'It seems to me something has been going on behind my back,' he said, looking from mother to son.

'Well, I didn't want to annoy you with Simon's madcap ideas,' Hannah murmured. 'But it's all over now, thank God!'

'Oh, he'd better know,' said Simon sulkily, 'especially as I am not going to be choked off. It's all stuff what the doctor says. I'm as strong as a horse. And, what's more, I'm one of the few applicants who can ride one.'

'Hannah, will you explain to me what this Meshuggas (madness) is?' cried S. Cohn, lapsing into a non-Anglicism.

'I've got to go to the front, just like other young men!'

'What!' shrieked S. Cohn. 'Enlist! You, that I brought up as a gentleman!'

'It's gentlemen that's going—the City Imperial Volunteers!'

'The volunteers! But that's my own clerks.'

'No; there are gentlemen among them. Read your paper.'

'But not rich Jews.'

'Oh, yes. I saw several chaps from Bayswater.'

'We Jews of this favoured country,' put in Hannah eagerly, 'grateful to the noble people who have given us every right, every liberty, must——'

S. Cohn was taken aback by this half-unconscious quotation from the war-sermon of the morning. 'Yes, we must subscribe and all that,' he interrupted.

'We must fight,' said Simon.

'You fight!' His father laughed half-hysterically. 'Why, you'd shoot yourself with your own gun!' He had not been so upset since the day the minister had disregarded his erudition.

'Oh, would I, though?' And Simon pursed his lips and nodded meaningly.

'As sure as to-day is the Holy Sabbath. And you'd be stuck on your own bayonet, like an obstinate pig.'

Simon got up and left the table and the room.

Hannah kept back her tears before the servant. 'There!' she said. 'And now he's turned sulky and won't eat.'

'Didn't I say an obstinate pig? He's always been like that from a baby. But his stomach always surrenders.' He resumed his meal with a wronged air, keeping his spectacles on the table, for frequent nervous polishing.

Of a sudden the door reopened and a soldier presented himself—gun on shoulder. For a moment S. Cohn, devoid of his glasses, stared without recognition. Wild hereditary tremors ran through him, born of the Russian persecution, and he had a vague nightmare sense of the Chappers, the Jewish man-gatherers who collected the tribute of young Jews for the Little Father. But as Simon began to loom through the red fog, 'A gun on the Sabbath!' he cried. It was as if the bullet had gone through all his conceptions of life and of Simon.

Hannah snatched at the side-issue. 'I read in Josephus—Simon's prize for Hebrew, you know—that the Jews fought against the Romans on Sabbath.'

'Yes; but they fought for themselves—for our Holy Temple.'

'But it's for ourselves now,' said Simon. 'Didn't you always say we are English?'

S. Cohn opened his mouth in angry retort. Then he discovered he had no retort, only anger. And this made him angrier, and his mouth remained open, quite terrifyingly for poor Mrs. Cohn.

'What is the use of arguing with him?' she said imploringly. 'The War Office has been sensible enough to refuse him.'

'We shall see,' said Simon. 'I am going to peg away at 'em again, and if I don't get into the Mounted Infantry, I'm a Dutchman—and of the Boer variety.'

He seemed any kind of man save a Jew to the puzzled father. 'Hannah, you must have known of this—these clothes,' S. Cohn spluttered.

'They don't cost anything,' she murmured. 'The child amuses himself. He will never really be called out.'

'If he is, I'll stop his supplies.'

'Oh,' said Simon airily, 'the Government will attend to that.'

'Indeed!' And S. Cohn's face grew black. 'But remember—you may go, but you shall never come back.'

'Oh, Solomon! How can you utter such an awful omen?'

Simon laughed. 'Don't bother, mother. He's bound to take me back. Isn't it in the papers that he promised?'

S. Cohn went from black to green.

VII

Simon got his way. The authorities reconsidered their decision. But the father would not reconsider his. Ignorant of his boy's graceless existence, he fumed at the first fine thing in the boy's life. 'Tis a wise father that knows his own child.

Mere emulation of his Christian comrades, and the fun of the thing, had long ago induced the lad to add volunteering to his other dissipations. But, once in it, the love of arms seized him, and when the call for serious fighters came, some new passion that surprised even himself leapt to his breast—the first call upon an idealism, choked, rather than fed, by a misunderstood Judaism. Anglicization had done its work; from his schooldays he had felt himself a descendant, not of Judas Maccabaeus, but of Nelson and Wellington; and now that his brethren were being mowed down by a kopje-guarded foe, his whole soul rose in venomous sympathy. And, mixed with this genuine instinct of devotion to the great cause of country, were stirrings of anticipated adventure, gorgeous visions of charges, forlorn hopes, picked-up shells, redoubts stormed; heritages of 'The Pirates of Pechili,' and all the military romances that his prayer-book had masked.

He looked every inch an Anglo-Saxon, in his khaki uniform and his great slouch hat, with his bayonet and his bandolier.

The night before he sailed for South Africa there was a service in St. Paul's Cathedral, for which each volunteer had two tickets. Simon sent his to his father. 'The Lord Mayor will attend in state. I dare say you'll like to see the show,' he wrote flippantly.

'He'll become a Christian next,' said S. Cohn, tearing the cards in twain.

Later, Mrs. Cohn pieced them together. It was the last chance of seeing her boy.

VIII

Unfortunately the Cathedral service fell on a Friday night, when S. Cohn, the Emporium closed, was wont to absorb the Sabbath peace. He would sit, after high tea, of which cold fried fish was the prime ingredient, dozing over the Jewish weekly. He still approved platonically of its bellicose sentiments. This January night, the Sabbath arriving early in the afternoon, he was snoring before seven, and Mrs. Cohn slipped out, risking his wrath. Her religion forced her to make the long journey on foot; but, hurrying, she arrived at St. Paul's before the doors were opened. And throughout the long walk was a morbid sense of one wasted ticket. She almost stopped at a friend's house to offer the exciting spectacle, but dread of a religious rebuff carried her past. With Christians she was not intimate enough to invite companionship. Besides, would not everybody ask why she was going without her husband?

She inquired for the door mentioned on her ticket, and soon found herself one of a crowd of parents on the steps. A very genteel crowd, she noted with pleasure. Her boy would be in good company. The scraps of conversation she caught dealt with a world of alien things—how little she was Anglicized, she thought, after all those years! And when she was borne forward into the Cathedral, her heart beat with a sense of dim, remote glories. To have lived so long in London and never to have entered here! She was awed and soothed by the solemn vistas, the perspectives of pillars and arches, the great nave, the white robes of the choir vaguely stirring a sense of angels, the overarching dome, defined by a fiery rim, but otherwise suggesting dim, skyey space.

Suddenly she realized that she was sitting among the men. But it did not seem to matter. The building kept one's thoughts religious. Around the waiting congregation, the human sea outside the Cathedral rumoured, and whenever the door was opened to admit some dignitary the roar of cheering was heard like a salvo saluting his entry. The Lord Mayor and the Aldermen passed along the aisle, preceded by mace-bearers; and mingled with this dazzle of gilded grandeur and robes, was a regretful memory of the days when, as a Town Councillor's consort, she had at least touched the hem of this unknown historic English life. The skirl of bagpipes shrilled from without—that exotic, half-barbarous sound now coming intimately into her life. And then, a little later, the wild cheers swept into the Cathedral like a furious wind, and the thrill of the marching soldiers passed into the air, and the congregation jumped up on the chairs and craned towards the right aisle to stare at the khaki couples. How she looked for Simon!

The volunteers filed on, filed on—beardless youths mostly, a few with a touch of thought in the face, many with the honest nullity of the clerk and the shopman, some with the prizefighter's jaw, but every face set and serious. Ah! at last, there was her Simon—manlier, handsomer than them all! But he did not see her: he marched on stiffly; he was already sucked up into this strange life. Her heart grew heavy. But it lightened again when the organ pealed out. The newspapers the next day found fault with the plain music, with the responses all in monotone, but to her it was divine. Only the words of the opening hymn, which she read in the 'Form of Prayer,' discomforted her:

'Fight the good fight with all thy might, Christ is thy Strength and Christ thy Right'

But the bulk of the liturgy surprised her, so strangely like was it to the Jewish. The ninety-first Psalm! Did they, then, pray the Jewish prayers in Christian churches? 'For He shall give His angels charge over thee: to keep thee in all thy ways.' Ah! how she prayed that for Simon!

As the ecclesiastical voice droned on, unintelligibly, inaudibly, in echoing, vaulted space, she studied the hymns and verses, with their insistent Old Testament savour, culminating in the farewell blessing:

'The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you peace.'

How often she had heard it in Hebrew from the priests as they blessed the other tribes! Her husband himself had chanted it, with uplifted palms and curiously grouped fingers. But never before had she felt its beauty: she had never even understood its words till she read the English of them in the gilt-edged Prayer-Book that marked rising wealth. Surely there had been some monstrous mistake in conceiving the two creeds as at daggers drawn, and though she only pretended to kneel with the others, she felt her knees sinking in surrender to the larger life around her.

As the volunteers filed out and the cheers came in, she wormed her way nearer to the aisle, scrambling even over backs of chairs in the general mellay. This time Simon saw her. He stretched out his martial arm and blew her a kiss. Oh, delicious tears, full of heartbreak and exaltation! This was their farewell.

She passed out into the roaring crowd, with a fantastic dream-sense of a night-sky and a great stone building, dark with age and solemnity, and unreal figures perched on railings and points of vantage, and hurrahing hordes that fused themselves with the procession and became part of its marching. She yearned forwards to vague glories, aware of a poor past. She ran with the crowd. How they cheered her boy! Her boy! She saw him carried off on the shoulders of Christian citizens. Yes; he was a hero. She was the mother of a hero.

IX

The first news she got from him was posted at St. Vincent. He wrote to her alone, with a jocose hope that his father would be satisfied with his sufferings on the voyage. Not only had the sea been rough, but he had suffered diabolically from the inoculation against enteric fever, which, even after he had got his sea-legs, kept him to his berth and gave him a 'Day of Atonement' thirst.

'Ah!' growled S. Cohn; 'he sees what a fool he's been, and he'll take the next boat back.'

'But that would be desertion.'

'Well, he didn't mind deserting the business.'

Mr. Cohn's bewilderment increased with every letter. The boy was sleeping in sodden trenches, sometimes without blankets; and instead of grumbling at that, his one grievance was that the regiment was not getting to the front. Heat and frost, hurricane and dust-storm—nothing came amiss. And he described himself as stronger than ever, and poured scorn on the medical wiseacre who had tried to refuse him.

