Ghetto Comedies Part 46

He staggered back, his pressure relaxed, the door slammed. This repet.i.tion of his 'Yvonne Rupert' experience sobered him effectually.

What right, indeed, had he to force himself upon this woman, upon these children, to whom he was dead? So might a suicide hope to win back his place in the old life. Life had gone on without him--had no need of him. Ah, what a punishment G.o.d had prepared for him! Closed doors to the past, closed doors everywhere.

And this terrible sense of exclusion had not now the same palliative of righteous resentment. With Yvonne Rupert, the splendid-flaming, vicious ingrate, he had felt himself the sinned against. But before this wife-widow, this dutiful, hard-working, tragic creature, he had nothing but self-contempt. He tottered downstairs. How should he even get his bread--he whose ill-fame was doubtless the gossip of the Ghetto? If he could only get hold of Gideon's carving-knife!

VIII

But he did not commit suicide, nor did he starve. There is always one last refuge for the failures of the Ghetto, and Elkan's easy experience with the Jewish philanthropist had prepared the way for dealings with the Christian.

To-day the Rev. Moses Elkan, 'the converted Jew,' preaches eloquently to his blind brethren who never come to hear him. For he has 'found the light.' Exeter Hall's exposition of the Jewish prophecies has opened his eyes, and though his foes have been those of his own household, yet, remembering the terrible text, 'He that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me,' he has taken up his cross and followed after Christ alone.

And even if the good souls for whose thousands of pounds he is the annual interest should discover his true past--through this tale-bearer or another--is there not but the more joy over the sinner that repenteth?

Duties neglected, deadly sins trailing in the actual world their unchangeable irreversible consequences--all this is irrelevant. He has 'found the light.'

And so, while Haigitcha walks in darkness, Yvonne prays in her chapel and Elkan preaches in his church.

HOLY WEDLOCK

HOLY WEDLOCK

I

When Schneemann, the artist, returned from Rome to his native village in Galicia, he found it humming with gossip concerning his paternal grandmother, universally known as the _Bube_ Yenta. It would seem that the giddy old thing hobbled home from synagogue conversing with Yossel Mandelstein, the hunchback, and sometimes even offered the unshapely septuagenarian her snuffbox as he pa.s.sed the door of her cottage. More than one village censor managed to acquaint the artist with the flirtation ere he had found energy to walk the muddy mile to her dwelling. Even his own mother came out strongly in disapproval of the ancient dame; perhaps the remembrance of how fanatically her mother-in-law had disapproved of her married head for not being shrouded in a pious wig lent zest to her tongue. The artist controlled his facial muscles, having learnt tolerance and Bohemianism in the Eternal City.

'Old blood will have its way,' he said blandly.

'Yes, old blood's way is sometimes worse than young blood's,' said Frau Schneemann, unsmiling. 'You must not forget that Yossel is still a bachelor.'

'Yes, and therefore a sinner in Israel--I remember,' quoth the artist with a twinkle. How all this would amuse his bachelor friends, Leopold Barstein and Rozenoffski the pianist!

'Make not mock. 'Tis high time you, too, should lead a maiden under the Canopy.'

'I am so shy--there are few so forward as grandmother.'

'Heaven be thanked!' said his mother fervently. 'When I refused to cover my tresses she spoke as if I were a brazen Epicurean, but I had rather have died than carry on so shamelessly with a man to whom I was not betrothed.'

'Perhaps they _are_ betrothed.'

'_We_ betrothed to Yossel! May his name be blotted out!'

'Why, what is wrong with Yossel? Moses Mendelssohn himself had a hump.'

'Who speaks of humps? Have you forgotten we are of Rabbinic family?'

Her son had quite forgotten it, as he had forgotten so much of this nave life to which he was paying a holiday visit.

'Ah yes,' he murmured. 'But Yossel is pious--surely?' A vision of the psalm-droners and prayer-shriekers in the little synagogue, among whom the hunchback had been conspicuous, surged up vividly.

'He may shake himself from dawn-service to night-service, he will never shake off his father, the innkeeper,' said Frau Schneemann hotly. 'If I were in your grandmother's place I would be weaving my shroud, not thinking of young men.'

'But she's thinking of old men, you said.'

'Compared with her he is young--she is eighty-four, he is only seventy-five.'

'Well, they won't be married long,' he laughed.

Frau Schneemann laid her hand on his mouth.

'Heaven forbid the omen,' she cried. ''Tis bringing a _Bilbul_ (scandal) upon a respectable family.'

'I will go and talk to her,' he said gravely. 'Indeed, I ought to have gone to see her days ago.' And as he trudged to the other end of the village towards the cottage where the lively old lady lived in self-sufficient solitude, he was full of the contrast between his mother's mental world and his own. People live in their own minds, and not in streets or fields, he philosophized.

II

Through her diamond-paned window he saw the wrinkled, white-capped old creature spinning peacefully at the rustic chimney-corner, a pure cloistral crone. It seemed profane to connect such a figure with flirtation--this was surely the very virgin of senility. What a fine picture she made too! Why had he never thought of painting her? Yes, such a picture of 'The Spinster' would be distinctly interesting. And he would put in the _Kesubah_, the marriage certificate that hung over the mantelpiece, in ironical reminder of her days of bloom. He unlatched the door--he had never been used to knock at grannie's door, and the childish instinct came back to him.

'_Guten Abend_,' he said.

She adjusted a pair of horn spectacles, and peered at him.

'_Guten Abend_,' she murmured.

'You don't remember me--Vroomkely.' He used the old childish diminutive of Abraham, though he had almost forgotten he owned the name in full.

'Vroomkely,' she gasped, almost overturning her wheel as she sprang to hug him in her skinny arms. He had a painful sense that she had shrunk back almost to childish dimensions. Her hands seemed trembling as much with decay as with emotion. She hastened to produce from the well-known cupboard home-made _Kuchen_ and other dainties of his youth, with no sense of the tragedy that lay in his no longer being tempted by them.

'And how goes your trade?' she said. 'They say you have never been slack. They must build many houses in Rome.' Her notion that he was a house-painter he hardly cared to contradict, especially as picture-painting was contrary to the Mosaic dispensation.

'Oh, I haven't been only in Rome,' he said evasively. 'I have been in many lands.'

Fire came into her eyes, and flashed through the big spectacles. 'You have been to Palestine?' she cried.

'No, only as far as Egypt. Why?'

'I thought you might have brought me a clod of Palestine earth to put in my grave.' The fire died out of her spectacles, she sighed, and took a consolatory pinch of snuff.

'Don't talk of graves--you will live to be a hundred and more,' he cried. But he was thinking how ridiculous gossip was. It spared neither age nor s.e.xlessness, not even this shrivelled ancient who was meditating on her latter end. Suddenly he became aware of a shadow darkening the doorway. At the same instant the fire leapt back into his grandmother's gla.s.ses. Instinctively, almost before he turned his head, he knew it was the hero of the romance.

Yossel Mandelstein looked even less of a hero than the artist had remembered. There had been something wistful and pathetic in the hunchback's expression, some hint of inner eager fire, but this--if he had not merely imagined it--seemed to have died of age and hopelessness. He used crutches, too, to help himself along with, so that he seemed less the hunchback of yore than the conventional contortion of time, and but for the familiar earlocks pendent on either side of the fur cap, but for the great hooked nose and the small chin hidden in the big beard, the artist might have doubted if this was indeed the Yossel he had sometimes mocked at in the crude cruelty of boyhood.