Children of the Ghetto Part 6

The dress fluttered in the breeze. Mrs. Jacobs caressed the stuff between her thumb and forefinger.

"Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk," she announced with a long ecstatic quaver.

Mrs. Isaacs stood paralyzed by the brilliancy of the repartee.

Mrs. Jacobs withdrew the moire antique and exhibited a mauve gown.

"Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk."

The mauve fluttered for a triumphant instant, the next a puce and amber dress floated on the breeze.

"Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk." Mrs. Jacobs's fingers smoothed it lovingly, then it was drawn within to be instantly replaced by a green dress.

Mrs. Jacobs pa.s.sed the skirt slowly through her fingers.

"Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk!" she quavered mockingly.

By this time Mrs. Isaacs's face was the color of the latest flag of victory.

"The tallyman!" she tried to retort, but the words stuck in her throat.

Fortunately just then she caught sight of her poor lamb playing with the other poor lamb. She dashed at her offspring, boxed its ears and crying, "You little blackguard, if I ever catch you playing with blackguards again, I'll wring your neck for you," she hustled the infant into the house and slammed the door viciously behind her.

Moses had welcomed this every-day scene, for it put off a few moments his encounter with the formidable Malka. As she had not appeared at door or window, he concluded she was in a bad temper or out of London; neither alternative was pleasant.

He knocked at the door of Milly's house where her mother was generally to be found, and an elderly char-woman opened it. There were some bottles of spirit, standing on a wooden side-table covered with a colored cloth, and some unopened biscuit bags. At these familiar premonitory signs of a festival, Moses felt tempted to beat a retreat.

He could not think for the moment what was up, but whatever it was he had no doubt the well-to-do persons would supply him with ice. The char-woman, with brow darkened by soot and gloom, told him that Milly was upstairs, but that her mother had gone across to her own house with the clothes-brush.

Moses's face fell. When his wife was alive, she had been a link of connection between "The Family" and himself, her cousin having generously employed her as a char-woman. So Moses knew the import of the clothes-brush. Malka was very particular about her appearance and loved to be externally speckless, but somehow or other she had no clothes-brush at home. This deficiency did not matter ordinarily, for she practically lived at Milly's. But when she had words with Milly or her husband, she retired to her own house to sulk or _schmull_, as they called it. The carrying away of the clothes-brush was, thus, a sign that she considered the breach serious and hostilities likely to be protracted. Sometimes a whole week would go by without the two houses ceasing to stare sullenly across at each other, the situation in Milly's camp being aggravated by the lack of a clothes-brush. In such moments of irritation, Milly's husband was apt to declare that his mother-in-law had abundance of clothes-brushes, for, he pertinently asked, how did she manage during her frequent business tours in the country? He gave it as his conviction that Malka merely took the clothes-brush away to afford herself a handle for returning. But then Ephraim Phillips was a graceless young fellow, the death of whose first wife was probably a judgment on his levity, and everybody except his second mother-in-law knew that he had a book of tickets for the Oxbridge Music Hall, and went there on Friday nights. Still, in spite of these facts, experience did show that whenever Milly's camp had outsulked Malka's, the old woman's surrender was always veiled under the formula of: "Oh Milly, I've brought you over your clothes-brush. I just noticed it, and thought you might be wanting it." After this, conversation was comparatively easy.

Moses hardly cared to face Malka in such a crisis of the clothes-brush.

He turned away despairingly, and was going back through the small archway which led to the Ruins and the outside world, when a grating voice startled his ear.

"Well, Meshe, whither fliest thou? Has my Milly forbidden thee to see me?"

He looked back. Malka was standing at her house-door. He retraced his steps.

"N-n-o," he murmured. "I thought you still out with your stall."

That was where she should have been, at any rate, till half an hour ago.

She did not care to tell herself, much less Moses, that she had been waiting at home for the envoy of peace from the filial camp summoning her to the ceremony of the Redemption of her grandson.

"Well, now thou seest me," she said, speaking Yiddish for his behoof, "thou lookest not outwardly anxious to know how it goes with me."

"How goes it with you?"

"As well as an old woman has a right to expect. The Most High is good!"

Malka was in her most amiable mood, to emphasize to outsiders the injustice of her kin in quarrelling with her. She was a tall woman of fifty, with a tanned equine gypsy face surmounted by a black wig, and decorated laterally by great gold earrings. Great black eyes blazed beneath great black eyebrows, and the skin between them was capable of wrinkling itself black with wrath. A gold chain was wound thrice round her neck, and looped up within her black silk bodice. There were numerous rings on her fingers, and she perpetually smelt of peppermint.

"_Nu_, stand not chattering there," she went on. "Come in. Dost thou wish me to catch my death of cold?"

Moses slouched timidly within, his head bowed as if in dread of knocking against the top of the door. The room was a perfect fac-simile of Milly's parlor at the other end of the diagonal, save that instead of the festive bottles and paper bags on the small side-table, there was a cheerless clothes-brush. Like Milly's, the room contained a round table, a chest of drawers with decanters on the top, and a high mantelpiece decorated with pendant green fringes, fastened by big-headed bra.s.s nails. Here cheap china dogs, that had had more than their day squatted amid l.u.s.tres with crystal drops. Before the fire was a lofty steel guard, which, useful enough in Milly's household, had survived its function in Malka's, where no one was ever likely to tumble into the grate. In a corner of the room a little staircase began to go upstairs.

There was oilcloth on the floor. In Zachariah Square anybody could go into anybody else's house and feel at home. There was no visible difference between one and another. Moses sat down awkwardly on a chair and refused a peppermint. In the end he accepted an apple, blessed G.o.d for creating the fruit of the tree, and made a ravenous bite at it.