'All the same,' sighed Hannah, 'I do hope they will just be used to guard the lines of communication.' She was full of war-knowledge acquired with painful eagerness, prattled of Basuto ponies and Mauser bullets, pontoons and pom-poms, knew the exact position of the armies, and marked her war-map with coloured pins.

Simon, too, had developed quite a literary talent under the pressure of so much vivid new life, and from his cheery letters she learned much that was not in the papers, especially in those tense days when the C.I.V.'S did at last get to the front—and remained there: tales of horses mercifully shot, and sheep mercilessly poisoned, and oxen dropping dead as they dragged the convoys; tales of muddle and accident, tales of British soldiers slain by their own protective cannon as they lay behind ant-heaps facing the enemy, and British officers culled under the very eyes of the polo-match; tales of hospital and camp, of shirts turned sable and putties worn to rags, and all the hidden miseries of uncleanliness and insanitation that underlie the glories of war. There were tales, too, of quarter-rations; but these she did not read to her husband, lest the mention of 'bully-beef' should remind him of how his son must be eating forbidden food. Once, even, two fat pigs were captured at a hungry moment for the battalion. But there came a day when S. Cohn seized those letters and read them first. He began to speak of his boy at the war—nay, to read the letters to enthralled groups in the synagogue lobby—groups that swallowed without reproach the tripha meat cooked in Simon's mess-tin.

It was like being Gabbai over again.

Moreover, Simon's view of the Boer was so strictly orthodox as to give almost religious satisfaction to the proud parent. 'A canting hypocrite, a psalm-singer and devil-dodger, he has no civilization worth the name, and his customs are filthy. Since the great trek he has acquired, from long intercourse with his Kaffir slaves, many of the native's savage traits. In short, a born liar, credulous and barbarous, crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn.'

'Crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn,' repeated S. Cohn, pausing impressively. 'Haven't I always said that? The boy only bears out what I knew without going there. But hear further! "Is it to be wondered at that the Boer farmer, hidden in the vast undulations of the endless veldt, with his wife, his children and his slaves, should lose all sense of proportion, ignorant of the outside world, his sole knowledge filtering through Jo-burgh?"'

As S. Cohn made another dramatic pause, it was suddenly borne in on his wife with a stab of insight that he was reading a description of himself—nay, of herself, of her whole race, hidden in the great world, awaiting some vague future of glory that never came. The important voice of her husband broke again upon her reflections:

'"He has held many nights of supplication to his fetish, and is still unconvinced that his God of Battles is asleep."' The reader chuckled, and a broad smile overspread the synagogue lobby. '"They are brave—oh, yes, but it is not what we mean by it—they are good fighters, because they have Dutch blood at the back of them, and a profound contempt for us. Their whole life has been spent on the open veldt (we are always fighting them on somebody's farm, who knows every inch of the ground), and they never risk anything except in the trap sort of manoeuvres. The brave rush of our Tommies is unknown to them, and their slim nature would only see the idiocy of walking into a death-trap, cool as in a play. Were there ever two races less alike?"' wound up the youthful philosopher in his tent. '"I really do not see how they are to live together after the war."'

'That's easy enough,' S. Cohn had already commented to his wife as oracularly as if she did not read the same morning paper. 'Intermarriage! In a generation or two there will be one fine Anglo-African race. That's the solution—mark my words. And you can tell the boy as much—only don't say I told you to write to him.'

'Father says I'm to tell you intermarriage is the solution,' Mrs. Cohn wrote obediently. 'He really is getting much softer towards you.'

'Tell father that's nonsense,' Simon wrote back. 'The worst individuals we have to deal with come from a Boer mother and an English father, deposited here by the first Transvaal war.'

S. Cohn snorted angrily at the message. 'That was because there were two Governments—he forgets there will be only one United Empire now.'

He was not appeased till Private Cohn was promoted, and sent home a thrilling adventure, which the proud reader was persuaded by the lobby to forward to the communal organ. The organ asked for a photograph to boot. Then S. Cohn felt not only Gabbai, but town councillor again.

This wonderful letter, of which S. Cohn distributed printed copies to the staff of the Emporium with a bean-feast air, ran:

'We go out every day—I am speaking of my own squadron—each officer taking his turn with twenty to fifty men, and sweep round the farms a few miles out; and we seldom come back without seeing Boers hanging round on the chance of a snipe at our flanks, or waiting to put up a trap if we go too far. The local commando fell on our cattle-guard the other day—a hundred and fifty to our twenty-five—and we suffered; it was a horrible bit of country. There was a young chap, Winstay—rather a pal of mine—he had a narrow squeak, knocked over by a shot in his breast. I managed to get him safe back to camp—Heaven knows how!—and they made me a lance-corporal, and the beggar says I saved his life; but it was really through carrying a fat letter from his sister—not even his sweetheart. We chaff him at missing such a romantic chance. He got off with a flesh wound, but there is a great blot of red ink on the letter. You may imagine we were not anxious to let our comrades go unavenged. My superiors being sick or otherwise occupied, I was allowed to make a night-march with thirty-five men on a farm nine miles away—just to get square. It was a nasty piece of work, as we were within a few miles of the Boer laager, three hundred strong. There was moonlight, too—it was like a dream, that strange, silent ride, with only the stumble of a horse breaking the regular thud of the hoofs. We surrounded the farm in absolute silence, dismounting some thousand yards away, and fixing bayonets. I told the men I wanted no shots—that would have brought down the commando—but cold steel and silence. We crept up and swept the farm—it was weird, but, alas! they were out on the loot. The men were furious, but we live in hopes.'

The end was a trifle disappointing, but S. Cohn, too, lived in hopes—of some monstrous and memorable butchery. Even his wife had got used to the firing-line, now that neither shot nor shell could harm her boy. 'For He shall give His angels charge over thee.' She had come to think her secret daily repetition of the ninety-first Psalm talismanic.

When Simon sent home the box which had held the chocolates presented by the Queen, a Boer bullet, and other curios, S. Cohn displayed them in his window, and the crowd and the business they brought him put him more and more in sympathy with Simon and the Empire. In conversation he deprecated the non-militarism of the Jew: 'If I were only a younger man myself, sir....'

The night Mafeking was relieved, the Emporium was decorated with bunting from roof to basement, and a great illuminated window revealed nothing but stacks of khaki trouserings.

So that, although the good man still sulked over Simon to his wife, she was not deceived; and, the time drawing nigh for Simon's return, she began to look happily forward to a truly reunited family.

In her wildest anxiety it never occurred to her that it was her husband who would die. Yet this is what the irony of fate brought to pass. In the unending campaign which death wages with life, S. Cohn was slain, and Simon returned unscratched from the war to recite the Kaddish in his memory.

X

Simon came back bronzed and a man. The shock of finding his father buried had supplied the last transforming touch; and, somewhat to his mother's surprise, he settled down contentedly to the business he had inherited. And now that he had practically unlimited money to spend, he did not seem to be spending it, but to be keeping better hours than when dodging his father's eye. His only absences from home he accounted for as visits to Winstay, his pal of the campaign, with whom he had got chummier than ever since the affair of the cattle-guard. Winstay, he said, was of good English family, with an old house in Harrow—fortunately on the London and North Western Railway, so that he could easily get a breath of country air on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. He seemed to have forgotten (although the Emporium was still closed on Saturdays) that riding was forbidden, and his mother did not remind him of it. The life that had been risked for the larger cause, she vaguely felt as enfranchised from the limitations of the smaller.

Nearly two months after Simon's return, a special military service was held at the Great Synagogue on the feast of Chanukah—the commemoration of the heroic days of Judas Maccabaeus—and the Jewish C.I.V.'s were among the soldiers invited. Mrs. Cohn, too, got a ticket for the imposing ceremony which was fixed for a Sunday afternoon.

As they sat at the midday meal on the exciting day, Mrs. Cohn said suddenly: 'Guess who paid me a visit yesterday.'

'Goodness knows,' said Simon.

'Mr. Sugarman.' And she smiled nervously.

'Sugarman?' repeated Simon blankly.

'The—the—er—the matrimonial agent.'

'What impudence! Before your year of mourning is up!'

Mrs. Cohn's sallow face became one flame. 'Not me! You!' she blurted.

'Me! Well, of all the cheek!' And Simon's flush matched his mother's.

'Oh, it's not so unreasonable,' she murmured deprecatingly. 'I suppose he thought you would be looking for a wife before long; and naturally,' she added, her voice growing bolder, 'I should like to see you settled before I follow your father. After all, you are no ordinary match. Sugarman says there isn't a girl in Bayswater, even, who would refuse you.'

'The very reason for refusing them,' cried Simon hotly. 'What a ghastly idea, that your wife would just as soon have married any other fellow with the same income!'

Mrs. Cohn cowered under his scorn, yet felt vaguely exalted by it, as by the organ in St. Paul's, and strange tears of shame came to complicate her emotions further. She remembered how she had been exported from Poland to marry the unseen S. Cohn. Ah! how this new young generation was snapping asunder the ancient coils! how the new and diviner sap ran in its veins!

'I shall only marry a girl I love, mother. And it's not likely to be one of these Jewish girls, I tell you frankly.'

She trembled. 'One of which Jewish girls?' she faltered.

'Oh, any sort. They don't appeal to me.'

Her face grew sallower. 'I am glad your father isn't alive to hear that,' she breathed.

'But father said intermarriage is the solution,' retorted Simon.

Mrs. Cohn was struck dumb. 'He was thinking how to make the Boers English,' she said at last.

'And didn't he say the Jews must be English, too?'

'Aren't there plenty of Jewish girls who are English?' she murmured miserably.

'You mean, who don't care a pin about the old customs? Then where's the difference?' retorted Simon.

The meal finished in uncomfortable silence, and Simon went off to don his khaki regimentals and join in the synagogue parade.

Mrs. Cohn's heart was heavy as she dressed for the same spectacle. Her brain was busy piecing it all together. Yes, she understood it all now—those sedulous Saturday and Sunday afternoons at Harrow. She lived at Harrow, then, this Christian, this grateful sister of the rescued Winstay: it was she who had steadied his life; hers were those 'fat letters,' faintly aromatic. It must be very wonderful, this strange passion, luring her son from his people with its forbidden glamour. How Highbury would be scandalized, robbed of so eligible a bridegroom! The sons-in-law she had enriched would reproach her for the shame imported into the family—they who had cleaved to the Faith! And—more formidable than all the rest—she heard the tongue of her cast-off seaport, to whose reverence or disesteem she still instinctively referred all her triumphs and failures.

