answer, and the few who chanced to meet him

reported dolefully that he was a changed man. Gone was the

light-hearted and light-footed dancer of the Paris pavement. Silent

the licentious wit of the neo-Pagan. This was a new being with

brooding brow and pained eyes that lit up only when they beheld his

dream. Never had Bohemia known such a transformation.

IV

But a change came over the spirit of the dream. Before he could

seriously plan out his journey to Palestine, he met Mabel Aaronsberg

in the flesh. She was staying in town for the season in charge of an

aunt, and the meeting occurred in one of the galleries of the newer

art, in front of Mabel's own self in marble. She praised the Psyche

without in the least recognising herself, and Barstein, albeit

disconcerted, could not but admit how far his statue was from the

breathing beauty of the original.

After this the Jewish borderland of Bohemia, where writers and

painters are courted, began to see Barstein again. But, unfortunately,

this was not Mabel's circle, and Barstein was reduced to getting

himself invited to that Jewish Bayswater, his loathing for which had

not been overcome even by his new-found nationalism. Here, amid

hundreds of talking and dancing shadows, with which some shadowy self

of his own danced and talked, he occasionally had a magic hour of

reality--with Mabel.

One could not be real and not talk of the national dream. Mabel, who

took most of her opinions from her brother Julius, was frankly

puzzled, though her marmoreal gift of beautiful silence saved her

lover from premature shocks. She had, indeed, scarcely heard of such

things. Zionism was something in the East End. Nobody in her class

ever mentioned it. But, then, Barstein was a sculptor and strange,

and, besides, he did not look at all like a Jew, so it didn't sound so

horrible in his mouth. His lithe figure stood out almost Anglo-Saxon

amid the crowds of hulking undersized young men, and though his

manners were not so good as a Christian's--she never forgot his

blunder at her father's dinner-party--still, he looked up to one with

almost a Christian's adoration, instead of sizing one up with an

Oriental's calculation. These other London Jews thought her

provincial, she knew, whereas Barstein had one day informed her she

was universal. Julius, too, had admired Barstein's sculpture, the

modern note in which had been hailed by the Oxford elect. But what

most fascinated Mabel was the constant eulogy of her lover's work in

the Christian papers; and when at last the formal proposal came, it

found her fearful only of her father's disapproval.

'He's so orthodox,' she murmured, as they sat in a rose-garlanded

niche at a great Jewish Charity Ball, lapped around by waltz-music and

the sweetness of love confessed.

'Well, I'm not so wicked as I was,' he smiled.

'But you smoke on the Sabbath, Leo--you told me.'

'And you told me your brother Julius does the same.'

'Yes, but father doesn't know. If Julius wants to smoke on Friday

evening, he always goes to his own room.'

'And I shan't smoke in your father's.'

'No--but you'll tell him. You're so outspoken.'

'Well, I won't tell him--unless he asks me.'

She looked sad. 'He won't ask you--he'll never get as far.'

He smiled confidently. 'You're not very encouraging, dear; what's the

matter with me?'

'Everything. You're an artist, with all sorts of queer notions. And

you're not so'--she blushed and hesitated--'not so rich----'

He pressed her fingers. 'Yes, I am; I'm the richest man here.'

A little delighted laugh broke from her lips, though they went on:

'But you told me your profits are small--marble is so dear.'

'So is celibacy. I shall economize dreadfully by marrying.'

She pouted; his flippancy seemed inadequate to the situation, and he

seemed scarcely to realize that she was an heiress. But he continued

to laugh away her fears. She was so beautiful and he was so

strong--what could stand between them? Certainly not the Palestinian

patriarch with whose inmost psychology he had, fortunately, become in

such cordial sympathy.

But Mabel's pessimism was not to be banished even by the supper

champagne. They had secured a little table for two, and were

recklessly absorbed in themselves.

'At the worst, we can elope to Palestine,' he said at last, gaily

serious.

Mabel shuddered. 'Live entirely among Jews!' she cried.

The radiance died suddenly out of his face; it was as if she had

thrust the knife she was wielding through his heart. Her silent

reception of his nationalist rhapsodies he had always taken for

agreement.

Nor might Mabel have undeceived him had his ideas remained Platonic.

