IV

"I don't think he means Rachael at all."

"Oh, how can you say so, Leah? It was me he took down to supper."

"Nonsense! it isn't either of you he's after; that's only his

politeness to my sisters. Didn't he say the bouquet was for me?"

"Don't be silly, Rebecca. You know you can't have him. The eldest must

take precedence."

This changed tone indicated their humbler attitude toward the Young

Man as the years went by. For the first young man did not propose,

either to the sisterhood _en bloc_ or to a particular sister. And his

example was followed by his successors. In fact, a procession of young

men passed and repassed through the house, or danced with the girls at

balls, without a single application for any of these many hands. And

the first season passed into the second, and the second into the

third, with tantalizing mirages of marriage. Balls, dances, dinners, a

universe of nebulous matrimonial matter on the whirl, but never the

shot-off star of an engagement! Mrs. Peyser's hair began to whiten

faster. She even surreptitiously called in the Shadchan, or rather

surrendered to his solicitations.

"Pooh! Not find any one suitable?" he declared, rubbing his hands. "I

have hundreds of young men on my books, just your sort, real

gentlemen."

At first the girls refused to consider applications from such a

source. It was not done in their set, they said.

Mrs. Peyser snorted sceptically. "Oh, indeed! and pray how did those

Rosenweiler girls find husbands?"

"Oh, yes, the Rosenweilers!" They shrugged their shoulders; they knew

they had not that disadvantage of hideousness.

Nevertheless they lent an ear to the agent's suggestions as filtered

through the mother, though under pretence of deriding them.

But the day came when even that pretence was dropped, and with broken

spirit they waited eagerly for each new possibility. And with the

passing of the years the Young Man aged. He grew balder, less

gentlemanly, poorer.

Once indeed, he turned up as a handsome and wealthy Christian, but

this time it was he that was rejected in a unanimous sisterly shudder.

Five slow years wore by, then of a sudden the luck changed. A

water-proof manufacturer on the sunny side of forty appeared, the long

glacial epoch was broken up, and the first orange blossom ripened for

the Peyser household.

It was Rebecca, the youngest of the Jewish group, who proved the

pioneer to the canopy, but her marriage gave a new lease of youth even

to the oldest. And miraculously, mysteriously, within a few months two

other girls flew off Mrs. Peyser's shoulders--a Jewish and a

pagan--though Sylvia was not yet formally "out."

And though Leah, the first born, still remained unchosen, yet Sylvia's

marriage to a Bayswater household had raised the family status, and

provided a better field for operations. The Shadchan was frozen off.

But he returned. For despite all these auguries and auspices another

arctic winter set in. No orange blossoms, only desolate lichens of

fruitless flirtation.

Gradually the pagan group pushed its way into unconcealable womanhood.

The problem darkened all the horizon. The Young Man grew middle-aged

again. He lost all his money; he wanted old Daniel to set him up in

business. Even this seemed better than a barren fine ladyhood, and

Leah might have even harked back to the parental pawn-shop had not

another sudden epidemic of felicity married off all save little

Schnapsie within eighteen months. Mrs. Peyser was knocked breathless

by all these shocks. First a rich German banker, then a prosperous

solicitor (for Leah), then a Cape financier--any one in himself catch

enough to "gouge out the eyes" of the neighbours.

"I told you so," she said, her portly bosom swelling portlier with

exultation as the sixth bride was whirled off in a rice shower from

the Highbury villa, while the other five sat around in radiant

matronhood. "I told you to come to London."

Daniel pressed her hand in gratitude for all the happiness she had

given herself and the girls.

"If it were not for Florence," she went on wistfully.

"Ah, little Schnapsie!" sighed Daniel. Somehow he felt he would have

preferred her hymeneal felicity to all these marvellous marriages.

For there had grown up a strange sympathy between the poor lonely old

man, now nearly seventy, and his little girl, now twenty-four. They

never conversed except about commonplaces, but somehow he felt that

her presence warmed the air. And she--she divined his solitude, albeit

dimly; had an intuition of what life had been for him in the days

before she was born: the long days behind the counter, the risings in

the gray dawn to chant orisons and don phylacteries ere the pawn-shop

opened, the lengthy prayer and the swift supper when the shutters were

at last put up--all the bare rock on which this floriage of prosperity

had been sown. And long after the others had dropped kissing him

good-night, she would tender her lips, partly because of the necessary

domestic fiction that she was still a baby, but also because she felt

instinctively that the kiss counted in his life.

Through all these years of sordid squabbles and canvassings and weary

waiting, all those endless scenes of hysteria engendered by the mutual

friction of all that close-packed femininity, poor Schnapsie had

lived, shuddering. Sometimes a sense of the pathos of it all, of the

tragedy of women's lives, swept over her. She regretted every inch she

grew, it seemed to shame her celibate sisters so. She clung willingly

to short skirts until she was of age, wore her long raven hair in a

plait with a red ribbon.

"Well, Florence," said Leah genially, when the last outsider at

Daisy's wedding had departed, "it's your turn next. You'd better hurry

up."