Yet, on the other hand, surged her hero-son's scorn at the union by contract consecrated by the generations! But surely a compromise could be found. He should have love—this strange English thing—but could he not find a Jewess? Ah, happy inspiration! he should marry a quite poor Jewess—he had money enough, thank Heaven! That would show him he was not making a match, that he was truly in love.

But this strange girl at Harrow—he would never be happy with her! No, no; there were limits to Anglicization.

XI

It was not till she was seated in the ancient synagogue, relieved from the squeeze of entry in the wake of soldiers and the exhilaration of hearing 'See the Conquering Hero comes' pealing, she knew not whence, that she woke to the full strangeness of it all, and to the consciousness that she was actually sitting among the men—just as in St. Paul's. And what men! Everywhere the scarlet and grey of uniforms, the glister of gold lace—the familiar decorous lines of devout top-hats broken by glittering helmets, bear-skins, white nodding plumes, busbies, red caps a-cock, glengarries, all the colour of the British army, mixed with the feathered jauntiness of the Colonies and the khaki sombreros of the C.I.V.'s! Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards, Dragoon Guards, Lancers, Hussars, Artillery, Engineers, King's Royal Rifles, all the corps that had for the first time come clearly into her consciousness in her tardy absorption into English realities, Jews seemed to be among them all. And without conscription—oh, what would poor Solomon have thought of that?

The Great Synagogue itself struck a note of modern English gaiety, as of an hotel dining-room, freshly gilded, divested of its historic mellowness, the electric light replacing the ancient candles and flooding the winter afternoon with white resplendence. The pulpit—yes, the pulpit—was swathed in the Union Jack; and looking towards the box of the Parnass and Gabbai, she saw it was occupied by officers with gold sashes. Somebody whispered that he with the medalled breast was a Christian Knight and Commander of the Bath—'a great honour for the synagogue!' What! were Christians coming to Jewish services, even as she had gone to Christian? Why, here was actually a white cross on an officer's sleeve.

And before these alien eyes, the cantor, intoning his Hebrew chant on the steps of the Ark, lit the great many-branched Chanukah candlestick. Truly, the world was changing under her eyes.

And when the Chief Rabbi went toward the Ark in his turn, she saw that he wore a strange scarlet and white gown (military, too, she imagined in her ignorance), and—oh, even rarer sight!—he was followed by a helmeted soldier, who drew the curtain revealing the ornate Scrolls of the Law.

And amid it all a sound broke forth that sent a sweetness through her blood. An organ! An organ in the Synagogue! Ah! here indeed was Anglicization.

It was thin and reedy even to her ears, compared with that divine resonance in St. Paul's: a tinkling apology, timidly disconnected from the congregational singing, and hovering meekly on the borders of the service—she read afterwards that it was only a harmonium—yet it brought a strange exaltation, and there was an uplifting even to tears in the glittering uniforms and nodding plumes. Simon's eyes met his mother's, and a flash of the old childish love passed between them.

There was a sermon—the text taken with dual appropriateness from the Book of Maccabees. Fully one in ten of the Jewish volunteers, said the preacher, had gone forth to drive out the bold invader of the Queen's dominions. Their beloved country had no more devoted citizens than the children of Israel who had settled under her flag. They had been gratified, but not surprised, to see in the Jewish press the names of more than seven hundred Jews serving Queen and country. Many more had gone unrecorded, so that they had proportionally contributed more soldiers—from Colonel to bugler-boy—than their mere numbers would warrant. So at one in spirit and ideals were the Englishman and the Jew whose Scriptures he had imbibed, that it was no accident that the Anglophobes of Europe were also Anti-Semites.

And then the congregation rose, while the preacher behind the folds of the Union Jack read out the names of the Jews who had died for England in the far-off veldt. Every head was bent as the names rose on the hushed air of the synagogue. It went on and on, this list, reeking with each bloody historic field, recalling every regiment, British or colonial; on and on in the reverent silence, till a black pall seemed to descend, inch by inch, overspreading the synagogue. She had never dreamed so many of her brethren had died out there. Ah! surely they were knit now, these races: their friendship sealed in blood!

As the soldiers filed out of synagogue, she squeezed towards Simon and seized his hand for an instant, whispering passionately: 'My lamb, marry her—we are all English alike.'

Nor did she ever know that she had said these words in Yiddish!

XII

Now came an enchanting season of confidences; the mother, caught up in the glow of this strange love, learning to see the girl through the boy's eyes, though the only aid to his eloquence was the photograph of a plump little blonde with bewitching dimples. The time was not ripe yet for bringing Lucy and her together, he explained. In fact, he hadn't actually proposed. His mother understood he was waiting for the year of mourning to be up.

'But how will you be married?' she once asked.

'Oh, there's the registrar,' he said carelessly.

'But can't you make her a proselyte?' she ventured timidly.

He coloured. 'It would be absurd to suddenly start talking religion to her.'

'But she knows you're a Jew.'

'Oh, I dare say. I never hid it from her brother, so why shouldn't she know? But her father's a bit of a crank, so I rather avoid the subject.'

'A crank? About Jews?'

'Well, old Winstay has got it into his noddle that the Jews are responsible for the war—and that they leave the fighting to the English. It's rather sickening: even in South Africa we are not treated as we should be, considering——'

Her dark eye lost its pathetic humility. 'But how can he say that, when you yourself—when you saved his——'

'Well, I suppose just because he knows I was fighting, he doesn't think of me as a Jew. It's a bit illogical, I know.' And he smiled ruefully. 'But, then, logic is not the old boy's strong point.'

'He seemed such a nice old man,' said Mrs. Cohn, as she recalled the photograph of the white-haired cherub writing with a quill at a property desk.

'Oh, off his hobby-horse he's a dear old boy. That's why I don't help him into the saddle.'

'But how can he be ignorant that we've sent seven hundred at least to the war?' she persisted. 'Why, the paper had all their photographs!'

'What paper?' said Simon, laughing. 'Do you suppose he reads the Jewish what's-a-name, like you? Why, he's never heard of it!'

'Then you ought to show him a copy.'

'Oh, mother!' and he laughed again. 'That would only prove to him there are too many Jews everywhere.'

A cloud began to spread over Mrs. Cohn's hard-won content. But apparently it only shadowed her own horizon. Simon was as happily full of his Lucy as ever.

Nevertheless, there came a Sunday evening when Simon returned from Harrow earlier than his wont, and Hannah's dog-like eye noted that the cloud had at last reached his brow.

'You have had a quarrel?' she cried.

'Only with the old boy.'

'But what about?'

'The old driveller has just joined some League of Londoners for the suppression of the immigrant alien.'

'But you should have told him we all agree there should be decentralization,' said Mrs. Cohn, quoting her favourite Jewish organ.

'It isn't that—it's the old fellow's vanity that's hurt. You see, he composed the "Appeal to the Briton," and gloated over it so conceitedly that I couldn't help pointing out the horrible contradictions.'

'But Lucy——' his mother began anxiously.

'Lucy's a brick. I don't know what my life would have been without the little darling. But listen, mother.' And he drew out a portentous prospectus. 'They say aliens should not be admitted unless they produce a certificate of industrial capacity, and in the same breath they accuse them of taking the work away from the British workman. Now this isn't a Jewish question, and I didn't raise it as such—just a piece of muddle—and even as an Englishman I can't see how we can exclude Outlanders here after fighting for the Outland——'

'But Lucy——' his mother interrupted.

His vehement self-assertion passed into an affectionate smile.

'Lucy was dimpling all over her face. She knows the old boy's vanity. Of course she couldn't side with me openly.'

'But what will happen? Will you go there again?'

The cloud returned to his brow. 'Oh, well, we'll see.'

A letter from Lucy saved him the trouble of deciding the point.

'DEAR SILLY OLD SIM,' it ran,

'Father has been going on dreadfully, so you had better wait a few Sundays till he has cooled down. After all, you yourself admit there is a grievance of congestion and high rents in the East End. And it is only natural—isn't it?—that after shedding our blood and treasure for the Empire we should not be in a mood to see our country overrun by dirty aliens.'

'Dirty!' muttered Simon, as he read. 'Has she seen the Christian slums—Flower and Dean Street?' And his handsome Oriental brow grew duskier with anger. It did not clear till he came to:

'Let us meet at the Crystal Palace next Saturday, dear quarrelsome person. Three o'clock, in the Pompeian Room. I have got an aunt at Sydenham, and I can go in to tea after the concert and hear all about the missionary work in the South Sea Islands.'

XIII

Ensued a new phase in the relation of Simon and Lucy. Once they had met in freedom, neither felt inclined to revert to the restricted courtship of the drawing-room. Even though their chat was merely of books and music and pictures, it was delicious to make their own atmosphere, untroubled by the flippancy of the brother or the earnestness of the father. In the presence of Lucy's artistic knowledge Simon was at once abashed and stimulated. She moved in a delicate world of symphonies and silver-point drawings of whose very existence he had been unaware, and reverence quickened the sense of romance which their secret meetings had already enhanced.

Once or twice he spoke of resuming his visits to Harrow, but the longer he delayed the more difficult the conciliatory visit grew.

'Father is now deeper in the League than ever,' she told him. 'He has joined the committee, and the prospectus has gone forth in all its glorious self-contradiction.'

'But, considering I am the son of an alien, and I have fought for——'

'There, there! quarrelsome person,' she interrupted laughingly. 'No, no, no, you had better not come till you can forget your remote genealogy. You see, even now father doesn't quite realize you are a Jew. He thinks you have a strain of Jewish blood, but are in every other respect a decent Christian body.'

'Christian!' cried Simon in horror.

'Why not? You fought side by side with my brother; you ate ham with us.'

Simon blushed hotly. 'But, Lucy, you don't think religion is ham?'

'What, then? Merely Shem?' she laughed.

Simon laughed too. How clever she was! 'But you know I never could believe in the Trinity and all that. And, what's more, I don't believe you do yourself.'

'It isn't exactly what one believes. I was baptized into the Church of England—I feel myself a member. Really, Sim, you are a dreadfully argumentative and quarrelsome person.'

'I'll never quarrel with you, Lucy,' he said half entreatingly; for somehow he felt a shiver of cold at the word 'baptized,' as though himself plunged into the font.

In this wise did both glide away from any deep issue or decision till the summer itself glided away. Mrs. Cohn, anxiously following the courtship through Sim's love-smitten eyes, her suggestion that the girl be brought to see her received with equal postponement, began to fret for the great thing to come to pass. One cannot be always heroically stiffened to receive the cavalry of communal criticism. Waiting weakens the backbone. But she concealed from her boy these flaccid relapses.

