'Do I not know it?' cried Pinchas. 'Were_Ghetto Comedies

leaving all the others to be read by the prompter, the house would be

spellbound, like Moses when he saw the burning bush.'

'That being so,' said Goldwater, 'you couldn't expect to have my wife

in the same cast.'

'No, indeed,' said Pinchas enthusiastically. 'Two such tragic geniuses

would confuse and distract, like the sun and the moon shining

together.'

Goldwater coughed. 'But Ophelia is really a small part,' he murmured.

'It is,' Pinchas acquiesced. 'Your wife's tragic powers could only be

displayed in "Hamlet" if, like another equally celebrated actress, she

appeared as the Prince of Palestine himself.'

'Heaven forbid my wife should so lower herself!' said Goldwater. 'A

decent Jewish housewife cannot appear in breeches.'

'That is what makes it impossible,' assented Pinchas. 'And there is no

other part worthy of Mrs. Goldwater.'

[Illustration: "You compare my wife to a Kangaroo!"]

'It may be she would sacrifice herself,' said the manager musingly.

'And who am I that I should ask her to sacrifice herself?' replied the

poet modestly.

'Fanny won't sacrifice Ophelia,' Kloot observed drily to his chief.

'You hear?' said Goldwater, as quick as lightning. 'My wife will not

sacrifice Ophelia by leaving her to a minor player. She thinks only of

the play. It is very noble of her.'

'But she has worked so hard,' pleaded the poet desperately, 'she needs

a rest.'

'My wife never spares herself.'

Pinchas lost his head. 'But she might spare Ophelia,' he groaned.

'What do you mean?' cried Goldwater gruffly. 'My wife will honour you

by playing Ophelia. That is ended.' He waved the make-up brush in his

hand.

'No, it is not ended,' said Pinchas desperately. 'Your wife is a comic

actress----'

'You just admitted she was tragic----'

'It is heartbreaking to see her in tragedy,' said Pinchas, burning his

boats. 'She skips and jumps. Rather would I give Ophelia to one of

your kangaroos!'

'You low-down monkey!' Goldwater almost flung his brush into the

poet's face. 'You compare my wife to a kangaroo! Take your filthy

manuscript and begone where the pepper grows.'

'Well, Fanny _would_ be rather funny as Ophelia,' put in Kloot

pacifyingly.

'And to make your wife ridiculous as Ophelia,' added Pinchas eagerly,

'you would rob the world of your Hamlet!'

'I can get plenty of Hamlets. Any scribbler can translate

Shakespeare.'

'Perhaps, but who can surpass Shakespeare? Who can make him

intelligible to the modern soul?'

'Mr. Goldwater,' cried the call-boy, with the patness of a reply.

The irate manager bustled out, not sorry to escape with his dignity

and so cheap a masterpiece. Kloot was left, with swinging legs,

dominating the situation. In idle curiosity and with the simplicity of

perfectly bad manners, he took up the poet's papers and letters and

perused them. As there were scraps of verse amid the mass, Pinchas let

him read on unrebuked.

'You will talk to him, Kloot,' he pleaded at last. 'You will save

Ophelia?'

The big-nosed youth looked up from his impertinent inquisition. 'Rely

on me, if I have to play her myself.'

'But that will be still worse,' said Pinchas seriously.

Kloot grinned. 'How do you know? You've never seen me act?'

The poet laid his finger beseechingly on his nose. 'You will not spoil

my play, you will get me a maidenly Ophelia? I and you are the only

two men in New York who understand how to cast a play.'

'You leave it to me,' said Kloot; 'I have a wife of my own.'

'What!' shrieked Pinchas.

'Don't be alarmed--I'll coach her. She's just the age for the part.

Mrs. Goldwater might be her mother.'

'But can she make the audience cry?'

'You bet; a regular onion of an Ophelia.'

'But I must see her rehearse, then I can decide.'

'Of course.'

'And you will seek me in the cafe when rehearsals begin?'

'That goes without saying.'

The poet looked cunning. 'But don't you say without going.'

'How can we rehearse without you? You shouldn't have worried the boss.

We'll call you, even if it's the middle of the night.'

The poet jumped at Kloot's hand and kissed it.

'Protector of poets!' he cried ecstatically. 'And you will see that

they do not mutilate my play; you will not suffer a single hair of my

poesy to be harmed?'

'Not a hair shall be cut,' said Kloot solemnly.

Pinchas kissed his hand again. 'Ah, I and you are the only two men in

New York who understand how to treat poesy.'

'Sure!' Kloot snatched his hand away. 'Good-bye.'

Pinchas lingered, gathering up his papers. 'And you will see it is not

adulterated with American. In Zion they do not say "Sure" or "Lend me

a nickel."'

'I guess not,' said Kloot. 'Good-bye.'

'All the same, you might lend me a nickel for car-fare.'

Kloot thought his departure cheap at five cents. He handed it over.

The poet went. An instant afterwards the door reopened and his head

reappeared, the nose adorned with a pleading forefinger.

'You promise me all this?'

'Haven't I promised?'

'But swear to me.'

'Will you go--if I swear?'

'Yup,' said Pinchas, airing his American.

'And you won't come back till rehearsals begin?'

'Nup.'

'Then I swear--on my father's and mother's life!'

Pinchas departed gleefully, not knowing that Kloot was an orphan.

III

On the very verge of Passover, Pinchas, lying in bed at noon with a

cigarette in his mouth, was reading his morning paper by candle-light;

for he tenanted one of those innumerable dark rooms which should make

New York the photographer's paradise. The yellow glow illumined his

prophetic and unshaven countenance, agitated by grimaces and sniffs,

as he critically perused the paragraphs whose Hebrew letters served as

the channel for the mongrel Yiddish and American dialect, in which

'congressman,' 'sweater,' and such-like crudities of to-day had all

the outer Oriental robing of the Old Testament. Suddenly a strange

gurgle spluttered through the cigarette smoke. He read the

announcement again.

The Yiddish 'Hamlet' was to be the Passover production at Goldwater's

Theatre. The author was the world-renowned poet Melchitsedek Pinchas,

and the music was by Ignatz Levitsky, the world-famous composer.

'World-famous composer, indeed!' cried Pinchas to his garret walls.

'Who ever heard of Ignatz Levitsky? And who wants his music? The

tragedy of a thinker needs no caterwauling of violins. Does Goldwater

imagine I have written a melodrama? At most will I permit an

overture--or the cymbals shall clash as I take my call.'

He leaped out of bed. Even greater than his irritation at this

intrusion of Levitsky was his joyful indignation at the imminence of

his play. The dogs! The liars! The first night was almost at hand, and

no sign had been vouchsafed to him. He had been true to his promise;

he had kept away from the theatre. But Goldwater! But Kloot! Ah, the

godless gambler with his parents' lives! With such ghouls hovering

around the Hebrew 'Hamlet,' who could say how the masterpiece had been

mangled? Line upon line had probably been cut; nay, who knew that a

whole scene had not been shorn away, perhaps to give more time for

that miserable music!

He flung himself into his clothes and, taking his cane, hurried off to

the theatre, breathless and breakfastless. Orchestral music vibrated

through the lobby and almost killed his pleasure in the placards of

the Yiddish 'Hamlet.' He gave but a moment to absorbing the great

capital letters of his name; a dash at a swinging-door, and he faced a

glowing, crowded stage at the end of a gloomy hall. Goldwater,

limelit, occupied the centre of the boards. Hamlet trod the

battlements of the tower of David, and gazed on the cupolas and

minarets of Jerusalem.

With a raucous cry, half anger, half ecstasy, Pinchas galloped toward

the fiddling and banging orchestra. A harmless sweeper in his path

was herself swept aside. But her fallen broom tripped up the runner.

He fell with an echoing clamour, to which his clattering cane

contributed, and clouds of dust arose and gathered where erst had

stood a poet.

Goldwater stopped dead. 'Can't you sweep quietly?' he thundered

terribly through the music.

Ignatz Levitsky tapped his baton, and the orchestra paused.

'It is I, the author!' said Pinchas, struggling up through clouds like

some pagan deity.

Hamlet's face grew as inky as his cloak. 'And what do you want?'

'What do I want?' repeated Pinchas, in sheer amaze.

Kloot, in his peaked cap, emerged from the wings munching a sandwich.

'Sure, there's Shakespeare!' he said. 'I've just been round to the

cafe to find you. Got this sandwich there.'

'But this--this isn't the first rehearsal,' stammered Pinchas, a jot

appeased.

'The first dress-rehearsal,' Kloot replied reassuringly. 'We don't

trouble authors with the rough work. They stroll in and put on the

polish. Won't you come on the stage?'

Unable to repress a grin of happiness, Pinchas stumbled through the

dim parterre, barking his shins at almost every step. Arrived at the

orchestra, he found himself confronted by a chasm. He wheeled to the

left, to where the stage-box, shrouded in brown holland, loomed

ghostly.

'No,' said Kloot, 'that door's got stuck. You must come round by the

stage-door.'

Pinchas retraced his footsteps, barking the smooth remainder of his

shins. He allowed himself a palpitating pause before the lobby

posters. His blood chilled. Not only was Ignatz Levitsky starred in

equal type, but another name stood out larger than either:

_Ophelia_ .. .. .. _Fanny Goldwater._

His wrath reflaming, he hurried round to the stage-door. He pushed it

open, but a gruff voice inquired his business, and a burly figure

blocked his way.

'I am the author,' he said with quiet dignity.

'Authors ain't admitted,' was the simple reply.

'But Goldwater awaits me,' the poet protested.

'I guess not. Mr. Kloot's orders. Can't have authors monkeying around

here.' As he spoke Goldwater's voice rose from the neighbouring stage

in an operatic melody, and reduced Pinchas's brain to chaos. A

despairing sense of strange plots and treasons swept over him. He ran

back to the lobby. The doors had been bolted. He beat against them

with his cane and his fists and his toes till a tall policeman

persuaded him that home was better than a martyr's cell.

Life remained an unintelligible nightmare for poor Pinchas till the

first night--and the third act--of the Yiddish 'Hamlet.' He had

reconciled himself to his extrusion from rehearsals. 'They fear I fire

Ophelia,' he told the cafe.

But a final blow awaited him. No ticket reached him for the premiere;

the boxes he had promised the cafe did not materialize, and the

necessity of avoiding that haunt of the invited cost him several

meals. But that he himself should be refused when he tried to pass in

'on his face'--that authors should be admitted neither at the stage

door nor at the public door--this had not occurred to him as within

the possibilities of even theatrical humanity.

'Pigs! Pigs! Pigs!' he shrieked into the box office. 'You and

Goldwater and Kloot! Pigs! Pigs! Pigs! I have indeed cast my pearls

before swine. But I will not be beholden to them--I will buy a

ticket.'

'We're sold out,' said the box-office man, adding recklessly: 'Get a

move on you; other people want to buy seats.'

'You can't keep me out! It's conspiracy!' He darted within, but was

hustled as rapidly without. He ran back to the stage-door, and hurled

himself against the burly figure. He rebounded from it into the

side-walk, and the stage-door closed upon his humiliation. He was left

cursing in choice Hebrew. It was like the maledictions in Deuteronomy,

only brought up to date by dynamite explosions and automobile

accidents. Wearying of the waste of an extensive vocabulary upon a

blank door, Pinchas returned to the front. The lobby was deserted save

for a few strangers; his play had begun. And he--he, the god who moved

all this machinery--he, whose divine fire was warming all that great

house, must pace out here in the cold and dark, not even permitted to

loiter in the corridors! But for the rumblings of applause that

reached him he could hardly have endured the situation.

