After his Sarah had been lowered into "The House of Life," and the
excitement of the tombstone recording her virtues had subsided, Daniel
would have withered away in an empty world but for little Schnapsie.
The two kept house together; the same big house that had reeked with
so much feminine life, and about which the odours of perfumes and
powders still seemed to linger. But father and daughter only met at
meals. He spent hours over the morning paper, with the old quaint
delusions about India and other things he read of, and he pottered
about the streets, or wandered into the Beth-Hamidrash, which a local
fanatic had just instituted in North London, and in which, under the
guidance of a Polish sage, Daniel strove to concentrate his aged wits
on the ritual problems of Babylon. At long intervals he brushed his
old-fashioned high hat carefully, and timidly rang the bell of one of
his daughters' mansions, and was permitted to caress a loudly
remonstrating baby; but they all lived so far from him and one another
in this mighty London. From Sylvia's, where there was a boy with
buttons, he had always been frightened off, and when the others began
to emulate her, his visits ceased altogether. As for the sisters
coming to see him, all pleaded overwhelming domestic duty, and the
frigidity of Florence's reception of them. "Now if you lived alone--or
with one of us!" But somehow Daniel felt the latter alternative would
be as desolate as the former. And though he knew some wide vague river
flowed between even his present housemate's life and his own, yet he
felt far more clearly the bridge of love over which their souls passed
to each other.
Figure then the septuagenarian's amaze when, one fine morning, as he
was shuffling about in his carpet slippers, the servant brought him
word that his six daughters demanded his instantaneous presence in the
drawing-room.
The shock drove out all thoughts of toilet; his heart beat quicker
with a painful premonition of he knew not what. This simultaneous
visit recalled funerals, weddings. He looked out of a window and saw
four carriages drawn up, and that completed his sense of something
elemental. He tottered into the drawing-room--grown dingy now that it
had no more daughters to dispose of--and shrank before the
resplendence with which their presence reinvested it. They rustled
with silks, shone with gold necklaces, and impregnated the air with
its ancient aroma of powders and perfumes. He felt himself dwindling
before all this pungent prosperity, like some more creative
Frankenstein before a congress of his own monsters.
They did not rise as he entered. The Jewish group and the pagan group
were promiscuously seated--marriage had broken down all the ancient
landmarks. They all looked about the same agelessness--a standstill
buxom matronhood.
Daniel stood at the door, glancing from one to another. Some coughed;
others fidgeted with muffs.
"Sit down, sit down, father," said Rachael kindly, though she retained
the arm-chair,--and there was a general air of relief at her voice.
But the old embarrassment returned as the silence reestablished itself
when Daniel had drooped into a stiff chair.
At last Leah took the word: "We have come while Florrie is at her
slumming--"
"At her slumming!" repeated Sylvia, with more significance, and a
meaning smile spread over the six faces.
"Yes?" Daniel murmured.
"--Because we did not want her to know of our coming."
"It concerns Schnapsie?" he murmured.
"Yes, your little Schnapsie," said Daisy viciously.
"Yes; she has no time to come and see _us_," cried Rebecca. "But she
has plenty of time for her--_slumming_."
"Well, she does good," he murmured apologetically.
"A fat lot of good!" sniggered Rachael.
"To herself!" corrected Lily.
"I do not understand," he muttered uneasily.
"Well--" began Lily. "You tell him, Leah; you know more about it."
"You know as much as I do."
He looked appealingly from one to the other.
"I always said the slums were dangerous places for people of our
class," said Sylvia. "She doesn't even confine herself to her own
people."
The faces began to lighten--evidently they felt the ice broken.
"Dangerous!" he repeated, catching at the ominous word.
"Dreadful!" in a common shudder.
He half rose. "You have bad news?" he cried.
The faces gloomed over, the heads nodded.
"About Schnapsie?" he shrieked, jumping up.
"Sit down, sit down; she's not dead," said Leah contemptuously.
He sat down.
"Well, what is it? What has happened?"
"She's engaged!" In Leah's mouth the word sounded like a death-bell.
"Engaged!" he breathed, with a glimmering foreboding of the horror.
"To a Christian!" said Daisy brutally.
He sank back, pale and trembling. A tense silence fell on the room.
"But how? Who?" he murmured at last.
The girls recovered themselves. Now they were all speaking at once.
"Another slummer."
"He's the son of an archdeacon."
"An awful Christian crank."
"And that's your pet Schnapsie."
"If _we_ had wanted Christians, we could have been married twenty
years ago."
"It's a terrible disgrace for us."
"She doesn't consider us in the least."
"She'll be miserable, anyhow. When they quarrel, he'll always throw it
up to her that she's a Jewess."
"And wouldn't join our Daughters of Mercy committee--had no time."
"Wasn't going to marry--turned up her nose at all the Jewish young
men!"
"But she would have told me!" he murmured hopelessly. "I don't believe
it. My little Schnapsie!"
"Don't believe it?" snorted Leah. "Why, she didn't even deny it."
"Have you spoken to her, then?"
"Have we spoken to her! Why, she says Judaism is all nonsense! She
will disgrace us all."
The blind racial instinct spoke through them--the twenty-five
centuries of tested separateness. But Daniel felt in super-addition
the conscious religious horror.
"But is she to be married in a Christian church?" he breathed.
"Oh, she isn't going to marry--yet."
His poor heart fluttered at the reprieve.
"She doesn't care a pin for _our_ feelings," went on Leah. "But of
course she won't marry while _you_ are alive."
Lily took up the thread. "We all told her if she'd only marry a Jew,
we'd all be glad to have you--in turn. But she said it wasn't that.
She could have you herself; her Alfred wouldn't mind. It's the shock
to your religious feelings that keeps her back. She doesn't want to
hurt you."
"God bless her, my good little Schnapsie!" he murmured. His dazed
brain did not grasp all the bearings, was only conscious of a vast
relief.
Disgust darkened all the faces.
He groped to understand it, putting his hand over the white hairs that
straggled from his skull-cap.
"But then--then it's all right."
"Yes, all right," said Leah brutally. "But for how long?"
Her meaning seized him like an icy claw upon his heart. For the first
time in his life he realized the certainty of death, and
simultaneously with the certainty its imminence.
"We want you to put a stop to it _now_," said Sylvia. "For our sakes
make her promise that even when-- You're the only one who has any
influence over her."
She rose, as if to wind up the painful interview, and the others rose,
too, with a multiplex rustling of silken skirts. He shook the six
jewelled hands as in a dream, and promised to do his best; and as he
watched the little procession of carriages roll off, it seemed to him
indeed a funeral, and his own.