Their irruption into the world of practical politics, into her own

life, was, however, another pair of shoes. Since Barstein had brought

Zionism to her consciousness, she had noted that distinguished

Christians were quite sympathetic, but this was the one subject on

which Christian opinion failed to impress Mabel. 'Zionism's all very

well for Christians--they're in no danger of having to go to

Palestine,' she had reflected shrewdly.

'And why couldn't you live entirely among Jews?' Barstein asked

slowly.

Mabel drew a great breath, as if throwing off a suffocating weight.

'One couldn't breathe,' she explained.

'Aren't you living among Jews now?'

'Don't look so glum, silly. You don't want Jews as background as well

as foreground. A great Ghetto!' And again she shuddered instinctively.

'Every other people is background as well as foreground. And you don't

call France a Ghetto or Italy a Ghetto?' There was anti-Semitism, he

felt--unconscious anti-Semitism--behind Mabel's instinctive repugnance

to an aggregation of Jews. And he knew that her instinct would be

shared by every Jew in that festive aggregation around him. His heart

sank. Never--even in those East End back-rooms where the pitiful

disproportion of his consumptive-looking collaborators to their great

task was sometimes borne in dismally upon him--had he felt so black a

despair as in this brilliant supper-room, surrounded by all that was

strong and strenuous in the race--lawyers and soldiers, and men of

affairs, whose united forces and finances could achieve almost

anything they set their heart upon.

'Jews can't live off one another,' Mabel explained with an air of

philosophy.

Barstein did not reply. He was asking himself with an artist's

analytical curiosity whence came this suicidal anti-Semitism. Was it

the self-contempt natural to a race that had not the strength to build

and fend for itself? No, alas! it did not even spring from so

comparatively noble a source. It was merely a part of their general

imitation of their neighbours--Jews, reflecting everything, had

reflected even the dislike for the Jew; only since the individual

could not dislike himself, he applied the dislike to the race. And

this unconscious assumption of the prevailing point of view was

quickened by the fact that the Jewish firstcomers were always aware of

an existence on sufferance, with their slowly-won privileges

jeopardized if too many other Jews came in their wake. He consulted

his own pre-Zionist psychology. 'Yes,' he decided. 'Every Jew who

moves into our country, our city, our watering-place, our street even,

seems to us an invader or an interloper. He draws attention to us, he

accentuates our difference from the normal, he increases the chance of

the renewal of _Rishus_ (malice). And so we become anti-Semites

ourselves. But by what a comical confusion of logic is it that we

carry over the objection to Jewish aggregation even to an aggregation

in Palestine, in our own land! Or is it only too logical? Is it that

the rise of a Jewish autonomous power would be a standing reminder to

our fellow-citizens that we others are not so radically British or

German or French or American as we have vaunted ourselves? Are we

afraid of being packed off to Palestine and is the fulfilment of the

dream of eighteen centuries our deadliest dread?'

The thought forced from him a sardonic smile.

'And I feared you were like King Henry--never going to smile again.'

Mabel smiled back in relief.

'We're such a ridiculous people,' he answered, his smile fading into

sombreness. 'Neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring.'

'Well, finish your good white fowl,' laughed Mabel. She had felt her

hold over him slipping, and her own apprehensions now vanished in the

effort to banish his gloom.

But she had only started him on a new tack. 'Fowl!' he cried grimly.

'_Kosher_, of course, but with bits of fried _Wurst_ to ape the scraps

of bacon. And presently we shall be having water ices to simulate

cream. We can't even preserve our dietary individuality. Truly said

Feuerbach, "Der Mensch ist was er isst." In Palestine we shall at

least dare to be true to our own gullets.' He laughed bitterly.

'You're not very romantic,' Mabel pouted. Indeed, this Barstein, whose

mere ideal could so interrupt the rhapsodies due to her admissions of

affection, was distinctly unsatisfactory. She touched his hand

furtively under the tablecloth.

'After all, she is very young,' he thought, thrilling. And youth was

plastic--he, the sculptor, could surely mould her. Besides, was she

not Sir Asher's daughter? She must surely have inherited some of his

love for Palestine and his people. It was this Philistine set that had

spoiled her. Julius, too, that young Oxford prig--he reflected

illogically--had no doubt been a baleful influence.

'Shall I give you some almond-pudding?' he replied tenderly.

