was a moderately good carpenter and joiner, but no man of the world, and
he wanted one. Nobody could tell what might not have happened to Tommy
Simmons if there had been no Mrs. Simmons to take care of him. He was a
meek and quiet man, with a boyish face and sparse, limp whiskers. He
had no vices (even his pipe departed him after his marriage), and Mrs.
Simmons had ingrafted on him divers exotic virtues. He went solemnly to
chapel every Sunday, under a tall hat, and put a penny--one returned to
him for the purpose out of his week’s wages--in the plate. Then, Mrs.
Simmons overseeing, he took off his best clothes, and brushed them with
solicitude and pains. On Saturday afternoons he cleaned the knives,
the forks, the boots, the kettles, and the windows, patiently and
conscientiously; on Tuesday evenings he took the clothes to the
mangling; and on Saturday nights he attended Mrs. Simmons in her
marketing, to carry the parcels.
Mrs. Simmons’s own virtues were native and numerous. She was a wonderful
manager. Every penny of Tommy’s thirty-six or thirty-eight shillings a
week was bestowed to the greatest advantage, and Tommy never ventured
to guess how much of it she saved. Her cleanliness in housewifery was
distracting to behold. She met Simmons at the front door whenever
he came home, and then and there he changed his boots for slippers,
balancing himself painfully on alternate feet on the cold flags. This
was because she scrubbed the passage and door-step turn about with the
wife of the downstairs family, and because the stair-carpet was her
own. She vigilantly supervised her husband all through the process of
“cleaning himself” after work, so as to come between her walls and the
possibility of random splashes; and if, in spite of her diligence, a
spot remained to tell the tale, she was at pains to impress the fact on
Simmons’s memory, and to set forth at length all the circumstances of
his ungrateful selfishness. In the beginning she had always escorted
him to the ready-made clothes shop, and had selected and paid for his
clothes, for the reason that men are such perfect fools, and shopkeepers
do as they like with them. But she presently improved on that. She found
a man selling cheap remnants at a street-corner, and straightway she
conceived the idea of making Simmons’s clothes herself. Decision was
one of her virtues, and a suit of uproarious check tweeds was begun
that afternoon from the pattern furnished by an old one. More: it was
finished by Sunday, when Simmons, overcome by astonishment at the feat,
was endued in it, and pushed off to chapel ere he could recover his
senses. The things were not altogether comfortable, he found: the
trousers hung tight against his shins, but hung loose behind his heels;
and when he sat, it was on a wilderness of hard folds and seams.
Also, his waistcoat collar tickled his nape, but his coat collar went
straining across from shoulder to shoulder; while the main garment
bagged generously below his waist. Use made a habit of his discomfort,
but it never reconciled him to the chaff of his shopmates; for, as Mrs.
Simmons elaborated successive suits, each one modelled on the last, the
primal accidents of her design developed into principles, and grew
even bolder and more hideously pronounced. It was vain for Simmons to
hint--as hint he did--that he shouldn’t like her to overwork herself,
tailoring being bad for the eyes, and there was a new tailor’s in the
Mile End Road, very cheap, where . . . “Ho yus,” she retorted, “you’re
very consid’rit I dessay sittin’ there actin’ a livin’ lie before your
own wife Thomas Simmons as though I couldn’t see through you like a
book a lot you care about overworkin’ me as long as _your_ turn’s
served throwin’ away money like dirt in the street on a lot o’ swindlin’
tailors an’ me workin’ and’ slavin’ ‘ere to save a ‘a’penny an’ this
is my return for it any one ‘ud think you could pick up money in the
‘orse-road an’ I b’lieve I’d be thought better of if I laid in bed
all day like some would that I do.” So that Thomas Simmons avoided the
subject, nor even murmured when she resolved to cut his hair.
