The minister descended the Ark-steps, and stalked back solemnly to his seat. As he passed Simeon Samuels, that gentleman whipped out his hand and grasped the man of God's, and his neighbours testified that there was a look of contrite exaltation upon his goodly features.

V

The Sabbath came round again, but, alas! it brought no balm to the congregation; rather, was it a day of unrest. The plate-glass window still flashed in iniquitous effrontery; still the ungodly proprietor allured the stream of custom.

'He does not even refuse to take money,' Solomon Barzinsky exclaimed to Peleg the pawnbroker, as they passed the blasphemous window on their way from the Friday-evening service.

'Why, what would be the good of keeping open if you didn't take money?' naively inquired Peleg.

'Behemah (animal)!' replied Solomon impatiently. 'Don't you know it's forbidden to touch money on the Sabbath?'

'Of course, I know that. But if you open your shop——!'

'All the same, you might compromise. You might give the customers the things they need, as it is written, "Open thy hand to the needy!" but they could pay on Saturday night.'

'And if they didn't pay? If they drank their money away?' said the pawnbroker.

'True, but why couldn't they pay in advance?'

'How in advance?'

'They could deposit a sum of money with you, and draw against it.'

'Not with me!' Peleg made a grimace. 'All very well for your line, but in mine I should have to deposit a sum of money with them. I don't suppose they'd bring their pledges on Friday night, and wait till Saturday night for the money. Besides, how could one remember? One would have to profane the Sabbath by writing!'

'Write! Heaven forbid!' ejaculated Solomon Barzinsky. 'But you could have a system of marking the amounts against their names in your register. A pin could be stuck in to represent a pound, or a stamp stuck on to indicate a crown. There are lots of ways. One could always give one's self a device,' he concluded in Yiddish.

'But it is written in Job, "He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise." Have a little of Job's patience, and trust the Lord to confound the sinner. We shall yet see Simeon Samuels in the Bankruptcy Court.'

'I hope not, the rogue! I'd like to see him ruined!'

'That's what I mean. Leave him to the Lord.'

'The Lord is too long-suffering,' said Solomon. 'Ah, our Parnass has caught us up. Good Shabbos (Sabbath), Parnass. This is a fine scandal for a God-fearing congregation. I congratulate you.'

'Is he open again?' gasped the Parnass, hurled from his judicial calm.

'Is my eye open?' witheringly retorted Barzinsky. 'A fat lot of good your preacher does.'

'It was you who would elect him instead of Rochinsky,' the Parnass reminded him. Barzinsky was taken aback.

'Well, we don't want foreigners, do we?' he murmured.

'And you caught an Englishman in Simeon Samuels,' chuckled the Parnass, in whose breast the defeat of his candidate had never ceased to rankle.

'Not he. An Englishman plays fair,' retorted Barzinsky. He seriously considered himself a Briton, regarding his naturalization papers as retrospective. 'We are just passing the Reverend Gabriel's house,' he went on. 'Let us wait a moment; he'll come along, and we'll give him a piece of our minds.'

'I can't keep my family waiting for Kiddush' (home service), said Peleg.

'Come home, father; I'm hungry,' put in Peleg junior, who with various Barzinsky boys had been trailing in the parental wake.

'Silence, impudent face!' snapped Barzinsky. 'If I was your father——Ah, here comes the minister. Good Shabbos (Sabbath), Mr. Gabriel. I congratulate you on the effect of your last sermon.'

An exultant light leapt into the minister's eye. 'Is he shut?'

'Is your mouth shut?' Solomon replied scathingly. 'I doubt if he'll even come to Shool (synagogue) to-morrow.'

The ministerial mouth remained open in a fishy gasp, but no words came from it.

'I'm afraid you'll have to use stronger language, Mr. Gabriel,' said the Parnass soothingly.

'But if he is not there to hear it.'

'Oh, don't listen to Barzinsky. He'll be there right enough. Just give it to him hot!'

'Your sermon was too general,' added Peleg, who had lingered, though his son had not. 'You might have meant any of us.'

'But we must not shame our brother in public,' urged the minister. 'It is written in the Talmud that he who does so has no share in the world to come.'

'Well, you shamed us all,' retorted Barzinsky. 'A stranger would imagine we were a congregation of Sabbath-breakers.'

'But there wasn't any stranger,' said the minister.

'There was Simeon Samuels,' the Parnass reminded him. 'Perhaps your sermon against Sabbath-breaking made him fancy he was just one of a crowd, and that you have therefore only hardened him——'

'But you told me to preach against Sabbath-breaking,' said the poor minister.

'Against the Sabbath-breaker,' corrected the Parnass.

'You didn't single him out,' added Barzinsky; 'you didn't even make it clear that Joseph wasn't myself.'

'I said Joseph was a goodly person and well-favoured,' retorted the goaded minister.

The Parnass took snuff, and his sneeze sounded like a guffaw.

'Well, well,' he said more kindly, 'you must try again to-morrow.'

'I didn't undertake to preach every Saturday,' grumbled the minister, growing bolder.

'As long as Simeon Samuels keeps open, you can't shut,' said Solomon angrily.

'It's a duel between you,' added Peleg.

'And Simeon actually comes into to-morrow's Sedrah' (portion), Barzinsky remembered exultantly. '"And took from them Simeon, and bound him before their eyes." There's your very text. You'll pick out Simeon from among us, and bind him to keep the Sabbath.'

'Or you can say Satan has taken Simeon and bound him,' added the Parnass. 'You have a choice—yourself or Satan.'

'Perhaps you had better preach yourself, then,' said the minister sullenly. 'I still can't see what that text has to do with Sabbath-breaking.'

'It has as much to do with Sabbath-breaking as Potiphar's wife,' shrieked Solomon Barzinsky.

VI

'"And Jacob their father said unto them, Me have ye bereaved. Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin."'

As the word 'Simeon' came hissing from the preacher's lips, a veritable thrill passed through the synagogue. Even Simeon Samuels seemed shaken, for he readjusted his praying-shawl with a nervous movement.

'My brethren, these words of Israel, the great forefather of our tribes, are still ringing in our ears. To-day more than ever is Israel crying. Joseph is not—our Holy Land is lost. Simeon is not—our Holy Temple is razed to the ground. One thing only is left us—one blessing with which the almighty father has blessed us—our Holy Sabbath. And ye will take Benjamin.' The pathos of his accents melted every heart. Tears rolled down many a feminine cheek. Simeon Samuels was seen to blow his nose softly.

Thus successfully launched, the Rev. Elkan Gabriel proceeded to draw a tender picture of the love between Israel and his Benjamin, Sabbath—the one consolation of his exile, and he skilfully worked in the subsequent verse: 'If mischief befall him by the way on which ye go, then shall ye bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.' Yes, it would be the destruction of Israel, he urged, if the Sabbath decayed. Woe to those sons of Israel who dared to endanger Benjamin. 'From Reuben and Simeon down to Gad and Asher, his life shall be required at their hands.' Oh, it was a red-hot-cannon-ball-firing sermon, and Solomon Barzinsky could not resist leaning across and whispering to the Parnass: 'Wasn't I right in refusing to vote for Rochinsky?' This reminder of his candidate's defeat was wormwood to the Parnass, spoiling all his satisfaction in the sermon. He rebuked the talker with a noisy 'Shaa' (silence).

The congregation shrank delicately from looking at the sinner; it would be too painful to watch his wriggles. His neighbours stared pointedly every other way. Thus, the only record of his deportment under fire came from Yankele, the poor glazier's boy, who said that he kept looking from face to face, as if to mark the effect on the congregation, stroking his beard placidly the while. But as to his behaviour after the guns were still, there was no dubiety, for everybody saw him approach the Parnass in the exodus from synagogue, and many heard him say in hearty accents: 'I really must congratulate you, Mr. President, on your selection of your minister.'

VII

'You touched his heart so,' shrieked Solomon Barzinsky an hour later to the Reverend Elkan Gabriel, 'that he went straight from Shool (synagogue) to his shop.' Solomon had rushed out the first thing after breakfast, risking the digestion of his Sabbath fish, to call upon the unsuccessful minister.

'That is not my fault,' said the preacher, crestfallen.

'Yes, it is—if you had only stuck to my text. But no! You must set yourself up over all our heads.'

'You told me to get in Simeon, and I obeyed.'

'Yes, you got him in. But what did you call him? The Holy Temple! A fine thing, upon my soul!'

'It was only an—an—analogy,' stammered the poor minister.

'An apology! Oh, so you apologized to him, too! Better and better.'

'No, no, I mean a comparison.'

'A comparison! You never compared me to the Holy Temple. And I'm Solomon—Solomon who built it.'

'Solomon was wise,' murmured the minister.

'Oh, and I'm silly. If I were you, Mr. Gabriel, I'd remember my place and who I owed it to. But for me, Rochinsky would have stood in your shoes——'

'Rochinsky is lucky.'

'Oh, indeed! So this is your gratitude. Very well. Either Simeon Samuels shuts up shop or you do. That's final. Don't forget you were only elected for three years.' And the little man flung out.

The Parnass, meeting his minister later in the street, took a similar view.

'You really must preach again next Sabbath,' he said. 'The congregation is terribly wrought up. There may even be a riot. If Simeon Samuels keeps open next Sabbath, I can't answer that they won't go and break his windows.'

'Then they will break the Sabbath.'

'Oh, they may wait till the Sabbath is out.'

'They'll be too busy opening their own shops.'

'Don't argue. You must preach his shop shut.'

'Very well,' said the Reverend Gabriel sullenly.

'That's right. A man with a family must rise to great occasions. Do you think I'd be where I am now if I hadn't had the courage to buy a bankrupt stock that I didn't see my way to paying for? It's a fight between you and Simeon Samuels.'

'May his name be blotted out!' impatiently cried the minister in the Hebrew imprecation.

'No, no,' replied the Parnass, smiling. 'His name must not be blotted out—it must be mentioned, and—unmistakably.'

'It is against the Talmud. To shame a man is equivalent to murder,' the minister persisted.

'Yet it is written in Leviticus: "Thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him."' And the Parnass took a triumphant pinch.

VIII

'Simeon and Levi are brethren ... into their assembly be not thou united: in their self-will they digged down a wall.'