Mabel laughed uneasily. 'I ask for romance, and you offer me

almond-pudding. Oh, I _should_ like to go to a Jewish party where

there wasn't almond-pudding!'

'You shall--in Palestine,' he laughed back.

She pouted again. 'All roads lead to Palestine.'

'They do,' he said seriously. 'Without Palestine our past is a

shipwreck and our future a quicksand.'

She looked frightened again. 'But what should we do there? We can't

pray all day long.'

'Of course not,' he said eagerly. 'There's the new generation to train

for its glorious future. I shall teach in the Arts and Crafts School.

_Bezalel_, it's called; isn't that a beautiful name? It's from

Bezalel, the first man mentioned in the Bible as filled with Divine

wisdom and understanding in all manner of workmanship.'

She shook her head. 'You'll be excommunicated. The Palestine Rabbis

always excommunicate everything and everybody.'

He laughed. 'What do you know about Palestine?'

'More than you think. Father gets endless letters from there with

pressed flowers and citrons, and olive-wood boxes and paper-knives--a

perennial shower. The letters are generally in the most killing

English. And he won't let me laugh at them because he has a vague

feeling that even Palestine spelling and grammar are holy.'

Barstein laughed again. 'We'll send all the Rabbis to Jericho.'

She smiled, but retorted: 'That's where they'll send you, you maker of

graven images. Why, your very profession is forbidden.'

'I'll corner 'em with this very Bezalel text. The cutting of stones is

just one of the arts which God says He had inspired Bezalel with.

Besides, you forget my statue at the Bale Congress.'

'Bale isn't Palestine. There's nothing but superstition and squalor,

and I'm sorry to say father's always bolstering it all up with his

cheques.'

'Bravo, Sir Asher! Unconsciously he has been bolstering up the

eventual Renaissance. Your father and his kind have kept the seed

alive; we shall bring it to blossom.'

His prophetic assurance cast a fresh shade of apprehension over her

marmoreal brow. But her face lightened with a sudden thought. 'Well,

perhaps, after all, we shan't need to elope.'

'I never thought for a moment we should,' he answered as cheerfully.

'But, all the same, we can spend our honeymoon in Palestine.'

'Oh, I don't mind that,' said Mabel. 'Lots of Christians do that.

There was a Cook's party went out from Middleton for last Easter.'

The lover was too pleased with her acquiescence in the Palestinian

honeymoon to analyse the terms in which it was given. He looked into

her eyes, and saw there the _Shechinah_--the Divine glory that once

rested on Zion.

V

It was in this happier mood that Barstein ran down to Middleton to

plead his suit verbally with Sir Asher Aaronsberg. Mabel had feared to

commit their fates to a letter, whether from herself or her lover. A

plump negative would be so difficult to fight against. A personal

interview permitted one to sound the ground, to break the thing

delicately, to reason, to explain, to charm away objections. It was

clearly the man's duty to face the music.

Not that Barstein expected anything but the music of the Wedding

March. He was glad that his original contempt for Sir Asher had been

exchanged for sincere respect, and that the bluff Briton was a mere

veneer. It was to the Palestinian patriarch that he would pour out his

hopes and his dreams.

Alas! he found only the bluff Briton, and a Briton no longer genially,

but bluntly, bluff.

'It is perfectly impossible.'

Barstein, bewildered, pleaded for enlightenment. Was he not pious

enough, or not rich enough, too artistic or too low-born? Or did Sir

Asher consider his past life improper or his future behaviour dubious?

Let Sir Asher say.

But Sir Asher would not say. 'I am not bound to give my reasons. We

are all proud of your work--it confers honour on our community. The

Mayor alluded to it only yesterday.' He spoke in his best platform

manner. 'But to receive you into my family--that is another matter.'

And all the talk advanced things no further.

'It would be an entirely unsuitable match.' Sir Asher caressed his

long beard with an air of finality.

With a lover's impatience, Barstein had made the mistake of seeking

Sir Asher in his counting-house, where the municipal magnate sat among

his solidities. The mahogany furniture, the iron safes, the ledgers,

the silent obsequious clerks and attendants through whom Barstein had

had to penetrate, the factory buildings stretching around, with their

sense of throbbing machinery and disciplined workers, all gave the

burly Briton a background against which visions and emotions seemed as

unreal as ghosts under gaslight. The artist felt all this solid life

closing round him like the walls of a torture-chamber, squeezing out

his confidence, his aspirations, his very life.