So his placid fortune endured for years. Then there came a golden summer
evening when Mrs. Simmons betook herself with a basket to do some small
shopping, and Simmons was left at home. He washed and put away the
tea-things, and then he fell to meditating on a new pair of trousers,
finished that day, and hanging behind the parlour door. There they
hung, in all their decent innocence of shape in the seat, and they were
shorter of leg, longer of waist, and wilder of pattern than he had ever
worn before. And as he looked on them the small devil of Original Sin
awoke and clamoured in his breast. He was ashamed of it, of course, for
well he knew the gratitude he owed his wife for those same trousers,
among other blessings. Still, there the small devil was, and the small
devil was fertile in base suggestions, and could not be kept from
hinting at the new crop of workshop gibes that would spring at Tommy’s
first public appearance in such things.
“Pitch ‘em in the dust-bin!” said the small devil at last. “It’s all
they’re fit for.”
Simmons turned away in sheer horror of his wicked self, and for a moment
thought of washing the tea-things over again by way of discipline. Then
he made for the back room, but saw from the landing that the front door
was standing open, probably the fault of the child downstairs. Now
a front door standing open was a thing that Mrs. Simmons would _not_
abide: it looked low. So Simmons went down, that she might not be wroth
with him for the thing when she came back; and, as he shut the door, he
looked forth into the street.
A man was loitering on the pavement, and prying curiously about the
door. His face was tanned, his hands were deep in the pockets of
his unbraced blue trousers, and well back on his head he wore the
high-crowned peaked cap, topped with a knob of wool, which is affected
by Jack ashore about the docks. He lurched a step nearer to the door,
and “Mrs. Ford ain’t in, is she?” he said.
Simmons stared at him for a matter of five seconds, and then said, “Eh?”
“Mrs. Ford as was, then--Simmons now, ain’t it?”
He said this with a furtive leer that Simmons neither liked nor
understood.
“No,” said Simmons; “she ain’t in now.”
“You ain’t her ‘usband, are ye?”
“Yus.”
The man took his pipe from his mouth and grinned silently and long.
“Blimy,” he said at length, “you look like the sort o’ bloke she’d
like,” and with that he grinned again. Then, seeing that Simmons made
ready to shut the door, he put a foot on the sill and a hand against the
panel. “Don’t be in a ‘hurry, matey,” he said; “I come ‘ere t’ ‘ave a
little talk with you, man to man, d’ ye see?” And he frowned fiercely.
Tommy Simmons felt uncomfortable, but the door would not shut, so he
parleyed. “Wotjer want?” he asked, “I dunno you.”
“Then, if you’ll excuse the liberty, I’ll interdooce meself, in a manner
of speaking.” He touched his cap with a bob of mock humility. “I’m Bob
Ford,” he said, “come back out o’ kingdom come so to say. Me as went
down with the _Mooltan_--safe dead five year gone. I come to see my
wife.”
During this speech Thomas Simmons’s jaw was dropping lower and lower. At
the end of it he poked his fingers up through his hair, looked down at
the mat, then up at the fanlight, then out into the street, then hard at
his visitor. But he found nothing to say.
“Come to see my wife,” the man repeated. “So now we can talk it over--as
man to man.”
Simmons slowly shut his mouth, and led the way upstairs mechanically,
his fingers still in his hair. A sense of the state of affairs sank
gradually into his brain, and the small devil woke again. Suppose
this man _was_ Ford? Suppose he _did_ claim his wife? Would it be
a knock-down blow? Would it hit him out?--or not? He thought of the
trousers, the tea-things, the mangling, the knives, the kettles, and the
windows; and he thought of them in the way of a backslider.
On the landing Ford clutched at his arm, and asked in a hoarse whisper,
“‘Ow long ‘fore she’s back?”
“‘Bout an hour, I expect,” Simmons replied, having first of all
repeated the question in his own mind. And then he opened the parlour
door.
“Ah,” said Ford, looking about him, “you’ve bin pretty comf’table. Them
chairs an’ things,” jerking his pipe toward them, “was hers--mine, that
is to say, speakin’ straight, and man to man.” He sat down, puffing
meditatively at his pipe, and presently, “Well,” he continued, “‘ere
I am agin, ol’ Bob Ford, dead an’ done for--gone down in the _Mooltan_.