The Parnass applauded mentally. The text, from Jacob's blessing, was ingeniously expurgated to meet the case. The wall, he perceived at once, was the Sabbath—the Jews' one last protection against the outer world, the one last dyke against the waves of heathendom. Nor did his complacency diminish when his intuition proved correct, and the preacher thundered against the self-will—ay, and the self-seeking—that undermined Israel's last fortification. What did they seek under the wall? Did they think their delving spades would come upon a hidden store of gold, upon an ancient treasure-chest? Nay, it was a coffin they would strike—a coffin of dead bones and living serpents.

A cold wave of horror traversed the synagogue; a little shriek came from the gallery.

'I don't think I ever enjoyed a sermon so much,' said the pawnbroker to the Parnass.

'Oh, he's improving,' said the Parnass, still swollen with satisfaction.

But as that worthy elder emerged from the synagogue, placidly snuffing himself, he found an excited gentleman waiting him in the lobby. It was Lazarus Levy, whom his wife Deborah, daughter of S. Cohn (now of Highbury), was vainly endeavouring to pacify.

'Either that Reverend Gabriel goes, Mr. Parnass, or I resign my membership.'

'What is it, Mr. Levy—what is the matter?'

'Everybody knows I've been a good Jew all my life, and though Saturday is so good for the clothing business, I've striven with all my might to do my duty by the Almighty.'

'Of course, of course; everybody knows that.'

'And yet to-day I'm pointed out as a sinner in Israel; I'm coupled with that Simeon Samuels. Simeon and Levy are brothers in their iniquity—with their assembly be not united. A pretty libel, indeed!'

The Parnass's complacency collapsed like an air-ball at a pin-prick. 'Oh, nonsense, everybody knows he couldn't mean you.'

'I don't know so much. There are always people ready to think one has just been discovered keeping a back-door open or something. I shouldn't be at all surprised to get a letter from my father-in-law in London—you know how pious old Cohn is! As for Simeon, he kept looking at me as if I was his long-lost brother. Ah, there comes our precious minister.... Look here, Mr. Gabriel, I'll have the law on you. Simeon's no brother of mine——'

The sudden appearance of Simeon through the other swing-door cut the speaker short. 'Good Shabbos,' said the shameless sinner. 'Ah, Mr. Gabriel, that was a very fine sermon.' He stroked his beard. 'I quite agree with you. To dig down a public wall is indefensible. Nobody has the right to make more than a private hole in it, where it blocks out his own prospect. So please do not bracket me with Mr. Levy again. Good Shabbos!' And, waving his hand pleasantly, he left them to their consternation.

IX

'What an impudent face!' said the Gabbai (treasurer), who witnessed the episode.

'And our minister says I'm that man's brother! exclaimed Mr. Levy.

'Hush! Enough!' said the Parnass, with a tactful inspiration. 'You shall read the Haphtorah (prophetic section) next Shabbos.'

'And Mr. Gabriel must explain he didn't mean me,' he stipulated, mollified by the magnificent Mitzvah (pious privilege).

'You always try to drive a hard bargain,' grumbled the Parnass. 'That's a question for Mr. Gabriel.'

The reverend gentleman had a happy thought. 'Wait till we come to the text: "Wherefore Levi hath no part nor inheritance with his brethren."'

'You're a gentleman, Mr. Gabriel,' ejaculated S. Cohn's son-in-law, clutching at his hand.

'And if he doesn't close to-day after your splendid sermon,' added the Gabbai, 'you must call and talk to him face to face.'

The minister made a wry face. 'But that's not in my duties.'

'Pardon me, Mr. Gabriel,' put in the Parnass, 'you have to call upon the afflicted and the bereaved. And Simeon Samuels is spiritually afflicted, and has lost his Sabbath.'

'But he doesn't want comforting.'

'Well, Solomon Barzinsky does,' said the Parnass. 'Go to him instead, then, for I'm past soothing him. Choose!'

'I'll go to Simeon Samuels,' said the preacher gloomily.

X

'It is most kind of you to call,' said Simeon Samuels as he wheeled the parlour armchair towards his reverend guest. 'My wife will be so sorry to have missed you. We have both been looking forward so much to your visit.'

'You knew I was coming?' said the minister, a whit startled.

'I naturally expected a pastoral visit sooner or later.'

'I'm afraid it is later,' murmured the minister, subsiding into the chair.

'Better late than never,' cried Simeon Samuels heartily, as he produced a bottle from the sideboard. 'Do you take it with hot water?'

'Thank you—not at all. I am only staying a moment.'

'Ah!' He stroked his beard. 'You are busy?'

'Terribly busy,' said the Rev. Elkan Gabriel.

'Even on Sunday?'

'Rather! It's my day for secretarial work, as there's no school.'

'Poor Mr. Gabriel. I at least have Sunday to myself. But you have to work Saturday and Sunday too. It's really too bad.'

'Eh,' said the minister blankly.

'Oh, of course I know you must work on the Sabbath.'

'I work on—on Shabbos!' The minister flushed to the temples.

'Oh, I'm not blaming you. One must live. In an ideal world of course you'd preach and pray and sing and recite the Law for nothing so that Heaven might perhaps overlook your hard labour, but as things are you must take your wages.'



The minister had risen agitatedly. 'I earn my wages for the rest of my work—the Sabbath work I throw in,' he said hotly.

'Oh come, Mr. Gabriel, that quibble is not worthy of you. But far be it from me to judge a fellow-man.'

'Far be it indeed!' The attempted turning of his sabre-point gave him vigour for the lunge. 'You—you whose shop stands brazenly open every Saturday!'

'My dear Mr. Gabriel, I couldn't break the Fourth Commandment.'

'What!'

'Would you have me break the Fourth Commandment?'

'I do not understand.'

'And yet you hold a Rabbinic diploma, I am told. Does not the Fourth Commandment run: "Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work"? If I were to close on Saturday I should only be working five days a week, since in this heathen country Sunday closing is compulsory.'

'But you don't keep the other half of the Commandment,' said the bewildered minister. '"And on the seventh is the Sabbath."'

'Yes, I do—after my six days the seventh is my Sabbath. I only sinned once, if you will have it so, the first time I shifted the Sabbath to Sunday, since when my Sabbath has arrived regularly on Sundays.'

'But you did sin once!' said the minister, catching at that straw.

'Granted, but as to get right again would now make a second sin, it seems more pious to let things be. Not that I really admit the first sin, for let me ask you, sir, which is nearer to the spirit of the Commandment—to work six days and keep a day of rest—merely changing the day once in one's whole lifetime—or to work five days and keep two days of rest?'

The minister, taken aback, knew not how to meet this novel defence. He had come heavily armed against all the usual arguments as to the necessity of earning one's bread. He was prepared to prove that even from a material point of view you really gained more in the long run, as it is written in the Conclusion-of-Sabbath Service: 'Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.'

Simeon Samuels pursued his advantage.

'My co-religionists in Sudminster seem to have put all the stress upon the resting half of the Commandment, forgetting the working half of it. I do my best to meet their views—as you say, one should not dig down a wall—by attending their Sabbath service on a day most inconvenient to me. But no sacrifice is too great to achieve prayerful communion with one's brethren.'

'But if your views were to prevail there would be an end of Judaism!' the minister burst forth.

'Then Heaven forbid they should prevail!' said Simeon Samuels fervently. 'It is your duty to put the opposition doctrine as strongly as possible from the pulpit.' Then, as the minister rose in angry obfuscation, 'You are sure you won't have some whisky?' he added.

'No, I will take nothing from a house of sin. And if you show yourself next Sabbath I will preach at you again.'

'So that is your idea of religion—to drive me from the synagogue. You are more likely to drive away the rest of the congregation, sick of always hearing the same sermon. As for me, you forget how I enjoy your eloquence, devoted though it is to the destruction of Judaism.'

'Me!' The minister became ungrammatical in his indignation.

'Yes, you. To mix up religion with the almanac. People who find that your Sabbath wall shuts them out of all public life and all professions, just go outside it altogether, and think themselves outside the gates of Judaism. If my father—peace be upon him—hadn't had your narrow notions, I should have gone to the Bar instead of being condemned to shop-keeping.'

'You are a very good devil's advocate now,' retorted the minister.

Simeon Samuels stroked his beard. 'Thank you. And I congratulate your client.'

'You are an Epikouros (Epicurean), and I am wasting my time.'

'And mine too.'

The minister strode into the shop. At the street-door he turned.

'Then you persist in setting a bad example?'

'A bad example! To whom? To your godly congregation? Considering every other shop in the town is open on Shabbos, one more or less can't upset them.'

'When it is the only Jewish shop! Are you aware, sir, that every other Jew in Sudminster closes rigorously on the Sabbath?'

'I ascertained that before I settled here,' said Simeon Samuels quietly.

XI

The report of the pastor's collapse produced an emergency meeting of the leading sheep. The mid-day dinner-hour was chosen as the slackest. A babble of suggestions filled the Parnass's parlour. Solomon Barzinsky kept sternly repeating his Delenda est Carthago: 'He must be expelled from the congregation.'

'He should be expelled from the town altogether,' said Mendel. 'As it is written: "And remove Satan from before and behind us."'

'Since when have we owned Sudminster?' sneered the Parnass. 'You might as well talk of expelling the Mayor and the Corporation.'

'I didn't mean by Act of Parliament,' said Mendel. 'We could make his life a torture.'

'And meantime he makes yours a torture. No, no, the only way is to appeal to his soul——'

'May it be an atonement for us all!' interrupted Peleg the pawnbroker.

'We must beg him not to destroy religion,' repeated the Parnass.

'I thought Mr. Gabriel had done that,' said the Gabbai.

'He is only a minister. He has no worldly tact.'

'Then, why don't you go?' said Solomon Barzinsky.

'I have too much worldly tact. The President's visit might seem like an appeal to authority. It would set up his bristles. Besides, there wouldn't be me left to appeal to. The congregation must keep some trump up its sleeve. No, a mere plain member must go, a simple brother in Israel, to talk to him, heart to heart. You, Barzinsky, are the very man.'

'No, no, I'm not such a simple brother as all that. I'm in the same line, and he might take it for trade jealousy.'

'Then Peleg must go.'

'No, no, I'm not worthy to be the Sheliach Tzibbur!' (envoy of the congregation).

The Parnass reassured him as to his merits. 'The congregation could not have a worthier envoy.'

'But I can't leave my business.'

'You, with your fine grown-up daughters!' cried Barzinsky.

'Don't beshrew them—I will go at once.'

