Ghetto Comedies Part 47

Yossel, propped on his crutches, was pulling out a mouldering black-covered book from under his greasy caftan. 'I have brought you back your _Chovoth Halvovoth_,' he said.

In the vivid presence of the actual romance the artist could not suppress the smile he had kept back at the mere shadowy recital. In Rome he himself had not infrequently called on young ladies by way of returning books to them. It was true that the books he returned were not Hebrew treatises, but he smiled again to think that the name of Yossel's volume signified 'the duties of the heart.' The _Bube_ Yenta received the book with thanks, and a moment of embarra.s.sment ensued, only slightly mitigated by the offer of the snuffbox. Yossel took a pinch, but his eyes seemed roving in amaze, less over the stranger than over the bespread table, as though he might unaccountably have overlooked some sacred festival. That two are company and three none seemed at this point a proverb to be heeded, and without waiting to renew the hero's acquaintance, the artist escaped from the idyllic cottage. Let the lover profit by the pastry for which he himself was too old.

So the gossips spoke the truth, he thought, his amus.e.m.e.nt not unblended with a touch of his mother's indignation. Surely, if his grandmother wished to cultivate a grand pa.s.sion, she might have chosen a more sightly object of devotion. Not that there was much to be said for Yossel's taste either. When after seventy-five years of celibacy the fascinations of the other s.e.x began to tell upon him, he might at least have succ.u.mbed to a less matriarchal form of femininity. But perhaps his grandmother had fascinations of another order. Perhaps she had money. He put the question to his mother.

'Certainly she has money,' said his mother vindictively. 'She has thousands of _Gulden_ in her stocking. Twenty years ago she could have had her pick of a dozen well-to-do widowers, yet now that she has one foot in the grave, madness has entered her soul, and she has cast her eye upon this pauper.'

'But I thought his father left him his inn,' said the artist.

'His inn--yes. His sense--no. Yossel ruined himself long ago paying too much attention to the Talmud instead of his business. He was always a _Schlemihl_.'

'But can one pay too much attention to the Talmud? That is a strange saying for a Rabbi's daughter.'

'King Solomon tells us there is a time for everything,' returned the Rabbi's daughter. 'Yossel neglected what the wise King said, and so now he comes trying to wheedle your poor grandmother out of her money.

If he wanted to marry, why didn't he marry before eighteen, as the Talmud prescribes?'

'He seems to do everything at the wrong time,' laughed her son. 'Do you suppose, by the way, that King Solomon made all his thousand marriages before he was eighteen?'

'Make not mock of holy things,' replied his mother angrily.

The monetary explanation of the romance, he found, was the popular one in the village. It did not, however, exculpate the grandame from the charge of forwardness, since if she wished to contract another marriage it could have been arranged legitimately by the _Shadchan_, and then the poor marriage-broker, who got little enough to do in this G.o.d-forsaken village, might have made a few _Gulden_ out of it.

Beneath all his artistic perception of the humours of the thing, Schneemann found himself prosaically sharing the general disapprobation of the marriage. Really, when one came to think of it, it was ridiculous that he should have a new grandfather thrust upon him. And such a grandfather! Perhaps the _Bube_ was, indeed, losing her reason. Or was it he himself who was losing his reason, taking seriously this parochial scandal, and believing that because a doddering hunchback of seventy-five had borrowed an ethical treatise from an octogenarian a marriage must be on the tapis? Yet, on more than one occasion, he came upon circ.u.mstances which seemed to justify the popular supposition. There could be no doubt, for example, that when at the conclusion of the synagogue service the feminine stream from the women's gallery poured out to mingle with the issuing males, these two atoms drifted together with unnatural celerity. It appeared to be established beyond question that on the preceding Feast of Tabernacles the _Bube_ had lent and practically abandoned to the hunchback's use the ritual palm-branch he was too poor to afford. Of course this might only have been grat.i.tude, inasmuch as a fortnight earlier on the solemn New Year Day when, by an untimely decree, the grandmother lay ill abed, Yossel had obtained possession of the _Shofar_, and leaving the synagogue had gone to blow it to her. He had blown the holy horn--with due regard to the proprieties--in the downstairs room of her cottage so that she above had heard it, and having heard it could breakfast. It was a performance that charity reasonably required for a disabled fellow-creature, and yet what medieval knight had found a more delicate way of trumpeting his mistress's charms? Besides, how had Yossel known that the heroine was ill? His eye must have roved over the women's gallery, and disentangled her absence even from the huddled ma.s.s of weeping and swaying womanhood.

One day came the crowning item of evidence. The grandmother had actually asked the village postman to oblige her by delivering a brown parcel at Yossel's lodgings. The postman was not a Child of the Covenant, but Yossel's landlady was, and within an hour all Jewry knew that Yenta had sent Yossel a phylacteries-bag--the very symbol of love offered by a maiden to her bridegroom. Could shameless pa.s.sion further go?