Suddenly an idea struck him. He hied to the nearest drug-store, and

entering the telephone cabinet rang up Goldwater.

'Hello, there!' came the voice of Kloot. 'Who are you?'

Pinchas had a vivid vision of the big-nosed youth, in his peaked cap,

sitting on the table by the telephone, swinging his legs; but he

replied craftily, in a disguised voice: 'You, Goldwater?'

'No; Goldwater's on the stage.'

Pinchas groaned. But at that very instant Goldwater's voice returned

to the bureau, ejaculating complacently: 'They're loving it, Kloot;

they're swallowing it like ice-cream soda.'

Pinchas tingled with pleasure, but all Kloot replied was: 'You're

wanted on the 'phone.'

'Hello!' called Goldwater.

'Hello!' replied Pinchas in his natural voice. 'May a sudden death

smite you! May the curtain fall on a gibbering epileptic!'

'Can't hear!' said Goldwater. 'Speak plainer.'

'I _will_ speak plainer, swine-head! Never shall a work of mine defile

itself in your dirty dollar-factory. I spit on you!' He spat viciously

into the telephone disk. 'Your father was a _Meshummad_ (apostate),

and your mother----'

But Goldwater had cut off the connection. Pinchas finished for his own

satisfaction: 'An Irish fire-woman.'

'That was worth ten cents,' he muttered, as he strode out into the

night. And patrolling the front of the theatre again, or leaning on

his cane as on a sword, he was warmed by the thought that his venom

had pierced through all the actor-manager's defences.

At last a change came over the nightmare. Striding from the envied,

illuminated Within appeared the Heathen Journalist, note-book in hand.

At sight of the author he shied. 'Must skedaddle, Pin-cuss,' he said

apologetically, 'if we're to get anything into to-morrow's paper. Your

people are so durned slow--nearly eleven, and only two acts over.

You'll have to brisk 'em up a bit. Good-bye.'

He shook the poet's hand and was off. With an inspiration Pinchas gave

chase. He caught the Journalist just boarding a car.

'Got your theatre ticket?' he panted.

'What for?'

'Give it me.'

The Journalist fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and threw him a

crumpled fragment. 'What in thunder----' he began. And then, to

Pinchas's relief, the car removed the querist.

For the moment the poet was feeling only the indignity of the

position, and the Heathen Journalist as trumpeter of his wrongs and

avenger of the Muses had not occurred to him. He smoothed out the

magic scrap, and was inside the suffocating, close-packed theatre

before the disconcerted janitor could meet the new situation. Pinchas

found the vacated journalistic chair in the stage-box; he was

installed therein before the managerial minions arrived on ejection

bent.

'This is _my_ house!' screamed Pinchas. 'I stay here! Let me

be--swine, serpents, Behemoth!'

'Sh!' came in a shower from every quarter. 'Sit down there! Turn him

out!' The curtain was going up; Pinchas was saved.

But only for more gruesome torture. The third act began. Hamlet

collogued with the Queen. The poet pricked up his ears. Whose language

was this? Certainly not Shakespeare's or his superior's. Angels and

ministers of grace defend him! this was only the illiterate jargon of

the hack playwright, with its peppering of the phrases of Hester

Street. 'You have too many dead flies on you,' Hamlet's mother told

him. 'You'll get left.' But the nightmare thickened. Hamlet and his

mother opened their mouths and sang. Their songs were light and gay,

and held encore verses to reward the enthusiastic. The actors, like

the audience, were leisurely; here midnight and the closure were not

synonymous. When there were no more encore verses, Ignatz Levitsky

would turn to the audience and bow in acknowledgment of the

compliment. Pinchas's eyes were orbs straining at their sockets; froth

gathered on his lips.

Mrs. Goldwater bounded on, fantastically mad, her songs set to comic

airs. The great house received her in the same comic spirit. Instead

of rue and rosemary she carried a rustling green _Lulov_--the

palm-branch of the Feast of Tabernacles--and shook it piously toward

every corner of the compass. At each shake the audience rolled about

in spasms of merriment. A moment later a white gliding figure, moving

to the measure of the cake-walk, keyed up the laughter to hysteria. It

was the Ghost appearing to frighten Ophelia. His sepulchral bass notes

mingled with her terror-stricken soprano.

This was the last straw. The Ghost--the Ghost that he had laid

forever, the Ghost that made melodrama of this tragedy of the

thinker--was risen again, and cake-walking!

Unperceived in the general convulsion and cachinnation, Pinchas leaped

to his feet, and, seeing scarlet, bounded through the iron door and

made for the stage. But a hand was extended in the nick of time--the

hand he had kissed--and Pinchas was drawn back by the collar.

'You don't take your call yet,' said the unruffled Kloot.

'Let me go! I must speak to the people. They must learn the truth.

They think _me_, Melchitsedek Pinchas, guilty of this _tohu-bohu_! My

sun will set. I shall be laughed at from the Hudson to the Jordan.'

'Hush! Hush! You are interrupting the poesy.'

'Who has drawn and quartered my play? Speak!'

'I've only arranged it for the stage,' said Kloot, unabashed.

'You!' gasped the poet.

'You said I and you are the only two men who understand how to treat

poesy.'

'You understand push-carts, not poesy!' hissed the poet. 'You conspire

to keep me out of the theatre--I will summons you!'

'We had to keep all authors out. Suppose Shakespeare had turned up and

complained of _you_.'

'Shakespeare would have been only too grateful.'

'Hush! The boss is going on.'

From the opposite wing Hamlet was indeed advancing. Pinchas made a

wild plunge forward, but Kloot's grasp on his collar was still

carefully firm.

'Who's mutilating the poesy now?' Kloot frowned angrily from under his

peaked cap. 'You'll spoil the scene.'

'Peace, liar! You promised me your wife for Ophelia!'

Kloot's frown relaxed into a smile. 'Sure! The first wife I get you

shall have.'

Pinchas gnashed his teeth. Goldwater's voice rose in a joyous

roulade.

'I think you owe me a car-fare,' said Kloot soothingly.

Pinchas waved the rejoinder aside with his cane. 'Why does _Hamlet_

sing?' he demanded fiercely.

'Because it's Passover,' said Kloot. 'You are a "greener" in New York,

otherwise you would know that it is a tradition to have musical plays

on Passover. Our audiences wouldn't stand for any other. You're such

an unreasonable cuss! Why else did we take your "Hamlet" for a

Passover play?'

'But "Hamlet" isn't a musical play.'

'Yes, it is! How about Ophelia's songs? That was what decided us. Of

course they needed eking out.'

'But "Hamlet" is a tragedy!' gasped Pinchas.

'Sure!' said Kloot cheerfully. 'They all die at the end. Our audiences

would go away miserable if they didn't. You wait till they're dead,

then you shall take your call.'

'Take my call, for _your_ play!'

'There's quite a lot of your lines left, if you listen carefully. Only

you don't understand stage technique. Oh, I'm not grumbling; we're

quite satisfied. The idea of adapting "Hamlet" for the Yiddish stage

is yours, and it's worth every cent we paid.'

A storm of applause gave point to the speaker's words, and removed the

last partition between the poet's great mind and momentary madness.

What! here was that ape of a Goldwater positively wallowing in

admiration, while he, the mighty poet, had been cast into outer

darkness and his work mocked and crucified! He put forth all his

might, like Samson amid the Philistines, and leaving his coat-collar

in Kloot's hand, he plunged into the circle of light. Goldwater's

amazed face turned to meet him.

'Cutter of lines!' The poet's cane slashed across Hamlet's right cheek

near the right eye. 'Perverter of poesy!' It slashed across the left

cheek near the left eye.

The Prince of Palestine received each swish with a yell of pain and

fear, and the ever-ready Kloot dropped the curtain on the tragic

scene.

Such hubbub and hullabaloo as rose on both sides of the curtain! Yet

in the end the poet escaped scot-free. Goldwater was a coward, Kloot a

sage. The same prudence that had led Kloot to exclude authors, saved

him from magnifying their importance by police squabbles. Besides, a

clever lawyer might prove the exclusion illegal. What was done was

done. The dignity of the hero of a hundred dramas was best served by

private beefsteaks and a rumoured version, irrefutable save in a court

of law. It was bad enough that the Heathen Journalist should supply so

graphic a picture of the midnight melodrama, coloured even more highly

than Goldwater's eyes. Kloot had been glad that the Journalist had

left before the episode; but when he saw the account he wished the

scribe had stayed.

'He won't play Hamlet with that pair of shiners,' Pinchas prophesied

early the next morning to the supping cafe.

Radsikoff beamed and refilled Pinchas's glass with champagne. He had

carried out his promise of assisting at the premiere, and was now

paying for the poet's supper.

'You're the first playwright Goldwater hasn't managed to dodge,' he

chuckled.

'Ah!' said the poet meditatively. 'Action is greater than Thought.

Action is the greatest thing in the world.'

THE CONVERTS

As he sat on his hard stool in the whitewashed workshop on the Bowery,

clumsily pasting the flamboyant portrait on the boxes of the 'Yvonne

Rupert cigar,' he wondered dully--after the first flush of joy at

getting a job after weeks of hunger--at the strange fate that had

again brought him into connection, however remote, with stageland. For

even to Elkan Mandle, with his Ghetto purview, Yvonne Rupert's fame,

both as a 'Parisian' star and the queen of American advertisers, had

penetrated. Ever since she had summoned a Jewish florist for not

paying her for the hundred and eleven bouquets with which a single

week's engagement in vaudeville had enabled her to supply him, the

journals had continued to paragraph her amusing, self-puffing

adventures.

Not that there was much similarity between the New York star and his

little actress of the humble Yiddish Theatre in London, save for that

aureole of fluffy hair, which belonged rather to the genus than the

individual. But as the great Yvonne's highly-coloured charms went on

repeating themselves from every box-cover he manipulated (at

seventy-five cents a hundred), the face of his own Gittel grew more

and more vivid, till at last the whole splendid, shameful past began

to rise up from its desolate tomb.

He even lived through that prologue in the Ghetto garret, when, as

benevolent master-tailor receiving the highest class work from S.

Cohn's in the Holloway Road, he was called upstairs to assist the

penniless Polish immigrants.

There she sat, the witching she-devil, perched on the rickety table

just contributed to the home, a piquant, dark-eyed, yet golden-haired,

mite of eleven, calm and comparatively spruce amid the wailing litter

of parents and children.

'Settle this among yourselves,' she seemed to be saying. 'When the

chairs are here I will sit on _them_; when the table is laid I will

draw to; when the pious philanthropist provides the fire I will purr

on the hearth.'

Ah, _he_ had come forward as the pious philanthropist--pious enough

then, Heaven knew. Why had Satan thrown such lures in the way of the

reputable employer, the treasurer of 'The Gates of Mercy' Synagogue,

with children of his own, and the best wife in the world? Did he not

pray every day to be delivered from the _Satan Mekatrig_? Had he not

meant it for the best when he took her into his workshop? It was only

when, at the age of sixteen, Gittel Goldstein left the whirring

machine-room for the more lucrative and laurelled position of heroine

of Goldwater's London Yiddish Theatre that he had discovered how this

whimsical, coquettish creature had insinuated herself into his very

being.