'And these gentlemen must await you here,' said the President, tapping his snuffbox incongruously at the 'here,' 'in order to continue the sitting if you fail.'

'I can't wait more than a quarter of an hour,' grumbled various voices in various keys.

Peleg departed nervously, upborne by the congregational esteem. He returned without even his own. Instead he carried a bulky barometer.

'You must buy this for the synagogue, gentlemen,' he said. 'It will do to hang in the lobby.'

The Parnass was the only one left in command of his breath.

'Buy a barometer!' he gasped.

'Well, it isn't any good to me,' retorted Peleg angrily.

'Then why did you buy it?' cried the Gabbai.

'It was the cheapest article I could get off with.'

'But you didn't go to buy,' said the Parnass.

'I know that—but you come into the shop—naturally he takes you for a customer—he looks so dignified; he strokes his beard—you can't look a fool, you must——'

'Be one,' snapped the Parnass. 'And then you come to us to share the expenses!'

'Well, what do I want with a barometer?'

'It'll do to tell you there's a storm when the chimney-pots are blowing down,' suggested the Parnass crushingly.

'Put it in your window—you'll make a profit out of it,' said Mendel.

'Not while Simeon Samuels is selling them cheaper, as with his Sabbath profits he can well afford to do!'

'Oh, he said he'd stick to his Sabbath profit, did he?' inquired the Parnass.

'We never touched on that,' said Peleg miserably. 'I couldn't manage to work the Sabbath into the conversation.'

'This is terrible.' Barzinsky's fist smote the table. 'I'll go—let him suspect my motives or not. The Almighty knows they are pure.'

'Bravo! Well spoken!' There was a burst of applause. Several marine-dealers shot out their hands and grasped Barzinsky's in admiration.

'Do not await me, gentlemen,' he said importantly. 'Go in peace.'

XII

'Good afternoon, Mr. Samuels,' said Solomon Barzinsky.

'Good afternoon, sir. What can I do for you?'

'You—you don't know me? I am a fellow-Jew.'

'That's as plain as the nose on your face.'

'You don't remember me from Shool? Mr. Barzinsky! I had the rolling-up of the Scroll the time you had the elevation of it.'

'Ah, indeed. At these solemn moments I scarcely notice people. But I am very glad to find you patronizing my humble establishment.'

'I don't want a barometer,' said Solomon hurriedly.

'That is fortunate, as I have just sold my last. But in the way of waterproofs, we have a new pattern, very seasonable.'

'No, no; I didn't come for a waterproof.'

'These oilskins——'

'I didn't come to buy anything.'

'Ah, you wish to sell me something.'

'Not that either. The fact is, I've come to beg of you, as one Jew to another——'

'A Schnorrer!' interrupted Simeon Samuels. 'Oh, Lord, I ought to have recognised you by that synagogue beginning.'

'Me, a Schnorrer!' The little man swelled skywards. 'Me, Solomon Barzinsky, whose shop stood in Sudminster twenty years before you poked your nose in——'

'I beg your pardon. There! you see I'm a beggar, too.' And Simeon Samuels laughed mirthlessly. 'Well, you've come to beg of me.' And his fingers caressed his patriarchal beard.

'I don't come on my own account only,' Barzinsky stammered.

'I understand. You want a contribution to the Passover Cake Fund. My time is precious, so is yours. What is the Parnass giving?'

'I'm not begging for money. I represent the congregation.'

'Dear me, why didn't you come to the point quicker? The congregation wishes to beg my acceptance of office. Well, it's very good of you all, especially as I'm such a recent addition. But I really feel a diffidence. You see, my views of the Sabbath clash with those of the congregation.'

'They do!' cried Barzinsky, leaping at his opportunity.

'Yes, I am for a much stricter observance than appears general here. Scarcely one of you carries his handkerchief tied round his loins like my poor old father, peace be upon him! You all carry the burden of it impiously in a pocket.'

'I never noticed your handkerchief round your waist!' cried the bewildered Barzinsky.

'Perhaps not; I never had a cold; it remained furled.'

Simeon Samuels' superb insolence twitched Barzinsky's mouth agape. 'But you keep your shop open!' he cried at last.

'That would be still another point of clashing,' admitted Simeon Samuels blandly. 'Altogether, you will see the inadvisability of my accepting office.'

'Office!' echoed Barzinsky, meeting the other's ironic fence with crude thwacks. 'Do you think a God-fearing congregation would offer office to a Sabbath-breaker?'

'Ah, so that was at the back of it. I suspected something underhand in your offer. I was to be given office, was I, on condition of closing my shop on Saturday? No, Mr. Barzinsky. Go back and tell those who sent you that Simeon Samuels scorns stipulations, and that when you offer to make him Parnass unconditionally he may consider your offer, but not till then. Good-bye. You must jog along with your present apology for a Parnass.'

'You—you Elisha ben Abuyai!' And, consoled only by the aptness of his reference to the atheist of the Talmud, Barzinsky rushed off to tell the Parnass how Simeon Samuels had insulted them both.

XIII

The Parnass, however, was not to be drawn yet. He must keep himself in reserve, he still insisted. But perhaps, he admitted, Simeon Samuels resented mere private members or committeemen. Let the Gabbai go.

Accordingly the pompous treasurer of the synagogue strode into the notorious shop on the Sabbath itself, catching Simeon Samuels red-handed.

But nothing could be suaver than that gentleman's 'Good Shabbos. What can I do for you?'

'You can shut up your shop,' said the Gabbai brusquely.

'And how shall I pay your bill, then?'

'I'd rather give you a seat and all the honours for nothing than see this desecration.'

'You must have a goodly surplus, then.'

'We have enough.'

'That's strange. You're the first Gabbai I ever knew who was satisfied with his balance-sheet. Is it your excellent management, I wonder, or have you endowments?'

'That's not for me to say. I mean we have five or six hundred pounds in legacies.'

'Indeed! Soundly invested, I hope?'

'First-class. English Railway Debentures.'

'I see. Trustee stock.' Simeon Samuels stroked his beard. 'And so your whole congregation works on the Sabbath. A pretty confession!'

'What do you mean?'

'Runs railway trains, lights engine-fires, keeps porters and signal-men toiling, and pockets the profits!'

'Who does?'

'You, sir, in particular, as the financial representative of the congregation. How can any Jew hold industrial shares in a heathen country without being a partner in a Sabbath business—ay, and opening on the Day of Atonement itself? And it is you who have the audacity to complain of me! I, at least, do my own dirty work, not hide myself behind stocks and shares. Good Shabbos to you, Mr. Gabbai, and kindly mind your own business in future—your locomotives and your sidings and your stinking tunnels.'

XIV

The Parnass could no longer delay the diplomatic encounter. 'Twas vain to accuse the others of tactlessness, and shirk the exhibition of his own tact. He exhibited it most convincingly by not informing the others that he was about to put it to a trial.

Hence he refrained from improving a synagogue opportunity, but sneaked one week-day towards the shop. He lingered without, waiting to be invited within. Thus all appearance of his coming to rebuke would be removed. His mission should pop up from a casual conversation.

He peeped into the window, passed and repassed.

Simeon Samuels, aware of a fly hovering on the purlieus of his web, issued from its centre, as the Parnass turned his back on the shop and gazed musingly at the sky.

'Looks threatening for rain, sir,' observed Simeon Samuels, addressing the back. 'Our waterproofs—— Bless my soul, but it surely isn't our Parnass!'

'Yes, I'm just strolling about. I seem to have stumbled on your establishment.'

'Lucky for me.'

'And a pleasure for me. I never knew you had such a nice display.'

'Won't you come inside, and see the stock?'

'Thank you, I must really get back home. And besides, as you say, it is threatening for rain.'

'I'll lend you a waterproof, or even sell you one cheap. Come in, sir—come in. Pray honour me.'

Congratulating himself on catching the spider, the fly followed him within.

A quarter of an hour passed, in which he must buzz about the stock. It seemed vastly difficult to veer round to the Sabbath through the web of conversation the spider wove round him. Simeon Samuels' conception of a marine-dealer's stock startled him by its comprehensiveness, and when he was asked to admire an Indian shawl, he couldn't help inquiring what it was doing there.

'Well,' explained Simeon Samuels, 'occasionally a captain or first mate will come back to England, home, and beauty, and will have neglected to buy foreign presents for his womenkind. I then remind him of the weakness of womenkind for such trophies of their menfolks' travel.'

'Excellent. I won't tell your competitors.'

'Oh, those cattle!' Simeon snapped his fingers. 'If they stole my idea, they'd not be able to carry it out. It's not easy to cajole a captain.'

'No, you're indeed a honeyed rascal,' thought the Parnass.

'I also do a brisk business in chutney,' went on Simeon. 'It's a thing women are especially fond of having brought back to them from India. And yet it's the last thing their menkind think of till I remind them of it on their return.'

'I certainly brought back none,' said the Parnass, smiling in spite of himself.

'You have been in India?'

'I have,' replied the Parnass, with a happy inspiration, 'and I brought back to my wife something more stimulating than chutney.'

'Indeed?'

'Yes, the story of the Beni-Israel, the black Jews, who, surrounded by all those millions of Hindoos, still keep their Sabbath.'

'Ah, poor niggers. Then you've been half round the world.'

'All round the world, for I went there and back by different routes. And it was most touching, wherever I went, to find everywhere a colony of Jews, and everywhere the Holy Sabbath kept sacred.'

'But on different days, of course,' said Simeon Samuels.

'Eh? Not at all! On the same day.'

'On the same day! How could that be? The day changes with every move east or west. When it's day here, it's night in Australia.'

Darkness began to cloud the presidential brow.

'Don't you try to make black white!' he said angrily.

'It's you that are trying to make white black,' retorted Simeon Samuels. 'Perhaps you don't know that I hail from Australia, and that by working on Saturday I escape profaning my native Australian Sabbath, while you, who have been all round the world, and have either lost or gained a day, according as you travelled east or west, are desecrating your original Sabbath either by working on Friday or smoking on Sunday.'

The Parnass felt his head going round—he didn't know whether east or west. He tried to clear it by a pinch of snuff, which he in vain strove to make judicial.

'Oh, and so, and so—atchew!—and so you're the saint and I'm the sinner!' he cried sarcastically.

