At last the welcome jar and creak of the gate awoke her.
"Why, I thought you knew I had to go to the Borough!" began a fretful
voice, forestalling reproach, and a buxom woman resplendent with black
satin and much jewellery came up the tiny garden-path.
"It doesn't matter, mother--I haven't been waiting long."
"Well, you know how difficult it is to get a 'bus in this weather--at
least if you want to sit outside, and it always makes my head ache
frightfully to go inside--I'm not strong and young like you--and such
a long way, I had to change at the Bank, and I made sure you'd get
something to eat at one of the girls', and go straight to the People's
Palace."
Still muttering, Mrs. Brill produced a key, and after some fumbling
threw open the door. Both made a step within, then both stopped,
aghast.
"It's the wrong house," thought Salvina confusedly, conscious of her
power of making such mistakes.
"_Kisshuf_ (witchcraft)!" whispered her mother, terrified into her
native idiom. The passage lay before them, entirely bare of all its
familiar colour and furniture: the framed engravings depicting the
trials of William Lord Russell, in the Old Bailey, and Earl Stafford
in Westminster Hall, the flower-pots on the hall table, the proudly
purchased hat-rack, the metal umbrella-stand, all gone! And beyond,
facing them, lay the parlour, an equally forlorn vacancy striking like
a blast of chilly wind through its wide-open door.
"Thieves!" cried Mrs. Brill, reverting from the supernatural and the
Yiddish. "Murder! I'm ruined! They've stolen my house!"
"Hush! Hush!" said Salvina, strung to calm by her mother's
incoherence. "Let us see first what has really happened."
"Happened! Haven't you got eyes in your head? All the fruit of my
years of toil!" And Mrs. Brill wrung her jewelled hands. "Your father
would have me call on those Sperlings, though I told him they'd be
glad to dance on my tomb. And why didn't Lazarus stay at home?"
"You know he has to be out looking for work."
"And my gilt clock that I trembled even to wind up, and the big vase
with the picture on it, and my antimacassars, and my beautiful couch
that nobody had ever sat upon! Oh my God, oh my God!"
Leaving her mother moaning out a complete inventory in the passage,
Salvina advanced into the violated parlour. It was an aching void. On
the bare mantelpiece, just where the gilt clock had announced a
perpetual half-past two, gleamed an unstamped letter. She took it up
wonderingly. It was in her father's schoolboyish hand, addressed to
her mother. She opened it, as usual, for Mrs. Brill did not even know
the alphabet, and refused steadily to make its acquaintance, to the
ironic humiliation of the Board School teacher.
"You would not let me give you _Get_," [ran the letter
abruptly], "so you have only yourself to blame. I have left the
clothes in the bed-rooms, but what is mine is mine. Good-bye.
"MICHAEL BRILL.
"P.S.--Don't try to find me at the factory. I have left."
Salvina steadied herself against the mantelpiece till the room should
have finished reeling round. _Get!_ Her father had wanted to put away
her mother! Divorce, departure, devastation--what strange things were
these, come to wreck a prosperity so slowly built up!
"Quick, Salvina, there goes a policeman!" came her mother's cry.
The room stood still suddenly. "Hush, hush, mother," Salvina said
imperiously. "There's no thief!" She ran back into the passage, the
letter in her hand.
A fierce flame of intelligence leapt into the woman's face. "Ah, it's
your father!" she cried. "I knew it, I knew he'd go after that painted
widow, just because she has a little money, a black curse on her
bones. Oh! oh! God in heaven! To bring such shame on me, for the sake
of a saucy-nosed slut whose sister sold ironmongery in Petticoat
Lane--a low lot, one and all, and not fit to wipe my shoes on, even
when she was respectable, and this is what you call a father, Salvina!
Oh my God, my God!"
Salvina was by this time dazed, yet she had a gleam of consciousness
left with which to register this culminating destruction of all her
social landmarks. What! That monstrous wickedness of marquises and
epauletted officers which hovered vaguely in the shadow-land of novels
and plays had tumbled with a bang into real life; had fallen not even
into its natural gilded atmosphere, but through the amulet-guarded
doors of a respectable Jewish family in the heart of a Hackney
Terrace, amid the horsehair couches and deal tables of homely reality.
Nay--more sordid than the romantic wickedness of shadowland--it had
even removed those couches and tables! And oddly blent with this
tossing chaos of new thought in Salvina's romantic brain surged up
another thought, no less new and startling. Her father and mother had
once loved each other! They, too, had dawned upon each other, fairy
prince and fairy princess; had laid in each other's hand that warm
touch of trust and readiness to live and die for each other. It was
very wonderful, and she almost forgot their hostile relationship in a
rapid back-glance upon the years in which they had lived in mutual
love before her unsuspecting eyes. Their prosaic bickering selves were
transfigured: her vivid imagination threw off the damage of the years,
saw her coarse, red-cheeked father and her too plump mother as the
idyllic figures on the lamented parlour vase. And when her thought
struggled painfully back to the actual moment, it was with a new
concrete sense of its tragic intensity.
"O mother, mother!" she cried, as she threw her arms round her. The
Greek grammar and the letter fell unregarded to the floor.
The fountain of Mrs. Brill's wrongs leapt higher at the sympathy. "And
I could have had half-a-dozen young men! The boils of Egypt be upon
him! Time after time I said, 'No,' though the Shadchan bewitched my
parents into believing that Michael was an angel without wings."
"But you also thought father an angel," Salvina pleaded.
"Yes; and now he _has_ got wings," said Mrs. Brill savagely.
Salvina's tears began to ooze out. Poor swain and shepherdess on the
parlour vase! Was this, then, how idylls ended? "Perhaps he'll come
back," she murmured.
The wife snorted viciously. "And my furniture? The beautiful furniture
I toiled and scraped for, that he always grumbled at, though I saved
it out of the housekeeping money, without its costing _him_ a penny,
and no man in London had better meals,--hot meat every day and fish
for Sabbath, even when plaice were eightpence a pound,--and no
servant--every scrap of work done with my own two hands! Now he carts
everything away as if it were his."
"I suppose it is by law," Salvina said mildly.
"Law! I'll have the law on him."
"Oh, no, mother!" and Salvina shuddered. "Besides, he has left our
clothes."