'You said you'd bring her to see me when she returned from the seaside,' she ventured to remind him.

'So I did; but now her father is dragging her away to Scotland.'

'You ought to get married the moment she gets back.'

'I can't expect her to rush things—with her father to square. Still, you are not wrong, mother. It's high time we came to a definite understanding between ourselves at least.'

'What!' gasped Mrs. Cohn. 'Aren't you engaged?'

'Oh, in a way, of course. But we've never said so in so many words.'

For fear this should be the 'English' way, Mrs. Cohn forbore to remark that the definiteness of the Sugarman method was not without compensations. She merely applauded Simon's more sensible mood.

But Mrs. Cohn was fated to a further season of fret. Day after day the 'fat letters' arrived with the Scottish postmark and the faint perfume that always stirred her own wistful sense of lost romance—something far-off and delicious, with the sweetness of roses and the salt of tears. And still the lover, floating in his golden mist, vouchsafed her no definite news.

One night she found him restive beyond his wont. She knew the reason. For two days there had been no scented letter, and she saw how he started at every creak of the garden-gate, as he waited for the last post. When at length a step was heard crunching on the gravel, he rushed from the room, and Mrs. Cohn heard the hall-door open. Her ear, disappointed of the rat-tat, morbidly followed every sound; but it seemed a long time before her boy's returning footstep reached her. The strange, slow drag of it worked upon her nerves, and her heart grew sick with premonition.

He held out the letter towards her. His face was white. 'She cannot marry me, because I am a Jew,' he said tonelessly.

'Cannot marry you!' she whispered huskily. 'Oh, but this must not be! I will go to the father; I will explain! You saved his son—he owes you his daughter.'

He waved her hopelessly back to her seat—for she had started up. 'It isn't the father, it's herself. Now that I won't let her drift any longer, she can't bring herself to it. She's honest, anyway, my little Lucy. She won't fall back on the old Jew-baiter.'

'But how dare she—how dare she think herself above you!' Her dog-like eyes were blazing yet once again.

'Why are you Jews surprised?' he said bitterly. 'You've held yourself aloof from the others long enough, God knows. Yet you wonder they've got their prejudices, too.'

And, suddenly laying his head on the table, he broke into sobs—sobs that tore at his mother's heart, that were charged with memories of his ancient tears, of the days of paternal wrath and the rending of 'The Pirates of Pechili.' And, again, as in the days when his boyish treasures were changed to ashes, she stole towards him, with an involuntary furtive look to see if S. Cohn's back was turned, and laid her hands upon his heaving shoulders. But he shook her off! 'Why didn't a Boer bullet strike me down?' Then with a swift pang of remorse he raised his contorted face and drew hers close against it—their love the one thing saved from Anglicization.



THE JEWISH TRINITY



THE JEWISH TRINITY

I

With the Christian Mayoress of Middleton to take in to dinner at Sir Asher Aaronsberg's, Leopold Barstein as a Jewish native of that thriving British centre, should have felt proud and happy. But Barstein was young and a sculptor, fresh from the Paris schools and Salon triumphs. He had long parted company with Jews and Judaism, and to his ardent irreverence even the Christian glories of Middleton seemed unspeakably parochial. In Paris he had danced at night on the Boule Miche out of sheer joy of life, and joined in choruses over midnight bocks; and London itself now seemed drab and joyless, though many a gay circle welcomed the wit and high spirits and even the physical graces of this fortunate young man who seemed to shed a blonde radiance all around him. The factories of Middleton, which had manufactured Sir Asher Aaronsberg, ex-M.P., and nearly all his wealthy guests, were to his artistic eye an outrage upon a beautiful planet, and he was still in that crude phase of juvenile revolt in which one speaks one's thoughts of the mess humanity has made of its world. But, unfortunately, the Mayoress of Middleton was deafish, so that he could not even shock her with his epigrams. It was extremely disconcerting to have his bland blasphemies met with an equally bland smile. On his other hand sat Mrs. Samuels, the buxom and highly charitable relict of 'The People's Clothier,' whose ugly pictorial posters had overshadowed Barstein's youth. Little wonder that the artist's glance frequently wandered across the great shining table towards a girl who, if they had not been so plaguily intent on honouring his fame, might have now been replacing the Mayoress at his side. True, the girl was merely a Jewess, and he disliked the breed. But Mabel Aaronsberg was unexpected. She had a statuesque purity of outline and complexion; seemed, indeed, worthy of being a creation of his own. How the tedious old manufacturer could have produced this marmoreal prodigy provided a problem for the sculptor, as he almost silently ate his way through the long and exquisite menu.

Not that Sir Asher himself was unpicturesque. Indeed, he was the very picture of the bluff and burly Briton, white-bearded like Father Christmas. But he did not seem to lead to yonder vision of poetry and purity. Lady Aaronsberg, who might have supplied the missing link, was dead—before even arriving at ladyship, alas!—and when she was alive Barstein had not enjoyed the privilege of moving in these high municipal circles. This he owed entirely to his foreign fame, and to his invitation by the Corporation to help in the organization of a local Art Exhibition.

'I do admire Sir Asher,' the Mayoress broke in suddenly upon his reflections; 'he seems to me exactly like your patriarchs.'

A Palestinian patriarch was the last person Sir Asher, with his hovering lackeys, would have recalled to the sculptor, who, in so far as the patriarchs ever crossed his mind, conceived them as resembling Rembrandt's Rabbis. But he replied blandly: 'Our patriarchs were polygamists.'

'Exactly,' assented the deaf Mayoress.

Barstein, disconcerted, yearned to repeat his statement in a shout, but neither the pitch nor the proposition seemed suitable to the dinner-table. The Mayoress added ecstatically: 'You can imagine him sitting at the door of his tent, talking with the angels.'

This time Barstein did shout, but with laughter. All eyes turned a bit enviously in his direction. 'You're having all the fun down there,' called out Sir Asher benevolently; and the bluff Briton—even to the northerly burr—was so vividly stamped upon Barstein's mind that he wondered the more that the Mayoress could see him as anything but the prosy, provincial, whilom Member of Parliament he so transparently was. 'A mere literary illusion,' he thought. 'She has read the Bible, and now reads Sir Asher into it. As well see a Saxon pirate or a Norman jongleur in a modern Londoner.'

As if to confirm Barstein's vision of the bluff and burly Briton, Sir Asher was soon heard over the clatter of conversation protesting vehemently against the views of Tom Fuller, the degenerate son of a Tory squire.

'Give Ireland Home Rule?' he was crying passionately. 'Oh, my dear Mr. Fuller, it would be the beginning of the end of our Empire!'

'But the Irish have as much right to govern themselves as we have!' the young Englishman maintained.

'They would not so much govern themselves as misgovern the Protestant minority,' cried Sir Asher, becoming almost epigrammatic in his excitement. 'Home Rule simply means the triumph of Roman Catholicism.'

It occurred to the cynical Barstein that even the defeat of Roman Catholicism meant no victory for Judaism, but he stayed his tongue with a salted almond. Let the Briton make the running. This the young gentleman proceeded to do at a great pace.

'Then how about Home Rule for India? There's no Catholic majority there!'

'Give up India!' Sir Asher opened horrified eyes. This heresy was new to him. 'Give up the brightest jewel in the British crown! And let the Russian bear come and swallow it up! No, no! A thousand times no!' Sir Asher even gestured with his fork in his patriotic fervour, forgetting he was not on the platform.

'So I imagine the patriarchs to have talked!' said the Mayoress, admiringly observing his animation. Whereat the sculptor laughed once more. He was amused, too, at the completeness with which the lion of Judah had endued himself with the skin of the British lion. To a cosmopolitan artist this bourgeois patriotism was peculiarly irritating. But soon his eyes wandered again towards Miss Aaronsberg, and he forgot trivialities.

II

The end of the meal was punctuated, not by the rising of the ladies, but by the host's assumption of a black cap, which popped up from his coat-tail pocket. With his head thus orientally equipped for prayer, Sir Asher suddenly changed into a Rembrandtesque figure, his white beard hiding the society shirtfront; and as he began intoning the grace in Hebrew, the startled Barstein felt that the Mayoress had at least a superficial justification. There came to him a touch of new and artistic interest in this prosy, provincial ex-M.P., who, environed by powdered footmen, sat at the end of his glittering dinner-table uttering the language of the ancient prophets; and he respected at least the sturdiness with which Miss Aaronsberg's father wore his faith, like a phylactery, on his forehead. It said much for his character that these fellow-citizens of his had once elected him as their Member, despite his unpopular creed and race, and were now willing to sit at his table under this tedious benediction. Sir Asher did not even let them off with the shorter form of grace invented by a wise Rabbi for these difficult occasions, yet so far as was visible it was only the Jewish guests—comically distinguished by serviettes shamefacedly dabbed on their heads—who fidgeted under the pious torrent. These were no doubt fearful of boring the Christians whose precious society the Jew enjoyed on a parlous tenure. In the host's son Julius a superadded intellectual impatience was traceable. He had brought back from Oxford a contempt for his father's creed which was patent to every Jew save Sir Asher. Barstein, observing all this uneasiness, became curiously angry with his fellow-Jews, despite that he had scrupulously forborne to cover his own head with his serviette; a racial pride he had not known latent in him surged up through all his cosmopolitanism, and he maliciously trusted that the brave Sir Asher would pray his longest. He himself had been a tolerable Hebraist in his forcedly pious boyhood, and though he had neither prayed nor heard any Hebrew prayers for many a year, his new artistic interest led him to listen to the grace, and to disentangle the meaning from the obscuring layers of verbal association and from the peculiar chant enlivened by occasional snatches of melody with which it was intoned.

How he had hated this grace as a boy—this pious task-work that almost spoilt the anticipation of meals! But to-night, after so long an interval, he could look at it without prejudice, and with artistic aloofness render to himself a true impression of its spiritual value.

'We thank Thee, O Lord our God, because Thou didst give as an heritage unto our fathers a desirable, good, and ample land, and because Thou didst bring us forth, O Lord our God, from the land of Egypt, and didst deliver us from the house of bondage——'

Barstein heard no more for the moment; the paradox of this retrospective gratitude was too absorbing. What! Sir Asher was thankful because over three thousand years ago his ancestors had obtained—not without hard fighting for it—a land which had already been lost again for eighteen centuries. What a marvellous long memory for a race to have!