'No, I don't profess to be a saint,' replied Simeon Samuels somewhat unexpectedly. 'But I do think the Saturday was meant for Palestine, not for the lands of the Exile, where another day of rest rules. When you were in India you probably noted that the Mohammedans keep Friday. A poor Jew in the bazaar is robbed of his Hindoo customers on Friday, of his Jews on Saturday, and his Christians on Sunday.'

'The Fourth Commandment is eternal!' said the Parnass with obstinate sublimity.

'But the Fifth says, "that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." I believe this reward belongs to all the first five Commandments—not only to the Fifth—else an orphan would have no chance of long life. Keep the Sabbath in the land that the Lord giveth thee; not in England, which isn't thine.'

'Oho!' retorted the Parnass. 'Then at that rate in England you needn't honour your father and mother.'

'Not if you haven't got them!' rejoined Simeon Samuels. 'And if you haven't got a land, you can't keep its Sabbath. Perhaps you think we can keep the Jubilee also without a country.'

'The Sabbath is eternal,' repeated the Parnass doggedly. 'It has nothing to do with countries. Before we got to the Promised Land we kept the Sabbath in the wilderness.'

'Yes, and God sent a double dose of manna on the Friday. Do you mean to say He sends us here a double dose of profit?'

'He doesn't let us starve. We prospered well enough before you brought your wretched example——'

'Then my wretched example cannot lead the congregation away. I am glad of it. You do them much more harm by your way of Sabbath-breaking.'

'My way!'

'Yes, my dear old father—peace be upon him!—would have been scandalized to see the burden you carry on the Sabbath.'

'What burden do I carry?'

'Your snuff-box!'

The Parnass almost dropped it. 'That little thing!'

'I call it a cumbrous, not to say tasteless thing. But before the Almighty there is no great and no small. One who stands in such a high place in the synagogue must be especially mindful, and every unnecessary burden——'

'But snuff is necessary for me—I can't do without it.'

'Other Presidents have done without it. As it is written in Jeremiah: "And the wild asses did stand in the high places; they snuffed up the wind."'

The Parnass flushed like a beetroot. 'I'll teach you to know your place, sir.' He turned his back on the scoffer, and strode towards the door.

'But if you'd care for a smaller snuff-box,' said Simeon Samuels, 'I have an artistic assortment.'

XV

At the next meeting of the Synagogue Council a notice of motion stood upon the agenda in the name of the Parnass himself:

'That this Council views with the greatest reprobation the breach of the Fourth Commandment committed weekly by a member of the congregation, and calls upon him either to resign his seat, with the burial and other rights appertaining thereto, or to close his business on the Sabbath.'

When the resolution came up Mr. Solomon Barzinsky moved as an amendment that weekly be altered into 'twice a week,' since the member kept open on Friday night as well as Saturday.

The Parnass refused to accept the amendment. There was only one Sabbath a week, though it had two periods. 'And the evening and the morning were one day.'

Mr. Peleg supported the amendment. They must not leave Mr. Simeon Samuels a loophole of escape. It was also, he said, the duty of the Council to buy a barometer the rogue had foisted upon him.

After an animated discussion, mainly about the barometer, the President accepted the amendment, but produced a great impression by altering 'twice a week' into 'bi-weekly.'

A Mr. John Straumann, however, who prided himself on his style, and had even changed his name to John because Jacob grated on his delicate ear, refused to be impressed.

Committed bi-weekly by a member sounded almost jocose, he argued. 'Buy! buy!' it sounded like a butcher's cry.

Mr. Enoch, the kosher butcher, rose amid excitement, and asked if he had come there to be insulted!

'Sit down! sit down!' said the Parnass roughly. 'It's no matter how the resolution sounds. It will be in writing.'

'Then why not add,' sarcastically persisted the stylist, '"Committed bi-weekly by a member by buying and selling."'

'Order, order!' said the Parnass angrily. 'Those who are in favour of the resolution! Carried.'

'By a majority,' sneered the stylist, subsiding.

'Mr. Secretary'—the President turned to the poor Reverend-of-all-work—'you need not record this verbal discussion in the minutes.'

'By request,' said the stylist, reviving.

'But what's the use of the resolution if you don't mention the member's name?' suddenly inquired Ephraim Mendel, stretching his long, languid limbs.

'But there's only one Sabbath-breaker,' replied the Parnass.

'To-day, yes, but to-morrow there might be two.'

'It could hardly be to-morrow,' said the stylist. 'For that happens to be a Monday.'

Barzinsky bashed the table. 'Mr. President, are we here for business or are we not?'

'You may be here for business—I am here for religion,' retorted Straumann the stylist.

'You—you snub-nosed monkey, what do you mean?'

'Order, order, gentlemen,' said the Parnass.

'I will not order,' said Solomon Barzinsky excitedly. 'I did not come here to be insulted.'

'Insulted!' quoth Straumann. 'It's you that must apologize, you illiterate icthyosaurus! I appeal to the President.'

'You have both insulted me,' was that worthy's ruling. 'I give the word to Mr. Mendel.'

'But——' from both the combatants simultaneously.

'Order, order!' from a dozen throats.

'I said Simeon Samuels' name must be put in,' Mendel repeated.

'You should have said so before—the resolution is carried now,' said the President.

'And a fat lot of good it will do,' said Peleg. 'Gentlemen, if you knew him as well as I, if you had my barometer to read him by, you'd see that the only remedy is to put him in Cherem' (excommunication).

'If he can't get buried it is a kind of Cherem,' said the Gabbai.

'Assuredly,' added the Parnass. 'He will be frightened to think that if he dies suddenly——'

'And he is sure to take a sudden death,' put in Barzinsky with unction.

'He will not be buried among Jews,' wound up the Parnass.

'Hear, hear!' A murmur of satisfaction ran round the table. All felt that Simeon Samuels was cornered at last. It was resolved that the resolution be sent to him.

XVI

'Mr. Simeon Samuels requests me to say that he presents his compliments to the secretary of the Sudminster Hebrew Congregation, and begs to acknowledge the receipt of the Council's resolution. In reply I am to state that Mr. Samuels regrets that his views on the Sabbath question should differ from those of his fellow-worshippers, but he has not attempted to impress his views on the majority, and he regrets that in a free country like England they should have imported the tyranny of the lands of persecution from which they came. Fortunately such procedure is illegal. By the act of Charles I. the Sabbath is defined as the Sunday, and as a British subject Mr. Samuels takes his stand upon the British Constitution. Mr. Samuels has done his best to compromise with the congregation by attending the Sabbath service on the day most convenient to the majority. In regard to the veiled threat of the refusal of burial rights, Mr. Samuels desires me to say that he has no intention of dying in Sudminster, but merely of getting his living there. In any case, under his will, his body is to be deported to Jerusalem, where he has already acquired a burying-place.'

'Next year in Jerusalem!' cried Barzinsky fervently, when this was read to the next meeting.

'Order, order,' said the Parnass. 'I don't believe in his Jerusalem grave. They won't admit his dead body.'

'He relies on smuggling in alive,' said Barzinsky gloomily, 'as soon as he has made his pile.'

'That won't be very long at this rate,' added Ephraim Mendel.

'The sooner the better,' said the Gabbai impatiently. 'Let him go to Jericho.'

There was a burst of laughter, to the Gabbai's great astonishment.

'Order, order, gentlemen,' said the Parnass. 'Don't you see from this insolent letter how right I was? The rascal threatens to drag us to the Christian Courts, that's clear. All that about Jerusalem is only dust thrown into our eyes.'

'Grave-dust,' murmured Straumann.

'Order! He is a dangerous customer.'

'Shopkeeper,' corrected Straumann.

The Parnass glared, but took snuff silently.

'I don't wonder he laughed at us,' said Straumann, encouraged. 'Bi-weekly by a member. Ha! ha! ha!'

'Mr. President!' Barzinsky screamed. 'Will you throw that laughing hyena out, or shall I?'

Straumann froze to a statue of dignity. 'Let any animalcule try it on,' said he.

'Shut up, you children, I'll chuck you both out,' said Ephraim Mendel in conciliatory tones. 'The point is—what's to be done now, Mr. President?'

'Nothing—till the end of the year. When he offers his new subscription we refuse to take it. That can't be illegal.'

'We ought all to go to him in a friendly deputation,' said Straumann. 'These formal resolutions "Buy! buy!" put his back up. We'll go to him as brothers—all Israel are brethren, and blood is thicker than water.'

'Chutney is thicker than blood,' put in the Parnass mysteriously. 'He'll simply try to palm off his stock on the deputation.'

Ephraim Mendel and Solomon Barzinsky jumped up simultaneously. 'What a good idea,' said Ephraim. 'There you have hit it!' said Solomon. Their simultaneous popping-up had an air of finality—like the long and the short of it!

'You mean?' said the Parnass, befogged in his turn.

'I mean,' said Barzinsky, 'we could buy up his stock, me and the other marine-dealers between us, and he could clear out!'

'If he sold it reasonably,' added Mendel.

'Even unreasonably you must make a sacrifice for the Sabbath,' said the Parnass. 'Besides, divided among the lot of you, the loss would be little.'

'And you can buy in my barometer with the rest,' added Peleg.

'We could call a meeting of marine-dealers,' said Barzinsky, disregarding him. 'We could say to them we must sacrifice ourselves for our religion.'

'Tell that to the marine-dealers!' murmured Straumann.

'And that we must buy out the Sabbath-breaker at any cost.'

'Buy! buy!' said Straumann. 'If you'd only thought of that sort of "Buy! buy!" at the first!'

'Order, order!' said the Parnass.

'It would be more in order,' said Straumann, 'to appoint an executive sub-committee to deal with the question. I'm sick of it. And surely we as a Synagogue Council can't be in order in ordering some of our members to buy out another.'

'Hear, hear!' His suggestion found general approval. It took a long discussion, however, before the synagogue decided to wash its hands of responsibility, and give over to a sub-committee of three the task of ridding Sudminster of its plague-spot by any means that commended itself to them.

Solomon Barzinsky, Ephraim Mendel, and Peleg the pawnbroker were elected to constitute this Council of Three.

XVII

The glad news spread through the Sudminster Congregation that Simeon Samuels had at last been bought out—at a terrible loss to the martyred marine-dealers who had had to load themselves with chutney and other unheard-of and unsaleable stock. But they would get back their losses, it was felt, by the removal of his rivalry. Carts were drawn up before the dismantled plate-glass window carrying off its criminal contents, and Simeon Samuels stood stroking his beard amid the ruins.