On’y I _ain’t_ done for, see?” And he pointed the stem of his pipe at
Simmons’s waistcoat. “I ain’t done for, ‘cause why? Cons’kence o’ bein’
picked up by a ol’ German sailin’-’utch an’ took to ‘Frisco ‘fore
the mast. I’ve ‘ad a few years o’ knockin’ about since then, an’
now”--looking hard at Simmons--“I’ve come back to see my wife.”
“She--she don’t like smoke in ‘ere,” said Simmons, as it were at random.
“No, I bet she don’t,” Ford answered, taking his pipe from his mouth and
holding it low in his hand. “I know ‘Anner. ‘Ow d’ you find ‘er? Do she
make ye clean the winders?”
“Well,” Simmons admitted, uneasily, “I--I do ‘elp ‘er sometimes, o’
course.”
“Ah! An’ the knives too, I bet, an’ the bloomin’ kittles. I know.
W’y”--he rose and bent to look behind Simmons’s head--“s’ ‘elp me, I
b’lieve she cuts yer ‘air! Well, I’m dammed! Jes’ wot she would do,
too.”
He inspected the blushing Simmons from divers points of vantage. Then
he lifted a leg of the trousers hanging behind the door. “I’d bet a
trifle,” he said, “she made these ‘ere trucks. No-body else ‘ud do ‘em
like that. Damme! they’re wuss’n wot you’ve got on.”
The small devil began to have the argument all its own way. If this man
took his wife back perhaps he’d have to wear those trousers.
“Ah,” Ford pursued, “she ain’t got no milder. An’, my davy, wot a jore!”
Simmons began to feel that this was no longer his business. Plainly,
‘Anner was this other man’s wife, and he was bound in honour to
acknowledge the fact. The small devil put it to him as a matter of duty.
“Well,” said Ford, suddenly, “time’s short an’ this ain’t business. I
won’t be ‘ard on you, matey. I ought prop’ly to stand on my rights, but
seein’ as you’re a well-meaning young man, so to speak, an’ all settled
an’ a-livin’ ‘ere quiet an’ matrimonual, I’ll”--this with a burst of
generosity--“damme! yus, I’ll compound the felony an’ take me ‘ook.
Come, I’ll name a figure, as man to man, fust an’ last, no less an’ no
more. Five pound does it.”
Simmons hadn’t five pounds,--he hadn’t even fivepence,--and he said so.
“An’ I wouldn’t think to come between a man an’ ‘is wife,” he added,
“not on no account. It may be rough on me, but it’s a dooty. _I’ll_ ‘ook
it.”
“No,” said Ford, hastily, clutching Simmons by the arm, “don’t do that.
I’ll make it a bit cheaper. Say three quid--come, that’s reasonable,
ain’t it? Three quid ain’t much compensation for me goin’ away for
ever--where the stormy winds do blow, so to say--an’ never as much as
seein’ me own wife agin for better nor wuss. Between man an’ man, now,
three quid, an’ I’ll shunt. That’s fair, ain’t it?”
“Of course it’s fair,” Simmons replied, effusively. “It’s more’n fair:
it’s noble--downright noble, _I_ call it. But I ain’t goin’ to take a
mean advantage o’ your good-’artedness, Mr. Ford. She’s your wife, an’
I oughtn’t to ‘a’ come between you. I apologise. You stop an’ ‘ave yer
proper rights. It’s me as ought to shunt, an’ I will.” And he made a
step toward the door.
“‘Old on,” quoth Ford, and got between Simmons and the door; “don’t do
things rash. Look wot a loss it’ll be to you with no ‘ome to go to,
an’ nobody to look after ye, an’ all that. It’ll be dreadful. Say a
couple--there, we won’t quarrel, jest a single quid, between man
an’ man, an’ I’ll stand a pot out o’ the money. You can easy raise a
quid--the clock ‘ud pretty nigh do it. A quid does it, an’ I’ll--”
There was a loud double knock at the front door. In the East End a
double knock is always for the upstairs lodgers.
