Yet through all the vicissitudes of his infantile career, Zillah's
faith in his survival never faltered. He was emphatically a child from
Heaven, and Providence would surely not fly in its own face. Jossel,
not being aware of this, had a burden of perpetual solicitude, which
Zillah often itched to lighten. Only, not having done so at first, she
found it more and more difficult to confess her negotiation with the
celestial powers. She went as near as she dared.
"If the Highest One has sent us a son after so many years," she said
in the "Yiddish" which was still natural to her for intimate domestic
discussion, "He will not take him away again."
"As well say," Jossel replied gloomily, "that because He has sent us
luck and blessing after all these years, He may not take away our
prosperity."
"Hush! don't beshrew the child!" And Zillah spat out carefully. She
was tremulously afraid of words of ill-omen and of the Evil Eye,
against which, she felt vaguely, even Heaven's protection was not
potent. Secretly she became more and more convinced that some woman,
envious of all this "luck and blessing," was withering Brum with her
Evil Eye. And certainly the poor child was peaking and pining away.
"Marasmus," a physician had once murmured, wondering that so well
dressed a child should appear so ill nourished. "Take him to the
seaside often, and feed him well," was the universal cry of the
doctors; and so Zillah often deserted her husband for a _kosher_
boarding-house at Brighton or Ramsgate, where the food was voluminous,
and where Brum wrote schoolboy verses to the strange, fascinating sea.
For there were compensations in the premature flowering of his
intellect. Even other mothers gradually came round to admitting he was
a prodigy. The black eyes seemed to burn in the white face as they
looked out on the palpitating universe, or devoured every and any
scrap of print! A pity they had so soon to be dulled behind
spectacles. But Zillah found consolation in the thought that the
glasses would go well with the high black waistcoat and white tie of
the British Rabbi. He had been given to her by Heaven, and to Heaven
must be returned. Besides, that might divert it from any more sinister
methods of taking him back.
In his twelfth year Brum began to have more trouble with his eyes, and
renewed his early acquaintance with the drab ante-rooms of eye
hospitals that led, at the long-expected ting-ting of the doctor's
bell, into a delectable chamber of quaint instruments. But it was not
till he was on the point of _Bar-Mitzvah_ (confirmation at thirteen)
that the blow fell. Unwarned explicitly by any physician, Brum went
blind.
"Oh, mother," was his first anguished cry, "I shall never be able to
read again."