Ghetto Tragedies Part 7

XVII

When Brum awoke, in bed again, after his long fainting-fit, he related with surprise his vivid dream of St. Paul's, and Zillah weakly acquiesced in the new deception, especially as the doctor warned her against exciting the boy. But her hopes were brighter than ever; for the old lady had beneficently appeared from behind a pillar in St.

Peter's to offer eau de Cologne for the unconscious Brum, and had then, interesting herself in the couple, promised to procure for her fellow-Catholics admission to the next Papal reception. Being a very rich and fashionable old lady, she kept her word; but unfortunately, when the day came round, Brum was terribly low and forbidden to leave his bed.

Zillah was distracted. If she should miss the great chance after all!

It might never recur again.

"Brum," she said at last, "this is the only day for a long time that the great eye-doctor receives patients. Do you think you could go, my lamb?"

"Why won't he come here--like the other doctors?"

"He is too great."

"Well, I daresay I can manage. It's miserable lying in bed. Fancy coming to Rome and seeing nothing!"

With infinite care Brum was dressed and wrapped up, and placed in a specially comfortable brougham; and thus at last mother and son stood waiting in one of the ante-chambers of the Vatican, amid twenty other pilgrims whispering in strange languages. Zillah was radiantly a.s.sured: the mighty Power, whatever it was, that spoke in music and in mountains, would never permit such weary journeyings and waitings to end in the old darkness; the malice of witches could not prevail against this great spirit of sunshine. For Brum, too, the long pilgrimage had enveloped the doctor with a miraculous glamour as of an eighth wonder of the world.

Drooping wearily on his mother's arm, but wrought up to joyous antic.i.p.ation, Brum had an undoubting sense of the patient crowd around him waiting, as in his old hospital days, for admission to the doctor's sanctum. His ear was strung for the ting-ting of the bell summoning the sufferers one by one.

At last a wave of awe swept over the little fashionable gathering, and set Zillah's heart thumping and the room fading in mist, through which the tall, venerable, robed figure, the eagle features softened in benediction, gleamed like a G.o.d's. Then she found herself on her knees, with Brum at her side, and the wonderful figure pa.s.sing between two rows of reverent pilgrims.

"Why must I kneel, mother?" murmured Brum feebly.

"Hush! hush!" she whispered. "The great doc--" she hesitated in awe of the venerable figure--"the great healer is here."

"The great healer!" breathed Brum. His face was transfigured with ecstatic forevision. "'Who openeth the eyes of the blind,'" he murmured, as he fell forward in death.

II

TRANSITIONAL

II

TRANSITIONAL

I

The day came when old Daniel Peyser could no longer withstand his wife's desire for a wider social sphere and a horizon blacker with advancing bachelors. For there were seven daughters, and not a man to the pack. Indeed, there had been only one marriage in the whole Portsmouth congregation during the last five years, and the Christian papers had had reports of the novel ceremony, with the ritual bathing of the bride and the breaking of the gla.s.s under the bridegroom's heel. To Mrs. Peyser, brought up amid the facile pairing of the Russian pale, this congestion of celibacy approached immorality.

Portsmouth with its careless soldiers and sailors might be an excellent town for p.a.w.nbroking, especially when one was not too punctiliously acceptant of the ethics of the heathen, but as a market for maidens--even with dowries and pretty faces--it was hopeless. But it was not wholly as an emporium for bachelors that London appealed.

It was the natural goal of the provincial Jew, the reward of his industry. The best people had all drifted to the mighty magic city, whose fascination survived even cheap excursions to it.

Would father deny that they had now made enough to warrant the migration? No, father would not deny it. Ever since he had left Germany as a boy he had been saving money, and his surplus he had shrewdly invested in the neighbouring soil of Southsea, fast growing into a watering-place. Even allowing three thousand pounds for each daughter's dowry, he would still have a goodly estate.