“Oo’s that?” asked Bob Ford, apprehensively.
“I’ll see,” said Thomas Simmons, in reply, and he made a rush for the
staircase.
Bob Ford heard him open the front door. The he went to the window, and
just below him he saw the crown of a bonnet. It vanished, and borne
to him from within the door there fell upon his ear the sound of a
well-remembered female voice.
“Where ye goin’ now with no ‘at?” asked the voice, sharply.
“Awright, ‘Anner--there’s--there’s somebody upstairs to see you,”
Simmons answered. And, as Bob Ford could see, a man went scuttling down
the street in the gathering dusk. And behold, it was Thomas Simmons.
Ford reached the landing in three strides. His wife was still at the
front door, staring after Simmons. He flung into the back room, threw
open the window, dropped from the wash-house roof into the back yard,
scrambled desperately over the fence, and disappeared into the gloom.
He was seen by no living soul. And that is why Simmons’s base
desertion--under his wife’s very eyes, too--is still an astonishment to
the neighbours.
A ROSE OF THE GHETTO, By Israel Zangwill
One day it occurred to Leibel that he ought to get married. He went to
Sugarman the Shadchan forthwith.
“I have the very thing for you,” said the great marriage broker.
“Is she pretty?” asked Leibel.
“Her father has a boot and shoe warehouse,” replied Sugarman,
enthusiastically.
“Then there ought to be a dowry with her,” said Leibel, eagerly.
“Certainly a dowry! A fine man like you!”
“How much do you think it would be?”
“Of course it is not a large warehouse; but then you could get your
boots at trade price, and your wife’s, perhaps, for the cost of the
leather.”
“When could I see her?”
“I will arrange for you to call next Sabbath afternoon.”
“You won’t charge me more than a sovereign?”
“Not a groschen more! Such a pious maiden! I’m sure you will be happy.
She has so much way-of-the-country [breeding]. And of course five per
cent on the dowry?”
“H’m! Well, I don’t mind!” “Perhaps they won’t give a dowry,” he thought
with a consolatory sense of outwitting the Shadchan.
On the Saturday Leibel went to see the damsel, and on the Sunday he went
to see Sugarman the Shadchan.
“But your maiden squints!” he cried, resentfully.
“An excellent thing!” said Sugarman. “A wife who squints can never look
her husband straight in the face and overwhelm him. Who would quail
before a woman with a squint?”
“I could endure the squint,” went on Leibel, dubiously, “but she also
stammers.”
“Well, what is better, in the event of a quarrel? The difficulty she has
in talking will keep her far more silent than most wives. You had best
secure her while you have the chance.”
“But she halts on the left leg,” cried Leibel, exasperated.
“_Gott in Himmel!_ Do you mean to say you do not see what an advantage
it is to have a wife unable to accompany you in all your goings?”
Leibel lost patience.
“Why, the girl is a hunchback!” he protested, furiously.
“My dear Leibel,” said the marriage broker, deprecatingly shrugging his
shoulders and spreading out his palms, “you can’t expect perfection!”
Nevertheless Leibel persisted in his unreasonable attitude. He accused
Sugarman of wasting his time, of making a fool of him.
“A fool of you!” echoed the Shadchan, indignantly, “when I give you a
chance of a boot and shoe manufacturer’s daughter? You will make a fool
of yourself if you refuse. I dare say her dowry would be enough to set
you up as a master tailor. At present you are compelled to slave away as
a cutter for thirty shillings a week. It is most unjust. If you only had
a few machines you would be able to employ your own cutters. And they
can be got so cheap nowadays.”
This gave Leibel pause, and he departed without having definitely broken
the negotiations. His whole week was befogged by doubt, his work became
uncertain, his chalk marks lacked their usual decision, and he did not
always cut his coat according to his cloth. His aberrations became
so marked that pretty Rose Green, the sweater’s eldest daughter,
who managed a machine in the same room, divined, with all a woman’s
intuition, that he was in love.
