And so the family spread its wings joyfully and migrated to the
wonder-town. Only its head and tail--old Daniel and little
Schnapsie--felt the least sentiment for the things left behind. Old
Daniel left the dingy synagogue to whose presidency he had mounted
with the fattening of his purse, and in which he bought for himself,
or those he delighted to honour, the choicest privileges of
ark-opening or scroll-bearing; left the cronies who dropped in to play
"Klabberjagd" on Sunday afternoons; left the bustling lucrative
Saturday nights in the shop when the heathen housewives came to redeem
their Sabbath finery.
And little Schnapsie--who was only eleven, and not keen about
husbands--left the twinkling tarry harbour, with its heroic hulks and
modern men-of-war amid which the half-penny steamer plied; left the
great waves that smashed on the pebbly beach, and the friendly moon
that threw shimmering paths across their tranquillity; left the narrow
lively streets in which she had played, and the school in which she
had always headed her class, and the salt wind that blew over all.
Little Schnapsie was only Schnapsie to her father. Her real name was
Florence. The four younger girls all bore pagan names--Sylvia, Lily,
Daisy, Florence--symbolic of the influence upon the family councils of
the three elder girls, grown to years of discretion and disgust with
their own Leah, Rachael, and Rebecca. Between these two strata of
girls--Jewish and pagan--two boys had intervened, but their stay was
brief and pitiful, so that all this plethora of progeny had not
provided the father with a male mourner to say the _Kaddish_. But it
seemed likely a grandson would not long be a-wanting, for the eldest
girl was twenty-five, and all were good-looking. As if in irony, the
Jewish group was blond, almost Christian, in colouring (for they took
after the Teuton father), while the pagan group had characteristically
Oriental traits. In little Schnapsie these Eastern charms--a whit
heavy in her sisters--were repeated in a key of exquisite refinement.
The thick black eyebrows and hair were soft as silk, dark dreamy eyes
suffused her oval face with poetry, and her skin was like dead ivory
flushing into life.