Was there any social reason why they should not cut as great a dash as the Benjamins or the Rosenweilers? No, father would not deny that his girls were prettier and more polished than the daughters of these pioneers, especially when six of them crowded around the stern granite figure, arguing, imploring, cajoling, kissing.

"But I don't see why we should waste the money," he urged, with the cautious instincts of early poverty.

"Waste!" and the pretty lips made reproachful "Oh's!"

"Yes, waste!" he retorted. "In India one treads on diamonds and gold, but in London the land one treads on costs diamonds and gold."

"But are we never to have a grandson?" cried Mrs. Peyser.

The Indian item was left unquestioned, so that little Schnapsie, whose childish imagination was greatly impressed by these eventful family debates, had for years a vivid picture of picking her way with bare feet over sharp-pointed diamonds and pebbly gold. Indeed, long after she had learned to wonder at her father's nave geography the word "India" always shone for her with barbaric splendour.

Environed by so much persistent femininity, the rugged elderly toiler was at last nagged into accepting a leisured life in London.

II

And so the family spread its wings joyfully and migrated to the wonder-town. Only its head and tail--old Daniel and little Schnapsie--felt the least sentiment for the things left behind. Old Daniel left the dingy synagogue to whose presidency he had mounted with the fattening of his purse, and in which he bought for himself, or those he delighted to honour, the choicest privileges of ark-opening or scroll-bearing; left the cronies who dropped in to play "Klabberjagd" on Sunday afternoons; left the bustling lucrative Sat.u.r.day nights in the shop when the heathen housewives came to redeem their Sabbath finery.

And little Schnapsie--who was only eleven, and not keen about husbands--left the twinkling tarry harbour, with its heroic hulks and modern men-of-war amid which the half-penny steamer plied; left the great waves that smashed on the pebbly beach, and the friendly moon that threw shimmering paths across their tranquillity; left the narrow lively streets in which she had played, and the school in which she had always headed her cla.s.s, and the salt wind that blew over all.

Little Schnapsie was only Schnapsie to her father. Her real name was Florence. The four younger girls all bore pagan names--Sylvia, Lily, Daisy, Florence--symbolic of the influence upon the family councils of the three elder girls, grown to years of discretion and disgust with their own Leah, Rachael, and Rebecca. Between these two strata of girls--Jewish and pagan--two boys had intervened, but their stay was brief and pitiful, so that all this plethora of progeny had not provided the father with a male mourner to say the _Kaddish_. But it seemed likely a grandson would not long be a-wanting, for the eldest girl was twenty-five, and all were good-looking. As if in irony, the Jewish group was blond, almost Christian, in colouring (for they took after the Teuton father), while the pagan group had characteristically Oriental traits. In little Schnapsie these Eastern charms--a whit heavy in her sisters--were repeated in a key of exquisite refinement.

The thick black eyebrows and hair were soft as silk, dark dreamy eyes suffused her oval face with poetry, and her skin was like dead ivory flushing into life.

III

The first year at Highbury, that genteel suburb in the north of London, was an enchanted ecstasy for the mother and the Jewish group of girls, taken at once to the bosom of a great German clan, and admitted to a new world of dances and dinners, of "at homes" and theatres and card parties. The eldest of the pagan group, Sylvia--tyrannically kept young in the interests of her sisters--was the only one who grumbled at the change, for Lily and Daisy found sufficient gain in the prospect of replacing the elder group when it should have pa.s.sed away in an odour of orange blossom. The scent of that was always in the air, and Mrs. Peyser and her three hopefuls sniffed it night and day.

"No, no; Rebecca shall have him."

"Not me! I am not going to marry a man with carroty hair. Leah's the eldest; it's her turn first."

"Thank you, my dear. Don't give away what you haven't got."

Every new young man who showed the faintest signs of liking to drop in, provoked a similar semi-facetious but also semi-serious canva.s.sing--his person, his income, and the girl to whom he should be allotted supplying the sauce of every meal at which he--or his fellow--was not present.