“What is the matter?” she said, in rallying Yiddish, when they were
taking their lunch of bread and cheese and ginger-beer amid the clatter
of machines, whose serfs had not yet knocked off work.
“They are proposing me a match,” he answered, sullenly.
“A match!” ejaculated Rose. “Thou!” She had worked by his side for
years, and familiarity bred the second person singular. Leibel nodded
his head, and put a mouthful of Dutch cheese into it.
“With whom?” asked Rose. Somehow he felt ashamed. He gurgled the answer
into the stone ginger-beer bottle, which he put to his thirsty lips.
“With Leah Volcovitch!”
“Leah Volcovitch!” gasped Rose. “Leah, the boot and shoe manufacturer’s
daughter?”
Leibel hung his head--he scarce knew why. He did not dare meet her gaze.
His droop said “Yes.” There was a long pause.
“And why dost thou not have her?” said Rose. It was more than an
inquiry; there was contempt in it, and perhaps even pique.
Leibel did not reply. The embarrassing silence reigned again, and
reigned long. Rose broke it at last.
“Is it that thou likest me better?” she asked.
Leibel seemed to see a ball of lightning in the air; it burst, and he
felt the electric current strike right through his heart. The shock
threw his head up with a jerk, so that his eyes gazed into a face whose
beauty and tenderness were revealed to him for the first time. The face
of his old acquaintance had vanished; this was a cajoling, coquettish,
smiling face, suggesting undreamed-of things.
“_Nu_, yes,” he replied, without perceptible pause.
“_Nu_, good!” she rejoined as quickly.
And in the ecstasy of that moment of mutual understanding Leibel
forgot to wonder why he had never thought of Rose before. Afterward he
remembered that she had always been his social superior.
The situation seemed too dream-like for explanation to the room just
yet. Leibel lovingly passed a bottle of ginger-beer, and Rose took a
sip, with a beautiful air of plighting troth, understood only of those
two. When Leibel quaffed the remnant it intoxicated him. The relics of
the bread and cheese were the ambrosia to this nectar. They did not dare
kiss; the suddenness of it all left them bashful, and the smack of lips
would have been like a cannon-peal announcing their engagement. There
was a subtler sweetness in this sense of a secret, apart from the fact
that neither cared to break the news to the master tailor, a stern
little old man. Leibel’s chalk marks continued indecisive that
afternoon, which shows how correctly Rose had connected them with love.
Before he left that night Rose said to him, “Art thou sure thou wouldst
not rather have Leah Volcovitch?”
“Not for all the boots and shoes in the world,” replied Leibel,
vehemently.
“And I,” protested Rose, “would rather go without my own than without
thee.”
The landing outside the workshop was so badly lighted that their lips
came together in the darkness.
“Nay, nay; thou must not yet,” said Rose. “Thou art still courting
Leah Volcovitch. For aught thou knowest, Sugarman the Shadchan may have
entangled thee beyond redemption.”
“Not so,” asserted Leibel. “I have only seen the maiden once.”
“Yes. But Sugarman has seen her father several times,” persisted Rose.
“For so misshapen a maiden his commission would be large. Thou must go
to Sugarman to-night, and tell him that thou canst not find it in thy
heart to go on with the match.”
“Kiss me, and I will go,” pleaded Leibel.
“Go, and I will kiss thee,” said Rose, resolutely.
“And when shall we tell thy father?” he asked, pressing her hand, as the
next best thing to her lips.
“As soon as thou art free from Leah.”
“But will he consent?”
“He will not be glad,” said Rose, frankly. “But after mother’s
death--peace be upon her--the rule passed from her hands into mine.”
“Ah, that is well,” said Leibel. He was a superficial thinker.
Leibel found Sugarman at supper. The great Shadchan offered him a chair,
but nothing else. Hospitality was associated in his mind with special
occasions only, and involved lemonade and “stuffed monkeys.”
He was very put out--almost to the point of indigestion--to hear of
Leibel’s final determination, and plied him with reproachful inquiries.