'Then you prefer to break your daughter's heart!' he cried

desperately.

'Break my daughter's heart!' echoed Sir Asher in amaze. It was

apparently a new aspect to him.

'You don't suppose she won't suffer dreadfully?' Barstein went on,

perceiving his advantage.

'Break her heart!' repeated Sir Asher, startled out of his discreet

reticence. 'I'd sooner break her heart than see her married to a

Zionist!'

This time it was the sculptor's turn to gasp.

'To a what?' he cried.

'To a Zionist. You don't mean to deny you're a Zionist?' said Sir

Asher sternly.

Barstein gazed at him in silence.

'Come, come,' said Sir Asher. 'You don't suppose I don't read the

Jewish papers? I know all about your goings-on.'

The artist found his tongue. 'But--but,' he stammered, 'you yearn for

Zion too.'

'Naturally. But I don't presume to force the hand of Providence.'

'How can any of us force Providence to do anything it doesn't want to?

Surely it is through human agency that Providence always works. God

helps those who help themselves.'

'Spare me your blasphemies. Perhaps you think you are the Messiah.'

'I can be an atom of Him. The whole Jewish people is its own

Messiah--God working through it.'

'Take care, young man; you'll be talking Trinity next. And with these

heathen notions you expect to marry my daughter! You must excuse me if

I wish to hear no further.' His hand began to wander towards the row

of electric bells on his desk.

'Then how do you suppose we shall ever get to Palestine?' inquired the

irritated artist.

Sir Asher raised his eyes to the ceiling. 'In God's good time,' he

said.

'And when will that be?'

'When we are either too good or too bad for our present sphere. To-day

we are too neutral. Besides, there will be signs enough.'

'What signs?'

'Read your Bible. Mount Zion will be split by an earthquake, as the

prophet----'

Barstein interrupted him with an impatient gesture. 'But why can't we

go to Jerusalem and wait for the earthquake there?' he asked.

'Because we have a mission to the nations. We must live dispersed. We

have to preach the unity of God.'

'I have never heard you preach it. You lowered your voice when you

denounced the Trinity to me, lest the Christians should hear.'

'We have to preach silently, by our example. Merely by keeping our own

religion we convert the world.'

'But who keeps it? Dispersion among Sunday-keeping peoples makes our

very Sabbath an economic impossibility.'

'I have not found it so,' said Sir Asher crushingly. 'Indeed, the

growth of the Saturday half-holiday since my young days is a

remarkable instance of Judaizing.'

'So we have to remain dispersed to promote the week-end holiday?'

'To teach international truth,' Sir Asher corrected sharply; 'not

narrow tribalism.'

'But we don't remain dispersed. Five millions are herded in the

Russian Pale to begin with.'

'The Providence of God has long been scattering them to New York.'

'Yes, four hundred thousand in one square mile. A pretty scattering!'

Sir Asher flushed angrily. 'But they go to the Argentine too. I heard

of a colony even in Paraguay.'

'Where they are preaching the Unity to the Indians.'

'I do not discuss religion with a mocker. We are in exile by God's

decree--we must suffer.'

'Suffer!' The artist's glance wandered cynically round the snug

solidities of Sir Asher's exile, but he forbore to be personal. 'Then

if we _must_ suffer, why did you subscribe so much to the fund for the

Russian Jews?'

Sir Asher looked mollified at Barstein's acquaintance with his

generosity. 'That I might suffer with them,' he replied, with a touch

of humour.

'Then you _are_ a Jewish patriot,' retorted Barstein.

The bluff British face grew clouded again.

'Heaven forbid. I only know of British patriots. You talk treason to

your country, young man.'

'Treason--I!' The young man laughed bitterly.

'It is you Zionists that will undermine all the rights we have so

painfully won in the West.'

'Oh, then you're not really a British patriot,' Barstein began.

'I will beg you to remember, sir, that I equipped a corps of

volunteers for the Transvaal.'

'I dare say. But a corps of volunteers for Zion--that is blasphemy,

narrow tribalism.'

'Zion's soil is holy; we want no volunteers there: we want saints and

teachers. And what would your volunteers do in Zion? Fight the Sultan

with his million soldiers? They couldn't even live in Palestine as men

of peace. There is neither coal nor iron--hence no manufactures.