Ah, madness, madness! that flight with her to America with all his

savings, that desertion of his wife and children! But what delicious

delirium that one year in New York, prodigal, reckless, ere, with the

disappearance of his funds, she, too, disappeared. And now, here he

was--after nigh seven apathetic years, in which the need of getting a

living was the only spur to living on--glad to take a woman's place

when female labour struck for five cents more a hundred. The old

bitter tears came up to his eyes, blurring the cheerless scene, the

shabby men and unlovely women with their red paste-pots, the medley of

bare and coloured boxes, the long shelf of twine-balls. And as he

wept, the vain salt drops moistened the pictures of Yvonne Rupert.

She became an obsession, this Franco-American singer and dancer, as he

sat pasting and pasting, caressing her pictured face with sticky

fingers. There were brief intervals of freedom from her image when he

was 'edging' and 'backing,' or when he was lining the boxes with the

plain paper; but Yvonne came twice on every box--once in large on the

inside, once in small on the outside, with a gummed projection to be

stuck down after the cigars were in. He fell to recalling what he had

read of her--the convent education that had kept her chaste and

distinguished beneath all her stage deviltry, the long Lenten fasts

she endured (as brought to light by the fishmonger's bill she disputed

in open court), the crucifix concealed upon her otherwise not too

reticent person, the adorable French accent with which she enraptured

the dudes, the palatial private car in which she traversed the States,

with its little chapel giving on the bathroom; the swashbuckling

Marquis de St. Roquiere, who had crossed the Channel after her, and

the maid he had once kidnapped in mistake for the mistress; the

diamond necklace presented by the Rajah of Singapuri, stolen at a

soiree in San Francisco, and found afterwards as single stones in a

low 'hock-shop' in New Orleans.

And despite all this glitter of imposing images a subconscious thought

was forcing itself more and more clearly to the surface of his mind.

That aureole of golden hair, those piquant dark eyes! The Yvonne the

cheap illustrated papers had made him familiar with had lacked this

revelation of colour! But no, the idea was insane!

This scintillating celebrity his lost Gittel!

Bah! Misery had made him childish. Goldwater had, indeed, blossomed

out since the days of his hired hall in Spitalfields, but his fame

remained exclusively Yiddish and East-side. But Gittel!

How could that obscure rush-light of the London Ghetto Theatre have

blazed into the Star of Paris and New York?

This Lent-keeping demoiselle the little Polish Jewess who had munched

Passover cake at his table in the far-off happy days! This gilded idol

the impecunious Gittel he had caressed!

'You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?' he inquired of his neighbour, a

pock-marked, spectacled young woman, who, as record-breaker of the

establishment, had refused to join the strike of the mere

hundred-and-fifty a day.

The young woman swiftly drew a knife from the wooden pail beside her,

and deftly scraped at a rough hinge as she replied: 'No, but I guess

she's the actress who gets all the flowers, and won't pay for 'em.'

He saw she had mixed up the two lawsuits, but the description seemed

to hit off his Gittel to the life. Yes, Gittel had always got all the

flowers of life, and dodged paying. Ah, she had always been

diabolically clever, unscrupulously ambitious! Who could put bounds to

her achievement? She had used him and thrown him away--without a word,

without a regret. She had washed her hands of him as light-heartedly

as he washed his of the dirty, sticky day's paste. What other 'pious

philanthropist' had she found to replace him? Whither had she fled?

Why not to Paris that her theatric gifts might receive training?

This chic, this witchery, with which reputation credited her--had not

Gittel possessed it all? Had not her heroines enchanted the Ghetto?

Oh, but this was a wild day-dream, insubstantial as the smoke-wreaths

of the Yvonne Rupert cigar!

III

But the obsession persisted. In his miserable attic off Hester

Street--that recalled the attic he had found her in, though it was

many stories nearer the sky--he warmed himself with Gittel's image,

smiling, light-darting, voluptuous. Night and sleep surrendered him

to grotesque combinations--Gittel Goldstein smoking cigarettes in a

bath-room, Yvonne Rupert playing Yiddish heroines in a little chapel.

In the clear morning these absurdities were forgotten in the realized

absurdity of the initial identification. But a forenoon at the

pasting-desk brought back the haunting thought. At noon he morbidly

expended his lunch-dime on an 'Yvonne Rupert' cigar, and smoked it

with a semi-insane feeling that he was repossessing his Gittel.

Certainly it was delicious.

He wandered into the box-making room, where the man who tended the

witty nail-driving machine was seated on a stack of Mexican

cedar-wood, eating from a package of sausage and scrapple that sent

sobering whiffs to the reckless smoker.

'You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?' he asked wistfully.

'Might as well ask if I'd smoked her cigar!' grumbled the nailer

through his mouthfuls.

'But there's a gallery at Webster and Dixie's.'

'Su-er!'

'I guess I'll go some day, just for curiosity.'

But the great Yvonne, he found, was flaming in her provincial orbit.

So he must needs wait.

Meantime, on a Saturday night, with a dirty two-dollar bill in his

pocket, and jingling some odd cents, he lounged into the restaurant

where the young Russian bloods assembled who wrote for the Yiddish

Labour papers, and 'knew it all.' He would draw them out about Yvonne

Rupert. He established himself near a table at which long-haired,

long-fingered Freethinkers were drinking chocolate and discussing

Lassalle.

'Ah, but the way he jumped on a table when only a schoolboy to

protest against the master's injustice to one of his schoolfellows!

How the divine fire flamed in him!'

They talked on, these clamorous sceptics, amplifying the Lassalle

legend, broidering it with Messianic myths, with the same fantastic

Oriental invention that had illuminated the plain Pentateuch with

imaginative vignettes, and transfiguring the dry abstractions of

Socialism with the same passionate personalization. He listened

impatiently. He had never been caught by Socialism, even at his

hungriest. He had once been an employer himself, and his point of view

survived.

They talked of the woman through whom Lassalle had met his death. One

of them had seen her on the American stage--a bouncing burlesque

actress.

'Like Yvonne Rupert?' he ventured to interpose.

'Yvonne Rupert?' They laughed. 'Ah, if Yvonne had only had such a

snap!' cried Melchitsedek Pinchas. 'To have jilted Lassalle and been

died for! What an advertisement!'

'It would have been on the bill,' agreed the table.

He asked if they thought Yvonne Rupert clever.

'Off the stage! There's nothing to her on,' said Pinchas.

The table roared as if this were a good joke. 'I dare say she would

play my Ophelia as well as Mrs. Goldwater,' Pinchas added zestfully.

'They say she has a Yiddish accent,' Elkan ventured again.

The table roared louder. 'I have heard of Yiddish-Deutsch,' cried

Pinchas, 'never of Yiddish-Francais!'

Elkan Mandle was frozen. By his disappointment he knew that he had

been hoping to meet Gittel again--that his resentment was dead.

But the hope would not die. He studied the theatrical announcements,

and when Yvonne Rupert once again flashed upon New York he set out to

see her. But it struck him that the remote seat he could afford--for

it would not do to spend a week's wage on the mere chance--would be

too far off for precise identification, especially as she would

probably be theatrically transmogrified. No, a wiser as well as a more

economical plan would be to meet her at the stage-door, as he used to

meet Gittel. He would hang about till she came.

It was a long ride to the Variety Theatre, and, the weather being

sloppy, there was not even standing-room in the car, every foot of

which, as it plunged and heaved ship-like through the watery night,

was a suffocating jam of human beings, wedged on the seats, or

clinging tightly to the overhead straps, or swarming like stuck flies

on the fore and hind platforms, the squeeze and smell intensified by

the shovings and writhings of damp passengers getting in and out, or

by the desperate wriggling of the poor patient collector of fares

boring his way through the very thick of the soldered mass. Elkan

alighted with a headache, glad even of the cold rain that sprinkled

his forehead. The shining carriages at the door of the theatre filled

him for once with a bitter revolt. But he dared not insinuate himself

among the white-wrapped, scented women and elegant cloaked men, though

he itched to enter the portico and study the pictures of Yvonne

Rupert, of which he caught a glimpse. He found his way instead to the

stage-door, and took up a position that afforded him a complete view

of the comers and goers, if only partial shelter from the rain.

But the leaden hours passed without her, with endless fevers of

expectation, heats followed by chills. The performers came and went,

mostly on foot, and strange nondescript men and women passed too

through the jealously-guarded door.

He was drenched to the skin with accumulated drippings ere a smart

brougham drove up, a smart groom opened an umbrella, and a smart--an

unimaginably smart--Gittel Goldstein alighted.

Yes, the incredible was true!

Beneath that coquettish veil, under the aureole of hair, gleamed the

piquant eyes he had kissed so often.

He remained petrified an instant, dazed and staring. She passed

through the door the groom held open. The doorkeeper, from his

pigeon-hole, handed her some letters. Yes, he knew every trick of the

shoulders, every turn of the neck. She stood surveying the envelopes.

As the groom let the door swing back and turned away, he rushed

forward and pushed it open again.

'Gittel!' he cried chokingly. 'Gittel!'

She turned with a quick jerk of the head, and in her flushed, startled

face he read consciousness if not recognition. The reek of her old

cherry-blossom smote from her costlier garments, kindling a thousand

passionate memories.

'Knowest thou me not?' he cried in Yiddish.

In a flash her face, doubly veiled, was a haughty stare.

'Who is zis person?' she asked the doorkeeper in her charming

French-English.

He reverted to English.

'I am Elkan, your own Elkan!'

Ah, the jostle of sweet and bitter memories. So near, so near again!

The same warm seductive witch. He strove to take her daintily-gloved

hand.

She shrank back shudderingly and thrust open the door that led to the

dressing-rooms beside the stage.

'Ze man is mad, lunatic!' And she disappeared with that delicious

shrug of the shoulders that had captivated the States.

Insensate fury overcame him. What! This creature who owed all this

glory to his dragging her away from the London Ghetto Theatre, this

heartless, brazen minx who had been glad to nestle in his arms, was to

mock him like this, was to elude him again! He made a dash after her;

the doorkeeper darted from his little room, but was hurled aside in a

swift, mad tussle, and Elkan, after a blind, blood-red instant, found

himself blinking and dripping in the centre of the stage, facing a

great roaring audience, tier upon tier. Then he became aware of a pair

of eccentric comedians whose scene he had interrupted, and who had not

sufficient presence of mind to work him into it, so that the audience

which had laughed at his headlong entrance now laughed the louder over

its own mistake.

But its delightful moment of sensational suspense was brief. In a

twinkling the doorkeeper's vengeful hands were on the intruder's

collar.

'I want Yvonne Rupert!' shrieked Elkan struggling. 'She is mine--mine!

She loved me once!'

A vaster wave of laughter swept back to him as he was hauled off, to

be handed over to a policeman on a charge of brawling and assaulting

the doorkeeper.

As he lay in his cell he chewed the cud of revenge. Yes, let them take

him before the magistrate; it was not he that was afraid of justice.

He would expose her, the false Catholic, the she-cat! A pretty

convert! Another man would have preferred to blackmail her, he told

himself with righteous indignation, especially in such straits of

poverty. But he--the thought had scarcely crossed his mind. He had not

even thought of her helping him, only of the joy of meeting her again.

In the chill morning, after a sleepless night, he had a panic-stricken

sense of his insignificance under the crushing weight of law and

order. All the strength born of bitterness oozed out as he stood

before the magistrate rigidly and heard the charge preferred. He had a

despairing vision of Yvonne Rupert, mocking, inaccessible, even before

he was asked his occupation.

'In a cigar-box factory,' he replied curtly.

'Ah, you make cigar-boxes?'

'No, not exactly. I paste.'

'Paste what?'

He hesitated. 'Pictures of Yvonne Rupert on the boxes.'

'Ah! Then it is the "Yvonne Rupert" cigar?'