Delivered from the house of bondage, forsooth! Sir Asher, himself—and here a musing smile crossed the artist's lips—had never even known a house of bondage, unless, indeed, the House of Commons (from which he had been delivered by the Radical reaction) might be so regarded, and his own house was, as he was fond of saying, Liberty Hall. But that the Russian Jew should still rejoice in the redemption from Egypt! O miracle of pious patience! O sublime that grazed the ridiculous!

But Sir Asher was still praying on:

'Have mercy, O Lord our God, upon Israel Thy people, upon Jerusalem Thy city, upon Zion the abiding place of Thy glory, upon the kingdom of the house of David, Thine anointed....'

Barstein lost himself in a fresh reverie. Here was indeed the Palestinian patriarch. Not with the corporation of Middleton, nor the lobbies of Westminster, not with his colossal business, not even with the glories of the British Empire, was Sir Asher's true heart. He had but caught phrases from the environment. To his deepest self he was not even a Briton. 'Have mercy, O Lord, upon Israel Thy people.' Despite all his outward pomp and prosperity, he felt himself one of that dispersed and maltreated band of brothers who had for eighteen centuries resisted alike the storm of persecution and the sunshine of tolerance, and whose one consolation in the long exile was the dream of Zion. The artist in Barstein began to thrill. What more fascinating than to catch sight of the dreamer beneath the manufacturer, the Hebrew visionary behind the English M.P.!

This palatial dwelling-place with its liveried lackeys was, then, no fort of Philistinism in which an artist must needs asphyxiate, but a very citadel of the spirit. A new respect for his host began to steal upon him. Involuntarily he sought the face of the daughter; the secret of her beauty was, after all, not so mysterious. Old Asher had a soul, and 'the soul is form and doth the body make.'

Unconscious of the effect he was producing on the sensitive artist, the Rembrandtesque figure prayed on: 'And rebuild Jerusalem, the holy city, speedily and in our days....'

It was the climax of the romance that had so strangely stolen over the British dinner-table. Rebuild Jerusalem to-day! Did Jews really conceive it as a contemporary possibility? Barstein went hot and cold. The idea was absolutely novel to him; evidently as a boy he had not understood his own prayers or his own people. All his imagination was inflamed. He conjured up a Zion built up by such virile hands as Sir Asher's, and peopled by such beautiful mothers as his daughter: the great Empire that would spring from the unity and liberty of a race which even under dispersion and oppression was one of the most potent peoples on the planet. And thus, when the ladies at last rose, he was in so deep a reverie that he almost forgot to rise too, and when he did rise, he accompanied the ladies outside the door. It was only Miss Aaronsberg's tactful 'Don't you want to smoke?' that saved him.

'Almost as long a grace as the dinner!' Tom Fuller murmured to him as he returned to the table. 'Do the Jews say that after every meal?'

'They're supposed to,' Barstein replied, a little jarred as he picked up a cigar.

'No wonder they beat the Christians,' observed the young Radical, who evidently took original views. 'So much time for digestion would enable any race to survive in this age of quick lunches. In America, now they should rule the roast. Literally,' he added, with a laugh.

'It's a beautiful grace,' said Barstein rebukingly. 'The glamour of Zion thrown over the prose of diet.'

'You're not a Jew?' said Tom, with a sudden suspicion.

'Yes, I am,' the artist replied with a dignity that surprised himself.

'I should never have taken you for one!' said Tom ingenuously.

Despite himself, Barstein felt a thrill of satisfaction. 'But why?' he asked himself instantly. 'To feel complimented at not being taken for a Jew—what does it mean? Is there a core of anti-Semitism in my nature? Has our race reached self-contempt?'

'I beg your pardon,' Tom went on. 'I didn't mean to be irreverent. I appreciate the picturesqueness of it all—hearing the very language of the Bible, and all that. And I do sympathize with your desire for Jewish Home Rule.'

'My desire?' murmured the artist, taken aback. Sir Asher here interrupted them by pressing his '48 port upon both, and directing the artist's attention in particular to the pictures that hung around the stately dining-room. There was a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, a Landseer. He drew Barstein round the walls.

'I am very fond of the English school,' he said. His cap was back in his coat-tail, and he had become again the bluff and burly Briton.

'You don't patronize the Italians at all?' asked the artist.

'No,' said Sir Asher. He lowered his voice. 'Between you and I,' said he—it was his main fault of grammar—'in Italian art one is never safe from the Madonna, not to mention her Son.' It was a fresh reminder of the Palestinian patriarch. Sir Asher never discussed theology except with those who agreed with him. Nor did he ever, whether in private or in public, breathe an unfriendly word against his Christian fellow-citizens. All were sons of the same Father, as he would frequently say from the platform. But in his heart of hearts he cherished a contempt, softened by stupefaction, for the arithmetical incapacity of Trinitarians.

Christianity under any other aspect did not exist for him. It was a blunder impossible to a race with a genius for calculation. 'How can three be one?' he would demand witheringly of his cronies. The question was in his eye now as he summed up Italian art to the sculptor, and a faint smile twitching about his lips invited his fellow-Jew to share with him his feeling of spiritual and intellectual superiority to the poor blind Christians at his table, as well as to Christendom generally.

But the artist refused to come up on the pedestal. 'Surely the Madonna was a very beautiful conception,' he said.

Sir Asher looked startled. 'Ah yes, you are an artist,' he remembered. 'You think only of the beautiful outside. But how can there be three-in-one or one-in-three?'

Barstein did not reply, and Sir Asher added in a low scornful tone: 'Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.'

III

A sudden commission recalled Barstein to town before he could even pay his after-dinner call. But the seed sown in his soul that evening was not to be stifled. This seed was nothing less than the idea of a national revival of his people. He hunted up his old prayer-books, and made many discoveries as his modern consciousness depolarized page upon page that had never in boyhood been anything to him but a series of syllables to be gabbled off as rapidly as possible, when their meaning was not still further overlaid by being sung slowly to a tune. 'I might as well have turned a prayer-wheel,' he said regretfully, as he perceived with what iron tenacity the race beaten down by the Roman Empire and by every power that had reigned since, had preserved its aspiration for its old territory. And this mystery of race and blood, this beauty of unforgetting aspiration, was all physically incarnate in Mabel Aaronsberg.

He did not move one inch out of his way to see her, because he saw her all day long. She appeared all over his studio in countless designs in clay. But from this image of the beauty of the race, his deepening insight drove him to interpret the tragedy also, and he sought out from the slums and small synagogues of the East End strange forlorn figures, with ragged curls and wistful eyes. It was from one of these figures that he learnt to his astonishment that the dream of Zion, whereof he imagined himself the sole dreamer, was shared by myriads, and had even materialized into a national movement.

He joined the movement, and it led him into strange conventicles. He was put on a committee which met in a little back-room, and which at first treated him and his arguments with deference, soon with familiarity, and occasionally with contempt. Hucksters and cigar-makers held forth much more eloquently on their ideals than he could, with far greater command of Talmudic quotation, while their knowledge of how to run their local organization was naturally superior. But throughout all the mean surroundings, the petty wrangles, and the grotesque jealousies that tarnished the movement he retained his inner exaltation. He had at last found himself and found his art. He fell to work upon a great Michel-angelesque figure of the awakening genius of his people, blowing the trumpet of resurrection. It was sent for exhibition to a Zionist Congress, where it caused a furore, and where the artist met other artists who had long been working under the very inspiration which was so novel to him, and whose work was all around him in plaque and picture, in bust and book, and even postcard. Some of them were setting out for Palestine to start a School of Arts and Crafts.

Barstein began to think of joining them. Meantime the Bohemian circles which he had adorned with his gaiety and good-fellowship had been wondering what had become of him. His new work in the Exhibitions supplied a sort of answer, and the few who chanced to meet him reported dolefully that he was a changed man. Gone was the light-hearted and light-footed dancer of the Paris pavement. Silent the licentious wit of the neo-Pagan. This was a new being with brooding brow and pained eyes that lit up only when they beheld his dream. Never had Bohemia known such a transformation.

IV

But a change came over the spirit of the dream. Before he could seriously plan out his journey to Palestine, he met Mabel Aaronsberg in the flesh. She was staying in town for the season in charge of an aunt, and the meeting occurred in one of the galleries of the newer art, in front of Mabel's own self in marble. She praised the Psyche without in the least recognising herself, and Barstein, albeit disconcerted, could not but admit how far his statue was from the breathing beauty of the original.

After this the Jewish borderland of Bohemia, where writers and painters are courted, began to see Barstein again. But, unfortunately, this was not Mabel's circle, and Barstein was reduced to getting himself invited to that Jewish Bayswater, his loathing for which had not been overcome even by his new-found nationalism. Here, amid hundreds of talking and dancing shadows, with which some shadowy self of his own danced and talked, he occasionally had a magic hour of reality—with Mabel.

One could not be real and not talk of the national dream. Mabel, who took most of her opinions from her brother Julius, was frankly puzzled, though her marmoreal gift of beautiful silence saved her lover from premature shocks. She had, indeed, scarcely heard of such things. Zionism was something in the East End. Nobody in her class ever mentioned it. But, then, Barstein was a sculptor and strange, and, besides, he did not look at all like a Jew, so it didn't sound so horrible in his mouth. His lithe figure stood out almost Anglo-Saxon amid the crowds of hulking undersized young men, and though his manners were not so good as a Christian's—she never forgot his blunder at her father's dinner-party—still, he looked up to one with almost a Christian's adoration, instead of sizing one up with an Oriental's calculation. These other London Jews thought her provincial, she knew, whereas Barstein had one day informed her she was universal. Julius, too, had admired Barstein's sculpture, the modern note in which had been hailed by the Oxford elect. But what most fascinated Mabel was the constant eulogy of her lover's work in the Christian papers; and when at last the formal proposal came, it found her fearful only of her father's disapproval.

'He's so orthodox,' she murmured, as they sat in a rose-garlanded niche at a great Jewish Charity Ball, lapped around by waltz-music and the sweetness of love confessed.

'Well, I'm not so wicked as I was,' he smiled.

'But you smoke on the Sabbath, Leo—you told me.'

'And you told me your brother Julius does the same.'

'Yes, but father doesn't know. If Julius wants to smoke on Friday evening, he always goes to his own room.'

'And I shan't smoke in your father's.'

'No—but you'll tell him. You're so outspoken.'

'Well, I won't tell him—unless he asks me.'

She looked sad. 'He won't ask you—he'll never get as far.'

He smiled confidently. 'You're not very encouraging, dear; what's the matter with me?'

'Everything. You're an artist, with all sorts of queer notions. And you're not so'—she blushed and hesitated—'not so rich——'

He pressed her fingers. 'Yes, I am; I'm the richest man here.'