Then the shop closed; the shutters that should have honoured the Sabbath now depressed the Tuesday. Simeon Samuels was seen to get into the London train. The demon that troubled their sanctity had been exorcised. A great peace reigned in every heart, almost like the Sabbath peace coming into the middle of the week.

'If they had only taken my advice earlier,' said Solomon Barzinsky to his wife, as he rolled his forkful of beef in the chutney.

'You can write to your father, Deborah,' said Lazarus Levy, 'that we no longer need the superior reach-me-downs.'

On the Wednesday strange new rumours began to circulate, and those who hastened to confirm them stood dumbfounded before great posters on all the shutters:

CLOSED FOR RE-STOCKING

THE OLD-FASHIONED STOCK OF THIS BUSINESS HAVING BEEN SOLD OFF TO THE TRADE,

SIMEON SAMUELS

IS TAKING THE OPPORTUNITY TO LAY IN THE BEST AND MOST UP-TO-DATE LONDON AND CONTINENTAL GOODS FOR HIS CUSTOMERS. BARGAINS AND NOVELTIES IN EVERY DEPARTMENT.

RE-OPEN SATURDAY NEXT

XVIII

A hurried emergency meeting of the Executive Sub-Committee was called.

'He has swindled us,' said Solomon Barzinsky. 'This paper signed by him merely undertakes to shut up his shop. And he will plead he meant for a day or two.'

'And he agreed to leave the town,' wailed Peleg, 'but he meant to buy goods.'

'Well, we can have the law of him,' said Mendel. 'We paid him compensation for disturbance.'

'And can't he claim he was disturbed?' shrieked Barzinsky. 'His whole stock turned upside down!'

'Let him claim!' said Mendel. 'There is such a thing as obtaining money under false pretences.'

'And such a thing as becoming the laughing-stock of the heathen,' said Peleg. 'We must grin and bear it ourselves.'

'It's all very well for you to grin,' said Solomon tartly. 'We've got to bear it. You didn't take over any of his old rubbish.'

'Didn't I, indeed? What about the barometer?'

'Confound your barometer!' cried Ephraim Mendel. 'I'll have the law of him; I've made up my mind.'

'Well, you'll have to bear the cost, then,' said Peleg. 'It's none of my business.'

'Yes, it is,' shouted Mendel. 'As a member of the Sub-Committee you can't dissociate yourselves from us.'

'A nice idea that—I'm to be dragged into your law-suits!'

'Hush, leave off these squabbles!' said Solomon Barzinsky. 'The law is slow, and not even sure. The time has come for desperate measures. We must root out the plague-spot with our own hands.'

'Hear, hear,' said the rest of the Sub-Committee.

XIX

On the succeeding Sabbath Simeon Samuels was not the only figure in the synagogue absorbed in devotion. Solomon Barzinsky, Ephraim Mendel, and Peleg the pawnbroker were all rapt in equal piety, while the rest of the congregation was shaken with dreadful gossip about them. Their shops were open, too, it would seem.

Immediately after the service the Parnass arrested Solomon Barzinsky's exit, and asked him if the rumour were true.

'Perfectly true,' replied Solomon placidly. 'The Executive Sub-Committee passed the resolution to——'

'To break the Sabbath!' interrupted the Parnass.

'We had already sacrificed our money; there was nothing left but to sacrifice our deepest feelings——'

'But what for?'

'Why, to destroy his advantage, of course. Five-sixths of his Sabbath profits depend on the marine-dealers closing, and when he sees he's breaking the Sabbath in vain——'

'Rubbish! You are asked to stop a congregational infection, and you——'

'Vaccinate ourselves with the same stuff, to make sure the attack shall be light.'

'It's a hair of the dog that bit us,' said Mendel, who, with Peleg, had lingered to back up Barzinsky.

'Of the mad dog!' exclaimed the Parnass. 'And you're all raging mad.'

'It's the only sane way,' urged Peleg. 'When he sees his rivals open——'

'You!' The President turned on him. 'You are not even a marine-dealer. Why are you open?'

'How could I dissociate myself from the rest of the Sub-Committee?' inquired Peleg with righteous indignation.

'You are a set of sinners in Israel!' cried the Parnass, forgetting even to take snuff. 'This will split up the congregation.'

'The congregation through its Council gave the Committee full power to deal with the matter,' said Barzinsky with dignity.

'But then the other marine-dealers will open as well as the Committee!'

'I trust not,' replied Barzinsky fervently. 'Two of us are enough to cut down his takings.'

'But the whole lot of you would be still more efficacious. Oh, this is the destruction of our congregation, the death of our religion!'

'No, no, no,' said Solomon soothingly. 'You are mistaken. We are most careful not to touch money. We are going to trust our customers, and keep our accounts without pen or ink. We have invented a most ingenious system, which gives us far more work than writing, but we have determined to spare ourselves no trouble to keep the Sabbath from unnecessary desecration.'

'And once the customers don't pay up, your system will break down. No, no; I shall write to the Chief Rabbi.'

'We will explain our motives,' said Mendel.

'Your motives need no explanation. This scandal must cease.'

'And who are you to give orders?' shrieked Solomon Barzinsky. 'You're not speaking to a Schnorrer, mind you. My banking account is every bit as big as yours. For two pins I start an opposition Shool.'

'A Sunday Shool!' said the Parnass sarcastically.

'And why not? It would be better than sitting playing solo on Sundays. We are not in Palestine now.'

'Oh, Simeon Samuels has been talking to you, has he?'

'I don't need Simeon Samuels' wisdom. I'm an Englishman myself.'

XX

The desperate measures of the Sub-Committee were successful. The other marine-dealers hastened to associate themselves with the plan of campaign, and Simeon Samuels soon departed in search of a more pious seaport.

But, alas! homoeopathy was only half-vindicated. For the remedy proved worse than the disease, and the cutting-out of the original plague-spot left the other marine-stores still infected. The epidemic spread from them till it had overtaken half the shops of the congregation. Some had it in a mild form—only one shutter open, or a back door not closed—but in many it came out over the whole shop-window.

The one bright spot in the story of the Sudminster Sabbath is that the congregation of which the present esteemed Parnass is Solomon Barzinsky, Esq., J.P., managed to avert the threatened split, and that while in so many other orthodox synagogues the poor minister preaches on the Sabbath to empty benches, the Sudminster congregation still remains at the happy point of compromise acutely discovered by Simeon Samuels: of listening reverentially every Saturday morning to the unchanging principles of its minister-elect, the while its shops are engaged in supplying the wants of Christendom.



THE RED MARK



THE RED MARK

The curious episode in the London Ghetto the other winter, while the epidemic of small-pox was raging, escaped the attention of the reporters, though in the world of the Board-schools it is a vivid memory. But even the teachers and the committees, the inspectors and the Board members, have remained ignorant of the part little Bloomah Beckenstein played in it.

To explain how she came to be outside the school-gates instead of inside them, we must go back a little and explain her situation both outside and inside her school.

Bloomah was probably 'Blume,' which is German for a flower, but she had always been spelt 'Bloomah' in the school register, for even Board-school teachers are not necessarily familiar with foreign languages.

They might have been forgiven for not connecting Bloomah with blooms, for she was a sad-faced child, and even in her tenth year showed deep, dark circles round her eyes. But they were beautiful eyes, large, brown, and soft, shining with love and obedience.

Mrs. Beckenstein, however, found neither of these qualities in her youngest born, who seemed to her entirely sucked up by the school.

'In my days,' she would grumble, 'it used to be God Almighty first, your parents next, and school last. Now it's all a red mark first, your parents and God Almighty nowhere.'

The red mark was the symbol of punctuality, set opposite the child's name in the register. To gain it, she must be in her place at nine o'clock to the stroke. A moment after nine, and only the black mark was attainable. Twenty to ten, and the duck's egg of the absent was sorrowfully inscribed by the Recording Angel, who in Bloomah's case was a pale pupil-teacher with eyeglasses.

But it was the Banner which loomed largest on the school horizon, intensifying Bloomah's anxiety and her mother's grievance.

'I don't see nothing,' Mrs. Beckenstein iterated; 'no prize, no medal—nothing but a red mark and a banner.'

The Banner was indeed a novelty. It had not unfurled itself in Mrs. Beckenstein's young days, nor even in the young days of Bloomah's married brothers and sisters.

As the worthy matron would say: 'There's been Jack Beckenstein, there's been Joey Beckenstein, there's been Briny Beckenstein, there's been Benjy Beckenstein, there's been Ada Beckenstein, there's been Becky Beckenstein, God bless their hearts! and they all grew up scholards and prize-winners and a credit to their Queen and their religion without this meshuggas (madness) of a Banner.'

Vaguely Mrs. Beckenstein connected the degenerate innovation with the invasion of the school by 'furriners'—all these hordes of Russian, Polish, and Roumanian Jews flying from persecution, who were sweeping away the good old English families, of which she considered the Beckensteins a shining example. What did English people want with banners and such-like gewgaws?

The Banner was a class trophy of regularity and punctuality. It might be said metaphorically to be made of red marks; and, indeed, its ground-hue was purple.

The class that had scored the highest weekly average of red marks enjoyed its emblazoned splendours for the next week. It hung by a cord on the classroom wall, amid the dull, drab maps—a glorious sight with its oaken frame and its rich-coloured design in silk. Life moved to a chivalrous music, lessons went more easily, in presence of its proud pomp: 'twas like marching to a band instead of painfully plodding.

And the desire to keep it became a passion to the winners; the little girls strained every nerve never to be late or absent; but, alas! some mischance would occur to one or other, and it passed, in its purple and gold, to some strenuous and luckier class in another section of the building, turning to a funeral-banner as it disappeared dismally through the door of the cold and empty room.

Woe to the late-comer who imperilled the Banner. The black mark on the register was a snowflake compared with the black frown on all those childish foreheads. As for the absentee, the scowls that would meet her return not improbably operated to prolong her absence.

Only once had Bloomah's class won the trophy, and that was largely through a yellow fog which hit the other classes worse.

For Bloomah was the black sheep that spoilt the chances of the fold—the black sheep with the black marks. Perhaps those great rings round her eyes were the black marks incarnate, so morbidly did the poor child grieve over her sins of omission.

Yet these sins of omission were virtues of commission elsewhere; for if Bloomah's desk was vacant, it was only because Bloomah was slaving at something that her mother considered more important.

