Ghetto Comedies - Israel Zangwill (great novels of all time txt) 📗

of cold at the word 'baptized,' as though himself plunged into the font.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE JEWISH TRINITY

THE JEWISH TRINITYToC

I

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

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

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

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

'Exactly,' assented the deaf Mayoress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

How he had hated this grace as