"I must take peppermints," Malka explained. "It's for the spasms."

"But you said you were well," murmured Moses.

"And suppose? If I did not take peppermint I should have the spasms. My poor sister Rosina, peace be upon him, who died of typhoid, suffered greatly from the spasms. It's in the family. She would have died of asthma if she had lived long enough. _Nu_, how goes it with thee?" she went on, suddenly remembering that Moses, too, had a right to be ill. At bottom, Malka felt a real respect for Moses, though he did not know it.

It dated from the day he cut a chip of mahogany out of her best round table. He had finished cutting his nails, and wanted a morsel of wood to burn with them in witness of his fulfilment of the pious custom. Malka raged, but in her inmost heart there was admiration for such unscrupulous sanct.i.ty.

"I have been out of work for three weeks," Moses answered, omitting to expound the state of his health in view of more urgent matters.

"Unlucky fool! What my silly cousin Gittel, peace be upon him, could see to marry in thee, I know not."

Moses could not enlighten her. He might have informed her that _olov hasholom_, "peace be upon him," was an absurdity when applied to a woman, but then he used the pious phrase himself, although aware of its grammatical shortcomings.

"I told her thou wouldst never be able to keep her, poor lamb," Malka went on. "But she was always an obstinate pig. And she kept her head high up, too, as if she had five pounds a week! Never would let her children earn money like other people's children. But thou oughtest not to be so obstinate. Thou shouldst have more sense, Meshe; _thou_ belongest not to my family. Why can't Solomon go out with matches?"

"Gittel's soul would not like it."

"But the living have bodies! Thou rather seest thy children starve than work. There's Esther,--an idle, lazy brat, always reading story-books; why doesn't she sell flowers or pull out bastings in the evening?"

"Esther and Solomon have their lessons to do."

"Lessons!" snorted Malka. "What's the good of lessons? It's English, not Judaism, they teach them in that G.o.dless school. _I_ could never read or write anything but Hebrew in all my life; but G.o.d be thanked, I have thriven without it. All they teach them in the school is English nonsense. The teachers are a pack of heathens, who eat forbidden things, but the good Yiddishkeit goes to the wall. I'm ashamed of thee, Meshe: thou dost not even send thy boys to a Hebrew cla.s.s in the evening."

"I have no money, and they must do their English lessons. Else, perhaps, their clothes will be stopped. Besides, I teach them myself every _Shabbos_ afternoon and Sunday. Solomon translates into Yiddish the whole Pentateuch with Rashi."

"Yes, he may know _Terah_" said Malka, not to be baffled. "But he'll never know _Gemorah_ or _Mishnayis_." Malka herself knew very little of these abstruse subjects beyond their names, and the fact that they were studied out of minutely-printed folios by men of extreme sanct.i.ty.

"He knows a little _Gemorah_, too," said Moses. "I can't teach him at home because I haven't got a _Gemorah_,--it's so expensive, as you know.

But he went with me to the _Beth-Medrash_, when the _Maggid_ was studying it with a cla.s.s free of charge, and we learnt the whole of the _Tractate Niddah_. Solomon understands very well all about the Divorce Laws, and he could adjudicate on the duties of women to their husbands."

"Ah, but he'll never know _Cabbulah_," said Malka, driven to her last citadel. "But then no one in England can study _Cabbulah_ since the days of Rabbi Falk (the memory of the righteous for a blessing) any more than a born Englishman can learn Talmud. There's something in the air that prevents it. In my town there was a Rabbi who could do _Cabbulah_; he could call Abraham our father from the grave. But in this pig-eating country no one can be holy enough for the Name, blessed be It, to grant him the privilege. I don't believe the _Shochetim_ kill the animals properly; the statutes are violated; even pious people eat _tripha_ cheese and b.u.t.ter. I don't say thou dost, Meshe, but thou lettest thy children."

"Well, your own b.u.t.ter is not _kosher_," said Moses, nettled.

"My b.u.t.ter? What does it matter about my b.u.t.ter? I never set up for a purist. I don't come of a family of Rabbonim. I'm only a business woman.

It's the _froom_ people that I complain of; the people who ought to set an example, and are lowering the standard of _Froomkeit_. I caught a beadle's wife the other day washing her meat and b.u.t.ter plates in the same bowl of water. In time they will be frying steaks in b.u.t.ter, and they will end by eating _tripha_ meat out of b.u.t.ter plates, and the judgment of G.o.d will come. But what is become of thine apple? Thou hast not gorged it already?" Moses nervously pointed to his trousers pocket, bulged out by the mutilated globe. After his first ravenous bite Moses had bethought himself of his responsibilities.

"It's for the _kinder_," he explained.

"_Nu_, the _kinder_!" snorted Malka disdainfully. "And what will they give thee for it? Verily, not a thank you. In my young days we trembled before the father and the mother, and my mother, peace be upon him, _potched_ my face after I was a married woman. I shall never forget that slap--it nearly made me adhere to the wall. But now-a-days our children sit on our heads. I gave my Milly all she has in the world--a house, a shop, a husband, and my best bed-linen. And now when I want her to call the child Yosef, after my first husband, peace be on him, her own father, she would out of sheer vexatiousness, call it Yechezkel."

Malka's voice became more strident than ever. She had been anxious to make a species of vicarious reparation to her first husband, and the failure of Milly to acquiesce in the arrangement was a source of real vexation.

Moses could think of nothing better to say than to inquire how her present husband was.

"He overworks himself," Malka replied, shaking her head. "The misfortune is that he thinks himself a good man of business, and he is always starting new enterprises without consulting me. If he would only take my advice more!"

Moses shook his head in sympathetic deprecation of Michael Birnbaum's wilfulness.