'Yes.' He had divined the court's complacent misinterpretation ere he

saw its smile; the facile theory that brooding so much over her

fascinating picture had unhinged his brain. From that moment a

hardness came over his heart. He shut his lips grimly. What was the

use of talking? Whatever he said would be discredited on this impish

theory. And, even without it, how incredible his story, how irrelevant

to the charge of assaulting the doorkeeper!

'I was drunk,' was all he would say. He was committed for trial, and,

having no one to bail him out, lingered in a common cell with other

reprobates till the van brought him to the Law Court, and he came up to

justice in an elevator under the rebuking folds of the Stars and

Stripes. A fortnight's more confinement was all that was meted out to

him, but he had already had time enough to reflect that he had given

Yvonne Rupert one of the best advertisements of her life. It would have

enhanced the prisoner's bitterness had he known, as the knowing world

outside knew, that he was a poor devil in Yvonne Rupert's pay, and that

New York was chuckling over the original and ingenious dodge by which

she had again asserted her sovereignty as an advertiser--delicious,

immense!

Short as his term of imprisonment was it coincided, much to his own

surprise, with the Jewish Penitential period, and the Day of Atonement

came in the middle. A wealthy Jewish philanthropist had organized a

prison prayer-service, and Elkan eagerly grasped at the break in the

monotony. Several of the prisoners who posed as Jews with this same

motive were detected and reprimanded; but Elkan felt, with the new

grim sense of humour that meditation on Yvonne Rupert and the world

she fooled was developing in him, that he was as little of a Jew as

any of them. This elopement to America had meant a violent break with

his whole religious past. Not once had he seen the inside of an

American synagogue. Gittel had had no use for synagogues.

He entered the improvised prayer-room with this ironic sense of coming

back to Judaism by the Christian prison door. But the service shook

him terribly. He forgot even to be amused by the one successful

impostor who had landed himself in an unforeseen deprivation of

rations during the whole fast day. The passionate outcries of the

old-fashioned _Chazan_, the solemn peals and tremolo notes of the

cornet, which had once been merely aesthetic effects to the reputable

master-cutter, were now surcharged with doom and chastisement. The

very sight of the Hebrew books and scrolls touched a thousand memories

of home and innocence.

Ah, God, how he had sinned!

'Forgive us now, pardon us now, atone for us now!' he cried, smiting

his breast and rocking to and fro.

His poor deserted wife and children! How terrible for Haigitcha to

wake up one morning and find him gone! As terrible as for him to wake

up one morning and find Gittel gone. Ah, God had indeed paid him in

kind! Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

The philanthropist himself preached the sermon. God could never

forgive sins till the sinner had first straightened out the human

wrongs.

Ah, true, true! If he could only find his family again. If he could

try by love and immeasurable devotion to atone for the past. Then

again life would have a meaning and an aim. Poor, poor Haigitcha! How

he would weep over her and cherish her. And his children! They must be

grown up. Yankely must be quite a young man. Yes, he would be

seventeen by now. And Rachel, that pretty, clinging cherub!

In all those years he had not dared to let his thoughts pause upon

them. His past lay like a misty dream behind those thousand leagues of

ocean. But now it started up in all the colours of daylight, warm,

appealing. Yes, he would go back to his dear ones who must still crave

his love and guidance; he would plead and be forgiven, and end his

days piously at the sacred hearth of duty.

'Forgive us now, pardon us now, atone for us now!'

If only he could get back to old England.

He appealed to the philanthropist, and lied amid all his contrition.

It was desperation at the severance from his wife and children that

had driven him to drink, lust of gold that had spurred him across the

Atlantic. Now a wiser and sadder man, he would be content with a

modicum and the wife of his bosom.

VII

He arrived at last, with a few charity coins in his pocket, in the

familiar Spitalfields alley, guarded by the three iron posts over

which he remembered his Yankely leaping. His heart was full of tears

and memories. Ah, there was the butcher's shop still underneath the

old apartment, with the tin labels stuck in the _kosher_ meat, and

there was Gideon, the fat, genial butcher, flourishing his great

carving-knife as of yore, though without that ancient smile of

brotherly recognition. Gideon's frigidity chilled him; it was an

inauspicious omen, a symptom of things altered, irrevocable.

'Does Mrs. Mandle still live here?' he asked with a horrible

heart-sinking.

'Yes, first floor,' said Gideon, staring.

Ah, how his heart leapt up again! Haigitcha, his dear Haigitcha! He

went up the ever-open dusty staircase jostling against a spruce,

handsome young fellow who was hurrying down. He looked back with a

sudden conviction that it was his son. His heart swelled with pride

and affection; but ere he could cry 'Yankely' the young fellow was

gone. He heard the whirr of machines. Yes, she had kept on the

workshop, the wonderful creature, though crippled by his loss and the

want of capital. Doubtless S. Cohn's kind-hearted firm had helped her

to tide over the crisis. Ah, what a blackguard he had been! And she

had brought up the children unaided. Dear Haigitcha! What madness had

driven him from her side? But he would make amends--yes, he would make

amends. He would slip again into his own niche, take up the old

burdens and the old delights--perhaps even be again treasurer of 'The

Gates of Mercy.'

He knocked at the door. Haigitcha herself opened it.

He wanted to cry her name, but the word stuck in his throat. For this

was not his Haigitcha; this was a new creature, cold, stern, tragic,

prematurely aged, framed in the sombre shadows of the staircase. And

in her eyes was neither rapture nor remembrance.

'What is it?' she asked.

'I am Elkan; don't you know me?'

She stared with a little gasp, and a heaving of the flat breasts. Then

she said icily: 'And what do you want?'

'I am come back,' he muttered hoarsely in Yiddish.

'And where is Gittel?' she answered in the same idiom.

The needles of the whirring machines seemed piercing through his

brain. So London knew that Gittel had been the companion of his

flight! He hung his head.

'I was only with her one year,' he whispered.

'Then go back to thy dung-heap!' She shut the door.

He thrust his foot in desperately ere it banged to. 'Haigitcha!' he

shrieked. 'Let me come in. Forgive me, forgive me!'

It was a tug-of-war. He forced open the door; he had a vision of

surprised 'hands' stopping their machines, of a beautiful, startled

girl holding the ends of a half-laid tablecloth--his Rachel, oh, his

Rachel!

'Open the window, one of you!' panted Haigitcha, her shoulders still

straining against the door. 'Call a policeman--the man is drunk!'

He staggered back, his pressure relaxed, the door slammed. This

repetition of his 'Yvonne Rupert' experience sobered him effectually.

What right, indeed, had he to force himself upon this woman, upon

these children, to whom he was dead? So might a suicide hope to win

back his place in the old life. Life had gone on without him--had no

need of him. Ah, what a punishment God had prepared for him! Closed

doors to the past, closed doors everywhere.

And this terrible sense of exclusion had not now the same palliative

of righteous resentment. With Yvonne Rupert, the splendid-flaming,

vicious ingrate, he had felt himself the sinned against. But before

this wife-widow, this dutiful, hard-working, tragic creature, he had

nothing but self-contempt. He tottered downstairs. How should he even

get his bread--he whose ill-fame was doubtless the gossip of the

Ghetto? If he could only get hold of Gideon's carving-knife!

VIII

But he did not commit suicide, nor did he starve. There is always one

last refuge for the failures of the Ghetto, and Elkan's easy

experience with the Jewish philanthropist had prepared the way for

dealings with the Christian.

To-day the Rev. Moses Elkan, 'the converted Jew,' preaches eloquently

to his blind brethren who never come to hear him. For he has 'found

the light.' Exeter Hall's exposition of the Jewish prophecies has

opened his eyes, and though his foes have been those of his own

household, yet, remembering the terrible text, 'He that loveth son or

daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me,' he has taken up his cross

and followed after Christ alone.

And even if the good souls for whose thousands of pounds he is the

annual interest should discover his true past--through this

tale-bearer or another--is there not but the more joy over the sinner

that repenteth?

Duties neglected, deadly sins trailing in the actual world their

unchangeable irreversible consequences--all this is irrelevant. He has

'found the light.'

And so, while Haigitcha walks in darkness, Yvonne prays in her chapel

and Elkan preaches in his church.

HOLY WEDLOCK

When Schneemann, the artist, returned from Rome to his native village

in Galicia, he found it humming with gossip concerning his paternal

grandmother, universally known as the _Bube_ Yenta. It would seem that

the giddy old thing hobbled home from synagogue conversing with Yossel

Mandelstein, the hunchback, and sometimes even offered the unshapely

septuagenarian her snuffbox as he passed the door of her cottage. More

than one village censor managed to acquaint the artist with the

flirtation ere he had found energy to walk the muddy mile to her

dwelling. Even his own mother came out strongly in disapproval of the

ancient dame; perhaps the remembrance of how fanatically her

mother-in-law had disapproved of her married head for not being

shrouded in a pious wig lent zest to her tongue. The artist controlled

his facial muscles, having learnt tolerance and Bohemianism in the

Eternal City.

'Old blood will have its way,' he said blandly.

'Yes, old blood's way is sometimes worse than young blood's,' said

Frau Schneemann, unsmiling. 'You must not forget that Yossel is still

a bachelor.'

'Yes, and therefore a sinner in Israel--I remember,' quoth the artist

with a twinkle. How all this would amuse his bachelor friends, Leopold

Barstein and Rozenoffski the pianist!

'Make not mock. 'Tis high time you, too, should lead a maiden under

the Canopy.'

'I am so shy--there are few so forward as grandmother.'

'Heaven be thanked!' said his mother fervently. 'When I refused to

cover my tresses she spoke as if I were a brazen Epicurean, but I had

rather have died than carry on so shamelessly with a man to whom I was

not betrothed.'

'Perhaps they _are_ betrothed.'

'_We_ betrothed to Yossel! May his name be blotted out!'

'Why, what is wrong with Yossel? Moses Mendelssohn himself had a

hump.'

'Who speaks of humps? Have you forgotten we are of Rabbinic family?'

Her son had quite forgotten it, as he had forgotten so much of this

naive life to which he was paying a holiday visit.

'Ah yes,' he murmured. 'But Yossel is pious--surely?' A vision of the

psalm-droners and prayer-shriekers in the little synagogue, among whom

the hunchback had been conspicuous, surged up vividly.

'He may shake himself from dawn-service to night-service, he will

never shake off his father, the innkeeper,' said Frau Schneemann

hotly. 'If I were in your grandmother's place I would be weaving my

shroud, not thinking of young men.'

'But she's thinking of old men, you said.'

'Compared with her he is young--she is eighty-four, he is only

seventy-five.'

'Well, they won't be married long,' he laughed.

Frau Schneemann laid her hand on his mouth.

'Heaven forbid the omen,' she cried. ''Tis bringing a _Bilbul_

(scandal) upon a respectable family.'

'I will go and talk to her,' he said gravely. 'Indeed, I ought to have

gone to see her days ago.' And as he trudged to the other end of the

village towards the cottage where the lively old lady lived in

self-sufficient solitude, he was full of the contrast between his

mother's mental world and his own. People live in their own minds, and

not in streets or fields, he philosophized.

Through her diamond-paned window he saw the wrinkled, white-capped old

creature spinning peacefully at the rustic chimney-corner, a pure

cloistral crone. It seemed profane to connect such a figure with

flirtation--this was surely the very virgin of senility. What a fine

picture she made too! Why had he never thought of painting her? Yes,

such a picture of 'The Spinster' would be distinctly interesting. And

he would put in the _Kesubah_, the marriage certificate that hung over

the mantelpiece, in ironical reminder of her days of bloom. He

unlatched the door--he had never been used to knock at grannie's door,

and the childish instinct came back to him.