III

The artist, at least, determined it should go no further. He put on his hat, and went to find Yossel Mandelstein. But Yossel was not to be found so easily, and the artist's resolution strengthened with each false scent. Yossel was ultimately run to earth, or rather to Heaven, in the _Beth Hamedrash_, where he was shaking himself studiously over a Babylonian folio, in company with a motley a.s.semblage of youths and greybeards equally careless of the demands of life. The dusky home of holy learning seemed an awkward place in which to broach the subject of love. In a whisper he besought the oscillating student to come outside. Yossel started up in agitation.

'Ah, your grandmother is dying,' he divined, with what seemed a lover's inaccuracy. 'I will come and pray at once.'

'No, no, she is not dying,' said Schneemann hastily, adding in a grim murmur, 'unless of love.'

'Oh, then, it is not about your grandmother?'

'No--that is to say, yes.' It seemed more difficult than ever to plunge into the delicate subject. To refer plumply to the courtship would, especially if it were not true, compromise his grandmother and, incidentally, her family. Yet, on the other hand, he longed to know what lay behind all this philandering, which in any case _had_ been compromising her, and he felt it his duty as his grandmother's protector and the representative of the family to ask Yossel straight out whether his intentions were honourable.

He remembered scenes in novels and plays in which undesirable suitors were tackled by champions of convention--scenes in which they were even bought off and started in new lands. Would not Yossel go to a new land, and how much would he want over and above his fare? He led the way without.

'You have lived here all your life, Yossel, have you not?' he said, when they were in the village street.

'Where else shall a man live?' answered Yossel.

'But have you never had any curiosity to see other parts? Would you not like to go and see Vienna?'

A little gleam pa.s.sed over Yossel's dingy face. 'No, not Vienna--it is an unholy place--but Prague! Prague where there is a great Rabbi and the old, old underground synagogue that G.o.d has preserved throughout the generations.'

'Well, why not go and see it?' suggested the artist.

Yossel stared. 'Is it for that you tore me away from my Talmud?'

'N--no, not exactly for that,' stammered Schneemann. 'Only seeing you glued to it gave me the idea what a pity it was that you should not travel and sit at the feet of great Rabbis?'

'But how shall I travel to them? My crutches cannot walk so far as Prague.'

'Oh, I'd lend you the money to ride,' said the artist lightly.

'But I could never repay it.'

'You can repay me in Heaven. You can give me a little bit of your _Gan Iden_' (Paradise).

Yossel shook his head. 'And after I had the fare, how should I live?

Here I make a few _Gulden_ by writing letters for people to their relatives in America; in Prague everybody is very learned; they don't need a scribe. Besides, if I cannot die in Palestine I might as well die where I was born.'

'But why can't you die in Palestine?' cried the artist with a new burst of hope. 'You _shall_ die in Palestine, I promise you.'

The gleam in Yossel's face became a great flame of joy. 'I shall die in Palestine?' he asked ecstatically.

'As sure as I live! I will pay your fare the whole way, second-cla.s.s.'

For a moment the dazzling sunshine continued on Yossel's face, then a cloud began to pa.s.s across it.

'But how can I take your money? I am not a _Schnorrer_.'

Schneemann did not find the question easy to answer. The more so as Yossel's eagerness to go and die in Palestine seemed to show that there was no reason for packing him off. However, he told himself that one must make a.s.surance doubly sure and that, even if it was all empty gossip, still he had stumbled upon a way of making an old man happy.

'There is no reason why you should take my money,' he said with an artistic inspiration, 'but there is every reason why I should buy to myself the _Mitzvah_ (good deed) of sending you to Jerusalem. You see, I have so few good deeds to my credit.'

'So I have heard,' replied Yossel placidly. 'A very wicked life it is said you lead at Rome.'

'Most true,' said the artist cheerfully.

'It is said also that you break the Second Commandment by making representations of things that are on sea and land.'

'I would the critics admitted as much,' murmured the artist.

'Your grandmother does not understand. She thinks you paint houses--which is not forbidden. But I don't undeceive her--it would pain her too much.' The lover-like sentiment brought back the artist's alarm.

'When will you be ready to start?' he said.

Yossel pondered. 'But to die in Palestine one must live in Palestine,'

he said. 'I cannot be certain that G.o.d would take my soul the moment I set foot on the holy soil.'

The artist reflected a moment, but scarcely felt rich enough to guarantee that Yossel should live in Palestine, especially if he were an unconscionably long time a-dying. A happy thought came to him. 'But there is the _Chalukah_,' he reminded Yossel.

'But that is charity.'