A little delighted laugh broke from her lips, though they went on: 'But you told me your profits are small—marble is so dear.'

'So is celibacy. I shall economize dreadfully by marrying.'

She pouted; his flippancy seemed inadequate to the situation, and he seemed scarcely to realize that she was an heiress. But he continued to laugh away her fears. She was so beautiful and he was so strong—what could stand between them? Certainly not the Palestinian patriarch with whose inmost psychology he had, fortunately, become in such cordial sympathy.

But Mabel's pessimism was not to be banished even by the supper champagne. They had secured a little table for two, and were recklessly absorbed in themselves.

'At the worst, we can elope to Palestine,' he said at last, gaily serious.

Mabel shuddered. 'Live entirely among Jews!' she cried.

The radiance died suddenly out of his face; it was as if she had thrust the knife she was wielding through his heart. Her silent reception of his nationalist rhapsodies he had always taken for agreement.

Nor might Mabel have undeceived him had his ideas remained Platonic. Their irruption into the world of practical politics, into her own life, was, however, another pair of shoes. Since Barstein had brought Zionism to her consciousness, she had noted that distinguished Christians were quite sympathetic, but this was the one subject on which Christian opinion failed to impress Mabel. 'Zionism's all very well for Christians—they're in no danger of having to go to Palestine,' she had reflected shrewdly.

'And why couldn't you live entirely among Jews?' Barstein asked slowly.

Mabel drew a great breath, as if throwing off a suffocating weight. 'One couldn't breathe,' she explained.

'Aren't you living among Jews now?'

'Don't look so glum, silly. You don't want Jews as background as well as foreground. A great Ghetto!' And again she shuddered instinctively.

'Every other people is background as well as foreground. And you don't call France a Ghetto or Italy a Ghetto?' There was anti-Semitism, he felt—unconscious anti-Semitism—behind Mabel's instinctive repugnance to an aggregation of Jews. And he knew that her instinct would be shared by every Jew in that festive aggregation around him. His heart sank. Never—even in those East End back-rooms where the pitiful disproportion of his consumptive-looking collaborators to their great task was sometimes borne in dismally upon him—had he felt so black a despair as in this brilliant supper-room, surrounded by all that was strong and strenuous in the race—lawyers and soldiers, and men of affairs, whose united forces and finances could achieve almost anything they set their heart upon.

'Jews can't live off one another,' Mabel explained with an air of philosophy.

Barstein did not reply. He was asking himself with an artist's analytical curiosity whence came this suicidal anti-Semitism. Was it the self-contempt natural to a race that had not the strength to build and fend for itself? No, alas! it did not even spring from so comparatively noble a source. It was merely a part of their general imitation of their neighbours—Jews, reflecting everything, had reflected even the dislike for the Jew; only since the individual could not dislike himself, he applied the dislike to the race. And this unconscious assumption of the prevailing point of view was quickened by the fact that the Jewish firstcomers were always aware of an existence on sufferance, with their slowly-won privileges jeopardized if too many other Jews came in their wake. He consulted his own pre-Zionist psychology. 'Yes,' he decided. 'Every Jew who moves into our country, our city, our watering-place, our street even, seems to us an invader or an interloper. He draws attention to us, he accentuates our difference from the normal, he increases the chance of the renewal of Rishus (malice). And so we become anti-Semites ourselves. But by what a comical confusion of logic is it that we carry over the objection to Jewish aggregation even to an aggregation in Palestine, in our own land! Or is it only too logical? Is it that the rise of a Jewish autonomous power would be a standing reminder to our fellow-citizens that we others are not so radically British or German or French or American as we have vaunted ourselves? Are we afraid of being packed off to Palestine and is the fulfilment of the dream of eighteen centuries our deadliest dread?'

The thought forced from him a sardonic smile.

'And I feared you were like King Henry—never going to smile again.' Mabel smiled back in relief.

'We're such a ridiculous people,' he answered, his smile fading into sombreness. 'Neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring.'

'Well, finish your good white fowl,' laughed Mabel. She had felt her hold over him slipping, and her own apprehensions now vanished in the effort to banish his gloom.

But she had only started him on a new tack. 'Fowl!' he cried grimly. 'Kosher, of course, but with bits of fried Wurst to ape the scraps of bacon. And presently we shall be having water ices to simulate cream. We can't even preserve our dietary individuality. Truly said Feuerbach, "Der Mensch ist was er isst." In Palestine we shall at least dare to be true to our own gullets.' He laughed bitterly.

'You're not very romantic,' Mabel pouted. Indeed, this Barstein, whose mere ideal could so interrupt the rhapsodies due to her admissions of affection, was distinctly unsatisfactory. She touched his hand furtively under the tablecloth.

'After all, she is very young,' he thought, thrilling. And youth was plastic—he, the sculptor, could surely mould her. Besides, was she not Sir Asher's daughter? She must surely have inherited some of his love for Palestine and his people. It was this Philistine set that had spoiled her. Julius, too, that young Oxford prig—he reflected illogically—had no doubt been a baleful influence.

'Shall I give you some almond-pudding?' he replied tenderly.

Mabel laughed uneasily. 'I ask for romance, and you offer me almond-pudding. Oh, I should like to go to a Jewish party where there wasn't almond-pudding!'

'You shall—in Palestine,' he laughed back.

She pouted again. 'All roads lead to Palestine.'

'They do,' he said seriously. 'Without Palestine our past is a shipwreck and our future a quicksand.'

She looked frightened again. 'But what should we do there? We can't pray all day long.'

'Of course not,' he said eagerly. 'There's the new generation to train for its glorious future. I shall teach in the Arts and Crafts School. Bezalel, it's called; isn't that a beautiful name? It's from Bezalel, the first man mentioned in the Bible as filled with Divine wisdom and understanding in all manner of workmanship.'

She shook her head. 'You'll be excommunicated. The Palestine Rabbis always excommunicate everything and everybody.'

He laughed. 'What do you know about Palestine?'

'More than you think. Father gets endless letters from there with pressed flowers and citrons, and olive-wood boxes and paper-knives—a perennial shower. The letters are generally in the most killing English. And he won't let me laugh at them because he has a vague feeling that even Palestine spelling and grammar are holy.'

Barstein laughed again. 'We'll send all the Rabbis to Jericho.'

She smiled, but retorted: 'That's where they'll send you, you maker of graven images. Why, your very profession is forbidden.'

'I'll corner 'em with this very Bezalel text. The cutting of stones is just one of the arts which God says He had inspired Bezalel with. Besides, you forget my statue at the Bale Congress.'

'Bale isn't Palestine. There's nothing but superstition and squalor, and I'm sorry to say father's always bolstering it all up with his cheques.'

'Bravo, Sir Asher! Unconsciously he has been bolstering up the eventual Renaissance. Your father and his kind have kept the seed alive; we shall bring it to blossom.'

His prophetic assurance cast a fresh shade of apprehension over her marmoreal brow. But her face lightened with a sudden thought. 'Well, perhaps, after all, we shan't need to elope.'

'I never thought for a moment we should,' he answered as cheerfully. 'But, all the same, we can spend our honeymoon in Palestine.'

'Oh, I don't mind that,' said Mabel. 'Lots of Christians do that. There was a Cook's party went out from Middleton for last Easter.'

The lover was too pleased with her acquiescence in the Palestinian honeymoon to analyse the terms in which it was given. He looked into her eyes, and saw there the Shechinah—the Divine glory that once rested on Zion.

V

It was in this happier mood that Barstein ran down to Middleton to plead his suit verbally with Sir Asher Aaronsberg. Mabel had feared to commit their fates to a letter, whether from herself or her lover. A plump negative would be so difficult to fight against. A personal interview permitted one to sound the ground, to break the thing delicately, to reason, to explain, to charm away objections. It was clearly the man's duty to face the music.

Not that Barstein expected anything but the music of the Wedding March. He was glad that his original contempt for Sir Asher had been exchanged for sincere respect, and that the bluff Briton was a mere veneer. It was to the Palestinian patriarch that he would pour out his hopes and his dreams.

Alas! he found only the bluff Briton, and a Briton no longer genially, but bluntly, bluff.

'It is perfectly impossible.'

Barstein, bewildered, pleaded for enlightenment. Was he not pious enough, or not rich enough, too artistic or too low-born? Or did Sir Asher consider his past life improper or his future behaviour dubious? Let Sir Asher say.

But Sir Asher would not say. 'I am not bound to give my reasons. We are all proud of your work—it confers honour on our community. The Mayor alluded to it only yesterday.' He spoke in his best platform manner. 'But to receive you into my family—that is another matter.'

And all the talk advanced things no further.

'It would be an entirely unsuitable match.' Sir Asher caressed his long beard with an air of finality.

With a lover's impatience, Barstein had made the mistake of seeking Sir Asher in his counting-house, where the municipal magnate sat among his solidities. The mahogany furniture, the iron safes, the ledgers, the silent obsequious clerks and attendants through whom Barstein had had to penetrate, the factory buildings stretching around, with their sense of throbbing machinery and disciplined workers, all gave the burly Briton a background against which visions and emotions seemed as unreal as ghosts under gaslight. The artist felt all this solid life closing round him like the walls of a torture-chamber, squeezing out his confidence, his aspirations, his very life.

'Then you prefer to break your daughter's heart!' he cried desperately.

'Break my daughter's heart!' echoed Sir Asher in amaze. It was apparently a new aspect to him.

'You don't suppose she won't suffer dreadfully?' Barstein went on, perceiving his advantage.

'Break her heart!' repeated Sir Asher, startled out of his discreet reticence. 'I'd sooner break her heart than see her married to a Zionist!'

This time it was the sculptor's turn to gasp.

'To a what?' he cried.

'To a Zionist. You don't mean to deny you're a Zionist?' said Sir Asher sternly.

Barstein gazed at him in silence.

'Come, come,' said Sir Asher. 'You don't suppose I don't read the Jewish papers? I know all about your goings-on.'

The artist found his tongue. 'But—but,' he stammered, 'you yearn for Zion too.'

'Naturally. But I don't presume to force the hand of Providence.'

'How can any of us force Providence to do anything it doesn't want to? Surely it is through human agency that Providence always works. God helps those who help themselves.'

'Spare me your blasphemies. Perhaps you think you are the Messiah.'

'I can be an atom of Him. The whole Jewish people is its own Messiah—God working through it.'

'Take care, young man; you'll be talking Trinity next. And with these heathen notions you expect to marry my daughter! You must excuse me if I wish to hear no further.' His hand began to wander towards the row of electric bells on his desk.

'Then how do you suppose we shall ever get to Palestine?' inquired the irritated artist.