"Thank you," said Florence coldly. "I shall take my own time;

fortunately there is no one behind me."

"Humph!" said Leah, playing with her diamond rings. "It don't do to be

too particular. Why don't you come round and see me sometimes?"

"There are so many of you now," murmured Florence. She was not

attracted by the solicitors and traders in whose society and carriages

her mother lolled luxuriously, and she resented the matronly airs of

her sisters. With Leah, however, she was conscious of a different and

more paradoxical provocation. Leah had an incredible air of

juvenility. All those unthinkable, innumerable years little Schnapsie

had conceived of her eldest sister as an old maid, hopeless,

senescent, despite the wonderful belt that had kept her figure

dashing; but now that she was married she had become the girlish

bride, kittenish, irresistible, while little Schnapsie was the old

maid, the sister in peril of being passed by. And indeed she felt

herself appallingly ancient, prematurely aged by her long stay at

seventeen.

"Yes, you are right, Leah," she said pensively, with a touch of

malice. "To-morrow I shall be twenty-four."

"What?" shrieked Leah.

"Yes," Florence said obstinately. "And oh, how glad I shall be!" She

raised her arms exultingly and stretched herself, as if shooting up

seven years as soon as the pressure of her sisters was removed.

"Do you hear, mother?" whispered Leah. "That fool of a Florence is

going to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. Not the slightest

consideration for _us_!"

"I didn't say I would celebrate it publicly," said Florence.

"Besides," she suggested, smiling, "very soon people will forget that

I am _not_ the eldest."

"Then your folly will recoil on your own head," said Leah.

Little Schnapsie gave a devil-may-care shrug--a Ghetto trait that

still clung to all the sisters.

"Yes," added Mrs. Peyser. "Think what it will be in ten years' time!"

"I shall be thirty-four," said Florence imperturbably. Another little

smile lit up the dreamy eyes. "Then I _shall_ be the eldest."

"Madness!" cried Mrs. Peyser, aloud, forgetting that her daughters'

husbands were about. "God forbid I should live to see any girl of mine

thirty-four!"

"Hush, mother!" said Florence quietly. "I hope you will; indeed, I am

sure you will, for I shall _never_ marry. So don't bother to put me on

the books--I'm not on the market. Good-night."

She sought out poor Daniel, who, awed by the culture and standing of

his five sons-in-law, not to speak of the guests, was hanging about

the deserted supper-room, smoking cigar after cigar, much to the

disgust of the caterer's men, who were waiting to spirit away the box.

Having duly kissed her father, little Schnapsie retired to bed to read

Browning's love-poems. Her mother had to take a glass of champagne to

restore her ruffled nerves to the appropriate ecstasy.

V

Poor portly Mrs. Peyser was not destined to enjoy her harvest of

happiness for more than a few years. But these years were an

overbrimming cup, with only the bitter drop of Florence's heretical

indifference to the Young Man. Environed by the six households which

she had begotten, Mrs. Peyser breathed that atmosphere of ebullient

babyhood which was the breath of her Jewish nostrils; babies appeared

almost every other month. It was a seething well-spring of healthy

life. Religious ceremonies connected with these chubby new-comers, or

medical recipes for their bodily salvation, absorbed her. But her

exuberant grandmotherliness usually received a check in the summer,

when the babies were deported to scattered sea-shores; and thus it

came to pass that the summer of her death found her still lingering in

London with a bad cold, with only Daniel and little Schnapsie at

hand. And before the others could be called, Mrs. Peyser passed away

in peace, in the old Portsmouth bed, overlooked by the old Hebrew

picture exiled from the London dining-room.

It was a curious end. She did not know she was dying, but Daniel was

anxious she should not be reft into silence before she had made the

immemorial proclamation of the Unity. At the same time he hesitated to

appall her with the grim knowledge.

He was blubbering piteously, yet striving to hide his sobs. The early

days of his struggle came back, the first weeks of wedded happiness,

then the long years of progressive prosperity and godly cheerfulness

in Portsmouth ere she had grown fashionable and he unimportant; and a

vast self-pity mingled with his pitiful sense of her excellencies--the

children she had borne him in agony, the economy of her house

management, the good bargains she had driven with the clod-pated

soldiers and sailors, the later splendour of her social achievement.

And little Schnapsie wept with a sense of the vanity of these dual

existences to which she owed her own empty life.

Suddenly Mrs. Peyser, over whose black eyes a glaze had been stealing,

let the long dark eyelashes fall over them.

"Sarah!" whispered Daniel frantically. "Say the Shemang!"

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one," said the sensuous

lips obediently.

Little Schnapsie shrugged her shoulders rebelliously. The dogma seemed

so irrelevant.

Mrs. Peyser opened her eyes, and a beautiful mother-light came into

them as she saw the weeping girl.

"Ah, Florrie, do not fret," she said reassuringly, in her long-lapsed

Yiddish. "I will find thee a bridegroom."

Her eyes closed, and little Schnapsie shuddered with a weird image of

a lover fetched from the shrouded dead.