IV

The next morning Salvina should have awakened with a sense through all

her bones that it was Friday--the last day of the school-week,

harbinger of such blessed rest that the mere expectation of it was

also a rest. Alas! she woke from the nightmare of sleep to the

nightmare of reality, and the week-end meant only time to sound the

horror of the new situation.

In one point alone, Friday remained a consolation. Only one day to

face her fellow-teachers and her children, and then two days for

hiding from the world with her pain, for preparing to face it again;

to say nothing of the leisure for practical recuperation of the home.

Lazarus turned up so late that the council of war was of the briefest

and held almost on the door-step, for Salvina must be in school by

nine. The thought of staying away--even in this crisis--simply did not

occur to her.

She arranged that Lazarus was to meet her in the city after morning

school, when she would have drawn her savings from the post-office:

more than enough for the advance on the furniture, which must be

delivered that very afternoon. Lazarus had been for telegraphing at

once to Kitty for assistance, but Salvina put her foot down.

"Let us not frighten her--I will go and break it to her on Sunday

afternoon. You know she can't spare any money; it is as much as she

can do to dress up to the position."

"I do hope the scandal won't spread," said Lazarus gloomily. "It would

be a nice thing if she lost the position and fell back on our hands."

"Yes, he has ruined all my children," sobbed Mrs. Brill, breaking out

afresh. "But what did he care? Ah, if it wasn't for me, you would have

been in the workhouse long ago."

"Well then, go and do your Sabbath marketing or else we'll have to go

there now," said Lazarus not unkindly; "the tradespeople will give you

credit."

"Rather! They know _I_ never ran away."

"And mind, mother," said Salvina as she snatched up her Greek grammar,

"mind the fried fish is as good as usual; we're a long way from the

workhouse yet! And if you're not in to-night, Lazarus," she whispered

as she ran off, "I'll never forgive you."

"Well, I'm blowed!" said Lazarus, looking after the awkward little

figure, flying to catch the 8.21.

"Yes, but I've no frying pan!" Mrs. Brill called after her.

"You'll have it by this afternoon," Salvina called back reassuringly.

The sun was already strong, the train packed, and Salvina stood so

jammed in that she could scarcely hold her grammar open, and the

irregular verbs danced before her eyes even more than their strange

moods and tenses warranted. At the school her thrilling consciousness

of her domestic tragedy interposed some strange veil between her and

her fellow-teachers, and they seemed to stand away from her, enveloped

in another atmosphere. She heard herself teaching--five elevens are

fifty-five--and her own self seemed to stand away from her, too. She

noted without protest two of the girls pulling each other's hair in

some far-off hazy world, and the answering drone of the class--five

elevens are fifty-five--seemed like the peaceful buzzing of a

gigantic blue-bottle on a drowsy afternoon. It occurred to her

suddenly that she was fifty-five years old, and when Miss Rolver, the

Christian head-mistress, came into her room, Salvina had an unexpected

feeling of advantage in life-experience over this desiccated specimen

of femininity, redolent of time-tables, record-parchments, foolscap,

and clean blotting-paper. Outside all this scheduled world pulsed a

large irregular life of flesh and blood; all the primitive verbs in

every language were irregular, it suddenly flashed upon her, and she

had an instant of vivifying insight into the Greek language she had

unquestioningly accepted as "dead"; saw Grecian men and women

breathing their thoughts and passions--even expressing the shape of

their throats and lips--through these erratic aorists.

"You look tired, dear," said the head-mistress.

"It's the heat," Salvina murmured.

"Never mind; the summer holidays will soon be here."

It sounded a mockery. Summer holidays would no longer mean Ramsgate,

and delicious days of study on sunny cliffs, with the relaxation of

novels and poems. These slowly achieved luxuries of the last two years

were impossible for this year at least. And this thought of being

penned up in London during the dog days oppressed her: she felt

choking. Her next sensation was of water sprinkling on her face, and

of Miss Rolver's kind anxious voice asking her if she felt better.

Instead of replying, Salvina wondered in a clouded way where the

school-managers were.

Even her naive mind had been struck at last by the coincidence that

whenever, after a managers' meeting, these omnipotent ladies and

gentlemen from a higher world strolled through the school, Miss Rolver

happened to be discovered in an interesting attitude. If it was the

play-hour, she would be--for this occasion only--in the playground

leading the games, surrounded by clamorously affectionate little ones.

If it was working-time, she was found as a human island amid a sea of

sewing: billows of pinafores and aprons heaved tumultuously around

her. Or, with a large air of angelic motherhood, she would be tying up

some child's bruised finger. Her greatest invention--so it had

appeared to the scrupulous Salvina--was the stray, starved,

half-frozen, sweet little kitten, lapping up milk from a saucer before

a ruddy blazing fire at the very instant of the great personages'

passage. How they had beamed, one and all, at the touching sight.

Hence it was that Salvina's dazed vision now sought vaguely for the

school-managers. But in another instant she realized that this present

solicitude was not for another but for herself, and that it had

nothing of the theatrical. A remorseful pang of conscience added to

her pains. She said tremulously that she felt better and was gently

chided for over-study and admonished to go home and rest.

"Oh, no, I am all right now," she responded instinctively.