Agriculture? It's largely stones and swamps. Not to mention it's too

hot for Jews to work in the fields. They'd all starve. You've no right

to play recklessly with human lives. Besides, even if Palestine were

as fertile as England, Jews could never live off one another. And

think how they'd quarrel!'

Sir Asher ended almost good-humouredly. His array of arguments seemed

to him a row of steam-hammers.

'We can live off one another as easily as any other people. As for

quarrelling, weren't you in Parliament? Party government makes quarrel

the very basis of the Constitution.'

Sir Asher flushed again. A long lifetime of laying down the law had

ill prepared him for repartee.

'A pretty mess we should make of Government!' he sneered.

'Why? We have given Ministers to every Cabinet in the world.'

'Yes--we're all right as long as we're under others. Sir Asher was

recovering his serenity.

'All right so long as we're under others!' gasped the artist. 'Do you

realize what you're saying, Sir Asher? The Boers against whom you

equipped volunteers fought frenziedly for three years not to be under

others! And we--the thought of Jewish autonomy makes us foam at the

mouth. The idea of independence makes us turn in the graves we call

our fatherlands.'

Sir Asher dismissed the subject with a Podsnappian wave of the hand.

'This is all a waste of breath. Fortunately the acquisition of

Palestine is impossible.'

'Then why do you pray for it--"speedily and in our days"?'

Sir Asher glared at the bold questioner.

'That seems a worse waste of breath,' added Barstein drily.

'I said you were a mocker,' said Sir Asher severely. 'It is a Divine

event I pray for--not the creation of a Ghetto.'

'A Ghetto!' Barstein groaned in sheer hopelessness. 'Yes, you're an

anti-Semite too--like your daughter, like your son, like all of us.

We're all anti-Semites.'

'I an anti-Semite! Ho! ho! ho!' Sir Asher's anger broke down in sheer

amusement. 'I have made every allowance for your excitement,' he said,

recovering his magisterial note. 'I was once in love myself. But when

it comes to calling _me_ an anti-Semite, it is obvious you are not in

a fit state to continue this interview. Indeed, I no longer wonder

that you think yourself the Messiah.'

'Even if I do, our tradition only makes the Messiah a man; somebody

some day will have to win your belief. But what I said was that God

acts through man.'

'Ah yes,' said Sir Asher good-humouredly. 'Three-in-one and

one-in-three.'

'And why not?' said Barstein with a flash of angry intuition. 'Aren't

you a trinity yourself?'

'Me?' Sir Asher was now quite sure of the sculptor's derangement.

'Yes--the Briton, the Jew, and the anti-Semite--three-in-one and

one-in-three.'

Sir Asher touched one of the electric bells with a jerk. He was quite

alarmed.

Barstein turned white with rage at his dismissal. Never would he marry

into these triune tribes. 'And it's the same in every land where we're

emancipated, as it is called,' he went on furiously. 'The Jew's a

patriot everywhere, and a Jew everywhere and an anti-Semite

everywhere. Passionate Hungarians, and true-born Italians,

eagle-waving Americans, and loyal Frenchmen, imperial Germans, and

double Dutchmen, we are dispersed to preach the Unity, and what we

illustrate is the Jewish trinity. A delicious irony! Three-in-one and

one-in-three.' He laughed; to Sir Asher his laugh sounded maniacal.

The old gentleman was relieved to see his stalwart doorkeeper enter.

Barstein turned scornfully on his heel. 'Neither confounding the

persons nor dividing the substance,' he ended grimly.

THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER

THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER

I

There was a storm in Sudminster, not on the waters which washed its

leading Jews their living, but in the breasts of these same marine

storekeepers. For a competitor had appeared in their hive of

industry--an alien immigrant, without roots or even relatives at

Sudminster. And Simeon Samuels was equipped not only with capital and

enterprise--the showy plate-glass front of his shop revealed an

enticing miscellany--but with blasphemy and bravado. For he did not

close on Friday eve, and he opened on Saturday morning as usual.