'_Guten Abend_,' he said.

She adjusted a pair of horn spectacles, and peered at him.

'_Guten Abend_,' she murmured.

'You don't remember me--Vroomkely.' He used the old childish

diminutive of Abraham, though he had almost forgotten he owned the

name in full.

'Vroomkely,' she gasped, almost overturning her wheel as she sprang to

hug him in her skinny arms. He had a painful sense that she had shrunk

back almost to childish dimensions. Her hands seemed trembling as much

with decay as with emotion. She hastened to produce from the

well-known cupboard home-made _Kuchen_ and other dainties of his

youth, with no sense of the tragedy that lay in his no longer being

tempted by them.

'And how goes your trade?' she said. 'They say you have never been

slack. They must build many houses in Rome.' Her notion that he was a

house-painter he hardly cared to contradict, especially as

picture-painting was contrary to the Mosaic dispensation.

'Oh, I haven't been only in Rome,' he said evasively. 'I have been in

many lands.'

Fire came into her eyes, and flashed through the big spectacles. 'You

have been to Palestine?' she cried.

'No, only as far as Egypt. Why?'

'I thought you might have brought me a clod of Palestine earth to put

in my grave.' The fire died out of her spectacles, she sighed, and

took a consolatory pinch of snuff.

'Don't talk of graves--you will live to be a hundred and more,' he

cried. But he was thinking how ridiculous gossip was. It spared

neither age nor sexlessness, not even this shrivelled ancient who was

meditating on her latter end. Suddenly he became aware of a shadow

darkening the doorway. At the same instant the fire leapt back into

his grandmother's glasses. Instinctively, almost before he turned his

head, he knew it was the hero of the romance.

Yossel Mandelstein looked even less of a hero than the artist had

remembered. There had been something wistful and pathetic in the

hunchback's expression, some hint of inner eager fire, but this--if he

had not merely imagined it--seemed to have died of age and

hopelessness. He used crutches, too, to help himself along with, so

that he seemed less the hunchback of yore than the conventional

contortion of time, and but for the familiar earlocks pendent on

either side of the fur cap, but for the great hooked nose and the

small chin hidden in the big beard, the artist might have doubted if

this was indeed the Yossel he had sometimes mocked at in the crude

cruelty of boyhood.

Yossel, propped on his crutches, was pulling out a mouldering

black-covered book from under his greasy caftan. 'I have brought you

back your _Chovoth Halvovoth_,' he said.

In the vivid presence of the actual romance the artist could not

suppress the smile he had kept back at the mere shadowy recital. In

Rome he himself had not infrequently called on young ladies by way of

returning books to them. It was true that the books he returned were

not Hebrew treatises, but he smiled again to think that the name of

Yossel's volume signified 'the duties of the heart.' The _Bube_ Yenta

received the book with thanks, and a moment of embarrassment ensued,

only slightly mitigated by the offer of the snuffbox. Yossel took a

pinch, but his eyes seemed roving in amaze, less over the stranger

than over the bespread table, as though he might unaccountably have

overlooked some sacred festival. That two are company and three none

seemed at this point a proverb to be heeded, and without waiting to

renew the hero's acquaintance, the artist escaped from the idyllic

cottage. Let the lover profit by the pastry for which he himself was

too old.

So the gossips spoke the truth, he thought, his amusement not

unblended with a touch of his mother's indignation. Surely, if his

grandmother wished to cultivate a grand passion, she might have chosen

a more sightly object of devotion. Not that there was much to be said

for Yossel's taste either. When after seventy-five years of celibacy

the fascinations of the other sex began to tell upon him, he might at

least have succumbed to a less matriarchal form of femininity. But

perhaps his grandmother had fascinations of another order. Perhaps she

had money. He put the question to his mother.

'Certainly she has money,' said his mother vindictively. 'She has

thousands of _Gulden_ in her stocking. Twenty years ago she could have

had her pick of a dozen well-to-do widowers, yet now that she has one

foot in the grave, madness has entered her soul, and she has cast her

eye upon this pauper.'

'But I thought his father left him his inn,' said the artist.

'His inn--yes. His sense--no. Yossel ruined himself long ago paying

too much attention to the Talmud instead of his business. He was

always a _Schlemihl_.'

'But can one pay too much attention to the Talmud? That is a strange

saying for a Rabbi's daughter.'

'King Solomon tells us there is a time for everything,' returned the

Rabbi's daughter. 'Yossel neglected what the wise King said, and so

now he comes trying to wheedle your poor grandmother out of her money.

If he wanted to marry, why didn't he marry before eighteen, as the

Talmud prescribes?'

'He seems to do everything at the wrong time,' laughed her son. 'Do

you suppose, by the way, that King Solomon made all his thousand

marriages before he was eighteen?'

'Make not mock of holy things,' replied his mother angrily.

The monetary explanation of the romance, he found, was the popular one

in the village. It did not, however, exculpate the grandame from the

charge of forwardness, since if she wished to contract another

marriage it could have been arranged legitimately by the _Shadchan_,

and then the poor marriage-broker, who got little enough to do in this

God-forsaken village, might have made a few _Gulden_ out of it.

Beneath all his artistic perception of the humours of the thing,

Schneemann found himself prosaically sharing the general

disapprobation of the marriage. Really, when one came to think of it,

it was ridiculous that he should have a new grandfather thrust upon

him. And such a grandfather! Perhaps the _Bube_ was, indeed, losing

her reason. Or was it he himself who was losing his reason, taking

seriously this parochial scandal, and believing that because a

doddering hunchback of seventy-five had borrowed an ethical treatise

from an octogenarian a marriage must be on the tapis? Yet, on more

than one occasion, he came upon circumstances which seemed to justify

the popular supposition. There could be no doubt, for example, that

when at the conclusion of the synagogue service the feminine stream

from the women's gallery poured out to mingle with the issuing males,

these two atoms drifted together with unnatural celerity. It appeared

to be established beyond question that on the preceding Feast of

Tabernacles the _Bube_ had lent and practically abandoned to the

hunchback's use the ritual palm-branch he was too poor to afford. Of

course this might only have been gratitude, inasmuch as a fortnight

earlier on the solemn New Year Day when, by an untimely decree, the

grandmother lay ill abed, Yossel had obtained possession of the

_Shofar_, and leaving the synagogue had gone to blow it to her. He had

blown the holy horn--with due regard to the proprieties--in the

downstairs room of her cottage so that she above had heard it, and

having heard it could breakfast. It was a performance that charity

reasonably required for a disabled fellow-creature, and yet what

medieval knight had found a more delicate way of trumpeting his

mistress's charms? Besides, how had Yossel known that the heroine was

ill? His eye must have roved over the women's gallery, and

disentangled her absence even from the huddled mass of weeping and

swaying womanhood.

One day came the crowning item of evidence. The grandmother had

actually asked the village postman to oblige her by delivering a

brown parcel at Yossel's lodgings. The postman was not a Child of the

Covenant, but Yossel's landlady was, and within an hour all Jewry knew

that Yenta had sent Yossel a phylacteries-bag--the very symbol of love

offered by a maiden to her bridegroom. Could shameless passion further

go?

III

The artist, at least, determined it should go no further. He put on

his hat, and went to find Yossel Mandelstein. But Yossel was not to be

found so easily, and the artist's resolution strengthened with each

false scent. Yossel was ultimately run to earth, or rather to Heaven,

in the _Beth Hamedrash_, where he was shaking himself studiously over

a Babylonian folio, in company with a motley assemblage of youths and

greybeards equally careless of the demands of life. The dusky home of

holy learning seemed an awkward place in which to broach the subject

of love. In a whisper he besought the oscillating student to come

outside. Yossel started up in agitation.

'Ah, your grandmother is dying,' he divined, with what seemed a

lover's inaccuracy. 'I will come and pray at once.'

'No, no, she is not dying,' said Schneemann hastily, adding in a grim

murmur, 'unless of love.'

'Oh, then, it is not about your grandmother?'

'No--that is to say, yes.' It seemed more difficult than ever to

plunge into the delicate subject. To refer plumply to the courtship

would, especially if it were not true, compromise his grandmother

and, incidentally, her family. Yet, on the other hand, he longed to

know what lay behind all this philandering, which in any case _had_

been compromising her, and he felt it his duty as his grandmother's

protector and the representative of the family to ask Yossel straight

out whether his intentions were honourable.

He remembered scenes in novels and plays in which undesirable suitors

were tackled by champions of convention--scenes in which they were

even bought off and started in new lands. Would not Yossel go to a new

land, and how much would he want over and above his fare? He led the

way without.

'You have lived here all your life, Yossel, have you not?' he said,

when they were in the village street.

'Where else shall a man live?' answered Yossel.

'But have you never had any curiosity to see other parts? Would you

not like to go and see Vienna?'

A little gleam passed over Yossel's dingy face. 'No, not Vienna--it is

an unholy place--but Prague! Prague where there is a great Rabbi and

the old, old underground synagogue that God has preserved throughout

the generations.'

'Well, why not go and see it?' suggested the artist.

Yossel stared. 'Is it for that you tore me away from my Talmud?'

'N--no, not exactly for that,' stammered Schneemann. 'Only seeing you

glued to it gave me the idea what a pity it was that you should not

travel and sit at the feet of great Rabbis?'

'But how shall I travel to them? My crutches cannot walk so far as

Prague.'

'Oh, I'd lend you the money to ride,' said the artist lightly.

'But I could never repay it.'

'You can repay me in Heaven. You can give me a little bit of your _Gan

Iden_' (Paradise).

Yossel shook his head. 'And after I had the fare, how should I live?

Here I make a few _Gulden_ by writing letters for people to their

relatives in America; in Prague everybody is very learned; they don't

need a scribe. Besides, if I cannot die in Palestine I might as well

die where I was born.'

'But why can't you die in Palestine?' cried the artist with a new

burst of hope. 'You _shall_ die in Palestine, I promise you.'

The gleam in Yossel's face became a great flame of joy. 'I shall die

in Palestine?' he asked ecstatically.

'As sure as I live! I will pay your fare the whole way, second-class.'

For a moment the dazzling sunshine continued on Yossel's face, then a

cloud began to pass across it.

'But how can I take your money? I am not a _Schnorrer_.'

Schneemann did not find the question easy to answer. The more so as

Yossel's eagerness to go and die in Palestine seemed to show that

there was no reason for packing him off. However, he told himself that

one must make assurance doubly sure and that, even if it was all empty

gossip, still he had stumbled upon a way of making an old man happy.

'There is no reason why you should take my money,' he said with an

artistic inspiration, 'but there is every reason why I should buy to

myself the _Mitzvah_ (good deed) of sending you to Jerusalem. You

see, I have so few good deeds to my credit.'

'So I have heard,' replied Yossel placidly. 'A very wicked life it is

said you lead at Rome.'

'Most true,' said the artist cheerfully.

'It is said also that you break the Second Commandment by making

representations of things that are on sea and land.'

'I would the critics admitted as much,' murmured the artist.

'Your grandmother does not understand. She thinks you paint

houses--which is not forbidden. But I don't undeceive her--it would

pain her too much.' The lover-like sentiment brought back the artist's

alarm.

'When will you be ready to start?' he said.

Yossel pondered. 'But to die in Palestine one must live in Palestine,'

he said. 'I cannot be certain that God would take my soul the moment I

set foot on the holy soil.'