"But I'll take your class," Miss Rolver insisted, and Salvina found

herself wandering outside in the free sunshine, with a sense of the

forbidden. An acute consciousness of Board School classes droning

dutifully all over London made the streets at that hour strange and

almost sinful. She went to the post-office and drew out as much of her

money as red tape allowed, and while wandering about in Whitechapel

waiting for the hour of her rendezvous with Lazarus, she had time to

purchase a coarse but white table-cloth, a plush cover embroidered

with "Jerusalem" in Hebrew, and a gilt goblet. These were for the

Friday-night table.

V

But the Sabbath brought no peace. Though miracles were wrought in that

afternoon, and, except that it was laid in the kitchen, the Sabbath

table had all its immemorial air, with the consecration cup, the long

plaited loaves under the "Jerusalem" cover, and the dish of fried

fish that had grown to seem no less religious; yet there could be no

glossing over the absence of the gross-paunched paternal figure that

had so unctuously presided over the ceremony. His vacant place held

all the emptiness of death, and all the fulness of retrospective

profanation. How like he was to Moss M. Rosenstein, Salvina thought

suddenly. Lazarus had ignored the gilt goblet and the shilling bottle

of claret, and was helping himself from the coffee-pot, when his

mother cried bitterly: "What! are we to eat like the animals?"

"Oh bother!" Lazarus exclaimed. "You know I hate all these mummeries.

I wouldn't say if they really made people good. But you see for

yourself--"

"Oh, but you must say _Kiddush_, Lazarus," said Salvina, half

pleadingly, half peremptorily. She fetched the prayer-book and

Lazarus, grumbling inarticulately, took the head of the table, and

stumbled through the prayer, thanking God for having chosen and

sanctified Israel above all nations, and in love and favour given it

the holy Sabbath as an inheritance.

But oh! how tamely the words sounded, how void of that melodious

devotion thrilling through the joyous roulades of the father. It was a

sort of symbol of the mutilated home, and thus Salvina felt it. And

she remembered the last ceremony at which her father had

presided--that of the Separation when the Sabbath faded into

work-day--the ceremony of Division between the Holy and the Profane,

and she shivered to think it had indeed marked for the unhappy man the

line of demarcation.

"Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, who hallowest the Sabbath,"

Lazarus was mumbling, and in another instant he was awkwardly

distributing the ritual morsels of bread.

But the mother could not swallow hers, for indignant imaginings of the

rival Sabbath board. "May _her_ morsel choke her!" she cried, and

nearly was choked by her own.

"Oh, mother, do not mention her--neither her nor him.--_Never any

more_," said Salvina. And again the new note of peremptoriness rang in

her voice, and her mother stopped suddenly short like a scolded child.

"Will you have plaice or sole, mother?" Salvina went on, her voice

changing to a caress.

"I can't eat, Salvina. Don't ask me."

"But you must eat." And Salvina calmly helped her to fish and to

coffee and put in the lumps of sugar; and the mother ate and drank

with equal calm, as if hypnotized.

All through the meal Salvina's mind kept swinging betwixt the past and

the future. Strange odds and ends of scenes came up in which her

father figured, and her old and new conceptions of him interplayed

bewilderingly. Her sudden vision of him as Moss M. Rosenstein

persisted, and could only be laid by concentrating her thoughts on the

early days when he used to take herself and Kitty to Victoria Park,

carrying her in his arms when she was tired. But it made her cry to

see that little tired happy figure cuddling the trusted giant, and

she had to jump for refuge into the future.

They must move back to Hounsditch. She must give up the idea of

becoming a "Bachelor": the hours of evening study must now be devoted

to teaching others. Her University distinction was already great

enough to give her an unusual chance of pupils, while her "Yiddish,"

sucked in with her mother's milk, had become exceptionally good German

under study. She might hope for as much as two shillings an hour and

thus earn a whole sovereign extra per week.

And over this poor helpless blighted mother, she would watch as over a

child. All the maternal instinct in her awoke under the stress of this

curiously inverted position. Her remorseful memory summoned a

penitential procession of bygone petulances. Never again would she be

cross or hasty with this ill-starred heroine. Yes, her mother was

become a figure of romance to her, as well as a nursling. This woman,

whose prosaic humours she had so often fretted under, was in truth a

woman who had lived and loved. She had ceased to be a mere mother; a

large being who presided over one's childhood. And this imaginative

insight, she noted with surprise, would never have been hers but for

her father's desertion: like one who realizes the virtues of a corpse,

she had waited till love was slain to perceive its fragrance.

A postman's knock, as the meal was finished, made her heart give a

corresponding pit-a-pat, and she turned quite faint. All her nerves

seemed to be on the rack, expecting new sensational developments. The

letter was for Lazarus.

"Ah, you abomination!" cried his mother, as he tore open the envelope.

He did not pause to defend his Sabbath breaking, but cried joyfully:

"What did I tell you? Granders Brothers offer me travelling expenses

and a commission!"

"Oh, thank God, thank God!" ejaculated his mother, her eyes raised

piously. He took up his hat. "Where are you going?" said Mrs. Brill.

"To see Rhoda of course. Don't you think she's as anxious about it as

you?"

Salvina's eyes were full of sympathetic tears: "Yes, yes, let him go,

mother."