The rumour did not get round all Sudminster the first Friday night,

but by the Sabbath morning the synagogue hummed with it. It set a

clammy horror in the breasts of the congregants, distracted their

prayers, gave an unreal tone to the cantor's roulades, brought a

tremor of insecurity into the very foundations of their universe. For

nearly three generations a congregation had been established in

Sudminster--like every Jewish congregation, a camp in not friendly

country--struggling at every sacrifice to keep the Holy Day despite

the supplementary burden of Sunday closing, and the God of their

fathers had not left unperformed His part of the contract. For 'the

harvests' of profit were abundant, and if 'the latter and the former

rain' of their unchanging supplication were mere dried metaphors to a

people divorced from Palestine and the soil for eighteen centuries,

the wine and the oil came in casks, and the corn in cakes. The poor

were few and well provided for; even the mortgage on the synagogue was

paid off. And now this Epicurean was come to trouble the snug

security, to break the long chain of Sabbath observance which

stretched from Sinai. What wonder if some of the worshippers,

especially such as had passed his blatant shop-window on their return

from synagogue on Friday evening, were literally surprised that the

earth had not opened beneath him as it had opened beneath Korah.

'Even the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath was stoned to death,'

whispered the squat Solomon Barzinsky to the lanky Ephraim Mendel,

marine-dealers both.

'Alas! that would not be permitted in this heathen country,' sighed

Ephraim Mendel, hitching his praying-shawl more over his left

shoulder. 'But at least his windows should be stoned.'

Solomon Barzinsky smiled, with a gleeful imagining of the shattering

of the shameless plate-glass. 'Yes, and that wax-dummy of a sailor

should be hung as an atonement for his--Holy, holy, holy is the Lord

of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.' The last phrase

Solomon suddenly shouted in Hebrew, in antiphonal response to the

cantor, and he rose three times on his toes, bowing his head piously.

'No wonder he can offer gold lace for the price of silver,' he

concluded bitterly.

'He sells shoddy new reach-me-downs as pawned old clo,' complained

Lazarus Levy, who had taken over S. Cohn's business, together with his

daughter Deborah, 'and he charges the Sudminster donkey-heads more

than the price we ask for 'em as new.'

Talk of the devil----! At this point Simeon Samuels stalked into the

synagogue, late but serene.

Had the real horned Asmodeus walked in, the agitation could not have

been greater. The first appearance in synagogue of a new settler was

an event in itself; but that this Sabbath-breaker should appear at all

was startling to a primitive community. Escorted by the obsequious and

unruffled beadle to the seat he seemed already to have engaged--that

high-priced seat facing the presidential pew that had remained vacant

since the death of Tevele the pawnbroker--Simeon Samuels wrapped

himself reverently in his praying-shawl, and became absorbed in the

service. His glossy high hat bespoke an immaculate orthodoxy, his long

black beard had a Rabbinic religiousness, his devotion was a rebuke to

his gossiping neighbours.

A wave of uneasiness passed over the synagogue. Had he been the victim

of a jealous libel? Even those whose own eyes had seen him behind his

counter when he should have been consecrating the Sabbath-wine at his

supper-table, wondered if they had been the dupe of some

hallucination.

When, in accordance with hospitable etiquette, the new-comer was

summoned canorously to the reading of the Law--'Shall stand Simeon,

the son of Nehemiah'--and he arose and solemnly mounted the central

platform, his familiarity with the due obeisances and osculations and

benedictions seemed a withering reply to the libel. When he

descended, and the _Parnass_ proffered his presidential hand in pious

congratulation upon the holy privilege, all the congregants who found

themselves upon his line of return shot forth their arms with

remorseful eagerness, and thus was Simeon Samuels switched on to the

brotherhood of Sudminsterian Israel. Yet as his now trusting

co-religionists passed his shop on their homeward walk--and many a

pair of legs went considerably out of its way to do so--their eyes

became again saucers of horror and amaze. The broad plate-glass

glittered nakedly, unveiled by a single shutter; the waxen dummy of

the sailor hitched devil-may-care breeches; the gold lace, ticketed

with layers of erased figures, boasted brazenly of its cheapness; the

procession of customers came and went, and the pavement, splashed with

sunshine, remained imperturbably, perturbingly acquiescent.