The artist reflected a moment, but scarcely felt rich enough to

guarantee that Yossel should live in Palestine, especially if he were

an unconscionably long time a-dying. A happy thought came to him. 'But

there is the _Chalukah_,' he reminded Yossel.

'But that is charity.'

'No--it is not charity, it is a sort of university endowment. It is

just to support such old students as you that these sums are sent from

all the world over. The prayers and studies of our old men in

Jerusalem are a redemption to all Israel. And yours would be to me in

particular.'

'True, true,' said Yossel eagerly; 'and life is very cheap there, I

have always heard.'

'Then it is a bargain,' slipped unwarily from the artist's tongue. But

Yossel replied simply:

'May the blessings of the Eternal be upon you for ever and for ever,

and by the merit of my prayers in Jerusalem may your sins be

forgiven.'

The artist was moved. Surely, he thought, struggling between tears and

laughter, no undesirable lover had ever thus been got rid of by the

head of the family. Not to speak of an undesirable grandfather.

The news that Yossel was leaving the village bound for the Holy Land,

produced a sensation which quite obscured his former notoriety as an

aspirant to wedlock. Indeed, those who discussed the new situation

most avidly forgot how convinced they had been that marriage and not

death was the hunchback's goal. How Yossel had found money for the

great adventure was not the least interesting ingredient in the cup of

gossip. It was even whispered that the grandmother herself had been

tapped. Her skittish advances had been taken seriously by Yossel. He

had boldly proposed to lead her under the Canopy, but at this point,

it was said, the old lady had drawn back--she who had led him so far

was not to be thus led. Women are changeable, it is known, and even

when they are old they do not change. But Yossel had stood up for his

rights; he had demanded compensation. And his fare to Palestine was a

concession for his injured affections. It was not many days before the

artist met persons who had actually overheard the bargaining between

the _Bube_ and the hunchback.

Meantime Yossel's departure was drawing nigh, and all those who had

relatives in Palestine besieged him from miles around, plying him with

messages, benedictions, and even packages for their kinsfolk. And

conversely, there was scarcely a Jewish inhabitant who had not begged

for clods of Palestine earth or bottles of Jordan water. So great

indeed were the demands that their supply would have constituted a

distinct invasion of the sovereign rights of the Sultan, and dried up

the Jordan.

With his grandmother's future thus off his mind, the artist had

settled down to making a picture of the ruined castle which he

commanded from his bedroom window. But when the through ticket for

Jerusalem came from the agent at Vienna, and he had brazenly endured

Yossel's blessings for the same, his artistic instinct demanded to see

how the _Bube_ was taking her hero's desertion. As he lifted the latch

he heard her voice giving orders, and the door opened, not on the

peaceful scene he expected of the spinster at her ingle nook, but of a

bustling and apparently rejuvenated old lady supervising a packing

menial. The greatest shock of all was that this menial proved to be

Yossel himself squatted on the floor, his crutches beside him. Almost

as in guilty confusion the hunchback hastily closed the sheet

containing a huddle of articles, and tied it into a bundle before the

artist's chaotic sense of its contents could change into clarity. But

instantly a flash of explanation came to him.

'Aha, grandmother,' he said, 'I see you too are sending presents to

Palestine.'

The grandmother took snuff uneasily. 'Yes, it is going to the Land of

Israel,' she said.

As the artist lifted his eyes from the two amorphous heaps on the

floor--Yossel and his bundle--he became aware of a blank in the

familiar interior.

'Why, where is the spinning-wheel?' he cried.

'I have given it to the widow Rubenstein--I shall spin no more.'

'And I thought of painting you as a spinster!' he murmured dolefully.

Then a white patch in the darkened wood over the mantelpiece caught

his eye. 'Why, your marriage certificate is gone too!'

'Yes, I have taken it down.'

'To give to the widow Rubenstein?'

'What an idea!' said his grandmother seriously. 'It is in the bundle.'

'You are sending it away to Palestine?'

The grandmother fumbled with her spectacles, and removing them with

trembling fingers blinked downwards at the bundle. Yossel snatched up

his crutches, and propped himself manfully upon them.

'Your grandmother goes with me,' he explained decisively.

'What!' the artist gasped.

The grandmother's eyes met his unflinchingly; they had drawn fire from

Yossel's. 'And why should I not go to Palestine too?' she said.

'But you are so old!'

'The more reason I should make haste if I am to be luckier than Moses

our Master.' She readjusted her spectacles firmly.

'But the journey is so hard.'

'Yossel has wisdom; he will find the way while alive as easily as

others will roll thither after death.'

'You'll be dead before you get there,' said the artist brutally.

'Ah, no! God will not let me die before I touch the holy soil!'

'You, too, want to die in Palestine?' cried the amazed artist.

'And where else shall a daughter of Israel desire to die? Ah, I

forgot--your mother was an Epicurean with godless tresses; she did not

bring you up in the true love of our land. But every day for seventy

years and more have I prayed the prayer that my eyes should behold the

return of the Divine Glory to Zion. That mercy I no longer expect in

my own days, inasmuch as the Sultan hardens his heart and will not

give us back our land, not though Moses our Master appears to him

every night, and beats him with his rod. But at least my eyes shall

behold the land of Israel.'

'Amen!' said Yossel, still propped assertively on his crutches. The

grandson turned upon the interrupter. 'But you can't take her _with_

you?'

'Why not?' said Yossel calmly.

Schneemann found himself expatiating upon the responsibility of

looking after such an old woman; it seemed too absurd to talk of the

scandal. That was left for the grandmother to emphasize.

'Would you have me arrive alone in Palestine?' she interposed

impatiently. 'Think of the talk it would make in Jerusalem! And should

I even be permitted to land? They say the Sultan's soldiers stand at

the landing-place like the angels at the gates of Paradise with

swords that turn every way. But Yossel is cunning in the customs of

the heathen; he will explain to the soldiers that he is an Austrian

subject, and that I am his _Frau_.'

'What! Pass you off as his _Frau_!'

'Who speaks of passing off? He could say I was his sister, as Abraham

our Father said of Sarah. But that was a sin in the sight of Heaven,

and therefore as our sages explain----'

'It is simpler to be married,' Yossel interrupted.

'Married!' echoed the artist angrily.

'The witnesses are coming to my lodging this afternoon,' Yossel

continued calmly. 'Dovidel and Yitzkoly from the _Beth Hamedrash_.'

'They think they are only coming to a farewell glass of brandy,'

chuckled the grandmother. 'But they will find themselves at a secret

wedding.'

'And to-morrow we shall depart publicly for Trieste,' Yossel wound up

calmly.

'But this is too absurd!' the artist broke in. 'I forbid this

marriage!'

A violent expression of amazement overspread the ancient dame's face,

and the tone of the far-away years came into her voice. 'Silence,

Vroomkely, or I'll smack your face. Do you forget you are talking to

your grandmother?'

'I think Mr. Mandelstein forgets it,' the artist retorted, turning

upon the heroic hunchback. 'Do you mean to say you are going to marry

my grandmother?'

'And why not?' asked Yossel. 'Is there a greater lover of God in all

Galicia?'

'Hush, Yossel, I am a great sinner.' But her old face was radiant.

She turned to her grandson. 'Don't be angry with Yossel--all the fault

is mine. He did not ask me to go with him to Palestine; it was I that

asked _him_.'

'Do you mean that you asked him to marry you?'

'It is the same thing. There is no other way. How different would it

have been had there been any other woman here who wanted to die in

Palestine! But the women nowadays have no fear of Heaven; they wear

their hair unshorn--they----'

'Yes, yes. So you asked Yossel to marry you.'

'Asked? Prayed, as one prays upon Atonement Day. For two years I

prayed to him, but he always refused.'

'Then why----?' began the artist.

'Yossel is so proud. It is his only sin.'

'Oh, Yenta!' protested Yossel flushing, 'I am a very sinful man.'

'Yes, but your sin is all in a lump,' the _Bube_ replied. 'Your

iniquity is like your ugliness--some people have it scattered all

over, but you have it all heaped up. And the heap is called pride.'

'Never mind his pride,' put in the artist impatiently. 'Why did he not

go on refusing you?'

'I am coming to that. Only you were always so impatient, Vroomkely.

When I was cutting you a piece of _Kuchen_, you would snatch greedily

at the crumbs as they fell. You see Yossel is not made of the same

clay as you and I. By an oversight the Almighty sent an angel into the

world instead of a man, but seeing His mistake at the last moment, the

All-High broke his wings short and left him a hunchback. But when

Yossel's father made a match for him with Leah, the rich

corn-factor's daughter, the silly girl, when she was introduced to the

bridegroom, could see only the hump, and scandalously refused to carry

out the contract. And Yossel is so proud that ever since that day he

curled himself up into his hump, and nursed a hatred for all women.'

'How can you say that, Yenta?' Yossel broke in again.

'Why else did you refuse my money?' the _Bube_ retorted. 'Twice, ten,

twenty times I asked him to go to Palestine with me. But obstinate as

a pig he keeps grunting "I can't--I've got no money." Sooner than I

should pay his fare he'd have seen us both die here.'

The artist collapsed upon the bundle; astonishment, anger, and

self-ridicule made an emotion too strong to stand under. So this was

all his Machiavellian scheming had achieved--to bring about the very

marriage it was meant to avert! He had dug a pit and fallen into it

himself. All this would indeed amuse Rozenoffski and Leopold Barstein.

He laughed bitterly.

'Nay, it was no laughing matter,' said the _Bube_ indignantly. 'For I

know well how Yossel longed to go with me to die in Jerusalem. And at

last the All-High sent him the fare, and he was able to come to me and

invite me to go with him.'

Here the artist became aware that Yossel's eyes and lips were

signalling silence to him. As if, forsooth, one published one's good

deeds! He had yet to learn on whose behalf the hunchback was

signalling.

'So! You came into a fortune?' he asked Yossel gravely.

Yossel looked the picture of misery. The _Bube_ unconsciously cut

through the situation. 'A wicked man gave it to him,' she explained,

'to pray away his sins in Jerusalem.'

'Indeed!' murmured the artist. 'Anyone you know?'

'Heaven has spared her the pain of knowing him,' ambiguously

interpolated her anxious protector.

'I don't even know his name,' added the _Bube_. 'Yossel keeps it

hidden.'

'One must not shame a fellow-man,' Yossel urged. 'The sin of that is

equal to the sin of shedding blood.'

The grandmother nodded her head approvingly. 'It is enough that the

All-High knows his name. But for such an Epicurean much praying will

be necessary. It will be a long work. And your first prayer, Yossel,

must be that you shall not die very soon, else the labourer will not

be worthy of his hire.'

Yossel took her yellow withered hand as in a lover's clasp. 'Be at

peace, Yenta! He will be redeemed if only by _your_ merits. Are we not

one?'

ELIJAH'S GOBLET

Aaron Ben Amram removed from the great ritual dish the roasted

shankbone of lamb (symbolic residuum of the Paschal Sacrifice) and the

roasted egg (representative of the ancient festival-offering in the

Temple), and while his wife and children held up the dish, which now

contained only the bitter herbs and unleavened cakes, he recited the

Chaldaic prelude to the _Seder_--the long domestic ceremonial of the

Passover Evening.

'This is the bread of affliction which our fathers ate in the land of

Egypt. Let all who are hungry come in and eat; let all who require

come in and celebrate the Passover. This year here, next year in the

land of Israel! This year slaves, next year sons of freedom!'

But the Polish physician showed nothing of the slave. White-bearded,

clad in a long white robe and a white skullcap, and throned on white

pillows, he made rather a royal figure, indeed for this night of

nights conceived of himself as 'King' and his wife as 'Queen.'