Sir Asher raised his eyes to the ceiling. 'In God's good time,' he said.

'And when will that be?'

'When we are either too good or too bad for our present sphere. To-day we are too neutral. Besides, there will be signs enough.'

'What signs?'

'Read your Bible. Mount Zion will be split by an earthquake, as the prophet——'

Barstein interrupted him with an impatient gesture. 'But why can't we go to Jerusalem and wait for the earthquake there?' he asked.

'Because we have a mission to the nations. We must live dispersed. We have to preach the unity of God.'

'I have never heard you preach it. You lowered your voice when you denounced the Trinity to me, lest the Christians should hear.'

'We have to preach silently, by our example. Merely by keeping our own religion we convert the world.'

'But who keeps it? Dispersion among Sunday-keeping peoples makes our very Sabbath an economic impossibility.'

'I have not found it so,' said Sir Asher crushingly. 'Indeed, the growth of the Saturday half-holiday since my young days is a remarkable instance of Judaizing.'

'So we have to remain dispersed to promote the week-end holiday?'

'To teach international truth,' Sir Asher corrected sharply; 'not narrow tribalism.'

'But we don't remain dispersed. Five millions are herded in the Russian Pale to begin with.'

'The Providence of God has long been scattering them to New York.'

'Yes, four hundred thousand in one square mile. A pretty scattering!'

Sir Asher flushed angrily. 'But they go to the Argentine too. I heard of a colony even in Paraguay.'

'Where they are preaching the Unity to the Indians.'

'I do not discuss religion with a mocker. We are in exile by God's decree—we must suffer.'

'Suffer!' The artist's glance wandered cynically round the snug solidities of Sir Asher's exile, but he forbore to be personal. 'Then if we must suffer, why did you subscribe so much to the fund for the Russian Jews?'

Sir Asher looked mollified at Barstein's acquaintance with his generosity. 'That I might suffer with them,' he replied, with a touch of humour.

'Then you are a Jewish patriot,' retorted Barstein.

The bluff British face grew clouded again.

'Heaven forbid. I only know of British patriots. You talk treason to your country, young man.'

'Treason—I!' The young man laughed bitterly.

'It is you Zionists that will undermine all the rights we have so painfully won in the West.'

'Oh, then you're not really a British patriot,' Barstein began.

'I will beg you to remember, sir, that I equipped a corps of volunteers for the Transvaal.'

'I dare say. But a corps of volunteers for Zion—that is blasphemy, narrow tribalism.'

'Zion's soil is holy; we want no volunteers there: we want saints and teachers. And what would your volunteers do in Zion? Fight the Sultan with his million soldiers? They couldn't even live in Palestine as men of peace. There is neither coal nor iron—hence no manufactures. Agriculture? It's largely stones and swamps. Not to mention it's too hot for Jews to work in the fields. They'd all starve. You've no right to play recklessly with human lives. Besides, even if Palestine were as fertile as England, Jews could never live off one another. And think how they'd quarrel!'

Sir Asher ended almost good-humouredly. His array of arguments seemed to him a row of steam-hammers.

'We can live off one another as easily as any other people. As for quarrelling, weren't you in Parliament? Party government makes quarrel the very basis of the Constitution.'

Sir Asher flushed again. A long lifetime of laying down the law had ill prepared him for repartee.

'A pretty mess we should make of Government!' he sneered.

'Why? We have given Ministers to every Cabinet in the world.'

'Yes—we're all right as long as we're under others. Sir Asher was recovering his serenity.

'All right so long as we're under others!' gasped the artist. 'Do you realize what you're saying, Sir Asher? The Boers against whom you equipped volunteers fought frenziedly for three years not to be under others! And we—the thought of Jewish autonomy makes us foam at the mouth. The idea of independence makes us turn in the graves we call our fatherlands.'

Sir Asher dismissed the subject with a Podsnappian wave of the hand. 'This is all a waste of breath. Fortunately the acquisition of Palestine is impossible.'

'Then why do you pray for it—"speedily and in our days"?'

Sir Asher glared at the bold questioner.

'That seems a worse waste of breath,' added Barstein drily.

'I said you were a mocker,' said Sir Asher severely. 'It is a Divine event I pray for—not the creation of a Ghetto.'

'A Ghetto!' Barstein groaned in sheer hopelessness. 'Yes, you're an anti-Semite too—like your daughter, like your son, like all of us. We're all anti-Semites.'

'I an anti-Semite! Ho! ho! ho!' Sir Asher's anger broke down in sheer amusement. 'I have made every allowance for your excitement,' he said, recovering his magisterial note. 'I was once in love myself. But when it comes to calling me an anti-Semite, it is obvious you are not in a fit state to continue this interview. Indeed, I no longer wonder that you think yourself the Messiah.'

'Even if I do, our tradition only makes the Messiah a man; somebody some day will have to win your belief. But what I said was that God acts through man.'

'Ah yes,' said Sir Asher good-humouredly. 'Three-in-one and one-in-three.'

'And why not?' said Barstein with a flash of angry intuition. 'Aren't you a trinity yourself?'

'Me?' Sir Asher was now quite sure of the sculptor's derangement.

'Yes—the Briton, the Jew, and the anti-Semite—three-in-one and one-in-three.'

Sir Asher touched one of the electric bells with a jerk. He was quite alarmed.

Barstein turned white with rage at his dismissal. Never would he marry into these triune tribes. 'And it's the same in every land where we're emancipated, as it is called,' he went on furiously. 'The Jew's a patriot everywhere, and a Jew everywhere and an anti-Semite everywhere. Passionate Hungarians, and true-born Italians, eagle-waving Americans, and loyal Frenchmen, imperial Germans, and double Dutchmen, we are dispersed to preach the Unity, and what we illustrate is the Jewish trinity. A delicious irony! Three-in-one and one-in-three.' He laughed; to Sir Asher his laugh sounded maniacal. The old gentleman was relieved to see his stalwart doorkeeper enter.

Barstein turned scornfully on his heel. 'Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance,' he ended grimly.



THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER



THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER

I

There was a storm in Sudminster, not on the waters which washed its leading Jews their living, but in the breasts of these same marine storekeepers. For a competitor had appeared in their hive of industry—an alien immigrant, without roots or even relatives at Sudminster. And Simeon Samuels was equipped not only with capital and enterprise—the showy plate-glass front of his shop revealed an enticing miscellany—but with blasphemy and bravado. For he did not close on Friday eve, and he opened on Saturday morning as usual.

The rumour did not get round all Sudminster the first Friday night, but by the Sabbath morning the synagogue hummed with it. It set a clammy horror in the breasts of the congregants, distracted their prayers, gave an unreal tone to the cantor's roulades, brought a tremor of insecurity into the very foundations of their universe. For nearly three generations a congregation had been established in Sudminster—like every Jewish congregation, a camp in not friendly country—struggling at every sacrifice to keep the Holy Day despite the supplementary burden of Sunday closing, and the God of their fathers had not left unperformed His part of the contract. For 'the harvests' of profit were abundant, and if 'the latter and the former rain' of their unchanging supplication were mere dried metaphors to a people divorced from Palestine and the soil for eighteen centuries, the wine and the oil came in casks, and the corn in cakes. The poor were few and well provided for; even the mortgage on the synagogue was paid off. And now this Epicurean was come to trouble the snug security, to break the long chain of Sabbath observance which stretched from Sinai. What wonder if some of the worshippers, especially such as had passed his blatant shop-window on their return from synagogue on Friday evening, were literally surprised that the earth had not opened beneath him as it had opened beneath Korah.

'Even the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath was stoned to death,' whispered the squat Solomon Barzinsky to the lanky Ephraim Mendel, marine-dealers both.

'Alas! that would not be permitted in this heathen country,' sighed Ephraim Mendel, hitching his praying-shawl more over his left shoulder. 'But at least his windows should be stoned.'

Solomon Barzinsky smiled, with a gleeful imagining of the shattering of the shameless plate-glass. 'Yes, and that wax-dummy of a sailor should be hung as an atonement for his—Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.' The last phrase Solomon suddenly shouted in Hebrew, in antiphonal response to the cantor, and he rose three times on his toes, bowing his head piously. 'No wonder he can offer gold lace for the price of silver,' he concluded bitterly.

'He sells shoddy new reach-me-downs as pawned old clo,' complained Lazarus Levy, who had taken over S. Cohn's business, together with his daughter Deborah, 'and he charges the Sudminster donkey-heads more than the price we ask for 'em as new.'

Talk of the devil——! At this point Simeon Samuels stalked into the synagogue, late but serene.

Had the real horned Asmodeus walked in, the agitation could not have been greater. The first appearance in synagogue of a new settler was an event in itself; but that this Sabbath-breaker should appear at all was startling to a primitive community. Escorted by the obsequious and unruffled beadle to the seat he seemed already to have engaged—that high-priced seat facing the presidential pew that had remained vacant since the death of Tevele the pawnbroker—Simeon Samuels wrapped himself reverently in his praying-shawl, and became absorbed in the service. His glossy high hat bespoke an immaculate orthodoxy, his long black beard had a Rabbinic religiousness, his devotion was a rebuke to his gossiping neighbours.

A wave of uneasiness passed over the synagogue. Had he been the victim of a jealous libel? Even those whose own eyes had seen him behind his counter when he should have been consecrating the Sabbath-wine at his supper-table, wondered if they had been the dupe of some hallucination.

When, in accordance with hospitable etiquette, the new-comer was summoned canorously to the reading of the Law—'Shall stand Simeon, the son of Nehemiah'—and he arose and solemnly mounted the central platform, his familiarity with the due obeisances and osculations and benedictions seemed a withering reply to the libel. When he descended, and the Parnass proffered his presidential hand in pious congratulation upon the holy privilege, all the congregants who found themselves upon his line of return shot forth their arms with remorseful eagerness, and thus was Simeon Samuels switched on to the brotherhood of Sudminsterian Israel. Yet as his now trusting co-religionists passed his shop on their homeward walk—and many a pair of legs went considerably out of its way to do so—their eyes became again saucers of horror and amaze. The broad plate-glass glittered nakedly, unveiled by a single shutter; the waxen dummy of the sailor hitched devil-may-care breeches; the gold lace, ticketed with layers of erased figures, boasted brazenly of its cheapness; the procession of customers came and went, and the pavement, splashed with sunshine, remained imperturbably, perturbingly acquiescent.