“You don’t mean to say that you give up a boot and shoe manufacturer
merely because his daughter has round shoulders!” he exclaimed,
incredulously.
“It is more than round shoulders--it is a hump!” cried Leibel.
“And suppose? See how much better off you will be when you get your own
machines! We do not refuse to let camels carry our burdens because they
have humps.”
“Ah, but a wife is not a camel,” said Leibel, with a sage air.
“And a cutter is not a master tailor,” retorted Sugarman.
“Enough, enough!” cried Leibel. “I tell you, I would not have her if she
were a machine warehouse.”
“There sticks something behind,” persisted Sugarman, unconvinced.
Leibel shook his head. “Only her hump” he said with a flash of humour.
“Moses Mendelssohn had a hump,” expostulated Sugarman, reproachfully.
“Yes, but he was a heretic,” rejoined Leibel, who was not without
reading. “And then he was a man! A man with two humps could find a wife
for each. But a woman with a hump cannot expect a husband in addition.”
“Guard your tongue from evil,” quoth the Shadchan, angrily. “If
everybody were to talk like you Leah Volcovitch would never be married
at all.”
Leibel shrugged his shoulders, and reminded him that hunchbacked girls
who stammered and squinted and halted on left legs were not usually led
under the canopy.
“Nonsense! Stuff!” cried Sugarman, angrily. “That is because they do not
come to me.”
“Leah Volcovitch _has_ come to you,” said Leibel, “but she shall not
come to me.” And he rose, anxious to escape.
Instantly Sugarman gave a sigh of resignation. “Be it so! Then I shall
have to look out for another, that’s all.”
“No, I don’t want any,” replied Leibel, quickly.
Sugarman stopped eating. “You don’t want any?” he cried. “But you came
to me for one?”
“I--I--know,” stammered Leibel. “But I’ve--I’ve altered my mind.”
“One needs Hillel’s patience to deal with you!” cried Sugarman. “But
I shall charge you, all the same, for my trouble. You cannot cancel an
order like this in the middle! No, no! You can play fast and loose with
Leah Volcovitch, but you shall not make a fool of me.”
“But if I don’t want one?” said Leibel, sullenly.
Sugarman gazed at him with a cunning look of suspicion. “Didn’t I say
there was something sticking behind?”
Leibel felt guilty. “But whom have you got in your eye?” he inquired,
desperately.
“Perhaps you may have some one in yours!” naively answered Sugarman.
Leibel gave a hypocritic long-drawn “U-m-m-m! I wonder if Rose
Green--where I work--” he said, and stopped.
“I fear not,” said Sugarman. “She is on my list. Her father gave her to
me some months ago, but he is hard to please. Even the maiden herself is
not easy, being pretty.”
“Perhaps she has waited for some one,” suggested Leibel.
Sugarman’s keen ear caught the note of complacent triumph.
“You have been asking her yourself!” he exclaimed, in horror-stricken
accents.
“And if I have?” said Leibel, defiantly.
“You have cheated me! And so has Eliphaz Green--I always knew he was
tricky! You have both defrauded me!”
“I did not mean to,” said Leibel, mildly.
“You _did_ mean to. You had no business to take the matter out of my
hands. What right had you to propose to Rose Green?”
“I did not,” cried Leibel, excitedly.
“Then you asked her father!”
“No; I have not asked her father yet.”
“Then how do you know she will have you?”
“I--I know,” stammered Leibel, feeling himself somehow a liar as well as
a thief. His brain was in a whirl; he could not remember how the thing
had come about. Certainly he had not proposed; nor could he say that she
had.
“You know she will have you,” repeated Sugarman, reflectively. “And does
_she_ know?”
“Yes. In fact,” he blurted out, “we arranged it together.”
“Ah, you both know. And does her father know?”
“Not yet.”
“Ah, then I must get his consent,” said Sugarman, decisively.
“I--I thought of speaking to him myself.”
“Yourself!” echoed Sugarman, in horror. “Are you unsound in the head?
Why, that would be worse than the mistake you have already made!”
“What mistake?” asked Leibel, firing up.