But 'Queen' Golda, despite her silk gown and flowery cap, did not

share her consort's majestic mood, still less the rosy happiness of

the children who sat round this fascinating board. Her heart was full

of a whispering fear that not all the brave melodies of the father

nor all the quaint family choruses could drown. All very well for the

little ones to be unconscious of the hovering shadow, but how could

her husband have forgotten the horrors of the Blood Accusation in the

very year he had led her under the Canopy?

And surely he knew as well as she that the dreadful legend was

gathering again, that the slowly-growing Jew-hatred had reached a

point at which it must find expression, that the _Pritzim_ (nobles) in

their great houses, and the peasants behind their high palings, alike

sulked under the burden of debts. Indeed, had not the Passover Market

hummed with the old, old story of a lost Christian child? Not murdered

yet, thank God, nor even a corpse. But still, if a boy _should_ be

found with signs of violence upon him at this season of the Paschal

Sacrifice, when the Greek Church brooded on the Crucifixion! O God of

Abraham, guard us from these fiends unchained!

But the first part of the elaborate ritual, pleasantly punctuated with

cups of raisin wine, passed peacefully by, and the evening meal,

mercifully set in the middle, was reached, to the children's vast

content. They made wry, humorous mouths, each jest endeared by annual

repetition, over the horseradish that typified the bitterness of the

Egyptian bondage, and ecstatic grimaces over the soft, sweet mixture

of almonds, raisins, apples, and cinnamon, vaguely suggestive of the

bondsmen's mortar; they relished the eggs sliced into salt water, and

then--the symbols all duly swallowed--settled down with more prosaic

satisfaction to the merely edible meats and fishes, though even to

these the special Passover plates and dishes and the purified knives

and forks lent a new relish.

By this time Golda was sufficiently cheered up to meditate her annual

theft of the _Afkuman_, that segment of Passover cake under Aaron's

pillow, morsels of which, distributed to each as the final food to be

tasted that night, replaced the final mouthful of the Paschal Lamb in

the ancient Palestinian meal.

But Elijah's goblet stood in the centre of the table untasted. Every

time the ritual cup-drinking came round, the children had glanced at

the great silver goblet placed for the Prophet of Redemption. Alas!

the brimming raisin wine remained ever at the same level.

They found consolation in the thought that the great moment was still

to come--the moment of the third cup, when, mother throwing open the

door, father would rise, holding the goblet on high, and sonorously

salute an unseen visitor.

True, in other years, though they had almost heard the rush of wings,

the great shining cup had remained full, and when it was replaced on

the white cloth, a vague resentment as at a spurned hospitality had

stirred in each youthful breast. But many reasons could be found to

exculpate Elijah--not omitting their own sins--and now, when Ben Amram

nodded to his wife to open the door, expectation stood on tip-toe,

credulous as ever, and the young hearts beat tattoo.

But the mother's heart was palpitating with another emotion. A faint

clamour in the Polish quarter at the back, as she replaced the samovar

in the kitchen, had recalled all her alarms, and she merely threw

open the door of the room. But Ben Amram was not absent-minded enough

to be beguiled by her air of obedient alacrity. Besides, he could see

the shut street-door through the strip of passage. He gestured towards

it.

Now she feigned laziness. 'Oh, never mind.'

'David, open the street-door.'

The eldest boy sprang up joyously. It would have been too bad of

mother to keep Elijah on the doorstep.

'No, no, David!' Golda stopped him. 'It is too heavy; he could not

undo the bolts and bars.'

'You have barred it?' Ben Amram asked.

'And why not? In this season you know how the heathen go mad like

street-dogs.'

'Pooh! They will not bite us.'

'But, Aaron! You heard about the lost Christian child!'

'I have saved many a Christian child, Golda.'

'They will not remember that.'

'But I must remember the ritual.' And he made a movement.

'No, no, Aaron! Listen!'

The shrill noises seemed to have veered round towards the front of the

house. He shrugged his shoulders. 'I hear only the goats bleating.'

She clung to him as he made for the door. 'For the sake of our

children!'

'Do not be so childish yourself, my crown!'

'But I am not childish. Hark!'

He smiled calmly. 'The door must be opened.'

Her fears lent her scepticism. 'It is you that are childish. You know

no Prophet of Redemption will come through the door.'

He caressed his venerable beard. 'Who knows?'

'I know. It is a Destroyer, not a Redeemer of Israel, who will come.

Listen! Ah, God of Abraham! Do you not hear?'

Unmistakably the howl of a riotous mob was approaching, mingled with

the reedy strains of an accordion.

'Down with the _Zhits_! Death to the dirty Jews!'

'God in heaven!' She released her husband, and ran towards the

children with a gesture as of seeking to gather them all in her arms.

Then, hearing the bolts shot back, she turned with a scream. 'Are you

mad, Aaron?'

But he, holding her back with his gaze, threw wide the door with his

left hand, while his right upheld Elijah's goblet, and over the

ululation of the unseen mob and the shrill spasms of music rose his

Hebrew welcome to the visitor: '_Baruch habaa!_'

Hardly had the greeting left his lips when a wild flying figure in a

rich furred coat dashed round the corner and almost into his arms,

half-spilling the wine.

'In God's name, Reb Aaron!' panted the refugee, and fell half-dead

across the threshold.

The physician dragged him hastily within, and slammed the door, just

as two moujiks--drunken leaders of the chase--lurched past. The

mother, who had sprung forward at the sound of the fall, frenziedly

shot the bolts, and in another instant the hue and cry tore past the

house and dwindled in the distance.

Ben Amram raised the white bloody face, and put Elijah's goblet to the

lips. The strange visitor drained it to the dregs, the clustered

children looking on dazedly. As the head fell back, it caught the

light from the festive candles of the Passover board. The face was

bare of hair; even the side curls were gone.

'Maimon the _Meshummad_!' cried the mother, shuddering back. 'You have

saved the Apostate.'

'Did I not say the door must be opened?' replied Ben Amram gently.

Then a smile of humour twitched his lips, and he smoothed his white

beard. 'Maimon is the only Jew abroad to-night, and how were the poor

drunken peasants to know he was baptized?'

Despite their thrill of horror at the traitor, David and his brothers

and sisters were secretly pleased to see Elijah's goblet empty at

last.

III

Next morning the Passover liturgy rang jubilantly through the vast,

crowded synagogue. No violence had been reported, despite the passage

of a noisy mob. The Ghetto, then, was not to be laid waste with fire

and sword, and the worshippers within the moss-grown, turreted

quadrangle drew free breath, and sent it out in great shouts of

rhythmic prayer, as they swayed in their fringed shawls, with

quivering hands of supplication. The Ark of the Law at one end of the

great building, overbrooded by the Ten Commandments and the perpetual

light, stood open to mark a supreme moment of devotion. Ben Amram had

been given the honour of uncurtaining the shrine, and its richly clad

scrolls of all sizes, with their silver bells and pointers, stood

revealed in solemn splendour.

Through the ornate grating of their gallery the gaily-clad women

looked down on the rocking figures, while the grace-notes of the

cantor on his central dais, and the harmoniously interjected 'poms' of

his male ministrants flew up to their ears, as though they were indeed

angels on high. Suddenly, over the blended passion of cantor and

congregation, an ominous sound broke from without--the complex clatter

of cavalry, the curt ring of military orders. The swaying figures

turned suddenly as under another wind, the women's eyes grew astare

and ablaze with terror. The great doors flew open, and--oh, awful,

incredible sight--a squadron of Cossacks rode slowly in, two abreast,

with a heavy thud of hoofs on the sacred floor, and a rattle of

ponderous sabres. Their black conical caps and long beards, their

great side-buttoned coats, and pockets stuffed with protrusive

cartridges, their prancing horses, their leaded knouts, struck a

blood-curdling discord amid the prayerful, white-wrapped figures. The

rumble of worship ceased, the cantor, suddenly isolated, was heard

soaring ecstatically; then he, too, turned his head uneasily and his

roulade died in his throat.

'Halt!' the officer cried. The moving column froze. Its bristling

length stretched from the central platform, blocking the aisle, and

the courtyard echoed with the clanging hoofs of its rear, which backed

into the school and the poor-house. The _Shamash_ (beadle) was seen to

front the flamboyant invaders.

'Why does your Excellency intrude upon our prayers to God?'

The congregation felt its dignity return. Who would have suspected Red

Judah of such courage--such apt speech? Why, the very Rabbi was

petrified; the elders of the _Kahal_ stood dumb. Ben Amram himself,

their spokesman to the Government, whose praying-shawl was embroidered

with a silver band, and whose coat was satin, remained immovable

between the pillars of the Ark, staring stonily at the brave beadle.

'First of all, for the boy's blood!'

The words rang out with military precision, and the speaker's horse

pawed clangorously, as if impatient for the charge. The men grew

death-pale, the women wrung their hands.

'_Ai, vai!_' they moaned. 'Woe! woe!'

'What boy? What blood?' said the _Shamash_, undaunted.

'Don't palter, you rascal! You know well that a Christian child has

disappeared.'

The aged Rabbi, stimulated by the _Shamash_, uplifted a quavering

voice.

'The child will be found of a surety--if, indeed, it is lost,' he

added with bitter sarcasm. 'And surely your Excellency cannot require

the boy's blood at our hands ere your Excellency knows it is indeed

spilt.'

'You misunderstand me, old dog--or rather you pretend to, old fox. The

boy's blood is here--it is kept in this very synagogue--and I have

come for it.'

The _Shamash_ laughed explosively. 'Oh, Excellency!'

The synagogue, hysterically tense, caught the contagion of glad

relief. It rang with strange laughter.

'There is no blood in this synagogue, Excellency,' said the Rabbi, his

eyes a-twinkle, 'save what runs in living veins.'

'We shall see. Produce that bottle beneath the Ark.'

'That!' The _Shamash_ grinned--almost indecorously. 'That is the

Consecration wine--red as my beard,' quoth he.

'Ha! ha! the red Consecration wine!' repeated the synagogue in a happy

buzz, and from the women's gallery came the same glad murmur of mutual

explanation.

'We shall see,' repeated the officer, with iron imperturbability, and

the happy hum died into a cold heart-faintness, fraught with an almost

incredulous apprehension of some devilish treachery, some mock

discovery that would give the Ghetto over to the frenzies of fanatical

creditors, nay, to the vengeance of the law.

The officer's voice rose again. 'Let no one leave the synagogue--man,

woman, or child. Kill anyone who attempts to escape.'

The screams of fainting women answered him from above, but impassively

he urged his horse along the aisle that led to the Ark; its noisy

hoofs trampled over every heart. Springing from his saddle he opened

the little cupboard beneath the scrolls, and drew out a bottle,

hideously red.

'Consecration wine, eh?' he said grimly.

'What else, Excellency?' stoutly replied the _Shamash_, who had

followed him.

A savage laugh broke from the officer's lips. 'Drink me a mouthful!'

As the _Shamash_ took the bottle, with a fearless shrug of the

shoulders, every eye strained painfully towards him, save in the

women's gallery, where many covered their faces with their hands.

Every breath was held.

Keeping the same amused incredulous face, Red Judah gulped down a

draught. But as the liquid met his palate a horrible distortion

overcame his smile, his hands flew heavenwards. Dropping the bottle,

and with a hoarse cry, 'Mercy, O God!' he fell before the Ark, foaming

at the mouth. The red fluid spread in a vivid pool.