II

On the Sunday night Solomon Barzinsky and Ephraim Mendel in pious black velvet caps, and their stout spouses in gold chains and diamond earrings, found themselves playing solo whist in the Parnass's parlour, and their religious grievance weighed upon the game. The Parnass, though at heart as outraged as they by the new departure, felt it always incumbent upon him to display his presidential impartiality and his dry humour. His authority, mainly based on his being the only retired shopkeeper in the community, was greatly strengthened by his slow manner of taking snuff at a crisis. 'My dear Mendel,' observed the wizened senior, flicking away the spilth with a blue handkerchief, 'Simeon Samuels has already paid his annual subscription—and you haven't!'

'My money is good,' Mendel replied, reddening.

'No wonder he can pay so quickly!' said Solomon Barzinsky, shuffling the cards savagely.

'How he makes his money is not the question,' said the Parnass weightily. 'He has paid it, and therefore if I were to expel him, as you suggest, he might go to Law.'

'Law!' retorted Solomon. 'Can't we prove he has broken the Law of Moses?'

'And suppose?' said the Parnass, picking up his cards placidly. 'Do we want to wash our dirty Talysim (praying-shawls) in public?'

'He is right, Solomon,' said Mrs. Barzinsky. 'We should become a laughing-stock among the heathen.'

'I don't believe he'd drag us to the Christian courts,' the little man persisted. 'I pass.'

The rubber continued cheerlessly. 'A man who keeps his shop open on Sabbath is capable of anything,' said the lanky Mendel, gloomily sweeping in his winnings.

The Parnass took snuff judicially. 'Besides, he may have a Christian partner who keeps all the Saturday profits,' he suggested.

'That would be just as forbidden,' said Barzinsky, as he dealt the cards.

'But your cousin David,' his wife reminded him, 'sells his groceries to a Christian at Passover.'

'That is permitted. It would not be reasonable to destroy hundreds of pounds of leaven. But Sabbath partnerships are not permitted.'

'Perhaps the question has never been raised,' said the Parnass.

'I am enough of a Lamdan (pundit) to answer it,' retorted Barzinsky.

'I prefer going to a specialist,' rejoined the Parnass.

Barzinsky threw down his cards. 'You can go to the devil!' he cried.

'For shame, Solomon!' said his wife. 'Don't disturb the game.'

'To Gehenna with the game! The shame is on a Parnass to talk like an Epikouros (Epicurean).'

The Parnass blew his nose elaborately. 'It stands in the Talmud: "For vain swearing noxious beasts came into the world." And if——'

'It stands in the Psalmist,' Barzinsky interrupted: '"The Law of Thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver."'

'It stands in the Perek,' the Parnass rejoined severely, 'that the wise man does not break in upon the speech of his fellow.'

'It stands in the Shulchan Aruch,' Barzinsky shrieked, 'that for the sanctification of the Sabbath——'

'It stands in the Talmud,' interposed Mendel, with unwonted animation in his long figure, 'that one must not even offer a nut to allure customers. From light to heavy, therefore, it may be deduced that——'

A still small voice broke in upon the storm. 'But Simeon Samuels hasn't a Christian partner,' said Mrs. Mendel.

There was an embarrassed pause.

'He has only his wife to help him,' she went on. 'I know, because I went to the shop Friday morning on pretence of asking for a cuckoo-clock.'

'But a marine-dealer doesn't sell clocks,' put in the Parnass's wife timidly. It was her first contribution to the conversation, for she was overpowered by her husband's greatness.

'Don't be silly, Hannah!' said the Parnass. 'That was just why Mrs. Mendel asked for it.'

'Yes, but unfortunately Simeon Samuels did have one,' Mrs. Mendel confessed; 'and I couldn't get out of buying it.'

There was a general laugh.

'Cut-throat competition, I call it,' snarled Solomon Barzinsky, recovering from his merriment.

'But you don't sell clocks,' said the Parnass.

'That's just it; he gets hold of our customers on pretence of selling them something else. The Talmudical prohibition cited by Mendel applies to that too.'

'So I wasn't so silly,' put in the Parnass's wife, feeling vaguely vindicated.

'Well, you saw his wife,' said the Parnass to Mendel's wife, disregarding his own. 'More than I've done, for she wasn't in synagogue. Perhaps she is the Christian partner.' His suggestion brought a new and holier horror over the card-table.

'No, no,' replied Mrs. Mendel reassuringly. 'I caught sight of her frying fish in the kitchen.'

This proof of her Jewishness passed unquestioned, and the new-born horror subsided.

'But in spite of the fish,' said Mr. Mendel, 'she served in the shop while he was at synagogue.'

'Yes,' hissed Barzinsky; 'and in spite of the synagogue he served in the shop. A greater mockery was never known!'

'Not at all, not at all,' said the Parnass judicially. 'If a man breaks one commandment, that's no reason he should break two.'

'But he does break two,' Solomon thundered, smiting the green cloth with his fist; 'for he steals my custom by opening when I'm closed.'

'Take care—you will break my plates,' said the Parnass. 'Take a sandwich.'

'Thank you—you've taken away my appetite.'

'I'm sorry—but the sandwiches would have done the same. I really can't expel a respectable seat-holder before I know that he is truly a sinner in Israel. As it is written, "Thou shalt inquire and make search and ask diligently." He may have only opened this once by way of a send-off. Every dog is allowed one bite.'

'At that rate, it would be permitted to eat a ham-sandwich—just for once,' said Solomon scathingly.

'Don't say I called you a dog,' the Parnass laughed.

'A mezaire!' announced the hostess hurriedly. 'After all, it's the Almighty's business, not ours.'

'No, it's our business,' Solomon insisted.

'Yes,' agreed the Parnass drily; 'it is your business.'

III

The week went by, with no lull in the storm, though the plate-glass window was unshaken by the gusts. It maintained its flaunting seductiveness, assisted, people observed, by Simeon Samuels' habit of lounging at his shop-door and sucking in the hesitating spectator. And it did not shutter itself on the Sabbath that succeeded.

The horror was tinged with consternation. The strange apathy of the pavement and the sky, the remissness of the volcanic fires and the celestial thunderbolts in face of this staring profanity, lent the cosmos an air almost of accessory after the fact. Never had the congregation seen Heaven so openly defied, and the consequences did not at all correspond with their deep if undefined forebodings. It is true a horse and carriage dashed into Peleg, the pawnbroker's, window down the street, frightened, Peleg maintained, by the oilskins fluttering outside Simeon Samuels' shop; but as the suffering was entirely limited to the nerves of Mrs. Peleg, who was pious, and to the innocent nose of the horse, this catastrophe was not quite what was expected. Solomon Barzinsky made himself the spokesman of the general dissatisfaction, and his remarks to the minister after the Sabbath service almost insinuated that the reverend gentleman had connived at a breach of contract.

The Rev. Elkan Gabriel quoted Scripture. 'The Lord is merciful and long-suffering, and will not at once awaken all His wrath.'

'But meantime the sinner makes a pretty penny!' quoth Solomon, unappeased. 'Saturday is pay-day, and the heathen haven't patience to wait till the three stars are out and our shops can open. It is your duty, Mr. Gabriel, to put a stop to this profanation.'

The minister hummed and ha'd. He was middle-aged, and shabby, with a German diploma and accent and a large family. It was the first time in his five years of office that one of his congregants had suggested such authoritativeness on his part. Elected by their vote, he was treated as their servant, his duties rigidly prescribed, his religious ideas curbed and corrected by theirs. What wonder if he could not suddenly rise to dictatorship? Even at home Mrs. Gabriel was a congregation in herself. But as the week went by he found Barzinsky was not the only man to egg him on to prophetic denunciation; the congregation at large treated him as responsible for the scandal, and if the seven marine-dealers were the bitterest, the pawnbrokers and the linen-drapers were none the less outraged.

'It is a profanation of the Name,' they said unanimously, 'and such a bad example to our poor!'

'He would not listen to me,' the poor minister would protest. 'You had much better talk to him yourself.'

'Me!' the button-holer would ejaculate. 'I would not lower myself. He'd think I was jealous of his success.'

Simeon Samuels seemed, indeed, a formidable person to tackle. Bland and aloof, he pursued his own affairs, meeting the congregation only in synagogue, and then more bland and aloof than ever.

At last the Minister received a presidential command to preach upon the subject forthwith.

'But there's no text suitable just yet,' he pleaded. 'We are still in Genesis.'

'Bah!' replied the Parnass impatiently, 'any text can be twisted to point any moral. You must preach next Sabbath.'

'But we are reading the Sedrah (weekly portion) about Joseph. How are you going to work Sabbath-keeping into that?'

'It is not my profession. I am a mere man-of-the-earth. But what's the use of a preacher if he can't make any text mean something else?'

'Well, of course, every text usually does,' said the preacher defensively. 'There is the hidden meaning and the plain meaning. But Joseph is merely historical narrative. The Sabbath, although mentioned in Genesis, chapter two, wasn't even formally ordained yet.'

'And what about Potiphar's wife?'

'That's the Seventh Commandment, not the Fourth.'

'Thank you for the information. Do you mean to say you can't jump from one Commandment to another?'

'Oh, well——' The minister meditated.

IV

'And Joseph was a goodly person, and well favoured. And it came to pass that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph....'

The congregation looked startled. Really this was not a text which they wished their pastor to enlarge upon. There were things in the Bible that should be left in the obscurity of the Hebrew, especially when one's womenkind were within earshot. Uneasily their eyes lifted towards the bonnets behind the balcony-grating.

'But Joseph refused.'

Solomon Barzinsky coughed. Peleg the pawnbroker blew his nose like a protesting trumpet. The congregation's eyes returned from the balcony and converged upon the Parnass. He was taking snuff as usual.

'My brethren,' began the preacher impressively, 'temptation comes to us all——'

A sniff of indignant repudiation proceeded from many nostrils. A blush overspread many cheeks.

'But not always in the shape it came to Joseph. In this congregation, where, by the blessing of the Almighty, we are free from almost every form of wrong-doing, there is yet one temptation which has power to touch us—the temptation of unholy profit, the seduction of Sabbath-breaking.'

A great sigh of dual relief went up to the balcony, and Simeon Samuels became now the focus of every eye. His face was turned towards the preacher, wearing its wonted synagogue expression of reverential dignity.

'Oh, my brethren, that it could always be said of us: "And Joseph refused"!'

A genial warmth came back to every breast. Ah, now the cosmos was righting itself; Heaven was speaking through the mouth of its minister.

The Rev. Elkan Gabriel expanded under this warmth which radiated back to him. His stature grew, his eloquence poured forth, polysyllabic. As he ended, the congregation burst into a heartfelt 'Yosher Koach' ('May thy strength increase!').