'The Beckenstein family first, the workshop second, and school nowhere,' Bloomah might have retorted on her mother.

At home she was the girl-of-all-work. In the living-rooms she did cooking and washing and sweeping; in the shop above, whenever a hand fell sick or work fell heavy, she was utilized to make buttonholes, school hours or no school hours.

Bloomah was likewise the errand-girl of the establishment, and the portress of goods to and from S. Cohn's Emporium in Holloway, and the watch-dog when Mrs. Beckenstein went shopping or pleasuring.

'Lock up the house!' the latter would cry, when Bloomah tearfully pleaded for that course. 'My things are much too valuable to be locked up. But I know you'd rather lose my jewellery than your precious Banner.'

When Mrs. Beckenstein had new grandchildren—and they came frequently—Bloomah would be summoned in hot haste to the new scene of service. Curt post-cards came on these occasions, thus conceived:

'DEAR MOTHER, 'A son. Send Bloomah. 'BRINY.'

Sometimes these messages were mournfully inverted:

'DEAR MOTHER, 'Poor little Rachie is gone. Send Bloomah to your heart-broken 'BECKY.'

Occasionally the post-card went the other way:

'DEAR BECKY, 'Send back Bloomah. 'Your loving mother.'

The care of her elder brother Daniel was also part of Bloomah's burden; and in the evenings she had to keep an eye on his street sports and comrades, for since he had shocked his parents by dumping down a new pair of boots on the table, he could not be trusted without supervision.

Not that he had stolen the boots—far worse! Beguiled by a card cunningly printed in Hebrew, he had attended the evening classes of the Meshummodim, those converted Jews who try to bribe their brethren from the faith, and who are the bugbear and execration of the Ghetto.

Daniel was thereafter looked upon at home as a lamb who had escaped from the lions' den, and must be the object of their vengeful pursuit, while on Bloomah devolved the duties of shepherd and sheep-dog.

It was in the midst of all these diverse duties that Bloomah tried to go to school by day, and do her home lessons by night. She did not murmur against her mother, though she often pleaded. She recognised that the poor woman was similarly distracted between domestic duties and turns at the machines upstairs.

Only it was hard for the child to dovetail the two halves of her life. At night she must sit up as late as her elders, poring over her school books, and in the morning it was a fierce rush to get through her share of the housework in time for the red mark. In Mrs. Beckenstein's language: 'Don't eat, don't sleep, boil nor bake, stew nor roast, nor fry, nor nothing.'

Her case was even worse than her mother imagined, for sometimes it was ten minutes to nine before Bloomah could sit down to her own breakfast, and then the steaming cup of tea served by her mother was a terrible hindrance; and if that good woman's head was turned, Bloomah would sneak towards the improvised sink—which consisted of two dirty buckets, the one holding the clean water being recognisable by the tin pot standing on its covering-board—where she would pour half her tea into the one bucket and fill up from the other.

When this stratagem was impossible, she almost scalded herself in her gulpy haste. Then how she snatched up her satchel and ran through rain, or snow, or fog, or scorching sunshine! Yet often she lost her breath without gaining her mark, and as she cowered tearfully under the angry eyes of the classroom, a stab at her heart was added to the stitch in her side.

It made her classmates only the angrier that, despite all her unpunctuality, she kept a high position in the class, even if she could never quite attain prize-rank.

But there came a week when Bloomah's family remained astonishingly quiet and self-sufficient, and it looked as if the Banner might once again adorn the dry, scholastic room and throw a halo of romance round the blackboard.

Then a curious calamity befell. A girl who had left the school for another at the end of the previous week, returned on the Thursday, explaining that her parents had decided to keep her in the old school. An indignant heart-cry broke through all the discipline:

'Teacher, don't have her!'

From Bloomah burst the peremptory command: 'Go back, Sarah!'

For the unlucky children felt that her interval would now be reckoned one of absence. And they were right. Sarah reduced the gross attendance by six, and the Banner was lost.

Yet to have been so near incited them to a fresh spurt. Again the tantalizing Thursday was reached before their hopes were dashed. This time the break-down was even crueller, for every pinafored pupil, not excluding Bloomah, was in her place, red-marked.

Upon this saintly company burst suddenly Bloomah's mother, who, ignoring the teacher, and pointing her finger dramatically at her daughter, cried:

'Bloomah Beckenstein, go home!'

Bloomah's face became one large red mark, at which all the other girls' eyes were directed. Tears of humiliation and distress dripped down her cheeks over the dark rings. If she were thus hauled off ere she had received two hours of secular instruction, her attendance would be cancelled.

The class was all in confusion. 'Fold arms!' cried the teacher sharply, and the girls sat up rigidly. Bloomah obeyed instinctively with the rest.

'Bloomah Beckenstein, do you want me to pull you out by your plait?'

'Mrs. Beckenstein, really you mustn't come here like that!' said the teacher in her most ladylike accents.

'Tell Bloomah that,' answered Mrs. Beckenstein, unimpressed. 'She's come here by runnin' away from home. There's nobody but her to see to things, for we are all broken in our bones from dancin' at a weddin' last night, and comin' home at four in the mornin', and pourin' cats and dogs. If you go to our house, please, teacher, you'll see my Benjy in bed; he's given up his day's work; he must have his sleep; he earns three pounds a week as head cutter at S. Cohn's—he can afford to be in bed, thank God! So now, then, Bloomah Beckenstein! Don't they teach you here: "Honour thy father and thy mother"?'

Poor Bloomah rose, feeling vaguely that fathers and mothers should not dishonour their children. With hanging head she moved to the door, and burst into a passion of tears as soon as she got outside.

After, if not in consequence of, this behaviour, Mrs. Beckenstein broke her leg, and lay for weeks with the limb cased in plaster-of-Paris. That finished the chances of the Banner for a long time. Between nursing and house management Bloomah could scarcely ever put in an attendance.

So heavily did her twin troubles weigh upon the sensitive child day and night that she walked almost with a limp, and dreamed of her name in the register with ominous rows of black ciphers; they stretched on and on to infinity—in vain did she turn page after page in the hope of a red mark; the little black eggs became larger and larger, till at last horrid horned insects began to creep from them and scramble all over her, and she woke with creeping flesh. Sometimes she lay swathed and choking in the coils of a Black Banner.

And, to add to these worries, the School Board officer hovered and buzzed around, threatening summonses.

But at last she was able to escape to her beloved school. The expected scowl of the room was changed to a sigh of relief; extremes meet, and her absence had been so prolonged that reproach was turned to welcome.

Bloomah remorsefully redoubled her exertions. The hope of the Banner flamed anew in every breast. But the other classes were no less keen; a fifth standard, in particular, kept the Banner for a full month, grimly holding it against all comers, came they ever so regularly and punctually.

Suddenly a new and melancholy factor entered into the competition. An epidemic of small-pox broke out in the East End, with its haphazard effects upon the varying classes. Red marks, and black marks, medals and prizes, all was luck and lottery. The pride of the fifth standard was laid low; one of its girls was attacked, two others were kept at home through parental panic. A disturbing insecurity as of an earthquake vibrated through the school. In Bloomah's class alone—as if inspired by her martial determination—the ranks stood firm, unwavering.

The epidemic spread. The Ghetto began to talk of special psalms in the little synagogues.

In this crisis which the epidemic produced the Banner seemed drifting steadily towards Bloomah and her mates. They started Monday morning with all hands on deck, so to speak; they sailed round Tuesday and Wednesday without a black mark in the school-log. The Thursday on which they had so often split was passed under full canvas, and if they could only get through Friday the trophy was theirs.

And Friday was the easiest day of all, inasmuch as, in view of the incoming Sabbath, it finished earlier. School did not break up between the two attendances; there was a mere dinner-interval in the playground at midday. Nobody could get away, and whoever scored the first mark was sure of the second.

Bloomah was up before dawn on the fateful winter morning; she could run no risks of being late. She polished off all her house-work, wondering anxiously if any of her classmates would oversleep herself, yet at heart confident that all were as eager as she. Still there was always that troublesome small-pox——! She breathed a prayer that God would keep all the little girls and send them the Banner.

As she sat at breakfast the postman brought a post-card for her mother. Bloomah's heart was in her mouth when Mrs. Beckenstein clucked her tongue in reading it. She felt sure that the epidemic had invaded one of those numerous family hearths.

Her mother handed her the card silently.

'DEAR MOTHER, 'I am rakked with neuraljia. Send Bloomah to fry the fish. 'BECKY.'

Bloomah turned white; this was scarcely less tragic.

'Poor Becky!' said her heedless parent.

'There's time after school,' she faltered.

'What!' shrieked Mrs. Beckenstein. 'And not give the fish time to get cold! It's that red mark again—sooner than lose it you'd see your own sister eat hot fish. Be off at once to her, you unnatural brat, or I'll bang the frying-pan about your head. That'll give you a red mark—yes, and a black mark, too! My poor Becky never persecuted me with Banners, and she's twice the scholard you are.'

'Why, she can't spell "neuralgia,"' said Bloomah resentfully.

'And who wants to spell a thing like that? It's bad enough to feel it. Wait till you have babies and neuralgy of your own, and you'll see how you'll spell.'

'She can't spell "racked" either,' put in Daniel.

His mother turned on him witheringly. 'She didn't go to school with the Meshummodim.'

Bloomah suddenly picked up her satchel.

'What's your books for? You don't fry fish with books.' Mrs. Beckenstein wrested it away from her, and dashed it on the floor. The pencil-case rolled one way, the thimble another.

'But I can get to school for the afternoon attendance.'

'Madness! With your sister in agony? Have you no feelings? Don't let me see your brazen face before the Sabbath!'

Bloomah crept out broken-hearted. On the way to Becky's her feet turned of themselves by long habit down the miry street in which the red-brick school-building rose in dreary importance. The sight of the great iron gate and the hurrying children caused her a throb of guilt. For a moment she stood wrestling with the temptation to enter.

It was but for the moment. She might rise to the heresy of hot fried fish in lieu of cold, but Becky's Sabbath altogether devoid of fried fish was a thought too sacrilegious for her childish brain.

From her earliest babyhood chunks of cold fried fish had been part of her conception of the Day of Rest. Visions and odours of her mother frying plaice and soles—at worst, cod or mackerel—were inwoven with her most sacred memories of the coming Sabbath; it is probable she thought Friday was short for frying-day.