'Hear, O Israel!' A raucous cry of horror rose from all around, and

was echoed more shrilly from above. Almighty Father! The Jew-haters

had worked their fiendish trick. Now the men were become as the women,

shrieking, wringing their hands, crying, '_Ai, vai!_' '_Gewalt!_' The

Rabbi shook as with palsy. 'Satan! Satan!' chattered through his

teeth.

But Ben Amram had moved at last, and was stooping over the scarlet

stain.

'A soldier should know blood, Excellency!' the physician said quietly.

The officer's face relaxed into a faint smile.

'A soldier knows wine too,' he said, sniffing. And, indeed, the spicy

reek of the Consecration wine was bewildering the nearer bystanders.

'Your Excellency frightened poor Judah into a fit,' said the

physician, raising the beadle's head by its long red beard.

His Excellency shrugged his shoulders, sprang to his saddle, and cried

a retreat. The Cossacks, unable to turn in the aisle, backed

cumbrously with a manifold thudding and rearing and clanking, but ere

the congregation had finished rubbing their eyes, the last conical hat

and leaded knout had vanished, and only the tarry reek of their boots

was left in proof of their actual passage. A deep silence hung for a

moment like a heavy cloud, then it broke in a torrent of

ejaculations.

But Ben Amram's voice rang through the din. 'Brethren!' He rose from

wiping the frothing lips of the stricken creature, and his face had

the fiery gloom of a seer's, and the din died under his uplifted palm.

'Brethren, the Lord hath saved us!'

'Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and ever!' The Rabbi began

the phrase, and the congregation caught it up in thunder.

'But hearken how. Last night at the _Seder_, as I opened the door for

Elijah, there entered Maimon the _Meshummad_! 'Twas he quaffed

Elijah's cup!'

There was a rumble of imprecations.

'A pretty Elijah!' cried the Rabbi.

'Nay, but God sends the Prophet of Redemption in strange guise,' the

physician said. 'Listen! Maimon was pursued by a drunken mob, ignorant

he was a deserter from our camp. When he found how I had saved him and

dressed his bleeding face, when he saw the spread Passover table, his

child-soul came back to him, and in a burst of tears he confessed the

diabolical plot against our community, hatched through his

instrumentality by some desperate debtors; how, having raised the cry

of a lost child, they were to have its blood found beneath our Holy

Ark as in some mystic atonement. And while you all lolled joyously at

the _Seder_ table, a bottle of blood lay here instead of the

Consecration wine, like a bomb waiting to burst and destroy us all.'

A shudder of awe traversed the synagogue.

'But the Guardian of Israel, who permits us to sleep on Passover night

without night-prayer, neither slumbers nor sleeps. Maimon had bribed

the _Shamash_ to let him enter the synagogue and replace the

Consecration wine.'

'Red Judah!' It was like the growl of ten thousand tigers. Some even

precipitated themselves upon the writhing wretch.

'Back! back!' cried Ben Amram. 'The Almighty has smitten him.'

'"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,"' quoted the Rabbi solemnly.

'Hallelujah!' shouted a frenzied female voice, and 'Hallelujah!' the

men responded in thunder.

'Red Judah had no true belief in the God of Israel,' the physician

went on.

'May he be an atonement for us all!' interrupted the Cantor.

'Amen!' growled the congregation.

'For a hundred roubles and the promise of personal immunity Red Judah

allowed Maimon the _Meshummad_ to change the bottles while all Israel

sat at the Seder. It was because the mob saw the _Meshummad_ stealing

out of the synagogue that they fell upon him for a pious Jew. Behold,

brethren, how the Almighty weaves His threads together. After the

repentant sinner had confessed all to me, and explained how the

Cossacks were to be sent to catch all the community assembled helpless

in synagogue, I deemed it best merely to get the bottles changed back

again. The false bottle contained only bullock's blood, but it would

have sufficed to madden the multitude. Since it is I who have the

blessed privilege of supplying the Consecration wine it was easy

enough to give Maimon another bottle, and armed with this he roused

the _Shamash_ in the dawn, pretending he had now obtained true human

blood. A rouble easily procured him the keys again, and when he

brought me back the bullock's blood, I awaited the sequel in peace.'

'Praise ye the Lord, for He is good,' sang the Cantor, carried away.

'For His mercy endureth for ever,' replied the congregation

instinctively.

'I did not foresee the _Shamash_ would put himself so brazenly forward

to hide his guilt, or that he would be asked to drink. But when the

_Epikouros_ (atheist) put the bottle to his lips, expecting to taste

blood, and found instead good red wine, doubtless he felt at once that

the God of Israel was truly in heaven, that He had wrought a miracle

and changed the blood back to wine.'

'And such a miracle God wrought verily,' cried the Rabbi, grasping the

physician's hand, while the synagogue resounded with cries of 'May thy

strength increase,' and the gallery heaved frantically with blessings

and congratulations.

'What wonder,' the physician wound up, as he bent again over the

ghastly head, with its pious ringlets writhing like red snakes, 'that

he fell stricken by dread of the Almighty's wrath!'

And while men were bearing the convulsive form without, the Cantor

began to recite the Grace after Redemption. And then the happy hymns

rolled out, and the choristers cried 'Pom!' and a breath of jubilant

hope passed through the synagogue. The mighty hand and the

outstretched arm which had redeemed Israel from the Egyptian bondage

were still hovering over them, nor would the Prophet Elijah for ever

delay to announce the ultimate Messiah.

THE HIRELINGS

Crowded as was the steamer with cultured Americans invading Europe,

few knew that Rozenoffski was on board, or even that Rozenoffski was a

pianist. The name, casually seen on the passengers' list, conveyed

nothing but a strong Russian and a vaguer Semitic flavour, and the

mere outward man, despite a leonine head, was of insignificant port

and somewhat shuffling gait, and drew scarcely a second glance.

He would not have had it otherwise, he told himself, as he paced the

almost deserted deck after dinner--it was a blessing to escape from

the perpetual adulation of music-sick matrons and schoolgirls--but

every wounded fibre in him was yearning for consolation after his

American failure.

Not that his fellow-passengers were aware of his failure; he had not

put himself to the vulgar tests. His American expedition had followed

the lines recommended to him by friendly connoisseurs--to come before

the great public, if at all, only after being launched by great

hostesses at small parties; to which end he had provided himself with

unimpeachable introductions to unexceptionable ladies from

irresistible personalities--a German Grand Duke, a Bulgarian

Ambassador, Countesses, both French and Italian, and even a Belgian

princess. But to his boundless amazement--for he had always heard that

Americans were wax before titles--not one of the social leaders had

been of the faintest assistance to him, not even the owner of the

Chicago Palace, to whom he had been recommended by the Belgian

princess. He had penetrated through one or two esoteric doors, only to

find himself outside them again. Not once had he been asked to play.

It was some weeks before it even dawned upon the minor prophet of

European music-rooms that he was being shut out, still longer before

it permeated to his brain that he had been shut out as a Jew!

Those barbarous Americans, so far behind Europe after all! Had they

not even discovered that art levels all ranks and races? Poor

bourgeois money-mongers with their mushroom civilization. It was not

even as if he were really a Jew. Did they imagine he wore phylacteries

or earlocks, or what? His few childish years in the Russian Pale--what

were they to the long years of European art and European culture? And

even if in Rome or Paris he had foregathered with Jews like Schneemann

or Leopold Barstein, it was to the artist in them he had gravitated,

not the Jew. Did these Yankee ignoramuses suppose he did not share

their aversion from the gaberdine or the three brass balls? Oh the

narrow-souled anti-Semites!

The deck-steward stacked the chairs, piled up the forgotten rugs and

novels, tidying the deck for the night, but still the embittered

musician tramped to and fro under the silent stars. Only from the

smoking-room where the amateur auctioneer was still hilariously

selling the numbers for a sweepstake, came sounds in discord with the

solemnity of sky and sea, and the artist was newly jarred at this

vulgar gaiety flung in the face of the spacious and starry mystery of

the night. And these jocose, heavy-jowled, smoke-soused gamblers were

the Americans whose drawing-rooms he would contaminate! He recalled

the only party to which he had been asked--'To meet the Bright

Lights'--and which to his amazement turned out to be a quasi-public

entertainment with the guests seated in rows in a hall, and

himself--with the other Bright Lights--planted on a platform and made

to perform without a fee. The mean vulgarians! But perhaps it was

better they had left him untainted with their dollars--better,

comparatively poor though he was, that America should have meant pure

loss to him. He had at least kept the spiritual satisfaction of

despising the despiser, the dignity of righteous resentment, the

artist's pride in the profitless. And this riot of ugliness and

diamonds and third-rate celebrities was the fashionable society to

which, forsooth, the Jew could not be permitted access!

The aroma of an expensive cigar wafted towards him, and the face

between whose prominent teeth it was stuck loomed vividly in the glare

of an electric light. Rozenoffski recognised those teeth. He had seen

countless pictures and caricatures of them, for did they not almost

hold the globe in their grip? This, then was the notorious

multi-millionaire, 'the Napoleon in dollars,' as a wit had summed him

up; and the first sight of Andrew P. Wilhammer almost consoled the

player for his poverty. Who, even for an imperial income, would bear

the burden of those grotesque teeth, protruding like a sample of wares

in a dentist's showcase? But as the teeth came nearer and the great

rubicund face bore down upon him, the prominence of the notorious

incisors affected him less than their carnivorous capacity--he felt

himself almost swallowed up by this monstrous beast of prey, so

admirably equated to our small day of large things, to that

environment in which he, poor degenerate artist, was but a little

singing-bird. The long-forgotten word _Rishus_ came suddenly into his

mind--was not the man's anti-Semitism as obtruded as his

teeth?--_Rishus_, that wicked malice, which to a persecuted people had

become almost a synonym for Christianity. He had left the thought

behind him, as he had left the Hebrew word, while he went sailing up

into the rosy ether of success, and _Rishus_ had sunk into the mere

panic-word of the Ghetto's stunted brood, shrinking and quivering

before phantasms, sinuously gliding through a misunderstood world, if

it was not, indeed, rather a word conveniently cloaking from

themselves a multitude of their own sins. But now, as incarnated in

this millionaire mammoth, the shadowy word took on a sudden solidity,

to which his teeth gave the necessary tearing and rending

significance.

Yes, in very sooth--he remembered it suddenly--was it not this man's

wife on whom he had built his main hopes? Was she not the leader of

musical America, to whom the Belgian princess had given him the

scented and crested note of introduction which was to open to him all

doors and all ears? Was it not in her marvellous marble

music-room--one of the boasts of Chicago--that he had mentally seen

himself enthroned as the lord of the feast? And instead of these

Olympian visions, lo! a typewritten note to clench his fist over--a

note from a secretary regretting that the state of Mrs. Wilhammer's

health forbade the pleasure of receiving a maestro with such

credentials. _Rishus--Rishus_ indubitable!

Turning with morbid interest to look after the retreating millionaire,

he found him in converse with a feminine figure at the open door of a

deck-cabin. Could this be the great She, the arbitress of art? He

moved nearer. Why, this was but a girl--nay, unless his instinct was

at fault, a Jewish girl--a glorious young Jewess, of that radiant

red-haired type which the Russian Pale occasionally flowered with.

What was she doing with this Christian Colossus? He tried vainly to

see her left hand; the mere possibility that she might be Mrs.

Wilhammer shocked his Semitic instinct. Wilhammer disappeared

within--the relation was obviously intimate--but the girl still stood

at the door, a brooding magical figure.

'Do I not know it?' cried Pinchas. 'Were you but to say your lines,