II

On the Sunday night Solomon Barzinsky and Ephraim Mendel in pious

black velvet caps, and their stout spouses in gold chains and diamond

earrings, found themselves playing solo whist in the _Parnass's_

parlour, and their religious grievance weighed upon the game. The

_Parnass_, though at heart as outraged as they by the new departure,

felt it always incumbent upon him to display his presidential

impartiality and his dry humour. His authority, mainly based on his

being the only retired shopkeeper in the community, was greatly

strengthened by his slow manner of taking snuff at a crisis. 'My dear

Mendel,' observed the wizened senior, flicking away the spilth with a

blue handkerchief, 'Simeon Samuels has already paid his annual

subscription--and you haven't!'

'My money is good,' Mendel replied, reddening.

'No wonder he can pay so quickly!' said Solomon Barzinsky, shuffling

the cards savagely.

'How he makes his money is not the question,' said the _Parnass_

weightily. 'He has paid it, and therefore if I were to expel him, as

you suggest, he might go to Law.'

'Law!' retorted Solomon. 'Can't we prove he has broken the Law of

Moses?'

'And suppose?' said the _Parnass_, picking up his cards placidly. 'Do

we want to wash our dirty _Talysim_ (praying-shawls) in public?'

'He is right, Solomon,' said Mrs. Barzinsky. 'We should become a

laughing-stock among the heathen.'

'I don't believe he'd drag us to the Christian courts,' the little man

persisted. 'I pass.'

The rubber continued cheerlessly. 'A man who keeps his shop open on

Sabbath is capable of anything,' said the lanky Mendel, gloomily

sweeping in his winnings.

The _Parnass_ took snuff judicially. 'Besides, he may have a Christian

partner who keeps all the Saturday profits,' he suggested.

'That would be just as forbidden,' said Barzinsky, as he dealt the

cards.

'But your cousin David,' his wife reminded him, 'sells his groceries

to a Christian at Passover.'

'That is permitted. It would not be reasonable to destroy hundreds of

pounds of leaven. But Sabbath partnerships are not permitted.'

'Perhaps the question has never been raised,' said the _Parnass_.

'I am enough of a _Lamdan_ (pundit) to answer it,' retorted Barzinsky.

'I prefer going to a specialist,' rejoined the _Parnass_.

Barzinsky threw down his cards. 'You can go to the devil!' he cried.

'For shame, Solomon!' said his wife. 'Don't disturb the game.'

'To Gehenna with the game! The shame is on a _Parnass_ to talk like an

_Epikouros_ (Epicurean).'

The _Parnass_ blew his nose elaborately. 'It stands in the Talmud:

"For vain swearing noxious beasts came into the world." And if----'

'It stands in the Psalmist,' Barzinsky interrupted: '"The Law of Thy

mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver."'

'It stands in the Perek,' the _Parnass_ rejoined severely, 'that the

wise man does not break in upon the speech of his fellow.'

'It stands in the Shulchan Aruch,' Barzinsky shrieked, 'that for the

sanctification of the Sabbath----'

'It stands in the Talmud,' interposed Mendel, with unwonted animation

in his long figure, 'that one must not even offer a nut to allure

customers. From light to heavy, therefore, it may be deduced that----'

A still small voice broke in upon the storm. 'But Simeon Samuels

hasn't a Christian partner,' said Mrs. Mendel.

There was an embarrassed pause.

'He has only his wife to help him,' she went on. 'I know, because I

went to the shop Friday morning on pretence of asking for a

cuckoo-clock.'

'But a marine-dealer doesn't sell clocks,' put in the _Parnass's_ wife

timidly. It was her first contribution to the conversation, for she

was overpowered by her husband's greatness.

'Don't be silly, Hannah!' said the _Parnass_. 'That was just why Mrs.

Mendel asked for it.'

'Yes, but unfortunately Simeon Samuels did have one,' Mrs. Mendel

confessed; 'and I couldn't get out of buying it.'

There was a general laugh.

'Cut-throat competition, I call it,' snarled Solomon Barzinsky,

recovering from his merriment.

'But _you_ don't sell clocks,' said the _Parnass_.

'That's just it; he gets hold of our customers on pretence of selling

them something else. The Talmudical prohibition cited by Mendel

applies to that too.'

'So I wasn't so silly,' put in the _Parnass's_ wife, feeling vaguely

vindicated.

'Well, you saw his wife,' said the _Parnass_ to Mendel's wife,

disregarding his own. 'More than I've done, for she wasn't in

synagogue. Perhaps _she_ is the Christian partner.' His suggestion

brought a new and holier horror over the card-table.