With a sob she turned back, hurrying as if to escape the tug of temptation.

'Bloomah! Where are you off to?'

It was the alarmed cry of a classmate. Bloomah took to her heels, her face a fiery mass of shame and grief.

Towards midday Becky's fish, nicely browned and sprigged with parsley, stood cooling on the great blue willow-pattern dish, and Becky's neuralgia abated, perhaps from the mental relief of the spectacle.

When the clock struck twelve, Bloomah was allowed to scamper off to school in the desperate hope of saving the afternoon attendance.

The London sky was of lead, and the London pavement of mud, but her heart was aglow with hope. As she reached the familiar street a certain strangeness in its aspect struck her. People stood at the doors gossiping and excited, as though no Sabbath pots were a-cooking; straggling groups possessed the roadway, impeding her advance, and as she got nearer to the school the crowd thickened, the roadway became impassable, a gesticulating mob blocked the iron gate.

Poor Bloomah paused in her breathless career ready to cry at this malicious fate fighting against her, and for the first time allowing herself time to speculate on what was up. All around her she became aware of weeping and wailing and shrieking and wringing of hands.

The throng was chiefly composed of Russian and Roumanian women of the latest immigration, as she could tell by the pious wigs hiding their tresses. Those in the front were pressed against the bars of the locked gate, shrieking through them, shaking them with passion.

Although Bloomah's knowledge of Yiddish was slight—as became a scion of an old English family—she could make out their elemental ejaculations.

'You murderers!'

'Give me my Rachel!'

'They are destroying our daughters as Pharaoh destroyed our sons.'

'Give me back my children, and I'll go back to Russia.'

'They are worse than the Russians, the poisoners!'

'O God of Abraham, how shall I live without my Leah?'

On the other side of the bars the children—released for the dinner-interval—were clamouring equally, shouting, weeping, trying to get to their mothers. Some howled, with their sleeves rolled up, to exhibit the upper arm.

'See,' the women cried, 'the red marks! Oh, the poisoners!'

A light began to break upon Bloomah's brain. Evidently the School Board had suddenly sent down compulsory vaccinators.

'I won't die,' moaned a plump golden-haired girl. 'I'm too young to die yet.'

'My little lamb is dying!' A woman near Bloomah, with auburn wisps showing under her black wig, wrung her hands. 'I hear her talk—always, always about the red mark. Now they have given it her. She is poisoned—my little apple.'

'Your little carrot is all right,' said Bloomah testily. 'They've only vaccinated her.'

The woman caught at the only word she understood. 'Vaccinate, vaccinate!' she repeated. Then, relapsing into jargon and raising her hands heavenward: 'A sudden death upon them all!'

Bloomah turned despairingly in search of a wigless woman. One stood at her elbow.

'Can't you explain to her that the doctors mean no harm?' Bloomah asked.

'Oh, don't they, indeed? Just you read this!' She flourished a handbill, English on one side, Yiddish on the other.

Bloomah read the English version, not without agitation:

'Mothers, look after your little ones! The School Tyrants are plotting to inject filthy vaccine into their innocent veins. Keep them away rather than let them be poisoned to enrich the doctors.'

There followed statistics to appal even Bloomah. What wonder if the refugees from lands of persecution—lands in which anything might happen—believed they had fallen from the frying-pan into the fire; if the rumour that executioners with instruments had entered the school-buildings had run like wildfire through the quarter, enflaming Oriental imagination to semi-madness.

While Bloomah was reading, a head-shawled woman fainted, and the din and frenzy grew.

'But I was vaccinated when a baby, and I'm all right,' murmured Bloomah, half to reassure herself.

'My arm! I'm poisoned!' And another pupil flew frantically towards the gate.

The women outside replied with a dull roar of rage, and hurled themselves furiously against the lock.

A window on the playground was raised with a sharp snap, and the head-mistress appeared, shouting alternately at the children and the parents; but she was neither heard nor understood, and a Polish crone shook an answering fist.

'You old maid—childless, pitiless!'

Shrill whistles sounded and resounded from every side, and soon a posse of eight policemen were battling with the besiegers, trying to push themselves between them and the gate. A fat and genial officer worked his way past Bloomah, his truncheon ready for action.

'Don't hurt the poor women,' Bloomah pleaded. 'They think their children are being poisoned.'

'I know, missie. What can you do with such greenhorns? Why don't they stop in their own country? I've just been vaccinated myself, and it's no joke to get my arm knocked about like this!'

'Then show them the red marks, and that will quiet them.'

The policeman laughed. A sleeveless policeman! It would destroy all the dignity and prestige of the force.

'Then I'll show them mine,' said Bloomah resolutely. 'Mine are old and not very showy, but perhaps they'll do. Lift me up, please—I mean on your unvaccinated arm.'

Overcome by her earnestness the policeman hoisted her on his burly shoulder. The apparent arrest made a diversion; all eyes turned towards her.

'You Narronim!' (fools), she shrieked, desperately mustering her scraps of Yiddish. 'Your children are safe. Ich bin vaccinated. Look!' She rolled up her sleeve. 'Der policeman ist vaccinated. Look—if I tap him he winces. See!'

'Hold on, missie!' The policeman grimaced.

'The King ist vaccinated,' went on Bloomah, 'and the Queen, and the Prince of Wales, yes, even the Teachers themselves. There are no devils inside there. This paper'—she held up the bill—'is lies and falsehood.' She tore it into fragments.

'No; it is true as the Law of Moses,' retorted a man in the mob.

'As the Law of Moses!' echoed the women hoarsely.

Bloomah had an inspiration. 'The Law of Moses! Pooh! Don't you know this is written by the Meshummodim?'

The crowd looked blank, fell silent. If, indeed, the handbill was written by apostates, what could it hold but Satan's lies?

Bloomah profited by her moment of triumph. 'Go home, you Narronim!' she cried pityingly from her perch. And then, veering round towards the children behind the bars: 'Shut up, you squalling sillies!' she cried. 'As for you, Golda Benjamin, I'm ashamed of you—a girl of your age! Put your sleeve down, cry-baby!'

Bloomah would have carried the day had not her harangue distracted the police from observing another party of rioters—women, assisted by husbands hastily summoned from stall and barrow, who were battering at a side gate. And at this very instant they burst it open, and with a great cry poured into the playground, screaming and searching for their progeny.

The police darted round to the new battlefield, expecting an attack upon doors and windows, and Bloomah was hastily set down in the seething throng and carried with it in the wake of the police, who could not prevent it flooding through the broken side gate.

The large playground became a pandemonium of parents, children, police, and teachers all shouting and gesticulating. But there was no riot. The law could not prevent mothers and fathers from snatching their offspring to their bosoms and making off overjoyed. The children who had not the luck to be kidnapped escaped of themselves, some panic-stricken, some merely mischievous, and in a few minutes the school was empty.

* * * * *

The School Management Committee sat formally to consider this unprecedented episode. It was decided to cancel the attendance for the day. Red marks, black marks—all fell into equality; the very ciphers were reduced to their native nothingness. The school-week was made to end on the Thursday.

Next Monday morning saw Bloomah at her desk, happiest of a radiant sisterhood. On the wall shone the Banner.



THE BEARER OF BURDENS



THE BEARER OF BURDENS

I

When her Fanny did at last marry, Natalya—as everybody called the old clo'-woman—was not over-pleased at the bargain. Natalya had imagined beforehand that for a matronly daughter of twenty-three, almost past the marrying age, any wedding would be a profitable transaction. But when a husband actually presented himself, all the old dealer's critical maternity was set a-bristle. Henry Elkman, she insisted, had not a true Jewish air. There was in the very cut of his clothes a subtle suggestion of going to the races.

It was futile of Fanny to insist that Henry had never gone to the races, that his duties as bookkeeper of S. Cohn's Clothing Emporium prevented him from going to the races, and that the cut of his clothes was intended to give tone to his own establishment.

'Ah, yes, he does not take thee to the races,' she insisted in Yiddish. 'But all these young men with check suits and flowers in their buttonholes bet and gamble and go to the bad, and their wives and children fall back on their old mothers for support.'

'I shall not fall back on thee,' Fanny retorted angrily.

'And on whom else? A pretty daughter! Would you fall back on a stranger? Or perhaps you are thinking of the Board of Guardians!' And a shudder of humiliation traversed her meagre frame. For at sixty she was already meagre, had already the appearance of the venerable grandmother she was now to become, save that her hair, being only a pious wig, remained rigidly young and black. Life had always gone hard with her. Since her husband's death, when Fanny was a child, she had scraped together a scanty livelihood by selling odds and ends for a mite more than she gave for them. At the back doors of villas she haggled with miserly mistresses, gentlewoman and old-clo' woman linked by their common love of a bargain.

Natalya would sniff contemptuously at the muddle of ancient finery on the floor and spurn it with her foot. 'How can I sell that?' she would inquire. 'Last time I gave you too much—I lost by you.' And having wrung the price down to the lowest penny, she would pay it in clanking silver and copper from a grimy leather bag she wore hidden in her bosom; then, cramming the goods hastily into the maw of her sack, she would stagger joyously away. The men's garments she would modestly sell to a second-hand shop, but the women's she cleaned and turned and transmogrified and sold in Petticoat Lane of a Sunday morning; scavenger, earth-worm, and alchemist, she was a humble agent in the great economic process by which cast-off clothes renew their youth and freshness, and having set in their original sphere rise endlessly on other social horizons.

Of English she had, when she began, only enough to bargain with; but in one year of forced intercourse with English folk after her husband's death she learnt more than in her quarter of a century of residence in the Spitalfields Ghetto.

Fanny's function had been to keep house and prepare the evening meal, but the old clo'-woman's objection to her marriage was not selfish. She was quite ready to light her own fire and broil her own bloater after the day's tramp. Fanny had, indeed, offered to have her live in the elegant two-roomed cottage near King's Cross which Henry was furnishing. She could sleep in a convertible bureau in the parlour. But the old woman's independent spirit and her mistrust of her son-in-law made her prefer the humble Ghetto garret. Against all reasoning, she continued to feel something antipathetic in Henry's clothes and even in his occupation—perhaps it was really the subconscious antagonism of the old clo' and the new, subtly symbolic of the old generation and the smart new world springing up to tread it down. Henry himself was secretly pleased at her refusal. In the first ardours of courtship he had consented to swallow even the Polish crone who had strangely mothered his buxom British Fanny, but for his own part he had a responsive horror of old clo'; felt himself of the great English world of fashion and taste, intimately linked with the burly Britons whose girths he recorded from his high stool at his glass-environed desk, and in touch even with the lion comique, the details of whose cheap but stylish evening dress he entered with a proud flourish.

II

The years went by, and it looked as if the old woman's instinct were awry. Henry did not go to the races, nor did Fanny have to fall back on her mother-in-law for the maintenance of herself and her two children, Becky and Joseph. On the contrary, she doubled her position in the social scale by taking a four-roomed house in the Holloway Road. Its proximity to the Clothing Emporium enabled Henry to come home for lunch. But, alas! Fanny was not allowed many years of enjoyment of these grandeurs and comforts. The one-roomed grave took her, leaving the four-roomed house incredibly large and empty. Even Natalya's Ghetto garret, which Fanny had not shared for seven years, seemed cold and vacant to the poor mother. A new loneliness fell upon her, not mitigated by ever rarer visits to her grandchildren. Devoid of the link of her daughter, the house seemed immeasurably aloof from her in the social scale. Henry was frigid and the little ones went with marked reluctance to this stern, forbidding old woman who questioned them as to their prayers and smelt of red-herrings. She ceased to go to the house.

And then at last all her smouldering distrust of Henry Elkman found overwhelming justification.

Before the year of mourning was up, before he was entitled to cease saying the Kaddish (funeral hymn) for her darling Fanny, the wretch, she heard, was married again. And married—villainy upon villainy, horror upon horror—to a Christian girl, a heathen abomination. Natalya was wrestling with her over-full sack when she got the news from a gossiping lady client, and she was boring holes for the passage of string to tie up its mouth. She turned the knife viciously, as if it were in Henry Elkman's heart.

She did not know the details of the piquant, tender courtship between him and the pretty assistant at the great drapery store that neighboured the Holloway Clothing Emporium, any more than she understood the gradual process which had sapped Henry's instinct of racial isolation, or how he had passed from admiration of British ways into entire abandonment of Jewish. She was spared, too, the knowledge that latterly her own Fanny had slid with him into the facile paths of impiety; that they had ridden for a breath of country air on Sabbath afternoons. They had been considerate enough to hide that from her. To the old clo'-woman's crude mind, Henry Elkman existed as a monster of ready-made wickedness, and she believed even that he had been married in church and baptized, despite that her informant tried to console her with the assurance that the knot had been tied in a Registrar's office.

'May he be cursed with the boils of Pharaoh!' she cried in her picturesque jargon. 'May his fine clothes fall from his flesh and his flesh from his bones! May my Fanny's outraged soul plead against him at the Judgment Bar! And she—this heathen female—may her death be sudden!' And she drew the ends of the string tightly together, as though round the female's neck.

'Hush, you old witch!' cried the gossip, revolted; 'and what would become of your own grandchildren?'

'They cannot be worse off than they are now, with a heathen in the house. All their Judaism will become corrupted. She may even baptize them. Oh, Father in Heaven!'

The thought weighed upon her. She pictured the innocent Becky and Joseph kissing crucifixes. At the best there would be no kosher food in the house any more. How could this stranger understand the mysteries of purging meat, of separating meat-plates from butter-plates?

At last she could bear the weight no longer. She took the Elkman house in her rounds, and, bent under her sack, knocked at the familiar door. It was lunch-time, and unfamiliar culinary smells seemed wafted along the passage. Her morbid imagination scented bacon. The orthodox amulet on the doorpost did not comfort her; it had been left there, forgotten, a mute symbol of the Jewish past.

A pleasant young woman with blue eyes and fresh-coloured cheeks opened the door.

The blood surged to Natalya's eyes, so that she could hardly see.

'Old clo',' she said mechanically.

'No, thank you,' replied the young woman. Her voice was sweet, but it sounded to Natalya like the voice of Lilith, stealer of new-born children. Her rosy cheek seemed smeared with seductive paint. In the background glistened the dual crockery of the erst pious kitchen which the new-comer profaned. And between Natalya and it, between Natalya and her grandchildren, this alien girlish figure seemed to stand barrier-wise. She could not cross the threshold without explanations.

'Is Mr. Elkman at home?' she asked.

'You know the name!' said the young woman, a little surprised.

'Yes, I have been here a good deal.' The old woman's sardonic accent was lost on the listener.

'I am sorry there is nothing this time,' she replied.

'Not even a pair of old shoes?'

'No.'

'But the dead woman's——? Are you, then, standing in them?'

The words were so fierce and unexpected, the crone's eyes blazed so weirdly, that the new wife recoiled with a little shriek.

'Henry!' she cried.

Fork in hand, he darted in from the living-room, but came to a sudden standstill.

'What do you want here?' he muttered.

'Fanny's shoes!' she cried.

'Who is it?' his wife's eyes demanded.

'A half-witted creature we deal with out of charity,' he gestured back. And he put her inside the room-door, whispering, 'Let me get rid of her.'

'So, that's your painted poppet,' hissed his mother-in-law in Yiddish.

'Painted?' he said angrily. 'Madge painted? She's just as natural as a rosy apple. She's a country girl, and her mother was a lady.'

'Her mother? Perhaps! But she? You see a glossy high hat marked sixteen and sixpence, and you think it's new. But I know what it's come from—a battered thing that has rolled in the gutter. Ah, how she could have bewitched you, when there are so many honest Jewesses without husbands!

'I am sorry she doesn't please you; but, after all, it's my business, and not yours.'

'Not mine? After I gave you my Fanny, and she slaved for you and bore you children?'

'It's just for her children that I had to marry.'

'What? You had to marry a Christian for the sake of Fanny's children? Oh, God forgive you!'

'We are not in Poland now,' he said sulkily.

'Ah, I always said you were a sinner in Israel. My Fanny has been taken for your sins. A black death on your bones.'

'If you don't leave off cursing, I shall call a policeman.'

'Oh, lock me up, lock me up—instead of your shame. Let the whole world know that.'

'Go away, then. You have no right to come here and frighten Madge—my wife. She is in delicate health, as it is.'

'May she be an atonement for all of us! I have the right to come here as much as I please.'

'You have no right.'

'I have a right to the children. My blood is in their veins.'

'You have no right. The children are their father's.'

'Yes, their Father's in heaven,' and she raised her hand like an ancient prophetess, while the other supported her bag over her shoulder. 'The children are the children of Israel, and they must carry forward the yoke of the Law.'

'And what do you propose?' he said, with a scornful sniff.

'Give me the children. I will elevate them in the fear of the Lord. You go your own godless way, free of burdens—you and your Christian poppet. You no longer belong to us. Give me the children, and I'll go away.'

He looked at her quizzingly. 'You have been drinking, my good mother-in-law.'

'Ay, the waters of affliction. Give me the children.'

'But they won't go with you. They love their step-mother.'

'Love that painted jade? They, with Jewish blood warm in their veins, with the memory of their mother warm in their hearts? Impossible!'

He opened the door gently. 'Becky! Joe! No, don't you come, Madge, darling. It's all right. The old lady wants to say "Good-day" to the children.'

The two children tripped into the passage, with napkins tied round their chins, their mouths greasy, but the rest of their persons unfamiliarly speckless and tidy. They stood still at the sight of their grandmother, so stern and frowning. Henry shut the door carefully.

'My lambs!' Natalya cried, in her sweetest but harsh tones, 'Won't you come and kiss me?'

Becky, a mature person of seven, advanced courageously and surrendered her cheek to her grandmother.

'How are you, granny?' she said ceremoniously.

'And Joseph?' said Natalya, not replying. 'My heart and my crown, will he not come?'

The four-and-a-half year old Joseph stood dubiously, with his fist in his mouth.

'Bring him to me, Becky. Tell him I want you and him to come and live with me.'

Becky shrugged her precocious shoulders. 'He may. I won't,' she said laconically.

'Oh, Becky!' said the grandmother. 'Do you want to stay here and torture your poor mother?'

Becky stared. 'She's dead,' she said.

'Yes, but her soul lives and watches over you. Come, Joseph, apple of my eye, come with me.'

She beckoned enticingly, but the little boy, imagining the invitation was to enter her bag and be literally carried away therein, set up a terrific howl. Thereupon the pretty young woman emerged hastily, and the child, with a great sob of love and confidence, ran to her and nestled in her arms.

'Mamma, mamma,' he cried.

Henry looked at the old woman with a triumphant smile.

Natalya went hot and cold. It was not only that little Joseph had gone to this creature. It was not even that he had accepted her maternity. It was this word 'mamma' that stung. The word summed up all the blasphemous foreignness of the new domesticity. 'Mamma' was redolent of cold Christian houses in whose doorways the old clo'-woman sometimes heard it. Fanny had been 'mother'—the dear, homely, Jewish 'mother.' This 'mamma,' taught to the orphans, was like the haughty parade of Christian elegance across her grave.

'When mamma's shoes are to be sold, don't forget me,' Natalya hissed. 'I'll give you the best price in the market.'

Henry shuddered, but replied, half pushing her outside: 'Certainly, certainly. Good-afternoon.'

'I'll buy them at your own price—ah, I see them coming, coming into my bag.'

The door closed on her grotesque sibylline intensity, and Henry clasped his wife tremblingly to his bosom and pressed a long kiss upon her fragrant cherry lips.

Later on he explained that the crazy old clo'-woman was known to the children, as to everyone in the neighbourhood, as 'Granny.'

III

In the bearing of her first child the second Mrs. Elkman died. The rosy face became a white angelic mask, the dainty figure lay in statuesque severity, and a screaming, bald-headed atom of humanity was the compensation for this silence. Henry Elkman was overwhelmed by grief and superstition.

'For three things women die in childbirth,' kept humming in his brain from his ancient Hebrew lore. He did not remember what they were, except that one was the omission of the wife to throw into the fire the lump of dough from the Sabbath bread. But these neglects could not be visited on a Christian, he thought dully. The only distraction of his grief was the infant's pressing demand on his attention.

It was some days before the news penetrated to the old woman.

'It is his punishment,' she said with solemn satisfaction. 'Now my Fanny's spirit will rest.'

But she did not gloat over the decree of the God of Israel as she had imagined beforehand, nor did she call for the dead woman's old clo'. She was simply content—an unrighteous universe had been set straight again like a mended watch. But she did call, without her bag, to inquire if she could be of service in this tragic crisis.